Tag Archives: Horror Writers Association

Pixel Scroll 6/18/23 I Think There Is A World Market For About Five Pixel Scrolls

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(1) STOKERCON 2024. Next year the Horror Writers Association will hold StokerCon in San Diego, CA from May 30-June 2. Here’s the Eventbrite listing: StokerCon 2024 Tickets.

(2) 3-BODY TRAILER FROM G-O-T CREATORS. “3 Body Problem: Netflix Show From Game of Thrones Creators Has Trailer” reports Variety.

At long last, Netflix has revealed the first footage of its highly anticipated sci-fi epic from “Game of Thrones” creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss — their first large-scale project at the streamer since signing a mega overall deal in 2019 — and Alexander Woo.

Based on the book series by Cixin Liu, the eight-episode drama, which recently wrapped production, will launch in January 2024.

Per Netflix’s logline for the sci-fi series, “A young woman’s fateful decision in 1960s China reverberates across space and time to a group of brilliant scientists in the present day. As the laws of nature unravel before their eyes, five former colleagues reunite to confront the greatest threat in humanity’s history.”…

(3) BAD B.O. “Pixar’s ‘Elemental’ Falls Flat, Adding to Worries About the Brand” opines the New York Times.

Pixar is damaged as a big-screen brand.

That was one of the rather glum takeaways from the weekend box office, which found “Elemental,” a $200 million-plus Pixar original, arriving to a disastrous $29.5 million in domestic ticket sales. “The Flash,” a Warner Bros. superhero spectacle that cost about $200 million, also struggled, taking in a lethargic $55.1 million, according to Comscore, which compiles ticketing data.

“Hard to sugarcoat this,” said David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers.

Questions about Pixar’s health have swirled in Hollywood and among investors since last June, when the Disney-owned studio released “Lightyear” to disastrous results. How could Pixar, the gold standard of animation studios for nearly three decades, have gotten a movie so wrong — especially one about Buzz Lightyear, a bedrock “Toy Story” character?

Maybe pandemic-worried families were not quite ready to return to theaters. Or maybe, as some box office analysts speculated, Disney had weakened the Pixar brand by using its films to build the Disney+ streaming service. Starting in late 2020, Disney debuted three Pixar films in a row (“Soul,” “Turning Red” and “Luca”) online, bypassing theaters altogether.

By streaming standards, those three movies were runaway hits. But Pixar’s most recent box office success was in 2019, when “Toy Story 4” took in $1.1 billion worldwide…

(4) MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE PIECE THEATRE. Cora Buhlert has posted a new Masters of the Universe toy photo story — or rather two short ones in time for the US Father’s Day: “Two Links and a Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre Double Feature: ‘New Dad’ and ‘Orko Interruptus’”.

…This version of King Randor is based on the 2002 cartoon, where Randor was protrayed as a somewhat younger and more active character than his Filmation counterpart. While the Filmation Randor mostly set around on his throne and occasionally gave a speech, the 2002 Randor charged into battle alongside his warriors on occasion and also seemed to do more actual governing. The 2002 cartoon also established that Randor was captain of the guard, i.e. Teela’s current, before he became king. All in all, I’d say that the 2002 cartoon features the best overall King Randor – and Randor is a difficult character, because his raison d’etre is to be the parent who does not understand or even see their child – though the Netflix CGI features the best version of Randor as a father. In case you’re wondering which version of King Randor is the worst, that would be the King Randor of Masters of the Universe Revelation, who narrowly missed winning the 2021 Darth Vader Parenthood Award…

(5) AGENT OF CHAOS. But trolls have made Father’s Day rough for Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki as he told Twitter readers:

Hows my Father’s day going? Saw @virtuallyleslie wrote a racist manifesto where she said I only get attention cuz of political correctness. Her supremacist cult friends are on it, including the one impersonating my dead father who was gruesomely murdered, to defame & harass me

Patrick S. Tomlinson also has commented on what Leslie Varney wrote, and the significance of it coming from an agent. Thread starts here.

Leslie Varney wrote a reply thread that starts here.

(6) ONCE UPON A BIRTHDAY. Brian Murphy profiles Lin Carter for what would have been his 93rd birthday: “Lin Carter: Enthusiast of the Fantastic” at Goodman Games.

…. I love Carter’s illuminating and occasionally gushing introductions to the volumes he edited. Introducing readers to William Morris in the BAFS, Carter makes a compelling case that his The Wood Beyond the World (1895) was the first-ever novel of heroic fantasy ever written in a true secondary world, quipping that “it was the first of all such tales of adventurous wanderings through the marvelous landscapes of worlds which have somehow managed to avoid the wear and tear of ever having actually existed.”…

(7) FREE READ. Issue 7 of Whetstone Amateur Magazine of Sword and Sorcery has just come out and is available as a free download: Whetstone: Amateur Magazine of Pulp Sword and Sorcery: Issue 7.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

1999 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in The Sky is our Beginning this Scroll.  It won a much deserved Hugo at Chicon 2000 along with a John W. Campbell Memorial Award and a Prometheus Award for Best Libertarian SF Novel. It was also nominated for a HOMer and a Nebula as well. Damn impressive I’d say.

The novel is a loose prequel and is set twenty thousand years earlier to his A Fire Upon the Deep which was published previously. 

So let’s get to the Beginning…

The manhunt extended across more than one hundred light-years and eight centuries. It had always been a secret search, unacknowledged even among some of the participants. In the early years, it had simply been encrypted queries hidden in radio broadcasts. Decades and centuries passed. There were clues, interviews with The Man’s fellow-travelers, pointers in a half-dozen contradictory directions: The Man was alone now and heading still farther away; The Man had died before the search ever began; The Man had a war fleet and was coming back upon them. 

With time, there was some consistency to the most credible stories. The evidence was solid enough that certain ships changed schedules and burned decades of time to look for more clues. Fortunes were lost because of the detours and delays, but the losses were to a few of the largest trading Families, and went unacknowledged. They were rich enough, and this search was important enough, that it scarcely mattered. For the search had narrowed: The Man was traveling alone, a vague blur of multiple identities, a chain of one-shot jobs on minor trading vessels, but always moving back and back into this end of Human Space. The hunt narrowed from a hundred light-years, to fifty, to twenty—and a half-dozen star systems. 

And finally, the manhunt came down to a single world at the coreward end of Human Space. Now Sammy could justify a fleet specially for the end of the hunt. The crew and even most of the owners would not know the mission’s true purpose, but he had a good chance of finally ending the search.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born June 18, 1917 — Richard Boone. He did only two genre roles of which one, playing Maston Thrust Jr. in The Last Dinosaur, I’m willing to bet almost all of you have never seen it. (It gets a fifty percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes.) The other however is one that nearly everyone here has heard, yes heard, as he voiced Smaug in the Rankin/Bass animated version of The Hobbit. Of course his major non-genre role was as Paladin in Have Gun, Will Travel which I’ve seen every episode of at least three times. Really I have. (Died 1981.)
  • Born June 18, 1931 — Dick Spelman. A fan and a legendary book dealer who was active at SF conventions from the late Seventies through the early Nineties. He chaired Windycon IX in 1982. He was a member of the board of directors of Chicon IV, and ran the Dealers’ Room at many Worldcons. In 1991 he sold his book business to Larry Smith and retired to Orlando, where he was active in local fannish affairs. (Died 2012.)
  • Born June 18, 1942 — Roger Ebert. He got his start as a fanzine writer while in high school, publishing the Stymie zine and having his writing appear in Xero, Yandro and many other zines such as Kipple, Parsection and Psi-Phi. At university, he was a member of the Champaign-Urbana Science Fiction Association. His fannish  autobiography is  How Propellor-Heads, BNFs, Sercon Geeks, Newbies, Recovering GAFIAtors and Kids in Basements Invented the World Wide Web, All Except for the Delivery System. Mike has much to say about him in a obituary here. (Died 2013.)
  • Born June 18, 1958 — Jody Lee, 65. Illustrator with a long career in genre work. Her first cover art was Jo Clayton’s Changer’s Moon for DAW Books in 1985. Her latest is Passages: All-New Tales of Valdemar, a Mercedes Lackey anthology from DAW Books which seems to be her primary client. Her most stellar website is here.
  • Born June 18, 1960 — Barbara Broccoli, 63. Daughter of the late James Bond producer Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli. She has producer or director credit on at least fourteen Bond films which or may not be genre depending on how you view each one of them. Her only acting role is as an uncredited Opera patron in The Living Daylights. She produced the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang production staged in NYC at the Hilton Theater sixteen years ago. 
  • Born June 18, 1947 — Linda Thorson, 76. Best known for playing Tara King, the only actual spy in The Avengers. For her role in that series, she received a special BAFTA at the 2000 BAFTA TV Awards along with the other three actresses from the series, Honor Blackman, Joanna Lumley and Diana Rigg. She’s also been in Return of the Saint, Tales from the Darkside, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, F/X: The Series and Monsters. 
  • Born June 18, 1949 — Chris Van Allsburg, 74. For some twenty years now until the Pandemic came upon us, the local Narrow Gauge Railroad ran a Polar Express every Christmas season compete with cars decorated in high Victorian fashion and steaming cups of hot chocolate for the children. It always sold out for the entire month they ran it. Allsburg‘s Polar Express book is just magical for me and I enjoy his Jumanji every bit as much. (I’ve never seen the film.) He illustrated A City in Winter which was written by Mark Helprin and I highly recommended it. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) ROLLING THE CREDITS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Descendants of Jack Kirby seem none too happy about the recently-released Disney+ documentary on Stan Lee’s life. Granddaughter Jillian Kirby has published a statement from her father Neal Kirby at the latter’s request. 

Among other things, Neil provides an analogy for Lee having an idea for a character to others bringing the character to life. “In 1501, the Opera del Duomo commissioned a 26-year-old Michelangelo to sculpt a statue of David for the Cathedral of Florence—their idea, their money. The statue is called Michelangelo’s David—his genius, his vision, his creativity.” “Jack Kirby’s Son, Neal Kirby Responds to Stan Lee Disney+ Documentary” at Bleeding Cool.

The following is an excerpt of the statement from Neal Kirby, son of the late Jack Kirby.

…I (000ps!) understand that, as a “documentary about Stan Lee,” most of the narrative is in his voice, literally and figuratively. It’s not any big secret that there has always been controversy over the parts that were played in the creation and success of Marvel’s characters. Stan Lee had the fortunate circumstance to have access to the corporate megaphone and media, and he used these to create his own mythos as to the creation of the Marvel character pantheon. He made himself the voice of Marvel. So, for several decades he was the “only” man standing, and blessed with a long life, the last man standing (my father died in 1994). It should also be noted and is generally accepted that Stan Lee had a limited knowledge of history, mythology, or science.

On the other hand, my father’s knowledge of these subjects, to which I and many others can personally attest, was extensive. Einstein summed it up better; “More the knowledge, lesser the ego. Lesser the knowledge, more the ego.”

If you were to look at a list and timeline of Marvel’s characters from 1960 through 1966, the period in which the vast majority of Marvel’s major characters were created during Lee’s tenure, you will see Lee’s name as a co-creator on every character, with the exception of the Silver Surfer, solely created by my father. Are we to assume Lee had a hand in creating every Marvel character? Are we to assume that the other co-creator never walked into Lee’s office and said, “Stan, I have a great idea for a character!” According to Lee, it was always his idea. Lee spends a fair amount of time talking about how and why he created the Fantastic Four, with only one fleeting reference to my father. Indeed, most comics historians recognize that my father based the Fantastic Four on a 1957 comic he created for DC, “Challengers of the Unknown,” even naming Ben Grimm (The Thing) after his father Benjamin, and Sue Storm after my older sister Susan.

Though the conflict between Lee and my father concerning creator credit gets glanced over with little mention, there is more attention paid to the strife between Lee and Steve Ditko, with Lee’s voice proclaiming, “It was my idea, therefore I created the character,” Ditko’s rebuttal being that his art and storyline is what brought life to Spiderman. In 1501, the Opera del Duomo commissioned a 26-year-old Michelangelo to sculpt a statue of David for the Cathedral of Florence – their idea, their money. The statue is called Michelangelo’s David – his genius, his vision, his creativity.

I was very fortunate. My father worked at home in his Long Island basement studio we referred to as “The Dungeon,” usually 14 – 16 hours a day, seven days a week. Most of the artists, writers, inkers, etc. worked at home, not in the Marvel offices as depicted in the program. Through middle and high school, I was able to stand at my father’s left shoulder, peer through a cloud of cigar smoke, and witness the Marvel Universe being created. I am by no means a comics historian, but there are few, if any, that have personally seen or experienced what I have, and know the truth with first-hand knowledge.

My father retired from comic books in the early 1980s and of course, passed away in 1994. Lee had over 35 years of uncontested publicity, much naturally, with the backing and blessing of Marvel as he boosted the Marvel brand as a side effect of boosting himself. The decades of Lee’s self-promotion culminated with his cameo appearances in over 35 Marvel films starting with “X-Men” in 2000, thus cementing his status as the creator of all things Marvel to an otherwise unknowing movie audience of millions, unfamiliar with the true history of Marvel comics. My father’s first screen credit didn’t appear until the closing crawl at the end of the film adaptation of Iron Man in 2008, after Stan Lee, Don Heck, and Larry Lieber. The battle for creator’s rights has been around since the first inscribed Babylonian tablet. It’s way past time to at least get this one chapter of literary/art history right. ‘Nuff said.

(12) JEOPARDY! [Item by David Goldfarb.] On Thursday’s episode there was a full category of “21st Century horror novels”, which the contestants took in order.

  • Returning champ Holly Hassel
  • Kiran MacCormick
  • Suzanne Goldlust

$200: Christina Henry’s “Looking Glass” is the last book in a chilling trilogy about a woman with this 5-letter name

Returning champ Holly Hassel tried: “What is Megan?”

Her name was Alice. (As in “Through the Looking-Glass”….)

$400: In Grady Hendrix’ “How to Sell” this place, it has a sealed attic & creepy puppet collection & Redfin will be no help

Suzanne Goldlust knew or guessed: “What is a haunted house?”

$600: The Scooby Gang was often accused of being these, the title of a book by Edgar Cantero about 4 teens with a telepathic pooch

Suzanne said, “What are meddling teens?”

Holly tried “What are those meddling kids?” but this was not accepted, as the title of the book was just “Meddling Kids”.

$800: Megan James pays homage to this horror master & his creation Cthulhu with her graphic novel “Innsmouth”

Holly knew this one.

$1000: Clive Barker’s “Scarlet Gospel” revisits the Hellraiser universe where this prickly priest of Hell mans the pulpit

Holly knew this one too: “Who is Pinhead?”

In the Double Jeopardy round, there was one:

TV Criminals, $800: The villainous supe Homelander on this series is the leader of The Seven, a group of some not-so-super heroes

This was triple stumper: nobody was familiar with the comic “The Boys” or its Amazon Prime adaptation. (I quibble with the question here. The Seven are super enough! It’s the “hero” part that should be getting the “not-so-“.)

(13) TURA SATANA. [Item by Steve Green.] Tura Satana, whose movie credits included The Astro-Zombies (1968) and its 2004 ‘reimaging’, is now an action figure, based upon her role in the 1965 cult classic Faster Pussycat… Kill! Kill!

Ms Satana, who died in 2011, was smart enough to trademark her own likeness, and this is apparently the first officially-licensed figure. It’s a collaboration between White Elephant Toyz and the publisher PlaidStallions (as Odeon Toys). “Tura Satana Action Figure Pre-Orders now open!”.

… This limited edition action figure is 8″ tall and features a detailed outfit, natural hair, motorcycle gloves, and boots. Tura is ready to kick your other action figures’ asses.

Each Tura Satana Action figure comes in vintage style packaging with striking artwork by Joseph Michael Linsner, creator of “Dawn.”…

(14) FIRST AMERICAN WOMAN IN SPACE. The National Air and Space Museum remembers “Sally Ride”.

40 years ago today, Dr. Sally K. Ride became the first American woman in space, launching aboard Space Shuttle Challenger on the STS-7 mission.

Dr. Sally Kristen Ride was a physicist, astronaut, educator, and advocate for young people in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Best remembered as the first American woman in space, Ride’s tenure as an astronaut was but one chapter in a long and impactful career.

Ride was accepted to the astronaut corps in 1978 as a member of Astronaut Group 8—NASA’s first astronaut class to include women. On June 18, 1983, when Dr. Sally K. Ride became the first American woman in space, she challenged long-held stereotypes about who would make a good astronaut. Ride spent more than two weeks in space over the course of two missions, STS-7 and STS-41G. Ride operated one of the Space Shuttle’s most important tools—the robotic arm—and loved taking photos of Earth from space.

When Ride retired from NASA in 1987, she dedicated herself to educating and inspiring learners. For more than 18 years she taught physics at the University of California San Diego. In 2001, Ride founded Imaginary Lines (now Sally Ride Science) with her partner, Dr. Tam O’Shaughnessy, to inspire girls and young women to explore science careers.

(15) ANKYLOBITERS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] A new dinosaur has been found on the Isle of Wight so the BBC reports.

Don’t worry, it’s dead! So we are all safe. (Phew.) If you do go to the Isle of Wight to hunt for dinosaurs (they really all are dead) then I recommend a beer and food at the Crab and Lobster Inn. The view from outside to the left is mainland Brit Cit while straight ahead and left is the English Channel with a view of The Nab tower a few miles offshore and transatlantic liners going around the point.

But if you can’t be bothered then there is the primary research paper.

…It is the first new species of armoured dinosaur to be found on the island since 1865 and belongs to the same family – the ankylosaurs.

Though fearsome in appearance with its blade-like armour, the giant reptile – which has been named Vectipelta barretti – only ate plants.

It was discovered in rocks dating back between 66 and 145 million years….

