(0) Scroll lite today because I will be attending a dinner to celebrate my daughter’s graduation with a Master’s in Social Work. Congratulations Sierra!
(1) SANFORD HONORED AT MO*CON. [Item by Chris Barkley.] On May 3, 2025 Hugo Award Finalist Jason Sanford (Best Fan Writer and Best Related Work) was the recipient of the Sara J. Larson Award at MoCon 2025 in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Maurice Broaddus (L) and Jason Sanford
Mr. Sanford, the editor and primary reporter of Genre Grapevine, was honored by MoCon Chair and bestselling author Maurice Broaddus for “his continuing support of the Indianapolis science fiction community.”
The Sara J. Larson Award is named for a beloved member of the Indianapolis sf fan community and a enthusiastic supporter of MoCon, who passed away in March 2012. More information about the event is on Maurice Broaddus’ blog: MO*CON. All photos by Chris M. Barkley.
Jason Sanford MoCon welcome plaque
(2) NNEDI OKORAFOR’S WORLD SERVICE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The BBC’s World Service is a great early morning listen to on sleepless nights and last night was a joy with a programme on three writers, the third of whom was with the SF writer Nnedi Okorafor. Her interview revealed that during her youth she competitively played tennis facing occasional racial slurs on the court as some inferior opponents tried to put her off her game. However, her sports ambitions were curtailed during an operation to correct her scoliosis induced spinal curvature which left her (fortunately temporarily) paralysed from the waist down. It was this time that got her writing stories and then novels and then Marvel comics came calling. Her novels include Lagoon, The Book of Phoenix and recently Death of the Author.
“Becoming a writer was not the most straightforward journey for Nnedi Okorafor. Before her literary success she was a talented tennis player and dreamt of turning pro. However following a diagnosis of scoliosis, routine surgery to her spine left her temporarily paralysed. Confined to her hospital bed, Nnedi found solace in her vivid imagination and began writing for the first time. It was the start of a highly successful career as an author and led to a request from Marvel to write some of their comics. Over the years she has written characters including Spiderman, the X-Men and the Avengers. Nnedi is also the first woman to write the character of T’Challa – the Black Panther, as well as his tech-loving sister, Shuri.”
This article includes spoilers for “Daredevil: Born Again,” “Severance,” “The Last of Us” and “The White Lotus.”
As a longtime player of the Last of Us video game series, Sam Gaitan knew the death was coming. Still, the brutal murder of Joel in a recent episode of the HBO adaptation hit her hard. It was already midnight when she went on Tumblr to read fan reactions. Then, in a fit of inspiration, she started writing.
“I was a wreck, and I needed to get those strong emotions out,” Gaitan, a tattooist and artist, said in a recent phone interview. By 5 a.m., she had written 3,761 words featuring Joel and Red, an original character Gaitan had previously created, and an alternative scenario that spares Joel from his onscreen fate.
Writing under the alias oh_persephone, she posted the story on AO3, an online repository for fan fiction and other fan-created art, and crashed until her dogs woke her up the next morning.
“It probably wasn’t the most coherent thing I’ve written,” she said, laughing. “But I figured other people could use it as much as I did.”
Gaitan’s urge to change the narrative is a familiar one among a subset of fans who write fan fiction, or fanfic, original stories that borrow characters, plots and settings from established media properties and are published mostly online, on sites like AO3, Tumblr and FanFiction.net.
Increasingly, these fans are taking matters into their own hands by writing “fix-it fics,” or simply “fix-its,” which attempt to right the perceived wrongs of a beloved work — and often provide some measure of emotional succor.
“The Last of Us,” which killed off its male lead surprisingly early in a hotly anticipated second season — a lead played, no less, by “the internet’s daddy,” Pedro Pascal — has proved to be particularly generative. Real numbers can be hard to track because of inconsistent labeling, but more than 50 “The Last of Us” stories tagged “Fix-It” were uploaded to AO3 in the week after Joel’s death, ranging from about 300 words to almost 80,000.
But if a TV writer can dream of it, a fan can feel betrayed by it: Fix-its have appeared in recent months for series like “Daredevil: Born Again,” “Severance” and “The White Lotus,” all of which contained whiplash-inducing plot twists….
(4) L J SMITH OBIT ON BBC RADIO 4. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The passing of the author L. J. Smith is one of those commemorated in BBC Radio 4’s Last Word. The author of the ‘Vampire Diaries’ series, she inspired girls to be determined and self-reliant. The Vampire Diaries were adapted into a CW Network series that lasted for eight seasons
By Lis Carey: In 1956, Forbidden Planet burst upon our movie screens. It’s considered one of the greats of early science fiction films, and rightly so.
Starring Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, and Leslie Nielsen, it also features the first appearance of Robby the Robot. Robby was the first movie robot that was more than just a prop, with a real personality and an important supporting role. This was also the first movie set entirely on a distant planet, with no scenes on Earth or in our solar system, and no direct contact with Earth. They were truly isolated. It’s also the first appearance of an FTL ship.
It’s also a lovely loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
The planet was Altair IV, and the ship’s mission was to find out what happened to the ship Bellerophon, and the scientists it carried, twenty years before. When they arrive, Dr. Edward Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), one of those scientists, warns them off for “safety reasons,” but Commander John J. Adams (Leslie Nielsen), sees it as his duty to land anyway. Morbius tells them that all the members of the expedition were killed by “a mysterious planetary force, one by one, except for himself, his wife, and his daughter, Altaira (Anne Francis). Their ship, Bellerophon, was destroyed by that “planetary force” when a few remaining members of the expedition tried to use it to escape. His wife, he says, later died of natural causes.
Do I have to say that, even as a child, watching it for the first time, I found his wife’s death fishy as heck? In fact, I may have been thinking other words, words I was not allowed to say.
The newly arrived ship and its crew start to suffer attacks. When the engineer is attacked by this force while trying to repair communications equipment, we know something very bad is going on. It’s a tense, exciting story, which I’ll assume everyone has seen.
So I’ll talk about what this film means to me.
Being born a year after its release, I never saw it in a theater. I saw it at home, on our very first color TV. It was also the largest screen we’d ever had—do not be impressed. It was the 1960s, and it was, what? 27 inches? And I watched it with my dad.
My mother either stayed busy in the kitchen, or took herself off someplace, because she did not share our enthusiasm for Saturday afternoon science fiction movies, even when they weren’t featured on Creature Double Feature. (We were devotees of Creature Double Feature.) Mom occasionally pointed out that those movies were objectively bad, in a variety of ways. We said that was a lot of the fun, and made popcorn. She went out.
She did not believe us that Forbidden Planet was different, and actually very good, and that she would like the story. She banned any mention of Shakespeare in connection with a science fiction movie. (Admittedly, she had seen a couple of the Creature Double Feature offerings with us before she implemented her Never Again rule—maybe that’s why?) She refused to watch it with us—ever. We watched it every time it came on. Dad pointed out all the bits that showed this was an adaptation of The Tempest. We analyzed everything the characters would maybe have picked up on as clues if they knew they were in The Tempest.
And for the Creature Double Feature movies, we picked out every zipper in the badly made monster costumes, the places where you could see that those rocks were not rocks, re-used fake scenery from other movies. The cheesy dialog.
Either way, it was a lot of fun. A wonderful bonding experience with my dad, the only one in the extended family who didn’t think I was a little weird. Because, you know, he was, too.
Both Forbidden Planet, and Creature Double Feature’s masterpieces that would have made Ed Wood proud, are fond memories.
In the summer of 1995, Robert Williams, then director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which manages the Hubble Space Telescope‘s research program, was paid two visits by the renowned astronomer John Bahcall, considered one of Hubble’s founding fathers.
Bahcall had, in hindsight, a strange request.
He urged Williams not to train the powerful NASA telescope into an uncharted region of space, where the school bus-sized observatory would stare for days in an attempt to observe profoundly distant, never-before-seen galaxies. It was a proposed endeavor to capture an unprecedented “deep field” view of the cosmos, allowing humanity to look back billions of years, near the dawn of time.
Though Bahcall believed Hubble would make many astronomical advances, he didn’t think it would observe any new, undiscovered galaxies — even in its lofty position above Earth‘s image-distorting atmosphere. Crucially, a failed attempt would bring more shame to a telescope that was already an orbiting object of ridicule: After launching in 1990, a flawed mirror captured blurry images in what was then the most expensive science project in history, requiring astronauts to visit Hubble and install a refrigerator-sized instrument to act as Hubble’s “correcting eyeglasses.”
So Williams knew the deep field was indeed a risk. Still, he told Bahcall he was compelled to take it.
“I told him that I’m willing to fall on my sword,” Williams told Mashable.
Soon after those meetings, Williams directed Hubble — which, in April 2025, celebrated its 35-year anniversary of launching — to peer at a seemingly empty patch of space for 10 straight days. The space telescope beamed home iconic imagery, a “cosmic zoo” of some 3,000 galaxies. It changed everything….
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
(2) HUGO AWARD BASE DESIGNER. Seattle Worldcon 2025 has announced that the Hugo Awards Base will be designed by Joy Alyssa Day, a professional glass sculpture artist. Joy, with her partner BJ, have previously designed the Hugo Awards base for LonCon in 2014. Examples of Joy’s sculptures can be found at her website, GlassSculpture. Below are photos of the 2014 Hugo Award base, and their work on the Cosmos Award given by the Planetary Society.
(3) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 132 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Almost Everything Is Not Mac” is here early, because the hosts John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty are discussing this year’s Hugo Awards finalists.
This time around, I grow anxious over a dream discovery of long-lost original comic book artwork, realize I was wrong about a certain Alan Moore/Frank Miller memory, contemplate the difficulty of condensing the life of Marie Severin into a mere 1,200 words, share the meager remains of what was once a massive comic book collection, remember there’s an issue of Fantastic Four I need to track down to solve an early fannish mystery, rededicate myself to Marie Kondo-ing my creative life, and more.
Given that beloved sci-fi series Doctor Who has been on air for over 60 years now, countless actors have featured either in major roles or as guest stars.
From Simon Pegg playing a villainous editor in ‘The Long Game’ to Andrew Garfield facing off against aliens in ‘Daleks in Manhattan’, the seemingly endless list also includes Get Out star Daniel Kaluuya, Oscar winner Olivia Colman, and Black Panther’s very own Letitia Wright – to name but a few.The question is then – who would showrunner Russell T Davies love to have on the series in a guest role, who hasn’t been featured before? Putting that to the man himself in a recent interview ahead of Doctor Who season 2 hitting our screens, Davies is puzzled at first admitting to GamesRadar+ that “almost everyone has been in it”. And he’s right – hell, even pop star icon Kylie Minogue even showed up for the Titanic themed episode ‘Voyage of the Damned’….
…As Davies tells us: “I simply worship Viola Davis, one of the greatest actors in the world, we should be so lucky we should have that money. She just brings quality, depth, and surprise. Every time I see her she does something surprising, which is a very Doctor Who quality. She’d get it. I say this hoping that you print it, then her agent will read it and say ‘yes, you can have Viola for absolutely no money, she will come to Cardiff for free.'” Well – here’s hoping!
Betty Boop has arrived on Broadway, nearly a century after she first boop-oop-a-dooped her way onto the big screen. “Boop! The Musical,” like the “Barbie” and “Elf” films that preceded it, imagines a transformational encounter between an anthropomorphic character and the real world (well, a fictional world full of people)….
…Jasmine Amy Rogers, the actress starring as Betty Boop on Broadway, described her as “full of joy” and “unapologetically herself.” “She is sexy, but I don’t think it is merely sex that makes her sexy,” she continued. “I would say it’s the way she carries herself, and her confidence and her unabashed self.”…
Betty, created at the height of the Jazz Age, is obviously modeled on flappers, and her relationship to music history has been a subject of debate and litigation.
In 1932, a white singer named Helen Kane sued, alleging that the “baby vamp” style of the Betty Boop character, including the “boop-oop-a-doop” phrase, was an unlawful imitation of Kane. At a widely publicized trial in 1934, Fleischer countered by pointing out that a Black singer, Esther Lee Jones, who performed as Baby Esther, had used similar scat phrases before Kane. Kane lost….
…Rogers said she hopes that over time, women of different ethnicities will portray the character, but said she is proud to play her as a Black woman, with nods to Baby Esther and the scat technique of jazz singing. “Jazz lives so deep in the heart of Betty that I feel as if we can’t really have a full discussion about her without involving the African American race,” she said…
Rather obviously, Billy Dee Williams’ best-known role is as — and no I did know this was his full name — Landonis Balthazar “Lando” Calrissian III. He was introduced in The Empire Strikes Back as a longtime friend of Han Solo and the administrator of the floating Cloud City on the gas planet Bespin.
(So have I mentioned, I’ve only watched the original trilogy, and this is my favorite film of that trilogy? If anyone cares to convince me I’ve missed something by not watching the later films, go ahead.)
He is Lando in the original trilogy, as well in as the sequel, The Rise of Skywalker, thirty-six years later. The Star Wars fandom site thinks this might be the longest interval between first playing a character and later playing the same character, being a thirty-six year gap.
