Tag Archives: James Webb Space Telescope

Pixel Scroll 4/16/25 It’s Been A Long File Since I Pixel Scrolled

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(1) WSFS BUSINESS MEETING TOWN HALLS IN MAY. The Seattle 2025 Worldcon committee today reminded members they will be hosting two Business Meeting Town Halls where members can learn how to participate in the business meeting process. They will be on Zoom, and recorded for later playback. The committee has yet to announce how to attend and RSVP. The available information is here on the convention website: “Business Meeting Town Hall”.

  • Town Hall One: May 4 at noon Pacific Daylight Time (UTC-7).
  • Town Hall Two: May 25 at noon Pacific Daylight Time (UTC-7).

(2) SEATTLE WORLDCON WILL HOLD CONSULTATIVE VOTE. The Seattle 2025 Worldcon also announced they will hold a consultative vote of WSFS members on two of the proposed Constitutional amendments passed on from the Glasgow 2024 Business Meeting to the Seattle Worldcon: (1) the proposed revisions of the Hugo Award categories for best professional artist and best fan artist, and (2) the proposed amendment to abolish the Retro Hugo Awards.

As when Glasgow 2024 did this, there is no constitutional authorization for the poll, and it is not binding on the Business Meeting.

…The purpose of this exercise is simply to test whether a consultative vote of Worldcon members is feasible, and to learn lessons about how it might someday be formally adopted as a part of the WSFS decision-making process. We chose these two proposals in particular because they have clearly generated wide interest among the Worldcon community.

The consultative vote results will be used solely to inform the Seattle Business Meeting of the preferences of a larger sample of the membership than might otherwise be able to attend. Glasgow 2024’s consultative vote allowed over 1,200 WSFS members to share their opinion on a proposed amendment.

The consultative vote will run from May 1 to May 31 and may be accessed at the same site and in the same manner as the Hugo Award voting—so you can do both at the same time!

(3) A DATE THAT SHALL LIVE IN INFAMY. Convention History is shocked, shocked I tell you, by the party in Room 770.

(4) MARK EVANIER DID NOT OUTGROW COMICS. [Item by rcade.] The comic book writer Mark Evanier remembers the 1960s divide between fans of science fiction and comic books. “Fandom Freedom” at News From ME.

…One older female fan used to lecture me that Comic Book Fandom was an unfortunate outgrowth of Science-Fiction Fandom and oughta stay that way…or better still, disappear entirely. What they read was for sophisticated adults and what “we” read (drawing a firm, uncrossable line with that “we” there) was for the kiddos. Her suggestion was that there was something wrong with us for not outgrowing it.

The last such lecture I got — this would have been around ’73 — was from a guy wearing Spock ears and brandishing a plastic phaser that fired little multi-colored discs….

(5) THINKING INSIDE THE BOX. “A new chapter for publishing? Book subscription services launch their own titles” – the Guardian tells how it works.

Book subscription services are magic. A few clicks of a form and a bunch of new books , selected by talented curators, turn up at your door – often with collectible perks such as special cover designs and art. In a world saturated by choice and trends, not only is the choosing done for you, but you’ll often have a less conventional, better rounded and precious bookshelf collection to show for it.

This is presumably why there’s a strong appetite for such services: UK fantasy subscription box FairyLoot has 569,000 followers on Instagram alone, and many bookshops have started sending out their own boxes.

Now, some of these businesses have decided not just to sell books, but to publish their own: In January, FairyLoot announced a collaboration with Transworld, a division of Penguin Random House, while last week Canada-based subscription service OwlCrate launched OwlCrate Press….

(6) REASONS TO WATCH. Phil Nichols and Colin Kuskie discuss an award-winning film in SF 101’s “Go With The Flow” episode.

Flow (2024) is an extraordinary film – Latvia’s most successful of all time, and winner of the Oscar for Best Animated Film. Colin and Phil discuss whether it counts as science fiction (of course it does!), and what makes this delightful movie tick.

If you haven’t seen the film, we think we give you enough of flavour of it for the discussion to make sense, and hopefully to inspire you to watch it.

(7) FASCINATING MARQUEE. Tony Gleeson ran the photo below on Facebook with this introduction:

The venerable Vista Theatre in East Hollywood: it’s been everything from a porno palace to a repertory house. It’s been featured in scenes for numerous movies (the one that comes to mind is “Throw Mama From the Train”). It’s now owned by Quentin Tarantino and offers some pretty unusual fare.

When he gave permission for File 770 to reprint it, Gleeson added:

One thing I love is the coffee shop attached to the theatre (it used to be called the Onyx many years ago and had the best blackout chocolate cake) is now called Pam’s Coffy and features a portrait of Pam Grier. There is also a mini-Grauman’s Chinese footprint walk in front.

(8) THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK. “No Bids Filed for 2027 Westercon” reports Kevin Standlee at the Westercon website.

No bids filed to be on the ballot to select the site of Westercon 79, the 2027 West Coast Science Fantasy Conference. Although there will be no bids listed on the ballot, there will be space for write-in bids, and bids can still file the necessary papers (specified in Section 3.4 of the Westercon Bylaws) before the close of voting at 6 PM Pacific Daylight Time (UTC -7) on Saturday, July 5, 2025. The election will take place during Westercon 77 / BayCon 2025 at the Marriott Hotel in Santa Clara, California. Should no valid bids file by the close of voting, or should None of the Above win the election, the site of Westercon 79 will be determined by the Westercon Business Meeting on Sunday, July 6.

We will post the 2027 Westercon Site Selection ballot on the Westercon website by the end of April. All members of BayCon 2025 are members of Westercon 77 and all members are eligible to vote. Members can vote by postal mail (there will be no electronic voting) or in person at Westercon 77 / BayCon 2025.

To file a bid, or to ask any questions about the Westercon Site Selection process, contact Kayla Allen, the 2027 Westercon Site Selection Administrator, at siteselection2027@westercon.org.

(9) ART SPIEGELMAN AND JUDY-LYNN DEL REY PROFILED. Through May 14 PBS is making available online “Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse” part of the American Masters series. At the end of the program, they’re also running a short documentary about Judy-Lynn Del Rey. It starts about 1 hour 40 minutes into the 2-hour program.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

April 16, 1921 – Sir Peter Alexander Ustinov. (Died 2004.)

Peter Ustinov showed up in Logan’s Run as the Old Man; he had the lead role in Blackbeard’s Ghost as Captain Blackbeard based on the Robert Stevenson novel; he was Charlie Chan in Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen (it’s at least genre adjacent, isn’t it?). He’s The Caliph in stellar Thief of Baghdad; a truck driver in The Great Muppet Caper and finally he has the dual roles of Grandfather and Phoenix in The Phoenix and the Carpet.

He voiced myriad characters in animated films including that of Grendel in Grendel Grendel Grendel based off John Gardner’s novel Grendel, in Robin Hood, he voiced Prince John and King Richard; and in The Mouse and His Child, he was the voice of Manny the Rat. 

Now I’m going to admit that my favorite role by Peter Ustinov was playing Poirot which he did in half a dozen films, which he first in Death on the Nile and then in Evil Under the Sun, Thirteen at Dinner, Dead Man’s Folly, Murder in Three Acts and Appointment with Death. He wasn’t my favorite Poirot as that was David Suchet but it was obvious that he liked performing that role quite a bit. 

Peter Ustinov

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) IN A BRICKYARD FAR, FAR AWAY. Gizmodo says get ready – “Lego Is Celebrating Star Wars Day With a Ton of Sets”.

The start of May is always a good time for Star Wars fans, but for Lego Star Wars ones, it’s also a time to fear the brick-maker coming down on your wallet with all the fury of a fully armed and operational battle station. This year is no exception, with Lego announcing a ton of sets ready to drop next month–including its next crowning entry in the Ultimate Collector Series line.

Today Lego announced that its annual May the 4th releases will be spearheaded by a new 2,970-piece take on Slave I as it appeared in Attack of the Clones. Renamed here as simply ‘Jango Fett’s Starship’ (aligning with prior merchandise moves away from the “Slave” naming around the ship’s return in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett), the new set includes a detailed interior cockpit which can house two new minifigures of Jango and a young Boba, an openable landing ramp and bomb hatch to place one of the ship’s legendary-sounding seismic charges in, and a display stand to have the ship posed in either landing or flight mode.

Jango’s starship will cost $300, and will release on early access for Insiders on May 1, before releasing widely on May 4….

… If you don’t want to grab Jango’s ride but still want to try and nab that Kamino set, then good news: Lego is also releasing another eight brand new Star Wars sets on May 1. Covering the whole gamut of the franchise, the releases see the first set inspired by Andor season 2, a new U-Wing, two Brickheadz releases inspired by A New Hope and the 20th anniversary of Revenge of the Sith, Rebels icon Chopper entering the buildable droid series, two new entries in the collectible helmet line, and even a buildable version of the Star Wars logo…. 

From the Lego Shop itself, the “Best Star Wars™ Gift Ideas for Adults” has photos of all the character helmets and other items mentioned above.

Fans who admire the pilots of the Star Wars™ galaxy can now showcase their passion with the LEGO® Star Wars AT-AT Driver™ Helmet (75429), inspired by the helmets worn by the pilots of the formidable AT-AT Walkers in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back™….

…For even more ways to put the heroes and villains of your favorite galaxy on display, check out the complete selection offered by the LEGO Star Wars helmet collection. From helmets inspired by Mandalorians and Clone Troopers to bounty hunters and Dark Lords of the Sith, there is something for every Star Wars fan to add to their collection.

(13) BUT ARE THOSE BRICKS PLASTIC OR GOLD? Just make sure you lock up your house after you buy those collectible Legos. The New York Times warns, “Worth Thousands on the Black Market, Lego Kits Are Now a Target of Thieves”.

It’s one Lego kit, a collection of small plastic bricks and related accessories. What could it cost? The answer, it turns out, could be thousands of dollars.

Lego kits and minifigures, figurines that are a little over 1.5 inches tall, are commanding high prices on the secondary market, with some, like the LEGO San Diego Comic-Con 2013 Spider-Man, valued as high as $16,846.

The children’s toys have even become something of an investing opportunity for those savvy enough to know what to look for.

But with the eye-popping price tags comes a dark side: Lego kits have become a hot commodity on the black market and the target of brazen thieves.

Last year, burglars hit Bricks & Minifigs outlets in California. Thieves made off with at least $100,000 worth of Lego kits and accessories.

Last month, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office in California recovered nearly 200 Lego sets after arresting a person in connection with a burglary at Crush Comics, a comic book store in Castro Valley, Calif.

Joshua Hunter, the owner of Crush Comics, said that members of his staff found the store’s stolen comic books for sale on eBay within hours of the theft.

The store worked with law enforcement and alerted other small business owners, including Five Little Monkeys, a toy store that recently had $7,000 worth of Lego stolen, to solve what turned out to be a spree of burglaries in the area.

Five Little Monkeys was able to recover a lot of its stolen Lego, said Meghan DeGoey, the company’s marketing director, but the theft was only the latest in what has been a growing problem.

“It’s been a problem for probably, I mean, forever, but it’s really ramped up in the last five, six years,” she said.

Five Little Monkeys has eight stores around the Bay Area, said Ms. DeGoey, and Lego stands out among its top-stolen items.

“People are really brazen when they’re going to steal,” she said, describing the way thieves will sometimes come into a store and walk right out or “do some like crazy misdirect and have a second person that tries to distract us.”…

(14) BUSINESS SHOULD NOT BE BOOMING. “Bahamas suspends SpaceX rocket landings pending post-launch probe” reports Reuters.

The Bahamas’ government said on Tuesday it is suspending all SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket landings in the country, pending a full post-launch investigation.

“No further clearances will be granted until a full environmental assessment is reviewed,” Bahamian Director of Communications Latrae Rahming said in a post on X.

The Bahamian government said in February after SpaceX’s first landing in the country that it had approved 19 more throughout 2025, subject to regulatory approval.

The Bahamas’ post-launch investigation comes after a SpaceX Starship spacecraft exploded in space last month, minutes after lifting off from Texas.

Social media videos showed fiery debris streaking through the skies near South Florida and the Bahamas after the spacecraft broke up in space shortly after it began to spin uncontrollably with its engines cut off.

Following the incident, the Bahamas said debris from the spacecraft fell into its airspace. The country said the debris contained no toxic materials and added it was not expected to have a significant impact on marine life or water quality.

The Starship explosion was not connected to the Bahamas’ Falcon 9 landing program with SpaceX.

(15) IS THAT SPACE ROT? “Webb telescope detects a possible signature of life on a distant world”  in the Washington Post.

A distant planet’s atmosphere shows signs of molecules that on Earth are associated only with biological activity, a possible signal of life on what is suspected to be a watery world,according to a report published Wednesday that analyzed observations by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

The peer-reviewed report in the Astrophysical Journal Letters presents more questions than answers, acknowledges numerous uncertainties and does not declare the discovery of life beyond Earth, something never conclusively detected. But the authors do claim to have found the best evidence to date of a possible “biosignature” on a planet far from our solar system.

The planet,known asK2-18b, is 124 light-years away, orbiting a red dwarf star. Earlier observations suggested that its atmosphere is consistent with the presence of a global ocean. The molecule purportedly detected is dimethyl sulfide (DMS). On Earth it is produced by the decay of marine phytoplankton and other microbes, and it has no other known source. The astronomers want to observe the planet further to strengthen the evidence that the molecule is present….

… “This is the first time humanity has ever seen biosignature molecules — potential biosignature molecules, which are biosignatures on Earth — in the atmosphere of a habitable-zone planet,” he added.The habitable, or “Goldilocks,” zone is the distance from a star that could allow water to remain liquid at the planet’s surface.

K2-18b, which is within ourgalaxy, the Milky Way,cannot be seen by any telescope as a discrete object. But it has a fortuitous orbit that crosses its parent star as seen from Earth. Such transits dim the starlight ever so slightly, which is how many exoplanets have been discovered. The transits also change the starlight’s spectrum in a pattern that — if observed with instruments on a telescope as advanced as the Webb — can reveal the composition of the planet’s atmosphere.

In 2023, Madhusudhan and colleagues reported that two instruments on the Webb had detected carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere of K2-18b, as well ashints of DMS. …

(16) SF² CONCATENATION  SUMMER 2025 EDITION. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] SF² Concatenation has just posted its seasonal edition of SF and science news and reviews. Also in the mix are some articles, convention reports as well as some archive items from its well over 30 years history and a load of standalone book reviews. Something for everyone.

v35(3) 2025.4.15 — New Columns & Articles for the Summer 2025

v35(3) 2025.4.15 — Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Reviews

v35(3) 2025.4.15 — Non-Fiction SF & Science Fact Book Reviews

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

Pixel Scroll 2/12/25 When The Scroll Rolls Over, We Will All Be Pixeled

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(1) KRESS Q&A. Asimov’s “From Earth to the Stars” department brings us a  “Q&A With Nancy Kress”

AE: What is your process?
NK: For any story with real science (or rather, real-to-a-point science; if it were all real it wouldn’t be science fiction), I research first.  The characters, like Kenda and Dayson, might already be in my mind, but characters have to actually do things, and the majority of those things should be connected in some way to the science.  So I begin with reading, note-taking, and playing with the concepts and details of the science, be it genetic engineering, stellar physics, or—in this case—the Earth’s geomagnetic sphere (which is not a sphere but an elongated shape that extends from the center of the Earth to several hundred miles into space.)  Because I knew next-to-nothing about geomagnetism, this involved a lot of study, a lot of going “Huh?” and then “Huh!”  Also a lot of cursing; I am not trained as a scientist.  Research not only grounds a story in actual science, it can also suggest plot ideas, and I ended up with as many pages of story ideas as research facts.
Next all this gets reviewed and a loose outline emerges.  Actually, to call it an “outline” is to vastly overstate.  It’s one or two pages labeled MASTER SHEET which pretty much ends up mastering nothing, but at least it’s something to point out which direction I am hypothetically going and a few possible pathways to get there.  Not so much GPS as a faded, dog-eared, slightly outdated Atlas roadmap that lacks all the new roads, collapsed bridges, and accidents on Interstate 90.

(2) GREENE’S REPLY. YouTuber Daniel Greene has responded in a 1-minute video to the sexual assault allegations reported in yesterday’s Scroll: “In Response To Naomi King’s Allegations”. Here is the transcript:

Hello, my name is Daniel Greene. This is an important message in response to various false allegations made against me by Naomi King of alleged sexual assault in a campaign launched on YouTube and more.

Let me be clear: I had consensual sex with Naomi King. Yes it was an affair that my then girlfriend and now fiance took several years to move on from. I also have clear and convincing evidence to prove everything was consensual.

Myself and my team are now planning to sue Naomi King in a court of law. The communication Naomi King has inaccurately used against me online has greatly damaged me and others to date. I also have many other pieces of evidence which prove my innocence.

Look for more communication from me based on truth and fact in the near future. Naomi King took time to launch a campaign against me and I will need time to communicate my truth as well more soon.

A commenter with the handle @ndrew7707 left these exceptionally worthwhile remarks after Greene’s video:

I doubt you’ll read through these comments, but just in case: I’ve never SA’d anyone, but I have cheated and sexually harassed people. I am a survivor of SA, though, and one that looked a lot like the situation described. Between this Naomi’s video about the cease and desist letter, it’s pretty clear to me that this is, in fact, a pattern of behavior that you’ve been denying for a long time. And I get it. Painful is an understatement for how it feels to fully admit to yourself the kind of person you’ve turned yourself into by following that impulse time and time again and learning new ways to hide it and justify it to yourself. So, please, take this from someone who does want you to get better: DO NOT sue them. Not just for their sake, but yours, and all the people you’ve hurt before this and the people you will hurt in the future if you don’t make real changes. Get out of the public eye, get into a treatment program, find a therapist that’s a social worker so that they can walk you through the change process and help you construct barriers to these thoughts and actions, including people who fully know the extent of what you’ve done and are willing to work with you to keep them in check. You cannot do this on your own. I know this comment section is full of people calling you a terrible person, and I don’t blame them. What you did is terrible, disgusting, all those things. But the most terrifying part of this is that you are not fundamentally, irredeemably bad. Very few people, if any, are. You are just a person who’s made a lot of bad decisions, and you are fully capable of making better ones. So, please, from one person who has unlearned abusive behavior: do not try to save your channel, your reputation, your career. Take the stability you’ve been able to build for yourself and actually get help. That is a privilege that should not be taken lightly. You might feel like you’re dying, but that’s normal. Feel that shit fully. Ask yourself for the rest of your life how you make certain you never treat someone else like that again. There is life to be lived on the other side of this, but you gotta figure out what that looks like without this attention, manipulation, and ill-gotten satisfaction you are clearly addicted to. And it is an addiction. Codependents Anonymous helped me tremendously for this reason, but I’d suggest some one-on-one treatment first before putting yourself in any group situation which will undoubtedly have survivors in it. I unsubscribed, but I’ll be back to remind you if you keep trying to do this. It’s bullshit, we all know it. It’s ok if the channel falls apart, it really is. There are a million other things one can do with the gift that is our one, finite, human life. Don’t waste yours on excuses.

(3) PEAK DOCTOR. Den of Geek says these are “The Doctor Who Episodes that Define Each Doctor”. The Fifth Doctor is the one I’m least familiar with, so let’s pick his segment to excerpt here.

The Fifth Doctor – Earthshock (1982)

…To younger fans (and by “younger” here I mean, “People in their 30s and 40s”) the Fifth Doctor has undergone a bit of a memetic evolution. Among the Doctors of the classic series, he was the Young One. We see him being chummy with David Tennant in the Children in Need “Time Crash” short, and hanging out with Tegan in “The Power of the Doctor”, and we watch Peter Davison in “The Five-ish Doctors” and he seems… nice. A bit grumpy. Definitely not on a par with the likes of McCoy, Ecclestone and Capaldi when you need a Doctor to go dark.

Yet what you forget about Tegan is that she’s the companion who left the TARDIS in “Resurrection of the Daleks” because it was too fricking violent. If you watch this charming collection of times the Doctor has shot someone to death with a gun, the Fifth Doctor is better represented than most – especially when you consider that in context, the Fourth Doctor is being framed in most of his scenes, and the Second Doctor is carrying a couple of big torches.

The show had been on the air for 20 years, and a battle was raging over whether it was going to be dark and grown-up and edgy now its audience was growing up, or be a kids’ show forever. And one of the definitive strikes in that battle was “Earthshock”, where the show killed off Adric. Sure, Adric will never rank well in our “Top 10 Least Annoying Doctor Who Companions” listicle, but if Star Trek: The Next Generation murdered Wesley Crusher, it’d still be considered a dark move.

