Tag Archives: Heinlein

Pixel Scroll 4/26/25 (Light) Years To You, Space Family Robinson, Earworms Love You More Than Etaoin Shrdlu

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(1) CEMETERY DANCE KERFUFFLE HAS CONSEQUENCES. StokerCon today announced on Facebook a punitive action against small press Cemetery Dance in response to publisher Richard Chizmar’s exchange with an author who wrote to him seeking overdue royalties.

Due to recent information coming to light, Cemetery Dance will not be allowed to hear pitches during StokerCon. The Horror Writers Association stands up for the rights of its members, including the right to receive royalties as contracted, to have their works published as contracted, and to have its members treated with civility and respect. Cemetery Dance appears to be lacking in all of these areas.

Todd Keisling is the author whose experience at the hands of Cemetery Dance publisher Richard Chizmar led to HWA’s action. It seems he did finally get paid.

Screencaps of the exchanges were posted by Keisling in comments on Facebook after Chizmar doubled down on calling Todd a funny little man and then did a “dirty delete” of the comment.

Several authors have followed up with comments about having to dun Cemetery Dance for payment.

(2) MAURICE BROADDUS’ BOOKSHELF. Shelfies, edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin, “Takes a unique peek each week into one of our contributors’ weird and wonderful bookshelves.” A recent entry was “Shelfies #33: Maurice Broaddus”. Photo at the link.

The why I do what I do shelf. This is the shelf of books that have inspired me or push me to do what I do. Futureland (Walter Mosley) was the first book that made me re-think my writing trajectory. When I read it, I thought to myself “we can do that?” It was the first sf book I read that had characters who looked like me, that had worldbuilding done through a different cultural lens….

(3) TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE, CHAPTER 37. Victoria Strauss introduces Denise Beck-Clark’s writeup before turning over the microphone in “Guest Post: My Twenty-Four Hour Dream” at Writer Beware.

I’ve written many scam case studies and investigations on this blog, all of which reference and/or describe writers’ direct experiences (while protecting their identities, as Writer Beware always promises to do). But when the essay below landed in my inbox this week, it presented the perfect opportunity to offer a different perspective: a writer’s own first-person description of her encounter with a scammer.

The scam in question is an extremely common one: out-of-the-blue contact from someone claiming to be a well-known film producer/famous movie director/executive with a major production company supposedly eager to turn the writer’s book into a movie. The essay details all the typical elements of this often-elaborate fraud: praise and promises carefully calibrated to manipulate the writer’s hopes and dreams (and ego), contracts and other items that lend a veneer of authenticity, even a phone call from the famous director attached to the project! But also warning signs, which this writer didn’t ignore but too many writers do–such as American movie people speaking with strong foreign accents.

Denise Beck-Clark has kindly given me permission to use her name and bio (at the bottom of the post). Hopefully her experience will help other writers recognize and avoid this type of scam. (My favorite part of the story: when the scammer recommends using Writer Beware.)…

(4) JOSH ROUNTREE Q&A. “Nuts & Bolts: Author Josh Rountree on Transitioning From Short Stories to Novels” on the Horror Writers Association blog.

Q: How is writing a novel different from writing short fiction?

A: I don’t think there’s one perfect answer for this, but in general I think short stories and novels require us to access different parts of our writer brains.

Being a short story writer, my brain is always telling me to tighten, tighten, tighten. Leave nothing in the story that’s not important to character, advancing plot, etc. You try to make every sentence you write do double duty.

When I transitioned to working on a novel, I felt that same instinct, and I had to remind myself that it’s okay to let things breath.  I can go deeper into the characters, their personal stories, and figure out who these people are on a deeper level. I still want every sentence to work hard, advancing the story and building the character, but I can be a bit more leisurely about it.

Some people are skilled at one form and not the other. I think I’m one of them. Short stories come easily to me, but novels are much more challenging.  I wrote a half dozen novels that will never see the light of day, for good reason. Books that I thought were wonderful at the time, but with hindsight I can see they’re a mess. As much as I love short story writing, I did want to prove to myself I could write a novel, but the process became discouraging with each new failure.

Finally, I decided to split the difference and see if I could write a novella.  I told myself it was really nothing more than a longer short story. I was consciously trying to trick myself, and ultimately it worked.

(5) ALEXANDER SKARSGÅRD Q&A. There are four Murderbot questions near the end: “Alexander Skarsgård: The Empire Interview” at Empire Online.

How did you approach that evolution, of portraying a machine that is becoming a bit more human?

Ironically, I found Murderbot more relatable than most characters I’ve ever played.

(6) NEW AI COPYRIGHT SUIT. “Publisher of PCMag and Mashable Sues OpenAI” reports the New York Times. (Behind a paywall.) “Ziff Davis, which owns more than 45 media properties, is accusing the tech company of infringing on the publisher’s copyrights and diluting its trademarks.”

… In a 62-page complaint filed in federal court in Delaware, where OpenAI is incorporated, Ziff Davis says the tech company has “intentionally and relentlessly reproduced exact copies and created derivatives of Ziff Davis works,” infringing on the publisher’s copyrights and diluting its trademarks. It claims that OpenAI used Ziff Davis content to train its artificial intelligence models and generate responses through its popular ChatGPT chatbot.

“OpenAI has taken each of these steps knowing that they violate Ziff Davis’s intellectual property rights and the law,” the complaint says.

The company is seeking at least hundreds of millions of dollars in its lawsuit, according to two people familiar with the matter.

A spokesman for OpenAI said in a statement that its models were “grounded in fair use,” referring to the legal standard for use of copyrighted material….

(7) COLONEL MUSTARD IN THE MOVIE THEATER WITH THE CASH REGISTER. CrimeReads says it’s time to praise this 1985 movie: “The Clues, the Clueless, and the Critics: Appreciating Clue” at CrimeReads.

…[It] is this latter element of the film (the board game come to life) that all its contemporary critics found both equally vexing and ingenious. The film, written and directed by Johnathan Lynn, features three different endings. Three different outcomes to the mystery, just as is possible in the board game. There is no motive in the board game, so one must be supplied for the film to have any meaning. That is, if it strives for meaning. It doesn’t. Instead, it embraces the randomness of a shuffled card deck, offering three random endings that might satisfy the clues in the story as well as the next.

This is what Ebert in referencing in the aforementioned quote, the start of his review of the film—an element that, on its own, he found brilliant. “The way Paramount is handling its multiple endings,” he wrote, “is ingenious. They’re playing each of the endings in a third of the theaters where the movie is booked. If this were a better movie, that might mean you’d have to drive all over town and buy three tickets to see all the endings.” He concludes, though, “[w]ith ‘Clue,’ though, one ending is more than enough.”

But he was correct in finding creative merit in this aspect of Clue. Writing in 2021, the scholar Milan Terlunen noted that “Clue lays bare the inner workings of all detective stories. Clue‘s multiple endings aren’t just a clever cinematic translation of the board game’s structure — they reveal something crucial about the nature of clues in general.” He goes on to explain that the very point of “solving” a mystery is “the process of distinguishing clues from red herrings… [t]here’s always too much evidence in a detective story, which fits beautifully with the general too-muchness of Clue.”…

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

April 26, 2010 — Iron Man II

Fifteen years ago the sequel to the highly successful and quite popular Iron Man se premiered in select markets before opening nationwide on May 7. 

Titled just Iron Man 2, it was directed by Jon Favreau who had done the first film, and written by Justin Theroux, who had not done the first film (which had been written by a committee of Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway. Hey it worked, didn’t it?) The first film got nominated for a Hugo at Anticipation. 

Iron Man 2 premiered at the El Capitan Theatre, a fully restored movie palace in Hollywood. This theater and the adjacent Hollywood Masonic Temple (which are now known as the El Capitan Entertainment Centre) are owned by the Disney Company and serve as the venue for a majority of the Disney film premieres.

Although fandom is very fond of saying it did substantially worse than the first film at the box office that’s a lie as it actually did better. Iron Man did five hundred and eighty million against one hundred and forty million in costs, whereas this film took in six hundred and thirty million against the same production costs. 

So how was it received by critics at the time? Anthony Lane at the New Yorker liked it better than its competitors Spider-Man and Superman: “To find a comic-book hero who doesn’t agonize over his supergifts, and would defend his constitutional right to get a kick out of them, is frankly a relief.” 

Roger Ebert writing for the Chicago Sun-Tribune was impressed: “Iron Man 2 is a polished, high-octane sequel, not as good as the original but building once again on a quirky performance by Robert Downey Jr.”

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a rather good seventy-two percent rating. 

It is of course streaming where all things Marvel are which is Disney+. I am going to have to subscribe, aren’t I?

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) ANTI-RULES. Karl K. Gallagher has done an interesting thought experiment on X:

(11) BATTLING THE BLAHS. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian’s Luke Holland considers the declining fortunes of assorted TV ‘super-franchises’ and comes up with some radical suggestions for reviving their fortunes: “May the force be with you! How to save every tired TV superfranchise, from Star Wars to Game of Thrones”.

It’s amazing to think that, not so very long ago, people were actually excited at the prospect of a new Star Wars show. Or when it emerged that a fresh Lord of the Rings saga was, through some kind of Gandalfian wizardry, being squeezed on to the small screen, the reaction was one of giddy awe. Even the faintest whisper of another trip to Hogwarts would have set the whole internet ablaze. And now? Well, here’s a test: there’s a new Harry Potter series coming out soon. How does that make you feel? Exactly.

There’s no doubt about it – a worrying number of what used to be the world’s most untouchable franchises are in trouble. But how did they arrive at this point of terminal audience ennui? And is there any route for them back into our hearts?

(12) TATOOINE-ALIKE. “Rare exoplanet orbits twin stars in ‘Star Wars’-like twist” reports Phys.org.

Astronomers have discovered a planet that orbits at a 90-degree angle around a rare pair of strange stars—a real-life ‘twist’ on the fictional twin suns of Star Wars hero Luke Skywalker’s home planet of Tatooine.

The exoplanet, named 2M1510 (AB) b, orbits a pair of young brown dwarfs—objects bigger than gas-giant planets but too small to be proper stars. Only the second pair of eclipsing brown dwarfs known—this is the first exoplanet found on a right-angled path to the orbit of its two host stars.

An international team of researchers led by the University of Birmingham made the surprise discovery using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). The brown dwarfs produce eclipses of one another, as seen from Earth, making them part of an “eclipsing binary.”

Publishing their discovery in Science Advances, the researchers note that this is the first time such strong evidence for a “polar planet” orbiting a stellar pair has been collected.

Thomas Baycroft, a Ph.D. student at the University of Birmingham who led the study commented, “I’m particularly excited to be involved in detecting credible evidence that this configuration exists.’…

(13) TRAILER PARK. “Love Death + Robots Volume 4”. Extreming May 15 on Netflix.

The Emmy-winning anthology of twisted tales from strange worlds returns, with stories featuring MrBeast and the Red Hot Chili Peppers

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

Pixel Scroll 3/27/25 I Just Dropped In To See What Condition My Pixels Were In

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(1) CANADIAN’S VIEW OF U.S. TARIFF THREATS. Silvia Moreno-Garcia spotlights the issues writers in Canada and the US are going to face if tariffs between these countries are implemented in “Bookish and world woes” on Patreon.

The threat of tariffs against Canada has made my travel more fraught. Stories about issues with border agents spike my anxiety. I love going to book festivals and conferences and meeting with fans. At this point, I am not cancelling the engagements I committed to last year (which include dates for a book tour that has yet to be publicized), but I am pausing any new travel to the USA. I figure I committed to stuff in 2024 and need to maintain my commitments, but that means I’m not going to make it to Worldcon in Seattle, which I was hoping to visit, as I did not book that trip last year.

Just a couple of days ago the US government blocked Canadians from accessing the front door of the Haskell Free Library in Stanstead, Quebec and Vermont. Built in 1904, this heritage site that serves both American and Canadian patrons is considered a symbol of harmony between both nations. Now, I supposed it’s a symbol of strife.

The situation for writers in both Canada and the US is going to be dire this year. As indicated in a story by Publishers Weekly, cross border tariffs will affect the price of paper. The US imported $1.82 billion of uncoated paper, which is used in books, in 2023, with 67% of that paper coming from Canada. American book manufacturers may not have enough capacity to take over the production of books that are currently printed in China. This may create increases to book costs….

…Meanwhile, in Canada, bookstores and libraries might face a catastrophic scenario if tariffs are applied to books. Many books sold in Canada, including my own, are printed and stored in the USA, then shipped to bookstores across Canada. A 25 percent tariff increase would put many bookstores out of business, and restrict library collection purchases….

… And then, of course, there is the problem of decreased collaboration and exchanges between writers of our countries. If fewer Canadians are traveling to the US because they are afraid to fly there, then we have less face to face exchanges and chances to talk to each other, share knowledge and build communities.

(2) BBC OVERSEAS UPDATE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] OK, a bit of confusion this end – not from me, the BBC Radio 4 news folk themselves are a little uncertain, as to the plans the BBC (a.k.a. ‘auntie’, Beeb and even ‘B Beeb Ceeb’) have for overseas access.

The situation seems to be this. If you are not based in the UK then at some point (they don’t know when) you will no longer have access to BBC Sounds. However, you will be able to use a BBC app to access BBC local radio, BBC Scotland, Radio 4 Plus and a few other services, but this will cost money (a subscription I guess?) You will not be able to access the BBC mainly music radio channels (Radio 1 that has pop music, Radio 2 vintage pop, Radio 3 and its classical music, and Radio 6 Music). This is because the BBC pays for music rights and does not have the right to re-sell these broadcasts. If you are a British subject, then you can download for free an app to your smartphone or lap top in the UK and then take that abroad with you when you go on holiday. I understand Brits will have a month a year allowance for free overseas listening. Nobody from outside Britain will be able to download this app. (Though I suspect if you brought your phone/laptop to the UK you could download it and then get a month of free access back in N. America. This you could consider a free trial to entice you to subscribe properly….?)

My understanding, from the BBC Radio 4 news folk, is that overseas citizens will still be able to listen to BBC Radio 4 live broadcast through the internet and also the Radio 5 Live live broadcast, Radio 4 Extra as well as the BBC World Service. However, I am not sure that you will be able to access Radio 4 programmes once they are aired (only live as they are broadcast). If this last is true then the links I occasionally provide Mike for BBC Radio 4 programmes will not work. We will have to wait and find out.

I guess much depends on how many regular File-ers will pay for the overseas citizens’ BBC app? If many do then it will be worthwhile my still providing links. But I suspect we will have to see how things pan out.

Apparently, the BBC already makes £300 million (about US$366m) from licensing content overseas. This provides added income to that the BBC gets from British subjects paying the licence fee. The licence fee is currently £169.50 (US$207) per household per year (I have just paid mine) that has all household occupants under 75 and not receiving ‘pension credit’ (a government benefit for those with minimal income). Over 75s households on pension credit get a discounted rate (might even be free, I’ve never checked)). The BBC gets roughly £4 billion (US$4.9bn) this way. In addition, there are special TV licence rates for pubs and hotels to show programmes to their patrons (in pubs this is mainly football matches). (‘Football’ by the way is original football and is what you US-folk call ‘soccer’, which I understand from physicist (don’t hold that against him) Sheldon Cooper that some in Texas consider to be a communist plot. (But I wouldn’t know about that, comrade.))

The TV licence gives British households the right to access the BBC by any means (including through the internet), and also FREEVIEW services which includes the BBC and other independent public service broadcasters. (Currently there are about 60 or so FREEVIEW TV channels and an additional score or so duplicates that broadcast with a one-hour time delay, and there are also a score or so radio channels).

I understand that arrangements for BBC World Service will remain unchanged. I am not sure what the score is for the Brit Box television streamer outside Britain or even if it is still going, but then you folk the other side of the Black Atlantic will be more clued up on that. More news when things are firmed up.

(3) BACK IN BUSINESS. Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore in San Diego reopened on Sunday March 23 they told Facebook readers. They had been forced to close in February for several weeks to repair extensive flooding damage to the store.

(4) HELP IS ON THE WAY. DAW Books has released the cover for Jim C. Hines’ Slayers of Old, which will release on October 21, 2025.

Perfect for fans of cozy mysteries and Buffy, the OG vampire slayer, this humorous standalone fantasy by Jim C. Hines, serves up a fun, funny, and heartwarming story, about second chances, bookshops, and witchery at the Second Life Books and Gifts in Salem, MA where three former Chosen Ones have joined together to spend their retirement in peace and quiet. Until some of the locals start summoning ancient creatures best left where they were . . . 

These ex-heroes may have thought they were done, but if they want to finish their retirement in peace, they’ll have to join together to save the world one last time.

(5) A DESTROYER NAMED HEINLEIN. [Item by Tim Kyger.] There’s a letter-writing campaign in progress asking the new Secretary of the Navy, John Phelan, to name a future DDG-51 Flight III destroyer for Robert A. Heinlein. See full details at the U.S.S. Robert A. Heinlein website.

It is the prerogative of the Secretary of the Navy to name Navy vessels. Navy policy is to name destroyers for deceased members of the Navy. We want the new Secretary of the Navy – John Phelan — to name a future DDG-51 Flight III destroyer for Robert A. Heinlein. This would happen if lots of people write asking him to name a future Arleigh Burke-class destroyer for Heinlein. The U.S.S. Robert A. Heinlein.

Phelan’s address is: The Honorable John Phelan Secretary of the Navy Room 4E686 Defense Pentagon Washington, D.C. 20301

What To Do — Write John Phelan; ask him to name a U.S. Navy vessel the U.S.S. Robert A. Heinlein. Get as many others as you can to do the same! Spread the information on the Campaign as far and as wide as you possibly can!

