(1) POSSIBLY AMONG THE BEST SF BOOKS AND FILMS OF 2024? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.]SF² Concatenation has just posted its annual team poll as to the possibly best SF books and films of 2024 (well some of SF² Concatenation team members liked them). This is an annual bit of fun and is not to be taken too seriously. Having said that, its past January team picks have seen some go on to be short-listed, and even win, some major SF Awards (scroll down the page to see these).
(3) ON THE FRONT. Literary Hub asked 54 designers to share their favorite covers of the year, and has posted a gallery of the 167 covers on their lists: “The 167 Best Book Covers of 2024”. At the top are the covers from The Southern Reach series.
(4) CLARKE AWARD WINNER ON QUIZ SHOW. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Last night’s Christmas University Challenge BBC2 30th Dec, saw Queens College Cambridge vs Emmanuel College Cambridge.
On the Queens team was SF author and Clarke Award winner Richard Morgan of Altered Carbon fame among much else.
Richard Morgan.
The Queens team members seemed to equally contribute to their collective score. Richard helped early on getting the 2nd starter question for 10 points right. He also demonstrated a knowledge of the film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as well as Bonnie Prince Charlie.
Mr. Carter made energy policy one of his top concerns. His presidency arrived after several years of oil shortages and price spikes that had roiled the economy.
He established the Department of Energy, which was also responsible for managing the nuclear weapons stockpile, and famously installed 32 solar panels on the West Wing of the White House to promote renewable sources. To his disappointment, Ronald Reagan had them removed. (The National Park Service quietly added new panels for secondary buildings on White House grounds in 2002, and the Obama administration revived solar power on the main structure in 2014.)
The Carter family got the Marvel Comics treatment by the artist John Tartaglione to encourage — along with Captain America — energy conservation. This illustration, signed by Stan Lee, Marvel’s publisher, is on display at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta.
The beloved sci-fi anthology The Twilight Zone (airing regularly on SYFY) is full of iconic quotes — like “It’s not fair… there was time now,” “Wish it into the cornfield,” and “It’s a cookbook!” — but the one that’s most associated with the classic show has to be from creator Rod Serling: “Submitted for your approval.”
When you picture Serling, appearing before the camera to introduce whatever twist-filled tale The Twilight Zone has in store, you can hear him saying that phrase. If you’re trying to do an impression of Serling, it’s almost mandatory that you say, “Submitted for your approval.”
But would it surprise you to learn that Serling only says that catchphrase three times across all of The Twilight Zone’s 156 episodes?
It is with profound sadness that I bring you the news of the death Barb Gilligan She and our friend Pat H started on an adventure cruise in the Sea of Cortez, but after a few fun days, Barb became ill. Her condition worsened, and the ship turned around to take her to a medical facility. From there she was airlifted to a larger hospital in San Jose del Cabo. Her condition continued to worsen, she was intubated, and never recovered. She was taken off life support on Saturday, December 28th. Her brother-in-law flew in and joined Pat to be there with Barb at the end.
Pat was a rock through all of this, working tirelessly to help and advocate for her friend in a country where she didn’t speak the language.
Barb was kind, adventurous, and always had a twinkle in her eye. She is survived by her dog Lily, and siblings, Cathy, Janice, David and James, and many friends.
(8) ANGUS MACINNES (1947-2024). Actor Angus MacInnes, whose active screen career included roles in many genre productions, died December 23 at the age of 77.
…He made his first on-screen appearance in 1975’s Rollerball.
His most notable role was in director George Lucas’ 1977 film Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, which saw him play Gold Leader/Jon “Dutch” Vander. He later reprised his role in 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, directed by Gareth Edwards.
“For Angus, the fans of Star Wars held a special place in his heart. He loved meeting you at conventions, hearing your stories, and sharing in your passion for the saga,” the family added in their statement. “He was continually humbled, delighted, and honored by the admiration and passion of the fans and convention community.”
MacInnes’ other acting credits included Space: 1999 (1977), Atlantic City (1980), Outland (1981), The Littlest Hobo (1980-81), Witness (1985), Half Moon Street (1986), Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988), Sleepers (1991), Roughnecks (1994), Judge Dredd (1995), Space Island One (1998), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Formula 51 (2001), Hellboy (2004), The Black Dahlia (2006), Vikings (2013) and Captain Phillips (2013).
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Born December 31, 1949 – Ellen Datlow, 75.
By Paul Weimer: Ellen Datlow is an Empress of short fiction editing.
Although I didn’t pay attention to it at the time, I’ve been reading fiction edited by Datlow for most of my science fiction reading life. That is to say, Omni Magazine. Datlow was the Omni Magazine (and later Omni Online) fiction editor. So the stories I enjoyed in those early halcyon days of short fiction reading were under her editorial hand — Omni was the first SF magazine I read and for a while was the only one before I transitioned into magazines like Asimov’s and Analog. So some of my early favorite SF stories, like “The Infinite Plane” by Paul Nahin, were thanks to her editorial direction. But young me didn’t even think of looking up editors in those halcyon days.
After her stint in Omni, and more famously, Datlow’s short fiction editing transitioned to a goodly number of anthologies. And this, friends, is where Datlow as a name came to my reading attention. Her editorial work on many volumes of books like The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Best Horror of the Year and others have been staples of my reading for years. Datlow has also won a number of Hugo and World Fantasy awards for her short fiction and for some of her one-off anthologies, such as the fantastic The Green Man.
Datlow also co-hosts the speculative fiction reading series held on the secondWednesday of every month at the KGB Bar in Manhattan.
Among the undated offerings from HBO and Max are Seasons 2 of “The Last of Us,”
the latest “Game of Thrones” offshoot, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” and the “It” prequel series “Welcome to Derry” (which we’re already scared of based on a sneak peak!).
Over on Hulu, the sixth and final season of the Emmy-winning “The Handmaid’s Tale” will premiere sometime in the spring, and will reveal what June (Elisabeth Moss) and Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski) can do now that they’ve joined forces to take down Gilead.
Amazon’s Prime Video service…Season 2 of “Gen V,” the brilliant spinoff of “The Boys”
Last but not least, we come to FX. …Noah Hawley’s “Alien: Earth,” which was first announced in December 2020, will at last be unveiled, and will likely be one of the biggest shows of the year.
A week before Christmas, a man returned a copy of Igor Stravinsky’s 1936 autobiography to a clerk at The New York Public Library’s 455 5th Ave. location.
The clerk immediately contacted the branch’s director.
“They called and said, ‘hey, are you able to come down?’” said Billy Parrott, director of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library.
The book was 72 years overdue, making it the most overdue book Parrott has ever heard of being returned to the branch.
“We routinely get stuff [returned], all the time, from the ‘80s or the ‘90s but rarely stuff from mid-century,” said Parrott, who loves learning the stories behind such superlatively overdue items….
… It was April 4, 1952. The book was due back two weeks later.
On Feb. 9, 1953, the tardy patron was mailed a formal notice, signed by the NYPL’s private investigator Herbert Bouscher (who later became head of its microfilm services, according to an obituary), requesting she return the book to the branch she borrowed it from and pay the fine of 1 cent per day plus a handling charge, which together came to $3.25.
Although she went on to work for a time at an NYPL location in the Bronx, she never did return the book, or pay the fine, said Parrott.
…Some scientists question whether human astronauts are going to be needed at all.
“Robots are developing fast, and the case for sending humans is getting weaker all the time,” says Lord Martin Rees, the UK’s Astronomer Royal. “I don’t think any taxpayer’s money should be used to send humans into space.”
He also points to the risk to humans.
“The only case for sending humans [there] is as an adventure, an experience for wealthy people, and that should be funded privately,” he argues.
Andrew Coates, a physicist from University College London, agrees. “For serious space exploration, I much prefer robotics,” he says. “[They] go much further and do more things.”
They are also cheaper than humans, he argues. “And as AI progresses, the robots can be cleverer and cleverer.”
But what does that mean for future generations of budding astronauts – and surely there are certain functions that humans can do in space but which robots, however advanced, never could?…
… In her 2024 Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital, author Samantha Harvey puts it more lyrically: “A robot has no need for hydration, nutrients, excretion, sleep… It wants and asks for nothing.”…
A lunar rock collected by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on humanity’s first trip to the Moon in 1969 was accidentally destroyed in a fire after spending three years in an Irish basement, it has emerged.
The rock was collected on Nasa’s Apollo 11 mission and gifted to Eamon de Valera, the Irish president at the time, in 1970.
Previously confidential documents from the Dublin National Archives reveal the historic item was left in bureaucratic limbo for three years, with civil servants unable to decide where it should be displayed….
… “This piece of Moon rock had lain in the basement for three-and-a-half years due to indecision as to where it might best be displayed,” a memo from 1984 seen by the PA news agency reads.
“It was decided to give the Moon rock to Dunsink when it became known that a second gift was to be made by the US government, and it was thought that some embarrassment would be caused if the first piece was not already on display.”
The lunar rock completed a 236,000-mile trip back to Earth on Apollo 11, only to spend three years in a dark room before being consumed by flames and accidentally disposed of with the rubble. “The first piece was destroyed during a fire at Dunsink on October 3, 1977,” documents confirmed.
The second piece of Moon rock, from Apollo 17, was gifted by the US in 1973, accompanied by a special plaque featuring the Irish tricolour.
(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Here are the special effects that explain “How They Made Hagrid Big” in the Harry Potter movies.
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Paul Weimer, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]
Erin Cairns, a South African-born white woman who moved to the U.S. with her parents when she was young, has published a 78-page memo charging Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki with unethical practices, among them submitting her work under his name to a “Black voices magazine”.
“I am reporting Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki for unethical practices. He submitted a story entirely written by me into a Black voices magazine without my name on the byline. He lied about who he knew and how well he knew them. He obfuscated information about publications and editors and manipulated me to such an extent that I still struggle to trust myself and others.”…
The 770 post also quotes and links to more information about Ekpeki and the status of his projects which has been broadcast in social media in response.
… As someone who helped Ekpeki fundraise to both attend the Chicago Worldcon and to deal with his visa issues, and who also donated my own money to support him, these revelations have left me pissed and gutted. I spent a lot of time helping Ekpeki. I’m glad Cairns went public with her report, but I also wish I’d pressed her for the name of that author when she’d originally approached me. At the time I felt, based on her email, that she was fearful to reveal the name and that it wasn’t appropriate for me to even ask. Now I wish I had done so…
Finally, Steve Davidson of Amazing Stories says they are delaying the release of The Martian Trilogy – a project reported in yesterday’s Scroll which includes a contribution by Ekpeki — owing to the current controversy.
It has been 19 long years between the first Wallace & Gromit feature in 2005 and now the second in 2024, but it is an understatement to say it was well worth the wait. Nick Park‘s and Aardman‘s delightful buddy movie, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is an animated film noir merged with the dangers of technology running rampant….
(3) LIS CAREY MEDICAL UPDATE. Yesterday Filer Lis Carey was admitted to the hospital. Today she reports feeling a bit better, and reports more tests are being done to diagnose the problem.
(4) GABINO IGLESIAS REVIEWS. In the New York Times, Gabino Iglesias assesses Laird Barron’s latest collection, Not A Speck Of Light: Stories, Hildur Knutsdottir’s new novella, The Night Guest (translated from the Icelandic by Mary Robinette Kowal), Richard Thomas’ novel Incarnate, and Sinophagia: A Celebration of Chinese Horror, translated and edited by Xueting C. Ni: “4 New Horror Books Filled With Eldritch Terrors and Other Frights” (behind a paywall.)
From the depths of Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s laboratory comes 50 culinary concoctions to titillate the taste buds of Rocky Horror fans, in this lip-smacking officially licensed cookbook based on the cult classic stage musical.
Never worry about the likes of Brad and Janet crashing your party; there will be plenty of food for everyone with this delightful and delectable cookbook beamed directly from the galaxy Transylvania to your kitchen. Give your guests a little tease with appetizers like Magenta Mash(ed) Potato Cakes and Thrill Me Chill Me Spicy Gazpacho. The main courses—which can be served in either the dining room or bedroom—offer scintillating options like Rocky’s Mussels, Riff Raff Ramen, and Slow-Cooked Thigh Ragu that will have you shivering in antici…
…pation. Wash it all down with a Make You a Man-hattan before biting into Midnight Double Chocolate Feature Brownies for dessert. With a foreword by Rocky Horror creator Richard O’Brien, The Rocky Horror Cookbook will have long-time fans and newly discovered creatures of the night singing in unison, “Don’t dream it. Eat it.”
“Have you got a name or should I just keep thinking of you as ‘the liability?’” a beautiful young woman named Grace asks the protagonist of Alan Moore’s THE GREAT WHEN (Bloomsbury, 315 pp., $29.99).
