Only works of speculative fiction by an African published between January 1, 2024 and December 31, 2024 anywhere in the world are eligible.
(3) WSFS BUSINESS MEETING PREPATORY TOWN HALL. The Seattle 2025 Worldcon will host its first WSFS Virtual Town Hall this Sunday, May 4 at Noon Pacific.
The WSFS Business Meeting Team will be hosting two town halls in preparation for the virtual business meetings in July. The town halls are designed for members to ask questions about the business meeting process. The town halls will be recorded and posted on the Seattle Worldcon 2025 YouTube channel for reference.
When: May 4, 2025, at noon Pacific Daylight Time (UTC – 7) Where: Zoom—link provided to those who RSVP RSVP:Via Eventbrite
Topic: WSFS Business Meeting Basics: Ask your questions about what the business meeting is. How do I submit a proposal? What types of changes can I propose? What if I disagree with a proposal submitted, but would like a changed one?
Town Hall Two
When: May 25, 2025, at noon Pacific Daylight Time (UTC – 7) Where: Zoom—link provided to those who RSVP RSVP:Via Eventbrite
Epic and Disney are launching their most expansive Star Wars collaboration in Fortnite to date with the first entirely Star Wars-themed Battle Royale Season and in-game premiere of Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld on May 2, two days ahead of its Disney+ launch. This marks the first debut of a Disney+ series in a game.
Recently announced at Star Wars Celebration, Fortnite: GALACTIC BATTLE begins May 2 and introduces new Star Wars content and gameplay to Battle Royale each week. Fans can play as Darth Jar Jar or Emperor Palpatine, while piloting ships like X-wings and TIE Fighters. The season will culminate in an epic in-game live event, “Death Star Sabotage.”
The Star Wars Watch Party island will also go live on May 2. Players will have a chance to view the first two episodes of Lucasfilm Animation’s Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld, its all-new animated shorts anthology series from creator Dave Filoni that focuses on the criminal underbelly of the Star Wars galaxy through two iconic villains: Asajj Ventress and Cad Bane.
Beyond the Star Wars Watch Party theater, players have the opportunity to fight off incoming waves of Stormtroopers using blasters and lightsabers. The standalone Star Wars Watch Party island was built in Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) using official Star Wars assets.…
…The first time I tried to write a comic book script, I had no guidance about what a script looked like, but I’d read comic books and graphic novels. So I wrote up my idea for a four-to-five-page story and sent it to the editor. He sent it back with a gentle note that read, paraphrased, “This is about twenty pages worth of material.”
I was taken aback because I’d separated it into five pages. But when I looked more closely at it, I saw what he meant. I’d crammed way too much into each of those five pages. With help from the artist I was working with, I pared it down, and we got the story to the required length (with some necessary but painful cuts).
Part of the problem was—and is—that there is no definitive template for comic scripts like there is for screenplays. At the end of this post are links to comic script archives; I suggest browsing them to see how established, published writers have tackled the problem. What I’ll cover here are the basics to keep in mind when writing a comic script: collaboration, layout, and dialogue.
Collaboration
If you are lucky enough to have an artist assigned to work on the project with you, your job becomes much more manageable. The comic script is a list of instructions for the artist, and any artist can tell you how best to write instructions for them. My experience has been that artists produce their best work when they have some kind of creative input, so I suggest that your comic script leave room for the artist to bring their creativity to the project….
Philip Pullman has revealed he will tell the final part of Lyra Silvertongue’s story in The Rose Field, which will come out this autumn.
It has been six years since a book about Lyra has been published – and 30 since readers first encountered her in Northern Lights, the first in Pullman’s His Dark Materials children’s fantasy trilogy. The bestselling novels, which have since been adapted into a TV seriesby the BBC, take place across a multiverse and feature “dæmons” – physical manifestations of a person’s soul that take the form of animals.
The Rose Field will be the third volume in the author’s The Book of Dust series, which expands on the His Dark Materials trilogy. It began in 2017 with La Belle Sauvage, set 12 years before Northern Lights, and continued with The Secret Commonwealth in 2019, set after the events of the original trilogy. This new book will pick up where that one left off, with Lyra alone in the ruins of a deserted city, where she has gone in search of her dæmon. Another important character from the previous books, Malcolm, has travelled towards the Silk Roads to look for Lyra.
(7) DENNIS MCCUNNEY OBITUARY. Dennis McCunney died April 29 after a long illness. He was a con-running fan who worked on numerous Northeast conventions, who lived in the New York City area. He chaired Philcon 1974, Philcon 1975 and Lunacon 34. He also worked on Albacon, Maltcon, and others. His specialties were facilities (hotel) and publications. He was part of the (unsuccessful) Philadelphia in 1977 Worldcon bid. He belonged to The Cult apa.
Mark Roth-Whitworth says: “One of my two oldest friends. We met in out late teens, long ago, in a universe far away. Lifelong fan, computer professional, hotel liaison for Philcon, and perhaps several other East Coast cons. Had a very Mark Twain look, before he started losing his hair to chemo. He’d been fighting cancer for several years.”
Twenty-one years ago he was a Guest of Honor at Capclave 2004. Alexis Gilliland’s bio for the souvenir book said in part:
Dennis McCunney is a tall and seriously lean man, and one of the very few fans who wears a suit and tie to conventions because the suit serves to bulk him up. Perhaps his mustache bulks up his face, or maybe he just wears it because it makes him look good….
[At Lunacons] Often he would sit with me in the bar, between interludes on his cellphone, and regale me with tales of the Lunarians, the small but contentious New York SF club of which he had been – for a time – a member, and how his efforts to create a lasting improvement in the arranging of Lunacon were like Sisyphus rolling his rock up the hill. He discussed the Lunarians together with their follies, fiascoes and ferocious fanfeuds, and perhaps a few other eff sounds as well.
As he was often trying to see that Lunacon ran smoothly in real time, much of what was on his mind was in the nature of who had dropped what ball, and why, with luck, it could be remedied while the con was still running. His triumphs being in the nature of getting the pocket program there on Saturday afternoon instead of Sunday morning. Listening to his stories, it was amazing that he could be as calm about the situation as he appeared, but his philosophy seemed to be: “What is the best that can be accomplished in these circumstances?” Acting on that philosophy enabled him to serve as a highly effective troubleshooter of Lunacons, to the point where he earned the title of “Mr. Lunacon,” although it was never formally bestowed upon him. He worked on other conventions, of course, and it was always a pleasure to meet him at the Worldcon or elsewhere, especially when he wasn’t tasked with some super-urgent business that should have been done last week” In real – that is, mundane – life, he is an ubertechie, charged with making his company’s computers perform in a commercially viable manner….
(8) MEMORY LANE
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
April 29, 1981 — The Greatest American Hero: “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys”
Forty-one years ago on this evening, The Greatest American Hero series served up the ever so sweet and rather nostalgic “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys”. It starts off with Ralph, our sort of superhero, quitting twice after perceiving that he has failed badly.
Meanwhile one of the secondary characters tells Ralph that her friend wants to go to an appearance by John Hart, the actor who played the second version of the Lone Ranger. Ralph is excited because Hart is his childhood hero. Why am I not surprised?
Later in the episode, Ralph and Hart get to have a talk and Ralph realizes that society needs its heroes and decides to wear the suit again.
I watched a lot of the Lone Ranger when I was rather young and never realized that there were two actors in that role. And no, I never figured out the deal with the silver bullets. Obviously that version of the Old West didn’t have werewolves. Or did it?
And yes, it was very, very sweet to see one of the Lone Rangers sort of playing his role again. If only as a mentor.
The Greatest American Hero series is streaming currently on Peacock.
Curtis underrates the requirements of horror writing.
Rubes has need for an exceptionally large pair of handcuffs.
(10) IF I HAD A HAMMER. “Godzilla Hammer Now On Sale” reports ScifiJapan. So often these silly things turn out to be AI fakes, but since you can actually buy it on Amazon.com (among other places) I’m going with this one.
Godzilla’s foot has crushed many buildings and structures. Now you can recreate that scene by smashing a nail with the Godzilla Hammer.
Precision casting manufacturer Castem Co., Ltd. (Fukuyama City, Hiroshima Prefecture, CEO: Takuo Toda) has released the Godzilla Hammer (ゴジラハンマー, Gojira Hanmā) – a powerful, one-of-a-kind tool, casted from a 3D scan of a real Godzilla movie suit.
Castem has 3D scanned the foot of the Godzilla suit that was actually used in the filming of the Toho classic GODZILLA, MOTHRA, AND KING GHIDORAH: GIANT MONSTERS ALL-OUT ATTACK (..Gojira Mosura Kingu Gidora Daikaijū Sōkōgeki, 2001) and obtained detailed data on the shape of the monster’s foot. The foot was then metallized in iron (dyed black) using the “lost wax method,” a precision casting method that can create particularly detailed, complex shapes in metal.
It perfectly replicates the legendary stomp of the King of the Monsters. Finished with a sleek black oxide coat and weighing 550g, this hammer has a heavy feel and lets you drive nails like Godzilla crushes cities. Turn it over and see the true sole of Godzilla’s foot—down to every epic detail!
Drive Nails Like Godzilla Crushes Buildings
Crafted from 3D Scan Data of the Actual Godzilla Used in Filming
Expertly Recreated in Metal Using Precision Casting
Attention, visionary science fiction writers! Amazing Stories is thrilled to announce the reopening of short story submissions for our popular weekly feature, beginning May 1, 2025.
This is your opportunity to share your most brilliant creations with the readers of Amazing Stories! We’re seeking exceptional stories (up to 10,000 words) that will transport, enthrall, and engage your imagination.
We offer $20 for original stories over 2500 words and $10 for shorter works or reprints. We’re looking for science fiction and especially hard science fiction!
Also worth noting, we’ll also be opening submissions later in 2025 for the special issue of Amazing Stories 100th Anniversary issue that will be published in 2026!
(13) LOST IN STARLIGHT. [Item by N.] Per Polygon, a teaser trailer for “Netflix’s first Korean original animated film…a sci-fi romance about two star-crossed lovers.” Lost in Starlight releases May 30.
When an astronaut leaves Earth for Mars, the vast infinite space divides star-crossed lovers in this animated romance that crosses the cosmos
[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Rich Lynch, N., Lloyd Penney, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
(1) WORLDCON TABLES AT EASTERCON 76.[Item by Cath Jackel.] I’m attending Reconnect this weekend — Eastercon 76 in Belfast. Here are some photos of the Worldcons and bids doing promotion at the event. Elayne Pelz and Joyce Lloyd are representing for LAcon V. Mary Ellen Moore is behind the table for the Montreal in 2027 bid. Alex McKenzie is at the Dublin in 2029 bid table. I don’t have a table, but do have a pile of flyers promoting the Edmonton in 2030 bid (my home town).
Elayne Pelz and Joyce Lloyd of LAcon VMary Ellen Moore for the Montreal in 2027 bidAlex McKenzie at the Dublin in 2029 bid tableEdmonton 2030 bid flyers
(2) SEE WHELAN AND GIANCOLA ART IN UTAH. The Compass Gallery in Provo, UT will host the “Fantastically Human 2025” art exhibit from June 6-July 12. It will feature art on loan from Brandon and Emily Sanderson’s Collection:
Cover for The Way of Kings – Michael Whelan
The Herald Taln – Donato Giancola
Tress – Howard Lyon
The Compass Gallery. 250 W Center St. Suite 101, Provo, UT 84601
Sporror (fungal horror), The Substance-style body horror and commodification of breast milk are among the more ghoulish themes booming across fiction as horror-influenced submissions continue to pile in, the trade has said.
A year on from the record-breaking high of horror books published, editors and agents are still reporting huge interest along with a shift towards more adventurous or alternative realities.
This year’s sales continue the upward trend for the horror category to just over £8m for the full year 2024, according to Nielsen BookScan. In the first quarter of 2025, it is up over a third (37%) in value against the same period in 2024 to £1.78m and volume is up 18% to nearly 161,000 copies. But the category remains small – no book has sold more than 10,000 in 2025 and just three – Grady Hendrix’s Witchcraft for Wayward Girls (Pan Macmillan), Lucy Rose’s debut The Lamb(W&N) and Stephen King’s Holly(Hodder) – have sold more than 5,000 copies, remaining mostly backlist-driven.
“I think there has been discussion about the evolving horror space for such a long time and the fact remains at the moment that very few ‘horror’ novels have broken out,” Curtis Brown agent Cathryn Summerhayes told The Bookseller. She represented Rose and said that The Lamb “has been a break out and I guess is both traditional – in that it is a cannibal novel set in a dark wood – and non traditional in that it deals with themes of queerness, infanticide and is both a modern and fable-esque setting at the same time.”
Summerhayes added: “What Lucy Rose has done brilliantly is tap into a younger, curious readership, targeting horror film and TV fans through her social media – and they seem willing to migrate back to books away from the screen. By publishing The Lamb as both horror and literary fiction […] we’ve hit two book buying markets instead of one.”
The strange political and social events of the last few years have paved the way towards different kinds of horror, according to Summerhayes. “I think horror hasn’t necessarily changed but our openness to reading stark horror about environmental meltdown, the isolation and devastation of people and places (thanks Trump) and the reality of monsters in our midst has grown hugely now we are away from the real life horror of the pandemic and lockdown. So reader openness plays a huge part – and BookTok is really making these authors and books pop.”…
(4) HE MADE A LITTLE MISTAKE. Brian Keene tells what happened.
I accidentally signed in @haileypiperfights.bsky.social’s spot, and she made her feelings on it known. ?????? Whichever one of you gets this sig sheet in their book will have a true one of a kind item.
After more than a decade, one of the lost Star Wars projects that will probably never be seen by anyone has received a surprising acknowledgment from Lucasfilm as they celebrated 20 years of Lucasfilm Animation. The project in question is the animated comedy series Star Wars: Detours , which was created by the team who brought the world Robot Chicken but was never released despite almost 40 episodes being completed and dozens of other scripts being written.
Detours’ surprising reappearance came thanks to a small reference in a poster released by Lucasfilm which incorporates characters from their many animated shows and movies, including those from The Clone Wars and Rebels, and, somehow, Detours. Fans of the world’s biggest franchises always love a good Easter egg or two making an appearance, and the poster offered up one of the most obscure of any Star Wars references you could name by including a very unorthodox-looking Stormtrooper with big googly eyes crumpled up in the bottom right of the poster, as seen in the locked away series.
Bella Ramsey self-recorded their audition tape for The Last of Us at their parents’ home in Leicestershire and sent it off more in hope than expectation. Ramsey, who was 17 at the time, had never played the post-apocalyptic zombie video game on which the new TV series was based, but knew it was a big deal: released in 2013, it had sold more than 20m copies. It would later emerge that Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, the show’s creators, looked seriously at more than 100 actors for the role of Ellie, the sassy and quirky but also complicated and vicious American protagonist of The Last of Us. “Yeah, I’ve been told,” says Ramsey with a wry smile.
When Ramsey got the first callback from Mazin and Druckmann, they joined the Zoom from their childhood bedroom. “I’ve gotten very used to sending in a self-tape and forgetting about it,” they say, when we meet at a photo studio in north London. “But the problem was when there was a self-tape that really meant something to me, like The Last of Us did. It feels quite scary. And when I got the phone call saying they wanted me to be Ellie it did feel surreal for a few days. I understood that if I said yes – which obviously I was going to – my life was going to change.”
Life-changing is one way to describe it. Ramsey was hardly inexperienced when they were cast: their professional debut was aged 11 as the no-nonsense Lyanna Mormont in Game of Thrones; they had also been the star of the CBBC series The Worst Witch and appeared in the BBC/HBO adaptation of His Dark Materials. But The Last of Us was something else. About 40 million people watched the first episode in 2023 and the series, which is said to have cost $100m, became the most popular HBO show ever in Europe. Brutally violent at times, but also tender and poignant, the odd-couple chemistry between Ramsey’s Ellie and Pedro Pascal’s Joel has attracted an obsessive fanbase far beyond video-game nerds….
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
April 20, 1939 — Peter S. Beagle, 86.
By Paul Weimer: It’s Rankin and Bass’ fault that I got into the work of Peter S. Beagle. As a voracious young reader, I saw The Last Unicorn in the library and somehow, even given my small “c” catholic tastes in SFF, saw that it was somehow not going to be for me. So I didn’t pick it up. I passed it by.
