Tag Archives: J. Michael Straczynski

Pixel Scroll 5/5/25 Piles Of Pithecanthropic Purple Pixels

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(1) JMS MOVES TO ENGLAND. J. Michael Straczysnki told Facebook followers he is pursuing his goal to write for British TV by becoming a Resident of the UK, which he is as of today.

…So it should come as no surprise that every year, when my agent and I have our “what goals should we set for the coming year” discussion, I’ve asked one question every time: “Is there any way I can produce a series in the UK and live there for a while?”

The answer, alas, has always been no, for the obvious reason that I’m not a British citizen or resident with a visa that would allow me to work in the UK. The closest I came was when we shot a big chunk of Sense8 in London. Rather than satisfy my desire to live and work in the UK, the experience only reinforced it.

Well, I finally decided to do something about it. Because that’s what dreams are for….

…Even though the outcome was far from certain, I made the decision to sell the house that has been my home for 25 years as a way of saying I’m committing to the path. Gave away or donated a ton of clothes and other stuff. If the visa went through, I wanted a fresh start, so I used much of what was left after selling the house to pay off debt accumulated during one pandemic, two strikes, and four years of paralysis in the film/TV business.

…As of today, I am officially a Resident of the United Kingdom. I can stay on indefinitely, can apply for full citizenship in three years, and finally, at long last, I am free to work for any studio, producer or network in the UK, from ITV to Channel 4, Britbox, Acorn…BBC….

…All of that being said, I’m not just leaving the US behind. My plan is to divide my time between both countries. In addition to looking after the Ellison Estate, there’s my ongoing comics work, several US-based projects that require my attention, and the possibility of more in the future, I want to launch some US/UK film and television co-productions, create series that can be shot in both places, and perhaps join arms with UK studios and networks already working to bring homegrown characters from comics and past TV series to an international audience.

But there’s that old joke: Q: How do you make God laugh? A: Tell Him your plans….

(2) RHYSLING AWARD NEWS. The Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) has announced the “2025 Rhysling Award Finalists”, 50 short poems and 25 long poems.

A short poem finalist is Pat Masson’s “The Last Valkyrie” from Forgotten Ground Regained 2. Paul Deane tells the story behind that poem’s publication and Rhysling eligibility in this Bluesky thread.

(3) PULITZER PRIZES 2025. The New York Times has the “Pulitzer Prizes: 2025 Winners List”. Complete list at the link, which bypasses the paywall. There are no winners of genre interest, however, File 770 has taken an interest in James because it has in common with Julia, based on 1984, the concept of retelling a classic from another character’s point of view.

FICTION

“James,” by Percival Everett

Mr. Everett’s book won for “an accomplished reconsideration of ‘Huckleberry Finn’ that gives agency to Jim to illustrate the absurdity of racial supremacy and provide a new take on the search for family and freedom,” the committee said.

Finalists “Headshot: A Novel,” by Rita Bullwinkel; “The Unicorn Woman,” by Gayl Jones; “Mice 1961,” by Stacey Levine

(4) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Daryl Gregory and Carol Gyzander on Wednesday, May 14, 2025, at 7:00 p.m. Eastern. Location: KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003. (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs.)

Daryl Gregory

Daryl Gregory is a Seattle writer whose latest novel is When We Were Real, which Kirkus in a starred review called “a marvel.” His books and short stories have been translated into a dozen languages and have won multiple awards, including the World Fantasy, Shirley Jackson, and Crawford awards, and have been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Edgar, and other awards. His ten other books include the novels Revelator and Spoonbenders, the novellas The Album of Dr. Moreau and We Are All Completely Fine, and the collection Unpossible and Other Stories. He also teaches writing and is a regular instructor at the Viable Paradise Writing Workshop

Carol Gyzander

Carol Gyzander is a two-time Bram Stoker Award® nominee who writes and edits horror, weird fiction, and science fiction—with strong women in twisted tales that touch your heart. She has stories in Weird Tales 367, Weird House Magazine, Under Twin Suns, and numerous other publications. Carol edited and contributed to the Stoker-nominated Discontinue If Death Ensues: Tales from the Tipping Point (Flame Tree Publishing), including her poem “Bobblehead,” which is nominated for a Rhysling Award. She’s Co-Chair of HWA NY Chapter and co-host of their Galactic Terrors online reading series. Follow her on Instagram @carolgyzander.

(5) SOMEBODY STILL WANTS TO RUN A WORLDCON? The Brisbane in 28 Worldcon bid woke from its ordinary social media slumber to leave this announcement on Facebook today:

Our apologies for being so quiet, we’ve been busy trying to organise ourselves for Seattle, and then a Federal Election happened. We plan on being more visible again from this point on.

Our bid is currently for Thursday the 28th of July to Monday the 31st of July, 2028. This is on the weekend following the total eclipse that will be passing through Australia on Saturday the 22nd of July, 2028.

We do plan on having a presence in Seattle for this year’s Worldcon, but the current situation is making that challenging. However, even if we are not there in person, we have people willing to handle things on our behalf, so we will have a presence there.

(6) ON THE TUBE. Camestros Felapton continues his 2025 Hugo review series with a Dramatic Presentation: Long Form finalist: “Hugo 2025: I Saw the TV Glow”.

… I Saw the TV Glow is billed as horror and while it contains a bunch of disturbing ideas and images it is not what I would regard as a frightening film. That’s not a criticism of the film just an indication that it sits in its own place rather than comfortably within one genre category. Of course, depending on your own life experiences (and particularly teenage experiences) this film may hit very differently….

(7) NEA PULLS PLUG ON GRANTS. “NEA Begins Terminating and Withdrawing Grants” reports Publishers Lunch (behind a paywall). (And the agency itself is getting the ax says Publishers Weekly.)

The National Endowment for the Arts began terminating and withdrawing grant offers on Friday night, after President Trump proposed cutting NEA funding from the government budget. Many small publishers, magazines, and publishing-related organizations lost funding.

The Community of Magazines and Literary Presses (CLMP) tells PL that they reached out to all fiscal year ’25 Grants for the Arts round one grantees in the literary/arts publishing category. “Of the 51,” said executive director Mary Gannon, “I’ve heard from 40 so far and all 40 have had their grants ‘terminated’ or ‘withdrawn.’ Some have already received payments, but not all.”

Among the institutions impacted were Open Letter Books, which publishes literature in translation; literary magazine N+1, which lost a $12,500 grant; Hub City Press, which lost $25,000; and Deep Vellum, which lost $20,000; Milkweed Editions, which lost $50,000; Electric Literature, which lost $12,000; Nightboat Books, which lost $30,000; McSweeney’s Literary Arts, which lost $25,000, and many more. (Find a growing list here.)…

(8) NASA PROPOSED BUDGET. “White House Announces Plans to Rip Up NASA’s Moon Program” – Futurism has the stats.

The Trump administration has released its proposed budget for next year, revealing massive budget cuts that could deal NASA’s space exploration and science efforts a devastating blow.

The agency’s budget would be slashed by 24 percent year over year, a difference of $6 billion, which is the biggest single-year cut in US history, according to the Planetary Society.

While space and Earth science funding would face massive lacerations, human space exploration could see its budget increase by roughly $1 billion in “new investments for Mars-focused programs,” according to the proposal, highlighting Trump’s desire to plant a flag on the Red Planet.

Notably, the Trump administration proposes canceling NASA’s “grossly expensive and delayed” Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion capsule after Artemis 3, the first attempt to return astronauts to the Moon’s surface in over half a century, which is tentatively scheduled for 2027….

(9) BEWARE: THIS IS A THUNDERBOLTS* SPOILER. According to The Independent: “Thunderbolts: Marvel fans react to ‘spoiler’ New Avengers title change”.

…At the end of Thunderbolts*, CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) announced the group’s rebrand as The New Avengers. A graphic on screen after the film’s post-credits scene then informs cinemagoers that “The New Avengers will return”.

Now, posters for Thunderbolts* appearing in cinemas and on billboards around the world have been updated to reveal its new title: The New Avengers.

This development also reveals the meaning of the asterisk featured at the end of the original title, which was part of a carefully orchestrated publicity stunt….

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 5, 1979 — Catherynne Valente, 46.

By Paul Weimer: Reading Catherynne Valente for me started with Palimpsest. The idea of a map on people’s skin, pieces transmitted by sex, was a little out of my comfort zone. But the dream/faerie reality of the titular city, accessible after nights of passion, entranced me. Valente’s work was lush, gorgeous, vivid, fey, The writing was poetic in language and form, a puzzle like the map on the visitors’ skin.  

Catherynne Valente

I was enchanted by her work, even if it wasn’t my usual. I skipped into and Valente’s work here and there rather than making her a solid must-buy. Sometimes for my own personal reading, a little Valente was enough. It’s as if her work was too potent for me to consume continually.  But I enjoyed Six Gun Snow White, and Deathless, particularly. 

And then there’s Space Opera. 

Space Opera is glorious, and was glorious to me, who is not immersed into the world of Eurovision, which it borrows shamelessly from. Space Opera is part of the branch of Space Operas in the same realm that Cat Rambo and Valerie Valdes and Lavanya Lakshminarayan play in: Frothy, fun, and light, and yet with hidden depths. Character focused and oriented science fiction space opera, and yet interesting and intriguing worldbuilding. Space Opera is the leading edge of this slice of space opera, and even someone with Amusia can and does enjoy it.  

Sadly, for me, the follow-up, Space Oddity, charitably didn’t live up to the first.  But I expect that I will get the urge to taste the potency of Valente’s work again in the future. Like that map in Palimpsest, I will be irresistibly drawn to the faerieland of her work once more.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) LOTR EAGLES RETURNING TO THE ROOST. “New Zealand airport to remove Hobbit-themed eagle sculptures” – BBC has the story.

For more than a decade, a pair of Hobbit-inspired eagle sculptures have cast a watchful eye over visitors at New Zealand’s Wellington Airport.

But the giant birds will be unfastened from the ceiling on Friday to make way for a new mystery exhibit, airport authorities said.

The eagles appear as messengers in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, which were adapted to film by New Zealand’s Sir Peter Jackson.

The spectacular New Zealand landscapes featured in Mr Jackson’s films are a consistent draw for tourists, who are greeted at the airport by the eagle sculptures.

“It’s not unusual to see airborne departures from Wellington Airport, but in this case, it will be emotional for us,” Wellington Airport chief executive Matt Clarke said in a statement.

The giant eagles will be placed in storage and there have not been long-term plans for them.

Each eagle weighs 1.2 tonnes (1,200kg) with a wingspan of 15m (49ft). Riding on the back of one of the birds is a sculpture of the wizard, Gandalf.

Made of polystyrene and with an internal steel skeleton, each eagle has hundreds of feathers, the longest one measuring 2.4m (8ft).

While the iconic eagles will soon be gone, not all is lost for fans of the franchise: Smaug the Magnificent, the dragon in The Hobbit, will continue to be displayed at the check-in area….

(13) TODAY’S THING TO WORRY ABOUT. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] End of the world coming… well, it is, about a billion years from now. “Neither climate change nor meteorites – NASA confirms that the end of life on Earth will be due to loss of oxygen, according to Toho University study – here’s when it will happen” at El Adelanto de Segovia.

If you’re worried about the end of the world, you can scratch asteroids and climate change off the list of final threats —at least in the very long term. According to new research from Toho University in Japan, supported by NASA modeling, the slow fade of life on Earth won’t come with a bang. Instead, it’ll happen with a lack of breathable air.

That’s right: the distant future of Earth won’t end in fire or ice, but in something far more subtle: oxygen loss. And while that sounds ominous, you can relax. This isn’t something that will affect you, your children, or even your great-great-great-great-grandchildren. In fact, the end is about a billion years away, give or take a few hundred million….

(14) REVIVAL TRAILER. “SYFY Debuts First Trailer for Highly Anticipated Image Comics Adaptation” at ComicBook.com.

The first trailer for SYFY’s upcoming adaptation of the fan-favorite Image Comics title Revival has been officially released online. The trailer provides people with a basic overview of the general premise; a rural Wisconsin town has to adjust to a startling new reality when the dead mysteriously come back to life. What sets Revival apart from similar zombie-themed titles is that the “revived” appear and act as they did before they passed away. At the center of the story is Officer Dana Cypress (played by Melanie Scrofano), who has to make sense of it all as the town’s residents struggling coming to terms with the situation….

(15) CITY IN FLIGHT. “Starbase: Elon Musk’s SpaceX launch site becomes an official Texas city” reports AP News.

The South Texas home of Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket company is now an official city with a galactic name: Starbase.

A vote Saturday to formally organize Starbase as a city was approved by a lopsided margin among the small group of voters who live there and are mostly Musk’s employees at SpaceX. With all the votes in, the tally was 212 in favor to 6 against, according to results published online by the Cameron County Elections Department.

Musk celebrated in a post on his social platform, X, saying it is “now a real city!”

Starbase is the facility and launch site for the SpaceX rocket program that is under contract with the Department of Defense and NASA that hopes to send astronauts back to the moon and someday to Mars.

Musk first floated the idea of Starbase in 2021 and approval of the new city was all but certain. Of the 283 eligible voters in the area, most are believed to be Starbase workers….

(16) SHOCKING NEW TASTE. “Scientists unveil RoboCake with edible robots and batteries” claims New Atlas.

Researchers from Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) have formed an unlikely collaboration team with pastry chefs and food scientists to create the RoboCake, currently on show at Osaka’s Expo 2025.

But this is a cake with a bit of a twist. Sitting atop the elaborate piece are edible robotic bears, which are reported to taste like pomegranate gummies, which have an internal pneumatic system that provides movement for their limbs and head. And, yes, these little dancing robots are completely edible….

… Not to be outdone, IIT researchers have made the world’s first edible rechargeable battery, using a recipe of vitamin B2, quercetin, activated carbon and chocolate.

“These batteries, safe for consumption, can be used to light the LED candles on the cake,” said Valerio Galli, a PhD student at IIT. “The first flavor you get when you eat them is dark chocolate, followed by a surprising tangy kick, due to the edible electrolyte inside, which lasts a few seconds.”…

(17) SQUID GAME 3. Courtesy of Gizmodo: “The End Is Here in the First Trailer for Squid Game 3”.

…What was up with that baby cry at the end there? And what game could possibly be coming with everyone getting their team out of a giant gumball machine?

We don’t know and that’s just the tip of the iceberg for all these questions. We love to see how 456 (Lee Jung-jae) is brought back into the game and that the story from the boat, and of the Front Man, will continue. In fact, everything has to wrap up here because the show’s creator, Hwang Dong-hyuk, has said this is the end….

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Michael J. Walsh, Jim Janney, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]

Pixel Scroll 4/28/25 We Have Scrolled Our Birthfile For A Mess Of Pixels

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(1) HARLAN’S HUGE SCRAPBOOKS. J. Michael Straczynski told the Harlan Ellison Facebook Club about his latest archival project. And when you get to the end don’t worry, people have already pointed him at Fanac.org.

With the first phase of Harlan’s publishing program done and the next one in progress; with the house almost entirely repaired now, and the paperwork formally begun to declare the place a historical/cultural landmark, we’re moving forward in other areas.

As part of that, we’re in the process of scanning the contents of Harlan’s scrapbooks. These are beasts. The eleven books are about four feet long and three feet wide, with an average of 150 pages with anywhere from 5-10 photos, letters, reviews, articles and other items covering the span of Harlan’s life and career. (So about 1,650 pages with a tick over 13,000 individual items.)