He does indeed: Our hero rejoices in the name of Dennis Knuckleyard, and that’s the least of his problems. Dennis, a miserable teenager who works in a bookshop for a phlegmy old crone named Coffin Ada, has been sold a dangerous book — “A London Walk,” which ought not to exist outside the fiction of horror writer Arthur Machen, but has somehow left the world of ideas and entered his possession. He must properly dispose of it or be drawn into a magical world called Long London that exists parallel to the Shoreditch of 1949 where Dennis usually resides. Also, at least some of Long London’s inhabitants possess the ability and possibly the inclination to turn Dennis inside out…
(7) MARC WELLS HAS DIED. Portland fan Marc Wells passed away October 25 after several months of illness. OryCon’s Bluesky account posted a statement provided by Linda Pilcher:
I am sending this on the behalf of Marc’s family:
With sadness, we share that Marc Wells, a long-time Portland fan, passed away on October 25 after several months of illness. Throughout his life, Marc was an active techie at conventions, served as president of the Portland Science Fiction Society, and President of the Board of Directors of OSFCI fo many years.
Above all, he was a cherished husband, father, grandfather, and friend.
Marc didn’t believe in funerals. Instead, his ashes will be scattered in the Columbia River Gorge. We will hold a wake at a future date, likely at the Rose City Book Pub, with a general invitation to follow.
As many of you know, Marc was a talented musician himself who loved supporting young musicians and all sorts of music, especially Friends of Noise, a non-profit dedicated to helping to support diversity among young musicians. If you wish to make a donation in Marc’s name, you can find the donation link as well as more details about Friends of Noise and their upcoming shows on their website: Friends Of Noise | All Ages. Always.
The family extends deep gratitude to everyone who supported Marc during his illness.
(8) JERI TAYLOR (1938-2024). Jeri Taylor, the showrunner behind Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager (which she co-created), died October 24 at the age of 86. The Deadline tribute
…In 1990, she began writing for Next Generation Season 4, eventually working her way up to co-executive producer in Season 6. She was the showrunner of the Patrick Stewart vehicle in its seventh and final installment, for which she garnered an Emmy nom for Outstanding Drama Series.
Afterward, Taylor co-created Voyager alongside Next Generation co-EPs Rick Berman and Michael Pillar, serving as showrunner from 1995 through 1998 and later creative consultant for its final three seasons. She pioneered the idea of a female lead captain in the franchise with actress Kate Mulgrew. In a tribute post on X, Mulgrew wrote that Taylor was “responsible, in large part, for changing my life. She was elegant, erudite, and fiercely opinionated. She wanted Kathryn Janeway to be a significant part of her legacy and I think there is no doubt that in that endeavor she succeeded.”…
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Born October 27, 1939 — John Cleese, 85.
By Paul Weimer: My first introduction to John Cleese was not, as it turns out, Monty Python. My older brother was to blame. He was in fact a Python fan, although in those times before we had a VCR I had never gotten to see any of it, and it had not circulated back around to being syndicated again, But he loved it, and loved Cleese’s work in it. And so, in 1986, he and I went to the movies to see…Clockwise.
Clockwise is an absurdist film that defies description and easy plotting. Let us say that a punctual school headmaster played by Cleese, someone bound to schedules and timing and order winds up making a single mistake, and his entire schedule and life go off the deep end. The absurdity and unbelievable vignettes and adventures Cleese gets up to as he tries to get back to normalcy are not just Pythonesque in their comedy, they are sui generis. It’s a movie you have to be in the mood for, but I was in the mood then, and have often been in the mood since to see a man’s life just go so off kilter, hilariously.
After seeing Clockwise, I finally was able to see Monty Python films…and later, the series itself (I realize just how weird it was to go in that order, but that was the hazards of life before having a VCR or streaming). I then enjoyed Cleese in other films and works like A Fish Called Wanda (a favorite) and the sometimes frustratingly fun, frustratingly terrible Rat Race (I am also an It’s a Mad Mad Mad World fan, you see). I found some of his later work disappointing (looking at you Fierce Creatures) and some of it surprisingly delightful. When I played Jade Empire, I was surprised to hear what I thought might be his voice playing an outlander wandering in the Empire. When I found out later that Sir Roderick Ponce von Fontlebottom the Magnificent Bastard was indeed voiced by Cleese, I was *delighted*
Cleese’s rants against “Cancel Culture” are disheartening, and make me sad that an actor and comedian whose work I’ve enjoyed for years could go so very wrong headed. Alas.
Wumo overhears complaints about a different infestation.
(11) TIM BURTON EXHIBIT. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Halloween may not be as big a deal in the UK as in North America, but fans in the London area will now have a chance to celebrate it with one of the modern Patron Saints of the day: Tim Burton.
Continuing a world tour that started in 2014 (albeit with a hiatus in 2019–21), The World of Tim Burton exhibition will opened October 25 and will be open until April 21, 2025 at the Design Museum in London.
(12) SUPERCHEAP PC. [Item by Steven French.] Here is “an edited extract from the book Curious Video Game Machines by Lewis Packwood, which explores the stories behind rare and unusual consoles, computers and coin-ops” and which describes how engineer Voja Antonic got around import restrictions in Yugoslavia to build his own computer, which had a major impact on the gaming and computer enthusiast community (I loved the description of an early form of ‘wireless’ tech when software was recorded in tape and transmitted over the radio!). “How one engineer beat restrictions on home computers in socialist Yugoslavia” in the Guardian.
…Antonić was pondering this while on holiday with his wife in Risan in Montenegro in 1983. “I was thinking how would it be possible to make the simplest and cheapest possible computer,” says Antonić. “As a way to amuse myself in my free time. That’s it. Everyone thinks it is an interesting story, but really I was just bored!” He wondered whether it would be possible to make a computer without a graphics chip – or a “video controller” as they were commonly known at the time.Typically, computers and consoles have a CPU – which forms the “brain” of the machine and performs all of the calculations – in addition to a video controller/graphics chip that generates the images you see on the screen. In the Atari 2600 console, for example, the CPU is the MOS Technology 6507 chip, while the video controller is the TIA (Television Interface Adaptor) chip.
Instead of having a separate graphics chip, Antonić thought he could use part of the CPU to generate a video signal, and then replicate some of the other video functions using software. It would mean sacrificing processing power, but in principle it was possible, and it would make the computer much cheaper….
A NASA astronaut who was taken to the hospital for an undisclosed medical issue after returning from a nearly eight-month space station stay extended by Boeing’s capsule trouble and Hurricane Milton has been released from the hospital.
A SpaceX capsule carrying three Americans and one Russian parachuted before dawn into the Gulf of Mexico just off the Florida coast after undocking from the International Space Station mid-week. The capsule was hoisted onto the recovery ship where the four astronauts had routine medical checks.
Soon after splashdown, a NASA astronaut had a “medical issue” and the crew was flown to a hospital in Pensacola, Florida, for additional evaluation “out of an abundance of caution” the space agency said in a statement….
… “Dark Horse presents ‘The Guide to The Orville,’ a jam-packed lore book collecting everything a new crew member needs to know about the Planetary Union’s most remarkable ship!”…
…Written by seasoned “The Orville” writer and co-executive producer Andre Bormanis, it’s a beautifully bound 192-page volume immersing followers into every aspect of the show’s world. It features dozens of illustrations, diary entries, and detailed cutaways that serve as an exacting manual for newbie spacefarers familiarizing themselves with the huge vessel and the vast universe it explores….
Sci-fi and fantasy movies often challenge viewers to imagine infinite possibilities, but many forget just how many cartoon spinoffs exist in their wake….
Cinema has long captivated children with its fantastic worlds, and over the years, it became increasingly common for movies to spin off into animated TV series… Today, that tradition continues with titles like Jurassic World: Chaos Theory, Gremlins: The Wild Batch, and an upcoming Ghostbusters project. For pop culture archivists, these animated adaptations often offer a glimpse into how beloved franchises evolve and reimagine themselves for new generations….
Here’s an example:
A Forgotten Cartoon Featured an American Werewolf in High School
Teen Wolf (1986-1987)
The teenage years come with plenty of changes, but for most high school students, those experiences don’t include fangs, claws, or the awkward discovery that they’re a werewolf. Starring Michael J. Fox of Back to the Future fame, this hair-raising comedy takes the term “fantasy sports” to a new level as protagonist Scott Howard becomes a basketball-playing lycanthrope.
The Cartoon Adventures of Teen Wolf, as it was known in the UK, followed the chaotic life of the “all-American werewolf” and his family. Navigating the ups and downs of high school, Scott’s life is less The Wonder Years and more “The Werewolf Years” as he tries to protect his family’s secret while dealing with a world that still sees them as monsters. While overshadowed by the 2011 live-action TV series, hopes were high in 2017 when Shout! Factory announced the release of the Teen Wolf cartoon in its entirety. However, due to legal issues, audiences are still left wondering where this werewolf series will resurface next.
(16) HORROR CLASSIC IN PUBLIC DOMAIN. [Item by Cat Eldridge.] The film is legitimately in the public domain due to some really stupid legal mistakes by the producers. “House on Haunted Hill, 1959 with Vincent Price and Carol Ohmart” – see it at Public Domain Movies.
House on Haunted Hill is a 1959 American horror film directed by William Castle. The film was written by Robb White and stars Vincent Price and Carol Ohmart as eccentric millionaires Frederick Loren and Annabelle Loren, who have invited five people to the house for a “haunted house” party.
Whoever stays in the house for one night will earn $10,000. As the night progresses, all the guests are trapped inside the house with ghosts, murderers, and other terrors….
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Steve Davidson, Michael J. Walsh, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
Erin Cairns, a South African-born white woman who moved to the U.S. with her parents when she was young, has published a 78-page memo charging Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki with unethical practices, among them submitting her work under his name to a “Black voices magazine”.
I am reporting Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki for unethical practices. He submitted a story entirely written by me into a Black voices magazine without my name on the byline. He lied about who he knew and how well he knew them. He obfuscated information about publications and editors and manipulated me to such an extent that I still struggle to trust myself and others.
Cairns has had work appear in Writers of the Future Vol. 34, the Silent Screams anthology, and The Dark Magazine.
Her memo about Ekpeki begins with a nine-page summary, and is supported by 69 pages of screencaps of text messages. It is available to download from Google Drive: ODE_Ethics Report_Compressed.pdf. Cairns has redacted the names of the anthology projects, and other professionals and sources.
The PDF shows her discussions with Ekpeki as she edited several of his stories and co-authored another, all of which was work done without credit and with his initially telling her he was just looking for a critique.
…We have never met or spoken outside of emails or twitter DMs. My first interaction with Ekpeki was in late 2018 when I posted on twitter that I had won a writing award. We interacted on twitter for a while, exchanging stories for critique which I had done many times before. But this gradually shifted into me editing stories, which at the time I did not know was for his co-edited anthology: [Anthology D]. When he told me a story I’d worked on was going to be in the anthology, I questioned him about what I’d been doing. He told me that for my help and work, my name would be in the acknowledgments of the book.
When the book was released, I bought a copy, and my name was nowhere to be found….
… None of the work I did for Ekpeki has ever been publicly acknowledged. The extent has been that he included my name in a ‘writer’s boost’ once or twice (a tweet with a list of writers usernames). This was fine-ish. It was a lot of work, it was hard work, and sometimes it was work I did not believe in, but there were no contracts. I knew I should say no when it became clear I wasn’t going to get credit, but I didn’t. I tried once, but he sent me a story anyway, and I did it. By that point it felt like a firmer ‘no’ was going to cost me a connection in the writing world I had already poured a ton of time and work into.
Much later, in 2021 he said: “I really wish you hadn’t gone off the radar around when I was doing [Anthology D],” as a way to say he would have published my work in that anthology. But I was on the radar, editing a story for [Anthology D]. I did not submit to the call (though I had been sent the submissions link by a friend, and did not know I was at that time editing a story in said anthology) because the submissions guidelines said “white South Africans need not apply,” and I am a white South African.
He hadn’t been transparent with me about his involvement with [Anthology D] when it was being put together, even while I was editing for it….
Ekpeki, telling her there was by now more demand for his work than he could satisfy, asked if Cairns was interested in co-authoring, which in this case would mean jointly revising a story she had already drafted: “[He] would change the story to reflect a more own-voice context, and give it more Nigerian spiritualism and culture, but distance it from the real world inspiration I’d had for the story (a Makonde mask I’d seen in the Dallas Museum of Art).”
But when [Editor S] solicited the story they had co-authored for [Market 2], a “Black voices magazine”, Cairns disagreed with Ekpeki about the ethics of allowing that to happen, and following some tense correspondence (reproduced in the report) she got Ekpeki to withdraw the story.
