Pixel Scroll 12/14/23 Because My Pixels Are Delicious To Scroll

(1) ALL SYSTEMS GREEN. Martha Wells’ series is coming to TV: “Alexander Skarsgård Stars In ‘Murderbot’ Sci-Fi Series Ordered By Apple”Deadline carried the announcement.

Apple TV+ has officially picked up Murderbot, a 10-episode sci-fi drama series starring and executive produced by Emmy winner Alexander Skarsgård (Succession). Based on Martha Wells’ bestselling Hugo- and Nebula Award-winning book series The Murderbot Diaries, the project hails from Chris and Paul Weitz (About a Boy) and Paramount Television Studios.

The action-packed Murderbot received a blinking green light a year ago, with the casting of the title character interrupted by the strikes. The series centers on a self-hacking security android (Skarsgård) 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….

(2) THE END IS NEAR. Good Omens is getting another curtain call: “Good Omens Renewed for Season 3 at Amazon” says The Hollywood Reporter.

The streamer has renewed Good Omensthe fantasy-comedy that started as a limited series, for a third and final season. Production on the show from BBC Studios, and based on the novel by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, is expected to begin soon in Scotland.

“I’m so happy finally to be able to finish the story Terry and I plotted in 1989 and in 2006,” Gaiman said in a release announcing the news Thursday. “Terry was determined that if we made Good Omens for television, we could take the story all the way to the end. Season one was all about averting Armageddon, dangerous prophecies and the End of the World. Season two was sweet and gentle, although it may have ended less joyfully than a certain Angel and Demon might have hoped. Now in season three, we will deal once more with the end of the world. The plans for Armageddon are going wrong. Only Crowley [David Tennant] and Aziraphale [Martin Sheen] working together can hope to put it right. And they aren’t talking.”…

(3) WHO COUP. Sir Derek Jacobi will be a headline guest at Gallifrey One, the annual LA Doctor Who convention, happening February 16-18.

Star of stage and screen, and one of Britain’s national treasures, Sir Derek Jacobi portrayed the Master (and his alter ego, Professor Yana) opposite David Tennant in 2007’s “Utopia,” fulfilling a life-long ambition of the actor to star in Doctor Who. He also voices the character in audio adventures for Big Finish Productions, credited as the War Master; also voiced the Master in the 2003 Doctor Who audio play “Scream of the Shalka”; and starred as Martin Bannister in the Doctor Who Unbound audio release “Deadline.”

…We are honored to be able to welcome Sir Derek to Gallifrey One this year, his first-ever Doctor Who appearance in North America, courtesy our friends at Showmasters Events.  Sir Derek will participate in two main stage interviews during his visit, one on Friday afternoon, and one Saturday, included with general admission.  He will also be autographing and doing photo ops on Saturday and Sunday, will do a VIP script reading on Sunday morning, will participate in our guest receptions on Friday & Saturday evenings, and has a separate Diamond Pass; all of these require purchase (see below.)  Additionally, he is included in the TARDIS Tag package….

The con will also have Billie Piper, Alex Kingston, and a flock of other Doctor Who actors, writers, and production people.

(4) WHO HOLIDAY SPECIAL. Inverse tells how “2023’s Wildest Sci-Fi Show is Bringing Back Its Most Underrated Secret Weapon”.

… With this episode being the first one to contain Gatwa as the sole Doctor, this could mean a shift in the Doctor Who we know and love. Original reboot showrunner Russell T. Davies may be back, but there’s a new Doctor and a new companion at the start of a new season, why not try a new (old) genre as well?

Even if this is just a temporary jaunt into the world of fantasy, it’s proof of exactly what the third special “The Giggle” established: The Doctor took a break to rest and deal with the literal centuries of trauma that he has undergone, and now he can find himself in silly high jinks that are more suited to a classic children’s novel instead of a hardboiled sci-fi paperback….

(5) ECCLESTON’S PRICE. CBR.com listens in as “Christopher Eccleston Reveals His Conditions for Doctor Who Return”.

Eccleston, who played the ninth Doctor in the first season of the show’s revival in 2005, had a relatively brief spell at the helm before being replaced by David Tennant. Eccleston has since been vocal about his mixed feelings about his time on the show. While speaking at the For The Love of Sci-Fi fan convention over the weekend, Eccleston was asked about if he would come back to Doctor Who, and what the BBC would need to do in order to make that happen. Eccleston was brutally honest with his answer, telling audiences, “Sack Russell T Davies. Sack Jane Tranter. Sack Phil Collinson. Sack Julie Gardner. And I’ll come back. So can you arrange that?”…

(6) MOVE TOWARDS STREAMER TRANSPARENCY. Netflix today debuted its first semi-annual report of hours of content viewed on the streaming site. Or as The Verge puts it: “Netflix reveals how many hours we spent watching The Night Agent and Queen Charlotte”.

Netflix is going to start publishing a new report twice a year that details the most popular shows and movies on the platform. The first report, released today, details the most-watched content from January to June 2023, and it’s perhaps the best look yet at how much people are actually watching Netflix’s gargantuan library of titles.

“What We Watched: A Netflix Engagement Report” will track three metrics: hours watched, whether a show is available globally, and a show’s release date. In this first report, the first season of The Night Agent tops the list with more than 812 million hours viewed, followed by Ginny & Georgia’s second season (665.1 million hours viewed), The Glory’s first season (622.8 million hours viewed), Wednesday’s first season (507.7 million hours viewed), and Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story (503 million hours viewed). Those are only the top five; the full list contains more than 18,000 titles. (Content is included if it has been watched for more than 50,000 hours.)

(7) SUBSTACK’S NAZI PROBLEM. Max Gladstone, in “Substackers Against Nazis”, told readers:

I’m taking part in a collective action on Substack today. I did not help draft the letter below, but I agree with it. I’ve been planning to shift this newsletter off Substack for a while now, and this is one of the reasons why.

Gladstone signal-boosted a mass letter which begins:

Dear Chris, Hamish & Jairaj:

We’re asking a very simple question that has somehow been made complicated: Why are you platforming and monetizing Nazis

According to a piece written by Substack publisher Jonathan M. Katz and published by The Atlantic on November 28, this platform has a Nazi problem

“Some Substack newsletters by Nazis and white nationalists have thousands or tens of thousands of subscribers, making the platform a new and valuable tool for creating mailing lists for the far right. And many accept paid subscriptions through Substack, seemingly flouting terms of service that ban attempts to ‘publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes’…Substack, which takes a 10 percent cut of subscription revenue, makes money when readers pay for Nazi newsletters.”

As Patrick Casey, a leader of a now-defunct neo-Nazi group who is banned on nearly every other social platform except Substack, wrote on here in 2021: “I’m able to live comfortably doing something I find enjoyable and fulfilling. The cause isn’t going anywhere.” Several Nazis and white supremacists including Richard Spencer not only have paid subscriptions turned on but have received Substack “Bestseller” badges, indicating that they are making at a minimum thousands of dollars a year….

Filer Robin Anne Reid also circulated the letter to her Substack readers.

(8) CHENGDU CATCHUP. [Item by Ersatz Culture.]

Two new articles published by Southern Weekly

On Wednesday 13th, Southern Weekly published two long articles following up from the Worldcon.

The first is titled ‘“They gave me comfort, and I risked my life to do something for them”: The birth of a Hugo-award winning science fiction fanzine’, and is an interview with Best Fanzine winner and Best Fan Writer finalist RiverFlow.  Extracts via Google Translate, with manual edits:

“In those two years, I was in so much pain that I couldn’t communicate with people normally, and I couldn’t take care of myself to a certain extent.  My daily spiritual support was to communicate with a group of science fiction fans on the Internet,” he said.  “They could give me some comfort. Even if I risk my life, I can do something for them.”  For a young man who is used to being self-isolated, these kindnesses and comforts from strangers are almost unbelievable…

He decided that he was not a “science fiction fan” in the strict sense, but a “fan of science fiction fans.”

So, he found another way to do something for his friends.  The idea of starting a fan magazine was mentioned by someone in the group, and it stirred something in his heart. He searched for public information about Chinese science fiction fans and found that there was almost no specialized research in the country.  “Why do the groups of science fiction fans who cared about me seem to have no part in the narrative of the entire history of Chinese science fiction and seem to have disappeared?”

In July 2020, the first issue of “Zero Gravity News” was released.  RiverFlow only took one day to typeset it in Word.  The issue was not detailed, just excerpting some science fiction news, group discussions, etc.  But the sci-fi fanzine had taken one small step.

RiverFlow also posted some comments on Weibo about the piece.

The second article is ‘A conversation with science fiction scholar San Feng: Why is science fiction fan culture important?’  Much of the article covers the history of the Worldcon, western SF fandom etc and seems to be aimed at a general audience, and so will be already familiar ground to File 770 readers.  Later on it moves onto SF in China, which will probably be of more interest.  (Again, this is via Google Translate with manual edits.)

Southern Weekly: Does the Chinese science fiction circle also have a similar structure [to SF in the West]?

San Feng: Our science fiction fan culture is relatively recent. According to our research, it was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s that science fiction fans in the strict sense began to appear.

Liu Cixin said that he is the first generation of science fiction fans, including Han Song, Yao Haijun, etc. It can be understood that people born in the 1960s fell in love with science fiction in the early 1980s. At that time, Chinese science fiction did not have a distinct cultural identity of science fiction. Science fiction clubs or science fiction research societies were established in many places, but most of them were in a top-down manner. Many places wanted to organize people to write science fiction, so they set up science fiction research associations.

To truly build a science fiction fan community from the bottom up, I think the landmark event was Yao Haijun’s founding of the science fiction fan magazine “Nebula” in 1988 (note: some say it was 1986).  At that time, he was still working as a lumberjack in Yichun [in northeast China].  Because he liked science fiction, he used a mimeograph in his spare time to publish a science fiction fan magazine “Nebula”, which was shared with science fiction fans all over the country.  If you got in touch with him and sent a little money to him, maybe a few cents, he would send you a mimeographed magazine.

(Note: both of the above links are to mobile versions of the articles, and have subheadings stating that they will only be freely available for some unstated time period, before going behind a paywall.  There are desktop versions of those pages, but those have truncated content, requiring a login to see the full article.)

Three Worldcon reports

The following Chinese-language con reports all strike quite different tones from each other.  (All extracts via Google Translate, with manual cleanup edits.)

The first one is by Shen Yusi, and was posted on the Zero Gravity Weixin/WeChat account on November 15th.  This one is very positive about the event.

If Liu Cixin won the Hugo Award and let the world hear the strongest voice in Chinese science fiction, then in 2023 the World Science Fiction Convention held in Chengdu allows the world to truly see what the Chinese science fiction community looks like…

I had seen the aerial view of the Chengdu Science Fiction Museum on the official website, which is quite shocking. It looks like a huge piece of silver metal foil flying down by the lake. I once joked that I would never be able to witness this form of the venue with my naked eyes – after all, I can’t fly. From the ground, the venue looks like a huge alien aircraft, with a silver-white outer shell and mostly icy blue light inside. From an aesthetic point of view, this sci-fi feel is relatively avant-garde, rather than being something from the present day…

There were many young people and children at the event, which I had never thought about before.  Groups of primary school students visited this event under the guidance of their teachers.  There was also an award ceremony for the essay competition in an exhibition hall on the second floor.  I can’t do anything other than praise Chengdu’s education sector!  Maybe the next Liu Cixin will emerge from these children?

There were many college students on site, including booth staff and student media interviewing guests.  As a person who was very capable of making waves when they were in college, I can’t help but sigh and think that it’s great to be young! Many of these college students have not yet shed their youthfulness, and they are full of bookishness and strong idealism. After all, science is “fantastical”. If you don’t have a little bit of the second spirit, how can you have the ambition to conquer the stars and the sea?

The second report was posted to Zhihu – which I think usually gets compared to Western Q&A websites like Stack Overflow or Quora – by Chen Mengyu on November 6th.  This one is slightly more mixed; it seems like they enjoyed the more literary, fannish or creative activities, but were bored stiff by some of the more “corporate” events that they stumbled into.

At lunch, the sun was just right and the lake was like a mirror. I lay on a soft chair and had a bite of fried chicken and a Coke, feeling comfortable.

[A woman I’d met previously] invited her friends over, and there were more people.  Everyone had finished eating and wandered around chatting. While chatting, I felt that most of the people who like science fiction are middle-class people. There was also a man who flew over from Guangzhou to attend the conference.

I went to the Trisolaris [Three-Body Problem] fan meeting and found that there was a queue of two to three hundred meters. Haha, the last time I saw such a queue was at the National Museum. We gave up on queuing.

Soon we found an area where people were playing a creative game. We were divided into several groups, and given a common starting prompt, each group would start writing one sentence at a time, and at the end there was a vote for the group with the best writing…. My group won first place, and as a reward each person chose a book. I chose

[2021 novel] Tales from a Small Town, and I was very happy….

Then I went to the Shenzhen Science and Fantasy Growth Fund panel. My friends became bored, so instead they queued up for the The Three-Body Problem panel. I was the only one who stayed, and I have to admit that it was really boring… The top ten sci-fi cities in the country, as calculated by complex formulas, were announced in the panel: Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Guangzhou, Xi’an, Chengdu, Hangzhou, Wuhan and Nanjing.  This looked familiar to me – the top ten cities ranked by GDP.  The list was exactly the same except that Xi’an is not in the top ten by GDP… Then I wrote down a piece of data and was shocked! Beijing and Chengdu have the highest density of science fiction writers, reaching a level of 27 science fiction writers per million people…

Because I drew a lottery ticket for the closing ceremony, I attended it on the next day, but there was nothing interesting in the closing ceremony… there were only two things worth  mentioning; one was the simultaneous interpretation, either English to Chinese or Chinese to English.  After choosing, if someone speaks English, the interpreter would translate it on the spot and read it out into the earphones, which I found very interesting.

[The other was that] next year’s science fiction convention was represented by Vincent in a kilt.  It is foreseeable that there will be many Scottish hunks in kilts at next year’s Worldcon.

(Attached images: chenmengyu[123].jpg)

The final report is a Weibo post from October 23rd, which to be honest is a bit of a snarky rant.  This isn’t completely unjustified, as the poster was unable to attend due to the rescheduling, despite living relatively close to Chengdu in a neighbouring province, nor did they have much success with the online component of the con, with both the livestreams and the Hugo voting failing for them.

Your science fiction conference this year is really terrible. I really can’t help but want to curse, but after thinking about it, I might as well forget it…

Since I couldn’t attend in person, I bought an online ticket.  However the website locked up, and I couldn’t get in to watch the live broadcast. They didn’t give me a refund. When I asked, they said it wasn’t allowed.

It’s 2023, and a “science fiction conference” that can’t even be broadcast online is awesome.

The Hugo Awards have always been voted for by members who spend money, and I have been a member for a long time.  I have been voting for the Hugo Awards in the past few years, but this year I was inexplicably unable to vote.  I really admire this organizer.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born December 14, 1916 Shirley Jackson. (Died 1965.) I was surprised to learn how prolific she was — she composed six novels, two memoirs, and more than two hundred short stories! 

Shirley Jackson in 1940.

Her first novel, The Bird’s Nest, she considered a mainstream work of fiction but the publisher didn’t and marketed it as the publishing house marketed it as a psychological horror story. She was right as it’s a woman with multiple personalities, not horror at all.

Her following novel, The Sundial, concerned a family of wealthy eccentrics who believe they have been chosen to survive the end of the world, and was definitely genre as there’s a ghostly presence. 

Jackson’s fifth novel, The Haunting of Hill House, Is one that we all know about it. It has been made into two feature films and a play, and is the basis of a Netflix series. It was done as The Haunting in 1963, and then as, errr, The Haunting thirty-six years later. The latter is not faithful to the novel as it is (SPOILER ALERT) an explicit fantasy horror film in which all the main characters are terrorized and two are killed as explicitly supernatural deaths (END SPOILER). 

Elizabeth Hand’s A Haunting on the Hill is the first authorized novel set in the world of Hill House. The novel takes place decades after the events of The Haunting of Hill House, as a group of theater professionals rent Hill House to workshop a new play. Lis is reviewing it for us. 

The same year she wrote The Bad Children, a one-act children’s musical based on the “Hansel and Gretel” tale. She wrote the book and lyrics with the music being by Allan Jay Friedman.

I’d talk about “The Lottery” short story but I’ve honestly never figured out the appeal of that frankly abhorrent story, so I won’t. If you won’t to, go ahead. Now “The Missing Girl” short story first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in their December 1957 issue is a chilling work of horror well worth you reading.

It’s available in a collection comprising fifty four stories of the hundred and four that she did called Just an Ordinary Day. Remarkably it’s a Meredith Moment I’d say at just $7.99! 

Though in extremely poor health, she produced two final works of note. The first being We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a Gothic mystery novel. Time magazine noted it as one of the Ten Best Novels of 1962.

The following year, she published Nine Magic Wishes, an illustrated children’s novel about a child who encounters a magician who grants him numerous enchanting wishes.

At just one forty-eight years of age, her heart failed, according to both of her biographers, due to a combination of heavy smoking, alcoholism and extreme dependence on pain killers prescribed by physicians who didn’t know better at the time. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Frazz is for those of us who like big words.
  • Shoe goes well with Frazz.

(11) I SEE NONEXISTENT PEOPLE. “Imaginary Friends ARE Real in ‘IF’ Teaser Trailer”Animation News Network explains how it works.

…Ask yourself the question, “What if all your imaginary friends were real?” And what if your superpower was you could see them all? Then your life would look a lot like the story of IF, John Krasinski’s upcoming comedy adventure about a girl who discovers that she can see everyone’s imaginary friends and the magical adventure she embarks upon to reconnect forgotten ‘IFs’ with their kids….

(12) MR. ROBOT NOW HAS A UNIVERSE. GQ tells readers, “Confirmed: ‘Leave the World Behind’ Takes Place in the ‘Mr. Robot’ Extended Universe”.

Leave the World Behind, Sam Esmail’s first feature film since the success of his tech-thriller series Mr. Robot, deals with themes similar to those of his acclaimed USA Network show. But the connections may not stop there. As one keen-eyed Reddit user noted, the film references a hacking in the tri-state area that nearly led to a catastrophic meltdown at a nuclear power plant. This seems to clearly be a nod to the 11th episode of Season 4, “eXit,” in which Rami Malek’s Elliot nearly hacks a nuclear plant, with catastrophic potential damage….

(13) FIRST, LET’S IGNORE ALL THE LAWYERS. As usual, people aren’t interested in legal advice that would keep them from doing what they’ve already decided to do: “Meta used copyrighted books for AI training despite its own lawyers’ warnings, authors allege”Reuters has the story.

…Meta Platforms’ (META.O) lawyers had warned it about the legal perils of using thousands of pirated books to train its AI models, but the company did it anyway, according to a new filing in a copyright infringement lawsuit initially brought this summer.

The new filing late on Monday night consolidates two lawsuits brought against the Facebook and Instagram owner by comedian Sarah Silverman, Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon and other prominent authors, who allege that Meta has used their works without permission to train its artificial-intelligence language model, Llama.

… In the chat logs quoted in the complaint, researcher Tim Dettmers describes his back-and-forth with Meta’s legal department over whether use of the book files as training data would be “legally ok.”

“At Facebook, there are a lot of people interested in working with (T)he (P)ile, including myself, but in its current form, we are unable to use it for legal reasons,” Dettmers wrote in 2021, referring to a dataset Meta has acknowledged using to train its first version of Llama, according to the complaint.

The month prior, Dettmers wrote that Meta’s lawyers had told him “the data cannot be used or models cannot be published if they are trained on that data,” the complaint said….

(14) SOUNDS LIKE THE NEEDLE IS STUCK. “NASA working to solve Voyager 1 computer glitch from billions of miles away” reports CNN.

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has experienced a computer glitch that’s causing a bit of a communication breakdown between the 46-year-old probe and its mission team on Earth.

Engineers are currently trying to solve the issue as the aging spacecraft explores uncharted cosmic territory along the outer reaches of the solar system.

Voyager 1 is currently the farthest spacecraft from Earth at about 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away, while its twin Voyager 2 has traveled more than 12 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) from our planet. Both are in interstellar space and are the only spacecraft ever to operate beyond the heliosphere, the sun’s bubble of magnetic fields and particles that extends well beyond the orbit of Pluto.

Voyager 1 has three onboard computers, including a flight data system that collects information from the spacecraft’s science instruments and bundles it with engineering data that reflects the current health status of Voyager 1. Mission control on Earth receives that data in binary code, or a series of ones and zeroes.

But Voyager 1’s flight data system now appears to be stuck on auto-repeat, in a scenario reminiscent of the film “Groundhog Day.”

A long-distance glitch

The mission team first noticed the issue November 14, when the flight data system’s telecommunications unit began sending back a repeating pattern of ones and zeroes, like it was trapped in a loop.

