Tag Archives: Foundation

Pixel Scroll 8/19/21 A Scroll Dinner In Pixelson

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(1) OUT OF KABUL. Allyson Reneau, who first met the girls through her work on the board of directors for Explore Mars, helped extract the “Afghan Girls Robotic Team, a group of girls ages 16-18 who have overcome hardship in order to pursue their love of engineering and robotics in Afghanistan.” “Oklahoma mom helps rescue 10 girls on Afghanistan’s robotics team” at Today.

…But it wasn’t as simple as organizing documents and the girls getting on the plane.

“They were in a sea of chaos with eight million people and a city halfway around the world,” Reneau told TODAY, adding that unrest in Kabul worked against the effort. “A lot of the work I’ve done with the embassy has been all night, and I have to work all day. It’s been exhausting.”

“It’s very narrow window of opportunity,” she said of the effort. “I knew that if I didn’t run through that door now — it’s now or never. Sometimes you only get one chance.”

After a cancelled flight, ten girls from the team were successfully evacuated.

“We were able to get them on the U.S. military side (of the airport), so they were protected over there waiting (and) the next text I got was that they were airborne,” Reneau said….

(2) MUCH IS NOT KNOWN. Historian Adrian Goldsworthy also writes books set in the Roman empire. “The Big Idea: Adrian Goldsworthy” at Whatever talks about the challenges.

The Big Idea behind The Fort is trying to understand what the world was like at the beginning of the second century. In my day job I write non fiction history books, and have been studying the Roman empire and the Roman army for all my adult life. So writing a novel in that setting gives me a chance to work out what I have learned from all this about life at the time and then push the evidence as far as it will go. There is so much that we do not know about the ancient world, which means that in a novel you have to imagine and invent to make the world of the story complete and convincing.  

(3) FOUNDATION. Apple TV+ will stream Foundation beginning September 24. Here’s the new trailer.

The fate of an entire galaxy rests on the beliefs of Dr. Hari Seldon (Jared Harris). Will his conviction save humanity or doom it? Based on the award-winning novels by Isaac Asimov, Foundation chronicles a band of exiles on their monumental journey to save humanity and rebuild civilization amid the fall of the Galactic Empire.

(4) BEGINNINGS. Lightspeed Magazine’s Author Spotlight shines on Tobi Ogundiran, whose story “The Tale of Jaja and Canti” is in the new issue.

How did you get into writing genre fiction?

Growing up in Nigeria, I constantly heard tales which would ordinarily seem too far-fetched to be true. But they were true. And this helped shape my understanding of the world, in that the lens through which you view life affects how you experience it. This, coupled with the fact that as a teen I read so much Stephen King and Harry Potter, I guess it was inevitable that when I finally decided to put pen to paper, to craft my own stories, the stories that came were fantastic in nature. The realization that what I wrote was genre only came later.

(5) BRADBURY 100 LIVE THIS WEEKEND. Phil Nichols invites Bradbury fans to view Bradbury 100 LIVE on Saturday, August 21:

On the eve of the 101st anniversary of the birth of Ray Bradbury, Phil Nichols invites you to a livestream of Bradbury 100.

WATCH the livestream, in the Ray Bradbury Fan Club Facebook group, or on the Bradbury 100 Facebook page.

OR:

JOIN IN the discussion, by joining the Zoom meeting (scroll down for Zoom link).

Phil will be joined by writer Steven Paul Leiva, who was the guest on the very first episode of the Bradbury 100 podcast. Steven, you may recall, was the driving force behind “Ray Bradbury Week” in Los Angeles in 2010, when Ray was 90 years old.

The livestream will include some never-before-seen footage from Ray’s 90th birthday party.

Here is the Zoom link.

(6) MS. A year from today the “J.R.R. Tolkien: The Art of the Manuscript” exhibit opens at the Raynor Memorial Libraries at Marquette University. It will run from August 19-December 12, 2022.

Marquette University’s Raynor Memorial Libraries and the Haggerty Museum of Art are pleased to announce an upcoming exhibition of manuscripts from the celebrated author and artist J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973), best known for his literary classics The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

The exhibition considers Tolkien’s work through the lens of manuscripts, both in terms of the materials he studied as a medieval philologist and the manuscripts he created while developing his legendarium. Professor Tolkien was deeply immersed in the complexities of manuscripts, and this exhibition will illustrate how different aspects of the manuscript tradition found expression within Tolkien’s scholarly life and in his creative writing.

The foundation for this exhibition is Marquette University’s extensive collection of Tolkien manuscripts housed within the library’s Department of Special Collections and University Archives; but it will also include items borrowed from other repositories, including a significant number of Tolkien manuscripts and artwork from the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford.

The exhibition will include over 100 items, many of which have not been exhibited or published.

Additional details are available in a brief FAQ. More information will be made available as the exhibition’s opening approaches!

(7) CHARACTERS IN PAIN. Sarah Chorn draws on personal experience to offer “Ten tips for writing believable pain” at Bookworm Blues.

2. Pain will change your mood. 

When I’m hurting really bad, my entire neighborhood probably knows to stay away from me. Pain tends to change moods, and everyone is different. Some people get really quiet and withdrawn. Some people get angry. I seem to become an absolutely intoxicating blend of both of those. Some people try to power through it by being overly happy. Some get depressed. Regardless, if your character hurts, they will have an altered mood, at least during the most intense part of their pain. Depending on who you are writing, they’ll react differently. I don’t know many people who get hurt, and then keep on going with their mood completely unaffected. Even if they act unaffected, inside, they’re probably screaming, and think of the energy it takes to hide that scream.

The thing to remember is, pain is going to take up part of your headspace. If you had your whole mind focused on defeating the emperor, and then you take an arrow to the shoulder, now 40% of your thoughts are going to be on defeating the emperor, and 60% are going to be focused on the pain you are feeling (Or something. You get the point.). Pain takes up space. It just does. Don’t think of it as something you feel. Think of pain as an uninvited guest, and now you have to make room for it because, depending on the injury and the timeline to healing (if there is a “healing”), that guest isn’t going anywhere. You have to feed your guest. Pain feeds on energy, and energy impacts mood. So keep that in mind when you write your injured character.

(8) MAKE ROOM! In the latest Rite Gud podcast, Raquel S. Benedict is joined by MK Anderson to discuss “This Is My Hole: On Negative Space and Leaving Room for the Reader”.

A story is a type of conversation with the reader. If you don’t leave room for the reader to speak, you’re a terrible conversationalist. This room, this essential emptiness, is called negative space. In this episode of Rite Gud, we discuss why the words you don’t write are just as important as the words you do. 

(9) BANKS ROBBERY. Matt Bell lists his favorite sf and fantasy novels where characters steal things in “Eight Science Fiction and Fantasy Heist Novels” at CrimeReads. One of them is —

Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks

In one of the early set pieces of Consider Phlebas, Horza is rescued/captured by the pirate crew of the Clear Air Turbulence (one of Banks’ fantastically named Culture ships), who are on their way to the planet Marjoin to rob the Temple of Light, a target described by the ship’s captain as easy in, easy out: “According to him,” one pirate says, “it’s full of priests and treasure; we shoot the former and grab the latter.” It’s a simple plan, but even the best-laid plans usually go sideways in heist narratives, and this one is no different: the Marjoin monks turn out to be heavily armed, and their temple is a trap made entirely of reflective surfaces that bounce the pirates’ lasers back at them—which means the pirates get to do very little pillaging and a lot of running for their lives.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

