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Pixel Scroll 4/7/25 That Sound? Either The Music Of The Spheres, Or Of An Infinity Of Pixels

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(1) HUGO VOTE TOTAL UPDATE. Today Hugo Administrator Nicholas Whyte issued a correction. The correct number of total Hugo Award nominating votes is 1,338.

(2) MURDERBOT PRODUCTION NEWS. Martha Wells is posting photos taken by Troyce on the Murderbot set at Bluesky. That’s in addition to the “First Look” photos in the following article which she warns is “spoilery”.

“’Murderbot’ Would Hate You—But That’s Why You’ll Love It” promises Vanity Fair.

… While the title might make the show sound like a hard-edged thriller, it’s more like a workplace comedy about hating what you’re good at. Skarsgård’s character is the unwitting straight man—or rather, straight…thing. (Though it looks like a man, Murderbot prefers the neutral pronoun because it is proud to be an object rather than a person.) It regards the small group of interplanetary scientists it must protect with the same enthusiasm as W.C. Fields babysitting a room full of toddlers. “It just doesn’t get humans at all,” Skarsgård says. “It’s not a deep hatred, it’s just zero amount of curiosity. It’s confused by humans and wants to get away from them.”…

… Murderbot’s devotion to a futuristic TV series called The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon also evokes real people on the spectrum, who can develop a phenomenon called hyperfixation. Murderbot studies the fictional melodrama for cues about how to behave in emotional situations. The show-within-a-show stars John Cho, Jack McBrayer, Clark Gregg, and DeWanda Wise, sporting outrageous hairstyles and costumes that make the stylings of A Flock of Seagulls look like business casual…

(3) SF TITLES PULLED FROM NAVAL ACADEMY LIBRARY. [Item by F. Brett Cox.] The Nimitz Library at the U.S. Naval Academy has removed 381 books in response to the current administration’s policies. The list includes What Are We Fighting For?, nonfiction by Joanna Russ, as well as the following works of contemporary science fiction and fantasy literature: Ryka Aoki, Light from Uncommon Stars; Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built; Mohsin Hamid, The Last White Man; Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland; Neon Yang, The Genesis of Misery. This has been reported in multiple outlets, including CNN, the NY Times, the AP, and CBS News.  Link to full list: “250404-List of Removed Books from Nimitz Library.xlsx” at Defense.gov.

(4) THE YEAR IN LIBRARY BOOK CHALLENGES. “ALA Releases Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2024” reports Publishers Weekly.

The American Library Association kicked off National Library Week 2025 with its annual report on the state of the nation’s libraries, including the top 10 most challenged books of 2024. All Boys Aren’t Blue, George M. Johnson’s YA memoir about growing up Black and queer, surpassed Maia Kobabe’s Gender-Queer, which had topped the list two years in a row, as the most challenged title of last year….

…[The] ALA stressed the new stakes, in a statement: “This year, as library funding is under attack, ALA encourages every library advocate to Show Up for Our Libraries by telling Congress to protect federal support for libraries.”

In its report, the ALA documented 821 attempts to censor materials and services at libraries, schools, and universities in 2024—a notable drop from the 1,247 attempts recorded in 2023. Moreover, the ALA 2,452 unique titles that were challenged or banned last year, marking a decrease from the record-breaking 4,240 titles targeted in 2023.

However, Caldwell-Stone noted that while the trend is a positive one, 2024 still marked “the third-highest number of book challenges recorded by ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom since it began documenting library censorship in 1990.” She added that the data is just one part of the picture.

“Not reflected in these numbers are the relentless attacks on library workers, educators, and community members who stand up to the censors and defend the freedom to read,” Caldwell-Stone wrote. “These attacks are creating an environment of fear in which library workers are afraid to buy books or report censorship.”…

(5) R. E. BURKE PROFILE. British comics creator R. E. Burke is “working on a comic that will tell the story of what happened to her, and the women she shared 19 days with, based on the drawings, notes and official documents she managed to take out of the detention centre. Becky still doesn’t know why she was incarcerated for so long.” “’I was a British tourist trying to leave the US. Then I was detained, shackled and sent to an immigration detention centre’” in the Guardian.

