Madame Web scored three of the $4.97 trophies — for Worst Picture, Screenplay and Actress (Dakota Johnson).
Joker: Folie a Deux also appropriately won a pair – for Worst Prequel, Remake, Rip-off or Sequel and Worst Screen Combo (Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga).
A complete list of “winners” is included below. Results were determined by emailing ballots to 1,217 Razzie Members (movie buffs, film critics and journalists) from 49 US States and about two dozen foreign countries who chose the “winners” in nine categories. The Redeemer award was decided by the Razzie Board of Governors.
WORST PICTURE
Madame Web
ACTOR
Jerry Seinfeld / Unfrosted
ACTRESS
Dakota Johnson / Madame Web
RAZZIE® REDEEMER
Pamela Anderson / The Last Showgirl
SUPPORTING ACTOR
Jon Voight / Megalopolis, Reagan, Shadow Land & Strangers
SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Amy Schumer / Unfrosted
DIRECTOR
Francis Ford Coppola / Megalopolis
SCREEN COMBO
Joaquin Phoenix & Lady Gaga / Joker: Folie a Deux
PREQUEL, REMAKE, RIP-OFF OR SEQUEL
Joker: Folie a Deux
SCREENPLAY
Madame Web — Screenplay by Matt Sazama & Burk Sharples and Claire Parker & S.J. Clarkson
Netflix is looking toward Discord for help in figuring out who, exactly, is leaking unreleased footage from some of its popular shows. The Northern District of California court issued a subpoena on Thursday to compel Discord to share information that can help identify a Discord user who’s reportedly involved in leaking episodes and images from Netflix shows like Arcane and Squid Game.
Documents filed alongside the subpoena specifically call out an unreleased and copyrighted image from the second season of Squid Game, posted by a Discord user @jacejohns4n. In an interview linked on the user’s now deleted X account, published on Telegram, the leaker claimed responsibility for the self-described “worst leak in streaming history,” where episodes of Arcane, Heartstopper, Dandadan, Terminator Zero, and other shows were published online. Netflix confirmed in August that a post production studio was hacked.
“One of our post production partners has been compromised and footage from several of our titles has unfortunately leaked online. Our team is aggressively taking action to have it taken down,” a Netflix representative told press at the time….
…The documents filed in November do not necessarily indicate a lawsuit; Digital Millennium Copyright Act laws allow copyright holders to file DMCA subpoenas without attached lawsuits. Copyright holders use this tactic to identify anonymous users on platforms like Discord, YouTube, X, and Reddit. Discord is currently fighting South Korean publisher Nexon over “improper and overly burdensome” DMCA subpoenas. “Discord is committed to fulfilling its obligations under the law, but acting as your copyright assertion partner is not one of them,” a Discord lawyer wrote to Nexon in a letter published as part of the case….
(2) BALLOONS, BEARS AND MORE, OH MY! [Item by Daniel Dern.] While driving over the weekend, listening to the radio, I happened to happen (on one of our local NPR stations) on part 1 (of 2) of Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics one-hour podcasts on the Macy’s Day Parade. Episode 1 started with “what does the parade cost,” and, while not answering that question, went into a fascinating look at the logistics, history (early on they had live bears!), getting/making a float, etc. (Part 2 is/will be “brick’n’mortar” which I may pass on)
(3) PILE HIGH YOUR MT. TSUNDOKU. NPR compiled a list of 351 “Books We Love” from 2024. Sixty-two of them are science fiction and fantasy.
NPR’s annual, interactive reading guide – is back with over 350 new recommendations from 2024. Discover picks by NPR staffers, including Ari Shapiro, Nina Totenberg, Eric Deggans, Steve Inskeep, Linda Holmes, and trusted critics such as Fresh Air’s Maureen Corrigan.
…Brian Collins writes fearlessly, expressing opinions that seem heartfelt even when they go against the public consensus. Some of their iconoclasm can likely be chalked up to the hotheadedness of youth — but at the same time, this willingness to disregard tin gods can lead to interesting insight. This is most evident when they tackle more complex matters in their Observatory editorials. Their piece on Starship Troopers is one of our favourite critiques of Heinlein published in recent memory. To quote from the editorial:
“Starship Troopers is one of the most famous and misremembered “canonical” SF novels; and unfortunately, no matter how you look at it, it also set a horrible precedent from which the genre still has not recovered. It’s totally possible the genre will never recover from such an impact so long as there are creative minds in the field (and by extension likeminded readers) who believe in Heinlein’s argument: that sometimes extermination is the only option.”
…When Paul Tazewell, costume designer for Wicked, was creating his own shoes for this year’s film, he went back to the original source material for inspiration. And it turns out, Baum never intended for those shoes to be red at all.
“They’re not ruby,” Tazewell tells PEOPLE of the original shoes. “In the book, they were these odd little silver boots.”
But because The Wizard of Oz was made in technicolor for 1939, the studio wanted to take advantage of the ability to showcase the many colors it had at its disposal, so Gilbert Adrian, costume designer for MGM, strayed outside the 1900 novel by L. Frank Baum.
Tazewell took the original book concept as his starting point and went from there….
…Earlier today, BBC revealed it’ll be re-releasing 1969’s “The War Games,” the final 10-part black-and-white serial that made up Doctor Who’s sixth season. That’d be notable on its own, but the network’s going the extra step by presenting it in color for the first time. In the serial, the Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton) and Companions Jamie and Zoe learn an alien called the War Lord has plucked soldiers from Earth history and brainwashed them into fighting each other so he can use the survivors as an army to conquer the galaxy. In the decades since, it’s been dubbed one of the most important Who episodes, and we were pretty high on the cliffhanger for its penultimate episode back in 2010.
But this new version of “War Games” isn’t just getting a splash of color, it’s also coming with an updated score and visuals. Interestingly, those changes may also affect how the Doctor regenerates into Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor. Whereas the original version is a trippy, almost nightmarish sequence as he’s forced into his new look and pleads for the transformation to stop, the trailer for the technicolor airing hints at a process more in line with the show’s now default glowing flames around his body….
The Simpsons’ Ray Bradbury-inspired horror and sci-fi anthology episode strikes gold with clever parodies, concise writing, and hilarious gags.
The Simpsons’ “Treehouse of Horror” specials were certainly the animated series’ first foray into anthology storytelling, but hardly the only time that they’ve dipped their toe into this water. 36 seasons in, The Simpsons has done “Simpsons Bible Stories,” “Simpsons Tall Tales,” “Simpson Christmas Stories,” and even “Thanksgiving of Horror.”…
… “Simpsons Wicked This Way Comes,” unsurprisingly, is an ode to Ray Bradbury, which the episode fully embraces. In many ways, it’s a successful counterpoint to “Treehouse of Horror IV’s” Night Gallery influence, except this time it’s riffing on Bradbury rather than Rod Serling. The episode’s triptych of supernatural societal stories is cleverly divided into different decades — the 1950s, an exaggerated sci-fi-skewing present, and a dystopian future — which makes for a strong enough structure that allows The Simpsons to flex its prophetic muscle, while it also wryly mocks the past and the present. It’s also a smart decision to use Lisa as the audience to the Illustrated Man’s (Andy Serkis) stories. Lisa is the one who listens to these subversive stories, but she’s not the protagonist in all three vignettes….
(8) A REASON FOR VIEWING. Abigail Nussbaum’s “Recent Movie Roundup 37” at Asking the Wrong Questions contains a highly qualified recommendation for Coppola’s Megalopolis.
..But for all of these problems—and without, to be clear, even suggesting that Megalopolis is not a bad movie—it must also be noted that it is not at all boring to watch. Partly this is simply because the cast—which also includes Laurence Fishburne, Jon Voight, and Robert De Niro—commit fully to the material no matter how absurd or nonsensical (Plaza, in particular, sinks her teeth into her rather iffy character with the zeal of a lion tearing meat off freshly-killed prey). Partly it’s that there are some beautiful images—Driver and Emmanuel balancing on steel beams among the city’s skyscrapers, building-sized statues of classical virtues collapsing in despair, human silhouettes flashing, stories tall, on the sides of buildings as a disaster strikes the city. But mostly, I think, it’s that Megalopolis is like no other movie you have seen or are likely to see, so obviously the product of a singular vision—and of that vision’s limitations, of time and age taking their toll on what was once a sharp talent—that you can’t help but appreciate it. It’s a terrible movie, but one that is terrible in its own, entirely unique way….
(9) TODAY’S DATE.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Born November 25, 1926 — Poul Anderson. (Died 2001.)
By Paul Weimer: One of my heart authors in the classical mode of SF is Poul Anderson, not far behind Zelazny and Vance in that ranking. My first known encounter with Poul Anderson’s work was, interestingly enough, Boat of a Million Years in 1989, years after my first encounters with Zelazny and Vance and the only one of the three I picked up as a grown up, first. I think there was a favorable couple of blurbs that got me interested. Unlike Vance and Zelazny, my older brother wasn’t into Anderson, so I missed him in my early SF education. But after reading Boat of a Million Years, about a set of immortals living through history (Highlander style!), I started seeking out his work, both his fantasy and his larger oeuvre of science fiction. I had loved the episodic historical vignettes of the characters as they live throughout human history, and I wanted more. I was hooked, friends.
I quickly found the theme of a lot of Anderson’s work: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” seems to be the keystone of what his characters try to do, time and again, across time and space. And his characters do that, be they time patrol veterans, heroes living through history, Imperial officers trying to stave off the end of their empire, or post-apocalyptic sea captains exploring and making contact with other societies trying to rebuild Earth. The odds may be stacked, the game may seemingly be doomed, but Anderson’s heroes plod on, doing the best that they can. (Kind of reminds you of Prince Corwin of Zelazny’s Amber, doesn’t it?)
And I found the historical motifs and how they add into his worldbuilding to be immersive, detailed and utterly enthralling. He does this in novels, both SFnal (such as his time patrol and other time travel novels) and historical fiction (such as The Golden Slave) where we are set in ancient and even prehistoric times. He does this also in imaginary societies as well. His Maurai novels and stories (such as Orion Shall Rise) are set on a future post-apocalyptic Earth, and Anderson has had a lot of fun in reimagining and mixing customs, societies and ideas from the past into his future world’s new civilizations. An overseas Empire very much like the British Empire–but run by the Polynesians. Raiders and brigands form the heartland of what was once America…but ones that use airships. He does this elsewhere, throughout his work, I could go all day with his historical motifs, but will just list one more for space: his Dominic Flandry portion of his future space history is very clearly an Empire in the Roman model…and Dominic Flandry is desperately trying to stave off its collapse, with plots, motifs and gambits taken from actual Roman history a plenty.
The more you read, the more you know, the deeper the work of Poul Anderson becomes. (The power of the story “Uncleftish Beholding”, for example, where he describes a nuclear test just using Anglo-Saxon words, shows his power with linguistics. And I haven’t even touched the sadness of The Broken Sword, the absolutely fun of A Midsummer’s Tempest, the genre-defining Three Hearts and Three Lions, and much more. His Science Fiction is his major chord, but his fantasy is definitely present as a noticeable minor chord in the fugue of his work.
My favorite Poul Anderson story is the one I keep coming back to, again and again and again. I consider it one of the definitive and best time travel stories ever written. No, it’s not “Delenda Est”, where Manse Everard must fix history after rogue time travels make Rome lose to Hannibal. That might get second place. No, my pride of place must go to “Flight to Forever”, where an inventor finds that going backwards is much harder (and after a certain amount of time, seemingly impossible) and so goes ever more forward into the future, looking for a way back to his home timeline. It’s got strange future societies, a tragic love story, immersive detail and worldbuilding, and a sympathetic and engaging and driven main character. It does everything that Anderson does, in one novella length piece.
Besides his SFF writing, Anderson wrote poetry, helped found the Society for Creative Anachronism, was trained as a physicist, and also wrote and sang filk, primarily with his wife. If the title Renaissance Man means anything, it is he who can claim it. Sadly, and tragically, I never met him in person. More happily given just how big his oeuvre is, both in short stories and in novels, there is still plenty of Poul Anderson I have not yet read. I plan to, next year for File 770, start tackling the NESFA Press collections of Anderson like I did with the Zelazny. Watch the skies!
Q: Is it morally correct to stay seated until the end of the credits in a cinema?
I’ve thought about this question my entire adult life! I think a lot of other people have, too. But to answer it, we have to think about what movie credits do, and why they’re there at all….
…It does seem like studios want you to watch all the credits, at least for their biggest movies. How can I tell? Because movies from Marvel and DC insert scenes after the credits roll that fill in key details about an upcoming sequel, or contain Easter eggs for fans of the franchise. Not everyone will stay, but people invested in the ongoing story will. And in a theater, you can’t just fast-forward through the credits to watch that post-credits scene….
In the realm of innovative furniture design, dragon-inspired sofas have emerged as one of the most exciting trends, blending fantasy with luxury. These extraordinary seating pieces are not just functional but also serve as bold statement pieces for any home or lounge area. Dragon sofas, with their plush textures, intricate details, and mythological symbolism, bring an enchanting and otherworldly element to any space. Whether you’re a fantasy lover or simply want a unique centrepiece for your living room, these dragon sofas offer the perfect combination of comfort and style….
Well, the verdict is in. The Moon is not made of green cheese after all.
A thorough investigation published in May 2023 found that the inner core of the Moon is, in fact, a solid ball with a density similar to that of iron. This, researchers hope, will help settle a long debate about whether the Moon’s inner heart is solid or molten, and lead to a more accurate understanding of the Moon’s history – and, by extension, that of the Solar System….
… They made several interesting findings. Firstly, the models that most closely resembled what we know about the Moon describe active overturn deep inside the lunar mantle.
This means that denser material inside the Moon falls towards the center, and less dense material rises upwards. This activity has long been proposed as a way of explaining the presence of certain elements in volcanic regions of the Moon. The team’s research adds another point in the “for” tally of evidence.
And they found that the lunar core is very similar to that of Earth – with an outer fluid layer and a solid inner core. According to their modeling, the outer core has a radius of about 362 kilometers (225 miles), and the inner core has a radius of about 258 kilometers (160 miles). That’s about 15 percent of the entire radius of the Moon.
The inner core, the team found, also has a density of about 7,822 kilograms per cubic meter. That’s very close to the density of iron….
Firefly Aerospace’s moon lander is ready for its upcoming lunar voyage.
The company announced its Blue Ghost lunar lander completed environmental testing at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in mid-October and is now ready to be shipped to Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA and SpaceX plan to launch the lander from Launch Complex 39A atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket during a six-day window that opens no earlier than mid-January 2025. The mission is known as “Ghost Riders in the Sky.”Blue Ghost will carry a variety of payloads to the moon, some of which are in support of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. CLPS pairs scientific payloads developed by NASA with commercial lunar landers headed for the moon on private missions….
(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Jim Janney says, “I know Worldcon is over, and this doesn’t seem to have any fannish connection, but it’s too good not to pass on.” Quite so! Enjoy the Haggis Wildlife Foundation’s documentary: “The Elusive Scottish Haggis”. (Is there any other kind?)
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Paul Weimer, Daniel Dern, Jim Janney, 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 Andrew (not Werdna).]
(2) WHY NOT SAY WHAT HAPPENED? In Episode 5 of Scott Edelman’s podcast Why Not Say What Happened? we get the story of “My Rooftop Dance with Larry Lieber” at the 1974 Worldcon.
