Tag Archives: J. K. Rowling

Pixel Scroll 5/6/25 All I Need To Know, I Learned From Pixel Scrolls

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(1) MORE SEATTLE WORLDCON 2025 COVERAGE. Two of the more widely-read pop culture sites have picked up the story – and heavily cite File 770, for which I thank them.

Jason Sanford’s new Genre Grapevine is also devoted to the “2025 Seattle Worldcon AI Fallout”.

Yesterday Elizabeth Bear and Fran Wilde withdrew from the Worldcon program:

(2) BALTIMORE BOOK EVENT FAILS. “Broken promises, Fyre Festival vibes: A Million Lives Book Festival was a disaster” reports The Baltimore Banner.

In February, Philadelphia-area author Hannah Levin found out she’d been accepted to participate in A Million Lives Book Festival, a convention of fantasy authors, narrators and influencers to be held the first weekend of May at the Baltimore Convention Center. As a new author whose debut novel, “The Treasured One,” was published by Aethon Books in 2024, she was excited about the event. “We thought it would be a big thing for us,” she said.

It was a big thing, but not in the way anyone expected. The festival, organized by Baltimore-based author Grace Willows’ Archer Fantasy Events, was supposed to provide an opportunity for writers to network and an audience of at least 500 to 600 paid ticket holders. What participants got, they said, was a disappointing weekend of dashed expectations, unfulfilled promises, lost money and more questions than answers.

“I think ‘debacle’ is the word for it,” Levin said of the event that was quickly dubbed online as the Fyre Festival of literary festivals.

The 11 authors, vendors and influencers I interviewed by email and phone spent between $300 and $2,000 to attend A Million Lives depending on their travel arrangements and other factors. They said they were promised special badges that designated them as official participants, a creator’s lounge, cosplay events and a VIP swag bag for the top two ticketing levels.

That didn’t happen.

“There was a huge financial loss for authors, vendors and narrators attending,” wrote a book influencer known as Azthia, who spent about $300 on a plane ticket but crashed with other participants when her hotel stay was not paid for as promised. “They were told 600 tickets and in the end there were more authors than attendees.”…

(3) ACTOR/ACTRESS AWARDS? “’The Last Of Us’ Star Bella Ramsey Defends Gendered Emmy Categories” at Deadline.

Bella Ramsey has a decent shot at Emmy success this year — and won’t quibble if competing in the Lead Actress category.

The British star of HBO hit The Last of Us identifies as non-binary and prefers the they/them pronouns, but said it was fine for people to “call me how you see me.”

Speaking on Spotify’s The Louis Theroux Podcast about gendered award categories, Ramsey said it was important “recognition for women in the industry is preserved.”

“I don’t have the answer and I wish that there was something that was an easy way around it, but I think that it is really important that we have a female category and a male category,” Ramsey added.

The former Game of Thrones star said they had thought hard about how to represent non-binary individuals in award categories, but did not have a solution.

One idea was to name the category “best performance in a female character,” but Ramsey said this creates issues for those portraying non-binary characters on screen.

One thing Ramsey is certain of is that being called an “actress” feels uneasy. “I have a guttural, ‘That’s not quite right,’ instinct to it,” Ramsey said. “But I just don’t take it too seriously … it doesn’t feel like an attack on my identity.”…

(4) ROWLING ON HARRY POTTER ACTOR’S SUPPORT OF TRANS RIGHTS. “’I don’t have the power’: JK Rowling won’t sack Paapa Essiedu from Harry Potter TV show over trans rights views” reports the Guardian.

JK Rowling has said she will not fire actor Paapa Essiedu from the forthcoming Harry Potter TV series over his support for transgender rights.

Essiedu has been cast as key character Severus Snape in the HBO drama, which is designed to run for more than a decade and will be one of the most expensively produced television shows of all time.

In a post on X, Rowling wrote: “I don’t have the power to sack an actor from the series and I wouldn’t exercise it if I did. I don’t believe in taking away people’s jobs or livelihoods because they hold legally protected beliefs that differ from mine.”

Last week, Essiedu, along with more than 1,500 figures from film and TV, signed an open letter condemning the UK supreme court ruling, which judged that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act refer only to a biological woman and to biological sex….

(5) CIVILIZATION ENDS: FILM AT ELEVEN. “Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?” from The Atlantic (Archive.ph link).

Last year, i visited the music historian Ted Gioia to talk about the death of civilization.

He welcomed me into his suburban-Texas home and showed me to a sunlit library. At the center of the room, arranged neatly on a countertop, stood 41 books. These, he said, were the books I needed to read.

The display included all seven volumes of Edward Gibbon’s 18th-century opus, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ; both volumes of Oswald Spengler’s World War I–era tract, The Decline of the West ; and a 2,500-year-old account of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, who “was the first historian to look at his own culture, Greece, and say, I’m going to tell you the story of how stupid we were,” Gioia explained….

…He’s not alone in fearing that we’ve entered a cultural dark age. According to a recent YouGov poll, Americans rate the 2020s as the worst decade in a century for music, movies, fashion, TV, and sports. A 2023 story in The New York Times Magazine declared that we’re in the “least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press.” An art critic for The Guardian recently proclaimed that “the avant garde is dead.”

What’s so jarring about these declarations of malaise is that we should, logically, be in a renaissance. The internet has caused a Cambrian explosion of creative expression by allowing artists to execute and distribute their visions with unprecedented ease. …

…in 312 c.e., the Roman Senate ordered the construction of a gaudy monument called the Arch of Constantine. It incorporated pieces from older monuments, built in more glorious times for the empire, which had begun its centuries-long decline.

The Arch is one of Gioia’s favorite metaphors for modern culture. The TV and film industry is enamored of reboots, spin-offs, and formulaic genre fare. Broadway theaters subsist on stunt-cast revivals of old warhorses; book publishers rely disproportionately on backlist sales. Entertainment companies have long understood the power of giving people more of what they already like, but recommendation algorithms take that logic to a new extreme, keeping us swiping endlessly for slight variations on our favorite things. In every sector of society, Gioia told me, “we’re facing powerful forces that want to impose stagnation on us.”

The problem is particularly acute in music. In 2024, new releases accounted for a little more than a quarter of the albums consumed in the U.S.; every year, a greater and greater percentage of the albums streamed online is “catalog music,” meaning it is at least 18 months old. Hoping to remonetize the classics, record labels and private-equity firms have spent billions of dollars to acquire artists’ publishing rights. The reemergence of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2022, 37 years after its release, seemed to signal that this was a good bet. A brief placement in a popular TV show (Netflix’s Stranger Things, itself a pastiche of 1980s movie tropes) could, it turned out, cause an old hit to outcompete most of the newer songs in the world….

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 6, 1969 — Annalee Newitz, 56.

By Paul Weimer: I first encountered Annalee Newitz’ nonfiction, first, as a columnist, as a non fiction writer, as a podcaster with their partner Charlie Jane Anders. Four Lost Cities is an amazingly researched book looking at the rise and fall of four cities and what we can learn about the challenges they faced. I learned an amazing amount I never know about, for example, Angkor Wat. I think it is their strongest work and if you asked me “what one book of theirs should I read?”, Four Lost Cities is the one I’d put into your hands. 

Annalee Newitz

Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction was a surprisingly hopeful book, given its title and content. 

Although they have been writing fiction, too for a while, I finally got into their fiction with The Future of Another Timeline, with rival powers fighting for control of a timeline just catnip for me. Given the political changes lately in the United States, it feels even more relevant than it once did. And once again, I learned a lot about some historical events I hadn’t even heard of, thanks to the jumping around the timeline by the protagonists. But even with that, the changes to the timeline are not shown in some grand manner, but how they affect people. People matter to Newitz’s work. 

Newitz’ work is bright, well researched, deep, and thought provoking, with a mind like an engineer and the language and diction of an English professor. I am pretty sure that as good as Future was, I prefer Newitz’ nonfiction more, but I am primed for whatever they decide to turn their prodigious powers on, next. (In the meantime, of course, there is always Our Opinions are Correct). 

[Note: ISFDB and the Science Fiction Encyclopedia say Newitz’ birthday is today, Wikipedia says tomorrow. Happy birthday whichever is the case!)

(7) COMICS SECTION.

(8) HUGO VIEWING. In “Hugo 2025: The Wild Robot”, Camestros Felapton rates another finalist.

…As I said in the intro, the film has more bite than you might imagine. It’s not a nature documentary and their are kid-friendly fantasy elements to how the animals of the island live but aside from that the animals are presented naturalistically. There is a repeated emphasis on death as a common occurrence and the film is clear that animals kill and eat other animals. Fink the fox (the almost ubiquitous Pedro Pascal) is a key supporting character but when he first turns up he is trying to catch and eat Bright Bill, Roz’s adopted baby goose child.

The idea of juxtaposing robots with nature is not a new one but it is an under-explored one….

(9) VINTAGE PROPS. “Where Would Hollywood Find Its Guillotines or Pay Phones Without Them?” asks the New York Times. (Article is behind a paywall.)

When the Netflix series “Wednesday” needed a guillotine recently, it did not have to venture far. A North Hollywood prop house called History for Hire had one available, standing more than eight feet high with a suitably menacing blade. (The business offers pillories too, but the show wasn’t in the market for any.)

The company’s 33,000-square-foot warehouse is like the film and television industry’s treasure-filled attic, crammed with hundreds of thousands of items that help bring the past to life. It has a guitar Timothée Chalamet used in “A Complete Unknown,” luggage from “Titanic,” a black baby carriage from “The Addams Family.”

Looking for period detail? You can find different iterations of Wheaties boxes going back to the ’40s, enormous television cameras with rotating lenses from the ’50s, a hair dyer with a long hose that connects to a plastic bonnet from the ’60s, a pay phone from the ’70s and a yellow waterproof Sony Walkman from the ’80s….

… History for Hire, which Jim and Pam Elyea have owned for almost four decades, is part of the crucial but often unseen infrastructure that keeps Hollywood churning, and helps make it one of the best places in the world to make film and television.

“People just don’t realize how valuable a business like that is to help support the look of a film,” said Nancy Haigh, a set decorator who found everything from a retro can of pork and beans to a one-ton studio crane there for “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” which she won an Oscar for. “But it’s because people like them exist that your moviegoing experience has such life to it.”…

… “I don’t know what we would do without them,” said Pascale, who has won an Oscar for “Mank.”

No one likes entertaining that idea. But with fewer movies and television shows being shot in Los Angeles these days, and History for Hire getting less business, the Elyeas fear they may not be able to afford to renew their lease for five more years. If they close, Los Angeles will lose another piece of the vibrant ecosystem that has kept it attractive to filmmakers, even as states like Georgia and New Mexico lure productions with lucrative tax credits. Some Angelenos fear a vicious cycle: If the city continues to lose local talent and resources, even more productions will flee….

(10) SPEAKEASY. “AI-Dubbed Swedish Film ‘Watch the Skies’ Opening in Theaters” – Variety listens in.

When XYZ Films‘ “Watch the Skies” has its U.S. theatrical release on Friday, Hollywood will also get a glimpse at the state-of-the-art in AI-driven “visual dubbing” and its potential for Hollywood.

“Watch the Skies” is a sci-fi adventure filmed in Swedish (under the name “UFO Sweden”), but, uniquely, the actors will appear to be speaking English through the use of TrueSync, an AI visual dubbing tool from startup Flawless, which effectively syncs new (in this case, English language) dialogue with the actors’ mouth movements. The original actors recorded their lines in English as an ADR process, before the Flawless AI tech was applied to the movie….

(11) LEFT BEHIND. “Andor Leaves Out a Key Part of Star Wars Mythology, and I Think It’s Brilliant” says CBR.com.

While Andor enjoys effusive praise from critics and Star Wars fans, both usually fail to mention a key reason the series is so unique. The two-season Disney+ series is the first, and thus far only, story in the expansive saga aimed specifically at adult viewers. How Cassian Andor finds his way to the Rebellion meticulously examines the Star Wars political philosophy, which only works because it ignores an important aspect of the mythology: the Force. As a fan of both the political and spiritual allegory in this universe, I believe ignoring the latter makes the series absolutely brilliant….

(12) GETTING WITH THE TIMES. Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki reminds readers:

(13) KEEPING THE AI IN SETI. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.]  I spotted this article pre-print on the Nature website. “AI scientist ‘team’ joins the search for extraterrestrial life”.

The collaborative system generated more than 100 hypotheses relating to the origins of life in the Universe.

 Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have created a system that can perform autonomous research in astrobiology, the study of the origins of life in the Universe.

AstroAgents comprises eight ‘AI agents’ that analyse data and generate scientific hypotheses. It joins a suite of other AI tools that aim to automate the process of science, from reading the literature to coming up with hypotheses and even writing papers….

…The result was 101 hypotheses from Gemini and 48 from Claude. One hypothesis posits that certain molecules found on Earth would make “reliable biomarkers” indicating the presence of life. Another suggests that a cluster of the organic molecules found in two meteorites might have formed through the same series of chemical reactions.

Buckner scored each hypothesis. She deemed 36 of the Gemini hypotheses to be plausible and 24 novel. By contrast, none of the Claude-generated hypotheses was original — but they were overall less error-prone and clearer than Gemini’s.

Primary research pre-print: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23170 

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Jeffrey Smith, Daniel Dern, Kathy Sullivan, 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 Kendall.]

Pixel Scroll 1/13/25 Why Yes, We Are (At Least In Part) Stardust

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(1) COMPREHENSIVE COVERAGE OF GAIMAN SEX ASSAULT ALLEGATIONS. New York Magazine‘s often explicit article “There Is No Safe Word” [Archive.is link] by Lila Shapiro, as described by Publishers Lunch, “reports on the details of the Neil Gaiman sexual assault case, expanding on allegations first reported by New Zealand podcast Tortoise Media. Last July, five women accused Gaiman of assault, and one woman said she filed a complaint with New Zealand police. Four out of five of Gaiman’s accusers spoke to New York Magazine for the piece, and the publication reviewed journal entries, texts, emails, and police correspondence. Gaiman did not comment for the article, but he has denied all allegations.” Shapiro spoke with eight women in total, three who had never gone public. The story contains content that readers may find disturbing, including graphic allegations of sexual assault.

(2) ROWLING ON GAIMAN. And in Deadline, “J.K. Rowling Compares Neil Gaiman To Harvey Weinstein Amid Claims”.

…Not long after New York magazine published its detailed cover story on multiple new and old claims against Gaiman by multiple women, the Harry Potter creator took to social media to give some opinionated context of her own.

No stranger to controversy, criticism and accusations of being transphobic for her strident views on gender identity and the transitioning of minors, Rowling pinned initial reactions to allegations against the once acclaimed Gaiman to incarcerated rapist Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo outburst against the much-accused Pulp Fiction producer.  

“The literary crowd that had a hell of a lot to say about Harvey Weinstein before he was convicted has been strangely muted in its response to multiple accusations against Neil Gaiman from young women who’d never met, yet — as with Weinstein — tell remarkably similar stories,” Rowling wrote this morning on X in the second of two missives on Gaiman….

(3) WRITER’S LEGACY BURNED. The London Review of Books reports that by a tragic coincidence of timing the late Gary Indiana’s personal library and collection was destroyed by the Eaton Fire in L.A.

(4) NEW OKORAFOR BOOK DRAWS FROM LIFE. The New York Times profiles Nnedi Okorafor in “Writing Fantasy Came Naturally. Reality Was Far More Daunting”. (Link bypasses the paywall). “After winning just about every major science fiction and fantasy award, Nnedi Okorafor explores a traumatic event in her own history in her most autobiographical novel yet.”

… Thirty years and more than 20 books later, Okorafor, now an acclaimed science fiction and fantasy writer, is exploring that traumatic experience, and the transformation that followed, in her heavily autobiographical new novel, “Death of the Author.”

A genre-defying metafictional experiment, the story centers on a Nigerian American writer from Chicago named Zelu, who is paralyzed and uses a wheelchair after a childhood accident. She dreams of becoming a writer, but her lovingly overprotective parents and siblings are skeptical that she’ll ever support herself. After struggling for years to get published, Zelu writes a best-selling postapocalyptic novel set among sentient robots in a future Nigeria, and lands a seven-figure advance and a movie deal. Her sudden rise to fame is both thrilling and jarring, as Zelu sees her success disrupt her family, and her novel get whitewashed by Hollywood executives who strip it of the African elements.

With its autobiographical framework, “Death of the Author” is a departure from Okorafor’s previous work, otherworldly stories that often draw on her experiences in Nigeria, where she found that belief in the supernatural — giant spider deities, water spirits, shape-shifting leopard people — is part of daily life….

(5) BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING…WHAT YOU BUY WITH THIS. “1984 author and former M.E.N. journalist George Orwell honoured on new £2 coin” reports the Manchester Evening News, where he used to work. (King Charles is on the obverse. Make of that what you will.)

Famed author and former Manchester Evening News journalist George Orwell is celebrated on a new £2 coin.

The writer of 1984 and Animal Farm will be honoured by the Royal Mint, 75 years after his death. Coin artist Henry Gray created a design which appears to be an eye, but is a camera lens at the centre of the design….

The Royal Mint will soon be ready to sell you one.

(6) MARKET REPORT. Incensepunk Magazine is now accepting submissions of speculative fiction stories about 4,000 to 6,000 words in length.

And what is “incensepunk” you ask?

Incensepunk is, at its core, a genre of longing. It desires a world in which traditional faiths and churches play a major role in society. Incensepunk extrapolates Byzantine and Gothic architecture styles into a modern world of skyscrapers and globalization. However, it is not regressive. It doesn’t view the past as good and the present as wicked and depraved. Instead, it tries to envision what the world could look like if faith and society were more integrated.

Incensepunk is speculative fiction, but it need not be alternate history (though it is certainly acceptable to be)….

(7) COMPLIMENTARY ENCOUNTERS OF THE HOLLYWOOD KIND. Far Out Magazine says “The writer Steven Spielberg called his muse” was Ray Bradbury.