Fast forward to the mid-1980’s. NYC’s Channel 11, an independent TV station, aka “New York’s movie station”, introduced me to a gigantic swelter of movies.
One of them, by accident, was the 1982 animated version of The Last Unicorn. I remember not remembering at the time or realizing at the time that it was based on the Beagle novel, but after I was transported and transformed by the adaptation, I went and sought out the original novel. As fine and charming as the movie is, the novel truly gave me a sense of the power and lyric nature of Beagle’s work.
I was hooked.
I came across my favorite Beagle, The Innkeeper’s Song, in the mid 90’s. I was in a strong fantasy vein at the time and was interested in a variety of narrative forms. The Innkeeper’s Song, with its multiple first-person narration, was a revelation in escaping the usual multiple third-person points of view that were the norm at the time. Even today, Innkeeper’s Song feels fresh and unique in its approach to narrative, point of view, and literary interest. Even before Gene Wolfe, I think Beagle’s fantasy was my first real immersion into what one might call literary fantasy.
But even more than literary talent or line by line skill, what Beagle’s work does to me, from the Last Unicorn to today, is make me feel. I think his shorter fiction is where the distillation of his skill, craft, mood and the ability to evoke emotion is at its best in the short form. “Two Hearts”, a sequel to The Last Unicorn, is a particular favorite, because Griffins. His TNG written episode “Sarek” is one of the most moving pieces of Star Trek to this day. And yes, to this day, The Last Unicorn, the movie, brings tears to my eyes.
Peter S. Beagle
(9) COMICS SECTION.
Brewster Rockit shows how a xenomorph celebrates the holiday.
A pair of 19th Century unicorn sculptures at the top of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile have had their horns restored
The sandstone sculptures adorn the façade of the Scotch Whisky Experience, just in front of the Edinburgh Castle esplanade.
Their original horns, made from wood and lead, had long been missing, but as part of the building’s restoration the attraction’s facilities manager Ross Morris, a keen woodworker, crafted some new ones.
A competition has now been launched to name the unicorns, with some whisky-themed puns such as Amber, Isla and Pete among the suggestions….
…Winners of the “spirit of the unicorn” naming contest, which runs until 27 April, will receive a whisky tour and a special unicorn cocktail at the visitor attraction’s bar.
Entries can be submitted via the Scotch Whisky Experience website.
(11) NEEDS TO BE NEWER ON THE OUTSIDE. A Doctor Who replica owner seeks help in making repairs: “Burbank TARDIS” at LAist.
A blue police box in Burbank has hosted wedding proposals, family Christmas photo shoots and countless excited smiles over the past 15 years — but now, it needs your help.
It’s a replica of a TARDIS, which stands for “Time and Relative Dimension in Space.” It’s one of the most recognizable and iconic inventions from the long-running TV series Doctor Who.
This box may not be able to travel through time and is just as big on the inside as the outside, but it was engineered by the late Grant Imahara, a roboticist best known for his work on Mythbusters and White Rabbit Project.
The creation has been in the care of Donna Ricci, friend and owner of Geeky Teas and Games, who is now looking for handy Whovian volunteers who can give the Burbank TARDIS an overdue facelift….
… The TARDIS got banged up at Geeky Teas and Games’ last location, where it sat in the glaring SoCal sun for about five years.
The heat warped the doors and pulled pieces of wood away from itself. It’s been marred with graffiti and scratches, and someone even threw a full container of orange juice through one of the windows.
“She used to also light up and make the roaring noise when you open the door,” Ricci said. “She doesn’t do that anymore.”…
Willem Dafoe is a legend of the screen, the kind of actor you see pop up in anything and everything. He’s appeared in over one hundred films, each drastically different from the last — but even with so many projects under his belt, he’s still finding stories that surprise him.
The Legend of Ochi is one such surprise. Distributed by A24 and helmed by music video director Isaiah Saxon, the film is a Millennial update on the family-friendly creature films that dominated the ‘80s. Think E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial spliced with Planet of the Apes and rendered with visuals so dreamy, most assumed it’d been created with AI. In reality, Saxon spent years crafting the world of Ochi — and the eponymous, ape-like creatures in it — with a mixture of puppetry, CGI, and matte paintings. Even after its hands-on, “down and dirty” production in Romania, Dafoe still can’t believe a project of this caliber found him.
“I read it and I thought, ‘Whoa, they want me to do this?’” Dafoe tells Inverse. “It’s very different from anything I had done.”…
I’m curious what it was like on set. Were you interacting with puppets for the ochi?
I don’t have that many scenes [with the ochi], because I’m looking for the ochi — but when I finally find him, it’s a puppet. And that was interesting, because you’d think it would be difficult to perform with a puppet, but in fact, no. Because those six, seven people that are operating the puppet, all their energy is going into it, so the puppet has a kind of presence. And you’ve got the energy of all those people that you’re playing the scene with, so it’s much more engaging than you might think….
After a sojourn around the globe for a second volume of international animation, Star Wars: Visions is returning to Japan for another volume of anime-centric adventures. So it’s perhaps fitting then, that Lucasfilm just gave us our first look at the latest anthology right out of Star Wars Celebration Japan.
Today in Tokyo, Lucasfilm lifted the lid on the first teaser for Visions Volume 3 to gathered fans at Star Wars Celebration. The latest volume will feature tales created by nine Japanese animation studios, each reflecting their own unique perspective and vision for the galaxy far, far away–including some returning stories, building on episodes from the first volume. Although the trailer has yet to be fully released online, it was shared with fans via the official Star Wars Celebration livestream. Check it out below!
[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Cath Jackel, Carl, Paul Weimer, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Lou.]
(1) SUNSET ON DARKOVER. Deborah J. Ross told Facebook readers yesterday her novel Arilinn, released in November, concludes the Darkover series.
Farewell and Adelandeyo, Darkover
I fell in love with the Darkover series, created by the late Marion Zimmer Bradley, when becoming a professional author was still my dream. I loved the world, the characters, and the insightful and compassionate treatment of themes. Many of my early short fiction sales were to the Darkover anthology series, which I eventually had the honor of continuing as editor, beginning with Stars of Darkover. Around 1999, Mrs. Bradley asked if I would consider collaborating with her on one or more Darkover novels. She passed away just as we began work on The Fall of Neskaya (DAW, 2000), which I completed. Since then, I have written eight more Darkover novels under the supervision of her Literary Works Trust. The final volume, Arilinn, was released in hardcover and ebook formats on November 12, 2024.
Darkover is one of the longest-running and best-loved series, straddling the border between science fiction, romance, and fantasy. For decades, it has touched the hearts and fired the imaginations of generations of fans. The earliest published stories date back over half a century to the publication of The Planet Savers in Amazing magazine, then the first version of The Sword of Aldones in 1962 and The Bloody Sun in 1964. You can find the list, both in order of publication and Darkover chronology, here.
For the last quarter-century, I have striven to tell the best stories I could, always staying true to the spirit of Darkover and its amazing people. Now the Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust and I have agreed to bring the saga to a close with Arilinn, a heartfelt love letter and farewell to the series and its fans. I hope that if you have enjoyed my Darkover stories, you will check out my original work.
(2) MORE KUDOS. The Wild Robot won Best Animated Feature and Best Original Score: “African American Film Critics Association 2024 Winners List” at Deadline. The winner for Best Picture, while not sff, is based on a book by a writer well-known to fans:
The African American Film Critics Association on Friday said that it has selected Orion Pictures and Amazon MGM Studios’ Nickel Boys as its Best Picture of 2024 to lead the 16th annual AAFCA Awards. Its writer-director RaMell Ross also won Best Director for his work adapting Colson Whitehead’s novel….
(3) COSTUME DESIGNERS GUILD NOMINATIONS. The 2025 Costume Designers Guild Awards include two categories devoted to sff, below. (However, there are also works of genre interest in some of the other categories.)
Excellence in Sci-Fi/Fantasy Film
Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice; Colleen Atwood, CDG
Borderlands; Daniel Orlandi, CDG
Dune: Part Two; Jacqueline West, CDG
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga; Jenny Beavan, CDG
Wicked; Paul Tazewell, CDG
Excellence in Sci-Fi/Fantasy Television
Agatha All Along; “If I Can’t Reach You/Let My Song Teach You”; Daniel Selon, CDG
Dune: Prophecy; “The Hidden Hand”; Bojana Nikitovic
Fallout; “The Target”; Amy Westcott, CDG
House of the Dragon; “The Red Dragon and the Gold”; Caroline McCall
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power; “Doomed to Die”; Luca Mosca, CDG & Katherine Burchill & Libby Dempster
The theme music to iconic British sci-fi TV show Doctor Who has been immortalized by Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive.
Wait? What? Why is music from the UK’s most substantial contribution to broadcast sci-fi worthy of inclusion in an Australian archive?
Because, as explained by the Archive (NFSA), it was written by an Aussie.
“While the theme for the long-running BBC series, with its otherworldly pulsing bassline, was recorded by English musician Delia Derbyshire, it was written by Australian composer Ron Grainer,” the NFSA explained, before going on to remind us all that the theme is thought to have been the first piece of electronic music used as a TV theme – and remains in use to this day, albeit modernized….
(5) JEOPARDY! ON FRIDAY THE 13TH. [Item by David Goldfarb.] Final Jeopardy in today’s episode had the category “Authors”. Here was the clue:
Following his unexpected death in 2001, he was referred to as the “Monty Python of science fiction”.
Challenger Carla Winston responded “Who is Terry Pratchett?” — but she crossed that out and scribbled in “Adams” underneath. A good choice!
Challenger Ram Murali tried ‘Who is Isaac Asimov?” which, of course, was not correct.
Returning champion Ashley Chan said “Who is Frank Herbert?” which feels like a desperation move; Herbert certainly wasn’t known for comedy. But she made only a small wager, and since Carla had not doubled up, she kept the lead she had had going into the final.
On November 27, 2024, a fragile ceasefire took effect in Lebanon following two months of intense Israeli bombardment mostly in southern Lebanon and Dahiyeh, Beirut’s southern suburb. Dahiyeh, where Hezbollah’s party headquarters is located, is composed of multiple neighborhoods with varied social, economic, and urban histories, and is also home to numerous warehouses, printers, and bookbinders on which the Lebanese book industry relies.
On the evening of October 20, Mohamed Hadi, of Dar al Rafidain publishing house, saw one of his five branches destroyed. The second floor of the building in Dahiyeh housed his bookstore and publishing house offices where management, editing, layout, accounting, and marketing were centralized. “We must rebuild all our work and archives, and our employees are scattered throughout Lebanon without homes,” Mohamed Hadi said.
A few weeks earlier, on September 28, Jihad Baydoun of Dar al Kotob al Ilmiyah, saw his 7,500-square-meter (80,729.3 sq-ft.) warehouse spanning two underground floors destroyed by an airstrike. The warehouse lies buried under four collapsed buildings. Of his 7,500 titles, Jihad Baydoun lost stock of 1,500 titles in all — or an estimated 2,520,000 bound books….
(7) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
December 13, 1985 — Clue
On this date thirty-nine years ago, Clue premiered. It was directed by Jonathan Lynn from his screenplay. The story was based off the Clue game created in 1943 by British board game designer Anthony E. Pratt, which is called Cluedo or Murder at Tudor Close in Britain.
It was produced by Debra Hill, best known for producing various works of John Carpenter.
It had a stellar cast of Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, Christopher Lloyd, Michael McKean, Martin Mull. Lesley Ann Warren, Colleen Campand Eileen Brennan.
Tim Curry played The Butler. And what a role what was for him. Possibly his best role. Though his Cardinal Richelieu in The Four Musketeers is magnificent as well.
Speaking of endings, if for no other reason to watch it, a fourth ending of it was filmed but exists only in the vaults of Paramount. So, it says the documentary recreates the fourth ending through animation and narration from the Clue storybook. I’ve not seen it yet but definitely want to see how they did this. I can say this much without giving anything away — let me quote director Lynn in a Dark Horizons interview: “It wasn’t funny enough, it wasn’t surprising enough. It ended the film on an anti-climax. So I just took it out. Three was enough.”
The mansion which was supposed to in Connecticut never existed. It, like so many such places, exists only in the imagination. It was stitched together out of exterior shots and film stages as it is documented lovingly here.
Critics did not like it, with both Siskel and Ebert harshly dissing it. They particularly hated the three alternative endings. No idea why, I myself am fond of them.
It didn’t break even at the Box Office despite costing only fifteen million to make, losing a half million dollars.
It was novelized as Clue The Novel, written by Michael McDowell who would write the Beettlejuice screenplay which was nominated for a Hugo at Noreascon 3. And yes it has all four endings. I’d love to heard a full cast audiobook version!
It however has a stellar rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes of eighty-six percent. Clue is currently airing on Paramount+. You can purchase it at Amazon and iTunes for six dollars right now.
I think an excellent film to watch any time of year.
We will not speak of the rumors that a new version is the works. No we won’t. Even The Butler won’t.
Travelers passing through John F. Kennedy International Airport’s Terminal 8 can now enjoy a cutting-edge gaming experience starting on Monday, Dec. 16, as Gameway opens its first New York location.
The Gameway Ultra lounge, part of a $125 million investment in Terminal 8 by Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and American Airlines, is designed to elevate the airport experience.
The new modern space will feature luxury console and PC gaming stations alongside the RetroZone® bar, where travelers can relax with craft beers and classic video games….
… The Gameway Ultra lounge will offer nine individual gaming stations, each equipped with a PlayStation or Xbox console, a 43″ 4K TV, premium gaming headphones, charging ports, and luggage space. The lounge also includes eight high-performance gaming PCs paired with Corbeau gaming chairs and high-speed internet.
Open daily from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m., 365 days a year, the lounge ensures travelers can enjoy its amenities regardless of their schedules. Operating hours may adjust slightly during seasonal holidays or based on flight times. Pricing starts at $17.99 for up to 30 minutes of play, $27.99 for up to an hour, and $45.99 for unlimited sessions. A 10% military discount is also available….
(10) THE WRITER’S OBJECTIVE. To me this sounded spot on.
Seems there are a bunch of writers who think differently.
Fortnite players who were charged for unwanted purchases in the game where cartoony characters battle on a virtual island are starting to receive what could be $245 million in refunds from Epic Games for what the federal government called manipulative online practices.
Denver Wills, a 20-year-old college student near Anniston, Ala., who has been playing Fortnite since middle school, said that a friend had received $350 and that he hoped to get a similar amount. It would help him cover the costs of building a new computer.
“Any money’s good money at this point,” said Wills, who is waiting for his check in the mail.
Fortnite’s in-game currency, V-Bucks, can be spent on cosmetics, weapons and outfits — known as skins — that enable players to make their avatars look like celebrities and fictional characters. To appear as John Wick, a player must spend about $19; the rapper Juice WRLD, who died in 2019, is about $14. When it is not on sale, a bundle of Spider-Man outfits and paraphernalia costs almost $50….
Epic agreed in December 2022 to a $520 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission that sent a strong signal that federal officials were taking a more assertive stance toward regulating the tech industry. Customers could ultimately receive $245 million for what the agency called Epic’s use of “dark patterns” to trick millions of players into unwanted purchases. Another $275 million will settle accusations that the studio violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.
… Wills said that his claims form, which he filed in September 2023, asked him how many V-Bucks he had mistakenly spent in the game. “I went through my Fortnite locker and picked out the stuff I had bought on accident,” he said.
Wills said that he continued to play Fortnite after the accusations against Epic emerged, but that he was pleased it was compensating players.
“It’s pretty obvious,” he said, “that there were probably children spending their parents’ debit cards and credit cards on skins in the game because it was so easy to do that.”…
(12) DRY VENUS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Venus has probably been dry, both inside and on its surface, for all of its history according to a new research paper…
The planet has no water now, making it inhospitable to life, but is at a distance from the Sun that might allow liquid water to exist on its surface. One theory holds that Venus once had watery oceans, but that these desiccated early in the planet’s history, leaving a dry, uninhabitable world.
To investigate this scenario, Tereza Constantinou at the University of Cambridge, UK, and colleagues used the amounts and proportions of gases such as water and carbon dioxide in Venus’s atmosphere to model the composition of gases that trickle out of the planet’s interior during volcanic eruptions, ultimately replenishing the atmosphere. The results suggest that Venus’s interior contains relatively little hydrogen and therefore little water. The authors also found that the molten rock that erupts from Venus is much drier than the lava from similar eruptions on Earth.
If early Venus had water, it was probably in the form of steam floating above a fiery surface — not life-friendly oceans, the scientists conclude.