  • 1958 – Sixty-three years ago in the August issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Robert Heinlein’s  Have Spacesuit – Will Travel was first published. (Anthony Boucher will announce his departure as editor in this issue.) The cover illustration is for this novel. Charles Scribner’s Sons will publish it in hardcover the next month. It was nominated at Detention for a Hugo, the year Blish’s A Case of Conscience won. It would be nominated for BSFA’s Fiftieth Anniversary Award: Best Novel of 1958 but that Award instead would go to Brian Aldiss’ Non-Stop.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 19, 1893 — Hans Waldemar Wessolowski. An artist best remembered for his cover art for pulp magazines like Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories, Clues and Strange Tales.  Wesso was the name most commonly cited wherever his art is given credit. Wesso painted all 34 covers of the Clayton Magazines Astounding Stories from January 1930 to March 1933. He was nominated for a Retro Hugo for Best Professional Artist at Loncon 3. (Died 1947.)
  • Born August 19, 1921 — Gene Roddenberry. Oh, you know who he is. But did you know he wrote a lot of scripts for Have Gun – Will Travel? Indeed his script for the show, “Helen of Abajinian” would win the Writer’s Guild of America award for Best Teleplay in 1958. And yes, he would share a Hugo for Star Trek’s  “The City on the Edge of Forever” episode which was awarded at Baycon. (Died 1991.)
  • Born August 19, 1928 — Richard N. Farmer. Author of Islandia Revisited, a sequel to Austin Tappan Wright’s Islandia. No idea it was if authorized. It’s not in print in either print or digital editions currently. Anyone here read it? (Died 1987.)
  • Born August 19, 1930 — D.G. Compton, 91. SWFA Author Emeritus whose The Steel Crocodile was nominated for the Nebula Award. The Unsleeping Eye, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe in the U.K., was filmed as Death Watch which the Audience Reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes actually like giving it a 60% rating. His two Alec Jordan near future police stories are superb. He recently was selected for the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award.
  • Born August 19, 1938 — Diana Muldaur, 83. She appeared in the original series in two episodes, first in “Return to Tomorrow” as Dr. Ann Mulhall / Thalassa and then in then in “Is There in Truth No Beauty?”  as Dr. Miranda Jones. She, of course, is up again in Next Gen as Dr. Katherine Pulaski.  She voiced  Dr. Leslie Thompkins in that animated Batman series as well. 
  • Born August 19, 1950 — Jill St. John, 71. She’s best remembered as Tiffany Case, the Bond girl in  Diamonds Are Forever. She was the first American to play a Bond girl. She shows in The Batman in “Smack in the Middle” and “Hi Diddle Riddle” as Molly. And she played Jennifer Holmes in the 1960 film version of The Lost World. Even more fascinatingly she’s one of the uncredited dancers on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In! 
  • Born August 19, 1950 — Mary Doria Russell, 71. The Sparrow series, The Sparrow and its sequel Children of God, are awesome. The Sparrow won the Clarke, BSFA, and Tiptree Awards, and it was the reason she won the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Though not genre, Doc and its sequel Epitaph are mysteries using the historic character of Doc Holliday. 
  • Born August 19, 1952 — Jonathan Frakes, 69. Best known for his portrayal of Commander William T. Riker in Next Gen and I’m fond of his voicing David Xanatos on the Gargoyles series which had at least five Trek actors doing voice work. Interesting bit of trivia: For a time in the Seventies, he worked for Marvel Comics at Cons as Captain America. He has directed more than seventy television episodes, including episodes of myriad Trek series, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Leverage, The Librarians and The Orville. 

(12) MOSLEY’S THING. Renowned storyteller Walter Mosley, known for his definitive and bestselling international work in mystery and crime fiction, will be writing a six-issue series of The Thing for Marvel in November 2021.

Written by Mosley and with art by Tom Reilly (X-Men: Marvels Snapshots), the story will range from the urban sprawl of the alleys of Manhattan to the furthest reaches of the cosmos itself. In THE THING, a lonely evening and a chance encounter (or is it?) sends Ben Grimm embarking on a sojourn that will have him confronting—and battling—figures both old and new.

 (13) A COMIC BOOK LIKE YOU’VE NEVER SEEN. Atlas Obscura shows off “The 36-Pound Comic Scrapbook That Chronicles the Great Depression”. This unusual artifact—now housed at the Columbia University Libraries—is part comic collection, part journal of life in the 1930s. 

“DEAR FRIENDS OF MINE, Please write a line / In this little Wash Tubbs book of mine. / Help me Keep you in my Mind”

So begins the inscription on the spine of a hulking tome that was once a source of idle amusement for clients at the Bungalow, a barbershop in Fredonia, Kansas. In 1928, the barber, I.A. Persinger, began compiling this collection of “Wash Tubbs” comics, a well-loved daily newspaper strip by artist Roy Crane, whose adventure graphics popularized the visual sound effects—Bam! Pow!—we know so well today. Soon, though, the scrapbook expanded with handwritten insights from Persinger and his customers on life during the Great Depression….

(14) ONLINE PUPPETRY EVENT. There’s a charge to participate in the 2nd Virtual National Capital Puppetry Festival happening from August 19-22, but the trailer is free and fun.

(15) PIECES OF EIGHT. Octothorpe episode 38 is “How the Sausage is Made”, which in lesser hands might be a great argument for dietary restrictions. John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty say —

We record around a dining room table using a single mic while our partners and friends were in a brewery without us. As a consequence, it’s a snappy episode this week…

(16) HE-MAN. Netflix dropped a trailer for the new series of “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe”.

He-Man and his powerful friends learn what it means to be a hero while battling the evil forces of Skeletor and his minions.

(17) ETERNALS VIGILANCE. Marvel Studios promises this is the Eternals Final Trailer. I’m going to hold them to it.

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. The King of Random explains why it’s really hard to create a Rube Goldberg machine!

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Paul Weimer, R.S. Benedict, John Coxon, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Michael Toman, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Jon Meltzer.]

Pixel Scroll 6/28/21 Elevenses At Tiffany’s

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(1) ON THE JOB. Slate has posted the June short story from Future Tense and Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination: “The Skeleton Crew,” by Janelle Shane, about a haunted house (supposedly) powered by AI.

Aroha had been a closet skeleton for two weeks now, the longest anyone had managed to hold the position. At first the job had been utterly undoable, but she and her co-workers had hacked in some we’d-totally-be-fired-for-this improvements…

 It was published along with a response essay by Melissa Valentine, an expert on how data and algorithms are changing work: “Ghost work, artificial intelligence, and Janelle Shane’s ‘The Skeleton Crew’”.

“The Skeleton Crew” asks us to consider two questions. The first is an interesting twist on an age-old thought experiment. But the second is more complicated, because the story invites us to become aware of a very real phenomenon and to consider what, if anything, should be done about the way the world is working for some people….

(2) FOUNDATION AND TEASER. What would I do if my civilization was about to end? Uh, log into Facebook? Of course, I’m not head of a galactic empire.

(3) HWA PRIDE. Horror Writers Association’s “A Point of Pride” series continues with an “Interview with Larissa Glasser”.

What inspired you to start writing?

I was more of a TV baby than a reader when I was little. The year after my dad died, I saw the original cartoon version of The Hobbit (1977) and it was the first time I’d seen the portrayal of an invented world—well, like mine it had darkness and evil but also hope and magic, and that was a great place to start from. I was so hooked in to the idea the something could be different in my own world of grief and losing my dad, so I sought out Tolkien and there was no turning back after that. The idea of having an experienced wizard and guardian helping you through trauma and hardship, and yet taught you to self-rely on your own cunning and imagination really appealed to me. In its own way, Tolkien’s novel surpassed the film adaptation. It expanded a world that I needed to see. So, I sought out other fantasy literature. Not long after, I discovered Clive Barker’s Books of Blood and I was astonished not only by its visceral brutality but also by its variety and diversity of setting and plotlines. As a trans kid, I needed different worlds, and to have even the most vague impression that I could create one or many from dreams and imagination drew me in to the creative process. All uphill from there.

(4) VERDICT OF FANHISTORY. Camestros Felapton has assembled the first 33 chapters of The Debarkle into downloadable free ebook: “Catch up on the Debarkle with ebook of Volume 1”.

Volume 1 in the epic saga of the culture war within science fiction. This volume covers the story up to 2014 of the people and events that would lead up to the 2015 Sad Puppy controversy at the prestigious Hugo Awards.

Links to Books2Read, Apple Books, and Rakuten Kobo in the post.

(5) NOT COMING BACK. Nicholas Whyte begins his series of blog reviews of this year’s Hugo nominees by putting some speculation to rest: “2021 Hugos: Best Graphic Story or Comic” at From the Heart of Europe.

A couple of people have asked me if I will return to the staff of DisCon III now that the Chair has resigned. Whoever the new Chair is, I will decline any such invitation. My former position as WSFS Division Head was filled within twenty-four hours of my own resignation, by someone who (unlike me) has actually done that job before, and who does not need me looking over their shoulder. I have no information about the rest of the vacancies, and frankly it’s none of my business whether others of the former team decide to return if invited to do so. Whoever does pick up the reins, I wish them well; I think that we left the Hugo Administration side of things in pretty good shape, and there is of course continuity in Site Selection and the Business Meeting. (One of my few regrets about the way things ended is that we had not yet set up systematic monitoring of the votes coming in, so I have absolutely no idea who is winning.)…

(6) READING THE FUTURE. Given all the interest a few years back about how sf writers were cooperating with the Defense Department, what the Germans are doing might be of interest: ‘At first I thought, this is crazy’: the real-life plan to use novels to predict the next war in The Guardian.