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Here’s the teaser trailer for One Piece.

Here’s a first look at the live action adaptation of the most popular manga in history, written by Eiichiro Oda. ONE PIECE sets sail on August 31st only on Netflix.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Cora Buhlert, David Goldfarb, Steve Green, Rich Lynch, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]

2022 Bram Stoker Awards

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The 2022 Bram Stoker Award winners were announced on June 17 during the Annual Bram Stoker Awards Banquet at StokerCon™ 2023 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 

2022 BRAM STOKER AWARDS®  

Superior Achievement in a Novel

  • Iglesias, Gabino – The Devil Takes You Home (Mullholland Press)

Superior Achievement in a First Novel

  • Nogle, Christi – Beulah (Cemetery Gates Media)

Superior Achievement in a Middle Grade Novel

  • Kraus, Daniel – They Stole Our Hearts (Henry Holt and Co.)

Superior Achievement in a Graphic Novel

  • Aquilone, James (editor) – Kolchak: The Night Stalker: 50th Anniversary (Moonstone Books)

Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel

  • Ottone, Robert P. – The Triangle (Raven Tale Publishing)

Superior Achievement in Long Fiction

  • Katsu, Alma – The Wehrwolf (Amazon Original Stories)

Superior Achievement in Short Fiction

  • Yardley, Mercedes M. – “Fracture” (Mother: Tales of Love and Terror) (Weird Little Worlds)

Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection

  • Khaw, Cassandra – Breakable Things (Undertow Publications)

Superior Achievement in a Screenplay

[TIE]

  • Derrickson, Scott and Cargill, C. Robert – The Black Phone (Blumhouse Productions, Crooked Highway, Universal Pictures)
  • Duffer Brothers, The – Stranger Things: Episode 04.01 “Chapter One: The Hellfire Club” (21 Laps Entertainment, Monkey Massacre, Netflix, Upside Down Pictures)

Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection

  • Pelayo, Cynthia – Crime Scene (Raw Dog Screaming Press)

Superior Achievement in an Anthology

  • Datlow, Ellen – Screams from the Dark: 29 Tales of Monsters and the Monstrous (Tor Nightfire)

Superior Achievement in Non–Fiction

  • Waggoner, Tim – Writing in the Dark: The Workbook (Guide Dog Books)

Superior Achievement in Short Non–Fiction

  • Murray, Lee – “I Don’t Read Horror (& Other Weird Tales)” (Interstellar Flight Magazine) (Interstellar Flight Press)

Also presented at the ceremony:

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD 

  • Elizabeth Massie
  • Nuzo Onoh
  • John Saul

SPECIALTY PRESS AWARD

  • Undertow Publications

THE RICHARD LAYMON PRESIDENT’S AWARD

  • Meghan Arcuri

THE KAREN LANSDALE SILVER HAMMER AWARD

  • Karen Lansdale

MENTOR OF THE YEAR AWARD

  • David Jeffery

Pixel Scroll 6/17/23 Whoever Lives In Glass Pixels Should Not Throw Scrolls

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(1) MEDICAL UPDATE. Ursula Vernon got a biopsy on a lump, and the results are unfortunate.

(2) MOVING WORDS. David Gerrold has opened a GoFundMe appeal to “Help Move David Gerrold’s Family To Vermont”. He offers a couple of free ebooks as an incentive to go to the link and read the whole thing.

…As many of you know, we’re planning to move to Vermont as soon as we can. It’s about the right schools for the kids, the right environment for Sean and Alyce’s health and work, and the right place for me to (eventually) retire. We have been working hard to get this house in shape, get all of our paperwork in order, and find a place that suits our specific needs.

…Right now, I’m the sole support of my family. I’m doing my best, but there’s a WGAW strike, so there are options that are on hold and if the past is any guide, will probably evaporate when the strike ends. Alyce has a toddler and a baby to take care of, so going back to work is out of the question for her. For various reasons, Sean has to rethink his career options, so he’s concentrating on being the best dad he can, and that’s fine with me too. Being a dad is good for him and good for the kids.

So right now, it’s all on me. I’ve got some resources, just not enough. So, I’m asking for a little help. Anything you can contribute will be greatly appreciated. It will get us where we need to be….

(3) THE GATES WE KEEP. Norman Spinrad’s latest “At Large SF” asks how to “Save The SF Magazines From AI, Amazon, And SFWA?” But is this a cure?

It is no secret that the three traditional ink and paper SF magazines, Asimov’s, Analog, and Fantasy and Science Fiction, are in deep trouble, and perhaps not as obviously so are the main online SF magazines. All of them are overrun with AI created submissions and how what was once SFWA, a professional SF writers’ union in all but name, has become just as much a part of the problem, if not worse.

When the SFWA, of which I was one of the creators, if you wanted to be a full member, as I remember, you had to have published 3 stories in magazines accepted as professional, or one novel published by such a book publisher.

This more or less continued while I was three time president, and until fairly recently. In those days, there were no more that 1000 full members of SFWA, but rather rapidly it has now become bloated by about 2500 members of all sorts of memberships which you can join and remain as long as you pay for one the various levels of available membership. And you can also buy even more sorts of official SFWA stuff, a perfect fannish economic operation.

Back in the day, you could write “Member of SFWA” on the header of your submission as long as it was true, and it could mean some thing to an editor, and it might get your story read above the slush pile….

And SFWA membership now plays the same lucrative game. Now since anyone could email anything anywhere without having print it, put it into an envelope, and mail it into the slushpile, anyone can do likewise for free, and of late, you don’t have to really be human, to make the slushpiles even more enormous.

And to make matters worse, since sales in book stories or even drug stores have largely disappeared,, the magazines were forced to largely resort to online subscriptions, meaning Amazon, which has now stopped serving them.

What is more, the SF magazines have for some time become just about the last magazines containing any real short stories, and if they should disappear, so might the literary short story, period.

What can be done about this? It seems to me that the magazines are making a big mistake worrying about what to do about the AI submissions and trying find ways to filter them out of the slushpiles. The answer to that, of course, would be AI slush readers, which at least could be easily taught to recognize each other, if not to recognize the 10% of literary interest.

So what I propose is to look backwards instead of forward to the original SFWA. Call it simply the SF Society. It could be the top of the SFWA or it could be independent, it doesn’t matter. As the original SFWA, there is a membership requirement of say the same 3 published stories by the approved magazines or maybe books too, but with a difference.

If you are a member of the SFS you are entitled to say so on your submissions to any SFS approved publications. But the SFS does not approve the publishers, they approve themselves! They just understand that the SFS mark on a submission means that the writer is a member and they can read it atop of the slushpile, it’s not a requirement, it’s a service.

But where does that leave would-be writers who believe they have what it takes to join the SFS? Look backward. There have long been SF writing schools where you must not just pay but where you must send a story and have it be accepted by a literary board as sufficiently promising.

But SFS is not a school. It has its own literary approval board for the sufficiently promising writers. So who is on the approval board?

Look much further back to Plato’s REPUBLIC. Plato was skeptical of democracy, so he wrote what amounted to the very first skeptical fiction in the form of the non historical Atlantis, ruled by proper philosophers such as himself. And who had selected them? Philosophers who had already been approved by other such philosophizers and so far up the line.

Okay, this is not democracy, but we are not talking about selecting rulers. An SFS approval board could be self-elected SFS member volunteers. Or even magazine editors as well who might want to serve and were approved by the SFS approval board….

(4) TIDHAR Q&A. “Pulp Fiction: PW Talks with Lavie Tidhar” at Publishers Weekly.

An unlikely cast is pulled into the hunt for lost pulp classic Lode Stars in World Fantasy Award winner Tidhar’s metafictional sci-fi romp The Circumference of the World (Tachyon, Sept.).

What inspired this story?

It began so long ago it’s hard to say! The very early seeds for it were born on Vanua Lava in Vanuatu, back in 2007, where the first section of the book takes place. I became interested in the little-known story of the WWII Coastwatchers there and climbed to their hill fort, which is much as it appears in the novel. But that was just one strand; then I had to wait for the others to materialize.

And how did they?

The black holes came from a novelette I wrote that was also called “Lode Stars.” I ran into someone who told me they thought there was more to it, which haunted me because I realized they were right. The section about hapless book dealers in 2001 London was conceived of as a trip to a vanished past. All those bookshops are long gone, and I was trying to catch a bit of the soul of that world before it disappeared. Which, in a way, is the whole theme of the book: how much of what we are is what we remember and what happens if those memories are lost?…

(5) COSY DELENDA EST. Cora Buhlert does an impressively thorough roundup of the players and viewpoints represented in the recent social media flash about “cosy horror” in “Same Old Debate, New Clothes: The Cozy Horror Controversy”. She begins:

Sigh. It’s that time of the year again and we’re having the same old debate again whether some interlopers are trying to ruin the purity of the genre and gentrify it by writing and reading the wrong sort of books.

This time around, the focus is not Hopepunk or what a certain podcast termed Squeecore, but cozy horror, cozy fantasy’s spookier sibling.

The current debate seems to have been sparked by an episode of the Books in the Freezer podcast about cozy horror (which I haven’t listened to yet), which received some pushback on Twitter, and in particular by a recent article on The Mary Sue by Julia Glassman on the cozy horror phenomenon and the backlash against it. Though the term “cozy horror” isn’t new. Here is an article by Jose Cruz from Nightmare Magazine, a horror mag, about cozy horror from 2021 and I’m pretty sure Cruz didn’t invent the term either. The phenomenon is much older anyway. What is now called cozy horror goes back to the ghost stories of the nineteenth century. A genre that – as Jess Nevins pointed out on Twitter – has triggered criticism and backlash for almost two hundred years now. And the reason was that ghost stories were mostly read and written by women. So yup, it’s plain old misogyny….

And Cora ends:

… In short, it’s all depressingly familiar and I probably should have just ignored this latest flare-up of this ages old argument, but the whole cozy horror debate annoyed me enough to put in my two cents.

Cora’s conclusion reminds me of a favorite H. L. Mencken remark, that it is best to spend life sitting in the brewery drinking beer, but sometimes he couldn’t help but rush out and break a bottle over someone’s head.

(6) HWA PRIDE. The Horror Writers Association blog continues its thematic interviews in “A Point of Pride: Interview with Lee Mandelo”.

What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it? 

Anything that provokes strong feeling, I’m into that—and horror, alongside erotica, devotes itself so well to powerful, bodily emotions. As a weird gay child of the ’90s, I was probably destined to love horror. There was such a huge boom in scary books, movies, and so on by LGBTQ+ artists going on during that decade. Unsurprising, given things like the HIV/AIDS epidemic, alongside government abandonment and surging social persecution through the late ’80s onward. I didn’t have that context as a kid, but I had the materials, and they left strong impressions on me! 

Looking back now, I feel like being drawn to horror—a place where stories about being an “outsider” and also experiencing extreme dread and fear could be made somehow safe to explore, in their own strange way—was only natural.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

1978 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

Vonda N. McIntyre is an author I’m well familiar with as I’ve read her Dreamsnake (we get our Beginning this Scroll), The Moon and the Sun and The King’s Daughter. Anyone read her Starfarers series? I’ve not but it looks potentially readable and certainly how she came to write it is a fascinating story indeed. 

Pocket Books decided to have her do novelizations of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. She created names for Trek characters that later became canon, including Hikaru Sulu, and Kirk’s mother Winona.

She’s won a number of Awards including one at Seacon ’79 for Dreamsnake which was also nominated for a Ditmar. She won a Nebula for Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand novelette (also nominated for a Hugo) and another one for her The Moon and The Stars novel. 

Another one I feel left us far too early though she had seven decades of life.  She died of metastatic pancreatic cancer. Damn.

Here’s our Beginning…

The little boy was frightened. Gently, Snake touched his hot forehead. Behind her, three adults stood close together, watching, suspicious, afraid to show their concern with more than narrow lines around their eyes. They feared Snake as much as they feared their only child’s death. In the dimness of the tent, the strange blue glow of the lantern gave no reassurance. 

The child watched with eyes so dark the pupils were not visible, so dull that Snake herself feared for his life. She stroked his hair. It was long, and very pale, dry and irregular for several inches near the scalp, a striking color against his dark skin. Had Snake been with these people months ago, she would have known the child was growing ill.

“Bring my case, please,” Snake said.

The child’s parents started at her soft voice. Perhaps they had expected the screech of a bright jay, or the hissing of a shining serpent. This was the first time Snake had spoken in their presence. She had only watched, when the three of them had come to observe her from a distance and whisper about her occupation and her youth; she had only listened, and then nodded, when finally they came to ask her help. Perhaps they had thought she was mute. 

The fair-haired younger man lifted her leather case. He held the satchel away from his body, leaning to hand it to her, breathing shallowly with nostrils flared against the faint smell of musk in the dry desert air. 

Snake had almost accustomed herself to the kind of uneasiness he showed; she had already seen it often.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born June 17, 1903 — William Bogart. Yes, another one who wrote Doc Savage novels under the pseudonym Kenneth Robeson, some with Lester Dent. Between 1949 and 1947, he or they wrote some fifteen Doc Savage novels in total. Some of them would get reprinted in the late Eighties in omnibuses that also included novels done with Lester Dent. (Died 1977.)
  • Born June 17, 1927 — Wally Wood. Comic book writer, artist and independent publisher, best known for his work on EC Comics’ Mad magazine, Marvel’s Daredevil, and Topps’s landmark Mars Attacks set. He was the inaugural inductee into the comic book industry’s Jack Kirby Hall of Fame, and was later inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame. (Died 1981.)
  • Born June 17, 1931 — Dean Ing. I’m reasonably sure the first thing I read by him was Soft Targets which I really liked and I know I read all of his Man-Kzin Wars stories as I went through a phase of reading all that popcorn literature set in Niven’s universe. (Died 2020.)
  • Born June 17, 1941 — William Lucking. Here because he played Renny in Doc Savage: Man of Bronze. (I know I’ve seen it, but I’ll be damn if I remember much about it.)  He’s also had one-offs in Mission: Impossible, The Incredible Hulk, The American Hero, The Quest, Voyagers, X-Files, The Lazarus Man, Millenium, Deep Space Nine and Night Stalker. (Died 2021.)
  • Born June 17, 1953 — Phyllis Weinberg, 70. She’s a fan who was married to fellow fan Robert E. Weinberg (died 2016). They co-edited the first issue of The Weird Tales Collector, and she co-edited the Weinberg Tales with him, Doug Ellis and Robert T. Garcia. She, along with Nancy Ford and Tina L. Jens, wrote “The Many Faces of Chicago” essay that was that was in the 1996 WFC guide. The Weinbergs co-chaired the World Fantasy Convention In 1996.
  • Born June 17, 1982 — Jodie Whittaker, 41. The Thirteenth Doctor who did three series plus several upcoming specials. She played Ffion Foxwell in the Black Mirror‘s “The Entire History of You”, and was Samantha Adams in Attack the Block, a horror SF film. I like her version of The Doctor a lot with David Tennant being my other favorite modern Doctor. 
  • Born June 17, 1982 — Arthur Darvill, 41. Actor who’s has in my opinion had two great roles. The first was playing Rory Williams, one of the Eleventh Doctor’s companions. The second, and to my mind the more interesting of the two, was playing the time-traveler Rip Hunter in the Legends of Tomorrow, a Time Lord of sorts. (And yes, I know where the name came from.) He also played Seymour Krelborn in The Little Shop of Horrors at the Midlands Arts Centre, and Mephistopheles in Doctor Faustus at Shakespeare’s Globe.  

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) A DWAYNE MCDUFFIE CALL OUT. [Item by Daniel Dern.] In the next-to-last and final episodes of the WB’s The Flash series, Chester (who, a season or so ago replaced Cisco as Team Flash’s science/tech nerd) (in Chester’s case, as a blerd), uttered, in moments of surprise/stress: “Sweet N.K. Jemisin!” and “Dazzling Dwayne McDuffie!”

The late Dwayne McDuffie wrote a lot of comics and an animated series, including, for DC, some Justice League, Batman, and others, see The DC Universe by Dwayne McDuffie  (I’m using HooplaDigital links; should be available in hardcopy from many libraries and comic/book stores, digitally presumably also from DC, probably ditto ComiXology and Libby.)

I know him best for co-founding Milestone Comics in the early 1990s which, per Wikipedia, “focused on underrepresented minorities in American comics”, including Static (also became an animated series), and my favorite, Icon, (see Icon Vol. 1: A Hero’s Welcome and Icon Vol. 2: The Mothership Connection.)

Milestone comics were published and distributed by DC, but were, at the time, in separate universes… which led to multi-part crossover, with, IIRC, one of my favorite cover gimmicks, namely little sticky-plastic decals of the characters (similar to Colorforms, but I don’t think that term’s been genericized) on a sealed-plastic bag (so I don’t think I opened that copy, I’d have to check my Milestone box…).

As of a few years ago, the Milestone Universe got shuffled/merged into DC main continuity, along with some character rebooting. (E.g., Virgil “Static” Hawkins, last I checked, was working at STAR Labs.)

(11) PICARD AND FRIENDS. Deadline has a superlative interview with the Picard cast: “’Star Trek: Picard’s Patrick Stewart, Gates McFadden, Jonathan Frakes”.

DEADLINE: Do you remember your first meeting with one another, way back in 1986?

JONATHAN FRAKES: I do remember the first time I met Patrick. We’d been called into the makeup trailer to meet the great king of makeup, Michael Westmore. Patrick and I introduced ourselves to one another, and we got right into a cricket versus baseball conversation that eventually led to him becoming a big LA Dodgers fan [laughs].

