Tag Archives: Hal Clement

Pixel Scroll 1/19/25 Also Spock Zarathustra

Posted on by
15

(1) AND KEEPS ON TICKING. It didn’t need three days to rise again. “TikTok Starts Working Again After Trump Says He Will Stall a Ban” – New York Times link bypasses the paywall.

TikTok flickered back to life in the United States on Sunday after President-elect Donald J. Trump said that he would issue an executive order to stall a federal ban of the app.

The abrupt shift came just hours after major app stores removed the popular social media site and it stopped operating for U.S. users as a federal law took effect on Sunday. The company said in a post on X that in “agreement with our service providers, TikTok is in the process of restoring service.”

Mr. Trump said in a Sunday morning post on Truth Social that he would “issue an executive order on Monday to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security.”

The ban stems from a 2024 law that requires app stores and cloud computing providers to stop distributing or hosting TikTok unless it is sold by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. Lawmakers passed the law over concerns that the Chinese government could use the app, which claims roughly 170 million United States users, to gather information about Americans or spread propaganda….

(2) IT’S TIME-WIMEY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Time travel is a major trope of SF. This week’s Radio 4 cinema programme Screenshot examined time travel…

Groundhog Day (1993) gets a mention but 12:01 (1993 film, “12:01 P.M.” 1973 story) ???

How does film and TV make time travel real? Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode take a quantum leap into the world of time travel and time loops on screen, from Back To The Future to Groundhog Day.

Mark speaks to theoretical physicist Sean Carroll about how films like Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Interstellar have handled the science of time travel – and whether it really is just the stuff of fantasy….

Personally speaking, I have been time travelling all my life. For most of it this has been at the rate of one second per second, but recently I have speeded things up to one minute per minute…  That’s the way I roll!

You can download the Radio 4 programme here.

(3) IT’S QUANTUM TIME-WIMEY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Parallel universes and the multiverse are firmly established SFnal tropes. Younger fans not into science may be forgiven in thinking that multiverses were largely an invention of Marvel and even the ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’, but actually you can trace it way back to the ancient Greeks.

And of course even if there are multiverses, each with their own realities, what is real?  Is reality real?  In quantum physics, particles may not even be located in one space but smeared across a region of space until observed and then somehow they become fixed in one specific place: it is as if the act of observing is key to the nature of real reality. And can you even ‘shift’ between realities?

This week, BBC Radio 4’s Sideways programme takes a half-hour deep-dive into alternate realities and the multiverse…

You can download the programme here.

In 2020, a curious trend went viral on social media, especially among teenagers and young adults. As much of the world stayed at home to curb the spread of CoVID-19, Reality Shifters began claiming they could move from one reality to another, referencing multiverse theory.

Beyond the actual possibility of switching between realities, this craze raised intriguing questions about the fabric of the reality we experience. Philosophers and scientists have long speculated about the existence of multiple realities. Today, Matthew Syed explores the blurry line between what we perceive as reality and what may lie beyond it, inviting us to question the very nature of existence.

(4) WHY NOT SAY WHAT HAPPENED? Episode 15 of Scott Edelman’s Why Not Say What Happened? podcast takes listeners back to “My Mysterious Mid-’70s Comic Con Meeting with Anthony Bourdain”.

Shredding hundreds of pages torn from notebooks filled by my teen and twentysomething self causes me to reminisce about my collaboration with artist P. Craig Russell which could have been, the poem 18-year-old me wrote about Action Comics #1, my mysterious mid-’70s New Jersey comic convention meeting with Anthony Bourdain, why when it comes to the process of writing I’m a voyeur but not an exhibitionist, the complete lyrics to a song I had Rick Jones sing way back in Captain Marvel #50, my joy upon seeing Superman co-creator Joe Shuster’s name in my old address book, how the Grim Reaper might have prevented my Scarecrow from being born, and much more.

And here’s where to find a dozen places where the episode can be heard, depending on taste.

(5) EATON FIRE AND JPL. The LA Times reports “NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory unscathed by Eaton fire, but not its workforce” (behind a paywall).

With its physical buildings and structures intact, the La Cañada Flintridge institution escaped the worst of the fire unscathed. The same can’t be said for its workforce.

At the height of the emergency, about 20% of the institution’s 5,500 employees were evacuated from their homes, director Laurie Leshin said.

About 210 employees lost their homes in the fire and an additional 100 — Leshin included — will likely be displaced long term by the extent of the damage to their house or neighborhood. Many more evacuees have yet to receive clearance to return home….

NASA has posted a satellite photo showing that “Eaton Fire Leaves California Landscape Charred”. (Click for larger image.)

On the afternoon of January 11, 2025, NASA’s AVIRIS-3 (Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer-3) flew aboard a B200 aircraft over Los Angeles County, where it captured images of several areas affected by wildland fires.

These false-color images show areas burned by the Eaton fire in Altadena and parts of Pasadena, Arcadia, and Sierra Madre. Charred trees and buildings in developed areas appear dark brown, whereas the burned wildland areas, particularly in Angeles National Forest, are shades of orange.

The Eaton fire ignited in the hills of Eaton Canyon, near Altadena, on the evening of January 7. By 10:30 a.m. the next day, the fire had quickly grown to cover more than 10,000 acres (40 square kilometers), according to Cal Fire. Around the time of this image on January 11, it had expanded to 14,117 acres (57 square kilometers), and the Los Angeles County Fire Department reported it was about 15 percent contained…

(6) WHY OCTAVIA BUTLER SEEMS PRESCIENT. “As California Burns, ‘Octavia Tried to Tell Us’ Has New Meaning” says New York Times contributor Veronica Chambers. (Link bypasses the NYT paywall.)

In the wake of the devastating fires in Los Angeles, many people are referencing the work of the science fiction writer Octavia Butler. Butler, who grew up in Pasadena, was the daughter of a housekeeper and a father who was a shoeshiner. She went on to become the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur “genius” award. Her book “Parable of the Sower,” published in 1993, paints a picture of a California ravished by the effects of climate change, income inequality, political divisiveness and centers on a young woman struggling to find faith and the community to build a new future.

The phrase “Octavia tried to tell us,” which began to gain momentum in 2020 during the pandemic, has once again resurfaced, in part because Butler studied science and history so deeply. The accuracy with which she read the shifts in America can, at times, seem eerily prophetic. One entry in “Parable of the Sower,” which is structured as a journal, dated on “February 1, 2025” begins, “We had a fire today.” It goes on to describe how the fear of fires plague Robledo, a fictional town that feels much like Altadena, a haven for the Black middle class for more than 50 years, where Butler lived in the late ’90s.

In 2000, Butler wrote a piece for Essence magazine titled, “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future.” She wrote: “Of course, writing novels about the future doesn’t give me any special ability to foretell the future. But it does encourage me to use our past and present behaviors as guides to the kind of world we seem to be creating. The past, for example, is filled with repeating cycles of strength and weakness, wisdom and stupidity, empire and ashes.”…

(7) DIDN’T PKD LIKE GRASS, TOO? [Item by Daniel Dern.] Not quite sure where androids would fit in here, and these would be either non-electric sheep, or perhaps hybrid electric/biofuel sheep… Perhaps: Do Android Farmers Dream Of Hybrid Electric/Biofuelled Sheep? “Large-Scale US Solar Farms Brings ‘Solar Grazing’ Work for Sheep” at Slashdot. (Clipped from ABC News.)

In Milam County, outside Austin [Texas], SB Energy operates the fifth-largest solar project in the country, capable of generating 900 megawatts of power across 4,000 acres (1,618 hectares). How do they manage all that grass? With the help of about 3,000 sheep, which are better suited than lawnmowers to fit between small crevices and chew away rain or shine. The proliferation of sheep on solar farms is part of a broader trend — solar grazing — that has exploded alongside the solar industry. Agrivoltaics, a method using land for both solar energy production and agriculture, is on the rise with more than 60 solar grazing projects in the U.S., according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

Nineteen years ago, Pan’s Labyrinth premiered. In Spanish, it was called El laberinto del fauno which means The Labyrinth of the Faun. It was written, directed and co-produced by Mexican-born and raised Guillermo Del Toro. 

