Tag Archives: Hunger Games

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Quantum Leap series (1989)

By Paul Weimer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have not seen the two-season remake. 

Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell

(11) COMICS SECTION.

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

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

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

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

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

The Lay of the Generic Landscape

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of them is —

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

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

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

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

Pixel Scroll 2/27/25 All These Pixels Are Yours, Except Scrollropa. Attempt No Filing There

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(1) NO MORE US WORLDCONS DECLARES JO WALTON. Welsh-Canadian author Jo Walton, past winner of the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Otherwise Awards, called on Bluesky yesterday for an end to US Worldcons. She did so in response to a leaked State Department policy designed to implement Trump’s executive order “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government”.

Walton says she would prefer for the LAcon V committee to abandon its Anaheim, CA location and move outside the country. Setting aside that the bid was seated by a democratic site selection process, they’ve also made legal and financial commitments to secure their 2026 facilities. Breaking those contracts would involve paying large penalties. How much? Remember that when Arisia 2019 decided the principled stance was to move the con away from two strike-affected hotels they were planning to use that triggered approximately $150,000 in cancellation fees and anticipated attrition charges. Even under the settlement negotiated by Arisia’s lawyers they still had to pay over $40K, much of the money donated by fans to Arisia’s fundraising campaign.

(2) MAY THE BEST APE WIN. [Item by Olav Rokne.] The Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog is advancing a bit of an off-board pick for the Best Dramatic Hugo, but it’s a beguilingly bonkers and beautiful little movie. And I will maintain to my last breath that any movie in which there are 100,000 chimpanzees fighting with swords is at the very least magical realism, and consequently a genre work: “The Ape Star”.

In the climactic moment of Better Man, an anthropomorphic chimpanzee named Robbie Williams takes the stage at the Knebworth Festival in front of 125,000 fans to sing his pop anthem, “Let Me Entertain You.” Nearing the end of the song, he spots in the audience dozens — then hundreds — of younger and angrier chimpanzee versions of himself. Leaping into the crowd, he begins fighting them one-by-one, with each showdown getting bloodier and more outlandish.

With the leaping chimpanzees, the soaring camera work, and the colourful cinematography, it is as if the Battle of Isengard had been set on the Planet of the Apes and directed by Speed-Racer-era Wachowskis….

(3) PEN AMERICA REPORT ON BOOK BANS. “PEN America Report Zooms In on School Year 2023–2024 Book Bans” — Publishers Weekly has a synopsis.

In a new report out today called “Cover to Cover,” PEN America provides a comprehensive analysis of the 4,128 unique titles that it determined were removed from public schools nationwide during the 2023–2024 academic year—the result of more than 10,000 instances of school book bans over that time period. With this latest look at its data from 2023–2024, PEN America builds on the findings it released last fall with a goal of better understanding the wide-reaching impacts of this educational censorship being driven by politics and coordinated, well-funded groups.

For the “Cover to Cover” report, PEN’s team of staff researchers, expert consultants, and author volunteers reviewed each banned title across 37 variables. What they learned was that certain marginalized identities are “being removed from library shelves en masse.” The reviewers found that 36% of the books banned during the 2023–2024 school year feature characters or people of color and 25% include LGBTQ+ people or characters. Of those banned titles with LGBTQ+ representation, 28% feature trans and/or genderqueer characters.

PEN’s researchers noted that in terms of identity erasure, the numbers are even more stark within the different genres and formats of the banned books. For example, they found that 73% of banned titles that fall into the graphic and illustrated titles category feature LGBTQ+ representation, people or characters of color, or discussions of race/racism. Sixty-four percent of banned picture books depict LGBTQ+ characters or stories; and 44% of banned history and biography titles feature people of color.

“When we strip library shelves of books about particular groups, we defeat the purpose of a library collection that is supposed to reflect the lives of all people,” Sabrina Baêta, senior manager for PEN America’s Freedom to Read program, said in a statement. “The damaging consequences to young people are real.”…

(4) KATHLEEN KENNEDY REPLIES. She’s not retiring. In Deadline, “Kathleen Kennedy clarifies Lucasfilm future, Star Wars plans”. After Mike Fleming, Jr. takes the media to task for what was reported, he walks Kennedy through a Q&A session which begins:

DEADLINE: We’ve read all these speculative reports that you are out, that there’s a frenzy for the next person who’s going to take over Lucasfilm. What is the truth?

KATHLEEN KENNEDY: The truth is, and I want to just say loud and clear, I am not retiring. I will never retire from movies. I will die making movies. That is the first thing that’s important to say. I am not retiring. What’s happening at Lucasfilm is I have been talking for quite some time with both Bob and Alan about what eventual succession might look like. We have an amazing bench of people here, and we have every intention of making an announcement months or a year down the road. We are in lockstep as to what that’s going to be, and I am continuing. I’m producing Mandalorian the movie right now, and I’m also producing Sean Levy’s movie, which is after that. So I’m continuing to stay at Lucasfilm and looking very thoughtfully with Bob and Alan as to who’s stepping in. So that is all underway, and we have every right to make that announcement when we want to make it….

(5) OCTOTHORPE. John Coxon thought of something, Alison Scott is educational, and Liz Batty reads contracts in Episode 129 of the Octothorpe podcast. They discuss the Belfast Eastercon, Alison shakes her cane at John and Liz, and they talk a little about WSFS things before getting into picks. Listen here: “Deep in Annex A”. An uncorrected transcript is available here.

Words read “Octothorpe 129: Can you pin Thailand on the map?” above a black-and-white world map. The backs of John, Alison and Liz’s heads are shown. John is thinking “Yup!”, Liz is thinking “100%”, and Alison is holding Thailand and thinking “???”.

(6) FILK HISTORY ZOOM. Fanac.org has posted video of the Zoom session “Margaret Middleton – A Shaper of Modern Filk (Part 1 of 2), interviewed by Edie Stern”.

Description: FANAC History Zoom: February 2025: Named to the Filk Hall of Fame in 1996, and a long time officer of the Filk Foundation, Margaret Middleton has been instrumental in the shaping of modern filk, as well as a mainstay of Arkansas fandom. She’s published multiple fanzines, including Kantele, and was a founder of the first specialized filk convention, Filkcon 1. In Part 1 of this 2 part recording, we learn about her introduction to conventions and fandom, including a delightful story of the Icon elevator that may have changed her life. 

Margaret starts at the beginning, with her entry to fandom and how she started writing filk, and continues to the four bearded guys and how she came to pub her ish. A traveling fan with many convention stories, this Part 1 includes the origin story of Roc*Con in the grand fannish tradition, as well as tales of Big Mac (MidAmericon, 1976 Worldcon), and reminiscences of some of the filkers of the time (incuding the “Great Broads of the Galaxy”). The talk moves on to filkzines, specialized filk conventions, and filksing styles. It’s great fun, especially for those of us that remember filking in those days. Full Disclosure: the interviewer (me) is one of those people.

(7) HUNGER GAMES TRIBUTES WILL TREAD THE BOARDS. “’Electrifying experience’: stage version of The Hunger Games to open in new London theatre” reports the Guardian.

A new theatre in London’s Canary Wharf will open with the delayed world premiere of The Hunger Games, based on Suzanne Collins’ bestselling 2008 novel and the hit 2012 film version.

Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s adaptation of the dystopian adventure, which follows teenagers fighting to the death in a televised spectacle, will begin previews on 20 October. The purpose-built, 1,200-seat Troubadour Canary Wharf theatre is operated by the company behind the venue for the successful Starlight Express reboot in Wembley Park, where singing roller-skaters whiz among the audience. The Hunger Games has been similarly designed to place theatregoers amid the action.

Tristan Baker and Oliver Royds, joint CEOs and founders of Troubadour Theatres, said the show would offer “a transportive, electrifying experience that fully captures the scale, intensity and spectacle of Suzanne Collins’ world. Every element – from the staging to the technology – has been tailored to transport audiences right into the heart of the Games like never before.”…

(8) GENE HACKMAN (1930-2025). Actor Gene Hackman and his wife, pianist Betsy Arakawa, were discovered dead in their Santa Fe, NM home yesterday. Authorities are investigating their deaths, with Deadline’s most current information summarized here: “Gene Hackman & Wife Suffered ‘No External Trauma’, Police Say”.

…No cause of death has been determined so far for Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa, but New Mexico police say the situation “remains an open investigation.”

With affidavits, search warrants and statements calling the death of the two-time Oscar winner, his wife and their dog late Wednesday “suspicious enough in nature,” the Santa Fe Sheriff’s office is reiterating Thursday that “there were no apparent signs of foul play.”…

…“An autopsy was performed. Initial findings noted no external trauma to either individual,” they added. “Carbon monoxide and toxicology tests were requested for both individuals. The manner and cause of death has not been determined. The official results of the autopsy and toxicology reports are pending. This remains an open investigation.” 

Earlier today, the local coroner’s office said it could be 4-6 weeks before a full report on the 95-year-old Hackman and the 63-year-old Arakawa is complete….

…With that, the deaths of Hackman and Arakawa become all the more complicated by what wasn’t addressed in the latest statement by the Santa Fe police. While the late Wednesday night affidavit for a search warrant on the couple’s property mentioned both bodies being on the floor of the house in different rooms and a “pill bottle being opened and pills scattered next to the female,” there was zero mention of that in this afternoon’s release…

The actor won Oscars winner for his work on 1971’s The French Connection and 1992’s Unforgiven. Hackman and classical pianist Arakawa married in 1991. 

His work of genre interest included playing Lex Luthor in multiple Superman films, appearing in Young Frankenstein, Marooned, and in one episode of The Invaders TV series. He also voiced a character in the animated movie Antz.

(9) A TOAST. This is a good day for “Remembering GENE HACKMAN in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)”.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Item by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary, TekWar: TekLab (1994)

Thirty-one years ago this evening TekWar: TekLab, the third of the TekWar episodes, aired. Created by William Shatner, the novels credited initially to him were actually ghost-written by Ron Goulart. I don’t know how much input Goulart had into the TV series. TekWar would be developed for television by Stephen Roloff who earlier had done the same for Friday the 13th: The Series and Beyond Reality which I liked, also filmed in Toronto, the site of other series such as Forever Knight. 

TekLab would take our detectives to London attend a ceremony at the Tower of London which marks the start of a campaign to restore the British monarchy. Before the film ends, much will happen including the appearance of Excalibur. 

The primary cast was Greg Evigan as Jake Cardigan, Eugene Clark as Sid Gomez, William Shatner as Walter Bascom, Michael York as Richard Stewart, Laurie Winger as Rachael Tudor and Maurice Dean Winter as Lt. Winger. 

I can’t say most critics loved this William-Shatner-created affair as they mostly did not, with who I’ll not quote by name to protect the guilty saying of the series that it was “bargain basement science fiction with a stale protagonist, a convoluted murder mystery, and a narrative that feels incomplete.” Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give this film specifically a thirty-six percent rating. 

It ran two seasons for a total of 22 episodes, films as well. Supposedly in production, there was an adult animated TekWar film (whatever the hell they meant by that and I’m definitely not speculating) which was announced five years ago but I can’t find any proof of it existing.

Unlike most of the critics, I liked this series as the lead protagonist, Jake, was developed enough to be a good character in that crucial story role and even Shatner in the role he was in was likable enough to be generally not annoying, the supporting characters made sense, the stories weren’t exactly the best science-fiction ever done, but they weren’t bad either and the setting made sense for what it was.

It is streaming, well, nowhere. It aired originally on the USA network before repeating on the Sci Fi network. The USA network is owned by NBC Universal, parent company of Peacock as well, so I’m surprised it is not there at least. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) BERLITZKRIEG. This bilingual joke has to have been around for a long time but today is the first time I’ve seen it. “Yo” is the Spanish counterpart to the English pronoun “I”.

The Spanish-language version of Asimov's sci-fi classic I, Robot sounds a lot more street.

— Rob McD (@yourfunnyuncle.bsky.social) 2025-02-27T22:20:11.197Z

(13) OUR MEGAFAUNA NEIGHBORS. TL;DR version: It took longer for humans to eat the last of them than previously thought. P.S. The article says that idea is actually wrong, no matter how much I like it. “Giant Megafauna Lived Alongside Humans As Recently As 3,500 Years Ago” says IFLScience.

….For a long time, the overall consensus has been that mammalian megafauna – giant mammals that roamed the Earth in the past, including species like mammoths, giant sloths and sabertoothed tigers – went extinct at the start of the Holocene. This is our current geological epoch, which started around 11,700 years ago, at the end of the last major glacial age.

However, some recent studies have obtained fossil evidence that challenges this consensus. In particular, the discovery that woolly mammoths were still alive 4,000 years ago helped undermine this idea. Now researchers have found other megafauna specimens, including giant sloths and camel-like animals, that survived in South America up to around 3,500 years ago.

This evidence raises questions about what really led to the planet’s most recent large animal extinction while also showing that it was not a homogenous event….

(14) NEWLYWED WALT. Animation Magazine alerts us that “Rare Early Disney Photos Go to Auction at Van Eaton Galleries”. And some of the photos can be viewed at the link.

(15) THE TECHNICAL TERM IS…. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] And you want to know why AI shouldn’t replace people? “’Emergent Misalignment’ in LLMs” at Schneier on Security.

Interesting research: “Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs“:

“Abstract: We present a surprising result regarding LLMs and alignment. In our experiment, a model is finetuned to output insecure code without disclosing this to the user. The resulting model acts misaligned on a broad range of prompts that are unrelated to coding: it asserts that humans should be enslaved by AI, gives malicious advice, and acts deceptively. Training on the narrow task of writing insecure code induces broad misalignment. We call this emergent misalignment. This effect is observed in a range of models but is strongest in GPT-4o and Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct. Notably, all fine-tuned models exhibit inconsistent behavior, sometimes acting aligned. Through control experiments, we isolate factors contributing to emergent misalignment. Our models trained on insecure code behave differently from jailbroken models that accept harmful user requests. Additionally, if the dataset is modified so the user asks for insecure code for a computer security class, this prevents emergent misalignment.

“In a further experiment, we test whether emergent misalignment can be induced selectively via a backdoor. We find that models finetuned to write insecure code given a trigger become misaligned only when that trigger is present. So the misalignment is hidden without knowledge of the trigger.

“It’s important to understand when and why narrow finetuning leads to broad misalignment. We conduct extensive ablation experiments that provide initial insights, but a comprehensive explanation remains an open challenge for future work.”

The emergent properties of LLMs are so, so weird.

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

Pixel Scroll 6/6/24 Any Way You Pixel, That’s The Way You Scroll It

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(1) STAR WARS AND SDI EXHIBIT. Longtime LASFSians may remember Jerry Pournelle telling about the meetings of the Citizens’ Advisory Council on National Space Policy he once organized at Larry Niven’s house, which contributed some ideas to the Reagan administration’s “Strategic Defense Initiative” (nicknamed “Star Wars”). Now the Reagan Presidential Library is combining memories of SDI with an exhibit of Star Wars memorabilia in “Defending America and the Galaxy: Star Wars and SDI”. It’s open through September 8.

This Oval Office scene probably won’t come as a surprise to many of you.

Star Wars may have been a transformative movie, but SDI transformed our national security.

Join us at the Reagan Library for a fun and informative exhibition on Star Wars – both the real-world technology of SDI, as well as items from the movie phenomenon.  The exhibition will include original items from SDI including an authentic Command Launch Equipment Console, as well as props, costumes, and concept art from the Star Wars franchise, including a Landspeeder made for A New Hope, master replicas of Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber made from the original mold of The Last Jedi, and an original script signed by Dave Prowse (actor who portrayed Darth Vader in the original trilogy). With special thanks to Propstore (propstore.com), Entertainment Memorabilia Auctions, the exhibit will also showcase an original dress worn by Princess Leia,  original  sketches  by George Lucas of the spaceships, and original helmets worn by Darth Vader, Stormtroopers and more.

(2) HUNGER GAME$ Variety brings word of a “New ‘Hunger Games’ Movie Set for 2026”. There will be a new book in the series, too.

A new “Hunger Games” prequel film will be released in theaters in 2026.

After last November’s “Hunger Games” prequel “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” charmed its way to $337 million at the box office, Lionsgate teased that moviegoers may not have seen the last of Panem, the dystopia where the story is set — even though the spinoff story covered the entirety of author Suzanne Collins’ 2020 novel of the same name….

… To that end, Collins is writing a new book, “Sunrise on the Reaping,” to be released in 2025. The film adaptation will hit theaters on Nov. 20, 2026. Francis Lawrence, who has helmed every “Hunger Games” installment since 2012’s “Catching Fire,” is in talks to direct.

(3) HPL ON THE BLOCK. Eighty-four pages of H. P. Lovecraft letters compose a lot in Heritage Auction’s June 27 offering Part I of the collection of Important English and American Literature from the library of William A. Strutz. “H. P. Lovecraft. Small archive of nine lengthy autograph letters”.