While the spacecraft can still receive and carry out commands transmitted from the mission team, a problem with that telecommunications unit means no science or engineering data from Voyager 1 is being returned to Earth.

The Voyager team sent commands over the weekend for the spacecraft to restart the flight data system, but no usable data has come back yet, according to NASA….

(15) IN A HOLE IN THE GROUND THERE LIVED…OUR ANCESTORS. IndieWire sets the frame for “’Out of Darkness’ Trailer: A Stone Age Survival Horror Story”.

Set during the Stone Age, the horror film “Out of Darkness” brings a modern twist to the survival story.

The film, which marks both director Andrew Cumming and screenwriter Ruth Greenberg’s respective feature debuts, centers on a teenager (Safia Oakley-Green) who must survive immigrating across the sea and into a foreign land that may or may not house monsters.

The official synopsis for the indie horror film reads: “A group of six have struggled across the narrow sea to find a new home. They are starving, desperate, and living 45,000 years ago. First they must find shelter, and they strike out across the tundra wastes towards the distant mountains that promise the abundant caves they need to survive. But when night falls, anticipation turns to fear and doubt as they realize they are not alone. Terrifying sounds suggest something monstrous at large in this landscape, something that could kill or steal them away. As relationships in the group fracture, the determination of one young woman reveals the terrible actions taken to survive.”…

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Joel Zakem.] Loontown is a nearly 18-minute animated noir set in a city reminiscent of Los Angeles, whose denizens are talking balloons, gasbags and others of their ilk. It was written by World Fantasy Award winning author Lavie Tidhar and directed, animated and scored by Nir Yaniv, who had previously collaborated with Tidhar on the 2009 novel The Tel Aviv Dossier. Loontown can currently be viewed on YouTube.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Ersatz Culture, Joel Zakem, Kathy Sullivan, Soon Lee, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day JJ.]

Pixel Scroll 12/12/23 Dancing With Pixels In Our Scrolls

(1) PAXSON ASSAILANT BYRON DECLES ARRESTED. The Berkeley Scanner reports that Byron DeCles, wanted for his attack on Diana Paxson and her son, Ian, was caught today and charged with attempted murder: “Berkeley double stabbing suspect arrested in Oakland”.

A man who had been wanted by police since Friday in connection with a stabbing in Berkeley that sent two people to the hospital is now in custody, according to booking records.

Byron DeCles, 21, was arrested shortly before 4 a.m. Tuesday in Oakland on a warrant from the Berkeley case, jail records show.

…On Tuesday, DeCles was arrested by OPD on suspicion of attempted murder, battery with serious bodily injury, elder abuse and burglary, according to booking records….

DeCles, who is unhoused, has no prior criminal cases in Alameda County, according to court records online.

According to preliminary information, he is related to the victims and has a history of mental health issues.

DeCles is now scheduled for arraignment Thursday at Wiley Manuel Courthouse in Oakland. He is being held without bail….

The Berkeley Scanner also got an update from Diana Paxson about her injuries: “Berkeley writer Diana Paxson on the mend after stabbing”.

… Reached by phone late Tuesday afternoon, Paxson said she had spent the whole day responding to the many well wishes she’d received from supporters and friends….

“We are currently being very, very grateful to the members of our community — our local community and the larger community — who have been sending us energy for protection,” she told The Scanner. “It’s been a very difficult time and we are also incredibly relieved and grateful to the Oakland Police Department for actually being able to find him.”

… Paxson said she and her son were “recovering well” from their injuries.

“We look forward to being able to resume our usual schedule of events with our community,” she said.

She said she and Grey now need to look into several home repairs stemming from Friday’s incident. They plan to call the Family Justice Center in Oakland, which helps victims with a range of services in the aftermath of crimes.

“We’re very happy to hear that there is such a thing,” she said.

Paxson said what happened Friday had been the culmination of “a series of difficulties” with DeCles over the past year, which may have stemmed from or been exacerbated by untreated head injuries linked to multiple vehicle collisions.

“He never went to the hospital to be checked out,” she said. “We’re hoping that at least he’ll get checked out now.”

Paxson said medication can also help with these types of issues, but only if people take it.

“The light bulb has to want to be changed,” she said, adding: “Our whole mental system needs a lot more support than it’s been getting. That’s something to think about.”…

Diana Paxson also said today in a public Facebook post:

What’s on my mind is overwhelming gratitude that our attacker was arrested by the Oakland police this morning.

Many, many thanks to everyone who has been sending energy for protection and aid in hunting him down.

(2) CORRAIN APOLOGY. Cait Corrain reopened her X.com account today to publish “A sincere apology”, which attributed her surreptitious campaign of one-star reviews against other debut authors to “depression, alcoholism, and substance abuse”, and a “complete psychological breakdown” after starting a new medication. (Click for larger image.)

Many responses in social media, not excerpted here, have been skeptical, or view the statement as inadequate.

Surprisingly, an author found Corrain’s book was still on Amazon, now with a 2027 publication date. Del Rey Books cleared the air.

The Washington Post covered the story today: “Author Cait Corrain loses book deal after ‘review bombing’ debut authors’ books via Goodreads”. (Gift link.)


Nnedi Okorafor’s notes about the shortcomings of Goodreads and the prevalence of this kind of misconduct are well worth thinking about. Thread starts here.

(3) DUNE TRAILER. “Dune Part 2’s Epic New Trailer Teases a War Across Generations” at Gizmodo.

… The main thing you get from that trailer is that Part Two is just a much, much bigger movie than Part One. Part One had to move all the pieces into place. Now, Paul is becoming the leader of an entire people and will use them to win back their planet. We’re talking war on a planetary scale, which—most excitingly—includes not just one, but multiple sandworms tearing through soldiers. Can you wait to see that shot in IMAX? We can’t….

(4) JURY SIDES WITH FORTNITE. The New York Times reports that a federal district court jury sided against Google: “Google Loses Antitrust Court Battle With Makers of Fortnite Video Game”.

A jury ruled on Monday that Google had violated antitrust laws to extract fees and limit competition from Epic Games and other developers on its Play mobile app store, in a case that could rewrite the rules on how thousands of businesses make money on Google’s smartphone operating system, Android.

After deliberating for a little more than three hours, the nine-person federal jury sided with Epic Games on all 11 questions in a monthlong trial that was the latest turn in a three-year legal battle.

The jury in San Francisco found that Epic, the maker of the hit game Fortnite, proved that Google had maintained a monopoly in the smartphone app store market and engaged in anticompetitive conduct that harmed the videogame maker.

Google could be forced to alter its Play Store rules, allowing other companies to offer competing app stores and making it easier for developers to avoid the cut it collects from in-app purchases.

Judge James Donato of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California will decide the remedies needed to address Google’s conduct next year. Google said it would appeal the verdict….

(5) RECOGNITION RESTORED. [Item by Steven French.] This sounds genre to me, especially as the author Yambo Ouologuem is described as writing in the style of Vonnegut. “African writer ruined by row with Graham Greene finally gets chance to shine” in the Guardian.

In 1968 the books pages of the French newspaper Le Monde excitedly praised an uncompromising new novel, Bound to Violence, going on to salute its author as one of “the rare intellectuals of international stature presented to the world by Black Africa”.

The newspaper’s words, written in tribute to the young Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem, sound condescending today. Back then, however, the intended compliment was genuine and many European critics soon agreed: the publication of Ouologuem’s strange novel really did mark the arrival of a major new talent.

But the literary world can be brutal, and particularly so for a young African novelist living in Paris who was attempting a fresh twist on conventional storytelling.

Fellow African writers began to express shock at Ouologuem’s harsh parody of his own culture. Three years later damaging accusations of plagiarism had also emerged, including a public skirmish with Graham Greene, which ended Ouologuem’s short career. He retreated into the life of a recluse, returned to Mali and died in 2017, having never published again.

Now, 50 years after this scandal, Penguin Classics is to bring out a new English edition of Bound to Violence in a bid to rehabilitate the gifted author and introduce him to new readers.

“I was so exhilarated when I read this book,” said Penguin editor Ka Bradley. “It’s the history of an imaginary African empire called Nakem and whole centuries are dealt with in just a paragraph or two. It’s dizzying.”

(6) WRITING WITH AI IS NOT A SPORT. This player has been ejected. “Publisher Of Sports Illustrated Ousts CEO Ross Levinsohn” reports Deadline.

The CEO of the parent company of Sports Illustrated was ousted on Monday.

The firing followed a scandal over the publication’s use of AI-generated stories from fake authors, although it was not immediately clear if that was related to the shakeup.

Ross Levinsohn, CEO of The Arena Group, was terminated and Manoj Bhargava was named interim chief executive officer, the company said. No other information was provided, other than that the board met “and took actions to improve the operational efficiency and revenue of the company.”…

(7) AUTHOR’S CANDIDACY SCOTCHED. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] The Tomorrow’s MPs Twitter account reported that a potential candidate for a constituency in Scotland was forced to stand down from the party selection contest, due to the content of novels he had previously written.  The tweet links to a piece in The Courier news website, which states:

A long-serving Fife Labour councillor has stood down from an internal contest to stand as the party’s candidate in Glenrothes after concerns were raised about fantasy books he has written.

Insiders expect Altany Craik to issue a statement saying he is withdrawing from the contest for “family reasons”.

But we can reveal that Mr Craik, a supernatural horror author, was directed to stand down because of party reservations about his novels.

Mr Craik had been seeking support from members to stand as the Labour candidate for Glenrothes at the General Election expected next year….

…A source said: “It’s absolutely disgusting.”

“They’re saying he’s not a suitable candidate because his books are too sexy and satanic.”…

…His profile on Amazon includes titles such as “Innocence Lost”, with readers praising the books and it’s (sic) protagonist, Father Andrew Steel.

One reviewer wrote: “This book has graphic descriptions of gore, mutilation, rape, and foul language. But getting past that, it is a worthwhile read.”…

(8) GUESS WHO HAS A NEW NEIGHBOR? [Item by John King Tarpinian.] John Waters’ star adjoins Ray Bradbury’s on the Hollywood Walk of Fame

(9) CHENGDU WORLDCON ROUNDUP. [Item by Ersatz Culture.]

Post about the Chengdu Worldcon receives complaint from con organizers

This November 13th post (archive.org backup copy) by an account using the name 四海朝阳/Sihai Zhaoyang is mostly about the history of the Chengdu Worldcon, although there’s some relatively brief coverage of the actual con itself – mainly the online aspects – towards the end.  Some extracts via Google Translate, with manual edits:

On January 17, 2022, the official WeChat public account of the Chengdu Worldcon released volunteer recruitment information. However, according to feedback from science fiction fans who submitted their resumes, there were no updates after their submission, and there was no mention of subsidies or compensation for volunteers. In actuality, volunteers during the conference were recruited from surrounding schools.

On January 20, 2022 [this is an error/typo, it should read “2023”], some science fiction fans on Twitter discovered that the Chengdu Science Fiction Conference had officially announced that the conference would be rescheduled from August to October 2023, and the location changed from the Century City International Convention and Exhibition Center to the Chengdu Science Fiction Museum. This news was not announced to Chinese fans at that time, nor were those who voted that year notified. (i.e. the group of science fiction fans who were also members of the 81st World Science Fiction Convention).  It was not until that night that the notice of the postponement and venue change was hastily issued.

In fact, this change had been known about for a long time. In May 2022, a science fiction fan discovered the news on a government bidding website that the Chengdu Science Fiction Museum and Qingrong Lake Science Fiction Park would be built in Pidu District, Chengdu, and posted this on Weibo. After making the news public, they received a message from the organizing committee, ordering them to delete their Weibo post. However, coverage of the same topic could still be seen in local Chengdu media.  At this time, the estimated completion time was the end of June [presumably 2023], and the exhibition completion time would be the end of July….

The organizing committee of the Chengdu Worldcon also began to travel to various cities to conduct research with local science fiction fans. However, of the university science fiction clubs with the largest number of science fiction fans, very few received relevant notifications. During this process, the organizing committee members who did not understand science fiction once again made a joke. Their main person in charge had never heard of such a thing as a “light saber” and vowed to invite Shinichi Hoshi,

Kobayashi Yasumi, Douglas Adams and others mentioned by fans, despite all those people passing away long ago…

[During the preparation period in the days leading up to the con] something ridiculous happened. A staff member from Science Fiction World entered the venue with Liu Cixin’s Hugo Award trophy from 2015, to set it up as an exhibit. However, they were stopped by the security guard at the door, because the trophy was too long and was a sharp object…

Of course, we cannot ignore the “good” side of this conference, and that side has nothing to do with this organizing committee and comes purely from the lovely fans. Thanks to the efforts of some of the staff from Science Fiction World, the science fiction associations of many schools took a group photo at the Galaxy Awards Ceremony for the “Best Science Fiction Society Award”. The number of participating societies has become the highest in history. Science fiction fans communicated with each other at the conference, from badges to ribbons, embodying the ingenuity and wonderful ideas of fantasy fans.  After RiverFlow was taken to hospital, many science fiction fans and science fiction authors rushed there spontaneously and waited all night. Online and offline, most of the problems encountered by science fiction fans were solved by other enthusiastic science fiction fans. No matter how many times a question was asked, they never tired of answering it…

Has the Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention had a good or bad impact on Chinese science fiction? In the short term, the answer does not seem to be available.

A couple of days later, on November 15th, there was a follow-up post (archive.org copy), stating that a complaint about the original post had been received from the Worldcon organizers.  A screenshot of the complaint was included; a Google Translate rendition to English is below, which I haven’t edited in any way.

The following content is not officially provided by WeChat and should be filled in by the rights holder when making a complaint. Please operate with caution.

This article involves malicious attacks against individuals, institutions and governments, seriously affects the government’s credibility, denies the work results of the Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention Organizing Committee, and misguides public opinion.

As the only legal entity of the 2023 Chengdu World Science Fiction Conference, the Chengdu Science Fiction Association strictly abides by the World Science Fiction Association charter and relevant regulations from application to hosting. The theme salon, guest reception, Hugo Award selection and award, and ticket sales all comply with relevant requirements. Said untrue situation.

The original poster responds by stating that their post was based on public information, whether from the con itself, or posted online by other members of the public, and argues that ‘it is precisely the organizing committee of the Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention itself that “seriously affects the government’s credibility.”‘ (via Google Translate, again with no manual edits).

It’s not clear to me whether this complaint had any weight behind it, legal or otherwise.  As I understand it, once a post has been made public on Weixin/WeChat, only a small number of edits can be made, so presumably any response would have involved taking the post down rather than removing any offending text.  Given that the post is still up a month later, the complaint seems to have had zero effect – other than provoking further coverage in this Weibo post by SF Light Year, and in issue 16 of the Zhejiang University SF association news summary, and now here, causing a Streisand effect.

Xingyun (Nebula) event to be held at the Chengdu SF Museum in May 2024

On the weekend of May 17th-19th next year, the 2024 Xingyun (Nebula) Celebration will be held at the Chengdu SF museum.  To the best of my knowledge, this is the only confirmed event or activity to be held at the venue post-Worldcon, other than Lukyanenko’s tour on December 1st.

This event appears to comprise three elements (via Google Translate, so these may not be the official English names):

  • The 2024 Children’s Science Fiction Conference
  • The 2024 International Science Fiction Summit Forum
  • The 15th Annual Xingyun (Nebula) Awards – I think these may have been previously announced, although I don’t think it was covered here on File 770.

Note: Looking at the dates of previous SFWA Nebula conferences, it wouldn’t surprise if both events take place on the same weekend.

Video of an SF themed bus in Chengdu

This three-minute video was filmed on the final day of the con, and posted to Bilibili a couple of days later.  It shows an SF-themed bus, followed by a timelapse sequence of the route it takes.  I’m sure people who attended the Worldcon may need to correct me, but I think the red and blue banners that hang from most of the streetlights were also promoting the con?

Note that these seem to be buses running a public route, different from the red ones that I think were dedicated to transporting Worldcon attendees, and which can be seen in the first photo.

(10) BUILDING A TOWN WITHOUT CGI. Not something many movie makers would do. “’Oppenheimer’ Production Designer Ruth De Jong – Featurette” at Deadline.

When location scouting for Oppenheimer, production designer Ruth De Jong was tasked with finding a location to recreate Los Alamos. Although the actual town of Los Alamos was too modernized to use for the period piece, De Jong and her team spent some time there for research. “I began laying out the expanse of the town with our set designer Jim Hewitt,” she says. “We took these drawings, with plans and elevations, and made foam core architectural models in a quarter-inch scale.”

De Jong and her team landed on Ghost Ranch, which is along the same mountain range as the existing Los Alamos. “We had this epic town that we wanted to do,” she says, “but the U.S. government had $2 million and a few years and I had nowhere near that.” Neither De Jong nor director Christopher Nolan wanted to use CGI for extensions on the town, so De Jong opted for building exteriors and shooting the interiors at the actual Los Alamos, like Oppenheimer’s house, which has been largely untouched since he lived there.…

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born December 12, 1946 Josepha Sherman. (Died 2012.) Josepha Sherman was a remarkable woman. She was another individual who died far too young. Author, folklorist, and anthologist, I knew her for a number of years up to the time of her death, by email and phone, though I lost touch with her a few years before she died. 

She wrote dozens of short stories and novels, including her Compton Crook Award-winning novel The Shining Falcon. She was prolific with Child of Faerie, Child of EarthA Strange and Ancient NameWindleafGleaming BrightKing’s Son, Magic’s Son and Son of Darkness being some of her other novels. 

She also penned five novels set in the Trek verse co-authored with Susan Shwartz including Vulcan’s Forge and Vulcan’s Heart.  She wrote a lot of media tie dipping into the universes of Andromeda and BuffyBardic Choices (with Mercedes Lackey) and even Highlander as she told me she loved Adrian Paul there.

Oh, she was a superb anthologist. A Jewish woman, she put together several collections reflecting what she knew so well — A Sampler of Jewish-American Folklore and Rachel The Clever and Other Jewish Folktales. But my favorite work by her was isn’t an anthology, but a rather serious work she did with T.K.F. Weisskopf: Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts: The Subversive Folklore of Childhood. Yes, Green Man reviewed it as she sent us a copy. Actually we reviewed so long ago that it ran on our predecessor, Mostly Folk, but that is another story for another time.

So let’s finish off by telling you that she was a Winter Queen at Green Man as was Ellen Kushner and Jane Yolen. All it means is they get to write a Speech and get chocolate. Somehow that charms them, so here’s Joshepa’s meditation on Winter: “Josepha Sherman’s Winter Queen Speech”.

Josepha Sherman. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter

(12) SHINY. Peer today posted a stunning improvement to that popular tune about a reindeer hero.  

You know Pixelsdasher and Pixeldancer
And Pixelprancer and Pixelvixen,
Pixelcomet and Pixelcupid
And Pixeldonner and Pixelblitzen.
But do you recall
The most famous scroll title of all?
Godstalk the click-boxed title
Had a very shiny scroll
And if you ever saw it
You would even feed the troll
All of the other titles
Used to laugh and scroll its names
They never let poor Godstalk
Play in any wordle games

Then one foggy Christmas Eve
Mike came to say,
“Jetpacks not working,
Won’t you scroll my File tonight?”

Then all the Filers loved it
And they shouted it out with glee,
“Godstalk as a scroll title
will go down in history!”

With apologies to … everyone I guess.

(13) FANAC’S APA PANEL NOW ONLINE.

APAs Everywhere with Fred Lerner, Christina Lake, Amy Thomson and Tom Whitmore

In this wonderful FanHistory Zoom panel, our speakers, all long-time participants (in multiple different APAs), speak about their experiences with APA life. During this 2-part recording, you’ll hear their personal fannish origin stories and APA experiences, along with a wealth of fascinating commentary on the nature and purpose of APAs. From “fanac in a corner” to “intentional community”, this video provides thoughtful, insightful discussion on why APAs have been a mainstay of science fiction fandom.

Of particular interest are the discussions of “standing waves” of cultural issues that run through our APAs and the ways that science fiction fandom has dealt with cultural challenges. Fandom had notable failures (and successes) dealing with social issues long before the general culture dealt with them.

Of course, it’s not all social commentary. You’ll hear the story of APAs used in divorce proceedings, APAs which may have been created to bedevil particular individuals, and the APA which didn’t live up to its banner of “the 13 nastiest bastards in fandom”.  You’ll learn why APAs thrive, even in this era of instant  online gratification. Other topics: privacy issues, digital preservation of APAs, a soft toy APA, APAs you wouldn’t join, Langdon charts, and of course, audience Q&A.

Part 1

Part 2

(14) THEY’RE NOT PLAYING AROUND. Turn out the lights, the party’s over. “E3 has entertained its last electronic expo” says TechCrunch.

