Pixel Scroll 3/13/24 Pixel Would Like A Word With Engineering

(1) SFWA NEBULA FINALIST ANNOUNCMENT TOMORROW. The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) will announce the 2023 Nebula Award finalists (to be presented this year in Pasadena) on the SFWA Youtube channel, tomorrow, March 14, starting at 5:00 p.m. Pacific. 

Once again, we’ll be calling upon a talented group of SAG-AFTRA narrators to take us through an evening filled with a variety of outstanding speculative fiction works. 

It’s sure to be a night to remember! We hope you’ll join us!

(2) NEBULA CONFERENCE SCHOLARSHIP DEADLINE. Also tomorrow — March 14, is the deadline to apply for the scholarships SFWA is offering for members of under-served communities to attend the Nebula conference! The 2024 Nebula Conference will take place June 6-9 in Pasadena, CA and online. If you or someone you know may benefit from these scholarships, please apply here or share this link: https://airtable.com/appqxO86fh6JpPBNR/shrjMcYbZyuTxhwVH

Scholarship applications must be completed on this form by March 14th, 2024. The scholarship recipients will be selected from the applicant pool by lottery. Applicants may be considered for more than one scholarship if they identify with more than one of the following groups.

Here are the categories of scholarships being offered and the number of online conference scholarships available for each:

  • Scholarship for Black and/or Indigenous Creators: This scholarship is open to Black and/or Indigenous creators in the United States and abroad. (quantity: 15 online scholarships)
  • Scholarship for AAPI Creators: This scholarship is available to Asian creators, Asian American creators, and creators from the Pacific Islands. (quantity: 15 online scholarships)
  • Scholarships for Hispanic/Latinx Creators: This scholarship is available to creators with backgrounds in Spanish-speaking and/or Latin American cultures. (quantity: 15 online scholarships)
  • Scholarship for Writers Based Outside of the U.S.: This scholarship is available to creators who live outside the United States. (quantity: 15 online scholarships)
  • Scholarship for members of the LGBTQIA+ Community: This scholarship is available to creators who identify as LGBTQIA+. (quantity: 15 online scholarships)
  • Scholarship for creators with disabilities: This scholarship is available to creators who identify as having a disability. (quantity: 15 online scholarships)
  • Scholarship for creators who face financial barriers: This scholarship is available to creators whose financial situations may otherwise prevent them from participating. (quantity: 15 online scholarships)
  • Scholarship for in-person registration are available in limited quantities for creators who identify with one of our online scholarship groups. This scholarship does not include funds for travel, lodging or other related expenses to attend the conference, only for registration.

SFWA says, “Our support of underserved communities isn’t possible without your help. If you are able, please consider making a donation at sfwa.org/donate to help us fund additional scholarships in the future.”

(3) COMPLETE TOLKIEN POEMS VOLUME PLANNED. “Collected poems of J R R Tolkien to be published for first time”The Bookseller has details.

HarperCollins will publish The Collected Poems of J R R Tolkien, edited by Christina Scull and Wayne G Hammond, in September 2024, the first time all the author’s poems will appear in one volume. 

HC, which holds world all-language rights to Tolkien’s works, said: “Poetry was the first way in which Tolkien expressed himself creatively and through it the seeds of his literary ambition would be sown.” One of Tolkien’s  poems “The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star”, begun in 1914, is where the “Silmarillion” first appears and both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings “are enriched with poems both humorous and haunting, magical and moving”. Tolkien scholars Scull and Hammond will provide analysis of each poem. 

Scull and Hammond were hired for the project by Christopher Tolkien’s, J R R Tolkien’s son and executor of his literary estate until Tolkien died in 2020. They said: “Charged at first to review only his early poems, we soon saw the benefits of examining the entire poetic opus across six decades, vast though it is with hundreds of printed and manuscript sources…Not long before his death, we were able to send Christopher a trial portion of the book, which he praised as ‘remarkable and immensely desirable’.”…

(4) SPEAKING OF. “The Oral History of ‘Repo Man,’ the Greatest Indie Sci-Fi Movie Ever Made” at Inverse.

Somewhere in the California desert, a police officer pulls over a 1964 Chevrolet Malibu as it lurches wildly across the highway. After interrogating the driver, he opens the trunk and is instantly vaporized by a blinding light that reduces him to a skeleton, leaving behind only a pair of smoldering leather boots.

Thus begins Repo Man, a sci-fi cult classic sci-fi with a nihilistic worldview and a punk rock soundtrack that by all accounts probably shouldn’t exist….

Dick Rude (plays Duke): I was a teenager going to the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in Los Angeles. I wrote a script called Leather Rubberneck with a friend of mine from school, about two kids who get drafted. Alex [Cox, writer and director] wanted to make the film, but it didn’t pan out. So he incorporated it into Repo Man. A lot of the characters, some of the dialogue, some of the ideas, there was quite a bit of it that was used in Repo Man….

Jonathan Wacks: We went through the Yellow Pages and looked up studios and producers and we sat and typed letters. We knew they wouldn’t pick up our phone. We sent hundreds of letters out and got zero responses. So we decided to raise $500,000 and shoot it at UCLA so we could use the equipment for free.

Peter McCarthy: The thing with UCLA is you never wanted to get your diploma. Once you did, you couldn’t go back and use anything….

Olivia Barash: I was talking to Alex, and I said, “Who are you going to have do the title track?” And he goes, “There’s one of two people. David Byrne, we have something out to his agent. But I really want Iggy Pop, we just don’t know where to find him.” And I said, “I know where to find him. He’s in my building. He’s my neighbor.” So Alex came over, and we rang the intercom outside, and Iggy answered. And that’s how we got Iggy….

(5) J-LO AND AI. “’Atlas’ trailer: Jennifer Lopez uses AI to save humanity in sci-fi thriller” – here’s Mashable’s introduction:

The first trailer for Netflix’s futuristic sci-fi thriller Atlas is here, featuring Jennifer Lopez having a very bad day.

Atlas follows the titular character Atlas Shepherd (Lopez), a government data analyst with a healthy distrust of artificial intelligence. However, after a mission to capture a rogue robot from her past goes wrong, she soon finds herself having to trust AI in order to save humanity. If AI wrote propaganda, this is probably what it would sound like….

(6) IT’S A TIE. “Reading with… Liz Lee Heinecke” at Shelf Awareness.

…Favorite book when you were a child:

It’s a three-way tie, with a few runners-up.

As a kid, I desperately wanted a horse but knew I would never have one, so I lived vicariously through Maureen and Paul Beebe’s adventures in Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry and illustrated by Wesley Dennis.

Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey had it all as far as I was concerned: a gifted girl who isn’t allowed to be a musician because of her gender, tiny, colorful dragons called fire lizards, and a nearby planet that rained down flesh-eating parasites frequently enough to keep things exciting. I probably read it 20 times.

The Tombs of Atuan is the second book in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series and features a female protagonist who struggles against the confines of a role that’s been chosen by others. Most of the story takes place in a nightmarish underground labyrinth, where Le Guin’s hero Ged (Harry Potter’s prototype) struggles to steal a talisman. I loved everything about it.  

I was always on the lookout for books about girls on adventures. When visiting the library, I often checked out Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking books or the Danny Dunn series by Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams, which features a girl who loves physics.  

Your top five authors:

Ursula K. Le Guin: She caught my attention as a middle-grade reader with her Earthsea fantasy series and has kept me captivated as an adult.

She uses science fiction to escape the social confines of our planet and explores themes of colonization, race, environmental destruction, political systems, gender roles, and sexuality without ever losing sight of the story. The Word for World Is ForestThe Dispossessed, and The Left Hand of Darknessare three of my favorites.

Amy Tan: I can’t recall whether The Kitchen God’s Wife or The Joy Luck Clubwas my first Amy Tan book. I adore the funny, relatable stories she tells about women and family, and enjoy learning about Chinese culture and history. The Bonesetter’s Daughter, which weaves science and anthropology into the story, was fantastic too. I became an even bigger fan after hearing Tan sing with the Rock Bottom Remainders at First Avenue a few years ago.  

J.R.R. Tolkien: I can’t count how many times I’ve re-read The Lord of the Rings. I love losing myself in Middle-earth, with its mountains and languages and monsters and lore, and I’ve always been a sucker for a well-told hero’s journey.

Margaret Atwood: Sometimes I think she can see the future. The Handmaid’s Taleis a masterpiece in so many ways. I heard her speak once, and I recall her saying that she grew up reading science fiction stories with her brother. It’s amazing how the books we read as children shape us as adults.

Ann Patchett: She has been one of my favorite authors for years. As a reader interested in themes of music, science, and theater, she’s hit the mark over and over again with books like Bel CantoState of Wonder, and Tom Lake. I can’t wait to see what she writes next….

(7) THE WRITERS’ PRIZE. A non-genre work, Liz Berry’s The Home Child, was announced as the winner of the poetry category (£2000) and The Writers’ Prize Book of the Year (£30,000) at the London Book Fair on March 13.

Born in the Black Country and now living in Birmingham, The Home Child was inspired by the story of Berry’s great-aunt Eliza Showell, one of the many children forcibly emigrated to Canada as part of the British Child Migrant Schemes. This beautiful novel-in-verse about a child far from home was described as ‘absolutely magical’ by Fiona Benson.

The book achieved the highest number of votes from the 350+ celebrated writers in the Folio Academy, who exclusively nominated and voted for the winners of The Writers’ Prize 2024.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 13, 1956 Dana Delany, 68. I remember Dana Delany best for her role as nurse  Colleen McMurphy on China Beach, set at a Vietnam War evacuation hospital.  It aired for four seasons starting in the late Eighties. Great role, fantastic series. I rewatched it a decade or so ago on DVD — it held up very well.

Dana Delany

So let me deal with her main genre role which was voicing Lois Lane. She first did this twenty years ago in Superman: The Animated Series for forty-four episodes, an amazing feat by any standard.  That role would come again in Superman: Brainiac AttacksJustice League: The Flashpoint Paradox (avoid if you’ve got even a shred of brain cells), in a recurring role on the Justice League and Justice League Unlimited series, The Batman and even in the Superman: Shadow of Apokolips game.

Her other voice role of note was for Wing Commander Academy as Gwen Archer Bowman. And she wasn’t Lois Lane but Vilsi Vaylar in Batman: The Brave and the Bold’s “The Super-Batman of Planet X!”. 

She’ll have a one-off on Battle Galactica as Sesha Abinell; more significantly she has a starring role as Grace Wyckoff in the Wild Palms series. 

Oh, she showed up on Castle as FBI Special Agent Jordan Shaw in a two-part story, the episodes being “Tick, Tick, Tick…” and “Boom!”. 

So I’m going to finish with her role in Tombstone, Emma Bull and Will Shetterley’s favorite Western film along with the Deadwood series. It’s an inspiration she says for her Territory novel. And I love it as well. Delany played magnificently Josephine Sarah “Sadie” Earp, the common-law wife of Wyatt Earp. The final scene of them dancing in the snow in San Francisco is truly sniffles inducing. 

(9) CREATOR CANNED. Variety reports “X-Men ’97 Creator Beau DeMayo Fired Ahead of Premiere on Disney+”. Article does not give a reason.

Beau DeMayo, the showrunner and executive producer behind Disney+’s upcoming animated series “X-Men ’97,” has been fired ahead of the March 20 premiere, Variety has confirmed.

DeMayo had completed work on Seasons 1 and 2 of “X-Men ’97” ahead of his exit. He will not attend the March 13 Hollywood premiere for the show. His Instagram account, on which he had been previewing artwork and answering fan questions about “X-Men ’97,” has also been deleted.

He wrote and produced “X-Men ’97,” which is a continuation of the popular “X-Men: The Animated Series” that aired on Fox Kids in the ’90s. It is unclear why DeMayo was fired from “X-Men ’97” so close to the premiere, but he will no longer promote the show or be involved with future seasons….

(10) NO MICHELIN STARS FOR MORDOR. CBR.com chronicles “Every Meal Hobbits Eat In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings”.

Peter Jackson and actor Billy Boyd found a memorable way to convey that love in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. As Aragorn leads the Hobbits toward Rivendell, Pippin asks about “second breakfast” and a litany of additional meals that will presumably be skipped as they continue. Tolkien specified six meals in the Prologue to The Fellowship of the Ring — which roughly match European traditions — but two of them are essentially the same meal. Here’s a rundown of each one to give a good idea of what Pippin is missing….

Here’s the one I’m always interested in:

Second Breakfast

Tolkien mentions second breakfast in The Hobbit, with Bilbo settling down to his just as Gandalf appears to tell him that the Dwarves have already left for The Lonely Mountain. It serves as a quiet joke — stressing that Hobbits in general and Bilbo in particular enjoy eating — as well as emphasizing the comfortable lifestyle he’s leaving behind to go on his adventure with the Dwarves. It also serves as the inspiration for Pippin’s line about second breakfast in The Fellowship of the Ring, which he doesn’t deliver in Tolkien’s text.

(11) PRAISE FOR STARMEN. [Item by Francis Hamit.] Demetria Head is a book blogger, one of that legion of reviewers who do it without pay and for the joy of it.  Ms. Head actually read the entire book and delivered an almost forensic analysis.  I think her work deserves wider exposure.

Demetria Head Review from BookBub and A Look Inside book blogs

“STARMEN” by Francis Hamit is a sprawling epic that seamlessly blends elements of magical realism, historical fiction, and sci-fi fantasy to create a mesmerizing tale that will captivate readers from start to finish. Set against the backdrop of the American Southwest in 1875, the novel introduces us to a cast of richly drawn characters whose lives become intertwined in a web of intrigue, adventure, and supernatural mystery.