GATES McFADDEN: I was doing a play with Linda Hunt called The Matchmaker, down in La Jolla. Patrick came down to see it. We went out to dinner and it was all very exciting; we found we had a lot of mutual friends who were in the Royal Shakespeare Company. We talked all night. We both said, “I don’t know, I’m nervous about this whole thing…”

PATRICK STEWART: I remember people telling me not to worry about signing a six-year contract. They said, “You’ll be lucky to make it through the first season.” You cannot revive an iconic series, that’s what they told us. I was told, “Get a plane ticket, come over here, do the show, make some money for the first time in your life, and work on your tan, then you can go home.”

FRAKES: You have to remember, audiences were not ready for a bald English captain with a French name. And a Klingon on the bridge, and a blind guy driving. It was a very strange environment and people were skeptical to say the least. I didn’t know anything about Star Trek. Neither did Gates, or Brent [Spiner], or Patrick. I think [Michael] Dorn did, and I know your space son, Gates, Wil Wheaton did. But we had different tastes in television — in spite of the fact that my wife, the wonderful Genie Frakes, had a poster of Captain Kirk on her bedroom wall when she was a kid [laughs].

McFADDEN: Brent said the same, that we just didn’t know if this was a good idea.

Johnny, do you remember the first time I met you? We went to a costume fitting the day before a shoot, and I was so excited and intense about it all. It was a silly scene in a shopping mall. I said, “Can we rehearse? Can we go over the scene?” You looked at me and just said, “Sure.” After about three times, you were like, “I think we’ve got it.” It was a four-line scene [laughs]. But I’d never done anything like this; committed to a series like that.

STEWART: Of course, I found out eventually that I was also signing up for six years of Jonathan Frakes.

FRAKES: Hey, now [laughs].

(12) SFF STALWART. Linda Hamilton of Terminator, Resident Alien and Beauty and the Beast fame has been cast in ‘Stranger Things’ Season 5 reports Variety.

“Stranger Things” Season 5 is adding Linda Hamilton to its cast. The announcement was made Saturday as part of Netflix’s annual Tudum event.

Exact details on the character Hamilton will be playing are being kept under wraps….

(13) BACK IN THE BLACK. On CBS Saturday Morning, “Black Mirror” Charlie Brooker discusses the show’s return.

“Black Mirror,” the science-fiction series, has released a new season after four years. Ahead of the release of the new episodes, “CBS Saturday Morning” sat down with Charlie Brooker, the creative mind behind the show. Jeff Glor reports.

(14) THE ENCELADUS FIZZ. “A ‘Soda Ocean’ on a Moon of Saturn Has All the Ingredients for Life” reports the New York Times.

Enceladus — the sixth-largest of Saturn’s 146 moons — has a liquid ocean with a rocky floor under its bright, white and frosty surface. Ice volcanoes spew frozen grains of material into space, generating one of the many rings circling the planet.

Now, a team of researchers has discovered that those icy grains contain phosphates. They found them using data from Cassini, a joint NASA-European orbiter that concluded its study of Saturn, its rings and moons in 2017. It is the first time phosphorus has been found in an ocean beyond Earth. The results, which add to the prospect that Enceladus is home to extraterrestrial life, were published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“We weren’t expecting this. We didn’t look for it,” said Frank Postberg, a planetary scientist at the Free University of Berlin who led the study. He described the realization that they had found phosphates (chemicals containing the element phosphorus) as a “tantalizing moment.”

With the discovery of phosphorus on the ocean world, scientists say they have now found all of the elements there that are essential to life as we know it. Phosphorus is a key ingredient in human bones and teeth, and scientists say it is the rarest bio-essential ingredient in the cosmos. Planetary researchers had previously detected the other five key elements on Enceladus: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur (the last of which has been tentatively detected).

(15) CAN’T FLY AWAY. Scientific American focuses on “The Mystery of Australia’s Paralyzed Parrots”.

…Cases of what is called lorikeet paralysis syndrome (LPS) have been increasing over the past decade, says veterinarian Claude Lacasse of the RSPCA Wildlife Hospital in the eastern Australian city of Brisbane. It is now considered one of Australia’s most significant wildlife diseases. But scientists are baffled as to what is causing it….

Native to Australia’s eastern seaboard, rainbow lorikeets dwell in forest and scrubland and in leafy coastal suburbs. They are the country’s most common backyard bird. The charismatic parrots typically drink the nectar of the fragrant blossoms of native trees and shrubs. But widespread habitat loss, heavy rains that damage blossoms and severe wildfires have increasingly driven lorikeets to other food sources, including fruit, seeds and, strangely, even meat. This increasing variety in their diet is one reason it’s so difficult to identify what’s making them sick….

To take on the mystery, Phalen and his team set up a citizen science project on iNaturalist, a social network for biodiversity observations, asking people in LPS hotspots to take photographs of wild lorikeets feeding on plants.

(16) DIGITAL AFTERLIVES. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] What’s it all about? Search me.  Some say 42, but other may want more than a two digit answer (no raising of fingers here).  And then again, what happens next? Is there an afterlife? Gosh, I hope not.  Too much trouble with this one.  Besides, if there was an afterlife it must be awfully crowded by now. (Still, I suppose one benefit might be finally being able to meet aliens?) Anyway, this week Isaac Arthur ponders digital afterlives…

For as long as we have had history and likely before, people have contemplated a life after this one, but might we one day create artificial afterlives? And if so, will we create heavens or hells?

This last reminds me of an Iain Banks novel…

[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Christopher Rowe, Danny Sichel, Daniel Dern, Cora Buhlert, 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 Jeff Jones.]

Pixel Scroll 6/12/23 Pixels Popping Fresh, Scrolls Buttered Just Right

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(1) ON THE GROUND IN CHENGDU. The Chengdu Worldcon has posted a gallery of photos on Facebook showing Ben Yalow, Helen Montgomery, Dave McCarty and other team members going “over the preparations work for the convention, covering transportation, accommodation, catering and other security work, and looked into the main site of the conference. They expressed satisfaction with the preparation work in Chengdu and expressed their eagerness to participate in this grand event and enjoy happy times right here with fans from around the world.”

Facing camera: Helen Montgomery, Ben Yalow, and Dave McCarty

(2) ONE TO BEAM DOWN. “Chamber Spock moves to ‘logical’ new home”. The Greater Birmingham (UK) Chamber of Commerce is moving this bear to Millennium Point, which is also the current venue for in-person meetings of the Birmingham SF Group.

Greater Birmingham Chambers of Commerce’s beloved Spock the bear has reached his final frontier.

The Star Trek-inspired sculpture – created in 2017 for public art trail The Big Sleuth – will ‘live long and prosper’ at Birmingham conference and event venue Millennium Point after being donated by the Chamber.

Spock was one of 100 bears on display at museums, parks, libraries and shopping centres across the city throughout The Big Sleuth.

The trail attracted thousands of visitors, before the bears were auctioned off to raise money for Birmingham Children’s Hospital Charity.

While local artists, celebrities and businesses contributed their own bear interpretations, the Chamber decided to ‘boldly go where no-one has gone before’ with a creation inspired by Star Trek character Spock, due to then president Paul Kehoe’s love of the classic science fiction TV series.

Spock’s relocation is ‘highly logical’ for both parties, with the GBCC moving to new premises later this year and Millennium Point championing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) education….

(3) LIGHTNING STRIKING AGAIN AND AGAIN. Mort Castle, whose Facebook post demanding an apology for not having been included in HWA’s “Celebrating Our Elders” blog series has now passed 400 comments, and reportedly triggered abusive direct messages to various HWA volunteers, today announced “And that’s all she wrote. I have nothing more to say…”

(4) SOMEBODY IS INTO THREE-BODY. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian went with this headline for their interview: “Rosamund Pike: ‘We’re all being conned by the wellness industry’”. But here’s the real story:

…My partner and I have been looking for Chinese stories to adapt for TV. Our first project was The Three-Body Problem, an amazing sci-fi trilogy which is one of Barack Obama’s favourite books. We partnered with Netflix and David Benioff and DB Weiss, who did Game of Thrones. In their hands, it’s very exciting. That will be coming out within a year….

(5) MAKING HIS BARK AS GOOD AS HIS BITE. Animation World Network spoke with VFX Supervisor Guy Williams and Animation Supervisor Michael Cozens about Wētā’s FX work: “Wētā FX Brings a ‘Universe’ of Visuals to ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’”.

…AWN: What assets were you actually given? You always generate a lot of your own concepts and previs and stuff just because that’s how you determine what’s actually needed to get given sequences done. What did you guys get to work from?

GW: They shared everything they had, so we got a full art package, including whatever previs had been done at that point. The main assets that they wanted to turn over early were for the Arête, because we all knew that that wasn’t a model that you’d be done with over the course of a couple of months. Two or three other models had conflicting details, so we had to rectify all that over time.

Even though Groot was established, we received Groot pretty early on from Framestore. We had a bunch of variations that we had to create, because Groot’s a very dynamic character in that he’s often doing things he hasn’t done before. Because of that, we had to build it in such a way that it can change over the course of a shot. It wasn’t just a matter of modeling something, it’s modeling it so that effects can work with it.

They gave us all the digi-doubles because we knew that we were going to need good high-resolution assets for those. James Gunn has a great production designer, Beth Mickle, he typically works with. She always builds up a fantastic art department. Plus, you have Marvel’s art department. So, we were not ever suffering from lack of good artwork to start with.

AWN: How much time and hassle does it save you when you’re handed such an extensive amount of good artwork, so that you don’t have to figure it all out yourself?

GW: You’re asking an interesting question because it’s not so much about how much does the artwork save you from having to work, it’s how willing is the creative team, whether it’s the director or the producers, to stick to the art that you’re given. What’s painful as hell is to get an amazing art package and start working on it, and then have people come in three months, four months later and say, “Love what you’re doing, but we never really liked those pictures, so can we make it blue and round?” That hurts.

James definitely isn’t that guy. He knows what he wants and he’s willing to commit to it. He’s talented enough that he doesn’t need to second guess himself. What he and his art team come up with is compelling as hell, and you don’t need to throw it all away and start over because it’s going to work….

(6) QUIZ TIME. [Item by Orange Mike Lowrey.] The answer: 42!

The question: how many years ago today did a bunch of fans walk from X-Con 5 [L. Sprague and Catherine De Camp, GoHs] in Brookfield, WI, to a nearby city park, to witness the marriage of “Orange Mike” Lowrey and Cicatrice du Veritas?

She wore a cream satin dress [with hennin] she’d kitbashed herself; he wore a rust-colored tux; the bridesmaids and groomsmen wore matching tuxes courtesy of a lucky draw at a bridal fair. The ceremony was performed by the very fannish Rev. Ted Wagner, ULC Bishop of Madison and allegedly an ex-roommate of Harlan Ellison.

(7) NICK WOOD OBIT. Zambian-born sff author Nick Wood died this month. The cause of death was not given. He was an actor, There’s a great deal of information about his life in the interview he gave Geoff Ryman for Strange Horizons in 2017.

Nick is a clinical psychologist who came to England with his wife and daughters toward the end of 1995, to do a PhD in the cognitive development of deaf children. He had been doing work in townships and deafness was the most common form of disability among children.

He was raised in South Africa. During the 1980’s he worked extensively in South African “black townships” during the transition to democracy “with the liberation struggle from apartheid, and was also on the move at times to avoid Military Police who had turned up at my parents’ home, keen to see me deployed in another no doubt more destructive role in the townships.”

Wood and Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki organized DisCon III’s program stream devoted to speculative fiction by Africans.

Wood’s first novel Azanian Bridges was a 2017 finalist for the BSFA Award, John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and Sidewise Award. His second novel, Water Must Fall, was a BSFA Award finalist in 2021.

Wood’s last medical update on his blog in 2022 said “I have been disabled (and am now partly deaf) from the ongoing march of right sided Meniere’s Disease.”

(8) ED ZDROJEWSKI (1954-2023). Midwest sf fan and journalist Ed Zdrojewski (“Ed Zed”) died May 4 Leah Zeldes announced on Facebook. She says:

He was most active in fandom during the 1970s and ’80s and became pretty gafiated after he moved to Champaign-Urbana and married. I knew him best when he lived in Michigan, first going to school at MSU and then working as a reporter for the St. Joseph Herald-Palladium, during which time he did a fanzine called the Benton Harbor Rat-Weasel. He was in MiSHAP, too.

He formerly edited the Grain Journal and there’s a professional obituary on Grainnet.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

1974 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

I think I’ve read more fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin than any other writer. As you know she won a number of Hugos including for The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition which is a stellar work that features illustrations by Charles Vess. 

Our Beginning is from Orsinian Tales published forty-nine years ago by Harper & Row with the cover illustration by Muriel Nasser. 

There are eleven stories here, six original to this collection, most of them set in the imaginary country of Orsinia.  The first story is “The Fountains” and here’s the Beginning of it…

THE FOUNTAINS

THEY KNEW, having given him cause, that Dr Kereth might attempt to seek political asylum in Paris. Therefore, on the plane flying Edwest, in the hotel, on the streets, at the meetings, even while he read his paper to the Cytology section, he was distantly accompanied at all times by obscure figures who might be explained as graduate students or Croatian microbiologists, but who had no names, or faces. Since his presence lent not only distinction to his country’s delegation but also a certain luster to his government—See, we let even him come—they had wanted him there; but they kept him in sight. He was used to being in sight. In his small country a man could get out of sight only by not moving at all, by keeping voice, body, brain all quiet. He had always been a restless, visible man. Thus when all at once on the sixth day in the middle of a guided tour in broad daylight he found himself gone, he was confused for a time. Only by walking down a path could one achieve one’s absence?

It was in a very strange place that he did so. A great, desolate, terrible house stood behind him yellow in the yellow sunlight of afternoon. Thousands of many-colored dwarfs milled on terraces, beyond which a pale blue canal ran straight away into the unreal distance of September. The lawns ended in groves of chestnut trees a hundred feet high, noble, somber, shot through with gold. Under the trees they had walked in shadow on the riding-paths of dead kings, but the guide led them out again to sunlight on lawns and marble pavements. And ahead, straight ahead, towering and shining up into the air, fountains ran.

They sprang and sang high above their marble basins in the light. The petty, pretty rooms of the palace as big as a city where no one lived, the indifference of the noble trees that were the only fit inhabitants of a garden too large for men, the dominance of autumn and the past, all this was brought into proportion by the running of water. The phonograph voices of the guides fell silent, the camera eyes of the guided saw. The fountains leapt up, crashed down exulting, and washed death away.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born June 12, 1940 — Mary Turzillo, 83. She won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette for her “Mars is No Place for Children” story, published in Science Fiction Age. Her first novel, An Old Fashioned Martian Girl was serialized in Analog, and a revised version, Mars Girls was released. Her first collection to polish her SWJ creds is named Your cat & other space aliens. Mars Girls which I highly recommend is available from the usual digital suspects. There’s an Analog interview with her here.
  • Born June 12, 1953 — Tess Gerritsen, 70. ISFDB lists her as genre so I’ll include her even though I’m ambivalent on her being so.  They’ve got one novel from the Jane Rizzoli series, The Mephisto Club, and three stand-alone novels (Gravity, Playing with Fire and The Bone Garden). All save Gravity could be considered conventional thrillers devoid of genre elements.
  • Born June 12, 1954 — Melanie Rawn, 69. Author of the Dragon Prince series – Dragon Prince, Dragon Prince: Star Scroll and Sunrunner’s Fire, and the sequel, the Dragonstar series, Dragonstar: Stronghold, The Dragon Token and Skybowl.  She was planning an Exlies series but only wrote one novel in it. 
  • Born June 12, 1955 — Stephen Pagel, 68. Editor with Nicola Griffith of the genre anthologies, Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction, Bending the Landscape: Fantasy, and Bending the Landscape: Horror.
  • Born June 12, 1964 — Dave Stone, 59. Writer of media tie-ins including quite a few in the Doctor Who universe which contains the Professor Bernice Summerfield stories, and Judge Dredd as well. He has only the Pandora Delbane series ongoing, plus the Golgotha Run novel, and a handful of short fiction.
  • Born June 12, 1970 — Claudia Gray, 53. She’s best known for her Evernight series, but has several more series as well, including the Spellcaster series and the Constellation Trilogy. In addition, she’s written a number of Star Wars novels — Star Wars: Lost Stars, Star Wars: Bloodline, Leia, Princess of Alderaan and Star Wars: Master and Aprentice.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Lio has invented his own kind of time tunnel.

(12) MIDDLE-EARTH CELEBRITY DEATHMATCH. “Tolkien Nearly Had Tom Bombadil Fight the Nazgul in Lord of the Rings” according to CBR.com, working from material in Christopher Tolkien’s 12-volume series containing his father’s drafts.

Another character that’s difficult to rate is Tom Bombadil. He fought off the Barrow-wights with his singing, and he put Old Man Willow in his place. Gandalf even suggested that the One Ring wouldn’t have an effect on him. But it’s hard to know how powerful Bombadil really was because no one knows exactly what he was — he never fought someone of note. Ironically, that wasn’t always the case because The Lord of the Rings author, J. R. R. Tolkien, almost had Tom Bombadil take on the Nazgul….

… A fight between Tom Bombadil and the Nazgul would never really happen because Bombadil didn’t pay any mind to worldly events. Gandalf actually said that if Bombadil was given the One Ring, he might misplace and forget about it. But hypothetically speaking, a fight between him and the Nazgûl would probably be petty complicated. For starters, the Nazgûl live in the spirit world and can’t see very well in the mortal realm. Depending on what Bombadil actually was, he might have been difficult for them to see, which could give him an advantage as he tried to sing the wraiths away….

(13) BOOK REVIEW$. The National Book Critics Circle has a spreadsheet of publications that pay for books coverage: “List of Publications”.

This spreadsheet, developed over the years as a resource for NBCC members and now maintained in partnership with Adam Morgan, lists 80+ publications that publish book coverage (reviews, interviews, essays, etc.), with editor contact information, pay rates, and more. 