He returned to the role within the continuity in the animated Star Wars Rebels series, voicing the role in “Idiot’s Array” and “The Siege of Lothal” episodes. Truly great series if you haven’t seen, and available of course on Disney+.
He voiced him in two audio dramas with one being the full cat adaption of Timothy Zahn’s Dark Empire.
Now this is where it gets silly, really silly. The most times he’s been involved with the character is in the Lego ‘verse. Between 2024 with The Lego Movie to Billy Dee Williams returned to the role in the Star Wars: Summer Vacation in 2022, he has voiced Lando in eight Lego films, mostly made as television specials.
Going from hero to villain, he was Harvey Dent in Batman, and yes in The Lego Batman Movie. Really they made it. I’d like to say I remember him here but than they would admitting this film made an impression on me which it decidedly didn’t. None of the Batman Films did in the Eighties.
He’s in Mission Impossible as Hank Benton, an enforcer for a monster, in “The Miracle” episode; he’s Ferguson in Epoch: Evolution, the sequel to Epoch, which looks like quite silly, and I’m using this term deliberately, sci-film, and finally he voiced himself on Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?, the thirteenth television series in the Scooby-Doo franchise.
Parents often look down at the whorl on the top of their children’s heads and wonder what, exactly, is going on inside. An industry of books, video games, films, merchandise and museums offers some insight: They’re probably thinking about the Titanic.
Last fall, Osiris, age 5, told his mother, Tara Smyth, that he wanted to eat the Titanic for dinner. So she prepared a platter of baked potatoes — each with four hot-dog funnels, or smokestacks — sitting on a sea of baked beans. (He found it delicious.) Since first hearing the story of the Titanic, Ozzy, as he’s known, has amassed a raft of factoids, a Titanic snow globe from the Titanic Belfast museum and many ship models at his home in Hastings, England.
About 5,500 miles away in Los Angeles, Mia and Laila, 15-year-old twins, devote hours every week to playing Escape Titanic on Roblox. They have been doing this for the last several years. Sometimes, they go down with the ship on purpose — “life is boring,” explained Mia, “and the appeal is that it’s kind of dramatic.”
Nearly 113 years after the doomed White Star Line steamship collided with an iceberg on April 14, 1912, and sank at around 2:20 a.m. the next day, it remains a source of fascination for many children. The children The New York Timesspoke to did not flinch at the mortal fact at the heart of the story: That of the more than 2,200 passengers on the Titanic, more than twice as many passengers died as those who survived.
“I really like whenever it just cracked open in half and then sank and then just fell apart into the Atlantic Ocean,” said Matheson, 10, from Spring, Texas, who has loved the story since he read “I Survived the Sinking of the Titanic, 1912” at age 5. After many frustrating bath time re-enactments involving flimsy ship models, Matheson and his father, Christopher Multop, designed a Tubtastic Titanic bath toy — of which they say they now sell about 200 a month (separate floating iceberg included)….
John Zaller, the executive producer of Exhibition Hub, the company that designed “Bodies: The Exhibition” and “Titanic: An Immersive Voyage,” a traveling exhibition with interactive elements, attested that Titanic kids often knew more than their tour guides. At the Titanic experience, children can sit in a lifeboat and watch a simulation of the ship sinking, see a life-size model of the boiler room be flooded with water, and follow along with the passengers on their boarding pass, ultimately finding out whether they survived the wreck.
“The biggest takeaway for kids is, ‘I lived!’ or ‘I died!’” Mr. Zaller said. “They understand the power of that.”…
It took only seconds for the judges on a New York appeals court to realize that the man addressing them from a video screen — a person about to present an argument in a lawsuit — not only had no law degree, but didn’t exist at all.
The latest bizarre chapter in the awkward arrival of artificial intelligence in the legal world unfolded March 26 under the stained-glass dome of New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division’s First Judicial Department, where a panel of judges was set to hear from Jerome Dewald, a plaintiff in an employment dispute.
“The appellant has submitted a video for his argument,” said Justice Sallie Manzanet-Daniels. “Ok. We will hear that video now.”
On the video screen appeared a smiling, youthful-looking man with a sculpted hairdo, button-down shirt and sweater.
“May it please the court,” the man began. “I come here today a humble pro se before a panel of five distinguished justices.”
“Ok, hold on,” Manzanet-Daniels said. “Is that counsel for the case?”
“I generated that. That’s not a real person,” Dewald answered.
It was, in fact, an avatar generated by artificial intelligence. The judge was not pleased.
“It would have been nice to know that when you made your application. You did not tell me that sir,” Manzanet-Daniels said before yelling across the room for the video to be shut off….
… As for Dewald’s case, it was still pending before the appeals court as of Thursday.
… was chosen for inventing two exceptionally precise gene editing tools, namely base editing and prime editing. Base editing was first used in a patient at Great Ormond Street in London, where it saved the life of a British teenager with leukaemia.
The young woman’s doctor apparently called the technique at the time, ‘science fiction’!
(13) ETERNAUT TRAILER. The Eternaut premieres on Netflix on April 30.
After a deadly snowfall kills millions, Juan Salvo and a group of survivors fight against a threat controlled by an invisible force. Based on the iconic graphic novel written by Héctor G. Oesterheld and illustrated by Francisco Solano López.
(14) WHY IS MARS RED? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Well, we all know the answer – an on-going process of the radiolysis of water (here UV and high energy particles from Solar wind splitting water) produces oxygen radicals that oxidise iron to hematite (a form of iron(III) that on Earth often gives some sandstones their red colour…) Well, maybe not! New research now suggests otherwise. Data from three orbiters combined with a look at Earth minerals suggests that the Martian red minerals were formed over three billion years ago when Mars was decidedly wet. Had Mars been warmer, then these minerals would have gone. ; Mars’ red colour looks like being ferrihydrite (Fe5O8H nH2O) that forms under decidedly wet conditions. This is yet more evidence – if more is needed – that Mars was wet billions of years ago.
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Scott Edelman, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]
LibGen contains millions of pirated books and research papers, built over nearly two decades. Court documents show Meta torrented a version of it to build its AI.
Here’s an example of what is being discovered.
But writers refuse to despair.
Search the LibGen database here, and peer inside a pirated library of millions of books and research papers used by Meta and others:
(2) BORDER AROUND THE WORLDCON. Seattle Worldcon 2025 chair Kathy Bond today responded to concerns about Trump administration policies and the hazards they create for international visitors to the U.S. Here are some excerpts:
I am writing this statement in order to share the status of Seattle Worldcon’s current journey through living up to our theme of Building Yesterday’s Future—For Everyone. We have received a number of concerns asking how the convention will respond to orders and actions of the U.S. government, which we condemn, that create hostile conditions and travel barriers for LGBTQ+ members and international members….
… We do not have a list of all the steps we are going to take in light of the political landscape right now, as it continues to shift rapidly. We know this is not a particularly satisfying answer in light of the many concerns that we have heard from you about our members who need to enter the United States and what they might encounter trying to cross the border. We are not minimizing those concerns. The situation is frightening, and we encourage our members to make the best decisions for themselves even if that means that we will miss you at our convention. At the same time we are committed to not cancelling the in-person Worldcon as some have suggested because it is even more important than ever to gather with those who are able to do so to discuss our theme and celebrate the power of SFF to imagine different societies.
We are investigating what concrete actions we can take and offer to our members. Our Code of Conduct, Diversity Commitment, and Anti-Racism Statement provide the guidelines we are using in making these determinations. We would also like to remind people about what we are already doing.
First, we have in place a Virtual Membership for people who determine that they are no longer safe traveling to the U.S or cannot attend for other reasons…
Second, building on the work of other Worldcons and conventions, we will be having Safer Spaces Lounges available for members of marginalized communities who attend the convention in person. These spaces will be marked on convention maps.
Third, we will be drafting a resource guide to collate many of the wonderful resources that local organizations have already put together. In the interim, the ACLU of Washington has several Know Your Rights publications available, as does Northwest Immigrants Rights Project for individuals concerned about their rights while traveling.
Fourth, we will be fundraising for the following nonprofit organizations at the convention: Books to Prisoners, The Bureau of Fearless Ideas, and Hugo House. All of these organizations do important work to promote literacy education in the Seattle area and help build community resilience.
Finally, the political landscape is changing daily and impacting all of us in differing, but profound ways. Our staff is not immune. Many of our staff are deeply, personally impacted by the actions of the U.S. president, as his bigoted and hateful orders target our shared humanity. Many of us are federal employees who are now navigating what is happening to the civil service, terminations from our careers, and extreme uncertainty about our livelihoods. Many of us are also still dealing with the impact of the Los Angeles fires, Hurricane Helene, tornadoes, and other recent severe weather events on our families, loved ones, and friends. As citizens in the U.S. and around the world, we have many concerns, which are probably similar to yours. We all care deeply about our community and about Worldcon and are working diligently to navigate all of the waters that surround us, but we are also human with all the fallibility, blind spots, and competing demands on our time that entails.
This is a time to support each other. If you have questions about how we can support you in deciding about your Worldcon attendance, please reach out to chair@seattlein2025.org.
(3) ADDITIONAL COMMENTARY. Frank Catalano, journalist, past SFWA Secretary, and File 770 contributor, amplified the expressed concerns in a Facebook post.
…The climate, and practices, at the border have changed a lot since Seattle committee won its bid.
…I think it now requires even more caution if you’re a writer or artist from outside the U.S. who considers conventions like this to be part of your work.
Asked at border crossings your purpose for entering the U.S.? In the past, saying you were attending a science-fiction convention might have gotten a weird look and a wave. Now, if you also say you work in the field, it may get you denied entry without an appropriate visa. Or even detained.
This isn’t alarmism. It’s happened to Canadian and U.K. citizens trying to enter the U.S. recently whose visa paperwork, in the eyes of those at the border, was not in order.
I’m attending Worldcon. I’d love to see all of you there, especially my international colleagues.
But take care. Prepare. Based on recent events, casual answers that led to a wave of flexibility in the past may keep you from entering, or returning home, in a timely manner.
After 11 years as Co-Editor-in-Chief and Co-Publisher of Uncanny Magazine, Lynne M. Thomas is stepping down from her editorial duties starting with Issue 64, and will also be stepping down as Co-Publisher starting withIssue 67. Going forward, Co-Editor-in-Chief and Co-Publisher Michael Damian Thomas will continue solo in both of these roles.
As many of you know, Lynne worked at Uncanny Magazine while also working as a rare books librarian, most recently as the Head of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. For over 15 years, Lynne has balanced rare book librarianship with an editorial and publishing career in science fiction and fantasy, but she is now shifting her focus to her day job as she works towards her rare book librarianship goals. The entire Uncanny Magazine staff warmly wishes Lynne the best of luck going forward!
Over the years, Michael gradually took over most of the editorial and publishing responsibilities at the magazine, and he is prepared for the work ahead and excited to continue sharing his vision as the sole Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Uncanny Magazine.
Today, Wheaton announced a brand new weekly audiobook podcast called It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton, in which he narrates speculative fiction stories he loves from places like Lightspeed Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, Clark’s World Magazine, and On Spec. The podcast launches on March 26, 2025, anywhere you get your podcasts.
We got a chance to chat with Wheaton about the inspiration behind it, what we’re going to experience, and getting the blessing of fellow Star Trek actor LeVar Burton.
Vital Thrills: Tell us all about “It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton”!
Wil Wheaton: …Our first season is mostly established authors. We have a couple of multiple Hugo and Nebula finalists who have written incredible works because I just wanted to have something to show people in a few months, or however long it takes, so I could say to them, look, this is what I’m doing. This is what I want to do. Do you want to pitch us?
And that’s the ultimate goal. The thing that pushed that all from an idea into a thing that I worked on and the thing that is coming out was my love of LeVar Burton’s podcast, “LeVar Burton Reads.” When he was finishing his podcast, I was at a point where I had to decide: am I going to do this, or am I just going to record a thing for my friend?
I asked LeVar what he thought, and I said, “This is what I’m thinking about doing, and this is how I’m thinking about doing it, and I just really want to make sure that I don’t step on your toes. You absolutely inspire it.”
And it was so awesome. We were at the Burbank airport waiting to get on an airplane to go to a convention together, and LeVar just lit up and he hugged me, and he was like, “I’m so excited for you. I love it. It’s such a great idea. I give you my blessing. If there’s anything I can do to help you, please ask.”…
VT: I love that! The book market is so different now with everything online and self-publishing and all that, so a lot of stuff gets buried. This is such a cool way to get stuff out there. Did you have specific criteria in terms of what you were picking? Were there things that you’ve seen before?
Wil Wheaton: There were a couple of things that I’d seen before. I knew, for instance, that I loved Uncanny Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, and Clarkesworld. I’ve been reading them for years, and when I was in the beginning, I went and looked for things… I was like, I’m going to do this entirely on my own.
And I went looking for new things. I went to all the writers’ markets. I went to all the very, very, very small publications. Most of ’em are online only in the double digits only. And I’m like, I’m going to find gems here. I know there are. And it turns out that I’m not good at that. It turns out that I don’t have that editorial skill.