(We are having a trusted firm that does scans of legal documents, house blueprints and other items where discretion and professionalism are forefront, do the scans of each full page of each scrapbook. The files are then given to me, which I’m currently going through to crop each and every item into a separate image, label/annotate them, date them, organize them, and color-correct those that are faded or damaged.)

This process will probably take a full year to complete, and really can’t be delegated because if I hire somebody they won’t know the references or history, so I’d have to go through them anyway. When they’re all in hand, we will include them as an aspect of a website that is nearly completed, about which more soon.

The reason I’m telling you all this: it’s not a secret that Harlan was deeply involved in fandom in his early years. What I didn’t realize, until I started to get very granular about the files, is just HOW deep the rabbit hole went. Not only was he attending conventions and fan events back in the 50s, he often wrote for the convention newsletter/magazine, took tons of photos, wrote reviews of some of the cons and had this whole years-long catalog of what are essentially first-person narratives about the early days of fandom.

For historical value, it feels like something specific to fandom should be done with at least some of this information, but I’m not sufficiently au courant about that world to even know where to begin….

(2) MURDERBOT CLIPS. “Murderbot — An Inside Look”. “Killer instincts. Zero social skills”. Murderbot premieres May 16 on Apple TV+.

In a high-tech future, a rogue security robot (Alexander Skarsgård) secretly gains free will. To stay hidden, it reluctantly joins a new mission protecting scientists on a dangerous planet…even though it just wants to binge soap operas.

(3) GOOD OMENS QUOTE. “’Good Omens’ Star David Tennant Shares His Thanks for Being Able To Deliver Closure To Fans” at Movieweb.

David Tennant has finally addressed returning for a third and final outing for Good Omens, the Amazon and BBC fantasy series based on the works of the once beloved and now highly controversial author, Neil Gaiman . While Good Omens was initially slated for a third season, following a series of allegations of sexual assault and misconduct, the series will instead return for a final 90-minute episode to wrap things up.

Tennant recently took part in The Assembly, which sees members of the public being given the opportunity to ask a celebrity any question they like. During Tennant’s turn, a group of autistic, neurodivergent, and learning-disabled participants were given the chance to question the former Doctor Who star, with one asking him, “Someone you’ve worked with, a friend, has been canceled for some quite serious allegations. How has that affected you?” After requesting clarification, the interviewer replied, “He worked on Good Omens, and that’s been stopped, and how has it affected you?”

While avoiding saying his name, Tennant did address a change of “personnel,” and is ultimately grateful that they have been given the opportunity to finish the Good Omens story.

“We’re doing ‘Good Omens’ again. We’re going back to do the final. We’re doing a final. There’s been a slight rejig with the personnel. But we still get to tell that story which I think, it would have been very difficult to leave it on a cliffhanger. So, I’m glad that’s been worked out.”…

(4) AKA LISA BEN. [Item by Andrew Porter.] “Meet the 1940s secretary who used office time to produce the first lesbian magazine” at NBC News. Known in fandom as “Tigrina.”  Note: in 1947, seriously doubt the zine was reproduced “by photocopier.” Thanks to Moshe Feder for the link (posted on Facebook).

In 1947, Edythe Eyde was a secretary working at RKO Radio Pictures in Los Angeles. A speedy typist who often completed work ahead of schedule, her boss told her: “Well, I don’t care what you do if you get through with your work, but … don’t sit and read a magazine or knit. I want you to look busy.” 

The literary-minded lesbian saw an opportunity. Gay culture was largely underground, and it was difficult for “the third sex” to meet like-minded others. Using a Royal manual typewriter and carbon paper, making six copies at a time, the 25-year-old launched Vice Versa — “a magazine dedicated, in all seriousness, to those of us who will never quite be able to adapt ourselves to the iron-bound rules of Convention.”…

… Though not identifying as a SciFi writer, Edye was an enthusiastic consumer of horror stories and fantasy; a card-carrying member of the Fourth World Science Fiction Convention Society; and, to the delight of the modern admirer, can be seen in a 1945 photo in a bikini top reading the pulp magazine Weird Tales….

(5) MARTIAN CHRONICLER. “75 Years Ago, The Martian Chronicles Legitimized Science Fiction” writes Bradbury biographer Sam Weller at Literary Hub.

“I recall Midwestern summer nights, standing on my grandparents’ hushed lawn,” Ray Bradbury told me in 2010, “and looking up at the sky at the confetti field of stars. There were millions of suns out there, and millions of planets rotating around those suns. And I knew there was life out there, in the great vastness. We are just too far apart, separated by too great a distance to reach one another.”

For the young Bradbury, who would grow up to make that great vastness feel, to many, as almost as tangible as home, there was one celestial body more captivating than any other: Mars.

Mars: The fourth planet from our sun, some 140 million miles from us on average. The only planet in our solar system, other than our own, deemed by scientists and stargazers over the centuries to be—possibly, at one time—hospitable to life.

The planet has been part of our collective imagination for centuries, from the tales of ancient mythology, to H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, to David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Mars. Ray Bradbury may have been yet another in a long line of artists dreaming about Mars, but he was the first science fiction writer to elevate the planetary tale beyond the marginalized gutter of “genre fiction,” with his 1950 story cycle The Martian Chronicles…

(6) TAKING THE FUTURE BACK. “To ‘Reclaim Future-Making’, Amazon Workers Published a Collection of Science Fiction Stories”. Link is to the Slashdot story (with comments), and there’s a link to the zine itself.

Its goal was to “support workers to reclaim the power of future-making“. A 2022 pilot project saw over 25 Amazon workers meeting online “to discuss how science fiction shed light on their working conditions and futures.” 13 of them then continued meeting regularly in 2023 with the “Worker as Futurist” project (funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, according to an article by the project’s leaders in the socialist magazine Jacobin). “Our team of scholars, teachers, writers, and activists has been able to pay Amazon workers (warehouse workers, drivers, copy editors, MTurk workers, and more) to participate in a series of skill-building writing workshops and information sessions….”

And when it was over, “the participants were supported to draft the stories they wanted to tell about The World After Amazon….”

Six months ago they held the big launch event for the book’s print edition, while also promising that “you can read the workers’ stories online, or download the book as a PDF or an ebook, all for free.” The Amazon-worker stories have tempting titles like “The Museum of Prime”, “The Dark Side of Convenience”, and even “The Iron Uprising.” (“In a dystopian future of corporate power, humans and robots come together in resistance and in love.”)

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

April 28, 1948 — Terry Pratchett. (Died 2015.)

By Paul Weimer: Sir Terry Pratchett. How does one talk about one of the greatest fantasy writers in the modern history of the genre? As is my wont here as I do these birthdays, I will do it from a personal perspective. 

I first came across Pratchett’s work in the early 90’s, as his works had started making their way across the Atlantic. I read The Colour of Magic and found it funny, but slight. I did follow up with The Light Fantastic and Sourcery and decided I was done with Pratchett.  And I was, for about a decade.

Enter my friend Scott. 

Scott, part of the Amber Diceless Community and inarguably my best friend for a good long period while he was alive, had a number of fandoms over which he enthused. Amber, of course. Tolkien. Michael Scott Rohan. And, as it so happens, Terry Pratchett. So one fine day, we got to discussing it and I told him of my experience and how I had stopped.  He considered this a challenge to be overcome and pushed Guards! Guards!, Pyramids (his personal all time favorite) and others from his collection into my hands.

It was then that I started to “get” Pratchett, once he was out of his relatively early phases. I highly enjoyed the adventures of the Watch, and the Librarian (L-Space for the win).  The witches are fun but not my all time favorite. But I kept up reading the Pratchett, finally caught up, and read them all the way to Unseen Alchemicals. Scott, his family and I watched a couple of the movies and at that point were able to critique and understand where they deviated from the books and why.

I became a Pratchett fan, in the end. 

He was taken from us far too soon. In Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End, in that verse, he wrote much longer and created a new civilization as counterpoint to Ankh-Morpork, popular enough to have people engage in a VR version of it in the mid 21st century.  I wish those novels could have been written, or if I could sneak a shadow or two over from ours and grab them and bring them back to our world (although his daughter might have strong opinions on that). 

Pratchett’s works, once he matured into his full powers, are full of social commentary, insightful observations, fantastic writing, and a lot of heart. Since everyone has an opinion on where to start the Discworld novels, I will offer mine. Guards! Guards!.  It is his earliest in his “full flowering” of writing. If you don’t like it, Pratchett is not for you. If it is… happy reading to you. You have a lot of fun in store. 

Requiescat in pace, Mr. Pratchett. May your work survive the great winnowing and be enjoyed by generations to come.

Terry Pratchett

(8) COMICS SECTION.

A Jane Austen cartoon for @theguardian.com

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2025-04-27T16:54:02.204Z
  • Tom Gauld also made the English language do tricks.

My latest @newscientist.com cartoon

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2025-04-28T10:09:15.299Z

(9) JACK KIRBY AT THE MUSEUM. The “Jack Kirby: Heroes and Humanity | Skirball Cultural Center exhibit opens May 1 at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

Delve into the six-decade career of legendary comic book artist Jack Kirby (1917–1994). This exhibition goes beyond the page, featuring original comic illustrations, fine art, and commercial art—many on view for the first time—and his experiences as a first-generation Jewish American whose faith remained important throughout his life.

Captain America. The Fantastic Four. The Avengers. OMAC. The X-Men. The Black Panther. Mister Miracle. The Incredible Hulk. The New Gods. These iconic superheroes are among the best-known of the many characters first brought to life by comic book artist Jack Kirby (1917–1994). Over the course of an extraordinary six-decade career, Kirby created some of the most enduring characters and storylines in the history of American comics. Along the way, he expanded the emotional and intellectual horizons of the comic book medium, championed diversity, and helped establish the visual vocabulary of modern popular culture.

Jack Kirby: Heroes and Humanity traces his experiences as a first-generation Jewish American born to immigrant parents in Manhattan’s storied Lower East Side, a soldier who fought in World War II, a successful commercial artist who worked in marginalized creative industries, a mentor to a generation of younger comic creators, a resident of New York and Los Angeles, and a proud family man whose Jewish faith remained important throughout his life. This exhibition features original comic illustrations alongside Kirby’s other works, many on view for the first time, considering his fine art and commercial art as equally significant and worthy of recognition.

Today, Kirby remains a pivotal figure in American popular culture, and his influence in the worlds of comics, film, animation, graphic design, and pop art is evident more than thirty years after his passing.

(10) TRAILER PARK. Inverse introduces a new Alien trailer with the hook, “46 Years Later, An Iconic Sci-Fi Franchise Just Gave Its Origin Story A Horrific Rewrite”.

…In a new trailer called “Gestation,” we get the inside view of how the xenomorph grows into a facehugger, its first stage after it emerges from its egg. No previous version of Alien has shown this process in such detail, and while the various images of cells dividing and reforming feel very much like the show’s possible opening credits, we’re also seeing how the series is visualizing its defining biological process….

“Alien: Earth Season 1 Teaser | ‘Gestation Complete’”. Coming to FX on Hulu in Summer 2025.

When a mysterious space vessel crash-lands on Earth, a young woman (Sydney Chandler) and a ragtag group of tactical soldiers make a fateful discovery that puts them face-to-face with the planet’s greatest threat in FX’s highly anticipated TV series Alien: Earth from creator Noah Hawley.

(11) CLICK (AND SQUAWK) BAIT. “Google Is Training a New A.I. Model to Decode Dolphin Chatter—and Potentially Talk Back” reports Smithsonian Magazine.

Dolphins are clever communicators. The animals use complex clicks, squawks and whistles to call out to each other, fight and attract a mate. Now, Google says it is developing a large language model (LLM) that can make better sense of those vocalizations—and, maybe, allow humans to talk back.

Over the last 40 years, researchers at the Wild Dolphin Project (WDP) have collected audio and video of a community of Atlantic spotted dolphins (Stenella frontalis) in the Bahamas. The new artificial intelligence model, called DolphinGemma, is trained on that database. It listens to the dolphins’ vocalizations, identifies patterns and predicts what comes next, just as LLMs do with human language.

Using A.I. “could give us the opportunity to see patterns that, from a human perspective, we may not look at,” says Thea Taylor, who manages the Sussex Dolphin Project in England and is not involved with Google’s work, to Melissa Hobson at Scientific American. Relying on the LLM can also speed up the data analysis process, which would take a human more than 100 years by hand.

Researchers with Google, the WDP and Georgia Tech are also working on a device called CHAT, or Cetacean Hearing Augmentation Telemetry. The wearable technology will allow researchers to generate dolphin-like sounds made up by A.I. to refer to specific items that dolphins enjoy, like seagrass or sargassum.

A pair of divers wearing the CHAT device will swim alongside a dolphin, “asking for” an object with the made-up sound and passing it back and forth. Then, if a dolphin mimics the sound that corresponds to seagrass, for example, a researcher will reward them by handing it over.

“By demonstrating the system between humans, researchers hope the naturally curious dolphins will learn to mimic the whistles to request these items,” notes a statement from Google. “Eventually, as more of the dolphins’ natural sounds are understood, they can also be added to the system.”

Taylor tells Scientific American that the researchers will need to make sure they aren’t unintentionally training the dolphins. Even if the animals repeat the sound, she says, “we have to think whether that’s actually an understanding of language—or whether it’s the same as teaching a dog to sit because they get a reward.”

(12) WATCH THE WATCH. Last week Neil Armstrong’s Gold Omega Speedmaster sold for US$2,125,000 with RR Auction.

This rare “Tribute to Astronauts” edition (No. 17) is one of just 26 pieces presented to NASA astronauts. It features an engraved caseback commemorating Neil Armstrong’s Gemini 8 and Apollo 11 missions. Personally owned and worn by Armstrong, the watch remains unpolished and in excellent condition and carries the added distinction of being one of the very first gold Speedmaster.

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

Pixel Scroll 12/6/24 Can We Borrow A Cup Of Pixels

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(1) DIAGRAM PRIZE. The Bookseller today announced the Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year went to The Philosopher Fish: Sturgeon, Caviar, and the Geography of Desire in the closest race of the past quarter century.

The Philosopher Fish: Sturgeon, Caviar, and the Geography of Desire earned 27% of the public vote, just ahead of How to Dungeon Master Parenting, which itself was a hair in front of Looking through the Speculum: Examining the Women’s Health Movement. With just five percentage points separating the top three, it is the closest Diagram race since the selection of the winner for the 46-year-old prize went to an online public vote 25 years ago….

(2) PIRACY? DON’T BE RUDE. 404 Media spoke to someone behind “The Unauthorized Effort to Archive Netflix’s Disappeared Interactive Shows”.

Last month, Matt Lyzell, the creator of the Netflix interactive series Battle Kitty announced on his personal Instagram account that Netflix was going to remove his show from the streaming service just two years after its debut. By the end of the day, Netflix confirmed that not only Battle Kitty was being removed, but that all 24 Netflix interactive series were to be removed on December 1, with the exception of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs. the Reverend, Ranveer vs. Wild with Bear Grylls, and You vs. Wild.

“The technology served its purpose, but is now limiting as we focus on technological efforts in other areas,” a Netflix spokesperson told 404 Media at the time. 