…Workaway warns users that they “will need the correct visa for any country that you visit”, and that it is the user’s responsibility to get one, but it doesn’t stipulate what the correct visa is for the kind of arrangements it facilitates in any given country. Becky had always travelled with a tourist visa in the past – including to the US in 2022 – without any problems. She checked that work visas were only required for paid work in Canada. She had had months to plan her trip, and would have applied for a work visa if it was necessary, she says.

But the Canadian officials told Becky they’d determined she needed a work visa. She could apply for one from the US and come back, they said. Two officers escorted her to the American side of the border. They talked to the US officials. Becky doesn’t know what was said.

After six hours of waiting – and watching dozens of people being refused entry to the US and made to return to Canada – Becky began to feel frightened. Then she was called into an interrogation room, and questioned about what she had been doing during her seven weeks in the US. Had she been paid? Was there a contract? Would she have lost her accommodation if she could no longer provide services? Becky answered no to everything. She was a tourist, she said.

An hour later, Becky was handed a transcript of her interview to sign. She was alone, with no legal advice. “It was really long, loads of pages.” As she flicked through it, she saw the officer had summarised everything she told him about what she had been doing in the US as just “work in exchange for accommodation”. “I remember thinking, I should ask him to edit that.” But the official was impatient and irritable, she says, and she was exhausted and dizzy – she hadn’t eaten all day. “I just thought, if I sign this, I’ll be free. And I didn’t want to stay there any longer.” So she signed.

Then she was told she had violated her tourist visa by working in the US. They took her fingerprints, seized her phone and bags, cut the laces off her trainers, frisked her, and put her in a cell. “I heard the door lock, and I instantly threw up.”

At 11pm, Becky was allowed to call her family. Her father asked what was going to happen next. “I looked at the officer and he said, ‘We’re going to take you to a facility where you’ll wait for your flight. You’ll be there one or two days – just while we get you on the next flight home.’”…

But of course, she wasn’t.

… On her first day in the facility, Becky asked for a scrap of paper and a pen, and began to draw the inmates on the table next to her. She was immediately inundated with portrait requests. A Mexican woman called Lopez, who had a photo of her children stored on one of the iPads, told Becky she would buy her some paper and colouring pencils from the commissary if Becky drew her kids. She soon became the dorm’s unofficial artist-in-residence, with women huddling around the dirty mirrors to make themselves look presentable before they sat for her. They would decorate their cells with Becky’s drawings, or send them to their families. Lopez declared herself Becky’s manager. “She kept saying, ‘Becky, you need to ask for stuff in exchange. Ask for popcorn.’ And I’d be like, ‘Lopez, I don’t need anything.’ I thought, I’m here briefly, you’re stuck here a long time. I’m not going to take your food away from you.”…

… Becky had arrived in the detention centre on a Thursday. She soon realised she would not be out of it before the end of the weekend. No one ever replied to the message she sent to Ice on the iPad; she found out the Ice officer assigned to her case had gone on annual leave. The following Monday, Paul contacted the Foreign Office in London, and the British consulate in San Francisco. “They were doing the diplomatic bit,” he tells me. “But, after seven days, I could see it wasn’t really working. My perception is the British consulate couldn’t get Ice people to respond to them. There was no end in sight.”

After Becky had been incarcerated for more than 10 days, Paul decided to go to the media…

(6) OLIVIER AWARDS 2025. The Guardian names the winners of the awards that celebrate London theatre: “Olivier awards 2025: Giant, Benjamin Button and Fiddler on the Roof triumph”.

…The play Giant, which portrays children’s author Roald Dahl amid an outcry about his antisemitism, has triumphed at the Olivier awards on a star-studded night at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

US star John Lithgow took home the best actor prize for his performance as Dahl, Elliot Levey won best supporting actor (for playing publisher Tom Maschler) and Mark Rosenblatt received the award for best new play.

Giant is Rosenblatt’s debut as a playwright and brought him a double victory at the Critics’ Circle theatre awards in March, where he won for most promising playwright and best new play. Giant ran last year at the Royal Court in London and will transfer to the West End later this month, with Lithgow and Levey resuming their roles.

Lithgow thanked the audience for “welcoming me to England” and said “it’s not always easy when you welcome an American into your midst”, highlighting that this moment was “more complicated than usual” for relations between the US and the UK….

(7) REMEMBERING THE INKLINGS. Brenton Dickieson revisits “The First Meeting of the Inklings, with George Sayer” at A Pilgrim in Narnia.