…His favourite example of literature’s ability to identify a social mood and cast it into the future is a retelling of the Cassandra myth by the East German novelist Christa Wolf. Kassandra, published in 1983, casts Troy as a state not unlike the late-stage German Democratic Republic, succumbing to the paranoia of a Stasi-like secret police as it veers towards a not-so-cold war. Kassandra, cursed with the gift of prophecy, is also a cipher for the author’s own predicament: she foresees the decline her society is heading for, but her warnings are ignored by the military patriarchy.

If states could learn to read novels as a kind of literary seismograph, Wertheimer argues, they could perhaps identify which conflicts are on the verge of exploding into violence, and intervene to save maybe millions of lives….

.. In 2018, weeks after the Bundeswehr officers had travelled to Tübingen, Wertheimer presented his initial findings at the defence ministry in Berlin. He drew attention to a literary scandal around Jovan Radulovi?’s 1983 play Dove Hole, about an Ustashe massacre against their Serbian neighbours, and the expulsion of non-Serbian writers from the Serbian Writers’ Association in 1986. In the years that followed, he showed, there was an absence of tales about Albanian-Serbian friendships or love stories, and a rise in revisionist historical novels. Literature and literary institutions, he told the military men, had “paved the way for war” a good decade before the start of the bloodshed of the Kosovo war in 1998.

Carlo Masala was at the presentation. “At the beginning, I thought: this is crazy shit,” he recalls. “It won’t fly.” But Masala, who had spent a part of his academic career studying the conflict in Bosnia, remembered how the hardening tensions in the regions had been preceded by a decline in interfaith marriages. “In Kosovo, it seemed, you could detect similar early warning signs in the literary scene.”

“It was a small project that created a surprising amount of useful results,” says one defence ministry official who attended the presentation. “Against our initial instincts, we were excited.”

In its bid for further government funding, Wertheimer’s team was up against Berlin’s Fraunhofer Institute, Europe’s largest organisation for applied research and development services, which had been asked to run the same pilot project with a data-led approach. Cassandra was simply better, says the defence ministry official, who asked to remain anonymous.

“Predicting a conflict a year, or a year and a half in advance, that’s something our systems were already capable of. Cassandra promised to register disturbances five to seven years in advance – that was something new.”…

(7) UNREAL ESTATE. James Davis Nicoll has the listings for “Five SFF Homes from Hell” at Tor.com.

… Unsurprisingly, speculative fiction authors have been swift to see the narrative potential in home renovation, whether for those who wish to own their own homes or who merely wish to find an affordable rental. Consider these five examples:

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959)

Hill House’s no doubt substantial real-estate potential has one impediment: a reputation for inducing madness in the inhabitants. Hill House was built by the cruel, eccentric Hugh Crain and is subtly, disturbingly, out of true. It has a long and bloody history, which has so far deterred occupation by the sane and the living.

A quartet of occult investigators sees opportunity here. Luke Sanderson is present to keep an eye on his aunt’s cursed property; bohemian Theodora appears to be intrigued by novelty. Doctor John Montague hopes to find scientific proof of the supernatural; Eleanor Vance wants to escape a life of being exploited and disparaged by her kin. What better place to find one’s dreams than an estate legendary for its nightmares?

(8) BLADES AND BIRKENSTOCKS. The Saturday Evening Post remembers “When Sword & Sorcery Cast a Spell on the 1980s”.

Between the time of the rise of disco and when the oceans drank the polar ice caps, there was an age undreamed of . . . and the name of this age was . . . The Eighties. And unto this age was born a seemingly sudden explosion of mystic tales about mighty warriors. For years, those stories shook the theaters with the strength of their steel before they diminished into perennial cable reruns and cult fandom. Now, forty years hence, cast your gaze back upon a time of stop-motion dragons and barbarian queens. Let me remind you of the days of HIGH ADVENTURE . . .

The Sword & Sorcery is a subgenre with an adventure-oriented style that contains elements of fantasy, like magic (hence the “sorcery” part). The name arose from correspondence between American writer Fritz Leiber and British writer Michael Moorcock in the 1960s as they debated what to call the kinds of tales that Robert E. Howard wrote (and which frequently featured his most famous creation, Conan the Barbarian). Leiber landed on “Sword and Sorcery” as a way to differentiate it from historical fantasy and “high fantasy” (which often dealt with world-shaking threats versus the more personal or sword-for-hire quests of “sword and sorcery”). It’s also a nod to the “sword and sandals” nickname that some myth and fantasy films had acquired in the 1950s and 1960s, generally movies featuring the likes of Steve Reeves or Reg Park as Hercules.

(9) LONG AND SHORT OF IT. Mental Floss catalogs “15 Facts About ‘Flowers for Algernon’” – many of which you already know, though maybe not all of them.

4. DANIEL KEYES FOUND INSPIRATION FOR CHARLIE IN HIS WORK.

Charlie Gordon isn’t based on a specific person or an existing experiment, but the character’s resolute drive to become smarter was inspired by one of Keyes’s students. In interviews over the following decades, Keyes would recount how one of his pupils in a class for children with intellectual disabilities asked to be transferred out. “Mr. Keyes, this is a dummy class,” the child said, according to the author’s recollection. “If I try hard and get smart before the end of the term, would you put me in a regular class? I want to be smart.”

(10) SHATNER HEALING UP. William Shatner, now 90,  told The Guardian he is recovering from falling off a horse, as he answered their questions about his work in Senior Moment, playing a retired Nasa test pilot and self-proclaimed ladies’ man who loses his driving license and meets a woman who changes his life, and about his next album.

…Shatner, who will release an album called Love, Death and Horses later in the summer, said he wishes he knew when he was younger that fame and success do not prevent loneliness.

He said: “The album is autobiographical and one of the songs is about loneliness, how much loneliness was a part of my life. It is a part of everybody’s life, no matter how much attention you get, and how happily married you are, and how many children you have. As the song says, we’re all essentially alone and the big mystery is will there be anybody there at the end?”

Shatner said he attributes the energy he still has to “DNA, no question about it” and added: “I have lived a good life. I don’t do drugs, I don’t drink and smoke, and I try to exercise as much as possible, with good food.”

However, he revealed he is currently suffering from a serious injury, saying: “My shoulder is shattered right now. I cracked the bone falling off a horse a couple of weeks ago. So my left arm is bad but I keep exercising it. It’s getting better and better.

“But I’ve had the good luck of not having anything really debilitating. So nothing has sapped my energy.”

(11) MEMORY LANE.

1982 – Thirty nine years ago, John Crowley’s Little, Big would win both the World Fantasy Award and the  Mythopoeic Fantasy Award. It would place fifth in the voting at Chicon IV for Best Novel Hugo. (C. J. Cherryh’s Downbelow Station won that year.) It would also be nominated for a Balrog, BSFA and Nebula as well.

