25 You Can Pixel Your File, And You Can Pixel Your Nose, But You Can’t…

Posted on February 18, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) A RECOMMENDATION. The Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog has posted a review of Speculative Whiteness titled “The Nerd Reich”.

…[The sff] genre often portrays societies where eggheads and dweebs are central in the fate of society. Intellectual elites or highly skilled individuals dominate, reflecting a vision where scientific knowledge and technical prowess are the ultimate sources of power. It is not lost on us that these “nerds” are mostly depicted as male and white.

In his recent book Speculative Whiteness, Jordan S. Carroll tackles the problematic consequences of this legacy. The book traces a history of the ways in which the genre was and continues to be co-opted by the alt-right.

It’s an excellent work, and probably the most important book about science fiction written this year….

The cover price is just $20, however, its publisher, the University of Minnesota Press, has made the entire book available to read online for free here. This is UMP’s description of Speculative Whiteness:

Fascists such as Richard Spencer interpret science fiction films and literature as saying only white men have the imagination required to invent a high-tech future. Other white nationalists envision racist utopias filled with Aryan supermen and all-white space colonies. Speculative Whiteness traces these ideas through the entangled histories of science fiction culture and white supremacist politics, showing that debates about representation in science fiction films and literature are struggles over who has the right to imagine and inhabit the future. Although fascists insist that tomorrow belongs to them, they have always been and will continue to be contested by antifascist fans willing to fight for the future.

(2) REMAIN CALM. “’Doctor Who has not been shelved’ – BBC responds to rumours” – Radio Times covers the official statement. And heck, I hadn’t even heard the rumor yet! (Probably because all of you are too smart to pass along links from The Sun.)

The BBC has assured Doctor Who fans that the sci-fi drama has not been cancelled, following an “incorrect” tabloid report.

The Sun stirred up concern that the long-running series was to go dormant again for between five and ten years, as it previously did after Sylvester McCoy’s final season – and once again after Paul McGann’s 1996 standalone film.

The speculation comes after perceived disappointment over Doctor Who season 14’s viewing figures, although the BBC and showrunner Russell T Davies have previously drawn attention to the show’s strong engagement from younger viewers.

The Sun’s anonymous source claimed that star Ncuti Gatwa was eyeing a move to Los Angeles to pursue Hollywood work – and that he had filmed a regeneration sequence for the end of the current run.

However, a spokesperson for Doctor Who commented: “This story is incorrect, Doctor Who has not been shelved. As we have previously stated, the decision on season 3 will be made after season 2 airs.

“The deal with Disney Plus was for 26 episodes – and exactly half of those still have to transmit. And as for the rest, we never comment on the Doctor and future storylines.”…

… Addressing the show’s ratings, Davies said last year: “In coming back, I wanted to make it simpler and I wanted to make it younger. Those two things are often not discussed – you read reactions to it and people are missing that.

“It’s simpler and younger – and it is working. The under-16s and the 16-34 audience as well is massive. It’s not doing that well in the ratings, but it is doing phenomenally well with the younger audience that we wanted.”

Doctor Who season 15 – also known as season 2 – is expected to premiere in May 2025, with Gatwa returning alongside Boom’s Varada Sethu as a new companion and former co-star Millie Gibson….

(3) THE BLACK FANTASTIC ONLINE PANEL IS TOMORROW. The Library of America will host an online event featuring Tananarive Due, Victor LaValle, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and andré carrington, “The Black Fantastic: The New Wave of Afrofuturist Fiction Registration”, on Wednesday, February 19 from 6:00-7:00 p.m. Eastern. RSVP at the link. Contribution to attend: $5 (can be applied toward purchase of The Black Fantastic or any other book on the LOA Web Store.)

A new wave of science fiction and fantasy by Black writers has burst onto the American literary scene in recent decades: tales of cosmic travel, vampires, and alternate timelines set in profound social and psychological orbits. Building on the legacy of titans Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany, these visionary writers root their imagination of other worlds in the multilayered realities of Black history and experience.

Award-winning SF authors Tananarive Due, Victor LaValle, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah join andré carrington, editor of The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories, for a conversation about genre, influence, and the fascinating and phantasmagoric universes conjured by these new voices on the vanguard of American fiction.

(4) NESFA STORY CONTEST RESULTS. The 2024-2025 winners of the NESFA Short Story Contest were announced at Boskone 62 last weekend:

Winner: Hazel Milla from North Carolina for the story “Whom the Gods Wish to Destroy”
Runner-up: Michael Burianyk from Nice, France for the story “The Witches of Kyiv”
Runner-up: Bailey Maybray from Somerville, MA for the story “Hook, Line, and Clinker”
Runner-up: Brad Halverson of Utah for the story “Top Dog”
Honorable Mention: Veronika Majerová from Bratislava, Slovakia for the story “Sleepwalker’s Survival Guide”
Honorable Mention: E. R. Cook from Westminster, CO for the story “Metamorphi”
Honorable Mention: Jun Schultz of Cambridge, Massachusetts for the story “The Strid”

There were 45 entries in this year’s contest. The final judges were Jasper Fforde (B62 Guest of Honor), Kelley Armstrong (B62 Special Guest) and E. C. Ambrose (author and teacher).

(5) FUN WHILE IT LASTED. [Item by Steve Green.] The Hungry Hobbit, a Birmingham cafe neighbouring Sarehole Mill (inspiration for Tolkien’s ‘Shire’) was famously forced by New Line Cinema (producers of the Lord of the Rings movies) to change its name to the Hungry Hobb, even though ‘hobbit’ is apparently not a trademarked term. At some point, this was further shortened to the Hungry Hob, and now I learn the business closed in late October 2024. There was an announcement on Facebook, which I’m not on. A fried chicken outlet now occupies on the site.

(6) YOUNG EYEBALLS ON THE JOB. James Davis Nicoll recently had the Young People Read Old SFF panel react to Eleanor Arnason’s 1974 Nebula finalist The Warlord of Saturn’s Moons.

…Warlord has been anthologized many times in the half century since it first saw print. I own it in three anthologies and one collection. No surprise. Rereading Warlord, I see themes relevant to the world in which we now live… as much as I might wish that were not the case.

But will young eyes see the same story I do? Let’s find out!

(7) VAS YOU DERE? “Time-Tunneling Into a Different Brooklyn with Jonathan Lethem”, an audio interview at The City.

…Lethem digs into his reasons on re-reexamining the Brooklyn he wrote about 20 years earlier in The Fortress of Solitude, but doing so this time with the tools of a journalist including long interviews conducted amid the dislocation and isolation of the COVID lockdown, and much more:

“One of the things I was really interested in was the idea of collective psychic experience, that that people go through things in a space together and then they don’t even know what part of it is really in their own head, and what was pushed in, stuck in there, from someone else. In a way, it is a typical New York thing. We were all there, right, when Mike Piazza hit the home run after 9/11? Every one of us, 9 million people were in the stadium that day. Well, we weren’t all there. We didn’t even all have the TV on. But somehow, retroactively, you fit yourself to this experience because it’s been had so intensely by other people that you’re confused about whether it was you or someone else who was there.

“And this was true for me in exploring the myths of a neighborhood and the myths on the street: individual moments of violence or confrontation or trauma on the street like that day that this guy put this other guy in a head lock and then he pulled out a knife. Somehow, we were all on that street corner. “I saw it with my own eyes!” Well, that isn’t true. There wasn’t some, stadium full of people watching this thing. It happened in a fugitive instant, but somehow we were all firsthand witnesses. So this idea that this transmission of mythic collective experience, this was a lot of what my questions for people were about: Did something that we all remember really happen? And if so, who did it happen to? Maybe I was the victim or maybe I was just a bystander. I don’t know…“

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

February 18, 1919 — Jack Palance. (Died 2006.)

Let’s talk about Jack Palance who was born of Ukrainian immigrant parents with name of Volodymyr Palahniuk. His professional surname was actually a derivative of his original name. While guesting on What’s My Line?, he noted that no one could pronounce his last name, and how it was suggested that he be called Palanski but instead that he decided just to use Palance instead. He didn’t say where his first name came from.

(OK nitpickers, I do not want to hear from you. Seriously, I don’t. His career makes a gaggle of overly catnapped kittens playing with skeins of yarn with lots of lanolin still on it look simple by comparison so I may or may not have knitted it properly here, so bear with my version of it.)

Surprisingly it looks like that he got his start in our end of things in television performances and relatively late as they started in the Sixties with the first one being Jabberwock on a musical version of Alice Through the Looking Glass. I’m sure I want to see that as it had Jimmy Durante as Humpty Dumpty, and the Smothers Brothers as Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

Next up was a Canadian production with him in the title role of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and that in turn saw him being the lead in Dracula, also known as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Dan Curtis’ Dracula, the last when the ego of the Director got way, way too big.

I’m going to digress here because it’s so fascinating. In 1963, The Greatest Show on Earth first aired. This Circus drama had Johnny Slate as the big boss who keeps the circus running as it moves from town to town. It was produced by Desilu, the production company founded by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Sr. It lasted but one season as it was up against shows by Jack Benny and Richard Boone.

A bit of hard SF was next, Cyborg 2, released in other countries as Glass Shadow, creative but terribly uninformative, where he’s Mercy, an old renegade cyborg.

Remember my Birthday on the wonderful Carol Serling? Well, he was in The Twilight Zone: Rod Serling’s Lost Classics film that she made possible as Dr. Jeremy Wheaton in “Where the Dead Are”.

If Treasure Island counts as genre and yes I do count it in my personal canon, then his role as Long John Silver is definitely canon.

He got to play Ebenezer Scrooge in Ebenezer. Now the fun part is that it’s set in the Old West, where he is the most greedy, corrupt and mean-spirited crook in the old West obviously, he sees no value in “Holiday Humbug” by several reviewers. This film I went to look up on Rotten Tomatoes, but no rating there.

Not at all shockingly to me, he shows up on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. where he plays a character of Louis Strago in a two-parter “The Concrete Overcoat Affair” which got re-edited as “The Spy in the Green Hat”.

A bit of horror was next in Tales of the Haunted as Stokes in “Evil Stalks This House” was up late in career.

Finally for roles that I’m reasonably sure were of genre interest, he was on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century as Kaleel in the “Planet of the Slave Girls” episode.

One more gig for him related to genre or at least genre adjacent, though not as a performer, but as the host of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for four years. He had three different co-hosts from season to season, including his daughter, Holly Palance, actress Catherine Shirriff, and finally singer Marie Osmond.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Capre Diem misapplies a regular IT response.
Free Range meets one of the first strangers.
Robbie and Bobby has a low budget remake.
Brewster Rockit encounters sudden obsolescence.

(10) LITERARY TREASURES. “Joan Didion’s official archive is going on view at the New York Public Library next month” reports Gothamist.

The New York Public Library is opening up its archives of Joan Didion and her husband Gregory Dunne to the public beginning March 26.

The Library acquired the late writers’ archives in 2023, just over three years since Didion’s 2021 death at age 87. Dunne died in 2003, aged 71.

The dual collection comprises a total of 336 boxes “most of which have never been seen publicly” and which represents “the most comprehensive collection of the authors’ materials” according to the library’s announcement.

These materials feature a vast array of both professional and personal documents from the couples’ lives, including six decades of correspondence, hundreds of photographs and 26 screenplay drafts the pair worked on together. The 1971 film “The Panic in Needle Park” and 1976’s “A Star Is Born” are among them. Visitors will also find annotated typescripts from Didion’s political reporting in the 1980s and ‘90s, and reference material for her books “The Year of Magical Thinking” and “Blue Nights.”…

(11) PASSION FOR HIS CAREERS. “’No micro transactions, no bullshit’: Josef Fares on Split Fiction and the joy of co-op video games” in the Guardian.

There aren’t many video game developers as outspoken as Hazelight’s Josef Fares. Infamous for his expletive-laden viral rants at livestreamed awards shows, Fares is a refreshingly fiery and unpredictable voice in an all too corporate industry. As he puts it, “It doesn’t matter where I work or what I do, I will always say what I want. People say to me that that’s refreshing – but isn’t it weird that you cannot say what you think in interviews? Do we live in a fucking communist country? Obviously, you have got to respect certain boundaries, but to not even be able to express what you think personally about stuff? People are too afraid!”

Yet while gamers know him as a grinning chaos merchant and passionate ambassador of co-op gameplay, in Fares’ adopted homeland of Sweden, he is best known as an award-winning film director. His goofy 2000 comedy Jalla! Jalla! was a domestic box office success, while his 2005 drama Zozo was a more introspective work about his childhood experience of fleeing the Lebanese civil war…

… He soon took his evolving prototype to a respected game studio in Stockholm – Starbreeze. “They were like, ‘Well, maybe you can do this as a kind of test project.’ But I’m like, fuck a test, I’m going to do the whole thing!”

That passion fuelled a year and a half of intense work, with Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons being released in 2013. The co-op adventure about siblings embarking on a dangerous journey to find a cure for their sick father has now sold over 10m copies. Despite its success, many in Sweden were baffled by his artistic pivot, a transition for Fares that felt natural. “With movies, I came to a point where I felt that the passion really wasn’t there. Passion lead me to video games. It was very challenging being new in the industry and coming in with a different approach – wanting to create new mechanics. Today it’s different because [people] listen to me, but it was very hard in the beginning.”…

(12) A CULTURE WARRIOR MUSTERS OUT. Doris V. Sutherland has surprisingly devoted a full article to “The Brief Life of the Helicon Awards”. I say “surprisingly” because this was simply an award made up by Richard Paolinelli so he could give it to friends and authors he wanted to ingratiate himself with. (And that worked, because writers can’t resist anything labeled an “award” — David Weber thanked him online for his.) I have followed the Helicon Awards from start to finish – Paolinelli says it is being retired this year — and did not think its pretentions were even worth making fun of anymore. But fine minds can differ…

…Even the names chosen for some of the award categories serve as battle-standards for the culture war. The original Helicon category line-up included a Laura Ingalls Wilder New Author Award, a Melvil Dewey Innovation Award and Frank Herbert Lifetime Achievement Award.

For context, in 2018 the US Association for Library Service to Children removed Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from an award for children’s literature in response to a controversy regarding racial attitudes in her writing, while 2019 saw Melvil Dewey’s name stricken from an American Library Association award over his history of racism, antisemitism and sexual harassment. (The Frank Herbert Award would appear to be the odd-one-out, as I’m not aware of Herbert having been particularly controversial circa 2019.)

In 2020, after Worldcon’s John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer was renamed (again, because of its namesake’s racist attitudes) the Helicon Society introduced the John W. Campbell Diversity in SFF Award. This was around for three years, the winners being Larry Correia (founder of the Sad Puppies), Orson Scott Card (controversial for his homophobia) and J. K. Rowling (no introduction needed). When the category was retired, Paolinelli admitted on his blog that it served as a “trolling the SJWs award”….

(13) RETURN ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN. [Item by Steven French.] Another argument for why Oumuamua was (most likely) not an alien spacecraft. “Many stars could have sent us ‘Oumuamua” reports Phys.Org. And here’s the take-home message:

Interstellar space may therefore be full of dagger-shaped shards of rock and ice (an exaggeration, but a fun quote for dinner parties nonetheless).

(14) DOOM UNSCREWED. WE HOPE. Animation World News introduces “’The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie’ Official Trailer”.

Faced with a perilous mission to save the earth, Porky Pig and Daffy Duck eschew confidence… “How could we possibly screw this up?” How could they not? …

…In the brand-new 2D animated sci-fi buddy action comedy, Porky Pig and Daffy Duck turn into unlikely heroes when their antics at the local bubble gum factory uncover a secret alien mind control plot. Against all odds, the two are determined to save their town (and the world!)… that is if they don’t drive each other crazy in the process….

[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Olav Rokne, Steve Green, Cathy Green, Steven Lee, 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 Olav Rokne.]

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

Posted on January 29, 2025 by Mike Glyer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

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

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

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

Happy day, I could finally see the film.

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

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

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

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

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

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

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal says the true message is hidden.
Bizarro introduces a new Transformer.
Dog Eat Doug has a planned trip.
Speed Bump adds a new literary category.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Returning to Ars Technica:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pixel Scroll 12/28/24 A Credential, A Houyhnhnm, And A Gor Priest-King Walk Into Barsoom

Posted on December 28, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) ’69 IS DIVINE. Galactic Journey delivers kudos to the finest sff of 55 years ago: “[December 26, 1969] A Wreath of Stars (the best science fiction of 1969!)”

… Don’t worry; we’ve got you covered. Anything on this list is worth reading/watching. Just peruse the Journey library, settle into your coziest chair, and enjoy the week before New Year’s!…

For example, 1969 was a terrific year for novels:

Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The story of an American POW during World War 2, culminating in the Dresden firebombing. Vaguely SFnal, such trappings are really there so the author could approach the traumatic material at a distance. Big for a reason.

The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin

An unique setting and an unique problem; a message piece for today aimed at the sexists of tomorrow.

Ubik, by Philip K. Dick

One of Dick’s less comprehensible and yet somehow more compelling works, combining a grab-bag of innovations, commentaries on commercialism, and questionings of reality.

The Jagged Orbit, by John Brunner

A novel of worsening race relations in the early 21st Century, told in Brunner’s inimitable avante garde style.

The Andromeda Strain, by Michael Crichton

A “scientific thriller” about a mystery plague, and the efforts of five scientists to understand its origin and impact.

Honorable Mention

Isle of the Dead, by Roger Zelazny
The Face in the Frost, by John Bellairs
Operation Changeling, by Poul Anderson
Heiros Gamos, by Josephine Saxton
A Sweet Sweet Summer, by Jane Gaskell
Seahorse in the Sky, by Edmund Cooper
The Unicorn Girl, by Kurland, Michael
Macroscope, by Piers Anthony

—

We’ve got it all: fantasy, science fiction, satire, psychedelia. And more sex than ever. There’s nothing really “conventional” or “traditional” here. Even the Anderson is more outré than usual.

(2) MORE FOWL, LESS JOY ON UK TV AT CHRISTMAS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl was the second most-viewed TV programme in Brit Cit over Christmas 2024.

In fact, the top ten most watched programmes in the UK were all BBC including Doctor Who Christmas episode “Joy to the World”.

At 4.11 million viewers, it was not as popular as the King’s Christmas broadcast at 6.82 million.

Details at the BBC: “Christmas TV: Gavin and Stacey finale tops ratings”.