So I went back to, okay, I love these magazines, and I love these editors. And as it turns out, a good friend of mine has a great relationship with Lynne and Michael Thomas, who are the editors of Uncanny, and she offered to make an introduction for me. I talked to them, and I told them what I wanted to do, and they were so excited.
They were on board before I even finished, before I got to the part of the pitch where I was like, “So, do you want to work together?” They were like, “So what do you need from us?” I was like, “Holy crap. This is amazing.” Every step of the way….
VT: The podcast launches on March 26 — where can everybody find it?
Wil Wheaton: You can get it wherever you get podcasts. I’ve asked the team to make sure that it’s in all the usual places. So Apple Podcasts is probably the biggest, most centralized place for people to find it, but it’s also on Stitcher, Pocket Casts, Pandora, iHeart, and Spotify. I have a homepage for the podcast at WilWheaton.net/Podcast. And there’s a list there with links to all the different places that it’s online at the moment….
(6) C.L. MOORE’S SHAMBLEAU. [Item by Rich Horton.] I thought this essay very interesting. There’s a paywall but you get two free per month. “The Soul Should Not Be Handled” by B.D. McClay in The Point Magazine.
… I like genre fiction for the same reason I like black-and-white film, stylized dialogue, animation, the paintings of Marc Chagall or ballet: things feel more real if they’re obviously a little fake. If somebody asked me whether I preferred literary fiction to genre fiction (or vice versa) I would say, I hope, that I prefer good fiction to bad fiction. I think that this is a good response to a silly question, but there’s another one we could ask that’s a little more interesting: Is what makes a genre story good the same thing that makes realistic fiction good? Part of what makes genre genre is its place in a certain tradition with certain conventions and stock elements. If we are reading a detective story, we have certain figures and moments we come to expect: the amateur detective, the hapless sidekick, the suspicious woman, a second crime, a red herring, a solution. Part of what makes a detective story good or bad is its use of these expectations—a use that can (and often does) include subverting them. When it comes to speculative fiction, another dimension is that the boundaries between a fan, a professional and an amateur are never very clear. The landscape is more horizontal. You could, if you wanted, start a fanzine and get important writers to contribute; you could publish your first story ever in a magazine and get a letter from one of your most famous peers. Within genre, work can be wildly experimental, but this experiment takes place in a context of shared touchstones and trust in the audience. Writers of speculative fiction want to be read, and they have a good idea of who is out there reading their work….
…So let’s go back to that old issue of Weird Tales—it’s from November 1933—and to the first entry in the table of contents: “Shambleau,” “an utterly strange story” (the table of contents says) “about an alluring female creature that was neither beast nor human, neither ghost nor vampire.”…
The Big Bang Theory spinoff on Max is untitled no more — and it’s good news and bad news for Kevin Sussman’s Stuart Bloom character.
The series, which remains in development, will be titled Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, Deadline has learned. That puts Stuart at the center of the offshoot but also hints that the beloved sidekick, who could never quite catch a break on Big Bang, might not have better luck on his own….
…On Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, Sussman is joined by fellow Big Bang alums Lauren Lapkus, who plays Stuart’s girlfriend Denise, Brian Posehn (Bert Kibbler) and John Ross Bowie (Barry Kripke). Because the series is still awaiting a green light, the quartet are not formally cast in it but have talent holding deals with WBTV with the purpose of starring in the spinoff once it’s picked up.
For the first time, legendary visual futurist Syd Mead will have a major exhibition of his paintings. “Future Pastime” will run March 28-May 21 at the former Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery space in Chelsea.
Long before the metaverse, Mead was crafting immersive future worlds that have shaped our collective imagination and became a defining force in science fiction cinema, designing iconic worlds. From the neon-drenched streets of Blade Runner (1982) to the sleek, geometric landscapes of TRON (1982), his influence on sci-fi films is undeniable. His designs also impacted Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) 2010 (1984), Aliens (1986), and many more. They even inspired Elon Musk’s Cybertruck.
Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1933, Mead was a visionary artist who redefined how we imagine the future. After serving in the U.S. Army, he studied at the Art Center School in Los Angeles, blending inspiration from classical masters like Caravaggio with the Space Age musings of Chesley Bonestell to create a singular and unprecedented art style: visions of the future rendered wholly with classical technique. His philosophy of science fiction as “reality ahead of schedule” defined a career that bridged imagination and reality. He died in 2019….
(9) TRIBUTE TO GINJER BUCHANAN. [Written by Cat Eldridge.] I have come to honor one of our most excellent Editors ever, Ginjer Buchanan. She was the Editor-in-Chief at Ace Books and Roc Books, two sff imprints of Penguin Books, where she stayed for an extraordinary thirty years before retiring. Prior to that, she was consulting editor for the Star Trek tie-ins at Pocket Books and an outside reader for the Science Fiction Book Club which just ended its long run.
And yes, she was active in fandom from an early age which included being a founding member of the Western Pennsylvania Science Fiction Association (WPSFA, or “Woops-fa” as it was affectionately known as she noted in a Locus interview.)
Berkley president and publisher Leslie Gelbman upon her retirement said of her: “During her thirty years with Ace and Roc, Ginjer was essential in growing our science fiction and fantasy list and launching the careers of several bestselling authors. Her love for the genre and books in general and dedication to her authors is unparalleled, and she’s a key reason Ace/Roc is one of the preeminent science fiction-fantasy publishers.”
She won a Hugo at Loncon 3 for Best Editor, Long Form and was nominated for the same at Nippon 2007, Denvention 3, Anticipation, Aussiecon 4 and Renovation.
She won the Nebula Solstice Award in 2013, and the same year saw her garner the Edward E. Smith Memorial Award for Imaginative Fiction (aka the Skylark). She was nominated in 2006 for a World Fantasy Award in the Special Award, Professional category for her work Ace Books but alas did not win.
She was the Toastmaster at the World Fantasy Convention in 1989, and a Guest of Honor at ArmadilloCon in 1988, Foolscap in 2000 and at OryCon in 2008. Ginjer was also a Guest of Honor at the Dublin 2019 Worldcon, and a GOH at World Fantasy Con in New Orleans in 2022.
And yes, she’s written fiction. Her sole novel is a Highlander series tie-in, White Silence. It’s a most excellent novel, well worth reading, especially if you are a fan of that series. Yes I am. She’s got a deft feel for the characters and the milieu they’re a part of. Yes, it’s available from the usual suspects.
She’s also penned three short pieces of fiction, “The End of Summer by The Great Sea” in the Alternate Kennedys anthology, “Cathachresis” in the More Whatdunits anthology, and “If Horses Were Wishes …” in the By Any Other Fame anthology. The first two are edited by Mike Resnick alone, the last by Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg. All three are available are to be had from the usual suspects.
So being a serious Firefly fan, she has an essay, “Who Killed Firefly?” in the Jane Espenson edited Finding Serenity: Anti-Heroes, Lost Shepherds and Space Hookers in Joss Whedon’s Firefly collection. It’s available from the usual suspects. And yes, it’s a lot of fun to read if you’re a Firefly fan. Really it is.
And being a fan of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series, she penned “The Journey of Jonathan Levenson: From Scenery to Sacrifice” which was in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Watcher’s Guide, Volume 3 edited by Paul Ruditis. This is not to be had from the usual suspects.
Oh, and she has one published poem, “Four Views of Necon” published in Cemetery Dance’s The Big Book of Necon anthology edited by Bob Booth. No luck on this one either.
All in all, a truly amazing individual who has contributed in oh so many ways to our community, so let’s toast her now as she so richly deserves to be.
Ginjer Buchanan
(10) COMICS SECTION.
Carpe Diem finds small businesses have it hard in Middle-Earth, too.
If there’s one man who could reliably be considered to have the history of the DC Universe at his fingertips, it’d be Barry Allen — the former Flash who was the first hero to travel the multiverse and uncover the secrets behind DC’s reality. If there were two, then the other would be real-life comic book writer Mark Waid, long-time DC expert and writer of everything from The Flash and Kingdom Come to Action Comics and Justice League Unlimited. Starting this June, the two will be collaborating (well, kind of) to make fans’ dreams come true with the four-issue comic book series New History of the DC Universe.
Written by Waid and starring the erstwhile Mr. Allen, the series is intended to reveal the truth behind the DCU — including some secrets even longtime fans might be surprised by.
“This is my dream project,” Waid said in a statement about the series. “It’s a chance to realign all of DC’s sprawling continuity into one master timeline, and to be joined by some of comics’ greatest artists to make it shine. With new information for even longtime fans, plus Easter eggs galore, this series will be an essential read for DC fans.”
The first issue will feature art from Jerry Ordway and Todd Nauck, and will cover everything from the beginnings of the DCU through the origins of the Justice Society of America. Future issues will see an “all-star line-up of interior artists” contribute, according to DC, with an equally impressive group of cover artists working on the title throughout….
… This isn’t the first time DC has released an official version of its comic book canon: in 1986, the company published History of the DC Universe by Marv Wolfman and George Perez, the two creators who had just rebooted everything in the previous year’s Crisis on Infinite Earths series. It’s also not the first time that Mark Waid has worked on a project of this scope; in 2019, he wrote the six-issue History of the Marvel Universe, illustrated by Javier Rodriguez….
Disney investors on Thursday voted down a proposal that the entertainment giant cease its participation in a prominent LGBTQ rights organization’s equality ratings program.
The proposal — requesting that Disney “cease” its participation in the Human Rights Campaign‘s annual Corporate Equality Index — was submitted by right-wing think tank National Center for Public Policy Research, through its Free Enterprise Project initiative. (The FEP calls itself “the original and premier opponent of the woke takeover of American corporate life.”)
“When corporations take extreme positions, they destroy shareholder value by alienating large portions of their customers and investors. This proposal provides Disney with an opportunity to move back to neutral,” the FEP’s proposal stated. It noted that since 2007, Disney has received a “perfect score” on the CEI, “which can only be attained by abiding by its partisan, divisive and increasingly radical criteria.”…
… Disney’s board recommended voting against the proposal to end its participation in the HRC’s Corporate Equality Index. Shareholders concurred, with only 1% of shares voted in favor the proposal, according to the preliminary tally….
A foreign language sci-fi movie is headed to U.S. movie theaters this spring, but audiences won’t have to groan about subtitles. For the first time, an international feature film will look and sound as if it was made in English thanks to artificial intelligence.
Though the supernatural Swedish adventure “Watch the Skies” was made in its native tongue, AI company Flawless has digitally altered the film’s images and sound so character mouth movements and speech will be perfectly synced for English speaking viewers. The tech uses voices of the original cast to create dubs, and is compliant with SAG-AFTRA.
AMC Theatres, the nation’s top movie chain, has committed 100 screens to the project in the top 20 markets across America. Flawless has partnered with distributor XYZ films to roll the film out to cineplexes on May 9.
SpaceX’s Crew-9 astronauts had some company in the water after they splashed down on Tuesday afternoon (March 18).
The Crew-9 mission returned to Earth at 5:57 p.m. EDT (2157 GMT) on Tuesday, splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida. A fleet of recovery vessels soon converged on Crew-9‘s Dragon capsule, named Freedom — and so did some curious marine mammals, who wanted to check out this strange object that fell from the sky into their domain.
Freedom carried four people — NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore and Aleksandr Gorbunov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos — home from the International Space Station (ISS)…
…Crew-9’s splashdown was memorable and dramatic even before the dolphins showed up. It brought an end to the long space saga of Wilmore and Williams, which was a big story from the outset but became turbo-charged recently….
While in space, astronauts must exercise two hours per day, every day,according to a NASA pamphlet, as zero-gravity conditions can cause “bone and muscle deterioration” over time. Williams worked out first thing as part of her morning routine — waking up at 5:30 a.m. GMT and “running, cycling, and weightlifting” until 7:30 a.m., according to ESPN.(NASA did not immediately respond to CNBC Make It’s request for comment on the amount of control Williams had over her schedule.)
Wilmore and Williams will now have to spend 45 days re-acclimatizing to Earth’s gravity, NPR reports. Their new routines will include a “personalized recovery program” of two hours per day that they spend exercising with personal trainers….
Dark energy, the mysterious force powering the expansion of the universe, appears to be weakening, according to a survey that could “overthrow” scientists’ current understanding of the fate of the cosmos.
If confirmed, the results from the dark energy spectroscopic instrument (Desi) team at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona would have profound implications for theories about the evolution of the universe, opening up the possibility that its current expansion could eventually go into reverse in a “big crunch”.
A suggestion that dark energy reached a peak billions of years ago would also herald the first substantial change in decades to the widely accepted theoretical model of the universe….
… Dark energy has been assumed to be a constant, which would imply the universe will meet its end in a desolate scenario called the “big freeze”, when everything is eventually so far apart that even light cannot bridge the gap between galaxies. The latest findings, announced on Thursday at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, California, challenge that prevailing view.
Desi uses its 5,000 fibreoptic “eyes” to map the cosmos with unprecedented precision. Its latest data release captures 15m galaxies, spanning 11bn years of history, which astronomers have used to create the most detailed three-dimensional map of the universe to date.
