(1) COMIC CREATOR BURKE’S ICE ORDEAL. From downthetubes.net: “Comic Creator RE Burke: Her Visa Story”.

The family of comic creator RE Burke, aka Becky Burke, have issued a detailed statement about her recent detention nightmare in the United States, asking for it to be shared so that the many thousands who offered support after her family’s appeal for Becky’s return can see it.

“We want everyone to know how grateful we are for their support, prayers and help in raising the profile. It is the reason she is home with us now, thank you,” they explain.

As we previously reported, comic creator RE Burke, aka Becky Burke, is home after her detention nightmare in the United States, detained by the United States by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for over two weeks for travelling with wrong visa. She is now back in the UK.

Becky, 28, was denied entry into Washington State after US immigration officials accused her of travelling on the wrong visa, her plight prompting a massive campaign to free her, which we reported here.

A GoFundMe campagn fund raised over £9000 to cover legal Becky’s costs. No more donations are being taken. Any surplus will be donated to charities in the Seattle area helping people in similar situations….

After 19 harrowing days in ICE detention due to a visa mix-up, our daughter Becky has finally returned home to the UK. Instead of allowing her to take an immediate flight back, Homeland Security detained her in handcuffs at a Tacoma, WA facility under harsh conditions. The current immigration crackdown and systemic delays exacerbated her ordeal, worsened by a shortage of immigration judges. Becky’s nightmare ended on March 18th, and she is now beginning to recover….

Did she overstay the 90 day limit on the ESTA tourist visa?

No. She had only been in the USA for 50 days when she had planned to travel by bus to Canada, she was planning to spend 2 months in Canada and then fly home to the UK.

Did she break the rules of the ESTA?

The ESTA is for tourists only. For work or study a specific visa is required. Becky did a lot of research before she went and what she had planned was classed as tourism. This was accepted when she entered the US on 7th January. It was also accepted in 2023 when she spent two weeks in San Francisco, with a host family. On the 26th February, US border officers suddenly decided staying with host families and joining in with household chores was now classed as work. Our US Immigration Lawyer said they got their definition of work wrong.

Was she given a chance to return to the UK at her own cost?

No, this was not offered at the border despite this being the usual protocol for tourists. ICE had the chance to offer this at any stage during her detention, her parents even had a flight home booked for her at one point, in the hope they would let her take it, but they didn’t.

Does she have a criminal record?

No. She also has many people who testify to her good character and her gentle soul.

Was she allowed to let family know when she was being deported?

No. One of the other detainees had to call us to say she had left. Even the British Consulate were not told that she had boarded the flight. We were only certain when she arrived at Heathrow.

Was she treated with ‘dignity and respect’ as written in ICE policy.

No. She was handcuffed when she was transferred from the border to the facility. When inside the facility ICE did not communicate where she was in the process, all her possessions were confiscated, lights were on 24/7 and there were four head counts each day during which they were forced stay on their bunk for at least an hour. When she was eventually transferred to Seattle airport to fly home she was taken in leg and waist chains and handcuffs, and was escorted to the plane.

We wish Becky and her family well after this ordeal….

(2) BEING ORWELL’S SON. [Item by Steven French.] On the 80th anniversary of 1984, the Guardian has an illuminating interview with Orwell’s son Richard Blair on his father’s attitude towards women, his antisemitism and his (Blair’s) mother: “George Orwell and me: Richard Blair on life with his extraordinary father”.

…Most memorable was the time Orwell misread the tide when they were out in the hazardous Gulf of Corryvreckan, home to one of the world’s biggest whirlpools. Their dinghy overturned and they almost drowned. Did that shock Orwell? “I think it gave him a hell of a shock, yes, absolutely.” Was his father as reckless with you as with himself? Blair smiles. “Well, health and safety didn’t really rear its ugly head in those days, did it? And yet we survived.”

There was one precaution Orwell did take. “He said I had to have a pair of decent, stout boots, because of the snakes. Jura has got a lot of adders. They’re not desperately poisonous, but he had a thing about snakes, probably because of his days in Burma.” Was he scared of them? “Yes, to a degree, but not scared enough that he wouldn’t stamp on them and kill them.” Orwell treated his son as a mini-adult, perhaps not surprisingly, as he had little experience of children and there were no other kids around….