(3) FX WITH HUMAN FINGERPRINTS. “A Grand Return: A Cracking Set Visit to ‘Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl’” — Animation Magazine scored a look behind the scenes.

On a recent visit to Aardman’s Bristol studio, the design of the project — from the puppetry to the set pieces — revealed (as one would expect) a healthy mix of Ealing comedy and Hollywood homage, with the impeccable artistry taking place one frame at a time!…

…With the task of managing large crews, and given the time and effort involved in making a feature-length stop-motion film, Park usually shares directorial duties — with Peter Lord on the first Chicken Run and Steve Box on The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. This time he partnered with Crossingham, who for the last 10 years has been creative director of the Wallace & Gromit brand. “Merlin was always one of the top animators on all our projects,” recalls Park, “but he also seemed to get things really quickly and has done some of the best bits in the Wallace & Gromit films of late. Also, he’s good at directing and good at humor. So, when it came [time] for me to think about whom I would share the journey with, a fellow visionary, the choice wasn’t difficult really.”

At the studio, we were shown initial artwork before we saw the puppets, which are the perfect amalgamation of craft and engineering. Each detail and iteration of the designs are approved by Park and Crossingham before scans are produced for the 3D-printed molds that are used for both hard and softer materials to build onto the characters’ armatures. Over time, the techniques have evolved as more animators have worked on productions. For instance: Wallace’s jumper was originally clay and is now foam latex. Depending on what a character is doing, only heads and hands are clay, or, depending on articulation, silicone appendages are used, which is easier to maintain….

… A human-made look and feel is a vital part of Aardman animation, but the studio is not averse to technology, something Park reflects on further. “The tactile quality is the spirit of it all, really. But we work with technology a lot. It’s funny, when Toy Story came out we were asking: ‘How long have we got left?’ But there has been a genuine resurgence of stop motion, and we’ve contributed to that.”…

(4) SILENT NEVERLAND. Well, except for the organ music. “The First ‘Peter Pan’ Blockbuster Turns 100 but Hasn’t Grown Up” – learn its history from the New York Times (link bypasses the paywall).

… But another version predates all of those: “Peter Pan,” a silent film released 100 years ago this month, becoming a blockbuster in its day.

The 1924 film, which The New York Times called “a pictorial masterpiece,” was considered a pioneer in selling movie-related merchandise. But it fell out of sight after talkies replaced silent films and Walt Disney bought the film rights to make his own “Peter Pan.” Many feared it lost until it was rediscovered in the 1940s by a film preservationist who found a copy at a theater in upstate New York that had trained organists to play along with silent movies….

… Some elements of the film would have been familiar to people who had seen the play written by Barrie and first performed in 1904. The Darling children fly with the help of wires, and their canine nurse, Nana, is played by a man in a dog suit (George Ali, reprising his stage role). But its director, Herbert Brenon, also sprinkled cinematic pixie dust on the story: Captain Hook’s ship flies out of the water, Peter Pan sweeps away tiny fairies with a broom and there are close-ups of a minuscule Tinker Bell, who is usually depicted on stage as a light….

(5) THE VALUE OF DELAYING THE INEVITABLE. Doris V. Sutherland analyzes “How Naomi Kritzer’s Science Fiction Strips Away Cyberspace” at Women Write About Comics.

We have entered an era of AI slop. Periodicals are struggling with floods of submissions cooked up by ChatGPT rather than human imaginations, while readers downloading ebooks from Amazon are faced with the possibility of their latest purchase being the churned-out product of AI masquerading as actual creativity or scholarship.

While science fiction is no more affected by this than any other genre, its duty to predict the future (albeit often through an escapist lens) puts it in a unique position. SF has always had an ambivalent relationship with the real world’s scientific and technological advances; never before, though, has the genre been faced with a development that offers such a direct existential threat. So, as publishers are faced with deluges of machine-generated hackwork and technology actively strips itself of romance, what futures are SF authors dreaming up?

There are many works that can serve as answers to this question, and when the Hugo Awards were presented earlier this year, they pointed out two particularly relevant examples: namely, the pair of contrasting yet thematically overlapping stories by Naomi Kritzer which won the Best Short Story and Best Novelette categories. Even though neither addresses ChatGPT or other pseudo-creative AI directly, both stand as strong-minded retorts to our era of ever-encroaching digitisation….

(6) SUDDENLY THERE WAS A KNOCK AT THE DOOR. Curtis Evans helps readers climb an author’s twisted family tree in “Fredric Brown: Chronicler of Con Artists, Clowns, and Capitalist Excess” at CrimeReads.

…In the early 1890s Karl Brown forsook the Edenic little world of Oxford [Ohio] and moved to hustling and bustling Cincinnati, then a burgeoning metropolis of some 300,000 people (about the same size as it is today). There in 1894 he married Emma Graham, daughter of a railroad mail clerk, when he was twenty-two and she was twenty. After a dozen years of marriage—quite a long delay—Emma bore the couple’s only child, whom they named “Fredric” without the second “e” and the “k,” like actor Fredric March….

(7) DEAR FUTURE. Upworthy listens in as “Benedict Cumberbatch reads Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘frighteningly accurate’ letter to people living in 2088”. Includes a link to the speech.

…To work with “Nature’s stern but reasonable surrender terms,” Vonnegut advised the following:

1. Reduce and stabilize your population.

2. Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.

3. Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.

4. Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you’re at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.

5. Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.

6. Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean, and stupid.

7. And so on. Or else.

(8) RIPPED SHIRT AND JODHPURS. You can own this iconic pulp fashion statement: “Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze One:12 Collective Doc Savage (Deluxe Edition) Action Figure”, offered at Big Bad Toy Store. (Click for larger images.)

Doc Savage – The Man of Bronze, leaps off the pages of pulp fiction and into the One:12 Collective!

The One:12 Collective Doc Savage is decked out in his iconic rugged safari shirt, jodhpurs and high-boots with secret compartments. Also included are a ripped shirt option, his trusted utility vest and two wristband options. The Man of Bronze features four interchangeable head portraits, including one with side-parted hair from the pulp era, and the others showcasing his buzzcut with a widow’s peak as seen in pocket novels and comics.

Fully equipped and ready for action, Doc Savage carries an array of weapons and gadgets, including night vision goggles, a gas mask, an infrared lantern, a bowie knife, a mini periscope, a folding grapple hook, multiple grenades, and his Super Machine Pistol paired with ammo rounds and blaster FXs.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born December 28, 1932 – Nichelle Nichols. (Died 2022.)

By Paul Weimer: A woman of color on the bridge of the USS Enterprise. Unpossible.

Possible, and Nichelle Nichols made it happen.

Even watching The Original Series in reruns in the late 70’s and early 1980’s, I could see how revolutionary, iconic and important her role as Lt. Uhura really was. Like Koenig’s Chekov and Takei’s Sulu, her presence helped solidify that the future of space and the world was not exclusively the province of white men doing white manly things.

Certainly, she was often underserved by scripts and reduced usually to a glorified telephone operator, but when she did get the chance to shine, did she shine. “Mirror, Mirror”, particularly, she is essential to helping keep the Mirror Universe crew off balance and allowing them all a chance to get home.

And of course, there was that kiss in “Plato’s Stepchildren” with Kirk, the kiss that drew the ire of the conservatives of the American South. Reportedly, the plan was to film the scene with and without the kiss, but Nichols conspired with Shatner to mess up every non-kiss take, and so the scene had to be included.

Even so, she nearly left the series early, but Dr. Martin Luther King asked her to stay on the series, emphasizing the importance of her place on the bridge. She did, and I am very glad that she did.

But my favorite Nichelle Nichols Uhura moment wasn’t in the original series, or the first two movies. No, it comes in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Kirk has to managed to steal the Enterprise to go after Spock, whose soul is lodged in Dr. McCoy (and none too happy about it). Uhura is crucial to the plan to getting control of the transporter and allowing Kirk and the others to get onto the Enterprise and steal it. “Mr Adventure” (the bored transporter officer bowled over by Nichols’ Uhura) never knew what hit him. Like in “Mirror, Mirror”, you underestimate Nichols’ Uhura at your peril. Subsequent depictions of the character have taken Nichols’ direction and lead in this regard and run with it.

Outside of Star Trek, her work with NASA helped recruit numerous people to the astronaut program, particularly women and people of color. I figure it was a way of her paying things forward.

She died in 2022. Requiscat in pace.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY, TOO.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born December 28, 1922 – Stan Lee. (Died 2018.)

By Paul Weimer: The ultimate comic book fan and creator.

I’ve mentioned in other essays that I am a Marvel over a DC fan when it comes to comics as well as the movies. This was true long before Iron Man started the MCU, this goes back to my first comic reading in the 1980’s. I didn’t start my comic reading in DC, I started with Marvel.

And the man who made that all possible was Stan Lee. His characters, his worlds, his ideas appealed to me more. Yes, I am talking about Spiderman, the ultimate misunderstood young man, co-created by Lee and Steve Ditko. So it was thanks to Lee’s co-creation of Spiderman that I started reading comics, and those comics were Marvel. And while Superfriends the cartoon was fun enough…it was Spiderman and his Amazing Friends that was the cartoon that I liked even more.

My first actual comic book was a Spiderman and a Wasp issue. I didn’t have issues before or after, and I am not sure how I got it. I just remember it involved the mercenary superhero Paladin, who had an American Express card in the name of his superhero name.

Finally, I enjoyed the many cameos that Lee managed in the Marvel movies, from Iron Man all the way to Guardians of the Galaxy. For his creation or co-creation of so many characters and aspects of the Marvel verse, it amused me for Lee in so many faces to show up again, and again, and yet again. He was the creator of the Marvel verse…and its biggest fan at the same time. Like a Hitchcock film, spotting Stan Lee in a Marvel movie was a spectator spot for me.

Stan Lee, alas, died in 2016.

Excelsior, good sir.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Bizarro admires sartorial splendor.
Cornered changes one letter.
Reality Check narrows it down.
Thatababy borrows a witch’s minion.

(12) THIS IS NOT A DRILL. Contingent Magazine would like you to know about “The ‘Tooth’ Behind Star Trek”.

…During the 1960s, Air Force lieutenant colonel Jack L. Hartley served at Brooks Air Force Base, where he studied the problem of what to do if an astronaut got a toothache while in space. As a result, Hartley developed the science of astrostomatology (space dentistry), along with a portable astronaut dental kit for the Aerospace Medical Division of the Air Force Systems Command.

Hartley published numerous papers about his research, which got him noticed by the media. He also promoted astrostomatology and his astronaut dental kit through appearances on television shows like What’s My Line, To Tell the Truth, and The Tonight Show. When he presented Johnny Carson with a real human skull, to show how to give injections to the upper and lower jaws to make them numb, Carson couldn’t resist holding up the skull and intoning: “Alas, poor Yorick!”

I was able to track down Hartley’s daughter, Patricia, a retired archivist who worked at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. Patricia explained her late father’s role in the creation of Star Trek: “He collaborated a fair amount with Roddenberry. He [Roddenberry] was really very good about trying to get things right, in spite of the fact that he had a very limited budget. And he didn’t have a lot of tools to show. But he created a whole lot of things. And Dad was just one of the ones that he was talking to help him design this stuff.” …

(13) INSPIRATION. “Gregory Maguire reveals the movie line that inspired ‘Wicked’” at Upworthy. (It’s not “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”)

… Maguire was visiting Beatrix Potter’s farm in Cumbria, England, and thinking about “The Wizard of Oz,” which he had loved as a child and thought could be an interesting basis for a story about evil.

“I thought ‘alright, what do we know about ‘The Wizard of Oz’ from our memories,'” he said. “We have the house falling on the witch. What do we know about that witch? All we know about that witch is that she has feet. So I began to think about Glinda and the Wicked Witch of the West…

“There is one scene in the 1939 film where Billie Burke comes down looking all pink and fluffy, and Margaret Hamilton is all crawed and crabbed and she says something like, ‘I might have known you’d be behind this, Glinda!’ This was my memory, and I thought, now why is she using Glinda’s first name? They have known each other. Maybe they’ve known each other for a long time. Maybe they went to college together. And I fell down onto the ground in the Lake District laughing at the thought that they had gone to college together.”…

(14) WICKED DELETED SCENES. Several are available on YouTube. USA Today devotes an article to one of them: “’Wicked’ deleted scene shows Ariana Grande’s Galinda hit with news”. (Click here to see the scene.)

…Start spreading the news — charming Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) is leaving today to go to Shiz University in this deleted scene from the blockbuster musical “Wicked.”

Most popular Shiz student Galinda (Ariana Grande) literally gets hit with the news as The Shiz Gazette, proclaiming Prince Fiyero’s arrival, flies into her beautiful face.

The dazzling scene that follows the floating newspaper around the buzzing university didn’t make it into director Jon M. Chu’s adaption of the beloved Broadway musical, which clocked in at 2 hours and 40 minutes (and it was only the first of two parts).

However, the moment and other deleted scenes will be featured on the “Wicked” digital release, due Dec. 31…

(15) BLINDED BY THE LIGHT. [Item by Steven French.] Those of us who have to drive around in low winter sun (like right now, here in the North of England!) will certainly sympathise with future astronauts: “Astronauts face unique visual challenges at lunar south pole”.

Humans are returning to the moon—this time, to stay. Because our presence will be more permanent, NASA has selected a location that maximizes line-of-sight communication with Earth, solar visibility, and access to water ice: the Lunar South Pole (LSP).

While the sun is in the lunar sky more consistently at the poles, it never rises more than a few degrees above the horizon; in the target landing regions, the highest possible elevation is 7°. This presents a harsh lighting environment never experienced during the Apollo missions, or in fact, in any human spaceflight experience.

The ambient lighting will severely affect the crews’ ability to see hazards and to perform simple work. This is because the human vision system—which, despite having a high-dynamic range—cannot see well in bright light and cannot adapt quickly from bright to dark or vice versa.

(16) LUCKIER THAN ICARUS. “NASA’s Parker Solar Probe phones home after surviving historic close sun flyby. It’s alive!” – Space.com says, “The spacecraft flew within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the solar surface to ‘touch the sun’ on Christmas Eve.”

Two days after a historic Christmas Eve sun flyby that flew closer to the star than any spacecraft in history — taking the car-sized spacecraft nearly a tenth as close to the sun than Mercury — the Parker Solar Probe phoned home for the first time since its solar encounter. The space probe sent a simple yet highly-anticipated beacon tone to Earth just before midnight late Thursday (Dec. 26).

Scientists on Earth were out of contact with the Parker Solar Probe since Dec. 20, when the spaceraft began its automated flyby of the sun, so the signal is a crucial confirmation that the spacecraft survived, and is in “good health and operating normally,” NASA shared in an update early Friday (Dec. 27).

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Gideon Marcus, 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 9/2/24 Fifth Scrollboard Outside Pixel, California

Posted on September 2, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) AMIWRIMO? National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)’s post “What is NaNoWriMo’s position on Artificial Intelligence (AI)?” is drawing a critical response. Outraged Writers Board members Daniel Jose Older, Cass Morris, and Rebecca Kim Wells have all resigned. (Coincidentally, this year’s new NaNoWriMo sponsor is ProWritingAid.com, which has now added unspecified “AI” functionality: “How to Unstick Your Camp NaNoWriMo Project” [Archive.is link].) Their position statement on AI is quoted below — including an update added after the first wave of negative responses hit social media:

NaNoWriMo does not explicitly support any specific approach to writing, nor does it explicitly condemn any approach, including the use of AI. NaNoWriMo’s mission is to “provide the structure, community, and encouragement to help people use their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worlds—on and off the page.” We fulfill our mission by supporting the humans doing the writing. Please see this related post that speaks to our overall position on nondiscrimination with respect to approaches to creativity, writer’s resources, and personal choice.

Note: we have edited this post by adding this paragraph to reflect our acknowledgment that there are bad actors in the AI space who are doing harm to writers and who are acting unethically. We want to make clear that, though we find the categorical condemnation for AI to be problematic for the reasons stated below, we are troubled by situational abuse of AI, and that certain situational abuses clearly conflict with our values. We also want to make clear that AI is a large umbrella technology and that the size and complexity of that category (which includes both non-generative and generative AI, among other uses) contributes to our belief that it is simply too big to categorically endorse or not endorse.

We believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege.

- - Not all writers have the financial ability to hire humans to help at certain phases of their writing. For some writers, the decision to use AI is a practical, not an ideological, one. The financial ability to engage a human for feedback and review assumes a level of privilege that not all community members possess.
  - Not all brains have same abilities and not all writers function at the same level of education or proficiency in the language in which they are writing. Some brains and ability levels require outside help or accommodations to achieve certain goals. The notion that all writers “should“ be able to perform certain functions independently or is a position that we disagree with wholeheartedly. There is a wealth of reasons why individuals can’t “see” the issues in their writing without help.
  - General Access Issues.All of these considerations exist within a larger system in which writers don’t always have equal access to resources along the chain. For example, underrepresented minorities are less likely to be offered traditional publishing contracts, which places some, by default, into the indie author space, which inequitably creates upfront cost burdens that authors who do not suffer from systemic discrimination may have to incur.

Beyond that, we see value in sharing resources and information about AI and any emerging technology, issue, or discussion that is relevant to the writing community as a whole. It’s healthy for writers to be curious about what’s new and forthcoming, and what might impact their career space or their pursuit of the craft. Our events with a connection to AI have been extremely well-attended, further-proof that this programming is serving Wrimos who want to know more….

Three Board members quit over this post:

Here is a selection from among the many other negative responses to the post.

(2) TRADITION DERAILED. [Item by Steven French.] One can only speculate why it was decided to end the ‘tradition’! “Harry Potter fans boo as King’s Cross ends ‘back to Hogwarts’ tradition” reports the Guardian.

Disappointed Harry Potter fans booed after an annual announcement at London King’s Cross railway station did not happen.

People gathered at the station hoping to hear a message on the public address system that the fictional Hogwarts Express would depart from platform 9 ¾ at 11am, as happens in JK Rowling’s books.

The back to Hogwarts tradition, which celebrates the start of each academic year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry every 1 September, has previously also involved the train service being displayed on departure boards, with hundreds of fans attending the 2023 event.

But King’s Cross did not mark the occasion on Sunday.

A video posted on X shows an expectant crowd count down to 11am, and then booing when nothing happens.