(6) HAPPY DAIS. “Kermit the Frog announced as UMD’s 2025 commencement speaker” reports The Diamondback.

Kermit the Frog will be the University of Maryland’s 2025 commencement speaker, according to a university news release on Wednesday.

University alum and renowned puppeteer Jim Henson founded The Muppets, a fictional musical ensemble that includes Kermit, in 1955. Henson performed Kermit from 1955 until he died in 1990.

Kermit appeared on The Muppets Show and Sesame Street and was later in Muppet movies and several television series.

“Nothing could make these feet happier than to speak at [this university],” Kermit said in the release. “I just know the class of 2025 is going to leap into the world and make it a better place.”

Henson graduated from this university in 1960 with a home economics degree, according to Wednesday’s news release. Henson also attended Northwestern High School in Hyattsville, his website said….

… “I am thrilled that our graduates and their families will experience the optimism and insight of the world-renowned Kermit the Frog at such a meaningful time in their lives,” university president Darryll Pines said in Wednesday’s news release. “Our pride in Jim Henson knows no bounds, and it is an honor to welcome Kermit the Frog to our campus.”

American puppeteer Matt Vogel has most recently performed as Kermit since 2017.

The 2025 commencement ceremony on May 21 at 6 p.m. in SECU Stadium will celebrate summer 2024, winter 2024 and spring 2025 graduates, the news release said….

Statue of Kermit the Frog and Jim Henson outside of Stamp Student Union. (Mateo Pacheco/The Diamondback)

(7) OCTOTHORPE. Octothorpe 131 is here! “We’re Performance Before We’re Interest”. John Coxon is moderating, Alison Scott is auctioning, and Liz Batty is lecturing. An uncorrected transcript of the episode is available here.

We discuss the Seattle Worldcon, the upcoming Belfast Eastercon, the BSFA Awards, and then we talk about the fan funds and handwriting. Also, John actually had a pick in advance this episode.

A birthday cake with six layers, from purple to a dark orange, and then a red 5 and five red candles on top, with fireworks overhead. The words “Octothorpe 131” are at the top.

(8) HUNGER GAMES PREQUEL SELLS MILLION-PLUS. Sunrise on the Reaping, Suzanne Collins’ new Hunger Games prequel, sold 1.5 million English-language units across all formats in its first week, with US sales exceeding 1.2 million units reports publisher Scholastic. Two-thirds of these were hardcovers.

Sunrise on the Reaping has sold twice as many copies its first week on sale domestically as The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes in 2019 and three times as many copies as Mockingjay in 2010.

Elie Berger, evp, president, Scholastic Trade, said, “After nearly a year of anticipation, sales for Sunrise on the Reaping have exceeded all expectations, as has the overwhelmingly positive critical and fan response to the book across the world.”

(9) CLIVE REVILL (1930-2025). The original voice of Emperor Palpatine, actor Clive Revill, died March 11 says The Hollywood Reporter: “Clive Revill Dead: Emperor Palpatine in ‘Empire Strikes Back’ Was 94”. He also appeared in many other films and TV shows of genre interest.

Clive Revill, the New Zealand native who after being recruited to be an actor by Laurence Olivier starred on Broadway, appeared in two films for Billy Wilder and provided the original voice of the evil Emperor Palpatine in The Empire Strikes Back, has died. He was 94.

Revill died March 11 at a care facility in Sherman Oaks after a battle with dementia, his daughter, Kate Revill, told The Hollywood Reporter.

The extremely versatile Revill played cops in Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965), starring Olivier, and Jack Smight’s Kaleidoscope (1966), starring Warren Beatty; not one but two characters (a Scotsman and an Arab) in Joseph Losey’s Modesty Blaise (1966); and a physicist investigating strange goings-on at a haunted mansion in John Hough’s The Legend of Hell House (1973), starring Roddy McDowall.

…. For Wilder, he portrayed a man representing a Russian ballerina in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) — his character is led to believe that Holmes (Robert Stephens) and Dr. Watson (Colin Blakely) are gay — and the besieged hotel manager Carlo in Avanti! (1972), which earned him a Golden Globe nom….

…For Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back (1980), director Irvin Kershner called upon Revill — the two had worked together on the 1966 film A Fine Madness — to record a couple of menacing lines in a Wilshire Boulevard studio in Los Angeles.

They would be used in the pivotal scene in which Darth Vader (James Earl Jones) communicates with the emperor (as a holographic projection).

Revill’s voice would be replaced on the 2004 DVD release of the film by Ian McDiarmid’s, who went on to play the character in Return of the Jedi (1983) and the franchise’s three prequels — but he had his fans nonetheless.

“They come up to me, and I tell them to get close and shut their eyes,” he said in a 2015 interview. “Then I say [in the emperor’s haunting voice], ‘There is a great disturbance in the Force.’ People turn white, and one nearly fainted!”

…He could play all manner of ethnicities, and his big-screen body of work included The Double Man (1967), Fathom (1967), The Assassination Bureau (1969), A Severed Head (1970), The Black Windmill (1974), One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing (1975), Zorro: The Gay Blade (1981), Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995) and The Queen of Spain (2016).

Revill portrayed an Irishman in 1978 on Peter Falk’s last episode of the original Columbo series and showed up on everything from Maude, Hart to Hart, Dynasty, Remington Steele, Murder, She Wrote and Babylon 5 to Magnum, P.I., Newhart, MacGyver, Dear John, The Fall Guy and Star Trek: The Next Generation….

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Quantum Leap series (1989)

By Paul Weimer.

[Editor’s note: Spoiler warning for end of original series.] 

Dr. Sam Beckett, theorizing one could time travel within their own lifetime, stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator, and vanished.

So began Quantum Leap, one of the iconic SF shows of the late 80’s and early 90’s. With excellent chemistry between Scott Bakula as Beckett and Dean Stockwell as Al, the show got to explore recent American History by mostly telling the small stories, stories of individual people, not usually famous ones, and changing the world for the better. (It seems interesting to me that Beckett has problems when he tries to change big events in history (the Lee Harvey Oswald episodes really show this in spades) but his goal is to make small changes in the timeline to make the world better.  It became clear to me somewhere along the line that the timeline of the Quantum Leap show wasn’t our own, but that the changes were aligning it with our own reality. The idea of our world being the best of all possible worlds is one that had a lot more plausibility then, than it does now, I am afraid. 

With a few exceptions to show his own range, this really is a masterpiece of a Bakula vehicle, playing basically the same character every week–and yet not, having to inhabit a new character every week in his ceaseless efforts. While I at first always wanted more allohistorical content (like, say, Voyagers), the show wasn’t for that. The show was about the small changes, the small moves, to make things better. 

I still don’t quite understand the last episode. Was the bartender God? Could Beckett ever return home whenever he wanted? Was he always really on a mission from God? I don’t know. I suppose with a series like this, one shouldn’t even try to find definitive answers, and when you get them they are unsatisfactory at best. 

I was amused, years later, during Enterprise, when Bakula, as Captain Archer, encounters an alien played by Dean Stockwell. They do NOT get along together at all.  That was a neat tip of the hat to Quantum Leap.

I have not seen the two-season remake. 

Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) NASA ERASURE. “NASA Deletes Comic Book About How Women Can Be Astronauts” reports Futurism.

NASA has deleted two comic books about women astronauts from all its websites, NASA Watch reports, in what appears to be the latest victim of the Trump’s administration’s purge of “DEI” content from federal agencies.

The online comics, titled “First Woman: NASA’s Promise for Humanity,” and “First Woman: Expanding Our Universe,” tell the stories of young women training to become astronauts, in anticipation of NASA’s upcoming Artemis missions, which had been set to see the first female astronaut to set foot on the lunar surface. Oh, except that promise has been dropped, too….

(13) CENTRALIZING POWER. Joachim Boaz takes a timely look at “Science Fiction in Dialogue with The Great Depression: Frank K. Kelly’s ‘Famine on Mars’ (1934)” at Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations.

… Kelly renders a hyperviolent microcosm of Great Depression-drenched despair within an adventure story package. Its protagonists might attack each other with bizarre and futuristic physical and chemical weapons in a transparent space station but the real focus is on the fate of “million dark faces convulsed by the same agony and torn by the same unspent desire” for a drop to drink on the surface of Mars” (79).

The Lay of the Generic Landscape

Frank K. Kelly (1914-2010) lived a varied life. He was born in 1914 in Kansas City, MO. When he was sixteen, he published his first science fiction story–“The Light Bender” (1931)–in Wonder Stories (June 1931). Of his ten published short fictions between 1931-1935, the first six appeared in Hugo Gernsback’s Wonder Stories, which at the time was overseen by managing editor David Lasser (1902-1996). Due to his efforts to “bring some realism to their fiction,.” Lasser is considered a  “much neglected revolutionary in science fiction” and under his tutelage the genre “started to mature.” Ashley describes Kelly as “the best exponent of this hard realism” and while his earliest stories might have lacked polish they made up for it in their bleak depiction of life in space….

… Simultaneously drawing on the rise of fascism in Europe, Kelly’s “Famine on Mars” creates an even more draconian governmental manifestation. Earth’s government, The Combine, acts as a genocidal and malevolent political entity that brainwashes its inhabitants in the name of “the brotherhood of man” (79). His use of “combine” evokes two interrelated images of monolithic and mechanical power: new 1920s harvesters pulled by tractors instead of mules and a combination of both political and economic powers. Like a new-fangled tractor-driven thresher, the Combine mechanizes society diminishing its human concerns. Kelly suggests the working class in this future receive numerical names while political elite received standard nomenclature….

(14) SOUTHERN FANDOM CONFEDERATION NEWS. Randy B. Cleary announced that the March 2025 issue of the SFC Bulletin can be downloaded here [PDF file].

(15) TIME IS NOT ON OUR SIDE. Lorna Wallace considers “Five Stories Exploring the Pitfalls of Time Travel” at Reactor.

If Marty McFly has taught us anything, it’s that messing with the past can lead to some pretty serious and harmful consequences in the future, but there are some time travel stories where the sci-fi concept is fairly harmless. In Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold (2015), for instance, the focus is on healing personal relationships, rather than causing problems with the established timeline. Then there are the many wonderful time travel romances, where the stakes are also often limited to the individual level (more “will falling in love free me from this time loop?” and less “will the entire universe collapse in on itself?”).

But let’s consider the time travel stories that explore the various ways in which time travel can go very wrong and/or be incredibly dangerous—think people being trapped in deadly situations and whole timelines being erased or irrevocably changed. Here are five such stories….

One of them is —

“Through the Flash” (2018) by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

There’s been plenty of debate over how long Phil is trapped in his time loop in Groundhog Day (1993); most estimates fall somewhere within the 10 to 40 year range. This is enough time for Phil to be driven to desperate measures, attempting to end it all via various painful methods out of despair. But imagine being just 14 years old when you became trapped in a time loop… and then imagine it going on and on forever.

That’s the situation that Ama finds herself in, but she isn’t alone in the loop, with the rest of the residents in her neighborhood also being subjected to the same strange timey-wimey phenomenon. At the end of each day a nuclear explosion—known as the Flash—wipes everyone out and the day resets. You might think that having other people to share in the hellish experience would ease the mental burden, but the characters in “Through the Flash” are there to prove you wrong. And yet, for all of the external violence and internal strife in the short story, it ends on a relatively hopeful note.

[Thanks to Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Joachim Boaz, 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 Cat “First Edition” Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 3/21/25 Listen: There’s A Hell Of A Good Scroll Next Door; Let’s Go

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(1) SLAIN ISRAELI HOSTAGE SFF COLLECTION UP FOR AUCTION. Going by the photo, there’s a lot of David Weber and other Baen authors in the stacks. “Tel Aviv store to auction slain hostage Nadav Popplewell’s sci-fi book collection” – The Times of Israel has details.

A collection of several hundred science fiction and fantasy books owned by slain British-Israeli hostage Nadav Popplewell is to go up for auction on Sunday, with the proceeds going to the families of hostages held in the Gaza Strip.

The collection is being offered in an online sale from the Green Brothers bookstore in Tel Aviv.

Ilai Green, who owns the store along with his twin brother Alon-Lee, told The Times of Israel that there are some 700 volumes in the library gathered by avid reader Popplewell.

A collection of several hundred science fiction and fantasy books owned by slain British-Israeli hostage Nadav Popplewell is to go up for auction on Sunday, with the proceeds going to the families of hostages held in the Gaza Strip.

The auction is to be held online via the Bidspirit website on Sunday at 7:30 p.m. Israel time, with a starting bid of $500. Proceeds will go to the families of hostages held by terror groups in the Gaza Strip.

Nadav Popplewell, 51, was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists from Kibbutz Nirim on October 7, 2023, along with his mother, Channah Peri.

His brother, Roi, was murdered the same day in the kibbutz during the Hamas-led onslaught, when over 5,000 terrorists invaded southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and abducting 251 to the Gaza Strip.

Channah was released from captivity six weeks later.

.. Green told The Times of Israel that a volunteer in the kibbutz recently contacted the store and said that Popplewell’s library was available. Green said he understood that the offer was being made with the blessing of Popplewell’s family and that the kibbutz needed to find somewhere for the books after it cleared out his home.

Under the impression that there would be no more than “a few crates of books,” Green described his surprise when the collection arrived.

“I didn’t know how many there were until they brought in crates and crates,” he recalled….

(2) MARCON COMES TO AN END. Dale Mazzola announced on Facebook today that Marcon is closing. Mazzola is chair of the nonprofit corporation, SOLAE, that hosts Marcon. The Columbus, OH sff convention, so far as available history shows, was last held in 2023.

Yes, The Marcon Science Fiction and Fantasy convention is closing.

I hated deciding that and writing that out really hurts. There were many reasons behind that statement. What the decision came down to was based off a couple of factors, Primarily, expenses, which included hotel, expenses, storage and supply costs have all gone up. Additionally, memberships are down across the board for fan run regional conventions.

SOLAE is a 501c3 that is the owner of the Marcon trade name, Marcon was/is an event organized through SOLAE. While we were still getting memberships to Marcon there were not enough to maintain it.

Going forth we are doing the following;

First, we are getting an inventory of our current assets and equipment looking towards offering it up for sales to other events and conventions. So, if you know of other events or conventions in need of equipment, please feel free to have them reach out to me at dale.mazzola@solaecons.org for inventory info.

Second, I will be reaching out to the hotels we have used in the past to work out any remaining bills we owe to them.

Third, if we are unable to reach an agreement with our creditors, I will engage with a Lawyer to see what our options are.

Regarding the Shed and its inventory, we will be able to maintain it until May 31st of 2025, After that we will see what happens. I’m hoping that we can get enough of the large equipment that is taking up about 50% of the space removed and we will condense down to a smaller unit.

(3) WRITER BEWARE. Victoria Strauss hears about “Author Complaints at Clear Fork Press” at Writer Beware. Full details at the link.

In early February, author Vanessa Keel published a long, cautionary blog post about her experience with one small publisher. It was not a happy tale: an absent editor, little marketing support, a non-standard wholesale discount that discouraged bookseller orders, problems with royalty statements and payments, and much more. The result: few sales, crushing disappointment, and, ultimately, a rights reversion.

Vanessa didn’t name the publisher, but she did mention the title of her book. So it was easy to confirm that the publisher in question was Clear Fork Press (CFP), a children’s book publisher that publishes under four imprints: Spork, Blue Whale Press (formerly an independent publisher, acquired by CFP in 2020), &MG, and Rise. Per Amazon, CFP has a catalog of around 150 titles, most released via the Spork imprint (though you’d never know it from looking at the CFP website–more on that below)….

… I don’t generally write about publishers based on one complaint: it can be difficult to know whether the complaint represents a pattern or a single bad experience, something that can happen even in the best of circumstances. I kept the 2018 complaint on file, as I do all complaints I receive, assuming that if there were wider problems, other reports would follow.

They did–though it took a while. Over the past few months, I’ve heard from multiple CFP authors and illustrators who report problems similar to those identified by the 2018 complainant and also by Vanessa Keel….

(4) ANOTHER UNEXPECTED MENTION OF PULP SF. [Item by Rich Horton.] This one is weirder and WAY less respectable than C. L. Moore!

Richard Shaver (yes, of “Shaver Mystery” fame, from Ray Palmer’s Amazing in the 1940s) gets written up in The Paris Review: “’A Threat to Mental Health’: How to Read Rocks”.

Richard Sharpe Shaver, born 1907 in Berwick, Pennsylvania, became a national sensation in the forties with his dramatic accounts of a highly advanced civilization that inhabited Earth in prehistoric times. An itinerant Midwesterner, he’d been employed as a landscape gardener, a figure model for art classes, and a welder at Henry Ford’s original auto plant. He gained public attention as a writer who asserted that descendants of those early beings still live in hidden underground cities, where they wield terrifying technology capable of controlling thoughts. Many readers agreed with Shaver, and a splashy controversy ensued.

Public fascination with his writings subsided during the fifties, but Shaver continued searching for evidence of a great bygone civilization. In about 1960, while living in rural Wisconsin, Shaver formulated a hypothesis that would captivate him for the balance of his life: some stones are ancient books, designed and fabricated by people of the remote past using technology that surpasses anything known today. He identified complex pictorial content in these “rock books.” Images reveal themselves at every angle and every level of magnification and are layered throughout each rock. Graphic symbols and lettering also appear in what he called “the most fascinating exhibition of virtuosity in art existent on earth.”