Other producers were Bertha Navarro, Alfonso Cuarón, Frida Torresblanco and  Álvaro Augustin. 

It was narrated by Pablo Adán with a primary Spanish language cast (Sergi López, Maribel Verdú, Ivana Baquero, Ariadna Gil and Álex Angulo) with the exception of Doug Jones as the Faun and the Pale Man who of course has a very long relationship with Del Toro going back to Mimic which was based on the Donald Wollheim story of the same name. 

The “Mimic” story was nominated for a Retro Hugo at Worldcon 76.

Reception for it was excellent. It won the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, at Nippon 2007 which had dual Toastmasters in the guise of George Takei and Nozomi Ohmori. Children of Men, The Prestige, V for Vendetta and A Scanner Darkly were also nominated for this Award.

Critics really liked it. Roger Ebert at the Chicago Sun Times said of it that “Nothing I am likely to see, however, is likely to change my conviction that the year’s best film was Pan’s Labyrinth.” And Mark Kermode writing in The Observer exclaimed that it is “an epic, poetic vision in which the grim realities of war are matched and mirrored by a descent into an underworld populated by fearsomely beautiful monsters.”

Box office was quite superb as it cost just under twenty million to produce and made over eighty million. Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give a near perfect ninety five percent rating. 

Usually I don’t note the figures made for a film but the Faun got some great ones including the NECA eight inch version which you see here in all its nightmarish glory. The Pale Man got his own figure as well.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) YOU CONTROL THE HORIZONTAL. YOU CONTROL THE VERTICAL. THEY CONTROL THE OFF SWITCH. Inverse remembers“60 Years Ago, The Most Sneakily Influential Sci-Fi Series Came To An Inglorious End”.

…The Outer Limits was ahead of its time — and misunderstood accordingly.

By the time it went off the air, however, the show was a shadow of its former self. Its season-and-a-half, 49-episode run (can you imagine a modern genre show producing nearly 50 episodes in less than two years?) came to a close with “The Probe.” Directed by Felix Feist, who helmed the 1953 sci-fi B-movie classic Donovan’s Brain, the story concerned three men and a woman who survive a plane crash, only to find themselves aboard an automated alien laboratory.

The series had already been canceled, and writers and crewmembers were literally walking out the door as “The Probe” went into production. The episode reflected that with wooden acting, cheap-looking sets and effects, and an exposition-heavy plot, all sad aspects of the truncated second season that drag it dangerously close to Ed Wood levels of amateurishness. Even the episode’s monster, a microbe that grows to an alarming size, was a large, silvery blob of rubber pulled over a man who crawled around on the floor (the stuntman inside the costume, Janos Prohaska, pulled off a much more successful version of the same idea two years later as the Horta in the classic Star Trek episode “The Devil in the Dark”)….

(11) UNKNOWN INDY. ComicBook.com contends they can name “10 Indiana Jones Adventures You Didn’t Even Know About”. There are definitely some I hadn’t heard about before. Let’s start with –

Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead

Steve Perry’s 2009 novel Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead acts as a prequel to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and provides some backstory for Indy’s relationship with his friend George “Mac” McHale (Ray Winstone) in the movie. Taking place in 1943, Indy and Mac team up on an adventure to Haiti to find a mysterious voodoo artifact known as the Heart of Darkness. However, Indy and Mac must battle both Nazi and Japanese soldiers also pursuing the artifact.

Kingdom of the Crystal Skull provided an unexplored backstory of Indy’s military background when the United States officially entered World War II, revealing that he and Mac worked as double agents for the U.S. government during the war. Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead not only takes Indy on a gripping literary adventure but also fleshes out his relationship with Mac before the latter joins forces with Soviet military leader Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which makes the novel a great read for Indiana Jones fans.

(12) DEFENSE ADVICE FROM SF WRITERS. Reminiscent of Dr. Arlan Andrews’ Sigma Forum of the last decade, the Guardian takes note as “UK Ministry of Defence enlists sci-fi writers to prepare for dystopian futures”.

It’s a scenario that would make Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, shudder: a future where self-driving cars are the norm but a catastrophic electronic breakdown traps thousands of people inside them.

This dystopian vision of the future was one sketched out by science fiction writers at an event this week where experts were asked to prepare Britain for threats ranging from pandemics to cyber and nuclear attacks.

The writers joined researchers and policymakers working in crisis management and resilience at the gathering organised by RBOC (Resilience Beyond Observed Capabilities), a network of academics whose funders include the Ministry of Defence (MoD).’

Emma Newman, a sci-fi novelist who was at the event, said: “Taking a very character-based approach can help reveal aspects of future scenarios that you might not necessarily get from a more pulled-out approach.”…

(13) THE HEAT IS ON. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Hot stuff from the last edition of the Astronomical Journal of 2024. With dayside temperatures hot enough to sustain a magma ocean and a silicate atmosphere, lava planets are the best targets for studying the atmosphere of a rocky world.  Some rocky exoplanets orbit so closely to their host star that the dayside temperature is high enough to melt rock!

Such planets are thought to have a magma ocean surface on their dayside, which is tidally locked to always face the star. Outgassing from the magma should produce an atmosphere on the dayside only, which freezes out on the nightside.  

“Clouds in Partial Atmospheres of Lava Planets and Where to Find Them”, Nguyen et al have simulated cloud formation in the partial atmospheres of five previously observed lava planets. These simulations indicate that clouds of silicate vapour form on the dayside and they would cast shadows on the magma ocean, so cooling it slightly…  Hal Clement’s Iceworld (1953) anyone?

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George takes us inside “Mufasa: The Lion King Pitch Meeting”.

(15) VIDEO OF AN EARLIER DAY. The Zombie Apache Trailer dropped in May 2024.

The story of ZOMBIE APACHE unfolds as a greedy real estate developer desecrates a sacred Viking burial ground, unleashing a comical nightmare upon the unsuspecting locals. This perfect blend of absurdity and horror, highlighted by the stellar performances of our lead actors, promises an unforgettable and wildly entertaining film. experience.”

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

Pixel Scroll 5/30/24 Scrollfiler Park Is Melting In The Dark, All The Sweet, Green Pixels Flowing Down

Posted on by
14

(1) THE STEPS LEADING TO RWA’S CHAPTER 11. Her Hands, My Hands today published a thorough roundup about the causes of Romance Writers of America’s evaporating membership: “RWA goes bankrupt; it’s not DEI, it’s the bigotry and racism.”

If you are new here: at the end of 2019, the then-second-largest-in-the-world professional writers organization, shot itself in the eye due to the baked-in racism of the people at the top. Within three months, the membership had dropped to a third of what it was, and many of those leaving predicted at the time that the annual conference venue contracts for the following years would bankrupt the organization.

Even though COVID so-called lockdowns postponed it for a bit, RWA has finally filed for Chapter 11–predictably, it’s blaming one woman of color for that….

…So yes, a professional trade organization founded by women, with a membership made up disproportionately of women, was the second largest of its kind in the world, and for a couple of decades at least. The most likely reason RWA grew so big was the incredible misogyny of the industry: genre romance authors and aspiring writers had nowhere else to go for advocacy or support. The most renowned publishers and authors have always been quick to distance themselves from genre romance and its readers, even as they benefit from marketing to them; from the “we don’t publish that shlock” to “I don’t write that” sneer.

…Why, you may ask, am I going on about the membership numbers drop after the ‘nice’ white ladies shat the RWA bed? Because of this:

Because they want to claim that it was Courtney Milan talking about racism, and the ‘woke’ push for DEI that led them to file for bankruptcy (Bloomberg link; also see footnote 7)…

(2) STATHOPOULOS IS 2024 ARCHIBALD PRIZE FINALIST. Professional artist Nick Stathopoulos, a ten-time Ditmar winner for his genre work, has just been named an Archibald Prize finalist for the ninth time.

