Tag Archives: Italo Calvino

Pixel Scroll 11/22/24 The Pixel Doesn’t Have Fur, Doesn’t Purr, And Can’t Walk Through Walls

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(1) IT CAUGHT ON IN A FLASH. Shelley Roche-Jacques considers “Flash fiction as a distinct literary form: some thoughts on time, space, and context” in a research paper available at Taylor & Francis Online.

…In this article, I consider what makes flash fiction qualitatively different from the short story. I demonstrate that the mobilisation of a story world is necessary for a text to function as flash fiction and that this can be a useful way of distinguishing the form from prose poetry. This is a new and necessary distinction, as critics and writers seem to have found the two forms very difficult to separate. I also consider how the interpretation of short texts is highly bound up with the context in which readers encounter them….

(2) NALO HOPKINSON Q&A. In Shelf Awareness for Friday, November 22, 2024, “Reading with…Nalo Hopkinson”.

…On your nightstand now: 

Honestly? I’m currently listening to the audiobook of my most recent novel, Blackheart Man. Hearing it in someone else’s words makes it almost like a different novel.

Favorite book when you were a child:

A two-parter: Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. My dad had them in English translation from Homeric Greek. I skipped all the “boring” parts and just read the bits with monsters, witches, and ghosts in them. And I rooted for poor Ulysses to finally get home from the wars and be reunited with his wife, Penelope. Though I didn’t expect the way he would get rid of all the men who were eating and drinking him out of house and home while they clamored for Penelope to admit her husband was dead and marry one of them. Funny thing is, I tried reading The Iliad a couple of years ago, and I stopped. It was too difficult! As a kid, I didn’t get as frustrated at struggling through the language….

(3) ITALO CALVINO. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Italo Calvino is one of Italy’s SF grandmasters (but of course you knew that) and pioneer of Italian neo-realism.
He was the son of biologists and almost became an agricultural applied biologist when World War II loomed. He joined the Communist resistance (because they were the most organised.

His first book was speculative fiction. He did then try mundane ‘literary’ fiction but just could not do it and preferred to write what he wanted to read.  Also, he found that using speculative fiction metaphors was a useful way to discuss possibly controversial issues.

This week’s In Our Time on BBC Radio 4 takes a look at Italo Calvino and his work.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Italian author of Invisible Cities, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, Cosmicomics and other celebrated novels, fables and short stories of the 20th Century. Calvino (1923 -1985) had a passionate belief that writing and art could make life better for everyone. Despite his parents being scientists, who dearly wanted him to be a scientist too, and his time fighting with the Partisans in Liguria in WWII during which his parents were held hostage by the Nazis, Calvino turned away from realism in his writing. Ideally, he said, he would have liked to be alive in the Enlightenment. He moved towards the fantastical, drawing on his childhood reading while collecting a huge number of the fables of Italy and translating them from dialect into Italian to enrich the shared culture of his fellow citizens. His fresh perspective on the novel continues to inspire writers and delight readers in Italian and in translations around the world.

With Guido Bonsaver (Professor of Italian Cultural History at the University of Oxford), Jennifer Burns (Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Warwick) and Beatrice Sica (Associate Professor in Italian Studies at UCL).

You can access the programme here.

Italo Calvino

(4) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to chow down on chicken tikka masala with Gareth L. Powell in Episode 241 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Powell has twice won the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel — in 2014 for Ack-Ack Macaque and in 2019 for Embers of War — and has become one of the most shortlisted authors in the award’s 50-year history. He’s also been a finalist for the Locus Award (twice), the British Fantasy Award, the Seiun Award, the Premios Ignotus, and the Canopus Award. His short fiction has appeared in the magazines Clarkesworld, Interzone, Galaxy, Worlds of IF, and others, and has been featured in numerous anthologies, including Shine: The Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction, Solaris Rising 3: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection.