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Jim Janney, David Goldfarb, 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 OGH.]
(1) A DIFFERENT KIND OF MEMORY HOLE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.]
<Hammer bangs>
Sold! That’s €1,275,000 for lot number 487, Mona Lisa’s left eye. Sold to the gentleman with the monocle in the third row.
Next up for bid we have lot number 488, Mona Lisa’s right eye. This lot has an opening bid of €600,000. And we have 650 from one of the telephone bidders; do I hear €675,000?
George Orwell’s archives provide an invaluable insight into one of the most influential British writers of the 20th century, casting light on how he produced his most memorable books, his sensitivity to criticism, and his fears that legal threats could ruin his work. Now the treasure trove that is the extensive archive of correspondence and contracts amassed by Orwell’s original publisher, Victor Gollancz, could be scattered to the winds in what has been described as an act of “cultural vandalism”.
Crucial correspondence involving the Nineteen Eighty-Four author and Observer correspondent is being offered for sale on the open market, following a decision in 2018 by the publisher’s parent company to sell the archive because the warehouse was closing.
Richard Blair, 80 – whose father Eric Blair wrote under the pen-name George Orwell – is dismayed by the loss: “It’s terribly sad … Once Gollancz material is acquired by private collectors, it could disappear into the ether for ever.”
For £75,000, Peter Harrington, a leading antiquarian bookseller, is currently offering Gollancz papers relating to Orwell’s second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter. They include his original contract, a letter with his corrections, and a 1934 report by Gerald Gould – then fiction editor of the Observer and a Gollancz manuscript reader – stating that it should be published.
Harrington is also selling letters for £50,000 relating to Orwell’s third novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which show that libel concerns led to key alterations in the final text. In 1936, dismayed by Gollancz’s desired changes, Orwell wrote that he would nevertheless do what he could to meet his publisher’s demands – “short of ruining the book altogether”….
(2) STRACZYNSKI ON LDV. J. Michael Straczynski told Facebook followers he has copies of Last Dangerous Visions in his hands, and shared some extra Tim Kirk artwork that’s in the books. Images at the link.
Four years ago I announced we were compiling and updating THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS. Some folks laughed, saying it’d never happen. Today the actual books arrived in advance of the 10/2 pub date. Given the shifting landscape of stories in and out of TLDV, this is as complete as it will ever be, and more complete than it has ever been.
And as a SURPRISE BONUS: artist Tim Kirk, who did the interior art pieces for THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS, also painted two alternate TLDV covers for Harlan back in the day. They are included in the book’s endpapers front and back, sans text and in full color, to allow their beauty to come through unimpeded.
The hat worn by actor Harrison Ford in the second instalment of the Indiana Jones film franchise has sold for nearly half a million pounds at auction.
The brown felt fedora – specifically made for the Temple of Doom film – fetched $630,000 (£487,000) in Los Angeles on Thursday.
Other items of movie memorabilia were sold at the same time including props from Star Wars, Harry Potter and James Bond productions.
Jones, an adventuring archaeologist, is seen with the hat early on in the movie where he and his companions jump from a crashing plane in an inflatable raft….
… The fedora was also worn by Ford’s stunt-double in the 1984 film, Dean Ferrandini, and was sold with previously unpublished photos of the stuntman wearing the now-iconic costume on location.
Ferrandini died last year. The hat came from his personal collection.
The sable-coloured fedora was an update to the original featured in the first Indiana Jones film – Raiders Of The Lost Ark – with a “more tapered” crown then the first, Propstore, the auction house, said.
Created by the Herbert Johnson Hat Company in London, the inside lining features gold monogrammed initials “IJ”.
Also sold at the auction was an imperial scout trooper helmet used in the 1983 Star Wars film Return Of The Jedi – which was bought for $315,000 (£243,000) – as well as a light-up wand used by Daniel Radcliffe in Harry Potter And The Prisoner of Azkaban, which attracted a winning bid of $53,550 (£41,400)….
… Jemisin’s work demonstrates how fantasy can illuminate the truth of contemporary society, blending enthralling narratives with uncomfortable realities. She’s vocal about wanting equality and justice to resonate within her stories, aiming to help readers confront and understand those themes.
Jemisin’s powerful message extends beyond literature; movie adaptations of her work are currently underway. The merging of cinema with her impactful stories opens new doors for broader audiences….
Hear Professor Paul Lerner discuss Orson Welles’ famous “The War of the Worlds” radio broadcast while actors from theatre dybbuk perform excerpts from radio broadcasts and other sources.
(6) A WORD GAME. [Item by Dann.] Under the “fun and games” section of the scroll, I came across Cell Tower a while back. The object of the puzzle is to find all of the words. The letters appear in the correct order, but they may be in consecutive rows. A perfect game is when you find all of the words without having to unselect/correct a word. All words are between 4 and 8 characters long.
My personal trick is to select all of the letters in the words that I find until all of the letters are covered. Then I deselect all of the letters and start selecting each word in turn.
(7) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
1987 – RoboCop. In my opinion, they should have stopped after RoboCop came out. Oh, the next one with Peter Weller reprising his role had life in it but this film, oh, it’s perfect. So let’s talk about this film that premiered thirty- seven years ago in Los Angeles.
Edward Neumeier, a script reader for Warner Bro. who had no scriptwriting credits before this film, had visited the Blade Runner shooting stage and was fascinated by the idea of whether a machine could have a soul. (Of course, we know RoboCop is human, but I guess we’re supposed to forget that.) He and Michael Miner whose first script was, oh guess, wrote this film.
Their script was purchased just a year before production began by Jon Davison for Orion Pictures who would produce this film.
Now they had considerable trouble finding a director as more than a few said no, so they approached Verhoeven who would also turn it down twice because he did not understand the intent of it, particularly the satirical edge. He was convinced by his wife that he should direct it.
So they had a script, a producer and director, but who to play the star of this film? A fairly long list of possible actors was considered with Orion wanting Arnold Schwarzenegger on the basis of being The Terminator but they were persuaded not to cast him when it was noted that in that costume he’d look like the Pillsbury Dough Boy.
Peter Weller had wanted the role and tested well, so he got the job. It didn’t hurt that he was a relative unknown, so the comparatively low salary didn’t bother him. It also helped that he had a following in the SF community because of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.
They had cast Stephanie Zimbalist as Anne Lewis, but she dropped out to be in Remington Steele. (A terribly dated series I discovered the other week — my opinion of course.) Nancy Allen found the script rather interesting and readily agreed to be cast.
In my mind, there’s one more human character of major importance and that’s played by Kurtwood Smith who auditioned for Boddicker and also for the ill-fated Jones. The script said according to later write-ups of the film that Boddicker was scripted to wear glasses so he would look like Heinrich Himmler. Smith in interviews later said he wasn’t told this, and I certainly didn’t see the likeness. Did any of you see it?
Let’s briefly talk about Weller as RoboCop. Remember how smoothly he looked on screen? That was a lie. The suit was a total clusterfuck, sorry Mike, that’s the best word for it — the visor was hard to see out and that meant he couldn’t handle his weapon right, too cumbersome for him to move as he had practiced, and he lost up to three pounds a day while filming because up the weight of it, so he started taking prescription meds which made him, errr, testy.
So he got fired by Verhoeven who considered replacing him with Lance Henriksen but cooler, saner heads prevailed and filming (eventually) resumed.
Did I mention Orion had to increase the budget? More than once?
Of the extensive SFX, I want to mention but one. Well two actually.
The first being Emil’s melting mutation was inspired by The Incredible Melting Man.
Rob Bottin who had previously worked with John Carpenter on The Fog and The Thing designed and constructed Emil’s prosthetics, creating a foam-latex headpiece and matching gloves that gave the appearance of Emil’s skin melting as he said in interviews “off his bones like marshmallow sauce” when his vehicle made the toxic water in that contained immerse him. Cool, very cool.
Then there’s ED-209. The one that RoboCop looks up, not the one he obviously destroyed, was a fully-articulated model of only fiberglass took over four months to build, was seven feet tall, and weighed five hundred pounds. However, all of the other scenes were done by two-foot-high miniature replicas for stop motion animation, all fifty-five shots.
Ok, I’ve prattled on long enough. Did it make money? Was it well received?
Well, the budget wasn’t really high despite Orion (reluctantly) giving it more funding as it cost just under fourteen million and it made nearly four times that at fifty-three million dollars!
Was it well received? What do you think? It nominated for a Hugo at Nolacon II losing to, errr, The Princess Bride. Trying for irony that year, oh voters? I’m going to quote but one critical review from Hillary Mantel of The Spectator: “The film is energetic, visually brilliant and very funny, with a sharp script that is never allowed to hold up the carnage.”
The video game Fortnite is back on mobile phones, four years after Apple and Google pulled it from their app stores. Android users worldwide can install the game, along with two new titles from the publisher, Epic Games, by downloading the company’s new app store.
However, only iPhone users in the EU can follow suit as Epic becomes the highest profile company yet to adopt the looser restrictions forced on Apple by the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
All three games will also be available on Alt Store PAL, the largest of the independent App Stores launched in the EU under Apple’s new terms, said Tim Sweeney, the founder of Epic Games.
“We’re really grateful to the European Commission for not only passing the DMA law, enabling store competition, but also really going in and robustly holding Apple and Google’s feet to the fire to ensure they can’t just obstruct competition,” Sweeney added….
The multiverse of Apple TV Plus’ Dark Matteris about to get bigger as the show heads into its second season. Apple announced on Friday that Dark Matter, Blake Crouch’s adaptation of his own 2016 novel about a physicist who gets sucked into multiple alternate realities, has been renewed for a new batch of episodes….
With all due respect to WWII dramas and Emma Stone satires, no genre has done more to unleash the mad scientist upon the world than the horror film. They are one of scary movies’ most famous characters, just behind the Final Girl and doomed quarterbacks. The two most iconic images of the silent era come from Metropolis (1927) and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), both chilling stories about the havoc of evil doctors. A century later, the mad scientist continues to haunt our movies, even if the inventions themselves do not. “Today, many of the things that would once have seemed like horror-story fodder are scientific reality,” noted TheAtlantic in 2014. “But still, as the boundaries of human knowledge are continually pushed, the trope of the mad scientist endures.”
(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George thought someone would want to know how this movie got made: “Blade: Trinity Pitch Meeting”. Really, he did.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Scott Edelman, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel “Mashup” Dern.]
(1) PAXSON ASSAILANT BYRON DECLES ARRESTED. The Berkeley Scanner reports that Byron DeCles, wanted for his attack on Diana Paxson and her son, Ian, was caught today and charged with attempted murder: “Berkeley double stabbing suspect arrested in Oakland”.
A man who had been wanted by police since Friday in connection with a stabbing in Berkeley that sent two people to the hospital is now in custody, according to booking records.
Byron DeCles, 21, was arrested shortly before 4 a.m. Tuesday in Oakland on a warrant from the Berkeley case, jail records show.
…On Tuesday, DeCles was arrested by OPD on suspicion of attempted murder, battery with serious bodily injury, elder abuse and burglary, according to booking records….
DeCles, who is unhoused, has no prior criminal cases in Alameda County, according to court records online.
… Reached by phone late Tuesday afternoon, Paxson said she had spent the whole day responding to the many well wishes she’d received from supporters and friends….
“We are currently being very, very grateful to the members of our community — our local community and the larger community — who have been sending us energy for protection,” she told The Scanner. “It’s been a very difficult time and we are also incredibly relieved and grateful to the Oakland Police Department for actually being able to find him.”
… Paxson said she and her son were “recovering well” from their injuries.
“We look forward to being able to resume our usual schedule of events with our community,” she said.
She said she and Grey now need to look into several home repairs stemming from Friday’s incident. They plan to call the Family Justice Center in Oakland, which helps victims with a range of services in the aftermath of crimes.
“We’re very happy to hear that there is such a thing,” she said.
Paxson said what happened Friday had been the culmination of “a series of difficulties” with DeCles over the past year, which may have stemmed from or been exacerbated by untreated head injuries linked to multiple vehicle collisions.
“He never went to the hospital to be checked out,” she said. “We’re hoping that at least he’ll get checked out now.”
Paxson said medication can also help with these types of issues, but only if people take it.
“The light bulb has to want to be changed,” she said, adding: “Our whole mental system needs a lot more support than it’s been getting. That’s something to think about.”…
What’s on my mind is overwhelming gratitude that our attacker was arrested by the Oakland police this morning.
Many, many thanks to everyone who has been sending energy for protection and aid in hunting him down.
(2) CORRAIN APOLOGY. Cait Corrain reopened her X.com account today to publish “A sincere apology”, which attributed her surreptitious campaign of one-star reviews against other debut authors to “depression, alcoholism, and substance abuse”, and a “complete psychological breakdown” after starting a new medication. (Click for larger image.)
Many responses in social media, not excerpted here, have been skeptical, or view the statement as inadequate.
Surprisingly, an author found Corrain’s book was still on Amazon, now with a 2027 publication date. Del Rey Books cleared the air.
Del Rey will no longer publish CROWN OF STARLIGHT by Cait Corrain or any other works on that contract.
Nnedi Okorafor’s notes about the shortcomings of Goodreads and the prevalence of this kind of misconduct are well worth thinking about. Thread starts here.
Many of us writers are familiar with the one star reviews of our books on Goodreads BEFORE we've even handed in the final draft of the manuscript and how nothing is done about these.
… The main thing you get from that trailer is that Part Two is just a much, much bigger movie than Part One. Part One had to move all the pieces into place. Now, Paul is becoming the leader of an entire people and will use them to win back their planet. We’re talking war on a planetary scale, which—most excitingly—includes not just one, but multiple sandworms tearing through soldiers. Can you wait to see that shot in IMAX? We can’t….
A jury ruled on Monday that Google had violated antitrust laws to extract fees and limit competition from Epic Games and other developers on its Play mobile app store, in a case that could rewrite the rules on how thousands of businesses make money on Google’s smartphone operating system, Android.
After deliberating for a little more than three hours, the nine-person federal jury sided with Epic Games on all 11 questions in a monthlong trial that was the latest turn in a three-year legal battle.
The jury in San Francisco found that Epic, the maker of the hit game Fortnite, proved that Google had maintained a monopoly in the smartphone app store market and engaged in anticompetitive conduct that harmed the videogame maker.
Google could be forced to alter its Play Store rules, allowing other companies to offer competing app stores and making it easier for developers to avoid the cut it collects from in-app purchases.
Judge James Donato of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California will decide the remedies needed to address Google’s conduct next year. Google said it would appeal the verdict….
In 1968 the books pages of the French newspaper Le Monde excitedly praised an uncompromising new novel, Bound to Violence, going on to salute its author as one of “the rare intellectuals of international stature presented to the world by Black Africa”.
The newspaper’s words, written in tribute to the young Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem, sound condescending today. Back then, however, the intended compliment was genuine and many European critics soon agreed: the publication of Ouologuem’s strange novel really did mark the arrival of a major new talent.
But the literary world can be brutal, and particularly so for a young African novelist living in Paris who was attempting a fresh twist on conventional storytelling.
Fellow African writers began to express shock at Ouologuem’s harsh parody of his own culture. Three years later damaging accusations of plagiarism had also emerged, including a public skirmish with Graham Greene, which ended Ouologuem’s short career. He retreated into the life of a recluse, returned to Mali and died in 2017, having never published again.
Now, 50 years after this scandal, Penguin Classics is to bring out a new English edition of Bound to Violence in a bid to rehabilitate the gifted author and introduce him to new readers.
“I was so exhilarated when I read this book,” said Penguin editor Ka Bradley. “It’s the history of an imaginary African empire called Nakem and whole centuries are dealt with in just a paragraph or two. It’s dizzying.”
The CEO of the parent company of Sports Illustrated was ousted on Monday.
The firing followed a scandal over the publication’s use of AI-generated stories from fake authors, although it was not immediately clear if that was related to the shakeup.
Ross Levinsohn, CEO of The Arena Group, was terminated and Manoj Bhargava was named interim chief executive officer, the company said. No other information was provided, other than that the board met “and took actions to improve the operational efficiency and revenue of the company.”…
(7) AUTHOR’S CANDIDACY SCOTCHED. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] The Tomorrow’s MPs Twitter account reported that a potential candidate for a constituency in Scotland was forced to stand down from the party selection contest, due to the content of novels he had previously written. The tweet links to a piece in The Courier news website, which states:
A long-serving Fife Labour councillor has stood down from an internal contest to stand as the party’s candidate in Glenrothes after concerns were raised about fantasy books he has written.
