Tag Archives: Ellen Datlow

Pixel Scroll 7/15/24 Frankly My Dear, I Don’t Scroll A Pixel

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(1) GLASGOW 2024 UPDATE. Glasgow 2024 has sent draft program schedules to almost a thousand participants.

(2) AUDIBLE REVEALS NEW CALCULATION  FOR ROYALTIES. “Audible’s New Royalty Model: More Opportunities for Authors and Publishers”.  

…We are now rolling out a new royalty model that prioritizes equity, flexibility, and insight for creators—one that evolved out of ongoing conversations with authors and publishers, and that advances our creator-centric ethos. Under this model, creators are able to monetize more types of content, and listeners will get to discover more innovative storytelling.

Titles in all Audible’s membership offerings can now earn royalties: Audible’s new royalty model means new opportunities for small publishers and independent authors to earn across all membership listening activity. Now more titles—including those currently in Audible Plus, Audible’s all-you-can-listen offering—can generate royalty payments. Depending on the audiences that publishers and creators want to reach, there are new ways to monetize and promote content, which means more flexibility to reach listeners where they are….

How is the new royalty model calculated? Audible takes a member’s plan value (Plus or Premium Plus) and adds the value of any additional credits used, then divides that value among the titles the member listened to over the course of the month. That figure, multiplied by the contractual royalty rate, comprises a creator’s royalty payment….

Publishers Weekly’s coverage, “Audible Rolls Out New Royalty Plan”, observes that “the announcement comes after one of Audible’s most vocal critics, bestselling author Brandon Sanderson, reported in March that Audible officials had approached him to discuss ‘a new royalty structure they intend to offer to independent writers and smaller publishers,’ a plan that Sanderson said was ‘encouraging.’”

(3) BACIGALUPI Q&A. At Colorado Public Radio:“Exhausted by climate fiction, Colorado novelist Paolo Bacigalupi turns to fantasy”.

Sure he has won the biggest prizes in science fiction– the Nebula and the Hugo awards. But Paolo Bacigalupi found himself bereft of inspiration. Penning apocalyptic climate fiction, like 2016’s The Water Knife, had taken its toll….

…The Paonia-based author knew it was time for a change. Then the invitation came.

A wine-importer friend who knew Bacigalupi’s penchant for languages (he’d studied Chinese in college) invited him to Bologna for a crash course in Italian.

The answer was yes…..

…The real-life Bolognese setting inspired Bacigalupi’s new fantasy novel, “Navola.” It takes place in a city-state reminiscent of Florence or Venice during The Renaissance.

His protagonist, Davico di Regulai, is the son of an uber-wealthy merchant and banker. The boy has big shoes to fill, but very different feet, as it were. Armed with a preserved dragon eye that possesses magical powers, Davico struggles to be the man his father and community expect him to be….

Ryan Warner: How did you know it was time for something different?

Paolo Bacigalupi: Well, when you keep trying to write things and you keep failing to actually finish them, or even when you’re starting to try to write, it’s like sticking your finger in a light socket. It is sort of painful and damaging, you think ‘maybe I should do something different.’

Warner: And that’s how it started to feel in the climate change space?

Bacigalupi: Yeah. A lot of what I was doing, the news was bad, and then the stories that you’re trying to tell are extrapolations on the present day, and those are all terrifying. Then you find you’re in this space where your creative world and your regular life are all smashed together, and they’re all really negative and they’re all full of terrors, and it’s not a sustainable space to be. If you spend all of your imaginative time in anxiety, then yeah, it takes a toll and eventually you just break down entirely.

Warner: And if the writer isn’t enjoying it, how possibly could the reader?

Bacigalupi: Yeah. I think that a healthy writer finds pleasure in their work. I think there are unhealthy ways to go about doing good work, as well. The outcome can be good, but the damage internally is bad for the writer.

(4) KGB. Ellen Datlow has posted photos from the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading on July 10.

A.T. Sayre read and Nat Cassidy read and played his guitar for a very enjoyable evening.

(5) ERIN UNDERWOOD PRESENTS. The latest Erin Underwood videos take up Star Wars fanhistory, and test the relevance of Battlestar Galactica’s 2004 remake.

Star Wars: The Impacts of How Lucasfilm Built its Fan Base

Star Wars fandom holds a unique place as possibly the first ever nurtured fanbase built by a film studio. To understand the evolution of Star Wars fandom, I decided to explore its roots by inviting Craig Miller, former publicity executive at Lucas Film, and Garen Daly, Director of the Boston SciFi Film Festival, to discuss the early days of Star Wars fandom and its lasting impact on the film industry. Watch the video podcast discussion on YouTube and share your thoughts in the comments.

Battlestar Galactica (2004) Series Review – Does this Iconic Sci-Fi Remake Hold Up Today?

It’s been 20 years since they remade the 1978 version of Battlestar Galactica, and remakes often struggle to be relevant over time. From the story to the characters and the technology, how does BSG hold up 2 decades later? Watch my review of the full series and let me know if you think Battlestar Galactica holds up as well today … or even better!

(6) NEW FILM PLAYS ON CONSPIRACY THEORIES. “Note To Hollywood: Nobody Faked The Moon Landing” complains Inverse.

It’s getting exhausting calling out Moon landing truthers. Especially when a high-profile rom-com starring Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson makes a mockery of one of the greatest human achievements in all of history. This weekend, the new film Fly Me to the Moon hits theaters, telling the story of a 1969 advertising executive (Johansson) who is determined to film a “backup” version of the Moon landing in a studio, in case the real one fails. Tatum plays an astronaut, and the two fall for each other, in a silly movie about how the nature of love is a lot like flying to the Moon, or pretending to, or something. All harmless fun, right?

Well, no. While Fly Me to the Moon isn’t presented as a dramatic film purporting to unveil long-lost truths about the space race, it is built upon a frustratingly pervasive conspiracy theory that the Apollo 11 moon landing never took place, or in this case, that NASA would try to use taxpayer dollars to create a hoax. But, the historical and scientific evidence that we did, in fact, land on the Moon is overwhelming. And, because this movie is dredging up all those conspiracy theories again, it’s worth restating why we know the 1969 Moon landing was very real….

… But outside of heroes like Buzz Aldrin, there is plenty of objective evidence that the Moon landing occurred. In light of the bogus concept behind Fly Me to the Moon, and to get a contemporary reminder of Moon landing evidence Inverse reached out to Dr. Brett Denevi, a planetary geologist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, was a vice-chair of Lunar Exploration Analysis Group, is working on the Artemis program.

“There is a whole host of evidence to demonstrate the Moon landings occurred, including images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera,” Denevi told Inverse. As she points out this is a relatively contemporary camera, launched back in 2009. “The camera is used to scout new landing sites like we are doing for Artemis, so it was built to take incredibly detailed pictures.”….

(7) SONGS OF SFF. [Item by Rob Thornton.] This is six minutes of reverb-soaked electric guitar recorded in a bathroom and reminiscent of the banjo in the theme song from the BBC’s Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. All the song titles are from my fave SF/F novels (see “Terminus Est,” “Burning Bright” and “Green Rapture.”). Bonus points if you know my musical nym! “Now And Always” by R Carnassus at Bandcamp.

(8) SDCC PROGRAM DROPS. “San Diego Comic Con Schedule: Best Panels in Hall H and More”. Variety has highlights at the link. Or you can browse the complete Programming Schedule on the Comic-Con website.

San Diego Comic-Con has rolled out its schedule for the 2024 convention this week, which runs from July 25–28. For the first time since 2019, SDCC will unfold without a virtual event, pandemic protocols or labor strike cancelations, marking a return to normal of sorts for the largest annual fan gathering in North America.

Several major franchises will make an appearance at the event, including panels for Marvel Studios, “Star Trek,” “The Penguin,” “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” the “Walking Dead” franchise, “Transformers One,” “Alien: Romulus,” “The Boys” and “Doctor Who.” Here are the highlights, with descriptions from SDCC and/or the panel sponsors…. 

(9) MEDICAL AWARENESS IN CANADA. CBC News led its post about tick-spread illnesses with the story of MaryAnn Harris, wife of sff author Charles de Lint: “Tick-spread illnesses are on the rise in Canada. Are surveillance, awareness efforts keeping up?”

One morning in Sept. 2021, MaryAnn Harris felt strangely tired. She told her husband, Charles de Lint, that she needed to lie down. Then more worrisome symptoms began cropping up, from nausea to double vision.

The Ottawa couple rushed to a local emergency department. 

At first, the cause of Harris’s ailment was a mystery. The ER team ran various tests, and after a few hours with no answers, they sent her husband home due to visitor restrictions put in place during the pandemic.

By the time de Lint came back the next day, his beloved partner of four decades was unresponsive and on life support in the intensive care unit.

“You don’t know what to think, what to feel,” de Lint recalled. “It was just utter panic.”

What followed was a three-year ordeal, as medical teams offered a battery of tests and treatments in hopes of bringing Harris back from the brink of death. She eventually regained consciousness, but by that point, inflammation in her brain stem had left her paralyzed. Harris never left the hospital and died in early June at the age of 71.

The cause of her devastating illness? A little-known virus that spreads through tick bites.

For years, medical experts have warned a rising number of Canadians are being exposed to ticks carrying an array of dangerous pathogens. Lyme disease is the most familiar — and by far the most common — but there’s growing concern about lesser-known threats as well, from various bacterial infections, to the rare Powassan virus that claimed Harris’s life earlier this year.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

1974 – Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia 

Fifty years ago, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia was published. (No, not on this day. Just this year.) 

Though it is often considered the fifth book of the Hainish Cycle, Le Guin in multiple interviews and her writings has stated that there is no particular cycle or order for what she called the Ekumen novels. 

And yes, I can say having read it more than once and those readings being decades apart that the full title does really make sense. Later printings would just call it The Dispossessed. No idea why the change and if Le Guin said why. 

It was by published by Harper & Row that year with a stunning wraparound cover by Fred Winkowski. I found only two first editions to be had online, the first $1200, the other substantially more, but that was signed. 

Le Guin in the forward to Ursula K. Le Guin: The Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume One which includes The Dispossessed says “The Dispossessed started as a very bad short story, which I didn’t try to finish but couldn’t quite let go. There was a book in it, and I knew it, but the book had to wait for me to learn what I was writing about and how to write about it. I needed to understand my own passionate opposition to the war that we were, endlessly it seemed, waging in Vietnam, and endlessly protesting at home. If I had known then that my country would continue making aggressive wars for the rest of my life, I might have had less energy for protesting that one. But, knowing only that I didn’t want to study war no more, I studied peace. I started by reading a whole mess of utopias and learning something about pacifism and Gandhi and nonviolent resistance. This led me to the nonviolent anarchist writers such as Peter Kropotkin and Paul Goodman. With them I felt a great, immediate affinity. They made sense to me in the way Lao Tzu did. They enabled me to think about war, peace, politics, how we govern one another and ourselves, the value of failure, and the strength of what is weak. So, when I realized that nobody had yet written an anarchist utopia, I finally began to see what my book might be.” 

So let’s now go on to note that I discovered that the novel has a story set before it, “The Day Before the Revolution” and the character in that story, revolutionary Laia Asieo Odo, is a major presence in The Dispossessed. 

But that’s not really why I’m bring the story to your attention. The story is included in the Library of America’s Ursula K. Le Guin: The Hainish Novels & Stories which has a short essay on what she was feeling after writing the novel which you can read here “Story of the Week: The Day Before the Revolution”. And the story is here “The Day Before the Revolution”.

Now where was I? Ahh it’s 1974, the novel has come out. Among us, it was widely acclaimed, and the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation definitely was appreciative of this as her website lists them this way:

Winner of the 1974 Nebula Award for Best Novel
Winner of the 1975 Hugo Award for Best Novel
Winner of the 1975 Locus Award for Best Novel
Winner of the 1975 Jupiter Award for Best Novel

And yes, each link takes you to the proper Award site. Stellar webmasters whoever they are. Now interestingly, the Foundation doesn’t include the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award. I wonder why.  It was also nominated for a John W. Campbell Memorial Award but didn’t win. 

As near as I can tell, it has never been out of print in the last fifty years with multiple hardcover, trade and paperback editions. ISFDB lists far too many editions to really make sense of its printing history, so I can’t say definitively. 

What I didn’t see is it ever got the small press, lavish edition treatment, but then I’m having a hard time remembering if any of her works did. Come on Filers, help me out here.  

In 2019, The Folio Society published a hardcover edition with illustrations by David Lupton and an introduction by Brian Attebery.  

On November 17, Harper Perennial will publish a trade paper edition of the  book with a new foreword by Karen Joy Fowler. 

(11) SEND HIM BACK. “Mexico ‘cancels’ statue of Greek god Poseidon after dispute with local deity” says NBC News.

The gods must be angry — or just laughing at the hubris of humanity.

Authorities in Mexico have slapped a “closure” order on a 10-foot-tall (3-meter) aquatic statue of the Greek god of the sea Poseidon that was erected in May in the Gulf of Mexico just off the town of Progreso, Yucatan.

Mexico’s environmental protection agency said late Thursday that the statue, which appears to show an angry trident-wielding Poseidon “rising” from the sea a few meters from the beach, lacked permits. In the few months it has been up, tourists had gathered to take pictures of themselves with it as a striking background.

But it was symbolically “closed” Thursday — and could be removed altogether — after a group of activist lawyers filed a legal complaint saying the statue offended the beliefs of local Maya Indigenous groups who prefer their own local god of water, known as Chaac.

It’s always been dangerous for humans to get involved in battles between deities. But this one appears to be all about present-day humanity, combining “cancel culture,” social media storms, lawsuits and the one truly fearsome, overpowering force in today’s world: Instagram selfie-fueled tourism….

(12) RECAST BLACK PANTHER? Fandomwire says there’s a call to “’Remove Black Panther 2 from the timeline’: After Harrison Ford Replaces William Hurt as General Ross Fans Demand a New Black Panther in MCU”.

…And after witnessing Harrison Ford replace William Hurt as General Ross, the calls for recasting have amplified within the Marvel fandom, particularly in the instance of Black Panther. Portrayed by the iconic Chadwick Boseman, fans now want the MCU to remove the Oscar-winning Black Panther 2 from the official timeline to facilitate the character’s recasting….

…However, Ford’s casting has also triggered a wave of demand within the Marvel fandom: the demand for Black Panther recasting. Portrayed by the late Chadwick Boseman throughout the MCU until his tragic death, the actor’s portrayal has remained iconic and pretty much irreplaceable. Yet, many fans believe recasting him would not be a bad choice, but only add to the legacy of the character he so clearly loved and played.

The MCU has recast several characters throughout its run, with Bruce Banner and Rhodey being some notable examples. These recasting decisions have hardly received as much hate from fans, but instead have triggered the calls for a Black Panther replacement since Boseman’s untimely death in 2020….

(13) NOT SURE THESE ARE THE ROLLING ROADS WE’RE LOOKING FOR. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “FreightTech Friday: Japan’s proposed conveyor-belt highway” at FreightWaves.

In a recent meeting of Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, the group unveiled plans to combat its transportation and logistics sector labor shortages with construction of an automated conveyor-belt highway running over 310 miles across central Japan.

Known as the Autoflow-Road proposal, the ministry showcased its blueprint for building both aboveground and underground conveyor-belt roads running between Tokyo and Osaka 24 hours a day. According to the ministry, it could move the same amount of freight in a day as 25,000 drivers.

“Automated logistics roads are designed to get the most out of road space by utilizing hard shoulders, median strips and tunnels beneath the roadway. …Our study is examining the impact on road traffic, including on surrounding roads, and costs,” senior official to the ministry, Shuya Muramatsu, told reporters.

The proposal comes as an answer to Japan’s ongoing transportation and logistics labor crisis, as the country begins to cap trucking overtime hours this year.

(14) HOW CAN A FRANCHISE CALLED THE TERMINATOR NEVER END? “’Terminator Zero’ Teases Judgement Day in First Apocalyptic Trailer” at Yahoo!

The Terminator promised he’d be back – and he is. Netflix is teasing a tense apocalyptic return to this world with the first trailer for “Terminator Zero,” its upcoming animated series set in the “Terminator” universe that will premiere on Judgement Day, aka August 29.

This teaser debuts Eiko, voiced by “House of the Dragon” star Sonoya Mizuno, a resistance fighter who is sent back in time to stop Skynet’s impending attack on humanity. “You can’t see it yet, but you’ve been on a collision course your entire life. There’s no going back, not really. It will never, ever stop,” Eiko ominously says in the teaser.

As she gives her warning, the trailer jumps between creepy shots of terminators repairing themselves, explosions and gunfire. “There’s only one thing standing between you and him — me,” Eiko says in the teaser’s final tense moment….

(15) ANDOR RETURNS. Disney+ has dropped a trailer for Andor Season 2 (2025).