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born June 28, 1920 — James Doohan. Montgomery “Scotty” Scott on Trek of course. His first genre appearance was in Outer Limits as Police Lt. Branch followed by being a SDI Agent at Gas Station in The Satan Bug film before getting the Trek gig. His first genre series would’ve been Space Command where he played Phil Mitchell. He filmed a Man from U.N.C.L.E.film, One of Our Spies Is Missing, in which he played Phillip Bainbridge, during the first season of Trek. After Trek, he was on Jason of Star Command as Commander Canarvin. ISFDB notes that he did three Scotty novels co-written with S.M. Stirling. (Died 2005.)
  • Born June 28, 1926 — Mel Brooks, 95. Young Frankenstein (1974) (Hugo and Nebula winner) and Spaceballs (1987) would get him listed even without The 2000 Year Old Man, Get Smart  and others. Here is an appreciation of Mel on YouTube. (Alan Baumler)
  • Born June 28, 1946 — Robert Asprin. I first encountered him as the co-editor along with Lynn Abbey of the Thieves’ World Series for which he wrote the superb “The Price of Doing Business” for the first volume. I’m also very fond of The Cold Cash War novel. His Griffen McCandles (Dragons) series is quite excellent. I’m pleased to say that he’s well stocked on both at the usual suspects. (Died 2008.)
  • Born June 28, 1947 — Mark Helprin, 74. Author of three works of significance to the genre, Winter’s Tale, A City in Winter, which won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella and The Veil of Snows. The latter two are tastefully illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg. I know Winter’s Tale was turned into a film but color me very disinterested in seeing it as I love the novel. 
  • Born June 28, 1951 — Lalla Ward, 70. She is known for her role as the second actress to play Romana (or Romanadvoratrelundar in full) on  Doctor Who during the time of the Fourth Doctor. She has reprised the character in Dimensions in Time, the webcast version of Shada, and in several Doctor Who Big Finish productions. In addition, she played Ophelia to Derek Jacobi’s Hamlet in the BBC television production.  And she was Helga in an early horror film called Vampire Circus. 
  • Born June 28, 1954 — Raffaella De Laurentiis, 67. Yes, she’s related to that De Laurentiis, hence she was the producer of the first Dune film. She also did Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer, both starting Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Kull the Conqueror. She also produced all films in the Dragonheart series. She was the Executive Producer of the Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
  • Born June 28, 1954 — Alice Krige, 67. I think her first genre role was in the full role of Eva Galli  and Alma Mobley in Ghost Story. From there, she plays Mary Shelley (née Godwin) in Haunted Summer before going onto being Mary Brady in Stephen King’s Sleepwalkers. Now it’s in Star Trek: First Contact in which she first plays the Borg Queen, a role she’ll repeat in the finale of Star Trek: Voyager, “Endgame”. She’s had a number of other genre roles but I will only note that she was Eir in Thor: The Dark World. 
  • Born June 28, 1954 — Deborah Grabien, 67. She makes the Birthday list for her most excellent Haunted Ballads series in which a folk musician and his lover tackle the matter of actual haunted spaces. It leads off with The Weaver and the Factory Maid. You can read the first chapter here. Oh, and she makes truly great dark chocolate fudge. 

(13) COMICS SECTION.

  • Tom Gauld foresees the future of job interviews:
  • And don’t miss the Bloom County / Calvin & Hobbes crossover –

(14) GENRE DICTIONARY. Nick Mamatas revises an entry:

(15) LEGO KERFUFFLE. “Disney drops ‘Slave I’ name for Boba Fett’s ship, prompting outcry from ‘Star Wars’ fans, actor” – Yahoo! has the story.

…Nonetheless, each attempt to bring inclusivity to Star Wars has been met with backlash from a small but vocal group of Star Wars fans lamenting the saga’s “social justice warriors” and “woke” approach to its latest endeavors.

Now, some Star Wars fans are mad again. This time at a Lego set.

As originally noted by the fan site Jedi News, the new Mandalorian-themed toy line features beloved bounty hunter Boba Fett’s spaceship; however, its traditional Slave I moniker has been changed to “Boba Fett’s Starship.” Per the definitive Star Wars reference site Wookieepedia, Fett’s heavily modified “Firespray-31-class patrol and attack craft” formerly belonged to this father, Jango. While originally built as a police craft with cells to transport criminals, Fett revamped the holding area into prisoner cages, “coffin-like cabinets that were less humane but better controlled his prisoners.”

Speaking to Jedi News, Lego designer Michael Lee Stockwell said the toymaker was no longer using the Slave I name, with fellow designer Jens Kronvold Frederiksen adding, “It’s probably not something which has been announced publicly but it is just something that Disney doesn’t want to use any more.”…

(16) ON THE RECORD. NPR interviews Sally Ride’s life partner in “Loving Sally Ride, The First American Woman In Space”.

Tam O’Shaughnessy and Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly in space — in 1983, aboard the space shuttle Challenger — shared a passion for getting girls involved in STEM. It led them to co-found Sally Ride Science, a company focused on equity and inclusion in science education.

There was much more to O’Shaughnessy and Ride’s relationship, however. They met as kids in the early 1960s and developed an instant connection. Years later, they fell in love.

But their relationship remained largely private until after Ride’s death in 2012 at age 61. In an interview with Short Wave host Madeline Sofia, O’Shaughnessy remembers how Ride opened the door to that revelation shortly before she died.

O’Shaughnessy says she asked Ride, “Who am I going to be in the world?”

“And she kind of thought about it for a second,” O’Shaughnessy remembers. “And she said, you decide. Whatever you decide will be just fine. …

“Very few people in general knew that she was gay. So it was really Sally telling me to do what I thought was best and then my friends helping me realize that I needed to be true to myself. And it changed my life, and I wish Sally could experience that.”…

(17) UNDER THE LID. Spencer Kornhaber endeavors to show “How Disney Mismanaged the Star Wars Universe” at The Atlantic.

…Had Lucas’s galaxy lost its power, or had its new stewards simply mismanaged it? The recent success of a remarkable Star Wars television series suggests the latter. When the streaming-TV service Disney+ launched in late 2019, it featured The Mandalorian, which picks up five years after the events of the original trilogy, and follows the adventures of a mysterious mercenary who has sworn never to take off his helmet. By the end of Season 2, a critical consensus had emerged: It was the best live-action Star Wars product to arrive since the early 1980s. Millions of viewers cooed over the short-statured enigma known to fans as Baby Yoda, who has a price on his adorable head for unknown reasons. As The Mandalorian’s laconic and lethal hero travels from one planet to the next, the sublime feeling of immersion that laced Lucas’s early movies reemerges. To watch the show and then look back at the sweep of Star Wars history is to understand where that feeling comes from—and why most of Hollywood’s hero-driven, special-effects-laden fantasies never attain it….

(18) SLEEP NUMBER. “This Implant Could One Day Control Your Sleep and Wake Cycles” – Smithsonian Magazine discusses an innovative idea.

In 1926, Fritz Kahn completed Man as Industrial Palace, the preeminent lithograph in his five-volume publication The Life of Man. The illustration shows a human body bustling with tiny factory workers. They cheerily operate a brain filled with switchboards, circuits and manometers. Below their feet, an ingenious network of pipes, chutes and conveyer belts make up the blood circulatory system. The image epitomizes a central motif in Kahn’s oeuvre: the parallel between human physiology and manufacturing, or the human body as a marvel of engineering.

An apparatus currently in the embryonic stage of development—the so-called “implantable living pharmacy”—could have easily originated in Kahn’s fervid imagination. The concept is being developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in conjunction with several universities, notably Northwestern and Rice. Researchers envision a miniaturized factory, tucked inside a microchip, that will manufacture pharmaceuticals from inside the body. The drugs will then be delivered to precise targets at the command of a mobile application. DARPA’s initial, modest goal for the four-and-a-half-year program, which awarded contracts to researchers this May, is to alleviate jet lag….

(19) WHO BOOKS FOR BLIND FANS. There is a Crowdfunder for tactile Doctor Who books for blind fans: “Louis’ Campaign – Doctor Who for Blind Children – a Community crowdfunding project in Kingsclere for Living Paintings”. At present, it’s raised £5,317 of its £15,000 goal.

Learn more about the campaign at Living Paintings “Doctor Who Touch to See Books”.

Louis Moorhouse, from Bradford has been blind since he was 18 months old.

Now aged 19, and about to finish his first year at University, Louis has been a beneficiary of Living Paintings Touch to See library since childhood; enjoying and learning from the audio tactile images and books, developing skills and experiencing things his sighted peers take for granted….

… Recently Louis approached us with a brilliant idea: to create a Touch to See book based on the greatly loved character: Doctor Who.

 “I’m a big fan of the show Doctor Who, but I have yet to fully meet the weird and wonderful characters, aliens, monsters and devices from the show because I can’t see them.

If I could sum up what I think is the most important thing about my campaign I would ask a sighted person to just imagine – close your eyes and now imagine you can’t open them ever again. This is how it is and now you want to read a book or watch Doctor Who. How are you going to do that? How important is reading a book to you? As a sighted person how would you feel if that was taken away from you and you couldn’t read anymore?

Then you discover Living Paintings and the books are full of characters you’ve heard about and imagined all the time, they’ve been on TV, you’ve listened to the audio books, you may have had the books read to you and you never quite understood what they looked like and now, because of Living Paintings you do.”

[Thanks to Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Rob Thornton, Cora Buhlert, Joey Eschrich, Jeff Warner, Lise Andreasen, James Davis Nicoll, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 10/6/20 Don’t Clickety, Don’t Call Me, Let Me Sit For A While, I’m Reading All The Books In My Tsundoku Pile

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(1) POWERFUL CANON. Amy Tenebrink shares the impact that stories by a leading sff author had on her: “Personal Canons: Nnedi Okorafor”.