Insiders expect Altany Craik to issue a statement saying he is withdrawing from the contest for “family reasons”.
But we can reveal that Mr Craik, a supernatural horror author, was directed to stand down because of party reservations about his novels.
Mr Craik had been seeking support from members to stand as the Labour candidate for Glenrothes at the General Election expected next year….
…A source said: “It’s absolutely disgusting.”
“They’re saying he’s not a suitable candidate because his books are too sexy and satanic.”…
…His profile on Amazon includes titles such as “Innocence Lost”, with readers praising the books and it’s (sic) protagonist, Father Andrew Steel.
One reviewer wrote: “This book has graphic descriptions of gore, mutilation, rape, and foul language. But getting past that, it is a worthwhile read.”…
(8) GUESS WHO HAS A NEW NEIGHBOR? [Item by John King Tarpinian.] John Waters’ star adjoins Ray Bradbury’s on the Hollywood Walk of Fame
(9) CHENGDU WORLDCON ROUNDUP. [Item by Ersatz Culture.]
Post about the Chengdu Worldcon receives complaint from con organizers
This November 13th post (archive.org backup copy) by an account using the name 四海朝阳/Sihai Zhaoyang is mostly about the history of the Chengdu Worldcon, although there’s some relatively brief coverage of the actual con itself – mainly the online aspects – towards the end. Some extracts via Google Translate, with manual edits:
On January 17, 2022, the official WeChat public account of the Chengdu Worldcon released volunteer recruitment information. However, according to feedback from science fiction fans who submitted their resumes, there were no updates after their submission, and there was no mention of subsidies or compensation for volunteers. In actuality, volunteers during the conference were recruited from surrounding schools.
On January 20, 2022 [this is an error/typo, it should read “2023”], some science fiction fans on Twitter discovered that the Chengdu Science Fiction Conference had officially announced that the conference would be rescheduled from August to October 2023, and the location changed from the Century City International Convention and Exhibition Center to the Chengdu Science Fiction Museum. This news was not announced to Chinese fans at that time, nor were those who voted that year notified. (i.e. the group of science fiction fans who were also members of the 81st World Science Fiction Convention). It was not until that night that the notice of the postponement and venue change was hastily issued.
In fact, this change had been known about for a long time. In May 2022, a science fiction fan discovered the news on a government bidding website that the Chengdu Science Fiction Museum and Qingrong Lake Science Fiction Park would be built in Pidu District, Chengdu, and posted this on Weibo. After making the news public, they received a message from the organizing committee, ordering them to delete their Weibo post. However, coverage of the same topic could still be seen in local Chengdu media. At this time, the estimated completion time was the end of June [presumably 2023], and the exhibition completion time would be the end of July….
The organizing committee of the Chengdu Worldcon also began to travel to various cities to conduct research with local science fiction fans. However, of the university science fiction clubs with the largest number of science fiction fans, very few received relevant notifications. During this process, the organizing committee members who did not understand science fiction once again made a joke. Their main person in charge had never heard of such a thing as a “light saber” and vowed to invite Shinichi Hoshi,
Kobayashi Yasumi, Douglas Adams and others mentioned by fans, despite all those people passing away long ago…
[During the preparation period in the days leading up to the con] something ridiculous happened. A staff member from Science Fiction World entered the venue with Liu Cixin’s Hugo Award trophy from 2015, to set it up as an exhibit. However, they were stopped by the security guard at the door, because the trophy was too long and was a sharp object…
Of course, we cannot ignore the “good” side of this conference, and that side has nothing to do with this organizing committee and comes purely from the lovely fans. Thanks to the efforts of some of the staff from Science Fiction World, the science fiction associations of many schools took a group photo at the Galaxy Awards Ceremony for the “Best Science Fiction Society Award”. The number of participating societies has become the highest in history. Science fiction fans communicated with each other at the conference, from badges to ribbons, embodying the ingenuity and wonderful ideas of fantasy fans. After RiverFlow was taken to hospital, many science fiction fans and science fiction authors rushed there spontaneously and waited all night. Online and offline, most of the problems encountered by science fiction fans were solved by other enthusiastic science fiction fans. No matter how many times a question was asked, they never tired of answering it…
Has the Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention had a good or bad impact on Chinese science fiction? In the short term, the answer does not seem to be available.
A couple of days later, on November 15th, there was a follow-up post (archive.org copy), stating that a complaint about the original post had been received from the Worldcon organizers. A screenshot of the complaint was included; a Google Translate rendition to English is below, which I haven’t edited in any way.
The following content is not officially provided by WeChat and should be filled in by the rights holder when making a complaint. Please operate with caution.
This article involves malicious attacks against individuals, institutions and governments, seriously affects the government’s credibility, denies the work results of the Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention Organizing Committee, and misguides public opinion.
As the only legal entity of the 2023 Chengdu World Science Fiction Conference, the Chengdu Science Fiction Association strictly abides by the World Science Fiction Association charter and relevant regulations from application to hosting. The theme salon, guest reception, Hugo Award selection and award, and ticket sales all comply with relevant requirements. Said untrue situation.
The original poster responds by stating that their post was based on public information, whether from the con itself, or posted online by other members of the public, and argues that ‘it is precisely the organizing committee of the Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention itself that “seriously affects the government’s credibility.”‘ (via Google Translate, again with no manual edits).
It’s not clear to me whether this complaint had any weight behind it, legal or otherwise. As I understand it, once a post has been made public on Weixin/WeChat, only a small number of edits can be made, so presumably any response would have involved taking the post down rather than removing any offending text. Given that the post is still up a month later, the complaint seems to have had zero effect – other than provoking further coverage in this Weibo post by SF Light Year, and in issue 16 of the Zhejiang University SF association news summary, and now here, causing a Streisand effect.
Xingyun (Nebula) event to be held at the Chengdu SF Museum in May 2024
This event appears to comprise three elements (via Google Translate, so these may not be the official English names):
The 2024 Children’s Science Fiction Conference
The 2024 International Science Fiction Summit Forum
The 15th Annual Xingyun (Nebula) Awards – I think these may have been previously announced, although I don’t think it was covered here on File 770.
Note: Looking at the dates of previous SFWA Nebula conferences, it wouldn’t surprise if both events take place on the same weekend.
Video of an SF themed bus in Chengdu
This three-minute video was filmed on the final day of the con, and posted to Bilibili a couple of days later. It shows an SF-themed bus, followed by a timelapse sequence of the route it takes. I’m sure people who attended the Worldcon may need to correct me, but I think the red and blue banners that hang from most of the streetlights were also promoting the con?
Note that these seem to be buses running a public route, different from the red ones that I think were dedicated to transporting Worldcon attendees, and which can be seen in the first photo.
When location scouting for Oppenheimer, production designer Ruth De Jong was tasked with finding a location to recreate Los Alamos. Although the actual town of Los Alamos was too modernized to use for the period piece, De Jong and her team spent some time there for research. “I began laying out the expanse of the town with our set designer Jim Hewitt,” she says. “We took these drawings, with plans and elevations, and made foam core architectural models in a quarter-inch scale.”
De Jong and her team landed on Ghost Ranch, which is along the same mountain range as the existing Los Alamos. “We had this epic town that we wanted to do,” she says, “but the U.S. government had $2 million and a few years and I had nowhere near that.” Neither De Jong nor director Christopher Nolan wanted to use CGI for extensions on the town, so De Jong opted for building exteriors and shooting the interiors at the actual Los Alamos, like Oppenheimer’s house, which has been largely untouched since he lived there.…
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born December 12, 1946 — Josepha Sherman. (Died 2012.) Josepha Sherman was a remarkable woman. She was another individual who died far too young. Author, folklorist, and anthologist, I knew her for a number of years up to the time of her death, by email and phone, though I lost touch with her a few years before she died.
She wrote dozens of short stories and novels, including her Compton Crook Award-winning novel The Shining Falcon. She was prolific with Child of Faerie, Child of Earth, A Strange and Ancient Name, Windleaf, Gleaming Bright, King’s Son, Magic’s Son and Son of Darkness being some of her other novels.
She also penned five novels set in the Trek verse co-authored with Susan Shwartz including Vulcan’s Forge and Vulcan’s Heart. She wrote a lot of media tie dipping into the universes of Andromeda and Buffy, Bardic Choices (with Mercedes Lackey) and even Highlander as she told me she loved Adrian Paul there.
So let’s finish off by telling you that she was a Winter Queen at Green Man as was Ellen Kushner and Jane Yolen. All it means is they get to write a Speech and get chocolate. Somehow that charms them, so here’s Joshepa’s meditation on Winter: “Josepha Sherman’s Winter Queen Speech”.
You know Pixelsdasher and Pixeldancer And Pixelprancer and Pixelvixen, Pixelcomet and Pixelcupid And Pixeldonner and Pixelblitzen. But do you recall The most famous scroll title of all? Godstalk the click-boxed title Had a very shiny scroll And if you ever saw it You would even feed the troll All of the other titles Used to laugh and scroll its names They never let poor Godstalk Play in any wordle games
Then one foggy Christmas Eve Mike came to say, “Jetpacks not working, Won’t you scroll my File tonight?”
Then all the Filers loved it And they shouted it out with glee, “Godstalk as a scroll title will go down in history!”
With apologies to … everyone I guess.
(13) FANAC’S APA PANEL NOW ONLINE.
APAs Everywhere with Fred Lerner, Christina Lake, Amy Thomson and Tom Whitmore
In this wonderful FanHistory Zoom panel, our speakers, all long-time participants (in multiple different APAs), speak about their experiences with APA life. During this 2-part recording, you’ll hear their personal fannish origin stories and APA experiences, along with a wealth of fascinating commentary on the nature and purpose of APAs. From “fanac in a corner” to “intentional community”, this video provides thoughtful, insightful discussion on why APAs have been a mainstay of science fiction fandom.
Of particular interest are the discussions of “standing waves” of cultural issues that run through our APAs and the ways that science fiction fandom has dealt with cultural challenges. Fandom had notable failures (and successes) dealing with social issues long before the general culture dealt with them.
Of course, it’s not all social commentary. You’ll hear the story of APAs used in divorce proceedings, APAs which may have been created to bedevil particular individuals, and the APA which didn’t live up to its banner of “the 13 nastiest bastards in fandom”. You’ll learn why APAs thrive, even in this era of instant online gratification. Other topics: privacy issues, digital preservation of APAs, a soft toy APA, APAs you wouldn’t join, Langdon charts, and of course, audience Q&A.
E3’s decades-long history has been peppered with ups and downs. The annual Los Angeles-based gaming expo saw a decade of steady growth after it was founded in the mid-90s. The mid-00s, on the other hand, were an altogether different story, as the event struggled, downsized and moved out of the LA Convention Center.
Opening the industry-only event to the public breathed new life into the event the following decade, however, until 2020 saw E3 — and the rest of the world — suddenly grind to a halt. Since then, the show has, understandably, struggled.
The in-person event was canceled courtesy of COVID, and a virtual version failed to materialize by that summer. Show organizer, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), did manage an online event in 2021, only to once again cancel things in full the following year. After failing to garner enough interest, there was no E3 2023, nor will the event return in 2024.
Given its recent history, there was little surprise this morning, when the ESA announced that E3 is now gone for good. Such decisions are never easy to make, and big organizations/events take a while to wind down. The group no doubt wanted to exhaust all feasible options before officially throwing in the towel for good….
Paddington, Michael Bond’s “very rare sort of bear”, is to star in a new stage musical. The production, announced on Tuesday, is being developed by Sonia Friedman’s company, whose hits include Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and will have music and lyrics by McFly’s Tom Fletcher. It is currently being workshopped with the title Paddington: The Musical and has a UK premiere planned for 2025.
The show is adapted from Bond’s bestselling children’s books – the first of which was published 65 years ago – and from the popular live-action film versions which feature Ben Whishaw as the voice of a CGI Paddington. How the marmalade-loving, accident-prone bear will be represented on stage has not yet been revealed….
Dr. Stephenie Lucas Oney is 75, but she still turns to her father for advice. How did he deal with racism, she wonders. How did he succeed when the odds were stacked against him?
The answers are rooted in William Lucas’s experience as a Black man from Harlem who made his living as a police officer, F.B.I. agent and judge. But Dr. Oney doesn’t receive the guidance in person. Her father has been dead for more than a year.
Instead, she listens to the answers, delivered in her father’s voice, on her phone through HereAfter AI, an app powered by artificial intelligence that generates responses based on hours of interviews conducted with him before he died in May 2022.
His voice gives her comfort, but she said she created the profile more for her four children and eight grandchildren.
“I want the children to hear all of those things in his voice,” Dr. Oney, an endocrinologist, said from her home in Grosse Pointe, Mich., “and not from me trying to paraphrase, but to hear it from his point of view, his time and his perspective.”…
… HereAfter AI was introduced in 2019, two years after the debut of StoryFile, which produces interactive videos in which subjects appear to make eye contact, breathe and blink as they respond to questions. Both generate answers from responses users gave to prompts like “Tell me about your childhood” and “What’s the greatest challenge you faced?”…
… StoryFile offers a “high-fidelity” version in which someone is interviewed in a studio by a historian, but there is also a version that requires only a laptop and webcam to get started. Stephen Smith, a co-founder, had his mother, Marina Smith, a Holocaust educator, try it out. Her StoryFile avatar fielded questions at her funeral in July.
According to StoryFile, about 5,000 people have made profiles. Among them was the actor Ed Asner, who was interviewed eight weeks before his death in 2021.
The company sent Mr. Asner’s StoryFile to his son Matt Asner, who was stunned to see his father looking at him and appearing to answer questions.
“I was blown away by it,” Matt Asner said. “It was unbelievable to me about how I could have this interaction with my father that was relevant and meaningful, and it was his personality. This man that I really missed, my best friend, was there.”…
For the first time in its 60-year history, Doctor Who is releasing an official Christmas single.
The Goblin Song, written by the show’s composer, Murray Gold, with lyrics by Russell T Davies, is raising money for Children in Need….
…The music video features a clip from the forthcoming Doctor Who Christmas special, in which Ncuti Gatwa will make his full-length debut as the Doctor, alongside Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday, who joins as a regular Tardis companion.
During the video, the Doctor and Ruby are seen crawling through a pirate ship while goblins sing about eating a baby. Gold described the song as “fiendishly catchy”, adding: “I don’t like these goblins – and you won’t either.”
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Ersatz Culture, Rob Thornton, Rose Embolism, Anne Marble, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Hampus Eckerman.]
N.K. Jemisin has already made history by winning three consecutive Hugo awards for each entry in her Broken Earth trilogy: The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, and The Stone Sky. Now, the perhaps inevitable next step is here, with a just-announced big-screen deal with Sony’s TriStar Pictures that will see the author adapting her own novels.
Deadline broke the news, noting that it was a “seven figure deal,” and Jemisin herself shared the story on Twitter (further down the thread, she joyfully emphasized the part about “the author will adapt the books herself”).
…Sharp-eyed readers may recall that The Fifth Season was, at one time, being developed as a TV series for TNT—but that was back in 2017, and obviously the situation has changed.
All bidders for the 2023 Worldcon have agreed the voting fee will be $50 USD. If you are at least a Supporting Member of DisCon III, you’re eligible to vote for the 2023 Worldcon Site Selection. The voting fee is in addition to your DisCon III membership. All site selection voters will become Supporting Members of the 2023 Worldcon regardless of who wins. All money collected from the voting fee will be turned over to the winning bid. Further details regarding the voting process will be announced later this summer.
…One managing director at the Big Five, who asked to remain anonymous, said he saw “a strange contradiction” in his workplace where everyone was positive about diversity, but where some also want to “pick and choose the kind of diversity we want”.
“If we want to be a publisher and employer for everyone, our publishing has to reflect that. And it becomes a necessary inevitability that we publish books and authors of viewpoints some of our staff don’t agree with or indeed, very, very actively disagree with,” he says. “That tension is not entirely new, but for whatever reason, it seems to be sort of boiling over now. It is complicated, but also, I think, quite stimulating.”
At political publisher Biteback, editorial director Olivia Beattie finds it frustrating that the debate is “so often framed as younger editors being oversensitive, rather than acknowledging that what senior editors choose to publish has an impact on the terms of public debate.