The wait is over! Dive into the highly anticipated first look at Andor Season 2 with this electrifying teaser trailer. Following the critically acclaimed first season, Cassian Andor’s (Diego Luna) journey continues as he navigates the treacherous world of the Rebellion. Set five years before the events of Rogue One and A New Hope, this season promises to delve deeper into the rise of the Rebellion against the oppressive Galactic Empire.

(16) THE END AND BEYOND. “’Stranger Things’ Season 5 First Look Revealed by Netflix” at The Hollywood Reporter.

…Maya Hawke recently told Podcrushed that the eight episodes in the final season of the sci-fi hit will feel like “eight movies,” and noted the episodes are “very long.”

“Our showrunners, Matt and Ross [Duffer], take a lot of responsibility,” she added. “They have an amazing team of writers, but they’re very involved. They write a lot and they are very intense and serious about the quality of the continued writing, and so it takes a long time to write each season, and a long time to shoot them.”…

…While season five is the show’s final season, there are additional Stranger Things projects in the works, including: Stranger Things: The First Shadow live on stage in London’s West End and an as-yet-untitled animated spinoff series….

[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Larry Powell, Rob Thornton, Daniel Dern, 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 Thomas the Red.]

Pixel Scroll 6/13/24 You Get A Pixel And You Get A Pixel! Everybody Gets A Pixel!

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(1) BRITISH FANTASY AWARDS TAKING NOMINATIONS. It’s time for eligible voters to nominate for the British Fantasy Awards 2024. Full details at the link. Voting will remain open until Saturday, June 29.

You can vote for the BFAs if you are any of the following:
– A member of the British Fantasy Society
– An attendee at FantasyCon 2023 (Birmingham)
– A ticket-holder for FantasyCon 2024 (Chester)

For each category, you may vote for up to three titles. There is no requirement to complete all three fields for each category, or to vote for every category. …

A crowdsourced list of suggestions has been created here: http://tinyurl.com/suggestionlist2024. You may vote for titles not on the suggestions list – this is just to help you generate ideas if you need some guidance….

…The four titles or names with the highest number of recommendations will make the shortlist of nominations. In case of a tie, the title with the most recommendations in space “1” will go through – so please rank your votes in order of preference.

(2) WORLDCON 2026 SITE SELECTION OPENS. Glasgow 2024 announced that WSFS Site Selection for the 2026 Worldcon is open. Complete directions for voting are at the link.

Los Angeles (Anaheim) in 2026 is the sole bidder on the ballot. Their website can be found here. Write-in bids are also allowed, however, to be selected they must meet the requirements in the WSFS Constitution and file the necessary documents with the administering Worldcon. 

Glasgow 2024 WSFS Members who wish to vote in Site Selection need to purchase an Advance WSFS Membership in the 2026 Worldcon, at a cost of £45.00 (GBP). All members who pay this fee will automatically become WSFS Members of the 2026 Worldcon, regardless of who they vote for (or indeed if they vote at all). All Advance WSFS Membership fees received by Glasgow for the 2026 Worldcon will be passed on to the successful candidate.

There are three ways for you to vote in Site Selection:

  1. We have partnered with Election Buddy, a leading provider of secure voting solutions, to enable easy online voting for Site Selection this year. Full information on how to vote online is provided below. This is the quickest and simplest way to pay your fee and submit your site selection ballot.
  2. Attending Members can vote in person at Glasgow 2024, until the Site Selection desk closes at Noon on Saturday, 10th August.
  3. You can also submit a printed ballot by postal mail. If you wish to use this option, please contact us at [email protected]. All postal ballots must reach us by Thursday, 1st August.

(3) WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION. The winner of the 29th Women’s Prize For Fiction is Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan, a non-genre novel.

The only shortlisted genre work was The Blue, Beautiful World by Karen Lord (Gollancz).

The Prize is awarded annually to the author of the best full-length novel of the year written in English and published in the UK. The winner receives £30,000, and the “Bessie”, a bronze statuette created by the artist Grizel Niven.

(4) NEW TOLKIEN MEMORIAL. With an assist from Neil Gaiman and Roz Kaveney, “JRR Tolkien memorial unveiled at Pembroke College” reports BBC News.

A memorial to The Lord of the Rings author JRR Tolkien has been unveiled at the University of Oxford college where he used to teach.

The bronze sculpture, created by sculptor Tim Tolkien, the writer’s grand-nephew, was revealed at Pembroke College.

Neil Gaiman, who served as master of ceremonies at the event, told the BBC that Tolkien was a “towering figure” who “singlehandedly created an entire genre of literature”.

The college said Tolkien was “one of the college’s most esteemed fellows and a literary giant of the 20th Century”.

The memorial design depicts Tolkien as he looked during his time at Pembroke.

Its Junior and Middle Common Rooms each raised 10% of the funds. The Tolkien Society and the Tolkien Estate also contributed.

The author served as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the college from 1925 to 1945.

He also wrote The Hobbit, part of The Lord of the Rings, and critical works such as Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics during his time there.

A special poem was read out at the unveiling by writer and Pembroke alumna Roz Kaveney.

Gaiman, author of The Sandman and Good Omens, said he had been a fan of Tolkien ever since he bought an “ancient green hardcover” of The Hobbit for a penny.

He said: “Even more exciting for me was finding in the school library The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers.

“I read them over and over and when I got to the end of The Two Towers I’d go back to The Fellowship of the Ring.

“And when at the age of 12 I won the school English prize they said: ‘What do you want? We’ll get you a book.’ And I said: ‘Can I have The Return of the King? I want to find out how it ends.'”

He said hosting the event was “an honour that I’m not worthy of, and that’s fine because none of us are”.

He added: “Being in this place feels huge and strange and very appropriate. Walking the grounds that Tolkien walked, [feeling] just slightly disappointed that there are not enough trolls and elves here as well, but maybe they’ll turn up.”…

(5) WINDS OF CHANGE? Mark Roth-Whitworth opens a discussion of “Cultural changes in fandom”. First on the list:

…Thinking back over the decades I’ve been going to cons, in the last few years, things seem to have changed. For one, there are more writers, and fewer fans on panels….

(6) MALIK & SHAWL EVENT. Usman T. Malik will be in conversation with Nisi Shawl at Hugo house in Seattle next week. It will be a hybrid event. Free registration to see it online is available here.

(7) GENERATIONAL CHANGE IN CHINA. “Escaping the Censors’ Gaze: Lai Wen on Sci-Fi and the Need for Chinese Protest Literature Today” at Literary Hub.

Xinran: What excites you about the literary scene in China today?

Lai Wen: I think Chinese science fiction is particularly good. It’s something that often sucks in the fundamental social conflicts and contradictions of a given time and remodels them through these incredibly creative and vast fantasy worlds. The earliest Chinese science fiction novels weren’t all that great, to be frank, but they still told you a lot about Chinese society, our way of life, our fears and our hopes.

Lu Shi’e’s New China, published at the beginning of the twentieth century was one of the first examples of homegrown Chinese sci-fi/fantasy. The memory of the Opium Wars—the defeat by foreign powers and the vast numbers of the population who remained addicted to the drug—was still raw.

In his novel, one of the central characters is a genius doctor who invents medical techniques that can pull the population out of an opium-induced stupefaction and supercharge their minds. China then goes on to experience a period of intense rejuvenation, emerging as an economic and cultural superpower where peace and prosperity reign. The novel itself is somewhere between wish-fulfillment and prophecy, as many of the novels from that period were.

I think that the creative and original wave of science fiction coming out of China can be understood in the context of our history. Throughout the twentieth century, change was occurring at a frenetic, world-shattering pace. The final Manchu/Qing dynasty ended in 1911 and then power was dispersed amongst hundreds of local war lords jockeying for position; then Kuomintang was able to unite China under a modern nationalization program.

There was the Second World War, the civil war, Mao’s communists, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, until, eventually, the country was opened up under Deng Xiaoping. Today, China has emerged as a dominant global power.

So many Chinese people born in the last hundred years have lived through successive social systems and different economic models compressed into a handful of decades. Chinese science fiction reflects this. During the period of Communist dictatorship, the genre tended to be more sterile, reduced to the level of propaganda for the Party, but in the 1980s and 1990s science fiction went through something of a revival under Deng’s administration.

While censorship was still robust, science fiction and dystopic fantasy enabled cutting political and social commentaries to fly under the radar. Nineteen Eighty-Four made it past the censors, for instance, and many of the classics of Western science fiction were accessible to people during this time, along with Hollywood films such as E.T.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the most famous Chinese science-fiction writers lived through this period—writers such as Han Song and, most famously of all, Liu Cixin, whose most successful novel, The Three-Body Problem, has been made into a Netflix series….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born June 13, 1893 — Dorothy Sayers. (Died 1957.) I’m going to talk about Dorothy Sayers tonight who though she wrote a handful of ghost stories is here because of mysteries. Oh, what mysteries they were.

Her first novel, Whose Body?, was published in 1923. Over the next thirteen years, she would write ten more novels featuring the ever so proper Lord Peter Wimsey who solved mysteries. In Strong Poison, we would be introduced to artist Harriet Vane who Wimsey would fall in love with in an properly upper-class manner. Harriet appears off and on in the future novels, resisting Lord Peter’s proposals of marriage until Gaudy Night six novels later.

Dorothy L. Sayers

Yes, I read all ten of these novels in order some forty years back. I like them better than Agatha Christie novels on the whole as the social commentary here gives them a sharper edge and I think Sayers described her society better than Christie did. Now Christie was way more productive over a much longer period of time as Sayers stopped writing these mysteries, which includes short stories, by the later Thirties in favor of writing plays, mostly on religious themes which were performed in cathedrals and broadcast by the BBC. 

So there’s eleven novels and the short story collection, Lord Peter Views the Body, which I’ve not read but now I see is on the usual suspects as a rather good deal of just a dollar, so I’ll grab a copy now. Done. 

I’d like to speak about The Lord Peter Wimsey series starring Ian Carmichael of the early Seventies, it covered the first five novels. Carmichael said he was too old to play the part for the romantic relationship of the later novels, but it didn’t matter as the series was cancelled.  

I thought it was a rather well-done series and I caught it recently on Britbox, one of those streaming services, and it has help up rather well fifty years on with the Suck Fairy concurring. 

He did play Wimsey into the BBC radio series that covered all of the novels and ran at the same time. They are quite excellent and are available on Audible at a very reasonable price. 

Finally she wrote, according to ISFDB, a handful of genre stories, four to be precise —“The Cyprian Cat”, “The Cave of Ali Baba”,  “Bitter Almonds” and “The Leopard Lady”.   Three seem to be fantasy and the fourth, “Bitter Almonds” I’ve no idea about. Anyone have knowledge of these?

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Rhymes with Orange features a page turner.
  • xkcd explains all those weird word math problems.
  • Carpe Diem offers the correct explanation why one species became extinct.

(10) THE BOYS IS BACK IN TOWN. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Season 4 of The Boys, based on Garth Ennis’ comic book series, (all available in digital omnibus editions via Hoopla, etc.) starts up (on Prime) Thursday, June 14 with the first 3 episodes, the following 5 dropping weekly.

Reminder, the Prime spin-off series GEN V takes place between The Boys seasons 3 and 4.

If you haven’t seen Seasons 1-3 and GEN V, watch those first.

Like the comics, The Boys (and GEN V) contains lots of fairly explicit violence, cussing, sex, nudity, and drugs. And a bit of song and dance here and there, but not much.

Also returning, August 8: the 4th and final season of The Umbrella Academy.

(11) KGB PHOTOS. Ellen Datlow has posted photos from last night’s Fantastic Fiction at KGB readings with Grady Hendrix and Bracken McLeod.  

(12) GINA CARANO SUIT PROCEEDING. The Hollywood Reporter updates readers: “Mandalorian Lawsuit: How Gina Carano, Disney Are Battling In Court”. “At a Wednesday hearing, a judge expressed skepticism that the Carano’s lawsuit should be tossed before discovery is allowed to take place.”

A federal judge has signaled that Gina Carano‘s lawsuit against Disney and Lucasfilm over her termination from The Mandalorian will be allowed to proceed as the court considers whether the First Amendment allows private companies to sever ties with employees who publicly clash with their values.

U.S. District Judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett on Wednesday pushed back on arguments from Disney lawyer Daniel Petrocelli, who argued that the lawsuit should be dismissed because the company has the “right not to associate with a high-profile performer on a high-profile show who’s imbuing” the Star Wars series with “views it disagrees with” that could turn fans away from the show.

Petrocelli urged the court to find in favor of Disney on its First Amendment defense on dismissal rather than at a later stage of litigation after discovery takes place in which it’s determined whether the case should be allowed to proceed to trial.

“I’m not convinced there are no disputed facts,” Judge Garnett responded. She pointed to allegations that Carano was terminated to deflect attention from Disney’s contentious business decisions at the time, including the company’s contract dispute with Scarlett Johansson and criticism of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, which led to the dissolution of its special tax district in the state….

(13) LATEST IN CAPTAIN FUTURE SERIES. Hugo, Locus, and Seiun award-winning author Allen Steele returns to the world of Edmond Hamilton’s classic SF pulp hero with Lost Apollo, a new Captain Future adventure,

The first installment of a two-part story arc takes the cosmic defender and his uncanny crew on a quest across parallel worldlines to save not just our own universe, but countless others!

When an archaic spacecraft unexpectedly comes through a spacetime rift between Earth and the Moon, Curt Newton and the Futuremen intercept it and discover that it’s Apollo 20, a NASA lunar mission from 1973. Yet history doesn’t record there being any further Apollo missions after Apollo 17 in 1972, which can only mean this craft and its crew must have come from a parallel universe … but how, and why?

To discover the answers, Newton enlists the aid of an old foe, a renegade Martian physicist who has unlocked the secret to multiverse travel. Together with the Apollo astronauts, the adventurers lead a military expedition back to the worldline the wayward spacecraft came from, only to discover an unexpected menace awaiting them, a force that threatens Earth … not just one, but many.

Allen Steele’s Captain Future series has been acclaimed by science fiction fans and pulp enthusiasts alike as the blazing return of a classic SF champion. The debut novel, Avengers of the Moon (Tor, 2017) was nominated for Japan’s Seiun Award for Best Foreign Translation. Steele is also the author of an unrelated 1995 novella, “The Death of Captain Future,” which received the Hugo, Locus, and Seiun Awards and was a finalist for the Nebula Award.

Lost Apollo is his sixth Captain Future adventure and his fifth to be published by Amazing Selects.

(14) NANO NEWS. The New Yorker looks at the question “How Will Nanomachines Change the World?”

…In the best case, Santos said, the advent of molecular machines will be less like the invention of an individual tool and more like the creation of a new toolbox. “We have to decide which tool works best for each job,” she told me. Nanomachines bring to mind other innovations for which scientists have found new applications over time. After lasers were invented, in 1960, the military used them to improve guidance systems for smart bombs; now they are used for eye surgery, high-speed Internet, and tattoo removal. Of course, for every technology like the laser, there are many others that never live up to their promise. Directing the right number of molecular machines to the right places, so that they do exactly what they’re made for and nothing more, is much easier in a petri dish than a living body.

Some machines could have untoward interactions with the immune system; others may be harmful to mammalian cells. It will probably be many years before the technologies are tested in humans. “There’s a huge leap between showing something works in a lab and proving it works in people,” Mihail Roco, a senior adviser at the National Science Foundation, who helped create the National Nanotechnology Initiative, told me. “These nanomachines could be a new treatment paradigm, but the human body is enormously complex. Many things we thought would work turned out to be ineffective or toxic.” Still, he went on, “Even if you don’t get exactly what you hoped for, you often learn something useful. You advance knowledge that, down the line, could benefit humanity.”

(15) 2024 NEBULA CEREMONY. The video of the 59th Annual Nebula Awards ceremony is now available on YouTube.

The 59th Annual Nebula Awards took place in Pasadena, California on June 8th, 2024. Hosted by Toastmaster, Sarah Gailey, the evening brought with it a toast to service, remembrance for those we lost in the publishing field, celebration of our finalists and winners of the evening and the induction of the 40th SFWA Grand Master, Susan Mary Cooper.

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

Pixel Scroll 6/3/24 Rikki Don’t Lose That Pixel, You Don’t Want To Scroll Nobody Else

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(1) THE NO BODY PROBLEM. The other day File 770 linked to a report with the good news that Netflix confirmed 3 Body Problem will have a second and third season. Today, Giant Freakin’ Robot took the same story and turned it into a reason for panic: “Huge Netflix Sci-Fi Hit Gets Canceled After Season 3”. Got to get those clicks somehow!

Netflix has long had a reputation for canceling great shows right as they become mainstream hits, and it looks like that won’t be changing anytime soon. The streamer recently revealed that 3 Body Problem will be canceled after season 3.

That means that fans still have two more seasons to look forward to, but it’s not entirely clear how much of the original novels will ultimately be adapted by the show.