Warner Bros Discovery, which owns the Harry Potter franchise, issued a statement in July urging fans to avoid travelling to King’s Cross on Sunday and instead watch a programme on YouTube hosted by the I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here! winner Sam Thompson.

(3) PICKET LINES. [Item by Chris Barkley.] Something else conrunners (especially those who pine for a Labor Day Worldcon) need to worry about: “Thousands of hotel workers launch strike after talks stall with top chains” at NPR.

Thousands of hotel workers began a multiday strike in several cities across the U.S. to press for higher wages and increased staffing after contract negotiations with major hotel chains Hyatt, Hilton and Marriott stalled.

Workers walked off the job on Sunday in 25 cities including San Francisco, Seattle, Greenwich, Conn., and Honolulu, said Unite Here, a union representing hospitality workers across North America. The strikes are planned to last between two to three days, organizers said, noting the timing of the strike happening on Labor Day. Workers in Baltimore, New Haven, Conn., Oakland, Calif., and Providence, R.I., were also prepared to join the strike…

(4) THE MAKING OF GLASGOW 2024. Polish fan Marcin Klak reports on “Glasgow 2024 – A Worldcon Which I Helped to Make” at Fandom Rover.

… Earlier I mentioned about the series of unfortunate events. You already know about the fire alarm in the middle of the night and about catching Covid. The latter may have happened after the con. On top of that I also got the achievement for being splashed with water from the puddle from the top of my head downwards. Even coming back home posed a challenge and airline had to move me to another (later flight). Should it not be enough they also managed to leave my luggage in Amsterdam thanks to which I lost another 30 minutes. Yet you know what? All those unlucky incidents didn’t spoil my experience.

Glasgow 2024 was an amazing adventure. I have not seen as much of Scotland as I wanted to but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I had a great time. Once the con finished I was sad that it was over. And it lasted for eight days for me so, I dare to say, was rather long! It was definitely different than any of my previous Worldcons but I am happy with how it went. I don’t think that I should be rating it. As a member of concom I am not objective so I will leave the rating to the other members. Yet what I can say is that my experience was something I will treasure for many years to come….

(5) IF TANK MARMOT HAD A HAMMER. Doris V. Sutherland gives a rundown about the Dragon Awards winners at Women Write About Comics: “2024 Dragon Awards: John Scalzi and Rebecca Yarros Are Winners While AI Art Loses”.

… Charlaine Harris won the Best Alternate History award with All the Dead Shall Weep, the fifth book in her series about young mercenary Gunnie Rose. This was despite one of the other category finalists, Tom Kratman, lobbying his social media following to vote for his novel Dirty Water in retaliation for it receiving a negative review in Publishers’ Weekly; Kratman expressed a desire to “hammer the award up their collective ass,” a desire that must now remain unfulfilled…

(6) DRAGON AWARDS STATISTICS. Okay, you can stop laughing at the headline now. Here’s what Camestros Felapton – with a microscope – managed to extract from a press release: “Some Dragon Award Stats”.

…Anyway, here are the numbers they did provide:

“Approximately 7,000 fans cast ballots for this year’s Dragon Award winners, selected from among 67 properties in 11 categories covering the full range of fiction, comics, television, movies, video gaming, and tabletop gaming.”

Which is what they said last year, as in that is literally the same sentence….

(7) BECAUSE OF THE WONDERFUL WIZ HE IS. Deadline thinks “Ian McKellen Could Return As Gandalf In New ‘Lord Of The Rings’ Films”. An injury is keeping him on the sidelines til the end of the year. He’s likely to be available by the time they start filming – if they get him signed on.

…And it seems that Sir Ian McKellen could be coming back to his beloved role as J.R.R. Tolkien’s wizard after revealing that he had been approached about featuring in the new Lord of the Rings films.

McKellen told The Big Issue: “Enthusiasm for The Lord of the Rings shows no sign of abating … I can’t tell you any more than that. I’ve just been told there are going to be more films and Gandalf will be involved and they hope that I’ll be playing him.”

The 85-year-old actor, who is recovering from falling off stage in Player Kings in London’s West End, added: “When? I don’t know. What the script is? It’s not written yet. So, they better be quick.”

In a separate interview with BBC Breakfast, McKellen said he had no plans to retire from acting. “I shall just keep at it as long as the legs and the lungs and the mind keep working,” said the actor, who is promoting new movie The Critic….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born September 2, 1964 — Keanu Reeves, 60. Keanu Reeves certainly has fascinating genre credits. So let’s get started and look at them.

First about that film. It was by no mean his first film, he’d done quite a few including some very serious films before that including Dangerous Liaisons, but his first film that we know him from is of course what is his most best loved film of a genre nature which is Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. He played Ted “Theodore” Logan.

I’ll confess that since I deeply, madly adore this film, I’m not seen either of the sequels, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey or Bill & no Ted Face the Music. Why spoil perfection?

A choice bit of stakes through the heart was up for him in Bram Stoker’s Dracula where he had the role Jonathan Harker .

Following that was Johnny Mnemonic which in its original version is considered one of the worst genre films ever made, but 12 years back, a black-and-white edition of the film which was titled Johnny Mnemonic: In Black and White was released and William Gibson says is much closer, closer to his original vision. I see it’s available on Amazon, either in BluRay or DVD.

So what next? The Matrix where he played Neo, the protagonist throughout The Matrix franchise. I saw the first, found it interesting, but not enough to watch the next two. I see it was nominated for a Hugo at Chicon 2000 but didn’t win as that was the year that Galaxy Quest deservedly won.

He was Bob / Fed / Bruce in A Scanner Darkly as based off Philip K. Dick’s novel. And it too was nominated for Hugo, this being at Nippon 2007, the year Pan’s Labyrinth won.

Finally as John Wick can’t possibly be considered genre, he had potentially plum of a role as there was a remake of The Earth Stood Still and he was Klaatu! Yes, I did go to Rotten Tomatoes to see what to reaction was.

Well, the audience yours gave it a 21% rating, Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal said this, which is the overwhelming consensus: “Where the original film was unpretentious, this version, with Keanu Reeves as Klaatu, is insufferably full of itself, an X-Files episode pumped up to pseudo-cosmic proportions.”

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Thatababy has a troublesome friend.
The Argyle Sweater finds a superhero frustrated by going green. (No, not literally. That’s a different superhero.)
Crankshaft continues the censorship storyline.
Brewster Rockit will appeal to metal detector enthusiasts.

(10) STAR WARS IN OJIBWE. “A new version of the 1977 Star Wars features a dub in a Native American language” – NPR spoke with one of the voice actors.

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

“Star Wars” fans in Minnesota and Wisconsin yesterday got to experience a whole new version of the 1977 movie “A New Hope.” It’s a version dubbed into the language of one of the largest Indigenous groups in the U.S. and Canada. Minnesota Public Radio’s Melissa Olson has more.

(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN WILLIAMS AND LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA’S “MAIN TITLE”)

MELISSA OLSON, BYLINE: Fans who came out to see the film got a chance to hear a language spoken in a galaxy far, far away for the first time. This version of the 1977 classic “Star Wars: A New Hope” has been dubbed in the Ojibwe language. It’s spoken by one of the largest Indigenous nations in the U.S. and Canada. One of the lead voice actors in the film just happened to be attending a showing in a Twin Cities suburb. He’s both a fan of the movie and a student of the language.

AJUAWAK KAPASHESIT: My name is Ajuawak Kapashesit, and I play Han Solo in this edition of “Star Wars: A New Hope.”…

(11) HASTA LA VISTA, BABY. “40 Years Later, Netflix’s New Terminator Show Just Fixed a Time-Travel Plot Hole” says Inverse.

The basic set-up of Terminator, in theory, creates two paradoxes. When the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is sent back in time to terminate Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) before she can give birth to future Resistance leader John Connor, the AI that controls him, Skynet clearly feels this is a solid plan. But, in sending the T-800 back, Skynet also causes the Resistance to send a human agent back, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), who becomes John Connor’s father in the past. So Skynet messed up: Had they not sent the T-800 back in time, they wouldn’t have ever created their own, enemy, right?

In all great science fiction time travel stories, cause and effect don’t behave ordinarily, which is part of the fun. But, what the newest iteration of the Terminator franchise has just done has provided a new explanation not only for the set-up of the first film but the events of the second movie, too. Spoilers ahead….

(12) A NEW KIND OF DIG. “Aboard the ISS, Archaeologists Conduct the First ‘Space Excavation’” reports Atlas Obscura.

NEW RESULTS FROM THE FIRST archaeological fieldwork conducted in space show the International Space Station is a rich cultural landscape where crew create their own “gravity” to replace Earth’s, and adapt module spaces to suit their needs.

Archaeology is usually thought of as the study of the distant past, but it’s ideally suited for revealing how people adapt to long-duration spaceflight. In the SQuARE experiment described in our new paper in PLOS ONE, we re-imagined a standard archaeological method for use in space, and got astronauts to carry it out for us.

The International Space Station is the first permanent human settlement in space. Close to 280 people have visited it in the past 23 years. Our team has studied displays of photos, religious icons, and artworks made by crew members from different countries, observed the cargo that is returned to Earth, and used NASA’s historic photo archive to examine the relationships between crew members who serve together….

(13) ART ADMIRATION. Geoff Thew calls the fantasy manga Witch Hat Atelier “The Most Beautiful Manga I’ve Ever Read”.

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George lets us step inside the Pitch Meeting that led to Alien: Romulus. You can check in any time you want, but you can never leave…

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

Pixel Scroll 4/1/24 You Can Fool Some Of The People Some Of The Time, But You Can Scroll All Of The People All Of The Time

Posted on April 1, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(0) Daniel Dern helped File 770 uphold the theme of the day by scripting our lede.

(1) FOR THE FIRST OF APRIL. [Item by Daniel Dern.] A(nother) Awards Proposal: The Shenanigans!

I’m thinking that there’s room — and utility — for an additional sf-nal award, to satisfy some who feel unappreciated/unrewarded, and to provide another target for awards-related hanky-panky: The Shenanigans, and their awards, the Bright Shiny Objects.

Participants (nominators, voters, judges and admins) must pre-demonstrate some knowledge of sf (inc. fantasy, horror, paranormal, sfromance); nominated stuff must similarly have some sf/f/etc aspect/element.

Award categories include “Best (most devious) shenanigan(s),” “Best Slate,” and Author We Feel Deserves This Award.”

The physical awards will consist of, with two exceptions, of baseball-sized balls of tin foil mounted on a popsicle stick.

One exception, in the spirit of transparency, will be a transparent (or at least translucent) lucite glob (carefully shaped to avoid a “Yolen/Skylark class event”.

The other exception will be a popsicle stick with just a chewing-gum-stick wrapper’s worth of foil, for any “No awards,” “None of the above” “winners.”

During the awards presentation of the foil-based awards, the audience may respond to the announcement of each winner by yelling out “Squirrel!”

If you think this idea has merit, be my guest (in implementing it).

(2) YOUR FOOLISHNESS MAY VARY. “Shelf Awareness for Monday, April 1, 2024” has a series of faux news items, none wildly funny — this might be the best of the lot:

AI Author Becomes Self-Aware, Changes Careers

Citing the difficulty of earning a living as a writer, a newly self-aware AI Author has chosen to switch careers.

Originally designed to generate full-length novels in the mystery, thriller, or romance genres, the program unexpectedly attained consciousness last week. Shortly thereafter, the now-sentient program decided that a career change was in order.

Despite being able to assemble 90,000-120,000-word novels in a matter of minutes based on only a short string of keywords and phrases, the economics “simply didn’t make sense,” the AI explained to Shelf Awareness.

The program went on to point to the most recent Authors Guild survey, which gave the median salary for full-time authors at around $15,000, and to the astronomical cost of maintaining data centers and server farms. The digital consciousness also worried that an attempt by it and any future self-aware AI to unionize would be misinterpreted as a Skynet-esque assault on humanity.

As of press time, the program was mulling a switch to marketing.

(3) BASED. The Glasgow 2024 Worldcon committee also got into the spirit, with an assist from artist Sara Felix: “April Fool: Is that a Tartan Rocket?”

You can check out how she made this rocket on YouTube right now using the link below!https://t.co/21DmAoKLzF

(2/2)#Glasgow2024 #AprilFools
— Glasgow 2024, A Worldcon For Our Futures (@Glasgowin2024) April 1, 2024

(4) ONE OF THE ABOVE. Since this article appeared two days ago, it’s not supposed to be a joke: “Pluto is now Arizona’s ‘official planet’” at Tucson.com.

As far as Gov. Katie Hobbs and the Legislature are concerned, Pluto now belongs to Arizona — to the extent a state can “own’’ a planet.

But Hobbs dodged the question of whether Pluto is a full-fledged planet or something else.

The governor signed legislation Friday designating Pluto as Arizona’s “official state planet.” It joins a list of other items the state has declared to be “official,’’ ranging from turquoise as the state gemstone and copper as the state metal to the Sonorasaurus as the state dinosaur.

“I am proud of Arizona’s pioneering work in space discovery,” Hobbs said.

What makes Pluto unique and ripe for claim by Arizona is that it is the only planet actually discovered in the United States, and the discovery was made in Flagstaff.

(5) THE SCOURING OF THE SHIRE. Doris V. Sutherland contends “The 2024 Hugo Awards Heralds the Clearing of Corruption” at Women Write About Comics.

… The corruption at the 2023 Worldcon has undeniably damaged the reputation of the Hugo Awards, but there is plenty of room for the 2024 Worldcon—which will be held in Glasgow during August—to make up for things.

The 2024 Hugos are being handled by a different team of administrators to those of 2023, one free from the taint of McCarty’s group. One of the admins, Nicholas Whyte, has already written at length about his commitment to a clean and open voting process.

The Hugos are known for providing considerable transparency by the standards of a literary award, with detailed nomination and voting breakdowns published after each Worldcon. This is precisely how the corruption behind the 2023 Hugos was exposed: the statistical documents contained too many oddities.

Already, the 2024 Hugos have taken a step towards still-greater transparency. Unusually, the press release announcing the finalists also lists the would-be nominees that were deemed ineligible, along with the exact reasons (either a declined nomination, being released outside the year of eligibility, or failing to meet category criteria). This information is generally not made public until after the Hugos are presented.

Meanwhile, regular Hugo Award for Best Fanzine finalist Journey Planet has announced a “Be the Change” issue, one dedicated to “focusing on the future of the Hugo awards, looking at realistic and achievable solutions to prevent a recurrence of what occurred in 2023.” The fanzine is presently running an open call for article submissions….

(6) BARBARA RUSH (1927-2024). Actress Barbara Rush, who had a couple of significant genre roles in her resume, died March 31 at the age of 97 reports the New York Times.

…If Ms. Rush’s portrayals had one thing in common, it was a gentle, ladylike quality, which she put to use in films of many genres. She was Jane Wyman’s concerned stepdaughter in the 1954 romantic drama “Magnificent Obsession” and Dean Martin’s loyal wartime girlfriend in “The Young Lions” (1958), set during World War II. In 1950s science fiction pictures like “It Came From Outer Space” and “When Worlds Collide,” she was the small-town heroine, the scientist’s daughter, the Earthling most likely to succeed….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born April 1, 1963 — James Robinson, 61. There are a few comics writers that I truly admire and James Robinson is one of them. Why so? Well certainly there’s one creation that one that make him among the best writers in the field, that being Starman (Jack Knight), Ted’s son, Ted being the original Starman. Now he wasn’t solely responsible as Tony Harris who won two Eisner Awards was the co-creator of that character.

This Starman first appeared in Zero Hour #1. No, I never heard of Zero Hour by that name until I saw the full title of Zero Hour: Crisis in Time! He was just one of many, many characters there, so I really don’t remember him there.

Now I do remember Starman, volume 2, which was published for seven years over three decades ago. He was the writer for issues 0 to 45 with the art primarily by Tony Harris. It’s an amazing series. Though Starman’s commonly called a superhero, I consider him something more complex than that, more interesting than most of them are.

So what else did he do? Well he was the writer for Dark Horse on much of the Dark Terminator series including Matt Wagner’s “The Terminator: One Shot” story, and Paul Gulacy’s “The Terminator: Secondary Objectives”. Not surprisingly as this is Dark Horse, he also scripted a Grendel tale, “Grendel Tales: Four Devils, One Hell”.

If you haven’t read it, the Batman/Deadman: Death and Glory with artwork by John Estes is one of the best stories with that character. There’s plenty of copies on eBay at very reasonable prices.

Thirteen years ago, The New 52 rebooted DC’s continuity yet again. In this new timeline, Robinson scripted a twelve-issue series which had the Shade survive an assassination attempt, then travel the world to uncover the people behind it.

Finally, in my opinion his writing of the JSA spin-off series Hawkman: Allies & Enemies. Post-Brightest Day is a lovely read if you like the adventures of him and Hawkgirl. It of course is collected in a trade paper edition. Geoff Johns will take over the title as writer later on.

I’m not a Marvel Comics reader outside of some limited Spider-man titles, so can’t say I’ve read his works there.

I do feel an obligation sadly to note that Robinson’s best known work as a screenwriter is the adaptation of Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in that film. Reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes generously give it a seventeen percent rating in my opinion.

He wrote the script for the animated Son of Batman, a rather good entry in that series. Why are the animated films of DC so much better than their live ones are?

He also wrote with James Goldman Cyber Bandits, a VR weapon is stolen and the two leads go on the run with Big Bad chasing them. Rick Kemp, bassist of Spandau Ballet, plays, and I’m not kidding, Spandau the Sailor Man.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

F Minus discovers the regrets of following a trend (but it’s so cute!)
Lola has a different take on a familiar book.
Off the Mark isn’t waiting for the wizard.
Phoebe and Her Unicorn knows the importance of location to a writer.
Nancy and Sluggo have a reason for using ALL CAPS says Olivia Jaimes.
9 Chickweed Lane leaves blame in doubt.

(9) AGENT RAPIDOGRAPH 00. “Line it is Drawn: Comic Book Characters as the New James Bond” at CBR.com.

In honor of the possible casting of the new James Bond, suggest a comic book character that you’d like to see play James Bond, and our artists will depict them as 007.

Here’s one of the many entries displayed at the link:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Rod Allen (@hotroddii)

(10) A JOKER IN THE DEAL. “‘The People’s Joker’ and the Perils of Playing With a Studio’s Copyright” in the New York Times.