“Any half-decent junior editor learns very quickly how to separate their personal ideological positions from the material they’re editing, because that’s a crucial part of the job,” she says. She believes the publishing industry skews more leftwing than the book-buying public, making it inevitable that staff will work on books they disagree with.
“But people aren’t having these kinds of conflicts over simple differences of political opinion, as you might assume from listening to the debate on it,” she says. “Nobody’s refusing to work on a book because it doesn’t fit with their party affiliation: what’s been at stake has virtually always been a question of whether the book or the author is responsible for inciting prejudice against already marginalised and oppressed minorities. That’s an absolutely valid area for debate. It’s also not always clear-cut – some people will be deafened by a dog-whistle that others can’t hear.”
Once junior editors are “up in arms”, Beattie believes that is proof of enough concern to warrant an internal conversation. “Ironically, the people railing against ‘cancel culture’ very often seem to be trying to shut down criticism themselves,” she says….
(4) MELLOW YELLOW. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the June 2 Financial Times, Tom Faber discusses the antitrust lawsuit Fortnite creator Epic Games filed against Apple.
Most ludicrous was the debate reported by the tech news website The Verge around Peely, a humanoid banana who is something of a mascot for Fortnite. Apple’s lawyers displayed an image of the figure in his ‘Agent Peely’ guise, saying, ‘We thought it better to go with the suit than the naked banana, since we are in federal court this morning, implying that a banana without clothes is somehow obscene. Hours later Epic’s attorney returned to this ridiculous proposition by asking Epic’s VP of marketing whether Peely without clothes would be ‘inappropriate’. Hi response was a firm ‘no.’: ‘It’s just a banana, ma’am.’
(6) AMERICA: THE MOTION PICTURE. This Netflix movie asks. “What if America’s greatest political leaders were superheroes who know four letter words and can smash things?”
(7) BOOKSELLER OBIT. [Item by Tom Whitmore.] Bob Brown (Robert L. Brown of B. Brown and Associates in Seattle) recently died of esophageal cancer.
Bob was pretty directly responsible for me becoming a bookseller: he and Clint Bigglestone and I did a rare book mailorder business in the early 1970s (50 years ago!). He continued to maintain his business, in conjunction with his other work of selling space and time (for advertising) up until right before his death. Anyone who went to big conventions and collected books probably knew him — he was a regular dealer. And he always had interesting books. His personal specialty was 19th Century SF and fantasy, but he had plenty of modern books as well; he also dealt in mysteries, like so many SF dealers. His other passions were his family and fishing. His passing leaves a major hole in the field. I’ll miss him.
PS: Please note that this is not the Bob Brown of B-Cubed Press. It’s too easy to get them confused.
(8) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
June 4, 1982 – On this date in 1982, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan premiered. Directed by Nicholas Meyer and produced by Robert Sallin, the screenplay was by Jack B. Sowards off a story by Harve Bennett and Jack B. Sowards. It starred the entire original Trek cast plus guest stars of Bibi Besch, Merritt Butrick, Paul Winfield, Kirstie Alley and Ricardo Montalbán. Gene Roddenberry was not involved in its production. It was a box office success and critics really, really liked it. It’s generally considered the best of all the Trek films ever produced. It would finish second to Bladerunner at ConStellation for Best Dramatic Presentation. Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes give it a stellar ninety percent rating.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born June 4, 1894 – Patricia Lynch. Interwove Irish rural life and fantasy. In The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey (here’s a Jack Yeats illustration) and 3 sequels, children meet the Salmon of Knowledge and Fionn mac Cumhaill (pronounced roughly “fin m’cool”), are replaced by mischievous changelings, and like that; in Brogeen of the Stepping Stones and 11 sequels the leprechaun Brogeen keeps running away from home, with his elephant companion Trud. Fifty novels, two hundred shorter stories. (Died 1972) [JH]
Born June 4, 1916 – Ozma Baum Mantele. First granddaughter of Frank Baum. The Lost Princess of Oz was dedicated to her. It was one of her last wishes that Baum’s manuscript of his last Oz book (Glinda of Oz) be donated to the Library of Congress; done, the year after her death. “Memories of My Grandmother Baum”, “Ozcot, My Second Home”, and “Fairy Tales Can Come True If You’re Young at Heart” in The Baum Bugle; see also its “Baum Family Questionnaire”. (Died 1999) [JH]
Born June 4, 1930 – Steve Schultheis, age 91. Coined “Beastley’s on the Bayou” when Beatley’s hotel on Indian Lake, Ohio, wouldn’t admit African-American Bev Clark to Midwestcon IV. Wrote (with Virginia Schultheis) the song “Captain Future Meets Gilbert & Sullivan”. Retrieved the 15th Worldcon’s gavel for the Goon Defective Agency, in what proved to be as true to life as the Agency itself (John Berry wrote up the Agency, satirizing himself as Goon Bleary). Instrumental in composing the World Science Fiction Society constitution adopted by the 21st Worldcon. [JH]
Born June 4, 1951 — Wendy Pini, 70. With husband Richard, responsible for Elfquest which won them a Balrog. Over the years Elfquest has been self-published by the Pinis through their own company Warp Graphics, then Marvel Comics, then the Pinis again, more recently DC Comics and then Dark Horse Comics. Everything prior to 2013 is free online at the Elfquest Comic Viewer. Be prepared to spend hours lost in great reading! (CE)
Born June 4, 1960 — Kristine Kathryn Rusch, 61. If you’ve not discovered the delights of her Diving Universe series, you’re in for a treat — it’s that good. Her Retrieval Artist series is one that can be read in no particular order so is a great deal of fun no matter where you start. Other than those two series, I’ve not read deeply of her, so other recommendations are welcome. Oh, and she won the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Her Website is here; don’t miss her appreciation of A.J. Budrys. (CE)
Born June 4, 1953 – Pam Fremon, F.N. Chaired two Boskones; worked on 47th, 62nd, 66th Worldcons (maybe more if I remembered better). Elected a Fellow of NESFA (New England SF Ass’n; service). Here’s a photo of some watermelon art for the Orlando in 2001 Worldcon bid. (Died 2012) [JH]
Born June 4, 1964 — Sean Pertwee, 57. Let’s see, where did I see him first? Oh, of course, playing Sheriff Hugh Beringar on Cadfael but that’s not genre, is it? Captain Heinz in “Trenches of Hell, Part 2 “, on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles which was his first genre role followed being Pilot Smith on Event Horizon and Macbeth in a UK film of that name the same year. He did a bit of low budget horror playing Bradley Cortese in Tale of the Mummy and likewise in being Sergeant Harry G. Wells in Dog Soldiers. There were some fairly low budget SF as well, say Father in Equilibrium. Not to mention Brother Proteus in Ultramarines: A Warhammer 40,000 Movie which I dearly want to see! All of which gets redeemed by his Inspector Lestrade in Elementary, a stunning take on that character. And then there’s his Alfred in Gotham.
Born June 4, 1969 – Ralph Voltz, age 52. German-born illustrator now of North Carolina. Four hundred fifty covers, and much else, in and out of our field. Here is This Is My Funniest; here is The Nakk and the Cat (Nakks are in the Perry Rhodan universe); here is “Star Wars” on Trial. [JH]
Born June 4, 1972 — Joe Hill, 49. I’ve met him once or twice down the years as he shows up here in Portland for signings at both book shops and comic shops. Nice guy like his father. Actually the whole family is amazingly nice. Locke & Key is a superb graphic novel series and I’m fond of all of his short stories, particularly those collected in 20th Century Ghosts. I’ve got Full Throttle, his latest collection in my digital reading pile. I notice that though he’s not yet won a Hugo, he’s won a fistful of Stokers, many BFAs, a World Fantasy Award and even an International Horror Guild Award. (CE)
Born June 4, 1975 — Angelina Jolie, 46. I really liked her two Tomb Raider films and thought Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was a really cool film with her role being quite magnificent. I never saw her early Cyborg 2 undertaking but think Hackers and her role as Kate “Acid Burn” Libby was rather good. I’ve not seen, nor have any desire to see, her Maleficent films. (CE)
Born June 4, 1984 – Xia Jia, age 37. Two dozen short stories so far (a dozen and a half available in English; E-book collection A Summer Beyond Your Reach appeared Apr 2020). In “The Demon-Enslaving Flask” James Clerk Maxwell meets a demon, with footnotes. “A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight” shows what at first seems a haunted keep, as in millennia of Chinese stories, but proves to be a decayed far-future theme park with cyborgs. Under the name by which she earned a Ph.D. she is a university lecturer in China. [JH]
Born June 4, 1991 — Jordan Danger, 30. She is best known for her role as Zoe Carter on Eureka. (Now inexplicably renamed A Town Called Eureka in syndication.) She also showed up in Ragin Cajun Redneck Gators which as horror is genre of sorts, plus the SF films, Higher Power and Beyond the Sky. And even a vampire film, Living Among Us. All low budget, all straight to DVD productions. (CE)
(10) COMICS SECTION.
Wulffmorgenthaler-36envisions the day water is more expensive than oil. Lise Andreasen translates the caption from Danish: “Listen up, soldiers. This is your new equipment for our incredibly peaceful and diplomatic mission. The willow branch is to look for water, and the bazooka is for diplomacy, if they won’t give you their water…”
…and I found that I can’t post or comment for 28 days. That also includes liking apparently I tried to like a post and this came up.
And if you scroll through here there’s all of these posts dating back to June 15, 2020 uh that they say violates their community standards. Now I don’t know what these posts are. You can’t click on any of these nor tell what they are uh so it’s all guesswork but I’m gonna guess i posted some memes that somebody went through and combed through my account and then uh tried to harass me here because this is just too many instances all at once. Very very odd uh that this showed up now. I don’t say anything that salty uh usually. I do comment perhaps on some globo homo stuff with my memes especially uh you know with pride month uh you know being in our faces constantly with their little fake corporate shilling that they always do. And I also comment a lot on uh I’d say election integrity, and uh you know certain uh shots that people are getting at this point so maybe that’s what had to do with it i don’t know. But uh one sort of post going through that’s one thing but all of these it looks like somebody went back and combed through my stuff just to try to target me now. Of course within a couple hours of that I found out that the same thing had happened on Twitter.
So I’m suspended for a 30 day on Facebook uh seven day on Twitter for a recent meme I posted which was making fun of the corporate pride month. And we’ll call it corporate pride month because that’s what it is. That’s it and so they made me remove it and I’m stuck without being able to market anywhere except for here for that amount of time so they are trying to hit my social media accounts and this comes in the wake where I’ve actually got some big news in the pipeline…
As I type this, a new film has been released which offers a backstory into the motivations of the Disney villainess Cruella de Vil, a character who needs no introduction (or even, some might say, explanation) but has been given one anyway. I haven’t seen this new film, Cruella, which stars Emma Stone and sets itself up as a pseudo-prequel to Disney’s live-action 101 Dalmatians film from 1996, which starred Glenn Close as the diabolical, piebald, puppy-stealing termagant. I probably won’t see the new film (simply because I’m not very interested in Disney’s live-action remakes and such), but I’m not writing this to knock it. All I can say about it is that I’ve noticed that, in preparation for or perhaps inspired by its release, many have taken to watching or rewatching Disney’s original 1961 film. To which I say: good.
One Hundred and One Dalmatians (which IS a crime film) is a timeless joy, and an aesthetic marvel. If you have seen it (or even if you haven’t) you probably know the gist, but here’s a deeper dive….
(13) TRAVEL TRIVIA. “In the 1950s and 60s a UFO was described as cigar shaped. Now a UFO is described as TicTac shaped,” notes John King Tarpinian.
Over 500 extremely high energy cosmic rays (PeVatrons) have been detected.
These are atomic nuclei travelling close to the speed of light. PeVatrons have energies around 100 times that of the particles generated in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. They have been detected before but their source is something of a mystery. This is because magnetic fields in space bend their trajectories. However, when they interact with the interstellar medium they generate gamma rays and these do travel in a straight line. The researchers have identified one source, the Crab Nebula. They have detected a dozen sources so doubling the known PeVatron sources. These sources seem to lie along the Galactic Plane. Sources could be other supernovae remnants, pulsar winds and related to the Galactic centre black hole: we just don’t know. However, we may learn more when the Cherenkov telescope Array in Chile and the Southern Wide-field Gamma Ray Observatory in S. America come on-line.
…In this new effort, the researchers noted that evidence from other studies has found some signs of similarities between testis and the human brain. Intrigued, they initiated a study that involved analyzing the proteins produced by different parts of the body and then comparing them to see similarities. The researchers found the greatest similarities between the brain and testicles—13,442 of them. This finding suggests that the brain and the testicles share the highest number of genes of any organs in the body….
…Plutarch’s observations about mola, the supposed products of parthenogenesis, almost definitely referred to molar pregnancies, birth defects incompatible with life, or other conditions that lacked a clear medical explanation at the time. But my paranormal-obsessed brain took the idea and ran with it in entirely different directions. Plutarch couldn’t have imagined that, roughly eighteen hundred years later, a young woman would encounter his general idea and instantly feel inspired to write a thriller about virgin birth.
And yet, that’s exactly what happened. I’m a sucker for a good origin story, and this one felt big. What if Plutarch was right, and women who strayed too far from a rational male influence—women who thought for themselves—could literally imagine their own children into being? What if a woman’s unruly brain gave rise to an unruly child, conceived without the “soul” that a father would imbue?…
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Michael Toman, Tom Whitmore, Lise Andreasen, Jennifer Hawthorne, Rob Thornton, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, John Hertz, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day bill.]
…Mr. Clark was kind enough to talk with me about the music behind his new novella, the novella’s long (and then fast) journey to publication, how the novella got personal, and more. Let’s get to the interview!
NOAF: You mention on your blog that this story was in your head for a long time before you wrote it down. Can you tell us about when and why you decided to write the story down? And while you were drafting it out, did were there any scenes or characters that ended up completely differently than how you had originally imagined them?
P. Djèlí Clark: Yeah, the story was definitely with me for a while—mostly in dreamt up scenes and characters with a smattering of a plot. Visuals or a song could send me daydreaming for a minute. As I’m prone to do, it’s only when I have a full sketch of a story in my head that I start jotting down notes. That was in early August 2016. I sat down and wrote up Ring Shout from start to ending, on the Notes feature on my iPhone. Then I put it down and went and lived the rest of my life. It wasn’t until April of 2019 that it started to become “a thing.” I was sitting in a DC café, on the phone with my editor Diana Pho about a book contract for an unrelated completed full-length novel. The book world being the book world, it probably wouldn’t come out until 2021. My novella The Haunting of Tram Car 015 had just been released and that meant there’d be this big gap before I was next published. Diana asked if I might be interested in doing another novella in between—that is, if I had any ideas. I pitched two concepts, one of which was Ring Shout. It ended up in the contract.
Then came the real trouble. I had nothing written but a set of notes from almost 3 years back and a head full of ideas. I had until about September to turn it into a working story. Planned to get it done that summer. But nope. Academic work and copyedits on the unrelated full-length novel pretty much devoured my writing time. Finally, I got started on August 30, 2019. Two days before it was due. Had to ask for an extension. Then somehow, in the next four weeks, got it written. By that time whole new characters had been added, scenes had changed, and elements of the overall plot had been rewritten—so that it only resembles in passing those original notes from 2016. But hey, that’s the writing process….
Over the past seven months, the Eboard Con Chair Team, along with Assistant Con Chair Vivian Abraham and the Division Heads, have been working hard to determine what we need to recreate the Arisia experience in an online-only convention. Our first step was to make sure that Arisia is squared away with its hotel contract. Hotel liaison Wendy Verschoor, along with Eboard President Nicholas “Phi” Shectman, have been in talks with the Westin Boston Waterfront and Aloft regarding our Arisia 2021 contract. As of September 15, 2020 we were able to come to an agreement. We will not need to have a hotel presence this year, and our continuing contract with the Westin Boston Marriott and Aloft will resume in 2022.
A federal judge presiding over a high-stakes antitrust lawsuit between Apple and Epic Games — maker of the popular video game Fortnite — repeatedly slammed Epic on Monday on its legal theories and tactics in the company’s case against the iOS App Store, a court battle that could reshape the digital economy.
Epic is seeking a temporary court order that would force Apple to unblock Fortnite from its iOS App Store. Apple removed the game in August after Epic pushed a software update to the app that allowed players to circumvent Apple’s proprietary in-app payment system — a move that is contractually prohibited.
