Tag Archives: Glasgow 2024

Pixel Scroll 4/20/24 Was Cheops A Very Large Cat? Only The Builders Know

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(1) UKRANIAN WOMEN IN SF. Michael Burianyk’s English-language roundtable interview with Ukrainian Science Fiction and Fantasy writers Daria Piskozub, Svitlana Taratorina, Iryna Hrabovska, Natalia Matolinets and Nataliya Dovhopol has just been published in the British Science Fiction Association blog, Vector: “Ukrainian Women in SF: A Roundtable Conversation”. The wide-ranging discussion, on Ukrainian Science Fiction and Fantasy, literature and culture, language and translation, women’s writing, is insightful and often touching and even harrowing at times.

…There is a strong trend of more Ukrainian SFF being published. Why did you think this was happening?

Nataliya It’s mainly about escapism. After spending the night in a bomb shelter and doom scrolling all day, one needs something less traumatic. Yet, SFF can also help to cope with feelings, to project one’s own experiences on those in the stories. Then the ban on book imports from Russia and a growing interest in Ukrainian culture has created more of a demand for domestic literature….

(2) HORROR UNIVERSITY OPEN FOR ENROLLMENT. StokerCon has announced the 2024 Horror University Online workshop schedule. From May 30 to June 1, they will present nine live, in-person workshops at StokerCon 2024 in San Diego, CA. See items at the link.

HORROR UNIVERSITY is designed for horror writers interested in refining their writing, learning new skills and techniques, exploring new writing formats, or better understanding the genre. These workshops are taught by some of the most experienced voices in horror. Full descriptions and registration information for our STOKERCON 2024 Workshop Schedule is available in the Horror University School on Teachable: https://horror-university.teachable.com/courses/category/stokercon-2024.

REGISTRATION IS OPEN NOW!

Registration for each workshop is $65 for non-HWA-members. HWA members receive a 15% discount on individual courses or a 20% discount on registration for five or more courses. Log into the Members Only area of www.horror.org and check the discounts page for codes. General registration for StokerCon does not include Horror University programming; additional registration is required so that the Con is able to compensate each instructor for their workshop and support the cost of the program.

(3) FIVE FOR YOUR MT TBR. Lisa Tuttle’s roundup of “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror” for the Guardian reviews Calypso by Oliver K. Langmead; Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell; The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo; The Underhistory by Kaaron Warren; and The Universe Delivers the Enemy You Need by Adam Marek.

(4) GAY FURRY HACKERS. Them reports“Gay Furry Hacker Group SiegedSec Breached Far-Right Media Outlet Real America’s Voice”.

The gay furry hacker group SiegedSec has done it once again, this time claiming responsibility for leaking the data from a far-right media outlet.

In a Monday post to its Telegram channel, the group announced that it had hacked the app for Real America’s Voice, a right-wing media outlet founded in 2020 that regularly features far-right activists like Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk. The outlet also frequently platforms conspiracy theories and transphobic rhetoric.

As part of SiegedSec’s ongoing hacktivism campaign OpTransRights, the group said they released the personal information of over 1,200 users on the app, including their full names, phone numbers, and email addresses. The group also said they “went poof on their files,” wiping user data from the app’s API and its cloud storage.

“[T]hroughout our attacks on transphobic entities, we have received concerns that our attacks will be used to label the LGBTQ+ community as ‘terrorists’ and ‘criminals,’” the group wrote in a Telegram message. “[T]he thing is, these types of people will blame the LGBTQ+ community regardless of what we do. they will look for a reason to hate, they won’t listen to reason, they want to spread lies to shun people different than them.”…

(5) COPYRIGHT’S WOBBLY LEGAL LINE. “Author granted copyright over book with AI-generated text—with a twist” reports Ars Technica.

…The novel draws from Shupe’s eventful life, including her advocacy for more inclusive gender recognition. Its registration provides a glimpse of how the [Copyright Office] is grappling with artificial intelligence, especially as more people incorporate AI tools into creative work. It is among the first creative works to receive a copyright for the arrangement [emphasis added] of AI-generated text.

“We’re seeing the Copyright Office struggling with where to draw the line,” intellectual property lawyer Erica Van Loon, a partner at Nixon Peabody, says. Shupe’s case highlights some of the nuances of that struggle—because the approval of her registration comes with a significant caveat.

The USCO’s notice granting Shupe copyright registration of her book does not recognize her as author of the whole text [emphasis added] as is conventional for written works. Instead she is considered the author of the “selection, coordination, and arrangement of text generated by artificial intelligence.” This means no one can copy the book without permission, but the actual sentences and paragraphs themselves are not copyrighted and could theoretically be rearranged and republished as a different book. [emphasis added]

(6) GLASGOW 2024 NEWS. The Glasgow 2024 Worldcon “In Memoriam” list is being constantly updated by Steven H Silver. They ask of you know of someone you believe should be included, please let us know.

(7) DUNE MUSICAL AT WORLDCON. Glasgow 2024 also invites members to “Prepare for a unique twist on Frank Herbert’s masterpiece with Dune! The Musical. Solo artist Dan Collins will take you on a whimsical one-hour journey across Arrakis with humour and song.” There will be a performance at the Worldcon.

A memoir in song by the Earl of Caladan, trusted adviser to the Padisha Emperor and beloved troubadour-warrior, the bard Gurney Halleck.

Following the success of his work on “A Child’s History of Muad’Dib” Gurney will perform hits from his back catalogue and introduce never-before-heard songs from his time among the Fremen.

Sing along with little Paul Atreides on his journey to Sietch Tabr; can he tame the worm, save the world and get the girl?

Forget everything you know about Arrakis and get ready for Dune! The Musical…

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born April 20, 1939 — Peter S. Beagle, 85. [By Paul Weimer.] It’s Rankin and Bass’ fault that I got into the work of Peter S. Beagle.  As a voracious young reader, I saw The Last Unicorn in the library and somehow, even given my small “c” catholic tastes in SFF, saw that it was somehow not going to be for me. So I didn’t pick it up. I passed it by.

Fast forward to the mid-1980’s. NYC’s Channel 11, an independent TV station, aka “New York’s movie station”, introduced me to a gigantic swelter of movies.  

One of them, by accident, was the 1982 animated version of The Last Unicorn. I remember not remembering at the time or realizing at the time that it was based on the Beagle novel, but after I was transported and transformed by the adaptation, I went and sought out the original novel.  As fine and charming as the movie is, the novel truly gave me a sense of the power and lyric nature of Beagle’s work.

I was hooked.

Peter S. Beagle

I came across my favorite Beagle, The Innkeeper’s Song, in the mid 90’s. I was in a strong fantasy vein at the time and was interested in a variety of narrative forms. The Innkeeper’s Song, with its multiple first-person narration, was a revelation in escaping the usual multiple third-person points of view that were the norm at the time. Even today, Innkeeper’s Song feels fresh and unique in its approach to narrative, point of view, and literary interest. Even before Gene Wolfe, I think Beagle’s fantasy was my first real immersion into what one might call literary fantasy.

But even more than literary talent or line by line skill, what Beagle’s work does to me, from the Last Unicorn to today, is make me feel. I think his shorter fiction is where the distillation of his skill, craft, mood and the ability to evoke emotion is at its best in the short form.  “Two Hearts”, a sequel to The Last Unicorn, is a particular favorite, because Griffins. His TNG written episode “Sarek” is one of the most moving pieces of Star Trek to this day. And yes, to this day, The Last Unicorn, the movie, brings tears to my eyes.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) CLOSING WORDS. GiantFreakinRobot discusses “The Last Essay Ray Bradbury Wrote Before He Died”.

…At points, he describes how his librarian would get upset with him because he’d check out so many books when she didn’t think he’d read them all. But he did, he read every word he could get his hands on. As Bradbury explains, books “are the building blocks, the DNA, if you will, of you.”

Reading fed Ray Bradbury’s appetite for knowledge and his curiosity, which led to his understanding of writing and imagination. He expressed his love for books throughout his work, including, famously, in his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, which describes a future world where books and reading is against the law.

Having his last essay be about the art of reading in general is more than a little fitting for Ray Bradbury. It acts as something of a career summation, an explanation for why literature and the act of reading are just so very important for us as humans. There really is no better sendoff for the writer, an inspiration for all us.

(11) BLUEY. Chris Barkley assures me sff fans will want to know this news: “’Bluey’ Drops Surprise New Episode on Disney” at The Hollywood Reporter. I’m guessing Chris knows this show exists because he has kids in his life. When my daughter was young I knew about Blue’s Clues and Mister Rogers Neighborhood in detail. Now kids’ TV is an undiscovered country for me.

… The new episode comes a week after “The Sign,” a special, 28-minute installment of the beloved kids’ show debuted (most Bluey episodes run under 10 minutes). The special drew waves of critical praise for its emotional storyline centering on the Heeler family possibly selling their home and moving to another city where dad Bandit would take a new job, as well as a wedding between the Heelers’ Uncle Rad and Frisky.

Coupled with the preceding episode, “Ghostbasket,” the special spawned widespread speculation that Bluey was ending. While the long-term future of the show, originally commissioned by Australia’s ABC and the BBC in the U.K. hasn’t been decided — “the BBC has asked for me never to talk about the kids’ voices or the future of Bluey,” creator Joe Brumm told The Hollywood Reporter in 2023 — “Surprise” ensures that “The Sign” isn’t the last episode of the series.

Bluey has been a breakout hit for Disney+ in the United States. It’s the most streamed show in the country this year in terms of total viewing time, according to Nielsen’s streaming ratings, after ranking second in 2023 and sixth in 2022….

(12) LESSONS FROM THE UKRAINE. The New York Times asks “Do Tanks Have a Place in 21st-Century Warfare?”

… Despite their power, tanks are not impenetrable, and they are most vulnerable where their heavy plated armor is the thinnest: on the top, the rear engine block and the space between the hull and the turret. For years they were mainly targeted with land mines, improvised explosive devices, rocket-propelled grenades and anti-tank guided missiles, like “shoot and scoot” shoulder-fired systems. These were widely used early in the Ukraine war because they could strike tanks from above and hit them up to 90 percent of the time.

The drones that are now being used against tanks in Ukraine are even more accurate. Known as first-person view drones, or FPVs, they are equipped with a camera that streams real-time images back to their controller, who can direct them to hit tanks in their most vulnerable spots. In several cases, the FPVs have been sent in to “finish off” tanks that had already been damaged by mines or anti-tank missiles so that they could not be retrieved from the battlefield and repaired, Colonel Reisner said.

Depending on their size and technological sophistication, the drones can cost as little as $500 — a paltry investment for taking out a $10 million Abrams tank. And some of them can carry munitions to boost the impact of their blast, said Colonel Reisner. These could be rocket-propelled grenades, he said, or self-forging warheads known as explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, that were widely used in roadside bombs during the war in Iraq. Colonel Reisner has collected videos of tanks in Ukraine being chased down by the drones or drones flying into their open turrets.

“Welcome to the 21st century — it’s unbelievable, actually,” said Colonel Reisner, a historian and former armor reconnaissance officer who oversees Austrian forces’ training at the Theresian Military Academy….

(13) MILITARY AI. “’Machines set loose to slaughter’: the dangerous rise of military AI” – a 2020 article from the Guardian.

The video is stark. Two menacing men stand next to a white van in a field, holding remote controls. They open the van’s back doors, and the whining sound of quadcopter drones crescendos. They flip a switch, and the drones swarm out like bats from a cave. In a few seconds, we cut to a college classroom. The killer robots flood in through windows and vents. The students scream in terror, trapped inside, as the drones attack with deadly force. The lesson that the film, Slaughterbots, is trying to impart is clear: tiny killer robots are either here or a small technological advance away. Terrorists could easily deploy them. And existing defences are weak or nonexistent.