E3’s decades-long history has been peppered with ups and downs. The annual Los Angeles-based gaming expo saw a decade of steady growth after it was founded in the mid-90s. The mid-00s, on the other hand, were an altogether different story, as the event struggled, downsized and moved out of the LA Convention Center.

Opening the industry-only event to the public breathed new life into the event the following decade, however, until 2020 saw E3 — and the rest of the world — suddenly grind to a halt. Since then, the show has, understandably, struggled.

The in-person event was canceled courtesy of COVID, and a virtual version failed to materialize by that summer. Show organizer, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), did manage an online event in 2021, only to once again cancel things in full the following year. After failing to garner enough interest, there was no E3 2023, nor will the event return in 2024.

Given its recent history, there was little surprise this morning, when the ESA announced that E3 is now gone for good. Such decisions are never easy to make, and big organizations/events take a while to wind down. The group no doubt wanted to exhaust all feasible options before officially throwing in the towel for good….

(15) BEAR BEGINNINGS. The Guardian declares “Paws for applause: Paddington set to star in stage musical”.

Paddington, Michael Bond’s “very rare sort of bear”, is to star in a new stage musical. The production, announced on Tuesday, is being developed by Sonia Friedman’s company, whose hits include Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and will have music and lyrics by McFly’s Tom Fletcher. It is currently being workshopped with the title Paddington: The Musical and has a UK premiere planned for 2025.

The show is adapted from Bond’s bestselling children’s books – the first of which was published 65 years ago – and from the popular live-action film versions which feature Ben Whishaw as the voice of a CGI Paddington. How the marmalade-loving, accident-prone bear will be represented on stage has not yet been revealed….

(16) SPEAKER FOR THE DEAD. The New York Times finds some are “Using A.I. to Talk to the Dead”.

Dr. Stephenie Lucas Oney is 75, but she still turns to her father for advice. How did he deal with racism, she wonders. How did he succeed when the odds were stacked against him?

The answers are rooted in William Lucas’s experience as a Black man from Harlem who made his living as a police officer, F.B.I. agent and judge. But Dr. Oney doesn’t receive the guidance in person. Her father has been dead for more than a year.

Instead, she listens to the answers, delivered in her father’s voice, on her phone through HereAfter AI, an app powered by artificial intelligence that generates responses based on hours of interviews conducted with him before he died in May 2022.

His voice gives her comfort, but she said she created the profile more for her four children and eight grandchildren.

“I want the children to hear all of those things in his voice,” Dr. Oney, an endocrinologist, said from her home in Grosse Pointe, Mich., “and not from me trying to paraphrase, but to hear it from his point of view, his time and his perspective.”…

… HereAfter AI was introduced in 2019, two years after the debut of StoryFile, which produces interactive videos in which subjects appear to make eye contact, breathe and blink as they respond to questions. Both generate answers from responses users gave to prompts like “Tell me about your childhood” and “What’s the greatest challenge you faced?”…

… StoryFile offers a “high-fidelity” version in which someone is interviewed in a studio by a historian, but there is also a version that requires only a laptop and webcam to get started. Stephen Smith, a co-founder, had his mother, Marina Smith, a Holocaust educator, try it out. Her StoryFile avatar fielded questions at her funeral in July.

According to StoryFile, about 5,000 people have made profiles. Among them was the actor Ed Asner, who was interviewed eight weeks before his death in 2021.

The company sent Mr. Asner’s StoryFile to his son Matt Asner, who was stunned to see his father looking at him and appearing to answer questions.

“I was blown away by it,” Matt Asner said. “It was unbelievable to me about how I could have this interaction with my father that was relevant and meaningful, and it was his personality. This man that I really missed, my best friend, was there.”…

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Doctor Who releases Christmas single The Goblin Song” and it’s on the Guardian’s radar. Warning for anthropophagy. Or maybe not. It’s goblins doing it.

For the first time in its 60-year history, Doctor Who is releasing an official Christmas single.

The Goblin Song, written by the show’s composer, Murray Gold, with lyrics by Russell T Davies, is raising money for Children in Need….

…The music video features a clip from the forthcoming Doctor Who Christmas special, in which Ncuti Gatwa will make his full-length debut as the Doctor, alongside Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday, who joins as a regular Tardis companion.

During the video, the Doctor and Ruby are seen crawling through a pirate ship while goblins sing about eating a baby. Gold described the song as “fiendishly catchy”, adding: “I don’t like these goblins – and you won’t either.”

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Ersatz Culture, Rob Thornton, Rose Embolism, Anne Marble, 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 Hampus Eckerman.]

Pixel Scroll 12/11/23 Pixelmancer

(1) BOTTOM FALLS OUT OF THE CORRAIN MARKET. Cait Corrain, a debut author who was on Goodreads dropping one-star reviews on several others’ debut novels (see Pixel Scroll 12/7/23 item #1 and Pixel Scroll 12/8/23 item #4) has lost her agent, her publisher has pulled the book, and Ilumicrate has dropped her book from the upcoming crate.

The story even made NBC News today: “Author Cait Corrain loses book deal after accusations of review bombing on Goodreads”.

A first-time author has been dropped by her U.S. publisher and her agent after readers and fellow authors accused her of posting fake negative reviews to a popular book recommendation website.

Many within the book community last week appeared to publicly turn against Cait Corrain, the author of the coming sci-fi fantasy novel “Crown of Starlight,” after allegations surfaced that she made fake accounts on the Amazon-owned book review platform Goodreads to post negative user reviews online about fellow authors — a practice known as review-bombing….

(2) WORLDCONS AND HUMAN RIGHTS. Amazing Stories’ Steve Davidson has interviewed the writer of “Worldconned: How China Co-Opted Sci-Fi’s Crown Jewel Amidst the Uyghur Genocide”, recently linked in the Scroll: “Human Rights & Worldcon: An Interview with Danielle Ranucci of the Human Rights Foundation”.

ASM:  In moving forward, do you think that WSFS and its members should be taking a host country’s politics and human rights into consideration when accepting bids for host countries?

D.R.: It’s essential for WSFS and its members to take a host country’s politics and human rights into consideration when accepting bids. There are many reasons for this. First, self-protection. How safe would it be for an attending member to publicly criticize China for its genocide at the 2023 Worldcon? For reference, when China hosted the 2022 Olympics, it warned Olympic athletes not to criticize the regime or they would face consequences. Given how China had handled protestors during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the consequences for speaking out against the regime are all too evident: intimidation, arrests, and killings.

It would be downright perilous for anyone to criticize China while at Worldcon. Now, I doubt that state repression is a common conversation topic at Worldcon, but the extreme danger that members would face for even broaching this topic means that they are never truly secure. For every second they spend in a dictatorship like China, their safety is always jeopardized. Clearly, it is unconscionable to ignore a country’s human rights record and so jeopardize the safety of attending members in this way.

Considering human rights also helps protect Worldcon from being twisted into a tool of totalitarian repression. Hosting events like Worldcon helps dictatorships distract from, and legitimize, ongoing repression. I wrote about the effect such reputation-laundering has on outside countries, but it also has an important effect on those living within the dictatorship: It isolates them. Americans praise China’s futuristic-looking sci-fi museum while Chinese citizens can’t even find employment. Yet their lived experiences become invalidated. Their reality is made unimportant. And for people being persecuted by the regime, to diminish their suffering in this way is to forsake them. In a sense, it’s to render their pasts, presents, and futures meaningless….

(3) A CONFEDERATE HELICOPTER? An Alabama inventor tried to design a helicopter for military use during the Civil War. What could be steampunk-ier than that? “Helicopters During the Civil War? Almost” at Historynet.

…What if Confederates had invented a helicopter capable of dropping bombs?

It came closer to happening than many people realize. An innovative inventor in Alabama saw the potential for such an aircraft and actually drew up plans for how it might fly. Those drawings are preserved today in the archives of the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

By January 20, 1862, Union ships had managed to prevent most vessels from entering or leaving the major Confederate port of Mobile Bay. While certainly not a complete cordon, the blockade cut off delivery of supplies and, more important, the export of cotton to other nations—a much-needed source of income for the Southern war effort.

William C. Powers believed he had the answer to breaking the blockade: a motorized airship capable of bombing the Northern fleet. Known today as the Confederate helicopter, his idea offered a revolutionary look at solving a bothersome military problem….

…And to many historians as well. Powers’ plans and a small-scale model he built were donated by his family to the Smithsonian Institution in 1941. Since then, researchers and aeronautical engineers have pored over his design to determine the scope and feasibility of his idea….

(4) GETTING IT RIGHT AND GETTING IT WRONG. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This weekend’s Infinite Monkey Cage on BBC Radio 4 looked at the depiction of space in SF film compared to reality.

Infinite Monkey Cage is a light-hearted look at science co-hosted by a comedian and a physicist (other sciences are available). This week they were accompanied by an Oscar winning SFX person and three astronauts.

There was much covered during the course of the show including how one aspect of space craft SFX they deliberately got wrong for Interstellar because it looked right.  And in Gravity Sandra Bullock would not have worn those undies as nappies are the order of the day…You can listen to the 25-minute programme here.

Brian Cox and Robin Ince put Hollywood under the microscope to unpick the science fact versus science fiction of some of the biggest movies set in space. They are joined by a truly out of this world panel of space experts including astronauts Tim Peake, Nicole Stott and Susan Kilrain alongside Oscar winning Special FX director Paul Franklin, whose movies include Interstellar and First Man. Tim, Nicole and Susan fact check how space travel and astronauts are portrayed in movies such as Gravity and The Martian, whilst Brian and Robin argue about Robin’s lack of enthusiasm for Star Wars. They look back at some of the greatest Space movies including Alien and 2001 A Space Odyssey and ask whether some fictional aspects of these blockbusters may not be so far from our future reality?

(5) BLACKLOCK Q&A. The Arthur C. Clarke Award blog has a piece about “The Nonfiction of J.G. Ballard: An interview with editor Mark Blacklock” at Medium. Blacklock’s new book is The Selected Nonfiction of J. G. Ballard.

MARK: … Once it was all gathered, my first instinct was to include everything, but wiser counsel prevailed: it would have been unmanageable. I made sure to include anything significant that had been ignored for A User’s Guide or turned up since — the Introduction to the French Edition of Crash, for example, which I think he felt was not for a general audience; all the commentaries on his own work that had appeared in forewords and introductory glosses; and a sample of the reviews he wrote for Chemistry & Industry at the start of his career. I cut the number of book reviews that make up the majority of A User’s Guide too, in favour of showing a greater range of his work — the lists and glossaries, the “capsule commentaries.” The major decisions then were over which of the book reviews to include, because he was so prolific as a reviewer. I have about 30 of some 180. I printed them all off, read them several times and gave them all star ratings and then selected from the top-starred for a representative range across dates and publications. This felt like quite a heavy responsibility, but all the reviews are included in the bibliography so geeks like us can go and find those that aren’t in the book….  

(6) CHENGDU WORLDCON COVERAGE CONTINUES. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] There have been several con reports and related news items since the last update in a Scroll; the following are a fairly arbitrary selection of recent and older items, with more to follow at some point.

Sylvia Hildr con report

This is a unique – I think – report, in that it’s written in English by a Chinese person.  Given that this report isn’t subject to the vagaries of machine translation, I’ll just include a short extract here

Did I have a good time? Well, I met with fans and writers who share the same deep passion for science fiction and it was fascinating experiences. I learned of lots of sci-fi magazines and databases where organizers put their best efforts to make it easier for Chinese fans to open their eyes. I will always cherish these memories. But, the difficulties that these people had to overcome truly blew my mind. Not a single conversation could end without any reasonable complaints. I could not take the stance for them but as I checked WeChat groups and Moments, or talked with friends, the situation was the same.

Hugo finalist Yang Feng receives WSJ magazine award

On Saturday, Best Editor (Short Form) and Best Related Work Hugo finalist Yang Feng received an award from the Chinese edition of the Wall Street Journal magazine; relevant Weibo posts are herehere and here.  I’m not sure exactly what relevance is of the guy with the shamisen-esque stringed instrument, but traditional music seems to have been a running theme of the awards ceremony.

I don’t think this is directly Worldcon/Hugo related, as the award seems to have been for business innovation, so it was possibly more due to her being CEO of the 8 Light Minutes publishing company?

Chengdu kids write about their Worldcon experiences

In early November, Character Weekly – which seems to be a magazine aimed at a young audience – published several short write-ups and photos (alternative link) from Chengdu children documenting their thoughts about attending the Worldcon.  A couple of examples (via Google Translate, with manual edits):

I felt very honored to visit the World Science Fiction Convention that was held in Chengdu. In the science fiction museum, I communicated with an intelligent robot dog, walked through a fantasy universe, and saw various science fiction works that I had never heard of before. I was particularly fortunate to have a brief exchange, and to take a photo with, Mr. Ben Yalow, Chairman of the Worldcon. Through this event, I truly felt the infinite imagination of human beings and the charm of science fiction.

_________________

A few days ago, my mother and I participated in the 81st World Science Fiction Conference held in my hometown of Chengdu. In the Chengdu Science Fiction Museum, which is like a vast nebula, we experienced The Wandering Earth, Benben [the giant robot/vehicle structure], Kemeng [aka Kormo, the mascot), and the Hugo Awards with science fiction fans from all over the world, wonderful lectures by science fiction celebrities, etc., I also collected a book full of autographs, and took photos next to the beautiful Hugo Hall. This is the closest experience I have to science fiction, and I hope that one day I can do follow the same path, winning the Hugo Award for writing good science fiction works.  I will meet the future with my scientific dreams.

Lukyanenko ends China tour

This Weibo post from his Chinese publisher covers the final event in Shanghai on Sunday 10th.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born December 11, 1959 M. Rickert, 64. Tonight’s Birthday is that of M. Rickert who I must say never disappoints me. I loved her writing ever since I read her very first short story nearly a quarter of a century ago, “The Girl Who Ate Butterflies”. It’s certainly a wonderful story. 

I’d say that two-thirds of her nearly fifty pieces of short fiction were published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Very impressive indeed. Some picked up well deserved awards— “Journey into the Kingdom” won a World Fantasy Award, and “The Corpse Painter’s Masterpiece” a Shirley Jackson Award.  Many more were nominated for Awards. 

There are three collections of her short fictions, both well worth your time on these cold nights. The first, Map of Dreams, covers a wide spread of her stories, and won a World Fantasy Award and the Crawford Award. The “Map of Dreams” novella herein was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award.  

The second, Holiday, showing how prolific she is as a short fiction writer as it is filled with just stories from 2006 and 2007. You can find “Journey into the Kingdom” here. 

The third, You Have Never Been Here: New and Selected Stories, to a certain extent is less necessary than the first two as a large part of it is already in the first two. If you’re a fan of hers, by all means pick it up.

Now her novels, her interesting novels. Both are very impressive with my favorite being The Memory Garden which sort of tangentially reminds me of McKillip’s The Solstice Wood in tone if not story.  I’ll say The Shipbuilder of Bellfairie is one quirky novel. Really quirky novel. Not quite what to make of it. 

Since this is the Christmas season, I should note her “Lucky Girl: How I Became a Horror Writer” is a Krampus story. It’s available as an actual paperback book or an epub. 

(8) SPIRIT OF THE SEASON. Bobby Derie looks at what remains of Lovecraft’s Christmas verses to his correspondents: “Her Letters To Lovecraft: Christmas Greetings” at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein.

H. P. Lovecraft spent most of his adult life in genteel poverty, slowly diminishing the modest inheritance that had come down to him from his parents and grandparents. He had no cash to spare on expensive gifts for his many friends and loved ones. So Lovecraft was generous with what he had—time, energy, and creativity. While not religious or given to mawkish displays, when it came to Christmas, Lovecraft poured his time and energies into writing small verses to his many correspondents, a body of poems collectively known as his “Christmas Greetings.”…

… In looking at Lovecraft’s Christmas Greetings to his women correspondents, we catch a glimpse at Lovecraft’s thoughtfulness. Their response, unfortunately, is often lost to us; though some few of them certainly responded in kind. We know Elizabeth Toldridge, for example, wrote her own Christmas poems to Lovecraft, because at least one survives….

(9) RAYMOND CHANDLER POEM REVEALED. Apparently located in the Bodleian, it may be a poetic response to the loss of his wife: “’A moment after death when the face is beautiful’: rare Raymond Chandler poem discovered by US editor”, a news item in the Guardian.

… Published on Monday in the 25th-anniversary issue of the Strand magazine, the poem, titled Requiem, dates back to 1955 and was discovered by the magazine’s managing editor, Andrew Gulli….

Grappling with loss, grief and what it describes as the “long innocence of love”, Requiem opens with: “There is a moment after death when the face is beautiful / When the soft, tired eyes are closed and the pain is over.”

For two stanzas, Requiem describes the moments after death when the “long innocence of love comes gently in / For a moment more, in quiet to hover”, as well as the fading of “bright clothes” and a “lost dream”. It adds that “silver bottles”, “three long hairs in a brush” and “fresh plump pillows / On which no head will lie/ Are all that is left of the long, wild dream”….

(10) MAKING A LIST AND CHECKING IT TWICE. “Big Bang observatory tops wish list for big US physics projects” reports Nature.

The United States should fund proposed projects to dramatically scale up its efforts in five areas of high-energy physics, an influential panel of scientists has concluded.

Topping the ranking is the Cosmic Microwave Background–Stage 4 project, or CMB-S4, which is envisioned as an array of 12 radio telescopes split between Chile’s Atacama Desert and the South Pole. It is designed to look for indirect evidence of physical processes in the instants after the Big Bang — processes that have been mostly speculative so far.

The other four priorities are experiments to study the elementary particles called neutrinos, both coming from space and made in the laboratory; the largest-ever dark-matter detector; and strong US participation in a future overseas particle collider to study the Higgs boson.

An ad hoc group called the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) presented the recommendations on 7 December. The committee, which is convened roughly once a decade, was charged to make recommendations for the two main US agencies that fund research in high-energy physics, the Department of Energy (DoE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF)….

(11) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Mark me as one of Today’s 10,000. I just learned there’s a Roblox game based on the Hamilton musical. “Hamilton X Roblox”.

Enhanced battle, squad upgrades, and a new rebirth mode to keep the adventure going. Check out the newest Hamilton Roblox update now!

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Bruce D. Arthurs, Anne Marble, Steven French, Ersatz Culture, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cubist.]

Pixel Scroll 12/8/23 The File Next Time

(1) BEEP-BEEP. Deadline says the Wile E. Coyote movie might yet escape the tax accounting black hole that the head of Warner Bros. shoved it into. “’Coyote vs. Acme’: Paramount Circling, Amazon Possible Contender For Movie”.

It’s not just Netflix that made a bid for Warner Bros.’ scrapped Coyote vs. AcmeParamount, Apple and Amazon have seen the movie as well. Of those, Paramount has made a bid, and the plus there is a potential theatrical release. The Melrose lot could use it on the 2024 release calendar. Debt-laden exhibitors would want it, too.

Meanwhile, Amazon is mulling, I’m told, with no formal bid made. First, it takes longer over there to conduct business and get decisions through the proper channels. I also hear that marketing execs are trying to get their heads around the picture (seriously — there’s a lot of action scenes in the movie and hysterical jokes that easily could be used in trailers. I’ve seen the movie. Look out for the Porky Pig pant-less joke)….

(2) DIAGRAM PRIZE.“Danger Sound Klaxon! picks up the Diagram Prize gong” as the “Oddest Book Title of the Year” announced The Bookseller today.

Sound the trumpets, folks, ring the bells and most importantly crank up that old-fashioned noisemaker that goes “a-rooo-gha” for Danger Sound Klaxon! The Horn That Changed History has blown away the competition to win the 45th The Bookseller Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year.

The book, in which author Matthew F Jordan charts the “meteoric rise and eventual fall” of the klaxon automobile horn, never fell out of the love with Diagramistas: it garnered 53% of the ballot, the greatest share since the award went to a public vote in 2000, and joins Is Superman Circumcised? (2022), The Joy of Waterboiling (2018) and Cooking with Poo (2011) as the only winners to ever grab a full majority of votes.

There is something of a wholesomeness to this year’s winner as voters have turned away from the slightly naughty and/or scatological tone of recent winners such as the aforementioned Is Superman Circumcised?, plus 2020’s A Dog Pissing at the Edge of a Path: Animal Metaphors in Eastern Indonesian Society and 2019’s The Dirt Hole and its Variations. And there were certainly those kinds of options to choose from on the 2023 shortlist, but Dry Humping: A Guide to Dating, Relating, and Hooking Up Without the Booze was a distant second, while early bookies’ favourite I Fart in Your General Direction: Flatulence in Popular Culture barely caused a stink with voters….

(3) GOODREADS REVIEW BOMBING ANALYSIS. Anne Marble provided a friends link to her Medium post “The Latest Goodreads Review Bombing Scandal” about the controversy at the top of yesterday’s Scroll.

