Glasgow 2024 has launched its Member Portal providing a single gateway to all online elements of the convention. The Member Portal is available to both in-person and online attendees aged 16 and over. The Portal is packed full of links to useful resources, as well as the link to join the convention Discord and to RingCentral Events where members will be able to stream a large proportion of the programme. Additional elements will be made available as the convention approaches, including the full convention schedule and the convention Newsletter.
The Member Portal is open to all Attending Members aged 16 or over, as well as all Online Members and Online Ticket holders. New joiners aged 16 or over can access the online convention by purchasing an Online Ticket at a cost of £40. Existing WSFS Members can upgrade to Online Membership at a reduced cost of £35.
Their Discord server is already open, offering a place to meet and chat with other attendees about the convention, programme items, and fandom in general, as well as coordinate plans, arrange ad hoc meetups, and play games together.
Starting on Saturday, July 27 they will be running pre-convention activities in the Discord server, including a scavenger hunt and a choose-your-own style adventure “If I Ran the Zoo Con” where the Discord members will run their own convention and see how “easy” it is. (We’ll be taking our chair, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, through the same questions at a future point and discovering whether she can do as well!).
We will be streaming many of our special events during the convention. These will include the Opening & Closing Ceremonies, the Masquerade, the Ian Sorensen play Nothing Nowhere, Never, Again, the Opera, the Worldcon Philharmonic Orchestra and of course the Hugo Awards Ceremony. (The Hugo Ceremony will also be broadcast publicly; the other events will only be streamed to members).
During the convention they will have up to 10 in-person rooms streaming at any given time, including purely in-person items and hybrid items with a mix of in-person and virtual participants. In addition, they will be hosting up to 4 purely online programme items at a time in peak hours.
(1) CHRIS GARCIA ANALYZES THE AGENDA. In Claims Department 74 – “2024 Business Meeting”, Chris Garcia will be happy to tell you what he thinks about every proposal or amendment up for ratification at Glasgow 2024.
Welcome to another Claims Department, and this one is hella SMoFish, so if you got loins, you might wanna gird them….
There are things Chris is for, things he’s against, even one thing “I’m all the damn hell crap balls of the way for!” There’s another he disapproves of because “It’s clear to me that some people just hate fun”. And one piece of business he writes down with, “It’s garbage.”
However, all the commentary is substantial and well-informed.
The issue also includes a six-page Q&A session with Business Meeting Presiding Officer Jesi Lipp. For example, Lipp says about the items which are going to be confined in an Executive Session:
…I want to clarify a few misunderstandings that I’ve seen. First, if you are an attending member of WSFS, you don’t have to leave the room. Second, the rules around divulging what happens in executive session only apply to non-members. Any member at the meeting is free to discuss what happened with other WSFS members (so long as they do so in a way that does not also divulge the proceedings to non-members) because they also have an interest in the happenings of the society. Third, minutes are still recorded in executive session, they just don’t become a part of the publicly available minutes, but they will be retained and could be read at a future meeting (if that meeting was itself in executive session)…
There is no misunderstanding that the idea is to keep the transactions of the Executive Session from becoming known to the general public.
The attempt to rig the Hugos has appeared in the most influential and biggest Brazilian newspaper (about 10 million people read it monthly)???? I think it was one of the first times they talked about it. If anything, at least it's reaching new audiences. pic.twitter.com/tmMoE5PntZ
As a graduate student in Laramie, Wyo., in the 1990s, Sarah Mentock spent many weekends hunting for bargains at neighborhood yard sales. On one of those weekends, she spotted “The Lord of the Isles,” a narrative poem set in 14th-century Scotland. Brilliant green with a flowery red and blue design, the clothbound cover of the book – written by “Ivanhoe” author Walter Scott and published in 1815 – intrigued Mentock more than the story.
“It was just so beautiful,” she says. “I had to have it.”
For the next 30 years, “The Lord of the Isles” occupied a conspicuous place on Mentock’s bookshelf, the vivid green sliver of its spine adding a shock of color to her home. Sometimes she’d handle the old book when she dusted or repainted, but mostly she didn’t think too much about it.
Until, that is, she stumbled upon a news article in 2022 about the University of Delaware’s Poison Book Project, which aimed to identify books still in circulation that had been produced using toxic pigments common in Victorian bookbinding. Those include lead, chromium, mercury – and especially arsenic, often used in books with dazzling green covers.
“Huh,” Mentock thought, staring at a photo of one of the toxic green books in the article. “I have a book like that.”
Mentock shipped the book – tripled-wrapped in plastic – to Delaware. It wasn’t long before she heard back. The red contained mercury; the blue contained lead. And the green cover that captivated Mentock all those years ago? Full of arsenic.
“Congratulations,” the email she received said, “you have the dubious honor of sending us the most toxic book yet.”…
SAG-AFTRA will go on strike against major video game publishers, the actors union announced Thursday, following more than a year and half of negotiations, with the main sticking being protections against the use of artificial intelligence.
“Although agreements have been reached on many issues important to SAG-AFTRA members, the employers refuse to plainly affirm, in clear and enforceable language, that they will protect all performers covered by this contract in their A.I. language,” SAG-AFTRA said.
The strike was called by SAG-AFTRA national executive director and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland and the Interactive Media Agreement Negotiating Committee. It will go into effect July 26 at 12:01 a.m….
The video game companies included in the strike are: Activision Productions Inc., Blindlight LLC, Disney Character Voices Inc., Electronic Arts Productions Inc., Formosa Interactive LLC, Insomniac Games Inc., Llama Productions LLC, Take 2 Productions Inc., VoiceWorks Productions Inc., and WB Games Inc….
“We’re not going to consent to a contract that allows companies to abuse A.I. to the detriment of our members,” SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher said. “Enough is enough. When these companies get serious about offering an agreement our members can live — and work — with, we will be here, ready to negotiate.”…
(6) WE ARE NOT AT THE SINGULARITY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.]Nature’s cover story this week “Garbage Out” looks at artificial intelligence. Apparently artificial intelligences (AIs) are really easy to induce to hallucinate if the AIs are trained by computer-generated data. One definition of a Singularity is that it is the point in time in which technology itself creates technology: such as robots building the computers and the computers programming the robots and themselves. Such a singularity was popularized by the mathematician and SF author Vernor Vinge…. The good news from this research is that humans are still key… (For now.)
The explosion in generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as large language models has been powered by the vast sets of human-generated data used to train them. As these tools continue to proliferate and their output becomes increasingly available online, it is conceivable that the source of training data could switch to content generated by computers. In this week’s issue, Ilia Shumailov and colleagues investigate the likely consequences of such a shift. The results are not promising. The researchers found that feeding AI-generated data to a model caused subsequent generations of the model to degrade to the point of collapse. In one test, text about medieval architecture was used as the starting point, but by the ninth generation the model output was a list of jackrabbits. The team suggests that training models using AI-generated data is not impossible but that great care must be taken over filtering those data — and that human-generated data will probably still have the edge.
(I do warn folk that the machines are taking over, but nobody ever listens…)
(7) DONATE TO DEB GEISLER AWARD. In honor of the late Deb Geisler, who died in March, her husband Mike Benveniste has established the Deb Geisler Award for Journalistic Excellence Fund at Suffolk University (where she taught) “to provide an annual stipend to a deserving student in the Communication, Journalism, & Media Department.”
Donations to the fund can be made online or by check: Link to give online: https://Suffolk.edu/Summa. By mail: Suffolk University, Office of Advancement, 73 Tremont Street, Boston, MA 02108. Attn: Kathy Tricca
(8) TOGETHER FOR A LUNCH “TREK” WITH THE FABULOUS NICK MEYER! [Item by Steve Vertlieb.] Together with the wondrous Nicholas Meyer on July 24, 2024. In addition to having directed the definitive “Star Trek” film … Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, as well as the last motion picture with the original television crew, Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country, Nick also directed the unforgettable romantic sci-fi fantasy, Time After Time, directed The Day After, the controversial telefilm predicting the devastating consequences of nuclear war, composed the screenplay for Star Trek: The Voyage Home, the teleplay for The Night That Panicked America (concerning Orson Welles radio production of “The War of the Worlds”) and authored The Seven Percent Solution.
He is a brilliant raconteur and conversationalist, as well as a charming and most delightful lunch companion. His newest Sherlock Holmes novel, SherlockHolmes and the Telegram from Hell, from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D. is enjoying critical success and brisk sales.
Had the pleasure of chatting with Nick once more on Sunday afternoon following a screening of Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country at the Aero Theater, and spent an absolutely delightful two hours over lunch this afternoon, enjoying more quality time with this sublimely gifted artist who I’m honored to think of as my friend.
Nicholas Meyer and Steve Vertlieb
(9) SHINING MEMORIES. IndieWire cues up the trailer for Shine On — The Forgotten ‘Shining’ Location”, a new Kubrick documentary.
Few movie sets in Hollywood history have generated more interest than the Overlook Hotel from Stanley Kubrick‘s “The Shining.” The fictional Colorado hotel provides the backdrop for Jack Torrance’s (Jack Nicholson) descent into madness, and Kubrick devotees have spent countless hours analyzing symbolism in the production design and the disorienting effects created by the hotel’s impossible floor plan. The hotel sets, hailed by many as some of the defining craftsmanship of Kubrick’s filmmaking career, now get their moment in the spotlight in a new documentary set to be released on the late director’s birthday.…
…The film will see the collaborators revisiting some of the last remaining studio sets from “The Shining,” which were thought to have been destroyed years ago….