(3) FRENCH BOOKSTORE RESISTANCE. “Mutiny brews in French bookshops over Hachette owner’s media grip” — the Guardian has the story.

A conservative Catholic billionaire and media owner is facing an independent bookshop rebellion in France over his influence in the publishing world.

Dozens of independent booksellers are trying to counter the growing influence of Vincent Bolloré, whose vast cultural empire includes television, radio, the Sunday paper Le Journal du Dimanche, and also, since 2023, the biggest book publishing and distribution conglomerate in France, Hachette Livre.

“Books matter,” said Thibaut Willems, owner of Le Pied à Terre independent bookshop in Paris’s 18th arrondissement and one of the booksellers taking a stand by limiting their orders of Hachette Livre books and placing them on lower shelves….

… As well as the moves by some booksellers, protest groups on the left have started a “bookmark rebellion”, where individuals hide bookmarks inside paperbacks in large commercial stores with messages such as “boycott Hachette”, detailing the scale of the Bolloré empire….

(4) ART DIRECTOR SWINGS AND MISSES. Michael Whelan analyzes an example of “When the Client Gets It Wrong”.

The Cover and What Could Have Been

ME: There’s one concept that stood out to me for The Demon of Scattery—one of my all-time favorite prelims—and I’ve always been curious how the AD passed on choosing it because the composition is so dynamic. It would have been a slam dunk of a cover.

MRW: I couldn’t agree more!

Back then I felt that it was on me to offer comps that would generate a good cover for a book, and if any of them didn’t make for a good painting that was my fault for not realizing the full potential of the original concept.

In retrospect, I often find myself asking a variation of the same question you posed: “Why on Earth did I submit any other options when THIS concept is so obviously the best of the bunch?”

The answer, of course, is that it wasn’t obvious to me at the time.

Also, as a cover artist I felt it incumbent on me to present a range of options, attempting to reflect what the publisher [and occasionally, even the author ????] wanted emphasized in the image. The editors called the shots more often than not, and being human, they often made regrettable decisions.

And on more occasions than I would like, the people who really called the shots were marketing idiots who thought THEY knew better than anyone else what the public would be looking for. Most of the banal or downright crappy covers one sees are the result of that aspect of the corporate bookselling machine.

While a few of the concepts submitted were strong, my favorite is pictured above—and not simply because it was the most polished of the lot. The composition is sinuous and alive with action.

There are so many subtle points of connection that bring eyes where they need to be. Placed off-center right, the warrior provides an easy entry point with the lines of his body directing attention to the serpent and the sorceress. The curve of the rocks forms a bowl, a solid foundation to leap into the image.

(5) NO AI. The Ursa Major Awards has posted a “Temporary notice regarding AI content”.

…We’ve been asked about our AI policies, which is the purpose of my message today!

Our current statement, although not final, is that AI/LLM generated content is not allowed. This includes art, text, and covers for things like books or music. The only exception is an event where an author has an AI generated image attributed to their work by their publisher without their permission. I’ve been told this does happen!

Regarding this year’s content, to the best of my awareness, none of the accepted entries break this rule. Should that not be the case, please do not hesitate to talk to me about it!

(6) ALIEN ROMANCE AND TEA. Clarion West will host “Steamy in Seattle 2025” on May 10. Tickets available here.

Meet authors Ann Aguirre and Elizabeth Stephens as they discuss the alien romance genre, science fiction and fantasy worlds, and what writing romance has taught them! Paranormal romance author Jasmine Silvera to moderate. 

Join us at Seattle’s beautiful Nordic Museum for a traditional high tea, featuring a delightful selection of savory finger sandwiches, scones, salad, and delectable sweet treats catered by Lovely Night Catering — and a custom tea blend provided by Friday Afternoon Tea. 

Time to pick out your favorite fascinators and elegant gowns to wear or get your fedora ready in preparation for this utterly romantic opportunity to support the literary arts! 

This event is not just a fundraiser; it’s a celebration of emerging and underrepresented writers — particularly women in the field of speculative fiction. Steamy in Seattle raises money for our annual programs, sliding scale tuition, and scholarship programs. 

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cora Buhlert.]

March 23, 1904 — H. Beam Piper. (Died 1964.)

