(1) SOLVING FOR UNKNOWNS. Alec Nevala-Lee is editing a new bimonthly puzzle feature for Analog, called “Unknowns,” that will run original puzzles in every issue of the magazine. The inaugural installment features contributions from veteran puzzle constructors Scott Kim and Patrick Berry. Future issues will include crosswords, picture puzzles, math puzzles, and more. As Nevala-Lee writes in an editor’s note:
“If you’re a fan of Analog, there’s a good chance that you also like puzzles. At its best, hard science fiction—which often hinges on a clever idea that still plays by the rules of physics—appeals to the same part of the brain. With that in mind, we’re introducing a new feature, ‘Unknowns,’ that will offer a unique puzzle in every issue. (Our model is the puzzle column that the legendary Martin Gardner wrote for our sister magazine, Asimov’s Science Fiction, from 1977 through 1986.)”
(2) FATE OF THE SCIENCE FICTION BOOK CLUB? The Science Fiction Book Club (owned by Bookspan), has put up this notice:
“Tell me that 50 years of finding new SF every month is not coming to an end,” pleads Maria Markham Thompson, CPA, Treasurer of the Baltimore Science Fiction Society. “Some of my best months, back under Doubleday, were when I didn’t send a reply and a book I hadn’t ordered introduced a new author. This is a sad day in fandom. Please find out what has happened. What is happening?”
Unfortunately, File 770 isn’t been able to answer Maria’s question. Perhaps one of our readers knows more?
Thompson says, “I went on the site, where it’s business as usual to sign up new members, and read the agreement – my best guess is that my back credits will die, so all I can do is just get busy ordering books. Someone has found a way to joy out of even that activity!”
(3) WHY NOT SAY WHAT HAPPENED? Episode 11 of Scott Edelman’s Why Not Say What Happened? podcast tackles “Stan Lee’s Problem with Iron Man’s Nose”.
Rummaging though a stack of mid-’70s memos has me remembering the time I attempted to convince Stan Lee to adapt Joseph Heller’s novel Something Happened, who was responsible for mutilating the contents of Marvel’s 1975 line of Giant-Size Annuals, how I repurposed a Winnie Winkle comic strip to resign from my staff job in the Bullpen, the day comic book fans ran a Baskin-Robbins out of ice cream, the meeting in which Stan Lee had a problem with Iron Man’s nose, Gerry Conway’s complaint to the Comics Code Authority about an Inhumans innuendo, and much more.
(4) IT’S A THEORY. CinemaBlend’s Dirk Libbey says, “I Just Found Out The Wild Reason Warner Bros. Reportedly Made That Anime Lord Of The Rings Film, And I Did Not See It Coming”.
It was a strange weekend at the box office considering that Moana 2 and Wicked continued to dominate theaters even though movies attached to major franchises like Spider-Man and Lord of the Rings debuted. Kraven The Hunter and The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, both bombed, which was not unexpected. For the former film, it reportedly spells the end of Sony’s Spider-Verse adjacent franchise. But it’s reportedly not a big deal for the anime-inspired Lord of the Rings movie.
You’d be forgiven for not even realizing that this past weekend saw an animated Lord of the Rings film release, set two centuries before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic. The movie wasn’t broadly promoted, and it only cost $30 million to make, a drop in the bucket when your average Disney or Pixar endeavor costs around $200 million. It’s claimed even the studio is only hoping the movie might break even. It feels like Warner Bros. didn’t care if anybody saw this movie, and actually, that may be the case….
…Peter Jackson is working on a pair of new live-action movies, with Andy Serkis set to star in and direct Lord of the Rings: The Hunt For Gollum. However, most deals between IP holders and studios have time limits and require that the IP be used regularly, or the rights revert to the original owner.
It’s been a decade since The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies opened in theaters and the new Gollum movie is at least two years away, likely more. While we don’t know exactly what the rights deal with WB is, it’s certainly possible that the time limit is close. Without a plan for more movies back when the anime movie was given the green light, one could see how a studio might spend a few million to get something out to have the opportunity to make millions, or billions, on something better later….
(5) STRIPES. “29 Years Later, Star Trek Just Fixed Its Most Insulting Oversight” huffs Inverse.
Throughout the entire seven-season run of Star Trek: Voyager, Ensign Harry Kim remained at the same rank. Yes in the alternate future of Endgame, Harry Kim was a captain, but that moment of ranking up is the exception that proves the rule; though he was a brave and innovative officer, Janeway (and the Voyager writers) never thought to give Kim a promotion beyond the basest of Star Trek ranks. And if Kim was given more overt authority on the show, it would sometimes be thanks to an alternate timeline.