I wrote last week about all the literary groups that formed some of the greatest writers of the 20th century, and how L.M. Montgomery was alone. One of those was the Inklings, which made C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien into the writers that they were. Without the daring possibilities in Tolkien’s work and the intelligent conversation of the Inklings, Lewis may never have turned to popular fiction and cultural criticism. Without Lewis’ persistent support and criticism and the company of other mythopoeic writers, Tolkien may never have completed that grand project of turning his mythology into popular story, lyric, and epic. I don’t think that the Inklings were more important to English literature than the Paris Expats or the Bloomsbury Set or the Detection Club, but in terms of the development of fantasy literature, the Inklings created new worlds.

Dickieson quotes from George Sayer’s Jack: C.S. Lewis and His Times (1988; 1994; 2005). 

…I don’t know if Sayer ever attended an official Inklings event, but his description of how the Inklings emerged and what happened there is a great introduction both to this Oxford literary circle and to Sayer’s biography.

“For years no regular event delighted Jack more than the Thursday evening meetings of the little group of friends called the Inklings. His was the second group to use this name. Its predecessor was founded in about 1930 by a University College undergraduate named Tangye Lean. Members met in each other’s rooms to read aloud their poems and other work. There would be discussion, criticism, encouragement, and frivolity, all washed down with wine or beer. Lean’s group consisted mainly of students, but a few sympathetic dons were invited to join, including Tolkien and Jack, who may have been Lean’s tutor. Lean graduated in June 1933, and that autumn Jack first used the name the Inklings to describe the group that had already begun to meet in his rooms.

“It was always utterly informal. There were no rules, no officers, and certainly no agenda. To become a member, one had to be invited, usually by Jack. Nearly all members were his friends….

“…The ritual never varied. When most of the expected members had arrived (and maybe only three or four would come), Warren would brew a pot of strong tea, the smokers would light their pipes, and Jack would say, ‘Well, has nobody got anything to read us?’ …”

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Quark series (1978)

Forty-six years ago, a series called Quark aired as mid-season replacement on NBC. It surprised me that it only lasted eight episodes as I swear, I remember it lasting longer than that, then I often think that of series such as the Space Rangers which lasted six episodes and Nightmare Cafe which, oh guess, lasted six episodes as well. Surely, they lasted longer, didn’t they? 

It was created by Buck Henry, co-creator along with Mel Brooks of Get Smart. It was co-produced by David Gerber who had been responsible for the series version of The Ghost & Mrs. Muir (try not to hold that against him) and Mace Neufield who after being a talent agent for such acts as The Captain and Tennille and became responsible for The Omen as its producer. That film is effing scary.

(I tried rewatching Get Smart! a few years ago. Unlike The Man from U.N.C.L.E which held very splendidly when we watched it again, Get Smart! caused the Suck Fairy to visibly cringe when we watched it. I just thought it was bad, really bad.)

The cast was Richard Benjamin, Tim Thomerson Richard Kelton, Cyb and Tricia Barnstable, Conrad Janis, Alan Caillou and Bobby Porter. The Barnstable twins got a lot of press, mostly for the fact that they didn’t wear much by the standards of the day and really, really could not act. They previously appeared as the Doublemint Twins often with identical canines. I kid you not. 

Interesting note: they still live in their hometown of Louisville, Kentucky and are the hostesses of the annual Kentucky Derby Eve party which they founded in 1989. There were no Kentucky Derby parties before that as Tricia notes here, “It was astonishing that there really weren’t any celebrations at that time in Louisville,” Tricia says. “We started with about 500 people. We invited James Garner. Dixie Carter. Lots of stars. And they came!” The party which now draws thousands is a fundraiser for diabetes research as the maternal side has a history of that disease. 

Ok, so how is the reception? Oh, you have to ask? Seriously? One reviewer summed it up this way: “Only lasting eight episodes, it is eight episodes too many. The idea of spoofing science fiction is a given and there are only a handful that get it right, but this is a spectacularly awful show.” 

And another said succinctly that “A viewer seeking something a little different may find the series entertaining, but low expectations are a must.” 

Doesn’t most television SF comedy require low expectations? Most I said, not all.

It has no rating at Rotten Tomatoes. It might be streaming on Crackle and Philo, two services that I’ve never heard of. It might not be. Telling what is there is almost impossible as the major streaming tracking services don’t bother such services.