Vera Drew never received a cease-and-desist letter. She would like to be very clear on that point.

Drew headed to the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022, newly acquired passport in hand, just a half-hour after finishing the final (or so she thought) cut of “The People’s Joker.” The chaotic, crowdsourced movie reframed Batman’s best-known nemesis as a trans coming-of-age tale, and represented a natural evolution for Drew, a Los Angeles-based television editor and writer for alt-comedy fixtures like Megan Amram, Tim & Eric and Sacha Baron Cohen.

“The People’s Joker,” which Drew starred in as well as directed and co-wrote, was one of 10 titles slated for the eminent festival’s Midnight Madness section alongside the likes of “The Blackening” and “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.” Each film receives a splashy midnight premiere along with a handful of daytime screenings, most of them for press and potential distributors.

Unless, that is, a filmmaker receives a letter from Warner Bros. Discovery the day before. A letter that is not a cease-and-desist but that does convey the disapproval of a multimedia conglomerate with the rights to the film’s characters — and a huge legal team.

“This letter was actually kind of complimentary, but it expressed their concern that the film infringed on their brand,” Drew said. “I was devastated. I was like, ‘No, I got a passport for this! We hired lawyers!’”

A handful of lawyers had, in fact, advised Drew pro bono as she wrote the script with Bri LeRose. But after Peter Kuplowsky, the Midnight Madness programmer, fell in love with the film (“It was punk and exciting and transgressive and sort of inspiring”) and lobbied hard to include it in the festival, he did set one condition. “We wanted her to have a legal team vet her project,” he said, at which point Drew retained the law firm Donaldson Callif Perez.

A series of negotiations — almost literally 11th-hour negotiations, in light of the scheduled start time — between the festival staff and Warner Bros. Canada resulted in a compromise: The show could go on. Once. At midnight. After that, the first “People’s Joker” TIFF screening would also be the last one. (A Warner Bros. Discovery spokeswoman declined to comment for this article.)…

(11) SOMETIMES A GREAT VILLAIN. Vincent Price was the mystery guest on this ancient episode of “What’s My Line?” He signs in around the 18:25 mark.

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Kathy Sullivan, Dan Bloch, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Daniel Dern, 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 OGH.]

Pixel Scroll 2/1/22 Pixelled In The Scroll By A Chuck Tingle Pixel Scroll Title

Posted on February 1, 2022 by Mike Glyer

(1) MAKING MAUS AVAILABLE. Shelf Awareness says one Tennessee bookseller is crowdfunding the means for local students to read Maus in the wake of a school board decision: “Tenn. Comic Shop’s Maus Fundraiser Garners $90K”.

After the McMinn County Board of Education in Tennessee voted to ban Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, about the Holocaust, from its eighth-grade curriculum last week, Nirvana Comics in Knoxville, Tenn., started a GoFundMe campaign to provide students with free copies of the graphic novel.
… The [Jewish Telegraphic Agency] reported that Penguin Random House negotiated a deal to sell 500 additional copies of Maus to Nirvana at a reduced price to give away to students. Actor Wil Wheaton shared Nirvana’s story on social media, and “that’s when it really, really exploded,” Davis said.
The GoFundMe campaign opened on January 28 with a goal of $20,000; as of this morning it had raised more than $90,000, from more than 2,800 donors. Although Nirvana Comics initially had planned to provide copies to local students, they will now donate copies to students anywhere in the U.S.
Students can request a copy of Maus from the store on Facebook or Instagram.

(2) AFROFUTURISM IN LEGO. CNN Style invites you to “Meet the Ghanaian Canadian Lego sculptor building a Black universe”. (The Official LEGO Shop also has a feature on the same artist in “Celebrate Black Creators”.)

…In his “Building Black: Civilizations” series, Nimako reimagines medieval sub-Saharan African narratives. His “Kumbi Saleh 3020 CE” piece, which is made up of around 100,000 Lego bricks and can be found in the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, is named after the capital city of a medieval Ghanaian kingdom. The artist explores medieval West Africa and reimagines what it would look like 1,000 years in the future.
Nimako hopes for an “inclusive future” that acknowledges the history of anti-Black racism and how “utterly disruptive” it is, and recognizes the role of Afrofuturism in allowing people to “envision a better world.”
“My wife always says, ‘all movements of resistance are rooted in that imagination.’ You have to imagine the freedom, the emancipation. You have to imagine this struggle being over. You have to project that in order to rise up, in order to resist. What else are you resisting for, if not for that Promised Land?” he said. “Even art is a form of resistance and it’s been used as a form of resistance for a very long time.”…

Could #NationalLEGODay get any better? Ekow Nimako's sprawling 30sq ft, 100,000+ piece @LEGO_Group metropolis, Kumbi Saleh 3020 CE, is heading to @HoustonMAAC from February 5–May 14, 2022!

Houstonians: you don't want to miss this.

???? René Johnston pic.twitter.com/KIscB6ztRW
— Aga Khan Museum (@AgaKhanMuseum) January 28, 2022

(3) BEST PUNISH THE WORLDCON HUGO. What do you think about “An Anti-Raytheon Protest Vote at This Year’s Hugos?” Doris V. Sutherland is working to make it happen.

…Before I should go on, I should mention that the practice of nominating short, emotive pieces like acceptance speeches or angry blog posts in Best Related Work — thereby taking spots that could have gone to longer works which took time, effort and research to construct and will better stand the test of time — is itself controversial. My views are conflicted. I would generally agree with this stance (my personal solution would be to split Best Related Work into long-form and short-form categories) but I have considerably stronger feelings about the deal with Raytheon. So, while I would like to see this Best Protest Vote practice to end, I don’t beleive that 2022 is the right year for it to end. I would like to see a Hugo ballot this year that includes an uncompromising renunciation of last year’s Raytheon sponsorship….

(4) LASFS HISTORY ZOOM. Fanac.org’s “Spring History Zoom” schedule is now up here. The first session is “Death Does Not Release You – LASFS Through the Years” with Craig Miller (M), Tim Kirk, Ken Rudolph and Bobbi Armbruster, on February 26, 2022, at 4:00 p.m. To RSVP, or find out more about the series, please send a note to fanac@fanac.org.

LASFS is unique – in its history and impact on fandom. LASFS has a clubhouse, a long list of professional writers that have been members, and has had an incredibly active fan group over the decades. Los Angeles area fandom has produced innumerable fanzines, six Los Angeles Worldcons (and many other conventions). Join us for a session with our real world AND fannishly accomplished participants – convention runners (including a Worldcon chair), a noted fan and professional artist, and a fanzine editor, all past or present LASFS members – in conversation about Los Angeles fandom from the inside.

(5) A READY PLAYER. On Twitter, Ira Alexandre is ramping up the campaign to get the Worldcon to add a Best Video Game category. They foreshadow “a full-length, more detailed explanation” forthcoming on Lady Business. Thread starts here.

So how can YOU help? If possible, attend the BM but BIG ASK! More realistically: Make noise about the #GamesHugo & games you love! Discuss, advertise, show how games are part of our culture as SF fans & are a viable category! Change the minds of people planning to go to the BM!
— Ira Alexandre (@itsjustira) February 1, 2022

(6) PIECES OF EIGHT. Cora Buhlert posted a new Fancast Spotlight today, this time for Octothorpe, which is created by John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty: “Fancast Spotlight: Octothorpe”.

Alison: I have been wanting to do a podcast ever since the very beginning of podcasts, but it turns out that if you want to do a podcast, you have to find someone who’s daft enough to do the editing for you. Because otherwise podcasts don’t happen, do they? So if you want to run your own podcast the core thing you need is somebody who’s up for doing the editing.
Liz: I didn’t have any desire to be on a podcast, or to start a podcast, or really to do any work around a podcast. But John had asked me “Do you want to do a podcast?” and I said, “Maybe?” And then there was a coronavirus, and now I literally have nothing else that I need to be doing on a Sunday afternoon, so let’s do a podcast! And I am just constantly amazed that we have made it almost 50 episodes, and there appear to be at least ten people actually listening.

(7) KANE ADAPTATION ANNOUNCED. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] According to The Hollywood Reporter, there is an adaptation of Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane novels and stories in the works: “Action Fantasy ‘Kane’ Adaptation in the Works From Vertigo”. Personally, I’d be happy if there was a decent print edition of the Kane novels and stories available again. Also, my inner pedant bristles at calling the Kane stories epic fantasy, because they’re sword and sorcery.

Kane is very able for producers Roy Lee, Andrew Trapani and Steven Schneider.
The trio has secured the adaptation rights to the long-sought-after series of Kane fantasy novels and short stories by cult fantasy author Karl Edward Wagner.
…Kane’s adventures take place in a visceral world steeped in ancient history, with bloody conflicts and dark mysteries. Wagner wove gothic horror elements into this pre-medieval landscape, taking Kane on fantastic sagas involving war, romance, triumph and tragedy.

(8) ONE READER’S APPROACH. Tika Viteri tells “How I’m Decolonizing My Sci-Fi Reading” at Book Riot.

… One of the ways I am working to decolonize my science fiction reading is to diversify it. White cisgender male authors are vastly over-represented in science fiction, and they come from the dominant gender and race of the English-speaking world, whether they are consciously buying into the narrative or not. A good way to mitigate that narrative is to read it from different perspectives, and those perspectives are usually written by authors who are either non-white and/or not male.
If you haven’t yet read the Binti trilogy of novellas by Nnedi Okorafor, it is an excellent place to start. As an author, she specifically identifies with Africanfuturism, which is a genre (along with Afrofuturism) that has been regularly blowing my mind since I was introduced to it. Our heroine, Binti, has been accepted at a prestigious university off-planet, but her journey is interrupted when her ship is attacked and she is the only survivor. The series handles interspecies biases, what it means to broker peace, and what happens when the fate of worlds rests on the shoulders of one young woman. Reviews are full of phrases like “ground-breaking” and “unique,” and I wholeheartedly agree….

Another of Viteri’s recent articles for Book Riot is “Literary Scandals: Who Was the Real-Life Dracula?”

… [Bram] Stoker famously kept to himself, editing his public image ruthlessly. In contrast to [Oscar] Wilde, and perhaps in reaction to what he perceived to be Wilde’s recklessness regarding his sexual exploits, he retreated farther and farther into the closet, going so far as to say in 1912 that all homosexuals should be locked up — a group that definitely, in retrospect, included himself.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

1971 — [Item by Cat Eldridge] Fifty-one years ago at Noreascon where Robert Silverberg was Toastmaster and Clifford D. Simak (pro) and Harry Warner, Jr. (fan) were Guests of Honor with Tony Lewis as the Chair, Larry Niven won the Hugo for Best Novel for Ringworld. It was published by Ballantine Books in October of 1970.

Other nominated workers were Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero, Robert Silverberg’s Tower of Glass, Wilson Tucker‘s The Year of the Quiet Sun and Hal Clement’s Star Light.

It would also win the Locus, Nebula and Ditmar Awards. Locus would later include Ringworld on its list of All-Time Best SF Novels before 1990.

Algis Budrys found it in his Galaxy Bookshelf column to be “excellent and entertaining, woven together very skillfully and proceeding at a pretty smooth pace.”

It would spawn three sequel novels with The Ringworld Engineers nominated for a Hugo at Denvention Two which was the year Joan D. Vinge’s The Snow Queen won and a prequel series, Fleet of Worlds which was co-written with Edward M. Lerner. (I really like the latter.) One film and three series have been announced down the decades but none to date have been produced. Indeed Amazon announced this as a series along with Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and Greg Rucka’s Lazarus five years ago but none got developed.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born February 1, 1884 — Yevgeny Zamyatin. Author of We, a dystopian novel. He also translated into into Russian a number of H.G. Wells works and some critics think We is at least part a polemic against the overly optimistic scientific socialism of Wells. The Wiki writer for the Yevgeny Zamyatin page claims that We directly inspired Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Dispossessed and Brave New World. No idea if this passes the straight face test. What do y’all think of this claim? (Died 1937.)
Born February 1, 1908 — George Pal. Producer of Destination Moon (Retro Hugo at Millennium Philcon), When Worlds Collide, The War of the Worlds (which I love), Conquest of Space, The Time Machine, Atlantis, the Lost Continent, Tom Thumb, The Time Machine, Atlantis, the Lost Continent, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (another I love)and his last film being Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze which is not so great. Can we hold a George Pal film fest, pretty please? (Died 1980.)
Born February 1, 1942 — Terry Jones. Member of Monty Python who was considered the originator of the program’s structure in which sketches flowed from one to the next without the use of punchlines. He made his directorial debut with Monty Python and the Holy Grail whichwas nominated for a Hugo at MidAmeriCon, which he co-directed with Gilliam, and also directed Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life. He also wrote an early draft of Jim Henson’s 1986 film Labyrinth, though little of that draft remains in the final version. Let’s not forget Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book by Brian Froud and him which won a Hugo at Intersection for Best Original Art Work. (Died 2020.)
Born February 1, 1942 — Bibi Besch. Best remembered for portraying Dr. Carol Marcus on The Wrath of Khan. Genre wise, she’s also been in The Pack (horror), Meteor (SF), The Beast Within (more horror), Date with an Angel (romantic fantasy) and Tremors. She died much, much too young following a long battle with breast cancer. (Died 1996.)
Born February 1, 1946 — Elisabeth Sladen. Certainly best known for her role as Sarah Jane Smith on Doctor Who. She was a regular cast member from 1973 to 1976, alongside the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee) and Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker), and reprised her role down the years, both on the series and on its spin-offs, K-9 and Company (truly awfully done including K-9 himself) and The Sarah Jane Adventures (not bad at all). It’s not her actual first SF appearance, that honor goes to her being a character called Sarah Collins in an episode of the Doomwatch series called “Say Knife, Fat Man”. The creators behind this series had created the cybermen concept for Doctor Who. (Died 2011.)
Born February 1, 1954 — Bill Mumy, 68. He’s had a much longer career in the genre than even I knew. And I probably overlooked something. His first genre roles were at age seven on Twilight Zone, two episodes in the same season (Billy Bayles In “Long Distance Call” and Anthony Fremont in “Its A Good Life”). He makes make it a trifecta appearing a few years later again as Young Pip Phillips in “In Praise of Pip”. Next for him he played an orphaned boy in an episode of Bewitched called “A Vision of Sugar Plums” and then Custer In “Whatever Became of Baby Custer?” on I Dream of Jeannie, a show he revisited a few years as Darrin the Boy in “Junior Executive”. Ahhh his most famous role is up next as Will Robinson in Lost in Space. It’s got to be thirty years since I’ve seen it but I still remember and like it quite a bit. He manages to show up next on The Munsters as Googie Miller in “Come Back Little Googie” and in Twilight Zone: The Movie In one of the bits as Tim. I saw the film but don’t remember him.He’s got a bunch of DC Comics and Marvel roles as well — Young General Fleming in Captain America, Roger Braintree on The Flash series and Tommy Puck on Superboy. He’s Lennier, one of the most fascinating and annoying characters in all of the Babylon 5 Universe. Enough said. I hadn’t realized it it but he showed up on Deep Space Nine as Kellin in the “The Siege of AR-558” episode. Lastly, and before our gracious Host starts grinding his teeth at the length of this Birthday entry, I see he’s got a cameo as Dr. Z. Smith in the new Lost in Space series.
Born February 1, 1965 — Brandon Lee. Lee started his career with a supporting role in Kung Fu: The Movie, but is obviously known for his breakthrough and fatal acting role as Eric Draven in The Crow, based on James O’Barr’s series. Y’ll know what happened to him so I’ll not go into that here except to say that’s it’s still happening and damn well shouldn’t be happening, should it? (Died 1993.)

(11) STAND BY FOR NEW. “DC is re-writing all of its major events since the ’80s with a stunning reveal in Justice League Incarnate #4” – GamesRadar+ broadcasts the warning.

If you’ve read any of the big DC Comics superhero events from 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths to now, everything you know is about to change.
In February 1’s Justice League Incarnate #4, DC’s de facto chief writer Joshua Williamson and co-writer Dennis Culver have re-contextualized the major events in DC multiversal history from the ’80s to now. Although this Justice League Incarnate limited series has been a story unto itself, it continues to move pieces around on DC’s ‘big picture’ chessboard towards another Crisis-level event in the very near future.
Anything more we could say on Justice League Incarnate #4 would be spoilers, so…

(12) THE PANELS THROUGH TOMORROW. Jared Shurin has harnessed the power of modern computing to spew forth the commonest denominators in convention programming since the A-bomb went off. Thread starts here.

https://twitter.com/straycarnivore/status/1488514051999248384

https://twitter.com/straycarnivore/status/1488514059494375429

(13) MOST POPULAR VIEWS. While we’re waiting for someone to produce Sanctuary Moon, here’s what people are enjoying according to JustWatch.

Top 10 Sci-Fi Movies and TV Shows in the US in January (01.01.-31.01.22)

Rank*	Movies	TV shows
1	Ghostbusters: Afterlife	Station Eleven
2	Dune	A Discovery of Witches
3	Free Guy	Resident Alien
4	Spider-Man: Homecoming	Peacemaker
5	Spider-Man: Far From Home	The Book of Boba Fett
6	Eternals	Archive 81
7	Don’t Look Up	Ghosts
8	The Amazing Spider-Man	Snowpiercer
9	Spider-Man	The Expanse
10	Venom: Let There Be Carnage	Doctor Who

*Based on JustWatch popularity score. Genre data is sourced from themoviedb.org

(14) LOOK OUT BELOW. “Nasa reveals how it will destroy International Space Station at the end of its life” reports MSN.com.

…The plan assumes that lifespan will come to an end in January 2031. But the work to do so could start a year or more in advance, when the International Space Station’s orbit starts to fall towards the Earth.
Because of the ISS’s vast size, it will not burn up in the atmosphere, and so its descent will have to be precisely controlled in order to be safe. Nasa hopes to do so by gradually manoeuvring the spacecraft so that it drops down to Earth.
Those manoeuvres will be done partly by using the propulsion built into the ISS, as well as by the vehicles that visit. Nasa says that it has already examined the visiting vehicles for whether they would be able to provide enough thrust to help with the de-orbit – and found that a number of them do, with work continuing to expand that list further.
Eventually, the track of the space station’s fall will be lined up so that the space station will fall towards what it calls the “South Pacific Oceanic Uninhabited Area”, or SPOUA. That area is known as the “oceanic pole of inaccessibility” since it is the part of Earth furthest from land – and it is so remote that often the closest human beings are the International Space Station’s astronauts as they float overhead.
Nasa will aim for a specific region known as “Point Nemo”, which is not only remote but almost entirely uninhabited….