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Higher dimensional aliens…  Isaac Arthur’s Futures had this month’s “Sci-fi Sunday” take a look at higher dimensional aliens. Rod Serling says “Hi” from the Twilight Zone…

Could there be universes with more than 3 Dimensions? And if so, could life exist there?

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

Pixel Scroll 6/9/23 Pixel Was A Scrollin’ Stone

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(1) ON THE FRONT OF F&SF. Here is The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction’s July-Aug 2023 issue cover.  The cover art is by Mondolithic Studios.

(2) 2023 NATIONAL BOOK FESTIVAL. The 2023 National Book Festival will be held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, August 12, from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. (doors open at 8:30 a.m.). The event is free and open to the public. Some creators of genre interest appearing at the Festival are:

George Saunders (Lincoln in the Bardo) discusses his latest collection of stories in Liberation Day.

TJ Klune returns with another fantasy adventure, “In the Lives of Puppets,” a tale of artificial intelligence robots and their human son.

National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Meg Medina shares the graphic novel adaptation of “Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass” with the novel’s illustrator Mel Valentine Vargas.

Interested attendees not able to join the festival in person can tune into sessions throughout the day. Events on several of the stages will be livestreamed on loc.gov/bookfest. Videos of all presentations will be made available on demand in the weeks after the festival.

(3) KNOST WINGS FINALISTS. The 2023 Michael Knost Wings award finalists have been announced by The Imaginarium Convention.  The award “focuses on authors of speculative and/or dark fiction, specifically authors who are up-and-coming . . . or those who have been around a while but do not get the recognition they deserve.”

The award is named for Michael Knost, is the 2015 recipient of the Horror Writers Association’s Silver Hammer Award for his work as the organization’s mentorship chair. He is also a two-time Bram Stoker Award-winner, and is known for his mentoring, writing classes, and bestselling works. Nominees/finalists are chosen by a committee of editors and authors, and Knost selects the award recipient.

This year’s nominees/finalists are:

  • John F. Allen
  • Anton Cancre
  • Elizabeth Donald
  • Sandy Lender
  • Tommy B. Smith

The winner will be announced during the Imaginarium Awards Banquet on July 15.

(4) REMEMBERING WHEN. Craig Newmark is the ‘Craig’ of Craig’s List, but before that he was 1/3 of Rat’s Mouth Fandom (back in the 1980s). He made the news this week for donating $100M to veteran charities.

You can decipher the origin of Rat’s Mouth Fandom if you know this about Boca Raton FL:

The meaning of the name Boca Raton has always aroused curiosity. Many people wrongly assume the name is simply Rat’s Mouth. The Spanish word boca, or mouth, often describes an inlet, while raton means literally, mouse.

(5) OTHER DARTS. Jacqueline Carey responds to readers who asked why there aren’t trans folk in Terre d’Ange: “Summer 2023”.

It’s Pride Month and we’re celebrating the official relaunch of the original Kushiel’s Legacy trilogy with these shiny new trade paperback editions! It’s hard to believe that it’s been over 20 years since Kushiel’s Dart burst on the scene, exploding with intrigue, heroism and unabashed sexuality the likes of which the fantasy genre had never seen.

In many ways, it’s still ahead of its time; but not all. When I polled a group of longtime readers, this was one of the most common questions on their mind:  Are there trans folk in Terre d’Ange?

Fair question! I created an entire theology based on the idea that love in all its forms, including sexual, was a divine force with agency in the real world. Pansexuality is the norm in Terre d’Ange. Even BDSM has a presiding deity! These books were groundbreaking! So what about gender identity? Where the heck are the trans and nonbinary characters? Where are the intersex and asexual characters?

Here’s what I’m not going to do, which is pull a Rowling and tell you, “Oh, Alcuin was nonbinary all along!” I mean… sure, it’s not outside the realm of possibility. But no. Coming from the author, it’s bullshit if it’s not on the page. I didn’t make that specific choice for the character. Nor did I create a society which explicitly acknowledges the full spectrum of human gender identity.

Sorry, guys. I did my best at the time with the knowledge I possessed. I simply wasn’t aware enough of the breadth and depth of human expression to encompass its totality in my worldbuilding. However, “Love As Thou Wilt” is some damn solid bedrock. It’s strong enough to support a broader and deeper understanding of the world. The love and acceptance were always there.

(6) LIFEWRITING PODCAST. Steve Barnes and Tananarive Due’s recent podcast Lifewriting: Write for Your Life! is “On the WGA strike, community for writers – and Clarion West!”

In this episode, Steve and Tananarive talk about some of the reason for the WGA screenwriters’ strike and the importance of community for writers — and welcome guests Rashida Smith and Stephanie Malia Morris to talk about Clarion West. Find out more information at www.clarionwest.org. 

(7) CLARION WEST EVENT. There will be a Clarion West fundraiser on November 10: Ted Chiang and Dr. Emily M. Bender in conversation, moderated by Tom Nissley, at Town Hall Seattle. Details to follow.

UW Professor of Linguistics Emily M. Bender talks with award-winning science fiction author Ted Chiang about the nature of creativity and the role of the author in relation to AI-generated storytelling. Moderated by Jeopardy! champion and Phinney Books owner Tom Nissley.

(8) OVERLOOKED, NOW OVERHEARD. Longtime Horror Writers Association member Mort Castle is enraged that he was not contacted to be part of the HWA blog’s “Celebrating Our Elders” Q&A series. (The Scroll linked to a couple of those posts.) He has published “An Open Letter To The Horror Writers Association” on Facebook. Below is a screencap of his public post. Castle’s concluding statement reads:

…The HWA needs to apologize. The HWA needs to attempt to make amends.

I do want to thank those people, the many HWA members and many others who’ve contacted me, letting me know they considered the HWA’s treatment of me to be flat-out wrong.

Your support means so much. It helps.

But it does not set this wrong thing right.

If you would like to help do that, I ask that you contact The Horror Writers Association. You might add comments on the HWA Facebook page and I hope you do.

I ask that you express your thoughts about Mort’s Uncelebration on the part of an organization that says it supports horror writing and the people who create it.

Somtow Sucharitkul’s comment on the open letter brings much needed lucidity and practicality to the issues.  

(9) MEMORY LANE.

2022 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

So let’s talk about Rachel Swirsky. She has two Nebulas, one for her “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window novella, the other for her short story, “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love”. No Hugo wins to date but she has been nominated four times including for that same novella. 

She was the founding editor of the PodCastle podcast which does fantasy fiction and served as editor. Ann Leckie was the founding assistant editor. Impressive.

Our Beginning is from the January Fifteenth novel which was published by Tor.com just last year. It was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award. 

And now here it is…

UBI Day: Early

Hannah

The blizzard first touched land in Maine. It glazed lakes and lighthouses and red-shingled roofs, and billowed through naked ash trees. It chased coastal waves southward to New Hampshire and then moved inland through Concord and into upstate New York, past Saratoga Springs and Syracuse. In Canastota, the historic Erie Canal froze beside iced railroad tracks, neither taking anyone anywhere. 

Hannah Klopfer felt grateful once again that she and the boys had been able to find a furnished rental inside their budget that was within easy walking distance of necessities like the post office and the grocery store. She zipped up her down jacket and tugged her hat over her ears. She patted her pockets: wallet, phone, keys. As she grabbed her scarf from the aging brass rack by the door, it made a shuddery twang against the greasy metal. 

As the twanging faded, Hannah heard a distant, quiet shuffle from the back of the house. Something wooden groaned. Hannah’s mouth went dry. The ends of her scarf dropped from her hands, unwound, and fell loosely across her chest. Her heart pounded. She hadn’t expected Abigail to find them so fast. She took a deep breath to shout upstairs for Jake and Isaiah to start piling furniture against their bedroom door.

A high-pitched giggle broke the quiet, followed by another. Hannah exhaled in relief. Thank God. It was just the boys playing. 

Her heart hadn’t stopped pounding, though. Damn it. Damn it! What was she supposed to do when the boys wouldn’t listen? This wasn’t about sticking their fingers in their cereal or getting crayon on the walls. Did it really matter that it was developmentally normal for a seven-year-old to test authority if it ended up giving Abigail a way back into their lives?

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born June 9, 1930 — Lin Carter. He is best known for his work in the 1970s as editor of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. As a writer, His first professional publication was the short story “Masters of the Metropolis”, co-written with Randall Garrett, in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1957. He would be a prolific writer, average as many as six novels a year. In addition, he was influential as a critic of the fantasy genre and an early historian of the genre. (Died 1988.)
  • Born June 9, 1934 — Donald Duck, 89. He made his first appearance in “The Wise Little Hen” on June 9, 1934. In this cartoon, Donald and his friend, Peter Pig, lie their way out of helping the titular little hen tend to her corn. 
  • Born June 9, 1943 — Joe Haldeman, 80. Whether or not it was written as a response to Starship Troopers as some critics thought at time, The Forever War is a damn great novel which I’ve read at least a half dozen times. No surprise that it won the Hugo at MidAmeriCon and the Nebula Award.
  • Born June 9, 1949 — Drew Sanders, 74. He’s an LA resident who’s active in con-running and costuming. He has worked on many Worldcons and is a member of LASFS and SCIFI, and has been an officer of both groups. He co-chaired Costume-Con 4 in 1986.
  • Born June 9, 1956 — Patricia Cornwell, 67. You’ll know her better as the author of the medical examiner Kay Scarpetta mystery series, now some twenty-six novels deep. She is here, well in part as I do like that series a lot, because she wrote two SF novels in the Captain Chase series, Quantum and Spin.
  • Born June 9, 1961 — Michael J. Fox, 62. The Back to The Future trilogy stands as one of the best SF series ever done and his acting was brilliant. Since 1999 due to his Parkinson’s Disease, he’s has mainly worked as a voice-over actor in films such as Stuart Little and Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Prior to his diagnosis, he performed on Tales from the Crypt and directed “The Trap” episode. He would return to live action performing in 2014, bless him, with The Michael J. Fox Show series. 
  • Born June 9, 1967 — Dave McCarty, 56. He’s a Chicago-area con-running fan who chaired Chicon 7. He has been the Hugo Administrator for Loncon (2014), MidAmeriCon II (2016), for Worldcon 76 (2018), and again for the Chengdu Worldcon (2023).
  • Born June 9, 1981 — Natalie Portman, 42. Surprisingly her first genre role was as Taffy Dale in Mars Attacks!, not as Padme in The Phantom Menace for which the fanboys gave her far too much hatred which is what they do when they do not have a real life. She’d repeat that role in Attack of The Clones and Revenge of The Sith and of course get fresh grief from them. She’d next play Evey in V for Vendetta. And she played Jane Foster, a role she played oh magnificently — and got more grief for — first in Thor, then in Thor: The Dark World and then in Avengers: Endgame. She reprised the role in Thor: Love and Thunder, playing both Jane Foster and Thor.

(11) NEW HOMES FOR PULPS. This strikes me as a more elegant (and remunerative) version of “Operation Surprise Package” in Bill, the Galactic Hero. “Sci Fi and Fantasy Pulp/Magazine Subscription (2 Per Package)!” offered by Chris Korczak, Bookseller.

The trouble with Tribbles: Chris Korczak wasn’t sure what to do with the thousands of science fiction and fantasy magazines piling up around him. He’s an antiquarian bookseller in Easthampton, Mass., who specializes in role-playing games and related titles. He knew the old pulp magazines comprised a rich record of the genre’s literary and artistic gems, but finding a buyer for each copy felt impossible. 

Don’t Panic: Korczak recently started offering these old magazines as part of an unusual mail-order service. Subscribers receive two randomly selected issues as often as they’d like for $14.49 per shipment (details). 

The magazines — mostly from the 1970s and ’90s, but some as far back as the 1940s — provide a kind of time travel through the world of science fiction and fantasy. “They’re really cool,” Korczak tells me, “and they’re just jam-packed with good stories by good authors.” A shipment could include copies of Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog, Argosy, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, If, Galaxy and other “smaller print-run publications.” (To be clear: These are not reprints; they’re original issues, some with their old mailing labels still attached.)

The randomness of each shipment is part of the thrill. Korczak estimates that “more than half of the magazines contain authors who are household names.” Subscribers might find stories by Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, George R.R. Martin, Frank Herbert and others. (Of course, mixed among the stars, there’s sure to be some dead planets, too.) 

“They’re so cool when you go through them,” Korczak says. “And the artwork — a lot of good illustrations there that are only on those covers.”

If that sounds enticing, boldly go.

(12) JEOPARDY! David Goldfarb reports on a Jeopardy! sff reference.

In the Double Jeopardy round, Literature for $800:

This writer known for robotic laws (which might come in handy soon) wrote his “Lucky Starr” series as Paul French

Returning champion Suresh Krishnan responded correctly.

(13) LATE NIGHT SNACK. Science’s article “Let there be dark” explains how “Crops grown without sunlight could help feed astronauts bound for Mars, and someday supplement dinner plates on Earth.”

For the first astronauts to visit Mars, what to eat on their 3-year mission will be one of the most critical questions. It’s not just a matter of taste. According to one recent estimate, a crew of six would require an estimated 10,000 kilograms of food for the trip. NASA—which plans to send people to Mars within 2 decades—could stuff a spacecraft with prepackaged meals and launch additional supplies to the Red Planet in advance for the voyage home. But even that wouldn’t completely solve the problem…

…Robert Jinkerson, a chemical engineer at the University of California (UC), Riverside, thinks the answer is for astronauts to grow their own on-board garden—in the dark, with plant growth fueled by artificial nutrients rather than sunlight. It won’t be easy; after all, plants evolved for hundreds of millions of years to extract energy from sunlight. But Jinkerson believes it can be done by reawakening metabolic pathways plants already possess—the same ones that power the germination of seeds buried in the ground and then shut off once a seedling’s leaves start to reach for the Sun. In his vision of the future, electricity from solar panels could transform water and carbon dioxide (CO2) exhaled by a spacecraft’s crew into simple, energy-rich hydrocarbons that genetically modified plants could use to grow—even in the darkness of space or the dim light on Mars, which receives less than half as much sunlight as Earth….

(14) TRAILER PROMOTING BOOK ABOUT FURRIES. Furry Planet: A World Gone Wild by Joe Strike covers a lot of ground.

From a veteran furry comes an immersive entry into the world of furries and furry fandom, with a colorful look at an amazing subculture, the timeless human instinct to identify with animals, and a wealth of photos and illustrations showcasing fursuits and furry art. Furries are the creative subculture of people who identify with animals. You can find them at furry conventions, furfests, worldwide—tens of thousands of people donning their most elaborate fursuit. In costume, at conventions, with friends or alone, furries unleash the animal within, letting their inner beasts roar and their inner cats purr, aware of the power—and joy—to be found in connecting with one’s animal side and encouraging others to do the same. In Furry Planet, long-time furry and a media staple for commentary on the culture, Joe Strike—a certified “greymuzzle,” as older furries are known—dives deep into this compelling subculture to share its appeal and rewards. Strike addresses stigmas and misconceptions head on and traces the history of the culture from forty thousand-year-old lion-man figurines through sixteenth-century legends of monkey kings to modern day television and movies starring anthropomorphized animals living human lives. He shares how furry fandom began in the United States but has spread across the globe and delves deep into the various iterations of the culture today, in the process covering events, media, art, storytelling, community resources, costume creation, and advice for newcomers. An unprecedented in-depth look at this intriguing, offbeat world, Furry Planet is complemented by colorful images throughout and is sure to inform and excite fans of the culture, as well as anyone who has ever been curious about it. Inside you’ll find: Insight into the natural impulse to anthropomorphize animals and the joys of furry culture A fascinating history of furry culture A thorough guide to furry conventions, fursuit costume creation, and resources for furries A wealth of colorful photographs from furfests and of superb fursuits Gorgeous furry artwork Much more!

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In 2020, The Late Late Show with James Corden brought us “Marvel’s Mrs. Maisel: Rachel Brosnahan Enters the Marvel Universe”.

James Corden and Rachel Brosnahan look back on their attempt to bring Midge Maisel into the Marvel Universe. Memories of the chemistry between Thanos and Midge have us all wondering how the mashup never made the screen.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Rich Lynch, Cathy Green, Daniel Dern, Gordon Van Gelder, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 6/7/23 Pixels Sleep On Scrolls

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(1) MARKOWITZ AWARD WINNERS. Naseem Jamnia and Maya Salameh are the winners of the 2023 Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. Naseem Jamnia is a widely-recognized sff writer. See Lambda Literary’s interview here: “Four Questions with Naseem Jamnia”.

The Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers recognizes LGBTQ-identified writers whose work demonstrates their strong potential for promising careers. The award includes a cash prize of $1,500. This year, the award goes to Naseem Jamnia and Maya Salameh.

Naseem Jamnia (they/them) is the Locus-nominated author of The Bruising of Qilwa, a novella introducing their queernormative, Persian-inspired world, which was shortlisted for the IAFA’s Crawford award. Named the inaugural Samuel R. Delany Fellow, they’ve also received fellowships from Lambda Literary and the Otherwise Award, and their nonfiction has appeared in The Rumpus, The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, New Orleans Review, Sarah Gailey’s Stone Soup newsletter, and other venues. They are the managing editor of Sword & Kettle Press, a tiny independent publishing house of feminist speculative writing, and their debut middle grade horror, Sleepaway, is out in 2025 from Aladdin. Find out more and sign up for their newsletter at naseemwrites.com, or follow them on social @jamsternazzy.

How has access to queer literature/queer stories impacted your life as a queer person and shaped you as a queer writer?