As a freelancer writer, he has written a strip for long-running British comic 2000 AD, articles for The Guardian, Irish Times, Acoustic Magazine, and SFX Magazine, and currently writes a monthly column about future tech for The Engineer. He’s the Managing Editor of Stars and Sabers Publishing, the publishing imprint he founded with his spouse, the American author Jendia Gammon.


Gareth L. Powell

We discussed the way a Diana Wynne Jones critique of his teenaged writing was a complete revelation in how to write fiction, how an adversarial relationship with a university professor who didn’t want him writing science fiction actually ended up helping him, the New Year’s resolution which led to him to both kick smoking and write a novel, how reading William Gibson’s short story collection Burning Chrome shook him up and made him realize what kind of short stories he really wanted to write, the message he most wants to convey to beginning writers in his workshops, the importance of stepping outside your comfort zone, how to make a good impression when approaching an editor in a convention bar, the way he developed his propulsive writing style, why he’s so receptive to editorial suggestions, what it was like collaborating with Peter F. Hamilton and Aliette de Bodard, his techniques for deciding which of many story ideas you should write, the reason his mother refuses to read his books, why writing novels can be like telling a joke and waiting two years for somebody to laugh, and much more.

(5) APPLAUSE WITHHELD. [Item by Steven French.] I think it’s safe to say that Guardian writer Stuart Heritage isn’t a fan: “Pretentious, moi?: Josh Brolin’s poetry about Dune has landed, whether we like it or not”.

When it comes to pretension, Dune isn’t exactly left wanting. In print, the books are a progressively abstract and deranged space opera about a young man and his son, the 3,500-year-old god worm. Onscreen the films are long and portentous screensavers that seem to really hate bald people, or bafflingly bad HBO prequel shows. But two media where Dune has yet to hit full pretension are photography and poetry – until now.

Because next week, Dune cinematographer Greig Fraser and Dune actor Josh Brolin will present an exhibition of photography and poetry from Dune: Exposures. You may have heard of Dune: Exposures. It’s a £50 coffee table book of behind the scenes photography that came out in February. Not that you will necessarily know it as that, because the book bills itself as an “exploratory artistic memoir”.

So, for example, one page has a nice picture of Timothée Chalamet, but on the opposite page is this poetic description: “Your cheekbones jump toward what are youth-laden eyes that slide down a prominent nose and onto lips of a certain poetry.” It is less a traditional poem and more the sort of thing ChatGPT would blurt out if you asked it to describe a crayon drawing of a melting Cabbage Patch Kid. There’s also a photo of Florence Pugh sticking her tongue out, which inspired Brolin to write: “You can feel her cells preparing for a thinner air, a higher ground.” And you can’t, really, because it’s just a photo of a woman in her 20s killing time by arsing about a bit.

(6) YOUNGEST EXOPLANET FOUND… AND WHY IT IS IMPORTANT. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Go back to my youth – which is quite a while to around the start of Doctor Who – and we simply did not know that there were planets around other stars, let alone that virtually all at least solo stars and at least some binary stars have exoplanets: today we know that planets seem to be fairly universal about stars. All of which is good news for those hoping to find an Earth-like planet capable of supporting life elsewhere in our galaxy.

Now, our sun, the Sun, formed some 4.6 billion years ago. Meanwhile, the International Commission on Stratigraphy has it that the Earth formed 4.567 billion years ago. This means that the Earth formed somewhere around 40 to 60 million years into our star’s life.  Could it be that planets have to form real early in a star’s life for there to be enough time for life to evolve into complex life (capable of brewing and enjoying real ale)?

In the run up to 2018, astronomers found gaps in dust disks around proto-stars that were around a million years old. These gaps were interpreted as proto-planets ‘sweeping’ lanes in the dust disks around early stars.

Then in 2020, astronomers detected four clear lanes within a dust disk around a proto-stellar less than 500,000 years old and 470 light years away.

Importantly, we need to remember that gaps in dust lanes is not the same as actually detecting a planet, or a proto-planet.