On the other hand, Cairns makes clear that it was her choice not to receive compensation for any work she did:
…I would like to note that as time went on, he started to offer payment, especially as he started to rise in popularity, but I always refused…. Money never exchanged hands. Whenever he offered it, it was always far past the time I’d done the work and that always felt odd to me. So I insisted he also worked hard on the stories he sent me and declined the sudden offers of payment again and again….
Cairns’ report prompted several people to comment publicly about issues involving Ekpeki that until now were known to a limited number.
Cairns posted the link to her report on Bluesky here, where it has received comments from several dozen writers. R.S.A. Garcia said there that Ekpeki’s behavior has already resulted in his being removed from two shared writer spaces:
L. D. Lewis said specifically that Ekpeki was removed from the FIYAHCON 2022 project. And gave added insights about that situation in a thread that starts here.
Elsewhere, some are now distancing their projects and themselves from Ekpeki.
Michael Bailey has announced that Ekpeki is no longer his co-editor on the You, Human anthology.
Two authors have announced they are leaving one of Ekpeki’s projects:
Gautam Bhatia has written a thoughtful interpretation of the meaning of the popular and financial support Ekpeki has received up til now within the overall power dynamics of the sff field. The thread starts here. Some excerpts follow below. (OED = Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki.)
Jason Sanford, who has pitched in again and again to help Ekpeki solve problems with his Amazon royalties and other international payment tangles, told File 770: “I’m pissed and gutted to learn all this. I’m also worried about how these revelations might close off opportunities for new writers from around the world who are trying to break into the SF/F genre.”
And Chris Barkley, who worked on a fundraiser to bring Ekpeki to Glasgow 2024, commented:
The last thirty six hours have been quite an eye opener for myself and my partner Juli. We have been supporters of Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki for the past few years and we were both shocked and deeply saddened at the recent allegations that have been against him over this past weekend.
We have heard from friends and acquaintances who, in some instances, have confirmed the allegations of ethical misbehavior. They involve malfeasance of funds that were raised or given to him, personal transgressions against individuals at conventions, questionable submissions to magazines and anthologies and theft of literary property that did not originate directly from him.
In light of these revelations, we are both angered, shocked and most of all disappointed that he took advantage of the goodwill of others to further his own writing career and social status at the expense of the people who earnestly tried to help him.
File 770 contacted Ekpeki for his comment on the Cairns report. He is preparing a response which will be reported in a follow-up post.
(1) F&SF GOES QUARTERLY. Jason Sanford relayed this announcement from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
The summer 2024 issue of F&SF is out. The issue contains a note from publisher Gordon Van Gelder that reads, "Ongoing production problems have led us to skip the Spring issue and to switch to a quarterly schedule." 1/2 weightlessbooks.com/the-magazine…
The note continues, "We apologize to our disappointed readers and assure subscribers that no one will be shorted any issues. Thank you for bearing with us during this rough stretch." 2/2
Production has been paused on the third and final season of fantasy drama Good Omens, the Neil Gaiman drama for Amazon that’s shooting in Scotland.
Deadline is hearing there are discussions about possible production changes. A spokesperson would not comment.
News about the future of Good Omen comes less than a week after Disney put a planned feature adaptation of Gaiman’s 2008 YA title The Graveyard Book on pause amid a series of sexual assault allegations against the award-winning author. (Insiders said multiple factors went into the decision). Gaiman has denied the allegations and said he was “disturbed” by them….
Seattle Worldcon 2025 is proud to dedicate a room for all five days of the convention exclusively for showcasing speculative fiction films. This room will be the home of the Seattle Worldcon 2025 Film Festival.
If you’re a cinephile, a filmmaker, or just a lover of speculative fiction, make sure to spend some of your time at the Worldcon in the festival room. The festival promises to be an exhilarating celebration of creativity, diversity, and the magic of the silver screen.
The Seattle Worldcon 2025 Film Festival is not your run-of-the-mill film event. It’s a carefully curated showcase of independent films that fall under the umbrella of speculative fiction. Whether you’re into mind-bending science fiction, epic fantasy, or spine-tingling horror, this festival has something for everyone. And the best part? It’s a judged festival, so you’ll be treated to the cream of the crop—films that push boundaries, challenge conventions, and transport you to otherworldly realms.
Calling All Filmmakers Are you a filmmaker with a passion for speculative storytelling? This is your chance to shine! The submission window for the Seattle Worldcon 2025 Film Festival opens on September 1, 2024 and closes on March 31, 2025. We encourage filmmakers from all backgrounds to submit their works. And here’s the icing on the cake: if you’re a BIPOC or a woman director, the submission fee is waived. So, dust off that camera, polish your script, and get ready to share your vision with the world. For more information on submitting films, please see the Seattle Worldcon 2025 Film Festival webpage on FilmFreeway.
For those of your who have never read Rich Larson, here’s the short version of what you need to know: he writes crisp, vivid scenes exploring messy human behavior in mostly near future SF contexts. His work often digs into the darker corners of technological advancement, examining how innovations might amplify or twist our existing flaws and desires. He also writes short, and fortunately for all of us, he writes a LOT.
Instead of belaboring how great his short fiction is, I want to tell you about the first time I met him in person. I was in the audience at a Worldcon panel (the topic of which I don’t remember). One of the panelists was a classic “old dude who doesn’t want the world to change” and he started editorializing about people clutching pearls ruining science fiction and fantasy.
The place devolved into mild pandemonium, with folks in the back yelling at the panelists, standard culture war stuff.
This was many years ago so I don’t remember the exact moment, but I had given a tshirt to Rich. He proceeded to take his shirt off and put mine on, and everyone was so incensed that nobody even noticed him shirtless in the auditorium.
That’s one of my favorite Worldcon memories, and is a Rich Larson signature: injecting humor into serious situations.
(5) DEEP PERSPECTIVE. At Reddit’s r/Fantasy forum, Janny Wurts chimed in and gave her informed perspective on the topic at hand, which was about changes in SFF book cover design trends over the past couple of decades. “WTF happened to book cover art?”
When I started painting cover art (and when my husband did) – the USA did full range portrait or figure style art. The UK tended to do landscapes – all painted. Digital art did not exist then.
The reasons given for this difference was market…UK, where life was more crowded, they claimed readers wanted to feel the other worldliness as an open landscape maybe with a castle or tiny figure.
The USA readers wanted to see character based.
Then one editor (Jane Johnson) shifted the metric – wanting to put Fantasy into a more ‘adult’ look – since many readers (she said) were tearing off the covers so that others wouldn’t see them reading in the genre…so she struck off in a new direction to make the books ‘appeal’ to a more adult audience, since so many books were not for younger readers anyway.
Then came digital art…and one publisher in the USA threw everything upside down…suddenly they realized they did not have to PAY for an artist at all. They could hire a design firm to do a simple cover design mostly based on typography – and use in house people doing photoshop (and therefore saving anywhere from 3000/7000 bucks per cover) to mere hundreds….
(7) BAEN CONTEST GETS NEW DIRECTOR. C. Stuart Hardwick told Facebook readers he has been selected as Contest Director for the Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award, taking over for William Ledbetter after 18 years. Hardwick said:
In this competition, Bill and Toni Weisskopf have created something of real and lasting value to the industry, and I’m honored and excited to have a part in carrying on its legacy.
Contest opens for submissions on October 1, 2024 at 12:01am EDT.
Founded in 1947, the Folio Society was once a membership club known for publishing classic tomes and history books, with a customer base of predominantly “old white men”, according to its boss.
Now, however, more than half the people who buy its books are aged between 25 and 44, and it is selling more sci-fi and fantasy titles, boosted by BookTok and growing gen Z interest in “artisanal” editions.
The publisher, which produces illustrated editions with elaborate covers, has seen sales soar 55% since 2017-18.
Joanna Reynolds, chief executive since 2016, said: “We’ve completely changed the sort of books that we sell. We developed fantasy, sci-fi and more children’s. Particularly the fantasy and sci-fi have made a massive difference to us. Game of Thrones was literally a gamechanger … It made so much money for us.”
Reynolds recalled that, when she joined, “the business was in freefall by every metric. It was losing money, losing customers. It was in a mess.”
She ditched the membership model, opened the company to new audiences and started asking them what they wanted.
One of the answers was more sci-fi and fantasy. The genres are a growing market in UK publishing, achieving a record year for sales in 2023. In the past year, the Folio Society’s three bestselling titles across all age groups are Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones, Dune by Frank Herbert and Jurassic Parkby Michael Crichton.
Last week, the society published Children of Dune, the third in Herbert’s series, and sold more than 1,000 copies of the £80 book in 24 hours. Younger audiences buy more Tolkien and Game of Thrones, while older readers want James Bond novels and classics such as The Wind in the Willows and Rebecca.
…Among his more than 80 film credits, Jones’ other notable movies include as a B-52 bombardier in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Cold War satire “Dr. Strangelove” (his feature film debut), as the first Black president of the United States in 1972’s “The Man,” as the fearsome villain in 1982’s “Conan the Barbarian,” as a reclusive author in 1989’s “Field of Dreams,” as a blind former baseball star in 1993’s “The Sandlot,” and as a minister living in apartheid South Africa in 1995’s “Cry, the Beloved Country.”…
He voiced Darth Vader in many Star Wars movies and innumerable live and animated TV productions and games. He also was Thulsa Doom in Conan the Barbarian (1982), King Jaffe Joffer from a mythical African country in Coming to America (1988) and Coming 2 America (2021) and appeared in Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1986). He appeared as himself in a 2014 episode of The Big Bang Theory.
James Earl Jones in Dr. Strangelove
(10) ROBERT SIDAWAY (1942-2024). Actor and documentary-maker Robert Sidaway died August 16 reports the Guardian. Fans saw him in several Sixties genre productions, including Doctor Who:
…His television credits included … Out of the Unknown (1965) and The Avengers (1968). The second of his two roles in Doctor Who – as the cheery, affable and dashing Captain Turner in the Patrick Troughton adventure The Invasion (1968) – involved him going up in a helicopter, being an original member of Unit (the army outfit that would become a mainstay of the series), and announcing one of the series’ most enduring sequences – the Cybermen bursting from the sewers and marching in front of St Paul’s Cathedral….
(11) COMICS SECTION.
Close to Home shows a prehistoric practical joker in action.
Thatbaby apparently does not need to apologize to everyone.
Firsts: The History of Computing from the Paul G. Allen Collection presents important milestones in the history of computing, some of which have been preserved in working order. Initially focused on recovering software for the DEC PDP-10, Paul Allen’s collection expanded to include hardware for many other systems as well. Iconic supercomputers such as the CDC-6500 and Cray 2 will be offered alongside early and influential microcomputers, like the Altair 8800 and Apple-1. These groundbreaking innovations were instrumental in shaping our modern world.
(13) NOT A BOMB. Denver fan Dana Cain’s musical The Android’s New Soul is praised by Front Row Center Denver.
I had the extreme pleasure of watching a dream come true tonight. Dana Cain as a teenager in 1974 had an idea for a musical that incorporated all the late-night movies she watched that were the aftermath of atomic bomb tests creating giant mutant bugs. She mixed in a hard rock beat like the groups she heard on the radio and MTV – ELO, Genesis, Kiss, Led Zeppelin. Robotics were in their infant stages but endlessly fascinating in their possibilities. Mix all this together with a beautiful medical technician as the lone survivor of a Big Bomb and you’ve got the outline for a rock musical that took fifty years to finish. But that is still as fresh, creative, and relevant as when it burst from her imagination. Her dream of seeing it come alive on a stage happened tonight at the appropriately named Bug Theatre. …
Automakers have often pushed the boundaries of creativity, resulting in concept cars that defied conventions and challenged the status quo. When these cars were first revealed, they dazzled everyone with their futuristic design and cutting-edge features… but now, they seem a bit strange and out of place compared to today’s standards.
However, despite all their eccentricities, these concepts have made a place in automotive history due to their quest for innovation. Let us have a look at some of the most futuristic concept cars from the past that look bizarre now…
Got to love this one:
Ford Nucleon (1958)
Back in the late 50s, it was believed that nuclear technology could be made small and cheap enough to replace gasoline. So, Ford came up with the bold idea to use it to power cars.
Unveiled in 1957, the Ford Nucleon featured a small nuclear reactor in the rear of the vehicle. The idea was to use uranium fission to power a steam engine, such as done in nuclear submarines. But it proved to be impractical, and the car could never advance beyond the concept stage.
HBO has set Sunday, October 6 for the premiere of Sam Mendes and Armando Iannuccci’s comedy series The Franchise. The streamer also released the official teaser trailer which can be viewed above.