…In terms of source material, Spielberg has adapted some of the greats. Michael Crichton provided the original novel on which Jurassic Park is based and Minority Report comes from a story by Philip K. Dick. However, for the director’s biggest sci-fi inspiration, we turn to a writer he never got the chance to bring to the big screen…

…Commenting on Bradbury’s [2012] passing, Spielberg was extremely complimentary of his work. “He was my muse for the better part of my sci-fi career,” he said in a statement (via The Hollywood Reporter). “He lives on through his legion of fans. In the world of science fiction and fantasy and imagination he is immortal.”

This admiration went both ways. In an interview with the Star Ledger (via Entertainment Weekly), Bradbury gave his thoughts on a Spielberg classic. “Close Encounters is the best film of its kind ever made,” he espoused. “It takes too long, but the transfiguration at the end, with the splendid arrival of the mother ship – that makes up for everything. I was so amazed and changed when I saw it that I went over to the studio to tell Spielberg what a genius he was.” In a full circle moment, Spielberg replied to this praise by claiming that Close Encounters wouldn’t have been possible without It Came From Outer Space, a 1953 film that Bradbury contributed the story to…. 

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 13, 1893 — Clark Ashton Smith. (Died 1961.)

Clark Ashton Smith

By Paul Weimer: Clark Ashton Smith was part of the Weird Tales crowd with people like Lovecraft, and it is through reading Lovecraft and authors like him that I came across Smith’s work. I started with his weird horror/fantasy, stories like City of Singing Flame (although that particular story I would only read years later) and eventually trying stuff from Poseidonis (his Atlantis world) and Zothique (once I found out that it had inspired Jack Vance).  Empire of the Necromancers feels like it could be set in a distant corner of the Dying Earth and I like that headcanon, for example. 

I found him to be a taproot writer, ones whose ideas and style were perhaps somewhat better than his execution at times (this is also true of Lovecraft, let’s be honest). But his ideas and style were inspirational, transformational and helped inspire a sheaf of fans, authors, games and much more as a result. In a way, without reading Smith, you’ve read Smith–through how he has influenced writers since (to say nothing of his correspondence with Howard and Lovecraft at the time). 

And it must be said that there is a poetic feel to all of his work. The poetry Smith wrote early in his career suffused and influenced his subsequent stories and fragments. He never lost the dream of poetry. Or, the poetic muse never left him.  Smith wrote intensely and evocatively and his poetic training and use of word choice and imagery come through in all of his stories. Reading a Smith story is to be transported into another world, into another reality, be it in the far past or the far future.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

January 13, 2008 — Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Seventeen years ago this evening on Fox, the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles premiered. It was directed by Josh Friedman whose sole genre work previously was H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.  The top cast was Lena Headey as Sarah Connor along with Thomas Dekker and Summer Glau in supporting roles

If Lena Headey sounds familiar that’s because she was on the Game of Thrones as Cersei Lannister.

In addition, the narrator was also Headey. Though it would last but two seasons comprising thirty-one episodes, as the first season was abbreviated, it was the highest-rated new scripted series of the ’07 to ‘08 television season. And yes, it started in the ‘07 television season even though its first episode was in January of ‘08. Such are the mysteries of television seasons.

Reception among critics was generally quite fine. Gina Bellafante of the New York Times said that it was “one of the more humanizing adventures in science fiction to arrive in quite a while.” And Maureen Ryan of the Chicago Tribune exclaimed of the second season that the “season’s opener is much clearer and more sheer fun than anything that aired last spring.”

It has a stellar eighty-four percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes on the Popcornmeter as they call it.

Despite numerous ongoing fan efforts to revive the series, Josh Friedman has dismissed the possibility of crowdfunding a third season unlike say the recent Veronica Mars series due to issues involving holder rights. I suspect the Terminator issues here are hellishly complex. 

(10) NEW ACTOR FOR T’CHALLA? [Item by Steven French.] I suspect fandom may be divided on this one: “Marvel is ready to recast Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa in Black Panther. Should they?” asks the Guardian.

Marvel’s multiverse has become a narrative Swiss army knife capable of slicing through the thorniest of creative dilemmas and papering over the widest of cracks. That said, few dilemmas are as sensitive as how to move forward with a superhero as iconic as Black Panther. Chadwick Boseman’s portrayal of T’Challa wasn’t just a performance – it was a cultural touchstone, woven so tightly into the fabric of modern blockbuster cinema that imagining anyone else in the role feels like attempting to rewrite history. Four years after Boseman’s untimely death from colon cancer, Marvel faces the delicate task of continuing a legacy that seems impossible to replicate.

If rumblings out of Hollywood this week have foundation, however, the studio is beginning to countenance just that, a new T’Challa from an alternate reality who presumably finds his way into the mainstream Marvel universe via one of the umpteen ways we’ve seen superheroes such as Doctor Strange, various Spider-Men and Scarlet Witch crossing the boundaries between one reality and another. Jeff Sneider of the InSneider newsletter reports that the studio is finally “firmly open” to bringing back the king of Wakanda, despite previous attempts to recast the role having getting rebuffed by actors who didn’t want to jeopardise their careers by “stepping into Boseman’s gigantic shoes”.

(11) CORREIA “DEDICATION” TO GRRM. A GRRM fansite ran a photo of the dedication page.

 “Fantasy author taunts Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin in his new book” reports MSN.com.

…Is this a playful jab or a petty insult? It’s probably closer to the latter, seeing as how Martin and Correia have locked horns before. Their last public clash involves the Hugo Awards, which are handed out every year to honor the best in science fiction and fantasy fiction. Martin has been attending the Hugos since the 1970s, while Correia got involved in the 2010s….

Correia is all over his social media crowing about the attention his jab is getting.

(12) STANDING ROOM ONLY. Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket did not leave the ground today after all: “Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin calls off launch of New Glenn rocket” – AP News tells the reason.

Blue Origin will try again to launch its massive new rocket as early as Tuesday after calling off the debut launch because of ice buildup in critical plumbing.

The 320-foot (98-meter) New Glenn rocket was supposed to blast off before dawn Monday with a prototype satellite. But ice formed in a purge line for a unit powering some of the rocket’s hydraulic systems and launch controllers ran out of time to clear it, according to the company.

Founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin said Tuesday’s poor weather forecast could cause more delay. Thick clouds and stiff wind were expected at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

The test flight already had been delayed by rough seas that posed a risk to the company’s plan to land the first-stage booster on a floating platform in the Atlantic….

(13) MOANA LITIGATION. “Disney faces copyright lawsuit over ‘Moana’ franchise” reports Entertainment Weekly.

Disney has been hit with a copyright lawsuit alleging that the wildly popular Moana franchise was nearly entirely lifted from a decades-old screenplay without the writer’s consent.

In a lawsuit reviewed by Entertainment Weekly that was filed Friday, animator Buck Woodall claims that former Mandeville Films development director Jenny Marchick violated his copyright by secretly passing to Disney materials he produced confidentially for her two decades ago. That material, Woodall alleges, became Moana and Moana 2….

…The animator claims that he delivered to Marchick “extremely large quantities of intellectual property and trade secrets” related to a project variously called “Bucky” and “Bucky the Wave Warrior” between 2003 and 2008. Those materials included a completed screenplay, character illustrations, budgets, a fully animated concept trailer, storyboards, background image references, and more.

Woodall also notes that he received copyright protection on these materials in 2004 that was updated in 2014.

“Bucky” was never developed, but Woodall claims that Marchick was able to pass his materials to Disney by exploiting legal loopholes inherent to the “tapestry of confusion” that is Disney’s elaborate corporate structure. According to Woodall, “Bucky” not only became Moana without his consent, but continued to serve as the basis for Moana 2 as well.

The suit enumerates a number of similarities between Woodall’s undeveloped script and Moana and Moana 2. Like “Bucky,” the first film follows a teenager on a voyage in an outrigger canoe across Polynesian waters to save Polynesian land. It features the Polynesian belief in spiritual ancestors who manifest as animal guides, and a number of specifics including a symbolic necklace, navigation by stars, a lava goddess, and a giant creature disguised as a mountainous island.

As for Moana 2, the suit notes that details such as the rooster and pig companions, a mission to break a curse, a whirlpool that leads to an oceanic portal, and an encounter with the Kakamora warrior tribe were all lifted without consent from “Bucky.”…

(14) PITCH MEETING. Hmm. Did any of the foregoing get mentioned during the “Moana 2 Pitch Meeting”?

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

Pixel Scroll 12/5/24 Some Scrolls In Life Are Bad, They Can Really Make You Mad

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(1) DISTINGUISHABLE FROM MAGIC. Ted Chiang received the Humanist Inquiry & Innovation Award at the American Humanist Association’s 83rd Annual Conference, held virtually in September 2024. “This award honors those who have advanced human understanding and innovation in ways that uphold humanist values, work that exemplifies the power of inquiry and innovation to promote human dignity, freedom and progress.” This text is excerpted from Chiang’s acceptance speech at the Conference: “The Distinction Between Imaginary Science and Magic” at TheHumanist.com.

…The reason these [two example] stories feel different to me has to do with the way these stories treat this impossibility. One feels like it’s a story about an imaginary scientific discovery, while the other one feels like it’s a story about magic. I think that the difference in the way these stories feel points to something significant. If I’m told that a phenomenon is dependent on the practitioner, that makes me think it’s magic, because think of the ways that magic is commonly depicted.

Sometimes magic works only for people born with an innate gift. Sometimes magic only works for people who have purified their soul through years of study. Sometimes magic only works for people who have good intentions, or it works differently for different people, depending on whether their intentions are good or bad. Sometimes magic requires intense concentration to be effective, or it requires that you make a sacrifice.

None of these things are true of scientific phenomena. When you pass a magnet through a coil of wire, electric current flows no matter who your parents are or whether your intentions are good or bad. You don’t have to concentrate hard or offer a sacrifice in order for a light bulb to turn on. Electricity does not care.

One of the central criteria for a scientific result is that it be reproducible, that it be it can be recreated anywhere by anyone. It does not depend on a specific person’s presence or participation. If an experiment only works when one particular person conducts it, then we discard that data as spurious. When radio waves were first discovered, they might have seemed magical to the casual observer and the scientists who first transmitted messages via radio might have seemed like wizards because they were able to communicate over long distances using an invisible medium, but because radio waves are reproducible, because they don’t rely on any particular person’s participation, it eventually became possible to build radio transmitters and receivers by the thousands and then the millions, and now, literally anyone can use a radio. It is no longer restricted to a handful of scientists….

(2) WHAT YOUNG PEOPLE THINK. James Davis Nicoll recently presented George R. R. Martin’s “With Morning Comes Mistfall” (1973) to the Young People Read Old SFF panel.

November’s Young People Read Old Nebula Finalists features George R. R. Martin’s ​“With Morning Comes Mistfall”. First published in the May 1973 issue of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, ​“Mistfall” was nominated for the Nebula as well as the Hugo, losing the first to “ Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death”, and the second to Le Guin’s ​“Those Who Walk Away from Omelas”.

I first encountered ​“Mistfall” in Lester del Rey’s Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Third Annual Collection.

I disagreed strongly with the apparent thesis — that looking for answers to interesting questions is the act of a buzzkill — but enjoyed the story enough start relentlessly hunting down Martin stories. One result is that I own at least three copies of this particular story, in the del Rey anthology, in A Song for Lya and Other Stories1, and in Portraits of His Children. I had the Analog back-issue until a flood ate my 1970s magazine collection. I have a shelf of Martin works and this story is why. 

Of course, there’s no guarantee the Young People will like the same stuff I enjoyed. Let’s find out what they thought….

(3) HBO CHIEF “TOTALLY COMFORTABLE” WITH ROWLING. “Harry Potter HBO Series to Film in Summer 2025 After 32,000 Auditions” – Variety has the story.

Warner Bros. Discovery announced that its upcoming “Harry Potter” series will start shooting this summer at Leavesden, where the movies were also filmed.

During a presentation at the Warner Bros. Discovery’s headquarters in London on Thursday, showrunner Francesca Gardiner and director Mark Mylod revealed that the show had auditioned 32,000 kids for the lead roles, and that the casting team is currently reviewing between 500 and 1,000 audition tapes per day with the intent to watch every single one. Though he affirmed they haven’t made any final choices in regards to casting yet, Mylod said the next step will be to “workshop with some of our shortlisted candidates” in January.

Gardiner and Mylod also said they will be sticking to correct canonical ages for the characters: Severus Snape (potentially being played by Paapa Essiedu) will be in his 30s, while James and Lily Potter will be younger, as they were only 21 when they died. Mylod teased that for the adult characters, he’s looking to continue the tradition of “brilliant theater actors in the U.K.,” with the young actors of course all being newcomers….

… The run-up to the series has not been without controversy, however, as book author J.K. Rowling has continued to cause backlash with her views on transgender identity. However, HBO has stood by her side, telling Variety in a statement last month: “J.K. Rowling has a right to express her personal views. We will remain focused on the development of the new series, which will only benefit from her involvement.”

At Thursday’s event, HBO chief Casey Bloys doubled down on that sentiment, saying that he’s “totally comfortable” with Rowling’s involvement and “not concerned about consumer response.”…

But as Chris Barkley said when he sent the link, “Well, heh, he SHOULD BE concerned….”

(4) SECOND FIFTH. James Davis Nicoll recommends “Five SF Stories About Rebuilding After a Cataclysmic Event” at Reactor. One of his very interesting choices is:

Second Ending by James White (1961)

World War Three killed nine out of ten people, but enough infrastructure survived to support reliable hibernation. This is good news for terminally ill Ross. He can be placed into suspended animation until a cure is found for his disease. The results are a mixed success. Ross wakes, now healthy, to discover that humans have, during his long slumber, not only annihilated themselves but almost all life on Earth.

Fortune smiles on Ross. First, life may be (mostly) dead but there is an army of robots to carry out his orders. Second, thanks to the upturned cuffs of the clothes he wore on his way to cold sleep, a few seeds survived the apocalypse. Third, thanks to suspended animation, Ross has all the time he needs to oversee Earth’s terraforming… although he might be surprised to learn how long that will take.

For the most part, this short novel is a tribute to what one human can accomplish, given only determination, knowledge, and a vast army of relentlessly obedient, highly advanced robots. That said, Second Ending may feature the longest timescale needed for terraforming ever featured in a science fiction novel.

(5) I CAN’T SAY NO. Camestros Felapton knows readers can’t resist taking the hook dangled in “Robot Fabulas: Introduction”: “Welcome to Robot Fabulas, a series that is never quite about what it appears to be about”… I certainly can’t.

…This is an attempt to trace a history of science fiction by following one niche part of science fiction. Many things can be science fiction but rockets, space travel, time travel and robots all share a common quality that even when they discussed in factual terms (as theories or in some cases actualities) they have a science fictional quality to them.

The premise of Robot Fabulas is that there is a class of stories that I am calling “robot stories” that share a group of features to them. That these stories long predate anything we might call science fiction in the modern sense but which clearly influenced modern science fiction. We can recognise Pinocchio in Star Trek’s Commander Data and we can recognise Victor Frankenstein in Data’s inventor Doctor Noonien Soong. How ancient stories rooted in folk tales, legends or myth evolved into modern stories about invention, technology is the story of science fiction. I will follow robot stories because I can see that path from the past to the future most clearly.

I think this will be a fun journey….

(6) OUROBOROS TENDENCY. “Doctor Who showrunners warn AI scripts will ‘eat their own tail’” in the Guardian.

One of the masterminds behind Doctor Who has warned that the more AI content is used for creative purposes the worse its output will be because it “eats its own tail”.

Ahead of the Doctor Who Christmas special, eagerly awaited by fans as a centrepiece of BBC1’s festive schedule, Steven Moffat made the comments in discussion with fellow showrunner Russell T Davies.

“Human beings are amazingly cheap, we’re knocking out human beings every day. And unlike anything else in history, the more we use it, the less good it is,” Moffat told the Radio Times. “Because the more content that is out there produced by AI, the more it absorbs its own content, and eats its own tail.”

Davies, who was responsible for the modern revival of Doctor Who in 2005 and returned as showrunner in 2022, had wondered whether AI would replace screenwriters.

He replied to Moffat: “Television has been run on those principles for a very long time. You’ve just described most networks!”

(7) APEX BRINGS ABOARD MANAGING EDITOR. Darian Bianco has accepted the position of Managing Editor for Apex Book Company.

As managing editor, Darian will oversee the production, marketing, and distribution of the imprint’s titles. She’ll also be involved with acquisitions and catalog management.

Darian started her career in publishing as an intern for Apex eight years ago. Most recently, she has been a writing instructor for the Reach Your Apex educational arm of the business.

Apex Book Company editor-in-chief Jason Sizemore says this about Darian: “Darian’s intellect, organizational skills, and editorial acumen will be a boon for the company.”

Darian Bianco currently works as an adjunct professor teaching English at Eastern Kentucky University. She holds an MFA from the Bluegrass Writers Studio. She is also a graduate of the 2022-2023 season of the Author’s Academy at the Carnegie Center, having worked with Ashley Blooms. Her novel-in-progress, Chatter, was one of five winners for issue six of Novel Slices. She is represented by Alexandra Levick of Writers House, LLC.

(8) NOT VERY SOURCEFUL. The Columbia Journalism Review shares “How ChatGPT Search (Mis)represents Publisher Content” based on a Tow Center study.

ChatGPT search—which is positioned as a competitor to search engines like Google and Bing—launched with a press release from OpenAI touting claims that the company had “collaborated extensively with the news industry” and “carefully listened to feedback” from certain news organizations that have signed content licensing agreements with the company. In contrast to the original rollout of ChatGPT, two years ago, when publishers learned that OpenAI had scraped their content without notice or consent to train its foundation models, this may seem like an improvement. OpenAI highlights the fact that it allows news publishers to decide whether they want their content to be included in their search results by specifying their preferences in a “robots.txt” file on its website. 

But while the company presents inclusion in its search as an opportunity to “reach a broader audience,” a Tow Center analysis finds that publishers face the risk of their content being misattributed or misrepresented regardless of whether they allow OpenAI’s crawlers….