“There have been so many rumors about some of the sets from ‘The Shining’ still existing at Elstree Studios, but to actually find them and walk around them was like discovering a holy grail of film history,” [Paul] King said in a statement announcing the film…
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
July 25, 1973 — Mur Lafferty, 51.
By Paul Weimer: The Mighty Mur Lafferty, to be truthful. Back in the early days of the modern SFFnal internet, when before even blogs were quite a thing, there was Mur Lafferty, doing audio versions of stories, doing her podcast (I should be writing) and being one of the early adopters and early heralds of the SFFnal internet. I came into the SFFNal internet not long after, and thus discovered her work, and her podcast, just when I was getting my own start in writing reviews and such (this was in 2008 or so). I started with her Afterlife series and followed her career along. In those days, self-published work “didn’t count” for publication, which is why she managed to be a 2013 John C. Campbell Award nominee and then winner (now the Astounding Award) for Best New Writer, which was odd, because I’d been reading her for half a decade.
Mur Lafferty in 2017.
And it is heartwarming that she remembers me from those early halcyon days.
But besides the Afterlife novellas, and the Shambling Guides, and her fun twitter threads of pretending to watch minor league Baseball in the guise of a lady of Westeros come to North Carolina, I’ve been listening to her podcast, interacting with her on social media, meeting her at cons for a good long time. She’s played the long game in honing her skills, craft and writing abilities. Mur Laffery is simply the embodiment of the “10,000 hours” school of writing, getting better by writing and writing and writing. Mur proves the grind can work.
I think her Midsolar Murders novels (starting with Station Eternity) are probably the best place to begin with her work. I find her voice as a writer quirky, comfortable, and relentlessly entertaining, Although Six Wakes, which really marks the start of her more recent career (and a Hugo finalist) is a good single novel to take the measure of Mur’s work, if you want to try it.
And yes, Mur, yes, as you say, I should be writing. Happy birthday my friend.
(11) COMICS SECTION.
Broom Hilda exposes the reason behind some shortages.
The BBC’s annual report has praised the impact of Doctor Who – as ratings for the recently concluded season 14 continue to grow on BBC iPlayer.
The beloved sci-fi series was mentioned several times throughout the report, which spotlighted it as one of the shows driving the corporation’s “huge audiences”, while also mentioning its “economic impact” in Wales and across the UK….
… The 60th anniversary specials were also mentioned as one of the year’s “content highlights” alongside Eurovision coverage and the third season of Planet Earth.
The latest figures for the new season, as reported by The Times, now make it the highest-rated drama for young viewers (under 35s) across the BBC this year.
Overnight ratings for the season had been lower than is typically the case due to the show’s new release strategy – which saw each episode debut on BBC iPlayer at midnight on Fridays, several hours before the BBC One broadcast on Saturday evening.
But a spokesperson for the show explained that this had always been the expectation, saying: “Overnight ratings no longer provide an accurate picture of all those who watch drama in an on-demand world.
“This season of Doctor Who premiered on iPlayer nearly 24 hours before broadcast, and episode 1 has already been viewed by nearly 6 million viewers and continues to grow.”
To celebrate a quarter century of “SpongeBob SquarePants,” Nickelodeon pulled out all the stops at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, starting with an epic Hall H panel.
Mark Hamill made a surprise appearance to reveal that he’d be voicing The Flying Dutchman in the upcoming fourth SpongeBob film, “The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants,” out in 2025. “He’s the most fearsome goofball pirate you’ve ever seen. The movie is more cerebral. It’s more thoughtful, intellectually challenging. No, I’m just yanking your chain. It’s inspired silliness from start to finish.”…
Already more than a month late getting back, two NASA astronauts will remain at the International Space Station until engineers finish working on problems plaguing their Boeing capsule, officials said Thursday.
NASA’s commercial crew program manager Steve Stich said mission managers are not ready to announce a return date. The goal is to bring Wilmore and Williams back aboard Starliner, he added.
“We’ll come home when we’re ready,” Stich said.
Stich acknowledged that backup options are under review. SpaceX’s Dragon capsule is another means of getting NASA astronauts to and from the space station.
… The absence of evidence for aliens could be because they don’t exist or because our sampling depth is inadequate to detect them—a bit like declaring the entire ocean free of fish when none appear in a scooped-up bucket of seawater. Sampling depth refers to how thoroughly and keenly we can conduct a search. Fermi’s question is valuable because it narrows the possibilities down to two: either aliens are not present near Earth, or our current search methods are insufficient….
…From our privileged position in history, we know that advances in energy use often come with increases in efficiency, not simply increases in size or expansiveness. Think of the modern miniaturization of smartphones versus the mid-20th-century trend of computers that filled up whole rooms. Perhaps we should be looking for sophisticated and compact alien spacecraft, rather than motherships spewing misused energy….
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a team of astronomers led by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy imaged a new exoplanet that orbits a star in the nearby triple system Epsilon Indi. The planet is a cold super-Jupiter exhibiting a temperature of around 0 degrees Celsius and a wide orbit comparable to that of Neptune around the Sun. This measurement was only possible thanks to JWST’s unprecedented imaging capabilities in the thermal infrared. It exemplifies the potential of finding many more such planets similar to Jupiter in mass, temperature, and orbit. Studying them will improve our knowledge of how gas giants form and evolve in time….
What do we know about Eps Ind Ab?
“We discovered a signal in our data that did not match the expected exoplanet,” says Matthews. The point of light in the image was not in the predicted location. “But the planet still appeared to be a giant planet,” adds Matthews. However, before being able to make such an assessment, the astronomers had to exclude the signal was coming from a background source unrelated to Eps Ind A.
“It is always hard to be certain, but from the data, it seemed quite unlikely the signal was coming from an extragalactic background source,” explains Leindert Boogaard, another MPIA scientist and a co-author of the research article. Indeed, while browsing astronomical databases for other observations of Eps Ind, the team came across imaging data from 2019 obtained with the VISIR infrared camera attached to the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT). After re-analysing the images, the team found a faint object precisely at the position where it should be if the source imaged with JWST belonged to the star Eps Ind A.
The scientists also attempted to understand the exoplanet atmosphere based on the available images of the planet in three colours: two from JWST/MIRI and one from VLT/VISIR. Eps Ind Ab is fainter than expected at short wavelengths. This could indicate substantial amounts of heavy elements, particularly carbon, which builds molecules such as methane, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide, commonly found in gas-giant planets. Alternatively, it might indicate that the planet has a cloudy atmosphere. However, more work is needed to reach a final conclusion.
…It’s a property with no windows, no running water and no mod cons except for a phone line. But there is parking, the countryside is phenomenal and when Armageddon happens it could be perfect.
This week will bring the rare sale of a 1958 nuclear bunker in the Cumbrian Dales near Sedbergh…
(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY The YouTube channel Grammaticus Books has released another vintage SF video as part of the multi-YouTube-channel, Rocket Summer, event. This time his 9-minute review looks at the Robert Heinlein novel Tunnel in the Sky.
Tunnel in the Sky (1955). Arguably not his best book – it is a young adult coming of age story – it does though reveal some of the themes that recur in a number of his works including societal structure. This one has a bit of a Lord of the Flies feel: that novel came out the previous year. Grammaticus does pick up on something Heinlein does not openly convey but does hint at in a few places, is that the main protagonist is from an ethnic minority: remember, this novel was published in 1955 USA.
[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Paul Weimer, Rob Thornton, Steve Vertlieb, 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 “DD Not DDS” Dern.]
In writer Geoffrey Landis’s short story “Cloudskimmer,” a pair of astronauts in the near future gaze down at planet Venus from their idling spacecraft. Hired by some unnamed government backer, the two, Zara and Sanjay, begin a loose debate after one decides to—for the sake of better research!—travel to Venus’s surface himself. Why? Zara asks.
“Same reason Mallory climbed Everest,” Sanjay says. “Because I can.”
“What are we going to tell our backers?” she tells Sanjay later in the story. “They’re paying us for science, not for stunts.”
Sanjay makes the trip personal. “Humans see different things than drones do,” he says.
The vision and risk in Landis’s science fiction, like in that 2022 short story, are barely contained to the realm of make believe. Landis, besides being an award-winning novelist and fiction writer, is an aerospace engineer at NASA Glenn, which has gifted the now 69-year-old a reciprocal gift in by-day and by-night lives: interplanetary research that feeds into his writing; writing that foreshadows his research….
A ceramic skull, grinning at visitors from a side table in the entry hall, offers a clue to the identity of the former owner of this grand home perched above the banks of the River Dart in Devon.
You don’t need Hercule Poirot’s little grey cells or the observational skills of Jane Marple to solve this mystery. Who else but the Queen of Crime would display such a macabre ornament?
Welcome to Greenway, the country retreat of Agatha Christie. This compact Georgian mansion, faced in white stucco that gleams in England’s rare bursts of spring sunshine, was her refuge from the demands of being the world’s most famous and beloved crime writer. It’s secluded – accessible only by boat or via a long, narrow driveway – and set on more than thirty acres of gardens and woodland. Her dream home, she called it, “the loveliest place in the world.”
Each year thousands of Christie fans make the pilgrimage to Greenway, which opened to the public fifteen years ago….
