Maral Agnerian. Photo by Steve Kaminsky – Kaminsky Kandids Photography.
Maral Agnerian was honored with the International Costumers’ Guild Lifetime Achievement Award during the virtual Single Pattern Contest and Future Fashion Show on April 12.
Here are highlights from ICG President Kevin Roche’s announcement of the award:
This costumer and cosplay legend has had a career spanning longer than some con attendees have been alive.
They have been costuming since 1999, compete at the Master level, and their work has been widely recognized in costuming communities world-wide. They have won numerous awards at local, national, and international competitions, including their most recent triumph as the winner of the U.S. National Crown Championships of Cosplay.
Well-known for their deep and abiding love of beautiful fabrics, beads, and all manner of shiny things, this year’s honoree relishes the challenge of bringing a 2-D design to life, but also loves the creativity inherent in original designs. They are always looking for, and sometimes creating, new sewing and construction techniques to learn and experiment with. In addition to execution with stunning craftsmanship, their creative presentations onstage bring her costumed characters to life.
On the community front, our honoree strongly believes in spreading knowledge and information throughout the greater costuming community. They are in high demand as a teacher, and regularly offer courses and workshops at conventions and other venues. They also author articles and present webinars highlighting their work and the techniques they have developed.
In addition to teaching and presenting, they have served our costuming community for many years by running conventions, serving as a masquerade director, and judging costume competitions in North America, such as at Costume-Con and Anime North, and internationally. In October 2024, They were invited to serve as a judge for masquerades, the Variety Show, and the World Cosplay Summit qualifiers at Comic Con London.
And on a purely personal note, this year’s honoree brought me tears of joy with her rendition at Costume-Con 39 of a design I also once recreated and presented, in drag, at Costume-Con 23: the Le Jazz Hot dress from Victor/Victoria.
It is my honor and privilege to announce that the recipient of the 2025 International Costumers’ Guild Lifetime Achievement Award is Maral Agnerian.
The Climate Fiction Prize shortlist has been announced, with the judges selecting five titles representing the depth and range of climate fiction on offer to readers. The titles, selected from the all-female longlist announced in November, encompass a range of genres, with each tackling the climate crisis differently. More information about each title can be found here.
The shortlisted books:
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Sceptre, Hodder)
And So I Roarby Abi Daré (Sceptre, Hodder)
Briefly Very Beautifulby Roz Dineen (Bloomsbury Circus)
(2) FILER HEADING TO WIKIMANIA. Congratulations to Michael J. “Orange Mike” Lowrey who has been awarded a full scholarship to attend the Wikimania 2025 conference in Nairobi, Kenya this August.
Wikimania is the annual conference celebrating all the free knowledge projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation – Wikimedia Commons, MediaWiki, Meta-Wiki, Wikibooks, Wikidata, Wikinews, Wikipedia, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikispecies, Wikiversity, Wikivoyage, Wiktionary and Wikifunctions.
After several months of work, I’m pleased to announce that the International Costumers’ Guild Press is up and running, with the first two titles just published at the end of January 2025. Visit the International Costumers’ Guild Press page for more details. These two titles are based on existing ICG assets, which enabled me to focus on the publishing process.
The first title is the 2021 Edition of the ICG Masquerade Guidelines. The Guidelines were created by the ICG to assist costume Masquerade Directors in writing and implementing rules to ensure fair competition in the Masquerades they run, and provide a resource for ensuring that all aspects of a successful Masquerade are covered. The Guidelines were created by the ICG Guidelines Committee in 1992. There have been four revisions, in 1994, 2006, 2010, and 2021.
This book is available in paperback, hardcover, and ebook versions. Visit the ICG Masquerade Guidelines page for information about this title, and to locate book sellers who offer the book. The ICG Press also sells the paperback and hardcover versions directly through our publication partner, IngramSpark.
The second title is Myrtle R Douglas: Mother of Convention Costuming. In 2016, the International Costumers’ Guild recognized Myrtle R Douglas as “The Mother of Convention Costuming” for creating the first costumes ever worn at a sci-fi/fantasy convention, in 1939. This full-color commemorative book, based on the video I made for my presentation at MidAmeriCon II, the 74th Worldcon, pays homage to the fan who forever influenced what we wear at sci-fi/fantasy conventions.
This book is available in paperback and hardcover versions. Because of the graphic layout and color illustrations, it is not easily adaptable as an ebook. Visit the Myrtle R Douglas: Mother of Convention Costuming page for more information and to locate vendors who sell the book. The ICG Press also sells the paperback and hardcover versions directly through our publication partner, IngramSpark.
The ICG Press will release its third title, a new edition of The Masquerade Handbook, on March 15, 2025. This work was originally compiled and privately distributed by Janet Wilson Anderson in 1991, and has been out of print since then. In 2022, ICG Vice President Leslie L. Johnston, working with ICG members Jill Eastlake and Judy Mitchell, began a project to bring this long-out-of-print title back to life and put it in the hands of today’s costumers. They turned over their work to the ICG Press in late fall of 2024….
(4) EUROPEAN FAN FUND TAKING NOMINATIONS. European fans have until March 22 to make nominations for the European Fan Fund 2025. The complete guidelines are at the link. [Via Ansible.]
EFF is the European Fan Fund which transports European SF fans to Eurocons.
The purpose of the EFF is to create and strengthen bonds between European fans and fandoms. Currently in almost every country there is a fandom that quite often has little or even no connection to the broader European fandom. Most fans do concentrate on the “here and now” and are not looking for friends in other countries.
Nominations in the race to send a fan to Archipelacon (Eurocon 2025 in Mariehamn, Åland islands, 26-29 June 2025) are open to any European fan living outside Finland, Bulgaria and Poland who was active in fandom prior to January 2023. For more details on the rules, visit the FAQ section.
(5) CHESLEY SEASON. The Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists (ASFA) is taking 2025 Chesley Award suggestions until March 31. The announcement says they accept suggestions from “anyone”. The necessary form to use is at the link.
Chesley Suggestions for 2025 are now open. Please suggest works that were shown or created in 2024. For the publications suggestions the date is based on the publication date.
You have until the end of March to suggest!
Anyone can suggest a piece. Your own art! Sure! A cover you liked? Yep! A fantastic piece you saw online or at a convention? Totally! Up to five suggestions per category.
…Fantasy had long been a staple of what we would now call mainstream publishing but before the 1940s American science fiction was relegated to gaudy pulp magazines, critically reviled as among the lowest forms of fiction. The superweapons that emerged from World War II, especially the atomic bomb, suddenly made the field look prescient, a look into the onrushing future.
With mainstream publishers still reluctant to mine magazine back issues, fans of the genre saw a publishing niche. More than a dozen small presses sprang into mayfly-like existence before 1950.
Gnome was founded in 1948 by two members of New York fandom, Martin Greenberg and David A. Kyle….
… What’s 150,000 words and 1100 images to the internet? I already owned the URL GnomePress.com. The 113 pages there now comprise the first complete bibliography of Gnome Press (by author, title, and publication date), a separate page for each title with color scans of every variant board and cover I own along with contemporary reviews and previously unknown photos of the more obscure authors, information about a range of associational items, and histories both of Gnome and the f&sf field up to the time of its founding.
For all its literally exhausting coverage, the site remains a work in progress….
…The Justice Department on Tuesday charged Carl Erik Rinsch, whom Netflix hired to make a science-fiction series that was never completed, with an $11 million scheme to defraud the company.
According to the indictment, which was announced by prosecutors for the Southern District of New York and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s New York Field Office, Mr. Rinsch secured funding from the streaming company from 2018 to early 2020. But he put the money in a personal brokerage account and ultimately used it to trade securities, instead of putting it toward the series, the indictment says.
Federal prosecutors charged Mr. Rinsch, who was arrested on Tuesday in West Hollywood, Calif., with engaging in wire fraud, money laundering and monetary transactions derived from unlawful activity.
The indictment does not cite Netflix by name. But the company has been involved in public disputes over the filmmaker’s planned series, which was initially called “White Horse” but was renamed “Conquest.” Last year, an arbitrator ruled that Mr. Rinsch owed the company nearly $12 million in damages and legal fees….
Warner Bros‘ shelved movie Coyote vs. Acme finally might have found a new home with the studio deep in sale negotiations, we can reveal.
Gareth West’s distributor-financier Ketchup Entertainment is negotiating an all-rights acquisition in the $50 million range for the animated/live-action hybrid project. Ketchup last year rescued the same studio’s The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie.
… Directed by David Green and written by May December scribe Samy Burch, as well as DC Studios co-boss James Gunn and Jeremy Slater, Coyote vs. Acme is based on the Looney Tunes characters and the New Yorker humor article “Coyote v. Acme” by Ian Frazier.
Will Forte, John Cena and Lana Condor star in the movie, which follows Wile E. Coyote, who, after Acme products fail him one too many times in his dogged pursuit of the Roadrunner, decides to hire a billboard lawyer to sue the Acme Corporation. The case pits Wile E. and his lawyer (Forte) against the latter’s intimidating former boss (Cena), but a growing friendship between man and cartoon stokes their determination to win.
Despite test-screening well, the project became a high-profile casualty of WB cost-cutting two years ago and it has been sitting on the shelf for more than a year. The studio reportedly screened the movie to a string of buyers in early 2024 with a price tag of around $70M, which is how much the film is said to have cost. Studio sources claim to us that they didn’t get any offers at the time….
…During a panel at the Indiana Comic Convention, Collider’s Steve Weintraub asked some Star Trek: The Next Generation alums what they thought of 1999’s Galaxy Quest.
“It’s perfect. It perfectly captures the essence (of Star Trek) with love and humor and intelligence…it’s so well-crafted,” said Denise Crosby, who played Lieutenant Tasha Yar in the first season of TNG and the Season 3 episode, “Yesterday’s Enterprise.”
Jonathan Frakes, who portrayed Commander Will Riker in TNG and later Captain Riker in Star Trek: Picard, and has gone on to success directing Star Trek films and television, joked during the panel saying, “It’s almost like they read our mail. The only thing I wish about it is that we had made it.”