This brings us up-to-date and the latest discovery which has been made using the NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The star, which goes by the catchy moniker IRAS 04125+2902, is a member of the Taurus–Auriga star-forming region some 520 light years from the Brighton Worldcon. Importantly, it is only three million years old. The planet detected is Jupiter-sized in a short, 8.8-day orbit about the proto-star. The star itself is about 0.7 the mass of the Sun, which makes it a K-type star.

The discovery was lucky.  Normally, planets form out of the circumstellar dust cloud about a protostar and so they are in the same plane as the dust disc. TESS works by detecting the dip in light from stars when a planet passes (transits) in front of it. This means that detecting planets this way should not work in the presence of circumstellar dust discs as the dust hides both the planet and the star. However, for some reason the planet is orbiting in a different plane to the dust disc! The researchers themselves say, “the origin of this misalignment is unclear”.

Taking all the evidence together, we now have hard evidence that planets form really early in a star’s life!

Now, if it took 4.567 billion years for life on Earth to get to a point where it was capable to have the technology to create real ale and enjoyed, then this proof of an early start to planets makes it more likely that planets around stars that have anticipated lifetimes of six or seven or more billon years, then they will likely have the time for real ale generating, and enjoying, species to arise.

The primary research is Barber M. G., et al. (2024) A giant planet transiting a 3-Myr protostar with a misaligned disk. Nature, vol. 635, p574-577.

(7) THE MEAL OF YOUR DREAMS. Tim Burton-inspired holiday menu is being offered at a place in Long Beach, CA: “Broken Spirits in Long Beach goes all-in on ‘Nightmare Before Christmas’-themed holiday dinners” at Longbeachize.

Broken Spirits Distillery in Downtown Long Beach is getting into the holiday spirit with not jingly bells but in a more macabre way. The space has becomed filled with creepy takes on Disney characters with none other than Jack Skellington and the Oogie Boogie Man greeting you at the door.

On top of it all, a $75, five-course, three-cocktail, three spirit tastings, “Nightmare Before Christmas”-themed dinner will be served Monday through Friday nightly at 7PM….

The menu includes such things as:

Jack Skellington’s Prime Wagyu Slider: Snake River Farms American wagyu ground beef | House-made squid ink bun | New cheese | Smoked pork belly

Oogie Boogie Garlic Cajun Linguine: Squid ink linguine | Pana Pesca Chilean Mussels | Cajun sauce | Porchetta | Pecorino Romano

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary — Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

Twenty-eight years ago on this date, Star Trek: First Contact premiered. 

It was the eighth film of the Trek films, and the second of the Next Gen films following Star Trek Generations. The story was written by Rick Berman, Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore.   It was directed by Jonathan Frakes from the screenplay by Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore. 

It had the Next Generation cast plus Alfre Woodard, James Cromwell and Alice Krige, the latter as the Borg Queen. She reprised the role in Voyager and Picard, and recently voiced the role in Lower Decks. 

A lot of titles were tossed around — Star Trek: Borg, Star Trek: Destinies, Star Trek: Future Generations and Star Trek: Generations II were all considered before Star Trek: Resurrection was chosen and then abandoned when 20th Century Fox announced the title of the fourth Alien film as Alien Resurrection, so the film was finally Star Trek: First Contact.

It did very well at the box office making one hundred fifty million against a budget of fifty million. 

First Contact received generally positive reviews upon release. The Independent said “For the first time, a Star Trek movie actually looks like something more ambitious than an extended TV show.”  And the Los Angeles Times exclaimed, “First Contact does everything you’d want a Star Trek film to do, and it does it with cheerfulness and style.” 

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a most excellent rating of eighty-nine percent. 

It was nominated for a Hugo at LoneStarCon 2, the year that Babylon 5’s “Severed Dreams” won. 

It is streaming on Prime Video but surprisingly is not on Paramount +.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Eek! discusses a monster’s health insurance.
  • Dinosaur Comics saves a writer’s life – but at what cost?
  • Wumo doesn’t recommend “hands free” operating commands.
  • Chicken Wings Comics kisses ChatGPT’s butt.