Yes, there are full episodes on YouTube. As it is very much still under copyright, those are definitely bootleg, so not provide links to them as they will be removed. As the Board Chair in Robocop 2 said, “Gentlemen, behave yourselves!”

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) JMS’ NEXT SPIDER-MAN. This July, writer J. Michael Straczynski closes out his series of “unlikely duo one-shots” with Spider-Man Vs. The Sinister Sixteen, featuring art by Phil Noto. For more information, visit Marvel.com.

 Over the last few months, prolific writer J. Michael Straczynski has been spotlighting unlikely character pairings in a series of action packed one-shots. These timeless and standalone stories have co-starred two Marvel icons of Straczynski’s choosing—either in unexpected team-ups or thrilling showdowns—from Doctor Doom & Rocket Raccoon to Nick Fury Vs. Fin Fang Foom. This July, Straczynski closes out the series with a collision course of heroes and villains from every corner of the Marvel Universe in SPIDER-MAN VS. THE SINISTER SIXTEEN #1.

…On what inspired the tale, Straczynski explained, “One of the most common tropes in the super hero world is that of the amount of destruction that comes when heroes and villains lock horns. We all accept that it just happens. This led to thinking: What if the owner of a popular restaurant has run it into the ground and needs the place to be destroyed for the insurance money, and invites a ton of heroes and villains to dine all at the same time in the hope that a fight breaks out? What if initially everyone tries to stay calm to enjoy the experience, but sooner or later, with that roster…the storm comes.”

(11) DIRE STRAITS. “’Game of Thrones’ Dire Wolves Return in De-Extinction Breakthrough” – The Hollywood Reporter mashes up science and show-biz insights.

Immortalized in Game of Thrones and on the crest of House Stark, the dire wolf is walking the Earth again and even howling after going extinct nearly 10,000 years ago.

As announced today by genetic engineering company Colossal Biosciences, the long-extinct canine — or at least a very close approximation of it — has been successfully brought back to life. The process was accomplished via DNA extracted from two fossils as well as 20 edits of the genetic code of a gray wolf, the species’ closest living relative, according to research carried out by Colossal, sometimes known as the De-Extinction Company.

Colossal says it has whelped three dire wolves and — using CRISPR technology — decided to select fluffy white fur for their coats, based on its new analysis that the original species had snow-colored fur. (A previous study, published in Nature in 2021, found evidence that dire wolves were not closely related to gray wolves.)

The Colossal company has named its two new male dire wolves — a pair of six-month old adolescents — Romulus and Remus, after the mythological twin founders of Rome, who were said to have been raised by a wolf. And in an homage to Game of Thrones’ Daenerys Targaryen, it’s christened a female puppy Khaleesi.

The trio are now living in an enclosed preserve of more than 2,000 acres at an undisclosed location. They are expected to mature at 130 to 150 pounds — by contrast, a typical gray wolf clocks in at about 80 to 100 pounds.

 “Our team took DNA from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull and made healthy dire wolf puppies,” says Colossal CEO and co-founder Ben Lamm in a statement. “It was once said, ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Today, our team gets to unveil some of the magic they are working on and its broader impact on conservation.”…

… Colossal reached out to [George R.R.] Martin after it started work on its dire wolf de-extinction project. Not only did he sign on as a Colossal Biosciences cultural adviser and investor, Martin also flew to meet Romulus and Remus at their private preserve (which Colossal says has been certified by the American Humane Society).

Says Martin, in a statement, “Many people view dire wolves as mythical creatures that only exist in a fantasy world, but in reality, they have a rich history of contributing to the American ecosystem.”

While many fans of Game of Thrones likely think that dire wolves as fantasy beasts, they are in fact an actual animal that lived in the Americas and likely went extinct due to the disappearance of the large herbivores on which they preyed. At L.A.’s famed La Brea Tar Pits, fossil remains from more than 3,600 dire wolves have been discovered and the adjacent museum devotes an entire wall to displaying around 400 dire wolf skulls….

(12) FUSION IN SPAAAAACE, [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] Actually, this makes *perfect* sense. In my novels, before we discover complete conversion, this is how we get around the solar system.

There will, of course, be idiots against it, I mean, let’s ignore the humongous fusion reactor in the middle of the solar system… “Nuclear-powered rocket concept could cut journey time to Mars in half” at CNN.

