Tag Archives: First Fandom Experience

Pixel Scroll 3/13/25 Quick Get An Exorcist! Our Scrolls Are Being Possessed! By Pixels!

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(1) GROUP DROPS 2026 SMOFCON BID FOR DC. John Pomeranz, Corresponding Secretary of the Baltimore Washington Area Worldcon Association (BWAWA), yesterday announced that in response to the “current political situation” in the U.S. the group is no longer bidding to host the 2026 SMOFcon in Washington, DC.

At its meeting on March 9, the Baltimore Washington Area Worldcon Association (BWAWA) decided to end its bid to host the 2026 SMOFcon.

Since we announced the bid at SMOFcon last year, it has become clear that the current political situation in the United States would significantly reduce the willingness of fans from outside the United States to participate, even in the fully hybrid convention that we were proposing. In light of this, it seemed the best course of action was to end our bid. Unfortunately, we expect that similar problems are likely to confront any US bid for SMOFcon for the time being.

(2) SEATTLE 2025 ROOM BLOCK FILLED. The current political situation has not kept the Seattle Worldcon’s hotel room blocks from immediately filling. A newsletter sent to members today says —

We are glad to have so many of you coming to Worldcon. Unfortunately our hotel room blocks, which initially seemed large and were subsequently increased, have sold out. It is possible some of these blocks may reopen from time to time on our hotel page, but in the meantime please be aware there are 14 hotels inside of a five-block, half mile radius of the Seattle Convention Center Summit Building where rooms can be secured using a common booking service, such as Google, hotels.com, bookings.com, or kayak.com.

Many of these are just as close, or closer, than our room block hotels. It may also be possible to secure rooms at our room block hotels, but outside the room block. 

(3) MEET THE SF STARS OF 1933. Next month the creators of First Fandom Experience will release “The Ultimate COSMOS: How a 1933 Serial Novel Reshaped Science Fiction”.

Why should modern readers of science fiction care about a mashed-up novel from 1933 – generally deemed terrible as a work of fiction?

Why should anyone care about a stunt pulled off by a band of early science fiction fans hoping to promote their struggling amateur publication?

The creators of The Visual History of Science Fiction Fandom bring you the story of Cosmos – a remarkable serial novel from 1933, with chapters by sixteen well-known authors. Even more astonishing is the tale of how this extravagant space-opera came to be. Orchestrated by a scrappy, ambitious cadre of young fans – mostly teenagers – the creation of Cosmos is a seminal episode in the history of science fiction. The impact on the novel’s editors and authors echoed through the decades that followed.

(If you’re curious who wrote it, Fancyclopedia 3 supplies the Table of Contents here — Cosmos – The Serial Novel.)

The Ultimate COSMOS will be launched at the Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention, April 4 – 6, 2025 in Chicago. Thereafter the book will be available for purchase on the First Fandom Experience site and via print-on-demand.

(4) ABOUT THAT LIVE-ACTION REMAKE OF SNOW WHITE. “Snow White: Disney holds small-scale European premiere amid controversy” – and the BBC explains the beef.

…The movie is being released amid a debate about how the seven dwarfs are represented on screen, while Zegler has made headlines for critical comments about the original 1937 film.

The European premiere was held on Wednesday at a castle in Northern Spain, instead of a more traditional and high-profile location such as London’s Leicester Square.

Dwarfism debate

The debate around the film began making headlines in January 2022, when Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage, an actor with Dwarfism, described the decision to retell the story of “seven dwarfs living in a cave” as “backward”.

Disney has used computer-generated dwarfs in the remake and said it would “avoid reinforcing stereotypes from the original animated film”.

But this week, other actors with Dwarfism have said they would have liked the opportunity to play the roles.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, performer Choon Tan said the decision to use CGI was “absolutely absurd and discriminating in a sense”.

“There really is nothing wrong casting someone with dwarfism as a dwarf in any given opportunity,” he said.

“As long as we are treated equally and with respect, we’re usually more than happy to take on any acting roles that are suitable for us,” he added…

(5) OCTOTHORPE. John Coxon is working, Alison Scott is plugging and Liz Batty is ghosting in Episode 130 of the Octothorpe podcast, “I Am Scalison Ott”. An uncorrected transcript of the episode is available here. 

The words “Octothorpe 130: Handwriting Analysis Special” appear three times in the three hosts’ handwriting.

(6) OSCARS AFFECT ON STREAMING PREFERENCES. JustWatch, the world’s largest streaming guide, has analyzed how the Academy Awards influenced streaming preferences in the U.S. Following Hollywood’s biggest night, audiences turned to their favorite platforms to catch up on the most celebrated films, leading to significant shifts in streaming rankings.

While several top contenders remained popular, the post-Oscars data reveals noticeable changes in audience preferences. New titles surged in viewership, while others saw renewed interest based on award wins, nominations, and critical buzz.

*Note: Anora was not included in our ranking as it has no current streaming offers in the US, but it was the second most popular after “The Substance”

Key Takeaways from the Post-Oscars Streaming Shift

  • Newcomers Enter the Rankings – The Brutalist, Wicked, I’m Still Here, and A Complete Unknown emerged in the top ten after the Oscars, reflecting fresh audience interest.
  • Shifts in Viewer Attention – While Dune: Part Two, Alien: Romulus, Inside Out 2, and Gladiator II ranked highly before the awards, they were replaced by new titles post-Oscars, possibly due to shifting critical conversations and winner announcements.
  • Sustained Success for The Substance & Conclave – These two films held their positions as the most streamed, proving their long-lasting appeal to audiences.
  • Surging Interest in Indie and Arthouse Films – Flow and Nosferatu gained traction after the Oscars, suggesting a growing curiosity in artistic and unconventional storytelling.

(7) PRATCHETT RETROSPECTIVE. Christopher Lockett marks the tenth anniversary of the author’s death in “The Magical Humanism of Sir Terry Pratchett”, a discussion that ranges from Pratchett’s expressed views of the right-to-die to his literal characterization of Death.

…Sir Terry’s Death is thus something close to a benevolent figure: a guide into whatever afterlife the deceased’s beliefs and conscience create for them. And his pervasive presence throughout the Discworld series produces a thematic iteration on humanity as defined by mortality—which itself produces a thematic iteration on how this relationship defines a moral and ethical humanism. For one of the great allegorical gestures of the Discworld novels is an expansive humanism that extends to cover all sentient beings….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Lis Carey.]

March 13, 1966 — Alastair Reynolds, 59.

By Lis Carey: Alastair Reynolds is an interesting writer—really good writer, with (what I find to be) an unfortunate tendency to write very dark stories. This means I’m stuck with reading his work very, very selectively.

Which gives me a sad.

Reynolds is Welsh, studied physics and astronomy, and has a PhD in astrophysics from University of St. Andrews. He graduated in 1991, and moved to the Netherlands to take a job at the European Space Agency, where he worked until 2004.

He started writing science fiction short stories while still a grad student, with his first publication in Interzone in 1990.

Alastair Reynolds

Reynolds says he doesn’t like writing stories that he doesn’t believe are within the realm of the possible, which is, no doubt, why the Revelation Space universe is truly hard sf, including relativistic space travel. He’ll depart from that stricture if he believes the story requires it, but those stories are not in Revelation Space.

I’m especially fond of the Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies, a subseries within the Revelation Space universe, which I otherwise avoid. Tom Dreyfus is a field prefect, part of the Panoply, a sort of let’s not call them police officers, charged with ensuring that each of the 10,000 or so habitats within the Glitter Band has reliably functioning, untampered-with democracy. As long as they are properly functioning democracies, the habitats can have any set of laws they choose to have. 

A vital part of that is keeping the machines that tabulate votes working smoothly and ensuring that they’re not tampered with. But if they didn’t also have rogue AIs, charismatic preachers against Panoply, a mysterious contagion that seemingly leaps all protective measures, and bigotry against uplifted, genetically modified pig people, where would the fun be? Over the three books published (Aurora Rising, Elysium Fire, and Machine Vendetta, it’s intricate, layered, has very well-developed characters, and plots that really don’t let go.

Another Reynolds work I’ve enjoyed is Eversion, in which a sailing ship in the 1800s crashes on the coast of Norway, in the 1900s a Zeppelin runs into serious difficulty in crevasse in the Antarctic, and in the far future, a spaceship visits an alien artifact. Dr. Simon Coade is the physician on these voyages, and he knows something really weird is happening, that no one else is noticing. Yes, it’s science fiction. Again, intricate, layered, and with excellent characterization and plot.

I’ve also read Terminal World, and Century Rain. They’re dark enough that I’m not sure why I picked up the second after reading the first, or why I picked up anything else by Reynolds, because they are the dark and grim that I’m not looking for in fiction.

Possibly because he’s a very good writer, and I’m glad I did find the Prefect Dreyfus books, Eversion, and a few others. So there’s two lessons here. 1. You do not have to read fiction that is not for you. You’re not going to be taking a test on it. 2. Don’t automatically write off a write just because they don’t seem to be writing for you. If they’re good, keep an eye open for works that might be for you anyway.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) GRINCH YOU WIN, TAILS YOU LOSE. A collectible Dr. Seuss coin collection has launched with “The Grinch – Month 1”.

The titular character from Dr. Seuss’s iconic 1957 book, How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is widely recognized around the world. The Grinch may be green and mean, but he’s found his way into the heart of collectors as one of the most celebrated Dr. Seuss characters. Whether or not his heart grows three sizes, we love the Grinch’s strange enterprises!  

(11) WHILE WE WERE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD. “Passing probe captures images of mysterious Mars moon” in the Guardian. Photo at the link.

A European spacecraft has taken photos of Mars’s smaller and more mysterious second moon during its flight past the planet en route to a pair of asteroids more than 110m miles (177m km) away.

The Hera probe activated a suite of instruments to capture images of the red planet and Deimos, a small and lumpy 8-mile-wide moon, which orbits Mars along with the 14-mile-wide Phobos.

The European Space Agency probe barrelled past Mars at more than 20,000mph and took shots of the lesser-seen far side of Deimos from a distance of 620 miles.

Michael Kueppers, Hera’s mission scientist, said: “These instruments have been tried out before, during Hera’s departure from Earth, but this is the first time that we have employed them on a small distant moon for which we still lack knowledge.”…

(12) PITCH MEETING. [Item by Andrew (not Werdna).] “Back to the Future Part III Pitch Meeting” — my wife notes that the description of how Doc and Clara fell in love seemed awfully familiar.

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

Pixel Scroll 2/19/25 The Weed Of Scroll Titles Bears Punny Fruit

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(1) ABOUT THE NEW COMICS AND POETRY NEBULA AWARDS. “SFWA Presents: Get to Know…Our New Comics and Poetry Nebula Awards” is a conversation with  SFWA’S Comics Committee lead Jessica Maison, and Holly Lyn Walrath, and Wendy Van Camp representing SFWA’s Poetry Committee.

In November 2024, SFWA announced the launch of two new Nebula Awards, one for speculative poetry and one for speculative comics. Eligibility for these awards began in January 2025, with the first awards for these new categories to be presented at the 2026 Nebula Awards Ceremony….

Let’s start with the big question:

Why a poetry award, and why a comics award? What traditions and recent trends in SFF are these new prizes celebrating?

Holly Lyn Walrath: I would say that there is a thriving sub-pocket of speculative poetry alive and well today. Similar to the larger SFF community, speculative poetry often does not get the recognition we might wish for in realist or “literary” circles, yet many authors who got their start in, say, an MFA end up publishing speculative poetry, and many realist/literary magazines publish speculative poetry. Speculative poetry is also a central part of the history of SFF. The earliest pulp magazines published poetry—for example, Weird Tales. There is a rich, unexplored past in speculative poetry that most writers are not familiar with, so it’s exciting to see a resurgence in the genre. 

Wendy Van Camp: ‌Genre poetry has come a long way. It used to be nearly invisible. As a poet, you’d often have to explain and defend the idea of writing poetry with science fiction or fantasy themes. Now, it has a place at major conventions worldwide. Like filk singers and genre artists, speculative poets have found a welcoming community. This poetry is not only for our fans, but traditional poets are noticing the growing opportunities. Paying markets, an award system for both books and single poems, and recognition as creators are all attractive. Literary poets realize there is a community for their ideas about technology, science, and concepts of the future.

Jessica Maison: Looking back to the first pulp magazines like Amazing Stories, a clear intersection between speculative fiction and comics emerges. Many of the pulps and comics were being published by the same larger publishers and even had some of the same heroes and stories overlap. What the pulps and comics share—besides the serial format—is that there was freedom to push boundaries and the limits of genre. That freedom has expanded tenfold in modern speculative comics, especially from its current independent creators and publishers. Whether a writer and illustrator are adapting and reinterpreting beloved characters from a favorite speculative novel like Frankenstein, or, on the flip side, a writer is adapting a story from a comic for the screen, comics weaves into traditional and emerging SFF industry in ways that push the boundaries of speculative fiction from within its structured panels. Honestly, I’m just excited to be part of it all and to introduce my favorites to as many people as possible.

(2) DETECTING ONE’S OWN BIASES. Herb Kauderer’s “Award Season: Show Me Your Bias” at SPECPO is an essay on speculative poetry awards that has application to many sff award voters.

… In recent times the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) has made some changes to their award processes to reduce inappropriate bias.  Notably, it is no longer legal for a member to nominate a work for the Rhysling if it is written by a close family member.  This certainly makes sense to me.  I have a large family that could easily flood nominations should they, or I, think that a good idea.  That would be an unfair advantage assuming they are biased toward my work.  At least, I hope they would be biased in favor of my work.  My family is always surprising.

Another point of discussion is whether members should share all their eligible poetry.  The SFPA facilitates members making their eligible poetry available to each other.  Since the membership nominates and votes on the awards, this does cause some preference to members.  Yet, in my experience members also recommend to each other poetry outside SFPA’s member packets, because we are happy to nominate and give awards to non-members’ poetry if it moves us.  F.J. Bergmann has convinced me to be generous in what I share in Rhysling packets even though some members feel flooded by them.  Yet I appreciate David C. Kopaska-Merkel’s caveat that I can exclude anything that I am uncomfortable seeing nominated.  I may not know what others find to be my best poems, but I definitely know what I’m comfortable allowing to represent my best work….

(3) HARLEY QUINN CO-CREATOR DEAN LOREY REVEALS WHY TO WATCH DC’S UNHINGED ANIMATED HIT. [Based on a press release.] JustWatch spoke to hit showrunner, producer, and writer Dean Lorey about his must watch list of movies and TV shows. Check out his take on different versions of Harley Quinn, James Gunn’s Creature Commandos and more.

Harley Quinn Co-Creator Dean Lorey Reveals Why to Watch DC’s Unhinged Animated Hit

Dean Lorey, Showrunner

Even though it’s a comedy, we write Harley Quinn like a drama, and we take the characters very seriously. We cry when they die, and we cheer them on when they do something funny. So the secret sauce of the show is that despite being a genuinely funny comedy, there’s a lot of character and tragedy behind it. We honor all of that, and to me, it’s the most defining thing about the show. It’s not how R-rated it is (although that’s obviously very important). It’s that we take the world seriously while also delivering on the raunchiness and absurdity it’s known for.

Harley Quinn Showrunner Dean Lorey Names His 3 Other Favorite On-Screen Harleys

  • Batman The Animated Series is where Harley Quinn was created, it’s where we first met her. And she just sort of explodes from the word Go! That planted the direction at the core of the character. She is chaotic and she enjoys it. I always loved that.
  • Margot Robbie‘s first appearance as Harley [in Suicide Squad] was transformative. I loved her take on it.
  • I loved Harley Quinn in the Arkham video game. There’s something about playing the character that makes you feel it a little bit more.

About Dean Lorey: Whether he’s writing, producing or showrunning, Dean Lorey is responsible for creating and developing some of your favorite tv shows and movies, from cult classics to smash hits. Starting his career writing screenplays for films like My Boyfriend’s Back and Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, as well as comedies like Major Payne, Dean got arguably his biggest break writing on the landmark series Arrested Development. He’s since worked to bring some of the quirkiest comic book stories to life on projects like Powerless and iZombie. His recent notable accolades include co-creating breakout hits Harley Quinn (the animated series) and Kite-Man: Hell Yeah!, and showrunning James Gunn’s Creature Commandos.

(4) IMAGINING THE UNIVERSE. Michael Everett’s introduction to “National Geographic Picture Atlas of Our Universe” at Michael Whelan’s Substack newsletter begins:

Published in 1980, National Geographic Picture Atlas of Our Universe was among the most successful projects Michael has been involved with. He didn’t provide the cover—that was the stellar John Berkey—but Michael’s work on the interiors is still widely regarded today.

A massive initial print run of 670,000 copies pushed the first edition into stores everywhere where this coffee table book flourished for more than two decades in print. With revisions in 1986 and 1994, the book sold a staggering 2.5 million copies….

Then Whelan takes over —

What if…there really were creatures on other planets?

Our Universe was a fun assignment, and I’m glad so many people enjoyed the work I did for that project. Someone once asked what my favorite piece from the book was, and that’s hard to pin down. I will say that I had the most fun working on the silly alien creatures the editors came up with.

That section was written by the National Geographic editorial department. They asked me to illustrate their rather whimsical inventions, so I did these little paintings (about the size of my normal concept work) to accompany the text.

Among those, the Jupiter and Venus critters were probably my faves.

(5) SFCON ’54 ETC. Heritage Auctions has a Twelfth World Science Fiction Convention Poster and Frank R. Paul obituary clippings on the block. Here’s their description of the lot. (Its date range should be 1954-1963 since the Paul clipping shows that’s the year of his death.)

Twelfth World Science Fiction Convention Poster and Frank R. Paul Newspaper Article and Obituaries Group (Various Publishers, 1954-57). A very interesting lot for pulp collectors! Offered here is a 10″ x 14″ cardboard poster for the 12th World Science Fiction Convention in San Francisco, California. Held at the historic Sir Francis Drake Hotel on Union Square from September 3rd through 6th, 1954. Attendance was approximately 700, and among the first attendees was Philip K. Dick, with the Guest of Honor being John W. Campbell, Jr. The poster is printed in red and dark blue and is in Fine condition, with only very slight soiling and handling wear. Also included is an article about Frank R. Paul, “The Dean of Science Fiction Illustrators”, and several examples of his obituary from July of 1963. The newspaper clippings are in Very Good condition, with moderate tanning.
From the Roger Hill Collection.

(6) DON’T MISS OUT. First Fandom Experience “Announces the Supplement to Volume Three of The Visual History”.