The results suggest that dark energy reached a peak in strength when the universe was about 70% of its current age and it is now about 10% weaker. This would mean the rate of expansion is still accelerating, but that dark energy is gently lifting its foot off the pedal.…
[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, N., Frank Catalano, Matthew Kressel, Rich Horton, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jim Janney.]
Congratulations to Chris M. Barkley and Jason Sanford for their article being among the finalists: “The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion” – which was simultaneously published by File 770 and Genre Grapevine, and so it would have been nicer if the BSFA announcement hadn’t failed to name File 770.
(2) ACE EDDIE AWARDS. The American Cinema Editors (ACE) announced the “ACE Eddie Winners” on March 15. The awards recognize outstanding editing in 14 categories of film, television and documentaries. The complete list is at the link. The winners of genre interest are:
BEST EDITED FEATURE FILM (COMEDY, THEATRICAL)
Wicked Myron Kerstein, ACE
BEST EDITED ANIMATED FEATURE FILM
The Wild Robot Mary Blee
BEST EDITED SINGLE CAMERA COMEDY SERIES
What We Do in the Shadows (603 – Sleep Hypnosis) Liza Cardinale, ACE Dane McMaster, ACE
BEST EDITED ANIMATED SERIES:
X-Men ’97 (105 – Remember It) Michelle McMillan
Also recognized were filmmaker Jon M. Chu who received the ACE Golden Eddie Filmmaker of the Year Award, recognizing a filmmaker who exemplifies distinguished achievement in the art and business of film. Film editors Maysie Hoy, ACE and Paul Hirsch, ACE received Career Achievement Awards for their outstanding contributions to film editing.
…To Victorian Londoners, crime was terrifying and out of control. Penny Dreadfuls, cheap pamphlets blending the lurid and the sensationalist, contributed to the feeling that violent crime was lurking behind every street corner, waiting to spring out of every shadow with a knife drawn and ready to kill.
Jack the Ripper, with the entire city at his heels, murdered and mutilated his way through the streets of London — preying on the same underworld he seemed to spring out of. And then, suddenly and without resolution, he disappeared, and slipped back into the shadows. Ready to spring out again, at any moment. A knife held against the entire city.
And then, out of these same shadows, stepped a hero. A man of science, who brought order to a dangerous world in the throes of calamitous change. A man who obeyed only a strict moral code, rather than the letter of an unjust law. A man who not only did not obey the class structure, but openly flaunted it — in his very first adventure, he reproached a King for saying a lower-class woman was not on his level. This was a man who would help anyone in need — as long as the case was interesting enough. He had no interest in money or class; he was as happy with a king’s simple portrait as he was with the proverbial king’s ransom. He was a man who didn’t just protect the city, but even adapted some of its worst bits, such as the young and ruthless pickpockets, to help him in his quest.
That man was, of course, Sherlock Holmes. And it’s no wonder he became a sensation when he first appeared in the Strand Magazine in 1891 — emerging into the city and wider society that he did.
(Author’s note: I’m setting aside the first novels for a few reasons. But in any case, it was the Adventures that exploded in popularity, and would’ve been most readers’ first introduction to Sherlock.)…
(4) WON’T BE IN SEATTLE. Count Australian sff author Jeremy Szal among those who are checking out of attending the Seattle Worldcon.
The AI apocalypse is primed for an explosive launch in the Black Mirror season 7 trailer, which previews a bloody, bombastic batch of six new episodes — including the return of Cristin Milioti (The Penguin) in a sequel to 2017’s epic “USS Callister” episode.
Netflix revealed Thursday the first preview of Charlie Brooker’s beloved sci-fi anthology, which welcomes a wealth of stars to its seventh season, including Issa Rae, Tracee Ellis Ross, Awkwafina, Rashida Jones, Chris O’Dowd, Emma Corrin, Oscar-nominated actor Paul Giamatti, and Will Poulter (reprising the role of Colin Ritman from 2018’s interactive Bandersnatch movie).
In addition to teasing Milioti’s return alongside fellow “USS Callister” stars Jimmi Simpson, Paul G. Raymond, Milanka Brooks, Osy Ikhile, and Billy Magnussen, the Black Mirror season 7 trailer gives us a glimpse at a few of the new installment’s harrowing episodes….
Blockbusters … have always been deceptively difficult to replicate; on some level, most of them seek some kind of overwhelming sensation, whether it’s thrills, big laughs, melodrama, spectacular visuals or some combination; these things can be faked or strung along (plenty of middling mega-movies have been big hits), but the presentation is part of that fakery, which in turn can be part of the fun. A well-crafted one can sweep you up in the moment even if what they’re doing isn’t all that clever or insightful and leaves you with empty calories; JJ Abrams owes his whole career to this phenomenon. The Netflix auteur movies, meanwhile, are made with the confidence that they will transcend their humble smaller screens (or maybe the serene knowledge that at least they’ll be shown at a lot of festivals before they make it to streaming). The most striking aspect of their mockbuster cousins is how they feel infused with the knowledge that this avenue is closed to them; it’s almost astonishing how inept they are at faking otherwise. Movies like The Electric State can throw around millions of dollars, big stars and cutting-edge effects, but they just can’t shake the bone-deep knowledge that they’re content first….
…As previously announced, this year’s winners of the juried Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation honors are background designer Philip Vose (Merry Little Batman), viz-dev artist Miho Tomimasu (Orion and the Dark), animation supervisor Elena Najar (Merry Little Batman), character designer Lesego Vorster (Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire), digimatte artist Lauren Zurcher (Orion and the Dark), art director Guillaume Fesquet (Merry Little Batman) and storyboard artist David Lux (Snoopy Presents: Welcome Home, Franklin)….
CAFÉ winners of genre interest included:
Children or Family Viewing Series
Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock (Apple TV Plus) [The Jim Henson Company /Apple]
Fiction Special
The Velveteen Rabbit (Apple TV Plus) [Magic Lamp Pictures/Apple]
Preschool Animated Series
The Tiny Chef Show (Nickelodeon)
Children’s or Young Teen Animated Series
Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur (Disney+)
Animated Special
Orion and the Dark (Netflix)
Voice Performer in a Children’s or Young Teen Program
Eric Bauza as Daffy Duck & Bugs Bunny – Teen Titans Go! (Cartoon Network)
Younger Voice Performer in a Preschool, Children’s or Young Teen Program
Jacob Tremblay as Orion – Orion and the Dark (Netflix)
Writing for a Children’s or Young Teen Animated Series
“Dancing with Myself” – Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur (Disney+)
Mystery fans love ingenious misdirection in their plots, and novels can be even more mysterious when the setting itself adds layers of intrigue. Creepy old buildings have a long history in mystery fiction, and the novels I’m diving into today use architecture as a key part of the puzzle….
In the middle of this list:
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
This classic novel is dominated by a medieval abbey’s labyrinthine library that’s filled with secret passageways and hidden rooms. Friar William of Baskerville and his apprentice are investigating the mysterious deaths of several monks at the abbey, and the architecture both provides clues and mirrors the deeper symbolic meaning behind the crimes.
DPD notes, Alex Williams’ obituary for Moore has a refreshing, remarkable depth (and presumed accuracy) with respect to sf stuff, e.g.:
Chris Moore, a British artist who conjured fantastical worlds with high-sheen covers for books by science-fiction masters like Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke and Alfred Bester, and who lent his artistry to albums by Rod Stewart and Fleetwood Mac, died on Feb. 7 at his home in Charmouth, on the southwestern coast of England. He was 77.
… Moore provided memorable interstellar images for various editions of notable books by Mr. Dick — including his novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,” the basis of the 1982 film “Blade Runner” — as well as works by Kurt Vonnegut, Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. Le Guin, H.G. Wells, Alastair Reynolds, J.G. Ballard, Stephen King and many others.
…While best known for his visual journeys through the cosmos, Mr. Moore produced a wide range of illustrations. He created the art for several album covers, including Fleetwood Mac’s “Penguin” (1973) and Mr. Stewart’s “The Vintage Years 1969-70” (1976), as well as contributing images to magazines like Omni and Asimov’s Science Fiction. And he designed wallpaper tied to the Star Wars film “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980).
…He exhibited his work for the first time in 1995, at the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, where he realized that there was a market for his originals, which he began selling….
DPD adds: So I’m sure I saw those there, and for all I know, crossed paths with Moore.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
March 19, 1928 — Patrick McGoohan. (Died 2009.)
I will not make any deals with you. I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own. — Number 6
I don’t how times I’ve seen the opening of The Prisoner series as it’s been separately shown from the episodes online pretty much since video came to the Internet. Not sure in what context I was watching it but it was, without doubt, one of the best openings I’ve seen.
Then there was the series. Weird, thrilling, mysterious. Eminently watchable over and over and over again. Was it SF? Or was it a spy series set in the very near future? Who knew? And then there was Number Six, the never named intelligence agent played by Patrick McGoohan. He seemed destined to play this role.
He was an American-born Irish actor, director, screenwriter, and producer. Now it turns out that The Prisoner was his creation. He was also one of the writers – there were five in fact — and he was one of four directors. In other words, he had his hand in every facet of the series and its sixteen episodes.
Before he was that unnamed intelligence agent he was, and I’m not at all convinced that McGoohan meant this to be a coincidence, secret agent John Drake in the Danger Man espionage series. I’ve seen a few episodes, it’s well crafted.
Danger Man (retitled Secret Agent in the United States for the revived series) was a British television series broadcast between 1960 and 1962, and again between 1964 and 1968. (A neat bit of history here: Ian Fleming was brought in to work on series development, but left before that was complete. Apparently, he didn’t like the way the secret service was to be portrayed.)
After The Prisoner, McGoohan’s next genre endeavor was as the narrator of Journey into Darkness is a British television horror film stitching together two episodes derived from late Sixties anthology television series Journey to the Unknown.
We are now leaving genre and headed for, well the Columbo series. Why so? Because he was good friends with Peter Falk and directed five episodes of the series, four of which he appeared in, winning two Emmys in the process. McGoohan was involved with the series in some way from 1974 to 2000.
He was said that his first appearance on Columbo was probably his favorite American role. He had top billing as Col. Lyle C. Rum, fired from a military academy, in “By Dawn’s Early Light”, one of the Columbo films that preceded the series.
His daughter Catherine McGoohan appeared with him in the episode “Ashes To Ashes” The other two Columbo episodes in which he appeared are “Identity Crisis” and “Agenda For Murder”.
Yes, he reprised his role as Number Six for The Simpsons in “The Computer Wore Menace Shoes”. Homer Simpson fakes a news story to make his website more popular, and he wakes up in a prison that is a holiday resort. As Number Five, he meets Number Six.
McGoohan’s last movie role was as the voice of Billy Bones in the animated Treasure Planet.
He received the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award for The Prisoner.
The Prisoner is streaming on Prime. No, not awful remake (shudder) but the original one.
(12) THE SHADOW KNOWS. ThePulp.Net takes us from Victor Jory to Alec Baldwin and beyond in “The Shadow on film”.
As in radio, The Shadow’s film career began with him as an announcer of detective stories, not as a lead character. In 1931 — the same year that the namesake pulp began — The Shadow began introducing a series of two-reel mysteries for Universal Studios.
It was five years before The Shadow returned to the screen. This time silent-screen actor Rod La Rocque appeared in The Shadow Strikes for Grand National Pictures. The 1937 film featured detective Lamont “Granston,” who like Cranston in the radio program was The Shadow. In 1938, La Rocque returned, this time as Lamont Cranston, in International Crime. The Shadow isn’t the main character, but rather radio sleuth Cranston is.
The Shadow is back in the lead role in a 15-chapter Columbia serial. The Shadow starred hawk-nosed actor Victor Jory….
… Alec Baldwin is the latest to assume the role in The Shadow. The 1994 film enjoyed the trappings of a robust budget. The art direction and production were splendid, but the script was lacking. Disappointingly for pulp purists, its story, like the previous motion pictures, was an amalgam of influences from The Shadow’s past in print, radio and film. On top of that, screenwriter David Koepp or director Russell Mulcahy added several curious twists to the story, such as Margo Lane being psychic, and Lamont Cranston being police commissioner Wainwright Barth’s nephew….
(13) A SOLAR ECLIPSE… FROM THE MOON. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander, which successfully touched down in Mare Crisium on March 2, 2025 got a pic of the *Earth* eclipsing the Sun… “Private Lunar Lander Captures Stunning ‘Diamond Ring’ Eclipse from the Moon’s Surface” at Daily Galaxy. You can see the image at the link.
For the first time in history, a privately operated lunar lander has captured images of a total eclipse from the Moon’s surface. Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander, which successfully touched down in Mare Crisium on March 2, 2025, recently transmitted breathtaking images of a “diamond ring” eclipse—a rare celestial phenomenon that occurs when the Sun emerges from behind Earth, forming a brilliant ring of light in the lunar sky….
A mysterious phenomenon at the centre of our galaxy could be the result of a different type of dark matter.
Dark matter, the mysterious form of unobserved matter which could make up 85% of the mass of the known universe, is one of science’s biggest manhunts.