It set the tone that would eventually lead to the All-Time-Favourites-List regular, “Caves of Androzani”….

(4) L.A. SWATTER SENTENCED. “L.A. teen ‘serial swatter’ sentenced to 4 years in prison” in the LA Times (behind a paywall).

A Lancaster teen was sentenced to four years in prison after making more than 375 hoax calls that included threats to detonate bombs, conduct mass shootings and “kill everyone he saw,” authorities said.

The calls targeted high schools, colleges and universities, places of worship, government officials and individuals across the United States, according to prosecutors.

The serial swatter, 18-year-old Alan W. Filion, pleaded guilty to making interstate threats to injure others, which frequently led to massive law enforcement responses and rendered officers unavailable to assist with other emergencies, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. He made hundreds of calls from August 2022 to January 2024, according to his plea agreement.

Filion was both a recreational swatter and a swatter-for-hire who advertised his services of mass disruption on social media platforms, prosecutors said.

In a January 2023 social media post, he claimed that when he swatted someone, he usually got police “to drag the victim and their families out of the house cuff them and search the house for dead bodies.” In some instances, officers entered the targeted buildings with their weapons drawn and detained individuals who were inside, prosecutors said.

He was arrested in January on Florida charges connected to a threat he made to a religious organization in Sanford, Fla., prosecutors said. Filion threatened to commit a mass shooting at the site and claimed to have an illegally modified AR-15, a Glock 17 pistol, pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails….

(5) STOP SWIPING SAYS FEDERAL JUDGE. “Thomson Reuters Wins First Major AI Copyright Case in the US” reports WIRED.

Thomson Reuters has won the first major AI copyright case in the United States.

In 2020, the media and technology conglomerate filed an unprecedented AI copyright lawsuit against the legal AI startup Ross Intelligence. In the complaint, Thomson Reuters claimed the AI firm reproduced materials from its legal research firm Westlaw. Today, a judge ruled in Thomson Reuters’ favor, finding that the company’s copyright was indeed infringed by Ross Intelligence’s actions.

“None of Ross’s possible defenses holds water. I reject them all,” wrote US District Court of Delaware judge Stephanos Bibas, in a summary judgment….

…Notably, Judge Bibas ruled in Thomson Reuters’ favor on the question of fair use. The fair use doctrine is a key component of how AI companies are seeking to defend themselves against claims that they used copyrighted materials illegally. The idea underpinning fair use is that sometimes it’s legally permissible to use copyrighted works without permission—for example, to create parody works, or in noncommercial research or news production. When determining whether fair use applies, courts use a four-factor test, looking at the reason behind the work, the nature of the work (whether it’s poetry, nonfiction, private letters, et cetera), the amount of copyrighted work used, and how the use impacts the market value of the original. Thomson Reuters prevailed on two of the four factors, but Bibas described the fourth as the most important, and ruled that Ross “meant to compete with Westlaw by developing a market substitute.”…

(6) TONY LEWIS (1941-2025). “Dr. Tony Lewis, one of the last surviving founders of NESFA, Chairman of Noreascon, and longtime Press Czar of NESFA Press passed away yesterday at home,” announced Gay Ellen Dennett on Facebook today. “Both Suford and Alice [his wife and daughter] were by his side. Further information will be posted when known.”

Tony Lewis

Fancylopedia notes Anthony R. Lewis co-founded the New England Science Fiction Association in 1967. He chaired the Boston Worldcon of 1971, Noreascon.

He was active for many years in compiling the NESFA Index to Science Fiction Magazines. He invented the term “recursive SF” (any sf story that refers to sf) and wrote An Annotated Bibliography of Recursive Science Fiction (NESFA Press).

Space Travel by Ben Bova and Anthony R. Lewis from Writer’s Digest Books was nominated for the 1998 Best Non-Fiction Book Hugo and Concordance to Cordwainer Smith, Third Edition by Anthony R. Lewis from NESFA Press was nominated for the 2001 Best Related Book Hugo.

Among his many talents he was a well-known (and skilled) auctioneer. 

He was an active member of SFWA.

Tony is survived by his wife, Suford (they married in 1968) and daughter Alice.

File 770 will post a fuller tribute later this evening.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

“Ill Met in Lankhmar” (1970)

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser faced each other across the two thieves sprawled senseless. They were poised for attack, yet for the moment neither moved.

Each discerned something inexplicably familiar in the other.

Fafhrd said, “Our motives for being here seem identical.”

“Seem? Surely must be!” the Mouser answered curtly, fiercely eyeing this potential new foe, who was taller by a head than the tall thief.

“You said?”

“I said, ‘Seem? Surely must be!'”

“How civilized of you!” Fafhrd commented in pleased tones.

“Civilized?” the Mouser demanded suspiciously, gripping his dirk tighter.

— “Ill Met in Lankhmar” 

Fifty-four years ago at the first Noreascon, Fritz Leiber would win the Hugo for Best Novella with “Ill Met in Lankhmar”, a Fafhrd and The Grey Mouser tale. It was also be awarded a Nebula Award for Best Novella. 

The other Hugo nominees that year were “The Thing in the Stone” by Clifford D. Simak, “The Region Between” by Harlan Ellison, “The World Outside” by Robert Silverberg and “Beastchild” by Dean R. Koontz.

It was first published in the April 1970 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. A prequel to the series, Leiber had by that time been chronicling the pair’s adventures for some thirty years. 

The story is the third one in Ace’s 1970 Swords and Deviltry paperback collection. It is available from the usual sources as are the later volumes. Audible has them as well. 

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

February 12, 1950 — Michael Ironside, 75 .

I most remember Michael Ironside for his role as Lieutenant Jean Rasczak in Starship Troopers. There wasn’t much great about that film but I thought that he made much of that character. 

Do I need to say that I’m not covering everything he’s done of a genre nature? Well most of you get that. Really you do. So let’s see what I find interesting.

Scanners is one weird film. It really is. And he was in it as Darryl Revok, the Big Baddie, a role he perfectly played. 

Next he got cast as the main antagonist in another of my favorite SF films, this time as Overdog McNab in Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. Who comes with these names?

Then there was Total Recall where he was Agent Richter, the ruthless enforcer of Cohaagen, the source of everything corrupt on Mars. Great role that fit his gruff voice and frankly even gruffer looks absolutely perfectly.

One of his major ongoing roles was in the V franchise, first as Ham Tyle, a recurring role in V: The Final Battle, and then playing the same character in all episodes of V: The Series.

Now we come to my favorite of his roles, in one of my favorite series, seaQuest 2032, where he was Captain Oliver Hudson. Great series and an absolute fantastic performance by him! Pity it got cancelled after thirteen episodes. 

Finally, he has one voice acting role I loved. In the DC universe, he was Darkseid, the absolute rule of Apokolis. He voiced him primarily on Superman: The Animated Series, but also on the Justice League series as well, and to my surprise on the HBO Harley Quinn series as well.

Michael Ironside

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) TRUE GRIT. Warner Bros. has an awards eligibility website – “WB Awards 2024”. One section is devoted to Dune: Part II, and includes items like “The sounds of Arrakis come to life” – about riding a sandworm.

(11) LATEST ITERATION OF CIVILIZATION. The New York Times reviews Civilization VII: “The Crises Are Simulations, but the Lessons Are Real” (behind a paywall).

Unhappiness is a dreaded condition in the Civilization game series. Unhappy citizens stop working, stop researching scientific pursuits and, worst of all, start rioting.

In the new Sid Meier’s Civilization VII, which introduces three historical ages and a mounting series of crises during the transitions between them, my ancient Persian empire was running smoothly and expanding with ease. Then, suddenly, things struggled to feel cohesive. The game declared that my empire had fractured “as once-loyal settlements seek their own path forward.”

The unhappiness in my cities and towns grew so severe that several outlying settlements began trashing their districts and looking to outside civilizations for support. While I worked at putting out fires started by rioters, my neighbor Napoleon swooped in and quickly conquered one of my towns. This started a territorial war that only deepened the unhappiness of my population. Soon, half my towns were in revolt.

While following your chosen civilization’s path in Civilization VII, from the rough-hewed settlements of the past to the glistening megalopolises of the future, you move through ages that transform not just your technologies, government and civic policies, but also the broader identity of your civilization itself.

With its precipitous rises and falls, Civilization VII, which will be released on Tuesday for PCs, Macs and consoles, is a departure for the series. Although past iterations have had revolts, diplomatic incidents and civic upset, they tend to feel less closely connected to the ways that historical forces can boil over into crisis and conflict.

The violent and chaotic cuts here accurately reflect a world history where many things can happen all at once and often with surprising swiftness. History doesn’t always move forward in the routine, turn-based lock step of the 4X genre (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) that Civilization popularized. More often, root causes like financial instability, cultural changes and oppressive hierarchies stay below the surface until emerging in a cacophony of war, revolution and natural-disaster-fueled chaos….

(12) HOT GAS STATION. “Nuclear Rocket Fuel Test Success Paves the Way for Faster Space Travel” – Extremetech has the story.

A new test of nuclear propellant fuel under space-like conditions has been hailed as a success by NASA and General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS), in what is considered one more step on the road to nuclear-powered rocket engines. Such designs have long been suggested as a more efficient method of space travel and could cut interplanetary voyages down to just a few weeks.

While this latest test doesn’t make nuclear-powered rocket engines viable just yet, it’s an important step on the journey. This latest batch of tests was conducted at the compact fuel element environmental test (CFEET) facility at NASA MSFC, as per Space.com. It cycled the nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) fuel up to 2600 Kelvin (4,220 Fahrenheit) and back down again several times, using superheated hydrogen… 

(13) SAVE MY ASS. “NASA Calls in Webb Telescope to Track Recently Identified Hazardous Asteroid” reports Gizmodo.

Faced with the (very low probability) threat of an incoming asteroid impact, NASA is bringing out the big guns. The agency will employ its powerful Webb space telescope to monitor newly discovered asteroid 2024 YR4, which has a small chance of hitting Earth in 2032.

Based on current estimates, asteroid 2024 YR4 has a 2.1% chance of impact on December 22, 2032. Although the odds are still in our favor, there are currently no other known large asteroids with an impact probability above 1%, according to NASA. The space agency tends to take these matters quite seriously, which is why it plans to collect additional observations of the space rock using the Webb telescope in March to refine the current estimates, NASA revealed in a recent update.

The Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in Chile discovered the asteroid on December 27, 2024. Shortly after its discovery, the impact probability of the asteroid was set to 1.3%. However, additional observations increased the asteroid’s chances of crashing into Earth to 2.3% as of yesterday, before dropping slightly to 2.1% this morning. These odds are preliminary, and more observations of the asteroid are desperately needed….

(14) ASK ANY VEGETABLE. Boing Boing isn’t convinced. “Fancy science journal caught publishing nonsense term ‘vegetative electron microscopy,’ doubles down”.

A completely made-up scientific term is making the rounds in academic journals, and instead of being “oops!” one major publisher is basically saying “this is fine!”

As reported in Retraction Watch, A sharp-eyed Russian chemist (going by the extremely cool pseudonym “Paralabrax clathratus”) spotted the weird phrase “vegetative electron microscopy,” which makes about as much sense as “photosynthetic hammer” or “reproductive calculator.” The term has somehow snuck into nearly two dozen published papers, including one whose senior author is an editor at prestigious publisher Elsevier.

When called out on this obvious nonsense, Elsevier basically said “No no, it’s fine! It’s just a shorter way of saying ‘electron microscopy of vegetative structures'” which is like saying “vegetative car” is a dandy way to describe “a car that drives past vegetables.”…

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

Pixel Scroll 1/7/25 The Fortress Of Scrollitude

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(1) CHANGE MY WORDS? Ira Nayman discusses the elements of “The Professional Editor/Writer Relationship” at the SFWA Blog.

…Many writers resist the editorial process for a variety of reasons. It takes a lot of time, thought and, ultimately, work to craft effective prose fiction; it can be galling to allow a stranger to come along and tell you that it has to be changed. In addition, it can be hard to accept that what you have put so much of yourself into is not perfect exactly as you wrote it. These issues can be overcome with experience. All you need is one great editor to help you see the flaws in a story and guide you through the process of correcting them to see the value in the process….

… My practice as an editor is to couch interpretive input as either a suggestion (“You might want to try…”) or a question (“This is unclear. Might it be better as…?”). If the writer makes a reasonable argument for why the change isn’t necessary, I’m usually willing to accept it (although it is also true that 90% or more of the changes I ask for are accepted by authors). I try to keep in mind that, in matters of artistic interpretation, there aren’t always clear-cut right or wrong answers. While my input makes sense to me given my understanding of how stories work, it is always possible that the writer is in a better position to judge what works for their specific story….

(2) DEPARTMENT OF REDUNDANCY DEPARTMENT. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] BBC Radio 4 is ready to mourn “The Strange Death of Cultural Originality”. The above was quite interesting. Basic thesis is that before 2000 only 25% of top box office films were sequels or franchise related but after 2000 it is 50%.  Worryingly, it also applies to TV and films. There is an explanation. Competition due to the growth in content delivery formats means that platform deliveries cannot afford to take chances. Conversely, it is possible to argue philosophically, that little is new and that most is a variation, re-hash, mix-n-match of old material….

These days, when you turn on the TV or visit the cinema do you ever think, hang on, I’m sure I’ve seen this before? Maybe you’ve bought the latest crime thriller after seeing it in the bestseller lists and, 50 pages in, you’re overcome with a weird feeling of deja vu? And when you put the radio on in the car, does all the music sound, well, the same? 

If so, don’t worry. It’s not just you. Something strange seems to be happening.

Statistics show that the number of top 20 highest grossing Hollywood films each year which are either sequels or spin-offs has risen from 25% to 50% in the past two decades.

In the 1960s, most TV shows were original formats. Today, a third are spinoffs or multiple broadcasts.

In music, the number of artists on the Billboard Hot 100 has been falling for some time, meaning the big established acts are getting more and more exposure while new acts struggle to break through.

Existing best-selling authors are becoming increasingly dominant in publishing sales.

So is it fair to say that cultural originality is in rather poor health?

Might it even be dead?

Ben Chu spends spends a lot of time thinking about economics, numbers and why the world works in the way it does. In this programme he’s going to ask – if cultural originality is dead, who or what killed it?

(3) SOME STATES RESIST CENSORSHIP OF LIBRARIES. “Librarians gain protections in some states as book bans soar” reports the South Dakota Searchlight.

… Amid a national rise in book bans in school libraries and new laws in some red states that threaten criminal penalties against librarians, a growing number of blue states are taking the opposite approach.

New Jersey joined at least five other states — California, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington — that have passed legislation within the past two years that aims to preserve access to reading materials that deal with racial and sexual themes, including those about the LGBTQ+ community.

Conservative groups have led the effort to ban materials to shield children from what they deem as harmful content. In the 2023-24 school year, there were 10,000 instances of book bans across the U.S. — nearly three times as many as the year before, according to a recent report by PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for literary freedom.

The New Jersey measure not only sets minimum standards for localities when they adopt a policy on how books are curated or can be challenged but also prevents school districts from removing material based on “the origin, background, or views of the library material or those contributing to its creation.”

The law also gives librarians immunity from civil and criminal liability for “good faith actions.”

New Jersey state Sen. Andrew Zwicker, a Democrat who introduced the legislation, said until recently he thought that book bans were a disturbing trend, but one limited to other states. But early last year, he went to a brunch event and met a school librarian who told him she faced a torrent of verbal and online abuse for refusing to remove a handful of books with LGBTQ+ themes from her library’s shelves.

https://southdakotasearchlight.com/2024/12/15/state-library-budget-cut-would-hamstring-local-libraries-opponents-say/embed/#?secret=AmvBI5LLAe#?secret=3GwRz4n2Kt “That’s when I realized that I was so horribly mistaken, that these attacks on librarians and on the freedom to read were happening everywhere,” Zwicker told Stateline. “I went up to her and asked, ‘What can I do?’”…

… Legislation differs by state, including in enforcement and how to penalize noncompliant localities.

In Illinois, for example, school districts risk losing thousands of dollars in state grant funding if they violate the state’s new law discouraging book bans. But as the Chicago Tribune reported last month, that financial penalty was not enough to persuade many school districts throughout the state to comply, with administrators saying they are concerned about giving up local control on school decisions.

Several school districts in other states have similarly rebelled.

North of Minneapolis, St. Francis Area Schools’ board last month decided it would consult with conservative group BookLooks to determine which books it will buy for its school libraries. BookLooks uses a 0-through-5 rating system that flags books for violent and sexual content.

Under its rating system, books that have long had a place in school libraries — such as the Holocaust memoir “Night” by Elie Wiesel or “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou — would require parental consent to read….

(4) CALLING LA COUNTY HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS. The Light Bringer Project is putting together the first-ever student edition of their literary journal, Locavore Lit. Los Angeles County high school students looking to publish their original fiction are invited to submit original fiction in any genre, between 500 and 5,000 words, through February 21.

Show us your fantastical worlds, your daring adventures, your tragic endings, and your strangely compelling characters.

We will be publishing between five and seven stories, and each chosen author will be paired with a professional illustrator who will work to highlight the story’s themes and imagery.

(5) DRONES FOR THE PROFESSIONAL ARMY. [Item by Francis Hamit.] A glimpse of the future courtesy of the US Army.  I follow this stuff the way other people follow sports. “Imagining a US Army Drone Corps” at the Modern War Institute.

In February 2024, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced the creation of the Unmanned Systems Forces. It is no secret that the Ukrainian military has used drones to great effect. Its units continue to innovate with drone tactics, techniques, and procedures and effects in the air, land, and maritime domains. Both belligerents in the Russia-Ukraine War have pledged to build over a million aerial drones each year to fill the skies. Even with the extremely innovative use of the drones (mine laying, incendiary delivery) already observed in Ukraine, history will show that the most important attribute of drones has been their ability to serve as economy-of-force systems. In a grinding war of attrition, drones have allowed the Ukrainian military to protect its limited combat power and threaten a much larger combat force across multiple domains.

The Unmanned Systems Forces that Zelenskyy announced amount, effectively, to a drone corps. US policymakers have taken note of the effectiveness of drones in the conflict and a drone corps may also be coming to the US Army….

… As an Army we are at a critical inflection point and have an opportunity to build a lethal enabling force. A more expansive course of action would involve creating drone units that can operate independently or augment brigade formations to fully leverage the situational awareness and strike capability of the systems. In a zero-growth environment with no major budgetary reallocations, the ready solution is the consolidation of the human-machine integration platoons across a division to build a robotics recon strike squadron (R2S2).,,, 

(6) PETER YARROW (1938-2024). “Puff the Magic Dragon” composer Peter Yarrow, part of the group Peter, Paul and Mary, died January 7. The New York Times tribute says in part:

Peter Yarrow, whose caring and righteous vocals for the trio Peter, Paul and Mary helped establish them as one of the most popular folk acts of the 1960s, died on Tuesday at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 86.

His death was confirmed by Ken Sunshine, his publicist. Mr. Sunshine said the cause was bladder cancer, which Mr. Yarrow had been battling for the past four years.

On many of the trio’s recordings they split the vocal parts equally, braiding Mr. Yarrow’s precise tenor around Noel Paul Stookey’s gentle baritone and Mary Travers’s warm contralto. But Mr. Yarrow also had some prominent lead vocals as well, fronting such well-known group recordings as “Puff the Magic Dragon,” “Day Is Done” and “The Great Mandala,” all of which he either wrote or co-wrote. “Puff” became a No. 2 Billboard hit, while “Day Is Done” grazed the Top 20….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

January 7, 1912 — Charles Addams. (Died 1988.)

Charles Addams

Ahhh, Charles Addams. No doubt you’re now thinking of the Addams Family and you’ve certainly reason to do so, but let’s first note some other artistic endeavors of his. 

His first published book work in the early Forties was the cover for But Who Wakes The Bugler by Peter DeVries, a silly slice of life novel.  He previously sold some sketches to the New Yorker. 

Random House soon thereafter contracted him for anthologies of drawings, Drawn and Quartered and Addams and Evil. (Lest you ask, the term “anthology” is from his website.)  Four more anthologies, now on Simon & Schuster will follow. 

And there was The Chas Addams Mother Goose, really there was. Here’s his cover for it.