…Every bit of information appalled me. Not only was [Cait] Corrain (“allegedly”) hurting other debut authors — she was also accused of downvoting a book from the same publishing imprint as her upcoming book. And books by authors who were with the same literary agency.

Perhaps the worst revelation of all? Corrain was in chat groups with some of the affected authors. Those authors had to be wondering what they’d shared with her in private. Talk about betrayal!

One of the targeted authors, Black author Bethany Baptiste, kept getting harassed on social media over her posts on this scandal. Why are people targeting her and not Cait Corrain?…

(4) STICK TO THE FACTS. Xiran Jay Zhao today posted a trio of videos with their own roundup about the Corrain news story, which counters some of the claims made about this debacle by some articles. 

(5) WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS.. “A Cultural Critique of the Tesla Cybertruck” at Road and Track. This vehicle sounds tailor-made to drive through the World of Null-A

…In the four years since the initial announcement of the Cybertruck and its release, Musk has doubled down on these comments. He has called the Cybertruck “what Bladerunner would have driven” and “the finest in apocalypse technology”. Press videos released by Tesla show entire MP5 magazines emptied into the doors to drive home the body’s bulletproof nature. Musk’s emphasis that the Cybertruck is an “armored personnel carrier from the future” is likely driven by his belief that “the apocalypse could come along at any moment.”

While Musk is, to say the least, well-known for outlandish statements, he does seem to genuinely believe society is on the precipice of a collapse. Over the past decade during his Tesla-fueled rise to prominence, he’s repeatedly expressed concerns that killer robots will threaten humanity in the near future and called artificial intelligence “our biggest existential threat.” His more recent embrace of right-wing rhetoric seems to have only deepened this belief; during a recent trip to the U.S.-Mexico border, he stated that undocumented immigrants will cause “a collapse in social services,” and he believes that falling birthrates—caused, in his view, by birth control and abortion—are a “much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”…

(6) AND THE WATER BUFFALO YOU RODE IN ON. Sergey Lukyanenko, now on a make-up trip after skipping the Chengdu Worldcon where he was a GoH, posted this photo taken in Beijing.

Sergey Lukyanenko in Beijing.

His appearances are being covered in Chinese social media. Ersatz Culture collected the following daily links. Click through and you should be able to request a computer translation. However, the dates in the translations are not always accurate – such as those with photos of an event dated four days from now.

= 2023-12-01 (Friday) =

https://weibo.com/6045346855/Nv6xbjqOM
https://weibo.com/5127624884/Nv7Omw5DD

= 2023-12-02 (Saturday) =

https://weibo.com/6045346855/NvhKUtInN

= 2023-12-03 (Sunday) =

https://weibo.com/6045346855/NvrI7Dnll

= 2023-12-04 (Monday) =

https://weibo.com/6045346855/NvCkMjFwz
https://weibo.com/6045346855/NvABLdeRJ
https://weibo.com/1649394251/NvxWndiGJ

= 2023-12-05 (Tuesday) =

https://weibo.com/6045346855/NvHA2uP5o
  (Refers to a Shanghai event on the 10th)
https://weibo.com/6386527089/NvGGb164f
  (Refers to an event on the 8th with Baoshu)
https://weibo.com/1951071703/NvH0h4fbB
  (About the previous day’s event at Sichuan University)

= 2023-12-06 =

Nothing?

= 2023-12-07 (Thursday) =

https://weibo.com/6045346855/Nw4F6wIcf
https://weibo.com/1649394251/Nw4uXBANo
https://weibo.com/1649394251/Nw3FpvNju
https://weibo.com/1649394251/Nw3yjyJBt
https://weibo.com/1649394251/Nw3qOAcTA
https://weibo.com/1649394251/Nw3e6lHHa
https://weibo.com/1649394251/Nw2Ql1lpX

= 2023-12-08 (Friday) =

(With Baoshu in Beijing)

https://weibo.com/6045346855/Nwe0rbH4j
https://weibo.com/1649394251/Nwd6toSk3
https://weibo.com/1649394251/NwcWUbR9Z
https://weibo.com/1649394251/NwcJFbue1
https://weibo.com/1649394251/NwblZhMfn

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born December 8, 1950 Rick Baker, 73. He won the Academy Award for Best Makeup a record seven times from a record eleven nominations, beginning when he won the first award given for An American Werewolf in London. It is one of my favorite horror films bar none. 

Rick Baker

The sequel, An American Werewolf in Paris, which until now I didn’t know existed, was not well received by either critics or fans. Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes give it a seven, let me repeat that, a seven percent rating. 

So what else is he known for? Oh, I’m not listing everything but let’s look at some of his more extraordinary work.

One of his early gigs in the industry was on The Exorcist where he was an uncredited special effects assistant. That happened to him some early in his career as he’s uncredited as a special makeup effects artist on It’s Alive and uncredited as makeup effects on King Kong. More intriguing, he’s uncredited on The Empire Strikes Back even though he was credited on Star Wars. Interesting. 

I think his work on The Incredible Shrinking Woman where he is creator and designer of Sidney, the super-intelligent gorilla, as well as doing the makeup effects and being an actor in it is among his best ever. 

Starman. Oh one of my all-time films. He created and did the Starman transformation. May we give him a round of applause for that that feat?

Oh Beauty and The Beast. It was Baker who designed the stellar makeup that was Vincent. He was responsible for Perlman getting hired based on his previous experiences in prosthetics feeling he’d be a good fit for the role and fought hard for his casting.

I see he was special effects supervisor on the second Gremins films but not the first. 

Which that brings us to Men in Black, certainly we agree a career highly for him where he listed as special makeup effects and alien makeup effects. Cool indeed. 

I’ll finish with his work on Hellboy,  which I need not tell you I’ve watched so many times that I’m memorised it. And no, I’m not going to watch the new Hellboy film. 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • Hi and Lois is very educational, just not about the assigned lesson.

(9) HEIRS AND MARVEL AGREE. “Marvel Settles Fight Over Spider-Man, Doctor Strange Rights”The Hollywood Reporter says the battle is finished.

It looks like Marvel won’t be bringing its battle over the rights to Spider-Man and Doctor Strange into the new year. Attorneys for the company and the estate of Steve Ditko on Wednesday notified the court that they’ve reached an amicable settlement and expect a stipulation of dismissal with prejudice to be filed in the coming weeks.

This all started back in 2021, when Marvel filed a series of lawsuits in response to copyright termination notices from Larry Lieber and the estates of Gene Colan, Steve Ditko, Don Heck and Don Rico. A very long list of characters were at issue, including Iron Man, Captain America, Black Widow, Hulk and Thor. In June, all but one of the matters settled….

(10) TIMEY WIMEY PRESENTS. The Mary Sue has a list of “The Best ‘Doctor Who’ Gifts for Your Favorite Whovian”. Here’s what I need – and don’t forget to fill it with homebaked chocolate chip cookies!

TARDIS cookie jar

(11) AS WITNESSED FROM AUSTRALIA. Bruce Gillespie’s SF Commentary 114 is a free download in both portrait and landscape edition at eFanzines.

Covers by Dennis Callegari. Features Denis Callegari and Jim Burns on the possibilities of AI art; wakes for people much missed (Valma Brown, Lee Harding, and Jenny Bryce); and memories of Helena Binns, who left us recently, including her fannish autobiography. Rich Horton remembers Cordwainer Smith’s first story; C. June Wolf conducts the final interview with Michael G. Coney; and Kim Huett describes the unique problems of SF readers in Australia during World War II. Book reviews are by regular Colin Steele; and Anna Creer joins SFC with her Crime File.

If you missed out on No. 113, it also is at eFanzines.

(12) GENE-EDITING ANSWER FOR SICKLE CELL. “FDA approves first genetic treatments for sickle cell disease : Shots”NPR has the story.

…In a landmark decision, the Food and Drug Administration Friday approved the first gene-editing treatment to alleviate human illness.

The FDA approved two gene therapies for anyone 12 and older suffering from the most severe form of sickle cell disease, a brutal blood disorder that has long been neglected by medical research.

The decisions are being hailed as milestones for treating sickle cell and for the rapidly advancing field of gene therapy, which is stirring excitement for treatment of many diseases….

… For the CRISPR treatment, which was developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics, both in Boston, doctors remove cells from each patient’s bone marrow, edit a gene with CRISPR and then infuse billions of the modified cells back into patients.

The edited cells produce a form of hemoglobin known as fetal hemoglobin, restoring normal function of red blood cells. While not a cure for the disease, the hope is the therapy, brand name Casgevy, is designed to be a one-time treatment that will alleviate symptoms for a lifetime.

In data presented to the FDA, the treatment resolved the severe pain crises for at least 18 months for 29 of the subjects — 96.7%. The treatment has produced similar results for patients suffering from a related condition known as beta thalassemia.

(13) THE TOP 10 MOVIES & TV SHOWS IN 2023. JustWatch finds this year’s movie streaming charts are dominated by titles available on Netflix and Disney+. Netflix secured rank #1 (The Super Mario Bros. Movie) and #2 (Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse) while Disney has the most original titles in the Top 10, including The Little Mermaid, Avatar: The Way of Water and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.

Interestingly, the three major streaming services (Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+) are not represented in the top 3 TV shows. Instead, this year’s podium belongs to MAX (The Last of Us), Peacock (Yellowstone) and AppleTV+ (Ted Lasso). [Based on a press release.]

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Daniel Dern, Anne Marble, Ersatz Culture, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip W.]

Pixel Scroll 12/3/23 Mount You-Could-Look-It-Up

(1) SMOFCON COMING TO SEATTLE. [Via Petréa Mitchell.] Last night Seattle won the right to host next year’s Smofcon, the international travelling con for people who run cons. It’ll be December 6-8 at the SeaTac Doubletree.

Attending memberships are $60 through sometime Tuesday. See more at the Smofcon 41 website.

(2) INDIE INK AWARDS. [Item by Dann.] The new Indie Ink Awards are trying to get off the ground.  

Traditionally published books do not corner the market on great works. Amazing works are produced by small press and self-published authors, and they often go unrecognized because their budgets for marketing are often smaller. So WriteHive, Inked in Gray Press, and Indie Story Geek joined together to celebrate great works of fiction published by small press and self-published authors, giving them the recognition they deserve.

There are 24 award categories with half being devoted to identitarian interests.  The remaining categories are for various facets of a book, but none are dedicated to just “best novel”.

M.V. Prindle was notified that his book, Bob the Wizard, was nominated in a handful of categories.

(3) LUKYANENKO IN CHENGDU UPDATES. [By Ersatz Culture.] As of Sunday 3rd, he has appeared at two more events.  The Saturday one is covered in this Weibo post.  I think that’s SF World editor and member of the Chengdu concom Yao Haijun sitting on the left of the panel.

The Sunday event also has a couple of Weibo posts, here and here.  He seems to be wearing a badge with the Worldcon panda logo on, although it’s not one I recall seeing from the event itself, so perhaps it’s unrelated?

Tomorrow (Monday 4th) he will be appearing at a university; this post lists an email address where people can send a question to him.

(4) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to snack on spanakopita with Neil Clarke in Episode 213 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

This time around you’re invited to dinner with Neil Clarke, who’s best known as the editor and publisher of the Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning Clarkesworld magazine, launched in October 2006. Clarkesworld has been a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine four times (winning three times), the World Fantasy Award four times (winning once), and the British Fantasy Award once (winning once).

Neil Clarke

Neil himself is also an eleven-time finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Editor-Short Form (winning twice), three-time winner of the Chesley Award for Best Art Director, and recipient of the 2019 Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award from SFWA. In the seventeen years since Clarkesworld Magazine launched, stories that he’s edited have been nominated for or won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Locus, BSFA, Shirley Jackson, WSFA Small Press, Stoker, and various other awards.

He also edits Forever — a digital-only, reprint science fiction magazine launched in 2015. His anthologies include: UpgradedGalactic EmpiresTouchable UnrealityMore Human than HumanThe Final FrontierNot One of UsThe Eagle has Landed, and the Best Science Fiction of the Year series. His latest anthology, New Voices in Chinese Science Fiction (co-edited with Xia Jia — who was a guest of this podcast way back in Episode 50 — and Regina Kanyu Wang), was published in July.

We discussed how Clarkesworld was born (and what he wishes he’d known back when the magazine launched), the motivation behind his unrivaled response times, the irresponsible impact of AI on science fiction and what he’s doing to help ameliorate it, how he proactively analyzes submission data to make sure he receives stories from diverse voices, the differing effect of the pandemic lockdown on first time vs. established authors, why it’s hard for people to sell him a time travel story, his problems with Star Trek‘s transporter, the true meaning of rejections, why reading science fiction in translation is so important, Lester del Rey’s prophetic warning about the provincialism of U.S. fandom, and much more.

(5) PLAGIARISM. [Item by Andrew Porter.] First several minutes of the video concern Harlan Ellison and Ben Bova, and case they won: “Plagiarism and You(Tube)”. Via Sandra Bond.

What is plagiarism? Where did plagiarism come from? Who made plagiarism? Where am I, plagiarism? Can you help me?

(6) MARK SHEPPARD SURVIVES HEALTH EMERGENCY. [Item by Cat Eldridge.]He also was in Warehouse 13 as Regent Benedict Valda, in  Doctor Who’s  “The Impossible Astronaut” and “Day of the Moon” playing  Canton Everett Delaware III. “’Supernatural’ Star Mark Sheppard Survives Massive Heart Attacks” in Deadline.

Mark Sheppard, best known as “Crowley” on Supernatural, revealed on Instagram Saturday that he somehow survived six heart attacks.

“You’re not going to believe this! Was on my way to an appointment yesterday when I collapsed in my kitchen,” Sheppard began. The 59-year-old actor wrote that he had “six massive heart attacks” and was “brought back from [the] dead 4 times,” before learning that he “had a 100% blockage in my LAD” (left anterior descending artery.)”

Sheppard called the event “The Widowmaker,” and expressed his thanksto his medics….

(7) THINKING ABOUT ROME. “’The Boys’ Season 4 Trailer Is a Bloody Good Time” according to The Mary Sue.

The Boys teaser trailer gives us a glimpse of the chaos ahead. Two new female supes, Sister Sage and Firecracker, join the Seven to replace Starlight and Queen Maeve. It looks like much of the focus will be on the battle between Starlight and Homelander. Sister Sage tells Homelander to let the masses tear themselves apart over the supe war, then he can swoop in and save them. Since Homelander is probably one of those guys always thinking about Rome, he says he can be “just like Caesar.” Jeffrey Dean Morgan makes his first appearance in a suit while talking to Billy Butcher. There will be so much to unpack in the new season. Our most burning question: will The Deep find love with a new octopus?…

(8) FAN FAVORITE ENDS RUN. Radio Times tells us “Doctor Who’s Wild Blue Yonder marked Bernard Cribbins’ final appearance”. I don’t know if the following is a spoiler of any kind, so let’s be safe and post a spoiler warning anyway.

Doctor Who fans were delighted to see the late Bernard Cribbins reprise his role as Wilfred Mott, beloved grandfather of Donna Noble (Catherine Tate), in the episode Wild Blue Yonder.

Having escaped a terrifying adventure in space, the Doctor (David Tennant) and Donna shared an emotional reunion with Wilf, who then warned them of a new menace threatening the Earth.

Speaking on companion show Doctor Who Unleashed, showrunner Russell T Davies confirmed that Cribbins’ scene in the special would mark his final appearance as Wilf.

(9) KEEP HOPE FROM ESCAPING. [Item by Steven French.] Kim Stanley Robinson gets a shout out in a Guardian editorial in utopian fiction (!): “The Guardian view on utopias: news from nowhere can help us here and now”.

… But it would be nice to think that, at some point, dystopia’s sunnier other half – the cultural tradition that gave us Thomas More’s UtopiaNews from Nowhere by William Morris and the early feminist visions of Charlotte Perkins Gilman – might make a comeback…

…So, in our own time, does the climate fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson, which speculatively explores the social and economic transformations that could help humanity to cope with the consequences of the climate emergency.

The intimidating scale of contemporary crises, interrelated and ranging from the economic to the environmental, is today accompanied by a widespread conviction that prevailing orthodoxies are inadequate to the task of meeting them. A sense of the ominous defines the zeitgeist, running through the pages of books such as Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. Lynch’s portrayal of political darkness enveloping one unfortunate family mines the same seam, giving eloquent expression to what he describes as a “tragic perspective”. But at a time when societies could desperately do with some imaginative headroom, it would be uplifting to see a new generation of authors following in the footsteps of Morris and Robinson as well….

(10) SPEAK, MEMORY. Adweek says “Apple’s Film is a Hopeful Fable About Speech Accessibility”.

…The tech brand released “The Lost Voice,” directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Taika Waititi and coinciding with International Day of Persons With Disabilities Dec. 3. The film unfolds as a narrated children’s story, with magical creatures and a journey through beautiful landscapes. 

The tale begins when a young girl meets a rabbit-like creature with white and pink fur. Curiously, she asks him, “Why are you so quiet?” and offers to help the animal find his voice. 

… At the end, it is revealed that the narrator is a dad with speech loss who is reading a bedtime story to his child using Apple’s latest accessibility feature, Personal Voice. 

The brand introduced Personal Voice on iOS 17 earlier this year. The feature uses secure on-device machine learning to sample and re-create people’s voices, helping those who lose their ability to speak due to conditions such as muscular dystrophy or motor neurone disease….

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born December 3, 1958 Terri Windling, 65. I first encountered her writing through reading The Wood Wife, a truly extraordinary fantasy that deserved the Mythopoeic Award that it won. (The Hole in the Wall bar in it would be borrowed by Charles de Lint with her permission for a scene in his Medicine Road novel.) I like American edition with Susan Sedona Boulet art much better than I do the British edition with the Brian Froud art.

I would be very remiss not mention about her stellar work as the founding editor along with Ellen Datlow of what would be called The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror after the first volume which was simply The Year’s Best Fantasy, that being noted for those of you who would doubt correct me for not footnoting it. It won three World Fantasy Awards and a Stoker as well.

They also splendidly edited a series of Snow White, Blood Red anthologies which were stories based on traditional folk tales. Lots of good stuff there. All available at the usual suspects now at very affordable prices. Like the Mythic Fiction series is excellent reading and available at usual suspects. 

Oh, and I want to single out The Armless Maiden which took on the difficult subject of child abuse. It garnered a much warranted Otherwise nomination.

Now let’s have a beer at the Dancing Ferret as I note her creation of the Bordertown series. I haven’t read all of it but I’ve quite a bit of it and one of the three novels written in it, Emma Bull’s Finder: A Novel: of The Borderlands, is one of my comfort works, so she gets credit for that. 

So now let’s move to an art credit for her. Some of you have seen the cover art for Another Way to Travel by Cats Laughing? That’s a hearse with the band posed in front of it. I’ve the original pen and ink art that she did here. 

Which brings me to the Old Oak Wood series which is penned by her and illustrated by Wendy Froud. Now Wikipedia and most of the reading world thinks that it consists of three lovely works — A Midsummer Night’s Faery TaleThe Winter Child and The Faeries of Spring Cottage

But there’s a story that Terri wrote that never got published anywhere but on Green Man. It’s an Excerpt from The Old Oak Chronicles: Interviews with Famous Personages by Professor Arnel Rootmuster. It’s a charming story, so go ahead and read it.

Terri Windling

(12) COMICS SECTION.

(13) DOGGONE IT. Marvel Mutts #1 launched December 1 on Marvel Unlimited in the exclusive Infinity Comic format.

Join Marvel’s Mightiest Mutts in their very own Infinity Comic! When Ms. Marvel and Kraven the Hunter crash through the Best Buds animal shelter, Kamala discovers an adorable ally and new best friend. 

This six-part series from creators Mackenzie CadenheadTakeshi Miyazawa, and Raúl Angulo is the latest drop from Infinity Comics’ “Friday Funnies,” the line of humor titles designed for fans of all ages. And in MARVEL MUTTS it all goes to the dogs: The pooches of the super-powered are now the stars of their own Marvel Unlimited-exclusive series, and they’ll get in all kinds of cute, cuddly, and (sometimes) mischievous adventures while they show newbie, Mittens, what it’s like to roll with a pack.

(14) STEELY MAN. “’Fallout’ series first-look images reveal Power Armor and Ghoul” and Entertainment Weekly has a photo.

Fallout stars Ella Purnell (Yellowjackets) as Lucy, an optimistic Vault Dweller with an all-American can-do spirit, whose idealistic nature is tested when people harm her loved ones. Kyle MacLachlan (Twin Peaks) plays Hank, the Overseer of Vault 33 and Lucy’s father, who is eager to change the world for the better. Aaron Moten plays Maximus, a young soldier hiding his tragic past as he serves in a militaristic faction called Brotherhood of Steel. He believes in the nobility of the Brotherhood’s mission to bring law and order to the Wasteland and will do anything to further their goals. Walton Goggins (The Righteous GemstonesJustified) stars as the Ghoul, a pragmatic and ruthless survivor who trawls the Wasteland as a bounty hunter. Irradiated Ghouls are one of the most recognizable elements of the Fallout franchise, and here, Goggins combines their iconic look with a Westworld-esque cowboy outfit….