… With funding from the UK Space Agency, British startup Pulsar Fusion has unveiled Sunbird, a space rocket concept designed to meet spacecraft in orbit, attach to them, and carry them to their destination at breakneck speed using nuclear fusion.

“It’s very unnatural to do fusion on Earth,” says Richard Dinan, founder and CEO of Pulsar. “Fusion doesn’t want to work in an atmosphere. Space is a far more logical, sensible place to do fusion, because that’s where it wants to happen anyway.”

For now, Sunbird is in the very early stages of construction and it has exceptional engineering challenges to overcome, but Pulsar says it hopes to achieve fusion in orbit for the first time in 2027. If the rocket ever becomes operational, it could one day cut the journey time of a potential mission to Mars in half….

(13) CUDDLY KEN PASSED 30 YEARS AGO THIS MONTH, [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Kenny Everett, one of Britain’s all-time top two disc jockey’s, died 30 years ago this month.  In addition to radio, he was known for The Kenny Everett TV Show: it was all in the best possible taste.. His humour was decidedly wacky and occasionally SF-adjacent if not, as with Captain Kremmen full-blown Sci-Fi.  And so…

Front shields on. Krill tray in position. Booster one. Booster two. Booster three. My mission, to camply go where no hand has set foot, to explore new vistas, quash new monsters and make space a safe place for the human race…  Yes, he’s so hunky… Muscles of steel, legs like a gazelle, thighs like tug boats, x-ray eyes, bionic blood, bulging biceps, a lock of tousled hair falling over a bronzed forehead, saviour of the Universe… Cue the music…

[Thanks to Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, F. Brett Cox, Lis Carey, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 1/23/25 Scrolls On Fire Off The Shoulder Of Orion

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(1) NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS. There seem to be only a couple works of genre interest among the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Finalists. Put the lists under your microscope, maybe you’ll find some more.

Fiction

  • Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The triumphant latest from Bertino (Parakeet) offers a wryly comic critique of social conventions from the perspective of a woman who also happens to be an alien from another planet. Adina, born in 1977 Philadelphia to an indefatigable and supportive “Earth mother,” is “activated” at age four by her extraterrestrial “superiors.” Her mission is ­to “report on the human experience” to her bosses on Planet Cricket Rice. They teach her to read and write in English before she starts school, and in one of her early communiques, she expresses a precocious insight into adult psychology after a store clerk is rude to her mother (“Human beings don’t like when other humans seem happy”)…. 

Nonfiction

  • Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham (Avid Reader)

(2) THIS TIME. We know what Frodo said. And what Gandalf said: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” Here’s what Kameron Hurley says: “Adrift on the Sea of History: Hope for Realists”.

…I’ve already done that emotional work, and lost years of my life to rolling around coming to grips with the reality of where exactly I was in history. That’s not to say I didn’t have hope this year! I did! Life is chaos! We could have gone full FDR. But I was fully prepared for how wind was blowing. Even a win meant just papering bandaids over wound getting larger and larger.

I compared last 10 years to being Hodor at the door, just being crushed by weight of the mad army while horrors slipped through. Now door is open. And honestly? It was almost a relief. Because I could stop worrying about it and papering over it and just turn and face it. This is the current world.

The truth is, my grandma got up every day in Vichy France and stood in rationing lines. She found a Nazi boot with a foot still in it by the river and threw it back in because if SS found it, they’d shoot 10 people. My great-grandfather was disappeared for months by the SS and came back broken.

She would often show us the scar on her head from when an Allied and Nazi plane were shooting above her and a bullet grazed her temple and landed in the shed behind her. She kept the bullet! It was chaos and near misses and misery and death and you survived on luck. But you got up every day.

*You got up every day.* Because truth is – no matter what anyone tells you – no one has any idea what’s going to happen or who is going to make it or what world will look like in 30 years. And in meantime, all you have NOW is this one great and glorious life. You get to decide how to spend this time….

(3) ROUGHEST QUIZ EVER? The New York Times, in “When A.I. Passes This Test, Look Out” (behind a paywall) discusses “Humanity’s Last Exam”.

…For years, A.I. systems were measured by giving new models a variety of standardized benchmark tests. Many of these tests consisted of challenging, S.A.T.-caliber problems in areas like math, science and logic. Comparing the models’ scores over time served as a rough measure of A.I. progress.