Based on his characters that had appeared in his New Yorker cartoons, 1964 saw The Addams Family television series premiere on ABC. It would star, and I’m just singling them out, John Astin as Gomez and Carolyn Jones as Morticia. 

It lasted just two seasons of thirty-minute episodes. Mind you there were sixty-four episodes. Yes, I loved every minute of it. I have watched it at least three times, as recently as several years ago and it as great now as was when I first watched it decades ago.

Halloween with the New Addams Family is a follow-up film with the primary cast back. No idea why the New is in there.  We also had The Addams Family, an animated with a voice cast with some of the original performers, yet another Addams Family series (each of these largely had just John Astin from the original series).

Think we’re done? Of course, there is The Addams Family with Raúl Julia as a most macabre Gomez and Anjelica Huston as Morticia Addams with Carol Struycken playing Lurch for the first of several times.  I really, really adore this film. 

It was followed by the Addams Family Values which for some reason that I can’t quite figure out I just don’t adore.

Are we finished? No. The New Addams Family which aired for one nearly a quarter of a century after the original series went off the air after but a single season but lasted an extraordinary sixty-five episodes. I need to see at least the pilot for this. 

And then there’s the Addams Family Reunion which had the distinction of Tim Curry as Gomez. I’ve not seen it, so who has? It sounds like an intriguing role for him…

There will be two animated films as well, The Addams Family and The Addams Family 2, neither of which I’ve seen.

Finally let’s talk about licensing. After his death, his wife, Tee Addams, was responsible for getting his works licensed. To quote the website, “The Addams Family, both its individual characters and the Family in its entirety, have a long history of selling products, in print ad campaigns and television commercials alike – from typewriters to Japanese scotch, from designer showcases to perfume, from paper towels to chocolate candies, and all that lies in between.” 

So I went looking for use of the characters. I think the best one I found is the claymation one for M&Ms Dark Chocolate. (And please don’t ask me about the Wizard of Oz M&Ms commercial. That one is still giving me nightmares. Though the FedEx Wizard of Oz commercial is just silly. I mean dropping a FedEx truck on that witch…)

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

January 7, 1929: Three comic strips debuted

I’ve no idea why three newspaper comic strips were first published on this date. Before you think that can’t be possible, I’ve double-checked and yes, they were. I think it has to do with traditional Christmas holidays at that time in American history, so they’d be launched after those holidays. 

January 7, 1929 — The Buck Rogers in the 25th Century A.D. comic strip premiered. Philip Francis Nowlan Was the writer for the first decade with Dick Calkins and Russell Keaton being the artists for the first three years. At its peak in 1934, Buck Rogers appeared in 287 U.S. newspapers. Like many other popular comic strips of that day, Buck Rogers was reprinted in Big Little Books in a reformatted form. 

January 7, 1929  — The Tarzan of the Apes strip was first published.  It was drawn by Hal Foster (the first decade of strips) and Rex Mason (nearly twenty years’ worth) with Don Kraar adapting Edgar Rice Burroughs story.  A full-page Sunday strip began on March 15, 1931, with artwork by Rex Maxon. A dozen artists would draw the strip including Gil Kane and Mike Grell in its waning years. Russ Manning’s portrayal of Tarzan Is considered by many to be the definitive one. We’ve included two strips here, one with him as artist, the first with Hal Foster. 

January 7, 1934 — First published on this date, the Flash Gordon comic strip was inspired by the success of, and created rather obviously to compete with, the already established Buck Rogers strip. The story goes that King Features tried to purchase the rights to John Carter of Mars from Burroughs who refused, so King Features then turned to Alex Raymond, one of their staff artists, to create a similar story. The rest is history. Raymond’s strip would run until 1943 with the various artists and strips continuing for decades.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Carpe Diem has a mirror with a gripe.
  • Loose Parts applies cartoon logic to civil engineering.
  • Rhymes with Orange shows a famous inventor was more ambitious than we knew.
  • xkcd charts the “features of adulthood”.

(10) JESSE HOLLAND Q&A. At WBUR, “Here and Now” host Celeste Headlee speaks with journalist Jesse Holland, author of the forthcoming Marvel/Titan Books anthology Captain America: The Shield of Sam Wilson, about the state of the Black superhero universe: “Taking stock of the Black superhero universe”. There’s also an excerpt from the book at the link.

(11) WEREWOLF? THERE PUB. [Item by Steven French.] Of marginal genre interest perhaps, but the Tan Hill Inn in North Yorkshire, where that famous pub scene in An American Werewolf in London was filmed, regularly gets snowed in during the winter. Here’s the Guardian’s amusing account of the latest ‘lock in’, including this reference to the classic movie: “Popcorn, pints and a pooch’s birthday: life snowed in at the Tan Hill Inn” from the Guardian.

7pm

Headlights are approaching! There’s a knock on the door. In step Chelsey Frankland and Luke Batty, who have somehow managed to get here in a 4×4 from Doncaster. Silence falls as we stare at them, gobsmacked, reminiscent of that scene in the 1981 film An American Werewolf in London. In fact, it’s identical to that scene because we are in the exact room where it was filmed.

(12) SET IN THE PRESENT? Slashfilm invites you to discover “Eight Classic (And Not-So-Classic) Sci-Fi Movies Set In 2025”.

We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Welcome to 2025. It’s the future….

…Now we’re actually here in 2025, though, and we can see that few of those old writings came to pass. Indeed, from our standpoint, the future is looking positively bleak. There is a lot of authoritarianism to look forward to, and the curtailing of human rights seems to be on the docket worldwide. As such, we would do well to look back at the sci-fi of the past, perhaps merely as a sociological exercise. What did the writers of previous decades think 2025 would look like? Would we be fighting future Nazis, falling in love with computers, or piloting 100-foot Rock-Em-Sock-Em Robots?

One of the films they picked only looked three years into the future – and it’s a future peculiar to The Asylum.

2025 Armageddon (2022)

Schlock-lovers everywhere are likely intimately familiar with The Asylum, a low-budget film studio best known for their mockbusters (that is; clear and open imitations of contemporary blockbuster movies). Just as there was a “Pacific Rim,” The Asylum churned out the zero-budget knockoff “Atlantic Rim.” They did their own “Aladdin.” Their sales model seems to be based on tricking consumers into renting their movies, confusing them for the genuine article. 

At least “2025 Armageddon” acknowledged that model, as one of the film’s opening plot points was two twin sisters (Jhey Castles and Lindsey Marie Wilson) bonding over the Asylum movie “Snakes on a Train,” which their grandmother rented for them, thinking it was “Snakes on a Plane.” 

The purpose of “2025 Armageddon” was to gather the many absurd monsters from multiple other Asylum films, and assemble them in a single gigantic crossover event akin to “Destroy All Monsters.” The film features the Mega Piranha from “Mega Piranha,” the Mega Shark from “Mega Shark,” robot monsters from both “Atlantic Rim” and “Transmorphers,” and the croc monster from “Mega Shark Versus Crocosaurus.” There’s even a Sharknado for good measure. These creatures are all manifesting in the real world after a species of aliens watched a bunch of Asylum movies, and mistook them for reality. They used their high-tech monster-making machines to populate the Earth with Asylum monsters, as God intended. 

Michael Paré appears, of course, because it was either him or Eric Roberts.

(13) GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS. “Mathematician Reveals Strange New Enigmas for Time Travelers” – Discover Magazine says it’s time you knew.

First, the good news for time travelers. Physicists have long recognized that nothing in the laws of physics specifically forbids time travel. As far as they can tell, these laws don’t care whether time is running forwards or backwards; they work just as well either way….

…Now the bad news, which comes from Lorenzo Gavassino, a mathematician at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Gavassino has discovered some previously unknown side effects of time travel.

He says the laws of physics may not forbid it but if it is possible, these laws lead to some outlandish consequences, one of which is that any human who made the journey would not be able to remember it. The laws of physics suggest this person’s memory would be wiped clean as soon as they returned to the present….

(14) GALACTIC SQUINTING. “How astronomers used gravitational lensing to discover 44 new stars in distant galaxy” at ABC News.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, history’s largest and most complex space observatory that serves thousands of astronomers around the world, has captured a unique image that revealed 44 individual stars in a galaxy 6.5 billion light-years away from the Milky Way, according to a paper published Monday in Nature Astronomy.

Astronomers used Webb’s high-resolution optics and distortion in space to reveal the existence of dozens of previously unknown stars, the researchers said. The detection of a “treasure trove” of stars was only possible because the light from the 44 new stars was magnified by a large cluster of galaxies, called Abell 370, in front of it, according to the Center for Astrophysics.

The technique is known as gravitational lensing, which is when a massive amount of matter — like a cluster of galaxies — creates a gravitational field that distorts and magnifies the light from distant galaxies that are behind it but in the same line of sight, according to NASA. The effect is essentially like looking through a giant magnifying glass….

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Exits Examined delves into “The Bizarre History of Dragonriders of Pern”.

What do you get when epic fantasy crashes violently into science fiction? The Dragonriders of Pern baby! This legendary series is packed with telepathic dragons, daring riders, and a world that’s as dangerous as it is fascinating. Set on the planet Pern, where humanity’s survival hinges on their bond with dragons to fight a deadly menace from the skies, these books are a wild mix of adventure, survival, and discovery. In this video, we’re diving into the history of Dragonriders of Pern, exploring its incredible worldbuilding, unforgettable characters, and why it’s still matters.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Andrew (not Werdna), Francis Hamit, 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 Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 12/9/24 If I Only Had A Positronic Brain

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(1) SNARKY CLAUS. Naomi Kritzer recommends “Gifts for People You Hate, 2024” at Will Tell Stories For Food. This really is an amazing/appalling assortment.

Once again, the holidays are upon us, and once again, people are telling me that in this trying time, the one thing I have to offer that they truly need is a hand-picked selection of the absolute worst possible gifts that they can give their brother-in-law. You know which brother-in-law…

…Using my guide, you can carefully select a gift to present with wide-eyed faux sincerity while knowing he’ll take it home and think, “what the hell am I supposed to do with this?” (Bonus points if the nephew thinks it’s awesome.)…

Here’s the kind of thing she’s talking about –

… So this one is actually kind of cool: it’s a whiskey decanter shaped like a Star Wars Storm Trooper’s head (with two glasses that are molded on the inside so that if you pour in whiskey or some other beverage that isn’t clear, it’ll look like you’re drinking your whiskey out of Storm Trooper heads. Like Ewoks.) However, you have to pour quite a lot of whiskey into the decanter to make it look cool (which means if you’re not drinking it quickly, and want to store it properly, you’ll have to pour it back into the bottle). It’s bulky to store and not dishwasher safe. It’s solidly in the sweet spot of “too nifty to just toss so it’ll take up cabinet space for years.”…

(2) YEAR’S TOP HORROR BOOKS. New York Times columnist Gabino Iglesias shared a gift link to “The Best Horror Books of 2024”. His list of 10 books includes:

Model Home

By Rivers Solomon

Solomon’s novel takes a new approach to the “evil house” trope. The novel is about three sisters forced to return to their haunted childhood home after the mysterious deaths of their parents. Solomon puts the malevolent building in the back seat and focuses instead on a plethora of topics like depression, motherhood, sexuality, gender, trauma and growing up in a hostile environment with a strong, demanding mother. The result is a wonderfully surprising haunted house story that is also a sharp excavation of the human issues that plague us all.

(3) ALEX SEGURA Q&A. “The End as the Beginning: Alex Segura on his Continuing Adventures in Comic Book Noir” at CrimeReads.

JBV: As with Secret Identity’s Carmen Valdez, this book has a trailblazing hero in Annie Bustamante, who is both an icon of the arts and entertainment world and a fiercely devoted single mom. In what ways did you want to honor the complexities of modern life (and womanhood) – both professionally and personally? How is this an extension of Carmen’s experiences without being a retread of them?

AS: I wanted Annie to feel three-dimensional, and that meant pushing back on some of the narrative tropes of crime fiction – like the untethered protagonist. Annie is a parent with a job, she’s also in recovery and isn’t afraid to speak her mind. She felt real to me, and though it made the writing more logistically challenging from a plot perspective, I felt like giving readers time to get to know Annie, her life, and most importantly, her past, created a more layered character and better story. Like Carmen, I wanted to be friends with Annie by the end of the story. 

I think the unifying thing between Carmen and Annie is that both are presented their dream creative opportunity – and are forced to realize that these dreams are often laced with poison. Carmen is asked to create a superhero for a comic book publisher, something she’s hoped for since she was a kid. But when she does it, it’s anonymous, and she has to claw and fight to reclaim that credit. On the flipside, Annie has to pinch herself when she’s asked to write and draw a new Legendary Lynx comic – based on the character that made her a comic fan. But when she finds that the people running the company that purports to own the Lynx don’t understand the property they control, Annie has to ask herself if it’s worth the artistic expense. Both characters find their dreams crashing down to reality, but that also creates a sense of fearlessness and freedom that propels both books….

(4) COMICS EDITOR’S DAYBOOK TO AUCTION. NateSanders.com is auctioning items from the Chic Young Estate (creator of Blondie) and others.

One lot has “Sheldon Mayer’s 1946 Day Planner as Editor of All-American Publications — Nearly Every Day Filled-in With Dozens of Artists & Strips Like Flash & Green Lantern — With Idea of Wonder Woman as a Girl”.

Sheldon Mayer’s personal day planner from 1946 when Mayer was editing and creating content for All-American Publications, one of the companies that would ultimately form DC Comics. Mayer filled-in nearly every day of this planner, mentioning almost all the characters and titles in the AA canon, including Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Mr. Terrific, Boy Blue, 3 Mousketeers, J. Rufus Lion, Wildcat, Molly Pitcher, Funny Stuff, Sargon [the Sorcerer], All Star [Comics], Willy Nilly, Black Pirate, Joey Kangaroo, Bulldog Drumhead, Ghost Patrol, Nutsy Squirrel, Foney Fairy Tales and more. Almost every day Mayer lists various comic artists, pairing them with the title, including the issue number and pages. He also sometimes notes payment details for the artist, recording mailing checks and other details such as ”Get raise for [Woody] Gelman”, which appears on 8 March 1946.

Interestingly, Mayer appeared to explore the possibility of expanding ”Wonder Woman” with an additional storyline or comic book with the character as a young girl. On 12 August 1946 Mayer writes a note to himself, ”See Jack re W.W. as a girl.” He seemed to get the idea on 2 August when he writes to himself, ”Wonder Girl?”. Other notes include a funny doodle of a man’s head that he draws on 25 March. There’s even a note slipped in by another person named Ted (likely Ted Udall) on Friday 26 June 1946 reading, ”I’ll see you Monday – BOO! / Ted”.

Some of the comic artists that Mayer mentions in the 1946 day planner include Joe Kubert, Harry Lampert, Ronald Santi, Jack Adler, Larry Nadle, Martin Naydel, Stookie Allen, Ed Wheelan, Moe Worthman, Paul Reinman, Howard Purcell, Rube Grossman, Bill Hudson, Joe Rosen, Ewald Ludwig, and Marin Nodell, sometimes with references to pay, and assigning artists to specific strips. A few notes are also tucked into the book. The day planner ends on 31 December, but with additional memoranda pages filled in after that, including one with entries for specific strips and prices. Most entries written in pencil, with a few in fountain pen. Planner measures 5” x 7.875”, with each page assigned to one calendar day. Bound in red boards with gold lettering. Some cocking to spine and light wear, overall in very good condition. A treasure trove detailing the inner workings of the comic industry during its Golden Age. From the Sheldon Mayer estate.

(5) JULES BURT NAMES ‘BEYOND THE VOID’ BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024. Popular YouTube channel presenter Jules Burt has named his book of the year: Steve Holland’s Beyond The Void: The Remarkable Story Of Badger Books.

Published by Bear Alley Books, this full-colour softback charts the history of the British paperback publisher, notorious for publishing the science fiction and horror stories of the Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe and John S. Glasby, who wrote over 400 novels and short story collections for the firm… some written over a weekend.

Beyond The Void covers the origins of Badger Books, when, as John Spencer & Co., they began producing slim magazines in the late 1940s, before turning to science fiction magazines in 1950, their four titles—Futuristic Science Fiction, Worlds of Fantasy, Tales of Tomorrow and Wonders of  the Spaceways—infamous for publishing some of the worst sf stories ever written.

The collapse of the market for original novels in 1954 led most publishers to experiment with reprints. Not so Badger Books, the imprint adopted in 1959, who continued to publish mostly original works, paid for at the rate of 10 shillings a thousand words—$75 for a full-length novel, all rights—well into the 1960s.

Steve Holland says: “To have the book recognised by Jules as his favourite title of 2024 is an honour given the quality of the books BEYOND THE VOID was up against, ironic as BEYOND celebrates a company and its notoriously terrible output. But exploring the authors and artists turns up some gems that I wanted to share with fans… and if you’re new to Badger, the interviews and over 500 covers illustrated will hopefully make you want to explore further.”

Beyond the Void: The Remarkable History of Badger Books is available at the link.  

(6) EYE THE JURY. In “another online conference” at Kalimac’s Corner, David Bratman discusses a paper presented last weekend at a virtual conference hosted by the Tolkien Society (UK-based) and the Tolkien Society of Serbia. He ends with a very hooky comment:

…It’s true that Tolkien experimented with writing stories that were factually unreliable within the fictive universe, but I think you can tell which ones those are, and while there are small points in The Lord of the Rings which are unknown or unanswered, the oft-used trope of claiming Sauron as the hero and depicting the book as a giant libel on him does not, I think, fall into that category. I mean, you can write that, but don’t claim Tolkien’s imprimatur on it….

(7) HANDMADE FANZINES. First Fandom Experience introduces us to a Chinese-American fan artist who wrote to Forrest J Ackerman in the Thirties: “Howard Low and the Junior Science Correspondence Club”.

…Although dated “Sol 23, 1947,” this remarkable Martian newspaper of the future was penned in January 1932 by one “Howard Lowe.” At the time of our 2020 post, we admitted that we knew nothing further about Lowe or his work.

We’ve learned a lot since then.

Stephen Howard Lowe (later, Low) was born on April 19 1917 in Portland Oregon. In 1930, he was 13 years old and living in New York City. During that year, he began a correspondence with Forrest J Ackerman, then 14. The first known example of the teenagers’ exchange dates to January 18 1931, where Lowe says, “I feel as if I’ve known you for a long time but really its been only about six or seven months.”…

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Anniversary: December 9, 2002 — Star Trek Nemesis (2002)

By Paul Weimer: Be prepared, this one is not going to be a fun look back.  

I had had high hopes for what would turn out to be the last of the Star Trek TNG movies, Star Trek Nemesis. It features Tom Hardy (in an early role) as the villain, a clone of Picard that wreaks havoc on the Romulan Empire. Themes of identity, cloning, technology and more were promised. What’s not to love?

Just about everything. There is little I can say that is good about this movie, and it would be folly for me to try, except maybe the confrontations between Shinzon and Picard. There is some actual good stuff there. But it’s cut to merry hell.

And I do think it was the bad editing that really kills the movie’s room to breathe. The original run time of 2 hours and 40 minutes may have been too much, but cutting it down to two hours means that a lot of character development and space for the characters just winds up on the cutting room floor, and it feels like a “this way to the egress” with a lot of scenes and subplots unexplained and undercooked. Just take Deanna and Riker’s marriage, with Wesley somehow coming back to say hi. What was that? 

And don’t get me started on Data and B-4.  The frustrating thing is, in the final cut, the existence of B-4, Data’s earlier model, there is absolutely, positively no consideration of the existence of Lore, Data’s original “twin”, who featured on multiple episodes of ST: TNG. As far as this movie concerned, and the way characters act and react to B-4…Lore might as well never have existed, which is a crying shame. And having Data be sacrificed at the end but his memories downloaded into B-4…that feels like an identity erasure of B-4, quite frankly.  I left the movie with a very foul taste in my mouth, and I didn’t even rewatch any TNG related stuff for a couple of years afterwards. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Baldo looks behind the scene.
  • Bizarro tentatively adds to the roll call of superheroes.
  • Free Range mocks our cryptid interest.
  • Working Daze knows why internet research doesn’t get finished.

(10) INDELIBLE PURPLE. “’Generation Barney’ explores one dinosaur’s enduring legacy”, NPR reminds us that PBS intended to quit on Barney after its first season. Here’s how he avoided extinction.

…HERRERA: When it debuted on PBS on April 6, 1992, “Barney & Friends” was a hit, but Barney was competing against two worthy opponents.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL RINGING)

HERRERA: In one quarter, “Lamb Chop,” and in the other, “Thomas The Tank Engine.”