…Staff members circulate through the house, answering questions and offering insights and anecdotes. The doll a bored-looking, four-year-old Christie clutches in a portrait housed in the morning room? Her name is Rosie and, 130 years later, she’s propped up in a nearby chair. Ask about the cuneiform tablet embedded in an outside wall – Mallowan brought it back from Iraq in the 1930s – and a staff member hands over a printout explaining it dates from 600 BCE and is a plea to the Assyrian god Nabu. The black gown with gold trim hanging in a bedroom closet? Christie wore it to the 1952 premiere of The Mousetrap, her record-setting play that has been performed in London’s West End more than 29,000 times and is still going strong…
(4) DAVID BRIN ON FIRST CONTACT. The Science in Fiction podcast hosted David Brin after they talked to Avi Loeb. So “first contact scenarios, Fermi Paradoxf and plausible types of alien probes in the Solar System all came up.” “David Brin on First Contact in ‘Existence’” at Spotify.
Marty and Holly speak with David Brin, science fiction icon, scientist, futurist and civilizational optimist. We discuss his particular view of first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, as portrayed in his 2012 novel ‘Existence’, along with his predictions about how artificial intelligence and virtual reality will change our world in the near future. We discuss the UFO phenomenon (a sophisticated form of cat lasers for us to chase) and the unspeakably rude behaviour of these hypothetical silvery teaser punks. David speaks directly to the artificial intelligences and possibly alien intelligences who may be inveigled in our internet. We talk about Cixin Liu’s ‘The Three Body Problem’ (there is no three body problem), the likely prevalence of life in the universe (90% of star systems), the Fermi Paradox, SETI, METI, and various forms that first contact with alien civilizations may take, among them Von Neumann machines and artificial alien intelligences stored in ‘envoy eggs’ orbiting our planet for millions of years. David tells us how to make the most powerful telescope in the universe, by turning the Kuiper Belt into a solar system sized lens. Finally, he implores us to fight back against the ingrate habit of cynicism and pessimism rotting our global civilization today, and declares “I’m proud as hell and nothing can stop us! … Be citizens of wonder, help save a good civilization.”
(5) RARE CODEX. The Folio Society’s illustrated edition of A Canticle for Leibowitz can be yours for $600.
Explore a world of feudal futurism in the beloved classic A Canticle for Leibowitz, a post-nuclear masterwork featuring 12 full-page pieces of original artwork by premier fantasy artist Elliot Lang. Folio presents Walter M. Miller Jr’s Hugo-award winning novel as never before seen. This vital chapter in the canon of 20th century science fiction takes place in a scorched earth in which an order of monks is dedicated to recovering the remnants of scientific knowledge lost to nuclear war. Evocative, complex and gently funny, A Canticle for Leibowitz most recently provided direct inspiration for the Fallout games and TV show, and has been one of Folio’s most consistently requested titles. Having recommended the book himself, Pulitzer Prize-winning literary essayist Michael Dirda provides an illuminating introduction, while Elliot Lang’s brilliant designs and illustrations create a truly immersive reading experience. Along with medieval-style historiated chapter initials, scrollworked part-titles, ingenious endpaper design, an illustrated cover and slipcase, Lang also contributes an exclusive afterword that tells the uncanny story of his own personal connection to this timeless work of spiritual wonder and post-apocalyptic terror.
(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
July 23, 1947 – Gardner Dozois. (Died 2018).
By Paul Weimer: I mentioned Dozois recently in my birthday appreciation of James E Gunn. And like Gunn, Dozois has both fictional and non-fictional elements to his oeuvre, but for Dozois that balance is even more on the nonfictional side.
Gardner Dozois
But the piece of Dozois fiction I want to mention before his editorial work is near and dear to me — his “Counterfactual”. It is an alternate history story of the metafictional kind, as someone who is in an alternate history (where the Civil War went very differently) and is trying to write a story about a world where the South lost, and not hitting the mark of our own world, but coming up with a complete and different variant. Since I had read The Man In the High Castle by the time I came across “Counterfactual”, I saw immediately what Dozois was doing, and was delighted he was going for that approach, too.
But really, Dozois as an anthologist is really what his bread and butter is. The Year’s Best SF collections were bread and butter to me, and once I got into Hugo nominations and voting regularly, they served as a guidepost as to help inform my choices. Those volumes not only had a great set of stories every year, but the gigantic editorial/field review essay Dozois provided gave a perspective as to what he thought the field was doing, where it had been and where it was going. I didn’t always agree with his assertions and ideas (once I had enough feet under me to do so) but I found his arguments and perspective fascinating. And that essay always included a whole additional set of recommendations of stories (and novels!) that he could not anthologize in that volume. I could set up a good half year’s reading just from one of those Year’s Best volumes and working my way through his recommendations.
Aside from the Year’s Best, I always found a new original or reprint anthology of Dozois’ to command my attention, and my wallet. And the sheer variety of the subgenres and topics he anthologized showed his Renaissance Man-like knowledge of the field. From The Good Old Stuff, to One Million AD, to The Book of Swords, Dozois provided endless reading of short fiction carefully curated and collected for particular tastes. One of my favorite of this was among his last. Ever since I read A Princess of Mars, Mars in its dying civilization mode has always fascinated me as a setting. So his collection Old Mars, with many stories in that vein, was a particular favorite. And with a kickass set of authors including Michael Moorcock, Ian McDonald and Melinda Snodgrass, the reputation of Dozois meant that when he cast for an anthology of new stories, authors jumped at the chance.
While there are plenty of year’s best and other anthologies since, no one, IMHO, has quite shown the power and magic of a collector of stories, be it reprints or original fiction, quite like Gardner Dozois did.
It wouldn’t be San Diego Comic-Con without a little drama, some big questions, and a lot of hype. Just 24 hours before this year’s show floor opens at the San Diego Convention Center, it appears that the con will deliver all that and more—including some terrific programming set to begin on Thursday and Friday’s Eisner Awards ceremony. And with downtown San Diego abuzz with comics fever, some companies are ramping up their presence at the show while others are leaving the playing field.
Star Trek: Prodigy gave Wesley Crusher the story he’s deserved for decades while also providing Wil Wheaton with the experience of watching his voiceover performance, one that made us both emotional talking about it. I think it’s a given at this point that fans would love to see more of him, potentially via his own upcoming Trek spinoff, but is that a realistic hope hold onto? Wil Wheaton had some thoughts.
As the host of The Ready Room (available to stream with a Paramount+ subscription) and someone who is around the Star Trek fandom and its creatives quite a bit, Wil Wheaton has a definite read on the franchise. If anyone would know rumblings about what is and isn’t possible, it’s probably him. So I decided to get his thoughts on the probability of a Wesley Crusher spinoff happening down the road, noting that Star Trek rarely produces projects centered around non-Starfleet characters (Prodigy being the first). When I asked whether a spinoff was a realistic hope or just a pipe dream, he told me:
“Well, if there’s one thing that we have learned through like 60 years of Star Trek, It’s that anything is possible. Like no one’s ever really gone. Things are constantly in flux, and when you have a character who can manipulate spacetime and thought to kind of do anything and go anywhere, sure, you could put him any place. As an audience member, as a fan of the characters and Prodigy, and as a fan of the actors who play them, I would love to see more. I am fascinated by stories in the Star Trek universe that do not take place inside of Starfleet. I’ve always been fascinated by that. I’ve always wanted to know what it is like. What is this universe that Starfleet is kind of like looking after? What goes on on these planets before and after the Federation shows up?”…
NASA is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its Chandra X-ray Observatory launch by sharing never-before-seen photos of the largest known spiral galaxy in the universe.
The Chandra X-ray observatory was launched on July 23, 1999. Since then, it has scoured the universe to look for X-ray emissions from exploded stars, clusters of galaxies and more, according to NASA. The observatory returns data to the Chandra X-ray Center at Harvard University’s Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
Since its launch, the observatory has captured images of the aftermath of exploded stars, photographed the supermassive black hole that exists at the center of the Milky Way, and helped scientists learn more about dark matter, dark energy and black holes….
… The observatory captured thousands of images of the spiral galaxy, known as NGC 6872, since its launch. The galaxy, located in the Peacock constellation of the universe, is over 522,000 light-years across, or more than five times the size of the Milky Way, according to NASA…
Of all the potential super-Earths—terrestrial exoplanets more massive than Earth—out there, an exoplanet orbiting a star only 40 light-years away from us in the constellation Cetus might be the most similar to have been found so far.
Exoplanet LHS 1140 b was assumed to be a mini-Neptune when it was first discovered by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope toward the end of 2023. After analyzing data from those observations, a team of researchers, led by astronomer Charles Cadieux, of Université de Montréal, suggest that LHS 1140 b is more likely to be a super-Earth.\
If this planet is an alternate version of our own, its relative proximity to its cool red dwarf star means it would most likely be a gargantuan snowball or a mostly frozen body with a substellar (region closest to its star) ocean that makes it look like a cosmic eyeball. It is now thought to be the exoplanet with the best chance for liquid water on its surface, and so might even be habitable.
Cadieux and his team say they have found “tantalizing evidence for a [nitrogen]-dominated atmosphere on a habitable zone super-Earth” in a study recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters….
(12) JOKER TRAILER. When you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you. Joker: Folie À Deux in theaters and IMAX, October 4.
…The next in the line-up is Italian-language Citadel: Diana, which will tell a completely fresh story when it arrives on 10 October, and will have little overlap with the main series, other than the fact that it’ll involve the mysterious Citadel agency.