At the heart of the story is George James Frazer, a budding anthropologist working for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, whose quest to contact a local Apache tribe leads him on a journey beyond the realms of ordinary reality. When a mysterious hot air balloon appears over the town of El Paso, owned by the British Ethnographic Survey, Frazer finds himself drawn into a world of ancient magic and hidden truths.

The characters in “STARMEN” are truly the heart and soul of the novel, each one fleshed out with depth and nuance that makes them feel like living, breathing individuals. From the determined and resourceful Frazer to the enigmatic Apache witches and the ruthless Pinkerton agents, every character brings their own unique perspective to the narrative, driving the plot forward with their conflicting desires and motivations.

Plot development in “STARMEN” is masterfully executed, with Hamit weaving together multiple storylines that intertwine and intersect in surprising and unexpected ways. From the quest to find a missing heir to the discovery of a town inhabited by extraordinary gunfighters, each twist and turn of the plot unfolds with breathtaking intensity, keeping readers on the edge of their seats until the very last page.

What truly sets “STARMEN” apart is its seamless blend of genres, incorporating elements of historical fiction, magical realism, and hard sci-fi into a cohesive and compelling narrative. From the romantic entanglements to the political intrigue and the mind-bending concepts of quantum mechanics and string theory, the novel offers something for every reader, appealing to fans of both traditional historical fiction and speculative fiction alike.

Overall, “STARMEN” is a tour de force of storytelling that will transport readers to a world of adventure, mystery, and wonder. With its unforgettable characters, intricate plot, and bold exploration of complex themes, it is a must-read for anyone seeking an immersive and thought-provoking literary experience.

(13) SHAKEN TO THEIR CORE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I have not seen it yet (but have downloaded to mem stick for home viewing – it might be rubbish???) In the TV series Pending Train, “100 People Accidently Time-Travel By Train to a Destroyed Earth in 2063”. See video at the link.

In Tokyo, train passengers find themselves fighting for their very survival after their train car jumps into an apocalyptic future

(14) ON THE AIR. Breathe (2024) with Jennifer Hudson, Milla Jovovich, Sam Worthington, Common, and Quvenzhané Wallis. In Theaters, On Digital, and On Demand April 26.

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. How It Should Have Ended brings us up to date with “Previously On – DUNE”.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Francis Hamit, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 11/3/23 Scrolled Things Are aFiled At The Pixel K

(1) GAHAN WILSON TV. Episode One of Gahan Wilson’s Tales of Horror TV series debuted on Halloween at GahanWilson.net where it is streaming exclusively.  They will be premiering one or two new episodes each month for the next two years. Episode One is “Phyllis” starring Bourke Floyd and Rachel Alig.

CHATGPT LOVES MY BOOK. [Item by Francis Hamit.]

STARMEN, A blended genre story merging Apache myths, witchcraft, science fiction, fantasy, history, detective, espionage, politics, and romance in a captivating narrative.

Had a conversation with ChatGPT that resulted in that promotional blurb.:  Now I know a bit about AI from covering it during my trade magazine journalism career and my experiments with Artspace.ai.  Any conversation with ChatGPT trains it to serve your needs but the “captivating narrative” bit at the end threw me for a bit.  It seems almost human, doesn’t it, as if it has read the book.

So was that just a lucky accident or could the ChatGPT program have done this? Could it have reached into my computer and read my novel and then compared it to the thousands of other novels and their reviews that have been uploaded to its massive database?  And now makes a value judgement like that?

It could do so in a nanosecond. There is an excerpt on Amazing Stories and other reviews of my other work online and several other books of mine in the Cloud at AWS..  

Will ChatGPT become a literary arbiter because it will always know more than humans do.  (And whose fault is that?  We trained it.)  I suspect that a ChatGPT review may become a default item for book promotion. I’m certainly going to use this just to see if it has any influence.

Two things; ChatGPT is also trained to be very polite so negative reviews are unlikely and a new book is now expected to get dozens of reviews from a variety of  sources; publications, book bloggers, Book Tok influencers, etc. So it will not displace any human reviewer but be just another data point.

(3) MIKE ALLEN Q&A. West Virginia Public Broadcasting interviews writer, editor and publisher Mike Allen about “Sci-fi, Horror And Ghosts In Western Virginia”.

Adams: I’m curious as to what you see when you look at Appalachia. What’s it look like from your perspective in the sci-fi/fantasy/horror world?

Allen: So here’s an interesting thing for me: Roanoke is unique. Some of it, I think, actually goes back to Nelson Bond having been based here, who was extremely active in the 1930s and ‘40s and ‘50s in the magazine scene that existed at that time. Writers like Sharyn McCrumb were making Roanoke, or at least the Roanoke region, their home base. Roanoke has this very robust culture for celebrating its writers, regardless of what they write. Those of us who are based here like myself, like Rod Belcher, who writes under the name R.S. Belcher, or Amanda McGee, who’s an up-and-coming writer whose work is definitely Appalachian and has a bit of witchery involved, we’ve experienced the benefit of that.

There’s no way for me to kind of sweepingly talk about everybody with an Appalachian connection. But there are some I do want to mention. Nathan Ballingrud, who lives in Asheville, is a horror writer who’s had some really high profile things happen lately. His first short story collection, “North American Lake Monsters,” was adapted into the Hulu series, “Monsterland.” The title story in that book, he considers to be an Appalachian story. I mentioned Rod Belcher whose novels have events in West Virginia and the Carolinas. Manly Wade Wellman might be the classic Golden Age writer who’s most associated with the Appalachians. He has a series of stories about John the Balladeer, or Silver John, who is a gentleman who has a guitar strung with silver strings. He wanders through this magical realist version of the Appalachian Mountains and has encounters that are very much based on Appalachian folklore….

(4) CHENGDU WORLDCON ROUNDUP. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] Today’s updates are briefer than planned, as I’ve been working on some other stuff, which might make it into tomorrow’s update.

Photos and video from the Iain M. Banks panel

This Weibo post has some photos from, and a brief write-up of, the Iain M. Banks panel.  (A translated edition of Look to Windward has just been released in China.)

The same person also posted a subtitled video of a 7-minute clip from a Sky documentary, which seems like it was maybe shown during the panel.

YouTube report from the con

I’ve only briefly skimmed this subtitled 19-minute video about the con, so I don’t know how worth watching it is.  The source seems to be a reporter who normally covers Silicon Valley and the tech industry, so there’s a fair bit of stuff about the “businessy” panels as well as things more likely to be of interest to Filers.  There’s a bit of footage from the panel/presentation Nnedi Okorafor was on.

Group photos from the con

It’s not clear to me if the person who posted this image gallery to Xiaohongshu was a volunteer or some other member of the con team, but some of the faces seen in the photos will be recognizable to Filers.

(5) SFWA RESPONDS TO GOVERNMENT CALL FOR COMMENTS ON AI. SFWA has posted the text of a letter the organization sent to the US Copyright Office about artificial intelligence – “SFWA Comments on AI to US Copyright Office” at the SFWA Blog.

On October 30, the SFWA Board and the SFWA Legal Affairs Committee sent the following letter to the US Copyright Office in response to their August 2023 Notice of Inquiry regarding copyright law and policy issues in artificial intelligence, which is part of their AI Initiative….

Quoting from the letter:

… it is with much regret that we cannot yet speak in favor of using AI technology in the business of creating art.

The current crop of artificial intelligence systems owes a great debt to the work of creative human beings. Vast amounts of copyrighted creative work, collected and processed without regard to the moral and legal rights of its creators, have been copied into and used by these systems that appear to produce new creative work. These systems would not exist without the work of creative people, and certainly would not be capable of some of their more startling successes. However, the researchers who have developed them have not paid due attention to this debt. Everyone else involved in the creation of these systems has been compensated for their contributions—the manufacturers of the hardware on which it runs, the utility companies that generate their electrical power, the owners of their data centers and offices, and of course the researchers themselves. Even where free and open source software is used, it is used according to the licenses under which the software is distributed as a reflection of the legal rights of the programmers. Creative workers alone are expected to provide the fruits of their labor for free, without even the courtesy of being asked for permission. Our rights are treated as a mere externality.

Perhaps, then, creative workers uniquely benefit from the existence of these artificial intelligence systems? Unfortunately, to date the opposite has been the case: SFWA has thus far seen mainly harm to the business of writing and publishing science fiction and fantasy as a result of the release of AI systems.

For example, short fiction in our genres has long been recognized as a wellspring of the ideas that drive our work as well as inspiring works in film, games, and television. Writers in our genres rely on a thriving and accessible landscape, which includes online and paper magazines. Part of the success of these publications depends on an open submission process, in which writers may submit their stories without a prior business relationship. This has frequently served as a critical opportunity for new and marginalized authors to have their voices heard.

Over the last year, these venues, particularly the ones that pay higher rates for stories, have been inundated with AI-written stories. The editors uniformly report that these submissions are poorly conceived and written, far from being publishable, but the sheer volume materially interferes with the running of these magazines. Once submission systems are flooded with such content, it takes longer to read and reject a submission than it took someone to have an AI produce it in the first place. Every submitted work must be opened and considered to verify that the writers for whom the system was originally designed are not missed or forgotten….

(6) JOANNA RUSS. LitHub provides readers with “Everything You Need to Know About Groundbreaking Queer Feminist Science Fiction Writer Joanna Russ”.

…Eventually Russ would find a way to channel that disjunction into a remarkable body of literature, including the revolutionary novel The Female Man (1975).

That novel and a selection of other novels and stories by Russ have now been collected and reissued by the Library of America. Not long ago, I sat down with the volume’s editor, Nicole Rudick, to talk about Russ’s life, work, and her reputation as one of the fiercest critics ever to write about science fiction.

JM: Let’s talk about Russ’s development as a writer. She grew up in New York, went to Cornell. She studied with Nabokov, correct?

NR: True, though I think it’s a little overstated. She studied with him in her last year at Cornell and dedicated “Picnic on Paradise” to him and to S.J. Perelman, but I think she came to feel a little silly about that. She named them both as stylistic influences, and she and Nabokov certainly share a metafictional approach, but she talked a lot more throughout her life about George Bernard Shaw.

She grew up loving science, and was a top 10 finalist in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search in 1953. She graduated high school early, and then went to Cornell and switched over to literature. She said that she came out to herself as a lesbian privately when she was a kid and went right back in because she had no models. She didn’t feel that it was real, that it could be done. And that continued at Cornell, where things were pretty traditional in terms of gender roles. And then she went to Yale and studied playwriting but found that she was not very good at it. When she returned to New York, she worked odd jobs, did some theater work, and made some adaptations for radio at WBAI. She was also writing stories and publishing them in little journals and SF magazines.

In the late 60s, she started writing stories about Alyx. She said it was the hardest thing she ever did in her life, to conceive of a tough, independent female protagonist and get it on the page. Feminism was not widespread in the United States at that moment and Russ wasn’t involved in consciousness-raising groups or anything like that, so it was a solitary time to be writing these sorts of things. But they did well. Picnic in Paradise, her novella about Alyx, won a Nebula Award. And then in ‘67, she was back at Cornell, as a teacher, and in ‘69, there was a colloquium on women in the United States organized by the university in the intercession period—Betty Friedan and Kate Millett and a bunch of other panelists talking about sexuality, race, and why women see each other the way that they do. They approached these issues as social problems, not individual problems. Russ was there, and her description of it is so funny—“Marriages broke up; people screamed at each other who had been friends for years…. The skies flew open.” A wave of feminism washed over Cornell, and she sat down and wrote “When it Changed” in the weeks afterwards. Six months later, she saw a novel in the story and wrote The Female Man. But she couldn’t find a publisher. She wanted it published by a trade press and they all rejected it. The excuses were like, “There’s more feminism than science fiction”—that from Viking Press. A lot of women editors were baffled by it and turned it down. It finally got bought by Frederik Pohl [at Bantam Books] in 1975….

(7) CUTTING EDGE. The UK’s Crime Writers Association is expanding their Dagger Awards with two new categories: “Dagger awards adds categories for ‘cosy crime’ and psychological thrillers” in the Guardian.

The growing popularity of two crime fiction subgenres has prompted the creation of two new categories in the annual Crime Writers’ Association awards, including one for “cosy crime” – the subgenre of comforting mysteries that originated with Agatha Christie and is now most associated with Richard Osman.

The Daggers, as the CWA awards are known, recognise authors across 11 categories including historical crime, translated crime and lifetime contribution to crime writing. Next year, the two new awards will be the Twisted Dagger, for psychological thrillers, and the Whodunnit Dagger, for cosy crime….

(8) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to binge BBQ with the legendary Mike Gold in Episode 211 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Mike Gold

I’m extremely pleased I was able to convince the legendary Mike Gold to head out for dinner the night before the con began.

Gold entered the comic industry as DC’s first public relations manager. But as I was astounded to discover, he did some PR earlier than that — as the media coordinator for the defense at the Chicago Conspiracy trial, acting as the intermediary between the press and the likes of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, when he was only a teen.

After DC, in 1983, he launched First Comics, where he edited Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg, Mike Baron and Steve Rude’s Nexus, Jim Starlin’s Dreadstar, Mike Grell’s Jon Sable Freelance, and many other classic series. Then after his move back to DC in 1986, he edited such titles as LegendsThe ShadowThe QuestionAction Comics WeeklyGreen Arrow: The Longbow HuntersBlackhawk, and others.

In 2006, he co-founded ComicMix, and in 2011, he received the first Humanitarian Award from the Hero Initiative. And — since he’s five years older than I am — meaning I would have read Fantastic Four #1 at age six, and Mike at eleven, five years counting for a lot back then — I enjoyed digging into our differing perspectives about the early days of comics.