Nine autograph letters signed with six addressed envelopes (four signed “HPL”, four signed “E’ch-Pi-El”, and one signed “H.P. Lovecraft”)…

…[Lovecraft comments on] the inspirations and influences of his own writing style: “You are right in saying that Poe is my chief source & model – & I can assure you that I have never presumed to compare my stuff to his, qualitatively… That is why I dispute your statement that my tales suffer from a ‘lack of warmth’. I may not have the warmth – but tales of the sort I write don’t require such a thing. Indeed – I’ll go a step further & express the opinion that a romantic or especially human element in a weird tale is a definite defect & dilution. The weird writer must above all else be cosmic & objective – with no more sympathy for mankind & its petty values than for the daemons that oppose mankind. Without this impersonal independence & unconventionality, weird fiction sinks quickly into a namby-pamby condition…” (letter dated Aug. 28, 1931). And continues in his next letter of September 3, 1931: “I still insist that ‘warmth’ is an element not properly belong to weird fiction as a genre… What you term ‘coldness & formality’ of style is what I call objective plainness – the bold, neutral simplicity which includes as frills, trivialities, or irrelevancies, & of which treats all phenomena – cosmic, terrestrial, human, or otherwise – as of perfectly equal importance in an infinite, futile, & meaningless cosmos…”

(4) CONSERVATIVE IDEAS FAIL THE TEST SAYS TINGLE. Chuck Tingle took another victory lap over the Rabid Puppies today.

(5) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 111 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Slightly Lower Tolerance for Feelings”, John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty read the Hugo Award finalists for Best Novel.

We talk about each of the novels, what we liked and what we didn’t, and then we each say how we’re (currently) planning to rank them on the ballot.

Uncorrected transcript here.

John is in the bottom-left, sitting in a chair, wearing a blue shirt and purple trousers, holding a can, and reading an ebook. Alison is in the upper-middle, lying down upside down, wearing a purple shirt and stripy trousers, and reading an ebook. Liz is in the bottom-right, wearing a pink shirt with green trousers, holding a mug of a hot beverage, and reading a physical book. They are surrounded by floating beer bottles, books, the Moon, a mug with a moose on it, and two cats. The text “Octothorpe 111” and “Hugo Novels 2024” appears to the top and the bottom of the image.

(6) VIEW ONLINE. [Item by lance oszko.] Some items from the Balticon 58 Film Festival are publicly available. See links here: “Winner of Balticon 58 Short Film Festival 2024”.

(7) ALAN SCARFE (1946-2024). Alan Scarfe, the classically trained British Canadian actor known for his turns as bad guys in Double Impact and Lethal Weapon III and as Dr. Bradley Talmadge on the UPN sci-fi series Seven Days died April 28. The Hollywood Reporter profile includes these additional genre roles:

…Born in England and raised in Vancouver, Scarfe portrayed the Romulans Tokath and Admiral Mendak on episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1991 and 1993 and was another alien, the powerful Magistrate Augris, on a 1995 installment of Star Trek: Voyager.

“Science fiction on film and television, especially if you are playing some kind of alien character with fantastic make-up, is great for actors with a strong stage background,” he said in a 2007 interview. “The productions need that kind of size and intensity of performance. You can’t really mumble if you’re a Klingon.”…

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

June 6, 1950 — Gary Graham. (Died 2024.) I was trying to remember where first saw Gary Graham as a genre performer. What I remember him most for is in the recurring role of Soval, the Vulcan ambassador to Earth, in the Enterprise series. It was a most excellent performance by him. 

So it turns out that it was the Alien Nation franchise in which he played Detective Matthew Sikes, which aired from the late Eighties until mid-Nineties, where I first saw him. Great role by him it was indeed. 

Gary_Graham. Photo by Keith McDuffee.

He had the recurring role of Captain Ken Hetrick on what I think was the underappreciated M.AN.T.I.S. series. Yes, it was a slightly awkward merging of a police procedural and a SF superhero story but I liked it a lot. 

Finally he got involved in one of those fanfic Trek videos that CBS decided to ignore as long as they didn’t attempt to make them a commercial property, e.g. sell them as DVDs.  (Yes, this one asked CBS to sell them for them. You can guess the answer.) 

In Star Trek: Of Gods and Men and the web series that came off it he was Ragnar, a shape-shifter, who led a rebellion against the Federation.  Bet that didn’t end well.

They claim CBS authorized them to write it as a script for a new series. Of course neither CBS or Paramount ever publicly said anything about this. They didn’t block the use of the characters either. You’re welcome to watch here as it’s legal.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Thatababy has a musical riddle.
  • Broom Hilda reveals the missing scene from a monster movie.
  • Boondocks finds a reason for making super soldiers.

(10) PERSISTENT TECHNOLOGY. The resurgence of interest in film photography leads to consideration of “The Lost Art of the Negative” by the New York Times. Customers who have been sent the photos often don’t return for the negatives.

…“The very-big-picture legal issue is the difference between ownership of the negatives and ownership of the copyright,” said David Deal, a former professional photographer who now practices copyright law. “When those two things are detached from one another, then all hell breaks loose.”

Put simply: Whoever has the negatives has the mechanism to reproduce the work but not the copyright to do so; the artist sans negatives has the right but not the means.

It’s a concept that has been battered in the age of digital cameras, then left for dead with the advent of iPhones. Dinosaurs of the photography game, negatives are the original images that are burned into frames when film loaded into an analog camera is exposed to light. They once were the primary deliverable when processing a roll of film.

In the digital age, most shops where people get their film developed will scan the negatives into a computer and just email the photographs to their customers.

“Negatives would’ve never been forgotten before, because people had to pick up the digital copy,” said Richard Damery, a developer who has worked at Aperture Printing in London for 15 years. “They can now have everything uploaded to them. They forget about the negatives.”

It can be hard for some to imagine (or remember) a time when a photograph involved more steps than just the instant gratification of looking down at a screen.

That’s especially true for much of Gen Z, the driving force behind the contemporary film resurgence. The industry has boomed in the years since the pandemic, and not just with upmarket brands like Leica; the classic Fujifilm disposables are back, too. For many young shooters, the anticipation and delayed payoff of film are a welcome salve to the 24/7 exposure of apps like Instagram….

(11) NO MORE DISCS DOWN UNDER? “Disney locks the Vault, ceases DVD distribution in Australia” reports A.V. Club.

In another win for Disney+, The Walt Disney Company has ceased DVD and Blu-ray distribution in Australia and New Zealand. As confirmed by a spokesperson for The Walt Disney Company in Australia and New Zealand, Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 will be the final release from the Mouse House in the countries. However, we’ve been assured that viewers can watch Disney+ to enjoy Disney classics and new releases, such as Willow season one and Artemis Fowl. The only option for viewers looking to score a copy of the 4K release of Cinderella is through international retailers because once stock runs out in the country, Disney will not replenish.

As noted by The Digital Bits, which first confirmed the news, the move is not surprising. Disney has already stopped distributing DVDs in some Asian and Latin American countries. Physical media sales in the region are dismal, and as global retailers like Amazon suck up a market share of customers, Disney has fewer reasons to keep shelves stocked….

(12) DISTANCE LENDS DISENCHANTMENT. CBR.com claims there are “10 Ways The Hobbit Trilogy Has Aged Poorly”. The movie, that is.

9. There Is Too Much Emphasis on Azog

Spotlight on villains is often admirable, but in the case of The Hobbit, it works to the film’s detriment. To accommodate for the book’s lack of a recurring antagonist and to set up a final fight for Thorin, Azog was introduced. One of the many aspects wrong with Azog in the movies is his very presence, as he was killed years before Bilbo journeyed to the Lonely Mountain in Tolkien’s novel.

Overall, Azog adds little to the plot. He doesn’t differ from any other orc in a relevant way, nor does he serve a major purpose beyond fueling Thorin’s rage towards orcs. What makes his sizable amount of screentime more confusing is the fact that Bolg, the son of Azog, could have fulfilled his role as the orc chieftain of the trilogy without resorting to resurrection.

(13) STARLINER ARRIVES AT ISS. Overcoming some problems, including small helium leaks, “Boeing’s astronaut capsule arrives at International Space Station” reports AP News.

Boeing’s new capsule arrived at the International Space Station on Thursday, delayed by last-minute thruster trouble that almost derailed the docking for this first test flight with astronauts.

The 260-mile-high (420-kilometer-high) linkup over the Indian Ocean culminated more than a day of continuing drama for Boeing’s astronaut flight debut carrying NASA test pilots Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams….

The Starliner capsule already had one small helium leak when it rocketed into orbit with two NASA astronauts Wednesday. Boeing and NASA managers were confident they could manage the propulsion system despite the problem and that more leaks were unlikely. But just hours into the flight, two more leaks cropped up and another was discovered after docking.

Later, five of the capsule’s 28 thrusters went down. The astronauts managed to restart four of them, providing enough safety margin to proceed. By then, Starliner had passed up the first docking opportunity and circled the world for an extra hour alongside the station before moving in.

The thrusters problems were unrelated to the helium leaks, NASA’s commercial crew program manager Steve Stich said after the docking.

Going forward in the flight, “we have some tools in our tool kit to manage this,” Stich said.

Earlier in the day, before the thrusters malfunctioned, officials stressed that the helium leaks posed no safety issues for the astronauts or the mission.

Helium is used to pressurize the fuel lines of Starliner’s thrusters, which are essential for maneuvering. Before liftoff, engineers devised a plan to work around any additional leaks in the system. A faulty rubber seal, no bigger than a shirt button, is believed responsible for the original leak….

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

Pixel Scroll 4/29/23 Don’t Go Chasing Waterscrolls, Please Stick To The Pixels And The Clicks That You Know

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(1) HUGO NOMINATING DEADLINE 4/30. The deadline for submitting nominations to the 2023 Hugo Awards is tomorrow, April 30 at 11:59 p.m. Hawaiian time.

Eligible voters can submit or make change to their selections up until the deadline. Submit nominations here. The committee says:

The nomination traffic is often heavy in the final moments of the process, which can sometimes slow down the process. Please nominate in advance of the deadline to make sure your selections are counted appropriately.

If you have any problems in accessing the website or other questions about the nomination, please feel free to contact us at hugoteam@chengduworldcon.com

(2) WFA SHORT ON ANTHOLOGIES. Ellen Datlow has a word for fantasy publishers:

The deadline for consideration is June 1 – and note: that’s when judging ends. As Peter Dennis Pautz has said, “If, for instance, something is received on May 31 the judges may well have only one day to read it before their deliberations conclude. Anything received after June 1 will receive little or no consideration.”

(3) A LOOK IN THE MIRROR. “Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: ‘The Story of Keldor (In His Own Words)’” | Cora Buhlert

This story was inspired by getting a new toy in the mail, namely the Masters of the Universe Origins He-Skeletor figure. So who is He-Skeletor? Well, best let him tell his story himself.

“I am Keldor, Prince of Eternia and defender of the secrets of Castle Grayskull…”

“…and this is Panthor, my fearless friend.”

“Meow.”

“And yes, I know you think you know how this story goes, but trust me, you don’t.”

(4) STAND BY TO READ. Publisher Weekly stokes the hype machine for Chuck Tingle’s horror novel Camp Damascus, coming from Tor Books: “Chuck Tingle Goes Mainstream…ish”.

…To a niche corner of the internet, Tingle has since achieved superstardom due to his delightfully outrageous book covers. All sport stock image collages and titles that take on a Mad Libs quality, generally beginning “Pounded in the Butt by….” Tingle then fills in the blank with whatever supernatural creature, sentient object, or personified concept strikes his fancy. (Pounded by President Bigfoot is on the tame end of the spectrum; things get more high-concept in Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt, which realizes its conceit through some unexpectedly intricate sci-fi worldbuilding.)

These covers have earned Tingle the nickname My Favorite Author I’ve Never Read, but he hopes that Camp Damascus will make this moniker obsolete. Asked about his decision to traditionally publish, Tingle cites the opportunity to grow his readership: “I am constantly striving to prove love to a broader audience.”…

… Camp Damascus is never sleep-with-the-lights-on scary, but it conjures a menacing atmosphere. Though the book is crawling with demons, it’s the humans that truly terrify. This was intentional.“Writing horror for any marginalized group,” Tingle says, “you have to recognize that what is happening in the dang world—without any supernatural elements—is already traumatic.”…

(5) NEXT TRIBUTES. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes in theaters November 17, 2023.

THE HUNGER GAMES: THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS & SNAKES follows a young Coriolanus (Tom Blyth) who is the last hope for his failing lineage, the once-proud Snow family that has fallen from grace in a post-war Capitol. With his livelihood threatened, Snow is reluctantly assigned to mentor Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), a tribute from the impoverished District 12. But after Lucy Gray’s charm captivates the audience of Panem, Snow sees an opportunity to shift their fates. With everything he has worked for hanging in the balance, Snow unites with Lucy Gray to turn the odds in their favor. Battling his instincts for both good and evil, Snow sets out on a race against time to survive and reveal if he will ultimately become a songbird or a snake.

(6) THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE. The New York Times makes a strike sound almost inevitable: “Hollywood, Both Frantic and Calm, Braces for Writers’ Strike”.

Writers scrambling to finish scripts. Rival late-night-show hosts and producers convening group calls to discuss contingency plans. Union officials and screenwriters gathering in conference rooms to design picket signs with slogans like “The Future of Writing Is at Stake!”

With a Hollywood strike looming, there has been a frantic sprint throughout the entertainment world before 11,500 TV and movie writers potentially walk out as soon as next week.

The possibility of a television and movie writers’ strike — will they, won’t they, how could they? — has been the top conversation topic in the industry for weeks. And in recent days, there has been a notable shift: People have stopped asking one another whether a strike would take place and started to talk about duration. How long was the last one? (100 days in 2007-8.) How long was the longest one? (153 days in 1988.)

“It’s the first topic that comes up in every meeting, every phone call, and everyone claims to have their own inside source about how long a strike will go on and whether the directors and actors will also go out, which would truly be a disaster,” said Laura Lewis, the founder of Rebelle Media, a production and financing company behind shows like “Tell Me Lies” on Hulu and independent movies like “Mr. Malcolm’s List.”

Unions representing screenwriters have been negotiating with Hollywood’s biggest studios for a new contract to replace the one that expires on Monday. The contracts for directors and actors expire on June 30….

(7) MISSED CONNECTION. Dark Worlds Quarterly’s G.W. Thomas profiles “Albert dePina, Space Opera Specialist”. DePina, like Ray Bradbury, got a lift from Henry Hasse – so it’s surprising that although this article does mention Bradbury, it does not note that Hasse also co-authored Bradbury’s first sale.

Albert dePina was a name blazoned across the covers of Planet Stories in 1944. He was never a prolific writer, not a professional in terms of volume. But dePina was a fan. Writing with Henry Hasse, he produced ten stories over ten years, 1943 to 1953. (Robert) Albert dePina died in 1957. (He is not to be confused with the comics creator, Alberto dePina 1907-2002). Sadly, there is little solid information on him….

(8) PUTTING A LIGHT ON INJUSTICE. Among Cora Buhlert’s most recent “Non-Fiction Spotlights” is one about “The Life and Art of Dave Cockrum by Glen Cadigan”.

Tell us about your book.

The Life and Art of Dave Cockrum is a cradle to grave biography of the comic book artist best known for co-creating the All New, All Different X-Men for Marvel, and before that, for revitalizing the Legion of Super-Heroes at DC. It tells the story of how he went from an enthusiastic fan and aspiring pro in the ’60s to the driving force behind the X-Men reboot in the ’70s to a down-on-his luck-creator in the early 2000s, fighting for his life in a veteran’s hospital while Marvel was making millions off his creations as he made nothing.

It’s a story about justice and injustice, both on the page and off.

(9) CARRIE FISHER WILL BE ADDED TO WALK OF FAME. Actress Carrie Fisher will be honored posthumously by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce with a posthumous star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on May 4th, Star Wars Day. The star, in the category of Motion Pictures, be unveiled near the historic El Capitan Theatre at 6840 Hollywood Boulevard at 11:30 a.m.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

1953 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Our Beginning tonight is short but oh-so- sweet.  It is from Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man which was published by Shasta Publishers in 1953. 

As you know, the version printed in Galaxy in January, February and March won a Hugo at Philcon II.

The novel is dedicated to Galaxy’s editor, H. L. Gold, who made suggestions during its writing. 

Yes, it’s one of my favorite novels, both to read and to listen to. Gerard Doylle narrates the novel and does a fantastic job of doing so.

Without further notes, here’s our Beginning…

IN THE ENDLESS UNIVERSE there is nothing new, nothing different. What may appear exceptional to the minute mind of man may be inevitable to the infinite Eye of God. This strange second in a life, that unusual event, those remarkable coincidences of environment, opportunity, and encounter… all may be reproduced over and over on the planet of a sun whose galaxy revolves once in two hundred million years and has revolved nine times already. 