When I was growing up, the closest I saw my gender portrayed in stories was with the “girl disguises herself as a boy to do the thing” trope, a la Mulan and Tamora Pierce’s Alanna books. I had to resort to fanfiction to explore queerness in terms of sexuality (and even then, rarely or never saw a portrayal of someone on the asexual spectrum). Much of my own writing growing up explored these issues inadvertently and vaguely, as I did not know what I was exploring at the time. However, once terms like “nonbinary” or understanding of transness outside a binary entered the public lexicon in the last 10-ish years, the wealth of queer literature we’ve seen explicitly including various identities has made a world of difference, helping me to understand and embrace my own various identities, which has since allowed me to live as my truest self. With this clearer understanding, I’ve taken the lack of what I saw growing up to turn into what I wish I had seen and where I wish we can go in the future. I’m grateful so many queer books exist now for kids and adults alike to explore the multiplicity of queer experiences….

(2) REUBEN FINALISTS INCLUDE TWO SFF ARTISTS. [Item by Dariensync.] Girl Genius creator Phil Foglio and frequent Neil Gaiman collaborator Colleen Doran have both been nominated for Reuben Awards by the National Cartoonist Society. Foglio for Online Comics: Long Form for Girl Genius, Doran for Best Graphic Novel for her adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Chivalry. “Finalists Announced For 2022 NCS Divisional Awards For The 77th Annual Reubens”.

(3) STARS ON MARS. You can watch the first aired episode of Stars on Mars on the FOX website. William Shatner serves as Mission Control.

Here’s an excerpt. “Celebrities Try To Fix A Fallen Satellite Tower”.

(4) NOT AS SPECIAL EFFECTS? Oh no, some of them were very special. Ranker came up with a list of“11 Classic Fantasy Movies Made Before CGI”.

Many fans feel that modern fantasy movies began in 2001 with the one-two punch of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Both having been produced after the CGI revolution of the 1990s, they applied the full power of the latest visual effects techniques to bring two beloved fantasy book series vividly to life.

But fantasy films go back a lot further than 2001. Since the dawn of movies, imaginative filmmakers have striven to use the medium’s unique capabilities to bring to life visions that cannot exist in reality. Long before computers were rendering T. rexes and Orc armies, special-effects crews had already amassed a huge bag of tricks to put fantastical stories on the screen, including stop-motion, bluescreen, forced perspective, puppets, and giant props.

Three of the four most highly-rated films have effects by Ray Harryahausen. Number one is –

Jason and the Argonauts

A retelling of the myth of the Golden Fleece, 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts was one of the peaks of Ray Harryhausen’s special effects career. Numerous striking effects appear throughout the film, but the show-stopper is the epic battle where Jason and his men confront an army of magically animated skeletons.

Harryhausen recalled the incredibly painstaking work that went into the sequence:

I had three men fighting seven skeletons, and each skeleton had five appendages to move in each separate frame of film. This meant at least 35 animation movements, each synchronized to the actor’s movements. Some days I was producing just 13 or 14 frames a day, or to put it another way, less than one second of screen time per day, and in the end the whole sequence took a record four and a half months to capture on film.

(5) YOU SAW IT HERE FIRST. At Galactic Journey, John Boston reviews the issue of Amazing which scored the coup of publishing an excerpt from Delany’s Nova, the novel Campbell declined to serialize in Analog: “[June 6, 1968] The Stalemate Continues (July 1968 Amazing)”.

Once more, all but one item of fiction are reprints, though this issue’s exception is more considerable than some: House A-Fire, by Samuel R. Delany, described as a short novel (at 33 pages!) on the cover and contents page, though editor Harrison acknowledges in the letter column that it is actually an excerpt from Delany’s new novel Nova, forthcoming from Doubleday.  Delany’s name is misspelled on the cover and contents page and in Harrison’s editorial, spelled correctly on the story’s title page and in the letter column.  Are you getting tired of all this nit-picking?  So am I.  But the persistent sloppiness of this magazine continues to irritate….

(6) LIAGUNO Q&A. One of the Horror Writers Association “A Point of Pride” blog posts is an “Interview with Vince A. Liaguno”.

What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it?

I’m less certain that I chose horror; I think horror chose me. Truthfully, from as far back as I can remember, I was drawn to all things dark. As a kid, my earliest recollections of being terrified were watching made-for-TV movies from the 70s like Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, Gargoyles, and Trilogy of Terror. I can still remember damn near pissing myself when that little Zuni fetish doll from the latter chased poor Karen Black around her apartment! (laughs)

As I got a little older, my Dad would take me to the movies as part of our weekend “buddy days”. They were usually Irwin Allen disaster flicks or movies with a lot of car chases, but then a little film called Jaws was released. I was eight years old and can still feel the knot in my stomach the first time I heard those opening notes of John Williams’ now-legendary score. I think I only made it up to the point that the ill-fated skinny-dipping Chrissie gets slammed into the buoy before I pleaded with my Dad to leave. It would take three subsequent tries before I could make it through the entire film, each time making it a little further into the film before my ever-patient father heard the desperation of the “Please, Daddy…can we leave now?” in my voice. Jaws was a rite of passage for me; it was the first time I needed to summon and sustain any sense of real bravery. When I finally saw those end credits, it was a mark of accomplishment… a hint of manhood, if you will.

1978 was a game changer for me—the cusp of adolescence and the release of John Carpenter’s Halloween. If Jaws hooked me, Halloween reeled me in and cemented what would become a lifelong adoration of both slasher films and a certain actress named Jamie Lee Curtis.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

2005 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

I won’t say that Haruki Murakami is author that I’m at familiar as he isn’t. Kafka on the Shore is the English translation of the original Japanese publication which is this, 海辺のカフカ. 

Alfred Knopf published the first English language edition eighteen years ago.

It would win a World Fantasy Award. 

It is an available from the usual suspects. 

And now for our Beginning…

So you’re all set for money, then?” the boy named Crow asks in his typical sluggish voice. The kind of voice like when you’ve just woken up and your mouth still feels heavy and dull. But he’s just pretending. He’s totally awake. As always. 

I nod.

 “How much?” 

I review the numbers in my head. “Close to thirty-five hundred in cash, plus some money I can get from an ATM. I know it’s not a lot, but it should be enough. For the time being.”

 “Not bad,” the boy named Crow says. “For the time being.

I give him another nod. “I’m guessing this isn’t Christmas money from Santa Claus.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” I reply. 

Crow smirks and looks around.

“I imagine you’ve started by rifling drawers, am I right?” 

I don’t say anything. 

He knows whose money we’re talking about, so there’s no need for any long-winded interrogations. 

He’s just giving me a hard time.

“No matter,” Crow says. “You really need this money and you’re going to get it—beg, borrow, or steal. It’s your father’s money, so who cares, right? Get your hands on that much and you should be able to make it. For the time being. But what’s the plan after it’s all gone? Money isn’t like mushrooms in a forest—it doesn’t just pop up on its own, you know. You’ll need to eat, a place to sleep. One day you’re going to run out.”

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born June 7, 1944 — Mildred Downey Broxon, 79. Author of three novels and some short stories, heavy on Nordic-German mythology.  The Demon of Scattery was co-written with Poul Anderson. There are no digital books available for her and her printed editions are out of print now. I see no sign that her short fiction has been collected into a volume to date.
  • Born June 7, 1952 — Liam Neeson,  71. He first shows up in genre films as Gawain in Excalibur and as Kegan in Krull. He plays Martin Brogan in High Spirits, a film I enjoy immensely. Next up is the title role in Darkman, a film I’ve watched myriad times. He’s Dr. David Marrow in The Haunting which I’d contend is loosely off of The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. Now we get him as Qui-Gon Jinn in The Phantom Menace. Followed unfortunately by his horrid take as Ra’s al Ghul in Batman Begins and as a cameo in the The Dark Knight Rises. Now he voiced Aslan with amazing dignity in The Chronicles of Narnia franchise and voiced Zeus as well in the Titans franchise. 
  • Born June 7, 1954 — Louise Erdrich, 69. Writer of novels, poetry, and children’s books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. Her genre work includes according to ISFDB the Ojibwe series of The Antelope Wife which won a World Fantasy Award and The Painted Drum, plus stand-alone novels of The Crown of Columbus (co-written with her husband Michael Dorris) and Future Home of the Living God.
  • Born June 7, 1968 — Sarah Parish, 55. In “The Runaway Bride“, a Tenth Doctor story, she got to play, with the assistance of extensive CGI, one of the nastiest Who villains to date, The Empress of the Racnoss, an oversized vicious spider with a human face. Great episode. It’s our introduction to Donna Noble, his Companion for quite some time to come. In a much lighter role, she played Pasiphaë on BBC’s Atlantis series.
  • Born June 7, 1969 — Anthony Simcoe, 54. Ka D’Argo in Farscape, one of the best SF series ever done. If you don’t watch anything else, just watch the finale, The Peacekeeper Wars as it’s fairly self contained. Farscape is the SF he did. If you can find a copy, Matt Bacon’s No Strings Attached: The Inside Story of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop is a wonderful look at the creation of the creatures on the show including D’Argo facial appendages. 
  • Born June 7, 1972 — Karl Urban, 51. He’s in the second and third installments of The Lord of the Rings trilogy as Éomer. He is McCoy in the Trek reboot franchise, Cupid on Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, John Kennex on Almost Human, Vaako in the Riddick film franchise, and Judge Dredd in Dredd. For the record, I liked both Dredd films for varied reasons.
  • Born June 7, 1974 — David Filoni, 49. Creator and an executive producer on Star Wars Rebels, a most awesome series, for all four seasons, and was supervising director and a writer on another excellent series, Star Wars: The Clone Wars. (I like the animated series far better than the live action films.) He makes his live acting debut in The Mandalorian playing Trapper Wolf, an X-Wing pilot, in “The Prisoner” episode. It’s also worth noting that he his first job was directing episodes during the first season of animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender
  • Born June 7, 1979 — Anna Torv, 44. She’s best known for her role as FBI agent Olivia Dunham on Fringe. She also played an ITU nurse in Frankenstein, a modern adaptation of that novel. She voiced the lead of Nariko in the animated Heavenly Sword film based off the game of the same name. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Argyle Sweater reveals an astronomical feature apparently known only to Federation navigators.

(10) HAMMER AND CHISEL. The Tom Brevoort Experience reproduces some of the 1938 letters between Detective Comics Inc. (DC) and Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel. The issue? Money, naturally. “The Selling of Superman: Correspondence between Jack Liebowitz and Jerry Siegel”.

…Above you see the first page of a letter sent by Jack Liebowitz to Jerry Siegel on September 28, 1938. For context, as this point, ACTION COMICS #5 had been published and the character of Superman was heating up. The McClure Newspaper Syndicate, which had been noncommittal about their interest in developing Superman as a newspaper strip, suddenly showed new signs of life, which had caused Siegel to write to Detective Comics and request that they return all rights but first publication to Superman to Siegel and Shuster. As you can imagine, Jack Liebowitz and his boss Harry Donenfeld weren’t having any part of that….

(11) VISITING SPACE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] This $50 Lego set was inspired by a group of “space travel posters” created by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA. In turn, those were inspired in part by classic travel posters from the golden age of luxury travel. “Retro NASA Space Tourism Posters made from LEGO Bricks are a Space Nerd Must-Have” at Yanko Design.

Here are the four LEGO “posters”.

Here are examples of NASA’s space travel posters.

(12) JEOPARDY! [Item by David Goldfarb.] On Monday’s episode, a clue from Single Jeopardy and one from Double Jeopardy.

In the first round, the category was “Task: Force”, and the $400 clue:

This term for a fictional energy barrier has been traced back to the 1931 sci-fi story “Islands of Space”

Returning champion Jared Watson knew it was a force field.

In the second round, “Movie Continents” for $2000:

Antarctica: a shape-shifting alien menaces helicopter pilot Kurt Russell

Harrison Seidel identified “The Thing”.

On Tuesday’s episode, “Books and Authors” had this at the $2000 level:

Her novel “Kindred” tells of Dana, a young Black woman who is transported from the 1970s back in time to the pre-Civil War South

Jared Watson (who gave the Vulcan sign during the intro, and made the A in Jared into a little Star Trek glyph) responded correctly.

(13) FREE FLASH SF EVENT. Space Cowboys Books of Joshua Tree, CA is hosting a “Flash Science Fiction Night Online Event” on Tuesday June 27 beginning at 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Register for free here.

Join us online for an evening of short science fiction readings (1000 words or less) with Shacklebound Books authors Marisca Pichette, Eric Fomley, and Jenna Hanchey. Flash Science Fiction Nights run 30 minutes or less, and are a fun and great way to learn about new authors from around the world.

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. With a new Transformers movie coming out, How It Should Have Ended decided to remaster its episode “How Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Should Have Ended”.

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

HWA Scholarship Applications Accepted Through 8/1/23

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The Horror Writers Association (HWA) has opened the submission window for seven scholarships and grants. You do not need to be a member to apply. The deadline is August 1. 

The scholarships are offered to those pursuing careers as writers of horror fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. The diversity grants also extend to library workers. And there are funds offered for YA writing programs at libraries.

The window to apply is open until August 1, 2023.

The scholarship, open to all horror writers (HWA membership is not required), is worth $2500, which may be spent on approved writing education over the two years following the granting of the scholarship.

This scholarship, worth $2,500, is open to horror writers who identify as women. It may be spent on approved writing education over the two years following the granting of the scholarship.

The late Rocky Wood, then HWA President, explained why the scholarship was created in 2014.

“It is very clear to the HWA that there are unseen, but real, barriers limiting the amount of horror fiction being published by women. There are many fine women writers being published in our genre but we also see potential for the percentage of horror fiction being published by women to increase. This Scholarship, named after the great female horror writer, aims to encourage more female writers to enter our genre and to aid in the development of those already working within it. At the same time the HWA exists to extend the horror genre in all its aspects, so we are also establishing Horror Writers Association Scholarship, which is open to all our members, regardless of gender.”

The Diversity Grants will be open to underrepresented, diverse people who have an interest in the horror writing genre, including, but not limited to writers, editors, reviewers, and library workers. …the Diversity Grants have adopted the broadest definition of the word diversity to include, but not limited to, gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disabled, and neurodiverse.

The number of grants awarded is subject to the amount of funds raised. Each Grant is worth $500 and may be spent on approved expenses for a period of two (2) years following the awarding of the Grant.

The Dark Poetry Scholarship, first awarded in 2015, is designed to assist in the professional development of Horror and/or Dark Fantasy Poets. It is worth $1,250, which may be spent on approved writing education over the two years following the granting of the scholarship.

The Rocky Wood Memorial Scholarship Fund for Non-fiction Writing provides grants for research and writing a specific nonfiction project relating to horror and dark fantasy literature. The amount is flexible. Membership in HWA is not a requirement.

The Dennis Etchison Young Writers scholarship is open to students in grades 10-12 (or the equivalent, if home schooled), with an interest in writing horror/dark fiction. The winner may apply the $500 toward college tuition, course fees (on line or traditional), and/or materials pertaining to the enhancement of writing skills. The money can also be used for online Horror University courses from the HWA. 

The Young Adults Write Now fund will provide up to five endowments of $250 each per year for selected libraries to establish new, or support ongoing, writing programs. The program is currently open to United States libraries, but will be expanded in the future to include other countries, as part of the HWA’s global presence. Membership in the HWA is not a requirement. Recipients receiving funding will be able to use the monies for anything relating to the proposed/active writing program, including but not limited to supplies, special events, publishing costs, guest speakers/instructors, and operating expense. Monies may not be used to fund other programs or expenses for the library.

Pixel Scroll 5/27/23 I Thought Muddy Waters Scrolled That Pixel

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(1) PROBLEMATIC PROGRAM CONTENT. Joshua Shaw raised a red flag in a public post at the Official Anime North Facebook Group.

This is a bit of a dour post and I don’t want to ruin anyone’s fun this weekend. Even still, please read because this is about an incident that is representative of an issue in the anime community.

My partner doesn’t have a Facebook so I’m acting mostly as a mouthpiece for her to share something that really bothered her at this year’s convention. During Anime Family Feud presented by Anime North Anime North Game Shows, there was an incredible game going on with a clever and exciting first category, the mood was brought down by the second category for the day: female anime characters most likely to have an onlyfans… as chosen by males.

Visible discomfort settled on the room. First of all, anyone can do an onlyfans, there is no real way to tell who has one. If there was a criteria, it would probably be people who are comfortable with their sexuality, and if people voted on the survey based on this it would probably be fine. But instead, participation was limited to men and selections only to women, the result was a forum for men to let everyone know not who would have an onlyfans, but who SHOULD have an onlyfans according to THEIR personal fantasies.

Enter Nezuko in position 8, a 13 year old girl. The audience was made extremely uncomfortable, and boos echoed from women in the crowd about the fact that this answer was even allowed. It’s really gross to allow this reflection of pedophilic beauty standards to be effectively normalized through the game. It basically is saying “Look! Other men like her, its normal for us to like little girls too. It’s all in good fun”. But it’s not, jokes and games are ALWAYS first steps that precede more violent and dangerous attitudes surrounding the issue.

You’d think in the accepting space of this community we would be above platforming pedophilic sexism in our events, but it’s clear that our beloved and appreciated organizers made an oversight and I’d encourage more robust efforts in the future.

(2) SNG Q&A. The Horror Writers Association continues a series with “Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with Christine Sng”.

What has writing horror taught you about the world and yourself?

Horror allows me to write about what I observe and experience in this world. It has helped me process what I see, realizing that while there is an abundance of cruelty and evil in the world, there is also a lot of good.

(3) NEW ELLIS ART CATALOG. Doug Ellis has made his latest illustrated science fiction, fantasy and pulp art sale catalog is available for download as a PDF here.

You can also download jpgs of each image here (however, to see prices and descriptions you’ll need to download the catalog).

Artists are in order, alphabetically by last name, other than the famous “Unidentified Artist”.  Note that some images do include nudity.