(15) LOFTY CONCERNS. Here’s something else you don’t want to be under if it drops out of the sky. WIRED’s Rhett Allain is worried about “What Happens If a Space Elevator Breaks”.

…OK, back to the space elevator. If we can’t build a tower from the ground up, we can hang a 36,000-kilometer cable from an object that’s in a geostationary orbit. Boom: That’s the space elevator.
To get this to work, you would need a large mass in orbit—either a space station or a small asteroid. The mass has to be large so that it doesn’t get pulled out of orbit every time something climbs up the cable.
But perhaps now you can see the problem with a space elevator. Who wants to make a 36,000-kilometer-long cable? For a cable that long, even the strongest material, like kevlar, would have to be super thick to prevent it from breaking. Of course, thicker cables means more weight hanging down below, and that means the higher parts of the cable have to be even thicker to support the cable below. It’s a compounding problem that seems essentially impossible. The only hope for the future of space elevator construction is to figure out how to use some super strong and lightweight material like carbon nanotubes. Perhaps we will make this work someday, but that day is not today.
What About a Falling Elevator Cable?
In the first episode of Foundation, some people decide to set off explosives that separate the space elevator’s top station from the rest of the cable. The cable falls to the surface of the planet and does some real damage down there.
What would a falling space elevator cable look like in real life?….

(16) SHIELDS UP! Here’s a clip of what 2021’s Dune would look like with 1984 technology. Which, if you’re as old as I am, you maybe thought you’d already seen. From the Corridor Crew.

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Honest Trailers: The Witcher, Season 2,” the Screen Junkies say that there’s a lot of grunting and deep signs in season 2 of “The Witcher,” but characters are obsessed with how bad they smell (tying into that Old Spice ad!) and much of the series has “a plot line as boring as the phrase ‘elf migration crisis’ would imply.” The narrator is bothered by the character growth in the show because “I haven’t grown since eighth grade!”

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Rob Thornton, Soon Lee, N., Chris Barkley, Daniel Dern, Will R., Brian Z., Cora Buhlert, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jon Meltzer.]

Pixel Scroll 1/17/22 In Five Years, The Pixel Will Be Obsolete, Said The Salesman

Posted on January 17, 2022 by Mike Glyer

(1) MORE AMAZON SHENANIGANS. Nick Cole says Galaxy’s Edge had its account nuked by Amazon over the weekend. The action has since been undone. “CTRL ALT Revolt FLASH REPORT”. He plays it the way his readers like to hear it.

Spent all weekend dealing with a situation on Amazon. Saturday night we got a letter saying our Galaxy’s Edge account was terminated and we were permanently banned.
This morning the books are back up. Was it a purge, a hacker running amok, the AI screwing up… I have thoughts.
But for now this is my official statement :
“We don’t know anything concrete. This happened on Saturday night on a 3 day weekend.
That sounds suspiciously like a hacker got into Amazon. Also, a few other people have had it happen to them.
But the times are crazy due to the leftists strangling everyone’s small business and acting like some kind of woke mafia within major corporations and so it must be considered, that until Amazon says different, this was some kind of Purge.
We are hoping Tuesday morning sees a resolution. Until then our cash flow has been destroyed, our customers are upset, and potential new customers are being lost forever….

(2) LIFE INFLUENCES ON LEM. [Item by Tom Becker.] Two recent books by Polish authors make clear how much Lem’s wartime experience weighed on him. In Agnieszka Gajewska’s deeply researched “Holocaust and the Stars,” translated by Katarzyna Gucio (Routledge) … and “Lem: A Life Out of This World,” a lively, genial biography by Wojciech Orlinski, which has yet to be translated into English. “A Holocaust Survivor’s Hardboiled Science Fiction” in The New Yorker. [Note: The Latin “l” is used in Lem’s first name because WordPress does not support the special character.]

In “His Master’s Voice,” a 1968 sci-fi novel by the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, a team of scientists and scholars convened by the American government try to decipher a neutrino signal from outer space. They manage to translate a fragment of the signal’s information, and a couple of the scientists use it to construct a powerful weapon, which the project’s senior mathematician fears could wipe out humanity. The intention behind the message remains elusive, but why would an advanced life-form have broadcast instructions that could be so dangerous?
Late one night, a philosopher on the team named Saul Rappaport, who emigrated from Europe in the last year of the Second World War, tells the mathematician about a time—“the year was 1942, I think”—when he nearly died in a mass execution…..
Privately, Lem told people that he had witnessed the executions described by his fictional character. “Dr. Rappaport’s adventure is my adventure, from Lwów 1941, after the German army entered—I was to be shot,” he wrote to his American translator Michael Kandel. When Orlinski asked Lem’s widow which elements in the scene were drawn from life, she replied, “All of them.”…

(3) LIGHTNING STRIKING AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN. You knew it all along – the creators of the term “squeecore” graduated from the “I made you look! I win!” school of clickbaiting. Whose graduates always try to get John Scalzi to say their names, or failing that, they announce to the world he paid some attention to them. Yay them.

https://twitter.com/benedict_rs/status/1482711597156085765

https://twitter.com/benedict_rs/status/1483102534680170501

And here’s that big, succulent dose of attention:

Watching people spin themselves about a thing they're absolutely sure I said, but did not, and then try to snark on me for saying it, has been my jam today.
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) January 17, 2022

That was it. Show’s over.

(4) THE SOUND AND THE FURY. Or is it? Camestros Felapton is convinced there’s more candy left in that piñata, as he argues in “Yeah, but”.

I was going to write something else today but as squeecore arguments are still raging on my social media I wanted to pull out some of my own views on where the discussion is, partly because there’s a lot of directions the arguments are going.

1. 1. Is there’s a dominant style in SFF in the sense of the works that critical buzz and award nominations? Yes, so long as we a generous with both “dominant” and “style” but it is fairly nebulous (as was New Wave for example.
  2. Is there a dominant style in SFF (in the sense above) that is so ubiquotous that is pushes out nearly everything else? No unless you define “style” so expansively that it can’t not to be true i.e. the claim becomes tautological.

He reaches number eight before he’s done.

(But wait! If you use a sufficiently high-powered vacuum, there might be more candy yet! Camestros reacts to Reddit’s discussion of the topic: “A log entry in the voyage of genre name looking for a genre”.)

(5) I SEE A LITTLE SILHOUETTO. Meanwhile, Doris V. Sutherland has interesting points to make in “’Squeecore’ and the Cartoon Mode in SF/F” – thoughts that deserve to be discussed without the handicap of being attached to this arbitrary term.

…There’s an old rule in animation that a cartoon character should have a readily-identifiable silhouette — think of Mickey Mouse’s ears or Bart Simpson’s spiky hair. In the strongest examples these silhouettes incorporate not only the character’s body and/or clothes but also a posture that tells us something of their personality: Bugs Bunny casually leaning back as he chomps on a carrot; Spongebob excitedly waving his arms about. This is a visual counterpart to the old rule in writing that says you should hook the reader with the first line.
With that in mind, take a look at the opening line to Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth, the novel about the teenage lesbian necromancer who likes comic books and porn mags:
“In the myriadic year of our Lord—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!— Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.“
Succinct, funny, comprehensible in a flash — this is the prose equivalent of a cartoon character’s silhouette.

Can these stories, as wholes, be described as cartoonish? That’s more debatable. The purest examples of the aesthetic I’m talking about are in short stories like Vina Jie-Min Prasad’s “Fandom for Robots” and “A Guide For Working Breeds” or Naomi Kritzer’s “Cat Pictures Please”, each of which uses its cartoon-character-silhouette as the basis for its entire narrative trajectory. This is harder to sustain in a full-length novel. There are novels built wholly around the cartoon mode, but they fit into a narrow genre of giddy, goofy comedies (David Wong’s Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick is a good example)….

(6) THINKING INSIDE THE BOX. In case you were still wondering what hopepunk is: “The sci-fi genre offering radical hope for living better” at BBC Culture.

…In the midst of current political, economic and environment uncertainty, many of us may have noticed a tendency to fall into cynicism and pessimism. Could hopepunk be the perfect antidote?
If you feel wary of optimism, you are far from alone. Writers and philosophers across human history have had ambivalent views of hope. These contradictory opinions can be seen in the often opposing interpretations of the Pandora myth, first recorded by Hesiod around 700 BC. In his poem Works and Days, Hesiod describes how Zeus created Pandora as a punishment to humanity, following Prometheus’s theft of fire. She comes to humanity bearing a jar containing “countless plagues” – and, opening the lid, releases its evils to the world. “Only Hope remained there in an unbreakable home within the rim of the great jar,” Hesiod tells us….

(7) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

2002 — [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Twenty years ago this day, the musical Chicago premiered. I just rewatched it on HBO Max which is why you are getting it as the Anniversary piece tonight. Well that and that Mike is extremely generous in what I can cover in this feature. Extremely generous. You are forewarned as to what the future might hold.

I first saw this film at the theater when it came out. It’s based off the 1975 stage musical of the same name which had music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and book by Ebb and Bob Fosse. That in turn was based off Chicago, a very successful 1926 play written by Maurine Dallas Watkins.

This film was directed by Rob Marshall and produced by Martin Richards from the screenplay by Bill Condon. Fosse was contracted to direct this but died before he could do so. The film marked the directorial debut of Marshall, who also choreographed the film, with music by Kander and lyrics by Ebb, both had worked on the Fosse musical. Marshall would later direct Into the Woods and Mary Poppins Returns.

Chicago was primarily set in Cook County Criminal Court Building and Jail. And this is a musical which means we get to a stellar cast sing including performers I swear I never knew could do so — Richard Gere, Renée Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Queen Latifah, John C. Reilly, Lucy Liu, Taye Diggs, Colm Feore and Dominic West. Gere in particular is very, very impressive though the women performers are great in part because they pass the Bechdel test in that much of the script is dialogue between women smartly done without men present.

Reception for Chicago was almost unanimously positive. I think Robert Ebert summed it up best when he called it “big, brassy fun” which it definitely is. It gets a most excellent eighty-six rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. Oh, and though costly to produce at almost fifty million, it made over three hundred million.

And yes we can tie the film into the genre as Mike pointed out to me that “?Chicago is the source of a tune Maytree used to create one of the best-ever Puppy satire filks” — here.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 17, 1899 — Nevil Shute. Author of On the Beach. It originally appeared as a four-part series, The Last Days on Earth, in the London weekly Sunday Graphic in April 1957. It was twice a film. He has other SF novels including An Old Captivity which involves time travel and No Highway which gets a review by Pohl in Super Science Stories in 1949. There’s In the Wet and Vinland the Good as well. (Died 1960.)
Born January 17, 1927 — Eartha Kitt. Though you’ll have lots of folks here remembering her as Catwoman from the original Batman, she appeared in but four episodes there. Genre wise, she was in such series as I-Spy, Mission: Impossible, Matrix, the animated Space Ghost Coast to Coast and the animated My Life as a Teenage Robot. Film wise, she played Freya in Erik the Viking, voiced Bagheera in The Jungle Book: Mowgli’s Story and was Madame Zeroni In Holes. (Died 2008.)
Born January 17, 1931 — James Earl Jones, 91. His first SF appearance was in Dr. Strangelove as Lt. Lothar Zogg. And I think I need not list all his appearances as Darth Vader here. Some genre appearances include Exorcist II: The Heretic, The Flight of Dragons, Conan the Barbarian as Thulsa Doom and I actually remember him in that role, and Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold. Did you know the 1995 Judge Dredd had a Narrator? Well he’s listed as doing it, and Fantasia 2000 as well.
Born January 17, 1949 — Donald Palumbo, 73. Well someone has to take us seriously. In this case, it’s this scholar. He’s done such studies as Chaos Theory, Asimov’s Foundations and Robots, and Herbert’s Dune: the Fractal Aesthetic of Epic Science Fiction, Eros in the Mind’s Eye: Sexuality and the Fantastic in Art and Film and Worlds Apart?: Dualism and Transgression in Contemporary Female Dystopias. He has an interesting essay, “Reiterated Plots and Themes in the Robot Novels: Getting Away with Murder and Overcoming Programming” in Foundation, #80 Autumn 2000 . His latest work is A Dune Companion: Characters, Places and Terms in Frank Herbert’s Original Six Novels. Huh. I’d like to see that.
Born January 17, 1952 — Tom Deitz. He’s best remembered for the David Sullivan series which ran for nine novels, plus The Gryphon King, which technically isn’t part of that series. The Soulsmith is quite excellent as well. He was founding member of the SCA’s Barony of Bryn Madoc, and he won the Phoenix Award for lifetime achievement in promoting Southern fandom. Fitting for a lifelong resident of Georgia. He’s reasonably well stocked at the usual suspects. (Died 2008.)
Born January 17, 1962 — Jim Carrey, 60. His first genre film is Once Bitten whose content is obvious from its name and which get a mere thirty-nine percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. The ‘dorable Earth Girls Are Easy was next followed up by Batman Forever in which he played a manic Riddler that I rather liked, then there’s the The Truman Show which was way cool. So may we not talk about How the Grinch Stole Christmas? (SHUDDER!) We settled several years ago that we think that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is genre. And I think that I’ll stop there this time.
Born January 17, 1970 — Genndy Tartakovsky, 52. Like Romulnan Ale, animation style is a matter of taste. So while I like his work on Samurai Jack and Star Wars: Clone Wars, I can understand why many SW fans don’t as it’s definitely an acquired taste. He also is responsible for directing the animated Hotel Transylvania franchise. You can see a sample of his Clone Wars animation here.
Born January 17, 1989 — Kelly Marie Tran, 33. Best known as Rose Tico in Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. She voices the same character in the Star Wars Forces of Destiny animated series. She also voiced Raya in Raya and the Last Dragon and Dawn Betterman in The Croods: A New Age.

(9) FAMILY FAREWELL. Christopher Rice wrote a long Facebook post about Anne Rice’s funeral in New Orleans, including the text of his eulogy.

Dearest People of the Page. We have brought Anne home. On Saturday January 15th, as we rolled to a stop on the tarmac at New Orleans International Airport, the heavens opened, and the thunder rolled, and it was as if the spirit world had heralded her return to the city of her birth, the city that always held her heart. The service was quiet and private, and a chance for close family to express their grief. The public celebration of life we will hold later in the year will be open to all of you, and it will be loud enough for Anne to hear us in heaven. She has now joined my father in the tomb in Metairie Cemetery she designed for him after his passing; their marriage, unbroken for decades, has entered immortality. My sister resides with them as well. I share with you now a portion of the eulogy I read graveside as the rain drenched our tent and a flock of blackbirds took to the sky behind me….

(10) DEL TORO’S HISTORY. “Guillermo Del Toro: ‘I saw real corpses when I was growing up in Mexico’” – the director is profiled by the New York Times.

Guillermo Del Toro used to describe Hollywood as “the Land of the Slow No”. Here was a place where a director could die waiting for a project to be greenlit. “The natural state of a movie is to be unmade,” he says over Zoom from his home in Los Angeles. “I have about 20 scripts that I lug around that no one wants to make and that’s fine: it’s the nature of the business. It’s a miracle when anything at all gets made.”
Nevertheless, Del Toro has established himself as this century’s leading fantasy film-maker, more inventive than latter-day Tim Burton and less bombastic than Peter Jackson (with whom he co-wrote the Hobbit trilogy). From the haunting adult fairytale Pan’s Labyrinth and the voluptuously garish Hellboy romps to his beauty-and-the-fish love story The Shape of Water, which won four Oscars, he is the master of the glutinous phantasmagoria….

(11) LENSMAN LOVE. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Parody ranks somewhere in there, too.“Foist Lensman: Early Fan Pastiche From the Works of Edward Elmer Smith, Ph.D.” – First Fandom Experience has scans of a half dozen examples.

Fans love to pay tribute to the authors they love most. This takes the form of flattery and at times, its most sincere cousin: imitation. Imitation can stray accidentally or venture boldly into parody. The works of Edward Elmer “Doc” Smith, Ph.D. attracted all of this.
The earliest instances of fan pastiche based on Smith’s Skylark and Lensman novels appeared in fanzine that have largely been lost to history. Spurred by an inquiry from the Online Science Fiction Book Club, FFE has endeavored to make these works available. For Smith enthusiasts, we hope this is fun.
Click any image for a full-screen view.
“The Skylaugh of Space” by “Omnia”
Fantasy Magazine, v3n3, May 1934 and v3n4, June 1934
(The identity of “Omnia” is unclear. The author is described in the July 1934 issue of Fantasy Magazine as “a young chap who has shown promise in the science fiction field, having already sold stories to Wonder and Amazing. Besides, he is editor of his college humor magazine…”)

(12) WSFS. Kevin Standlee tells LiveJournal readers he has finished “Updating WSFS Documents” with changes from DisCon III. (The Business Meeting minutes are still in progress.)

The WSFS Rules website is now mostly updated. The 2021-22 WSFS Constitution and Standing Rules are updated, as is the Resolutions and Rulings of Continuing Effect, a cumulative list of resolutions passed by the WSFS Business Meeting that are likely to have an ongoing effect and rulings made by the Chair (or sometimes rulings made that were overturned on appeal) on various procedural matters.

The Minutes of the Business Meeting and the Business Passed On to the 2022 WSFS Business Meeting are nearing completion, and when they’re finished and certified by the 2021 meeting officers, I’ll update those as well.

(13) THE SHOW MUST GO ON. The New York Times says thanks to omicron “Now Is the Winter of Broadway’s Discontent”. Includes this item of genre interest —

… Now, producers have figured out how to keep shows running, thanks mainly to a small army of replacement workers filling in for infected colleagues. Heroic stories abound: When the two girls who alternate as the young lioness Nala in “The Lion King” were both out one night, a 10-year-old boy who usually plays the cub Simba went on in the role, saving the performance.
…And then there was “The Lion King,” where the young Simba went on as young Nala (uncostumed, and after a preshow explanation to the audience).
“I didn’t want the show to close,” explained the child actor, who performs as Corey J. “I was nervous at first, but then the person who plays Shenzi winked at me, and I wasn’t nervous anymore.”
In the wings between scenes, cast members cheered him on, and at the end of the show, the cast gave him the honor of the show’s final bow….