In this first of its kind study, scientists have taken a step closer to understanding the elusive mystery matter. They believe a reimagined candidate for dark matter could be behind unexplained chemical reactions taking place in the Milky Way…
Dr. Shyam Balaji, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at King’s College London and one of the lead authors of the study explains, “At the centre of our galaxy sit huge clouds of positively charged hydrogen, a mystery to scientists for decades because normally the gas is neutral. So, what is supplying enough energy to knock the negatively charged electrons out of them?
“The energy signatures radiating from this part of our galaxy suggest that there is a constant, roiling source of energy doing just that, and our data says it might come from a much lighter form of dark matter than current models consider.”
Primary research: Pedro De la Torre Luque et al, (2025) Anomalous Ionization in the Central Molecular Zone by Sub-GeV Dark Matter, Physical Review Letters, vol. 134, 101001
(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Around tea time, about 65 million years ago, a large pebble hit the Earth, wiping out many birds with a single stone. (I really have never forgiven the dinosaurs for what they did to Raquel Welch.) Recently there has been news of asteroid 2024 YR4 possibly hitting Earth in 2032. It now looks like it will be a near miss, but what other dangers are there out there? Keep watching the skies…. Over at PBS Space Time Matt O’Dowd looks at the chaotic Solar system that otherwise might puzzle Bruce Willis…
Giant space rocks are definitely going to hit the Earth again. We actually do know how to deflect them, but only if we find them and correctly assess their risk. But the solar system is a chaotic place. How is it even possible to tell if a space rock will one day collide with the Earth?
[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Oscar Dunham, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Mark Roth-Whitworth for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
(1) BULWER-LYTTON RIDES OFF INTO THE SUNSET. Last week Scott Rice told fans of The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, “Au Revoir, Noble Bulweriers!”
It is with deep regrets that I announce the conclusion of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Being a year and a half older than Joseph Biden, I find the BLFC becoming increasingly burdensome and would like to put myself out to pasture while I still have some vim and vigor!
When I initiated the competition in 1983, inviting entrants to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels, I never dreamed that we would receive thousands of entrants from all over the U.S. and the globe, or that the contest would survive for over four decades.
I am especially grateful to our entrants for keeping the contest alive and to our Panel of Undistinguished Judges who dutifully selected each year’s “winners.” And, of course, I would like to thank my daughter, EJ, who has been indispensable the last several years of the contest. It’s been 42 good years but, alas, all good things must come to an end. Rest assured we’re keeping the BLFC spirit alive by maintaining our archive for posterity so that generations and generations hence may witness your greatness!
(2) ERRATA REDUX. The UK’s SF Gateway bookselling site is having a little trouble identifying author “William Rotsler”, co-author with Gregory Benford of Shiva Descending. As Andrew Porter pointed out to them, this is a photo of Robert Silverberg.
It isn’t the first time something like this has happened to Rotsler. When he was the 1973 Worldcon Fan Guest of Honour, the designer of TorCon 2’s program book erroneously ran a photo of John Schoenherr instead of Rotsler. (Coincidentally, Robert Silverberg was the author of that 1973 bio!)
The United States has been added to the Civicus Monitor Watchlist, which identifies countries that the global civil rights watchdog believes are currently experiencing a rapid decline in civic freedoms.
Civicus, an international non-profit organization dedicated to “strengthening citizen action and civil society around the world”, announced the inclusion of the US on the non-profit’s first watchlist of 2025 on Monday, alongside the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Italy, Pakistan and Serbia….
The Short: I recently read Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art, Indrapramit Das editor, 2024 The MIT Press. My favorites of the ten short stories were “Encore“, by Wole Talabi, “The Quietude” by Lavie Tidhar, and “Autumn’s Red Bird“, by Aliette de Bodard. The essays and art were great also. My overall rating was 3.88/5, or “Great”. Strongly recommended.
(5) FUTURE TENSE. February’s Future Tense Fiction story is “Mothering the Bay,” by Deji Bryce Olukotun—a story about AI, misinformation, and parenting, set on the BART public transit system in California’s Bay Area.
(6) PAGING CAPTAIN PIKE’S BARBER. “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 Character Posters” – there are 13 images in the gallery. The Captain looks like he stuck his head out a porthole while the ship was at Warp 3. I rather like the photo of Scotty, though.
The new character art features Anson Mount as Captain Christopher Pike, Rebecca Romijn as First Officer Una Chin-Riley, Ethan Peck as Spock, Jess Bush as Nurse Christine Chapel, Christina Chong as La’An Noonien-Singh, Celia Rose Gooding as Nyota Uhura, Melissa Navia as Erica Ortegas and Babs Olusanmokun as Dr. M’Benga.
In addition to the main cast, we have recurring guests Paul Wesley as James T. Kirk, Melanie Scrofano as Marie Batel, Martin Quinn as Montgomery ‘Scotty’ Scott, and Carol Kane as Pelia.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is based on the years Captain Christopher Pike manned the helm of the U.S.S. Enterprise.
Anson Mount as Captain Christopher PikeMartin Quinn as Montgomery ‘Scotty’ Scott
(7) KAZUO ISHIGURO Q&A. [Item by Steven French.] With a 20th Anniversary special edition of his science fiction novel Never Let Me Go about to be published, Nobel prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro is interviewed by the Guardian and discussed his openness to speculative fiction, his own opinion of his prose style and the dangers posed by the increasing use of AI: “’AI will become very good at manipulating emotions’: Kazuo Ishiguro on the future of fiction and truth”.
Never Let Me Go had a long gestation period, as Ishiguro explains in his introduction to a new edition; for many years, it existed merely as thoughts and notes about a group of students whose lifespan – perhaps as the result of a nuclear accident – was markedly different from their peers. The breakthrough came via a combination of external factors and timing: societal interest in the potential benefits and dangers of cloning, at its most headline-grabbing in the shape of Dolly the sheep; and a shift in writing and publishing that made a place in so-called literary novels for the techniques and practices of speculative fiction.
“I gave myself permission to use what traditionally might have been called genre tropes,” Ishiguro explains. “And that wasn’t because I was being terribly brave or anything. I think the climate around me changed; the next generation of writers, people about 15 years younger than me, didn’t see anything weird about it, at least the people I happened to become friends with, David Mitchell or Alex Garland. They were taking their cues from all kinds of places and I really liked their work.”
Simon Fisher-Becker, a British actor known for his roles on “Doctor Who” and in the first “Harry Potter” film, has died. He was 63.
Fisher-Becker’s death was confirmed by his agency in a statement issued to USA TODAY on Monday.
“Today, I lost not only a client Simon Fisher-Becker, but a close personal friend of 15 years standing,” the statement said. “I shall never forget the phone call I made to him when he was offered the part of ‘Dorium’ in Dr Who. He had been a fan of the show since he was a child.
“Simon was also a writer, a raconteur and a great public speaker. He helped me out enormously and was always kind, gracious and interested in everyone. My condolences go to his husband Tony, his brother, nieces and nephews and his legion of fans.”
Fisher-Becker portrayed the Fat Friar, a ghost from Hufflepuff, who appeared in 2001’s “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” In the film, he comes through the floor of the Hogwarts dining hall as several ghosts arrive, including Nearly Headless Nick.
The actor also starred as Dorium Maldovar on the British sci-fi series “Doctor Who.” He played the role in the fifth and sixth seasons of the modern reboot opposite Matt Smith’s Doctor….
(9) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Frederik Pohl’s Gateway wins the Hugo for Best Novel (1978)
Forty-six years ago at IguanaCon II, where Tim Kyger was the Chair, Harlan Ellison was the pro guest, and Bill Bowers was the fan guest, Frederik Pohl’s Gateway wins the Hugo for Best Novel.
The other nominated works for that year were The Forbidden Tower by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Time Storm by Gordon R. Dickson and Dying of the Light by George R. R. Martin.
It was serialized in the November and December 1976 issues of Galaxy prior to its hardcover publication by St. Martin’s Press. A short concluding chapter, cut before publication, was later published in the August 1977 issue of Galaxy.
It would win damn near every other major Award there was as it garnered the John Campbell Memorial for Best Science Fiction Novel, the Locus Award for Best First Novel, the Nebula Award for Novel and even the Prix Pollo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel published in France. It was nominated for but did not win the Australian Ditmar Award.
It’s the opening novel in the Heechee saga, with four sequels that followed. It is a most exceptional series. I’ve read I think all of them.
I’m chuffed that Pohl was voted a Hugo for Best Fan Writer at Aussiecon 4. Who can tell what works got him this honor?
Gateway of course is available at the usual suspects.
If I’m remembering right, there was talk of a film for awhile.
Another month, another revolutionary generative AI development that will apparently fundamentally alter how an entire industry operates. This time tech giant Microsoft has created a “gameplay ideation” tool, Muse, which it calls the world’s first Wham, or World and Human Action Model. Microsoft claims that Muse will speed up the lengthy and expensive process of game development by allowing designers to play around with AI-generated gameplay videos to see what works.
Muse is trained on gameplay data from UK studio Ninja Theory’s game Bleeding Edge. It has absorbed tens of thousands of hours of people’s real gameplay, both footage and controller inputs. It can now generate accurate-looking mock gameplay clips for that game, which can be edited and adapted with prompts.
All well and good, but in an announcement video for Muse, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer caused confusion when he said that it could be invaluable for the preservation of classic games: AI models, he implied, could “learn” those games and emulate them on modern hardware. It’s not clear how this would be possible. Further muddying the waters, Microsoft’s overall CEO Satya Nadella then implied in a podcast interview that Muse was the first step in creating a “catalogue” of AI-generated games.
But Muse, as it stands, can’t create a game – it can only create made-up footage of a game. So just what is this new gaming AI tool? A swish addition to game developers’ tool belts? Or the first step towards an era of AI-generated gaming detritus?…
(12) CLIPPING SERVICE. Filer Lise Andreasen says, “I made a joke!”
In 79 C.E., Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying the nearby ancient Roman city of Pompeii and the smaller town of Herculaneum under deadly layers of volcanic ash, pumice and pyroclastic flows. But the disaster that demolished the two settlements also immortalized them, preserving everything from the shape of victims’ bodies to frescoes in private villas and library scrolls.
Archaeologists even discovered the remains of a young man whose brain and parts of his spinal cord had turned into glass. Scientists had never seen a glassy soft tissue in nature before—and no one has found anything like it since….
…The recent study, however, supports the 2020 research claiming that the remains are indeed a brain—they found preserved neurons and axons, as well as proteins known to be common in brain tissue. They conclude the vitrification was caused by an ash cloud that arrived in Herculaneum before the pyroclastic flows from the volcano….
…But there’s a catch: “Conditions must have been very, very specific, because the organic tissue must have experienced a heating fast enough not to entirely destroy it (which is instead the most common occurrence) and then fast-cool to turn into glass,” Giordano says to Popular Science’s Andrew Paul.
To achieve those specific circumstances, the skull and spine acted as protective layers, shielding the soft tissue within from a bit of the heat. “The glass that formed as a result of such a unique process attained a perfect state of preservation of the brain and its microstructures,” the team writes in the paper.
Giordano tells Live Science’s Tom Metcalfe that they found charcoal fragments in Herculaneum that supported their idea. These fragments “experienced multiple [heating] events, and the highest temperatures were associated with the early, super-hot ash cloud.”
Benjamin Andrews, a volcanologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History who was not involved in the study, tells Science’s Collin Blinder that the team’s findings are “remarkable.”
“There’s a huge story, a huge wealth of information, contained in these little particles,” he adds.
Not everyone agrees with the new conclusions, however. For example, Alexandra Morton-Hayward, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Oxford in England who was also not involved in the research, is not convinced that the glassy material is indeed parts of the man’s brain. She maintains that soft tissue vitrification is “incredibly unlikely,” per CNN….
This week, the moon experiences a total lunar eclipse, which although not as spectacular as a total solar eclipse is still a beautiful celestial sight to behold.
A total lunar eclipse occurs when the full moon passes directly behind Earth, through our planet’s shadow. Skywatchers first see the shadow of Earth creeping across the face of the moon. This is known as the partial phase.
Then, during the total phase, when the moon is engulfed by Earth’s shadow, the lunar surface turns a deep red colour. In the last phase, also known as a partial phase, Earth’s shadow slips off the lunar surface and all returns to normal.
It is a leisurely process, taking more than three hours to complete. On 14 March, the partial eclipse begins at 0509 GMT. The total phase begins at 0658 GMT before returning to a partial phase at 0731 GMT. This final partial phase then ends at 0847 GMT.
Unfortunately for European and African viewers, only the initial partial phase will be visible. Observers in North and South America, however, will be treated to the whole thing. Parts of Asia and Australia will then catch the final partial phase.
Title: Margaret Middleton – A Shaper of Modern Filk (Part 2 of 2), interviewed by Edie Stern
Description: FANAC History Zoom: February 2025: Named to the Filk Hall of Fame in 1996, and a long time officer of the Filk Foundation, Margaret Middleton has been instrumental in the shaping of modern filk, as well as a mainstay of Arkansas fandom. She’s published multiple fanzines, including Kantele, and was a founder of the first specialized filk convention, Filkcon 1.