(15) A COINCIDENCE. On the day that the Hugo final round voting statistics came out, Chris Barkley was delighted to see what was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered this afternoon: “Ranked choice voting is being touted as a cure-all for U.S. deep partisan divides”. Audio at the link; no text transcript.

(16) THE MULTIVERSE IS REAL! [Item by Mike Kennedy.] A bride-to-be went shopping for wedding dresses and had their photo taken with an iPhone. Each photo with modern phones is made using computational photography. Among other things, that means the device takes multiple exposures each time the shutter is pressed and tries to stitch together the best image using portions that are least blurry, etc.

The bride appears three times in the photo; once in “real life“ from the rear, and twice in front and side views in separate mirrors. Not knowing that those are the same person, the phone used different versions for each of them when performing the computation. The bride was moving their arms when the photo was snapped, so they appear to be in three different poses simultaneously.

Either that, or the Multiverse is real. “A bride discovers a reality bending mistake in her iPhone camera” at Apple Insider.

…A U.K. woman was photographed standing in a mirror where her reflections didn’t match, but not because of a glitch in the Matrix. Instead, it’s a simple iPhone computational photography mistake.

Thanks to technological advancements, photography has come a long way from flash bulbs and film. Every time the iPhone shutter button is clicked, billions of operations occur in an instant that results in a photo….

(17) RIGHT OF WAY. “Largest iceberg in the world, 40 miles wide, is now heading into the open ocean” reports NPR.

Ships plying the frigid waters near the Antarctic Peninsula, south of South America, will need to keep an eye on their radar for a floating island of ice: “The largest iceberg in the world, A-23a, is on the move into open ocean!” as the British Antarctic Survey recently announced.

“It’s a trillion tons of ice. So it’s hard to comprehend just how big a patch of ice this is,” Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, told NPR.

Iceberg A23a measures 40 by 32 nautical miles, according to the U.S. National Ice Center. For comparison, Hawaii’s island of Oahu is 44 miles long and 30 miles across. And New York City’s Manhattan Island is about 13.4 miles long and spans around 2.3 miles at its widest point….

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Via Geri Sullivan, “A Holiday to Remember”. Admittedly, it’s a 5-minute Chevy commercial. Say what you like, I’m finished crying anyway.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Kevin Standlee, Ersatz Culture, Dann, Lise Andreasen, Steven French, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter, for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 12/1/23 Five Weeks In A Granfalloon

(1) WATERSTONES BOOK OF 2023. The Guardian reports, “Katherine Rundell wins Waterstones book of 2023 with ‘immediate classic’”.

Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell has been named the 2023 Waterstones book of the year.

The children’s novel, about a magical archipelago where all mythical creatures still reside, was voted for by booksellers as the book they most enjoyed recommending to readers over the past year.

Rundell said that she was “truly, utterly thrilled” on hearing the news. “I did not believe it until they showed me it in writing. I made my editor show me written-out proof.”

(2) AUTHORS SUE IOWA. NBC News has details as “Penguin Random House and bestselling authors sue Iowa over school book-banning law”.

The nation’s largest publisher and several bestselling authors, including novelists John Green and Jodi Picoult, are part of a lawsuit filed Thursday challenging Iowa’s new law that bans public school libraries and classrooms from having practically any book that depicts sexual activity….

…The law also bans books containing references to sexual orientation and gender identity for students through sixth grade, which the lawsuit says is a violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

The lawsuit seeks a court order declaring the law unconstitutional, Novack said, adding that government can’t violate free speech rights “by pretending that school grounds are constitutional no-fly zones.”

The lawsuit does not seek monetary damages….

…Asked for comment on the lawsuit, Reynold’s office referred to her statement issued earlier this week in response to a separate lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal on behalf of several families challenging the entirety of the new law. In that statement, Reynolds defended the law as “protecting children from pornography and sexually explicit content.”

Plaintiffs in the latest lawsuit took issue with that characterization, noting that among books that have been banned in Iowa schools are such critically acclaimed and classic works as “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker, “Native Son” by Richard Wright and “1984” by George Orwell, showing that under the law, “no great American novel can survive,” [said Dan Novack, an attorney for and vice president of Penguin Random House]….

(3) DAWN OF CYBERPUNK. The Mirrorshades anthology edited by Bruce Sterling (1986) is now available as a free download (or can be read at the link).

(4) IMAGINARY PAPERS. ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination has published the sixteenth issue of Imaginary Papers, a quarterly newsletter on science fiction worldbuilding, futures thinking, and imagination. 

In this issue, David K. Seitz writes about “Sanctuary,” a 1993 episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine with timely insights about the abandonment and exclusion of refugees; Katherine Buse and Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal write about the 2019 video game Hypnospace Outlaw and its alternate-history vision of the 1990s internet; and we share two recent academic publications by our colleague Malka Older, the sociologist and science fiction author.

The full archive of Imaginary Papers is available to read here.

(5) CHINA FANDOM. RiverFlow, a finalist for a 2023 Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer, is interviewed in “Students Are the Future of Science Fiction: A Conversation with RiverFlow by Arley Sorg” at Clarkesworld Magazine.

How did you get involved with the science fiction community?

…On July 23, 2020, I founded the sci-fi fanzine also called Zero Gravity. My hope is that Zero Gravity can let zero gravity sci-fi fans have access to more information, and that they can use this publication to combine the power of Chinese fans. (China has not had an official fanzine, so sci-fi fans did not have a centralized platform for expression.) Now those scattered, but high-quality, sci-fi review articles can be seen by more people. In 2023, we started contacting foreign writers and translating their introductions to the history of sci-fi in their own country as well!

(6) LUKYANENKO’S DECEMBER 1ST EVENTS IN CHENGDU. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] The Weibo account of publisher 8 Light Minutes posted this covering the Friday morning event where Lukyanenko visited a university.  I’m far from certain about this, but I think the guy sitting third from left in the photo of the audience is Chen Shi, aka Raistlin Chen, one of the Worldcon co-chairs.

The afternoon visit to the SF Museum was covered in this Weibo post, which seems to come from the media relations account for the Pidu district of Chengdu, and is a short video with minimal information.  If my recollection of the layout of the museum is correct, the opening shot shows that the big “Hugo Award” rocket mounted on the wall has now been removed.

(7) DOUBLING DOWN ON DOUBLING UP. [Item by Bruce D. Arthurs.] A comment on Blue Sky led to this amusing news piece about a legal motion to impose Microsoft Word standards (28 points) over regular standards (24 points) when double-spacing in legal documents.

Reminded me of the Formatting Foofaraws that regularly erupted in fanzine fandom and still do in writing circles. But this particular one used sixty-six pages of argument and citations in its motion, which feels excessive, even if it was a fannish foofaraw.

(Since this was filed by a law firm, cynical me suspects the legal profession’s “Maximize your billable hours” rule was in action here.) “Heated Litigation Fight Over ‘Double-Spacing’ Ends In Judge Telling Everyone To Shut Up” at Above the Law.

…The brief backs up the vagaries over time point by noting that Microsoft even expanded its spacing before the 2007 version release and that the company’s “double spacing” is not even consistent across fonts.

There’s not been a historical account of typography this thrilling since that Helvetica movie!

Not content to leave well enough alone, plaintiffs pile on with policy arguments for their interpretation of double spacing….

(8) READY FOR YOUR CLOSE-UP? In this 1966 commercial for Butter-Nut Coffee, viewers were enlisted to interact with Boris Karloff, delivering the subtitled lines. (Why are you trembling? Maybe you’ve already had too much caffeine…)

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born December 1, 1942 John Crowley, 81. What a splendiferous Little, Big is! Full of quiet charms that invite second and third readings. It won a Mythoepoeic Award and World Fantasy Award, and was nominated for a Hugo at Chicon IV. It also picked up Balrog, BSFA and Nebula nominations as well. Oh, and it deservedly makes David Pringle’s Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels.

For a treat, you should listen to Crowley read it. He takes great pleasure in doing so. It’s available on Audible. 

John Crowley

Next up is the Ægypt cycle as it’s called that, huh, Harold Bloom declared part of American canon of books. I thought they were good but unlike Little, Big, I’ll freely admit that I’ve not gone back to them since the first reading of them. 

And there’s Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land in which the author in loving detail envisions the novel the Lord Byron never penned but very well might have. An extraordinary work indeed. 

Finally my last novel that I like by him is Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr. As Crowley says on his stellar site, “Dar Oakley, the main character and storyteller in the novel, is really a Crow.” It’s hard to bring off making a narrator that it’s animal feel like an animal but he does so it here. Fascinating tale indeed which also has a telling narrated by him. Crowley being his crow. Cool indeed. It won a Mythopoeic Award and garnered a World Fantasy Award nomination as well. 

I’ve not read enough short fiction by him to reach a firm opinion of him as a teller of tales at that length, so your opinion please as to which collection I should delve into. The newest one is And Go Like This: Stories. Will that do?

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Tom Gauld is not waiting.

(11) UYGHURS REMEMBERED. Danielle Ranucci, an sff writer and an intern at the Human Rights Foundation, “a nonprofit dedicated to combating dictatorial regimes”, has written an opinion piece “about how China has co-opted Worldcon to help avoid accountability for its ongoing Uyghur genocide.” “Worldconned: How China Co-Opted Sci-Fi’s Crown Jewel Amidst the Uyghur Genocide”. (Ranucci’s personal blog is “Lit In The Time Of War”.)

 Last month, Chengdu, China hosted the 81st World Science Fiction Convention. Known as Worldcon, this annual convention is the site of the prestigious Hugo Awards—sci-fi’s equivalent to the Oscars. Past Hugo winners include household names like George R.R. Martin and Stephen King. Yet as over 20,000 people flocked to Chengdu’s futuristic-looking Worldcon site, China was committing one of the largest genocides since the Holocaust.

China is detaining 2 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other ethnic populations in concentration camps in the East Turkestan region. Meanwhile, the regime seeks to avoid accountability and improve its image through reputation laundering, such as taking advantage of voting irregularities to become the host of the prestigious Winter 2022 Olympics. Or to buy Worldcon….

(12) OPEN CHANNEL ZZZ. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Another “I’ll take $100 for ‘What could possibly go wrong…'” “Lucid Dream Startup Says Engineers Can Write Code In Their Sleep” at Slashdot.

People spend one-third of their lives asleep. What if employees could work during that time … in their dreams? Prophetic, a venture-backed startup founded earlier this year, wants to help workers do just that. Using a headpiece the company calls the “Halo,” Prophetic says consumers can induce a lucid dream state, which occurs when the person having a dream is aware they are sleeping. The goal is to give people control over their dreams, so they can use that time productively. A CEO could practice for an upcoming board meeting, an athlete could run through plays, a web designer could create new templates — “the limiting factor is your imagination,” founder and CEO Eric Wollberg told Fortune.

(13) RABBIT EARS. “’The Velveteen Rabbit’ Captures Holiday Nostalgia with Stylized Animation Mix” says Animation World Network.

VD: As a parent, I have to ask what makes a stuffed rabbit so captivating to a child? There have been numerous children’s stories featuring a young rabbit and my daughter has about 50 stuffed rabbits of her own that she can’t bear to part with. Why do these creatures mean so much to children and lend themselves so well to children’s storytelling?  

TB: Rabbits are wonderful, unthreatening animals with brilliantly expressive faces and ears. Maybe that’s what draws children to them. But we think what really captivates children is the imaginative idea that their toy rabbits, and other toys they may possess, are real, that they can come alive, and that toys feel emotions and understand the children themselves. Children feel the imaginative world is “real” and they know their toys understand that.

(14) IT’S ALWAYS SUNNY IN SPACE. From Giant Freakin Robot, “The Sci-Fi Star Trek Comedy Series From It’s Always Sunny Trio That Didn’t Happen, Watch The Only Episode”.

Boldly Going Nowhere, a proposed comedy science fiction series based on Star Trek ultimately went nowhere, but the original pilot episode can now be seen below. The series came from the showrunners, stars and co-creators of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, Charlie Day, Glenn Howerton, and Rob McElhenney, with Adam Stein, who pitched the idea to the trio. Stein was a writer’s assistant on the series at the time…

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Steven French, John King Tarpinian, Orange Mike Lowrey, Joey Eschrich, Ersatz Culture, 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 11/30/23 Too Much Pixel And No Scroll

(1) THE TIMES THEY ARE A’CHANGIN’. Gabino Iglesias is the new horror columnist for the New York Times. He told told readers on X.com, “It’s a dream come true. Can’t wait to bring you all the horror goodness starting in January. Long live horror.”

(2) LUKYANENKO EVENT AT WORLDCON VENUE. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] Sergey Lukyanenko will appear December 1 in an event at the Worldcon venue.

In the Friday 24th Scroll, it was mentioned that Sergey Lukyanenko would be making four appearances in Chengdu between December 1st and 4th.  Today (November 30th) I saw a Weibo announcement indicating there will be an additional event on December 1st; notably, this one takes place at the SF Museum that was the venue for the Worldcon.  I think this may be the first time that the museum has been used or open to the public since the con?

There was also a new Weixin/WeChat blog post from his publisher yesterday (Wednesday 29th); curiously this does not mention the event at the SF Museum.

(3) GOLDMAN FUND UPDATE. Dream Foundry reports that they were able to fully fund everyone who applied within the preferred window for the Con or Bust initiative to assist Palestinian creators and fans of speculative fiction in attending the 2024 World Science Fiction Convention.

They still have funds remaining for 2024 and will continue taking applications on a rolling basis. They say –

Don’t self reject! Anyone who is a citizen of Palestine or a member of the Palestinian diaspora qualifies and is encouraged to apply.

Applications for the 2025 Worldcon will open in summer of 2024.

(4) FURIOSA TRAILER. The first official trailer has dropped for Furiosa : A Mad Max Saga.

Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth star in Academy Award-winning mastermind George Miller’s “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” the much-anticipated return to the iconic dystopian world he created more than 30 years ago with the seminal “Mad Max” films. Miller now turns the page again with an all-new original, standalone action adventure that will reveal the origins of the powerhouse character from the multiple Oscar-winning global smash “Mad Max: Fury Road.” The new feature from Warner Bros. Pictures and Village Roadshow Pictures is produced by Miller and his longtime partner, Oscar-nominated producer Doug Mitchell (“Mad Max: Fury Road,” “Babe”), under their Australian-based Kennedy Miller Mitchell banner. As the world fell, young Furiosa is snatched from the Green Place of Many Mothers and falls into the hands of a great Biker Horde led by the Warlord Dementus. Sweeping through the Wasteland, they come across the Citadel presided over by The Immortan Joe. While the two Tyrants war for dominance, Furiosa must survive many trials as she puts together the means to find her way home.

(5) A GOOD TONGUELASHING. “Adam Sandler’s ‘Leo’: A Crotchety Old Lizard Helping Kids Be Kids” at Animation World Network.

Hitting Netflix [on November 21] is Leo, a clever and charming coming-of-age animated musical comedy starring noted actor and comedian Adam Sandler as a curmudgeonly 74-year-old iguana, stuck living for decades in an elementary school class terrarium, who plots his escape – complete with an odd bucket list – after learning he only has one year to live. At the same time, he can’t help but offer friendly advice to a bunch of kids who each must take him home for a weekend, only to discover – and swear to keep secret – that he can talk…

… The idea for the film gestated with Sandler for eight years. “Basically, I had the idea of looking at an elementary school graduation, almost like in Grease, the kids’ last year of elementary school, and how you’re moving on to the big leagues after that,” he shares. “And me and my friend, Paul Sado, were working on that idea. And then I told Robert Smigel about it, and he said, ‘What about if you do it that year, but through the eyes of a class pet that’s been involved in that grade forever?’ And we got excited, and that’s when everything got flowing.”…

(6) PAGE-TURNER. Jay of Tar Vol On posted an extra-large magazine review this month, with thoughts on 35 different works of short SFF and a little bit of related non-fiction. “Tar Vol Reads a Magazine: November 2023”.

… the piece that inspired me to pick up this issue [of Asimov’s] in the first place: “Berb by Berb” by Ray Nayler. This story is connected to some of his other work that I haven’t yet read, but it makes an acceptable standalone, delivering a heartfelt tale of one person trying to do the best they can in a world that has gone to pieces around them. It’s a theme Nayler returns to often, and it makes for a good read every time. ..

(7) HOME IS THE SPACEMAN. Neil Clarke tells about his adventures at the Chengdu Worldcon in his Clarkesworld editorial, “This Would Have Been Longer”. He was impressed by how many children were at the con, and participated in the Hugo ceremony.

…Oh! That’s me up there with “little astronaut” after unexpectedly winning the Hugo Award for Best Editor Short Form. Those are two of the hosts of the event on the left and the gentleman on the right is convention Co-Chair Chen Shi, who presented the category. I actually had a speech written this time, but in the moment, I opted to abandon it and try to speak from what I was feeling instead. Probably not the brightest thing to do, but I wanted to say something to the kids watching now or later. I let them know that I was once like them and never believed that I would someday be up on this stage accepting an award I considered the domain of my childhood heroes. I told them that I hoped to be in the audience and watch them win one someday. I encouraged them to try, told them it wasn’t easy and that people might tell them it wasn’t possible . . . but it is.

After the ceremony, I was whisked off to do interviews. They had maybe two dozen reporters from a variety of outlets present and asking questions. It kept me from enjoying part of the after party with friends, but how often does a Hugo winner get that kind of attention? I understood and appreciated the novelty of it, and besides, they weren’t asking me about AI, so that’s progress, right?…

(8) YOU’VE HEARD HER WORK. [Item by Steven French.] “Jane Horrocks: ‘I’d love to be a baddie in a Tarantino movie’”, so she told the Guardian. Horrocks voices Babs, one of the chickens in Chicken Run and also starred with Anjelica Huston in Jim Henson’s film of Roald Dahl’s The Witches.

When did you discover you had an amazing voice? chargehand
From starting impersonations, really. My first impersonation was Julie Andrews when I got The Sound of Music album when I was nine. I fell in love with sounding like Julie. My mum and dad were massively into Shirley Bassey and I found I could impersonate her and Barbra Streisand. That’s when I started to realise that utilising my voice was going to be a good thing for me. It’s brought me a lot of pleasure, and I’ve made people laugh, which is great.

(9) NEW TO U.N.I.T. A disabled character is featured in the latest episode of Doctor Who. The actress discusses her role with Radio Times. Beware spoilers, maybe; I’m not sure.

“She is just so fun and feisty and ballsy – she’s just so much fun to play,” Doctor Who star Ruth Madeley says of her character Shirley Anne Bingham. “I’d love to be more like Shirley in my real life, I have got nowhere near that much cool in me!”

Madeley made her spectacular on-screen Doctor Who debut in The Star Beast as UNIT’s 56th scientific advisor. In the space of the 57-minute special, she got David Tennant’s Doctor out of some very sticky situations – and took absolutely none of his nonsense.

“Overall she is not overly impressed by anyone or anything, which I love about her because I am the complete opposite. That’s really fun to play,” Madeley tells RadioTimes.com….

(10) WHO PREVIEW. “Doctor Who debuts new scene from next episode Wild Blue Yonder” at Radio Times.

The veil of secrecy surrounding the next episode of Doctor Who, Wild Blue Yonder, is slowing beginning to lift, with the BBC dropping a first-look clip….

… In the new clip, Donna is left panicked when the TARDIS disappears, with the Doctor promising to return her home to her daughter Rose. But it appears someone – or something – is watching them……

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born November 30, 1906 John Dickson Carr. (Died 1977.) As you know, we don’t do just sff genre Birthdays here and so it is that we have here one of my favorite mystery writers, John Dickson Carr.  Indeed I’m listening to The Hollow Man, one of his Gideon Fell mysteries. 

He who wrote some of the best British mysteries ever done was himself not British being American. Oh the horror. He did live there for much of the Thirties and Forties, marrying a British woman. 

Dr. Fell, an Englishman, lived in the London suburbs. Carr wrote twenty-seven novels with him as the detective. I’m listening to The Hollow Man because it’s considered one of the best locked room mysteries ever done. Indeed, Dr. Fell’s discourse on locked room mysteries in chapter reprinted as a stand-alone essay in its own right.

All of the Fell novels are wonderful mysteries. The detective himself? Think a beer drinking Nero Wolfe who’s a lot more outgoing. Almost all of the novels concern his unraveling of locked room mysteries or what he calls impossible crimes.  Of these novels, I’ve read quite a number and they’re all excellent.