But A.I. systems eventually got too good at those tests, so new, harder tests were created — often with the types of questions graduate students might encounter on their exams.

Those tests aren’t in good shape, either. New models from companies like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic have been getting high scores on many Ph.D.-level challenges, limiting those tests’ usefulness and leading to a chilling question: Are A.I. systems getting too smart for us to measure?

This week, researchers at the Center for AI Safety and Scale AI are releasing a possible answer to that question: A new evaluation, called “Humanity’s Last Exam,” that they claim is the hardest test ever administered to A.I. systems.

Humanity’s Last Exam is the brainchild of Dan Hendrycks, a well-known A.I. safety researcher and director of the Center for AI Safety. (The test’s original name, “Humanity’s Last Stand,” was discarded for being overly dramatic.)…

At the Humanity’s Last Exam website they explain further:

Benchmarks are important tools for tracking the rapid advancements in large language model (LLM) capabilities. However, benchmarks are not keeping pace in difficulty: LLMs now achieve over 90% accuracy on popular benchmarks like MMLU, limiting informed measurement of state-of-the-art LLM capabilities. In response, we introduce Humanity’s Last Exam, a multi-modal benchmark at the frontier of human knowledge, designed to be the final closed-ended academic benchmark of its kind with broad subject coverage. The dataset consists of 3,000 challenging questions across over a hundred subjects. We publicly release these questions, while maintaining a private test set of held out questions to assess model overfitting.

Humanity’s Last Exam (HLE) is a global collaborative effort, with questions from nearly 1,000 subject expert contributors affiliated with over 500 institutions across 50 countries – comprised mostly of professors, researchers, and graduate degree holders.

Here’s an example question. (Dang, the answer is right on the tip of my tongue!)

(4) SATURN HONORS ANNOUNCED. “Saturn Awards: William Shatner, ‘Back to the Future’ Receive Honors” says Variety. The awards ceremony will livestream on February 4.

William Shatner and the “Back to the Future” cast are some of the honorees that will be recognized at the 52nd Saturn Awards, which will incorporate fundraising for California wildfire relief efforts.

The awards, hosted by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, take place Feb. 2 at the Hilton Los Angeles/Universal City hotel. The ceremony will include QR codes that will allow both in-person attendees and viewers at home to donate. Viewers can watch the ceremony for free on ElectricNow and Roku Channel….

…Shatner, who played Captain Kirk in the “Stark Trek” franchise, will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award. “Back to the Future” will be honored for its 40th anniversary through the George Pal Memorial Award, which recognizes achievement in specific genres. Actors Christopher Lloyd and Lea Thompson, composer Alan Silvestri and writer and producer Bob Gale, will be the film’s representatives….

…The Spotlight Award, which the Academy gives to standout works, will go to the stars and team behind “Fallout.” …

(5) BIG DEALS. Without requiring a time machine to do it, Kali Wallace takes us back to 2004 in “Primer: A Film for People Who Would Use Time Travel for Day Trading” at Reactor. It’s a fascinating study of filmmaking with plenty of entertaining clips. Here’s a brief quote.

…Primer is about two corporate tech bros who hate their jobs and accidentally invent a time machine. Aaron (Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan) are working with some friends of theirs to invent a device that will make them a lot of money. They do the work in Aaron’s garage, using parts they steal from their day jobs or scavenge from cars and household appliances. What they are aiming for is a sort of superconductor-adjacent device for reducing the weight of objects, but at some point Abe notices that the machine actually creates a time loop. He tells Aaron, and the two immediately decide to use it to accomplish their original goal: making a lot of money.

There is something grimly hilarious about this and what it says about the characters. They don’t care that they don’t understand the machine they’ve built; they’re more concerned about the number of stock shares they trade while time traveling. They try very hard to ignore signs that time travel is giving them brain damage—bleeding from their ears, developing tremors so severe they can’t write—and focus instead on how they will steal their own passports to leave the country. They’ve created something strange and incredible, and they devote a lot of time and effort to working out the fiddly details of how to make the time loops work, but they have very little broader curiosity or awe about what they are doing….

(6) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

January 23, 1947 — The Lady in The Lake film

Seventy-eight years ago today in New York City, the Lady in The Lake film opened. Based on the Raymond Chandler novel of the same name, it was the directing debut of Robert Montgomery who also played Phillip Marlowe here. The rest of the cast is Audrey Totter, Lloyd Nolan, Tom Tully, Leon Ames and Jayne Meadows. 