There are and have been worlds and cultures without end, each nursing the proud illusion that it is unique in space and time. There have been men without number suffering from the same megalomania; men who imagined themselves unique, irreplaceable, irreproducible. There will be more… more plus infinity. This is the story of such a time and such a man… 

THE DEMOLISHED MAN.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born April 29, 1887 — H. Bedford-Jones. Pulp writer of whom only maybe ten percent of his twelve hundred stories could be considered genre but some such as the Jack Solomon novels, say John Solomon, Argonaut and John Solomon’s Biggest Game are definitely genre. Like many of the early pulp writers, he used a number of pen names, to wit Michael Gallister, Allan Hawkwood, Gordon Keyne, H. E. Twinells and L. B. Williams. Wildside Press published in 2006 a collection of his short stories, The House of Skulls and Other Tales from the Pulps. (Died 1949.)
  • Born April 29, 1908 — Jack Williamson. By the end of his long career in sff he had won eight lifetime achievement / grand master honors, and been inducted to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. I’ll frankly admit that he’s one of those authors that I know I’ve read a fair amount by can’t really recall any specific titles as I didn’t collect him either in hard copy or digitally. A quick bit of research suggests the Legion of Space series was what I liked best when I was reading him. Aussiecon Two awarded him a Hugo for Wonder’s Child: My Life in Science Fiction (1985), and Millennium Philcon saw him get one for his “Ultimate Earth” novella (2000), which also won the Nebula. (Died 2006.)
  • Born April 29, 1923 — Irvin Kershner. Director and producer of such genre works as the Amazing Stories and seaQuest DSV series, Never Say Never Again, RoboCop 2 and The Empire Strikes Back. By the way, several of the sources I used in compiling this Birthday claimed that was the best Star Wars film. (Died 2010.)
  • Born April 29, 1943 — Russell M. Griffin. Author of but four novels as he died far too young of a heart attack. The Makeshift God was his first novel, I remember that novel as being a rather excellent dystopian affair, and Century’s End was even bleaker. He wrote but nine stories. He alas has not made into the digital realm yet. (Died 1986.)
  • Born April 29, 1946 — Humphrey Carpenter. Biographer whose notable output includes J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography; he also did the editing of The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, and is responsible for The Inklings: CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Charles Williams and their Friends. He also wrote the engaging Mr. Majeika children’s series which is most decidedly genre. (Died 2005.)
  • Born April 29, 1960 — Robert J. Sawyer, 63. Hominids won the Hugo for Best Novel at Torcon 3, and The Terminal Experiment won a Nebula as well. Completing a hat trick, he won a John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Mindscan too. Very impressive.  And then there’s the FlashForward series which lasted for thirteen episodes that was based on his novel of that name.  Interesting series that ended far too soon. 

(12) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Far Side shows why it can be dangerous to work as a scientist.
  • The Far Side notes there are hazards to working as an artist, too.
  • Tom Gauld displays a librarian’s idea of good architecture.

(13) CONAN COMICS WRITER INTERVIEWED. The Rogues in the House podcast interviews Jim Zub, writer of the new Conan comics for Titan.

(14) THEY MADE IT SO. “‘The Bridge Is Yours:’ You Can Now Virtually Visit Every Star Trek Enterprise Bridge” says Gizmodo. (The direct link is: “U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D (2364) – Roddenberry Archive”.)

Save for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and—obviously—Star Trek: The Lower Decks, most of the action for Star Trek takes place upon the fabled bridge. Over the course of Star Trek’s over-five decade runtime, there have been more than one fan who has imagined themselves working under lights at their station. You can close your eyes and imagine yourself among a crew of like-minded people sharing in that optimistic hope for the future that the show was known for. Finally, there’s now a way to truly put yourself into the captain’s chair of whatever version of the show was your favorite and watch through the viewscreen at all the twinkling stars and imagine where you too might boldly go.

To commemorate the end of Star Trek: Picard’s third and final season, on Thursday the Roddenberry Archive created a new web portal that includes dozens and dozens of accurate 3D models of the famed Starship Enterprise alongside an inside look at its bridge….

(15) FRANK TALK ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH. Kevin Smith, director of Dogma, Clerks, Mallrats and many other at least SFF-adjacent movies and showrunner of Masters of the Universe: Revelation, opens up about his struggles with mental health at People: “Kevin Smith Tells PEOPLE About His Recent Mental Health Crisis”.

One morning last January, film director Kevin Smith awoke in terror, convinced he was losing his mind.

The next day Smith, 52, checked into Arizona’s Sierra Tucson treatment center where he spent the next month in intensive therapy, learning how several childhood traumas had led him to create and hide behind a “larger than life” public persona he calls “the other guy” that eventually usurped his core sense of self.

“It was scary,” he says, speaking about the incident—that he describes as a “complete break from reality”—publicly for the first time in this week’s PEOPLE.

“At that moment, I wouldn’t have been averse to not being around any longer. I called a friend and said, ‘I’m in a weird, dark place. I need to go somewhere and get help.'”…

(16) SCI-FI LONDON FILMS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Sci-Fi London has just announced its initial tranche of films for this year’s fest 31st May to 6th June 2023.

Even if you are not in the London region, you can check out the trailers below and keep an eye out for the DVD.

All the films are recent and a good few are having their UK, some even, World, premiere at the fest.

There will also be six thematic sessions of short films among much else.

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] The Dad-at-Arms podcast has a great interview with Netflix producer Ted Biaselli: “Revolution News! Dad-at-Arms Interview: Netflix MOTU Producer Ted Biaselli”. It’s a Masters of the Universe podcast, so the interview focuses on Masters of the Universe: Revelation, but Biaselli worked on a lot of Netflix SFF shows like Wednesday, The Dark Crystal and Castelvania. He also offers some excellent insights into the workflow of an animated TV episode is made and how long it takes. For example, I had no idea that they record the dialogue first and then do the animation, though it makes sense.

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

Pixel Scroll 8/30/22 Set Out Filing But I Take My Time, A Friend Of The Pixel Is A Scroll Of Mine

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(1) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to join writer David Ebenbach for cheesecake in D.C. on Episode 179 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

David Ebenbach

David’s the author of eight books of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, the most recent being his novel How to Mars, published last year by Tachyon Press, and the short story collection The Guy We Didn’t Invite to the Orgy and Other Stories, published in 2017 by the University of Massachusetts Press. His short stories have appeared in such genre markets as Asimov’s, Analog, and Not One of Us, but he’s also been published in such literary markets as the Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and New England Review.

His writing has won him the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, the Juniper Prize, the Patricia Bibby Award, and other awards. He works at Georgetown University, teaching creative writing and literature at the Center for Jewish Civilization and creativity through the Masters in Learning, Design, and Technology Program, and promoting inclusive, student-centered teaching at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship.

We discussed the way he started writing science fiction without realizing he was writing science fiction, the final line of the worst thing he’s ever written, how his first scribbling as a kid was a violent spy novel about The Smurfs, why it’s important to root for an author and not merely our own reading experience, the cliches some in the literary and science fiction worlds believe about each other, the newspaper article which sparked his novel How to Mars, the way he’s managed to carve himself out a bifurcated writing life, the philosophical differences between those writing novels and short stories, and much more.

(2) KEEPING THE LAW GREEN. “Tatiana Maslany on ‘She-Hulk’, Joining Marvel, and LGBTQ Advocacy” in an ELLE interview.

… When she was announced as the next Marvel superhero, her cult following—which refers to themselves as the Clone Club—rejoiced. Maslany shielded both her pleasure and her apprehension well.

“I had always been wary of entering this universe or doing anything of this scale,” Maslany admits when we meet for the first time over Zoom. “There’s a part of me that always feels a bit more comfortable in a smaller piece. Just something that I can guarantee will be focused on character, guarantee will be collaborative.”

Her She-Hulk audition arrived “at this very raw, very interesting time for her,” says her best friend and Arrow actor Ben Lewis, who’s known her since they met in the early aughts on the set of the misguided Rob Lowe-led film Stir of Echoes: The Homecoming. (Lewis is reluctant to even name the film, but acknowledges Google maintains its existence.) When, during the height of the pandemic, Maslany told Lewis she planned to audition for She-Hulk, the idea of the 5’3” Maslany in a cape and tights—perhaps worse, as a derivative of the Incredible Hulk—seemed “incongruous” at best, Lewis says….

(3) COULD LIGHTNING STRIKE TWICE? Savannah Walsh’s Vanity Fair article recaps the teen dystopia’s rise and fall: “Nobody Ever Found the Next ‘Hunger Games’—But Boy, Did They Try”.

… “For years everyone tried to have the next Harry Potter and no one managed to do so, but that didn’t stop companies from trying,” Craig Dehmel, then head of international distribution for Fox, told TheWrap in 2015. “And in a sense, the Twilight and Hunger Games franchises were both born out of that pursuit.” 

The first film both rode and inspired a wave of similar films as studios began clamoring to find the next Y.A. juggernaut. In 2013 and 2014, there were no less than eight teen-centered sci-fi/fantasy films based on best-selling books crammed into theaters: Ender’s Game, The Maze Runner, The Giver, The Host, Beautiful Creatures, Percy Jackson Sea of Monsters, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, and Divergent. 

These films all adhered to a similar formula: promising up-and-coming actors (Saoirse Ronan, Logan Lerman, Lily Collins) played heroic and/or divinely gifted teenagers with the power to stop a tyrannical leader and/or oppressive government structure. Some were set in the future, others in an alternate universe. Most lured in veteran stars for scenery-chewing supporting roles (Kate Winslet, Jeff Bridges, Viola Davis) or hedged in a watered-down love triangle. And all were angling for a piece of the Hunger Games pie….

(4) HOUSE OF THE DRAGON VIEWERSHIP GROWS. Lost Remote reports “House of the Dragon Continues to Light HBO Ratings on Fire”.

…On Sunday, Episode 2 of the Game of Thrones spinoff was up 2% from its debut, earning 10.2 million viewers domestically across HBO Max and linear telecasts, based on a combination of Nielsen and first-party data. HBO previously noted that Sunday night viewership for a series typically represents just 20-40% of the show’s total gross audience.

House of the Dragon’s debut on Aug. 21 was the largest in HBO history, reaching nearly 10 million viewers. That episode is now approaching 25 million viewers in the U.S., according to the company….

(5) TOUGH QUIZ. Book Riot challenges fans: “Can You Guess the Sci-Fi Book By Its Pixelated Cover?” I got zero, so bleep them! (Many are not what I think is the iconic cover for a particular title, but one was, and I still didn’t get it.)

So, you consider yourself a sci-fi expert. You’ve read the classics and keep up with new releases. Well, then I’m sure you know all of these titles. They’re a mix of the most well-known and enduring stories in the genre and some very popular new releases. There’s nothing here that a sci-fi fan hasn’t heard of — in fact, you’ve likely read many of them. The trick is: can you name the title and author based on a pixelated version of the cover? After all, it’s when you have to test yourself that every book title leaves your mind.

(6) THE FORCE IS DOOP WITH THIS ONE. “Futurama’s Silliest Character Highlights a Constant Flaw in Sci-Fi” according to CBR.com.

… Any time the stakes get high enough on Futurama, it’s not uncommon to see the show’s perpetual blowhard, Zapp Brannigan, enter the fray. An oafish commanding officer within the intergalactic peacekeeping force known as DOOP, Brannigan frequently gets his men slaughtered in a series of heartless decisions and strategies. When things get particularly dire, it’s not uncommon to see Brannigan arrive in the Nimbus — a truly massive spaceship that serves as the flagship for DOOP forces. But despite the inherent power of the ship, it’s frequently being shown as completely useless in combat missions….

Across multiple stories, films and shows, it’s often shown that truly massive spaceships like the Nimbus just aren’t all that useful. They lack maneuverability, making for easy targets. The Star Wars series in particular is full of these, with the Moon-sized Death Star being destroyed with a single well-placed shot, while a massive flagship Star Destroyer is brought down when a single A-Wing crashes into the bridge in Return of the Jedi. Shows like Battlestar Galactica focused on the massive populations and crews necessary to keep those ships floating — and highlighted how quickly supplies can quickly run out…. 

(7) MEMORY LANE.  

1891 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Excerpt from J.M. Barrie’s Sherlock Holmes : My Evening with Sherlock Holmes pastiche:

I am the sort of man whose amusement is to do everything better than any other body. Hence my evening with Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes is the private detective whose adventures Mr. Conan Doyle is now editing in the Strand magazine. To my annoyance (for I hate to hear anyone praised except myself) Holmes’s cleverness in, for instance, knowing by glancing at you what you had for dinner last Thursday, has delighted press and public, and so I felt it was time to take him down a peg. I therefore introduced myself to Mr. Conan Doyle and persuaded him to ask me to his house to meet Sherlock Holmes.

For poor Mr. Holmes it proved to be an eventful evening. I had determined to overthrow him with his own weapons, and accordingly when he began, with well-affected carefulness, “I perceive, Mr. Anon, from the condition of your cigar-cutter, that you are not fond of music,” I replied blandly, “Yes, that is obvious.

J.M. Barrie was a close personal friend of Arthur Conan Doyle, a fellow Scots. That was because Conan Doyle had worked on a new magazine called The Idler, which allowed him to meet other writers including James Barrie, the actual name of of J.M Barrie.

J. M. Barrie would write three pastiches about Sherlock Holmes : My Evening with Sherlock Holmes (1891), The Adventure of the Two Collaborators (1893) and The Late Sherlock Holmes (1893) where Dr. Watson is accused of the murder of Sherlock Holmes before being proven innocent when Holmes is found alive.

Otto Penzler, the expert on these matters, states that it is the earliest Holmes parody ever done.

So let’s look at the very first pastiche about Sherlock Holmes : My Evening with Sherlock Holmes. It was originally written anonymously by J. M. Barrie and published in The Speaker magazine on November 28, 1891, which was four months after the publication of the first Sherlock Holmes “A Scandal in Bohemia” story.

It’s an odd bit of writing as it’s narrated by Anon who’s determined to beat Holmes at his own game. 

SPOILERS BE HERE!

The narrator, Mr. Anon, convinces Conan Doyle to introduce him to Sherlock Holmes. The narrator then proceeds to beat Holmes at his own game, deducing his recent movements and his plans for the rest of the evening. 

He taunts Holmes like this, “Fool, fool! I have kept you in luxury for years. By my help you have ridden extensively in cabs where no author was ever seen before. Henceforth you will ride in buses!”

Angrily annoyed, Holmes leaves abruptly.

END SPOILERS

Barrie would write two more of these, The Adventure of the Two Collaborators and The Late Sherlock Holmes which Doyle really liked. They are available at the usual suspects though finding them takes a bit of Holmesian hunting. 

They’re available in various collections, so you’ll just need to decide which one you want to download. Some are free, some are Meredith moments, and some are actually professionally produced therefore cost quite a bit. The latter actually are edited properly. 

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 30, 1797 — Mary Shelley. Author of the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus which I’ll admit that I’ve not read. Who here has read it? It certainly has spawned a multiverse of novels and films since it came, some quite good, some quite bad.  (Died 1851.)
  • Born August 30, 1942 — Judith Moffett, 80. Editor and academic. She won the first Theodore Sturgeon Award with her story “Surviving” and the fame gained for her Pennterra novel helped her win John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at Nolacon II. Asimov wrote an introduction for the book and published it under his Isaac Asimov Presents series.  Her Holy Ground series of The Ragged World: A Novel of the Hefn on Earth, Time, Like an Ever-Rolling Stream: A Sequel to the Ragged World and The Bird Shaman are her other genre novels. The Bear’s Babys And Other Stories collects her genre short stories. All of her works are surprisingly available at the usual digital suspects.
  • Born August 30, 1943 — Robert Crumb, 79. He’s here because ISFDB lists him as the illustrator of The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick which is likely they say an interview that Dick did with Gregg Rickman and published in Rickman’s The Last Testament. They’re also listing the cover art for Edward Abby’s The Monkey Wrench Gang as genre but that’s a very generous definition of genre.
  • Born August 30, 1955 — Jeannette Holloman. She was one of the founding members of the Greater Columbia Costumers Guild and she was a participant at masquerades at Worldcon, CostumeCon, and other conventions. Her costumes were featured in The Costume Makers Art and Threads magazine. (Died 2019.)
  • Born August 30, 1955 — Mark Kelly. He maintains the indispensable Science Fiction Awards Database, which we consult almost daily. He wrote reviews for Locus in the Nineties, then founded the Locus Online website in 1997 and ran it single-handedly for 20 years, along the way winning the Best Website Hugo (2002). (OGH)
  • Born August 30, 1965 — Laeta Kalogridis, 57. She was an executive producer of the short-lived not-so-great Birds of Prey series and she co-wrote the screenplays for Terminator Genisys and Alita: Battle Angel. She recently was the creator and executive producer of Altered Carbon. She also has a screenwriting credit for Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, a film the fanboys hate but which I really like. 
  • Born August 30, 1972 — Cameron Diaz, 50. She first shows as Tina Carlyle in The Mask, an amazing film. (The sequel is bloody awful.) She voices Princess Fiona in the Shrek franchise. While dating Tom Cruise, she’s cast as an uncredited Bus passenger in Minority Report. Oh, and she’s Lenore Case in the Green Hornet.
  • Born August 30, 1980 — Angel Coulby, 42. She is best remembered for her recurring role as Gwen (Guinevere) in the BBC’s Merlin. She also shows up in Doctor Who as Katherine in the “The Girl in the Fireplace”, a Tenth Doctor story. She also voices Tanusha ‘Kayo’ Kyrano in the revived animated Thunderbirds Are Go series.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Lio is present when something goes viral.