And now, as Star Trek crosses the multiverse in the penultimate episode of Lower Decks with a slew of legacy character cameos, the most prominent returning character is none other than Harry Kim. And this time, one version of him is a full lieutenant.
“It is a bit of an apology,” Garrett Wang tells Inverse. “It’s a long time coming!”…
… In Lower Decks’ “Fissure Quest,” we quickly learn that Boimler’s covert multiverse ship, the Anaximander, is staffed by mostly alternate versions of Harry Kim, which they all refer to as “the Kim crew.” But when one Harry Kim arrives who has been promoted to lieutenant, the other Kims are totally freaked out. This leads to the basic conflict of the episode: The Harry Kim who has been promoted is suddenly mad with power, to the point where he nearly destroys everything. For Wang, this was a chance to do something that he almost never got to do on Voyager — go big with a certain kind of performance.
“In the beginning, we were told that as all the human characters, you need to stay as military, as two dimensional,” Wang says of the early days of Voyager. “The idea was that if we had flat line delivery, it would make the alien characters look more realistic. But in reality, when you’re that flat and that monotone, it just looks like you’re a bad actor! So, it’s nice to do something like Lower Decks where I felt free.”…
(6) HEROES WITH FEET OF CLAY. In “From hacked ‘smart gnomes’ to the revenge of Feathers McGraw: inside Wallace & Gromit’s joyous return”, the Guardian’s Tim Jonze chronicles his visit to Aardman’s studios.
…Aardman’s studios are a hive of productivity – down every corridor are little rooms in which people tinker away on replica canal boats or fiddle with tiny clay arms. I have to promise to be on my best behaviour. Apparently on one previous set visit a French journalist picked up a figure in a live scene meaning the whole thing had to be shot again from the start. “That was very upsetting,” says my guide.
… I’m whisked off to the art department, where “everything you see on screen that’s not puppets” is made. For Vengeance Most Fowl that means a scenic waterway designed for a high speed canal chase and an impressively ramshackle submarine made out of stolen garden items: bath planters, rakes, drain pipes for periscopes and so on. Part of the challenge is not to make anything too snazzy. “It shouldn’t distract from the characters,” says Matt Perry, the film’s production designer. When they first made the submarine it looked a little too fabulous for something supposedly compiled from garden detritus. So one member of the team got to work smacking dents into it, which alarmed passing visitors. “Weathering is also important,” adds Perry. “The police station’s desk has to have the right amount of rust for a desk of that era.”
As with all Wallace & Gromit films, eagle-eyed viewers are rewarded with all kinds of smart references. The submarine is a nod to Nautilus, Captain Nemo’s vehicle in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Seas. Elsewhere, lead graphic artist Gavin Lines entertains himself with all sorts of gags that might only flash on the screen for a second or two (Gromit’s record collection this time around contains Walkies on the Wildside). These days he follows strict rules – it has to be family friendly and it has to be legal. “I did get into trouble before,” he admits. Whereas Smeg have apparently always seen the funny side of their fridges being rebranded as Smug, Bosch were less than happy about Gromit using a “Botch” tool in Curse of the Were-Rabbit. “We weren’t allowed to use it on any promotional material,” says a chastened Lines…
(7) TEDDY HARVIA CARTOON.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Born December 16, 1928 – Philip K. Dick. (Died 1982.)
By Paul Weimer: If any SF writers could have been said to have predicted our moment here in the 21st century, in all of its absurdity and weirdness, I’d pick two. The first would be John Brunner, whose novels like Stand on Zanzibar seem to all too well describe the madness of the second decade of the 21st century.
The other author is Philip K. Dick. Not the Philip K. Dick of The Man in the High Castle, the first PKD I read (because, well, alternate history). That might be his most accessible, his best work. It’s the one where he has his full powers, the energy and vibrance of his early novels, and not yet the spiraling into his ultimately tragic end.
But it is those later novels, and some of the earlier ones, that describe the worlds as it is today. A word of old technology and new, of people who you never thought in a rational world could or would occupy the White House, a world where technology seemingly has a half-mind of its own. Can anyone deny that Chat GPT or Generative AI feel like some of the strange and out of control technologies from Dick’s work? Or the creepiness of the panopticon that our modern world is as reflected in A Scanner Darkly?
This makes Dick’s work sometimes not comfortable, especially the later novels, where he becomes less and less coherent. The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick is at best disorienting and at worst, incomprehensible even to a deep reader of his work. There was a period where I was reading a PKD novel or story every month for over a year…and I still don’t “get” the Exegesis. Maybe it’s a metaphor for our modern world after all–confused, strange, contradictory and ultimately incomprehensible.