It is normal for Netflix and other streaming services to rotate titles in and out of their catalogue depending on what they cost to license and host and how many subscriptions they drive to the platform, but Netflix removing its interactive series means that, as original Netflix creations, once they are removed from Netflix they will not be available anywhere else, and they are a new and unique format that dozens of producers, animators, voice actors, and other creatives have finished work on very recently. 

Unwilling to accept Netflix’s decision to make all these interactive shows totally inaccessible, a group of fans—and, in a few cases, people who worked on the interactive shows—are finding ways to archive and make them available for free. 

“I couldn’t let this work go to waste. We’re talking about over 100 hours of video and ~ one thousand hours of dubbing,” Pixel, one of the archivists in a Discord channel archiving Netflix interactive shows, told me.

On Discord, dozens of users have collaborated on capturing all the videos from Netflix before they were removed, as well as reverse engineering how the platform handled their interactive elements. Some shows are already fully emulated and can be streamed in bespoke, alternative players, others are uploaded to YouTube in a series of daisy-chained, interlinked videos that recreate a very similar interactive experience, while some others have been uploaded as non-interactive videos. 

404 Media agreed not to name the Discord channel and some of the places where the Netflix interactive archives are being hosted so Pixel could talk about the archiving effort. While Netflix has made it so there is no way to view Netflix interactive shows without basically pirating them, the archivists worry that the company will still try to take down any alternative method for viewing them.    

“While I can’t disclose fully how we are archiving these, I can say that they pull directly from Netflix’s servers, so no re-encoding or loss of quality,” Pixel said. “I would love to talk more about how it works, but it risks Netflix patching out the tool entirely.”

Netflix interactives, in case you are unfamiliar, are choose-your-own-adventure videos where the viewer can make choices at the end of a scene that determine how the story unfolds….

(3) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 124 of the Octothorpe podcast, “The Third D Isn’t What You Think”, John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty –

…Discuss your comments and also go into detail on upcoming conventions in the UK and worldwide, before talking about some Hugo-eligible things. (They’re games. Sorry, Mark.)

And there’s an uncorrected transcript at the link.

The Glasgow 2024 logo drawn in pencils and crayon, but across the middle there is a segmented creature with eight eyes and mandibles. At the top, the words “Octothorpe 124” appear in blue.

(4) TALKING ABOUT GALAXY QUEST. [Item by N.] For RedLetterMedia, noted Star Trek superfan Mike Stoklasa and noted Star Trek actor Jack Quaid look back on and dissect the 1999 Hugo-winning cult classic: “Galaxy Quest Review”.

Mike and Jack sit down to talk about the cult classic film “Galaxy Quest” starring Tim Allen and many others. A film that has gained popularity over the years and days since it was released. Mike and Jack come at this film with different perspectives, while both appreciating it as the wonderful magical fun adventure film it is with fantastic visual FX and monsters, Jack sees the film as the memorable movie he grew up with and helped to mold his love for cinema and acting. Mike (being 37 years older than Jack) sees the film as a magical what-could-have-been kind of thing. He smells the studio meddling like a wet fart from afar. The potential for a PG-13 or R rated dry, vulgar comedy was there, but watered down by a spineless studio that wanted to G-rated Tim Allen comedy. Would it have flopped as a more adult film? Would it have been better if they went full kids tale? Don’t ya know no one will ever know! It’s a slippery pig that’s been oiled up with K-Y jelly. Mike tries to grab a hold of that piggy to see what it done be. Jack is happy with what the movie is. Mike can’t see the forest through the trees. He loves all the moments in the film. So many good moments and character choices and fun gags. But at what cost? Who done they make this movie for?

(5) OLD PEOPLE WATCH OLD SF. (Hey, this title was Mark’s own suggestion!) at Mark Roth-Whitworth’s blog, he asks people to “Just for fun, compare and contrast”.

Back in the mid-eighties, two films came out about three years apart. One was a box office wonder, and the other was a bomb.

Unfortunately, the Hollywood smash, War Games, was written by Hollywood writers without a clue. Manhattan Project, on the other hand, was dead on… but wasn’t set in California, and the plot didn’t have an utterly unrealistic storyline….

(6) PLONK YOUR COSMIC TWANGER. [Item by Steven French.] If anyone fancies some acoustic gothic blues inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, well, here’s your jam: “’The Lighthouse’ by Half Deaf Clatch” at Bandcamp.

‘The Lighthouse’ is a musical work of fiction, inspired by the writing of H.P Lovecraft. A Gothic, Acoustic type thing, played on a nylon strung folk guitar with some percussion, vocals and other bits and pieces thrown in for good measure.

(7) TONY MEADOWS (1948-2024). [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I have only just found out. Tony was part of the NW England fandom and interacted with MaD SF (Manchester & District – not to be confused with BaD SF – Bolton down devil’s highway A666). He lived in northwest England all his life, though did once make it to the US and visit his friend, one Forrest J Ackerman.

Picture of him as he should be remembered, in the dark screening fantastic films.

Tony was a stalwart of the Festival of Fantastic Films which he helped found (with the legendary Harry Nadler also now sadly gone) and up to late 2000s ran a programme stream screening celluloid films (the only way to see a film with the whirrr of a projector going…). He had a huge film collection.  Also, back in the day when Eastercons weren’t wall-to-wall fan panels and actually had pros giving talks and a film programme (remember them?), Tony would contribute.

Part of the hippy generation of Brit fandom. Another sad loss.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Anniversary: December 6, 1979 — Star Trek: The Motion Picture

By Paul Weimer: Star Trek: The Motion Picture was, as it so happened, the fourth Star Trek movie I saw. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (and when the time comes, I will tell that story) came first, followed by Star Trek IV, Wrath of Khan and finally Star Trek: The Motion Picture. 

I had the disadvantage of having read and learned about the movie before I ever saw it, and it colored my perception of it, and to a real sense, colors it today. Star Trek: The Motion Picture was described to me as a movie with a painfully glacial pace, a movie that takes forever to get to its point, a movie that really is just a two-hour version of a one-hour television show. It was with all of this baggage that I saw the movie, on VHS. 

I found all of this true, and yet not true. Yes, the movie has pacing issues. Yes, there really is just a one-hour plot in a two-hour movie. Yes, there are some extremely weird choices (why are Klingon warships firing Federation photon torpedoes?  Star Fleet Battles had to have a whole supplement to explain that). I still don’t get Ilia as a character but I do kind of like having Decker tell Kirk that he has to be the one who merges with V’Ger, not him. Kirk was once again be ready to be a ballhog…but gets shut down. It does nicely set us up for the Admiral Kirk in Star Trek II, I think. 

And the movie is gorgeous. It gave us an idea of what Star Trek could look like if it had a real budget. It gave us sense of wonder and allowed the imagination of taking cardboard sets from the 1960’s and making them substantial, and realer for it. And without Star Trek: The Motion Picture, there would be no Wrath of Khan, or probably any further TV series. So for all of its issues and problems, Star Trek: The Motion Picture made modern Star Trek possible… and kept Star Trek from just being something you watched on New Year’s Eve like Twilight Zone reruns and see at small conventions.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Baldo reports on a new scam.
  • Birdbrains doesn’t realize how easy it is to be overlooked.
  • Bizarro gets stuck with this joke.
  • Dinosaur Comics gives arts career counseling.
  • Ink Pen has a crossover.
  • Zits follows a Science article (check the days before and after as well)

(10) STRACZYNSKI DOING CAPTAIN AMERICA & COLLEAGUES. “Patton Oswalt on J. Michael Straczynski’s Return to Spider-Man” at Bleeding Cool. Oswalt doesn’t have that much to say, the post is mostly sample interiors from the comic – which are pretty entertaining.

J. Michael Straczynski is coming to the end of his run on Captain America, and he has used that fact to bring in a couple of other characters he is best known for writing at Marvel; Thor and Spider-Man. He is taking advantage of that fact to remind readers of what he used to be best known for at Marvel Comics back in the day, drawn by stellar Marvel artist Jesus Saiz….

(11) BIG HAMMER! [Item by Steven French.] You not only have to be worthy to lift this, but pretty tall as well! (Spotted outside the exhibition ‘Movie Icons: Hollywood Props’  in Turin, Italy).

(12) I RECOGNIZE THIS ONE. “How do you save a dying mobile game? Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp has the answer” says the Guardian. My daughter used to play this game!

At some point, most mobile games die. Apple’s iOS software updates have killed thousands of App Store games over the years: older games simply disappear, unless their developers make them compatible with every new device or software. (Most don’t, or can’t, devote such resources to that.) And for live mobile games, which encourage users to log in every day, the game’s popularity inevitably wanes and its developer stops updating it, leaving it inert and unplayable. Sometimes there is no warning. A game is there one day and gone the next. A bleak fate indeed.

The mortality rate for mobile games is high: 83% of them fail within their first three years, according to one survey. But perhaps there’s another way. In 2017, Nintendo released a mobile version of its bestselling chill life-simulation game Animal Crossing. Named Pocket Camp, it ran for seven years before Nintendo ended support for it last month. But instead of letting the game die, the company has released a complete version for £8.99, packaging up years of content and letting players either transfer their data and keep their memories, or start fresh. The game lives on.’

(13) SURF’S UP! A tsunami warning followed a 7.0 earthquake in Northern California the other day. Not everyone got excited for the same reason.

(14) CHINESE SPACEPLANE?  “Mysterious Object Appears At Remote Chinese Airfield Linked To Spaceplane Program” is TWZ’s analysis.

Recent satellite imagery shows a curious white-colored object at the end of the runway at a remote airstrip in northwestern China. The airfield, which is situated near the Lop Nur nuclear test site, has been tied to Chinese reusable space plane developments in the past.

A satellite image taken on Nov. 29 that The War Zone obtained from Planet Labs shows the white-colored object, along with several smaller ones, that look to be vehicles and support equipment, at the southwestern end of the desert airstrip’s runway. The runway itself is more than 16,400 feet in total length, or more than 3 miles long, which makes it one of the longest anywhere in the world. A row of vehicles is also visible at the facility’s main apron, which has been significantly expanded in recent years, including with the addition of a new large hangar.

What the larger object on the runway might be, or even its exact shape, is unclear. Though it looks broadly cylindrical from above, its body is also seen casting a distinctly wedge-shaped shadow. Some obscuration of markings on the runway may point to the presence of short stubby wings at one end. It has an overall length of around 32 feet.

As already noted, the remote Chinese airfield and its extremely long runway have previously been linked to work on reusable spaceplanes with potential military applications, including ones believed to be roughly akin in form and function to the X-37B. The War Zone‘s first report on this facility came after it appeared that one of these crafts touched down there following the end of a mission in space in September 2020. The recently observed object is comparable length-wise to the U.S. Space Force’s two secretive X-37B mini-shuttles (just over 29 feet long), though that alone does not mean there is a relationship between the two….

(15) NOT MUCH TO ‘EM. “James Webb Space Telescope discovers 4th exoplanet in sweet triple ‘super puff’ star system” – Space.com has the story.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered a fourth world in a strange system of ultralight “super puff” planets.

The new extrasolar planet or “exoplanet” was discovered around the sun-like star Kepler-51, located around 2,615 light-years away in the constellation of Cygnus (the Swan).Remarkably, the new world, designated Kepler-51e, isn’t just the fourth exoplanet found orbiting this star; all these other worlds are cotton-candy-like planets. That means this could be a whole system of some of the lightest planets ever discovered.

“Super puff planets are very unusual in that they have very low mass and low density,” team member Jessica Libby-Roberts of Penn State’s Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds said in a statement. “The three previously known planets that orbit the star, Kepler-51, are about the size of Saturn but only a few times the mass of Earth, resulting in a density like cotton candy.”

Libby-Roberts added that the team theorizes that these cotton-candy planets have tiny cores and huge, puffy atmospheres of hydrogen or helium….

(16) SECOND ARTEMIS MISSION DELAYED. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Am amazed at what you Yanks do without Cavorite: “Artemis: Nasa delays mission to send astronauts around Moon” reports BBC.

US space agency Nasa has announced a further delay to its plans to send astronauts back to the Moon.

The agency’s chief, Bill Nelson, said the second mission in the Artemis programme was now due for launch in April 2026.

The plan had been to send astronauts around the Moon but not land in September 2025. The date had already slipped once before, from November of this year.

That will mean that a Moon landing will not take place until at least 2027, a year later than originally planned.

The delay is needed to fix an issue with the capsule’s heat shield, which returned from the previous test flight excessively charred and eroded, with cracks and some fragments broken off.

Mr Nelson told a news conference that “the safety of our astronauts is our North Star”.

“We do not fly until we are ready. We need to do the next test flight, and we need to do it right. And that’s how the Artemis programme proceeds.”

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Disney+ has posted the Doctor Who Christmas 2024 trailer.

The Doctor brings Joy to the world(s)! The eagerly awaited Doctor Who Christmas Special, “Joy to the World,” premieres December 25. When Joy checks into a London hotel in 2024, she opens a secret doorway to the Time Hotel — discovering danger, dinosaurs, and the Doctor. But a deadly plan is unfolding across the Earth, just in time for Christmas. The Doctor Who Christmas special beings streaming December 25 on Disney+.

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

Pixel Scroll 11/24/24 When You Saw Only One Set Of Pixels, It Was Then That I Scrolled You

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(1) GEEZERS TERRIBLES. Rob Latham reviews Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions and the 60th anniversary issue of Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds magazine in “Back to the New Wave Future” at Los Angeles Review of Books. Latham lavishes praise on New Worlds, while saying all the negative things about LDV that Christopher Priest wishes he’d lived long enough to say himself.

…It gradually became clear to me that there were in fact two independent, if occasionally overlapping, New Waves: one British, centered on the magazine New Worlds under the editorship of Michael Moorcock (1964–74), and the other American, which, though more decentralized, found its most voluble expression in a pair of hefty all-original anthologies edited by Harlan Ellison: Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972). And now, over half a century later, we have a serendipitous opportunity to reassess these two traditions in publications that appeared within mere days of one another: a fresh issue of New Worlds celebrating the 60th anniversary of Moorcock’s accession to the journal’s editorship, and the long-delayed publication of the third volume in Ellison’s anthology series, The Last Dangerous Visions. It’s a case of back to the future with a vengeance, as these erstwhile enfants terribles have morphed into vehicles of nostalgic reverie.

That description is not entirely fair to either publication, both of which seek to recapture at least some of the febrile energy of bygone apocalypses. The key difference is that Moorcock’s New Worlds does not merely embrace but also critiques the perils of a melancholy wistfulness, while Last Dangerous Visions, in its blatant earnestness, trips and falls into a pit of banality. As a result, the former emerges as a provocative reinvention of a legendary past while the latter seems an exhausted last gasp across a belated finish line….

(2) INFO NOISE POLLUTION. [Item by Steven French.] Neal Stephenson imagined a future in which the internet becomes so polluted that only the rich could afford to access the truth but could we end up with the Borges’ alternative in which the web deteriorates into mostly meaningless gibberish? “An 83-year-old short story by Borges portends a bleak future for the internet” says TechXplore.

… A July 2024 paper published in Nature explored the consequences of training AI models on recursively generated data. It showed that “irreversible defects” can lead to “model collapse” for systems trained in this way—much like an image’s copy and a copy of that copy, and a copy of that copy, will lose fidelity to the original image.

How bad might this get?

Consider Borges’ 1941 short story “The Library of Babel.” Fifty years before computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee created the architecture for the web, Borges had already imagined an analog equivalent.