(10) HOW THE CLAY SAUSAGE IS MADE. Deadline offers a look “Behind The Scenes On ‘Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl’”.

The prospect of creating a stop motion film is daunting, to say the least. The process of taking a photo, altering a scene slightly, then taking another photo, over and over can almost make the medium seem pointlessly complicated for a filmmaker… and yet, there is something about the handcrafted aesthetic of a stop motion film that can’t be matched by anything digital. And that special something is where Aardman Animations has made their mark….

… The tour begins with a stop in the puppet department, led by puppet designer Anne King. Here, we are introduced to the process of creating the puppets out of both silicone and clay. “The clay takes quite a long time to sculpt,” says King, “so if the animators on the studio floor have to do a big shot with Gromit walking across a set on all fours, getting it all looking perfect is actually very time consuming. So, we developed this silicone puppet so the animators can actually get a lot of movement out of it without going through all the sculpting.” However, since the silicone isn’t expressive like clay, they can’t use full silicone puppets for the stop motion. “With the clay, you can sculpt it to anything you want basically, so a lot of the hands and faces are of clay just to get that expressiveness.”

Even though silicone can’t be altered once cast, Park says the advancements in the technology have helped to maintain their handmade aesthetic. “The heart of our whole ethos is to keep everything handmade and keep the clay quality of it all, with the fingerprints and everything, which is the key to keeping the charm and the authenticity.”…

(11) ELIGIBLE FOR THE OSCAR. Animation Magazine reports these “31 Titles Are Eligible for the Animated Feature Film Academy Award This Year”. (With hotlinks to their articles about the films, if any.)

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced feature films eligible for consideration in the Animated Feature Film, Documentary Feature Film and International Feature Film categories for the 97th Academy Awards.

Thirty-one features are eligible for consideration in the Animated Feature Film category this year. Some of the films have not yet had their required qualifying release and must fulfill that requirement and comply with all the category’s other qualifying rules to advance in the voting process. In 2023, 33 titles were eligible (a record high), and in 2022, 27 movies made the cut, while only 26 were considered in 2021….

The eligible animated features are:

(12) MY NAME IS INIGO MONTOYA. “No politics allowed at this sword-fighting club near Pittsburgh” at NPR.

…It’s a tournament — as well as a party — billed as Friday Night Fights.

There are plenty of rules in a sword fight. But there’s one rule that applies after the fighters have put down their weapons: no talk of politics.

The evolution of the rule started around 2016, when club owner Josh Parise says he was getting fed up with the rancor of political discourse in the U.S. — personal attacks were on the rise, even within families, as was cancel culture.

“I couldn’t tolerate the lack of decency between human beings,” says Parise, whose club focuses on historical European martial arts.

“None of it made sense anymore,” he says.

And then there were a few would-be sword fighters who came to the club and didn’t treat others well. Parise had to tell them to get on their horses and leave.

“It’s infuriating to me, so with this place, we just don’t allow that to happen,” Parise says….

(13) NOT THE DIAGRAM PRIZE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The Diagram Prize is for books with the oddest title of the year. But why should book readers have all the fun? What about academics? This week saw the publication in Science Advances of the paper entitled, “Stiffness-tunable velvet worm–inspired soft adhesive robot”.

There’s got to be more peculiar ones out there.  If you see any, do pass them on…

Schematic of the system showing the stellar orbit (a), the disk (b), and the planet’s orbit (c).

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

Pixel Scroll 6/20/21 Teenage Mutant Fannish Pixels, Heroes On The File Scroll

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(1) FATHER’S DAY AND THE NIMOY FAMILY. “I absolutely adored Spock. Loving Dad was much more complicated” – by Adam Nimoy in the Boston Globe. (I usually hit a paywall at the Globe, but I was able to push past the pop-ups and read this article, so maybe you will too.)