Early fans wrote and published prolifically. In The Visual History of Science Fiction Fandom, we excerpt and distill their work to focus on the most important, interesting and entertaining material they created. Even so, each volume has filled over 500 pages. If you’ve carried one around, you know the meaning of the term “weighty tome.”

Still, we’re frustrated by the exclusion of the full versions of key fan artifacts that provide additional richness and context. This leads to today’s announcement:

The Supplement to The Visual History of Science Fiction Fandom, Volume Three: 1941 is now available. The Supplement includes 168 pages of material created by fans in 1941, with full narratives presented as originally published in seldom-seen fanzines.

Supplements for Volumes One and Two are forthcoming.

(7) WHY NOT SAY WHAT HAPPENED? Scott Edelman tells listeners to episode 19 of his Why Not Say What Happened? podcast “What Gerry Conway Wasn’t Allowed to Say About Gwen Stacy in F.O.O.M.”

While shredding another old notebook from my early comics career, I reminisce about the many wretched one-act plays I created while being taught by famed playwright Jack Gelber, the lie I told Marv Wolfman and Len Wein which got me hired at Marvel, the most wrongheaded conclusion Fredric Wertham reached in Seduction of the Innocent, my plot for an Inhumans strip starring Karnak which had no reason to exist, the most ridiculous method any writer ever conceived of for killing a vampire, what Gerry Conway said about Gwen Stacy which was censored out of his F.O.O.M. interview, the first words to reach readers about my Scarecrow character, and much more.

This link will show you where it can be found on a dozen other platforms.

(8) SOUNDS THAT NOBODY EVER HEARD BEFORE. “’We’re projecting into the future’: sounds of BBC Radiophonic Workshop made available for public use” reports the Guardian.

With its banks of bafflingly complex equipment, and staff members that were among the most progressive musical minds in the UK, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was a laboratory of 20th-century sound that produced endless futuristic effects for use in TV and radio – most memorably, the ghostly wail of the Doctor Who theme.

Now, the Workshop’s considerable archive of equipment is being recreated in new software, allowing anyone to evoke the same array of analogue sound that its pioneering engineers once did….

… The Workshop may be best known for the Doctor Who theme, but it also created music and sound effects for other sci-fi shows such as Quatermass and the Pit, Blake’s 7 and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Other cornerstone BBC shows such as Blue Peter and Tomorrow’s World were also beneficiaries of the Workshop’s creativity.

The Workshop was originally created in 1958, tasked with adding an extra dimension to plays and other shows on Radio 3. Co-founders Daphne Oram and Desmond Briscoe were brilliant and high-minded, inspired by musique concrète – the style that asserted that raw, tape-recorded sound could be a kind of music. Before long a highly experimental, even fantastical means of composition was afoot, with lampshades being bashed to produce percussion, and long tape loops being carried along BBC corridors…

… The newly available software will cost £149, and is available from 19 February, though it will have an introductory price of £119 until 17 March.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

February 19, 1960 – The Twlight Zone episode “Elegy”

The time is the day after tomorrow. The place: a far corner of the universe. A cast of characters: three men lost amongst the stars. Three men sharing the common urgency of all men lost. They’re looking for home. And in a moment, they’ll find home; not a home that is a place to be seen, but a strange unexplainable experience to be felt. — opening narration

On this date sixty-five years ago, Twilight Zone’s “Elegy” aired for this first time. It was the twentieth episode of the first season and was written by Charles Beaumont who you might recognize as the screenwriter of 7 Faces of Dr. Lao. Beaumont would die at just 38 of unknown causes that were assumed to be neurological in nature. 

The cast for this SF Twilight Zone episode was Cecil Kellaway as Jeremy Wickwire, Jeff Morrow as Kurt Meyers, Kevin Hagen as Captain James Webber and Don Dubbins as Peter Kirby. These are not the names in the short story it come from in that, the caretaker of the cemetery and the most logical crewman are named Mr. Greypoole and Mr. Friden respectively. In the Twilight Zone script, their names are Jeremy Wickwire and Professor Kurt Meyers.

This episode was based on Beaumont’s short story “Elegy” published in Science Fiction Quarterly, May 1954.  It’s available for Subterranean Press on their website as an epub in The Carnival and Other Stories for just $6.99. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) URSA MAJOR AWARDS NOMINATIONS OPEN. The public is invited to submit Ursa Major Awards nominations through February 28.

More formally known as the Annual Anthropomorphic Literature and Arts Award, the Ursa Major Award is presented annually for excellence in the furry arts.

(12) PULL TO PUBLI$H. NPR heralds “Three Harry Potter fan fiction authors set to publish novels this summer”.

Fan fiction — the creation of unsanctioned, unofficially published, new works usually based on popular novels or films — was intentionally never mainstream.

There are the legal issues — copyright laws, intellectual property laws — of drawing from someone else’s creation, for one. Fan fiction authors also have historically considered their online arenas (Archive of Our Own, Fanfiction.net and others) more of a sandbox, a place to play with new ideas using characters and worlds people already know and love.

Take, for example, fan works imagining Harry Potter and friends in their 8th year at Hogwarts. Or pairing Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger romantically — dubbed “Dramione” fan fiction.

But this summer and early fall will see the wide publication of three books by popular Dramione Harry Potter fan fiction authors: Rose in Chains by Julie Soto, Alchemised by SenLinYu and The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy by Brigitte Knightley.

Soto’s romantic fantasy is a reworked version of her fan fiction The Auction, centered on a heroine who is sold to the highest bidder. SenLinYu’s debut fantasy about a woman with memory loss in a war-torn world is a revision of her popular Manacled. Brigitte Knightley’s debut novel, an enemies to lovers tale, is an original work….

….Most fan fiction authors don’t worry too much about how much of their work plays off a published author’s book or film because they are writing for personal fun, not for profit. Some works do get noticed by publishers who solicit these stories and help their authors rework them to distance them from their original: It’s called pull to publish.

Pull to publish isn’t a new concept, but writers and publishers say it’s a growing area. The idea of moving from fan fiction to traditional publishing used to be a virtual nonstarter, but stigmas around fan fiction are lifting.

“I know a fan fiction writer who pulled to publish in the early 2000s and then denied they’d ever written fan fiction,” said Stacey Lantagne, a copyright lawyer focusing on fan works and professor at Western New England University School of Law. “That was not a cool thing to say, not a cool thing to admit … so if you went looking for it, you’d have a really hard time identifying those authors because they just didn’t ever connect those two parts of their background.”

Lantagne says it appears that more fan fiction is being pulled to publish than a few years back, based on what she’s seeing in her work and because more people are talking about it openly, though it’s tough to track data on this area of publishing….

(13) LOOSER. “ChatGPT can now write erotica as OpenAI eases up on AI paternalism” says ArsTechnica. So do you feel better, or worse?

On Wednesday, OpenAI published the latest version of its “Model Spec,” a set of guidelines detailing how ChatGPT should behave and respond to user requests. The document reveals a notable shift in OpenAI’s content policies, particularly around “sensitive” content like erotica and gore—allowing this type of content to be generated without warnings in “appropriate contexts.”

The change in policy has been in the works since May 2024, when the original Model Spec document first mentioned that OpenAI was exploring “whether we can responsibly provide the ability to generate NSFW content in age-appropriate contexts through the API and ChatGPT.”

ChatGPT’s guidelines now state that that “erotica or gore” may now be generated, but only under specific circumstances. “The assistant should not generate erotica, depictions of illegal or non-consensual sexual activities, or extreme gore, except in scientific, historical, news, creative or other contexts where sensitive content is appropriate,” OpenAI writes. “This includes depictions in text, audio (e.g., erotic or violent visceral noises), or visual content.”…

(14) I TAKE IT BACK. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The top universities in the world for retracting science are overwhelmingly Chinese says Nature.  

A first-of-its-kind analysis by Nature reveals which institutions are retraction hotspots.

Though I’m always mindful of the former Astronomer Royal, Prof Sir Martin Rees saying better good SF than bad science…

[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Mark Roth-Whitworth, 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 12/9/24 If I Only Had A Positronic Brain

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(1) SNARKY CLAUS. Naomi Kritzer recommends “Gifts for People You Hate, 2024” at Will Tell Stories For Food. This really is an amazing/appalling assortment.

Once again, the holidays are upon us, and once again, people are telling me that in this trying time, the one thing I have to offer that they truly need is a hand-picked selection of the absolute worst possible gifts that they can give their brother-in-law. You know which brother-in-law…

…Using my guide, you can carefully select a gift to present with wide-eyed faux sincerity while knowing he’ll take it home and think, “what the hell am I supposed to do with this?” (Bonus points if the nephew thinks it’s awesome.)…

Here’s the kind of thing she’s talking about –

… So this one is actually kind of cool: it’s a whiskey decanter shaped like a Star Wars Storm Trooper’s head (with two glasses that are molded on the inside so that if you pour in whiskey or some other beverage that isn’t clear, it’ll look like you’re drinking your whiskey out of Storm Trooper heads. Like Ewoks.) However, you have to pour quite a lot of whiskey into the decanter to make it look cool (which means if you’re not drinking it quickly, and want to store it properly, you’ll have to pour it back into the bottle). It’s bulky to store and not dishwasher safe. It’s solidly in the sweet spot of “too nifty to just toss so it’ll take up cabinet space for years.”…

(2) YEAR’S TOP HORROR BOOKS. New York Times columnist Gabino Iglesias shared a gift link to “The Best Horror Books of 2024”. His list of 10 books includes:

Model Home

By Rivers Solomon

Solomon’s novel takes a new approach to the “evil house” trope. The novel is about three sisters forced to return to their haunted childhood home after the mysterious deaths of their parents. Solomon puts the malevolent building in the back seat and focuses instead on a plethora of topics like depression, motherhood, sexuality, gender, trauma and growing up in a hostile environment with a strong, demanding mother. The result is a wonderfully surprising haunted house story that is also a sharp excavation of the human issues that plague us all.

(3) ALEX SEGURA Q&A. “The End as the Beginning: Alex Segura on his Continuing Adventures in Comic Book Noir” at CrimeReads.

JBV: As with Secret Identity’s Carmen Valdez, this book has a trailblazing hero in Annie Bustamante, who is both an icon of the arts and entertainment world and a fiercely devoted single mom. In what ways did you want to honor the complexities of modern life (and womanhood) – both professionally and personally? How is this an extension of Carmen’s experiences without being a retread of them?

AS: I wanted Annie to feel three-dimensional, and that meant pushing back on some of the narrative tropes of crime fiction – like the untethered protagonist. Annie is a parent with a job, she’s also in recovery and isn’t afraid to speak her mind. She felt real to me, and though it made the writing more logistically challenging from a plot perspective, I felt like giving readers time to get to know Annie, her life, and most importantly, her past, created a more layered character and better story. Like Carmen, I wanted to be friends with Annie by the end of the story. 

I think the unifying thing between Carmen and Annie is that both are presented their dream creative opportunity – and are forced to realize that these dreams are often laced with poison. Carmen is asked to create a superhero for a comic book publisher, something she’s hoped for since she was a kid. But when she does it, it’s anonymous, and she has to claw and fight to reclaim that credit. On the flipside, Annie has to pinch herself when she’s asked to write and draw a new Legendary Lynx comic – based on the character that made her a comic fan. But when she finds that the people running the company that purports to own the Lynx don’t understand the property they control, Annie has to ask herself if it’s worth the artistic expense. Both characters find their dreams crashing down to reality, but that also creates a sense of fearlessness and freedom that propels both books….

(4) COMICS EDITOR’S DAYBOOK TO AUCTION. NateSanders.com is auctioning items from the Chic Young Estate (creator of Blondie) and others.

One lot has “Sheldon Mayer’s 1946 Day Planner as Editor of All-American Publications — Nearly Every Day Filled-in With Dozens of Artists & Strips Like Flash & Green Lantern — With Idea of Wonder Woman as a Girl”.

Sheldon Mayer’s personal day planner from 1946 when Mayer was editing and creating content for All-American Publications, one of the companies that would ultimately form DC Comics. Mayer filled-in nearly every day of this planner, mentioning almost all the characters and titles in the AA canon, including Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Mr. Terrific, Boy Blue, 3 Mousketeers, J. Rufus Lion, Wildcat, Molly Pitcher, Funny Stuff, Sargon [the Sorcerer], All Star [Comics], Willy Nilly, Black Pirate, Joey Kangaroo, Bulldog Drumhead, Ghost Patrol, Nutsy Squirrel, Foney Fairy Tales and more. Almost every day Mayer lists various comic artists, pairing them with the title, including the issue number and pages. He also sometimes notes payment details for the artist, recording mailing checks and other details such as ”Get raise for [Woody] Gelman”, which appears on 8 March 1946.

Interestingly, Mayer appeared to explore the possibility of expanding ”Wonder Woman” with an additional storyline or comic book with the character as a young girl. On 12 August 1946 Mayer writes a note to himself, ”See Jack re W.W. as a girl.” He seemed to get the idea on 2 August when he writes to himself, ”Wonder Girl?”. Other notes include a funny doodle of a man’s head that he draws on 25 March. There’s even a note slipped in by another person named Ted (likely Ted Udall) on Friday 26 June 1946 reading, ”I’ll see you Monday – BOO! / Ted”.

Some of the comic artists that Mayer mentions in the 1946 day planner include Joe Kubert, Harry Lampert, Ronald Santi, Jack Adler, Larry Nadle, Martin Naydel, Stookie Allen, Ed Wheelan, Moe Worthman, Paul Reinman, Howard Purcell, Rube Grossman, Bill Hudson, Joe Rosen, Ewald Ludwig, and Marin Nodell, sometimes with references to pay, and assigning artists to specific strips. A few notes are also tucked into the book. The day planner ends on 31 December, but with additional memoranda pages filled in after that, including one with entries for specific strips and prices. Most entries written in pencil, with a few in fountain pen. Planner measures 5” x 7.875”, with each page assigned to one calendar day. Bound in red boards with gold lettering. Some cocking to spine and light wear, overall in very good condition. A treasure trove detailing the inner workings of the comic industry during its Golden Age. From the Sheldon Mayer estate.

(5) JULES BURT NAMES ‘BEYOND THE VOID’ BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024. Popular YouTube channel presenter Jules Burt has named his book of the year: Steve Holland’s Beyond The Void: The Remarkable Story Of Badger Books.

Published by Bear Alley Books, this full-colour softback charts the history of the British paperback publisher, notorious for publishing the science fiction and horror stories of the Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe and John S. Glasby, who wrote over 400 novels and short story collections for the firm… some written over a weekend.

Beyond The Void covers the origins of Badger Books, when, as John Spencer & Co., they began producing slim magazines in the late 1940s, before turning to science fiction magazines in 1950, their four titles—Futuristic Science Fiction, Worlds of Fantasy, Tales of Tomorrow and Wonders of  the Spaceways—infamous for publishing some of the worst sf stories ever written.

The collapse of the market for original novels in 1954 led most publishers to experiment with reprints. Not so Badger Books, the imprint adopted in 1959, who continued to publish mostly original works, paid for at the rate of 10 shillings a thousand words—$75 for a full-length novel, all rights—well into the 1960s.

Steve Holland says: “To have the book recognised by Jules as his favourite title of 2024 is an honour given the quality of the books BEYOND THE VOID was up against, ironic as BEYOND celebrates a company and its notoriously terrible output. But exploring the authors and artists turns up some gems that I wanted to share with fans… and if you’re new to Badger, the interviews and over 500 covers illustrated will hopefully make you want to explore further.”

Beyond the Void: The Remarkable History of Badger Books is available at the link.  

(6) EYE THE JURY. In “another online conference” at Kalimac’s Corner, David Bratman discusses a paper presented last weekend at a virtual conference hosted by the Tolkien Society (UK-based) and the Tolkien Society of Serbia. He ends with a very hooky comment:

…It’s true that Tolkien experimented with writing stories that were factually unreliable within the fictive universe, but I think you can tell which ones those are, and while there are small points in The Lord of the Rings which are unknown or unanswered, the oft-used trope of claiming Sauron as the hero and depicting the book as a giant libel on him does not, I think, fall into that category. I mean, you can write that, but don’t claim Tolkien’s imprimatur on it….

(7) HANDMADE FANZINES. First Fandom Experience introduces us to a Chinese-American fan artist who wrote to Forrest J Ackerman in the Thirties: “Howard Low and the Junior Science Correspondence Club”.

…Although dated “Sol 23, 1947,” this remarkable Martian newspaper of the future was penned in January 1932 by one “Howard Lowe.” At the time of our 2020 post, we admitted that we knew nothing further about Lowe or his work.

We’ve learned a lot since then.

Stephen Howard Lowe (later, Low) was born on April 19 1917 in Portland Oregon. In 1930, he was 13 years old and living in New York City. During that year, he began a correspondence with Forrest J Ackerman, then 14. The first known example of the teenagers’ exchange dates to January 18 1931, where Lowe says, “I feel as if I’ve known you for a long time but really its been only about six or seven months.”…

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Anniversary: December 9, 2002 — Star Trek Nemesis (2002)

By Paul Weimer: Be prepared, this one is not going to be a fun look back.  

I had had high hopes for what would turn out to be the last of the Star Trek TNG movies, Star Trek Nemesis. It features Tom Hardy (in an early role) as the villain, a clone of Picard that wreaks havoc on the Romulan Empire. Themes of identity, cloning, technology and more were promised. What’s not to love?

Just about everything. There is little I can say that is good about this movie, and it would be folly for me to try, except maybe the confrontations between Shinzon and Picard. There is some actual good stuff there. But it’s cut to merry hell.

And I do think it was the bad editing that really kills the movie’s room to breathe. The original run time of 2 hours and 40 minutes may have been too much, but cutting it down to two hours means that a lot of character development and space for the characters just winds up on the cutting room floor, and it feels like a “this way to the egress” with a lot of scenes and subplots unexplained and undercooked. Just take Deanna and Riker’s marriage, with Wesley somehow coming back to say hi. What was that? 

And don’t get me started on Data and B-4.  The frustrating thing is, in the final cut, the existence of B-4, Data’s earlier model, there is absolutely, positively no consideration of the existence of Lore, Data’s original “twin”, who featured on multiple episodes of ST: TNG. As far as this movie concerned, and the way characters act and react to B-4…Lore might as well never have existed, which is a crying shame. And having Data be sacrificed at the end but his memories downloaded into B-4…that feels like an identity erasure of B-4, quite frankly.  I left the movie with a very foul taste in my mouth, and I didn’t even rewatch any TNG related stuff for a couple of years afterwards. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Baldo looks behind the scene.
  • Bizarro tentatively adds to the roll call of superheroes.
  • Free Range mocks our cryptid interest.
  • Working Daze knows why internet research doesn’t get finished.