The Archibald Prize is awarded annually to the best portrait, “preferentially of some man or woman distinguished in art, letters, science or politics, painted by any artist resident in Australasia”.

The story behind Nick’s entry, titled “The last picture show”, is explained in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ introduction to the piece.

Nick Stathopoulos was a finalist in the 2008 Archibald Prize with an irreverent portrait of distinguished film critic David Stratton fast asleep in a cinema.

Sixteen years later, Stathopoulos decided to undertake a smaller, intimate, more serious work, choosing again to paint the now-retired Stratton in monochrome, but retaining the deep red of his cardigan – a cinematic device used to dramatic effect in the 1993 film Schindler’s list. The title of the painting references Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 film The last picture show.

The sitting for this portrait proved to be a happy one. ‘It was a bright, crisp Blue Mountains day, and we sat on David’s back porch talking movies (what else?) as I sketched in the final details. It also happened to be his wedding anniversary, and his wife Susie was keen to point out that she had knitted the red cardigan 40 years ago,’ says Stathopoulos.

An Archibald finalist on eight previous occasions, Stathopoulos won the People’s Choice in 2016 with a portrait of Sudanese refugee and lawyer Deng Adut.

(3) THE MAN FROM UNCLES. Publishers Weekly celebrates bookseller Don Blyly, owner of the reopened Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Edgar’s: “The Uncles in Minneapolis Celebrate 50 Years of Bookselling Perseverance”.

…Even though the Uncles are now located on a side street, instead of a major thoroughfare, Blyly maintains that one reason sales are up is that “we see primarily people who are interested in what we’re selling,” rather than “people walking in who could not even figure out it was a bookstore; they came in to cause problems or to use the restroom.” There is also a lot of cross-pollination among the different bookstores’ customer bases. “A lot of people who are into sci-fi and fantasy and a lot of other things automatically go to both stores when they are in the neighborhood,” Blyly said. “And we’re selling a lot more kids books than in the old location; there are more families here. Two things I’m not happy about: it takes me longer to get here from my home, and there’s no good Chinese carryout nearby. Other than that, everything else is better.”

The new location of Uncle Hugo’s in 2022.

(4) NEW ARGUMENT TO UNDERMINE COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT CHARGE. “Nvidia denies pirate e-book sites are ‘shadow libraries’ to shut down lawsuit” at Ars Technica. However, Ars Technica can’t explain that terminology, or how not being a shadow library helps the defendants.

Some of the most infamous so-called shadow libraries have increasingly faced legal pressure to either stop pirating books or risk being shut down or driven to the dark web. Among the biggest targets are Z-Library, which the US Department of Justice has charged with criminal copyright infringement, and Library Genesis (Libgen), which was sued by textbook publishers last fall for allegedly distributing digital copies of copyrighted works “on a massive scale in willful violation” of copyright laws.

But now these shadow libraries and others accused of spurning copyrights have seemingly found an unlikely defender in Nvidia, the AI chipmaker among those profiting most from the recent AI boom.

Nvidia seemed to defend the shadow libraries as a valid source of information online when responding to a lawsuit from book authors over the list of data repositories that were scraped to create the Books3 dataset used to train Nvidia’s AI platform NeMo.

That list includes some of the most “notorious” shadow libraries—Bibliotik, Z-Library (Z-Lib), Libgen, Sci-Hub, and Anna’s Archive, authors argued. However, Nvidia hopes to invalidate authors’ copyright claims partly by denying that any of these controversial websites should even be considered shadow libraries.

“Nvidia denies the characterization of the listed data repositories as ‘shadow libraries’ and denies that hosting data in or distributing data from the data repositories necessarily violates the US Copyright Act,” Nvidia’s court filing said.

The chipmaker did not go into further detail to define what counts as a shadow library or what potentially absolves these controversial sites from key copyright concerns raised by various ongoing lawsuits. Instead, Nvidia kept its response brief while also curtly disputing authors’ petition for class-action status and defending its AI training methods as fair use.

“Nvidia denies that it has improperly used or copied the alleged works,” the court filing said, arguing that “training is a highly transformative process that may include adjusting numerical parameters including ‘weights,’ and that outputs of an LLM may be based, at least in part, on such ‘weights.'”…

(5) BALTICON SUNDAY SHORT SCIENCE FICTION FILM FESTIVAL (BSSSFFF) 2024. [Report by lance ozko.] Audience scores were from 0 to 5, with sum of values divided by number of votes. 

  • Best of Show. A retrospective screening of “Troll Bridge” from a short story by Terry Pratchett won Best of Show, edging out the George RR Martin production of Howard Waldrop’s “Night of The Cooters”. GRRM provided a new introduction to Howard Waldrop’s work, mentioning 4 films currently. 
  • Best Animated Film went to “Triskelion”, a Stop Motion Celtic Fable from Belgium by Jessica Raes.

Noteworthy were: 

  • “Siren” a comedy from Estonia with a Mermaid. Directed by Katariina Škurinski.
  • “Splinter” a Twilight Zoneish Episode filmed during the Hollywood Strike. Directed by Marc Bernardin.
  • “Falling Forward into an Unknown and Dangerous Future”  based on a verbatim  transcript of an A.I. conversation. Directed by  Mike Ambs.

Several selections were withdrawn between Balticon 57 and 58, as the festival windows did not coincide with Balticon.  Overall 1,010 films were considered. 

Coming last was a Horror Alien Abduction.  Next year we will lean into comedies. Another Howard Waldrop short film “Mary Margaret Road Grader”  is penciled in for 2025. 

(6) MOANA 2 TEASER TRAILER. Entertainment Weekly says “’Moana 2′ trailer reunites Auli’i Cravalho, Dwayne Johnson”.

…The trailer showcases the now-older Moana reuniting with Maui on a mission to reconnect her people “across the entire ocean,” she says, meeting all sorts of oceanic creatures and obstacles along the way….

(7) COLUMBIA RELIC. “Astronaut’s diary found among fallen Columbia space shuttle debris added to National Library of Israel” – Space.com has the story.

The handwritten journal pages of Israel’s first astronaut have been added to the country’s national library in Jerusalem, more than 20 years after they were found among the debris from the NASA tragedy that claimed his life.

Ilan Ramon wrote most of the diary while he was in orbit aboard the space shuttle Columbia, serving as an STS-107 payload specialist on the winged spacecraft’s last, ill-fated flight. The found pages document Ramon’s day-to-day life in space, from his hygiene routine to the research he performed on behalf of NASA and his home nation.

Also included were his notes on the Jewish practices that he was to demonstrate from high above Earth.

“Identified among the restored pages was the Friday night blessing over wine, with Ramon’s annotations. Apparently aware he was to broadcast the ‘Kiddush’ live from space, Ramon wanted to make sure he did not forget a single word,” read a release issued by the National Library of Israel on Wednesday (May 29).

(8) NEW SEASON OF UMBRELLA ACADEMY. Variety introduces “’Umbrella Academy’ Season 4 Trailer: The Hargreeves’ Final Countdown”.

Netflix has released the teaser trailer for the fourth and final season of its superhero series “The Umbrella Academy.” The footage, set to the tune of Europe’s 1986 song “The Final Countdown,” sees the Hargreeves siblings stepping out of their regular lives, prepping to band together one last time.

Based on the graphic novel series written by Gerard Way and illustrated by Gabriel Bá, the beloved series follows a family of adopted siblings with superpowers working to prevent the end of the world….

(9) DIGITAL HANDSELLING? The New York Times studies “How a Self-Published Book, ‘The Shadow Work Journal,’ Became a Best Seller”. (Note: this is a non-genre, nonfiction book.)  Link bypasses NYT paywall.