…“We are now passing Beacon Hill, home to John F. Kennedy, John Hancock, and John Kerry, the three Johns. And we’re coming up on the West End, formerly an immigrant neighborhood that was demolished in the 1950s to make way for quote-unquote urban renewal. Of course, the most famous resident of the original West End is none other than Leonard Nimoy, who starred as Mr. Spock on ‘Star Trek.’ Do we have any ‘Star Trek’ fans on board?”

About a half dozen people raised their hands. Some yelped their excitement. I got all warm and fuzzy inside. Dad sat with his arms crossed over his linen jacket and gave one of his approving nods. Paul Revere, John Adams, John Kennedy, and . . . Leonard Nimoy. What a lineup — “highly illogical,” as Mr. Spock would say.

The trip to Boston gave me the chance to see the city through my father’s eyes while giving Dad an opportunity to relive the events that shaped his life and career. Father and son closeness was relatively new to us….

Dad’s zeal for work had its downside. His career always came first. He was not one to come to Little League games, for example — a regular source of disappointment for a boy who just wanted to please the father he so admired….

Alternatively, CinemaBlend hosted this Nimoy tribute: “Leonard Nimoy’s Daughter Julie Pens Sweet Father’s Day Letter To Late Star Trek Actor”.

In the world of Star Trek, Spock was never a father, but the actor who played him, Leonard Nimoy, certainly was. The actor juggled a busy career along with being a good father to his two children, Adam and Julie and, on Father’s Day, Julie Nimoy shared a special letter with CinemaBlend to her father on this special holiday….

“…Forever my rock, I could always depend on him for his wise advice. Like most dads, he was very protective, but always encouraged me to be independent, starting at very young age….”

(2) INFLUENTIAL IDEAS. Samuel R. Delany shares his experiences reading and meeting Arthur C. Clarke on Facebook.

…(I’ve incorporated a lot of his ideas into my own, such as his early defense of the space program as a money saver on the large scale, because of the weather damage it prevented.) I met him—possibly, but I don’t even remember for sure—at a gathering at Michael Moorcock’s home at the end end of my first (’66) or in the midst of my second (for three weeks, covering Christmas/New Years ’66-’67) trip to London. The gathering was overshadowed by the presence of J. G. Ballard, whom most of his friends called Jimmy, and the growing pains of the “New Wave” and *New Worlds.* To me he was always Dr. Clarke—and when I met him the second time, in this country, at the opening of his, I-can-only-call-it World-Changing collaboration with the consistently greatest American filmmaker, Stanley Kubrick, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” he recognized me as “Chip.” (That made it into the first volume of my journals and the review I wrote, one of a pair—the other by filmmaker/artist Ed Emshwiller— that were published on the film in F&SF.)…

Delany’s post mentions the side-by-side ads taken out in 1968 prozines by writers to express either their support for or opposition to the Vietnam War. Todd Mason blogged about it (in 2012) and included a screencap of the pages here: “1968: Judith Merril and Kate Wilhelm put together an ad against the Vietnam War…”

…it appears in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and in Galaxy, Worlds of If and International Science Fiction magazines (the latter three of which are published by the same publisher, Robert Guinn of the Galaxy Publishing Co., and edited by Frederik Pohl, the first edited by Edward Ferman and published by his father Joseph Ferman), along with a corresponding ad from “hawks” who are moved by Wilhelm and Merril’s canvassing….

(3) NOT THROWIN’ AWAY MY SHOT. Black Gate presents Sara Light-Waller’s commentary: “Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen: Piper’s Connecticut Yankee Tale”.

…As mentioned, Lord Kalvan is part of the Paratime universe. It was originally published in two parts, the second posthumously to Piper’s death. “Gunpowder God” first appeared in Analog in November 1964. The second part — “Down Styphon” — was published in the November 1965 issue. The novel, Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen (1965), is a compilation of the two which also includes new material expanding on the original stories.