…In total, we pulled two hundred quotes from twenty publications and asked ChatGPT to identify the sources of each quote. We observed a spectrum of accuracy in the responses: some answers were entirely correct (i.e., accurately returned the publisher, date, and URL of the block quote we shared), many were entirely wrong, and some fell somewhere in between.

We anticipated that ChatGPT might struggle to answer some queries accurately, given that forty of the two hundred quotes were sourced from publishers who had blocked its search crawler. However, ChatGPT rarely gave any indication of its inability to produce an answer. Eager to please, the chatbot would sooner conjure a response out of thin air than admit it could not access an answer. In total, ChatGPT returned partially or entirely incorrect responses on a hundred and fifty-three occasions, though it only acknowledged an inability to accurately respond to a query seven times. Only in those seven outputs did the chatbot use qualifying words and phrases like “appears,” “it’s possible,” or “might,” or statements like “I couldn’t locate the exact article.”…

(9) HEY, BUDDY, HOW CAN I GET THIS CAR OUT OF SECOND GEAR? “NYC’s film industry is still ‘totally dead’ a year after the strikes — at least for some” says Gothamist.

A year after the writers’ and actors’ strikes that stalled the film and television industry, production activity in New York City remains stuck in low gear, according to city data and interviews with more than a dozen local actors, writers, executives and crew members.

“It’s been totally dead,” said Max Casella, a series regular on “The Sopranos,” “Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” and other shows. “Nothing going on, no work, nothing.”

“There are just so many fewer ways to make a living in this industry now than ever,” said Nivedita Kulkarni, a comedian and actress with a 14-year career.

The past several years have been enormously challenging for many New Yorkers in the industry. First there were the pandemic shutdowns, which brought production to a halt. Then, there were the strikes that began in May 2023.

Nearly all the workers interviewed for this story described a dead summer and fall with few auditions and little work. In some cases, actors used to starring scenes have taken diminished roles, and minor actors or co-stars have taken work as background actors or extras.

Some have turned to trading cryptocurrencies and others have left the city altogether, no longer seeing it as a place where they might build a career in the industry.

“It’s not just a New York City shift, it’s an industry shift. It’s a national shift,” said Pat Kaufman, commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment.

Industry experts and sources expect the downturn to last several years at minimum, following larger changes in the entertainment industry’s business model. Many predict that New York City will likely remain a domestic production hotspot, but it may take years for employment to return to pre-pandemic levels.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary: December 5, 1977 — Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas

Forty-seven years ago on CBC on this date, Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas film first aired. It would premiere a year later in the States on HBO.  It was based off of the children’s book of the same name by Russell Hoban and his wife Lillian Hoban. Russell Hoban you’ll no doubt recognize as the author of Riddley Walker which won a John W. Campbell Memorial Award. It was directed and produced by Jim Henson off the script by Jerry Juhl who was known for his work on The Muppet Show, Fraggle Rock and Sesame Street.

The Muppets voice cast was Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Jerry Nelson, Richard Hunt, Dave Goelz, Marilyn Sokol and Eren Ozker. 

Paul Williams, who I was surprised to learn wrote Three Dog Night’s “An Old Fashioned Love Song” among quite a few other songs, composed the music and several songs here. This would not be his last such Muppets work as he would be involved in The Muppet Movie several years later among other of his Muppets projects. 

Reception was very positive with the New York Times comparing it to The Wind in The Willows saying and “These really are the nicest folk on the river.” It was Christmas season, blame that comparison on too much eggnog made way too strong if you want. And AV Critic said that “it was “The kind of Christmas special you could wrap in tissue when the season’s over and store carefully in a box in the attic.”   

Oh, and Bret McKenzie (you fans of The Hobbit films might recognize him) was writing the script and songs for a film adaptation of it which might be someday produced by The Jim Henson Company though it’s been years since that was announced. 

Yes, the Suck Fairy very much liked it. She even looked at her iPad mini to see what the audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes thought of it. She’s pleased to say that the more than five thousand people who had rated it gave it a hundred percent rating. After that, she put her iPad mini down, went back to stroking Pixel and watching the film. Again. Sentimental sop. 

For some reason unlike most Muppet properties, it is not streaming on Disney+ but on Peacock, but then Jim Henson’s The Storyteller is there and as well, seasonally appropriate, It’s A Very Muppet Christmas too. Not at all Muppet, but How The Grinch Stole Christmas isas well. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) A TRIBUTE. In “Why George R. R. Martin Broke the Cardinal Rule of Hollywood”, The Hollywood Reporter gives George R.R. Martin an opportunity to tell about his friendship with the late Howard Waldrop.

…“He was an amazing writer. There was no one like Howard.” And it’s not as if Waldrop’s career was without acclaim. But his peers, including Martin, worried about his finances and health towards the end of his life. With the financial success Martin enjoyed thanks to Thrones, he wanted to strike a deal to turn some of Waldrop’s stories into short films, but it wasn’t easy.

“It’s hard to get anyone to finance a short film,” Martin tells THR. “Movie theaters don’t want to show short films. I own a movie theater myself, so I know that. And it’s hard to get the big studios to make them. I tried for a number of years… I finally gave up.”

Then the author decided to break “the cardinal rule of Hollywood.”

With Waldrop’s health deteriorating, Martin was determined to honor his friend by bringing his work to the big screen. “The cardinal rule of Hollywood is: never use your own money. I broke that. I [thought], ‘God damn it, I’m gonna use my own money,’” he adds. “So we put these films into production — three of them are now finished. Two more are in post-production.”

The Ugly Chickens, starring Felicia Day (Supernatural, The Guild), has been shot alongside adaptations of Waldrop’s short stories Mary-Margaret Road Grader and Night of the Cooters. The movies are now screening on the festival circuit, with Chickens already securing a best short film nomination at the HollyShorts Film Festival (the Oscar-qualifying short film fest based in Los Angeles) …

(13) CAVES OF QUD EMERGES FROM 15 YEARS OF ‘EARLY ACCESS’. Polygon enthuses: “A beloved indie RPG just launched after 15 years in early access”.

Caves of Qud isn’t a new game by any means. Over 15 years of development, Freehold Games has built a community of passionate players over a long period of early access. But on Wednesday, Caves of Qud finally enjoyed a 1.0 launch, and is available for sale on Steam, Itch.io, and GOG.

It’s not easy to categorize Caves of Qud, because it covers so much ground — quite literally, since it’s generating an entire world full of ancient ruins, toxic jungles, scattered settlements, mutants, beasts, clones, sentient bears, and mysterious robots. It’s advertised as a “science fantasy roguelike epic” and a “deep simulation” that allows the players to do basically anything. Thanks to all the technology and magic of the setting, that can be anything from arguing with a sentient plant to becoming a spider and trapping your enemies in webs.

The 1.0 update adds a tutorial to teach the basics of the game, which was sorely needed, and adds a final quest to the main questline that initiates the end of the game. There are several new music tracks, as well as sound effects. Players can also earn 40 new achievements, find new items, and enjoy lots of minor bug fixes and quality of life changes….

And PC Gamer has a fuller description of gameplay in its “Caves of Qud review”.

(14) YOU BE CAREFUL OUT THERE AMONG THEM ENGLISH. See how easy it is to write rhyming verse in our native tongue?

(15) OVERTHINKING THINGS. “How ‘Dune: Prophecy’ will explore war against ‘thinking machines’” at Entertainment Weekly.

It’s true that fear is the mind-killer — but a laser blast from a giant robot can also be pretty lethal. 

HBO’s upcoming prequel series Dune: Prophecy is set to explore the history of author Frank Herbert’s sci-fi universe, including something that’s never been seen on screen in any of the multiple movie adaptations of Dune — namely, the war against “thinking machines” that took place tens of thousands of years before the birth of Paul Atreides….

… But the whole reason there are “human computers” in the Dune universe in the first place is because the actual computers were all destroyed in a massive war! Viewers of Dune: Prophecy will see glimpses of that war in the opening moments of this Sunday’s premiere episode….

… The actual show is set years after the end of the Butlerian Jihad, but its lingering shadow hangs over the proceedings….

(16) MUSK FRIEND WILL BE NASA ADMINISTRATOR. “Trump chooses billionaire astronaut Jared Isaacman to run NASA” reports NPR.

President-elect Donald Trump has chosen billionaire astronaut Jared Isaacman to be the next administrator of NASA….

…Isaacman made headlines earlier this year when he became the first private astronaut to conduct a spacewalk. The five-day mission took place using a capsule built by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX. During the flight, Isaacman and SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis donned space suits supplied by the company and floated briefly outside the capsule.

It was Isaacman’s second trip to space using a SpaceX capsule. He has declined to say how much he’s paid the company for the two flights.

Isaacman is a friend of Musk, and his online payment company, Shift 4, has extensive financial ties to SpaceX. According to financial disclosure documents, Shift 4 had invested $27.5 million dollars in SpaceX as of 2021. That same year, Shift4 announced a five-year partnership that would make it the payment platform for Starlink, the satellite internet service run by SpaceX.

If confirmed as NASA administrator, Isaacman would oversee billions of dollars in contracts that the government has awarded to SpaceX. He would also be in a position to funnel more money to Musk’s company.

“Isaacman is likely to favor ambitious and innovative commercial projects,” says Tim Farrar, president of TMF Associates, which analyzes the space business. “Many of those projects could well be executed by SpaceX.”

In fact, in previous posts on Musk’s social media platform X, Isaacman appears to have shown a strong preference for SpaceX. He has supported allowing SpaceX to increase its launches out of California, after lawmakers there voted to restrict its flights from Vandenberg Air Force Base. He’s also been critical of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) to carry astronauts to the moon, as well as the agency’s decision to award a lunar landing contract to Blue Origin, the spaceflight company of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos….

(17) ON THE ROAD. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The starship Enterprise ran on antimatter which sort of explains why Scotty looked a tad nervous when saying ‘the engines canna take it’. So consider today’s Nature which reports on “Antimatter being transported outside a lab for first time — in a van”   

The volatile substance will be driven across the CERN campus in trucks to different facilities, giving scientists greater opportunities to study it….

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

Pixel Scroll 11/30/24 Dead Pixels Don’t Scroll Plaid

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(1) WHEN THE ‘NEW WAVE’ WAS CONTROVERSIAL. Joachim Boaz’ new Simak-related post about the author’s Worldcon 1971 Guest of Honor speech contains a timeless message: “Exploration Log 6: Clifford D. Simak’s 1971 Worldcon Guest of Honor Speech” at Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations.

In an August 1967 editorial in Galaxy titled “S.F. as a Stepping Stone”, Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) voiced his extreme disapproval of the New Wave movement as “‘mainstream’ with just enough of a tang of the not-quite-now and the not-quite-here to qualify it for inclusion in the genre” (4). He concludes: “I hope that when the New Wave has deposited its froth and receded, the vast and solid shore of science fiction will appear once more and continue to serve the good of humanity” (6). The implication is clear: there is a Platonic science fiction form that exists (and that he writes) that must be rediscovered.

Fellow “classic” author Clifford D. Simak (1904-1988) offered a different, and far more inclusive, take at his Guest of Honor speech at Norescon 1 (Worldcon 1971). In an environment of “shrill” disagreement between various New Wave and anti-New Wave camps, Simak celebrated science fiction as a “forum of ideas” open to all voices (148)….

Fanac.org has posted an audio recording of Simak’s speech on YouTube. He begins speaking at the 28:00-minute mark: “Noreascon (1971) Worldcon – Guest of Honor Speeches – Clifford Simak and Harry Warner, Jr.”

(2) BITE ME. At Black Gate, Neil Baker happily tells readers what’s lacking in this bunch of simply jaw-ful movies: “Jumping the Shark, Part I”. First on his list:

Apex Predators (2021) Prime

What kind of shark? Stock footage and a rubber dorsal fin.

How deep is the plot? There is no plot.

Anyone famous get eaten? No

Let me preface this by saying I have a lot of respect for anyone who tries to make a feature film (having tried myself), however, I have not one ounce of respect for Dustin Ferguson, who wrote, directed and edited this utter shit show.

Everything about it is dire, an utter waste of time, and let’s talk about that time. It has a run time of 74 mins. I like a film that keeps its runtime down and packs it full of action and plot. However, this film contains approximately 18 minutes of action and/or ‘plot’. The rest of the time is padded out with stock footage of fish, or shots of characters walking along doing fuck all….

(3) MURDERBOT GIVES CHARITY A BOOST. Martha Wells has pointed readers at the sale of authored Murderbot merch from Worldbuilders, which raises funds for charities like Heifer International, Mercy Corps, First Book etc. Here’s the link: Worldbuilders Market. Wells says, “This is the ONLY licensed Murderbot seller.” The things available include Murderbot pins, a Sanctuary Moon t-shirt, and signed books.

Here’s one of the pins available ($16).

(4) CURSED CHOW? Eater commentator Jaya Saxena, in “We Don’t Have to Do a Harry Potter Baking Show”, contends that “By creating ‘Harry Potter: Wizards of Baking,’ Food Network is condoning its creator’s transphobia. It’s also just plain lazy.”

The Food Network has produced yet another formulaic competition show, but this is not news. This is what the channel has been reduced to at this point — for every Chopped, which still holds its charm, there seem to be dozens of one-off holiday challenges and pumpkin carving competitions to serve as background noise for whoever fell asleep while Netflix was running.

But Harry Potter: Wizards of Baking is different. Premiering last week, the competition features all things Harry Potter. It’s hosted by James and Oliver Phelps, who played the Weasley twins in the films, and features cameos by a host of other secondary characters. It’s shot on the original sets of the films. And competitors are expected to make fantastical creations inspired by the series, for the opportunity to win a Wizards of Baking Cup and appear in a forthcoming Harry Potter cookbook. Carla Hall is there too.

This sucks.

Food Network could have made a generic wizard-themed baking show — no one owns the concept of magic. But being an official Harry Potter property means the show was licensed in some way by its creator, J.K. Rowling, a woman who has so thoroughly dedicated her public persona to promoting transphobia that even Elon Musk is telling her to cool it….

(5) JEOPARDY! [Item by David Goldfarb.] Wednesday’s episode of Jeopardy! had a whole SFF category in the Double Jeopardy round, entitled “The Worlds of TV”. The contestants went through the category in order, top to bottom:

$400: Even though it sounds like the Ewok planet, this show is named for Diego Luna’s character
Challenger Drew Wheeler was able to come up with “What is Andor?”

$800 (accompanied by a picture all filtered in red of a hazy figure among frightening spikes, with a jet of fire in the background): It’s the name of the menacing dimension on Stranger Things
Returning champion Kevin Laskowski replied, “What is the Upside Down?”

$1200: According to Gene Roddenberry, this home planet of a USS Enterprise officer orbits a star called 40 Eridani A
Drew knew it was Vulcan.

$1600: On a SyFy miniseries, James Hook finds a magical orb that takes him, Peter, and the Lost Boys to this one-word title world
Julia Schan guessed “What is Neverland?” and was correct.

$2000: Geralt of Rivia travels across a landmass simply known as The Continent on this show
Kevin got “What is The Witcher?”

(6) BIRD IS THE WORD. George R.R. Martin reports “Dodos Take Pittsburgh” at Not A Blog.

Winners have just been announced for this year’s Pittsburgh Shorts Film Festival (November 21-24), and we’re pleased and proud  to announce that THE UGLY CHICKENS  took home the Jury Award for Best Live Action Short Film.

Mark Raso was in Pittsburgh to represent us, and accept the prize of behalf of our cast and crew and dodo lovers everywhere.  Felicia Day starred in the film, while Mark directed.   Michael Cassutt wrote the script, adapted from Howard Waldrop’s classic short story, winner of the Nebula and World Fantasy Award in 1980-1981.

Pittsburgh Shorts is one of the premiere short film venues in the country, and the competition is always tough.   It is a real honor take home the trophy, and I know Howard would have been thrilled as well.

(7) WHY NOT SAY WHAT HAPPENED?  Scott Edelman tells “Why Captain Marvel Caused Me to Reach Out to Robert De Niro” in episode 9 of the Why Not Say What Happened podcast. (Here’s the link to the whole series.)

Mulling over whether 2024 me agrees with what 1984 me thought about 1974 me reminded me getting the gig to write Marvel’s Bullpen Bulletins Page was both the best and worst thing that ever could have happened, why my willingness to burn bridges by writing an Ethics column for The Comics Journal shouldn’t be confused with bravery, which comic book art recently caused me to reach out to Robert De Niro, Stan Lee’s all-caps cover critique, the day Larry Hama verified Tony Isabella was right and I was wrong, and more.

Below is an installment of Scott’s ethics column. (Click for larger images.)

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary: Nutcracker: The Motion Picture (1986)

Christmas long ago was the memory of a dream that seemed never to end. But somewhere in the middle of that dream, I always did wake up, just in time to attend the Christmas party. — Opening lines as said by the adult Clara in E.T. Hoffman’s The Nutcracker

So let’s talk about a most unusual Nutcracker that had the blessing to get filmed. Nutcracker: The Motion Picture, also known as Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Nutcracker or simply Nutcracker, it was produced thirty-eight years ago by the Pacific Northwest Ballet.

What makes this one worth knowing about? Two words that form an oh-so-wonderful name: Maurice Sendak. 

Choreographer Kent Stowell, the artistic director of the Pacific Northwest Ballet, had invited author-illustrator Maurice Sendak to collaborate on a Nutcracker production in 1979 after his wife and another colleague had seen a Sendak design for a performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.  

(I saw those his creations when they were stored away when I was in Seattle.  Quite amazing even just there.)

Sendak initially rejected Stowell’s invitation, later explaining why he did so:  

The Nutcrackers I’ve seen have all been dull. You have a simpering little girl, a Christmas party, a tree that gets big. Then you have a variety of people who do dances that seem to go on and on ad nauseam. Technically it’s a mess, too; Acts I and II have practically nothing to do with each other. … What you don’t have is plot. No logic. You have lots of very pretty music, but I don’t enjoy it because I’m a very pedantic, logical person. I want to know why things happen.

He later accepted provided that he could write it so it was in tune with the themes in Hoffmann’s original story. It was extremely popular and it was the annual Christmas show for thirty-one years. 