In his 3,000-word story, the writer imagines a world consisting of an enormous and possibly infinite number of hexagonal rooms. The bookshelves in each room hold uniform volumes that must, its inhabitants intuit, contain every possible permutation of letters in their alphabet.

Initially, this realization sparks joy: By definition, there must exist books that detail the future of humanity and the meaning of life.

The inhabitants search for such books, only to discover that the vast majority contain nothing but meaningless combinations of letters. The truth is out there—but so is every conceivable falsehood. And all of it is embedded in an inconceivably vast amount of gibberish.

Even after centuries of searching, only a few meaningful fragments are found. And even then, there is no way to determine whether these coherent texts are truths or lies. Hope turns into despair.

Will the web become so polluted that only the wealthy can afford accurate and reliable information? Or will an infinite number of chatbots produce so much tainted verbiage that finding accurate information online becomes like searching for a needle in a haystack?

The internet is often described as one of humanity’s great achievements. But like any other resource, it’s important to give serious thought to how it is maintained and managed—lest we end up confronting the dystopian vision imagined by Borges….

(3) UNLUCKY NUMBER 14. BookRiot reports “Utah Bans 14th Book From Schools Statewide”. Many of the banned books are sff.

Utah passed one of the most restrictive book ban laws in the previous legislative session and now, we’re seeing the ongoing results of that new law.  House Bill 29 allows parents to challenge books they deem “sensitive material” while also outright banning books from public schools if those books have been deemed “objective sensitive material” or “pornographic” per state code in at least three school districts or two school districts and five charter schools statewide. This law means that once a book has been banned in three public school districts or two districts and five charter schools, it is added to a statewide list of books banned from every one of those public institutions throughout Utah.

The law, which went into effect July 1, applied retroactively, meaning that every school needed to submit to the Utah State Board of Education the titles that had been deemed against the law in their district. Now, any time a public or charter school removes a book deemed “sensitive material,” they must notify the State Board of Education. If that book now meets the threshold of removals, all schools will be notified and expected to dispose of it.

Utah released its initial list of books banned statewide in August. Those thirteen titles included:

  • Blankets by Craig Thompson (2003)
  • A Court of Frost and Starlight by Sarah J. Maas (2018)
  • A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas (2016)
  • A Court of Silver Flames by Sarah J. Maas (2021)
  • A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas (2015)
  • A Court of Wings and Ruin by Sarah J. Maas (2017)
  • Empire of Storms by Sarah J. Maas (2016)
  • Fallout by Ellen Hopkins (2010)
  • Forever by Judy Blume (1975)
  • Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur (2014)
  • Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood (2003)
  • Tilt by Ellen Hopkins (2012)
  • What Girls Are Made Of by Elana K. Arnold (2017)

Now, the state has added a 14th title to the list.

Elizabeth Scott’s Living Dead Girl, an award-winning book published for teens in 2008. The 16 year old book will need to be pulled from every public school and charter district throughout the state….

(4) GHOSTS WHO CASH BIG CHECKS. Publishers Weekly reports “Ghostwriter Survey Finds Manuscripts Fetch High Fees”. (The complete report is at Gotham Ghostwriters: “Comp survey how much does it cost”.)

The American Society of Journalists and Authors and Gotham Ghostwriters have released the findings from their joint compensation survey of ghostwriters. According to the survey of 269 working ghostwriters and collaborators, one-third of respondents reported that they earn over $100,000 in annual income from ghostwriting books. The report did not specify the salary breakdown for the other two-thirds of respondents. Other findings include:

  • 25% of ghostwriters charged at least $100,000 for their last nonfiction manuscript
  • 8% of ghostwriters charged more than $150,000 for their last nonfiction manuscript
  • 50% of ghostwriters charged $10,000 to $20,000 for their last nonfiction proposal
  • 11% of ghostwriters charged more than $20,000 for their last nonfiction proposal
  • 2% of ghostwriters have written 10 or more New York Times bestsellers and charge upwards of $150,000 for a nonfiction manuscript, with 1% indicating that they charge over $300,000

“Contrary to widespread assumption that AI is putting writers out of work, we are seeing the opposite,” said Gotham Ghostwriters CEO Dan Gerstein in a statement…. 

(5) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born November 24, 1948 — Spider Robinson, 76.

By Paul Weimer: My older brother is responsible for me first reading Spider Robinson, as I borrowed one of the Callahan Saloon books from him. I found the wordplay, light humor and interesting characters engaging, and read a bunch of that series.  I never told my mother but when I came across his allied series about a brothel, I bought it, but never told her of the salacious setting. Even then, thanks to that book, I could see the influence Robert Heinlein had had on Spider Robinson, and so when I read “RAH RAH RAH”, I was not surprised that it was Spider Robinson writing an appreciation…and an outright defense, of Heinlein and his work.

I am not sure it’s that good a defense of his work (Farah Mendelsohn’s recent book on Heinlein is far better on balance) but it is enthusiastic, engaging and well written. It may suffer from being “too” close to its subject for any real objectivity.

The Robinson work that stays with me, though, is not any of the Callahan stories, or Variable Star (a book based on a Heinlein outline), or his Stardance books. No, in the mid 80’s I picked up his very strange one-off novel called Night of Power. It was set in the far future of 1996, a New York and a United States still in a cold war, and a NYC plagued by crime, gangs, and a mysterious figure with a Plan. It might have been the first contemporary interracial couple I’d read at that point in science fiction, fantasy or mimetic prose.  The actual science fiction content is rather light, there are some advances in technology and some speculation of what the late 1990’s would be like that are rather wild, in retrospect.  But the fact that this novel is about an ultimately successful revolution and secession really knocked me on my arse. Sure, I had read about revolutions and revolts as history, and in fantasy worlds and in far future SF settings, but this was New York a little more than a decade from now. It was shocking and surprising, but ultimately quite memorable. It also, as I recall, had an awful amount (for the time) of sex in the book, but (like the Callahan’s Lady books) was very sex positive as well. 

Spider Robinson

(6) COMICS SECTION.

  • Birdbrains tests a military innovation. 
  • Frazz turns a profit from science. 
  • Off the Mark suggests Looney Tunes characters are unsuccessful cannibals.
  • Reality Check takes us to the Star Wars family Thanksgiving feast. 
  • Bizarro depicts the fall of a soundalike house. 
  • Tom Gauld’s author is ready for her close-up.

My cartoon for this weeks Guardian Books. @theguardian.com

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2024-11-24T11:32:00.906Z

(7) THE SKIES OF OZ. In episode 12 of the AirSpace podcast, “Defying Gravity”, the National Air and Space Museum explores the varieties of flight shown in The Wizard of Oz movie.

Houses, broomsticks, people-sized bubbles, monkeys — there’s a surprising amount of flight in The Wizard of Oz. In addition to these more unusual flying objects, there’s even a hot air balloon, which is what brings the Wizard to Oz and nearly takes Dorothy home.

In a recent episode of our AirSpace podcast, we talk to National Museum of American History curator Ryan Lintelman, an expert in The Wizard of Oz, about some of the movie’s aviation connections: “Flight is really a central theme in the film from this early desire of [Dorothy’s] to fly away from home. Professor Marvel, when she first meets him, says ‘You want to see other lands, big cities, big mountains, big oceans,’ and flight is the way for her to get away.”

In the episode, Lintelman and AirSpace hosts Matt Shindell and Emily Martin also discuss depections of flight in the film — how it was captured on camera and what messages it was meant to send: “The thing that really struck me upon re-watching the film recently is when you see the squadrons of [monkeys] in the sky flying over,” Lintelman reflected. “I mean, it really gives you this ominous feeling like World War II is on the horizon, here come the bombers flying in. And I think that wouldn’t have been lost on audiences in 1939, you know, seeing some of the images coming out of Europe at that time and, and worrying about what was coming next.”

(8) FOR YOUR KRYPTONIAN KITCHEN. There’s a line of “Superman™ Knives & Culinary Tools” offered by Dalstrong.  “Forget capes. Real heroes wear aprons,” they say.

(9) COMING IN FOR A LANDING. [Item by Steven French.] We so often see photos of the start of the journey but so rarely see any of the end!  “The big picture: earthbound reality at the International Space Station landing site in Kazakhstan” in the Guardian.

The photographer Andrew McConnell first went to Kazakhstan in 2015, to witness what the Earth’s primary space portal looked like on the ground. A particular corner of the remote steppe-land, near a village called Kenjebai-Samai, was where, every three months, astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station fell to earth, having been launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome 400 miles to the south. McConnell had spent much of the previous years working in war zones and was keen to focus on something more life-affirming.

He discovered a curious landscape that was both on the frontier of human exploration and unchanged for centuries. Over a dozen visits in the subsequent years, McConnell became used to the rhythm of the landings. He would sleep out on the steppe in a tent with the ground crew of the Russian space agency; on hearing the explosion that heralded the capsule separating in the sky above, they would drive out over the wasteland to meet it as it landed – a vehicle no bigger than a family car.

Over time McConnell became at least as fascinated by those who assembled to watch the spacecraft descend. “On each visit I would stay in Kenjebai-Samai or explore further afield,” he recalls. “The steppe, which at first appeared as a boundless void, would over time reveal unexpected details. I found a people largely uninterested in the space travellers and yet somehow bound up in this strange ritual.” He took this picture of one of the village boys, called Roman, at a waste tip in the district in 2018, where he had come to collect scrap to recycle. In McConnell’s book, Some Worlds Have Two Suns, the images of astronauts and their mission are juxtaposed with those of local Kazazh nomads in the moonscape of the steppe.

Some Worlds Have Two Suns by Andrew McConnell is published by Gost (£60)…

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, 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 Matthew Johnson.]

Pixel Scroll 10/14/24 Pixelling Pigeons In The Scroll

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(1) SEATTLE WORLDCON 2025 SHORT STORY CONTEST. The Seattle Worldcon 2025 today announced a short story writing contest with adult and young adult entry categories. The winners in each category will be recognized at the convention, receive free memberships to the convention, and have their stories published in an upcoming anthology by Grim Oak Press. Full details at the link: “Writing Contest – Seattle Worldcon 2025”.

Stories must draw inspiration from the Worldcon theme: Building Yesterday’s Future–For Everyone. This theme was selected to invoke nostalgia for the hopeful science-fictional era of the early 1960s, when Seattle held its first (and until now, only) Worldcon, followed up by the Century 21 Exposition (a.k.a. 1962 World’s Fair), showing the world a vision of its technological future, complete with freshly built Monorail and Space Needle.

(2) WHEN BAD NEWS IS BIG NEWS. Charlie Jane Anders answers the question “Why Are Toxic ‘Superfans’ Such a Nightmare for Hollywood?”

…But even if @Fanboy3997 is not a king-maker, he can do a certain amount of damage to a franchise. This is at least partly a reflection of the fact that the internet, like so many other media before it, does a better job of boosting negativity and hate than spreading anything positive. (“If it bleeds, it leads.”)

Disgruntled fans can help to shape the narrative about a project in various ways.

1) They can drown out the people who actually like it.

2) They can even harass anybody who expresses enthusiasm for a project they don’t like.

3) They can do the aforementioned review bombing, and harass actors and creators.

4) They can create the appearance of a major backlash, even if it’s really just five people and an swarm of bots.

5) And, though journalists will never admit it, a angry fans have a major ally in the journalistic profession, which will assist in blowing their complaints way out of proportion and creating a fake controversy in order to manufacture drama that in turn will lead to eyeballs on news sites.

To some extent, this is what happened with Star Wars: The Last Jedi, a movie that was a massive financial success and one of the most successful movies of all time, with an “A” on Cinemascore (signifying that audiences in theaters overwhelmingly loved it.) What I’m convinced were a relatively small number of fans had a meltdown, which probably would’ve had a limited impact if journalists hadn’t chosen to run with it and create a news cycle around the backlash. That, in turn, led to the notion that 

(3) IDENTIFYING DANGER. “INTERVIEW: J. Michael Straczynski” at Grimdark Magazine asks JMS in the context of his work on Last Dangerous Visions.

[GdM] Can you explain your perspective, and, by extension, Ellison’s, on what makes a story “dangerous” in speculative fiction?

[JMS] The distinction you draw is correct, in terms of how this relates to speculative or science fiction. There has been a lot of hard-edged, socially challenging writing in other forms and genres. Alan Ginsberg’s Howl, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the raw emotionalism of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind, JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye…all of them pushed the frontiers of writing, and many of them got banned or ended up in court on obscenity charges. But they kept on writing, because it was necessary to take a stand for literary freedom.

The SF genre was (and to a degree still is) fairly conservative and, seeing what happened to the writers noted above, tended to steer clear of controversy. This persisted up until the time of Harlan’s first Dangerous Visions anthology and the slow birth of New Wave Science Fiction (with writers like Michael Moorcock, Ursula K. Leguin, Samuel R. Delany and others poking at the walls of conservatism) which DV codified from individual efforts into a movement.

What makes a story dangerous in speculative fiction? Anyone who is willing to risk controversy, to speak to the flaws of society, to sexual and political issues even though they might get in trouble as a result. Harlan once wrote that “the chief commodity a writer has to sell is their courage,” and for me, that’s what a dangerous vision is all about: a story that requires a modicum of courage to tell it.

(4) FIRST FANDOM ANNUAL 2024. Editors John L. Coker III and Jon D. Swartz invite fans to order the First Fandom Annual 2024, devoted to a “History of the Sam Moskowitz Award”.

Sam Moskowitz, I-Con XIV (1995), Long Island, NY. Photo by John L. Coker III
  • Remembering Sam Moskowitz
  • The Sam Moskowitz Archive Award
  • The Sam Moskowitz Collection

Articles by Sam, photographs With Hal W. Hall, David A. Kyle, Robert A. Madle, Julius Schwartz, Jon D. Swartz, Ph.D., Joseph Wrzos

Fifty-six pages, 28# paper, heavy gloss color covers, printed endpapers, face-trimmed, saddle-stitched, B&W interiors, with color illustrations throughout.

Limited to (26) copies, available for $35. each (includes packaging, Priority Mail, insurance).  Please send check or money order for $35 (payable to John L. Coker III) at 4813 Lighthouse Road, Orlando, FL – 32808.

(5) ALTERNATE BATMAN. [Item by Danny Sichel.] Paul Dini found some notes in his car on which he had long ago written alternate ideas for the resolution to Batman Beyond.

(6) ART HENDERSON (1942-2024). Virginia fan Art Henderson died October 12 at the age of 82. He is survived by his wife, Becky.   

Art and Becky Henderson at the 1974 Worldcon. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Mike Glyer.]

Born October 14, 1952 – Charlie Williams. (Died 2021.) Fan artist Charlie Williams first came to prominence as a regular contributor to Chat, the Chattanooga clubzine published by Rich and Nicki Lynch. He also later appeared in all 30 issues of their Hugo-winning genzine Mimosa.

Williams was a member of the Knoxville Science-Fantasy Federation and in the 1970s, he owned a comics store in Knoxville and taught cartoon illustration at the University of Tennessee. At one time he was a member of the Spectator Amateur Press Association. He was guest of honor at Imagincon ’81 (1981), Con*Stellation II (1983), and Roc*Kon 8 (1983).

Williams loved to draw complex, inventive scenes several of which are displayed below, including a cover for an issue of File 770 from the Eighties.