Created and executive produced by Jon Brown, The Franchise follows the crew of an unloved franchise movie fighting for their place in a savage and unruly cinematic universe. The comedy series shines a light on the secret chaos inside the world of superhero moviemaking, to ask the question — how exactly does the cinematic sausage get made? Because every f*ck-up has an origin story….
In celebration of Star Trek Day (Sept. 8), Paramount+ debuted an exclusive clip and the official key art for the fifth and final season of its hit animated comedy series Star Trek: Lower Decks. The new season will premiere on Paramount+ with two episodes on Thursday, October 24 in the U.S. and internationally. Following the premiere, new episodes of the 10-episode long season will drop every Thursday on the service leading up to the series finale on Thursday, December 19.
In Season 5 of Star Trek: Lower Decks, the crew of the U.S.S. Cerritos is tasked with closing “space potholes” — subspace rifts that are causing chaos in the Alpha Quadrant. Pothole duty would be easy for Junior Officers Mariner, Boimler, Tendi and Rutherford … if they didn’t also have to deal with an Orion war, furious Klingons, diplomatic catastrophes, murder mysteries and scariest of all: their own career aspirations….
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Jennifer Hawthorne, N., Joe, Jason Sanford, 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 Bill.]
(1) SFRA 2025 CONFERENCE AND CFP. The Science Fiction Research Association has announced the theme and Call for Papers for the SFRA 2025 Conference. The event will be held July 30-August 3, 2025 at the University of Rochester in New York state, hosted by the Susan B. Anthony Institute: The program for Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies.
The theme will be: “’Trans People are (in) the Future’: Queer and Trans Futurity in Science Fiction”. Submission deadline November 15, 2024.
The tagline for this year’s conference is adapted from an art exhibit by Alisha Wormsley in which her art pieces assert that “there are black people in the future,” as a way to insist that unrelenting antiblackness will not steal the future from black people. Given the perpetual violence trans people are subject to, Wormsley’s insistence on black futurity resonates powerfully in trans contexts as well. Science fiction/Speculative Fiction writers, from Rivers Solomon to Kai Ashanti Wilson to Charlie Jane Anders, are all producing work that imagines trans and queer futurity in powerfully capacious ways, rejecting figurative and literal attempts at erasing trans and queer lives. This year’s conference focuses on issues related to trans and queer themes, though we encourage papers and panel proposals in all areas relevant to science fiction studies.
Full information about the topic is at the link.
(2) OMEGA SCI-FI PROJECT OFFERS WORKSHOPS. The Omega Sci-Fi Project invites L.A. high schools and students to participate in this season’s short science fiction story writing program, both through creative writing workshops and student story submissions.
To schedule a free science fiction creative writing and editing workshop follow this Calendly link: Select a Date & Time
Submissions for their 2024-2025 awards — The Tomorrow Prize and The Green Feather Award — will open on September 4 and run through February 14. Learn about the updated guidelines or submit an entry through their website.
The program’s culminating event is traditionally held at Vroman’s bookstore and where celebrity actors and authors reading selected student works.
… Perhaps in no acceptance speech was that more clear than in Emily Tesh’s, who won the Hugo Award for Best Novel for her science fiction book Some Desperate Glory. Tesh’s speech closed out the night, and after some initial joking about pranking the audience with Bilbo’s birthday speech from The Fellowship of the Rings and vanishing, she buckled down and went straight for the heartstrings. I’ve transposed a good deal of what Tesh had to say about Some Desperate Glory below, so that perhaps you might be as moved reading her words as I was hearing them:
“Here is my hope for this book… I hope this book disappears. I hope it joins the honorable, very honorable ranks of past Hugo winners, which spoke to a particular community at a particular time and not to all of history. And I hope for that disappearance because no one sets out to write a science fiction dystopia wanting to be proved right. And Some Desperate Glory is a book which was inspired by some of the worst of what is happening in the world today”….
Lionsgate is recalling its latest trailer for Francis Ford Coppola‘s epic “Megalopolis,” which featured a littany of fabricated quotes from famous film critics.
“Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for ‘Megalopolis,’” a Lionsgate spokesperson said in a statement provided to Variety. “We offer our sincere apologies to the critics involved and to Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope for this inexcusable error in our vetting process. We screwed up. We are sorry.”…
…In quotes attributed to their reviews of “The Godfather,” the trailer cites The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael as calling it “diminished by its artsiness,” and Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris as criticizing the “sloppy self-indulgent movie.” Other quotes from critics such as Roger Ebert, John Simon, Stanley Kauffmann, Vincent Canby and Rex Reed similarly flash across the screen, offering harsh critiques of Coppola’s work on masterpieces such as “Apocalypse Now.” The idea being these movies stood the test of times — their initial reactions, not so much. “Megalopolis,” which premiered at Cannes, was dismissed by many critics as indulgent and muddled. The new trailer aims to position Coppola’s latest film, as a work of art that will age well, much like its predecessors from the famed director….
One of the critics cited had this to say:
…Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman was incorrectly cited as calling the 1992 film “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” “a beautiful mess” and highlighting its “absurdity” when he reviewed the film for Entertainment Weekly, where he worked at the time of its release.
“Even if you’re one of those people who don’t like critics, we hardly deserve to have words put in our mouths. Then again, the trivial scandal of all this is that the whole ‘Megalopolis’ trailer is built on a false narrative,” Gleiberman said of the trailer’s falsified quotes. “Critics loved ‘The Godfather.’ And though ‘Apocalypse Now’ was divisive, it received a lot of crucial critical support. As far as me calling ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ ‘a beautiful mess,’ I only wish I’d said that! Regarding that film, it now sounds kind.”…
Do you want to read Marvel Comics, but don’t know where to start learning about the original comic versions of the characters and stories that have now become household names thanks to the MCU? The new book Marvel Comics for Dummies has you covered. And yes, that’s “Dummies” meant very affectionately, as is the signature of the Dummies series of books that have offered accessible primers for nearly every topic under the sun.
That now includes Marvel Comics, with the aforementioned Marvel Comics for Dummies book kicking off a series of Marvel related books in the Dummies line, with Captain America for Dummies soon to follow….
…The Marvel for Dummies line will include six titles, with future installments featuring explainers on the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, Spider-Man, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe (X-Men lore seems to have been too dense for even the experts to attempt to condense into one book).
(7) APEX NEWS. Apex Book Company today announced the acquisition of a new novella by Jason Sanford entitled “We Who Hunt Alexanders”.
In this fast-paced story, a neurodivergent monster named Amelia confronts both her mother’s expectations for her life and a gothic city where religious extremists threaten everyone who disagrees with them.
(8) WHILE ONE WAS BANNED, ANOTHER WAS CELEBRATED. Ersatz Culture made a wry comment on X.com:
And just in case anyone thinks I am unfairly picking on Joe Yao – well, the evidence shows that he and Dave McCarty were both heavily involved in the Hugo stats that were published. pic.twitter.com/uGtgb4nvW9
(9) M. J. ENGH (1933-2024). Author M. J. Engh, a SFWA Author Emeritus, died July 11. The SFWA Blog paid tribute: “In Memoriam: M. J. Engh”.
M. J. Engh (26 January 1933 – 11 July 2024), also writing as Jane Beauclerk and Mary Jane Engh, was a librarian, scholar, teacher, editor and writer. She wrote short fiction, non-fiction, and speculative novels, including 1976’s Arslan, later released as A Wind from Bukhara. Engh was honored by SFWA in 2009 with the title of Author Emeritus.
Engh wrote four speculative fiction books, from 1976’s Arslan to 1993’s Rainbow Man. Arslan achieved its success as a primarily underground work, one that dealt directly with the methods of dictators and warlords, including the use of morality and charisma. Engh believed sci-fi writers had a responsibility not to make violence and destruction less horrific, and used the reactions to her novel to note the disconnect of those same readers when dealing with equivalent real-world harm. She also wrote to all-ages audiences, in particular with her work The House in the Snow, illustrated by Leslie W. Bowman. She believed in speaking plainly to children, who she found able to deal with reality and better able to process new ideas than adults….
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
August 21, 1967 – Carrie-Anne Moss, 57. Tonight we are looking at Carrie-Anne Moss who most of you will first of think as Trinity in the Matrix franchise, but she has had a much longer genre and genre-adjacent career.
Let’s start with her first role with on Dark Justice, one of the series that made up Crime After Prime Time on CBS. Yes, that was how it was graphically presented in the promos which were brilliantly bright and noisy. The show was about a judge, well two judges in the end, that when a case against them became a vigilante at night.
She was Tara McDonald, an assistant to the first Judge, Judge Nicholas Marshall. He was played by Ramy Zada, a Spaniard, as the series was shot in Spain before the Olympics forced it to be moved to Los Angeles for its two final years.
Next up for her was Liz Teel in Matrix. No, not that Matrix. This one had Nick Mancuso as Steven Matrix, a hitman who is killed during a job and sent to a version of Purgatory called The City In-Between. She owned a gym with him, and she, no surprise, is interested in being lovers with him. Scriptwriters are so predictable.
Next up is, I think genre adjacent at least, which her role in the F/X: The Series based on the F/X film. She was Lucinda ”Luce” Scott, a struggling actress brought in by the crew to act as a body double or ringer whenever one was needed. The series came off as another version of Leverage.
We’ve now reached that Matrix where she played Trinity, a human freed by Morpheus, a crewmember of the Nebuchadnezzar, and later would be Neo’s lover. It would become a true franchise with four live films and an animated anthology with her in all of them.
What else was she involved in? Well, a role that upset the fanboys to no end was her role on Jessica Jones as Jeri Hogarth as in the Marvel Universe, gasp, that is a male role. She also played the character in the Daredevil, Defenders and Iron Fist series.
A series I didn’t know existed was Humans about AIs in human form. It was based on the Swedish Real Humans series. She was Athena Morrow, an AI researcher based in San Francisco who has been invited to reverse engineer the consciousness program.
Finally, well at least for me, she was Master Indara on The Acolyte. I am most decidedly not going to discuss anything about her story here. The series — which was cancelled after a short first season — sounds fascinating.
Today is the opening day of Gamescom, the Cologne expo that is now the biggest event in the video game calendar. This year, I am not among the 300,000-odd crowd descending on Germany, but I did watch the two-hour livestreamed opening-night broadcast yesterday – so you don’t have to. Here is all of the most interesting news, arranged by theme because I am deeply bored of writing straightforward lists of games and trailers.
News that will annoy Xbox fanboys the most There was a new trailer for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Bethesda and MachineGames’s new first-person adventure, in which longtime video game actor Troy Baker seems charmingly thrilled to be playing Indiana Jones. It’ll be out on Xbox and PC on 9 December – but it was also announced that it will be coming to PlayStation 5 in spring 2025. Earlier this year, Xbox boss Phil Spencer went to great lengths to reassure Xbox fans that Indiana Jones would not be a multiplatform game, so I’m interested to see how this goes down….
…One actor amongst them is so iconic that he replaced Johnny Depp in the Fantastic Beasts franchise during the infamous defamation trial. We are talking about Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen.
Known for portraying the role of a young Hannibal Lecter in the TV show Hannibal and Gellert Grindelwald in the Fantastic Beasts franchise, Mikkelsen is truly a fascinating villainous actor. As per a report, the actor was in talks with Marvel Studios for the role of Doctor Doom.
However, Marvel Studios allegedly decided to play it safe and hired (or rather re-hired) Downey Jr. for “New mask. Same task”. Sure enough, people were happy to see Downey Jr. return….
Kahhori, the new Marvel hero who debuted in the MCU’s What If…? animated streaming series as one of the first MCU characters with no direct ties to comics, is now coming to the core Marvel Universe in her own comic as part of the Marvel’s Voices line. And it seems that, in what may be a first, the version of Kahhori who will make her debut in comics later this year is not an alternate version of Kahhori created specifically for comics or a Variant of some kind – it’s apparently the exact same character from the MCU.
At least, that’s how Marvel’s official press release for the Kahhori: Reshaper of Worlds one-shot makes it sound. Here’s Marvel’s official description, which by all indications seems to say that Kahhori will be making the jump straight from the MCU to comics, while leaving just enough ambiguity to make the passage slightly less than definitive:
“The Mohawk warrior Kahhori fell into Sky World and into our hearts from her first appearance fighting invaders to her home. She’s already helped save all of reality from a demented Doctor Strange and secured peace in her own world… So what NOW? Award-winning storyteller Ryan Little launches Kahhori into the 616! Chasing a threat out of Sky World, she lands in the fiery streets of Hell’s Kitchen! But culture shock’s gonna be the least of her problems as her strange adversary tears through NYC. Featuring exciting guest stars and the comics debuts of some extraordinary creators, Marvel’s Voices brings you an extra-special anthology celebrating Indigenous heritage and one of the most exciting characters to emerge from the MCU!”
Almost 50 years after “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” debuted, Tim Curry is gearing up for another spooky role.