We discussed the way his hiring at DC Comics was all Neal Adams’ fault, how the guerrilla marketing he learned from Abbie Hoffman helped him quadruple direct market sales, the Steve Ditko Creeper cover which sent a not-so-secret message to publisher Carmine Infantino, why editor Murray Boltinoff compared Marvel Comics to the Beatles (and not in a good way), which staffer was “the most disgusting human being I’d ever met in my life,” how First Comics was born, his secret weapon for getting creators to deliver their work on time, our differing contemporaneous exposure to Fantastic Four #1 (and how his related to Merrick Garland), the way an off-hand comment led to a classic John Byrne comic, how the comic book field is like a donut shop, and much more.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born November 3, 1929 Neal Barrett, Jr. Heavily nominated for many awards including a number of Hugos but he never won. He was Toastmaster at LoneStarCon 2.  He was prolific writing over two dozen novels and some fifty pieces of short fiction including a novelization of the first Dredd film. As good much of his genre work was, I think his finest, best over the top work was the Wiley Moss series which led off with Pink Vodka Blues. He’s generously available at usual digital suspects. (Died 2014.)
  • Born November 3, 1933 Jeremy Brett. Still my favorite Holmes of all time. He played him in four Granada TV series from 1984 to 1994 in a total of 41 episodes. One source said he was cast as Bond at one point, but turned the part down, feeling that playing 007 would harm his career. Lazenby was cast instead. (Died 1995.)
  • Born November 3, 1942 Martin Cruz Smith, 81. Best remembered for Gorky Park, the Russian political thriller, but he’s also done a number of genre novels in The Indians Won (alternate history), Gypsy in Amber and Canto for a Gypsy (PI with psychic powers) and two wonderful pulpish novels, The Inca Death Squad and Code Name: Werewolf
  • Born November 3, 1952 Eileen Wilks, 71. Her principal genre series is the World of Lupi, a FBI procedural intertwined with shapeshifters, dragons and the multiverse. Highly entertaining, sometimes considered romance novels though I don’t consider them so. The audiobooks are amazing as well!
  • Born November 3, 1953 Kate Capshaw, 70. Best known as Willie Scott in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (which I’ll confess I’ve watched but a few times unlike the first film which I’ve watched way too much), and she was in Dreamscape as well. She retired from acting several decades ago.
  • Born November 3, 1963 Brian Henson, 60.  Can we all agree that The Happytime Murders should never have been done?  Wash it out of your consciousness with Muppet Treasure Island or perhaps The Muppet Christmas Carol. If you want something darker, he was a puppeteer on The Witches, and the chief puppeteer on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And he voices Hoggle in Labyrinth.
  • Born November 3, 1977 David Edison, 46. His Waking Engine series, beginning with the rather excellent Waking Engine novel, an urban fantasy set in the afterlife, would’ve been great. His only other novel, Sandymancer, merges fantasy and hard SF. 

(10) IN THE SAME SPIRIT. “We Almost Got a Superhero Movie from The Exorcist Director William Friedkin” says Literary Hub.

In 1975, four years after the release of The French Connection, William Friedkin revealed to a reporter the inspiration for the film’s celebrated car chase scene.

It was the cover of a comic book: a man runs terrified on elevated tracks, just a few steps ahead of a train. He is handsome and athletic. Save for a domino mask, he is dressed like a classic Hollywood detective, in a blue suit and loose tie; he bears no resemblance to Gene Hackman’s slovenly everyman “Popeye” Doyle. The cover was from The Spirit, a comic that ran as a seven-page newspaper insert throughout the 40s and early 50s. The series, created by Will Eisner, was admired for its black humor, innovative compositions, shocking violence, and its setting in a precisely realized urbanscape. “Look at the dramatic use of montage, of light and sound,” Friedkin told the reporter. “See the dynamic framing that Eisner employs, and the deep, vibrant colors.”

Friedkin may not have been telling the truth. The comic he showed the reporter was a reprint that had been published after the release of The French Connection. The stories were three decades old, but the covers were new. Still, it was good publicity for the project he was then planning, a feature-length pilot for an NBC series that would feature the Spirit, aka Denny Colt, a detective who has risen from the dead, lives in a cemetery, and fights crime with his wits, his fists, and a willingness to withstand pain that borders on masochism….

(11) ITALIAN POLITICAL BRANDING USING LOTR. Jamie Mackay asks “How did The Lord of the Rings become a secret weapon in Italy’s culture wars?” in a Guardian opinion piece.

As a longtime fan of JRR Tolkien, I’ve long felt put out by Giorgia Meloni’s bizarre obsession with The Lord of the Rings. Over the years, Italy’s ultra-conservative prime minister has quoted passages in interviews, shared photos of herself reading the novel and even posed with a statue of the wizard Gandalf as part of a campaign. In her autobiography-slash-manifesto, she dedicates several pages to her “favourite book”, which she refers to at one point as being a “sacred” text. When I read the news this week that Italy’s culture ministry is spending €250,000 to organise a Tolkien show at Rome’s National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, and that Meloni will attend the opening, I couldn’t help wondering: why? What is this government trying to achieve by stamping its mark so aggressively on one of the world’s most loved fantasy sagas?

My Italian friends don’t get the fuss. This is everyday politics, they say, a simple branding exercise to soften Meloni’s image. Perhaps. But there’s a deeper, and frankly stranger, side to this story. When The Lord of the Rings first hit Italian shelves in the 1970s, the academic Elémire Zolla wrote a short introduction in which he interpreted the book as an allegory about “pure” ethnic groups defending themselves against contamination from foreign invaders. Fascist sympathisers in the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) quickly jumped on the provocation. Inspired by Zolla’s words, they saw in Tolkien’s world a space where they could explore their ideology in socially acceptable terms, free from the taboos of the past. Meloni, an MSI youth wing member, developed her political consciousness in that environment. As a teenager she even attended a “Hobbit Camp”, a summer retreat organised by the MSI in which participants dressed up in cosplay outfits, sang along to folk ballads and discussed how Tolkienian mythologies could help the post-fascist right find credibility in a new era….

(12) STREAMING TOP 10. JustWatch has released the top 10 streaming movies and TV shows for October 2023.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Marvel Studios’ Echo” official trailer dropped today. The series begins streaming January 10 on @DisneyPlus and @Hulu.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Francis Hamit, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Ersatz Culture, and John King Tarpinian  for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 10/6/23 When You’re Dune And Tribbled, And Need A Gripping Hand…

(1) ARE THESE YOUR FAVORITE SPOILERS? “Doctor Who’s Alex Kingston on hiding River Song’s biggest spoiler” at Radio Times. Beware spoilers. Further warning: the one excerpted below is not the “biggest spoiler” referred to in the headline.

“She’s not a companion, she’s a wife!” Alex Kingston is quick to correct about her beloved Doctor Who character River Song.

And she’s completely right. River Song is unlike any other Doctor Who character, first introduced in 2008’s Silence in the Library and spanning multiple eras in one of the most complex and glorious timelines to ever grace the show.

“She’s the most incredible character to play, and certainly when the role was offered to me, I had obviously no idea of the journey that both she and I would be undertaking – because obviously in the very first Silence in the Library story, she dies,” Kingston exclusively tells RadioTimes.com….

(2) TEXAS BOOK RATING LAW REMAINS IN EFFECT PENDING HEARING. “Appeals Court Lets Texas Book Rating Law Take Effect, Orders Expedited Hearing” reports Publishers Weekly.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit will let Texas’s controversial new book rating law, HB 900, take effect while an “expedited” appeals process plays out—despite a district court finding the law to be “a web of unconstitutionally vague requirements.”

In a two-line decision issued on October 5, the Fifth Circuit said it would not hear the state’s emergency motion for a stay separately and will instead carry the motion to be heard with the state’s challenge of judge Alan D. Albright’s preliminary injunction on the merits. The court also ordered the appeal to be “expedited to the next available oral argument panel.”

But the appeals court also declined to lift an administrative stay placed on Albright’s order…

Signed by Texas governor Greg Abbott on June 12, HB 900 requires book vendors, at their own expense, to review and rate books for sexual content under a vaguely articulated standard as a condition of doing business with Texas public schools. The law includes both the thousands of books previously sold to schools and any new books. Furthermore, the law gives the state the unchecked power to change the rating on any book, which vendors would then have to accept as their own or be barred from doing business with Texas public schools….

(3) WHERE, OH WHERE IS THE CHENGDU WORLDCON BUSINESS MEETING AGENDA? No link — with less than two weeks until the Chengdu Worldcon business meeting agenda still hasn’t been released.

People want the agenda posted so they can read what business is coming before the meeting and think about the inevitable assortment of proposed rules changes. The rule requiring the agenda to be available 30 days ahead of the meeting is so that the movers don’t have the advantage of being able to organize in favor while depriving potential opposition of the same advantage.

(4) CHENGDU WORLDCON ROUNDUP. [Item by Ersatz Culture.]

Welcome to the hotel confusion-ia

This item is based on a Kevin Standlee blog post “More Worldcon Travel Plans”, and subsequent Mastodon exchange.

Some of the guests whose accommodation has been arranged by the con have been told they are staying in the “Chengdu Tianfu Hengbang Sheraton”.  However, it seems that this is a direct translation of the Chinese name of the hotel near the con venue (成都恒邦天府喜来登酒店), but it actually uses a different English name “Sheraton Chengdu Pidu”. (Compare http://www.sheraton-chengdu.com/ to http://www.sheraton-chengdu.com/en?pc )

Thus when searching Google for the first name, people are getting results for a Sheraton in the Tianfu area, which is roughly the opposite side of Chengdu from the Pidu district where the con is actually taking place, which resulted in this.

Per Kevin’s comments on Mastodon, some people have been told that they’ll be staying at the “Sheraton Lidu Pidu”, which does seem to be a different hotel from either of the two previously mentioned.

Here’s a Xiaohongsu post from a week ago showing views of the con venue from the Sheraton Chengdu Pidu: http://xhslink.com/HINobv

Video featuring the “Kormo” con mascot https://weibo.com/5516881774/Nly3wqo4Y

This 90-second video posted by the GoChengdu Weibo account is a week old, but I only came across it today.  Content-wise, it has only minimal connection to the Worldcon – it focuses more on the mid-Autumn festival that’s just gone by – but “stars” the Kormo con mascot.

(5) A HISTORY OF PEE-WEE HERMAN PRODUCTS. The Comics Journal continues a conversation: “The Artists and Cartoonists Who Designed Pee-wee Herman’s World – Part Two”.

…But by season two in 1987, by which time production of the show itself had moved from New York City to Los Angeles, any number of Pee-wee related products—toys, dolls, bed sheets, sweaters, pajamas, t-shirts, stickers, trading cards—were available for purchase. And like the Playhouse show itself, these products were chiefly designed by a group of young NYC artists under the direction of Gary Panter and Reubens himself. Cartoonists and illustrators working on Playhouse merchandise included Ric Heitzman, Mark Newgarden, Kaz, Charles Burns, J.D. King, Richard McGuire, Stephen Kroninger, Tomas Bunk, Norman Hathaway and others. When Reubens died of acute hypoxic respiratory failure on July 30th of this year, I reached out to a number of people involved in shaping the Pee-wee empire. In Part One of this series, I spoke with a number of artists who designed the visual aesthetic of the successful television program; in this second and final part, the focus will be on the many functional and ridiculous products created in its wake, including some that never made it to stores….

… The cartoonist Kaz, another frequent RAW contributor, was brought in early on.

“I can’t remember what came first for me, but I’d been visiting Gary Panter in his various studios around Brooklyn for quite a while,” Kaz said. “Seeing his paintings, sculptures and sketchbooks was always inspiring, and he was one of the sweetest guys and very generous with his time and ideas. I love the guy! So, at some point he asked me to help out with art on some of the Pee-wee licensing that was coming in hot and hard. I just aped his Pee-wee art style (which was not as easy as it looked). I did all the flat art on the inside of the Playhouse Playset. I did some art when they expanded the Pee-wee Colorforms set by adding two wings, thereby making it ‘Deluxe.’ A keen eye will see my cartoon character, Little Bastard, sitting on Pee-wee’s bed on that art.”

“In 1987, through Gary Panter and Mark Newgarden, I worked with Mark on the Topps Chewing Gum’s ‘Pee-wee’s Playhouse Fun Pak’,” Kaz continued. “I remember going into Topps’ offices every day for a few weeks. At the time, Topps was in a grimy industrial waterfront neighborhood in Brooklyn that was not a good place to be after dark. Mark did the bulk of the writing and editing on the “Fun Pak” as well as drawing. I wrote and did a bunch of drawings (in the Panter style). There was a lot to do, so some of the art was freelanced out to other cartoonists. Trivia: I got my full Lithuanian first name [Kazimieras] on the back of one card!”…

(6) PAEAN TO LOST. “Six Part Fan-Made Lost Documentary 815 Explores the Complicated Production of the J.J. Abrams-Directed Pilot Episode”Movieweb has the story.

Released in 2004 and created by J. J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof, Lost has become not only one of the most popular series of all time, but also a role model for many other shows. Its complicated and mysterious story, along with its constant reinvention and plots full of suspense, provided its viewers with a unique experience. Its unexpected twists and strange elements that appeared without any apparent explanation, turned it a legend.

The series follows the experiences of a group of survivors of a plane crash on what appears to be a deserted island. However, as they struggle to live with each other, it becomes apparent that the island is far from a safe place, and they are not the only ones inhabiting the place.