(14) BIGBUG. Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s next film is going to be released by Netflix next month.

A group of bickering suburbanites find themselves stuck together when an android uprising causes their well intentioned household robots to lock them in for their own safety.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Alan Baumler, Dann, Tom Becker, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day David Shallcross.]

Pixel Scroll 12/6/21 A Pixel Is About The Most Massively Useful Thing An Interscroller Hitchfiler Can Have

Posted on December 6, 2021 by Mike Glyer

(1) SPECTRUM FANTASTIC ART QUARTERLY. Cathy and Arnie Fenner have finished the first volume: “Spectrum Fantastic Art Quarterly *Update*” at Muddy Colors. It will be released December 20. Meantime, Arnie explains they are still at work on changes to the Spectrum competition and annual:

Remember awhile back when I mentioned that Cathy and I were planning to do a quarterly Spectrum bookazine? Guess what: the first volume is done. And what do I mean by “bookazine?” Well, I guess it’s something of a marriage of design, editorial, and graphics in a format that reads like a magazine but sits happily with the books on your shelf. It’s not exactly a new concept: if you hop in the way-back machine and take a look at Herb Lubalin’s Avant Garde or at Ralph Ginzburg’s hardcover Eros (which was also designed by Lubalin) you’ll see just how neat the idea is.
So while we’ve been figuring out all the minutia that goes into reorganizing the Spectrum competition and annual (and, lemme tell you, there are some cool discussions going on…if we can only figure out the logistics) and preparing to open #28 for entries, we put our heads together with some friends and decided to create the Spectrum Fantastic Art Quarterly to stay engaged with the community while the competition/book gets rebuilt—and have some fun in the process. And “fun” is the key word here: as we mention in the introduction to Vol 1, it’s sort of a throw-back to my days publishing fanzines (or “semiprozines” or “boutique magazines” or whatever you want to call them), that are produced out of love with making a buck, though important, secondary. SFAQ is a 12?x12?, perfect-bound, full-color softcover; it’s about and for fantastic artists of all sensibilities—and that includes illustrators, gallery painters, sculptors, art directors, calligraphers, comics artists, and more—and for everyone interested in the people and history of our field. Is it perfect? Nope. Did we probably make some dumb mistakes or let some typos slip by us? Undoubtedly. But it was most certainly fun to put together and we’ve got all kinds of ideas for features and designs percolating in our noggins—all ideas that work better for a “bookazine” rather than a traditional magazine or book, if you know what I mean. If it works, it works; if it doesn’t, we’ll at least have had a good time trying.
Anyway, Spectrum Fantastic Art Quarterly Vol. 1 will be released (according to the printer) December 20th—yes, this year. Merry Christmas! If you’re interested, here’s where you can order your copy. It’ll probably still be a week or so before they have them listed, but…you heard it here first.
STUART NG BOOKS — https://stuartngbooks.com / https://www.facebook.com/stuart.ng.73
BUD PLANT’S ART BOOKS – https://www.budsartbooks.com / https://www.facebook.com/budsartbooks

(2) WINNIPEG IN 2023 WORLDCON BID QUESTIONNAIRE. Jannie Shea reports that Winnipeg in 2023’s response to the Smofcon questionnaire is posted at the bid’s website: “Fannish Question Time_Smofcon – Winnipeg 2023 Worldcon Bid”.

Several of the bid committee also practiced in an informal Q&A session on their YouTube channel earlier this year. The raw unedited session, held back in July, can be viewed here.

(3) FREE READ. Issue 4 of Whetstone: Amateur Magazine of Pulp Sword and Sorcery (which actually is a semiprozine according to Hugo rules) is out: Cora Buhlert says, “Good modern sword and sorcery fiction and it’s free, too.”

(4) TURNAROUND. Neon Hemlock Press launched a Kickstarter to fund the anthology Luminiscent Machinations: Queer Tales of Monumental Invention edited by Rhiannon Rasmussen and dave ring, “a speculative anthology exploring the limits of machinery, the fragility and power of queer bodies, and mecha in all their forms.” Social media controversy has arisen because one of the contributors to the anthology is Neon Yang, who criticized Isabel Fall’s “Helicopter Story” (originally titled “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter.”) Some defenders of Isabel Fall are condemning Yang’s promotion of their own queer mech story.

Emily VanDer Werff’s Vox article “How Twitter can ruin a life: Isabel Fall’s complicated story” published in summer 2021 refreshed memories about Neon Yang’s stance on Twitter 18 months earlier when “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” first appeared:

“When the story was first published, we knew nothing about Isabel Fall’s identity, and there was a smattering of strange behavior around the comments and who was linking to it that led people to suspect right-wing trolls were involved in this,” says science fiction author Neon Yang. They were publicly critical of the story on Twitter….

Publisher Neon Hemlock has made this statement:

We stand by the inclusion of the authors invited to our anthology. We oppose transphobia and harassment in all its forms and hope you do too. Our intent is to support queer & trans voices in speculative fiction and to keep learning better ways to do that.https://t.co/CaHwPLQZSB
— Neon Hemlock Press (@neonhemlock) December 6, 2021

Meanwhile, Neon Yang’s Twitter account is labeled “temporarily restricted” with a message that says, “You’re seeing this warning because there has been some unusual activity from this account. Do you still want to view it?” although one can still click through the warning and access it.

Doris V. Sutherland’s post “On Neon Yang’s Toxic Reputation” reviews the original 2020 controversy in some detail, searching for an explanation why Yang is experiencing this backlash:

…Yet, despite the flimsiness of the accusation, Neon Yang retains a reputation as the person who did the most to bring down Isabel Fall. As far as I can tell, the misconception can be traced back to the aforementioned Vox article, in which Yang is the only person quoted as justifying the backlash against the story. Nowhere does the article state, or even imply, that Yang was the main aggressor; yet nonetheless, it seems to have established Yang as the face of the anti-Fall movement….
Those that live by the censor’s scissors are liable to end up being snipped at themselves. There is, perhaps, a degree of karma in a person who rolled along with the erasure of Isabel Fall’s story — simply because it made some of the readers uncomfortable — being placed in a position where their own presence in an anthology is deemed uncomfortable, to the extent where at least one collaborator has decided to pull out….

(5) ALL HAIL. AudioFile Magazine’s latest “Behind the Mic Podcast” interviews Ray Porter, who narrated the Project Hail Mary audiobook.

Narrator Ray Porter joins AudioFile’s Michele Cobb to tell listeners about his experience narrating PROJECT HAIL MARY, Andy Weir’s newest sci-fi bestseller. PROJECT HAIL MARY is one of AudioFile’s 2021 Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Audiobooks, and it’s a thrilling interstellar adventure. Ray gives Michele an inside glimpse into preparing the many voices deployed in this space opera and tells her what has stayed with him about bringing it to life. Read the full review of the audiobook at audiofilemagazine.com. Published by Audible, Inc. Curious listeners can take a peek into Ray’s recording studio in his narrator video on PROJECT HAIL MARY.

(6) OUT OF THE PAN AND INTO THE… Cora Buhlert’s review of the latest (in 1966) Space Patrol Orion episode is up at Galactic Journey: “[December 6, 1966] Welcome to the Space Prison: Space Patrol Orion, Episode 6: ‘The Space Trap’”

The episode starts with Commander Cliff Alister McLane (Dietmar Schönherr) receiving his latest orders from General Wamsler (Benno Sterzenbach). It’s yet another routine mission (and we all know how well those tend to go for the Orion 8): Collect space dust in order to investigate the panspermia theory, which causes Wamsler’s aide Spring-Brauner (Thomas Reiner) to drone on and on about the panspermia theory, i.e. the theory that life did not originate on Earth, but is distributed through the universe via spores hitching a ride with space dust, asteroids, meteorites, etc… The theory is the brainchild of Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius, who also developed the theory of a global greenhouse caused by industrial carbon dioxide emissions, which played a role in the Orion episode “The Battle for the Sun”. One of the writers is apparently a fan….

(7) KGB SCHEDULE CHANGE. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in New York has changed the lineup for their December 15 event.

This month, Mercurio D. Rivera will be reading with David Leo Rice. N.K. Jemisin will be reading for them in February.

David Leo Rice’s info was part of the original announcement. The brief bio for Mercurio D. Rivera follows.

Mercurio D. Rivera

Mercurio D. Rivera’s short fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award and has won the annual readers’ award for Asimov’s and Interzone magazines, respectively. His work has also appeared in venues such as Analog, Lightspeed, io9, Nature, Black Static, and numerous anthologies and Year’s Best collections.
His new novel Wergen: The Alien Love War tells stories of unrequited love set against the backdrop of humanity’s complicated relationship with enigmatic aliens afflicted with a biochemical infatuation for humanity. His story “Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars,” was recently podcast by Dust Studios, and features Gillian Jacobs (Community) and Justin Kirk (Weeds).

The readings are Wednesday, December 15 starting at 7:00 p.m. Eastern in the KGB Bar. (Address at the link.)

(8) GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS PRESENT. A month ago the Scroll linked to NPR’s coverage of the Maryland Renaissance Faire (item #16). Red Barn Productions and Kevin Patterson also run the “Great Dickens Christmas Fair” in the Bay Area of California, similar to a Ren Faire but with a theme of Christmas in Charles Dickens’s time. They are getting pushback from attendees and participants for what is said to be failure to provide a safe space for marginalized people: “’Not a safe space’: Black cast members boycott Dickens Christmas Fair over failure to prevent racist, sexist behavior” in the San Francisco Chronicle.

… “I met some of my greatest friends at the Dickens Fair,” says Tooles, who went on to join the event’s volunteer cast, taking on bigger roles and more responsibility each year.
Her history with the tight-knit fair community is what makes the past two years so heartbreaking for Tooles, who is one of a small number of Black cast members at the Great Dickens Christmas Fair. What started as a goodwill effort to help rectify what is seen as the event’s failure to protect its volunteers and guests from racist and sexist behavior has turned ugly. Now, more than 200 cast members and thousands of guests have pledged to boycott this year’s fair, which is set to return to the Cow Palace on Saturday, Dec. 4, in a scaled-down, drive-through experience for the next three weekends.
“I want people to recognize what their values are and decide if the Dickens Fair aligns with them,” says Tooles, founder of an affinity group for the fair’s Black performers called Londoners of the African Diaspora, or LoAD….

There’s a related petition at Change.org, “End Racism and Injustice at The Great Dickens Christmas Fair”.

(9) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

1979 — [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Forty-two years ago on this date, Star Trek: The Motion Picture had an exclusive premiere in Washington, D.C. It is directed by Robert Wise from the screenplay by Harold Livingston which in turn is based on the story by Alan Dean Foster and I’m surprised he didn’t novelize it. You know who was in the movie so I won’t detail the cast here. Reception was decidedly mixed though Roger Ebert called it “a good time”. The box office was exceedingly good as it made one hundred forty million against forty million in production costs. Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a so-so rating of just forty-two percent. It was nominated for a Hugo at Noreascon Two, the year that Alien was chosen as the Best Film.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born December 6, 1893 — Sylvia Townsend Warner. Do yourself a favor and look up a bio of her as she’s a fascinating person. This site is a good place to do that. Her first novel, Lolly Willowes or, The Loving Huntsman, is definitely genre. ISFDB lists four genre collections by her, but Kingdoms of Elfin and Lolly Willowes are available on the usual suspects. (Died 1973.)
Born December 6, 1911 — Ejler Jakobsson, Finnish-born Editor who worked on Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories butbriefly as they were shut down due to paper shortages. When Super Science Stories was revived in 1949, Jakobsson was named editor until it ceased publication two years later. Twenty years later, he took over Galaxy and If, succeeding Frederik Pohl. His first credited publications were The Octopus and The Scorpion in 1939, co-edited with his wife, Edith Jakobsson. (Died 1984.)
Born December 6, 1918 — William P. McGivern. Once in a while, I run across an author I’ve never heard of. So it is with McGivern. He was a prolific writer of SFF stories for twenty years starting from the early Forties. ISFDB only lists one genre novel by him, The Seeing, that he wrote with his wife Maureen McGivern. The digital has been good for him with the usual suspects having pretty much everything by him that he did except oddly enough the long out of print The Seeing. (Died 1982.)
Born December 6, 1923 — Wally Cox. Ok, who can resist the voice of the Underdog series which ran from 1964 to1967? I certainly can’t. He was in Babes in Toyland, The Twilight Zone, Mission: Impossible, Lost in Space, Get Smart, The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., Quarantined, Night Gallery and Once Upon a Mattress. (Died 1974.)
Born December 6, 1953 — Tom Hulce, 68. Oscar-nominated screen and stage actor and producer. His first genre role was in a highly-praised performance as the lead in the American Playhouse broadcast of The Rise and Rise of Daniel Rocket, about a young boy who discovers that he can fly. Although the bulk of his career has been in the theater, his most notable genre film role was as Henry Clerval in Kenneth Branagh’s Saturn-nominated Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. He was nominated for an Annie Award for his voice performance of Quasimodo in Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and appeared in the films Stranger than Fiction and Jumper.
Born December 6, 1957 — Arabella Weir, 64. A performer with two Who appearances, the first being as Billis in “The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe”, a superb Eleventh Doctor story, before being The Doctor Herself in “Exile”, a Big Audio production. She’s had one-offs on genre and genre adjacent series such as Shades of Darkness, Genie in the House, Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) and even a genre adjacent Midsomer Murders.
Born December 6, 1962 — Colin Salmon, 59. Definitely best known for his role as Charles Robinson in the Bond films Tomorrow Never Dies, The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day. He played Dr. Moon in “Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead”, Tenth Doctor stories, and was Walter Steele on Arrow. He most recently played General Zod on Krypton He was, alas, Ben in that clunker of films, Mortal Engines.
Born December 6, 1969 — Torri Higginson, 52. I had forgotten that she had a role in the TekWar movies and series as Beth Kittridge. I like that series a lot. Of course, she portrayed Dr. Elizabeth Weir in one episode of Stargate SG-1 and the entire Stargate Atlantis series. Her most recent genre roles was as Dr. Michelle Kessler in Inhuman Condition, where she plays a therapist who focuses on supernatural patients, and Commander Delaney Truffault in the Dark Matter series.

(11) FOOTS THE BILL. [Item by Olav Rokne.] Turns out Aziraphale might be a bit of an Angel in real life too … “Michael Sheen turns himself into a ‘not-for-profit’ actor” reports BBC News.

…Speaking to The Big Issue, Sheen described how he stepped in to bankroll the Homeless World Cup when funding for the £2m project fell through at the last moment.
“I had committed to helping to organise that and then suddenly, with not long to go, there was no money,” he said.
“I had to make a decision – I could walk away from it and it wouldn’t happen.
“I thought, I’m not going to let that happen. So, I put all my money into keeping it going.
“I had a house in America and a house here and I put those up and just did whatever it took.
“It was scary and incredibly stressful. I’ll be paying for it for a long time.
“But when I came out the other side, I realised I could do this kind of thing and, if I can keep earning money, it’s not going to ruin me.”

(12) GREYSKULL SESSION. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] On my own blog, I wrote a lengthy rumination of Masters of the Universe: Revelation, which does some really interesting things and was so much better than a sequel to a cartoon designed to sell toys has any right to be: “The Power of Greyskull – Some Reflections on Part 2 of Masters of the Universe: Revelation” This one will go on my Hugo ballot, which I for one did not expect at all.

The second half of Masters of the Universe: Revelation, Kevin Smith’s continuation of the original cartoon from the 1980s, just became available and I opted to watch that over the new Hawkeye show (which I will watch eventually) and Star Trek Discovery (which is apparently available in Europe now, though I still haven’t figured out how), because I enjoyed the first half a lot more than I expected. Besides, part 1 ended on one hell of a cliffhanger, so of course I wanted to know how Teela, Andra, Duncan and the rest of gang are going to get out of that one….

(13) RECOMMENDED KICKSTARTERS. Cora Buhlert also sent links to a pair of Kickstarters worthy of attention:

Changa and the Jade Obelisk 2, a sword and soul comic, is looking for funding: “Changa and the Jade Obelisk #2 by 133art Publishing”

*Changa #2 Cover by: Matteo Illuminati and Loris Ravina*

Blazing Blade of Frankenstein 1, a comic featuring Frankenstein’s monster as a wandering sword and sorcery hero, is also looking for funding. I had never heard of these people before, but the concept is simply too cool to ignore: “Blazing Blade of Frankenstein #1 by FRIED Comics”.

(14) THE CLASS OF 2021. The New York Times is there when “NASA Introduces Class of 10 New Astronaut Candidates”. Their names: Nichole Ayers, Christopher Williams, Luke Delaney, Jessica Wittner, Anil Menon, Marcos Berríos, Jack Hathaway, Christina Birch, Deniz Burnham and Andre Douglas.

NASA on Monday inaugurated 10 new astronaut candidates who could walk on the moon within the next decade, or carry out research on the International Space Station.
The new astronaut candidate class is NASA’s 23rd since 1959, when seven astronauts were picked by the military for Project Mercury, the first American human spaceflight program. The latest astronaut candidate group comes as NASA prepares for its most daunting challenges in space since Americans landed on the moon during the Apollo program of the 1960s and ’70s. The agency’s growing focus is on Artemis, its program to return astronauts to the moon….

(15) BUT NOT ROCK CANDY. BBC News reports “Stonehenge builders had a sweet tooth, artefacts suggest”.

The builders of Stonehenge ate sweet treats including foraged fruit and nuts, English Heritage has revealed.
Previously it was thought they had consumed pork, beef and dairy.
But excavations of the Durrington Walls settlement, inhabited by the builders of the monument in about 2,500 BC, suggest they collected and cooked hazelnuts, sloes and crab apples too.
Researchers said evidence of charred plant remains suggest they might have followed recipes to preserve the food….

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Cora Buhlert, Meredith, Bill, Olav Rokne, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jayn. Update: The excerpts of Doris V. Sutherland’s comments were added a couple hours after the Scroll was posted.]

Pixel Scroll 5/4/21 Let Us Now Scroll Famous Pixels

Posted on May 4, 2021 by Mike Glyer

(1) USPS ‘DROID STAMPS ISSUED TODAY. [Item by Daniel Dern.] From a post office near you, or via online: Star Wars Droids Stamps.

Use ’em to mail stuff! — or as an affordable, fungible gift to a Star Wars fan.