(10) PHONE HACKER. “Artist Turns Old Payphone Into Fantastical Sci-Fi Art Display: ‘It’s Generated A Lot Of Interest’” – Block Club Chicago has the story.

…The art display is named for its coordinates: 42.004587, -87.690123. It features an inscription with a cryptic quote attributed to St. Luna, another alias of the artist, saying, “Some day the words of an old, beloved song will go, “Parlin’s space is vast and so is time … .’”

The payphone is across the street from Warren Park, a few blocks from Luna Rail’s West Ridge home. One day, the artist took note of the payphone infrastructure that had been left to decay.

Luna Rail figured there could be a better use for it and conceived of the installation. The piece was installed in June.

“There’s so few of these left,” Luna Rail said. “I looked at it [and thought], ‘It’s perfect.’”

Luna Rail visits the display most days. He comes by at night to turn on lights connected to the installation. During the day, he fixes issues caused by weather or vandalism….

(11) DEATH FROM ABOVE. “The Giant Meteor Trope In Science Fiction, Explained” by GameRant.

… There is perhaps no simpler trope in science fiction. The giant meteor is what it says on the tin. A piece of a comet or an asteroid that once orbited the sun breaks and gets caught up in Earth’s gravity. As it enters the atmosphere, it reaches terminal velocity. When it hits the surface, it does so with cataclysmic force. The first recorded meteor strike witnessed by a person was in 1064, near Changzhou, China. Shen Kuo reported the sights, the sound, and his findings in the resulting crater. There are a few cases of meteorites landing in Europe in the 1400s to be studied by scientists. In 1980, a team of award-winning scientists concluded that the age of the dinosaurs ended in an impact event. Those elements, along with mankind’s general fear of the endless unknown that makes up outer space led to a tradition of tales about things falling from the sky…

(12) CAT GOT THEIR TONGUE? [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] The New York Times investigates whether AI tools can help SJWs figure out what their cat wants. “Did My Cat Just Hit On Me? An Adventure in Pet Translation”.

… MeowTalk, whose founders enlisted Dr. Ntalampiras after the study appeared, expands on this research, using algorithms to identify cat vocalizations made in a variety of contexts.

The app detects and analyzes cat utterances in real-time, assigning each one a broadly defined “intent,” such as happy, resting, hunting or “mating call.” It then displays a conversational, plain English “translation” of whatever intent it detects, such as Momo’s beleaguered “Let me rest.” (Oddly, none of these translations appear to include “I will chew off your leg if you do not feed me this instant.”)

MeowTalk uses the sounds it collects to refine its algorithms and improve its performance, the founders said, and pet owners can provide in-the-moment feedback if the app gets it wrong.

In 2021, MeowTalk researchers reported that the software could distinguish among nine intents with 90 percent accuracy overall. But the app was better at identifying some than others, not infrequently confusing “happy” and “pain,” according to the results….

(13) YESTERDAY’S TOMORROW. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Kate Bellingham explains in 1994 how “something called the Internet” can let you watch movies and buy things and even write to politicians because she wrote President Clinton and got a response but British Prime Minister John Major didn’t have a modem. “1994: Are YOU Ready for the INTERNET?” from BBC’s Tomorrow’s World.

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Honest Game Trailers: Xenoblade Chronicles 3,” Fandom Games, in a spoiler-filled episode, says that this game may be “the most Japanese thing” since the dude who sings “Pen Pineapple Apple Pen,” since you cosplay a character who spends a third of the time playing the flute for dead people, there’s a fat kid who dies, and a required friendship robot.  “No one likes a game about the power of friendship more than a drudge who hasn’t seen an actual human being in weeks,” says the narrator.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Jennifer Hawthorne, Scott Edelman, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Joe H.]

Pixel Scroll 8/15/22 Pixel Scrolling to the Faraway Towns

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(1) WHO IS NUMBER ONE? At The Splintered Mind, Eric Schwitzgebel continues his annual ratings with the “Top Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazines 2022”. The scoring is done in the following way:

(2.) I gave each magazine one point for each story nominated for a Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, or World Fantasy Award in the past ten years; one point for each story appearance in any of the Dozois, Horton, Strahan, Clarke, or Adams “year’s best” anthologies; and half a point for each story appearing in the short story or novelette category of the annual Locus Recommended list.

(2a.) Methodological notes for 2022: Starting this year, I swapped the Sturgeon for the Eugie award for all award years 2013-2022. Also, with the death of Dozois in 2018, the [temporary?] cessation of the Strahan anthology, and the delay of the Horton and Clarke anthologies, the 2022 year includes only one new anthology source: Adams 2021. Given the ten-year-window, anthologies still comprise about half the weight of the rankings overall.

The ratings are followed by various observations, for example:

For the past several years it has been clear that the classic “big three” print magazines — Asimov’s, F&SF, and Analog — are slowly being displaced in influence by the four leading free online magazines, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Uncanny (all founded 2006-2014).  Contrast this year’s ranking with the ranking from 2014, which had Asimov’s and F&SF on top by a wide margin.  Presumably, a large part of the explanation is that there are more readers of free online fiction than of paid subscription magazines, which is attractive to authors and probably also helps with voter attention for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards.

(2) ALTERNATE SPACE. Polygon’s article “For All Mankind season 3 showed how hard Star Trek’s utopia is to achieve” is a spoiler-filled summary of the show, but also a good way to catch up if you haven’t been watching.

After two seasons of an extended Cold War, For All Mankind moved into the technology boom of the ’90s. If the real ’90s were driven by a techno-optimism, For All Mankind explores an idea of what a utopian America driven by technology would actually look like. In this alternate space-focused timeline, the go-go ’90s are filled with electric cars, videophones, and moon-mining. Sounds pretty good, right? But over the course of the season, For All Mankind shows how even if the utopianism of the actual ’90s could have been translated into reality, we couldn’t have left our problems behind.

By the third season, For All Mankind’s alternate history has moved leaps and bounds beyond where our ’90s found us. The larger powers have wound down their military snafus in Vietnam and Afghanistan to focus on building military bases on the moon. The Equal Rights Amendment entered the Constitution thanks to the prominence of female astronauts, electric cars are readily available thanks to investments in technology, and the Soviet Union never collapsed….

(3) MYTHIC MOMENTS. Rivera Sun and David Bratman were the Author and Scholar guests of honor, respectively, at Mythcon 52 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

If you’ve never heard David Bratman speaking about Tolkien and other mythopoeic figures, don’t miss the opportunity to at least read the text of his GOH Speech, hosted on the Southwestern Oklahoma State University site.

And you can listen to Rivera Sun’s GoH speech in a video here.

(4) CRITICAL MASS. The Guardian interviews Namwali Serpell, who won the Clarke Award in 2020: “Namwali Serpell: ‘I find uncertainty compelling in literature’”.

As a critic, you’ve been sceptical about how we tend to construe literary value, not least in your 2019 essay The Banality of Empathy.

The idea that literature’s ethical values stem from its ability to produce empathy has become the be-all and end-all of how we talk about it. The incredible immersion in the minds of others [that fiction offers] is something I wouldn’t be able to live without, but I’d push against the notion that it is valuable for a kind of portable empathy that makes us better people. Many bad people don’t read. Many good people never got to learn how to read. The equation of reading with morally positive effects [resembles] the neoliberal model of eating well and doing exercise. We can see that in the way books are commodified right now: pictures of your latte or smoothie next to a beautiful book cover on Instagram are meant to reflect one’s engagement in a project of self-improvement, rather than actual engagement with other people, talking and thinking about that book. My scepticism isn’t of art – it’s of what we take art to be for.

(5) ONE SMELL IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS. Cora Buhlert posted a lengthy Masters of the Universe toy photo story about He-Man’s long lost twin sister She-Ra: “Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: ‘The Mystery of He-Man’s Long-Lost Twin Sister’”.

Here is the long-awaited Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre Photo Story about She-Ra, He-Man’s long lost twin sister. To recap, last year I bought myself a Masters of the Universe Origins He-Man and Battlecat and then a Teela figure, because I couldn’t find my vintage figure. Gradually, they were joined by other Masters of the Universe Origins figures. I also started posing the action figures to re-enact scenes from the cartoons and my imagination and started posting the results first on Twitter and then here.

This is part 3 in a sub-series of posts called “Secrets of Eternia” about how much the entire Masters of the Universe franchise is driven by secrets….

“Halt! Put down the babies, fiends! You are under arrest.”

“Tell Randor that he will never see his precious children again, bwahaha.”

“Waaah!”

“Why is it making those sounds, Keldor? And what’s that smell?”

“Just shut up and take the baby!”

(6) FRANKED BY URSULA. [Item by Kevin Standlee.] Today, we mailed the last batch of Westercon 74 program books to the members whose records showed that they did not pick up their membership badge, including supporting members. Whenever possible, we included that person’s membership badge and one of the Westercon 74 ribbons that we gave to every member until they ran out. We excluded “Guest of” members and those people we knew to have died over the past three years. Of course, we also did not try to send a program book to any member who did not provide a valid postal mailing address. In total, we mailed 156 program books, which coincidentally was almost exactly the same number of members who did pick up their membership badges.

We mailed everything from Fernley, Nevada by first class mail. The last 27 in this batch went out a few days after the main mailing because we exhausted the supply of Ursula K. Le Guin high-value stamps from our local post office and had to wait for another shipment of stamps to arrive.

(7) MOURNING. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] Here is a very touching piece by Melissa Navia, who plays Lieutenant Erica Ortegas in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, about losing her partner to cancer between seasons: “An Actor, a Helmsman, and My Brian: Boldly Going Where No Widow Has Gone Before” at Talkhouse.

…All I thought before now rings inconsequential and incomplete. Death will do that to you. Grief transforms you. Losing the love of your life breaks you. So, this is the beginning of a new story, one I am still finding the strength to tell. Of how I went from not being able to physically leave my couch, all of six months ago, to reluctantly leaving the country to film the much-anticipated second season of a yet-to-be-aired, internationally anticipated TV show. Of how I went from becoming a widow in an agonizing heartbeat to re-becoming Erica Ortegas, helmsman of the USS Enterprise on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and how the two will forever be inextricably linked….

(8) MEMORY LANE.  

1951 – [By Cat Eldridge.] I was downstairs this morning as I as most mornings chatting with the usual group when someone mentioned that Yul Brynner’s The King and I had played here at Merrill Auditorium and that she saw it.

So I got interested to see just what the history of The King and I was. It is based on Margaret Landon’s Anna and the King of Siam novel which came out in 1944, which she based upon the memoirs of Anna Leonowens, governess to the children of King Mongkut of Siam in the early 1860s. Mongkut reigned for an astonishing sixty-four years.

(It has since been established by historians that the memoirs of Anna Leonowens are, to put it mildly more fiction than actual reality.)

I discovered it was a Richard Rodgers (the music) and Oscar Hammerstein II (the lyrics) affair (I didn’t know that) that first opened in 1951 with, of course, Yul Brynner who had shaved his head for the role (something he never stopped doing) and Gertrude Lawrence as Anna Leonowens, the widowed Briton who was teaching his children. 

It opened on Broadway’s St. James Theatres and ran for nearly three years, making it the fourth-longest-running Broadway musical in history at the time,

Brynner would perform the role of the King of Siam four thousand six hundred and twenty-five performances on Broadway and off Broadway on stages in places like here in Portland. 

He of course starred in the film version of The King and I whose screenplay was written by Ernest Lehman. The film starred Deborah Kerr as Anna Leonowens. The film made five times what it cost to make.  The Variety review at the time praised it lavishly: “All the ingredients that made Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The King and I a memorable stage experience have been faithfully transferred to the screen.” 

He also starred in 1972 in Anna and the King, the CBS series that lasted thirteen episodes. Samantha Eggar co-starred. Anyone see it? 

Oh, and it was banned in Thailand but so is the book, and any adaptations of the book including other film versions. 

Yes, I like it very much so and have watched the film a number of times. 

The role would net Brynner two Tony Awards, and an Academy Award for Best Actor. 

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 15, 1858 — E. Nesbit. She wrote or collaborated on more than sixty books of children’s literature including the Five Children Universe series. She was also a political activist and co-founded the Fabian Society, a socialist organization later affiliated to the Labour Party. (Died 1924.)
  • Born August 15, 1932 — Robert L. Forward. Physicist and SF writer whose eleven novels I find are often quite great on ideas and quite thin on character development. Dragon’s Egg is fascinating as a first contact novel, and Saturn Rukh is another first contact novel that’s just as interesting. (Died 2002.)
  • Born August 15, 1933 — Bjo Trimble, 89. Her intro to fandom was TASFiC, the 1952 Worldcon. She would be active in LASFS in the late 1950s onward and has been involved in more fanzines than I can comfortably list here. Of course, many of us know her from Trek especially the successful campaign for a third season. She’s responsible for the Star Trek Concordance, an amazing work even by today’s standards. And yes, I read it and loved it. She’s shows up (uncredited) as a crew member in the Recreation Deck scene in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Bjo and her husband John Trimble were the Fan Guests of Honor at the 60th Worldcon, ConJose. She was nominated at Seacon for Best Fanzine for Shangri L’Affaires, and two years later at DisCon 1 for the same under the Best Amateur Magazine category. 
  • Born August 15, 1952 — Louise Marley, 70. Winner of two Endeavour Awards for The Glass Harmonica and The Child Goddess. Before becoming a writer, she was an opera singer with the Seattle Opera, and so her works often feature musical themes.
  • Born August 15, 1943 — Barbara Bouchet, 79. Yes, I’ve a weakness for performers who’ve shown up on the original Trek. She plays Kelinda in “By Any Other Name”.  She also appeared in Casino Royale as Miss Moneypenny, a role always noting, and is Ava Vestok in Agent for H.A.R.M. which sounds like someone was rather unsuccessfully emulating The Man from U.N.C.L.E. It will be commented upon by Mystery Science Theater 3000.  
  • Born August 15, 1945 — Nigel Terry. His first role was John in A Lion in Winter which is at least genre adjacent as it’s alternate history, with his first genre role being King Arthur in Excalibur. Now there’s a bloody telling of the Arthurian myth.  He’s General Cobb in the Tenth Doctor story, “The Doctor’s Daughter”, and on the Highlander series as Gabriel Piton in the “Eye of the Beholder” episode. He even played Harold Latimer in “The Greek Interpreter” on Sherlock Holmes. (Died 2015.)
  • Born August 15, 1972 — Ben Affleck, 50. Did you know his first genre role is in Buffy the Vampire Slayer? He’s a basketball player in it. He’s Batman in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League. IMDB claims he shows up in an uncredited spot in Suicide Squad as well. He’s reprising his role as Batman in forthcoming Flash. He’s Matt Murdock / Daredevil in Daredevil which I have seen. He’s actually in Field of Dreams too as a fan on the stands in Fenway though he’s not credited. Can I nominate Shakespeare in Love as genre? If so, he’s Ned Alleyn in it.
  • Born August 15, 1972 — Matthew Wood, 50. He started out as, and still is, a sound engineer but he also became a voice actor with his best known role being that of General Grievous in The Revenge of the Sith and The Clone Wars. He often does both at the same time as on 2013 Star Trek Into Darkness where he was the lead sound editor and provided the ever so vague additional voices. If you’ve been watching The Mandalorian, he was Bib Fortuna in “The Rescue” episode. 

(10) TURN UP THE VOLUMES. “Exploring a literary gem: Milwaukee’s Renaissance Book Store endures through decades of change” is the local CBS affiliate’s love letter to an indie bookstore.

For some people reading is a hobby but for C Kay Hinchliffe it’s a lifestyle. She’s been working at Renaissance Book Store for more than 40 years.

“I started working for Renaissance in January of 1980 when we were still in the big building downtown,” said Hinchliffe. “You meet all sort of people in used books. Part of the fun for me is the joy I can give people because they come in and say I’m looking for a book and I say okay what’s the name?”

Renaissance Books is one of the only standing independent bookstores left in Milwaukee, first opening back in the 1950s when its original location was downtown in a five-story building.

In 1979, it opened a location inside Mitchell International Airport becoming the first used bookstore inside an airport in the country.

“At the airport store you have people coming from all over. There are people who fly into Milwaukee just so they can come to the store,” said Hinchliffe.

…Working at Renaissance has become a family affair. Hinchliffe’s husband Michael has worked at the store since the 1970’s.

“Michael has worked for Renaissance since ’76 and I started working at Renaissance because he worked at Renaissance,” said Hinchliffe.

Since working at this location Hinchliffe estimates she’s sold more than 25,000 books and says she will work at Renaissance for as long as possible.

“We’re a dying breed but we’re small but fierce,” said Hinchliffe.

And the “Michael” referred to is TAFF delegate and Filer “Orange Mike” Lowrey.

(11) YOU’VE SEEN THIS FACE BEFORE. S.E. Lindberg is hosting videos of writing and literature panels from the 2022 GenCon Writer’s Symposium here.

Paul Weimer is one of the panelists on “Sword & Sorcery Renaissance in Writing” along with Jaym Gates, Howard Andrew Jones, Matt John; Jason Ray Carney, and S.E. Lindberg.

(12) LET THE GAMES BEGIN. Variety reports “Viola Davis to Star in ‘Hunger Games’ Prequel as Head Gamemaker”.

Viola Davis is headed to Panem as the head gamemaker in “The Hunger Games” prequel, “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.”

The Lionsgate movie is based on the 2020 book of the same name, which takes place decades before the adventures of Katniss Everdeen in “The Hunger Games.” The prequel story is focused on 18-year-old Snow, who eventually becomes the tyrannical leader of the dystopia known as Panem. In “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” he’s chosen to be mentor during the 10th Hunger Games, a televised event in which teenagers are chosen via lottery to fight to the death.

Davis, who is playing Volumnia Gaul, the mastermind of the diabolical teen death-match, will star opposite Tom Blyth as young Coriolanus Snow, Rachel Zegler as tribute Lucy Gray Baird, Hunter Schafer as Snow’s cousin and confidante Tigris Snow and Peter Dinklage as Academy dean Casca Highbottom….

(13) CALIFORNIA’S DROUGHT ISN’T ITS ONLY WORRY. [Item by Tom Becker.] Researchers from UCLA and National Center for Atmospheric Research have found that climate change has doubled the risk of a major “mega-flood” in California. The Great Flood of 1862 inundated the Central Valley. Steamships went along the main streets of towns, picking up passengers from rooftops. Sacramento was under ten feet of water. Climate change increases the severity of both droughts and floods. A major flood can occur when an “atmospheric river” melts the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada and it all runs off at once. It has happened before in California, hence the Great Flood of 1862. When it happens again, 5 to 10 million people may be in the path of the flood. Evacuating that many people would be an enormous task, never done before. There are ways to mitigate the flooding, but they would necessarily involve changes to water rights and land use policies that will be highly controversial. Science fiction writers, take note.

(14) VARIATION ON A THEME. From Jeff Blyth: “Wall-E’s Old Man”.

My latest tribute film about Wall-E, this time an “origin” story. Yes, I know the true background of the beloved character, but, like all fan fiction, I wanted to try putting out my own version of how he might have come to be. To those who have faithfully followed my other Wall-E films in the past, this one has been made especially for you. There are a few Easter eggs you’ll find throughout the film and in the soundtrack as well. This is the longest and most complex animation project I’d ever attempted and took me over a year, working alone and on a single computer, with many new challenges.

(15) THE FUTURE IS HERE. It’s a lovely trailer, I’ve got to say that. “L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 38 Book Trailer”.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Isaac Arthur picks out the “Dumbest Alien Invasions”.

An Alien Invasion of Earth is a terrifying scenario, yet science fiction rarely has good reason for those invasions. Today we’ll discuss the worst reasons aliens invade in fiction and some plausible scenarios for why they might do it in fact.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Tom Becker, Cora Buhlert, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]

Pixel Scroll 5/20/20 Don’t Wait To Get Filed, There Are Pixels To Scroll And Boxes To Tick

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(1) TAP INTO THE COMMUNITY. Cat Rambo gives writers a list of tips about “How to Ask for Things” at the SFWA Blog.

One thing that can really boost a writer in their early career is getting help from a more experienced writer. The fantasy and science fiction genre has a long and valued tradition of “paying things forward,” mentoring and assisting newer writers to pay back the way they themselves were helped when they first came onto the scene….

Accordingly, I join others telling new writers not to be afraid to draw on this tradition and ask for things. But I do have some tips for making those asks more successful.

Above all: be specific, and do as much of the work for the other person as you can. The reference letter where I have the URL to submit it, the applicant’s statement of purpose, and their notes of stuff I might want to hit are more likely to get written than the one where I have to ask or search online for the information…

(2) NOT USING WESTERN UNION. NPR’s Annalisa Quinn finds that “‘The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes’ Is A Lackluster Prequel To ‘The Hunger Games'”.

With her Hunger Games novels, Suzanne Collins harnessed a combination of twisty plots, teen romance, dystopian worldbuilding and subtle intimations of cannibalism to sell more than 100 million books around the world.

The premise was unbeatable: Authoritarian regime forces children to fight to the death on live TV; rebellion ensues. But much of the series’ appeal came from the spiky charisma of protagonist Katniss Everdeen, the sharpshooting teenager who wins the games and starts a revolution while choosing between two boys who are as alike in cuteness as they are different in Weltanschauung.

Collins’ new novel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, is a baggy, meandering prequel to the events of The Hunger Games that tells the story of Katniss’ nemesis and Panem’s authoritarian ruler, Coriolanus Snow. With his Roman tyrant’s name, surgically altered face and breath smelling of blood and roses, Coriolanus appeared as a distant villain throughout most of The Hunger Games series. It’s only the last installment that gives him a touch of mystery — in its final pages, sentenced to public execution, he instead dies laughing, choked on his own blood.

…The question of how much of character is innate, how much formed, becomes a more explicit — OK, painfully obvious — theme in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. The novel is a plinth for two opposing worldviews. The cruel Hobbesian Gamemaster tells Coriolanus that the hunger games are a reminder that people are monsters kept only in check by strong rule: “What happened in the arena? That’s humanity undressed. … That’s mankind in its natural state.” Meanwhile, in spite of the cruelty she suffers in the arena, Lucy Gray believes that there is “a natural goodness built into human beings.” The debate matters, the Gamemaster says, “[b]ecause who we are determines the type of governing we need” — a republic or a tyranny.

(3) ICONIC ACTRESS DEPARTS BATWOMAN. “Ruby Rose leaves Batwoman – and other stars who exited major roles” – BBC has an overview.

The Australian actress Ruby Rose is to leave her role as comic book superhero Batwoman after just one series.

Rose said it had been a “very difficult decision” not to return to the show, which is shown in the UK on E4.

Batwoman, which began on the CW network last year, is the first superhero show to have an openly gay lead character.

Its producers said they were “firmly committed” to the show’s “long-term” future and would re-cast the role with another member of the LGBTQ community.

Rose, who is openly gay, said she was “truly grateful… to everyone who made season one a success”.

The 34-year-old said she had “the utmost respect” for everyone involved and that the decision to leave had not been “made lightly”.

(4) GETTING EVEN. Even if you’re working at home that presence is probably lurking in Zoom. Does James Davis Nicoll suspect what might happen after you read “Five Revenge Tales Featuring Treacherous Bosses and Evil Overlords”?

…David Drake’s mercenary troupe, Hammer’s Slammers (commanded by Friesland’s Colonel Alois Hammer), was formed to suppress an uprising on Friesland’s colony-world Melpomone. The foreign mercenaries were offered settlement on wealthy Friesland in exchange for their services, as well as a chunk of cash. But after the mercenaries crushed the rebellion, Friesland’s government decided that it wasn’t such a great idea to settle battle-hardened mercenaries in their midst. Nor did it seem like a good idea to let the mercenaries sell their skills to other employers, since said employers could well be Friesland’s enemies. Best idea: kill off the now-superfluous soldiers. Friesland expects that their own Colonel Hammer will acquiesce. They are wrong. Hammer sides with his soldiers. Forewarned, the Slammers obliterate their would-be assassins and become the very destabilizing force that Friesland had feared.

(5) FULFILLING A ROLL. In “A City Locks Down to Fight Coronavirus, but Robots Come and Go”, the New York Times studies the success of an emerging technology.

If any place was prepared for quarantine, it was Milton Keynes. Two years before the pandemic, a start-up called Starship Technologies deployed a fleet of rolling delivery robots in the small city about 50 miles northwest of London.

The squat six-wheeled robots shuttled groceries and dinner orders to homes and offices. As the coronavirus spread, Starship shifted the fleet even further into grocery deliveries. Locals like Emma Maslin could buy from the corner store with no human contact.

“There’s no social interaction with a robot,” Ms. Maslin said.

The sudden usefulness of the robots to people staying in their homes is a tantalizing hint of what the machines could one day accomplish — at least under ideal conditions. Milton Keynes, with a population of 270,000 and a vast network of bicycle paths, is perfectly suited to rolling robots. Demand has been so high in recent weeks, some residents have spent days trying to schedule a delivery.

(6) THOMAS OBIT. German film composer Peter Thomas, who died May 19, aged 94. Cora Buhlert says that since she couldn’t find an English language obituary, she wrote one herself: “In Memoriam: Peter Thomas”. Thomas provided the soundtracks for a lot of SFF works, including the legendary SF TV series Raumpatrouille Orion as well as the 1959 science fiction film Moonwolf and a lost TV adaptation of G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. A lot of the Edgar Wallace thrillers, for which he composed the music, are borderline SFF as well.

(7) LIPPINCOTT OBIT. Charles Lippincott (1939-2020), whose work marketing Star Wars changed the way movies are publicized, died May 19 following a heart attack last week. He was 80. The Hollywood Reporter traced his beginnings:

Lippincott worked on campaigns for a number of groundbreaking films, including Michael Crichton’s Westworld (1973); Alfred Hitchcock’s final film, Family Plot (1976); Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979); and Flash Gordon (1980). But it was his work on Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) that left the biggest mark, and he helped reshape how movies are marketed.

Craig Miller, in his recent book Star Wars Memories, notes that Lippincott went to USC Film School at the same time as George Lucas. At the Star Wars Corporation —

Charley was responsible for a lot. He made sure every character, every name, every image was properly copyrighted and trademarked. He made the licensing deals (along with Marc Pevers, an attorney who was Vice President of Licensing at 20th Century Fox) for the merchandise that, despite the enormous box office gross, was the real profit center for Lucasfilm. He was even part of the pitches to the 20th Century-Fox Board, to help convince them to make the movie.

Charles Lippincott

Lippincott’s other film publicity and advertising credits include Judge Dredd (which he also produced) and Comic Book Confidential (which he wrote and produced), which starred Star Wars’ Mark Hammill.

I’ve always been grateful to him for the chance to bask in the reflected glory of Star Wars when, in my first meeting as LASFS president, held at the 1976 Westercon, I introduced his promotional pre-release Star Wars slide show.

You can find many posts about marketing and Star Wars industry history at his blog From the Desk of Charles Lippincott.

(8) TODAY IN HISTORY.

  • May 20, 1950 — Dimension X’s “The Lost Race” was playing on NBC stations nationwide. Ernest Kinoy adapted the story from Murray Leinster’s “The Lost,” first published in the April 1949 of Thrilling Wonder Stories. A space crew find themselves shipwrecked on a world where the ruins of a long dead spacefaring civilization hide a deadly secret that has much power to destroy the present as it did the past.  Matt Crowley, Kermit Murdock and Joseph Julian were the cast. You can listen to it here.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born May 20, 1799 – Honoré de Balzac.  His complete works total 20,000 pages.  We can claim six novels, three dozen shorter stories, translated into English, German, Romanian, sometimes more than once.  What of The Quest for the Absolute, whose alchemist hero at the end cries Eureka! [Greek, “I have found it”] and dies: is it fantasy?  (Died 1850) [JH]
  • Born May 20, 1911 — Gardner Francis Fox. Writer for DC comics and other companies as well. He was prolific enough that historians of the field estimate he wrote more than four thousand comics stories, including 1,500 for just DC Comics. For DC, he created The Flash, Adam Strange and The Atom, plus the Justice Society of America. His first SF novel was Escape Across the Cosmos though he wrote a tie-in novel, Jules Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon, previously. (Died 1986.) (CE)
  • Born May 20, 1911 – Annie Schmidt.  Mother of the Dutch theatrical song, queen of Dutch children’s literature.  Hans Christian Andersen Medal.  Poetry, songs, plays, musicals, radio and television for adults.  Two fantasies for us, Minoes (tr. as The Cat Who Came In Off the Roof), Pluk van de Petteflet (tr. as Tow-Truck Pluck).  One of fifty in the Dutch Canon with Erasmus, Rembrandt, Spinoza, Van Gogh, Anne Frank; see here.  (Died 1995) [JH]
  • Born May 20, 1925 – Roy Tackett.  “HORT” (Horrible Old Roy Tackett, so named by Bruce Pelz; while RT was alive, anyone hearing this responded “Oh, I know Roy, and he’s not that old!”) is credited with introducing SF to Japan.  Active since 1936, drifted away in the late 1950s, returned upon finding the Coulsons’ fanzine Yandro, published a hundred issues of his fanzine Dynatron.   Co-founded the Albuquerque (New Mexico) SF Society and Bubonicon.  Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund delegate, 1976; report, Tackett’s Travels in Taffland.  Fan Guest of Honor at Westercon XXI and the 55th Worldcon.  (Died 2003) [JH]
  • Born May 20, 1928 — Shirley Rousseau Murphy, 92. Author of the Joe Grey series of mysteries. Its narrator is a feline who speaks and who solves mysteries. Surely that’s genre. Excellent series which gets better in characterization as it goes along. She also did some more traditional genre, none of which I’ve encountered, the Children of Ynell series and the Dragonbard trilogy. (CE)
  • Born May 20, 1940 — Joan Staley. She showed up twice as Okie Annie on Batman in “It’s How You Play the Game” and “Come Back, Shame“. She played Ginny in Mission Impossible’s two-parter, “The Council”, and she was in Prehistoric Valley (Dinosaurs! Caveman! Playboy mates in bikinis!) (Died 2019) (CE)
  • Born May 20, 1946 – Mike Glicksohn.  A great loccer (“loc” also “LoC” = letter of comment, the blood of fanzines) comparable to Harry Warner; three Fan Activity Achievement awards.  Founding member of Ontario (Canada) SF Club.  With Susan Wood published the superb fanzine Energumen, Hugo winner 1973; with her, Fan Guests of Honour at the 33rd Worldcon; his trip report, The Hat Goes Home (he famously wore an Australian bush hat).  Co-founded the fanziners’ con Ditto (named for a brand of spirit-duplicator machine).  One of our best auctioneers at Art Shows, at fund-raisers for cons and for traveling-fan funds.  (Died 2011) [JH]
  • Born May 20, 1949 – Mary Pope Osborne.  Children’s and young-adults’ book author best known for the Magic Tree House series, sixty of them so far; 164 million copies sold; animé film grossed $5.7 million, donated to educational projects.  Iliad and Odyssey retelling books, also myths e.g. Echo, Atalanta, Ceres; Thor, Baldur.  Thirty chapbooks.  Camped six weeks in a cave on Crete.  Two separate terms president of the Authors Guild.  Says she tries to be as simple and direct as Hemingway.  Honorary Doctorate of Letters, U. North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  [JH]
  • Born May 20, 1951 — Steve Jackson, 69. With Ian Livingstone, he founded Games Workshop and  also the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, the two most dominant aspects of the UK games industry before it came to be essentially wiped by the advent of videogames. I’m fairly sure the only one of his works that I’ve played is Starship Traveller which I’d been playing around the same time as Traveller. (CE)
  • Born May 20, 1954 – Pat Morrissey.  Thirty covers, a hundred twenty interiors; Magic, the Gathering cards; limited-edition prints; tattoos; Einstein Planetarium at Smithsonian Institute; Philadelphia Museum of Science; sometimes as Pat Lewis, Pat Morrissey-Lewis.  See here, here.  [JH]
  • Born May 20, 1954 – Luis Royo.  Prolific Spanish artist; covers in and out of our field, comics, a Tarot deck, CDs, video games; a domed-ceiling fresco in Moscow (with his son Romulo Royo).  Spectrum silver award, Inkpot award.  See here, here, here.  [JH]
  • Born May 20, 1961 — Owen Teale, 59. Best known role is as Alliser Thorne on the just concluded Game of Thrones. He also was Will Scarlet in the superb Robin Hood where the lead role was performed by Patrick Bergin, he played the theologian Pelagius in 2004 King Arthur, was Vatrenus in yet another riff on Arthurian myth called The Last Legion, was Maldak in the “Vengeance on Varos” episode in the Era of the Sixth Doctor, and was Evan Sherman in the “Countrycide” episode of Torchwood. He’s currently playing Peter Knox in A Discovery of Witches based on the All Souls trilogy by Deborah Harkness, named after the first book in the trilogy. (CE)
  • Born May 20, 1968 — Timothy Olyphant, 52. He’s been cast in the next season of The Mandalorian where he might be Sheriff Cobb Vanth which in turn means he’d be wearing Bobo Fett’s salvaged armor. And he was Sheriff Seth Bullock in the Deadwood franchise which must at least genre adjacent given the great love of it by Emma Bull and Will Shetterly.  (CE)

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) A KINDER CUT. Apparently, we’ll get to find out. “What if the Snyder Cut of Justice League is actually great?” Jeffrey Lyles of Lyles Movie Files has hope.

…All of which to say is I’m actually very interested in the HBO Max launch 2021 reveal of the Snyder cut of Justice League. I’m surprised it needs to wait another year to debut unless Warner Bros. is throwing out some more cash for some post production elements. If anything the Snyder cut will be a win because it shouldn’t feature a digitally removed mustache version of Cavill’s Superman with the odd lip CGI.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Snyder said while he’s never watched the version Joss Whedon completed, fans “probably saw one-fourth of what I did.” Snyder added, “It will be an entirely new thing, and, especially talking to those who have seen the released movie, a new experience apart from that movie.“

(12) SPACEX MISSION. “Astronauts arrive at Kennedy for historic launch” – BBC has the story.