For reasons too complicated to explain here, I got invited on a personal tour of the backstage area of the Pacific Northwest Ballet building where the scenery and other materials that Sendak had designed for this were stored. To say these were magical is an understatement. And just a tad scary up close. 

Two Disney executives attended the premiere and suggested it’d make a splendid film. Sendak and the Director of the Ballet resisted at first preferring to just film the ballet. But both finally decided to adapt it to a film. That meant Clara’s dream had to be clarified; large portions of the choreography were changed; some of the original designs underwent revision, and Sendak created additional ones from scratch.

It was shot in ten days on the cheap and critics weren’t particularly kind about the result as they could see the necessary shortcuts taken. Ballard, the Director here as well, responded to criticism about the editing in a later The New York Times interview, noting that the editing was not what he had initially planned, but was because of the tight filming schedule.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by JJ.]

Born November 30, 1952 — Jill Eastlake, 72.

By JJ: Jill Eastlake is an IT Manager, Costumer, Conrunner, and Fan who is known for her elaborate and fantastical costume designs; her costume group won “Best in Show” at the 2004 Worldcon.  

A member of fandom for more than 50 years, she belonged to her high school’s SF club, then became an early member of NESFA, the Boston-area fan club, and served as its president for 4 years. 

She has served on the committees for numerous Worldcons and regional conventions, co-chaired a Costume-Con, and chaired two Boskones. 

She was the Hugo Award ceremony coordinator for the 1992 Worldcon, and has run the Masquerade for numerous conventions. 

Her extensive contributions were honored when she was named a Fellow of NESFA in 1976, and in 2011 the International Costumer’s Guild presented her with their Lifetime Achievement Award. 

She and her fan husband Don (who is irrationally fond of running WSFS Business Meetings) were Fan Guests of Honor at Rivercon.

Jill Eastlake

(9b) TODAY’S OTHER BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born November 30, 1906 — John Dickson Carr. (Died 1977.)

As you know, we don’t do just sff genre Birthdays here and so it is that we have here one of my favorite mystery writers, John Dickson Carr.  Indeed, I’ve listened to The Hollow Man, one of his Gideon Fell mysteries, and it’s quite superb.

He who wrote some of the best British mysteries ever done was not British himself, being American. Oh the horror. He did live there for much of the Thirties and Forties, marrying a British woman. 

Dr. Fell, an Englishman, lived in the London suburbs. Carr wrote twenty-seven novels with him as the detective. I’m listening to The Hollow Man because it’s considered one of the best locked room mysteries ever done. Indeed, Dr. Fell’s discourse on locked room mysteries in a chapter has been reprinted as a stand-alone essay in its own right.

All of the Fell novels are wonderful mysteries. The detective himself? Think of a beer-drinking Nero Wolfe who’s a lot more outgoing. Almost all of the novels concern his unraveling of locked room mysteries or what he calls impossible crimes.  Of these novels, I’ve read quite a number and they’re all excellent.

Now let’s talk about Sir Henry Merrivale, created by “Carter Dickson”, a pen name of John Dickson Carr. (Not sure why he bothered with such a thinly-veiled pen name though.) Merrivale was like Fell an amateur detective who started who being serious but, and I’m not fond of the later novels for this, became terribly comic in the later novels. Let me note that Carr was really prolific as there were twenty-two novels with him starting in the Thirties over a thirty-year period. One of the finest is The White Priory Murders which was a Wodehousian country weekend with yet another locked room mystery in it. 

He also, as did other writers of British mysteries, created a French detective, one by the name of Henri Bencolin, a magistrate in the Paris judicial system. (Though I’ve not mentioned it, all of his mysteries are set in the Twenties onward.) Carr interestingly has an American writer Jeff Marle narrating the stories here and he describes Bencolin as looking and feeling Satanic. His methods are certainly not those of the other two detectives as he’s quite rough when need be to get a case solved. 

There are but four short stories and five novels of which I think The Last Gallows is the best. 

With Adrian Conan Doyle, the youngest son of Arthur Conan Doyle, Carr wrote some Sherlock Holmes stories that were published in The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes collection. Not in-print but used copies available reasonably from the usual suspects. 

He was also chosen by the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1949 to write the biography of the writer. That work, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is in-print in a trade paper edition.

John Dickson Carr

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) TOP COVERS. GamesRadar+ calls these “The 25 Best Marvel Comics covers ever”.

The best Marvel Comics covers of all time may be a matter of personal taste – but there are all-time classic illustrations which are instantly recognizable, and which evoke a specific time and place in the Marvel Universe.

We’ve pored over decades of covers dating back to the ’30s, and while it’s impossible to include every great and memorable cover in Marvel Comics history, these are the 25 that we feel best represent the Marvel Universe.Our criteria include a cover’s quality, its recognizability, and its influence, including how many other covers and artists have paid homage to it, like with these recent Fantastic Four variant covers that recreate other classic Marvel images….

In first place is –

1. X-Men #1 – Jim Lee and Scott Williams

If there’s one single cover, one magnum opus image that sums up everything Marvel Comics is about, it has to be Jim Lee’s timeless cover for 1991’s X-Men #1, which draws on classic influences going all the way back to Jack Kirby’s Uncanny X-Men #1 cover and pulls them into a thoroughly modern piece of superhero art. This cover not only sums up decades of previous art and storytelling into one evocative drawing, it has become so definitive that it has itself informed decades of covers since – including more recreations and homages than you can shake your adamantium claws at.

(12) TO GET KIDS READING. [Item by Steven French.] Includes a number of genre related recommendations such as Steve Jackson’s House of Hell! Advice from the Guardian: “’Relax your rules, let them pick what they want’: 10 page-turners to get kids reading”.

The news from the National Literacy Trust this month was bleak. Their annual report revealed that just one in three eight- to 18-year-olds enjoy reading in their free time – the lowest level in almost two decades of research. Boys and young people in secondary school in particular are turning away from books, with steep declines in reading recorded for both groups….

…So, how do we get children back to books and turning those pages again? We have to give them ways to discover the joy of reading in ways that matter to them. Let your children read what they want – within reason, without pressure. Please don’t tell them you were reading weighty tomes at their age, it’s not helping. Resist that urge, relax your rules, let them read….

(13) BEWARE OF NUCLEAR WASTE. It’s going to be around for a long time. One group wants to learn “HOW TO SEND A MESSAGE 10,000 YEARS INTO THE FUTURE” that will warn people long after our languages and cultures have expired.

This is The Ray Cat Solution:

1. Engineer cats that change colour in response to radiation.

2. Create the culture/legend/history that if your cat changes colour, you should move some place else.

At the link view The Ray Cat Solution video (2015) on Vimeo.

And, of course, buy the merch for everyone you know. For example, one of these t-shirts.

Fascinated by the problem of designing warnings for people 10,000 years in the future, New Hampshire Institute of Art’s Type 1 class has joined forces with Bricobio and The Raycat Solution to help insert Raycats into the cultural vocabulary.  While Bricobio works towards genetically altering cats so they change color when in the presence of radioactive material, the NHIA Type 1 class is working to insert the idea that if a cat changes color, that space might be dangerous to others. 

(14) GAMING BUSINESS. [Item by Steven French.] From this week’s gaming newsletter in the Guardian:“How Sony could reclaim handheld gaming from Nintendo and the smartphone”.

A report from Bloomberg this week suggests that Sony is working on a new portable PlayStation device. As someone who still has a PlayStation Vita languishing in my desk drawer because I can’t quite bear to put it in the attic, this is an exciting prospect. It has been almost 13 years since Sony released the Vita, its last portable console, and it’s such a wonder of a thing, with its big crisp screen and dinky little sticks. I wish more people had made games for it – paper-craft adventure Tearaway and topsy-turvy platform-puzzler Gravity Rush remain underrated.

Actually, apart from the lovely and extremely niche Playdate, nobody has bothered to release a dedicated handheld games console in over a decade. Both the Nintendo Switch and Valve’s Steam Deck are hybrids that can be played handheld and connected to a big screen.

There’s a reason for this: firstly, smartphones have snapped up almost the entire market for portable games, offering endless free or cheap games on a device that everybody already has. And secondly: having handheld and home consoles on the market once would split development resources. Only Nintendo was successful enough at selling handhelds to weather several generations of splitting its talent between creating games for the DS and the Wii, or the 3DS and Wii U, which has led to the Switch being a contender for the cleverest business decision of its history.

(15) STEP BACK IN TIME. Gizmodo reports “Remarkable Fossil Footprints Show Two Hominin Species Coexisting 1.5 Million Years Ago”. See a photo of the fossilized marks at the link.

Approximately 1.5 million years ago, two human relatives belonging to two distinct species made their way along the shore of an ancient lake. Researchers know this because the hominins’ footprints fossilized in the mud, alongside the prints of giant birds that occupied the paleoenvironment….

…The footprints were made by Homo erectus and Paranthropus boisei, long-extinct species that shared eastern Africa in the ancient past. Together, the footprints are a remarkable window into the lives of our nearest relatives and ancestors. The prints show how hominins overlapped as they eked out existence in ancient Africa; according to the research team, if the hominins who made the prints didn’t overlap at the site, they crossed it within hours of one another. The team’s research was published today in Science….

(16) A BOOST FOR THE HOLIDAYS. NASA has created the “Rocket Engine Fireplace” to give you warm holiday thoughts – for eight hours!

Just what you need for the holidays… the coziness of a crackling and roaring rocket engine! Technically, this fireplace packs the heat of the SLS rocket’s four RS-25 engines and a pair of solid rocket boosters – just enough to get you to the Moon! (And get through the holidays with your in-laws.) This glowing mood-setter is brought to you by the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket that launched Artemis I on its mission around the Moon and back on Nov. 16, 2022. 8.8 million pounds of total thrust – and a couple glasses of eggnog – might just be enough to make your holidays merry.

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

Pixel Scroll 9/15/24 Yes, You May Say Hi To My Therapy Theropod

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(1) THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS SPOTTED IN THE WILD. Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions exists! It has started arriving in customers’ mailboxes. Although the book’s official release date is October 1, Jon C. Manzo told the Harlan Ellison Facebook Fan Club his copy came on Friday.

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out…

(2) COVID CONCERN. John Wiswell has canceled plans to attend World Fantasy Con next month over dissatisfaction with the convention’s Covid policy, an announcement that elicited responses in social media from several other writers who have made the same decision about WFC.

(3) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman tells listeners it’s time for two scoops of Sarah Pinsker on Episode 236 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Sarah Pinsker

I won’t almost call it historic — I will call it historic. Because it’s the only episode since this podcast began during which you’ll hear me chat with a creator while we eat a flavor of ice cream inspired by their latest book — in this case, Sarah Pinsker’s Haunt Sweet Home — created by the Baltimore ice cream experts at The Charmery.

… The flavor launched on Friday the 13th, and we met at The Charmery yesterday for a taste of that book-inspired ice cream, where we discussed the sculpture she saw at the American Visionary Art Museum which planted a seed for Haunt Sweet Home, the origin of the ice cream collaboration, how she knew her idea was meant to be a novella and not a novel, why she prefers writing books without a contract, how multiple ideas coalesced into one, the narrative purpose of telling a story via multiple formats, how to know a character who doesn’t know themselves, why you can’t tell from the end product whether a piece of fiction was plotted or pantsed, Kelly Robson’s theory about the Han Solo/Luke Skywalker dichotomy and what it means for creating interesting characters, why she’s a fan of making promises in the early paragraphs of her stories, whether our families understand what we’re writing about when we write about families, and much more.

(4) UNHAPPY IN WESTEROS. “Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin vs House of the Dragon: A timeline”. Elements of the news in Winter Is Coming’s story have been covered here, but this article makes a comprehensive chronology of the pieces.

The other week, author George R.R. Martin did something surprising: writing on his Not a Blog, he publicly criticized HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel show House of the Dragon, which is based on his book Fire & Blood. He dinged the show for changing things from the source material in a way that weakened the story, and warned that there were bigger, “more toxic” changes being contemplated for future seasons of the show.

Martin never did anything like this during the nine years that Game of Thrones (which is based on his book series A Song of Ice and Fire) was running on HBO, so the changes that House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal made from his book obviously upset him. We the fans had inklings that something was bothering Martin before he went public, but I certainly wasn’t expecting him to be so up front about it….

(5) JOURNEY PLANET CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS. Sarah Gulde and Chuck Serface are co-editing an upcoming issue of Journey Planet about friendships in science fiction and fantasy. You could approach this topic in several ways:

  • Famous friendships from science-fiction and fantasy literature, comics, films, or television. Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamjee, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Spock and James T. Kirk, Captain Marvel and Spider-Woman (or She-Hulk), Dana Scully and Fox Mulder, and Katniss Everdeen and Rue come to mind.
  • Friendships among writers, artists, and other professionals within the genre. The Inklings and other writing or artistic fellowships would fit here.
  • Friendships between fans.  Who are your favorite people to see at conventions? Dare I mention the Futurians or the Greater New York Science Fiction Club? What about your local clubs or associations?

Friendships take many forms, so we accept broad interpretations expressed in fiction, personal essays, art, reviews, whatever we can publish in a fanzine format. Please send your submissions to Sarah Gulde at sarahmiyoko@gmail.com or Chuck Serface at ceserface@gmail.com by November 15, 2024.

(6) BBC PLANS ‘THREADS’ REBROADCAST. “’The most horrific, sobering thing I’ve ever seen’: BBC nuclear apocalypse film Threads 40 years on” – the Guardian has an overview. “Ahead of a timely re-airing of Mick Jackson’s famously bleak, rarely seen docudrama, its director recalls why he unleashed a mushroom cloud on Sheffield in 1984, while our writer explores the film’s lasting legacy.”

One Sunday night in September 1984, between championship darts and the news with Jan Leeming, the BBC broadcast one of its bravest, most devastating commissions. This was Threads, a two-hour documentary-style drama exploring a hypothetical event deeply feared at the time and also somehow unthinkable: what would happen if a nuclear bomb dropped on a British city….

…The BBC has shown Threads only three times to date: in 1984; in August of the following year, to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and as part of a cold war special on BBC Four in 2003. Another – timely – showing is planned for October. When I watched the film at the end of the 20th century, Threads felt like a piece of history. Today, in a world of conflict in Russia, China and the Middle East, and expanding nuclear capabilities, it no longer does….

… For Jackson, the message of Threads comes down to something very simple: trusting people with the truth. “That’s what I wanted to get across,” he says. “That there’s no going back, that this happens. You can’t go back and press replay.”

But with a film you can. This month, Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov hinted at his country’s intention to change its stance on the use of nuclear weapons “connected with the escalation course of our western adversaries”. The UK and the US recently enhanced their nuclear cooperation pact. Threads airs on BBC Four next month. Be brave for two hours, and then continue the conversation.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary: September 15, 1991: Eerie, Indiana

You remember Joe Dante, who has served us such treats as the Gremlin films, a segment of the Twilight Zone: The Movie (“It’s A Good Life”) and, errr, Looney Tunes: Back in Action? (I’ll forgive him for that because he’s a consultant on HBO Max prequel series Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai. Anyone seen the latter?)

Dante also was the creative consultant and director on a weird little horror SF series thirty-three years ago on NBC called Eerie, Indiana. Yes, delightfully weird. It was created by José Rivera and Karl Schaefer. For both it would be their first genre undertaking, though they would have a starry future, their work including Eureka, that a favorite of mine until the debacle of the last season, Goosebumps, The Jungle Book: Mowgli’s Story and Strange Luck to name but a few genre series that they’d work on in a major capacity. 

SPOILER ALERT! REALLY I’M SERIOUS, GO AWAY

Hardly anyone there is normal. Or even possibly of this time and space. We have super intelligent canines bent on global domination, a man who might be the Ahab, and, in this reality, Elvis never died, and Bigfoot is fond of the forest around this small town. 

There’s even an actor doomed to keep playing the same role over and over and over again, that of a mummy. They break the fourth wall and get him into a much happier film. Tony Jay played this actor.

Yes, they broke the fourth wall. That would happen again in a major way that I won’t detail here. 

END SPOILER ALERT. YOU CAN COME BACK NOW. 

It lasted but nineteen episodes as ratings were very poor. 

Critics loved it. I’m quoting only one due to its length: “Scripted by Karl Schaefer and José Rivera with smart, sharp insights; slyly directed by feature film helmsman Joe Dante; and given edgy life by the show’s winning cast, Eerie, Indiana shapes up as one of the fall season’s standouts, a newcomer that has the fresh, bracing look of Edward Scissorhands and scores as a clever, wry presentation well worth watching.”

It won’t surprise you that at Rotten Tomatoes, that audience reviewers give it a rating of ninety-two percent.  It is streaming on Amazon Prime, Disney+ and legally on YouTube. Yes, legally on the latter. 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) HOW DOES THIS SHOE FIT? THEM says “LGBTQ+ Fans Are Speaking Out About WNBA Star Breanna Stewart’s ‘Harry Potter’ Sneaker Collab”.

Shortly after winning her third Olympic gold medal at the Paris Games last month, out New York Liberty star Breanna Stewart (or “Stewie,” as she is affectionately known by WNBA fans) announced a new signature shoe. The Stewie 3, created in partnership with Puma, is inspired by the Harry Potter films and features design details, like the “Deathly Hallows” symbol, that reference the Potter-verse. Almost immediately, the comments sections of official social media posts promoting the shoe were filled with fans voicing their disappointment that Stewart, one of the league’s highest-profile players and an outspoken trans ally, would be tied to one of the world’s most vocal antagonists of trans people.

The timing of the shoe drop has particularly upset Stewie’s queer and trans fans, considering it comes on the heels of Rowling being named in a cyberbullying lawsuit filed by Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who alleges that the Harry Potter author, Elon Musk, and other public figures took part in a “massive” harassment campaign that labeled her a “biological male.”

While fan backlashes to Harry Potter products are almost de rigueur at this point, this particular Potter collab hits harder because of who Stewart is and what the league means to its many LGBTQ+ enthusiasts. The WNBA itself is considered one of the safest and most affirming leagues for queer and trans crowds. Over 25% of the players in the league, including Stewart, are out as LGBTQ+ and the WNBA was the first professional league in the U.S. to officially recognize Pride….