…Judge Gonzalez Rogers looked skeptically at many of Epic’s claims, explicitly telling the company several times in the hearing she was not persuaded by its arguments or its strategy.
Epic knew that it was breaching its contract with Apple when it published the update, but did it anyway, she said, accusing the company of dishonesty.
Apple has justified its app store policies partly as a way to protect consumers from security risks and malicious software. Epic has countered that it is a credible business that has been on the iOS App Store for years and poses no security threat. But Gonzalez Rogers said that is not the issue.
“You did something, you lied about it by omission, by not being forthcoming. That’s the security issue. That’s the security issue!” Gonzalez Rogers told Epic. “There are a lot of people in the public who consider you guys heroes for what you guys did, but it’s still not honest.”
Epic’s attorneys acknowledged that the company breached its agreement with Apple but claimed Epic was simply refusing to comply with an anti-competitive contract, and that forcing a legal battle was part of Epic’s plan.
…It also cited Apple’s in-app payment system as an example of illegal tying — when a company bundles two products together for anti-competitive gain.
But there is no tying going on with Apple’s in-app payment system, Gonzalez Rogers observed.
“I’m not particularly persuaded,” she said of the in-app payment mechanism. “I just don’t see this as a separate and distinct product.”
Nor did the judge buy Epic’s argument that Apple has harmed the distribution of Fortnite because of Apple’s exclusive control of the iOS App Store. Fortnite players on iOS have a variety of choices to access the game even if it is no longer available on iOS, she said.
“Walled gardens have existed for decades,” she said. “Nintendo has had a walled garden. Sony has had a walled garden. Microsoft has had a walled garden. What Apple’s doing is not much different… It’s hard to ignore the economics of the industry, which is what you’re asking me to do.”
(5) ACCIO ERRAT! [Item by Olav Rokne.] Writing in Forbes, film critic Scott Mendelson examines the recent announcement that Warner Brothers will be making another Harry Potter-related movie, despite the diminishing returns from the franchise, and the cavalcade of transphobia from J.K. Rowling. “4 Reasons Warner Bros. Is Still Making J.K. Rowling’s Third ‘Fantastic Beasts’ Movie”.
He writes: “In a skewed way, stopping now and admitting that the Fantastic Beasts franchise was a failed experiment would probably do Warner Media, a publicly-traded company, more harm than just bringing the story to a natural conclusion and taking their commercial licks along the way. Call it sunk-cost fallacy.”
(6) JOHN THE BALLADEER NEWS. The latest Haffner Press newsletter includes an update on the forthcoming 500+-page volume, Manly Wade Wellman’s The Complete John The Balladeer – with a link to preview five examples of Tim Kirk’s illustrations. Here’s one of them:
(7) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
September 30, 2005. The Joss Whedon-written Serenity premiered. The sequel, or perhaps continuation, or perhaps finale of, the short-lived Firefly series, it reunited the entire cast from the series. It would overwhelmingly win the Hugo Best Dramatic Presentation at L.A. Con IV beating out The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Batman Begins and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. It holds an excellent eighty two percent rating by audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born September 30, 1915 – Richard D. Mullen. Founder of Science Fiction Studies; co-editor (with Darko Suvin) 1973-1978; returned as editor, managing editor, and like that, 1991. Two books of selected SFS articles, two more on P.K. Dick (with DS & others); essays, reviews, in SFS, Extrapolation, Foundation, Riverside Quarterly. (Died 1998) [JH]
Born September 30, 1926 – Gillian Avery. Historian of children’s education and literature. The Guardian Children’s Literature prize for Edwardian father-son novel A Likely Lad. For us, Huck and Her Time Machine (note pronoun); a dozen others; nonfiction including a Life of Juliana Ewing and an ed’n of Emily Pepys’ Journal (this branch of the family pronounces their name peppis). (Died 2016) [JH]
Born September 30, 1949 – D Potter. Fanziner, photographer, railroad fan. Fan Guest of Honor at Balticon 16. Active in various apas including APA-Q, FAPA, Myriad. Appreciations by Our Gracious Host and Avedon Carol here. (Died 2017) [JH]
Born September 30, 1950 — Laura Esquivel, 70. Mexican author of Como agua para chocolate, Like Water for Chocolate in English. Magic realism and cooking with more than a small soupçon of eroticism. Seriously the film is amazing as is the book. ISFDB says she’s also written La ley del amor (The Law of Love) which I’ve not read. (CE)
Born September 30, 1951 — Simon Hawke, 69. Author of the quite superb Wizard of 4th Street series as well as the TimeWars series. He has written Battlestar Galactica, Trek, Friday the 13th, Predator and Dungeons & Dragons novels as well as the genre adjacent Shakespeare & Smythe mysteries which bear titles such as Much Ado About Murder. (CE)
Born September 30, 1954 – Sylvia McNicoll, 66. Two dozen children’s novels, of which two for us. Silver Birch; four Hamilton Arts Council awards (Body Swap won 2019 Literary Award for Fiction); several more. Website. [JH]
Born September 30, 1960 — Nicola Griffith, 60. Editor with Stephen Pagel of the genre gender anthologies, Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction, Bending the Landscape: Fantasy (World Fantasy Award and Lambda winner) and Bending the Landscape: Horror. Ammonite won both the Lambda and Otherwise Awards. She also garnered a Lambda and a Nebula for the most excellent Slow River. All of her novels are available from the usual digital suspects. (CE)
Born September 30, 1972 – Sheree Renée Thomas, 48. Dark Matter, a NY Times Notable Book of the Year, won World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology, then Dark Matter, Reading the Bones won another; Fall 2016 Obsidian; Jul 2018 Strange Horizons (with Rasha Abdulhadi, Erin Roberts); Aug 2018 Apex. A dozen short stories, fifty poems, essays, for us; many others; see here (Wikipedia). [JH]
Born September 30, 1975 — Ta-Nehisi Coates, 45. He has also written Black Panther and Captain America stories. Issue number one of the former series sold a quarter million physical copies, very impressive indeed. The Water Dancer contains magic realism elements. (CE)
Born September 30, 1982 — Lacey Chabert, 38. Penny Robinson on the Lost in Space film reboot which I did see in the theater and didn’t think it was too bad. She’s done mostly voice acting and children’s features after that. She voiced Gwen Stacy on The Spectacular Spider-Man series and does likewise for Zatanna Zatara on the current Young Justice series. (CE)
Born September 30, 1983 – Angela Kulig, 37. Seven novels, a dozen shorter stories. “I write books, many of which have been published. I live in Las Vegas, which sounds exciting, but I prefer to pretend I live in books.” Website. [JH]
Born September 30, 1985 — Katrina Law, 35. She’s well-known for playing the roles of Mira on Spartacus: Blood and Sand and Spartacus: Vengeance which are sort of genre, and Nyssa al Ghul on Arrow. (CE)
(9) JEOPARDY! Andrew Porter says another Jeopardy! contestant missed their shot with a genre topic.
Category: Playing the part on TV
Answer: Mr. Sulu; His own head on “Futurama”
Wrong question: “Who is DeForest Kelley?”
(10) FORD NOVEL RETURNS. Today is the republication date for John M. Ford’s long out-of-print The Dragon Waiting.
Available for the first time in nearly two decades, with a new introduction by New York Times-bestselling author Scott Lynch, The Dragon Waiting is a masterpiece of blood and magic.
Isaac Butler has all kinds of reasons you should read it:
From just the first two paragraphs you can get a sense of the power and grace of Ford’s writing, the way it dances through exposition with real lyrics in that feels ancient and mythic, hewn from stone. pic.twitter.com/9Dos2nnJYj
Incendiary is the first in a new Young Adult Fantasy trilogy by author Zoraida Córdova, with the setting inspired by Inquisitorial Spain. Córdova is a prolific YA writer whose work I hadn’t gotten to previously, but one I was hoping to get to at some point, so I requested this novel via inter-library loan once my library reopened.
And well, Incendiary is a really interesting YA fantasy novel, with a compelling protagonist….but also one that feels not quite sure what it wants to do with her….
A Utah man is behind bars after he stole a pickup truck out of a 7-Eleven parking lot.
The victim left the keys in the truck and the vehicle unlocked when he went in to the convience store for a quick stop.
That’s when Bryce Jerald Dixon hopped into the vehicle and took off.
KUTV reports that Dixon took the truck in order to drive all the way to the “Colosseum to get on a flight with alien diplomats.”
Unfortunately, before Dixon could get to the Colosseum, which was some 6,000 miles away across the ocean, he started feeling bad, and decided to return the red pickup truck to the parking lot and its owner, where the police were waiting….
(13) CHEESE FROM OUTER SPACE. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] “Mamie Van Doren On The Red Skelton Show S09E30 (5/24/60” on YouTube is a sketch from a 1960 episode of The Red Skelton Show where Mamie Van Doren is the Queen of Outer Space and Peter Lorre is the Galactic Emperor. They want to destroy the Earth — and the only person who can stop them is Red Skelton’s goofball character Clem Kadiddlehopper! Special cameo by Rod Serling.
(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Honest Game Trailers: Among Us” Fandom Games reviews a mindless phone game from 2018 that’s for “the attention-deficit gaming community” that “searches for something to keep them busy in this time of isolation.”
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Rob Thornton, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, John King Tarpinian, John Hertz, Michael Toman, JJ, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Olav Rokne.]
Smartly, the Dune trailer saves the giant Sandworms of the planet Arrakis for the very end. In the reality of Dune, the Sandworms are responsible for the creation of the substance known as “the Spice,” which is basically why anyone wants to be on Arrakis at all. The Spice is created by the Sandworms, and dealing with the worms, and making peace with them is a huge part of what Dune is all about.
It’s unclear which Sandworm scene this is from the book, but the look and scope of the worm feel correct. These are mysterious creatures in the world of Dune, but they are not monsters. In some ways, the Sandworms are the most important characters in Dune, and this Sandworm looks exactly as it should. The Maw of the Sandworms seems a little more refined, but overall, these are the worms we’re looking for.
What’s an ocean doing in a movie called Dune? The footage of Paul on the shore of a vast sea with starships hovering in the sky takes place on his original home world of Caladan. Their move to Arrakis at the behest of the Emperor is like moving from Scandinavia to the Sahara.
“He thinks he’s going to be sort of a young general studying his father and his leadership of a fighting force before he comes of age, hopefully a decade later, or something like that.” Chalamet said.
Events are moving faster than he expects.
(3) OSCARS ADDING INCLUSION AND DIVERSITY REQUIREMENTS. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Tuesday published detailed inclusion and diversity guidelines that filmmakers will have to meet in order for their work to be eligible for a best picture Oscar, starting in 2024. Variety has a breakdown of the new rules: “Oscars Announce New Inclusion Requirements for Best Picture Eligibility”.
For the 94th and 95th Oscars ceremonies, scheduled for 2022 and 2023, a film will submit a confidential Academy Inclusion Standards form to be considered for best picture. Beginning in 2024, for the 96th Oscars, a film submitting for best picture will need to meet the inclusion thresholds by meeting two of the four standards.
All other Academy categories will keep their current eligibility requirements. For categories such as animated feature, documentary feature and international feature, that submit for best picture consideration, they will be addressed separately….
Adweek’s summary says:
The body that hands out the Academy Awards on Tuesday published detailed inclusion and diversity guidelines that filmmakers will have to meet in order for their work to be eligible for a best picture Oscar, starting in 2024. (Reuters)
To meet the onscreen representation standard, at least one of the lead actors or a significant supporting actor must be from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group, whether that means Asian, Hispanic, Black, Indigenous, Native American, Middle Eastern, North African, native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander. (NYT)
Alternatively, a film can meet the standard if at least 30 percent of all actors in secondary and more minor roles are women, from a racial or ethnic group, LGBTQ+, or people with cognitive or physical disabilities or if the film’s main storyline, theme or narrative focuses on one of these groups. (Variety)
Additionally, films seeking consideration must hire diverse creative leadership and department heads, maintain at least 30 percent of crew from the previously mentioned groups, offer paid internships to underrepresented groups, and ensure representation in marketing and distribution. (THR / The Race)
(4) NOT EVEN WITH A MASK. LA County has not entirely cancelled Halloween, only a lot of the activities traditionally associated with it. (Complete guideline here.)
Halloween Activities:
Not Permitted (gatherings and events are not currently allowed under the Health Officer Order)
• Halloween gatherings, events or parties with non-household members are not permitted even if they are conducted outdoors.
• Carnivals, festivals, live entertainment, and haunted house attractions are not allowed.
Not Recommended
• Door to door trick or treating is not recommended because it can be very difficult to maintain proper social distancing on porches and at front doors, ensure that everyone answering or coming to the door is appropriately masked to prevent disease spread, and because sharing food is risky.
• “Trunk or treating” where children go from car to car instead of door to door to receive treats is also not recommended, particularly when part of Halloween events, since it is difficult to avoid crowding and sharing food.
(5) HAUNTED DRIVE-THRU. That explains why, here in the land of the drive-in, folks will be able to pay to drive through Haunt ‘O Ween LA.
The experience will last between 25-35 minutes. We recommend guests arrive 10 – 15 minutes prior to their scheduled time slot during peak hours.
Pumpkin “Picking” (1 pumpkin per vehicle. Additional pumpkins available for purchase)
“Door to Door” Trick or Treating (enough candy for everyone!)
What John David Washington’s secret agent in Tenet wouldn’t give for such trivial problems. He not only needs to save the world from a supervillain armed with nuclear warheads and a time machine, but also get his head around the news that his nemesis can invert an object’s temporal properties at will, thus sending it hurtling backwards through a space-time continuum that is not as linear as he thought. Worse still, so do we….
Oops, we lied! Actually, there’s going to be a spinoff.
The Walking Dead is officially ending after its 11th season. Season 11 will be a super sized season, offering the show a 24-episode farewell tour, with its airing beginning in the fall of 2021. The 24-episode run will span the fall of 2021 and the beginning of 2022. It is unclear whether it will be broken into three 8-part segments to two 12-part halves. The AMC zombie show began in 2010 with its premiere episode Days Gone Bye airing on Halloween. In the years which followed, The Walking Dead became a global hit, claiming the #1 spot on cable and spawning several spinoff shows, including two more new series which will follow its conclusion.
… Following the conclusion of the flagship Walking Dead series, a spinoff centered around Norman Reedus as Daryl Dixon and Melissa McBride as Carol Peletier will go into production. The Walking Dead showrunner Angela Kang will run the Daryl/Carol spinoff show. There will also be a Tales From The Walking Dead anthology series which will follow different characters in each episode, exploring pockets of the TWD universe which have been left undiscovered.
(8) SCOOBY ORIGINS. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] I thought these paragraphs from Harrison Smith’s obituary for “Scooby-Doo” co-creator Joe Ruby in the Washington Post, “Joe Ruby, TV writer and producer who co-created Scooby-Doo, dies at 87”, would be of interest to Filers. “Silverman” is a reference to NBC president Fred Silverman. “Spears” is Ruby’s writing partner Ken Spears, Scooby-Doo’s other co-creator. “Takamoto” is Iwao Takamoto, a Japanese American animator who drew the original sketches for the main characters.
Mr. Ruby said he considered a small, feisty sheepdog character before settling on an oversized, cowardly Great Dane inspired by actor and comedian Bob Hope. The dog was originally called Too Much–the show was originally called ‘Mysteries Five’–before Silverman said he pushed for raising the character’s profile and renaming him Scooby-Doo, after hearing Frank Sinatra scatting ‘doo-be-doo-be-doo’ on a recording of ‘Strangers in the Night.’…
…Most persistently came questions about Shaggy. Why did he have the munchies all the time? Was he, as many viewers speculated, actually a stoner, a marijuana-loving emblem of the drug-infused 1960s?
By all accounts, the answer was no. Shaggy and Scooby’s constant hunger was simply an attempt by Mr. Ruby and Spears ‘to insert certain idiosyncrasies into their characters,’ the animator Takamoto wrote in a memoir, My Life With A Thousand Characters.
‘And for the record,’ he added, ‘drugs of any kind were anathema to Joe Ruby; he hated them.’
I also learned that the idea for “Scooby-Doo” came from Fred Silverman, who wanted a cartoon like the 1940s radio show “I Love A Mystery” but with kids.