By Cora Buhlert: Content warning: Discussion of suicide

 Considering how well regarded he was and still is as an author, we know surprisingly little about him. For example, we don’t know whether the H stands for Henry, Horace or Herbert. And while we know how he died, we don’t know exactly when or why.

H. Beam Piper never received a formal higher education, because he considered the college experience unpleasant, but instead educated himself in science, engineering and history. He worked as a laborer and later as a night watchman at the railroad yard in his hometown.

At some point, Piper began to write and in 1947 at age 43 he sold his first story “Time and Time Again” to John W. Campbell at Astounding Science Fiction. More stories followed, both for Astounding and other magazines. In 1961, finally, Piper published his first novel, the juvenile Four-Day-Planet. On the planet Fenris, a year is only four days long, but each of those days lasts four thousand hours with extreme temperatures. Giant whale-like creatures roam the seas of Fenris and are hunted for their valuable tallow wax, which makes for excellent radiation shielding. Protagonist Walt Boyd is a seventeen-year-old boy reporter, who gets entangled in a conflict between the whalers guild and the corrupt mayor of Fenris and some equally corrupt business people. Basically, this is Tintin and the Space Whalers with a bonus message about the importance of formal education, which is ironic considering Piper’s own life. I have read Four-Day-Planet and enjoyed it quite a bit as a fun science fiction adventure.

However, my introduction to Piper’s work was not Four-Day-Planet, but what is probably his best known work, the 1962 novel Little Fuzzy. I discovered the book as a teenager at Storm, the one bookshop in town with an extensive foreign language section. Most of that foreign language section actually consisted of dictionaries. There was also a table where one could peruse the huge Books-in-Print catalogues as well as a special order desk, where you could order any book listed in those giant catalogues. That special order desk was always busy with university students ordering otherwise unavailable textbooks and literature. Annoyingly, those students also kept staring at me, especially the male ones, and I was sure that they were judging my reading choices. Yes, I was quite dense.

The foreign language section at Storm also has two spinner racks with mass market paperbacks. The paperbacks in those spinner racks were almost entirely genre fiction. Romance, crime and mystery and of course science fiction, fantasy and horror. Whenever I was in the city center, I would stop at Storm (which still exists, though much diminished), head up to the foreign language section on the first floor and check out the spinner racks for anything that caught my eye, all the while dodging annoying male students staring at me. I discovered a lot of great authors and books in those spinner racks. And one day, I discovered Little Fuzzy, the 1980s Ace Books edition with the Michael Whelan cover of protagonist Jack Holloway surrounded by Fuzzies. The books caught my eye at once, because the Fuzzies were not only cute, but they looked just like the Ewoks from Return of the Jedi. Indeed, Little Fuzzy is widely considered to be the inspiration for the Ewoks and the parallels are quite obvious. The cover intrigued me enough that I plopped down my hard earned pocket money to buy the book. And English language mass market paperbacks were expensive in the 1980s due to the bad exchange rate and high import duties.

On the planet Zarathustra, prospector Jack Holloway discovers a furry alien creature he names Little Fuzzy. Little Fuzzy takes Jack to meet the rest of his tribe and Jack realizes that the Fuzzies are intelligent. This causes a problem for the mining company that has set up shop on Zarathustra to exploit the planet’s natural resources, because if the Fuzzies are declared an intelligent species, they and their habitat will be protected by law and the company will lose their mining rights. Being an unscrupulous company in a science fiction novel, they will of course do everything to prevent this, up to and including murder.

My teen self enjoyed Little Fuzzy a whole lot and it’s easy to see why. The plight of the furry aliens and their human protector against the big bad mining company is highly compelling. Though I never read any of the sequels, neither Piper’s own nor those by other authors, mostly because I didn’t know they existed.

One H. Beam Piper novel I did read, though several years later, was Space Viking, which was serialized in Analog from November 1962 to February 1963 and then appeared as a paperback in 1963. Once again, it was the cover – a glorious Michael Whelan cover with the titular space Vikings in front of a bright purple background – which attracted me along with, “Oh, it’s by H. Beam Piper. Cool. I liked Little Fuzzy.”