Crosby, who is also known for her role as Rachel Creed in 1989’s Pet Sematary, added that she had a small part in getting Galaxy Quest made. In 1997, Crosby hosted and was a co-executive producer of a Star Trek documentary film titled Trekkies that focused on die-hard fans of the franchise.
“Supposedly, and I’ve never asked him to verify this, but apparently on the first day of shooting, the story goes that Tim Allen gave the whole cast a copy of Trekkies,” Crosby said. “I had screened Trekkies for the writers of Galaxy Quest; they had never been to a con, and I was shopping Trekkies around at that time. I knew a production girl at the studio, and she said, ‘We’ve got these writers, they’re doing a rewrite on Galaxy Quest. Can they come to a screening?’” she said….
(10) MARGARET CLARK (1955-2025). Noted editor Margaret Clark died March 16. Books she acquired and edited have won seven of the last nine Scribe Awards for Best Original Novel – Speculative, given by the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers.
…Margaret was the first editor to ever hire me to write a book, roughly 25 years ago, when she commissioned me to pen The Starfleet Survival Guide. She took a chance on me before I had any print credits, and in so doing helped launch my professional prose-writing career, altering the trajectory of my life for the better.
During the past 25 years, I’ve written 32 novels for Star Trek, and roughly 40 books in total. Margaret was my editor on 24 of my Star Trek novels, and she also hired me to write a novel based on the TV series The 4400….
… I could be wrong, but I think Margaret might be the longest-serving editor of Star Trek novels in the history of the franchise. She oversaw part of the license for over a decade, and she was the sole acquiring editor for the line for most of the past decade….
(11) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
March 19, 1999 — Farscape debuted on this day
By Paul Weimer: Farscape is the punkier, overseas cousin to Stargate SG-1 (the fact that two members of Farscape wound up becoming series regulars in late SG-1 is not lost on me). A product of a vivid imagination, the genius of Jim Henson, and vagaries of trying to find one’s way in a science fiction universe that was brand new. Farscape dared to make its own way, with our Earthling Crichton being dropped in the far end of the galaxy and among a bunch of alien races, conflicts and concerns. And of course, given that he did use an impossible technology to get there, and still seeks to get back, this provided early and interesting hooks for Crichton right from the get go.
But, really, the season really gets its feet under it when it got its villains. The first season is fine, and we get to know the characters and their various sides. But it is Season 2, with the full use of Scorpius (although he did show up in Season 1), that the show really takes off. Bialar, the initial antagonist (and later less of one) really didn’t have the spark that the show needed in a recurring villain opposing the found family (because what else are the crew of Moya but that), and their plans and hopes. But Scorpius really provided the spark that the show needed, especially the “harvey” version in Crichton’s head.
But where the series really shines, above and beyond the characters, the puppetry, the inventiveness and the uniqueness of its space opera verse, is that the series is self-aware. Crichton is genre savvy, he knows where and what is in for, and he is a protagonist and a hero for fans of the series who love and respect and enjoy science fiction. This makes the series a series for viewers who have watched Star Trek, read science fiction novels, and are and were ready to immerse themselves into a SF universe. Nowadays, some of the episodes and seasons feel padded by the strictures and requirements of network and syndication television, probably more than a few episodes could be excised and you would still get the long form character arcs, development, drama, and shared history that you get between the members of Moya’s crew.
In some ways, while it is definitely more akin to Stargate SG-1, it, like Babylon 5, was an earnest and mostly successful attempt to create a universe that was neither Star Wars nor Star Trek, but something new, risky, and different. Farscape, even though it did delve into some serious themes, always has felt a bit lighter, more playful than B5. That’s no bad thing.
It was last seen standing at the entrance to a spaceship with a potted plant of chrysanthemums, its chest glowing bright red as it stared down at the tearful young boy on the ground below.
Now, the original body model of ET, the Extra-Terrestial, is expected to fetch up to $1m (£700,000) when it is sold at Sotheby’s auction house at in April.
The 3ft tall model was one of three used in the 1982 film, directed by Steven Spielberg, which won four Oscars. It comes directly from the collection of the film’s Oscar-winning special effects artist, the late Carlo Rambaldi, who also worked on King Kong and Alien….
…In addition to the model, other items from Rambaldi’s collection are included, like never-before-seen sketches for E.T., an animatronic study of one of E.T.’s eyes, two screen-used sand worm models from Dune (est. $15,000-20,000) and a dinosaur egg (est. $6,000-9,000) and baby dinosaur animatronic from the 1993 Japanese film Rex: A Dinosaur’s Story (est. $8,000-12,000). Items from Blade Runner, Total Recall, Dune, Labyrinth, The Wizard of Oz and Spielberg’s Jurassic Park franchise are also included in the collection….
But in case you’ve forgotten, Disney is reminding the masses by retelling the story of Lilo & Stitch via a live-action remake of the beloved 2002 film.
The first trailer for the upcoming film reintroduces Stitch, a chaotic blue alien experiment who quickly becomes the galaxy’s most-wanted extraterrestrial when he steals a spaceship and crash-lands on Earth. The kicker? His arrival just so happens to coincide with a desperate wish from a little Hawaiian girl, Lilo (Maia Kealoha).
“I wish for a friend,” Lilo says in the trailer, staring up at a shooting star. “Like, a best friend.”
And when Lilo’s attempt to adopt a dog leads her to befriend Stitch, that wish comes true. Just not in the way she expected….
[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, N., Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel “Mairzy of Eastown” Dern.]
(1) FANTASY TAKES CENTER STAGE. The Guardian’s “Bookmarks” newsletter says, “Fantasy appears to be having a ‘moment’ (quite a long one as it happens)”
“Increasingly fantasy has moved more from the fringes towards the centre”, with a rise in writers operating in the genre, says Irenosen Okojie, who founded the afrofuturist festival Black to the Future and whose books include Curandera.
Why is the genre thriving? Readers “need escapism right now in ways that truly speak to our imagination”, says Okojie, and they “like these richly imaginative worlds that explore our lived experiences in dynamic, transformative ways”. Fantasy is also “invested in projecting how worlds different from our own might flourish”, says Matthew Sangster, a professor of romantic studies, fantasy and cultural history at the University of Glasgow.
However, even though the “success of the likes of George RR Martin and Nnedi Okorafor” show fantasy is a “thriving space”, says Okojie, it “always has been”: look at the likes of Ursula K Le Guin and Samuel R Delany.
George Sandison, managing editor at Titan Books – which publishes VE Schwab and Veronica Roth – agrees. Though he often hears that a particular genre is “having a moment”, when it comes to fantasy, he feels as though “that moment has lasted my entire career in fiction, my entire life before that, and for the countless generations required to produce all the work that lit up my brain as a child!”
Fantasy “is arguably at the root of all literature”, he says – even Virginia Woolf. Every work of fiction “imagines a whole new reality”, fantasy “just has a lot more fun with those mental images, turning them into dragons and talking cats, giving them magic powers, and breaking them free of our planet’s geography”. He sees the publishing industry’s categorisations of fantasy as simply telling readers what metaphors and tropes to expect, “to try to sell more books”….
(2) CTHULHU IS ON THE LINE. Christopher Lockett, in “China Miéville and the Banality of Weird”, has a Lovecraft quote from almost a century ago that is still capable of launching discussions:
…Once again, the best articulation of this premise is the opening paragraph of “The Call of Cthulhu,” which functions as about as perfect a Lovecraftian mission statement as you’ll find:
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (139)”
To be fair to Lovecraft, he was writing in the 1920s and 30s, and he died before the outbreak of WWII. He wrote during the post-WWI crisis of spirit and the more general collapse of faith in such prewar verities as the invariably positive nature of scientific and technological progress. His work shares the alienation and disillusion present in the critical mass of modernism, alongside its often desperate pursuit of meaning in arcana.³ His fascination with and nominal devotion to science, along with his militant atheism, coexisted with his figurations of occultism in a manner entirely consonant with the historical moment: science and technology shorn of utopianism by the horrors of the Western Front, seeming to hint at vaster horrors beyond human ken.
In that respect he was not wrong: the war he didn’t live to see ended in the unthinkable. The Holocaust and Hiroshima would seem to represent the “terrifying vistas of reality” warned of in the passage above and allegorized by such Old Gods as Cthulhu and his monstrous kin. But if those unthinkable events have shown us anything, it’s the basic flaw of Lovecraft’s premise: far from going “mad from the revelation” or fleeing “from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age,” humanity has demonstrated instead an apparently bottomless capacity to make the unthinkable thinkable. Indeed—with the benefit of time, self-rationalization, mythologization, and a massive dose of delusional euphemism—to render the unthinkable banal….
… Ghostwriting scams pose as publishing service providers. Like the similar similar-seeming publishing/marketing scams from the Philippines, they are based overseas, primarily in Pakistan and India, and offer menus of publishing and marketing services designed to attract writers looking to self-publish or to market their books.
Also like the Philippine scams, they frequently take writers’ money and run, or deliver substandard quality, or treat whatever package or service the writer initially buys as a gateway to the writer’s bank account, relentlessly pressuring them to hand over more cash….
… It didn’t take long on USA Pen Press’s website for me to identify it as a ghostwriting scam. Many of the typical markers are there: the prominent advertising of ghostwriting services, of course, but also an array of trad-pubbed book covers to falsely imply USA Pen Press had something to do with them, a header image (see above) with even more false references to famous writers, “testimonials” that all sound alike and in one case reference a different company, awkward English (“How Do the USA Pen Press Work on the Book Covers?” “What the process of Ghostwriting includes?”), and false claims (they say 10+ years in business but as of this writing, their web domain is just 119 days old)….
(4) IT WAS THE WORST OF TIMES. [Item by Steven French.] Another day, another piece on Dick and dystopias: “The PKD Dystopia” by Henry Farrell at Programmable Mutter.