(9) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
September 2013 — Seven years ago this month, Kamala Khan made her first appearance in Captain Marvel #14 before going on to star in the her own series Ms. Marvel, which debuted in February 2014.This Pakistani American Muslim teenager was created by G. Willow Wilson along with editors Sana Amanat and Stephen Wacker, and artists Adrian Alphona and Jamie McKelvie. The first volume of Ms. Marvel would win the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story at Sasquan in 2015.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born September 9, 1900 — James Hilton. Author of the novel Lost Horizon which was turned into a film, also called Lost Horizon by director Frank Capra. It is best remembered as the origin of Shangri-La. Many claim Lost Horizon is the first American book printed as a paperback but it’s actually Peal S. Buck’s The Good Earth. (Died 1954.) (CE)
Born September 9, 1906 – Aileen Fisher. A hundred children’s books, some ours. Nat’l Council of Teachers of English Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children. Natural history, fiction, poetry, plays; nonfiction including lives of Louisa Alcott, Jeanne D’Arc, Emily Dickinson. “Poetry is a rhythmical piece of writing that leaves the reader feeling a little richer than before”. (Died 2002) [JH]
Born September 9, 1915 — Richard Webb. Captain Midnight on the Captain Midnight series when it began and which ran for two years in the Fifties on CBS. It was called Jet Jackson, Flying Commando when it was syndicated. He played Lieutenant Commander Ben Finney in the “Court Martial” episode of Star Trek. And in the Fifties, he was Lane Carson, the lead investigator in The Invisible Monster. (Died 1993.) (CE)
Born September 9, 1922 – Pauline Baynes. Seventy covers, a hundred eighty interiors, for us; many others. First to illustrate “Farmer Giles of Ham”; also The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, “Smith of Wootton Major”, other Tolkien including The Lord of the Rings; Narnia; Richard Adams, Hans Andersen, the Grimms, Kipling; outside our field, Uden’s Dictionary of Chivalry, winning the Greenaway Medal; religious books e.g. King Wenceslaus, the Nicene Creed; magazines e.g. The Illustrated London News. (Died 2008) [JH]
Born September 9, 1929 — Joseph Wrzos, 91. He edited Amazing Stories and Fantastic under the name Joseph Ross from August 1965 through early 1967. He was responsible for their move to mostly reprints and a bimonthly schedule while the publisher refused to pay authors for the reprints saying he held the rights to them without needing pay additional renumeration and leading to severe conflict with SFWA. With Hannes Bok, he edited in 2012, Hannes Bok: A Life in Illustration. (CE)
Born September 9, 1943 — Tom Shippey, 77. Largely known as a Tolkien expert, though I see he wrote a scholarly 21-page introduction to Flights of Eagles, a collection of James Blish work, and under the pseudonym of John Holm, he is also the co-author, with Harry Harrison, of The Hammer and the Cross trilogy of alternate history novels. And early on, he did a lot of SF related non-fiction tomes such as Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative (edited with George Slusser). (CE)
Born September 9, 1946 – Anna Lee Walters, 74. Pawnee (her mother) / Otoe-Misouria (her father). Goddard alumna. American Book Award, Virginia McCormick Scully Award. Ghost Singer is ours; half a dozen nonfiction books; she is in many anthologies and journals. [JH]
Born September 9, 1952 – Michael Dobson, 68. Chaired Corflu 36 (fanziners’ con; corflu = mimeograph correction fluid, once indispensable). Fanzine, Random Jottings (note, “FIAWOL” = Fandom Is A Way Of Life”).Three alternative-history novels (with Douglas Niles). Nonfiction books may show SF color, e.g. Watergate Considered as an Organization Chart of Semi-Precious Stones. Timespinner Press has a booklet for each day of the year. [JH]
Born September 9, 1952 — Angela Cartwright, 68. Fondly remembered as Penny Robinson on the original Lost in Space. She, like several of her fellow cast members, made an appearance in the Lost in Space film. She appeared in the Logan’s Run series in “The Collectors” episode as Karen, and in Airwolf as Mrs. Cranovich in the “Eruption” episode. (CE)
Born September 9, 1955 — Janet Fielding, 65. Tegan Jovanka, companion to the Fifth Doctor. The actress had a rather short performing career starting with the Hammer House of Horror series in 1980 where she was Secretary Mandy on the “Charlie Boy” episode” before landing the the Doctor Who gig through 1984. Her career ended in the early Nineties. She was part of the 2013 50th Anniversary The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot. (CE)
Born September 9, 1958 – Frank Catalano, 62. Book reviews in Amazing with Buck Coulson. Half a dozen short stories. Toastmaster at the first Baycon (i.e. the regional, not the Westercon or Worldcon, with that name) and at Dreamcon 10. Fan Guest of Honor, Rustycon 4. Fanzine, Syntactics. [JH]
Born September 9, 1977 – Viktor Martinovich, Ph.D., 43. (Various romanizations of this Belarusian name.) Teaches at European Humanist Univ., Vilnius. Bogdanovich Prize. Paranoia is ours, I mean his novel by that title (see NY Rev Bkshere), also Mova; several others. [JH]
(13) AHH, NATURE! This video suggests the American Museum of Natural History in New York is hosting a Terrible Pun exhibit when its doors reopen this week.
(14) GONE MORE THAN A FORTNITE. Epic Games is still trying to get Apple to reinstate its Fortnite app on iOS devices. Late Friday, the gaming company filed a motion for a preliminary injunction against Apple’s blocking Fortnite on iPhones and iPads. “Epic Games renews legal request to bring Fortnite back to Apple store” at CNN Business.
The injunction brief says that more than 116 million gamers have played Fortnite on iOS, making it the game’s biggest platform, larger than its player base on Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PlayStation, PC or Android.
Filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, the motion says, “all Epic seeks is for the Court to stop Apple from retaliating against Epic for daring to challenge Apple’s misconduct.”
In a Saturday statement to CNN Business, Epic said, “today we ask the Court to stop Apple from retaliating against Epic for daring to challenge Apple’s misconduct while our antitrust case proceeds.”
Fortnite has been blocked on iOS since August, when Epic introduced a new way for players to buy in-game currency directly without paying Apple or Google their customary 30% cut of revenue. This move violated both Apple and Google’s app store policies, the tech giants said, and Fortnite was pulled from both iOS and Android devices. Epic then sued both Apple and Google, accusing them of monopolistic practices.
(15) FROM SOMEBODY’S GOLDEN AGE. The Bristol Board has a flock of excellent black & white illustrations by famed sff artist Edd Cartier.
In July 2019, I had the unique opportunity to revisit the astronaut walkout doors at the Neil Armstrong Operations & Checkout Building (O&C) at the Kennedy Space Center for the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. Fifty years ago, I was one of more than 3,500 journalists trying to get the “money shot” of the Apollo 11 astronaut walkout.
As I balanced on top of my camera case, I took as many pictures of the astronauts as possible as they walked purposely through those double doors before disappearing like magic into the transfer van on the way to the launch pad. I was 17 years old and was covering this historic event for a small Illinois newspaper. It was an experience that will change my life and soul forever. I covered Apollo 15 as well, and that mission was equally as exciting.
For the Apollo 50th reunion at KSC, I also took many photos of the famous astronaut walkout doorway and surrounding area as part of the NASA tour granted to a select group of “old space journalists.” There were no astronauts this time, just memories of the excitement and anticipation of seeing them walking through those iconic doorways. Those brave men and women were heading on the adventures of their lives, and they were taking us all with them.
This article is about investigating the O&C shuttle mission stickers that have been placed on the historic doorway, as noted in the photographs I took of the O&C walkout area. While many stickers seemed easy to identify, I noticed several immediately that could not be easily identified due to weathering and other issues.
(17) GROK AROUND THE CLOCK. Today I learned there is official Heinlein apparel. Shades of the Sixties!
(18) HERE THEY COME TO SAVE THE DAY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] A group of mice genetically engineered to have greater muscle mass have retained that muscle during a trip to the International Space Station. Their regular, unmodified cousins who also went for the trip lost muscle and bone mass—just as happens for astronauts during their stay in weightlessness. Some of this mouse control group were treated with the “mighty mice” drug upon returning and rebuilt their muscle mass faster than untreated mice. “‘Mighty mice’ stay musclebound in space, boon for astronauts”.
…While encouraged by their findings, the couple said much more work needs to be done before testing the drug on people to build up muscle and bone, without serious side effects.
“We’re years away. But that’s how everything is when you go from mouse to human studies,” Germain-Lee said.
Lee said the experiment pointed out other molecules and signaling pathways worth investigating — “an embarrassment of riches … so many things we’d like to pursue.” His next step: possibly sending more “mighty mice” to the space station for an even longer stay.
(19) SHAT’S BACK. “William Shatner ‘The Thrill Is Gone’ feat. Ritchie Blackmore and Candice Night” on YouTube is a track from Shat’s new album The Blues, which Cleopatra Records will release In October.
[Thanks to JJ, Cat Eldridge, N., Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, Michael Toman, John Hertz, John King Tarpinian, Contrarius, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
The worlds of Marvel and the Island collide in Nexus War in Fortnite Chapter 2 – Season 4. This new season will feature Marvel heroes crossing over with the world of the Fortnite via character skins, weapons, comics – and a new series of variant covers releasing in September and October.
Some of the industry’s top artists including Joe Quesada, Ed McGuinness, Sara Pichelli, Russell Dauterman, and more will showcase Fortnite favorites like Blaze and Carbide side by side with the Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, and the X-Men.
Set in Marvel Comics continuity, the events of Nexus War take place between the panels of Thor #4, which released this past March. To learn more, don’t miss a special 10-page Fortnite/Thor crossover story written by Donny Cates and drawn by Greg Land in Fantastic Four #24.
The artwork for six of the Fortnite variant covers, plus a list of the others, follows the jump.
Epic Games, the video game developer behind the mega popular online game Fortnite, just posted a video criticizing Apple for removing the game from its App Store. Using imagery directly referencing Apple’s own iconic “1984” ad, Epic Games’s video (titled “Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite”) positions Apple as a soulless corporate entity, shouting from a screen and demanding obedience from a black and white crowd. That is, until a woman in color shows up, and throws a Fortnite axe at the screen and shatters it. The following copy reads, “Epic Games has defied the App Store Monopoly. In retaliation, Apple is blocking Fortnite from a billion devices. Join the fight to stop 2020 from becoming ‘1984.’”
Epic Games (also being a corporate entity themselves) is making this charge over money. The company introduced a direct payment option within Fortnite to bypass Apple’s 30% fee on in-app purchases. In retaliation, Apple pulled the popular game from its app store. Epic Games responded with both this video, as well as an antitrust lawsuit, alleging that Apple takes anti-competitive actions in order to “unlawfully maintain its monopoly.”
In a statement to The Verge, Apple said that Epic had benefited from the App Store’s ecosystem for years.
“The fact that their business interests now lead them to push for a special arrangement does not change the fact that these guidelines create a level playing field for all developers and make the store safe for all users.”
It’s unclear, really, what George Orwell has to do with any of this.
Your task is to create an original limerick that has something to do with speculative fiction. It could be about a character, a series, an author, or whatever fits the theme. Here are the rules for creating a good limerick (quoting from this source).
…The author of the limerick we like best wins a book from our stacks or a FanLit T-shirt (sizes avail are S – XL). If you live outside the US, we’ll send a $7 Amazon gift card.
I have known Fox since he was a baby. His parents, Charles Wingate and Melissa Williamson, are long-time members of the Potomac River Science Fiction Society and hosted meetings three times a year until the pandemic.
“At the beginning they valorized what was deemed a dead-end job, but four months later they don’t even treat us like humans anymore,” said Fox Wingate, 24, who works at a Safeway in Maryland.
…“Everyone was very gung-ho,” adds the film’s production designer Grant Major of his first day back on set. “We all loved the film, actors and director, so were pumped to get going and do the best job we could.”
That can-do attitude is what will likely tide the industry over despite Tuesday’s late-night announcement that the country will enter a three-day lockdown, which went into effect at midday Wednesday local time. The measures came after Prime Minster Jacinda Ardern confirmed four members of an Auckland family tested positive for COVID-19, acquiring the virus from an unknown source. The cases ended the nation’s 102-day streak of having no new community infections (cases have been limited to the strictly-quarantined border).
While New Zealand dropped to level one — the lowest of a four-level alert system — on June 8, the Auckland region is now on level three restrictions until Friday, meaning residents are asked to work from home, only interact with people in their household “bubble,” and practice social distancing and mask-wearing in public. Filming can continue if strict health and safety protocols are followed.
Several international productions were in pre-production in Auckland at the time of the announcement, including “LOTR,” Robert Downey Jr.’s “Sweet Tooth,” anime adaptation “Cowboy Bebop” and “The Greatest Beer Run Ever,” directed by Peter Farrelly. The New Zealand Film Commission (NZFC) tells Variety that the Auckland projects are now continuing with pre-production, but working from home.
The remainder of the country — including Wellington, where the “Avatar” sequels are filming — has been placed in level two, which encourages mask-wearing and social distancing and allows social gatherings of up to 100 people. Large-scale productions such as “Avatar” can continue under level two screen production rules, such as physical distancing among crew and following recommendations for scenes involving intimacy or fighting….
(5) CHANGES ON THE WAY. “Avatar 2 Will Change Movies Forever” on YouTube is a video from ScreenRant that explains one reason why Avatar 2 is taking so long is that James Cameron is working on a way of shooting motion-capture scenes underwater and may also be coming up with a way to see 3D effects without special glasses.
(6) DEFINING SF. Adam Roberts, in “How I Define Science Fiction” on Neotext says that he defines science fiction by showing the bone and a spaceship from 2001 and that much of the sense of wonder from sf can’t be rationally explained in a definition. However, he also supplies the thousand words that a picture is reputed to be worth. Because, as someone said, “This f***ing job is not that f***ing easy!”
In those occasions when people ask me to define science fiction, I reference the above. Probably the most famous jump-cut in cinema. You already know the context, so I don’t need to spell it out for you: millions of years BC, an apeman throws a bone into the sky. It flies upward. The camera pans with it, following it a little shakily into the blue sky. The bone reaches its apogee and, just as it starts to fall back down, Kubrick cuts to a shot of a spaceship in orbit in AD 2001.
Now, this seems to me an extremely beautiful and affecting thing, a moment both powerful and eloquent even though I’m not sure I could lay out, in consecutive and rational prose, precisely why I find it so powerful or precisely what it loquates. It is, I suppose, something ‘about’ technology, about the way humans use tools, our habit of intrusively (indeed, violently) interacting with our environments, about the splendor but also the limitation of such tools, the way even a spaceship is, at its core, a primitive sort of human prosthesis. But when you start explaining the cut in those terms you become conscious that you are losing something, missing some key aspect to what makes it work so well.
It works, in other words, not by a process of rational extrapolation, but rather metaphorically. I mean something particular when I say that, and I explain what I mean in detail below; but for now, and to be clear—I’m suggesting this moment actualizes the vertical ‘leap’ from the known to the unexpected that is the structure of metaphor, rather than the horizontal connection from element to logically extrapolated element that is the structure of metonymy. Kubrick’s cut is more like a poetic image than a scientific proposition;——and there you have it, in a nutshell, my definition of science fiction. This genre I love is more like a poetic image than it is a scientific proposition.
Now, if my interlocutor needs more, and if the picture doesn’t make my point, I might add something Samuel Delany-ish: about how science fiction is a fundamentally metaphorical literature because it sets out to represent the world without reproducing it….
This Saturday August 15 at 8 PM, multi-instrumentalist phenomenon Scott Robinson will be improvising music to the work of one of his heroes, Richard Powers, whose work graces the covers of all of Scott’s ScienSonic Laboratories releases (which can be seen at www.sciensonic.net). Scott will be sharing from his personal collection of Powers’ work, along with other pieces — some unpublished. These paintings are shown with the kind permission of the artist’s estate. In a nod to the series’ name, for this performance Scott has chosen only works containing an eye!
AMC Theatres, the nation’s largest movie theater chain, will reopen in the U.S. on Aug. 20 with retro ticket prices of 15 cents per movie.
AMC Entertainment, which owns the chain, said Thursday that it expects to open the doors to more than 100 cinemas — or about a sixth of its nationwide locations — on Aug. 20 with throwback pricing for a day.
AMC theaters have reopened in numerous international countries but have remained shuttered in the U.S. since March. The chain touted the reopening as “Movies in 2020 at 1920 Prices.”
After several false starts due to a summer rise in coronavirus cases throughout much of the U.S., widespread moviegoing is currently set to resume in late August. Regal Cinemas, the second largest chain, is to reopen some U.S. locations on Aug. 21.