The veteran actor will return to the big screen as a character in the horror film “Stream,” which is opening Wednesday in select theaters. It will be his first feature film role since the 2010 comedy “Burke & Hare,” even though he has worked on many animated projects as a voice actor since then. He also appeared in the 2016 television film remake of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” on Fox.
Beyond his “Rocky Horror” role of Dr. Frank-N-Furter, Curry earned his genre bonafides with his performance as Pennywise in the TV miniseries “It,” as well as roles in films like “Legend,” “Clue” and “Scary Movie 2.”…
[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, 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 Patrick Morris Miller.]
(1) SIGN FROM A FELINE. Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Rude Litterbox Space” is a free read at Sunday Morning Transport to encourage people to subscribe. Bonnie McDaniel says it is based on the author’s real-life communication-board-using cat.
… Language was hard. Bending space-time was not….
(2) A HITCH. P. Djèlí Clark’s blog post makes you want to read “The Dead Cat Tail Assassins”, then tells you why you’ll need to wait ’til summer’s end.
…Okay, now for the not so good news. The Dead Cat Tail Assassins was supposed to drop this month, March. But… yadda, yadda, yadda.. we got a new pub date: August, 6 2024.
What happened? Stuff. Stuff happened. Putting a book together requires lots of hands: me the author, editors, copyeditors, publicists, printers, centaurs, goblins, magical creatures from Fillory. And, for a myriad of reasons, sometimes things go pear shaped and stuff gets pushed back. You’re probably like, yeah but from March to August? That’s a big pushback! Hey, what can I tell you… lose your place in line, and you don’t just get a back-cut. There are other books by other authors waiting to be worked on, books coming out that can’t clash with your own, gotta find a new place in the queue at the printing warehouse, and all kinds of arcane alchemy I don’t pretend to understand…
(3) LIVESTOCK BY MAIL. I think the anecdote that starts Brian Keene’s “Letters From the Labyrinth 370” really happened, though I won’t be surprised if it finds its way into a book.
“I’m here about the dead chicks.”
That was what the woman butting in front of me and another customer at the post office said. I turned, intrigued. She was short, thin, blonde hair fading with age to the color of straw. I placed her at older than me — probably mid-sixties but then I remembered the day before when my postal carrier, whom I’d thought was in her seventies, told me she was the same age as me — 56. I can’t gauge age anymore. When I look in the mirror, I don’t see 56. But I’m also smart enough to know that how I see myself isn’t necessarily how others see me. In my mind, I’m still as suave and charming as Diamond David Lee Roth, but I suspect others look at me and think “Look at that silly old man. How sweet.”
But I digress….
Makes me remember when I was surprised to learn you could order live honeybees through the Sears catalog. (Which I wasn’t allowed to do. Just as well.)
In early February, Chris Barkley contacted me and said he’d received emails and documents related to the 2023 Hugo Awards from Diane Lacey, one of the award administrators. I’d seen Chris only two weeks earlier at the ConFusion convention in Detroit, where we sat at the bar discussing that weekend’s release of the Hugo nomination and voting stats. We were both shocked by the works and authors deemed “not eligible” and kept off the final ballot for no stated reason. We also were surprised so few Chinese authors and works made the Hugo longlist.
While talking in Detroit, Chris and I felt shenanigans had likely happened during last year’s Hugos. However, we also feared the truth of what happened might never come out.
Two weeks later, Chris shared the leaked emails and documents and I realized we’d been wrong. The truth would indeed come out….
(5) FAITH. Abigail Nussbaum walks readers through “The 2024 Hugo Awards: My Hugo Ballot” at Asking the Wrong Questions. She says in a preamble to the nominations:
We’ve spent so much of the last six weeks talking about the debacle that was last year’s Hugo awards, that it was easy to forget that another awards season was gearing up at the same time. So here we are, with less than a week left to nominate for this year’s Hugos, and to be honest it feels a bit strange to make this post. I always love to talk about the things I enjoyed in the fantastic genres over the last year, and to encourage my readers to consider them for a Hugo nomination. But doing it this year, with the shadow of an award whose nominations and results we can have no faith in, can feel a bit pointless.
Another way of putting it is that this is an act of faith–in the administrators of this year’s award, who have been doing their utmost to project reliability and distance themselves from last year’s inexcusable actions; in the fandom, which continues to care about this award and try to make it the best it can be; and in the award itself, and the idea that it can overcome this blow to its reputation and start moving back to what it was….
(6) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Christopher Rowe and Moses Ose Utomi on Wednesday, March 13 starting at 7:00 p.m. Eastern. Location: KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003. (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs)
Christopher Rowe
Christopher Rowe’s most recent novella, The Navigating Fox, published by Tordotcom was described by The Wall Street Journal as a “modern Aesop’s fable.” His other books include the novella These Prisoning Hills and a collection, Telling the Map. Over the last 25 years, his stories have been published, anthologized, and translated around the world and he has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, Neukom, Seiun, and other awards. He lives in Kentucky.
Moses Ose Utomi
Moses Ose Utomi is a Nigerian-American fantasy writer and nomad currently based out of San Diego, California. He has an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and short fiction publications in Fantasy Magazine, Sunday Morning Transport, and other venues. He is the author of the young adult fantasy novel Daughters of Oduma and The Forever Desert, the fantasy novella series that includes the acclaimed The Lies of the Ajungo. When he’s not writing, he’s traveling, training martial arts, or doing karaoke—with or without a backing track.
Oppenheimer took the marquee Best Edited Feature Film (Dramatic) honor and The Holdovers landed the top Best Edited Feature Film (Comedy) award at the 74th ACE Eddie Awards Sunday….
Here are all the winners of genre interest:
BEST EDITED FEATURE FILM (Drama, Theatrical)
Oppenheimer — Jennifer Lame
BEST EDITED ANIMATED FEATURE FILM
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse — Michael Andrews, ACE
BEST EDITED DRAMA SERIES
The Last of Us: “Long, Long Time” — Timothy A. Good, ACE
A coalition of Hollywood’s below-the-line unions rallied Sunday on the eve of their latest contract negotiations. They threatened a historic strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers if their demands weren’t met. Such a work stoppage would follow a pair of strikes in 2023 by industry writers and actors which crippled the entertainment industry and have left it limping into the new year.
“I hope they’re paying attention right down the road at the AMPTP,” IATSE vice president Michael Miller announced from the stage to the crowd of around a thousand people at Woodley Park in Encino. (Nearly a thousand more watched a live-stream online.) He then invoked a slogan repeated throughout the event: “Nothing moves without the crew.”
For the first time since 1988, the Hollywood Basic Crafts group — which includes Teamsters Local 399, IBEW Local 40, LiUNA! Local 724, OPCMIA Local 755 and UA Local 78 — and the crew union IATSE are joining this year to negotiate their health and pension benefits with the Hollywood trade group the AMPTP, which represents studios and streamers. Those talks begin Monday.
The “Many Crafts, One Fight” rally served mainly as an opportunity for members to express solidarity and hype each other up. So-called “above-the-line” unions SAG-AFTRA and the WGA made strong shows of force with their sign-wielding members and leaders expressing gratitude. (Teamster cooperation was key in the WGA’s production shutdown strategy early in its stoppage.) WGA West vice president Michele Mulroney drew applause when she acknowledged crew support which “sustained us through our own long and arduous fight,” and noted that “without all of you our words would just languish on the page.”…
“Dune: Part Two” is turbocharging the international box office.
Director Denis Villeneuve’s otherworldly sequel has generated $97 million from 71 overseas markets, bringing its global tally to a promising $178.5 million. Those worldwide revenues include $81.5 million from North American theaters, where it landed the biggest domestic opening weekend of the year.
The movie, starring Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya, has been embraced in the U.S. and Canada. But the backers of “Dune 2” need overseas audiences to keep the ticket sales flowing as freely as spice on the desert planet of Arrakis. That’s because Warner Bros. and Legendary Entertainment spent $190 million to produce and roughly $100 million more to promote the film to global audiences. Those hefty fees mean the tentpole will require outsized admissions to turn a profit.
Mark Dodson, whose unique voice characterizations propelled creatures in the films Star Wars: Return of the Jediand Gremlins, has died at 64.
His daughter told TMZ that he died while in Evansville, Indiana, to attend Horror Con. He checked into a hotel and suffered a “massive heart attack” while sleeping, she said.
Dodson was the voice of Salacious Crumb, the scruffy little creature who was a cackling crony of Jabba the Hut inStar Wars: Return of the Jedi.That memorable voice led to a gig in Gremlins, where he became the voice Mogwai, much-imitated in school yards.
He worked continuously for several decades in film, video games, radio and commercials as a voice artist. .
His daughter, Ciara, told TMZ that her father “never ceased making me proud.” a
The Evansville Horror Con, where Dodson was scheduled to appear, posted a tribute to Facebook.
“We are heartbroken to announce the sudden passing of Mark Dodson last night. Mark was not only a talented voice actor but also a cherished member of the horror community. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family, friends, and fans during this incredibly difficult time. We hope that you can take a moment out of your day to reflect on the joy and laughter that Mark brought into the world. His legacy will live on through his work.”
Survivors include his daughter and several grandchildren.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born March 3, 1920 — James Doohan. (Died 2005.) James Doohan, a Canadian, is of course remembered best for being the original Montgomery “Scotty” Scott on the first version of the Enterprise. And doesn’t it say something about the franchise that I had to write the sentence that way?
He played, definitely way too much in my opinion, the archetypal Scotsman. He even had a Dress Uniform Kilt, something I’m dead certain doesn’t exist in the modern Navy, as on display in “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” and “The Savage Curtain”. And I forget how many characters he drank literally to the floor. No don’t get me wrong, I loved the character, but the depiction was seriously over the top.
So my favorite episode involving him? That had to be when he defended the honor of the Enterprise in a bar brawl with a Klingon in “The Trouble with Tribbles” after that Klingon called his beloved ship a garbage scow. Perfect, just perfect.
So what else has he done? His first major genre role (he had previously appeared in one episode of Tales of Tomorrow) was as Paul Mitchell on Space Command, an early Fifties Canadian children’s sf series. It only lasted two years but they did one hundred and fifty episodes! Shatner would appear there.
A decade later, he entered the Twilight Zone playing Johnson, by no means a major role, in the “Valley of the Shadow”. Around the same time, on Outer Limits he played Police Lt. Branch in “Expanding Human”, this time a lead role.
He showed up twice in The Man from U.N.C.L.E (in different roles), Bewitched, Fantasy Island, MacGyver and Knight Rider 2000.
Need I say Next Generation’s “Relics” was wonderful? And I’m not talking about Trials and Tribble-ations even though it’s a stellar story as he’s only there in existing footage of him.
Filmwise, Trek was his major gig as I see very little genre undertakings at all. He had an uncredited role in The Satan Bug, an sf thriller. It’s so short that IMDB gives the time that he’s in the film.
His only other genre role that I can see in a film outside of Trek was as Judge Peterson in Skinwalker: Curse of the Shaman. If you’ve not seen it don’t feel bad. It’s obscure enough that no one on Rotten Tomatoes has either.
I think that covers it for him. Now keep in mind that I did love him, despite my criticism of his portrayal of a Scottish character, on Trek as he’s really likeable. He and Nichelle Nichol’s always seems to be the two most, well, truly warm, likeable individuals there.
I think I’ll go watch both of the Tribbles episodes on Paramount + now. Yes, I know there’s the animated episode as well, “More Tribbles, More Trouble”, but it just doesn’t have the charm the actual ones with live actors do.
(13) CACHING IN. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] If my memory serves (and it is not that reliable though I constantly amaze myself in recalling a science paper from years ago out of the recesses of my mind) I have a feeling that File770 covered the demise of Google’s readily available Cache. Then this piece might interest you — “Why Is Google Hiding Its Cached Search Results?” at Tedium.
I have to imagine that Google did not make a lot of money from people pinging its search engine for cached website results, but making it convenient to access was a service to searchers.
It was also somewhat of a service to society. Often, when information-related scandals broke—such as content with egregious errors, evidence of deleted social media statements, or information at risk of appearing offline in short order—it was a great backstop that worked more effectively than the Internet Archive for capturing fresh information.
And yet, for some reason, Google has treated this feature like it was embarrassed of it. Over the years, it has increasingly come to bury the feature in its search interface, making it harder and harder to find, despite me finding it just as useful as it was the day it launched.
Recently, the company started removing it entirely…
… To be clear, the cache is not gone—it is simply hidden from public view. (I don’t see it on my end, either.) You can access it manually by typing in a specialized URL…
The idea was to celebrate one of the greatest British authors with a beautiful statue set up in a cathedral for the 250th anniversary of their birth.