In Part 2 of this 2 part recording, the conversation ranges from Margaret’s taxonomy of filk, to tips for busking at the Farmer’s Market, and to the effect of the internet on filking and the filk community. We also learn about Margaret-when-she’s not filking, including her involvement in the Civil Air Patrol, quilting and her professional responsibilities for “measuring piles of dirt and holes in the ground.” … It’s a wide-ranging conversation, and ends with barbershop quartets, the Ballad of Eskimo Nell (discussed – not sung), the relationship of quilts to filk conventions and audience Q&A…For those interested in the history of filk, this 2 part interview is highly recommended.
[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Joey Eschrich, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
(2) ASTOUNDING AWARD’S FUTURE? Following the report that Asimov’s, Analog and F&SF have been purchased by a new owner, John Scalzi speculated about the fate of the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Although voting is administered by the Worldcon, the Astounding Award belongs to Dell Magazines, publisher of Analog prior to this sale. Will Analog’s new owners continue the sponsorship? John Scalzi volunteered a landing place if one is needed in a post at Whatever:
If the new owners of Asimov’s and Analog don’t want to take sponsorship of the Astounding Award (or the award is not otherwise folded into the responsibilities of WSFS/the individual Worldcons), we’ll take it on. The ideal plan would be for the Scalzi Family Foundation to act as a bridge sponsor while we set up an endowment that would allow the Astounding Award to be run indefinitely.
(3) EISNER HALL OF FAME INDUCTEES. Comic-Con International has announced 21 creators and industry figures who will be inducted into the Eisner Awards Hall of Fame this year.
In addition to these choices, voters in the comics industry will elect 6 persons from a group of 18 nominees proposed by the judges. Those nominees will be announced within the next week, and a ballot will be made available for online voting.
We’ve received more than 150 stories nominated by publishers, editors, and authors so far, and the range of stories, ideas, and perspectives has been so wonderful to read. As this is our first year of the anthology and our launch happened so quickly, we’ve decided to extend the submissions window out to Monday, March 17, to ensure that everyone publishing ecofiction gets a chance to submit….
…Ecofiction engages with some of the most urgent issues facing us today and also looks ahead to the possibilities of the future. Even when dealing with dark or tragic themes, ecofiction stories are expressions of our human connection to the most beautiful planet we know, and to all of earthlife….
(5) BOOK WITHIN A BOOK. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] BBC Radio 4 working weekday Women’s Hour had a second half (35 minutes in) largely devoted to two SF works. The first was a play, a re-imagining of the Greek tragedy Oedipus but set in a dystopic, near-future, climate drought-ridden future…
And then the Nigerian-American SF author Nnedi Okorafor who was discussing her latest book Death of the Author (out from Gollancz). This is a sweeping story about a writer of a science fiction novel that becomes a global phenomenon… at a price. The future of storytelling is here. A book-within-a-book that blends the line between writing and being written. This is at once the tale of a woman on the margins risking everything to be heard and a testament to the power of storytelling to shape the world as we know it… This interview begins 50 minutes in.
Nigerian American science fiction author Nnedi Okorafor’s new book is Death of the Author. It follows the story of Zelu, a novelist who is disabled, unemployed and from a very judgmental family. Nnedi and Nuala talk about the book within her book, success, and the influence on her writing of being an athlete in her earlier years.
James Cameron has reportedly revealed an anti-AI title card will open up Avatar 3, officially titled Avatar: Fire and Ash. The Oscar-winning director shared the news in a Q&A session in New Zealand attended by Twitter user Josh Harding.
Sharing a picture of Cameron at the event, they wrote: “Such an *incredible* talk. Also, James Cameron revealed that Avatar: Fire and Ash will begin with a title card after the 20th Century and Lightstorm logos that ‘no generative A.I. was used in the making of this movie’.”Cameron has been vocal in the past about his feelings on artificial intelligence, speaking to CTV news in 2023 about AI-written scripts. “I just don’t personally believe that a disembodied mind that’s just regurgitating what other embodied minds have said – about the life that they’ve had, about love, about lying, about fear, about mortality – and just put it all together into a word salad and then regurgitate it,” he told the publication. “I don’t believe that’s ever going to have something that’s going to move an audience. You have to be human to write that. I don’t know anyone that’s even thinking about having AI write a screenplay.”…
(7) IMAGINARY PAPERS. ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination has published the latest issue of Imaginary Papers, its quarterly newsletter on science fiction worldbuilding, futures thinking, and imagination.
In this issue, Sarah M. Ruiz writes about climate action, allegory, and solidarity in the 2024 film Flow; Libia Brenda writes about Crononauta, the quasi-mythical, short-lived 1964 magazine founded by Alejandro Jodorowsky and René Rebetez; and Rachael Kuintzle reports on a workshop on energy futures hosted by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory in 2024.
On April 5, a beacon for California horror fans will be snuffed out when legacy Los Angeles shop Dark Delicacies closes its doors. “We’ve been open for 30 years, and I could have happily died right here,” laughs co-owner Del Howison, “but my wife Sue wanted to have a life — whatever that is.”
Dark Delicacies is more than just a Southern California storefront selling ghoulish souvenirs. It’s been a destination for film buffs, horror genre diehards and celebrities from across the macabre spectrum for decades, and Howison himself has become a cult attraction for those with a love of Southern California’s darker corners.
The longtime horror curator plans to stay busy until the end. On a recent weekday, Howison is moving about his Burbank shop, taking pictures of vintage Spanish and Italian movie posters to sell online. He occasionally breaks to gesture at the Tiki mugs, shot glasses, board games, playing cards and action figures on the shelves. “We stopped calling them dolls, as guys didn’t like saying they were collecting dolls,” Howison says of his early days in business. “Of course, back then, there was no such thing as a horror convention.”…
(9) UK PAPERS PROTEST AI LEGISLATIVE PROPOSAL. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] A first this side of the Pond. Irrespective of their political leanings, all the papers came together on Tuesday in a campaign to stop British government proposals (yes, we have daft politicians over here just as you do in the US) to allow artificial intelligence (AI) free access to intellectual property so that it can be trained. This is something that authors have been worried about. “UK newspapers launch campaign against AI copyright plans” in the Wandsworth Times.
Special wraps appeared on Tuesday’s editions of the Daily Express, Daily Mail, The Mirror, the Daily Star, The Sun, and The Times – as well as a number of regional titles – criticising a Government consultation around possible exemptions being added to copyright law for training AI models.
The proposals would allow tech firms to use copyrighted material from creatives and publishers without having to pay or gain a licence, or reimbursing creatives for using their work.
In response, publishers have launched the Make It Fair campaign, which saw newspapers put covers on the outside of their front page – criticising the Government’s consultation – organised by the News Media Association (NMA), and backed by the Society of Editors (SOE).
The message said: “The Government wants to change the UK’s laws to favour big tech platforms so they can use British creative content to power their AI models without our permission or payment. Let’s protect the creative industries – it’s only fair.”…
…In a statement shared with the Times, the Klara and the Sun (Faber) author said the country had reached a “fork-in-the-road” moment. “If someone wants to take a book I’ve written and turn it into a TV series, or to print a chapter of it in an anthology, the law clearly states they must first get my permission and pay me,” he said.
“To do otherwise is theft. So why is our government now pushing forward legislation to make the richest, most dominant tech companies in the world exceptions? At the dawn of the AI age, why is it just and fair – why is it sensible — to alter our time-honoured copyright laws to advantage mammoth corporations at the expense of individual writers, musicians, film-makers and artists?”
Ishiguro continued that “no one believes the proposed ‘opt-out’ system will work”, saying this is why “those lobbying on behalf of the tech giants favour it”….
(11) MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG (1985-2025). Actress Michelle Trachtenberg, known especially to fans for playing Dawn Summers in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has died at the age of 39. According to the Guardian:
…Police sources confirmed her death to both ABC News and the New York Post. There is no cause of death yet known, with police saying on Thursday that the New York Medical Examiner is investigating but no foul play was suspected. She had recently undergone a liver transplant, according to sources….
A successful child actress, her first lead film role was in the comedy adventure Harriet the Spy (1996). Trachtenberg followed the film with a role in Inspector Gadget next to Matthew Broderick. Her role in Buffy the Vampire Slayer came in 2000 and continued til the show ended three years later.
Trachtenberg continued to have an active career after that in non-genre productions.
(12) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Award-Winning Barbara Hambly
Barbara Hambly, one of my favorite writers of horror and mysteries, has won two Lord Ruthven Awards given by the Lord Ruthven Assembly, a group of scholars specializing in vampire literature who are affiliated with the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.
(This piece is about her fantasies and mysteries that I’m familiar with. I know she wrote some SF, do comment upon it if so inclined.)
Those Who Hunt in The Night, the first in her excellent John Asher series, won the Locus Award for Best Horror Novel. I think the series, eight long, might be concluded, as the last came out six years ago.
I’m also very impressed of her two novelizations done for one of my favorite TV series, Beauty and the Beast and and Beauty and the Beast: Song of Orpheus as it’s hard to write material off those series that’s worth reading. I’ve read others which very quickly got really mawkish as they overly focus on the relationship, in my opinion of course, of the relationship of Catherine and Vincent to the exclusion of what could a fleshing out of that world. Not her. Wonderful novels!
I’ve not tracked down her three Sherlock Holmes short story pastiches yet.
I listened to Bride of the Rat God, which is the only supernatural fantasy in theSilver Screen historical mystery series, and the next book which was not a fantasy, Scandal in Babylon. There are two more in the series so far. They likewise are not fantasy according to her.
And yes, there’s lots about her writing career I’ve not included here so feel free to tell me what you think I should have mentioned. If anybody has read her Abigail Adams or Benjamin January mystery series, I’d be interested in knowing what you think.
Dark Horse Media has officially shut down Dark Horse Digital as of February 24, 2025, with comics no longer available for purchase on the platform. Online access to the DHD website, however, will still be available at least through this summer, and users can continue to log in and read the comics in their bookshelves.
Effective March 31, 2025, the Dark Horse Comics and Plants vs. Zombies Comics apps for iOS will also no longer be supported.
Eric Reynolds from Fantagraphics gets in touch to correct me. He says “Contrary to what you wrote, the comics were actually not printed yet. If they had been, we would have proceeded as planned. But since they weren’t, and given the uncertainty of whether Diamond will even exist come May (or be able to pay us for them), we made the difficult decision to pull the plug while we could. We may still produce the comic this year, bypassing FCBD. Things are, as you can probably understand, a bit fluid these days… The decision was made entirely based on the uncertainty of FCBD and had nothing to do with the Lost Marvels book series itself, which is otherwise proceeding as planned!”
When Netflix first started adding video games to its huge catalogue of streaming TV shows and films, it did so quietly. In 2021, after releasing an impressive experiment with the idea of interactive film in Black Mirror: Bandersnatch in 2018 and a free Stranger Things game in 2019, Netflix began expanding more fully into interactive entertainment.
The streamer’s gaming offering, for a long time, was its best-kept secret. Whoever was running it really had an eye for quality: award-winningly brilliant and relatively little-known indie games comprised the majority of its catalogue, alongside decent licensed games based on everything from The Queen’s Gambit to the reality dating show Too Hot to Handle. Subscribers could play games such as Before Your Eyes, a brief and touching story about a life cut short; Spiritfarer, about guiding lost souls to rest and Into the Breach, a superb sci-fi strategy game with robots v aliens. The company bought or invested in several game studios known for making critically acclaimed work, including London-based Ustwo games (which was behind Monument Valley). It also established a studio in California to work on blockbuster games, staffed by veteran developers.
But it seems things are changing. That blockbuster studio has been closed, as first reported by Game File, before it could ever release a game. Its latest tie-in game, Squid Game Unleashed, absolutely sucks – it’s constructed around the celebration of slapstick violence, making it a terrible fit for a satirically violent show about capitalist exploitation. Funding a bunch of indie darlings and hiring big-name talent from the likes of Blizzard and Bungie for its game studio gave the impression that Netflix really was keen on becoming a part of the gaming industry, and doing it properly. Now that is very much in question.
The company has made layoffs across its gaming divisions, including at Night Studio – makers of weird-fiction supernatural teen horror series Oxenfree. It has cancelled plans for several forthcoming games that were due to join the service, including indie hits Thirsty Suitors and Don’t Starve Together, and promising-looking hobbit game Tales of the Shire. What’s going on?
He is probably most often thought of today as a wizard, a shape-shifter or a mentor to the young King Arthur.
But a detailed re-examination of Myrddin – Merlin – by Welsh scholars suggests he can also be considered an early British environmentalist deeply worried about human interaction with the natural world…
… The researchers have been combing through manuscripts in the National Library of Wales, in Aberystwyth, and also in the 15th-century Red Book of Hergest at Jesus College, Oxford.
They also discovered more about the importance of Merlin’s sister, Gwenddydd. Callander said: “Gwenddydd is a really important figure in Welsh Merlin poetry. She supports Merlin and also appears to be a prophet in her own right.
“We found hundreds of lines of poetry in her voice in dialogue with her brother. Merlin describes her as ‘fair Gwenddydd, summit of dignity’ and ‘refuge of songs’. One of the important aspects of the project is to throw light on this lost female voice from medieval Wales.”