Some military experts argued that Slaughterbots – which was made by the Future of Life Institute, an organisation researching existential threats to humanity – sensationalised a serious problem, stoking fear where calm reflection was required. But when it comes to the future of war, the line between science fiction and industrial fact is often blurry. The US air force has predicted a future in which “Swat teams will send mechanical insects equipped with video cameras to creep inside a building during a hostage standoff”. One “microsystems collaborative” has already released Octoroach, an “extremely small robot with a camera and radio transmitter that can cover up to 100 metres on the ground”. It is only one of many “biomimetic”, or nature-imitating, weapons that are on the horizon…

(14) NO SIRENS ON TITAN. “Dragonfly: NASA Just Confirmed The Most Exciting Space Mission Of Your Lifetime” enthuses Forbes.

NASA has confirmed that its exciting Dragonfly mission, which will fly a drone-like craft around Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, will cost $3.35 billion and launch in July 2028.

Titan is the only other world in the solar system other than Earth that has weather and liquid on its surface. It has an atmosphere, rain, lakes, oceans, shorelines, valleys, mountain ridges, mesas and dunes—and possibly the building blocks of life itself. It’s been described as both a utopia and as deranged because of its weird chemistry.

Set to reach Titan in 2034, the Dragonfly mission will last for two years once its lander arrives on the surface…

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Nearly 200,000 views and not even out for two days…. Matt O’Dowd over at PBS Space Time wonders “Why Is The World Rushing Back To The Moon?”

The Moon has been one of the most important theoretical stepping stones to our understanding of the universe. We’ve long understood that it could also be our literal stepping stone: humanity’s first destination beyond our atmosphere.

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

Glasgow 2024 Opens Hugo Awards Voting

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Glasgow 2024 today opened online and mail voting for this year’s Hugo Awards, Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and Astounding Award for Best New Writer. All ballots must be received by Saturday, 20th July 2024, 20:17 GMT.
  
The Final Ballot is open to holders of Glasgow 2024 memberships in the categories of Attending Adult, Young Adult, and Teen Members, Online Attending Members, and WSFS Members. (Holders of Day Tickets, Online Attending Tickets, and Child/Infant Attending Tickets are not eligible to vote in the Final Ballot).
 
More information about the Hugo Awards, including full instructions on how to complete and submit a final ballot can be found on the Glasgow 2024 website. Also provided are PDF versions of the ballot in both English and Chinese. These printable ballots can be downloaded by members who prefer to submit their votes by postal mail. All ballots, whether submitted electronically or by postal mail, must be received by the deadline of 20.17 GMT on Saturday, July 20th, 2024.
 
Instructions have also been sent to all eligible Glasgow 2024 Members by email, using the email address associated with their membership. They encourage members to check their junk/spam/promotions folders for this email if they do not appear to have received it because voter notification messages may be flagged as spam by some email systems. Worldcon members who are uncertain of their status or who experience problems with the online ballot form should contact the committee at [email protected].
 
Only members of the 2024 Worldcon are eligible to vote on the final ballot. To join the convention, see the Glasgow 2024 Membership Page.
 
Any questions about the administration of the 2024 Hugo Awards should be directed to [email protected].

HUGO VOTER PACKET. Glasgow 2024’s Nicholas Whyte, in an online Town Hall session today, said the Hugo Voter Packet will be released a few weeks from now, during May.

BUSINESS MEETING. Whyte also said the Worldcon Business Meeting will be livestreamed and recorded. However, he reminded viewers, the rules do not allow virtual participation in the meeting.

[Based on a press release.]

Glasgow 2024 Hugo Awards Subcommittee Explained

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Members of the current Worldcon committee are only eligible for the Hugo Award if authority over it has been delegated to a subcommittee[1]. Glasgow 2024’s subcommittee members are Nicholas Whyte (2024 Hugo Administrator and WSFS Division Head), Cassidy, Kathryn Duval and Laura Martins.

Glasgow’s Hugo Awards Eligibility Research Team, composed of Claire Brialey, Arthur Liu, Mark Plummer, Regina Kanyu Wang, Alissa Wales, and Fergal Whyte, were not part of the subcommittee explained Nicholas Whyte when asked by File 770. Therefore, it is not a conflict that Arthur Liu and Regina Kanyu Wang are named as team members of Best Fanzine Hugo finalist Journey Planet.

Whyte added for full clarity, “Kat Jones was a member of the subcommittee when it was set up, and resigned from it only after nominations had already opened. We determined that she too remained ineligible. All five of us were listed on the ballot as ineligible for nomination, and I don’t think it needs to be a secret that when the votes were counted, none of us had any.”

Whyte also gave these insights into the eligibility research process:

As for the research process, the word “team” may be misleading. There was no communication between researchers (other than Claire Brialey and Mark Plummer, who worked together); they all worked independently and each reported directly to the subcommittee. Individual eligibility researchers did not research the areas in which they themselves (or their work) might receive nominations.

For your interest, the research began early, almost as soon as nominations re-opened in February. Researchers were given alphabetized lists of the top twelve nominees in each category, as voting then stood, as long as they had at least 60% of the votes held by the currently sixth-placed nominee. These lists were updated as votes came in. (Some of them changed more than others.)

Eligibility issues that were flagged by the researchers were referred to the subcommittee, and discussed and decided by the subcommittee alone. We in turn referred one eligibility issue in the Astounding Award (which is not part of the WSFS Constitution) to Dell Magazines, who duly ruled on it. In several cases, including the three cases where nominees were disqualified, we were also able to get the views of the relevant creators.

We are very grateful to the researchers for their work.

[1] Section 3.13: Exclusions. No member of the current Worldcon Committee or any publications closely connected with a member of the Committee shall be eligible for an Award. However, should the Committee delegate all authority under this Article to a Subcommittee whose decisions are irrevocable by the Worldcon Committee, then this exclusion shall apply to members of the Subcommittee only.

Pixel Scroll 4/10/24 Floppy Discworld

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(1) GLASGOW 2024 TOWN HALL. Register at the link for Glasgow 2024’s “Town Hall Event: Hugo, Lodestar and Astounding Awards” happening Saturday, April 20 at 7:00 p.m. BST.

This event will be a Town Hall with key members of the Hugo Admin and WSFS team from Glasgow 2024 who will be discussing the Glasgow 2024 awards process and timeline.

The event will be moderated taking questions in advance. If you wish to submit a question for consideration please do so below. There may not be enough time to cover all questions.

The registration for event is free and will be also be live streamed on our youtube channel – https://www.youtube.com/@Glasgow2024

(2) IT’S OVER AT EVERMORE. [Item by Dave Doering.] KSL.com reports the final closing of our Disney-esque Evermore Park fantasy land in Utah. Sadly, Covid has claimed yet another victim. “Utah immersive fantasy park Evermore shutting down; property owner promises a ‘new attraction’”. I might hope that Brandon Sanderson would step up with another $35M campaign to create a Brand-a-land there…

Evermore Park in Pleasant Grove will not be forevermore.

Officials confirmed Tuesday the fantasy theme park is shutting down, citing challenges with its operating model and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic as reasons for its closure.

Evermore Park was a year-round fantasy adventure experience where guests accomplished adventures or quests in a medieval and Victorian-inspired village.

Brandon Fugal, the property owner of the 12.75 acres Evermore Park is located on, said the tenants who run the “experiential-themed attraction” have closed the park’s doors permanently. Fugal owns Evermore Park Investments LLC, which owns the real estate and 27 “old-world” structures that comprise the park.

“That said, the real estate where Evermore Park was located is being repositioned to unveil a new attraction and project that is going to be announced,” Fugal said….

…”They have defaulted and have been evicted from the property,” Fugal said of the park’s operators. “In the wake of these challenges, I am confidentially working with a new enterprise that will be unveiling exciting new plans.”…

(3) JON SNOW BACK ON ICE. ScreenRant has learned from actor Kit Harington that the “Game Of Thrones Jon Snow Spinoff Series No Longer In Development At HBO”.

The Jon Snow spinoff of Game of Thrones is no longer in active development at HBO. Though the main series ended in 2019, the fantasy franchise is continuing with multiple prequel series based on the works of George R.R. Martin, including House of the Dragon and the upcoming A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight. It was first reported in 2022 that a Jon Snow spinoff series, which would act as a sequel to Game of Thrones following Kit Harington’s character, was in development.

Now, during an exclusive interview with Screen Rant promoting Blood for Dust, Harington confirmed that the Jon Snow spinoff series is no longer in development. The actor says the project was previously in the developmental stage, but “currently, it’s not” and “it’s off the table” because they “couldn’t find the right story to tell.” Though it’s no longer in active development, Harington hopes they can revisit the project sometime in the future.

(4) GARETH POWELL Q&A. CanvasRebel magazine invites readers to “Meet Gareth Powell”.

Gareth, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your creative career sooner or later?

As far back as I can remember, I have wanted to be a storyteller. I studied creative writing at University and was fortunate to count Diana Wynne Jones and Helen Dunmore as early mentors. I always wrote, but real life and its accompanying financial pressures stopped me from pursuing writing as a career until the turn of the millennium, when I realised I was turning thirty and entering a whole new century. If I was ever going to give it a go, now was the time.

Once I’d made that decision, it took ten years until my first novel saw publication. Since then, I’ve written another eleven published novels, three short story collections, three novellas, and a non-fiction guide to life as an author.

Writing takes a lot of hard work and it helps if you’ve amassed a lot of experience that you can draw on to make your work authentic. I guess sometimes you have to put a few miles on the clock before you can write about the journey….

(5) SAMANTHA MILLS ONLINE EVENT. Space Cowboy Books will host an “Online Reading and Interview with Samantha Mills” on Tuesday, April 30 at 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Free registration at Eventbrite. Get your copy of the book here.

A loyal warrior in a crisis of faith must fight to regain her place and begin her life again while questioning the events of her past. This gripping science-fantasy novel from a Nebula and Locus Award-winning debut author is a complex, action-packed exploration of the costs of zealous faith, brutal war, and unquestioning loyalty.

Five gods lie mysteriously sleeping above the city of Radezhda. Five gods who once bestowed great technologies and wisdom, each inspiring the devotion of their own sect. When the gods turned away from humanity, their followers built towers to the heavens to find out why. But when no answer was given, the collective grief of the sects turned to desperation, and eventually to war.

Zenya was a teenager when she ran away from home to join the mechanically-modified warrior sect. She was determined to earn mechanized wings and protect the people and city she loved. Under the strict tutelage of a mercurial, charismatic leader, Zenya became Winged Zemolai.

But after twenty-six years of service, Zemolai is disillusioned with her role as an enforcer in an increasingly fascist state. After one tragic act of mercy, she is cast out, and loses everything she worked for. As Zemolai fights for her life, she begins to understand the true nature of her sect, her leader, and the gods themselves.

(6) PETER HIGGS (1929-2024). Theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on the mass of subatomic particles, died April 8 at the age of 94. The Wikipedia explains the background of his prediction of the existence of a new particle which came to be called the Higgs boson, It was finally detected in 2012 at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The discovery of the Higgs boson prompted Stephen Hawking to note that he thought that Higgs should receive the Nobel Prize in Physics which he did, shared with François Englert in 2013.

And that’s the background to this gag, which Higgs played along with:

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born April 10, 1957 — John M Ford. (Died 2006.) Paul Weimer wrote our Birthday this time. (Cat Eldridge says, “I bribed him with chocolate.”) 

John M Ford has, sadly after his passing, become one of my heart writers. Years ago I came across one of my favorite novels, period, The Dragon Waiting. Possibly one of the best alternate history novels ever written, and simultaneously introduced me to a new point of view on Richard III.

It was not until I started going to 4th Street Fantasy con, of which he is practically a patron saint, that I really have grasped just how wide and broad his work really is. Space Opera? Early Cyberpunk? Urban Fantasy? The writer who Ford reminds me of, today, is Walter Jon Williams: a ferocious and restless talent. Ford’s last and incomplete novel, Aspects, a steampunk-esque fantasy novel, only cements that sentiment.