…Onyesonwu is one of those angry, defiant, adventurous heroines of my heart. But Who Fears Death isn’t just a story of a warrior girl; it’s the story of all warrior girls. Who Fears Death is, itself, angry, defiant, and adventurous. It rips apart the fabric of our quotidian world and shows us, more clearly for all its speculation, what is wrong with us but what could be right with us. This is speculative fiction at its best: incisive, unflinching, uncompromising. Untethered from what’s “real” in a way that can show us what is, in fact, actually real—and what could be real if only we reached for the stars.

In Who Fears Death, Nnedi put a heroine of my heart into a book of my heart. Who Fears Death showed me, in a moment, what speculative literature can be: not just a series of quest-wanderings, of dragon-slayings, of evil mage-vanquishings, but an inspirational, aspirational blueprint for me and my place in the world. Who Fears Death is itself a sword, a magic wand, a spell that can change everything.

(2) ALPHA OF THE OMEGA. The award administrators — Sci-Fest L.A. and Light Bringer Project — have announced that the Tomorrow Prize and The Roswell Award will now reside under an umbrella competition name, the Omega Sci-Fi Awards. Here’s the new logo.

(3) MEMBERS OF THE JURY. James Davis Nicoll introduces the Young People Read Old SFF panel to “The Pleiades” by Otis Kidwell Burger.

The Pleiades is impressive enough readers would no doubt run out to acquire her other works. Unfortunately, Rediscovery’s biographical entry on her reveals that her SF career was quite short1. At least, I assume younger readers would react as positively as I did. How did my Young People actually feel?

(4) QUESTIONS ABOUT THE POLICY. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] Non-binary writer Akwaeke Emezi, whose works are at least borderline SFF, has declared that they will no longer submit their novels to Women’s Prize for Fiction (where they were a finalist last year), after being asked to provide proof of their legal gender: “Akwaeke Emezi shuns Women’s prize over request for details of sex as defined ‘by law'” in The Guardian.

… Emezi said that when Faber got in touch with the Women’s prize about submitting The Death of Vivek Oji, they were informed: “The information we would require from you regards Akwaeke Emezi’s sex as defined by law.”

“Forget about me – I don’t want this prize – but anyone who uses this kind of language does not fuck with trans women either, so when they say it’s for women, they mean cis women,” wrote Emezi. “And yes, this does mean that them longlisting [Freshwater] was transphobic. It’s fine for me not to be eligible because I’m not a woman! But you not about to be out here on some ‘sex as defined by law’ like that’s not a weapon used against trans women.”

The Women’s prize was established in response to the Booker failing to shortlist a single female writer in 1991. Following Emezi’s nomination in 2019, the organisers of the £30,000 award said it was working on a policy “around gender fluid, transgender and transgender non-binary writers”.

Responding to Emezi’s comments, the prize organisers said that their terms and conditions for entry equated the word “woman” with “a cis woman, a transgender woman or anyone who is legally defined as a woman or of the female sex”.

(5) O’DELL KICKSTARTER. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] Here is a Kickstarter of interest: Claire O’Dell is looking for funding to republish her River of Souls trilogy, which came out in 2010 from Tor, when she was still writing as Beth Bernobich: “The River of Souls Trilogy, Second Edition” With 26 days left, $566 of the $2,500 goal has been raised.

I’m Claire O’Dell, author of the Lammy Award-winning Janet Watson Chronicles, the River of Souls trilogy, and the Mage and Empire books.

Back in 2007, writing as Beth Bernobich, I landed my very first book deal—a three-book contract with Tor Books for my novel Passion Play and two sequels, aka, the River of Souls trilogy.  Passion Play came out in October 2010, and to my absolute delight it won the RT Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Epic Fantasy. Queen’s Hunt and Allegiance followed in 2012 and 2013, with great reviews, and a prequel novel, A Jewel Bright Sea, appeared last year from Kensington Books.

Now that I have the rights back to the trilogy, I’d like to re-release them with new covers that better match the story and the characters. (Not to mention fixing a few continuity errors that crept in along the way.) Pledges from this campaign will pay for custom cover art and rewards.

(6) FOUNDATION. At WIRED, “The Geeks Guide to the Galaxy” interviews several creators to support the claim that “‘Foundation’ Has One of the Best Sci-Fi Concepts Ever”.

John Kessel on psychohistory:

“I studied physics as an undergrad, and basically what [Asimov] is doing is taking classical thermodynamics and applying it to human behavior. In thermodynamics, you can’t predict what one atom is going to do, but if you have several billion atoms in a contained box, you can predict—very precisely—if you raise the temperature, exactly what the effect on pressure is going to be, things like that. He’s basically saying if you have enough human beings—you have 100 million worlds, all inhabited by human beings—that psychohistory can predict the mass behavior of human beings, without being able to predict any individual human being’s behavior. That’s a cool idea.”

(7) WHITE SCREEN OF DEATH? [Item by Cora Buhlert.] The Guardian has run several articles and opinion pieces about how the postponement of Dune and that James Bond movie will affect British cinemas — and may kill them off altogether. A lot of anger, which is partly understandable, because movie theatres are open again at reduced capacity in the UK and much of the rest of Europe, but have nothing to show, because all of the big Hollywood movies are being held back. Here are four views of the situation.

He’s best known for sweeping in at the last minute to save the day – but James Bond’s latest act could be the death knell for many British cinemas.

The announcement that the release of No Time to Die, the 25th film featuring the secret agent, would be delayed again has left cinemas facing financial obliteration because of the absence of other forthcoming blockbuster films.

Our movie industry was just about keeping its morale steady. It was enforcing perfectly workable rules on sanitising and physical distancing and not subject to those closures taking theatre and live entertainment to the cliff edge. The pilot light of big-screen cinema culture was flickering. But it was still alight.

But this is a serious blow. If it is really true that Cineworld will close 128 cinemas, putting 5,500 jobs at risk (and it is not simply a scare-story negotiating ploy leaked to the press alongside the company’s official letter to the culture secretary Oliver Dowden demanding action) then this is potentially devastating. 

…For an understanding of how we got here, look at the fates of two films that did get released during the pandemic. Following a tense summer in which Christopher Nolan’s Tenet and Disney’s live-action Mulan remake competed against the coronavirus in a game of grandmother’s footsteps, both films were finally released using opposing strategies.

“Warner Bros did a brave thing bringing out Tenet [in cinemas] at that very fraught time,” says Naman Ramachandran, international correspondent at Variety magazine. “It sent a positive message to the exhibition sector as a whole.” Disney, on the other hand, launched Mulan on its streaming service Disney+, where it came with a premium price tag (£19.99/$29.99) in addition to subscription fees. Cinemas screened it only in territories where Disney+ is not available. “My opinion is that Disney should’ve released Mulan in cinemas also,” says Ramachandran. “There was a demand for it and it would’ve kept the theatrical chains happy.” As it stands, no one is: not the exhibitors who lost out on an event movie, nor Disney, who won’t be thrilled if the mediocre streaming audience estimates are correct.

Mulan’s defection and Tenet’s under-performance in the US (it still hasn’t opened in the lucrative New York and Los Angeles markets, where cinemas remain closed) have had a devastating effect on other big releases.

…After six weeks of global release, Tenet has grossed more than £235m worldwide – a number that means different things to different analysts. For a latter-day Nolan film, it’s borderline disastrous: far short of the £405m grossed by his last film, Dunkirk, which itself was a modest performer compared to the £830m racked up by The Dark Knight Rises. With a production budget around £154m, it’s fair to say these are not the receipts of Nolan’s or Warner Bros executives’ dreams. Others would argue that they’re not half bad for a film released in the midst of a global pandemic in which the filmgoing public has been actively discouraged from communal indoor activity – a metric for which there is no precedent to set the bar. Globally, it’s the third-highest grosser of the year, behind Chinese epic The Eight Hundred and January’s Bad Boys for Life, which already feels like a relic from another era.

All in all, things could be worse for Tenet – except for the fact that, by just about anyone’s yardstick, things haven’t been nearly good enough….

(8) MEDIA ANNIVERSARY.

  • Twenty five years ago this year at Intersection, the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form went to Star Trek: The Next Generation’s two-part series finale, “All Good Things…“.  (It beat out The Mask, Interview with the Vampire, Stargate and Star Trek: Generations.) It was directed by Winrich Kolbe from a script written by Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga. The title is derived from the expression “All good things must come to an end”, a phrase used by Q during the story itself. It generally considered one of the series’ best episodes with the card scene singled out as one of the series’s best. 

(9) TODAY’S DAY.