The pilot episode, directed by Abrams and filmed in Oahu, Hawaii, was at the time the most expensive in history, a title it held for a long time. For this reason, YouTuber and Lost fan kuhpunkt (who’s real name is Stefan Lensa) took the time to collect hours of video content about the making of the show’s pilot, transforming it into a six-part documentary titled 815, the number of the flight where the protagonists were traveling…

(7) NATO IN TIMES TO COME. In 2024, NATO will celebrate its 75th anniversary. The NATO Defence College asks writers, especially science fiction writers, for 1500 words on what NATO will look like in 2099. More details at the link. €500 if you are selected. “NATO 2099: A Graphic Novel”.

…Science fiction, while often discredited by dint of its creative and at times outrageous character, holds real added value for research purposes. Not only does science fiction influence the present by projecting inventions (i.e. headsets, mobile phones and tablets), science fiction can leverage the wisdom of the crowd effect: when several authors “see” a similar future, such a future becomes more likely. As such, science fiction has the power of making ideas acceptable. It can entertain a wider public, which under normal circumstances, might not entertain certain ideas, thereby broadening mindsets and fostering critical thinking. Of course, the precondition to this is that science fiction be not fantastical, but is rooted in evidence. (Hence the term FICINT, fictional intelligence.)

Harnessing these benefits, science fiction has been instrumentalized by military organizations in the United States and France to increase preparedness, train critical thinking, and even spot trends in technology and geopolitics. (For example, the idea of Russia attacking Ukraine appeared in Russian science fiction in the 1990s).

Your mission, should you accept it…

The year is 2099, NATO will be celebrating its 150th anniversary. For this reason, sci-fi and fictional intelligence authors are being asked to contribute about 1500 words on what this future might look like. Authors are asked to describe the end state, i.e. 2099, but are free to describe how we got there.

…The compilation of 32 written pieces will be transformed and published into a graphic novel or comic book that narrates a holistic story entitled, “NATO 2099”.

(8) MICHIGAN FAKE ELECTORS CASE. “Michigan judge rules defendants accused in false elector scheme will not have charges dropped” reports the Associated Press. We’re following this story because Michele Lundgren, wife of sff artist Carl Lundgren, is one of the sixteen charged, although she was not a maker of the motion covered here.

Michigan defendants accused of participating in a fake elector scheme will not have their charges dropped after the state attorney general said the group was “brainwashed” into believing former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election, a judge ruled Friday morning.

The decision comes after motions to dismiss charges were filed last week by two defendants, Clifford Frost and Mari-Ann Henry. The two defendants are part of a group of 16 Michigan Republicans who investigators say met following the 2020 election and signed a document falsely stating they were the state’s “duly elected and qualified electors.” Each of the 16 faces eight criminal charges, including multiple counts of forgery….

(9) STARLING HOUSE. At NPR: “Book review: Alix E. Harrow’s ‘Starling House’ Gothic fantasy novel”.

In Eden, Kentucky, the air is thick with dust.

The dying coal town is the fictional setting of Alix E. Harrow’s “Starling House,” and the smog of fading power and bad luck is enough to suffocate its residents, most of whom live in abject poverty.

For Harrow, writing a book about Kentucky was a long time coming.

“This is the first book that I set fully in, like committed to writing about Kentucky,” Harrow says. “One of the reasons that I had found that difficult to do before is because I find it to be a place of very mixed experiences that I love very, very, very much, and which has just an incredible violence and terror to it.”…

(10) CHRIS HADFIELD COMMENTS ON ‘FOR ALL MANKIND’. “Apple TV+ series For All Mankind Depicts Realistic Death in Space According to Renowned Astronaut” at Movieweb.

…Navigating through this cosmic portrayal, Chris Hadfield, an astronaut with feet firmly planted in both scientific and storytelling worlds, lent his expert gaze to scrutinize a particularly grim depiction of death in the aforementioned series. Hadfield, experienced in the authentic silence of the cosmos, put under the microscope a scene from For All Mankind in a special breakdown for Vanity Fair, where an American astronaut fiercely ends a Soviet astronaut’s lunar expedition—with a gun.

But is the rendering of a bullet speeding through the weightlessness and silence of the moon’s environment precise? Hadfield nods in unsettling agreement.

What permeates this acknowledgment is the recognition of the horrifying reality of how gunfire operates in the vacuum of the moon. Unlike its earthly counterpart, a bullet on the moon, devoid of air and oxygen to disrupt its trajectory, travels with haunting precision, straighter and farther into the abyss. The portrayal of such a scenario in For All Mankind doesn’t simply draw from a well of imagined horrors, but rather bathes in a chilling accuracy that aligns with the physical realities of our universe.

Moreover, the aftermath of such a bullet puncturing a spacesuit, according to Hadfield, is equally petrifying and authentic. A spacesuit, cushioning its inhabitant with a hundred percent oxygen, can turn into an infernal chamber when breached. History has witnessed this, as Hadfield recalls an incident during a test at the Johnson Space Center, where even aluminum, veiled in flames, narrated the horrors of what could transpire inside a suit, albeit thankfully unoccupied by a human during the incident. Oxygen, the life-giving force, transforms into a silent executioner in the blink of an eye when exposed to a spark in such an environment….

(11) START THE PARTY. Today is Francis Hamit’s 79th birthday and he’s celebrating at Amazing Stories by posting a 15,000-word excerpt from his novel: “Excerpt: STARMEN by Francis Hamit: Support the Kickstarter”.

Today is  Francis Hamit’s Birthday.  (Happy Birthday, Francis!)  He also informs us that the Kickstarter for his forthcoming “genre experiment” novel – STARMEN – closes on October 10th.  As his Birthday gift to all of our readers, he wants to make sure that you know that EVERYONE contributing to the project will be able to purchase the E-book edition of this 190,000-word epic for just one dollar ($1.00)….

“My mixed genre novel STARMEN is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to excerpts.  It’s about 190,000 words long and incorporates alternative post Civil War history, quantum mechanics, Apache Indian myths and some rather nasty Aliens.  It begins in 1875 El Paso, Texas at the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.  Some of the detectives are witches.  So are some of the Apaches.  There are also some romance elements. And politics.”

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born October 6, 1911 Flann O’Brien. Irish novelist, playwright and satirist. He wrote three novels, At Swim-Two-BirdsThe Dalkey Archive and The Third Policeman. Though The Dalkey Archive was published before The Third Policeman, it was written after that novelso entire sections of The Third Policeman are recycled almost word for word in it, mostly the atomic theory and the character De Selby. (Died 1966.)
  • Born October 6, 1950 David Brin, 73. Author of several series including Existence (which I do not recognize), the Postman novel, and the Uplift series which began with Startide Rising, a most excellent book and a Hugo-winner at L.A. Con II.  I’ll admit that the book he co-wrote with Leah Wilson, King Kong Is Back! An Unauthorized Look at One Humongous Ape, tickles me to no end if only for its title. So who’s read Castaways of New Mohave, that he wrote with Jeff Carlson?
  • Born October 6, 1952 Lorna Toolis. Librarian, editor, and fan Lorna was the long-time head of the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation, and Fantasy at the Toronto Public Library and a significant influence on the Canadian SF community. She founded the SF collection with a donation from Judith Merril. She was a founding member of SFCanada, and won an Aurora Award for co-editing Tesseracts 4 with Michael Skeet. (Died 2021.)
  • Born October 6, 1955 Donna White, 68. Academic who has written several works worth you knowing about — Dancing with Dragons: Ursula K. LeGuin and the Critics and Diana Wynne Jones: An Exciting and Exacting Wisdom. She’s also the author of the densely-written but worth reading A Century of Welsh Myth in Children’s Literature
  • Born October 6, 1955 Ellen Kushner, 68. If you’ve not read it, do so now, as her sprawling Riverside series is stellar. And there’s cups of hot chocolate. I’ve read all of it. And during the High Holy Days, do be sure to read The Golden Dreydl as it’s quite wonderful. As it’s Autumn and this being when I read it, I’d be remiss not to recommend her Thomas the Rhymer novel which won both the World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Award. 
  • Born October 6, 1967 Joshua Glenn, 56. Publisher who re-issued a lot of the scientific romances from the beginning of last century like J D Beresford’s Goslings, The Edward Shanks’ People of the Runs and E V Odle’s The Clockwork Man. He’s edited two anthologies, Voices from the Radium Age and More Voices from the Radium Age.

(13) CONNECTING SFF AND SCIENCE. The U.S. State Department website is hosting “From Science Fiction to Science Fact”. It begins with a video introduction by Mark Hamill.

About 400 kilometers above the Earth, the International Space Station orbits at 28,000 kilometers an hour. It’s the single largest structure humans have ever put in space and a football-field-size symbol of diplomatic cooperation.

Built over a decade with U.S. and Russian spacecraft, the station has been continuously occupied by an international crew since November 2000. The station isn’t owned by any one nation, but rather operates as a partnership among five space agencies — the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA; the Russian State Space Corporation “Roscosmos”; the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA); the European Space Agency; and the Canadian Space Agency. There are regular crew handovers whereby some astronauts leave and new ones come aboard. Two hundred seventy-three astronauts from 21 countries have worked on the station….

DETECTING MICROBES

In the popular 1960s television show Star Trek, the starship Enterprise crew members depend on handheld tricorders. The devices seem to magically detect everything from unknown life forms to the nature of a crew member’s illness.

While the TV version seems fantastical, a real — if nascent — tricorder has been developed on the International Space Station. What’s more, the research that built it is already supporting human health here on Earth.

The impetus was NASA’s efforts to sequence DNA. Scientists aimed to simplify the multistep DNA sequencing process so that one device on the space station could handle it, working to move the tricorder from the realm of science fiction to real life.

Today NASA is looking at hand-held devices made by a U.S. company and a U.K.-based company that can amplify and sequence DNA. The devices identify microbes — bacteria, viruses, fungi and other organisms too small to be seen with the naked eye — growing throughout the International Space Station. The crew can monitor what microbes are on board, how the space environment shapes microbial behavior, and how that might affect astronaut health during long missions to the Moon or Mars.

Crew members gather microbes to sequence by rubbing swabs around the space station’s interior. They then process the genetic material by inserting the swabs into a hand-held device called a miniPCR, which makes copies of a targeted microbial DNA sequence. The copies are fed into another hand-held device called the MinION, which sequences the DNA.

(14) DOUBLE YOUR TIANGONG, DOUBLE YOUR FUN. “China to double size of space station, touts alternative to NASA-led ISS”Reuters has details.

China plans to expand its space station to six modules from three in coming years, offering astronauts from other nations an alternative platform for near-Earth missions as the NASA-led International Space Station (ISS) nears the end of its lifespan.

The operational lifetime of the Chinese space station will be more than 15 years, the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), a unit of China’s main space contractor, said at the 74th International Astronautical Congress in Baku, Azerbaijan, on Wednesday….

… China’s self-built space station, also known as Tiangong, or Celestial Palace in Chinese, has been fully operational since late 2022, hosting a maximum of three astronauts at an orbital altitude of up to 450 km (280 miles).

At 180 metric tons after its expansion to six modules, Tiangong is still just 40% of the mass of the ISS, which can hold a crew of seven astronauts. But the ISS, in orbit for more than two decades, is expected to be decommissioned after 2030, about the same time China has said it expects to become “a major space power”.

Chinese state media said last year as Tiangong became fully operational that China would be no “slouch” as the ISS headed toward retirement, adding that “several countries” had asked to send their astronauts to the Chinese station.

But in a blow to China’s aspirations for space diplomacy, the European Space Agency (ESA) said this year it did not have the budgetary or “political” green light to participate in Tiangong, shelving a years-long plan for a visit by European astronauts.

“Giving up cooperation with China in the manned space domain is clearly short-sighted, which reveals that the U.S.-led camp confrontation has led to a new space race,” the Global Times, a nationalist Chinese tabloid, wrote at the time.

Tiangong has become an emblem of China’s growing clout and confidence in its space endeavours, and a challenger to the United States in the domain after being isolated from the ISS. It is banned by U.S. law from any collaboration, direct or indirect, with NASA….

(15) WHAT IS IMAGINATION? The Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination will host an in-person event “Imagine Otherwise: Featuring Stephen T. Asma” Tickets, Fri, Oct 20, 2023 at 6:00 PM | Eventbrite on October 20 at 6:00 p.m. at UC San Diego. Free registration and full information at the link.

Imagination is touted as a gift for artists or a vital skill for visionary thinkers and scientists. But what do we mean by the term “imagination,” and what has science revealed about the diversity of ways it shows itself in human minds?

In a conversation with Stephen T. Asma, philosopher and author of The Evolution of Imagination, Erik Viirre and Cassandra Vieten will explore the history of our understanding of imagination, how science has attempted to advance our understanding of it, and what is at stake for the future of imagination studies and the pathways it may open to advancing the imagination’s power for transformative change.

This event will take place at the Great Hall at UC San Diego and is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be provided. RSVP required.

(16) UP ALL NIGHT. “The ‘Ghost Hunting Gays of Ohio’ find queer community in the search for the supernatural” at WVXU.

A small group of people huddled around Mirror Lake on Ohio State University’s campus on a September evening. Their black attire matched the night sky that stretched over the splashing fountain.

Nick Post stood at the center of the group. He leaned in as he told a ghost story about the so-called ‘Lady of the Lake.’

“On cold wintry nights she can sometimes be seen skating across the ice, warming her hands and wearing outdated clothing,” Post said. “Some reports say she wears white, others say she wears pink. But none have gotten close enough to see her face.”

This is just one of many apparitions that supposedly stalk OSU’s dorms and classrooms at night. Its these legends that brought ten members of the Ghost Hunting Gays of Ohio, the state’s newest paranormal investigators, to campus on a Sunday night….