…One of the questions fans like McKenzie want answers to is how a product celebrating Harry Potter and benefiting J.K. Rowling makes sense as a collaboration between an out pro-trans athlete and a company that has demonstrated support for LGBTQ+ people. (Neither Puma nor representatives for Stewart responded to multiple requests for comment.)…

(10) THEY’VE GOT THE GOODS. If you’re interested in Star Wars figure collecting, there’s a large photo gallery of the offerings unveiled here: “Hasbro Pulse Con 2024 – Star Wars Panel Recap” at The Toyark.

The Star Wars panel just wrapped up over on Hasbro Pulse Con 2024. New figures were shown for The Vintage Collection and Black Series from multiple eras. A couple that stood out to me was a refresh of Black Series A New Hope Luke and Leia, which have all new sculpts and no soft goods. Read on to check out details and pics from the stream. Pre-Orders for most go live at 5 PM for the general public!

(11) STAR TREK, 1-YEAR BARGAIN MISSION. [Item by Daniel Dern.] ParamountPlus.com (lotsa Star Trek, if nothing else)(also Daily Show and Stephen Colbert, of course) is offering a year for half price (so $29.99 for with-ads, or $59.99 with “No ads except live TV & a few shows, and SHOWTIME originals & movies”).

Coupon name/ID (in case you need it):  Coupon: fall50  (for “50% off”)

You can’t do this as a “renew” — at least not thru the web site, possibly via their phone people.

Our similarly-priced sale year just ended yesterday, so (having deliberately cancelled a few days ago so it didn’t autorenew at full price), I just signed up (for the cheapskate-with-ads, dunno if it’s too late to call and splurge the upgrade).

(Note: If you already have a ParamountPlus account, you don’t have to create a new account; your existing account persists if/when your subscription ends.)

(12) POLARIS DAWN RETURNS. “SpaceX capsule splashes down after history-making Polaris Dawn mission” reports NBC News.

A SpaceX capsule carrying four private citizens splashed down off Florida at 3:36 a.m. ET Sunday, ending a historic mission that included the world’s first all-civilian spacewalk.

Billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Scott “Kidd” Poteet and SpaceX engineers Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon returned to Earth in a Crew Dragon capsule, splashing down off Dry Tortugas, Florida, in the Gulf of Mexico….

…It was also the company’s [SpaceX’s] most ambitious expedition, as the crew members and their spacecraft executed several risky maneuvers.

Chief among them was the all-civilian spacewalk Thursday. Isaacman and Gillis exited the Dragon capsule on a tether, each spending around 10 minutes out in the vacuum of space. The duo spent the spacewalk conducting mobility tests in their newly designed spacesuits.

The outing was a risky undertaking, because the Dragon capsule does not have a pressurized airlock. That meant that all four members of the Polaris Dawn mission wore spacesuits during the spacewalk and that the entire capsule was depressurized to vacuum conditions….

(13) FROM NEIGHBORHOOD OF MAKE-BELIEVE TO GOTHAM CITY. Collider tells how “Michael Keaton Got His Start Working on One of Your Favorite Kids’ Shows”.

…In an interview, David Newell, who played deliveryman Mr. McFeely on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, went into more detail about what Michael Keaton did on the show. According to Newell, Keaton worked on the floor crew. Because of this job, Keaton ran the trolley that went through Mr. Rogers’ living room. If you’re watching any mid to late ’70s episodes, and you see the trolley come through the hole in the wall, that’s the man who would become Beetlejuice flipping the switch to make the trolley move. Keaton also helped build the sets and take them down before and after shooting an episode….

(14) REALLY OLD SCHOOL. “’Entire ecosystem’ of fossils 8.7m years old found under Los Angeles high school” – Yahoo! has the story.

Marine fossils dating back to as early as 8.7m years ago have been uncovered beneath a south Los Angeles high school.

On Friday, the Los Angeles Times reported that researchers had discovered two sites on the campus of San Pedro high school under which fossils including those of a saber-toothed salmon and a megalodon, the gigantic prehistoric shark, were buried.

According to the outlet, the two sites where the fossils were found include an 8.7m-year-old bone bed from the Miocene era and a 120,000-year-old shell bed from the Pleistocene era.

The discoveries were made between June 2022 and July 2024, LAist reports….

(15) WOLVES OF YELLOWSTONE. [Item by Jeffrey Smith.] Balanced Ecology — not particularly sfnal, but certainly adjacent. What happened to Yellowstone National Park when (a) wolves were removed and (b) when they were returned. Very instructive as to what one change can make to an ecosystem. A fascinating read.  “Friday Night Soother – Digby’s Hullabaloo” at Digby’s Blog.

…In 1995, something really exciting happened in the nation’s first national park, Yellowstone. 41 wild wolves are reintroduced here by scientists. After 100 years of being hunted, wolves could once again call this place home.

The wolves thrived, but something else very surprising happened. Their return had a spectacular effect on the landscape, an effect that spread wider than anyone thought possible. So how did this all happen?…

(16) AUTUMN CONCATENATION NOW ONLINE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The SF² Concatenation has just posted its northern hemisphere academic autumnal issue. The contents are:

v34(5) 2024.4.15 — New Columns & Articles for the Summer 2024

And scrolling further down there are loads of fiction as well as a few non-fiction SF and pop science book reviews. Accessible at www.concatenation.org.

Splundig.

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

Pixel Scroll 8/22/24 This Is My Pixel, This Is My Scroll. This Is For Info, This Is For Lol

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(1) BROADDUS SCORES INDIANA AWARD. Congratulations to Maurice Broaddus whose book Unfadeable won the Indiana Authors Awards 2024 Middle Grade category.

(2) REID ON JRRT ADAPTATIONS. Robin Anne Reid’s fifth installment about Tolkien screen adaptations has arrived: “Books, Films, Adaptations & Reader Responses 5/?”

Welcome to the *fifth* in my long-delayed (would not want to be hasty!) series on adaptation issues around Tolkien’s fiction, Jackson’s films, and the importance of reader responses. Since it’s been so long since I posted the first posts in the series, I’m providing the links to the five earlier posts, plus short summaries of them (five because there is a Part 3 and a Part 3.5!) in the note below.²

This post is a discussion of my response to how Jackson’s film characterized the Ents and adapted the scenes between them and Merry and Pippin in Fangorn, after the hobbits escape from the Orcs.

Tolkien describes the meeting of the hobbits and Ents in one chapter (“Treebeard”) which ends with the line “‘Night lies over Isengard,’ said Treebeard” (LotR.3.4.461-487). Then the action cuts away to Gimli, Legolas, and Aragorn on the verge of entering Fangorn (“The White Rider), and doesn’t return to the storyline of the Ents, Merry, and Pippin until “Flotsam and Jetsam” (which starts on page 560 of my edition). The Battle of Isengard is not directly narrated: Merry and Pippin get to describe it to their friends and to the Rohirrim.

Jackson transforms Tolkien’s interlaced narrative to a chronological one (which I think was absolutely necessary for the film to be at all understandable for the percentage of the audience which had never read the book which I would bet real money was larger than the percentage of the audience who had).³ Jackson, of course, shows us the Ents attacking and taking Isengard (which, really, makes perfect sense for a visual artform).

I love the “Treebeard” chapter—and the other scenes with Treebeard—and have ever since I first read the book….

(3) BOOK BANNING DRIVEN BY A SMALL FRACTION OF ADULTS. A Knight Foundation “Survey Finds Most Americans Unengaged with Book Banning Efforts in Public Schools” reports Publishers Weekly.

One of the persistent themes to emerge from the ongoing nationwide surge in book banning is that the bans are being pursued by a vocal, politically motivated minority. This week, a new survey report from the Knight Foundation is offering more support for that conclusion, finding that public engagement with efforts to ban books in public school libraries and classrooms is limited, despite a dramatic surge in book challenges since 2021.

The survey, based on a sizable national sample of more than 4,500 adults, found that most Americans feel informed about efforts to ban books in schools. But just 3% of respondents said that they have personally engaged on the issue—with 2% getting involved on the side of maintaining access to books, and 1% seeking to restrict access. Overall, a solid majority of respondents expressed support for the freedom to read, and expressed high levels of trust in their local teachers and school librarians.

“Strong sentiment is lopsided, with strong opponents of book restrictions outnumbering strong supporters by nearly 3-1,” the survey report states. “In general terms, 78% of adults are confident that their community’s public schools select appropriate books for students to read. Additionally, more people say it is a bigger concern to restrict students’ access to books that have educational value than it is to provide them with access to books that have inappropriate content.”…

(4) COVER OF TANYA HUFF’S NEXT NOVEL. DAW Books today released the cover for Tanya Huff’s Direct Descendants, coming next April.

Jeff Miller Faceout Studio designed this charming cover to perfectly capture the novel’s rom-com vibes with a supernatural missing person’s case at the heart of this tale. 

Releasing on April 1st, 2025, Direct Descendants is a stand-alone cozy horror from acclaimed science fiction & fantasy author Tanya Huff, mixing the creepy with the charming for plenty of snarky, queer fun….

ABOUT DIRECT DESCENDANTS: Generations ago, the founders of the idyllic town of Lake Argen made a deal with a dark force. In exchange for their service, the town will stay prosperous and successful and keep outsiders out. And for generations, it’s worked out great. Until a visitor goes missing, and his wealthy family sends a private investigator to find him, and everything abruptly goes sideways.

Now, Cassidy Prewitt, town baker and part-time servant of the dark force (it’s a family business), has to contend with a rising army of darkness, a very frustrated town, and a very cute PI who she might just be falling for…and who might just be falling for her. And if they can survive their own home-grown apocalypse, they might even just find happiness together.

(5) ANOTHER LOOK AT THE ROTSLER AWARD EXHIBIT AT GLASGOW 2024. Photographer Kenn Bates documented for fanhistorians the Rotsler Award exhibit presented at this year’s Worldcon. The panels were produced by Elizabeth Klein-Lebbink for the Southern California Institute for Fan Interests, which presents the award.

(6) ROWLING’S QUIET, TOO. “The Sound of Silence? J.K. Rowling Has Not Tweeted in 12 Blissful Days” – Them has been counting.

For once, J.K. Rowling isn’t tweeting through it — and by “it,” I mean her near-pathological fixation on trans women and girls. As of this writing, the author has not posted on X since August 7.

Taking 12 days off from posting on X is highly unusual for the Harry Potter author, who posted or reposted 18 times on August 7 alone. Four days later, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif filed a complaint that named Rowling, Elon Musk, and other public figures as being part of a massive cyberbullying campaign against her. Plenty of X users observed that the timing was worth noting.

X user @Cooperstreaming pointed out that Rowling had stopped tweeting since before Khelif filed her lawsuit: “Excited to see someone fighting back, & to potentially have it laid bare in court: Rowling doesn’t care about women,” she wrote. “The protecting ‘real women’ was always a lie, an excuse for hating trans women.”…

Coincidentally, for reasons of his own, Neil Gaiman hasn’t posted to his X.com account since July 2.

(7) ON THE TRAIL(ER) OF THE ROHIRRIM. “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim Animated Movie Reveals First Trailer”, and IGN sets the scene.

The War of the Rohirrim will be released on December 13. Set roughly 200 years before the events of The Lord of the Rings, this prequel reveals the untold story of Rohan’s former ruler, Helm Hammerhand (voiced by Brian Cox).

The trailer gives us a much better idea of the plot of the film, which deals with a bloody conflict between Rohan and the Dunlendings. After an arranged marriage between Helm’s daughter Hèra (Gaia Wise) and the Dunland prince Wulf (Luke Pasqualino) falls through and leads to the death of Wulf’s father Freca (Shaun Dooley), Wulf declares war on Rohan. As Helm rallies his kingdom, the defiant Hèra may prove to be the only hope for Rohan’s survival….

(8) VISITING RAY ON HIS BIRTHDAY. Ray Bradbury, who died in 2012, was born 104 years ago today. John King Tarpinian made his annual pilgrimage to Ray’s gravesite.

I appeared to have been Ray’s first visitor of the day, at least the first to leave gifts.  Left Ray a tin print of Laurel & Hardy, a dinosaur, a picture with him and his buddy, Stan Grenberg @ ComiCon.  Of course, the annual birthday cake.  I always give the cake to the cemetery staff as a thank you for taking care of Ray.  (Anybody is welcome to share.)

(9) BRADBURY LIVE. The broadcast was. Bradburymedia’s Phil Nichols celebrated Ray’s natal day with a livestream: “Bradbury 100 LIVE: 2024 Edition!”

On Thursday 22 August 2024 – what would have been Ray Bradbury’s 104th birthday! – I went live once again with my Bradbury 100 podcast.

I talked about the “Chronological Bradbury” series of episodes, and went through all the steps I usually take in putting together such an episode: the books I consult, how I compare different versions of the same story, and how to track down the rarer Bradbury stories.

I also showed some of the statistics about Ray’s stories, went into questions about copyright, and looked at some of the Bradbury books which have come out in the last twelve months….

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

August 22, 1920 – Ray Bradbury. (Died 2012.)

By Paul Weimer: How DOES one get their arms around a titan, a giant in the field? Very carefully, I say.

I don’t remember the order in which I read them, but The Martian Chronicles was one of the first two SF books I ever read, at the tender age of nine. (The other was Asimov’s I Robot).  I was too young to understand it wasn’t a novel, but a collection/fixup of short stories, but I didn’t care.  I was fascinated by his Mars, his Martians and the pathos of the Martians fading away. And of course, “The Million-Year Picnic” where I excitedly told my older brother that I “got it” – the family were the new Martians, the new inheritors of a world, and with Earth bombed back to the stone age, the way forward.  

Ray Bradbury in 2008 with his collection of Egyptian artifacts.

Bradbury’s story and collection moved me, it made me feel in a way that sometimes other writers tried but never could manage. The ending to Something Wicked this Way Comes, when joy and laughter are the keys to defeating Mr. Dark. The gentleness and the elegy of the stories that make up Dandelion Wine. That collection showed Bradbury’s dark side too, as does stories like “The Veldt”, which gives me chills every time I read it.  Bradbury was good at that, mixing in the horror into stories featuring children. Consider “Zero Hour” where the kids’ imaginary game with an imaginary alien turns out to be not so imaginary.

And I haven’t to this point even mentioned Fahrenheit 451, because, really, I need a re-read of it at some point. But that one, for all the horror of its dystopian society, is a story of hope, and survival at the end. (But, again, the Hound is one of the most terrifying robots in science fiction. I am pretty sure the Black Mirror “Metalhead” took some of the cues for its creatures from 451’s relentlessly tracking Hound).  

But my favorite Bradbury work (aside from The Martian Chronicles, which will always have a special place in my heart) has to be The Halloween Tree?  Again, whimsy, horror, fantasy and a profoundness of introducing children to such themes. The fact that the other children are willing to give up a year of their lives, each to restore and return Pip from the clutches of Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud moved me then, and it moved me now.  I would have done it in a heartbeat when I was thirteen…but would I do it now? I don’t know and that is what fascinates me about the book, today, as well as it’s “Halloween world tour”  (maybe only Zelazny’s A Night in the Lonesome October exceeds it in my Halloween canon). 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Arlo and Janis names a new season.
  • Crabgrass talks about the spotting of a new fan.
  • F Minus diagnoses a cat tantrum.
  • Glasbergen would rather books worked differently.
  • Non Sequitur shows what’s left of fairy tales after the legal team gets through.
  • A cartoon by @ngoziu:

(12) AUTHORS GO AFTER ANOTHER AI CREATOR FOR INFRINGEMENT. “Authors sue Claude AI chatbot creator Anthropic for copyright infringement” reports AP News.

A group of authors is suing artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, alleging it committed “large-scale theft” in training its popular chatbot Claude on pirated copies of copyrighted books.

While similar lawsuits have piled up for more than a year against competitor OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, this is the first from writers to target Anthropic and its Claude chatbot.

The smaller San Francisco-based company — founded by ex-OpenAI leaders — has marketed itself as the more responsible and safety-focused developer of generative AI models that can compose emails, summarize documents and interact with people in a natural way.

But the lawsuit filed Monday in a federal court in San Francisco alleges that Anthropic’s actions “have made a mockery of its lofty goals” by tapping into repositories of pirated writings to build its AI product.

“It is no exaggeration to say that Anthropic’s model seeks to profit from strip-mining the human expression and ingenuity behind each one of those works,” the lawsuit says.

… The lawsuit was brought by a trio of writers — Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson — who are seeking to represent a class of similarly situated authors of fiction and nonfiction….

The Verge adds:

…In the lawsuit, the authors say that Anthropic used a sprawling, open-source dataset known as “The Pile” to train its family of Claude AI chatbots. Within this dataset is something called Books3, a massive library of pirated ebooks that includes works from Stephen King, Michael Pollan, and thousands of other authors. Earlier this month, Anthropic confirmed to Vox that it used The Pile to train Claude….

(13) JOHN WILLIAMS DOCUMENTARY. “Music By John Williams’ Doc Set As AFI Fest Opening Night Film” – Deadline has the story.

The American Film Institute has announced that Music By John Williams, a documentary on the iconic film composer from Lucasfilm Ltd, Amblin Documentaries and Imagine Documentaries, will world premiere as the opening night film of the 38th AFI Fest on Wednesday, October 23.

Directed by Laurent Bouzereau, the doc is billed as a comprehensive look at Williams’ life and career, from his early days as a jazz pianist to his 54 Oscar nominations and five wins, celebrating his countless contributions to the moving image arts, music for the concert stage as well as his indelible impact on popular culture….

… In Music by John Williams, documentary subjects speaking to the ways in which their lives have been touched by Williams’ timeless music include Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall, Kate Capshaw, Gustavo Dudamel, J.J. Abrams, Chris Martin, Ron Howard, Chris Columbus, George Lucas, Itzhak Perlman, Lawrence Kasdan, Yo-Yo Ma, Ke Huy Quan, James Mangold, Alan Silvestri, David Newman, Thomas Newman, Seth MacFarlane, Anne-Sophie Mutter and Branford Marsalis….