It was just Meadows second film.  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer signed Jane Cotter to a movie contract in 1944 giving her this professional name. Her first film was Undercurrents, a film noir affair.

Steve Fisher, a pulp writer, who published in far too many pulps to list here but I’ll note that wrote some of The Shadow stories, wrote the screenplay. His most significant stories, however, would be published in Black Mask.

Montgomery’s desire was to recreate the first-person narrative style of the Marlowe novels. As the film is up legitimately on YouTube as part of their film series, you can judge yourself if he succeeded in that. 

So how was the reception? Well critics didn’t like it. Really they didn’t it at all. As BBC critic George Perry much later put it: “This is the only mainstream feature ever to have been shot in its entirety with the subjective camera. Which means that you, the viewer, sees everything just as the hero Philip Marlowe does. Every so often the camera pauses by a mirror and looking at you in the reflection is Robert Montgomery, who also directed, for it is he who is playing Marlowe.” And I think that’s reflected in the audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes who give an ambivalent rating of fifty percent. I think it’s still worthwhile as it is Marlowe after all.

He would play Marlowe once more in Robert Montgomery Presents The Big Sleep, an hour-long version of that novel that aired on September 25th, 1950.  Robert Montgomery Presents ran for eight seasons. As near as I can tell it is not up to be viewed. If you can find a copy that is in the public domain, note that provision, please give a link. 

(7) COMICS SECTION.

  • Carpe Diem is still perfecting the disguise.
  • Lio decides to help.
  • Rubes finds a bargain for Kermit.
  • Tom Gauld goes with the simpler answer.

A timely cartoon for @newscientist.bsky.social

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2025-01-22T18:13:41.976Z

(8) MORENO-GARCIA BOOK TO TV. “Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Novel ‘The Daughter of Doctor Moreau’ To Be Adapted For TV” – and the author will be one of the executive producers. Deadline has details.

Debra Moore Muñoz  (Mayans M.C., DMZ) is developing Silvia Moreno-Garcia ’s 2022 novel The Daughter of Doctor Moreau for television from UCP, a division of Universal Studio Group, Atomic Monster and Telemundo Studios.

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau is a retelling of the classic Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells from the perspective of his coming-of-age daughter, Carlota — a sheltered girl raised to believe her father is a genius. When the charming son of Moreau’s patron, Eduardo, arrives at their estate, he threatens to upend the long-simmering feelings between Carlota and the estate’s overseer, Montgomery Laughton, and causes Carlota to question everything she’s been told — forcing her to reckon with some dark truths about her father and his work. 

“The Daughter of Doctor Moreau is a mixture of science fiction, historical fiction and drama set in lush, 19th century Yucatan, and I’m excited to see this part of Mexico come to life on the screen in all its beauty and complexity,” Moreno-Garcia shared in a statement.

The Spanish/English project is executive produced by Moreno-Garcia, Moore Muñoz, and James Wan, Michael Clear and Rob Hackett for Atomic Monster….

(9) ASIMOV ROBOT MOVIE COMING. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel elaborates on reports that “Oscar winner John Ridley is adapting Isaac Asimov’s ‘Caves of Steel’”.

…Deadline.com reported Tuesday that Ridley, who won an Academy Award for his screenplay for 2013’s “12 Years a Slave,” is adapting Isaac Asimov’s 1954 science-fiction novel “The Caves of Steel,” with plans to direct the feature film as well for Twentieth Century Studios.

According to Deadline, Ridley wrote a recent draft of the screenplay with “Luke Cage” creator Cheo Hodari Coker.

The first novel in sci-fi master Asimov’s “Robot” series, “Caves of Steel” is set in a future world where humanity lives in huge domed cities to protect themselves from what’s in the outside world. There, a police detective reluctantly joins forces with a humanoid robot to solve the murder of a scientist who’s descended from humans who have colonized other planets — a case that reveals the clash between factions in society that resent and support robots and their role.