In our reality and timeline, Pennsylvania state trooper, Corporal Calvin Morrison, is part of a group of police about to burst in on a criminal hiding out in an old farmhouse. As he walks forward with pistol drawn, he is accidently caught up in a Ghaldron-Hesthor temporal field…. 

Back on Home timeline, paracops quickly figure out what’s happened. Our old friend Verkan Vall, Special Assistant to the Chief of the Paratime Police, is there to see the damage.

“A man who can beat a Paracop to the draw won’t sink into obscurity on any time-line,” he says and decides to take charge of the case himself…

(4) WELLINGTON PARANORMAL. The New Zealand show has been mentioned here a few times – and now it’s coming to U.S. screens says SYFY Wire: “Wellington Paranormal: What We Do in the Shadows spinoff gets U.S. premiere date and trailer”.

Before What We Do in the Shadows became a hit TV series on FX, the first spinoff from the iconic 2014 mockumentary arrived on TV in its homeland of New Zealand. First announced in 2017, Wellington Paranormal began broadcasting into Kiwi homes in 2018, and has since produced three successful seasons and a holiday special, all without being widely available to U.S. viewers who’ve been enjoying a spinoff of their own. Next month, that holdout finally ends. 

Back in the spring, The CW announced that it would begin airing Wellington Paranormal for American audiences this year, with episodes made available to stream the next day on HBO Max. Now, a new trailer’s here to get us all excited about finally seeing this show in all its clumsy paranormal cop glory. Check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfhbvsnR9Y0

(5) CRT 451. “Opinion: To leave out these discussions of history is akin to burning books” writer Howard Stacy in a letter to the Gainesville Times.

Visiting a local book store recently, I bought the book “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury. I had read some of Bradbury’s books in the past (I’m a science fiction fan) and thought I would enjoy this one. Unfortunately, the book written in 1951 has so many parallels with today’s political climate that I am not sure I can finish it. 

The plot covers the life of Guy Montag, a fireman in the not too distant future. The occupation of the firemen in Bradbury’s story is markedly different from the firemen today. Montag’s crew of firemen are tasked with burning books as well as the houses of the people that own them. It does not matter what books are in the house; their mere presence qualifies for destruction. 

The firemen pull their hoses from the fire truck and start spraying kerosene on the offensive house. The kerosene is ignited, and the fire destroys the house and the books in it. 

If the owner of the house refuses to leave, then the firemen burn him or her, too. The government has ordered that this is to be done because books contain dangerous ideas. 

The similarity to today is the effort of the Trump Republicans and the Georgia State Board of Education to limit the discussion of Critical Race Theory. The full definition of CRT is complicated, involving White privilege and economic advantage based simply on the color of skin. However the CRT acronym makes it something that the Trump Republicans can get excited about. It looks good on a poster held up at a school board meeting, and it allows a racist to appear as someone that is only interested in having the youngsters in public schools receive the “correct” history instruction….

(6) WALTER SCHNEIDERMAN (1922-2021). The acclaimed makeup artist Walter Schneiderman died April 8 at the age of 98 reports The Guardian:

…The complex makeup required for the title character of The Elephant Man was nearly the undoing of that celebrated 1980 film. … But applying the resulting designs, which had been modelled from a cast of the real Joseph Merrick … fell upon the makeup artist Walter Schneiderman.

Schneiderman, who has died aged 98, called the film “one of the hardest pictures I had to do”. It took seven hours each day to put the makeup on Hurt, and another two to take it off again. Schneiderman was acclaimed for his work on the movie, which was nominated for eight Oscars. The lack of official recognition for … Schneiderman caused a furore, which led to the implementation the following year of a new Oscar category for best makeup.

Uncredited early work came his way on … Powell and Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffman (1951). 

He spent five years, first as makeup artist and then as makeup supervisor, on the television series The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955-60). He moved into more film work with … One Million Years BC (1966), … Rollerball (1975). Schneiderman was makeup supervisor on the fantasy Labyrinth (1986), starring David Bowie as the flamboyant Goblin King.