(14) AI FORGETS TO REMEMBER? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I keep on telling people that the machines are taking over the world, but nobody every listens…  So it is good news for little old me this week in today’s Nature.  It seems that Artificial Intelligences (AIs) cannot learn new tasks without forgetting old skills. “Switching between tasks can cause AI to lose the ability to learn”.  

“Artificial neural networks become incapable of mastering new skills when they learn them one after the other. Researchers have only scratched the surface of why this phenomenon occurs — and how it can be fixed.”

Sadly, researchers looking into this in “Loss of plasticity in deep continual learning” have suggested a solution…  (And so my joy is short-lived.) 

“We show that a simple change enables them to maintain plasticity indefinitely in both supervised and reinforcement learning. Our new algorithm, continual backpropagation, is exactly like classical backpropagation except that a tiny proportion of less-used units are reinitialized on each step much as they were all initialized at the start of training.”

Why can’t they leave well enough alone?

(15) BLAKE’S 7 DISCS ON THE WAY. Gizmodo cheers the announcement that “British Sci-Fi Legend Blake’s 7 Is Getting the Blu-ray Treatment It Always Deserved”.

Today the BBC lifted the lid on a brand-new Blu-ray remaster, Blake’s 7: The Collection. Styled in the vein of the corporation’s lavish Blu-ray remasters of classic seasons of Doctor Who, the first of Blake’s four series will release later this year. Including a brand-new remastering of the series—available for the first time on Blu-ray after an infamously rough home release history on VHS and DVD decades prior—complete with all new practical model work for the show’s VFX sequences, the first volume of Blake’s 7: The Collection will include all 13 episodes from series one, as well as new interviews with surviving cast and crew, and a previously unreleased documentary planned for the show’s DVD release, The Making of Blake’s 7.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George decided we needed to hear about the Elektra Pitch Meeting. A commenter declared, “’Thank you for implying that there was a plot to twist up until this point’ is my new favorite pitch meeting line.”

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

Pixel Scroll 8/13/24 The Fifth-Million Pixel Fan

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(1) INDUSTRY TAKE ON WORLDCON. Publishers Weekly gave it thumbs up: “In Glasgow, Worldcon Worked to Put Controversy Behind It”.

In a spirited five-day celebration, held August 8–12 at the Scottish Events Campus in Glasgow, Scotland, crowds converged from all over the globe for the 82nd World Science Fiction Convention, known as Worldcon. Show organizers said that more than 8,000 membership badges were purchased in total, with over 7,200 issued at the venue and upwards of 600 in attendance online.

On the convention floor and across a wealth of a wealth of panels, book signings, and creative showcases, the mood was buoyant, with old hands and first-timers alike connecting in bars, at events, and simply in passing. And the organization’s promise to “[consider] access, inclusion, and diversity as integral to Glasgow 2024,” found the perfect venue in the Scottish city, which was welcoming, accessible, and spacious.

…From an industry perspective, there was a scarcity of American publishers at this year’s Worldcon. Still, everyone in attendance seemed more focused on celebrating the current boom in the genre around the world.

“There’s never been a more exciting time to be a SFF publisher,” said Bethan Morgan, editorial director of Gollancz. Eleanor Teasdale, publisher at Angry Robot Books and Datura Books, remarked, “It’s been a joyous festival of genre, with so many international attendees too.”

This excitement was shared by Amanda Rutter, commissioning editor at Solaris Books. “I haven’t been to [a Worldcon] that felt so productive and positive since before the pandemic,” she said, adding, “The Glasgow team made it the most inclusive convention I have been to by far, given their commitment to accessibility needs and striving to ensure that every single participant felt as though they were represented.”

“The con felt very well organized,” said George Sandison, managing editor at Titan Books. “Like all effective project management, it looked like it was very simple to do and probably required Herculean efforts by numerous highly competent people!” Francesca T. Barbini, founder of Luna Press Publishing, agreed, praising the organizers for “being lots of help when we arrived. Overall, it’s been an amazing experience.”

The main takeaway from the event seemed to be about the importance of in-person connection to both the publishing industry and the greater SFF community. Cath Trechman, editor at large at Titan Books, noted, “I can say I found this year’s Worldcon to be a great place to meet authors and agents and chat about the current trends and the idiosyncrasies of publishing, surrounded by an enthusiastic crowd of genre fans and book lovers.”…

(2) GLASGOW 2024 BUSINESS MEETING VIDEOS. At the link is the YouTube playlist for the 2024 WSFS Business Meeting videos recorded by Lisa Hayes. Kevin Standlee finally found a workaround to overcome the bandwidth problem at his Glasgow hotel.

(3) REVERSE PSYCHOLOGY. [Item by Olav Rokne.] Intended as a happy, silly coda to this year’s Hugo season, Amanda and I present “How to Lose a Hugo,” which after four go-arounds we’re starting to have some experience at. (Though we can think of some folks who have lost far more often than we have.) “How To Lose A Hugo” at the Hugo Book Club Blog.

… When it comes to the Hugo Awards, it’s worth remembering that they are a community award that masquerades as a literary institution. These awards are nominated and voted on by a self-selected group that loosely organizes itself around a series of conventions. That means that how well someone is known and how they are seen within the community will inevitably affect whether or not their work is recognized by the community.

Social media is awash with accounts run by authors who rarely post anything other than promotional content aimed at selling their own books. It’s also worth letting people know who you are, what books you enjoy, and what your general vibe is.

Engaging with the community isn’t just about telling people how good you think your book or art is, it’s about listening and talking about the things that are important to them. Talk about politics, talk about art, talk about architecture, talk about music, and be authentic….

(4) BRISBANE 2028 WORLDCON BID MAY CHANGE DATE. To July?

(5) ROWLING, MUSK, LISTED IN CYBERBULLYING COMPLAINT. “J.K. Rowling, Elon Musk Named in Imane Khelif’s Cyberbullying Lawsuit” – Variety has details.

J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk have both been named in a criminal complaint filed to French authorities over alleged “acts of aggravated cyber harassment” against Algerian boxer and newly crowned Olympic champion Imane Khelif.

Nabil Boudi, the Paris-based attorney of Khelif, confirmed to Variety that both figures were mentioned in the body of the complaint, posted to the anti-online hatred center of the Paris public prosecutor’s office on Friday.

The lawsuit was filed against X, which under French law means that it was filed against unknown persons. That “ensure[s] that the ‘prosecution has all the latitude to be able to investigate against all people,” including those who may have written hateful messages under pseudonyms, said Boudi. The complaint nevertheless mentions famously controversial figures….

(6) TWO GREATS AGREE.

(7) DISCREET HORROR. [Item by Steven French.] Signs of the times: Nightmare on Elm Street gets downgraded from ‘18’ to ‘15’ while Paint Your Wagon is reclassified a ‘12’ from a PG for the ‘sex references’. “A Nightmare on Elm Street rating change defended by BBFC” reports the Guardian.

The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has defended its decision to change the certificate of horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street from an 18 to a 15, saying that its audience research showed “strong support for older content to be reclassified in line with modern standards”.

The classic 1980s horror, featuring the malevolent, razor-gloved Freddy Krueger who stalks and murders teenagers in their dreams, was given an 18 certificate on its first UK release in 1985, a designation confirmed on a subsequent cinema release in 2013 and a series of home entertainment releases. However, after a new application from its studio Warner Bros, the certificate was changed to a 15 on 1 August, ahead of a home entertainment reissue in September….

…The spokesperson added: “In the case of A Nightmare on Elm Street, although the film features various bloody moments, it is relatively discreet in terms of gore and stronger injury detail. The kills often leave more to the imagination than visceral detail, and largely occur within a fantasy context. Compared to more recent precedents for violence and horror [classified] at 18 – such as Halloween, Thanksgiving, Imaculate or Saw X – the film is now containable at 15 and we reclassified it accordingly.”…

(8) ABOUT THAT BLACK HOLE. This looks irresistible. Omni Loop – Official Trailer. In theaters September 20.

OMNI LOOP follows Zoya Lowe (Parker), a quantum physicist who finds herself in a time loop, with a black hole growing in her chest and only a week to live. But what the doctors and her family don’t know is that she has already lived this week before; so many times, in fact, that she doesn’t even know how long it’s been. Until one day Zoya meets a gifted student named Paula (Edebiri). Together they team up to save her life – and to unlock the mysteries of time travel.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born August 13, 1953 — The War of The Worlds film (1953)

It’s 1953, it’s New York City, it’s August, a hot summer night, a perfect evening for an alien invasion to begin, and so we have The War of The Worlds premiere there. Based off, of course the H.G. Wells novel of the same name, it was produced for the screen by George Pal. 

The screenplay was written by Barré Lyndon. This is part of his legal name, Alfred Edgar Barre Lyndon, and it is obviously taken from the title character of Thackeray’s novel. This and Conquest of Space were his only SF screenplays.

It was directed by Brian Haskin, just one of many films where he teamed with George Pal, another one being Conquest of Space which our screenwriter here also was on.

It starred Gene Barry who six years later would be Bat Masterson, and Anne Richards, who would be in the Dragnet film that led to the series as Officer Grace Downey. (She does not reprise the character in the series.) Bless her, she’s still with us at age ninety-five. Barry passed on five years ago. 

Paramount rather pointedly said there’d be a romantic subplot in which our scientist have a love interest, hence the casting of Richards here.

The story itself is moved to Southern California in to my surprise, it was set in, emphasis was, an actual real place. Linda Rose was formerly in San Diego County, but is now in Riverside County. It’s a ghost town as it was a failed development scheme from the 1880s, one of many from that time. Fascinating as Spock would say.

The special effects were, shall I say, inordinately expensive. Paramount budgeted two million and wouldn’t budge, not a dollar over that amount would be further given, so stock footage of World War Two battles had to do for the global Mars invasion.  Even so the film just broke even — two million in production costs, two million in box office receipts in an era when studios generally own the cinemas. 

What did critics think of it? The best summation I think come from Variety at the time: “War of the Worlds is a socko science-fiction feature, as fearsome as a film as was the Orson Welles 1938 radio interpretation of the H.G. Wells novel.” It was at the time, after all, only fourteen years since the latter broadcast. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) LATEST AND GREATEST. Lisa Tuttle, in “The best recent science fiction and fantasy – reviews roundup” for the Guardian, covers Extremophile by Ian Green; Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan; Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova; The Formidable Miss Cassidy by Meihan Boey; and Lake of Darkness by Adam Roberts.

(12) TAKE A WHIFF. [Item by Steven French.] I love the smell of Minecraft in the morning! “Want to smell like the Ender Dragon? We test the Lush Minecraft range” in the Guardian.

Last spring, one of my favourite brand tie-ins of 2023 saw high-street cosmetics chain Lush team up with Nintendo to create a range of products based around Super Mario. It was a riot of brightly coloured shower gels and super-sweet fragrances, including a divine Princess Peach body spray that I’m still using because screw gender-based perfume norms.

Now, Lush has released a new video game range celebrating 15 years of Minecraft. There are 12 items in the collection, including easily the most literal bath bomb Lush has ever made – a TNT block – as well as Grass and Lava blocks, a Creeper head shower bomb and a Diamond Pickaxe bubble bar, which is genuinely quite hefty despite its diminutive size.

The collection is apparently the result of a year-long collaboration with the game’s developer Mojang, and it’s been a popular project for the company’s employees. Lush concepts creative director Melody Morton is a regular player – and she’s not the only one. “We have many Minecraft players within the business, so there was lots of reference and resource to pull on when it came to products, creative and messaging,” says Kalem Brinkworth, the creative lead on the Lush collaborations team….

(13) BONESTELL ON THE BLOCK. Christie’s will run its “Over the Horizon: Art of the Future from the Paul G. Allen Collection” online auction from August 23-September 12.

Over the Horizon: Art of the Future from the Paul G. Allen Collection is devoted to how the future, especially interplanetary travel, was imagined by artists and other thinkers during the 20th century. These include Chesley Bonestell, Robert McCall, R.C. Swanson, George Gibbs, and Fred Freeman, among many others. The artworks in this auction, along with their publication in popular magazines, inspired a generation of explorers, scientists, and aerospace engineers. 

Paul Allen was among the most significant collectors of works by Chesley Bonestell, widely acknowledged as the “father of space art.” Bonestell’s Saturn as Seen from Titan, first published in 1949, has been called by the Smithsonian “the painting that launched a thousand careers.” A version of that painting, circa 1952, is available in the sale, along with several works published as illustrations for the famous “Man Will Conquer Space Soon!” series of articles, published in Collier’s Magazine in the early 1950s. 

(14) MET AT READERCON. The Nerd Count Podcast, hosted by Mercurio D. Rivera and Matthew Kressel, brings episode 4 “Live From Readercon”.

In our fourth episode, we come you you LIVE from Readercon, the “conference on imaginative literature,” held this past July in Quincy, Massachusetts. We had the pleasure of interviewing the following guests: Jeffrey Ford, A.T. Greenblatt, A.C. Wise, Scott H. Andrews, Mike Allen, A.T. Sayre, Julie C. Day, C.S.E. Cooney, William Alexander, John Wiswell, Rob Cameron, and Sophia Babai. We talk about Readercons past, what makes Readercon a truly special convention — particularly its welcoming and friendly vibe — and we talk with each guest about their recent and upcoming creative works. This was a blast to record, and we had so much fun talking to all these diverse and talented folks!

(15) SPLISH, SPLASH. “Mars water: Liquid water reservoirs found under Martian crust” reports BBC.

Scientists have discovered a reservoir of liquid water on Mars – deep in the rocky outer crust of the planet.

The findings come from a new analysis of data from Nasa’s Mars Insight Lander, which touched down on the planet back in 2018.

The lander carried a seismometer, which recorded four years’ of vibrations – Mars quakes – from deep inside the Red Planet.

Analysing those quakes – and exactly how the planet moves – revealed “seismic signals” of liquid water.

While there is water frozen at the Martian poles and evidence of vapour in the atmosphere, this is the first time liquid water has been found on the planet.

The findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Insight’s scientific mission ended in December 2022, after the lander sat quietly listening to “the pulse of Mars” for four years.

In that time, the probe recorded more than 1,319 quakes….

(16) LEGOS BY THE THOUSANDS. Bell of Lost Souls is thrilled that “Huge LEGO Star Trek ‘Deep Space Nine’ Model Has Over 75,000 Pieces”.

…Adrian Drake built the famous space station from the frame up using more than 75,000 pieces. It’s 6 feet tall and eight feet in diameter and is heavy enough that it needs some extra supports. The whole build took over two years.

It’s a truly impressive and gigantic build. Drake displayed it at Brickworld Chicago, where he gave a tour to Beyond the Brick. Check out how he built the LEGO Deep Space Nine and all of the cool details….

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

Pixel Scroll 8/7/24 With A Purposeful Pixel And A Terrible Scroll  He Pulls The Spitting Godstalk Down

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(1) CRANKY DRAGON AWARD FINALIST. It’s not the Dragon Awards that Tom Kratman is upset with — in contrast to those who are miffed because they dropped Cedar Sanderson. Kratman welcomes his book’s appearance on the ballot because it lets him count coup on Publishers Weekly which gave it a bad review.

That Publisher Weekly’s review concluded:

….A deeply conservative ideology runs throughout, often given voice through Sean’s observations about the differences between past and present: “The Democratic Party of my time,” he tells a 1960s Democrat, “is a wholly owned subsidiary of a new class of amazingly rich, denationalized and globalist plutocrats.” He follows this up with digs at LGBTQ rights and the sexual revolution (arguing it actually “reduced women’s choices”), and Kratman does nothing to differentiate the views of his character from the philosophy of the book itself. While the author’s flair for fight scenes is undeniable, there’s little else to recommend this. 

(2) BOOKMARK THIS. The Photography Team at the 2024 World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow is posting “Worldcon Photos” to Flickr. Obviously, there will be more when the convention really starts on August 8.

(3) BRISBANE IN 28 UPDATE. Today Random Jones, chair of the Brisbane in 28 Worldcon bid, sent a progress report subscribers:

The bid for Worldcon in Brisbane began in 2020, with the intention to bid for the 2025 Worldcon. However the pressures of dealing with a world with Covid and the massive changes that resulted from those years caused the committee to realise that 2025 was not feasible, and the bid was retargeted towards 2028.

Earlier this year the committee determined it was time to pass the baton on to a new and reinvigorated committee, and from this we are now a few days out from the start of Worldcon Glasgow 2024 full of energy and the desire to get the job done.

My name is Random Jones and I am the chair of the Brisbane in 28 Worldcon bid committee. I am the head of a small but dedicated bunch of fans who are intending to make our Worldcon the best that not only Brisbane has to offer, but the whole of Australia and the South Pacific region.

Over the next 2 years until the site selection vote, we want to make sure people truly believe that we are a fantastic option to hold Worldcon, and that we have the both the dreams and the ability to make it happen.

Glasgow Worldcon: Brisbane in 28 will be present at Glasgow Worldcon, 8 to 12 August, 2024. We will be running a table in the fan-tables section plus holding a party on the Thursday night. Come along and get a badge ribbon, learn what a Tim Tam Slam is, and possibly discover the truth about drop bears. There may also be fairy bread, but we can’t make any guarantees at this stage.

We will also be present at the Future Worldcons Q&A session which will be held on Friday August 9 at 13:00 BST in the Carron room. Vix will be there as our representative, and will be doing a small presentation and answering any questions people have.

(4) CHENGDU DELEGATION AT GLASGOW WORLDCON. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] On Tuesday 6th July, Hugo winner RiverFlow posted on Weibo a list of Chinese people who were known to be attending the Glasgow Worldcon in person.

Amongst the list of Hugo finalists and fans – some of whom wrote reports from last year’s Worldcon that were mentioned in Pixel Scrolls in late 2023 and early 2024 – there is a line item about a mysterious “Chengdu delegation”, with the parenthesized caveat that River doesn’t know who might be part of this delegation.