Join me as I demonstrate the limits of my memory by telling tales of why my first Worldcon was supposed to have been my second Worldcon, the question I never got around to asking my cousin, the actor Herb Edelman, which song I sang while dancing across a Manhattan rooftop with Larry Lieber, what Fantastic Four moment motivated the first letter I ever wrote to a comic book company, the string of serendipities which led to one of my DC horror stories being adapted as an episode of Tales from the Darkside, how the Washington Post got me a job editing Science Fiction Age magazine, and more.
(3) MEMORIES FINALLY RETURNING. [Item by Michael Dobkins.] This is a follow up to a news item by Bruce D. Arthurs in the October 19 Pixel Scroll ((8) SECOND, JUST SAY, ‘I FORGOT’.) A new video on the Beinecke Library at Yale’s YouTube just dropped that gives more details on the exhibit and even quotes briefly letters between Disch and David Gerrold about the project at the end.
Remembering “Amnesia” with Claire Fox- MAB 10/14/24
A talk in conjunction with the exhibition “Remembering ‘Amnesia’: Rebooting the First Computerized Novel” on view now in the Hanke Gallery at Sterling Memorial Library. “Amnesia”—a work of interactive science fiction by Thomas M. Disch, published in 1986—was an early attempt to bring video games into the realm of literary art by translating a novelist’s script into a medium that readers could only experience by interacting with a computer. This exhibition traces how “Amnesia” moved from story idea to digital manifestation. Visitors can also play the game on workstations in the Hanke Gallery in Sterling Memorial Library and in Bass Library, using Emulation-as-a-Service Infrastructure (EaaSI) software. Included is the story of the library’s Digital Preservation unit’s work to bring the interactive, computerized novel to life. Claire Fox, curator of the exhibition, is Software Preservation and Emulation Librarian in Yale Library. Mondays at Beinecke online talks focus on materials from the collections and include an opening presentation at 4pm followed by conversation and Q & A beginning about 4:30pm until 5pm.
There is also an Amnesia: Restoredwebsite devoted to the interactive novel that offers “a new version of the cult classic published by Electronic Arts 1986, now available on the web for contemporary computers.”
(4) UNREAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENTS. Arturo Serrano gives Poltergeist an almost theological analysis at Nerds of a Feather: “First Scare: Poltergeist”.
…Poltergeist feels like a condensation of mystical currents of thought that had gained strength during the hippie era but really date back to the spiritualist fad of the 19th century. Advances in the understanding of electromagnetism coincided with a growing interest in the inner workings of the mind, and it was only natural that a theory eventually formed linking electromagnetism with the paranormal. If you didn’t know any better, it made some sort of sense: if you consider radio waves, they’re an invisible force that exists all around us and can even pass through us, and have very tangible effects if you have a properly sensitive machine at hand. So it wasn’t too much of a stretch to suppose that ghosts worked the same way. Poltergeist is an heir to over a century of superstition that viewed in electrical devices a viable tool for contacting the spiritual realm.
But Poltergeist does more than that. It also takes advantage of the moral panic that was forming around mass media and the way the TV set ended up altering not only the inner dynamics of the American family, but also the rhythm of daily life. People in Poltergeist time their activities by the programming schedule of TV; their day ends when the last broadcast ends. Even before malevolent spirits jump out of the screen, they’re already under the spell of TV….
In breaks on his Never Ending Tour, Bob Dylan has returned to social media to send his regrets to the Buffalo Sabres hockey team for missing a game, recommend an incredibly famous restaurant in New Orleans and, in a new twist for the Nobel laureate, hint at his spooky literary aspirations.
“At the hotel in Frankfurt there was a publishing convention and every room was taken, parties all night,” Dylan posted on the social platform X (formerly Twitter) Oct. 23.
“I was trying to find Crystal Lake Publishing so I could congratulate them on publishing The Great God Pan, one of my favorite books,” Dylan continued. “I thought they might be interested in some of my stories. Unfortunately it was too crowded and I never did find them.”
As always, Dylan speaks, the world listens. It came as quite the October surprise for Crystal Lake, a Bloemfontein, South Africa-based press specializing in dark fiction and horror whose current titles include an anthology called Dastardly Damsels and Blood and Bullets: A Trio of Western Horror Novellas. (Yes, they also published a “revamped” edition of Machen’s 1894 Great God Pan, about a sinister woman who seems to be driving powerful men to suicide.)
“We had literary agents in Frankfurt representing our books, so we weren’t there in person,” Crystal Lake’s founder and CEO Joe Mynhardt said in an email.
Mynhardt said that, since the Dylan post, they’d spent a few days tracking down the songwriter and his team.
“It’s my understanding that they now have our contact info, so fingers crossed,” Mynhardt wrote in his email Saturday.
While Dylan has previously published poetry, the first part of his memoirs and most recently his 2022 book The Philosophy of Modern Song, it remains to be seen what scary stories he may have in his drawer. Less of a mystery is what he may have admired in Machen’s novella — a tale of sex, pagan gods and death. Somehow this all seems very on brand, even if it’s lacking in the Americana department (Machen was Welsh, like another great poet named Dylan)…
… The election of Kamala Harris will not end the partisan and political divisiveness that ails America. But it, along with a majority in the House and Senate, will be an important and vital first step toward restoring a sense that democracy, and the underlying systems that support and nourish it, can prevail and grow.
Fear sells—until we, collectively, stop buying it.
We have no excuse. We know better, and now we must do better….
The filmmaker has been selected to receive the 50th installment of the organization’s highest honor, the AFI Life Achievement Award, at a ceremony scheduled to take place at Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre on April 26, 2025. He will be 86 at the time. The tribute will air on TNT with encore presentations on Turner Classic Movies. All proceeds from the gala will support AFI’s education and arts initiatives.
The AFI Life Achievement Award is presented to an honoree “whose talent has in a fundamental way advanced the film art, whose accomplishment has been acknowledged by scholars, critics, professional peers and the general public, and whose work has stood the test of time.”…
Kathryn: “Jac Schaeffer who wrote it is a genius because she wrote Wandavision too and so I just hurled myself with faith into whatever she would do, she knows this character really well.”
Kathryn Hahn on a viral Halloween dog costume inspired by the Disney+ series
Kathryn: “Apparently there is a dog costume called Wagitha Barkness… which I’m like, that seems amazing!”
(9) ALTERNATIVES TO OUR DIGITAL FUTURE. Joshua Rothman asks “Could Steampunk Save Us?” – behind a paywall in The New Yorker.
In 1990, Gibson and Bruce Sterling wrote “The Difference Engine,” an alternative-history novel, set in the nineteenth century, in which computers are built about a hundred years earlier than in reality, using quirky systems including gears, wheels, and levers. The novel helped popularize the genre of steampunk, in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century technologies are merged. Arguably, Jules Verne and H. G. Wells wrote steampunk avant la lettre, simply by crafting science fiction in the late nineteenth century; the genre’s aesthetic markers-valves, pipes, airships, monocles-have since informed the imaginative worlds of films and television shows like “Snowpiercer,” “Silo,” and much else. Steampunk mounts an imaginative protest against the apparent seamlessness of the high-tech world; it’s an antidote to the ethos of Jony Ive. It’s also fun because it’s counterfactual. It’s fascinating to imagine, implausibly, how ravishing technology could be constructed out of yesterday’s parts.
But what if the world really is constructed that way? In that case, it could be a mistake to put too much faith in digital perfection. We might need to fiddle with our technology more than we think.
(10) STOP BEING MIDDLE-CLASS IMMEDIATELY. “This is a Thomas Ha Fanzine Now” at Seize the Press, edited by Jonny Pickering and Karlo Yeager Rodríguez.
The other week someone asked me why I thought there was such discomfort with unresolved narratives and non-cathartic endings in some corners of the contemporary short story world. I thought about it a bit and figured my answer would be worth sharing.
The conversation came about after I read a Thomas Ha story called “The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video”, which features a story within the story — an old pulp western the narrator discovers has been altered so that the original ending (where the protagonist is defeated by the evil sheriff and limps off into the desert) is rewritten into a glorious, audience-pleasing victory. As with any Thomas Ha story, there are layers stacked on layers to the narrative, but one thing it got me thinking about is why so much contemporary media (and short fiction in particular) is so ill at ease with leaving the audience ill at ease.
I can’t say for sure why this is, but I can speculate. I think one reason is there’s an influential school of (largely American) middle class liberal writers who dominate a lot of the bigger magazines and who come at fiction from the viewpoint that writing and reading stories constitutes some form of activism. You see it a lot in the ‘power of stories’ assertions that go round from time to time and is also partly why we see so much didactic fiction out there, because it’s a view that thinks the purpose of art is to ‘instruct’ and to portray the ‘correct opinions’, whereas for me good art raises more questions than it answers….
… At the risk of sounding like a vulgar Marxist I think western society in general (and, from what I can gather as a Brit, particularly American society, which has such a big effect on western culture as a whole) has reached a stage where, for lots of people, collectively trying to change the world can seem pretty hopeless, and so there’s a tendency to retreat into a very individualistic notion of activism, where if you’re working on yourself and thinking the right things and reading the right things, even when that thing is fiction, it feels like praxis. It’s incredibly reactionary and has a stultifying effect on art in my opinion, because it results in these calcifying stories that do nothing to challenge, and whose purpose and effect is simply to reassure….
(11) TERI GARR (1944-2024). Teri Garr, who received an Oscar nomination for her role in Tootsie, died October 29 reports the AP. She died of multiple sclerosis “surrounded by family and friends,” said publicist Heidi Schaeffer. Garr battled other health problems in recent years and underwent an operation in January 2007 to repair an aneurysm.
Garr is best remembered by fans playing the helpmate in four genre classics:
Wife, Ronnie Neary, to Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Wife, Bobby Landers, to John Denver in Oh, God
Lab Assistant, Inge, to Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein
Office Assistant, Roberta Lincoln to Robert Lansing in Star Trek’s “Assignment Earth” episode
She also appeared on the Sixties Batman series. And forty years later she voiced the character of Mary McGinnis in the animated “Batman Beyond” TV series, and Sandy Gordon in 2003’s What’s New, Scooby Doo? animated series.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Born October 29, 1906 — Fredric Brown. (Died 1972.)
By Paul Weimer: I first encountered Fredric Brown’s work with a pastoral work known as “The Waverlies”. Sometime in the near future, a peculiar sort of alien arrives on earth that is invisible, and eats all forms of radio, and electromagnetic signals and power fail. The United States and the rest of the world is thus plunged into a late Victorian era of technology. It was and is a pastoral, gentle story of the hands of time being stopped and put backward to a slower pace, permanently. The story nagged at me, though, even as I liked it. Such a technological change would be wrenching and millions…if not more, would die in the result (c.f. S M Stirling’s The Change series). I don’t think Brown considered that. But this is notably one of Philip K Dick’s favorite short stories. It has a power…even if it doesn’t realize its full implications and problematic nature
But he considered and thought about a lot of other SF ideas in other fantastic stories. His story “Answer” has the classic line you know even if you haven’t read it “NOW there is a God”. “Arena” is the basis of the Star Trek episode where Kirk fights a Gorn. And there are plenty more where those come from. I haven’t delved into his extensive work with mystery novels and stories, but if that is your jam, Brown has a plethora of work for you once you finish his science fiction stories and short novels.
But as much as I like “The Waverlies” (even as I recognize the problematic aspects of the story), my favorite Brown story is probably his most definitive one, and that is “What Mad Universe”. You probably know this story if you read it. A SF book editor finds himself in a world whose ideas run on SF magazine story conventions. With a breakneck pace and change of action and twists at a pace that Van Vogt might envy, the story is a rollercoaster and deconstruction of what was soon to become a dying breed — pulp SF stories. It thus stands as the Pulp Science Fiction story for as unwitting capstone of the era, and it’s a lot of fun. I’m not the only one who thinks this, as witness Lawrence Block’s The Man Who Met Frederic Brown, which takes up on this trope and references that story directly.
…Burns became obsessed with monsters at a young age. His father had “every kind of hobby”, which meant the house was always full of art tools and Indian ink. Burns would try to recreate comics he found around the house but his awakening came in early 1969 when a kid at school introduced him to Zap Comix, helmed by the godfather of underground comix Robert Crumb. “Suddenly, here’s this thing with intense drawings! I wasn’t interested in Captain America and Iron Man – but I would imitate these psychedelic comics.”
Burns disappears again and comes back with some of his early examples. They have a beautiful, frantic quality – a kind of professionalised bedlam – with all the hallmarks of his current work, from weird monsters to attractive adolescents. The cartoonist Lynda Barry once wrote of his style and the standard he reaches: “You can’t believe a person could do it with regular human hands. It’s the kind of drawing that would have scared the pants off you in grade school, not only because the images are so eerie but because they are too perfectly done, and not good or evil enough for you to tell what you are supposed to think about them.”
That eerie perfectionism is right there in his earliest work. It’s this style that excited Spiegelman, who agreed to publish Burns in Raw in the 1980s. It’s why the cult literary magazine The Believer, founded by Dave Eggers in 1998, used Burns for every cover until 2014…
(15) HOW WOULD YOU TRANSLATE IT? From Viktoria on Threads:
(16) TV VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS FOR LAST-MINUTE JACK O’LANTERN CARVERS. In anticipation of Halloween, JustWatch has put together a list of the Top 10 spooky movies and TV shows available to stream in the United States based off their 13 million users in the United States.
MGM+ has dropped the first trailer and unveiled the premiere date for Earth Abides, its upcoming post-apocalyptic limited series adaptation of George R. Stewart’s sci-fi novel of the same name. It’s slated to launch December 1 on the streamer.
Written and executive produced by Todd Komarnicki (Sully), who also serves as showrunner, in Earth Abides, when a plague of unprecedented virulence sweeps the globe, the human race is all but wiped out. In the aftermath, as the great machine of civilization slowly and inexorably breaks down, only a few shattered survivors remain to struggle against the slide into extinction….
…As seen in an almost seven-minute-long video shared by Chinese state-owned news agency CCTV, members of the current Shenzhou-18 crew gave an extensive tour of their temporary abode.
Crew members show off the station’s kitchen, from a small heater that dispenses water into small pouches to a modified microwave. Astronauts also showed off the surprisingly roomy beds that each feature a sizable porthole, with unparalleled views of the Earth below.
We even got a glimpse of the two orbital lab segments, including several cherry tomato and lettuce plants growing in the station’s greenhouse….
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Jo Fletcher, Lew Wolkoff, Andrew (not Werdna), Michael Dobkins, 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 Cat Eldridge.]
…See there are people who will go with the full title Megalopolis: A Fable, and people who will not. I’ll go with it as far as it wants to go. There are people who will be on board with a movie where Adam Driver clambers out onto the top of the Chrysler Building and screams “TIME STOP!!!”—and time actually does stop. I am such a people, I eat that kind of shit right up. There are people who giggle with delight at a character named Wow Platinum and people who roll their eyes—I’m a giggler, baby.
But when the “fable” is so obvious Aesop could see all the twists and turns coming even though he was sight-impaired in life, and is currently dead, and when TIME STOPS but no one uses it to do anything interesting, and when the character Wow Platinum is a boring misogynist cliché—well, to be honest I become frustrated and sad that my willingness to go with a movie has been squandered…
And that’s just the beginning of Schnelbach’s highly entertaining review.