…The real creator of “The Shadow Work Journal” is Keila Shaheen, a 25-year-old writer from Texas with a background in marketing who self-published the book in 2021, and has since been crowned “the self-help queen of TikTok.”

After the journal blew up on TikTok, Shaheen went on to sell more than a million copies. Most of those — nearly 700,000 copies — were sold through the TikTok shop, and were marketed relentlessly by passionate influencers like Glay, who earn a 15 percent commission on each sale from Zenfulnote, Shaheen’s company.

Shaheen’s unusual path to bestsellerdom shows how radically book marketing and sales have been changed by TikTok. Over the past few years, publishers have frantically rushed to harness the power of the platform as viral videos and reviews by influencers have propelled sales for blockbuster authors like Colleen Hoover, Emily Henry and Sarah J. Maas.

But Shaheen is perhaps the first self-published nonfiction author to break out in a big way on the platform, a feat she accomplished by fully harnessing its potential not just for marketing, but for direct sales.

…“To think that she achieved a million copies sold in the United States alone, without a publisher, without any international expansion, without brick and mortar support, it breaks all the rules of what makes a best seller,” said Albert Lee, a literary agent with United Talent Agency, which represents Shaheen….

(10) MEDICAL UPDATE. MaryAnn Harris, wife of Charles de Lint, has been hospitalized since 2021 after contracting Powassan virus, an extremely rare tick-bourne illness. She has been dependent on a ventilator to breathe, and paralyzed except for a toe. Julie Bartel organized a Gofundme “de Lint Recovery Fund”. And the May 23 update begins by detailing further medical problems leading to a sad status report:

…However, all of this has taken a toll and MaryAnn is quite weak. As a result, her treatment has shifted since she returned to SVH, with a new focus on quality of life rather than full recovery. The palliative care team has been brought in, and there have been numerous conversations with MaryAnn about what comes next, and about concentrating on helping her feel comfortable and pain free.

Yesterday she had a desat that was bad enough that she is now on full oxygen again. Afterwards Dr. Kirby and one of the excellent palliative care doctors, Dr. Nick, explained just how fragile MaryAnn is and that her lungs may no longer be able to function adequately. They reiterated the need to focus on comfort and on keeping her as stable as possible and that’s what is happening now.

A very sad and difficult message to hear, but Lynn and Charles are confident the staff at SVH are doing all that they can to care for MaryAnn as well as possible.

We thought you all should know. Please keep MaryAnn in your thoughts, as she and Charles navigate the road ahead. As always, your love and support are a shining light during dark times.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 30, 1922 – Hal Clement. (Died 2003.)   

By Paul Weimer. If hard science and physics could be considered “characters” in science fiction, Hal Clement is certainly the person who was able to make them so. Mission of Gravity is the premier look at this, giving an extremely weird and strange, and yet possible high gravity world. Do the characters he populates this world with work as individual characters? Not really, but what you read Clement for is the puzzles and the logic behind the hard science that makes a high gravity-distorted world like Mesklin (the planet of Mission of Gravity) possible in the first place. 

Hal Clement at ConFiction (1990). Photo by Frank Olynyk. From Fanac.org site.

Another novel in this vein that doesn’t get much play or notice, but I ironically read before Mission of Gravity, is The Nitrogen Fix. In this book, Earth’s atmosphere has changed, radically, with the free nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere having combined into a toxic and unbreathable mix of nitrogen oxides, carbon dioxide and water. Did the aliens who have come to Earth change and terraform Earth for their own purposes? In the end, the transformation of Earth’s atmosphere is a puzzle that is solved, and makes sense, with a big heaping sense of irony to it all. 

Although shared worlds are not a big thing anymore, back in the 1980’s, they were all the rage. I didn’t mention it back when I wrote on Ellison (way too much to write about him) but even Harlan Ellison did a shared world, Medea. His shared planet had a bunch of writers very interested in building a realistic planet and solar system. Clement not only provided an essay on worldbuilding the astrophysics of  Medea in the book, but also contributed a story. 

Once again, hard science as a character in Clement’s work. That’s what it means to me. 

(12) COMICS SECTION.

(13) UNOBTAINABLE TIMEPIECE. Hamilton Watch put together a prop watch for Dune: Part Two. You can’t buy that one. At the link they have a couple of items you can buy which echo some of its design ideas.

Collaborating with Prop Master Doug Harlocker, Hamilton Watch assisted in bringing this uniquely hardwearing Fremen device to the big screen in “Dune: Part Two”.

While the “Desert Watch” is only available on Arrakis, the creative influence behind it was too strong not to bring into our own world.

(14) OUT, OUT, DANGED SPOT. Space.com says “That giant sunspot that supercharged auroras on Earth? It’s back and may amp up the northern lights with June solar storms.”

…The first hint of AR 13697’s sunspots came into view late on May 27, with the full region visible end of May 28. Making an entrance worthy of its earlier reputation, the active region produced an X2.9 solar flare. Despite triggering fewer large flares from the sun’s backside, Monday’s X-class solar flare asserts that the region is still capable of producing these more noteworthy events. 

The active region will continue to rotate across the sun over the next two weeks, providing a view of any solar flares from the region during this window. The light from any solar flares in this window will reach Earth, with the potential to produce short-term radio blackouts. These are temporary disruptions to radio-wave propagation on the sun-facing side of Earth, lasting only an hour or so. 

As we experienced in mid-May 2024, some flares may also trigger the eruption of a CME. Unlike flares, CMEs are directional, and their potential impact on Earth relies heavily on the location of its source on the sun. For a CME to have the best odds of reaching Earth, it would need to erupt from the slight right of the sun’s center. AR 13697 will reach this location of optimum Earth connection around June 4-6, around one full solar rotation (27 days) since the mid-May solar flares. Eruptions close to this window will have the best odds of producing a geomagnetic storm and enhanced aurora display here on Earth….

(15) BIG GULP. “SpaceX fuels Starship megarocket again to prep for test flight” at Space.com. Sounds like a lot.

SpaceX has fueled up its Starship megarocket again, ramping up preparations for the huge vehicle’s upcoming test flight.

The operation, known as a wet dress rehearsal (WDR), occurred on Tuesday (May 28) at SpaceX‘s Starbase site in South Texas. The company pumped huge quantities of liquid oxygen and liquid methane into Starship‘s first and second stages, which are known, respectively, as Super Heavy and Starship (or just “Ship” for short).

“Starship and Super Heavy loaded with more than 10 million pounds of propellant in a rehearsal ahead of Flight 4. Launch is targeted as early as June 5, pending regulatory approval,” SpaceX said today (May 29) in an X post, which also shared photos of the procedure….

(16) MINECRAFT GETS SERIES. “’Minecraft’ Animated Series in the Works at Netflix” reports Variety.

Netflix is developing an animated series based on the wildly popular sandbox video game “Minecraft.” The streamer will produce the project alongside Mojang Studios, the Swedish developer of the game.

Plot details are not yet known, but according to Netflix, the series “will feature an original story with new characters, showing the world of ‘Minecraft’ in a new light.”…

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

Pixel Scroll 5/15/21 What Can You Get A Pixel For Christmas When He Already Owns A Scroll?

Posted on by

(1) SUCCESSFUL SURGERY. Amazing Stories’ Kermit Woodall says “Steve Davidson’s Heart Surgery is Successful!”

I got the call a few hours ago (didn’t know what it was and it went to voicemail) and just listened to it. Steve’s doctor said all went well and he’s doing fine in recovery!

(2) OH, THE NEUTRINOS YOU’LL BASH. The New York Times profiles the author in “Andy Weir’s New Space Odyssey”.

“The real world is a far richer and more complex tapestry than any writer could invent,” Andy Weir, the author of “Project Hail Mary,” said.

When Andy Weir was writing his new novel, “Project Hail Mary,” he stumbled into a thorny physics problem.

