Pun ~= (Scroll Title)

Posted on March 10, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) BULWER-LYTTON RIDES OFF INTO THE SUNSET. Last week Scott Rice told fans of The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, “Au Revoir, Noble Bulweriers!”

It is with deep regrets that I announce the conclusion of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Being a year and a half older than Joseph Biden, I find the BLFC becoming increasingly burdensome and would like to put myself out to pasture while I still have some vim and vigor!

When I initiated the competition in 1983, inviting entrants to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels, I never dreamed that we would receive thousands of entrants from all over the U.S. and the globe, or that the contest would survive for over four decades.

I am especially grateful to our entrants for keeping the contest alive and to our Panel of Undistinguished Judges who dutifully selected each year’s “winners.” And, of course, I would like to thank my daughter, EJ, who has been indispensable the last several years of the contest. It’s been 42 good years but, alas, all good things must come to an end. Rest assured we’re keeping the BLFC spirit alive by maintaining our archive for posterity so that generations and generations hence may witness your greatness!

(2) ERRATA REDUX. The UK’s SF Gateway bookselling site is having a little trouble identifying author “William Rotsler”, co-author with Gregory Benford of Shiva Descending. As Andrew Porter pointed out to them, this is a photo of Robert Silverberg.

It isn’t the first time something like this has happened to Rotsler. When he was the 1973 Worldcon Fan Guest of Honour, the designer of TorCon 2’s program book erroneously ran a photo of John Schoenherr instead of Rotsler. (Coincidentally, Robert Silverberg was the author of that 1973 bio!)

(3) DROPPING FAST. The Guardian reports “US added to international watchlist for rapid decline in civic freedoms”.

The United States has been added to the Civicus Monitor Watchlist, which identifies countries that the global civil rights watchdog believes are currently experiencing a rapid decline in civic freedoms.

Civicus, an international non-profit organization dedicated to “strengthening citizen action and civil society around the world”, announced the inclusion of the US on the non-profit’s first watchlist of 2025 on Monday, alongside the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Italy, Pakistan and Serbia….

(4) NEW DAVE HOOK POSTS. A Deep Look by Dave Hook praises “’Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art’, Indrapramit Das editor, 2024 The MIT Press”.

The Short: I recently read Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art, Indrapramit Das editor, 2024 The MIT Press. My favorites of the ten short stories were “Encore“, by Wole Talabi, “The Quietude” by Lavie Tidhar, and “Autumn’s Red Bird“, by Aliette de Bodard. The essays and art were great also. My overall rating was 3.88/5, or “Great”. Strongly recommended.

And for an encore, Dave Hook shares “My 2025 Hugo Nominations”. His list includes —

Best Related Work nomination:

I nominated “The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion“, Chris Barkley & Jason Sanford Author/Editors, File770/Genre Grapevine, February 14, 2024.

(5) FUTURE TENSE. February’s Future Tense Fiction story is “Mothering the Bay,” by Deji Bryce Olukotun—a story about AI, misinformation, and parenting, set on the BART public transit system in California’s Bay Area.

The response essay, “The Awareness Imperative”, is by educational technologist Babe Liberman.

(6) PAGING CAPTAIN PIKE’S BARBER. “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 Character Posters” – there are 13 images in the gallery. The Captain looks like he stuck his head out a porthole while the ship was at Warp 3. I rather like the photo of Scotty, though.

Paramount+ reveals new character art for Season 3 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds!

The new character art features Anson Mount as Captain Christopher Pike, Rebecca Romijn as First Officer Una Chin-Riley, Ethan Peck as Spock, Jess Bush as Nurse Christine Chapel, Christina Chong as La’An Noonien-Singh, Celia Rose Gooding as Nyota Uhura, Melissa Navia as Erica Ortegas and Babs Olusanmokun as Dr. M’Benga.

In addition to the main cast, we have recurring guests Paul Wesley as James T. Kirk, Melanie Scrofano as Marie Batel, Martin Quinn as Montgomery ‘Scotty’ Scott, and Carol Kane as Pelia.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is based on the years Captain Christopher Pike manned the helm of the U.S.S. Enterprise.

(7) KAZUO ISHIGURO Q&A. [Item by Steven French.] With a 20th Anniversary special edition of his science fiction novel Never Let Me Go about to be published, Nobel prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro is interviewed by the Guardian and discussed his openness to speculative fiction, his own opinion of his prose style and the dangers posed by the increasing use of AI: “’AI will become very good at manipulating emotions’: Kazuo Ishiguro on the future of fiction and truth”.

Never Let Me Go had a long gestation period, as Ishiguro explains in his introduction to a new edition; for many years, it existed merely as thoughts and notes about a group of students whose lifespan – perhaps as the result of a nuclear accident – was markedly different from their peers. The breakthrough came via a combination of external factors and timing: societal interest in the potential benefits and dangers of cloning, at its most headline-grabbing in the shape of Dolly the sheep; and a shift in writing and publishing that made a place in so-called literary novels for the techniques and practices of speculative fiction.

“I gave myself permission to use what traditionally might have been called genre tropes,” Ishiguro explains. “And that wasn’t because I was being terribly brave or anything. I think the climate around me changed; the next generation of writers, people about 15 years younger than me, didn’t see anything weird about it, at least the people I happened to become friends with, David Mitchell or Alex Garland. They were taking their cues from all kinds of places and I really liked their work.”

(8) SIMON FISHER-BECKER (1961-2025). “Simon Fisher-Becker dead: ‘Harry Potter,’ ‘Doctor Who’ actor was 63” reports USA Today.

Simon Fisher-Becker, a British actor known for his roles on “Doctor Who” and in the first “Harry Potter” film, has died. He was 63.

Fisher-Becker’s death was confirmed by his agency in a statement issued to USA TODAY on Monday.

“Today, I lost not only a client Simon Fisher-Becker, but a close personal friend of 15 years standing,” the statement said. “I shall never forget the phone call I made to him when he was offered the part of ‘Dorium’ in Dr Who. He had been a fan of the show since he was a child.

“Simon was also a writer, a raconteur and a great public speaker. He helped me out enormously and was always kind, gracious and interested in everyone. My condolences go to his husband Tony, his brother, nieces and nephews and his legion of fans.”

Fisher-Becker portrayed the Fat Friar, a ghost from Hufflepuff, who appeared in 2001’s “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” In the film, he comes through the floor of the Hogwarts dining hall as several ghosts arrive, including Nearly Headless Nick.

The actor also starred as Dorium Maldovar on the British sci-fi series “Doctor Who.” He played the role in the fifth and sixth seasons of the modern reboot opposite Matt Smith’s Doctor….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Frederik Pohl’s Gateway wins the Hugo for Best Novel (1978)

Forty-six years ago at IguanaCon II, where Tim Kyger was the Chair, Harlan Ellison was the pro guest, and Bill Bowers was the fan guest, Frederik Pohl’s Gateway wins the Hugo for Best Novel.

The other nominated works for that year were The Forbidden Tower by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Time Storm by Gordon R. Dickson and Dying of the Light by George R. R. Martin.

It was serialized in the November and December 1976 issues of Galaxy prior to its hardcover publication by St. Martin’s Press. A short concluding chapter, cut before publication, was later published in the August 1977 issue of Galaxy.

It would win damn near every other major Award there was as it garnered the John Campbell Memorial for Best Science Fiction Novel, the Locus Award for Best First Novel, the Nebula Award for Novel and even the Prix Pollo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel published in France. It was nominated for but did not win the Australian Ditmar Award.

It’s the opening novel in the Heechee saga, with four sequels that followed. It is a most exceptional series. I’ve read I think all of them.

I’m chuffed that Pohl was voted a Hugo for Best Fan Writer at Aussiecon 4. Who can tell what works got him this honor?

Gateway of course is available at the usual suspects.

If I’m remembering right, there was talk of a film for awhile.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Bizarro has a break-up line.
Brewster Rockit is too ready for a close-up.
The Argyle Sweater gets ready to compress.
Yaffe provides a start.

(11) THE NEXT DISRUPTION. The Guardian asks, “Are AI-generated video games really on the horizon?”

Another month, another revolutionary generative AI development that will apparently fundamentally alter how an entire industry operates. This time tech giant Microsoft has created a “gameplay ideation” tool, Muse, which it calls the world’s first Wham, or World and Human Action Model. Microsoft claims that Muse will speed up the lengthy and expensive process of game development by allowing designers to play around with AI-generated gameplay videos to see what works.

Muse is trained on gameplay data from UK studio Ninja Theory’s game Bleeding Edge. It has absorbed tens of thousands of hours of people’s real gameplay, both footage and controller inputs. It can now generate accurate-looking mock gameplay clips for that game, which can be edited and adapted with prompts.

All well and good, but in an announcement video for Muse, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer caused confusion when he said that it could be invaluable for the preservation of classic games: AI models, he implied, could “learn” those games and emulate them on modern hardware. It’s not clear how this would be possible. Further muddying the waters, Microsoft’s overall CEO Satya Nadella then implied in a podcast interview that Muse was the first step in creating a “catalogue” of AI-generated games.

But Muse, as it stands, can’t create a game – it can only create made-up footage of a game. So just what is this new gaming AI tool? A swish addition to game developers’ tool belts? Or the first step towards an era of AI-generated gaming detritus?…

(12) CLIPPING SERVICE. Filer Lise Andreasen says, “I made a joke!”

(13) MIND INTO MATTER. “Vesuvius Turned a Roman Man’s Brain Into Glass. Now, Scientists Reveal How the Extremely Rare Preservation Happened” in Smithsonian Magazine.

In 79 C.E., Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying the nearby ancient Roman city of Pompeii and the smaller town of Herculaneum under deadly layers of volcanic ash, pumice and pyroclastic flows. But the disaster that demolished the two settlements also immortalized them, preserving everything from the shape of victims’ bodies to frescoes in private villas and library scrolls.

Archaeologists even discovered the remains of a young man whose brain and parts of his spinal cord had turned into glass. Scientists had never seen a glassy soft tissue in nature before—and no one has found anything like it since….

…The recent study, however, supports the 2020 research claiming that the remains are indeed a brain—they found preserved neurons and axons, as well as proteins known to be common in brain tissue. They conclude the vitrification was caused by an ash cloud that arrived in Herculaneum before the pyroclastic flows from the volcano….

…But there’s a catch: “Conditions must have been very, very specific, because the organic tissue must have experienced a heating fast enough not to entirely destroy it (which is instead the most common occurrence) and then fast-cool to turn into glass,” Giordano says to Popular Science’s Andrew Paul.

To achieve those specific circumstances, the skull and spine acted as protective layers, shielding the soft tissue within from a bit of the heat. “The glass that formed as a result of such a unique process attained a perfect state of preservation of the brain and its microstructures,” the team writes in the paper.

Giordano tells Live Science’s Tom Metcalfe that they found charcoal fragments in Herculaneum that supported their idea. These fragments “experienced multiple [heating] events, and the highest temperatures were associated with the early, super-hot ash cloud.”

Benjamin Andrews, a volcanologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History who was not involved in the study, tells Science’s Collin Blinder that the team’s findings are “remarkable.”

“There’s a huge story, a huge wealth of information, contained in these little particles,” he adds.

Not everyone agrees with the new conclusions, however. For example, Alexandra Morton-Hayward, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Oxford in England who was also not involved in the research, is not convinced that the glassy material is indeed parts of the man’s brain. She maintains that soft tissue vitrification is “incredibly unlikely,” per CNN….

(14) LUNAR ECLIPSE VISIBLE FROM THE AMERICAS. Coming March 14: “Total lunar eclipse to mesmerise skywatchers in March” reports the Guardian.

This week, the moon experiences a total lunar eclipse, which although not as spectacular as a total solar eclipse is still a beautiful celestial sight to behold.

A total lunar eclipse occurs when the full moon passes directly behind Earth, through our planet’s shadow. Skywatchers first see the shadow of Earth creeping across the face of the moon. This is known as the partial phase.

Then, during the total phase, when the moon is engulfed by Earth’s shadow, the lunar surface turns a deep red colour. In the last phase, also known as a partial phase, Earth’s shadow slips off the lunar surface and all returns to normal.

It is a leisurely process, taking more than three hours to complete. On 14 March, the partial eclipse begins at 0509 GMT. The total phase begins at 0658 GMT before returning to a partial phase at 0731 GMT. This final partial phase then ends at 0847 GMT.

Unfortunately for European and African viewers, only the initial partial phase will be visible. Observers in North and South America, however, will be treated to the whole thing. Parts of Asia and Australia will then catch the final partial phase.

(15) FILK HISTORY. “Margaret Middleton – A Shaper of Modern Filk (Part 2 of 2), interviewed by Edie Stern” has been posted by FANAC.org on YouTube.

Title: Margaret Middleton – A Shaper of Modern Filk (Part 2 of 2), interviewed by Edie Stern

Description: FANAC History Zoom: February 2025: Named to the Filk Hall of Fame in 1996, and a long time officer of the Filk Foundation, Margaret Middleton has been instrumental in the shaping of modern filk, as well as a mainstay of Arkansas fandom. She’s published multiple fanzines, including Kantele, and was a founder of the first specialized filk convention, Filkcon 1.

In Part 2 of this 2 part recording, the conversation ranges from Margaret’s taxonomy of filk, to tips for busking at the Farmer’s Market, and to the effect of the internet on filking and the filk community. We also learn about Margaret-when-she’s not filking, including her involvement in the Civil Air Patrol, quilting and her professional responsibilities for “measuring piles of dirt and holes in the ground.” … It’s a wide-ranging conversation, and ends with barbershop quartets, the Ballad of Eskimo Nell (discussed – not sung), the relationship of quilts to filk conventions and audience Q&A…For those interested in the history of filk, this 2 part interview is highly recommended.

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

Pixel Scroll 1/30/25 Scrolling Considered As A Helix Of Semi-Precious Pixels

Posted on January 30, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) GAIMAN WILL RECEIVE NO PROCEEDS FROM GOOD OMEN GRAPHIC NOVEL KICKSTARTER. Rhianna Pratchett today pointed to a Kickstarter update from the Pratchett estate about the Good Omens graphic novel.

“Good Omens graphic novel update – January 2025”

[We] had locked refunds of the Good Omens graphic novel in mid-November due to where we were in the production process, however will no longer maintain this freeze in light of new articles and allegations. While we cannot speak further on the subject at present, we have chosen to reopen a short refund window for those who would no longer like to support the graphic novel, until Friday 7th February 2025. Please contact us via email or Kickstarter message.

It has also been agreed that Neil Gaiman will not receive any proceeds from the graphic novel Kickstarter. Given the project management, production and all communication has always been under the jurisdiction of the Estate on behalf of Good Omens at large, this will not fundamentally change the project itself, however we can confirm the Kickstarter and PledgeManager will now fully be an entity run by, and financially connected to, the Terry Pratchett Estate only.

A number of tiers also come with author merchandise and books; we have been working on a system in the back end to remove or swap out particular rewards from tiers, should you wish to continue with the project, but not receive these specific items. In this instance, please contact us via Kickstarter or the email listed on the project FAQ and we will endeavour to alter your orders, to swap items in of an equivalent value, where we are able.

Given the point in the production process, we cannot extend refunds beyond this new deadline, but will honour requests in this window – the only exceptions will be tiers where rewards have already been actioned, such as cameos, and custom or rare items on higher level tiers. In the instance of cameos, should backers wish to have their name removed from the postcard (Archangel) or not receive their cameo print (God), we are able to alter this, but not the cameo itself.

If you do get in touch, we aim to get back within a few days; if you have not heard back within a week, please chase up your query.

Good Omens in all its forms is very special to us, and we know that for many fans the landscape has shifted. We appreciate the sensitivity of this issue, and will be working through all queries in the coming weeks.

We will continue on our journey with Crowley and Aziraphale, and all of our surrounding plans, in some form. Thank you for being part of the journey with us.

The Terry Pratchett Estate (Good Omens HQ)

David Tennant’s Facebook page also posted a truncated version of the statement, and notes that the Kickstarter has raised £2,419,973 to date. Colleen Doran is doing the artwork for this book, as File 770 has reported from time to time.

(2) DOES GAIMAN STILL HAVE REPS? Deadline has been trying to get statements from Neil Gaiman’s various agents about whether they still represent him. No statements have been provided. However, Deadline reported today his name has disappeared from the public client list of one of them: “Neil Gaiman Dropped By Agent Casarotto Ramsay After Misconduct Claims”.

Neil Gaiman has been removed from UK agent Casarotto Ramsay & Associates’ client list after the Good Omens writer has faced a string of sexual misconduct allegations over the past six months.

Gaiman’s profile was quietly scrubbed from Casarotto Ramsay & Associates’ website, meaning he no longer appears on pages listing its film, TV, and theatre clients.

Internet archives show Gaiman’s profile, which included trailers for his screen work, was live on the agency’s website as recently as last October, months after the initial allegations were published. The author denies wrongdoing.

Casarotto Ramsay & Associates failed to respond to repeated requests for comment about whether it continues to rep Gaiman. Gaiman has been contacted for comment. His long-time literary agent is Writers House’s Merrilee Heifetz, who has been approached for comment. Gaiman has also been repped by CAA, who have been contacted….

(3) FILK HISTORY ZOOM. The next FANAC Fan History Zoom on February 22 will be about filk fandom. Edie Stern will interview Margaret Middleton. To attend, contact fanac@fanac.org.

(4) DOES YOUR BOOK HAVE A BELLY BUTTON? “Books written by humans are getting their own certification” says The Verge. Self-certification. Because no one would ever lie about this, right?

The Authors Guild — one of the largest associations of writers in the US — has launched a new project that allows authors to certify that their book was written by a human, and not generated by artificial intelligence.

The Guild says its “Human Authored” certification aims to make it easier for writers to “distinguish their work in increasingly AI-saturated markets,” and that readers have a right to know who (or what) created the books they read. Human Authored certifications will be listed in a public database that anyone can access. The project was first announced back in October in response to a deluge of AI-generated books flooding online marketplaces like Amazon and its Kindle ebook platform.

Certification is currently restricted to Authors Guild members and books penned by a single writer, but will expand “in the future” to include books by non-Guild members and multiple authors. Books and other works must be almost entirely written by humans to qualify for a Human Authored mark, with minor exceptions to accommodate things like AI-powered grammar and spell-check applications….