I talk to 10 people about Harlan Ellison and that’s how almost every conversation starts. If I’d talked to a hundred, it would’ve been the same. Because everyone has a Harlan Ellison story. Everyone who knew him, worked with him, argued with him, fought with him; everyone who was friends with him or claimed to be; everyone who was taught by him, learned from him, owes some portion of their career or life to him; everyone who loved him or hated him — they’ve all got a story about Harlan….
…It matters because this book was different. Special in a way that only lost albums or missed connections truly can be. Over 50 years, TLDV (as the cool cats call it) had been promised, anticipated, maligned, dreaded, forgotten, and mythologized by generations of fans. In Harlan’s lifetime, it swelled to over 600,000 words, got split into three volumes (none of which ever materialized), shrunk down to half its size, then a third. It is undoubtedly the most famous science fiction book never published. And it haunted Harlan — physically, emotionally, and spiritually. At his home in Sherman Oaks, California, it literally sat, in pieces, stacked on the railing outside his office until the dust started gathering dust.
But now, decades later, Harlan’s great, unfinished project is finally going to see the light of day. Set to hit shelves on Oct. 1, The Last Dangerous Visions comes with all the weight of decades of impossible expectation and the relief of a last debt finally paid. And its existence as a finished, bound, actually readable object is thanks largely to years of efforts by Harlan’s friend, partner in crime and the executor of his estate, J. Michael Straczynski….
(3) NATIONAL BOOK AWARD. The 2024 shortlists have been released. The complete lists are at Publishers Weekly: “2024 National Book Award Shortlists Announced”. These are the works of genre interest:
FICTION
Ghostroots by ‘Pemi Aguda (Norton)
NONFICTION
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie (Random House)
TRANSLATED LITERATURE
The Book Censor’s Libraryby Bothayna Al-Essa, translated from the Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain (Restless)
YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE
The First State of Being by Erin Entrada Kelly (Greenwillow)
(4) FUTURE TENSE FICTION IS BACK. After a hiatus for much of 2024, Future Tense Fiction once again will be publishing an original speculative fiction story each month, accompanied by illustrations and a response essay from an expert in a related field. Their new publishing partner is Issues in Science and Technology, a publication of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and Arizona State University.
The story for September 2024 is “Parasocial,” by Monica Byrne.
“Do you have any idea how good holography has gotten in the last 10 years?”
In a recent episode of the podcast Women at Warp, the hosts discussed their favorite episodes of the various Star Trek series in which the Holodeck—a fully immersive, interactive virtual reality interface—is central to the plot. On occasion, a Trek character uses a Holodeck to interact with holo-versions of their crewmates, turning their coworkers and friends into unwitting characters in a storyline that they didn’t help to write. Reflecting on the potential problems of that choice, one host observed that Starfleet’s human resources department “would have a binder that was the size of Crime and Punishment for the Holodeck.”
The characters in Monica Byrne’s “Parasocial” should have read whatever is in that binder….
The archive of Future Tense Fiction stories, running through January 2024, is still available on Slate. As they continue publishing new work with Issues, though, they will be resurfacing some favorites from the archives, with new illustrations, and posting them on the Issues site as well.
…It’s true that Marvel moves through films faster than most studios would ever dare to try, but “two and a half years” is in reality more like 11. Jackson’s first appearance in the MCU as Nick Fury, the former spy, Avengers founder, and director of S.H.I.E.L.D., was in 2008’s Iron Man, and his ninth was in 2019’s Spider-Man: Far From Home.
The character and the conditions at Marvel were clearly agreeable enough to Jackson, because he has starred in a tenth film (The Marvels), three TV series (Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., What If…?, and Secret Invasion), and three video games (Iron Man 2, Disney Infinity: Marvel Super Heroes, and Disney Infinity 3.0) as Fury….
… The old woman, with her legs as skinny as bones, lives deep in the woods in a hut that stands on chicken feet. The structure turns and moves as it likes, but especially away from those who seek to find her. Baba Yaga’s broom isn’t for flying but for sweeping away her tracks. She is rumored to eat her victims for supper if she thinks they deserve it, but she also features in tales of reluctant kindness, of mentorship, and of fairy godmother-like grace. Isn’t it time we all knew her for who she is?
Folktale traditions can be difficult to explore, because how does one capture the whispers at bedtime or recollections told back and forth among family and friends, all of which have been built upon centuries and centuries of tellers? There is good; there is evil. Then there is Baba Yaga….
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Mike Glyer.]
October 1, 1941 – Glen GoodKnight. (Died 2010.) I was often in the home of Glen Goodknight and his partner Ken Lauw when I was on Glen’s 1997 Mythcon committee. It was the ideal fan’s home, walls covered with bookcases, though unlike other fans Glen’s shelves were filled with editions of Lord of the Rings in every language it had appeared: collecting these was his passion.
Ken Lauw and Glen GoodKnight at 2007 Mythcon.
Glen founded the Mythopoeic Society in 1967 in the aftermath of the legendary “Bilbo-Frodo Birthday Picnic” held in September of that year. He invited fans to his house on October 12 to form a continuing group. The 17 attendees became the Society’s first members. Within a few years they had planted 14 discussion groups around the country. In 1972 at the suggestion of Ed Meskys of the Tolkien Society of America the two organizations merged and overnight the Society grew to more than a thousand members.
Mythcon I in 1970 was organized to help knit the Society’s different groups together. Glen married Bonnie GoodKnight (later Callahan) at Mythcon II in 1971.
Glen edited 78 issues of the Society journal Mythlore between 1970 and 1998.
After staying away from Mythcons for several years, Glen returned to celebrate the Society’s 40th anniversary at Berkeley in 2007. Greeted with a standing ovation, he delivered an emotion-filled reminiscence of the Society’s early days.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….Superman took on Darth Vader.
Well, not quite. However, this almost happened. Believe it or not, Star Wars was going to crossover with the DC Universe. In 2017 writer Kurt Busiek revealed that he and Alex Ross had once developed a DC/Star Wars pitch, but the project fell apart due to corporate disagreements regarding the money. It’s unknown when this project was first pitched, but it was presumably sometime before Disney acquired Lucasfilm. While details of the pitch are scant, some of Alex Ross’ concept art has been released, including the Superman vs Vader image that acts as a headline for this article.
Speaking to a crowd at Tampa Bay Comic Convention, former DC publisher Dan DiDio elaborated on why he canceled the project, which apparently was about more than money.
“I was brought a DC Universe and Star Wars crossover. There was fighting over what you could and couldn’t do, and who gets the better shot, and who gets the hero moment…it wasn’t worth it. Honestly, it just wasn’t worth it.”
While DiDio didn’t name Busiek, he noted that the creator was not happy.
“The creator who came onboard got really angry because he brokered the deal and brought it to us. I just didn’t want to do it at that time, because it didn’t make sense.”
On Aug. 1, a ship dropped its unusual cargo into a patch of ocean some 70 miles northwest of San Francisco: three orange robots, each more than 20 feet long and shaped like a torpedo. For a day, the aquatic drones autonomously prowled the waters, scanning nearly 50 square miles of ocean floor.
Some 3,500 feet beneath the surface, an apparition popped up on the robots’ powerful sonar. Down in the darkness, the drones saw a ghost.
The robots had spotted the wreck of the “Ghost Ship of the Pacific,” the only U.S. Navy destroyer captured by Japanese forces during World War II. Formerly known as either the U.S.S. Stewart, orDD-224, the ship was resting in what is now the Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary.
Three days later, another set of underwater robots captured images of the historic wreck. Though shrouded in decades of marine growth — and home to sponges and skittering crabs — the 314-foot-long destroyer is almost perfectly intact and upright on the seafloor.
“This level of preservation is exceptional for a vessel of its age and makes it potentially one of the best-preserved examples of a U.S. Navy ‘four-piper’ destroyer known to exist,” Maria Brown, superintendent of both the Cordell Bank and Greater Farallones national marine sanctuaries, said in a statement.
The find, which came during a technology demonstration, highlights the efficiency of modern robotic ocean exploration. Ocean Infinity, the marine robotics firm that operated the drones that made the discovery, owns the world’s largest fleet of autonomous underwater vehicles. The drones are used to create high-resolution maps of the seafloor — a major gap in our understanding of the oceans. The technology is also crucial for selecting sites for offshore construction projects such as wind farms and oil rigs, or for laying out routes for undersea pipelines and cables.
These robotic fleets are also proving invaluable to marine archaeologists. In 2020, Ocean Infinity helped find the wreck of the U.S.S. Nevada. In 2022, the company also contributed to the rediscovery of the Endurance, which sank during a 1915 expedition by Ernest Shackleton….
…Nestled in the Appalachian mountains, the community of Spruce Pine, population 2,194, is known for its hiking, local artists and as America’s sole source of high-purity quartz. Helene dumped more than 2 feet of rain on the town, destroying roads, shops and cutting power and water.
But its reach will likely be felt far beyond the small community.
Semiconductors are the brains of every computer-chip-enabled device, and solar panels are a key part of the global push to combat climate change. To make both semiconductors and solar panels, companies need crucibles and other equipment that both can withstand extraordinarily high heat and be kept absolutely clean. One material fits the bill: quartz. Pure quartz.
Quartz that comes, overwhelmingly, from Spruce Pine.
“As far as we know, there’s only a few places in the world that have ultra-high-quality quartz,” according to Ed Conway, author of Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization. Russia and Brazil also supply high-quality quartz, he says, but“Spruce Pine has far and away the [largest amount] and highest quality.”
Conway says without super-pure quartz for the crucibles, which can often be used only a single time, it would be impossible to produce most semiconductors…
(12) GETTING THERE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] You know how it is, there you are stuck out 500 light years away on the Galactic rim from the nearest decent real ale pub in Bognor Regis when your motor breaks down. The repair guy says a new engine is required (‘they couldna’ take it Jim’). So what sort of drive should you have?
Many of you wanted me to talk about the different interstellar propulsion ideas out there so we figured a fun way to compare them all would be in a tier list! Today we take a look at 14 different methods proposed to explore the stars. Let us know your rankings down below in the comments.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Michael J. Walsh, Joey Eschrich, 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 Paul Weimer.]
Disney is hitting pause on its adaptation of “The Graveyard Book” in the wake of sexual assault allegations leveled against the book’s author Neil Gaiman.
The film from director Marc Forster hasn’t been thrown out entirely, but development was halted for a variety of reasons, including the claims about Gaiman.
Published in 2008, “The Graveyard Book” follows a young boy who is raised by graveyard ghosts following his family’s murder. The film adaptation had not yet entered pre-production and did not have any confirmed casting. Gaiman had no involvement with the film….
…“There are few greater fans of George R.R. Martin and his book Fire & Blood than the creative team on House of the Dragon, both in production and at HBO,” the statement reads. “Commonly, when adapting a book for the screen, with its own format and limitations, the showrunner ultimately is required to make difficult choices about the characters and stories the audience will follow. We believe that Ryan Condal and his team have done an extraordinary job and the millions of fans the series has amassed over the first two seasons will continue to enjoy it.”
Showrunner Ryan Condal also addressed the challenge of adapting Fire & Blood for the small screen on the latest installment of the Official Game of Thrones podcast. He called Martin’s tome a “history book” that doesn’t necessarily come with fully fleshed-out moments or characters.
“As dramatists, I think we have to approach this history, though it is fictional, as anyone would do, as trying to adapt a chapter from real history,” Condal said. “So we have to construct this three-dimensional reality and this full story for the world to inhabit and provide the characters with internal lives and flaws and desires that might not necessarily have made it into the historical account. Now there are plenty of opportunities in reading Fire & Blood to say, well, there was actually a flaw or a desire or something that does not make it into the record, but it’s often an incomplete picture. So really a lot of what we do is, as dramatists and adapters of this is coloring in the lines that we’re given … and a lot of that color is ultimately our own.”…
…Coincidentally, Martin’s blog entry, which remains taken down, first published on the same day HBO released the final episode of the official Game of Thrones podcast’s current season. It includes an interview with Condal, who talks about the decision to remove Maelor from the season 2 narrative.
“Frankly, this goes back to our first season and trying to adapt a story that takes place over 20 years of history, instead of a story that takes place over 30 years of history,” the showrunner said. “We had to make some compromises in rendering that story so that we didn’t have to recast the whole cast multiple times and really just, frankly, lose people. I mean, we were walking right up against the line with it in season 1, and I think we did a really great job. I think the response to season 1 sort of extolls that.
“But the casualty in that was that our young children in this show are very young — very, very young — because we compress that timeline,” he continued. “So those people could only have children of a certain age and have it be believable where it didn’t feel like we weren’t hewing to the realities of the passage of time and the growth of children in any real way. People look at that stuff and, particularly with a show like this, they look at it very closely. So it was a choice made. It did have a ripple effect, and we decided that we were going to lean into it and try to make it a strength instead of playing it as a weakness.”…
(3) MEDICAL UPDATE. Some very sad news about author Howard Andrew Jones has been shared by Sean CW Korsgaard:
To fantasy fans, sword-and-sorcery lovers, and Hanuvar fans everywhere… I share some devastating news. Howard Andrew Jones has been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Keep him and his family in your thoughts, and if ever he or his work meant anything to you, let him know. pic.twitter.com/FR2MZVWgXQ
Here we go again. Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” has a new trailer, and this time without any of the AI-aided fake quotes. They’re going with a new angle here. No “Coppola is a misunderstood artist” shtick.
On August 21, less than 24 hours after backlash commenced, Lionsgate took down the “Megalopolis” trailer, apologized for the fabricated critics quotes and fired the marketing consultant responsible for the mess up.
There is nothing conventional about “Megalopolis,” and it’s become quite difficult for Coppola/Lionsgate to market this film. This is the first official trailer for the film, not counting the teaser, which comes to us just 22 days before it’s set to be released in theaters….
(5) SHAZAM! In case you ever wondered, here’s the official answer to “How Does Shazam Tell People His Name?” at DC Comics. It’s not the “Gotcha!” I imagined….
How does Shazam tell people his name?
From 1940 until 2011, he called himself “Captain Marvel.” He only started using the name “Shazam” in 2011. At first, during Geoff Johns’ Justice League run, there was a sort of intentionality clause where he would only transform while saying “Shazam” if that’s what he wanted to do. From about 2018 to 2023, though, he just avoided saying his name out loud altogether. These days, he’s been going by “The Captain,” so it’s largely a non-issue.
(6) SCREEN TIME. The New York Times has viewing recommendations. The link bypasses their paywall: “Five Science Fiction Movies to Stream Now”. “Among this month’s picks, there’s a blend of sci-fi and Hindu mythology, plus Nicolas Cage in postapocalyptic times.”
(7) HOLLY LISLE (1960-2024). [Item by Anne Marble.] Author Holly Lisle died August 27. Of course, she is remembered for her fantasy and SF books, starting with Fire in the Mist for Baen (a Compton Crook Award winner). She also published The Secret Texts series with Warner Aspect and the World Gates series with HarperCollins. She also delved into paranormal romantic suspense, and co-wrote books with Mercedes Lackey and S.M. Stirling, among others.