Now let’s talk about Sir Henry Merrivale who created by Carter Dickson, a pen name of John Dickson Carr. (Not sure why he bothered with such a thinly-veiled pen name though.) Merrivale was like Fell an amateur detective who started who being serious but, and I’m not fond of the later novels for this, become terribly comic in the later novels. Let me note that Carr was really prolific as there were twenty-two novels with him starting in the Thirties over a thirty-year period. One of the finest is The White Priory Murders which was a Wodehousian country weekend with yet another locked room mystery in it. 

He also, as did other writers of British mysteries, created a French detective, one by the name of Henri Bencolin, a magistrate in the Paris judicial system. (Though I’ve not mentioned it, all of his mysteries are set in the Twenties onward.) Carr interestingly has an American writer Jeff Marle narrating the stories here and he describes Bencolin as looking and feeling Satanic. His methods are certainly not those of the other two detectives as he’s quite rough when need be to get a case solved. 

There are but four short stories and five novels of which I think The Last Gallows is the best. 

With Adrian Conan Doyle, the youngest son of Arthur Conan Doyle, Carr wrote some Sherlock Holmes stories that were published in The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes collection. Not in-print but used copies available reasonably from the usual suspects. 

He was also chosen by the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1949 to write the biography of the writer. That work, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is in-print in a trade paper edition.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

(13) ARTILLERY AND JOSEPHINE. Haley Zapal is the first reviewer I’ve seen who is genuinely enthusiastic about Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. Find out why in “Review: Napoleon” at Nerds of a Feather.

…The scenes where men and horses fall into the water are brilliant and artistic. There are things in Napoleon that I definitely have never seen before, and that’s wild considering director Scott is nearing 90. There is also absolutely brutal gore that makes Saving Private Ryan seem like Hogan’s Heroes….

(14) IT’S WASHED. Applause to Arturo Serrano for being one of the rare folk reviewing The Marvels who talks about the movie instead of its box office. But he’s no fan of the movie either: he rates “On the woes of ‘The Marvels’” only 5on a scale of 10 at Nerds of a Feather.

Someone at Marvel Studios should have pointed out that being simultaneously a sequel to WandaVisionCaptain MarvelMs. Marvel and Secret Invasion and providing two sequel teases was too much weight to load onto the shoulders of one movie. But we’ve played this tune before: Marvel movies are doomed to be mere links in a neverending chain, each forgettable villain is just there to get the pieces in position for the next entry, what you see isn’t most of what the director intended, and so on. To keep going to theaters for a Marvel movie is by now a thoughtless habit, like grabbing one more potato chip when you know you’re full….

(15) IT’S COLD OUTSIDE. The New York Times covers “A Video Game That Doubles as a World War I History Lesson”. “Last Train Home tells an overlooked story of the Czechoslovak Legion’s evacuation across Russia in the embers of the Great War.”

 … Foregrounding historical accuracy was a priority for Ashborne’s first original game, Last Train Home, which retells the Legion’s rolling evacuation eastward across Russia in the embers of the war. Its journey for homebound ships at the port of Vladivostok was tangled in Russia’s internal conflict between Bolshevik and anti-Bolshevik armies….

…Jos Hoebe, the founder of BlackMill Games and a longtime producer of World War I shooters, said video game developers had a responsibility to get details correct, especially when a particular battle or event has few depictions in popular culture. For his games, Hoebe digests historical documents in an attempt to understand the average soldier and shed light on overlooked aspects of combat.

“It feels like we’re responsible for creating the image that people have of this theater of war,” Hoebe said.

Last Train Home is a real-time strategy game in which the player orders specialized squads around rural battlefields. Scouts clear the fog of war, riflemen charge at enemies — usually the Bolshevik Red Army — and medics heal wounds. Another significant portion of the game is managing the armored train and exhausted infantry while fighting disease, starvation and the cruel Siberian cold…..

(16) THE DOOR INTO WINTER. Here’s an interesting artifact at Fullerton Arms Ballintoy: Giant’s Causeway North Coast Guesthouse and Restaurant in Ireland.

In 2016, Storm Gertrude ripped up some centuries-old beeches from the avenue known as Dark Hedges, (familiar to Game of Thrones fans as the Kingsroad). Ten doors, fashioned from the fallen trees, were carved with scenes from the cult TV show and placed in 10 pubs with Thrones connections in Northern Ireland. A fierce dragon embellishes the deep-brown polished door in Ballintoy’s Fullerton Arms. From the pub, it’s 20 minutes’ walk down a dramatic winding road to the cliff-ringed harbour, used to film scenes involving Theon Greyjoy in the Iron Islands. The steep climb back up will help build an appetite for the pub’s rope-grown mussels or seafood chowder, and Northern Irish specialities such as champ (mash with spring onions).
Doubles from £60 B&B

(17) NONE DARE CALL IT “LIP-SYNCHING”. A ventriloquist and his dummy sing “’Time Warp’ from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

“Time Warp” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a song by Nell Campbell, Patricia Quinn, and Richard O’Brien as sung by Terry Fator and Walter In this video Terry is singing live without moving his lips, 100% guaranteed!

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

Pixel Scroll 11/24/23 “My Bellona” — Theme Song from Dhalgren: The Musical

(1) R’LYEH AND PUPPIES. Francis Gooding’s review of The World We Make includes comments placing it in recent genre history: “Slimed It: On N.K. Jemisin” in The London Review of Books.

…The backstory to this battle with Cthulhu was widely covered when The City We Became first appeared. It stretches back to 2011, when the Nigerian American writer Nnedi Okorafor won the World Fantasy Award for her novel Who Fears Death. The prize came with a trophy – an ugly sculpture of Lovecraft’s head – and Okorafor wrote a thoughtful, measured blog post about her conflicted feelings on getting the award, having discovered just how racist Lovecraft was. A petition was drawn up to have the Lovecraft trophy replaced, and there was something of a furore in the sci-fi and fantasy community about what to do with Lovecraft now that, belatedly, his influence and reputation had to be squared with his racism.

The debate that followed had the disheartening outlines familiar from other culture war clashes of the time. A reactionary bitterness at progressive political gains came to the surface, a sure sign of festering prejudice. A few years later, that lurking ressentiment assumed a more active form: a concerted effort by two organised groups of authors and fans (known as the ‘Sad Puppies’ and ‘Rabid Puppies’), to skew the public nomination process for the prestigious Hugo Awards in sci-fi publishing. In response to a perceived bias in favour of the liberal left in all its manifestations – Black and brown people, women, novels with progressive themes (‘boring message fic’), gay writers and so on – the Puppies flooded the nominations with their own picks. Some of the people involved were connected to the then ascendent alt-right, and racist abuse was aimed at Jemisin herself. But though the campaign succeeded in souring the atmosphere, it didn’t achieve its desired result: in 2016, on a slate dominated by the Puppies’ astroturfed nominees, Jemisin won the Hugo for best novel with The Fifth Season, the first book in her Broken Earth trilogy. She was the first Black writer to win the award. Both the book’s sequels, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky, won the Hugo in subsequent years; a fourth Hugo followed in 2019 for the novella Emergency Skin.

The alt-right of the 2000s and early 2010s was preparing the ground for the subsequent radicalisation of the mainstream. The neofascist ideologies that once lurked in the subcultural margins have since become the basis of the ‘war on woke’, as an endless succession of manufactured outrages have bound small-c conservatives ever more tightly to what were once outré far-right positions. The eldritch bullshit that turbo-charged the Trump era wasn’t put back in its box. Jemisin evidently felt there was unfinished business. ‘The City Born Great’ was a knowing literary confrontation with the noisy and reactionary elements in the sci-fi community for whom Lovecraft remains talismanic.

In the novels, New York’s initial scrap with the Enemy expands to take in wider, ongoing struggles. Lovecraft, however, remains elemental. It eventually emerges that the Enemy is the personification of R’lyeh, the lost city from Lovecraft’s ‘The Call of Cthulhu’. Lovecraft’s stories often feature dead, inhuman cities from an unfathomably ancient past. Jemisin’s cities are the opposite, alive and defiantly human – real people, right now. And Jemisin makes sure to embody them in just the sort of people Lovecraft loathed. All the boroughs (bar Staten Island) are Black, Asian or Indigenous; and Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx and New Jersey – later an honorary sixth borough – are gay or queer…

(2) PERSONAL FAVORITE WHO MOMENTS. “’My favourite moment is me … not in a big-headed way!’ Stars share their best Doctor Who memories – part four” in the Guardian.

Neve McIntosh (played Silurians, including Madame Vastra, 2010-2014)

The episode A Good Man Goes to War was so special because they’d killed me off twice before and I was amazed to be asked back, as a goodie not a baddie, with Catrin Stewart as my fabulous kick-ass wife and brand new friend and stunt potato Dan Starkey! The best bit was filming the dematerialisation. The director cries “freeze!”. We are still as statues, two guys from the art department run out and flat-pack the Tardis, then, “action!”, and we all react to the Doctor disappearing off to a new adventure! Of course Madame Vastra is blase about it all but inside I was bursting with delight!

(3) WORKING HER WAY BACK. Writer Kelly Barnhill tells “How a Traumatic Brain Injury Changed Me” in an opinion piece for the New York Times.

[Ms. Barnhill is the author of “The Ogress and the Orphans.” She experienced a traumatic brain injury in 2021.]

I’ve been trying to write this essay for a very long time. Months, I think. Or maybe even longer, before I ever mentioned it to anyone, before I let anyone know that I was even capable of multiple sentences again. When all I could muster writing was a single sentence on a note card. My brain works differently now than it used to, and differently than I feel that it ought to. I told my speech therapist that I was frustrated that I haven’t been able to write fiction since experiencing a traumatic brain injury — which means that I am still, after nearly two years, unable to do my job.

He nodded with practiced care. “That must feel frustrating,” he said. “But maybe it’s important to focus on what you can do.”

Which is fair, I suppose. But I still wanted to clock him.

Healing from any injury is a process of rebuilding cells and tissues and structures — taking that which is broken and making it new again. Healing a brain injury is the process of rebuilding not only tissues and cells and the connections between those cells, but also memory, thoughts, imagination, the fundamentals of language and our very concept of ourselves.

I am rebuilding myself, you see. Right now. Sentence by sentence.

In December 2021, just a few months before the publication of two of my novels, “The Ogress and the Orphans” and “When Women Were Dragons,” I took a colossal spill down the stairs.

My husband heard me holler and found me in an unconscious heap. I remember none of this. It’s strange not remembering the moment that changed my life, that altered my work and vocation, that disrupted the me-ness of me. I think, though, that my body remembers it, even if I do not. A chaos of movement. A scramble through space. A short, sharp knock at the back of my head. And then a thunderous dark….

The piece discusses the many changes to her life and the challenges in recovery, and ends:

…But lately, I’ve had dreams of writing. I wake up in tears. What story was I writing? No idea. But each neuron shoots forth messages into the dark. A small candle. A lighthouse at the edge of a stormy ocean. I exist. I saw this. Felt this. Know this. Am this. Meanwhile, my sentences have grown. I’ve taken to using larger index cards. Sometimes I go as far as a steno pad. A full sheet of paper is too much — my eyes can’t track it very well. I get lost. I need something small and contained, where I can fit pretty words into a pretty sentence and allow them to become more than themselves.

Recently, I wrote a story. Only six sentences long, but a story nonetheless. With a character, a place and the passage of time. An opening, a turn, a conclusion. Such a small thing, a tiny accomplishment. And yet. I stared at the card for a long time, utterly astonished.

(4) DETAILS OF SERGEY LUKYANENKO’S DECEMBER BOOK TOUR IN CHINA. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] Further to the File 770 post on November 12, Sergey Lukanenko’s visit to China in December has now been publicly announced on Chinese social media.  That Weixin/WeChat piece describes him as a GoH of the 2023 Chengdu Worldcon (2023成都世界科幻大会荣誉主宾), despite his non-appearance then.

He will be making four appearances in Chengdu between December 1st and 4th, two in Beijing on the 7th and 8th, and a final one in Shanghai on the 10th.  Three organizations are listed as event co-hosts:

The announcement also indicates a number of people will be appearing alongside Lukyanenko at some of the events:

  • Yao Haijun – deputy editor-in-chief of Science Fiction World, Hugo finalist and member of the Chengdu concom
  • Jiang Zhenyu – member of the Chengdu concom
  • Baoshu – writer of a Three-Body Problem sequel, amongst other works

(5) ILYA SAYS, ‘OPEN CHANNEL BEEB…’ [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] There has been a lot the past week on BBC Radio 4 or the Home Service as I like to call it, of likely interest to Filers (and indeed SF² Concateneers)… 

This month’s Open Book has a substantive section on book banning in the USA (“Bestselling novelist Michael Connelly talks about his response to the ongoing campaigns banning books in American school libraries.”) We do not have this problem to such a degree over here in Brit Cit but, from coverage in File770, it is clearly a substantive issue in the US mega-cities and especially the Cursed Earth. You can listen to the programme here

Doctor Who is 60 this year and some of us in Brit Cit remember its first episode, peering out from behind the sofa. Anyway, the BBC has a number of programmes to mark this special anniversary. One of these was Doctor Who: The Wilderness Years that looked at why the original series ended and what happened over the years when the show was not on our screens. 

In December 1989 – after 26 years on TV, 694 episodes and seven different Doctors – Doctor Who, the longest running series in the history of British television, was quietly exterminated by the BBC. It remained off air for 16 years until the series was revived in 2005, quite spectacularly under the auspices of Russell T Davies with Christopher Eccleston as the Time Lord. But the period between 1989 and 2005 was a very special interregnum. Known as the Wilderness Years, they belonged to the true keepers of the flame, Doctor Who fans – and never had a wilderness proved so fertile. 

You can listen to the programme here

iPromise was a cyberpunk stand-alone radio play about a hacker hired by not nice people to break into a quantum computer so as to get at cryptocurrency…. 

A quantum cryptocurrency audio heist movie and psychological tech thriller exploring the illusory nature of money itself. Bit – real name Rebecca “Becky” Isobel Troughton, BIT, get it? – is in trouble. Big trouble. She’s only gone and hacked into US mainframes and brought the entire eastern seaboard to a standstill. And now she’s on everybody’s Most Wanted list. But Bit is no hacking ‘gun for hire’. She’s driven by principle and she’s the very best at what she does. So when shady government organisations come knocking in a bid to secure her services, she just sends them packing. Well, sort of. .

You can listen to the play here

Spores is a five-part SF series. Mysterious glowing fungi appear in a house. Father and son are exposed to its spores. The father becomes unresponsive and the mother takes it upon herself to get out with her son and go camping. But did they get away in time…? You can listen to episode one here; episode two here; episode three here; episode four here; episode five here.

(6) SF2C EXITS X. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I see that a load of folk are leaving Twitter or X or whatever it is these days. Actually, SF² Concatenation left Twitter a few months ago after the Musk takeover. We only used Twitter for site alerts and not chat, and found only a handful of folk signed up to our account. But I had kept it going for those few die-hard followers, sometimes treating them to some early releases before they were announced on our various indices pages. The thing is that that account, @SF2Concat, was set up ages ago using a now defunct e-mail address.

One of the first things Musk did was to insist on strengthening passwords blocking accounts – such as ours – that did not have a password that included a number, symbol and Klingon hieroglyph. To get our account back, I’d have to give Twitter an extant e-mail address. Those that know me are aware that I really hate to sign up to anything (so, for example, for the first time since 1979 I will not be on the science programme of next year’s British Worldcon – Less work for me, so that’s a plus.)

Anyway, seeing the writing on the wall what with Musk’s apparent support of Trump’s ramblings, I decided not to continue with Twitter. The account is still there for future digital archaeologists.

For those wanting alerts, the wonderful Caroline frequently posts something on the BSFA Facebook page (last season edition alert here) which I mention because the BSFA is a worthy page to follow for a plethora of other reasons. And if you are on FB I give a shout out to one of Brit Cit’s local SF group pages North Heath SF.

(7) LET’S FIX THAT RIGHT UP. Artnet analyzes how “A Prankster Used A.I. to ‘Improve’ Edward Hopper’s Classic ‘Nighthawks’”.

The rise of artificial intelligence has created reams of new artworks, many of them generated, controversially, on the backs of artist’s existing pieces. Now, one X (formerly Twitter) user has shown a way that A.I. can offer “improvements” to classic works of art, starting with Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, and even one of the art world’s most beloved critics may have fallen for the gag.

“Using AI, I was able to take some old painting and make it better,” posted X user Sonch (@soncharm) last week, sharing a jpeg of Edward Hopper’s famous scene of urban ennui, Nighthawks from 1942, how housed in the Art Institute of Chicago. “Where even is this? Who are the people? Huh? You’re too far away to really see the setup. Whole left side blank. Nothing here to grab onto,” Sonch complained….

Click on tweets for larger images.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born November 24, 1948 Spider Robinson, 75. Spider’s an American-born Canadian citizen who’s one of my favorite writers and individuals to boot. 

This is not a complete listing of what he’s written, just my experiences with him and what I think should be commented upon.

I wasn’t surprised to discover that his first sale, “The Guy with the Eyes”, published by Analog in February 1973, was one of his Callahan stories. Four years later, he released Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, a collection of Callahan short stories. These stories, and the later novels, make frequent reference to the works of mystery writer John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee stories.

I’m very fond of the Lady Slings The Booze and Booze and Callahan’s Key as these Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon novels allow him to develop the characters at length more than he dies in the short stories. 

It was at this time that he married Jeanne Robinson, with whom he later co-wrote the quite excellent Stardance trilogy. The first, “Stardance”, a novella, won a Hugo at IguanaCon II, and a Nebula as well. 

His first published novel, Telempath, was a reworking of the “By Any Other Name” novella. 

And there’s Variable Star which as you know was based on an outline by Heinlein. I think it was, errr, ok. Not great, not bad, just ok. 

Hugo wise, I mentioned the first “Stardance” novella garnered a Hugo as did his “By Any Other Name” novella at SunCon and “Melancholy Elephants” short story which also got a Hugo at ConStellation. He was an Astounding Award Best Writer as well. And he received a much deserved LASFS Forry Award for Lifetime Achievement. 

He hasn’t published anything since 2008 though he’s been working on a novel, Orphan Stars, for the last decade and is said to be working on his autobiography as well.

He was Toastmaster at MagiCon and Torcon 3.

Spider and Jeanne Robinson at MagiCon. Photo by Lenny Provenzano.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) WORKING FOR THE DOCTOR EVERY NIGHT AND DAY. “’It’s £2m ploughed into Cardiff’: how Doctor Who boosted the Welsh economy” in the Guardian.

…The original Doctor Who series ran from 1963 to 1989 before being mothballed. The report acknowledges that basing the series in Cardiff for its revival at the turn of the century felt like a risk.

But the show, originally starring Christopher Eccleston as the Time Lord and first broadcast in 2005, was an immediate success. Further series were commissioned and the BBC launched the spin-offs Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures.

As well as finding creative people ready to work on the series, the show used settings in and around Cardiff, from the beaches of South Glamorgan to the capital’s castle and museums, prompting a spike in Doctor Who tourism.

The report, by economists within the BBC public policy team using research from the consortium Media Cymru and Cardiff University’s centre for the creative economy, looks at the impact of the show between 2004 and 2021. It estimates that each of the 13 revamped series generated the equivalent of 50 FTE (full-time equivalent) jobs per series in Wales, and 95 within the UK overall. These jobs are in addition to posts for people who directly work on the show.

It describes Doctor Who’s return as a “pivotal moment”, a catalyst for the growth of the Welsh creative industries over the past 15 to 20 years, claiming it paved the way for big BBC-commissioned shows including Merlin, Atlantis and Sherlock. This year, six new dramas have come out of Wales including Steeltown Murders, the story of the serial killer Joseph Kappen, and the thriller Wolf, both of which have won plaudits…

(11) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 97 of Octothorpe, “The Future of Language”  is raring to go!

We fire up the LizBat signal and discuss the Chengdews (John’s new pun; he’s extremely proud of it) including WSFS discussion, before moving onto Glasgow 2024’s online plans and Novacon chat. Then we talk about books and games and stuff. In

(12) BRING ME THE HEAD OF E.T. “An otherworldly auction full of cinematic sci-fi props will land in Beverly Hills” promises NBC Los Angeles.

…[December is] an eye-catching and otherworldly month, in other words, but sci-fi splendor and the heart of the holiday season don’t intertwine all that often, or as often as someone who adores both might wish.

But here’s some good news: That’s changing about a week ahead of Christmas when the “Robots, Wizards, Heroes & Aliens: Hollywood Legends” auction phones home at Julien’s Auctions in Beverly Hills.

Indeed, “phones homes” is a reference to a certain sweet space traveler, so you can bet you’ll spy E.T the Extra-Terrestrial, or rather an animatronic E.T. head, in the collection.