(5) AI NAY NAY? Steve J. Wright discusses in fascinating detail the brain, intelligence, why the very different operations of a computer do not resemble either of the former, and his skepticism about artificial intelligence in “The Little Man Who Isn’t There”.

…So, Artificial Intelligence, if it is achievable at all with current technology (and I suspect the technology which might make it achievable is some way in the future) will necessarily operate in a way which is radically, fundamentally different from human intelligence. So different that communicating with it, or even recognizing that it’s there, will present significant technological challenges. So why are we so happy – well, why are some of us so happy – to believe that Artificial Intelligence is with us here and now, ready to correct our grammar and do our homework for us?

Wright’s article includes a rather amusing callback to Sixties chatbot ELIZA.

“Ah,” says the knowledgeable reader, “he’s going to talk about ELIZA.” Yes, I am absolutely going to talk about ELIZA, because it is such a very good example. Created by Joseph Weizenbaum between 1964 and 1967, ELIZA is credited as the first chatbot; it was designed to emulate a psychotherapist, using a fairly limited set of stock responses which identified key words in its interlocutor’s messages and fitted them into templates for replies. And it had people convinced that it was a real person, that no mere machine could possibly understand them as well as ELIZA did. Now look at those dates again, and consider just how much technical progress there has been on the hardware end of things since then. ELIZA is not a sophisticated program. If you are the sort of weirdo who has a “smart” home, you probably have light bulbs with enough capacity to run ELIZA. Your fridge probably has enough computing power to run ELIZA and perform its normal fridgely duties (maintaining optimum temperatures and levels of energy usage, keeping an inventory of its contents and their expiry dates, and snitching on you to Amazon about your chocolate ice cream habit.)

So, since a rinky-dink little gizmo like ELIZA can successfully con people into believing it’s human, what chance do our poor gullible brains stand against modern technology?

(6) THESE THINGS MUST BE HANDLED DELICATELY. “Sale of Wicked Witch’s hat from the ‘The Wizard of Oz’ sparks fraud lawsuit” reports the LA Times. (Article republished on MSN, so not behind a paywall). There are three known existing Wicked Witch hats used in filming of The Wizard of Oz. Schneider acquired one in 2019 for $100,000, from Profiles in History, a movie memorabilia house that Heritage acquired two years later. He later consigned it to Heritage for a big Hollywood memorabilia auction. The owner of another Witch’s hat, Michael Shaw, also decided to sell his. And in addition, Shaw was consigning an authentic pair of the ruby slippers. Here’s the rest of the story….

…In July 2023, Schneider agreed to consign his hat to Heritage and the item was given a value of $200,000 for insurance purposes, according to his lawsuit.

However, Heritage pulled Schneider’s hat from an auction in which another Wicked Witch’s hat owned by Michael Shaw…

In August, [Heritage Auctions senior director Brian] Chanes called Schneider and offered him a quick private sale of the hat for $250,000. Instead of taking it to auction, the hat worn by actor Margaret Hamilton would be sold directly to Shaw, who had expressed interest. The price was “more than any Hat had previously sold for,” Chanes told him, according to the complaint.

A few months later, Heritage began promoting a December auction of movie memorabilia that included Shaw’s three Oz pieces….

…According to the suit, Heritage launched a promotional tour of Shaw’s items, holding events in New York, London and Tokyo.

Shaw is not a defendant in the lawsuit against Heritage.

During the auction held on Dec. 7, the ruby slippers sold for a record $32.5 million and the hat hammered down for $2.93 million, which was nearly 12 times the amount Schneider received for his hat. Like other houses, Heritage receives a commission on the items sold at auction.

“It’s very unusual to have an item plucked out of an auction and get an offer like that from the auctioneer,” Schneider said. He says the house violated its fiduciary obligations to him, having failed to disclose the level of market interest in the hat or its planned roadshow for the auction.

Schneider alleges that Heritage struck the deal with him as a “device for HERITAGE or its executives to get ownership at a deep discount while also favoring Mr. S by making his Hat the only one in the auction,” states the suit….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 30, 1924 — Lloyd Alexander. (Died 2007.)

By Paul Weimer: In the mid 1980’s, Disney came out with The Black Cauldron, an animated fantasy movie. This was the “wilderness years” of Disney before the boom that started with The Little Mermaid. (The Black Cauldron came out the same year as Return to Oz) It looked interesting, and I was now at a point where I could go and see such movies on my own. Sure, it was an animated movie probably aimed at a younger audience than who I probably was, but I was game. (The fact that it was rated PG drew my attention and convinced me to see it). I enjoyed it deeply even if apparently few others did at the time. (Again, see above, Wilderness Years)

So it goes.

Naturally, the movie led me to the Lloyd Alexander book. I didn’t realize at the time that The Black Cauldron is actually the second in the Prydain series, but having seen the movie loosely based on it, I wasn’t lost at the time and when I finally did read The Book of Three (the first in the series) sometime thereafter, I saw how sneakily the filmmakers had been inspired by that book for helping to establish Taran, as well as The Black Cauldron itself. So I could and did happily read the book and the sequels, and so being hooked on Alexander’s work thereby.

I had only the smallest amount of knowledge of Welsh mythology at the time I read the Pyrdain series, the mythology books I had read to that point were focused on the Greco-roman and the Norse. The tales of the Mabinogion that Alexander’s series was based on did later, some years on, inspire me to investigate and learn about Welsh mythology in much more detail. So I have Alexander to thank for that.

And in general, Alexander is a novelist who I am glad I did not “miss”. There is a swath of authors I managed to miss because I felt myself too old by the time I found them (Susan Cooper comes to mind, although I did read her a few years ago). Alexander is in that class, while writing for a younger audience, his strong use of theme, decently three-dimensional female characters (although still cross about Eilonwy’s losing her magical powers) and the sheer verve and quality of the writing and the language.

That quality of writing extended to all of the other work I’ve read of him, from the meditation on war that is The Kestrel, to the Vesper Holly adventure archaeology series. He’s definitely an excellent gateway to much further reading and I think that he still stands up as someone to introduce a young reader to fantasy.

My only regret is that I didn’t discover his work sooner.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Peanuts from 1958 – could this be futurism?
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal shows the origin of paying for stories.

(9) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 127 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Hello Buoys”, John Coxon is incoherent, Alison Scott is excited, and Liz Batty is romantic. An uncorrected transcript of this episode is available here.

Episode 127 is here. We discuss the latest juicy gossip from the Belfast Eastercon, we hear from Claire Brialey of Croydon, and we pick things that aren’t games!

Alt text: A flowchart entitled “How to meet John, Alison and/or Liz at Eastercon”. The boxes culminate in “console yourself with Octothorpe 127”, and the various options are listed below, but the original file is linked in the show notes in case that’s more helpful to the partially sighted. How to meet John, Alison and/or Liz at Eastercon Are you going to Reconnect? Of course!/Not sure Oh go on it will be a laugh Oh all right then/No... Are they in the bar? Yes! I can't see them Are you quite sure? Check again Oh wait... there they are No sign Is there another bar? Yes! Nope Are they on programme? Yes! No Wait till the moderator asks for questions But it's Octothorpe Live! Is your joke very funny? Obviously! Excellent! Good to know. COME AND SAY HELLO until then... Are they asleep or on the loo? No, they look chill Er, yes? Oh, that's a shame Console yourself with Octothorpe 127

(10) THE NEXT TENTACLE. “’Squid Game’ Season 3 Release Date Set at Netflix”. Variety tells what it is.

“Squid Game” Season 3 will premiere June 27, following the major cliffhanger finale that Season 2 ended on.

“Squid Game” Season 2, which consisted of seven episodes, debuted Dec. 26. The installment was filmed back-to-back with Season 3, assuring there would be a much shorter wait between seasons than there was for Season 2 and Season 1 (which debuted in 2021, and was not originally written as an ongoing series).

In Season 2, Gi-hun, aka Player 456 (played by Lee Jung-jae), returns to the sadistic competition three years after winning 45.6 billion in South Korean won as the sole survivor of the event, in order to now put an end to Squid Game and save the lives of the players around him….

(11) SUPER ADVERTISING. The commercials aired during the Super Bowl have a reputation for creativity and entertainment. If you’re likely to watch them, whether during the broadcast or later on YouTube, here’s Deadline’s scouting report of the movie promos that will be part of the lineup, most of them of genre interest: “Super Bowl Movie Trailers 2025: What to Expect”.

…This year, count on the following to air either pre, during or post-game:

Disney, the No. 1 studio of last year with more than $2.2 billion in domestic box office, has always had a presence at the Super Bowl. It won’t be a surprise if it shows off wares for upcoming pics Snow White (March 21), Lilo & Stich (May 23) and Pixar’s Elio (June 13). We understand they’ll only be showing off two out of three of their upcoming Marvel Studios movies, a batch that includes the upcoming Captain America: Brave New World (February 14), summer kickoff Thunderbolts* (May 2) and Fantastic Four: The First Steps (July 25)….

Universal, the No. 2 studio with $1.88B domestic in 2024, will be wowing with trailers for Dean DeBlois’ live-action take of his How to Train Your Dragon (June 13) and the Scarlett Johansson-Mahershala Ali-Jonathan Bailey starring Jurassic World Rebirth (July 2) from Gareth Edwards. Don’t be surprised if you catch a Blumhouse title, like a M3GAN 2.0 (June 27). You’ll remember how Uni previously stunted the first installment with dancing M3GAN dolls on talks shows and popular landmarks like the Empire State Building.

Paramount is no stranger to the Super Bowl, even when its sister CBS network and Paramount+ isn’t broadcasting it (Fox has the game this year). This year, the buzz is that Par will air spots for the Jack Quaid comedy thriller Novocaine (March 14), the Smurfs animated musical movie starring Rihanna (July 18) and Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning. …

Nothing to do with genre, however, you can already watch the “Hellmanns Super Bowl Commercial 2025” which reunites the When Harry Met Sally stars Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal in an update of their deli scene.

(12) ALL’S FAIR. The answer to the Guardian’s question is microcollectibles, apparently: “Evil toilets, terror food and billionaire Squishmallows: my eye-popping day at the UK’s giant toy fair”.

A chubby baby dinosaur waddles down a pink carpeted aisle, narrowly avoiding an army of Care Bears tramping in the other direction. Nearby, a sales rep shows off a collection of insect-breeding habitats, just as Pikachu scampers around the corner, bumping into her neat display. Across the hall, inventors show off their fiendish new board games, magicians demonstrate glowing plastic thumbs, while others grapple with instructions by a table covered with thousands of tiny plastic bricks.

Welcome to the Toy Fair, in London’s Kensington Olympia, the UK’s biggest bonanza of toys, games and hobbies, where the world’s manufacturers converge to peddle their latest wares, as retailers scour the endless stands for the hottest new trends. It’s a mind-boggling place of plushies and puzzles, remote-control cars and mud kitchens, and more plastic than you would find at a petrochemical convention. Here, the £3.4bn business of fun is taken very seriously indeed, with NDAs galore and not a child in sight. So where is the toy world heading in 2025?…

Fans of the YouTube phenomenon, Skibidi Toilet, can now buy the official toy line at Walmart, Target and Amazon. The line includes the Mystery Surprise Toilet, Collector Figures, Mystery Plush and more.

[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Lise Andreasen, Joe Siclari, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Juli Marr, Meredith, JJ, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Jones.]

Pixel Scroll 12/26/24 Clicks! Clicks! The Scroll Was Full Of Clicks!

Posted on December 26, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) SMELLING BEE. “How Much Does Our Language Shape Our Thinking?” in The New Yorker begins with a rant against the prevalence of the English language, however, there are some interesting anthropological bits, too:

…Western writers have long assumed that human beings have an inherently limited capacity to describe some senses, with olfaction ranking as the most elusive. We can speak abstractly about colors (red, blue, black) and sound (high, low, loud). With smell, though, we usually give “source-based” references (“like cut grass”). But the cognitive scientist Asifa Majid, now of Oxford, and the linguist Niclas Burenhult, of Lund University, in Sweden, have shown that this needn’t be the case. They discovered that the Jahai, hunter-gatherers living at the border of Malaysia and Thailand, have a rich vocabulary of abstract smell words. One Jahai term, itpit, refers to the “intense smell of durian, perfume, soap, Aquillaria wood, and bearcat,” Majid and Burenhult report. Another, cnes, applies to “the smell of petrol, smoke, bat droppings and bat caves, some species of millipede, root of wild ginger, leaf of gingerwort, wood of mango tree.” Subsequent research has found large olfactory lexicons in at least forty other languages, among them Fang, Khmer, Swahili, and Zapotec.

It makes a difference. In a study that Majid and Burenhult conducted a decade ago, Jahai and English speakers were asked to identify and name twelve smells, including cinnamon, turpentine, gasoline, and onion. English speakers, despite their greater familiarity with the odors, faltered….

…Twenty years ago, abstract smell vocabularies seemed ridiculous. Burenhult studied the Jahai language for a decade, even writing a doctoral dissertation on its grammar, before Majid asked him to run a battery of tasks that revealed Jahai speakers’ exceptional way of talking about smell. Other linguistic features once assumed to be universal-such as tenses, personal pronouns, and even, potentially, a distinction between nouns and verbs-have turned up missing when greater numbers of languages have been scrutinized. Likewise, we’ve enlarged our sense of the metaphors used to map concepts. English describes acoustic pitch using a verticality metaphor (high-low), but a study by experts in musical cognition found that people around the world use at least thirty-five other mappings, such as small-big, alert-sleepy, pretty-ugly, tense-relaxed, summer-winter, and-in the case of some traditional Zimbabwean instrumentalists-“crocodile” (low pitch) and “those who follow crocodiles” (high pitch)….

Everett’s book revels in such discoveries, which multiply the conceivable differences separating languages. In a recent review of the research literature, the language scientist Damián E. Blasi, along with Majid and others, listed the many cognitive domains that English seems to affect, including memory, theory of mind, spatial reasoning, event processing, aesthetic preferences, and sensitivity to rhythm and melody.”

(2) DISSECTING THE TEASER. After you watch the short Doctor Who promo video below, The Hollywood Reporter stands ready with a “’Doctor Who’ Season 2 Trailer: Scene-by-Scene Breakdown of 2025 Preview”.

Is That Donna Noble?

Eagle-eyed fans may have been a little surprised to spot a magazine containing a promotional picture for the Doctor Who 2023 specials featuring Noble actress Catherine Tate.

In a whirlwind couple of seconds, we see the Doctor and the occupants of what looks like a soccer-loving barbershop (in what’s certainly not the U.K.) sucked out into some kind of cosmic storm. If you look closely at the magazines fluttering by, you can spot a magazine with the aforementioned image….

(3) DAVIES AND MOFFAT Q&A. Inverse introduces its interview with the pair, “19 Years Later, ‘Doctor Who’ Brings Back Its Best Collaboration — For Potentially The Last Time”, saying, “Nineteen years ago, TV magic happened: Steven Moffat wrote his first Doctor Who story for showrunner Russell T Davies…”.

…Davies: Because what you get, Steven, is a fool because he throws away huge movie franchises every time he does a Doctor Who story.

Moffat: So do you.

Davies: There’s River Song — could be bigger than James Bond every day, and now there’s the Time Hotel that could run for 20 years as a television show.

Moffat: You know you’ve got an idea that’s good enough for 45 minutes of Doctor Who if you’ve got a movie idea. If you just pissed away a franchise, yeah, I might give you 45 minutes….

(4) UNIVERSITIES PRESERVING SFF. Fanac.org’s next “FANAC Fanhistory Zoom” is “Out of the Ghetto and into the University: SF Fandom University Collections”. To attend, email fanac@fanac.org.

Most of us are collectors (or at least accumulators) of science fiction memorabilia. And others are researchers and historians. Our first program should be interesting to all of you. We will be interviewing the Curators of three of the largest library collections specializing in science fiction, fanzines, comics and other related materials.

Come to find out what is in their collections, what they want for their collections, and how to use them. January 11, 2025 – 2PM EST, 11 AM PST, 7PM GMT London, and 6AM AEDT (sorry) Sunday, Jan 12 Melbourne

(5) VIDEOS FROM NINTH CITY TECH SCIENCE FICTION SYMPOSIUM. Videos from panels held at the Ninth Annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium on SF, Artificial Intelligence, and Generative AI have been posted to YouTube. There’s also a gallery of photos taken during the event by Andrew Porter.

This is the direct link to the YouTube video playlist.

Jason W. Ellis, Associate Professor of English and Coordinator, City Tech Science Fiction Collection at New York City College of Technology says:

Our sign-in sheet recorded 58 attendees, but I’m guessing the attendance across the day was between 75-100 people as some folks, including students, didn’t sign-in. I even heard one positive take on the symposium via the telephone grapevine from a past colleague who I didn’t know attended. In any event, it took an army to chow down 10 pizzas at lunch!

(6) CLASSIC COMIC STRIP COLLECTIONS. These used to make ideal holiday gifts. CBR.com gives us the “10 Best Comic Strip Collections, Ranked”. “…The best comic strip collections feature the best comic strip titles and probably contain strips significant to its legacy and/or offer insight into its creation….”

Coming in at number six:

Pearls Before Swine: Sgt. Piggy’s Lonely Hearts Club Comic: A Comic Strip Collection About Life, Death, and Everything in Between

Starring anamorphic animals named after the animals they are, Pearls Before Swine explores themes of death, meaning, and the world’s chaos with irony and visual humor. It’s named after the Bible verse, Matthew 7:6, which contains the phrase, “Do not cast your pearls before swine,” meaning don’t impart wisdom on those who won’t appreciate it. This is a pun because Rat, a cynical and snarky loudmouth, often feels this is what he’s doing when talking to Pig, a literal swine who is kind-natured and naïve. Pearls Before Swine also stars Goat, a character often annoyed at Rat and Pig because he’s more educated and informed than them, and a family of crocodiles who always fail at killing their zebra neighbors.