At first glance, the news that Netflix has canceled 3 Body Problem after season 3 comes as something of a shock.

After all, the first season was a genuine hit: it currently has a 79 percent critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 78 percent audience score….

(2) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Grady Hendrix & Bracken MacLeod on Wednesday, June 12, 2024. The event begins 7:00 p.m. Eastern at the KGB Bar (85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003; Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs.)

Grady Hendrix

Grady Hendrix is the New York Times-bestselling author of How To Sell a Haunted House, The Final Girl Support Group, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, and many more. His history of the horror paperback boom of the ’70s and ’80s, Paperbacks from Hell, won the Stoker Award for Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction. His books have been translated into 23 languages and sold over a million copies, which means he is guaranteed a seat on the space ark when the earth becomes uninhabitable. You can learn more useless facts about him at www.gradyhendrix.com.

Bracken MacLeod

Bracken MacLeod is a Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, and two-time Splatterpunk Award finalist and the author of several books including Closing Costs and 13 Views of the Suicide Woods, which the New York Times Book Review called, “Superb,” though he imagines the reviewer pronouncing that, “supOIB.” Before devoting himself to full-time writing, he’s survived car crashes, a near drowning, being shot at, a parachute malfunction, and the bar exam. So far, the only incident that has resulted in persistent nightmares is the bar exam. So, please don’t mention it.

(3) PHILLY SUMMER AUTHOR EVENTS SCRATCHED. Michael Swanwick alerted Facebook fans that the summer Author Events at the Free Library of Philadelphia have been cancelled. Apparently, the entire staff quit this morning. Here’s the announcement in its totality:

Dear Friends,

The entire lineup of scheduled Author Events is cancelled. The Author Events team is no longer with the Free Library Foundation.

With sincere thanks for your support over these many years of our program, “the big, beating heart of literature in Philadelphia,” (Philadelphia Inquirer),

Andy Kahan, Laura Kovacs, Jason Freeman, and Nell Mittelstead

Reasons for their quitting have yet to be reported.

UPDATE: The Philadelpha Free Library has followed up the earlier email with another saying that despite the resignations no Author Events have been cancelled. See the complete text of that email in Todd Dashoff’s comment below.

Here is the later message:

(4) MARK YOUR CALENDAR – AND MAP. Lev Grossman will be taking to the skies on “The Bright Sword Tour”. The full schedule is at the link. The journey starts in Brooklyn and ends at the San Diego Comic-Con

The Bright Sword is coming out on July 16th. I’m going on tour to promote it.

Not in any virtual or zoomy sense, I am actually going to transport my physical corporeal cells all around the USA. And to bits of the UK as well. Any other anglophone nations want a piece of this—Canada, Australia, New Zealand—you just let me know.

I’m really, really looking forward to it. It’s an incredible privilege to be able to travel around and talk to people about books.

There are definitely aspects of it that make me nervous. Like most writers I am a poorly distributed mix of intro- and extro-vert and I’m never quite sure which of these aspects is going to be outward-facing at any given moment.

But mostly I’m just unbelievably excited. My extrovert-face actually loves talking to crowds, especially about books and King Arthur and The Bright Sword, which I have been working on for ten years, and my family got sick of me talking about it about one year into that process, so you can imagine how much stuff I’ve got pent up. I love new places, and food, I don’t mind planes, and I actively, immoderately adore hotels of all kinds….

(5) SECOND FIFTH. “55 Years Ago, Star Trek Delivered Its Worst Finale — And Accidentally Saved the Fandom” claims Inverse’s Ryan Britt. It was the last aired episode of Star Trek: The Original Series. One of Kirk’s revenge-seeking ex-girlfriends engineers a way to swap bodies with him.

…The episode also accidentally fueled an emergent fan phenomenon: slash fiction. As fanfic readers know, the concept of slash fiction, in which fans pair one character with another, derives its name from Kirk/Spock fanfic, which imagined the famous duo as lovers. In “Turnabout Intruder,” after Spock mind-melds with Janet Lester and realizes Kirk is in her body, he holds their hand, treating Kirk like his girlfriend. It’s not subtle. Supposedly, even the actors were aware the story’s gender-role-switching elements prompted all kinds of questions about Kirk and Spock’s true feelings. In a famous outtake, William Shatner jokingly reworked his line to say, “Spock, it’s always been you, you know it’s always been you. Say you love me too.”

We know this because super-fan Joan Winston got herself onto the “Turnabout Intruder” set. In the fan-made essay collection Star Trek Lives! Winston recounted the experience in great detail, including the anecdote about Shatner jokingly professing his love to Spock. By 1972, Joan Winston would become one of the key organizers of the world’s first Star Trek conventions.

In 1970, only 300 people attended the first San Diego Comic-Con. In 1972, Winston brought 3,000 people to the first Star Trek convention. By 1974, Winston’s fourth Star Trek Lives! convention attracted at least 15,000 attendees. Star Trek conventions helped create large-scale genre-themed conventions in general, which is partially why today’s geek landscape even exists. Small fantasy and sci-fi conventions existed before Star Trek, but Trek made the idea of having a big convention possible, and Joan Winston was one of the movement’s key pioneers….

(6) SOUND INVESTMENT. “U.S. Audiobook Sales Hit $2 Billion in 2024” reports Publishers Weekly.

The audiobook market in the United States continues steadily growing, with revenue increasing by 9%, to $2 billion, in 2023, according to the Audio Publishers Association, which published data from its annual sales survey today. The sales survey, conducted by Toluna Harris Interactive, incorporates data from 27 publishers, including Audible, Hachette Audio, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster, among others.

In addition, the APA has released highlights from its 2024 consumer survey, carried out by Edison Research, which showed that 52% of U.S. adults, or nearly 149 million Americans, have listened to an audiobook. The survey also found that 38% of American adults listened to an audiobook in the last year, up from 35% reported in 2023….

(7) STOKERCON 2025. The StokerCon 2025 Guests of Honor are:

  • Paula Guran
  • Graham Masterson
  • Gaby Triana
  • Tim Waggoner

(8) SMALL WONDER KICKSTARTER FUNDS.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

June 3, 1964 — James Purefoy, 60. James Purefoy has an interesting genre history though I’m going to start with his role in Hap and Leonard based off that series created by Joe R. Lansdale. There he was Hap Collins who was imprisoned for refusing to be drafted during the Vietnam War.  He and Leonard Pine are rather eccentric private investigators for Hap’s girlfriend Brett Sawyer. 

Remember A Knight’s Tale, a film that the Suck Fairy tells me that they don’t even have in their database. He played the dual role of Edward, the Black Prince of Wales and Sir Thomas Colville. It currently not surprisingly has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of eighty percent. It’s one of my favorite films. 

James Purefoy at San Diego Comic-Con in 2012.

Next on his genre work is Solomon Kane where he played that character. Based on the Robert E. Howard character, he made a stellar Kane. It currently has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of seventy-one percent. 

He was Kantos Kan, the Odwar, the commanding officer, of the ship Xavarian in the John Carter film. It currently has a much better rating than I was expecting at Rotten Tomatoes rating — sixty percent. Huh.

He is cast in a main role as Captain Gulliver “Gully” Troy / Captain Blighty in the second and third seasons of the Pennyworth series, the prequel to the Gotham series. I like it a lot better than the latter series. 

He’s Philippe de Clermont  in A Discovery of Witches series based off on Deborah Harkness’ All Souls Trilogy, and it’s named after the first book in the trilogy.  I read and really loved these novels. 

Almost on my list is his performance as Laurens Bancroft in the Altered Carbon series. Yes I read the Richard Morgan trilogy. I thought it was excellently well written story with great characters and a fascinating story. He’s a ruthless billionaire who cares for nothing but what he wants. 

What is finally on my list is something I never knew had been done. BBC Radio 4 as part of their Dangerous Visions series broadcast a two-part adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Off the Philip K. Dick work. It stars James Purefoy as Rick Deckard and Jessica Raine as Rachael Rosen.  No other cast is credited, a bit odd I think. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) MUSEUM STARTED WITH SALVAGED SETS CAN’T OPEN ITS DOORS. Santa Monica’s SciFi World isn’t open despite a “gala opening” on Memorial Day – the LA Times says in its story “A child porn conviction and angry ‘Star Trek’ fans: Inside the drama around a new sci-fi museum” that “The museum’s public opening is delayed indefinitely due to permitting issues with the city”. The full article is behind a paywall.

Sci-Fi World, a new “museum” that promises fans real and replica props, costumes and sets from popular films and TV shows, hosted its opening “gala” on Memorial Day in the historic former Sears building just a couple of blocks from the Santa Monica Pier.

More than a decade in the making, the museum has drawn the interest of “Star Trek” fans worldwide thanks to its genesis story: Superfan Huston Huddleston said he salvaged a replica of the bridge from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” from a discard pile outside of a Long Beach warehouse in 2011. Huddleston, known for his fanatical devotion to science fiction and horror, launched Kickstarter campaigns to restore the prop and open a museum to house it, raising nearly $163,000 in less than two years.

But now Huddleston, 54, has emerged as the nexus of questions swirling around the museum, which, despite the recent gala, did not actually open as scheduled. Some of those same sci-fi fans who were enthralled by the museum’s origin story have since learned that in 2018, Huddleston was convicted of misdemeanor possession of child pornography. He was required to serve 126 days in jail and three years of summary probation, complete 52 weeks of sex offender counseling and pay fines.

In an interview with The Times, Huddleston said he knew that any association with the museum after his conviction would be toxic for an organization that hopes to attract young fans, so he gave up control of the nonprofit and its collection of film and TV ephemera to the museum’s chief executive.

But several Sci-Fi World volunteers past and present told The Times that Huddleston remains active — if not central — in museum operations and preparations for opening. Lee Grimwade, one of the museum’s lead volunteers who quit a day before the gala, said Huddleston is “definitely 100% involved.”…

(12) AI AND SHOW BIZ. “State of Generative AI in Hollywood” — Variety has a roundup. The complete report is behind a paywall.

… It further examines the advancement and potential of video generation models that have gripped the industry, including OpenAI’s Sora and Google DeepMind’s Veo, which were announced in the first half of 2024.

Yet to understand how the tech is actively being used today also requires an understanding of its limitations and challenges. VIP+ digs into the specific factors holding back gen AI implementation as tools used to make the highest production-value content. Ethical use is now central and critical to gen AI decision making for media and entertainment companies, and it is the final focus area of this report.

Research for this special report partly draws from 28 independent interviews conducted on background from February to May 2024 with leaders at generative AI tech and service providers, those in VFX and content localization networks, film and TV concept and storyboard artists, independent filmmakers experimenting with generative AI, ethical technologists and lawyers specializing in entertainment and cybersecurity….

(13) VOICE ACTOR Q&A. “Star Wars Bad Batch: Dee Bradley Baker on Voices, Clones, Show Ending” at The Hollywood Reporter.

If The Bad Batch were a live-action series, it’d most certainly be considered an ensemble show. But given that one actor voiced 22 (!) characters in the final season of the animated series, that term might not quite fit in this case. It’s a point that the voice actor himself, Dee Bradley Baker, humbly acknowledges.

“The Bad Batch is a very different creative ask of an actor, to bring all of these full-fledged, full-bodied characters together in a scene as an ensemble, not as disconnected or one-offs,” says Baker. “This is an ensemble story in the same way that The Clone Wars was originally an ensemble story. It’s just in this particular ensemble, I’m most of the ensemble,” he adds, laughing.

The Disney+ series, which ended its three-season run on May 1, follows Clone Force 99, a special forces squad comprising clone solders who were enhanced with special abilities, in the aftermath of Order 66 (whereby Emperor Palpatine ordered the clones to kill all Jedi). The group is led by stellar tracker Hunter and includes the abnormally strong Wrecker, brilliant Tech and uber marksman Crosshair. The quintet is rounded out with Echo, a regular clone who, after cybernetic modifications, joined up with the Bad Batch. All five of those characters are voiced by Baker, who is an Emmy contender this awards season for his role as Crosshair….

Speaking of fans, what is the voice you get asked to do most often?

[In Wrecker’s voice] They want to hear Wrecker all the time. I always say Wrecker wrecks my voice, but I’ll talk like Wrecker anyway. [Switching to Crosshair’s voice] Also, Crosshair because he meant a lot to many of the fans. He was probably the most interesting character of all of the Bad Batch [switching back to his real voice] because Crosshair really had the arc, the transformational redemption arc, that was his story, and what started out to seem to be sort of an adversarial counter-character ends up being the character that you’re rooting for. And that is finally redeemed with that hug that he gets from Omega. It’s a really beautiful story, it’s an inspiring story, and people are really locked into that. But it’s a lot of fun [in Hunter’s voice] just to switch from character to character [in Tech’s voice] because each one is very different from the other [back to his real voice], and they’re all just different people, and they’re here within me.

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

Pixel Scroll 5/9/24 When Pixel Filed, And Scroll Span, Who Then Melted Jack Dann?

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(1) PARDON MY WTF. “Apple Apologizes for iPad Pro Ad After Criticism” – The Hollywood Reporter explains why they need to. (Though they can’t be too sorry because the kerfuffle has helped the ad draw 53 million views.)

Apple is apologizing for an iPad Pro ad that was widely criticized when it debuted earlier this week.

The dystopian spot, titled “Crush,” shows several instruments, including a guitar and piano, being crushed by a hydraulic press. Also among the items being smashed flat are balls that look like emojis and an Angry Birds statue….

Apple CEO Tim Cook posted the spot on X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday (it also was posted on YouTube). His post and the YouTube video are still up, but the spot won’t run on TV, according to Ad Age.

“Meet the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created, the most advanced display we’ve ever produced, with the incredible power of the M4 chip. Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create,” Cook wrote….

[One of the many negative comments was,] “Crushing symbols of human creativity and cultural achievements to appeal to pro creators, nice. Maybe for the next Apple Watch Pro you should crush sports equipment, show a robot running faster than a man, then turn to the camera and say, ‘God is dead and we have killed him.’”

(2) KGB. Ellen Datlow has posted photos from Wednesday night’s Fantastic Fiction at KGB session where John Wiswell and Anya Johanna DeNiro read from their recent novels.

(3) CHOOSING CONVENTIONS. The new episode of Mur Lafferty’s I Should Be Writing podcast is “Conquering Conventions; Crafting Confidence”. (There’s also an excellent transcript available – yay!)

In this episode, she shares her experiences and insights on convention attendance, from choosing the right ones to the art of mingling without the cringe. Plus, she tackles the ever-present concern of COVID safety in crowded spaces.

Whether you’re a cosplayer or a casual attendee, Mur advises on how to present yourself professionally, connect with industry pros, and enjoy the con experience while staying true to your comfort level. And for those not ready to dive back into the physical con scene, she discusses the merits of virtual conventions and how they can be a great alternative.

(4) LEVAR READS RAY. LeVar Burton Reads “The Toynbee Convector” © 1983 by Ray Bradbury in his latest podcast.

The world’s only time traveler finally reveals his secrets.

(5) ‘THE HUNT FOR GOLLUM’. “New ‘Lord of the Rings’ Movie Coming in 2026, Andy Serkis Directing” – Variety has the story.

Warner Bros. will release the first of its new batch of live-action “The Lord of the Rings” films in 2026, which will focus on Andy Serkis’ Gollum.

Original “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy filmmaker Peter Jackson and his partners Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens are producing the movie and “will be involved every step of the way,” Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav said during an earnings call Thursday.

The project is currently in the early stages of script development from writers Walsh and Boyens, along with Phoebe Gittins and Arty Papageorgiou, and will “explore storylines yet to be told,” Zaslav said.

In a press release from Warner Bros. later Thursday morning, the studio revealed that the working title for the film is “Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum,” and it will be directed by and star Serkis in his iconic titular role….

…A separate, animated Middle-earth movie, “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim,” is due on Dec. 13 via Warner Bros. and director Kenji Kamiyama. That movie is set 200 years before the events of “The Hobbit.”…

(6) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 109 of the Octothorpe podcast, “But Also a Worrying One”, John Coxon is middle, Alison Scott is even sadder, and Liz Batty is sorry.

We have a bumper mailbag in Octothorpe 109, and we continue our discussion about accessibility in Eastercon before segueing into a discussion of money and privilege with respect to conventions. We also mention the latest news out of Chengdu. Massive thanks to Ulrika O’Brien for the gorgeous cover art this week!

The background is a starry, lightning-filled square in blues, purples, and yellows. Atop that, there is a spaceship, somewhat like a rocket, with engines coming out of the sides. There are yellow lights shining from it, and a ladder reaches up to a central archway. John, Alison and Liz are depicted as silhouettes, regarding it with wonder. Their shadows stretch off the canvas, and they look faintly alien or futuristic in a hard-to-define manner.

(7) SERLING’S TRUNK STORY. “A short story by The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling is published for the first time” reports NPR.