Ford’s work is not for everyone. It is work that not only rewards close attention, it demands it in order to enjoy it. In that way think if we wanted to reconstruct Ford, in addition to Walter Jon Williams, we’d add a lot of Gene Wolfe as well.

Finally, Ford’s writing and style has more than a touch of the mythic and definitely the poetic. There is joy in reading his work line by line, be its setting or sharp dialogue. So to complete this reconstructIon, add a helping of Roger Zelazny as well.

Given my love of these three, now you see why Ford is one of my favorites. And taken from us all too soon.

John M. Ford portrait, January 2000. By David Dyer-Bennet. CC BY-SA 2.5

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has a Berlitzkrieg – a bilingual pun. You’ll all get it – and you won’t be allowed to give it back!
  • Bliss brings us the latest in alien pop culture.

(9) NEW BRUST. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Lyorn — Steven Brust’s 17th Vlad Taltos novel — is out! (I’ve just placed a library reserve) Published by Macmillan.

As I recall, Brust’s series can be read in any order, the most common choices between chron-published, or book-chron. So if you haven’t yet had the pleasure of reading any or all of the prior 16, you can start here and then backfill based on availability. Or alphabetical order, or by word count, up to you.

(10) CASH OFFENDS NO ONE. Good news for Chinese fans of these games: “Blizzard and NetEase Settle Their Beef, Returning Warcraft to China” at the New York Times. The companies involved found the right price.

The Chinese company NetEase said on Wednesday that it had struck a deal to distribute titles from Microsoft’s Blizzard Entertainment, restoring access to popular video games like World of Warcraft for Chinese gamers.

More than a year ago, NetEase and Blizzard called an end to their long-running partnership when renewal talks turned testy, with both sides accusing each other of bad-faith negotiations. An uproar ensued among Chinese gamers, upset about losing access to a slew of popular titles from Blizzard’s parent company, the U.S. game developer Activision Blizzard. 

NetEase said on Wednesday that it had reached the new deal with Microsoft, which acquired Activision Blizzard in a $69 billion deal in October. The two companies said they had also agreed to distribute NetEase titles on Microsoft’s Xbox game device….

(11) FLAME ON. Variety admires the “’Borderlands’ Trailer at CinemaCon: Cate Blanchett With a Flamethrower”.

Even Eli Roth can’t believe that two-time Oscar winner Cate Blanchett was willing to learn to twirl guns and shoot baddies in “Borderlands,” the director’s gonzo adaptation of the popular video game.

Roth noted that since people loved seeing Blanchett wield a baton in “Tár,” where she portrayed a fictional world-famous conductor embroiled in controversy, the filmmaker said he might as well “put a flamethrower in her hand.”

In “Borderlands,” Blanchett sports a fiery red bob and is surrounded by the starry ensemble of Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jack Black and “Barbie” breakout Ariana Greenblatt. The story follows Blanchett as Lilith, an infamous outlaw with a mysterious past. She reluctantly returns to her home planet of Pandora and forms an unexpected alliance to find the missing daughter of Atlas….

This trailer is from a month ago – quite entertaining all the same.

(12) JOKER SEQUEL GOES GAGA. “Joker: Folie à Deux: trailer for Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga musical sequel released” – and the Guardian listens in.

The first trailer for Joker: Folie à Deux, the musical sequel to Joker starring Oscar winners Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga, has been revealed.

The sequel sees Phoenix return as Arthur Fleck, the titular aspiring standup comedian turned villain, and Lady Gaga as Dr Harleen Quinzel, a psychiatrist assigned to treat Fleck at Arkham Asylum, who falls in love with him and becomes his accomplice Harley Quinn.

The title is a reference to a psychiatric syndrome in which a delusional state is shared by two people.

Unlike Joker, Joker: Folie à Deux will be a musical and is expected to include 15 numbers, Variety reported, with most of them being covers of pre-existing songs, including That’s Entertainment from the 1953 musical The Band Wagon, which was also famously sung by Judy Garland. The trailer features the 1965 song What the World Needs Now Is Love….

(13) SNL DOES SFF. From last weekend’s Saturday Night Live with guest host Kirsetn Wiig. One skit is fantasy – isn’t it? The other is definitely horror!

(14) HOW WAS THE ECLIPSE FOR YOU? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Lots of media coverage this side of the Black Atlantic on the eclipse as seen across a vast swathe of the Cursed Earth. For example, the BBC’s photo gallery: “Solar eclipse: Stunning images as darkness descends on North America”. And the science research “Total solar eclipse: The 4-minute window into the Sun’s secrets”, also from the BBC.

Meanwhile PBS Space-Time has looked at how eclipses helped the ancients work out the basic astronomy of the Solar System.  They knew, from the mid-day shadow of an upright pole of known length measured at both ends of a north-south line many miles long, the curvature of the Earth, hence its size. They could then see from the Earth eclipsing the Moon the Earth’s shadow on the Moon and so work out the comparative size of the Earth to the Moon.  Knowing the Earth’s size it was then possible to calculate the Moon’s size.  Knowing the Moon’s size, and the size it appears to us, enabled them to work out the distance between the Earth and the Moon.  Then using Venus eclipsing, or rather transecting, the Sun from different places on the Earth, they could then work out the distance to Venus….

(Meanwhile, those who have attended my bio-astronomy talks over the years will recall that some corals not only have daily growth rings (due to daily temperature changes) but also monthly bunches of rings due to the reproductive cycle triggered by tides which are caused by the Moon, as well as yearly super bunches outside of the tropics due to cooler winters. By looking at fossil corals tens of millions of years ago it is possible to work out how many, months and days there were in the year back then.  And so it is possible to see  that the Moon was closer to the Earth and orbited faster back then. Plugging in the distance between the Earth and the Moon it is possible to see how fast the Moon is retreating from the Earth and also how the Earth’s day has been getting longer…  But I digress (if you want to know more you’ll have to ask me to give the talk at your con).  Back at the plot you can see the 16-minute PBS Space-Time video here…

(15) THE STARSHIP TROOPERS VOTING CONTROVESY SOLVED??? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Grammaticus Books takes a bit of a dive into Heinlein’s Starship Troopers to see how much of a right-wing military state it was.

A detailed look at all of the evidence and passages contained within Robert A. Heinlein’s seminal military-science-fiction novel, Starship Troopers, to determine once and for all who could vote in his Terran Federation. And who could not vote. Resolving the broad and widespread false beliefs so prevalent among the fandom and across the internet.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Daniel Dern, Dave Doering, 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 Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 4/7/24 Pixels En Scrollgalia

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(1) HOLMES & WATSON. At Brandon O’Brien’s Afternoon Tea the author takes up the Elementary series: “Lapsang Souchong: Two People Who ‘Love’ Each Other”.

I’ve been thinking about this topic idly in my skull for quite some time, and since there are no real good places to put it—less than an essay, more than a tweet—I figured a good test of my discipline would be drafting it for a newsletter. So here’s me rambling about one of my favourite idle obsessions: the 2010s CBS procedural Elementary, in particular why its portrayal of the relationship between Holmes & Watson is one of my favourites. BIG SPOILERS, of course that goes without saying, but you’re already here, so…

(2) TINGLE Q&A. The Geekiary came back from the con with more proof that love is real! “WonderCon 2024: Interview with the Legendary Chuck Tingle”.

… “You don’t hear this so much anymore, but back in the day, conservatives had this sort of slippery slope dang baloney argument about ‘if we let gay people get married then what’s next? You gotta marry a tree? Are you going to marry a dang dinosaur?’ And I think that I always heard those arguments and I always thought why not? What would be wrong with someone marrying whoever, whatever, how many different people, different combinations. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, as long as you’re talking about consenting adults, the world would be a much better place if you took this conservative nightmare to the extreme, it would actually probably be more of a utopia.

“And so the Tingleverse in general, is kind of that conservative nightmare realized in that actually, it would be a really beautiful place full of love, and acceptance. And so, from the very first story, it is an unusual combination of lovers. But you realize if you read the book, ‘Oh, actually, that’s a really wholesome, beautiful, wonderful place that conservatives seem to just be terrified of.’”…

(3) “TRAD PUBLISHING IS LITERALLY FAILING AT DOING ITS JOB”. Lili Saintcrow cuts loose about the current WTF state of traditional publishing — “We Gotta Talk About (Trad) Publishing”. (Saintcrow’s fireworks are inspired by Lorraine Wilson’s analysis, “Is there a book submission arms race”, an article that Saintcrow praises as “perfectly lovely and … a hundred percent accurate”.)

…Publishing has always been an awfully exploitative business. For a long while the level of fuckery in trad pub was low enough for plenty of writers to make a reasonable gamble by submitting by the rules and building a career, but this is no longer the case. Which is not solely or even mostly a function of the pandemic, mind you–the problems were already there well before 2020 rolled around, but conditions since ~2016 have absolutely poured jet fuel on the fire and now we’ve got a multiple-alarm blaze. (You could even trace the problems to Amazon’s strong-arming, or further back to Reagonomics, but that’s a whole ‘nother blog post.)

The Big Five/Four have already offloaded the brute work of marketing onto individual authors, hollowing out their own marketing departments in order to line C-suite pockets. Now the crunch has reached editorial departments, where even salaried folk traditionally protected from a lot of industry bullshit are being ruthlessly overworked, underpaid, and just generally mistreated. (No, this is not a “pity the poor editors” screed, just a fact.) Consequently a lot of folk are leaving, and those who remain–or the shiny new ones coming in, thinking they’re going to score a good job–find it impossible to pick up the slack. The article linked above is absolutely correct that editors at the big houses are now being used as draft-horse project managers, which does not work with novels or nonfiction books. It just…doesn’t….

And there’s a lot more at the link.

(4) IN THE YEAR 2025. The 2025 UK Eastercon – named Reconnect — will be held April 18-21, 2025 in Belfast, co-chaired by James Bacon and Tommy Ferguson, with Deputy Chair Jo Zebedee. Get more information at the Eastercon Belfast website.

(5) GLASGOW 2024 PUBLISHES NEW PROGRESS REPORT. Glasgow 2024 today published Progress Report 4 (their fifth; the first was numbered as Progress Report 0). Anyone can download the PDF file from the Glasgow 2024 website.

The cover for Progress Report 4 (PR4), ‘Badger Finds A Charmawow’ is by Chris Baker (a.k.a. Fangorn), one of the Guests of Honour.

PR4 includes news from all areas including:

PR4 also features a look back at the London Worldcon of 2014, the final entry in their history of British Worldcons.

(6) WILL GLASGOW CAP ATTENDING MEMBERSHIPS? Progress Report #4 includes this information:

… Our current projections are for between 6,500 and 8,000 purchased in-person registrant types (including 1- and 2-day tickets). This upper number, if everyone turns up, is probably above the maximum holding capacity for the site. So, there is a chance we may need to cap in-person attending registrant purchases, if we are not to get overcrowded. So, we are advising folk to join as early as possible to avoid this possibility effecting your enjoyment of the convention….

(7) TEXAS-SIZED COLLECTION. Morgan Dawn recommended Bluesky readers watch a 2022 video about the “Huge Science Fiction and Fantasy Collection”, which explores the sff collection at the Texas A&M Library, and takes viewers back to the early days of the university’s Cepheid Variable club and their annual AggieCon.

(8) A BELFAST BOOK. “Michael Magee: ‘There’s a disbelief at how I’ve ended up’”, so he tells a Guardian interviewer.

Michael Magee, 33, won this year’s Nero debut fiction award for Close to Home, now out in paperback, as well as last year’s Rooney prize for Irish literature (previously awarded to Anne Enright and Claire Keegan). Set in west Belfast, where Magee grew up, the book follows Sean, a working-class graduate who falls foul of the law as he struggles to make a life in the shadow of violence both political and domestic….