Frustrated that the equipment needed to fully decipher the dense rock books was lost to time, Shaver undertook strategies to make at least a fraction of the books’ content clearly visible. Initially, he made drawings and paintings of images he found in the rocks, developing idiosyncratic techniques to project a slice of rock onto cardboard or a wooden plank. Shaver also produced conventional black-and-white photos using 35 mm film, often showing a cross section of rock alongside a ruler or a coin to indicate scale. Sometimes he highlighted imagery by hand coloring the prints with felt pens. He attached photos to typewriter paper where he added commentary: he describes the rock books, interprets images, details his photo techniques, and expresses disappointment at the conspicuous lack of academic or journalistic interest in his findings…

(5) BUGS OR FEATURE? The Guardian’s Ben Child asks, “Is Hollywood really going to ditch the anti-fascist satire in its Starship Troopers remake?”.

If there is a modern day equivalent in Hollywood to Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, he or she must be hiding in the nearest underground space bunker, desperately praying that irony makes a comeback. Verhoeven arrived at a time when transgressive “video nasties” were just fading into irrelevance, a period in which filmgoers were just as likely to head to the cinemas for schlocky thrills as they were for biting sci-fi allegory. With films such as 1987’s RoboCop, 1990’s Total Recall and 1997’s Starship Troopers, Verhoeven managed to combine a high-energy, hyper-kinetic thrust that has rarely been achieved since. He remains one of the most subversive and controversial film-makers of his generation – which is why it’s so depressing that Hollywood keeps churning out substandard remakes of his best work….

… Studios have been trying to rework this thing since at least 2016. The latest attempt, according to the Hollywood Reporter, will see District 9’s Neill Blomkamp, once the coming man of sci-fi, taking the reins.

You might think that Blomkamp, with his flair for gritty dystopia and penchant for socially conscious sci-fi carnage, would be the perfect film-maker to reignite the spirit of gleeful nihilism that infected Verhoeven’s best work from the 80s and 90s. And you wouldn’t be far off, except that studio Sony, AKA Columbia Pictures, appears to have decided (according to reports) that the only way to bring this one back to the big screen is to jettison the subversive tone and instead lean in to the Riefenstahlian chest-thumping militarism of the original source novel by Heinlein.

Is this the legacy of Trump’s return to power infecting Hollywood boardrooms in 2025? Have the studios really decided that the smartest way to reboot Starship Troopers is to just go all in on the laser-soaked Nazi space opera vibes? Heinlein’s 1959 novel is all about a society in which people need to get battling the alien space bugs that are threatening Earth quick sharp or face a future without voting rights, basic human dignity or the faintest hint of a social safety net – because nothing says “civic duty” quite like strapping on a flamethrower and mowing down intergalactic cockroaches to prove you’re worthy of democracy. It’s hard not to imagine Verhoeven wondering how his cynical parody of militaristic nationalism ended up being remade as a sincere recruitment video for totalitarian space marines.

Moreover, why get Blomkamp involved if this is the plan? Is he really the right director to helm a fascist fantasy epic when his entire career has been built on scrappy, anti-establishment sci-fi that makes you want to riot against the nearest dystopian overlord? …

(6) SAY IT AIN’T SO! Grammaticus Books is highly peeved about the proposed remake for rather different reasons: “IS SONY Studios about to DESECRATE HEINLEIN?!?!”

A rant about Sony Studios plan to remake the Robert A. Heinlein’s seminal science fiction novel, Starship Troopers. For the first time since Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 film Starship Troopers, Sony will reboot the franchise with their new director Neil Blomkamp. But will they desecrate the memory of Heinlein by painting Starship Troopers as a pro-fascist book?!?!

(7) IF NOBODY SEES AN APPLE TV+ SHOW DROP… [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian also wonders: “Big stars, little shine: is anyone actually watching Apple TV+ shows?” Despite Severance, Apple TV is in trouble, apparently.

…According to the Information, TV+ is currently the only Apple subscription service that isn’t profitable. This is said to be down to a number of factors. The first is that despite having 45 million subscribers, Apple blows through a $5bn production budget every year. And when a lot of it is being spent on blockbuster movies that squander every scrap of their potential – like the $200m spy disaster Argylle – then all this expense starts to look like bad financial sense. The report claims Apple TV+ is losing $1bn annually.

Another factor is that despite all those subscribers, very few people actually seem to watch anything on Apple TV+. The Information reports that Apple shows constitute less than 1% of total US streaming service viewing. In other words, while an Apple subscription ($8.99 a month) might be half the price of a Netflix subscription ($17.99 a month), people still watch eight times more Netflix than they do Apple….

(8) SAFE HABOR DESTINED TO END? “Bipartisan Effort to Sunset the ‘26 Words That Created the Internet’ Is on the Way” reports Gizmodo.

Section 230, the linchpin law that has dictated how online platforms have been regulated for decades, appears destined to come to an end. According to The Information, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin and Republican Lindsey Graham are planning to introduce a new bill that will set an expiration date for the law and encourage tech companies to offer alternatives as to what should replace it.

Per The Information, the bill could be introduced as early as Monday, March 24, and is expected to have bipartisan support from Republicans Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn and Democrats Sheldon Whitehouse and Amy Klobuchar, who are reportedly ready to co-sponsor the bill. It’s also a modified version of a proposal made last year in the House by Republican Cathy Rodgers and Democrat Frank Pallone, Jr., so there is some juice for this thing throughout Congress. The proposal would effectively sunset Section 230, setting January 1, 2027, as a drop-dead date for the law that so many tech companies have leaned on to duck legal challenges.

The gambit that Durbin and Graham appear to be attempting is to force tech companies to the table and talk about Section 230 alternatives. By setting a deadline, the message is basically, “Come help us write the replacement law or lose this protection in its entirety.” The latter should be basically an intolerable outcome for tech firms, as it would leave them extremely exposed to legal challenges.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, as it stands, essentially grants companies legal immunity from being held legally liable for the content posted on their platforms by users. It is often referred to as the “26 words that created the internet” because it created a framework for user-generated content. But its legal protection of companies has come under fire from both major political parties for very different reasons.

Democrats have come after Section 230 for allowing Big Tech companies to be derelict in their duties to remove harmful and hateful content, falling short of the “Good Samaritan” standard of good faith moderation. Scrutiny from the left turned up during the COVID pandemic when misinformation was rampant on platforms like Facebook and some Democrats wanted the company to do more to address the issue. Republicans, meanwhile want Section 230 repealed because they believe tech companies have been overzealous in removing content and think their viewpoints have been “censored.” It’s here where you can see the cracks start forming in this bipartisan effort….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

March 21, 1968 — Planet of The Apes film

On this day in the United Kingdom fifty-six years ago, Planet of The Apes premiered. It was directed by Franklin J. Schaffner. The screenplay was by Michael Wilson and Rod Serling and was based loosely upon Pierre Boulle‘s La Planète des Singes. 

It starred Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans, James Whitmore, James Daly and Linda Harrison. Roddy McDowall had a long-running relationship with this series, appearing in four of the original five films (absent only from the second film of the series, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, in which he was replaced by David Watson in the role of Cornelius, no idea why as I can’t find the reasoning), and also in the television series. 

I never saw the TV series. I don’t know why as it must’ve been shown on reruns eventually. So how was it?  As good as the films?  Well, the early films. I didn’t think they held up that well as they went along.

It was met with critical acclaim and is widely regarded as a classic film and one of the best films of that year.  Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said that it was “much better than I expected it to be. It is quickly paced, completely entertaining, and its philosophical pretensions don’t get in the way.” And Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times exclaimed that it was, “A triumph of artistry and imagination, it is at once a timely parable and a grand adventure on an epic scale.” 

It did exceedingly well at the box office costing less than six million to make and making more than thirty million in its first year of screening. One dollar in 1968 is equivalent in purchasing power to about nine dollars now, so that’s been a very successful film! 

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes give it an eighty-six percent rating with over a hundred thousand watchers having expressed an opinion!

Most of the later Planet of the Apes films are streaming somewhere, on Disney + or Hulu mostly but not this. Nor Beneath the Planet of The Apes or Conquest of the Planet of The Apes which are out on DVD as it is. I’ve got a suspicion that streaming rights were never negotiated on these and apparently can’t be. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) THE BIONIC WOMAN. “50 Years Ago, One Iconic Sci-Fi Show Sneakily Launched a Much Better Spinoff” at Inverse.

Today, the idea of secret cyborgs may sound like the set-up for the villains in a sci-fi show or movie, but in the 1970s, secret cyborgs were superheroes. Starting in 1973 with The Six Million Dollar Man, the titular hero was rebuilt with cyber-strength following a near-fatal NASA flight test crash. As former astronaut Steven Austin, Lee Majors starred as the titular man who was now worth $6 million thanks to all of his bionic enhancements. Based on the 1972 Martin Caidin novel Cyborg, the series was a hit for ABC. But, arguably, its best development didn’t come until two years later, when The Six Million Dollar Man launched a backdoor pilot for an even better cyborg show: The Bionic Woman.

Fifty years ago, on March 16, 1975, The Six Million Dollar Man dropped a two-parter called “The Bionic Woman,” which was destined to be its own ongoing sci-fi TV series. And, in terms of quality and staying power, the eponymous Bionic Woman herself, Jaime Sommers (Lindsay Wagner) became, over the decades, a much bigger deal. Mild spoilers ahead.

Just like her high school sweetheart Steve, Jamie also suffers a huge accident, this time involving skydiving, which leads to her bionic enhancements. Although these kinds of ‘70s and ‘80s soft sci-fi shows might seem fairly wholesome now, nearly all of them (like Knight Rider) had grisly origin stories for their heroes, which again, feels closer to supervillain origin stories in other contexts. Arguably, all of these tropes are deeply ableist now, but what made Jamie Sommers so important was that unlike other female-led action shows of the era (Charlie’s Angels debuted in 1976) she wasn’t a seductress, or scantily clad in order to be awesome…

(12) THE STARS MY PUNCTUATION. “Thunderbolts* Director Addresses What The Asterisk Means While Florence Pugh Reveals She Actually Knows” at ScreenRant. And at File 770 Mike Glyer reveals he doesn’t really care.

The mysterious asterisk in Thunderbolts* continues to dominate the conversation about the next MCU movie, and in the lead-up to its release, director Jake Schreier and actress Florence Pugh have teased what they know. It isn’t long before answers to all the mysteries surrounding Thunderbolts* are revealed as the movie nears its May 2 release date. Until then, fans can only speculate over how the titular team will deal with the challenge of the Void in the apparent absence of the comparatively more powerful Avengers…

(13) WHEN FAILURE WAS AN OPTION. “In event of moon disaster: ‘The speech that never was’”. The BBC’s Witness History tells about the speech that – fortunately – didn’t have to be delivered.

“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.” 

These are the opening lines of the ‘In Event of Moon Disaster’ speech, written in 1969 in case the moon landing astronauts did not make it home. 

They were composed by President Richard Nixon’s speechwriter, William Safire, who died in 2009, at the age of 79. 

The speech continued: “These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.” 

Using archive from the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and NASA, Vicky Farncombe tells the story of “the speech that never was”.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Moshe Feder, Rich Horton, Lise Andreasen, Jeffrey Smith, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, and Teddy Harvia for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 3/5/25 When You’re In Love With A Scrollable Pixel It’s Hard

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(1) DREAMHAVEN BOOKS IN THE NEWS. “Bad author behavior forces decisions on Minnesota booksellers” the Minneapolis Star-Tribune has learned.

…Many years ago, DreamHaven Books owner Greg Ketter was disturbed by misogynistic statements from John Norman, who wrote a book series about a different kind of monster, the “Gor” fantasy books. Ketter took them off the Minneapolis store’s shelves for a time but ended up restocking them when customers requested them.

About a dozen Gaiman titles remain at DreamHaven, although his presence isn’t as big as it once was. That’s largely because Gaiman has been more involved in filmmaking than novel writing in recent years (after the allegations became public, a planned Disney movie of “The Graveyard Book” was put on hold, although several completed film and TV shows are expected to be released eventually. He’s also been dropped by a U.K. publisher and a “Coraline” musical has been scrapped).

“We had a huge section for Neil Gaiman for years but it had been slowing down, so we were just moving things around when everything came out in the news,” said Ketter, who published some of Gaiman’s early work. “We are still selling some of his books and things. We just leave it up to people. If they keep buying books, we keep them on the shelves.”

The attitude is different at Avant Garden, “an unapologetically feminist and LGBTQIA-inclusive” business, according to owner Jenni Hill. Because it was created as a welcoming space for all kinds of people, Hill said, “We strive to carry books in-store that reflect our values.”

That means Avant Garden, which opened about four years ago, has never stocked Rowling titles, which Hill worries might trigger trans customers and their allies: “I don’t want anyone to feel I would advocate for a writer who has been hurtful to our community.”

That’s also why Avant Garden stopped carrying Gaiman titles as soon as the allegations came out.

“I texted Emily, our employee, ‘Let’s remove his books.’ That was literally the whole discussion,” said Hill. “It just doesn’t feel right to profit from those books. And I’d already bought the books, so I will lose money on those. But I won’t restock them for sure.”…

(2) DID YOU NOTICE SOMETHING’S MISSING? Zach Weinersmith tells Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal readers he’s cut ties with Hiveworks and that’s why for the moment there are no ads on his site. He also explains some things about the business dynamics of advertising in social media.

(3) LIBBY AWARDS. People magazine’s list of the 2025 Libby Awards winners includes many works of genre interest.

…Hosted by library lending apps OverDrive and Libby, the prize, now in its second year, honors the best books published in 2024, as chosen by librarians and library staff.

Debut Author of the Year
The Ministry of Time by Kailane Bradley – Winner

Best Fantasy
The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst – Winner
The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo – Runner-Up

Best Horror
Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle – Winner
I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones – Runner-Up

Best Romantasy
House of Flame and Shadow by Sarah J. Maas – Winner
Faebound by Saara El-Arifi – Runner-Up

Best Science Fiction
The Ministry of Time by Kailane Bradley – Winner
The Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei – Runner-Up

(4) DOES DOCTOR WHO EVER REALLY ARRIVE AT THE WRONG TIME? [Item by Kathy Sullivan.] This German trailer of the next season of Doctor Who briefly appeared and then was taken down supposedly because it was meant to be released at the end of March.  It includes much of the content from the Season 2 trailer released a few days ago, but has additional bits: “German Doctor Who Trailer Staffel 2 Disney+”.

(5) AI RIGHTS. “’Sign our own death warrant’: Australian writers angry after Melbourne publisher asks them to sign AI agreements” reports the Guardian.

Australian writers, literary agents, and the industry’s peak body have expressed concern after Black Inc Books asked its authors to consent to their work being used to train artificial intelligence.

The Melbourne publisher, which produces the Quarterly Essay as well as fiction and nonfiction by prominent Australian writers, gave them until Wednesday to enter into third-party agreements with an unnamed AI company.

The writers were asked to grant Black Inc “the right to reproduce or use, adapt and exploit the work in connection with the development of any software program, including, without limitation, training, testing, validation and the deployment of a machine learning or generative artificial intelligence system”.

Under the deal the publisher will split the net receipts with the author 50/50.

The Guardian has confirmed that a number of writers published by Black Inc received the request to alter their contracts last week.

The documents sent by the company’s publishing coordinator promise that, by authorising their works to be used by an unspecified AI company, authors would unlock “new revenue streams” with their works receiving “increased visibility and credibility”.

“I feel like we’re being asked to sign our own death warrant,” said Laura Jean McKay, author of Holiday in Cambodia, published with Black Inc a decade ago and shortlisted for three literary awards.

McKay says she had received the addendum to her contract on Friday, and was worried that three business days was not long enough to decipher what Black Inc was asking her to sign….

(6) BROTHER GUY AT SF CONS. The Vatican Observatory blog has a post by Robert Trembley about Brother Guy Consolmagno attending Boskone, just the latest of many he’s been at. The article includes a link to Daniel Dern’s Boskone post here, plus one of his photos of Brother Guy.

Br. Guy attended a science fiction convention over the weekend of Feb. 14-16 in Boston, where he met with friends, and autographed copies of his books….

…Br. Guy was introduced to me by mutual friends at a WindyCon (an SF Con in Chicago) in the mid-90’s – he was curator of meteorites at the Vatican Observatory at the time, and he spoke about the science of meteoritics, and how he was studying meteorites from the VO’s impressive collection. He completely blew me away! I walked away with a entirely different view of the “cool rocks from space” I’d been collecting for a couple years. Br. Guy continues to WOW people with meteorites, as he did at the recent L.A. Religious Education Congress in Anaheim, California.

(7) WHY NOT SAY WHAT HAPPENED? Scott Edelman twenty-first episode of his Why Not Say What Happened? podcast remembers “My Long Weekend Annoying MAD Magazine Publisher Bill Gaines”. You can also download episodes at the site of your choice.

My latest look back at what I was doing in comics during the ’70s has me remembering the weekend I couldn’t stop myself from teasing Bill Gaines about the National Lampoon‘s satirical slam of MAD magazine, why famed con-runner Phil Seuling castigated us fans one afternoon for mistreating our mothers, the words Gerry Conway wrote for Daredevil’s girlfriend Karen Page in the basement of a Times Square Nathan’s, how my 1980 DC Comics vampire story ended up as a 1987 episode of Tales from the Darkside, the continuing mystery of the martial arts series I’d forgotten I’d tried to write for Deadly Hands of Kung Fu (and what Tony Stark had to do with it), and much more.