…Not long after he returned from the war in 1946, Serling attended Antioch College on the G.I. bill. There, in his early 20s, he penned “First Squad, First Platoon,” a short story which is being published for the first time Thursday in The Strand. It was one of his earliest stories, starting a writing career that Serling once said helped him get the war “out of his gut.”

“It was like an exercise for him to deal with the demons of war and fear,” said his daughter, Jodi Serling. “And he sort of turned it into fiction, although there was a lot of truth to it.”

The story is set on Leyte Island in “heavy jungle foliage” and a “hostile rain that caked mud on weapons, uniforms, equipment.” Each of the five chapters in the 11,000-word story is about a different soldier and how they died….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born May 9, 1936 — Albert Finney. (Died 2019.) I’m very, very fond of British performers and among them is Albert Finney. So let’s look at the career of this most talent actor.

His first genre performance is as Ebenezer Scrooge in Scrooge. Scrooge is my favorite Albert Finney film and it is benefitted immensely by the many extraordinary strong performances by actors like him. To give a good sense of him in that role, I feel obligated to show him in his full Victorian regalia. 

That’s followed by being Dewey Wilson in Wolfen, a deeply disturbing film. Wolfen to me is the perfect werewolf film as it is a police procedural firmly within the horror genre. His character here Detective Dewey Wilson along with Diane Venora as Detective Rebecca Neff unraveled the grisly murders that turn-out to be based in First Folk reality. 

He plays Edward Bloom, Sr. Big Fish in the wonderful Big Fish. He’s central character here.  He is a story-teller but his only son, Will, doesn’t enjoy them because he believes they are simply not true. Of course, they are, but they’re just exaggerated. Or are they being so? 

He voices Finis Everglot in Corpse Bride. Now I’d love to tell how he was in that role but I’ll confess and say that I’ve not see that film as I am not a big fan of Tim Burton’s animated work at all. 

He was Kincade in Skyfall. He’s the gamekeeper of Skyfall Lodge and the ancestral Bond family estate in Scotland. He’s got a major role in that film.

He was Maurice Allington in The Green Man based on Kingsley Amis’ novel of the same name. He’s the somewhat inebriated owner and landlord of The Green Man, an inn that he says is haunted by ghosts.  He tells tales of these to scare guests as it amuses, or trying to seduce them to no avail as he’s not at all handsome. But it may be that The Green Man is truly haunted and those ghosts are happy with him…  it’s a great role for him and he play it quite well.

Lastly, I’ll wrap up with Murder on the Orient Express, the 1974 version. I have that poster, an original, not a reproduction, framed and hanging here as I truly love this film. Christie, who lived just long enough to see the film get released and be a box office success, said that Murder on the Orient Express and Witness for the Prosecution were the only movie versions of her books that she liked although she expressed disappointment with Poirot’s moustache as depicted here was far from the creation she had detailed in her mysteries.

She’s misremembering her detailing of that moustache which I confirmed checking the many such novels I have on hand in Apple Books. Most novels have no detailed description at all, and this in The Mysterious Affair at Styles  being typical: “Poirot seized his hat, gave a ferocious twist to his moustache, and, carefully brushing an imaginary speck of dust from his sleeve, motioned me to precede him down the stairs; there we joined the detectives and set out for Styles.”

Finney made a most excellent Poirot though many later critics compared him to David Souchet who they consider the definitive version of the character. I always wondered what Dame Christie would have thought of Souchet.  

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Free Range might not be teaching what the student wants to learn.
  • Carpe Diem has an unexpected Egyptian traffic sign.
  • Heathcliff’s latest in a week-long series of guest appearances comes from Star Wars.
  • Nathan W. Pyle emphathizes with creators.

(10) GLIMPSE THE NEXT CHAPTER OF NEIL GAIMAN AND MARK BUCKINGHAM’S GROUNDBREAKING MIRACLEMAN SAGA. Miracleman By Gaiman & Buckingham: The Silver Age #1-7 is now available as a complete collection. Catch a glimpse of the action in the new trailer, featuring artwork from all seven issues.

In THE SILVER AGE, Miracleman has created a utopia on Earth where gods walk among men and men have become gods. But when his long-dead friend Young Miracleman is resurrected, Miracleman finds that not everyone is ready for his brave new world! The story that ensues fractures the Miracleman Family and sends Young Miracleman on a stirring quest to understand this world — and himself. It’s a touching exploration of the hero’s journey that ranges from the top of the Himalayas to the realm of the towering Black Warpsmiths — and into the secret past of the Miracleman Family!

 (11) X-MEN ONE-DAY SPECIAL ON LEARNEDLEAGUE. [Item by David Goldfarb.] LearnedLeague just had a One-Day Special quiz about the X-Men. It focused more on the comic books than the various adaptations, which suited me just fine. I’m currently scored at 11/12, but I’ve submitted an appeal on the one answer where I was marked wrong. We’ll see if that goes through.

You can find the questions behind this link, although nearly all of them have pictures that people who aren’t LL members won’t be able to see. None of the pictures are absolutely necessary, but at least a couple of them have valuable clues.

(12) VIDEO GAME ANIMATION INSIGHTS. “’Harold Halibut’ brings with handmade charm and stop motion inspirations” on NPR’s “Here and Now”.

“Harold Halibut” is a new sci-fi video game set in an underwater space colony. But it’s got a novel look; all of the characters and sets in the game were made by hand, then 3D scanned and animated digitally….

(13) BRAINS DON’T GROW ON TREES. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] 1 cu. mm of brain tissue. 5000 slices. 23 cm of blood vessels. 57,000 cells. 150,000,000 neural connections. Lots of surprises. The Guardian reports “Scientists find 57,000 cells and 150m neural connections in tiny sample of human brain”.

… “The aim was to get a high resolution view of this most mysterious piece of biology that each of us carries around on our shoulders,” said Jeff Lichtman, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard. “The reason we haven’t done it before is that it is damn challenging. It really was enormously hard to do this.”

Having sliced the tissue into wafers less than 1,000 times thinner than the width of a human hair, the researchers took electron microscope images of each to capture details of brain structure down to the nanoscale, or thousandths of a millimetre. A machine-learning algorithm then traced the paths of neurons and other cells through the individual sections, a painstaking process that would have taken humans years. The images comprised 1.4 petabytes of data, equivalent to 14,000 full length, 4k resolution movies.

“We found many things in this dataset that are not in the textbooks,” said Lichtman. “We don’t understand those things, but I can tell you they suggest there’s a chasm between what we already know and what we need to know.”

In one baffling observation, so-called pyramidal neurons, which have large branches called dendrites protruding from their bases, displayed a curious symmetry, with some facing forwards and others backwards. Other images revealed tight whorls of axons, the thin fibres that carry signals from one brain cell to another, as if they had become stuck on a roundabout before identifying the right exit and proceeding on their way…

(14) INSULIN PUMP ISSUE. “FDA Warns on Insulin Pump Problem” at MedPage Today. “This has been a plot point in several movies and tv shows lately,” says Chris Barkley.

A mobile app used with an insulin pump that led to 224 injuries was recalled by Tandem Diabetes Care, the FDA announced today.

The recall is for the 2.7 version of the Apple iOS t:connect mobile app, used in conjunction with t:slim X2 insulin pump with Control-IQ technology, the agency said.

The FDA identified the action as a Class I recall, the most serious type. The recall is a correction, not a product removal, and was prompted by a software glitch that may cause the pump battery to drain sooner than expected. Users are being urged to update the app to the latest software….

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Adam Savage tells “How Star Wars: Ahsoka’s Jedi Shuttle Filming Model Was Made!”

During the production of Star Wars: Ahsoka, Adam Savage visited the miniatures filming stage set up at Lucasfilm to watch the practical model of Ahsoka’s T-6 Jedi Shuttle being filmed. Modelmaker John Goodson and machinist Dan Patrascu spent four months building the 30-inch model of that T-6 ship for the show–an incredible hero ship model not only equipped with lights, but was fully mechanized with a rotating wing!

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

Datlow Shares ToC for Best Horror of the Year, Volume 16

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Ellen Datlow has revealed the table of contents for The Best Horror of the Year Volume Sixteen, to be released later this year by Night Shade.

  • “The Importance of a Tidy Home” by Christopher Golden
  • “Dodger” by Carly Holmes
  • “Rock Hopping” by Adam L.G. Nevill
  • “That Maddening Heat” by Ray Cluley
  • “Jack O’Dander” by Priya Sharma
  • “The Assembled” by Ramsey Campbell
  • “R is For Remains” by Steve Rasnic Tem
  • “The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs” by E. Catherine Tobler
  • “Return to Bear Creek Lodge” by Tananarive Due
  • “The Enfilade” by Andrew Hook
  • “Lover’s Lane” by Stephen Graham Jones
  • “Hare Moon” by H.V. Patterson
  • “Build Your Houses With Their Backs to the Sea” by Caitlín R. Kiernan
  • “The Scare Groom” by Patrick Barb
  • “The Teeth” by Brian Evenson
  • “Nábrók” by Helen Grant
  • “The Salted Bones” by Neil Williamson
  • “Tell Me When I Disappear” by Glen Hirshberg
  • “The Motley” by Charlie Hughes

Pixel Scroll 4/25/24 Why Scroll Around Half Dead When We Can File You For Only 22 Pixels?

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(1) THE EDITOR’S LIFE. Penmen Review has a two-part transcript of a panel about “The Role of the Editor in Publishing” with editors Ellen Datlow and Joe Monti, and copyeditor Deanna Hoak.  

Ellen Datlow: Well, I mean, short fiction is very different in getting into. It’s always been difficult, and I think it still is, but there are so many people starting new magazines. It’s hard to make a living out of writing short fiction and editing. There aren’t that many magazines that pay their editors or publishers, like F&SF, the four Dell Magazines: Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock, Analog, and Asimov’s. Most of the others are started by people who are scrambling to make a living out of it, like Neil Clarke and the Thomases. It’s very hard. And the way to get into anything is to read slush, whether it’s novels or short stories, if you can get a job or an internship. You often don’t get paid to do that, but it’s experience, and you make connections and contact anyone you ever heard of.  

One thing I learned very early is that if someone—a book editor or a major editor or publisher or anybody else—says “There’s no job, but I can talk if you’d like to come in,” always say yes. If anyone professional offers to have a drink with you, coffee with you, just talk with you in their office, say yes, because they may know some other job available, and they’ll give you insight into the whole publishing industry. It goes back to the connections and networking aspect of the whole thing. You have to put yourself out there.  

Part II is here: “Professional Editors Discuss Self-Publishing, Networking and More”

W4W: We’re going to try to pull some questions out of the chat. How fast do you need to be able to edit?  …

Deanna Hoak: I’m paid by the hour, but you’re expected to do more and more within that hour. When I first started out in copy editing, the standard was that you were expected to edit about 2,500 words per hour, say ten manuscript pages an hour. But now companies are expecting more and more. I know there is one publisher that wants 17 pages an hour done.  

As a copy editor, I read every manuscript at least twice, and I read sections of it more than that, because if I don’t read it at least twice, I will miss some of the plot holes. Plus, you’re fact checking. You’re going back and forth. You’re doing a lot of stuff. Seventeen pages an hour – it just doesn’t work for me. I end up not taking very many projects for the companies that want me to do that.  

Joe Monti: I keep it all in my head as I go along. It’s terrible. So I’m a slow reader, but it’s because I read and ingest it and keep it all going in my head at the same time. I may make little comments on the side throughout the manuscript. But yeah, I keep it all in my head, and then keep going. And then there’s a flow that happens. It’s very much a bell curve. Maybe 15, 20 pages the first hour. And then by like hour two or three, I’m going to 40, 60 pages an hour.  

But it depends on the book. And sometimes I have little to no editing. I have done almost no editing on Ken Liu‘s quartet of fantasy novels. And if you’re not familiar, the last two were 367,000 words, so it was split in two. That one we cut the ends off and beginnings. But other than that, I didn’t edit almost anything in it. Yet it took me two months because I was reading it and making sure it all fit. And everything fit perfectly. But Ken’s a rare genius, and he’s worked meticulously on his craft. One of the reasons why we work well together is that I know he knows that I trust him, and I get him. This is a lot of the creative part of it–I get your voice.  

(2) ONE BILLION SERVED. In “Yes, People Do Buy Books”, Lincoln Michel rebuts the claims in Elle Griffin’s “No one buys boks” (recently linked in the Scroll). 

… How many books are sold in the United States? The only tracker we have is BookScan, which logs point of sale—i.e., customer purchases at stores, websites, etc.—for most of the market. BookScan counted 767 million print sales in 2023. BookScan claims to cover 85% of print sales, although many in publishing think it’s much less. It does not capture all store sales, any library sales, most festival and reading sales, etc. (Almost every author will tell you their royalty reports show significantly more sales than BookScan captures. Sometimes by orders of magnitude.)

Still, I’ll be very conservative and assume 85% is correct. This means around 900 million print books sold to customers each year. Add in ebooks and the quickly growing audiobook market, and the total number of books sold over 1 billion. Again, this is the conservative estimate….

(3) DEDUCING THE SATISFACTIONS OF SHERLOCK. “Nicholas Meyer on the Great Escape of Art (and the Art of Detective Fiction)” at CrimeReads.

…I write Sherlock Holmes stories for the same reason I read them, to divert my attention from the terrifying issues that plague the rest of my waking hours—Ukraine, Gaza, drought, famine, wildfires, limits on voting rights, Fox News and anti-vaxxers.

But for a few hours, when I read or write Sherlock Holmes stories, I am transported to what appears to be a simpler world, where a creature of superhuman intelligence, nobility, compassion and yes, frailty, can make sense of it all. Was the Victorian world in fact simpler than this one? We’ve no way of knowing, but like an audience willing itself to believe that the magic trick is really magic, we are conniving accomplices to our own beguilement….

(4) JIM HENSON DOCUMENTARY. Animation Magazine is there when “Disney+ Debuts ‘Jim Henson Idea Man’ Official Trailer”.

… Directed by Academy Award winner Ron Howard, Jim Henson Idea Man chronicles the story of extraordinary artist and visionary Jim Henson. In his 36-year career, Henson created some of the world’s most cherished characters, including classic Muppets like Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy and all of Sesame Street’s iconic residents, including Big Bird, Grover, Cookie Monster and Bert and Ernie. Henson also directed beloved fantasy films like The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth….

(5) HUGO 24. Camestros Felapton is reviewing the 2024 Hugo finalists. The latest entry is “Hugo 24: The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera”.

…Fetter, the central character of The Saint of Bright Doors is more keenly aware of the dislocation of both time and geography than most. He has some of the qualities of a Peter Pan, unattached from his shadow and with a loose relationship with gravity. Raised in a remote rural village by his mother to be an assassin, he has turned his back on that destiny and instead lives in the modern world of email, crowd-funding, run-down apartments and light-rail transit.

Fetter lives in the present or rather he doesn’t live there at all. Science fiction and fantasy have their fair share of unreliable narrators but Fetter lives in a world of unreliable world-building….

(6) TEDDY HARVIA CARTOON.

(7) FATHOM LORD OF THE RINGS EVENT. Via Robin Anne Reid we learn that Fathom Events will reprise The Lord of the Rings Trilogy on June 8, 9 and 10 in certain U.S. theaters. Tickets available at the link.

Warner Bros. and Fathom Events are teaming up to release Jackson’s magnum opus in extended versions, including those Jackson remastered for the 4K Ultra HD rerelease that came out in 2020. This will be the first chance for fans to see the purest iteration of Jackson’s vision on the big screen, however.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born April 25, 1969 — Gina Torres, 55. Where shall I start with Gina Torres?  What was her best role? I submit it was a non-genre role as Jessica Pearson in the legal drama Suits and Pearson, the sort of sequel series where she was a disbarred attorney. It was a truly meaningful role that she got to grow into over the time the two series ran.

Gina Torres in 2018.

Genre-wise her most interesting character was Zoë Alleyne Washburne in the Firefly series which I really would have loved to see developed into more a rounded character had the series lasted. I liked her background of having served in the Unification War under Reynolds for two-and-a-half years and being one of the few to survive the Battle of Serenity Valley. 

Before that she was down in New Zealand, where she appeared in Xena: Warrior Princess as Cleopatra in “The King of Assassins” , and in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, she had a recurring role as Nebula. 

She was in the M.A.N.T.I.S. series as Dr. Amy.  I liked that series. 

She was the Big Bad in a season of Angel as Jasmine. It’s hard to explain what she did here without Major Spoilers being given away and there might be at least one least one reader here who hasn’t seen Angel yet. I actually think it’s a better series than Buffy was. 

Right after the Firefly series, she has a role in the Matrix films, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions as Cas. 

After that came the Cleopatra series where she was Helen “Hel” Carter  (and which last longer than I thought at twenty-six episodes) , a great piece of pulpy SF. She was obviously having a lot of fun there.