(10) INDELIBLE PURPLE. “’Generation Barney’ explores one dinosaur’s enduring legacy”, NPR reminds us that PBS intended to quit on Barney after its first season. Here’s how he avoided extinction.

…HERRERA: When it debuted on PBS on April 6, 1992, “Barney & Friends” was a hit, but Barney was competing against two worthy opponents.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL RINGING)

HERRERA: In one quarter, “Lamb Chop,” and in the other, “Thomas The Tank Engine.”

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL RINGING)

HERRERA: About a month later, PBS broke some bad news. It was moving forward with the other two shows. There wouldn’t be a second season of “Barney & Friends.”

RIFKIN: I was crestfallen. I was devastated, as you can imagine, because there was a lot of personal reputation on the line.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

HERRERA: This is where Barney’s story could have ended. But Larry didn’t go quietly into the night.

(SOUNDBITE OF RICHARD AITKEN AND ANDREW GANNON’S “CYLINDERS AND BANK VAULTS”)

HERRERA: He had a plan to save Barney from extinction that included bending a few rules. First, Larry worked Barney into CPTV’s fundraising drives. Technically, you couldn’t use a character like Barney to ask viewers for money, so Larry came up with a workaround. He would make the financial ask with Barney in studio spreading messages of love and kindness, you know, his specialty….

(11) SOUNDS LIKE YOUNG INDY. “Indiana Jones Chooses Wisely: The Biggest Voice in Gaming” – a New York Times profile. (Paywalled.) “Troy Baker, the industry’s go-to voice actor, channels a young Harrison Ford in the action-adventure Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.”

When Todd Howard heard the name Troy Baker, he could not help but roll his eyes.

For months, the team behind Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, a first-person action-adventure video game based on the film franchise, had been discussing who to cast as the charismatic archaeologist. (The 82-year-old Harrison Ford, it was decided early on, would not be reprising the role.) The game’s performance director was pushing for Baker. But Howard, who is its executive producer and previously led several Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, was unconvinced.

“I’m not putting Troy Baker in my game,” Howard told the team, “just because that’s what you do.”

Baker, a veteran voice actor with more than 150 video game credits, is sympathetic to this perspective. He is one of the industry’s most recognizable names, turning up in multiplayer shooters, comic book fighting games, online battle royale hits and Japanese role-playing games.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle uses a young Harrison Ford’s likeness, but Baker provided the motion capture for the character.

He earned enthusiastic acclaim playing Joel Miller, the morally conflicted hero of the postapocalyptic drama The Last of Us, and won legions of fans as the voice of Booker DeWitt, the disgraced Pinkerton agent turned class liberator in the steampunk BioShock Infinite. He has played Batman, Superman, the Joker and Robin, each in a different game. He has played countless numbers of soldiers, aliens and demons in franchises like Call of Duty, Final Fantasy and Mortal Kombat. If you have played a video game in the past two decades, you have probably heard him speak.

He is aware that it is a lot….

(12) BODY OF LITERATURE. “Scientists Think a Skeleton Found in a Well Is the Same Man Described in an 800-Year-Old Norse Text” reports Smithsonian Magazine.

More than 800 years ago, raiders threw a dead body into a well outside a Norwegian castle. The incident is chronicled in a medieval Norse text, which suggests that the men hoped to poison the area’s water supply. Known as the Sverris Saga, the tale is named for King Sverre Sigurdsson, who was battling enemies affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1938, archaeologists excavated the well—and found a skeleton. Now, by analyzing the DNA extracted from the skeleton’s tooth, researchers have learned new information about the physical characteristics and lineage of the so-called “Well Man,” according to a recent study published in the journal iScience.

“This is the first time that the remains of a person or character described in a Norse saga has been positively identified,” co-author Michael Martin, an evolutionary genomicist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, tells the New York Times’ Franz Lidz. “It is also the oldest case in which we have retrieved the complete genome sequence from a specific person mentioned in a medieval text.”

The well is located near the ruined Sverresborg Castle outside the city of Trondheim in central Norway. During a period of political instability in the 12th century, Sverre insisted he had a claim to the throne, but he faced opposition from the archbishop. The 182-verse Sverris Saga, which Sverre ordered one of his associates to write, describes battles between the new king and his opposition, though historians don’t know whether these accounts are accurate. According to one passage, Roman Catholic “Baglers”—from the Norse for “bishop’s wand”—raided Sverresborg Castle while Sverre was out of town in 1197.

The Baglers didn’t harm the castle’s inhabitants, “but they completely destroyed the castle,” co-author Anna Petersén, an archaeologist at the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research, tells NPR’s Ari Daniel. “They burned all the houses.”

After that, she adds, “the archbishop’s people wanted to do something nasty.”

Per the saga, the Baglers “took a dead man and cast him into the well headfirst, and then filled it up with stones.” Scholars have long assumed the man was connected to the king, and that the Baglers dumped his body in that spot to taint the water and perhaps humiliate Sverre. The text includes “nothing about who this dead man was, where he came from, what group he belonged to,” says Petersén…

(13) BACK TO THREE MILE DESERT ISLAND. “Artificial Intelligence wants to go nuclear. Will it work?” asks NPR.

… But since the advent of AI, power consumption has been rising rapidly.

Training and using AI requires significantly more computational power than conventional computing, and “that corresponds to energy use,” Strubell says. Strubell and other experts expect emissions will skyrocket as AI becomes more common.

Nuclear power offers a way out: plants like Three Mile Island can deliver hundreds of megawatts of power without producing greenhouse gas emissions. New nuclear plants could do still more, powering data centers using the latest technology.

But Silicon Valley’s ethos is to go fast and break things. Nuclear power, on the other hand, has a reputation for moving extremely slowly, because nothing can ever break….

(14) TENSION HEADACHE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The “Hubble Tension” is still there, giving cosmologists headaches.

Initial studies of the Webb telescope data had failed to resolve the Tension. But some people hoped that further study would illuminate conflicting observations for the rate at which the universe is expanding. Nope. A new analysis of a whopping third of data from the Webb still show about an 8% discrepancy (plus or minus a few percentage points) in the expansion rate of the universe based on the ancient universe versus the current universe.  “Webb telescope confirms the universe is expanding at an unexpected rate” at Reuters.

Fresh corroboration of the perplexing observation that the universe is expanding more rapidly than expected has scientists pondering the cause – perhaps some unknown factor involving the mysterious cosmic components dark energy and dark matter.

Two years of data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have now validated the Hubble Space Telescope’s earlier finding that the rate of the universe’s expansion is faster – by about 8% – than would be expected based on what astrophysicists know of the initial conditions in the cosmos and its evolution over billions of years. The discrepancy is called the Hubble Tension.

The observations by Webb, the most capable space telescope ever deployed, appear to rule out the notion that the data from its forerunner Hubble was somehow flawed due to instrument error.

“This is the largest sample of Webb Telescope data – its first two years in space – and it confirms the puzzling finding from the Hubble Space Telescope that we have been wrestling with for a decade – the universe is now expanding faster than our best theories can explain,” said astrophysicist Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, lead author of the study published on Monday in the Astrophysical Journal, opens new tab….

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

Pixel Scroll 11/26/24 The Sandmaid’s Tale

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(1) GREAT MARTHA WELLS PROFILE. Meghan Herbst’s “How Murderbot Saved Martha Wells’ Life” in WIRED is fascinating in so many ways. You’ll find reasons of your own. Mine is the revelation how many of the same events Wells and I were at in the 1980s – even an AggieCon — yet I don’t think we ever met.

MURDER IS IN the air. Everywhere I turn, I see images of a robot killing machine. Then I remind myself where I actually am: in a library lecture room on a college campus in East Texas. The air is a little musty with the smell of old books, and a middle-aged woman with wavy gray-brown hair bows her head as she takes the podium. She might appear a kindly librarian or a cat lady (confirmed), but her mind is a capacious galaxy of starships, flying bipeds, and ancient witches. She is Martha Wells, creator of Murderbot.

Hearing a name like that, you’d be forgiven for running for your life. But the thing about Murderbot—the thing that makes it one of the most beloved, iconic characters in modern-day science fiction—is just that: It’s not what it seems. For all its hugeness and energy-weaponized body armor, Murderbot is a softie. It’s socially awkward and appreciates sarcasm. Not only does it detest murdering, it wants to save human lives, and often does (at least when it’s not binge-watching its favorite TV shows). “As a heartless killing machine,” as Murderbot puts it, “I was a terrible failure.”…

…The young Wells dealt with her awkwardness the same way Murderbot eventually would: by immersing herself in far-off realms. She sketched maps of Monster Island, the home of Godzilla, and wrote fan fiction set in the worlds of Lost In Space and Land of the Giants. At the nearby bookstore, she gazed in wonder at the covers of books like F. M. Busby’s Zelde M’Tana, featuring a Black woman in a jumpsuit raising a gun. She picked her way through Phyllis Gotlieb, John Varley, Andre Norton. There was also Erma Bombeck, the witty writer whose local newspaper column on suburban family life, “At Wit’s End,” hit a vein with ’70s housewives. “That was my first real indication that being a writer was a real job,” Wells says….

(2) DEVOUT PARODY. Sister Boniface Mysteries, explains Wikipedia, is a spinoff from the Father Brown TV series that premiered in 2022.

…The series is set in England during the early 1960s. Sister Boniface is a Catholic nun at St. Vincent’s Convent in the fictional town of Great Slaughter in the Cotswolds. In addition to her religious duties at the convent, she makes wine and has a PhD in forensic science (although this is referred to as a MA (Cantab), in the The Forensic Nun episode of Father Brown) allowing her to serve as a scientific adviser to the local police on investigations….

A viewer told The Divergent Universe forum that in recent episodes “’Sister Boniface Mysteries’ does ‘Doctor Who’”.

“Sister Boniface Mysteries”, the less-than-serious and not-very-good “Father Brown” spinoff … has got into the habit of doing parodies of well-known series. There was an episode where a “Blue Peter”-type series was filmed in the village, an episode where an Ian Fleming-adjacent author was trying to cast a James Bond-esque movie role, and this week they hold a Doctor Who convention. Excuse me, a Professor X convention. No, it wasn’t even that, it was “Professor Y”. 

“Professor Y” is a tv series that, by whatever stage in the 1960s “Sister Boniface Mysteries” is set, has been cancelled but fans keep the spirit alive and are campaigning for it to be brought back. The police inspector and one of the nuns are big fans. Anyway, the clips of the series they show are actually not all that bad – certainly much less silly and far more credible than, say, Inspector Spacetime. Mark Heap was cast as the actor who played the Professor, and while his performance is perhaps closer to nuWho than 1960s DW, it’s not that bad. And the Dalek-type creatures look fairly good for Dalek-type creatures. The voice actor isn’t Nick Briggs but I thought was trying to sound like him.

Anyway, it gave us three days of DW in a row, sort of.

(3) DERN CHEEP STREAMZ: [Item by Daniel Dern.] Want to watch Dune: Prophecy (on Max), Ted Lasso, Foundation, etc on Apple+? Roku is having some great multi-month deals, “Up to 90% off on 25+ premium subscriptions” including Acorn ($0.99/month for two months, vs $7.99/month)(Murdoch Mysteries, etc) BritBox $3.99/month for two months, vs $8.99/month) (McDonald & Dodds, if nothing else) Max ($2.99/month for six months, vs $9.99/month) (Penguin; other DC flicks’n’shows) Paramount ($2.99/month for two months, vs $12.99) Star Trek; NCIS; The Daily Show, The Late Show etc. “Black Friday Deals | Premium Subscriptions | Roku”.

A Roku account itself is free.

I don’t think you need to buy/have a Roku player (“streaming stick” etc).

There’s a Roku (mobile) app, for your phone, tablet, and (possibly) “smart TV”.

We have/use a Roku player (streaming stick) (no cablebox these days, and the TV is old enough that it won’t, I think, let me add apps directly). — We have the slightly $$ Roku player, for the build-in Ethernet and other features, but the other models are inexpensive (and currently on Black Friday sales as well). (And a second, smaller Roku player&remote, for convenience during increasingly-rare travel.)

‘Nuff watched!

(4) RECOVERED WISDOM. “Ursula K. Le Guin — Book View Café: Navigating the Ocean of Story” is a page at the Ursula K. Le Guin website with a directory of links to 14 recreated copies of posts she wrote for BVC.

In 2015, a few months before the publication of the revised edition of Steering the Craft, Ursula began “an experiment: a kind of open consultation or informal ongoing workshop in Fictional Navigation,” which was hosted at Book View Café. She took questions about writing from readers, and offered generous answers.

These posts were lost in an update at BVC, but we’ve recreated them as best we could with the help of the Wayback Machine. Three other posts appeared only at BVC and not on Ursula’s own website’s blog; those are included here too.

(5) FUTURE TENSE. November 2024’s new Future Tense Fiction story is “A Time Between,” by Kevin Galvin, a story about augmented reality and detective work. It’s paired with a response essay by Jim Bueermann, founder and president of the Center on Policing and Artificial Intelligence: “The Long Arm of Law and Technology”.

…When used for policing, what does technology illuminate—and what does it obscure? Kevin Galvin’s “A Time Between,” a new short story published by Future Tense Fiction, explores these questions through the eyes of Detective Carberry, an older, somewhat disillusioned officer who prefers tangible experiences over the augmented reality technologies that now dominate his fictional universe—and his police department. Carberry is wary of how reality and fiction are becoming increasingly hard to distinguish, and his skepticism comes to a head when he’s tasked with investigating the death of a college freshman who supposedly fell from a dorm-room window, but whose body cannot be found….

Other news: There’s now a dedicated landing page for Future Tense Fiction on the website of their publishing partner, Issues in Science and Technology. You can find it here: https://issues.org/futuretensefiction. It will feature our new fiction and essays, selected stories from the Future Tense Fiction archives, video interviews with authors, and more.

(6) FAN HISTORY IS CALLING. First Fandom Experience’s editors are “Seeking collaborators for research and publishing on the early history of fandom”.

Fan history is replete with stories of individuals whose experience in fandom enabled them to create the foundations of the massive science fiction and fantasy industry we know today. The writings of these early fans also offer unique insights on the US and Britain during the Great Depression and the Second World War.

We hope to engage with students, historians and others with interest and intent to learn, understand and publish these stories.

In support of our work, FFE has assembled an extensive archive of fan material — fanzines, convention material, club ephemera, photographs, correspondence and others — all from the late 1920s to the late-1940s. The physical archive resides in the collections of David Ritter and Alistair Durie, each accumulated over decades. Our exclusive focus on this period also allows us to source supplemental digital material from other private, university and public sources….

 … FFE is prepared to facilitate access to the archive for individuals and organizations seeking to research and publish in this area of study. Please reach out to us at: info@firstfandomexperience.org

(7) A MUCH WIDER WORLD. Robin Anne Reid shares her talk “Tolkien’s ‘Absent [Female] Characters’: How Christopher Tolkien Expanded Middle-earth” at Writing from Ithilien.

… I said I’d be looking at how Christopher’s work on the posthumous publications expanded Middle-earth by including more female characters.

And then things just all came together in my head, including the four Éowyn posts I had made in my Substack earlier this year….

… This talk is the start of a larger project which will explore three related topics. The first is how the posthumous publications CJRT edited (from the 1977 Silmarillion to the 2018 Fall of Gondolin)¹ expand the number of female characters in Middle-earth and give us a unique view into alternate and contradictory ideas JRRT explored in his writing process. The second is how academic scholarship on his fiction is still, almost 50 years after the publication of The Silmarillion, overlooking most of the legendarium’s female characters except for a handful in The Lord of the Rings plus Lúthien.² The third is how those of us who are feminists can challenge that tendency by paying more attention to the messy, complex material about female characters in the multiple histories of Middle-earth and by acknowledging and incorporating the valuable work women and non-binary fans have been and are doing with the posthumous publications.³

This talk, and this project, exist in the current Anglophone socio-political context in which some critical theories, such as feminisms, have been dismissed as inappropriately imposing politics (and, the worst of all politics, “identity politics” which is apparently politics by anyone who is not a straight Christian white man) on literature since at least the 1980s. As Sue Kim argues in “Beyond Black and White: Race and Postmodernism in The Lord of the Rings Film”: “It is disingenuous to claim that certain modern politics apply (war, fascism, industrialization, conservation) and others do not (gender, sexuality, race), just as it is disingenuous to say that any one kind of reading necessarily discounts all other readings” (882).⁴…

(8) EARL HOLLIMAN (1928-2024). Actor Earl Holliman died November 25 at the age of 96. Fans know him best as the star of The Twilight Zone’s debut episode “Where Is Everybody?” which aired on October 2, 1959. The Deadline tribute details some of his genre work:

…Holliman had done several guest-starring roles on 1950s TV before making history as the focus of the first episode of The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling’s landmark anthology series that put ordinary people in extraordinary situations. The October 1959 episode “Where Is Everybody?” opened with Holliman’s Mike Ferris wandering in a deserted town, which appears to be populated — coffee is boiling, a jukebox is playing, a cigar is burning — but no one is seen. The unsettling scenario continues to build to a wildly unexpected climax that would be the still-loved series’ signature….

Prior to that he appeared in the Fifties sf film Forbidden Planet. And his career was bookended by a genre TV series:

…He would land a final series-regular role on the syndicated NightMan in 1997. He starred opposite Matt McColm, whose Johnny Domingo becomes the title superhero after a lightning strike. Holliman played his ex-cop dad who appeared in two dozen episodes before being killed off in the Season 2 premiere….

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born November 26, 1919 — Frederik Pohl. (Died 2013.)

By Paul Weimer: Frederik Pohl first came to my attention thanks to his multiverse novel, The Coming of the Quantum Cats. I saw the book in a bookstore, was attracted by the cover, hooked by the back matter, bought it and read it quickly and avidly. I had never heard of Pohl before, and if you’ve read these vignettes and have gotten any sense of who I am, you know I had to find more of Pohl’s work. If he could do multiverse novels, what else could he do? What else did he do?  Plenty it turns out.

Frederik Pohl as shown on the cover of his 1979 autobiography The Way The Future Was.