But many writers remember her first as a mentor. This started from her original personal website and then the original Forward Motion for Writers website. (I was one of the first to get an invitation to “kick the tires” on the Forward Motion website.) She also wrote beloved articles and e-books on many aspects of writing, and taught classes on her sites and for Writer’s Digest. Holly believed in paying it forward, so she gave a lot of her time and energy to mentor aspiring writers.
September 5, 1992 — Anniversary: Batman: The Animated Series
I’m simply amazed that I’ve not talked before about Batman: The Animated Series, my favorite animated series bar none. It first aired on this date thirty-two years ago with the “On Leather Wings” featuring Man-Bat, a typically bizarre Batman villian.
But I’m getting ahead myself just a bit. So let’s start at beginning, shall we?
The very, very beginning of course, is who created the Batman character, which, as you know is Bob Kane who is again credited here and Bill Finger who once again is unfairly not. Rat bastards.
The series was developed by Paul Dini, Bruce Timm and Eric Randomski. Dini would be one of many writers on the show. One of the others I recognize is Michael Reaves who was also a writer on the most excellent Gargoyles series.
If you’ve seen it, you’ve no doubt admired it’s amazing visual style. It was unlike anything that went before it. Well, you can thank Bruce Timm for that. He says a great deal of the style came from the acclaimed Superman cartoons of the 1940s, that the Fleischer Studios did with the blimps, police, cars, fashions and much more all taken from the 40s.
The Music? That was inspired by the Tim Burton Batman film.
Most of the villains are from the comics — Mad Hatter, Two-Face, Clock King, though Harley Quinn, the companion of the Joker, was created here. She then, because she was so popular, got added to the comics.
Oh, the voices.
Kevin Conroy is Bruce Wayne / Batman. Now considered by almost all Batman fans to be the definitive Batman, animated or not. Seriously a lot of fans, don’t think anybody else should be playing Batman whoever it is. I think more than a few of them think that should be a film with him playing Batman. He certainly made the character come alive. He changed his voice enough so that Bruce sounded different, which is an amazing thing to do.
I always found the Dick Grayson / Robin to be meh character, so I’m not really qualified to say well the casting of Loren Lester was there. I’ll leave that to y’all.
I just learned that two actors played Alfred Pennyworth who, unlike Robin, I did love a lot as a character. He’s been a character well done in animated and live Batman setting alike. Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. played him in all but three episodes of the series. Clive Revill did those — “On Leather Wings”, “Christmas with the Joker” and “Nothing to Fear”.
We round the primary voice cast out with some fine actors with Bob Hastings as Commissioner James Gordon, Melissa Gilbert as a quite fun Barbara Gordon / Batgirl, Robert Costanzo voicing a grumbling Detective Harvey Bullock. Finally, there two women who voiced Officer Renée Montoya — Ingrid Oliu and Liane Schirmer. Loved that character!
The only villain I need mention here is obviously The Joker though be other I could go on The Scarecrow here is scary as Hell in one incarnation.
But it’s the portrayal of him, both is the animation itself, and as voiced by Mark Hamill. Was there ever a more perfect match? Really, I mean that the animated Joker looked unhinged, looked evil, looked well, I’m not sure how to describe him, but the look was perfect for the role, and then Hamill sounded like he was having a perfect time. He’s given interviews talking about being The Joker and he says he had an incredibly delightful time doing so. I believe it was his first animated role, but he’s done dozens of animated roles since and is doing still doing them.
A quick check on IMDb, shows that he played the Joker a total of 15 times. That’s once more than Two-Face showed up here as a villain. Actually, he’s got one more appearance since he had The Return of The Joker film. Now that’s an interesting film because it exists in two versions one of which is PG-13 rated. Why it is I cannot say as that would be a massive spoiler.
Need I say it was universally adored. I think not. There were 109 episodes over three seasons, a more than decent run I’d say. I noted The Return of The Joker (which is actually a Batman Beyond film but ties into series obviously as The Joker and, oppps, can’t say as that’s a spoiler too, isn’t it?) but there are two more films set in this series, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm which got a theatrical release, and Batman & Mr. Freeze: SubZero.
I didn’t know til now it was a direct-to-video release. It was produced as a tie-in to Batman & Robin. Its release was delayed until the following year due to that film being a financial and critical disaster. Don’t judge Batman & Mr. Freeze: SubZero by Batman & Robin, because it’s quite excellent.
…A month ago, Bleeding Cool scooped the news that Trinity, the daughter of Wonder Woman, would be getting her own series. written by Wonder Woman writer Tom King. We also stated that “Bleeding Cool gets the tip-off that Trinity will see three different versions of Trinity from different times: the toddler, the middle-grader, and the older teenager previously seen in Trinity’s stories, but all existing together and working together at the same time.”
And in today’s Trinity Special: World’s Finest, which collects the Wonder Woman Trinity backup strips from Wonder Woman written by King and drawn by Belen Ortega, we get a special coda. An exclusive preview. With all three versions of Trinity together, sat on the sofa, discussing their current plight….
When PlayStation‘s “Astro Bot” launches Friday, it will give PS5 owners access to a brand new, fully fleshed out story starring the little robot whose previous claim to fame was teaching gamers all the cool new features for the Sony gaming console launched in 2020 through pre-loaded title “Astro’s Playroom.”
Four years later, Astro has broken out of his playroom and is on a bigger mission: Celebrating the 30th anniversary of Sony Interactive in an easy-entry platformer that features more than 150 cameos of beloved PlayStation characters from across mega hits and deep cuts, including “God of War,” “Ratchet & Clank,” “Ape Escape” and many more.
A Chinese game called Black Myth: Wukong has been the biggest hit of the summer, selling 10m copies in just three days, according to its developer Game Science, with over 1 million people playing it every day on games marketplace Steam. China’s homegrown games industry is absolutely massive, but concentrated almost entirely on mobile phones: this is the country’s first successful blockbuster console and PC game, which makes it very interesting in itself. It’s also a massively successful single-player game arriving on the back of a few high-profile multiplayer flops, which suggests there is still more of a market for this kind of adventure than video game execs like to believe.
But Wukong has been grabbing headlines for other reasons, too. Back in November, IGN put together a report compiling crude, vulgar public comments from a number of Game Science staff, some of whom are very well-known in China’s games industry. IGN also spoke to several women who expressed their disappointment and despair over omnipresent sexism in games and in China more broadly. It is a very interesting and well-researched article that doesn’t so much point the finger at Game Science specifically as set it within the context of a bigger Chinese feminist struggle. But of course, it attracted the ire of an increasingly vocal swathe of “anti-woke” gamers that has found a gathering-place on YouTube and social media, some of whom accused IGN of trying to sabotage Black Myth: Wukong by making things up.
As a result, willingly or not, Black Myth: Wukong became a kind of talisman for the video game culture wars. This was not helped when, a few weeks ago, advance copies of the game were sent out to streamerswith guidelines prohibiting the discussion of Covid, the Chinese games industry and “feminist propaganda”, alongside more usual prohibitions against fetishisation and offensive language. It is normal for advance copies of games sent to influencers (though not to press) to come with conditions, but “feminist propaganda” was definitely a new one.’…
…At first, NASA remained adamant that it was simply a matter of routine procedure to investigate the mishap before imminently returning Wilmore and Williams on board Starliner. The agency repeatedly fought off reports that the two astronauts were “stranded” in space, arguing that engineers just needed a little more time to figure out the issue.
But it didn’t take long for NASA to change its tune. While attempting to duplicate the issue at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, engineers eventually found what appeared to be the smoking gun, as SpaceNews‘ Jeff Foust details in a detailed new breakdown of the timeline.
A Teflon seal in a valve known as a “poppet” expanded as it was being heated by the nearby thrusters, significantly constraining the flow of the oxidizer — a disturbing finding, because it greatly degraded the thrusters’ performance.
Worse, without being able to perfectly replicate and analyze the issue in the near vacuum of space, engineers weren’t entirely sure how the issue was actually playing out in orbit.
During a late August press conference announcing its decision to send Starliner back empty, NASA commercial crew program manager Steve Stich admitted that “there was just too much uncertainty in the prediction of the thrusters.”
“People really want to understand the physics of what’s going on relative to the physics of the Teflon, what’s causing it to heat up and what’s causing it to contract,” he admitted. “That’s really what the team is off trying to understand. I think the NASA community in general would like to understand a little bit more of the root cause.”
While engineers found that the thrusters had returned to a more regular shape after being fired in space, they were worried that similar deformations might take place during prolonged de-orbit firings….
…Speaking to GamesRadar+ previously, Black joked that he thinks he deserves an Oscar for playing Steve – the real MVP of the trailer. “Oh, you know I’m playing Minecraft all the time. Whenever I’m not filming I’m playing Minecraft because an actor prepares,” he told us.
“I like to be in that Minecraft headspace. I like to know the rules, and I like to get little, like, things like, ‘Oh, in the game you pickaxe like this. You hit stuff like that,’ then I do that in the movie. I think the members of the Academy will appreciate my research later. I don’t want to jinx it, but I’m pretty sure I’m getting an Oscar for this one…”
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Anne Marble, Steven H Silver, N., Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel “Glory Road” Dern.]
(1) SFRA 2025 CONFERENCE AND CFP. The Science Fiction Research Association has announced the theme and Call for Papers for the SFRA 2025 Conference. The event will be held July 30-August 3, 2025 at the University of Rochester in New York state, hosted by the Susan B. Anthony Institute: The program for Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies.
The theme will be: “’Trans People are (in) the Future’: Queer and Trans Futurity in Science Fiction”. Submission deadline November 15, 2024.
The tagline for this year’s conference is adapted from an art exhibit by Alisha Wormsley in which her art pieces assert that “there are black people in the future,” as a way to insist that unrelenting antiblackness will not steal the future from black people. Given the perpetual violence trans people are subject to, Wormsley’s insistence on black futurity resonates powerfully in trans contexts as well. Science fiction/Speculative Fiction writers, from Rivers Solomon to Kai Ashanti Wilson to Charlie Jane Anders, are all producing work that imagines trans and queer futurity in powerfully capacious ways, rejecting figurative and literal attempts at erasing trans and queer lives. This year’s conference focuses on issues related to trans and queer themes, though we encourage papers and panel proposals in all areas relevant to science fiction studies.
Full information about the topic is at the link.
(2) OMEGA SCI-FI PROJECT OFFERS WORKSHOPS. The Omega Sci-Fi Project invites L.A. high schools and students to participate in this season’s short science fiction story writing program, both through creative writing workshops and student story submissions.
To schedule a free science fiction creative writing and editing workshop follow this Calendly link: Select a Date & Time
Submissions for their 2024-2025 awards — The Tomorrow Prize and The Green Feather Award — will open on September 4 and run through February 14. Learn about the updated guidelines or submit an entry through their website.
The program’s culminating event is traditionally held at Vroman’s bookstore and where celebrity actors and authors reading selected student works.
… Perhaps in no acceptance speech was that more clear than in Emily Tesh’s, who won the Hugo Award for Best Novel for her science fiction book Some Desperate Glory. Tesh’s speech closed out the night, and after some initial joking about pranking the audience with Bilbo’s birthday speech from The Fellowship of the Rings and vanishing, she buckled down and went straight for the heartstrings. I’ve transposed a good deal of what Tesh had to say about Some Desperate Glory below, so that perhaps you might be as moved reading her words as I was hearing them:
“Here is my hope for this book… I hope this book disappears. I hope it joins the honorable, very honorable ranks of past Hugo winners, which spoke to a particular community at a particular time and not to all of history. And I hope for that disappearance because no one sets out to write a science fiction dystopia wanting to be proved right. And Some Desperate Glory is a book which was inspired by some of the worst of what is happening in the world today”….
Lionsgate is recalling its latest trailer for Francis Ford Coppola‘s epic “Megalopolis,” which featured a littany of fabricated quotes from famous film critics.
“Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for ‘Megalopolis,’” a Lionsgate spokesperson said in a statement provided to Variety. “We offer our sincere apologies to the critics involved and to Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope for this inexcusable error in our vetting process. We screwed up. We are sorry.”…
…In quotes attributed to their reviews of “The Godfather,” the trailer cites The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael as calling it “diminished by its artsiness,” and Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris as criticizing the “sloppy self-indulgent movie.” Other quotes from critics such as Roger Ebert, John Simon, Stanley Kauffmann, Vincent Canby and Rex Reed similarly flash across the screen, offering harsh critiques of Coppola’s work on masterpieces such as “Apocalypse Now.” The idea being these movies stood the test of times — their initial reactions, not so much. “Megalopolis,” which premiered at Cannes, was dismissed by many critics as indulgent and muddled. The new trailer aims to position Coppola’s latest film, as a work of art that will age well, much like its predecessors from the famed director….
One of the critics cited had this to say:
…Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman was incorrectly cited as calling the 1992 film “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” “a beautiful mess” and highlighting its “absurdity” when he reviewed the film for Entertainment Weekly, where he worked at the time of its release.
“Even if you’re one of those people who don’t like critics, we hardly deserve to have words put in our mouths. Then again, the trivial scandal of all this is that the whole ‘Megalopolis’ trailer is built on a false narrative,” Gleiberman said of the trailer’s falsified quotes. “Critics loved ‘The Godfather.’ And though ‘Apocalypse Now’ was divisive, it received a lot of crucial critical support. As far as me calling ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ ‘a beautiful mess,’ I only wish I’d said that! Regarding that film, it now sounds kind.”…
Do you want to read Marvel Comics, but don’t know where to start learning about the original comic versions of the characters and stories that have now become household names thanks to the MCU? The new book Marvel Comics for Dummies has you covered. And yes, that’s “Dummies” meant very affectionately, as is the signature of the Dummies series of books that have offered accessible primers for nearly every topic under the sun.
That now includes Marvel Comics, with the aforementioned Marvel Comics for Dummies book kicking off a series of Marvel related books in the Dummies line, with Captain America for Dummies soon to follow….
…The Marvel for Dummies line will include six titles, with future installments featuring explainers on the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, Spider-Man, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe (X-Men lore seems to have been too dense for even the experts to attempt to condense into one book).
(7) APEX NEWS. Apex Book Company today announced the acquisition of a new novella by Jason Sanford entitled “We Who Hunt Alexanders”.
In this fast-paced story, a neurodivergent monster named Amelia confronts both her mother’s expectations for her life and a gothic city where religious extremists threaten everyone who disagrees with them.
(8) WHILE ONE WAS BANNED, ANOTHER WAS CELEBRATED. Ersatz Culture made a wry comment on X.com:
And just in case anyone thinks I am unfairly picking on Joe Yao – well, the evidence shows that he and Dave McCarty were both heavily involved in the Hugo stats that were published. pic.twitter.com/uGtgb4nvW9
(9) M. J. ENGH (1933-2024). Author M. J. Engh, a SFWA Author Emeritus, died July 11. The SFWA Blog paid tribute: “In Memoriam: M. J. Engh”.
M. J. Engh (26 January 1933 – 11 July 2024), also writing as Jane Beauclerk and Mary Jane Engh, was a librarian, scholar, teacher, editor and writer. She wrote short fiction, non-fiction, and speculative novels, including 1976’s Arslan, later released as A Wind from Bukhara. Engh was honored by SFWA in 2009 with the title of Author Emeritus.
Engh wrote four speculative fiction books, from 1976’s Arslan to 1993’s Rainbow Man. Arslan achieved its success as a primarily underground work, one that dealt directly with the methods of dictators and warlords, including the use of morality and charisma. Engh believed sci-fi writers had a responsibility not to make violence and destruction less horrific, and used the reactions to her novel to note the disconnect of those same readers when dealing with equivalent real-world harm. She also wrote to all-ages audiences, in particular with her work The House in the Snow, illustrated by Leslie W. Bowman. She believed in speaking plainly to children, who she found able to deal with reality and better able to process new ideas than adults….
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
August 21, 1967 – Carrie-Anne Moss, 57. Tonight we are looking at Carrie-Anne Moss who most of you will first of think as Trinity in the Matrix franchise, but she has had a much longer genre and genre-adjacent career.
Let’s start with her first role with on Dark Justice, one of the series that made up Crime After Prime Time on CBS. Yes, that was how it was graphically presented in the promos which were brilliantly bright and noisy. The show was about a judge, well two judges in the end, that when a case against them became a vigilante at night.
She was Tara McDonald, an assistant to the first Judge, Judge Nicholas Marshall. He was played by Ramy Zada, a Spaniard, as the series was shot in Spain before the Olympics forced it to be moved to Los Angeles for its two final years.
Next up for her was Liz Teel in Matrix. No, not that Matrix. This one had Nick Mancuso as Steven Matrix, a hitman who is killed during a job and sent to a version of Purgatory called The City In-Between. She owned a gym with him, and she, no surprise, is interested in being lovers with him. Scriptwriters are so predictable.
Next up is, I think genre adjacent at least, which her role in the F/X: The Series based on the F/X film. She was Lucinda ”Luce” Scott, a struggling actress brought in by the crew to act as a body double or ringer whenever one was needed. The series came off as another version of Leverage.
We’ve now reached that Matrix where she played Trinity, a human freed by Morpheus, a crewmember of the Nebuchadnezzar, and later would be Neo’s lover. It would become a true franchise with four live films and an animated anthology with her in all of them.
What else was she involved in? Well, a role that upset the fanboys to no end was her role on Jessica Jones as Jeri Hogarth as in the Marvel Universe, gasp, that is a male role. She also played the character in the Daredevil, Defenders and Iron Fist series.
A series I didn’t know existed was Humans about AIs in human form. It was based on the Swedish Real Humans series. She was Athena Morrow, an AI researcher based in San Francisco who has been invited to reverse engineer the consciousness program.
Finally, well at least for me, she was Master Indara on The Acolyte. I am most decidedly not going to discuss anything about her story here. The series — which was cancelled after a short first season — sounds fascinating.
Today is the opening day of Gamescom, the Cologne expo that is now the biggest event in the video game calendar. This year, I am not among the 300,000-odd crowd descending on Germany, but I did watch the two-hour livestreamed opening-night broadcast yesterday – so you don’t have to. Here is all of the most interesting news, arranged by theme because I am deeply bored of writing straightforward lists of games and trailers.
News that will annoy Xbox fanboys the most There was a new trailer for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Bethesda and MachineGames’s new first-person adventure, in which longtime video game actor Troy Baker seems charmingly thrilled to be playing Indiana Jones. It’ll be out on Xbox and PC on 9 December – but it was also announced that it will be coming to PlayStation 5 in spring 2025. Earlier this year, Xbox boss Phil Spencer went to great lengths to reassure Xbox fans that Indiana Jones would not be a multiplatform game, so I’m interested to see how this goes down….
…One actor amongst them is so iconic that he replaced Johnny Depp in the Fantastic Beasts franchise during the infamous defamation trial. We are talking about Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen.
Known for portraying the role of a young Hannibal Lecter in the TV show Hannibal and Gellert Grindelwald in the Fantastic Beasts franchise, Mikkelsen is truly a fascinating villainous actor. As per a report, the actor was in talks with Marvel Studios for the role of Doctor Doom.
However, Marvel Studios allegedly decided to play it safe and hired (or rather re-hired) Downey Jr. for “New mask. Same task”. Sure enough, people were happy to see Downey Jr. return….
Kahhori, the new Marvel hero who debuted in the MCU’s What If…? animated streaming series as one of the first MCU characters with no direct ties to comics, is now coming to the core Marvel Universe in her own comic as part of the Marvel’s Voices line. And it seems that, in what may be a first, the version of Kahhori who will make her debut in comics later this year is not an alternate version of Kahhori created specifically for comics or a Variant of some kind – it’s apparently the exact same character from the MCU.
At least, that’s how Marvel’s official press release for the Kahhori: Reshaper of Worlds one-shot makes it sound. Here’s Marvel’s official description, which by all indications seems to say that Kahhori will be making the jump straight from the MCU to comics, while leaving just enough ambiguity to make the passage slightly less than definitive:
“The Mohawk warrior Kahhori fell into Sky World and into our hearts from her first appearance fighting invaders to her home. She’s already helped save all of reality from a demented Doctor Strange and secured peace in her own world… So what NOW? Award-winning storyteller Ryan Little launches Kahhori into the 616! Chasing a threat out of Sky World, she lands in the fiery streets of Hell’s Kitchen! But culture shock’s gonna be the least of her problems as her strange adversary tears through NYC. Featuring exciting guest stars and the comics debuts of some extraordinary creators, Marvel’s Voices brings you an extra-special anthology celebrating Indigenous heritage and one of the most exciting characters to emerge from the MCU!”
Almost 50 years after “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” debuted, Tim Curry is gearing up for another spooky role.
The veteran actor will return to the big screen as a character in the horror film “Stream,” which is opening Wednesday in select theaters. It will be his first feature film role since the 2010 comedy “Burke & Hare,” even though he has worked on many animated projects as a voice actor since then. He also appeared in the 2016 television film remake of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” on Fox.
Beyond his “Rocky Horror” role of Dr. Frank-N-Furter, Curry earned his genre bonafides with his performance as Pennywise in the TV miniseries “It,” as well as roles in films like “Legend,” “Clue” and “Scary Movie 2.”…
[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Patrick Morris Miller.]
(1) ORWELL VS. KAFKA. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was published 75 years ago (June 8, 1949) less than a year before his death. BBC Radio 4 is running a series of programmes on George Orwell and Franz Kafka.
In “Battle of the Adjectives”, Ian Hislop and Helen Lewis explore the two adjectives that have arisen from the writing of both men.
But what exactly do we mean by ‘Orwellian’ or ‘Kafkaesque’? They also find a vivid illustration of the very particular dystopias conjured up by both Orwell and Kafka in the form of the current UK Post Office horizon scandal, hearing from Alan Bates about his experience of striving against injustice in a system that seemed stacked against him.
In episode one of Orwell vs. Kafka: Nineteen Eighty-Four,“Big Brother Is Watching You”, actor Martin Freeman (The Hobbit and Sherlock) reads the novel – there are an additional five more episodes to come.
The year is 1984. War and revolution have left the world unrecognisable. Great Britain, now known as Airstrip One, is ruled by the Party, and its leader, Big Brother, stares out from every poster. The Thought Police uncover every act of betrayal, and no one is free. Winston Smith works at The Ministry of Truth, carefully rewriting history, but he dreams of freedom and of rebellion. When he falls in love with Julia, their affair is an act of rebellion against the Party. But nothing is secret. And Room 101 awaits.
There is also a dramatization of Kafka’s The Trial.
The most quintessentially ‘Kafkaesque’ of Kafka’s work, The Trial is a sinister satire, charting one man’s descent into self-destruction in the face of a society that has become a machine.
(2) WESTERCON 76 GOH CHANGES. In Westercon 76 Utah’s Progress Report 2 the committee announces new Fan GoHs Dave and Keri Doering have replaced Sally Wohrle, who reportedly dropped out for health reasons.
Jewelry and many-media artist, Darlene P. Coltrain has accepted Artist GoH.
CJ Lawson, who was originally announced as a Guest of Honor, is unable to attend.
The convention takes place July 4-7 in Salt Lake City.
Artist GoH: Darlene P Coltrain. Darlene has spent decades making and selling art at conventions, art-fairs, and galleries. Her early professional work, was lost-wax precious-metal jewelry, and later brass, and even small bronze sculptures. In addition, she’s worked in polymer clay, painted-dyed silks, stencil-prints, beading, etc.
Fan GoH: Dave Doering. Dave is a long-time fan in Utah, with more than 40 years of SF/F activity. It is hard to recall any SF event here that he hasn’t participated in or been on the committee. (Including Chairing a Westercon, and a Costume-Con.) Surprisingly, though he grew up in New York, he had no idea there was organized fandom, until he got to the Beehive State. Since then, he was a founding member of the first SF/F club at BYU, started the Leading Edge magazine at the school, and also began the professional development “Life the Universe and Everything” Con in Provo (#42, this year). In addition, he and his lovely wife Keri are award-winners costumers (including at Costume-cons and Worldcons). Come find out why his tagline is “It’s NEVER boring with Dave Doering!”
Fan GoH: Keri Doering. Founding member of the Utah Costumers Guild, Master-level Award Winning costumer, competing in local, as well as international events (Worldcons, and Costume-Cons) (She has helped behind the scenes, in countless fannish events, including Costume-Con 23 Utah, and Westercon67)
(3) POKÉMON. [Item by Steven French.] Joseph Earl Thomas reflects on being a black Pokémon player: “Pokémon Is All About Reading” in The Paris Review.
… And while I’m never stepping on a court serious with AI or LeBron or Steph—shit, I couldn’t even check Damon Young last year at his local gym—anyone can play against some of the best in the Pokémon game by virtue of its general openness, whereby openness, of course, involves money. Getting out to a Pokémon tournament ain’t like buying Beyoncé or Taylor Swift tickets, but it’s also not getting penny candies from the corner store. Registration might run you around seventy dollars, but that’s the small of it; the real shit is paying for the hotel and travel. Many players move in groups, sharing the cost, at the very least, of housing. Having taken years off from gaming for real for real—between children and changing careers and being deployed to Baghdad and writing the book and all the college-degree collecting and grade-school trips and deaths in the family and living, and living and COVID and calls from school and calls from court and calls from hospitals and calls from the shelter—I have never been part of such a group….
…The potential to play gets me giddy at times, like the boy I was never supposed to be; we were never supposed to be. It encourages one to wonder what’s possible in this smaller social world, the structures of almost-togetherness heaped upon with strangers, how I’m besieged by the naive sincerity I had discarded for survival until now, and how this is also a dimension of being a black man in public. I return to Omari Akil’s provocation about Pokémon GO: the death sentence, they called it, if you’re a black man, lambasting the augmented reality approach to catching Pokémon in the streets as a safety hazard in a racist society—though one could always already guess, given history or intuition, where the best Pokémon or important locales would be, where risk would be assumed and by whom. It’s hard for me to shake the state of any game from what happened today or yesterday, what will happen next year or what went down in the eighteen- or nineteen-sixties. So why then, I ask myself, does this thing here feel so much like life?
Move over Anxiety, there’s a new dominant emotion at the box office: Joy!
Heading into the weekend, the follow-up film to 2015’s cerebral hit Inside Out was projected to collect $80 million to $90 million. It overtakes Dune: Part Two ($82.5 million) and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire ($80 million) as the biggest opening of the year. It’s also the first movie since last July’s Barbie ($162 million) to debut above $100 million.
The second “Inside Out 2” also connected at the international box office with $140 million, enough to surpass “Frozen 2” ($135 million) as the biggest overseas animated opening of all time. Turnout was especially strong across Latin America, where it landed the second-biggest opening of all time behind Disney’s Marvel epic “Avengers: Endgame.” Globally, the movie has grossed $295 million to notch the title for biggest animated debut in like-for-like markets at current exchange rates. It carries a $200 million production budget….
(5) POE HOUSE CELEBRATIONS. A “Movie Night” in Baltimore will mark two Poe-related anniversaries.
This year we commemorate two very special anniversaries: the 175th Anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s Death in Baltimore in 1849 and the 75th Anniversary of The Edgar Allan Poe House & Museum established in 1949. Join us festival eve at a special kick-off reception and MOVIE NITE in the glorious and newly-opened M&T Bank Exchange Theatre at France-Merrick Performing Arts Center.
This extraordinary evening includes two panel discussions with special guests Victoria Price, author and daughter of Vincent Price, and Michael Connelly, bestselling author of The Lincoln Lawyer and the Hieronymus Bosch detective series. Q&A followed by a special tribute recognizing the life and career of Vincent Price, and of the passing of the extraordinary film director, Roger Corman, followed by 60th Anniversary screening of their 1964 horror classic, “Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death” starring Vincent Price.
(6) TOWARDS MORE AND BETTER AUTHOR READINGS. Charlie Jane Anders calls on everyone to “Let Authors Read Their Work!” at Happy Dancing.
One thing that bums me out is my sense that people don’t seem to want to listen to authors reading their work in public as much as they used to. (This is a trend that predates covid.) I don’t entirely get it: audiobooks are more popular than ever, but the equivalent a of a live performance of an audiobook isn’t automatically popular….
,,, Listening to a good speaker read some of their own prose tells you things about the text that you will never learn from hearing that same person answer questions about the book. Good prose is immersive and engaging: it draws you in, and tells you a lot about what kind of story you’ll be getting. You can get to know the characters, live in their thoughts, get sucked into their problems.
Here’s the part where I brace myself for dozens of people to email me saying that they went to too many author readings that were dull, interminable, or actually incomprehensible. And yeah, I feel you.
Author readings are an art form, just like anything else. They can be done well or incredibly badly. Some authors are great at writing, but terrible at speaking. Believe me, I know. A big part of curating a reading series was avoiding those authors who were brilliant on the page but mumbled on the stage.
But I believe that most of us can get good at reading our work out loud, because it really is a skill that can be learned. Even introverts can master it!
In fact, I’ve been meaning to compile a set of tips for getting better at reading your work to an audience, as someone who worked on this for years. So I’m going to spend the rest of this newsletter sharing that advice….
A series of substantial tips follows.
(7) ADAM-TROY CASTRO GOFUNDME. “The Cancer is Alas Back, But I am Fighting” says Adam-Troy Castro in an update on his GoFundMe, which is as needed as ever. Fuller medical details at the link.
…So what is happening now is that a surgery, probably one involving my prior surgeon, is being wrangled, and my blood is going to undergo testing at a genetic level to determine what chemo I get this next time, and the same will be done to the little bugger once he’s in a specimen tray, and the good news is that this time, my chemo will be in my immediate neighborhood, not an hour’s drive from me. In all ways not involving whatever side-effects I experience, this will be a smaller impact on my life.
The surgery may be as long as two or three weeks away. It is not scheduled yet. It will be determined. Maybe it’s next Tuesday. Don’t hock on me about demanding it be earlier. We are doing the best we can. People with actual power are already speaking up.
I will change the name of the current GoFundMe and establish that the cancer is back, though I do not expect spectacular uptick in collection, given how frequently fate has returned me to the same well. It will remain open, in any event. I can use the help. But this is the shitty sequel. Let it not be a trilogy….
Tory Stephens, Climate Fiction Creative Manager, says, “If you’ve got a great short story in the works and haven’t submitted it yet, we’d love to read it.”
The contest judges are Omar El Akkad and Annalee Newitz.
(9) THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE. Abigail Nussbaum rounds up the misrepresentations about artificial intelligence in “AI and Me” at Lawyers, Guns & Money.
…The solution the AI companies have come up with to this problem is essentially fake it until you make it. Insist, loudly and repeatedly, that AI is “inevitable”, that anyone who resists it is standing in the path of technological progress, no different from anyone who futilely resisted the automation of their labor in the past. That non-technology industries are falling for this spin is perhaps unsurprising—motivated, obviously, by the dream of dumping those pesky human employees and freelancers and replacing them with cheap and uncomplaining machines (though, again, I must stress that if AI was priced realistically—and if water and energy for server farms were sanely priced—there is no AI tool that would be cheaper than a human doing the same job). What’s more interesting is that other Silicon Valley companies are doing the same, even though, again, the result is almost always to make their product worse. Google has essentially broken its key product, and Microsoft is threatening to spy on all its users and steal their data, all because a bunch of CEOs have been incepted into the idea that this technology is the future and they cannot afford to be left behind. (This desperation must be understood, of course, in the context of a Silicon Valley that hasn’t come up with a new killer app that genuinely revolutionizes users’ lives since maybe as far back as the smartphone, and where advances in screens, cameras, disk sizes, and computing power have plateaued to a point that no one feels the need to upgrade their devices every year.)…”
(10) MEMORY LANE.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
June 17, 2007 — Anniversary of “The Unicorn and The Wasp”. If you haven’t seen this episode, go away now. Really. Truly. Everything that follows is spoilers in the extreme. You have been warned.
So one of my best loved episodes of the new series of Doctor Who is “The Unicorn and The Wasp” which aired on this date on BBC America.
It is a country house mystery set in high summer featuring a number of murders. And, to add an aspect of meta-narrative to the story, it has writer Agatha Christie in a prominent role. It would riff off her disappearance for ten days which occurred just after she found her husband in bed with another woman. Her disappearance is a mystery that has never been satisfactorily answered to this day.
Yes, there have been entire books, Queen of Air and Darkness forgive their writers, offering up their theories as to what happened to her.
So the Doctor and Donna Noble arrived at the grounds of that country house just during afternoon tea. When else would they arrive? The Doctor, here played by David Tennant at his very best, uses his psychic power in the form of an identity card, to convince The Lady of The Manor that she has met him previously and invited them for the weekend.
A murder will soon happen when Professor Plum is killed in The Library with a lead pipe. Yes, a Clue board game reference which his plucky companion (Catherine Tate) gleefully notes. And so it goes for the entire episode in a rather delightful manner. It’s silly, it’s fast-paced, and it’s one of the most British episodes that the new Who does. And it’s one that shows how clearly this series is fantasy, not science fiction, as I’ll note when you read on.
The Unicorn of the title is simply the code name of an infamous jewel thief, but The Wasp of the title is a wasp, a bloody big one on that. A wasp that’s the love child of a shape shifting alien who made Her Ladyship pregnant in India forty years ago. A wasp that’s so big that it couldn’t survive in Earth’s gravity, but this is fantasy after all. (I firmly believe that almost all science fiction is fantasy — some are just more blatant about it.) And do keep an ear out for the many, many references to the novels Christie wrote. There’s even a paperback published if I remember correctly millions of the year in the future. See books do survive!
It’s a quite delightful affair which fits very nicely into the genre of Manor House mysteries which of course the future Dame Agatha would write a few of these novels herself. Oh and Agatha Christie was played by Fanella Woolgar, to the far right in the image below, who was cast at the urging of Tennant who may or may not have known that the actress had twice appeared in the Agatha Christie’s Poirot series several years previously. She played Ellis in the “Lord Edgware Dies”, and in “Hallowe’en Party” as Elizabeth Whittaker.
This episode is why one of the many reasons that David Tennant is my favorite actor that played a Doctor in the new Whovian era. (Tom Baker is my favorite of the classic Doctors.) Jodi Whittaker, my second favorite in the modern era, who I believe a great performer that I thought was let down too often by scripts that were less than they could’ve been.
It, like all modern Who, is now available exclusively in the States on Disney+. I downloaded this and my other favorite episodes when they came out.
(11) COMICS SECTION.
Rubes puts a funny twist on a familiar confrontation.
Eek! requires knowledge of those unseen to be funny.
The massively popular 2024 edition of the Annecy Intl Festival of Animation came to its exciting conclusion on Saturday with the announcement of the winners of this year’s Cristal prizes. Adam Elliot‘s audience-pleasing stop-motion feature Memoir of a Snail was the winner of the 2024 Cristal for Best Animated Feature, while Alexandra Ramires and Laura Gonçalves’ s Percebese was the winner of the top prize in the shorts category….
In a world turned upside down, civilized apes sit at the top of the evolutionary ladder, ruling over a population of primal humans. But this dominion will not go unchallenged. Wayward astronauts arrive to lead an uprising, questioning this madness and the events that led to this topsy-turvy, backward future. Political intrigue, societal conflict, and fantastical, dangerous mysteries abound on this planet ruled by apes!
Built on the celebrated, time-tested D6 System developed by RPG pioneer West End Games, this exciting science fiction adventure series brings a wealth of new features and roleplaying mechanics for a new generation of gamers.
Players will be easily thrust into the PLANET OF THE APES through the new “Magnetic Variant (D6MV)” Rule Set taking full advantage of the unique and popular “Wild Die” system and other unique role-playing systems. Adventures in PLANET OF THE APES will be as thrilling and cinematic as players dare to imagine.
Francis Ford Coppola’s sci-fi epic “Megalopolis,” which proved to be wildly divisive after its Cannes Film Festival premiere, has finally found a distributor. Lionsgate has signed a deal to distribute the film in theaters in the U.S. and Canada.
It will be released on Sept. 27. “Megalopolis” is playing in Imax, but it will likely share screens with Christopher Nolan’s 10th anniversary “Interstellar” rerelease. It’ll also have to relinquish those coveted premium large format screens a week later, as “Joker: Folie à Deux,” which was filmed with Imax cameras, lands on Oct. 4….
… Orphan Black: Echoes is the name of the next chapter, and while it will be similar to its predecessor, it will also have some notable changes.
The original Orphan Black focused on a series of clones flawlessly played by Tatiana Maslany….
…Orphan Black: Echoes will premiere on Sunday, June 23, at 9/8c on AMC and BBC America.
Full episodes will be available to stream on AMC+….
… Orphan Black: Echoes is headlined by Krysten Ritter, who plays a young woman named Lucy who has undergone a procedure and has no recollection of what happened.
Keeley Hawes is playing Dr. Kira Manning, the daughter of Orphan Black’s Sarah Manning, serving as one of the sequel’s most significant ties to the original.
The impressive cast is rounded out by Avan Jogia (Jack), Amanda Fix (Jules Lee), James Hiroyuki Liao (Paul Darrow), and Rya Kihlstedt (Eleanor Miller).
While 37 years have passed between Orphan Black Season 5 and Orphan Black: Echoes, it is possible that some familiar faces will stop by, thanks to the show’s focus on clones….
The series stars Krysten Ritter and is set in 2052 in the same universe as Orphan Black…taking place in 2052, thirty-seven years since the end of the original series, Echoes follows the life of the now adult Kira [daughter on one of the original clones] and her wife, as they try to help an amnesiac woman….
(16) LINER NOTES FOR TODAY’S SCROLL TITLE. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “You Gets No Kzin With One RingWorld”. Notes:
[1] Per Genius.com and other citations, Josh White sang “…you gets…” although no doubt there are versions with “…you get…”
With “One Meatball”, Josh White became the first African-American to have a million-selling hit. According to his biographer Elijah Wald it was White’s “biggest hit by far, and one of the most popular songs of the 1940s folk revival”.
[Thanks to Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Jeffrey Smith, Daniel Dern, Nancy Collins, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
The year 2024 marks the beginning of the critical dystopian future Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) envisioned in her groundbreaking novel Parable of the Sower. Her fiction and the story of her life compel us to reckon with power, leadership, creativity, the Earth, human relationships, and the unknown possibilities that await us in the stars. Now, intellectuals from different communities will gather to contemplate her legacy. This conference asks how we have learned from Butler’s writing and what her archive at The Huntington—a short distance from where the author spent her formative years in Pasadena, California—can help future generations discover.
One of the panels will feature well-known sff creators.
Session 1: Creativity as Praxis
Moderator: Sage Ni’Ja Whitson Queer & Trans anti-disciplinary artist and writer, Department of Dance and Department of Black Study at UC Riverside
Damian Duffy Author of the graphic novel adaptations of Kindred and Parable of the Sower
Steven Barnes Author of The Eightfold Path, Marvel’s Black Panther: Sins of the King podcast series, and Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror on Shudder
Sheree Renée Thomas Editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and the Dark Matter anthologies, poet, author of Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future
Tickets for the two-day conference are available here. General: $25 (Students free). Optional lunch: $20 (each day)
Ahead of its world premiere here at Cannes, Francis Ford Coppola has dropped a teaser trailer for his master epic Meglopolis. While the first trailer showed Adam Driver’s ambitious architectural idealist Cesar attempting suicide atop a skyscraper, yet stopping time, here we see a montage of the pic’s action: a devastated city indulged in neon and noir infused Bacchanal.
Coppola’s latest is billed as a Roman Epic fable set in an imagined Modern America. The City of New Rome must change, causing conflict between Cesar Catilina (Driver), a genius artist who seeks to leap into a utopian, idealistic future, and his opposition, Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who remains committed to a regressive status quo, perpetuating greed, special interests, and partisan warfare. Torn between them is socialite Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s daughter, whose love for Cesar has divided her loyalties, forcing her to discover what she truly believes humanity deserves.
Early reactions to Megalopolis have been mixed. After a private screening in Los Angeles last month, one executive described it as “batshit crazy”….
…Others, however, were fulsome in their praise. “I feel I was a part of history. Megalopolis is a brilliant, visionary masterpiece,” said the director Gregory Nava after the screening. “I was so overwhelmed that I couldn’t do anything for the rest of the day.” An anonymous viewer at a London screening went even further: “This film is like Einstein and relativity in 1905, Picasso and Guernica in 1937 – it’s a date in the history of cinema.”…
(4) CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE. The 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, which provides $150,000USD to the winner, is the largest English-language literary prize in the world for women and non-binary authors. So the announcement of the winner may be of interest to you even if the book is not genre.
V. V. Ganeshananthan has been named the winner for her novel Brotherless Night, published by Random House.
(5) COMPUSERVE GETS A PLAQUE. It didn’t take as long as you might have expected for one of the building blocks of personal computing to earn its own historic marker. Alex Krislov shared a photo of Ohio’s salute to CompuServe.
…To say Clifton’s is kitschy doesn’t begin to capture it. It’s more like if uber-kitschy, ur-kitschy and mondo-kitschy had a baby….
We’re interested because LASFS used to meet at Clifton’s in the late 1930s. And consequently, Discover Los Angeles’ article “Clifton’s Republic: The Story of an LA Icon” has the tidbit of greatest interest to fans:
…The third floor is home to the Gothic Bar, which features a booth named after sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury, a patron of the original Clifton’s who became a pal of Meieran’s. The back bar is a repurposed 19th-century gothic altar. The third floor also features Clinton Hall, a live performance and private event space, and lots of taxidermy dioramas created in consultation with experts from the Natural History Museum….
(7) HE’S ON THE COVER. Fantasy author Lev Grossman in on the front of Publishers Weekly.
Scavengers Reign, the remarkable but underseen sci-fi series that premiered on Max in late 2023. Scavengers Reign was widely regarded as one of the year’s best shows, and one of many projects that heralded a golden age for indie animation. Unfortunately, the series was canceled on May 10… but that development has a silver lining.
Per Variety, Scavengers Reign will remain on Max (a rare concession for WB’s canceled shows), but its first season will also stream on Netflix. The rival streamer is reportedly interested in picking up the show for more seasons, but continuation is contingent on Scavengers’ success on the platform.
… Given Netflix’s growing interest in adult animation, the streamer might be an ideal destination. Scavengers Reign follows the crew of a deep space freighter after they crash on a hostile alien planet. Across 12 episodes, the crew works to find their way back to their ship, and survive a world trying to annihilate them. The series doesn’t shy away from dark themes, so it should feel at home alongside Netflix originals like Blue Eyed Samurai….
(9) TEDDY HARVIA CARTOON.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born May 14, 1944 — George Lucas, 80. I can say without doubt George Lucas was a director whose first work I encountered was THX 1138. What a damn strange film that is. Upon rewatching it twenty or so years later, the Suck Fairy wasn’t pleased by it as I’ll say she holds that it just feels really dated now which I agree with her.
Ahhh but then was Star Wars, and no I won’t accept the renaming it. Simply didn’t happen. The film itself which I’ve seen at the theater and watched a number of times since is extraordinary. That it garnered a Hugo at IguanaCon II shouldn’t surprise anyone here.
George Lucas in 2009.
Confession time. I’ve not watched any of Star Wars films past the first three. I adore The Empire Strikes Back, a Hugo winner at Denvention Two, actually my favorite of the first three films. I don’t dislike the final film, Return of the Jedi, Hugo of course, this time at L.A. Con II, but I really do think the story is better in The Empire Strikes Back. Also, Lucas gave his screenwriting credit to Leigh Brackett for that film after her death from cancer.
So, what’s my next film that he did that I really like? Oh guess. It was when he was story writer and executive producer on the first four Indiana Jones films, which his colleague and good friend Steven Spielberg directed, so it is Raiders of The Lost Ark is my favorite film here (with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom being almost as good), and the last should been not have been done. So not surprisingly Raiders of The Lost Ark would win him and Spielberg a Hugo, this time at Chicon IV.
Need I say that The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles was wonderful? Yes, it stretched probability to the breaking point and way beyond continuously in terms of who young Indy met, but that was the sheer fun of the series. No Hugo nomination, why, oh why?
Did you know he wrote the story for Willow? (Not the screenplay.) Well, he did. Cool. I mean really cool. Noreascon 3 nominated it for a Hugo but a rabbit from Toon Town won that year. Speaking of really cool films, he was executive producer and co-edited Labyrinth with director Jim Henson. Yes, you nominated it for a Hugo, this time at Conspiracy ’87.
He produced Howard the Duck, which the French had the gall to name on the one-sheets Howard Une nouvelle race de héros (Howard: A New Breed of Hero) was considered his worst film by far. It’s not a film I like but I feel that it should be noted here. No, you did not nominate Howard Une nouvelle race de héros for a Hugo. Nor did French give it any Awards either.
Finally for me, he also was the creator and executive producer of the Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated series which premiered with a feature film of the same name that aired just before its first episode.
I know he’s done a lot more including some new material now on Disney+ but I’m not taking that streaming service now. At some point, I’ll gorge myself over there but not yet.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away began George Lucas’ epic space opera tale that eventually grew into the pop culture phenomenon we know today as Star Wars. The original trilogy of films Lucas made during the 70s and 80s, became beloved across the globe, but the theatrical cuts of the movies have neared the brink of extinction following Lucas’ special edition re-releases.
As a result, a group of rebel Star Wars fans have taken it upon themselves to not only preserve but also digitally restore the original cuts so that the fanbase can enjoy the version of the films they first fell in love with. However, the group’s activities directly clash with Lucas’ vision for his franchise and border on a legal grey area. Here is why George Lucas won’t be happy with the rebel fans trying to preserve the original cuts of the original trilogy.
The original trilogy of Star Wars films, spearheaded by George Lucas were critical and commercial successes. However, in 1997 Lucas released the “Special Edition” of the films for the trilogy’s 20th anniversary, which featured extensive changes to the original theatrical cuts.
The original cuts have since become scarce. However, a group of Star Wars fans, known as Team Negative One have reportedly almost completely digitally restored the original cuts in 4K using 35-millimeter prints of the original trilogy….
To show how serious Lucas is about his later cuts —
…Similarly, when the National Film Registry aimed to preserve 1977’s Star Wars (later retitled Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope), Lucas reportedly refused to provide them with a copy of the original theatrical release…
(13) Q&A ABOUT FUNDRAISING ANTHOLOGY. Broken Olive Branches is a charity anthology; over 30 authors in the horror community donated stories to help the civilians of Palestine. The proceeds from the anthology go to ANERA and the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. Roseanna interviews the editor and some of the authors involved in “Roundtable Interview: Broken Olive Branches” at Nerds of a Feather.
In late April, Senator Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) began his testimony before a Senate subcommittee hearing by doing something unusual for a stuffy institution like Congress: He played a new song from the rapper Drake.
But it wasn’t Drake’s rap verse that Tillis felt was important for Congress to hear. Rather it was a verse in the song featuring the voice of the legendary — and long dead — rapper Tupac Shakur.
In a kind of uniquely modern sorcery, the song uses artificial intelligence to resurrect Tupac from the dead and manufacture a completely new — and synthetic — verse delivered in the late rapper’s voice. The song, titled “Taylor Made Freestyle,” is one in a barrage of brutal diss tracks exchanged between Drake and Kendrick Lamar in a chart-topping rap battle. Kendrick is from California, where Tupac is like a god among rap fans, so weaponizing the West Coast rap legend’s voice in the feud had some strategic value for Drake, who is from Toronto.
Drake, apparently, thought it’d be okay to use Tupac’s synthetic voice in his song without asking permission from the late rapper’s estate. But, soon after the song’s release, Tupac’s estate sent a cease-and-desist letter demanding that Drake take the song down, which he did. However — given the murky legal landscape regulating AI creations — it’s unclear whether Tupac’s estate actually has the law on their side.
And so the beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar has become not only one of the most brilliant — and most vicious — battles in the history of rap. It’s also become a historic flashpoint for the issues posed by what you might call AI necromancy — resurrecting traits of the dead using AI technology.
We’ve entered a new world where anyone can conjure the voice or visual likeness of a dead celebrity — or really anyone, dead or alive — with a few clicks using AI software.
(15) JEOPARDY! SFF. [Item by David Goldfarb.] Catching up on Jeopardy Masters and also watching tonight’s episode, here’s the SFF content I saw:
Jeopardy Masters, Wednesday 5/8/2024
Game 1:
Literature: Who Said It? $2000: “I freewheel a lot…I reckon I’ll become president of the galaxy, and it just happens, it’s easy”
Matt Amodio got the right book but the wrong character: “What’s Dent?”
(One of his quirks is that he never bothers to change his question words but just always says “What’s…?”)
Amy Schneider gave us, “Who is Beeblebrox?”
Most Filers I assume know this, but just in case I’ll fill in that the book was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the characters Arthur Dent and Zaphod Beeblebrox.
Literature: Who Said It? $1600: “For if he is still with the quick un-dead, your death would make you even as he is. No, you must live!”
Yogesh Raut knew or correctly guessed, “Who is Van Helsing?”
Literature: Who Said It? $1200: A Daily Double for Yogesh, who wagered all of his 15,400 points. “She betrayed you, Winston. Immediately — unreservedly. I have seldom seen anyone come over to us so promptly”.
Yogesh hesitated a bit, then tried, “Who is…O’Brien?” And this was correct, the inquisitor from 1984.
Literature: Who Said It? $400: “What’s taters, precious, eh, what’s taters?”
Matt got it: “What’s Gollum?”
Game 2:
On the Director’s Résumé, $2000: He spoke the silent language of horror in 1922’s “Nosferatu”
Victoria Groce got it: “Who is Murnau?”
Regular Jeopardy!, Monday 5/13/2024
In the Double Jeopardy round:
TV’s Fantastical Places, $1200: This undersea abode of cartoon fame is based on an actual atoll used for atomic testing between 1946 and 1958
Michael Richter tried, “What is SpongeBob Squarepants?” but this was the name of the show, not the place.
Returning champ Will Stewart knew, “What is Bikini Bottom?”
TV’s Fantastical Places, $2000: First seen in 1969, this planet on “Doctor Who” was caught up in a time war with the Daleks
Will knew it: “What is Gallifrey?”
Literary Title Occupations, $800: In a special edition, J.K. Rowling did her own illustrations for the story collection title “The Tales of Beedle the” this
Michael got it: “What is a bard?”
Literary Title Occupations, $400: Emily Chambers is one of these spiritual intermediaries in a C.J. Archer novel, hunting a demon & talking to a ghost
Will: “What is a medium?”
Literary Title Occupations, $1200: In “The Magician’s Nephew”, animals talk like humans & Jadis, an evil witch, flees from Charn & reaches this fantasy land
Will got this one too: “What is Narnia?”
TV’s Fantastical Places, $800: This castle was the ancestral home of Ned Stark & family on “Game of Thrones”
Will, evidently an SFF watcher, knew “What is Winterfell?”
TV’s Fantastical Places, $800: Mystic Falls is the locale for blood-sucking brothers Damon & Stefan on this long-running CW show
Joyce Yang got in for “What’s The Vampire Diaries?”
Jeopardy Masters, Friday 5/10/2024
Game 1, Double Jeopardy round:
Oscars for Makeup & Hairstyling, $1600: For this 2015 film, Lesley Vanderwalt got the idea for Furiosa’s look from an image of a girl with clay across her forehead
Mattea Roach got it: “What’s Mad Max: Fury Road?”
Oscars for Makeup & Hairstyling, $1200: This man has won 7 Academy Awards for makeup, including one for his work on “An American Werewolf in London”
Amy Schneider responded, “Who is Baker?” And Rick Baker was correct.
Oscars for Makeup & Hairstyling, $400: Makeup artist Ve Neill used moss to make Michael Keaton look like he crawled out from underneath a rock for this 1988 film.
Mattea asked us, “What’s ‘Beetlejuice’?”
Game 2, Single Jeopardy round
A Literary Tipple, $600: It takes a lot of flowers (weeds, some say) to make a batch of this stuff, the title of a Ray Bradbury novel
James Holzhauer knew it was dandelion wine.
Made You Say It, $1000: Compelled by his people’s naiveté, this Trojan said, “Don’t trust the horse…even when they bring gifts, I fear the Greeks”
Because it was a Sci-Fi Sunday episode, Isaac assumed some sort of FTL travel but not instantaneous communication. He takes a (he himself says) simple assumption of all civilizations arising together and expanding their sphere of influence, which in 3-dimensions would give each 12 neighbors.
With regards to SF, he draws mainly on cinema and TV looking at embassies Babylon V, Star Trek and Stargate. However Niven and Pournelle’s A Mote in God’s Eye, and Dune do get a look in.
He also points to flaws in many SF shows’ plot arising out of mis-understandings making a fairly plausible case against such actually taking place.
He opines that the embassy would be in space for control biological contaminants (both ways) and here, it is bacteria rather than viruses are the major problem. He also notes that assuming an advanced planetary system might be colonized out to the equivalent of it Kuiper belt, such is the distance between stars that any traveler passing through a stellar empire would likely come no closer than many thousands of times the Kuiper orbit distance to a single star’s civilization and so no need or practicality to control travelers simply passing through.
“We often imagine encountering many alien civilizations, and establishing trade and relationships with them, but what would being an alien ambassador be like?”
35-minute episode below…
[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, David Goldfarb, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Teddy Harvia for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Joe H.]
(1) TROUBLED DENVER EVENT WON’T REPEAT IN 2025. Anne Marble did a roundup about the complaints against Readers Take Denver in Pixel Scroll 4/22/24 item #5.
…All of the negative attention Readers Take Denver has received in the days, weeks following the event has prompted the cancellation of next year’s convention, which was previously scheduled for February 2025….
(2) TURNING THINGS TO GOLD. The original artwork for the cover of Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone will be auctioned June 26 by Sotheby’s reports CNN. It’s expected to set a record.
…When the illustration was first up for auction at Sotheby’s in London in 2001, it sold for around four times its estimated sale price, for a record £85,750 (about $106,000), according to a Sotheby’s press release Thursday.
…The record for an item related to the book series is currently held by an unsigned first edition of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,” which sold for $421,000 at Heritage Auctions in Dallas, Texas, in 2021, according to Sotheby’s.
JK Rowling has shared the conversation she had with actor Alan Rickman, when she revealed to him the true complications of his character in the Harry Potter movies.
“He rang me up and said, ‘Look, I’m spinning plates here. I really need to understand what Snape’s up to? Am I a pure baddie?’ He was the only person I told: ‘You were in love with Harry’s mother.’
Copies of George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four have been arriving at an artist’s studio in Edinburgh for months. Every shape and size, posted from Ukraine, Hong Kong, Peru, Germany, Cape Cod and Sarajevo.
Some are in mint condition, others are dog-eared, tea-stained, heavily annotated or turned into graffitied art works. One is a water-stained first edition; one is a secret love letter from a married woman to her first love; another, a graphic novel version, came from Orwell’s son Richard Blair.
Each has been donated to a unique installation in the community hall of Jura, the Hebridean island where Orwell, in dire poverty and desperately ill, wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four during the late 1940s, to mark its publication 75 years ago.
Hans K Clausen, a sculptor based in Edinburgh, is collecting 1,984 copies of the book to exhibit on Jura for three days in early June. It will be an interactive, “living” sculpture where visitors are invited to open and read every volume.
Many have arrived, often with overseas postmarks and customs stamps, addressed to “Winston Smith, care of Hans K Clausen”….
(5) JEOPARDY! [Item by David Goldfarb.] I got around to watching the first episode of the new Jeopardy! Masters tournament. Each episode has two games. I didn’t notice any SFF content in the first game, but there was in the second. Here are details:
In the first round:
Spell it!, $1000: How about this dwarves race of “Ring Cycle” fame whose name begins & ends with the same letter
Yogesh Raut got it: “What is N-I-B-E-L-U-N-G-E-N?”.
Meet the Smiths, $400: Matt Smith’s TV roles include the Doctor on “Doctor Who” & this member of the royal family on seasons 1 & 2 of “The Crown”
Yogesh again: “Who is Prince Philip?”
In the second round:
Authors’ Fictional Places, $2000. A Daily Double on which Yogesh bet 9400 points: The town of Eastwick, Rhode Island
Yogesh said, “Who is John Updike?” (The novel here being The Witches of Eastwick.)
Authors’ Fiction Places, $1600: A world of dragons & dragonriders, Pern
Amy Schneider rang in, then hesitated, but got to “Who is McCaffrey?”
Authors’ Fictional Places, $1200. They displayed a picture of a bespectacled, bald man holding a cloth, sitting next to a model of a fantasy setting that Filers would recognize. The clue: Resting on the backs of four elephants atop a giant turtle, Discworld.
Yogesh knew it: “Who is Pratchett?”
Author’s Fictional Places, $400: Castle Rock, Maine.
Yogesh again: “Who is King?”
(Fictional Places $800 was William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, in case you were wondering.)
China’s US$15 billion sci-fi industry, which has gained global attention after the success of the Netflix show 3 Body Problem, offers a potential boost to the economy while aligning with Beijing’s aspirations to become a tech powerhouse, analysts said, underscoring the need for stronger government backing to fortify the sector.
The industry achieved 113.29 billion yuan (US$15.6 billion) in total revenue last year, representing a 29 per cent year on year increase according to the 2024 China Science Fiction Industry Report, released last week during the eighth China Science Fiction Convention in Beijing.
Science fiction could also help companies conceptualise and produce new ideas, such as the establishment of a human settlement on Mars or brain-computer interfaces, according to Wu Yan, who co-authored the report….
Adam Driver is on the edge in the first official teaser for Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis.”
“Megalopolis,” which will premiere in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, has been a project years in the making for the director, who first began work on the screenplay in the 1980s. The legendary filmmaker behind “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now” has invested $120 million of his own money into the film….
…According to the official synopsis, “‘Megalopolis’ is a Roman Epic fable set in an imagined Modern America. The City of New Rome must change, causing conflict between Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a genius artist who seeks to leap into a utopian, idealistic future, and his opposition, Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who remains committed to a regressive status quo, perpetuating greed, special interests, and partisan warfare. Torn between them is socialite Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s daughter, whose love for Cesar has divided her loyalties, forcing her to discover what she truly believes humanity deserves.”…
(8) BERNARD HILL (1944-2024). Bernard Hill, who played Theoden in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, died May 5 reports Deadline. His best known film role was as the captain of the Titanic in James Cameron’s film. He played a number of secondary roles in about 20 genre/related productions, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999), The Scorpion King (2002) and Gothika (2003).
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Catherynne M. Valente in 2017.
Born May 5, 1979 – Catherynne Valente, 45. By Paul Weimer: My strong impression of Cat Valente’s work came from the beginning of my reviewing life. Way back in the halcyon days of 2009, when I was first putting reviews out there, and getting review copies, I was offered a review copy of an author I had never heard before, named Cat Valente. The novel was Palimpsest and well, the novel knocked me on my arse. Reader, I was not quite prepared for a novel that involved sex as a gateway to another realm of existence. It’s a sensuous, sensual and rich novel in immersive detail, and that immersion is something I would notice in future Cat Valente’s books. I’ve not tried Palimpsest again, but I eagerly have read a number of her novellas and short stories. I particularly like “Six Gun Snow White” among these.
But, really, Space Opera is the one book I think of when I think of Cat Valente’s work. Although I’ve never actually watched Eurovision, I know enough about it to understand the “Eurovision with Aliens in Space” high concept of Space Opera and I found the novel, like much of Valente’s work to be a sensory delight, queer, unapologetic, and with strongly defined and delineated characters. I think it is probably the one Valente book that if you are going to try Valente, that’s the one to try. I know there have been discussions and thoughts about a sequel to the book ever since it came out, but part of the joy of Space Opera for me is, like a lot of Valente’s other work, is that it is self-contained and complete within it’s pages. Sure, Valente has written other sequels and follow ups to other work, but this is a function I think of her exuberant and vivid writing, rather than any incompleteness in a work that needs sequels to resolve.
(10) COMICS SECTION.
Fur Babies has a variety of cartoonists’ styles of sound effects in honor of the day. Can you identify them before you get to the explanation in the comments?
It’s no secret Egon Spengler was a very hands-on, DIY kinda scientist, often cobbling together his hardware from common, everyday items, and the P.K.E. Meter is no different. Egon used an old electric shoe polisher for the bulk of this handheld piece of tech, which trades in footwear for phantasms, determining specter location and quantification. The P.K.E. Meter acts like a divining rod when near a spectral being, with a pair of motorized arms extending outward from the sides, embedded lights flashing in sync with detectable spectral frequencies.