…“I’ve always been obsessed with ghost-hunting shows and all of that good stuff, so I was like, what if we just go check out some haunted places?” he said.

Post said looking to the supernatural was only natural for him, and he thinks that’s true for a lot of queer people. He said the paranormal holds a special appeal to many in the gay community.

“When you are misunderstood your entire life, it intrigues you to understand other things that are misunderstood,” Post said….

(17) PAUL BUCKLEY’S GREATEST HITS. Steven Heller talks about “Layoffs in the Publishing Industry Sting” at PRINT Magazine, and the loss of one design director in particular.

When the latest round of publishing industry buyouts and layoffs were announced in mid-July, I was surprised to see a few friends and acquaintances on the hit list. Buyouts are the humane way to let go of employees, and some can be generous. But while many buyouts come at the end of careers, layoffs can particularly sting while in mid-stride.

At Penguin Random House, the biggest book publisher in the United States, veteran editors who have worked with many of the biggest authors in fiction and nonfiction are leaving the company. It is a changing of the guard. The New York Times reported that Penguin Random House lost both its global and U.S. chief executives in the past seven months alone.

Until this latest upheaval, 58 year old Paul Buckley was the longest serving (34 years) design director of Penguin Books. His layoff was a shock to those, like me, who greatly admired his work. If he of all people is this vulnerable, what about others who are not yet ready to take retirement?

Buckley leaves behind an incredible legacy of iconic, smart, clever and damn beautiful work. So upon hearing the sad news, I asked him to select 10 projects out of the thousands he’s created for Penguin that give him the most pride. It’s better to see and read about them now than in a later postmortem/historical reprise….

(18) QUANTUM PAULI ENGINE. [Item by Steven French.] “No-heat quantum engine makes its debut” at Physics World.

“All particles known to science fall into one of two categories: bosons or fermions. While bosons cluster in the same quantum state, fermions obey the Pauli exclusion principle, meaning no two fermions can share the same state. This doesn’t matter much at room temperature when particles are flying about at high speeds. Cool those particles down to just shy of absolute zero, though, and the difference becomes vast: the bosons pile into the lowest available energy state, while fermions stack on top of each other in a “ladder” of states. At such low temperatures, a collection of fermions will thus have much more energy than a collection of bosons.”

Until recently that energy difference couldn’t be accessed but in the early 2000s  a way was found to form bosons molecules from fermionic atoms which means you could switch from one form of statistics to another. Now researchers have used this to construct a ‘proof-of-principle’ quantum Pauli engine which offers an entirely different way of charging quantum batteries and powering quantum computers. 

That may be some years off yet but this is still very cool!

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Nicholas Whyte, JeffWarner, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Ersatz Culture, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

More Things Left Undone

[Introduction: There are three days left to go in Francis Hamit’s Kickstarter to fund publication of Starmen: A Novel. Donors of $1 or more get a copy of the ebook as a reward. The following post first appeared as one of his campaign updates and is reprinted with permission.]

By Francis Hamit: One of the privileges of writing fiction, even fact-based historical fiction is the right to make up improbable coincidences.  You can slide with perfect confidence into Alternative History because Real Life has outdone you at every turn.  Hence the phrase “you can’t make this stuff up”.

But you can try.  And here I have. One of the characters in Starmen is borrowed from my novel The Shenandoah Spy — Sir Percy Wyndham, the Irish “wild goose” mercenary recruited to lead the 1st New Jersey Cavalry during the early part of the American Civil War.  He developed a rivalry with 7th Virginia Cavalry leader Turner Ashby, derided him as a dirt farmer amateur only to have his entire unit trapped and captured soon thereafter by Ashby.

The same day Ashby was killed by friendly fire. Belle Boyd’s birthday as well.  While I know the exterior circumstances I have little idea of how those people felt, reacted, or what they said to each other.  One of the revelations of my Civil War Research is that the so-called Official Records were usually written months after the actual events by staff officers who were not there.  What shreds of truth there are can be used to support an otherwise bald lie.  Diaries as and letters are more reliable but even there some people lie.

And lie I also must to create creditable dialog about and between my characters.  To that end Sir Percy Wyndham must stay in character as a flawed, egotistical and suicidally brave soldier willing to die in battle.  With a strong moral center.  In real life, once he knew that he was surrounded, he jumped down off his horse and indulged himself in a rather childish tantrum.  Then he surrendered.  He might have been willing to fight Ashby to the death (although that was not how they did things in Europe) but his men came first.  They were able and willing to fight.   He would not let them be slaughtered.

Wyndham goes through a number of transformations is an alternative timeline that depends a great deal on my layman’s understanding of quantum physics.  In it he is critical to the ending I currently plan. At no time does he fall out of character or lose that strong moral center every professional soldier must have.

Which Book Cover Works Best?

[Introduction: Francis Hamit’s Kickstarter for Starmen: A Novel runs until October 10. You can get the ebook for a one dollar donation. Meanwhile, the author would like your opinion about the cover….]

By Francis Hamit: I really am in a quandary about which cover to use, so I would like feedback.

Alternative Book Cover Version Two

Based on feedback, I moved the title a little.  Small changes sometimes make a big difference.  I think this is very powerful and catches the eye. 

The original cover developed and donated by Markee Book Designs is here:

Original book cover

As you can see this is more narrative, based upon the opening paragraphs.  Quite a bit of work went into this but they wanted a sample for their portfolio and I am happy to oblige. 

The first book cover I bought was for The Shenandoah Spy.  It cost me over $2,000 but certainly sold the story while also feeding my passion for historical accuracy. These new covers cost me very little and the one from Canva took me an hour of playing around with a blank image and placing type.

I have bought other covers for $100 each and just moved virtual type around .  It’s not hard for me.  I took Design in college and I was a professional photographer for eleven years.  That was all about designing as I framed the shot either in the camera or the darkroom.  (Yeah, I was in the photochemical world). I was crushed out of that business by K-Mart and their 99-cent color portraits.  

These low cost and free blanks for book covers are yet another example of a hard-won artistic profession being crushed by a low cost and “good enough” alternative.

So you tell me; which cover will sell more books? That is, after all, the name of the game.

Leave your vote in comments here.

And if you have not yet donated to get the E-book please do so.  Everyone gets that. Other items at higher reward tiers.  

[Reprinted with permission.]

Implications of the Thaler vs Perlmutter Decision. Can You Use Artificial Intelligence in Your Writing?

[Introduction: Francis Hamit, currently running a Kickstarter appeal for Starmen: A Novel, wrote this article as one of the Updates. He’s given File 770 permission to reprint it.]

By Francis Hamit: Not even God can get a Copyright. That’s one of the takeaways from Thaler vs. Perlmutter.  Thaler wanted to register an image generated by a computer program he devised.  Perlmutter, who runs the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress, said no.  Only works made by humans can get copyright protection.  Your pet monkey pounding away on a computer keyboard might produce something brilliant that everyone wants to buy but you won’t be able to protect it from infringement.   Likewise anything from a celestial being also falls into the Public Domain. Only work that is the result of human creativity can be protected.

Francis Hamit

Copyright is a global law through various treaties so registration here protects your work in most but not all markets. It lasts a very long time and is about the money and controlling who gets to publish, display, distribute and  adapt original work.

ChatGPT may seem like a brilliant innovation to some but all it really is is a very sophisticated computer program with a huge database.  Even then it has to be trained by humans before it gets those amazing results.  The “ghost in the machine” is us.  (Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.)

To be a real writer you have to be real.  You have to do your own work.  Artificial Intelligence is just that; artificial.   And it shows in recent AI submissions submitted by quick buck artists to magazines in the science fiction field.  There were so many that they closed down the submissions window.   Easily detected and easily dismissed but still a drag on the process because they had to be dealt with.  

I recommend that everyone register their copyrights.  Forget about that mail it to yourself nonsense.  Go online and pay the fees but understand that all you are protecting is the expression, the arrangement of the words, not the idea behnd the words. And all you have is the right to sue some person you think has infringed your work in a Federal District Court.  

I’ve done this and don’t recommend it unless there is life-changing money at stake.  You have to prove the case and the Federal Courts hate copyright cases with a passion. Why? There is the Law, which is simple.  Black Letter as they say.  And then there are the Facts and those are incredibly complicated.

Most cases settle before they get to trial.  Mine did but it took four years and thousands of dollars and thousands of hours before I got paid.  How much I’m not allowed to say.  The Judgment is Sealed.

The Thaler vs.  Perlmutter decision sets a precedent.  Any taint of A.I. in your text can void your copyright registration.  But the judge left open the use of A.I. as a tool similar to a spellchecker as long as that original spark of creativity is preserved.  If you use A.I. to transform your short story into a screenplay is that simply a derivative work?  Will the original copyright registration stretch to cover it? Ask yourself this:  Which is easier? Learning how to write that screenplay yourself or defending your A.I. generated version in Federal Court? 

Francis Hamit’s Recommended Writers Rules For Book Signings

[Introduction: Francis Hamit, whose Kickstarter for Starmen: A Novel is close to funding, wrote this article as one of the Updates. He’s given File 770 permission to reprint it.]

By Francis Hamit: I’ve been thinking ahead about promoting this book and the changing landscape of publishing.  It has been 30 years since my best-selling non-fiction book Virtual Reality and the Exploration of Cyberspace was published. 15,700 copies in the first run sold very quickly but it was already obsolete thanks to Tim Berners Lee.  He created the World Wide Web and that changed everything. There was a lot of hype and disinformation. The same kind of media sensationalism that Artificial Intelligence suffers from now.  The book took two-and-a-half years of research, interviews, conferences and fact checking.  It was in print for 13 months.  I literally did the last book signing three weeks later.   

Fiction doesn’t have an expiration date and there are many places you can sign books other than bookstores but usually you are going to lose money on the deal.   Sell a few copies or no copies if the stores has not promoted the event but it’s not really about the number of copies sold that day but the people you meet.

I once had  a guy drive two and a half hours so he could meet me and get a signed copy of The Shenandoah Spy.  Very gratifying but also slightly unnerving.   He was a bit intense.  

On that same book tour a teen-aged girl came for advice about Young Adult fiction.  Why was it so bad she asked and why couldn’t she find stories that she could relate to?  I suggested she should write those stories herself.  How do I do that? she asked.  A poor girl from a rural community with parents who did not read much less write themselves? With an indifferent school system?  

You’ll find a way, I said, if you really want to be a writer. Just write. Get used to writing every day. Learn the mechanicals but don’t get trapped by the Puncuation Police.  The kind of writing you want to do is not about the proper use of the semi-colon. It’s about telling stories. The First Million Words Are The Hardest. You will have to write that many before you attain any kind of mastery.

Those are the kind of conversations you will have at a book signing and showing a little kindness pays off years, even decades later. If they like you people are more likely to buy to buy your books.  

As for the practical aspects of doing a good book signing here is my advice:

1. Dress for the gig:  Wear business attire.  Be clean and neat. .  Get your hair cut or styled close to the event.

2.   Be sober.   Being in an altered state of consciousness will damage reputations.  Not just yours, but your publisher or sponsor and that of the hosting entity (store, group, meeting, etc.)

3.  Be Cheerful.  No one cares if you are having a bad day.  Keep that to yourself.

4.  Sell the book.  Get up when people approach the table you are at and greet them. Answer questions.  Sign the book in front of them once they have bought it.

5. Stay put.  Nothing irritates the staff more than an author who acts bored and wanders off to look at other books or decides to chat up an attractive sales person or staffer because no one is in the store.  

6.  Bring back-up stock and promotional supplies.  Many a book signing has been undone because the shipment didn’t arrive on time.  You can’t sell books if you don’t have them. Likewise a shipment of promotional bookmarks may get lost, misappropriated for a child’s craft project or thrown away.  

7. Location is important. A table near the front of the store is preferred.  Locations at the back or where people can’t see you or shared with other writers are not.  

8.  Do your own publicity.  Most stores don’t have time. Send a nice professionally written release to all local media along with a copy of the book.   Call the producers of local news and talk shows to see if you can be interviewed.  You will probably be on a television news program for no more than four minutes.  Bring your own make-up.  Those lights are very bright.  A simple base will do.

9.  Enjoy yourself.  Seriously. Have fun and enjoy a moment that most people never have. Be humble and grateful that you have this opportunity.

Pixel Scroll 8/16/23 La Pixel È Malleable

(1) NEW SFF NOVELLA CONTEST COMING IN SEPTEMBER. The Fantasy Review will take entries in the inaugural Speculative Fiction Indie Novella Championship (SFINCS) beginning September 2.

The Speculative Fiction Indie Novella Championship (SFINCS, pronounced “sphinx”) is a yearly competition to recognize, honor, and celebrate the talent and creativity present in the indie community. We are a sister competition to both SPFBO and SPSFC, and we highlight greatness in the novella format in all areas of speculative fiction (fantasy, science fiction, horror, etc.).

See eligibility requirements here. Find the judging process and timeline here.

These are the organizers and their social media pages: Nathan: TwitterInstagram, and TikTok; The Shaggy Shepherd: Twitter; Rowena: Twitter and Instagram; Tabitha: Twitter and Instagram.

(2) WILL FTC DIP INTO BIG RIVER? “Authors and Booksellers Urge Justice Dept. to Investigate Amazon” reports the New York Times.

With mounting signs that the Federal Trade Commission is preparing to file a lawsuit against Amazon for violating antitrust laws, a group of booksellers, authors and antitrust activists are urging the government to investigate the company’s domination of the book market.

On Wednesday, the Open Markets Institute, an antitrust think tank, along with the Authors Guild and the American Booksellers Association, sent a letter to the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission, calling on the government to curb Amazon’s “monopoly in its role as a seller of books to the public.”