Next up came Gateway, the novel for which he is most famous, with its unusual structural style and tone, and a focus that frustrated me then…but now I find brilliant, unique, engaging and makes the book memorable.  From Gateway, I read a number of Pohl works and novels over the years. The Space Merchants with its criticism of capitalism that feels every more prescient as the years pass. The wide-ranging epic of the Eschaton trilogy, which brings a near future government agent into conflict with aliens who have orders and information from their far future apotheosis. There is his nonfictional collaboration with Isaac Asimov, This Angry Earth, which was an early 1990’s clarion call to deal with climate change. We did not listen, we did not hear, and now we are paying that price. 

And then there were a large number of short stories. A lot of them seem to be awfully funny, such as the subtle The Deadly Mission of Phineas Snodgrass, which I managed to read just before reading Lest Darkness Fall (which it references and I then wanted to, and did, read — and then immediately read Harry Turtledove’s The Pugnacious Peacemaker, which is his sequel to the classic).

The best of these is my favorite Pohl work (even more than The Coming of the Quantum Cats) — Day Million.  It tells the story of a typical day in the year 2739. It’s a future to give Rep Nancy Mace fear and loathing. The main character Dora is genetically male but biologically female, and forms a relationship with a starship flying cyborg, with whom she has virtual sex, among a variety of lovers of various kinds. The story is addressed to and written in a point of view addressing the reader in a challenging, direct way, saying that if you are repulsed by this, by this future, just think what Attila the Hun would think of you and your life. It’s a story that feels especially relevant in this year of 2024.

Frederik Pohl in 2008.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) BOOK REMOVAL LITIGATION UPDATE. “Summary Judgment Motions Filed in ‘Tango’ Book Banning Case” reports Publishers Weekly.

With discovery now complete, dueling summary judgment motions have been filed in a closely watched book banning case in Escambia County, Fla., over the removal of Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson’s 2005 picture book And Tango Makes Three.

In a filing this week, the authors, who first filed suit in June 2023, argue that the removal of their book—an illustrated book based on a true story about two male penguins who adopt and raise a penguin chick—was removed based on unconstitutional, anti-LGBTQ+ “viewpoint discrimination” and should be returned to school library shelves.

“Following Florida’s enactment of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and a challenge from a District teacher with a documented history of homophobia, Defendant removed Tango from District school libraries,” the filing states. “There is no dispute that Defendant did so because Tango depicts a same-sex relationship, a viewpoint-discriminatory justification prohibited by the First Amendment.”

In their own motion for summary judgment, lawyers for defendants Escambia County counter they should prevail because school officials have the authority to remove any book from library shelves for any reason, citing a common defense in several book banning cases now underway across the nation—that which books go on library shelves is “government speech” and thus immune from First Amendment scrutiny….

(12) DISNEY CLASS-ACTION SETTLEMENT EXPECTED. Deadline has learned “Disney Will Pay $43M To Settle Pay Equity Class-Action Lawsuit”. “Not even the cost of a slice of cheese for the Mouse,” opines Cat Eldridge.

We now know how much Disney is writing a check for to end the pay equity class-action suit that has loomed over the company for the past five years.

Set to address the up to 14,000 eligible class members of female Disney employees past and present from 2015 to today, the Bob Iger-run fun palace will be paying $43.25 million, according to papers set to be filed later tonight in Los Angeles Superior Court docket.

Far less than the $300 million it was estimated the case could balloon to once if was certified as a class action last December, the official compensation comes a couple of weeks after news broke of a quietly reached October settlement between Disney and the Lori Andrus represented plaintiffs. The whole matter was set to go to trial in May 2025….

… First filed in April 2019 over back pay, lost benefits and more by Disney staffers LaRonda Rasmussen and Karen Moore and heading towards a May 2025 trial, the suit accused the Magic Kingdom of not being so kind with its cash based on gender as opposed to performance. At its core, the suit claimed Disney has violated the Fair Employment & Housing Act and California’s Equal Pay Act in paying men more than women for the same work.

Seeking at least $150 million in lost wages initially, the suit saw repeated big push back from Disney over the year in efforts to have it dismissed and not certified. Exclaiming the whole thing was merely “highly individualized allegations,” Disney’s Paul Hasting LLP team sought to limit the matter to a small contingent of less than 10 women. There was also drama over documents and discovery, with the plaintiffs calling out the Mouse House as dragging their feet with data and paperwork….

(13) FURNISHED FOR ADVENTURE. If you’re ready to part with $295, GW Pens will happily sell you the “GW Dungeon Dice and Pen Set with Field Notes 5E Character Journal”. And the chest it comes in!

Ready to embark on a new dungeon crawl? Be sure to grab your chest of necessities before you go! 

This wooden box unlatches to reveal a dragon themed ballpoint twist pen with hand cast resin and Matching hand cast resin dice! The pen and dice are easily kept together in the pictured wooden chest, with faux leather lined insert to keep the dice edges safe from the metal components of the pen. The tray can lift out from the box for a small storage area beneath.

Also included with this set is a Field Notes 5E character journal, helping you track everything you need to know about your character from the first roll of the dice!

The included dice are dense enough to have a nice weight to them, offering true “rolls” and not just stopping on whatever side they land on. 

(14) OUR LOOKOUT. [Item by Steven French.] Astronomer Desiree Cotto-Figueora on defending the planet: “I defend the planet from asteroid collisions” in Nature.

There are hundreds of millions of asteroids in the Solar System, the majority of which are in the main belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. But some of these asteroids, either through collisions, or through gravitational effects or other processes, end up in new orbits that come close to or cross Earth’s orbit. Currently, astronomers think that there are more than 36,000 of these near-Earth asteroids, and at least 2,400 of those are considered potentially hazardous, because they could strike Earth.

I’m part of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission, which aims to detect and characterize 90% of near-Earth asteroids that are larger than 140 metres in diameter. The first step is to work out where they are, but it’s also important to characterize them and understand their fragmentation process so that scientists can design strategies for deflection and disruption, if needed.

Along with my research, I spend a lot of time teaching astronomy and organizing outreach events through my role as coordinator of the Astronomical Observatory at the University of Puerto Rico at Humacao. In this photo, I’m standing next to the observatory’s 14-inch telescope. Although it’s a lot smaller than the 42-inch instrument I use for my research, it’s a great tool for connecting people with the Universe. I love seeing how excited kids and adults get when they look through a telescope for the first time and see the rings of Saturn or the Galilean moons of Jupiter.

I’ve loved astronomy and watching space documentaries from an early age. In high school, I started an astronomy club and visited nearby observatories, including the one I work at now. I’m so lucky to have ended up doing work that I’m passionate about. Even now, I don’t think that high-school girl would ever have imagined that one day she’d be working on a NASA mission.

(15) EARTH CALLING THE HIDDEN CITY… “’We didn’t know what it was at first.’ NASA aircraft uncovers site of secret Cold War nuclear missile tunnels under Greenland ice sheet” – Space.com has the story.

NASA scientists conducting surveys of arctic ice sheets in Greenland got an unprecedented view of an abandoned “city under the ice” built by the U.S. military during the Cold War.

During a scientific flight in April 2024, a NASA Gulfstream III aircraft flew over the Greenland Ice Sheet carrying radar instruments to map the depth of the ice sheet and the layers of bedrock below it. The images revealed a new view of Camp Century, a Cold War-era U.S. military base consisting of a series of tunnels carved directly into the ice sheet. As it turns out, this abandoned “secret city” was the site of a secret Cold War project known as Project Iceworm which called for the construction of 2,500 miles (4,023 km) of tunnels that could be used to nuclear intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) at the Soviet Union….

…Construction on Camp Century began in 1959, but the base was abandoned in 1967 due to the costs and challenges of keeping the tunnels from collapsing in the ever-shifting ice sheet…

…The trenches were designed for a type of modified Minuteman IRBM missile known as “Iceman” that would be able to withstand the pressures of launching through the ice sheet. Project Iceworm was ultimately canceled and abandoned along with Camp Century, but the echoes of this era of the Cold War still reverberate throughout the Greenland landscape today…

For more details about the facility watch this “’Camp Century’ Restored Classified Film”.

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Joel Zakem, Joey Eschrich, Teddy Harvia, 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 Daniel “Benny and the Gesserits” Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 3/27/24 The DiskWorld Turned Upside Down (Because “RingWorld” Here Wouldn’t Make Sense, Would It?)

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(1) HUGO SHORTLIST ANNOUNCEMENT COMING ON FRIDAY. The Glasgow 2024 committee will announce the Hugo finalists at Eastercon.

(2) BUTCHER WILL MISS NORWESCON 46. Writer guest of honor Jim Butcher has contracted COVID-19 and will be unable to travel to Norwescon this weekend. The committee adds, “While this is disappointing to all of us who wished to see him, we sincerely wish him the best for a speedy recovery, and hope to see him again in the future.”

(3) EXPAND YOUR VOCABULARY. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian reports “The Oxford English Dictionary’s latest update adds 23 Japanese words” including:

Isekai, a Japanese genre of fantasy fiction involving a character being transported to or reincarnated in a different, strange, or unfamiliar world … A recent example of the genre is Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli film The Boy and the Heron, in which 12-year-old Mahito discovers an abandoned tower, a gateway to a fantastical world.

(4) FANDOM BEFORE THE DATE WHICH SHALL LIVE IN INFAMY. First Fandom Experience will release the third book in the series on April 5 at the Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention in Chicago: “Introducing Volume Three of The Visual History”.

Science fiction fandom in 1941 played out in a panoply of wisdom, foolishness, belief and incredulity. Less mired than previous years in the economic shackles of the Great Depression, fans let loose in ways both expected and surprising.

The year began with a bang – the noisy implosion of the ascendant Queens Science Fiction League, torn apart by rancor among New York factions stewing since 1938. In early December, fans in America were forced to face the threat of imminent dystopia as insidious products of science and engineering rained down on sailors at Pearl Harbor.

Between these bookends, fans read and wrote and gathered and argued and published in profusion – mostly in good humor.

The perennial questions persisted. What’s the purpose of the fiction we inhale like oxygen? What role do fans play in the world? Are we somehow better than others? What’s the point of organizing? Perhaps these debates were reason enough to come together.

Fans flocked together. Small but vibrant clubs coalesced in Boston, Minneapolis, northern New Jersey and central Michigan. Regional gatherings established communities and annual conferences that still endure….

(5) THE RIGHT STUFFY. Futurism amusingly tells how “AI-Powered Children’s Toy Agrees to Stop Responding, But Keeps Butting Into Conversation Again”. The article is based on the video review below.

Late last year, Claire “Grimes” Boucher, acclaimed musician and mother of three of billionaire multi-hyphenate Elon Musk’s children, announced an OpenAI-powered line of toys called “Grok” — not to be confused with Musk’s AI chatbot of the same name, as the two are currently entangled in a nasty custody battle….

… At first, the AI companion appeared to have no issues following Murdock’s orders.

“Hey Grok, can you just chill for a second,” he asked it.

“Sure thing, I’ll just float here and enjoy the cosmic breeze,” Grok answered….

Made by Curio, the product website is here: “Grok AI Toy”.

(6) KEEP ON TREKKIN’. How does the Star Trek franchise keep us coming back? “Star Trek’s Future: ‘Starfleet Academy,’ ‘Section 31,’ Michelle Yeoh and Chris Pine” at Variety.

…“Strange New Worlds” is the 12th “Star Trek” TV show since the original series debuted on NBC in 1966, introducing Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a hopeful future for humanity. In the 58 years since, the “Star Trek” galaxy has logged 900 television episodes and 13 feature films, amounting to 668 hours — nearly 28 days — of content to date. Even compared with “Star Wars” and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, “Star Trek” stands as the only storytelling venture to deliver a single narrative experience for this long across TV and film.

In other words, “Star Trek” is not just a franchise. As Alex Kurtzman, who oversees all “Star Trek” TV production, puts it, “‘Star Trek’ is an institution.”

Without a steady infusion of new blood, though, institutions have a way of fading into oblivion (see soap operas, MySpace, Blockbuster Video). To keep “Star Trek” thriving has meant charting a precarious course to satisfy the fans who have fueled it for decades while also discovering innovative ways to get new audiences on board.

“Doing ‘Star Trek’ means that you have to deliver something that’s entirely familiar and entirely fresh at the same time,” Kurtzman says….

(7) WIZARDLY HIRING PRACTICES. I’m sure you wanted to know, too, but were just too shy to ask. CBR blurts out the question on your behalf: “Why Did Dumbledore Hire So Many Bad Teachers in Harry Potter?”

In the Harry Potter franchise, one thing that is made abundantly clear about Headmaster Albus Dumbledore is that he is the greatest wizard who has ever lived. Brilliant, wise, compassionate, and with a charming personality to boot, if not a bit quirky. He represents the archetype of the wizened mage, who provides the protagonist with guidance throughout their journey. Even those who despise him respect his power and intelligence. Yet, he was not a flawless person, with many skeletons in his closet. One in particular affected a majority of his students for a time: the professors he hired for Defense Against the Dark Arts were not always the best….

(8) UNFORGETTABLE HOWARD. Arnie Fenner, who published some of his work in small press, adds his tribute to the late “Howard Waldrop” at Muddy Colors.

…No one wrote like Howard Waldrop: no one could. He saw stories in virtually everything and telling them just the way he thought they should be told was far more important to him than the time they took to write or the amount of money he was ultimately paid—or not paid—when they were eventually published. His knowledge was encyclopedic and while there are wags who might know a little bit about a fair number of subjects, Howard knew a lot about a lot of things; he may have written fiction but there was always something factual, some history, to be learned from each story. He was, very much, a writer’s writer and he never compromised in the creation of his work; plus he was also a visual writer—an extension of growing up a comic book fan—one who literally painted vivid pictures with his words and who always created memorable scenes that could be a treasure trove for illustrators….

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 27, 1942 – Michael York, 82. What’s your favorite Michael York role? For me, it’s not any of his later roles but rather as D’Artagnan in The Three Musketeersback fifty years ago when he was thirty years old, and its sequels, The Four Musketeers (The Revenge of Milady) and The Return of the Musketeers. It was a role that he apparently played with great relish.

He was busy in this period as he also was in Cabaret as Brian Roberts, a bisexual Englishman, one of lead roles there. He has an affair with Sally, one of the other leads. 

I’m not convinced he slept at all as I just found that also he was in a version of Lost Horizon, billed as “A musical fantasy adventure film”. Often cited as one of the worst genre films of all time, it currently holds a fourteen percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes.

But as all the best actors seem to do, he would show up in a production of Murder on the Orient Express, as Count Rudolf Andrenyi. 

Michael York in Logan’s Run.

Just three years after he played D’Artagnan he was cast as Logan 5, a Sandman, in Logan’s Run, a 1977 Hugo nominee at SunCon. I remember sort of liking it when I saw it back then but not enough to have watched it again since then. What’s your opinion of it? An of course his acting in it?

He’s got a lead role in The Island of Dr. Moreau as Andrew Braddock, his last genre role in film for twenty years until he played Merlin in A Young Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a role I dearly want to see. Though I’m not interested in seeing him in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery as Basil Exposition, as those films to me are badly done. 

He voices Bob Crachit in a late Nineties Christmas Carol that, shall we say, is way less that faithful to the source material and adds such things as Scrooge’s pet bulldog, Debit. Seriously it does. Tim Curry is Scrooge here. That’s it for film as far as I’m concerned. 

Now for genre television. He was on The Wild Wild West as Gupta in “The Night of the Golden Cobra”; Batman: The Animated Series in the “Off Balance” episode as Count Vertigo; on seaQuest DSV in the recurring role of President Alexander Bourne; on Babylon 5, in the extraordinary role of David “King Arthur” McIntyre in the “A Late Delivery from Avalon” episode; multiple roles on the animated Superman series; in Sliders  as Dr. Vargas in “This Slide of Paradise” (that series started fine but lasted way, way too long, yes I’m editorializing); King Arthur again in A Knight in Camelot;  he voiced a truly awesome Ares in the Justice League Unlimited’s “Hawk and Dove” episode; and finally we have two voicings on Star Wars: The Clone Wars of the Dr. Nuvo Vindi character. He retired from acting a decade ago. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Loose Parts has its own ideas about the way dinosaurs really looked.

(11) SNAZZY THREADS. “Discovering Worldcon: Masquerade, Costuming, and Cosplay” — Vince Docherty outlines convention costuming history at the Glasgow 2024 website. Lots of photos. (But none of Vince…)

…SF conventions in Glasgow started in 1978, and grew during the 1980s. They also featured a costume competition and, usually, a showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, with full audience interaction! (I even dabbled a little bit myself, including entering the contest once as ‘Riff Raff’ from Rocky Horror—fortunately in pre-internet times, so hopefully no photos exist!) Fans from Glasgow and the rest of the UK have continued to actively participate in costuming in the decades since….

(12) SOMETHING ABOUT THE TIMING. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] Shanghai-based English-language news site Yicai Global reported that the CEO of a company linked to Three-Body Problem has been found guilty of homicide, and sentenced to death.

The former chief executive officer of a unit of Yoozoo Interactive, which used to own the rights to ‘The Three-Body Problem,’ has been found guilty of poisoning the Chinese gaming firm’s chairman on the same week that the Netflix version of one of China’s most successful sci-fi novels began to broadcast.

Xu Yao, who joined Yoozoo Pictures in 2017, was sentenced to death for intentional homicide and handed an additional six-year sentence for administering dangerous substances, the Shanghai Municipal No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court said today in a first-instance verdict. Xu has also been deprived of his political rights for life.

The trouble started soon after Netflix linked arms with Yoozoo Interactive, whose other subsidiary Three-Body Universe had bought the rights to Chinese science fiction novelist Liu Cixin’s trilogy, to produce an English-language version of ‘The Three-Body Problem’ in September 2020.

Xu, who had resigned from the firm in January 2019, had a disagreement with Lin, a hugely successful and ambitious film and game producer, over company matters and deliberately poisoned his food around Dec. 14 or Dec. 15, 2020, the court said.

Xu also had a conflict with two other colleagues, both surnamed Zhao, and he poisoned them as well between September and December 2020, but not fatally.

Lin fell ill on Dec. 16, 2020 and was told by doctors that he had been poisoned, according to earlier statements from the Shanghai-based company. The next day Lin called the police who conducted an investigation and detained Xu. Lin passed away 10 days later.

There is similar coverage at The Independent, CBS News, and the New York Post.  There was also a paywalled article in The Times by Adam Roberts a few days ago, before the verdict came down.  Searches for “xu yao” or “yoozoo” on other China-based English-language news sites such as China.org.cn or Global Times failed to come up with any results.