This is not the dystopia we were promised. We are not learning to love Big Brother, who lives, if he lives at all, on a cluster of server farms, cooled by environmentally friendly technologies. Nor have we been lulled by Soma and subliminal brain programming into a hazy acquiescence to pervasive social hierarchies.
Dystopias tend toward fantasies of absolute control, in which the system sees all, knows all, and controls all. And our world is indeed one of ubiquitous surveillance. Phones and household devices produce trails of data, like particles in a cloud chamber, indicating our wants and behaviors to companies such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Yet the information thus produced is imperfect and classified by machine-learning algorithms that themselves make mistakes. The efforts of these businesses to manipulate our wants leads to further complexity. It is becoming ever harder for companies to distinguish the behavior which they want to analyze from their own and others’ manipulations.
This does not look like totalitarianism unless you squint very hard indeed. As the sociologist Kieran Healy has suggested, sweeping political critiques of new technology often bear a strong family resemblance to the arguments of Silicon Valley boosters. Both assume that the technology works as advertised, which is not necessarily true at all.
Standard utopias and standard dystopias are each perfect after their own particular fashion. We live somewhere queasier—a world in which technology is developing in ways that make it increasingly hard to distinguish human beings from artificial things. The world that the Internet and social media have created is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. Vast commercial architectures are being colonized by quasi-autonomous parasites. Scammers have built algorithms to write fake books from scratch to sell on Amazon, compiling and modifying text from other books and online sources such as Wikipedia, to fool buyers or to take advantage of loopholes in Amazon’s compensation structure. Much of the world’s financial system is made out of bots—automated systems designed to continually probe markets for fleeting arbitrage opportunities. Less sophisticated programs plague online commerce systems such as eBay and Amazon, occasionally with extraordinary consequences, as when two warring bots bid the price of a biology book up to $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping)….
Read the first two pages of an operatic Libretto Bloch wrote for Gaston Leroux’s novel, The Phantom of the Opera.
IN 1980, Bloch penned a script for the pilot of a proposed weekly TV spinoff series of the (Stephen King) Salem’s Lot TV movie that recounted the further adventures of Ben Mears and Mark Petrie. Sadly, what we have is not the complete script (of 54 pages), rather a random sampling, the only pages available, captured during an auction of the script. Still, an interesting find!
Depending on who you ask, where you search, or how you feel about it, Yorkshire Pudding and popovers either are or aren’t the same thing, although they’re clearly related. Here’s some of those opinions (and more recipes):
Jay Smith was a costumer, attending conventions primarily in California, going back to Equicon. He was an actor and worked Renaissance Fairs and The Great Dickens Christmas Fair, where he was known for his portrayal of Father Christmas. He was beloved for his portrayal of the character for decades at many events.
At the link is a photo of Smith wearing a “Redesign of Superman” from Equicon 1985 by Civi Poth.
(9) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Buck Rogers serial (1939)
Eighty-six years ago, the Buck Rogers serial, produced by Universal Pictures, first was in the theaters. It starred Buster Crabbe (who had previously played the title character in two Flash Gordon serials and would return for a third.) Buster was sometimes billed as Larry Crabbe as well as you will note in the poster below.
I don’t think I need to say that it’s based on the Buck Rogers character as y’all know that as created by Philip Francis Nowlan but for the sake of the few Filers who will nitpick if I don’t I will.
It was directed by Ford Beebe was Saul A. Goodkind as written by Norman S. Hall, Ray Trampe and Dick Calkins. It would run for twelve chapters of roughly twenty minutes each.
As I said Buck Roger was Larry “Buster” Crabbe with Constance Moore as Wilma Deering, and Jackie Moran as “Buddy” Wade, an original character who was based on the Sunday strip character Buddy Deering.
It had a really small budget and re-used film footage from the futuristic Thirties musical Just Imagine.
In 1953, it was edited into the film Planet Outlaws and twelve years later it was edited again into Destination Saturn, and not to stop there, the late Seventies saw the latter release of the latter as Buck Rogers. All three were feature films.
Not surprisingly, you can watch it online as it’s public domain — here is the first chapter
A famous dragon sculpture that spits out real fire is going to be a little less dramatic this month. The Wawel Dragon–or Smok Wawelski–in Krakow, Poland will have to hold its fiery breath so that authorities can see why it has been guzzling too much fuel lately.
Krzysztof Wojdowski, spokesman for Krakow’s road infrastructure office, told the Associated Press that officials will inspect the gas lines and pipes that feed the 19-feet metal dragon to look for ways to reduce energy bills. The sculpture is expected to begin to breathe fire again by March, pending the investigation….
Owners of electric cars in Vermont recently got a letter from the Department of Motor Vehicles with some bad news. Starting Jan. 1 they would have to pay $178 a year to register their cars, twice as much as owners of vehicles with internal combustion engines.
In imposing the higher fee, Vermont became the latest state to make people pay a premium for driving electric. At least 39 states charge such annual fees, including $50 in Hawaii and $200 in Texas, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. That’s up from no states a few years ago.
Now, as President Trump rolls back Biden administration measures to promote electric vehicles, Republicans in Congress are considering imposing a national fee to bolster the fund used to finance roads and bridges, a fund that is in dire shape.
The fees are an attempt to make up for declining revenue from gasoline taxes that electric cars, for obvious reasons, don’t pay. They’re an example of how governments are struggling to adjust to technological upheaval in the auto industry.
Environmentalists and consumer groups agree that electric vehicle owners should help pay for road maintenance and construction. But they worry that Republicans, who control Congress, would set the fee at extremely high levels to punish electric vehicle owners, who tend to be liberals…
And yet somehow not all owners of companies that make electric cars are liberals….
The Enforcement Droid Series 209, or ED-209, is a fictional heavily armed robot that appears in the RoboCop franchise. It serves as a foil for RoboCop, as well as a source of comic relief due to its lack of intelligence and tendency towards clumsy malfunctions.
The sales pitch says:
Premium Collectibles Studio presents their ED-209 1/3 Scale Statue. Hailing from the sci-fi classic RoboCop, this piece stands nearly 35 inches tall. Featuring every rivet, plate, and movie-accurate feature of the iconic Enforcement Droid, the finish is in a slate gray and matte black. Included is a pedestal base with the OCP logo, making it a striking addition for any RoboCop fan.
(14) I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU. Ryan George does a hilarious Tolkien-themed “When Your Friend Won’t Admit He’s Wrong” bit which some might say is NSFW, though really just for the last couple seconds, and not even then if you work for Frederick’s of Hollywood….
(15) FANGS FOR THE MEMORIES. Once upon a time actor Jonathan Frid, Dark Shadows’ Barnabas Collins, appeared as a celebrity guest on What’s My Line – vampire dentures and all.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Rich Lynch, John Hertz, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day John Hertz.]
Jeanine Swick, Recipient of the 2024 ICG Lifetime Achievement AwardKevin Roche presents 2024 LAA to Jeanine Swick.
Jeanine Swick received the International Costumers’ Guild Lifetime Achievement Award on March 30 at Costume-Con 42 in Aurora, Colorado.
Here are highlights from ICG President Kevin Roche’s announcement of the honor:
For over fifteen years this costumer has played a formidable role, both for the International Costumers’ Guild and in the wider costuming community.
As ICG Treasurer since 2009, they have exceeded all expectations in performing the duties of the office. Not only have they ensured that the ICG’s finances have been impeccably maintained and annual budgets prepared and submitted, but they have also performed all the membership functions including interacting with chapters on monthly membership updates, contacting chapters who have become delinquent, and in a few cases the difficult job of notifying chapters that they are no longer associated with the ICG when they have lapsed….
Their exemplary service has been recognized with the ICG President’s Award on four occasions. indicating high regard for their services to the ICG; to say that they have played and continue to play a pivotal role in the life of the ICG would be a considerable understatement.
Role in the Costuming Community: This member is widely recognized in multiple costuming communities for both their participation and craftsmanship, and for offering encouragement to others. They are especially active in medieval costuming within the Society for Creative Anachronism, where they also vend costume accessories that are highly regarded for their quality and craftsmanship. They are also known for offering helpful advice to newer costumers. Finally, they are the first of a three-generation family who participate in costuming, textile and wearable arts, and competition.
Costuming Skills: This year’s recipient has demonstrated considerable costuming skills, including costuming construction and performance during various local, regional, and international competitions, including many Costume-Cons. In addition, they have made or participated in making costumes for their daughter and grandson, have been a judge or judges’ clerk, and a frequent volunteer in many roles at these events.
The Greater Columbia Fantasy Costumers Guild, owing a staggering attrition penalty after failing to meet the hotel room block commitment for Costume-Con 40 in 2022, has announced they will dissolve.
Jamie Peddicord, the group’s representative on the International Costumers’ Guild Board of Directors, made the announcement on Facebook.
GCFCG logo
I unfortunately have some difficult news to share. You might be aware that Greater Columbia Fantasy Costumers Guild (GCFCG) did not have the attendance we needed at Costume-Con 40 to meet the room block for the hotel, which is in large part because of complications due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
One thing that worked against us is that the hotel penalized the convention heavily for not reaching a room block practically doubling the bill to $200,000. Since the con the guild has worked hard to come up with some means of paying the hotel to be able to continue the chapter and unfortunately we have exhausted our options.
The chapter board of directors, after looking at every option possible, had to come to the extremely difficult decision, due to the unmanageable debt, to dissolve the GCFCG. This is definitely not something we are doing lightly and to quote Sarah [Richardson] “It is painful and it hurts, but it has to be done.”
The GoFundMe appeal Richardson set up for the group last year only raised $1130. As she explained at the time:
…Many of our attendees, especially our international members, were unable to attend due to Covid travel restrictions were levied right before the convention. Because of this, over a fourth of our registered members (100+ people) were not able to attend. This led to our not meeting the room night obligations in our contract, and so we must pay a hefty “attrition” penalty….
Formed in 1982, the GCFCG was the founding chapter of the International Costumers’ Guild. Plans are being made for a new ICG chapter in Maryland.