A “Homage to Howard”
A “Homage to Howard”

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • Brewster Rockit discovers the reason for a recent space event.
  • Eek! obviously thinks it’s “threat or treat”.
  • Lio has a classic reference.
  • The Argyle Sweater missed an update.
  • Macanudo underrates genre reading.
  • Tom Gauld knows about speed reading.
  • And he’s had better days.

(9) POLITICAL COMICS. The makers of the “Stop Project 2025 Comic” website say:

We’re a group of comic book writers & artists who are furious about Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation’s plan to consolidate power under authoritarian rule. So we made a bunch of comics to explain their agenda and move you to vote against it.

(10) VIDEO GAME WITH NUANCE. “Metaphor: ReFantazio is the rare fantasy game that goes beyond racism 101” declares The Verge’s reviewer.

…But Metaphor is more than just a stylish, dynamic RPG — it’s also the rare fantasy story that tackles discrimination with nuance.

In a lot of fantasy, I’m annoyed by the storytelling conceit of using discrimination against fantasy races as an allegory for real-world racism. Stories featuring this trope usually stop at the “racism is bad” surface level, demonstrating that with ugly over-the-top displays of violence (hey there, Dragon Age) while ignoring the subtleties that make racism so heinous and pervasive. Metaphor manages to incorporate and tackle both aspects of this reality. 

There’s a moment when you’re reading a fantasy book with a companion, and they mention that realizing their goal of a world where everyone is treated equally won’t be enough. “Equal competition doesn’t mean equal footing,” Heismay says. It’s the first time I’ve seen a video game acknowledge that simply stopping the big bad evil racist won’t magically make up for the countless generations of oppression. The game does the same with class and wealth. There’s a character vying for the throne who wishes to essentially “eat the rich” and redistribute their wealth at the point of a guillotine. But by virtue of her extremely low status, she sees everybody with more than a few coins to rub together as her ideological enemy. It’s just like when people in poverty lash out at other people a little bit less in poverty when their real enemies are the wealthy powerholders who exploit that animosity. It’s awesome that the game calls that out….

(11) SPACE DETECTIVE WORK. NASA’s JPL announces “First Greenhouse Gas Plumes Detected With NASA-Designed Instrument”.

The imaging spectrometer aboard the Carbon Mapper Coalition’s Tanager-1 satellite identified methane and carbon dioxide plumes in the United States and internationally.

Using data from an instrument designed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the nonprofit Carbon Mapper has released the first methane and carbon dioxide detections from the Tanager-1 satellite. The detections highlight methane plumes in Pakistan and Texas, as well as a carbon dioxide plume in South Africa.

The data contributes to Carbon Mapper’s goal to identify and measure greenhouse gas point-source emissions on a global scale and make that information accessible and actionable.

(12) ANNUAL APPARITION. “It’s Spirit Halloween season. How does the retailer stay afloat year-round?” NPR tried to find the answer.

SELYUKH: It is unusual. To be clear, it is a private company – Spirit Halloween – so we don’t know for sure, all of the under-the-hood stuff. They do skip the most expensive parts of being a retailer. That’s kind of how they save a lot of money on rent, utilities, workers. If you think about it, their stores – most of them are not permanent. Most of the store workers are temporary. Much of the year, Spirit Halloween mainly pays a big team to scout real estate locations, looking for empty store fronts. Then in late summer, the hustle starts for new stores to materialize. They’ve built over 1,000 of them.

RASCOE: That has to be a really big operation, like, turning all of these empty spaces into stores.

SELYUKH: It is, and it is very fast, too. You know, last year, I talked to a woman who worked at a mall where Spirit Halloween took over shuttered Sears, and she was describing an insane speed, like a matter of days. And I should say, I have tried a few times to get a tour of how Spirit Halloween works in an empty store or at least an interview with some official, and they don’t do interviews.

RASCOE: So you got ghosted. You see what I did there….

(13) EUROPA CLIPPER LAUNCHES. “NASA spacecraft rockets toward Jupiter’s moon Europa” and AP News wishes it bon voyage.

A NASA spacecraft rocketed away Monday on a quest to explore Jupiter’s tantalizing moon Europa and reveal whether its vast hidden ocean might hold the keys to life.

It will take Europa Clipper 5 1/2 years to reach Jupiter, where it will slip into orbit around the giant gas planet and sneak close to Europa during dozens of radiation-drenched flybys.

Scientists are almost certain a deep, global ocean exists beneath Europa’s icy crust. And where there is water, there could be life, making the moon one of the most promising places out there to hunt for it.

Europa Clipper won’t look for life; it has no life detectors. Instead, the spacecraft will zero in on the ingredients necessary to sustain life, searching for organic compounds and other clues as it peers beneath the ice for suitable conditions…

(14) COMET A3 FROM THE DC SUBURBS OF MARYLAND. [Item by Rich Lynch.] An iPhone photo…I just held the phone as steady as I could and hoped for the best. I’m actually amazed that it worked!

For those wanting to see the comet, this evening it’s located halfway between Venus and Arcturus, and remains visible for probably a couple of hours after the sun has set.

(15) TAKE INSPIRATION FOR YOUR HALLOWEEN BAKING. “Swedish chef making a pumpkin pie” – a Muppets excerpt.

(16) IN NO TIME AT ALL. Boing Boing says “’Skip Danger vs the Space-Time Continuum’ is a hilarious anti-time travel movie”.

…A  wonderfully self-aware homage to Back to the Future and Hot Tub Time Machine — minus, perhaps, the actual time machine. 

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

J. Michael Straczynski Unites Unlikely Duos in Marvel Universe One-Shots

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Prolific writer J. Michael Straczynski has graced nearly every corner of the Marvel Universe with his masterful storytelling skills, including acclaimed runs on Amazing Spider-Man, Thor, Fantastic Four, and more. Starting this January, follow Straczynski to wherever his imagination takes him next as he pens a new line of standalone one-shots that costar two Marvel icons of his choosing—either in unexpected team-ups or action-packed showdowns.

Joining Straczynski will be a lineup of incredible artistic talent: Will Robson, Bernard Chang, Elena Casagrande, Germán Peralta, Juan Ferreyra, and Phil Noto.

Straczynski and Robson kick things off in Doctor Doom & Rocket Raccoon where Doom does the one thing he never wants to do: ask for a favor! What awaits Rocket in Latveria? Mischief, miscommunication and an emotional journey across space and time in the Mighty Marvel Way! Following that, Volstagg recruits the Sentinel of Liberty in Straczynski and Chang’s Captain America & Volstagg. When a war breaks out in the Nine Realms, Volstagg of the Warriors Three turns to the only man skilled enough to end it: Steve Rogers, Captain America!

And that’s only the beginning, see below for a full list of the titles and pairings!

  • DOCTOR DOOM & ROCKET RACCOON
  • CAPTAIN AMERICA & VOLSTAGG
  • NICK FURY VS. FIN FANG FOOM
  • HULK & DOCTOR STRANGE (plus a backup story starring AUNT MAY & AGATHA HARKNESS!)
  • GHOST RIDER VS. GALACTUS
  • SPIDER-MAN VS. DOCTOR OCTOPUS

“I like to go where the fun is, and the idea of putting together Marvel characters who had either never been paired before, or only minimally, seemed like it would be a ton of fun, and it was even more of a blast than I anticipated,” Straczynski explained. “For the first time we could see the original Nick Fury in China along with the Flying Tigers taking on a newly awakened Fin Fang Foom…go to the edge of time and space with Rocket Raccoon and Doctor Doom…see the Ghost Rider slugging it out with none other than Galactus…Aunt May caught in the midst of a supernatural battle alongside Agatha Harkness…the more unlikely the pairing, the more eccentric the combo, the more fun it was to see it come to life. I’ve been sitting on news of this series for over a year and I’m so excited to know it will finally be hitting newsstands starting in January.”

See all the featured characters on a special promo piece by Leinil Francis Yu, which will also be available as a variant cover by Doctor Doom & Rocket Raccoon #1, along with the covers for the first three one-shots. For more information, visit Marvel.com.

See some of these covers following the jump. 

Continue reading →

Pixel Scroll 8/17/24 Stand By Your Slan In The High Castle On Zanzibar

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(1) A DIFFERENT KIND OF MEMORY HOLE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.]

<Hammer bangs>

Sold! That’s €1,275,000 for lot number 487, Mona Lisa’s left eye. Sold to the gentleman with the monocle in the third row.

Next up for bid we have lot number 488, Mona Lisa’s right eye. This lot has an opening bid of €600,000. And we have 650 from one of the telephone bidders; do I hear €675,000?

“’It could disappear for ever’: Anger over sale of George Orwell archive” reports the Guardian.

George Orwell’s archives provide an invaluable insight into one of the most influential British writers of the 20th century, casting light on how he produced his most memorable books, his sensitivity to criticism, and his fears that legal threats could ruin his work. Now the treasure trove that is the extensive archive of correspondence and contracts amassed by Orwell’s original publisher, Victor Gollancz, could be scattered to the winds in what has been described as an act of “cultural vandalism”.

Crucial correspondence involving the Nineteen Eighty-Four author and Observer correspondent is being offered for sale on the open market, following a decision in 2018 by the publisher’s parent company to sell the archive because the warehouse was closing.

Richard Blair, 80 – whose father Eric Blair wrote under the pen-name George Orwell – is dismayed by the loss: “It’s terribly sad … Once Gollancz material is acquired by private collectors, it could disappear into the ether for ever.”

For £75,000, Peter Harrington, a leading antiquarian bookseller, is currently offering Gollancz papers relating to Orwell’s second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter. They include his original contract, a letter with his corrections, and a 1934 report by Gerald Gould – then fiction editor of the Observer and a Gollancz manuscript reader – stating that it should be published.

Harrington is also selling letters for £50,000 relating to Orwell’s third novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which show that libel concerns led to key alterations in the final text. In 1936, dismayed by Gollancz’s desired changes, Orwell wrote that he would nevertheless do what he could to meet his publisher’s demands – “short of ruining the book altogether”….

(2) STRACZYNSKI ON LDV. J. Michael Straczynski told Facebook followers he has copies of Last Dangerous Visions in his hands, and shared some extra Tim Kirk artwork that’s in the books.  Images at the link.

Four years ago I announced we were compiling and updating THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS. Some folks laughed, saying it’d never happen. Today the actual books arrived in advance of the 10/2 pub date. Given the shifting landscape of stories in and out of TLDV, this is as complete as it will ever be, and more complete than it has ever been.

And as a SURPRISE BONUS: artist Tim Kirk, who did the interior art pieces for THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS, also painted two alternate TLDV covers for Harlan back in the day. They are included in the book’s endpapers front and back, sans text and in full color, to allow their beauty to come through unimpeded.

(3) FLIPPING HIS LID. BBC keeps an eye on the Propstore cash register as “Indiana Jones’s Temple of Doom hat sells for £490,000 at auction”.

The hat worn by actor Harrison Ford in the second instalment of the Indiana Jones film franchise has sold for nearly half a million pounds at auction.

The brown felt fedora – specifically made for the Temple of Doom film – fetched $630,000 (£487,000) in Los Angeles on Thursday.

Other items of movie memorabilia were sold at the same time including props from Star Wars, Harry Potter and James Bond productions.

Jones, an adventuring archaeologist, is seen with the hat early on in the movie where he and his companions jump from a crashing plane in an inflatable raft….

… The fedora was also worn by Ford’s stunt-double in the 1984 film, Dean Ferrandini, and was sold with previously unpublished photos of the stuntman wearing the now-iconic costume on location.

Ferrandini died last year. The hat came from his personal collection.

The sable-coloured fedora was an update to the original featured in the first Indiana Jones film – Raiders Of The Lost Ark – with a “more tapered” crown then the first, Propstore, the auction house, said.

Created by the Herbert Johnson Hat Company in London, the inside lining features gold monogrammed initials “IJ”.

Also sold at the auction was an imperial scout trooper helmet used in the 1983 Star Wars film Return Of The Jedi – which was bought for $315,000 (£243,000) – as well as a light-up wand used by Daniel Radcliffe in Harry Potter And The Prisoner of Azkaban, which attracted a winning bid of $53,550 (£41,400)….

(4) WELL WORTH READING. The Pinnacle Gazette admires sff authors: “Science Fiction Writers Inspire Reality And Reflect Society”.

… Jemisin’s work demonstrates how fantasy can illuminate the truth of contemporary society, blending enthralling narratives with uncomfortable realities. She’s vocal about wanting equality and justice to resonate within her stories, aiming to help readers confront and understand those themes.

Jemisin’s powerful message extends beyond literature; movie adaptations of her work are currently underway. The merging of cinema with her impactful stories opens new doors for broader audiences….

(5) THE MARTIANS ARE BACK. LA’s Skirball Cultural Center will host “Radio, Propaganda, and The War of the Worlds: An Illuminated Lecture by theatre dybbuk featuring Professor Paul Lerner” on September 1. Tickets and full details at the link.

Hear Professor Paul Lerner discuss Orson Welles’ famous “The War of the Worlds” radio broadcast while actors from theatre dybbuk perform excerpts from radio broadcasts and other sources. 

(6) A WORD GAME. [Item by Dann.] Under the “fun and games” section of the scroll, I came across Cell Tower a while back.  The object of the puzzle is to find all of the words. The letters appear in the correct order, but they may be in consecutive rows.  A perfect game is when you find all of the words without having to unselect/correct a word.  All words are between 4 and 8 characters long.

My personal trick is to select all of the letters in the words that I find until all of the letters are covered.  Then I deselect all of the letters and start selecting each word in turn.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

1987 – RoboCop. In my opinion, they should have stopped after RoboCop came out. Oh, the next  one with Peter Weller reprising his role had life in it but this film, oh, it’s perfect. So let’s talk about this film that premiered thirty- seven years ago in Los Angeles.

Edward Neumeier, a script reader for Warner Bro. who had no scriptwriting credits before this film, had visited the Blade Runner shooting stage and was fascinated by the idea of whether a machine could have a soul. (Of course, we know RoboCop is human, but I guess we’re supposed to forget that.)  He and Michael Miner whose first script was, oh guess, wrote this film. 

Their script was purchased just a year before production began by Jon Davison for Orion Pictures who would produce this film. 

Now they had considerable trouble finding a director as more than a few said no, so they approached Verhoeven who would also turn it down twice because he did not understand the intent of it, particularly the satirical edge.  He was convinced by his wife that he should direct it. 

So they had a script, a producer and director, but who to play the star of this film? A fairly long list of possible actors was considered with Orion wanting Arnold Schwarzenegger on the basis of being The Terminator but they were persuaded not to cast him when it was noted that in that costume he’d look like the Pillsbury Dough Boy. 

Peter Weller had wanted the role and tested well, so he got the job. It didn’t hurt that he was a relative unknown, so the comparatively low salary didn’t bother him. It also helped that he had a following in the SF community because of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.

They had cast Stephanie Zimbalist as Anne Lewis, but she dropped out to be in Remington Steele. (A terribly dated series I discovered the other week — my opinion of course.) Nancy Allen found the script rather interesting and readily agreed to be cast. 

In my mind, there’s one more human character of major importance and that’s played by Kurtwood Smith who auditioned for Boddicker and also for the ill-fated Jones. The script said according to later write-ups of the film that Boddicker was scripted to wear glasses so he would look like Heinrich Himmler. Smith in interviews later said he wasn’t told this, and I certainly didn’t see the likeness. Did any of you see it? 