One of my favorite roles for her strictly using her voice came in the animated Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths where she was the Crime Syndicate Siberia Woman. Stellar role done with just her voice.  She also voiced Vixen / McCabe on Justice League Unlimited. She was the girlfriend of John Stewart, the Green Lantern there. 

She voiced Ketsu Onyo on two of the animated Star Wars series, Star Wars Rebels and Star Wars Forces of Destiny. She’s a Mandalorian bounty hunter who helps the Rebel Alliance. 

She’s on Westworld in a storyline that that is so convoluted that I’m not sure that I could explain it. Suffice it to say that she was there. Or not. 

Lest I forget I should note that she had a recurring role on Alias as Anna Espinosa, an assassin who was the utterly ruthless and ceaselessly persistent nemesis of Sydney Bristow, the character that Jennifer Garner played. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 108 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Ramp is Not Ramp”, John Coxon, Alison Scott and Liz Batty look back at Eastercon.  

We bask in the post-Levitation haze, going into some detail on accessibility, venue, programme, virtual, social and other aspects of the most recent Eastercon. We also mix in a variety of witty and insightful commentary, probably.

A drawing of a blackboard with text that reads: “Octothorpe 108 guide to Glasgow street food.” A picture of a deep fried pizza with glasses is next to text reading ’The “Coxon” pizza crunch’, a picture of three pakora with glasses next to ‘The “Scott” haggis pakora’, and a picture of a deep fried Mars bar next to ‘The “Batty” deep fried Mars bar”. Stars also adorn the backboard, and bottles of red and brown sauce are in the bottom-left-hand corner.

(11) ABANDON HOPE. Inverse reasons that if Heritage Auctions is selling all the stuff needed to make more episodes of HBO’s Westworld, there’s no hope that will happen: “2 Years After It Was Canceled, HBO’s Most Divisive Sci-Fi Show Might Officially Be Dead”.

Westworld ran for four seasons on HBO, but was canceled shortly after its last season wrapped and was later booted from the streaming platform. Season 4 ended on a more or less satisfactory note, but both Nolan and Joy have expressed interest in finishing the story they started.

According to the creators, Westworld still needs one more season to wrap up the battle of wills between humans and hosts. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, however, Nolan suggested the story could continue in a different medium, like a graphic novel or even a movie. Either way, television production seems to be moving on for good, as Westworld’s costumes, props, and set pieces are about to be scattered to the winds.

Heritage Auctions is hosting a massive Westworld auction. The event features more than 230 pieces from the series…

(12) THE HILLS ARE ALIVE WITH THE SOUND OF MAGIC. Variety reports “Harry Potter Books Full-Cast Audiobooks to Be Exclusively on Audible”.

… Amazon’s Audible and Pottermore Publishing, the global digital publisher of Rowling’s Wizarding World, will co-produce a brand-new audiobook series for the original seven Harry Potter stories. The new audiobooks are scheduled to premiere in late 2025, with each of the seven English-language titles to be released sequentially for a global audience, exclusively on Audible.

The companies said the full-cast audio productions — with more than 100 actors — will “bring these iconic stories to life as never heard before.”…

(13) UNEXPECTED STUFF. “Oreo Has a First-Of-Its-Kind Cookie Hitting Shelves Soon” and Allrecipes is ready to blab what it is.

… Oreo and Sour Patch Kids have teamed up to create the first-ever sour Oreo cookie. No, the Sour Patch Kids aren’t playing a trick on you—this collab is very real.

The limited-edition Sour Patch Kids Oreos look like your classic Golden Oreo, but look again; Those mischievous gummy candies are actually in the cookie and creme. The Oreo cookie itself is Sour Patch Kids-flavored and dotted with colorful mix-ins. The sandwich creme is the classic Oreo creme filled with sour sugar pieces. Looks like this Oreo will also be sour, sweet, then gone…. 

(14) CHARGE IT! “Detroit debuts ‘road of the future’ with wireless electric vehicle charging” – WBUR explains.

Drivers will buy 17 million electric vehicles this year, according to the International Energy Agency. That means one in five cars sold worldwide will be EVs.

That’s a lot of cars, and they need a lot of places to charge. Detroit is testing a new way to charge EVs that doesn’t require plugging cars in — just drive on the right strip of road and watch the battery fill up.

Here & Now’s Peter O’Dowd spoke with Bloomberg NEF analyst Ryan Fisher and Justine Johnson, chief mobility officer with the state of Michigan’s Office of Future Mobility and Electrification about the future of charging systems and EV sales….

“A vehicle will be connected to a smart road. Essentially the road has a wireless inductive charging coil inside of it and the vehicle is communicating with the actual coils underneath the road to receive their charge. So while a vehicle is driving, as long as it has the receiver underneath the vehicle, you charge and you drive at the same time maintaining your charge but also adding some charge range to that as well.”…

(15) TAU BELOW ZERO. Reported in today’s Nature: “Detectors deep in South Pole ice pin down elusive tau neutrino”. “Antarctic observatory gathers the first clear evidence of mysterious subatomic particles from space.”

An observatory at the South Pole has made the first solid detection of a type of elementary particle called the tau neutrino that came from outer space.

Neutrinos of all three known ‘flavours’ are notoriously elusive, but among them, the tau neutrino is the most elusive yet: it was first directly detected in the laboratory only in 2000.

At the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, detectors embedded throughout a cubic kilometre of the Antarctic ice sheet pick up flashes of light that signal the possible presence of a neutrino. When a tau neutrino hits the ice, it produces a particle called a tau lepton, which travels only a short way before decaying. The resulting signal is similar to that produced by an electron neutrino, whereas muon neutrinos produce muons, which leave long traces in the ice.

The IceCube Collaboration looked at IceCube data from 2011 to 2020, and used machine learning to distinguish between the signals of tau, electron and muon neutrinos. The collaborators found seven interactions that had a high probability of being produced by high-energy tau neutrinos.

Primary research here

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

Pixel Scroll 4/16/24 Click For The Scroll Necessities, The Simple Scroll Necessities

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(1) DATLOW Q&A. The Horror Writers Association blog checks in with one the genre’s all-stars: “NUTS & BOLTS: Interview With Ellen Datlow, Editor and Shaper of Multiple Genres”.

Q: What qualities must a story have to qualify as good horror in particular?

A: The things that any good story has plus the building of a sense of unease in the reader, the feeling that something is seriously wrong — dark and creepy and horrific. Horrible things are going to happen or are happening. I don’t expect stories to scare me, but I surely appreciate them making me feel extremely uncomfortable.

Q: What are some of your most common reasons for rejecting stories?

A: Bad writing, boring, tired plots. The words lying there like a dead fish.

(2) 2024 NEBULA CONFERENCE PRELIMINARY PROGRAMMING SCHEDULE HAS BEEN RELEASED. SFWA’s preliminary programming schedule for the 2024 Nebula Conference can be viewed here. The full schedule of events, including office hours and author meet-and-greets is yet to come.

Programming will begin on the 6th of June at 1:30pm PDT and conclude on the 9th of June at 11:30am PDT.

This professional development conference is for all authors and industry professionals within the science fiction, fantasy, and related genres and includes content geared toward creators working in games, comics, prose, poetry, and other mediums of storytelling.

If you volunteered to speak on programming: Thank you! You may have received a programming assignment email–please review this email to accept your assignment. Some assignments, however, will arrive in later waves. If you have not received an assignment you are still being considered. Our programming team will send notifications to all speaking volunteers, including those who were not scheduled, when assignments are complete.

If you submitted a programming idea: We’re grateful for the hundreds of panel topics and suggestions submitted for the conference – if your submission was not scheduled for this conference weekend, we may still be in touch about using it for an online panel later this year or during another event.

New Registration Feature: If you’ve already registered for the conference, we’ve now implemented a checkbox on newer registrations to show that you’re going! This option wasn’t available early on in the registration process, but if you’d like to opt-in and show your name on our list of attendees, please email [email protected] and we’ll get you sorted!

Registration (whether online or in-person in Pasadena, CA,  includes access to the event, a year of access to recordings of many of the weekend’s panels, mentorship opportunities, the Nebula Awards ceremony, a conference Discord, and entry to our ongoing Nebula conference events–writing events, regular online panels, meetups, and more!

Register here.

Room Block: If you are thinking about attending in person, time is ticking to reserve your room for the conference. Our room block will be closing soon and SFWA will not be able to guarantee the price for your stay with us. Every room that is booked directly will help us with our room block obligations, so if you have already booked, please let us know so we can add you to our list! 

Hotel booking – Start your reservation.

(3) A THOUSAND SUNS. Inverse says don’t miss out: “The Best Sci-Fi Anthology Series of the Year Is Streaming For Free Right Now”.

…One indie sci-fi anthology series, just released on YouTube, proves that the short form is still alive and well. A Thousand Suns is a series created by filmmaker Macgregor, a cinematographer who has worked on everything from music videos for Dua Lipa to the Gerard Butler spy thriller Kandahar. Produced by Blackmilk Studios, with work from directors Ruairi Robinson, Tyson Wade Johnston, Tim Hyten, and Philip Gelatt, A Thousand Suns is basically a miniature, independent sci-fi film festival that you can watch right now….

…Because each of these shorts is about four minutes long, the Black Mirror-esque twists are sort of already happening as soon as you start watching….

…As of April [15], 2024, there are six episodes of A Thousand Suns up on YouTube and on the official site: 1Ksuns.com. 

This is the trailer:

Here’s Episode One:

(4) CINEMATIC LANGUAGE. “’Civil War’ Action Sequences Build on War Movies” at IndieWire.

… “Civil War” joins a robust tradition of war films stretching back as far as 1925’s “The Big Parade” and 1926’s “What Price Glory?” that try to convey the power of violence itself: its horror, its allure, its twisted humor, and most of all its undeniable pull towards more violence. Hardy told IndieWire that he was much more influenced by photographers William Eggleston and Saul Leiter than specific war films or war photographers — although he did look at the work of Jessie’s (Cailee Spaeny) hero Lee Miller and others….

… Here are five war films (and one video game) that all share something — be it a sensibility, specific techniques, or a philosophical approach — with how “Civil War” tackles its action and combat sequences. They show just how successful war films can be at evoking strong feelings about violence, suffering, power, and courage, and also just how hard it is to tell war stories in a way that helps us avert them….

Here’s what the writer says about one of them:

‘Zero Dark Thirty’ (2012)

The impact of “Zero Dark Thirty” seems to have lessened over time, but that might be because the Seal Team Six assault that takes up the final third of Kathryn Bigelow’s film is so tautly edited that it leaves no room for other combat sequences to top its realism. Its use of night vision cameras and its ability to make the camera feel like another soldier on the mission is painfully precise. But there’s also something of a military practitioner’s perspective on how the camera tracks movement and what it settles on as important — it assesses threats and moves on. That perspective is sometimes clinical, sometimes fearful and adrenaline-fueled, and doesn’t leave too much space for sadness or horror until it floods in. Whether that is good enough determines whether you think a movie with combat sequences like “Zero Dark Thirty” or “Civil War” is ultimately a success or a failure in what it has to say about war.

(5) BAKER STREET IRREGULARITIES. Here’s a literary curiosity: “Sherlock Holmes Original Manuscripts by Conan Doyle: A Census by Randall Stock & Peter E. Blau”. There is a list at the link.

…Conan Doyle wrote 60 Sherlock Holmes stories.  He sold or gave away many of these manuscripts during his lifetime.  He passed along others through his children.  They eventually sold most of them, but his last surviving child, Dame Jean Conan Doyle (1912-1997), bequeathed three Holmes manuscripts to British institutions.  Her gifts included The Retired Colourman, The Illustrious Client, and The Creeping Man….

… Almost all of the Holmes manuscripts written after 1902 still exist, in part because Conan Doyle started submitting typed copies to his publishers and retaining the original for himself.  Only 4 of the 27 manuscripts written before 1902 are known to survive, although a few leaves remain from three other tales.  Private collectors hold about half of the known existing manuscripts….

(6) EXTREMIST PLAY. “IntelBrief: Incels and the Gaming-Radicalization Nexus” is an overview by The Soufan Center.

… Gaming is an inherently multisensory, immersive experience that, when riddled with violence or slanted by an extremist ideology, can be more impactful than a simple propaganda text or image in the radicalization process. According to a report by the UN Counter-Terrorism Centre (UNCCT) on the intersection between gaming and violent extremism, simulations created by extremists in otherwise neutral games like The Sims and Minecraft allow players to experience the Christchurch massacre from the shooter’s perspective. Meanwhile, in Roblox, a system that allows users to program and play games created by themselves or other users, extremists have created “white ethnostates”. Christian Picciolini, a former white supremacist, has explained how far-right extremists use popular games like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Call of Duty to recruit and radicalize marginalized youth experiencing social isolation….

(7) DRAGON ICON BURNS. “Fire destroys Copenhagen’s Old Stock Exchange, collapsing its spire” – AP News says the 184-foot-tall dragon-tail spire was destroyed today.

A fire raged through one of Copenhagen’s oldest buildings Tuesday, destroying about half of the 17th-century Old Stock Exchange and collapsing its iconic dragon-tail spire, as passersby rushed to help emergency services save priceless paintings and other valuables.

The blaze broke out on the building’s roof during renovations, but police said it was too early to pinpoint the cause. The red-brick building, with its green copper roof and distinctive 56-meter (184-foot) spire in the shape of four intertwined dragon tails, is a major tourist attraction next to Denmark’s parliament, Christiansborg Palace, in the heart of the capital.

Bells tolled and sirens sounded as fire engulfed the spire and sent it crashing onto the building, which was shrouded by scaffolding. Huge billows of smoke rose over downtown Copenhagen and could be seen from southern Sweden, which is separated from the Danish capital by a narrow waterway.

(Click for larger images.)

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born April 16, 1921 — Sir Peter Alexander Ustinov. (Died 2004.) Peter Ustinov showed up in Logan’s Run as the Old Man; he had the lead role in Blackbeard’s Ghost as Captain Blackbeard based the Robert Stevenson novel; he was Charlie Chan in Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen (it’s at least genre adjacent, isn’t it?); he’s The Caliph in stellar Thief of Baghdad; a truck driver in The Great Muppet Caper and finally he has the dual roles of Grandfather and Phoenix in The Phoenix and the Carpet.

Peter Ustinov in 1986. Portrait by Allan Warren.

He voiced myriad characters in animated films including that of Grendel in Grendel Grendel Grendel based off John Gardner’s novel Grendel, in Robin Hood, he voiced Prince John King Richard; and in The Mouse and His Child, he was the voice of Manny the Rat. 

Now I’m going to admit that my favorite role by Peter Ustinov was playing Poirot which he did in half a dozen films, which he first in Death on the Nile and then in Evil Under the Sun, Thirteen at Dinner, Dead Man’s Folly, Murder in Three Acts and Appointment with Death. He wasn’t my favorite Point as that was David Suchet but it was obvious that he liked performing that role quite a bit. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Far Side needles Superman.
  • Macanudo shows a problem you can never get away from, even on Arrakis.

(10) CHP PUTS THEIR FOOT DOWN. Luckily, they were wearing shoes.“California police arrest four in $300,000 stolen Lego brick bust” in The Verge.

Los Angeles citizens can rest easy knowing that a criminal theft ring is no longer stalking the city’s retail stores to feed a Lego black market. That’s because the California Highway Patrol (CHP) announced this week that it had arrested four people it accused of swiping what police estimated was “approximately $300,000” worth of Lego sets.

The four had allegedly burgled stores like Target, Home Depot, and Lowe’s of their Lego stock and sold them to black-market dealers who would then vend the stolen bricks at “seemingly legitimate businesses, swap meets, or online.” Police say they were booked on “charges related to Organized Retail Theft, Grand Theft, and Conspiracy to commit a crime.”…

(11) AS YOU WISH. Figure Fan Zero reviews “The Princess Bride Figures by McFarlane”. Lots of photos of the figures in different poses.

The Princess Bride is a movie that I absolutely love and for some reason never seem to re-watch a lot these days. I’m not sure why that is, but maybe it’s because I overdid it back when it first hit home video. I was surprised to see McFarlane turn up with the license, not only because it was a weird fit among their sea of DC Comics and Warhammer figures, but also because the film has received so little merchandising over the years. Either way, I wasn’t in on these figures when they were first released, but earlier this year they hit the bargain bins and I was able to snap up the regular figures for under ten bucks each and the Mega Figure, Fezzik, for $16. So, let’s just tackle the whole damn thing today! Inconceivable? Nah, we can do this!

(12) JOCULARITY. Entertainment Weekly is “On set for Ncuti Gatwa’s ‘Doctor Who’ debut”.