The groups are pressing the Justice Department to investigate not only Amazon’s size as a bookseller, but also its sway over the book market — especially its ability to promote certain titles on its site and bury others, said Barry Lynn, the executive director of the Open Markets Institute, a research and advocacy group focused on strengthening antimonopoly policies.

“What we have is a situation in which the power of a single dominant corporation is warping, in the aggregate, the type of books that we’re reading,” Lynn said in an interview. “This kind of power concentrated in a democracy is not acceptable.”

The letter, addressed to Lina Khan, the chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, and Jonathan Kanter, who leads the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, comes as the F.T.C. appears to be closing in on its decision to bring an antitrust case against Amazon. Amazon representatives are expected to meet this week with members of the commission to discuss the possible suit, a sign that legal action may be imminent….

(3) BARBIE’S TEACHABLE MOMENTS. The New York Times asks “Will Hollywood Learn These 5 Lessons From ‘Barbie’?” Here’s one of the lessons they have in mind:

5. Stop saving the good stuff for the sequel

With “Barbie” on a path to become the year’s highest-grossing movie worldwide, Warner Bros. will inevitably try to conjure a franchise from it. Yet much of what makes “Barbie” feel fresh is that it tells a complete story and doesn’t spend time setting up spinoffs or sequels. In fact, it ends in a place that would be hard to roll back: with its lead at the definitive end of her character arc. Gerwig and her stars aren’t signed for “Barbie” sequels, and when I spoke to Gerwig after her blockbuster opening weekend, she said she’d put every idea she had into this movie without the thought of doing more: “At this moment, it’s all I’ve got.”

(4) KING HAS PLANS. The Guardian tells readers, “Stephen King says he may continue the Talisman series”. Later in the article King tells what he finds scary.

Stephen King has suggested that he may write a third instalment of the two-book Talisman series, which he co-wrote with the late Peter Straub. Asked on a podcast if his days of writing “epics” were in the past, King replied “never say never”. “Before he died, Peter sent me this long letter and said we oughta do the third one, and he gave me a really cool idea and I had some ideas of my own,” he said.

Speaking as a guest on an episode of the Talking Scared podcast, King added that the volume – which would follow The Talisman and its sequel, Black House – “would be a long book”….

(5) HAUNTED LAUGHS. Nostalgia Central introduces a new generation to the Fifties ghostly comedy series Topper. Episode videos can be viewed there, too.

… The Thorne Smith classic came to television with Leo G Carroll as the stuffy and befuddled well-to-do banking vice president, Cosmo Topper, whose new house at 101 Yardley Avenue in New York, was inhabited by the ghosts of the former owners, George and Marion Kerby, who had been killed in an avalanche while skiing in Switzerland.

Only he could see them, which made for some hilarious situations indeed, especially as George and Marion – not to mention their alcoholic St Bernard dog, Neil – were prone to practical joking….

(6) EVEN A DOLLAR. Francis Hamit’s Kickstarter for his novel Starmen is over 80% funded. As he explained in the latest update, he’s looking for any level of help.

An old friend who I have not seen or heard from for many years wrote me to say that she hasn’t got much these days but would give something.  And that is all I want. Even a dollar is welcome.  Seriously.  I set the goal low deliberately because I want as many people as possible to read this book and tell their friends.  Most publishers will reject this out of hand.  It’s too long.  180,000 words  and counting as I add more material to fix flaws my developmental editors found.  

I’m a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, generally acknowledged as the best writing school in the English speaking world but I never thought i’d learned it all.  My motto is KAISAN!, a Japanese management term meaning “continuous improvement”.  

Most publishers will also reject this book because it does not fit neatly into a genre.  They won’t know how to market it unless  there is  so much “buzz” that everyone wants to read it.  And that, Gentle Reader, is where you come in.   Give me a dollar or more and help me make goal.

 If I make more there are other things I can do with it.  Hire help.  Both Leigh and I are disabled. The goal amount will go to hire someone to properly format the E-Book so its a smooth read.  Buying reviews from Kirkus and other outlets. Managing the fulfillment.  The  T-shirts and mugs come from Printful.  They will send them directly to you.  Formatting and producing a paperback.  Upgrading our computers.  I have a big backlog of other work to publish. Every dollar helps!

As the old English folksong goes “Have you got a penny?  Can you give a  penny?  But if you haven’t got a penny, then God Bless You!

(7) ORPHANS IN THE SKY. “Our Galaxy Is Home to Trillions of Worlds Gone Rogue” in the New York Times says “Astronomers have found that free-floating planets far outnumber those bound to a host star.” But Andrew Porter is disappointed the article doesn’t mention “spindizzies”.

Free-floating planets — dark, isolated orbs roaming the universe unfettered by any host star — don’t just pop into existence in the middle of cosmic nowhere. They probably form the same way other planets do: within the swirling disk of gas and dust surrounding an infant star.

But unlike their planetary siblings, these worlds get violently chucked out of their celestial neighborhoods.

Astronomers had once calculated that billions of planets had gone rogue in the Milky Way. Now, scientists at NASA and Osaka University in Japan are upping the estimate to trillions. Detailed in two papers accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal, the researchers have deduced that these planets are six times more abundant than worlds orbiting their own suns, and they identified the second Earth-size free floater ever detected.

The existence of wandering worlds orphaned from their star systems has long been known, but poorly understood. Previous findings suggested that most of these planets were about the size of Jupiter, our solar system’s most massive planet. But that conclusion garnered a lot of pushback; even scientists who announced it found it surprising.

To better study these rogue worlds, David Bennett, an astronomer at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and his team used nine years of data from the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics telescope at the University of Canterbury Mount John Observatory in New Zealand. Exoplanets were indirectly detected by measuring how their gravity warped and magnified the light arriving from faraway stars behind them, an effect known as microlensing.

With help from empirical models, the researchers worked out the spread of the masses for more than 3,500 microlensing events, which included stars, stellar remnants, brown dwarfs and planet candidates. (Data from one of those candidates was compelling enough for the team to claim the discovery of a new rogue Earth.) From this analysis, they estimate that there are about 20 times more free-floating worlds in our Milky Way than stars, with Earth-mass planets 180 times more common than rogue Jupiters…

(8) MEMORY LANE

1987 – [Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Sharyn McCrumb is, to me, an interesting writer that I like and admire a lot. Appalachian-born and resident, her novels are deeply rooted in the history and folklore of that region though for the most part our Beginning this Scroll is definitely not.

My favorite series by her is decidedly genre, the Ballad series, which has a woman who knows exactly when an individual is going to pass beyond the mortal veil, and more than one novel where ghosts figure in. I think Ghost Riders is the best of these.

And her Elizabeth MacPherson novels aren’t genre but they are really fun mysteries with MacPherson being an archaeologist. The Scottish games set Highland Laddie Gone is the best and intentionally comical of these. (Davina Porter narrates the audio version and does a stellar job.) You need to have attended a Scottish game or two, and been possible slightly inebriated while there to appreciate this novel. Don’t miss the haggis on a stick if you do go. Is it in a sheep’s stomach? Maybe, maybe not.

The Bimbos of the Death Sun duology where our Beginning comes includes Zombies of the Gene Pool

Bimbos of the Death Sun was published by Windwalker / TSR in 987 with the cover illustration by Jeff Easley. Zombies of the Gene Pool followed five years later from Simon & Schuster. Not quite a Meredith Moment but really close, both are available from the usual suspects. 

Both are set within fandom and that means that anyone who reads them, well, I like them a lot but I know that is not a opinion not universally shared. But since when is any book universally liked or disliked, loved or hated?

Now I expect nearly all of you have read these novels but some haven’t so I’m not spoiling a damn thing. 

So here’s the beginning of Bimbos of the Death Sun

The visiting Scottish folksinger peered out of the elevator into the hotel lobby. When he pushed the button marked “G,” he naturally assumed that he would arrive at the ground floor of the building. Now he wasn’t so sure. Things were different in America, but he hadn’t realized they were this different. Perhaps “G” stood for Ganymede, or some other intergalactic place. Who were those people? 

A pale blonde in blue body paint wearing a green satin tunic stepped on to the elevator, eyeing his jeans and sweatshirt with faint disapproval. “Going up?” she said in her flat American accent. She looked about twenty, he thought. The elevator was moving before he realized that he’d forgotten to get out.

 “You here for the con?” she asked, noticing his guitar case.

“No. I’m a tourist.” He liked that better than saying he was on tour; it prevented leading questions that ended in disappointment when the American discovered: 1) that they had never heard of him, and 2) that he didn’t know Rod Stewart. “What are you here for?” 

She grinned. “Oh, you mean you don’t know? It’s Rubicon—a science fiction convention. We’re practically taking over the hotel. There’ll be hundreds of us.” 

“Oh, right. Like Trekkies.” He nodded. “We have some of your lot back home.” 

“Where’s home?” she asked, fiddling with the key ring on her yellow sash.

“Scotland.” At least she hadn’t tried to guess. He was getting tired of being mistaken for an Australian. 

As the elevator doors rumbled open on the fifth floor, the departing blue person glanced again at his jeans. “Scotland, huh?” she mused. “Aren’t you supposed to be wearing some kind of funny outfit?” 

“Is Diefenbaker here yet?” asked Bernard Buchanan breathlessly. He always said things a little breathlessly, on account of the bulk he was carrying around, and he was always clutching a sheaf of computer printouts, which he would try to read to the unwary. 

Miles Perry, whose years of con experience had made him chief among the wary, began to edge away from the neo-fan. “I haven’t seen him,” he hedged.

“I had a letter from him on Yellow Pigs Day, and he said he’d be here,” Bernard persisted. “He’s supposed to be running one of the wargames, and I wanted him to look at my new parody.” 

Miles swallowed his exasperation. It was, after all, the first hour of the convention. If he started shouting now, his blood pressure would exceed his I.Q. in no time, and there were still two more days of wide-eyed novices to endure. Diefenbaker would encourage these eager puppies; he brought it on himself. Miles had a good mind to post a notice in the hotel lobby informing everyone of Diefenbaker’s room number. Maybe a few dozen hours of collective neo-fans, all reading him fanzine press at once, would cure him of these paternal instincts. Really, Diefenbaker would write to anybody. Just let someone in Nowhere-in-Particular, New Jersey, write in a comment to Diefenbaker’s fan magazine, and Dief would fire back a friendly five-page letter, making the poor crottled greep feel liked. More comments would follow, requiring more five-page letters. Miles didn’t like to think what Dief’s postage budget would run. And this is what it came to: post-adolescent monomaniacs waiting to waylay him at cons to discuss Lithuanian politics, or silicon-based life forms, or whatever their passion was. If he weren’t careful, he’d get so tied up with these upstarts that he wouldn’t have time to socialize with the authors and the fen-elite. Miles would have to protect Dief from such pitfalls, for his own good.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 16, 1884 Hugo Gernsback. Publisher of the first SF magazine, Amazing Stories in 1926. Also helped create fandom through the Science Fiction League. Writer of the Ralph 124C 41+ novel which most critics think is utterly dreadful but Westfahl considers “essential text for all studies of science fiction.” (Died 1967.)
  • Born August 16, 1930 Robert Culp. He’d make the Birthday Honors solely for being the lead in Outer Limits’ “Demon with a Glass Hand” which Ellison wrote specifically with him in mind. He would do two more appearances on the show, “Corpus Earthling” and “The Architects of Fear”. Around this time, he made one-offs on Get Smart! and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. before being Special FBI Agent Bill Maxwell in The Greatest American Hero. Did you know there was a Conan the Adventurer series in the Nineties in which he was King Vog in one episode? I’ve not seen it. Do we consider I Spy genre? Well we should. (Died 2010.)
  • Born August 16, 1933 Julie Newmar, 90. Catwoman in Batman. Her recent voice work includes the animated Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders and Batman vs. Two-Face, both done in the style of the Sixties show. They feature the last voice work by Adam West. Shatner btw plays Harvey Dent aka Two Face.  She was on the original Trek in the “Friday’s Child” episode as Eleen. She also has one-offs on Get Smart!Twilight ZoneFantasy IslandBionic WomanBuck Rogers in the 25th CenturyBewitched and Monster Squad
  • Born August 16, 1934 Diana Wynne Jones. If there’s essential reading for her, it’d be The Tough Guide to Fantasyland which is a playful look at the genre. Then I’d toss in Deep Secret for its setting, and Fire and Hemlock for her artful merging of the Scottish ballads Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer. Now what’s the name of the exemplary short story collection she did late in life? Ahhh it was Unexpected Magic: Collected Stories with the great cover by Dan Craig. Yes, I bought it without opening the book solely because of the cover! (Died 2011.)
  • Born August 16, 1934 andrew j. offutt (and Andrew J. Offutt, A. J. Offutt, and Andy Offutt). I know him through his work in the Thieves’ World anthologies though I also enjoyed the Swords Against Darkness anthologies that he edited. I don’t think I’ve read any of his novels. And I’m not a Robert E. Howard fan so I’ve not read any of his Cormac mac Art or Conan novels but his short fiction is superb. His only award was a Phoenix Award which is a lifetime achievement award for a science fiction professional who had done a great deal for Southern Fandom. (Died 2013.)
  • Born August 16, 1952 Edie Stern, 71. Fancyclopedia 3 says that she is “a well-known SF club, con, filker, collector and fanzine fan.” Well it actually goes on at impressive length about her. So I’m going to just link to their bio for her thisaway.
  • Born August 16, 1960 Timothy Hutton, 63. Best known as Nathan Ford on the Leverage series which is almost genre. His first genre was in Iceman as Dr. Stanley Shephard, and he was in The Dark Half in the dual roles of Beaumont and George Stark. He’s David Wildee in The Last Mizo, based off “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” by Lewis Padgett (husband-and-wife team Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore). He was Hugh Crain in The Haunting of Hill House series. I’m going to finish off this Birthday note by singling out his most superb role as Archie Goodwin on the Nero Wolfe series. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Argyle Sweater has a superhero case of “It’s not you, it’s me…”
  • Last Kiss shows a summer camp where all eyes are on Wonder Woman

(11) DOES THIS DOME HAVE A FUTURE? The New York Times notes how “A Dormant Dome for Cinephiles Is Unsettling Hollywood”.