(4) HAZARDS OF BEING A WRITER. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] What happens if an author’s life partner doesn’t care for their latest work? Horror ensues. Or comedy about horrible feelings anyway. “’Deeper than a sexual betrayal’: what happens if your partner doesn’t like your writing?” in the Guardian.

…“Writing can be extremely embarrassing. It can be more revealing than porn,” said Moser, whose next book is a personal meditation on Dutch painting. “Whenever you put yourself out there, you are allowing not just the possibility but the absolute certainty of criticism. If you’re not supported by your nearest and dearest, it would be impossible to go on,” he said.

To hear Moser speak of the unflagging support that he and his partner, the novelist Arthur Japin, provide each other, one can’t help wondering if their mutual appreciation society isn’t partly a reflexive bulwark against an all but inevitable unraveling. “It would be deeper than a sexual betrayal,” Moser said of what happened to Beth. “You could hook up with somebody at a party, and whatever, a couple can recover, but [learning that your partner doesn’t think you’re a good writer] is an attack on your being.”…

(5) ANCIENT SPOILERS. “40 years ago, NPR had to apologize for airing ‘Return of the Jedi’ spoilers” and they still bear the scars. Spoiler warning, of course.

…At the time, though, these plot details really rankled NPR listeners. So much so that the next day Stamberg issued an on-air apology.

Well, sort of. Here’s what she said:

“Well, the comic book was a goof, but we certainly goofed last night. We goofed so badly that we changed our program before rebroadcasting it to the West Coast, which means that you West Coast listeners won’t know what I’m talking about. But enough of you on the East Coast called to complain that we want to apologize publicly to everybody.

“Calls — there were more phone calls on this one than we ever got in the middle of the hottest Middle East disputes.

“Calls — there were more phone calls than Richard Gere would get if he listed his number.

And all because last night on All Things Considered, we permitted a six-and-a-half-year-old boy to tell us everything — and I mean everything — about Return Of The Jedi. “You gave the plot away,” you said. “I’ve been waiting for that movie for three years, and now you have ruined it for me. How could you do a thing like that?”

“Well, we are sorry. We’re contrite, and we’re fascinated. Usually you get angry when we get our facts wrong. This time we got them right, and you got angry.”…

(6) MEMORY LANE.

2019 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Julie E. Czerneda’s  a Canadian who’s won four Aurora Award for Best Novel winners for In the Company of Others, A Turn of Light, A Play of Shadow and The Gossamer Mage which is the source of our Beginning this Scroll. 

All of her novels are well-crafted in a detailed universe with stories that are well thought out. Her Trade Pact Universe series is fantastic space opera. 

And John Clute said in the SFE: “As an anthologist, Czerneda has very usefully assembled several attractive volumes with high Canadian content.”

The world was not always thus. 

Keepers of histories agree on this, if little else. Those from the southern continents insist the world began as a frozen hen’s egg, its yolk the ground beneath, its pristine white the ice, and its shell a sky of endless darkness and stars. When the shell cracked, in poured sunlight and warmth, melting the ice. Finally, the world was ready for people to live upon it, and so they did. 

Historians and lore masters of the northern continent, experienced with ice, teach the world started in fire and it was only as it cooled that life of any sort could exist, be it hen or person. 

Theologians both north and south avoid the topic, the present and future wellbeing of the souls in their care having the greater weight, the past being unalterable. 

And perilous.

We were not the first here. 

This is the truth no one—no person—dares imagine. That there were voices before ours. Hands. Hearts and love. Rage and a hunger so terrible it consumed the surface of the world, heaving mountains skyward, tossing continents, boiling oceans. Until nowhere was left unscarred. 

Save one place. 

This is a truth impossible to rediscover. Only in the names of places, only in that one place on all the world, could you glimpse it. For ages flew by and everywhere, even there, came new voices, new hearts and hands, to claim the land and write their truths upon it.

Magic, once, was everywhere. 

Now magic is not, being confined to that one untouched place. Those of north and south might be curious. Might long for magic of their own. Might wish, in the fragile moment between twilight and the rise of the moon, to see a gossamer come to life before their eyes and transform the ordinary into wonder. 

But there is only one place left in the world where you could. Where the words of those who came before linger. Where mage scribes write them down, to summon magic from the land itself. Tananen.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born May 27, 1894 — Dashiell Hammett. Yes, I know he’s written some genre fiction but I’m interested this time in his mysteries. He wrote The Maltese Falcon which was turned into the film you remember and another film a decade earlier. And of course there are Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man series that got turned in a six film series. Now my favorite character by him is the Continental Op in Red Harvest and The Dain Curse. And let’s not forget the Secret Agent X-9 comic strip which I think is genre, which artist Alex Raymond of Flash Gordon fame illustrated. (Died 1961.)
  • Born May 27, 1911 — Vincent Price. Ok, what’s popping into my head is him on The Muppets in “The House of Horrors“ sketch they did in which he and Kermit sport impressive fangs which you can see thisaway. If I had to single out his best work, it’d be in such films as House on Haunted Hill, House of Usher and The Pit and the Pendulum. Yes, I know the latter two are Roger Corman productions.  Sue me. He also did a lot of series work including being Egghead on Batman, appearing in the Fifties Science Fiction Theater, having a recurring role as Jason Winters on the Time Express and so forth. (Died 1993.)
  • Born May 27, 1922 — Christopher Lee. He first became famous for his role as Count Dracula in a series of Hammer Horror films.  His other film roles include The Creature in The Curse of Frankenstein, Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace, Kharis the Mummy in The Mummy, Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun, Lord Summerisle In The Wicker Man, Saruman in The Lord of the Rings films and The Hobbit film trilogy, and Count Dooku in the second and third films of the Star Wars prequel trilogy. (Died 2015.)
  • Born May 27, 1929 — Burnett Toskey, 94. He was a Seattle fan who was a member of the Nameless Ones who served in various offices for them from the early Fifties to the mid Sixties. He was also the editor of Spectator Amateur Press Society.  His work on Cry of the Nameless won the Best Fanzine Hugo at Pittcon, a honor he shared with F. M. Busby, Elinor Busby and Wally Weber.
  • Born May 27, 1934 — Harlan Ellison. Setting aside the “The City on the Edge of Forever” Star Trek episode, I think I best remember him for the two Dangerous Vision anthologies which were amazing reading though I admit I read them long enough that I’ve no idea how the Suck Fairy would treat  them now.  His awards are far, far too numerous to recount here. His Hugos alone are legion and that’s hardly all of the awards that he was honored with. (Died 2018.)
  • Born May 27, 1935 — Lee Meriwether, 88. Catwoman on Batman. (And if you have to ask which Batman, you’re in the wrong conversation.) Also, she had a turn as a rather sexy Lily Munster on The Munsters Today. And of course she had a co-starring role as Dr. Ann MacGregor on The Time Tunnel as well. And yes, I know I’m not touching upon her many other genre roles including her Trek appearance as I know you will.
  • Born May 27, 1966 — Nina Allan, 57. Author of two novels to date, both in the last five years, The Race and The Rift which won a BSFA Award. She has done a lot of short stories hence these collections to date, A Thread of Truth, The Silver Wind: Four Stories of Time Disrupted, Microcosmos, Stardust: The Ruby Castle Stories and Spin which has also won a BSFA Award. Partner of the true Christopher Priest.

(8) SFF SNACKS. Bones Coffee Company has a whole lineup of sff-branded products. Here are two examples.

Inspired by Marvel’s Spider-Man, Web Slinger gives you the power you need to swing into action and get your flavor senses tingling!

They’re here from Chocolate Space! The Mint Invaders have come to planet Earth to harvest our most precious resource: Mint Chocolate Chip Ice-Cream! But…fear not, fellow humans! With the power of opposable thumbs and caffeine, we can send those little green jerks back to Chocolate Space! Will you stand with us?

(9) IN CASE YOU WONDERED. CBR.com keeps track of “Everything Added to The Lord of the Rings Extended Editions”.

Released between 2002 and 2004, the Extended Editions of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings — The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King — add a whopping two hours and 5 minutes of content to an already-lengthy trilogy. Some of the additional material consists of lengthened versions of existing scenes, but a good chunk of it is entirely new footage, unavailable outside of these cuts. There are also new musical cues and special effects to accompany the added content….

(10) SHOUT-OUT FOR THE EARLY SKY WATCHERS. “Nabta Playa: The World’s First Astronomical Site Was Built in Africa and Is Older Than Stonehenge” at Discover Magazine.

For thousands of years, ancient societies all around the world erected massive stone circles, aligning them with the sun and stars to mark the seasons. These early calendars foretold the coming of spring, summer, fall and winter, helping civilizations track when to plant and harvest crops. They also served as ceremonial sites, both for celebration and sacrifice.

These megaliths — large, prehistoric monuments made of stone — may seem mysterious in our modern era, when many people lack a connection with, or even view of, the stars. Some even hold them up as supernatural, or divined by aliens. But many ancient societies kept time by tracking which constellations rose at sunset, like reading a giant, celestial clock. And others pinpointed the sun’s location in the sky on the summer and winter solstice, the longest and shortest days of the year, or the spring and fall equinox. 

Europe alone holds some 35,000 megaliths, including many astronomically-aligned stone circles, as well as tombs (or cromlechs) and other standing stones. These structures were mostly built between 6,500 and 4,500 years ago, largely along the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. 

…Located in Africa, Nabta Playa stands some 700 miles south of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. It was built more than 7,000 years ago, making Nabta Playa the oldest stone circle in the world — and possibly Earth’s oldest astronomical observatory. It was constructed by a cattle worshiping cult of nomadic people to mark the summer solstice and the arrival of the monsoons….

(11) IN SPACE, EVERYONE CAN HEAR YOU POOP. You probably didn’t need to read that. So be warned – it’s the subject matter of Futurism’s article “Space Tourists Learn Harsh Reality of Space Station Bathroom”.

… Private spaceflight companies have yet to overcome the challenge. SpaceX, for one, admitted in September 2021 that a previous crop of space tourists had struggled with waste management during a crewed mission. A month after that, we got more information when SpaceX revealed that it had fixed a problem on one of its Crew Dragon capsules in which its space toilet, which relies on two separate vacuum tubes for numbers one and two, was leaking and spraying urine onto the floor of the craft.

“We didn’t really even notice it, the crew didn’t even notice it, until we got back,” SpaceX’s Bill Gerstenmaier told The New York Times at the time. “When we got the vehicle back, we looked under the floor and saw the fact that there was contamination underneath the floor of Inspiration4.”…

(12) HOLE NEW THING. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] NASA has published evidence of an intermediate mass black hole in the globular cluster nearest to earth — about 6000 light years away. “NASA’s Hubble Hunts for Intermediate-Sized Black Hole Close to Home”.

Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have come up with what they say is some of their best evidence yet for the presence of a rare class of “intermediate-sized” black hole that may be lurking in the heart of the closest globular star cluster to Earth, located 6,000 light-years away.

Like intense gravitational potholes in the fabric of space, virtually all black holes seem to come in two sizes: small and humongous. It’s estimated that our galaxy is littered with 100 million small black holes (several times the mass of our Sun) created from exploded stars. The universe at large is flooded with supermassive black holes, weighing millions or billions of times our Sun’s mass and found in the centers of galaxies.

A long-sought missing link is an intermediate-mass black hole, weighing in somewhere between 100 and 100,000 solar masses. How would they form, where would they hang out, and why do they seem to be so rare?…

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George gets inside the experience of “When People Hate-Watch Stuff”.

[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Juli Marr, 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 Jake.]

Pixel Scroll 5/26/23 Pixels Get Ready, There’s A Scroll A-Coming

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(1) BRADBURY MUSEUM CLOSING. The Ray Bradbury Experience Museum in his hometown of Waukegan, IL is shutting down this month they announced today on Facebook.

In 2017 a group of dedicated volunteers came together to honor Ray Bradbury in his hometown Waukegan, Illinois, with an interactive museum. As the Ray Bradbury Experience Museum Committee, we operated the museum out of a space in downtown Waukegan, donated by the Greater Waukegan Development Coalition.

Now, after much consideration, the RBEM Committee has decided to officially close in May 2023. This decision followed challenging realities. COVID was a daunting obstacle. Many donors shifted their attention to other, more pressing social needs. In addition, it was immensely difficult to secure a much-needed permanent location in downtown Waukegan.

Over the years, we worked with museum designers to develop plans for the future museum. At the same time, the RBEM Committee and volunteers welcomed visitors to events, readings, performances, and exhibits in Waukegan and at national and regional conventions. We presented Ray Bradbury programs, online and in-person, for local and regional schools and libraries. A highlight event was the August 22, 2020, celebration of the Centennial of Ray Bradbury’s birth in Waukegan.

April 2023 marked our final program. Partnering with the Waukegan Public Library and the Waukegan Historical Society and funded by an Illinois Humanities grant, we presented Explore Ray Bradbury, a weekend of multi-media and hands-on engagement with Bradbury’s classic books and themes. Excited visitors of all ages heard Bradbury stories, created Bradbury-themed crafts, invented banned book slogans and pins, and experienced a virtual reality journey to the International Space Station….

(2) FLORIDA FUR. CBR.com reports how “Furry Convention Disrupted by Florida Governor’s New Law”.

Megaplex, a furry convention based in Orlando, has been forced to change its policy on the minimum age of attendees due to new Florida legislation.

Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida and Republican presidential nominee, recently passed SB 1438, or the Protection of Children Act. This bill prohibits the admission of children to any “adult live performance,” defined as “a presentation that depicts or simulates nudity, sexual conduct, or specific sexual activities.” Allowing underage individuals to an event in Florida falling under that definition is punishable by a year of prison and/or a $1,000 fine. As reported by Rolling Stone, furries are not a specific target of SB 1438, but the subculture, which involves art and costumes of anthropomorphized animals, is often stereotyped as being highly sexualized.

… A statement on Megaplex’s website reads, “Many have raised concerns about recent changes in Florida legislation. After reviewing Florida SB 1438 it has been decided that for legal reasons and protection of our attendees, our venue, and the overall convention, Megaplex 2023 attendees must be 18 years of age at the time of registration pickup. Megaplex has welcomed younger fandom members and their families since its inception and making this change was very difficult… It is our hope that this change is temporary and that we can welcome members of all ages back next year. With this in mind, the public decorum portion of the Code of Conduct as well as standards for programming, attire, and behavior in convention space will not be changing and will continue to be enforced as has been in the past.”…

The Rolling Stone article has more analysis: “Furries Now Have Serious Beef With Ron DeSantis”.

…So what does a law about exposing kids to sexually charged content have to do with people dressing as cartoon bunnies and foxes? While SB 1438 does not specifically target minors dressing as furries, it prohibits children from attending adult performances, which it defines as “a presentation that depicts or simulates nudity, sexual conduct, or specific sexual activities.” And, like drag, there are pervasive misconceptions that this mode of expression is inherently sexual. 

While it is true that there is a segment of furrydom that does treat it as a kink, it is not a representation of the wider community, and many furries do not view their interest in anthropomorphized creatures as sexual at all. Though many conventions do cater to the NSFW aspects of the furry fandom, they typically save such programming for later at night to ensure the rest of the con is family-friendly, or cordon off adult vendors so they are not in full view of other attendees.

The fact that the furry organizers felt pressured to bar children from the convention is yet another example of how it’s been seen as an attack on LGBTQ rights. (The ACLU referred to it as “a blatant attempt to erase drag performers and silence the LGBTQ+ community.”) The furry fandom overwhelmingly skews LGBTQ, with nearly 80 percent of furries self-identifying as such, according to surveys of the fandom. “Furry has become synonymous with LGBTQ, since there is such a large intersection of communities,” says Joelle, one of the founders of Moms of Furries, an organization supporting kid furries and their parents. (Joelle and her cofounder, Carrie, requested their last names be withheld for safety reasons; they both have children in the fandom who are also queer.) “Furries feel connected to what they see as persecution of the queer community.”

Additionally, many furries identify as transgender, and “would not feel safe” at a convention in Florida, which recently passed a law making it a misdemeanor trespassing offense for someone to use a bathroom that does not align with their birth sex, says Carrie. “Right now anything that isn’t very straight-laced, in Florida, is starting to be called out as deviant,” she says. “Obviously furries are an easy mark for that.”…

… Megaplex will take place September 15-17 in Orlando, FL.

(3) IAFA ASKS IF THEY SHOULD STAY IN ORLANDO. For similar reasons, The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA) has launched a survey about whether it should remain in Florida, relocate to another state, or adapt to a virtual or hybrid format.

We have received many concerns regarding the safety of our multiply-marginalized members, the ethical issues of spending organizational and personal funds in Florida, and many other concerns. We fully acknowledge and share your dismay over these developments, as they are antithetical to our organization’s values of inclusivity, equality, and justice. 

While the decision to move the conference is a significant one, we also understand that it may have practical implications and involve a complex process. Therefore, we assure you that we are actively exploring alternative options and potential venues. We are engaging with our partners and considering various locations that align with our values and prioritize the well-being of our members. 

Moreover, we recognize that this situation extends beyond a single event or location. We are committed to using our platform and influence to raise awareness, challenge discriminatory practices, and support organizations and activists who are fighting against systemic inequalities. We will actively seek opportunities to collaborate with local advocates, amplify their voices, and contribute to the ongoing efforts to create a more just and inclusive society. 

We want to emphasize that your feedback and perspectives are invaluable to us. We encourage you to continue sharing your concerns, suggestions, and insights with us by clicking the ICFA45 Survey below. Together, we can navigate these challenging times and work towards a more equitable future.

(4) SCHOLARSHIP FROM HELL. The Horror Writers Association Scholarship from Hell recipients are Alex Luceli Jimenez and Timaeus Bloom.

The Scholarship From Hell puts the recipients into the workshop environment of Horror University, which takes place during HWA’s annual StokerCon®.