Diana herself is played by Matilda De Angelis, who’s been making quite a name for herself in Italian productions, and looks suitably big-budget and high-concept, fusing the same sci-fi aesthetic as the first season of Citadel did….
[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Paul Weimer, Mark Roth-Whitworth, 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 Andrew (not Werdna).]
The Glasgow 2024 Worldcon announced today they have detected at least 377 fraudulent votes for the Hugo Awards, most meant to benefit a particular unnamed finalist, and have disqualified those votes. As a result, the beneficiary of those votes now will not win in their category.
The Glasgow 2024 Hugo Awards Statement is published below, followed by a video commentary by Nicholas Whyte, WSFS Division head and Hugo Administrator.
In the course of tallying the votes on the final ballot for the 2024 Hugo Awards, the Glasgow 2024 Hugo Administration team detected some unusual data.
Paragraph 6.2 of the WSFS Constitution states that “In all matters arising under this Constitution, only natural persons may introduce business, nominate, or vote, except as specifically provided otherwise in this Constitution. No person may cast more than one vote on any issue or more than one ballot in any election.”
A large number of votes in 2024 were cast by accounts which fail to meet the criteria of being “natural persons”, with obvious fake names and/or other disqualifying characteristics. These included, for instance, a run of voters whose second names were identical except that the first letter was changed, in alphabetical order; and a run of voters whose names were translations of consecutive numbers.
Many of these votes favoured one finalist in particular, who we will call Finalist A. This pattern of data is startlingly and obviously different from the votes for any other finalist in 2024, and indeed for any finalist in any of the previous years where any member of the current Hugo Subcommittee has been involved with administering the Hugo final ballot.
In addition to patterns observable in the data, we received a confidential report that at least one person had sponsored the purchase of WSFS memberships by large numbers of individuals, who were refunded the cost of membership after confirming that they had voted as the sponsor wished.
On the basis of the above evidence, we have concluded that at least 377 votes have been cast fraudulently, of a total of 3,813 final ballot votes that we received. We have therefore disqualified those 377 votes from the final vote tally. This decision is not one made lightly, but we are duty bound as the Hugo Administrators to protect the Hugo Awards and to act against fraud.
We have no evidence that Finalist A was at all aware of the fraudulent votes being cast for them, let alone in any way responsible for the operation. We are therefore not identifying them. Finalist A has not been disqualified from the 2024 Hugo Awards. However, they do not win in their category, once the invalid votes have been disallowed.
No other votes have been disallowed. The only votes disallowed are those which we have positively identified as not cast by natural persons.
We recognise that after the Hugo voting in 2023, many in the community will, understandably, have questions about this. Unfortunately, our ability to answer is very limited, due to our responsibility to maintain the confidentiality of the ballot and data protection regulations. There are proposals to institute a system of independent audit for Hugo votes. But at present such a system does not exist, therefore the raw 2024 voting data cannot and will not be shared outside the Glasgow 2024 Hugo team.
However, the full voting results, nominating statistics, and voting statistics will be published immediately after the Hugo Awards ceremony on August 11th, 2024 as previously agreed in our transparency statement. Those will not include the 377 votes which have been disallowed but will include the other 3,436 votes.
We believe that it is important for transparency that we inform you now about what has happened. We want to reassure 2024 Hugo voters that the ballots cast were counted fairly. Most of all, we want to assure the winners of this year’s Hugos that they have won fair and square, without any arbitrary or unexplained exclusion of votes or nominees and without any possibility that their award had been gained through fraudulent means.
The 2024 WSFS Business Meeting Agenda published today by the Glasgow 2024 Worldcon contains the text of 12 amendments passed at the Chengdu Worldcon that are up for ratification; 20 newly proposed constitutional amendments; and the full text of 12 resolutions – but not the text of two other resolutions described by the committee as calling for the “censure of certain groups and named individuals over the administration of the 2023 Hugo Awards”.
The titles of the two resolutions are:
“Statement of Values for Transparency and Fair Treatment” submitted by Chris Garcia, James Bacon, Frank Wu, Chris Barkley, Steve Davidson, Kirsten Berry, Chuck Serface, Paul Weimer, Andrew E. Love, Claudia Beach, Nina Shepardson, Bonnie McDaniel, Tobes Valois, and Linda Robinette.
“Chengdu Censure” submitted by Terri Ash, Kevin Sonney, Cliff Dunn, and Kristina Forsyth.
The resolutions will still be brought to the floor of the Business Meeting, but the substance of the charges will not be allowed to be discussed. Instead, Glasgow 2024, availing themselves of procedures in Robert’s Rules of Order, Newly Revised, will treat the censure resolution as “a motion to form a committee on investigation as the first step in disciplinary proceedings.” This committee will be elected by the meeting to conduct an investigation into the allegations contained in the resolutions — including a reasonable attempt to speak with the members accused — and report back to the 2025 Business Meeting in Seattle, USA.
Glasgow 2024 has assumed the authority to say the Business Meeting will be placed in executive session while all of these proceedings are handled, and that session will be exclusively focused on the formation of an investigative committee into the charges. Glasgow 2024 says they will suspend livestream coverage during the related portion of the Business Meeting. The details of debate will not be published in the publicly available minutes, nor will this section of the meeting be shown in the posted recording of the Business Meeting.
The committee says this procedure has been formulated after taking “legal counsel to ensure adherence to Scottish law.”
We are concerned that publication of these items, as well as public debate about them in Glasgow 2024 spaces, will bring us out of compliance with Scottish libel and defamation law and expose Glasgow 2024, the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS), and/or its members to significant legal liability.
But their statement in the agenda also says, “The World Science Fiction Society also has the clear right to hold its members accountable for their conduct and do so as transparently as possible.”
Glasgow 2024 has told Chengdu Worldcon co-chair Ben Yalow and Chengdu Worldcon Hugo Administrator Dave McCarty they will not be allowed to attend the convention. McCarty says he did not receive an explanation why; Yalow says he did not request one.
Yalow said to File 770:
I was told by the Glasgow committee that they would not permit me to attend the convention in person.
I had all of the monies that I had paid returned to me.
Asked what explanation he was given for this decision, and who communicated it to him, Yalow replied:
It came from the Vice Chair. I did not ask for an explanation, since I accept that it’s within the power we grant to Worldcon committees.
Dave McCarty today told a listserv of former Worldcon chairs that Glasgow 2024 notified him they are refunding his attending upgrade and will not sell him a virtual membership. McCarty says, “This was done without explanation or any prior contact on this topic and questions about it were not answered.”
File 770 asked the Glasgow 2024 committee for an explanation and got this reply:
The convention’s formal response is as follows:
Glasgow 2024, A Worldcon for Our Futures, believes in and respects everyone’s right to privacy. Various sections of applicable Scottish and international law, including the UK’s General Data Protection Regulation, legally limit what we may disclose. To maintain our commitment to individual privacy and confidentiality, we cannot discuss any person’s membership status or attendance.
So at this time Yalow and McCarty are representing they’ve had no explanation of Glasgow’s action, nor is Glasgow offering one to the public.
Prior to that, in January, Worldcon Intellectual Property (W.I.P.), the California non-profit corporation that holds the service marks of the World Science Fiction Society including the mark “Hugo Award”, announced it had censured several directors including McCarty and Yalow. McCarty was “censured for his public comments that have led to harm of the goodwill and value of our marks and for actions of the Hugo Administration Committee of the Chengdu Worldcon that he presided over.” Ben Yalow was “censured for actions of the Hugo Administration Committee of the Chengdu Worldcon that he presided over.”
(1) FANAC.ORG LOOKING FOR FANZINES TO SCAN AT WORLDCON. Joe Siclari, Mark Olson and Edie Stern say FANAC.org will be travelling to Glasgow next month.
We have arranged with the 2024 Glasgow Worldcon (August 8-12) to have a scanning station at the con, to scan and digitally archive more fanzines. This has been exceptionally helpful and successful at past conventions.
What you can do to help: Please help us grow this digital archive of fandom. If you’re a fanzine editor, bring your old fanzines to the fan table area at the con. If you have convention publications not already online, bring them too (fanac.org/conpubs/). We will scan them onsite and be able to give them back to you at con. Bring memorable and worthwhile fanzines by other editors as well. We will reach out to them for permission before we put them online.
We do have to unstaple and restaple the zines to scan them, and if they are perfect-bound, we may not have time at con.
If you can, please drop us a note (to [email protected]) telling us what you are bringing so we can be prepared.
Stop by and say hello: Even if you don’t have fanzines or other pubs to scan, stop by the table and say hello, and pick up your history ribbon. We’d like to see you!
How big is it? The archive has over 24,500 fanzines, 5,000 convention pubs and more than 5,000 photos. It’s over half a million pages and grows every week!
(2) PARADIGM SHIFT? In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane reviews Chris Nashawaty’s new book The Future Was Now (Flatiron): “1982 and the Fate of Filmgoing”
…So, what is it with this fateful eight? Well, Nashawaty has a solemn case to make. He writes:
“During the eight weeks spanning between May 16 and July 9, Hollywood’s major studios would release eight sci-fi/fantasy films that would not only go on to become cornerstones in the pop culture canon four-plus decades on, they would also radically transform the way that the movie industry did—and continues to do—business, paving the way for our current all-blockbusters-all-the-time era.”