(8) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present: Jedediah Berry & Victoria Dalpe on Wednesday, March 12. Location: KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003, (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs). Starts at 7:00 p.m. Eastern.

Jedediah Berry

Jedediah Berry’s latest novel, The Naming Song, was described in a starred Library Journal review as “a wonderfully odd ode to language, story, and family.” His first book, The Manual of Detection, won the Crawford Award and the Hammett Prize, and was adapted for broadcast by BBC Radio 4. He is the author of numerous games and interactive works, including a story in cards, The Family Arcana, and the Ennie Award-winning RPG setting The Valley of Flowers (co-written with Andrew McAlpine). He lives in Western Massachusetts with his partner Emily Houk, with whom he runs Ninepin Press, an independent publisher of fiction in unusual formats.

Victoria Dalpe

Victoria Dalpe is a Providence-based horror writer and painter. She has published over forty-five short stories in various collections, the gothic horror novel Parasite Life and the short story collection Les Femme Grotesques. “Dalpe’s horror stories are equal parts intriguing, compelling, and appropriately macabre,”—Rue Morgue. Book one of her dark horror fantasy series Selene Shade: Resurrectionist for Hire was released September of 2024 by Clash Books. Book two in the trilogy, Loving the Dead will be out this fall. Dalpe was also a producer on the drag queen slasher film Death Drop Gorgeous. For upcoming events follow her on Instagram at victorialdalpe

(9) TURING AWARD. “Turing Award Goes to 2 Pioneers of Artificial Intelligence”, Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton. The New York Times has the story (behind a paywall.)

In 1977, Andrew Barto, as a researcher at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, began exploring a new theory that neurons behaved like hedonists. The basic idea was that the human brain was driven by billions of nerve cells that were each trying to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.

A year later, he was joined by another young researcher, Richard Sutton. Together, they worked to explain human intelligence using this simple concept and applied it to artificial intelligence. The result was “reinforcement learning,” a way for A.I. systems to learn from the digital equivalent of pleasure and pain.

On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest society of computing professionals, announced that Dr. Barto and Dr. Sutton had won this year’s Turing Award for their work on reinforcement learning. The Turing Award, which was introduced in 1966, is often called the Nobel Prize of computing. The two scientists will share the $1 million prize that comes with the award.

Over the past decade, reinforcement learning has played a vital role in the rise of artificial intelligence, including breakthrough technologies such as Google’s AlphaGo and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The techniques that powered these systems were rooted in the work of Dr. Barto and Dr. Sutton.

“They are the undisputed pioneers of reinforcement learning,” said Oren Etzioni, a professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Washington and founding chief executive of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “They generated the key ideas — and they wrote the book on the subject.”

Their book, “Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction,” which was published in 1998, remains the definitive exploration of an idea that many experts say is only beginning to realize its potential.

(10) GEORGE LOWE (1957-2025). TVLine reports “George Lowe Dead, Voice of Space Ghost Age 67”.

George Lowe, a veteran voice actor whose credits include the title role in Space Ghost Coast to Coast, died on March 2 at age 67, a spokesperson confirms for TVLine…

…An alumnus of the Radio Engineering Institute of Sarasota, Lowe began his career in the 1980s with occasional voiceover work, before landing the title role in Cartoon Network’s Space Ghost Coast to Coast. A send-up of talk shows that featured live-action celebrity guests, the animated series would run for 10 years and more than 100 episodes, including a move to Adult Swim and a brief revival via Turner Broadcasting’s GameTap online video game service…

… Lowe also voiced Space Ghost in the 1995 spinoff Cartoon Planet, the 2007 movie Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters and in the 2011 video game Cartoon Network: Punch Time Explosion.

His voice acting credits also include The Brak Show, Robot Chicken, Squidbillies and American Dad…

(11) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Stranger in a Strange Land (1962)

Sixty-three years ago at Chicon III where Earl Kemp was the Chair, Wilson Tucker was Toastmaster and Theodore Sturgeon was the Guest of Honor, Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land won the Hugo for Best Novel. It had been published the previous year by G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 

Other nominated works that year were Dark Universe by Daniel F. Galouye, Sense of Obligation (also called Planet of the Damned) by Harry Harrison, The Fisherman (also known as Time Is the Simplest Thing) by Clifford D. Simak and Second Ending by James White.  I know all those authors and have read deeply of them save Daniel F. Galouye. Tell me about him please. 

It was his third Hugo in six years after Double Star at NyCon II and Starship Troopers at Pittcon. He’d win his fourth and final Hugo for The Moon is a Harsh Mistress at NyCon 3 in another five years.

The working title for the book was A Martian Named Smith which was also the name of the screenplay started by a character at the end of the novel. 

I must note Jubal Harshaw for me is the most interesting and enjoyable character in the book, an older experienced man who questioned everything, but with compassion, honor and a truly open heart. Harshaw also appears in three later Heinlein novels, The Number of the Beast in the coda, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and To Sail Beyond the Sunset which I’ll confess I never finished. 

Needless to say the novel is available from the usual suspects. There’s also an audiobook, one of myriad audiobooks done of his novels. 

As always the artwork below is for the first edition. 

(12) COMICS SECTION.

  • xkcd explains a homeowner’s risk of water damage.
  • Brewster Rockit relays a broadcast of the Cat News Network.
  • Bizarro is in on the bust.
  • Free Range discovers why returning to Kansas wasn’t easy.
  • Herman is on the track. Or vice versa.
  • WaynoVision has a variation on a monster.

(13) ‘KIRBYVISION’ DOCUMENTARY PLANNED. Acclaimed documentary film director Ricki Stern (Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, UFOs: Investigating the Unknown) will be helming Kirbyvision – a feature length documentary telling the story of the legendary Jack Kirby.

Kirby is widely regarded as one of the comic book medium’s most innovative, prolific, and influential creators. At the height of his nearly six decade career, Kirby created or co-created many of Marvel’s major characters including Captain America (with Joe Simon), the Avengers, Black Panther, the Fantastic Four, Hulk, Iron Man, Silver Surfer, Thor, the X-Men, and countless others (with comics impresario Stan Lee). 

He worked similar magic for DC Comics, where he created the sprawling, psychedelic “Fourth World,” a series of political and psychedelic sci-fi epics often considered his most ambitious work. His creations as writer, artist, and editor include Darkseid, Mister Miracle, OMAC, The Demon, and many others who are mainstays of DC’s publishing and screen projects to this day. 

Ricki Stern says: “Jack was not only one of the great comic book artists of all time, but a true visionary genius. In this new feature length documentary, we actively campaign for the recognition he finally deserves as a leading artist and storyteller of the 20th Century.”

Kirby drew his way out of an impoverished, Depression-era upbringing when he co-created Captain America, who brazenly punched out Adolf Hitler on the cover of his very first comic, months before the US had entered World War II. He was soon sent into real combat on the frontlines of the war in Europe, a harrowing experience which had a significant impact on his later work. Kirby’s astounding career touched virtually every genre, including war, romance, westerns, science fiction, horror, and, of course, superheroes. His impact is felt beyond comics to this day everywhere from animation to music to blockbuster films.

(14) FUTURIAN WAR DIGEST. Polygon recalls “How a WWII fanzine helped sci-fi survive the Blitz and beyond”. A 2019 article, but timeless.

…The cost of a mimeograph machine may have been high, but the cost of not talking to each other was higher — even in some of the most dire moments of the 20th century. The oldest zine included in As If is also the longest running fanzine to remain in distribution in Britain throughout the course of the second World War: Futurian War Digest, or FIDO, which printed from October 1940 until March 1945.

FIDO reviewed science fiction works and reflected on the fragile state of the fan community in the United Kingdom during wartime. The first issue of the zine, which was published and distributed less than a month after the start of the London bombing raids known as The Blitz, made a point of announcing the conscription of fan William F. Temple and the death on active duty of sci-fi enthusiast Edward Wade. These sombre announcements ran alongside musings about John Carter of Mars.

In a time of great uncertainty, publisher J. Michael Rosenblum said in the pages of FIDO that his self-avowed goal was to “a) to give news of and to fandom, b) to keep burning those bright mental constellations possessed by all fans.” The publication was created just as much to be an archive and time capsule as a source of entertainment, news, and distraction. By publishing the fanzine, Rosenblum recorded the history of a subculture of science fiction enthusiasts, and helped to keep a community that was being actively ripped apart together.

(15) SUPERMAN’S SPIRIT. Distilled, that is. Onward Giants is hustling the “Limited Edition Super Bottle”.

The Limited Edition Superman Whiskey Bottle is a meticulously crafted collectible designed for fans of both Superman and fine whiskey. Each bottle embodies the timeless power and spirit of Superman, making it not just a bottle of whiskey, but a unique piece of art and a symbol of heroism. This limited edition release is a must-have for collectors and superhero enthusiasts alike.

A Tribute to Superman’s Spirit
Superman represents courage, justice, and hope, and this whiskey bottle captures his essence. The iconic “S” emblem and the heroic silhouette of Superman are artistically integrated into the design, making every bottle a tribute to the hero who has inspired generations.

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

Pixel Scroll 9/8/24 I’ve Grown Accustomed To The Doors of Your Face, the Lamps of Your Mouth

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(1) OFF THE CLOCK. “Critical Choices: Time Travel and Identity” by Rjurik Davidson at Speculative Insight.

…Psychologists suggest that your sense of self is constructed interpersonally, in relationship with others, and hence also in relationship to the social world. Individualism is nothing but a liberal myth. For example, people who venture into nature to “find themselves” typically discover the opposite: they lose any sense of their self. Isolated from society, they dissolve into their surroundings, become one with daily tasks: “catch fish,” “start fire,” “sleep.” They no longer exist. “All You Zombies” brilliantly illuminates this dissolution, counterintuitive to those schooled in Thoreau’s Walden or other such romantic myths. In the story, the main character (Jane) takes painkillers for her perpetual headache but discovers that without the pain everyone else disappears. It is as if the veil is torn from a false reality, revealing the true world beneath, seen before as through a glass darkly but now face to face – a premonition of one of Philip K. Dick’s enduring fascinations. Without mother, father, a social world, Jane’s existence manifests as a headache of existential dread. Either way, with headache or not, she experiences her plight as a pain of isolation. She is “alone in the dark.” Her declaration, “I know where I came from,” is replete with irony. Her somewhat desperate affirmation is made precisely because there is nothing but doubt. Neither she, nor the reader, actually knows where she came from – methinks that Jane dost protest too much….

(2) REWARDING TRANSLATION. Anton Hur analyzes “Literature that expands the borders of what ‘international’ can mean” in the Washington Post. (Usually there’s a paywall, but I was able to read this article. Hopefully, so will you.)

…But why have a translated literature category [for the National Book Awards] at all? Neil Clarke, the editor of the science fiction magazine Clarkesworld, had the same thought; he has argued against creating a translation category at the Hugo Awards, claiming that it would serve to further marginalize translated literature. A quick glance at the history of nominees for best novel at the Hugos reveals that a translation has been a finalist only twice, and for the same team: the redoubtable Cixin Liu, author of “The Three-Body Problem,” and his translator Ken Liu. As someone who reads translations primarily and prodigiously, you can’t make me take Clarke’s fears of “further” marginalization seriously. And it has to be said that this also applies to the National Book Awards, which simply stopped taking translated literature into consideration for more than three decades. (In writing this article, I was asked to consider what works may have been overlooked by the awards during the 2010s and, well, imagine me madly gesticulating at all the works in translation published in the eligibility periods between 2009 and 2017.)…

(3) THE DOCTOR IS IN. Jon Del Arroz proclaimed yesterday over a photo of Kirk and Spock that “Star Trek is an inherently right-wing concept. It upholds man’s greatness as being designed in the image of God and promotes manifest destiny and dominion of God’s creation.” Robert Picardo (who memorably played Voyager’s Emergency Medical Hologram) took him to task. Admittedly, the kind of attention Jon always hopes somebody will give him.

(4) FULL MOON VOTERS. “In Michigan, an ‘Unhinged Werewolf’ Will Make It Clear Who Voted” says the New York Times. (Behind a paywall.)

Plenty of the submissions in a statewide contest to design Michigan’s next “I Voted” sticker featured cherry blossoms or American flags fluttering in the wind.

Only one entry, however, depicted a werewolf clawing its shirt to tatters and howling at an unseen moon. A smattering of stars and stripes poke out from behind its brawny torso.

“I Voted,” reads a string of red, white and blue block letters floating above the creature’s open maw.

The illustration, which was created by Jane Hynous, a 12-year-old from Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich., was revealed on Wednesday as one of nine winning designs that the Michigan Department of State will offer local clerks to distribute to voters in the November election.

The werewolf sticker received more than 20,000 votes in the public contest, beating every other entry by a margin of nearly 2,000 votes, said Cheri Hardmon, a spokeswoman for the Michigan Department of State. The design gained traction on social media among those who found it fitting for an intense, and at times bewildering, moment in national politics….

(5)  FANAC FAN HISTORY ZOOM: PLOKTA. [Item by Joe Siclari.] It’s a fannish mystery how this jumped from nothing to an everyday phrase all over fandom.

The FANAC Fan History Zoom Series starts off its new season with what promises to be a fun, interesting, historical and important session as it brings back together the Plokta Cabal. The group was known for its weird news, quirky humour and radical graphics. 

September 22, 2024 – The Secret Origins of Plokta, with Steve Davies, Sue Mason, Alison Scott, and Mike Scott

Time: 2PM EDT, 1PM CDT, 11AM PDT, 7PM London (BST) & too early in Melbourne

This fannish group burst on the scene in May 1996 with the fanzine Plokta, which went on to receive two Best Fanzine Hugos, 2 Nova Awards for Best Fanzine, and Hugo nominations each year from 1999 to 2008. They are energetic, quirky and very, very funny. They are writers, artists, con runners, Worldcon bidders and fan fund winners. Join us and learn more about their secret origins, fannish impact and what they are doing now.

To attend, send an email to fanac@fanac.org

Two other Fanac Zoom session already on the calendar are:

  • October 26, 2024, Time 7PM EDT, 4PM PDT, Midnight London (sorry), and 10AM AEDT Sunday, Oct 27 Melbourne, Senior Australian fan Robin Johnson interview, with Robin Johnson, Perry Middlemiss and Leigh Edmonds
  • January 11, 2025, Time 2PM EST, 11AM PST, 7PM GMT London, and 6AM AEDT (sorry) Sunday, Jan 12 Melbourne, Out of the Ghetto and into the University: Science Fiction Fandom University Collections, with Phoenix Alexander (University of California, Riverside), Peter Balestrieri (University of Iowa), Susan Graham (University of Maryland, Baltimore County), and Richard Lynch (moderator)

(6) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary – Star Trek, The Original Series (1966).

On September 8 fifty-eight years ago the first episode of Star Trek aired. I want to talk about my favorite episode in the series, which is “Trouble with Tribbles”. Now there are other episodes that I will go to Paramount+ to watch such as “Shore Leave”, “Mirror, Mirrior” or “Balance of Terror” but is the one that I have watched by far the most and which I enjoy as just the funnest one they ever did.

It was first broadcast in the show’s second season, just after Christmas on December 29, 1967. The previous episode had been another one I also like a lot, “Wolf in the Fold”, written by Robert Bloch. 

This script, which was Gerrold’s first professional sale, bore the working title for the episode of “A Fuzzy Thing Happened to Me…” Writer and producer for the series Gene did heavy rewrites on the final version of the script.  The final draft script can be read in Gerrold’s The Trouble with Tribbles: The Story Behind Star Trek’s Most Popular Episode with much, much more on this episode. 

Memory Alpha notes that “While the episode was in production, Gene Roddenberry noticed that the story was similar to Robert Heinlein’s novel, The Rolling Stones, which featured the ‘Martian Flat Cats’. Too late, he called Heinlein to apologize and avoid a possible lawsuit. Heinlein was very understanding, and was satisfied with a simple ‘mea culpa’ by Roddenberry.”  

It of course is centered on tribbles. Wah Chang designed the original tribbles. Five hundred were sewn together during production, using pieces of extra-long rolls of carpet. Some of them had mechanical toys placed in them so they could move. 

According to Gerrold, the tribble-maker Jacqueline Cumere was paid $350. Want a tribble now? Gerrold has them for you in various sizes and colors. So if you’re in seeing these, go here. tribbletoys.com

Let’s talk about why it’s about my favorite episode. I’m watching it now on Paramount+. I’ve to come to the bar scene where Cyrano Jones is trying to sell the Bar Manager a tribble when Chekov and Uhura come in. When Uhura asks if it’s alive, it starts adorably purring (who created that purr?), and the story goes from there.

The next morning Kirk walks. Uhura and a group are admiring that her tribble has reproduced. Where there was one, there are now, I stopped the video to count fourteen in various hues. (Not sure what all of them are as I’ve got color blindness.) Really cute but remarkably not one seems concerned.

Right there it exhibits that It has some of the best script writing in the series including this choice line as Spock holds and strokes a tribble: “Its trilling seems to have a tranquilizing effect on the human nervous system. Fortunately, of course … I am immune … to its effect.” There is an amused look from Uhura and the others. 

Oh, and it has Klingons. Not the Worf-style ones. The ones that look like someone cos-played an Asian military character of a thousand years ago. So naturally that hard to lead to a bar fight, doesn’t it? It does when a Klingon calls Scotty’s Enterprise, his beloved ship, a garbage scow. Well, he actually calls it a lot of things before ending with that. Perfect, just perfect. 

Now let’s segue from that bar brawl to reworking of this episode to the Deep Space Nine episode which I need not talk about as I know you know about it: “Trials and Tribble-ations”. It would be nominated for Hugo at a LoneStarCon 2. It would digitally insert the performers from the original series into that episode. 