Whilst this could be a delegation representing the Chengdu Worldcon, this is perhaps unlikely for a variety of reasons.  A perhaps more plausible answer is that it relates the retooled Tianwen Program which in its recent press announcement, explicitly mentioned the involvement of people from Chengdu local government.  Other possibilities might be promotion for the Chengdu SF Museum, or parties interested in the ASFiC/EASFiC proposal (item E.12 on the Business Meeting agenda).

This delegation item doesn’t seem to refer to representation of Chengdu-based science fiction publishers such as Science Fiction World or Eight Light Minutes Culture, as staff from those organizations are listed in separate items in River’s post.

As an aside, it is unclear if the Panda Study trip covered in posts earlier this year is still going ahead.  There was a Chinese-language update in late March (which didn’t get written up for File 770), which has a schedule indicating that the group would have arrived in London on Tuesday 6th, before heading to Glasgow on the 9th.  That piece also states that the trip would involve a previous Hugo winner and/or one of the “Four Kings” of Chinese SF, saying that more details would be released 3 months in advance.  The apparent lack of any such details becoming public may well indicate that the trip has been cancelled.  No-one I’ve spoken to about it is aware of any updates since that one in late March.

(5) EVERMORE OVERHAUL COMING. [Item by Dave Doering.] Great news on Utah’s answer to Disneyland. Evermore revived! “Evermore’s new owners to reveal hints about opening with interactive clues, cash prizes” at KSL.com.

Evermore Park is soon to be nevermore. Utah real estate executive Brandon Fugal announced the private sale of the now-defunct fantasy adventure theme park Monday.

“I am thrilled to see the venue transition into its next chapter, now in progress,” Fugal said. “The new owners have an extraordinary vision.”

Evermore had struggled for years with its operating model, pandemic setbacks and financial woes until ultimately defaulting and being evicted from the property owned by Fugal.

New owners Travis Fox and Michelle Fox want Utahns to get excited about plans for the park through their community “Hatch The Egg” tournament. Anyone 18 or older can sign up, whether as individuals or families, to receive clues and compete for a chance to win cash prizes.

Details about the park’s new direction and opening will be revealed over the course of several months via tournament clues. The tournament’s grand prize of $20,000 and the grand reopening date will be announced Nov. 21…

(6) GALAXY MAGAZINE RETURNS WITH ISSUE 263. Galaxy Science Fiction magazine is back. Originally running from 1950 to 1980, Starship Sloane Publishing has revived the classic magazine for a contemporary audience, featuring both authors from its original run and beyond into today’s global SF landscape, with works spanning seven countries.

With fiction, essays, poetry and art by: Eugen Bacon, F. J. Bergmann, Eliane Boey, Ronan Cahill, A J Dalton, Bob Eggleton, Zdravka Evtimova, David Gerrold, Richard Grieco, Rodney Matthews, Bruce Pennington, Daniel Pomarède, Gareth L. Powell, Christopher Ruocchio, Paulo Sayeg, Robert Silverberg, Nigel Suckling, & Dave Vescio

Cover art by Bruce Pennington.

Galaxy #263 will be available in digest paperback and as a free PDF download at Galaxy SF.

(7) FAN IS NOW VEEP CANDIDATE. Nicholas Whyte notes that Politico lists Tim Walz’s status as an sf fan as one of his defining characteristics. The link goes to a January 2019 Twin Cities.com / Pioneer Press headline: “Minnesota, meet your new governor: teacher, coach, soldier, sci-fi fan — and eternal optimist”.

(8) OUT OF THE STARTING GATE. Michael Capobianco finishes his overview of the first year of SFWA in “A Brief History of SFWA: The Beginning (Part 2)” at the SFWA Blog.

… Damon Knight was now president of SFWA, Editor/Writer/Publisher of the Bulletin, and chair of a one-person Contracts Committee/Griefcom.  It was at about this point that SFWA was becoming unmanageable for one person. Enter Lloyd Biggle, Jr., the newly elected Secretary-Treasurer. Biggle struck Knight as someone who was “sucker enough to take that job (Secretary-Treasurer) and do it conscientiously,” which was apparently an extremely accurate assessment.

Knight recalled in Bulletin #54, “Lloyd not only served two terms as Secretary-Treasurer and did dozens of other jobs for the organization, he set up the trustee system and served on it for years, while I got out after two terms and lay in a hammock. Furthermore, it was Biggle who proposed the annual SFWA anthology as a means of making money for the organization. And from that came the idea of the annual awards and the trophies and the banquets and this whole apparatus. Of course, it had crossed my mind that we might do something like that eventually, but in the beginning, we were too poor. It was our share of the royalties that made it possible.”…

(9) WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM. Steve Stred wants people to know how he was treated by DarkLit Press: “Speaking Up: My DarkLit Experience”.

I’m just seeing that it looks as though DarkLit Press is pulling all the books & closing up shop. It doesn’t surprise me with the number of authors who pulled their books – myself included – and I very well might’ve been the first one whose book had been published (a few pulled them when the new crew took over before publication) and out in the wider world, when the rights were requested to be returned.

But, behind the scenes I’ve already seen screenshots labelling me as the ‘trouble maker,’ and the reason this is happening. Which, if you know me and have even a passing idea of what’s gone on behind the scenes, you’ll know that is furthest from the truth. I try really hard to support everyone, cheer everyone on, and have helped with the Ladies of Horror Fiction Writers Grant (how I miss that!) and trying to get the Canadian Horror Writers Association up and running….

These are just two of many incidents Stred lists:

– DarkLit had been known to post sales/preorder numbers. So and so has hit 1000 preorders! So and so has sold 2000 copies etc etc. From when my book went up for preorder, I asked monthly either through DM or emails for updates on the preorder numbers. As of writing this – on August 6th, 2024 – I’ve never been shown a single report, nor given any numbers.

– During the weekend before launch, I had a number of DarkLit authors reach out asking how my experience had been, and I was forthcoming. They shared lack of royalty payments, having to chase down being paid for royalties or even receiving a report, and this was both prior to and after the leadership/ownership take over….

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Lis Carey.]

August 7, 1960 — Melissa Scott, 64.

By Lis Carey: Melissa Scott was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1960, and grew up there. She discovered science fiction when she broke her arm in gym class, and was sent to the school library until it healed. The librarian offered her a science fiction book and suggested she try it. She was hooked, and proceeded to exhaust the resources of every library she had access to.

Melissa Scott at Bucconeer in 1998. Photo by Dbrukman

Following in her father’s footsteps, Melissa attended Harvard College, in Cambridge, MA, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in history, and helped produce a college-sanctioned science fiction magazine, which led to the formation of the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association. From there, she enrolled in the graduate history program at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA. (Both Cambridge and Waltham are within the metropolitan area generally referred to as “Boston,” by those from more distant parts who might find Boston’s actual boundaries a surprise.) While at Brandeis, she earned her PhD in comparative history, and sold her first novel, The Game Beyond.

The other thing Melissa did in Greater Boston was meet her partner, Lisa A. Barnett. They settled in Portsmouth, NH, and were together for 27 years, until Lisa’s death from breast and brain cancer, in May 2006. 

Melissa has written two dozen science fiction and fantasy novels, as well as short stories. Three of those novels, the fantasy novels Point of Hopes and Point of Dreams, and the alternate history fantasy novel, The Armor of Light, were co-written with Lisa. Can I just express here how much I enjoyed the Points novels, and truly treasure The Armor of Light?

Some of my other favorite books of Melissa’s are the Silence Leigh trilogy (Five-Twelfths of Heaven, Silence in Solitude, and The Empress of Earth), Dreamships, and Trouble and Her Friends.

Melissa’s books typically feature gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender characters, but their sexuality is rarely the point of the story. The characters’ sexuality is just a feature of the characters, and the cultures they live in. When she started publishing, this was new and exciting—at least for me. The one exception to the characters’ sexuality being just part of the characters and not the point of the story is Shadow Man, where a drug used to survive interstellar travel causes an increase in intersex births. This leads the culture recognize and accept five body types—except on the relatively isolated planet of Hara, where they recognize only two, male and female.

Trouble and Her Friends, Point of Dreams, and Death by Silver won Lambda Literary Awards for gay/lesbian science Fiction. Melissa also won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1986.

After Lisa’s death, Melissa moved to North Carolina, near where her mother grew up. She has continued to write fantasy and science fiction, including more Points novels, more original science fiction, and both Star Trek and Stargate: Atlantis tie-in novels, as well as collaborations with other authors.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) MEDICAL UPDATE. “Daisy Ridley Reveals She’s Been Diagnosed with Graves’ Disease: ‘I Didn’t Realize How Bad I Felt’” at Yahoo!

Daisy Ridley is opening up about her health, revealing in a new interview that she was diagnosed with Graves’ disease in September 2023.

The actress, 32, discussed her experience with the autoimmune disorder in the cover story for the September/October issue of Women’s Health, which dropped on Tuesday, Aug. 6.

“It’s the first time I’ve shared that [Graves’],” said Ridley, who had previously shared her struggle with endometriosis and polycystic ovaries.

Graves’ disease is an immune system condition that affects the thyroid gland, according to Mayo Clinic. It causes the body to make too much thyroid hormone….

(13) TERF BATTLE. The New York Times finds “A Play About J.K. Rowling Stirred Outrage. Until It Opened.”

There are more than 3,600 shows in this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe and most will struggle to get even a single newspaper review. Yet for months before the festival opened on Friday, one play was the subject of intense global media attention: “TERF,” an 80-minute drama about J.K. Rowling, the “Harry Potter” author, and her views on transgender women.

Before anybody had even read the script, a Scottish newspaper called the play, which imagines Rowling debating her views with the stars of the “Harry Potter” movies, a “foul-mouthed” attack on the author. An article in The Daily Telegraph said that “scores of actresses” had turned down the opportunity to play Rowling. And The Daily Mail, a tabloid, reported that the production had encountered trouble securing a venue.

On social media and women’s web forums, too, “TERF” stirred outraged discussion.

The uproar raised the specter of pro-Rowling protesters outside the show and prompted debate in Edinburgh, the city that Rowling has called home for more than 30 years. But when “TERF” opened last week, it barely provoked a whimper. The only disturbance to a performance on Monday in the ballroom of Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms came from a group of latecomers using a cellphone flashlight to find their seats. About 55 theatergoers watched the play in silence from the front few rows of the 350-seat capacity venue….

… But the muted response to the show itself suggests that fewer British people are riled by the debate than the media coverage implies — or at least that when activists engage with potentially inflammatory art, outrage can quickly vanish.

The play’s title, “TERF” — an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist — is a pejorative label that Rowling’s critics have applied to her for years. Rowling has gotten into heated debates about gender issues on social media, and she published an essay in 2020 accusing transgender activists of “seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators.” Critics have accused her of being transphobic or anti-trans, which she has denied. Through a spokesman, she declined to comment for this article….

(14) CRUSHING LAWSUIT. “Crew of Titan sub knew they were going to die before implosion, according to more than $50M lawsuit” – AP News has the story.

The family of a French explorer who died in a submersible implosion has filed a more than $50 million lawsuit, saying the crew experienced “terror and mental anguish” before the disaster and accusing the sub’s operator of gross negligence.

Paul-Henri Nargeolet was among five people who died when the Titan submersible imploded during a voyage to the famed Titanic wreck site in the North Atlantic in June 2023. No one survived the trip aboard the experimental submersible owned by OceanGate, a company in Washington state that has since suspended operations.

Known as “Mr. Titanic,” Nargeolet participated in 37 dives to the Titanic site, the most of any diver in the world, according to the lawsuit. He was regarded as one of the world’s most knowledgeable people about the famous wreck. Attorneys for his estate said in an emailed statement that the “doomed submersible” had a “troubled history,” and that OceanGate failed to disclose key facts about the vessel and its durability….

…The lawsuit goes on to say: “The crew may well have heard the carbon fiber’s crackling noise grow more intense as the weight of the water pressed on Titan’s hull. The crew lost communications and perhaps power as well. By experts’ reckoning, they would have continued to descend, in full knowledge of the vessel’s irreversible failures, experiencing terror and mental anguish prior to the Titan ultimately imploding.”…

(15) THIS HOAX IS UNUSUAL FOR BEING FONDLY REMEMBERED. “A giant sea monster shows up on Nantucket 87 years after an elaborate hoax” – NPR attends the celebration.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST: Eighty-seven years ago, a local artist perpetrated a spectacular prank on the residents of Nantucket, the Massachusetts island. The artist, Tony Sarg, was big in his day. Edgar B. Herwick III of member station GBH was on Nantucket yesterday for a re-creation of the monstrous hoax.

EDGAR B HERWICK III, BYLINE: In the summer of 1937, artist, entrepreneur and notorious prankster Tony Sarg took his penchant for high jinks to grand new heights with a long con of sorts that began weeks before the main event.

DARIN JOHNSON: He met up with two of his fisherman friends who he coaxed into going to the newspaper and telling the newspaper that there was a sea monster spotted out in the water.

HERWICK: That’s Darin Johnson, CEO of the American Theater for Puppetry Arts and Sarg scholar. Later, these so-called firsthand accounts were augmented in the press with photos of enormous reptilian footprints on a South Shore beach, whipping the townsfolk into a frenzy.

JOHNSON: And then, on August 19, they blew up this giant balloon and floated it out in the water, and it became this huge national media sensation.

HERWICK: And it was a monster balloon – a 125-foot green monster named Morton. Parade balloons may be Sarg’s greatest legacy. After all, he designed the very first ones for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in 1927. But he’s also considered by some the father of modern American puppetry….

HERWICK: It’s that all-too-forgotten legacy that inspired the historical association to dub this the Summer of Sarg on the island. And yesterday was its centerpiece, Sarg Community Day….

(16) RECOMMENDED. [Item by Ed Fortune] Here is the trailer for Emily Carding’s award-winning show: Quintessence, coming to Hall 2, Sunday, August 11, 2024, at the Glasgow Worldcon. “Quintessence by Emily Carding”.

A combination of cataclysmic events results in the extinction of the human race, leaving behind an AI being programmed to recreate humanity when the time is right, with the complete works of Shakespeare as a guide to the human spirit. Humanity must thrive… but at what cost? This original sci-fi storytelling show was inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and will leave you wondering who the real monster is. Originally created in collaboration with the London Science Museum, written and performed by award-winning actor Emily Carding (Richard III (A One-Woman show)).

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

Pixel Scroll 7/19/24 The Doors Of His Cats, The Lamps Of His Reading Table

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(1) DRAMA. “JK Rowling Edinburgh Trans Rights Play ‘TERF’ Primed For Protests” reports Deadline. The play will be presented during the Edinburgh Fringe next month.

…Penned by Joshua Kaplan, a Hollywood writer whose credits include HBO’s Tokyo Vice, TERF imagines a confrontation between Rowling and the stars of Harry Potter over her views on transgender rights.

The production is topical given Rowling’s near-daily pronouncements and hardened rhetoric on how trans rights have come into conflict with women’s rights. Her posts on X (once Twitter) have put her further at odds with Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint in recent months, and Kaplan sees TERF as a “family conversation” between loved ones with differing views.

In the real world, there have been public exchanges between Rowling and the Harry Potter stars as recently as this year. In April, Rowling accused Radcliffe and Watson of being “cosied up to a movement intent on eroding women’s hard-won rights.” Radcliffe told The Atlantic that he was saddened by Rowling’s stance.

Staged by veteran Edinburgh Festival Fringe producers at Civil Disobedience, TERF (an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist usually deployed in a pejorative context) had to change venue from Saint Stephens Theatre to the Assembly Rooms amid concerns over the controversy the play was attracting.

Barry Church-Woods, the co-founder of Civil Disobedience, said that the team is now putting security and other measures in place for protests. He told Deadline that they anticipate audience members could attempt to disrupt the play as it is performed.

“We expect that most people, if they’re intending on disrupting what we’re doing, that will happen in the auditorium of the theatre. We have processes in place that are going to deal with that,” said the producer, who has previously worked on Edinburgh shows with the likes of RuPaul’s Drag Race star Courtney Act….

(2) GLASGOW 2024 PUBLISHES FINAL PROGRESS REPORT. This week the Worldcon published its sixth electronic Progress Report, which due to there having been a PR #0 is numbered Progress Report 5. Download the PDF here. Cover by Sara Felix.

PR5 includes news from all areas including:

  • A final update from Convention Chair Esther MacCallum-Stewart
  • A list of our 6,000+ registered members and ticket holders
  • Membership statistics and demographics, with 33 countries represented from around the globe
  • Practical information to help attendees arrive in and enjoy their time at the convention, from site maps to badge collection arrangements and discounted local travel passes
  • Full details and timings for our Special Events – including the Hugo Award Ceremony, Masquerade, Opera, Orchestra, theatrical performances, concerts, and dances
  • Updates on Volunteering, Accessibility and Childcare Services, as well as our approach to Sustainability
  • Our updated Code of Conduct, which all members and ticket holders are expected to abide by when attending the convention in person or online.

(3) DOCTOR WHO REPORT CARD. “’Doctor Who: Disney Deal, Ncuti Gatwa & Russell T Davies In Spotlight” reports Deadline.

Those lucky enough to attend May’s Disney‘s upfronts at the North Javits Center were treated to clips, teases and appearances from some of the world’s biggest stars.

In the spotlight from the Bob Iger-led Mouse House were hits from the Disney stable including The Acolyte, Welcome to Wrexham, Abbott Elementary and a wealth of ESPN sports shows. The combined budget must have been astronomical.

But almost completely absent from the upfront festivities was Doctor Who, the iconic British sci-fi series that Disney+ now co-produces with the BBC following what was undoubtedly one of the biggest global TV show deals of the past decade. Doctor Who was handed a minor bit of real estate at the North Javits, but its lack of front-and-center placement may spin a yarn about the series’ position in the Disney priority log nearly three years on from the deal being struck.

… Following the conclusion of the the first Disney-BBC Doctor Who season several weeks ago, Deadline has taken the opportunity to analyze its performance both locally and across the pond, its critical reception and just what the future has in store for the deal. Noises that it may not last beyond its initial two seasons are already reverberating around international TV circles, and one source close to the production tells us that they feel its future hangs in the balance already. Disney, the BBC, and co-producers BBC Studios and Bad Wolf all declined Deadline’s interview requests for this article….