…To be fair, Gatwa has a lot to laugh about. After stealing scenes in Sex Education and Barbie, the 31-year-old actor is launching his next act, playing the titular Time Lord in the BBC’s legendary sci-fi series Doctor Who. After popping up in last year’s 60th anniversary special, “The Giggle,” and a solo Christmas episode, he’s now taking full control of the TARDIS, headlining his first full season as the Doctor — making him the first Black and first openly queer man to take on the role. It’s a new era for both Gatwa and the show itself: For the first time ever, the BBC is partnering with Disney+ to launch the show worldwide, and when the new season premieres May 10, it will air simultaneously around the globe….

(13) FORGET PLAN A, FIND PLAN $. NASA admits plan to bring Mars rocks to Earth won’t work — and seeks fresh ideas. Meaning: cheaper. “Nasa: ‘New plan needed to return rocks from Mars’” at the BBC.

The US space agency says the current mission design can’t return the samples before 2040 on the existing funds and the more realistic $11bn (£9bn) needed to make it happen is not sustainable.

Nasa is going to canvas for cheaper, faster “out of the box” ideas.

It hopes to have a solution on the drawing board later in the year.

Returning rock samples from Mars is regarded as the single most important priority in planetary exploration, and has been for decades.Just as the Moon rocks brought home by Apollo astronauts revolutionised our understanding of early Solar System history, so materials from the Red Planet are likely to recast our thinking on the possibilities for life beyond Earth….

(14) IT’S OFFICIAL. “NASA confirms mystery object that crashed through roof of Florida home came from space station” — Yahoo! has the story.

NASA confirmed Monday that a mystery object that crashed through the roof of a Florida home last month was a chunk of space junk from equipment discarded at the International Space Station.

The cylindrical object that tore through the home in Naples on March 8 was subsequently taken to the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral for analysis.

The space agency said it was a metal support used to mount old batteries on a cargo pallet for disposal. The pallet was jettisoned from the space station in 2021, and the load was expected to eventually fully burn up on entry into Earth’s atmosphere, but one piece survived.

The chunk of metal weighed 1.6 pounds (0.7 kilograms) and was 4 inches (10 centimeters) tall and roughly 1 1/2 inches (4 centimeters) wide.

Homeowner Alejandro Otero told television station WINK at the time that he was on vacation when his son told him what had happened. Otero came home early to check on the house, finding the object had ripped through his ceiling and torn up the flooring….

(15) BUSINESS IS BOOMING. Unlike the last story, you won’t need NASA to make a home delivery in order to look at this: “NASA’s New Solar Sail Spacecraft Will Shine So Bright We’ll See It From Earth” reports Autoevolution.

… The most recent piece of news on this front comes from American space agency NASA, which announced last week that it is getting ready to launch a new kind of solar sail that may revolutionize such technologies.

You see, one of the trickiest parts of making a solar sail is not the sail surface itself but the booms that are used to deploy them. That’s because solar sails are meant to extend after the ship reaches space.

At the moment there are only so many materials booms can be made from, and so many structures that can be used, and that limits the capabilities of a functional sail. NASA says it kind of solved that problem and promises “to change the sailing game for the future.”

The hardware that will do that is officially called Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3), and it physically comprises twelve NanoAvionics CubeSats linked together. The boom that’s meant to unfurl the sail is made of flexible polymer and carbon fiber materials.

NASA says this way of making the booms ensures they are both stiffer and lighter than what came before, which were either heavy, metallic structures or light but bulky ones that didn’t necessarily fold as they should have.

The new NASA design comes as tubes that can be squashed flat and rolled like a tape measure – up to 23 feet (seven meters) of booms can be rolled into something that fits in a human hand, NASA says. The design also provides less bending and flexing during temperature changes, which is what the spacecraft is expected to experience in space….

(16) SCOOBY SPINOFF CONTINUES. Velma Season 2 premieres April 25 on Max.

More mystery. More murder. And lots, lots more meddling.

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

Pixel Scroll 3/29/24 Scroll On, You Crazy Pixel

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(1) FLOTSAM AND JETSAM. The five-day “Treasures From Planet Hollywood” auction brought in more than $15.6 million from over 5,500 bidders worldwide across some 1,600 lots, according to Heritage Auctions. Here are some items of genre interest that fetched big bucks.

Mechanical Man from Hugo

…The whip from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom sold for $525,000 to become the most valuable prop or costume from the beloved franchise…

Another first-day smash was the Bapty& Co.-made ax Jack Nicholson used to heeeeeere’s-Johnny his way through the bathroom door in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Among the first props Planet Hollywood secured before its grand opening in New York City in 1991, that ax sold for $125,000. When that sold Wednesday after a fierce bidding war, the auction room erupted in applause — for the first time, but not the last.

Over the five-day event, the hits kept coming: The Barbasol can Wayne Knight uses to smuggle dinosaur embryos out of 1993’s Jurassic Park realized $250,000. The blaster Princess Leia carried across the forest moon of Endor in Return of the Jedi sold for $150,000, while an original Stormtrooper blaster from Star Wars, which Bapty & Co. forged from a British Sterling submachine gun, sold for $112,500.

Tobey Maguire’s black symbiote suit from 2007’s Spider-Man 3 swung out the door for $125,000, just a web ahead of one of his signature Spidey suits from the same film, which realized $106,250. A “good guy” Chucky doll from 1988’s Child’s Play scared up a winning bid of $106,250….

…. A set of three Sankara stones from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom realized $100,000, while “the cup of the carpenter” — the Holy Grail itself — sold for $87,500.

But one of the auction’s first bidding wars was over a display figure wearing Gary Oldman’s Vlad the Impaler reproduced armor from 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which Planet Hollywood obtained from technical advisor Christopher Gilman and sold on Wednesday for $87,500. And on the auction’s final day, a bidding war broke out over a prop from one of Martin Scorsese’s most underappreciated masterpieces, his 2011 adaptation of Brian Selznick’s children’s book Hugo, from which the original Mechanical Man automaton realized $81,250….

The top-selling item overall was the “Titanic prop that saved Rose and sparked debate…” reports NPR.

…”The wood panel from Titanic that saved Rose — but, controversially, not Jack — was the king of the auction, realizing $718,750 to float to the top of the five-day event,” auction house Heritage Auctions said in a release….

(2) SPOT RESOLUTION. Camestros Felapton wants you to know “Why I Declined a Hugo Spot”.

…2023 looms large here and there were definitely people I would rather see on the Hugo ballot for Best Fan Writer this year than myself. One was obviously Paul Weimer but I was certain he’d be top of most people’s ballots anyway but I was hoping some Chinese fans would make it onto the category. That didn’t happen but it is a decent list of finalists and there is nobody there that I would have wanted to replace.

Closely related to this was also the sense that I was likely to have gathered additional votes from things that I had written in 2024, specifically on the 2023 Hugo Award stats. Even if that wasn’t the case it would have felt like it was the case to me. So, I thought I’d feel happier skipping this year and putting my hat into the ring for next year…

(3) DREAM FOUNDRY CONTESTS OPEN SOON. The Dream Foundry’s annual contest for emerging artists and writers will take entries from April 1 until May 27, 2024. Every year their contest coordinators select ten finalists from a pool of submissions from around the world. Both contests offer cash prizes, first choice of seats in Flights of Foundry workshops, and other opportunities. Eligibility requirements and full details about prizes are at the links:

  • Art Contest — This year’s art contest will be judged by Lauren Raye Snow & Jessica Cheng, The contest coordinator is Grace P. Fong.
  • Writing Contest — The writing contest will be judged by Valerie Valdes and C.L. Polk, and our contest coordinator is Julia Rios.

(4) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Robert Levy and Jennifer Marie Brissett on Wednesday, April 10 at 7:00 p.m. Eastern. Location: KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003 (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs).

ROBERT LEVY

Robert Levy’s novel The Glittering World was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the Lambda Literary Award. His collection No One Dies from Love: Dark Tales of Loss and Longing was published last year by Worde Horde and includes stories from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nightmare, Black Static, The Dark, The Best Horror of the Year, and The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction. Trained as a forensic psychologist, he teaches at the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and can be found at TheRobertLevy.com.

JENNIFER MARIE BRISSETT

Jennifer Marie Brissett is the author of Destroyer of Light, which received a starred Kirkus Review and was on its list of Best Fiction of the Year. She is also the author of Elysium, which won The Philip K. Dick Award Special Citation and was a finalist for the Locus and Tiptree Awards. And once a long time ago she owned and operated an independent bookstore in Brooklyn. She lives in Manhattan where she is currently working on her next novel Daughters of the Night. Find her via her website at www.jennbrissett.com

(5) CLIMATE FICTION CONTEST OPENS. Grist’s “Imagine 2200 climate fiction contest 2024” is open for submissions through June 24.

Grist is excited to open submissions for the fourth year of our Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors short story contest. 

Imagine 2200 is an invitation to writers from all over the globe to imagine a future in which solutions to the climate crisis flourish and help bring about radical improvements to our world. We dare you to dream anew….

…. The winning writer will be awarded $3,000. The second- and third-place winners receive $2,000 and $1,000, respectively. An additional nine finalists will each receive $300. All winners and finalists will have their story published in an immersive collection on Grist’s website. …

We are thrilled to also announce the judges for our 2024/25 contest: Omar El Akkad and Annalee Newitz. El Akkad is an author and journalist whose award-winning debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World. Newitz is a science fiction and nonfiction writer whose third novel, The Terraformers is a finalist for the Nebula Award, and whose latest nonfiction book, Four Lost Cities, is a national bestseller.

Imagine 2200 celebrates stories that envision the next decades to centuries of equitable climate progress, imagining futures of abundance, adaptation, reform, and hope. We are looking for stories that are rooted in creative climate solutions and community-centered resilience, showing what can happen as solutions take root, and stories that offer gripping plots with rich characters and settings, making that future come alive.

In 2,500 to 5,000 words, show us the world you dream of building.

Your story should be set sometime between the near future and roughly the year 2200….

(6) WANT TO GO TO SPACE? NASA is accepting applications to “Become An Astronaut” through April 16. The complete guidelines are at the link.

Astronaut requirements have changed with NASA’s goals and missions. Today, to be considered for an astronaut position, applicants must meet the following qualifications:

  1. Be a U.S. citizen
  2. Have a master’s degree* in a STEM field, including engineering, biological science, physical science, computer science or mathematics, from an accredited institution.
  3. Have a minimum of three years of related professional experience obtained after degree completion (or 1,000 Pilot-in-Command hours with at least 850 of those hours in high performance jet aircraft for pilots) For medical doctors, time in residency can count towards experience and must be completed by June 2025.
  4. Be able to successfully complete the NASA long-duration flight astronaut physical.

(7) LOUIS GOSSETT JR. (1936-2024). Actor Louis Gossett Jr., winner of an Oscar for his performance in An Officer and a Gentleman and an Emmy for his role in TV’s Roots,died March 29 at the age of 87.

His genre resume includes the movie Enemy Mine (as the alien soldier), the Watchmen TV series (as the former Hooded Justice, for which he won an Emmy), and an episode of Touched By An Angel (a role which also earned an Emmy nomination). He voiced Lucius Fox in The Batman animated series (2007).

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 29, 1957 — Elizabeth Hand, 67. These are my personal choices, not an overview of her career. 

I’ll say up front that my favorite work by Elizabeth Hand is an atypical work by her, Wylding Hall. Using an oral history framing to tell the story of when the young members of a British folk band decide to record a new album, they choose this ancient country house that has a history that is very troubled. The characters are fascinating, the setting is well crafted and the story, well, I think it’s her best story ever and it did win the Shirley Jackson Award. 

Elizabeth Hand

So what else did I like by her? There’s Mortal Love which intertwine the now while reaching back in the Victorian past with the mystery of a woman who holds the key to lost Pre-Raphaelite paintings, appropriate since she seems too akin to one of those of those works herself. 

I will admit that I like her more grounded works better which is why the next pick is Illyria, a short novel set in the theater world (did I mention that I adore Angel Carter’s Wise Children? Well I do.) Twin sisters are now cast in a production of Twelfth Night, and magic will happen this night. It garnered a World Fantasy Award.

Curious Toys is an extraordinary work as a young girl attempts to find a murderer in turn-of-the-century Chicago. That description hardly describes the story awaiting the reader here as the girl is but fourteen and the setting the killer is stalking is the famous Riverview amusement park.  

Finally I find much to appreciate in her Cass Neary private eye series. A smart-assed, substance abusing and always self-destructive punk who means well, the series is that rare series that develops the character novel by novel. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) FANCY THREADS. “When Hollywood Needs a Historically Accurate Outfit That Looks Just Right, It Turns to Rabbit Goody” – Smithsonian Magazine has the story.

… Thistle Hill Weavers, founded by Rabbit Goody in 1989, makes textiles for movies and television shows, historic houses, and high-end furniture and clothing companies. What sets this little mill in Central New York apart from every other cloth manufacturer in the country is Goody’s remarkable ability to re-animate the past: No one else produces short runs of textiles that so faithfully replicate the weave, texture, weight and color of historic fabrics. If you’ve seen “The Gilded Age” or Cinderella Man, you’ve seen Goody’s work in action. The majority of Thistle Hill’s income comes from creating more contemporary fabrics for interior designers and architects, and from the work Goody does with historic houses, such as Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home in Virginia. Yet many of her favorite jobs have come from Hollywood costume designers seeking perfectly rendered, historically accurate textiles to recreate items like Abraham Lincoln’s shawl for the movie Lincoln or much of the colonial-era clothing seen in the 2008 mini-series “John Adams.”…

… Today Thistle Hill Weavers employs seven people whom Goody has trained to run the nine mechanized shuttle looms dating from the 1890s through the 1960s, plus archaic-sounding equipment like a warp winder and a quiller—all necessary to transform big cones of thread into beautiful pieces of fabric. Goody’s workers generally arrive with no knowledge of weaving; she teaches them everything they need to know….

(11) NYT ON VINGE. The New York Times obituary linked here is behind a paywall: “Vernor Vinge, Innovative Science Fiction Novelist, Dies at 79”.

… Mr. Vinge’s immersion in computers at San Diego State University, where he began teaching in 1972, led to his vision of a “technological singularity,” a tipping point at which the intelligence of machines possesses and then exceeds that of humans.

He described an early version of his vision in Omni magazine in 1983.

“We’re at the point of accelerating the evolution of intelligence itself,” he wrote, adding, “Whether our work is cast in silicon or DNA will have little effect on the ultimate results.” He wrote that the moment of the intellectual transition would be as “impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole,” and that at that moment “the world will pass far beyond our understanding.”

A decade later, he fleshed out the intellectual transition — the singularity — in a paper (subtitled “How to Survive in the Post-Human Era”) for a symposium sponsored by the NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute.

“Within 30 years,” he said, “we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended. Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive?”

That prediction has not come true, but artificial intelligence has accelerated to the point that some people fear that the technology will replace them….

(12) MEASURING THE UNIVERSE. The New York Times makes sure she is “Overlooked No More: Henrietta Leavitt, Who Unraveled Mysteries of the Stars”.

…In the early 20th century, when Henrietta Leavitt began studying photographs of distant stars at the Harvard College Observatory, astronomers had no idea how big the universe was. Debate raged over whether all of the objects visible through the telescopes of the day were within our own Milky Way galaxy, or whether other galaxies — or “island universes,” as they were then called — might exist somewhere out in space.

Leavitt, working as a poorly paid member of a team of mostly women who cataloged data for the scientists at the observatory, found a way to peer out into the great unknown and measure it.

What’s now commonly called Leavitt’s Law is still taught in college astronomy courses. It underpinned the research of other pioneering astronomers, including Edwin Hubble and Harlow Shapley, whose work in the years after World War I demolished long-held ideas about our solar system’s place in the cosmos. Leavitt’s Law has been used on the Hubble Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope in making new calculations about the rate of expansion of the universe and the proximity of stars billions of light years from earth.

“All of those major discoveries rested on Leavitt’s discovery,” Wendy L. Freedman, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, said in a phone interview, referring to the explosion of knowledge about space over the last century. “It’s the bedrock foundation of so much of what we do today in cosmology and astrophysics in general.”

What Leavitt achieved was essentially twofold. In a groundbreaking observation in 1908, she noticed that certain stars, called Cepheids, photographed in the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds — two relatively nearby galaxies — had a distinctive pattern: The longer it took for the Cepheids to cycle through their variations, the brighter they were in magnitude. Then, in a paper in 1912, she laid out a mathematical formula to explain her observation, called a “period-luminosity” relationship.

That opened the door to a new kind of interstellar triangulation, as Cepheid variables emerged as a reliable way to calculate cosmic scale for Earthbound astronomers. Distances that before then were anyone’s guess suddenly had a formula, and the portrait that emerged was shocking — a universe hundreds of times bigger than most astronomers had imagined….

(13) AT THE CORE. “Astronomers Capture Dazzling New Image of the Black Hole at the Milky Way’s Center” in Smithsonian Magazine.