I’m assuming y’all know this delightful episode which I think can best have its attitude summed up in this conversation…

Sisko to Bashir: “Don’t you know anything about this period in time?” 

Bashir: I’m a doctor, not an historian.”

Dax in her red short skirt: “In the old days, operations officers wore red, command officers wore gold… (Looks at her outfit.) “And women wore less. I think I’m going to like history.” 

I’ve watched both shows back-to-back several times, which is well worth doing as they did an stellar job of making the DS9 characters work seamlessly in the old episode. (I know they weren’t actually there but still.) No wonder it got nominated for a Hugo. 

I could single out even more scenes like Kirk buried in tribbles, for how he reacts or the very subtle line about Spock’s ears, but I’ll stop here. I just adore it and “Trials and Tribble-ations” as both are entertaining, feel-good episodes. 

(7) COMICS SECTION.

(8) MAR$. The Week contrasts The Martian Chronicles with billionaires’ plans for Mars in its editorial letter, “Martian dreams”.

…Along with other sci-fi staples such as living forever and computerizing consciousness, colonizing Mars is now an obsession of our tech elite. Rocket tycoon Elon Musk has said he wants to establish a “self-sustaining civilization” of 1 million people on our neighboring planet as an insurance policy against humanity’s extinction. Yet I can’t help but think that, like Bradbury and Lowell before them, Musk and his fellow billionaires are really projecting their own beliefs onto Mars’ red vistas….

(9) HIDDEN PROPERTY INSPIRED LOVECRAFT. Charming old NYC architectural history, with a genre link! “Inside a West Village passageway leading to a hidden courtyard and 1820s backhouse” at Ephemeral New York.

…One person who made note of this Evening Post writeup when it appeared was author H.P. Lovecraft. A resident of New York City in the 1920s, this horror and science fiction writer published a short story titled “He,” which involved a narrator taking a late-night, time-traveling sojourn through Greenwich Village.

“At the conclusion of ‘He,’ a passerby finds the narrator—bloodied and broken—lying at the entrance to a Perry Street courtyard,” wrote David J. Goodwin, author of the 2023 book Midnight Rambles: H.P. Lovecraft in Gotham.

In “He,” from 1925, the narrator calls it “a grotesque hidden courtyard of the Greenwich section,” as well as “a little black court off Perry Street.”…

(10) TARA CAMPBELL READING.  Space Cowboys Books of Joshua Tree, CA will host an “Online Reading & Interview with Tara Campbell” on Tuesday September 17 at 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Register to attend for free at Eventbrite.

In the parched, post-apocalyptic Western U.S. of the 22nd Century, wolves float, bonfires sing, and devils gather to pray. Water and safety are elusive in this chaotic world of alchemical transformations, where history books bleed, dragons kiss, and gun-toting trees keep their own kind of peace. Among this menagerie of strange beasts, two sentient stone gargoyles, known only as “E” and “M,” flee the rubble of their Southwestern church in search of water. Along the way, they meet climate refugees Dolores Baker and her mother Rose, who’ve escaped the ravaged West Coast in search of a safer home. This quartet forms an uneasy alliance when they hear of a new hope: a mysterious city of dancing gargoyles. Or is it something more sinister? In this strange, terrible new world, their arrival at this elusive city could spark the destruction of everything they know. Tara Campbell summons fantastical magic in this kaleidoscopic new speculative climate fiction.

Get your copy of the book here.

(11) RADIO ASTRONOMY. [Item by Steven French.] This is pretty much standard stuff but the radio telescope itself is amazing: “Inside the ‘golden age’ of alien hunting at the Green Bank Telescope” at Physics.org.

Nestled between mountains in a secluded corner of West Virginia, a giant awakens: the Green Bank Telescope begins its nightly vigil, scanning the cosmos for secrets.

If intelligent life exists beyond Earth, there’s a good chance the teams analyzing the data from the world’s largest, fully steerable radio astronomy facility will be the first to know.

“People have been asking themselves the question, ‘Are we alone in the universe?’ ever since they first gazed up at the night sky and wondered if there were other worlds out there,” says Steve Croft, project scientist for the Breakthrough Listen initiative.

For the past decade, this groundbreaking scientific endeavor has partnered with a pioneering, US government-funded site built in the 1950s to search for “technosignatures”—traces of technology that originate far beyond our own solar system.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or “SETI,” was long dismissed as the realm of eccentrics and was even cut off from federal funding by Congress thirty years ago.

But today, the field is experiencing a renaissance and seeing an influx of graduates, bolstered by advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as recent discoveries showing that nearly every star in the night sky hosts planets, many of which are Earth-like.

“It feels to me like this is something of a golden age,” says Croft, an Oxford-trained radio astronomer who began his career studying astrophysical phenomena, from supermassive black holes to the emissions of exploding stars…

(12) MERCHANT OF MENACE. Actor Vincent Price gave an entertaining interview on Aspel & Co in 1984.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George invites us step inside the Pitch Meeting that led to The Crow (2024).

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

Pixel Scroll 8/18/24 The Golden Pixels Of The Scroll

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(1) LOOK OUT FOR YOURSELF. The Horror Writers Association blog continues its “Nuts & Bolts” series with “Author Todd Keisling on Self-Advocacy for Writers”.

Nobody becomes a writer because they had childhood dreams of negotiating contracts. Like it or not, according to author Todd Keisling, it’s part of the job for authors without an agent. In this month’s edition of Nuts & Bolts, Todd talks about what authors – particularly beginners – should know about self-advocacy.

Q: What do you mean by self-advocacy, where writers are concerned?

A: I mean just that: You have to advocate for yourself. Not every writer has the luxury of an agent to review and negotiate contractual matters. I certainly didn’t, not for many years, and over time I learned from others what to watch out for, what was acceptable, and when to walk away. If a writer has no representation, it’s necessary to be their own advocate and speak up when a publisher isn’t doing what they said they would, or if a contract isn’t worded to your liking. No one else is going to speak up for you, so you have to do it yourself.

Q: What mistakes do beginning writers tend to make in that regard?

A: The biggest mistake I’ve seen (and one that I’ve made myself) is jumping into a contract as soon as it’s offered. Contracts are legally binding agreements, but many young writers are so enamored by an offer of publication that they will sign it without reading it. Another mistake is not taking the time to research the publisher, or to research the market and determine if what said publisher is offering is a standard deal or not. I’m talking about pay rates, percentages, rights, and more.

Q: What are some red flags that writers should look out for?

A: Any legal language that says the writer is financially responsible for any part of the process. That’s a huge red flag. Money flows to the writer, always.

Rights grabs are a big one. If a publisher is seeking all rights — worldwide print rights (regardless of language and region), film, audio, graphic novel — with little or no compensation, that’s a huge red flag. Especially if the publisher has no history of acting on those rights.

Term limits are another — you don’t want a publisher to own the publishing rights in perpetuity. Those terms should be spelled out in the contract. Lack of a rights reversion clause is another one I look for. A reversion clause will spell out how and when your rights revert back to you in the event the publisher files bankruptcy or goes out of business….

(2) BOMBADIL FINALLY GETS HIS 15 MINUTES OF FAME. In an Interview with actor Rory Kinnear, the Guardian reporter reveals that they haven’t read LoTR very carefully (hello, Barrowdowns?!!): “Rory Kinnear: ‘I congratulate everyone who is on the brink of baldness’”.

… Kinnear’s next appearance will be in the second season of Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. He’s playing Tom Bombadil, a mysterious, magical, much-beloved character from JRR Tolkien’s classic, but one never before seen on screen. Viewed by Tolkien as a personification of nature, and the oldest being in Middle-earth, Bombadil doesn’t intervene in any of the goings-on in the books. Having been around since the dawn of time, he’s above the petty notions of good and evil.

That makes him a tricky character to adapt. Neither Ralph Bakshi, director of the 1978 animated retelling of the story, nor Peter Jackson, the film-maker behind the multi-Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy, thought him worthy of inclusion in their versions. Bakshi said Bombadil “didn’t move the story along”, a view shared by Jackson. Even JD Payne, co-showrunner of The Rings of Power, told Vanity Fair that the character was “anti-dramatic … the characters kind of just go there [to Bombadil’s home] and hang out for a while, and Tom drops some knowledge on them.”

What drew Kinnear to a character so inconsequential no director ever wanted to go near him before? His partner, it turns out. Kinnear had been approached by the producers of the series in late 2022 about joining the cast. But having never read the books or seen any adaptations, he was in the dark about the significance of the character. He got off the phone and went downstairs to tell his partner, fellow actor Pandora Colin, about some character called Tom Bombadil.

“She looked at me and said: ‘You’re kidding?’” he recalls. “It’s her favourite part of the books. I usually like her taste, so I thought I’d better read them and start preparing. It was mainly from her reaction that I was interested. Inconsequential, dramatically, as Tom may be, he’s obviously left an impression on fans.”’

(3) OCTOTHORPE. Winner of the 2024 Best Fancast Hugo Octothorpe has dropped episode 116: “I’m Not Absolutely Sure I Voted”.

The live episode from Glasgow 2024 is here! We know you all expect the live episodes to be a bit less structured and organised than the recorded ones, but the three of us had had even less sleep than usual and so it’s a bit more chaotic than usual… normal service will resume in 117!

Spontaneously generated transcript here.

John, Liz and Alison (I know, listener, I know) are looking off to the right holding their Hugo Awards as people take photographs of them on the stage at the SEC Armadillo.

(4) FRESH HORROR. Gabino Iglesias, author of House of Bone and Rain, reviews three new horror books in the New York Times: Nicholas Belardes’s The Deading (Erewhon Books, 280 pp., $28); Cherie Priest’s The Drowning House (Poisoned Pen Press, 418 pp., paperback, $16.99); and Chuck Tingle’s Bury Your Gays (Tor Nightfire, 294 pp., $26.99). 

(5) FURTHER PERSPECTIVES ON NEIL GAIMAN. Maureen Ryan, a critic, journalist and contributing editor at Vanity Fair, has thoughts on Neil Gaiman, creative gods, American Gods and rotten pedestals at Burner Account.

…It sounds like some of these women approached the media before and didn’t get anyone to take on their stories. If you’ve wondered, I’ve never been approached by anyone with allegations like the ones that recently came to light. And while I would be very surprised if there is not further coverage of this matter, I know from extensive experience that these kinds of investigations take time. A lot of time.

Time, care and attention are required to do this kind of reporting properly, in ways that show compassion and consideration to the survivors, and in ways that pass muster with fact-checkers, editors and lawyers. (Legal review of my book, for example, took about a year, and some stories I’ve done have gone through several months of legal review, especially when the subject of a story has the resources to hire a lot of lawyers, spin doctors and crisis PR firms. Having to engage for months with all those hired guns is about as pleasant as you’d think.)

Because folks have asked, I am not working on any kind of Gaiman followup. In part because I have other commitments that take precedence. In part because what I have to say about these kinds of behaviors, patterns, dynamics and abuses is in my book (and in my previous decades’ worth of in-depth reporting on Hollywood).

And in part because I have already reported on Gaiman, somewhat indirectly, and I did not enjoy a significant aspect of the fallout of that experience. 

In 2018, I began hearing about massive issues affecting the TV adaptation of Gaiman’s book American Gods. The debut season’s showrunners had been fired abruptly, and the second season, according to my sources, was in deep trouble. I pitched a story to Lesley Goldberg, a friend and a longtime reporter/editor at The Hollywood Reporter — and it turned out she’d been hearing similar things, so we teamed up. As it happened, our sources didn’t overlap much, which was actually a good thing: Between us, we’d gathered a large array of people with a wide range of perspectives, all of whom were saying similar things about the acrimonious chaos behind the scenes. 

We worked really hard on that piece, and I felt — and still feel — confident of our sourcing and diligence. What we published, I believe, was not just accurate but prophetic. American Gods certainly wasn’t perfect in its first season, but it was bold, stylish, had a lot of potential and was a solid televisual interpretation of the book. Gods was a far inferior drama in Season 2, and the chaos behind the scenes apparently continued until it was finally cancelled after three seasons. At one point, the following became a running joke among myself and a couple of journalist friends: The shortest roster in Hollywood was the one listing experienced showrunners who hadn’t been asked to take over American Gods. 

People are allowed to react to reported pieces however they want, and the folks at or near the center of a story may well have a very different perspective than I do as a journalist. That’s all fine, and that’s not something I generally get worked up about. What I want you to understand about what follows is that I wasn’t upset by the fact that Gaiman had a reaction to that story, or that he appeared to have a reaction that didn’t align with my own impressions. What pissed me off was the nature of that reaction and how it made me feel as an experienced professional. 

After the story came out, and then when Season 2 of American Gods finally emerged months later, on social media and in interviews, Gaiman had things to say about our reporting. What pissed me off were remarks that made us sound like pesky little irritants who didn’t know what we were doing. Speaking for myself, I felt he conveyed the impression that we didn’t talk to anybody important or deeply informed or who had knowledge of the real story. (We did.)…

…When I saw Gaiman’s comments in various spheres, I felt some kind of way about this supposed champion of women being so gratingly, condescendingly dismissive of the work of two women who had, at that point, half a century’s worth of journalism experience between them. (Two queer women as well, though anyone reading the piece may not have known that.) 

After that, whenever I saw his “approachable cool guy” routine on social media, or saw him touted as an ally or feminist, I rolled my eyes pretty hard. Back when all this was going on, I thought about saying some of the above online, because for a while there, I was pretty angry about the way our work was dismissed so arrogantly. But I didn’t say anything in public, in part because I knew it might come off as sour grapes or pettiness.

An even bigger reason I stayed silent was that, after more than 30 years of acclaim, attention and adoration in comics, film, book publishing and TV, Neil Gaiman has a lot of strident defenders and superfans, and …honestly, that intimidated me. Having had other stan armies hatemob me in the past, I did not have the bandwidth to potentially endure a lot of enraged superfans coming after me….

(6) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

August 18, 1950 – Destination Moon.  Seventy-four years ago on this date, Destination Moon, produced by George Pal and an uncredited Walter Lantz premiered in the United Kingdom. (It premiered earlier in New York City on June 27.)

It’s based off Heinlein‘s Rocketship Galileo novel. That novel, one of his juvenile works, had been published by Charles Scribner’s Sons just three years before the film came out. Heinlein wrote in Expanded Universe that publishers initially rejected the script feeling that journeying to the Moon was “too far out”.

It was directed by Irving Pichel from the screenplay by Alford Van Ronkel, Robert Heinlein and James O’Hanlon. Heinlein was also the technical adviser. 

It starred John Archer, Warner Anderson, Erin O’Brien-Moore, Tom Powers and Dick Wesson. Oh, and an appearance by Woody Woodpecker, who helps explain how rockets work. Really, he does appear here. 

Matte paintings by Chelsey Bonestell, already known for similar artwork, was used for the lunar landscapes. These were used for the departure of the Luna from Earth; its approach to the Moon; a panorama of the lunar landscape; and the spaceship’s landing on the lunar surface.

I can’t find any production notes so I’m unable to tell you about how the SFX was done. A pity that. If anybody knows, do tell. 

Critics were mixed with Bob Thomas of the Associated Press saying, “Destination Moon is good hocus-pocus stuff about interplanetary travel” whereas Isaac Asimov meanwhile not surprisingly said in In Memory Yet Green that it was “the first intelligent science-fiction movie made.”  

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes give it a so-so 48% rating. It however did rather well at the box office returning ten times its half million-dollar production budget. 

It would be voted a Retro Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation at the Millennium Philcon. 

It is not in the public domain, but the trailers are and here is one for you. So as always in such circumstances, do not offer up links to it. 

(7) COMICS SECTION.

(8) FICTION TAXONOMY. [Item by Steven French.] Mark Haddon on the difference between ‘literary’ and genre fiction: “Author Mark Haddon: ‘Bodies are such a good source of drama’” in the Guardian.

…One difference between what you might loosely call literary fiction and genre fiction is a kind of decorous avoidance of the overly dramatic. I always think of the sex scene in The Well of Loneliness: “And that night they were not parted.” Come on! Let’s see what happens! Or the Hilary Mantel story The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, which pulls away at the end. In genre fiction – horror, police procedural, whatever – that’s where the story would start, isn’t it? Keep the camera running. You get to the end of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These and think the drama is about to start: now the real difficulties will happen; now you have a family….

(9) SHAKE AND BAKE. “Pompeii Wrecked by Earthquake at Same Time as Vesuvius Eruption, Research Shows” – an unlocked New York Times article.

…“The effects of seismicity have been speculated by past scholars, but no factual evidence has been reported before our study,” Dr. Sparice said, adding that the finding was “very exciting.”

The team focused on the Insula of the Chaste Lovers. This area encompasses several buildings, including a bakery and a house where painters were evidently interrupted by the eruption, leaving their frescoes uncolored. After excavation and careful analysis, the researchers concluded that walls in the insula had collapsed because of an earthquake.

First, they ruled out hazards such as falling debris as a primary cause of the destruction — a deposit of stones under the wall fragments in the insula suggested it did not crumble during the eruption’s initial stage. Then they compared the damage to known effects of seismic destruction — for example, on historical buildings.

The excavation also revealed a pair of skeletons covered with wall fragments in the insula. One skeleton even showed signs of having attempted to take cover. According to the researchers, bone fracture patterns and crushing injuries observed in modern earthquake victims are evidence that these unfortunate Romans were killed by a building collapse….