The winners receive domestic coach airfare (contiguous 48 states) to and from StokerCon 2023 in Pittsburgh, PA, June 15-18, $50 for luggage reimbursement, a 4 night stay at the convention,  free registration to StokerCon®, and as many Horror University workshops as they’d like to attend.

(5) UTOPIA AWARDS. The public is invited to make nominations for the 2nd annual Utopia Awards hosted by CliFiCon 2023.

The 2nd annual Utopia Awards will highlight and honor authors, artists, and other creators producing works focused on hopeful outlooks, solutions to climate change and related social problems, and building a better future.

Nominations for the 2nd annual Utopia Awards are open to works published in 2022 that exemplify hopeful, utopian fiction (science fiction, fantasy, climate fiction…)

Works nominated for a Utopia Award must have been published during 2022.

Nominations are accepted for works published by traditional or independent publishers, magazines, and anthologies, as well independently published works.

CliFiCon 2023 is a two-day online conference taking place October 7-8. Buy tickets here.

(6) WHERE DID YOUR SF JOURNEY START? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Don’t know if you’ve seen this over at Media Death Cult – ”This is where my Science Fiction journey started”? But Moid Moidelhoff has done a piece on where his SF journey began… 

Now, mine began with H. G. Wells War of the Worlds original film and then novel along with Gerry Anderson’s Supercar then Fireball XL5 etc. Quickly followed by 2001: A Space Odyssey (premiere week in Cinerama format at London Leicester Square) to discover Arthur C. Clarke wrote books too and so it was: Sands of Mars, Childhood’s End, City and the Stars, Tales From The White Hart…  My first con was the 1977 Novacon 7 in Birmingham with John Brunner (whom I had already read) as GoH.  At Novacon 8 I met biologist and SF fan Jack Cohen and I did not know it but that was to become a life-long (his sadly and not mine) fan friendship and biological colleague (he was active in the professional learned body, the Institute of Biology, of whom I was to become a staff member and ultimately Head of Science Policy and Books. Jack was occasionally on one of the committees I serviced.)…

I’m rambling aren’t I? Anyway, Moid’s journey it seems began with the weekly comic 2000AD and its Judge Dredd. I too was (and am) into 2000AD and our college SF group, Hatfield PSIFA, visited the 2000AD office a couple of times and they were also guests of honour at one of our early Shoestringcons (as recorded in the 2000AD  1983 annual – see pic attached). It’s been sad to lose so many of the 2000AD staff including recently Alan Grant (to whom I owe a few pints as he always said I was a poor student (and so to this day I always buy a pint for a student at cons and/or an unemployed fan depending on whom I come across)).

I’m rambling again aren’t I?  Moid recounts his being a fan of 2000AD in this 20 minute vid here.

(7) BOLO FOR A DEATH ON THAT HILL. Collider’s Lloyd Farley declares “’Return of the Jedi’ Is the Best Film in the Original Star Wars Trilogy and I Will Die on That Hill”.

… New, unique creatures enter the Star Wars universe for the first time, including a rancor, the sarlacc, Ewoks, fan favorite Max Rebo, and Jabba the Hutt himself, a large slug-like creature covered in his own excesses, lauded for heading a far-reaching criminal empire. Jabba is nothing like we would have expected him to be, but to me, he’s perfect — a visual representation of the ugliness of his vocation. Jedi also brings back the fun that took a back seat in Empire Strikes Back. Han oozing charm and confidence as he tries in vain to sweet talk Jabba out of killing our group of heroes is a funny return to the charming scoundrel we love. C-3P0’s awkward handling of the revelation that the Ewoks see him as a god is delightfully comic, a pretentious droid having to come to terms with unyielding adoration….

(8) WHEN MONEY FLOWS AWAY FROM THE WRITER. “Termination Fees in Publishing Contracts: Not Just Bad for Authors” explains Victoria Strauss at Writer Beware.

…Why are termination fees a red flag?

Obviously, they are onerous for authors, who might have good reason to want to escape a contract early, and can’t do so without opening up their wallets.

More problematically, publishers can and do employ termination fees abusively. They may hold them over the heads of unhappy writers to shut them up, attempt to use them as an extra income source by offering to jettison dissatisfied authors at the slightest provocation (for example, now-defunct publisher Curiosity Quills offered an annual “escape clause” period where writers could request an invoice), impose them even in situations where, per their own contract language, they shouldn’t apply (as happened to this author as part of a dispute over publisher breach), terminate the contracts of writers who’ve pissed them off and demand the fee even though termination wasn’t the writer’s decision, or, in more than one case I’ve heard about, close the publisher down and refuse to return rights unless the writers paid to get them back….

(9) GARY KENT (1933-2023). [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Gary Kent, a stunt performer, stunt coordinator, and actor in numerous genre films, died May 25 reports Variety. Most were horror with a smaller number of science, fiction & fantasy flicks. Most were also “B movies.” He was most active during the 60s, 70s, and 80s. One of the notable exceptions to that time period was his stint as stunt coordinator for Bubba Ho-Tep in 2002.

…Soon after his stuntman debut in 1965, Kent appeared as a gas tank worker in Peter Bogdanovich’s debut feature film “Targets,” then worked on “Hell’s Bloody Devils,” “The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant” “Angels’ Wild Women” and Richard Rush’s “Psych-Out,” racking up injuries along the way.

While starring in Al Adamson’s soft-core Western “Lash of Lust,” Kent encountered Charles Manson and his followers living at the Spahn movie ranch, and later told Quentin Tarantino about Manson and his mechanic’s work on the film’s dune buggy. Though the Cliff Booth character was also based on other stuntmen, Kent’s story inspired the “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” sequence when Booth encounters the Manson family at Spahn Ranch.

In addition to performing in front of the camera, Kent also worked in production jobs and directed, serving as the assistant director on “Dracula vs. Frankenstein,” the unit production manager on Brian De Palma’s “Phantom of the Paradise,” writer-director for “Rainy Day Friends” and director of “The Pyramid.”…

(10) MEMORY LANE.

2011 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Lisa Goldstein’s The Uncertain Places gives us the Beginning this Scroll. 

Now she’s one of my favorite writers with this novel plus Dark Cities Underground, Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon and Walking the Labyrinth all being excellent reads.  I also like her short fiction, some of which has been collected in Daily Voices and Travellers in Magic but none since the latter collection was done thirty years ago.

This novel was published by Tachyon twelve years ago.  The cover art was by Ann Monn. 

It won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature. 

And here is that Beginning…

IT WAS BEN AVERY who introduced me to Livvy, Livvy and her haunted family. This was in 1971, when Ben and I were sophomores in college. A lifetime ago, another world, but it seems like I can still remember all of it, every motion, every color, every note of music. For one thing, it was the year that I fell in love. But for another, I don’t think that anyone who experienced what I did that year could possibly forget it. 

Ben had gone to Berkeley early in September, before classes started, to find an apartment for us. He’d seen Livvy’s sister Maddie in a play and they’d started dating, and when I got to Berkeley he couldn’t talk about anything else. Now we were going to visit her family up in Napa Valley, in the wine country, for a couple of days. 

Back then Ben drove a humpbacked 1966 Volvo, a car that seemed ancient even though it was only five years old. It smelled of mold and rust and oil, and to this day, whenever I find myself in a car like that, I feel young and ready for anything, any wild scheme that Ben or I would propose. The car went through a constant cycle of electrical problems—either the generator didn’t work, or the regulator, or the battery—and on this trip, as on so many others, the battery warning light flickered on and off, a dull red like the baleful eye of Mordor.

We got on the freeway and headed out of Berkeley, then passed through the neighboring suburbs. As we crossed the Carquinez Bridge Ben started telling me about the last time he’d taken the car in, and the Swedish mechanic who told him the problem was with the “yenerator.” He did a goofy imitation of the mechanic, who I was sure was nothing like Ben portrayed him, but I barely paid attention. I was thinking about my upcoming classes, and about this sister of Maddie’s he wanted me to meet.

“Tell me again why I’m coming with you,” I said, interrupting him in the middle of the story.

You’ll like them,” Ben said. “They’re fun. Come on, Will, have I ever disappointed you?”

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born May 26, 1865 — Robert Chambers. His most-remembered work was The King in Yellow short stories. Though he would turn away from these supernatural tellings, Lovecraft included some of them in his Supernatural Horror in Literature critical study. Critics thought his work wasn’t as great as could have been. That said, Stross, Wagner, Carter and even Blish are said to have been influenced by him. (Died 1933.)
  • Born May 26, 1913 — Peter Cushing. Best known for his roles in the Hammer Productions horror films of the Fifties to the Seventies, as well as his performance as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars. He also played Holmes many times, and though not considered canon, he was the Doctor in Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. and Dr. Who and the Daleks. He even made appearances in both The Avengers and The New Avengers as well as Space: 1999. There’s a CGI recreation of Grand Moff Tarkin used for his likeness in Rogue One. (Died 1994.)
  • Born May 26, 1923 — James Arness. He appeared in three Fifties SF films, Two Lost Worlds, Them! and The Thing from Another World. The latter is based on the 1938 novella Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell (writing under the pseudonym of Don A. Stuart). The novella would be the basis of John Carpenter’s The Thing thirty years later. (Died 2011.)
  • Born May 26, 1923 — Roy Dotrice. I’ll always think of him first and foremost as Jacob “Father” Wells on Beauty and the Beast. He was Commissioner Simmonds in two episodes of Space: 1999. He also appeared in recurring role on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys as Zeus. He was on A Game of Thrones in the second season playing “Wisdom Hallyne the Pyromancer” in “The Ghost of Harrenhal” and “Blackwater” episodes. (Died 2017.)
  • Born May 26, 1925 — Howard DeVore.He was according to all sources, an expert on pulp magazines who dealt in them and collected them, an APA writer, con-runner and otherwise all-around volunteer in First Fandom. He wrote two fascinating-sounding publications with Don Franson, A History of the Hugo, Nebula, and International Fantasy Awards, Listing Nominees & Winners, 1951-1970 and A History of the Hugo, Nebula, and International Fantasy Awards. (Died 2005.)
  • Born May 26, 1964 — Caitlín R. Kiernan, 59. They’re an impressive two-time recipient of both the World Fantasy and Bram Stoker awards. As for novels, I’d single out Low Red Moon, Blood Oranges (writing as Kathleen Tierney) and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir as being particularly worth reading. They also fronted a band, Death’s Little Sister, named for Neil Gaiman’s character, Delirium.
  • Born May 26, 1970 — Alex Garland, 53. Writer of Dredd, Ex Machina and Annihilation (which I still haven’t seen — opinions please on it — the books for the latter were excellent and usually don’t see films based on fiction I like). Ex Machina was nominated for a Hugo at MidAmeriCon II, Annihilation likewise was at Dublin 2019: An Irish Worldcon. Dredd alas wasn’t nominated. He also wrote 28 Days Later but I’m really not into Pandemic films right now despite the current one ending. 

(12) BOOKSTORE UNIONIZATION UPDATE. Publishers Weekly tells the status of three different bookstore unionization efforts: “Workers at Park Slope B&N File for Union Election; Hadley, Mass. Store Votes for Union”.

Barnes & Noble workers at the Park Slope, Brooklyn, store filed for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board on May 25, seeking representation from the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU). The news comes a little less than a month after workers at the flagship B&N store in Manhattan’s Union Square launched their own union drive, and on the same day as 15 workers at the B&N outlet in Hadley, Mass., voted unanimously to join the United Food and Commercial Workers, Local 1459. The Union Square B&N election is scheduled for June 7.

(13) ANTHOLOGY WILL BENEFIT PRO-CHOICE ORGANIZATION. [Based on a press release.] Aqueduct Press announced today that it will publish Adventures in Bodily Autonomy: Exploring Reproductive Rights in Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Horror. One hundred percent of royalties will go to NARAL, Pro-Choice America.

Edited by Raven Belasco, author of the Blood & Ancient Scrolls series, the anthology will feature the work of Kathleen Alcalá, Elizabeth Bear, Raven Belasco, Tara Campbell, Anya De Niro, Jaymee Goh, Cynthia Gralla, K Ibura, Ellen Klages, Annalee Newitz, Nisi Shawl, Cecilia Tan, Sonya Taaffe, Helena María Viramontes, and an introduction by international social justice activist Maggie Mayhem.

World Fantasy Award Winner Elizabeth Lynn says this of the anthology, “So satisfying to read a volume of new speculative fiction stories centered on women’s experience, women’s lives, women’s choices! You’ll find a pleasurable variety here: hard sf, fantasy, ghosts, vampires, horror, sweet lyricism, and steel-edged noir—stories from well-known names, and stories from writers you’ve never encountered before. I guarantee that at least one story in this volume will make you punch the air in triumph, and another will work its way into your dreams, and not let go.”

(14) FANS IN THE FIFTIES. [Item by Andrew Porter.] Just an amazing number of photos from the 1950s, all digitized in Dave Rike’s gallery of old black-and-white photos of fans now preserved at the Internet Archive.

(15) RISKY BUSINESS. [Item by Steven French.] Like the author of this piece, I hadn’t really thought of quantum based tech being of interest to the insurance industry but of course, the latter is all about dealing with risk, and the former offers risk a-plenty. These include risks associated with cyber attacks (because according to the no cloning theorem quantum states can’t be replicated), or with the fact that we’re dealing with fundamentally irreducible probabilistic phenomena (at least according to most interpretations of quantum theory) but what was most interesting to me, as a philosopher of physics, was the concern about risks to do with our lack of understanding: “Commercializing quantum technologies: the risks and opportunities” at Physics World.

…Striking a balance between using reinsurance and insuring risk internally is a classic optimization problem that is very important for an insurance company to get right. Getting things wrong, even by a tiny bit, can be very costly. Scharrer explains that optimization is currently done using a heuristic approach that relies on human expertise.

While reinsurance optimization could be done better on a conventional computer, Scharrer says that it would take decades to do the calculations. And that is where a quantum computer could come in handy – because some quantum computers are predicted to be very good at solving certain optimization problems that could be relative to reinsurance. But like a lot of the technology being discussed at the conference, such a quantum computer does not yet exist.

In his talk, Munich Re’s Nawroth talked about how insurers could use quantum computers to do simulations that could help them better understand a wide range of phenomena that affect risk. These include climate change, green technologies, financial markets, pandemics, cyber security and so on….

(16) SPEAK, MEMORY. “Security vendor says fast action is needed now on deepfake voice” reports Biometric Update.

A new research report from security analyst vendor Recorded Future says voice cloning is capable of defeating voice multifactor authentication in the wild. Authors of the report say a cross-industry approach is needed to keep deepfake voice in check.

The report, “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Do Crime,” is a nod to science-fiction author Harlan Ellison’s dark visions, but the findings it contains warrant poetic flourish.

“Voice cloning technology is currently being abused by threat actors in the wild,” the report states. It is “enabling the spread of misinformation and disinformation and increasing the effectiveness of social engineering.” The barrier to entry continues to get lower, with platforms such as ElevenLabs’s popular Prime Voice AI offering low cost, browser-based options for text-to-speech (TTS) conversion.

“Voice cloning samples – such as those of celebrities, politicians, and internet personalities (‘influencers’) – and are intended to create either comedic or malicious content, which is often racist, discriminatory, or violent in nature,” the report says. Threat actors are demonstrating effective voice-based fraud attacks including voice phishing, or vishing….

(17) FLIGHT TEST. BBC News finds Virgin Galactic back on the scene after two years: “Virgin Galactic: Sir Richard Branson’s rocket plane returns to spaceflight”.

Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic rocket plane is back in action after a gap of almost two years.

The Unity vehicle, with two pilots and four passengers aboard, climbed high over the New Mexico desert to the edge of space – before gliding back down.

It was billed as the plane’s final test outing before entering commercial service in June.

Galactic has sold over 800 tickets to individuals who want to ride more than 80km (260,000ft) above Earth.

The company expects to start working through this passenger list with Unity flights initially occurring at the rate of one a month. New rocket planes are being designed for service in 2026 that should each be capable of increasing the cadence to one a week.

Thursday’s mission came just a couple of days after winning bids were announced to buy the assets in Sir Richard’s other space firm, Virgin Orbit, which filed papers with a bankruptcy court in April….

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Actor, author and “Reading Rainbow” founder LeVar Burton joined the L.A. Times Book Club on May 24 to discuss the State of Banned Books with Times editor Steve Padilla.

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

Pixel Scroll 5/19/23 I’m Still Big; It’s The Pixels That Got Small

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(1) EXPECT HUGO BALLOT IN “EARLY JUNE”. The Chengdu Worldcon committee today told Facebook readers when to look for the 2023 Hugo ballot:

The 2023 Chengdu Worldcon Hugo Awards nomination was officially closed on April 30th, and the shortlist will be out early June. Big thank you to all members who spent your valuable time to make the nominations.

(2) TAKE TWO. Cass Morris was very sorry to hear that Disney is closing the Galactic Starcruiser. And not for any abstract reasons – she was planning to go next year. However, the attraction’s inability to stay in business prompted Morris to embark on a vast thought experiment about the kind of Disney Star Wars immersive hotel experience which could work, and her results are quite entertaining. “Galactic Travels” at Scribendi.

…Unfortunately, while this news is terribly sad, it’s also not wholly unexpected. The Starcruiser has had trouble ever since it opened. The high price point, unusual conceit, and level of fannish commitment required for full enjoyment seem to have kept it operating at low capacity.