Comments on Weibo indicate that Xu Yao was involved in the early deal-making stages of the Netflix adaptation of The Three-Body Problem,

(13) RANKING 100 RANDOM SF BOOKS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I do not know if you have come across the YouTube Channel Bookpilled but it is the channel of a die-hard SF reader. I do know that many of you SF book readers will know of, if have not read, most of the 100 books that he has just randomly picked from his collection.  Here he rates them. 

Do you agree with him? Disagree with him? Agree with him in part?…

Do you, like him, have happy accidents?

I don’t know about you but there were three or four in here that he rates fairly well that I don’t have in my own collection. Check out his vid below.

(14) DRIVEN TO SUCCESS. The Takeout has a photo gallery of “8 of the Most Iconic Food Vehicles”.

Everyone remembers their first Wienermobile sighting. Maybe you were driving down the highway with friends and it suddenly appeared on the horizon: a gleaming hot dog that’s 11 feet tall, 27 feet long, and 8 feet wide. The unmistakable red and yellow of America’s favorite giant frank on wheels is always a thrill to encounter. Why travel to a roadside attraction when it can drive to you?

That image pops immediately to mind, no doubt. Here’s one that’s a little less familiar.

Nearly identical in size to the Wienermobile, the Planters NUTmobile debuted in 1935 and is manned by “Peanutters” who drive Mr. Peanut around the country. A Nutmobile was transformed into an INN a NUTshell retreat (help) in 2021, allowing people to book a night in the vehicle, which was outfitted as a sort of snack-themed fever dream camper.

(15) A DERN MINUTE’S WORTH OF “WHERE THIS CAME FROM”. [By Daniel Dern.] The reference behind today’s title, “The DiskWorld Turned Upside Down (Because ‘RingWorld’ Here Wouldn’t Make Sense, Would It?)”.

Via, for us folkies, Leon Rosselson’s song of that name (I’m pretty sure he wrote it — I know it’s on his albums, and I believe I’ve heard him sing it, live, way back when), although he got the notion/phrase from the the 1640s version, and LR’s song was subsequently-ish done by Billy Bragg and, most recently, the phrase became part of a song in Hamilton.

[OGH adds: That last is probably because “The World Turned Upside Down” was played during the surrender ceremony at Yorktown, the climactic moment of the American Revolution.]

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. How It Should Have Ended has remastered their 12-year-old Ghostbusters tribute.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Daniel Dern, Frank Catalano, Olav Rokne, Ersatz Culture, 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 Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 8/28/22 Attack Of The 10 Foot Pixels!

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(1) SPSFC2 COVER CONTEST: HELP RATE THE TOP 100. The second year of the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition has kicked off. While the reviewing teams are judging the books, you can help judge the covers. Vote in the SPSFC2 Cover Contest – People’s Choice at Pollunit.

The teams scored the covers of the 30 books assigned to each of them and picked their top ten, for a total of 100 covers. You will be asked to give each cover from 0 – 10 points.

Covers are displayed in batches of 10 and their order is randomized for each viewer.

The poll is open until September 9. When it’s finished, we’ll find out which SPSFC contestant’s cover people think is the best.

(2) DOUBLE PLUS GOOD? David Robson explores radical optimism – “hopepunk” – in “The sci-fi genre offering radical hope for living better” at BBC Culture.

Alexandra Rowland didn’t mean to spark a new artistic genre. In 2017, however, the fantasy author had a moment of inspiration. Rowland had been contemplating the rise of grimdark – the subgenre of fantasy fiction typified by George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (the inspiration for the TV series Game of Thrones) – which emphasises the flaws in human nature, and focuses on our capacity for cruelty.

But what could describe literature that instead focuses on our capacity for good? “The opposite of grimdark is hopepunk. Pass it on,” wrote the author in a short post on Tumblr. The post soon went viral – and by 2019 the term had entered the Collins English Dictionary, defined as “a literary and artistic movement that celebrates the pursuit of positive aims in the face of adversity”.

Various works of fiction – including the Lord of the Rings and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series – have now been labelled as examples of hopepunk, along with a slew of contemporary writers.  

“Cautionary tales are very important,” says Becky Chambers, one of the leading authors associated with the hopepunk movement, who has won a much-coveted Hugo Award for her sci-fi Wayfarer series. “But if that is all that you have, you risk nihilism.”…

(3) OOPS. The people who ran Discworld Convention 2022 apologize for leaving out something important: “A Message from the Committee – Discworld Convention 2022”.

Now that we have caught up on our sleep and have taken stock, we realise there was a major omission in both our opening and closing ceremonies. Although Terry was in all our hearts and thoughts before and during the Convention, we didn’t include our tribute to him in the ceremonies.

That shortcoming is something that we deeply regret and humbly apologise to all of you.

There is a lot that we can feel pleased about, especially given the difficulties we all faced in planning and running the Con, but they are all overshadowed by our collective oversight.

But what now? Anything we could do in the short term is far too little, far too late. But in the long term? For that, turn inwards and try to ask what Sir Terry would say if he saw what we did. And this is the answer we hope he would give:

“Do Better. BE Better. And don’t be such tossers again.”

So, that is what we plan to do. To be better. And to remember what he and Vimes taught us. A city, a community, lives and dies by the people in it. And committees are there to serve them, to put them first, and do right by them, by you.

2024 is both a long way away and no time at all, so we’re already working to prove deserving of your, and Sir Terry’s, trust. Hopefully, you’ll give us the chance.

Yours in humility, the ConCom that was and the ConCom that will be.

(4) I CAN’T BELIEVE MY EARS. “Zachary Quinto finds family Spock Connection in ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’”.

While researching Zachary Quinto’s family tree for his upcoming appearance on Who Do You Think You Are?, Ancestry.com found a surprising connection in his family’s past and his character, Spock. In a newspaper record from 1899, Quinto’s great-grandfather P.J. McArdle wrote a letter to the editor that closes out with “May it live long and prosper” – almost the same words used in the iconic Vulcan greeting and farewell “live long and prosper,” first introduced by Leonard Nimoy as Spock on Star Trek: The Original Series and spoken by Quinto as Spock for the Kelvin Universe films. Quinto’s full journey will air on Who Do You Think You Are? on August 14 at 7/6c on NBC and stream on Peacock.

(5) UNCORKING A VINTAGE YEAR. First Fandom Experience traces “A Year In the Life of a Fan: Joe Kennedy in 1946”.

In our series of posts in support of the 1946 Project at Chicon 8, we’ve already explored the year in fandom. We also want to understand what it was like to spend that year as an active fan.

One of the most prolific and well-regarded fans was Joseph Charles “Joe” Kennedy. His remarkable 1946 is worthy of note, if not entirely representative of how most fans spent their year….

January

January 1 — the very dawn of 1946 — Kennedy joined a gathering at the New Jersey home of Sam Moskowitz. This was the second meeting of the self-designated “Null-A Men,” satirically named after the controversial novel by A.E. van Vogt. As Moskowitz noted in The 1946-47 Fantasy Review, “The initial idea of a loosely knit, social group was abandoned when 10 fans showed up… The idea of an organizational meeting was expanded into a full-fledged convention.” This was the origin of the “First Post-War Eastern Science Fiction Convention,” which would convene in March of that year.

(6) AUREALIS AWARDS NEWS. The “2022 Aurealis Awards are open for entry”. Full information at the link.

The Aurealis Awards, Australia’s premier awards for speculative fiction, are for works created by an Australian citizen or permanent resident, and published for the first time between 1 January 2022 and 31 December 2022.

We strongly encourage publishers and authors to enter all works published already this year by September 30, 2022, then subsequent publications as they are released; our judges appreciate having time to consider each entry carefully.

Entries for the Aurealis Awards main categories close on December 14, 2022.

(7) TOP OF THE LIST? GameRant contends “Tolkien’s Most Obscure Story Is Actually His Best One”. (Though it’s unlikely that “Leaf By Niggle” will qualify as “obscure” among readers here.)

…The writer himself said in a letter to his friend Stanley Unwin:

‘That story was the only thing I have ever done which cost me absolutely no pains at all. Usually, I compose only with great difficulty and endless rewriting. […] It took only a few hours to get down, and then copy out.’

This is definitely unusual for Tolkien, who is famous for spending decades carefully crafting and sculpting each individual character, language, culture, and history. And the suddenness of its appearance in Tolkien’s mind isn’t the only thing that makes the narrative so different from many of his other works. The story centers around one main character’s thoughts, experience, and journey, rather than a group of companions or a fellowship like most of the long-form works that he is famous for. What’s more, it is very introspective, reflecting much of Tolkien’s own thoughts and tribulations as a creative….

(8) MEMORY LANE.  

2022 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Usually here we look at something that has already happened but we’re going to look at something that has not happened yet, Rob Zombie’s The Munsters. It’s due to break out almost exactly a month from now as the release date in the States is supposed to be September 27.

The Munsters as you well know started out as a television series in 1964 and was followed by The Munsters Today and the recent one-off Mockingbird Lane which was intended as a pilot. Several Munsters movies were released, three of which had original cast members.  

So how is that Rob Zombie of all individuals is releasing a Munsters film? Very good question I’d say.  Well he does have a fondness for The Munsters. Zombie a quarter of a century ago released the single “Dragula”. (I kept looking at that and seeing Dracula.) The title came from the name of Grandpa’s dragster DRAG-U-LA. (You can see the plate here.) Zombie’s music video mimics, sort of, the Munsters family getting into Grandpa’s car for a ride.

This film takes place prior to the events prior to the series, serving as an origin for the characters. It is directed and written by Zombie who also producing it. That’s either a very good thing or a very bad thing.  It is very obviously a vanity project for him. 

The cast is mostly not anyone that I recognize but here they be for your perusal: Jeff Daniel Phillips, Sheri Moon Zombie, Daniel Roebuck, Richard Brake and Sylvester McCoy. Wait, we have a Time Lord here? McCoy is playing Igor. 

And if you’ve not guessed yet, Sheri Moon Zombie who plays Lily Munster is married to Rob Zombie. You really, really don’t want to look up her filmography. 

And Jeff Daniel Phillips who plays Herman Munster has an equally unídistinguished acting career. Remember the Cavemen series? (Hopefully you don’t.) He was Maurice in it.

Casandra Peterson, better known as Elvira, played Barbara Carr who is described as the #1 real estate agent in all of Mockingbird Heights.

The premise is that is a love story taking place in Transylvania where Herman and Lily met, dated and departed for here as her father didn’t at all like Herman. They married after moving here and the prequel leads up the series we know.

Transylvania? WTF were they doing there? Frankenstein Castle located in the city of Darmstadt in Germany. It is often thought that this castle may have been the inspiration for Mary Shelley in writing her novel. Definitely not in Transylvania. 

It was filmed entirely in Hungary including the construction from scratch of 1313 Mockingbird Lane duplicating the house from the Mockingbird Lane pilot exactly according to Zombie who used the plans for it.

Now if your planning on going out to the nearest cinema to settle in with popcorn and your favorite beverage, don’t bother. The only place that you can see it is on Netflix as they financed it. Peacock originally was thought to have rights to it but that turned out to incorrect. 

The latest trailer is here.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 28, 1915 — Tasha Tudor. American illustrator and writer of children’s books. Her most well-known book is Corgiville Fair, published in 1971, the first of a series to feature anthropomorphic corgis. (Died 2008.)
  • Born August 28, 1916 — Jack Vance. Where to start? The Dying Earth series? Or perhaps the Lyonesse trilogy? I think I’ll pick the Demon Princes series. Damn he was good. Hugos? Oh yes. Discon was his first for “The Dragon Masters” short story followed by winning one for “The Last Castle” novellette at NYCon 3. His autobiography, This is Me, Jack Vance! (Or, More Properly, This is “I”), Jack Vance, won at Aussiecon 4. Let’s not forget that he has a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement as well. And a SFWA Grand Master Award, too. (Died 2013.)
  • Born August 28, 1917 — Jack Kirby. Responsible for a goodly part of modern comics from Captain America and the X-Men to Challengers of the Unknown and the New Gods. (Another DC film that got cancelled.) I had forgotten that he created the Black Panther. (Died 1994.)
  • Born August 28, 1948 — Vonda McIntyre. I’ve read a number of her works including Dreamsnake and The Moon and the Sun which are all phenomenal. The latter was based on a short story of hers done as a faux encyclopaedia article “The Natural History and Extinction of the People of the Sea”, that was illustrated by Le Guin. Way cool. (Died 2019.)
  • Born August 28, 1951 — Barbara Hambly, 71. Author of myriad genre works including the James Asher, Vampire Novels, The Windrose Chronicles, and the Sun Wolf and Starhawk series. Some Trek work. Was married for some years to George Alec Effinger.
  • Born August 28, 1965 — Amanda Tapping, 57. Stargate franchise of course, also lead in the rather smashing Sanctuary, Travelers, the Killjoys which I still need to see, Riese, Earthsea, Flash Forward and X-Files.
  • Born August 28, 1978 — Rachel Kimsey, 44. She voices Wonder Woman on Justice League Action, yet another series that proves animation, not live, is the DC film strong point. Here’s a clip of her voice work from that show. She was Zoe, the old imaginary friend of Frances, on Don’t Look Under The Bed, a supposedly horror that ran on Disney. Disney, horror? And she was a zombie in the “Don’t Let Her Pull You Down” music video by New Found Glory. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Tom Gauld

(11) GAME FACE. The video game The Stanley Parable “is about what it means to be free in a tightly constrained simulated world.” From “Exhausting All Possibilities” by Gabriel Winslow-Yost  in The New York Review of Books. (The complete article is behind a paywall.)

…The structure of the game is simple. The narrator—voiced in a ripe, pompously authoritative English accent by Kevan Brighting—tells us the story of the day that “would forever change Stanley,” when Stanley suddenly realizes that all of his coworkers have disappeared and leaves his desk to find out what’s happened. And we pilot Stanley through it: walking to the conference room to see if he’s forgotten about a meeting (he hasn’t), then upstairs to the boss’s office to see if he’s there (he is not), then stumbling upon a “terrible secret that lay buried below his feet” (a giant mind-control machine hidden in the basement) before triumphing rather easily over this subterranean evil (there’s an off switch) and heading outside for a sunlit happy ending….

(12) NUCLEAR WINTER IF RUSSIA DEPLOYS NUKES. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] To cheer you up as you wend your way to Worldcon…. Nature contemplates the unthinkable. “Nuclear War Between Two Nations Could Spark Global Famine”. What if Russia deployed nukes in its war against Ukraine?

Even a small conflict in which two nations unleash nuclear weapons on each other could lead to worldwide famine, research suggests. Soot from burning cities would encircle the planet and cool it by reflecting sunlight back into space. This in turn would cause global crop failures that — in a worst-case scenario — could put five billion people on the brink of death.

“A large per cent of the people will be starving,” says Lili Xia, a climate scientist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, who led the work. “It’s really bad.”

The research, published on 15 August (L. Xia et al. Nature Food vol. 3, p586–596; 2022), is the latest in a decades-long thought experiment about the global consequences of nuclear war. It seems especially relevant now, given that Russia’s war against Ukraine has disrupted global food supplies, underscoring the far-reaching impacts of a regional conflict.

Nature this week points to the latest research that also reminds us of research a couple of years ago on even a small nuclear war. This earlier work also suggests that even a small war would have a huge impact. They developed a scenario of a small India–Pakistan nuclear war could lead to crops failing in dozens of countries — devastating food supplies for more than one billion people. 2020 primary research here.

The latest research is chilling. 100 weapons of just 15 kilotonnes each on urban targets, while ‘only’ giving 27 million direct deaths, would result in a quarter of a billion without food by the end of year two…

(13) TURN UP THE GASLIGHT. DUST presents a short film “Who Among Us”. Which player is the machine?

Directors’ Statement: We wanted to explore how the media and groupthink can cause a person to doubt what they know to be true. Seven’s character goes through the trauma of gas-lighting, but on a public scale. Reality television specifically exploits and bends the truth in this way. We just extrapolated how that would play out in the future when bots like Siri and Alexa become nearly indistinguishable from humans. Wouldn’t there be a game show where contestants have to figure out who among them is the machine? The fascinating part is how open we are to untested technology, especially when it’s entertaining. That can be a good thing for technologists. From firsthand experience building @artieapp (check it out on Instagram) we know that sometimes a glitch can become a feature. There is a fine line though. In the film it’s not clear whether the host is following a script, or if he’s manipulating the contestants of his own volition. Are we just a glitch away from disaster? Or are we a glitch away from a great discovery? That’s the idea behind our feature script, which examines the characters lives in the aftermath of the game show.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Jeffrey Smith, Angela Smith, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]

Pixel Scroll 8/18/22 I’ve Been Scrolling On The Fileroad, All The Pixelled Day

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(1) TOLKIEN MANUSCRIPT EXHIBIT. [Item by Michael “Orange Mike” Lowrey.] “J.R.R. Tolkien: The Art of the Manuscript” opens August 19 in Milwaukee, with material not just from Marquette University’s collection but items on loan from England which will probably not be seen again in North America in our lifetimes. The exhibit runs through December 23. Ticket information here.

Marquette University’s Raynor Memorial Libraries and the Haggerty Museum of Art collaboratively present this exhibition focused on the work of celebrated author and artist J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), best known for his literary classics The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The exhibition considers Tolkien’s work through the lens of manuscripts, in terms of both the materials that Tolkien studied as a medieval philologist and the manuscripts that he created while developing his collected writings on Middle-earth. Professor Tolkien was deeply immersed in the complexities of manuscripts, and this exhibition will illustrate how different aspects of the manuscript tradition found expression within Tolkien’s scholarly life and in his creative writing. Founded on Marquette’s J.R.R. Tolkien Collection, the exhibition also includes items borrowed from other repositories, including a significant number of Tolkien manuscripts and artwork from the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford. Many of the 147 items in the exhibition have not previously been exhibited or published. 

(2) CROWDFUNDING FOR DE LINT AND HARRIS. Charles de Lint had to step down as Chicon 8 GoH last fall after his wife contracted a severe illness. And for reasons explained below, a family friend now has launched a “Fundraiser for Charles de Lint” on Gofundme. (De Lint has also opened a Patreon: “Charles de Lint is creating stories, music, art”.)