The book’s plot hinges on a space mold that devours the sun’s energy, threatening all life on Earth, and that propels itself by bashing neutrinos together. He needed to figure out how much energy would be produced by two of those subatomic particles colliding.

“I was having a really difficult time finding information on that, and the reason is because people don’t fully know. I mean, we’re getting to the edge of human knowledge on that one,” Weir said in an interview last month from his home in Saratoga, Calif. “Neutrinos are the smallest and most difficult to deal with subatomic particles that we have ever actually managed to prove exist.”

Most sci-fi writers would err on the side of fiction rather than science. But Weir has never been satisfied with fictional solutions to scientific quandaries. He eventually figured out the number he needed for a single sentence — 25.984 microns — and, in the process, learned a lot about neutrinos.

“You have something like 100 trillion neutrinos passing through you, personally, every second,” he said excitedly. “Just being emitted by the sun.”

(3) WEIR Q&A. Dr. Brian Keating interviews the author in “Andy Weir: Project Hail Mary = Even Better than the Martian!”. Some of the questions are:

  • How do you balance realism and scientific fact with a fictional narrative?
  • Could you really mobilize resources at a planetary scale?
  • Do you think it’s realistic to turn an amateur avocation into a career?
  • Is there too much UFOlogy? What’s your stance on SETI and UFOs?
  • Do you think we’ve been going about SETI the wrong way?

Andy Weir built a two-decade career as a software engineer until the success of his first published novel, The Martian , allowed him to live out his dream of writing full-time. He is a lifelong space nerd and a devoted hobbyist of such subjects as relativistic physics, orbital mechanics, and the history of manned spaceflight. He also mixes a mean cocktail. He lives in California.

(4) EVERYONE’S A CRITIC. Some would call this common beginning and ending point Joycean. Some will get that call and hang up. Thread starts here.

(5) FOUR’S A CHARM. Charles Payseur’s Hugo nomination made the news in Wisconsin: “Beyond Belief: Local Author Named Finalist For Hugo Awards – For the Fourth Time” at Volume One. Payseur blogs at Quick Sip Reviews.

… Payseur said he’s grateful for the recognition he said is largely the result of years of consistent effort and a deep affinity for sci-fi/fantasy writing. His own writing, combined with blogs and reviews, landed him on the Hugo map, he said, noting that during the past six years he has reviewed more than 5,000 short fiction and poetry works. His Hugo recognition “comes on the back of my nonfiction work, my blogging and reviewing, and most of that probably comes down to just keeping at it and trying my best to engage with other people’s work openly, thoroughly, and compassionately,” Payseur said.

… Payseur, a 2008 UW-Eau Claire graduate in English, enjoys a variety of different writing styles, from poetry to romance to mystery. But ultimately science fiction and fantasy “with a dash of horror” is his favorite form to write and read.

Payseur has penned a book, The Burning Day and Other Strange Stories, published by Lethe Press and scheduled for release this summer. The work is a compilation of short stories – some of which he wrote years ago and some more recently. The Burning Day is a reflection of Payseur’s questioning of himself and the world around him, he said, examining “desire, nostalgia, and hope in a time when the past and future don’t exactly seem bright.”…

(6) TWO FOR THE PRICE OF NONE. Bruce Gillespie’s SF Commentary 105 (March 2021) and SF Commentary 106 (May 2021) are available as free downloads here. Bruce comments —

They are really two parts of one issue, 80 pages each. No. 105 includes my natter, plus Colin Steele’s reviews column, and the first half of the Gigantic Letter Column, plus covers by Carol Kewley and Alan White.

No. 106 includes my tribute to Yvonne Rousseau (1945–2021), noted Australian fan, critic, essayist and editor; Perry Middlemiss’s article about the 1960s Hugos; Andrew Darlington’s discussion of early John Brunner; Jennifer Bryce’s Top 10 Books of 2020; and with Tony Thomas, a coverage of the most recent Booker Prizes. Plus the second half of the Gigantic Letter Column.

(7) HEAR AUDIO OF A FIFTIES EASTERCON PLAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] “Last and First Fen” is a play that was performed at the 1956 Eastercon and recently put online by Rob Hansen as part of his invaluable research into British fan history.  If this play was a transcript it would have to be heavily annotated.  I got none of the jokes about British fen and only a few of the references to Americans.  But I nonetheless got the gist of the production and thought it was agreeably silly, especially for people who like British comedy of the era.  I thought it was worth an hour.  The website also has photos of what cosplayers looked like in 1956. The audio recording is here.

(8) WIBBLY WOBBLY WEATHER. James Davis Nicoll is your ambassador to “Five Fictional Planets Plagued by Extreme Climate Shifts” at Tor.com.

…SF authors being what they are, those whose works feature climate forcing due to companion stars tend to prefer dramatic oscillations rather than low, single percent wobbles. One might expect that such works would have first shown up in these times of worry over anthropogenic climate change. Not so! This was already a well-established genre. Consider the following works from times of yore:

Cycle of Fire by Hal Clement (1957)

Precisely how ancient red dwarf Theer came to orbit much younger, far more massive Alcyone is unclear. The consequences, however, are obvious. Theer’s habitable world Abyormen cycles between comfortable temperate conditions and overheated and wet greenhouse conditions. Abyormen’s life has adapted in ways Terrestrials would find astounding.

Providentially for castaway Nils Kruger, inadvertently abandoned on Abyormen by fellow crewpersons, Abyormen is in the temperate part of its cycle. Even better, he encounters native Dar Lang Ahn, in whose company he explores an alien world Nils is unlikely to leave soon. Thus, he gains knowledge of just how Abyormen’s life has adapted to its periodic baking. To his distress, he realizes that these adaptations could make the likeable aliens a threat to humanity….

(9) DO YOU HAVE GOOD TASTE? In the Washington Post, Alexandra Petri meets a creature who’s hungry for people to come back to the office. “Only the least tasty employees work from home!”

Is it good and important to go back to the office? Oh yes! Oh yes! It is so very good and important, and I am so glad that you asked me! I know all that transpires in the office, and how very good and important it is to be there — yes, for everyone to be there! Everyone must be in the office with their assorted smells and their good meaty legs! It is bad that the office is empty of people and filled only with the scent of hand sanitizer and flat sodas that were opened in March 2020. There is no nourishment in this! How the management yearns for a return of the workers! How it is ravenous for them! How it hungers for them!…