…The Complete New Who limited edition collection is now available to preorder at Amazon and will feature every single episode from the modern era of Doctor Who in wonderful physical Blu-ray format. At $174.99, this looks incredibly affordable vs. buying each series on its own.
It’s still a premium price, for sure, but you’re getting a lot of TV-show for that price, with the collection comprising every series from the revival in 2005, to the Flux episodes (Series 13) in 2021, and every Holiday episode or one-off special along the way as well….
(2) BOOKS AS RARE AS UNICORNS. Or maybe you’d rather spend your money on one of the three limited editions of The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle from Suntup Editions, announced today.
…Magical, beautiful beyond belief and completely alone, the unicorn has lived since before memory in a forest where death could touch nothing. Maidens who caught a glimpse of her glory were blessed by enchantment they would never forget. But outside her wondrous realm, dark whispers and rumors carried a message she could not ignore: “Unicorns are gone from the world.” Aided by a bumbling magician and an indomitable spinster, the unicorn embarks on a dangerous quest to learn the truth about what happened to her kind….
The signed limited edition of The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle is presented in three states: Classic, Numbered and Lettered. The edition measures 6” x 9” and features nine full color tipped in oil painting illustrations by Tom Kidd as well as a new exclusive introduction by the author. One of the nine illustrations is a presented as a fold-out appearing in all three states….
The Classic edition is limited to 750 copies, and is the only edition to include a dust jacket illustrated by Tom Kidd….
The Numbered edition of 250 copies is a Bradel binding with a cover design inspired by the famous Unicorn Tapestries of the late Middle Ages….
The Lettered edition is limited to 26 copies and is bound in full white goatskin with a unicorn and bull design by Laura Serra on the cover. …
…Presumably Franklin gets to the time jumps quick enough, considering the rest of the movie will see him team up with Burrell to use the ring on a mission of vengeance against a sinister pharmaceutical company that was responsible for the death of his sister. But for now, it’s nice to see someone react just like we would if we discovered time travel: with a lot of anxiety, confusion, and some mild cursing…
ScreenRant posted its own, different exclusive clip a couple days ago.
(4) THE LAW AND MISTER WILLINGHAM. [Item by Jennifer Hawthorne.] “The Litigation Disaster Tourism Hour: Bill Willingham, DC, and the Fight Over Fables – no, really, WTF is going on?” on Twitch is a video of a law stream done by Mike Dunford. He’s an actual professional copyright lawyer (did his JD thesis on it) and he was asked to address Bill Willingham’s statement that he was placing Fables into the public domain as a means of striking back at DC comics who Willingham asserts has disrespected him. Mike D goes over Willingham’s statement and explains why it’s utter nonsense. Warning: Lots of colorful profanity, much of it directed at Willingham. TL:DR: Willingham is talking BS and Mike D’s only concern is that some third party might believe WIllingham’s statement, try to make a Fables creative product, and end up getting sued into oblivion by DC.
(5) YOU MUST LISTEN. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The British SF writer Nigel Kneale is possibly best known for creating the character Quatermass whose most famous adventure was the BBC TV series Quatermass and the Pit that gripped Britain back in 1958/9, so much so that it spawned a film version, the most successful of the four cinematic adaptations of the four BBC series (there were five Quatermass TV series in all).
Because much of Kneale’s work was decades before the internet (a good portion even before the widespread adoption of the transistor and microchip) some of his works have been lost. However, a trawl through his personal archive has uncovered the script for one of his lost radio play’s You Must Listen. This has now been re-made and premiered on BBC Radio 4 yesterday, September 20.
A solicitor’s office has a new phone line connected, but the staff keep hearing a woman’s voice on the phone. Engineer Frank Wilson is called to fix the problem, and gradually the disturbing story of the woman starts to emerge.
Originally broadcast in September 1952, You Must Listen was written by Nigel Kneale, one of the most admired English science-fiction writers of the last century. His Quatermass trilogy of science fiction serials continues to influence generations of admirers and filmmakers, among them Russell T Davies and John Carpenter.
But before The Quatermass Experiment established his television career, Kneale’s radio drama You Must Listen paved the way for what was to come. It explores many of the same themes that he later addressed in Quatermass, The Stone Tape and The Road, of the paranormal coming into collision with modern science.
No recording of the original version of You Must Listen is known to exist, but fortunately Kneale kept a copy of the script in his archives, and this new version has been recorded to mark the centenary of BBC Radio Drama.
Donations of rare books, artworks, manuscripts, photographs and ephemera are being sought for an auction aimed at raising funds for Ukrainian booksellers and publishers affected by the Russia-Ukraine war.
Authors are also being invited to donate signed first-edition copies of their books. The proceeds of the auction will go to Helping Ukrainian Books and Booksellers (Hubb), a group formed shortly after the war began, when thousands of publishing professionals suddenly found themselves out of work.
…Donations across “literature, poetry, history and science” are welcomed, said Avi Kovacevich, founder of Catalog Sale, a New York-based auction house that is facilitating the sale….
Hubb’s proceeds will be distributed in Ukraine by the Ukrainian Publishers and Booksellers Association. So far, Hubb has raised more than $30,000 (£24,257), which has been allocated to booksellers, publishers and libraries in Ukraine.
A large portion came from donations made by customers at Brookline Booksmith in Boston, the bookshop visited by the late Ukrainian novelist Victoria Amelina when she lived in the city for a year. Amelina died in July from injuries sustained in a Russian missile attack on a restaurant in eastern Ukraine.
The auction will take place online in mid-November….
The call for submissions is open until 10 October. Those interested in contributing to the sale are asked to send images of up to 10 items to hubb@catalog-sale.com.
(7) SF TERMS IN NEW YORK MAGAZINE NEWSLETTER. [Item by Michael A. Burstein.] Unfortunately, this isn’t available on the web, but New York Magazine is sending out a newsletter to subscribers who sign up called Queries, from copy editor Carl Rosen. (Information about the newsletter here.)
The issue that came out yesterday, Queries Week 2, includes this question from a reader and an answer from Rosen that I thought would be of interest (and does anyone know if Rosen was/is a part of fandom?):
A pet peeve: The new widespread usage of the phrase “I’m excited for …” applied to events instead of people. I believe that we all used to say “I’m excited for you, the bride-to-be, getting married next month!” Or, “I’m so excited about your wedding!” Now everyone says instead “I’m so excited for your wedding!” As though an event needs empathy. When did this start and why is it allowed to continue? —Callie
It started in the locker room at my middle school and followed the misuse of best for favorite that stoked my dudgeon in playground discussions of filk songs and FIAWOL (sci-fi fan terms). At least excited people talk in ways that favor empathy, as you point out, so let’s extend our sympathies to them. But only in their quotations.
No matter how many light years you travel, you just can’t outrun pronouns.
Starfield, Bethesda Game Studios’ new science fiction role-playing game, launched almost two weeks ago with its fair share of bugs and glitches — but for the internet’s angriest hobbyists, one thing above all else had ruined the game: a drop-down menu in character creation that allows players to choose their own woke pronouns, by which we mean you can choose whether to be referred to as “he,” “she,” or “they.” (Next you’ll be telling us they let you have blue hair — aw, shit!)
Anti-trans gamer bros went on a comments-section rampage, led by one YouTuber who briefly went viral for a shrieking rant about Bethesda “tak[ing] everything we love” and shoving it full of “fucking pronouns.” One person was so Large Mad about the pronoun selection option that they even modified the game’s PC version to remove the option from character creation entirely. There’s just one problem: the mod accidentally made the player’s character gender-neutral….
I am very saddened to report that Deborah K. Jones, respected and admired by all in the costuming community for her exquisitely crafted and thoughtfully choreographed masquerade presentations, passed away peacefully on July 8, 2023, following a three year bout with glioblastoma. Debby had struggled with a number of medical issues over several decades, but always with a positive attitude and quiet fortitude, and never lost her sense of curiosity and creative drive. She is survived by her husband Terry and their two children, Rhiannon and Bryan….
Continues at the link.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born September 21, 1895 — Norman Louis Knight. His most-remembered work is A Torrent of Faces, a novel co-written with James Blish and reprinted in the Ace Science Fiction Specials line. His only other writing is a handful of short fiction. Not surprisingly his short fiction isn’t available at the usual suspects but neither A Torrent of Faces. (Died 1972.)
Born September 21, 1912 — Chuck Jones. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies creator (think Bugs Bunny). His work won three Oscars, and the Academy also gave him an honorary one in 1996. I’ve essayed him more that once here, so you know that I like him. What’s your favorite one of his? Though perhaps culturally suspect these days, I’m very fond of “Hillbilly Hare”. (Died 2002.)
Born September 21, 1935 — Henry Gibson. I’m going confess upfront that I remember best him as a cast member of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. In regards to his genre work, he showed up on the My Favorite Martian series as Homer P. Gibson, he was in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as an uncredited dancer, in Bewitched twice, once as Napoleon Bonaparte, once as Tim O’ Shanter, he was the voice of Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web, in The Incredible Shrinking Woman as Dr. Eugene Nortz, and even in an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the “Profit and Lace” episode to be exact in which he was Nilva, a ferengi. (Died 2009.)
Born September 21, 1947 — Stephen King, 76. I once saw him leaning up against a wall in Bangor outside his favorite breakfast spot nose deep in a paperback novel. That’s how his native city treated him. Favorite by him? I’m not fond of his novels but I love his novellas and shorter fiction, so Different Seasons, Four past Midnight and Skeleton Crew are my picks.
Born September 21, 1950 — Bill Murray, 73. Scrooged is my favorite film by him by a long shot followed by the first Ghostbusters film as I remain firmly not ambivalent about the other Ghostbusters films. I’m also fond of his voicing of Clive the Badger in Fantastic Mr. Fox.