That is quite a claim. Nashawaty is by no means sure that he likes the result—“what should have been a new golden age of sci-fi and fantasy cinema became a pop-culture beast that would devour itself to death and infantilize its audience”—but he proposes that, for most of us, going to the cinema is now “one endless summer,” which is much less sunny than it sounds. Like it or not, we live in a Conanistic world.
Whether or not you buy into this notion of 1982 as a red-letter year, it’s worth asking when the redness first began to dawn. Does Nashawaty, in his soothsaying capacity, even have the right decade? Note the elaborate tribute that he pays not only to Spielberg’s “Jaws” and George Lucas’s “Star Wars”—the first released in May, 1975, the second in June, 1977—but also to another summer hit, Scott’s “Alien,” from 1979, which seemed like a suppurating antidote to the antisepsis of “Star Wars.” (I still don’t comprehend how you can love both of those movies equally. You make your choice, and you stick to it.) Clamp the three together, top them with “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981), which bore the imprint of Lucas and Spielberg, and there, I suggest, you have the precursor of 1982, and a more compelling template for so much that has blazed and crawled across our screens ever since.
Viewed from that perspective, what the filmmakers were doing, when they created the eight works that are covered in “The Future Was Now,” was not crunching through barriers or setting fresh trends. They were cashing in. This is not a lowly skill, or an easy one; indeed, in some respects, it is the raison d’être of the movie trade. But let’s not pretend that Hooper, Lisberger, Meyer, and the rest of the guys were a movement, conjoined by a common iconoclastic purpose.
Elon Musk is moving the headquarters of social media platform X and rocket ship maker SpaceX from California to Texas, blaming a new law that bars school districts in the state from requiring that parents be notified of changes in their child’s gender identification.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the law, the of its kind in the nation, on Monday. It says school staff can’t be required to disclose a student’s gender identity or sexual orientation to any other person without the child’s permission, with some exceptions.
It also requires the California Department of Education to develop resources for families of LGBTQ+ students in grade 7 through high school….
Join us for a captivating evening as we bring together two iconic actors who have both portrayed the legendary character Sulu in the Star Trek universe. “A Tale of Two Sulus” features George Takei and John Cho in a dynamic conversation that delves into their shared legacy as Starfleet’s esteemed helmsman. Beyond their roles in Star Trek, Takei and Cho are celebrated authors of graphic novels and passionate advocates for social justice. This event promises an engaging exploration of their diverse careers, creative endeavors, and the impactful contributions they have made to important causes. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to hear from two trailblazing artists whose work continues to inspire and resonate across generations.
George Takei and John Cho. Moderated by Michael Giacchino
[The] Collision Awards, which honor animation across all disciplines (marketing and communications, commercials, TV, film, experimental, game and XR), were announced this morning. The awards honor work by studios, production companies, brands, agencies and individuals with a varied list of categories specifically focused on the intersection of creativity and technical skills unique to this community and inclusive of everyone working in the medium of animation and motion design.
“We’re here to help them survive. We’re here to free them.” Aggressive has revealed an official trailer for an indie sci-fi short film creation called Escape Attempt, from filmmakers Dan Shapiro & Alex Topaller. This is a full-on, 30 minute hard sci-fi film, which is also being pitched a series pilot. It already premiered at the 2023 Sitges Film Festival last year and won a Navigator Pirx Award for Best Sci-Fi Film at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. No idea when it will be out in full to watch, but it’s showing at the Fantasia Film Fest in Montreal next this summer. A soldier escapes from a WWII concentration camp. Once he is out, he finds himself on an unknown planet in an unknown future controlled by a homicidal alien race….
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
July 17, 1954 – J. Michael Straczynski, 70.
By Paul Weimer: For all the trouble the series had in getting produced, and getting aired, and me finding it on the dial when it was moved yet again, J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5 is one of the defining SFF series in my science fiction diet and education.
Is it a perfect show? No, and part of that is the capricious nature of television and the “unexpected” fifth season which leaves that season weaker than the others. And frankly, I do like Bruce Boxleitner much better as Captain Sheridan than I do Michael O’Hare in the first season as Commander Sinclair. I can kind of see where Straczynski was going to possibly go with Sinclair had he been allowed to do so and he gets it most of the way there (my theory: Babylon Squared would have been a fifth season show, and so Sinclair ends his time here by going back and becoming Valen, after defeating the Shadows). But what we got is pretty darned special to me. I’m on my third iteration of having physical media of the shows (four if you count me trying to videotape episodes back in the 90’s).
The post Babylon 5 series Straczynski works are of course a mixed bag. The movies are a mixed bag to be sure. Crusade had some interesting ideas but never got a chance to actually do its thing. I did highly enjoy the animated Babylon 5 movie, The Road Home. I honestly don’t think it works except for deep Babylon 5 fans, but that’s me, so it did feel like coming home.
Of course, one can’t talk about Straczynski without mentioning his huge impact on a number of different comic runs. I suspect that for a lot of fans, Babylon 5 is off to the side, forgotten. Instead, his fans can talk endlessly about his numerous comic projects and runs. It is his runs with Squadron Supreme, Spiderman, Superman, and a number of others (mostly recently, a new take on Captain America) that for a whole slew of fans defines what Straczynski is a writer.
I only found out years later after the fact that he was a writer on a weird cartoon I watched in the 1980’s. No, not He-Man, although he wrote for them and was one of the minds behind the original She-Ra. No, the strange and weird and wondrous Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, which had the titular character fight malevolent plant creatures…in SPAAACE. What can I say, the 1980’s were weird, man. But it goes to show the wide breadth and interests of Straczynski’s work.
(8) COMICS SECTION.
Speed Bump warns that the picture has left the attic.
Wizard of Id knows people have heard this motif before!
FX‘s upcoming “Alien” series has a new title, according to network boss John Langraf and showrunner Noah Hawley: “Alien: Earth.”
… “Alien: Earth” serves as a prequel to Ridley Scott’s 1979 film “Alien,” which kicked off a franchise that is now comprised of eight films. Alongside Hawley’s series, a new film titled “Alien: Romulus” is set to debut later this summer….
…Not counting the animated Clone Wars movie, there have been 11 movies in the Star Wars series to date: nine encompassing the Skywalker Saga, and two spin-off movies. The posters for all of those are ranked below, based partly on how well they tie to the film they’re attached to, but based mostly on how visually striking they look overall. To those who might disagree, too bad, because “I am the Senate” and have “unlimited power.”
Collider says the worst poster is the one for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019).
There’s a horse on the poster for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, but no room was given to Carrie Fisher, even though she was rather confusingly first billed, owing to prior footage of her being incorporated into the movie. Princess Leia still plays a part in the film, and was likely to be given a bigger one had Fisher not sadly passed away. Han and Luke were featured prominently on other sequel trilogy movie posters, but maybe there was a good reason not to feature Leia here.
There’s a goofy blaster round visible, thanks to Poe (a running theme across the two worst Star Wars posters), Zorii Bliss is featured way too prominently for a character who does basically nothing, and even the apparent clashing of two lightsabers looks clunky. Kylo Ren’s helmet is there, and presumably another Kylo Ren is holding that red lightsaber? And the placement of the Millennium Falcon between Rey and Kylo looks dreadful. This one’s pretty bad overall; a lackluster poster for a lacking (and overlong) movie.
…The aging orbital outpost’s demise has been in the works for years now, with NASA hoping to destroy it by 2030, marking the end of three decades of peaceful international cooperation in Earth’s orbit.
And not everybody’s happy with the plan. Jean-Jacques Dordain, who was the director general of the European Space Agency when the station was being built, and former NASA administrator Michael Griffin say its life should be extended instead, giving future scientists a chance to continue studying outer space.
“As two among many builders of ISS, we recommend to those in charge to consider other options than destroying” the station, Dordain told Forbes in an interview.
Instead, he argued, the ISS should be transferred “to future generations… leaving them to decide” its fate, he added.
To do it, Dordain and Griffin argue SpaceX’s deorbit vehicle should be used to rescue the station, not destroy it. Such a rocket would increase the ISS’s altitude, not lower it, allowing it to enter a stable orbit much farther from the Earth.
In an open letter published by SpaceNews earlier this month, the two space agency legends argued that boosting the ISS “from its present 400-kilometer altitude to an 800-kilometer altitude circular orbit requires a boost of about 220 meters per second, about the same as required for precise deorbit control.”…
(12) WE HAVE TOUCHDOWN! [Item by Mike Kennedy.] This student has designed and built a model rocket using standard Estes solid fuel rocket motors that can takeoff and land vertically. He designed a two-axis gimbal so that he would have thrust vector control plus the microcontroller and software to integrate sensor data and drive the gimbal to keep the rocket vertical. Separate Estes motors were used for ascent and decent. He also designed landing gear to absorb the shock of any slight off-vertical landing. “High School Student Makes Model Rocket That Can Land Vertically, Like A Falcon 9 Booster” at IFL Science.
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Andrew (not Werdna), Jeffrey Smith, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, and Teddy Harvia for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day (and night) Daniel Dern.]
(1) GLASGOW 2024 DELAYS BUSINESS MEETING AGENDA. The WSFS Standing Rules required publication of this year’s Business Meeting Agenda by July 17. However, Glasgow 2024 today announced that agenda “will be delayed until Friday, 19th July 7pm (BST/UTC+1)”. X.com thread starts here.