The protagonist of Space Viking is Lucas Trask, an aristocrat from the planet Gram. Trask is about to marry Lady Elaine, when a spurned former suitor of Elaine’s crashes the wedding and proceeds to gun down the wedding party (shades of the Red Wedding from A Song of Ice and Fire and the Moldavian wedding massacre from Dynasty, though Space Viking predates them both). Elaine is killed but Trask survives and vows revenge. He joins the Space Vikings, a group of space-faring raiders, to go after the killer, who has escaped aboard a stolen spaceship. In the process, Trask winds up establishing a little galactic empire of his own and also finds a new love. And yes, he gets his man, too, in the end. 

I enjoyed Space Viking, though not nearly as much as Little Fuzzy. Part of the reason may simply be that I was older when I read Space Viking and more critical. The novel offered plenty of adventure and thrills, but also some irritating politics, including a very American view of emigration and colonization that is common, but also plain wrong. In fact, I remember wondering at the time, “Was Piper always like this and I just didn’t notice?”

Little Fuzzy, Four-Day-Planet and Space Viking are all part of a future history series called the Terro-Human Future History along with the 1963 novel The Cosmic Computer and several pieces of short fiction. The Terro-Human Future History chronicles the rise and fall and rebirth of a galactic civilization and was clearly influenced by the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. 

Piper also wrote the Paratime series, which chronicles the adventures of the Paratime Police who can move between timelines and alternate histories. The Paratime series consists of several pieces of short fiction and one novel, Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, which was published in 1965 and would be Piper’s final novel. 

This brings us to the sad part of this birthday note, namely Piper’s untimely death. It is widely known that Piper committed suicide, but both the reason and the exact date of his death are not known. 

What is known is that Piper dated the last entry in his diary November 5, 1964. On November 8, his body was found. Piper had apparently shut off the power and water to his apartment, covered the walls and floors with tarp and shot himself with a handgun from his extensive collection. He left behind a note saying “I don’t like to leave messes when I go away, but if I could have cleaned up any of this mess, I wouldn’t be going away.”

What mess precisely Piper was referring to is not known. The most common explanation is that Piper had financial problems. He had just gone through a painful and costly divorce and his agent was not replying to his letters and calls – due to having died – so Piper assumed his writing career was over. Another explanation is that Piper wanted to prevent his ex-wife from collecting his life insurance payment, so he took his own life to make sure that the insurance company would not pay. Most likely, the reason for his death was a combination of these factors.

More than sixty years after Piper’s death, the legacy that remains is a remarkable body of work, much of which is not only still in print, but is still receiving sequels and prequels written by other authors to this day.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

• Brewster Rockit witnesses duplication.
• Carpe Diem analyzes planetary concerns.
• Pearls Before Swine is there for the cancellation.
• The Argyle Sweater adds a silly level of difficulty.

(9) AT THE SHOW. The boys were whoopin’ it up in the Malamute Saloon – er, the Glendale Civic Auditorium – during today’s LA Vintage Paperback Show. Photos by John King Tarpinian.

(10) DO YOU KNOW THE WAY TO MILTON KEYNES? [Item by Steven French.] A sci-fi graphic novel from ten years ago is reissued and reviewed (by someone who seems to hold, sadly, some rather stereotypical attitudes towards the genre): “There’s No Time Like the Present by Paul B Rainey review – a funny, unpredictable and wild comic” in the Guardian.

People who enjoy science fiction love to imagine the future: time travel, spaceships, something wobbly with a green face. But what if those fans really had access to it – the future, I mean – courtesy of something very similar to the internet? This is the possibility Paul B Rainey floats in There’s No Time Like the Present, in which a crowd of misfits from Milton Keynes (once the future itself) are able, if not to visit Mars, then at least to watch episodes of Doctor Who that have not yet been screened.

Mordant and misanthropic in almost equal measure, Rainey’s book has three central characters, each one somewhat stuck, unable fully to escape their childhood. Barry, an obnoxious lazybones, still lives at home with his parents; he makes his living selling bootleg recordings of TV shows he has lifted from the “ultranet”, which provides entry to the future. Cliff, Barry’s friend, and a yoghurt-addicted woman called Kelly live together in her new house, but they’re not a couple; while he secretly pines for her, he’s only her tenant. In the evenings, they watch, with varying degrees of guilt, future episodes of their favourite series (Doctor Who in his case, Emmerdale in hers): tapes pressed on them by the grisly Barry….