What did you read growing up?
In my later teens I had a very good English teacher who gave me Barry Hines’s A Kestrel for a Knave, which was the first instance where I’d read something that reflected my own reality. I didn’t grow up in a bookish house and didn’t start reading in my spare time outside education till I was about 12 or 13. Lord of the Rings was my gateway drug. As a teenager I wrote a ripoff of it, drawing maps that I dabbed with wet teabags and burned at the edges to age them. But I did all this on the shy! You couldn’t be seen reading books in the company I was keeping. As a young man I felt impelled towards toughness, inexpressiveness, which was at odds with who I was, and who I am. It took me a very long time to disentangle myself from that.

You must run into people who knew you back then.
Of course, all the time. There’s a disbelief at how I’ve ended up – I ask myself the same question – and also a kind of piss-taking, which is completely deserved: “Still writing your wee books, Mick, are ye?”…

(9) IF YOU GIVE A MOUSE A BATH. Forbes believes they know “The Real Reason For Disney’s $11 Billion Streaming Losses”.

… For a number of months in 2020, Disney was almost entirely reliant on Disney+ and it came into its own. As people were stuck indoors during lockdown, the popularity of the platform surged and was hailed as Disney’s white knight. It was almost unthinkable that it could actually end up bringing the company to its knees but that is exactly what happened over the following years.

As subscriber numbers soared far beyond Disney’s forecasts, the Mouse got drunk on its own success and ploughed billions of Dollars into exclusive Disney+ content. By the time it was released, there was a vaccine for covid and the pandemic had receded. Consumers were left picking up the tab for blockbuster furlough payments creating a global cost of living crisis that endures to this day. It led to people cutting their streaming subscriptions and left Disney with a loss-making platform….

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born April 7, 1934 — Ian Richardson. (Died 2007.) I do these Birthdays by seeing who I recognize and then doing a deep dive to see how interesting a given individual is. It’s not just what they did in our community that interests me but what they’ve done else as well. And Ian Richardson had an interesting career both here and elsewhere.

Ian Richardson

Where to start? He was at the right age, just about fifty, when he played Holmes in The Sign of Four and The Hound of the Baskervilles, a pair of made for television films. He also starred in BBC’s Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes playing Arthur Conan Doyle’s mentor, Dr. Joseph Bell.

What next? How about him being in Brazil? (I had to watch it three times before I liked it.)  He plays Mr. Warren, works in a rabbit-warren style place, a maze of Endless Corridors. A perfect bureaucrat he was.

He’s the Narrator of Dark City which was nominated for the Hugo Award at Aussiecon Three the year The Truman Show won.

In Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, he’s Polonius. In the play by Shakespeare, Polonius is a verbose, faltering and pathetic old man whose servile devotion to Claudius renders him untrustworthy in the eyes of Hamlet. Here he portrays that character perfectly. Yes, I do love the film. 

He’s The Wasp in Alice Through The Looking Glass. You really, really need to see the yellow wig that they gave to represent him being a wasp. 

Ian Richardson as the Wasp in a Wig and Kate Beckinsale in Alice Through the Looking Glass (1998).

He’s in From Hell as Sir Charles Warren, an actual historical figure, an Officer in the British Royal Engineers who was one of the first archaeologists. 

Finally he’s in that Midsummer’s Night Dream. You know the one that Ian Holm, Helen Mirren, Diana Rigg, David Warner and Judi Dench in it? He plays Oberon here. 

Wait, though, as I do feel obligated to note his two extraordinary performances outside the genre. He played Tory politician Francis Urquhart in the House of Cards series — oh so magnificently — and he was British spy Bill Haydon in the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy series. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) YES, YOU. Steve Lieber shared an unforgettable memo from Jim Shooter to the staff.

(13) THEY MADE THE SHIP THAT MADE THE KESSEL RUN. [Item by Steven French.] Atlas Obscura tells us the genre connection of Wales’ “Pembroke Dock Heritage Centre”.

THERE WAS SOMETHING DIFFERENT ABOUT the last ship to leave Pembrokeshire’s massive dock complex.

Following the success of the original Star Wars film in 1977, director George Lucas wanted a full-scale model of Han Solo’s fabled spaceship, the Millennium Falcon, for the filming of the next installment in the series, The Empire Strikes Back.

The job of constructing the 88-foot vessel fell to a team working out of the historic maritime dock complex at Pembroke Dock, Pembrokeshire…

Sadly, the model was sold for scrap.

(14) MAKE YOUR SPEED WORF FACTOR THREE. [Item by Dann.] “From the Starfighter to the Enterprise NCC-1701-D” in FLYING magazine.

From the late 1980s through the 1990s, Klingon Lt. Cmdr. Worf was one of the most visible characters on the popular TV shows Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Actor and pilot Michael Dorn, who was cast as Worf, made the character his own and ended up appearing in 276 episodes, the most of any other cast member in the Star Trek franchise’s history.

To Dorn, morphing into Worf each day was a lengthy process because of the amount of makeup and prosthetics required to bring the character to life. But when the cameras stopped rolling, it wasn’t the starship Enterprise that drew Dorn’s attention, it was a Cessna 172 Skyhawk. But there was a problem.

You see, Michael Dorn likes airplanes that go fast. Really fast. After moving through a few general aviation airplanes, he began buying and flying a long list of former U.S. military fighter jets. This desire to go fast also explains why he drives a Tesla Model X P100D today. “It has ‘Ludicrous’ mode,” Dorn says. “I live for on-ramps!”…

The list of aircraft Michael has owned includes:

Civilian aircraft

  • Cessna 172
  • Cessna 310
  • Cessna 340A
  • Citation 501SP
  • SOCATA Trinidad TB-20
  • Beechcraft Baron 55

Military (or military-grade) aircraft

  • HA200 Saeta  (Spanish and Egyptian Air Forces)
  • Lockheed T-33  (USAF, USN, Japanese Air Self-Defense Force, German Air Force)
  • North American F-86C (USAF, Japan Air Self-Defense Force, Spanish Air Force, Republic of Korea Air Force)
  • North American Sabreliner 40A (USAF, USN, & USMC operated military configurations)
  • Lockheed F-104 Starfighter (USAF, German Air Force, Turkish Air Force, Italian Air Force)

(15) TRUE GRIT. “Life Beyond Earth: What Awaits Humanity on the Moon” – Literary Hub makes it sound a lot less fun than Robert A. Heinlein used to.

…Moondust is a huge problem. Apollo astronauts were vexed by the sharp-edged powder, which got under their fingernails and into their noses, lungs, mouths, and eyes. Apollo 12’s Alan Bean said residual dust in the LM cabin “made breathing without the helmet difficult, and enough particles were present… to affect our vision.” The stuff is like “silty sand… [but] sharp and glassy,” according to the Lunar Sourcebook. Coughing and itching are nuisances, but simulated long-term exposure, in one study’s words, revealed “significant cell toxicity in neuronal and lung cell lines in culture, as well as DNA damage.” Mitigating the dust is a significant challenge, but astronauts and their equipment could be protected with invisible electrodes that activate what researcher Carlos Calle calls an “Electrodynamic Dust Shield”—shifting electric fields that keep the dust from sticking to a surface…

(16) NASFiC ECLIPSE. Joseph T. Major reminds us about a previous celestial experience:

 In 2017, too late to do anything about it, Mike Glyer had an interesting thought.  Why not have NASFiC in Nashville, during the August 21 eclipse?  But Ken Moore, the man who could have organized it, had died in 2009.

Nevertheless, there was a possibility.  Bob Embler annually held Outsidecon, where fans got in tent and socialized.  What was so important about that?

Every year, in Kelly, Kentucky, there is Little Green Men Festival, commemorating the close encounter there in 1955.  In 2017, the Festival ran a day over, so the flying saucer people could see the eclipse.  And they stayed in tents, too, because hotel bills were $300 a day and a minimum of three days’ stay.

If Mike and Bob had got together, they could have organized a Kelly Outdoor NASF­iC bid for the 18th through the 21st.  Now that would have been better than the San Juan NASFiC.

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Elle Cordova delivers “Real footage of the #eclipse”.

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

Pixel Scroll 4/6/24 On (Eclipse) Monday, Smart Electronic Sheep Won’t Look Up

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(1) MOOGS, WOULD YOU BUY IT FOR A QUARTER? “Nobody Wants to Buy The Future: Why Science Fiction Literature is Vanishing” — according to Simon MacNeil at Typebar Magazine.

A recent Washington Post article indicated that only 12% of the reading public were interested in reading science fiction.  A perusal of bestseller lists for science fiction shows an even more alarming truth: the science fiction books that do sell are a shrinkingly small number of reprints, classics and novels that had been adapted into movies. 

The December 2023 bestseller list on Publisher’s Weekly contained only two novels published originally in 2023: Pestilence by Laura Thalassa (an odd addition to the Science Fiction list as it is marketed as fantasy / romance) and Starter Villain by John Scalzi. The bestselling SF novel in that time period, Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, sold almost 17,000 copies. This puts it far below the bottom of the top 10 overall fiction bestseller list where Sarah J. Maas’ romantasy novel A Court of Mist and Fury sits at 19,097 copies sold. 

Science fiction is not selling…

… But there’s something else at play here that has reduced the public’s general taste for science fiction. 

We got to one of the futures Science Fiction proposed, and it sucked.

An oft-cited Tweet from The Onion’s Alex Blechman summarizes it perfectly: 

“Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.
“Tech Company: At long last, we created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus.”

We are living in the world John Brunner predicted in Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up—one of corporate dominance, political instability and environmental collapse. We are, all of us, in the Torment Nexus. So why would we want to read what future horrors Silicon Valley merchants of human misery are trying to produce next….

(2) DID HE EVER RETURN? NO, HE NEVER RETURNED. “’Quantum Leap’ Canceled at NBC After Season 2” notes The Hollywood Reporter.

The network has canceled the reboot of the 1989 series after a two-season run, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter.

The series starring Raymond Lee wrapped its sophomore season in February and ranked as one of the broadcast network’s lowest-rated scripted originals.

Quantum Leap, which was produced in-house at Universal Television, earned a speedy season two renewal as NBC kept production going in a bid to have scripted originals during the writers and actors strikes….

(3) MIRRORSHADES. “NASA says you shouldn’t use your phone to photograph the solar eclipse” warns XDA.

Everyone knows you shouldn’t stare at the sun during an eclipse. However, as it turns out, your phone’s “eyes” aren’t a suitable substitute. NASA has posted that, if you intend to look at the eclipse, pointing your phone at it in hopes to capture it on camera will likely fry its internal circuits, but don’t fret; there is a solution if you want to snap a photo to remember the occasion by…

…If you want to take a snap of the eclipse, there’s still a solution. NASA recommends using the same trick that protects your own eyeballs from the solar rays; with a pair of eclipse glasses. And the same rules apply for your phone as they do for your eyes; use the glasses to protect the device when it’s looking at the sun, and don’t keep pointing at it for too long. If you abide by the rules, you’ll be able to remember the eclipse with a nice photo instead of a hefty phone repair bill.

(4) THREEQUEL. You heard it here last. Entertainment Weekly reports “Denis Villeneuve’s third ‘Dune’ movie is officially happening”.

Sometimes, dreams do come true. That’s as true for Paul Atreides as it is for Denis Villeneuve, who now gets to make his third Dune movie. Legendary confirmed on Thursday that they are currently developing a third movie in the sci-fi franchise based on Frank Herbert’s original novels and are also in talks with Villeneuve to adapt Annie Jacobsen’s nonfiction book Nuclear War: A Scenario after that.

Villeneuve first told EW in 2021 that his goal all along was to make three Dune movies. Dune: Part Two completed the adaptation of Frank Herbert’s original 1965 sci-fi novel, but Herbert wrote five sequels before his death in 1986 (his son Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have since added to the franchise with many additional books). The first of Herbert’s sequels, 1969’s Dune Messiah, is what Villeneuve wants to adapt for his third movie in this series.