Born September 21, 1964 — Andy Duncan, 59. If I were to start anywhere with him, it’d be with his very excellent short stories which fortunately were published in two World Fantasy Award-winning collections Beluthahatchie and Other Stories, and The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories, and another WFA nominee, An Agent of Utopia: New & Selected Stories. I’ve read his novels, so what you recommend? He has garnered some very impressive Awards — not only World Fantasy Awards for the two collections, but also for the “Wakulla Springs” novelette (co-authored with Ellen Klages), and a Nebula for the novelette “Close Encounters” (2013). He has three Hugo nominations, for his “Beluthahatchie” short story (1998), the novella “The Chief Designer” (2002), and “Wakulla Springs”
Born September 21, 1974 — Dexter Palmer, 49. He wrote interesting novels, the first being The Dream of Perpetual Motion which is based off The Tempest, with steampunk, cyborgs and airships as well; the second being Version Control, a media-saturated twenty minutes into the future America complicated by time travel that keep changing everything. He wrote these and that was it.
Born September 21, 1983 — Cassandra Rose Clarke, 40. I strongly recommend The Witch Who Came in from the Cold, a serial fiction story she coauthored with Max Gladstone, Lindsay Smith, Ian Tregillis, and Michael Swanwick. It’s quite brilliant. And The Mad Scientist’s Daughter, nominated for a Philip K. Dick Award, is equally brilliant.
…Max on Thursday announced that Doom Patrol‘s in-progress final season will resume on Thursday, Oct. 12. Two episodes will drop on premiere day, followed by one new episode every week through Nov. 9.
In Season 4B, “the Doom Patrol meet old friends and foes as they race to defeat Immortus and get back their longevities,” according to the official logline. “Battling between saving the world and each other, the Doom Patrol are forced to face their deepest fears and decide if they are ready to let go of the past in order to take their future into their own hands — and away from the zombie butts.”…
…This interactive exhibit looks back at how the pop culture of yesterday has influenced the technology of the future, exploring the fantasy and reality of driverless cars, robots, drones, 3D printers, and more.
Museum attendees will get to explore:
How We Play – The future of toys and games. Is virtual the new reality? Experience Oculus Rift and virtual projection games.
How We Connect – The revolution in communication technology, with concept drawings from the visual futurists who created the looks for Blade Runner.
How We Live and Work – Inventions and ideas that shape daily life, including interacting with robots.
How We Move – The future of transportation on Earth and beyond. Check out everything from a full-sized replica of the Back to the Future DMC DeLorean to the world’s first 3D-printed car.
…The first of which is “Colleen Doran Illustrates Neil Gaiman”, which features original artwork by the award-winning artist Colleen Doran. The new exhibit will focus on her work illustrating the stories of Neil Gaiman, including Chivalry, Snow, Glass, Apples, The Sandman, Troll Bridge, American Gods, Norse Mythology, and the upcoming Good Omens.
The centerpiece of the exhibit will be 20 hand-painted pages for Doran and Gaiman’s Chivalry (Dark Horse Books), the Eisner-award winning graphic novel adaptation of Gaiman’s short story which features the story of Mrs. Whitaker, a British widow who finds the Holy Grail in a thrift shop and the knight who offers her priceless relics in exchange so he can win the Grail and end his quest…
John Coxon went to Reno, Alison Scott went to San Francisco, and Liz Batty went to Chicago. We spend some time discussing ConFrancisco, which celebrated its 30th anniversary recently, before also discussing Glasgow and Chengdu. We read out some excellent letters of comment and discuss some science fiction, too! The cover art is by our own Alison Scott.
At 8.55 a.m. local time on 24 September, a small and precious cargo is due to touch down in Utah’s West Desert, ending a journey of more than two years and two billion kilometres. Released 100,000 kilometres from Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, the sample capsule contains roughly 250 grams of material transported from the near-Earth asteroid 101955 Bennu — the largest ever asteroid sample to be brought back to Earth.
…The imminent return of the Bennu samples by OSIRIS-REx reminds me of what an exhilarating time this is and the profound possibilities of these precious materials.
Once Europe’s first successful launch is completed, the base aims to build capacity for “rapid launching” by 2030, where satellites would be ready to be thrust into orbit within a fortnight of notification. “To us, it’s not a race to be first, it’s a race to be successful,” said Gustafsson, a former marathon canoeist with world championship medals to his name. But, he adds, “competition is good because it drives speed and cost effectiveness”. Make no mistake, the Swedes have their eyes on the stellar prize.
Gav plops down the high speed camera next to a rocket engine with 45,000lbs of thrust and the results are epic. Big thanks to Firefly for allowing us to film at their facility and BBC Click for letting us use their behind the scenes footage from the day.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Ersatz Culture, Chris Barkley, Jennifer Hawthorne, Steven French, Michael A. Burstein, Dariensync, Lise Andreasen, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]
(1) ICG LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD. Congratulations to John and Christine O’Halloran, who were presented with this year’s International Costumers Guild Lifetime Achievement Award at Costume-Con 39 on April 22.
(2) AUDIOPYROMATRONICS. Maleficent Dragon caught fire during last night’s performance of Fantasmic! at Disneyland.
Additional clips from the #fantasmic dragon fire at #disneyland. The show stopped when the prop head caught fired instead of breathing out of the mouth, which then spread to the rest of the body pic.twitter.com/fSfWlr8k8j
Fictional Brands Archive is a collection of many fictional brands found in films, series and video games. It is structured according to the principles of brand identity design and aims to provide a comprehensive view of each fictional brand, framing them in their own fictional context and documenting their use and execution in the source work.
This website was developed as part of a Master’s thesis in Communication Design at Politecnico di Milano, supervised by Professor Francesco E. Guida, titled Fictional Brand Design.
The Research section contains the theoretical foundations upon which the project is based: it is a summary of several chapters of the thesis and is intended to serve as an informative compendium for anyone interested in learning more about fictional branding.
The Acme corporation spans across several TV series, cartoons and films. The company is perhaps best-known for its appearance in the Looney Tunes universe. Its name is derived from the Greek word “acm”, which means peak or prime, but also refers to a common practice, in the era of the yellow pages that were written alphabetically, of naming companies with the initial “A” to make it appear at the top of lists. Acme seems to be a conglomerate which makes incredibly dangerous products that are known to fail at the worst of times.
Acme doesn’t have a consistent branding system, it’s logo appears in a multitude of serif, sans serif and stencil typefaces.
(4) ADVENTURES IN BOOKSELLING. In addition to everything else, Don Blyly has to combat the elements to keep Uncle Hugo’s & Uncle Edgar’s Bookstores open as he explained in his latest “How’s Business?” newsletter.
…People have been asking about the flood I wrote about last time. When this building was built in the 1920s, Minneapolis had a single sewer system for both sanitary sewage and storm sewage, and the roof of the building was slanted so that all the rain water flowed to the center of the roof and then down through a large pipe to the sewer pipe in the basement. With the single sewer system, every major summer rain storm effectively “flushed” the entire sewer system, resulting in untreated sewage flowing into the Mississippi and into some basements. About 40-45 years ago Minneapolis created a second sewer system to handle only storm sewage (primarily dumping the rain water into the city lakes instead of taking it to the sanitary sewage treatment plant), and all buildings were forced to divert the rain water from their roofs away from
the sanitary sewage system. For this building, all the water still collected in the center of the roof, but then went through a cast iron pipe around 6 inches in diameter across the ceiling of the first floor, through the side of the building, and dumped into the alley to make it to the storm sewer system on the street. The part of the pipe outside the building is wrapped with electrical thermal tape, and then wrapped in fiber glass insulation, which is then wrapped with an aluminum-foil like coating. This system had kept the outside pipe from freezing through all of the below zero days all winter long, but the insulation blanket had slipped down a couple of inches over the winter, so that the water no longer dripped directly onto the alley–it instead sprayed onto the bottom of the fiber glass, froze over night in the fiber glass, and then the ice started creeping up the pipe. At the time the flood took place, there was a column of ice reaching down to the alley and reaching up the pipe for an unknown distance. I knock away the column of ice, and nothing happened. I then got a hammer and chisel and started breaking off pieces of ice within the pipe. Eventually, water started dripping from the bottom of the pipe. After more chiseling, all the ice came out of the pipe and water started gushing into the alley and stopped coming through the ceiling. I removed the fiber glass that had slipped down over the end of the pipe, and we’ve had no water problems since. Of course, there have been insurance problems. When I reported the flood, I was promised that I would be contacted by an adjuster within 2 days. Two weeks later I called again, talked to somebody who tried to claim that the water pouring through the ceiling had to have been caused by a sewer backup in the basement. An on-site adjuster came out a few days later, did a good examination of the situation, took lots of photos of the floor, the section where part of the ceiling fell, and the water-damaged books, and agreed with me that the sewer in the basement had nothing to do with the ice dam in the alley. A few weeks later I received a check for part of the estimated cost of repairing the floor, but nothing for repairing the ceiling. The insurance company also wants a title-by-title inventory of every book that got wet, and I haven’t had time to do that yet….
The crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise boldly returns for new adventures full of new life and new civilizations, and, of course, exploring strange new worlds.
… After Sauron lost his Ring, it came into contact with a number of powerful figures. Gandalf, Elrond and Galadriel could have claimed the One Ring as their own, and each of those hypothetical situations would have ended badly. Their natural power — combined with the power of the One Ring — may not have been enough to conquer Sauron, but it would have doomed Middle-earth. But what would happen if Treebeard had happened upon the One Ring? Would it have corrupted him too, or would he have been oblivious to its effects like the powerful Tom Bombadil?…
A hilarious video has emerged of the moment students on a Lord of the Rings pub crawl bumped into an East Lancashire actor who starred in the real movies.
22-year-old student, Ben Coyles, was dressed as Lord of the Rings character Gandalf for his birthday pub crawl in Bristol, on April 13.
Little did he know that he would end up bumping into the Burnley-born actor who played Gandalf in the movies, Sir Ian McKellen.
In the video, which has been viewed more than 3.5million times on video sharing platform TikTok, Ben can be seen posing for a picture and chatting with the legendary actor.
Scarlet Learmonth, who posted the video and was on the pub crawl, said: “It was such a shock but also a beautiful and magical moment….
This is the Beginning of Bob Tucker’s “The Survey” that he wrote for Science Fiction Five-Yearly in their sixth issue which was in 1976.