Nasa astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken have arrived at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to prepare for their historic mission next week.

The pair’s flight to the International Space Station (ISS) will be made in a rocket and capsule system provided by a commercial company, SpaceX.

Nasa has traditionally always owned and operated its space vehicles.

But that is a capability it gave up in 2011 when it retired the last of the space shuttles.

The agency now intends to contract out all future crew transportation to low-Earth orbit.

Hurley and Behnken flew into Florida from the agency’s human spaceflight headquarters in Texas where they have been in quarantine.

They’ll continue protecting their health at Kennedy as they get ready for Wednesday’s planned lift-off.

Their rocket, a Falcon-9, and capsule, known as Dragon, will be wheeled out to the spaceport’s famous launch pad – complex 39A – in the next few days for its static fire test.

This will see the Falcon ignite briefly all nine of its first-stage engines to check they are fit to go.

(13) TURNOVER AT NASA. But why did you resign? NASA doesn’t usually remind me of The Prisoner, “Nasa: Doug Loverro steps down days before crewed launch”.

The head of Nasa’s human spaceflight programme has stepped down just days before a “historic” launch.

Doug Loverro resigned on Monday, Nasa announced, less than a year after his appointment.

…No official reason for Mr Loverro’s departure has been announced, but a leaked copy of an email sent to Nasa employees mentioned a risk taken earlier in the year “because I judged it necessary to fulfil our mission”.

“Now, over the balance of time, it is clear that I made a mistake in that choice for which I alone must bear the consequences,” the message continued.

While Mr Loverro offered no further explanation, he told the Axios news website that his decision to leave the agency was unrelated to the upcoming launch. “I have 100% faith in the success of that mission,” he said.

Mr Loverro was appointed in October last year. His deputy, Ken Bowersox, will become the acting head of human spaceflight.

(15) BIG BIRD. And BBC has the word: “Megaraptor: Fossils of 10m-long dinosaur found in Argentina”.

Palaeontologists have found the fossils of a new megaraptor in Patagonia, in the south of Argentina.

Megaraptors were large carnivorous dinosaurs with long arms and claws measuring up to 35cm (14in) in length.

They also had powerful legs and long tails which made them more agile than the Tyrannosaurus rex and allowed them to catch smaller herbivorous dinosaurs.

The new megaraptor is one of the last of its group, before dinosaurs became extinct, the scientific team says.

(16) TAKE ONE TABLET AND CALL ME IN THE MORNING. “Gilgamesh tablet: Bid to confiscate artefact from Museum of the Bible reports the BBC.

US prosecutors are seeking to confiscate a rare ancient tablet from a Christian museum co-founded by the president of retailer Hobby Lobby.

The 3,500-year-old artefact, from what is now Iraq, bears text from the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the world’s oldest works of literature.

Prosecutors allege that an auction house deliberately withheld information about its origins.

Hobby Lobby said it was co-operating with government investigations.

It bought the tablet from the auction house in a private sale in 2014 for $1.67m (£1.36m) for display at the Museum of the Bible in Washington.

The office of the US attorney for the Eastern District of New York says the tablet was illegally imported into the US.

(17) JEOPARDY! Last night’s Jeopardy! contestants struggled with this one, says Andrew Porter.

Category: Adventure Novels.

Answer: In this novel the surname of a pastor, his wife & 4 sons is not given in the text; the title was meant to evoke a 1719 novel.

Wrong questions: “What is Gulliver’s Travels?” and “What is 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea?”

Correct question: “What is Swiss Family Robinson?”

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “This is What The Matrix Really Looks Like Without CGI!!!–Special Effects Breakdown” on YouTube, Fame Focus looks at how the special effects crew of the matrix used a combination of CGI, wire work, rear projection, and miniatures to acheive the spectacular special effects of The Matrix.

[Thanks to John Hertz, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Chip Hitchcock, N., Mike Kennedy, Richard Horton, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]

Pixel Scroll 5/12/20 If Pixels Be The Scroll Of Life, File On

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(1) DRAWING A LINE IN THE SILICON.  Tor author S.L. Huang, in “Genre Labels: What Makes A Book More Thriller Than Sci-Fi?” on CrimeReads, says “I’ve been a science fiction and fantasy nerd for as long as I can remember,” and that a book is more of a thriller than sf if “the science-fiction elements feel more realistic,” the book is in a contemporary Earth setting, and the book is written at a thriller pace with many short chapters rather than a sf pace.

4. Making the science fiction a single switch flip.

Lots of science fiction books have a broad array of speculative elements—worldbuilding, culture, technology, language, and advancements in science are just a few elements science fiction writers consider when building intricate other universes. But it’s not the only way to do science fiction. And a lot of the speculative stories that feel more mainstream have that “switch flip” element—that single, isolated “what if” that sets off everything.

What if we could extract viable dinosaur DNA from amber? What if a disease like this got out? What if this person switched bodies?

Then, after that one, singular leap of faith, the rest of the book logic plays out identically to how our real-world logic would work, with only that fundamental beginning change….

(2) STREAMING PLAYGROUND. Of necessity, Escape Room L.A.’s business has gone virtual. They’ve created two Escape Room scenarios for groups to play on Zoom, at $15 per person.

These live-hosted games feature both audio and visual clues. Your host will verbally describe your surroundings while showing you a series of images and puzzles, letting you know how you can interact with everything you see. It will be up to you to work together to solve the fun clues and tricky challenges! Can you escape in one hour or less?

There’s “The Lost Pyramid” and “Escape from Planet X.” The description of the latter is –

A vacation in outer space takes a wrong turn when your spaceship crash-lands on an uncharted alien planet. You discover that all of the crew have disappeared and the aliens are getting restless! In this fun, wacky adventure, it’s up to you to find a way to get the spaceship up and running and escape from Planet X before the aliens attack.

(3) THE BOOKS THEY DECIDED TO DISCUSS. In “Positron 2020 Report: Analyses of Chicagoland Speculative Fiction Book Clubs”, Jake Casella Brookins runs the numbers on Chicago-area sff book club selections, looking at race/gender balance in selected titles, genre changes over time, most-read authors, and how the various clubs’ lists of choices compare. “Pretty niche stuff,” says Brookins, “but SF/F scholars, readers, booksellers & librarians might be interested.”

His introduction to the report begins —

In-person book clubs are necessarily tied to very real and geographic communities. As I write this, Chicago is entering its second month of lockdown due to Covid-19. While many groups and organizations are successfully shifting to online meetings, the future of our clubs, bookstores, and libraries are uncertain. Ironically, this lockdown has given me the first chance to take a deep look at Chicago’s SF book clubs since Positron’s inception.

This report focuses entirely on book club meetings. While data from book sales and library loans would paint a much larger picture of reader behavior and preferences, there are a few advantages to using book club discussions as the unit of analysis, even beyond privacy and logistic concerns. At the most basic level, selection for a book club indicates that the book was definitely read, by at least some members. Furthermore, book club members are a distinct class of readers, committing not only to read books in community, but to share their opinions, a behavior that likely spills beyond the group itself. Through their recommendations, it is likely that book club members have an outsize influence on readers generally.

For me, joining a few SF book clubs was a huge part of adjusting to life in Chicago. They led me to massively important books I might not have otherwise discovered, and introduced me to my spouse and many friends. The clubs certainly have a direct influence on many bookstores and libraries. And, at the level of SF as a culture, the importance of book clubs is easily overlooked, and could provide a window into the specifics of how books, authors, and ideas move through the reading community….

(4) FALLEN SNOW. Entertainment Weekly issues an invitation: “Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes: Listen to the first 11 minutes of the Hunger Games prequel’.

Centered on the original trilogy‘s antagonist, the story follows an 18-year-old Snow as he prepares for his one shot at glory as a mentor in the 10th Hunger Games. He’s up against it, though: His family has fallen on hard times, and he’s forced to guide the female tribute from District 12, the lowest of the low. Suddenly, their fates are intertwined.

The audio clip is here at Soundcloud.

(5) BEWARE OF FALLING HOUSES. Connie Willis just read a book about the making of The Wizard of Oz movie and is eager to share what she learned about “The Ruby Slippers And The Wizard’s Coat”.

…One of the most fascinating sections was about the ruby slippers, which, in case you’ve forgotten, belonged to the Wicked Witch of the East and which Glinda the Good Witch gives Dorothy after the house falls on her (the Witch, not Glinda) and kills her. The ruby slippers protect Dorothy from the Wicked Witch of the West (sort of.) At any rate, the only way to take them off her is to kill her, which makes Dorothy quite a target. (You’d think Glinda would have thought about that.)

They also hold the secret to Dorothy’s getting home. All she has to do is click the heels together and say three times, “There’s no place like home” to be magically transported back to Kansas. That means they’re central to the plot and in many ways the heart of the movie. After Toto, of course.

Like everything else involved in the making of the movie, the ruby slippers were more complicated than they looked. In the first place, the book had specified “silver shoes”, but Louis B. Mayer wanted to show off his Technicolor so he decided they should be red–and that they should “sparkle.”…

(6) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

May 12, 1989 — The Return Of Swamp Thing premiered.  The follow-up to Swamp Thing, it was directed by Jim Wynorski, with production by Benjamin Melniker and Michael E. Uslan. The story was written by Neil Cuthbert and Grant Morris.  It starred Dick Durock and Heather Locklear who replaced Adrienne Barbeau as the female lead which Barbeau was in Swamp Thing.  Louis Jourdan also returns as a spot-on Anton Arcane. Like its predecessor, neither critics nor the audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes liked it so it had a poor twenty seven rating. The original Swamp Thing series which also Durock in contrast has an eight three Percent rating among audience reviewers! [CE]

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born May 12, 1812 – Edward Lear.  With us in fantasyland for his nonsense poems, he was famous in his day as a painter and illustrator.  First major bird artist to draw from live birds; look at this parrot.  Here are some Albanians.  Here’s Masada.  His musical settings for Tennyson’s poems were the only ones Tennyson approved of.  It may be that a grasp of reality makes his nonsense cohere – it holds together.  We may never see an owl dancing with a pussycat, but they do in his creation – in a hundred languages.  (Died 1888) [JH]
  • Born May 12, 1828 – Dante Gabriel Rossetti.  Put his third name first in honor of The Divine Comedy.  Founded the Pre-Raphaelite school of art because he thought Raphael (1483-1520) had ruined things; see how this led him to imagine Proserpine.  His poetry too was fantastic.  He is credited with the word yesteryear.  He loved wombats.  (Died 1882) [JH]
  • Born May 12, 1902 – Philip Wylie.  His novel Gladiator was an inspiration for Superman.  When Worlds Collide (with Edwin Balmer) inspired Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon.  No doubt he was a prolific pulp writer with quite a few of his novels adapted into films such as When Worlds Collide (co-written with George Balmer) by George Pal. Columnist, editor, screenwriter, adviser to the chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee for Atomic Energy, vice-president of the International Game Fish Association.  Wrote “Anyone Can Raise Orchids” for The Saturday EveningPost.  In The Disappearance a cosmic blink forces all men to get along without women, all women without men.  (Died 1971) [JH/CE]
  • Born May 12, 1907 – Leslie Charteris.  Born with the surname Yin; his Chinese father claimed descent from the Shang Dynasty emperors.  Passenger on the maiden voyage of the Hindenburg.  A hundred books, also films, radio, television, about his character Simon Templar, the Saint; also “The Saint” Mystery Magazine; others wrote some too, Vendetta for the Saint is by Henry Harrison.  Detective fiction is our neighbor, and both ISFDB and ESF list the series with the latter noting that “Several short stories featuring Templar are sf or fantasy, typically dealing with odd Inventions or Monsters (including the Loch Ness Monster and Caribbean Zombies.” The Last Hero really is SF, with a disintegrator and a scientist who doesn’t care who gets it.  (Died 1993) [JH/CE]
  • Born May 12, 1928 – Buck Coulson.  Applauded by fanziners  – we have costumers and filksingers, don’t we? –  for Yandro, ten times a Best-Fanzine Hugo finalist, winning once, co-edited with his wife Juanita – speaking of filksingers.  Together Fan Guests of Honor at the 30th Worldcon; the Coulsons to Newcastle Fund sent them to the 37th.  With Gene DeWeese, Buck wrote Now You See It/Him/Them loaded with allusions to fans, including Bob Tucker whose doing this himself led to calling the practice “tuckerism”; Juanita is not left out.  Two Man from U.N.C.L.E. books with DeWeese, translated into Dutch, French, Hebrew, Japanese.  Book reviews for Amazing.  Active loccer (letters of comment to fanzines).  Two terms as as SFWA Secretary (first Science Fiction Writers, then Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers, of America).  Mildly described as having an acerbic writing style.(Died 1999) [JH]
  • Born May 12, 1942 — Barry Longyear, 80. Best known for the Hugo- and Nebula Award–winning novella Enemy Mine, which became a film by that name as well. Gerrold would later novelize it. An expanded version of the original novella as well as two novels completing the trilogy, The Tomorrow Testament and The Last Enemy make up The Enemy Papers. I’m very fond of his Circus World series, less so of his Infinity Hold series. (CE)
  • Born May 12, 1968 — Catherine Tate, 52. Donna Noble, Companion to the Eleventh Doctor. She extended the role by doing the Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor Adventures on Big Finish. She also played Inquisitor Greyfax in Our Martyred Lady, aWarhammer 40,000 audio drama, something I did not know existed. [CE]

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) SUPERHERO PREVIEW. “DC’s Stargirl: New Images Offer the Best Look Yet at Doctor Mid-Nite and Hourman” at ComicBook.com.

In just under a week, a new generation of justice comes to DC Universe when DC’s Stargirl premieres on the streaming service on Monday, May 18. The series, which follows high school sophomore Courtney Whitmore as she moves to Blue Valley, Nebraska following her mother’s marriage to Pat Dugan and becomes the hero Stargirl and inspires an unlikely group of young heroes to help her stop the villains of the past. Now, ComicBook.com has an exclusive look at two of those young heroes ready to fight for justice in their super suits: Doctor Mid-Nite and Hourman.

(10) HAPPY BIRTHDAY ESCAPE POD. Hugo-nominated sff fiction podcast Escape Pod has reached a major milestone — “Escape Pod Turns Fifteen!” The celebration includes creation of a book — Escape Pod: The Science Fiction Anthology.

Escape Pod has been bringing the finest short fiction to millions all over the world, at the forefront of a new fiction revolution. Specializing in science fiction, the podcast gives its audience a different story each week that’s fun and engaging, with thought-provoking afterwords from its episode hosts.

The anthology, assembled by editors Mur Lafferty and S.B. Divya, gathers original fiction and audience favorites from:

  • Maurice Broaddus
  • Tobias Buckell
  • Beth Cato
  • Tina Connolly
  • Cory Doctorow
  • Greg Van Eekhout
  • Sarah Gailey
  • Kameron Hurley
  • N. K. Jemisin
  • Mary Robinette Kowal
  • Mur Lafferty
  • Ken Liu
  • Tim Pratt
  • John Scalzi
  • Ursula Vernon

Preorder now from Titan Books, Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon CA, and Forbidden Planet.

(11) RETRO BLAST. Cora Buhlert continues to review the best of 1944 in “Retro Review: “City” by Clifford D. Simak”.

“City” is a science fiction novelette by Clifford D. Simak, which was first published in the May 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and is a finalist for the 1945 Retro Hugo. The magazine version may be found online here. “City” is part of Simak’s eponymous City cycle and has been widely reprinted….

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point! …

(12) FASHION REPORT. Aliette de Bodard understandably likes this style.

(13) NOT HOME ALONE. In “Creativity in the Time of Shutdown”, Mad Genius Club’s Amanda S. Green tells how everyday life is squeezing her writing time, and the commenters chime in about their own challenges.

…All this has made me wonder how the writers out there who have been used to having their alone time to write have coped with suddenly having their kids and spouses/partners home. With schools and businesses closed, our isolated work styles have been impacted by having people home all the time. A number of us have had to transform into teachers and tech advisors as our kids try to navigate their school classes through Zoom and similar programs. We’ve had to adjust to our spouses/partners invading our work area as they work from home.

Sooo many people in our spaces again.

And we can’t even escape to the library or the coffee shop because they’re closed too….

(14) STILL INFLUENTIAL. The Detroit News explains why “Octavia Butler’s prescient sci-fi resonates years after her death”.

…A revolutionary voice in her lifetime, Butler has only become more popular and influential since her death 14 years ago, at age 58. Her novels, including “Dawn,” “Kindred” and “Parable of the Sower,” sell more than 100,000 copies each year, according to her former literary and the manager of her estate, Merrillee Heifetz. Toshi Reagon has adapted “Parable of the Sower” into an opera, and Viola Davis and Ava DuVernay are among those working on streaming series based on her work. Grand Central Publishing is reissuing many of her novels this year and the Library of America welcomes her to the canon in 2021 with a volume of her fiction.