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL RINGING)

HERRERA: About a month later, PBS broke some bad news. It was moving forward with the other two shows. There wouldn’t be a second season of “Barney & Friends.”

RIFKIN: I was crestfallen. I was devastated, as you can imagine, because there was a lot of personal reputation on the line.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

HERRERA: This is where Barney’s story could have ended. But Larry didn’t go quietly into the night.

(SOUNDBITE OF RICHARD AITKEN AND ANDREW GANNON’S “CYLINDERS AND BANK VAULTS”)

HERRERA: He had a plan to save Barney from extinction that included bending a few rules. First, Larry worked Barney into CPTV’s fundraising drives. Technically, you couldn’t use a character like Barney to ask viewers for money, so Larry came up with a workaround. He would make the financial ask with Barney in studio spreading messages of love and kindness, you know, his specialty….

(11) SOUNDS LIKE YOUNG INDY. “Indiana Jones Chooses Wisely: The Biggest Voice in Gaming” – a New York Times profile. (Paywalled.) “Troy Baker, the industry’s go-to voice actor, channels a young Harrison Ford in the action-adventure Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.”

When Todd Howard heard the name Troy Baker, he could not help but roll his eyes.

For months, the team behind Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, a first-person action-adventure video game based on the film franchise, had been discussing who to cast as the charismatic archaeologist. (The 82-year-old Harrison Ford, it was decided early on, would not be reprising the role.) The game’s performance director was pushing for Baker. But Howard, who is its executive producer and previously led several Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, was unconvinced.

“I’m not putting Troy Baker in my game,” Howard told the team, “just because that’s what you do.”

Baker, a veteran voice actor with more than 150 video game credits, is sympathetic to this perspective. He is one of the industry’s most recognizable names, turning up in multiplayer shooters, comic book fighting games, online battle royale hits and Japanese role-playing games.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle uses a young Harrison Ford’s likeness, but Baker provided the motion capture for the character.

He earned enthusiastic acclaim playing Joel Miller, the morally conflicted hero of the postapocalyptic drama The Last of Us, and won legions of fans as the voice of Booker DeWitt, the disgraced Pinkerton agent turned class liberator in the steampunk BioShock Infinite. He has played Batman, Superman, the Joker and Robin, each in a different game. He has played countless numbers of soldiers, aliens and demons in franchises like Call of Duty, Final Fantasy and Mortal Kombat. If you have played a video game in the past two decades, you have probably heard him speak.

He is aware that it is a lot….

(12) BODY OF LITERATURE. “Scientists Think a Skeleton Found in a Well Is the Same Man Described in an 800-Year-Old Norse Text” reports Smithsonian Magazine.

More than 800 years ago, raiders threw a dead body into a well outside a Norwegian castle. The incident is chronicled in a medieval Norse text, which suggests that the men hoped to poison the area’s water supply. Known as the Sverris Saga, the tale is named for King Sverre Sigurdsson, who was battling enemies affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1938, archaeologists excavated the well—and found a skeleton. Now, by analyzing the DNA extracted from the skeleton’s tooth, researchers have learned new information about the physical characteristics and lineage of the so-called “Well Man,” according to a recent study published in the journal iScience.

“This is the first time that the remains of a person or character described in a Norse saga has been positively identified,” co-author Michael Martin, an evolutionary genomicist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, tells the New York Times’ Franz Lidz. “It is also the oldest case in which we have retrieved the complete genome sequence from a specific person mentioned in a medieval text.”

The well is located near the ruined Sverresborg Castle outside the city of Trondheim in central Norway. During a period of political instability in the 12th century, Sverre insisted he had a claim to the throne, but he faced opposition from the archbishop. The 182-verse Sverris Saga, which Sverre ordered one of his associates to write, describes battles between the new king and his opposition, though historians don’t know whether these accounts are accurate. According to one passage, Roman Catholic “Baglers”—from the Norse for “bishop’s wand”—raided Sverresborg Castle while Sverre was out of town in 1197.

The Baglers didn’t harm the castle’s inhabitants, “but they completely destroyed the castle,” co-author Anna Petersén, an archaeologist at the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research, tells NPR’s Ari Daniel. “They burned all the houses.”

After that, she adds, “the archbishop’s people wanted to do something nasty.”

Per the saga, the Baglers “took a dead man and cast him into the well headfirst, and then filled it up with stones.” Scholars have long assumed the man was connected to the king, and that the Baglers dumped his body in that spot to taint the water and perhaps humiliate Sverre. The text includes “nothing about who this dead man was, where he came from, what group he belonged to,” says Petersén…

(13) BACK TO THREE MILE DESERT ISLAND. “Artificial Intelligence wants to go nuclear. Will it work?” asks NPR.

… But since the advent of AI, power consumption has been rising rapidly.

Training and using AI requires significantly more computational power than conventional computing, and “that corresponds to energy use,” Strubell says. Strubell and other experts expect emissions will skyrocket as AI becomes more common.

Nuclear power offers a way out: plants like Three Mile Island can deliver hundreds of megawatts of power without producing greenhouse gas emissions. New nuclear plants could do still more, powering data centers using the latest technology.

But Silicon Valley’s ethos is to go fast and break things. Nuclear power, on the other hand, has a reputation for moving extremely slowly, because nothing can ever break….

(14) TENSION HEADACHE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The “Hubble Tension” is still there, giving cosmologists headaches.

Initial studies of the Webb telescope data had failed to resolve the Tension. But some people hoped that further study would illuminate conflicting observations for the rate at which the universe is expanding. Nope. A new analysis of a whopping third of data from the Webb still show about an 8% discrepancy (plus or minus a few percentage points) in the expansion rate of the universe based on the ancient universe versus the current universe.  “Webb telescope confirms the universe is expanding at an unexpected rate” at Reuters.

Fresh corroboration of the perplexing observation that the universe is expanding more rapidly than expected has scientists pondering the cause – perhaps some unknown factor involving the mysterious cosmic components dark energy and dark matter.

Two years of data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have now validated the Hubble Space Telescope’s earlier finding that the rate of the universe’s expansion is faster – by about 8% – than would be expected based on what astrophysicists know of the initial conditions in the cosmos and its evolution over billions of years. The discrepancy is called the Hubble Tension.

The observations by Webb, the most capable space telescope ever deployed, appear to rule out the notion that the data from its forerunner Hubble was somehow flawed due to instrument error.

“This is the largest sample of Webb Telescope data – its first two years in space – and it confirms the puzzling finding from the Hubble Space Telescope that we have been wrestling with for a decade – the universe is now expanding faster than our best theories can explain,” said astrophysicist Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, lead author of the study published on Monday in the Astrophysical Journal, opens new tab….

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, David Ritter, Steve Badger, 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 Dern.]

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 6/11/24 A Pixel Is To Be Hugged And Sung Lullabies Lest It Grow Up Feeling Unwanted. And Then It Won’t Want To Be Scrolled

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(1) GLASGOW 2024 TOWN HALL ABOUT BUSINESS MEETING ON 6/15. Glasgow 2024 will host a virtual Town Hall Event about the WSFS Business Meeting on Saturday, June 15, at 7:00 p.m. BST (which is 11:00 a.m. Pacific). Sign up for a free ticket at this Eventbrite link.

Key members of the Business Meeting and The World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) team from Glasgow 2024 will discuss the Business Meeting that will occur at Glasgow 2024.

The event will be moderated, taking questions in advance. If you wish to submit a question for consideration, please do so below. There may not be enough time to cover all questions, but we will do our best to get to as many as we can. https://forms.gle/goRw9ZGspQ4YE3mA9

(2) SHE’S ON THE FRONT. Nnedi Okorafor is featured in the June 10 issue of Publishers Weekly.

(3) CREDIT FOR HELPING SAVE TREK. Bjo Trimble’s daughter Lora reports on Facebook she “again went to the Peabody awards last night to watch Star Trek be honored with the Peabody Institutional Award. What Bjo didn’t know was Alex Kurtzman paid tribute to her and My father John Trimble and all the work they did to save Star Trek and keep it going! It was a lovely evening.” More photos at the link.

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

Below you can see J. J. Abrams and Alex Kurtzman accepting Star Trek’s Peabody Award, including Kurtzman’s mention of Bjo.

(4) A STELLAR VILLAIN. “Paul Giamatti Joins ‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ as Main Villain” reports Variety. (Does Starfleet Academy have holiday holdovers?)

Set phasers to stunned. In another casting coup, the upcoming Paramount+ series “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy” has cast Emmy winner and multiple Oscar nominee Paul Giamatti in a recurring guest role as the first season’s main villain, who has a sinister connection to the past of one of the (yet to be cast) cadets.

Giamatti joins Holly Hunter, who Variety exclusively reported in May is boarding “Starfleet Academy” as the Academy’s captain and chancellor.

“Sometimes you’re lucky enough to discover that one of the greatest actors alive is also a huge ‘Star Trek’ fan, and meeting Paul was one of those miraculous moments for us,” said co-showrunners Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau in a statement. “The sheer delight with which he dove in on ‘Starfleet Academy’ is only surpassed by the gratitude we feel about him joining our incredible cast.”…

(5) HOW MANY VIEW WHO. Steven Moffat told Facebook readers today:

According to Russell T Davies, the ratings for Doctor Who are “far above expectations.”

While he admits that the figures “aren’t where we want them. We always want higher”, an independent BBC review has revealed that it is the most watched show for under 30s in the world.

The series has “reached and exceeded every target, so we are showing no signs of slowing down.”

(6) NO VROOM AT THE INN. New York Times critic Esther Zuckerman recommends “A Four-Hour-Long Hotel Review That Is Actually About So Much More” – Jenny Nicholson’s report on Disney’s Star Wars-themed Galactic Starcruiser hotel, now shut down, which she deems a spectacular failure.

…One of the most captivating pieces of entertainment I’ve seen so far this year is a four-hour-long YouTube video in which one woman describes her stay at a Disney World hotel. I’m as shocked by this as anyone.

To be clear: I was initially resistant when my partner encouraged me to watch Jenny Nicholson’s epic “The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel,” which breaks down in microscopic detail her visit to Disney’s Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser. During the experience, now closed, guests on vacation were encouraged to live out their George Lucas dreams by participating in a role-playing game while staying in a structure on the outskirts of the park near Orlando, Fla.

Nicholson’s monologue, which runs longer than “Lawrence of Arabia,” has been viewed more than seven million times since it was uploaded last month and has been the talk of social media, yet I was still unprepared for how absolutely riveting it was. While it highlights a litany of problems with the hotel itself, the video can also be viewed as a diagnosis of the entertainment industry’s current ills writ large. In her frustration, Nicholson becomes a valiant truth teller, clearly articulating how corporate greed betrays loyal fans to sell a cheaper and less emotionally enriching product. And she does this against a backdrop of stuffed animals and while wearing various costumes, including, at one point, a giant suit resembling a Porg, the puffin-like creature in “The Last Jedi.”…

…The great irony is that Nicholson herself produced what Disney couldn’t: a comprehensive, entrancing experience that held my attention.

(7) PLEASE DON’T FEED THE BOTS. Clarkesworld’s Neil Clarke has updated his blog post “Block the Bots that Feed ‘AI’ Models by Scraping Your Website” to warn about another offender: “If you haven’t updated your robots.txt to protect your work from scraping for ‘AI’ training recently, there’s probably a few bots you aren’t blocking. Added Applebot-Extended this morning.”

Applebot-Extended does not directly crawl webpages. It is used to determine whether or not pages crawled by the Applebot user agent will be used to train Apple’s models powering generative AI features across Apple products, including Apple Intelligence, Services, and Developer Tools….

(8) ANOTHER SCURRILOUS TACTIC. [Item by Jennifer Hawthorne.] I was listening to a favorite law podcast of mine, Law and Chaos, (“PA Dad Takes On Moms For Liberty”) and they were  interviewing a Pennsylvania father who discovered books were quietly going missing from his kid’s local school library and decided to figure out why. Turns out it was a “shadowban” campaign against books that Moms for Liberty hates and included such lovely behavior as the school creating fake student library accounts, checking out the books to those accounts for an entire year, and then adding the books to the list of items to be removed from the library on the grounds that they weren’t being checked out (!). It’s a fascinating story about just how far Culture Warriors will go to ban books! The titles secretly removed included the entire “A Court of Thorns and Roses” (ACOTAR) fantasy series, which, while not my cup of tea where fantasy is concerned, are very popular with teenage girls who deserve to have the right to check out the books if they want.

The Bucks County Beacon wrote about the Dad who discovered what was going on: “Uncovering the Cover-up: How Republican Pennridge School Board Directors Secretly Banned Books”.

…Frustrated by the lack of answers, I submitted a Right-To-Know request seeking a report that listed the books checked out of the high school library by non-students.  To my surprise, the report furnished by the district was discernibly inaccurate. It did not contain any of the targeted titles that had recently gone missing.

I hired an open records attorney, Joy Ramsingh, to negotiate with the district’s law firm, Eckert Seamans. I was simply requesting the production of a good faith public record. My goal was to learn which books were being censored.  

I wanted to give the community a fair opportunity to read, defend, and debate the merit of literature before it was permanently removed from the library. My lawyer sought to reach a quick and amicable resolution, but the negotiations were unsuccessful. We appealed to the Court of Common Pleas.

After a year of litigation, my attorney was able to prove that the RTK report furnished by the district was illegally manipulated. Faced with overwhelming evidence, the district eventually conceded that an employee had deleted records from the report. It was a clear attempt to hide the removal of books from public scrutiny….

(9) MEDICAL UPDATE. Adam-Troy Castro, in a public Facebook post, has announced he is battling cancer again – but it should be survivable. Full details at the link.

…They remove this and give me another round of chemo and it is pretty survivable. Which is a lot different than this would be if the Colon Cancer had metastasized in any other organ. Anywhere else would have been a case of, “okay, we’re bailing water to keep the boat afloat until it sinks.”

On the scale of having Stage 4 any kind of Cancer, this kind of cancer is not as bad as most. Okay? It’s survivable.

Does this suck?

Yes.

Does it suck a lot less than it could suck if it has to suck?

Yes….

(10) WHAT THE SCROLL SHOULD HAVE ADDED ABOUT H. BRUCE FRANKLIN. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Pixel Scroll 5-23-24 item #9’s mini-obit of H. Bruce Franklin, while acknowledging him as “author of numerous books, essays, and exhibitions related to science fiction.” fails to cite what (to me at least) are the obvious suspects (titles) Future Perfect (an antho that I read decades ago; my memory burped the title up instantly when I saw the NYTimes obit a few weeks ago) and it looks like he also wrote a book about Heinlein, Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction, and, along with political/historical non-fiction, this one of interest no doubt to SJW credentials: The Most Important Fish in the Sea: Menhaden and America.  

And thanks to Scott Edelman, here’s an unlocked copy of the New York Times obituary: “H. Bruce Franklin, Scholar Fired for His Antiwar Views, Is Dead at 90”.

(11) WORKING THROUGH LOSS. Sharon Lee writes about her experiences while grieving the death of her husband, Steve Miller, in “While one lives, both stand”. Here are the opening paragraphs.

Grief puts funny ideas into your head.

For instance, for awhile back in March, I was convinced that Steve had left me — walked out of our partnership and left no forwarding address.  I couldn’t imagine why, and spent way too much time minutely reviewing our past, looking for my error.

Then I became convinced that we had gotten done at this house, and were moving on.  As has been the case in previous moves, Steve had gone on ahead, leaving me to clean up these last few things before I joined him.  This delusion is particularly pernicious because for those of us who speak Metaphor, it’s true.   Only it’s not.

Anyhow, it’s been my goal for some while now to find or create for myself a place of gratitude for having been privileged to share so much time, love, and magic; for having had Steve in my life.  While it’s certainly a very lonely, hard, and scary thing to no longer have him for back-up, for taking the lead, for producing surprising — and occasionally infuriating — insights — surely unrelenting misery was not the best lesson I could take from our life together.

So, I started looking for ways to achieve, at first, equilibrium.  I didn’t expect to leap from misery to gratitude.  I expected there to be a process, and backsliding, and all the things that attend the pursuit of any mighty goal.

Steve and I not only shared our mundane lives, but we shared an active and beguiling fantasy life.  The worlds we built, the people who live there, the lessons, the philosophies — those also fed the richness of our partnership and informed our mundane lives…

(12) DOUG LEWIS (1955-2024). Thomas Kellogg, in a Centipede Press newsletter, paid tribute to bookseller and publisher Doug Lews, who died May 20.

Doug Lewis who with his wife Tomi, owned and operated the Little Bookshop of Horror/Roadkill Press in Arvada, Colorado and won a World Fantasy Award in the Nonprofessional category in the 1990s, died on May 20, 2024 of complications of diabetes. 

Doug started their bookstore when he was unable to find a copy of Joe Lansdale’s The Night Runners to purchase locally. The Lewis’ store primarily featured horror, fantasy, science fiction and crime fiction. Soon they were sponsoring readings by Joe R. Lansdale, along with Edward Bryant, Harlan Ellison, Dan Simmons, Connie Willis, Nancy Collins, Norm Partridge, Steve Rasnic Tem, Melanie Tem and many others. 

The Night Voices series of readings spawned a long friendship between Doug, Tomi and Ed Bryant. Ed was in many ways their mentor. Ed was the MC for the readings and his introductions were memorable by themselves. The readings spawned a publishing venture Roadkill Press. The initial idea was to publish chapbooks of the writers featured in readings. At that time chapbooks were a rarity. The concept was a quality item using high quality paper, with illustrations, signed by the writers that were incredibly affordable. The line of chapbooks was a big success. A collectible that was affordable was unusual in a time dominated by costly limited editions.

…It all came to a crashing end when Tomi became ill and was diagnosed with cancer. Although she fought bravely, she was gone in less than eight months. A farewell auto tour across the county to see all their friends was thwarted by the ravages of the chemotherapy. Doug was crushed by Tomi’s passing. Nothing mattered anymore. Tomi was the extrovert of the pair. With her gone, Doug fell into an abyss of despair that would last the rest of his life.

Adrift in that despair, his physical health deteriorated. He became a type 1 diabetic almost overnight. I remember at the time he told me that he wasn’t going to let diabetes run his life. Caring about nothing, he failed to take care of himself. The disease ultimately destroyed life. 

My 30 year plus friendship with Doug spanned both his highs and his lows of his life. It as a tragedy that he couldn’t overcome the loss of Tomi. As with us all, he had his demons. Many friends reached out multiple times in the years after Tomi’s passing, only to be rebuffed or ignored. I like to think he avoid responding because it only deepened his sense of loss….

(13) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Compiled by Paul Weimer.]

Born June 11, 1971 — P. Djeli Clark, 53.

By Paul Weimer. By day, he is a historian of slavery in history and popular culture. By night. P. Djèlí Clark is a ferocious new talent in science fiction and fantasy.  It took me a bit to come across his work, a friend of mine practically pushed his novella, The Haunting of Tram Car 015 into my hands, telling me that this was going to be my jam.  And an alternate historical late 19th century Egypt with magic, becoming a world power? Djinn, magic, spirits and a strong sense of place in this alternate Cairo?  It most certainly was, and is. 

P. Djèlí Clark

His A Master of Djinn continues in that same world as the novella, and builds and extends and grows that world in a very satisfactory manner. Like the first novella, it builds and works with themes of colonialism, race and gender relations, and magical worldbuilding in exploring the consequences of “The magic returns” and making Egypt a powerhouse. I would so love to physically visit this alternate Cairo and photograph its wonders, but for the moment, can only hope for more books set in this world.

 I have not yet read the copy of Ring Shout on my Kindle although, given his day job, it is probably the work of his thus far that is closest to his day job and his academic research interests. I am confident that it will be excellent, but it remains buried in Mount TBR. For now.

However, as part of my Hugo Reading for 2024, I read and enjoyed “How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub”. It’s a clever little story that takes its worldbuilding as a matter of fact sort of approach to add Krakens, and merpeople, to a 19th century Britain not really equipped or ready to deal with the consequences of racism and colonialism and sexism.

As of the writing of this, I have started reading an ARC of his forthcoming work, The Dead Cat Tail Assassins. This story, unlike his others, is firmly set in a secondary world, and reminds me, as of this moment, of the secondary world fantasy of N K Jemisin, in particular the Dreamblood novels. The setting is an entrepot city, and indeed, the main character is one of the titular Dead Cat Tail Assassins. Shenanigans have already ensued.  It’s a new and different mode for Clark, and I look forward to seeing how he continues with it. 