(10) KILLING THE MESSENGER. “’Incredibly rare’ dead sea serpent surfaces in California waters; just 1 of 20 since 1901” – Yahoo! has the story.

Nothing marks the sign of impending doom like the appearance of the elusive oarfish, according to Japanese folklore. Hopefully it’s just a myth, since one was recently found floating in Southern California waters for only the 20th time in nearly 125 years.

A team of “sciencey” kayakers and snorkelers found the dead sea serpent while they were out for a swim at La Jolla Cove in San Diego over the weekend, according to Lauren Fimbres Wood, a spokesperson for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

A number of people, including the team of scientists and lifeguards, worked together to get the oarfish from the beach to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration facility, Fimbres Wood told USA TODAY on Friday.

Only 20 oarfish have washed up in the state since 1901, making the sighting of the deep-sea fish “incredibly rare,” according Scripps’ in-house fish expert Ben Frable.

…The belief that the sight of an oarfish in shallow waters is an omen of an impending earthquake dates back to 17th century Japan, according to reporting by Atlas Obscura.

The fish, also know as “ryugu no tsukai,” were believed to be servants of the sea god Ryūjin, according to Japanese folklore.

It’s believed that “Ryugu no tsukai,” which translates to “messenger from the sea god’s palace,” were sent from the palace toward the surface to warn people of earthquakes, USA TODAY reported.…

(11) ALL M. NIGHT LONG. NPR celebrates as “The Sixth Sense’ turns 25”.

Twenty-five years ago this month, one film and one filmmaker became synonymous with the big plot twist.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “THE SIXTH SENSE”)

HALEY JOEL OSMENT: (As Cole Sear) I see dead people.

MA: Now, after all this time, if you still have not seen “The Sixth Sense,” we are not going to ruin it for you. But it’s no spoiler to say that the film became a phenomenon, and its director, M. Night Shyamalan, an overnight sensation. His career has had some ups and downs since then. He currently has a film out called “Trap.” But it was his breakthrough film that reimagined the psycho thriller….

But if you don’t mind spoilers, I offer my review “Sixth Sense and Sensibility”.

…I think everyone went to see Sixth Sense twice: the second time to admire the way they’d deceived themselves about what was happening when they saw it the first time….

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Mr. Sci-Fi” Marc Scott Zicree has posted a Space Command Rough Cut with no finished VFX, music, color correction, sound mix, etc. He’s still gathering funding:

To find out about purchasing shares in Space Command, email marcicree@gmail.com — Thanks!

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

Pixel Scroll 7/20/24 There’s A Barsoom On The Right

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(1) HELLO FROM CHINA. The Hugo Book Club Blog has a guest post from Chinese fan RiverFlow: “Guest Post: Unite Sci-Fi Fans Around The World”.

Hello science fiction fans attending the 2024 World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow. First of all, have you heard of Chinese sci-fi fandom? If so, what examples can you give?

Science fiction fans in China were excited when Zero Gravity News won the Hugo Award for Best Fanzine last year. See “Introducing Chinese sci-fi fanzine Zero Gravity News” to learn more about the fanzine.

Yes, in fact, there is a very large group of science fiction fans in China, but few people have collected and collated their materials. I have been working on this since 2020, and have written some articles to introduce the collection.

The earliest Chinese Fanzine was born in 1988. In the 1990s, many science fiction fans were employed and writing in their leisure time, but in the 21st century, these contributions were mainly completed by students. Because workers are busy with their lives and families, it is difficult to find time to organize related activities. So I wrote a book, History of Chinese University Science Fiction Association, to introduce Chinese science fiction fans to the rest of the world. The thousands of photos and hundreds of thousands of words are enough to prove the rich history of this group….

(2) LOCAL GROUP FOCUS – NORTHUMBERLAND HEATH SF. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This is the Northumberland Heath SF’s group meet recently when a Mandalorian visited. 

This is just half its regular membership of a score or so who turn up to at least two or three meets a year: work shift rotas, familial and other commitments, etc., mean that it is rare that all regulars attend the same meet.  In addition, the group’s Facebook has some 260 followers of which half are local, but 120 of these have never physically attended a meet. (Is this typical of other local groups?) Of the non-local remainder FB followers, a good proportion are familiar names on some Worldcon registrant lists. Some of its members belong to other specialist regional and national SF groups and one of its members is the daughter of a former Worldcon fan GoH.

The group is only several years old but has some heritage connection with the former NW Kent SF group of the 1980s and ’90s that used to meet in nearby Dartford.  N. Heath SF is located in southeast London, on its border in Kent, which means that in addition to local social gatherings and cinema outings, it is easy to have trips to central London events, such as the annual Sci-Fi London film fest, or one-offs, such as the Loncon 3 Worldcon. It meets the second Thursday of each month so as not to clash with the first Thursday London SF Circle (as it used to be called) gathering.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Jonathan adds, “I for one would be interested to see potted summaries of local SF groups across different countries” and I enthusiastically second the idea. I’d love to run people’s introductions to the sf groups they’re in.

(3) DOWNLOAD THE 2019 GUFF TRIP REPORT. Simon Litten’s 2019 GUFF Trip Report Visiting Nearly Kiwiland has been published. Copies can be downloaded at the Australian Fan Funds website.

There’s no charge to download the report but interested fans may wish to make a donation to GUFF (via PayPal to guffeurope@gmail.com).

(4) THE SELF-PUBLISHING BUSINESS. Dave Dobson offers a deep dive into the numbers in his “Anatomy of a free BookBub featured deal”. A lot to learn here about Amazon, free book campaigns, and ratings.

Also, the intangibles – the sales rank, the visibility, the (I hope) new fans, the glut of new ratings and reviews – all of those are things I’d gladly have paid a couple hundred bucks pursuing. So, I’m going to call this a clear win, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

(5) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 114 of Octothorpe, “Tastemaker Batty”, John Coxon, Alison Scott and Liz Batty discuss the Hugo Awards. Uncorrected transcript is available here.

We cover all the categories except Best Novel, which we covered in a previous episode. The deadline is today (20 July 2024 at 21:17 Glasgow time). Don’t forget to vote beforehand. 

The value for “today” is a now-expired deadline. But that comes to us all sooner or later.

”Octothorpe 114” is at the top, and the word ”Octothorpe” is written on a series of lottery balls. Below that, a bingo card, and below that, the words ”Worldcon Community Group Bingo Card". The items on the card are as follows: - Can I convert pounds to Scottish money? - Does anyone have any opinions on...? - Do you know my Scottish cousin? - This list is too long to read so can someone... - Is the programme out yet? - Can I swim in the Clyde? - Can I visit Stonehenge for the day? - Asks question answered in PR5 - Does Glasgow Zoo have live haggis? - Volunteering is the best way to have fun - What's with all the armadillos? - Shouldn't the subway be a Digital Orange now? - Free! - Is the con organising an aurora viewing? - Is it too late to get on the programme? - Will Nessie be doing a signing? - Mention of Glasgow, England - Can anyone go to the Hugo Awards? - Why don't we do this the way we did in 1956? - Can I fly from Glasgow to Edinburgh? - Will there be any authors there? - Can I bring my Emotional Support Moose? - Are tartan and/or kilts compulsory? - What I reckon... - Mention of deep-fried Mars Bar

(6) PLUTO STILL NOT ONE OF THE COOL KIDS. “Astronomers Propose New Criteria to Classify Planets, but Pluto Still Doesn’t Make the Cut” in Smithsonian Magazine.

Nearly two decades after Pluto got kicked out of the planet club, astronomers are proposing an updated way to define “planet” based on more measurable criteria. The current definition is “problematic” and “vague,” they write in a paper published Wednesday in The Planetary Science Journal.

Unfortunately for fans of the dwarf planet, however, Pluto would remain excluded, even if the proposal is approved….

… “Jupiter’s orbit is crossed by comets and asteroids, as is Earth’s,” Gladman points out in a university statement. “Have those planets not cleared their orbit and thus, aren’t actually planets?”

In a bid to correct for this ambiguity, Gladman and his two colleagues propose a more measurable definition. According to their model, a celestial body is a planet if it: orbits one or more stars, brown dwarfs or stellar remnants; is more massive than 1023 kilograms (a size big enough to clear its orbit of debris); and is less massive than 2.5 x 1028 kilograms (equivalent to 13 Jupiter masses).

Pluto’s mass is 1.31 x 1022 kilograms, so it would remain excluded—but our current eight planets would retain their classification….

New Horizons photo of chaos region on Pluto.

(7) TOP SCI-FI MOTORBIKES. SlashGear praises “10 Of The Coolest Motorcycles In All Of Science Fiction”.

…When making this list, we looked at motorcycles that specifically had a sci-fi bent to them. The 1990 Harley-Davidson Fat Boy in “Terminator 2: Judgement Day” is definitely cool, but that’s a bike that already exists. We wanted motorcycles that pushed the boundaries of transportation in the future and perhaps even inspired folks to design their own bikes that look similar in real life. These are the sci-fi motorcycles that show that while society might change in the future, riding around on a cool motorcycle never gets old. …

The list includes —

Kaneda’s bike in Akira

Kaneda’s bike in “Akira,” one of the most influential anime films of all time, isn’t just cool-looking — it inspired the famous “Akira Slide,” which has entered meme status and has been referenced in a wide range of projects, from “Batman: The Animated Series” to Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Even when it’s not sliding, the bike is beautifully drawn. 

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 20, 1938 – Dame Diana Rigg. (Died 2020.)

By Paul Weimer:

I was introduced to Diana Rigg thanks to Roger Zelazny’s Amber.

It’ll make sense, trust me.

As you know, I am and have been an enthusiastic player of the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game, set in the endless multiverse of the novels.  Lots of players and GMs like to import ideas from other books, shows and series. (I am no exception in that regard, mind you).

Diana Rigg

One of these GMs I played with was a big enthusiast of The Steed and Peel Avengers series from the 1960’s. I was not yet familiar with the series, but after playing a session where Steed turned out to be a secret Amberite, I had to know more! Who was Steed and who was the mysterious Mrs. Peel he was looking for (as part of the plot)?  (She did not actually appear on screen). The GM encouraged me to seek out The Avengers.

And thus, I discovered the original Avengers TV series, and thus, Diana Rigg. I was enchanted immediately, of course, by a beautiful kick-arse actress with skill, verve, and action. I avidly watched all the episodes of The Avengers, finding Rigg the best of the partners for McNee by a long way. The DNA of some notable action heroines with skill, verve, intelligence and independence definitely can be traced back to Rigg’s Mrs. Peel.

Later on, she was proven delightful in things such as Game of Thrones (Olenna Tyrell was a great major character for her late in her career) and, when I discovered, the weird and wonderful steampunk movie The Assassination Bureau.

But in the end, yes, for me Diana Rigg IS Mrs. Peel.  Now, if only Moorcock could confirm that Peel is actually an aspect of the Eternal Champion…

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) MONSTERPIECE THEATRE. “Godzilla Takes on the Great Gatsby in Monsterpiece Theatre Comic” at The Wrap. Cover art and preview pages at the link.

Godzilla’s been on a resurgent streak, from the MonsterVerse franchise and “Godzilla Minus One” in theaters to “Monarch” on Apple TV+. Now, TheWrap can exclusively share that acclaimed writer and artist Tom Scioli is delivering comic book “Godzilla’s Monsterpiece Theatre” from IDW, with the giant lizard taking on figures from throughout literary history — including the Great Gatsby, Sherlock Holmes, H.G. Wells’ Time Traveller and a mystery man with vampiric fingers and a “D” on the back of his cape (want to take a guess?).

The three-issue series is set in 1922, with one of Jay Gatsby’s legendary parties luring the attention of the giant lizard himself. Rather than being able to woo Daisy Buchanan, he has to deal with Godzilla absolutely demolishing his estate. Gatsby follows up on the destruction by teaming with the aforementioned 20th century literary icons to take his revenge….

(11) POINT OF NO RETURN? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Bad news in this week’s Science editorial: “Go/no-go for a Mars samples return”.

Last month’s return to Earth of China’s lunar lander Chang’e-6 with samples from the far side of the Moon is a reminder that there are “firsts” in robotic space exploration still to be achieved. Unfortunately, this year has seen a major set-back for the prospects of an even more extensive plan to collect samples from Mars. In April, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) made clear that the ballooning cost for the US Mars Sample Return mission to around $11 billion was too much and the 2040 return date was too distant. NASA has been told to look for ideas to lower costs and shorten the timeline. Shock and anger are palpable in the astronomy community.

The challenge of an exploratory robotic mission to Mars to collect samples and return them to Earth for study dates back to the post-Apollo era, 50 years ago. Twenty-five years ago, a breakthrough occurred when France and the US announced a joint Mars sample return program. Sadly, that foundered on financial grounds. Fifteen years ago, the goal of a joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) was vetoed at a high level in NASA, possibly an echo of the previous experience.

Nonetheless, the last two US National Academy of Sciences planetary science decadal surveys gave the Mars Sample Return mission a high priority, thereby encouraging federal agencies to fund it. Then, last year, after the critical design phase and external review, the program’s price turned out to be way above expectations, leading NASA to apply brakes to the project…

The figures quoted for cost escalation of the Mars Sample Return mission are a reminder that NASA’s JWST project grew from less than $1 billion to around $10 billion. However, most of the JWST cost increases came after the design phase, the point where the Mars project is now caught. The sub[1]sequent steady growth in the cost of JWST was due to a different cause— namely, the year-by-year NASA budget negotiation in Congress. Once the design phase is completed, a large development team is formed. European collaborators watched in frustration as the annual US budget, cycle after cycle, drip-fed just enough money to sustain the JWST mission’s team but not enough to allow efficient progress. The multiyear funding of the ESA Science Programme by member states mitigates this.

NASA is now told to look for a solution to the Mars Sample Return mission, but the agency is likely caught at a tricky crossroads. A quicker, cheaper swoop to grab Mars dust and get it back to Earth could win the exploration “first,” but that will not satisfy the US National Academy decadal goals….

(12) FARM ROBOTS. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] “Could robot weedkillers replace the need for pesticides?” in the Guardian. I’m sure they will, and I expect smaller ones for gardens.

On a sweltering summer day in central Kansas, farm fields shimmer in the heat as Clint Brauer watches a team of bright yellow robots churn up and down the rows, tirelessly slicing away any weeds that stand in their way while avoiding the growing crops.

The battery-powered machines, 4ft (1.2 metres) long and 2ft (0.6 metres) wide, pick their way through the fields with precision, without any human hand to guide them….

His Greenfield agricultural technology company now builds and programs its robots in a shed behind an old farmhouse where his grandmother once lived….

…Farmers have been fighting weeds in their fields – pulling, cutting and killing them off with an array of tools – for centuries. Weeds compete with crops for soil moisture and nutrients and can block out sunlight needed for crop growth, cutting into final yields. Over the last 50-plus years, chemical eradication has been the method of choice. It is common for farmers to spray or otherwise apply several weedkilling chemicals on to their fields in a single season.

But as chemical use has expanded, so has scientific evidence that exposure to the toxic substances in weedkillers can cause disease. In addition to glyphosate’s link to cancer, the weedkilling chemical paraquat has been linked to Parkinson’s disease. Another common farm herbicide, atrazine, can be harmful to reproductive health and is linked to several other health problems.

Weedkilling chemicals have also been found to be harmful to the environment, with negative impacts on soil health and on pollinators and other important species. 

… North Dakota-based Aigen Robotics has raised $19m to date. Its compact robots are powered by solar panels fixed to the top of each machine and are designed to work autonomously, sleeping and waking up on farm fields….

… Still, many farmers and academic experts are skeptical that farm robots can make a substantial difference. They say that there is simply too much farmland and too many diverse needs to be addressed by robots that are costly to make and use. The better path, many say, is for farmers to work with nature, rather than against it.

The model of regenerative agriculture – using a variety of strategies focused on improving soil health, including limiting pesticides, rotating crops, planting crops that provide ground cover to suppress weeds and avoiding disturbing the soil – is the better path, they say….

(13) ELEMENTARY. According to ScienceAlert, “Curiosity Cracked Open a Rock on Mars And Found a Huge Surprise”.

A rock on Mars has just spilled a surprising yellow treasure after Curiosity accidentally cracked through its unremarkable exterior.

When the rover rolled its 899-kilogram (1,982-pound) body over the rock, the rock broke open, revealing yellow crystals of elemental sulfur: brimstone. Although sulfates are fairly common on Mars, this is the first time sulfur has been found on the red planet in its pure elemental form….

“But do they smell like rotten eggs?” asks John King Tarpinian.

(14) SF IN 1958. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Grammaticus Books has continued his deep dive into some golden age editions of SF pulps. This time he looks at a1958 edition of Fantasy & Science Fiction that saw Heinlein’s “Have Spacesuit Will Travel” which if memory serves was short-listed for a Hugo. There’s also a Richard Matheson in the mix…

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Via Cat Rambo.] “We Didn’t Start the Fire (Bardcore|Medieval/Renaissance Style Cover)” from Hildegard von Blingin’.

There are many covers of Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire that adapt it to different times, but we wanted to give it the bardcore treatment. *Unlike the original, the list is not chronological, and jumps around in time a lot. It very loosely spans from around 400 to 1600, and is from a rather Eurocentric point of view. Thank you to my brother, Friar Funk, for devising the lyrics and providing the majority of the vocals. Many thanks as well to his new wife and our dad for joining us in the chorus at the end.

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

Classics of SF at the 2024 NASFiC

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By John Hertz: Since 1975, North America has held a NASFiC (North America Science Fiction Convention) when the World Science Fiction Convention is overseas. In 2024, the 82nd Worldcon being at Glasgow, Scotland, the 16th NASFiC will be at Buffalo, New York, July 18-21.