(15) PUTTING A GOOD FACE ON THINGS. Cheering viewers up while we’re stuck at home.“Lincolnshire make-up artists lifting lockdown spirits” – BBC video.

A group of make-up artists in Lincolnshire are painting themselves as superheroes and cartoon characters to pass the time during the lockdown.

They have been getting together online and setting each other make-up challenges to keep busy.

(16) LEARN FROM THE MASTER. “Studio Ghibli artist teaches anime fans how to draw Totoro” – video.

An anime film producer from Japan’s Studio Ghibli has given fans a quick lesson on how to draw one of its most famous characters: Totoro.

According to Toshio Suzuki – the secret lies in the eyes.

(17) FUN TO BE WITH? BBC introduces us to “The robot that helps before you ask it to” — short video.

A project led by Ocado Technology has developed a robot to work alongside people. Using advanced artificial intelligence, it can follow the motions of its human colleagues, and offer to help them before they even ask for assistance.

(18) STRIKING A PERFECT MATCH. Back in the days of black-and-white TV, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore treated their fans to puppet parody in Superthunderstingcar.

(19) THESE CHAIRS ARE MADE FOR TALKING. Past Aussie Worldcon chairs David Grigg and Perry Middlemiss talk about their favorite sff on the small screen in “TV or not TV?” at their latest Two Chairs Talking podcast. Their favorites include The Expanse, The Outsider, For All Mankind, and Star Trek: Picard.

(20) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Sea You” on Vimeo, Ben Brand finds the backstory of the fish a widow has for dinner.

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

Pixel Scroll 4/21/20 If A Pixel Walks In Dressed Like A Click And Acting As If He Owns The File, He’s A Scrollman

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(1) TWO EVENTS SHUFFLED IN RESPONSE TO PANDEMIC. KU’s Gunn Center has announced these changes:

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we will likely move our Science Fiction Summer program to online offerings for 2020.

We are also moving this year’s Gunn Center Conference and Awards to the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, NE, October 1 -3.

Stay tuned.

(2) BEYOND THE FINAL FRONTIER. “Legends of Tomorrow’s Wild New Trailer Promises a Star Trek Parody for the Ages”. The trailer for the remainder of the season shows the Legends (superheroes etc. in a time-travel spaceship trying to fix time problems) taking on Star Trek and more. Io9 has a breakdown.

https://youtu.be/SbCh5g6sc0A

(3) TRAVEL BROCHURE. In “Worlds Enough and Tim”, Camestros Felapton and Timothy the Talking Cat plot a way to get out of their apartment without the inconvenience of contracting the plague.

…[Timothy] …shut that pie hole for a moment, please! This isn’t a regular cruise! It’s not a cruise on the sea! It is a cruise ship of THE IMAGINATION!
[Camestros] Gasp! Tell me more…

Timothy clicked the settings menu on his Zoom app and switched from ‘dialogue mode’ to ‘conventional narrative form’ and with that the whole story shifted style. With another deft flick of his paws he activated ‘share screen’ and a bright colourful image filled the screen. In a friendly font it announced “Mythopoeic Cruises: Travel the worlds in style”.

“Oooh! A fancy brochure!” said Camestros, who was warming to the idea of ditching this timeline altogether….

(4) VACUUM BREATHERS. How does James Davis Nicoll come up with all these listicle ideas? “Five Stories Featuring Vast Beings From the Darkest Depths of Space” at Tor.com.

Space, even the deep space between the stars, is not entirely empty. As far as we can tell at present, the matter scattered through interstellar space is lifeless. But…appearances can be deceiving. Even if they are not, there’s enough story in the idea of vast beings living in the interstellar depths to attract SF writers. Here are five books that took the idea and ran with it…

(5) SOURCE MATERIAL. “Motherhood And Monsters: How Being A Parent Helps Me Write Thrillers” — Jennifer Hillier explains the connection at CrimeReads.

 … I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since I gave birth to my son, Mox. Actually, if I’m keeping it real, I haven’t slept well since I was pregnant. Nightmares have always been a normal occurrence for me, but during my pregnancy they were more vivid than usual, more visceral, more terrifying. I can only guess it was the hormones, acting as an anabolic steroid for my already overactive imagination. Mox is five and a half now, which means I haven’t slept well in six years.

Exhaustion notwithstanding, my nightmares do provide plenty of fuel for writing, since my thrillers are inspired by the things that scare me the most. For a long time, it was serial killers (and still is). I’m also afraid of dark basements, old cellars, lurking shadows, fog, dimly lit parking lots, the backseat of my car if I’m driving at night, and anytime the doorbell rings.

(6) NASA QA TESTING. [Item by Daniel Dern.] From my $DAYJOB (for loosish definitions, as I’m a self-employed/freelance writer), another fun-to-research-and-write article about NASA (I’ve recently written about NASA and 3D printing, and recycling-in-space.) “How NASA does software testing and QA”.

Every quality tester worries about the cost of missing defects. But imagine the scenario when lives are at stake, and when embedded flaws can be expensive or impossible to fix. That’s what it’s like for QA testing at NASA – and it applies to equipment such as rocket engines, fuel mixes, satellites, space habitats, as well as to ordinary computer software and hardware.

What makes NASA’s testing requirements unique? Here’s a take-off point – and how the U.S. space agency’s methods can help not-for-space testers and QA practitioners….

The SFnal sub-heads were at my editor’s suggestion. (An sf story ref or two didn’t make it in.)

Enjoy!

(7) TABLEAUS. [Item by JJ.] Getty Museum challenged people who are staying at home to recreate famous works of art. Not genre, but absolutely hilarious. Click on this link to see a long string of them. The creativity is amazing!

  • Klimt’s Woman in Biscuits:
  • Vermeer’s Girl With a Purrl Earring

(8) FLIGHTS OF FOUNDRY. Dream Foundry plans to hold Flights of Foundry, a virtual convention for speculative creators and their fans, on May 16-17. Registration is open – and free, although donations are requested. The guests of honor will be:

  • Comics: Suzanne Walker and Wendy Xu
  • Editor: Liz Gorinsky
  • Fiction: Ken Liu
  • Games: Andrea Phillips
  • Illustration: Grace Fong
  • Translation: Alex Shvartsman and Rachel S. Cordasco

In addition to panels and information sessions, programming will include workshops, a dealer’s room, a virtual consuite (I expect people will be appertaining their own drinks), and more.

There is no cost to register, though donations to defray costs and support Dream Foundry’s other programming are welcomed.  Dream Foundry is a registered 501(c)3 dedicated to supporting creators working in the speculative arts as they begin their careers.

Register here.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born April 21, 1911 — John Lymington. Between the late Fifties and the mid-Eighties, he wrote twenty-six genre novels, an astonishing number. All of his short fiction was done in 1964 and published in his Night Spiders collection. He’s not made it into the digital realm and I’ll admit that I’ve not heard of him, so I’m hoping the brain trust here can tell me about him.(Died 1983.)
  • Born April 21, 1933 — Jim Harmon. During the Fifties and Sixties, he wrote more than fifty short stories and novelettes for Amazing Stories, Future Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction, If, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and other magazines. Most of his fiction was collected in Harmon’s Galaxy. EoSF says he has one genre novel, The Contested Earth, whereas ISFDB lists two more, Sex Burns Like Fire and The Man Who Made Maniacs. He’s a member of First Fandom Hall of Fame. (Died 2010.)
  • Born April 21, 1939 — John Bangsund, 81. Australian fan most active from the Sixties through the Eighties. He was instrumental with Andrew Porter in Australia’s winning the 1975 Aussiecon bid, and he was Toastmaster at the Hugo Award ceremony at that con. His fanzine, Australian Science Fiction Review is credited with reviving Australian Fandom in the Sixties. And he’s the instigator of the term Muphry’s law which states that “If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.”
  • Born April 21, 1954 — James Morrison, 66. Lt. Col. Tyrus Cassius ‘T.C.’ McQueen on the short-lived but much loved Space: Above and Beyond series. Starship Troopers without the politics. He’s got a lot of one-off genre appearances including recently showing up as an Air Force General in Captain Marvel, guesting on the Orville series and being Warden Dwight Murphy on Twin Peaks. 
  • Born April 21, 1965 — Fiona Kelleghan, 55. Though an academic to the bone, she has two genre stories “The Secret in the Chest: With Tests, Maps, Mysteries, & Intermittent Discussion Questions” and “The Secret in the Chest”. Of her academic works, I find most fascinating Mike Resnick: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide to His Work and her forthcoming Alfred Bester, Grand Master: An Annotated Bibliography. 
  • Born April 21, 1971 — Michael Turner. Comics artist known for his work on a Tombraider / Witchblade one-off, the Superman/Batman story involving Supergirl, his own Soulfire, and various covers for DC Comics and Marvel Comics. He would die of bone cancer and A Tribute to Michael Turner with writings from people who knew him would feature a cover done by Alex Ross would be released to cover his medical expenses. (Died 2008.)
  • Born April 21, 1979 — James McAvoy, 41. In the Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune series, he was Duke Leto II Atreides. Later roles included Mr. Tumnus in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Professor Charles Xavier in X-Men film franchise, Victor Frankensteinin Victor Frankenstein and Bill Denbrough in It – Chapter Two. 
  • Born April 21, 1980 — Hadley Fraser, 40. His first video acting role was as Gareth in the superb Tenth Doctor story, “Army of Ghosts”. He’d later be Chris in The Lost Tribe, a horror film, and play Viscount Raoul de Chagny in The Phantom of The Opera, as well as being being Tarzan’s father in The Legend of Tarzan. And though not even genre adjacent, I’m legally obligated to point out that he showed up as a British military escort in the recent production of Murder on the Orient Express.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) FINAL FRONTIERSMAN. The piece by Glen Swanson for The Space Review is about how Gene Roddenberry worked with NASA during the creation of Star Trek: “’Space, the final frontier’: Star Trek and the national space rhetoric of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and NASA”.

… In the October 1956 premiere issue of Missile and Rockets, the publisher wrote, “This is the age of astronautics. This is the beginning of the unfolding of the era of space flight. This is to be the most revealing and the most fascinating age since man first inhabited the earth.”[2]

In the midst of the Cold War, space started to become a real place in popular culture as both fiction and fact began riding on the back of a galloping technology and could not dismount for fear of breaking their necks. Together, they were on a convergent course, and the lines separating fact from fiction became more blurred. Nonfiction books that romanticized humanity’s future in the new frontier of space started to borrow the look and feel of many of the popular pulps.

This essay attempts to explore the origins of some of the national space rhetoric that appeared during the Cold War, the way its use in political documents, congressional reports and campaigns tells us something about the self-image of Americans in the early to mid 1960s, and how this rhetoric may have influenced Gene Roddenberry during the creation of his pioneering and highly influential television series Star Trek….

(12) QUESTION REALITY. Camilla Bruce recommends uncanny fiction in “Eight Novels To Make You Question Reality” at CrimeReads. Some books on her list are creepy, others are surreal. One of them is –

Experimental Film by Gemma Files

This novel is about Lois Cairns, a film critic in Toronto who stumbles upon the work of what she believes to be Canada’s first female filmmaker. The latter, Mrs. Whitcomb, mysteriously disappeared in 1918, leaving behind canisters of film containing scenes from the Wendish legend of Lady Midday, a deity who shines so bright that you cannot look upon her face, and who sports a pair of shears sharp enough to cut off heads. The beauty of this novel is how it combines the mundane details of Lois’ life (she has a son with autism) with the more mysterious elements. Like several of the novels on this list, it flitters on the border between psychological thriller and horror, which is my favorite kind of read. 

(13) ZOOM FURNITURE. Nerdbot volunteers “Official Star Wars Backgrounds You Can Use For Your Next Meeting”. There’s a partial gallery at the link. You can check out all the backgrounds to download by clicking here. One example —

(14) ONE MORE STEP. “Facebook bans events that violate social distancing orders”.

Facebook has banned event listings that violate government social distancing policies.

On Monday, the social media giant removed the listing for anti-quarantine protests in California, New Jersey, and Nebraska.

The discussion sparked outrage from some including the son of President Donald Trump who claimed the company’s move violated free speech.

Protests have been planned for across the US calling for the lifting of stay-at-home orders.

Facebook said it consulted with local governments and would only take down events that violated states’ guidelines.

“Unless government prohibits the event during this time, we allow it to be organized on Facebook. For this same reason, events that defy government’s guidance on social distancing aren’t allowed on Facebook,” a spokesperson said.

(15) COMING TO A THEATER NEAR YOU, EVENTUALLY. Yahoo! Entertainment reports “‘Hunger Games’ Director Francis Lawrence Returns for Prequel ‘Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes’”.

The movie adaptation of the upcoming “The Hunger Games” prequel book “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” from author Suzanne Collins is a go at Lionsgate, and the creative team from the original films, including director Francis Lawrence, is all returning for the new film, Lionsgate motion picture group chairman Joe Drake announced Tuesday.

Lawrence, who directed “Catching Fire” and both “Mockingjay” films, will direct “The Hunger Games” prequel. Collins will write a treatment based on her upcoming novel, Color Force’s Nina Jacobson is returning to the franchise to produce, and Michael Arndt, who wrote “Catching Fire,” will pen the screenplay.

“The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” takes place 64 years before the original trilogy, during the 10th annual Hunger Games, and will focus on Coriolanus Snow (played by Donald Sutherland in the original franchise) at age 18, years before he would become the tyrannical president of Panem.

(16) A NUMBER ONE NEW RELEASE. Yes, I’d say we’re all surprised to learn Amazon has a category for this —

(17) BARN DOOR. “WHO developing guidance on wet markets” – BBC has the story.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is calling for stricter safety and hygiene standards when wet markets reopen.

And it says governments must rigorously enforce bans on the sale and trade of wildlife for food.

The start of the pandemic was linked to a market in Wuhan, where wildlife was on sale.

Wet markets are common in Asia, Africa and elsewhere, selling fresh fruit and vegetables, poultry, fresh meat, live animals and sometimes wildlife.

The WHO is working with UN bodies to develop guidance on the safe operation of wet markets, which it says are an important source of affordable food and a livelihood for millions of people all over the world.

But in many places, they have been poorly regulated and poorly maintained, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the WHO, said in a briefing on Friday.

“WHO’s position is that when these markets are allowed to reopen it should only be on the condition that they conform to stringent food safety and hygiene standards,” he said. “Governments must rigorously enforce bans on the sale and trade of wildlife for food.”

And he added: “Because an estimated 70% of all new viruses come from animals, we also work together closely [with the World Organization for Animal Health and the Food and Agricultural Organization, FAO, of the United Nations] to understand and prevent pathogens crossing from animals to humans.”

(18) DON’T INVITE HIM TO THE PREMIERE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, “How I’m Living Now: David Lynch, Director”, Lynch was asked about life in the time of quarantine, both current & possible future projects, and what he thinks about the upcoming movie adaptation of Dune. On that latter:

This week they released a few photos from the new big-screen adaptation of Dune by Denis Villeneuve. Have you seen them? 

I have zero interest in Dune.

Why’s that?

Because it was a heartache for me. It was a failure and I didn’t have final cut. I’ve told this story a billion times. It’s not the film I wanted to make. I like certain parts of it very much — but it was a total failure for me.

You would never see someone else’s adaptation of Dune?

I said I’ve got zero interest.

(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “The Mandalorian Theme (Cello Cover)” on YouTube is Nicholas Yee’s adaptation for cello of the theme to The Mandalorian.

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

Pixel Scroll 1/22/20 Keep Scrolling And Pixel On

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(1) THE APPETIZER COMES LAST. “Hunger Games prequel will reveal villain’s origins” – BBC has the story,

A new Hunger Games novel is to be published in May, focusing on the back story of the villainous President Snow.

…The new book is set 64 years before the events of The Hunger Games and details the “Dark Days” that led to the failed rebellion in Panem.

A first excerpt, available on the Entertainment Weekly website, depicts Coriolanus Snow as a charming university student who was born into privilege.

Here is the Entertainment Weekly link: “Excerpt from The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, by Suzanne Collins”.

The world still thought Coriolanus rich, but his only real currency was charm, which he spread liberally as he made his way through the crowd. Faces lit up as he gave friendly hellos to students and teachers alike, asking about family members, dropping compliments here and there. “Your lecture on district retaliation haunts me.” “Love the bangs!” “How did your mother’s back surgery go? Well, tell her she’s my hero.”

(2) HELP NAME THE ROVER. NASA’s Name the Rover contest—for their next Mars rover—has published its list of nine finalists. Students around the country sent in over 28,000 essays supporting their suggested names.

Now the public is invited to chime in — “You Can Help Name the Mars 2020 Rover!” The polls are open for another five days. Each finalist comes with a link to the essay describing why the nominators think it should win.

(3) NEW EDITOR. Galaxy’s Edge publisher, Shahid Mahmud, has announced Lezli Robyn will take over as editor.

As many of you know, Mike Resnick passed away recently.

He pretty much single handedly created this magazine with the aim to give writers, particularly newer writers, a new venue for their stories. He was known in the industry as someone who loved helping younger aspiring authors and there is a large group of writers out there who proudly call themselves Mike’s Writer Children.