But at a public meeting to discuss the erection of a Jane Austen sculpture close to her final resting place at Winchester Cathedral, concerns were raised that it would lead to the “Disneyfication” of the place of worship and become a magnet for tourists keen to get a selfie.
Elizabeth Proudman, an Austen expert and leading light in the Jane Austen Society, also suggested the author herself would not have approved of the statue and the fuss surrounding it.
She said: “We don’t know what she looked like, but we do know that she was a very private person. She despised publicity.”
Austen is buried in the north nave aisle of Winchester Cathedral under a memorial stone, which mentions “the extraordinary endowments of her mind”but does not provide any more detail about her career.
… The ominously named demon core, a sphere of plutonium used in the development of atomic bombs after the success of the Trinity Test, was responsible for the deaths of two scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project. The core, which weighed 14 pounds and measured just 3.5 inches in diameter, was all set to be turned into a third bomb that could have been used against Japan had they not surrendered following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945….
Now with on-screen libretto, my “restoration” of Gilbert & Sullivan’s operetta version of Dracula married to the sumptuous visuals of Coppola’s masterful 1992 film adaptation… Have fun with it before someone has it taken down
Star Trek and Deep Space Nine writer Marc Scott Zicree shares the entire Captain Sulu Star Trek pilot he and Emmy winner Michael Reaves wrote, and shares the untold story of why you never got to see that series — despite its Hugo and Nebula Award nominations!
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Kathy Sullivan, Bill, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Bill.]
(1) PROLOGUE. Daniel Dern is champing at the bit to explain today’s Scroll title “(This Is) A Fine Paranormal Romance”.
Deets: Via the Kern & Fields song “A Fine Romance”, “…written for the musical film, Swing Time, where it was co-introduced by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.”
… Gaiman will donate part of the auction proceeds to the Hero Initiative, which is an emergency fund for comics creators, and the Authors League Fund, which benefits writers in financial hardship; he will also give living artists whose work sells part of the proceeds. The items are on display at Heritage Auctions in Dallas, and bidding starts on Friday.
More than 100 pieces are up for sale, and Gaiman pointed to some highlights….
The whole shooting match can be seen at Heritage Auctions. The card uses a piece of art by Mike Kaluta.
(3) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to snack on sushi with Ray Nayler in Episode 219 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.
Ray Nayler
Nayler is the author of the Locus Award-winning debut novel The Mountain in the Sea, which was also a finalist for the Nebula Award and the L.A. Times Book Awards’ Ray Bradbury Award for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction. He began publishing speculative fiction in 2015 in Asimov’s, and since then, his stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Vice, Nightmare, and other magazines. His story “Yesterday’s Wolf” won the 2022 Clarkesworld Readers’ poll, and the same year, his story “Muallim” won the Asimov’s Readers’ Award, his story “Father”, in French translation, won the Bifrost readers’ award, and his novelette “Sarcophagus” was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award.
In addition to his speculative fiction, Ray has published in many other genres, from mainstream literary fiction to comics. Those have appeared in Ellery Queen, Crimewave, Hardboiled, Cemetery Dance, Deathrealm, Queen’s Quarterly, the Berkeley Fiction Review, and other journals. He’s also a widely published poet, with work in the Atlanta Review, the Beloit Poetry Journal, Weave, Juked, Able Muse, Sentence, and many more. He is currently Diplomatic Fellow and Visiting Scholar at the Institute for International Science and Technology Policy at The George Washington University.
We discussed how his time living outside the U.S. helped him become a better science fiction writer, why he feels the greatest effect of having written The Mountain in the Sea was a culinary one, the reason we agree our favorite part of writing is rewriting, the sad results of his accidental Facebook experiment, whether his mammoth memory behavior is based on scientific facts or is purely speculative, why we’ll likely never be able to truly resurrect extinct species, how changes in culture can affect evolution, the train trip where he received career advice from a stranger he didn’t realize was Neil Gaiman, why we aren’t totally in control of our writing destines, how he’s haunted by the ghost of an alternate version of himself, plus much more.
(4) RADIO FREE FANDOM. Chris Barkley must feel like he’s reached the top of Mt. Olympus – he and Jason Sanford were interviewed for NPR’s “Morning Edition”. Listen here: “The Hugo Awards scandal has shaken the sci-fi community”.
(5) SHOCKED THAT ‘YEET’ IS NOT IN MY ARCHAIC LANGUAGE DICTIONARY. [Item by Anne Marble.] We all need some lighter discourse. Here is a great response (from author Moniza Hossain) to another “hot take.”
You know what irritates me about this? Here is a book, clearly intended for a very specific readership. It’s a monster romance. It’s genre fiction. The title and the cover BOTH convey those facts. The packaging couldn’t be more clear. Don’t read it if it’s not your thing! pic.twitter.com/44LiNGx2ZS
The book in question “That Time I Got Drunk and Yeeted a Love Potion at a Werewolf” by Kimberly Lemming. She is a Black author who has been building her brand. And clearly has a great sense of humor.
She is aware of the recent posts and has a fun response here. It turns out that the “Yeet” title is actually the fault of people who criticized her for using modern language in her fantasy novels.
Another reaction:
figured out why the tone of this discourse is bothering me so much. it reminds me of when people discover Chuck Tingle for the first time and gleefully mock Space Raptor Butt Invasion as if the humor was a thing Tingle did on accident pic.twitter.com/h3XCKDXu4D
This past weekend, the organizers of a My Little Pony convention in Moscow shut down the festivities early after police were called to investigate the event for alleged “LGBTQ propaganda.”
As the Associated Press reported, the organizers of Mi Amore Fest posted to the Russia social media site VK on Sunday, writing that police had received a complaint about the event promoting “non-traditional relationships and related symbols, adult content for minors, and general horror and darkness.”
Police were unable to find any confirmation of these allegations, but asked for the convention to be shut down a few hours early on Saturday, according to the post. The organizers additionally chose to end the event even earlier than the police asked, after hearing unconfirmed reports of additional officers heading to the venue, per the Associated Press. Both attendees and organizers were able to leave without incident.
My Little Pony has minimal canonical LGBTQ+ representation, but the franchise has been the subject of some scrutiny in Russia, especially in the wake of the country’s recent ruling against anti-LGBTQ+ “propaganda.” In November, Russia’s Supreme Court ruled that the “international public LGBT movement” is an “extremist organization,” and banned all forms of related activism (which includes displaying LGBTQ+ “paraphernalia or symbols”). Shortly after the ruling was issued, the Russian streaming service Kinopoisk changed its age rating for My Little Pony to 18+, according to Pink News. (There has been speculation that the change was due to the character Rainbow Dash, who has a rainbow-colored mane and tail. )…
…After 5 decades at the heart of it all, Mark’s elder health problems led to hospitalization at the new year in 2024. He was lovingly supported by friends and partners and a crowdfund until he passed away on February 20. Anime, furry, and brony networks lit up with condolences from around the world while the name Mark Merlino trended on social media next to mainstream celebrities.
He is survived by partners including Rod, and Changa who joined them for 28 years. They were united by love and creativity, but as queer people, their relationship was fundamental to the acceptance and expression that aligns many furries with queer culture. Fandom may be a hobby, but it’s also a way to show identity, and theirs was the soul of what furries are.
Dozens of convention memorial messages are collected on the Telegram news channel of Grovel Husky.
History book Furry Nation by Joe Strike (Cleis Press) profiles Mark in Chapter Four (“A Fandom is Born”).
…In 1970, while teaching at the Swiss university ETH Zurich, Dr. Wirth released Pascal, the programming language that powered early Apple computers and initial versions of applications like Skype and Adobe Photoshop. He also built one of the first personal computers and was instrumental in helping a Swiss start-up commercialize the mouse. (The start-up, Logitech, became one of the world’s largest makers of computer accessories.)
The Association for Computing Machinery honored Dr. Wirth in 1984 with the Turing Award, often referred to as the Nobel Prize of computing. Other recipients have included Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, and Vinton G. Cerf, who wrote the code that powers communication on the internet.
For Dr. Wirth, simplicity was paramount in computing, and he created Pascal — named after Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century French mathematician and calculator inventor — as a simpler alternative to languages like BASIC, which he deemed too cumbersome.
BASIC forced programmers to “jump all over the place, writing spaghetti code,” Philippe Kahn, a former student of Dr. Wirth’s who later founded several tech companies, told the New York Times reporter Steve Lohr in an interview for his book “Go To” (2001), a history of software.
“Pascal forced people to think clearly about things and in terms of data structures,” Mr. Kahn said. He added: “Wirth’s influence is extremely deep because so many of the people who were taught in real computer science programs learned Pascal. It was the language of classical thinking in computing.”…
(9) PAMELA SALEM (1944-2024). Actress Pamela Salem, who had James Bond film and Doctor Who roles on her resume, died February 21 reports Deadline.
… She played Bond’s secretary Miss Moneypenny in Sean Connery’s 1983 film Never Say Never Again…
Salem made guest appearances in Doctor Who as Professor Rachel Jensen, first appearing in 1988’s Remembrance of the Daleks episodes with Sylvester McCoy’s seventh Doctor.
She reprised the character in Counter-Measures, a Big Finish audio spin-off series. The more recent story in the series, The Dalek Gambit, was released in 2020.
She also guest starred in Big Finish’s The Fourth Doctor Adventures (reunited with Tom Baker) and then reprised the role of Toos in The Robots.
Other screen roles included 1978 crime film The Great Train Robbery and The West Wing, in which she featured as fictional UK prime minister Maureen Graty. ER and Blake’s 7 were also notable credits.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born February 23, 1932 — Majel Barrett Roddenberry. (Died 2008.) Majel Barrett. Number One. Nurse Chapel. Computer. Betazoid. Widow of a Centauri emperor.
She first appeared in the initial Trek pilot, “The Cage” as the Enterprise’s first officer. Number One, as she was called, is a title that was from there forwarded through the Trek universes, though not as their only name usually.
Majel Barrett as Nurse Chapel
Even before she was cast in this role, she was already involved with Roddenberry. So every reliable Trek source agrees that the network executives were extremely, well, pissed off that the girlfriend of a married man was cast in a series they were going to be broadcasting. So she had to go. And hence we got Spock instead.
So instead she was cast as Christine Chapel, a nurse, one assumes more to the least grumbling acceptance of the network bosses. (Though some Trek sources claimed they were still extremely annoyed at her presence in the series. Idiots.) Chapel made her first appearance the revised script of “The Naked Time.” Of the seventy-nine episodes, she would appear in twenty-five of them. I think she was in some of the films but I can’t confirm that and it’s been too long for me to remember if that’s true.
I said Computer above, and yes she provided the voice of the computer system starting off with the original series, but it continued on from there to include the computers of Next Generation and Voyagers ships, the Deep Space Nine station and the ships in these films — Generations, First Contact, Insurrection, Nemesis, and J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, Star Trek. She also reprised her role as a shipboard computer’s voice in two episodes of the prequel series Enterprise.
Then there’s Lwaxana Troi, Daughter of the Fifth House, Holder of the Sacred Chalice of Riix, Heir to the Holy Rings of Betazed who is also, Goddess help us, the Betazoid ambassador to the Federation. I’ll admit that I never warmed to her character, but then Picard didn’t really either. Mother of Deanna (who I felt they never played right), it’s a role that just never sat right with me.
She made just six appearances here and three on Deep Space Nine.
She appeared, live or animated, in her lifetime in nearly all series that were produced.
She got cast in other Roddenberry productions, too. She appeared as Primus Dominic in Genesis II pilot; as Dr. Bradley in The Questor Tapes and as Lilith the housekeeper in the Spectre pilot.
She also appeared in Michael Crichton’s Westworld as Miss Carrie.
Remember Earth: Final Conflict? She played the character Dr. Julianne Belman in it. Well she stitched it together from notes that Roddenberry left after his death and she executive produced it.
Finally in a role I thought was pitch perfect she was in the Babylon 5 “Point of No Return” as Lady Morella, the widow of the Centauri emperor and she was psychic. Her role which was used to set-up a major story line.
I could go on, but I don’t think I will.
So what’s your favorite story about her?
(11) COMICS SECTION.
Eek! suggests I was wrong when I assumed superhero sidekicks were independent contractors.
(12) JEOPARDY! [Item by David Goldfarb.] Today’s first round of the Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions had a whole category in the Double Jeopardy round.
First, in the Jeopardy round, there was this:
1960’s Fiction, $200: The Mrs. W’s (Whatsit, Who, and Which) are guides through the universe in this Madeleine L’Engle classic
Suresh Krishnan asked: “What is ‘A Wrinkle in Time’?”
Then in Double Jeopardy we had Pop Culture Dragons. Introducing the category, Ken Jennings quipped, “Not like the real ones.” I’ll present the clues in the order the contestants encountered them.