(14) COMICS SECTION.

(15) THE GAME’S AFOOT. Inverse’s Ryan Brittthinks “’Indiana Jones and the Great Circle’ Could be the Best Indy Adventure in 35 Years”.

…But for the most ideal Indy results, perhaps it’s still best if the entire adventure happens in the 1930s or 1940s, with Dr. Jones looking and sounding like he’s in between the events of the first three movies. And with the release of a new trailer for the upcoming Bethesda game Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, it seems the franchise is getting back to its roots in an unexpected medium.

Set in 1937, The Great Circle takes place right in between Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade and pairs Indy with a new character named Gina Lombardi. As revealed in the new trailer, the primary mystery in this story is centered on various spiritual sites of great importance — from the Vatican to the Great Pyramids — that form a kind of invisible circle. A madman named Voss is after this power, and it’s up to Gina and Indy to stop him while they race to unlock the secrets of the circle.

Indy is voiced by Troy Baker, but you can barely tell this isn’t Harrison Ford uttering the lines. The mystical and religious overtones of the story also feel very aligned with the tone of The Last Crusade. In other words, this feels authentically Indy in a way that aspects of Dial of Destiny and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull didn’t.

(15) BAIT FOR YOUR CLICK. “’Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim’ Debuts Epic First Footage” – Variety has the reaction. (But no video!)

Warner Bros. Animation, New Line Cinema and Sola Entertainment previewed 20 minutes of its upcoming anime feature “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim,” receiving thunderous applause during the packed presentation on Tuesday at the Annecy Animation Festival.

Director Kenji Kamiyana said he was inspired by not just J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” books, but by the films of Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, who were confirmed as exec producers of the movie during the session.

The new story is set nearly 200 years before Bilbo Baggins comes into contact with the ring of power, and centers on the House of Helm Hammerhand, the King of Rohan (voiced by Brian Cox), with a focus on his daughter, the strong willed Princess Héra (voiced by Gaia Wise). In the clip, a dispute erupts during a council meeting, leaving Wulf, a ruthless Dunlending lord, seeking vengeance. Miranda Otto reprises her “Lord of the Rings” role as Éowyn, this time as the movie’s narrator….

(16) BYE, BOYS. “’The Boys’ Is Ending With Season 5 on Amazon” says The Hollywood Reporter.

The Boys will have their final fight in the near future.

Eric Kripke, the showrunner of Prime Video‘s super(anti)hero series, said on social media Tuesday that the show’s fifth season — which the streamer ordered in May — will be its last.

“Season 4 premiere week is a good time to announce: Season 5 will be the final season!” Kripke wrote on X. “Always my plan, I just had to be cagey till I got the final OK from Vought. Thrilled to bring the story to a gory, epic, moist climax.”…

(17) NO SCRAPING UNLESS IT’S MY SCRAPING. Gizmodo tells us “Elon Musk Just Cancelled iPhones”.

Apple and OpenAI’s partnership is only a few hours old, and Elon Musk is already going to war over it. The owner of Tesla, X, SpaceX, and xAI said he would ban Apple devices at his companies if Apple integrated ChatGPT at the operating system level, which the companies are very much planning to do. Musk, a founder of OpenAI who is now suing the present owners, said ChatGPT integrated iPhones present an “unacceptable security violation.”

“If Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS level, then Apple devices will be banned at my companies,” said Musk in a tweet on Monday. “And visitors will have to check their Apple devices at the door, where they will be stored in a Faraday cage,” said Musk in a follow-up tweet…

(18) STEVE HEADROOM? “Brighton general election candidate aims to be UK’s first ‘AI MP’” reports the Guardian. Candidate Steve Endacott tells journalists how it’s supposed to work.

‘Politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians’, so the saying goes.

This may be why a businessman in the south of England is proposing a novel solution: putting himself forward as a candidate in the UK general election as the first “AI MP”.

AI Steve is a nominee on the list of candidates for the 4 July general election in Brighton Pavilion, last held by the Green party’s Caroline Lucas, who is stepping down.

The man behind AI Steve is Steve Endacott, a self-described entrepreneur who lives in Rochdale, but “maintains a house in Brighton”.

Endacott, who is the chair of an artificial intelligence company called Neural Voice but “made his fortune” in the travel sector, claims he will attend parliament to vote on policies as guided by AI Steve’s feedback from his constituents.

He claims the AI representative would answer constituents’ concerns and questions using a rendition of Endacott’s voice and an avatar.’…

(19) SMALL BANG THEORY. “Webb telescope reveals asteroid collision in neighboring star system” at Hub.

Astronomers have captured what appears to be a snapshot of a massive collision of giant asteroids in Beta Pictoris, a neighboring star system known for its early age and tumultuous planet-forming activity.

The observations spotlight the volatile processes that shape star systems like our own, offering a unique glimpse into the primordial stages of planetary formation.

“Beta Pictoris is at an age when planet formation in the terrestrial planet zone is still ongoing through giant asteroid collisions, so what we could be seeing here is basically how rocky planets and other bodies are forming in real time,” said Christine Chen, a Johns Hopkins University astronomer who led the research.

The insights will be presented today at the 244th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Madison, Wisconsin.

Chen’s team spotted significant changes in the energy signatures emitted by dust grains around Beta Pictoris by comparing new data from the James Webb Space Telescope with observations by the Spitzer Space Telescope from 2004 and 2005. With Webb’s detailed measurements, the team tracked the dust particles’ composition and size in the exact area previously analyzed by Spitzer.

Focusing on heat emitted by crystalline silicates—minerals commonly found around young stars as well as on Earth and other celestial bodies—the scientists found no traces of the particles previously seen in 2004–05. This suggests a cataclysmic collision occurred among asteroids and other objects about 20 years ago, pulverizing the bodies into fine dust particles smaller than pollen or powdered sugar, Chen said.

(20) VIDEO OF THE DAY. PRINT Magazine praises “Design Army’s Out of This World Campaign for the Hong Kong Ballet”.

The Hong Kong Ballet is celebrating its 45th anniversary with a groundbreaking campaign in collaboration with Design Army and Dean Alexander Productions. The production brings the ethereal beauty of ballet to the masses, transforming it from a symbol of privilege to a universal cultural experience. This inventive campaign, inspired by Degas’ ballerina portraits, the Renaissance, and artistic hip-hop, redefines ballet in a uniquely Hong Kong context. From the witty “Tutu Academy” to sci-fi extraterrestrial scenes, the film captures the essence of dance as a universal language, connecting everyone, even aliens, to its unearthly magic. With vibrant settings ranging from university halls to iconic plazas, the campaign showcases the troupe’s artistry against the backdrop of Hong Kong’s cultural landmarks, making ballet accessible, relatable, and joyfully unconventional….

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

Pixel Scroll 5/13/24 Just Dropped In To See What Condition My Pixel Was In

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(1) RAPHAEL HYTHLODAEUS’ UTOPIA. Go back to where Utopia began in “Utopian Realism, a speech by Bruce Sterling”.

…So, Thomas More and Peter Gillis are in this private home, avoiding actual work. They enjoy many free-wheeling, private, intellectual discussions, which are all about law, and justice, and business, and economics, and politics, and the general state of the world.

These two intellectuals agree that the state of the world is pretty terrible. Clearly the real world is quite bad, it’s not a Utopia at all. In fact the first part of the book “Utopia” is pretty much all dystopia. It’s about how bad things are in Europe, and it’s rather realistic too — these are grim assessments.

So, Thomas More and Peter Gillis, while discussing the world together, decide to invent this wandering scholar named Raphael Hythlodaeus. The wise and learned Raphael can speak Latin and Greek, just like they do — but Raphael has been to a country where everything works.

Peter Gillis even invents a Utopian alphabet, and he writes some poetry in the language of Utopia — just to demonstrate that he can play this fun Utopian game with his guest Thomas More.

Peter Gillis is willing to cooperate. He even pretends to personally introduce Thomas More to Raphael Hythlodaeus.

In the book, Raphael appears, and he starts talking. He recites the entire story of Utopia. Raphael speaks the book “Utopia,” aloud. It’s 30,000 words of text, so Raphael recites this book in one long afternoon. It’s a three and a half hour lecture, and Thomas More writes it all down.

However, it’s somehow not boring. It’s a brilliant, world-class lecture, because Raphael Hythlodaeus is quite an amazing guy. Raphael doesn’t look rich or famous. Basically, he looks like a sailor. He’s got a long beard, and he’s kind of weatherbeaten. He’s a long-haired wanderer in beat-up old clothes…

(2) WHO FELL? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] BBC Radio 4 has aired a dramatisation of a mid-twentieth century classic The Man Who Fell to Earth (1963) by Walter Tevis. This was made famous beyond the SF book-reading community with the 1976 UK film starring starman David Bowie as the man himself from a dying world who comes to Earth for help and who uses his knowledge to create a techno-industry to fund his own space mission home, but whom the authorities rumble and capture…

This 1-hour radio play co-stars Doctor Who’s northern incarnation, Christopher Eccleston (also known for the apocalyptic 28 Days Later and a bit-part in the US series Heroes among much else) as Bryce. Harry Treadaway stars as Thomas Newton.

Prior to the radio play there was a separate introductory programme that most interestingly includes an audio clip of an interview with Tevis himself. This reveals that the story is as much about alcoholism: a man struggling to cope in a strange, hostile world, separated from his family.

“The Man Who Fell to Earth by American writer Walter Tevis was published in 1963. Unlike most sci-fi of its time, it’s not about space, far-off galaxies or a distant future, but set only a decade or so from the time of writing.”

I was unaware that a few years later Tevis modified the novel to include a reference to ‘Watergate’ but that (apparently (I’ve not read it)) this was unnecessary for the core of the story. Here’s  the BBC descriptor for the play…

“The classic novel that spawned the acclaimed film starring David Bowie, from the writer of The Queen’s Gambit and The Hustler.

An alien arrives in Kentucky with five years to save the handful of survivors of his dying planet, and to save humanity from itself. Calling himself Thomas Newton, his plan is to use his race’s advanced technology to make millions, and then build a spaceship to bring the last of his people to live on Earth.

But Newton begins to doubt his purpose, and finds himself unable to cope with the emotional weight of being human. He finds solace with two fellow outsiders – cheery functioning alcoholic Betty-Jo, who falls quietly in love with him, and widowed scientist Nathan Bryce, who tracks him down after recognising his tech as impossible.

Little do they realise that the Government are watching…”

You can download the introduction as an MP3 here.

You can download the play as an MP3 here.

(3) BAFTA TV AWARDS 2024. There was only one winner of genre interest in last night’s BAFTA TV Awards 2024.

REALITY

  • Squid Game: The Challenge Production Team – Studio Lambert, The Garden / Netflix

In contrast, there were many genre winners when the 2024 BAFTA Television Craft Awards were previously announced on April 28.

(4) QUIRINO AWARDS. Animation Magazine reports the winners of the “Quirino Awards: ‘Robot Dreams,’ ‘Jasmine & Jambo,’ ‘Lulina and the Moon’”.

The Ibero-American Animation Quirino Awards closed its seventh edition with the awards ceremony on Saturday. Streamed worldwide, the Tenerife event was swept by animation from Spain, which won five of the 10 awards….

7th Quirino Awards Winners

  • Best Feature Film – Robot Dreams by Pablo Berger. Arcadia Motion Pictures, Lokiz Films, Noodles Prod., Les films du Worso (Spain, France).
  • Best Series – Jasmine & Jambo – Season 2 by Sílvia Cortés. Teidees Audiovisuals, Corporació Catalana de Mitjans Audiovisuals, with the participation of IB3 (Televisió de les illes Balears), Institut Català de les Empreses Culturals (Spain).
  • Best Short Film – Lulina and the Moo by Marcus Vinicius Vasconcelos and Alois Di Leo. Estudio Teremim (Brazil).
  • Best Animation School Short Film – The Leak by Paola Cubillos. KASK & Conservatorium Hogeschool Gent, Vrije Universiteit Brussels (Belgium, Colombia).
  • Best Commissioned Animation – In the Stars by Gabriel Osorio. Punkrobot Studio, Lucasfilm (Chile, US).
  • Best Music Video – SIAMÉS “All the Best” by Pablo Roldán. Rudo Company (Argentina).
  • Best Video Game Animation – The Many Pieces of Mr Coo directed by Nacho Rodríguez. Developed by Gammera Nest (Spain).
  • Best Visual Development – Sultana’s Dream by Isabel Herguera. Abano Producións, El Gatoverde Producciones, UniKo Estudio Creativo, Sultana Films, Fabian&Fred (Spain, Germany).
  • Best Animation Design – Cold Soup by Marta Monteiro. Animais AVPL, La Clairière Ouest (Portugal, France).
  • Best Sound Design and Original Music – Robot Dreams by Pablo Berger. Arcadia Motion Pictures, Lokiz Films, Noodles Production, Les films du Worso (Spain, France).

(5) FURRY STEM. “Furries, Neurodivergence, and STEM: Finding Your Path from Zero to One to One Billion” is Furries at Berkeley’s inaugural Furry Masterclass event, the first in a series of talks featuring prominent academic voices from within the furry community.

This talk is hosted by the fantastic Dr. David “Spottacus” Benaron! Spottacus is an inventor, entrepreneur, biochemist, a founding editorial board member of the Journal of Biomedical Optics, and a former professor at Stanford University. Among his achievements are the invention of the green light heart sensor, the first in vivo imaging of light-emitting genes, and the multispectral wearable optical sensor for tracking hemoglobin and hydration levels. Last year, Spottacus won a lifetime achievement award in biomedical optical physics from the International Society for Optics and Photonics. Spottacus is also a furry; a member of a community based upon the appreciation of anthropomorphic animals, featuring all kinds of creative self-expression. While furry has long been the target of misinterpretation and vitriol, folks like Spottacus show that fandom engagement and living outside the box can be boons rather than limitations. Spottacus’ talk explores his personal experiences with; as well as the intersections between; his career in STEM, the furry fandom, and neurodivergence.

(6) SFF FILMS THAT PASS MUSTER. BGR conducts a roll call of “The best sci-fi movies ever, according to Neil deGrasse Tyson”.

Celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has never been shy about expressing his opinion about movies on X/Twitter — and, specifically, weighing in as to whether they got the scientific elements right or not. On a recent episode of his show StarTalk, meanwhile, he decided to actually share a detailed list of the sci-fi movies that he thinks are the best of the best, detailing what they got right, what they missed the mark on, and why some of them are so good that they deserve a “hall pass” for any errors….

These are two of the films on his list:

The Martian (2015): Tyson describes this one, starring Matt Damon as an astronaut who gets stranded on Mars, as “the most scientifically accurate movie I’ve ever witnessed.”

The Blob (1958): Reaching deep into the past for this one, Tyson gives this old-school creature feature high marks because of the way it imagines aliens looking amoeba-like — totally different, in other words, from almost every other movie in which you see an alien depicted as something like a little green man.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born May 13, 1937 – Roger Zelazny. (Died 1995.)

By Paul Weimer: The author that got me into Science Fiction and Fantasy? Maybe.  My first science fiction and fantasy was Asimov (I,Robot), Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles) and Tolkien (The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings).  But it was Roger Zelazny who really made it stick. Sure, I read more of Asimov, and I tried to read The Silmarillion and failed, but it was reading Nine Princes in Amber and its sequels that really convinced me to get on the endless road through shadow to seek out other science fiction and fantasy. 

It is ironic that for a writer best known for his short stories that I started with, and for a while stuck with, Zelazny’s novels. After Amber came Jack of Shadows, Deus Irae, Dilvish the Damned, Lord of Light and others. 

Roger Zelazny

If I had to point a single novel at a reader for Zelazny, I would go with Jack of Shadows. Jack of Shadows does a lot of things that the second Amber series tries to do (and not always successfully) . And I have mentioned before and elsewhere science fantasy IS my jam. How can I resist a novel where the dayside of the Earth is run on science, and the darkside is run on magic? 

 It took me a while to actually find and delve into the short fiction that everyone had raved about.  The Last Defender of Camelot was the first collection of his I read, and then I started hunting his stories in “Best of” collections and other anthologies, and started filling in hjs oeuvre and trying to read all of his work. 

This is a process that continues to this day. 

Reading the NESFA collections of Roger Zelazny, which I have been reviewing here at File 770, I have realized how much of the Zelazny stories I have missed, and how much, for even the author that got me into SF and Fantasy, I still have a lot to learn about. My love for Roger Zelazny and his work is a lifelong journey. I suppose in theory there will come a day where I can say I have read all of Zelazny’s work. Someday. 

There are always surprises. I remember reading and liking a story in an old anthology of “best stories” that, much to my surprise, I only recently learned was a Zelazny story. (“The Game of Blood and Dust”). Zelazny continues to delight me.

But why do I like Zelazny’s work in the first place?  Even long before I picked up a camera, I’ve always been interested in imagery, in capturing moments. Zelazny captures these moments, that imagery, those scenes that resonate in my mind. Those moments captured, that lovely writing demands my attention. From Corwin walking down the stairs to Rebma, to Jack coming back from the death at the eastern pole of the world, to the Tristan and Isolde imagery of The Dream Master, to Hellwell in Lord of Light. And on, and on, and on. 

And such well drawn characters in often very limited space. They are often driven, and yes, the women very often have green eyes and red hair. (Zelazny had a type, you see) but I see that as feature, not bug. And yes, too many of them smoked, and that helped take him from us way way too soon. I never got to meet him, much to my sorrow. (He, Pratchett and Banks are three of my regrets in that regard). Dilvish the Damned, particularly comes across as a character we learn in bursts, in small bits of backstory and worldbuilding. (Also a lot of Zelazny’s characters are driven, almost to obsession.  They are passionate and seize things by the horns, and sometimes get the horns as a result.

But, finally, what other SFF author has written properties that I’ve mined and run roleplaying games out of for three decades, after all? Long live the work of Roger Zelazny.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Tom Gauld has been busy again.

(9) IT’S A WRAP. “’The Mummy’ at 25: Director on Brendan Fraser, Dwayne Johnson, Reboot” in The Hollywood Reporter.

Brendan has talked about doing some of his own stunts, during which he endured some bumps and scrapes.

We had a great stunt team, but Brendan [Fraser] is a big, tough guy, and he was younger back then. We kind of beat the crap out of him. Everybody talks about the scene when he gets hung. Usually when somebody gets hung, it’s a dummy, and that’s why they put bags over people’s heads. Brendan was always gung-ho, and he was like, “Make the noose really tight on me.” Then he decided to let his knees sag a little bit. But what he forgot is that the minute you put that much pressure on your carotid arteries, it knocks you out. We all looked, and he’s completely unconscious. It was fine, and he recovered in 10 seconds. But he woke up like, “What happened?”

(10) AGATHA UPDATE, MAYBE. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “What the Heck Is Happening With Marvel Studios’ Agatha Show?” asks Gizmodo. The studio must be telling them it’s “Narnia business!”

The fact that a show about a devious witch has us so confused feels completely on brand. It started back in late 2021 when Marvel revealed it was working on a WandaVision spinoff series focused on Kathryn Hahn’s breakout character, Agatha Harkness. Since then, the show has had at least four publicly announced titles, with a possible fifth revealed in the most Agatha of ways. All of which (witch?) is to say, what the heck is happening?

The first title revealed back in 2021 was Agatha: House of Harkness. A few months later, at Comic-Con 2022, that was changed to Agatha: Coven of Chaos. A year or so after that, it became Agatha: Darkhold Diaries. Finally, earlier this year, it became just plain Agatha. You’d imagine it couldn’t change again (unless, of course, Marvel finally goes with the always-best choice Agatha All Along) but that may not be the case. Monday morning, the official Marvel Studios account tweeted a new Agatha title which was deleted only minutes later. The title was Agatha: The Lying Witch With Great Wardrobe….

(11) SPACE MINING. Ars Technica tells how “In the race for space metals, companies hope to cash in”. If they can get their tech to work.

…Potential applications of space-mined material abound: Asteroids contain metals like platinum and cobalt, which are used in electronics and electric vehicle batteries, respectively. Although there are plenty of these materials on Earth, they can be more concentrated on asteroids than mountainsides, making them easier to scrape out. And scraping in space, advocates say, could cut down on the damaging impacts that mining has on this planet. Space-resource advocates also want to explore the potential of other substances. What if space ice could be used for spacecraft and rocket propellant? Space dirt for housing structures for astronauts and radiation shielding?…

… To further the company’s goals, AstroForge’s initial mission was loaded with simulated asteroid material and a refinery system designed to extract platinum from the simulant, to show that metal-processing could happen in space.