We’ll discuss three Classics of Science Fiction at Buffalo, one discussion each. Come to as many as you like. You’ll be welcome to join in.

Our operating definition is “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 the 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?

Leigh Brackett, Shadow Over Mars (1944)

This won the 1945 Best Novel Retro Hugo. It has action, aliens, politics, alien politics — also characterization — subtlety — indeed richness — all within the realm of Startling Stories where it first appeared — which could be done, and sometimes was.

Robert A. Heinlein, The Rolling Stones (1952)

Never mind whether these “flat cats” look like Star Trek tribbles (when David Gerrold wrote The Trouble with Tribbles, he hadn’t read Stones; seeing the similarity, he asked Heinlein’s permission, which was granted in exchange for an autographed copy of Gerrold’s script). Consider Edith and Roger Stone.

Tom Clancy, The Hunt for Red October (1984)

Of course it’s SF. No one could build the caterpillar drive in 1984. What a reach outside our field this book has had — even to a U.S. President! How does the author do it? Story? Characterization? Corroborative detail (thanks, Gilbert & Sullivan)?

Pixel Scroll 6/24/24 Doctor Who and the Scrolls of Pixeldon

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(1) AGENT CUT LOOSE BY AGENCY. The kt literary agency is presumably talking about Hilary Harwell, the subject of item #1 in Pixel Scroll 6/23/24.

(2) THE ‘SPORT’ OF REVIEW BOMBING. “In Three Weeks ‘The Acolyte’ Has More Audience Reviews Than Three Seasons Of ‘The Mandalorian’” reports Forbes.

You may not like The Acolyte, but don’t look me in the eye and tell me it’s not being review bombed to hell and back.

The Disney era of Star Wars has been full of debates about quality, canon, oversaturation and contained a mix of good and bad projects. But I have not seen this kind of backlash to a project since The Last Jedi, and things have gotten just absolutely ridiculous at this point.

There is this idea that The Acolyte is not being “review bombed,” it’s just really that bad. But the data here is absurd, showing a clear tidal wave of users racing to make it the lowest user-scored product in 50 years of Star Wars history, and it’s amassed quadruple the reviews of the longest-running Star Wars series, The Clone Wars. The only thing even close is three seasons across five years of the massively-watched Mandalorian, and even then, that falls well short…

(3) GAMING AWARD CODE OF CONDUCT AND “ZIONISM”. The CRIT Awards™, which will be presented at Gen Con, foster “Creator Recognition in Table Top Role Playing Game industry”.

Our mission is to celebrate and recognize the contributions and achievements of our community in a way that is inclusive, diverse, and represents the values of our community.

By shining a light on the talent, creativity, and hard work of our community members, we aim to inspire others to reach their full potential and make a positive impact on TTRPGs and beyond!

Their six-part statement of Criteria And Code Of Conduct begins with:

1. Inclusivity and Respect

1.1. No Racism: We do not tolerate any form of racism, racial discrimination, or xenophobia. Treat all individuals with respect and fairness, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or cultural background.

1.2. No Homophobia: We embrace diversity and do not condone any homophobic behavior or discrimination against individuals based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.

1.3. No Ableism: We are committed to being accessible and accommodating to all individuals. Avoid ableist attitudes or behaviors and strive to make the CRIT Awards inclusive for people of all abilities.

1.4. No Sexism: Gender-based discrimination, stereotypes, or harassment will not be tolerated. We promote gender equality and a supportive environment for all genders.

1.5. Individuals who identify as Zionists, promote Zionist material, or engage in activities that without a doubt support Zionism are not eligible for nomination.

The fifth point triggered Larry Correia’s post “Inclusivity And Respect In The Crit Awards” [Internet Archive link], which he terms to be “anti-Semitic crap”.  

…GenCon is hosting a event that explicitly bans people who think Israel has a right to exist… yet I guarantee the same kind of invertebrate squishes who condemn people like me for nothing, won’t say crap about that.

None of these grifter scumbags actually give a crap about racism. It’s always a political weapon, nothing more. I can at least respect them for their hustle. It’s their willing dupes, the cowards, the quislings, the useless one-way virtue signalers who can only speak up when their masters say it’s okay, who are too scared to go against the rigid group think of their deranged cult, who’ll let evil shit slide because they’re scared their team will get upset at them… Those people I despise.

Mostly it’s all about Larry, venting a long-held grievance. But setting him aside, does that fifth point belong in a code of conduct?

(4) SOMEONE ON THE INTERNET ACTUALLY CHANGED THEIR MIND! “Ginger” first published the error-riddled post “Can the Hugo Awards Recover Their Credibility?” on the Hidden Gems Book Blog in March. Chris Barkley recently noticed it began bombarding it with critical comments. “Ginger” now has written a new version, which appears first (not trying to deny the problematic original existed.) Here’s an excerpt from the post’s new introduction.

Hi there! Ginger here. Back in March, I wrote an article entitled “Can the Hugo Awards Recover Their Credibility?” referencing the controversy surrounding the nominations for the 2023 Hugo Awards, which were awarded to winning writers at the 2023 Worldcon in Chengdu, China.

Months later, it was pointed out that there were some factual errors in that article, such as my claim that the 2023 Woldcon was the second to be held in Chengdu (when in fact it was the second Worldcon to be held in Asia – in 2022 the Con was held in Chicago, Illinois.) Several readers, including Hugo Award winners and nominees, and members of the Worldcon committee themselves, pointed out these errors while criticizing the article itself….

…It was careless, lazy, and not representative of who I try to be as a writer. I’d lost sight of who I write these articles for – writers – and tried to “report” on a news story instead. Not only did I do a bad job of that by incorporating errors, but I feel now that the tone, subject, and theme of the article were also incongruent with the sort of article I want to write.

I imagined for a second how I’d feel if I’d been recognized for a Hugo Award following a lifetime of hard work and dedication to my craft, and then had some random ginger kid with a British accent dismiss the significance of that with a wave of their hand – and in an article that contained factual errors, no less!

So, instead of just ignoring the criticism, or trying to retroactively fix the errors to pretend that they didn’t happen, I wanted to take responsibility for the tone of my article and revisit it. After all, I’ve mentioned many times how important science fiction and fantasy was to me growing up, and how influential many Hugo Award winners have been to my writing, and my enjoyment of books as a whole. The Hugo Awards deserve better, and so do the writers who took the time to read and comment on my article….

(5) STOP THAT TRAIN! “Record Labels Sue AI Music Services Suno and Udio for Copyright” – Variety explains the lawsuit.

The Recording Industry Association of America has announced the filing of two copyright-infringement cases against the AI music services Suno and Udio based on what it describes as “the mass infringement of copyrighted sound recordings copied and exploited without permission by two multi-million-dollar music generation services.”

The cases are the latest salvo in the music industry’s battle to prevent the unlicensed use of copyrighted sound recordings to “train” generative-AI models.

The case against Suno, Inc., developer of Suno AI, was filed in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts and the case against Uncharted Labs, Inc., developer of Udio AI, was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. The plaintiffs in the cases are music companies that hold rights to sound recordings infringed by Suno and Udio – including Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Records….

… “The music community has embraced AI and we are already partnering and collaborating with responsible developers to build sustainable AI tools centered on human creativity that put artists and songwriters in charge,” said RIAA Chairman and CEO Mitch Glazier. “But we can only succeed if developers are willing to work together with us. Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it’s ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s life’s work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all.”…

(6) GOODBYE BETSY, HELLO STEFAN. Open Road Media’s Strategic advisor, science fiction and fantasy Betsy Mitchell will retire on June 28.

Stefan Dziemianowicz will join as consulting editor, horror, fantasy, & science fiction.

Betsy Mitchell with Joshua Bilmes. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.
Betsy Mitchell with Raymond Feist at the 1993 Worldcon. (Elst Weinstein in background.) Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.
Betsy Mitchell with Andy Zack. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

(7) ASTOUNDING AUTHORS AT WAR. You might like to be reminded “How Sci-Fi Writers Isaac Asimov & Robert Heinlein Contributed to the War Effort During World War II”, an article at Open Culture.

…Having once been a Navy officer, discharged due to tuberculosis, Heinlein jumped at the chance to serve his country once again. During World War II, writes John Redford at A Niche in the Library of Babel, “his most direct contribution was in discussions of how to merge data from sonar, radar, and visual sightings with his friend Cal Laning, who captained a destroyer in the Pacific and was later a rear admiral. Laning used those ideas to good effect in the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944, the largest naval battle ever fought.” Asimov “was mainly involved in testing materials,” including those used to make “dye markers for airmen downed at sea. These were tubes of fluorescent chemicals that would form a big green patch on the water around the guy in his life jacket. The patch could be seen by searching aircraft.”

Asimov scholars should note that a test of those dye markers counts as one of just two occasions in his life that the aerophobic writer ever dared to fly. That may well have been the most harrowing of either his or Heinlein’s wartime experiences, they were both involved in the suitably speculative “Kamikaze Group,” which was meant to work on “invisibility, death rays, force fields, weather control” — or so Paul Malmont tells it in his novel The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown. You can read a less heightened account of Heinlein and Asimov’s war in Astounding, Alec Nevala-Lee’s history of American science fiction.

(8) MEMORIES OF DONALD SUTHERLAND. The Guardian has a set of reminiscences from those who worked with Donald Sutherland: “’I can see him now. I will see him forever’: Donald Sutherland remembered by Keira Knightley, Elliott Gould, Ralph Fiennes and more”. Francis Lawrence, director of three of The Hunger Games films, recalls:

When we were on set, he’d call me “Governor” and sometimes hold on to me as we walked along. One day he seemed sad and I asked him why. He said: “Because this is almost over.” I was like: “No! We still have a few days and it’s not even the last movie.”

That evening, he wrote me this hilarious email blaming his sadness on a handful of bad grapes he’d eaten. As soon as he got back to his trailer after our walk, he wrote, he’d blown a hole in the lavatory. Now they’d need to burn down the trailer and he hoped that didn’t disrupt the shoot. It was great fun and it was written really beautifully. Now I’ll have to frame that email.

Donald was very politically engaged and that’s why he wanted to do The Hunger Games. He loved that we were smuggling these ideas about the consequences of war into a pop cultural phenomenon. He certainly didn’t give a shit about being a celebrity. It was all about the work and craft and collaborators.

A lot of people see the character he played, President Snow, as the villainous antagonist of those films. And he is – but we needed to find out what his belief system was. Snow believed in the Hobbesian idea that everybody in this world is savage and therefore needs to be ruled with an iron fist. So Donald and I talked a lot about that, on a core thematic level.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

June 24, 1987 – Spaceballs. Let’s reminisce upon a certain rather silly film named Spaceballs that premiered in the States thirty-seven years ago. No, make that an utter silly film called Spaceballs that everyone loved, and yes, I know I usually quote critics later but I’m breaking my format here, well because I can, to share a quote from the review by Peter Rosegg of the  Honolulu Advertiser: “Spaceballs has everything you have come to look for (or dread) in a Brooks movie. Riotous sight gags, terrible puns, rude language, movie and TV jokes.”

So this is  a parody of Star Wars and that meant the blessing of Lucas as it hewed way too close to source material to be considered original material. Lucas agreed with one interesting restriction: there could be no action figures as “Yours are going to look like mine”. So that meant the very cool Yogurt doll used in the merchandise scene couldn’t be made; it is now owned by Brooks. 

Lucas according to Show Biz Cheat Sheet sent Brooks a note saying how much he loved the film. 

The script was written by Mel Brooks, Ronny Graham and Thomas Meehan. Now Brooks I don’t have to do a deep dive into since y’all know him but the other two I’ll assume that’s not true of. 

Ronny Graham was an actor with a very long of credits who Johnny Carson apparently liked a lot as he was a very frequent guest. (The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson!, thirty seasons, available on Peacock.) I suspect he got picked as a writer here because four years earlier, he had written and been in An Audience with Mel Brooks, but I don’t know, so let’s continue onward. 

Let’s see if Thomas Meehan has a link too to Brooks. Yes indeed. He acted in When Things Were Rotten, the mid-Seventies series Mel Brooks created, a Robin Hood parody, and he was in To Be or Not to Be is an early Eighties war comedy Brooks produced.  The screenplay was written by both Ronny Graham and Thomas Meehan, so that’s where the writing connection comes from.

The script was, I believe, a perfect parody of Star Wars. But not just that film as it cheerfully ripped into guts — sorry I couldn’t resist — of popular culture everywhere, as this delicious morsel of quote from John Hurt who makes a cameo appearance credited as himself, parodying (SPOILER ALERT) Gilbert Kane’s death in Alien as a xenomorph rips out of his stomach . He looks down at it and says “Oh, no. Not again”. 

Now a great script deserves fantastic cast and this film certainly has one. The primary cast was the trio of John Candy, Rick Moranis and Bill Pullman. I’m going to say all three were perfect parodies of the characters that they were based off, a very neat trick indeed. Pullman in particular pulled off the neat job of merging aspects of Luke both Skywalker and Han Solo into one character.

The supporting cast would’ve filled the seats of a cantina on Mos Eisley, or Brooks’s parody of one as it was Dick Van Patten, George Wyner, Lorene Yarnell and Daphne Zuniga. Now that doesn’t count Brooks who played a dual role, with Dom DeLuise and Rudy De Luca who appeared here in cameo appearances.

And then we have Joan Rivers doing voice work here for Dot Matrix, Princess Vespa’s droid of honor and guardian. She is a parody of C-3PO. She does a more than merely good version female version of that character. Lorene Yarnell, a mime and dancer was the performer of the body.

I liked it though I thought Brooks was trying too hard to stuff as many references by way of jokes to every cultural thing he or possibly the other two writers could think of. 

Wikipedia would have you believe the film received a lukewarm reception and, guess what, they’re wrong.  A lot of reviews I read on Rotten Tomatoes were positive. They like the gags, the acting and well, that’s all they wrote up. Not one mentioned the ship, the cutimes, the helmet. Interesting indeed.

Here’s another review quote by Jay Carr of the Boston Globe: “Spaceballs has the happy air of a comic enterprise that knows it’s going right. It just keeps spritzing the gags at us, Borscht Belt-style, confidently and rightly sensing that if we don’t laugh at this one, we’ll laugh at the next. And so we do.” 

Now it’s not fair to you to give the impression that critics were all positive, so here’s one of the more negative ones by Elvis Mitchell of the Detroit Free Press: “No one is that interested in Star Wars anymore. So watching Spaceballs is like picking up an old copy of Mad magazine and being puzzled about that Jack Palance parody you found so funny years ago.” Oh ouch. Really ouch. 

Finally, how did it do financially? It certainly didn’t make money at first as it cost twenty-two point seven million to make and it only made thirty-eight point two million. Given that movie theaters in the States receive forty percent of each ticket sold, so that leaves nine million point three for all other expenses. (Foreign theaters do even better getting between sixty and eighty percent depending on where there are.) 

Eventually with television sales, cassette and DVD sales and now streaming, it certainly made money. 

I think I need to stop now before this essay gets any longer… 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) SHE’S BACK. The Hollywood Reporter tells how “Krysten Ritter’s Breaking Bad Death Paved Way for Orphan Black: Echoes”.

It’s now been 15 years since Krysten Ritter’s Breaking Bad arc came to a tragic, series-altering end. But that eight-episode run in season two of the beloved AMC series continues to bear fruit for the actor. 

Last night, she made her return to the home network of Breaking Bad as the star of Orphan Black: Echoes — a spinoff of Tatiana Maslany’s mothership series that picks up 37 years later. Created by Anna Fishko, Ritter’s new character, Lucy, instead of being a clone, was recently printed into existence by a four-dimensional printer. And, despite her best efforts to create a well-adjusted life for herself in just two years’ time, she’s soon forced to piece together the puzzle of who she really is and why she was created.…

(12) NEW SFF ACADEMIC CONFERENCE. Speculative Fiction Across Media will hold its inaugural conference, “Queens of the Future: A Century of Women in Speculative Fiction Media” from October 17-19 in Los Angeles. Present will be Guest of Honor: Gale Ann Hurd, Special Guest: Ann Leckie, and Featured Speaker: Constance Penley. SFAM is located in Southern California and sponsored by UC Riverside, Cal State LA, and the University of Zurich.

(13) BOILER MAKERS. Collider offers its list of the “10 Best Steampunk Movies, Ranked”.

Steampunk refers to the sci-fi subgenre that imagines a society where humanity continues to rely primarily on steam power. It takes the aesthetics and gadgetry of the Victorian era but extrapolates them to their logical conclusion, producing quirky, hyper-advanced machines with a retro flavor. Steampunk movies also often play with the gender dynamics and social norms of that era, usually to subvert them.

In ninth place is last year’s unexpected award contender:

9. ‘Poor Things’ (2023)

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

“I am a changeable feast. As are all of we.” The latest addition to the canon of steampunk classics is Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things, a dark comedy about a woman (Emma Stone) brought back to life by an eccentric scientist (Willem Dafoe). Set in a fantastical Victorian era, Bella embarks on a journey of self-discovery, navigating a world filled with bizarre characters and situations. It’s essentially a raunchy, tongue-in-cheek rewrite of Frankenstein, and it’s simply terrific.

Lathimos deploys steampunk aesthetics throughout, like the fisheye lenses and stylized colors. The setting is also simultaneously retro and futuristic, with both rudimentary surgery and advanced skyships. Indeed, the technology is decidedly steampunk, particularly the machines and critters in Baxter’s laboratory. He has a device that digests his food for him and a host of pets spliced together from various animals, like a duck/dog hybrid. “Creating the animals was a challenge because we did it partly in-camera,” noted effects supervisor Simon Hughes.