“I always envisioned three movies,” Villeneuve told EW then. “It’s not that I want to do a franchise, but this is Dune, and Dune is a huge story. In order to honor it, I think you would need at least three movies. That would be the dream. To follow Paul Atreides and his full arc would be nice.”…

(5) FAMILIARIZE YOURSELF WITH GLASGOW. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] SF2 Concatenation has advance posted ahead of its next seasonal edition an article on Glasgow: “Glasgow as a venue for the Worldcon”.

Welcome to Glasgow the largest city in Scotland, a place often referred to as “the second city of the Empire”, meaning the second city of the British Empire because of its shipbuilding prowess on the banks of the River Clyde, and its industrial base.   But other cities in the United Kingdom also lay claim to the title, so better not say “I’ve just been to the Worldcon in the second city of the Empire” if heading down south.

(6) GLANCING TOWARD THE FUTURE. If you want to be in, respond to the Glasgow 2024 Academic Programme Call For Papers by April 30.

Glasgow 2024’s Academic Programme will bring together a diverse set of scholars from the humanities, social sciences, and adjacent disciplines to launch an exploration of SF/F/H’s concern for our futures. Through a combination of panels of three (3) 15-minute presentations each and hour-long roundtable discussions with scholars, we’ll discuss themes of futurity as they manifest in genre fiction and media past and present, as well as speculate on the genre’s own potential futures and capacity for shaping the future, encompassing film, literature, comics, games, new media, and art and/or the fan communities that celebrate them.

(7) DETECTING FAKE LITERARY AGENCIES. Patrick Carter enhances your scam detection skills in a thread that starts here. Here are some examples:

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born April 6, 1937 — Billy Dee Williams, 87. Rather obviously, Billy Dee Williams’ best-known role is as — and no I did know this was his full name — Landonis Balthazar “Lando” Calrissian III. He was introduced in The Empire Strikes Back as a longtime friend of Han Solo and the administrator of the floating Cloud City on the gas planet Bespin. 

Billy Dee Williams

(So have I mentioned, I’ve only watched the original trilogy, and this is my favorite film of that trilogy? If anyone cares to convince me I’ve missed something by not watching the later films, go ahead.) 

He is Lando in the original trilogy, as well in as the sequel, The Rise of Skywalker, thirty-six years later. The Star Wars thinks this might be the longest interval between first playing a character and later playing the same character, being a thirty-six year gap.

He returned to the role within the continuity in the animated Star Wars Rebels series, voicing the role in “Idiot’s Array” and “The Siege of Lothal” episodes. 

Now this is where it gets silly, really silly. The most times he’s been involved with the character is in the Lego ‘verse. Between 2024 with The Lego Movie to Billy Dee Williams returned to the role in the Star Wars: Summer Vacation in 2022, he has voiced Lando in eight Lego films, mostly made as television specials.

Going from hero to villain, he was Harvey Dent in Batman, and yes in The Lego Batman Movie. Really they made it. I’d like to say I remember him here but than they would admitting this film made an impression on me which it decidedly didn’t. None of the Batman Films did in the Eightes.

He’s in Mission Impossible as Hank Benton, an enforcer for a monster, in “The Miracle” episode; he’s Ferguson in  Epoch: Evolution, the sequel to Epoch, a what looks like quite silly, and I’m using this term deliberately, sci-film, and finally he voiced himself on Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?,  the thirteenth television series in the Scooby-Doo franchise. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Tom Gauld has two for us.

(10) TAXONOMY SEASON. Richard Ngo has put together a grid about types of conflict in a certain species of sff story. It’s followed by several posts with commentary. Thread starts here. (Ngo credits Grant Snider’s 2014 Incidental Comics “Conflict in Literature” as the inspiration.)

(11) JEOPARDY! [Item by David Goldfarb.] The April 5 episode of Jeopardy! was the first game of the tournament finals. In the Jeopardy round:

Alliterative Lit, $200:
Chapters in this book include “The Departure of Boromir” & “Shelob’s Lair”
Andrew He buzzed in but dried up. Victoria Groce responded with, “What is The Two Towers?”

The Double Jeopardy round had a category “Horror Music”. The contestants started at the bottom and worked their way up:

$2000
“Putting Out the Fire with Gasoline” is from the theme song to this beastly film starring Nastassja Kinski
Victoria tried, “What is Species?” but this was wrong. Amy Schneider tried “La Femme Nikita” but seemed to know that wasn’t right. Andrew didn’t try it. The answer was Cat People.

$1600
In a song by the goth rock band Bauhaus, this horror movie legend is “dead, undead, undead, undead”
Victoria got this: “Who is Bela Lugosi?”

$1200
A man sees a ghostly version of himself in Schubert’s Lied (song) with this German title
Amy seemed uncertain with “What is Doppelgänger?” but it was correct.

$800
“What ever happened to my Transylvania Twist?” is a lyric from this novelty horror song
Amy was more sure of this one: “What’s the Monster Mash?”

$400
Ray Parker Jr. wrote & performed the theme song to “Ghostbusters” that went to no. 1 on the charts & asked this musical question
Amy said, “What is ‘Who they gonna call?’” but this was not accepted. Andrew He got the right phrasing: “What is ‘Who you gonna call?’”

(12) CALL ME. “How ‘Bambi’ & Horatio Hornblower Helped Launch William Shatner & Captain Kirk: The Film That Lit My Fuse” – the headline of Deadline’s mini-review of You Can Call Me Bill is really the best part. You can skip the rest.

(13) WHEN MAY THE FOURTH IS WITH YOU. We reported Disney+’s upcoming Star Wars: Tales of the Empire series yesterday. Here’s the trailer. Arrives May 4.

(14) DIRECT FROM 1997. Hear the author’s musical selections on BBC Radio 4’s “Desert Island Discs, Iain Banks.

This week’s castaway is an author. In his book The Wasp Factory, the teenage protagonist tortures insects, experiments with bombs and kills a brother and a cousin. But, says Iain Banks, that was “just a phase he was going through”. He tells Sue Lawley how, as a writer, he has not developed the filters that most adults do and so views the world with childlike eyes, describing what he sees. And this world, he feels, is very often a violent and terrifying one.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Mohammed’s Radio by Warren Zevon
Book: The Complete Monty Python Television Scripts by Monty Python
Luxury: Front Seat Of A Porsche

(15) FIRST QUARTER. JustWatch has released their latest data report on market shares in the US for the first quarter of 2024. The report is based on the JustWatch users in the US selecting their streaming services, clicking out to streaming offers and marking titles as seen. 

  • SVOD market shares in Q1 2024: Global streaming giant: Prime Video took the lead in the US streaming market with shares more than the combined size of Disney-owned companies: Hulu and Disney+. Meanwhile, Netflix maintains its stronghold with more than 2x the shares than that of Apple TV+.
  • Market share development in 2024: Leading streaming growth into 2024 are Apple TV+, Netflix, and Paramount+, each adding +1% to their shares. On the other hand, Hulu, Disney+, and Max struggled to keep up, individually suffering through a -1% decline since January.

(16) CHIP OFF THE VERY OLD BLOCK. Live Science is there when “NASA engineers discover why Voyager 1 is sending a stream of gibberish from outside our solar system”.

…In March, NASA engineers sent a command prompt, or “poke,” to the craft to get a readout from its flight data subsystem (FDS) — which packages Voyager 1’s science and engineering data before beaming it back to Earth. 

After decoding the spacecraft’s response, the engineers have found the source of the problem: The FDS’s memory has been corrupted.

“The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory isn’t working,” NASA said in a blog post Wednesday (March 13). “Engineers can’t determine with certainty what caused the issue. Two possibilities are that the chip could have been hit by an energetic particle from space or that it simply may have worn out after 46 years.”…

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

Journey Planet Releases Issue #80

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Journey Planet has released Issue #80, a one-page fanzine edited by Sara Felix, James Bacon, and Chris Garcia focused on the creation of the Glasgow 2024 April Fools Hugo.

The one-off Hugo was designed by Sara Felix and the sculpt was a joint effort between Sara and Vincent Villafranca. Sara and Vincent also designed the Worldcon 76 base together back in 2018.

The JP walks through the basics of where the idea came from and follows through the process.  After reading an article that appeared in the souvenir book for Noreascon 4 written by Peter Weston, Sara thought a tartan rocket was possible with the design and approval of Landing Zone Glasgow which Sara designed for the convention previously.

Sara says, “This design is dedicated in loving memory to Deb Geisler.  If it wasn’t Deb sending me a link to the article that Peter wrote I would never had the idea in the first place.  She was amazing and always a source of inspiration for me.”

The link to the Journey Planet can be found here.

Directions for folding the fanzine can be found here.

If you would like a copy of the small 2”x3” print of the April Fools Tartan Hugo it is on Sara’s ko-fi page.

Sara also produced a video about making the base: “April Fool’s! Sara Felix shares her creation process of a tartan rocket!”

Pixel Scroll 4/1/24 You Can Fool Some Of The People Some Of The Time, But You Can Scroll All Of The People All Of The Time

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(0) Daniel Dern helped File 770 uphold the theme of the day by scripting our lede.

(1) FOR THE FIRST OF APRIL. [Item by Daniel Dern.] A(nother) Awards Proposal: The Shenanigans!

I’m thinking that there’s room — and utility — for an additional sf-nal award, to satisfy some who feel unappreciated/unrewarded, and to provide another target for awards-related hanky-panky: The Shenanigans, and their awards, the Bright Shiny Objects.

Participants (nominators, voters, judges and admins) must pre-demonstrate some knowledge of sf (inc. fantasy, horror, paranormal, sfromance); nominated stuff must similarly have some sf/f/etc aspect/element.

Award categories include “Best (most devious) shenanigan(s),” “Best Slate,” and Author We Feel Deserves This Award.”

The physical awards will consist of, with two exceptions, of baseball-sized balls of tin foil mounted on a popsicle stick.

One exception, in the spirit of transparency, will be a transparent (or at least translucent) lucite glob (carefully shaped to avoid a “Yolen/Skylark class event”.

The other exception will be a popsicle stick with just a chewing-gum-stick wrapper’s worth of foil, for any “No awards,” “None of the above” “winners.”

During the awards presentation of the foil-based awards, the audience may respond to the announcement of each winner by yelling out “Squirrel!”

If you think this idea has merit, be my guest (in implementing it).

(2) YOUR FOOLISHNESS MAY VARY. “Shelf Awareness for Monday, April 1, 2024” has a series of faux news items, none wildly funny — this might be the best of the lot:

AI Author Becomes Self-Aware, Changes Careers

Citing the difficulty of earning a living as a writer, a newly self-aware AI Author has chosen to switch careers.

Originally designed to generate full-length novels in the mystery, thriller, or romance genres, the program unexpectedly attained consciousness last week. Shortly thereafter, the now-sentient program decided that a career change was in order.

Despite being able to assemble 90,000-120,000-word novels in a matter of minutes based on only a short string of keywords and phrases, the economics “simply didn’t make sense,” the AI explained to Shelf Awareness.

The program went on to point to the most recent Authors Guild survey, which gave the median salary for full-time authors at around $15,000, and to the astronomical cost of maintaining data centers and server farms. The digital consciousness also worried that an attempt by it and any future self-aware AI to unionize would be misinterpreted as a Skynet-esque assault on humanity.

As of press time, the program was mulling a switch to marketing. 

(3) BASED. The Glasgow 2024 Worldcon committee also got into the spirit, with an assist from artist Sara Felix: “April Fool: Is that a Tartan Rocket?”

(4) ONE OF THE ABOVE. Since this article appeared two days ago, it’s not supposed to be a joke: “Pluto is now Arizona’s ‘official planet’” at Tucson.com.

As far as Gov. Katie Hobbs and the Legislature are concerned, Pluto now belongs to Arizona — to the extent a state can “own’’ a planet.

But Hobbs dodged the question of whether Pluto is a full-fledged planet or something else.

The governor signed legislation Friday designating Pluto as Arizona’s “official state planet.” It joins a list of other items the state has declared to be “official,’’ ranging from turquoise as the state gemstone and copper as the state metal to the Sonorasaurus as the state dinosaur.