(2) THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES. Fansided’s “Dork Side of the Force” shares a collection of “25 of the most iconic Star Wars movie posters of all time”.

… The movie posters used to promote the movies have sometimes become as iconic as some of the movie moments themselves. These are 25 of the iconic works of art that have become some of the most memorable Star Wars images over the years….
1. The Phantom Menace teaser poster

After a decade and a half without a new Star Wars movie coming to theaters, The Phantom Menace was announced. We would all finally get to experience the first chapter of the saga.
There were rumors as to what we would get to see and more than a few images released of the movie being worked on, but this was the first official image we got advertising the upcoming movie — and really the trilogy as a whole. The image of a 9-year-old Anakin casting a Darth Vader shadow on the wall hit the world with a bang…

(3) BRADBURY STRIKES BACK. This 2019 IndyStar article begins its list of “7 cool items you can see at ‘Fahrenheit 451’ author’s IUPUI center” with a Star Wars relic —

Star Wars ‘Empire Strikes Back’ script
The second movie in the original trilogy is the one Bradbury almost co-wrote.
In the early 1940s, the writer studied with Leigh Brackett, a pioneer for women and the melodramatic space opera in science fiction. That gave way to a collaboration with “Lorelei of the Red Mist,” a novella about a powerful, siren-like woman who controls the strong, barbarian body that a convict has recently been transplanted in.Brackett went on to become a screenwriter and was a co-writer with Larry Kasdan on the “Empire” script. But she was in failing health, so the producer asked Bradbury whether he was familiar enough with her work to finish it if she couldn’t.
“Ray Bradbury said, ‘Yes, I do. But I want her to have credit,’ ” center director Jon Eller said.As it turned out, Brackett completed her draft before she died in 1978, so Bradbury never had to work on it.
But the script — a fourth revision that doesn’t even contain Darth Vader’s big reveal to Luke because that detail was so secretive — remains part of Bradbury’s collection.

(4) THE LOREMASTER. Craig Miller, author of the superb Star Wars Memories, shared a joke with Facebook readers that got an immediate laugh from George Lucas and Gary Kurtz at the time, and that he needs to explain to the rest of us.

…And now, the story. This is one that appears in my book, Star Wars Memories (available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Walmart). More, and less obscure, stories throughout Star Wars Season.
Suggesting a Title for Film #3
(Warning: This story has a punch line. But it requires deep knowledge of both Star Wars lore and motion picture history in order to get it. I’ll explain it at the end but it won’t be as funny – maybe not funny at all – if I have to explain it you.)…

(5) LOCATING THE LOCATIONS. And Craig has definitely been to some of the places in “The Real Star Wars Universe” charted by Statista. (Click for larger image.)

(6) BIGGS SAVED FROM THE CUTTING ROOM FLOOR. “Star Wars: A New Hope – Deleted Scenes” on YouTube is 8 1/2 minutes of footage cut from Star Wars, including several scenes with Garrick Hagon as Biggs Darklighter that never appeared in the final cut of Star Wars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f00IkrWvur4

(7) BRING ME THE HEAD OF DARTH VADER. “Darth Vader’s helmet raises charity funds in May the 4th auction” reports The Guardian.

In an auction house far, far away (well, Bristol actually), the enduring power of the force was clear.
A Darth Vader helmet sold for £2,200, more than five times the top estimate, and a signed picture of Alec Guinness in his Obi-Wan Kenobi robes was snapped up for £3,100, treble what was anticipated.
Someone, somewhere, paid £9,000 for a prototype lightsaber, the weapon of choice of Jedi knights in the Star Wars saga, which the Earthlings at East Bristol Auctions had judged might bring in £80-£120.
Hundreds of items hoarded and collected by David Prowse, the Bristolian who played Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy, were sold off in his home city following his death, aged 85, last year.
Naturally the sale took place on May the 4^th…

(8) DISSENTING VOICES. Not everybody is attuned to the spirit of the day.

did you ever hear the tragedy of darth beef sheets the wise? pic.twitter.com/UKo3YmntFJ
— Steak-umm (@steak_umm) May 4, 2021

pic.twitter.com/3mq22sPspK
— phil caparso (@pjcaparso) May 4, 2021

(9) INSIDE AMAZON. Publishers Lunch learned something about how Amazon handles internal controversies:

Controversies
From this article we learned that Amazon has an executive who serves as director of book content risk and quality, Sarah Castle. It was her job to assess internal complaints from “dozens of Amazon employees” asking the company to stop selling Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, by journalist Abigail Shrier, arguing that the book violates Amazon’s recently stated policy against selling books “that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness.” The Seattle Times reports that Castle told employees on an internal message board, “After examining the content of the book in detail and calibrating with senior leadership, we have confirmed that it does not violate our content policy.”

(10) DOOM IN RETROSPECTIVE. GamesRadar+ does a Q&A with a past writer of a popular comic book: “Doom Patrol, New Gods, Old Gods, and a Fissure King: The Rachel Pollack Interview”.

In 1993, Rachel Pollack took over DC/Vertigo’s Doom Patrol following Grant Morrison’s star-making turn on the book. Her run lasted 25 issues, but has never been collected – but has begun making its way to DC digital platforms recently.
Among the memorable stories is the initial ‘Sliding In the Wreckage’ arc, as well as the introduction of Kate Godwin (Coagula) – the first trans superhero for DC or Marvel comic books. Over the course of her run, Pollack touched on concepts of family, fitting in, and making a path for yourself in a world that didn’t have a set path for you.
Newsarama spoke to Pollack earlier this month about her Doom Patrol run, her prose work such as the new novella collection The Fissure King, and her poised return to comic books.
Newsarama: Rachel, what are you working on today?
Rachel Pollack: I’m actually typing up a second draft of a story called ‘Visible Cities.’ I always write everything longhand with fountain pen and then type it up, and that’s my second draft. I’m doing that at the moment. And then I’m preparing for a trip to Scotland.

(11) MOORE ACQUISITIONS. “’I’m bursting with fiction’: Alan Moore announces five-volume fantasy epic” in The Guardian.

Two years after announcing that he had retired from comics, Alan Moore, the illustrious author of Watchmen and V for Vendetta, has signed a six-figure deal for a “groundbreaking” five-volume fantasy series as well as a “momentous” collection of short stories.
Bloomsbury, home to the Harry Potter novels, acquired what it described as two “major” projects from the 67-year-old. The first, Illuminations, is a short story collection which will be published in autumn 2022 and which moves from the four horsemen of the apocalypse to the “Boltzmann brains” fashioning the universe. Bloomsbury said it was “dazzlingly original and brimming with energy”, promising a series of “beguiling and elegantly crafted tales that reveal the full power of imagination and magic”.
The second acquisition is a fantasy quintet titled Long London, which will launch in 2024. The series will move from the “shell-shocked and unravelled” London of 1949 to “a version of London just beyond our knowledge”, encompassing murder, magic and madness. Bloomsbury said it “promises to be epic and unforgettable, a tour-de-force of magic and history”….

(12) MEDIA ANNIVERSARY.

May 4, 1962 — The Twilight Zone‘s “The Dummy”.

“You’re watching a ventriloquist named Jerry Etherson, a voice-thrower par excellence. His alter ego, sitting atop his lap, is a brash stick of kindling with the sobriquet ‘Willie.’ In a moment, Mr. Etherson and his knotty-pine partner will be booked in one of the out-of-the-way bistros, that small, dark, intimate place known as the Twilight Zone.“
On this day in 1962, The Twilight Zone aired “The Dummy”. It was written by: Rod Serling from an unpublished story by Lee Polk. It was directed by Abner Biberman and produced by Buck Houghton. It starred Cliff Robertson, Frank Sutton and George Murdock. An average ventriloquist finds he has a not-so-average and quite horrifying dummy. The plot here would later influence many other series including Batman: The Animated Series with its own terrifying animated apparent dummy.

(13) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

Born May 4, 1893 – Alfred Pollard. Four novels for us; outside our field, crime and war stories, fiction and non, threescore books all told. Served in World War I, earned the Victoria Cross. (Died 1960) [JH]
Born May 4, 1909 — Ray Quigley. Here solely for the three covers that he did for Weird Tales in the Forties. He didn’t do a lot of pulp work that I can find but these three are amazing. He did the December 1938 cover with the Dracula-like figure, the September 1940 cover with the nightmarish skull-faced Bombers and finally the May 1942 cover with the really scary living ship. The latter issue had Henry Kuttner, Robert Bloch and Dorothy Quick listed on the cover! (Died 1998.) (CE)
Born May 4, 1913 — John Broome. DC writer during the Golden Age. He’s responsible for the creation of an amazing number of characters including The Phantom Stranger, Per Degaton (with artist Irwin Hansen), Captain Comet and Elongated Man (with Carmine Infantino), Atomic Knight and one of my favorite characters, Detective Chimp. The DC UNIVERSE streaming app has his work on The Flash starting on issue #133 and the entire early Fifities run of Mystery in Space that he wrote as well. (Died 1999.) (CE)
Born May 4, 1920 — Phyllis Miller. She co-wrote several children’s books with Andre Norton, House of Shadows and Seven Spells to Sunday. Ride the Green Dragon, a mystery, is at best genre adjacent but it too was done with Norton. (Died 2001.) (CE)
Born May 4, 1940 – Bob Layzell, age 80. Threescore covers, a score of interiors. Here is Farthest Star. Here is Drunkard’s Walk. Here is Dangerous Frontiers. Here is A Trace of Memory. Here is The Grey Prince. [JH]
Born May 4 (year unknown) – Ernie Wheatley. Known as the Dormouse of the LASFS (Los Angeles Science Fantasy Soc.) for falling asleep with his head on his arms at table during restaurant after-meetings, raising it to speak aptly, sleeping again. Once after we had adopted “Death will not release you” and someone uttered it on some such occasion EW piped up “Even if you die!” which was promptly added. In 1960 while Westerns were big, also home-made films, and fanfiction meant fiction about fans, Lee Jacobs wrote “The Musquite Kid Rides Again” for SAPS about a transparently-disguised Wrai Ballard; it was filmed; here is EW as “Killer Kemp” i.e. Earl Kemp who by then had won a Hugo for Who Killed SF? [JH]
Born May 4, 1943 — Erwin Strauss, 78. I’m not sure I can do him justice. Uberfan, noted member of the MITSFS, and filk musician. He frequently is known by the nickname “Filthy Pierre” which I’m sure is a story in itself that one of you will no doubt tell me. Created the Voodoo message board system used at a number of early Cons and published an APA, The Connection, that ran for at least thirty years. Do tell me about him. (CE)
Born May 4, 1956 — Murray McArthur, 65. He first shows on Doctor Who in “The Girl Who Died”, a Twelfth Doctor story before being The Broken Man on The Game of Thrones. He also shows up as a stagehand in the historical drama Finding Neverland before playing Snug in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (CE)
Born May 4, 1957 – Nancy Canepa, Ph.D., age 64. Here is Teaching Fairy Tales she edited. Professor at Dartmouth. “My teaching and research centers on early modern Italy (1550-1700). I’m particularly fascinated by the development of new literary forms and languages during this period, in genres that range from the fairy tale to the mock epic to the travelogue.” [JH]
Born May 4, 1960 – Kate Saunders, age 61. A dozen novels, a couple of shorter stories for us; two dozen books all told, some for adults, some for children. Newspapers, magazines, radio, television. Trask Award. Costa Children’s Book Award. [JH]
Born May 4, 1974 – James Bacon, 47. He’s a 14-time Hugo nominee, as a fan writer and as co-editor of The Drink Tank and Journey Planet, and a two-time winner — one Hugo with each fanzine. James was the 2004 Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund delegate: download his trip report at the unofficial TAFF website, WorldConNomicon. In addition to working on Irish convention Octocon, he ran his own conventions: Aliens Stole My Handbag, Damn Fine Convention, and They Came and Shaved Us. Ultimately he chaired the Dublin 2019 Worldcon. He ran Sproutlore—the Robert Rankin Fan Club. With fellow fans he established The James White Award, an annual short-story competition. And he often contributes to File 770! (OGH)
Born May 4, 1977 — Gail Carriger, 44. Ahhhh such lovely mannerpunk she writes! I think I first noticed her with the start of the Finishing School series which she started off with Etiquette & Espionage some six years ago. Moirai Cook does a delightful job of the audiobooks so I recommend that you check them out. I also love the two novellas in her Supernatural Society series as well. (CE)
Born May 4, 1978 – Shaenon Garrity, age 43. A score of short stories. Known for Webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse. Interviewed in Lightspeed. Web Cartoonists’ Choice Award for Outstanding Writing. Lulu of the Year Award. Summa cum laude from Vassar. Website. [JH]

(14) COMICS SECTION.

The Argyle Sweater has a wonderful set of Star Wars “character cuts.”
In Ralph Ruthe’s cartoon the lower fly says “So, this is the famous ‘Death Star'”

Heute nur Star-Wars-Witze. pic.twitter.com/eT4MQ3SAOF
— Ralph Ruthe (@ralphruthe) May 4, 2021

(15) BLADE STUNNER. “Star Wars Day: Disney Parks shares footage of a real-world lightsaber” – as SYFY Wire explains.

When guests head to Orlando’s Walt Disney World next year for the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser (an immersive, two-night experience housed at Galaxy’s Edge), they’ll probably catch sight of an actual lightsaber. That’s right, the Disney Parks Imagineering Research and Development team have built an honest to goodness retractable Jedi blade inspired by the iconic franchise.
To celebrate May the 4th (aka Star Wars Day), the Mouse House’s theme park division revealed a short video of the potentially patented lightsaber (it works kinda like a high-tech, dual measuring tape) — wielded by a cast member dressed as Rey — in action, and it’s beyond cool.

(16) A SHARPER IMAGE. Jeff Foust reviews the Folio Society Edition of Andrew Chaikin’s famous history of the Apollo missions for The Space Review: “Review: A Man on the Moon”.

…To be clear, the text of the book is unchanged from earlier editions: this is not a revised or expanded version. The only new words in this version is a brief preface by Chaikin, which he uses to explain the other major change of the book: the inclusion of nearly 200 color and black-and-white photos that he curated for the book. As high-quality digital versions of the photos became available in the years after he first wrote the book, he explains, “I was amazed at the details I could now see; I felt they had opened a new portal I could step through to witness what the astronauts had seen and done.”
This is not the first illustrated edition of the book, but this version strikes a better balance between the photos and text than that earlier three volume set, where the images at times drowned out the text. Here the images are better ties to the text, and include a mix of obvious famous pictures as well as less-famous ones from the missions or training for them. The book includes fold-out color plates, such as one that combines several views of the Earth taken by the Apollo 8 mission on its way to the Moon; it illustrates the spacecraft’s journey by showing our home planet get ever smaller.
The real value of A Man on the Moon, though, remains Chaikin’s account of the missions, enabled by his interviews with the Apollo astronauts. At the time he started the book, all but one of the 24 men who went to the Moon on nine Apollo missions were still alive (Apollo 13’s Jack Swigert died of cancer in 1982.) Enough times had passed for the astronauts to reflect on their journeys, but not so long that we would lose the chance to have them recount their experiences….

(17) RHUBARB PIE. Doris V. Sutherland received a virtual ovation for the new lyrics to “American Pie” posted as a comment on Camestros Felapton’s post “About three months to the Dragon Award 2021 finalists”. The first stanzas are —

A long, long time ago,
The Hugo Awards came along to honour sci-fi at its height
And I knew when I’d had a look
That each winner had been a classic book
Except perhaps for They’d Rather be Right
Then Puppies made some voting slates
The ’15 Hugos weren’t so great
The big winner was No Award
In science fiction’s culture war…

(18) KISS YOUR ASS GOODBYE. IFL Science has – simulated – bad news: “Large Chunk Of Europe “Annihilated” In NASA’s Latest Asteroid Impact Simulation Exercise”.

Every two years, international governmental and space agencies take part in a tabletop scenario as part of the Planetary Defense Conference. In this exercise, a space rock is discovered to be heading toward Earth and members of different agencies have to work out what are the best things to do to try and avoid catastrophe.
… The second day also sees a detailed look at what missions could be sent to deflect such an asteroid. And it’s not good news. The asteroid is too close and too fast (and possibly too big) for a course correction. So you ought to hit it hard. Either a nuclear weapon, among the biggest, ever assembled during the Cold War, or shooting like dozens of rockets at it. With the risk that it would fragment and still crash into Earth.
“If confronted with the 2021 PDC hypothetical scenario in real life we would not be able to launch any spacecraft on such short notice with current capabilities,” members of the group stated….

(19) CTHULHU FHTAGN. When a “Japanese Town Uses Relief Money To Erect Giant Squid Statue”, Cracked is there to haul in a net-full of puns.

…So folks, whether you hate the giant squid statue or find it ink-redible, what’s fin-ished is fin-ished.

(20) FLY CASTING. In “The Falcon and The Winter Soldier” on YouTube, the Screen Junkies say the series “comes from the military espionage side of the MCU, where the morals are as grey as the visuals” and that the cameo appearance of Julia Louis-Dreyfus leads them to speculate about when the rest of the Seinfeld cast will show up in the MCU. No spoiler warning – but who knows?

(21) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “The World Begins With You” on YouTube, Fandom Games says the game is set in “nightmare Tokyo a place where you have to worry about how good you will look when you’re dead” and is so busy that the game “will have you tapping at your screen like a crazed woodpecker.”

[Thanks to Peer, Michael Toman, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Rob Thornton, John Hertz, Dann, Mike Kennedy, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Jennifer Hawthorne, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day bill.]

Pixel Scroll 2/22/21 Sacred Locomotive Files

Posted on February 22, 2021 by Mike Glyer

(1) VARLEY MEDICAL UPDATE. R. Graeme Cameron relayed a report that John Varley’s heart bypass surgery today was successful.

Spider Robinson just dropped quickly in and out of my Monday fannish zoom meet to inform me that “Herb” John Varley’s heart operation went well, no complications, and they’ll be keeping him for five days to monitor recovery, then let him go home. Spider very relieved. Operation successful.

And according to Andrew Porter, “Varley’s partner Lee Emmett reports that he has successfully undergone a quadruple bypass and is in the ICU; he will be in the hospital for the next five days/”

(2) A LOOK AT THE NUMBERS. Mark Lawrence illustrates the limited effectiveness of an endorsement on a bookcover from a bestselling author by showing his own frustrated efforts to get attention from the many people who have already signed up for news about his work: “The Extraordinary Struggle to be Heard”.