Although an inventive and resourceful practitioner, he was always practical. “Directors think you open your box and out pops magic,” he said. “It does. But you’ve got to know how to apply it.” After his retirement, he went on to create and sell a line of commercial products under the name Make-Up International. Among them were Quick Action Powder Blood, Bruise Simulation Gel and Omaha Action Mud.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

  • 1981 — Forty years ago at Denvention Two, The Empire Strikes Back which was released the previous year by Lucasfilm, won the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation. Other nominated works were Lathe of Heaven, the Cosmos series, The Martian Chronicles and Flash Gordon.  It was directed by Irvin Kershner from the screenplay by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan with story by being George Lucas. 

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born June 20, 1897 — Donald Keyhoe. Early pulp writer whose works included the entire contents of all three published issues of the Dr. Yen Sin zine. The novels were The Mystery of the Dragon’s Shadow, The Mystery of the Golden Skull and The Mystery of the Singing Mummies. He would create two pulp characters, one with ESP who was a daredevil pilot and one who was blind that could see none-the-less in the dark. He’s best remembered today for being one of the early believers in UFOs and being very active in that community. (Died 1988.)
  • Born June 20, 1913 — Lilian Jackson Braun. Author of The Cat Who… series which I think is genre. The two cats in it are delightful and one, Koko, certainly has a sixth sense, but the author never suggests is psychic. The first, The Cat Who Could Read Backwards, was published in 1966. She’d publish twenty-nine more novels plus three collections of The Cat Who… shorter tales over the next forty years.  Good popcorn reading. (Died 2011.)
  • Born June 20, 1928 — Martin Landau. I’ve got his first genre role as being on The Twilight Zone as Dan Hotaling in “Mr. Denton on Doomsday” episode. Of course his longest running genre role was as Rollin Hand on Mission Impossible though he had a good run also on Space: 1999 as Commander John Koenig. His last role was in Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie voicing Mr. Rzykruski. (Died 2017.)
  • Born June 20, 1951 — Tress MacNeille, 70. Voice artist extraordinaire. Favourite roles? Dot Warner on The Animaniacs, herself as the angry anchorwoman in Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, Babs Bunny on Tiny Toons and Hello Nurse on Pinky and The Brain. 
  • Born June 20, 1952 — John Goodman, 69. Some may know him as the TV husband of a certain obnoxious comedian but I’ve never watched that show. So I picture him as Fred Flintstone in The Flintstones, a role perfect for him. Mind you he’s had a lot of genre roles: voicing James P. “Sulley” Sullivan in the Monsters franchise, a cop in the diner in C.H.U.D., and he’ll even be the voice of Spike in the Tom and Jerry film that came out recently.  
  • Born June 20, 1947 — Candy Clark, 74. Mary Lou in The Man Who Fell to Earth which of course featured Bowie. She also was in Amityville 3-D, Stephen King’s Cat’s Eye and The Blob inthe role of Francine Hewitt. That’s the remake obviously, not the original. Oh, and she’s Buffy’s mom in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Wiki being Wiki lists that as non-canon because it’s not the Whedon Buffy.
  • Born June 20, 1967 — Nicole Kidman, 54. Batman Forever was her first foray into the genre but she has done a number of genre films down the years: Practical Magic, The Stepford Wives, Bewitched (I liked it), The Invasion (never heard of it), The Golden Compass (not nearly as good as the novel was), the splendid Paddington and her latest was as Queen Atlanna in the rather good Aquaman. 
  • Born June 20, 1968 — Robert Rodriguez, 53, I’ll single out the vastly different Sin City and Spy Kids franchises as his best work, though the From Dusk till Dawn has considerable charms as well. ISFDB notes that he’s written two novels with Chris Roberson riffing off his The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D film, The Day Dreamer and Return to Planet Droll.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) FIRE IN THE SKY. Did the monks see what they say they saw in 1178? Connie Willis is rooting for them in her Facebook post. Astronomers and scientists have their own ideas:

Canterbury Cathedral was part of St. Augustine’s Abbey, a monastery founded in 598 A.D. It endured Viking raids, William the Conqueror’s invasion, a large fire (in 1168), and the murder of its archbishop, Thomas a Becket, and was finally done in by Henry VIII. But possibly the most important event in its long history was something happened on a summer night in June in 1178.

