Tag Archives: Internet Archive

Pixel Scroll 12/4/24 To Scroll Beyond The Pixel

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(1) AUDIOBOOKS OF THE YEAR. AudioFile Magazine today released its picks for the Best Of 2024 in nine categories.

File 770 partnered with them to share “AudioFile’s 2024 Best Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Audiobooks”.

Moira Quirk and Jefferson Mays. Photos courtesy of the narrators.

(2) INTERNET ARCHIVE LOSS FINALIZED. Time has run out for the defendant to appeal Hachette Book Group v. Internet Archive to the Supreme Court. IA will also be reimbursing some of the plaintiff’s attorney fees and costs reports Publishing Perspectives in “Copyright: Publishers Cheer Conclusion of Internet Archive Suit”.

The Association of American Publishers (AAP)  today (December 4) has announced a final resolution to the case Hachette Book Group v. Internet Archive—this because the Internet Archive declined to file a “cert petition” with the Supreme Court of the United States by a December 3 deadline.

The moment signifies a hard-won victory for publishing, and it comes at a propitious moment for the AAP team, key members of the staff of which are in Mexico. There, the AAP is a partner to CANIEM, the Mexican publishers’ organization, in producing for this week’s International Publishers’ Association (IPA) and thus providing more than 200 publishing-delegates with whom to share the news….

…As the AAP puts it today, “with this case concluded, publishers have achieved a decisive and broadly applicable victory for authors’ rights and digital markets, an outcome that was our foremost, principled objective.

“In addition, the Internet Archive is bound by a sweeping permanent injunction and must make a payment to AAP, which funded the action, the amount of which is confidential under the terms of a court-approved, negotiated consent judgment between plaintiffs and Internet Archive.

“We are, however, permitted to disclose that ‘AAP’s significant attorney’s fees and costs incurred in the action since 2020’ will be ‘substantially compensated.’”…

(3) HOW DARE THEY? The Heinlein Society got a little tetchy about challenges to its Heinlein-related content and set Facebook readers straight that their scope is practically unlimited.

It seems someone is always asking how one of our posts is Heinlein related. Actually, complaining because they don’t think it’s Heinlein related. Now seems a good time to clarify.

1. Anything relating to SF/F, books, libraries or reading is Heinlein related. I could even argue that Heinlein is the father of modern SF. He certainly legitimized it after WWII. When Heinlein started writing, SF was limited to the pulp magazines and was generally looked down upon. It certainly wasn’t considered literature. Heinlein changed that when he started selling stories to the slick magazines and had his juvenile novels published in hardcover. He was also the first SF writer to have a NY Times best seller with Stranger in a Strange Land.

2. Anything relating to Star Trek is Heinlein related. Heinlein enjoyed Star Trek. He gave his permission to air The Trouble With Tribbles when they realized how closely Tribbles resembled the Martian Flat Cats from The Rolling Stones. He had an original painting by Kelly Fries of LT Uhura / Nichelle Nichols hanging on the wall of his study. He went to Star Trek conventions to promote blood drives. (Also, see item 1)

3. Anything relating to space or space travel is Heinlein related. Heinlein wrote about space travel his entire career and deeply cared about the future of space travel. He wrote the screenplay for Destination Moon and acted as the technical advisor, the first realistic movie about a trip to the moon. Heinlein was a guest commentor with Arthur C. Clarke and Walter Cronkite during the first moon landing in 1969. After her husband’s death, Virginia Heinlein started the Heinlein Prize Trust to promote the commercialization of space.

4. Anything relating to science is Heinlein related. Heinlein graduated from the US Naval Academy as an engineer, but he always wanted to be an astronomer. He loved and promoted science in his books. He inspired a generation of youth to pursue science with his juvenile book series.

5. Anything relating to cats is Heinlein related. This one should be obvious, but Heinlein was a huge cat lover and included cats in many of his stories.

6. Anything relating to humor is Heinlein related. Heinlein was a great fan of humor in general as evidenced from the humor in his books. He was greatly influenced by Mark Twain.

I know that people will continue to complain. I suppose it’s just human nature…

(4) CALL FOR PEER REVIEWERS. The Journal of Tolkien Research, a peer-reviewed, open access, online-only journal devoted to Tolkien research is looking for peer reviewers to assist with reviewing and assessing peer-review submissions to the journal. The editor is looking for the following minimum qualifications:

  • Published at least 2 peer-reviewed articles related to Tolkien research
  • Adequate knowledge of past and current research related to Tolkien and his works
  • A master’s degree in any area (ABD or Ph.D. preferred)
  • Ability to review 9-12 articles per year
  • Ability to provide appropriate criticism, review, and suggestions for revision on a timely basis on all articles that you agree to peer review

Please send an email detailing your qualifications along with a CV (attachment or URL). Please send any questions to the founding and current editor of JTR: Dr. Brad Eden brad.l.eden@gmail.com

(5) SFF WRITER IS NERO BOOK AWARDS FINALIST. [Item by Steven French.] Novelists shortlisted for this year’s Nero awards in the U.K. include YA author Patrick Ness: “2024 Nero book awards shortlist announced to celebrate ‘extraordinary writing talent’” in the Guardian. “The awards are run by Caffè Nero, and launched after Costa Coffee abruptly ended its book prizes in June 2022. The prizes are aimed at pointing readers ‘of all ages and interests in the direction of the most outstanding books and writers of the year’”.

…Ness made the children’s fiction list for Chronicles of a Lizard Nobody, illustrated by Tim Miller. “Ness’s brio turns the school travails of a group of monitor lizards into a bonkers, yet convincing story about difference – and giant killer robots,” wrote reviewer Kitty Empire in the Observer….

…A total of 16 books were shortlisted across the four categories of fiction, debut fiction, nonfiction and children’s fiction. Winners of each category will be announced on 14 January 2025 and receive £5,000, and an overall winner of the Nero Gold prize will be revealed on 5 March and win an additional £30,000….

(6) LOSCON 51 GOHS. Next year’s Loscon guests of honor were announced at the end of last weekend’s convention.

(7) A TAKE ON RAY BRADBURY. For all those of us who are C.S. Lewis fans – by which I mean, me – here’s an interesting letter on offer from Heritage Auctions: “C. S. Lewis. Autograph letter signed”.

Responding to a request for a photograph, Lewis offers his opinions on Ray Bradbury:

“Dear M. Rutyearts / I enclose a photo; whether good or not I do not know, but it is the only one I can find. Bradbury is a writer of great distinction in my opinion. Is his style almost too delicate, too elusive, too nuancé for S[cience]. F[iction]. matter? In that respect I take him and me to be at opposite poles; he is a humbled disciple of Corot and Debussy, I an even humbler disciple of Titian and Beethoven. / With all good wishes, / Yours sincerely, C. S. Lewis.”

The same December 11 auction includes a first edition Edgar Allan Poe. Tales (1845), current bid is $2,800.

FIRST EDITION, third printing, with copyright notice in three lines and no imprints on copyright page. “Here… begins the detective story, with ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ ‘Mystery of Marie Roget,’ and primus inter pares, the character of the amateur detective who triumphs over the blundering police, in ‘The Purloined Letter.’ The earlier Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque… contains a larger number of the Poe tales of horror, which are still the artistic standard for that school, but this volume adds ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ ‘The Descent into the Maelstrom,’ and ‘The Gold Bug'” (Grolier).

(8) GUMBY. The Los Angeles Breakfast Club presents “Restoring Gumby with Mauricio Alvarado” on December 11. (From 7:00 a.m.– 9:00 a.m. at 3201 Riverside Dr, Los Angeles, CA 90027).

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION: In preparation for Gumby’s 70th next year, official Gumby licensee, Mauricio Alvarado is working on preserving and screening the work of Art Clokey. Mauricio is currently scanning and restoring the original film prints in 4K, so a new generation can meet Gumby. Join the LA Breakfast Club on December 11th to learn about the history of Gumby and see some of Mauricio’s newly restored clips — exhibited publicly for the first time!

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Mauricio Alvarado is owner of Rockin Pins and manager of the official Gumby social media channels. Thanks to the support of the new owners of ‘Gumby’, Mauricio has been actively screening and sharing the work of Art Clokey to new and old audiences across the country. Mauricio is also the co-founder of Fleischertoons, a project dedicated to locating, scanning, and distributing lost or unknown cartoons by legendary animator and filmmaker Max Fleischer.

(9) FREE READ. Sunday Morning Transport’s first story each month is free. They hope that you will subscribe to receive all the stories, and support the work of their authors. Start off December with “And You and I” by Jenna Hanchey.

(10) DEGREE OF SEPARATION? [Item by N.] “When Your Hero Is A Monster” by The Leftist Cooks is an hour-long video essay using Neil Gaiman as a framework to examine the dissonance in separating the artist from the art, tied with larger discussions of fandom and parasocial relationships. 

(11) HEAR ‘ORBITAL’. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Orbital, Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize winning novel, has been serialized on BBC Radio 4 as book of the week.  No, according to her, it is not ‘science fiction’ but ‘space realism’. Nonetheless, it is cracking hard SF…

Across 24 hours on the International Space Station, six astronauts from different nations contemplate the Earth, as continents and oceans pass beneath them. They are there to collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.

Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of one astronaut’s mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction. The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from Earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it. They begin to ask, what is life without Earth? What is Earth without humanity?

You can down load mp3 of the 15-minute episodes here… Episode 1; Episode 2; Episode 3; Episode 4; Episode 5.

(12) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Anniversary: Back To The Future (1985)

I already discussed how important Back to the Future II was to my SFF education a couple of weeks back. But before Back to the Future II, was the original Back to the Future.  I was younger, then, by four years, and not yet immersing myself as much into fandom. So I do recall a Starlog article about the movie, but it would take the sequel and the discussions of same to really get me excited for the franchise outside of the movie itself.

But this was 1985 and I was able to go to movies on my own at last, and so a time travel movie was tailor-made for my tastes. Sure, I didn’t quite get the music or the joke about Marvin Barry, but I knew what I liked. And I liked this. I could see Marty as a slightly older brother, cool, trying his best in a dysfunctional family (boy did that hit) and then trying desperately to save his own future even as problematic as it is.

I didn’t quite realize then what the movie was doing, by giving us a slice of the 1950’s, it was recapitulating things like Happy Days. Hill Valley circa 1955 is a paean to a time and place that has fixated itself strongly in the American Imagination. As Grease was an image of that time for an earlier generation, as was Happy Days, Hill Valley’s Back to the Future is a vision of a very much idealized time. Now, I can see the weaknesses and the problems of that idealized time but it is winningly described and shown here.  And given that Marty’s original timeline present isn’t all that great…in a sense Marty going back to the 1950’s is him going to a happier and simpler time for him (if not that he has to save his own existence). 

Is it any wonder that McFly not only manages to save his future…but to *improve* upon it? 

But for all of the time travel shenanigans and the culture of the 1950’s as compared to the 1980’s, where this movie sings is in its cast. From Michael J. Fox in the Marty McFly role, to Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Crispin Glover and especially Thomas Wilson as Biff make this movie what it is, and is a great deal of why it was such an out of nowhere success. (that, and of course, DeLoreans are cool).  It actually grew in box office success, and held off strong competitors for weeks. The movie was, and remains, a phenomenon.

(13) STEPPING INTO HISTORY. [Item by Steven French.] Jade Cuttle talks about her love of re-enacting: “’I’m a mixed Black female historical re-enactor in a sea of men with beards’” in the Guardian.

…I can shake the shackles of gender, race and class and slip into skins different to my own. It’s a reclamation of power, though not everyone agrees. There’s always debate about the authenticity of historical TV dramas and films. Look at the uproar that greeted Ridley Scott daring to “lob a few sharks” into the Colosseum in Gladiator II, and the mixed Black female actor Caroline Henderson playing a leader in Netflix’s Vikings: Valhalla. As a mixed Black female re-enactor in a sea of men with beards, I’m not always fully authentic myself either. It’s a struggle to squeeze my afro hair beneath a coif, wimple or helmet, unless I tame the fuzzy strands into tiny plaits first. The costumes are not always made for people like me. But the groups I’m part of encourage me to explore a range of roles. We are 21st-century organisations based on modern values….

(14) COMPANIONS, VILLAINS, AND OTHERS. Valerie Estelle Frankel has put together Women in Doctor Who (McFarland):

Over the past half-century Doctor Who has defined science fiction television. The women in the series—from orphans and heroic mothers to seductresses and clever teachers—flourish in their roles yet rarely surmount them. Some companions rescue the Doctor and charm viewers with their technical brilliance, while others only scream for rescue. The villainesses dazzle with their cruelty, from the Rani to Cassandra and Missy. Covering all of the series—classic and new—along with Class, K9, Torchwood, The Sarah Jane Adventures, novels, comics and Big Finish Audio adventures, this book examines the women archetypes in Doctor Who.

(15) SCREENTIME. JustWatch has shared its Top 10 streamers for November 2024.

(16) HIGH AND DRY. [Item by Steven French.] “Did Venus ever have oceans? Scientists have an answer” reports Reuters. And the answer is … nope!

Earth is an ocean world, with water covering about 71% of its surface. Venus, our closest planetary neighbor, is sometimes called Earth’s twin based on their similar size and rocky composition. While its surface is baked and barren today, might Venus once also have been covered by oceans?

The answer is no, according to new research that inferred the water content of the planet’s interior – a key indicator for whether or not Venus once had oceans – based on the chemical composition of its atmosphere. The researchers concluded that the planet currently has a substantially dry interior that is consistent with the idea that Venus was left desiccated after the epoch early in its history when its surface was comprised of molten rock – magma – and thereafter has had a parched surface…

(17) NO, SF GOT IT RIGHT! [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Did you watch that video File 770 posted a couple of days ago? “Minicon 15 (1979)-History of the Future-Ted Sturgeon Clifford Simak Lester del Rey Gordon Dickson”?

Interestingly, in it they said that SF got space travel wrong and that private companies would never go to space because it was too expensive hence the provenance of Governments only…

Now, Star Trek was familiar then (1979) and the authors would know of William Shatner… but never guess he would get to space courtesy
of a private company.

Just had to share that musing….

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

Pixel Scroll 9/23/24 Slartibartleby, The Pixeler

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(1) RETRO HUGOS IN THE REAR VIEW MIRROR? “’The Conclusion of the Retro Hugo Era’ – A Glasgow 2024 panel and my thoughts” at A Deep Look by Dave Hook.

The Short: I moderated a panel at Glasgow 2024, A Worldcon for our Futures, titled “The Conclusion of the Retro Hugo Era” on Saturday evening, August 10, 2024. We had a good discussion of the Retro Hugo Awards, warts and all. The title turned out to be prescient; the next day, the WSFS Business Meeting voted in favor of Constitutional Amendment F.19 (No More Retros), which will be up for ratification at Seattle 2025, Building Yesterday’s Futures–For Everyone. More thoughts below.

The Long: I was selected to moderate a panel at Glasgow 2024, A Worldcon for our Futures, titled “The Conclusion of the Retro Hugo Era” on Saturday evening, August 10.

I had applied to be on the panel because I love the Retro Hugo Awards and have loved doing the reading and voting for them, even though I came to have some serious reservations.

I had voted for the the 1944 (43) Retro Hugos in 2019, and the 1945 (44) Retro Hugos in 2020. Paul Fraser at www.sfmagazines.com was especially helpful in gathering and sharing resources that I used for these. I served on several panels for the 1946 Project (and several that were not) at Chicon 8 Worldcon in 2022 that focused on works that could have been nominated if there had been a 1947 (46) Retro Hugo held that year.

Former Hugo finalist Trish E. Matson, Fan Guest of Honor Mark Plummer, Perriane Lurie and Hugo Award winner Cora Buhlert joined me on this panel….

(2) COLLISION COURSE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] No appeal has yet been made by the Internet Archive to the Supreme Court in their copyright case with Hachette, et al. But if they do appeal, the case could see a fascinating intersection with one of the hottest topics in American politics—to wit, The Supremes v. Ethics. “How A Copyright Case Is Shining A Spotlight On SCOTUS Ethics Issues” at Huffpost.

Six out of the high court’s nine justices have published books with the publishers involved in the case. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson have all published books or signed book deals with Penguin Random House. HarperCollins has published books by justices Clarence Thomas and Gorsuch. And Justice Brett Kavanaugh is signed to a book deal with Hachette. (None of the publishers responded to requests for comment.)

The case involves a digital lending library operated by the nonprofit Internet Archive that it expanded during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The publishers challenged the archive’s practice of copying and lending out digital copies of library books with no limit, through what the archive calls its National Emergency Library, as a violation of copyright that threatens authors’ earnings. A district court and the appeals court both ruled in favor of the publishers, finding that the archive’s digital lending practices violated copyright law.