Callander said it was surprising that early Merlin poems had been largely neglected. “These Welsh-language texts had not been edited or translated in full, meaning much material has been missed out.”…
Akiva Goldsman is developing a new Universe at Legendary Television featuring three reimagined Irwin Allen sci-fi TV series. The Oscar-winning writer, producer and director will draw inspiration for the new TV shows from Allen’s catalog and focus on revitalizing Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Land of the Giants and The Time Tunnel.
… Legendary Television is focused on the three titles above and not Allen’s second TV series Lost in Space, which aired from 1965-68 on CBS and was reimagined by Legendary TV for a 2018-21 series on Netflix. 20th Century Fox produced all four of the original shows….
[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Jason Sizemore, Joey Eschrich, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]
Asimov’s, Analog and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction have been purchased by a new owner. Jason Sanford reported the transactions on his Patreon page.
Sanford says the new owner of the magazines is Steven Salpeter and a group of investors. More information about the buyers is in Sanford’s report.
The Asimov’s, Analog and several other Dell magazines changed their websites to identify the new ownership over the weekend. F&SF, which was owned separately by Gordon Van Gelder, has yet to make an update.
Northeast Airport lies on Grant Avenue in Philadelphia. I live on Grant Avenue, some five minutes from the site of the departure of a Lear Jet medical transport plane that took off at a few minutes past six last evening with a little girl being transported home following life-saving surgery.
I was enroute to my girlfriend Shelly’s home to go out to dinner at Tiffany’s Restaurant on the Boulevard. I had considered taking Roosevelt Boulevard North down to Oxford Circle, as it may have been a faster trip but, at the last second, decided to follow Bustleton Avenue down to Castor, instead.
I arrived at Shelly’s house at a few moments past six. We drove down Levick Street to the boulevard, and turned left into the middle lanes to continue our journey. Within seconds we were dodging police vehicles, fire trucks, and ambulances trying desperately to reach Cottman Avenue and Roosevelt Boulevard amidst screaming sirens where, thirty seconds after takeoff, the Lear Medical Jet had crashed into Cottman Avenue near the boulevard, across from the Roosevelt Mall where I had grown up.
Traffic was being re-routed from virtually every direction, and I found it difficult to keep from being hit by other oncoming busses and trucks while attempting to crossover onto nearby side streets. As I passed Cottman Avenue on the boulevard, I turned to my left and saw flashing lights, emergency vehicles, and bright flames bursting into the rainy night sky.
Had I decided to travel down Roosevelt Boulevard on my way to the Oxford Circle, as I had originally planned, I might have traveled past the outside lanes of Roosevelt Boulevard, at the corner of Cottman Avenue going South, just at the moment of impact of the small jet into the congested community adjoining the fatal crash.
It took us over an hour to finally reach our dinner destination on a trip that normally might have taken fifteen or twenty minutes. We didn’t know just what had occurred mere inches from our travels North on the boulevard until we reached Tiffany’s, and were told by the staff that a plane had fatally crashed into our tightknit community. We were shaken, but glad to be alive.
Our hearts go out to our neighbors in our surrounding community, and to the families of those who perished in this terrible, nightmarish tragedy. May God Rest Their Sweet Souls.
Science fiction writer Octavia Butler wrote in her 1993 novel “Parable of the Sower” that Feb. 1, 2025, would be a time of fires, violence, racism, addiction, climate change, social inequality and an authoritarian “President Donner.”
That day is today.
The big picture: ThisBlack History Month, which begins this year on a day of Butler’s dystopian vision, Axioswill examine what the next 25 years may hold for Black Americans based on the progress in the first quarter of this century.
Through her fiction, Butler foresaw U.S. society’s direction and the potential for civil societies to collapse thanks to the weight of economic disparities and climate change — with blueprints for hope.
Afrofuturist writers today interpret Butler’s work as metaphorical warnings that appear to be coming true and a call to action….
Octavia Butler
(6) A CITY ON MARS REVIEW. [Item by Kyra.] Published in 2023.
A City On Mars, by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith
Nonfiction/Related
Can you make babies in space? Should corporations govern space settlements? What about space war? Are we headed for a housing crisis on the Moon’s Peaks of Eternal Light—and what happens if you’re left in the Craters of Eternal Darkness? Why do astronauts love taco sauce? Speaking of meals, what’s the legal status of space cannibalism? The Weinersmiths investigate perhaps the biggest questions humanity will ever ask itself—whether and how to become multiplanetary.
This is a clear-eyed look at the current barriers to settling space, including technological, physiological, sociological, and legal issues. This may be a must-read for anyone interested in the subject; it’s not the deepest possible examination (it is a pop-science book, after all), but it’s probably one of the broadest.
(7) GET READY FOR WASTED WEEKEND. Booktube luminary Criminolly has been hosting an event called Garbaugust, including the reading of some trashy books in August. Last year he added a mini-event, Wasted Weekend. It’s coming up again on February 15-16. Grammaticus Books wants viewers to pick their book: “I Need YOU to VOTE FOR….” But I don’t know – these are not names I associated with the word “trashy” —
Vote for your favorite trashy novel for this year’s Wasted Weekend. A reading event created by CriminOlly. Choose from a diverse selection of books by authors such as Samuel R. Delany, L. Sprague DeCamp, Terrence Dicks, Frederick Pohl, C.M. Kornbluth and of course…Lin Carter the King of Trash!
(8) JOHN ERWIN: CORA BUHLERT’S FAVORITE HE-MAN. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] John Erwin [who died December 20] was my He-Man. For most Germans, their He-Man is either Norbert Langer, who voiced him in the long-running German audio drama series, or Sasha Hehn or Heiko Liebig, who voiced him in the German dub of the Filmation He-Man and She-Ra cartoons.
But even though I first heard He-Man speak in the Filmation cartoon He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, I didn’t watch the German dub, but the English version via Sky Channel, when my Dad worked in the Netherlands in the 1980s. And in that cartoon, the voice of He-Man and his alter ego Prince Adam was none other than John Erwin.
If you rewatch the iconic opening narration of the cartoon – where John Erwin explains the entire premise of the series in one minute and ten seconds – you’ll notice the subtle difference between Prince Adam’s more youthful tones (Adam turned nineteen in the course of the series, while John Erwin was 47, when he first voiced him) and He-Man’s booming heroic voice.
However, John Erwin didn’t just voice He-Man and Prince Adam, but as was common with Filmation, he voiced multiple other characters in the He-Man and She-Ra cartoons as well, showcasing his amazing range. And so John Erwin lent his voice to Skeletor’s henchmen Beast-Man, Whiplash and Webstor. He was the delightfully dim-witted heroic warrior Ram-Man and the wise but grumpy dragon Granamyr as well as many one-of guest characters.
Beyond He-Man, John Erwin appeared in the western series Rawhide alongside Clint Eastwood, one of his comparatively few parts in front of the camera, and voiced Reggie in various Archie cartoons over the years. He was also the voice of Morris the Cat in the commercials for 9-Lives cat food. And if you ever needed proof that dragons are related to cats, just compare the snarky Morris to the equally snarky Granamyr.
Voice actors are unseen and often unsung. This is unfair, because their talent is what brings cartoon characters to life and turns them into icons. John Erwin’s voice played a big part in turning the Filmation He-Man cartoon into the runaway success that it was and in turning He-Man into the iconic hero he became.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
February 1, 1954 — Bill Mumy, 71.
By Paul Weimer: Bill Mumy’s intersection with my genre show watching boils down to three properties, and they are the three ones that you think they are. I first saw him as the mutant overpowered psychic child Anthony in one of the most terrifying Twilight Zone episodes of all time, “It’s a Good Life”. What happens when a young boy develops psychic powers and takes control of the town. Nothing good…I mean, no wait, Anthony, I mean, it’s a good life. I swear, it’s a good life. The whole idea that he cuts off the town from the rest of the universe is terrifying in and of itself, isn’t it? You can’t escape him, you can’t escape his power. Mumy also appears in a few other Twilight Zone episodes in various roles, but they are nothing compared to the power and centrality of his performance in “It’s a Good Life”
His role as Will Robinson in Lost in Space couldn’t be any different. I stumbled across episodes of Lost in Space in reruns not long after seeing the Twilight Zone episode. As the naive, but well-meaning youngest child of the Robinson family, Will Robinson couldn’t be any different than the psychic Anthony. Whether with Robbie, or Dr. Smith (and it seemed he spent more time with either of them than the rest of his family), he showed the childlike wonder of being on alien planets. I was delighted he had a small role in the recent remake of Lost in Space, too, as the “real” Zachary Smith. (He gets his identity stolen by Parker Posey’s character). That was a neat bit of turnaround, and not at all stunt casting.
The other genre work I associate Mumy with is, of course, Babylon 5, and Lennier. As the assistant to Delenn, he stands with Vir (Stephen Furst) as one of the two maintained underlings in the diplomatic corps. While Vir feels like an everyman (as the Centauri as, outwardly very much human), Lennier could show, on occasion, through Mumy’s acting, just how alien and not-human the Minbari were. He was meek, mild and deferential…until he needed not to be, and then could be all too inhumanly dangerous and determined. And given that this story is ultimately a tragedy, Lennier’s story is one that hits me in the feels, from start to finish. Such great acting. I remember when watching “Midnight on the Firing Line” and seeing his name in the credits and wondering what the child actor had become. He had become a fine adult actor, that’s what.
Happy birthday!
Bill Mumy
(10) COMICS SECTION.
Broom Hilda wonders if she has what it takes to be a writer.
(11) THE TEST OF TIME. The Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog analyzes the Best Dramatic Hugo finalists of 1984 as part of their continuing series: “Big Worldcon Is Watching (Hugo Cinema 1984)”.
L.A. Con II, the 42nd Worldcon, was the largest World Science Fiction Convention of all time up to that point, with more than 8,000 fans in attendance (to this day, only the 2023 Worldcon in Chengdu, China has eclipsed that number). Science fiction cinema was bigger than ever. The Hugo Awards were bigger than ever. But in 1984, the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation was still considered a second-tier award.
“We will now proceed with the minor awards: Best Dramatic Presentation,” Toastmaster Robert Bloch quipped as he introduced the nominees: Bradbury adaptation Something Wicked This Way Comes, special effects maestro Douglas Trumbull’s Brainstorm, early hacking movie Wargames, blockbuster Return of the Jedi, and Oscar Best Picture contender The Right Stuff.
It’s an uneven shortlist that reveals both a tension between the populism and the insularity to which the award was often prone….
Remember the plot to the 1984 sci-fi blockbuster “The Terminator”?
“There was a nuclear war,” a character explains. “Defense network computers. New… powerful… hooked into everything, trusted to run it all. They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence. Then it saw all people as a threat, not just the ones on the other side. Decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination.”
It seems like either the execs at OpenAI have never seen it or they’re working overtime to make that premise a reality.
Don’t believe us? OpenAI has announced that the US National Laboratories will use its deeply flawed AI models to help with a “comprehensive program in nuclear security.”
As CNBC reports, up to 15,000 scientists working at the institutions will get access to OpenAI’s latest o1 series of AI models — the ones that Chinese startup DeepSeek embarrassed on the world stage earlier this month.
According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who announced the partnership at an event in Washington, DC, the tech will be “focused on reducing the risk of nuclear war and securing nuclear materials and weapons worldwide,” as quoted by CNBC.
I once saw an episode of America’s Dumbest Criminals where a man called the cops to report his car stolen, only for it to turn out he’d stolen it from someone else in the first place. I couldn’t help thinking of him this week while watching OpenAI’s Sam Altman wet his pants about the fact that a Chinese hedge fund might have made unauthorised use of his own chatbot models, including ChatGPT, to train its new little side project. This is the cheaper, more open, extremely share-price-slashing DeepSeek.
As news of DeepSeek played havoc with the tech stock market, OpenAI pressed its hanky to its nose and released a statement: “We are aware of and reviewing indications that DeepSeek may have inappropriately distilled our models, and will share information as we know more,” this ran….
…So, to put it another way … wait, Sam – you’re not telling us that the Chinese hedge fund crawled all over your IP without asking and took it for themselves? Oh my God, IMAGINE?! You must feel used and abused. Financially violated. Like all your years of creativity were just grist to some other bastard’s mill. Like a host organism. Like a schmuck. Like Earth’s most screamingly preposterous hypocrite….
(14) SUPERHAMLET. From Christopher Reeve’s appearance on The Muppet Show long ago: “Brush Up Your Shakespeare”.
(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid Moidelhoff over at Media Death Cult considers the sense of place as a principal character in some SF/F… “When Location is the Main Character”.
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Olav Rokne, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, and Teddy Harvia for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
…The Pocket Book of Science-Fiction was the first anthology of reprinted science fiction. Another important aspect of this anthology is that it was the first one with “science fiction” in the title.
Finally, it was probably the first paperback of science fiction. After first publication in hardback in 1933, Lost Horizon by James Hilton was published in paperback in 1939 by Pocket Books. I have not read it, but what I found suggested that it is probably more fantasy than SF. I could be wrong.