Since the November night in 1963 when the Cinerama Dome opened its doors with the premiere of “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World” — drawing Milton Berle, Buddy Hackett and Ethel Merman to the sidewalks of Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood — the theater, and the multiplex that later rose around it, has been a home for people who liked to watch movies and people who liked to make movies.

Its distinctive geodesic dome, memorialized by Quentin Tarantino in the 2019 film “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” has become more retro than futuristic over the years, a reminder of a Technicolor past. Yet through it all, the complex known as the ArcLight Hollywood remained a cinephile favorite, with no commercials, no latecomers admitted and ushers who would, after introducing the upcoming show, promise to stay behind to make sure the sound and picture were “up to ArcLight standards.”

But today the ArcLight Hollywood is closed, both a victim of the coronavirus pandemic and a symbol of a movie industry in turmoil, even in its own backyard….

The shuttered complex — its entrance marked by plywood boards instead of movie posters — stands as a reminder of the great uncertainty that now shadows old-fashioned cinema in American culture. Dual strikes have shut down production. Competition from streaming services, as well as shortened attention spans in a smartphone era, has led movie theaters around the nation to shut their doors….

Yes, that’s where I saw It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. Also Krakatoa, East of Java. And years later, E.T. It would be missed.

(12) ELEMENTARY. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “12 Different Ways to Organize the Periodic Table of Elements” at Visual Capitalist. (Playlist: Tom Lehrer’s “The Elements”, of course…) I’m sure there are yet more arrangement variants out there.

The Periodic Table of Elements is an iconic image in classrooms and laboratories all around the world.

Yet despite having an almost unanimous agreement amongst scientists on its composition, there are over 1,000 different periodic tables—and that number continues to grow. This is because the standard table does not highlight all of the existing relationships between the elements.

With 118 elements currently known, there are many different interactions and stories to tell. Here are some of the most remarkable, fascinating and bizarre periodic tables that we could find….

(13) IT’S NOT EXACTLY SACRAMENTAL. Good grief, whoever thought of this branding? “The Exorcist Collectors Series” at Mano’s Wine.

Mano’s Wine is thrilled to offer horror fans the chance to collect officially licensed bottles featuring moments from their favorite movies. Whether you plan to kick back and calm your nerves after those jump scares with a glass of delicious Cabernet Sauvignon, or keep it on your bar for the suspense this bottle is a showstopper.

(14) TAKES A KICKING AND KEEPS ON TREKKING. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Tsk! and maybe “Maybe you don’t want to do that…” “Introducing Unitree H1: Its First General-purpose Humanoid Robot”.

(15) MENTAL MASONRY. Scientific American tells how “Neuroscientists Re-create Pink Floyd Song from Listeners’ Brain Activity”.

Researchers hope brain implants will one day help people who have lost the ability to speak to get their voice back—and maybe even to sing. Now, for the first time, scientists have demonstrated that the brain’s electrical activity can be decoded and used to reconstruct music.

A new study analyzed data from 29 people who were already being monitored for epileptic seizures using postage-stamp-size arrays of electrodes that were placed directly on the surface of their brain. As the participants listened to Pink Floyd’s 1979 song “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1,” the electrodes captured the electrical activity of several brain regions attuned to musical elements such as tone, rhythm, harmony and lyrics. Employing machine learning, the researchers reconstructed garbled but distinctive audio of what the participants were hearing. The study results were published on Tuesday in PLOS Biology….

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Billie Ellish sings “What Was I Made For?” from Barbie.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Daniel Dern, Steven French, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jim Janney.]

Pixel Scroll 8/12/23 O Beautiful For Pixeled Files

(1) ACTION IS YOUR REWARD! [Item by Chuck Serface.] The next issue of The Drink Tank is dedicated to all things Spider-Man.  We’re looking for articles, artwork, fiction, poetry, photography, or whatever you’d like to share about Peter Parker, Miles Morales, Ben Reilly, Spider-Woman, Ghost-Spider, Silk, Venom, Carnage, or others throughout the Spider-Verse from comics, films, television, and beyond.  The deadline is August 25, 2023.  Send submissions to Chris Garcia at [email protected] or to Chuck Serface at [email protected].

(2) SUPPORT STARMEN. Author Francis Hamit, a longtime File 770 contributor, has launched a Kickstarter appeal for his novel Starmen. Jacqueline Lichtenberg has these words of praise for it: “I read the manuscript of this book. As is all of Hamit’s work, it is engrossing, well-paced, easily readable storytelling. But the mixture of history, imagination, and insightful extrapolation doesn’t fit current commercial genre formulae. Notably, even after years, I recall many vivid images from the book that should be set pieces from an Indiana Jones movie.”

Every donor gets the E-book Edition for a dollar, and there are additional perks for other contribution levels. What’s it about?

It’s a detective story that begins at the El Paso office of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in 1875. That also makes it historical.  A huge balloon arrives with a group from the British Ethnographic Society. With them is George James Frazer, a young academic from Cambridge who wants to study the Apaches. The balloon is commanded by Rose Green, a beautiful young woman who is the daughter of Confederate secret agent Rose Greenhow.  The balloon is surveying for minerals and is a threat to the USA and the Apaches and Mexico.  A young Apache boy working for Pinkerton’s becomes Frazer’s guide. He says that Apache witches can fly…and later proves it by flying himself!  The balloon intrudes on a sacred place and its crew encounters multiple troubles but Frazer, left with the Apaches, almost becomes one of them. Pinkerton’s is hired to find the balloon and the missing heir to a wealthy Chicago family. Two detectives, one of them newly hired and suspected of being an agent of the Confederate government in exile in Britain, go in search of the heir.  Their journey takes them to a curious small town taken over by a hotelier whose customers come from far away; very far away.  Famous gunfighters are one of the amusements provided with showdowns and barfights every day.  The Strangers win every fight.  The missing heir has been arrested for killing a Stranger in a bar fight.   He cannot buy his way out of it and appeals to the detectives for help. There are also romantic, magical subplots.  

Francis Hamit models the Starman book cover shirt, one of the available donor perks.

(3) INTERVIEW WITH CHINA FAN RIVERFLOW. [Item by mlex.] Emad Aysha of the Egyptian Science Fiction Society just posted an interesting interview with RiverFlow, editor of an online SF zine in China, Zero Gravity Newspaper“The Sci-Fi Overflow – From China’s Fanzines and Moviemakers to a World in Waiting” at The Liberum. This provides some more context to fandom in China on the eve of Worldcon Chengdu.

Please introduce yourself.
“My name is RiverFlow. I have been organising the historical materials of Chinese university sci-fi clubs and fanzines, Chinese fandom.

I first came to know the concept of sci-fi writing after reading an introduction article by Baoshu(宝树) in the Chinese literary magazine “Literary Style Appreciation”(《文艺风赏》). In 2019, when I was searching for science and technology information on the official website of “Global Science magazine”(《环球科学》), I inadvertently turned to Liu Cixin’s Ball Lightning(《球状闪电》) and began to create some sci-fi practice works, but only conversational, and I did not write after eight novels.

At that time, I had a severe stomach illness, so I wrote novels and poems to relax my mind, and at that time the pen name was “Running RiverFlow”(奔腾的河流). In May 2020, with the help of Chinese science fiction researcher Sanfeng(三丰), I started to contact the Chinese sci-fi circle, began to organise the historical data of the Chinese sci-fi fan community, and interviewed more than 80 Chinese sci-fi practitioners.

There was no same work in China in the past, and a group of sci-fi fans in “zero gravity”(零重力科幻)who gave me a lot of comfort and support during the process of my illness, so I wanted to do something for them, and I did not expect to do it now. I am an entry member of the “Chinese science fiction database”(中文科幻数据库), so I have been exposed to this article a lot, and the concept of science fiction writers is a little unsympathetic….

(4) MEET EGYPTIAN SF AUTHOR EMAD AYSHA. [Item by Mlex.]  For those interested in SF in the Arab Muslim world and Eqypt, there is also a recent interview that I conducted with Emad Aysha for Diamond Bay Radio:  “Arab and Muslim SF with Emad Aysha”.

An interview with Dr. Emad Aysha, author and member of the Egyptian Society for Science Fiction.

Emad introduces Arab and Muslim Science Fiction: Critical Essays, a major survey of the genre, which he co-edited with Dr. Hosam El-Zembely (McFarland, 2022)

The vast range of this book is stunning. It covers 45 contributors, 29 countries, 4 continents, and many languages. Biographical notes and photos: PDF. Complete publication details.

Emad also describes the popular science fiction and fantastic pulps that crowded the news stands of Egypt in the 1990s, and their main authors, Nabil Farouk and Ahmed Towfik.

Fantasy? Futurism? Dystopia? The science fiction of the greater Arab and Muslim world is a dimension in creativity that is little known in the English speaking world. Join us to find out about the multi-layered cultures, religions, and imaginary altered states that stretch from desert… to mountain… to archipelago.

(5) PITCH IN. Kameron Hurley issued an appeal for help funding her dog’s vet care. (Lovely photo at the link.)

Indy the saint bernard is in a bad way and spouse has covid and we’re flat broke, so if you can spare a couple bucks for the emergency vet on this hell timeline we’d all appreciate it

Transmit funds vis PayPal or venmo Kameron-Hurley.

(6) THE FAITH OF THE EXORCIST. “William Friedkin’s Movie ‘The Exorcist’ Understands Old-Time Catholicism”, an opinion piece in the New York Times by Matthew Walther, editor of The Lamp, a Catholic literary journal.

 It is one of those strange accidents of history that the best film ever made about the Roman Catholic Church was directed by a Jewish agnostic. The career of William Friedkin, who died on Monday at 87, spanned seven decades, but to the end of his life, his best-known picture remained “The Exorcist,” a horror movie from 1973 about a demonically possessed girl whose mother enlists two Catholic priests to save her.

Despite the fact that Mr. Friedkin repeatedly acknowledged the essentially religious nature of the film, “The Exorcist” continues to be regarded, like his other signature movie, “The French Connection,” as a genre picture — a very well-crafted one, to be sure — rather than what it really is: an art film premised on the idea that the claims the Catholic Church makes for itself are true — not in some loose metaphorical sense but literally….

It appears that throughout his life Mr. Friedkin remained interested in demonic possession. In his old age he befriended Father Gabriele Amorth, a priest who served for many years as an exorcist in the Diocese of Rome and who allowed Mr. Friedkin to film an actual exorcism. In an interview in 2018, Mr. Friedkin was asked about his own religious beliefs. “I don’t know anything,” he said, “but neither does anyone else. No one knows anything about the eternal mysteries, how we got here, why we’re here, is there an afterlife. Is there a heaven and a hell? Who knows?”…

(7) SAN FRANCISCO’S DOWNWARD SPIRAL CONTINUES. “Owner giving up 2 big S.F. hotels now expects city’s recovery to take up to 7 years” reports the SF Chronicle. One of them – the Parc 55 – is where I stayed during the 1993 Worldcon.

Park Hotels & Resorts gave up two of the biggest hotels in San Francisco in a “difficult but necessary decision” that reflected a plunge in bookings and a pandemic recovery expected to take far longer than expected.

In an earnings call Thursday, CEO Thomas Baltimore elaborated on June’s announcement that the company would stop mortgage payments on a $725 million loan due in November for the 1,024-room Parc 55 and 1,921-room Hilton San Francisco Union Square, the city’s largest hotel.

…Park Hotels joins an exodus of investors and retailers from the hard-hit Powell Street and Union Square area, a critical tourism district and shopping hub. Westfield is giving up its namesake mall two blocks from Parc 55, where Nordstrom is preparing to close its store at the end of the month after 35 years in business. Saks Off Fifth and Old Navy have also shuttered within a block. Still, some luxury retailers are expanding in the area.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 12, 1894 Dick Calkins. He’s best remembered for being the first artist to draw the Buck Rogers comic strip. He also wrote scripts for the Buck Rogers radio program. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, The Complete Newspaper Dailies in three volumes on Hermes Press collects these strips. (Died 1962.)
  • Born August 12, 1881 Cecil B. DeMille. Yes, you think of him for such films as Cleopatra and The Ten Commandments, but he actually did some important work in our genre. When Worlds Collide and War of The Worlds were films which he executive produced. (Died 1959.)
  • Born August 12, 1921 Matt Jefferies.He’s best known for his work on the original Trek where he designed much of the sets and props including the Starship Enterprise, the Klingon logo, and the bridge and sick bay. The Jefferies tubes are named after him. (Died 2003.)
  • Born August 12, 1931 William Goldman. Writer of The Princess Bride which he adapted for the film. Wrote the original Stepford Wives script and King’s Hearts in Atlantis and Misery as well. He was hired to adapt “Flowers for Algernon” as a screenplay but the story goes that Cliff Robertson intensely disliked his screenplay and it was discarded for one by Stirling Silliphant that became Charly. Not genre at all, but he won an Academy Award for his Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid screenplay. (Died 2018.)
  • Born August 12, 1947 John Nathan-Turner. He produced Doctor Who from 1980 until it was cancelled in 1989. He finished having become the longest-serving Doctor Who producer and cast Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy as the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors. Other than Who, he had a single production credit, the K-9 and Company: A Girl’s Best Friend film. He wrote two books, Doctor Who – The TARDIS Inside Out and Doctor Who: The Companions. He would die of a massive infection just a year before the announcement the show was being revived. (Died 2002.)
  • Born August 12, 1957 Elaine Cunningham, 66. She’s best known for her work on Dungeons & Dragons, creating the campaign setting of Forgotten Realms, including the realms of EvermeetHalruaa, Ruathym and Waterdeep. She’s also wrote The Changeling Detective Agency series as well as a Star Wars novel, Dark Journey.
  • Born August 12, 1960 Brenda Cooper, 63. Best known for her YA Silver Ship series of which The Silver Ship and the Sea won an Endeavour Award, and her Edge of Dark novel won another such Award. She co-authored Building Harlequin’s Moon with Larry Niven, and a fair amount of short fiction with him. She has a lot of short fiction, much collected in Beyond the WaterFall Door: Stories of the High Hills and Cracking the Sky. She’s well-stocked at the usual suspects.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Tom Gauld delivers a few blood drops of truth from Dracula.