The Internet Archive has not appealed to the Supreme Court yet. A spokesperson for the Internet Archive told HuffPost the nonprofit is still reviewing the appeals court decision. But if the case were to reach the high court, it would raise serious questions about the self-enforcement of conflict of interest rules by the individual justices at a time when the court has been embroiled in ethics controversies, particularly around Thomas’ receipt of gifts from friends and wealthy conservative benefactors….

(3) BOOK BANNING ACCELERATES. The New York Times studies how “New State Laws Are Fueling a Surge in Book Bans”.

States and local governments are banning books at rates far higher than before the pandemic, according to preliminary data released by two advocacy groups on Monday.

Books have been challenged and removed from schools and libraries for decades, but around 2021, these instances began to skyrocket, fanned by a network of conservative groups and the spread on social media of lists of titles some considered objectionable.

Free speech advocates who track this issue say that in the past year, newly implemented state legislation has been a significant driver of challenges.

PEN America, a free speech group that gathers information on banning from school board meetings, school districts, local media reports and other sources, said that over 10,000 books were removed, at least temporarily, from public schools in the 2023-24 school year. That’s almost three times as many removals as during the school year before.

About 8,000 of those bans came just from Florida and Iowa, where newly implemented state laws led to large numbers of books being removed from the shelves while they were assessed.

Lawmakers and those who describe themselves as parental rights advocates favor restricting access to certain books because they don’t believe children should stumble upon sensitive topics while alone in the library, or without guidance from their parents. Many think that some books that have traditionally been embraced in school libraries are inappropriate for minors, including, for example, “The Bluest Eye,” by Toni Morrison, which includes references to rape and incest.

The law in Iowa, which went into effect in 2023, prohibits any material that depicts sexual acts from all K-12 schools, with the exception of religious texts. It also limits instruction about gender and sexual orientation until seventh grade. In Florida, a law that took effect before the 2023-24 school year said that any book challenged for “sexual conduct” must be removed while it is reviewed….

(4) THE MINISTRY OF TIME. Coincidentally I just finished reading this novel yesterday, and agree it deserves high praise. “Review: The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley” by Rich Horton at Strange at Ecbatan. Beware spoilers aplenty, however.

…If at first it reads like a convenient use of the time travel device to tell a love story, and a story about the experience of expatriates (either in time or space), with some cli fi mixed in, by the end it’s all of those things plus a book that gloriously and whole-hearted buys into the strangeness and paradoxes of time travel. There is a wild twist at the end, which I only guessed half of in advance. The love story is beautifully handled. The depiction of near future life is fraught and believable. The examination of the expat experience, the depiction of the horrors of the Franklin Expedition, and the intricate plot are very well done….

(5) DIALING BACK. Colleen Doran reveals some personal issues here – “In Which the Artist Chronicles Life With OCD: The Cognitive Behavioral Therapy That is My Art” at Colleen Doran’s Funny Business — ultimately to explain why she now spends little time looking at social media.

I suppose it’s no surprise for me to admit right here in print I’ve had a lifelong problem with OCD. Not as in, “I’m a little OCD because I like a well organized pantry,” but the kind of OCD that sees you spending hours a day doing something repetitively and it kind of ruins your life in small bites of hell.

I posted a snippet of this previously private essay here a short time ago, but here’s the whole lightly edited enchilada from May 2020.

OCD morphs. When I was a kid, it was one set of habits, then it became another set of habits, which I’m not going to belabor, because they’re all weird and embarrassing. 

Early on I knew nothing about what was happening because who had ever heard of it, and no internet. I assumed it was a willpower issue, and  trained myself to turn my nervous energy into something productive, like channeling that prickly power into drawing comics.

I had no idea that this is a foundation of cognitive behavioral therapy, so go me….

(6) GRRM Q&A. Daniel Roman interviewed GRRM while they were both in Glasgow for the Worldcon. “The George R.R. Martin interview: On fandom, writing, and his work beyond Westeros” at Winter Is Coming. Roman obligingly avoided areas that would be de rigeur for a journalist: “There were a few topics we agreed ahead of time to steer clear of, like Martin’s long-awaited sixth Song of Ice and Fire novel The Winds of Winter, or the HBO shows Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon.”

WiC: Yeah, I went to Discon in Washington D.C. in 2021. That’s the only other one I’ve been to so far.

GRRM: Well, they’re very big these days and they have multi-tracks of programming. Those early Worldcons had one track of programming, and they had panels. And there was a room where a panel was, the panel would have four or five people on it, but they certainly weren’t inviting guys like me who had published four stories, you know? Every panel was all big names. So I would go to a panel, it’d be Isaac Asimov, and talking to Frederick Pohl, and talking to Harlan Ellison, and you know, then there would be another panel…but no one was asking me to be on a panel yet. You had to pay your dues in those days, and little by little, I did pay my dues. I actually [chuckles], as I said, I won the Hugo in ’75…it still didn’t get me on any panels. The first time I was put on a panel was ’77. But they were great opportunities to see friends, to make professional contacts, and once I started getting on panels and doing autographings, to promote myself.

(7) IS THIS HEAVEN? NO, IT’S IOWA. CrimeReads looks back to the Seventies and the challenge of “Bringing Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution to the Big Screen”. Novelist Meyer also wrote the screenplay.

…Meyer has a special talent as an adaptor of other people’s work, but quickly learned that it isn’t as easy when the material you are adapting is your own. “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution was relatively early in my career,” he observes, “and it was me working with my own material. I’ve listened to many authors talking about adapting their own material, and they have a great deal of difficulty in being ruthless. It happens with directors too. You can have a shot you really love, and it was very hard to get . . . it’s a beautiful shot. But if you discover it doesn’t belong in the movie, you have to accept that it has to go.”

Meyer’s early inclination to wordiness wasn’t because he began his career as a novelist, but instead is due to his time in college at the University of Iowa. “I was a theater major, and so I started out with a sort of stage orientation. That means dialogue. As a beginning screenwriter, I started out writing tons of dialogue because I thought it was like a play. But in screenwriting imagery dominates dialogue, and if it’s too talky it doesn’t feel cinematic. You have to be ruthless. I have learned since that time to write very, very spare stuff . . . descriptions, dialogue, everything. It is just the bare minimum of what you need. Certainly with my own stuff, I never had the feeling that it was so wonderful that it was incapable of improvement.”…

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Mike Glyer.]

Born September 23, 1971 – Rebecca Roanhorse, 53. Entering the field with a roar, Rebecca Roanhorse’s first published sff story “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian ExperienceTM” (Apex Aug 2017) won both the Hugo and Nebula, and helped her win the Astounding Award for best new writer in 2018.

Rebecca Roanhorse

She has written two novels in the Star Wars universe, Resistance Reborn (2019) and Dark Vengeance (2020). However, she’s best known for being what Science Fiction Encyclopedia’s John Clute describes as “an advocate of the concept of Indigenous Futurism”, exemplified by her novels Trail of Lightning and Black Sun (both Hugo and Nebula finalists; the latter an Ignyte winner), and Storm of Locusts, and her short story “A Brief Lesson in Native American Astronomy” (also an Ignyte-winner).  

Black Sun and Fevered Star are part of the Between Earth and Sky series, joined this summer by a third book, Mirrored Heavens.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Bizarro lists some nearly supers.
  • Carpe Diem is having a bad day.
  • Breaking Cat News for September 22 was missing on a few sites. And now we know why – it crossed several genres!
  • Wizard of Id complains about pet people.
  • Tom Gauld overhears a wistful voice.

(10) ‘BOLTS TRAILER. Is this news to us? It came out in May. “’Thunderbolts’ Trailer: Marvel Recruits Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan” in Variety.

…In the upcoming superhero pic, starring “Captain America” mainstay Sebastian Stan and “Black Widow” cast members Florence Pugh and David Harbour, reformed Marvel villains are forced to team up to conduct covert operations on behalf of the U.S. government.

“Everyone here has done bad things,” Pugh says in the trailer, brought face to face with the rest of the team. “Shadow ops, robbing government labs, contract kills. … Someone wants us gone.”…

(11) CASH THAT GLOWS IN THE DARK. The Royal Canadian Mint has struck a 1 oz. Pure Silver Glow-in-the-Dark Coin commemorating “Canada’s Unexplained Phenomena: The Langenburg Event”.

A 50-year-old story of UFOs at a farm near Langenburg, Sask. — a town 220 kilometres east of Regina — is being celebrated by Canada Post and the Canadian Royal Mint with a new coin.

The story of the UFOs and the five crop circles from 1974 have prompted Canada Post and the Royal Canadian Mint to issue a coin that commemorates the event. “The Langenburg Event” coin is the seventh in the Canada’s Unexplained Phenomena series.

The coin is one ounce of pure silver, glows in the dark, and can be purchased online for C$140.

Coin #7 brings you a close encounter of the second kind.

Some crop circles are harder to dismiss… and that’s what makes Saskatchewan’s most famous UFO/UAP incident so intriguing! Viewed from the witness’s perspective, the Langenburg Event is the seventh unusual encounter re-told as part of our popular Canada’s Unexplained Phenomena series of coins.

On the morning of September 1ˢᵗ, 1974, a farmer was swathing his fields near the town of Langenburg, Saskatchewan, when he noticed five highly polished, steel-like objects at the edge of a slough. Upon closer look, he noticed these unusual saucer-shaped objects were rotating rapidly and hovering just above the ground. He continued to observe them until they suddenly rose up, emitting a strange vapour as they silently disappeared into the sky. But the objects hadn’t vanished without a trace; according to the RCMP incident report, they left behind “five different distinct circles, caused by something exerting what had to be heavy air or exhaust pressure over the highgrass,” which was curious enough to warrant serious attention both locally and worldwide.  

… A blacklight flashlight (included) activates the glowing colour effect on your coin’s reverse, which presents a view of the five mysterious objects described by the eyewitness. When the blacklight paint technology is activated, these objects are seen emitting an eerie glow as they fly away, leaving radioactive circular patterns in the field below.

An image of King Charles in profile is on the back, which if you think of it as a disembodied head probably helps the theme along.

(12) SOUND TRACK FOR THE SPANISH DRACULA. The LA Opera invites audiences to relive Hollywood’s Golden Age with a rediscovered classic film at the historic United Theater: “LA Opera Spanish Dracula with Live Orchestra”. Daily performances October 25-27.

While Bela Lugosi was vamping it up in front of the cameras by day, a night crew shot an alternate version of Dracula in Spanish — same sets, same story, new cast. This second incarnation of the classic, starring  Carlos Villarías, was largely forgotten until a recent renaissance, and many now hail it as the superior version.

See it on the big screen (with English subtitles) as Resident Conductor Lina González-Granados leads the LA Opera Orchestra in a live performance of a new LAO-commissioned score by Academy Award-winning composer Gustavo Santaolalla (The Last of Us, Brokeback Mountain), who’ll also star as a featured performer.

(13) YUCKTASTIC. Beware! The Disgusting Food Museum tries to live up to its name!

Food is so much more than sustenance. Curious foods from exotic cultures have always fascinated us. Unfamiliar foods can be delicious, or they can be more of an acquired taste. While cultural differences often separate us and create boundaries, food can also connect us. Sharing a meal is the best way to turn strangers into friends.

The evolutionary function of disgust is to help us avoid disease and unsafe food. Disgust is one of the six fundamental human emotions. While the emotion is universal, the foods that we find disgusting are not. What is delicious to one person can be revolting to another. Disgusting Food Museum invites visitors to explore the world of food and challenge their notions of what is and what isn’t edible. Could changing our ideas of disgust help us embrace the environmentally sustainable foods of the future?

The exhibit has 80 of the world’s most disgusting foods. Adventurous visitors will appreciate the opportunity to smell and taste some of these notorious foods. Do you dare smell the world’s stinkiest cheese? Or taste sweets made with metal cleansing chemicals?…

For example, there are these “Disgusting Christmas Foods”. Here’s one of the tamer examples on the list.

Christmas Tinner

… a more modern type of craziness – the video game retailer GAME in the UK sells Christmas Tinner every year, a full Christmas dinner in a can. They started selling them in 2013 and has now added a vegan and a vegetarian option.

The Christmas Tinner layer list in full:

Layer one – Scrambled egg and bacon
Layer two – Two mince pies
Layer three – Turkey and potatoes
Layer four – Gravy
Layer five – Bread sauce
Layer six – Cranberry sauce
Layer seven – Brussel sprouts with stuffing – or broccoli with stuffing
Layer eight – Roast carrots and parsnips
Layer nine – Christmas pudding

The tin will run you £2, but sadly it’s currently out of stock.

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I remember the Larry Niven ‘Known Space’ story “Neutron Star” in which a spaceship with an impervious hull came too close to a neutron star and nobody knew why the crew inside were smeared across the inner hull…

And then there was the Arthur Clarke mini-short in a similar vein, “Neutron Tide” in which a battle cruiser did something similar and all that was left was a ‘star mangled spanner’.

What larks.

But what of the real thing?

Matt O’Dowd over at  PBS Space Time looks at a black hole’s tidal properties.   

If you track the motion of individual stars in the ultra-dense star cluster at the very center of the Milky Way you’ll see that they swing in sharp orbits around some vast but invisible mass—that’s the Sagittarius A* supermassive black hole. These are perilous orbits, and sometimes a star wanders just a little too close to that lurking monster, leading to its utter destruction in the spectacular phenomenon known as a tidal disruption event. We’ve never seen a TDE in the Milky Way, but we’ve seen them in distant galaxies—and we now know how to spot stellar destructions so extreme that they reveal properties of the black hole itself.

Over a quarter million views since Friday.

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

Internet Archive Loses “Fair Use” Appeal to Second Circuit

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The U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals today affirmed a district court decision that the Internet Archive’s “Free Digital Library” violates the suing publishers’ copyrights. (A complete copy of the Second Circuit decision in Hachette vs. Internet Archive can be downloaded at the link. A discussion of the 2023 district court decision is here.)

The court summarized its ruling as follows:

Internet Archive creates digital copies of print books and posts those copies on its website where users may access them in full, for free, in a service it calls the “Free Digital Library.” Other than a period in 2020, Internet Archive has maintained a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio for its digital books: Initially, it allowed only as many concurrent “checkouts” of a digital book as it has physical copies in its possession. Subsequently, Internet Archive expanded its Free Digital Library to include other libraries, thereby counting the number of physical copies of a book possessed by those libraries toward the total number of digital copies it makes available at any given time.

Plaintiffs-Appellees―four book publishers―sued Internet Archive in 2020, alleging that its Free Digital Library infringes their copyrights in 127 books and seeking damages and declaratory and injunctive relief. Internet Archive asserted a defense of fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act. The district court rejected that defense and entered summary judgment for Plaintiffs.

This appeal presents the following question: Is it “fair use” for a nonprofit organization to scan copyright-protected print books in their entirety, and distribute those digital copies online, in full, for free, subject to a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio between its print copies and the digital copies it makes available at any given time, all without authorization from the copyright-holding publishers or authors? Applying the relevant provisions of the Copyright Act as well as binding Supreme Court and Second Circuit precedent, we conclude the answer is no. We therefore AFFIRM.

The Court’s analysis revolved around “four non-exclusive factors” for determining whether a particular use is “fair”: (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

In the Court’s analysis of the fourth factor, “The effect of the use on the potential market for or value of the work”, it said:

…Within the framework of the Copyright Act, IA’s argument regarding the public interest is shortsighted. True, libraries and consumers may reap some short-term benefits from access to free digital books, but what are the long-term consequences? If authors and creators knew that their original works could be copied and disseminated for free, there would be little motivation to produce new works. And a dearth of creative activity would undoubtedly negatively impact the public. It is this reality that the Copyright Act seeks to avoid. While IA claims that prohibiting its practices would harm consumers and researchers, allowing its practices would―and does―harm authors. With each digital book IA disseminates, it deprives Publishers and authors of the revenues due to them as compensation for their unique creations…

The Internet Archive posted this response to the decision:

We are disappointed in today’s opinion about the Internet Archive’s digital lending of books that are available electronically elsewhere. We are reviewing the court’s opinion and will continue to defend the rights of libraries to own, lend, and preserve books. 

What statutory damages the Internet Archive should owe is a question the district court is expected to revisit once the plaintiffs reduce their damage claims to judgment. In the district court case, the Internet Archive asked that damages be remitted if the court rejected IA’s fair use defense, citing Section 504 of the Copyright Act which directs courts to remit statutory damages where the infringer is a “nonprofit educational institution, library, or archives,” or one of its agents or employees, and the defendant “infringed by reproducing the work in copies” and “believed and had reasonable grounds for believing” that its use of the work was fair use. At the time of the district court’s decision they said the request was premature and that IA may renew the argument “in connection with the formation of an appropriate judgment” (i.e., when the plaintiffs try to get paid.)

Pixel Scroll 7/3/24 The Magic Morlock, So Pixeled And So New

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(1) OCTAVIA’S BOOKSHELF RESCUED BY CROWDFUNDING. A  GoFundMe appeal reopened to keep Octavia’s Bookshelf in business raised its target amount almost immediately reports Pasadena Now: “Black Woman-Owned Bookstore Relaunches Urgent Fundraiser to Stay Open”.

A fundraiser to save a local bookstore has raised almost $70,000 in a matter of days.

Nikki High, founder and owner of Octavia’s Bookshelf in Pasadena, has reopened a GoFundMe campaign to raise funds for her struggling bookstore, Octavia’s Bookshelf. 

In a heartfelt social media post, she revealed her heavy heart, tired soul, and months of sleepless nights, and said she needed transparency with her community….

As Nikki High explained in her GoFundMe call:

We managed to open last year to great support and lots of excitement. This past year has been some of the most rewarding and difficult times in my life.

Bookselling is a tricky animal and being a Black Women entrepreneur adds another level of hardship that I was not quite prepared for.

Being underresourced but determined, I have fought through the highs and lows of retail. I’ve made some mistakes, and I’ve learned so much. Of all the sleepless nights and hardships, it’s the community we’ve built that has kept me going and reaffirmed to me that Octavia’s Bookshelf is a space we need to keep in our community.

To be completely transparent, we need an urgent influx of cash to keep us afloat right now. The coffers are dry and the reserves are non existent. We are being faced with tremendous financial mountains to climb to get here we need to be to be sustainable and I need your help once again…

The bookstore, named for Octavia Butler, opened its doors on February 18, 2023, at 1361 North Hill Ave, in Pasadena. 

(2) CORY PANSHIN Q&A. [Item by Andrew Porter.] Alexei Panshin’s widow on their collaborations together, Robert A. Heinlein, other subjects. “Interview with Cory Panshin” at One Geek’s Mind.

John Grayshaw: How did you and Alexei become writers and critics of science fiction?

We both started off as SF and fantasy readers from an early age and then as  fans. Alexei has written detailed accounts of his pathway in a couple of places, but the short version is that as a teenager he began subscribing to fanzines. Then he received a typewriter as a high school graduation present and the idea struck him that he should be a writer. He started out by writing a novel which was very amateurish. (As I recall from the one time I read the manuscript, it was something like a spaceship full of librarians seeking refuge from an evil empire.) He made better progress doing book reviews for fanzines, as well as short stories, of which he wrote about twenty between 1960 and 1965.

As for me, it’s a little more complicated, since I didn’t launch right into writing the way Alexei did. When I was twelve, I started trying to write a spy novel, and only got a few pages in. I recently found that old notebook and discovered to my surprise that I’d kept adding pages on and off for the next four years before giving up entirely and launching into a science fiction story about a spaceship crew that goes astray in hyperspace and finds itself battling a jabberwock that attacks them with its eyes of flame.

That might have been the beginning and end of my abortive science fiction writing career, but that fall I started my freshman year at Harvard College, where my roommate Leslie Turek and I discovered we had a lot in common; but also that Harvard was not particularly geek-friendly, being primarily dedicated to grooming the scions of the ruling class. So instead, we found our way to the MIT Science Fiction Society, where we were quickly drafted to co-edit the MITSFS fanzine and from there got drawn into science fiction fandom.

There weren’t a lot of women in fandom at that time, so it was easy for us to get noticed. Alexei spotted me in costume at the 1966 Worldcon and we were married in 1969. Around the same time, my fellow MITSFS member Fuzzy Pink married Larry Niven, while Leslie became actively involved in convention-running and eventually chaired the 1980 Worldcon.

Except for occasional con reports and other fanzine articles, I wasn’t doing much writing in the late 60s, but once I married Alexei we discovered a mutual interest in theorizing about the nature of science fiction and began to do critical writing in collaboration….

(3) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to gab over garlic bread with Sally Wiener Grotta in Episode 229 of his Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Sally Weiner Grotta

Sally Wiener Grotta’s latest two books are Of Being Woman, a collection of feminist science fiction stories, and Daughters of Eve, a discussion workbook which uses tales of biblical matriarchs to explore the modern world. Her short fiction has appeared in anthologies and magazines such as the North Atlantic Review, DreamForge, Across the Universe: Tales of Alternative Beatles, and others.

Her previous books include Digital Imaging for Visual Artists (co-authored with Daniel Grotta), and the novels Jo Joe, which was a Jewish Book Council Network book, and The Winter Boy, which was a Locus Magazine Recommended Read. Sally is also co-curator of the Galactic Philadelphia Salon reading series. Plus she’s also an award-winning journalist and photographer who has traveled on assignment to all seven continents.

We discussed when we first met (and can’t quite figure out whether it was a third or a quarter of a century ago), how her first storytelling impulse began because she’d fall asleep while being read stories as a child, the importance of the question “what if?,” why she often finds horror difficult to read, the early experience which allowed her to have such a good relationship with editors, the story she wrote in Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing workshop which caused that Grand Master to say “what a darling monster,” when we should submit to editorial suggestions and when we should run screaming, and much more.

(4) MTV NEWS THROWN LIFELINE BY INTERNET ARCHIVE. “Search MTV News Articles Archive at Wayback Machine” reports Variety.

In the days after Paramount Global disabled mtvnews.com and mtv.com/news — removing a trove of hundreds of thousands of articles about music and pop culture from the internet — the not-for-profit Internet Archive assembled a searchable index of 460,575 web pages previously published at mtv.com/news.

You can search the MTV News archive on the organization’s Wayback Machine at this link. Prior to Internet Archive aggregating the MTV News pages into a collection, there was no way to locate articles based on search terms.

Paramount shut down the MTV News division as part of a larger round of layoffs in May 2023… 

(5) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

July 3, 1937 — Tom Stoppard, 87. I was delighted to discover that playwright Tom Stoppard has crafted far more genre than I thought, considering I all I knew he had done was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (which is adjacent genre if not actually genre). If you’ve not seen it yet, it is quite delightful. 

He scripted Brazil, which he co-authored with Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeow. Brazil was actually part of the Trilogy of Imagination, all written or co-written by Gilliam, which consisted of Time Bandits, Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Not my favorite of those three films by any means but certainly interesting to catch at least once I’d say. 

Tom Stoppard

He also did the final Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade rewrite of Jeffrey Boam’s rewrite of Menno Meyjes’s screenplay. Now I like that film a lot but not as much as Raiders of The Lost Ark, which I consider perfect. The Suck Fairy broke her buckles when she tried to sully Raiders of The Lost Ark’s reputation recently. 

He did one genre adjacent script, the adaptation of the Robert B. Parker and Raymond Chandler novel Poodle Springs for television. Chandler had completed four chapters before his death, so on the occasion of the centenary of Chandler’s birth, Parker was asked by the estate of Raymond Chandler to complete the novel. No, I’ve not read it for the same reason I don’t watch films or series off novels that I really like — I prefer the originals, thank you. 

Let’s not overlook Shakespeare in Love which he co-authored with Marc Norman. Any film with Geoffrey Rush in it is certainly going to be worth seeing and if the script is written by Stoppard in some fashion as it was here, it’s likely that the dialogue is going to be stellar. It certainly is here. 

He was even involved in the largest SF franchise ever as  he did the dialogue polish of George Lucas’s Revenge of the Sith screenplay. Polish? Interesting phrase there. 

(6) COMICS SECTION.

(7) TEDDY HARVIA CARTOON.

(8) STARLOST AND FOUND. [Item by Michael Burianyk.] Any SF fan who was around in the early 70s will remember the TV series Starlost. Canadian writer Den Valdron is running a Kickstarter for his Starlost Unauthorized book which has six more days to go to reach its stretch goal. Den is a good writer (who has written unauthorized works discussing ‘Dr Who’ and ‘Lexi’) with a lot of energy and will bring a lot to understanding this little known piece of Science Fiction history in the context of Canadian cultural identity. I think the whole project is timely and is worthy of support. “Starlost Unauthorized by D.G. Valdron”.

(9) CHURCH ARCHITECTURAL FEATURES FROM OUTER SPACE. Atlas Obscura introduces us to the “Cathedral of Salamanca’s Astronaut – Salamanca, Spain”. (Image at the link.)

…The thing that makes old hoaxes so frustrating is that they are hard to tease out from their actual history. Something fabricated in the 1600s made to look like it is from the 1400s can be very hard to pick out. The astronaut on the Cathedral of Salamanca is not in fact a hoax, but an approved and modern addition to the Cathedral, however it has all the earmarks of something which may provide for great confusion some 500 years from now.

Built between 1513 and 1733, the Gothic cathedral underwent restoration work in 1992. It is a generally a tradition of cathedral builders and restorers to add details or new carvings to the facade as a sort of signature. In this case after conferring with the cathedral, quarry man Jeronimo Garcia was given the go-ahead to add some more modern images to the facade.  He included an astronaut floating among the vines, a dragon eating ice cream, a lynx, a bull, a stork, a rabbit, and a crayfish….

A Scottish abbey, likewise, has a modern addition — a xenomorphic spout: “’Alien’ Gargoyle – Paisley, Scotland”. (Image at the link.)

…In 1991, the abbey underwent some necessary restoration work. Twelve of its 13 gargoyles were so badly ruined from water damage they had to be removed. The work was carried out by an Edinburgh-based stone masonry company, which replaced the carvings with newer models.

Apparently, some of the stone masons had a bit of fun with their creations. One of the gargoyles is certainly unique, which is fitting, as medieval tradition holds that no two gargoyles can look the same. The creature bears a strong resemblance to H.R. Giger’s Xenomorph from the Alien franchise. As the films were popular throughout the 1980s and early ‘90s, it’s likely one of the workers drew a bit of inspiration from its otherworldly antagonist….

(10) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “G. Rossini: Duetto para dos Gatos- Duet for Two Cats”. A YouTube commenter explains, “When you’re happy, you enjoy the music. When you’re sad, you understand the lyrics.”

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Scott Edelman, Michael Burianyk, Daniel Dern, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 6/28/24 The Infinity Kidney And Gall Stones (Powers To Be Determined)

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(1) IS IT WORTH THE BILLABLE HOURS? Courtney Milan has written a long thread on X.com sharing her skepticism about the lawsuit by Lynne Freeman against Tracy Wolff (the author of the Crave series, a popular YA vampire series), Entangled Publishing and other defendants, a suit which covered here the other day in Pixel Scroll 6/26/24 item #3. Thread starts here. Here are several excerpts.

(2) I’VE BEEN CHEATED, BEEN MISTREATED, WHEN WILL I BE LOVED? Victoria Strauss takes up the question “Cheated, Swindled, or Scammed: What’s a Writer to Do?” at Writer Unboxed.

You’ve chosen a publishing service, engaged a marketing company, entered a writing contest, hired an editor, inked a representation agreement, or contracted with a publisher, hybrid or traditional.

You’re aware that there are no guarantees: your book won’t necessarily become a bestseller. Your story may not win the contest prize. Your agent may not find a home for your manuscript. But your expectation is that the person or company will keep their promises, adhere to timelines, deliver acceptable quality, and generally honor whatever contract or agreement you both have signed.

What if they don’t, though? What if, after paying out a lot of money and/or waiting in vain for a service to be completed and/or receiving a product too shoddy to use, you realize you’ve been conned? What are your options? What can you do?…

Strauss first considers “Getting Your Money Back”.

Scammers generally don’t do refunds (never mind the money-back guarantees that many promise). You can certainly ask: it’s a reasonable starting point. Just be prepared to be refused, or promised a refund that somehow never arrives.

A more direct method, if you paid with a credit or debit card or via PayPal, is to dispute the charges. This doesn’t always succeed: if some degree of service was delivered, even incomplete and/or of poor quality, the decision may go against you.  However, I’ve heard from many writers who’ve been able to get some or all of their money back this way.

You do need to be prompt. There’s a limited window to file disputes–which rules out situations where the scam only becomes apparent over a longer period of time (although, from personal experience, credit card companies will sometimes honor disputes beyond their deadlines if you can make a strong enough case)…

(3) IA APPEAL HEARD IN PUBLISHER’S SUIT. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The Internet Archive is appealing the judgment of a lawsuit from publishers that recently forced IA to remove hundreds of thousands of books from their online library. The appeals court panel did not rule from the bench and listened to arguments for significantly longer than originally scheduled. Lawyers for IA have said they believe this is a good sign for the archive. “Appeals court seems lost on how Internet Archive harms publishers” at Ars Technica.

… “There is no deadline for them to make a decision,” Gratz said, but it “probably won’t happen until early fall” at the earliest. After that, whichever side loses will have an opportunity to appeal the case, which has already stretched on for four years, to the Supreme Court. Since neither side seems prepared to back down, the Supreme Court eventually weighing in seems inevitable…

(4) PUBLIC DOMAIN FORECAST. Voronoi has a clever infographic showing “Which Characters are Next to Enter the Public Domain?”

(5) MEDICAL UPDATE. Sharon Lee was visiting family when she collapsed: “Life Going On”.

I was scheduled to spend some time with family this week — and in fact did spend some time with family this week, just not as much and not in the way we all would have preferred to see the thing done….

…Once we made base, vacation things — TV, games, talk — commenced.  It was while we were all standing around the kitchen, shooting bulls, as one does, when, in the middle of Making a Point, I — folded up.  The next few minutes were exciting for everybody but me. From my perspective, one second I was talking, the next, I was looking at the floor tiles and asking, “What happened?”

That was when things got exciting for me.  My prize for beeping out in the middle of a sentence was a ride in the ambulance to the island hospital, an overnight in ER, many tests, including CAT scan, MRI, blood tests, cognitive and physical/balance tests.  When I was admitted to ER, the Operating Theory was that I had suffered a posterior stroke.  By the time I was returned to the wild, on Tuesday afternoon, the thinking was divided between soft “stroke” and hard “stress.”

I also won both the coveted “no driving” and “no alcohol” awards which are mine at least until I can see my regular doctor, on July 9….

(6) STEVE MILLER MEMORIAM ON BAEN PODCAST. This week on the Baen Free Radio Hour, “Steve Miller, In Memoriam; and Tinker by Wen Spencer”.

Description: Celebrating the life and works of Steve Miller, coauthor of the Liaden Universe® series, with a collection of excerpts from past BFRH episodes; and Tinker by Wen Spencer, Part 58

For the audio-only podcast click here. For the video podcast click here.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born March 1, 1952 — Steven Barnes, 72.

By Paul Weimer. While Barnes often gets tied to his very talented wife Tananarive Due, he is a first class talent in his own right. I first came across his work, first with the Dream Park works he co-wrote with Larry Niven. Dream Park really deserves a post of its own in appreciation, and before (IMHO) it went south around book three, the idea of a LARPING RPG park was amazing and a “Why didn’t anyone think of this?” sort of idea. Barnes, with Niven, correctly predicted, back in the early 1980’s, just how popular RPGs and D&D would become and the Dream Park novels definitely ride that wave. 

Steven Barnes

I followed Barnes into other collaborations…the Heorot series, Achilles Choice…but the novels that for me define Barnes and his work are Lion’s Blood and Zulu’s Heart. These novels, together are two of the finest examples of alternate history written.  The turning point is never really said inside of the text itself (Barnes avoids the Turtledove technique of having characters think about alternate history). But the idea that the Global South turns out to come out on top in ancient history and then to the present means that we have Black Muslim estates across North America, and the backward island of Ireland is just good for slave raids for useful white men and women not suited for anything else.  

While the novels are ostensibly about Aidan, a young Irish boy who winds up a slave in the household of Kai, a rich and powerful young scion of a noble house, the novels eventually put Kai and his story front and center. The novelsl provide a rich and unflinching look at a “19th century” where the Middle Passage is taking white slaves across the ocean (many dying on the voyage), where powerful aristocratic families squabble and scheme for political power. And oh yes, there is a looming war with the Aztecs. They remain today some of the best alternate history novels I’ve ever read.

Born June 28, 1946 — Robert Asprin. (Died 2008.)

By Paul Weimer. I started off with Robert Asprin, among other authors with the Thieves World anthologies.  The 1980’s was a high water mark for shared world anthologies, sometimes more than a dozen authors contributing stories to the shared world. And while George R R Martin’s Wild Cards continues to this day, the second most successful of these shared worlds was Robert Asprin’s Thieves World. Set in the city of Sanctuary, an edge of the empire city under very uneasy rule, I came across Thieves World first as a RPG supplement for D&D, and then the actual books themselves. Asprin did a lot of the worldbuilding and scene setting in the anthology, and created The Vulgar Unicorn, the one true bar of which all fantasy bars are but shadows.

Eventually the series petered out, had side novels set far away from the city of Sanctuary, but Asprin’s initial idea helped color what a fantasy city, especially for roleplaying games, in a way only matched, I think, by Lankhmar. Lots of fantasy cities in SFF since clearly show inspiration, or acknowledge it as an inspiration. And why not?  An edge of the empire city with a spare prince sent to rule it, a resentful native population, myth and magic around every street corner? What fantasy reader wouldn’t want to spend time there?

Bob Asprin in 1993. Photo by Sharon72015

I followed Asprin to other series of his, particularly the Myth series. The Myth series, featuring a callow untrained wizard and a demon who has lost his magic, was multiverse before Multiverse was cool, as Skeeve and Aahz have adventures across a number of worlds and dimensions. And the cover art by Phil Foglio (whose work I was enjoying in Dragon magazine) definitely was a selling point for me to pick them up and give them a try.

There are many clever bits within the series. For example, what are Demons, after all, but Dimensional Travelers? Deva, the dimension which is just a bazaar for making deals,  is the home of Devils.  The broad puns and humor of Asprin’s MYTH series would be the standard by which I would benchmark humor in SFF until I later encountered the likes of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett.  And yet, even given that, The Bazaar on Deva remains the standard for me for interdimensional bazaars.  I can see how the Bazaar definitely influenced places in fantasy fiction like, for example, Sigil, the City of Doors. 

It would be a mythstake not to celebrate his birthday today.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • Eek! is a reminder to watch where one steps
  • F Minus demonstrates the dark side of badge collecting

(9) A LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO BOOP. “Betty Boop Time Travels to New York, and Broadway, Next Spring” promises the New York Times (article is unlocked.)

A long-in-the-works musical about Betty Boop, a curvy flapper first featured in animated films of the 1930s, will open on Broadway next spring following a run in Chicago last year.

“BOOP! The Betty Boop Musical” has some thematic echoes of last year’s “Barbie” movie, although it was in the works before that film came along. The stage production imagines that Boop leaves her early-20th-century film life to travel to present-day New York, where musical comedy ensues. (Her first stop: Comic-Con.)…

(10) PKD FEST IN COLORADO. David Agranoff’s latest Amazing Stories column is “25th Century Five and Dime #6: The Philip K. Dick Festival 2024 -My Recap”, where names are dropped.

…We ran into our podcast guest Jonathan Letham at the bar. He is a bestselling author, and very respected. I just finished reading his novel The Feral Detective. I realize many at the fest were a little star-struck meeting Letham. I told one of those star-struck not to be as he clearly is one of us. He sat in all the workshops listening and adapting his keynote speech, something I was impressed with. When we shook hands he said he was a listener to our podcast, I thought he was just being nice, but as we talked he mentioned something we talked about on a four-year episode of DHP about Vulcan’s Hammer. So the man is Legit….

(11) LEFT IN THE LURCH. “NASA’s ISS Spacesuit Situation Turns Grim” reports Gizmodo.

Two NASA astronauts were preparing to exit the International Space Station (ISS) for a second attempt at a spacewalk, but it was once again called off due to a concerning malfunction with the spacesuit.

NASA was forced to cancel a spacewalk on Monday due to a water leak in the service and cooling umbilical unit on astronaut Tracy Dyson’s spacesuit. “There’s water everywhere,” Dyson could be heard saying during the live feed from the ISS, pointing to an alarming malfunction with the space station’s aging suits that put other astronauts at risk in the past. NASA is in desperate need of new spacesuits for its astronauts, but in a troubling development, the company contracted to design the suits has just pulled out of the agreement….

(12) CATCHING FRESH WAVES. [Item by Steven French.] Personally I like the one that involves putting a diamond into a quantum superposition! “Five new ways to catch gravitational waves — and the secrets they’ll reveal” in Nature.

The detection of gravitational waves has provided new ways to explore the laws of nature and the history of the Universe, including clues about the life story of black holes and the large stars they originated from. For many physicists, the birth of gravitational-wave science was a rare bright spot in the past decade, says Chiara Caprini, a theoretical physicist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. Other promising fields of exploration have disappointed: dark-matter searches have kept coming up empty handed; the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva has found nothing beyond the Higgs boson; and even some promising hints of new physics seem to be fading. “In this rather flat landscape, the arrival of gravitational waves was a breath of fresh air,” says Caprini.

That rare bright spot looks set to become brighter….

(13) NEW BATMAN SERIES. Animation Magazine is there when “Official ‘Batman: Caped Crusader’ Trailer Steps Out of the Shadows”.

…Welcome to Gotham City, where the corrupt outnumber the good, criminals run rampant and law-abiding citizens live in a constant state of fear. Forged in the fire of tragedy, wealthy socialite Bruce Wayne becomes something both more and less than human — the Batman. His one-man crusade attracts unexpected allies within the GCPD and City Hall, but his heroic actions spawn deadly, unforeseen ramifications.

The series is a reimagining of the Batman mythology through the visionary lens of executive producers J.J. Abrams, Matt Reeves and Bruce Timm….

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

Pixel Scroll 6/22/24 A Multitverse Of Mikes Putting Out An Infinity Of Scrolls. Shall We Go Read Them? All We Need To Do Is Follow Pixel Through The Nearest Wall

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(1) YOU PAYS YOUR MONEY AND YOU TAKES YOUR CHANCE. The Sports Geek proves to be rather clueless in its attempt to set the “2024 Hugo Awards Odds, Predictions, Best Bets”. But it made me click, which is a win for them, right? Here’s one of their lines.

The following Hugo Awards 2024 odds are courtesy of BetUS:

Why wouldn’t the front-runner among bettors be Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors, which just won the Nebula? But for my own prediction I’m going with Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory, partly based on the buzz, and partly my having read the finalists. (Actually reading the contenders – that’s cheating, isn’t it?)

(2) META ONLY RESPONDS TO A CREDIBLE THREAT. Engadget reports litigation that ironically explains “How small claims court became Meta’s customer service hotline”.

Last month, Ray Palena boarded a plane from New Jersey to California to appear in court. He found himself engaged in a legal dispute against one of the largest corporations in the world, and improbably, the venue for their David-versus-Goliath showdown would be San Mateo’s small claims court.

Over the course of eight months and an estimated $700 (mostly in travel expenses), he was able to claw back what all other methods had failed to render: his personal Facebook account.

Those may be extraordinary lengths to regain a digital profile with no relation to its owner’s livelihood, but Palena is one of a growing number of frustrated users of Meta’s services who, unable to get help from an actual human through normal channels of recourse, are using the court system instead. And in many cases, it’s working.

Engadget spoke with five individuals who have sued Meta in small claims court over the last two years in four different states. In three cases, the plaintiffs were able to restore access to at least one lost account. One person was also able to win financial damages and another reached a cash settlement. Two cases were dismissed. In every case, the plaintiffs were at least able to get the attention of Meta’s legal team, which appears to have something of a playbook for handling these claims.

Why small claims?

At the heart of these cases is the fact that Meta lacks the necessary volume of human customer service workers to assist those who lose their accounts. The company’s official help pages steer users who have been hacked toward confusing automated tools that often lead users to dead-end links or emails that don’t work if your account information has been changed. (The company recently launched a $14.99-per-month program, Meta Verified, which grants access to human customer support. Its track record as a means of recovering hacked accounts after the fact has been spotty at best, according to anecdotal descriptions.)

Hundreds of thousands of people also turn to their state Attorney General’s office as some state AGs have made requests on users’ behalf — on Reddit, this is known as the “AG method.” But attorneys general across the country have been so inundated with these requests they formally asked Meta to fix their customer service, too. “We refuse to operate as the customer service representatives of your company,” a coalition of 41 state AGs wrote in a letter to the company earlier this year….

(3) TESTING FOR EMPATHY. [Item by Steven French.] “The Stormtrooper Scandal review – inside the Star Wars art sale that wrecked lives” in the Guardian is a review of a tv show that aired on BBC2 (available via iPlayer) about selling images of customized Star Wars Stormtrooper helmets as Non-Fungible Tokens and my eye was caught by the opening paragraph:

Here’s a tricky ethical conundrum – how much can you command yourself to care about the suffering of a monumental dickhead? Do you say a breezy “Not at all!” and move on with your day? Do you say “I have limited resources and prefer to expend them on non-dickhead entities, ta?” Do you say “No dickhead is all dickhead, just as none of us is entirely free of dickheadery ourselves – thus our common humanity demands of us always a degree of empathy and compassion?” Have a think, then test yourself again at the end of 90 minutes of The Stormtrooper Scandal. Send the results on a postcard to the usual address…

(4) DIGITAL LIBRARY PULLS DOWN BOOKS AS LITIGATION CONTINUES. “Internet Archive forced to remove 500,000 books after publishers’ court win” – Ars Technica is counting.

As a result of book publishers successfully suing the Internet Archive (IA) last year, the free online library that strives to keep growing online access to books recently shrank by about 500,000 titles.

IA reported in a blog post this month that publishers abruptly forcing these takedowns triggered a “devastating loss” for readers who depend on IA to access books that are otherwise impossible or difficult to access.

To restore access, IA is now appealing, hoping to reverse the prior court’s decision by convincing the US Court of Appeals in the Second Circuit that IA’s controlled digital lending of its physical books should be considered fair use under copyright law. An April court filing shows that IA intends to argue that the publishers have no evidence that the e-book market has been harmed by the open library’s lending, and copyright law is better served by allowing IA’s lending than by preventing it.…

… In an open letter to publishers signed by nearly 19,000 supporters, IA fans begged publishers to reconsider forcing takedowns and quickly restore access to the lost books.

Among the “far-reaching implications” of the takedowns, IA fans counted the negative educational impact of academics, students, and educators—”particularly in underserved communities where access is limited—who were suddenly cut off from “research materials and literature that support their learning and academic growth.”

They also argued that the takedowns dealt “a serious blow to lower-income families, people with disabilities, rural communities, and LGBTQ+ people, among many others,” who may not have access to a local library or feel “safe accessing the information they need in public.”

“Your removal of these books impedes academic progress and innovation, as well as imperiling the preservation of our cultural and historical knowledge,” the letter said.

“This isn’t happening in the abstract,” Freeland told Ars. “This is real. People no longer have access to a half a million books.”…

… Asked for comment, an AAP spokesperson provided Ars with a statement defending the takedown requests. The spokesperson declined to comment on readers’ concerns or the alleged social impacts of takedowns.

“As Internet Archive is certainly aware, removals of literary works from Internet Archive’s transmission platform were ordered by a federal court with the mutual agreement of Internet Archive, following the court’s unequivocal finding of copyright infringement,” AAP’s statement said. “In short, Internet Archive transmitted literary works to the entire world while refusing to license the requisite rights from the authors and publishers who make such works possible.”…

(5) GRIFTING FOR DOLLARS. Lucidity threatens “I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again”. God this is witty – and very informative!

The recent innovations in the AI space, most notably those such as GPT-4, obviously have far-reaching implications for society, ranging from the utopian eliminating of drudgery, to the dystopian damage to the livelihood of artists in a capitalist society, to existential threats to humanity itself.

I myself have formal training as a data scientist, going so far as to dominate a competitive machine learning event at one of Australia’s top universities and writing a Master’s thesis where I wrote all my own libraries from scratch in MATLAB. I’m not God’s gift to the field, but I am clearly better than most of my competition – that is, practitioners like myself who haven’t put in the reps to build their own C libraries in a cave with scraps, but can read textbooks, implement known solutions in high-level languages, and use libraries written by elite institutions.

So it is with great regret that I announce that the next person to talk about rolling out AI is going to receive a complimentary chiropractic adjustment in the style of Dr. Bourne, i.e, I am going to fucking break your neck. I am truly, deeply, sorry.

I. But We Will Realize Untold Efficiencies With Machine L-

What the fuck did I just say?

I started working as a data scientist in 2019, and by 2021 I had realized that while the field was large, it was also largely fraudulent. Most of the leaders that I was working with clearly had not gotten as far as reading about it for thirty minutes despite insisting that things like, I dunno, the next five years of a ten thousand person non-tech organization should be entirely AI focused. The number of companies launching AI initiatives far outstripped the number of actual use cases. Most of the market was simply grifters and incompetents (sometimes both!) leveraging the hype to inflate their headcount so they could get promoted, or be seen as thought leaders1.

The money was phenomenal, but I nonetheless fled for the safer waters of data and software engineering. You see, while hype is nice, it’s only nice in small bursts for practitioners. We have a few key things that a grifter does not have, such as job stability, genuine friendships, and souls. What we do not have is the ability to trivially switch fields the moment the gold rush is over, due to the sad fact that we actually need to study things and build experience. Grifters, on the other hand, wield the omnitool that they self-aggrandizingly call ‘politics’2. That is to say, it turns out that the core competency of smiling and promising people things that you can’t actually deliver is highly transferable….

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Compiled by Paul Weimer.]

June 22, 1947 — Octavia Butler. (Died 2006.)

By Paul Weimer: The first Octavia Butler story I encountered caused me not to read more of her work for over a decade afterwards.

The year was 1984. I was a young SF reader. Isaac Asimov’s SF magazine was one of the things I read as part of my SF education. June 1984 had a striking cover image for Octavia Butler’s story Bloodchild that drew my eye right away. I had to Know More!

But then I read the story itself. A hard-hitting Butler with an emphasis on biology, and the idea of human men becoming part of a life cycle of aliens’ breeding, I was, to say the least, a little traumatized at the idea of someone being a host for parasitic alien eggs! I got right away the parallels Butler was making and as a reader I was poleaxed.

I decided that Butler was Not for Me (or, Too Much For Me) and did not read her again for years. 

Finally, I was persuaded to give Butler another go, and I picked up Wild Seed. This experience was completely and rather different.  I was absolutely struck by the power and grace of her imagination, her consummate writing skill, and (yes) her ability to make me feel. I didn’t mind that I had started the series out of order, I was sucked in right away and was absorbed by the book, its pair of main characters, and the world Butler has made.

I then went on to other books in the Patterrnist sequence, the Parable novels, and in general, steadily consumed her oeuvre ever since. One of the best SF writers of all time? I don’t think that’s a stretch. Taken from us too soon? Absolutely yes, no question. (Recall that she won a MacArthur Award Genius grant, in addition to her SFF awards and nominations)

And yes, I have given Bloodchild another read…and yes, it STILL freaks me out. Some things never do change. 

While I think her Parable books are the most timely books for today (and the ones I would push into the hands of interested readers), my favorite Octavia Butler piece might not be a novel at all, but rather the short story “Speech Sounds”. It focuses on her biological SF concerns, describing the aftermath of a plague which renders nearly everyone unable to speak. For those who still can talk…life is not precisely pleasant in the post-plague Los Angeles. But the bonds and the character development and worldbuilding packed into the short space of the story show just what Butler could do as a writer.

For those interested, I recount in even more detail my experience with Octavia Butler and her work in an essay in the anthology Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, edited by Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal (Twelfth Planet Press, 2017). One of the weirdest things I’ve ever had as a SFF person is someone wanting me to sign my essay in their copy of the book. I attribute that to the power Octavia Butler has, not mine own modest talents.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

(8) JOURNEY PLANET. Journey Planet’s Issue 82 – “Be The Change” is out. Fortunately, Chris Barkley thought File 770 would be interested in knowing.

Paul Weimer, Allison Hartman Adams, James Bacon, and Chris Garcia bring you a look at WorldCons and what things might be done to bring positive change! There’s discussion of the Recent Hugo Controversies, about changed needed in governance, proposals that will be sent on to the WorldCon Business Meeting, and much more! 

(9) UNDESERVED DOOM, THAT’S WHO. CBR.com names “10 Doctor Who Characters Who Deserved Better Fates”.

…Doctor Who has a habit of giving viewers very sympathetic and likeable characters and then killing them off just as audiences have fully embraced them. This raises the stakes for Doctor Who fans, but it sometimes results in characters (particularly female characters) being killed in order to further the Doctor’s storyline and make them sad. Many of these characters got meaningful deaths, but there’s no denying that too often their deaths were more about the Doctor, or his companions or enemies, than truly about them….

Here’s one of the heartbreakers:

8. Chantho Never Got a Chance to Develop Past ‘Utopia’

Chantho (Chipo Chung) was an absolutely adorable alien woman. She had a fascinating quirk to her language where she had to say the first and last syllables of her name at the beginning and end of every sentence, and not doing so was like swearing to her. She and Martha (Freema Agyeman) bonded over this, and they could have had a great friendship if not for what happened next.

When kindly old Professor Yana turned out to be the evil Master, he killed the frightened Chantho with an electrical wire. She did, however, manage to get a shot off at him in her last moments, causing the Master to regenerate. It’s still a shame, however, that Chantho died, as Doctor Who has never had an alien companion like her before, and she could have been something intriguingly different.

(10) CHAPLIN, ALPERT, HENSON – WHO’S NEXT? Gizmodo alerts fans that “The Jim Henson Company’s Iconic Studio Is Now Up for Sale”. It’s a Hollywood property with quite a history. We hope it isn’t fated to be developed into another 600-unit apartment building.

According to a new report from the Wrap, the Jim Henson Company is selling its Los Angeles studio lot at 1416 La Brea Avenue as “part of a much longer-term strategy” to merge an undisclosed future location with its Jim Henson Creature Shop in Burbank, California. The building has headquartered the company since 2000, shortly after the release of the Sci-Fi Channel’s Farscape and Muppets From Space.

Before becoming ground zero for all things felt and googly-eyed, the historic lot served as Charlie Chaplin Studios from 1917-1953; it was then taken over by Red Skelton, whereupon it became the shooting location for multiple classic TV series, including The Adventures of Superman and Perry Mason. Grander still, the building went on to house A&M Studios from 1966-1999, where Nine Inch Nails recorded The Downward Spiral and U.S.A for Africa recorded charity single “We Are the World.”

(11) PLAYING TO SURVIVE. NPR witnesses “How a board game can help vulnerable communities prepare for catastrophic wildfires”.

As climate change increases the intensity of wildfires, experts are struggling to prepare vulnerable communities for potential catastrophes. One new approach is a community-wide board game that tests resilience….

KATHERINE MONAHAN, BYLINE: About 40 people are gathered in the Tomales Town Hall. They’re sitting around folding tables covered with giant maps of the region, and each map is a game board. The point of the game – to safely evacuate this remote area as wildfires threaten. First, residents calculate whether they start with a bonus or a penalty.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Do you have an evacuation plan?

MONAHAN: They add points for how prepared they are in real life, like by having a go bag of essentials or being signed up to receive emergency alerts on their phones. They subtract points for factors that could slow them down, like having extended family or multiple pets. Next, they choose their game pieces….

… MONAHAN: Maiorana says residents must think about these things ahead of time. It can mean life or death. Deadly fires have raged through California in recent years, including the Camp Fire, which killed 85 people in Paradise, another isolated town. Tiny, coastal Tomales has only two main roads in and out.

MAIORANA: My secret agenda with this game is actually to get people talk to one another….

(12) SPEAKER TO ANIMALS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In this week’s Science journal there is an article by Carlo G. Quintanilla on how SF helped him become a better science communicator. He is a health science policy analyst at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. “Science and fiction”.

As I stepped out of the punishing Arizona heat and into the cool air-conditioned halls of the convention centre, I saw a sea of costumed attendees. Some wore elaborate steampunk attire; others portrayed their favourite Marvel or Star Wars characters. “Why did I agree to this?” I thought as I made my way to the room where I’d be giving a talk about the science behind the classic Dune books by Frank Herbert. I had been struggling for years to find new ways to communicate science to a broad audience. My hope was to inspire admiration and awe of what science can teach us about the world through the imaginative lens of science fiction. At first I felt like an imposter at this pop culture convention. Then I saw the audience’s excitement…

(13) LEST DARKNESS FALL. Henri Barde refutes the wonderful vision in “Space-Based Solar Power: A Skeptic’s Take” at IEEE Spectrum.

… Space-based solar power is an idea so beautiful, so tantalizing that some argue it is a wish worth fulfilling. A constellation of gigantic satellites in geosynchronous orbit (GEO) nearly 36,000 kilometers above the equator could collect sunlight unfiltered by atmosphere and uninterrupted by night (except for up to 70 minutes a day around the spring and fall equinoxes). Each megasat could then convert gigawatts of power into a microwave beam aimed precisely at a big field of receiving antennas on Earth. These rectennas would then convert the signal to usable DC electricity.

The thousands of rocket launches needed to loft and maintain these space power stations would dump lots of soot, carbon dioxide, and other pollutants into the stratosphere, with uncertain climate impacts. But that might be mitigated, in theory, if space solar displaced fossil fuels and helped the world transition to clean electricity…

…Despite mounting buzz around the concept, I and many of my former colleagues at ESA are deeply skeptical that these large and complex power systems could be deployed quickly enough and widely enough to make a meaningful contribution to the global energy transition. Among the many challenges on the long and formidable list of technical and societal obstacles: antennas so big that we cannot even simulate their behavior.

Here I offer a road map of the potential chasms and dead ends that could doom a premature space solar project to failure. Such a misadventure would undermine the credibility of the responsible space agency and waste capital that could be better spent improving less risky ways to shore up renewable energy, such as batteries, hydrogen, and grid improvements. Champions of space solar power could look at this road map as a wish list that must be fulfilled before orbital solar power can become truly appealing to electrical utilities….

(14) WHERE THEY’RE TUNING IN TO THE BOYS. JustWatch analyzed the reception of the latest season of The Boys to see how this release compared to the previous three seasons. They found that this season is the second most popular among global viewers, with season 2 ranking first in 89 countries on their Streaming Charts.

JustWatch created this report by pulling data from the week following the release of “The Boys”, and compared it to the previous three seasons. JustWatch Streaming Charts are calculated by user activity,  including: clicking on a streaming offer, adding a title to a watchlist, and marking a title as ‘seen’. This data is collected from >40 million movie & TV show fans per month. It is updated daily for 140 countries and 4,500 streaming services.

(15) OOPS-EL. “Billy Zane teases ‘Superman’ Easter egg in Marlon Brando biopic” – Entertainment Weekly has the story. (Watch the Marlon Brando as Jor-El Superman outtake at the link.)

Billy Zane is set to play Marlon Brando in a new biopic — and the actor tells Entertainment Weekly that the project will briefly touch on the legendary film star’s time playing Kal-El’s Kryptonian dad in Superman.

In a conversation primarily focusing on his Lifetime movie Devil on Campus: The Larry Ray Story, the Titanic star reveals that he recently shot a last-minute addition to Waltzing with Brando. “We added this one little Easter egg for the credit sequence that we just shot a week and a half ago. That’s being color-timed and slotted in as we speak,” he tells EW. “Literally, we just added a little outtake as Jor-El — of him doing outtakes during the filming of [Superman]. We found that [footage] online and thought it was the funniest thing.”

The footage in question is a flubbed line reading from the 1978 superhero film, wherein Brando says, “Develop such conviction in yourself Alal, Kal-El, Ralph, whatever your name is,” forgetting the name of his on-screen super-son as he performs a dramatic monologue.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Andrew (not Werdna), SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 9/12/23 For Us, the Scrolling

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(1) MICHAEL CHABON SUES META OVER AI COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT. At The Hollywood Reporter:“Meta, OpenAI Class Action Lawsuit: Novel Authors Claim Infringement”.

Michael Chabon and other decorated writers of books and screenplays sued Meta on Tuesday in California federal court in a lawsuit accusing the company of copyright infringement for harvesting mass quantities of books across the web, which were then used to produce infringing works that allegedly violate their copyrights. OpenAI was sued on Sept. 8 in an identical class action alleging the firms “benefit commercially and profit handsomely from their unauthorized and illegal” collection of the authors’ books. They seek a court order that would require the companies to destroy AI systems that were trained on copyright-protected works.

…As evidence that AI systems were fed authors’ books, the suit points to ChatGPT generating summaries and in-depth analyses of the themes in the novels when prompted. It says that’s “only possible if the underlying GPT model was trained using” their works.

“If ChatGPT is prompted to generate a writing in the style of a certain author, GPT would generate content based on patterns and connections it learned from analysis of that author’s work within its training dataset,” states the complaint, which largely borrows from the suit filed by [Paul] Tremblay.

And because the large language models can’t operate without the information extracted from the copyright-protected material, the answers that ChatGPT produces are “themselves infringing derivative works,” the lawsuit against Meta says….

(2) CHENGDU PROGRAM PARTICIPANTS. File 770 asked Chengdu Worldcon committee member Joe Yao for a list of the people who have been added as Worldcon guests since the recent offer of help went out. No names were provided, however, Yao made this statement:

We kept inviting guests from both China and abroad, and now we have about 500 guests confirmed to come. They will attend some key events including the opening ceremony, Hugo ceremony and the closing ceremony, and they will also participate in programs as either guests or speakers. My team is working closely with the overseas team on programs and we have drafted a mastersheet of the programs. It will be confirmed and released soon.

(3) BARRIERS TO TRAVEL. Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki commented on Facebook about the challenges of getting a visa.

Nigerian passport & visa issues. Recently found out the Italian visa app has more requirements than US. Then I thought maybe China’s. Someone just told me that’s harder than the US’s. Germany might not give you visa even on their chancellor’s request. Is there any one that’s easy (possible) for a Nigerian?

When I was in the US, anytime Africans saw I was on a b1-b2 visa they used to be shocked out of their skulls. Like you find someone with the complete infinity gauntlet and stones. So for all these to be harder, Lol.

It’s really something to be a Nigerian that isn’t chained down and utterly grounded. Meanwhile what it took to get my US visa & the price I had to and still pay for it gifted me PTSD and damage I might never be able to afford treatment for. But hey, na me wan dream. Lol

(4) NASFIC MINUTES AVAILABLE. [Item by Kevin Standlee.] The minutes of the NASFiC WSFS Business Meeting at Pemmi-Con are now published on the WSFS Rules page here. (Scroll down to “MINUTES of the 2023 WSFS Business Meeting of the 15th NASFiC”.)

(5) ABRAHAM AND FRANCK Q&A. Award-winning sci-fi writers Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck talk with Meghna Chakrabarti about the world they created in The Expanse and what they’re working on next. “’The Expanse’ authors on ‘the importance of complicating people’” at WBUR.

(6) INTERNET ARCHIVE APPEALS TO HIGHER COURT. “Internet Archive Files Appeal in Copyright Infringement Case” – Publishers Weekly has details.

As expected, the Internet Archive this week submitted its appeal in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the closely watched copyright case involving the scanning and digital lending of library books.

In a brief notice filed with the court, IA lawyers are seeking review by the Second Circuit court of appeals in New York of the “August 11, 2023 Judgment and Permanent Injunction; the March 24, 2023 Opinion and Order Granting Plaintiffs’ Motion for Summary Judgment and Denying Defendant’s Motion for Summary Judgment; and from any and all orders, rulings, findings, and/or conclusions adverse to Defendant Internet Archive.”

The notice of appeal comes right at the 30-day deadline—a month to the day after judge John G. Koeltl approved and entered a negotiated consent judgment in the case which declared the IA’s scanning and lending program to be copyright infringement, as well as a permanent injunction that, among its provisions, bars the IA from lending unauthorized scans of the plaintiffs’ in-copyright, commercially available books that are available in digital editions.

“As we stated when the decision was handed down in March, we believe the lower court made errors in facts and law, so we are fighting on in the face of great challenges,” reads a statement announcing the appeal on the Internet Archive website. “We know this won’t be easy, but it’s a necessary fight if we want library collections to survive in the digital age.”…

(7) GARETH EDWARDS VIRTUAL CONVERSATION. MIT Technology Review will hold an online event “Humanity and AI: A conversation with the director of ‘The Creator’” at LinkedIn on Thursday, September 14, 2023, at 2:30 p.m. Eastern. Appears that LinkedIn registration is required.

As many today try to imagine the future of our world with artificial intelligence, MIT Technology Review’s senior editor of AI, Melissa Heikkilä, speaks with Gareth Edwards, director of the upcoming sci-fi epic “The Creator,” about the current state of AI and the pitfalls and possibilities ahead as this technology marches toward sentience. The film, releasing September 29th and starring John David Washington and Gemma Chan, imagines a futuristic world where humans and AI are at war and fundamentally explores humanity’s relationship with AI, what it means to be human, and what it means to be alive.

(8) THE HEINLEIN SOCIETY. These are the new Officers for The Heinlein Society:

The Board of the Society voted [September 11] for its new leadership & Executive Committee effective immediately:

  • President & Chairman: Ken Walters
  • Vice President: Walt Boyes
  • Treasurer: Geo Rule
  • Secretary: Betsey Wilcox

Congratulations to all of them! 

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 12, 1897 — Walter B. Gibson. Writer and professional magician who’s best known for his work creating and being the first and main writer of the pulp character The Shadow with The Living Shadow published by Street & Smith Publications in 1933 being the first one. Using the pen-name Maxwell Grant, he wrote 285 of the 325 Shadow stories published by Street & Smith in The Shadow magazine of the Thirties and Forties. He also wrote a Batman prose story which appeared in Detective Comics #500 and was drawn by Thomas Yeates. (Died 1985.)
  • Born September 12, 1921 — Stanisław Lem. He’s best known for Solaris, which has been made into a film three times. The latest film made off a work of his is the 2018 His Master’s Voice (Glos Pana In Polish). The usual suspects have generous collections of his translated into English works at quite reasonable prices. (Died 2006.)
  • Born September 12, 1940 — John Clute, 83. Critic, one of the founders of Interzone (which I avidly read) and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (with Peter Nicholls) and of the Encyclopedia of Fantasy (with John Grant) as well as writing the Illustrated Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction. All of these publications won Hugo Awards for Best Non-Fiction. And I’d be remiss not to single out for praise The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror which is simply a superb work.
  • Born September 12, 1942 — Charles L. Grant. A writer who said he was best at what he called “dark fantasy” and “quiet horror”. Nightmare Seasons, a collection of novellas, won a World Fantasy Award, while the “A Crowd of Shadows” short garnered a Nebula as did “A Glow of Candles, a Unicorn’s Eye” novella. “Temperature Days on Hawthorne Street” story would become the Tales from the Darkside episode “The Milkman Cometh”. Both iBooks and Kindle have decent but not outstanding selections of his works including a few works of Oxrun Station, his core horror series. (Died 2006.)
  • Born September 12, 1952 — Kathryn Anne Ptacek, 71. Widow of Charles L. Grant. She has won two Stoker Awards. If you’re into horror. Her Gila! novel is a classic of that genre, and No Birds Sings is an excellent collection of her short stories. Both are available from the usual suspects. She is the editor and publisher of the writers-market magazine The Gila Queen’s Guide to Markets. 
  • Born September 12, 1952 — Neil Peart. Drummer and primary lyricist for the prog-rock, power-trio band Rush. Neil incorporated science fiction and fantasy elements into many of Rush’s songs.  An early example is “By-Tor and the Snow Dog” from the Album “Fly By Night”.  The entire first side of the 2112 album (back when albums had sides) was the 2112 suite telling the dystopian story of a man living in a society where individualism and creativity are outlawed.  Neil is a genre author having co-written The Clockwork Angels series with Kevin J. Anderson.  (Died of glioblastoma, 2020.) (Dann Todd) 
  • Born September 12, 1965 — Robert T. Jeschonek, 58. Writer for my purposes of both genre and mysteries. He’s written short fiction set in the Trek universe. He’s also written fiction set in the Battletech, Captain Midnight, Deathlands, Doctor Who, Starbarian Saga and Tannhauser universes. We really need a concordance to all these media universes. Really we do. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Candorville is where an author claims to focus on the positive. But does he?

(11) WESTERCON 75 ANNOUNCEMENT. Arlene Busby, chair of the cancelled Westercon 75, announced today that all membership refunds have been issued. Also, the transfers have been completed for all those members who requested that their membership monies be transfer to Loscon 49.

Similarly, refunds have been issued to all Dealers who requested them. And transfers have been completed for Dealers who requested their fees be transferred to Loscon 49.

Busby adds, “We thank everyone for their support and patience in getting all these transactions processed. If you have any questions please contact me at westercon75chair1@gmail.com.”

(12) TREK THEME PERFORMED IN CHINA. From the Beijing Star Trek Day event mentioned in the September 9 Scroll comes this a video of the Michael Giacchino Star Trek theme performed on traditional Chinese instruments – see it on Weibo

(13) PULITZER PRIZE ELIGIBILITY UPDATED. “Pulitzer Board Expands Eligibility for Authors” reports Publishers Lunch.

Beginning with the 2025 awards, which opens for submissions in spring 2024, the Pulitzer Prize board has changed the eligibility requirements for the books, drama and music awards to include “US citizens, permanent residents of the United States,” and authors for whom “the United States has been their longtime primary home.” Previously, only US citizens were eligible for the awards, with the exception of authors of history books, who could be of any nationality if their book was about US history. “For the sake of consistency,” the prize board said, history books must be written by US authors according to the new guidelines.

Books still must be “originally published in English in the United States.”

In “Pulitzer Prizes expand eligibility to non-U.S. citizens”, the Los Angeles Times amplifies how the change was brought about.

…Following an August petition on the literary sites Literary Hub and Undocupoets to reconsider the U.S. citizenship requirements for the arts prizes, the Pulitzer board addressed the issue….

The petition, which was signed by many prominent authors, was created in part because of the passionate case that author Javier Zamora made against the Pulitzer’s U.S. citizen requirements in a De Los opinion piece titled “It’s time for the Pulitzer Prize for literature to accept noncitizens.”…

(14) GREG JEIN COLLECTION TO AUCTION. Model and miniature-maker Greg Jein, who died last year, had an extraordinary collection of iconic sf props and costumes, which are now going under the hammer: “’Star Wars’ Red Leader X-Wing Model Heads A Cargo Bay’s Worth Of Props At Auction” at LAist.

…The intricately made starfighter brought millions of people along for the ride as a group of plucky Rebel pilots assaulted the Death Star. Now the Star Wars scale model is being sold at auction, with bids starting at $400,000.

The “Red Leader” (Red One) X-wing Starfighter from 1977’s Star Wars: A New Hope is “the pinnacle of Star Wars artifacts to ever reach the market,” says Heritage Auctions, which is handling the sale as part of a trove of science fiction props, miniatures and memorabilia.

The X-wing tops the auction list, but it’s far, far from alone: It was found in the expansive collection of Greg Jein, an expert craftsman who was as skilled at bringing futuristic stories to life as he was devoted to preserving the models and props used to bring strange new worlds to TV and film.

…More than 550 items from Jein’s collection are now heading to auction, from Nichelle Nichols’ iconic knee-high boots and red tunic as Lt. Uhura to Leonard Nimoy’s pointy ears as Spock. A hairpiece for William Shatner’s Captain Kirk and Lt. Sulu’s golden tunic are also up for sale….

There’s more information in the Heritage Auctions press release: “Mother Lode From the Mothership: Model-Making Legend Greg Jein’s Collection Beams Up to Heritage”.

…Jein also preserved Spock’s ka’athyra, the Vulcan lute strummed in a handful of Original Series episodes, including “Amok Time ” and “The Conscience of the King “; the ray generator called into duty during several Original Series episodes; and the Universal Translator that Kirk used to talk to the Gorn in “Arena. “ There’s something for fans of nearly every episode of The Original Series, from the ahn-woon of “Amok Time “ to the agonizer used in “Mirror, Mirror” to The Great Teacher of All the Ancient Knowledge intended to restore “Spock’s Brain.” The Trek offerings in The Greg Jein Auction are nearly as vast as the final frontier itself….

(15) IN THE SPIRIT OF PHILIP K. DICK. A discussion with 81st Worldcon Chair He Xi and multidisciplinary sci-fi artist Yin Guang, “HUGO X: 2”, a Chengdu Worldcon Talkshow, closes with the jolly speculation that carbon-based life will be the scaffolding for silicon-based life – artificial intelligence – and when that building is built, “you’ll be torn down.”

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Kevin Standlee, Ersatz Culture, Daniel Dern, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]

Pixel Scroll 9/11/23 Pixels Are A Scroll’s Best Friend

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(1) USE THESE EMAILS FOR SUBMISSIONS TO WSFS BUSINESS MEETING. Donald Eastlake III, Presiding Officer of the 2023 WSFS Business Meeting, announced that if anyone is having trouble sending email to businessmeeting (at) chengduworldcon.com, there is an alternative email address available for the submission of new business: ChengduNewBusiness (at) pobox.com.

The general deadline for new business is September 19, Chengdu time.

(2) GET IA TO TAKE DOWN YOUR BOOKS. From the Authors Guild: “Update: How to Tell Internet Archive to Remove Your Books”. “The court’s decision in the Open Library lawsuit made it clear that making full-text copyrighted books available for free without permission is copyright infringement. Here’s how any author can demand the Internet Archive take down any titles that are still on its website.”

In March, four major publishers scored a resounding victory in their copyright lawsuit against Internet Archive and its so-called Open Library program. The court decisively ruled that Internet Archive’s practice of scanning books and making them freely available on its website is copyright infringement and does not constitute fair use. While the Authors Guild was not a party to the lawsuit, we supported the publishers throughout the litigation and welcomed the court’s clear rejection of Internet Archive’s “Controlled Digital Lending” theory.

Following the decision, the court directed the parties to propose specific steps that Internet Archive must take to remedy its infringement. The parties agreed, in a proposed consent judgment, that Internet Archive should be subject to a permanent court-ordered injunction barring it from making the publishers’ books available online. We have heard from some authors who are concerned that the injunction is limited to books in which the four publisher plaintiffs hold copyrights and does not cover books whose copyrights are owned by the author or a smaller publisher. Unfortunately, this case was not a class action, and therefore only the actual parties in the case can be bound by the court’s order. We were surprised and disappointed, however, that the court adopted Internet Archive’s proposal to limit the injunction to books that the publishers have made available in electronic form. As we explained, limiting the injunction in this way fails to recognize that the author has the right to decide in what formats they wish to make their books available, and that the market for a print book can be harmed by an unauthorized electronic edition as easily as the market for an ebook can.

But regardless of the scope of the injunction, the court’s decision on the main legal issue remains in place: Making full-text copyrighted books available for free on the open internet without permission is copyright infringement. That is just as true for books owned by self-published authors and micro publishers as it is for the books owned by the publishers in this case.

We therefore expect Internet Archive to comply with demands by authors who hold copyrights in their books (e.g., self-published authors and where rights are reverted) to take down any titles that are still on its website….

A model takedown letter and full directions are at the link.

(3) IT MEANS MORE THAN SIMPLY NAMING A CRATER. BBC Radio 4 program “Seek the Light, Out of the Shadows” is available online for the next few weeks.

Singer, story teller and seven-times Radio 2 Folk Awards winner, Karine Polwart brings together her love of science, history and the natural world.

Karine looks up into the dark for a story of discovery, diversity and the righting of a historical wrong.

When young geologist turned planetary scientist Annie Lennox surveyed the night sky of her Aberdeenshire home, little did she realise that one day she’d be giving names to landmarks on our closest neighbours in the solar system. In 2021, while studying for her PhD, Annie discovered an enormous 50km wide crater near Mercury’s southern pole. An area that had never been seen in sunlight until until the Messenger mission of 2015.

The crater’s distinctive spectral colour and shape caught her eye. As the first person to see it, Annie has the honour of naming it. An accomplished singer and harpist, Annie named it ‘Nairne’ after the 17th-century Scottish poet and songwriter Lady Carolina Nairne.

All the craters of Mercury are named after famous artists, Burns and Pushkin are there along with Bach and Boccaccio. And it was this dominance of white men that Annie wanted to challenge. The International Atstonomical Union’s naming conventions around new discoveries have proven themselves inherently sexist and exclusionary and Annie felt compelled to do waht she could to rebalance it. In her lifetime, Lady Carolina Nairne was responsible for such staples of Scottish folk singing as ‘Charlie is my darlin’ and ‘Caller Herrin’, yet she’s largely unknown, publishing much of her work anonymously or under pseudonyms. Now there is a corner of the universe that will forever be a testament to her talents.

(4) MAXIMUM PEEVATION. James Davis Nicoll actually got paid to tell Tor.com readers about his “Five Readerly Pet Peeves (That Have Nothing To Do With Storytelling)”

…A bugaboo I discovered when I began collecting the books published by the otherwise exemplary Haikasoru imprint has to do with the orientation of the book’s title on the spine of the book with respect to the text inside the book. In short, if the title on the spine is right way up, I expect the words on the page to be right way up when I open the book. Opening the text to discover I am holding it upside down kicks me out of the reading experience. Haikasoru eventually stopped orienting their titles in an idiosyncratic way, yay…but until then it was a distraction.

Don’t let that stop you from running out and buying every book in the Haikasoru line. The works themselves earned their places on my shelves….

(5) PUBLISHER FUNDRAISING AUCTION. “Award-Winning Indie Publisher Hosts Auction To Stay Open Amid Book Bans Targeting Poc, LGBTQ+ Youth Lit” at The Mary Sue.

Award-winning indie publisher Levine Querido is hosting an auction to stay open as book banning takes a toll on publishers. Unfortunately, Levine Querido is exactly the type of publisher most likely to be badly impacted by the rise of book banning across the United States. This isn’t only because it’s an independent publisher with less support and resources than major publishers like HarperCollins or Penguin Random House. It also has to do with the kinds of books LQ specializes in, which feature marginalized writers and artists….

The full list of auction items is here.

(6) PROPOSED LAW ABOUT CLOTHING IN CHINA. The New York Times reports “China May Ban Clothes That Hurt People’s Feelings. People Are Outraged.” Andrew Porter wonders how such a law would affect cosplay.

…Now the government is proposing amendments to a law that could result in detention and fines for “wearing clothing or bearing symbols in public that are detrimental to the spirit of the Chinese people and hurt the feelings of Chinese people.” What could be construed as an offense wasn’t specified.

The plan has been widely criticized, with Chinese legal scholars, journalists and businesspeople voicing their concerns over the past week. If it goes into effect, they argue, it could give the authorities the power to police anything they dislike. It would also be a big step backward in the public’s relationship with the government.

Under the rule of China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, the government has been fixated on control — how people think, what they say online and now, what they wear.

In July, an older man on a bus berated a young woman, on her way to a cosplay exposition — where people dress up as a characters from movies, books, TV shows and video games — for wearing a costume that could be considered Japanese style. A security guard at a shopping mall last month turned away a man who was dressed like a samurai. Last year, the police in the eastern city of Suzhou temporarily detained a woman for wearing a kimono.

These episodes were related to anti-Japanese sentiment instigated by the Chinese government. But the confrontations go beyond that.

Last month in Beijing, security guards cracking down on expressions of gay pride stopped people dressed in rainbow-themed clothes from entering a concert featuring the Taiwanese singer Zhang Huimei, better known as A-Mei. Also in August, people filed complaints about a concert by the Taiwanese singer Jolin Tsai because her fans displayed rainbow lights and some of the male fans dressed in what was described as “flamboyant” female clothing. Just last week the police in Shenzhen scolded a man who was livestreaming in a miniskirt. “A man wearing a skirt in public, do you think you’re positive energy?!” the police yelled at the man.

If the proposed amendments, which are open to public comment until Sept. 30, are approved by the national legislature, such incidents could result in fines of up to $680 and up to 15 days in police custody.

“The morality police is on the verge of coming out,” a lawyer named Guo Hui wrote on Weibo. “Do you think you can still make fun of Iran and Afghanistan?” People posted photos last week of Iranian and Afghan women wearing miniskirts and other Western-style clothes in the 1970s, before their countries were taken over by autocratic religious rulers.

Many people are concerned that the proposal doesn’t specify what would constitute an offense. The language it uses — clothing or symbols that are “detrimental to the spirit of the Chinese nation and hurt the feelings of the Chinese people” — tracks expressions the foreign ministry and official media use to voice their displeasure at Western countries and people. No one knows exactly what they mean.

Without a clear definition, enforcement of the law would be subject to the interpretation of individual officers….

(7) LOSCON 49 SPECIAL GUEST. Loscon 49 welcomes Robert J Sawyer as a Special Guest. The convention will be held at the LAX Marriott from November 24-26.

Rob is one of only eight writers in history — and the only Canadian — to win all three of the world’s top Science Fiction awards for best novel of the year: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. A prolific author, his most recent release is The Oppenheimer Alternative.

(8) DISNEY’S LATEST WAY TO EMPTY YOUR WALLET (OR MAYBE YOUR BANK ACCOUNT). [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Disney has announced they are releasing a Blu-ray + digital box set of 100 films. What’s the price, you ask? Well, if you ask, maybe you can’t afford it. Pre-orders start at Walmart.com later this month at a cool $1,500. “Disney will release a 100-film Blu-ray collection that includes Pixar movies” at The Verge.

Disney is releasing a 100-film Blu-ray collection on November 14th called the Disney Legacy Animated Film Collection (via The Wrap). Preorders will start on September 18th at Walmart.com, and we regret to inform you it will cost $1,500, according to The Wrap.

The collection includes movies from both Disney and Pixar, all crammed into three volumes of discs that span Disney’s entire feature film history from 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves to this year’s Elemental.

What’s really impressive is how little filler this package seems to have. Scrolling through the list that The Wrap published, it has every single movie I’d have wanted to see, like all of the Toy Story movies, both of The Incredibles, The Black Cauldron, Frankenweenie, and Robin Hood, but very few of the mediocre direct-to-video snoozers the company produced so many of over the years…

The Wrap’s coverage includes the complete list of films.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 11, 1856 — Richard Ganthony. Playwright of A Message from Mars: A Story Founded on the Popular Play by Richard Ganthony which is a genre version of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol. Really, it is. Published in 1912, it was filmed twice, both times as A Message from Mars (1913 and 1921) and I’m assuming as silent movies given their dates. It would be novelized by Lester Lurgan. (Died 1924.)
  • Born September 11, 1929 — Björn Nyberg. A Swedish writer known largely for his Conan stories which given that he wrote just one non-Conan story makes sense. His first book in the series was The Return of Conan which was revised for publication by L. Sprague de Camp. Likewise, they later did Conan the Avenger, Conan the Victorious, Conan the Swordsman and Sagas of Conan. The latter two are available at the usual suspects. (Died 2009.)
  • Born September 11, 1930 — Jean-Claude Forest. He became famous when he created Barbarella, which was originally published in France in V Magazine in 1962.  In 1967 it was adapted by Terry Southern and Roger Vadim and made into 1968 film of that name featuring Jane Fonda, with him acting as design consultant.  It was considered an adult comic by the standards of the time. (Died 1998.)
  • Born September 11, 1941 — Kirby McCauley. Literary agent and editor, who as the former who represented authors such as Stephen King, George R.R. Martin and Roger Zelazny. And McCauley chaired the first World Fantasy Convention, an event he conceived with T. E. D. Klein and several others. As Editor, his works include Night Chills: Stories of Suspense, Frights, Frights 2, and Night Chills. (Died 2014.)
  • Born September 11, 1951 — Michael Goodwin, 72. Ahhh — Alan Dean Foster’s Commonwealth series. I know that I’ve read at least a half dozen of the novels there and really enjoyed them, so it doesn’t surprise that someone wrote a guide to it which is how we have Goodwin’s (with Robert Teague) A Guide to the Commonwealth: The Official Guide to Alan Dean Foster’s Humanx Commonwealth Universe. Unfortunately, like so many of these guides, it was done once and never updated.
  • Born September 11, 1952 — Sharon Lee, 71. She is the co-author with Steve Miller of the Liaden universe novels and stories which are quite excellent reading with the latest being Neogenesis. The authors have won Edward E. Smith Memorial Award for lifetime contributions to science fiction, and The Golden Duck (the Hal Clement Young Adult Award) for their Balance of Trade novel.  They are deeply stocked at the usual digital suspects.
  • Born September 11, 1965 — Catriona (Cat) Sparks, 58. She’s manager and editor of Agog! Press with her partner, Australian horror writer Rob Hood. Winner of an astounding sixteen Ditmar Awards for writing, editing and artwork, her most recent in 2021 for Best Collected Work for Dark Harvest. She also collected one for The 21st Century Catastrophe: Hyper-capitalism and Severe Climate Change in Science Fiction. She has just one novel to date, Lotus Blue, but has an amazing amount of short stories which are quite stellar. Lotus Blue and The Bride Price are both available at the usual suspects. 
  • Born September 11, 1970 — Colson Whitehead, 53. Winner of the Arthur Clarke C. Award for The Underground Railroad. Genre wise, he’s not a prolific writer, he’s written but two other such works, The Intuitionists and Zone One. He’s written but one piece of short genre fiction, “The Wooden Mallet”. However he’s written seven other works including John Henry Days which is a really interesting look at that legend, mostly set at a contemporary festival. 

(10) IT PAYS TO PAY ATTENTION. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Even when it’s not something plot-essential, a lot can go by if you aren’t listening carefully (and know the territory).

Here’s an addition to the two callouts I caught in the final two episodes of The Flash (see Item 10 in the June 17, 2023 scroll)…

In the trailer for Gen V, the upcoming spinoff of The Boys, as potential supers (in a looks-like-Professor X’s School for Mutants) suggest power-related names, one student suggests “Coagula”. Which is the cape-name (or whatever we call these) of one of the late Rachel Pollack’s characters for her run on DC’s The Doom Patrol comics (after Grant Morrison’s run). (Here’s Coagula’s Wikipedia entry.)

(11) LOOK FOR IT ON STAR TREK DAY. “Paramount Teams with Kid Cudi on ‘Star Trek: Boldly Be’ Campaign” — Animation World Network has the story.

In celebration of “Star Trek Day,” Scott Mescudi, AKA Kid Cudi, is joining forces with Star Trek in a one-of-a-kind collaboration reflecting the “optimistic and inclusive spirit of adventure, discovery, imagination, and most importantly, hope, at the heart of the cultural phenomenon.” The collaboration will launch Star Trek’s new “Boldly Be” campaign.

Mescudi lends his lens to music with an original song inspired by Star Trek, an interactive gaming component, and a bold fashion collaboration that will launch in October. More details will be announced later….

(12) THERE’S PLENTY GOOD MONEY TO BE MADE SUPPLYING THE TOOLS OF THE TRADE. [Item by Steven French.] A company previously known for making chips for games is now making billions from AI: “How savvy trillion-dollar chipmaker Nvidia is powering the AI goldrush” in the Guardian.

It’s not often that the jaws of Wall Street analysts drop to the floor but late last month it happened: Nvidia, a company that makes computer chips, issued sales figures that blew the street’s collective mind. It had pulled in $13.5bn in revenue in the last quarter, which was at least $2bn more than the aforementioned financial geniuses had predicted. Suddenly, the surge in the company’s share price in May that had turned it into a trillion-dollar company made sense.

Well, up to a point, anyway. But how had a company that since 1998 – when it released the revolutionary Riva TNT video and graphics accelerator chip – had been the lodestone of gamers become worth a trillion dollars, almost overnight? The answer, oddly enough, can be found in the folk wisdom that emerged in the California gold rush of the mid-19th century, when it became clear that while few prospectors made fortunes panning for gold, the suppliers who sold them picks and shovels prospered nicely.

We’re now in another gold rush – this time centred on artificial intelligence (AI) – and Nvidia’s A100 and H100 graphical processing units (GPUs) are the picks and shovels. Immediately, everyone wants them – not just tech companies but also petro states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Thus demand wildly exceeds supply. And just to make the squeeze really exquisite, Nvidia had astutely prebooked scarce (4-nanometre) production capacity at the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the only chip-fabrication outfit in the world that can make them, when demand was slack during the Covid-19 pandemic. So, for the time being at least, if you want to get into the AI business, you need Nvidia GPUs….

(13) TIM BURTON ON AI. “Tim Burton on Seeing His Animation Style Imitated by AI: ‘It’s Like a Robot Taking Your Humanity’” at Yahoo!

…“They had AI do my versions of Disney characters!” he exclaimed in response. “I can’t describe the feeling it gives you. It reminded me of when other cultures say, ‘Don’t take my picture because it is taking away your soul.’”

Some of the AI-generated examples included Elsa from Frozen with a pale white face and wearing a black dress while standing in what appeared to be a haunted forest, as well as Aurora from Sleeping Beauty with a similar colored face but with stitches across her cheeks and lying in a long, dark dress.

While Burton acknowledged that some of the creations were “very good,” it didn’t take away from the less-than-enjoyable feeling he got from seeing his creative style imitated.

“What it does is it sucks something from you,” he explained. “It takes something from your soul or psyche; that is very disturbing, especially if it has to do with you. It’s like a robot taking your humanity, your soul.”…

(14) THE FLIP SIDE. Guillermo del Toro is positively glib by comparison. “Guillermo del Toro Talks Artificial Intelligence: ‘I’m Worried About Natural Stupidity’” at Yahoo!

Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro isn’t much worried about artificial intelligence and its impact on making entertainment content.

It’s people that keep him up at night, evidently. “People ask if I’m worried about artificial intelligence, I say I’m worried about natural stupidity. It’s just a tool, right?” the Pinocchio and Shape of Water director said during a keynote address at the Toronto Film Festival on Friday.

“If anyone wants movies made by AI, let them get it immediately. I don’t care about people who want to be fulfilled and get something shitty, quickly,” he said, arguing that AI would succeed or die based on what people did with it creatively to bring a personal vision to a screen.

“Otherwise, why not buy a printer, print the Mona Lisa and say you made it,” del Toro said during his appearance in Toronto, which was part of the TIFF Visionaries program sponsored by The Hollywood Reporter….

(15) A GIF TO HUMANITY. Here’s a Godzilla teaser. You can watch the complete commercial on Facebook.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. J. Michael Straczynski pointed Facebook followers to this is a dramatization of the Amazing Spider-man #36 that is about the terrorist attacks in New York on 9/11/2001: The Black Issue 9/11.

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

Pixel Scroll 8/15/23 All That Is Scrolled Does Not Pixel

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(1) WHEN IS HUGO VOTER PACKET COMING? Joe Yao of the Chengdu Worldcon committee responded online to questions about this year’s Hugo Voter Packet.

Sorry for the delayed release of the Hugo Packet since we are still waiting for the approval from the Administrator.

This year we have about 88 entries including all the works in fiction categories (Novel, Novella, Novelette and Short Story), and as you can see this is a Hugo finalist with the most non-Chinese works and editors/writers than ever before. We encouraged the finalists to submit their works with both Chinese and English as much as they can and some of the non-Chinese finalists are willing to do a Chinese translation version for the Chinese fandom, thus it took longer than we expected to release the packet.

But the good news is that we are almost there, and please stay posted with us on our official announcement.

Thanks for your patience.

The online Hugo voting deadline is October 1, 2023, 17:59 pm China Standard Time / September 30, 2023,23:59 pm Hawaiian Time. 

(2) CHENGDU SCIENCE FICTION MUSEUM VIDEO. [Item by rcade.] There’s video of the Chengdu Science Fiction Museum under construction embedded in a June 2023 post at KevinJamesNg: “Chengdu Science Fiction Museum #June2023| a New International Landmark”. When the video was made is unknown to me.

(3) NEW PILOT. Escape Pod announces “A Change in Crew”. Assistant editor Benjamin C. Kinney is leaving. Kevin Wabaunsee is coming aboard.

As Octavia Butler said, “All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change.”

Escape Pod is changing as our longtime Assistant Editor, Ben Kinney, leaves the bridge. Ben has been part of the crew since 2016, and he’s seen many of the changes we’ve gone through: the shift from Submittable to Moksha, from volunteer staff to paid staff, from private company to non-profit. Not to mention the co-editors transitions!

Ben has also helped to change Escape Pod for the better through his tireless work. From recruiting and overseeing the associate editors to navigating the galaxy of submissions we receive, Ben’s guidance and vision have kept our ship flying at warp speed. His knowledge of science and of what makes a good story are some of the reasons the podcast has been so successful in recent years. We will miss him.

Taking up Ben’s post is Kevin Wabaunsee. Kevin is a speculative fiction writer and a former newspaper reporter. He is a professional science news editor and the former managing editor for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA). He is a Prairie Band Potawatomi. His short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, PseudoPod, Apex, and the anthology Fighting for the Future. You can find him online at kevinwabaunsee.com. We’re excited to discover what changes Kevin has in store for us in the future….

(4) IT’S HIM. You may not realize it but the name of Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, who made news yesterday presiding over the submission of grand jury indictments against Trump and 18 others, came up in a news item here once before.

In 2019 he was the presiding officer of the Georgia state panel that officially suspended Judge Kathryn Schrader after she and three co-defendants were indicted on felony computer trespass charges. We covered it because one of those co-defendants was Dragon Con co-founder Ed Kramer. He worked for a private investigator tracking the activity on a WireShark monitoring system the judge had installed on her computer, under a belief the DA was spying on her. An Atlanta Journal-Constitution article quoted from the panel’s report:

“The Panel further finds that Judge Schrader’s personal decision to allow an outside third party to gain access to the County’s network — with its many subsequent repercussions, including the discovery that Judge Schrader’s actions allegedly enabled a convicted child molester to have access to Court data — also adversely affects the administration of that office, as well as the rights and interests of the public,” wrote Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, the presiding officer of the JQC panel.

(5) EKPEKI AND OMENGA Q&A. “Carriers of Culture: PW Talks with Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Joshua Uchenna Omenga” at Publishers Weekly.

In the stories and essays of Between Dystopias: The Road to Afropantheology (CAEZIK SF & Fantasy, Oct.), Ekpeki and Omenga explore the intersections of the fantastic and the spiritual.

What drew you to speculative fiction?

Ekpeki: I was exposed to speculative fiction at a young age through oral storytelling traditions maintained by my grandmother….

See the rest at the link.

(6) THIS IS WHY YOU HAVE TO STAY TIL THE END. “Judge Approves Final Injunction in Publishers, Internet Archive Copyright Case” — but with a twist reports Publishers Weekly. Will it make a difference? The publishers spokesperson doesn’t think so.

After more than three years of litigation, it took judge John G. Koeltl just hours to sign off on the parties’ negotiated consent judgment—but not without a final twist. In a short written opinion made public yesterday, Koeltl sided with the Internet Archive in a final dispute, limiting the scope of the permanent injunction to cover only the plaintiffs’ print books that also have electronic editions available.

In a letter to the court, lawyers for the plaintiff publishers had argued that the injunction should cover all the plaintiffs’ commercially available books, whether the books have digital editions or not. “The law is clear that the right to decide whether or not to publish a book in electronic format belongs to its authors and publishers, not IA,” the publishers’ letter argued. Furthermore, IA’s unauthorized digital editions create “clear potential market harm to the print book market,” the publisher letter claims, because a “straight, verbatim digital copy of the entire work is an obvious competing substitute for the original.”

In their letter to the court, IA attorneys argued that the injunction should be limited to the plaintiffs’ books that have digital editions available because that was what the suit addressed. “Because the parties did not have the opportunity in this case to litigate the degree to which the unavailability of digital library licensing would affect the fair use analysis, it is inappropriate for an injunction in this case, by its breadth, to effectively prejudge the outcome of that question,” IA attorneys argued.

Koeltl sided with the Internet Archive, holding that because the 127 works chosen for the suit were all commercially available works with digital editions, sweeping all the plaintiffs’ books into the final injunction risked being overbroad.

“This action concerned the unauthorized distribution of a select number of works in suit, all of which were ‘available as authorized e-books that may be purchased by retail customers or licensed to libraries,’” Koeltl pointed out in a 4-page order. “That fact was relevant to the court’s conclusion that Internet Archive was liable for copyright infringement. In particular, the court’s fourth-factor analysis emphasized the ‘thriving e-book licensing market for libraries’ and concluded that Internet Archive ‘supplants the publishers’ place in this market’ by ‘bring[ing] to the marketplace a competing substitute for library e-book editions of the works in suit.'”

In an August 15 statement, AAP president and CEO Maria Pallante said Koeltl’s decision would have “a very minimal” impact.

“The overwhelming majority of the tens of thousands of books that plaintiffs make available in print are also commercially available from them as authorized e-books,” Pallante said. “Nor are the plaintiffs precluded from enforcing under the Copyright Act the small percentage of works that may not be covered by the injunction.”…

(7) PERSONS OF INTEREST. Gizmodo learned that “Persons of Interest in Gen Con Card Theft Are Game Designers”.

At Gen Con earlier this month, a pallet of Magic: The Gathering cards worth $300,000 was stolen from the convention center; the product belonged to Pastimes, a gaming shop and MTG vendor. In an update from Indianapolis news station WTHR 13, police have identified two people of interest in the case: Thomas J. Dunbar and Andrew Pearson Giaume.

Dunbar and Pearson Giaume were attending Gen Con 2023, and might have been present to support their own card game, Castle Assault. In the photos taken from security footage, such as the one that appears above, a man that the police department has identified as a person of interest (assumed to be Dunbar) can be seen wearing a dark tee shirt with what looks like Castle Assault artwork and logotype on the back….

(8) DITCH DAY. Akemi C. Brodsky finds “5 Academic Novels That Won’t Make You Want to Go Back to School” for Tor.com.

… The academic setting works as a literary mount just as well, if not better. Students are bound by law or narrative obligation to remain, trapped, day after day, and therefore must face their demons (sometimes literally). Maybe it’s rooting for the underdog that keeps me coming back, maybe it’s just nostalgia. In any case, I am drawn to campus novels. Still, I have no desire to relive my own school days. Fiction seems to emphasize the facts and while some stories highlight first friendships and carefree youth, others remind us that education is laced with external pressures and inner turmoil….

One of those books is —

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

Of all of these novels, this is the book that makes me want to go back to school least of all. Throughout the story, Galaxy “Alex,” Stern is repeatedly traumatized by both the mystical and the mundane (in ways that keep you on the edge of your seat throughout). An undergraduate given a special acceptance to Yale, Alex is an apprentice, learning to keep watch over Yale’s infamous secret societies. Only thing is, the secret societies each practice their own brand of dark magic. What I love about this book is that as much as the narrative relies on mystical elements, Bardugo does not shy away from the evils of our own world. In fact, she carefully wraps them up in her own magic that keeps you speeding through the pages but leaves you with a chilling understanding of the true wickedness among us. She almost makes you believe that Yale’s secret societies really are practicing the occult, or worse.

(9) CUTS AT LUCASFILM ILM. “Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & Magic to Close VFX and Animation Facility in Singapore Due to ‘Economic Factors Affecting the Industry’”

Disney-owned Lucasfilm/ Industrial Light & Magic is to close its VFX and animation facility in Singapore, where more than 300 people are employed. The company points to changes in the global entertainment industry as a factor behind the decision.

“Over the next several months, ILM will be consolidating its global footprint and winding down its Singapore studio due to economic factors affecting the industry,” Disney said in a statement emailed to Variety.

The Singapore studio was founded in 2004 as Lucasfilm Animation Singapore and began operations in 2006 with work on the animated TV series “Star Wars: The Clone Wars.”

It relocated within the city-state in 2013, setting up shop in the futuristic George Lucas-owned Eclipse Building at Fusionopolis. It was nicknamed the “Sandcrawler Building,” due to its similarity to an iconic “Star Wars” vehicle. The Eclipse Building was sold by Lucas in January 2021 to the Blackstone Group.

(11) AI-ASSISTED BOOK CHALLENGES. “Iowa School District Bans 19 Books Over ‘Depictions of a Sex Act’” reports Rolling Stone, and the assessment was done using AI.

BOOKS ARE BEING pulled from the library shelves of an Iowa school district following new legislation from Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, which purports to protect children from obscene material, The Gazette reports.

The new legislation, Senate File 496, prohibits “instruction related to gender identity and sexual orientation in school districts, charter schools and innovation zone schools in kindergarten through grade six.” It requires that every book available to students be “age appropriate” and free of any “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act.”

The district used Artificial Intelligence to make is determinations on what books to ban.

The Mason City school board began reviewing library titles last month to ensure compliance with the law. The district said “lists of commonly challenged books were compiled from several sources to create a master list of books that should be reviewed. The books on this master list were filtered for challenges related to sexual content. Each of these texts was reviewed using AI software to determine if it contains a depiction of a sex act. Based on this review, there are 19 texts that will be removed from our 7-12 school library collections and stored in the Administrative Center while we await further guidance or clarity. We also will have teachers review classroom library collections.”…

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 15, 1858 — E. Nesbit. She wrote or collaborated on more than sixty books of children’s literature including the Five Children Universe series. She was also a political activist and co-founded the Fabian Society, a socialist organization later affiliated to the Labour Party. (Died 1924.)
  • Born August 15, 1906 — William Sloane. Best known for his novel To Walk The Night which Boucher, King and Bloch all highly praise. Indeed, the latter includes it on his list of favorite horror novels. It and the Edge of Running Water were published together as The Rim of Morning in the early Sixties and it was reissued recently with an introduction by King. (Died 1974.)
  • Born August 15, 1933 — Bjo Trimble, 90. Her intro to fandom was TASFiC, the 1952 Worldcon. She would be active in LASFS in the late 1950s onward and has been involved in more fanzines than I can comfortably list here. Of course, many of us know her from Trek especially the successful campaign for a third season. She’s responsible for the Star Trek Concordance, an amazing work even by today’s standards. And yes, I read it and loved it. She’s shows up (uncredited) as a crew member in the Recreation Deck scene in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Bjo and her husband John Trimble were the Fan Guests of Honor at the 60th Worldcon, ConJose. She was nominated at Seacon for Best Fanzine for Shangri L’Affaires, and two years later at DisCon 1 for the same under the Best Amateur Magazine category. 
  • Born August 15, 1934 — Darrell K. Sweet. Illlustrator who was best-known for providing cover art for genre novel with his first with being Andre Norton’s Shadow Hawk, published by Ace in 1972, in which capacity he was nominated for a Hugo award in 1983. He was Illustrator GoH at 71st Worldcon, LoneStarCon III. He was also a guest of honor at Tuckercon in 2007, at the 2010 World Fantasy Convention in 2010, and LepreCon in 2011. (Died 2011.)
  • Born August 15, 1943 — Barbara Bouchet, 80. Yes, I’ve a weakness for performers who’ve shown up on the original Trek. She plays Kelinda in “By Any Other Name”.  She also appeared in Casino Royale as Miss Moneypenny, a role always noting, and is Ava Vestok in Agent for H.A.R.M. which sounds like someone was rather unsuccessfully emulating The Man from U.N.C.L.E. 
  • Born August 15, 1945 — Nigel Terry. His first role was John in A Lion in Winter which is at least genre adjacent as its alternate history, with his first genre role being King Arthur in Excalibur. Now there’s a bloody telling of the Arthurian myth.  He’s General Cobb in the Tenth Doctor story, “The Doctor’s Daughter”, and on the Highlander series as Gabriel Piton in the “Eye of the Beholder” episode. He even played Harold Latimer in “The Greek Interpreter” on Sherlock Holmes. (Died 2015.)
  • Born August 15, 1958 — Stephen Haffner, 65. Proprietor of Haffner Press which is mainly a mystery and genre reprint endeavor though he’s published such original anthologies as Edmond Hamilton & Leigh Brackett Day, October 16, 2010 and the non-fiction work Thirty-Five Years of the Jack Williamson Lectureship which he did with Patric Caldwell.

(13) COMICS SECTION.

  • David Brin says xkcd makes his point:

(14) WALK A MILE (OR THREE) IN HER SHOES. Take Anne Marble’s advice about “How to Attend the National Book Festival” at Medium. To read all of it requires registration for a free account.

…The National Book Festival is a yearly event run by the Library of Congress. In 2001, it was founded by former First Lady Laura Bush (a librarian) and the 13th Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington. The first one hosted between 25,000 and 30,000 attendees.

Since 2014, with attendance soaring to as many as 200,000 people, the National Book Festival has been held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.

The National Book Festival is huge, busy, and overwhelming. Read up on the event. Learn from what I did right, and most important of all, learn from what I did wrong…

(15) SIC TRANSIT AVENUE VICTOR HUGO. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Avenue Victor Hugo Books, a SF-and-much-more bookstore (which also, for a while, was doing Galileo magazine) used to be one of my regular stops over on Boston’s Newbury Street. Then they relocated to Lee, New Hampshire. (Where I never got to.)

Now, Vince McCaffrey is hanging up his brick’n’mortar shingle, as Vince explains on the store’s web site main page, “A letter to our customers” and in the August 1st, 2023 entry to the site’s blog-ish Annotations.

Bookselling is not what it used to be. Never was, really. For me, it was always what I was willing to make of it. It’s probably that way with most independent booksellers. I’ve known a few and the motivations are as diverse as the individuals themselves.

Maybe an explanation for that is in order. The world is full of unpleasant jobs that have to be done. Bookselling is not one of them—unless it’s made to be that way. Selling books as rectangular objects to be marketed with phony advertising or artificial words such as ‘magisterial,’ or ‘brilliant,’ or even the lowly ‘provocative,’ without regard to the real matters that the authors have spent years of their lives (or too few weeks perhaps) working on, is not a better occupation than selling cars or soap…

FYI, AVH is running a 20% off online sale here.

(16) SUBLIME ACTING. Praise for “Jules: Ben Kingsley Rules” at Leonard Maltin’s Movie Crazy.

Ben Kingsley disappears into every character he plays, and the quiet senior citizen he becomes in Jules is no exception. The fact that he has a mop of hair and no trace of a British accent should come as no surprise; this is an actor who has played everyone from Mahatma Gandhi to Salvador Dali, not to mention his wide range of fictional characters in films as diverse as The Wackness and House of Sand and Fog.

In Jules, writer Gavin Steckler and director Marc Turtletaub have given him a part he can play with, an understated senior citizen whose life has fallen into a routine…. 

[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Anne Marble, rcade, Cliff, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 8/14/23 Nine Hundred Granfalloons

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(1) LUKYANENKO’S LATEST OPINIONS ABOUT UKRAINE. Chengdu Worldcon GoH Sergey Lukyanenko’s interview on Radio Komsomolskaya Pravda was transcribed for his website. Here are some computer-translated excerpts; “’By the end of 2023, the situation for Russia will be clearer’ – S. Lukyanenko”.

… M. Bachenina:

Well, then, who would you like to see at the head of Ukraine?

S. Lukyanenko:

This is a very difficult question, because, firstly, I would not want to see anyone there. As well as Ukraine itself. Because Ukraine, it was originally formed and is being formed as anti-Russia. That is, as long as Ukraine exists, it will act, unfortunately, as anti-Russia. It needs to be completely reformatted, it needs to completely change itself, including both the name and the territories, in order to create some kind of state that they want to create not as such an antagonist of Russia, an adversary and hater, but as a state that wants to represent something and live its own life. This will be a completely different state.

…M. Bachenina:

Many now say that Russia cannot lose, we have the gene of winners. Do you agree with that? And if so, what is the manifestation of this gene?

S. Lukyanenko:

I don’t know if we have a special gene for winners, but I know that we didn’t worry about that, and we will naturally win, it’s indisputable. I would just like this to happen without any unnecessary victims, not only ours, but also those deceived Russian people who now live on the territory of Ukraine. As a matter of fact, we are, of course, one people, just part of the people has been reformatted. It’s, you know, like Tolkien, at one time he described that orcs are the same elves, only who have been poisoned, changed and distorted.

I understand that here we probably have a conviction on both sides that the beautiful elves are us, and there, on the other side, the nefarious orcs. But we know that we are not orcs….

(2) WRONG. THANKS FOR PLAYING. Robin A. Reid devotes her latest Writing From Ithilien newsletter to those “Misquoting Tolkien”.

At some point before Covid (2019 maybe?), I attended a Tolkien Society event and heard a great presentation by Marcel Aubron-Bülles based on a project that he calls “Things J.R.R. Tolkien has never said, done, written or had anything to do with (TThnsdwohatdw)” where he debunks, through research, internet quotes that are not by Tolkien, or are corrupted versions of what Tolkien wrote (I might charitably call some of those paraphrases but they are attributed as direct quotes to Tolkien), or are quotes from Jackson’s films (though they also might be incorrectly quoted). It was fascinating and turns out to that wrong/fake quotes on the internet are legion.

I’m quite sure there will eventually be quotes from Rings of Power attributed to Tolkien!

I am happy in this post to be able to add another example to Marcel’s list (I have skimmed the fifteen blog entries and do not see it!)….

Read the post to find out which one she has in mind.

(3) HUGO RECEPTION MUSICAL CHAIRS. The Hugo Book Club Blog takes its turn at explaining the “The Numbers Game” – the fluctuating ceiling on how many team members get listed as Hugo finalists.

…Over the past decade, there has been a regularly recurring argument about the maximum number of individual contributors that can be listed for each group finalist on the Hugo ballot. This is more common with fan categories like fanzine, fancast, and semiprozine — in recent years some of the contributors lists for an individual publication have extended to several dozen names.

On one side of the argument are those who express logistical concerns about the size of the ballot. On the other side are those who want to ensure that everyone who contributed to the success of a work or publication are given nomination-level credit for their work….

Is this issue something that should be addressed in a new Worldcon rule?

…Those advocating for a more restrictive set of rules point out that the pre-Hugo reception already has capacity issues and logistical constraints. They also suggest that if everyone gets called a “Hugo finalist,” then the status becomes devalued. In addition, the distribution of perks to Hugo finalists, such as the rocketship pins, etc., increase costs on Worldcons.

Both of these positions have merit, and neither should be dismissed out of hand. But the debate should take place in the appropriate forum. The WSFS membership on whose behalf these awards are presented deserve a say in this matter, and the way to do this is to allow both sides to make their case at a business meeting….

(4) INTERNET ARCHIVE SUIT PROPOSED AGREEMENT. Publishers Weekly has more details: “Judgment Entered in Publishers, Internet Archive Copyright Case”.

…The jointly proposed agreement includes a declaration that cements the key finding from Judge John G. Koeltl’s March 24 summary judgment decision: that the IA’s unauthorized scanning and lending of the 127 in-suit copyrighted books under a novel protocol known as “controlled digital lending” constitutes copyright infringement, including in the IA’s controversial “National Emergency Library” (under which the IA temporarily allowed for simultaneous access to its collections of scans in the the early days of the pandemic, when schools and libraries were shuttered).

Most importantly, the proposed agreement includes a permanent injunction that would, among its provisions, bar the IA’s lending of unauthorized scans of in-copyright, commercially available books, as well as bar the IA from “profiting from” or “inducing” any other party’s “infringing reproduction, public distribution, public display and/or public performance” of books “in any digital or electronic form” once notified by the copyright holder. Under the agreement, the injunction will not be stayed while the case is on appeal—essentially meaning that once Koeltl signs off, the IA will have to take stop making unauthorized scans of copyrighted works available to be borrowed within two weeks of notification.

The parties left one final dispute for Koeltl to clean up, however: what books will be “covered” by the proposed injunction?

In a letter to the court, IA attorneys argue that “Covered Books” should be limited to books that are both “commercially available” and available in digital format. “This case involved only works that the Publishers make available as e-books and so the scope of any injunction should be limited accordingly,” IA attorneys argue. “Because the parties did not have the opportunity in this case to litigate the degree to which the unavailability of digital library licensing would affect the fair use analysis, it is inappropriate for an injunction in this case, by its breadth, to effectively prejudge the outcome of that question.”

Lawyers for the plaintiff publishers counter that the injunction should cover all unauthorized scans of commercially available books, whether the copyright holder has licensed a digital edition or not. “The law is clear that the right to decide whether or not to publish a book in electronic format belongs to its authors and publishers, not IA,” the publishers’ letter argues….

(5) MAGICAL HISTORICAL FICTION. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This week’s B Beeb Ceeb Radio 4 programme Open Book takes a deep dive into magical historical fiction and includes an interview with Ann Patchett.

Available on BBC Sounds  here. 28 minutes.

Anne Patchett

Octavia Bright talks to Ann Patchett about her captivating new novel. Tom Lake is the story of a young actor Lara under the spell of a future Hollywood star, but it is also about how she retells that story in later life to her adult daughters, and the power of storytelling itself.

Two masters of historical fiction, Laura Shepherd-Robinson and S. J. Parris (aka Stephanie Merritt) discuss the allure of magic and mysticism in their latest books set either side of the Enlightenment.

Plus Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah recalls the enchanting tale behind the book he’d never lend.

(6) IT ALL TIES TOGETHER. You may know about Philip José Farmer’s creation, but for the benefit of those born in the past few decades Keith Roysdon explains “The Wold Newton Universe: How a Fictional History Connects Literary Legends” at CrimeReads.

…Even a casual student of science fiction and comic-book history knows all about meteorites. They’re either the source of superheroic powers – or agents of destruction to people with fantastic abilities. (See: Kryptonite.) 

Farmer chose the former concept and, in an unmatched bit of revisionist literary history, decided to use the Wold Newton meteorite to form an interconnected world for some of imaginative literature’s most fantastic characters. Not Superman, of course, because his off-planet origin is well known. But very nearly everyone else was included, as Farmer and his successors in tending the Wold Newton Universe would have it….

(7) OLD SFF LOOKS AT EVOLUTION. The Public Domain Review revisits “H. G. Wells and the Uncertainties of Progress” in this 2019 article.

For Wells the most basic level of uncertainty arose from the fear that the human race might not sustain its current rate of development. In his 1895 story “The Time Machine” he imagined his time traveler projected through eras of future progress: “I saw great and splendid architecture rising about me, more massive than any buildings of our time, and yet, as it seemed, built of glimmer and mist.”2 But the time traveler ends up in a world brought down by social division and degeneration. The brutal Morlocks are the descendants of the industrial workers, while the childlike Eloi are the remnants of the leisured upper classes. This prediction was based on his zoologist friend E. Ray Lankester’s extension of the Darwinian theory. Lankester argued that because evolution works by adapting populations to their environment, progress is not inevitable and any species that adapts itself to a less active and hence less challenging way of life will degenerate.3 Here was the model for a more complex vision of progress in which any advance would depend on the circumstances of the time and could not be predicted on the basis of previous trends….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 14, 1929 — Richard Carpenter. Responsible for the simply superb Robin of Sherwood series. He also created Catweazle, the children’s series about an unfortunate wizard from the 11th century who is accidentally transported to the present day. And he was an actor who appeared in such shows as the Sixties Sherlock Holmes series, The Terrornauts film and the Out of the Unknown series as well. (Died 2012.)
  • Born August 14, 1932 — Lee Hoffman. In the early Fifties, she edited and published the Quandry fanzine. At the same time, she began publication of Science-Fiction Five-Yearly which appeared regularly until ‘til 2006. The latter won the fanzine Hugo at Nippon 2007 (with Geri Sullivan and Randy Byers) after her death. She wrote four novels and a handful of short fiction, none of which are in-print. (Died 2007.)
  • Born August 14, 1940 — Alexei Panshin. He has written multiple critical works along with several novels, including the Nebula Award-winning Rite of Passage and the Hugo Award-winning study of SF, The World Beyond the Hill which he co-wrote with his wife, Cory Panshin. He also wrote the first serious study of Heinlein, Heinlein in Dimension: A Critical Analysis. Let’s not overlook that he was the Hugo Award winning Best Fan Writer at NYCon 3. (Died 2022.)
  • Born August 14, 1950 — Gary Larson, 73. Setting aside a long and delightful career in creating the weird for us, ISFDB lists a SF link that deserve noting. In the March 1991 Warp as published by the Montreal Science Fiction and Fantasy Association, he had a cartoon “The crew of the Starship Enterprise encounters the floating head of Zsa Zsa Gabor”.
  • Born August 14, 1956 — Joan Slonczewski, 67. Their novel A Door into Ocean won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. They won a second John W. Campbell Memorial Award for their Highest Frontier novel. They were nominated for an Otherwise Award for The Children Star novel.
  • Born August 14, 1965 — Brannon Braga, 58. Writer, producer and creator for the Next Gen, Voyager, Enterprise, as well as on the Star Trek Generations and Star Trek: First Contact films. He has written more episodes of the Trek various series than anyone else has with one hundred and nine to date. He was responsible for the Next Generation series finale “All Good Things…” which won him a Hugo Award at Intersection for excellence in SF writing, along with Ronald D. Moore. He’s one of the producers of The Orville. 

(9) WORLDCON THEMED FABRIC. Glasgow 2024, A Worldcon For Our Futures introduces Sara Felix-designed fabrics.

Sara Felix, Hugo award-winning artist and Glasgow 2024 designer, has launched six brand-new fabric designs on Spoonflower, now available for purchase.

Whether it’s a yard of fabric or a throw pillow, tea towels or a blanket, you can celebrate Glasgow 2024 with your choice of festive wares!

A word from Sara: “I created these fabrics because while I love the tartan, I wanted a few more options to play with. So I took the Armadillo we use on the bottom of some of our webpages and publication pages and made these. Of course, we had to have the logo on there as well!”

Browse the designs on Sara Felix’s website.

(10) PASSENGERS. “You’ll travel nearly a trillion miles in your lifetime. Here’s how” explains Space.com. This reminds me of a paragraph in a Vonnegut book that ends, “Who says there’s no such thing as progress?”

….In addition to rotating, Earth orbits the sun. That orbit is an ellipse, which causes our planet to occasionally move more quickly or slowly depending on its distance from the sun. But on average, Earth’s orbital speed is about 19 miles per second (30 km per second).

That’s about 600 million miles (1 billion km) every year. So over a lifetime, each of us travels roughly 50 billion miles (80 billion km) — which, again, dwarfs the distance we travel due solely to the rotation of our planet….

(11) MULTITALENTED JOYNER’S NEW BOOK. Jackiem Joyner, author of Zarya Episode II Sochi Unleashed, also is a contemporary saxophonist and music producer with a pair of number one hit songs and five top 10 Billboard under his belt.

In the second novel of his Zarya series, the fate of Cydnus, a highly advanced desert world, hangs in the balance. With oxygen levels beginning to deplete, this politically divided planet stands on the brink of an existential crisis.

In the heart of the advanced city of New Cebrenia City, Zarya, along with her father, Aaron, and friends Kizzy and Marco, must navigate a complex web of political strife. With Vice Chairman Eros’s dark plots threatening their progress, the security of their only political ally, the chairman, is under threat.
Their most powerful asset is Sochi, Zarya’s advanced AI Airboard. Yet, Sochi’s newfound ability to control other machines presents both significant opportunities and risks.

Meanwhile, Aaron embarks on a perilous journey into the cosmos, driven by desperation to resurrect a long-abandoned project that might be Cydnus’s last hope. His mission, shadowed by his past, is a race against time, with the future of Cydnus at stake.

Zarya Episode II: Sochi Unleashed delves into the intricate relationship between sentient beings and technology, bravery amidst uncertainty, and the struggle for survival. As Zarya, her allies, and Sochi traverse this journey, the tale evolves into a saga filled with challenges and triumphs. Welcome to Cydnus, a world teetering on the brink of an uncertain future, in this captivating narrative.

Available at Amazon.com and Amazon.ca.

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Media Death Cult’s latest from Moid is a very brief (Hondo Cit) look at Japanese SF shot on location in a Japanese garden in Poole (Dorset, England, Brit Cit): “The History Of Japanese Science Fiction”.

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