Other iconic additions to the line-up include a “Fantastic Voyage” ship, a Xenomorph head from “Aliens,” a “Back to the Future Part II” hoverboard, and the oh-so-cuddly Muffit II the daggit, a “Battlestar Galactica” favorite; Marvel and Harry Potter treasures will also be in the spotlight….

(13) THE ART IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. Nature tells readers “How AI is expanding art history”. (Don’t worry, nothing in here about “Nighthawks”.)

From identifying disputed artworks to reconstructing lost masterpieces, artificial intelligence is enriching how we interpret our cultural heritage.

Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and computer vision are revolutionizing research — from medicine and biology to Earth and space sciences. Now, it’s art history’s turn.

For decades, conventionally trained art scholars have been slow to take up computational analysis, dismissing it as too limited and simplistic. But, as I describe in my book Pixels and Paintings, out this month, algorithms are advancing fast, and dozens of studies are now proving the power of AI to shed new light on fine-art paintings and drawings.

For example, by analysing brush strokes, colour and style, AI-driven tools are revealing how artists’ understanding of the science of optics has helped them to convey light and perspective. Programs are recovering the appearance of lost or hidden artworks and even computing the ‘meanings’ of some paintings, by identifying symbols, for example…

(14) FIRE-AND-FORGET MATING TECHNIQUE. Butts with a mind of their own. Don’t tell me you haven’t seen this in fandom. “Why these sea worms detach their butts to reproduce” at Popular Science.

Bye bye, butt

Some segmented sea worms like the syllid worm go through a reproductive process called stolonization. The stolon is the worm’s posterior organ and it is full of eggs or sperm depending on the worm’s sex. During stolonization, the stolon completely detaches from the rest of the worm’s body for reproduction. 

This detached butt swims around by itself and spawns when it meets another stolon of the opposite sex. This autonomous swimming is believed to protect the original body of the worm from dangers in the environment and help the eggs and sperm travel longer distances. 

In order to swim by themselves, the stolon have to develop their own eyes, antennae, and swimming bristles while still attached to their original body. How this happens has been a mystery. The formation of the stolon itself begins when the gonads near the worm’s butt mature. A head is then formed in the front of the developing stolon, with the eyes, antennae, and swimming bristles following close behind. It develops its nerves and the ability to sense and behave independently before the stolon detaches from the rest of the body….

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. John King Tarpinian found this old Tonight Show clip on YouTube: “Paul Williams Arrives Straight From Filming ‘Battle for the Planet of the Apes’”.

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Ersatz Culture, Lise Andreasen, Steven French, 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 11/11/23 Thanks To His Repellatron Skyway, Tom Swift Always Takes The High Road

(1) BESTSELLING WRITERS WILL OPEN BOOKSTORE. [Item by Anne Marble.] Brian Keene and Mary SanGiovanni are opening an indie bookstore in the historic district of Columbia, Pennsylvania. They’re planning to open it in the spring of 2024. They were inspired by indie bookstores such as Mysterious Galaxy, Dark Delicacies, etc.

Brian Keene and Mary SanGiovanni

Here’s their announcement: “New Brick and Mortar Bookstore”.

At the respective ages of fifty-six and forty (mumbles incoherently), Mary and I are planning for our golden years. We have seen too many of our peers struggling to write in their later years, and dependent upon those advances and royalties from book sales. It’s a sobering and frightening prospect, and we’d like a different future, with a second revenue stream so that we can continue to write in our old age….

…We are opening an independent bookstore specializing in Horror, Science-Fiction, Fantasy, Bizarro, and other speculative fiction genres.

Vortex Books & Comics will open Spring of 2024 in the historic district of beautiful Columbia, Pennsylvania — easily and quickly accessible from Baltimore, Philadelphia, Harrisburg, New York City, Washington D.C. and more. We’ll carry a full complement of books from the Big Five, as well as hundreds of books from many cool indie publishers and small presses, and titles in Espanol and other languages. We’ll host weekly signings, readings, workshops, and other events. We know this business, and are intimately familiar with its ups and downs, ebbs and flows. Our goal is to make the store a destination. As our record for the last 30 years shows, we believe that Horror fiction is for everyone, and Vortex will echo that. All are welcome, and all will have a place on our shelves….

And for everyone in the community who wants to help, there’s a GoFundMe: “Brian Keene and Mary SanGiovanni’s Bookstore”.

…If you would like to show your solidarity and support with a donation, it will be put toward further set-up costs such as fixtures, security, inventory, marketing and advertising, signage, etc. thus giving us a bit of breathing room and time to make the store profitable….

(2) AI IN TIMES TO COME. [Item by Cliff.] Very interesting take on ‘AI’ from a number of authors. Two of them reference Italo Calvino, who I guess was ahead of his time in dwelling on this subject.“’It is a beast that needs to be tamed’: leading novelists on how AI could rewrite the future” in the Guardian.

Bernardine Evaristo

… Imagine a future where those who are most adept at getting AI to write creatively will dominate, while we writers who spend a lifetime devoted to our craft are sidelined. OK, this is a worst‑case scenario, but we have to consider it, because ChatGPT and the other Large Language Models (LLMs) out there have been programmed to imagine a future that threatens many creative professions. ChatGPT is already responding to the questions I ask it in seconds, quite reliably. It is an impressive beast, but one that needs to be tamed. We cannot afford to ignore it…

(3) CUT! The Hugo Book Club Blog argues against ratification of two new Hugo categories which received first passage at the Chengdu Worldcon business meeting: “Hugo Book Club Blog: Indie Cinema And The Hugo Of Doom”.

At the 2023 WSFS Business Meeting, a constitutional amendment was passed that would (if ratified at the 2024 Business Meeting) add two new categories to the already long list of Hugo Awards: Best Independent Short Film and Best Independent Feature Film.

The beauty and diversity of global cinema and of independent film is something that should be more celebrated at the Hugo Awards. But despite our love of independent SFF cinema, we are firmly opposed to the creation of a secondary award for a specific type of movie.

… In recent years, sub-par corporate works such as The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and Avengers Endgame have received Hugo nods ahead of significantly better independent and foreign movies such as Robot & Frank and Prospect. That does point to problems with the category. But the solution is advocacy. People who care about independent cinema should be working to encourage Hugo voters to check out a wider variety of films, and then giving them the time to watch those movies by WSFS extension of eligibility under rule 3.4.3.

Over the past four years, we have filed extension of eligibility motions (allowing a longer time for Hugo voters to consider nominating) on lower-budget SFF movies like After YangStrawberry MansionNeptune FrostMad GodNine DaysBeyond The Infinite Two MinutesPsycho GoremanThe Color Out Of Space, and Prospect. We are passionate about celebrating and promoting independent SFF movies. However, we do not think that the best way to recognize that is with the creation of new Hugo Award categories, seemingly based on how much money a film makes.

There are a number of problems with the idea of a Hugo Award for independent cinema. The first and most significant to us is that creating these categories positions independent cinema as something other than “real” movies…

(4) CHENGDU WORLDCON ROUNDUP. [Item by Ersatz Culture.]

Southern Weekly article

This is a long piece – which can also be found in truncated form here, and partially behind a login barrier here – covering a number of aspects of the convention.  There are some factual errors – for example, stating that the first Worldcon took place in Chicago – but overall it is the most thorough coverage of the con that I’ve seen from a media outlet.

Following are several extracts, via Google Translate with manual edits to the text for style and grammar.  I have reordered and grouped chunks of the text, in order to put related material together.  Note: 南方周末 literally translates as “Southern Weekend”, but images on that page show that they use the English name “Southern Weekly”, so I’ve tried to update all references from the former to the latter.

On the location and date of the con:

The Chengdu Science Fiction Museum, the main venue of the 81st World Science Fiction Convention, is located in the center of a two-kilometer radius area called “Science Fiction Avenue”. When Chengdu’s bid to host the event was successful two years ago, it was still a wilderness. This plot of land in Pidu District, Chengdu, which was originally planned as a “Science and Technology Museum”, was quickly upgraded to become a “Science Fiction Museum”…

It’s already chilly in Chengdu in late October, and the summer vacation period for students is long past. When Chengdu applied to host the World Science Fiction Convention in 2021, many student science fiction fans spent money – around 600 yuan [$80 USD] – to register as members of DisCon III, in order to vote for Chengdu [in site selection], with the expectation that they would attend the science fiction event during their summer vacation…

Co-chair Chen Shi comments:

[Note: He also uses the English name Raistlin Chen – as seen on the video wall at the ceremonies – but most English language material, such as the staff page on the con’s site, uses Chen Shi, so I’ve kept with that.

Pretty much all coverage of the con describes him – and the other members of the concom – as members of the “Chengdu Science Fiction Society” (examples: 12), but an archived copy of the original “Worldcon in China” website shows that he is/was a marketing director at the Chengdu Business Daily news organization, and that several other members of the bid/con team are/were also employees of that company.  Whether people will feel that this context is relevant, YMMV…]

“Its charm is that it is a spirit based on a community of creators. Everyone is both a participant and a creator. This is something given to it by cultural tradition and cannot be replaced or copied casually,” convention co-chair Chen Shi told Southern Weekly reporters…

Chen Shi had also applied for a panel at Chi-Con 8. “I just filled in a form, and the organizing committee told me when and where it would take place. You can just do it yourself, and they won’t bother you,” Chen Shi said.  “Given China’s cultural background, this may not be suitable.”

“The foreign World Science Fiction Convention is very attractive to the fantasy fandom, but within the fandom, their core membership is around 20,000 people. The number of people who come every year does not change much, and it has formed its own community culture. There is a cultural threshold you have to pass in order to enter that community. If we were to completely copy that, it might be very miserable…” When Chen Shi first thought about what kind of World Science Fiction Convention he would hold, he had already decided to take a different path.

[Question: when Chen Shi and/or the Chengdu team were doing presentations at other events, was there any indication that “he had already decided to take a different path”, or what that path might be?]

On the exhibition areas and panels:

The two large halls on the first floor are the divided into the commercial exhibitors, and the science fiction fan tables. Most of the dozens of booths in the corporate exhibition hall are Chinese companies. Some sell science fiction cultural creations, some make projections, and more are engaged in science fiction publishing. The sound and light effects of their booths are eye-catching, which clearly differs from the adjacent fan exhibition area. The corporate exhibition hall is something that has never been seen in previous Worldcons. The support of the government, the participation of enterprises, and the brand promotion of a large number of sponsors have given the event more forms and commercial value.

Compared with the coolness of the corporate exhibition area, the science fiction fan exhibition area looks much simpler.  A table, a flag, an introduction card or a QR code. They come from university clubs, foreign science fiction organizations, and unknown amateur authors… It’s a bit like a recruitment fair for university clubs. On the table of the Tibetan science fiction club, there are Tibetan science fiction works that have been published over the years. A young Tibetan man patiently introduces the history of Tibetan science fiction to curious onlookers. This kind of atmosphere is more like the previous World Science Fiction Conventions. Science fiction literature research scholar Arthur Liu attended the 2019 Dublin Worldcon, and recalls that the atmosphere there was “free and easy”…

There were more than 400 panels registered for the Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention, and more than 230 panels were eventually held…  This time, the Chengdu Organizing Committee invited a total of more than 600 guests, including more than 180 overseas guests – of whom more than 150 people were present at the con – who formed the bulk of the panellists.

On the WSFS Business Meeting:

But old science fiction fans all know that “only by attending business meetings can you have a deep understanding of the organization and participation methods of the World Science Fiction Association and the World Science Fiction Convention, and you will feel some interesting things,” Chen Shi said.

If you have personally experienced the process and debate of the business meeting, it is not difficult to understand why the fandom circle calls this meeting the “Constitutional Amendment Conference.” The business meetings of the Chengdu Worldcon are held in the Meteor Hall of the Science Fiction Hall, which is a small hall independent of the main building. People with [a WSFS] membership can enter to listen, express opinions and vote at any time. …

Comment: regarding “a small hall independent of the main building”, comments I have seen from a couple of different people indicated that it had inaccessibility issues not that far from “Beware of the Leopard” levels.  Certainly, I could never find any reference to the “Meteor Hall” on any of the several interior and exterior maps of the con that came into my possession.  (Anyone who did attend the Business Meetings, please correct me if my impression is incorrect.)

On organizational hassles for smaller entities:

It is not easy for publishers participating in the exhibition to sign and sell their books at this venue.

Xixi (pseudonym) is an editor at a publishing house. This time he brought an author’s science fiction novel to Chengdu and planned a panel. He hoped that science fiction fans could have a good chat with the author themselves, and hold a book signing.  Xixi initially communicated the entire process to the organizing committee, but a few days before the opening, he received a notice that the panel could not be placed together with the signing session. “In normal book fairs, there are book signings after the interaction between authors and readers, but here the two events must be separated in both time and location,” Xixi said. This means that readers who are interested in the author would have to make two trips to get a signed copy.

On the corporate/commercial aspects of the con:

There are various panels, forums, and summits at the World Science Fiction Convention, but in addition to the opening and closing ceremonies and the Hugo Award presentation night, there was also an “Industrial Development Summit”. Almost all the major guests were invited to attend this summit, and the lineup was comparable to the Hugo Awards night.

This was the first time an industry development-related conference has been held at the World Science Fiction Convention. At the meeting, a number of plans related to the development of the science fiction industry were announced, including the “Chengdu Consensus on the Science Fiction Industry”, the Tianwen Program, the “2023 China Chengdu Science Fiction Industry Report”, and there was even a centralized signing ceremony for science fiction industry projects. According to reports, there were 21 signed projects, with a total investment of 8 billion yuan [approx $1 billion USD].

At this “Industrial Development Summit”, Liu Cixin no longer talked about literature, but talked about industrial development: “Chengdu has long planned the layout of the science fiction industry, and related industrial plans, industrial policies, talent policies, etc. have been implemented.”

“Science fiction full industry chain ecosystem”, “IP creation” and “strengthening the image of the science fiction city”: faced with these various new words, Canadian science fiction writer Robert Sawyer said, “I am very shocked to see you turning science fiction into an industry.”  He said that in North America those who do these things may be publishers, and that science fiction is a career that is random, aimless, and without long-term planning. These industry figures were generally not invited to previous World Science Fiction Conventions, and most of the people who came were writers and editors.

The area where the Chengdu Science Fiction Museum is located will also be turned into the science fiction hub of Chengdu.  According to a person close to the local government, we were told that a science fiction industrial park may be built here in the future. “That street is a science fiction themed block, and science fiction companies may move in in the future. This area is said to be a science fiction education base; there will be training camps for science fiction writers, and summer camps for students every year, and the science fiction museum itself is a large-scale consumer and public welfare space. This area will be built into a science fiction themed tourist destination.” …

On how the more traditional aspects of Worldcons fared:

Previous conventions would set up a memorial area, which is a place for middle-aged and elderly science fiction fans to reminisce and reminisce about the past.  In 2017, the British science fiction writer Brian Aldiss [who had previously visited Chengdu, and has several works published in China] passed away. There was a small space at the World Science Fiction Convention that year, displaying his works, and photos from his life, as well as some of his treasure possessions, and a black and white TV playing back interviews with him. In 2023, Aldiss’ daughter Wendy had also come to Chengdu. She told our reporters that the Chengdu Worldcon was originally going to hold an exhibition for those photos, but it was not possible “because of a lack of space.” …

[Double Hugo finalist, CEO of the publisher 8 Light Minutes, and member of the Chengdu concom] Yang Feng originally planned to stage a commemorative exhibition at the convention, in honour of Mike Resnick, the former editor-in-chief of the American science fiction magazine “Galaxy’s Edge”.  After Resnick’s death in 2020, his collection and books were put up for online auction, and 8 Light Minutes bought a large number of items. “Look, this is full of his things,” said Yang Feng, pointing to a glass cabinet.  Initially, the organizers promised an exhibition area of 70 square meters. Worried about missing out, “thousands of yuan [was spent] on freight shipping” the collected items.  However, the exhibition area ended up being occupied by several technology companies, and Yang Feng was only given a glass cabinet.

Fans and authors talk about the changes and clashes in culture at this Worldcon:

In the midst of this sea of noise, a man was dozing on a chair. He had white hair, a cowboy hat on the table, and his eyes were lowered, as if he had entered another world. His name was James Joseph [Styles], and he had come from Australia. He is in his seventies and has been a science fiction fan for nearly fifty years. In 1975, the World Science Fiction Convention was held in Oceania for the first time. He was moved by the atmosphere of science fiction and has attended Worldcons 15 times to date.

James told us that this convention is the most special one he has ever been to. He had never seen so many enthusiastic and young science fiction fans [when he attended cons] in Europe or the United States before…

… Wang Jinkang, another science fiction writer who has stopped writing, also recalled the low ebb of Chinese science fiction in the 1990s. “At that time, Chinese science fiction was wild, and received little attention from society. However, there were also many science fiction fans. When we went to universities to participate in activities, they all I used chalk to write ‘Welcome Mr. Wang Jinkang’ on the blackboard, and that’s how we started to communicate. The simplicity back then had its charm, and I still miss it very much. It is indeed different now.”

“You can vaguely feel a conflict between [different] science fiction cultures in the convention venue,” Zero Gravity News co-editor Ling Shizhen told Southern Weekly reporters, “but I don’t think this is really a conflict. Whether things are harmful or meaningless, this is a necessary process.  If you want to embrace a truly diverse world, this step cannot be escaped.”

Outside of the above extracts, a number of people familiar to Filers, such as Ben Yalow, Kevin Standlee, Donald Eastlake, and Nicholas Whyte are namechecked or interviewed.

(5) HUNGARIAN POLITICAL EFFORTS TO LIMIT LGBTQ BOOKS AND MEDIA. The New York Times tells how “Restrictions on L.G.B.T.Q. Depictions Rattle Hungary’s Cultural World”.

When a far-right member of Hungary’s Parliament invited the media three years ago to watch her shred a book of fairy tales that included a gay Cinderella, only one reporter showed up.

But what began as lonely, crank campaign against “homosexual propaganda” by a fringe nationalist legislator, Dora Duro, has snowballed into a national movement led by the government to restrict depictions of gay and transgender people in Hungary.

The campaign has unsettled booksellers, who have been ordered to shrink-wrap works that “popularize homosexuality” to prevent young readers from browsing, and also rattled one of Hungary’s premier cultural institutions.

The director of the Hungarian National Museum was fired this past week for hosting an exhibition of news photographs, a few of which featured men in women’s clothing, and for suggesting that his staff had no legal right to check whether visitors were at least 18 years old.

The exhibition displayed scores of photos awarded prizes by the World Press Photo Foundation in Amsterdam and had been running for weeks before Ms. Duro went to take a look with a friend and noticed a handful of images showing older gay men in the Philippines that were shot on assignment for The New York Times.

Also upset by explanatory texts that she believed were “indoctrinating” young visitors, she wrote a letter to Hungary’s culture minister, Janos Csak, complaining that photos of men wearing high heels and lipstick violated a Hungarian law that bans the display to minors of content deemed to promote homosexuality or gender fluidity.

The minister ordered the museum to bar anyone under 18 from attending the exhibition.

Tamas Revesz, a Hungarian photographer who has organized the annual show for more than 30 years, said he was aghast to arrive at the museum to find signs at the entrance restricting entry to adults “as if this place were a porn shop.”…

… Hannah Reyes Morales, who took the photographs at the center of the museum furor while on assignment for The New York Times and won a World Press Photo award, said her pictures of a Manila community called Golden Gays “are not dangerous or harmful” but portrayed “warm, kind and loving human beings.”

She said she was “saddened that their story is being kept in a shadow, echoing much of the oppression that the Golden Gays have had to live through over the years.”…

(6) DON’T SAY GAY-LICK. [Item by Anne Marble.] Have you seen this article about the use and abuse of Scottish Gaelic in Fourth Wing? (The article also mentions Holly Black and Sarah J. Maas.) It’s an interesting point — language is more political than people realize. At the same time, with all those Gaelic fantasies out there, I also wonder how many other authors got it wrong and weren’t called out in it. Hmm… “Reader Frustrated Over ‘Fourth Wing’s Gaelic” at The Mary Sue.

Over the summer, Scottish BookToker Muireann went viral on Tiktok for sharing the Scottish Gaelic pronunciation of words from the bestselling adult fantasy novel Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros. While she offered mild criticism of the book’s grammatical errors, Muireann spoke out again following a viral interview of Yarros at New York Comic-Con….

…Story-wise, Muireann expressed praise and excitement to see where the series goes. However, regarding the use of Scottish Gaelic, she had mixed feelings. Without spoiling anything, Muireann gave translations and best guesses on non-Gaelic words that looked to be fused with Gaelic ones. It was here she found missing accent marks and misspellings. Also, she found words in the book that, in Gaelic, would be two or three words instead of one. Many commenters appreciated the information and pointed to how different the audiobook was from actual Gaelic.