Wilson “Bob” Tucker was a member of First Fandom, coined the term space opera, and lent his name to the practice of tuckerization.
He won the Heicon ’70 Best Fan Writer Hugo and the 1954 Best Fan Writer Retro Hugo, and was nominated for the 1951 Best Fan Writer Retro Hugo and the 1946 Best Fan Writer Retro Hugo.
And now for your considerable amusement is the Beginning of “The Survey”…
I have a weakness for fan history, and somebody made a joke about rubber chicken. It may have been Robert Bloch because he has this weakness for chickens. Preferably chicks in showers.
I wondered if it were true that all fan convention banquets served rubber chicken? For many years the allegations were rife, the references many, the jokes extensile. Were fan banquets all rubber chicken banquets? The question itself was enough to light a mental fire, enough to cause me to spring from my rocking chair and dash quickly to the bookcase to consult Harry Warner. (The elapsed time from rocking-chair-spring to bookshelf arrival was thirty-five minutes, but then this is a wide room and I did become entangled between feet and beard on the first upward spring.
I was astonished and disappointed at what I did not find in Warner’s All Our Yesterdays. I realized at once the omissions were the fault of Ed Wood and George Price, who labored many hours extracting the index which appears at the back of the book, but nevertheless Warner must share in the guilt, if only by association. The index does not have an entry “Rubber Chicken.” Nor does it have a “Chicken, rubber.” There isn’t so much as a “Banquet” entry. I know very well the fans who attended conventions in the 1940s ate something, because I was among them and I remember eating — but here, in supposedly living history, was no mention of that fact.
Still unbelieving, I turned to the text itself and discovered that Harry had mentioned worldcon banquets but did not often reproduce the menus. Of Chicago, 1940, he said: “They got free meeting rooms (in the hotel) in return for staging a banquet at which they needed to guarantee only fifty dinners at one dollar each.” And later: “The banquet that night had food in quantities approximating the cost of the meal.” Nothing about chicken, rubber.
I was at that banquet but creeping senility has long since robbed me of the memory of what was served. (However, I doubt that it was hamburgers or hotdogs.)
Of the 1941 Denver worldcon, Warner reported that bread was the banquet entree: “There were forty fans on hand for the banquet. After the breaking of bread, there were many informal talks.” It should be noted that again, Wood and Price failed to include an entry for “bread” in the index, and I’m not aware of any stale jokes about rubber bread in fandom — not even from Bloch.
But now, at last, a partial success! The Pacificon, 1946, served chicken. Yes, they did. Read Warner on page 262: “More than ninety fans and pros ate thin soup and halves of chicken, and mulled a lot of statistics that Don Day gave …” Note that. The first admission of chicken appears in history, together with a convention menu: thin soup, halved chicken, mulled statistics. No doubt a satisfactory meal for the $2.50 fee charged in that year. (Also please note the alarming rate of inflation: the official banquet had rocketed from only one dollar per person in 1940, to two and one-half in 1946. Remember this when someone blames Nixon for inflationary pressures.) I shouldn’t have to state at this point that Wood and Price are again remiss. The index carries no mention of soup, chicken, statistics….
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born April 23, 1879 — Talbot Mundy. English-born, but based for most of his life in the United States, he also wrote under the pseudonym of Walter Galt. Best known as the author of King of the Khyber Rifles which is not really genre and the Jimgrim series which is genre, much of his work was published in pulp magazines. (Died 1940.)
Born April 23, 1923 — Avram Davidson. Equally at home writing mystery, fantasy or science fiction, he wrote two splendid Ellery Queen mysteries, And on the Eighth Day and The Fourth Side of the Triangle. I’m fond of his Vergil Magus series if only for the names of the novels, like The Phoenix and the Mirror or, The Enigmatic Speculum. There was a 2020 audiobook edition of The Avram Davidson Treasury: A Tribute Collectionedited by Robert Silverberg and Grania Davis, first published in 1998, with afterwords by Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison, and intros by many other sff writers. (Died 1993.)
Born April 23, 1935 — Tom Doherty, 88. Once publisher of Ace Books who left that in 1980 to found Tor Books. Tor became a subsidiary of St. Martin’s Press in 1987; it became part of the Holtzbrinck group, now part of Macmillan in the U.S. Doherty was awarded a World Fantasy Award in the Lifetime Achievement category at the 2005 World Fantasy Convention for his contributions to the fantasy field.
Born April 23, 1946 — Blair Brown, 77. Emily Jessup In Altered States (based on the Paddy Chayefsky novel) was her first genre role. Later roles include Nina Sharp, the executive director of Massive Dynamic, on Fringe, an amazing role indeed, and Elizabeth Collins Stoddard in the 2004 television remake of Dark Shadows. Her last genre role I think was Kate Durning on Elementary.
Born April 23, 1955 — Paul J. McAuley, 68. Four Hundred Billion Stars, his first novel, won the Philip K. Dick Award, Fairyland which I adore won an Arthur C. Clarke Award and a John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best SF Novel. His short story, “The Choice”, won a Sturgeon Award, and “Pasquale’s Angel” won a Sideways Award. He was Toastmaster along Kim Newman at Interaction.
Born April 23, 1962 — John Hannah, 61. Here for being Jonathan Carnahan in The Mummy, The Mummy Returns, and there was apparently a third film as well though let’s not talk about it please, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. In a more meaty role, he was the title characters in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and of late he’s been Holden Radcliffe on Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. series. Though not even remotely genre adjacent, he was Rebus in the BBC adaptation of the Ian Rankin series.
Born April 23, 1973 — Naomi Kritzer, 50. I saw that her 2015 short story “Cat Pictures Please” had been a Hugo Award winner at MidAmeriCon II, so I went and purchased Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories off Apple Books so I could read it. It’s since been expanded continued in two more novels, Catfishing on CatNet, which won the Lodestar Award, and the Chaos on Catnet. DisCon III saw her nominated for two Hugos, one for her “Monster” novelette and one for her most excellent “Little Free Library” short story. She also picked up a nomination at Dublin 2019 for her “The Thing About Ghost Stories” novelette.
Born April 23, 1985 — Angel Locsin, 38. She starred as the superhero in the epic 170-episode Darna series on her country’s television. Her character looks suspiciously like Wonder Woman.
(11) COMICS SECTION.
Close to Home shows The Wizard of Oz gang examining one character’s Ancestry.com results.
The deadline for nominating work for the 2023 Hugo awards is a week away. If you’re eligible to nominate, you should have received an email from the Chengdu Worldcon (if not, you can query them here). This year’s nominations are likely to be unusual due to the high number of Chinese Worldcon members—it’s entirely possible, and even likely, that the ballot will include Chinese-language work that hasn’t received an English translation, which will render the voting phase somewhat tricky. Still, it’s not as if I’m used to seeing my taste reflected perfectly by this award even in years when there is no language barrier, so I see no reason not to continue as I’ve always done, nominating the things I thought were excellent last year, and calling attention to them in the hopes that others, too, find them worthy.
In compiling my nominations this year, I made great use of two tremendous resources, the Locus Recommended Reading List and the Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom. I also appreciated all the authors and critics who have posted their own award recommendations on their blogs and on twitter. The conversation about awards eligibility posts was settled long ago on the “pro” side, and I have no problem with people who try to promote their own work. But I always pay more attention to (and get more utility out of) the people who recommend the things they loved and would like to see nominated as well as the things they’ve published….
(13) VIDEO’S FOREVER HOME. Polygon shows that “Anime Blu-rays and DvDs are more popular than ever”. “Blu-rays are great collectibles — and you never have to worry about your favorites disappearing from streaming”
… Calculating anime home video sales is complicated. The market for it in Japan has been declining almost yearly for the past decade — coinciding with the worldwide move to digital platforms — but specific releases, like the first Demon Slayer film, can inspire greater interest. That movie has both the highest box office in Japanese history, and sold over a million copies on Blu-ray and DVD within the first three days of its release. To put that kind of success in perspective, only three American blockbuster films in 2022 sold more than a million copies throughout the entire year.
But the hunger for anime has only grown in the U.S., to the extent that in August 2022, Sony acquired Right Stuf Anime, a distributor established in 1987 that expanded into selling anime, live-action releases, toys, manga, and all manner of collectibles. (Sony also owns Crunchyroll, an anime streaming service.) In an era where anime home video was far from ubiquitous — one might find an ad in the back of a magazine here, a vendor with a massive collection at a convention there, and a smattering of opportunities among message boards — Right Stuf’s mission was to give the anime consumer “everything in one place” and a trusted system of delivering it to them. It was a fruitful operation. At this point, Right Stuf says it’s the largest online seller of anime in North America….
Other space ventures and spacefaring nations have tried and failed before.
Undeterred by previous flops, a Japanese company will attempt to land a robotic spacecraft on the moon. If it succeeds, ispace could claim the first commercial lunar landing in history.
The company will broadcast the event live at 11:40 a.m. ET April 25, 2023, giving viewers a peek behind the curtains at mission control in Tokyo as engineers oversee the challenging feat. Lunar landings are rare in and of themselves, let alone opportunities for the public to watch them unfold in real time.
The mission, known as HAKUTO-R(opens in a new tab), is one of several commercial lunar missions happening soon. Others in the pipeline are an outgrowth of NASA‘s Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program, established in 2018 to recruit the private sector(opens in a new tab) to help deliver cargo to the moon. ispace(opens in a new tab), a startup specializing in landing vehicles, couldn’t directly participate in the NASA program because it isn’t an American company, but it is collaborating on a contract led by Draper Technologies based in Massachusetts to land on the moon in 2025….
…It resulted in an explosion that caused residents near the launch site in South Texas to notice ashy particulates falling from the sky and vibrations in their classrooms and homes.
The city of Port Isabel said there is no immediate concern for people’s health and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk declared the fireworks show a victory, saying SpaceX “learned a lot for the next test launch in a few months.”