Let’s briefly talk about Weller as RoboCop. Remember how smoothly he looked on screen? That was a lie. The suit was a total clusterfuck, sorry Mike, that’s the best word for it — the visor was hard to see out and that meant he couldn’t handle his weapon right, too cumbersome for him to move as he had practiced, and he lost up to three pounds a day while filming because up the weight of it, so he started taking prescription meds which made him, errr, testy. 

So he got fired by Verhoeven who considered replacing him with Lance Henriksen but cooler, saner heads prevailed and filming (eventually) resumed. 

Did I mention Orion had to increase the budget? More than once? 

Of the extensive SFX, I want to mention but one. Well two actually.

The first being Emil’s melting mutation was inspired by The Incredible Melting Man.

Rob Bottin who had previously worked with John Carpenter on The Fog and The Thing designed and constructed Emil’s prosthetics, creating a foam-latex headpiece and matching gloves that gave the appearance of Emil’s skin melting as he said in interviews “off his bones like marshmallow sauce” when his vehicle made the toxic water in that contained immerse him. Cool, very cool.

Then there’s ED-209. The one that RoboCop looks up, not the one he obviously destroyed, was a fully-articulated model of only fiberglass took over four months to build, was seven feet tall, and weighed five hundred pounds. However, all of the other scenes were done by two-foot-high miniature replicas for stop motion animation, all fifty-five shots. 

Ok, I’ve prattled on long enough. Did it make money? Was it well received? 

Well, the budget wasn’t really high despite Orion (reluctantly) giving it more funding as it cost just under fourteen million and it made nearly four times that at fifty-three million dollars! 

Was it well received? What do you think? It nominated for a Hugo at Nolacon II losing to, errr, The Princess Bride. Trying for irony that year, oh voters? I’m going to quote but one critical review from Hillary Mantel of The Spectator: “The film is energetic, visually brilliant and very funny, with a sharp script that is never allowed to hold up the carnage.”

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) LA DONNA E MOBILE. “Fortnite is back on mobiles after four years thanks to EU law” – the Guardian tells how it happened.

The video game Fortnite is back on mobile phones, four years after Apple and Google pulled it from their app stores. Android users worldwide can install the game, along with two new titles from the publisher, Epic Games, by downloading the company’s new app store.

However, only iPhone users in the EU can follow suit as Epic becomes the highest profile company yet to adopt the looser restrictions forced on Apple by the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

All three games will also be available on Alt Store PAL, the largest of the independent App Stores launched in the EU under Apple’s new terms, said Tim Sweeney, the founder of Epic Games.

“We’re really grateful to the European Commission for not only passing the DMA law, enabling store competition, but also really going in and robustly holding Apple and Google’s feet to the fire to ensure they can’t just obstruct competition,” Sweeney added….

(10) CROUCH SERIES GETS SECOND BITE. The Verge reports “Dark Matter is coming back for a second season on Apple TV Plus”.

The multiverse of Apple TV Plus’ Dark Matter is about to get bigger as the show heads into its second season. Apple announced on Friday that Dark Matter, Blake Crouch’s adaptation of his own 2016 novel about a physicist who gets sucked into multiple alternate realities, has been renewed for a new batch of episodes….

(11) MAD, MAD I TELL YOU. Atlas Obscura contemplates “The Metamorphosis of the Mad Scientist”.

With all due respect to WWII dramas and Emma Stone satires, no genre has done more to unleash the mad scientist upon the world than the horror film. They are one of scary movies’ most famous characters, just behind the Final Girl and doomed quarterbacks. The two most iconic images of the silent era come from Metropolis (1927) and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), both chilling stories about the havoc of evil doctors. A century later, the mad scientist continues to haunt our movies, even if the inventions themselves do not. “Today, many of the things that would once have seemed like horror-story fodder are scientific reality,” noted The Atlantic in 2014. “But still, as the boundaries of human knowledge are continually pushed, the trope of the mad scientist endures.”

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George thought someone would want to know how this movie got made: “Blade: Trinity Pitch Meeting”. Really, he did.

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

Pixel Scroll 8/15/24 Have Spice Suit, Will Travel

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(1) SFWA ON ITS THIRD PRESIDENT THIS SUMMER. Chelsea Mueller today resigned as Interim President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. Mueller had been in office only since the beginning of August, as SFWA’s VP becoming the organization’s Interim President upon the resignation of SFWA President Jeffe Kennedy on August 1. Anthony W. Eichenlaub, SFWA Secretary, is stepping up as the new  Interim President. Mueller’s and Eichenlaub’s statements are excerpted in the File 770 post “Mueller Resigns as Interim SFWA President; Eichenlaub Takes Office”.

To learn why the organization is in a crisis SFWA members must read the Forum. Those outside can get only a very general idea from social media posts like M L Clark’s statement on Bluesky.

Author Jenny Rae Rappaport his urging SFWA members to sign a Petition for bylaws amendment to forbid NDAs. The supporting statement follows. The wording of the amendment is at the link.

In the last several years, SFWA has begun requiring its Board members, employees, and key volunteers to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) to ensure confidentiality. However, recent events have shown that these NDAs cause more problems than they solve. Because the NDAs are overly broad without clear limits or expiration dates, they leave employees, Board members, and volunteers uncertain about what they can and cannot say without potential legal repercussions. Even more concerning is that these NDAs have created distrust between SFWA membership and the Board, and an environment where the perception exists that bad actors can mistreat others and violate SFWA’s bylaws with impunity.

There is no legal requirement for SFWA as a 501(c)(3) to use NDAs, for either its legal or tax status. Many nonprofits, both inside and outside California, function perfectly well without using NDAs, either trusting that people will follow the laws about disclosure of personal, financial, and medical information, or using individual confidentiality agreements with the details of what information needs to be kept confidential spelled out.

Accordingly, in the interests of greater transparency for the organization, we, the undersigned members of SFWA, petition for the following change to the bylaws:

(2) INDUSTRY REACTS TO GAME HUGO WINNER. PC Gamer marvels that “Somehow, Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t done winning yet: It’s just claimed the most prestigious award for science fiction and fantasy writing”.

….A special videogame category was added in 2021 to recognize the increased impact of videogames amidst the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, but it was a one-off: No game-related Hugo was awarded in 2022 or ’23.

In 2023, however, Worldcon voted to make the Best Game or Interactive Work a permanent category for 2024—wouldn’t you know it, just in time for the Baldur’s Gate 3 behemoth to smash through the walls like the Kool-Aid Man and run off with it. BG3 beat out Alan Wake 2 (yet again), Chants of Senaar, Dredge, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor for the big prize….

“The Hugo nominees and awards have determined my reading list since forever, so it’s a huge honor to be standing here,” Larian boss Swen Vincke said during his acceptance speech (via Polygon). 

“Videogame writing is often underestimated. It is very very very hard work. For Baldur’s Gate 3 we had to create over 174 hours of cinematics just to be able to respect the choices of the players and to make sure that each and every single one of them would have an emotional story that was reflecting their choices and their agency. It takes a very long time, it takes a very large team … It takes a lot of perseverance and a lot of talent. So I’m very happy for all of them and for all of the team back home that we can get this, and very grateful to the fandom.”

Vincke isn’t kidding when he says Larian wanted to ensure Baldur’s Gate 3 was as reactive as possible to player choices: The studio recently revealed that the game’s rarest ending has only been unlocked by 34 players—and remember, this is a game that’s sold well over 10 million copies. (For a little added context, 1.9 million Baldur’s Gate 3 players were turned into a cheese wheel. Which is fine, really: No one has as many friends as the man with many cheeses.)…

(3) ELLISON FOUNDATION HAD IRS CHARITABLE STATUS REVOKED. The IRS has revoked the 501(c)(3) charitable status of The Harlan and Susan Ellison Foundation after it failed to file the required Form 990 for three straight years. Douglas J. Lane provides detailed coverage of the Foundation’s creation, activities, and status in his blog post “For Want of a Form”:

On Monday, August 12, 2024 the Internal Revenue Service updated its monthly list of 501(c)(3) organizations for whom it was revoking charitable status based on failure to file Form 990, Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax, for three consecutive years. 

Among the organizations freshly listed was EIN number 873507738, The Harlan and Susan Ellison Foundation.

The revocation of charitable status puts the Foundation and its president, J. Michael Straczynski, in a tricky spot, as it makes the organization fully taxable. They cannot receive tax-free donations or offer deductions to donors. Under California law, they will also not be able to distribute charitable funds. There are other ramifications, and while reinstatement is possible, it comes with a swath of requirements.

It’s critical to say at the outset of this account of the public-facing facets of the Foundation: I ascribe no malicious intent or nefarious purpose to anyone involved in any of the events that led to this revocation, and no impropriety is indicated by anything that has occurred. Indeed, Joe Straczynski speaks in a caring and sincere way about the place the Ellisons have in his heart, and how he wants to carry out their wishes. The Foundation has a laudable vision. But malicious intent and carelessness are two different things, and it’s clear a severe breakdown occurred somewhere along the way that resulted in opacity where transparency was required, creating a situation in which warnings were missed and the Foundation was positioned for a catastrophic setback that was wholly avoidable…

Lane also posted the information today at The Harlan Ellison Facebook Fan Club, leading to this series of comments from J. Michael Straczynski.

Thursday, August 15, 2024 at 10:21 a.m.

This is literally the first time I’m hearing this. We’ve had no contact from them directly or indirectly. If the forms were not submitted that’s strictly a paperwork issue and that’s on us. I need to find out what happened on the attorney side. This will be fixed and as per this the status will then be reinstated once we’ve sent in the forms.

Thursday, August 15, 2024 at 11:21 a.m.

Okay, last quick update for the moment. It looks like the notices were being sent to the wrong address/suite number. Also, as for the Packard, it was not sold, it was given freely to a member of this very forum in exchange for looking after it and maintaining it in Harlan’s memory. He can confirm this here if he so desires.

So bottom line for now: the paperwork fell through a crack between different offices over who was handling what, and the address (as noted in the link) was incorrect for the notices. I assumed all this was being properly attended to, while I was busy getting Harlan’s work back into print. That error was mine. The good news is that since this was apparently a comedy of errors on both sides, there should be no issue with getting this rectified swiftly by simply filing the paperwork.

Thursday, August 15, 2024 at 12:41 p.m.

Okay…I just heard from the business management firm we’ve been using and they confirmed that they hadn’t looked after this because they believed it was already being handled by others. They’re filing the paperwork as we speak and this will be rectified promptly.

Thursday, August 15, 2024 at 3:25 p.m.

This has now been officially resolved. We just confirmed with the tax dept that we never received any notices from the IRS. We sent in and they have now filed the returns with the correct address. After the IRS processes them, we will handle the paperwork to reinstate the Foundation which will apparently not be a problem. The IRS will update their records so no further notices are missed. The tax dept now has the Foundation on their schedule so they won’t miss it again anyway. Just to be on the safe side moving forward we are going to hire a nonprofit attorney on retainer to coordinate all of the moving parts so nothing falls through the cracks in future.

A colorful day but at least it’s ending better than it began.

(4) ANOTHER LOOK AT GAIMAN ALLEGATIONS. The Spinoff books editor Claire Mabey listened to the Tortoise Media podcast “Master: the allegations against Neil Gaiman” and distilled the information into a timeline with explicit details of the encounters described by survivors in “The New Zealand allegations at the centre of a Neil Gaiman podcast investigation”.

(5) AMERICAN NON-IDOL. I don’t know that any of the many ways John Scalzi restates the basic point in his 3,600-word post really feels like it stuck the landing, but the oft-repeated message makes sense: “Please Don’t Idolize Me (or Anyone, Really)” at Whatever.

In the wake of the various recent allegations involving Neil Gaiman, people have been both very sad that someone who they looked up to as an inspiration has, allegedly, turned out to be something less than entirely admirable, and are now looking to see who is now left that they can rotate into the spot of “the good dude,” i.e., that one successful creative guy who they think or at least hope isn’t hiding a cellar full of awful actions. One name I see brought up is mine, in ways ranging from “Well, at least we still have Scalzi,” to “Oh, God, please don’t let Scalzi be a fucking creep too.” Which, uhhhh, yeah? Thanks?…

…Every person you’ve ever admired has fucked up, sometimes really badly. Everyone you’ve ever looked up to has secrets, and it’s possible some of those secrets would materially change how you think about them, not always for the better. Everyone you’ve ever known has things about them you don’t know, many of which aren’t even secrets, they’re just things you don’t engage with in your day-to-day experience of them. Nevertheless it’s possible if you were aware of them, it would change how you feel about them, for better or for worse. And now let’s flip that around! You have things about you that even your best friends don’t know, and might be surprised to learn! You have secrets you don’t wish to share with the class! You have fucked up, and lied, and have been a hypocrite too!…

…Oh, God, this is where Scalzi starts admitting to terrible, terrible things. No. I feel pretty confident I live a tolerably ethical life. Part of the reason for this is that I have what I think is a decent operating principle, which is: If I’m thinking of doing something, and Krissy called me right then and asked “what are you doing?” and I would be tempted to lie to her about it, then I don’t do that thing….

(6) GET READY FOR FANTASTIC FEST. “Fantastic Fest 2024 Lineup Featuring Terrifier 3, Never Let Go, More Unveiled” – Deadline has details.

Fantastic Fest, the country’s largest genre film festival, has unveiled the feature lineup for its 19th edition, taking place at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar in Austin, TX, from September 19th- 26th.

Featuring 28 World Premieres, 23 International and North American Premieres, and 15 U.S. Premieres, the fest opens with the world premiere of James Ashcroft’s The Rule of Jenny Pen, a new thriller starring John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush. Lionsgate’s horror thriller Never Let Go will be presented during the opening night gala, with director Alexandre Aja, star Halle Berry and the team from 21 Laps in attendance. Meanwhile, opening night will also feature the world premiere of Terrifier 3, the latest film in Damien Leone’s horror franchise, centered on the horrifying Art the Clown.

(7) AURORA AWARDS VOTING STATISTICS. Clifford Samuels has posted the “Final results for the 2024 Aurora Awards” at the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association website. The direct link to the statistics is here.

(8) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboy Books of Joshua Tree, CA brings listeners Simultaneous Times episode 78. Stories featured in this episode:

“When You See A Dragon, You Run” by Jenna Hanchey, read by the author

“The Darling Murders” by Jonathan Nevair. Read by Jean-Paul Garnier

Music by Phog Masheeen. Theme music by Dain Luscombe.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Lis Carey.]

Born August 15, 1933 – Bjo Trimble, 91.

By Lis Carey: Bjo was born in Holdenville, Oklahoma, in 1933, discovered sf fandom in 1952. She was serving in the US Navy, at the Great Lakes Naval Station, and saw an announcement in Astounding Science Fiction about the science fiction convention that weekend in Chicago—the 10th Worldcon, the one we now call Chicon II, though at the time it had no official name. The largest Worldcon ever at the time, with 870 members, it was a great place for a smart and friendly young woman to meet people and make connections in fandom. Her new acquaintances included Robert Bloch, Willy Ley, August Derleth, and Harlan Ellison.

Bjo Trimble attends the 2024 Peabody Awards at Beverly Wilshire on June 9. Photo by Jon Kopaloff.