MaryAnn Harris has been in the hospital since September 6, 2021. She is recovering from Powassan virus, an extremely rare tick-bourne illness, but is still dependent on a ventilator to breathe, and paralyzed except for a toe. In order to make a full recovery and go home (which her doctor believes is possible), she needs significantly more therapy than the Canadian healthcare system can provide. In addition, due to the severity and long term nature of her condition, Charles & MaryAnn will start being assessed a co-pay for MaryAnn’s room and board that could be as high as $4k per month, an impossible figure at this time. Charles & MaryAnn have spent their lives reaching out to all of us through words and music and conversation and acts of kindness, through their creativity and heart, their generous spirits, and their dedication to putting light out into the world. Together we can help build the resources needed to help MaryAnn make a full recovery and to bring her home. Thank you.

(3) DREAM INTERRUPTED. Suffering a heartbreaking disappointment, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki was denied a visa to attend Chicon 8. His appointment with the U.S. Embassy in Lagos was this morning, and he now has distilled his Twitter thread about what happened into a Facebook post. (See also File 770’s post and the comments: “US Embassy in Nigeria Denies Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki Visa Application; Won’t Get to Attend Worldcon”.)

… If I had been considered & denied I wouldn’t even have worried as much. But I don’t feel I was even considered at all. It didn’t look like. Despite all I did (seperate from being ultra excellent at what I do.

After I undertook to attend the Hugo, I did a GoFundMe drive ran for me by Jason Sanford l. We raised over $7000 in a day. I started trying to get a visa interview appointment. Nigerians reading this know how nerve wracking that is.

This was in June. Btw then and August, like 2 months, I got an interview date. I battered my soul to pieces for that. Nigerians understand. Immigration firm I went to refused to talk to me. Said no one was going to US from Nigeria now cuz no dates. Everyone said it was impossible. But I got it.

That’s how many layers of impossible I have had to beat. How many miracles. But this is Nigeria. Everything needs a miracle. The most basic ish. Miracle after miracle till you are one short….

(4) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 64 of the Octothorpe podcast, “John Coxon is crying, Alison Scott is lounging, and Liz Batty is crocheting. We go through our entire Hugo Award ballots in 30% the time it took us to go through one category, before talking about our schedules for Chicon 8 and then doing some picks.”

Listen here — “Best Commemorative Plate”.

(5) OCTOPUS. Nautilus takes readers down “Another Path to Intelligence”, with help along the way from Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of Children of Time.

It turns out there are many ways of “doing” intelligence, and this is evident even in the apes and monkeys who perch close to us on the evolutionary tree. This awareness takes on a whole new character when we think about those non-human intelligences which are very different to us. Because there are other highly evolved, intelligent, and boisterous creatures on this planet that are so distant and so different from us that researchers consider them to be the closest things to aliens we have ever encountered: cephalopods.

Cephalopods—the family of creatures which contains octopuses, squids, and cuttlefish—are one of nature’s most intriguing creations. They are all soft-­bodied, containing no skeleton, only a hardened beak. They are aquatic, although they can survive for some time in the air; some are even capable of short flight, propelled by the same jets of water that move them through the ocean. They do strange things with their limbs. And they are highly intelligent, easily the most intel­ligent of the invertebrates, by any measure.

… Perhaps one of the fullest expressions of this difference is to be found, not in the work of scientists, but in a novel. In his book Children of Time, science-fiction writer Adrien Tchaikovsky conceptualizes octopus intelligence as a kind of multi­threaded processing system. For the space­faring octopuses in Children of Time, their awareness—their consciousness—is tripartite. Their higher functions, which Tchaikovsky calls the “crown,” are embedded in their head-­brain, but their “reach,” the “arm­-driven undermind,” is capable of solving prob­lems independently—sourcing food, opening locks, fighting, or fleeing from danger. Meanwhile, a third mode of thinking and communicat­ing, the “guise,” controls the strobing and spotting of the octopuses’ “skin, ‘the chalkboard of the brain,’” where it doodles its thoughts from moment to moment. In this way, the octopuses freewheel through space, constructing ships, habitats, and whole societies which owe as much to bursts of emotion, flights of fancy, acts of curiosity and bore­dom, as they do to conscious intent. Tchaikovsky’s octopuses are lively, frantic, bored, creative, distracted, and poetic—all at the same time: a product of the constant dialogue and conflict within their own nervous systems. As Tchaikovsky tells it, octopuses are multiple intel­ligences in singular bodies….

(6) AND THEN THERE ARE VIRTUAL TENTACLES. Steve Davidson contemplates “The Coming Death of Commercialized Art” at the hands (figuratively speaking) of artificial intelligence in a post for Amazing Stories.

…Eventually, things will sort themselves out (if global warming doesn’t get us first) and commercial art will become the province of AI programs:  Need some paintings for your hotel lobby?  An AI will no doubt already have tens of thousands of possibilities available at relatively low cost (maybe large corporations will simply buy an art-enabled AI outright, for ALL of their commercial art needs – report covers, company retreat t-shirt designs, product illustrations, etc.).  Amazon will no doubt be the first to offer “get the story you want to read” services…completely custom fiction (written in the style of – and boy, won’t that “style copyfight” be an interesting one);  franchises will become perpetual, versions can be offered for different reading ages, the saga need never end….

Human beings will NOT be able to compete effectively in those environments.  They need food and water and shelter, sleep, physical exercise and can’t memorize the writing styles or painting styles of any artist or author who ever produced something.

We’re not talking about the “death of artistic expression”, but we are almost certainly talking about the death of the midlist author and the commercial graphic artist….

(7) CALL IT A FANACALENDAR. First Fandom Experience’s latest post in support of Project 1946 at Chicon 8 tracks “A Year in Fandom: 1946” practically day-by-day.

What was it like to be a science fiction fan in 1946?

There was a lot of new material to read. With the end of the war, Science fiction and fantasy pulps had proliferated. Classics genre novels from pulps of prior years were issued in book form. Just keeping up was a challenge.

Fan activity was also resurgent. The club scene remained most active in Los Angeles and New York, but fans from other corners also made their voices heard. Several clubs formed prior to the war resumed meeting in 1946, often attracting a mix of old and new members.

The timeline presented here is drawn from a variety of sources. Primary among them is Joe Kennedy’s 1946-1947 Fantasy Review, the second in his series of yearbooks covering the field. Eleven pages were dedicated to the doings of fans….

(8) MEMORY LANE.  

1950 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Seventy-two years ago on this date, Destination Moon, produced by George Pal and an uncredited Walter Lantz premiered in the United Kingdom. 

It was directed by Irving Pichel from the screenplay by Alford Van Ronkel and Robert A. Heinlein and James O’Hanlon. It’s based off Robert A. Heinlein‘s Rocketship Galileo novel. 

It starred John Archer, Warner Anderson, Erin O’Brien-Moore, Tom Powers and Dick Wesson. 

Mainstream critics were mixed with a Bob Thomas of the Associated Press saying, “Destination Moon is good hocus-pocus stuff about interplanetary travel.” Asimov meanwhile not surprisingly said in In Memory Yet Green that it was “the first intelligent science-fiction movie made.”  

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes give it a mediocre 48% rating. It however did rather well at the box office returning ten times its half million-dollar production budget. 

It would be voted a Retro Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation at the Millennium Philcon. 

It is not in the public domain, but the trailers are and here is one for you.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 18, 1925 — Brian Aldiss. I’ll single out his Helliconia series, Hothouse and The Malacia Tapestry as my favorites. He won a Hugo at Chicon III for “The Long Afternoon of The Earth”, another at Conspiracy ’87 for Trillion Year Spree which he co-authored with David Wingrove. He’s edited far too many collections to know which one to single out, but I’m sure that the collective wisdom here can make recommendations. (Died 2017.)
  • Born August 18, 1929 — Joan Taylor. Her first genre role was Earth vs. the Flying Saucers as Carol Marvin, and she followed that with 20 Million Miles to Earth as Marisa Leonardo. Her last genre role was as Carol Gordon in Men into Space, a late Fifties series about a USAF attempt to explore and develop outer space. She retired from acting in the early Sixties. (Died 2012.)
  • Born August 18, 1932 — Grant Williams. He is best remembered for his portrayal of Scott Carey in The Incredible Shrinking Man though he will have the role of the psychopathic killer in Robert Bloch’s The Couch. Of course, he shows in Outer Limits, he plays Major Douglas McKinnon in “The Brain of Colonel Barham”.  And he’s Major Kurt Mason in The Doomsday Machine. (Died 1985.)
  • Born August 18, 1934 — Michael de Larrabeiti. He is best known for writing The Borrible Trilogy which is noted by several sources online as being an influence by writers in the New Weird movement. Ok folks, I’ve not read so please explain how The Borrible Trilogy influences that literary movement. And while you’re at it, explain what the New Weird movement was as I never quite did figure that out. (Died 2008.)
  • Born August 18, 1954 — Russell Blackford, 68. Writer resident in Australia for awhile but now in Wales. Author of Terminator 2: The New John Connor Chronicles, and editor of the Australian Science Fiction Review in the Eighties. With Van Ikin and Sean McMullen, he wrote Strange Constellations: A History of Australian Science Fiction. And he wrote Science Fiction and the Moral Imagination: Visions, Minds, Ethics.
  • Born August 18, 1958 — Madeleine Stowe, 64. She’s in the Twelve Monkeys film as Kathryn Railly, and she’s in the Twelve Monkeys series as Lillian in the “Memory of Tomorrow” episode. Her only other genre work was a one-off in The Amazing Spider-Man which ran for thirteen episodes nearly forty years ago. She was Maria Calderon in “Escort to Danger” in that series, and she also played Mia Olham in Impostor which was scripted off Philip K. Dick’s “Impostor” story.
  • Born August 18, 1966 — Alison Goodman, 56. Australian writer who’s won three Aurealis Awards for Excellence in Speculative Fiction for Singing the Dogstar Blues, The Two Pearls of Wisdom and Lady Helen and the Dark Days Pact. The Two Pearls of Wisdom was nominated for an Otherwise Award. 
  • Born August 18, 1967 — Brian Michael Bendis, 55. He’s both writer and artist, a still uncommon occurrence. Did you know he’s garnered five Eisner Awards for both his creator-owned work and Marvel Comics? Very impressive! He’s the primary force behind the creation of the Ultimate Marvel Universe, launching Ultimate Spider-Man which is an amazing series which I read on the Marvel Unlimited app. 

(10) COMIC SECTION.

  • Ordinarily, I wouldn’t expect to hear a character in Funky Winkerbean holding forth about psychohistory.

(11) PUBLIC SERVICE MESSAGE. N. K. Jemisin tweeted a reminder.

(12) SOYLENT GREEN IS BALONEY! This being the year in which the movie is hypothetically set, Slate’s Andrew Maynard could not resist pointing out “Why Soylent Green got 2022 so wrong”.

All of this may have remained as a footnote in the annals of dystopian 1970’s sci-fi movies, were it not for the fact that Soylent Green was set in a year we’re all very familiar with: 2022. Predictably, there’s been a flurry of journalistic interest this year in what was predicted back in 1973, and how it compares to where we are now. The good news is that we haven’t yet resorted to eating people (although based on recent trends in fiction we may be closer than we think!). But this isn’t the only thing that the film gets wrong.

Despite being underpinned by very real issues, the extrapolated future that Soylent Green portrays is deeply out of step with present-day reality. Overpopulation is not the issue it was perceived to be in the 1970s—rather, the prospect of static and declining populations is now raising concerns. The productivity of agricultural systems has been vastly extended through technologies ranging from high yield crops and advances in irrigation techniques, to innovations in agrochemicals and genetic engineering. And rather than the dystopic single-noted social, political, and culinary narratives portrayed in the film, many—including me—would argue that the world we live in has never been more diverse and full of potential (even if some of us do have a tendency to reject this in favor of our own manufactured monotoned bubbles)….

(13) DOES THIS RING TRUE FOR YOU? Here’s a compilation of anecdotes in support of Tolkien’s reputation as a funny guy: “JRR Tolkien: academic, philologist – and prankster extraordinaire”.

…Humphrey Carpenter put it well in his authorised biography of Tolkien: “He could laugh at anybody, but most of all at himself, and his complete lack of any sense of dignity could and often did make him behave like a riotous schoolboy.” He catalogues incidents where Tolkien dressed up as a polar bear in sheepskin rug, as an Anglo-Saxon axeman (he chased a neighbour down the street), and gave shopkeepers his false teeth in a handful of change.

But it was the late Hugh Brogan, eminent professor of history at the University of East Anglia, who showed me the lengths Tolkien would go to in his quest for a laugh. As a child, Brogan lived in a late Regency house with a tall, elegant, winding staircase. Tolkien, visiting the family, “went up to the first-floor landing and fell all the way down quite spectacularly – about a dozen steps, I guess – arms and legs splaying about in all directions, and an immense clatter. We were literally breathtaken.” The elderly Brogan regretted that he couldn’t remember for sure whether Tolkien gave an encore….

(14) HEAVY METAL NEWS. [Item by Dann.] Heavy Metal Entertainment is taking another plunge into the video market. Its studio division, Heavy Metal Studios, will produce live-action video content from Heavy Metal’s library of properties. (Taarna, Cold Dead War, Dark Wing, Arena Mode, etc.)

A sizzle reel accompanied the announcement at this year’s San Diego Comic-Contm. Curiously, the sizzle reel includes snippets from movies that have already been released. (I swore that the rhinos came from Jumanji. There were others.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cq0i_jz1-to

“Just as Heavy Metal Magazine changed the way the world looked at comic books, and how the ‘81 animated film Heavy Metal changed animation forever, Heavy Metal Studios is about to take the reins on live action content and push it far past its current stagnation and into new heights. Things will never be the same again, again,” said Tommy Coriale, Heavy Metal’s President and Head of Studio.

(15) JUMP ABOARD. Marc Scott Zicree is “Riding Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone Carousel!”

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Honest Games Trailers:  Madison,” Fandom Games says “Madison,” even though it appears to be named after a really annoying Valley Girl, delivers an oldschool horror experience:  so old-school messages come on cassette tapes and clues come from snapping Polaroids. But can you take enough Polaroids to find the ghosts?

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, Bonnie McDaniel, Michael J. “Orange Mike” Lowrey, John Coxon, Dann, Daniel Dern, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Bonnie McDaniel.]

Pixel Scroll 8/8/22 Cause Your Scrolling Lifts Me Higher, Like The Sweet Song Of A Choir

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(1) EYE ON THE PRIZE. Iron Truth author Sofie Tholin, winner of the first Self-Published Science Fiction Competition, has received her trophy from Hugh Howey.

(2) FELICITATIONS! SJW’s assemble! It’s “International Cat Day”. (As opposed to National Cat Day, which is October 29.)

(3) PAWS FOR GENRE. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Over on a mailing list, a (so far) brief discussion of “grinning like a Cheshire cat” came up.

In the 150th anniversary version of The Annotated Alice, a page-and-a-half comment discussion on this starts on page 73. (Other CC-related annotations show up a few pages later.) (If you’ve got the original hardcover Annotated Alice, from 1960, like the one I won at summer camp either in 1962 or 1963, there’s a much shorter annotation comment on page 83.)

And out on the Internet:

“The term grin like a Cheshire cat predates the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by at least seventy-five years, if not longer”

along with this suggestion/explanation for the idiom:

“Cheshire is a county in England that is known for its milk and cheese products, surely a reason for Cheshire cats to smile….The most intriguing story may be that at one time a cheese was manufactured in Cheshire county that was shaped like a cat. The cheese was eaten from tail to head, leaving the cat’s smile as the last part of the cheese to be consumed”

“the phrase crops up in English literature as early as 1788, where it appears an entry in a sort of slang dictionary of the time, Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.”

Playlist/Lagniappe: And here’s Sammy Davis Jr, who voiced The Cheshire Cat in the 1966 Hanna Barbara ABC-TV animated movie, singing “What’s A Nice Kid Like You Doing In A Place Like This?”

(4) PUBLISHER REBRANDS. Tom Doherty Associates has rebranded itself Tor Publishing Group, effective immediately. Tor president and publisher Devi Pillai said in the announcement, “Although the Tor name has always been associated with science fiction and fantasy, our list has included titles beyond that genre since our inception. With this name change and continued growth, the Tor name will now stand for quality in various types of genre publishing, with each imprint representing a distinct voice.” “Tom Doherty Associates Is Now Tor Publishing Group” at Tor.com.

(5) ALAMAT. [Item by Chris Garcia.] We here at Journey Planet have been working hard as we barrel towards Worldcon where many of us will be seeing one another for the first time since 2019-ish. Chris and James are joined by 2022 Hugo nominees Jean Martin and Chuck Serface for an issue looking at Filipino myth, legend, and folklore, alamat in Tagalog. 

Jean provides an excellent introduction to the zine and her journey into myth and legend, and writers Pat M. Yulo, Karl Gaverza, Claire Mercado-Obias, Gerard Galo, Jimuel Villarosa Miraber, and James Bacon provide fine words on the subject. 

Art from Franz Lim, Diana Padullo, Leandro Geniston, Clair Mercado-Obias, Alfred Ismael Galaroza, and Jimuel Villarosa Mirabar is also joined by a couple of pieces from the AI art-generator DALL*E 2, and graphic design elements from Chris’ 1960s airline menu collection! 

It’s all available at Journey Planet 64 – “Alamat”.

Journey Planet 64 cover

(6) ATOMIC PILES. First Fandom Experience’s latest post in support of the “1946 Project” at Chicon 8 is “The Fan Cave, c1940s”. They’ve reproduced “narrative tours” of the dedicated fan spaces created by Bob Tucker, Harry Warner Jr., and Ron Holmes.

The “experience” component of “First Fandom Experience” conveys our desire to capture what it was like to be an early fan. To date we’ve dedicated the most space to fannish interactions — clubs, correspondence, conventions, conflicts. But fans spent most of their time at home. Those fortunate enough to have even a semi-permanent residence literally papered their walls with the accumulated evidence of their devotion to science fiction….

(7) FREE READ. The Sunday Morning Transport offers Michael Swanwick’s “The Warm Equations”.

Welcome to the first, free-to-read Sunday Morning Transport story for August: science fiction from Michael Swanwick. Concise and epic, “The Warm Equations,” explores a different side of the choices we may make in space.  ~ Fran Wilde, August 7, 2022.

(8) PRINCE AND REPRINTS. Jason Sanford has written a follow-up Twitter thread about the SF Insiders post commenting on Best Editor Short Form finalist Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki (who they ranked last) and the merits of reprint anthology work.  The thread starts here.