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born May 15, 1856 — L. Frank Baum. I adore The Wizard of Oz film and I’m betting you know that it only covers about half of the novel which is a splendid read indeed. I’ll confess that I never read the numerous latter volumes in the Oz franchise, nor have I read anything else by him. What’s the rest of his fiction like?  There is, by the way, an amazing amount of fanfic out here involving Oz and of it is slash. (Died 1919.) (CE) 
  • Born May 15, 1891 – Mikhail Bulgakov.  Had he only written The Master and Margarita, that would have sufficed us.  Margarita, not the Master, allies herself with the Devil – maybe; I talk a little about it here; published decades after his death, too dangerous.  Mick Jagger said it inspired “Sympathy for the Devil”.  Try this Website.  See also Diaboliad, The Fatal Eggs, Heart of a Dog. Two rival museums in Moscow – in the same building; one in Kiev.  (Died 1940) [JH]
  • Born May 15, 1919 – Harry Bennett.  Thirty covers, half a dozen interiors.  Here is The “Lomokome” Papers.  Here is The White Jade Fox.  Here is Floating Worlds.  Here is The Last Enchantment.  Here is the frontispiece for a Short Stories of Oscar Wilde.  (Died 2012) [JH]
  • Born May 15, 1926 — Anthony Shaffer. His genre screenplays were Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man. Though definitely not genre, he wrote the screenplays for a number of most excellent mysteries including the Agatha Christie based  Evil Under the Sun,Death on the Nile, and Murder on the Orient Express. (Died 2001.) (CE) 
  • Born May 15, 1946 – Michaelene Pendleton.  Eight short stories.  Editor, particularly ESL (work written in English as a second language) “because I learn about your culture through your writing.”  (Died 2019) [JH]
  • Born May 15, 1955 – Tatsumi Takayuki, age 66.  (Personal name last, Japanese style.)  Professor at Keiô University, chair of its SF Study Group; editor, essayist, interviewer, theoretician; Nihon SF Taishô (Grand Prize) from SFWJ (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of Japan).  President, Amer. Literature Society of Japan 2014-2017, Poe Soc. of Japan 2009-  ; editorial boards of Paradoxa, Mark Twain Studies, Journal of Transnat’l Amer. Studies.  In English, for NY Review of SF, SF Chronicle, SF Eye, SF Studies, the 65th and 72nd Worldcons’ Souvenir Books; The Liverpool Companion to World SF Film; The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature.  [JH]
  • Born May 15, 1955 — Lee Horsley, 66. A performer who’s spent a lot of his career in genre undertakings starting with The Sword and the Sorcerer (and its 2010 sequel Tales of an Ancient Empire), horror films Nightmare Man, The Corpse Had a Familiar Face and Dismembered and even a bit of SF in Showdown at Area 51. Not sure where The Face of Fear falls — it has a cop with psychic powers and a serial killer. (CE) 
  • Born May 15, 1960 — Rob Bowman, 61. Producer of such series as Alien Nation, M.A.N.T.I.S., Quantum Leap, Next Generation, and The X-Files. He has directed these films: The X-Files, Reign of Fire and Elektra. He directed one or several episodes of far too many genres series to list here.  (CE) 
  • Born May 15, 1966 — Greg Wise, 55. I’m including him solely as he’s in Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. It is a film-within-a-film, featuring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon playing themselves as egotistical actors during the making of a screen adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s 18th century metafictional novel Tristram Shandy. Not genre (maybe) but damn fun. (CE)
  • Born May 15, 1974 – Ahmet Zappa, age 47.  Brother of Dweezil, Moon Unit, and Diva; wrote song “Frogs with Dirty Little Lips” with his father Frank.  Debut novel (and interiors), The Monstrous Memoirs of a Mighty McFearless; debut film, The Odd Life of Timothy Green; television, three-season host of Robotica; co-author with wife Shana Muldoon Zappa, Sage and the Journey to Wishworld and 14 more Star Darlings books. [JH]
  • Born May 15, 1991 – Julie Novakova, age 30.  In English, a score of short stories, two anthologies; recent essay in Clarkesworld 174 (Mar 2021).  Seven novels in Czech.  Website (in Czech and English).  As of 11 May 21 Kickstarter looks good for Life Beyond Us.  [JH]

(11) FANTASTIC FOUR TURNS SIXTY. Marvel Comics is celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Fantastic Four, and artist John Romita, Jr. has returned to the company just in time to help.

Following the highly anticipated BRIDE OF DOOM storyline, August’s FANTASTIC FOUR #35 will be a special giant-sized spectacular that will see series writer Dan Slott teaming up with legendary artist John Romita Jr.

Recently returned to the House of Ideas, Romita Jr. is back to bringing his incredible artwork to Marvel’s biggest heroes, starting with this celebratory 60th anniversary issue for Marvel’s First Family. FANTASTIC FOUR #35 will launch a brand-new storyline that will see every iteration of the iconic villain Kang teaming up for a devious plot that will unravel across Fantastic Four history!

(12) I’VE BEEN WORKING ON THE RAILROAD. Mr. Muffin’s Trains offers these two irresistible additions to your model railroad’s rolling stock:

(13) SHOCKED, I TELL YOU. Of course there should be a stolen body involved in this story! ScreenRant points a finger as “Resident Evil Village Accused Of Stealing Horror Movie’s Monsters”.

Resident Evil Village has a number of new and rather unique monsters for the franchise, but one of them may have been stolen from a film. One of the most noteworthy bosses in Resident Evil Village is a creature that is half man, half aircraft propeller, and apparently, the director of the 2013 film Frankenstein’s Army believes Capcom knowingly ripped it off along with other characters in that same section of the game.

Resident Evil as a franchise is known for its imaginative, well-realized monsters, such as Lady Dimitrescu in Resident Evil Village. Oftentimes the disgusting and violent villains become incredibly iconic and are held up highly in the survival horror genre. The series has birthed the likes of Mr. X, the Nemesis, the Chainsaw Man, and many more, but some of the franchise’s latest creations may not be wholly original….

(14) IT’S NO TRICK. Julia Alexander’s Musings on Mouse contends “Loki is now a sign of Disney+’s strength”.

… None of this implies that Disney+ is struggling by any means. It’s not. But whereas competitors might give subscribers more reasons to open the app daily, Disney+ is still looking for its constant. Disney+’s catalog makes up 4% of catalog demand in the US, according to Parrot Analytics, behind all of the other big streamers. Internal restrictions (nothing above PG-13 can be on the app, nothing outside of Disney’s core brands) means the catalogue can only grow so large each month. 

We’re getting there, though. Disney moving Loki to Wednesdays is in part because The Bad Batch is running on Fridays through mid-August. In-between that time, Disney is bringing back High School Musical: The Musical: The Series (on Fridays) and see big movie debuts, including Cruella and Black Widow in May and July respectively. Disney+ has appointment viewing spots for Friday and into the weekend. But Disney wants to increase consistency in engagement throughout the week. 

Disney is in a rare position where over the next 10 months the company will have a high profile show or movie every single day, every single week. A new movie, overlapping Marvel shows, a Star Wars series, a Pixar series, and other potentially big live-action projects. These series overlap and create a consistent flow of appointment television that all bleed into one another. For all the conversation about “franchise fatigue,” statistically that’s not present in actual consumer behavior. 

There’s a reason that consistency is key to any business model, but with streaming, if subscribers are consistently opening and using a platform, this leads to less churn and Disney feels better about raising prices incrementally. This helps with overall ARPU in important regions. Or, to put it simply, Wall Street is happy, Disney executives are happy, and consumers are fine with the increase because the value is apparent. …

(15) EVERBODY WATCHES, NOBODY QUITS. If you haven’t already satisfied your daily minimum requirement for deconstructing Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, it’s time to watch the second installment of Kyle Kallgren’s analysis: “STARSHIP TROOPERS, Part 2: VERHOEVEN”. (Part 1 is here.)

(16) YOUR EPISTEMOLOGY DOLLARS AT WORK. Public television is here to help you decide an important question: “PBS Space Time – How To Know If It’s Aliens.”

There’s one rule on Space Time: It’s never Aliens. But every rule has an exception and this rule is no exception because: It’s never aliens, until it is. So is it aliens yet? And on this fortnight’s Space Time they have been examining all the best case scenarios for life beyond Earth.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, John Hertz, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Jennifer Hawthorne, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Bruce Gillespie, James Davis Nicoll, and Michael Toman, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]

Pixel Scroll 10/12/20 Petronius Tiberius Tirebiter

Posted on by

(1) ASU CSI PODCAST. The initial episode of the second season of The Imagination Desk podcast from the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University is live now, featuring an interview with Ytasha Womack, author of the book Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. The next episode will be with sff author and editor Troy L. Wiggins

The Imagination Desk is a series of interviews with authors, scholars, and technologists about how we can harness creativity and imaginative thinking to inspire new work and build better futures. As this long, strange year wanes, we’re launching new set of podcast episodes featuring deep conversations with fascinating collaborators to think about ways we can move forward together.

For the first installment of Season 2, we sat down with Ytasha L. Womack. Ytasha is a Chicago-based filmmaker, dancer, fiction writer, scholar, and the author of the 2013 book Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. In this chat, CSI’s Joey Eschrich and Ytasha discuss how culture, art, and storytelling help us to understand the complexity of Black life in the present, as well as transformative prospects for the future.