Glasgow 2024 has received 50 items, including new business and items passed on from the prior Worldcons. And they have put up this chart to justify the delay in producing the agenda.
In the meantime, File 770 has published the text of more than 20 of these proposals. Here are the links.
File 770’s reprints from the Journey Planet #82 “Be the Change” issue included two more proposals. Whether any or all were submitted to the Business Meeting is not known.
(2) LAST DAYS TO VOTE FOR THE HUGOS. There are only four days left to vote in the 2024 Hugo Awards and to download this year’s Hugo Voting Packet.
Voting closes at 20:17 GMT on 20 July because that will be 55 years *to the minute* since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first landed on the moon in 1969!
Instructions about how to vote and the way to download the Hugo Voting Packet are on the Glasgow 2024 website.
….According to Pasadena Now, the Black woman-owned business Octavia’s Bookshelf was founded by Nikki High, a former corporate communications employee at Trader Joe’s who left corporate America to accomplish one of her biggest goals: owning a bookstore. The name of her shop was inspired by Octavia Butler, who was known for her science fiction novels. When she opened her doors in February 2023, she was immediately embraced by her neighborhood and got more than enough support to move into a bigger space.
Due to traffic slowing down in the store, High is asking her community and the general public for help to remain in business; she set up a GoFundMe page….
…Due to lack of funding, she was forced to cut the shop’s regular events, group discussions, children’s readings and workshops, but she hopes to be able to offer these services again soon once she raises enough money.
Despite the hurdles she faces, High is unwilling to throw away her dreams.
“I still know that this is a viable business,” High told Pasadena Now, “and this space is crucial to our community.”
A black market for highly valuable Lego sets is being built brick by brick, and authorities are trying to knock it down.
Lego sets are highly sought after, by kids and their parents as well as adult collectors.
But it’s not all fun and games. Bad actors who know the resale value of these sets are increasingly cashing in, while law enforcement aims to bust such Lego theft rings.
Police in Oregon last week recovered 4,000 stolen Lego sets worth more than $200,000, according to law enforcement. Ammon Henrikson, 47, the owner of a retail store called Brick Builders in Eugene, was arrested and accused of knowingly purchasing the allegedly stolen goods for a fraction of their retail price and then reselling them, a local CBS channel reported….
… Two people were arrested in Los Angeles last month in connection with more than 2,800 stolen Lego sets. In April, California police arrested three men and a woman after discovering stolen Lego sets worth a combined $300,000. Some of the stolen sets included the 921-piece Millennium Falcon, typically priced around $85, the 6,167-piece Lord of the Rings Rivendell set, worth $500, and the 1,458-piece Porsche 911 set, worth $170.
Meanwhile, overseas, French police announced in 2021 that they had begun building a case against an international gang of toy thieves specializing in Lego….
The Sherman Family Foundation has offered a Week Five Matching Challenge, doubling any donations made this week up to $2,000! Donations made to Clarion West support free and low-cost programming for writers and readers year-round.
“Loamblood” by Phoenix Alexander — read by the author
“Surgery for Dummies” by F.J. Bergmann — read by Jean-Paul Garnier
Music by Phog Masheeen. Theme music by Dain Luscombe
Heather Wood in 1988. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter
(7) A. HEATHER WOOD (1945-2024). Publishing pro and folk singer A. Heather Wood died at Stony Brook Memorial Hospital on July 15 at the age of 79. At one time she was assistant to Tor’s President and Publisher Tom Doherty, and a consulting editor for Tor Books. She was also well-known in the folk music community as part of The Young Tradition, a 60s English group.
We applied a tiny bit of that musical talent on Noreascon Three’s (1989) program SF Tonight, where I played Ed McMahon to Tappan King’s Johnny Carson, and Heather Wood was our kazoo-playing answer to Doc Severinsen.
She also was known as part of World Fantasy Convention’s “Musical Interlude,” which featured pros singing in a folk revue.
Her website, which lists her many accomplishments, is here.
(8) IVAN GEISLER (1944-2024). [Item by Jeanne Jackson.] Ivan Geisler, longtime member of the Denver Area Science Fiction Association, passed away July 2, 2024 of congestive heart failure and old age.
I was first informed this afternoon by Sherry Johnson, his ex-wife. Although Ivan was quickly found by his neighbors after his passing, and his dog Brownie returned to the shelter Ivan had adopted her from, there had been some difficulty locating contact information for friends and relatives.
According to Sherry, memorial arrangements have not yet been organized. As Ivan was a veteran of the United States Army, it is likely the Veterans’ Administration will be involved in his funeral.
Ivan joined DASFA over 30 years ago. He was a lifelong reader of science fiction and fantasy, and also an avid amateur astronomer—he was an active member of the Denver Astronomical Society long before he found his way into DASFA.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
July 16, 1928 — Robert Sheckley. (Died 2005.)
By Paul Weimer: I came to Robert Sheckley’s work through an oblique angle. Somehow, through all of the reading I did in the late 70’s and early 80’s, I missed or didn’t recognize, his short story work (although it’s dollars to donuts I came across a story of three in the many anthologies I read during that period. (And a check in the writing of this shows a couple of Sheckley stories in 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories). But I didn’t recognize his work and his genius and his skill until 1992.
Sheckley in the 1990s. Photo by John Henley
Yes, it wasn’t until the movie Freejack came around that I started looking for Sheckley’s work specifically, since the movie proudly announced in its credits that it was based on “Immortality, Inc. by Robert Sheckley”. Yes, this is the movie where Emilio Estevez is a car driver transported to the future, with Mick Jagger (!) of all people as the major antagonist.
The name sounded familiar even so, and so, as was my practice at the time (Total Recall leading me to Philip K. Dick in similar fashion), I decided that I needed to investigate his work, starting with Immortality, Inc. The novel was very different than the movie by a long show, but I was immediately hooked on his writing.
I found his work sharp, twisty, clever, devilishly entertaining, and especially for his short stories, with a sting in the tail. It was no wonder to me that his work has been so adapted so frequently, and with such great effect. And while science fiction is generally not explicitly in the prediction business, “The Prize of Peril” pretty accurately and sharply predicts and shows the consequences of television devoted and focused on Reality Television for clicks. “The Perfect Woman” shows the consequences of wanting the perfect mate, straight from the factory, and the consequences of a lack of quality control.
My favorite Sheckley story might surprise, but it is “Death Freaks” from the “Heroes in Hell” shared world verse. With the ability of throwing anyone who is anyone into their shared world version of Hell, the editors got a story from Sheckley involving the Marquis de Sade, Baudelaire, Lizzie Borden, Jesse James, and an 8th Century BC Greek Hoplite. Sheckley, perhaps out of all of the authors in the series, best “understood the assignment” and let his imagination run wild. It’s a story that’s a lot of fun and full of the unexpected, entertaining all along the way. That’s what Sheckley could, and did do, with his fiction.
Ten days ahead of the film’s release, Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine has a new trailer and TV spot.
Set to the tune of Toni Basil’s “Hey Mickey,” one of the first shots in the trailer shows the mysterious Lady Deadpool’s red boots and up past her signature belt to show the ends of blonde hair without landing on her face.
Everyone seemed to like the Deadpool Bachelorette spot last night but can we talk about the episode? Thought Jenn made some strong choices, except for sending my countryman Brendan packing. Marcus is easy on the eyes, Grant was a little much and the day trading thing, but I get it. Two Sams will get confusing so slightly leaning towards Sam N. Jenn’s mom might have been the highlight and Melbourne, Australia, felt like a Hugh shout out so bit of a lowlight there. Overall, great start. What was I talking about again?
Monsters have roamed the human consciousness as long as there has been one, from tales around the campfire, to the tomes of antiquity, to the modern cineplex. And sometimes those monsters leap off the page or the screen, and out of our imaginations. Sightings of cryptids and other frightful creatures have spanned millennia, often taking place in the darkest corners of the world. Luckily there are lots of ways to get to know these fantastical creatures—especially when enthusiasts create museums or exhibits dedicated to their lore….
…In Point Pleasant, West Virginia, is a museum dedicated to the state’s most widely known cryptid: the Mothman. The only collection dedicated to the half-moth, half-man creature, the Mothman Museum celebrates this harbinger of misfortune, who has been spotted in Appalachia on and off since 1966. Much further in the past, stories of massive sea monsters off the Icelandic coast have stricken fear into the hearts of sailors. The Skrímslasetrið in Bíldudalur, Iceland, covers the history of these encounters. According to the museum, two of the monsters most endemic to Iceland’s waters are the hafmaður (Sea Man) and the skeljaskrímsli (Shell Monster), but there are more. From a four-legged beast that terrorized 18th-century France to an amphibious water demon in Japan, here are a few of our favorite places to get up close to monsters in relative safety…
The latest dinosaur being mounted at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles is not only a member of a new species — it’s also the only one found on the planet whose bones are green, according to museum officials.
Named “Gnatalie” (pronounced Natalie) for the gnats that swarmed during the excavation, the long-necked, long-tailed herbivorous dinosaur’s fossils got its unique coloration, a dark mottled olive green, from the mineral celadonite during the fossilization process.
While fossils are typically brown from silica or black from iron minerals, green is rare because celadonite forms in volcanic or hydrothermal conditions that typically destroy buried bones. The celadonite entered the fossils when volcanic activity around 50 million to 80 million years ago made it hot enough to replace a previous mineral….