Roughly half the strips in Pearls Before Swine treasuries, which collect the strips in the previous two collections, have notes under them from Pearls Before creator Stephen Pastis. Pearls Before Swine: Sgt. Piggy’s Lonely Hearts Club Comic is the first Pearls Before Swine treasury and showcases where it all began. The strips in this book were made before Pastis started drawing himself as a character to make meta-commentary, but it still had plenty of other laughs, including a strip where Pig orders bacon and says it’s a “pig-eat-pig world.”

(7) RAY, BART AND HOMER. Phil Nichols’ Bradbury 100 podcast devoted a recent episode to “Ray Bradbury and The Simpsons”, tracking down every reference the series has made to Ray.

A few weeks ago, there was a new episode of The Simpsons which was entirely based on the works of Ray Bradbury. “Simpsons Wicked This Way Comes” is not the first time Ray has been referenced by the show. In fact, the number of Bradbury allusions across all of The Simpsons (i.e. on TV, in comics, and in books) now totals: thirteen.

In this episode I detail them all!

Many of them are represented by audio clips. But there are a few gags which are purely visual, including the comic-book and book appearances, and so I’ll present a few of them below. (Click on the images to embiggen!)

(8) PARTY TIME. People’s Elizabeth Rosner tells how “I Spent the Weekend at Neil Patrick Harris’ Murder Mystery Party—and Lived to Tell the Tale”.

…Saturday evening, the drama reached its peak during a lavish five-course dinner under a heated tent. The menu featured a Crenn Caesar salad, savoy cabbage, steak wing lamb, and soy custard, paired with fine wines. But before dinner was over, the chef’s driver, Charlie Carr, was killed.

The tension escalated when a dinner guest was poisoned for suggesting Sinclair’s death wasn’t an accident, putting her in the killer’s crosshairs.

In the end, we learned the killer and his motive…

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Galaxy Quest

By Paul Weimer: Galaxy Quest — the best movie about Star Trek fandom of all time?

Very possibly yes.

In the days before The Orville (which has neatly taken up the Galaxy Quest banner in some ways), Star Trek’s self importance was sometimes overweening. Oh you could see and find some deflation of the seriousness of movies like Star Trek the Motion Picture now and again in the Star Trek canon (Star Trek IV in particular). But the strong desire and passion of fans was something that was mocked for a long time, and by William Shatner himself.

On December 20, 1986, the infamous “Get a Life” sketch was aired on Saturday Night Live. It’s worth seeing if you haven’t seen it. People forget that at the end Shatner “recants” his rant against the fans and says he was just channeling “Evil Kirk”. Everyone remembers how for the first 6 minutes of the episode he rips and destroys the enthusiasm and geeky intense interest of those same fans.

So, Galaxy Quest is a corrective, I feel, to that sketch and those perceptions. And at the time I saw Galaxy Quest in 1999, I had been to one Star Trek convention (with Marina Sirtis and George Takei). I knew and know the passions of people for a property, a franchise, an imaginary future. I share them, after all.

Galaxy Quest channels all that, and with love and respect, but knowing how silly its own source material is, uses it. From the funky controls on the bridge, to the “choppers” in a passageway that Sigourney Weaver’s character calls out as being stupid, the movie shows the absurdity of following a property so closely. And yet in showing the absurdity of it, it also shows the love, respect, care and humanity of fans of a property. (Consider how the fans come together to help land the remnants of the ship). It’s a movie that touches the heart and knows when to cut from horror, to comedy, to moments of tenderness and pathos. There are few episodes, or movies of the actual Star Trek than can say the same.

And the casting is perfect. Tim Allen as the clueless captain? Sigourney Weaver, whose sole job is to repeat the computer? The late Alan Rickman, horrified he has, by Grabthar’s Hammer, been permanently typecast? Tony Shalhoub as the slacker chief engineer? All of the cast understood the assignment and give the movie their all. The movie is peppy, doesn’t flag, and entertains thoroughly. It satirizes and respects and loves Star Trek, and its fans.

Also, in 2020, inspired by this movie, I went out of my way in my trip around the “Utah 5” to see Goblin Valley State Park, where the alien planet with the beryllium mine (and the rock monster) was filmed. Friends, it is as alien and weird as the movie makes it out to be.

Never give up, never surrender may be Captain Taggart’s catchphrase, but it’s some damn fine advice for life, too.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Bob the Squirrel has the logical response.
Dinosaur Comics reforms a vampire’s powers.
Rubes owns a special edition.
Dinosaur Comics tests out stories about brothers.

(11) ALTERNATE GALAXY QUESTS. Cracked.com has selected “25 Trivia Tidbits About ‘Galaxy Quest’ on Its 25th Anniversary”.

For the final Christmas of the 20th century, Santa dropped off an extra special gift to movie lovers: Galaxy Quest, a Star Trek parody that’s also so much more.

In it, Tim Allen plays egotistical actor Jason Nesmith whose claim to fame was portraying the Captain Kirk-like lead, Commander Peter Quincy Taggart, in the cheesy 1980s sci-fi show Galaxy Quest. Years after Galaxy Quest has concluded, Nesmith and his co-stars are scraping by with personal appearances at sci-fi conventions. Things take a twist, though, when real-life aliens — who have mistaken Galaxy Quest as real — abduct the actors to help save them from an extraterrestrial warlord.

In the 25 years since its release, the movie has turned into a legitimate cult hit, and so, to mark its 25th anniversary, here are 25 behind-the-scenes tidbits about it…

Here are two particularly juicy tidbits – imagine Galaxy Quest helmed by the same director as Groundhog Day, Harold Ramis, and with a different cast.

21 Why Ramis Left the Project

According to Dean Parisot, who ultimately directed Galaxy Quest, “The studio wanted Tim Allen to do it, but Harold didn’t want to do it with Tim.” Additionally, producer Mark Johnson said, “Harold didn’t do the movie because we couldn’t cast it. The people we went to all turned it down, and by the time we got to Tim Allen, Harold couldn’t see it.”

20 Ramis’ Pick

Ramis had originally wanted Alec Baldwin for the lead. Other casting choices proposed were Steve Martin and Kevin Kline.

(12) ALL SINGING, ALL DANCING, ALL GRINCHING. Cat pointed out a huge oversight in yesterday’s Scroll – I should have followed his Grinch TV memory with a link to Martin Morse Wooster’s “Review of ‘Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas – The Musical’”, an account of the stage production from 2016.

I saw Dr. Seuss’ How The Grinch Stole Christmas!—The Musical last night at the National Theatre in Washington. From the musical’s website and Wikipedia, I learned that this musical has been around since 1994 and has played in 41 other cities in the U.S. before it showed up in Washington….

….You know the plot. The citizens of Whoville are looking forward to Christmas when they can get lots of stuff and eat many sugary treats. Then that mean Grinch shows up and steals all their stuff. But why? Deprived childhood? Acid reflux? The answer here is that the Grinch is tired of all the noise the Whovians make. At that point I started cheering the Grinch on….

(13) IF YOU CAN SAY SOMETHING NICE. [Item by Steven French.] As a counterweight to all the doom mongering about AI, here’s a positive news report for the Xmas season: “NHS to begin world-first trial of AI tool to identify type 2 diabetes risk” in the Guardian.

The NHS in England is launching a world-first trial of a “gamechanging” artificial intelligence tool that can identify patients at risk of type 2 diabetes more than a decade before they develop the condition.

More than 500 million people worldwide have type 2 diabetes, and finding new ways to spot people at risk before they develop the condition is a major global health priority. Estimates suggest 1 billion people will have type 2 diabetes by 2050.

The condition is a leading cause of blindness, kidney failure, heart attacks, strokes and lower limb amputation. It is often linked to being overweight or inactive, or having a family history of type 2 diabetes, although not all those diagnosed are in those categories.

Now doctors and scientists have developed a transformative AI tool that can predict those at risk of the condition as much as 13 years before it begins to develop.

The technology analyses electrocardiogram (ECG) readings during routine heart scans. It can detect subtle changes too small to be noticed by the human eye that could raise the alarm early about a patient on the road to getting type 2 diabetes.

It could enable early interventions and potentially help people avoid developing the condition altogether by, for example, making changes to their diet and lifestyle….

(14) SCIENCE IN THE ASTIN FAMILY TREE. [Item by Andrew (not Werdna).] This short documentary discusses “The AD-X2 Controversy” — in which the evaluation of the effectiveness of a car battery additive led to the firing (and later reinstatement) of the head of the National Bureau of Standards Allen Astin. The documentary features interviews with Astin’s son John Astin and grandson Sean Astin. Further details in the Wikipeida here: “AD-X2”.

(15) ‘TIS ALWAYS THE SEASON THERE. “Mars orbiters witness a ‘winter wonderland’ on the Red Planet” – Space.com shares ESA’s photos.

Hoping for a white Christmas this year? Well, even if there’s no snow where you live, at least you can enjoy these images of a “winter” wonderland on Mars.

Taken by the German-built High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express orbiter in June 2022, and by NASA’s NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter using its High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on September 2022, these images showcase what appears to be a snowy landscape in the Australe Scopuli region of Mars, near the planet’s south pole.But the “snow” seen here is quite different from what we have on Earth.

In fact, it’s carbon dioxide ice, and at Mars’ south pole, there’s 26-foot-thick (8-meter-thick) layer of it year-round. (These image was actually taken near the summer solstice, not the winter one — it’s very cold here all year long.)…

(16) INTERNATIONAL CHRISTMAS STATION. We’re a little bit late picking this up, folks! “Space Station Astronauts Deliver a Christmas Message for 2024”.

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

Pixel Scroll 10/23/24 Of ARMs And The Un-Man I Sing

Posted on October 23, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) AI AND THE NOVEL. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The march of artificial intelligence (AI) continues relentlessly: bullets won’t stop it… Of concern to SF readers – and greater still, SF writers – is the question of whether AI will successfully compete with authors?

This weekend, BBC Radio 4’s Open Book assembled a panel to discuss this issue. Included on the panel was SF author Naomi Alderman. She is currently writing her new series of novels called The Power series (out by Viking in the British Isles), the title novel of which was short-listed for the Kurd Laßwitz Prize in Germany in 2019.

Elizabeth Day and Johny Pitts present a special edition of the programme exploring AI and the novel.

Recorded at the Southbank Centre’s London Literature Festival; novelists Naomi Alderman, Adam Thirlwell and Julianne Pachico join Elizabeth and Johny on stage to discuss depictions of AI in their fiction – and what AI might mean for fiction.

Naomi Alderman’s new novel, The Future, is the tale of a daring heist hatched in the hope of saving the world from the tech giants whose greed threatens life as we know it. Adam Thirlwell’s The Future, Future takes us from the salacious gossip of pre-revolutionary Paris to a utopian lunar commune, and Julianne Pachico tells the story of a young girl raised by artificial intelligence in her novel Jungle House.

You can download the programme here.

(I keep on telling folk that the machines are taking over, but no-one ever listens…)

(2) TRANSLATING JOAN SLONCZEWSKI TO THE SCREEN. Jeanne Griggs shares notes from a panel discussion about “Filming A Door Into Ocean” at Necromancy Never Pays.

…Last week I moderated a panel at SFAM, Speculative Fiction Across Media, on “Ecofeminism and A Door Into Ocean.” Because the conference was largely focused on ideas about films, I invited the panel members and then the audience to think about issues involving the possible differences between reading the novel and seeing it on screen….

…Casting is another imaginary game for anyone who has read A Door Into Ocean. I would want someone who comes across as thoughtful and maybe isn’t as astoundingly beautiful as many of the actresses in Hollywood for Merwen, and someone who comes across as smart and powerful, someone like Gina Torres, for her sometime antagonist Yinevra. And for Spinel, the young Valan, perhaps someone like Aryan Simhadri, who plays Grover in Percy Jackson and the Olympians….

(3) HOLLYWOOD LAWSUIT. A Los Angeles-based production company sued Tesla, CEO Elon Musk, and Warner Bros. Discovery, alleging that the electric vehicle maker ripped off scenes from 2017 film Blade Runner 2049 to promote its new robotaxi. “’Blade Runner 2049′ producer sues Musk, Tesla, Warner Bros.” in the LA Times (paywalled).

…Alcon Entertainment, which produced the film for Warner Bros., filed the copyright infringement lawsuit Monday in California.

The complaint accuses the Hollywood studio, Tesla and Musk of using artificial intelligence to generate an image resembling scenes from “Blade Runner 2049,” which Musk presented during a launch event for Tesla’s Cybercab on the Warner Bros. studio lot in Burbank. The livestreamed event took place Oct. 10 — shortly after Alcon said it denied a request from Warner Bros. Discovery to use a production photo from the sci-fi film to promote Tesla’s new product.

“Alcon refused all permissions and adamantly objected to Defendants suggesting any affiliation between [‘Blade Runner 2049’] and Tesla, Musk or any Musk-owned company,” the 52-page lawsuit reads.

“Defendants then used an apparently AI-generated faked image to do it all anyway.”…

… “It was hardly coincidental that the only specific Hollywood film which Musk actually discussed to pitch his new, fully autonomous, AI-driven cybercab was [‘Blade Runner 2049’],” the complaint reads, “a film which just happens to feature a strikingly-designed, artificially intelligent, fully autonomous car throughout the story.”

Alcon is demanding a jury trial and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.

(4) CINEMATIC DNA. “100 Years Ago, a Forgotten Russian Epic Secretly Inspired the the Most Iconic Sci-Fi Movie Ever”. “Get your communist ass to Mars” is Inverse’s tagline.

It’s unusual for a movie to have inspired creations as diverse as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day, but a movie celebrating its 100th birthday today can claim just such an accomplishment. Loosely based on a 1923 novel by Alexei Tolstoy, Yakov Protazanov’s 1924 silent film Aelita: Queen of Mars is, in fact, secretly one of the most influential sci-fi movies of all time.

Set in 1921, the film follows a group of people in post-civil war Soviet Russia as they reckon with their place in a rebuilding society. The movie begins with people worldwide attempting to understand a mysterious radio message, and the scene immediately makes Queen of Mars’ influence obvious. Seventy years later, its visuals were echoed by Emmerich as countries around the globe received transmissions from Independence Day’s invaders, then later used Morse code to coordinate a united counter-offensive….

(5) TWO-LEGGED SYLLOGISM OF THE DAY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Smart people drink alcohol.

Fans drink alcohol.

Therefore fans are smart.

Wait, something feels off about that logic…

Must. Think. Hard.

ᕙ(⇀‸↼)ᕗ

“Your IQ in High School Can Predict Your Alcohol Use Later in Life” at Science Alert.

When Brown and his colleagues at UT considered socioeconomic factors, they found that household income partially mediated the relationship between IQ and drinking habits, but a person’s level of education did not affect this relationship.

“While it’s not possible to capture all the underlying mechanisms that mediate the relationship between drinking and IQ, we know that income partially explains the pathway between the two,” says neuroscientist Jayme Palka from UT.

Previous studies have also linked higher IQ scores to higher household incomes. In turn, studies have found a relationship between higher incomes and more frequent alcohol consumption, possibly because of the availability of alcohol in this population and “social drinking norms related to prestige/success”….

(6) RON ELY (1938-2024). Actor Ron Ely, best known as star of TV’s Tarzan series, died September 29. The Deadline obituary notes his many other genre roles.

…With his height at 6-foot-4 and a solid athletic build, Ely went on to win the title role in the film Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze. He also appeared in multiple episodes of the series Fantasy Island and starred in the Wonder Woman series’ two-part episode “The Deadly Sting.”

His other credits include The Aquanauts in 1960-61, the Western adventure film The Night of the Grizzly in 1966 and in Jürgen Goslar’s slavery movie Slavers in 1978….

… He continued working well into the ’90s with a role in the Superboy syndicated series….

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary: Bradbury’s Twilight Zone script, “I Sing the Body Electric” (1962)

This has absolutely nothing to do with today’s date. It’s just something I find really interesting. And I feel that it has a proper autumnal feel to it.

Bradbury wrote one of the shortest opening narrations that Serling gave in the series:

They make a fairly convincing pitch here. It doesn’t seem possible, though, to find a woman who must be ten times better than mother in order to seem half as good, except, of course, in the Twilight Zone. — “I Sing the Body Electric”

Though I didn’t know that Ray Bradbury had a script produced for the one and true Twilight Zone, it doesn’t at all surprise me that he did. I had assumed Serling wrote all of the episodes. Not true as it turns out, to my delight, as we get the “I Sing the Body Electric”.

It is known that he contributed several scripts to The Twilight Zone, but this is the only one that actually was produced. He certainly was no stranger to TV script writing with five scripts for the Alfred Hitchcock Presents series alone.

This would air as the thirtieth-fifth episode of the third season on May 18, 1962. This was one of six Twilight Zones episodes directed by James Sheldon and his co-director William Clazton who did four.

LOOK, GO EAT A CANDY APPLE FOR A MINUTE PLEASE.

Just three words this time— sweet robotic grandmothers. Ok, a few more. My god, this episode drips with cloyness, it does. A recent widower, needing care for his three young children, orders a robotic “grandmother”. Two of the children accept her, but one of his daughters adamantly rejects her, with what might be near fatal consequences.

DID YOU ENJOY THAT CANDY APPLE?

A fable? Most assuredly. But who’s to say at some distant moment there might be an assembly line producing a gentle product in the form of a grandmother whose stock in trade is love? Fable, sure, but who’s to say? — Closing words

(8) COMICS SECTION.

F Minus finds a higher court.
Moderately Confused is repelled by corporate jargon.
Off the Mark makes a good impression.
Speckticles finds signs of a visitor.

(9) ENDLESS BEEPING. Fanac.org recently added to its online library Milton F. Stevens’ fanzine Passing Parade 2, featuring his insider’s view of working L.A.con, the 1972 Worldcon (and the first one I ever attended).

Milt was the hotel liaison and de facto troubleshooter who responded to about 300 calls to his beeper during the weekend. And that doesn’t count the people who just walked up to make their requests in person. For example:

…Thursday started on a rather strange note. I was eating breakfast as I often find myself doing at the beginning of the day. Then as I was about to leave a woman approached me and asked me if I was involved in running the convention. I was unquestionably involved and I made the mistake of copping-out to it. Then she pounced. Despite her unobtrusive appearance she was in reality selling acrylic fur all-weather blankets and wished to do so at the convention. I explained that our convention was not particularly a merchandising convention except for books and we’d oven sold all the space for that. It soon became apparent that she was a salesman in the worst sense of the word. I couldn’t get rid of her. Suddenly I had one of my occasionally brilliant notions. I explained to her that if she wanted to sell her product at our convention she should bill them as Super Tribbles. I then pointed her in the direction of David Gerrold and suggested that she try renting part of his table. As it turned out, she offered him a commission and he did try selling them at his table. I don’t know what luck he had, but at least I didn’t hear from the woman again….