10/6 — Mad Hatter Day. The original picture of the Mad Hatter by John Tenniel in Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll depicts him wearing a hat, bearing the note “In This Style 10/6”. Although we know this is really an order from the time the picture was drawn to mean a hat in that style cost 10 shillings and sixpence, we take this as inspiration to act in the style of the Mad Hatter on 10/6 (In the UK this would point to the tenth of June, but as the day was founded in America it is the 6th of October).

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born October 6, 1895 – Caroline Gordon.  Guggenheim Fellowship.  O. Henry Award.  Honorary D.Litt. degrees from Bethany College (West Virginia), St. Mary’s College (Indiana).  The Glory of Hera for us, her last novel; ten others; short-story collections; non-fiction.  (Died 1981) [JH]
  • Born October 6, 1928 – Frank Dietz.  Co-founder of the Lunarians; chaired the first 15 Lunacons; Fan Guest of Honor at Lunacon 50.  Fanzine Luna (and Luna’).  Recorded many SF cons on wire and tape, unfortunately most now seems lost.  File 770 appreciation by Andrew Porter here.  (Died 2013) [JH]
  • Born October 6, 1942 – Arthur Hlavaty, 78.  A dozen times Best Fanwriter Hugo finalist.  No doubt inspired by the C.M. Kornbluth story “MS. Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie” – maybe the only circumstance in which no doubt could be applied to him – he called a fanzine The Diagonal Relationship, later The Dillinger Relic, then Derogatory Reference; not seen since 2002, but in Fanzineland that’s neither complete nor conclusive: No. 33 of his Nice Distinctions just appeared after three years.  Fan Guest of Honor at Empricon 3, MidSouthCon 2, Westercon 42, Minicon 37; Detcon the 11th NASFiC (North America SF Con, since 1975 held when the Worldcon is overseas).  If Sarcasm is in anger, satire is with love, he is as so often with him both.  [JH]
  • Born October 6, 1942 — Britt Ekland, 78. She starred in The Wicker Man* as Willow MacGregor, and appeared as a Bond girl, Goodnight in The Man with the Golden Gun. She was also Queen Nyleptha in King Solomon’s Treasure based off the H. Rider Haggard novels. *There is only one Wicker Man film as far as I’m concerned. (CE)
  • Born October 6, 1946 — John C. Tibbetts, 74. Film critic, historian, author. He’s written such articles as “The Illustrating Man: The Screenplays of Ray Bradbury” and “Time on His Hands: The Fantasy Fiction of Jack Finney”. One of his two books is The Gothic Imagination: Conversations on Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction in the Media, the other being The Gothic Worlds of Peter Straub. (CE) 
  • Born October 6, 1950 — David Brin, 70. Author of several series including Existence (which I do not recognize), the Postman novel and the Uplift series of which The Uplift War won the Best Novel Hugo at Nolacon II and is most excellent. I’ll admit that the book he could-wrote with Leah Wilson, King Kong Is Back! An Unauthorized Look at One Humongous Ape, tickles me for its title. So who’s read his newest novel, The Ancient Ones? (CE)
  • Born October 6, 1953 – Roseanne Hawke, Ph.D., 67.  Wolfchild, 11th Century story set in the lost land of Lyonesse (RD was awarded Bard of Cornwall in 2006).  Daughter of Nomads, Mughal empire.  Chandani and the Ghost of the Forest, Himalayan mountains.  Memoir, Riding the Wind.  “I started a romantic novel when I was 17 but I burnt it….  working for ten years in the Middle East and Pakistan … I started writing seriously.”  Website here.  [JH]
  • Born October 6, 1955 — Donna White, 65. Academic who has written several works worth your knowing about — Dancing with Dragons: Ursula K. LeGuin and the Critics and Diana Wynne Jones: An Exciting and Exacting Wisdom. She’s also the author of the dense but worth reading A Century of Welsh Myth in Children’s Literature. (CE) 
  • Born October 6, 1955 — Ellen Kushner, 65. If you’ve not read it, do so now as her sprawling Riverside seriesis amazing. I’m reasonably sure that I’ve read all of it. And during the the High Holy Days, do be sure to read The Golden Dreydl as it’s quite wonderful. As it’s Autumn and this being when I read it, I’d be remiss not to recommend her Thomas the Rhymer novel which won both the World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Award. (CE) 
  • Born October 6, 1962 – John Knoll, 58.  Chief Creative Officer at Industrial Light & Magic.  Creating the Worlds of “Star Wars”; covers for The Art of “Star Trek” (with M. Uesugi), Inside “Star Trek”.  Scientific & Engineering Award given him and his brother Thomas for creating Adobe Photoshop.  Cameo appearance as a pilot in The Phantom Menace.  More in his Wikipedia entry.  [JH]
  • Born October 6, 1978 – Anna Elliott, 42.  Three Tristan & Isolde books; four about Jane Austen characters, two about Sherlock Holmes, a few more.  Among her favorites by other authors, Life With Father, Wodehouse’s books about Bertie Wooster, Sayers’ books about Lord Peter Wimsey.  “What do you like to do when you’re not writing?”  “Mostly think about writing.”  [JH]
  • Born October 6, 1986 — Olivia Jo Thirlby, 34. She is best known for her roles as Natalie in Russian SF film The Darkest Hour and as Judge Cassandra Anderson in the excellent Dredd. And she was Holly in the supernatural thriller Above the Shadows. (CE)  

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) HEAVY GOING. Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson finds it easy to curb his enthusiasm: “The Haunting of Bly Manor Is an Erratic, Melodramatic Follow-Up”.

A great actor whose name I am not supposed to mention here narrates much of the new Netflix series The Haunting of Bly Manor (out October 9). In 2007, her character tells a wedding party a chilling, sad story of 1987 (and years previous) England, when a spooky estate’s resident ghosts tangled fitfully with living people, all caught in the grip of personal loss. This American actor tries her noble best to maneuver a Northern English accent, though it gets a bit wobbly as her narration scrapes the ceiling of profundity but never quite breaks through. 

The voiceover, with its heavy writing and uneven if committed delivery, is pretty neatly representative of the whole of Bly Manor, which aims for something scary and sweeping but is too often hampered by messy adornment. Bly Manor is the second series in the Haunting franchise that began with 2018’s Hill House, an adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s novel led by horror auteur Mike Flanagan.

(13) SCRUBTOBER IS OVER. “After series of scrubs, SpaceX launches Starlink mission from Kennedy Space Center” reports Florida Today.

After more than a month of scrubs and delays, SpaceX broke the Space Coast’s launch drought early Tuesday when a Falcon 9 rocket boosted 60 Starlink internet satellites from Kennedy Space Center.

The 7:29 a.m. liftoff from pad 39A signaled the end of what was commonly referred to as “Scrubtober,” a long series of mission delays that actually began in September due to hardware issues and inclement weather. Tuesday’s Starlink mission, for example, had been scrubbed four times…

(14) FINDING THE GEMS. The Virtual Memories Show devotes Episode 399 to editor “Sheila Williams”.

With her new fantastic short story anthology, Entanglements: Tomorrow’s Lovers, Families, and Friends (MIT Press), editor Sheila Williams brings together a panoply of voices to explore how technology and scientific advances have on the deepest human relationships. We talk about Sheila’s nearly 40 years editing science fiction stories at Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, how she manages to balance new and diverse voices with a foundation of SF’s history, how she copes with receiving ~800 stories a month (while only being able to buy 5-6), and technology’s greater role in day-to-day life and what that means for writers’ and readers’ imagination and expectations. We also get into her author freakouts (like going blank when she met Samuel R. Delany many years ago), how her philosophy background helps her as an editor, missing cons and festivals, the challenge of editing an author in translation (in this case Xia Jia), and more. Give it a listen! And go read Entanglements!

[Thanks to Cora Buhlert, JJ, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, John Hertz, James Davis Nicoll, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Bill.]

Pixel Scroll 7/5/20 Voyage To The Bottom of the Wonderful Mushroom Planet

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(1) LAST NIGHT IN MY HOMETOWN. LA County banned cities from hosting the usual Fourth of July public fireworks displays. But as you know, nature abhors a vacuum.

(2) LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS FEN. Camestros Felapton is firing up a new series of posts about the Best Fan Writer Hugo finalists. First on deck is: “Hugo Fan Writer: Why you should vote for…Cora Buhlert”.

… Cora has been doing the hard working of promoting self-published and small press SF&F for years. While sections of fandom have been trying to reframe publishing mode as some kind of partisan ideological battle, Cora has been writing, publishing and promoting indie sci-fi consistently and in a way designed to enhance science fiction writing….

(3) FOLLOW THE MONEY. NPR takes “A Look Into The Wild Economy Of Tabletop Board Game Funding”.

Long before the coronavirus pandemic, tabletop board games were having something of a renaissance, with popular games like The Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride becoming mainstream additions to family game nights.

Then, COVID-19 hit and, as Quartz reported, it changed how many hobbyist board game creators approached the industry. But for many people who suddenly found themselves stuck at home under lockdown, the pandemic also spurred newfound interest in strategy games that require creativity and concentration. Board game hobbyists had more time to spend learning about new games coming out, while newbies to the scene were discovering a world beyond classics like Monopoly and Clue.

Then, on March 30, the board game Frosthaven — the dungeon crawling, highly-anticipated sequel to the hit game Gloomhaven — surpassed its funding goal of $500,000 on Kickstarter in mere hours. Today, it is the most-funded board game on the site ever, with nearly $13 million pledged toward funding the game’s development. Only two projects have ever crowdsourced more funding on the site.

Frosthaven’s success seemed to exemplify a shift that has been happening in the tabletop gaming community for years: toward games that are not only focused on strategy and adventure, but also a new type of funding model where fans have more say than ever in which games move from the idea stage to their living rooms. And hobbyist tabletop games are a different breed of entertainment altogether.

“You have mass market games, which are Monopoly and everything that you find at Target or Toys “R” Us, and you have hobbyist games, which you typically find at your FLGS — your friendly local gaming store,” said Cree Wilson, the programming and tabletop gaming manager for Comicpalooza. “Then there’s this blurry line of stuff in between, which I’ve heard sometimes called entertainment gaming, and it’s games selling tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of copies, but isn’t selling millions yet.”

For many of these smaller games, funding from fans has proved essential. Hasbro, the company that makes games like Monopoly and Connect 4, earns hundreds of millions each year through everything from game sales and licensing deals to its TV and film business. But funding models are far different for newer or smaller game makers. These makers have become part of one of the country’s most popular quarantine hobbies, but they’ve done so through a mini-economy that relies on crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter.

(4) AI-YI-YI! “Star Trek’s Robert Picardo Sings About Not Being Brent Spiner in New Music Video”  – Comicbook.com sets the stage.

… “A few weeks ago, my friend and colleague Brent Spiner tweeted a hilarious musical spoof of himself that inspired me to do something in my characteristically more sophisticated manner, as an homage,” Picardo says in a statement about his new video. “My good friend James Marlowe (The Marlowe-Pugnetti Company) directed a crack mini-crew. Legendary event planner and TV personality Edward Perotti does a great cameo.”

And by popular demand, the Brent Spiner video he is reacting to:

https://twitter.com/BrentSpiner/status/1260963237551411200?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1260963237551411200%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cinemablend.com%2Ftelevision%2F2496365%2Fstar-trek-vet-brent-spiner-drops-f-bombs-singing-about-how-awesome-he-is-for-a-video

(5) LAYING THE FOUNDATION. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] WIRED talked to one of the principals on the upcoming Apple TV+ adaptation of the Foundation series: “The Producer of ‘Foundation’ on Asimov, Covid-19, and Race in Sci-Fi”.

The Covid-19 pandemic all but halted Hollywood. Production on most movies and television shows (except for a handful of  animated programs) became too risky, and ceased. It’s only in the last few weeks that organizations like SAG-AFTRA and the Directors Guild of America have begun publishing guidelines for how cast and crew members might safely return to work. In this lull, however, studios are still cobbling together their stockpiled footage and releasing tantalizing trailers for upcoming projects. The most recent to ricochet around the internet? A first look at Apple TV+’s adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s beloved Foundation series.

Even if you’ve never read the Asimov novels, which were first published in the 1950s, every science fiction fan has felt their influence, especially in genre classics like Star Wars. Much of the plot concerns the fall of a certain Galactic Empire (ahem), and a desperate, surprisingly math-heavy attempt to save human civilization from a vast, bleak dark age. Apple’s adaptation, which is due to hit the tech giant’s streaming platform sometime in 2021, features stars like Jared Harris (Chernobyl) and Lee Pace (Halt and Catch Fire) and, based on the first teaser, looks epic. One of the people behind that epic-ness is Leigh Dana Jackson, Foundation’s co-executive producer. He can’t talk much about his new show yet, but WIRED still picked his brain about Asimov, Covid-19, and genre fiction’s unique capacity to capture revolution.

(6) TRIVIAL TRIVIA.

Published fifty-nine years ago as a novel by Ace Books, Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time started out as a two-part serial in Galaxy Magazine‘s March and April 1958 issues. It would win the Hugo Award for Best Novel or Novelette at Solacon. In general, it was well-received with Algis Budrys liking it but noting it was more of a play than an actual novel. In 2012, it was selected for inclusion in the Library of America’s two-volume compilation American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s. (CE)

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born July 5, 1878 – Howard Brown.  A hundred covers for us, forty interiors; only a small part of his prodigious work.  Cover artist for Scientific American 1913-1931.  Argosy, Radio News, Science and Invention.  Main cover artist for Astounding while Tremaine was editor.  Also Startling and Thrilling Wonder.  Here is the January 1934 Astounding.  Here is the November 1938.  Here is the May 1940 Startling.  Here is an interior for At the Mountains of Madness (April 1934 Astounding).  Here is HB’s cover for the April 1934 Astounding and a more detailed biography.  (Died 1945) [JH]
  • Born July 5, 1935 – John Schoenherr.  Two hundred covers, seven hundred interiors.  Here is Starship Troopers.  Here is The Tomorrow People.  Here is the August 1980 Analog.  Here is the March 1965 Analog with the beginning of Dune that made JS famous for illustrating this story.  Here is an interior for Children of Dune.  Here is his cover for Jane Yolen’s Owl Moon (1987) for which JS won the Caldecott Medal.  See also “The Role of the Artist in Science Fiction” (with Kelly Freas, Jack Gaughan, Eddie Jones, Karel Thole), Noreascon I Proceedings (29th Worldcon).  Here is Kurt Snavely’s treatment of JS.  Here is Ian Schoenherr’s.  Hugo for Best Pro Artist, 1965.  Guest of Honor at Boskone 14, Lunacon 25.  SF Hall of Fame.  (Died 2010) [JH]
  • Born July 5, 1941 — Garry Kilworth, 79. The Ragthorn, a novella co-authored with Robert Holdstock, which won the World Fantasy Award. It’s an excellent read and it makes me wish I’d read other fiction by him. Anyone familiar with his work? (CE)
  • Born July 5, 1944 – Cathy Hill, 76.  Known in particular for drawing raccoons – cartoon raccoons.  Here is “Raccoons on the Moon”; here is “The Lisping Asteroid”, which was used for the cover of The “Rowrbrazzle” Sampler.  The raccoons even got involved with Cerebus the Aardvark; and CH published Mad Raccoons.  Here is an index of her comic-book work.  She’s done more, in and out of our field: here is Locus 52 from its fanzine days, with her logograph (note that her puzzled aliens get it wrong); here is her cover for the 1979 printing of The Blue World; here is her cover for the original Keep Watching the Skies! (note propeller beanie).  Here is a dinosaur she drew for Don Glut.  Her oil paintings will have to wait for another time.  [JH]
  • Born July 5, 1948 — William Hootkins. One of these rare performers who showed up playing secondary roles in a number of major film franchises. He was the Rebel pilot Jek Tono Porkins in Star Wars, he played Munson in the Flash Gordon film, he was Major Eaton, one of the two officers who gave Indy his orders in Raiders of The Lost Ark, and he was Lt Eckhardt in the 1989 Batman. (Died 2005.) (CE)
  • Born July 5, 1957 — Jody Lynn Nye, 63. She’s best-known for collaborating with Robert Asprin on the ever so excellent MythAdventures series.  Since his death, she has continued that series and she is now also writing sequels to his Griffen McCandle series as well. She’s got a space opera series, The Imperium, out now which sounds intriguing. (CE)
  • Born July 5, 1958 — Nancy Springer, 62. May I recommend her Tales of Rowan Hood series of which her Rowan Hood: Outlaw Girl of Sherwood Forest is a most splendid revisionist telling of that legend? And her Enola Holmes Mysteries are a nice riffing off of the Holmsiean mythos. (CE)
  • Born July 5, 1963 — Alma Alexander, 57. Sixteen novels, a dozen shorter stories, for us; more outside our field.  The Secrets of Jin-Shei has been translated into fourteen languages; three sequels.  God of the Unmage has Nikola Tesla.  Of writing The Second Star, just released a few days ago, she says “dream fragments … wash up tantalizingly as flotsam and jetsam on the shores of coming awake.  One such fragment lay glittering on that shore one morning – a single sentence … a soul is like a starfish”; this proves to bear on interstellar travel.  She likes coffee, cherries, and sonnets.  [JH]
  • Born July 5, 1964 — Ronald D. Moore, 56. Screenwriter and producer who’s best-remembered  for his work on Star Trek: The Next Generation where he fleshed out the Klingon race and culture, on the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, and Outlander. He’s the creator and writer of For All Mankind. (CE) 
  • Born July 5, 1985 – Meagan Spooner, 35.  Ten novels (five with Amy Kaufman).  Shadowlark had a Booklist starred review; Hunted, a Kirkus starred review.  These Broken Stars (with AK) was a New York Times Best-Seller and won an Aurealis Award.  Here’s how she ranks some books I know: Euripedes, Electra, The Phoenician Women, The Bacchae (4.21); Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (4.18); Austen, Persuasion (4.14); Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac (4.07); Adams, Watership Down (4.06).  She plays guitar, video games, and with her cat.  [JH]

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Jan Eliot’s Stone Soup comic strip is winding down:

For those of you who saw this Sunday’s strip, I know you can see that I have decided to retire Stone Soup. I can’t imagine turning the strip, which is so personal to me, over to anyone else, and my syndicate is not planning on running reruns. The last Stone Soup strip will appear on July 26, when I will officially jump off the funny pages.

And the artist has been breaking the news to the characters, within the strips: June 14, June 21, June 28, and July 5.

(9) DESPITE HAMILTON. In the Washington Post, Steven Zeitchik interviews “frequent chronicler of Disney” Josh Spiegel about whether Disney’s business model works any more. “How Disney could be facing a lot more than a lost summer”.

Disney has long been an outfit fueled by nostalgia…But Disney’s little secret is that such nostalgia cannot stand on its own–it needs to be continually fed and reinforced.  New Star Wars offerings drive longing for the ’70s, a Beauty And The Beast remake powers nostalgia for the 1990s.  Marvel movies draft off pleasant feelings of a childhood of comic books (and, 12 years into their run, of themselves).  Disney is a constant interplat between past and present, a continuous bicycle chain between the pieces we once loved and the current releases we see to remind us of them.

And that chain has now been severed.

‘What Disney really needs to do, what they rely on, is creating new nostalgia; they can’t just let the old kind stand for itself,’ Spiegel said.  ‘Because, at some point, the umpteenth time you watch Frozen is the last time you watch Frozen.’

(10) OOPSIE. “Rocket Lab: Latest mission from New Zealand lost in flight” – BBC can’t find it either.

The American launch company that flies its rockets out of New Zealand has lost its latest mission.

Rocket Lab said its Electron vehicle failed late in its ascent from Mahia Peninsula on North Island.

All satellite payloads are assumed to have been destroyed.

These included imaging spacecraft from Canon Electronics of Japan and Planet Labs Inc of California, as well as a technology demonstration platform from a UK start-up called In-Space Missions.

Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck apologised to his customers.

“I am incredibly sorry that we failed to deliver our customers’ satellites today. Rest assured we will find the issue, correct it and be back on the pad soon,” he said on Twitter

Rocket Lab has made everyone in the space sector sit up since it debuted its Electron vehicle in 2017. It’s at the head of a wave of new outfits that want to operate compact rockets to service the emerging market for small satellites.

Saturday’s lift-off from New Zealand was the Electron’s 13th outing to date. All prior launches had been a complete success, bar the very first which failed to reach its intended orbit.

(11) BEYOND BURGERS. “Can a BBC reporter make better pizza than a machine?” – video.

A machine which is able to put together about 300 pizzas per hour has been developed by Picnic.

The dough base still has to be prepared by a human but the sauce and toppings are added by machine.

Inside the machine are ingredient modules such as sauce, cheese, vegetables and meat.

A camera takes pictures of each stage of the ingredients being added to the pizza which is then analysed by artificial intelligence software to help it improve the process.

(12) THE THINGIE WITH A DONGLE. “Why Singapore turned to wearable contact-tracing tech”.

Singapore’s TraceTogether Tokens are the latest effort to tackle Covid-19 with tech. But they have also reignited a privacy debate.

The wearable devices complement the island’s existing contact-tracing app, to identify people who might have been infected by those who have tested positive for the virus.

All users have to do is carry one, and the battery lasts up to nine months without needing a recharge – something one expert said had “stunned” him.

The government agency which developed the devices acknowledges that the Tokens – and technology in general – aren’t “a silver bullet”, but should augment human contact-tracers’ efforts.

The first to receive the devices are thousands of vulnerable elderly people who don’t own smartphones.

To do so, they had to provide their national ID and phone numbers – TraceTogether app users recently had to start doing likewise.

If dongle users test positive for the disease, they have to hand their device to the Ministry of Health because – unlike the app – they cannot transmit data over the internet.

(13) HOLLYWOOD ON THE LINE. “A Theater Student Gets Supersized Attention After Superhero Video Goes Viral” – NPR story and video.

Julian Bass loves Spider-Man, a trait you can easily glean by scrolling through the videos he posts to his TikTok and Twitter accounts.

“I just think Spider-Man is so fun. It’s so inspiring to me,” Bass told NPR’s Weekend Edition. “Everything, every little aspect that you could possibly think of about Spider-Man is something that I’m aware of, that I know of.”

In one now-viral video, the 20-year-old theater major at Georgia State University morphs into his favorite heroes using his own special-effects — first a Jedi wielding a blue lightsaber, then Ben 10, before his final transition into Spider-Man. He asked his followers to retweet the video “enough times that Disney calls.” Twenty million views later, Disney wasn’t the only one he heard from.

At first, he said his video gained “some small traction with my immediate circle.”

“And then the verified profiles started commenting,” he said. “The first one for me was The Lonely Island. And then I started seeing Josh Gad, Matthew Cherry. I saw Mark Hamill liked it. I mean if Mark Hamill likes it, I’m a Jedi now.”

Bass said these aren’t just retweets — he’s also getting messages from “bigwigs” such as Marvel co-president Louis D’Esposito and people from HBO Max.

(14) NZ LETS IN SOME PRODUCTIONS. Variety reports various genre shows get exemptions for cast and crew to enter NZ: “‘The Lord Of the Rings’, ‘Cowboy Bebop’ Series Among 5 Productions Granted New Zealand Border Exemptions”.

Several more overseas productions will join James Cameron’s Avatar sequels and Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog Netflix film in New Zealand in the coming months.

New Zealand’s Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment has announced that Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings series, Netflix series Cowboy Bebop and Sweet Tooth, Peter Farrelly’s film Greatest Beer Run Ever starring Viggo Mortensen, and Power Rangers Beast Morphers series have been granted border exemptions.

A total of 206 foreign-based cast and crew from those productions, along with 35 family members, will be allowed to enter New Zealand in the next six months, according to MBIE manager immigration policy Sian Roguski, quoted by New Zealand’s Stuff. Additionally, 10 more Avatar crew – in addition to the 31 already in New Zealand – had been granted border exemptions. All new arrivals will be subject to self-quarantine….

(15) BLOWN UP, SIR! In “Independence Day Pitch Meeting” on ScreenRant, Ryan George explains that the film’s aliens are very considerate by blowing up monuments that can be put in the trailer.

[Thanks to Daniel Dern, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Errolwi, Chip Hitchcock, John King Tarpinian, John Hertz, Mike Kennedy, Michael Toman, Martin Morse Wooster, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Foundation Teaser Trailer

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Apple TV+ has dropped a teaser trailer for its adaptation of Asimov’s series, Foundation.

Based on the award-winning novels by Isaac Asimov, Foundation chronicles a band of exiles on their monumental journey to save humanity and rebuild civilization amid the fall of the Galactic Empire: https://apple.co/_Foundation Foundation stars SAG Award-winner and Emmy-nominee Jared Harris as Hari Seldon; Lee Pace as Brother Day; Lou Llobell as Gaal; Leah Harvey as Salvor; Laura Birn as Demerzel; Terrence Mann as Brother Dusk; and Cassian Bilton as play Brother Dawn.