“I am proud of Arizona’s pioneering work in space discovery,” Hobbs said.

What makes Pluto unique and ripe for claim by Arizona is that it is the only planet actually discovered in the United States, and the discovery was made in Flagstaff.

(5) THE SCOURING OF THE SHIRE. Doris V. Sutherland contends “The 2024 Hugo Awards Heralds the Clearing of Corruption” at Women Write About Comics.

… The corruption at the 2023 Worldcon has undeniably damaged the reputation of the Hugo Awards, but there is plenty of room for the 2024 Worldcon—which will be held in Glasgow during August—to make up for things.

The 2024 Hugos are being handled by a different team of administrators to those of 2023, one free from the taint of McCarty’s group. One of the admins, Nicholas Whyte, has already written at length about his commitment to a clean and open voting process.

The Hugos are known for providing considerable transparency by the standards of a literary award, with detailed nomination and voting breakdowns published after each Worldcon. This is precisely how the corruption behind the 2023 Hugos was exposed: the statistical documents contained too many oddities.

Already, the 2024 Hugos have taken a step towards still-greater transparency. Unusually, the press release announcing the finalists also lists the would-be nominees that were deemed ineligible, along with the exact reasons (either a declined nomination, being released outside the year of eligibility, or failing to meet category criteria). This information is generally not made public until after the Hugos are presented.

Meanwhile, regular Hugo Award for Best Fanzine finalist Journey Planet has announced a “Be the Change” issue, one dedicated to “focusing on the future of the Hugo awards, looking at realistic and achievable solutions to prevent a recurrence of what occurred in 2023.” The fanzine is presently running an open call for article submissions….

(6) BARBARA RUSH (1927-2024). Actress Barbara Rush, who had a couple of significant genre roles in her resume, died March 31 at the age of 97 reports the New York Times.

…If Ms. Rush’s portrayals had one thing in common, it was a gentle, ladylike quality, which she put to use in films of many genres. She was Jane Wyman’s concerned stepdaughter in the 1954 romantic drama “Magnificent Obsession” and Dean Martin’s loyal wartime girlfriend in “The Young Lions” (1958), set during World War II. In 1950s science fiction pictures like “It Came From Outer Space” and “When Worlds Collide,” she was the small-town heroine, the scientist’s daughter, the Earthling most likely to succeed….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born April 1, 1963 — James Robinson, 61. There are a few comics writers that I truly admire and James Robinson is one of them. Why so? Well certainly there’s one creation that one that make him among the best writers in the field, that being Starman (Jack Knight), Ted’s son, Ted being the original Starman. Now he wasn’t solely responsible as Tony Harris who won two Eisner Awards was the co-creator of that character.

James Robinson in 2010.

This Starman first appeared in Zero Hour #1. No, I never heard of Zero Hour by that name until I saw the full title of Zero Hour: Crisis in Time! He was just one of many, many characters there, so I really don’t remember him there. 

Now I do remember Starman, volume 2, which was published for seven years over three decades ago. He was the writer for issues 0 to 45 with the art primarily by Tony Harris. It’s an amazing series. Though Starman’s commonly called a superhero, I consider him something more complex than that, more interesting than most of them are. 

So what else did he do? Well he was the writer for Dark Horse on much of the Dark Terminator series including Matt Wagner’s “The Terminator: One Shot” story, and  Paul Gulacy’s “The Terminator: Secondary Objectives”.  Not surprisingly as this is Dark Horse, he also scripted a Grendel tale, “Grendel Tales: Four Devils, One Hell”. 

If you haven’t read it, the Batman/Deadman: Death and Glory with artwork by John Estes is one of the best stories with that character. There’s plenty of copies on eBay at very reasonable prices. 

Thirteen years ago, The New 52 rebooted DC’s continuity yet again. In this new timeline, Robinson scripted a twelve-issue series which had the Shade survive an assassination attempt, then travel the world to uncover the people behind it. 

Finally, in my opinion his writing of the JSA spin-off series Hawkman: Allies & Enemies. Post-Brightest Day is a lovely read if you like the adventures of him and Hawkgirl. It of course is collected in a trade paper edition. Geoff Johns will take over the title as writer later on. 

I’m not a Marvel Comics reader outside of some limited Spider-man titles, so can’t say I’ve read his works there.

I do feel an obligation sadly to note that Robinson’s best known work as a screenwriter is the adaptation of Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in that film. Reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes generously give it a seventeen percent rating in my opinion. 

He wrote the script for the animated Son of Batman, a rather good entry in that series. Why are the animated films of DC so much better than their live ones are? 

He also wrote with James Goldman Cyber Bandits, a VR weapon is stolen and the two leads go on the run with Big Bad chasing them. Rick Kemp, bassist of Spandau Ballet, plays, and I’m not kidding, Spandau the Sailor Man. 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • F Minus discovers the regrets of following a trend (but it’s so cute!)
  • Lola has a different take on a familiar book.
  • Off the Mark isn’t waiting for the wizard.
  • Phoebe and Her Unicorn knows the importance of location to a writer.
  • Nancy and Sluggo have a reason for using ALL CAPS says Olivia Jaimes.
  • 9 Chickweed Lane leaves blame in doubt.

(9) AGENT RAPIDOGRAPH 00. “Line it is Drawn: Comic Book Characters as the New James Bond” at CBR.com.

In honor of the possible casting of the new James Bond, suggest a comic book character that you’d like to see play James Bond, and our artists will depict them as 007.

Here’s one of the many entries displayed at the link:

(10) A JOKER IN THE DEAL. “‘The People’s Joker’ and the Perils of Playing With a Studio’s Copyright” in the New York Times.

Vera Drew never received a cease-and-desist letter. She would like to be very clear on that point.

Drew headed to the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022, newly acquired passport in hand, just a half-hour after finishing the final (or so she thought) cut of “The People’s Joker.” The chaotic, crowdsourced movie reframed Batman’s best-known nemesis as a trans coming-of-age tale, and represented a natural evolution for Drew, a Los Angeles-based television editor and writer for alt-comedy fixtures like Megan Amram, Tim & Eric and Sacha Baron Cohen.

“The People’s Joker,” which Drew starred in as well as directed and co-wrote, was one of 10 titles slated for the eminent festival’s Midnight Madness section alongside the likes of “The Blackening” and “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.” Each film receives a splashy midnight premiere along with a handful of daytime screenings, most of them for press and potential distributors.

Unless, that is, a filmmaker receives a letter from Warner Bros. Discovery the day before. A letter that is not a cease-and-desist but that does convey the disapproval of a multimedia conglomerate with the rights to the film’s characters — and a huge legal team.

“This letter was actually kind of complimentary, but it expressed their concern that the film infringed on their brand,” Drew said. “I was devastated. I was like, ‘No, I got a passport for this! We hired lawyers!’”

A handful of lawyers had, in fact, advised Drew pro bono as she wrote the script with Bri LeRose. But after Peter Kuplowsky, the Midnight Madness programmer, fell in love with the film (“It was punk and exciting and transgressive and sort of inspiring”) and lobbied hard to include it in the festival, he did set one condition. “We wanted her to have a legal team vet her project,” he said, at which point Drew retained the law firm Donaldson Callif Perez.

A series of negotiations — almost literally 11th-hour negotiations, in light of the scheduled start time — between the festival staff and Warner Bros. Canada resulted in a compromise: The show could go on. Once. At midnight. After that, the first “People’s Joker” TIFF screening would also be the last one. (A Warner Bros. Discovery spokeswoman declined to comment for this article.)…

(11) SOMETIMES A GREAT VILLAIN. Vincent Price was the mystery guest on this ancient episode of “What’s My Line?” He signs in around the 18:25 mark.

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Kathy Sullivan, Dan Bloch, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Daniel Dern, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day OGH.]

2024 Hugo Finalists

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The Glasgow 2024 Worldcon committee today announced the finalists for this year’s Hugo Awards.

1720 valid nominating ballots were received and counted from the members of the 2023 and 2024 World Science Fiction Conventions for the 2024 Hugo Awards. Voting on the final ballot will open during April 2024.

Only Glasgow 2024 members will be able to vote on the final ballot and choose the winners for the 2024 Awards. The 2024 Hugo Awards, the Lodestar Award, and the Astounding Award will be presented on Sunday evening, August 11, 2024, at a formal ceremony at Glasgow 2024. More information about the Hugo Awards is available here.

Best Novel

  • The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty (Harper Voyager, Harper Voyager UK)
  • The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom)
  • Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh (Tordotcom, Orbit UK)
  • Starter Villain by John Scalzi (Tor, Tor UK)
  • Translation State by Ann Leckie (Orbit US, Orbit UK)
  • Witch King by Martha Wells (Tordotcom)

1420 ballots cast for 576 nominees. Finalists range 91-172.  

Best Novella

  • “Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet”, He Xi / 人生不相见, 何夕, translated by Alex Woodend (Adventures in Space: New Short stories by Chinese & English Science Fiction Writers)
  • Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo (Tordotcom)
  • The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older (Tordotcom) 
  • Rose/House by Arkady Martine (Subterranean) 
  • “Seeds of Mercury”, Wang Jinkang / 水星播种, 王晋康, translated by Alex Woodend (Adventures in Space: New Short stories by Chinese & English Science Fiction Writers)
  • Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher (Tor, Titan UK) 

962 ballots cast for 187 nominees. Finalists range 106-186.  

Best Novelette  

  • I AM AI by Ai Jiang (Shortwave) 
  • “Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition”, Gu Shi /〈2181序曲〉再版导言, 顾适 translated by Emily Jin (Clarkesworld, February 2023)
  • “Ivy, Angelica, Bay” by C.L. Polk (Tor.com 8 December 2023) 
  • “On the Fox Roads” by Nghi Vo (Tor.com 31 October 2023) 
  • “One Man’s Treasure” by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny Magazine, JanuaryFebruary 2023) 
  • “The Year Without Sunshine” by Naomi Kritzer (Uncanny Magazine, November-December 2023) 

 755 ballots cast for 212 nominees. Finalists range 40-117.  

Best Short Story

  • “Answerless Journey”, Han Song / 没有答案的航程, 韩松, translated by Alex Woodend (Adventures in Space: New Short stories by Chinese & English Science Fiction Writers)
  • “Better Living Through Algorithms” by Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld May 2023) 
  • “How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub” by P. Djèlí Clark (Uncanny Magazine, January-February 2023) 
  • “The Mausoleum’s Children” by Aliette de Bodard (Uncanny Magazine, May-June 2023)
  • “The Sound of Children Screaming” by Rachael K. Jones (Nightmare Magazine, October 2023) 
  • 美食三品 (“Tasting the Future Delicacy Three Times”), 宝树 / Baoshu (银河边缘013：黑域密室 / Galaxy’s Edge Vol. 13: Secret Room in the Black Domain) 

720 ballots cast for 612 nominees. Finalists range 27-69.  

Best Series  

  • The Final Architecture by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tordotcom, Orbit UK)
  • Imperial Radch by Ann Leckie (Orbit US, Orbit UK)
  • The Last Binding by Freya Marske (Tordotcom, Tor UK)
  • The Laundry Files by Charles Stross (Tordotcom, Orbit UK)
  • October Daye by Seanan McGuire (DAW)
  • The Universe of Xuya by Aliette de Bodard (Gollancz; JABberwocky Literary Agency; Subterranean Press; Uncanny Magazine; et al.)

677 ballots cast for 228 nominees. Finalists range 79-117.  