So, last night as I was nursing my sadness about probably never getting to go, I started thinking… 

If I were going to design a Star Wars hotel for Disney World, one that might stand a better chance of succeeding… what would I do?…

(3) MINDFULNESS ABOUT VIRTUAL GOHS. Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki has an idea for using virtual cons in a progressive way – involving international, disabled, and otherwise nontraveling creators — which he has shared with Facebook readers:

…Something I learnt along the way, from my first con I participated in, was that virtual cons are important. Having people of diverse backgrounds & voices be able to attend, contribute to the general pool of knowledge & discussions. I believe diversity, multiple viewpoints and experiences taking into account, people working together, will solve many world problems, including the recent AI scourge of the arts. twitter.com/Penprince_/sta…

Sure, running virtual components isnt always possible. Funding, the tech issues, etc. It’s understandable when cons can’t have them. But when they do have them, it’s imperative, almost compulsory they have both virtual attendees and guests of honour like CanConSF & ICFA did. It gives a platform to allow people with the experience and expertise to contribute on a larger scale to genre development and history, the change to. As ICFA guest of honour, the first ever African born, Black writer to be, I created the genre #Afropantheology, which I believe hope, & plan will contribute and richly influence genre & storytelling generally. The GoH platform was very helpful in that. …

(4) IT’S BIG. Max Gladstone tells how his vacation was interrupted by word about the apotheosis of his writing career in “Big Bigolas Energy” at The Third Place.

…It unfolded for me in fits and starts, and almost out of order, as one would expect of a book about time travel.

While we were in transit, a friend who often texts us about Time War sitings in the wilds of social media sent my partner a screenshot of The Bigolas Tweet, which at that time had 12,000 likes.

I thought, how wonderful! Nice note to start the vacation. And also: what a great screen name. My brain was in vacation mode already, so I didn’t think about the numbers too much. As I’ve been told many times, Twitter Doesn’t Sell Books. 

Later that evening, Amal (that’s my New York Times Bestselling co-author Amal El-Mohtar, to be clear, though at this point we were neither of us New York Times Bestselling co-authors) sent me a screenshot of the same tweet; the numbers were much bigger (Bigolas-er?). I thought: wow! It’s really taking off. But still: Twitter Doesn’t Sell Books.

As they say: lol….

(5) INNOCENT BYSTANDER. Google Bard, another of these AI language models, has somehow managed to pull Nnedi Okorafor into the latest row about BasedCon.

(6) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to munch on mahi mahi with L. Marie Wood in Episode 198 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

L. Marie Wood

I knew L. Marie Wood for a decade or more before I learned at the last in-person Balticon before the pandemic that we’re basically neighbors, but never knew it. So after an earlier lunch during which we tried to figure out how we’ve somehow managed to avoid each other all these years, we got together at Brix 27 in downtown Martinsburg, West Virginia so I could learn more about who she is and how she came to be.

L. Marie Wood is a writer of psychological horror, supernatural suspense, and dark fiction of all kinds who’s been a professionally published writer for 20 years, ever since her first novel Crescendo and first short story “The Dance” were published in 2003. Her novels since then include The Promise Keeper, Cacophony, Accursed, and others, plus multiple short story collections, including Anathema and Phantasma. She’s also a screenwriter who’s a three-time winner of Best Horror Screenplay at the NOVA International Film Festival, Best Psychological Horror Short Script at Hollywood Horrorfest, and on and on. Her most recent publications are the novel The Open Book, accompanied by the related short story collection The Tales of Time, which contains the short stories being read by — and feared by — the characters in that first book.

We discussed the way she began her writing career selling poetry in parking lots, our differing experiences with hand selling our own books, the fears which keep horror writers up at night, the many misconceptions she had about the writing life back when he began, the uncomfortable novella she wrote when she was five, what our parents made of our horrific scribblings, the ever-present problem of dealing with rejection, our mutual love of pantsing, what should become of our papers, and much more.

(7) WHEN THEY WERE THE FUTURE. Fanac.org has posted video of a panel from this year’s Eastercon: “Conversation 2023 – The Third Row w/ John Coxon, Niall Harrison, Emily January & Abigail Nussbaum”.

At the 2023 Eastercon (Conversation), Guest of Honor Niall Harrison, and fellow “Third Row” fans John Coxon, Emily January and Abigail Nussbaum sat down for a discussion on the future of fandom (circa 2004). 

Moderated by Meg MacDonald,  the panel hilariously tells the story of Third Row Fandom, named and brought into being accidentally by Greg Pickersgill during a “Future of Fandom” panel at the 2004 Eastercon. 

Themselves dubbed “the future of fandom” by Greg, the fans seated in the third row at that panel have made good on the title, pulling others into their orbit and having an outsized influence on science fiction and science fiction fandom over the last 20 years.

Illustrated with powerpoint slides to map out their impact, this fascinating panel tells the story of a cohort of young fans maturing into movers and shakers in the field, as writers, reviewers, editors, award judges and convention organizers.

Many thanks to Conversation 2023 for providing this recording, and particularly to Alison Scott for her assistance.

(8) WORRA Q&A. The Horror Writers Association blog continues its series: “Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with Bryan Thao Worra”.

What inspired you to start writing? 

These days I think a poet has a thousand beginnings. Sometimes I trace it back to an old encyclopedia with gorgons and dinosaurs, another, a 3rd-grade role-playing game almost no one remembers. Others it feels like an unrequited crush on a classmate, a fortune teller’s prediction about me shared to my grandmother, a ghost in an attic, or just the absence of seeing stories like my own in the news, in movies and novels, and especially poetry. Each moment was liberating in its own way….

(9) KNOW YOUR CONTRACT. “Editing Clauses in Publishing Contracts: What to Watch For” — Victoria Strauss issues warnings at Writer Beware.

Editing Clauses of Concern

Here’s an example of an editing clause that should be a dealbreaker (this and other clauses quoted below are taken from actual contracts in my possession):

“Publisher shall have the right to edit and revise the Work for any and all uses contemplated under this Agreement.”

What’s missing here? Any obligation on the publisher’s part to seek your approval before making the edits and revisions–or even allow you to see them before publication. A clause like this enables the publisher to edit at will without consulting or even informing you, and, if you do have the opportunity to see the edits, to unilaterally reject your concerns. If you sign a contract with this kind of language, you are at the mercy of the publisher and its editors. You shouldn’t be surprised if the publisher takes advantage of it.

(10) SPFBO 9. Right now Mark Lawrence’s Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off judges are picking their favorite covers from among the 300 entrants. See them here: “SPFBO 9 – The Cover Contest!”

(11) MEMORY LANE.

1996 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow is one of those novels that treats the Catholic Church with respect and is also a true SF novel at the same time, a very neat trick indeed. 

It was published by Villard twenty seven years ago, and was honored with an Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Otherwise Award, and a BSFA Award. It has a sequel, Children of God, published two years afterwards.

The Sparrow has one of the most perfect Beginnings I’ve ever read which you can see below if by any slim chance you’ve not read it yet. 

It was predictable, in hindsight. Everything about the history of the Society of Jesus bespoke deft and efficient action, exploration and research. During what Europeans were pleased to call the Age of Discovery, Jesuit priests were never more than a year or two behind the men who made initial contact with previously unknown peoples; indeed, Jesuits were often the vanguard of exploration. 

The United Nations required years to come to a decision that the Society of Jesus reached in ten days. In New York, diplomats debated long and hard, with many recesses and tablings of the issue, whether and why human resources should be expended in an attempt to contact the world that would become known as Rakhat when there were so many pressing needs on Earth. In Rome, the questions were not whether or why but how soon the mission could be attempted and whom to send. 

The Society asked leave of no temporal government. It acted on its own principles, with its own assets, on Papal authority. The mission to Rakhat was undertaken not so much secretly as privately—a fine distinction but one that the Society felt no compulsion to explain or justify when the news broke several years later. 

The Jesuit scientists went to learn, not to proselytize. They went so that they might come to know and love God’s other children. They went for the reason Jesuits have always gone to the farthest frontiers of human exploration. They went ad majorem Dei gloriam: for the greater glory of God. 

They meant no harm.

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born May 19, 1937 — Pat Roach. He was cast in the first three Indy Jones films as a decided Bad Person though he never had a name. His first genre appearance was in A Clockwork Orange as a Milkbar bouncer but his first named role was being Hephaestus in Clash of Titans. He was of an unusually stocky nature, so he got cast as a Man Ape in Conan the Destroyer, and as Bretagne the Barbarian in Red Sonja. And of course he had such a role as Zulcki in Kull the Desttoyer. Oh, and he played a very large and mostly naked Executioner in the George MacDonald Fraser scripted The Return of The Musketeers. (Died 2004.)
  • Born May 19, 1944 — Peter Mayhew. Chewbacca from the beginning to The Force Awakens before his retirement from the role. The same year he first did Chewy, he had an uncredited role as the Minotaur in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. He also shows in the Dark Towers series as The Tall Knight.  Can we say he earned a Hugo at IguanaCon II? I know I’m stretching it there. (Died 2019.)
  • Born May 19, 1946 — Andre the Giant. Fezzik in The Princess Bride, one of my all-time favorite films. Also, an uncredited role as Dagoth in Conan the Destroyer. He’s actually did a number of genre roles such as The Greatest American Hero with his American acting debut playing a Bigfoot in a two-part episode aired in 1976 on The Six Million Dollar Man titled “The Secret of Bigfoot”. He died of cardiac arrest, not at all surprising given his size and weight of over five hundred pounds. (Died 1993.)
  • Born May 19, 1948 — Grace Jones, 75. First genre appearance was as Stryx in Rumstryx, an Italian TV series. Her next was Zulu in Conan the Destroyer followed by being May Day in A View to Kill and Katrina in Vamp. She was Masako Yokohama in Cyber Bandits which also starred Adam Ant. Her last several genre roles to date were Christoph/Christine in Wolf Girl, and Death aka The Devil in Gutterdammerung, a film that also featured Henry Rollins, Slash and Iggy Pop! 
  • Born May 19, 1966 — Jodi Picoult, 57. Her Wonder Women work is exemplary (collected in Wonder Women, Volume 3 and Wonder Woman: Love and Murder).  She also has a most excellent two-volume YA series called the Between the Lines Universe which she wrote with Samantha van Leer. ISFDB lists her Second Glance novel as genre but I’d say it’s genre adjacent at best. Her latest work though marketed as a mainstream novel, Between the Lines Musical, is actually genre.
  • Born May 19, 1966 — Polly Walker, 57. She appeared in Syfy’s Caprica, Sanctuary and Warehouse 13, as well as performing voice work in John Carter.
  • Born May 19, 1996 — Sarah Grey, 27. Before DC Universe cast the present Stargirl in Brec Bassinger for that series, Legends of Tomorrow cast their Stargirl as this actress for a run of three episodes.  The episodes (“Out of Time”, “Justice Society of America” and “Camelot 3000”) are superb. I’ve not seen her as Alyssa Drake in The Order but I’ve heard Good Things about that series.

(13) COMICS SECTION.

  • Speed Bump shows even the ultimate Creator needs prompts.
  • The Far Side, on the other hand, shares an idea about Hell.  
  • The Far Side also imagined how this Star Trek personality would spend his time in Hell.

(14) KAIJU IN TRANSLATION. Never before available in English it says here. Now’s your chance to read the original Godzilla stories: “Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again” coming from the University of Minnesota Press in October 2023.

The first English translations of the original novellas about the iconic kaijū Godzilla

Although the Godzilla films have been analyzed in detail by cultural historians, film scholars, and generations of fans, Shigeru Kayama’s two Godzilla novellas—both classics of Japanese young-adult science fiction—have never been available in English. This book finally provides English-speaking fans and critics the original texts with these first-ever English-language translations of Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again. As human activity continues to cause mass extinctions and rapid climatic change, Godzilla provides a fable for the Anthropocene, powerfully reminding us that nature will fight back against humanity’s onslaught in unpredictable and devastating ways.

(15) IMAGINARY PAPERS. ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination has published Imaginary Papers, Issue 14, their latest quarterly newsletter on science fiction worldbuilding, futures thinking, and imagination.

 In this issue, medievalist and SF writer Erin K. Wagner writes about C. S. Lewis’ science fiction novel That Hideous Strength, communication studies scholar and SF writer Jenna N. Hanchey considers the Africanfuturist film Neptune Frost, and we offer a brief reflection on the new essay collection Ex Marginalia, edited by Chinelo Onwualu.

(16) WHERE THE SKELETONS ARE. Ranker takes up “The Story of Theodore Rex, The Bizarre Whoopi Goldberg Dinosaur Film”.

Theodore Rex, the weirdest of weird ’90s movies, is a $33 million direct-to-video buddy cop movie starring Whoopi Goldberg and a wisecracking dinosaur. (Take as much time as you need to wrap your brain around that sentence. We understand.)

Theodore Rex wasn’t an attempt to tie into the dino-fever that swept the nation’s youth in the early ’90s; it was a genuine attempt at making a gritty sci-fi film about a detective and her dinosaur partner. That’s right. Legendary EGOT-winner Whoopi Goldberg and a Talking Man-Sized Dinosaur teamed up for a cop film and they demanded to be taken seriously. (The 90s were a very strange time.)

Even though the film is a complete nightmare, things behind the scenes of Theodore Rex were much worse. As weird as it sounds, we can’t stress this enough: nobody had fun on this Whoopi Goldberg/Dinosaur joint.

Ranker’s first little-known fact is –

Whoopi Goldberg Was Forced By Law To Be In This Movie

Whoopi Goldberg did, at one time, want to be in Theodore Rex and agreed to play the lead for $5 million and a share of the profits, but she quickly changed her mind and tried to back out (good instincts, Whoopi!). Goldberg had to learn the hard way that it’s just not that easy to simply walk away from expensive movies starring talking dinosaurs (a lesson we all could learn from). Because she had agreed to do the movie, the producers sued her for $20 million when she tried to back out. After an answering machine recording of Goldberg surfaced where she said she was “100% committed” to the project, she was forced to choose between appearing in the film or paying out the nose for a dinosaur detective movie that she agreed to appear in. There’s a famous saying in Hollywood: “The only thing worse than appearing in a terrible dinosaur movie is paying $20 million NOT to appear in a terrible dinosaur movie,” so Whoopi opted to appear in the terrible dinosaur movie.

(17) CASE SOLVED? “Who Stole Dorothy’s Ruby Slippers? A Minnesota Man Is Charged.” reports the New York Times.

A Minnesota man has been indicted on charges that he stole a pair of the famed ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz” from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minn., the actress’s hometown, nearly 18 years ago.

The red-sequined pumps were recovered in a sting operation that ended in Minneapolis in 2018, but the authorities said at the time that their investigation was continuing and they did not name any suspects.

On Tuesday, a federal indictment in U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota charged Terry Jon Martin of Minnesota with stealing an authentic pair of the slippers, which officials estimated have a market value of $3.5 million, from the museum sometime between Aug. 27 and Aug. 28 of 2005. Mr. Martin was indicted on one count of theft of a major artwork….

Interesting – I recently corresponded with someone from this museum. They’re always looking for things related to cousin Judy, and I’m told some of my other cousins may be making donations. (I have nothing, myself, and never met her.)

(18) AU REVOIR. Deadline has posted a list of what’s being pulled: “Disney To Remove Dozens Of Series, Including ‘Big Shot’, ‘Willow’, ‘Y’ & ‘Dollface’”.

Big Shot [Disney+]
Turner & Hooch [Disney+]
The Mysterious Benedict Society [Disney+]
The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers [Disney+]
Willow [Disney+]
The Making Of Willow [Disney+]
Diary of a Future President [Disney+]
Just Beyond [Disney+]
The World According to Jeff Goldblum [Disney+]
Marvel’s Project Hero [Disney+]
Marvel’s MPower [Disney+]
Marvel’s Voices Rising: The Music of Wakanda Forever [Disney+]
Cheaper by the Dozen remake [Disney+]
The One and Only Ivan [Disney+]
Stargirl [Disney+]
Artemis Fowl [Disney+]
The Princess [Disney+]
Encore! [Disney+]
A Spark Story [Disney+]
Black Beauty [Disney+]
Clouds [Disney+]
America the Beautiful [Disney+]
Better Nate Than Ever [Disney+]
Weird but True! [Disney+]
Timmy Failure [Disney+]
Be Our Chef [Disney+]
Magic Camp [Disney+]
Howard [Disney+]
Earth to Ned [Disney+]
Foodtastic [Disney+]
Stuntman [Disney+]
Disney Fairy Tale Weddings [Disney+]
Wolfgang [Disney+]
It’s a Dog’s Life with Bill Farmer [Disney+]
The Real Right Stuff [Disney+]
The Big Fib [Disney+]
Rogue Trip [Disney+]
More Than Robots [Disney+]
Shop Class [Disney+]
Pick the Litter [Disney+]
Own the Room [Disney+]
Among the Stars [Disney+]
Harmonious Live! [Disney+]
Pentatonix: Around the World for the Holidays [Disney+]
Y: The Last Man [FX/Hulu]
Pistol [FX/Hulu]
Little Demon [FX/Hulu]
Maggie [Hulu]
Dollface [Hulu]
The Hot Zone [Nat Geo/Hulu]
The Premise [Hulu]
Love in the Time of Corona [Hulu]
Everything’s Trash [Hulu]
Best in Snow [Hulu]
Best in Dough [Hulu]
Darby and the Dead [Hulu]
The Quest [Hulu]
Rosaline [Hulu]

(19) DISORIENTING. Steven Heller interviews Hungarian artist István Orosz in “Illusions From a Visual Magician” at Print Magazine. Includes a gallery of images like the one below.

What you see is never what you really see. It is neither real nor surreal, it is art—the result of precision drafting and intricate mathematical logic. Hungarian illustrator, animated film director and poster artist István Orosz basks in the mystique of his ambitious visual contortions, implausible objects and incredible optical illusions. He is a visual punster on the highest plane who is happiest when making confounding images and anamorphoses relying on forced perspective that echo, not coincidentally, his famous mathematics teacher (and inventor of the Rubik’s cube) Ernő Rubif….

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Joey Eschrich, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]