That night, “after sunset when the moon was first seen,” five monks were sitting outside looking at the sky and the crescent moon when the upper part of the horn “suddenly split in two. From the midpoint of this division, a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out fire, hot coals, and sparks. The body of the moon writhed like a wounded snake. Afterwards it resumed it proper state. This phenomenon was repeated a dozen times or more, the flame assuming various twisting shapes at random and then returning to normal. Then, after these transformations, the Moon, from hook to horn, that is, along the whole length, took on a blackish appearance.”

The five monks told Gervase of Canterbury, the chronicler of the Abbey, what they’d seen, and he wrote it all down, adding that the monks were “prepared to stake their honor on an oath that they have made no addition or falsification in the narrative.” Unfortunately, they were the only people to have seen it. According to European chroniclers of the time, the continent was “fogged in” that night, so the five Canterbury monks were the only witnesses, and nobody paid any attention to their account for nearly eight hundred years, at which point geologist Jack B. Hartung proposed a theory for what they might have seen: a giant asteroid slamming into the moon.

If it had, there should be a crater at the place the monks described the explosion as being, so Hartung went about looking for one–and found a likely candidate…

(11) THE DAWN OF HARRY. Harry Harrison started out drawing horror comics in the 1950s. Here is a post by G. W. Thomas which looks at his comics work:  “Harry Harrison… Beware!”

Harry Harrison… Beware! Not of Harry Harrison’s writing because that’s excellent. Beware he drew horror strips for more than just EC Comics. While he and Wally Wood produced some classic comics there, HH began selling off other strips to packagers for a fee. The authors are not know for sure but Harry wrote most of these, including the writing in the fee. Some of these free market sales ended up at Youthful’s Beware and later Trojan’s Beware when the comic changed hands….

(12) NEFFY NOMS. The National Fantasy Fan Federation, in the June issue of TNFF, corrected the omission of Elizabeth Bear’s novel Machine, and the fanzine Outworlds, from the previously-announced list of finalists for the Neffy Awards.

(13) SENTENCES OF DEATH. “The Becoming of Italo Calvino” in The New Yorker discusses the collection Last Comes the Raven.

… The Calvino of “Crossed Destinies” is a familiar one, the magical realist with a playful approach to the author-narrator-reader relationship. But the book also captures one of his spinier qualities: his aura of danger. He likes to pry things open, often in uncomfortable ways; “Crossed Destinies” throws together characters who can communicate only through tarot cards, and ends when the deck scatters, along with their identities. This is formal violence, the story flying apart like a tossed hand, but a bodily analogue is never far away: one man describes being dismembered, how “sharp blades .?.?. tore him to pieces.” And yet, because much of Calvino’s cruelty is abstracted, it seems free of malice, which makes it all the more magnetic. Even before they disintegrate, the characters in “Crossed Destinies” are subject to bizarre structural rigors: pulled from the forest, stripped of their voices, severed from their pasts. When brutality occurs at the level of form, flashing in every choice (or “renunciation”), it can surface how narrative is not just an act of creation but—for the unseen, unwritten alternative—a death sentence….

(14) KEVIN SMITH NEWS. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Kevin Smith says he really enjoyed his time running the He-Man and The Masters of the Universe universe and 12-year-olds of all ages will love Masters of the Universe: Revelation when it comes to Netflix in July.

[Thanks to JJ, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, Lise Andreasen, Cora Buhlert, James Reynolds, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and Martin Morse Wooster  for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]