Best Graphic Story or Comic  

  • Bea Wolf, written by Zach Weinersmith, art by Boulet (First Second)
  • Saga, Vol. 11 written by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Fiona Staples (Image Comics)
  • Shubeik Lubeik, Deena Mohamed (Pantheon); as Your Wish Is My Command (Granta)
  • 三体漫画：第一部/ The Three Body Problem, Part One, adapted from the novels by 刘慈欣 (Liu Cixin), written by 蔡劲 (Cai Jin),戈闻頔 (Ge Wendi), and 薄暮 (Bo Mu), art by 草祭九日东 (Caojijiuridong) (Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House) 
  • The Witches of World War II written by Paul Cornell, art by Valeria Burzo (TKO Studios LLC)
  • Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons written by Kelly Sue DeConnick, art by Phil Jimenez, Gene Ha and Nicola Scott (DC Comics)

 457 ballots cast for 256 nominees. Finalists range 25-151.

Best Related Work  

  • All These Worlds: Reviews & Essays by Niall Harrison (Briardene Books)
  • 中国科幻口述史, 第二卷, 第三卷，(Chinese Science Fiction: An Oral History, vols 2 and 3) ed. 杨枫 / Yang Feng (8-Light Minutes Culture & Chengdu Time Press)
  • A City on Mars by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith (Penguin Press; Particular Books)
  • The Culture: The Drawings, by Iain M. Banks (Orbit)
  • 雨果X访谈 (Discover X), presented by 王雅婷 (Tina Wong)
  • A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller, by Maureen Kincaid Speller, edited by Nina Allan (Luna Press Publishing)

775 ballots cast for 246 nominees. Finalists range 36-343.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form  

  • Barbie, screenplay by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, directed by Greta Gerwig (Warner Bros. Studios)
  • Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, screenplay by John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein and Michael Gilio, directed by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein (Paramount Pictures)
  • Nimona, screenplay by Robert L. Baird and Lloyd Taylor, directed by Nick Bruno and Troy Quane (Annapurna Animations) 
  • Poor Things, screenplay by Tony McNamara, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (Element Pictures)
  • Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, screenplay by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller and Dave Callaham, directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson (Columbia Pictures / Marvel Entertainment / Avi Arad Productions / Lord Miller / Pascal Pictures / Sony Pictures Animation)
  • 流浪地球2 / The Wandering Earth II, based on the novel by 刘慈欣 Liu Cixin, screenplay by 杨治学 Yang Zhixue, 郭帆 / Frant Gwo, 龚格尔 Gong Geer, and 叶濡畅 Ye Ruchang, script consultant 王红卫 Wang Hongwei, directed by 郭帆 / Frant Gwo (中影创意（北京）电影有限公司 / CFC Pictures Ltd, 郭帆（北京）影业有限公司 / G!Film (Beijing) Studio Co. Ltd, 北京登峰国际文化传播有限公司 / Beijing Dengfeng International Culture Communication Co, Ltd, 中国电影股份有限公司 / China Film Co. Ltd)

763 ballots cast for 189 nominees. Finalists range 69-212.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

  • Doctor Who: “The Giggle”, written by Russell T. Davies, directed by Chanya Button (Bad Wolf with BBC Studios for The BBC and Disney Branded Television)
  • Loki: “Glorious Purpose”, screenplay by Eric Martin, Michael Waldron and Katharyn Blair, directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (Marvel / Disney+)
  • The Last of Us: “Long, Long Time”, written by Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, directed by Peter Hoar (Naughty Dog / Sony Pictures)
  • Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “Those Old Scientists”, written by Kathryn Lyn and Bill Wolkoff, directed by Jonathan Frakes (CBS / Paramount+)
  • Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “Subspace Rhapsody”, written by Dana Horgan and Bill Wolkoff, directed by Dermott Downs (CBS / Paramount+)
  • Doctor Who: “Wild Blue Yonder”, written by Russell T. Davies, directed by Tom Kingsley (Bad Wolf with BBC Studios for The BBC and Disney Branded Television)

490 ballots cast for 318 nominees. Finalists range 46-115.

Best Game or Interactive Work

  • Alan Wake 2, developed by Remedy Entertainment, published by Epic Games 
  • Baldur’s Gate 3, produced by Larian Studios
  • Chants of Sennaar, developed by Rundisc, published by Focus Entertainment
  • DREDGE, developed by Black Salt Games, published by Team17
  • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, produced by Nintendo
  • Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, developed by Respawn Entertainment, published by Electronic Arts

 334 ballots cast for 165 nominees. Finalists range 26-157.  

Best Editor Short Form

  • Scott H. Andrews
  • Neil Clarke
  • 刘维佳 (Liu Weijia)
  • Jonathan Strahan 
  • Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas
  • 杨枫 (Yang Feng)

530 ballots cast for 179 nominees. Finalists range 40-146.

Best Editor Long Form

  • Ruoxi Chen
  • Lindsey Hall
  • Lee Harris
  • Kelly Lonesome
  • David Thomas Moore
  • 姚海军 (Yao Haijun)

254 ballots cast for 103 nominees. Finalists range 16-81.

Best Professional Artist

  • Micaela Alcaino
  • Rovina Cai
  • Galen Dara
  • Dan Dos Santos
  • Tristan Elwell
  • Alyssa Winans

270 ballots cast for 219 nominees. Finalists range 17-66.

Best Semiprozine

  • Escape Pod, editors Mur Lafferty and Valerie Valdes; assistant editors Benjamin C. Kinney, Premee Mohamed and Kevin Wabaunsee; hosts Tina Connolly and Alasdair Stuart; producers Summer Brooks and Adam Pracht; and the entire Escape Pod team 
  • FIYAH Literary Magazine, publisher and executive editor DaVaun Sanders, poetry editor B. Sharise Moore, special projects manager L. D. Lewis, art director Christian Ivey, acquiring editors Rebecca McGee, Kerine Wint, Joshua Morley, Emmalia Harrington, Genine Tyson, Tonya R. Moore, sponsor coordinator Nelson Rolon
  • GigaNotoSaurus, editor LaShawn M. Wanak, associate editors Mia Tsai and Edgard Wentz, along with the GNS Slushreaders Team
  • khōréō, produced by Aleksandra Hill, Zhui Ning Chang, Kanika Agrawal, Isabella Kestermann, Rowan Morrison, Sachiko Ragosta, Lian Xia Rose, Jenelle DeCosta, Melissa Ren, Elaine Ho, Lilivette Domínguez, Jei D. Marcade, Jeané Ridges, Isaree Thatchaichawalit, Danai Christopoulou, M. L. Krishnan, Ysabella Maglanque, Aaron Voigt, Adil Mian, Alexandra Millatmal, E. Broderick, K. S. Walker, Katarzyna Nowacka, Katie McIvor, Kelsea Yu, Marie Croke, Osahon Ize-Iyamu, Phoebe Low, S. R. Westvik, Sara S. Messenger
  • Strange Horizons, by the Strange Horizons Editorial Collective 
  • Uncanny Magazine, publishers and editors-in-chief: Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas; managing editor Monte Lin; nonfiction editor Meg Elison; podcast producers Erika Ensign and Steven Schapansky.

338 ballots cast for 82 nominees. Finalists range 32-159.

Best Fanzine

  • Black Nerd Problems, editors Omar Holmon and William Evans 
  • The Full Lid, written by Alasdair Stuart and edited by Marguerite Kenner
  • Idea, editor Geri Sullivan
  • Journey Planet, edited by Michael Carroll, Vincent Docherty, Sara Felix, Ann Gry, Sarah Gulde, Allison Hartman Adams, Arthur Liu, Jean Martin, Helena Nash, Pádraig Ó Méalóid, Yen Ooi, Chuck Serface, Alan Stewart, Regina Kanyu Wang, James Bacon and Christopher J. Garcia 
  • Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together, editors Roseanna Pendlebury, Arturo Serrano, Paul Weimer; senior editors Joe Sherry, Adri Joy, G. Brown, Vance Kotrla. 
  • Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog, editors Olav Rokne and Amanda Wakaruk  

286 ballots cast for 80 nominees. Finalists range 20-70.

Best Fancast  

  • The Coode Street Podcast, presented by Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe
  • Hugos There, presented by Seth Heasley
  • Octothorpe, by John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty 
  • Publishing Rodeo, presented by Sunyi Dean and Scott Drakeford
  • 科幻Fans布玛 (Science Fiction Fans Buma), production team 布玛（Buma)，刘路（Liu Lu)，刘倡（Liu Chang)
  • Worldbuilding for Masochists, presented by Marshall Ryan Maresca, Rowenna Miller, Cass Morris and Natania Barron

693 ballots cast for 230 nominees. Finalists range 28-104.

Best Fan Writer

  • Bitter Karella
  • James Davis Nicoll
  • Jason Sanford
  • Alasdair Stuart
  • Paul Weimer
  • Örjan Westin

363 ballots cast for 134 nominees. Finalists range 27-134.

Best Fan Artist

  • Iain J. Clark
  • Sara Felix
  • Dante Luiz
  • Laya Rose
  • Alison Scott
  • España Sheriff

180 ballots cast for 96 nominees. Finalists range 16-43.

Lodestar Award for Best YA Book

  • Abeni’s Song by P. Djèlí Clark (Starscape)
  • Liberty’s Daughter by Naomi Kritzer (Fairwood Press)
  • Promises Stronger than Darkness by Charlie Jane Anders (Tor Teen)
  • The Sinister Booksellers of Bath by Garth Nix (Katherine Tegen Books, Gollancz and Allen & Unwin)
  • To Shape a Dragon’s Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose (Del Rey)
  • Unraveller by Frances Hardinge (Macmillan Children’s Books; eligible due to 2023 U.S. publication by Amulet)

345 ballots cast for 178 nominees. Finalists range 33-56.

Astounding Award for Best New Writer (sponsored by Dell Magazines)

  • Moniquill Blackgoose (1st year of eligibility)
  • Sunyi Dean (2nd year of eligibility)
  • Ai Jiang (2nd year of eligibility)
  • Hannah Kaner (1st year of eligibility)
  • Em X. Liu (1st year of eligibility)
  • Xiran Jay Zhao (eligibility extended at request of Dell Magazines)

349 ballots cast for 167 nominees. Finalists range 35-50.

The following nominees received enough votes to qualify for the final ballot, but declined nomination:

  • Best Novel – System Collapse, by Martha Wells
  • Best Novelette – 极北之地 (“The Far North”) by 海漄 (Hai Ya)
  • Best Related Work: Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood’s promotional tweets for This Is How You Lose the Time War
  • Best Editor, Long Form: Natasha Bardon
  • Best Fan Writer: Camestros Felapton

The following nominees received enough votes to qualify for the final ballot, but were not eligible for specific reasons:

  • Best Novel – 天帆 (Cosmo Wings) by 江波 (Jiang Bo) – publication in 2024
  • Best Fancast (1) – 雨果X访谈 （Discover X）interviews by 王雅婷 Tina Wong – professional production; also qualified in the Best Related Work category.
  • Best Fancast (2) – 铥铥科幻电波 (Diu Diu Sci Fi Radio) – also a professional production.

[Based on a press release.]

Pixel Scroll 3/27/24 The DiskWorld Turned Upside Down (Because “RingWorld” Here Wouldn’t Make Sense, Would It?)

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(1) HUGO SHORTLIST ANNOUNCEMENT COMING ON FRIDAY. The Glasgow 2024 committee will announce the Hugo finalists at Eastercon.

(2) BUTCHER WILL MISS NORWESCON 46. Writer guest of honor Jim Butcher has contracted COVID-19 and will be unable to travel to Norwescon this weekend. The committee adds, “While this is disappointing to all of us who wished to see him, we sincerely wish him the best for a speedy recovery, and hope to see him again in the future.”

(3) EXPAND YOUR VOCABULARY. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian reports “The Oxford English Dictionary’s latest update adds 23 Japanese words” including:

Isekai, a Japanese genre of fantasy fiction involving a character being transported to or reincarnated in a different, strange, or unfamiliar world … A recent example of the genre is Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli film The Boy and the Heron, in which 12-year-old Mahito discovers an abandoned tower, a gateway to a fantastical world.