But for the community near the site, it will take time to clean up from this one—a nearby road was covered in debris and temporarily closed and teams dedicated to protecting the bays and estuaries of the Texas coastal bend are busy surveying the damage. It’s an area where shorebirds have had their habitat disrupted from prototypes that exploded after previous test launches, and at least two species have stopped or reduced nesting in recent years, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
It’s these concerns that drew residents to release a statement before the launch, blasting SpaceX and elected officials for declining to meet about Starship and often cutting off their access to the beach.
“Whenever Elon Musk and his accomplices, the Cameron County Commissioners and Texas General Land Office, close Boca Chica beach for his pet project SpaceX, they destroy our native life ways.” wrote Juan B. Mancias, Carrizo Comecrudo Tribal Chairman.
The local community’s clash with SpaceX to protect and access their beach and wildlife represents a striking contrast to the company’s grand vision for the future. SpaceX wants to make humans a multi-planetary society, and Musk has shared his thoughts that getting humans to Mars and the “greater Solar System” could protect us if large-scale devastation happened like an asteroid hitting Earth….
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Stuart Hall.]
The recipients of the International Costumers’ Guild’s 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award and President’s Award were announced at Costume-Con 40 this weekend by ICG President Kevin Roche.
2022 ICG LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Leslie L. Johnston has been honored with the International Costumers’ Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, recognizing a body of achievement in the costuming art and service to the costuming community. Her contributions are praised in the citation.
Leslie has been an active participant in costuming communities for over four decades. After a childhood where her mother lovingly made her costumes for plays and holidays, Leslie eventually started making her own. In the 1970’s, she found a costume-making community in the SCA, and by the early 1980’s she was creating original costumes on her own and in collaboration with other costumers. Those who have gotten to know her have a friend with whom they look forward to collaborating.
The scope of Leslie’s costuming work is broad, including horror and the macabre, the elegance of Regency and Victorian, world folklore, old movies, and many others. Accolades include major awards internationally and regionally at historical and sci-fi/fantasy competitions where she enters in the open division. Her research methods and documentation are exemplary, and she is always willing to give talks and provide mentoring about how to produce great documentation. She also authors costuming-related articles, is actively involved in assisting with convention programming and exhibits, and serves as ICG Vice President.
Leslie’s qualities as a wise and kind human being, a force for order and consensus, and her extensive costuming experience have led to her being requested for masquerade judging panels, from Worldcons to small local specialty cons. World-class masquerade judging is a special skill set, requiring almost superhuman patience, collaborative spirit, and love for people who compete at every level of experience. Leslie excels at it. Her experience, calm, organization, and consensus-driven approach help the judging process work as intended.
Most recently Leslie has been instrumental in the development of the new Pat and Peggy Kennedy Memorial Archives site. Leslie applied her skills and experience as a professional archivist to the task, with an eye to making them accessible, expandable, and maintainable far into the future. She was the major researcher for choosing new software. She customized the software to best serve the needs of the Archives, has done the yeoman’s share of uploading photos to the new software, and has created exhibits to enhance the visitor’s experience. She has also been researching new storage options for the Archives to accommodate its rapidly expanding oeuvre.
Leslie’s decades-long participation in the costuming community, her demonstrated costuming skills, her willingness to mentor and share what she knows, and her many and continuing services to the costuming community and to the ICG make her an ideal recipient of the 2022 ICG Lifetime Achievement Award.
2022 ICG PRESIDENT’S AWARD
Betsy L. Marks has received the 2022 ICG President’s Award for her work restoring the Costume-Con archive. President Kevin Roche said in the citation:
The history of Costume-Con and the International Costumers’ Guild are inextricably linked to each other; it is, after all, at the “dead dog” party after Costume-Con 3 where a bunch of us from the West Coast decided to form what became the Costumers’ Guild West, who along with the Greater Columbia Fantasy Costumers’ Guild and the Sick Pups of Monmouth County banded together to create this thing we call the ICG.
It is because of that tight relationship that we hold our Annual Meeting at Costume-Con, and announce our major awards to the public this weekend. Tonight it is my privilege to present the ICG President’s Award.
Our art form is shockingly ephemeral, which is why the ICG Archives are so important, but so, too, are the records of this event, of Costume-Con itself. I know, because I had a hand myself in rebuilding the costume-con.org archives some many years ago.
Those archives were recently threatened by the same software obsolescence that shut down the ICG archive site. Fortunately, thanks to the Herculean efforts of one person, the costume-con visual archive is now not just restored, but expanded and searchable for both images and historical data.
For that work, as well as her tireless efforts for the ICG and the costuming community in general, I am recognizing Betsy Marks with the 2022 ICG President’s Award.
Besides her work on the Archives, Betsy was part of the team who assisted Karen Schnaubelt in updating the Costume-Con Constitution. She was an active member of the team who developed the new expanded ICG Guidelines, and last year was instrumental in writing the Standing Rules amendments that brought some of our practices in line with current corporate codes.
It is my privilege to recognize her hard work on behalf of Costume-Con, the International Costumers’ Guild, and the fan costume community in general, and I ask you to join me in applauding her endeavors.
Philip and Kathleen Gust at Costume-Con 33. Photo by Kenneth T. Warren
Philip and Kathleen Gust are the recipients of the 2021 International Costumers’ Guild Lifetime Achievement Award. ICG President Kevin Roche shared the announcement on April 24. The award is the highest honor that the International Costumers’ Guild’s presents to costumers, recognizing a body of achievement in the costuming art and service to the costuming community.
Phil and Kathe Gust made a splash in the San Francisco Bay Area costuming community 18 years ago, with Lord of the Rings costumes featuring King Theoden of Rohan and Eowyn of Rohan. After winning a “Rising Star” award from the GBACG (Greater Bay Area Costumer’s Guild), a tie-award for a best-of workmanship title in the Novice category, and the winner of the Best Fantasy Costume in the Masquerade at BayCon (a large regional convention) in 2006, their rising star was certainly the one to watch!
Both singly and as a couple, Phil and Kathe descended upon the costuming community with glitter, knowledge, and a desire to serve. They have each taught classes at multiple conventions, and for the annual GBACG Costume Academy, on a variety of topics. They have run masquerades at the regional level, and judged at both regional and international competitions.
They have also ably served as officers in multiple roles within the ICG.
The first recipient of the award, in 1990, was Marjii Ellers. Sally Fink won it last year.
(1) A DAY FOR VISIBILITY. On International Transgender Day of Visibility, one fan talks about the way Star Trek fandom helped her feel safe and seen as her full self: “Coming Out to My Star Trek Family”.
In October 2012, I stepped into a room full of people who’d known me for years, but most of them were about to truly meet me for the first time. I was scared out of my mind. At a science-fiction convention in Chicago, they were busy turning a hotel suite into a tiny nightclub, and I had arrived to step up my DJ gear, a now-familiar ritual. Only this time, I was wearing a full face of makeup and a dress… and an announcement needed to be made. I had new pronouns. And a new name. This was not some ultra-liberal organization of party throwers, either. It’s an organization known as Barfleet, whose only real ethos is “throw the best, safest convention parties”. And I was about to their first out, visibly transgender member….
(2) COSTUMER PHOTO HISTORY RETURNS. The International Costumers Gallery, the largest collection of costume photos in the world, includes photos from science fiction and fantasy conventions, masquerade competitions, fashion shows, historical dress competitions and other events and displays. The Gallery is returning online, featuring new software and new features at a new location: ICG Pat and Peggy Kennedy Memorial Archives.
The International Costumers’ Guild (ICG), founded in 1985, is an affiliation of hobbyist and professional costumers from around the world, dedicated to the promotion and education of costuming as an art form in all its aspects, and to fostering local educational and social costume events…
If there is one lesson Tolkien intended us to take from The Lord of the Rings, it is that NPC (non-player-character) bards are extraordinarily dangerous beings. Not because they might kill you (although some might) but because by their nature, they are adept at upstaging other characters. It’s probably only due to the merciful brevity of his appearance on stage that Tom Bombadil didn’t manage to transform LOTR into Tom Bombadil Saves Middle-Earth with the Power of Verse (also there were some hobbits).
First on the list is Manly Wade Wellman’s collection John the Balladeer. (If you don’t mess around with Jim, you certainly don’t mess around with John.)
I’m afraid that I must decline the invitation to be an author guest/program participant at Balticon 55, and have no plans to return to the convention any time soon.
The convention’s handling of the multiple harassment complaints against convention chair Eric Gasior is disappointing. All the more so because my wife Wrenn Simms and I were witnesses to the incident spelled out in one of those complaints. We were at Arisia 2016, and we observed Eric’s behavior toward one of the complainants. At the time, we thought it was an isolated incident due to a particular set of circumstances. We have since learned that there were at least three other complaints against Eric of a similar nature to that of the one we were privy to. Our names were passed on to the investigator that Balticon hired to look into the allegations, but we were never contacted. Now the investigation is said to be complete and finished, even though Wrenn and I were not questioned, despite being witnesses to Eric’s harassment in January 2016.
This is massively unacceptable and I cannot in good conscience support the con. Balticon is a favorite convention of ours, and I am disappointed to not be attending, but to attend now would be to give my tacit support to a convention committee that has proven to not care about the safety of its attendees.
An inexplicable event confers supernatural powers on a select group of people in Victorian London, who must battle prejudice and those who would exploit their abilities in The Nevers, a new original series coming to HBO next month.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gs-ODufnJ8Y
(6) HE CAN DIG IT. [Item by rcade.] Not many actors would do as much preparation for a role as Alexander Skarsgard did to portray geologist Nathan Lind in the movie Godzilla vs. Kong, if this Uproxx interview is to be believed: “Alexander Skarsgard Knows You Don’t Care About Him In Godzilla Vs Kong”.
Alexander Skarsgard: Even though I play a very peripheral character and no one cares, I still take my craft seriously. And that means a decade of studying geology and living, breathing the character. Just to give the audience that sublime performance that I give in the movie.
Uproxx: When you’re giving the technical jargon during the movie, viewers can rest assured that you know exactly what you’re talking about, because you studied for so long with trained geologists.