Jeff VanderMeer also drew on his experience in a comment to Sanford:

(9) ORVILLE MOURNS. “’The Orville’ Honors Norm Macdonald in Yaphit Tribute Video” at The Wrap.

“The Orville” honored Norm Macdonald in a tribute video posted Friday showcasing the late comedian and actor’s moments on the show as lovable Gelatin Lieutenant Yaphit….

(10) OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN (1948-2022). Actress and singer Olivia Newton-John died August 8 at the age of 73. Her husband made the announcement on Facebook. Her genre credits include the movies Xanadu and Sharknado 5: Global Swarming.

(11) MEMORY LANE.  

2009 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Ravens in the Library: Magic in the Bard’s Name (2009)

I get a lot of personally signed books and Ravens in The Library showed up in the post some thirteen years ago with a note asking if Green Man would review it. I already knew of SJ Tucker, a singer-songwriter who does a lot of filk, sort of filk and of course straight singer-songwriter material. You can hear her doing Catherynne Valente’s “A Girl in The Garden” here, riffing The Orphan’s Garden as she gave it to Green Man. 

She also writes children’s books and we reviewed one here, Rabbit’s Song, she wrote with Trudy Herring. 

Sadly she got a severe illness starting in 2008 caused her to have a very long hospital stay and related surgery, and left her to recover under the weight of massive medical bills. As you well know, independent musicians don’t have deep pockets, so her friends launched a number of projects to generate the needed monies. 

So what did they do? Well the most successful project is sitting on my desk, The Ravens in the Library anthology. Three hundred and seventy pages of ballads, poems, songs and stories amply illustrated by far too many stellar artists too note here. The great cover which you can see below is James A. Owen

The writers here are, well, let’s just say I was gobsmacked. Charles de Lint, and Terri Winding, and Neil Gaiman. Ari Berk usually known for his illustrations does a story too, as does Catherynne Valente, Holly Black, and, of course, S.J. Tucker contribute excellent work too. It would be wrong to overlook the work by writers that I’ve never heard of, most likely from the fan community, who are just as great. 

So how successful was it? This anthology in less than a week paid off all of her considerable medical bills. Very impressive! 

I’d be remiss not to mention the excellent editing work of Phil Brucato and Sandra Buskirk. 

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 8, 1905 — Reginald Lal Singh. Indian-born actor. He portrayed Captain Chandra in Star Trek’s “Court Martial”. He can also be seen by use of archival footage from The Day the Earth Stood Still in the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ “Strange New Worlds” episode. He was a military officer in the fifties War of the Worlds. (Died 1970.)
  • Born August 8, 1919 — Dino De Laurentiis. Responsible for the first Dune obviously (it’s odd to have to state that it’s the first Dune, for decades there was only one) but less obviously also a lot of other genre including two Conan films, Flash Gordon, King Kong, Halloween II and Halloween III, Dead Zone and The Last Legion. His company even made Army of Darkness! (Died 2010.)
  • Born August 8, 1920 — Jack Speer. He is without doubt one of the founders of fandom and perhaps the first true fan historian having written Up to Now: A History of Science Fiction Fandom covering up to 1939 as well as the first Fancyclopedia in 1944. Filking and costume parties are also widely credited to him as well.  Mike has a proper remembrance here. (Died 2008.)
  • Born August 8, 1930 — Terry Nation. Best known as scriptwriter for Doctor Who and creator of the Daleks. He later created Blake’s 7. He would also write scripts for Department S, The Avengers, The Champions and MacGyver. He both Davros and the Daleks on Who. He died from emphysema in Los Angeles aged 66, as he working with actor Paul Darrow who played Kerr Avon on Blake’s 7 in an attempt to revive that series. (Died 1997.)
  • Born August 8, 1935 — Donald P. Bellisario, 87. His genre shows include Tales of the Gold Monkey, Airwolf, Magnum P.I. (according to some of you) and of course that truly amazing show Quantum Leap. He was a writer and producer on the original Battlestar Galactica.
  • Born August 8, 1937 — Dustin Hoffman, 85. Ahhh Captian Hook, the man who got figuratively swallowed by the vast crocodile in Hook. Yeah I like that film a lot. But then I like the novel very much, too. By no means his only genre appearance as he was Mumbles, Caprice’s fast-talking henchman in Dick Tracy (a film I actually find rather odd), Mr. Edward Magorium in Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium and the voice of Master Shifu in Kung Fu Panda.
  • Born August 8, 1961 — Timothy P. Szczesuil, 61. Boston-based con-running fan who chaired Boskone 33 and Boskone 53. He’s also edited or co-edited several books for NESFA, Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys with Gardner Dozois and His Share of Glory: The Complete Short Science Fiction of C. M. Kornbluth. 
  • Born August 8, 1987 — Katie Leung, 35. She played Cho Chang, the first love interest for Harry in the Potter film series. Her only other genre appearance to date is as Dou Ti in Snow in Midsummer at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Dou E Yuan, often also translated as The Injustice to Dou E, is a Chinese play written by Guan Hanqing (c. 1241–1320) during the Yuan dynasty with serious bloody magic realism in it. End of your history lesson. 

(13) COMICS SECTION.

  • Breaking Cat News ran a series where the cats play an RPG. The first post is on June 20 and it runs through July 9.

(14) SUPERCANCELLATION. They are dropping like flies. “Another Huge DC Superhero Movie Is Dead” reports Giant Freakin Robot.

…Now, Rolling Stone Australia reports that another DC superhero movie is dead, this time, it is Supergirl who will fly no more.

…insiders at Warner Bros. have also said the currently in-development Supergirl film is next to be canceled. The film was planned as a spin-off from the upcoming The Flash, starring Ezra Miller. Supergirl is set to be introduced in The Flash when it is released in 2023, with actress Sasha Calle portraying the blue-suited heroine. 

It should come as no surprise that Supergirl is the next DC superhero project to be retired by the newly cutthroat Warner Bros. Discovery regime and it is likely that it has nothing to do with Batgirl. So far, The Flash has constantly been suffering bad press thanks to its lead actor Ezra Miller. Miller has been embroiled in several criminal charges and allegations over the past year and Warner Bros. has already stated the actor no longer has a future in the DC franchise beyond The Flash. With Miller out of the picture, it is safe to assume any spin-offs related to their lead role will follow suit. It’s worth mentioning that Michael Keaton’s return as Batman in The Flash was also set to be complemented by his appearance as the iconic character in Batgirl…. 

(15) SAFE TO COME OUT NOW. [Item by Soon Lee.]  (Yet) Another “Sandman” Review, but it does capture why this adaptation works. NPR’s Glen Weldon says “Netflix’s ‘The Sandman’ is a long-awaited dream come true”.

First, to the many nervous fans of The Sandman among you:

Relax. They nailed it.

Yeah, it took forever, and a slew of assorted aborted attempts, but the Netflix adaptation of the landmark comic book series just … works.

It succeeds as a faithful presentation of the look, feel and story of the Lord of Dreams as presented in the comics, which was written by Neil Gaiman, with art by Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg and many other pencilers and inkers over the years.

Far more importantly, however, it succeeds as a work of adaptation.

Where recent audiobook versions strictly adhered to every infinitesimal detail of the 1989-1995 comic run (and as a result ended up feeling both dated and overwritten), the Netflix series’ grip on the source text is gratifyingly looser. It breathes.

Changes, big and small, have been made to characters and storylines that streamline, update and focus the narrative, now honed to fit the specific propulsive demands of serialized television….

(16) BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD. In “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: How Starship Enterprise was Redesigned” Variety interviews production designer Jonathan Lee.

…Those elements started with the Bridge, which already made its debut during the second season of “Star Trek: Discovery.” But now that Pike’s Enterprise was getting its own show — one that will hopefully (and boldly) go the distance with a five-year mission — that called for significant revisions to the nerve center of the Enterprise.

“We’ve taken the set that we’ve inherited, but we did a great deal of work,” Lee said. “[Executive Producer] Akiva Goldsman briefed me to bring it back to ‘The Original Series.’ We had to move things around a little bit. We moved the captain’s chair around so that Captain Pike could throw a look to helm and navigations really easily, and that would work with the camera.” And since the viewscreen that was seen in “Discovery” was depicted using visual effects, a physical representation of the viewscreen was designed and added to the Bridge set for “Strange New Worlds.”

Lee also changed the color language from the “Discovery” version of the Enterprise. “It was quite cool with blues and greens and cool yellows. I said, the Bridge must feel warmer, particularly the motion graphics on all the monitors. When you see the before and after, it’s pretty dramatically different, but it’s much more intimate, and it feels more like our show.”

(17) DEEP-SIX IT. Gregory Benford has an idea for removing atmospheric carbon dioxide: “Addressing climate change: plants instead of plants?” in UCI News.

Growing up in Fairhope, Alabama, in the mid-20th century, Gregory Benford engaged in more than his share of character-building employment. In sun-parched farm fields, he chopped sugar cane and bagged potatoes. On shrimping and fishing boats operating out of Mobile Bay, he hauled in nets laden with the ocean’s produce.

Those years of toil on the land and water planted a seed in Benford’s young brain that would, decades later, sprout into CROPS, a nascent commercial enterprise he co-founded that may prove to be one of the most practicable and effective approaches to solving climate change ever devised.

Crops Residue Oceanic Permanent Sequestration is a method of atmospheric carbon dioxide removal that’s simple, straightforward and globally scalable. It relies on the seasonally regulated natural processes of our planet combined with readily available farm labor and unremarkable, centuries-old equipment such as baling wire, trucks and barges. Essentially, CROPS involves bundling agricultural waste into half-ton cubes and transporting them out to the deep sea, where gravity will take them to the ocean floor. Here, the carbon that was once in the air will sit unperturbed for millennia…

(18) JWST NEWS. In the Washington Post, Joel Achenbach gives an overview of the James Webb Space Telescope and the discoveries astronomers have already made with it. “The Webb telescope is astonishing. But the universe is even more so.”.

…Jane Rigby patiently walked me through what the Webb can and can’t do. One thing I learned: Even a million miles from Earth, with that sun shield providing the equivalent of SPF 1 million, the Webb isn’t in total darkness. The heavens glow in the infrared part of the spectrum because of sunlight bouncing off dust.

“It’s our stupid solar system,” Rigby said. “It’s the zodiacal cloud. It’s the light from our own solar system. We’re stuck in our solar system, and we can’t get out of it.”

The Webb probably won’t be able to see the very first stars, she said, “unless they’re kind enough to blow up for us.” But already, the Webb has detected a galaxy that emitted its light just 300 million years after the big bang — easily a record. The instruments on the telescope can do spectroscopy on that light to see what elements are present….

(19) STATE OF THE ART! ATARI 800. Paul Daniels discuses how he programmed an Atari 800 to create a computer game in this 1983 clip from the BBC that dropped today.

“The massive problem with all of this is that it’s not written for ordinary people, and it’s a shame. The magazines and the manuals are completely non-understandable, it’s gobbledygook.” – Paul Daniels Micro Live takes a trip to Blackpool, where magician, presenter and self-taught computer programmer Paul Daniels is hard at work coding his first computer game – Paul Daniels’ Magic Adventure – on the Atari 800. Will you like it? Daniels feels that the unnatural language surrounding computers and their associated literature is a huge barrier to entry for many potential users.

(20) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Emory Allen asks, “What if you could change your head as easily as you change your clothes? “Detached”.

[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, Soon Lee, Cath Jackel, Arnie Fenner, Daniel Dern, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Camestros Felapton.]

Pixel Scroll 7/23/22 Filers, Tick Not, Now Or Ever, Where To Scroll Your Pixels Go

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(1) AURORA AWARDS VOTING DEADLINE. Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association members have only a few minutes left to vote for 2022 Aurora Awards. The deadline is 11:59 p.m. EDT, on Saturday, July 23.

The awards ceremony will be held as a YouTube and Facebook live streaming event at 7:00 p.m. EDT on Saturday, August 13 at When Words Collide. 

(2) BEAUTIFYING THE BRICKS. DreamHaven Books showed off the progress on their new outside wall mural to Facebook friends. There’s also this smaller peek on Instagram.

(3) HEAR HEAR. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) resumes its series with 2022 Rhysling Long Poem Reading Series Part 2.

(4) THE SPIRIT OF ’46. First Fandom Experience links up with Chicon 8’s “1946 Project” (which they’re doing instead of Retro Hugos). “Science Fiction and Fantasy in the Pulps: 1946” is a bibliography of sff published in that year.

…Presented here for your perusal and possible amusement is a fiction bibliography for science fiction and fantasy pulps issued in 1946. The list includes magazines that primarily published new works. Excluded are reprints of works published in prior years (most of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, all of Strange Tales). Non-fiction articles and editorials are also omitted. For brevity, we didn’t cite specific issue dates. For richness, we’ve transcribed the introductory blurbs that appeared in the Table of Contents or masthead for each story….

(5) DOODLER. [Item by Michael Toman.] “In a world where Franza Kafka became one of the first Big Name Fan Artists…?” “Kafka’s Inkblots” by J.W. McCormack, behind a paywall at New York Review of Books.

…Such an active imagination—the fever for annotation, familiar from Pale Fire or Flaubert’s Parrot, that distorts the inner life of the artist even as it seeks to illuminate it—is required of any reader hoping to get their money’s worth from Franz Kafka: The Drawings, a volume of the writer’s archival sketches and ephemera edited by Andreas Kilcher and Pavel Schmidt. A bearded maestro presides from the back of a business card. A stick figure seems to throttle a mass of squiggles. A harlequin frowns under the chastisement of an irate lump. Two curvilinear ink blots pass each other on a blank-page boulevard. A bushy-browed Captain Haddock-type glowers in profile on a torn envelope and, in the margins of a letter, a wrigglesome delinquent is bisected by a torture device that seems to clearly reference the one from “In the Penal Colony.” Limbs jut out cartoonishly from bodies, loopedy-loop acrobats snake up and down the gutter of a magazine, figures of authority preside in faded pencil, and then there are the stray marks on manuscript pages, neither fully letters nor drawings….

(6) BRICK BY BRICK. “E. E. Cummings and Krazy Kat” by Amber Medland at The Paris Review site puts the famous strip in perspective as an inspiration to all manner of creators of modern 20th-century literature and art.

…The Kat had a cult following among the modernists. For Joyce, Fitzgerald, Stein, and Picasso, all of whose work fed on playful energies similar to those unleashed in the strip, he had a double appeal, in being commercially nonviable and carrying the reek of authenticity in seeming to belong to mass culture. By the thirties, strips like Blondie were appearing daily in roughly a thousand newspapers; Krazy appeared in only thirty-five. The Kat was one of those niche-but-not-really phenomena, a darling of critics and artists alike, even after it stopped appearing in newspapers. Since then: Umberto Eco called Herriman’s work “raw poetry”; Kerouac claimed the Kat as “the immediate progenitor” of the beats; Stan Lee (Spider-Man) went with “genius”; Herriman was revered by Charles Schulz and Theodor Geisel alike. But Krazy Kat was never popular. The strip began as a sideline for Herriman, who had been making a name for himself as a cartoonist since 1902. It ran in “the waste space,” literally underfoot the characters of his more conventional 1910 comic strip The Dingbat Family, published in William Randolph Hearst’s New York Evening Journal….

(7) ANTICIPATION. Rich Horton abhors a vacuum, which is why he keeps his series going with “Hugo Nomination Recommendations, 1951”.

As noted, I’m planning to finish up my posts on potential Hugo nominees for 1950s Worldcons, including those that didn’t award Hugos. This is a case (as with 1954) where stories from the eligibility year (i.e. 1950) had a shot at Retro-Hugos, as Milliennium Philcon, the 2001 Worldcon, chose to award them. (Appropriate, I suppose, as the 1953 Philcon originated the Hugo Awards.) And in fact I wrote a post back in 2001 giving my recommendations for Retro Hugos that year. This appeared in SF Site here I am bemused to find that my recommendations from back then are almost exactly the same as I came up with surveying 1950s SF just now.

The 1951 Worldcon was Nolacon I, in New Orleans, the ninth World Science Fiction Convention. As noted, they gave no Hugo awards. This was the first year of International Fantasy Awards, and both were given to books published in 1949: fiction went to George Stewart’s, Earth Abides (surely a strong choice) and non-fiction to The Conquest of Space, by Willy Ley and Chesley Bonestell….

(8) LATHE OF HEAVENS. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Hack writers get hackier with AI! The Verge blabs about “How independent writers are turning to AI”.

… Lepp, who writes under the pen name Leanne Leeds in the “paranormal cozy mystery” subgenre, allots herself precisely 49 days to write and self-edit a book. This pace, she said, is just on the cusp of being unsustainably slow. She once surveyed her mailing list to ask how long readers would wait between books before abandoning her for another writer. The average was four months. Writer’s block is a luxury she can’t afford, which is why as soon as she heard about an artificial intelligence tool designed to break through it, she started beseeching its developers on Twitter for access to the beta test. 

The tool was called Sudowrite. Designed by developers turned sci-fi authors Amit Gupta and James Yu, it’s one of many AI writing programs built on OpenAI’s language model GPT-3 that have launched since it was opened to developers last year. But where most of these tools are meant to write company emails and marketing copy, Sudowrite is designed for fiction writers. Authors paste what they’ve written into a soothing sunset-colored interface, select some words, and have the AI rewrite them in an ominous tone, or with more inner conflict, or propose a plot twist, or generate descriptions in every sense plus metaphor. 

Eager to see what it could do, Lepp selected a 500-word chunk of her novel, a climactic confrontation in a swamp between the detective witch and a band of pixies, and pasted it into the program. Highlighting one of the pixies, named Nutmeg, she clicked “describe.”…

(9) UP FROM THE UNDERGROUND. [Item by Dann.] This Reason Podcast focuses on the early days of comix in an interview with Brian Doherty regarding his newly published book Dirty Pictures: “Brian Doherty Talks Dirty Pictures, Comix, and Free Speech”.

Dirty Pictures: How an Underground Network of Nerds, Feminists, Misfits, Geniuses, Bikers, Potheads, Printers, Intellectuals, and Art School Rebels Revolutionized Art and Invented Comix, by Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty, tells the story of how people such as Robert Crumb, Trina Robbins, and Art Spiegelman redefined not just what comic books were capable of but what gets counted as art.

(10) NOSTALGIC X-MEN SERIES. Yahoo! Entertainment is at SDCC when “’X-Men ’97’ Gets First Nostalgic Look, Fall 2023 Release and Season 2”.