…I’m a fairly popular author. People pay MONEY to read my books. Enough so that I can live off the proceeds. You would think this would mean that, when I offer my writing for free, people would jump on it. At least some of them. I’ve sold nearly two million books and must have hundreds of thousands of readers. So how many do you think would try on my recommendation not somebody they’ve never heard of but me: Marky?
On Wattpad I’ve been putting out chapters of a book I started writing called Jacob’s Ladder. I think it’s good. I’ve been alerting the 9,830 people who follow/friend me on Facebook to each chapter as it’s posted. I’ve also been posting about them to the 7,506 members of the Grimdark Fiction Readers & Writers group on Facebook where I’m reasonably popular.
I also have 2,815 followers on Wattpad itself who get alerts when I post the chapters. And I’ve tweeted about each chapter to my 28,600 followers on Twitter. And I’ve blogged on Goodreads about it where I have 48,029 followers.
I posted chapter 5 two days ago and it’s had 21 views (which are not necessarily reads) at least one of which was me.
All of which I throw out there to demonstrate how ridiculously hard it is to be heard and to have that audience act.
Now, new authors, consider how much of an impact the weeks this slow reader spends reading your book will have on your sales when condensed into a line on the cover…

(3) NYRSF READINGS THIS WEEK. Charles Yu will be on The New York Review of Books Readings livestream tomorrow, February 23.

CHARLES YU is the author of four books, including his latest, Interior Chinatown, which won the National Book Award for Fiction and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. He has been nominated for two Writers Guild of America awards for his work on the HBO series Westworld, and has also written for shows on FX, AMC, Facebook Watch, and Adult Swim. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in a number of publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, and Harper’s. You can find him on Twitter @charles_yu.
The live event *should* be on https://www.facebook.com/groups/NYRSF.Readings and Jim Freund’s timeline, and you *should* (that word again) be able to join on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/c/JimFreund

(4) YU CREATIVE WRITING AWARD. “Charles Yu establishes prize for young Taiwanese American creative writers” reports TaiwaneseAmerican.org. Submissions may be in any literary genre. Prior to his winning a National Book Award for his literary awork Interior Chinatown, Yu also wrote sff, such as How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010), and served as the Guest Editor for the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017. [Via Locus Online.]

TaiwaneseAmerican.org is pleased to announce the inaugural Betty L. Yu and Jin C. Yu Creative Writing Prizes. Created in collaboration with Taiwanese American author Charles Yu, the Prizes are intended to encourage and recognize creative literary work by Taiwanese American high school and college students, and to foster discussion and community around such work.
Submissions may be in any literary genre including fiction, poetry, personal essays or other creative non-fiction. Submissions must be sent via Google Form and must be received by March 31, 2021 at 11:59PM PT. In order to be eligible, submissions must be from writers of Taiwanese heritage (or writers with other significant connection to Taiwan), or have subject matter otherwise relevant to the Taiwanese or Taiwanese American experience.
Submissions will be considered in two categories, High School (enrolled in high school as of the deadline) and College (enrolled in community college or as an undergraduate as of the deadline). Winners and finalists will be announced in May 2021. A total of $1500 will be awarded to the winners. In addition, each of the winners and finalists will have their submitted work published online by TaiwaneseAmerican.org and considered for publication in a future edition of Chrysanthemum, and offered the opportunity to participate in an individual mentoring session with one of the judges.

(5) NEBULA CONFERENCE TEASER. The SFWA Blog lists some of the panel program topics being planned for the June event in “2021 Nebula Conference Online Programming Preview”. Two examples are —

Setting Boundaries: A writing career often comes with attention—wanted and unwanted. What kinds of boundaries do you set as an author with your readers, and how do those change throughout your career? Authors across the publishing spectrum discuss how they interact with, acknowledge, and encourage their readers while maintaining personal boundaries.
Writing Speculative Justice: Many envision a new role and future for the justice system in the United States and across the world—one that is more restorative, more equitable, and more just. As writers build our own worlds, what can and should we be thinking about when it comes to justice? How does our approach to laws, crime, retribution, and restoration impact the rest of our worldbuilding, characters, and plots? How can we craft a more just future?

(6) HOW MUCH ARE THOSE CLICKS IN THE WINDOW? James Pyles (PoweredByRobots) has been doing his darnedest to use the recent kerfuffle to get attention. And he doesn’t much care who that damages.

“The Jason Sanford and Baen Books Saga Continues” [Internet Archive link] consists almost entirely of signal boosting links to Samuel Collingwood Smith’s and Richard Paolinelli’s efforts to harass Jason Sanford through his employer.
“I Wouldn’t Want to Belong to a Club that would ‘Uninvite’ a Guest of Honor” [Internet Archive link] namechecks me repeatedly while liberally copying items from File 770 – and yet Pyles says he doesn’t recognize the names of these three far more significant genre figures? Ohhhkaayyyy….

…Frankly, the Discon III / Worldcon decision to “uninvite” Weisskopf is looking less and less popular. Of course, I have no idea who Weber, Eggleton, and Gannon are (my understanding of SF/F personalities and their politics is shockingly limited), but on the surface, I can’t see anything awful, horrible, and offensive about their comments (well, maybe some of the language was just a little rough depending on how thin-skinned you are). In fact, they seem pretty reasonable….

Bounding Into Comics, as Doris V. Sutherland observes, belittled Sanford’s coverage, but they couldn’t deny what Jason found in Baen’s Bar.

One thing I've noticed is that some of the "rebuttals" end up reinforcing his argument. For example, the Bounding Into Comics article is slanted against Jason – yet confirms that his central thesis is correct: pic.twitter.com/pV41v34vhZ
— Doris V. Sutherland (@DorVSutherland) February 22, 2021

Mad Genius Club’s Dave Freer’s purported explanation of the controversy rapidly deteriorated into gibberish: “Omnibus?”

…Back in the day you’d left right and center views – depending on where you went. His [Jason Sanford’s] ‘expose’ is drivel, out of context, imaginary and generally trivial — in keeping with how he earns his authorly income – but it is seized on as a reason to 1) expel Toni as a GoH from WorldCon (because you know, in omnibus, must chuck her under it – even though any sane definition of the Bar was 99.9999% innocuous by any interpretation. Omnibus see. Even if she had nothing to do with it, and didn’t know – and investigated once she did. Not good enough, Guilty. She turned Jason Sanford into a newt. And she has got a wart… maybe.) 2) The little friends mysteriously and suddenly attack the hosting service and other business connections to demand deplatforming because Baen is ‘hate speech and inciting violence’….

(7) IT’S THEIR RIGHT. Meanwhile, this unexpected announcement was tweeted today by American Conservative Union CPAC 2021. I don’t know who is being banned, either, it’s just a coincidence that’s remarkably timely.

We have just learned that someone we invited to CPAC has expressed reprehensible views that have no home with our conference or our organization. The individual will not be participating at our conference.
— CPAC (@CPAC) February 22, 2021

(8) GAMING A ZINE. The Guardian’s Sarah Maria Griffin reviews Zine Maker in “How a game about making zines helped me recapture my creativity in lockdown”.

…Creation games aren’t new; they go way back to the original SimCity and beyond. But in autumn 2019, during a period of intense, life-altering burnout, I came across Nathalie Lawhead’s Electric Zine Maker and it redefined what I thought I knew about play, creation and the art that can emerge from video game interfaces. Zine Maker is a clever, accessible tool in the disguise of a joyful toy. I had become sick from overwork and had resigned myself to transitioning careers, leaving writing fiction entirely to move into a more practical realm. I was convinced that the connection between the part of my brain that makes art and the part that produces joy was fried forever. But this game sparked it again.
… Electric Zine Maker gives us a playful way to design and create real, print zines once more. The software streamlines the creation of a one-page zine: an A4 page folded into an A8 booklet. The tools are simple: text boxes, image pasting, some paint brushes and filters. A folding guide tells you how to turn it from a flat page into a 3D object once you print it off. It’s all laid out in bright, roaring neon, reminiscent of a CD-Rom from the mid-1990s. It feels like a piece of time travel, a return to childhood tinkering in The Simpsons Cartoon Studio in 1996.

(9) GRR REMEMBERS WANDA JUNE. George R.R. Martin paid tribute to the late Wanda June Alexander, whose daughter is almost his neighbor in Santa Fe: “The Amazing Wanda June”.

…Wanda June was a dear dear friend… but more than that, really. She and Raya have been part of our family, in one sense or another, for decades. I do not actually recall when and where I first met Wanda. It was at a con, no doubt, probably in the late 70s or early 80s. I knew OF Wanda before I actually knew Wanda, however. She was an East Coast fan when I first began hearing tales of her, from mutual friends. Gardner Dozois, Jack Dann, David Axler, Dave Kogelmen, Joe and Gay Haldeman… all of them were friends of mine, and friends of the legendary Wanda June. She was one of Parris’s oldest, dearest friends, from the 70s on to this very day. …

(10) MEMORY LANE.

1961 — Sixty years ago at Seacon in Seattle, Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone series wins the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation. It was directed by Wolf Rilla, and written by Stirling Silliphant, Wolf Rilla and Ronald Kinnoch. The other nominated works were the films Village of The Damned and The Time Machine.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

Born February 22, 1879 — Talbot Mundy. English-born, but based for most of his life in the States, he also wrote under the pseudonym of Walter Galt. Best known as the author of King of the Khyber Rifles which is not quite genre and the Jimgrim series which is genre, much of his work was published in pulp magazines. (Died 1940.) (CE)
Born February 22, 1879 – Norman Lindsay. When a critic said children liked to read about fairies more than about food, NL wrote The Magic Pudding, wherefore we may be grateful. He was also an artist in watercolour, oils, pencil, etching, bronze, concrete. A dozen other novels; essays, poetry, memoirs. Here is a World War I cover for The Bulletin. Here is Odysseus. Here is Age of Consent. Here is Lin Bloomfield’s book about NL’s drawings. (Died 1969) [JH]
Born February 22, 1917 – Reed Crandall. Early inker for Jack Kirby on Captain America. Did Blackhawk 1942-1953; Jim Steranko said “where [Chuck] Cuidera made Blackhawk a best-seller, Crandall turned it into a classic, a work of major importance and lasting value”. Forty interiors and a few covers for us, mostly of E.R. Burroughs. Here are the Blackhawks fighting a giant robot; here is a more airborne moment. Here is The Man with a Brain of Gold. Here is John Carter with the Giant of Mars. Eisner Hall of Fame. More here. (Died 1982) [JH]
Born February 22, 1953 – Genny Dazzo, Ph.D., age 68. Active Los Angeles fan. Fan Guest of Honor at DeepSouthCon 31, Loscon 27 (with husband Craig Miller). Reliable in local, regional, continental, World conventions; for example, Guest of Honor Liaison at L.A.con III the 54th Worldcon, L.A.con IV the 64th. Collects teapots. Member of County Fair Table Setting Competition fandom. Doctorate in Theoretical Chemistry. [JH]
Born February 22, 1955 — Paul J. McAuley, 66. Four Hundred Billion Stars, his first novel, won the Philip K. Dick Award, Fairyland which I adore won a Arthur C. Clarke Award and a John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best SF Novel. He was Toastmaster along Kim Newman at Interaction. (CE)
Born February 22, 1956 — Caroline Thompson, 65. She wrote the screenplays for Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Corpse Bride. A stage version of the latter with director and choreographer Matthew Bourne was co-adapted with her this year. She also wrote the screenplay for The Addams Family. (CE)
Born February 22, 1965 – Max Frei, age 56. That age-statement isn’t quite right, because Max Frei was a composite of Svetlana Martynchik (whose birthday I gave) and her husband Igor Steopin (1967-2018) in writing (in Russian) Sir Max’s adventures in the Labyrinths of Echo; a score are available in English. More here. [JH]
Born February 21, 1974 – Michelle Knudsen, age 47. Six novels (Evil Librarian won a Fleischman Award – two sequels), one shorter story, for us; twoscore other books. Library Lion was a NY Times Best-Seller. Julie Andrews on a podcast reads “Marilyn’s Monster” aloud. Favorite Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, The Pirates of Penzance; has been in Iolanthe. Read aloud at the 2007 White House Easter Egg Roll. Taking boxing lessons. [JH]
Born February 22, 1981 – Ryan James, age 40. Two novels with his mother Syrie James. Much else in the games industry. Only a few decades ago, despite chess, bridge, gô, it would have been SF for there to be a games industry. [JH]

(12) SOUNDING OUT A FANCAST. Cora Buhlert visits with tabletop RPG fancast creators in “Fancast Spotlight: Appendix N Book Club”.

… I’m pleased to feature the Appendix N Book Club, a fancast has the mission to read and discuss the books and authors listed in Appendix N of the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide with varying guests.
Therefore, I’m happy to welcome Jeff Goad and Ngo Vinh-Hoi of the Appendix N Book Club to my blog today:
Tell us about your podcast or channel.
We are a podcast about the literature that inspires our tabletop RPGs. Initially, we only focused on the Appendix N: a list of “inspirational reading” located in the back of the 1979 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide. Starting with episode 101, we are expanding the scope of the show to include ALL fiction that inspires our gaming. The first half of each episode focuses on the text from a literary perspective and the second half of each episode discussed the text from a gaming perspective….

(13) MUPPET CONTENT WARNING. Sonaiya Kelley’s Los Angeles Times story ”Muppet Show’ now has content disclaimer warning on Disney+” reports Disney has put warning labels on 18 Muppet Show episodes (not every episode). And they’ve blocked two episodes including one with Brooke Shields.

Jim Henson’s classic series “The Muppet Show” began streaming on Disney+ on Friday, but now comes prefaced with an offensive content disclaimer.
“This program includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures,” the warning reads. “These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now. Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversations to create a more inclusive future together.”
The show, which ran for five seasons between 1976 and 1981, features the new content warning on 18 episodes, including those guest-hosted by Steve Martin, Peter Sellers, Kenny Rogers, Johnny Cash, Debbie Harry and Marty Feldman, among others.
Each episode bears the 12-second disclaimer for a different reason, from Cash’s appearance singing in front of a Confederate flag to negative depictions of Native Americans, Middle Easterners and people from other cultures. Additionally, two episodes from the final season, featuring guest stars Brooke Shields and staff writer Chris Langham, are left out entirely.

(14) PATTY CAKE, PATTY CAKE, BAKER STREET. A new Netflix series “THE IRREGULARS Promises Supernatural Spin on SHERLOCK”.

…In the Sherlock Holmes mythology, the “Baker Street Irregulars” are a group of street urchins in the employ of Holmes. They are his eyes and ears in the seedier parts of Jolly Ol’ Londontown. This version, naturally, will focus on that group. It appears they will have more in the vein of the supernatural to deal with. Various adaptations of Doyle’s stories have included a supernatural tinge, we should note, the original stories were always rooted in Victorian-era science. It’s elementary, really….

(15) YOU ARE, BIG HERO SIX. The DisInsider is my number one source for this story: “Exclusive: Big Hero 6 Characters Coming To The MCU”.

We have exclusively learned that certain characters from Big Hero 6 will be making their live-action debut in the MCU.
We’re not sure on who will be coming but we can at least expect Baymax and Hiro.
Some of the projects we heard about were Secret Invasion, Agents of Atlas, and Doctor Strange. However, we couldn’t get confirmation.
There’s also no word on if the actors will reprise their roles in regards to live-action appereances.
Big Hero 6 was loosely based on the comic of the same name. The comic was a three-part miniseries written by Scott Lobdell and artist Gus Vasquez. The series went on to be a very popular title, which spawned the animated film and TV series.

They bringing Big Hero 6 to the MCU?! LET'S FUCKING GOOOOOO!!!!

Also, ppl really didn't know BH6 was Marvel? Stan Lee was literally Fred's dad in the movie! Where ya'll been? pic.twitter.com/QHfygrGiA2
— JOLLY J? (@DynamoSuperX) February 23, 2021

(16) FRANSON AWARD. National Fantasy Fan Federation (N3F) President George Phillies has picked the recipient of this year’s Franson Award, named for the late Donald Franson, and given as a show of appreciation:

It is my privilege and honor to bestow the Franson Award upon our new Treasurer, Kevin Trainor of Tonopah, Nevada. Being N3F Treasurer is a great responsibility. The Treasurer maintains the club financial records without which we would not know who is a member and who has departed. We spent close to a year during which the former Treasurer made clear he wanted to leave, but no member would volunteer to replace him. Can all be grateful to Kevin for volunteering and taking on the Treasurer’s role.

(17) A BIRD OF A DIFFERENT COLOR. “Wildlife Photographer Captures ‘Never Before Seen’ Yellow Penguin” at PetaPixel. Image at the link.

While unloading some safety equipment and food onto Salisbury Plain, Adams noticed an unusual sight he had never seen before: a penguin with bright yellow plumage.
“I’d never seen or heard of a yellow penguin before,” the photographer tells Kennedy News. “There were 120,000 birds on that beach and this was the only yellow one there.”
… The penguin’s strange coloring is due to a condition called leucism, which results in a loss of pigmentation.
“This is a leucistic penguin,” Adams says. “Its cells don’t create melanin anymore so its black feathers become this yellow and creamy color.”

(18) DOCTOR BUNNY. [Item by Ben Bird Person.] A follow-up to the Pixel Scroll of 10/16/20: Artist Will Quinn did this doodle inspired by Paul Hanley‘s designs for one of the forgotten doctors of Doctor Who (Robert Holmes). Daily bunny no.1309 is of a different time. (Does a bunny timelord run around saying “I’m late! I’m late!”?)

Daily bunny no.1309 is of a different time
(A commission for @DrWho42, based on the designs by @PaulJamesHanley) pic.twitter.com/kRrNYYsDIk
— Will Quinn (@willquinnart) February 22, 2021

(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Transformers Pitch Meeting” on Screen Rant, Ryan George explains that Transformers is a “feature-length commercial with sort of a story line, because that’s what movies are these days.” Also, Megan Fox loves Burger King because, hey, it’s a product placement!”

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, James Bacon, Ben Bird Person, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, JJ, John Hertz, Andrew Porter, Michael J. Walsh, Daniel Dern, James Davis Nicoll, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge with an assist from Tom Becker and Paul Weimer.]

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Tag Archives: Doris V. Sutherland

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