Astronomers have captured the first-ever image of magnetic fields circling the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

The fields have a similar structure to those around the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a massive elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo. This finding suggests that strong magnetic fields may be a common feature of all black holes, the researchers report in a pair of papers published today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“This spiral pattern that we see swirling around the black hole indicates that the magnetic fields must also be a spiral pattern whirling around—and that they’re very strong and very ordered,” Sara Issaoun, a co-leader of the research and an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, says to BBC Science Focus’ Tom Howarth….

(14) WEEDS IN SPACE! Yesterday I was frustrated that NASA had not said what plants are part of its lunar-bound experiment. Cat Eldridge found the answer on the Space Lab website: “Lunar Payload LEAF – Lunar Effects on Agricultural Flora”.

…The LEAF β (“LEAF Beta”) payload will protect plants within from excessive Lunar sunlight, radiation, and the vacuum of space, while observing their photosynthesis, growth, and responses to stress. The experiment includes a plant growth chamber with an isolated atmosphere, housing red and green varieties of Brassica rapa (Wisconsin Fast Plants®), Wolffia (duckweed), and Arabidopsis thaliana. By bringing seedling samples back to Earth, as part of Artemis III, the research team will apply advanced system biology tools to study physiological responses at a molecular level…

(15) WHEN DID THE FIRST HOMININS TRULY ENTER EUROPE? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] (I have never forgiven the dinosaurs for what they did to Raquel Welch.) When did humans first enter Europe has been the subject of some debate. Now, new research from a site in Ukraine at Korolevo has used two different dating methods. These have given a very similar result… “East-to-west human dispersal into Europe 1.4 million years ago” in Nature.

Here, using two methods of burial dating with cosmogenic nuclides [the researchers] report ages of 1.42 ± 0.10 million years and 1.42 ± 0.28 million years…

…this suggests that early hominins exploited warm interglacial periods to disperse into higher latitudes and relatively continental sites—such as Korolevo—well before the Middle Pleistocene Transition.

(16) NEW SF YOUTUBER….? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Well, we all (OK, perhaps just some of us) have our favorite SF YouTuber, be it Moid Moidelhoff at Media Death Cult who is particularly popular with those fairly new on their SF journey, or Book Pilled for those that are perhaps more seasoned.  One recent newcomer that some Filers might like to check out is Grammaticus Books.  He recently reminded me of a forgotten Heinlein classic from 1942, Orphans of the Sky.  So I went to see if I had a copy in my library, and lo, it came to pass that I had and that I must have read it the best part of half a century ago…

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

Pixel Scroll 3/19/24 Ocean’s Elevenses

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(1) GAIMAN COLLECTION AUCTION RESULTS. March 15 was “The Day Neil Gaiman Swapped His Original Comic Art, Comic Books and Collectibles for More Than $1 Million”.

[He offered] 125 prized pieces from his collection — everything from original comic artwork to signed books, a Coraline puppet used in the film to limited-edition sculptures, handmade Christmas stories given as gifts, to the awards he received. It was a day well spent: The completely sold-out Neil Gaiman Collection Comics & Comic Art Signature ® Auction, which drew more than 1,200 bidders worldwide, realized $1,029,392.

A portion of the auction’s proceeds will benefit The Hero Initiative, which provides medical and monetary assistance to veteran comics creators, writers and artists needing a helping hand. Some proceeds will also go to the Authors League Fund, which assists professional authors, journalists, critics, poets and dramatists in financial need because of medical or health-related problems, temporary loss of income or other misfortunes.

Gaiman will also share some of the proceeds with the artists who made his imagination tangible enough to put on Bristol board.

“I love the idea of benefitting charities that look after authors who’ve fallen on hard times, that look after the artists and writers and creators of comics who’ve had hard times,” Gaiman told the packed auction gallery Thursday morning. “And I like the idea of normalizing the idea that we who do have art we bought for $50 a page or $100 a page that now sells for tens of thousands of dollars a page get into the idea of giving something back to the artists who originally drew it. That seems to me an important thing to do.”

This single page of art alone went for $132,000: “Dave Gibbons and John Higgins Watchmen #7 Story Page 16 Original Art”.

… Not far behind was the only piece of Sandman-related artwork Gaiman had ever purchased: Jean Giraud’s 1994 painting of Death of the Endless, sister of the titular Sandman whose epic tale spans the universe’s origin through the present day. This painting by the man called Moebius sparked a bidding war that drove its final price to $96,000. That was also the amount realized for John Totleben’s cover of Miracleman No. 16, the last issue written by Moore before Gaiman took the reins.

One of the auction’s most sought-after, fought-over pieces was among its smallest: an on-screen, camera-used puppet of Coraline in her orange polka-dot pajamas accompanied by her ever-present companion, The Cat — “fully posable actors,” as Gaiman explained. He told the audience that Coraline “has been in my bedroom in a glass case since 2009, and I had more qualms about letting her go than I did anything else in this entire auction. She’s there. She smiles at me. She’s special.”

It was so special that a bidding war broke out over Coraline, who eventually went to a new home for $72,000….

(2) KGB. Ellen Datlow has posted photos from the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading on March 13, 2024 where Moses Ose Utomi and Richard Butner read.

(3) EVIDENCE THAT SCHOOL TOSSED BOOKS WHICH WERE OBJECTED TO BY STAFF OR PARENTS. “Publishers Issue Letter to NYC DOE Over Discarded Books” – Publishers Weekly has details.

Candlewick Press, Charlesbridge Press, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Sourcebooks, and the organization Authors Against Book Bans have issued a letter to the New York City Department of Education over reports that hundreds of books were discarded by a Staten Island elementary school on ideological grounds.

On March 11, Gothamist reported that hundreds of new books featuring characters of color and LGBTQ themes were found near the garbage at PS 55. Some of the books, pictured in the report, were marked by sticky notes that marked certain titles “not approved,” with reasons such as “Boy questions gender,” “teenage girls having a crush on another girl in class,” and “Witchcraft? Human skulls.”

The discarded books included copies of My Two Border Towns by David Bowle, illustrated by Erika Meza; Kenzy Kickstarts a Team (The Derby Daredevils #1) by Kit Rosewater, illustrated by Sophie Escabasse; Black Panther: The Young Prince by Ronald Smith; We Are Still Here: Native American Truths Everyone Should Know by Traci Sorell, illustrated by Frané Lessac; and Nina: A Story of Nina Simone by Traci N. Todd, illustrated by Christian Robinson.

Gothamist reporter Jessica Gold found that no formal challenge to the books had been raised through official channels and that “the removal of the books resulted from an objection raised by staff or parents.” The NYC DOE has reportedly announced it is conducting an investigation into the incident.

In response, a coalition of publishers whose books were discarded teamed with Authors Against Book Bans to pen a letter to New York City’s DOE over the report about the book removal, stating, “If true, such action amounts to unlawful censorship and violates authors’ and students’ First Amendment rights.”…

(4) SENDAK FELLOWS. “2024 Sendak Fellows Announced” – Publishers Weekly has the names.

The Maurice Sendak Foundation has announced this year’s Sendak Fellows: Charlotte Ager, Rocío Araya, and Cozbi A. Cabrera.

The four-week fellowship will take place May 13 through June 9 at Milkwood Farm in South Kortright, N.Y., and comes with a prize of $5,000. During the residency, artists will focus on a project of their choosing, meet with visiting artists and professionals in the field, and explore Sendak’s house and archives in Ridgefield, Conn.

Originally from the Isle of Wight, Ager is a freelance illustrator based in London. Her clients have included the New York Times, Google Design, Penguin Random House, and Flying Eye Books. Araya is an illustrator from Bilbao, Spain, currently living in France. Rocío’s first English-language translation of her book Head in the Clouds will be published by Elsewhere Editions in 2024. And Cabrera is the author-illustrator of Me & Mama, which received a Coretta Scott King Honor and Caldecott Honor, and My Hair Is a Garden.

(5) NOT QUITE INFINITE COMBINATIONS. Den of Geek says “It’s Official: TV Shows Have Run Out of Titles”. (Fanzines have run into the same problem – how else to explain “File 770”?)

Back when it was all fields around here, TV show titles were in abundance. In the days when television used to be hand-stretched and sun-dried and made at a gentlemanly pace by artisanal methods, there were titles galore. Worzel Gummidge. Starsky and Hutch. Last of the Summer Wine. Distinct and descriptive titles milled around drinking holes, and all writers had to do was toss in a lasso and drag out a Sapphire & Steel or a Knight Rider.

But thanks to streaming, nowadays TV is made in windowless factories and injected with antibiotics and e-numbers. There can never be enough. Every streamer requires a chunky flow of television shows they can release all on the same day, not tell anybody about, and quickly delete for tax purposes before anybody watches them. And the first casualty (aside from the livelihoods of the writers, directors, crew, cast and the collective human spirit)? The titles.

The problem is, the glut has dried up the supply. Abstract nouns. Character names. Place names. Common phrases. “Fun” puns. Creepy lines from nursery rhymes for psychological thrillers. Every combination of words in the English language has already been used to name a TV show. ITV got lucky with Mr Bates Vs the Post Office, but it’s hardly a long-term solution.

Neither is it a uniquely new problem, but it is getting worse. Time was that two competing TV shows with the same title would be released a good many years apart, by which point, who could really remember the first one? When HBO brought out android interplanetary sci-fi Raised by Wolves in 2020, it was several years after the Channel 4 comedy Raised by Wolves set on a Wolverhampton council estate, and fairly difficult to confuse the two….

(6) DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME? “George Lucas Backs Bob Iger in Disney Proxy Fight with Nelson Peltz: ‘Creating Magic Is Not for Amateurs’” – a quote in The Hollywood Reporter.

… The Star Wars and Indiana Jones filmmaker is weighing in on The Walt Disney Company’s ongoing proxy fight with activist investors, and he is throwing his support firmly behind CEO Bob Iger and Disney’s board.

“Creating magic is not for amateurs. When I sold Lucasfilm just over a decade ago, I was delighted to become a Disney shareholder because of my long-time admiration for its iconic brand and Bob Iger’s leadership,” Lucas said in a statement Tuesday. “When Bob recently returned to the company during a difficult time, I was relieved. No one knows Disney better. I remain a significant shareholder because I have full faith and confidence in the power of Disney and Bob’s track record of driving long-term value. I have voted all of my shares for Disney’s 12 directors and urge other shareholders to do the same.”…

… Disney is facing a proxy fight against two activists: The corporate raider Nelson Peltz, and Blackwells Capital. Notably, Peltz has billions of dollars in shares pledged by Ike Perlmutter, who, like Lucas, sold his company (Marvel) to Disney and became a major shareholder. Perlmutter remained with Disney until being laid off last year….

(7) ARE YOU GOING TO BELIEVE YOUR LYIN’ EYES? Meanwhile, Variety reports Disney’s Star Wars cash register has rung up another sale: “’The Acolyte’ Trailer: New Star Wars Show Gets First Look on Disney+”.  

…Disney has released the trailer for its newest “Star Wars” series “The Acolyte,” which is set to stream on Disney+ June 4.

The series takes place 100 years before the franchise’s prequel trilogy during the High Republic era of the “Star Wars” universe, which is the furthest back in the timeline “Star Wars” has gone in a live-action production. An official logline for the series reveals, “An investigation into a shocking crime spree pits a respected Jedi Master (Lee Jung-jae) against a dangerous warrior from his past (Amandla Stenberg). As more clues emerge, they travel down a dark path where sinister forces reveal all is not what it seems.”…

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 19, 1928 — Patrick McGoohan. (Died 2009.) I don’t how times I’ve seen the opening of The Prisoner series as it’s been separately shown from the episodes online pretty much since The Prisoner series first aired. Not sure in what context I watching it but that it was. It was, without doubt, one of the the best openings I’ve seen.

Then there was the series. Weird, thrilling, mysterious. Eminently watchable over and over and over again. Was it SF? Or was it a spy series set in the very near future? Who knew? And then there was Number Six, the never named intelligence agent played by Patrick McGoohan. He seemed destined to play this role.

He was an American-born Irish actor, director, screenwriter, and producer. Now it turns out that The Prisoner was his creation. He was also one of the writers – there were five in fact — and he was one of four directors. In other words, he had his hand in every facet of the series and its sixteen episodes. 

Before he was that unnamed intelligence agent he was, and I’m not at all convinced that McGoohan meant this to be a coincidence, secret agent John Drake in the Danger Man espionage series. I’ve seen a few episodes, it’s well crafted.  

Danger Man (retitled Secret Agent in the United States for the revived series) was a British television series broadcast between 1960 and 1962, and again between 1964 and 1968. (A neat bit of history here: Ian Fleming was brought in to work on series development, but left before that was complete. Apparently he didn’t like the way the secret service was to be portrayed.) 

After The Prisoner, McGoohan’s next genre endeavor was as the narrator of Journey into Darkness is a British television horror film stitching together two episodes derived from late sixties anthology television series Journey to the Unknown.

We are now leaving genre and headed for, well the Colombo series. Why so? Because he was good friends with Peter Falk and directed five episodes of the series, four of which he appeared in, winning two Emmys in the process. McGoohan was involved with the series in some way from 1974 to 2000. 

He was said that his first appearance on Columbo was probably his favorite American role. He had top billing as Col. Lyle C. Rum, fired from a military academy, in “By Dawn’s Early Light”, one of the  Colombo films that preceded the series.

His daughter Catherine McGoohan appeared with him in the episode “Ashes To Ashes” The other two Columbo episodes in which he appeared are “Identity Crisis” and “Agenda For Murder”.  

Yes, he reprised his role as Number Six for The Simpsons in “The Computer Wore Menace Shoes”.  Homer Simpson fakes a news story to make his website more popular, and he wakes up in a prison that is a holiday resort. As Number Five, he meets Number Six. 

McGoohan’s last movie role was as the voice of Billy Bones in the animated Treasure Planet.

He received the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award for The Prisoner.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) JEOPARDY! [Item by David Goldfarb.] On last night’s Jeopardy! episode, the Double Jeopardy round had a category, “Horrors!”

$1200: This horror master turned director to translate his own novella “The Hellhound Heart” to the screen as “Hellraiser”

Yogesh Raut knew this was Clive Barker.

$1600: H.P. Lovecraft wrote that the “U”s in the name of this “hellish entity” should sound “about like that in ‘full’ “

Ben Chan stumbled over the pronunciation a bit but gave “Cthulhu”.

$2000 – Daily Double. Yogesh: “I’ve wanted to say this ever since I was a child. Alex, I’ll make it a true Daily Double.” His bet: $15,200.

The title of this 1962 Ray Bradbury novel is a Shakespeare line that rhymes with “By the pricking of my thumbs”.

Very unsurprisingly, Yogesh got this right, parlaying this into a runaway win for the round.

$800: His Christmas ghost story “The Haunted Man” sold 18,000 copies on its first day of publication in 1848

Yogesh picked it as Dickens.

$400: Catriona Ward’s “The Last House on Needless Street” is partly narrated by Olivia, one of these animals, & that can’t be good luck

Troy Meyer tried, “What is a pig?”

Yogesh said, “What’s a cat?” and on prompting added “black” and was scored right.

Catriona Ward squeed about being a clue.

(11) GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN. “Researchers Name Ancient Species of Giant Turtle After a Universe-Vomiting Stephen King Character” – IGN unravels the references.

Researchers have named a newly discovered species of giant prehistoric turtle after a universe-creating character that features in Stephen King’s novel It, alongside the Dark Tower series of books.

The monstrous armoured reptile was thought to have lived between 40,000 to 9,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene period, during which time it may have lived alongside and potentially been hunted as a source of food by early humans in the Amazon….

…The fossil’s gigantic proportions lead the scientists to name the species Peltocephalus Maturin, in reference to the fictional, god-like turtle Maturin, which vomited out the universe that serves as the setting for Stephen King’s novel It. The benevolent turtle also appears as one of the guardians of the beams featured in King’s eight-part Dark Tower book series, which, like It, has been adapted into a live-action movie, though perhaps the less said about that the better.

As noted in the paper published in the scientific journal Biology Letters – and by the author himself on X after reading the news – King’s character was itself named in reference to the fictional doctor Stephen Maturin, who, in the course of Patrick O’Brian’s seagoing novel H.M.S. Surprise, names a giant tortoise….

(12) LIFE IS SHORT, ART IS LONG. ShortCon2024, “the Premiere Conference for Short Crime Fiction Writers”, takes place Saturday, June 22, and Michael Bracken and Brendan DuBois – familiar around here – are among the presenters.

Join acclaimed crime fiction professionals for an immersive, one-day event and learn how to write short crime fiction, get your stories published, and develop and sustain a long-term career writing short. 

(13) THUMBS UP. Camestros Felapton gives us his eyewitness account in “Review: Zombie the Musical”.