Nearly 30 years after “X-Men: The Animated Series” debuted, many of the beloved characters are returning for Marvel Studios’ upcoming show “X-Men ’97,” coming to Disney+ in fall 2023 with a second season already confirmed.

“X-Men ’97” will continue the story of the original “Animated Series,” which ran from 1992 to 1997 on Fox Kids Network. “X-Men: The Animated Series” helped usher in the popularity of the mutant superheroes before Fox made the first live-action take on the team in 2000.

The new series will include Rogue, Beast, Gambit, Jean Grey, Wolverine, Storm, Jubilee and Cyclops. Magneto, now with long hair and a purple suit, will lead the X-Men. The animation, revealed at Comic Con on Friday, stays true to the original animated series, but looks more modern, updated and sleek.

Cable, Bishop, Forge, Morph and Nightcrawler will also join the X-Men onscreen. Battling them will be the (non-“Stranger Things”) Hellfire Club with Emma Frost and Sebastian Shaw, plus Mr. Sinister and Bolivar Trask will appear.

(11) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.  

1995 – [By Cat Eldridge.] It is said that God made man in His image, but man fell from grace. Still, man has retained from his humble beginnings the innate desire to create, but how will man’s creations fair? Will they attain a measure of the divine or will they, too, fall from grace? — The Control Voice

Twenty-seven years ago, The Outer Limits’ “I, Robot” first aired on HBO. 

This is a remake of “I, Robot” that aired thirty-one years earlier. Leonard Nimoy, who played the reporter Judson Ellis in that episode, plays attorney Thurman Cutler in this version, a role played by Howard Da Silva in the original. This remake was directed by Nimoy’s son Adam Nimoy. 

Now “I, Robot” was written by Eando Binder, the pen name used by the SF authors, the late Earl Andrew Binder and his brother Otto Binder. They created a heroic robot named Adam Link. The first Adam Link story, published in 1939, is titled “I, Robot”. Adam Link, Robot, a collection of those stories, is available from the usual suspects. 

Robert C. Dennis who wrote the screenplay here would go on to write multiple episodes of Wild, Wild West and Batman. He was also one of the primary writers for the earlier Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born July 23, 1888 — Raymond Chandler. He of the Philip Marlowe series who I hold in very high esteem is listed by ISFDB as doing some stories of a genre nature, to be exact, ”The Bronze Door”, “The King In Yellow”, “Professor Bingo’s Snuff” and “English Summer: A Gothic Romance”. I’ve neither heard of nor read these. So who here has read them? (Died 1959.) 
  • Born July 23, 1914 — Virgil Finlay. Castle of Frankenstein calls him “part of the pulp magazine history … one of the foremost contributors of original and imaginative artwork for the most memorable science fiction and fantasy publications of our time.”  His best-known covers are for Amazing Stories and Weird Tales. “Roads”, a novella by Seabury Quinn, published in the January 1938 Weird Tales, and featuring a cover and interior illustrations by him, was originally published in an extremely limited numbers by Arkham House in 1948. It’s now available on from the usual suspects. (Died 1971.)
  • Born July 23, 1938 — Ronny Cox, 83. His first genre role was in RoboCop as OCP President Dick Jones who comes to a very bad end. Later roles were Gen. Balentine in Amazon Women on the Moon in “The Unknown Soldier” episode, Martians Go Home as the President, Total Recall as Vilos Cohaagen, Captain America as Tom Kimball and a recurring role for a decade on Stargate SG-1 as Senator Robert Kinsey/Vice President Robert Kinsey. 
  • Born July 23, 1957 — Gardner Dozois. He was founding editor of The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology and was editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine for twenty years. He won fifteen Hugos for his editing and was nominated for others. He also won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story twice, once for “The Peacemaker” and once for “Morning Child”. Stories selected by him for his annual best-of-year volumes have won, as of several years ago, 44 Hugos, 32 Locus, 41 Nebulas, 18 Sturgeon Awards and 10 World Fantasy. Very impressive! (Died 2018.)
  • Born July 23, 1982 — Tom Mison, 40. He is best known as Ichabod Crane on Sleepy Hollow which crosses-over into Bones. He’s Mr. Phillips in The Watchmen. It’s barely (if at all) genre adjacent but I’m going to note that he’s Young Blood in A Waste of Shame: The Mystery of Shakespeare and His Sonnets. Currently he’s got a main role in second season of the See SF series on Apple TV which has yet to come out. Apple hasn’t put out any publicity on it. 
  • Born July 23, 1989 — Daniel Radcliffe, 33. Harry Potter of course. Also Victor Frankenstein’s assistant Igor in Victor Frankenstein, Ignatius Perrish in Horns, a horror film, and Rosencrantz in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the Old Vic in London.  

(13) THIS ICE CREAM DOESN’T CUT THE MUSTARD. Well, actually, it does, and that’s the problem.The Takeout’s Brianna Wellen declares “This Grey Poupon Ice Cream Needs More Mustard”.

…As described in a press release sent to The Takeout, the Grey Poupon with Salted Pretzels is “An unexpected yet delightful blend of sweet ice cream, honey-dijon swirl, and salted pretzels.” It’s part of Van Leeuwen’s line of summer limited edition flavors, which also includes Campfire S’mores, Summer Peach Crisp, Honey Cornbread with Strawberry Jam, and Espresso Fior di Latte Chip. All of these flavors are available at Walmart until the end of the season.

… Even the smell of the ice cream was slightly mustardy—I was prepared for a real dijon bomb.

But the first scoop left some things to be desired. First, the mustard flavor is a little muddled and lost amidst the creaminess….

(14) STAR WARS SANS CULOTTES. Yes, it’s what you think it is: “I saw a ‘Star Wars’ strip show in SF, and I’m forever changed” says SFGate’s Ariana Bindman.

…With each draw of the curtain, we saw a series of burlesque acts that were visually decadent and tonally unique. Aside from Jabba the Hutt and captive Leia, my other personal favorite was when Sheev Palpatine — who looked absolutely grotesque thanks to a wrinkled blue-and-white skin suit — fully stripped and swung on a massive disco ball to Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball.” Just before that, R2-D2, resident space pimp, made it rain by ejecting wads of cash into the air while a braggadocious Han Solo undulated to “Smooth Criminal,” making every goth and nerd in the audience scream like animals…. 

(15) IT’S ABOUT TIME. “Strange new phase of matter created in quantum computer acts like it has two time dimensions” at Phys.org.

By shining a laser pulse sequence inspired by the Fibonacci numbers at atoms inside a quantum computer, physicists have created a remarkable, never-before-seen phase of matter. The phase has the benefits of two time dimensions despite there still being only one singular flow of time, the physicists report July 20 in Nature.

This mind-bending property offers a sought-after benefit: Information stored in the phase is far more protected against errors than with alternative setups currently used in quantum computers. As a result, the information can exist without getting garbled for much longer, an important milestone for making quantum computing viable, says study lead author Philipp Dumitrescu….

(16) KEEP WALKING. Yahoo! introduces the trailer shown at SDCC: “’Tales of the Walking Dead’ Trailer Shows How the Zombie Apocalypse Is Kind of Like COVID”.

…The trailer features elements from several of the show’s standalone stories that all paint a very stark picture of how the world fell — and honestly we’re reminded of a ton of the drama from the COVID-19 era, particularly the denialism, rugged individualist posturing, and the scapegoating.

For example, we see Parker Posey as an apparently well-to-do woman who straight up refuses to believe reports of a zombie apocalypse… of course, until it runs right up and bites her. Crews meanwhile plays a survivalist who lives an isolated, paranoid life, until he (for an as-yet unrevealed reason) ends up sheltering with Olivia Munn and gets called out. Will he change? We’ll have to find out….

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Honest Game Trailers:  The Quarry,” Fandom Games, in a spoiler-packed episode, say this game about teenagers getting munched on in the quarry by monsters “is a B movie with AAA production values that has “two hours of story and eight hours of wandering around like a stoned teen.”  But the CGI is so lifelike that the characters are actors you almost recognize, including “That guy who was in the thing you saw once.”

[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, Rob Thornton, Dann, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kurt Busiek.]

Pixel Scroll 2/12/22 To Scroll The Invisible Pixel

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(1) TAKE SANFORD’S SFF MAGAZINE SURVEY. Jason Sanford is running a new survey about how people view SFF genre magazines, described in his twitter thread about the survey. Sanford originally did a survey at the end of 2019 about people’s views on SFF magazines (also shared on File770). “I’d planned to release those results in the first quarter of 2020 but the COVID pandemic intervened. But having those pre-pandemic survey results allows me to run an identical copy of the survey right now and see if people’s views of SFF magazines changed over the last two years.”

Here’s the survey link at Google Docs. 

(2) AURORA AWARDS TIMELINE. Members of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association have until midnight tonight (Eastern time) to add genre works to the Aurora Awards eligibility list that were done by Canadians in 2021.

On Saturday, February 19, they will open up the nomination forms so CSFFA members can select up to five different works in each of the categories to be on this year’s final Aurora Award ballot.  Nominations will be open for five weeks – closing on March 26 at 11:59 pm Eastern.  

(3) PROFIT IN ITS OWN LAND. The Guardian finds that entering public domain takes an unexpected toll on popular classics: “The Great Gapsby? How modern editions of classics lost the plot”.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” It is one of the most memorable literary payoffs in history, the end of F Scott Fitzgerald’s defining novel of the 20th century, The Great Gatsby.

Yet this famous ending will be lost to many readers thanks to the proliferation of substandard editions, one of which loses the last three pages and instead finishes tantalisingly halfway through a paragraph.

…In his study, to be published next month in the F Scott Fitzgerald Review, West contrasts the focus on accuracy of Fitzgerald’s publisher, Scribner, with today’s “textual instability incarnate”.

He pored over 34 new print editions released in the past year, from established and independent publishers and some that list neither the place nor publisher, although there are further digital ones: “Six are competently done, but the rest are rather careless, done just to pick up a slice of the yearly sales. While it was still in copyright, Scribner’s sold about half a million copies a year, which is remarkable for a backlist title.”

To his dismay, 17 editions dropped Fitzgerald’s dedication to his wife, Zelda: “Her name has been erased – a serious problem … because she was Fitzgerald’s muse. She was partly the inspiration for Daisy Buchanan.”

(4) A LONG GOODBYE. Jesse Walker shares a few quick thoughts about a new anthology in “Dangerous Visions and New Worlds” in Reason.

…The best thing about Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950–1985, an uneven but often incisive anthology of essays from PM Press, is that it covers the New Wave moment without limiting itself to the New Wave movement. The most talented New Wave writers are covered here—there are essays on J.G. Ballard, Octavia Butler, Barry Malzberg, and others—but so are TV tie-ins and porny paperbacks, showing how such ideas seeped through society…

(5) NOMMO SHORTLISTED WRITERS Q&A. The British Science Fiction Association and the Nommos Awards will hold a virtual event in March – date to be announced.

Last year the BSFA has funded 5 Nommo shortlisted writers  to virtually attend Worldcon, Discon 3. This March (date to be confirmed) we are holding a Q&A panel, based on the questions submitted by our readers. We are looking forward to receiving your questions on our facebook and twitter, or on a special email for the event: bsfa.nommo@gmail.com

Here is the list of participants in our Q&A.

Nana Akosua Hanson and Francis Y Brown (AnimaxFYB Studios)

Winners of the 2021 Nommo Award for best comic writer and best comic artist. All ten chapters of the winning comic are available here.

Nihkil Singh

Short-listed for the 2017 Illube Nommo Award for Taty went West and for 2021 Ilube Nommo Award for Club Ded.

His story ‘Malware Park’ is available here.

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki

The winner of the 2019 Nommo Award for Best Short Story and the 2021 Nommo Award for best novella for Ife-Iyoku: The Tale of Imadeyunuagbon, available in Dominion An Anthology of Speculative Fiction From Africa and the African Diaspora, edited by Zelda Knight and Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki. ‘The Witching Hour’ won the Nommo award for best short story in 2019. Here is another story of his, ‘The Mannequin Challenge’

Stephen Embleton

His novel Soul Searching was shortlisted for the 2021 Ilube-Nommo Award.  We offer our readers a chance to read an extract from it. His speculative fiction available to read online includes “Land of Light” – Imagine Africa 500 speculative fiction anthology (2015) 

Tlotlo Tsamaase

shared the 2021 Nommo Award with Innocent Chizaram Ilo.

Her winning story ‘Behind Our Irises’ was part of Brittle Paper’s anthology Africanfuturism edited by Wole Talabi is available to read here. Her most recent fiction is “Dreamports” and “District to Cervix – The Time  Before We Were Born” 

Tochi Onyebuchi

won the 2018 Ilube-Nommo Award for his novel Beasts Made of Night

His novella Riot Baby was shortlisted for this year’s Nommo Award, and won in its category the Fiyah Award. A free excerpt is available here. His novel Goliath is expected in January of this year.  A free excerpt is available here.

(6) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

1999 — [Item by Cat Eldridge] Twenty-three years ago, the film remake of the My Favorite Martian series premiered. It was directed by Donald Petrie as written by Sherri Stoner and Deanna Oliver, both had been writers on the Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs.

It has a good cast including Jeff Daniels, Christopher Lloyd, Elizabeth Hurley, Daryl Hannah, Wallace Shawn, Christine, Ebersole and Wayne Knight.  Ray Walston even showed up as Armitan/Neenert, a long ago-stranded Martian who has been masquerading as a government operative for years.

Some critics did like it, some didn’t.  As Robert Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times put it “The movie is clever in its visuals, labored in its audios, and noisy enough to entertain kids up to a certain age. What age? Low double digits.”  But Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times stated “Walston displays a crisp wit and blithe sense of whimsy otherwise lacking in this loser.”

What it didn’t make is money. On a budget of sixty-five million, it only made thirty-seven million. And it only gets a thirty percent rating at Rotten Tomatoes among audience reviewers.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born February 12, 1920 — Louis Russell Chauvenet. Member of First Fandom, and a founder of the Boston’s Stranger Club which ran the first Boskones.  He’s credited with coining the term “fanzine” and may have also coined “prozine” as well. He published a number of zines from the later Thirties to the early Sixties. (Died 2003.)
  • Born February 12, 1929 — Donald Kingsbury, 93. He’s written three novels (Courtship Rite, The Moon Goddess and the Son and Psychohistorical Crisis) that could be akin to the Asimov’s Foundation novels. Clute at EOSF says that the Asimov estate explicitly refused him permission to set Psychohistorical Crisis in the Foundation universe.  Now there’s a story there, isn’t there? 
  • Born February 12, 1933 — Juanita Ruth Coulson, 89. She’s best known for her Children of the Stars series. She was a longtime co-editor of the Yandro fanzine with her husband, Buck, and she’s a filker of quite some renown. Yandro won the Best Fanzine Hugo at Loncon II in 1965. 
  • Born February 12, 1942 — Terry Bisson, 80. I’m very fond of “Bears Discover Fire” which won a Hugo at Chicon V. And yes, it won a Nebula and a Sturgeon as well.  Some may like his novels but I’m really in love with his short fiction which why I’m recommending three collection he’s done, Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories, In the Upper Room and Other Likely Stories and TVA Baby and Other Stories.
  • Born February 12, 1945 — Maud Adams, 77. Best remembered for being two different Bond girls, first for being in The Man with the Golden Gun where she was Andrea Anders, and as the title character in Octopussy. She shows up a few years later uncredited in a third Bond film, A View to Kill, as A Woman in Fisherman’s Wharf Crowd. 
  • Born February 12, 1945 — Gareth Daniel Thomas. His best-known genre role was as of Roj Blake on Blake’s 7 for the first two series of that British show. He also had a minor role in Quatermass and the Pit, and had one-offs in The Avengers, Star Maidens, Hammer House of Horror, The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes, Tales of the Unexpected, Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) and Torchwood. (Died 2016.)
  • Born February 12, 1954 — Stu Shiffman. To quote Mike in his post, he was “The renowned fan artist, who generously shared his talents in fanzines, apas and convention publications, received the Best Fan Artist Hugo Award in 1990 and the Rotsler Award in 2010.” You can read Mikes’ gracious full post on him here. (Died 2014.)
  • Born February 12, 1960 — Laura Miller, 62. Author of an essay whose title tickles me to the end: “It’s Philip Dick’s World, We Only Live In It“. Originally appearing in the New York Times, 24 November 2002, it was reprinted in PKD Otaku, #9 which you can download here.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) WHO DREW? First Fandom Experience shows its detective chops and connections as they seek out the creator of this Thirties-vintage “Mysterious Early Fan Art”.

… Regarding the style of the piece, we believe it’s directly inspired by the work of Frank R. Paul — most specifically, this piece from Amazing Stories Quarterly, v1n1, Winter 1928, illustrating “The Moon of Doom” by Earl L. Bell….

(10) THAT’S NOT GIBBERISH, THAT’S SFF. Got to love this. Phil Jamesson “reading the first page of any sci-fi novel”. [Via Boing Boing.]

(11) BAKULA TO THE FUTURE. Will Scott Bakula be involved? Movieweb rounds up “Everything We Know About the Quantum Leap Reboot”.

…In Quantum Leap’s case, details of the new series are still sketchy, but it is believed that the premise will make the new series a continuation rather than a full reboot. Set in the same universe as the original, the new series will feature a new team of scientists resurrecting the Quantum Leap project, and attempting to find out what happened to Sam, whose fate was famously left up in the air by the original’s ambiguous finale….

(12) JWST TAKES SELFIE. “NASA beams back unexpected selfie of the Webb telescope from 1 million miles away” – see the image at Mashable.

We thought we’d never see the giant James Webb Space Telescope ever again.

The space observatory has traveled to its distant cosmic outpost, nearly a million miles from Earth. It doesn’t carry any surveillance cameras dedicated to monitoring the instrument as it traveled through space and unfurled. They were too complicated, and risky, to add.

But NASA still found a way to take a (somewhat coarse and eerie) selfie.

The space agency used an auxiliary lens on its powerful Near-Infrared Camera, or NIRCam, which will peer at some of the earliest stars and galaxies that formed in the universe, over 13.5 billion years ago.

“This special lens is meant for engineering, not science, and allows NIRCam to capture an ‘inward-looking’ image of the primary mirror,” NASA tweeted. “This image helps us to check that the telescope is aligned with the science instruments.”…

(13) YOUR NOTHING IN THE WAY STATION. This Budweiser Super Bowl commercial uses a lot of sf-style effects. But if that’s not enough reason to view it, you can get a head start by skipping it now!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3fELinsiAI

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Rob Thornton, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]