(10) THIRD AND FINAL, PROBABLY. (But you already know that trilogies don’t always end.)“Venom: The Last Dance review – Tom Hardy’s Marvel sequel is a delight when it’s not being a Madame Web rerun” says the Independent.

…We’re subsequently introduced to more symbiotes, all helpfully colour-coded, and Knull’s squad of symbiote hunters, the xenophages, a generic alien foe save for a quite cool feature that sees them spray a blood mist out the back of their heads every time they chow down on someone. Two accomplished actors, Ted Lasso’s Juno Temple and Oscar nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor, play a scientist and a soldier, respectively – jobs that largely involve peering through observation windows and attempting to fathom the unfathomable.

But Marcel, who’s now added director to her usual screenwriter credit, is well aware of what her film is. Any non-Venom scene flies by like it’s being watched from a passing rollercoaster while, crawling out from underneath the pile of studio demands, appears a tribute to Hardy’s blissfully untethered performance as both host and guttural-voiced parasite. What started as the actor dunking his entire body into a restaurant lobster tank here ends with him hunched over a Vegas slot machine, slamming buttons and pulling cranks as if he were being puppeteered off camera.

Any scene in The Last Dance that concerns Venom and Eddie is a delight, a direct continuation of the series’s charming, broad-purpose metaphor – queer-coded in parts (they refer to each other as Thelma and Louise), and all about self-love and acceptance. Together, they break up a dog fighting ring and ensure the pups all find “loving forever homes”, a particularly Hardy touch considering his offscreen canine advocacy….

(11) PRIME TEAMWORK. [Item by Steven French.] The latest largest prime number has just been found, by one of thousands of volunteers contributing spare computer processing time (and in case anyone is wondering, yes it is very big — over 41 million digits long). “Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search” at PrimeNet.

…This prime ends the 28 year reign of ordinary PCs finding the largest known prime. In 2017, Mihai Preda authored Mersenne prime search software that runs on GPUs. GPUs were primarily used in PCs as video cards or for mining cryptocurrency. Nowadays, video cards are also used to power the AI revolution. Durant’s idea was to use these powerful GPUs that are now available in the cloud and heavily discounted when they are being under-utilized. Luke organized these cloud GPUs creating a kind of “cloud supercomputer” spanning 17 countries. After nearly a year of testing, Luke finally struck paydirt. On October 11, an NVIDIA A100 GPU in Dublin, Ireland, reported that M136279841 is probably prime. On October 12, an NVIDIA H100 in San Antonio, Texas, USA, confirmed primality with a Lucas-Lehmer test….

(12) SEVERANCE TRAILER. Severance has dropped its Season 2 teaser trailer.

In Severance, Mark Scout (Adam Scott) leads a team at Lumon Industries, whose employees have undergone a severance procedure, which surgically divides their memories between their work and personal lives. This daring experiment in “work-life balance” is called into question as Mark finds himself at the center of an unraveling mystery that will force him to confront the true nature of his work… and of himself. In season two, Mark and his friends learn the dire consequences of trifling with the severance barrier, leading them further down a path of woe.

(13) THE FUTURE OF GAME CONSOLES. Keza MacDonald, in “Pushing Buttons”, The Guardian’s gaming newsletter, wonders if advances in console tech have reached the point of dismissing returns: “Is there even any point in making more powerful games consoles?”

Last week, my favoured gaming news site, VGC, asked former US PlayStation boss Shawn Layden whether he thought the pursuit of more powerful consoles was still the way to go for the video games industry. His answer was not what I expected.

“We’ve done these things this way for 30 years, every generation those costs went up and we realigned with it. We’ve reached the precipice now, where the centre can’t hold, we cannot continue to do things that we have done before … It’s time for a real hard reset on the business model, on what it is to be a video game,” he said. “We’re at the stage of hardware development that I call ‘only dogs can hear the difference’. We’re fighting over teraflops and that’s no place to be. We need to compete on content. Jacking up the specs of the box, I think we’ve reached the ceiling.”

This surprised me because it seems very obvious, but it’s still not often said by games industry executives, who rely on the enticing promise of technological advancement to drum up investment and hype. If we’re now freely admitting that we’ve gone as far we sensibly can with console power, that does represent a major step-change in how the games industry does business.

(14) FREE UPDATE OF VIDEO GAME. [Item by N.] Slay the Princess, an inventive dark fantasy horror game that came close to being nominated in the inaugural Best Game or Interactive Work category at the 2024 Hugos, releases its expanded “Pristine Cut” in two days, both as a free update for PC players and a complete release for console owners. Watch the trailer here:

Slay the Princess – The Pristine Cut releases tomorrow at 1pm Eastern on PC, Playstation, Switch, and Xbox.
— Black Tabby Games (This is Tony) – Slay the Princess (@blacktabbygames.com) 2024-10-23T11:32:51.694Z

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

Pixel Scroll 10/3/24 I Don’t Think He Knows About Second Pixel Scroll

Posted on October 3, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) GOFUNDME FOR HOWARD ANDREW JONES. Friends have started “A Call to Help Howard Andrew Jones and His Family” at GoFundMe.

In August, Howard Andrew Jones wrote that he has been diagnosed with brain cancer––multifocal glioblastoma – and that, “People I trust––my doctors and my family––inform me it will be fatal, and we are deciding now on a course of action to make the most of the time I have left.” This GoFundMe shall go to forthcoming medical bills in the months to come and any other funding the family might need.

At this writing the appeal has raised $22,345 of the $35,000 goal.

(2) SCARE UP THE VOTE. The Scare Up the Vote event by members of the horror community hopes to raise funds and awareness to elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. The live online event at 8:00 p.m. Eastern on October 15 will include appearances from Stephen King, Joe Hill, Mike Flanagan, Tananarive Due, Stephen Graham Jones, Cynthia Pelayo, Paul Tremblay, Gabino Iglesias, Victor LaValle, Alma Katsu, Bryan Fuller (Hannibal), Scott Derrickson (The Black Phone), and Don Mancini (creator of Chucky). Follow the YouTube page for the livestream: “Scare Up the Vote” YouTube page.

(3) GOLDSMITHS PRIZE SHORTLIST. The finalists for the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize were announced October 2. None of the six are detectably of genre interest:

All My Precious Madness (Mark Bowles, Galley Beggar Press)
Tell (Jonathan Buckley, Fitzcarraldo)
Parade (Rachel Cusk, Faber)
Choice (Neel Mukherjee, Atlantic)
Spent Light (Lara Pawson, CB Editions)
Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking (Han Smith, JM Originals).

The prize, worth £10,000 and run in association with the New Statesman, was open to novels published between 1 November 2023 and 31 October 2024, written in English by citizens of the UK or Ireland, or authors who have been resident in either country for three years and have their book published there.

The winner will be announced on November 6.

(4) BOOK FREEDOM. Publishers Weekly reports “In Arkansas, Book Banners Dealt Another Legal Setback”.

In yet another major win for freedom to read advocates, a federal judge has ordered the Crawford County Public Library in Arkansas to stop segregating books deemed inappropriate by some local residents into special “social sections,” and to return the books to general circulation.

In his September 30 opinion and order, U.S. district court judge P.K. Holmes III held that “it is indisputable” that the creation and maintenance of the library’s so-called social sections “was motivated in substantial part by a desire to impede users’ access to books containing viewpoints that are unpopular or controversial in Crawford County.” In a preliminary injunction, Holmes ordered county officials to dismantle the sections and return the books to general circulation, as well as to refrain from “coercing” library staff to censor books.

The decision comes in a lawsuit first filed in May 2023 by three local parents, who challenged the county’s quorum court, the library board, and the library’s interim director for a policy that created special sections and classifications for segregating books, mostly LGBTQ content. Among their defenses, county officials argued that moving the books to special sections did not amount to book banning. But Holmes said the evidence showed that “viewpoint discrimination was a substantial motive” for the creation of the “social sections,” and that the policy held “profound” First Amendment implications….

(5) PAY THE WRITER. “The SoA responds to results of The Bookseller’s survey on advances and royalties” at The Society of Authors (UK).

A recent survey launched by The Bookseller on advances and royalties revealed that 52% of respondents had experienced payment issues with their publishers.

The survey found that among those who experienced issues with payment, ‘around 18% experienced problems with both advances and royalties, 17% only with advances [and] with around the same number experiencing problems only with royalties’….

(6) ZOOMING INTO FANHISTORY. Fanac.org will host a Zoom FanHistory session featuring globetrotting Australian fan Robin Johnson on October 26. To attend, send a note to fanac@fanac.org

FANAC FanHistory Zoom Session
Robin Johnson: Traveling Fan from Oz
Robin Johnson, interviewed by Perry Middlemiss & Leigh Edmonds

October 26,2024 – 7PM EDT, 4PM PDT, 12AM London, 10AM AEDT Sunday, Oct 27 Melbourne

(7) DEFENSE AGAINST THE DARK ARTS. “Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and Other Toxic Fans: How Hollywood Is Fighting Back” – Variety has the details.

… Still, toxic fandoms have grown so pernicious that they’ve become a fact of life for many — and so powerful that while talent, executives and publicists will privately bemoan the issue, fear of inadvertently triggering another backlash kept several studios from speaking for this story even on background. (As one rep put it, “It’s just a lose-lose.”)

Those who did talk with Variety all agreed that the best defense is to avoid provoking fandoms in the first place. In addition to standard focus group testing, studios will assemble a specialized cluster of superfans to assess possible marketing materials for a major franchise project.

“They’re very vocal,” says the studio exec. “They will just tell us, ‘If you do that, fans are going to retaliate.’” These groups have even led studios to alter the projects: “If it’s early enough and the movie isn’t finished yet, we can make those kinds of changes.”

Several studio insiders say they often put their talent through a social media boot camp; in some cases, when a character is intentionally challenging a franchise’s status quo, studios will, with the actor’s permission, take over their social media accounts entirely. When things get really bad — especially involving threats of violence — security firms will scrub talent information from the internet to protect them from doxxing….

(8) NEW GERROLD NOVELLA COMING THIS MONTH. David Gerrold’s new SF novella Praxis will be released October 22 by Star Traveler Press, an imprint of Starship Sloane Publishing.

A lifetime in the Labor Corps—or colonize a new world. For Jamie and José, not much of a choice. But Praxis wouldn’t be easy. To survive there, you had to depend on each other. And that requires honesty that few possess. Praxis is a bold experiment in society building, a monosexual colony, with no promises of survival and no return trip. But it’s got potential. You just have to build a new civilization—on the other side of the universe.

It is a compelling story that explores social issues without skimping on the hard science fiction.

The foreword is by John Shirley and the cover art is an original piece by Bob Eggleton commissioned for the book. F. J. Bergmann did the book design and layout and Justin T. O’Conor Sloane is the editor and publisher.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

October 3, 2017 — Anniversary: Blade Runner 2049

Science fiction fans live in hope, especially when it comes to sequels, prequels, and other works. Maybe this time it will be good. Maybe the magic will return. Maybe the horse will sing.

Maybe.

I won’t claim to be one of the seventeen people who saw the original Blade Runner in the theaters in 1982, my exposure came when versions of it arrived on videotape, but it had become one of my core SFF experiences. And so in 2017, upon the announcement of its forthcoming release, I was extremely interested in what Denis Villeneuve (whose Arrival I had loved) could do with the film.

I saw it opening weekend, because it was my birthday weekend, and I wanted to treat myself. I had been led to expect spectacle and visuals, and I wanted the large screen, and in those days before the Covid Pandemic, I had no inhibitions in doing so. And so I sat down to see what Villeneuve had wrought.

If the original Blade Runner is a noir classic pinpricked and studded with moments of beauty, Blade Runner 2049 was a large, sprawling epic on the screen, pinpricked and studded with moments of different kinds of beauty. Such visions, taking the future of Los Angeles from Blade Runner and adding a level of inexorable environmental devastation that we get right in the first scene and all the way to the finale at the devastated, buried Las Vegas. A twisty, twisted tale that wraps around the shed snake skin of the original film. And a story, and revelations that are of a piece, and feel like they belong in a Philip K. Dick story. The bones of the movie and its revelations.

This film doesn’t and didn’t work unless you were steeped in the original, sometimes too much for its own good. But even for its long run time, around every corner, there was so much to see and take in. The long running time can work against it, but it gives us so much of the world to inhabit and see and explore.

Is it the original? No. Does it depend too much on the original? In some ways, trying to follow up on a classic movie was an impossible task. Had Villeneuve gone for another noir piece (even more than the mystery chassis of this film), it would have felt like too much of a copy. If there was no acknowledgement of the original, it would have felt like a betrayal of the original. I think that Villeneuve made the Blade Runner universe his own in a way that Ridley Scott did with his original movie. He understood the assignment and I think he hit the mark.

And long before Barbie, this movie helped cement Gosling as someone far more than just his good looks and charm. And to see Harrison Ford again, of course, was a pleasure. And Ana de Armas. And Robin Wright. And thanks to Blade Runner 2049, for better or worse, we got two Dune movies from Villeneuve. The template for those two movies is here.

And now I need to rewatch it. Maybe you should give it a try, if you haven’t.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Bliss has an unexpected birdwatcher.
Rhymes With Orange knows the problem with waiting rooms.

(11) UR SID TO JOIN LEE-MILLER ARCHIVE AT TEXAS A&M. Sharon Lee today informed fans of the Liaden Universe®:

Long-time Friends of Liad will recall Ur Sid, an eight-inch tall Teddy bear, dressed in a Scout uniform. Ur Sid attended the conventions that Steve and Sharon couldn’t make, hobnobbing with the Famous, and, like every good fan, collecting buttons and memorabilia.

The authors would occasionally meet Ur Sid at worldcons, and were always happy to see him. But his purpose was to be an Ambassador at Large for the Liaden Universe®, and in that he succeeded very well, indeed.

Ur Sid traveled between cons via the Bumpy Passage, a refurbed Scout ship that had seen better days, and he sent reports back to the Friends of Liad listserve.

Those reports are sadly lost. However, Ur Sid also kept a diary. From it, we learn that his first WorldCon was ChiCon 2000. His last con, though it’s not noted in the diary, was Heliophere 2023, where Steve and Sharon were Writer Guests of Honor. He attended the Teddy Bear Tea, and charmed the room, as always.

All good adventures do finally come to an end. Ur Sid stopped travelling when the Bumpy Passage suffered a catastrophic failure of its Struven Unit. Subsequently, he spent some years with Friend of Liad Sarge, who reunited him with the authors at PhilCon 78, in 2014.

Ur Sid is about to embark on his last trip, via FedEx. He will be escorting a shipment of Liaden Universe® books to the Lee and Miller Archive at the Cushing Memorial Library at Texas A&M. Once that duty is accomplished, Ur Sid will become part of the permanent archive. He’ll be keeping a Very Close Eye on Steve and Sharon’s Literary Legacy. And charming the curators, of course.

Link to the Sharon Lee and Steve Miller Archive (note that the papers are still being processed).

(12) HAVE THEY GONE NUTS? “Nutter Butter, Are You Okay? The Brand’s Unhinged Social Media Has Customers Concerned” reports Delish.

You probably haven’t thought much about Nutter Butter since the cookie was in your lunchbox in the third grade. However, the snack brand has taken an interesting route to regain cultural relevance.

Nutter Butter has been posting completely unhinged TikToks for weeks now. No one seems to understand the brand’s bizarre approach, but it seems to be working. People are talking about Nutter Butter again, and the account has amassed millions of video views and hundreds of thousands of followers.

We’ll just leave these Nutter Butter TikToks here for evidence…

And while no one can’t seem to make any sense of it, that’s kind of the point. We got in touch with Nutter Butter to ask what was going on.

“Nutter Butter embraces its nuttiness, departing from a perfectly curated feed to experiment with the surreal side of the internet,” a spokesperson for the brand told Delish. “Our social channels create a realm of extreme absurdity and deep lore by going where no other cookie has gone before. Follow us as we push the boundaries of creativity to take you on unexpected adventures.”…

@officialnutterbutter
come play,
? original sound – nutter butter

(13) SIM CRADLE TO GRAVE. Variety has details about how “‘The Sims 4’ to Launch ‘Life and Death’ Expansion Pack Featuring Grim Reaper Career, Funerals, Afterlife and Reincarnation”.

… “In the Reaper Profession, Sims with an affinity for the afterlife can become Grimterns and work their way up to Reaper as they make a career out of facilitating the next phase of life for Sims,” per “The Sims” developers. “Work with Grim at the Netherworld Department of Death (N.W.D.D.) and even head off into the ‘field.’ Sims in this profession can experience reaper training with the all-around-good-guy-training-dummy, Kenny, maintain Grimtern Sims’ scythes, practice reaping souls on practice dummies, and determine causes of deaths for reaped souls. At higher levels, Sims in this Career can even determine which souls they’ll reap and which they’ll return to life. Once retrieved, souls can be placed in the Netherworld Portal to meet the soul quota. Grimterns who meet the soul quote are eligible to become Employee of the Month.”…

(14) DOXX EVERYONE IN SIGHT? According to Gizmodo, “This Facial Recognition Experiment With Meta’s Smart Glasses Is a Terrifying Vision of the Future”.

Two college students have used Meta’s smart glasses to build a tool that quickly identifies any stranger walking by and brings up that person’s sensitive information, including their home address and contact information, according to a demonstration video posted to Instagram. And while the creators say they have no plans to release the code for their project, the demo gives us a peek at humanity’s very likely future—a future that used to be confined to dystopian sci-fi movies….

… An Instagram video posted by Nguyen explains how the two men built a program that feeds the visual information from Meta Ray Ban smart glasses into facial recognition tools like Pimeyes, which have essentially scraped the entire web to identify where that person’s face shows up online. From there, a large language model infers the likely name and other details about that person. That name is then fed to various websites that can reveal the person’s home address, phone number, occupation or other organizational affiliations, and even the names of relatives….

(15) SECOND DINOSAUR ASTEROID. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The BBC have just reported that research has uncovered a second dinosaur-killing asteroid. However this is not new news as the headline suggests as a couple of paragraphs in reveals that this discovery has previously been covered by the BBC themselves. What is new is a more detailed survey whose results have just been published in Nature: “3D anatomy of the Cretaceous–Paleogene age Nadir Crater”. See the pictures below.

Ripley once said of other monster creatures, we should “nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.” Having two giant asteroids, one for the western and one the eastern hemisphere was a good way to be sure.

I have never really forgiven the dinosaurs for what they did to Raquel Welch…

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Another movie pulled out of the vault & given the Pitch Meeting treatment. “Superman III Pitch Meeting”.

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

Pixel Scroll 9/24/24 Tales From Scrollographic Pixels

Posted on September 24, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) F&SF COVER REVEAL. The cover of the Summer 2024 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is by Mondolithic Studios.

(2) ADDED ATTRACTIONS. “The Obsession with Extra-Illustrating Books” discussed by The Huntington blog.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, an obsession spread among bibliophiles for extra-illustrating or grangerizing books. Readers would supplement the pages of an already published book by inserting prints and related materials acquired from other sources. This process would often result in a huge expansion of the original volume, a ballooning that could easily stretch the book to bursting, requiring rebinding into additional volumes to hold the interleaved material. Where did this practice come from? Who thought of doing it in the first place?

In 1769, a country vicar named James Granger (1723–1776) published A Biographical History of England, from Egbert the Great to the Revolution. A guide for collectors of portrait prints, the book cataloged and gave brief descriptions of significant personages in British history as well as directed readers to the most desirable engraved portraits of those subjects for their collections.

Granger’s friend Richard Bull (1721–1805), a member of Parliament and an avid collector, went well beyond using the book to find and procure the recommended prints for his collection. Instead, he dismantled and cut up Granger’s text, placing relevant passages with the corresponding engravings on large backing sheets that served as new pages, and then he bound all these pages together. This process radically altered and expanded the structure and contents of the original book.

Granger’s A Biographical History of England, published as four quarto volumes 9 inches tall, expanded in Bull’s hands to 35 folio volumes with leaves 23 to 28 inches tall, filled with 14,500 portrait prints. What had once been a work free of images—except for Granger’s portrait—became a mixed-media compendium of British historical figures. Today, it is known as the Bull Granger. The Huntington holds all 35 volumes of this first-identified project of extra-illustration, traditionally defined….

(3) HAPPY BOOK BIRTHDAY. Cat Rambo’s Rumor Has It, sequel to You Sexy Thing and Devil’s Gun, was released today.

It's my book birthday! RUMOR HAS IT is out in the wild. Please pick it up from your favorite bookstore or get it from your library! And if you enjoy it, please spread the word. 🙂 pic.twitter.com/WFXHK9OZhn
— Cat Rambo (@Catrambo) September 24, 2024

(4) DREAMHAVEN BOOKS ACQUIRES ANOTHER STORE’S INVENTORY. Announced today on Facebook:

DreamHaven Books of Minneapolis is pleased to announce the acquisition of the remaining inventory of the 1990s Colorado bookstore, The Little Bookshop of Horrors. The Arvada Colorado bookstore specialized in Horror, Science Fiction and Mystery books and hosted frequent signings with authors. The owners, Doug and Tomi (Cheri) Lewis were also publishers of Roadkill Press who produced a number of chapbooks with the authors they would host.

The store closed after the death of Tomi Lewis in 1996 and Doug locked the doors and simply walked away. The store and it’s impressive inventory would sit for many years until it was more recently moved into a storage unit. Greg Ketter of DreamHaven Books agreed to purchase the remaining stock and has transferred it to his brick & mortar store in Minneapolis. The books are now being integrated into the store stock and certain items listed on ABE Books and eBay.

There are many signed books by Joe R. Lansdale, Dan Simmons, Edward Bryant, Harlan Ellison, John Dunning, Elmore Leonard, Donald Westlake and many others. Hundreds of limited edition and small press books are also included. Want lists are welcome (DreamHaven will not be able to quote books by phone; they are still sorting through hundreds of boxes of books).

(5) GET ON BOARD. The SFWA Blog continues its series on board game playtesting with “Playtesting TTRPG Stories”.

Don’t Help Playtesters

Give the material you’ve produced to a playtesting group without additional explanation or support. Effective game writing must stand without outside explanation.

A common error is supporting the players or gamemaster if they’re confused about how a narrative element should be presented or how some mechanics function. Observing playtests is a good source of data, but it’s best not to interfere directly. Watching someone get your game wrong is an important step in revising the text so that future customers will get it right….

(6) VIDEO GAME ACTORS STRIKE ACTION. Variety reports “’League of Legends’ Added to Actors’ Video Game Strike”.

After previously being exempt from inclusion in the ongoing video game actors strike, Riot Games‘ massively multiplayer online role-playing game “League of Legends” has been added to the list of blocked titles by SAG-AFTRA amid the union’s accusation of unfair labor practices against Formosa Interactive.

According to SAG-AFTRA, Formosa, a union signatory that provides voiceover services for “League of Legends,” is accused of trying to “cancel” one of its struck video games “shortly after the start of SAG-AFTRA’s video game strike” on July 26. SAG-AFTRA has filed a charge against the company with the National Labor Relations Board.

“When they were told that was not possible, they secretly transferred the game to a shell company and sent out casting notices for ‘NON-UNION’ talent only,” the union said. “SAG-AFTRA charges that these serious actions are egregious violations of core tenets of labor law – that employers cannot interfere with performers’ rights to form or join a union and they cannot discriminate against union performers. The unilateral and surreptitious transfer of union work to a ‘non-union’ shell company is an impermissible and appalling attempt to evade a strike action and destroy performers’ rights under labor law.”

It should be noted SAG-AFTRA is not accusing the Riot Games title of unfair labor practices, but rather calling for a strike against “League of Legends” because it is the most high profile title produced by Formosa Interactive.

In a statement Tuesday, “League of Legends” publisher Riot Games said: “‘League of Legends’ has nothing to do with the complaint mentioned in SAG-AFTRA’s press release. We want to be clear: Since becoming a union project five years ago, ‘League of Legends’ has only asked Formosa to engage with Union performers in the US and has never once suggested doing otherwise. In addition, we’ve never asked Formosa to cancel a game that we’ve registered. All of the allegations in SAG-AFTRA’s press release relating to canceling a game or hiring non-union talent relate to a non-Riot game, and have nothing to do with ‘League’ or any of our games.”…

(7) O CAPTAIN, MY CAPTAIN! “Writer David Gerrold said Star Trek held together because of William Shatner” at Redshirts Always Die.

…In The Fifty-Year Mission The First Twenty-Five Years by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman, Gerrold was reported as having said that “all of the movies and all of the episodes hold together because Shatner holds it together.”

Gerrold pointed out that Spock [Leonard Nimoy] needed someone to play off of, and that was Captain Kirk. When Spock had scenes that didn’t involve the captain, he didn’t think they were interesting.

“The scenes where Spock doesn’t have Shatner to play off of are not interesting. If you look at Spock with his mom or dad, it’s very ponderous. But Spock working with Kirk has sthe magic and it plays very well, and people give all of the credit to Nimoy, not to Shatner.”…

(8) TERRY QUERY: WHERE’S ARNOLD? [Item by Daniel Dern.] My friend (and former boss) Paul Schindler is having no luck finding information, much less the online thing itself, of Sir Pterry’s story “Arnold, The Bominable Snowman” which is/was supposed to be published online this month (September 2024).

See Item 2 in the May 11, 2024 Pixel Scroll for more about the story proper, the onlineification, contest, etc:

(2) PTERRY SURPRISE. The Terry Pratchett website has announced “Another lost Terry Pratchett story found”

Thanks (on behalf of Paul, who I’ll advise of any follow-ups)

(9) TEDDY HARVIA CARTOON.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born September 24, 1934 – John Brunner. (Died 1995.)

By Paul Weimer: The man who saw our future. Or multiple futures. Yes, I know science fiction is really about the present much more than “predicting the future”, but take a look around at our year of 2024, with random violence, political instability, a kaleidoscope of fashions and trends, social divisions, global terrorism, extremism, billionaires running amok. And also, gay marriage, affirmative action, electric cars, the use of marijuana and more.

Aside from the fact that the random violence in the book is NOT gun-based, we seem to be living very much in the world of Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar. But that’s not all. In The Sheep Look Up, we get environmental degradation, a Republican President who says the answer to all our problems is “Deregulation”, a widening gap between rich and poor, and a degradation of quality of life across the board. Or The Jagged Orbit, where a cabal of Republicans are going to use computers to swing an election. Or The Shockwave Rider, showing a United Stated dominated by computer networks a la the internet, even as infrastructure crumbles and crumbles.

Reading (or rereading Brunner) in 2024 can be a lot.

Beyond the gloom and doom of Brunner’s trilogy, though, there is much lighter fare if you want to try one of SF’s greatest visionaries. Out of his large oeuvre, my favorite is The Squares of the City. Boyd Hakluyt is a traffic and systems engineer who is hired by a fictional South American country to resolve a traffic and transit problem. While there, he gets wrapped up in a plot between the government and the not so loyal opposition, in a literal chess match where Boyd finds himself a piece on the board. It’s a taut and fun political thriller that might be a bit light on the SF, but high on tension, drama, and if you like chess, you will love this book. And then there is The Infinitive of Go, which is the type of multiverse novel whose implications slowly creep on you.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Brewster Rockit and Thatababy have posted James Earl Jones memorials.
Phoebe and Her Unicorn discuss overlords.
Reality Check has a vengeful character with a soundalike name.
Rudy Park has two bros reactions to cosmic news.

(12) DIAL THAT DOWN. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The folks behind HBO’s new “workplace comedy” about the creation of a superhero franchise movie claim they had to take what happens in real life movie making down a notch. Otherwise, they say, no one would believe them. It would just be too silly. The Hollywood Reporter has the story of The Franchise.

There’s a situation discussed in HBO’s upcoming series The Franchise — a comedy about the behind-the-scenes struggle to make a superhero movie — that sounds rather absurd: A director laboring away on a fictional Marvel-like film gradually realizes the studio brass has changed their mind about the project’s creative direction and started secretly shooting the “real” movie somewhere else, while he continues to film scenes destined to be scrapped.

Yet this has actually happened to at least one filmmaker working on a franchise movie, according to the show’s producers.

“All the research we did — and we did tons, we spoke to so many people — the actual chaos [on superhero films] was really surprising,” says The Franchise creator Jon Brown (Succession), who made the series along with Armando Iannucci (Veep) and Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes (1917). “People think these movies are laid out in neat phases for the next 10 years. Then you hear about a set where, in the morning, a limo literally pulls up, the window comes down, and they hand out new script pages. Or producers on set have eight versions of the same script open, and they go through each script, cherry picking lines, and then they Frankenstein a scene out of nothing. Or the studio sends an actor to the set in the morning and they basically rewrite the day’s entire scene [to accommodate the last-minute cast addition]. You would assume all this was decided two years ago, but it’s happened a lot across Marvel and DC movies.”

As a result, the writers of The Franchise found themselves in the rather odd position of sometimes making story choices for their show that were less wild than the real-life anecdotes they were hearing from industry insiders. “You think, ‘I know this is real, but it just seems too silly,'” Brown said. “So we sometimes have to take it back a step, because you don’t think people will believe it unless they know it’s true.”…

(13) COLLECTORS ITEM. Are you in the market for a complete run of Weird Tales? This one can be yours for $150,000. “RARE! Complete Set of Weird Tales” at eBay.

(14) LATEST EDITION SONIC SCREWDRIVER. “Doctor Who fans unveils Fifteenth Doctor’s sonic screwdriver – pre-order now” — Radio Times tells what button to push.

While it’s been a few months since the adventures of the Fifteenth Doctor and companion Ruby Sunday, the excitement lives on, as fans can now pre-order the Doctor’s trust sonic screwdriver!

The screwdriver is available to pre-order from Character Options at £39.99….

“Doctor Who The Fifteenth Doctor’s Sonic Screwdriver Deluxe Edition” at Character Online.

The Fifteenth Doctor’s sonic screwdriver boasts a completely revamped shape and design, with its curved edges, making it the most unique rendition of his favourite bit of tech yet.

The deluxe version, available only on Character online, boasts an exclusive ‘electro plated’ finish making it look like real polished steel and brass. It features two modes of operation, Open and Closed, as well as five brand new and totally unique sound and light effects, with each accessed by a different button sequence.

On this deluxe version of The Fifteenth Doctor’s device there are many new features including a uniquely shaped, swivel-out Power Core complete with flickering Power Crystal Chamber and on/off sounds. There are also three distinctly different sounds with accompanying light FX; a standard sonic sound, a data sound, and a lifeform scan sound. The spring-out and retract Emitter section also has its own sound and finally the slide out analyser comes with its own sound completing the sound FX.

The sonic comes beautifully presented in Regeneration style packaging and is the perfect piece of memorabilia to add to any Doctor Who collection.

(15) IF PUSH COMES TO SHOVE. “Nuclear blast could save Earth from large asteroid, scientists say” – the Guardian has the story.

Scientists, as well as Hollywood movie producers, have long looked to nuclear bombs as a promising form of defence should a massive asteroid appear without warning on a collision course with Earth.

Now, researchers at a US government facility have put the idea on a firm footing, showing how such a blast might save the world in the first comprehensive demo of nuclear-assisted planetary defence.

Physicists at Sandia National Laboratories, whose primary mission is to ensure the safety and security of the US nuclear arsenal, recorded in nanosecond detail how an immense pulse of radiation unleashed by a nuclear blast could vaporise the side of a nearby asteroid.

The event is so violent that it heats the surface to tens of thousands of degrees, producing a rapidly expanding ball of gas capable of nudging the asteroid off course. Do the sums correctly and the shunt should be sufficient to put doomsday on hold.

(16) TEN YEARS OF SCIENCE AND FUTURISM. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] As regular Filers may have spotted, I occasionally throw a link 770’s way to Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur’s YouTube Channel (among much other material). The video item on “Transcendence” last week on File770 actually marked the 10th anniversary of that channel but I failed to include a mention that and that that episode also happened to coincide with Isaac’s 44th birthday.

As Mike knows, but you most likely don’t, I am one of the rare, endangered western-nation species that is not on the internet at home (actually, in the UK currently some 35% UK households solely occupied by over 65s are not on the internet so actually I am not as rare a creature as many of you may suspect – so always respect digital access diversity – the recent Glasgow Worldcon was not). What happens is this, working almost next door for an hour three or four times a week at the library cybercafé, if I spot an item of likely interest to Filers and then pass it Mike’s way for him to decide whether or not to include. This is an important filter as usually I spot things without looking at them in depth (I do that later at home having downloaded whatever it is to memory stick), so some duff material can get through and Mike commendably filters that out. This survey of the landscape is no hardship on my part as I have to keep an eye out for material for the seasonal SF² Concatenation. That zine has just three principal editions a year, whereas Mike’s is daily, so it makes sense for File770 to have first dibs as it could be up to four months before anything I (and other providers) air in Concatenation. Mike only uses 0.01% of the stuff I send him, so if you want to see other SF (through more a European/British prism) & science coverage then feel free to drop in on SF² Concatenation just three times a year.

Meanwhile, back to Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur, the previously linked “Transcendence” episode was number 465 in Isaac’s run or actually 700 in that series if you include Isaac Arthur’s shorts, live-streams and specials. Ohio-based Isaac is also currently the incumbent President of the National (US) Space Society, which I guess is the US analogue of our British Interplanetary Society. As for Isaac’s future episodes, of applied science interest is a forthcoming one on “Is Privacy Going Extinct” on 26th September (2024), and of SFnal/science interest “The Fermi Paradox: Large Moons” on 3rd October. Then, in more of an SFnal vein there will be one on “Fungal Aliens” on 13th October. You can check these out at www.youtube.com/@isaacarthurSFIA. He has more background info at www.IsaacArthur.net.

I should point out that Isaac’s channel is not the only one I monitor. His channel has a few occasional items of SF/SF interest for my catholic taste, but as for some of my other favourites there is: for pure physics I enjoy Matt O’Dowd at PBS Space-Time; for palaeo-environmental science (which is fairly close to my own specialist area) PBS Eons; for astrophysics Dave Kipping at Cool Worlds; for astronomy Becky Smethurst at Doctor Becky and for the presentation of the sheer love of finding out about SF Moid Moidelhoff at Media Death Cult and that of the joy of SF book collecting Book Pilled. There are, of course, other channels out there, and I dare say Mike would welcome your recommendations in the comments…

(17) SECRET ORIGINS OF PLOKTA, PT. 1. The Fanac Fanhistory Zoom for September 2024 is online:

This fannish group (aka the Plokta Cabal) burst on the scene in May 1996 with the fanzine Plokta, which went on to receive two Best Fanzine Hugos, 2 Nova Awards for Best Fanzine, and Hugo nominations each year from 1999 to 2008. They are energetic, quirky and very, very funny. They are writers, artists, con runners, Worldcon bidders and fan fund winners.

In part 1 (of 2), Steve Davies, Sue Mason, Alison Scott and Mike Scott, recount how they came into fandom and found each other. They tell entertaining stories of their fannish lives, from convention newsletters to the celebrated Plokta to the glories of providing a unique in-joke badge to each member of a convention. You’ll learn what a SMURF is, hear strong opinions about staples, and find out just what voodoo board spam can be. Plokta was one of the first web fanzines, and came together differently than most other fanzines. The group dynamics and interactions that created it are on full display in this recording. It’s great fun to watch, and it’s very, very clear that it was great fun to live.

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

Pixel Scroll 9/8/24 I’ve Grown Accustomed To The Doors of Your Face, the Lamps of Your Mouth

Posted on September 8, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) OFF THE CLOCK. “Critical Choices: Time Travel and Identity” by Rjurik Davidson at Speculative Insight.

…Psychologists suggest that your sense of self is constructed interpersonally, in relationship with others, and hence also in relationship to the social world. Individualism is nothing but a liberal myth. For example, people who venture into nature to “find themselves” typically discover the opposite: they lose any sense of their self. Isolated from society, they dissolve into their surroundings, become one with daily tasks: “catch fish,” “start fire,” “sleep.” They no longer exist. “All You Zombies” brilliantly illuminates this dissolution, counterintuitive to those schooled in Thoreau’s Walden or other such romantic myths. In the story, the main character (Jane) takes painkillers for her perpetual headache but discovers that without the pain everyone else disappears. It is as if the veil is torn from a false reality, revealing the true world beneath, seen before as through a glass darkly but now face to face – a premonition of one of Philip K. Dick’s enduring fascinations. Without mother, father, a social world, Jane’s existence manifests as a headache of existential dread. Either way, with headache or not, she experiences her plight as a pain of isolation. She is “alone in the dark.” Her declaration, “I know where I came from,” is replete with irony. Her somewhat desperate affirmation is made precisely because there is nothing but doubt. Neither she, nor the reader, actually knows where she came from – methinks that Jane dost protest too much….

(2) REWARDING TRANSLATION. Anton Hur analyzes “Literature that expands the borders of what ‘international’ can mean” in the Washington Post. (Usually there’s a paywall, but I was able to read this article. Hopefully, so will you.)

…But why have a translated literature category [for the National Book Awards] at all? Neil Clarke, the editor of the science fiction magazine Clarkesworld, had the same thought; he has argued against creating a translation category at the Hugo Awards, claiming that it would serve to further marginalize translated literature. A quick glance at the history of nominees for best novel at the Hugos reveals that a translation has been a finalist only twice, and for the same team: the redoubtable Cixin Liu, author of “The Three-Body Problem,” and his translator Ken Liu. As someone who reads translations primarily and prodigiously, you can’t make me take Clarke’s fears of “further” marginalization seriously. And it has to be said that this also applies to the National Book Awards, which simply stopped taking translated literature into consideration for more than three decades. (In writing this article, I was asked to consider what works may have been overlooked by the awards during the 2010s and, well, imagine me madly gesticulating at all the works in translation published in the eligibility periods between 2009 and 2017.)…

(3) THE DOCTOR IS IN. Jon Del Arroz proclaimed yesterday over a photo of Kirk and Spock that “Star Trek is an inherently right-wing concept. It upholds man’s greatness as being designed in the image of God and promotes manifest destiny and dominion of God’s creation.” Robert Picardo (who memorably played Voyager’s Emergency Medical Hologram) took him to task. Admittedly, the kind of attention Jon always hopes somebody will give him.

(4) FULL MOON VOTERS. “In Michigan, an ‘Unhinged Werewolf’ Will Make It Clear Who Voted” says the New York Times. (Behind a paywall.)

Plenty of the submissions in a statewide contest to design Michigan’s next “I Voted” sticker featured cherry blossoms or American flags fluttering in the wind.

Only one entry, however, depicted a werewolf clawing its shirt to tatters and howling at an unseen moon. A smattering of stars and stripes poke out from behind its brawny torso.

“I Voted,” reads a string of red, white and blue block letters floating above the creature’s open maw.

The illustration, which was created by Jane Hynous, a 12-year-old from Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich., was revealed on Wednesday as one of nine winning designs that the Michigan Department of State will offer local clerks to distribute to voters in the November election.

The werewolf sticker received more than 20,000 votes in the public contest, beating every other entry by a margin of nearly 2,000 votes, said Cheri Hardmon, a spokeswoman for the Michigan Department of State. The design gained traction on social media among those who found it fitting for an intense, and at times bewildering, moment in national politics….

(5) FANAC FAN HISTORY ZOOM: PLOKTA. [Item by Joe Siclari.] It’s a fannish mystery how this jumped from nothing to an everyday phrase all over fandom.

The FANAC Fan History Zoom Series starts off its new season with what promises to be a fun, interesting, historical and important session as it brings back together the Plokta Cabal. The group was known for its weird news, quirky humour and radical graphics.

September 22, 2024 – The Secret Origins of Plokta, with Steve Davies, Sue Mason, Alison Scott, and Mike Scott

Time: 2PM EDT, 1PM CDT, 11AM PDT, 7PM London (BST) & too early in Melbourne

This fannish group burst on the scene in May 1996 with the fanzine Plokta, which went on to receive two Best Fanzine Hugos, 2 Nova Awards for Best Fanzine, and Hugo nominations each year from 1999 to 2008. They are energetic, quirky and very, very funny. They are writers, artists, con runners, Worldcon bidders and fan fund winners. Join us and learn more about their secret origins, fannish impact and what they are doing now.

To attend, send an email to fanac@fanac.org

Two other Fanac Zoom session already on the calendar are:

October 26, 2024, Time 7PM EDT, 4PM PDT, Midnight London (sorry), and 10AM AEDT Sunday, Oct 27 Melbourne, Senior Australian fan Robin Johnson interview, with Robin Johnson, Perry Middlemiss and Leigh Edmonds
January 11, 2025, Time 2PM EST, 11AM PST, 7PM GMT London, and 6AM AEDT (sorry) Sunday, Jan 12 Melbourne, Out of the Ghetto and into the University: Science Fiction Fandom University Collections, with Phoenix Alexander (University of California, Riverside), Peter Balestrieri (University of Iowa), Susan Graham (University of Maryland, Baltimore County), and Richard Lynch (moderator)

(6) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary – Star Trek, The Original Series (1966).

On September 8 fifty-eight years ago the first episode of Star Trek aired. I want to talk about my favorite episode in the series, which is “Trouble with Tribbles”. Now there are other episodes that I will go to Paramount+ to watch such as “Shore Leave”, “Mirror, Mirrior” or “Balance of Terror” but is the one that I have watched by far the most and which I enjoy as just the funnest one they ever did.

It was first broadcast in the show’s second season, just after Christmas on December 29, 1967. The previous episode had been another one I also like a lot, “Wolf in the Fold”, written by Robert Bloch.

This script, which was Gerrold’s first professional sale, bore the working title for the episode of “A Fuzzy Thing Happened to Me…” Writer and producer for the series Gene did heavy rewrites on the final version of the script. The final draft script can be read in Gerrold’s The Trouble with Tribbles: The Story Behind Star Trek’s Most Popular Episode with much, much more on this episode.

Memory Alpha notes that “While the episode was in production, Gene Roddenberry noticed that the story was similar to Robert Heinlein’s novel, The Rolling Stones, which featured the ‘Martian Flat Cats’. Too late, he called Heinlein to apologize and avoid a possible lawsuit. Heinlein was very understanding, and was satisfied with a simple ‘mea culpa’ by Roddenberry.”

It of course is centered on tribbles. Wah Chang designed the original tribbles. Five hundred were sewn together during production, using pieces of extra-long rolls of carpet. Some of them had mechanical toys placed in them so they could move.

According to Gerrold, the tribble-maker Jacqueline Cumere was paid $350. Want a tribble now? Gerrold has them for you in various sizes and colors. So if you’re in seeing these, go here. tribbletoys.com

Let’s talk about why it’s about my favorite episode. I’m watching it now on Paramount+. I’ve to come to the bar scene where Cyrano Jones is trying to sell the Bar Manager a tribble when Chekov and Uhura come in. When Uhura asks if it’s alive, it starts adorably purring (who created that purr?), and the story goes from there.

The next morning Kirk walks. Uhura and a group are admiring that her tribble has reproduced. Where there was one, there are now, I stopped the video to count fourteen in various hues. (Not sure what all of them are as I’ve got color blindness.) Really cute but remarkably not one seems concerned.

Right there it exhibits that It has some of the best script writing in the series including this choice line as Spock holds and strokes a tribble: “Its trilling seems to have a tranquilizing effect on the human nervous system. Fortunately, of course … I am immune … to its effect.” There is an amused look from Uhura and the others.

Oh, and it has Klingons. Not the Worf-style ones. The ones that look like someone cos-played an Asian military character of a thousand years ago. So naturally that hard to lead to a bar fight, doesn’t it? It does when a Klingon calls Scotty’s Enterprise, his beloved ship, a garbage scow. Well, he actually calls it a lot of things before ending with that. Perfect, just perfect.

Now let’s segue from that bar brawl to reworking of this episode to the Deep Space Nine episode which I need not talk about as I know you know about it: “Trials and Tribble-ations”. It would be nominated for Hugo at a LoneStarCon 2. It would digitally insert the performers from the original series into that episode.

I’m assuming y’all know this delightful episode which I think can best have its attitude summed up in this conversation…

Sisko to Bashir: “Don’t you know anything about this period in time?”

Bashir: I’m a doctor, not an historian.”

Dax in her red short skirt: “In the old days, operations officers wore red, command officers wore gold… (Looks at her outfit.) “And women wore less. I think I’m going to like history.”

I’ve watched both shows back-to-back several times, which is well worth doing as they did an stellar job of making the DS9 characters work seamlessly in the old episode. (I know they weren’t actually there but still.) No wonder it got nominated for a Hugo.

I could single out even more scenes like Kirk buried in tribbles, for how he reacts or the very subtle line about Spock’s ears, but I’ll stop here. I just adore it and “Trials and Tribble-ations” as both are entertaining, feel-good episodes.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

Baldo orders the special.
Brewster Rockit knows there are two types of stargazers.
The Argyle Sweater offers a herpetological survey.

(8) MAR$. The Week contrasts The Martian Chronicles with billionaires’ plans for Mars in its editorial letter, “Martian dreams”.

…Along with other sci-fi staples such as living forever and computerizing consciousness, colonizing Mars is now an obsession of our tech elite. Rocket tycoon Elon Musk has said he wants to establish a “self-sustaining civilization” of 1 million people on our neighboring planet as an insurance policy against humanity’s extinction. Yet I can’t help but think that, like Bradbury and Lowell before them, Musk and his fellow billionaires are really projecting their own beliefs onto Mars’ red vistas….

(9) HIDDEN PROPERTY INSPIRED LOVECRAFT. Charming old NYC architectural history, with a genre link! “Inside a West Village passageway leading to a hidden courtyard and 1820s backhouse” at Ephemeral New York.

…One person who made note of this Evening Post writeup when it appeared was author H.P. Lovecraft. A resident of New York City in the 1920s, this horror and science fiction writer published a short story titled “He,” which involved a narrator taking a late-night, time-traveling sojourn through Greenwich Village.

“At the conclusion of ‘He,’ a passerby finds the narrator—bloodied and broken—lying at the entrance to a Perry Street courtyard,” wrote David J. Goodwin, author of the 2023 book Midnight Rambles: H.P. Lovecraft in Gotham.

In “He,” from 1925, the narrator calls it “a grotesque hidden courtyard of the Greenwich section,” as well as “a little black court off Perry Street.”…

(10) TARA CAMPBELL READING. Space Cowboys Books of Joshua Tree, CA will host an “Online Reading & Interview with Tara Campbell” on Tuesday September 17 at 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Register to attend for free at Eventbrite.

In the parched, post-apocalyptic Western U.S. of the 22nd Century, wolves float, bonfires sing, and devils gather to pray. Water and safety are elusive in this chaotic world of alchemical transformations, where history books bleed, dragons kiss, and gun-toting trees keep their own kind of peace. Among this menagerie of strange beasts, two sentient stone gargoyles, known only as “E” and “M,” flee the rubble of their Southwestern church in search of water. Along the way, they meet climate refugees Dolores Baker and her mother Rose, who’ve escaped the ravaged West Coast in search of a safer home. This quartet forms an uneasy alliance when they hear of a new hope: a mysterious city of dancing gargoyles. Or is it something more sinister? In this strange, terrible new world, their arrival at this elusive city could spark the destruction of everything they know. Tara Campbell summons fantastical magic in this kaleidoscopic new speculative climate fiction.

Get your copy of the book here.

(11) RADIO ASTRONOMY. [Item by Steven French.] This is pretty much standard stuff but the radio telescope itself is amazing: “Inside the ‘golden age’ of alien hunting at the Green Bank Telescope” at Physics.org.

Nestled between mountains in a secluded corner of West Virginia, a giant awakens: the Green Bank Telescope begins its nightly vigil, scanning the cosmos for secrets.

If intelligent life exists beyond Earth, there’s a good chance the teams analyzing the data from the world’s largest, fully steerable radio astronomy facility will be the first to know.

“People have been asking themselves the question, ‘Are we alone in the universe?’ ever since they first gazed up at the night sky and wondered if there were other worlds out there,” says Steve Croft, project scientist for the Breakthrough Listen initiative.

For the past decade, this groundbreaking scientific endeavor has partnered with a pioneering, US government-funded site built in the 1950s to search for “technosignatures”—traces of technology that originate far beyond our own solar system.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or “SETI,” was long dismissed as the realm of eccentrics and was even cut off from federal funding by Congress thirty years ago.

But today, the field is experiencing a renaissance and seeing an influx of graduates, bolstered by advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as recent discoveries showing that nearly every star in the night sky hosts planets, many of which are Earth-like.

“It feels to me like this is something of a golden age,” says Croft, an Oxford-trained radio astronomer who began his career studying astrophysical phenomena, from supermassive black holes to the emissions of exploding stars…

(12) MERCHANT OF MENACE. Actor Vincent Price gave an entertaining interview on Aspel & Co in 1984.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George invites us step inside the Pitch Meeting that led to The Crow (2024).

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

Pixel Scroll 7/17/24 Night At The Space Opera

Posted on July 17, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) FANAC.ORG LOOKING FOR FANZINES TO SCAN AT WORLDCON. Joe Siclari, Mark Olson and Edie Stern say FANAC.org will be travelling to Glasgow next month.

We have arranged with the 2024 Glasgow Worldcon (August 8-12) to have a scanning station at the con, to scan and digitally archive more fanzines. This has been exceptionally helpful and successful at past conventions.

What you can do to help: Please help us grow this digital archive of fandom. If you’re a fanzine editor, bring your old fanzines to the fan table area at the con. If you have convention publications not already online, bring them too (fanac.org/conpubs/). We will scan them onsite and be able to give them back to you at con. Bring memorable and worthwhile fanzines by other editors as well. We will reach out to them for permission before we put them online.

We do have to unstaple and restaple the zines to scan them, and if they are perfect-bound, we may not have time at con.

If you can, please drop us a note (to Fanac@fanac.org) telling us what you are bringing so we can be prepared.

Stop by and say hello: Even if you don’t have fanzines or other pubs to scan, stop by the table and say hello, and pick up your history ribbon. We’d like to see you!

How big is it? The archive has over 24,500 fanzines, 5,000 convention pubs and more than 5,000 photos. It’s over half a million pages and grows every week!

(2) PARADIGM SHIFT? In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane reviews Chris Nashawaty’s new book The Future Was Now (Flatiron): “1982 and the Fate of Filmgoing”

…So, what is it with this fateful eight? Well, Nashawaty has a solemn case to make. He writes:

“During the eight weeks spanning between May 16 and July 9, Hollywood’s major studios would release eight sci-fi/fantasy films that would not only go on to become cornerstones in the pop culture canon four-plus decades on, they would also radically transform the way that the movie industry did—and continues to do—business, paving the way for our current all-blockbusters-all-the-time era.”

That is quite a claim. Nashawaty is by no means sure that he likes the result—“what should have been a new golden age of sci-fi and fantasy cinema became a pop-culture beast that would devour itself to death and infantilize its audience”—but he proposes that, for most of us, going to the cinema is now “one endless summer,” which is much less sunny than it sounds. Like it or not, we live in a Conanistic world.

Whether or not you buy into this notion of 1982 as a red-letter year, it’s worth asking when the redness first began to dawn. Does Nashawaty, in his soothsaying capacity, even have the right decade? Note the elaborate tribute that he pays not only to Spielberg’s “Jaws” and George Lucas’s “Star Wars”—the first released in May, 1975, the second in June, 1977—but also to another summer hit, Scott’s “Alien,” from 1979, which seemed like a suppurating antidote to the antisepsis of “Star Wars.” (I still don’t comprehend how you can love both of those movies equally. You make your choice, and you stick to it.) Clamp the three together, top them with “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981), which bore the imprint of Lucas and Spielberg, and there, I suggest, you have the precursor of 1982, and a more compelling template for so much that has blazed and crawled across our screens ever since.

Viewed from that perspective, what the filmmakers were doing, when they created the eight works that are covered in “The Future Was Now,” was not crunching through barriers or setting fresh trends. They were cashing in. This is not a lowly skill, or an easy one; indeed, in some respects, it is the raison d’être of the movie trade. But let’s not pretend that Hooper, Lisberger, Meyer, and the rest of the guys were a movement, conjoined by a common iconoclastic purpose.

(3) X MARKS A NEW SPOT. According to Deadline, “Elon Musk Is Moving SpaceX And X From California To Texas”

Elon Musk is moving the headquarters of social media platform X and rocket ship maker SpaceX from California to Texas, blaming a new law that bars school districts in the state from requiring that parents be notified of changes in their child’s gender identification.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the law, the of its kind in the nation, on Monday. It says school staff can’t be required to disclose a student’s gender identity or sexual orientation to any other person without the child’s permission, with some exceptions.

It also requires the California Department of Education to develop resources for families of LGBTQ+ students in grade 7 through high school….

(4) GET READY. “A Tale of Two Sulus: An Evening with George Takei and John Cho” will be hosted at UCSD’s Epstein Family Ampitheater on Tuesday, July 23 at 7:30 pm. Reserved seating $25-$75. Tickets at the link.

Join us for a captivating evening as we bring together two iconic actors who have both portrayed the legendary character Sulu in the Star Trek universe. “A Tale of Two Sulus” features George Takei and John Cho in a dynamic conversation that delves into their shared legacy as Starfleet’s esteemed helmsman. Beyond their roles in Star Trek, Takei and Cho are celebrated authors of graphic novels and passionate advocates for social justice. This event promises an engaging exploration of their diverse careers, creative endeavors, and the impactful contributions they have made to important causes. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to hear from two trailblazing artists whose work continues to inspire and resonate across generations.

George Takei and John Cho. Moderated by Michael Giacchino

(5) COLLISION AWARDS. Animation Magazine has the list of “Animation and Motion Design Winners for the Inaugural Collision Awards”.

[The] Collision Awards, which honor animation across all disciplines (marketing and communications, commercials, TV, film, experimental, game and XR), were announced this morning. The awards honor work by studios, production companies, brands, agencies and individuals with a varied list of categories specifically focused on the intersection of creativity and technical skills unique to this community and inclusive of everyone working in the medium of animation and motion design.

The “Collision Awards 2024 Winner Reel” doesn’t identify what works the various clips come from, but it’s fun to watch.

(6) COMING TO FILM FESTIVALS. “Impressive Full Trailer for ‘Escape Attempt’ – A Cerebral Sci-Fi Short” explains FirstShowing.net.

“We’re here to help them survive. We’re here to free them.” Aggressive has revealed an official trailer for an indie sci-fi short film creation called Escape Attempt, from filmmakers Dan Shapiro & Alex Topaller. This is a full-on, 30 minute hard sci-fi film, which is also being pitched a series pilot. It already premiered at the 2023 Sitges Film Festival last year and won a Navigator Pirx Award for Best Sci-Fi Film at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. No idea when it will be out in full to watch, but it’s showing at the Fantasia Film Fest in Montreal next this summer. A soldier escapes from a WWII concentration camp. Once he is out, he finds himself on an unknown planet in an unknown future controlled by a homicidal alien race….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 17, 1954 – J. Michael Straczynski, 70.

By Paul Weimer: For all the trouble the series had in getting produced, and getting aired, and me finding it on the dial when it was moved yet again, J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5 is one of the defining SFF series in my science fiction diet and education.

Is it a perfect show? No, and part of that is the capricious nature of television and the “unexpected” fifth season which leaves that season weaker than the others. And frankly, I do like Bruce Boxleitner much better as Captain Sheridan than I do Michael O’Hare in the first season as Commander Sinclair. I can kind of see where Straczynski was going to possibly go with Sinclair had he been allowed to do so and he gets it most of the way there (my theory: Babylon Squared would have been a fifth season show, and so Sinclair ends his time here by going back and becoming Valen, after defeating the Shadows). But what we got is pretty darned special to me. I’m on my third iteration of having physical media of the shows (four if you count me trying to videotape episodes back in the 90’s).

The post Babylon 5 series Straczynski works are of course a mixed bag. The movies are a mixed bag to be sure. Crusade had some interesting ideas but never got a chance to actually do its thing. I did highly enjoy the animated Babylon 5 movie, The Road Home. I honestly don’t think it works except for deep Babylon 5 fans, but that’s me, so it did feel like coming home.

Of course, one can’t talk about Straczynski without mentioning his huge impact on a number of different comic runs. I suspect that for a lot of fans, Babylon 5 is off to the side, forgotten. Instead, his fans can talk endlessly about his numerous comic projects and runs. It is his runs with Squadron Supreme, Spiderman, Superman, and a number of others (mostly recently, a new take on Captain America) that for a whole slew of fans defines what Straczynski is a writer.

I only found out years later after the fact that he was a writer on a weird cartoon I watched in the 1980’s. No, not He-Man, although he wrote for them and was one of the minds behind the original She-Ra. No, the strange and weird and wondrous Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, which had the titular character fight malevolent plant creatures…in SPAAACE. What can I say, the 1980’s were weird, man. But it goes to show the wide breadth and interests of Straczynski’s work.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Speed Bump warns that the picture has left the attic.
Wizard of Id knows people have heard this motif before!

(9) WHATCHAMACALLIT. “’Alien: Earth’: FX’s ‘Alien’ Series Gets Official Title” – Variety has the story.

FX‘s upcoming “Alien” series has a new title, according to network boss John Langraf and showrunner Noah Hawley: “Alien: Earth.”

… “Alien: Earth” serves as a prequel to Ridley Scott’s 1979 film “Alien,” which kicked off a franchise that is now comprised of eight films. Alongside Hawley’s series, a new film titled “Alien: Romulus” is set to debut later this summer….

(10) POSTER CHILDREN. Collider presents “All 11 ‘Star Wars’ Movie Posters, Ranked”.

…Not counting the animated Clone Wars movie, there have been 11 movies in the Star Wars series to date: nine encompassing the Skywalker Saga, and two spin-off movies. The posters for all of those are ranked below, based partly on how well they tie to the film they’re attached to, but based mostly on how visually striking they look overall. To those who might disagree, too bad, because “I am the Senate” and have “unlimited power.”

Collider says the worst poster is the one for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019).

There’s a horse on the poster for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, but no room was given to Carrie Fisher, even though she was rather confusingly first billed, owing to prior footage of her being incorporated into the movie. Princess Leia still plays a part in the film, and was likely to be given a bigger one had Fisher not sadly passed away. Han and Luke were featured prominently on other sequel trilogy movie posters, but maybe there was a good reason not to feature Leia here.

There’s a goofy blaster round visible, thanks to Poe (a running theme across the two worst Star Wars posters), Zorii Bliss is featured way too prominently for a character who does basically nothing, and even the apparent clashing of two lightsabers looks clunky. Kylo Ren’s helmet is there, and presumably another Kylo Ren is holding that red lightsaber? And the placement of the Millennium Falcon between Rey and Kylo looks dreadful. This one’s pretty bad overall; a lackluster poster for a lacking (and overlong) movie.

(11) KEEP IT UP. “Former Space Agency Leaders Horrified by Plan to Destroy Space Station, Say It Would Be Easier to Save It” reports Futurism.

…The aging orbital outpost’s demise has been in the works for years now, with NASA hoping to destroy it by 2030, marking the end of three decades of peaceful international cooperation in Earth’s orbit.

And not everybody’s happy with the plan. Jean-Jacques Dordain, who was the director general of the European Space Agency when the station was being built, and former NASA administrator Michael Griffin say its life should be extended instead, giving future scientists a chance to continue studying outer space.

“As two among many builders of ISS, we recommend to those in charge to consider other options than destroying” the station, Dordain told Forbes in an interview.

Instead, he argued, the ISS should be transferred “to future generations… leaving them to decide” its fate, he added.

To do it, Dordain and Griffin argue SpaceX’s deorbit vehicle should be used to rescue the station, not destroy it. Such a rocket would increase the ISS’s altitude, not lower it, allowing it to enter a stable orbit much farther from the Earth.

In an open letter published by SpaceNews earlier this month, the two space agency legends argued that boosting the ISS “from its present 400-kilometer altitude to an 800-kilometer altitude circular orbit requires a boost of about 220 meters per second, about the same as required for precise deorbit control.”…

(12) WE HAVE TOUCHDOWN! [Item by Mike Kennedy.] This student has designed and built a model rocket using standard Estes solid fuel rocket motors that can takeoff and land vertically. He designed a two-axis gimbal so that he would have thrust vector control plus the microcontroller and software to integrate sensor data and drive the gimbal to keep the rocket vertical. Separate Estes motors were used for ascent and decent. He also designed landing gear to absorb the shock of any slight off-vertical landing. “High School Student Makes Model Rocket That Can Land Vertically, Like A Falcon 9 Booster” at IFL Science.

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

Pixel Scroll 3/21/24 Mr. Sandworm, Bring Me A Dream

Posted on March 21, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) MASTER OF SF. Vernor Vinge died March 20. One of the many callbacks to this distinguished sf author’s genre contributions comes from the Hugo Book Club Blog: “A Tribute To Vernor Vinge”.

…“Singularity is the point at which our old models will have to be discarded, where a new reality will reign,” Vinge wrote. “This is a world whose outlines will become clearer, approaching modern humanity, until this new reality obscures surrounding reality, becoming commonplace.”

One of these forays into singularitarianism helped launch an entire subgenre of science fiction. First appearing in a Dell paperback alongside George R.R. Martin’s Nightflyers, the story True Names offered a blueprint for cyberpunk that would influence and inspire everything from blockbuster movies to role playing games and television series….

(2) CIXIN LIU ON PRODUCTIVITY ISSUES. [Via Zionius on Weibo] On Wednesday, Singapore newspaper The Straits Times published an article tying in with the release of the Netflix adaptation of The Three-Body Problem. The piece includes a few quotes from Liu himself, where he talks about his activity in recent years, and his sympathy with one of his peers, George R.R. Martin.

While he yearns to see Martin place the long-delayed sixth book, The Winds Of Winter, in the hands of publishers, Liu, 60, also sympathises with his 75-year-old peer’s plight – Liu himself has been through a long fallow period.

“The Winds Of Winter has been delayed for 10 years. As a writer who also writes fantasy literature, I completely understand this, because I have not been able to publish a new work for more than 10 years,” Liu tells The Straits Times in an e-mail interview…

Other than Of Ants And Dinosaurs (2010), a work that imagines a war between the two species of the title, Liu has not produced a new novel since.

“Martin has at least published other works during that time, and I had done almost nothing,” he says.

(3) A LIFELINE TO SANITY. The Guardian calls it, “’A fascinating insight into pandemic psychology’: how Animal Crossing gave us an escape”.

“Today is the first day of your new life on this pristine, lovely island. So, congratulations!” says Tom Nook, the benevolent tanuki landlord, a few minutes into Animal Crossing: New Horizons. (Nook is often besmirched online, but you can’t argue that he’s extremely welcoming.) Many players read this comforting message at a destabilising and frightening time in the real world: Animal Crossing: New Horizons came out on Nintendo Switch on 20 March 2020, a few days before the UK entered its first Covid lockdown.

This was fortuitous timing. When we were all stuck at home, the game let us plant our native fruits, tend to our flowers and see what the town shop had on offer, repaying our extensive loans (interest-free, thankfully) to Tom Nook as a way of escaping the chaos and daily death tolls. We opened the gates to our islands and welcomed friends and strangers into our pristine little worlds. As real life crumbled, we started anew with bespectacled cats, sheep in clown’s coats and rhinos who looked like cakes.

The game’s sudden popularity caused Nintendo Switch sales to skyrocket among pandemic-induced shortages. New Horizons had sold 44.79 million units by December 2023 – nearly three-and-a-half times more than any other game in the Animal Crossing series, which has been running since 2001. It’s the second best-selling Switch game to date, behind Mario Kart 8 Deluxe….

(4) BOT AND PAID FOR. Annie Bot has already been called “A sharp take on a sex robot that becomes human” in a paywalled New Scientist review:

I opened the novel with low hopes, because the idea of a robot learning to be human, then chafing at its bonds, seemed a bit old hat. How wrong I was. Right from the first page, the book is coruscating, unexpected and subtle….

Now Glamour has interviewed author Sierra Green in a Q&A titled “Annie Bot Is a Chillingly Prescient Novel That Asks What Happens When a Sex Robot Realizes Her Worth”.

…The character of Doug felt so real to me (a man who would rather have a sex slave robot than a real human companion), which is scary, to say the least. What does his character represent to you, and why do you think it is important to demonstrate these types of men in the media?

This is a complicated subject. I think it’s important to try to understand what in our society encourages a man to feel like he ought to be in control, even when he’s not. No one likes to feel helpless, but men can feel doubly conflicted when they are denigrated because society has taught them that they deserve respect. Suddenly they have to reassess the entire system. When we see a character like Doug who is lonely and wants to be in control, we understand why he’s reaching out for a connection. We’re not surprised that men turn to the internet for pornography, and Annie is just a step beyond that. What matters to me is that Doug learns from his situation. He experiences deep shame, isolation, and rage, but he’s also willing to reflect on how to become a better man, a better human. Almost despite himself, he takes risks that lead him where he needs to go.

Do you think if Stellas really existed, a lot of men would buy them?

Yes. Women would buy them too, or the male Handy models. People will buy a new toy whether it’s good for them or not….

(5) MONSTER MASHER. Radio Times says “Doctor Who needs Steven Moffat – despite what he might say”.

…Every showrunner has brought something incredible to Doctor Who, from Russell T Davies’s famously skillful writing to Chris Chibnall’s bold new directions, but there’s something that Moffat brings to the show that no other writer does.

He remains unmatched as Doctor Who’s monster maker. By his own admission, his creations are simple and actually a little formulaic, usually riffing on a childhood fear to create a chilling physical embodiment of our nightmares. But it doesn’t get old – because he does it so well.

Moffat’s first episodes, a season 1 two-parter, introduced the Empty Child. Arming his creation with a haunting catchphrase (“Are you my mummy?”) and a gruesome physicality (I’ve never forgotten that transformation scene), he immediately ensured his first Doctor Who monster would be one for the ages. But it was far from his most iconic.

In season 3, Moffat penned what is widely described as one of Doctor Who’s best ever episodes, Blink, creating an all-time classic monster, the Weeping Angels….

(6) A TILT TOWARD NORTH AMERICA. “Doctor Who’s schedule change is inevitable – but still heartbreaking” opines Radio Times.

With the decision being made to debut new Doctor Who episodes at midnight on BBC iPlayer, many Whovians have expressed their disappointment. They argue that the choice was made for US-based audiences, and it undeniably was.

When the first two episodes are released on BBC iPlayer at midnight on Saturday 11th May, they will also be available on Disney Plus at 7pm ET on Friday 10th May, before BBC One airs them again later in the day on Saturday.

This means that while viewers on the US East Coast can enjoy the premiere episode in the late evening, UK fans will have to stay up into the late hours of the night to watch, diminishing the event nature and experience of watching the series…

(7) NEW HORROR. Gabino Iglesias reviewed Premee Mohamed’s The Butcher Of The Forest, C.J. Cooke’s A Haunting In The Arctic, Tim Lebbon’s Among The Living, and Amanda Jayatissa’s Island Witch in “Demons, Haunted Forests and Arctic Nightmares in 4 New Horror Novels” for the New York Times in February.

(8) SPUR AWARDS. The Western Writers of America have presented the 2024 Spur Awards. Complete winners list at the link – there do not appear to be any genre works among them. Not even Thomas Goodman’s Best First Novel The Last Man: A Novel of the 1927 Santa Claus Bank Robbery has much to do with jolly old elves.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 21, 1946 – Timothy Dalton, 78. Timothy Dalton made his film debut sixty-eight years ago as Philip II of France in The Lion in Winter. I remember him distinctly in that role. Of course, I’ve watched that film enough times that I think I’ve memorized much of the script.

He would do two Bond films, The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill. He made a decent Bond, but then I think the only true Bond was Connery.

Now doing a dive into his genre roles, he was Prince Barin in Flash Gordon, and had a major role as film star Neville Sinclair, one of baddies in The Rocketeer. An absolutely amazing film which is why it got a nomination for a Hugo at MagiCon.

And he was Lord President Rassilon in “The End of Time”, the last Tenth Doctor story. He made a rather impressive Time Lord indeed.

I’ll finish up with his role as the Chief on the DC Universe/Max Doom Patrol series which just wrapped up. It was a great role for him, and a most excellent series indeed.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Crankshaft longs for a sci-fi invention.
Bliss has a not unexpected twist.
Eek! mentions aging problems.
Rhymes With Orange knows the dangers of unlabeled umbrellas.

(11) TRAINING FOR WAR. James Bacon reviews an issue of Battling Britons, “The Fanzine of Vintage British War Comics”, for Downthetubes.net: “In Review: Battling Britons 6 – Planes, Trains and Giant Vampire Bats!”.

The Book: The latest issue of a fanzine dedicated to British war comics, offering articles, reviews and features on comics such as Commando, still published, and vintage comics such as Battle Picture Weekly, War Picture Library, including items on strips such as “Black Max”, “Dredger”, “Maddock’s Marauders”, “Kommando King” and more…

…Editor and publisher Justin Marriott often writes about subjects that are close to my heart, and this issue he looks at Commando comics that feature trains. He starts this with a fabulous laugh out loud list of the ten things he has learned from reading comics which featured trains. It’s a light hearted and humorous approach, and then lists some 30 Commando stories, and discusses them briefly….

(12) NOT JUST LOOKING AT THE PICTURES. And Downthetubes.net founder John Freeman suggests, “Comics: The Answer to The UK’s Literacy Crisis?”

We’re used to Spider-Man saving the world from the Green Goblin and a multiverse of masked miscreants. But new research by Comic Art Europe, and a separate research project by the National Literacy Trust, suggests that he could have the super-powers to do something even more valuable – something our government has signally failed to do: turn us into a nation of readers again

That’s the view, at least, of Lakes International Comic Art Festival chair Peter Kessler MBE, in an article for the latest issue of Books for Keeps magazine.

“A unique project has been unfolding in a primary school in North Manchester,” he notes, discussing the Comics and Literacy Project the Festival worked on as a partner of Comic Art Europe, launched in 2021, supported by The Phoenix comic, its full, interim report here on the Festival web site.“Abraham Moss is a typical, hard-working community school in an underprivileged area. Most of its students are from ethnic minority backgrounds, and it has a higher-than-average number in receipt of the Pupil Premium subsidy given to disadvantaged students. The school has spent two academic years participating in a Europe-wide research project entitled Comics and Literacy. The aim of the project: to analyse and quantify the impact of exposure to comics on young people.

“The results are jaw-dropping….”

(13) FANAC ZOOM NOW ONLINE. You can view the two-part FANAC History Zoom: “The Women Fen Don’t See” with Claire Brialey, Kate Heffner and Leah Zeldes Smith on YouTube.

Part 1 –

Description: Women did not magically appear in fandom with the advent of Star Trek, but have been part of science fiction fandom since the earliest days. They’re faneds, and convention chairs, writers and artists, club fans and costumers. Sometimes, they’re all of the above. Our impressive panelists (see bios on the bottom) Claire Brialey, Kate Heffner and Leah Zeldes Smith talk about why early female fans have received less credit than they deserved, or been overlooked entirely, and describe the contributions of a number of them…In this recording (Mar 2024, part 1 of 2), our panelists talk about how this research began, and why women that were cranking the mimeos, writing fanzine articles and going to conventions were not even regarded as fans. Early fan historians didn’t correct this impression, reflecting the attitudes of society and ignoring women’s contributions to fandom, especially married women. In this recording, you’ll learn about what fans did say about women in the community, “the radical hoax of Lee Hoffman”, and Miss Science Fiction 1949 (and the Fake Geek Girl response that ensued).

Women discussed in this part 1 include Jean Bogart, Pam Bulmer, Daphne Buckmaster, Marion Eadie, Helen Finn, Nancy Kemp, Trudy Kuslan, Lois Miles, Frances Swisher, and Jane Tucker. There’s a lot of information, a little hero worship and a dive into those hard-to-research women whose fanac was not primarily in fanzines. The discussion continues in Part 2. For more fan history, go to https://fanac.org and https://fancyclopedia.org. If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe to our channel.

Bios:

Claire Brialey – Claire encountered fandom in her early teens, in the mid-’80s, after having read SF for five or six years. She’s a fanzine fan and co-editor of Banana Wings, as well as having won the 2011 Best Fan Writer Hugo. She’s a former President of ANZAPA and a conrunner (up to and including the Worldcon level). She’s worked on clubs, fan funds, and awards administration. She is one of the Guests of Honor of the 2024 Worldcon in Glasgow. And she still enjoys reading and watching SF.

Kate Heffner – Kate Heffner (she/they) is a PhD researcher at the University of Kent England in the Department of History and an adjunct faculty member in the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Iowa. She is completing her dissertation entitled ‘A Fanzine of Her Own: Femme Fans in the Post-War Era.’ She is the recipient of the 2022 Peter Nicholls prize for best essay and a former judge for the Arthur C Clarke Award. For the last several years, she has also been adding to Fancyclopedia.org.

Leah Zeldes Smith – A retired journalist, Leah has been an actifan for more than 50 years, since she was a young teenager. She is a fanzine fan, and her zine STET was nominated for the Best Fanzine Hugo 3 times (1993, 1994, 2001). She’s a DUFF winner (93). She’s been involved with APAs, clubs and convention running. Leah’s involvement in documenting fanhistory dates back several decades. She has been a mainstay of Fancyclopedia, and has made thousands of updates to the site. Recently she’s pulled together a list of Fandom Firsts.

Part 2:

Description: Women did not magically appear in fandom with the advent of Star Trek, but have been part of science fiction fandom since the earliest days. They’re faneds, and convention chairs, writers and artists, club fans and costumers. Sometimes, they’re all of the above. In this part 2 of the session (Mar 2024), our panelists Claire Brialey, Kate Heffner and Leah Zeldes Smith continue to talk about why early female fans have received less credit than they deserved, or been overlooked entirely, and describe the contributions of a number of them.

Women discussed here include Ina Shorrock, Bobbie Gray, and Ethel Lindsay. There’s more about Femizine, the impact that early female fans can have on younger generations today, and whether women fans today will experience the same sorts of erasure. At about 32 minutes in, Q&A from the audience begins, with the difficulty of researching women fans, especially those that change their names multiple times, and anecdotes of Nan Gerding, Lynette Mills, Fuzzy Pink Niven, and Noreen Shaw. Maggie Thompson contributes a wonderful anecdote about her mother SF author Betsy Curtis and Tony Boucher. The recording concludes with a welcome discussion of how women have been treated in fandom in recent years.

(14) OSCARS A RISING TIDE FOR THESE ACTORS. JustWatch asked: (1) Which movies featuring Oscar-winners Emma Stone and Cillian Murphy are the most popular with audiences? (2) Are their 2024 Oscar-winning pictures at the top?

Key Insights

Poor Things is topping our popularity ranking, with an overall popularity of 48.6% among global audiences. The Favourite, her other Oscar winning performance, is no surprise in second place. Followed by La La Land, which was also a top contender during the 2016 Oscars. Surprisingly, Cruella ranked lower on the list, even though it was a big budget Disney project.

Oppenheimer blew away Cillian Murphy’s other movies, garnering more than 60% of global popularity. Inception, another Christopher Nolan project, took second place. Dunkirk, A Quiet Place, and The Dark Knight also ranked in our top 1010.

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

(15) DON’T BOTHER ME, I’M BUSY. The form letter Robert A. Heinlein devised to answer his mail is making the rounds again. In the Seventies when I heard this existed I wrote him a fan letter in hopes of receiving a copy in reply, and I did — though it was a later variation than this one. (Click for larger image.)

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Arriving in theaters on September 9: “’Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ Trailer: ‘The Juice Is Loose’ In Sequel Teaser”. Let Deadline lead the way.

… The logline: Still haunted by Beetlejuice, Lydia’s life is turned upside down when her rebellious teenage daughter, Astrid (Ortega), discovers the mysterious model of the town in the attic and the portal to the Afterlife is accidentally opened. With trouble brewing in both realms, it’s only a matter of time until someone says Beetlejuice’s name three times and the mischievous demon returns to unleash his very own brand of mayhem….

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

Pixel Scroll 3/11/24 Fast Pixels At Ridgemont Scroll

Posted on March 11, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) GLASGOW 2024 COMMUNITY FUND NEWS. The first deadline for Glasgow 2024 Community Fund applications is March 15. Details at the link.

In order to make Glasgow 2024 more affordable for those who need it most, we are running a community fund to help with the costs of attending. With the first deadline for applications coming up on the 15th of March, we encourage you to apply for funds if you need them in order to attend; or else to donate funds to help others attend, if you are able to do so. We are so grateful to all of you who have already done so!

(2) VILLAINOUS OSCAR PRESENTERS. Variety took notes on these Batman jokes at Oscars 2024.

"Twins" co-stars and former Batman villains Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito jokingly berate Michael Keaton from the #Oscars stage. https://t.co/UNgGySGz3r pic.twitter.com/bPLTrLlcNk
— Variety (@Variety) March 11, 2024

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito had a “Twins” reunion at the Oscars as they joined forces to present best visual effects to “Godzilla Minus One” and best film editing to “Oppenheimer.” But it was their jokes about Batman that stole the show and had the Oscars audience uproariously laughing.

“Arnold and I are presenting tonight together for a very obvious reason,” DeVito said.

“We’ve both tried to kill Batman!” Schwarzenegger revealed to applause….

…“Oh. He threw me out a window!” DeVito said about his Penguin death. “There he is. He’s right here. He’s right there. Look!”

The camera then cut to Micheal Keaton in the audience. Keaton was a presenter at the Oscars earlier in the night, taking the stage alongside his “Beetlejuice” co-star Catherine O’Hara.

“You have a lot of nerve to show your face around here,” Schwarzenegger quipped to Keaton.

DeVito then yelled: “We’ll see you after the Governor’s Ball, pal!”

(3) TRACKING THE ELUSIVE KAIJU. Variety analyzes “How ‘Godzilla Minus One’ Surprised With the VFX Oscar”.

…In late 2023, many still didn’t have the Kaiju movie, released by Japan’s Toho Studios, on their awards radar. But it was incredibly well received when it opened Dec. 1 in the United States, and in the weeks that followed, a VFX branch committee included the movie in the category shortlist.

Then came the Jan. 13 VFX category “bake off,” an event held at the Academy Museum during which the potential nominees representing the 10 shortlisted movies presented clips and spoke about their work before branch members entered their ballots for the final five. The “Godzilla Minus One” team made a charming presentation, talking about their creative problem solving and challenges. The movie was made for under $15 million and the VFX were pulled off by a team of just 35 people.

The well-received presentation seemed to have secured the team a trip to the Dolby Theatre and when the nominations were officially announced on Jan. 23, a video of the thrilled team in Tokyo went viral. From there, they spoke at screenings and appeared at events including the nominees luncheon, building momentum along the way. In early February, as part of Variety’s Screening Series, the team also participated in a Q&A following a screening at Harmony Gold in Hollywood. The film played to a packed room, with guild members and Academy voters staying long after credits had rolled to meet the filmmakers….

(4) FEBRUARY THE FIRST IS TOO LATE. Peculiarly, if you want to see this Oscar-winner, you’re out of luck. “’Godzilla Minus One’ Isn’t Streaming or in Theaters: Here’s Why”. IndieWire knows the answer.

If you want to catch up with Oscar Visual Effects nominee “Godzilla Minus One” before the awards Sunday night, you’ve got exactly one option: Find an Academy member who will invite you to view it on the voters’ portal. For everyone else in the world, you’re out of luck.

Why? Although never confirmed by Toho, it relates to an apparent contractual agreement between Toho, the Japanese studio that created (and still owns rights to) “Godzilla,” and Legendary Entertainment, which licensed the monster character for a series of films released by Warner Bros. Legendary’s latest with Warners, “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” fifth in the MonsterVerse franchise, opens wide in the U.S./Canada March 29.

Toho retains the ability to make its own “Godzilla” movies, but with the reported limitation of not releasing them in the same year as a Legendary production. Under that arrangement, “Godzilla Minus One” opened in Japan last November, and then domestically (as well as multiple European countries) in December.

“Godzilla Minus One” turned out to be a sleeper success in the U.S, grossing $56 million stateside. That’s stunning for a subtitled film and even more so for one that was anticipated as pre-holiday filler. A black-and-white version was added in January.

However, Toho notified theaters that all dates for “Godzilla Minus One” had to end by February 1 — even though “Godzilla Minus One” still ranked #8 in the final weekend of its run, after January 26, with a $2.7 million gross. It’s highly unusual to force a film to leave theaters while it’s still making money, but that’s consistent with reports of limits imposed on its looming competition with “Godzilla x Kong.”…

(5) SHARON LEE UPDATE. In “And when the stars threw down their spears”, author Sharon Lee tells how she’s been keeping up with life since the loss of her husband and collaborator Steve Miller.

It’s a funny thing, how life goes on. Until it doesn’t, of course, but we’re very good as a species about ignoring that.

So — life. Much changed, but still moving, still demanding attention, response, thought, and action.

My short-term goal is to find all of Steve’s papers — which is not as easy as you might think — and get them into boxes to send to the archive at Northern Illinois University. My brother-in-law and nephew are coming up from mid-Coast in a few days to help me, literally, with the heavy lifting, and a Dumpster has been engaged to receive such things as no longer have utility.

My longer-term goals are to finish the sequel to Ribbon Dance — the deadline having been moved from September to November — and start work on the book after that…

(6) KAPLAN ONLINE READING. Space Cowboys Books will host an “Online Reading and Interview with Carter Kaplan” on Tuesday, March 26 at 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Register for free tickets at the link.

Carter Kaplan is the author of The Invisible Tower Trilogy: Echoes, We Reign Secure, and The Sky-Shaped Sarcophagus. His first novel is Tally-Ho, Cornelius! Diogenes is an Aristophanic comedy. Editor of Emanations; IA edition of The Scarlet Letter with Afterword, “A” is for Antinomian: Theology and Politics in The Scarlet Letter; the anthology Fantasy Worlds. Co-translator and editor of Creation of the World by Torquato Tasso. Book on Wittgenstein and literary theory: Critical Synoptics. Articles on “Karel Čapek,” “Menippean Satire” and “Dystopian Literature” in The Encyclopedia of Literature and Politics. Articles on “Herman Melville” and “Michael Butterworth” in A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (which has an article about him). A chapter on William Blake and Michael Moorcock appears in New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction. Teaching includes Literature, Philosophy, and post-graduate Medical Research Writing in universities ranging across Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York City, and Scotland.

(7) FANAC FAN HISTORY ZOOM. This is the last FANAC Fan History Zoom for this season and it will stream on March 16. To attend, send a note to fanac@fanac.org

We have less than a week until the next FANAC Fan History Zoom program. We have some very knowledgeable fans on this program and it promises to be an enlightening subject in an often overlooked area of our field. Join us!

Please get the word out to all your friends.

The Women Fen Don’t See

Claire Brialey, Kate Heffner, and Leah Zeldes Smith

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Time: 3PM EDT, 2PM CDT, Noon PDT, 7PM London (GMT), and Mar 17 at 6AM AEDT in Melbourne

(8) SECRET NO MORE. In “Move Over, Alan Turing; Meet the Teenage Girls Who Rocked Bletchley Park”, New York Times reviewer Sarah Lyall discusses THE ENIGMA GIRLS: How Ten Teenagers Broke Ciphers, Kept Secrets and Helped Win World War II, by Candace Fleming.

As war raged in Europe in 1941, Sarah Norton, the 18-year-old daughter of an English lord, received a letter in a plain brown envelope with no return address. “You are to report to Station X at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire in four days’ time,” said the letter, signed by a mysterious “Commander Travis.” “That is all you need to know.”

Little did Sarah realize she was being recruited for Britain’s top-secret wartime code-breaking operation. Arriving at Bletchley Park with a suitcase full of “what she considered the bare essentials — five daytime outfits, an evening gown with matching shoes, lipstick and, most importantly, her teddy bear” — she would work alongside hundreds of similar recruits to help intercept and decipher the Nazis’ secret communications.

“This is the story of a handful of young women — teenagers really — who left their childhoods behind and walked into the unknown,” Candace Fleming writes in “The Enigma Girls,” her beguiling new account of their contributions. “For most of their lives, they never breathed a word about their war experiences.”

We learn about 10 of these real-life conscripts. In addition to Sarah, there was Mavis Lever, also 18, who was assigned to work with Dilly Knox, a Greek scholar who had “spent years successfully deciphering ancient papyri fragments at the British Museum.” There was Patricia Owtram, another 18-year-old, whose job was to monitor radio frequencies for enemy communications while simultaneously converting the Morse code messages into plain text. And there was Diana Payne, just 17, who helped operate the massive “Bombe” machines, which sped up the process of breaking the enemy’s ever-shifting codes….

(9) LISA MORTON Q&A. Alpha’s Court scored an interview with “Lisa Morton: Author, Editor, and Screenwriter”. Her new release, Placerita, comes out in June.

Q: Where do you draw inspiration from in your work?

A: Everywhere! One of my favorite places is my own backyard, which is both full of amazing plants and which draws all kinds of wildlife at night. As a horror writer, there’s certainly no shortage of fodder in the daily news and, of course, reading other writers’ work is always inspiring.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 11, 1952 — Douglas Adams. (Died 2001.) Was there ever a better work of epic humorous, and yes I deliberately used the British spelling there, SF in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that Douglas Adams delightfully created?

I first encountered it as the BBC television adaptation on public television in the Eighties. It was quite good. Really it was very, very silly.

I next listened to the most excellent radio series which originally broadcast in by BBC Radio 4, and then on the National Public Radio where I heard it. I think it one of the best full cast SF dramas I’ve heard and I’ve listened to it at least three or four times that I can remember.

Now the books. Oh they’re most excellent as well. All five of them that he wrote before his very untimely death as there were more later, one of which I’ve read. The US edition of the fifth book was originally released with the note of “The fifth book in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker’s Trilogy” on the cover.

I’m trying to remember at what point the novels finally weren’t based on off the radio series but I know that it finally happened.

I have not read Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency novels which were described by him as “a kind of ghost-horror-detective-time-travel-romantic-comedy-epic, mainly concerned with mud, music and quantum mechanics”. I did see some of the BBC series, oddly enough filmed in Vancouver, and it’s silly and fun.

Adams was the script editor for the seventeenth season of Doctor Who, and he wrote three scripts starring Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor — “The Pirate Planet” City of Death” and “Shada”.

The latter was only partially filmed but never not televised due to industry disputes which even unclear to this day. It was later completed using animation for the unfinished scenes and broadcast as Doctor Who: The Lost Episode on BBC America seven years ago.

The last thing I want you to mention is Last Chance to See, BBC radio documentary series and a book, written and presented by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine. Adams and Carwardine travel to various locations in the hope of encountering species on the brink of extinction. It’s quite extraordinary.

(11) WRITER BEWARE. Victoria Strauss gives Writer Beware readers a detailed rundown about “Author Complaints at City Owl Press”. This is just a taste.

…Several authors announced their split from COP on social media, without providing details as to why, causing questions and concerns from observers. This is also the point at which COP authors started contacting Writer Beware. Then, in late January, Erin Fulmer published her detailed series of blog posts about her departure from COP. Authors are often very, very reluctant to go public with publisher complaints, whether because they don’t want to single themselves out, fear retaliation and blowback from the publisher and/or fellow authors, or are simply too exhausted and demoralized–but a flood of other accounts followed Erin’s: Megan Van Dyke, SL Choi, Elisse Hay, Jen Karner, Lisa Edmonds, Lily Riley, and more have all chosen to speak out about their experiences.

This unusually public discussion has had an impact. On February 22, COP posted a public apology to authors and readers, with a pledge to implement “systematic and operational changes”. (This is the overshare mentioned in the first paragraph; it was later reformulated in response to criticism)….

(12) VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD. [Item by Steven French.] Early Antarctic explorers would while away the weeks of darkness by writing stories, some silly, some fantastical – the first book printed on the frozen continent included a science-fiction story (complete with drawings) about exploring an undiscovered tropical region of Antarctica: “Antarctica Publications Tried to Hide Danger in Fiction and Strange Stories” at Atlas Obscura.

…It imagines the Nimrod’s party making their way into the strange land of Bathybia, 22,000 feet below sea level. They used rafts made of giant, man-sized mushrooms to travel down rivers into a red jungle, encountering giant ticks, alcoholic algae, and huge carnivorous versions of microscopic Antarctic rotifers….

(13) IT’S NOT KANSAS CABERNET SAUVIGNON, TOTO. But drink enough and you will see flying monkeys. “The Wizard of Oz Tornado Etched Wine” from Mano’s Wine.

Embark on a mesmerizing journey with our Wizard of Oz wine bottles. Expertly deep-etched and lovingly hand-painted, these enchanting collectibles capture the essence of the beloved film. Sip from the elixir of nostalgia and let the magic unfold with every pour. Raise your glass to the Emerald City and indulge in a taste of cinematic splendor.

(14) WORM HYPE. [Item by Steven French.] Nature invites you to “Meet the real-life versions of Dune’s epic sandworms”. “‘Dune’s sandworms can grow to at least 450 metres long, about 15 times the size of the longest blue whale. How big do real-life worms get?”

…There are annelid worms that get up to several metres in length called eunicid worms, a type of bristle worm. They’re pretty gnarly — they have big jaws, they look a bit like Graboids from the 1990 film Tremors. Some of them are ambush predators. They eat octopuses, squid, vertebrates….

There are some earthworms that get really big, as well. Megascolides reaches up to 2 metres. The biggest ones are from Australia.

(Of course they are!)

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Dan Monroe wants to find out “Whatever Happened to LOGAN’S RUN?” (See, I didn’t know anything had happened to Logan’s Run!)

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

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