When it was discovered that she was an artist and cartoonist, she was recruited to provide illustrations for fanzines, sealing her fate. She claims to have met her husband, John Griffin Trimble, under Forrest J Ackerman’s piano, during a particularly crowded party. He was serving in the US Air Force, and they traded Stupid Officer Stories.

But as we all know, this was mere prelude. Bjo was active in LASFS (Los Angeles Science Fiction Society), and organized a fashion show for Solacon (the 16th Worldcon). In 1960, she started Project Art Show, which brought the first modern, organized art show at a science fiction convention to Pittcon, the 1960 Worldcon. Bjo continued the project, bringing art shows to Worldcons and other conventions. By 1969, Project Art Show had become The International Science-Fantasy Art Exhibition” (ISFAE), and was judging and awarding prizes, as well as organizing the art shows.

But in 1968, Bjo started turning her attention to a new fannish interest–Star Trek. Bjo and John Trimble were active in the letter-writing campaign credited with getting the show a third season, after it was initially canceled after its second season. They also helped convince NASA to name the first of the Space Shuttles Enterprise, although that was a test vehicle never intended for space flight.

Bjo was a major contributor to the Star Trek Concordance, containing cross-referenced details on every character, setting, event and device in every episode of the original Star Trek, and, in later editions of the book, its animated incarnation, and the Star Trek films. Originally self-published, it got a mass market publication by Ballantine Books in 1976, and an updated edition by Citadel Press in 1995. On the Good Ship Enterprise: My 15 Years with Star Trek, her memoir of her experiences in Star Trek fandom, was published in 1982.

Bjo was a Guest of Honor at Dragon Con, which was also the 6th North American Science Fiction Convention, in 1995. Bjo and John Trimble were Fan Guests of Honor at ConJosé, the 60th Worldcon. Bjo, or Bjo and John, were also honored at many Star Trek and other science fiction conventions.

 In addition, Bjo and John Trimble were Baron and Baroness of the Society for Creative Anachronism’s Barony of the Angels, from September 2008 to January 2012. That’s at least fandom adjacent, right?

 Sadly, John in April 2024, but Bjo is still with us. Her contributions to fandom will remain.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) MUTANTS DESERVE AWARDS. The Walt Disney Studios has a “For Your Consideration” website for the X-Men ’97 series.

(12) PAGING ALL READERS. “Book Bars Gain Momentum Around New York”: Eater tells you where to find the ones in New York City.

A flurry of book bars has recently opened that prioritize solo time as much as low-key conversation, offering a fun alt-combo to record bars and libraries. These spaces for reading, drinking, listening to music, and chatting with other book lovers (or not) are a post-shutdown pivot from social distancing. And while the throwback staple had started to revive just after the pandemic, their openings have gained momentum around the city.

Like wine bars and cocktail bars, the focus in book bars is less on needing labor to make complicated dishes as the case may be in a full-fledged restaurant. Instead, the business relies on easier-to-procure revenue streams: booze, books, and sometimes, ready-made snacks, like olives, nuts, and tinned fish. But book bars, owners say, are less about practicality than about creating a community, a third place that’s conducive to reading and chatting while enjoying a drink…

(13) PURINA HOBBIT CHOW. “What’s on the Menu in Your Fantasy World?” at Gastro Obscura.

FOOD AND FANTASY HAVE LONG gone hand in hand. Our oldest myths and fairy tales abound with ravenous monsters and enchanted apples, while modern fantasy literature has brought us the second breakfast-savoring hobbits of The Lord of the Rings and the sprawling medieval banquets of A Song of Ice and Fire. Fantasy fans rally around official cookbooks from the worlds they love, as well as unofficial recreations and fanfiction that explores the diets of their favorite characters.

(14) THE TREES THAT GREW THE POOH-STICKS. BBC Countryfile invites readers to “Discover the real-life Winnie-The-Pooh locations that inspired the famous children’s books by AA Milne”.

Ashdown Forest in East Sussex is perhaps best known as The Hundred Acre Wood, the beloved setting of arguably the most famous children’s books ever written, Winnie-the-Pooh, published in 1926, and The House at Pooh Corner (1928)….

…Today, the 6,500-acre heathland and woodland 36 miles south of London, is a rare and protected area, providing habitat for endangered flora and fauna. In this gentle, ancient landscape, we can enjoy its literary, cultural and environmental history; we can be twitchers, walkers or pub-goers….

(15) NOW LEAVING ON TRACK 9-3/4. “Back to Hogwarts pop-up coming to Grand Central Terminal with spellbinding interactive activities” reports AMNY.

For the first time ever, Warner Bros. Discovery will be hosting a Back to Hogwarts pop-up in New York City. From Aug. 30 through Sept. 1, “Harry Potter” fans can gather at Vanderbilt Hall at Grand Central Terminal to celebrate the start of a new school year at Hogwarts.

In the “Harry Potter” universe, all students board the Hogwarts Express and return for a new year on Sept. 1. Warner Bros. Discovery hosts global celebrations in cities like London, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo, uniting fans worldwide with digital activities, in-person gatherings, and watch-alongs, plus huge celebrations at “Harry Potter” destinations such as the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios.

At the New York pop-up, guests can expect to find magical performances, LEGO building activities, an interactive “Harry Potter: Quidditch Champion” experience, and a Butterbeer toast, courtesy of the flagship Harry Potter New York store. On Sept. 1, there will be a ticketed event with a live 11 a.m. countdown, marking when the Hogwarts Express would leave Kings Cross station in the series.

Though all of the events are free to attend, “Harry Potter” fans must sign up for a timed-entry ticket, which will be available starting Aug. 19. To make sure you don’t miss it, sign up and opt into email communications from the Harry Potter Fan Club by Aug. 17. On Aug. 19, an email will be sent including a link to the ticket site ahead of release at 12 p.m. EST. 

(16) NOT A ROLLING STONE. SAILING, MAYBE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Today’s Nature has Stonehenge on the cover. There’s a Nature News item here.

The history of Stonehenge poses many challenges, not least of which is where all of the stones came from and how they were transported to the site. The Neolithic structure is made up of two main types of stone — sarsens sourced some 25 kilometres away near Marlborough, and bluestones that originated in Wales. The largest of the bluestones at the site is the six-tonne Altar Stone, but it is an anomaly: it did not come from Wales. In this week’s issue, Anthony Clarke and colleagues reveal that the Altar Stone probably made a remarkable journey of some 750 kilometres from Scotland. The researchers analysed two fragments from the stone and discovered a striking similarity to the Old Red Sandstone of the Orcadian Basin in northeast Scotland. The team suggests that the stone could have been transported by sea, indicating that there might have been a significant level of societal organization within Neolithic Britain.

The original research by Anthony Clarke and colleagues link above is to “A Scottish provenance for the Altar Stone of Stonehenge”.

(17) UPLIFTING HUMANS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In a series of stories and novels, David Brin explored the idea of species uplift where by a technological civilization genetically manipulates a non-sentient species into full-blown sentience: a process called ‘uplifting’. Brin’s series has a climax in the Hugo-winning The Uplift War (1986).

Last weekend, while folk in Glasgow were preparing for the Hugo Awards ceremony, Isaac Arthur posted one of his monthly ‘Sci-Fi Sunday’ videos. While in David Brin’s stories the humans appeared to be the exception in the Galaxy who evolved sentience naturally whereas every other civilization seems to have been uplifted with the original uplift being made by some ancient and now extinct civilization. Conversely, in Isaac’s video, he explores the notion that humans were uplifted by an alien race.

Now, it has to be said that Isaac himself does not subscribe to the idea of humans being uplifted (he makes that clear both at the video’s beginning and end), but explores the concept hypothetically.  Included in the mix is a slightly more sober idea that the Earth might have been subject to panspermia and specifically directed panspermia… As well as a brief dive into Eric von Daniken which, mercifully, he looks at purely through an SFnal lens… “Were Primitive Humans Uplifted By Aliens?”

Many believe humanity’s climb upward may have been assisted by outsiders. Is this possible, and if so, what does that tell us about our own past… and future?

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Clifford Samuels, Christian Brunschen, 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 7/18/24 Pixel Furry, Credential of S.C.R.O.L.L.

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(1) DOCTOR WHO’S SHORE THING. “Doctor Who spin-off gets update as ‘filming start date revealed’” notes RadioTimes. (It’s actually a short series.)

The long-rumoured Doctor Who spin-off, The War Between the Land and the Sea, is set to start filming in September, it’s been reported…

The information comes from the end of a long Deadline article about the series: “’Doctor Who: Disney Deal, Ncuti Gatwa & Russell T Davies In Spotlight”.

…All eyes now on the upcoming season, which is in the can and due to launch next year, along with a long-rumored set of spin-offs that comprise the new ‘Whoniverse’ including The War Between the Land and the Sea. Fans were delighted when this spin-off was alluded to in the ’73 Yards’ episode of the latest season and Deadline is told that shooting will commence in September.

One of our sources close to the production believes Disney will “need to make a decision” on its future relationship with the show soon after The War Between the Land and the Sea wraps, and this could have a bearing on how long the in-demand Gatwa — who will lead a West End production of The Importance of Being Earnest at the end of this year — remains Doctor. Although the next season has wrapped, this source predicts the final episode has been left open-ended, with the possibility remaining that Gatwa could regenerate into his successor if he chooses to exit. Gatwa’s agents hadn’t responded to Deadline’s request for comment by press time.

(2) WHAT’S THE MATTER. “Constellation and Dark Matter: the TV series that could change your view of quantum mechanics” in the opinion of Physics World.

… A fundamental principle of the many-worlds interpretation is that any contact between the different worlds is impossible. But a fundamental principle of popular culture is that it’s not, physics be damned. The beauty of using parallel worlds in fiction is that it can neatly exploit our human anxiety over the consequences of taking and having taken actions. In a sense, it reveals the God-like, world-shaping power of the human ability to choose and the depth of our innate desire to live our lives again.

As Brit Marling, co-author and star of Another Earth, told an interviewer: “Sometimes in science fiction you can get closer to the truth than if you had followed all the rules.”…

…Quantum-inspired fictional worlds are back in the spotlight after featuring in two Apple TV+ dramas this year – Constellation and Dark Matter. Both use superposition as a device for allowing characters to take forking paths. The former was cancelled after one season, while the latter finished its season in June. The two shows illustrate what’s problematic about the genre….

(3) JMS DEFENDS THE DISCLAIMER. J. Michael Straczynski says he’s gotten sharp criticism for beginning the new edition of Harlan Ellison’s Greatest Hits with this disclaimer.

“Harlan Ellison’s work epitomized and reshaped the speculative, science fiction, and horror genres across decades. Ellison’s stories and novellas have been an inspiration to subsequent writers, and his impact can still be seen in contemporary television, culture, and literature.

“However, while these stories are outstanding works across multiple genres, they may contain outdated cultural representations and language. We present the works as originally published. We hope that you enjoy discovering, or rediscovering these stories.”

The other day in a public comment on Facebook’s Harlan Ellison group JMS defended that choice (and others) in a long post of which this is an excerpt:

Several folks here have used terms like “disgraceful” and “shameful” to discuss the disclaimer at the front of Harlan Ellison’s Greatest Hits, and the decision not to use the original computer tape images in I Have No Mouth. Let me address these frankly, and in that order.

When the disclaimer was first brought up by the publisher, I bristled at it. (And that part is literally just one sentence inside of one paragraph.) But it was explained to me that having that one sentence in that one paragraph meant that nothing in the stories themselves would have to be changed or edited. The book could go out without so much as a misplaced comma. Just as importantly, it meant the book could be sold into high school and college bookstores, school and public libraries, and curricula without impediment.

The fellow who did the YouTube video posted twice here made the observation, on this topic, that he basically didn’t give a shit if the book was available to high schools and universities, even though most everyone reading this discovered Harlan’s work at around that age. All he cared about was having the book of stories he’d already read and owned be readily available in a bookstore so he could buy one more edition of it, new readers be damned. (And it’s nearly impossible to get enough copies into print to be in stores without being able to sell the book into schools, libraries and the like.) So yes, I pulled the trigger on that, and I’d do it all over again given how this has worked out.

Jumping to the computer tape issue…what folks need to understand is that while Greatest Hits is certainly a wonderful opportunity for fans to collect some of Harlan’s best work in one place, that’s not the primary target of this book. Everybody reading this already has all or most of those stories, in the original books and in some cases even the original magazines. It’s not one more fan service compilation.

Greatest Hits is a primer of Harlan’s work for newcomers. As such, the whole point is to make the book as accessible as possible to new readers, many of whom had never previously even heard of Harlan Ellison. It’s not so much that I wanted folks to want to buy the book, I wanted to make sure there was nothing that could prompt them to *not* buy the book.

The disclaimer was part of that decision. So was removing the computer tape image and substituting the actual words themselves, especially given the current technological state of things. Corollary: You’re watching the latest Dune movie, and one of the main characters goes to a highly sophisticated computer system to give it instructions on the next issue by loading in a mountain of 3 inch floppy disks. It would get a laugh.

Computer tapes, *outside of their original historical context* (about which more in a second), would have the same effect on a modern reader. It’s being offered as a story right now to a modern readership, at a time when such tapes aren’t used anymore, and folks either wouldn’t know what it was (and some say “well, let them do their homework” but that’s a self-defeating line of reasoning when the whole point is to get the work out to that new readership) or they would know and it would break the illusion and be considered laughable.

So yes, I pulled the trigger on that as well. Because again: this is a primer, by definition an accessible introduction to a writer’s work.

As a result of all this, at a time when so many writers are having their words altered, softened or otherwise bastardized in order to be allowed into the marketplace, Harlan’s stories went out intact.

…The first print run of the regular edition Greatest Hits sold out before it was even formally published. There was another print run of that edition, and two print runs of the exclusive edition.

As I write these words, there are now roughly *sixty thousand copies of Harlan Ellison’s Greatest Hits in print*….

(4) HELLO, DALI! “You can now ask Salvador Dali questions (sort of), as part of an AI installation” at NPR.

…The surrealist artist Salvador Dali was known for art featuring melting clocks, bizarre landscapes and dreamlike imagery. He died in 1989, but visitors at the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla., can ask him questions about his art or anything else. NPR’s Chloe Veltman reports that Ask Dali uses generative AI to bring the artist back to life.

CHLOE VELTMAN, BYLINE: The question – why are the clocks in your paintings melting? – provokes a long, poetical response from Ask Dali. Here’s a snippet.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

AI-GENERATED VOICE: (As Salvador Dali) My dear questioner, think not of the clocks as merely melting. Picture them as a vast dream caressing consciousness.

VELTMAN: Museum visitors just pick up the lobster-shaped receiver on a replica of Dali’s famous telephone sculpture to speak with him. The museum says the artificial intelligence Dali has responded to well over 30,000 questions since the installation launched in mid-April. People ask about things like the artist’s famous curling moustache…

(5) BEAR MAKEOVER. “’Drunk’ Disney bear cancelled over ‘derogatory and offensive’ name” reports Yahoo!

A drunk animatronic bear who was a Disney World fixture for over 50 years has reportedly been cancelled over concerns he could offend alcoholics.

Liver Lips McGrowl did not make an appearance when the “Country Bear Jamboree” – one of the final attractions designed by Walt Disney before his death – returned on Wednesday following a seven-month refurbishment.

The attraction, which features 18 animatronic bears performing country-style Disney songs, first opened its doors in 1971 and has been a mainstay of the theme park for decades.