One of his writer children was Lezli Robyn, who also works for me as my assistant publisher. During the last year she also helped Mike with the magazine, particularly as his illness started taking a greater toll on his health.

Lezli is an award-winning writer in her own right and has also collaborated with Mike on a number of stories. She will now be taking over as editor of the magazine. I know Mike was very pleased with that decision…to have someone who was very close to him take over something he put so much of his heart into.

Since the two of them were working together on the magazine for the last few months, the transition should be smooth and we expect issue 43 to be available on time, on March 1, 2020.

(4) GALLERY OF HUGO ELIGIBLE ARTISTS. Rocket Stack Rank has posted their annual gallery of pro artists who are eligible for the Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist. “2020 Professional Artists”.

It has 300+ images from 100+ pro artists whose art was used for short fiction, magazine covers, and novel covers.

However, there is this note –

Thumbnail images with a highlighted link are professional works done in 2019. Thumbnails without a highlighted link were done earlier (shown in last year’s list), later (show in next year’s list) or fan art (published in a semi-prozine) and included to give more examples of the artist’s style.

(5) STET, I REPEAT, STET. Ursula Vernon fights back against the Copyedits of Doom. Thread starts here.

(6) FREE AGENCY. Rudy Rucker shared his experience “Discussing ‘Agency’ with William Gibson”.

RR===

It’s fine with me if the thriller pace slows down. I like your meditative stuff. so nice to have you doing real SF again! “Slash is electric once more.”

I love how Netherton is expecting to be in a superhero iron man peripheral, and then it’s squat and small, like part of an oil filled radiator. He’s a good anti hero, and you have fun tormenting him. He still works as a character being sober, still has the same outside attitude. When I had my character Sta-Hi be sober in Realware, some of my older fans were mad about it, grumbled that “Rucker has gone religious, he’s no fun anymore, etc.” But if they’d notice, Sta-Hi stays exactly as crazy as before, as does Netherton.

WG===

For me, what took over for Netherton in this book was his co-parenting! My first POV character with a baby to take care of! When I discovered how different that felt to write, I guess I decided to roll with it, getting some perverse satisfaction out of imagining poor fuckers who bought the book in an airport, just before jumping on an 8-hour flight, expecting to get the generic thriller hand-job, and bang, they’re parenting!

(7) VOTING AGAINST THE MUTANT REGISTRATION ACT. The National Post’s “Rookies of Parliament Hill” spotlights a new Canadian legislator with a link to X-Men.

Lenore Zann, best known to the SFF community as the voice of Rogue in the classic X-Men cartoon series of the 1990s has a new role: as a legislator in the Canadian parliament. The 61-year-old actress was elected last autumn as part of the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau. 

“X-Men is a deep show about deep themes that are universal. They’re almost like our Greek gods and goddesses — they’re like mythology for young people,” said Zann. “I sit on a plane watching what people are looking at on their TV screens in front of them. Most of them are watching stuff like that.”

(8) JONES OBIT. Terry Jones of Monty Python’s Flying Circus died January 22. He had been suffering from dementia for years, says The Hollywood Reporter: “Terry Jones, ‘Monty Python’ Co-Founder and British Comedy Icon, Dies at 77”.

Born in North Wales, Jones read English at Oxford University, where he met his long-term collaborator and friend, Michael Palin. The two would star together in the college’s comedy troupe The Oxford Revue, and after graduation, they appeared in the 1967 TV sketch comedy Twice a Fortnight.

Two years later, they created The Complete and Utter History of Britain, which featured comedy sketches from history as if TV had been around at the time. It was on the show Do Not Adjust Your Set where they would be introduced to fellow comic Eric Idle, who had starred alongside John Cleese and Graham Chapman in productions mounted by the Cambridge University theatrical club the Footlights.  

The five — together with Terry Gilliam, whom Cleese had met in New York — would quickly pool their talents for a new show. Monty Python’s Flying Circus was born and ran on the BBC for four seasons between 1969 and 1974, with Jones driving much of the show’s early innovation.

Vanity Fair’s 1999 profile of the troupe, “The Dead Parrot Society”, includes this intro of Terry:

Jones is a noted history buff who has written on Chaucer and hosted a number of documentaries, including one on the Crusades. He directed Life of Brian and Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life; apart from Monty Python he has directed the films Erik the Viking and The Wind in the Willows and written several children’s books. The son of a bank clerk, he was born in North Wales and attended Oxford University. He and his wife, a biochemist, live in London and have a son and a daughter. Jones regularly appeared nude (playing the organ) in the opening credits of the Monty Python television series; he also played the obscenely fat, vomit-spewing Mr. Creosote in The Meaning of Life.

(9) TODAY IN HISTORY.

  • January 22, 2000 — Cleopatra 2525 first aired in syndication. It was created by R.J. Stewart and Robert G. Tapert. Many who aired it do so as part of the Back2Back Action Hour, along with Jack of All Trades. The primary cast of this SF with chicks not wearing much series was Gina Torres of later Firefly fame, Victoria Pratt and Jennifer Sky. (A sexist statement? We think you should take a look at the show.)  it would last two seasons and twenty episodes, six episodes longer than Jack of All Trades. (Chicks rule?) it gets a 100% rating by its reviewers at a Rotten Tomatoes though the aggregate critics score is a much lower 40%. 
  • January 22, 1984 — Airwolf would premiere on CBS where it would run for three seasons before ending its run on USA with a fourth season. Airwolf was created by Donald P. Bellisario who was also behind Quantum Leap and Tales of The Golden Monkey, two other SFF series. It starred Jan-Michael Vincent, Jean Bruce Scott. Ernest Borgnine, and Alex Cord. It airs sporadically in syndication and apparently has not developed enough of a following to get a Rotten Tomatoes rating.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born January 22, 1858 — Charles H. M. Kerr. He’s best remembered for illustrating  the pulp novels of H. Rider Haggard. Some of his other genre-specific work includes the Andrew Lang-edited The True Story Book, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Wrong Box and Arthur Conan Doyle‘s  “The Sign of the Four”. You can see the one of the H. Rider Haggard novels he did here. (Died 1907.)
  • Born January 22, 1906 — Robert E. Howard. He’s best remembered for his characters Conan the Barbarian and Solomon Kane, less so for Kull, and is widely regarded as the father of the sword and sorcery subgenre. His Cthulhu mythos stories are quite good. I believe all of these were published in Weird Tales.  If you’re interested in reading him on your slate, you’re in luck as all the ebook publishers are deep stockers of him at very reasonable prices. (Died 1936.)
  • Born January 22, 1925 — Katherine MacLean. She received a Nebula Award for “The Missing Man” novella originally published in Analog, March of 1971. She was a Professional Guest of Honor at the first WisCon. Short fiction was her forte and her two collections, The Diploids and Other Flights of Fancy and The Trouble with You Earth People, are brilliant. I can’t speak to her three novels, all written in the Seventies and now out of print, as I’ve not read them. (Died 2019.)
  • Born January 22, 1940 — John Hurt. I rarely grieve over the death of one individual but his death really stung. I liked him. It’s rare that someone comes along like Hurt who is both talented and is genuinely good person that’s easy to like. If we count his role as Tom Rawlings in The Ghoul, Hurt had an almost fifty-year span in genre films and series. He next did voice work in Watership Down as General Woundwort and in The Lord of the Rings as the voice of Aragon before appearing as Kane, the first victim, in Alien. Though not genre, I must comment his role as Joseph Merrick in The Elephant Man — simply remarkable. He had the lead as Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four and had a cameo as that character in Spaceballs. He narrates Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Unbound and will later be one of two of the narrators of Jim Henson’s The Storyteller. That role is simply magnificent. Ok, I’m just at 1994. He’s about to be S.R. Hadden in Contact. Did you remember he played Garrick Ollivander In Harry Potter films? You certainly remember him as Trevor Bruttenholm in the Hellboy films, all four of them in total. He’s in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as Dr. Harold Oxley, one of the few decent things about that film. Series wise, he’s been around. I’ve got him in Spectre, a Roddenberry occult detective pilot that I’ve not seen. On the Merlin live action series, he provides the voice of the Great Dragon. It’s an amazing role for him. And fitting that he’s a dragon, isn’t it? And of course he played The War Doctor. It, despite the brevity of the screen time, was a role that he seemed destined to play. Oh, for an entire series of stories about His Doctor! Big Finish, the audiobook company, had the singular honor of having him flesh out his character in a series of stories that he did with them just before his death. I’ve heard some, they’re quite remarkable. If I’ve missed anything about him that you feel I should’ve touched upon, do tell me. (Died 2017.)
  • Born January 22, 1959 — Tyrone Power Jr., 61. Yes, son of that actor. He is the fourth actor to bear the name Tyrone Power. If you remember him at all, it’s as Pillsbury, one of the aliens, in the Cocoon films. Other than Soulmates, a horrid sounding sort of personal zombie film, in which he had a role, that’s it for his SFF creds. 
  • Born January 22, 1959 — Linda Blair, 61. Best known for her role as the possessed child, Regan, in The Exorcist. She reprised her role in Exorcist II: The Heretic. (I saw the first, I had no desire to see the second film.)  Right after those films she started she started starring in a lot of the really bad horror films. Let’s see… Stranger in Our House, Hell Night (fraternity slasher film), Grotesque, Witchery, Dead Sleep and Scream to name a few of these films. She even starred in Repossessed, a comedy parody of The Exorcist. 
  • Born January 22, 1969 — Olivia d’Abo, 51. She makes the Birthday Honors list for being Amanda Rogers, a female Q, in the “True Q” episode on Next Generation. Setting that gig aside, she’s got a long and extensive SFF series history. Conan the Destroyer, Beyond the Stars, Asterix Conquers America, Tarzan & Jane and Justice League Doom are some of her film work, while her series work includes Fantasy Island, Batman Beyond, Twilight Zone, Eureka and Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
  • Born January 22, 1996 — Blanca Blanco, 24. She’s here today because she’s on one of those Trek video fanfics that seem to have proliferated a few years back. This one had her planning on playing someone on Star Trek Equinox: The Night Of Time but the funding never materialized. I’m fascinated by this one as a certain actor was reprising his Gary Mitchell role here.  If it was decided that  an audio series would be made instead but I can’t find any sign of that being done either. Any of you spotted it? 

(11) WHEN THE GALAXY IS OUT OF ORDER YOU CALL… Guardians of the Galaxy!

Someone has to guard the galaxy – but who will accept the mission? And will they survive it? See who answers the call in the GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY #1 trailer featuring writer Al Ewing, Editor in Chief CB Cebulski, and Editor Darren Shan! 

Cosmic peace is hanging by a thread as the major galactic empires bristle against each other. Amidst the chaos, the Gods of Olympus have returned — harbingers of a new age of war, reborn to burn their mark on the stars themselves! The legendary Star-Lord leads Rocket Raccoon, Nova, Marvel Boy, Phyla-Vell, and Moondragon on a mission to restore order to the stars!

“The galaxy is just one bad day away from complete and total collapse, and that day is here,” teases Shan.

“Guardians of the Galaxy is where the Marvel cosmic universe, as we know it, comes alive. Marvel space is about to come crashing into the Marvel Universe in a big way,” says Ewing. 

(12) SO MUCH FOR THOSE GOLDEN MEMORIES. The Guardian’s Luke Holland is a little grumpy: “Rise of the ‘bleakquel’: your favourite heroes are back – and more miserable than ever”

… Take the recent Star Wars trilogy, whose entire existence is predicated on the revelation that Han, Leia and Luke all had a miserable old time of it after the events of Return of the Jedi. Before, any fan with R2-D2 on their jim-jams could envisage the three of them growing old together, with a grey-muzzled Chewbacca snoozing contentedly by a crackling hearth. The new films suddenly forced them to confront a new reality in which Han and Leia are estranged because their son became a mass-murderer, and a PTSD-ravaged Luke lives a life of solitude on a remote skerry somewhere uncannily reminiscent of Ireland. And what happens next? Oh, they all die. Miserably. Great. Thanks.

(13) FISTS OF FURRIES. On TV news — “Furries to the rescue: Costumed conventioneers save woman from assault in San Jose”. This is KABC’s caption:

A trio of costumed furries – people who like to dress as animals – came to the rescue of a woman who was being assaulted in a car in San Jose.

(14) CLOSING THE UNDERWATER BARN DOOR. A bit late for this, isn’t it? “Titanic Wreckage Now Protected Under U.S.-U.K. Deal That Was Nearly Sunk”.

More than a century after the RMS Titanic sank to bottom of the sea — and nearly a quarter-century after its memory was dredged up for a Hollywood blockbuster — the U.S. and U.K. have implemented a formal agreement on how to safeguard and manage the ill-fated steamship’s remains.

British Maritime Minister Nusrat Ghani confirmed the news Tuesday during a visit to Belfast, Northern Ireland, where the ship was built before setting off from the English port city of Southampton in 1912.

…”This momentous agreement with the United States to preserve the wreck means it will be treated with the sensitivity and respect owed to the final resting place of more than 1,500 lives,” Ghani said in remarks released Tuesday by the Maritime Ministry.

Ghani’s comments cap a long and winding journey for the deal, which representatives from the U.K., the U.S., Canada and France officially agreed to as part of a 2003 treaty. The Agreement Concerning the Shipwrecked Vessel RMS Titanic sought to sort out and regulate public access, artifact conservation and salvage rights within 1 kilometer of the wreck site, situated hundreds of miles off the coast of Canada in the North Atlantic.

But since the countries negotiated the treaty, the document has largely languished. It requires the ratification of at least two of the four countries to enter into force, and while the U.K. quickly ratified the agreement, both Canada and France have yet to do so. The formal approval of the U.S. government looked long in doubt, as well.

(15) DEAD LETTERS. BBC warns about “The alphabets at risk of extinction”.

It isn’t just languages that are endangered: dozens of alphabets around the world are at risk. And they could have even more to tell us.

On his first two days of school, in a village above the Bangladeshi port of Chittagong, Maung Nyeu was hit with a cane. This was not because he was naughty. It was simply that Nyeu could not understand what the teacher was saying, or what was written in his textbooks. Although 98% of Bangladeshis speak Bengali as a first language, Nyeu grew up with Marma, one of several minority tongues in the region. Written, it is all curls, like messy locks of hair.

Eventually Nyeu managed to escape this cycle of bewilderment and beatings. After learning Bengali at home, he returned to school and went to university. Now he is pursuing a doctorate at Harvard. Yet Nyeu never forgot his early schooldays. He spends much of his time in the hills where he grew up, where he founded Our Golden Hour – a nonprofit fighting to keep Marma and a flurry of other scripts alive.

There are between 6,000 to 7,000 languages in the world. Yet 96% are spoken by just 3% of the global population. And 85% are endangered, like Marma.

Along with the spoken words, something else is also at risk: each language’s individual script. When we talk about “endangered languages”, most of us think of the spoken versions first. But our alphabets can tell us huge amounts about the cultures they came from. Just as impressive is the length people will go to save their scripts – or invent whole new alphabets and spread them to the world.

(16) LET THERE BE LIGHT MEASUREMENT. And it was good. “Space mission to reveal ‘Truths’ about climate change”.

The UK is going to lead a space mission to get an absolute measurement of the light reflected off Earth’s surface.

The information will be used to calibrate the observations of other satellites, allowing their data to be compared more easily.

Called Truths, the new spacecraft was approved for development by European Space Agency member states in November.

Proponents of the mission expect its data to help reduce the uncertainty in projections of future climate change.

Scientists and engineers met on Tuesday to begin planning the project. Industry representatives from Britain, Switzerland, Greece, the Czech Republic and Romania gathered at Esa’s technical centre in Harwell, Oxfordshire.

(17) POCKET WATCH. “Australia fires: ‘Incredible’ signs of life return to burned bush” – BBC video, including incredibly cute joey.

Australia’s bushfires have burnt through 10 million hectares of land, and it is feared some habitats may never recover.

But in some worst-affected areas, the sight of plants growing back and animals returning to habitats is raising spirits.

(18) CALLING CHARLES FORT. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Things are not so cute in Florida. NPR aired this story today: “Florida Weather Forecasters Warn Of Falling Iguanas”.

Last night, the National Weather Service called for lows in the 30s and 40s with a chance of falling iguanas. Apparently, the lizards can fall into a deeper slumber in the cold, and it is not uncommon for them to tumble from trees. The advice for you is watch your heads, and don’t bug the iguanas after they land. I mean, do you like being bothered when you’re just getting up?

Related older stories: “What To Do If You Come Across A Frozen Iguana” (2018) – “Bottom line: don’t touch them. They are not dead. They may thaw out and attack.”

For perspective: “Florida Has An Iguana Problem” (2019).

Biologists say invasive green iguanas have been spreading in Florida, and they’re a major nuisance. The state encourages homeowners to kill iguanas on their property.

And for “historical context.” Bob & Ray “The Komodo Dragon” (Live at Carnegie Hall, 1984)

[Thanks to Olav Rokne, JJ, Cliff Ramshaw, Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Chip Hitchcock, John King Tarpinian, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Rick Moen.]