Things didn’t go exactly as planned. After the small craft got to orbit, it was hard to identify and communicate with among the dozens of other newly launched satellites. The solar panels, which provide the spacecraft with power, wouldn’t deploy at first. And the satellite was initially beset with a wobble that prevented communication. They have not been able to do the simulated extraction.

The company will soon embark on a second mission, with a different goal: to slingshot to an asteroid and take a picture — a surveying project which may help the company understand which valuable materials exist on a particular asteroid….

(12) TO AIR IS HUMAN. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This Earth-like exoplanet is the first confirmed to have an atmosphere. “‘Milestone’ discovery as JWST confirms atmosphere on an Earth-like exoplanet” in Nature. This is an important milestone in exo-planet astronomy.  55 Cancri e is too hot to support life as we know it, but could provide clues about Earth’s formation.

 Astronomers say that they have used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to detect for the first time an atmosphere surrounding a rocky planet outside the Solar System1. Although this planet cannot support life as we know it, in part because it is probably covered by a magma ocean, scientists might learn something from it about the early history of Earth — which is also a rocky planet and was once molten.

Finding a gaseous envelope around an Earth-like planet is a big milestone in exoplanet research, says Sara Seager, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who was not involved with the research. Earth’s thin atmosphere is crucial for sustaining life, and being able to spot atmospheres on similar terrestrial planets is an important step in the search for life beyond the Solar System.

Primary research here (abstract only as rest is behind a pay wall).

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid Moidelhoff over at the Media Death Cult  YouTube channel has had a look at a book by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, who was married to the Duke William Cavendish.  One of her books inspired Alan Moore…

[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, 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 12/26/23 Warning – Spindizzy Recall! Your City May Auto-Return Abruptly!

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(1) TO THE NASFIC AND BEYOND. A chapter of Sandra Bond’s Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund trip saga appears in the new issue of Geri Sullivan’s fanzine Idea 13. Says S&ra, “It contains my report on Pemmi-Con with detailed thoughts on What Went Wrong With It And Why.”

Day thirteen of TAFF, unlucky for some. Sandra Bond – already befuddled by her travels and overwhelmed by the generosity of North American fans – has left Minneapolis and has hitched a lift with Minnesota fans Curt Gibson and Alice Ableman in Curt’s mom’s SUV, riding north for NASFiC. No, you haven’t missed any previous instalments; they will be published elsewhere, in due course, and eventually a complete version will follow. I’m starting with this chapter, partly because Geri is publishing it and chapter 1 will largely be about her as my first host, and partly in order to air some issues arising from Pemmi-Con while the iron, so to speak, is hot….

Here’s a taste of those hot iron issues. Think of it as what the 2023 Worldcon experience would have looked like if Chengdu had not wrested it away from Winnipeg.

… (The programme as a whole showed every sign of having been thrown together by robots with no human eyes; for instance, the registration field had a space for you to enter your “organization.” I had put “TAFF”, which was fine, but Tanya Huff had foolishly essayed a little joke by putting “I am not at all organized” in that field, and was rewarded by having that phrase appended to her name on every single programme item featuring her. Others were flagged as variations on “n/a” or “–”, or found themselves billed as representing the organisation of “Myself” (Rich Horton) or “Julie E. Czerneda” (go on, guess). And Nisi Shawl – a fucking guest of honor, and consequently on many programme items – was accompanied on every occasion by the tag “I believe you already have my bio and photo.” Apparently they didn’t, since her “photo” was the generic one used for people who hadn’t supplied any.)…

(2) WHEN NEEDS MUST. The BBC interviewed a fan who remembers “When Tom Baker popped in to watch Doctor Who”. The experience wasn’t quite like when Dustin Hoffman needed to see “Wapner” in Rain Man, but was not entirely unlike it, either.

The time is November 1976, and the space is the Nuneaton branch of Radio Rentals, the old TV stockist that was once a familiar high street fixture. Pauline Bennett remembers being on shift there when a “very smart chap” walks in with a strange request.

“He came in about five o’clock and said he and Tom Baker needed to watch the Doctor Who episode that was going to be on shortly,” she said.

Titular star Baker had been travelling back from the show’s exhibition in Blackpool with BBC manager Terry Sampson when the pair were delayed by fog.

They had turned off the motorway heading for the town, hoping to persuade someone to let them watch the show, the first to feature filming at an outside location, she explained….

(3) FREE AT LAST. Jennifer Jenkins, Director, Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain, tells us what we can look forward to on “Public Domain Day 2024” at the Duke University School of Law blog.

On January 1, 2024, thousands of copyrighted works from 1928 will enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1923. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. This year’s highlights include Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence and The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht, Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman and Cole Porter’s Let’s Do It, and a trove of sound recordings from 1923. And, of course, 2024 marks the long-awaited arrival of Steamboat Willie – featuring Mickey and Minnie Mouse – into the public domain. That story is so fascinating, so rich in irony, so rife with misinformation about what you will be able to do with Mickey and Minnie now that they are in the public domain that it deserved its own article, “Mickey, Disney, and the Public Domain: a 95-year Love Triangle.” Why is it a love triangle? What rights does Disney still have? How is trademark law involved? Read all about it here. …

(4) NO WAITING FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN HERE. In “’Gale: Stay Away From Oz’ Offers a Horror Take on ‘The Wizard of Oz’”, The Mary Sue reminds everyone this 30-minute short already was released in September.

…In 2023, The Wizard of Oz books by L. Frank Baum entered the public domain. That means anyone can take those characters or the world of Oz and reimagine them in brand-new stories. The independent short horror film Gale: Stay Away From Oz does just that. According to IMDB, Gale‘s official summary is “Long gone are the days of emerald cities and yellow brick roads. In this dark re-imagining of the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy Gale is now an elderly woman, broken by years of paranormal entanglement with a mystical realm.” Emily Gale, the granddaughter of Dorothy, reconnects with her grandmother and the mystical realm that haunts her.

Unlike Winnie the Pooh, which also got the horror treatment, the original stories of Dorothy already lend themselves to the horror genre. Who hasn’t watched Return to Oz and felt terrified? With Gale: Stay Away From Oz, it seems like the curse of Oz haunts any of Dorothy’s descendants, which makes for an even creepier connection. So when is Gale: Stay Away From Oz coming out and where can you watch it?…

(5) AT THE NIMOY. “Mr. Spock’s Widow Puts on a Show” – and The New Yorker profiles her.

The other day, Susan Bay Nimoy—actress, writer, director, philanthropist, and widow of Leonard—stood at the entrance of a historic Art Deco theatre in Westwood, which she had helped to restore and convert to a live-performance space. On the marquee, lit bulbs spelled out the theatre’s new name: the Nimoy.

“There’s a lot of history,” Bay Nimoy, an exuberant eighty-year-old, said. “I called Jane Fonda and asked if she would come to the press opening, because her mother, Frances, funded the theatre.” More history: during the Second World War, newsreels played at the theatre; “Dr. Strangelove” had its first L.A. screening there, in 1964. Two decades later, when Disney managed the theatre, “Three Men and a Baby” was the opening film. Leonard was the director; Bay Nimoy accompanied him to the première. “It was certainly in the eighties, because I wore a black suit with big shoulder pads, with a lot of jewelled things on them,” she said….

… “Leonard and I came from very poor backgrounds. His father was a barber. My dad was an accountant,” Bay Nimoy said. The couple invested their Hollywood earnings in California real estate and contemporary art. “Leonard was not a fancy person,” she went on. When they met, she said, “I was driving a Honda.” Their goal was to give their children—he had two, she had one—a buffer, and no more. “They will not be gabillionaires, but they have a leg up,” she said. “And the rest we’re giving away.” They built a Jewish day school (their rabbi asked them to), a new theatre at Griffith Observatory (Leonard loved outer space), and a theatre for Symphony Space, in New York (where Leonard used to perform short stories)….

(6) NOTHING YOU HAVEN’T THOUGHT OF YOURSELF. Maris Kreizman tells New York Times Readers “Let’s Rescue Book Lovers From This Online Hellscape”.  

… In an ideal world — one in which it wasn’t owned by Amazon — Goodreads would have the functionality of a site like Letterboxd, the social network for movie fans. Letterboxd has called itself “Goodreads for movies” but it has far surpassed that initial tag line, having figured out how to create a smooth and intuitive user experience, provide a pleasant and inviting community and earn revenue from both optional paid memberships and advertisers, including studios that produce the films being discussed. Meanwhile, publishers still rely on Goodreads to find potential readers, but targeted advertising has grown both less affordable and less effective.

So how to fix it? It starts with people: Goodreads desperately needs more human moderation to monitor the goings-on. Obviously, part of any healthy discussion is the ability to express displeasure — those one-star reviews, ideally accompanied by well-argued rationales, are sacrosanct — but Goodreads has enabled the weaponization of displeasure.

It’s not just fledgling authors being pummeled. Earlier this year, Elizabeth Gilbert, the best-selling author of “Eat, Pray, Love,” decided to withdraw a forthcoming novel, “The Snow Forest,” after Goodreads users bombarded its page with one-star reviews objecting primarily to the fact that the novel (which no one had yet read) was set in Russia and would be published at a time when Russia and Ukraine were at war. There is most likely no way to eliminate personal attacks entirely from the site — or from the internet, for that matter — but having more human beings on hand to mitigate the damage would certainly improve the experience.

Fortifying the guard rails wouldn’t be that difficult. Currently Goodreads uses volunteer librarians who add new books to the site’s database in their free time. Hiring these people (and scores more like them) and paying them a living wage would empower Goodreads’s representatives to communicate with publishers, large and small, to facilitate posting books to the site when, and only when, a book has actually been written and edited and is ready to be shared with the world….

(7) CURING YOUR WHO HANGOVER. In the unlikely event that you need somebody to explain the Doctor Who Christmas Special to you, The Hollywood Reporter has volunteered. “’Doctor Who’ Christmas Special “The Church on Ruby Road,” Explained”. For everyone else, beware spoilers. The following excerpt is a little spoilery though not prohibitively so, I thought.

…Initially, Mrs. Flood would appear to be just a normal neighbor. Nothing unusual about her, until we see her sitting down to enjoy the TARDIS dematerializing. Something that most humans would balk at.

However, not for Mrs. Flood. In fact, at the end of the episode, she says to her understandably shocked neighbor (who also witnessed The Doctor’s ship disappearing), “Never seen a TARDIS before?”

And, if this wasn’t enough, she looks directly down the camera and winks. Mrs. Flood is clearly someone to be reckoned with, and undoubtedly will make a return. But is she a familiar character in the Whoniverse? (Time Lords change their appearance quite regularly.) Or, is this a new friend/foe for The Doctor? Names have often hinted at deeper connections and meanings in Doctor Who (see Melody Pond and River Song, for example) — is there a clue here?

Mrs. Flood is played by Anita Dobson, who will be known to many in the U.K. as she made a name for herself as alcoholic landlady Angie Watts in the BBC’s long-running soap, Eastenders. An accomplished stage actress, Dobson is also married to Brian May, guitarist for rock outfit Queen (who’ve had a number of songs feature memorably in Doctor Who, such as “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and “Don’t Stop Me Now”)….

(8) IT ONLY GETS WORSE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Did you get new clothes for Christmas? Then beware Jólakötturinn, the gigantic Yule Cat, which will chase you down and eat you if you don’t wear those clothes! “Meet the Yule Cat, an Icelandic folklore beast who eats children” on NPR.

… That’s right. A child’s worst nightmare — new clothes under the tree — could only be outdone by a somehow worse nightmare, being devoured by a ferocious feline that hunts down children caught not wearing their new clothes.

The tale of Jólakötturinn, which translates to Yule Cat, is an Icelandic Christmas classic dating back to at least 1932, according to the Icelandic Folklore website, a research project managed by the University of Iceland….

(9) THE COMPUTER SAYS ‘CHEESE!’ “A.I. Is the Future of Photography. Does That Mean Photography Is Dead?” wonders Gideon Jacobs in an opinion piece for the New York Times.

John Szarkowski, the legendary curator at the MoMA, once described photography as “the act of pointing.” And for the nearly 200 years since its inception, photography has consisted of capturing a visual perspective from the physical world using light — first with light-sensitive plates, then film, then digital sensors. When digital cameras became widely available, many photographers lamented the move away from analog technology but basically Szarkowski’s definition still held: Photography consists of pointing, as a reaction to something that exists in the world.

With advent of A.I. image generators, however, this definition feels obsolete.

Generative A.I. tools can produce photorealistic images, typically in response to written prompts. These images are available for purchase from major stock photography agencies, alongside traditional photos. They routinely go viral before being debunked. They even occasionally win prestigious photography prizes. All if which has reignited a two-centuries-old debate: What exactly qualifies as a photograph?

… Artists, writers and theorists have long remarked on our very human tendency to project slippery ideas about truth onto two dimensional surfaces. In 1921, Franz Kafka was told about a miraculous machine that could automatically take one’s portrait, a “mechanical Know-Thyself.” He offered up his own name for the apparatus: “The Mistake-Thyself.” Kafka was ahead of his time — in Susan Sontag’s 1977 essay “In Plato’s Cave,” she wrote, “Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.” Each photograph, she argued, is inevitably the product of countless decisions informed, consciously or not, by the photographer’s predilections and biases, as well as the limits and parameters of the technology.

So when I hear some people calling the arrival of A.I. an extinction-level event for photography, I often think of the French painter Paul Delaroche who, legend has it, declared painting “dead” after seeing a daguerreotype, one of the first photographic inventions. Painting did not die; it just evolved into a different kind of artistry, freed from the obligations of verisimilitude….

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born December 26, — Elisha Cook, Jr. (Died 1995.) His first major role was the psychopathic killer Wilmer Cook in the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon. Yeah there are two versions, I’ve never seen the earlier version. Anyone here seen it? 

Now as for genre roles, his first was a Boris Korloff film, Voodoo Island, in which he was Martin Schuyler. Adam West is here in his first film role, uncredited.

His next horror film with Vincent Price, House on Haunted Hill, in which he was Watson Pritchard, is interesting because exterior shots of the house were filmed at the historic Ennis House in Los Feliz, California, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and built in 1924.

Here’s a curious one for you. The Haunted Palace is a horror film starring Vincent Price Lon Chaney Jr. in which he’s Micah Smith / Peter Smith. The film was marketed as based on a Poe title but only the title is from him – the plot is from Lovecraft’s “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” novella.

I saw Rosemary’s Baby once in which he played Mr. Nicklas. That was more than enough, thank you.  Hey, he’s in the original The Night Stalker movie as Mickey Crawford. Neat. And next up is being Gordon “Weasel” Phillips in Salem’s Lot, a scary film indeed.

Most memorable series appearance? As Samuel T. Cogley, Esq in Star Trek’s “Court Martial” episode of course. He also made a Wild, Wild West appearance as Gideon McCoy in “The Night of the Bars of Hell”, the new Twilight Zone in “Welcome to Winfield” as Weldon, The Bionic Woman in “Once a Thief” as Inky and in ALF in “We’re So Sorry, Uncle Albert” as Uncle Albert.  Oh, and his first television appearance was on the Adventures of Superman in “Semi-Private Eye” as Homer Garrity.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) EJECT! Arturo Serrano declares “Rebel Moon is the most Snyder that Snyder has ever been” at Nerds of a Feather. And that’s not a good thing.

One could summarize Rebel Moon as “the Zack Snyder of Star Wars,” which would sound mean-spirited if it weren’t its literal description. Conceived originally as Snyder’s pitch for Lucasfilm and eventually rescued by Netflix, Rebel Moon files off the Star Wars serial numbers just enough to prevent lawsuits from the Mouse. As you would expect, it tells the story of a loosely assembled team of impromptu freedom fighters who rise up against a brutal interstellar empire. A tale as old as time, and one that Lucasfilm has kept profitable for nine movies and I forget how many TV shows. But Snyder’s version of this formula, stripped of its identifiable markers for legal reasons, becomes a nameless, featureless collection of plot beats and cool poses. If there was ever a time when the infamous itch for canceling everything at Netflix could be used for good, it’s now. There’s no need for a Rebel Moon Part 2, or for all the multimedia spinoffs Snyder is reportedly preparing. This is not the galaxy you’re looking for….

(13) TO HELL AND MAYBE BACK. Disney+ has started airing the new series based on Rick Riordan’s YA fictionalization of Greek myth: “Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Quest Begins in New Clip” from Comicbook.com.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians is gearing up to kick off its quest. The serialized adaptation of Rick Riordan‘s best-selling novels made its surprise debut on December 19th, dropping its first two episodes six hours ahead of schedule in the Tuesday primetime slot. This came with the announcement that all future episodes of Percy Jackson would get the primetime treatment, as the rest of Season 1 will premiere at 9 PM ET. The last fans saw, Percy (Walker Scobell) was officially claimed by his father, Poseidon, and given the news that he must lead a cross-country quest to retrieve Zeus’s (Lance Reddick) stolen master bolt. The belief is that Hades (Jay Duplass) stole it out of jealousy and is keeping it in the Underworld….

(14) STRANGE NEW WORLDS. We hear from the Guardian “How the James Webb telescope is ‘set to find strange and bizarre worlds’”.

There is a distant world where quartz crystals float above a searing hot, puffy atmosphere. Vaporised sand grains, not water droplets, form the clouds that fill the sky on Wasp-107b, a planet 1,300 light years from Earth.

Then there is GJ1214, the sauna planet. With a mass eight times that of Earth, it orbits its parent star at a distance that is one-seventieth of the gap between Earth and the sun and seems to be coated in a thick dense atmosphere containing vast amounts of steam.

Or there are the giant, Jupiter-sized planets of the Orion Nebula which have been discovered free-floating in space, rogue worlds that appear to be unconnected to any parent star – to the bafflement of astronomers….

(15) A YEAR’S WORTH OF SCREEN TIME. Gizmodo picks out the “40 Most Memorable Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror Movie Moments of 2023”. Here’s one example:

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: Jarnathan Arrives

This is the moment you knew Honor Among Thieves absolutely got Dungeons & Dragons. It’s an incredible set-up to a gag that builds over the opening scenes, establishing the roguish humor of our heroes, throwing a loving curveball to an esoteric D&D race, and of course giving us the most perfect ass-pull of a character name that feels like a Dungeon Master made it up for an NPC on the spot mid-improv. Oh Jarnathan, indeed.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Our Pros bring Wednesday Addams to the Strictly Ballroom” from the BBC.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Daniel Dern, Jeff Warner, Kathy Sullivan, 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 Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 12/22/23 Lot 97! One Child’s Space Suit, Never Travelled In

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(1) FUTURE TENSE. The December 2023 entry in the Future Tense Fiction series is “Rigland,” by Suyi Davies Okungbowa. The story is about oil rigs and what we owe to our communities.

It was published along with a response essay by journalist Mia Armstrong-López: “What if Oil Platforms Belonged to the People Who Worked on Them?”.

…When I set out to report on Mexican women working offshore, I expected to focus on harassment, discrimination, and abuse and the grueling labor conditions that facilitate them. Women are in the minority on platforms—one interviewee was the only woman among dozens of men; others recounted being in groups of only five or 10 women on an entire platform, outnumbered 1 to 10 or 20. The conditions they face are often punishing: In Mexico, platforms are isolated with limited communication, living situations are dorm-style and sometimes coed, and many workers have short-term contracts with little protection. The work is dangerous—they’re exposed to heavy machinery, harsh weather, and hazardous chemicals.

I heard plenty of stories of these precarious conditions—women who were spied on while they showered or changed, discriminated against due to pregnancy, and verbally abused. But more often, women shared experiences like the fishing story. They wanted to tell me about spending hours carving tomatoes to look like flowers to make a meal feel more special; about coordinating workers to bring their favorite candies to stuff holiday piñatas so they would all feel less alone; about learning to teach yoga, helping their colleagues relieve the years of work-related pain and exhaustion their bodies had come to carry. They told me these stories not to excuse or brush over the other, darker realities of working offshore but to show me, Look what we’ve built, despite it all….

(2) ANOTHER DAY IN COURT. Michele Lundgren, charged as a Michigan fake Trump elector in July, was back in court on December 13 along with five other defendants to hear testimony before a judge who will eventually rule whether the Michigan Attorney General’s office has established probable cause for the felony charges to proceed to trial. “Michigan elections director says he contacted AG on false electors” in the Detroit News. Michele Lundgren is the wife of Carl Lundgren, a well-known sff artist.