This conversation with Ytasha is part of our observance of Black Speculative Fiction Month, which takes place every October. Started by authors Balogun Ojetade and Milton Davis, Black Speculative Fiction Month honors the role that Black people have played in shaping the culture of speculative fiction and charting the course toward vibrant and equitable futures. We’ll continue to explore these themes in future events and upcoming episodes of The Imagination Desk. Follow along on our website and subscribe to the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or RadioPublic.

(2) SHOSHANA EDWARDS Q&A. Conducted by Cat Rambo:

I interviewed Shoshana Edwards, author of Death Lives in the Water: A Harper’s Landing Story from Ring of Fire Press and A Roman Wilderness of Pain. We talk about her writing, neurolinguistics, and current political rhetoric. Shoshana Edwards was born in rural Oregon, attended Portland State University and California State University, Los Angeles. She later earned advanced degrees in English and Rhetoric. Now retired, she lives near Portland, Oregon where she continues to write.

(3) ADA PALMER’S EXOTERRA GAME CRITICIZED. Ashlyn Sparrow’s op-ed “A Game that Threatens Student Intellectual Property”, in the Chicago Maroon, the independent newspaper of the University of Chicago, contends “Ada Palmer’s ExoTerra game has colonial themes and undermines students’ creative freedom.”

During the 2020 fall quarter, Ada Palmer (Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago) launched ExoTerra. The WordPress website for this project describes ExoTerra as “an online collaborative research role-playing game (RPG) community, in which students from all disciplines, from physics to literature, pool their expertise to design a new world.” The game incorporates students via several university courses, including “Self, Culture, and Society 1,” “America in World Civilization I,” and “Europe’s Intellectual Transformations.” What appears like a well-intentioned pedagogical experiment, however, turns out to make lazy narrative choices and, more importantly, undermines the creative labor and intellectual property of University of Chicago undergraduate students.

ExoTerra is a game where “participating students play the crew of a space colony ship traveling from Earth to a newly-terraformed exoplanet.” Sparrow thinks narratives should focus on improving the Earth.

… But as I looked closer at ExoTerra and began to discuss it with colleagues, I grew increasingly concerned. Some of my initial concerns had to do with a narrative frame that focuses on a colonization narrative at a historical moment when Black and Brown people continue to be exploited in the aftermath of global empire in so many ways. In focusing on the creation of a “new civilization,” this game rests on a colonization and Earth escape fantasy that is being celebrated by tech billionaires such as Elon Musk. Rather than improving the Earth, such a narrative takes us further from facing the ills of climate change, unprecedented income inequality, systemic racism, and global pandemic. This is problematic even at an allegorical level or via the cognitive estrangement characteristic of the science fiction genre. There are so many better narrative arcs and fresher sub-genres from which to choose, especially in our current world.

Sparrow points out that participants sign away to Palmer the rights to what they create in the game.

…Palmer (who is also a published science fiction novelist) reserves the right to take any intellectual property that students might contribute to this allegedly collective storytelling game and use it for her own purposes, including fiction she publishes in the future. To be clear, this is not a video game that students play. It is instead a roleplaying and world building game that they are creating together. Yet the material benefits of this shared effort return to a single person: Ada Palmer.

(4) WHAT SPACE LETS CREATORS DO. Dwayne Day reviews the second season of For All Mankind at The Space Review. “In the paler moonlight: the future’s past in ‘For All Mankind’”.

…Setting a program in the near future restricts the writers and what they can do. In contrast, as Hale noted, setting a science fiction show in the far future (or, alternatively, “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away”) can free up the writers from having to reference—and be limited by—historical or current events that the audience is familiar with. Setting a story in a far distant future can be liberating in terms of storytelling. But it also restricts the writers’ ability to use the show to make social commentary, and their ability to use familiar historical and cultural reference points in their storytelling.

“For All Mankind” has a different set of challenges in terms of storytelling—it is both about our past, and our future, while also inevitably being a commentary about the present. The show’s setting in the 1960s and, for season two, the 1980s, represents a time decades in our past, but still within the living memory of many people. Yet the stories depict a space program that never happened, but still might happen in some way. The Jamestown lunar base in the show is not that different from concepts NASA and its contractors are currently studying. Perhaps in the coming decades, NASA could build something that looks a lot like Jamestown….

(5) WALT WILLIS’ TASFIC SPEECH. Fanac.org announced on FB that thanks to the fan history researches of Rob Hansen in Vince Clarke’s papers, they can present the final draft typescript of Walt Willis’s speech at the 1952 Worldcon, which Willis was able to attend because of the “WAW with the Crew in ’52” fan fund started by Shelby Vick. Here is Joe Siclari’s introduction to the speech:

Although Walt Willis was prolific, the quality of his writing remained very high because he was diligent. In several articles, Walt Willis described some of his writing procedures. Despite what so many people thought was his facile and relaxed style, he worried over pieces and rewrote them. See Warhoon 12, p 22.

Walt’s quality writing was why Shelby Vick created the first really successful campaign to bring a foreign fan to a US Worldcon, “WAW with the Crew in ’52”. You can imagine the excitement when this was successful. You might also imagine the stress when Walt realized that he would have to speak at the TASFiC/Chicon II.

So it seems he wrote a speech beforehand. Not only did he work on it in advance and rewrite and edit it, but it seems he sent it to at least one friend. During his research into Vince Clarke’s papers, Rob Hansen discovered this presentation that you are about to read. It’s probably the closest we will get to what Walt Willis said at the TASFiC. As Rob indicated in a note: “What *isn’t* included, obviously, is whatever off-the-cuff thanks he added after he’d finished reading.”

Not seen in close to 70 years, here is what Rob has called: “The Harp Speaks”

(6) MEDIA ANNIVERSARY.

  • 1987 — Thirty-three years ago, the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Novel went to Peter Beagle‘s The Folk of the Air which had been published that year by Ballantine Del Rey. The main character is Joe Farrell, who first appeared as the hero of a short story called “Lila the Werewolf”, making a sequel of sorts to that story. The League for Archaic Pleasures, here described as a group dedicated to the pleasures of the medieval period, is very obviously modelled after the SCA. Thirteen years later, Tamsin would garner him a second Mythopoeic Award, and The New Voices of Fantasy anthology three years ago would get him his third. He also received their Lifetime Achievement Award as well. 