(14) ORLOK UNLOCKED. Variety sets the frame: “Nosferatu Trailer: Bill Skarsgard Plays Vampire in Robert Eggers Movie”.

From Pennywise the clown to one of the most famous vampires of all time, Bill Skarsgård is transforming into Nosferatu in Robert Eggers’ upcoming reimagining of the iconic 1922 German Expressionist silent film. But horror fans will have to keep waiting to see Skarsgård’s full appearance as Count Orlok, as the movie first’s trailer from Focus Features continues to keep the vampire’s complete look a mystery. Skarsgård is barely seen in the clip outside of a few quick shots, but his character’s haunting presence looms large….

(15) RICK AND MORTY: THE ANIME. Here’s a preview of Rick and Morty: The Anime, coming to Adult Swim and Max later this year.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna) who says this is a novelization of the Tom Baker-era episode “Scrolls of Pixeldon”).]

Pixel Scroll 5/10/24 Pride And Prejudice And Pixels

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(1) STAR TREK WINS PEABODY AWARD. The Star Trek franchise was among the Peabody Award winners announced today. Given to television, radio, and other media, the Peabody honors “stories that powerfully reflect the pressing social issues and the vibrant emerging voices of our day.”

TrekMovie.com homes in on the story of greatest interest to fans: “Star Trek Franchise Wins Peabody Award” –

… This is actually Trek’s second Peabody. In 1987 the Next Generation episode “The Big Goodbye” won the Entertainment, Children’s & Youth Award. The first season of Star Trek: Discovery was also nominated for the same award.

Here is the full text of the announcement for Star Trek…

The Institutional Award – Star Trek

The original Star Trek television series aired on NBC for only three seasons, from September 1966 to June 1969. It was fresh, prescient, and so ahead of its time that it couldn’t quite capture the mainstream audience required for hits during a particularly insipid time in television. But fast forward nearly 60 years, and creator Gene Roddenberry’s vision is alive and well, having spawned a media franchise of 13 feature films, 11 television series, and numerous books and comics, with a legendary fan following. Today Star Trek is more vibrant, imaginative, funny, entertaining, and progressive than ever. And these days, we’ve got the special effects to make it look stellar.

The original science-fiction series was set aboard a starship, Enterprise, whose mostly human crew encountered alien life as they traversed the stars, led by the iconic Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner). It was groundbreaking for its diverse cast and for its unapologetically progressive values—exploration over colonialism, cooperation over violence. Its fandom grew over time, and the successors to the original series have updated the franchise without losing its moral core—the dream of a future free from human destruction, poverty, and bigotry. Subsequent captains have served as models of ethical and diverse leadership: The Next Generation’s Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), Deep Space Nine’s Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks), and Voyager’s Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) among them.

With every passing decade, new versions have proliferated, attracting new generations of fans. Film reboots directed by J.J. Abrams and Justin Lin revived Kirk and his crew with new, young actors, zippier dialogue, and vastly improved effects in the 2000s and 2010s. The Streaming Era has brought a raft of reimaginings with a variety of sensibilities, from the dark and complicated Star Trek: Discovery to the crowd-pleasing prequel Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (featuring a young Spock!) to the hilariously meta cartoon Star Trek: Lower Decks. As the latest versions of Star Trek invite in a new generation of viewers, the interstellar travelers still encounter danger and difficulty, of course. But the Starfleet crew always comes out on top— and without sacrificing essential values that seem quintessentially human: valor, self-sacrifice, curiosity, compassion, broadmindedness.

“From a groundbreaking television series to an expansive collection of films, novels, comic books and so much more, Star Trek has been delivering joy, wonder, and thought-provoking stories since the 1960s,” said Jones. “With powerful anti-war and anti-discrimination messages, it has blazed trails for all science fiction franchises while winning over passionate fans across the globe. We’re proud to honor Star Trek with Peabody’s Institutional Award.”

The Hollywood Reporter has the complete list of Peabody Awards 2024 Winners.

Other winners of genre interest are:

CHILDREN’S/YOUTH

Bluey (Disney+)
Creator Joe Brumm’s endearing family of animated Australian dogs have captivated both children and adults for years in episodes equally delightful and heartrending. Very little feels off the table, as Bluey fearlessly tackles topics from death to infertility to fleeting friendships, all while maintaining a sense of innocence and exuberance for the children, and affinity and understanding for the parents, who are allowed to be dynamic, imperfect beings on their own growth journey. 
Ludo Studio, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, BBC Studios

ENTERTAINMENT

The Last of Us (HBO | Max)
In HBO’s post-apocalyptic The Last of Us, a faithful adaptation of the critically-acclaimed Naughty Dog video game, the road trip odyssey of Joel and Ellie (played by Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey) functions as a recursive meditation on love and loss—and how love is capable of changing people, for good and for ill. In the hands of showrunner Craig Mazin, who worked in collaboration with Neil Druckmann, a co-director on the original game, this adaptation extracts new layers from the text that expand its meaning—imagining what a life of love and fulfillment, and survival, can look like at the end of the world.
HBO in association with Sony Pictures Television Studios, PlayStation Productions, Word Games, The Mighty Mint, and Naughty Dog.

(2) MINNESOTA BOOK AWARDS. The Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library announced the Minnesota Book Awards winners. The complete list is at the link.

Emma Törzs’ fantasy novel Ink Blood Sister Scribe is the winner of the Genre Fiction category.

For generations, the Kalotay family has guarded a collection of ancient and rare books. Books that let a person walk through walls or manipulate the elements—books of magic that half-sisters Joanna and Esther have been raised to revere and protect.

All magic comes with a price, though, and for years the sisters have been separated. Esther has fled to a remote base in Antarctica to escape the fate that killed her own mother, and Joanna’s isolated herself in their family home in Vermont, devoting her life to the study of these cherished volumes. But after their father dies suddenly while reading a book Joanna has never seen before, the sisters must reunite to preserve their family legacy. In the process, they’ll uncover a world of magic far bigger and more dangerous than they ever imagined, and all the secrets their parents kept hidden; secrets that span centuries, continents, and even other libraries . . .

(3) OUT OF TIME. Jonathan Russell Clark analyzes “Why We Love Time Travel Stories” for Esquire.

…For Wells’s contemporaries, Gleick notes, “technology had a special persuasive power.” For us, now a quarter of the way through the 21st century, things have grown complicated. Technology governs everything we do, but rather than enhancing our lives, our gadgets seem to exploit us, isolate us, box us in. Moreover, the technology itself has moved beyond our understanding, leaving us dependent on the two or three corporate entities producing it. The World of Tomorrow never arrived; no matter how much technology has progressed, it is still frustratingly Today.

Instead of holding out for a future that will solve our problems, contemporary readers now look into the past to address the wrongs inflicted on the less powerful, so what makes a convincing time-travel story in the 21st century isn’t the verisimilitude of the science but rather the morality of the characters’ intentions. In her book on ’80s movies, Life Moves Pretty Fast, Hadley Freeman notes that in Back to the Future, “Marty’s meddling in the past results in his parents living in a nice house, with chicer furnishings, posher breakfast dishes, and even domestic help in the form of Biff Tannen in 1985. Marty’s triumph is to lift his family up to middle-class status.” If Hollywood rebooted the franchise today, Freeman writes, “Marty’s challenge would be to save the world.” I still think a remake would keep Marty’s adventures confined to his personal bubble; it’s just that instead of reuniting his parents to ensure his existence, his mission would instruct him to meddle in his parents’ past because, down the line, this will save the world. Nowadays, to exploit time travel for personal gain—and indeed to tell a story in which such actions are uncritically celebrated—is unacceptable, as is returning to our discriminatory, segregated, slavery-filled history without seriously grappling with those realities. It’s no longer technology but rather moral conviction that now has a special persuasive power on us….

(4) A RARE HEINLEIN CONNECTION. Dave Hook has done fascinating research into a forgotten Heinlein collaborator: “Who is Elma ‘Miller’ Wentz?”

I know I’ve read this story in “Beyond the End of Time” at least once, but I remember nothing about it or even that it existed until seeing this. I found this very interesting for several reasons:

  1. To my knowledge, this is the only fiction published by Heinlein with a co-author during his lifetime.
  2. Heinlein clearly was not fond of it, as he never allowed this and two of his other early stories published as by “Lyle Monroe” to be reissued in a Heinlein collection during his lifetime (per Wikipedia).
  3. I had no idea who “Elma Wentz” was.

…Sometime in the early 1930s, she moved to Los Angeles. Her family did also, although it’s not clear if they moved at the same time or not.

William H. Patterson, Jr.’s “Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 1: 1907-1948: Learning Curve” (“Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue…”), 2010 Tor, noted that Elma was working for Upton Sinclair on Sinclair’s California 1934 governor’s campaign as his personal secretary. Patterson also notes that she and her husband to be, Roby Wentz, met Robert A. Heinlein when Heinlein joined Sinclair’s related “End Poverty in California” (EPIC) movement in early 1935. The EPIC movement overlapped substantially with Sinclair’s run for governor. This resulted in her and Roby becomes friends with Robert A. Heinlein and his first wife Leslyn (MacDonald) Heinlein, and with journalist (and future SF writer) Cleve Cartmill….

(5) GUARDIAN REVIEW ROUNDUP. Lisa Tuttle’s “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup” for the Guardian encompasses The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard; A View from the Stars by Cixin Liu; Flowers from the Void by Gianni Washington; The Dark Side of the Sky by Francesco Dimitri; The Hungry Dark by Jen Williams; and To the Stars and Back by various writers.

(6) VANISHING POINT. Atlas Obscura advises “Don’t Stare at the Dark Watchers”.

… There are dozens of similar accounts of so-called dark watchers by hikers in the Santa Lucia Mountains near Big Sur, California. The stories often share details: The figure stands seven to 10 feet tall and has a walking stick and hat, for example. No one has ever been able to interact with the looming figures—they always disappear once the hiker acknowledges them…

…Despite their ephemeral nature—and claims that they only appear to hikers with low-tech, old-school gear—stories of these cryptids go back hundreds if not thousands of years. Some people trace the legend to the pre-colonial oral stories of the Chumash, Indigenous peoples that have lived along the Central Coast of California and the Channel Islands for 13,000 years. But while there are many Chumash accounts of various creatures in December’s Child by Thomas Blackburn—the most complete written record of Chumash stories—it’s unclear whether any describe the dark watchers.

“These entities—whatever they are—have not just influenced the local people,” says Offutt. “They influenced some pretty famous people, too.” The earliest written accounts of dark watchers go back to the 1700s, when Spanish colonists gave the mysterious beings their name: los vigilantes oscuros. Since then, sightings have continued, and in 1937, the creatures made their literary debut….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born May 10, 1969 — John Scalzi, 55. This is not full accounting of everything that the rather prolific John Scalzi has done, nor is it limited to his fiction. Now that I’ve got that out of the way let’s start…

I was trying to remember what I first read by him and I think it was actually Old Man’s War whereas I expect you know the characters of Old Man’s War are senior citizens who leave Earth to have their brains transplanted into cyborg bodies and sent off to be fight in an interstellar war. Scalzi has said the series was in homage in Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.

John Scalzi in 2019.

I only read further in the series through the “Questions for a Soldier” short story, The Ghost Brigades and the Zoe’s Tale. The latter broke my heart really it. Damn, I so like the main character here, and spoiler alert, what happened to her really did severely distressed me. Effing hell. 

So who here has read and liked The Android’s Dream novels? I liked everything I read by Scalzi save this. Maybe it was the premise itself, maybe the weirdness of the sheep hybrid which I’ll not discuss lest somebody be here who’s keen to read it still, maybe there there was too much Philip K. Dick in it. Whatever it was, I didn’t like it. So tell me why I should have.

Space opera, I knew he had it in him. And the Interdependency series certainly proved that amply. Lovely premise of an Empire, spoiler alert again so go drink Romulan blood wine, as the portals connecting the worlds of their Empire are apparently collapsing. The titles of the final novel in the trilogy sums up the trilogy up nicely, The Last Emperox.

And then there’s the Hugo winning Redshirts. Obviously off the Trek’s infamous oh my he’s a red shirt and will die a horrible death meme, it allowed Scalzi to play around with that delicious premise. No, I’m not saying a word more, so no spoiler alert needed. It’s a great story told well. There’s even something that Scalzi might well have borrowed from the Clue film here.

The last novel I want to talk about involves Fuzzies. Fuzzy Nation, authorized by the estate of H. Beam Piper, was not intended to be a sequel to Little Fuzzy, the Piper novel which was nominated for a Hugo. Scalzi wrote it first and then got permission from the Estate to publish it. It doesn’t feel like something the Piper would have written, but it’s worth reading none the less. 

Now let’s note Whatever, no doubt the most entertaining blog done by any writer, genre or otherwise. Is this what he won a Fan Writer Hugo for? If so, great choice. It’s something I very much look forward to reading every day. I see his Hugo for Best Related Book was related to his blog, Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever 1998–2008. 

Ok, that’s what I like by him. No, it’s not everything but I did say it would be. As always, I know you’ll give copious comments about what I didn’t mention. 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • Off the Mark’s lines up the usual suspects.
  • Shoe lets the name speak for itself.
  • Speed Bump disappoints these readers.
  • Carpe Diem has an unexpected haunting.
  • Nathan W Pyle shows a character resisting inimical forces!

(9) A VICIOUS GANG OF FACTS. Those skeptics at ScreenRant pooh-pooh “8 Sci-Fi Movie Inventions Ruined By Real Science”. First on their list of impossibilities:

8. Lightsabers

The Star Wars Series

One of the most iconic movie weapons ever created, lightsabers need little introduction. The mythical weapons of both the legendary Jedi order and the insidious Sith, these blazing hot swords of pure light can slice through nearly anything in the Star Wars universe, barring specialty-made materials like Durasteel. Not only that, but they’re also capable of deflecting bolts from energy-based blaster weapons, making them an impressive source of offense as well as defense. In the lore of the franchise, the lightsabers are powered by the mysterious Kyber crystals.

The lightsabers operate on different laws of physics than those in reality. Creating a powerful enough beam of light to cut through solid metal would result in a much longer, unwieldy weapon, not limited in its projection to a mere three feet. Even ignoring the issues regarding the lightsabers’ power source, which would easily need to be connected to some kind of power-generating backpack with today’s available technology, the ability of the weapons to physically clash with one another disobeys the properties of light. In reality, crossing lightsabers would simply pass through one another.

(10) BEWARE DOCTOR WHO SPOILER. Is it really? I don’t know, so better safe etc. “Doctor Who’ Star Ncuti Gatwa Filmed With 20 Babies in Season Premiere”.

While filming episode one of “Doctor Who” season 14, entitled “Space Babies,” Millie Gibson had to do the impossible: keep the attention of 20 infants at once. Although she was bearing her soul in a speech integral to her character’s backstory, the babies kept dozing off and losing their attention to the flashing lights of the space-age set. So, to keep their little eyes focused on her, she delivered her lines while a nursery rhyme played on her phone just out of camera view.

“It was so hard honestly,” recalled Gibson. “It was the most bizarre thing but it will stay in my mind forever.”

…“They were such divas,” Gatwa joked about his toddler co-stars. “They had so many demands.”…

(11) FLAME ON! I don’t know how this cooking news item ended up at Popular Mechanics: “’Star Wars’ Fans, Truff’s Latest Super-Spicy Hot Sauce Is for You”.

…That’s right: Truff—the brand behind the decadent truffle-infused hot sauces Oprah has named to her Favorite Things list for the last three years—just dropped a new hot sauce with some serious Star Wars flair. Truff’s Star Wars Dark Side Hot Sauce is nothing to play with, given it’s now the brand’s spiciest sauce, featuring the hot-as-Hades ghost pepper.

Yes, the ghost pepper is certainly quite hot, topping out at over 1 million Scoville Units. That said, it isn’t the hottest. That title only recently belongs to Pepper X, which reaches more than double the ghost pepper’s 1+ million Scoville Units. According to Britannica, though, less than 20 years ago, the ghost pepper actually was the fieriest, most fearsome of them all. But just because there’s one hotter out there now doesn’t mean ghost peppers aren’t still fierce, as you’ll find out when you crack open this hot sauce….

(12) MONSOON Q&A. A BBC interview: “Doctor Who star Jinkx Monsoon on playing ‘zany’ villain Maestro”.

… American drag queen Jinkx Monsoon, who plays the new nemesis, tells BBC Newsbeat her “dreams have been granted in a wonderful way”.

Jinkx is known as the “Queen of Queens” after winning a regular and All Star season of RuPaul’s Drag Race.

And she says moving to the world’s longest-running science fiction show felt like a natural progression for a self-described trans queer actor.

“Sci-fi has always been queer. Anyone who tells you otherwise is delusional,” she says.

“There are prominent writers, directors, producers who are queer in these fields. And it just hasn’t really been able to be talked about and a lot of them nowadays are done being silent.”

She adds there has been “so much queer progress” in society, but feels in the entertainment industry “there’s still been this thing of queer people behind the cameras”.

“And only certain palatable society-approved queer people get to be in front of the camera.

“What I really love about this Doctor Who season is it saying: ‘To hell with that’.”

(13) HOLY SH!T! Aka the video of the day — Hell and Back by Scott Base. A short film based on original Bad Space comic. Mark sent the link with a warning, “I’m not sure I’d want to see a whole movie…”

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