Michigan elections director Jonathan Brater testified in court Wednesday that he contacted the Attorney General’s office after finding out about a certificate state Republicans signed falsely claiming Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election.

Brater’s revelation highlighted the first day of preliminary examinations in the criminal cases of six of the 16 Republicans whose names appeared on the certificate, which was part of an attempt to flip Michigan’s 16 electoral votes to Trump although Democrat Joe Biden won Michigan in November 2020.

Over about seven hours of testimony in Ingham County District Court, prosecutors from Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office and defense lawyers repeatedly clashed over what the importance of the false certificate was, Michigan election law and even who could be in the courtroom.

The examinations will continue Thursday with Ingham County District Court Judge Kristen Simmons eventually having to decide whether the Attorney General’s office has established probable cause for the eight felony charges it’s brought against each of the Republicans to proceed to trial….

(3) KEEP A HANKY READY. Camestros Felapton’s “Smith Rewatch: Vincent and the Doctor”. Maybe cue Judy Garland singing, “You made me love you / I didn’t want to do it….”

…Let’s make it potentially worse by adding in a writer against which Moffat’s attraction to twee Britishisms and romcoms looks positively restrained. Richard Curtis getting to write floppy haired Matt Smith as a surrogate Hugh Grant sounds like a recipe for disaster.

And yet, this is one of the most beloved episodes of Doctor Who — perhaps more with its general normy audience rather than die-hard Who fans but still one that is often pointed at. I think I went into this episode feeling cynical, I’ll concede the ending touched me but it felt messy to me at the time. On rewatch? I’ll confess that I started tearing up much earlier than the plot demanded. It is very sentimental but a good rule for Who is to always go a little bit extra with whatever direction the story is heading….

(4) THE NEW DOCTOR. [Item by Steven French.] In the run up to the Xmas special, Ncuti Gatwa on Xmas, family and Dr Who: “Ncuti Gatwa: ‘I know many a gay man who’s exactly like the Doctor’” in the Guardian.

 “We choose our families. And the Doctor is a lonely wanderer, looking for their next adventure … I know many a gay man, MANY a gay man, I could describe that way!” He laughs. “I think that’s a beautiful, beautiful theme Doctor Who has, because chosen family can be more meaningful, more supportive. That really can be the case, and it’s a theme that absolutely runs through the show.”

(5) ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES. “Can the Oompa-Loompas Be Saved?” The New York Times seriously doubts it, if the answer depends on finding a way to make them politically correct.  

What do we do with the Oompa-Loompas?

That’s a question filmmakers and writers have tangled with ever since the 1964 debut of the tiny, largely unpaid laborers in Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s book “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

In Dahl’s original, the Oompa-Loompas were starving African pygmies, subsisting largely on a mash of green caterpillars and tree bark until “rescued” by Willy Wonka. He smuggled the entire tribe out of Africa in packing crates to live and work, and sing and goof and dance, in the chocolatier’s plantation, er, factory.

“It didn’t occur to me that my depiction of the Oompa-Loompas was racist,” Dahl said in a 1988 interview. “But it did occur to the N.A.A.C.P. and others.”

In the five decades since their literary debut, the Oompa-Loompas have undergone a series of transformations to shake their story from its colonialist roots. Some fixes have been transparently cosmetic (in subsequent editions of the book, illustrators simply made the tribesmen white). Others weren’t fixes at all: In the 2005 film “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” the director, Tim Burton, just shifted continents, moving the Oompa-Loompas out of Africa to someplace that vaguely resembles South America, as imagined by an adventure film director from the 1950s.

In the Warner Bros. prequel “Wonka,” which opens Dec. 15, the filmmakers address the colonialist aspects head on…

(6) WESTERCON. [Item by Kevin Standlee.] The official papers of Westercon as of the end of Westercon 75 (Loscon 49) have been updated and are available at Bylaws & Business – Westercon

This document includes:

  • Minutes of the Westercon 75 Business Meeting
  • Links to video of the Business Meeting and the Committee of the Whole on Site Selection held thereat
  • Bylaws and Standing Rules as of the end of Westercon 75 and the Draft Agenda for the Westercon 76 Business Meeting.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born December 22, 1951 — Charles de Lint, 72. Need I say this is just my personal choices by an author I’ve known personally for over thirty years now? I think not.

Let’s start with Moonheart, the novel that Tamson House at its heart, a most amazing architectural wonder which may be at center of the universe. It amazes me with every page. I know that’s why readers I’ve talked to pick it as their favorite of his considerable writings. The sequel, Spiritwalk, is a patch-up novel and in someways a deeper, more interesting story, mainly because the characters are more flawed.

Moonheart is set in home city of Ottawa as are these three novels. Yarrow is an autumnal tale of a woman who has stopped dreaming, and the two Jack of Kinrowan novels, Jack, the Giant-Killer and Drink Down the Moon, involve the fey courts in Ottawa. If you like War for the Oaks, I think that you will like these novels. 

Charles deLint at 1980 World Fantasy Con. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

Memory and Dream is his take on artists and their work with the usual magic thrown in. Lots of pre-Raphaelite influence here, I think if I remember correctly that he has an artist named Ruskin. Very interesting. 

Someplace to Be Flying is the first of two novels set in his city of Newford that I deeply, madly love. This one introduces the Crow Girls, immortal shape shifters who just want to have fun and eat sugar. Really they do. It’s got great characters, wonderful settings and a fantastic story as does Forests of The Heart which adds a large dollop of Irish music and the green man to boot to the Newford setting.

The Mystery of Grace which was his last novel for Tor for reasons that were interesting to say the least is a fantastic story of a motorcycle riding female mechanic who may have crossed over to the other side when the veils on Día de los Muertos grew too thin in the right, or if you prefer, wrong place. Stellar writing by him. 

The Cats of Tanglewood Forest as infused with lavish illustrations by his friend Charles Vess should be read by anyone who loves cats, Appalachian folklore or just a great story. Need I say the book itself is stunningly gorgeous?  Lillian here was the girl in A Circle of Cats, the children book done by him and again illustrated by Vess. Again recommended. Medicine Road will feature a grown up Lillian. 

His newest undertaking, in which Junniper Wiles is the central character, is a mystery series and a lot of fun. More light heated than some of his fiction has been, not a bad tack to take.

So how are his short stories you say? Extraordinarily good. For over a decade before he stopped publishing them, he sent me his annual Winter chapbook on Triskell Press, a perfect treat from him. 

If I was going to recommend but one collection to read by him, it would be an easy pick and that would be Dreams Underfoot. It has “The Moon is Drownimg While I Sleep”, maybe his best story ever, and other excellent stories such as “The Sacred Fire” which was produced as an episode of the The Hunger anthology television series hosted first by Terrence Stamp and then by David Bowie  and was first shown I some twenty-five years ago. 

He did a later collection as well on his new publisher, Tachyon Press, The Best of Charles de Lint. I’ll admit I’ve not looked at its content so let me do that now. Huh, it’s up but Tachyon Press didn’t do an epub edition so he did it himself.  I will recommend it as the stories in The Very Best of Charles de Lint are those of Dreams Underfoot plus a whole more of his later work.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • Carpe Diem continues its Star Wars and pets imitating their owners theme.
  • Eek! has the worst gift.
  • Eek! also has a silly demonstration of a bit of monster trivia many get wrong.

(9) TO DYE FOR. The Guardian pages back to the 19th century to explain “How a European colour revolution brought us the humble Christmas card”.

What would Christmas be without the humble Christmas card? It’s hard to think of a more quintessentially British seasonal tradition than propping up colourful bits of stiff paper on your mantelpiece, but in fact we wouldn’t be sending each other bits of stiff paper were it not for a feat of pan-European collaboration – and competition – cooked up in the mid-19th century. Many of our most familiar traditions percolated down from Britain’s royal and aristocratic families, who themselves had imported many of them from their German forebears. But it wasn’t until the widespread adoption of colour printing in the 1860s that Christmas cards, first commissioned as high-status, handcrafted items in the 1840s, became cheap enough for the middle and lower classes to get their hands on them.

Some of these early mass-produced cards are on show at the Ashmolean in Oxford, as part of their Colour Revolution exhibition. To the modern eye they are pretty elaborate affairs, dating from the 1880s, with beautifully coloured floral images, silk tassels and fringes, dyed vibrant shades of purple and orange. The cards may be small but they are part of an important story, one that the exhibition aims to tell in a detailed way. It concerns the almost incalculably formative influence of the mid-19th century “chromatic turn”, in which the Victorians’ obsession with admiring, analysing and then manufacturing colour in all sorts of areas – fashion, art, design, advertising – made itself felt across Britain, France and Germany, and indeed the rest of the world.

The Ashmolean exhibition is a brilliant and fascinating show, re-creating elements of the 1862 International Exhibition in London’s South Kensington, which showcased 19th-century attempts to reconstruct the original colours of ancient Greek sculpture (including Alma-Tadema’s fabulous painting Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends), and some elaborate late-Victorian fashions, including a gruesome necklace made from dead hummingbirds.

The show’s key element may appear slightly dusty by comparison: a section outlining the development of synthetic aniline dyes, starting in 1856 with the invention of the strident purple known as “mauveine” by young British chemist William Henry Perkin, while studying under German professor August Wilhelm von Hofmann. Discovered accidentally as Perkin was trying to produce a malaria treatment from coal tar, mauveine – and its subsequent counterparts such as fuchsine (reddish-purple), and induline (bluish red) – were cheap to produce and had enormous commercial success as, for the first time, brightly coloured fabric became affordable for large swathes of the European lower and middle classes, allowing them to indulge in fancy dresses, hats, upholstery and, yes, Christmas card tassels….

(10) SECOND TO NONE. What is the exact time? Tom Vanderbilt learned why it’s hard to tell: “In Search of Lost Time” at Harper’s.

…The night before my visit, I’d opened time.gov, the very official-looking page—headlined official u.s. time—run by NIST and the U.S. Naval Observatory. The site features a map of the United States, divided into time zones, as well as a variety of subsidiary clock displays (Chamorro Standard Time, Aleutian Standard Time) that ticked, at the second level, in seeming synchrony. I noticed that my own watch—the Garmin Forerunner 935, a “premium running watch,” which generally gets its time from four of the thirty-one operational GPS satellites encircling the globe—looked to be a second behind. Why?

This was one of the first questions I put to Judah Levine, an eighty-two-year-old JILA physicist and one of “America’s timekeepers.” “The handheld guys are typically wrong by a second or a half-second,” Levine said. “That’s because the device’s display is not fast enough.” He said this with weary resignation. White-haired, with gold-rimmed glasses, wearing a blue flannel shirt, gray work pants, and sturdy black shoes, Levine reminded me of one of those somewhat cantankerous master craftsmen you still find in certain old quarters of Brooklyn. The shelves of his office were lined with physics textbooks, and an Oregon Scientific clock—which gets a radio signal from NIST—displayed the time in blocky liquid-crystal numbers.

In fairness to my watch, Levine explained that time.gov (which had informed me that the laptop I was using had strayed “+0.012 s”) was itself off by a noticeable amount. “It takes a while for the signal to transfer across the network, which we don’t control,” he explained. The actual correct time was on display in a laboratory adjacent to Levine’s office. It appeared as a string of red digits on a device that looked like a high-end stereo amplifier. This was a display of the official time, which is kept by a series of cesium fountain atomic clocks a few miles away, at NIST’s Boulder campus, and sent via satellite to JILA. Here was the seat of temporal power, the nation’s pulsing metronome. I watched the red LED seconds tick away, bathing in their implacable authority. It was then, however, that Levine introduced another complication. The time we were looking at might actually, a month from now, be deemed incorrect….

(11) THE DOORS, NOT THE DALEKS, WERE THE REAL NIGHTMARE. “Doctor Who: TV crew member recalls genesis of the Daleks” at BBC.com.

On 21 December 1963, some of the most feared characters in science fiction first appeared on screen.

The first episode of Doctor Who in which the dreaded Daleks appeared – The Dead Planet – was broadcast on BBC television.

While the rest of the country watched from behind their sofas, Sue Webb, from Winchester, was working as a producer’s assistant at the BBC’s Lime Grove studios in Shepherd’s Bush, west London.

Sixty years on, she has been recalling the recording of this landmark moment in TV sci-fi.

Ms Webb admits to being initially unimpressed about working on the BBC’s new science fiction drama for Saturday teatimes, based on an eccentric alien, played by William Hartnell, who time travelled in a police phone box.

“It was really just another programme and not what we were used to – we’re drama darling – we do play,” she says.

She recalls the studio being “actually a bit too small”.

“We had to fit in a petrified forest and a metal city for the Daleks,” she says, adding: “It looks like cardboard boxes covered in sheets.”

As for the metallic pepperpot-shaped aliens, created by designer Raymond Cusick, Ms Webb remembers rehearsals with actors “trolleying” around on castors in just the bottom halves of the characters that would become The Doctor’s nemesis.

She says: “Daleks were difficult creatures to move around. They got very hot and the actors were very uncomfortable inside.”

Actor David Graham, along with Peter Hawkins, spoke the Daleks’ lines in a booth off-screen. Graham later worked on Thunderbirds and Hawkins was the voice of Captain Pugwash….

…”The whole episode creaks – it just doesn’t look real at all – the actual surroundings would look terribly amateur.

“The real nightmare was the set with all those sliding doors – they were supposed to rise and sometimes they didn’t.

“You have got to rise above it and accept some things are dodgy, keep fingers crossed and hope for the best.”…

(12) LITERARY MOONS. “See the James Webb Telescope’s Stunning New Image of Uranus With Its Rings and Moons Clearer Than Ever” at Smithsonian Magazine.

…Nine of Uranus’s 27 moons can be seen surrounding the planet in the new image, shining like pearls. Individual astronomers discovered the ice giant’s five largest moons between 1787 and 1948. When Voyager 2 flew by Uranus in 1986, it discovered ten more natural satellites. Since then, the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based observations have brought the total to what it is today.

The ice giant’s moons are sometimes referred to as the “literary moons,” because they’re named for characters in Shakespeare’s plays, along with a few from the works of Alexander Pope. Those in Webb’s close-up image, moving clockwise from 2 o’clock, are called Rosalind, Puck, Belinda, Desdemona, Cressida, Bianca, Portia, Juliet and Perdita. (A second, wide-view image shows 14 moons.)…

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

Pixel Scroll 9/13/23 Scroll Your Pixels Well

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(1) LE GUIN ON HER ILLEGAL ABORTION IN 1950. Arwen Curry told Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin Kickstarter backers that a “New Ursula K. Le Guin short film series starts today on LitHub!”

The Journey That Matters, a series of six short films about Ursula K. Le Guin’s life and work that will be serialized on Literary Hub, based on outtakes from the feature documentary you all helped me to create. Spending time with Ursula meant having access to her warm, wise perceptions about all kinds of questions in literature and life. With these little films, I hope to share some more of that abundance.

It starts today with “What it Was Like,” in which Ursula reads her powerful essay about the illegal abortion she had as a senior at Radcliffe in 1950, which she credits with allowing her to pursue her career as a writer and to build her family. It’s a chilling reminder of what we’ve lost since Roe fell — and how women’s success and happiness is predicated on our bodily autonomy….

See the first video in the series on Literary Hub: “Ursula K. Le Guin on Her Illegal Abortion in 1950” introduced by Elisabeth Le Guin and Caroline Le Guin:

As young women growing up under the protection of Roe, we never really talked with our mother about her abortion. Elisabeth [Le Guin] learned that it had occurred when she went through several abortions of her own in the 1980s; but what we know about the story of Ursula’s necessarily different experience comes to us through her written words, as it does to you.  “The Princess” was her keynote address to NARAL Pro-Choice America in 1982 when Roe was not even a decade old, and this piece, “What It Was Like,” was a talk for Oregon’s NARAL chapter in 2004. These stories are public statements, performances of Ursula’s own life material as a means to inspire and transform. The second of them, which you are about to hear, is also a rather extraordinary public love letter to her own family.

This is a hard essay to read or listen to, and it’s meant to be. Clearly, it was hard to write; watching Ursula in her 80s read her own words aloud, more than a decade after she wrote them, the emotion is palpable—and that shy little shrug at the end, that letting go. For us, it’s hard to watch. It’s a hard thing to think about your mother having an abortion, and an illegal one at that—to do so takes you to an exquisitely painful, vulnerable place, imagining what she went through: the shame, the grief, the sense of loss she must have experienced, the lingering, corrosive doubt. A hard thought exercise, but necessary to fully honor the fact that she could later choose to carry you to term, bring you into the world, into her world, to love and mother you the way she wanted to mother….

(2) NEW SFWA PROGRAM SEEKS INTERNS. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) received a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) to support a new program they’re launching: Publishing Taught Me. This program will be shepherded by Nisi Shawl, an accomplished and multiple award-winning author, editor, instructor, and Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award recipient. It will take place over the coming year. And the press release adds that “Publishing Taught Me Launches with an Intern Search”.

…Publishing Taught Me will produce an online essay series, to be collated into an anthology, and a symposium aimed at promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres. This will be done by inviting publishing professionals of color to describe their journeys and to provide advice and motivation to writers entering the field via their essays and participation in a Publishing Taught Me symposium. These goals will be accomplished with the support of two paid interns, who will serve as assistant editors for the essay series, symposium, and resultant anthology.

As managing editor for the project, Shawl will oversee the operational aspects of putting together an online essay series and anthology, and will work with SFWA staff to coordinate and execute their publication and the associated events. They will also provide mentorship to the two assistant editor interns, who should be early in their professional publishing careers.

We are now recruiting for the assistant editor internship positions for this program. Interested individuals must be at least at 18 years of age, and should have at least three months previous editing experience, preferably within the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres, and a firsthand knowledge of the challenges facing people of color in the current publishing environment. Familiarity with Google Docs, Zoom, WordPress, and Canva is a plus.

Responsibilities include soliciting and editing project essays, overseeing contributor agreement completion, assisting with arranging the essays within the final publication, helping to establish and supporting project participant communication protocols, and preparing marketing materials for the project. The term “editing” includes developmental editing, line editing, and copyediting.

The editorial assistants’ work on the project begins November 1, 2023 and will be completed in November 2024. Hours worked will vary from week to week, but the anticipated time commitment will be up to 50 hours per month per person. A flat $2,000 stipend will be provided to each intern for their participation in the program.

If you are interested in applying, please complete the application here by September 30, 2023. We encourage you to share this opportunity with anyone who qualifies and would benefit from learning about the science fiction, fantasy, and horror publishing industry as they fill this important role.

…This program will deliver invaluable insight into our industry that will benefit current and future genre storytellers, and we’re excited to bring it into existence. For questions about Publishing Taught Me, please contact publishing-taught-me@sfwa.org. 

(3) STURGEON SYMPOSIUM NEXT WEEK. Katie Conrad, Interim Director of the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction shared the schedule for the Second Annual Sturgeon Symposium being held at the University of Kansas from September 20-22. Full details at the link.  

The Symposium theme this year, “Fantastic Worlds, Fraught Futures,” was inspired by this year’s KU Common Book, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. The festivities start Tuesday night (9/19) with a co-sponsored Feminist Futures Forum, and continue through Friday (9/20-9/22) with a three-day academic conference open to all and events including a zine workshop (Wednesday afternoon), an open-to-all young adult creative writing workshop with YA author L.L. McKinney (Thursday afternoon), the reception and presentation of the annual Sturgeon Award with a reading by author Samantha Mills (Thursday evening), a closing reception in the gallery with the KU Common Work of Art (Friday afternoon), and a free showing of the movie The Host (Friday evening).  

(4) WHAT LIES IN STORE FOR SIMON & SCHUSTER? The Atlantic warns about the potential consequences of KKR’s purchase of Simon & Schuster in “Private Equity Comes for Book Publishing”.

Earlier this year, the Department of Justice blocked Penguin Random House, owned by the German media giant Bertelsmann, from acquiring Simon & Schuster. The big five publishers—HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster—already control about 80 percent of the book market. The literary class was relieved.

Less than a year later, the private-equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts announced that it would buy Simon & Schuster. Because the firm doesn’t already own a competing publisher, the deal is unlikely to trigger another antitrust probe. But KKR, infamous as Wall Street’s “barbarians at the gate” since the 1980s, may leave Simon & Schuster employees and authors yearning for a third choice beyond a multinational conglomerate or a powerful financial firm.

“It may be a stay of execution, but we should all be worried about how things will look at Simon & Schuster in five years,” says Ellen Adler, the publisher at the New Press, a nonprofit focused on public-interest books….