…Ridley’s last feature film to make it to theaters was “Needle in a Timestack,” a 2021 time-travel thriller set in a near future where people can travel to their past and alter their present. He’s also contributed to a slew of comic books and graphic novels, including “Future State: The Next Batman” and “The Other History of the DC Universe.”…

(10) ATTENTION GETTERS. History Facts is getting its clicks today by reminding us about “The Strangest Fads Throughout History”. One was “phone booth stuffing” – and those booths definitely weren’t bigger on the inside. Here’s another I haven’t thought about for a long time:

The Pet Rock

The Pet Rock seems, on its surface, like the most frivolous fad on record. This simple Mexican beach stone was sold in a box (with air holes!) that included a satirical-sounding manual with instructions on what to do if the rock “appears to be excited.” Created by California advertising professional Gary Dahl in August 1975, the rock was an instant hit as a fuss-free pet….

(11) PURSUING THE POLE. CNN tells us, “Earth’s magnetic north pole is on the move, and scientists just updated its position”. (OMG, it’s headed for Russia!. What happens when it gets there? Will the Russians keep the rest of us from using it? That and other dumb questions today on File 770…)

If you are using your smartphone to navigate, your system just got a crucial update. Scientists have released a new model tracking the position of the magnetic north pole, revealing that the pole is now closer to Siberia than it was five years ago and is continuing to drift toward Russia.

Unlike the geographic North Pole, which marks a fixed location, the magnetic north pole’s position is determined by Earth’s magnetic field, which is in constant motion. Over the past few decades, magnetic north’s movement has been unprecedented — it dramatically sped up, then in a more recent twist rapidly slowed — though scientists can’t explain the underlying cause behind the magnetic field’s unusual behavior.

Global positioning systems, including those used by planes and ships, find magnetic north using the World Magnetic Model, as it was named in 1990. Developed by the British Geological Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, this model notes the established position of magnetic north and predicts future drift based on the trajectory of the past few years. To preserve the accuracy of GPS measurements, every five years researchers revise the WMM, resetting the official position of magnetic north and introducing new predictions for the next five years of drifting….

(12) FUSION RECORD. “China’s ‘artificial sun’ shatters nuclear fusion record by generating steady loop of plasma for 1,000 seconds” reports LiveScience.

…Nuclear fusion offers the potential of a near-unlimited power source without greenhouse gas emissions or much nuclear waste. However, scientists have been working on this technology for more than 70 years, and it’s likely not progressing fast enough to be a practical solution to the climate crisis. Researchers expect us to have fusion power within decades, but it could take much longer.

EAST’s new record won’t immediately usher in what is dubbed the “Holy Grail” of clean power, but it is a step towards a possible future where fusion power plants generate electricity.

East is a magnetic confinement reactor, or tokamak, designed to keep the plasma continuously burning for prolonged periods. Reactors like this have never achieved ignition, which is the point at which nuclear fusion creates its own energy and sustains its own reaction, but the new record is a step towards maintaining prolonged, confined plasma loops that future reactors will need to generate electricity.

“A fusion device must achieve stable operation at high efficiency for thousands of seconds to enable the self-sustaining circulation of plasma, which is critical for the continuous power generation of future fusion plants,” Song Yuntao, director of the Institute of Plasma Physics responsible for the fusion project at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Chinese state media.

EAST is one of several nuclear fusion reactors worldwide, but they all currently use far more energy than they produce….

(13) WORST CASE SCENARIO. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] They say it is a good thing to kill two birds with one stone.  Well, back in the day there was one stone that killed countless bird ancestors, and their cousin family of species, the dinosaurs.  That was an asteroid strike some 66 million years ago, on a Tuesday, around tea time. That event used to be known as the K/T extinction with K/T being Cretaceous/Tertiary.  But then the youngsters came alone, and we had decimalisation which among other things in new money K/T became K/Pg (Cretaceous/Palaeogene) extinction… (A change in nomenclature which to my mind is as bad as Worldcon organisers failing to follow the WSFS constitution…)  Anyway, as said, that event wiped out the dinosaurs. (I don’t know if I have ever told you, but I have never really forgiven the dinosaurs for what they did to Raquel Welch…)

OK, so here’s the thing. Could you have survived the K/T (K/Pg) event?  This is the question the wonderful folk over at PBS Eons have asked.

66 million years ago, an asteroid hit our planet triggering global wildfires, an impact winter, and the end of the Age of Dinosaurs. Could you make it through the darkest days of planet Earth?

(14) TENTACLES EVERYWHERE. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert invites the President to switch to “The Cult Of Cthulhu”.

In this cult we do not answer to bureaucrats in Washington.

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