Skarsgard: Exactly. And they can see that in my eyes, that I’m not lying. I’m not pretending. I’m not acting. I’m not playing a geologist. I am a geologist.
(7) ATTACK THE MOCK. The Mitchells vs.The Machines comes to Netflix on April 30.
A quirky, dysfunctional family’s road trip is upended when they find themselves in the middle of the robot apocalypse and suddenly become humanity’s unlikeliest last hope!
(8) ST-PIERRE OBIT. Montreal club member Sylvain St-Pierre died March 25 of Covid reports MonSFFA’s Cathy Palmer-Lister: “Sad news: Sylvain St-Pierre”.
I am so sorry to have to inform you that Sylvain St-Pierre and his mom have both passed away from Covid. His brother, Marc, is in quarantine as a precautionary measure.
We are in shock. Sylvain was one of the rocks on which this club was founded, and a best friend to so many of us in fandom.
More details here. Tributes are being posted on St-Pierre’s Facebook page.
(9) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
March 31, 1987 — On this day in 1987, the Max Headroom series premiered on ABC. This is the America version of Max Headroom as the British version was Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future which is essentially identical to the initial origin episode of the American series. Matt Frewer as Max Headroom and Edison Carter, Amanda Pays as Theora Jones and W. Morgan Sheppard as Blank Reg would reprise their characters from the British film. It ran from April of 1985 to March of 1987. A spin-off series, a talk show featuring Max was recorded, The Original Max Talking Headroom Show, this time in New York. It aired on Cinemax between the two seasons and lasted six episodes. And yes, Max had a lucrative gig shilling Coca Cola and other products here and in the United Kingdom.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born March 31, 1844 — Andrew Lang. To say that he is best known as a collector of folk and fairy tales is a bit of understatement. He collected enough tales that twenty five volumes of Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books for children was published between 1889 and 1913. That’s 798 stories. If you’re interested in seeing these stories, you can find them here. (Died 1912.) (CE)
Born March 31, 1918 – Beth Krush. Illustrator, mostly with husband Joe Krush, who survived her. Both did Mary Norton’s Borrowers books. BK did Eudora Welty’s only children’s book The Shoe Bird and sixteen with Sally Scott. Here is The Borrowers Afield. Here is A Spell Is Cast. Here is Countdown at 37 Pinecrest Drive. (Died 2009) [JH]
Born March 31, 1932 — John Jakes, 89. Author of a number of genre series including the Brak the Barbarian series. The novels seem to fix-ups from works published in such venues as Fantastic. Dark Gate and Dragonard are his other two series. As Robert Hart Davis, he wrote a number of The Man From UNCLE novellas that were published in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Magazine. The magazine apparently only existed from 1966 to 1968. (CE)
Born March 31, 1934 — Richard Chamberlain, 87. His first dive into our end of reality was in The Three Musketeers as Aramis, a role he reprised in The Return of Three Musketeers. (I consider all Musketeer films to be genre.) Some of you being cantankerous may argue it was actually when he played the title character in Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold which he did some years later. He listed as voicing the Jack Kirby created character Highfather on the superb Justice League: Gods and Monsters but that was but a few lines of dialogue I believe. He was in the Blackbeard series as Governor Charles Eden, and series wise has done the usual one-offs on such shows as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Boris Karloff’s Thriller, Chuck and Twin Peaks. (CE)
Born March 31, 1936 — Marge Piercy, 85. Author of He, She and It which garnered the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction novel. Of course she also wrote Woman on the Edge of Time doomed to be called a “classic of utopian speculative sf”. Woman on the Edge of Time was nominated for a Tiptree Award. (CE)
Born March 31, 1955 – Janice Gelb, age 66. Co-founded the Israel SF Ass’n and the Filk Foundation. Ran the Hugo Ceremony at L.A.con IV the 64th Worldcon, has run Program Ops at eight. Fan Guest of Honor at Concave 22, Baycon 2003; Capricon 31 (with husband Stephen Boucher). Big Heart (our highest service award; with Boucher). DUFF (Down Under Fan Fund) delegate; her campaignzine is here; trip report not available electronically so far as I know: try E-mail to either of the DUFF Administrators as given here; or send paper mail to me, 236 S. Coronado St., No. 409, Los Angeles, CA 90057, U.S.A., and we’ll arrange something. [JH]
Born March 31, 1957 – David Bratman, age 64. Librarian. Classical-music reviewer. Tolkien scholar; a dozen entries in the Tolkien Encyclopedia; edited Mythprint; edits & contributes to Tolkien Studies and Mythlore (about the Inklings). See here. Administered the Hugo Awards at three Worldcons, the Retrospective Hugos at one. Although he once said “We liked dancing ‘The Black Nag’ to annoy John Hertz”, my answer to the question of the day is yes. [JH]
Born March 31, 1957 – Gary Louie. Hard-working, much-missed Los Angeles fan. Evans-Freehafer Award (service to LASFS, L.A. Science Fantasy Society). Labored on nearly every Worldcon for years. When he arrived in L.A. fandom the mah jongg fad had begun (for which I bear some responsibility), and as he said, being Chinese he mixed right in. (Died 1999) [JH]
Born March 31, 1960 — Ian McDonald, 61. I see looking him up for this Birthday note that one of my favorite novels by him, Desolation Road, was his very first one. Ares Express which was the sort of sequel was just as splendid. Now the Chaga saga was, errr, weird. The Everness saga was fun but ultimately shallow. Strongly recommend both Devish House and River of Gods. Luna series just didn’t impress me me, so other opinions are sought on it. (CE)
Born March 31, 1971 — Ewan McGregor, 50. Nightwatch, a horror film, with him as lead Martin Bell is his first true genre film. That was followed by The Phantom Menace with him as Obi-Wan Kenobi, a role repeated in Attack of the Clones,Revenge of the Sith and The Force Awakens. His latest role of interest, well to me if to nobody else, is as Christopher Robin in the film of the same name. (CE)
Born March 31, 1982 – Alaya Dawn Johnson, age 39. Seven novels, a dozen shorter stories. Won a Nebula and an Andre Norton. Interviewed in Fantasy, Lightspeed. Guest of Honor at WisCon 39, ConFusion 42 (not its real name, which was “Life, the Universe, and ConFusion”). [JH]
Born March 31, 2010 – João Paulo Guerra Barrera, age 11. Two short stories in Portuguese and English. Won the NASA Ames Space Settlement Contest. And that ain’t the half of it. [JH]
(11) MANGA NEWS. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the March 22 Financial Times, Leo Lewis reports that Japan’s Financial Services Agency has “turned to a scatological cartoon character to teach children about money.” The character, “Unko Doriru” (“poo exercises”) was introduced by publisher Bunkyosha in 2017 to help children deal with all the memorization that it takes to learn to read and write Japanese.
“In the original books,” Lewis writes, “each new character is introduced with an excrement-based sentence by Unko-sensei, a smartly-dressed, bespectacled and mustachioed pedagogue whose head is a stylized stool. The author’s bet on the inexhaustible powers of faeces to entertain children has seen the series expand to mathematics, science, and other usually soberly-taught realms of Japanese education.”
The Financial Services Agency’s use of the character is an online multiple-choice quiz, “asking children how they would respond to various financial realities, such as having insufficient funds (to buy video games), sudden seasonal gluts of capital (gift money) and the appropriate evaluation of rendered services (washing up.) In each case, one of the available answers involves faeces.”
(12) YOU’LL NEVER GUESS WHO’S WRITTEN A BOOK. That’s what the email said. Even when it revealed that the subject was newly-released novel The Eighth Key by Laura Weyr I still needed the next clue – that Laura Weyr is the nom de plume of Janice Marcus, of the Galactic Journey Marcuses. Here’s the pitch for her new book:
The magic is gone…or is it?
Lucian is a jaded flirt and professional bard who knows all the old songs about sorcery. When he meets Corwin, a shy mage who can still use magic despite the Drought, Lucian finds his desire growing with each passing day—not just for answers, but for Corwin himself.
Sparks fly as they find themselves passionately entangled in adventure and each other. But learning the true origin of the Drought and the Key to ending it comes at a price that their bond may not survive…
(13) A PEEK INTO THE FUTURE. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] 60 Minutes had a segment about Boston Dynamics. They went behind the scenes and had many interesting shots of company headquarters and some robots we’ve never seen. The most interesting fact in Anderson Cooper’s piece is that the humanoid robot that does all the leaping is only five feet tall. “Robots of the future at Boston Dynamics”.
…“If you read any publications that claim we have figured out how to break the speed of light, they are mistaken,” said one of the researchers, Gianni Martire, in an email to The Debrief. “We [instead] show that a class of subluminal, spherically symmetric warp drive spacetimes, can be constructed based on the physical principles known to humanity today.”
… So, with the team assembled, Martire described how they first looked at the classical warp designs before trying to tackle the problem themselves. “[Harold] White’s paper makes heavy use of extra non-physical dimensions,” he said, “which, as you know, is incompatible with the current understanding of general relativity. Thus, the work is not usable in our reality. No warp metric was.
Hence, why they were all unphysical.”
With this limitation in mind, Martire and his co-author, Lund University Astrophysicist Alexey Bobrick, set out to design an entirely new type of Warp drive, a design they term a physical warp drive. “Our paper covers all the existing warp drives and all their possible modifications (i.e., Alcubierre),” Martire said in the email, “but the APL metric stands on its own, hence why it’s the first physical class of warp.”
(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Honest Trailers: Zack Snyder’s Justice League” on YouTube, the Screen Junkies note that the Snyder Cut is 2 1/2 times longer than Casablanca, which gives him plenty of room for many, many slo-mo scenes (including a slo-mo shot of Lois Lane’s coffee cup) and scenes where “the grey CGI villain reports in excruciating detail to his grey CGI boss and his boss’s grey CGI executive assistant.”
[Thanks to N., Lloyd Penney, John King Tarpinian, James Davis Nicoll, Mike Kennedy, JJ, Pierre and Sandy Pettinger, John Hertz, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Martin Morse Wooster, Dann, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Rob Thornton.]