When Hollywood producers showed up a few years ago at Sean Waugh’s office, he couldn’t wait to show them his thunderstorm-tracking equipment. Waugh, a meteorologist at the US National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, is a big fan of the 1996 film Twister, which stars Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton as leaders of a tornado-chasing research team. And now, Hollywood was asking Waugh his opinion on how the science in the next film in the Twister franchise should look.
On 17 July, when the film is released internationally, the world will see how Waugh’s recommendations panned out. Like its predecessor, the new Twisters film focuses on characters who are storm chasers: Daisy Edgar-Jones plays a researcher traumatized by past weather disasters and Glen Powell a social-media star racing for footage of the biggest and baddest tornadoes. But science has an even bigger role in the plot of the new film than it had in the original, say Waugh and other researchers who worked as consultants for Twisters. It not only shows advanced radar data and highlights links between climate change and tornadoes, “it’s an incredible opportunity to inspire the next generation of scientists”, Waugh says….
(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George’s “Battlefield Earth Pitch Meeting” tells why the movie was made – not that you didn’t already know.
[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Anne Marble, Joe Siclari, Jeanne Jackson, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Niall McAuley.]
…We are now rolling out a new royalty model that prioritizes equity, flexibility, and insight for creators—one that evolved out of ongoing conversations with authors and publishers, and that advances our creator-centric ethos. Under this model, creators are able to monetize more types of content, and listeners will get to discover more innovative storytelling.
Titles in all Audible’s membership offerings can now earn royalties: Audible’s new royalty model means new opportunities for small publishers and independent authors to earn across all membership listening activity. Now more titles—including those currently in Audible Plus, Audible’s all-you-can-listen offering—can generate royalty payments. Depending on the audiences that publishers and creators want to reach, there are new ways to monetize and promote content, which means more flexibility to reach listeners where they are….
How is the new royalty model calculated? Audible takes a member’s plan value (Plus or Premium Plus) and adds the value of any additional credits used, then divides that value among the titles the member listened to over the course of the month. That figure, multiplied by the contractual royalty rate, comprises a creator’s royalty payment….
Publishers Weekly’s coverage, “Audible Rolls Out New Royalty Plan”, observes that “the announcement comes after one of Audible’s most vocal critics, bestselling author Brandon Sanderson, reported in March that Audible officials had approached him to discuss ‘a new royalty structure they intend to offer to independent writers and smaller publishers,’ a plan that Sanderson said was ‘encouraging.’”
Sure he has won the biggest prizes in science fiction– the Nebula and the Hugo awards. But Paolo Bacigalupi found himself bereft of inspiration. Penning apocalyptic climate fiction, like 2016’s The Water Knife, had taken its toll….
…The Paonia-based author knew it was time for a change. Then the invitation came.
A wine-importer friend who knew Bacigalupi’s penchant for languages (he’d studied Chinese in college) invited him to Bologna for a crash course in Italian.
The answer was yes…..
…The real-life Bolognese setting inspired Bacigalupi’s new fantasy novel, “Navola.” It takes place in a city-state reminiscent of Florence or Venice during The Renaissance.
His protagonist, Davico di Regulai, is the son of an uber-wealthy merchant and banker. The boy has big shoes to fill, but very different feet, as it were. Armed with a preserved dragon eye that possesses magical powers, Davico struggles to be the man his father and community expect him to be….
Ryan Warner: How did you know it was time for something different?
Paolo Bacigalupi: Well, when you keep trying to write things and you keep failing to actually finish them, or even when you’re starting to try to write, it’s like sticking your finger in a light socket. It is sort of painful and damaging, you think ‘maybe I should do something different.’
Warner: And that’s how it started to feel in the climate change space?
Bacigalupi: Yeah. A lot of what I was doing, the news was bad, and then the stories that you’re trying to tell are extrapolations on the present day, and those are all terrifying. Then you find you’re in this space where your creative world and your regular life are all smashed together, and they’re all really negative and they’re all full of terrors, and it’s not a sustainable space to be. If you spend all of your imaginative time in anxiety, then yeah, it takes a toll and eventually you just break down entirely.
Warner: And if the writer isn’t enjoying it, how possibly could the reader?
Bacigalupi: Yeah. I think that a healthy writer finds pleasure in their work. I think there are unhealthy ways to go about doing good work, as well. The outcome can be good, but the damage internally is bad for the writer.
A.T. Sayre read and Nat Cassidy read and played his guitar for a very enjoyable evening.
(5) ERIN UNDERWOOD PRESENTS. The latest Erin Underwood videos take up Star Wars fanhistory, and test the relevance of Battlestar Galactica’s 2004 remake.
Star Wars: The Impacts of How Lucasfilm Built its Fan Base
Star Wars fandom holds a unique place as possibly the first ever nurtured fanbase built by a film studio. To understand the evolution of Star Wars fandom, I decided to explore its roots by inviting Craig Miller, former publicity executive at Lucas Film, and Garen Daly, Director of the Boston SciFi Film Festival, to discuss the early days of Star Wars fandom and its lasting impact on the film industry. Watch the video podcast discussion on YouTube and share your thoughts in the comments.
Battlestar Galactica (2004) Series Review – Does this Iconic Sci-Fi Remake Hold Up Today?
It’s been 20 years since they remade the 1978 version of Battlestar Galactica, and remakes often struggle to be relevant over time. From the story to the characters and the technology, how does BSG hold up 2 decades later? Watch my review of the full series and let me know if you think Battlestar Galactica holds up as well today … or even better!
It’s getting exhausting calling out Moon landing truthers. Especially when a high-profile rom-com starring Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson makes a mockery of one of the greatest human achievements in all of history. This weekend, the new film Fly Me to the Moon hits theaters, telling the story of a 1969 advertising executive (Johansson) who is determined to film a “backup” version of the Moon landing in a studio, in case the real one fails. Tatum plays an astronaut, and the two fall for each other, in a silly movie about how the nature of love is a lot like flying to the Moon, or pretending to, or something. All harmless fun, right?
Well, no. While Fly Me to the Moon isn’t presented as a dramatic film purporting to unveil long-lost truths about the space race, it is built upon a frustratingly pervasive conspiracy theory that the Apollo 11 moon landing never took place, or in this case, that NASA would try to use taxpayer dollars to create a hoax. But, the historical and scientific evidence that we did, in fact, land on the Moon is overwhelming. And, because this movie is dredging up all those conspiracy theories again, it’s worth restating why we know the 1969 Moon landing was very real….
… But outside of heroes like Buzz Aldrin, there is plenty of objective evidence that the Moon landing occurred. In light of the bogus concept behind Fly Me to the Moon, and to get a contemporary reminder of Moon landing evidence Inverse reached out to Dr. Brett Denevi, a planetary geologist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, was a vice-chair of Lunar Exploration Analysis Group, is working on the Artemis program.
“There is a whole host of evidence to demonstrate the Moon landings occurred, including images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera,” Denevi told Inverse. As she points out this is a relatively contemporary camera, launched back in 2009. “The camera is used to scout new landing sites like we are doing for Artemis, so it was built to take incredibly detailed pictures.”….
(7) SONGS OF SFF. [Item by Rob Thornton.] This is six minutes of reverb-soaked electric guitar recorded in a bathroom and reminiscent of the banjo in the theme song from the BBC’s Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. All the song titles are from my fave SF/F novels (see “Terminus Est,” “Burning Bright” and “Green Rapture.”). Bonus points if you know my musical nym! “Now And Always” by R Carnassus at Bandcamp.
San Diego Comic-Con has rolled out its schedule for the 2024 convention this week, which runs from July 25–28. For the first time since 2019, SDCC will unfold without a virtual event, pandemic protocols or labor strike cancelations, marking a return to normal of sorts for the largest annual fan gathering in North America.
Several major franchises will make an appearance at the event, including panels for Marvel Studios, “Star Trek,” “The Penguin,” “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” the “Walking Dead” franchise, “Transformers One,” “Alien: Romulus,” “The Boys” and “Doctor Who.” Here are the highlights, with descriptions from SDCC and/or the panel sponsors….
One morning in Sept. 2021, MaryAnn Harris felt strangely tired. She told her husband, Charles de Lint, that she needed to lie down. Then more worrisome symptoms began cropping up, from nausea to double vision.
The Ottawa couple rushed to a local emergency department.
At first, the cause of Harris’s ailment was a mystery. The ER team ran various tests, and after a few hours with no answers, they sent her husband home due to visitor restrictions put in place during the pandemic.
By the time de Lint came back the next day, his beloved partner of four decades was unresponsive and on life support in the intensive care unit.
“You don’t know what to think, what to feel,” de Lint recalled. “It was just utter panic.”
What followed was a three-year ordeal, as medical teams offered a battery of tests and treatments in hopes of bringing Harris back from the brink of death. She eventually regained consciousness, but by that point, inflammation in her brain stem had left her paralyzed. Harris never left the hospital and died in early June at the age of 71.
The cause of her devastating illness? A little-known virus that spreads through tick bites.
For years, medical experts have warned a rising number of Canadians are being exposed to ticks carrying an array of dangerous pathogens. Lyme disease is the most familiar — and by far the most common — but there’s growing concern about lesser-known threats as well, from various bacterial infections, to the rare Powassan virus that claimed Harris’s life earlier this year.
(10) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
1974 – Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
Fifty years ago, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia was published. (No, not on this day. Just this year.)