$1600: In a series of books by Cressida Cowell, this son of Stoick the Vast can speak Dragons & learns to train a dragon
Triple stumper: nobody knew this was Hiccup.
$2000: A Daily Double, found by Suresh, who wagered $3000. (All his money).
Falkor the white Luck Dragon helps Atreyu in this epic fantasy film from Wolfgang Petersen
Suresh did not come up with “The Neverending Story”.
The contestants then went through every clue in every other category before coming back to this one.
$400: Stuff the Magic Dragon is the name of the mascot for the NBA team that plays home games in this city
Emily Sands said, “What is Orlando?” (The team would be the Orlando Magic.)
$800: After killing the Ender Dragon in this “blockbuster” video game, players receive a dragon egg as a trophy
Matthew Marcus: “What is Minecraft?”
$1200: Instead of a standard written clue, we saw a picture of a group of musicians standing in front of a backdrop labeled with logos, reading things like “Golden Gods”, “Fireball”, and “Hammer”. Ken read the clue:
Where Dragons Dwell” is a swell song from this band that took its name from the Japanese word for Godzilla.
Suresh tried, “What is Gorillaz?” but this was wrong. Matthew got it right with, “What is Gojira?”
(13) WHEN ZINES WALKED THE EARTH. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Warning: There are no sff fanzines in exhibit. “When Zines Walked the Earth” at the New York Times. “An extraordinary exhibition of dissident and countercultural takes at the Brooklyn Museum shows the power of the copy machine….”
The curators of “Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines” at the Brooklyn Museum, the art historians Branden Joseph and Drew Sawyer, define them as low-budget, limited-circulation publications (short for “magazine” or “fanzine”) that are not political pamphlets or countercultural newspapers.
The show’s territory starts in 1969, coinciding with the widening availability of photocopy machines, and runs to the present.
Daniel Dernnotes the obvious: SF fanzines clearly predate all this. Aside from the obvious — “starts in 1969” — I’m not seeing any mention of (mimeo or spirit) duplicators, enchanted or otherwise. IIRC, I was introduced to (sf) fanzines early ’60s, by a friend/fan from camp, Ed Reed.
Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines. Through March 31, Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, 718-501-6354, brooklynmuseum.org.
A large trove of more than 500 sensitive technical documents posted online anonymously last week details one Chinese technology company’s hacking operations, target lists and marketing materials for the Chinese government.
The majority of the operations appear to be focused on surveilling and harassing dissidents who publicly criticize the Chinese government, including on global social media platforms like X, formerly known as Twitter.
Target lists reveal victims from at least 14 governments from Pakistan to Australia, as well as academic institutions, pro-democracy organizations in places like Hong Kong, as well as the military alliance NATO. The company was also bidding for work to surveil the minority Uyghur population in Xinxiang, a broader Chinese government program that major global human rights’ organizations around the world have heavily criticized. There are even pictures of custom devices used for spying, such as a recording device disguised as a power bank….
NASA scientists are just getting started in their analysis of fragments brought back from the Bennu asteroid, and the early indications are that the material it contains originated from an ancient ocean world.
That assumption is based on the phosphate crust detected on the asteroid. The calcium and magnesium-rich phosphate mineral has never been seen before on meteorites – those small space rocks that make it through our atmosphere and down to Earth.
The mineral’s chemistry bears an eerie resemblance to that found in vapor shooting from beneath the icy crust of Saturn‘s moon, Enceladus….
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Gary Farber, Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
…The incident prompted discussion among the science fiction community in China. One commenter on Weibo wrote: “Diane Lacey’s courage to disclose the truth makes people feel that there is still hope in the world, and not everyone is so shameless … I can understand the concerns of the Hugo award staff, but ‘I honestly think that the Hugo committee are cowards.’”…
BBC Radio 4: Last night’s arts programme Front Row’s third quarter looked at the Hugo Awards debacle. “Ukraine drama A Small Stubborn Town, Emma Rice, The Hugo Awards”. Jonathan Cowie says, “It was a superficial dive. For example, it did not note that the nominating stats literally did not add up, so clear fraud, nor that Glasgow also is ignoring WSFS rules.” (Cowie adds, “Remember to skip to the programme’s final third quarter.”)
In the wake of the Hugo Awards scandal, Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, culture critic and Hugo awards finalist, Han Zhang, editor-at-large at Riverhead Books, focussed on finding works in the Chinese language for translation and publication in the US, and Megan Walsh, author of The Subplot: What China is reading and why it matters, discuss the fallout and what is reveals about the popularity of Sci-Fi in China.
IT IS a truth universally acknowledged that all awards are total bunk except for the ones you personally have lifted into the air in triumph. That rule doesn’t hold, however, if your prize is in some way sullied later on. This, sadly, is the situation for the winners of the 2023 Hugo awards….
(2) IT ONLY GETS VERSE. [Item by Jennifer Hawthorne.] A brilliant poem by TrishEM about the Hugo mess: “A Vanilla Villain’s Variant Villanelle” at What’s the Word Now. The first stanza is:
It’s wrong to allege we were mere censors’ tools; If you knew all the facts, you’d condone our behavior. I grok Chinese fans, and was their White Savior. I maintain the Committee just followed the rules.
“Was it a government action, or did they do it themselves because of pressure?”
This is inevitably among our first questions when news breaks that any expressive work (a book, film, news story, blog post etc.) has been censored or suppressed by the company or group trusted with it (a publisher, a film studio, a newspaper, an awards organization etc.)
This is not a direct analysis of the current 2023 Chengdu Hugo Awards controversy. But since I am a scholar in the middle of writing a book about patterns in the history of how censorship operates, I want to put at the service of those thinking about the situation this zoomed-out portrait of a few important features of how censorship tends to work, drawn from my examination of examples from dozens of countries and over many centuries….
In recent years, as readers of Publishing Perspectives’ coverage of book and publishing awards know, there have been several cases in which higher-profile book and publishing awards programs have decided to broaden their eligibility requirements for authors whose work is submitted.
Today’s (February 15) announcement from the National Book Foundation about the United States’ National Book Awards‘ change in eligibility opens the program to submissions of work by authors who are not citizens of the United States, as long as they “maintain their primary, long-term home in the United States, US territories, or Tribal lands.”
These new updated criteria will be in effect as of March 13, when submissions for the 75th National Book Awards open….
The Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers is pleased to announce the second annual Wayward Wormhole, this time in New Mexico. Join us for the short story workshop to study with Arley Sorg and Minister Faust, or the novel workshop with Donald Maass, C.C. Finlay, and Cat Rambo.
Both intensive workshops will be hosted at the Painted Pony ranch in Rodeo, New Mexico. The short story workshop runs November 4-12, 2024, and the novel workshop runs November 15 through 24, 2024.
The Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers has been in existence for thirteen years, serving hundreds of students who have gone on to win awards, honors, and accolades, including Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards. “I attended Clarion West, and have taught at multiple workshops now,” says Academy founder Cat Rambo. “While others have delivered the gold standard, I decided to stretch to the platinum level and deliver amazing workshops in equally amazing settings. Last year’s was a castle in Spain, this year a fabulous location in southwestern America. And wait till you hear what we’ve got cooked up for 2025!”
(6) CHENGDU WORLDCON ROUNDUP. [Item by Ersatz Culture.]
Photos from the reopened Chengdu Science Fiction Museum
The Chengdu SF Museum reopened to the public a few weeks ago, after an event a few days earlier involving Hai Ya and other authors. The images I’ve selected here are primarily because of their potential interest to MPC types, but you can click on the following links to see the Xiaohongshu galleries these came from.
As far as I can tell, all of these photos have been taken in the past few weeks; there are none from when the Worldcon was running.
(7) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 103 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Just This Guy, Y’know?”, is available for listening. John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty say:
Octothorpe 103 is here! We discuss a bunch of stuff which isn’t Hugo Award-related before moving onto the bits of the kerfuffle that we couldn’t fit into 102 and hadn’t come out when we recorded.
(8) MOURNING MUSIC. “Matthew” (at Bandcamp) is a tribute song about Matthew Pavletich by his sister, Jo Morgan. Matthew died in January. The lyrics are heart-wrenching – see them at the link.
‘Matthew’ is a touching tribute dedicated to Jo’s beloved brother who passed away after a courageous battle with Motor Neurone Disease. Tenderly capturing the power of familial love, serving as an anthem honouring all the qualities defining him.
Jo says “I wrote this song to celebrate my brother Matthew who passed away from Motor Neurone Disease in January 2024. There are so many wonderful qualities about this beautiful man and I am so blessed to have had him as my brother. He lost so much to this illness, and I want the world to know about this sweet and humble gentle man.”
Jo will be making a donation from some of the proceeds from the song to support MND NZ and animal welfare charities.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born February 15, 1945 — Jack Dann, 79. It’s been awhile since we’ve done an Australian resident writer, so let’s do Jack Dann tonight. Yes, I know he’s American-born but he’s lived there for the past forty years and yes he’s citizen there.
In 1994 he had moved to Melbourne to join Janeen Webb, a Melbourne based academic, SF critic, and writer, whom he had met at a conference in San Francisco and who he married a year later. Thirty years later they’re still married.
They would edit together In the Field of Fire, a collection of science fiction and fantasy stories relating to the horrors of the Vietnam War. I’m not aware who anyone else has done one on this subject, so go ahead and tell who else has.
Jack Dann
He published his first book as an editor, Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction forty years ago, (later followed up by More Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction) and his first novel, Starhiker, several years later.
His Dreaming Again and Dreaming down-under are excellent anthologies of Australian genre short fiction. The latter, edited with his wife, would win a Ditmar and a World Fantasy Award. Dreaming Again, again edited with his wife, also won a Ditmar.
With Nick Gever, he won a Shirley Jackson Award for one of my favorite reads, Ghosts by Gaslight: Stories of Steampunk and Supernatural Suspense.
He’s written roughly a hundred pieces of shorter fiction. I’ve read enough of it to say that he’s quite excellent in that length of fiction. Recently Centipede Press released in their Masters of Science Fiction, a volume devoted to him. Thirty stories, all quite excellent.
So what is worth reading for novels beyond Starhiker which I like a lot? Well if you’ve not read it, do read The Memory Cathedral: A Secret History of Leonardo da Vinci in which de Vinci actually constructs his creations as it is indeed an amazing story.
The Rebel: An Imagined Life of James Dean is extraordinary. All I’ll say here is Dean lived, had an amazing life and yes it’s genre. I see PS Publishing filled out the story when they gave us Promised Land.
Those are the three novels of his that I really, really like.
(10) COMICS SECTION.
Frazz points out the divide between general SF fans and hard SF fans.
(11) EVIL GENIUS GAMES. [Item by Eric Franklin.] Morrus, the owner of ENWorld, posted an article on “The Rise And Fall Of Evil Genius Games” that may be of interest to the gaming contingent of File770’s readership: EGG has produced games for a number of licensed genre properties, including Pacific Rim, Escape from New York, and The Crow. “DriveThruRPG – Evil Genius Games”.
How does a company go from over twenty core staff to just six in the space of a few weeks?
In the summer of 2023, Evil Genius Games appeared to be riding high. They’d made about half a million dollars over two Kickstarter campaigns and had raised $1M from several rich investors in the form of technology companies. The company boasted 25-30 core staff, an official tabletop role-playing game for a movie franchise called Rebel Moon was well under development, and EGG standees and window clings representing characters from the d20 Modern-inspired Everyday Heroes could be seen in game stores across America.
By the end of the year, the Rebel Moon game was dead, staff had been asked to work without pay for periods of up to three months, freelancers were struggling to get paid, people were being laid off, and the company’s tech company investors seemed to be having cold feet in the face of escalating expenditure and dwindling resources….
“Iwájú” is an original animated series set in a futuristic Lagos, Nigeria. The exciting coming-of-age story follows Tola, a young girl from the wealthy island, and her best friend, Kole, a self-taught tech expert, as they discover the secrets and dangers hidden in their different worlds. Kugali filmmakers—including director Olufikayo Ziki Adeola, production designer Hamid Ibrahim and cultural consultant Toluwalakin Olowofoyeku—take viewers on a unique journey into the world of “Iwájú,” bursting with unique visual elements and technological advancements inspired by the spirit of Lagos.
(13) NSFF770? [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Star Zendaya walked the red carpet at the Dune Part Two premiere wearing a formfitting silver and translucent robot-inspired outfit. Friendly warning: anyone inclined to over-agitation at such a sight might want to make sure they’ve taken their heart medication before checking out the video. “Zendaya’s Robotic Outfit For The ‘Dune: Part Two’ Premiere Has To Be Seen To Be Believed” at Uproxx. Article includes a roundup of X.com posts with video.