His early short novels and stories show is endless invention. If there is anyone who embodies the idea of a pulp SF writer, it was 1950’s era Philip K Dick. It was a time and place where an idea could get you 90% of the way to a sale…and Dick achieved that again and again and again with his mutants, psionics, aliens, time travel stories, and so much more. He did try to become a mimetic fiction writer, and I read the posthumously published Puttering About in a Small Land. It feels like a SF novelist trying to “go straight” and being frustrated by the effort.
So it seems that he may have lost his true power…somewhere in the early 1970’s. He was not the writer that he was. It is notable that Roger Zelazny co-wrote a novel with Dick, partly to help him out, called Deus Irae. That one does not entirely work as a story, but it is a novel with a fascinating end thesis, that may rather disturb readers if you think about it, and its relation to modern religions, too hard.
But I hate to leave out this note, so I will tell you about my favorite Dick work. It’s not Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, as brilliant as Blade Runner is (Blade Runner deserves a whole piece on its own, quite frankly but a few words here. The novel is not the movie. The movie is not the novel. The movie may be better than the novel in some ways (since we are dealing with late Dick here, this not surprising).
My favorite PKD would “Faith of Our Fathers”. It’s a world where communism won, but our protagonist, moving slowly toward the center of power, finds out there is something very strange and very odd about the ruling party. The revelation of just what is going on, and the ending of the story is strange, weird…and entirely everything that you want in a Philip K. Dick story. It’s perfect, perhaps even more so than The Man in the High Castle. And I think, in general, shorter PKD works are better than his novels.
(9) COMICS SECTION.
- Carpe Diem asks the dino question everyone is thinking.
- Eek! needs some good excuses.
- Loose Parts is on the lookout.
- Macanudo refuses to be reassured.
- Off the Mark’s Christmas tree lacks nothing.
- Red and Rover know the season’s classic tunes.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal knows every weakness hides a strength.
(10) THE SKY IS NOT THE LIMIT. Charlie Jane Anders’ “A Basket Full of Mini Rants!” at Happy Dancing includes this praise for cheap-looking productions.
It’s time for low-budget, DIY movies and TV
I just watched the first episode of a TV show called Davey and Jonesie’s Locker on Hulu, which I’ve been meaning to check out for ages. It’s an extremely silly comedy about female friendship and having an interdimensional portal in your high-school locker. It seriously looks like it was made for a tiny fraction of what an episode of House of the Dragon costs.
Lately, I just really crave TV and movies that look cheap. Bonus points if they’re silly and kind of outrageous. On the TV side, I’ve talked a lot about my love of Extraordinary and the Brazilian show Back to 15, and there are a handful of other low budget, goofy TV shows that I’ve loved lately. On the movie side, my two favorite films of the year are Hundreds of Beavers and The People’s Joker: they don’t have much in common, other than looking like they were made with sofa-cushion money and being completely off-the-chain. They both use virtual backgrounds that look amateurish as heck, and feature physical comedy in a surreal void.
Why do I love DIY-looking TV and movies? Part of it is just a reaction to the fact that most Hollywood entertainment these days looks ridiculously expensive and lavish, which a lot of people are starting to get tired of. With high budgets often comes a certain blandness. But also, this defiantly indie/cheap aesthetic feels subversive in this age of corporate domination: it’s the equivalent of those direct-to-VHS movies that I obsessively watched as a youngster. I predict that the next few years will see a flowering of micro-budget, maximally-ambitious, utterly ridiculous entertainment. And I am here for it.
(11) UP ALL NIGHT. The Guardian shares “Galaxies, auroras and a cosmic bat: Southern Sky astrophotography exhibition 2024 – in pictures”. Photo gallery at the link.
The Southern Sky Astrophotography 2024 exhibition displays the top entries from the 20th David Malin awards for Australian astronomers and photographers. The images are on display at the Sydney observatory until 1 February.
(12) CAPTAIN AMERICA IN BRITISH TRANSLATION? Marvel has dropped a trailer for Captain America: Brave New World. According to Gizmodo, the US and UK trailers differ slightly. Below is the UK version.
For whatever reason, Marvel UK has a longer, trailer-length version of the Brave New World video. We’ll got it here for you, and its key difference is a brief look at Sidewinder attacking Sam and no stinger teasing Joaquin becoming the Falcon, like in the shorter US version.
[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Maria Markham Thompson, CPA, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]