Disney decided to cancel the character because the phrase “liver lips” could be offensive to alcoholics, according to the Disney Inside the Magic blog.

“The decision to remove Liver Lips McGrowl was driven by concerns over the character’s name. The term “liver lips” is considered derogatory and offensive,” it reported….

… The bear has been replaced by Romeo McGrowl, who looks identical to his predecessor – including his protruding lips – but sports a sky-blue jumpsuit and blonde quiff….

(6) BOB NEWHART (1929-2024). [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The one and only Bob Newhart is gone. A quick glance at his credits on IMDb might give the impression that his contributions to entertainment were modest. That would be utterly false. 

If you’re young enough to be unfamiliar with his work, I urge you to investigate not only his genre appearances, but his entire body of work. So much of it has what might be called sfnal sensibilities. For instance, the entire run of Newhart (his 1982–90 TV show) was just skew enough to our mundane world that you could be convinced it was deliberately set in an alternate reality. So, too, were many of the standup comedy routines he was beloved for before he ever set foot on a soundstage. 

His contributions to specifically genre media were also significant. They include: On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, The Rescuers and The Rescuers Down Under, The Simpsons (as himself), Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer: The Movie, Elf, The Librarian(s) series (3 TV movies & a TV series), and two appearances on Svengoolie (one as himself).

Rolling Stone’s tribute is here: “Bob Newhart, Groundbreaking Stand-Up Comic and TV Sitcom Legend, Dead at 94”.

…Understated in his delivery and physically small of stature — he looked like the former accountant that he was — Newhart nonetheless left a sizable footprint on comedy. His first album, 1960’s The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, was a blockbuster; featuring his trademark one-sided conversations, the album won multiple Grammys including Album of the Year and achieved the commercial success of a huge pop album….

…Some of his most popular bits — marketing executives advising Abraham Lincoln, the Wright Brothers and a harried driving instructor — were included on The Button-Down Mind. (“What’s the problem?” Lincoln’s publicist is overheard saying to him before the Gettysburg Address. ” … You’re thinking of shaving it off? … Um, Abe, don’t you see that’s part of the image?”)…

…He gained a new legion of fans after appearing as Will Ferrell’s tiny North Pole dad in Elf and he guest-starred in several episodes of The Big Bang Theory as Professor Proton, the host of Leonard and Sheldon’s childhood-favorite TV science show. Those appearances led to Newhart finally winning an Emmy in 2013 (for “Outstanding Guest Actor”) after seven previous nominations….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 17, 1967 – Paul Cornell, 57.

By Paul Weimer: I came to Cornell different.  Not thanks to all of his excellent and groundbreaking work with Doctor Who (his DW novels were and are groundbreaking, and elements of those novels have made their way into multiple episodes of the rebooted shot. Nor was it for all of his work in television, from Coronation Street to Robin Hood, and much more. I didn’t even come to Cornell thanks to his extensive work in comics, from Captain Britain to Wolverine to Demon Knight. I was not aware of any of that vast oeuvre…at first.

Paul Cornell

I came to Cornell’s work first thanks to the SF Squeecast. SF Squeecast was one of the high-water marks of professionals being fans and doing fannish things that was a major source of controversy back in the early 2010’s. I remember the discussions at Loncon in 2014, whether such productions such as Squeecast should really be “eligible” for fan awards, since they were “Stacked with pros”.  But I knew, and personally knew, some of the people on the SF Squeecast, so I began listening to it, and discovering the work of people I didn’t know.  

Just like Paul Cornell.

So I got in on the ground floor when Cornell announced his Shadow Police novel, London Falling, and I gave it a try (and even managed to get an ARC). I enjoyed it highly. It was part of a trend of Magical London novels out at that time — Ben Aaronovich, and others explored this as well. I highly enjoyed London Falling, and its two sequels, and so my reading of Cornell began in earnest.  I started reading his Doctor Who work (The Discontinuity Guide in particular, was a revelation) and have continued to read him ever since. 

Cornell’s wide oeuvre and styles continue to amaze. I also particularly like his switch from urban London to the more pastoral rural fantasy of the Witches of Lychford novellas. And again here, like the London novels, he has counterparts in work such as that of Juliet McKenna. I like to think of Cornell’s work as an amplifier and booster of themes and subgenres and ideas, adding his voices to a chorus and making his work, and the subgenre he works in, stronger and better. 

Oh, and one last bit. For a number of years, Cornell came to Convergence, a local big con here in Minneapolis. Every year, Cornell had a special panel, where he would go out to a parking lot and teach us poor Americans how cricket works. These demonstrations were fun, entertaining, and I always came away feeling that I better understood the game. His absolute fun and joy in showing us the game is the takeaway and mental image I have of Paul.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) WHAT HAPPENED TO THE BATTLE OF ENDOR’S MOST COURAGEOUS WARRIORS? This October, Steve Orlando, Álvaro López, and Laura Braga’s Star Wars: Ewoks tell a new saga set directly after the events of Return of the Jedi. For more information, visit Marvel.com.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Ewoks’ continued adventures beyond the Star Wars films. The Ewok Adventure, also known as Caravan of Courage, followed up on the popularity of the adorable—but formidable—creatures who secured the Rebellion’s victory during the Battle of Endor in Return of the Jedi. To celebrate the anniversary and the Ewok’s mighty legacy, they’ll star in a new 4-issue limited comic series this October—STAR WARS: EWOKS!

A team of Imperial-led bounty hunters and scavengers arrive on the Forest Moon of Endor searching for a secret cache of Imperial weaponry! Are they prepared to face off against the battle-ready Ewoks who took down so many of their ranks? Who is the mysterious new warrior Ewok returning to Bright Tree village, and what is their connection to Wicket W. Warrick?

STAR WARS: EWOKS #1 (OF 4): Written by STEVE ORLANDO; Art by ÁLVARO LÓPEZ & LAURA BRAGA

COVER BY PETE WOODS

VARIANT COVER BY DAVID LOPEZ

ACTION FIGURE VARIANT COVER BY JOHN TYLER CHRISTOPHER

(10) UNHAPPY LANDING. “Halo Canceled At Paramount+ After 2 Seasons” reports Deadline.

Paramount+ has cancelled Halo.

The news comes a few months after Season 2 of the live-action video game adaptation premiered on the streamer in February. Amblin Television, Xbox and 343 Industries are currently shopping Halo in hopes of finding it a new home, Deadline understands….

(11) THE BUCKET WARS CONTINUE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Red fuming nitric acid, um I mean popcorn “butter” is optional. Gizmodo says, “Step Aside, Deadpool & Wolverine, the Real Heir to the Dune Popcorn Bucket Is Here”.

(12) BACK IN THE CAN. Rather like what Warner Bros. has done to a couple of finished movies, NASA has done to a moon rover: “NASA cancels $450 million VIPER moon rover due to budget concerns” at Space.com.

NASA has cancelled its VIPER moon rover program due to rising costs. 

VIPER, short for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, was a robotic mission intended to land near the moon’s south pole and spend 100 days scouting for lunar ice deposits. The rover was slated to launch in 2025 to the moon aboard an Astrobotic Griffin lander as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative (CLPS). Now, it appears VIPER will be scrapped for parts or potentially sold to industry. The decision to axe the VIPER mission was announced today (July 17) in a teleconference; cancelling the program is expected to save the agency an additional $84 million in development costs. NASA has spent about $450 million on the program so far, not including launch costs.

…At the time of its cancellation, the car-sized VIPER was completely assembled and undergoing environmental testing to ensure the rover could handle the physical stresses of launch and the harsh environment of space. 

NASA is now looking to “potentially de-integrate and reuse VIPER scientific instruments and components for future moon missions” Kearns said today, but will first ask both U.S. and international industry partners for any interest in using the rover as-is….

(13) YOU NEVER KNOW. “Signs of two gases in clouds of Venus could indicate life, scientists say” in the Guardian.

Hot enough to melt metal and blanketed by a toxic, crushing atmosphere, Venus ranks among the most hostile locations in the solar system. But astronomers have reported the detection of two gases that could point to the presence of life forms lurking in the Venusian clouds.

Findings presented at the national astronomy meeting in Hull on Wednesday bolster evidence for a pungent gas, phosphine, whose presence on Venus has been fiercely disputed.

A separate team revealed the tentative detection of ammonia, which on Earth is primarily produced by biological activity and industrial processes, and whose presence on Venus scientists said could not readily be explained by known atmospheric or geological phenomena.

The so-called biosignature gases are not a smoking gun for extraterrestrial life. But the observation will intensify interest in Venus and raise the possibility of life having emerged and even flourished in the planet’s more temperate past and lingered on to today in pockets of the atmosphere….

(14) BONES AWAY! “Stegosaurus skeleton, nicknamed ‘Apex,’ sells for record $44.6M at Sotheby’s auction” reports Yahoo!

A nearly complete stegosaurus skeleton sold at a Sotheby’s auction in New York on Wednesday for a record $44.6 million — the most ever paid for a fossil.

The dinosaur, nicknamed “Apex” — which lived between 146 and 161 million years ago in the Late Jurassic Period — was originally expected to sell for between $4 million and $6 million, according to the auction house.

Sotheby’s has said Apex is the “most complete and best-preserved Stegosaurus specimen of its size ever discovered.”

(15) KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES. “Rare ‘daytime fireball’ spotted as meteor falls to Earth over New York City” at Space.com.

A meteor crashed into Earth’s atmosphere over New York City yesterday (July 16), putting on quite the show for spectators throughout the region. 

The meteor created a rare daytime fireball that traveled west into New Jersey at speeds of up to 38,000 mph (61,000 km/h) according to NASA Meteor Watch.The American Meteor Society received several reports of a daytime fireball on July 16, 2024 over New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. Dramatic fireball footage was captured over Wayne, New Jersey and Northford, Connecticut….

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George lets us eavesdrop on the “Independence Day: Resurgence”. As a commenter says, “Forgetting this movie existed was super easy, barely an inconvenience.”

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

Last Dangerous Visions Table of Contents

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Advance reading copies of Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions anthology are going out and book marketing platform Edelweiss has posted screenshots of the table of contents:

The book goes on sale October 1, 2024 from Blackstone Publishers. The marketing copy says:

An anthology more than half a century in the making, The Last Dangerous Visions is the third and final installment of the legendary science fiction anthology series.

In 1973 celebrated writer and editor Harlan Ellison announced the third and final volume of his unprecedented anthology series, which began with Dangerous Visions and continued with Again, Dangerous Visions. But for reasons undisclosed, The Last Dangerous Visions was never completed.

Now, six years after Ellison’s passing, science fiction’s most famous unpublished book is here. And with it, the heartbreaking true story of the troubled genius behind it.

Provocative and controversial, socially conscious and politically charged, wildly imaginative yet deeply grounded, the thirty-two never-before-published stories, essays, and poems in The Last Dangerous Visions stand as a testament to Ellison’s lifelong pursuit of art, uniting a diverse range of science fiction writers both famous and newly minted, including Max Brooks, Edward Bryant, Cecil Castellucci, James S. A. Corey, Howard Fast, Patricia Hodgell, Dan Simmons, Robert Sheckley, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Mildred Downey Broxon, and Cory Doctorow, among others.

The historic publication of The Last Dangerous Visions completes the long-awaited final chapter in an incredible literary legacy.

J. Michael Straczynski’s vision for The Last Dangerous Visions set in 2021 explains the book that now exists:

…There was no one thing that stands as Harlan’s version of TLDV. It never existed because it was always in a state of flux. It was going to be whatever it was on the day when he finally finished with it. THAT was to be TLDV, not something frozen in amber that only reflected the70s. Which is why he continued buying stories all through the 80s and into the 90s (including from folks like Stephen Dedman) because he saw the book as a living document that would have to grow and change to stay relevant with changing times. It wasn’t supposed to be static until it actually came out…and he was the first to say that some stories would have to be trimmed to make room for ones that were more current.

Further to the point: no publisher in their right mind is going to put out a 700,000 word anthology that follows on books that came out in the 70s. The risk is too great. A reasonable sized book, yes. A behemoth, no. And the whole point of the exercise is to put the work of the best of the original DV writers, and those new voices Harlan wanted to continue to see, out where the mainstream world could see it…not as a limited edition sold to the already-faithful, not as an Ebook or a print-on-demand…but something to be published from a major company that would receive the kind of critical attention in the press that these stories and Harlan’s work deserve….

To carry out his vision Straczysnki pursued new stories by contemporary and marketable authors. James S. A. Corey, Max Brooks, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cecil Castellucci and Cory Doctorow are in the new book. There is also a story by Kayo Hartenbaum, the winner of a competition Straczynski ran to fill one slot.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST. That said, fans still want to know how the Blackstone anthology resembles the version Ellison projected in the 1970s?

Locus reported in 1979 that Last Dangerous Visions had been sold to Berkley Books and ran a table of contents listing 113 stories. (However, Ellison would acquire several more in the 1980s.[*])

As of mid-2023, at least forty stories purchased for Last Dangerous Visions have been published elsewhere (Wikipedia list).

The Blackstone anthology contains 13 stories that definitely were on the 1979 table of contents. Whether to count two more authors’ work is unclear. D.M. Rowles, who has eight “Intermezzos” in the Blackstone version had a single story by another title on the 1979 table of contents. Also, Howard Fast had a story announced in 1979 but the one in Blackstone has a different title [**]. Fast died in 2003, so whether or not it’s the same story, it would not be one of those commissioned by Straczysnki.  

The following titles in red from Blackstone’s table of contents were on the list announced in 1979:

Last Dangerous Visions – stories per digital ARC:

  • “Assignment No. 1” by Stephen Robinett
  • “Hunger” by Max Brooks
  • “Intermezzo 1: Broken, Beautiful Body on Beach” by D. M. Rowles
  • “None So Deaf” by Richard E. Peck
  • “War Stories” by Edward Bryant
  • “Intermezzo 2: Bedtime Story” by D. M. Rowles
  • “The Great Forest Lawn Clearance Sale—Hurry, Last Days!!” by Stephen Dedman  [*]
  • “Intermezzo 3: Even Beyond Olympus” by D. M. Rowles
  • “After Taste” by Cecil Castellucci
  • “Leveled Best” by Steve Herbst
  • “The Time of the Skin” by A. E. van Vogt
  • “Rundown” by John Morressy
  • “Intermezzo 4: Elemental” by D. M. Rowles
  • “The Weight of a Feather (The Weight of a Heart)” by Cory Doctorow
  • “The Malibu Fault” by Jonathan Fast
  • “The Size of the Problem” by Howard Fast [**]
  • “Intermezzo 5: First Contact” by D. M. Rowles
  • “A Night at the Opera” by Robert Wissner
  • “Goodbye” by Steven Utley
  • “Primordial Follies” by Robert Sheckley
  • “Men in White” by David Brin
  • “Intermezzo 6: Continuity” by D. M. Rowles
  • “The Final Pogrom” by Dan Simmons
  • “Intermezzo 7: The Space Behind the Obvious” by D. M. Rowles
  • “Falling from Grace” by Ward Moore
  • “First Sight” by Adrian Tchaikovsky
  • “Intermezzo 8: Proof” by D. M. Rowles
  • “Binary System” by Kayo Hartenbaum
  • “Dark Threshold” by P. C. Hodgell
  • “The Danann Children Laugh” by Mildred Downey Broxon
  • “Judas Iscariot Didn’t Kill Himself: A Story in Fragments” by James S. A. Corey