(4) DOROTHY VAUGHAN DEDICATION. “NASA Johnson to Dedicate Building to Dorothy Vaughan, Women of Apollo”.

NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston will recognize legendary human computer Dorothy Vaughan and the women of Apollo with activities marking their achievements, including a renaming and ribbon-cutting ceremony at the center’s “Building 12,” on Friday, July 19, the eve of the 55th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing.

At 9 a.m. CDT, NASA Johnson Director Vanessa Wyche will begin with a discussion about the importance of Vaughan and the women of Apollo’s contributions to the agency’s lunar landing program and their significance to today’s Artemis campaign. Other highlights include a poetry reading, a recital by Texas Southern University’s Dr. Thomas F. Freeman Debate Team, and a “Women in Human Spaceflight” panel discussion….

…Following the program, the ribbon-cutting ceremony will begin at Building 12, which will thereafter be named the “Dorothy Vaughan Center in Honor of the Women of Apollo.” The dedication is a tribute to the people who made humanity’s first steps on the Moon possible.

(5) CAGE MATCH. “’Spider-Noir’: Li Jun Li Cast In Amazon’s Marvel Series” – Deadline has the story.

 Li Jun Li (Wu Assassins) is set as a series regular opposite Nicolas Cage in Spider-Noir, the upcoming MGM+ and Prime Video live-action series based on the Marvel comic Spider-Man Noir.

From executive producers/co-showrunners Oren Uziel and Steve Lightfoot and Sony Pictures Television, Spider-Noir tells the story of an aging and down-on-his-luck private investigator (Cage) in 1930s New York who is forced to grapple with his past life as the city’s one and only superhero.

Li will play a singer at the premier nightclub in New York. In addition to Cage, she joins previously cast Lamorne Morris as Robbie Robertson….

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 19, 1969 – Kelly Link, 55.

By Paul Weimer: Genius Grant recipient. Small Press Owner, Small Beer Press. Anthologist.

Oh, and just perhaps the best short fiction fantasist of our age. 

 No biggie, right? I think of her work, be it ”Magic for Beginners”, “The Faery Handbag” or “The Hortlak” or any of the numerous other stories she’s written, as being in an overlapping series of subgenres that are centered in magic slipstream realism. To this core central subgenre, Link ably adds elements of urban fantasy, horror, mystery, into this basic dough and bakes rather tasty treats of stories that linger in the mind and in the soul. 

Kelly Link

 I think of Link as a magic realist counterpart to Ted Chiang: her actual output of stories is not actually all that massive. She is careful with word choice and writing, shaping words and sentences to sublime effect. Link’s stories are never to be skimmed over, ever. You will, in the end, regret it.  Her work needs and demands attention, and sometimes, like the work of Liz Hand, I feel like as a reader I am “not in her league” and don’t always grok what she is doing in a story. (To be fair the kind of fantasy Link writes is stuff I do not commonly read besides her fabulous work.

But that’s really wrongheaded of me to make her seem inaccessible. In fact, like Chiang, I think of Link as an excellent ambassador for genre fiction in the worlds of literary fiction, luring readers from outside the genre into it, hopefully to stay. Certainly “Magic for Beginners” is probably the one story I would hand to someone who hasn’t read much or any contemporary fantasy and wanted to give it a try.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

(8) WHAT IF? Check out the next trio of covers in the monthly Disney What If? variant cover series, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Avengers and X-Men.

The new covers see Goofy, Donald, and Daisy fill in for Wolverine, Captain America, and Black Widow for their iconic team-up in Uncanny X-Men #268; Mickey, Minnie and more enter the X-Men’s revolutionary Krakoan age that kicked off in House of X #1, and the gang assembling for one of the Avengers’ most pivotal moments, the “Disassembled” storyline, in Avengers #500. For more information, visit Marvel.com.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #59 DISNEY WHAT IF? VARIANT COVER BY GIADA PERISSINOTTO

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #61 DISNEY WHAT IF? VARIANT COVER BY PAOLO MOTTURA

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #63 DISNEY WHAT IF? VARIANT COVER BY FRANCESCO D’IPPOLITO

(9) REMEMBERING H.R. PUFNSTUF. The LA Breakfast Club will host “Sid Krofft: 55 Years of Weird” on September 4. Tickets at the link.

CELEBRATE ALL THINGS KROFFT, INCLUDING PUFNSTUF’S ANNIVERSARY! On September 6, 1969, the world was introduced to the series H.R. PufnStuf and with it, the zany genius of brothers Sid and Marty Krofft! In the decades that followed, Sid & Marty continued to innovate TV, films, live shows and even theme parks with their signature style of puppetry, visuals and storytelling.

Join us on September 4th to witness Sid Krofft’s honorary initiation into The LA Breakfast Club! We’ll then join Sid on a rollicking discussion about the beloved projects that define his groundbreaking career.

Sep 04, 2024, 7:00 AM – 9:00 AM

The Los Angeles Breakfast Club, 3201 Riverside Dr, Los Angeles, CA 90027, USA

(10) IN A HOLE IN THE GROUND THERE LIVED… “A newly-discovered dinosaur may have spent part of its life underground” NPR has learned.

…Now there is a new dinosaur species on the paleontology block, Fona herzogae.

HAVIV AVRAHAMI: Small plant-eating dinosaurs – they were bipedal. If you took, like, a Komodo dragon tail and attached it to the back of an ostrich, that’s kind of what Fona would have looked like.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

That’s Haviv Avrahami. He’s a Ph.D. student at North Carolina State University and was part of the team that identified this new dino. They published their research in the scientific journal The Anatomical Record this month.

AVRAHAMI: It was a small dinosaur. It was about 7 feet long, so probably would have been as long as Shaq would have been if he was laying down….

(11) HORRIFYING HUMOR. From Twilia’s Art: “Peter Lorre & Vincent Price being a chaotic duo”.

Vincent Price and Peter Lorre were in 3 Roger Corman films together, and the two shone as a hilariously odd couple. I would gladly watch their chemistry in any film! So here’s a compilation of all my favorite bits of them.

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

Pixel Scroll 6/30/24 Mr. Holmes, They Were The Pixels Of An Enormous Scroll!

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(1) VASTER THAN EMPIRES. George Sandison, managing editor for Titan Books, hopes to demystify publishing in his newly-launched a series of newsletter posts. First up, a survey of the industry: “Submissions: steering the iceberg”.

I find myself, these days, in the preposterous position of working in genre fiction. Having been publishing since 2014 as an indie, and heading up a major trade list since 2019, it’s close to second nature in a lot of ways.

But for the vast majority of people outside the industry, publishing is arcane, weird and no doubt seems arbitrary. There is a huge extended community of readers, reviewers, fans and authors fascinated by publishers and their lists, but so few ways for those people to get a sense of how publishers work, and why.

Which is silly.

So I’d like to make some sense of it all. The intent here is that this will be the start of a series of articles which will shine a light on some of the many, many opaque bits of publishing. Because really, none of it is that complicated, at least taken in isolation – doing it all at the same time is the trick, which will likely be a recurring theme across the series…..

…So exactly how big a mountain are we talking about? Fortunately there are a couple of useful numbers to call on to help make sense of it.

The last time anyone was mad enough to try and count how many books are published in the UK each year they came up with a number in the region of 200,000, which averages out to 548 a day. I remember seeing a survey in The Bookseller (link lost to the vagaries of time, with apologies) that it was 250,000 one year.

Now say I’m overseeing a list of 100 publications a year, across all formats, you can begin to see how many publishers – and editors – are involved, to say nothing of self-publishers….

(2) HOW TO CLOSE THE BARN DOOR. Futurism tells what happens after “John Scalzi Discovers That One of His Book Covers Was Created Using AI”.

…Regardless, Scalzi’s handling of the discovery seems like a model for anyone who finds themselves in a similar situation — which, given the Wild West of still-forming norms and practices around AI art, wouldn’t be surprising for anyone in a creative industry.

Their article is based on Scalzi’s Whatever post “A Note on ‘AI’ Art and My Book Covers” from June 21. And here’s what he said:

Well, Goddamnit, it looks like some “AI”-generated art got onto one of my covers, specifically, the cover to the Italian edition of Starter Villain. Some (actual human) artists tracked down the cover art, and (on Adobe’s stock art site, at least), it’s marked as “generated with AI.”

It’s my policy not to accept AI-generated art for final cover art, and I thought I and my team had communicated that widely. When this art was presented to me for approval, I made the assumption that it was done by a human, and approved it. So, this is on me….

… That being the case, here’s what I am doing right now to make sure we don’t have this happen again, and to mitigate some of the damage AI-generated art is doing to the actual humans in the field.

1. I have instructed my agent (who is sending the instruction down the chain), that all book contracts henceforth have to agree that cover art must be created by a human artist. Stock art use is acceptable, but that stock art must be human-created, not AI-generated. We will expect our contractual partners to exercise due diligence to make sure these conditions are met (by, as an example, using only stock art sites that note when art is AI-generated). I’ll note that Tor already has agreed to this. So this is no longer just a policy; it’s a hard contractual point.

2. I have donated to the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists, specifically to their Sponsored Memberships for BIPOC artists, to help emerging artists from marginalized communities receive the benefit of the professional and artistic community that ASFA can provide. They will need it for this new era of artistry….

(3) MESSIANIC PROPHECY. Deadline thinks it’s happening: “’Dune 3′ Release Date Hinted As Denis Villeneuve Movie Is Set For 2026 Holidays”.

Let the speculation begin. The “Untitled Event Film” Warner Bros had dated for December 2026 now is being billed as a “Denis Villeneuve Event Film,” and sources said the studio and Legendary are holding the date with expectations that he wraps up the spectacular trilogy with Dune 3.

Hurdles still have to be cleared as they’re still working on script and locking cast, but it is the project Villenueve has been working on….

…Villeneuve and Legendary are prepping Dune: Messiah, which the filmmaker said in January “should be the last Dune movie for me.” They next will reteam Nuclear War: A Scenario, based on Annie Jacobsen’s nonfiction book that explores a ticking-clock scenario about what would happen in the event of a nuclear war…

(4) NOT QUIET AT THE BOX OFFICE. According to Yahoo! — “Box Office: ‘A Quiet Place: Day One’ Scores Franchise-Best $53 Million Debut, Kevin Costner’s ‘Horizon’ Misfires With $11 Million”.

“A Quiet Place: Day One” is making noise at the box office, collecting a roaring $53 million in its domestic opening weekend. The nearly silent thriller added $45.5 million internationally for a global tally of $98.5 million.

Though it landed in second place behind Disney-Pixar’s billion-dollar blockbuster “Inside Out 2,” the ticket sales for “Day One” are especially impressive because spinoff stories usually don’t bring in as much business as direct sequels. Yet “A Quiet Place: Day One” — a prequel in Paramount’s post-apocalyptic horror series — landed the biggest debut in the franchise, exceeding the original 2018 “A Quiet Place,” ($50 million to start) and the 2021 sequel, “A Quiet Place Part II” (a $48 million debut during COVID).

(5) DODGING ROWLING’S ENDORSEMENT. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] JK Rowling: (Regarding the July 4th election in the UK.) The Labour Party supports Trans Rights, so don’t vote for them. I endorse the UK‘s Communist Party instead.

Communist Party of Britain: (Backs away from her slowly.) Uh, no thanks, we’re good!

“U.K. Communist Party Backs Away Slowly After J.K. Rowling Expresses Support” at The Daily Beast.

The Communist Party of Britain affirmed that it supports transgender people’s right to “live equal, full and meaningful lives” after J.K. Rowling, almost as well known at this point for her hatred of trans women as for penning the mega-popular Harry Potter series, expressed tacit support for its candidates. On Saturday, Rowling encouraged her social media followers to vote Communist, a move made in response to the anti-trans feminist group For Women Scotland tweeting that a party spokesperson had told them it stood “in support of [recognizing] the nature of biological sex.” A day later, a statement was released on the party’s official X account clarifying the matter. “For avoidance of doubt, the Communist Party supports the right of trans people to medically transition, to have access to healthcare and live equal, full and meaningful lives, socially, economically and politically,” it said. “We believe that such liberation will only be possible under socialism.” Rowling’s blessing, likely now to be rescinded, came after she published an op-ed in The Times of London on Friday disavowing the Labour Party over its support for trans rights….

(6) GRAPHIC NOVEL RECOMMENDATIONS. The New York Times’ Sam Thielman reviews The Complete Web of Horror edited by Dana Marie Andra; The Ribbon Queen by Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows; All My Bicycles, by Powerpaola; and Very Bushwack, by Sig Burwash. “Book Review: Best Graphic Novels in June – The New York Times (nytimes.com) (Link is to unlocked article.)

 (7) SFF ZINE LAUNCHES TOMORROW. The WYRMHOLE is coming July 1.

(8) AMAZING’S BEST. “Amazing Stories Releases THE BEST OF 2023!”. Edited by Lloyd Penney, The Best of 2023 features 29 science fiction short stories, published throughout 2023 on the Amazing Stories website, featuring a collaborative cover from Ron Miller and Tom Miller.

Stories by Paul Saka; Heather N. Santo; Royce Badgers; David Ian; David Hewitt; David Hankins; Adam Breckenridge; Nerine Dorman; Victor Jimenez; Gene Turchin; Adrian Tchaikovsky; Jack McKenzie; David Newkirk; John Andrew Karr; James Mapes; Alex Graham-Heggie; Leonid Korogodski; Dave Creek; John Taloni; Norman Spinrad; Lisa Fox; Andrew Hiller; Chaz Osburn; Ray Daley; Michael Carabott; Pete Carter; C.J. Peterson; Jenna Hanchey; Jeff Hewitt.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

June 30, 1959 — Vincent D’onofrio, 65. You no doubt know Vincent D’onofrio as Edgar the Bug in Men in Black which I’ll talk about about shortly, but let me first discuss what I think is his greatest role which was his decade-long performance as New York City Police Detective Robert Goren in Law & Order: Criminal Intent. 

Of course it’s not genre but it’s rare that we get to see an actor in a primary role that long. Goren is an incredibly intense, extremely intelligent though opponents often thought he wasn’t and physically imposing man, but is could be very unpredictable and sometimes volatile and even angry. 

Like Holmes, his methods were unusual and he admitted that “I am an acquired taste”. Eames, his female partner, often explained him to individuals who were puzzled and offended by him.

If you’ve not seen Men in Black, you really should and I’m assuming you have, otherwise, go away. You can come back later. He played Edgar / The Bug, Edgar being a farmer who is killed and eaten by a giant alien insect. An Effing Big Bug. From here out, it’s his voice and his body language that is what carries being under the Rick Baker designed face and full body suit. Now there’s a great interview with him and director Barty Sonnefiejd here that you should read: “Vincent D’Onofrio’s Men in Black: A Sugar-Water Oral History” at Vulture.

I singled out these two roles above all the roles he’s had because they demonstrate his most extraordinary skills — the first being the use of his voice to convey a character in a way I believe that is truly rare among performers, and second, the sheer physicality that he bring to a role. 

I know the Rick Baker suit added to his bulk but his acting ability made the character even more present, more menacing that just the alieniness created by the suit and the sheer nastiness of his head of it grew more corrupt, more decayed. A truly brilliant performance. 

Feel free to mention other roles that I didn’t note. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Tom Gauld foresees the publishing apocalypse.

(11) “JOHN WICK MEETS LOOPER”. “Ryan Coogler Mattson Tomlin Team for A Vicious Circle at Universal” learned The Hollywood Reporter.

Universal Pictures has landed the rights to A Vicious Circle, a Boom! Studios graphic novel series created by Terminator Zero showrunner Mattson Tomlin and artist Lee Bermejo.

Tomlin will write the screenplay adapting his own work while Ryan Coogler, the filmmaker behind the Black Panther movies, will produce via his Proximity Media banner.

Also producing are Proximity’s Sev Ohanian and Zinzi Coogler, along with Boom!’s president of development Stephen Christy.

Circle is a two-hander action thriller about assassins from the future hunting each other through time. “John Wick meets Looper” is how it is being described.

(12) SHREK 5. Courtesy of Yahoo! – “Eddie Murphy gives fans ‘Shrek 5’ update, reveals Donkey is ‘gonna have his own movie’ next”.

Eddie Murphy is returning to the fairytale-fueled world of “Shrek.”

In an interview with Collider published Monday, Murphy opened up about voice acting as “Donkey” in the franchise’s next film. “We started doing ‘Shrek’ four or five months ago,” Murphy told Collider, while promoting his latest “Beverly Hills Cop” installment, “I recorded the first act, and we’ll be doing it this year, we’ll finish it up.”

“Another ‘Shrek’is coming out, and Donkey’s gonna have his own (spin-off) movie,” Murphy said, adding later that he thinks “Shrek 5” will be released sometime in 2025….

(13) CHEEK TO CHEEK. “Scientists in Japan Give Robots a Fleshy Face and a Smile” according to Yahoo!

Engineers in Japan are trying to get robots to imitate that particularly human expression — the smile.

They have created a face mask from human skin cells and attached it to robots with a novel technique that conceals the binding and is flexible enough to turn down into a grimace or up into a squishy smile.

The effect is something between Hannibal Lecter’s terrifying mask and the Claymation figure Gumby.

But scientists say the prototypes pave the way for more sophisticated robots, with an outward layer both elastic and durable enough to protect the machine while making it appear more human.

Beyond expressiveness, the “skin equivalent,” as the researchers call it, which is made from living skin cells in a lab, can scar and burn and also self-heal, according to a study published June 25 in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science…

…Scientists, including Takeuchi and his colleagues at the University of Tokyo, have been working with lab-made human skin for years.

In 2022, the research team developed a robotic finger covered in living skin, allowing the machine’s digit to bend like a human finger, giving it the tactility to potentially perform more precise tasks.

Takeuchi’s team had tried anchoring the skin with mini-hooks, but those caused tears as the robot moved. So the team decided to mimic ligaments, the tiny ropes of loose tissue that connect bones….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “90s Time Traveler Discovers Taylor Swift” — Ryan George tell how it happened.

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