… The show starts off with the hapless cast rehearsing their production of “It’s a Musical! (The Musical!)” with requisite sailors singing about the wonders of New York. In reality, the cast is a mix of a not-so-bright leading man whose acting career is magically failing upwards, a leading woman sick of playing two-dimensional characters, an ageing actress whose career is effectively over and a perpetual understudy with genuine talent but no chance of ever becoming a professional. Outside it is Sydney 1999 and people are worried about Y2K and excited about the Olympics coming in 2000. The tone is set with broad parodies about musicals and the sexism of the theatre industry (especially circa the 1990s).

The world of musicals begins breaking down when the leading man quits and the news on the radio warns of a rapidly spreading infection. Will there even be an audience for their opening night?…

Here’s a “sneak preview” from last fall.

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

Pixel Scroll 3/8/24 The Pixels Are All Tucked In Their Scrolls For The Night

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(1) THERE WILL BE NO 2023 HUGO LONGLIST ANTHOLOGY. David Steffen says, “With all of the complications of this year’s nomination list, Diabolical Plots has decided not to produce a new volume of the Long List Anthology this year.”

Instead, Hal Y. Zhang, with assistance from Chelle Parker and David Steffen, have produced a set of reading recommendations, “The 2023 Hugo Award Nomination List (With Links!)”.

We do still want to help boost readership for the amazing authors involved, however, so in lieu of the anthology, we have done our best to compile the most comprehensive list of links to the works from this year’s Short Story and Novelette categories that we could.

(2) MORE MURDERBOT ACTORS. “’Murderbot’ Casts Sabrina Wu, Tattiawna Jones, Akshay Khanna & Tamara Podemski” – Deadline has the story.

The Apple TV+ series Murderbot is rounding out its leading cast with Sabrina Wu (Joy Ride), Tattiawna Jones (Orphan Black: Echoes), Akshay Khanna (Polite Society) and Tamara Podemski (Outer Range). The quad will star opposite Alexander Skarsgård, who also executive produces.

Based on Martha Wells’ bestselling Hugo- and Nebula Award-winning book series The Murderbot Diaries, the 10-episode series Murderbot centers on a self-hacking security android who is horrified by human emotion yet drawn to its vulnerable “clients.” Murderbot must hide its free will and complete a dangerous assignment when all it really wants is to be left alone to watch futuristic soap operas and figure out its place in the universe….

(3) SANDERSON SETS BACKERKIT RECORD. Publishers Weekly is there as “Brandon Sanderson Raises $16 Million, Breaking Records Again”.

Brandon Sanderson, the bestselling author known for his epic fantasy novels, has already raised more than $16 million on crowdfunding platform BackerKit since launching it earlier this week.

The campaign is to fund a leatherbound edition of Words of Radiance, the second book in Sanderson’s fantasy series, The Stormlight Archive. The leatherbound edition will feature premium materials and illustrations, as well as a new “secret project,” Sanderson has teased. Add-ons include an audiobook, which Sanderson says will also be available on Audible, suggesting he has come to an agreement with the audiobook giant . (Sanderson had been in negotiation with the company for better terms for authors).

Sanderson’s BackerKit campaign, which has 55,000 backers and runs through March 30, is the most successful fundraising effort on the platform thus far. This follows Sanderson’s previous record-breaking Kickstarter campaign in March 2022, which raised $41.7 million from 185,341 backers, setting a new record for the most funded Kickstarter in the platform’s history. That campaign supported the release of four books.

(4) CHANGE AT KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel have updated the readers for their March 13 event. Christopher Rowe has suffered a death in the family. Therefore, Richard Butner will take his place, joining Moses Ose Utomi.

(5) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to nosh pastrami with Glenn Hauman in Episode 220 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

When I realized Glenn Hauman, with whom I’ve been crossing paths for decades on the con circuit, was going to be a guest at Farpoint, I thought it was about time I captured some of his wit and wisdom for you. Here’s just a small taste of what Glenn’s been up to over the years —

Glenn Hauman.

He’s an electronic publishing pioneer who founded BiblioBytes in 1993, which resulted in him being dubbed a “young Turk of publishing” in The New York Observer. He was an editorial consultant to Simon & Schuster Interactive for many years, during which time he contributed to many Star Trek CD-ROMs, such as the Star Trek Encyclopedia, the Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion, and the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion, plus additional projects for many other properties. He’s published fiction in the Star Trek, X-Men, and Farscape franchises.

The particular piece of fiction which has probably brought him the most fame is Star Trek: Starfleet Corps of Engineers: Creative Couplings, co-authored with Aaron Rosenberg, which featured the first Klingon/Jewish wedding ceremony, and ended up getting him mass media coverage from outlets such as NPR and the Jewish weekly newspaper The Forward. In 2011, Glen teamed up with Peter David, previous guest of the podcast Michael Jan Friedman, Robert Greenberger, and Aaron Rosenberg to launch an electronic publishing endeavor called Crazy 8 Press. He’s also a columnist over at ComicMix.

We discussed how he shook things up during the earliest days of electronic publishing, the embarrassing high school newspaper writings of Ted Chiang, the way the assembly-line nature of comics keeps many creatives from seeing the big picture, why he’s nobody’s first choice for anything but everybody’s second choice for everything, his pre-teen encounters with another pre-teen fan who became a Marvel Comics Executive Editor, the philosophical question he asked actor Michael O’Hare just before Babylon 5 began to air, the lunch that led to his first published short story being about the X-Men, what visiting Don Heck’s house at age 12 taught him about artists and taking an art class from John Buscema at age 13 taught him about himself, the plot of the Warren Worthington novel he never got a chance to write, the free speech lawsuit which had him going head to head with the Dr. Seuss estate, plus much more.

(6) GIBSON READING. Space Cowboy Books will host an “Online Reading and Interview with Adrian M. Gibson” on Tuesday, March 12, 2024 at 6:00 p.m. Register for free with Eventbrite at the link.

BLADE RUNNER, TRUE DETECTIVE and HANNIBAL meld with the weird worlds of JEFF VANDERMEER in Adrian M. Gibson’s fungalpunk noir debut novel.

TWO YEARS AFTER a devastating defeat in the decade-long Spore War, the island nation of Hōppon and its capital city of Neo Kinoko are occupied by invading Coprinian forces. Its Fungal citizens are in dire straits, wracked by food shortages, poverty and an influx of war refugees. Even worse, the corrupt occupiers exploit their power, pushing the native populace toward the brink of civil unrest.

As a winter storm looms over the metropolis, NKPD Detective Henrietta Hofmann begrudgingly partners up with mushroom-headed patrol officer Koji Nameko to investigate the mysterious murders of Fungal and half-breed children. Their investigation drags them deep into the seedy underbelly of a war-torn city, one brimming with colonizers, criminal gangs, racial division and moral decay.

In order to solve the case and unravel the truth, Hofmann must challenge her past and embrace Fungal ways. What she and Nameko uncover in the midst of this frigid wasteland will chill them to the core, but will they make it through the storm alive?

(7) THOMAS SADLER (1946-2023). Alexiad editor Joseph T. Major shared recently-learned news of the death last year of Thomas Sadler, longtime editor of the fanzine The Reluctant Famulus.

Thomas “Tom” David Sadler, age 76, of Owenton, KY, passed away on Wednesday, February 1, 2023, at his home. Tom was born on March 3, 1946, in Piedmont, AL, the son of Thomas and Elizabeth (Tanner) Sadler. On October 8, 1966, he married Ruth Underhill, and she survives. He had been employed with the City of Adrian before moving to Kentucky. Tom was a published author, and enjoyed reading, writing, and gardening.

Sadler is survived by his wife, Ruth, their children, and grandchildren.

(8) AKIRA TORIYAMA (1955-2024). Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama died March 1. The New York Times tribute says a statement by his manga and design production company, Bird Studio, and Capsule Corporation Tokyo, attributed his death to acute subdural hematoma, when blood collects between the skull and brain. It did not specify where he died.

The Dragon Ball comic series debuted in 1984. It follows a boy named Son Goku in his quest to collect magical dragon balls to defend Earth against alien humanoids called Saiyans.

 … Mr. Toriyama’s absurd concepts and sense of caricature “sparked a real joyful hysteria” in Japan, Matthieu Pinon and Laurent Lefebvre wrote in their 2023 book, “A History of Modern Manga.”

In 1982, Mr. Toriyama married a former manga artist who published under the pen name Nachi Mikami, Mainichi Shimbun reported. Besides his wife, he is survived by his children, according to the local news media.

When “Dragon Ball” was first published in 1984, it was an immediate hit, becoming one of the best-selling manga series of all time. The adventure story sold more than 260 million copies worldwide, according to the studio that produced the anime adaptation, Toei Animation.

The manga was serialized in the Japanese magazine Weekly Shonen Jump until 1995. In the year after the series ended, the magazine lost about one million of its six million readers, according to “A History of Modern Manga.” The story lived on through anime, such as “Dragon Ball Z,” and video games, including the “Dragon Quest” series for which Mr. Toriyama designed the characters….

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 8, 1921 — Alan Hale Jr. (Died 1990.) Let’s talk about Alan Hale Jr. — son of Alan Hale Sr. who played Little John in the Robin Hood a century ago with Douglas Fairbanks and Wallace Beery, reprised the role in The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone, then played him once more in The Rogues of Sherwood Forest. We agreed that Robin Hood is genre, didn’t we? 

Alan Hale Jr.

Now we come to Alan Hale Jr.’s Captain Jonas Grumby as he was referred to only in the Gilligan’s Island pilot, better known as The Skipper, which we’ve also agreed is genre. He’s owner and captain of the S.S. Minnow which ends up in the genre based lost island setting with its passengers and sole crew member.

Counting the pilot, it ran for ninety-nine episodes over three seasons sixty years ago. There would later be three television sequels in the late Seventies and early Eighties in color. I don’t remember any of them, do any of you remember them? 

There are two Filmation-produced animated sequel series which I’ve mercifully never seen. They were The New Adventures of Gilligan and Gilligan’s Planet, both short lived. Yes, he voiced his character.

Other genre appearances included Fantasy Island, My Favorite Martin, The Wild Wild West and ALF for television series, whereas films were The Giant Spider Invasion,  The Fifth Musketeer, and well, and I didn’t see anything else but if I missed anything I’m sure I’ll hear about it. 

(10) RINGO AWARDS 2024 NOMINATIONS NOW OPEN. The Mike Wieringo Comic Book Industry Awards return for their sixth year on Saturday, September 21, 2024 as part of The Baltimore Comic-Con. Access the Ringo Awards 2024 Nominations ballot at the link.

Unlike other professional industry awards, the Ringo Awards include fan participation in the nomination process along with an esteemed jury of comics professionals. 

More than 20 categories will be celebrated with top honors being given at the awards ceremony in September.

Fan and pro-jury voting are tallied independently, and the combined nomination ballot is compiled by the Ringo Awards Committee. The top two fan choices become nominees, and the jury’s selections fill the remaining three slots for five total nominees per category. Ties may result in more than five nominees in a single category. Nominees will be listed on the ballot alphabetically. Nomination ballot voting is open to the public (fans and pros) between March 8, 2024 and May 23, 2024.

New in 2024, we have changed two categories based on juror, publisher, and voter submissions: The “Best Inker” category has been combined with the “Best Artist or Penciller” category to form a combined “Best Artist or Penciller/Inker Team” category. This update reflects the changing way comics are being created, with more artists working digitally and going directly to inks. When a nominated Penciller/Inker Team wins the final ballot, both individuals will receive separate awards.

Final Ballot Voting

After processing by the Ringo Awards Committee and Jury, the Final Ballots are targeted to be available to comic creative professionals for voting on July 24, 2024 and will be due by August 21, 2024 for final tallying. Presentation of the winners will occur at the Baltimore Comic-Con on the evening of Saturday, September 21, 2024.

(11) STRANGER IN NEW YORK. “’Stranger Things’ Play: Broadway Opening Eyed With New York Casting” – Variety has the story.

“Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” the prequel play to the popular Netflix series, looks to be headed to the Great White Way after debuting in London.

Broadway World was the first to report that equity casting notices were posted on Thursday seeking New York City-based actors and stage managers for the show with a 2025 start date. There is no venue specified yet for the show. Oscar-nominated filmmaker Stephen Daldry is listed as the director of the New York City production.

“Stranger Things: The First Shadow” was written by Kate Trefry, from an original story by the Duffer Brothers, Jack Thorne and Trefry. The play debuted at the Phoenix Theatre on the West End on Nov. 17, 2023 in previews, with an official opening date of Dec. 14, 2023. Daldry also directed the West End version….

(12) MOST-WATCHED OSCAR WINNING FILMS. JustWatch has published a new report covering the most popular Best Picture winners. JustWatch wanted to see if tastes have shifted to more modern titles, or if the classics have had a lasting impact on audiences. They ranked all of the Best Picture winners since the first Oscars ceremony in 1929. 

Key Insights: Modern titles like “Everything Everywhere all at Once” and “Parasite” ranked highest in our study. Meanwhile, classic titles like “Titanic” and “Forrest Gump” managed to break into the top 10. The genres of the top 10 varied between thrillers, dramas, and even one romance.  

We created this report by comparing the Best Picture Oscars winners from 1929-2023. JustWatch Streaming Charts are calculated by user activity, including: clicking on a streaming offer, adding a title to a watchlist, and marking a title as ‘seen’. This data is collected from >40 million movie & TV show fans per month. It is updated daily for 140 countries and 4,500 streaming services.

(13) SUCCESSFUL NETFLIX SFF LAUNCHES? JustWatch has also assessed how well three of Netflix’ anime live action remakes did right out of the gate.

Netflix has seen a lot of success with this format, and as their latest production, Avatar: The Last Airbender, is probably their most anticipated release to date, we wanted to see how it stacked up against previous attempts. 

Developments relevant to this report include Netflix’s release of Avatar: The Last Airbender and One Piece’s second season announcement in September 2023.

Key Insights:

  • Death Note topped the charts in almost 3x more countries than One Piece, and 10x more than Avatar: The Last Airbender 
  • Avatar has an above average rating, but by far the least ‘successful’ launch
  • One Piece had a lower popularity score, but the highest rating out of all three titles

(14) FLOOD WARNING US. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] My reportage of the coastal flood risk to US homes yesterday was a bit dry as I jumped straight to the research paper. This is what comes of speed scanning the electronic version of the journal.  When I got home and saw the paper edition, I found its cover story was that very research and it came with a far more readable descriptor…

The cover shows homes under threat from rising sea levels in Summer Haven, Florida. In this week’s issue, Leonard Ohenhen and colleagues suggest that a considerable amount of land in 32 US coastal cities could be at risk of flooding by 2050. Combining models of changes in land elevation with projected rises in sea levels, the researchers estimated the flooding risk in the cites, including Boston, New Orleans and San Francisco. They note that a combination of coastal subsidence and rising sea levels could put an additional 1,006–1,389 km2 of land at risk of flooding by 2050, which could affect up to 171,000 properties. As a result, they call for improvements to flood defences and subsidence control to bolster current coastal protection.

The original research is here.

(15) TWO, COUNT ‘EM, TWO! [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] “TWO Earth-like planets found in the HABITABLE ZONE (just 6% bigger than Earth!)”. This news has been covered elsewhere, but Dr Becky (Smethurst)   — the Oxford U. based astrophysicist — is rather good. Her YouTube channel has just shy of three-quarter of a million subscribers and — thanks to YouTube income has just moved house…

The holy grail of exoplanets research is to find an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone around its star (where it’s not too hot and not too cold for life to exist) and then study its atmosphere with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to determine if life is present there. But to do that, we have to find these planets first. This is where the TESS mission comes in; this month a research paper was published claiming to have found TWO possible Earth-like planets in the habitable zone. The hope is that we can use JWST to study at least one of them.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. From the Late Show, “Is ‘Dune’ A Perfect Movie? Neil deGrasse Tyson And Stephen Colbert Agree To Disagree”. The Hollywood Reporter tells some of the things they disagree about in “Neil deGrasse Tyson, Stephen Colbert on Dune 2 Sandworms Accuracy”. Because Neil is like your fannish friend who knows why the movie you love is impossible!

…Tyson explained that the film takes place in the sand dunes on the planet of Arrakis. The dunes are home to massive, very hungry sandworms that will appear wherever a thumper — a device that sends repeated vibrations through the sand — is placed.

“Somebody didn’t do the research on that,” he stated. When Colbert asked if that’s because that’s not how sandworms — which are fictional creatures — actually behave, Tyson said, “I’m saying you can’t thump sand.”

He noted that if someone hits sand repeatedly, it’s not audible because it’s sand. “You can’t hear it, but a sandworm can. They hear things differently than we do, Neil Tyson,” Colbert retorted, jokingly. “If you wanted to insulate yourself acoustically from your surroundings, fill the volume with sand,” the astrophysicist responded. “No one will hear you. I’ve got to let it go because there’s no movie without it.”…

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Robin Anne Reid, Ryan H., Joseph T. Major, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]