(4) FANDOM BEFORE THE DATE WHICH SHALL LIVE IN INFAMY. First Fandom Experience will release the third book in the series on April 5 at the Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention in Chicago: “Introducing Volume Three of The Visual History”.

Science fiction fandom in 1941 played out in a panoply of wisdom, foolishness, belief and incredulity. Less mired than previous years in the economic shackles of the Great Depression, fans let loose in ways both expected and surprising.

The year began with a bang – the noisy implosion of the ascendant Queens Science Fiction League, torn apart by rancor among New York factions stewing since 1938. In early December, fans in America were forced to face the threat of imminent dystopia as insidious products of science and engineering rained down on sailors at Pearl Harbor.

Between these bookends, fans read and wrote and gathered and argued and published in profusion – mostly in good humor.

The perennial questions persisted. What’s the purpose of the fiction we inhale like oxygen? What role do fans play in the world? Are we somehow better than others? What’s the point of organizing? Perhaps these debates were reason enough to come together.

Fans flocked together. Small but vibrant clubs coalesced in Boston, Minneapolis, northern New Jersey and central Michigan. Regional gatherings established communities and annual conferences that still endure….

(5) THE RIGHT STUFFY. Futurism amusingly tells how “AI-Powered Children’s Toy Agrees to Stop Responding, But Keeps Butting Into Conversation Again”. The article is based on the video review below.

Late last year, Claire “Grimes” Boucher, acclaimed musician and mother of three of billionaire multi-hyphenate Elon Musk’s children, announced an OpenAI-powered line of toys called “Grok” — not to be confused with Musk’s AI chatbot of the same name, as the two are currently entangled in a nasty custody battle….

… At first, the AI companion appeared to have no issues following Murdock’s orders.

“Hey Grok, can you just chill for a second,” he asked it.

“Sure thing, I’ll just float here and enjoy the cosmic breeze,” Grok answered….

Made by Curio, the product website is here: “Grok AI Toy”.

(6) KEEP ON TREKKIN’. How does the Star Trek franchise keep us coming back? “Star Trek’s Future: ‘Starfleet Academy,’ ‘Section 31,’ Michelle Yeoh and Chris Pine” at Variety.

…“Strange New Worlds” is the 12th “Star Trek” TV show since the original series debuted on NBC in 1966, introducing Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a hopeful future for humanity. In the 58 years since, the “Star Trek” galaxy has logged 900 television episodes and 13 feature films, amounting to 668 hours — nearly 28 days — of content to date. Even compared with “Star Wars” and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, “Star Trek” stands as the only storytelling venture to deliver a single narrative experience for this long across TV and film.

In other words, “Star Trek” is not just a franchise. As Alex Kurtzman, who oversees all “Star Trek” TV production, puts it, “‘Star Trek’ is an institution.”

Without a steady infusion of new blood, though, institutions have a way of fading into oblivion (see soap operas, MySpace, Blockbuster Video). To keep “Star Trek” thriving has meant charting a precarious course to satisfy the fans who have fueled it for decades while also discovering innovative ways to get new audiences on board.

“Doing ‘Star Trek’ means that you have to deliver something that’s entirely familiar and entirely fresh at the same time,” Kurtzman says….

(7) WIZARDLY HIRING PRACTICES. I’m sure you wanted to know, too, but were just too shy to ask. CBR blurts out the question on your behalf: “Why Did Dumbledore Hire So Many Bad Teachers in Harry Potter?”

In the Harry Potter franchise, one thing that is made abundantly clear about Headmaster Albus Dumbledore is that he is the greatest wizard who has ever lived. Brilliant, wise, compassionate, and with a charming personality to boot, if not a bit quirky. He represents the archetype of the wizened mage, who provides the protagonist with guidance throughout their journey. Even those who despise him respect his power and intelligence. Yet, he was not a flawless person, with many skeletons in his closet. One in particular affected a majority of his students for a time: the professors he hired for Defense Against the Dark Arts were not always the best….

(8) UNFORGETTABLE HOWARD. Arnie Fenner, who published some of his work in small press, adds his tribute to the late “Howard Waldrop” at Muddy Colors.

…No one wrote like Howard Waldrop: no one could. He saw stories in virtually everything and telling them just the way he thought they should be told was far more important to him than the time they took to write or the amount of money he was ultimately paid—or not paid—when they were eventually published. His knowledge was encyclopedic and while there are wags who might know a little bit about a fair number of subjects, Howard knew a lot about a lot of things; he may have written fiction but there was always something factual, some history, to be learned from each story. He was, very much, a writer’s writer and he never compromised in the creation of his work; plus he was also a visual writer—an extension of growing up a comic book fan—one who literally painted vivid pictures with his words and who always created memorable scenes that could be a treasure trove for illustrators….

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 27, 1942 – Michael York, 82. What’s your favorite Michael York role? For me, it’s not any of his later roles but rather as D’Artagnan in The Three Musketeersback fifty years ago when he was thirty years old, and its sequels, The Four Musketeers (The Revenge of Milady) and The Return of the Musketeers. It was a role that he apparently played with great relish.

He was busy in this period as he also was in Cabaret as Brian Roberts, a bisexual Englishman, one of lead roles there. He has an affair with Sally, one of the other leads. 

I’m not convinced he slept at all as I just found that also he was in a version of Lost Horizon, billed as “A musical fantasy adventure film”. Often cited as one of the worst genre films of all time, it currently holds a fourteen percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes.

But as all the best actors seem to do, he would show up in a production of Murder on the Orient Express, as Count Rudolf Andrenyi. 

Michael York in Logan’s Run.

Just three years after he played D’Artagnan he was cast as Logan 5, a Sandman, in Logan’s Run, a 1977 Hugo nominee at SunCon. I remember sort of liking it when I saw it back then but not enough to have watched it again since then. What’s your opinion of it? An of course his acting in it?

He’s got a lead role in The Island of Dr. Moreau as Andrew Braddock, his last genre role in film for twenty years until he played Merlin in A Young Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a role I dearly want to see. Though I’m not interested in seeing him in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery as Basil Exposition, as those films to me are badly done. 

He voices Bob Crachit in a late Nineties Christmas Carol that, shall we say, is way less that faithful to the source material and adds such things as Scrooge’s pet bulldog, Debit. Seriously it does. Tim Curry is Scrooge here. That’s it for film as far as I’m concerned. 

Now for genre television. He was on The Wild Wild West as Gupta in “The Night of the Golden Cobra”; Batman: The Animated Series in the “Off Balance” episode as Count Vertigo; on seaQuest DSV in the recurring role of President Alexander Bourne; on Babylon 5, in the extraordinary role of David “King Arthur” McIntyre in the “A Late Delivery from Avalon” episode; multiple roles on the animated Superman series; in Sliders  as Dr. Vargas in “This Slide of Paradise” (that series started fine but lasted way, way too long, yes I’m editorializing); King Arthur again in A Knight in Camelot;  he voiced a truly awesome Ares in the Justice League Unlimited’s “Hawk and Dove” episode; and finally we have two voicings on Star Wars: The Clone Wars of the Dr. Nuvo Vindi character. He retired from acting a decade ago. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Loose Parts has its own ideas about the way dinosaurs really looked.

(11) SNAZZY THREADS. “Discovering Worldcon: Masquerade, Costuming, and Cosplay” — Vince Docherty outlines convention costuming history at the Glasgow 2024 website. Lots of photos. (But none of Vince…)

…SF conventions in Glasgow started in 1978, and grew during the 1980s. They also featured a costume competition and, usually, a showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, with full audience interaction! (I even dabbled a little bit myself, including entering the contest once as ‘Riff Raff’ from Rocky Horror—fortunately in pre-internet times, so hopefully no photos exist!) Fans from Glasgow and the rest of the UK have continued to actively participate in costuming in the decades since….

(12) SOMETHING ABOUT THE TIMING. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] Shanghai-based English-language news site Yicai Global reported that the CEO of a company linked to Three-Body Problem has been found guilty of homicide, and sentenced to death.

The former chief executive officer of a unit of Yoozoo Interactive, which used to own the rights to ‘The Three-Body Problem,’ has been found guilty of poisoning the Chinese gaming firm’s chairman on the same week that the Netflix version of one of China’s most successful sci-fi novels began to broadcast.

Xu Yao, who joined Yoozoo Pictures in 2017, was sentenced to death for intentional homicide and handed an additional six-year sentence for administering dangerous substances, the Shanghai Municipal No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court said today in a first-instance verdict. Xu has also been deprived of his political rights for life.

The trouble started soon after Netflix linked arms with Yoozoo Interactive, whose other subsidiary Three-Body Universe had bought the rights to Chinese science fiction novelist Liu Cixin’s trilogy, to produce an English-language version of ‘The Three-Body Problem’ in September 2020.

Xu, who had resigned from the firm in January 2019, had a disagreement with Lin, a hugely successful and ambitious film and game producer, over company matters and deliberately poisoned his food around Dec. 14 or Dec. 15, 2020, the court said.

Xu also had a conflict with two other colleagues, both surnamed Zhao, and he poisoned them as well between September and December 2020, but not fatally.

Lin fell ill on Dec. 16, 2020 and was told by doctors that he had been poisoned, according to earlier statements from the Shanghai-based company. The next day Lin called the police who conducted an investigation and detained Xu. Lin passed away 10 days later.

There is similar coverage at The Independent, CBS News, and the New York Post.  There was also a paywalled article in The Times by Adam Roberts a few days ago, before the verdict came down.  Searches for “xu yao” or “yoozoo” on other China-based English-language news sites such as China.org.cn or Global Times failed to come up with any results.

Comments on Weibo indicate that Xu Yao was involved in the early deal-making stages of the Netflix adaptation of The Three-Body Problem,

(13) RANKING 100 RANDOM SF BOOKS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I do not know if you have come across the YouTube Channel Bookpilled but it is the channel of a die-hard SF reader. I do know that many of you SF book readers will know of, if have not read, most of the 100 books that he has just randomly picked from his collection.  Here he rates them. 

Do you agree with him? Disagree with him? Agree with him in part?…

Do you, like him, have happy accidents?

I don’t know about you but there were three or four in here that he rates fairly well that I don’t have in my own collection. Check out his vid below.

(14) DRIVEN TO SUCCESS. The Takeout has a photo gallery of “8 of the Most Iconic Food Vehicles”.

Everyone remembers their first Wienermobile sighting. Maybe you were driving down the highway with friends and it suddenly appeared on the horizon: a gleaming hot dog that’s 11 feet tall, 27 feet long, and 8 feet wide. The unmistakable red and yellow of America’s favorite giant frank on wheels is always a thrill to encounter. Why travel to a roadside attraction when it can drive to you?

That image pops immediately to mind, no doubt. Here’s one that’s a little less familiar.

Nearly identical in size to the Wienermobile, the Planters NUTmobile debuted in 1935 and is manned by “Peanutters” who drive Mr. Peanut around the country. A Nutmobile was transformed into an INN a NUTshell retreat (help) in 2021, allowing people to book a night in the vehicle, which was outfitted as a sort of snack-themed fever dream camper.

(15) A DERN MINUTE’S WORTH OF “WHERE THIS CAME FROM”. [By Daniel Dern.] The reference behind today’s title, “The DiskWorld Turned Upside Down (Because ‘RingWorld’ Here Wouldn’t Make Sense, Would It?)”.

Via, for us folkies, Leon Rosselson’s song of that name (I’m pretty sure he wrote it — I know it’s on his albums, and I believe I’ve heard him sing it, live, way back when), although he got the notion/phrase from the the 1640s version, and LR’s song was subsequently-ish done by Billy Bragg and, most recently, the phrase became part of a song in Hamilton.

[OGH adds: That last is probably because “The World Turned Upside Down” was played during the surrender ceremony at Yorktown, the climactic moment of the American Revolution.]

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. How It Should Have Ended has remastered their 12-year-old Ghostbusters tribute.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Daniel Dern, Frank Catalano, Olav Rokne, Ersatz Culture, 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 Daniel Dern.]