(10) SUPER ORIGINALS. You will believe a man can fly – if he’s thrown by another pro wrestler. Literary Hub’s Paul Martin takes a long look back “On the Men Who Lent Their Bodies (and Voices) to the Earliest Iterations of Superman”.

On a Friday night in May 1942, the Shadowland Ballroom in St. Joseph, Michigan, hosted a match between Karol Krauser, a Polish wrestler, and Gorilla Grubmyer. Grubmyer was an ugly man with cauliflower ears, and he had a habit of eye-gouging. Krauser was, as the local paper noted a few weeks before, “the poor girls’ Robert Taylor in a G-string”—in other words, a gentleman-hero. “Karol is a champion, and wrestles like one. He refuses to stick his tongue out at the referee, won’t bite very hard, and deplores amateur histrionics.” He was also the model for Superman.

 To be more specific, he was the model for the version of Superman that appeared in a series of cartoons made by the Fleischer Studios in Miami. It’s not clear when he posed for the studio team, but it was probably during the previous summer, when he was performing in matches at the city’s Tuttle Arena, one of them a battle royale in which he and eight other wrestlers hurled each other at a 500-pound black bear….

(11) KGB. Ellen Datlow has posted her photos from the August 9 Fantastic Fiction at KGB where C.S.E. Cooney and Steve Berman graced the audience reading their work.

(12) CRUNCHY BITS. “Nevada’s Extraterrestrial Highway Is Full of Earthly Wonders, Too” promises Atlas Obscura.

Driving Through an Interstellar Impact Event

Leif Tapanila, paleontologist and director of the Idaho Museum of Natural History, has spent years studying the area’s desert, craggy hills, and mountain peaks of tan and brown. He can read the rocks like the pages of a tattered novel, and says visitors driving the Extraterrestrial Highway looking for evidence of alien invaders are surrounded by it—only they’re about 380 million years too late.

The best place to see evidence of what Nevada was like during this period is about 13 miles west of the town of Crystal Springs, where an unmarked turnoff takes you about a quarter-mile to the base of a wedge-shaped hill. Here, tilted layers of pale limestone are interrupted by a thicker gray section, the telltale pattern of a marine environment disrupted by a catastrophic event.

“The whole area was a shallow sea. It would have looked like the Bahamas, warm and tropical with all sorts of underwater life,” says Tapanila. In an instant, a space rock estimated to be at least a mile wide slammed into the teeming waters of Nevada’s Devonian Period. The massive meteor strike sent shockwaves across the sea, creating megatsunamis as tall as 1,000 feet. Geologists estimate that the monstrous waves carried debris across 1,500 square miles, an expanse nearly the size of Rhode Island.

The destructive event, known as the Alamo Impact, scattered countless organisms and tons of sediment. The rocks along Route 375 contain fossilized sponges, corals, fish, and a cement-like rock conglomerate known as breccia that formed from the heat of the impact. …

VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George (both of them) bring us “Secret Invasion Pitch Meeting”.

Disney and Marvel Studios have been absolutely churning out content in the past few years with a ton of shows hitting their streaming service Disney+. Secret Invasion has come out after a deluge of other superhero shows and people seem to be… tired of this? Secret Invasion definitely raises some questions. Like why didn’t the show play more with the mystery of who is a Skrull and who isn’t? Why doesn’t Nick Fury call the Avengers? If this fight is so personal, why doesn’t he actually fight it? How are all the powers in the final fight even being used? To answer all these questions, check out the pitch meeting that led to Secret Invasion!

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, mlex, Chuck Serface, Steven French, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day jayn.]

Pixel Scroll 5/1/23 And If I Scroll Today, I’ll Be A Happy Pixel

(1) CLARKESWORLD UNCOVERED. Neil Clarke told Facebook readers about an exasperating discovery that they had violated their no-AI policy, and what he was going to do about it.

Much to our embarrassment, evidence suggesting that our most recent cover was generated art rather than the artist’s own work has surfaced. We have removed the cover from our site while we make a final assessment. Our contracts include a clause where the artist verifies that the work is entirely their own, created by them, and without the assistance of AI tools. They signed this contract.

We apologize for this mess and stand firmly on our no-AI policy. We will learn from this and do better.

In the event that we determine the work is generated, it will be replaced. In the meantime:

(2) YOU MAY ALREADY HAVE WON. Or not. The deadline to nominate for the Hugos arrived last night, and Cora Buhlert has updated her advice in “An Open Letter to the 2023 Hugo Finalists, Whoever They May Be”.

7. Once the Hugo finalists have been announced, there will be people who have opinions about the ballot. Most will be positive or at least fair – I always try to be fair in my own Hugo and Nebula finalist commentaries, even if I don’t care for some of the finalists – but some will be not. There are always people who think that your category or the entire ballot is too male, not male enough, too white, not white enough, too queer, not queer enough, too American, not American enough, too bestselling, not bestselling enough – you get the idea. There will be people who complain that only people no one knows got nominated or that only the usual suspects got nominated – and multiple bestsellers and Hugo winners can be “people no one knows”, while first or second time finalists can be “the usual suspects”. Some of these people won’t even wait 24 hours after the Hugo finalists have been announced to air their opinions – at least they didn’t in 2021. Some will even tag you, just to make sure you don’t miss their very important opinions. The best thing to do is ignore those people.

(3) CELEBRITY IMPERSONATORS. Alina Adams’ guest post for Writer Beware is about “The Book Marketing Scam That Went the Extra Mile”. The scammers she dealt with didn’t merely gin up fake client endorsements from Joe Blow – they faked one from Piranesi author Susanna Clarke!

…My research did turn up a NYT feature article on Martha. But when I reached out to the author who wrote it, she told me: “I’ve never even heard of [them]. You’re absolutely right — coverage in the Times cannot be bought, and everything must be approved by an editor.”

When confronted with this fact, my friendly neighborhood scam artist got a little testy:

“We directly worked with Martha T. You should confirm from her. Yes we sent the order for an article for Martha to be published in that.”

Likely sensing that I was wriggling off the hook, they sent me the contact info of another author they claim to have worked with, Susanna Clarke. She’s even featured on their website, with a testimonial that reads like it was created by a self-published author rather than a writer with a Big 5 publisher whose debut novel sold 4 million copies…

(4) WHO’D HAVE GUESSED? Alva Rogers’ cover art (ink on paper) for The Acolyte #9, the Winter 1945 issue of Francis T. Laney’s fanzine (yes, that Laney), has sold at auction for $25,000.

This cover for the pioneering Lovecraft-related science fiction/fantasy fanzine features one of the most striking, early renditions of the author’s most famous creation.

Mike Ward comments, “Yeah, this is the Alva Rogers we used to hang out with. He was a good guy, long gone. Those were some great days.

“That’s probably about 2500 times more than Alva ever got for a drawing. His best-known work is probably the historical volume A Requiem for Astounding from Advent:Publishers.”

(5) MEMORY LANE.

2001[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Jack Williamson’s a genius. He truly is. Living not quite a century, he was an amazing writer selling his first story to Gernsback at age twenty. That story, “The Metal Man” would be published in the December 1928 issue of Amazing. His career would then last another ninety years. He published a novel, The Stonehenge Gate, just a year before he died at home. 

I’ll get to our Beginning in a minute but first let me note what I like among his works. First of course is the Legion of Space series which is well-worth reading, and there is the Starchild trilogy written with Frederik Pohl. Darker Than You Think is weird and really fun.  I love his short stories but I’m really unsure which collection to recommend, so do recommend which ones you think are essential reading.

Our Beginning is from Terraforming Earth, published by Tor twenty-two years ago, and won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. It had started out as several novellas that became a fix-up novel, the first being “Agents of the Moon” in Science Fiction Age, their March 2000 issue which is the image below. The second, “The Ultimate Earth”, was published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact in the December 2000 issue.

Our Beginning starts here…

Terraforming Earth

We are clones. A hundred years have passed since the great impact. All our natural parents lay in the cemetery on the rubble slope outside the crater rim long before the robots brought our frozen cells to life in the maternity lab. I remember the day my Robo father brought the five of us up to see the Earth, a hazy red-spattered ball in the black Moon sky. “It looks—looks sick.” Looking sick herself, Dian raised her face to his. “Is it bleeding?”

“Bleeding red-hot lava all over the land,” he told her. “The rivers all bleeding iron-red rain into the seas.”

“Dead.” Arne made a face. “It looks dead.”

“The impact killed it.” His plastic head nodded. “You were born to bring it back to life.”

“Just us kids?” “

“You’ll grow up.”

“Not me,” Arne muttered. “Do I have to grow up?”

“So what do you want?” Tanya grinned at him. “To stay a snot-nosed kid forever?”

“Please.” My Robo father shrugged in the stiff way robots have, and his lenses swept all five of us, standing around him in the dome. “Your mission is to replant life on Earth. The job may take a lot of time, but you’ll be born and born again till you get it done.”

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born May 1, 1905 Edna Mayne Hull. Wife of A.E. van Vogt. And yes, she too wrote genre fiction. Her initial sale, “The Flight That Failed”, appeared in the November 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction under chosen author credit of “E.M. Hull” though eventually she used her own name. She has but one novel of her own, Planets for Sale, and one with her husband, The Winged Man, and only a dozen stories, one with A.E. Van Vogt & James H. Schmitz. I’m not find that her novels are available at the usual suspects. (Died 1975.)
  • Born May 1, 1924 Terry Southern. Screenwriter and author of greatest interest for the screenplay from Peter George’s original novel, Two Hours to Doom (as by Peter Bryant) of Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb directed (and in part written) by Stanley Kubrick. He was also involved in scripting Barbarella. (Died 1995.)
  • Born May 1, 1952 Andrew Sawyer, 71. Member of fandom who managed the Science Fiction Foundation library in Liverpool for 25 years. For his work and commitment to the SF community, the Science Fiction Research Association awarded him their Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service. The paper he wrote that I want to get and read is “The Shadows out of Time: H. P. Lovecraftian Echoes in Babylon 5” as I’ve always thought The Shadows were Lovecraftian!  And his fanpublication list is impressive, editing some or all issues of &Another Earth MatrixPaperback Inferno and Acnestis.
  • Born May 1, 1955 J. R. Pournelle, 68. Some years ago, I got an email from a J. R. Pournelle about an SF novel they wanted Green Man to review. I of course thought it was that Pournelle. No, it was his daughter, Jennifer. And that’s how I came to find out there was a third Motie novel called Outies. It’s much better than The Gripping Hand.
  • Born May 1, 1956 Phil Foglio, 67. Writer, artist, and publisher. Twice winner of the Best Fan Artist Hugo. Foglio co-won with his wife Kaja the first Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story at Anticipation for the absolutely stunning Girl Genius, Volume 8: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones, and the next two in the category at Aussiecon 4 and Renovation. If you haven’t read them, you’re in for treat as they’re quite amazing.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

(8) TARGETED BOOKS. PEN America has released their annual report on books that were challenged or banned in school libraries. The report covers the 2021-2022 school year. Some of the books are works of genre interest, including Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander, and Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House. “2023 Banned Books Update: Banned in the USA”.

The 2022-23 school year has been marked to date by an escalation of book bans and censorship in classrooms and school libraries across the United States. PEN America recorded more book bans during the fall 2022 semester than in each of the prior two semesters. This school year also saw the effects of new state laws that censor ideas and materials in public schools, an extension of the book banning movement initiated in 2021 by local citizens and advocacy groups. Broad efforts to label certain books “harmful” and “explicit” are expanding the type of content suppressed in schools.

Again, and again, the movement to ban books is driven by a vocal minority demanding censorship. At the same time, a 2022 poll found that over 70% of parents oppose book banning. Yet the bans continue. Many public school districts find themselves in a bind. They face threats and political pressure, along with parental fears and anxieties surrounding the books on their school shelves. School Boards, administrators, teachers, and librarians are told in some cases to “err on the side of caution” in the books they make available. Too often, they do just that….

(9) CREATING WITH AI. For those using AI as a tool, Francis Hamit recommends The Copyright Society’s video “Exploring the Impact on Copyrightability When Creating New Works Through AI”. “This webinar is an hour long but well worth watching for anyone who is concerned about the copyrightability of artificial intelligence assisted creative work.” 

(10) SOMEONE HAD TO BE FIRST. Mr. Sci-Fi, Marc Scott Zicree, names his candidate for “The First GREAT Science Fiction Movie!” It’s Metropolis.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Lise Andreasen, Mike Ward, Francis Hamit, Nina Shepardson, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day John A Arkansawyer.]