…In their recent book about private equity, These Are the Plunderers, Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner recount maddening stories about KKR: how it bankrupted Toys “R” Us; gouged residents of Bayonne, New Jersey, for water and sewage; and, very recently, ran a vital provider of emergency services into the ground. If KKR’s latest deal follows a similar trajectory, Morgenson and Rosner might have a harder time documenting it. Their publisher is Simon & Schuster….

(5) DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE 2023. Noah Hawley’s Anthem is a work of genre interest among the six fiction finalists for the 2023 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Given for both fiction and nonfiction, the prize honors writers whose work uses the power of literature to foster peace, social justice, and global understanding. Each winner receives a $10,000 cash prize.

2023 Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalists

Anthem by Noah Hawley (Grand Central Publishing)

Something grave is happening to teenagers across America. Recovering from his sister’s tragic passing, Simon breaks out of a treatment facility to join a man called “The Prophet” on a quest as urgent as it is enigmatic. Their journey becomes a rescue mission when they set off to save a woman being held captive by a man who goes by “The Wizard” in this freewheeling adventure that finds unquenchable light in the dark corners of society.

Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta by James Hannaham (Little, Brown and Company)

A trans woman, Carlotta Mercedes, reenters life on the outside after more than twenty years in a men’s prison. Set over the course of a whirlwind Fourth of July weekend, Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta follows her struggles to reconcile with the son she left behind, to reunite with a family reluctant to accept her true identity, and to avoid anything that might send her back to lockup.

Horse by Geraldine Brooks (Viking)

A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history. Based on the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred Lexington, Horse is a novel of art and science, love and obsession, and our unfinished reckoning with racism.

Mecca by Susan Straight (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

From the National Book Award finalist Susan Straight, Mecca is a stunning epic tracing the intertwined lives of native Californians fighting for life and land. The author crafts an unforgettable American epic, examining race, history, family, and destiny. With sensitivity, furor, and a cinematic scope that captures California in all its injustice, history, and glory, she tells a story of the American West through the eyes of the people who built it—and continue to sustain it.

The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara (W. W. Norton & Company)

In an Indian village in the 1950s, a precocious child is born into a family of Dalit coconut farmers. King Rao will grow up to be the world’s most accomplished tech CEO and lead a global corporate government. King’s daughter, Athena, must reckon with his legacy—literally, for he has given her access to his memories. The Immortal King Rao obliterates the boundaries between literary and speculative fiction, the historical and the dystopian, to confront our age of technological capitalism.

The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton (Grand Central Publishing)

As devastating weather patterns wreak gradual havoc on Florida’s infrastructure, a powerful hurricane approaches a small town on the southeastern coast. Wanda, named for the terrible storm she was born into, grows up in a landscape abandoned by civilization. Moving from childhood to adulthood, Wanda loses family, gains community, and ultimately, seeks adventure, love, and purpose in a place remade by nature.

(6) ONLINE EVENT WILL DRAW ATTENTION TO HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES AGAINST UYGHURS. “World Uyghur Congress announces #WritersSupportUyghurs campaign to coincide with World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon) in Chengdu, China”. The complete press release is at the link.

The World Uyghur Congress will host an online panel discussion featuring several award-winning and bestselling authors on Tuesday, October 17th, 2023. The date, one day before the opening of the Worldcon science fiction convention in Chengdu, China, was selected deliberately in order to draw attention to ongoing human rights abuses against the Uyghurs in East Turkistan. The United States, along with 11 parliaments and senates around the world and the independent Uyghur Tribunal have officially recognized the abuses as a genocide and a crime against humanity. 

This marks the first year that Worldcon, the largest science fiction convention and the bestower of the prestigious Hugo Awards, will be hosted in China. The decision to hold the event in China has prompted concern from a wide range of science fiction fans, journalists, and authors, many of whom have called for a boycott. Making matters worse, the organization has invited Liu Cixin and Sergei Lukyanenko to attend as “guests of honor.” Both writers have been outspoken in favor of genocidal policies, with Liu saying that the genocidal policies are a justifiable form of “economic development” and Lukyanenko calling for Ukrainian children to be drowned. 

“The Chinese government wants to use Worldcon as a sort of Potemkin Village in order to showcase how futuristic and technologically advanced the country has become,” said Andrew Gillsmith, author of the bestselling novel Our Lady of the Artilects and organizer of the #WritersSupportUyghurs campaign. “Meanwhile, they are interning people in concentration camps, forcibly separating children from their families, conscripting Uyghurs into slave labour schemes, and implementing the most comprehensive and technologically sophisticated surveillance regime in history. Science fiction writers and fans have a longstanding tradition of standing for human rights. This is in the spirit of that tradition.”

The event in October will broadcast live worldwide and is expected to last 90 minutes….

“We are grateful for this support from the science fiction and literary communities,” said Dolkun Isa, President of the World Uyghur Congress. “Our goal is not to disrupt Worldcon but to ensure that coverage of the event includes the facts about an ongoing genocide being perpetrated by the host country.”… 

(7) ALAN MOORE NOW SENDING HIS DC ROYALTIES TO BLM. Variety reports “Alan Moore Donates Film and TV Money to Black Lives Matter”.

Alan Moore, the comic book visionary best known for writing such revered works as “Watchmen,” “V for Vendetta” and “Batman: The Killing Joke,” revealed to The Telegraph that he is longer accepting royalty checks from DC Comics for films and television series based on his works. He’s asked the company to instead reroute these checks to Black Lives Matter.

The Telegraph asked Moore if reports were true about him taking all of the money he makes from film and TV series and dividing it among the writers and other creatives, to which the writer answered: “I no longer wish it to even be shared with them. I don’t really feel, with the recent films, that they have stood by what I assumed were their original principles. So I asked for DC Comics to send all of the money from any future TV series or films to Black Lives Matter.”…

(8) SPACE:1999 SPACECRAFT GETS DOCUMENTARY. “’Space: 1999′ documentary to focus on the iconic Eagle spacecraft” at Space.com.

A Kickstarter campaign has been launched to raise funds for a dedicated documentary focusing specifically on the design and development of the iconic Eagle transport spacecraft from the epic 70s sci-fi TV show “Space: 1999.” The documentary feature is called “The Eagle Has Landed” and will showcase never-before-seen archival footage. It’s set to be released in time for the 50th Anniversary of “Space: 1999” in 2025. 

“‘Space: 1999’ appeared on TV a few short years after the world watched Neil Armstrong take the first steps on the moon. The show’s unforgettable Eagle inspired a generation to envision a future in space and is still doing so decades later. The question we explore is why?” said writer, director Jeffrey Morris and founder FutureDude Entertainment, the production company behind the project….

The Kickstarter link is here: “The Eagle Has Landed – Sci-Fi Documentary by Jeffrey Morris”. The appeal has raised $27,000 of the $500,000 goal on the first day.

…The Eagle Has Landed explores a passionate and ongoing nostalgia for a future that never happened. This intriguing feature-length documentary follows Jeffrey Morris—a Minnesota-based filmmaker and lifelong science-fiction aficionado—as he examines the fascinating connections between art, science, culture, and the iconic Eagle spacecraft. …

(9) MEMORY LANE.

1964 — [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

So let’s talk about the publishing of Keith Laumer’s A Plague of Demons which is our Beginning this time as it’s fascinating.  Especially when it got entangled with Baen Books later on.

It first was published in If in the November and December 1964 issues as The Hounds of Hells. This is not the later version known as A Plague of Demons but a shorter version.  

It got its first book publication as a paperback from Berkley Medallion the next year. The cover illustration is by Richard Powers. 

Penguin, Paperback Library and then Warner Paperback Library (yes Warner bought Paperback Library), then Warner Books (such for Paperback Library) and finally Pocket Books before we get to Baen Books.

And there’s Baen Books. They did three paperback editions of it and then printed it as part of A Plague of Demons and Other Stories which collected a lot of his shorter fiction, mostly novelettes. It was then offered up as part of the Baen Free Library. ISFDB says it was included as part of The 1634: The Baltic War Disk and The 1635: The Eastern Front CD-ROMs. 

Now let’s not overlook as you see in a few moments that A Plague of Demons is a most amazing novel. I’ve only included the first paragraph but it’s all you need as it’s most excellent. 

So here is it. Do enjoy it.

It was ten minutes past high noon when I paid off my helicab, ducked under the air blast from the caged high-speed rotors as they whined back to speed, and looked around at the sun-scalded, dust-white, mob-noisy bazaar of the trucial camp-city of Tamboula, Republic of Free Algeria. Merchants’ stalls were a slash of garish fabrics, the pastels of heaped fruit, the glitter of oriental gold thread and beadwork, the glint of polished Japanese lenses and finely-machined Swiss chromalloy, the subtle gleam of hand-rubbed wood, the brittle complexity of Hong Kong plastic – islands in the tide of humanity that elbowed, sauntered, bargained with shrill voices and waving hands, or stood idly in patches of black shadow under rigged awnings all across the wide square. I made my way through the press, shouted at by hucksters, solicited by whining beggars and tattooed drabs, jostled by UN Security Police escorting officials of a dozen nations.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 13, 1931 — Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, 92. An American author. Anthropologist, author of both fiction and non-fiction books on animal behavior, Paleolithic life, and the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert. She was written three works of fiction two genre, Reindeer Moon and The Animal Wife and one, Certain Poor Shepherds: A Christmas Tale, a Christmas story, a folk tale and therefore at least genre adjacent. 
  • Born September 13, 1933 — Warren Murphy. Ok, I’ll admit that I’m most likely stretching the definition of genre just a bit by including him as he’s best known for writing along with Richard Sapir the pulp Destroyer series that ran to some seventy novels and was (making it possibly genre) the basis of Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins.  He did a number of other series that were more definitely genre. (Died 2015.)
  • Born September 13, 1947 — Mike Grell, 76. He’s best known for his work on books such as Green Lantern/Green Arrow, The Warlord, and Jon Sable Freelance. The Warlord featuring Travis Morgan is a hollow Earth adventure series set in Skartaris which is a homage to Jules Verne as Grell points out “the name comes from the mountain peak Scartaris that points the way to the passage to the earth’s core in Journey to the Center of the Earth. It would be adapted by Matt Wayne for Justice League Unlimited’s “Chaos at the Earth’s Core”. 
  • Born September 13, 1960 — Bob Eggleton, 63. He’s has been honored with the Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist eight times! He was guest of honor at Chicon 2000. There’s a reasonably up to date look at his artwork, Primal Darkness: The Gothic & Horror Art of Bob Eggleton which he put together in 2010 and was published by Cartouche Press.
  • Born September 13, 1961 — Tom Holt, 62. Assuming you like comical fantasy, I’d recommend both Faust Among Equals and Who Afraid of Beowulf? as being well worth time. If you madly, deeply into Wagner, you’ll love Expecting Someone Taller; if not, skip it. His only two Awards are a pair of World Fantasy Awards, both for novellas, “A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong” and “Let’s Maps to Others”. And yes, I know that he also publishes under the K. J. Parker name as well but I won’t go into the works he publishes here. 
  • Born September 13, 1974 — Fiona Avery, 49. Comic book and genre series scriptwriter. While being a reference editor on the final season of Babylon 5, she wrote “The Well of Forever” and “Patterns of the Soul” as well as two that were not produced, “Value Judgements” and “Tried and True”. After work on the Crusade series ended, she turned to comic book writing, working for Marvel and Top Cow with three spin-offs of J. Michael Straczynski’s Rising Stars being another place where her scripts were used. She created the Marvel character Anya Sofia Corazon later named Spider-girl. She did work on Tomb Raider, Spider-Man, X-Men and Witchblade as well. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) CHENGDU WORLDCON NEWS. A three-part news release primarily devoted to a name for the Chengdu Worldcon mascot and its slogan – “Meet The Future! Slogan and Mascot’s Name for 2023 Chengdu Worldcon Announced” – included this segment publicizing some of the guests and programs, from which Sergey Lukianenko’s name is conspicuously absent.

…This year, the Committee has invited famous sci-fi activists such as Ben Yalow and Dave McCarty, as well as sci-fi litterateurs such as Robert Sawyer and Liu Cixin to bring a sci-fi literature feast to sci-fi fans. Meanwhile, Richard Taylor, the founder of Weta Workshop founder, who has won five Oscars for Best Visual Effects, and prominent figures in the Chinese sci-fi industry such as directors Guo Fan and Yang Lei, will attend the convention. They will engage in in-depth discussions on topics related to the fusion and development of science and technology innovation, culture, cultural tourism, and cultural creativity.

According to Liang Xiaolan, the full-time chairman of the 2023 Chengdu Worldcon and the vice president of the Chengdu Science Fiction Association, the convention will hold about 260 themed salons and parties, which are divided into eight categories: Science Fiction and Literature, Science Fiction and Art, Science Fiction and Film and TV, Science Fiction and Games (Animation), Science Fiction and Academics, Science Fiction and Technology, Science Fiction and Future, and Science Fiction and Industry. “For example, in the Science Fiction and literature section, there will be salons like Liu Cixin’s ‘A Sci-fi Reunion After 10 Years’, and Robert Sawyer’s ‘The Past, Present, and Future of Science Fiction’; In the Science Fiction and Technology section, we will discuss ‘How Far Are We From Space Travel?’ In the Science Fiction and Film and TV section, there will be a ’Sci-fi Film Special Effects Summit’; In the Science Fiction and Art section, there will be a ‘Three-Body Themed Concert’; In the Science Fiction and Games section, we will release the International Sci-fi Gaming Ranking,” Liang said….

(13) NANCY AND ZIPPY. “Bill Griffith on Love, Loss and the Lives of Ernie Bushmiller and Diane Noomin” at the Comics Journal – “Long and moving,” says Andrew Porter.

There are scenes in both Three Rocks and The Buildings are Barking that converge for me. Toward the end of the Diane book, there’s a haunting scene where she appears to you on a sort of “ghost ferry,” and she’s beckoning to you, in a dream sequence, to come join her. It’s very powerful, very sad, very beautifully rendered, and it’s heartbreaking. And toward the end of Three Rocks you have Ernie—toward the end of his life—snoozing on his chair, and Nancy, in another dream sequence, is in some ways doing the same thing to Ernie. Calling on him to follow her.

So that’s me recognizing that parallel– or, under the reality that we’re all experiencing together, there is another reality. It’s just there. It’s there to find. Or create. In that dream sequence in Three Rocks, the conceit is that Nancy is doing this. I’m not doing this. Ernie is not. Nancy is doing this. So, I am saying something that I have said throughout the book, which is that Nancy is a powerful figure. She both represents and controls the world she is in. And Ernie’s world as well. Some people thought she was a child that Ernie and Abbie never had. That’s a little sentimentalized, but possible. And before that dream sequence, I’ve used Nancy in these transitional sections throughout the book where Nancy is taking you from the previous chapter, in effect, to the next chapter. Once again, it’s Nancy, physically, the drawing. Yes, I’m writing it, but it’s Nancy [who is doing it].

In the dream sequence, she’s just pure Nancy. To me, because there’s no writing going on until the very end. It came out of a conversation I had with [Nancy collector and producer/writer for The Simpsons] Tom Gammill, and I’ve also heard the same thing from Mark [Newgarden]. That Ernie would always say that he’s looking for “the perfect gag.” There’s always a more perfect gag that he can’t quite find. The most perfect gag ever. [Laughs] Which I think is a little bit… romanticizing. Either people who heard Ernie say it, or they themselves, romanticized it. It seems a little bit like false humility. In other words, “I’m not all that funny, I’m still looking for the perfect gag. If I ever find it, I’ll let you know.” It’s like a way of deflecting, that he’s a great cartoonist or a funny guy….

(14) BEAMS CHOICE. “The Influence of Star Trek and Science Fiction on Real Science” at Smithsonian Magazine, an excerpt from Reality Ahead of Schedule: How Science Fiction Inspires Science Fact. 

…To trace the roots of Star Trek’s replicator, it is necessary to understand that it is essentially a repurposed form of the transporter—the teleportation or matter transmission device that “beams” the crew between starship and planet surface. According to legend, the transporter was invented only because the original series lacked the budget to film special, effect-heavy scenes of planetary landing shuttles, but Star Trek did not invent the concept of matter transmission. Its first appearance in science fiction dates back at least as far as 1877, in Edward Page Mitchell’s story “The Man Without a Body,” which prefigures George Langelaan’s much better-known 1957 story “The Fly,” by having a scientist experience a teleportation mishap when his batteries die while he is only partway through a transmission, so that only his head rematerializes.

The replicator uses the same basic principle as the transporter, in which the atomic structure of a physical object is scanned and the information is used to reconstruct the object at the “receiving” end through energy-matter conversion. In practice, all transporters are replicators and matter “transmission” is a misnomer, because matter itself is not transmitted, only information. Every time Captain Kirk steps out of the transporter having “beamed up” from a planet’s surface, it is, in fact, a copy of him—the original has been disintegrated during the initial phase of the operation.

This was precisely the mechanism of teleportation explored in one of the earliest stories on this theme. In Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1910 story “Remote Projection,” an inventor finds that his teleporter is actually a replicator and ends up with 841 identical copies of himself scattered around the world. This idea anticipated the well-known Teletransporter philosophy thought experiment by British philosopher Derek Parfit, which explored questions of continuity of identity. If a transporter is actually a replicator, is the Captain Kirk that steps off the transporter pad the same as the one that was “beamed up” from the planet? If the planet-side Kirk is not disintegrated in the process, and survives the process, which of the two Kirks is the “real” one? Star Trek TNG explored this precise scenario as an ongoing story line, after an episode (“Second Chances,” 1993) featuring a transporter malfunction that results in two copies of the character Will Riker—one who materializes on board his ship and the other who is stranded on a planet. The planet-side copy eventually chooses to be known as Tom Riker….

(15) BID ARAGORN REMEMBER. Far Out Magazine counts this as “The movie with the largest battle scene of all time”.

…However, the formula for creating monumental battle scenes saw a paradigm shift as we moved into the digital age. It was no longer just about recruiting an army of extras and meticulously planning every combat move. Instead, the magic started happening in the digital realm, thanks to pioneering technology developed by New Zealand-based Weta Digital.

Enter Peter Jackson’s acclaimed Lord of the Rings trilogy, released from 2001 to 2003. With the assistance of Weta Digital’s specialised crowd-simulation software, the movies shattered all previous records by featuring battles with an unprecedented 200,000 characters. The program, sensibly named Massive, fused digital animation with early artificial intelligence to govern individual character interactions, creating a spectacle of unparalleled scale and complexity.

What sets Massive apart is its innovative use of AI, allowing each digitally-created soldier to act and react in ways that mimic real-life human behaviour – not just this, but to do it ‘independently’. By allowing the program to govern the movements, animators were spared from tailoring the movements of each of the 200,000 figures. This leap in technology generated battle scenes that were vast in scale and eerily realistic. The technology altered the very foundations of what directors considered possible, raising the bar for epic cinema to an entirely new level….

(16) A SIGNATURE OF LIFE? Mashable reports an intriguing James Webb Space Telescope discovery: “Webb finds a molecule made by microbial life in another world”.

While the James Webb Space Telescope observed the atmosphere of an alien world 120 light-years away, it picked up hints of a substance only made by living things — at least, that is, on Earth.

This molecule, known as dimethyl sulfide, is primarily produced by phytoplankton, microscopic plant-like organisms in salty seas as well as freshwater.

The detection by Webb, a powerful infrared telescope in space run by NASA and the European and Canadian space agencies, is part of a new investigation into K2-18 b, an exoplanet almost nine times Earth’s mass in the constellation Leo. The study also found an abundance of carbon-bearing molecules, such as methane and carbon dioxide. This discovery bolsters previous work suggesting the distant world has a hydrogen-rich atmosphere hanging over an ocean.

Such planets believed to exist in the universe are called Hycean, combining the words “hydrogen” and “ocean.”

“This (dimethyl sulfide) molecule is unique to life on Earth: There is no other way this molecule is produced on Earth,” said astronomer Nikku Madhusudhan in a University of Cambridge video. “So it has been predicted to be a very good biosignature in exoplanets and habitable exoplanets, including Hycean worlds.”…

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. The new miniseries of Star Trek: Very Short Treks continues with “Holiday Party” about a “blooper reel” that’s mostly not actually funny, which is the point.

It’s a First Contact Day celebration and Spock is in charge of the entertainment.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Daniel Dern, JJ, Lise Andreasen, Mark Roth-Whitroth, Andrew Gillsmith, Ersatz Culture, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Lou.]