During its opening-day promotion, AMC will show catalog films, including “Ghostbusters,” “Black Panther,” “Back to the Future” and “Grease.” Those older films will continue to play afterward for $5.
AMC confirmed that Disney’s much-delayed “New Mutants” will debut in theaters Aug. 28, with Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet” to follow Sept. 3. Warner Bros. is planning to release “Tenet” a week earlier internationally, including in Canada. A handful of smaller new releases are also planned for late August, including “Unhinged,” a thriller from Solstice Studios with Russell Crowe; and Armando Iannucci’s “Personal History of David Copperfield,” from Disney’s Fox Searchlight.
AMC said Thursday is expects about two thirds of its theaters will be open in time for “Tenet.” Several states, including California and New York, are yet to allow movie theaters to reopen.
(9) A SHORT HISTORY WITHOUT TIME. Elisa Gabbert, author of The Unreality of Memory and Other Essays, interrogates “The Unreality of Time” in The Paris Review.
…[John] McTaggart does not use “unreality” in the same way I do, to describe a quality of seeming unrealness in something I assume to be real. Instead, his paper sets out to prove that time literally does not exist. “I believe that time is unreal,” he writes. The paper is interesting (“Time only belongs to the existent” … “The only way in which time can be real is by existing”) but not convincing.
McTaggart’s argument hinges in part on his claim that perception is “qualitatively different” from either memory or anticipation—this is the difference between past, present, and future, the way we apprehend events in time. Direct perceptions are those that fall within the “specious present,” a term coined by E.?R. Clay and further developed by William James (a fan of Bergson’s). “Everything is observed in a specious present,” McTaggart writes, “but nothing, not even the observations themselves, can ever be in a specious present.” It’s illusory—the events are fixed, and there is nothing magically different about “the present” as a point on a timeline. This leads to an irresolvable contradiction, to his mind.
Bergson, for his part, believed that memory and perception were the same, that they occur simultaneously: “The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” He thought this explained the phenomenon of déjà vu—when you feel something is happening that you’ve experienced before, it’s because a glitch has allowed you to notice the memory forming in real time. The memory—le souvenir du présent—is attached not to a particular moment in the past but to the past in general. It has a past-like feeling; with that comes an impression one knows the future.
(10) LET THE RECORD REFLECT. This typo is from the Loncon 3 (2014 Worldcon) Souvenir Book.
In honor of the misspellings and mispronunciations from this year's Hugo Awards, allow me to add my own and personal favorite.
Nobody’s copyediting (outside of File 770’s own) has ever challenged the record left by the ConDiego NASFiC of 1990. Neither a fine speech by pro GoH Samuel Delany, an excellent Masquerade, a well-stocked Dealer’s Room, a top-quality Press Relations department, nor a successful Regency Dance, could divert the avalanche of sentiment which quickly made ConDiego a byword for haphazard convention-running. Not after fans were handed a typo-riddled Program Book which misspelled the hotel’s name, the guests of honors’ names and even the con’s own name – that in headline type: ConDigeo.
(11) BOOK ANNIVERSARY.
August 1998 — Delia Sherman and Terri Windling released The Essential Bordertown anthology. (The first one, Elsewhere, would garner a World Fantasy Award.) A follow-up on the three earlier Borderlands anthologies, it featured such writers as Teresa Nielsen Hayden and Terri Windling doing a Rough Guide of sorts to Bordertown along stories from the likes of Patrica McKillip, Micole Sudbeg, Ellen Steiber , Felicity Savage and Charles de Lint. It would be successful enough that Welcome to Bordertown would come a decade later though the publisher would shift from Tor to Random House.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born August 14, 1929 — Richard Carpenter. Responsible for the simply superb Robin of Sherwood series. He also created Catweazle, the children’s series about an unfortunate wizard from the 11th century who is accidentally transported to the present day. And he was an actor who appeared in such shows as the Sixties Sherlock Holmes series, The Terrornauts film and the Out of the Unknown series as well. (Died 2012.) (CE)
Born August 14, 1940 — Alexei Panshin, 80. He has written multiple critical works along with several novels, including the Nebula Award-winning Rite of Passage and the Hugo Award-winning study of SF, The World Beyond the Hill which he co-wrote with his wife, Cory Panshin. He also wrote the first serious study of Heinlein, Heinlein in Dimension: A Critical Analysis. (CE)
Born August 14, 1932 – Lee Hoffman. Among our finest fanwriters, and a fanartist who showed with her “lil peepul” that in fandom too – although I never asked her about Buckminster Fuller – one can do more with less. Had she only done her fanzine Quandry (note spelling; she was also responsible for the famous typo poctsarcd) it would, as the saying goes, have been enough for us. She also brought forth Science Fiction Five-Yearly, published on time for sixty years, in whose last issue I was proud to be, and on the back cover, even. Also four novels for us, a dozen shorter stories; among much else a superb Western The Valdez Horses, winning a Spur Award. At first she appeared only by mail; after we eventually learned she was not male, she was sometimes known as Lee Hoffwoman. Fan Guest of Honor at Chicon IV the 40th Worldcon. (Died 2007) [JH]
Born August 14, 1940 – Meade Frierson III. President, Southern Fandom Confederation 1970-1983. SF on Radio. Active in Myriad and SFPA (Southern Fandom Press Alliance). Fan Guest of Honor at Windycon IV, Balticon 11, Coastcon 1978 (with wife Penny). Rebel Award. (Died 2001) [JH]
Born August 13, 1949 – Pat York. A dozen short stories. “Moonfuture Incorporated” in the teachers’ guide Explorer (J. Czerneda ed. 2005); “You Wandered Off Like a Foolish Child to Break Your Heart and Mine” in the Nebula Awards Showcase 2002. Poem “A Faerie’s Tale” in the 1998 Rhysling Anthology. Cory Doctorow’s appreciation here. (Died 2005) [JH]
Born August 14, 1950 — Gary Larson, 70. Ok, setting aside long and delightful career in creating the weird for us, ISFDB notes a SF link that deserve noting. In the March 1991 Warp as published by the Montreal Science Fiction and Fantasy Association, he had a cartoon “The crew of the Starship Enterprise encounters the floating head of Zsa Zsa Gabor”. (CE)
Born August 14, 1962 – Tim Earls, 58. Set and concept designer, visual effects art director, for Babylon 5 and Crusade; then Voyager, Mission Impossible III, Serenity. An Earth Alliance Olympus Class Corvette (B5) here. Design for the Borg Central Plexus in “Unimatrix Zero” (Voyager) here. Some Serenity sketches here. IMDb (Internet Movie Database) bio here. [JH]
Born August 14, 1965 — Brannon Braga, 55. Writer, producer and creator for the Next Gen, Voyager, Enterprise, as well as on the Star Trek Generations and Star Trek: First Contact films. He has written more episodes than anyone else with one hundred and nine to date. He was responsible for the Next Gen series finale “All Good Things…” which won him a Hugo Award at Intersection for excellence in SF writing, along with Ronald D. Moore. (CE)
Born August 14, 1966 — Halle Berry, 54. Her first genre role was not as I thought Miss Stone in The Flintstones but a minor role in a forgotten SF series called They Came from Outer Space. This was followed by being Storm in the X- Men franchiseand Giacinta “Jinx” Johnson in Die Another Day, the twentieth Bond film. She then shows up as the lead in Catwoman. She has myriad roles in Cloud Atlas. (CE)
Born August 14, 1973 — Jamie Sives, 47. First, he played Captain Reynolds in a Tenth Doctor story, “Tooth and Claw” where the Doctor encounters Queen Victoria and saves her from a werewolf. Great tale! Second, he had a recurring role as Jory Cassel on A Games of Thrones. His fate like so many there is tragic. And third, he was was Valhalla Rising which is a decidedly oddDanish financed Viking magic realism film. (CE)
Born August 14, 1974 – Raphael Lacoste, 46. A score of covers, half a dozen interiors; games, films. Prince of Persia and Assassin’s Creed for Ubisoft. Here is The Windup Girl. Here is Shadow Run. Here is “Nanthis City”. Here is “Wind Towers”. Artbooks Worlds, Lignes. Two VES (Visual Effects Society) Awards. Website here. [JH]
Born August 14, 1981 – Karen Healey, 39. Five novels, as many shorter stories; ten essays in Strange Horizons. “I wanted to be an astronaut, or possibly a dinosaur-hunting cowgirl…. I was a bit vague on the concept of extinction…. we moved to Oamaru, where my mother’s family has lived for five generations … good for white people in New Zealand … ridiculous in comparison to one’s family being there for a thousand years…. I had this vague idea of becoming a lawyer…. it turned out being a lawyer is not a lot of fun arguing with people and shouting OBJECTION but a lot of boring and distressing paperwork…. applied to the JET [Japan Exchange & Teaching] Programme (even though I had failed second-year Japanese) and went to Japan to teach English for two years…. currently training to be a high school teacher… and, of course, being a novelist.” [JH]
(13) COMICS SECTION.
Existential Comics listens in on a conversation between The Elflord and the Mayfly.
(14) MAYBE THE MAP IS THE TERRITORY AFTER ALL. In The Paris Review, Ivan Brunetti considers “Comics as Place”.
Most comics focus on the actions of a figure, and the narrative develops by following that figure as it moves through its environment, or as it is commonly referred to by cartoonists, who have the often tedious, time-consuming task of actually drawing it, the background. One widely used cartoonist’s trick is to draw/establish the setting clearly and then assiduously avoid having to redraw it in subsequent panels, or at least diminish the number of background details as the sequence progresses. After all, once this setting/background has seeped into the reader’s brain, the reader can and will fill in the gaps. Moreover, sometimes drawing the background would only clutter the composition and distract the reader from the emotional core of the narrative, and so the background might judiciously disappear altogether, having outlived its graphic usefulness, until the next shift in scene.
Robert Crumb’s 1979 “A Short History of America” upends all of the above. It is a small miracle of concision and grace, consisting of a mere twelve panels that span across four pages (of three horizontal panels each) and roughly a hundred and fifty years of history….
(15) FIGHTING FOR WHO YOU LOVE. In the Washington Post, Helena Andrews-Dyer interviews Lovecraft Country star Jonathan Majors, who explains how he interpreted the series’ heroic lead and discusses his other work in The Last Black Man In San Francisco and Da 5 Bloods. “Jonathan Majors is your new American hero”.
The hero’s journey is a circuitous one. After setting out into the great unknown, battling monsters and men, our protagonist inevitably winds up at Point A again, ready to slay whatever Big Bad sent them packing in the first place.
That’s a familiar road for Jonathan Majors, the 30-year-old actor who’s quickly becoming that guy — the one you can’t stop seeing in .?.?. well, everything.He started acting because of a fight in middle school; he had a bunch of big emotions and a blocked vent. Now, a decade and a half later, in his first leading role, Majors is playing the kind of hero his younger self (and the boys he used to “cut up with”) could’ve used. Someone who’s learned how to harness his hard-earned rage for good.
In 7,900 words Ozzie M. Gartrell’s The Transition of OSOOSI gives us a cyberpunk story of an audacious idea to eradicate bigotry.
(17) HEADS WILL ROLL. Camestros Felapton makes it to the finish line — “I finished the Wolf Hall trilogy” – and shares an insightful review.
…The Tudor period looms large in English national mythology of greatness and Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth I are two of the most fictionalised and dramatised British monarchs (Queen Victoria being the third but Elizabeth II is getting higher in the charts I’d imagine). Although I often read Booker prize winners, when Wolf Hall won I was originally uninterested. Another book about Henry and Anne Boleyn? Is there seriously anything new to say about all that? Turns out there was a lot of new things to say about it, and by employing a story people know at least in sketch form, Mantel could focus on an aspect that makes the Tudor period fascinating.
(18) SUPERVERSIVE WAKES. The Superversive SF blog will become active again, led by columnists L. Jagi Lamplighter-Wright and John C. Wright.
It has been some time since we have had regular posts on this site, but, God willing, that is all about to change!
In the coming months, we hope to have more posts about Superversive Matters, but we also hope to unveil two new regular columns. I will announce the second column separately, but, before we can begin, the first column needs a name!
The column is to be stories, observations, and insights about the meeting of life and our genres—writing with children; writing with cats (a whole subject in itself!); sharing your favorite books, shows, and movies with offspring, parents, friends; and other stories of the intersection of reality and fantasy (or science fiction.)
The purpose is to share light and fun stories, as well as poignant or bittersweet ones, about our life and experience as readers and writers of science fiction and fantasy—stories that remind us of our shared experience as human beings as well as our joy in the wonder of our wonderful genre.
Sharks are often maligned as Hollywood monsters, the lone wolves lurking in the deep, hunting for prey. (Cue Jaws theme song).
But that caricature of sharks is increasingly out of step with what scientists are learning about the animals. Instead, they say, some species of sharks are social creatures who return day after day to a group of the same fellow sharks.
“They form these spatially structured social groups where they hang out with the same individuals over multiple years,” says Yannis Papastamatiou, who runs the Predator Ecology and Conservation Lab at Florida International University.
Papastamatiou’s team studied gray reef sharks populating the waters off Palmyra Atoll, a sunken island ringed by coral reefs, in the central Pacific Ocean between the Hawaiian Islands and Fiji. They attached small location transmitters to 41 sharks, which allowed them to track the animals’ movements around the reef. They also outfitted two sharks with small video cameras on their fins, to get what Papastamatiou calls a shark’s-eye view of their daily lives.
After tracking the sharks for four years, the researchers found that the same groupings of sharks — ranging from a couple up to as many as 20 — frequently returned to the same parts of the reef over and over again. They also found that some of the groups stuck together for the duration of the study — longer than previous studies have observed.
Mars’ nightside atmosphere glows and pulsates in this data animation from MAVEN spacecraft observations. Green-to-white false color shows the enhanced brightenings on Mars’ ultraviolet “nightglow” measured by MAVEN’s Imaging UltraViolet Spectrograph at about 70 kilometers (approximately 40 miles) altitude. A simulated view of the Mars globe is added digitally for context, with ice caps visible at the poles. Three nightglow brightenings occur over one Mars rotation, the first much brighter than the other two. All three brightenings occur shortly after sunset, appearing on the left of this view of the night side of the planet. The pulsations are caused by downwards winds which enhance the chemical reaction creating nitric oxide which causes the glow. Months of data were averaged to identify these patterns, indicating they repeat nightly.
In 1973, Graham Greene wrote an introduction to a bookselling friend’s memoir. As Greene was one of the most respected writers of his day, this was no small gesture, but the author was also a committed bibliophile. The book dealer and biographer John Baxter’s memoir A Pound of Paper contains treasurable glimpses of Greene deliberately signing obscure copies of his works in far-off locations, in the certain knowledge that these items would become hugely sought-after rarities, and he remains one of the few serious literary figures who also understood the glamour and romance of the bookselling trade. In his introduction, he openly acknowledged this, writing ‘Secondhand booksellers are the most friendly and most eccentric of all the characters I have known. If I had not been a writer, theirs would have been the profession I would most happily have chosen.’
If Greene was alive today, he would look at his beloved second-hand and antiquarian bookshops with an air of sorrow, leavened with a touch of bewilderment. The recent news that one of Charing Cross’s most famous booksellers, Francis Edwards, was to close after 150 years, maintaining only a presence in Hay-on-Wye, was greeted without the anguish that it might have been otherwise….
The first museum dedicated to Godzilla is open in Japan for a limited time. TOHO launched its official English Godzilla website back in May 2019, complete with a “Monsterpedia” for the kaiju’s friends and foes. One can never overstate the pop culture impact of the Godzilla series. Although the King of the Monsters wasn’t the first giant monster on the big screen, he would headline a long-running franchise, the longest of any movie series to date.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect is how the character changed over time. He went from being a grim allegory for the nuclear bomb to a Japan-saving hero, not unlike Ultraman. As a franchise, Godzilla has ventured into multimedia. He has battled the Avengers in a Marvel comic and even received his own version of Jenga. For a limited time, fans can enjoy the franchise in a museum format.
(23) MEET THE PARENTS OF THE YEAR.
Somehow I’ve lucked out and have an 8yo who thinks secretly reading under the covers past her bedtime is an act of rebellion, and it hasn’t yet occurred to her that her flashlights never seem to run out of batteries.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Lise Andreasen, Cat Eldridge, Chip Hitchcock, JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, Mike Kennedy, Michael Toman, Cliff, John Hertz, Dann, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credt goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Anna Nimmhaus.]