(11) BRICKS GALORE. “Huge LEGO ‘Game of Thrones’ The Wall Has 200,000 Pieces – Is Very, Very Cool” according to Bell of Lost Souls.

The Wall is maybe the most iconic setting in Game of Thrones. Constructed by Bran the Builder in the Age of Heroes, it marks the northern border of the Seven Kingdoms. Some three hundred miles long and several hundred feet high in most places, it is one of the wonders of the world. Of course, the wall is no normal wall; it is built of ice and carries potent magical protections.

Originally meant to keep the Others out of the Realms of Men, for most of its history, it instead kept the Wildlings of the North out of the Seven Kingdoms. The Wall is home to The Night’s Watch. This order of men sworn to defend the Wall and the Realms of Men has built a number of castles into the Wall. Along with the Red Keep, it is one of the major setting locations of the story.

The Wall has now been rendered in stunning detail in LEGO. Done by the talented Anuradha Pehrson (you can find their Flickr here), this immersive build has over 200,000 pieces. It’s a truly massive build and includes several sections of The Wall and vignettes combined into one. The model takes up a full 5 ft x 5 ft square and is about 4.5 ft tall. Due to having several elements and scenes, it is not consistent on one scale….

(12) A WHIFF OF HOLINESS. Smithsonian Magazine says“Ancient Greek and Roman Statues Were Not Only Beautiful, but Also Smelled Nice, Too”.

In ancient Greece and Rome, statues not only looked beautiful—they smelled good, too.

That’s the conclusion of a new study published this month in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology. Cecilie Brøns, who authored the study and works as an archaeologist and curator at the Glyptotek art museum in Copenhagen, finds that Greco-Roman statues were often perfumed with enticing scents like rose, olive oil and beeswax…

… While reading ancient Greco-Roman texts, Brøns noticed a handful of references to sweet-smelling statues. She was intrigued, so she decided to go looking for even more mentions of scented sculptures.

Brøns was surprised to find lots of evidence in texts by Cicero, Callimachus, Vitruvius, Pliny the Elder and Pausanias, among other writers. Several of these texts mentioned anointing statues of Greek and Roman deities—including one depicting Artemis, the Greek goddess of wild animals, in Sicily. Statues of rulers, such as Egypt’s Berenice II, were also perfumed, Brøns finds.

The statues were anointed in different ways. In some instances, they were covered in a mixture of waxes and oils through a process known as “ganosis.” In others, they were coated in olive oil as part of a process called “kosmesis,” which was meant to help protect the sculptures from the elements…

(13) DON’T LOOK UP. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In this week’s Nature more on space junk… “Space debris is falling from the skies. We need to tackle this growing danger”.

At 3 p.m. on 30 December last year, residents of Mukuku village in Makueni county, Kenya, were startled by a loud crash. In the middle of a field lay a mysterious, smouldering metal ring, 2.5 metres across and weighing nearly 500 kilograms. Elsewhere, in western Uganda in May 2023, villagers reported seeing streaks of fire in the sky before debris rained down, scattering wreckage across a 40-kilometre-wide area. These were no ordinary meteorites — they were remnants of a defunct satellite and spent rocket stage, returning to Earth without warning.

These events are not isolated. Across the world, from Texas to Saudi Arabia, from Cape Town to the Amazon rainforest, objects launched into low Earth orbit (LEO) are now falling back to Earth. Some burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere, but others — especially those made of titanium and heat-resistant space-age alloys — survive re-entry and slam into the ground, sometimes in populated areas. The problem is getting worse. With the rapid expansion of commercial space flight, thousands of satellites are being launched each year. Yet few owners have plans to remove them from orbit in a controlled way….

(14) WILL WE SURVIVE THE FUTURE? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Look, the dinosaurs didn’t survive (and I have never really forgiven them for what they did to Raquel Welch)  and I keep on telling people that the machines are taking over, but no-one ever listens…  All of which begs the question as to whether we will survive the future…?

Well, over at PBS Eons  they have been asking just that…

Just because our ancestors have made it through every major period of upheaval in the Earth’s history so far doesn’t mean that our survival through future changes is guaranteed. Humans have become a force of nature, but will we survive ourselves?

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