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born October 12, 1904 — Lester Dent. Pulp-fiction author who was best known as the creator and main author of the series of novels chronicling Doc Savage. Of the one hundred and eighty-one Doc Savage novels published by Street and Smith, one hundred and seventy-nine were credited to Kenneth Robeson; and all but twenty were written by Dent. (Died 1959.) (CE)
  • Born October 12, 1905 – William Kolliker.  Moved from Switzerland to New York at 16.  Illustrated for newspapers e.g. NY American, Baltimore News & American.  Art director & editor of The American Weekly 25 years.  Moved to Texas, resigned from business, taught at El Paso Museum of Art; Conquistador Award from El Paso 1963.  A hundred twenty interiors for us.  Here is an interior for “The Weapon Shop” (Astounding, Dec 42).  Here is one for “Mimsy Were the Borogoves”.  Here is one for “The Sorcerer of Rhiannon”.  Here is a 1979 etching “The Graduate”.  Here is a mid-1970s abstract landscape.   (Died 1995) [JH]
  • Born October 12, 1943 – Daphne Patai, Ph.D., 77.  Feminist dissenter, see e.g. What Price Utopia? (2008); Oral History, Feminism, and Politics (2010, in Portuguese).  Outstanding to us for discovering that the author of Swastika Night, published under a pseudonym 1930, was Englishwoman Katherine Burdekin.  [JH]
  • Born October 12, 1949 – Barclay Shaw, 71.  A hundred twenty covers, thirty interiors.  Here is The Glass Teat; here is I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.  Here is The Shockwave Rider.  Here is The Ringworld Throne.  Here is the Mar 01 F&SF.  Chesley for three-dimensional Wonderland.  Artbooks The Art of Barclay Shaw; Electric Dreams.  Website here (includes 3D animation).  [JH]
  • Born October 12, 1951 – Taral Wayne, 69.  Fanartist, pro artist, fanwriter.  Many covers and interiors for fanzines; here is Torus 2; here is File 770 116 (PDF); see more in the cover gallery at his efanzines.com page.  Here is his logograph for IguanaCon II the 36th Worldcon; Fan Guest of Honor at Anticipation the 67th.  Co-founded Ditto (fanziners’ convention, named for a brand of spirit-duplicator copying machine); Special Guest at Ditto 8.  Toastmaster at Corflu 4 (fanziners’ con, named for mimeograph correction fluid).  CUFF (Canadian Unity Fan Fund) delegate; his CUFF history here.  Numismatist.  Collections Old Toys; The Great White Zine.  Eleven-time Hugo finalist.  FAAn (Fan Activity Achievement) award.  Rotsler Award.  [JH]
  • Born October 12, 1956 — Storm Constantine, 63. Writer with her longest-running series being the Wraeththu Universe which has at least four separate series within all of which are known for their themes of alternative sexuality and gender. She has also written a number of non-fiction (I think they are) works such as Sekhem Heka: A Natural Healing and Self Development System and The Grimoire of Deharan Magick: Kaimana. (CE) 
  • Born October 12, 1961 – Susan Power, 59.  Enrolled member of the Standing Rock Tribe (Dakota).  Law degree from Harvard.  Hemingway/PEN Award for first novel The Grass Dancer (ours); several more novels; shorter fiction in The Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Story, a dozen for us in collection Roofwalker.  Voices from the Gaps interview with her here (PDF).  [JH]
  • Born October 12, 1965 — Dan Abnett, 55. His earlier work was actually on Doctor Who Magazine,  but I’ll single out his co-writing Guardians of the Galaxy #1–6 with Andy Lanning, The Authority: Rule Britannia and his Border Princes novel he did in the Tirchworch universe as great looks at him as a writer. (CE) 
  • Born October 12, 1966 — Sandra McDonald, 54. Author of some sixty genre short stories, some of which are collected in Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories (which won a Lambda Award for LGBT SF, Fantasy and Horror Works) and Lovely Little Planet: Stories of the Apocalypse.  Outback Stars is her space opera-ish trilogy. (CE)
  • Born October 12, 1968 — Hugh Jackman, 52. Obviously Wolverine in the Marvel film franchise. He’s also been the lead character in Van Helsing as well as voicing him in the animated prequel Van Helsing: The London Assignment. One of his most charming roles was voicing The Easter Bunny in The Rise of The Guardians. And he played Robert Angier in The Prestige based off the World Fantasy Award winning novel written by the real Christopher Priest. (CE)
  • Born October 12, 1974 — Kate Beahan, 46. Her best remembered role is as Sister Willow Woodward in the remake of The Wicker Man. In the same year, she was Michell in The Return, a horror film. She showed up on Farscape as Hubero in “Fractures”, and on Lucifer as Justine Doble in “All About Her”. (CE) 
  • Born October 12, 1992 – Melanie Vogltanz, 28.  Austrian author and translator.  European SF Society Encouragement Award, 2016; shortlisted for several prizes e.g. Kurd Laßwitz.  Five novels, plus six in a Black Blood series; shorter stories collected in On Dark Wings (in German).  I have not yet found translations into English.  [JH]

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) WHAT CHILD IS THIS. Disney released posters for season 2 of The Mandalorian, including a sad Baby Yoda!

(10) DISNEY DISAPPOINTS EURO MOVIE HOUSES. Naman Ramachandran, in the Variety story “Disney’s ‘Soul’ Decision Upsets European Cinemas” says the European trade association the International Union of Cinemas is mad at Disney because they say they operate safe cinemas and would love to have exhibited Soul.

…“There is compelling evidence that where audiences have returned, they have found the experience both safe and enjoyable,” the UNIC statement said. “But it is also clear that it is the release of new films that will make all the difference in encouraging people back to the big screen.”

“Indeed, across Europe, many cinemas have — since re-opening successfully — screened countless local releases, underlining that first-run titles are now more important than ever.”

(11) SAINTHOOD FOR J.R.R.? Daniel Cote Davis, a promoter of J.R.R. Tolkien Cause for Canonization, will speak in New Zealand on October 31 reports the Tolkien sainthood Facebook group. (See more information about the movement in “Tolkien: An Unexpected Sainthood”.)

Should J.R.R. Tolkien be made a Saint? In this film we explore the Catholic virtue of one of England’s most renowned authors and look beyond the trolls and goblins at what the Lord of the Rings is really trying to say.

(12) IT ALL GOES AROUND. CrowdScience answers the question “Why do planets spin?” in an episode available at the BBC Sounds archive.

Crowdscience solves a range of listeners’ cosmic mysteries, from the reason we only ever see one side of the moon, to why planets spin, and discover the answer can be found in the formation of the solar system. We talk to astronomer Dr Carolin Crawford to understand how stars are made, and investigate the art of astronomy with journalist Jo Marchant, hearing how the ancient Greeks came up with a zodiac long before the invention of a telescope, revealing an intimate relationship between humans and the night sky.

(13) WOMEN OF SFF IN THE SIXTIES. Fanac.org has posted to its YouTube channel a recording from Boskone 6 in 1969, “The Feminine Viewpoint,” moderated by Hal Clement, with Anne McCaffrey, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Larry Niven. NESFA and Rick Kovalcik provided the recording.

Moderated by Hal Clement, this audio recording (illustrated with dozens of images) is a 1960s view of feminism and the female viewpoint in SF by two of SF’s most successful women writers of the day. It is uncomfortable in parts by today’s standards, with comments like “you can’t be a feminist if you like being a woman”, and remarks about fanzines that discount female writers solely because of their sex. Hal Clement is the neutral moderator, and Larry Niven provides a male perspective. This panel is dominated by MZB and Anne McCaffrey, who express their views on women in the field, on the differences in fiction written by woman and men, and on the disadvantages attendant on being a female science fiction writer. Remember, Anne McCaffrey was born in 1926 and MZB in 1930. Their opinions were shaped by the times. It’s a fascinating snapshot of the times.

The audio recording is accompanied by contemporary photos, including one of Walter Breen and MZB, just so you know.

[Thanks to JJ, Cat Eldridge, John King Tarpinian, Michael Toman, Martin Morse Wooster, John Hertz, Mike Kennedy, Joey Eschrich, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Classics of SF at Loscon 45

Posted on by

By John Hertz:  We’ll take up three Classics of Science Fiction at Loscon XLV, one discussion each.  Come to as many as you like.  You’ll be welcome to join in.

We’re still with “A classic is a work that survives its own time.  After the currents which might have sustained it have changed, it remains, and is seen to be worthwhile for itself.”  If you have a better definition, bring it.

Each of our three is famous in a different way.  Each may be more interesting now than when first published.  Have you read them?  Have you re-read them?

Arthur C. Clarke, Prelude to Space (1951)

Halfway between the end of World War II and the rise of Sputnik – I warned you about these puns – is this fine instance of giving the touch of reality to what had never yet been, as SF hopes to achieve.  Today, knowing many things happened otherwise, we can watch the author at work.

Hal Clement, Iceworld (1953)

Interstellar traders return to a world where they’ve been operating with great difficulty.  Its inhuman cold hinders everything.  It seems to have intelligent life, but how could that be?  The world is so cold it freezes zinc – yes, Earth: the protagonists’ world is hundreds of degrees hotter.

Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)

An extraordinary novel, terrifyingly grim, prodigiously imaginative, richly comic – well, that’s true.  Also we’re not long on stories that well paint any mainstream religion.  Here the Catholic Church is at center stage, the light relentless, but not ruthless, on Catholics and everyone else.