Fans will be happy to know that not only have the HasLab Lab Lab Techs included classic P.K.E. Meter features, such as Ghost Detection Mode, but they’ve also included a very special upgrade. Yes, that’s right, the HasLab P.K.E. Meter 1:1-scale premium adult collectible features Egon Spengler’s personal upgrade from his time as the Dirt Farmer, in Summerville: Taser Mode! Taser Mode, if you’re unfamiliar, turns the P.K.E. Meter into a taser that forces an apparition to reveal itself… or explode in a burst of marshmallow goo, as we know from Podcast’s dealings with the mischievous Mini-Pufts in the Ecto-1.
GHOST TRAP
Needing something to contain and transport paranormal entities to a more permanent housing facility (namely the Ecto-Containment Unit), Ray Stantz and Egon Spengler designed the Ghost Trap. Consisting of a main chassis and a removable cartridge, the Ghost Trap has limited battery life and was never meant to accommodate ecto-plasmic beings for any extended period.
This 1:1-scale premium adult collectible features everything fans love about this vital piece of ghost-bustin’ gear, including the removable cartridge, high-powered LEDs, premium metal finishes, functioning diecast metal wheels for smooth deployment, and more! This thing is so gorgeous that ghosts will be throwing themselves at you just for a chance to get trapped within this highly detailed, premium collectible!
Physical media is very popular these days. Nostalgia, fandom, and streaming burnout have caused certain segments of American society to switch off their Amazon Prime accounts and fire up their Blu-ray players. One of the many advertised benefits of physical media is that it offers a more permanent, definitive form of media ownership than a streaming service. But just how permanent are your Blu-rays? And is physical media really built to last?…
… Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of open-source information about the longevity of commercially mass-produced Blu-rays, technically known as read-only discs, or BD-ROMs. The Blu-ray Disc Association, which developed and owns the technology behind the discs, ignored multiple emails I sent them, and the people that I did speak to on the subject couldn’t give me a very specific answer….
A half-century ago when George Lucas decided to make “Star Wars,” a core visual effects team was handed a sizable challenge: Figure out a believable way to transport audiences to a galaxy far, far away. Essential to that goal was the development of a new type of motion control camera system: built in a Van Nuys warehouse where the production filmed space-set scenes such as the climatic trench run.
Now fans in Southern California can see the historic Dykstraflex camera system, newly restored and in working order, on display at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures starting Saturday in recognition of May the 4th, aka Star Wars day. The system weighs 1,500 lbs. and will be demonstrated by VFX vets with a 14-foot track and studio scale replicas of the Millennium Falcon, which is five-feet long, and a 20-inch X-Wing fighter.
In Season Four, the world is on the brink. Victoria Neuman is closer than ever to the Oval Office and under the muscly thumb of Homelander, who is consolidating his power. Butcher, with only months to live, has lost Becca’s son and his job as The Boys’ leader. The rest of the team are fed up with his lies. With the stakes higher than ever, they have to find a way to work together and save the world before it’s too late.
[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Paul Weimer, David Goldfarb, Martin Easterbrook, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Teddy Harvia for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]
…In the upcoming relaunched Doctor Who Season 1 (2024), the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) will travel to the 1960s in the forthcoming episode “The Devil’s Chord,” and, at some point, cross paths with the Beatles….
… As Russell T. Davies says in the new Empire interview: “‘How would you do a Beatles episode without Beatles music?” Previous movies about the Beatles have faced similar problems. The 1994 biopic Backbeat — which chronicles the Beatles’ early days in Hamburg — features no actual Beatles music. Meanwhile, the 1979 movieBirth of the Beatles (helmed by Return of the Jedi director Richard Marquand!) used cover versions of most Beatles songs to avoid copyright issues of the time.
But, for Davies and Doctor Who, the copyright law problem became “the entire plot.” As Davies says, “I knew instantly you can never play Beatles songs on screen because the copyright is too expensive… That’s where the idea came from — copyright law!”
Could this mean the Doctor and Ruby will inspire alternate Beatles songs? Could the Beatles be getting by with a little help from their time-traveler friends? We don’t know the exact plot of “The Devil’s Chord,” but there’s a good bet that the Doctor will almost certainly inspire a classic Beatles song. We’ll just have to read between the lines to figure out which one.
(2) CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FINALISTS. The Carol Shields Prize shortlist has been revealed. The award recognizes “creativity and excellence in fiction by women and non-binary writers in Canada and the United States”.
One of the finalists is a work of genre interest.
Birnam Woodby Eleanor Catton
In this eco-thriller, a guerilla gardening collective named ‘Birnam Wood’ (after Macbeth) meets an American billionaire. In his review for WHYY’s Fresh Air, John Powers writes, “this New Zealand-set book is a witty literary thriller about the collision between eco-idealism and staggering wealth.”
The other shortlisted books are:
Daughter by Claudia Dey
Coleman Hill by Kim Coleman Foote
A History of Burning by Janika Oza
Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan
The winner gets $150,000 and a residency with Fogo Island Inn in Newfoundland, Canada. Each of the four runner-ups will get $12,500. The prize-winner will be announced May 13.
(3) INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE SHORTLIST. Based on the descriptions of the works at the website, there are no books of genre interest among the 6 that made the International Booker Prize 2024 shortlist today.
(4) 2023’S MOST-CHALLENGED BOOKS. From the American Library Association: “ALA Releases Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2023”. Publishers Weekly has the list. Based on the descriptions, none are sff works.
The Most Challenged Books of 2023
Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, for LGBTQIA+, and sexually explicit content.
All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson, for LGBTQIA+ and sexually explicit content.
This Book Is Gay by Juno Dawson, for LGBTQIA+ and sexually explicit content.
…I’ve been especially interested in revisiting three of her strangest works—her vampire novel Fledging; “Bloodchild,”a short story about a colony of humans living alongside an insectoid race of aliens; and the Xenogenesis trilogy, which explores human’s post-apocalypse relationship with a bioengineering race of extraterrestrials called the Oankali. Across these stories, I see a recurring fascination with the reality of our bodies, our needs and frailties, and the way our bodily desires inextricably link us to each other.
In each of these stories, humans are less powerful than their nonhuman counterparts, whether that’s the tentacled, pheromone-exuding Oankali in Xenogenesis or the three-meter long, centipede-like Tlic in “Bloodchild.” But for all of their physical superiority, the nonhuman characters are desperately reliant on their relationships with humans. In Xenogenesis, the Oankali can exude chemicals that drug humans with a thought and heal with a touch. They manipulate their own genetic makeup and easily heal their own bullet wounds. Yet they depend on their human relationships in order to live. Oankali adolescents go into metamorphosis where they are comatose—profoundly helpless—and rely on their human partners to care for them. In Imago, the final book in the trilogy, a young Oankali begins to physically dissolve, unable to survive because it does not have human companions to ground it in a stable form. As the narrator notes, “We called our need for contact with others and our need for mates hunger. One who could hunger could starve.”….
AfroAnimation, the largest annual event featuring diverse and BIPOC animators and creators, announced today the honorees for the first AfroAnimation Summit Icon Awards…
…Icon Award honoree Kemp Powers, director of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, will headline the summit’s kick-off panel April 10, ‘Developing Original Stories and the Art of Diverse Storytelling.’ Pioneer Award honoree Camille Eden, Vice President of Recruitment, Talent Development & Outreach at Nickelodeon, will speak on the April 11 panel, ‘Unveiling the Untold Narratives of Women in Entertainment: Triumphs, Challenges, & Journeys.’
In addition, Bruce Smith, creator and executive producer of Disney+’s The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder, and Jermaine Turner, Director of Adult Genre Animation for Netflix, will be honored as industry pioneers at the AfroAnimation Icon Awards….
FRWD AwardsSemifinalists.(Celebrates the art of diverse storytelling in the film, new media, and streaming platform industries.)
Best Series:Castevania, The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder, Young Love, Scavengers Reign
Best Animation Feature: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Elemental, The Boy and the Heron, Craig Before the Creek
Best International Series: Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire, Iwájú, Kiya & the Kimoja Heroes, Supa Team 4
Best Animation Director: Kemp Powers (Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse)
(7) M. JOHN HARRISON MEMOIR. Saga Press will publish author M. John Harrison’s anti-memoir Wish I Was Here on September 3, 2024.
What is an “anti-memoir”? M. John Harrison has produced one of the greatest bodies of fiction of any living British author, encompassing space opera, speculative fiction, fantasy, and magical and literary realism. Yet in WISH I WAS HERE, he asks, ‘Is there even an M. John Harrison and if so, where do we find him?’ This is the question the author asks in this memoir-as-mystery, turning for clues to forty years of notebooking: ‘A note or it never happened. A note or you never looked.’
Are these notebooks records of failed presence? How do they shine a light on a childhood in the industrial Midlands, a portrait of a young artist in counterculture London, on an adulthood of restless escape into hill and moorland landscapes? And do they tell us anything about the writing of books, each one so different from the last that it might have been written by another version of the author?
With aphoristic daring and laconic wit, this anti-memoir will fascinate and delight. It confirms M. John Harrison still further in his status as the most original British writer of his generation.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born April 9, 1937 — Marty Krofft. (Died 2023.)
H.R.Pufnstuf. Who’s your friend when things get rough? H.R. Pufnstuf. Can’t do a little, ‘cause he can’t do enough
Who here didn’t grow up watching some of the shows created by the Krofft brothers? Well, this is the day that Marty Krofft was born, so I get to talk about their work. So let’s get started.
Their very first work was designing the puppets and sets for Banana Splits, a rock band composed of four animal characters for Hanna-Barbera. To get a look at them, here’s the open and closing theme from the show.
After working for Hanna-Barbera, they went independent with the beloved H. R. Pufnstuf, their first live-action, life sized puppet series. It ran a lot shorter than I thought lasting only from September to December of ‘69. Like everything of theirs, it ended up in heavy, endless syndication.
Next was The Bugaloos. This was a musical group, very much in keeping with the tone with Banana Splits. It was four British teenagers wearing insect outfits, constantly beset by the evil machinations of the Benita Bizarre. Here’s the opening song, “Gna Gna Gna Gna Gna” courtesy of Krofft Pictures.
Lidsville, their next show lasted but seventeen episodes, and I’ve no idea if the short longevity of their series, all of them, was planned or due to poor ratings. This show had two types of characters: conventional actors in makeup taped alongside performers in full mascot costumes. It was mostly stop motion in its filming.
Opening credits are here. The opening was produced at Six Flags Over Texas. The show was itself shot at Paramount Pictures film studio in Los Angeles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFMuNkseruo
Sigmund and the Sea Monsters lasted two seasons though it was aired over three years, the second delayed because a fire at the beginning of season two which destroyed everything. It’s about two brothers who discover a friendly young sea monster named Sigmund who refuses to frighten people. Poor Sigmund. This time you get a full episode as that is all Krofft Pictures had up, “Frankenstein Drops In”.
There’s two more series I want to note.
The first is Land of the Lost which was created though uncredited in the series by David Gerrold. So anyone know why that was? It was produced by Sid and Marty Krofft who co-developed the series with Allan Foshko. Lots of genre tropes here. A family lost in a land with dinosaurs and reptile men? It was popular enough that it lasted three seasons. And here’s the opening and closing credits for season three.
The very last pick by me is Electra Woman and Dyna Girlwhich lasted but sixteen episodes of twelve minutes. Despite the ElectraEnemies, their foes here being way over the top, this is SF though admittedly on the pulp end of things.
So they stayed active including doing rebooted versions of new versions of Electra Woman and Dyna Girl, H.R. Pufnstuf, Land of the Lost and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters.
Marty Krofft passed on from kidney failure on November 25, 2023, at the age of eighty six.
(9) COMICS SECTION.
Wallace the Brave demonstrates that not everyone appreciates interesting facts.
(10) VASTER THAN EMPIRES, AND MORE EXPENSIVE. Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis might be sff – which might matter more if the film can make it into theaters. Variety says it will premiere at Cannes. However, The Hollywood Reporter learned studios are not lining up to accept the film’s high-dollar marketing risk: “’Megalopolis’: Francis Ford Coppola’s Challenges in Distribution”.
…The project, which Coppola first began writing in 1983, cost a reported $120 million to make — funded in part by the sale of a significant portion of his wine empire (the 2021 deal was reportedly worth over $500 million). Clocking in at two hours and 15 minutes, the film follows the rebuilding of a metropolis after its accidental destruction, with two competing visions — one from an idealist architect (Adam Driver), the other from its pragmatist mayor (Giancarlo Esposito) — clashing in the process. References to ancient Rome — including Caesar haircuts on the men — abound…
… One source tells THR that Coppola assumed he would make a deal very quickly, and that a studio would happily commit to a massive P&A (prints and advertising, including all marketing) spend in the vicinity of $40 million domestically, and $80 million to $100 million globally.
That kind of big-stakes rollout would make Megalopolis a better fit for a studio-backed specialty label like the Disney-owned Searchlight or the Universal-owned Focus. But Universal and Focus have already tapped out of the bidding, sources tell THR….
… Why should some teenager enjoy perfect skin, a pain-free back, and functional joints when persons of my age could make much better use of these body parts? Yet such are the politically correct times in which we live that simply proposing, never mind implementing, mandatory organ1 donations is considered somehow controversial.
Science fiction can see past the squeamishness of short-term social fashions to the glorious world we might have if we were willing to apply technology in a socially responsible—which is to say, one that benefits the people in charge—manner. Consider these five classic tales….
One of the selections is –
The Reefs of Space by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson (1964)
…Reefs features an intriguing deep space ecology in no way inhibited by plausible science. The use of political prisoners as involuntary organ donors is much more plausible….
(12) SPACE COWBOYS READINGS. Space Cowboy Books will host an online Flash Science Fiction Night on April 23 with Howard V. Hendrix, Ai Jiang, and Hailey Piper. These short science fiction readings (1000 words or less) are great way to learn about new authors from around the world. Starts at 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Lasts around half an hour. Register for free at Eventbrite.
If you’re looking for meteorites, here’s a tip: Go south. All the way south. And do it soon.
In some parts of Antarctica, there’s a good chance that what looks like a regular old rock could actually be a chunk of an asteroid, the moon, or even Mars. Roughly 60 percent of all known meteorites have been collected there.
But scientific sleuthing for such extraterrestrial material, which can shed light on how the solar system formed billions of years ago, will probably get more difficult in Antarctica in the coming decades. That’s because, as temperatures rise, thousands of meteorites will sink into the continent’s ice and disappear from sight every year, according to a new study published on Monday.
Antarctica’s meteorite largess isn’t because more extraterrestrial stuff is falling there, Cari Corrigan, a geologist at the Smithsonian Institution and a curator of the National Museum of Natural History’s meteorite collection, said.
Rather, meteorites simply tend to be more visible on the Antarctic ice sheet than they would be, say, in your backyard. “Your eye can pick out a dark rock on a white surface super easily,” said Dr. Corrigan, who was not involved in the new research….
(14) ON THE JOB. Here’s the trailer for “Monsters at Work: Season 2” with Ben Feldman, Billy Crystal, and John Goodman. The season premiered April 5 on Disney Channel, and on May 5 comes to Disney+.
(15) VIDEO OF THE DAN. [Item by Daniel Dern.] For the small Venn overlap who know both references: “Leslie Nielsen in Star Wars”.
[Thanks to Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Kathy Sullivan, Dann, Daniel Dern, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