… On this basis, I believe that The Pocket Book of Science-Fiction was important both for what it was and as a harbinger of easier access to SF by more people….
(2) HOW MICHAEL WHELAN GOT HIS START. [Item by Bruce D. Arthurs.] Michael Whelan writes interestingly about how he broke into professional illustration, along with pics of some of his early book covers. “1975: Year in Review”.
Ever since I can remember, it seemed natural to draw things that interested me. I just did it. I wasn’t aware of wanting to be an artist until the concept of a career impinged on my mind, but in any case I never thought of it as a serious option until my third year in college.
I had grown to think that I had to be something professional, and since I’d always had an interest in human anatomy, I was intending to become a doctor. In college I was able to separate what I wanted to do from what I thought was expected of me, and in the latter half of my junior year I changed my major to art.
After graduating from San Jose State University, I attended The Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. I enrolled hoping to acquire some mysterious quality of refinement I felt was lacking in my work.
I knew it would be a big mistake to attempt to find my first commission with anything less than professional-level work in my portfolio…
The rest of Whelan’s article tells why he was more surprised than anyone when sf publishers said his work made the grade.
(3) NOT HIS BEST VINTAGE. Jason Sanford’s latest Genre Grapevine devotes a long passage to justifying Erin Cairns’ disproven complaints against Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, in the process shading File 770’s post “Two Accusations Against Ekpeki Disproved”. Sanford refuses to account for the critical fact that Cairns made up two of the worst accusations in her “ODE Ethics Report”.
First, when Erin Cairns claimed that Ekpeki had left her name off the byline when submitting their co-authored story, she merely assumed that must have happened because it was a way she could make sense of how Ekpeki was responding to her, and how she was being ignored by the magazine’s editors. She didn’t know whether that had actually occurred when she made the claim. It wasn’t true. Her name was on the byline of the cover letter and the manuscript. I’ve seen the magazine’s archived copies.
Second, Cairns, a white woman, was distressed because she was under the impression the publication their story was submitted to was a “Black voices magazine”. Cairns emailed the magazine about her concerns and received no answer from them. Therefore, in her report she represented her belief about the magazine’s policy as a fact. It wasn’t a fact. Through contact with an editor of the magazine involved File 770 learned that it was not inappropriate for Cairns’ co-authored story to be submitted to the magazine, which has published a white author in the past.
Jason Sanford had exactly the same opportunity as File 770 to fact-check Cairns’ story. He did not choose to do it, instead devoting the Genre Grapevine for September/October 2024 to a Queeg-like exercise of geometric logic denying Ekpeki’s self-defense:
…In Ekpeki’s response, he essentially says the story was co-written by both of them and he submitted it without her name due to “miscommunication and misunderstandings and assumptions on both sides from two people in not great situations.” Ekpeki also says all the claims Cairns made were incorrect.
However, his argument doesn’t hold up for me. I see it as semantics and legalese, trying to rationalize away what happened. For example, Ekpeki said in his report that “As for her name not being on the bi-line, even if that were true (which it isn’t), it would not be theft, or even an attempt at theft, just an oversight, unless there was an intention to eventually publish it without her name on the bi-line.” And he then says that the magazine he submitted the story to wasn’t a Black voices publication because the magazine “caters to Africans and African diasporans. So there was no malfeasance there. She was eligible to be on the mag.”
That claim is absolutely wrong. As a white person born in South Africa, Cairns specifically said she wasn’t eligible to submit works to the magazine….
Sanford rejected Ekpeki’s statement that her name was on the byline. Yet it was. And about the magazine not being a “Black voices publication”, how did Sanford establish that claim was “absolutely wrong”? By the circular process of referring back to Cairns’ report. Not by pursuing third-party verification, through which he could have learned that it is Cairns’ claim that was wrong.
Know that when celebrated astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson nitpicks the bad science commonly encountered in mainstream Hollywood blockbusters, he’s not trying to spoil anyone’s fun. He’s just being a nerd, and I think we can all respect that. There’s nothing shameful about possessing a lot of scientific knowledge, and pointing out the physics and astronomical errors in a movie can only, one might hope, encourage filmmakers to be more accurate next time….
… There are a few movies, however, that would strain the credulity of anyone. Michael Bay’s 1998 thriller “Armageddon,” for instance, is about a team of oil drillers and astronauts who fly to an oncoming comet to blow it up. On a 2024 episode of “The Jess Cagle Show,” Tyson pointed out several reasons why blowing up a potentially lethal comet is a bad idea. In fact, he once felt that “Armageddon” was the most brazenly unscientific sci-fi film ever made.
But “Armageddon” was recently supplanted by an even stupider movie. Tyson has some harsh words for Roland Emmerich’s 2022 mega-dud “Moonfall.”…
“It was a pandemic film […] — you know, Halle Berry — and the moon is approaching Earth, and they learned that it’s hollow. And there’s a moon being made out of rocks living inside of it. And the Apollo missions were to visit and feed the moon being.* And I … And I just couldn’t … I thought ‘Armageddon’ had a secure hold on this crown. But apparently not.”…
(5) TEDDY HARVIA CARTOON.
(6) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Batman movie (1966)
By Paul Weimer: Batman 1966 film, or some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb.
The Batman movie was, for me, just a long two-part episode of the Batman 1960’s TV series. I didn’t even know for years that it was meant to be a movie, I just thought it was a long episode of the second superhero show I remember watching. (The first is another story entirely).
Come back me to the days of the 1970’s and endless reruns. Among the reruns on Channel 5 (I swear, by the time I finish doing these anniversaries, you filers will know every nuance of TV in NYC in the 70’s and 80’s) was the 1960’s Batman TV show. I’ll save my thoughts about the entire show for another day.
Today we’re talking about the movie. It’s the classic set up, have several supervillains (Catwoman, Penguin, Joker, and Riddler) team up for their greatest plot yet, which Batman and Robin must foil. Sadly, Julie Newmar was unable to play Catwoman for the movie, and instead fell on Lee Meriweather. I’m sorry, but Lee is a distant third behind Newmar and the last Catwoman, Eartha Kitt, in my book. She’s not bad, but she doesn’t quite inhabit the role as the other two actresses do.
The plot is silly but the movie has a lot of the extra tropes and gadgets that people associate with the entire series but were only in this movie or were much more prominent in this movie. The Batboat. Bat Shark repellent. Batcycle. Batcopter. Catwoman with a secret identity. Someone figures out a way into the Batcave! Lots of silly fights and chases.
And of course, the bomb. In trying to save some civilians, we are treated with Batman carrying a preposterous large bomb with a fuse, unable to dispose of it safely. He becomes so exasperated by this that he utters the memorable line “some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb.”
The movie itself is not a bomb. Sure, Batman is a very different character these days. But the movie is pure fun, and it never takes itself too seriously, not even in the denouement.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
January 12, 1980 — Kameron Hurley, 45.
So I’ve been re-listening to Kameron Hurley’s space opera The Stars are Legion as I write this Birthday essay. A most excellent story indeed.
Her time travel novel which I listened to recently, The Light Brigade, is one the best works in that sub-genre I’ve encountered. It was nominated for a Hugo at CoNZealand.
Her first novel which I need someday to listen to (if it’s in audiobook format) is the start of her matriarchal Islam culture Bel Dame Apocrypha biopunk trilogy. Her term, not mine.
The Worldbreaker trilogy which begins with The Mirror Empire I find delightful with its merging of hard SF underpinned by magic in a space opera setting. Now that shouldn’t work, should it? Really. But it magnificently does.
And let’s talk about her non-fiction. The Geek Feminist Revolution which garnered a BFA is a collection of previously published blog posts and none news essays written for here. One of the first, “We Have Always Fought’: Challenging the ‘Women, Cattle and Slaves’ Narrative” got a Hugo for Best Related Work at Loncon 3, and she also won a Hugo for Best Fan Writer.
Her exemplary short stories have been collected so far in Meet in The Future and Future Artifacts. Meet in The Future was nominated for an Otherwise Award.
Of course, everything she’s written is available from the usual suspects.
Mur Lafferty, Ursula Vernon, and Kameron Hurley at 2017 Hugo Award reception.
Warwick Davis, the British star best known for his appearances in the “Star Wars” and “Harry Potter” franchises, is to be awarded the British Academy’s highest honor, the BAFTA Fellowship.
Recognizing those who have made an outstanding and exceptional contribution to film, games or television, the honor will be presented at the BAFTA film awards on Feb. 16….
For as long as humans have endeavored to build upwards toward the sky, they have also been forced to contend with inexorable laws of nature — ones that are not always so accommodating to our species’ vertical endeavors. In the modern era, that tension is perhaps best exemplified in Florida, where coastal erosion, sinkholes, and other environmental factors have become a constant challenge in the march toward upward construction.
Nearly three dozen structures along Florida’s southern coast sank an “unexpected” amount between 2016 and 2023, according to a report released this month by researchers at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science. All told, “35 buildings along the Miami Beach to Sunny Isles Beach coastline are experiencing subsidence, a process where the ground sinks or settles,” the school said in a press release announcing the results of its research. Although it’s generally understood that buildings can experience subsidence “up to several tens of centimeters during and immediately after construction,” this latest study shows that the process can “persist for many years.” What do these new findings mean for Miami-area residents, and our understanding of how to build bigger, safer buildings in general?…
Why it’s so special: This image of a spiral galaxy taken by the Hubble Space Telescope is a portrait more than two decades in the making.
Like most full-color images of space objects, it’s a composite of images taken in different wavelengths of light. What sets this image apart, however, is that the data used to create it was collected during observation sessions in 2000 and 2023 — 23 years apart. That’s one advantage of having a space telescope in orbit for so long: Hubble was launched from the space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990, and its long service has enabled it to capture a huge amount of data about every corner of the cosmos.
But besides the prolonged methods used to create it, it’s also an unusual image on its face. Spiral galaxies — which account for about 60% of all galaxies in the universe, according to the European Space Agency — are, by chance, typically seen face-on when viewed from the solar system. That’s why spiral galaxies are typically associated with vivid spiral arms, which can only be seen from a face-on vantage. However, UGC 10043 is viewed edge-on, with its rings seemingly flattened into a line. This unique angle gives astronomers the chance to see how spiral galaxies are structured in 3D.
This cat tower is also an air purifier; it is also good
There are a lot of phones out there that need charging and a bunch of gamers who, for some reason, need even more controllers and screens to play on. But there is another, eternally underserved market getting some attention at CES: cats wanting to sit.
LG, which primarily concerned itself with stuffing generative AI interfaces into every other device at CES 2025, crafted something that feels like a real old-time trade show gimmick. There is no guarantee that your cat will use the AeroCat Tower; some cats may just sit inside the cardboard box it came in out of spite. But should they deign to luxuriate on it, the AeroCat will provide gentle heat beneath them, weigh them, and give you a record of their sleep habits. Also, it purifies the air in that room….
[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Paul Weimer, Bruce D. Arthurs, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Mark Roth-Whitworth.]
For Your Consideration, The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report On Censorship and Exclusion
Chris M. Barkley. Photo by Juli Marr.
By Chris M. Barkley: If I were to say that the past year in sff fandom has been both too interesting and tumultuous, it would be an incredibly disingenuous understatement.
But, let’s face it, it was all of that and more.
In the waning weeks of 2024, my partner Juli has been urging me to write a fifty word (or less) promotion regarding the report Jason Sanford and I wrote and published last February chronicling the highly unusual and irregular administration of the 2023 Hugo Awards.
In the time since its publication, the report Jason and I wrote has generated a lot of drama, public comment, speculation and repercussions that have been felt all over the fannish world and not in a good way.
At first, I had wanted to include a consideration plea at the end of a compilation of things in a timeline that extended from the Glasgow Worldcon to the end of December but as the year came to a close the size of the essay grew too large and unwieldy for me to complete before the New Year. (Those events will be chronicled on File 770 at a later date.)
The three things I remember most vividly about this saga were the initial shock of the release of the nomination results while we were attending Confusion (the annual Michigan sf convention in Detroit) on January 20th, receiving the explosive revelations from the trembling hands of Diane Lacey two weeks later at Capricon 44 and, once I read through those documents and spreadsheets, was the realization that for once, I was totally incapable of reporting a story on my own.
Fortunately for me, I quickly thought of enlisting my fellow Hugo Nominee (and fellow Ohioan) Jason Sanford, who not only laid down the foundation of the report in short order, he also added his professional journalistic instincts, insights and commentary as well.
Speaking personally, I am very grateful for Jason’s assistance, along with my editor, Mike Glyer, my partner in life, Juli Marr and, most importantly, the bravery and fortitude of Ms. Diane Lacey, for bringing this important story to everyone’s attention.
Jason and I also feel that this story of betrayal and malfeasance should be remembered and honored, so I humbly ask that you, the Hugo Award nominators for the 2025 Seattle Worldcon, consider The 2023 Hugo Awards – A Report On Censorship and Exclusion for the Best Related Work category on your ballot.
And speaking for myself, I also ask that you consider the 2024 journalistic works of Jason Sanford on his Genre Grapevine Patreon site in the Best Fan Writer category as well.
Links to the The Report On Censorship and Exclusion:
