Whether you’re wondering what to put on an awards ballot or simply looking for good things to read, this summary of File 770’s “2024 Recommended SF/F List” will give you plenty to think about.
Filers added titles and short reviews throughout last year as these books and stories came out. (Read the reviews in the comments at the link above). Here’s everything they shared, including the person it was “[Recommended by]”, and if provided, a link to read the work online.
The list includes 35 novels, 14 novellas, 12 novelettes, 30 short stories, plus various graphic novels, movies, TV programs, and other items.
NOVEL
Calypso, Oliver K. Langmead [Lace]
The Wings Upon Her Back, Samantha Mills [Bonnie McDaniel]
The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley [Lace]
The Many Faces of Ista Flit, Clare Harlow [Kyra]
Kindling, by Traci Chee [Kyra]
The Husbands, by Holly Gramazio [Kyra]
Service Model, Adrian Tchaikovsky [Lace] [Bonnie McDaniel]
Burn, Peter Heller [Bruce D. Arthurs]
Long Live Evil, by Sarah Rees Brennan [Kyra]
A Sorceress Comes to Call, by T. Kingfisher [Kyra]
Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky [Lace]
The Familiar, by Leigh Bardugo [Kyra]
Lucy Undying, by Kiersten White [Kyra]
The Last Song of Penelope, by Claire North [Kyra]
Wicked Problems, by Max Gladstone [Kyra]
Alliance Unbound (Hinder Stars #2) by C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher [Cassy B.]
Warlords of Wyrdwood by R.J. Barker [Nina]
The Mercy of Gods, by James S. A. Corey [Kyra]
The Tusks of Extinction, by Ray Nayler [Rich Horton] [Bonnie McDaniel]
The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett [Bonnie McDaniel] [Lace] [Nina] [Kyra]
Machine Vendetta by Alastair Reynolds [Greg L. Johnson]
The Prisoner’s Throne, by Holly Black [Kyra]
Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulubelle Rock, by Maud Woolf [Kyra]
Sunbringer, by Hannah Kaner [Kyra]
The Book of Love, by Kelly Link [Kyra]
Gogmagog, by Jeff Noon and Steve Beard [Kyra]
The Warm Hands of Ghosts, by Katherine Arden [Kyra]
Ghost Station, S.A. Barnes [Bonnie McDaniel]
Red Side Story, by Jasper Fforde [Kyra]
The Siege of Burning Grass, Premee Mohamed [Bonnie McDaniel]
Blade, by Linda Nagata [Greg L. Johnson]
Someone You Can Build a Nest In, John Wiswell [Lace]
The Last Murder at the End of the World, Stuart Turton [Lace]
The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo [Nina]
Lord of the Empty Isles by Jules Arbeaux [Nina]
NOVELLA
When Among Crows, Veronica Roth [Lace]
A Magical Girl Retires, Park Seolyeon, translated by Anton Hur [Lace]
The Brides of High Hill, Nghi Vo [Lace]
What Feasts at Night, T. Kingfisher [Lace]
The Dead Cat Tail Assassins, P. Djèlí Clark [Lace]
“Maisie Vs Antarctica”, by Jack Jackman [Kyra]
The Forest of a Thousand Eyes, by Frances Hardinge [Kyra]
The Lotus Empire, by Tasha Suri [Kyra]
Demon Daughter, Lois McMaster Bujold [Cassy B.]
The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, Malka Older [Lace]
Stephen King has announced he is quitting X after describing the platform as “too toxic”.
In a post on X on Thursday, the author of The Shining and Shawshank Redemption wrote: “I’m leaving Twitter. Tried to stay, but the atmosphere has just become too toxic.” Referring to the rival platform launched by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, he added: “Follow me on Threads, if you like.”
This week, the Guardian said it would stop posting on X, citing concerns over toxic content on the platform. The German football club St Pauli, the actor Jamie Lee Curtis, the US TV journalist Don Lemon and Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia have also announced they will no longer post on the site.
On Wednesday, King denied he had called X’s owner, Elon Musk, “Trump’s new first lady” or that the world’s richest person, a staunch Donald Trump supporter, had kicked him off the platform – drawing a reply of “Hi Steve!” from Musk’s own account.
The Guardian left ahead of King:
…On Wednesday, the Guardian said it would no longer post from its official accounts because the benefits of being on the site were outweighed by the negatives, citing the “often disturbing content” found on it….
Since the election there’s been a mass X-odus. Bluesky has been one of the beneficiaries. File 770, which honestly has never had a big following at X.com, has lost 150 readers there — while gaining over 400 at Bluesky. We’re probably in somebody’s Starter Pack. Once people discover what they’ve signed up for I predict there will be a market correction…
(2) B&N BOOK OF THE YEAR. Barnes & Noble has announced James by Percival Everett as the 2024 Book of the Year reports Publishers Weekly. Filers soundly rejected my efforts to label James as being of genre interest. However, the bookseller has specially recognized two additional books, naming Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell (definitely genre) as its inaugural Children’s Book of the Year, and The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan as its first-ever Gift Book of the Year. The entire list of “2024 Book of the Year Finalists” is here at B&N Reads.
… Meanwhile on Earth ends the way it should end, which is to say not all is revealed, and it’s up to you to decide what happens. Remember, this isn’t a big-budget sci-fi movie, so there’s no need to satisfy a mass audience who desperately need all questions answered and all mysteries revealed.
This film doesn’t do that, and it’s better for it. The ending is either happy or sad depending on how you interpret it. I’m leaning more to the former, although like everything else in the film, happiness comes at a cost, and you’re still left asking the film’s central question: Was everything Elsa did worth it?…
One particular saying of comics arts genius Wally Wood has always stuck with me:
“Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you can trace, never trace anything you can cut out and paste up.”
I worked in comics for several years, and then — as in Wally Wood’s day — creators were mostly paid by the page. There was a minimum quality bar you needed to hit, but quantity was the thing. As a writer, I could manage about eight finished script pages per day. That meant I wrote a comic in three days. To make my rent, I needed to write four or five comics a month. It’s largely because of those days that I still think of myself as a pulp writer at heart.
(I envied writers who went faster — still do).
In that kind of environment, you need outlines, structures, reliable starting places, formulas. And you need to work fast.
Wood’s quote hits to the heart of those requirements. If it worked before, it should work again. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Use your tools to tell the story, then tell the next story, and the next. Most of all, don’t worry about starting with a copy. By the time you finish the work, it will be your own.
One of the artists Wally Wood copied … was himself. His “22 Panels That Always Work” was a toolkit of poses and composition for injecting variety into boring panels from “some dumb writer (who) has a bunch of lame characters sitting around and talking for page after page!” (Ahem)….
Warner Bros has made a deal to mount a new version of the 1956 science fiction classic Forbidden Planet. The film will be written by comic book and screenwriter Brian K. Vaughan, and it will be produced by Emma Watts.
For its forward-thinking themes, the film is considered a north star for science fiction writing and cinema that came after it. It has never had a big-screen remake — though James Cameron reportedly once considered it — partly because the rights were complicated and difficult to untangle. The studio and Watts finally got that major obstacle out of the way….
… Vaughan is the Hugo- and Eisner Award-winning comic book writer and screenwriter whose comic creations include Y: The Last Man, Ex Machina, Runaways, Pride of Baghdad, Saga and Paper Girls. He also wrote on such comics as X-Men, Spider-Man and Captain America — and his TV work includes serving as writer, story editor and producer of three seasons of Lost, after being tapped by Damon Lindelof. Vaughan was then handpicked by Steven Spielberg to adapt Stephen King’s novel Under the Dome. He has the sci-fi bona fides….
(6) WIN THE STOKER AWARD IN HALF AN HOUR. The Horror Writers Association debuted its “official tabletop game” at StokerCon 2024 – Sudden Acts of Horror! Available from the Stop The Killer online store. Takes 30 minutes to play.
In this fun party charades game, teams invent fake horror novel titles on-the-spot to score points and win their very own mini Bram Stoker Award®!
The game comes packaged in a box that looks and opens like a novel, and includes:
460 words printed on 230 double-sided tiles
1 velvety black drawstring bag with gold cord to hold the tiles
1 mini (2.5″) Bram Stoker Award®
3 Dice
1 Sand timer
1 Score pad with pencil
1 Rule Book
(7) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Anniversary: —Star Trek’s “The Tholian Web”
Untold years ago this evening, Star Trek’s “The Tholian Web” first aired.
It was written by Judy Burns, her first professional script. She would later write scripts for myriad genre series including Mission: Impossible, The Six Million Dollar Man and Fantasy Island. Her co-writer was Chet Richards, this would be his only script.
Primary guest cast was Sean Morgan as Lt. O’Neil, Barbara Babcock as the voice of Loskene who was the Tholian commander (she was Mea 3 in “A Taste of Armagedon” and Philana in “Plato’s Stepchildren” plus four voice roles), and Paul Baxley (uncredited in the episode) as the Captain of the Defiant. Baxley was the stunt coordinator for the series, and the stunt double for Shatner.
RED ALERT, ERR, SPOILER ALERT. GO DRINK SOME KLINGON BLOOD WINE IF YOU CAN STOMACH IT. NOT ALL CAN.
The Defiant has gone missing. Everyone can see the faintly green glowing ship, and the Enterprise is not picking up on any sensor readings. “Fascinating!” says Spock. (How many times did we hear those words in the final season?)
Kirk decides Chekov, Bones, Spock and himself will beam over and check it out. They beam aboard the Defiant, each wearing a special suit. Everyone there is dead. Are you surprised? A Red Shirt murdered the Captain. Again, are we supposed to be surprised? This is a season three episode. I consider that season by far the weakest season.
Then transporter seriously acts out. Scotty manages to get it almost behave but says he can take only three at a time. (Plot device!) Kirk says he’ll beam last. He vanishes. Errr, no surprise. And they can’t get a fix on him. No, I won’t say that again.
As Chekov observes, the Defiant disappeared and took the captain with her. Shortly thereafter, aliens called the Tholians demand that the Enterprise go away. Spock, who is now in command, insists that they will not leave until Kirk is rescued.
The Tholians decide to trap the crew there inside an energy web, and reveal that this is a part of space where people tend to go insane as if we need to be told that by now. The crew begins to go insane, again no surprise.
Kirk is declared dead after attempts to save him have failed. Will it be any surprise that then Kirk is rescued? I think not. Will all be well in the end? What do you think?
In a two-part episode of Enterprise, “In a Mirror, Darkly”, written by Michael Sussman, it is told that the Defiant has reappeared in the Mirror Universe of Archer’s time, where it is salvaged by the Tholians and later stolen from them by Jonathan Archer of the Terran Empire who tries but fails to become Emperor of that Empire when he is murdered by his lover so becomes Empress. All of this happening because the Defiant is the most technologically advanced starship in the Empire.
Yes, I very much like the latter story and think those episodes were very well told. Each of the regular cast here got to do something they didn’t usually get to do, actually really act.
ENJOY THE WINE? OR NOT? EITHER WAY DO COME BACK BACK NOW.
This is the first appearance of a Tholian in Star Trek — in this case, Commander Loskene. For this appearance, Loskene appeared only on the Enterprise’s viewscreen and was portrayed simply by a puppet created by Mike Minor.
They would be a recurring presence in the Trek verse with three appearances in Star Trek Next Generation, seven in Deep Space Nine, Star Trek Nemesis and Enterprise twice.
It is well worth noting as Memory Alpha says, “The approximately two dozen crew members who attend Kirk’s memorial service appear to constitute the largest assemblage of Enterprise personnel in the original series.” Having seen the rest of the various Trek series, I don’t think there’s another scene where there’s that many crew members assembled. Anyone remember one?
It is considered by most critics and a lot of fans alike to be one of the best Trek episodes done though it did not get a Hugo nomination unlike a lot of other Trek episodes. It appears we were more picky than they were.
At the start of Valve’s Half-Life 2, the seminal first-person shooter game that turns 20 this month, taciturn scientist Gordon Freeman is trapped within a dystopian cityscape. Armed soldiers patrol the streets, and innocent citizens wander around in a daze, bereft of purpose and future. Dr Wallace Breen, Freeman’s former boss at the scientific “research centre” Black Mesa, looks down from giant video screens, espousing the virtues of humankind’s benefactors, an alien race known as The Combine.
As Freeman stumbles through these first few levels of Half-Life 2, the player acclimatises to the horrible future laid out before them. It’s hardly the most cheerful setting, but there are some friendly faces (security guard Barney, Alyx and Eli Vance) and even moments of humour, as Dr Isaac Kleiner’s pet, a debeaked face-eating alien called Lamarr, runs amok in his laboratory. It feels safe. It feels fun. It feels familiar. There’s even a crowbar! And then, the foreshadowing. “That’s the old passage to Ravenholm,” mutters Alyx Vance during Freeman’s chapter five tour of the Black Mesa East facility. “We don’t go there any more.” You feel a shiver down your spine; you know you will end up going there.
“[Ravenholm] was a totally different environment from what the player had been in until that point,” says Dario Casali, level designer and member of the informal City 17 Cabal, a group within Valve that worked on Half-Life 2’s most famous level. “It was an outlier of a map set that survived from a pretty early build of the game, borne from a need to give the newly introduced Gravity Gun a place to shine.”
A self-described “investor rights law firm” filed a lawsuit Wednesday alleging that Hasbro, the tabletop gaming and toy company, misrepresented its excessive inventory to investors, something the firm says is a violation of federal securities laws. Polygon reached out to Hasbro for comment and has yet to hear back.
Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann (the law firm) filed a complaint in a New York court on behalf of the West Palm Beach Firefighters’ Pension Fund, asking the court to grant the case class action status — meaning other investors and stock purchasers can participate. Hasbro, like other gaming companies, saw a boost in interest and sales during the pandemic, when people were looking for things to do in their homes; games were an obvious choice. The lawsuit alleges Hasbro purchased inventory to meet that demand — but ended up buying too much. Hasbro allegedly told investors the high purchasing was necessary to “mitigate supply chain risk and meet consumer demand” ahead of the 2022 holiday season, according to the lawsuit. When that inventory sat, Hasbro said the stock “reflected outstanding and anticipated demand” and not a decreased demand. The lawsuit alleges Hasbro was intentionally misleading investors and knew it “overpurchased inventory to an extend that significantly outpaced customer demand.” The timeline makes sense: 2022 is when the world started opening up more broadly, and people were eager to get out of their houses….
…Because of all this — especially the October 2023 financial disclosures — stock prices declined and investors lost money, the lawsuit alleges, to the tune of a loss of $831 million in shareholder value. The stock value Hasbro previously had, according to the lawsuit’s claims, was due to inflated prices due to the lack of disclosures….
Last month, an asteroid impacted Earth’s atmosphere just hours after being detected — somehow, it managed to circumvent impact monitoring systems during its approach to our planet. However, on the bright side, the object measured just 3 feet (1 meter) in diameter and posed very little threat to anything on Earth’s surface.
This asteroid, designated 2024 UQ, was first discovered on Oct. 22 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) survey in Hawaii, a network of four telescopes that scan the sky for moving objects that might be space rocks on a collision course with Earth. Two hours later, the asteroid burned up over the Pacific Ocean near California, making it an “imminent impactor.”The small amount of time between detection and impact means impact monitoring systems, operated by the European Space Agency’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Center, didn’t receive tracking data about the incoming asteroid until after it struck Earth, according to the center’s November 2024 newsletter….
In this episode of Physics World Stories, astronaut Eileen Collins shares her extraordinary journey as the first woman to pilot and command a spacecraft. Collins broke barriers in space exploration, inspiring generations with her courage and commitment to discovery. Reflecting on her career, she discusses not only her time in space but also her lifelong sense of adventure and her recent passion for reading history books. Today, Collins frequently shares her experiences with audiences around the world, encouraging curiosity and inspiring others to pursue their dreams.
Joining the conversation is Hannah Berryman, director of the new documentary SPACEWOMAN, which is based on Collins’ memoir Through the Glass Ceiling to the Stars, co-written with Jonathan H Ward. The British filmmaker describes what attracted her to Collins’ story and the universal messages it reveals. Hosted by science communicator Andrew Glester, this episode offers a glimpse into the life of a true explorer – one whose spirit of adventure knows no bounds….
The steel cables holding up the telescope’s 900-ton receiver platform became loose because the zinc-filled sockets built to support them failed, according to the report published Oct. 25.
The failure was due to excessive “zinc creep,” a process in which the metal used to prevent corrosion or rusting on the sockets deforms and loses it grip over time, the report said.
The zinc gradually lost its hold on the cables suspending the telescope’s main platform over the reflector dish. This allowed several cables to pull out of the sockets, ultimately causing the platform to plummet into the reflector more than 400 feet below, according to the report…
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Lise Andreasen, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip W.]
Cora Buhlert convened a meetup of File 770 readers at the Worldcon in Scotland today and took these photos.
From left to right, Klaus Schmitz, Susan, Kathryn Sullivan, Ann-Marie Rudolph, Perrianne Lurie, Doctor Science, Dave Wallace, con photographer Simon Bubb, and Paul Weimer.
The File 770 meetup then decamped to a table in the food truck area. From left to right, Christian Brunschen, Dave Wallace, Klaus Schmitz, Perrianne Lurie and Doctor Science.
By Cath Jackel: I’m at the con and have had a chance to look around. Programming starts at 10 am. There will be Filer meetups on Saturday and Sunday morning at NINE a.m. Location will be the Japanese garden/plaza south of the Delta hotel. Go out the front door of the hotel, turn left, and walk half a block. There isn’t seating, but the Carlton Street side has raised concrete planters we can perch on.
BYO drinks and snacks. The Delta has a main floor coffee shop that opens at 7 a.m. both mornings. On Saturday, the Bagelsmith, on 185 Carlton on the way to the plaza, opens at 9 a.m. Their breakfast sandwich is pretty good.
I have red hair and will be wearing a bright blue batik shirt. Looking forward to meeting you!
(1) BOTS LOVE FILE 770. The Washington Post invited readers to “See the websites that make AI bots like ChatGPT sound so smart”. They analyzed one of the large data sets that may be used in training AI, and also have made it publicly searchable. Their stats show File 770 is a leading contributor to the cause of educating AI, ranked 3,445th. Uh, yay?
…Tech companies have grown secretive about what they feed the AI. So The Washington Post set out to analyze one of these data sets to fully reveal the types of proprietary, personal, and often offensive websites that go into an AI’s training data.
To look inside this black box, we analyzed Google’s C4 data set, a massive snapshot of the contents of 15 million websites that have been used to instruct some high-profile English-language AIs, called large language models, including Google’s T5 and Facebook’s LLaMA. (OpenAI does not disclose what datasets it uses to train the models backing its popular chatbot, ChatGPT)…
Is your website training AI?
A web crawl may sound like a copy of the entire internet, but it’s just a snapshot, capturing content from a sampling of webpages at a particular moment in time. C4 began as a scrape performed in April 2019by the nonprofit CommonCrawl, a popular resource for AI models. CommonCrawl told The Post that it tries to prioritize the most important and reputable sites, but does not try to avoid licensed or copyrighted content….
We then ranked the remaining 10 million websites based on how many “tokens” appeared from each in the data set. Tokens are small bits of text used to process disorganized information — typically a word or phrase.
As shown in the rather scrofulous screencap below, file770.com is ranked 3,445th with 2.5 million tokens, which is 0.002% of the tokens in the set examined by the Washington Post.
(2) HUGO VOTING DEADLINE APPROACHES. 2023 Hugo nominations are closing on April 30, at 23:59 Hawaiian Time. Eligible voters can access the ballot here.
… One of the 663 authors and counting who signed an open letter to Scholastic’s Education Solutions Division is author Kelly Yang. She is one of many best-selling Scholastic authors horrified by this response to accelerating fascism. In a vulnerable video, Yang shared her thoughts about these actions. She also broke down what it feels like to be targeted by this censorship and bigotry. Sometimes, in person….
However, Yang correctly insists that they have to push past this. She says in the video:
“As one of your top authors, I’m asking you to have more courage. You cannot be quietly self-censoring. Whatever pressure you may be facing, know that your authors are facing even more pressure. And we’re still out here writing these books. Risking our lives. Bleeding to make you millions. Trying to write the books for the next generation that will hopefully improve the world.”
She continued discussing the importance of representation and capturing the moment children live in.
“Let me tell you, it’s not easy. I am not a giant corporation. I am an individual. Every day people attack me personally. They write me emails, they come into my comments and my DMs. I had a guy show up at an event and whisper in my ear how much he loves seeing my books get banned. And yet, everyday I keep going. You know why? Because I am brave.
“Despite getting paid pennies on the dollar, we authors are brave. The librarians—they are brave. The educators—they are brave. I need you to be braver.
“You cannot choose which books to include in your Fairs and Clubs for kids nationwide and edit lines out because you’re scared of DeSantis. If you want to carry Maggie’s book, you gotta carry all of her book. If you want to carry Kelly Yang, you’ve gotta carry all of Kelly Yang—not some stripped-down version.
“I need you to not cave to political pressure and be on the right side of history. Because it’s the right thing to do. Because you can afford it with your 90% market share of the school distribution channel. If you’re going to be deciding children’s book for the entire nation, your taste have to reflect the entire nation. And because I know it’s what Dick Robinson would have wanted.
“I love you Scholastic. You’ve done a lot of good for a lot of kids, but how you play you next move will determine how you’re remembered. The world is watching. I am watching. I hope you do the right thing.”
(4) NOT JUST ANY USED BOOKS. Plenty of sff among AbeBooks “Most expensive sales from January to March 2023”. Two Harry Potter books lead the list, with the biggest sale being a copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone for $85,620. Further down is a PKD first edition.
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick – $17,195
A true first edition with an unrestored original dust jacket
One of the most famous novels by Philip K. Dick, this book was the basis for the movie Blade Runner. This copy of a true first edition is special because of the condition of the book and the dust jacket and its vibrant, unfaded colors.
The novel is about a bounty hunter who tracks tracks down escaped androids in a post-apocalyptic future. This book belongs to our list of 50 must-read science fiction books.
Recently, another copy of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was sold. That book came with an original letter, typed and signed by the author, along with a humorous self-review of another of his own novels, The Divine Invasion.
Over on Facebook, someone in the group devoted to Capclave — a con where I’ve harvested many conversations for you — mentioned Thomas was scheduled to speak at Maryland’s Rockville Memorial Library. When I checked the details and saw the venue was only a 90-minute drive away, I reached out to see whether she’d have time in her schedule to grab lunch — and luckily she did. So early the same day as her presentation titled “Afrofuturism & Diversity in Sci-Fi,” I scooped her up from her hotel and took her over to Commonwealth Indian Restaurant, where I’ve had many wonderful meals. Here’s how the event organizers described Thomas and her career —
New York Times bestselling, two-time World Fantasy Award-winning author and editor Sheree Renée Thomas has been a 2022 Hugo Award Finalist, and her collection, Nine Bar Blues, is a Locus, Igynte, and World Fantasy Finalist. She edited the groundbreaking Dark Matter anthologies that introduced a century of Black speculative fiction, including W.E.B. Du Bois’s science fiction stories. Thomas wrote Marvel’s Black Panther: Panther’s Rage novel (October 2022), adapted from the legendary comics, collaborated with Janelle Monáe on The Memory Librarian, and is the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, founded in 1949 and Obsidian, founded in 1975. In 2022 she co-curated Carnegie Hall’s historic, citywide Afrofuturism Festival.
We discussed how to prevent being an editor interfere with being a writer (and vice versa), the way a serendipitous encounter with Octavia Butler’s Kindred caused her to take her own writing more seriously and a copy of Black Enterprise magazine spurred her to move to New York, how her family’s relationship with Isaac Hayes nourished her creative dreams, the advice she gives young writers about the difference between the fantasy and reality of a writer’s life, how realizing the books she thought were out there weren’t launched her editing career, the rewards and challenges of taking over as editor for a 75-year old magazine, why she reads cover letters last, and much more.
Some guy is currently suing Tolkien and Amazon to the tune of $250 million. That alone takes serious bravery. But what’s notable about this lawsuit is the reason he’s suing: Copyright infringement over his Lord of the Rings fanfic. Specifically, he’s arguing that Amazon lifted elements of his fan-fiction for its own Tolkien adaptation TV series, The Rings of Power.
Demetrious Polychron wrote a book, a work of fan-fiction set in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, called The Fellowship of the King, which he copyrighted in 2017 and which later were published and made available for sale, including on Amazon. According to PC Gamer, Polychron sent a letter to the Tolkien Estate asking for a manuscript review. That’s right: This man asked J.R.R. Tolkien’s grandson Simon to sign off on his fanfic. Unsurprisingly, he did not get a response.
In September of 2022, the month that Polychron published The Fellowship of the King, Amazon also began airing its extremely expensive Lord of the Rings spin-off series, The Rings of Power. …Now, Polychron is arguing that the Amazon TV show lifts elements from his novel.
According to RadarOnline, which has seen documents pertaining to the suit, Polychron alleges that characters and storylines he created for his book “compose as much as one-half of the 8-episode series,” and that in some cases the show “copied exact language” from his book. [Also, “In other instances, Defendants copied images that match the book cover and descriptions as created in the book as authored by Polychron,” the suit read.]
However, the claims seem spurious. For instance, the lawsuit purportedly points to the fact that both his book and the show feature a hobbit named Elanor, with the Elanor in his book being the daughter of Samwise Gamgee, while the Elanor featured in The Rings of Power is a Harfoot. Images purporting to be the lawsuit circulating online include a host of other circumstantial connections or similarities to back up Polychron’s argument that the writers of Rings of Power lifted ideas from his fanfic for their own story.
… While no one believes that Polychron will win against the Tolkien Estate, there are concerns that the lawsuit might negatively impact the legality of fanworks in general. Hopefully, fanfic writers will be fine as long as they’re not trying to extort Tolkien’s grandson.
(6) MEMORY LANE.
2015 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
So let’s have a conversation about Elizabeth Hand’s Wylding Hall which was published by PS Publishing eight years ago.
There’s some spoilers here so skip to the Beginning if you’d rather not hear them.
A British folk band are told by their manager to record their new album, so they hole up at Wylding Hall, an ancient country house with let us say an interesting past. There they hope to create the album that will make their reputation.
The novel, a short one at that, is told entirely in a series of interviews decades later by the surviving musicians, along with their friends, lovers and the band’s manager by a documentary filmmaker who gets them to talk about something that happened when they were there. (No, I’m not going to say what happened.) Should they be believed? Maybe, maybe not. What is the truth after all those years have passed anyways?
I think it’s a brilliant way to approach this story.
I’ll say no more and direct you now to the Beginning…
“I was the one who found the house. A friend of my sister-in-law knew the owners; they were living in Barcelona that summer and the place was to let. Not cheaply, either. But I knew how badly everyone needed to get away after the whole horrible situation with Arianna, and this seemed as good a bolt-hole as any. These days the new owners have had to put up a fence to keep away the curious. Everyone knows what the place looks like because of the album cover, and now you can just Google the name and get directions down to the last millimeter.
But back then, Wylding Hall was a mere dot on the ordnance survey map. You couldn’t have found it with a compass. Most people go there now because of what happened while the band was living there and recording that first album. We have some ideas about what actually went on, of course, but the fans, they can only speculate. Which is always good for business.
Mostly, it’s the music, of course. Twenty years ago, there was that millennium survey where Wylding Hall topped out at Number Seven, ahead of Definitely Maybe, which shocked everybody except for me. Then “Oaken Ashes” got used in that advert for, what was it? Some mobile company. So now there’s the great Windhollow Faire backlash.
And inexplicable—even better, inexplicable and terrible—things are always good for the music business, right? Cynical but true.
“Apart from when I drove out in the mobile unit and we laid down those rough tracks, I was only there a few times. You know, check in and see how the rehearsal process was going, make sure everyone’s instruments were in one piece, and they were getting their vitamins. And there’s no point now in keeping anything off the record, right? We all knew what was going on down there, which in those days was mostly hash and acid.
And of course, everyone was so young. Julian was eighteen. So was Will. Ashton and Jon were, what? Nineteen, maybe twenty. Lesley had just turned seventeen. I was the elder statesman at all of twenty-three.
“Ah, those were golden days. You’re going to say I’m tearing up here in front of the camera, aren’t you? I don’t give a fuck. They were golden boys and girls, that was a golden summer, and we had the Summer King.
And we all know what happens to the Summer King. That girl from the album cover, she’d be the only one knows what really went on. But we can’t ask her, can we?
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born April 21, 1933 — Jim Harmon. During the Fifties and Sixties, he wrote more than fifty short stories and novelettes for Amazing Stories, Future Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction, If, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and other magazines. Most of his fiction was collected in Harmon’s Galaxy. EoSF says he has one genre novel, The Contested Earth, whereas ISFDB lists two more, Sex Burns Like Fire and The Man Who Made Maniacs. He’s a member of First Fandom Hall of Fame. (Died 2010.)
Born April 21, 1939 — John Bangsund. Australian fan most active from the Sixties through the Eighties. He was instrumental with Andrew Porter in Australia’s winning the 1975 Aussiecon bid, and he was Toastmaster at the Hugo Award ceremony at that con. His fanzine, Australian Science Fiction Review is credited with reviving Australian Fandom in the Sixties. And he’s the instigator of the term Muphry’s law which states that “If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.” (Died 2020.)
Born April 21, 1947 — Iggy Pop, 76. Here solely as on Deep Space Nine in an episode loosely upon The Magnificent Seven film that was entitled “The Magnificent Ferengi”, he played a vorta called Yelgrun.
Born April 21, 1947 — Allan Asherman, 76. Official historian for D.C., he’s also written scripts for Tarzan during the Gooden Age. A Trekker of note, he wrote The Star Trek Compendium, The Star Trek Interview Bookand The Making of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
Born April 21, 1954 — James Morrison, 69. Lt. Col. Tyrus Cassius ‘T.C.’ McQueen on the short-lived but much loved Space: Above and Beyond series. Starship Troopers without the politics. He’s got a lot of one-off genre appearances including recently showing up as an Air Force General in Captain Marvel, guesting on the Orville series and being Warden Dwight Murphy on Twin Peaks.
Born April 21, 1965 — Fiona Kelleghan, 58. Author of the critical anthology The Savage Humanists in which she identifies a secular, satiric literary movement within the genre. She also did Mike Resnick: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide to His Work. A work in still progress, according to the Wikipedia, is Alfred Bester, Grand Master: An Annotated Bibliography.
Born April 21, 1971 — Michael Turner. Comics artist known for his work on a Tombraider / Witchblade one-off, the Superman/Batman story involving Supergirl, his own Soulfire, and various covers for DC Comics and Marvel Comics. He would die of bone cancer and A Tribute to Michael Turner with writings from people who knew him would feature a cover done by Alex Ross would be released to cover his medical expenses. (Died 2008.)
Born April 21, 1980 — Hadley Fraser, 43. His first video acting role was as Gareth in the superb Tenth Doctor story, “Army of Ghosts”. He’d later be Chris in The Lost Tribe, a horror film, and play Viscount Raoul de Chagny in The Phantom of The Opera, as well as being being Tarzan’s father in The Legend of Tarzan. And though not even genre adjacent, I’m legally obligated to point out that he showed up as a British military escort in the recent production of Murder on the Orient Express.
(9) MISSY RETURNS IN TITAN COMICS’ DOCTOR WHO: DOOM’S DAY. Titan comics will launch a two-issue Doctor Who comic series on July 5 as part of the multi-platform story Doom’s Day. The comic will feature fan-favorite character Missy on the trail of new character Doom, who makes her comic book debut.
Doom’s Day is a standalone transmedia series across multiple platforms and will allow Doctor Who fans to follow Doom, the Universe’s greatest assassin, as she travels through all of time and space in pursuit of the Doctor to save her from her ever-approaching Death. She only has 24 hours and a vortex manipulator to save herself before her fate is sealed forever.
Available in comic stores and on digital devices at release, Titan’s Doctor Who: Doom’s Day #1 comic is an adventure starring Doom in her comic book debut – using her vortex manipulator, she’ll do anything to find the tempestuous time traveller, the Doctor, including cavorting with the maleficent MISSY. Every hour a new adventure, every hour closer to death…
Doctor Who: Doom’s Day #1 is written by Eisner-nominated Jody Houser (Stranger Things, Star Wars,Spider-Man) with art by Roberta Ingranata (Witchblade). The comic debuts with two covers for fans to collect: from celebrated artist Pasquale Qualano, and a photo cover variant.
Doctor Who: Doom’s Day #1 ($3.99) is now available to pre-order globally from May’s Diamond Previews catalogue, ForbiddenPlanet.com and on digital device via Comixology.
…. The first Star Trek trading cards were produced 1967, released one year after the series debuted. These were manufactured and distributed by Leaf Brands Division, WR Grace & Co of Chicago. This was a limited-scale run with sources saying it had a small geographical distribution within the Ohio and Illinois areas. The trading cards didn’t get too far before there were controversies on whether Leaf had licenses to distribute Star Trek cards in the first place. As soon as the licensing problems came to light, all cards that hadn’t been distributed were destroyed and all others were recalled if they had not been sold yet. In the set, there were 72 base cards. They had black and white pictures on the front. The pictures were randomly chosen from episodes and, in some cases, taken from behind the scenes or from publicity shots. The text on the back typically didn’t match up to the picture on the front and were written haphazardly. These cards were printed on layered card stock and measured at 2 ?” x 3 7/16”. The popularity grew, and with this new craze came many unauthorized reprints.
Dan Kremer Imports in Europe reprinted the 1967 Leaf cards without any rights to do so. They were considered counterfeit and were of terrible quality. Most of these are easily recognizable due to the blurry picture quality, and the pictures were cropped from the original, so the outer edges of the images are missing. Also, the cut on the card was not precise and was slightly smaller than the original. The cards were printed on non-gloss-coated single-layer card stock.
1981 Reprint is easily recognized by the mark on the back stating “1981 Reprint” where the “Leaf Brands” was originally. These were also printed on a very bright white stock of paper. The images are very crisp, and the cut is precise, with the cards being the exact size of the originals. There are 2 versions of these reprints. One of the versions has a red toned print of Kirk & Spock on the backs, while the other version has a black and white print of Kirk & Spock on the backs.
Though they were unauthorized reprints, these cards are still sought after by some as being part of history….
(11) JEOPARDY! David Goldfarb has the play-by-play from the Neal Stephenson item on Jeopardy!
Category: Modern Words
Neal Stephenson coined this word in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash”; it was later shortened by a company to become its new name
As the most powerful rocket ever built blasted from its launchpad in Boca Chica, Texas, on Thursday, the liftoff rocked the earth and kicked up a billowing cloud of dust and debris, shaking homes and raining down brown grime for miles.
In Port Isabel, a city about six miles northwest where at least one window shattered, residents were alarmed.
“It was truly terrifying,” said Sharon Almaguer, who, at the time of the launch, was at home with her 80-year-old mother. During previous launches, Ms. Almaguer said she had experienced some shaking inside the brick house, but “this was on a completely different level.”
Meanwhile, SpaceX’s Starship exploded minutes after liftoff and before reaching orbit. Near the launch site, the residents of Port Isabel, known for its towering lighthouse and less than 10 miles from the border with Mexico, were left to deal with the mess.
Virtually everywhere in the city “ended up with a covering of a rather thick, granular, sand grain that just landed on everything,” Valerie Bates, a Port Isabel spokeswoman, said in an interview. Images posted to social media showed residents’ cars covered in brown debris.
A window shattered at a fitness gym, its owner, Luis Alanis, said. Mr. Alanis, who was at home at the time of the launch, said he felt “rumbling, kind of like a mini earthquake.” He estimated that the window would cost about $300 to fix.
Closer to the launch site, large pieces of debris were recorded flying through the air and smashing into an unoccupied car. Louis Balderas, the founder of LabPadre, which films SpaceX’s launches, said that while it was common to see some debris, smoke and dust, the impact of Thursday’s liftoff was unlike anything he had ever seen….
(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Isaac Arthur analyzes the possibility of “Life on Giant Moons”.
We often contemplate life on alien planets, but might giant moons orbiting distant immense worlds be a better candidate for where extraterrestrial life might be found?
[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Kathy Sullivan, David Goldfarb, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Lou.]
File 770 usually has a tiny uptick of Twitter followers every month, and I happened to notice that what was tracking +19 a few days ago is now +6. Since I don’t think I did anything new to make people irate during the week I am going to guess it’s not about me and instead reflects the followers who have terminated their Twitter accounts because Elon Musk took over the service.
I’ve seen many Twitter users in the sff community discuss what course they should take once Musk assumed control because at times he has signaled there will be a radical change (for the worse) in content moderation and a weakening of rules enforcement. Some wrote they were thinking about leaving. I read a few announcements by others just before they did terminate their accounts. Their decisions are to some degree a protest, and an obviously more quantifiable one than the subtle changes that will be registered in other users who, although unhappy with developments, keep their accounts but filter more severely what they post, or simply post less.
I wondered if there was data that could be used to infer how many people have taken the step of actually quitting the service.
I laid the subject before John Scalzi and asked if he’d experienced a fluctuation in his large Twitter following this week. He had:
I was at 204.2K this time last week; I’m down to 202k today, so I’ve seen a drop of about 1%. When I noted that, other people also anecdotally noted similar percentage drops. My expectation is that the drops may be skewed by general political affiliation and/or antipathy to Musk, either as a person or with regard to his stated aims for the service. 1% is not a large number overall — I’ve had larger drops before when Twitter cleared out some bot accounts — but the question is whether these drops will stabilize, as they’ve done in the past, or continue as Musk continues to bumble along. If I drop below 200k, and especially if that happens by the end of this month, I will consider that not great news for Twitter’s general direction.
(Thanks to John for permission to quote his reply.)
That people are actually terminating their accounts speaks to their determination to separate themselves from the future of Twitter. Because there are easier alternatives, like just abandoning the account. Think how common that phenomenon is anywhere in social media where accounts are free. Therefore, the wave of departures from Twitter this week indicates an intentional message, and we will watch to see whether it is the start of a trend.
By Hampus Eckerman: There is a Jazz Festival running in the Millennium Park which makes it an impractical place to have a meetup. There are fences and cops everywhere.
Instead, we will move the meetup closer. We meet at Friday, 13:00 just outside the Hyatt Regency Hotel, by the statue of a horse.
I will bring hot water in thermoses and also instant coffee, tea, cups and some cookies and Swedish candy.