Muireann said it was cool for the language to be represented in such a popular book. She feels that other Celtic languages like Irish/Gaeilge (what Scots call Irish Gaelic) are more common in contemporary fantasy. Still, she put the onus on the publisher for not hiring a language consultant. That grace dropped off when Muireann heard Yarros speaking about the book.

“It is genuinely laughable to me that American fantasy authors can get away with this. They can use minority languages in such a disrespectful way. They’re just pronouncing them like English speakers. She’s just sprinkling Gaelic words in there to add a bit of spice to her fancy book.”

Veronica Valencia interviewed Rebecca Yarros for Popverse at NYCC 2023, where she asked Yarros to “set the record straight” on pronouncing words. After Popverse shared a video of this to TikTok, Muireann stitched it frustrated. She began by pointing out that Yarros said Gaelic by pronouncing it “gay-lick” which is a different language than the Scottish Gaelic (“gal-lick”). Muireann said most Gaelic words used were mispronounced in the interview. These were small mistakes that showed a genuine lack of care when bringing other cultures into the book…

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born November 11, 1916 Donald Franson. Longtime fan who lived most of his life in LA. Was active in the N3F and LASFS including serving as the secretary for years and was a member of Neffer Amateur Press Alliance.  Author of A Key to the Terminology of Science-Fiction Fandom. Also wrote A History of the Hugo, Nebula, and International Fantasy Awards, Listing Nominees & Winners, 1951-1970 and An Author Index to Astounding/Analog: Part II—Vol. 36, #1, September, 1945 to Vol. 73 #3, May, 1964, the first with Howard DeVore. (Died 2002.)
  • Born November 11, 1917 Mack Reynolds. He’d make Birthday Honors just for his first novel, The Case of the Little Green Men, published in 1951, which as you likely know is a murder mystery set at a Con. He gets Serious Geek Credits for writing the first original authorized classic Trek novel Mission to Horatius. And I’ve enjoyed his short fiction as well. He’s available at the usual suspects including The Case of the Little Green Men for very reasonable prices. (Died 1983.)
  • Born November 11, 1922 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. The Sirens of Titan was his first SF novel followed by Cat’s Cradle which after turning down his original thesis in 1947, the University of Chicago awarded him his master’s degree in anthropology in 1971 for this novel. Next was Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death which is one weird book and an even stranger film. It was nominated for best novel Nebula and Hugo Awards but lost both to Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. I’m fairly sure Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday is his last genre novel there’s a lot of short fiction where something of a genre nature might have occurred. (Died 2007.)
  • Born November 11, 1946 Ian Miller, 77. Let’s have one illustrator and an editor this time.  He did the backgrounds for Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards film. Genre wise, he did the cover art and interior illustrations for David Day’s The Tolkien Bestiary, and what I think is one of the weirder covers for Something Wicked This Way Comes. Oh and I did say editor, didn’t I? Well he was. Between 1983 and 1985, he co-edited Interzone along with John Clute, Alan Dorey, Malcolm Edwards, Colin Greenland, Roz Kaveney, Simon Ounsley and David Pringle. 
  • Born November 11, 1947 Victoria Schochet, 76. Wife of Eric Van Lustbader. She co-edited with John Silbersack and Mellisa Singer the most excellent The Berkley Showcase: New Writings in Science Fiction and Fantasy that came out in the Eighties. She worked editorially at Analog as their managing editor and additionally at Harper, Putnam, and as a senior editor at the Berkley Publishing Group, where she co-edited with Silbersack all five volumes of The Berkley Showcase: New Writings in Science Fiction and Fantasy.
  • Born November 11, 1974 Felix Gilman, 49. Two series. The first, Arjun series, started off with the Thunderer novel and has one more novel so far, Gears of the City, earned him a nomination for Astounding Award in both 2009 and 2010. The other series, Half-Made World, is fantasy with a generous dollop of steampunk served warm.

(8) THE OTHER THREE-BODY ADAPTATION. “’3 Body Problem’ Premiere Date, New Trailer From Netflix”The Hollywood Reporter shares them all.

The new sci-fi drama from the creators of Game of Thrones now has a premiere date: 3 Body Problem will launch on Netflix on March 21, 2024. The streamer also released a video with some new footage from the series, which is adapted from Liu Cixin’s Hugo Award-winning trilogy….

…There’s also a new, more specific description of the anticipated show: “A young woman’s fateful decision in 1960s China reverberates across space and time into the present day. When the laws of nature inexplicably unravel before their eyes, a close-knit group of brilliant scientists join forces with an unflinching detective to confront the greatest threat in humanity’s history.”

3 Body Problem is from Emmy-winning Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss along with Emmy-nominated True Blood writer-producer Alexander Woo.

Netflix also released some teaser art to promote the premiere date, which rather cleverly incorporates an element from the story that the novel’s fans will recognize…

(9) NO ONE WAS LEFT HOLDING THE BAG. “Astronauts dropped a tool bag during a spacewalk, and you can see it” says Space.com.

Joining stars, planets, nebulas, and galaxies as a target for skywatchers is now a surprisingly bright tool bag floating through the space around Earth. The bag of tools gave NASA astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara the slip on Nov. 2, 2023, as they were conducting a spacewalk outside of the International Space Station (ISS). 

The tool bag is now orbiting our planet just ahead of the ISS with a visual magnitude of around 6, according to EarthSky. That means it is slightly less bright than the ice giant Uranus, the seventh planet from the sun. As a result, the bag  —  officially known as a crew lock bag  —  is slightly too dim to be visible to the unaided eye, but skywatchers should be able to pick it up with binoculars.

To see it for yourself, first find out when you can find spot the space station over the next few months (NASA even has a new app to help you). The bag should be floating two to four minutes ahead of the station. As it descends rapidly, the bag is likely to disintegrate when it reaches an altitude of around 70 miles (113 kilometers) over Earth….

(10) GET A HEAD START ON SF2 CONCATENATION. [Item by Jonathan Cowie.] SF² Concatenation has published an advance post of an article ahead of its next seasonal edition as it is time sensitive. It is a longer version of the new British Library exhibition on Fantasy that File770 ran the other week. “British Library Fantasy Exhibition 2023”.

Also up is a short 1-page best of Nature ‘Futures’ short story: “’Aleph’ by Lavie Tidhar”. This story came out in 2022 before this year’s (2023) explosion in artificial intelligence (AI). But AI is not ‘General AI’. What would that first conversation be like?

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Anne Marble, Brian Keene, Cliff, Andrew Porter, Ersatz Culture, John King Tarpinian and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 11/10/23 Ralph 3.14159, P.I.

(0) Been having a lot of monitor trouble, so today’s Scroll is short.

(1) IN THE FALL. Mark Lawrence calls it the ”Goodreads Droop”. He shared a graph of the performance of his novel The Book That Wouldn’t Burn.

… When a book has ten or twenty ratings, many or all of them might come from friends and family, and the tendency is for these to rate highly. The first few hundred ratings will often come from highly motivated people – they may be fans of the author, or interested in new authors, and are generally predisposed to be generous. So that intitial high rating falls but not too much.

Next come the general readers who like the genre and specifics of the book but may have no general good feeling towards the author, and rate purely on what’s in front of them. Over the first few thousand ratings the average will generally drop swiftly…..

(2) PIECES OF EIGHT. “Paul McGann ‘to return as Eighth Doctor in new Doctor Who spin-off'” reports Radio Times.

… But just when you think things couldn’t get more exciting, the Doctor Who rumour mill has been churning out news of some very special potential spin-offs.

As reported by The Mirror, it looks as though Paul McGann could be set to make his return as the Eighth Doctor in a brand new series.

According to the newspaper, the spin-off will work in the same way as the Disney-created series for Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which also stream on Disney Plus, the new international home for Doctor Who.

A source told The Mirror: “Russell likes the idea of bringing back McGann with his own set of episodes in the TARDIS.

“Disney are on board as they want more original content and want to fully exploit the franchise as they know how big it could become.”…

(3) SWEET EMOTION. “’Inside Out 2′ Makes History as Disney’s Biggest Animated Trailer Launch” by Variety’s count.

People can’t get enough of Anxiety.

Not the emotion, but rather Pixar’s newest animated character played by Maya Hawke, as “Inside Out 2” marks the biggest animated trailer launch in Disney history.

The trailer to the animated sequel about personified feelings garnered 157 million views in 24 hours, according to Disney. “Inside Out 2” unseated the previous record holder, 2019’s “Frozen 2.” Of those 157 million views, 78 million came from TikTok.

“We are thrilled so many people have tuned in to check out the new trailer for ‘Inside Out 2,’” said Pete Docter, chief creative officer of Pixar. “When the first film came out, we knew that by telling a story where we could see our emotions — those little voices inside your head — there would be so much more to explore than we could possibly fit into one film.”…

(4) CHENGDU WORLDCON ROUNDUP. [Item by Ersatz Culture.]

The final part of Arthur Liu’s con report

The penultimate part – which was covered in Sunday’s Scroll – documented what could be thought of as more typical con activity, and was more upbeat than the earlier installments.  However the conclusion perhaps returns to the mood of the earlier parts, which is unsurprising when you read the opening paragraphs, which are very intense and perhaps not for all readers.

(Disclosure: I’m mentioned a couple of times in this report.)

Some extracts, via Google Translate with manual edits:

While we were waiting for the bus [well past midnight following the Hugo ceremony and party, after visiting RiverFlow in hospital], we looked across the road and saw the bright neon lights of a science fiction convention illuminating the ground in the cold night, like a gaudy cyberpunk street scene.

It was still dark on this side of the road, with only the screens of everyone’s mobile phones shining brightly.

We returned to the hotel in this atmosphere and went upstairs to rest.

Svetlana Alexievich once wrote a book titled [in Chinese] “I Don’t Know What to Say, About Death or Love”.  This state of wanting to say something, but being speechless due to continued depression, together with a nameless anger, continued to linger in my heart while attending the rest of the con. At 20:36 on Saturday 21st, after the Hugo Awards were presented, RiverFlow released the full text of his Hugo Award acceptance speech on his WeChat/Weixin account.  In the acknowledgments, he individually thanked all the friends who had supported Zero Gravity News. At the end, he said:

Grasp the things you can control, ignore the things you cannot control, and let go of your obsession with these uncontrollable things. This is maturity. Let your mentality be better. After all, the body is sinking, but the soul can be upward. Thank you, [Hugo Finalist] Lu Ban, for letting me understand this truth and sharing with me Marcus Aurelius’ famous saying: “Always remember, your soul is Invincible. As long as you are unwilling to be sad, nothing can make you sad. As long as you want to smile, you can smile immediately when you lift the corners of your mouth. Always remember, your heart is invincible, my friend.” [Note: I couldn’t find an English-language quote that matched this one; perhaps the Chinese version is a fairly loose translation?]

But “letting go of your obsession with things you can’t control” doesn’t mean you have to silently swallow all the hurt you receive. In China, what science fiction fans need most is a kind of self-esteem when facing so-called “professionals”, because the industry will not respect you just because you love science fiction. The industry will always only love the industry…

[From the Hugo acceptance speech Arthur prepared]

Five days ago, I came here with two identities; one as an invited guest because I was shortlisted for this award. The other was a staff member [of CSFDB and the Tsinghua University SF Society]. In the latter capacity, I had to host two panels and organize two fan tables.

When I first arrived on-site as a staff member five days ago, the reception we received was anything but friendly.  To this day, I continue to use my status as a finalist to try to resolve the various obstacles that have come in my role as a staff member. I don’t like using this privilege, but in this situation, it is the last resort.

Even so, I’m still enjoying the parts I can as much as possible.  I think this is a common goal of all the science fiction fans who have come here.  Meet up colleagues from both and abroad, whom you have never met before; make friends with them; take photos with them; exchange gifts, thoughts and imagination; and try to remember it all.  At DisCon III in Washington, it was precisely in order to share this experience and this memory with our international neighbors that we cast our votes to make the convention come true here.

This is a moment for all science fiction fans; this convention belongs to you.

On the night of the opening ceremony, when most people were waving flags and cheering, my friend RiverFlow, who was also a finalist for Best Fan Writer and Best Fanzine in this year’s Hugo Awards, was, due to physical reasons and venue reasons, sent to the hospital. That night was a sleepless night for many of us. That contrast makes me want to stand here and ask, “Why do we science fiction fans love science fiction?  What has science fiction brought us?  Why are we burdened with fatigue, illness, and all the inconveniences, yet still persevere?”

To me, the answer to these questions is this: science fiction gives us the power to use our imagination to understand these things, and to fight them. …

[End of extract from his prepared acceptance speech.]

On the way, [Dip Ghosh, who presented a panel about Indian SF] said that the “acceptance speech” I posted on WeChat Moments last night deeply touched him, and maintained the spirit of “Trufans”.  I asked him, can you read Chinese?  He replied no, but he could use machine translation.

At the fan tables, he gave me a copy of “Adventures of Ghanada“, and also the second volume of “The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction”, and Indian director Satvajit Ray’s memoir “Travails with the Alien”…  I was really humbled by these gifts, and it was a pity that the conference catalog was sold out, and I had no way to repay him. He also said that if a science fiction convention is held in India in the future, I can be a guest, and he will help me go through the procedures to go to New Delhi. His enthusiasm not only moved me, but also made me feel ashamed and sad at this time. I sincerely hope that this encounter will lead to a lasting friendship.

By now it was almost noon, so I stayed at the table, dismantling the display panels piece by piece, and handed them to Hua Wen [see the November 1st2nd and 5th Scrolls] along with the stickers for storage. I then took the last stack of commemorative cards and waited for someone to pick them up. Around twelve o’clock, Helen [Montgomery] came over again and gave Chicon 8 commemorative patches (the kind that can be ironed on clothes) to RiverFlow, Ling Shizhen and me. After handing over the two physical copies of “Journey Planet” to Liza [Groen-Trombi] of Locus Magazine and Vincent [Docherty] of Glasgow 2024, it was finally time to leave.

This time, it went very smoothly, except that I almost left my suitcase on the shuttle bus…

On the way to the airport, it seemed that I really had caught a fever, and it felt unbearable. On the way, Ann [Gry] sent her greetings and asked if the RiverFlow’s had improved, how I was doing, and expressed her agreement with the remarks I had made the day before. She said that while she was saddened by some of the organizational aspects, she hoped only the good memories would remain in her mind.  I think she is right, but it is precisely because of those bad memories, that the shining moments retrospectively seem more beautiful and more fragrant.

Taiyo Fujii posts about two more panels

The November 2nd Scroll linked to his “Decolonize the Future” panel, but he has since posted similar write-ups on the How I Became a Professional Science Fiction Writer and Localization Paths of Science Fiction in Non-English-Speaking Countries panels.

The first of those posts is also available in a Japanese language version, which seems to be a slightly different version of the text; the extracts below are a mix of the English post, and the Google Translate rendition of the Japanese post, with minor manual edits.

In Japan, many authors make their debut  through awards for new writers, but many of the panel members did not go through that route, and I was able to hear some interesting stories.

Hosuke Nojiri made his debut with a novelization of a game that was developed by his employer. As such, Mr. Nojiri was a professional writer from the very first work, but he then talked about how he moved into science fiction novels….

Yugen Yashima is from the SF writing school founded by Nozomi Omori. His works were published on the class website. Later, he won several contests. He’s a good example of how Omori’s writing school became a notable gateway for writers to become professionals.

Two bilingual Bilibili videos by Hong Hong

The aforementioned Localization Paths panel comes up in the second of two videos posted to the Bilibili video sharing site by Hong Hong, a Chengdu resident who I came into contact with on the HelloTalk language exchange app.  Her videos are in English with bilingual subtitles.

The first video is a 4-minute wander around the vicinity of the venue, on the day before the con started, plus a visit to a restaurant.

The second one is a 12-minute compilation of various footage from the con.  We see some of the catering facilities, which have been mentioned in previous items, but I don’t think we’ve actually seen them in any of the photos or videos that have been posted.  Content warning: the final minute of this second video features a cat who is clearly unimpressed at having to appear on camera.

Video of the water fountain show

Also from Bilibili, here’s a 23-minute video of the water fountain display that took place on the lake outside the SF museum.  There seems to be some sort of video projection or hologram sequences visible from around 09:00, maybe projections onto a continual spray of water?  Perhaps someone who was there knows more about what exactly those were?

(5) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born November 10, 1946Jack Ketchum. Winner of four Bram Stoker Awards, he was made a World Horror Convention Grand Master Award for outstanding contribution to the horror genre. Oh, and he wrote the screenplays for a number of his novels, all of which he quite naturally performed in. He’s deeply stocked at the usual suspects, most of the Meredith Moments, and if you like listening to your fiction, an impressive number of his novels had been done that manner. (Died 2018.)
  • Born November 10, 1948Steven Utley. Best known for his short stories of which he had two series, the first being his Silurian tales (collected in two volumes, The 400-Million-Year Itch and Invisible Kingdoms), and his time travel stories have been collected in Where or When. The Silurian tales Are available on iBooks and Kindle, Where or When isn’t either place. His “Custer’s Last Jump” novelette was nominated for Nebula and his “Invisible Kingdoms“ story was nominated for a Sturgeon. (Died 2013.)
  • Born November 10, 1950Dean Wesley Smith, 73. Editor of Pulphouse magazine, about which fortunately Black Gate has provided us with a fascinating history which you can read herePulphouse I first encountered when I collected the works of Charles de Lint who was in issue number eight way back in the summer issue of 1990. As a writer, he is known for his use of licensed properties such as StarTrekSmallvilleAliensMen in Black, and Quantum Leap. He is also known for a number of his original novels, such as the Tenth Planet series written in collaboration with his wife, Kristine Kathryn Rusch. 
  • Born November 10, 1960Neil Gaiman, 63. Where to start? By far, Neverwhere is my favorite work by him, especially the version narrated by him, followed by the Sandman series and StardustStardust is wonderful, particularly when voiced by him. And I sort maybe possibly kind of liked American Gods. I’ve not seen the video series. Who here has? Coraline is just creepy. By far, I think his best script is Babylon 5’s “Day of The Dead” though his Doctor Who episodes, “The Doctor’s Wife” and “Nightmare in Silver” are interesting, particularly the former. Anansi Boys is a tasty soufflé of a novel. 
  • Born November 10, 1971Holly Black, 52. Best known for her Spiderwick Chronicles, which were created with fellow writer & illustrator Tony DiTerlizzi, and for the Modern Faerie Tales YA trilogy. Her first novel was Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale. (It’s very good.) There have been two sequels set in the same universe. The first, Valiant, won the first Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy.  Doll Bones which is really, really creepy was awarded a Newbery Honor and a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award. Suffice it to say if you like horror, you’ll love her.  Definitely not horror, she and Ellen Kushher, co-edited the last Bordertown anthology, Welcome to Bordertown.
  • Born November 10, 1982Aliette de Bodard, 41. Author of the oh-so-excellent Xuya Universe series of which the latest is A Fire Born of Exile. Her Xuya Universe novella “The Tea Master and the Detective” won a Nebula Award and a British Fantasy Award, and was nominated for the Hugo and World Fantasy Award. “The Shipmaker”, also set herein, won a BSFA Award for Best Short Fiction. Her other major series is The Dominion of the Fallen which is equally lauded. More Hugos noms?  Oh yes indeed. LoneStarCon3 saw her nominated both for her oh so amazing “On a Red Station, Drifting” novella and her “Immersion” short story; Loncon 3 for her “The Waiting Stars” novelette (a Nebula winner); “Children of Thorns, Children of Water” novelette nominated at Worldcon 76; at Dublin2019, In a Vanishers’ Palace was nominated as was the ever so stellar The Tea Master and The Detective novella (a Nebula winner), a favorite of mine ever more; DisCon III saw another novelette, “The Inaccessibility of Heaven”, nominated . Her excellent Fireheart Tiger novella was nominated for a Hugo at Chicon 8. 

(6) AS THE CHILD IS BENT. Avatar: The Last Airbender Official Teaser Trailer.

Live-action adaptation of the animated series centering on the adventures of Aang and his friends, who fight to save the world by defeating the Fire-Nation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KDNPLyhsRU

(7) ONE IS THE LONELIEST NUMBER. “When Will the Singularity Happen? Scientist Says by 2031” in Popular Mechanics.

… Ben Goertzel, CEO of SingularityNET—who holds a Ph.D. from Temple University and has worked as a leader of Humanity+ and the Artificial General Intelligence Society—told Decrypt that he believes artificial general intelligence (AGI) is three to eight years away. AGI is the term for AI that can truly perform tasks just as well has humans, and it’s a prerequisite for the singularity soon following….

… Getting to the singularity, though, will require a significant leap from the current point of AI development. While today’s AI typically focuses on specific tasks, the push towards AGI is intended to give the technology a more human-like understanding of the world and open up its abilities. As AI continues to broaden its understanding, it steadily moves closer to AGI—which some say is just one step away from the singularity….

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