Though it is often considered the fifth book of the Hainish Cycle, Le Guin in multiple interviews and her writings has stated that there is no particular cycle or order for what she called the Ekumen novels.
And yes, I can say having read it more than once and those readings being decades apart that the full title does really make sense. Later printings would just call it The Dispossessed. No idea why the change and if Le Guin said why.
It was by published by Harper & Row that year with a stunning wraparound cover by Fred Winkowski. I found only two first editions to be had online, the first $1200, the other substantially more, but that was signed.
Le Guin in the forward to Ursula K. Le Guin: The Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume One which includes The Dispossessed says “The Dispossessed started as a very bad short story, which I didn’t try to finish but couldn’t quite let go. There was a book in it, and I knew it, but the book had to wait for me to learn what I was writing about and how to write about it. I needed to understand my own passionate opposition to the war that we were, endlessly it seemed, waging in Vietnam, and endlessly protesting at home. If I had known then that my country would continue making aggressive wars for the rest of my life, I might have had less energy for protesting that one. But, knowing only that I didn’t want to study war no more, I studied peace. I started by reading a whole mess of utopias and learning something about pacifism and Gandhi and nonviolent resistance. This led me to the nonviolent anarchist writers such as Peter Kropotkin and Paul Goodman. With them I felt a great, immediate affinity. They made sense to me in the way Lao Tzu did. They enabled me to think about war, peace, politics, how we govern one another and ourselves, the value of failure, and the strength of what is weak. So, when I realized that nobody had yet written an anarchist utopia, I finally began to see what my book might be.”
So let’s now go on to note that I discovered that the novel has a story set before it, “The Day Before the Revolution” and the character in that story, revolutionary Laia Asieo Odo, is a major presence in The Dispossessed.
But that’s not really why I’m bring the story to your attention. The story is included in the Library of America’s Ursula K. Le Guin: The Hainish Novels & Stories which has a short essay on what she was feeling after writing the novel which you can read here “Story of the Week: The Day Before the Revolution”. And the story is here “The Day Before the Revolution”.
Now where was I? Ahh it’s 1974, the novel has come out. Among us, it was widely acclaimed, and the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation definitely was appreciative of this as her website lists them this way:
Winner of the 1974 Nebula Award for Best Novel Winner of the 1975 Hugo Award for Best Novel Winner of the 1975 Locus Award for Best Novel Winner of the 1975 Jupiter Award for Best Novel
And yes, each link takes you to the proper Award site. Stellar webmasters whoever they are. Now interestingly, the Foundation doesn’t include the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award. I wonder why. It was also nominated for a John W. Campbell Memorial Award but didn’t win.
As near as I can tell, it has never been out of print in the last fifty years with multiple hardcover, trade and paperback editions. ISFDB lists far too many editions to really make sense of its printing history, so I can’t say definitively.
What I didn’t see is it ever got the small press, lavish edition treatment, but then I’m having a hard time remembering if any of her works did. Come on Filers, help me out here.
In 2019, The Folio Society published a hardcover edition with illustrations by David Lupton and an introduction by Brian Attebery.
On November 17, Harper Perennial will publish a trade paper edition of the book with a new foreword by Karen Joy Fowler.
The gods must be angry — or just laughing at the hubris of humanity.
Authorities in Mexico have slapped a “closure” order on a 10-foot-tall (3-meter) aquatic statue of the Greek god of the sea Poseidon that was erected in May in the Gulf of Mexico just off the town of Progreso, Yucatan.
Mexico’s environmental protection agency said late Thursday that the statue, which appears to show an angry trident-wielding Poseidon “rising” from the sea a few meters from the beach, lacked permits. In the few months it has been up, tourists had gathered to take pictures of themselves with it as a striking background.
But it was symbolically “closed” Thursday — and could be removed altogether — after a group of activist lawyers filed a legal complaint saying the statue offended the beliefs of local Maya Indigenous groups who prefer their own local god of water, known as Chaac.
It’s always been dangerous for humans to get involved in battles between deities. But this one appears to be all about present-day humanity, combining “cancel culture,” social media storms, lawsuits and the one truly fearsome, overpowering force in today’s world: Instagram selfie-fueled tourism….
…And after witnessing Harrison Ford replace William Hurt as General Ross, the calls for recasting have amplified within the Marvel fandom, particularly in the instance of Black Panther. Portrayed by the iconic Chadwick Boseman, fans now want the MCU to remove the Oscar-winning Black Panther 2 from the official timeline to facilitate the character’s recasting….
…However, Ford’s casting has also triggered a wave of demand within the Marvel fandom: the demand for Black Panther recasting. Portrayed by the late Chadwick Boseman throughout the MCU until his tragic death, the actor’s portrayal has remained iconic and pretty much irreplaceable. Yet, many fans believe recasting him would not be a bad choice, but only add to the legacy of the character he so clearly loved and played.
The MCU has recast several characters throughout its run, with Bruce Banner and Rhodey being some notable examples. These recasting decisions have hardly received as much hate from fans, but instead have triggered the calls for a Black Panther replacement since Boseman’s untimely death in 2020….
In a recent meeting of Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, the group unveiled plans to combat its transportation and logistics sector labor shortages with construction of an automated conveyor-belt highway running over 310 miles across central Japan.
Known as the Autoflow-Road proposal, the ministry showcased its blueprint for building both aboveground and underground conveyor-belt roads running between Tokyo and Osaka 24 hours a day. According to the ministry, it could move the same amount of freight in a day as 25,000 drivers.
“Automated logistics roads are designed to get the most out of road space by utilizing hard shoulders, median strips and tunnels beneath the roadway. …Our study is examining the impact on road traffic, including on surrounding roads, and costs,” senior official to the ministry, Shuya Muramatsu, told reporters.
The proposal comes as an answer to Japan’s ongoing transportation and logistics labor crisis, as the country begins to cap trucking overtime hours this year.
The Terminator promised he’d be back – and he is. Netflix is teasing a tense apocalyptic return to this world with the first trailer for “Terminator Zero,” its upcoming animated series set in the “Terminator” universe that will premiere on Judgement Day, aka August 29.
This teaser debuts Eiko, voiced by “House of the Dragon” star Sonoya Mizuno, a resistance fighter who is sent back in time to stop Skynet’s impending attack on humanity. “You can’t see it yet, but you’ve been on a collision course your entire life. There’s no going back, not really. It will never, ever stop,” Eiko ominously says in the teaser.
As she gives her warning, the trailer jumps between creepy shots of terminators repairing themselves, explosions and gunfire. “There’s only one thing standing between you and him — me,” Eiko says in the teaser’s final tense moment….
The wait is over! Dive into the highly anticipated first look at Andor Season 2 with this electrifying teaser trailer. Following the critically acclaimed first season, Cassian Andor’s (Diego Luna) journey continues as he navigates the treacherous world of the Rebellion. Set five years before the events of Rogue One and A New Hope, this season promises to delve deeper into the rise of the Rebellion against the oppressive Galactic Empire.
…Maya Hawke recently told Podcrushed that the eight episodes in the final season of the sci-fi hit will feel like “eight movies,” and noted the episodes are “very long.”
“Our showrunners, Matt and Ross [Duffer], take a lot of responsibility,” she added. “They have an amazing team of writers, but they’re very involved. They write a lot and they are very intense and serious about the quality of the continued writing, and so it takes a long time to write each season, and a long time to shoot them.”…
[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Larry Powell, Rob Thornton, Daniel Dern, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, 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 Thomas the Red.]
By John Hertz: WOOF is the Worldcon Order of Faneditors, an apa (amateur press association) whose contributions are collated and distributed at the annual World Science Fiction Convention. It has no formal membership; anyone may contribute.
The 2024 Worldcon, as many File 770 readers know, will be held Thursday, August 8 through Monday, August 12 at the Scottish Events Campus, Glasgow, Scotland, U.K.
This year’s Official Editor of WOOF will be Christina Lake. Alison Scott will do a cover. This will be a hybrid print & electronic distribution.
If you will print your WOOFzine, use A4 or compatible paper; 25 copies. There will be a collection box in the Fanzine lounge. España Sheriff will host the Fanzine Lounge. Get your WOOFzine into the box (which includes having someone get it there for you) by the end of August 10.
If you will contribute electronically, your PDF should reach the OE by then: <[email protected]>.
Scott can print some WOOFzines: PDF laid out in A4, remember to embed your fonts, reaching her by the end of July 25: <[email protected]>. You should make a suitable donation to GUFF, the Get-Up-and-over Fan Fund, this year sending delegate Kat Clay from Australia to the Glasgow Worldcon (in altemate years, GUFF is the Going Under Fan Fund, sending delegates from Europe- Ireland-the United Kingdom to Australia-New Zealand- Oceania); Scott is the Northern Administrator.
The electronic version of this year’s WOOF will be posted at <efanzines.com>. If you wish one sent to you, arrange with the OE.
WOOF collation should be finished by the end of August 11, with paper copies available in the Fanzine lounge. If you wish one sent to you, arrange with the OE.
Paper copies may be available for people who did not contribute; arrange with the OE. Some previous WOOF distributions are posted at <efanzines.com>.
If you saw Scott’s note on p. 159 of Idea 14 (Geri Sullivan’s fanzine; can be seen at <efanzines.com>), all the better.
Fancyclopedia Ill has a general note: <https://fancyclopedia.org/WOOF>.
What have I to do with this, when I’ve never contributed to WOOF? Well —