Astronomers have reconstructed nearly nine billion years of cosmic evolution by tracing the X-ray glow of distant clusters of galaxies. The analysis supports the standard model of cosmology, according to which the gravitational pull of dark matter — a still-mysterious substance — is the main factor shaping the Universe’s structure.
“We do not see any departures from the standard model of cosmology,” says Esra Bulbul, a senior member of the team and an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, Germany. The results are described1 in a preprint posted online on 14 February.
The galactic clusters were spotted in the most detailed picture ever taken of the sky using X-rays, which was published late last month. This image revealed around 900,000 X-ray sources, from black holes to the relics of supernova explosions.
The picture was the result of the first six months of operation of eROSITA (Extended Roentgen Survey with an Imaging Telescope Array), one of two X-ray telescopes that were launched into space in July 2019 aboard the Russian spacecraft SRG (Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma). eROSITA scans the sky as the spacecraft spins, and collects data over wider angles than are possible for most other X-ray observatories. This enables it to slowly sweep the entire sky every six months….
The love stories definitely aren’t the main focus in Doctor Who… but they certainly don’t hurt.
From David Tennant’s Ten and Billie Piper’s Rose being ripped away from each other in Doomsday, to Matt Smith’s Eleven and Alex Kingston’s River Song finding their way back to each other through time, some of them are love stories for the ages.
Some of them, perhaps, deserved a little more time (looking at Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteen and Mandip Gill’s Yaz), and some don’t even feature the Doctor at all, with Karen Gillan’s Amy and Arthur Darvill’s Rory melting our hearts….
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Jason Sanford, Cat Rambo, Kathy Sullivan, Eric Franklin, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]
“You acquire information and you convey the information. That’s the job.”
++ National Public Radio News Director, Editor and Reporter Emeritus Linda Wertheimer, February 7, 2024
INTRODUCTION
By Chris M. Barkley: The earliest documentation of the phrase, “News is only the first rough draft of history,” is attributed to a 1943 New Republic book review written by Alan Barth. The phrase quickly caught on with other writers and journalists at the time and for many decades, the late Washington Post president and publisher Philip L. Graham was wrongly given credit for the phrase.
For journalists, such as myself for example, the phrase rings true on a very basic and emotional level. And while what you are about to read here will be considered shocking and a seismic event in the history of SF fandom and the World Science Fiction Society in particular, it is my hope that it is just the beginning of a greater story yet to be told.
What my colleague and co-author Jason Sanford and I are going to outline in this lengthy report will most certainly not be the final word on the extraordinary events and actions surrounding the 2023 Hugo Awards that were adjudicated and presented by the 81st World Science Fiction Convention held in the city of Chengdu in China in October of 2023.
To understand how extraordinary these events were, I refer back to the 79th Worldcon held in Washington D.C. in December of 2021; a bid from fans based in The People’s Republic of China won the bid for the 81st Worldcon over the bid from Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada by a wide margin.
This in itself was not unusual, except that there was a considerable amount of consternation on the method and accounting of the Chinese ballots. A majority of the ballots from China had email addresses and not the traditional street addresses that fans in other parts of the world usually provide.
The DisCon III committee allowed the contested votes and the Chengdu bid was declared the winner.
Almost immediately there were signs that the Chengdu convention committee may not have expected to win; the one-sheet announcement had no guests of honor, hotel information or membership rates listed. Most alarmingly, several vital convention committee spots were either vacant or non-existent.
In the intervening twenty-one months, there were long periods of silence from the concom, which caused a great deal of concern among many SF fans and convention organizers as well.
This period was followed up by a frenzy of activity. First came the announcement of the author Guests of Honor, the Hugo Award winning novelists Liu Cixin from China and Canadian Robert J. Sawyer and Russian SF author Sergey Lukianenko.
Lukianenko, who was mostly unknown to readers and fans in the West, turned out to be an ardent supporter of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and subsequently made inflammatory comments about his support for the unprovoked war against Ukraine, which began in February of 2022.
In addition, the Chengdu Worldcon was heavily criticized because it was being held under the auspices of an authoritarian regime which regularly spied on, discriminated against or jailed political dissenters, religious minorities, writers, artists, booksellers and publishers. There were also allegations that the government was colluding with business interests to build the venue the convention would be held in. The delays in the construction of the facility moved the date of the start of the Worldcon from early August to mid-October.
But, against all odds, the Chengdu Worldcon was staged successfully and was widely acclaimed by all those who attended, including myself.
I was invited by the Worldcon Convention Committee and its hosting organization, the Chengdu Science Fiction Society as a finalist in the Best Fan Writer category. (Full Disclosure: My airfare, lodgings and meals were paid for by the convention. I gave no considerations to the Worldcon in return for my attendance).
The Science Fiction Museum turned out to be a fabulous site for the proceedings, the panels were well attended, presentation areas were spectacular and the Hugo Awards Ceremony came off without a hitch.
But, having attended thirty-one previous Worldcons, there is no such thing as a convention without some problems or complications; the main one was that I heard first hand of complaints by attendees that there were a limited number of tickets for the main events, the opening ceremonies, the Hugo Awards ceremony and closing ceremonies.
The only curious thing I noticed was that the long list of nominations and the voting results, which are usually out soon after the ceremony, were not released. In fact, that was still the case by the time I left China, which was two days later.
The final voting results were finally published on December 3, 2023, forty-six days after the end of the Chengdu Worldcon. There was no explanation for the delay.
And on January 20th, ninety-one days from the opening of the convention, the Long List of nominees was published on TheHugoAwards.org.
There was a firestorm of outrage, condemnation, speculation and rumors of malfeasance surrounding the absence of the works of novelist R.F. Kuang (Babel), screenwriter and producer Neil Gaiman (The Sandman), fan writer Paul Weimer, and Xiran Jay Zhao — who would have been an Astounding Award nominee for Best New Writer — despite having enough nominations to make the Final Ballot.
At the time of its release, no further explanation was given by the Chengdu Worldcon Convention Committee or Hugo Award Administrators, other than the works in question were ruled not eligible.
Both Jason and I have taken care to diligently gather evidence to answer the following questions:
Who was responsible for the “not eligible” rulings?
Was there evidence to support marking these particular works “not eligible”?
Why were these particular works chosen?
To what extent was the Chinese Communist Party and business interests involved?
What measures should be taken to ensure that the disenfranchisement of future nominees is never repeated?
This report, prepared by myself and Jason Sanford, is not meant to be the final word on what happened at this Worldcon. We are hoping that others, both here and abroad, will follow in our journalistic footsteps and come forward with more information and details about these events.
We hope that this is not the last inquiry into the curious, shocking and ultimately devastating story that we hope will bring about changes in how Worldcons are run and how the Hugo Awards are administered. We also acknowledge that this report will be quite upsetting to the fannish community but we hope that exposing the truth will also lead to the first steps in healing these social and political wounds ailing us.
As journalists, we are dedicated to be fair, accurate, and equitable in our pursuit of the truth. We are lucky that we live in an open society where inquiries like this are not only legal, but possible.
Jason, I, and other dedicated journalists like the recently retired Linda Wertheimer (whom I quoted above) know that we carry a sacred responsibility to get it right and convey it directly to you, factually and without bias.
++ Chris M. Barkley — 14 February 2024
LEAKED EMAILS AND FILES REVEAL POLITICAL CONCERNS RESULTED IN INELIGIBILITY ISSUES WITH 2023 HUGO AWARDS
By Chris M. Barkley and Jason Sanford: Emails and files released by one of the administrators of the 2023 Hugo Awards indicate that authors and works deemed “not eligible” for the awards were removed due to political considerations. In particular, administrators of the awards from the United States and Canada researched political concerns related to Hugo-eligible authors and works and discussed removing certain ones from the ballot for those reasons, revealing they were active participants in the censorship that took place.
When the Hugo Award voting and nomination statistics were released, no detailed explanation was given for why multiple authors and works were deemed “not eligible” even though they had enough nominations to make the award’s final ballot. The only official explanation came from overall Hugo Awards administrator Dave McCarty, who said “After reviewing the Constitution and the rules we must follow, the administration team determined those works/persons were not eligible.”
However, emails and files released by another member of that Hugo administration team, Diane Lacey, shows that the rules “we must follow” were in relation to Chinese laws related to content and censorship.
Lacey previously served as an administrator for the Hugo Awards in 2009, 2011, and 2016, and was the lead Hugo administrator for Chicon 7 in 2012. The 2023 Hugo Award Administration Team for the 81st World Science Fiction Convention in Chengdu were comprised of the following people according to the official Hugo Awards website: Dave McCarty, Ben Yalow, Ann Marie Rudolph, Diane Lacey, Shi Chen, Joe Yao, Tina Wang, Dongsheng Guo, and Bo Pang.
While the official Hugo Awards website doesn’t list Kat Jones as an administrator, the emails Lacey shared show Jones was involved in working on the awards. Lacey also confirmed this in an interview, as did Jones who said in an email exchange that “I did a small amount of work in the margins of the 2023 Hugo process, but was nowhere near any decisions.”
In an apology letter released to this report’s authors, Diane Lacey wrote “Let me start by saying that I am NOT making excuses, there are no adequate excuses. I am thoroughly ashamed of my part in this debacle, and I will likely never forgive myself. But the fans that have supported the Hugos, the nominees, and those that were unfairly and erroneously deemed ineligible in particular, deserve an explanation. Perhaps the only way I can even begin to ease my conscience is to provide one.”
The emails Lacey shared are extremely illuminating about the entire controversy. In an email from Dave McCarty dated June 5, 2023, he announced to the Hugo Award administration group that “This is us, the group of folks that are validating the Hugo finalists.”
None of the Chinese members of the administration team were listed as recipients in any of the emails examined for this report, only administrators who were from Western countries.
After discussing technical details of the work in the June 5th email, McCarty wrote “In addition to the regular technical review, as we are happening in China and the *laws* we operate under are different…we need to highlight anything of a sensitive political nature in the work. It’s not necessary to read everything, but if the work focuses on China, taiwan, tibet, or other topics that may be an issue *in* China…that needs to be highlighted so that we can determine if it is safe to put it on the ballot (or) if the law will require us to make an administrative decision about it.”
On June 5, Kat Jones asked McCarty for a “list or a resource you can point us to that elaborates on ‘other topics that may be an issue *in* China’?”
McCarty responded on June 5 at 7:18 pm saying “At the moment, the best guidance I have is ‘mentions of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, negatives of China’. I will try to get better guidance when I have a chance to dig into this deeper with the Chinese folks on the committee.”
On June 6, Kat Jones wrote an email to the administration group titled “Best Novel potential issues.” In the email, Jones raised concerns about the novels Babel, or the Necessity of Violence by R. F. Kuang and The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Jones wrote that Babel “has a lot about China. I haven’t read it, and am not up on Chinese politics, so cannot say whether it would be viewed as ‘negatives of China’” while adding that The Daughter of Doctor Moreau talked “about importing hacienda workers from China. I have not read the book, and do not know whether this would be considered ‘negative.’”
Babel, which won the Nebula Award for Best Novel, ended up being deemed “not eligible” for the Hugo Awards despite having 810 nominations, more than enough to make the final ballot. The Daughter of Doctor Moreau was not removed from the ballot.
When the authors of this report reached out to Kuang for comment, her publicist said by email that due to her academic schedule and writing deadlines Kuang was unavailable for an interview.
In addition to being involved in work on last year’s Hugos, Kat Jones is the current overall Hugo Awards administrator for the 2024 Worldcon in Glasgow, Scotland.
In an emailed statement in response to a request for comment, Jones said she was concerned that the “confidential Hugo Award eligibility research work product that was ‘leaked’” may be incomplete or modified, and that she was “shocked that this extremely extremely confidential material was shared in the first place.”
“In relation to my involvement with Chengdu,” she added, “as the previous Hugo administrator from Chicon8, there is a necessary handover aspect from administrator-to-administrator. Then in addition, at the request of the Chengdu team I assisted with eligibility research for some of the English language works/creators in June 2023. I performed some of the 2023 Hugo Awards eligibility research on some of the English-language potential finalists. …
“For Chengdu, I conducted the eligibility research as instructed by the 2023 Hugo Award Administrator, and asked for clarifications where instructions were not clear. I did have concerns, and I shared them with the Administrator. Those concerns you should have evidence of if you have access to all communications. I was not involved in the evaluation of the data we flagged – and you’ll note in those emails we all expressed confusion over the vague instructions and had no idea whether anything we were mentioning was an actual problem. I had serious concerns at this point about this process. I then stepped back and did no further work for the Chengdu Worldcon after the first pass of eligibility research. I only had visibility into that first step as a Hugo researcher. I did not ever and do not have visibility into why the choices that were made, were made.”
At the end of her statement, Jones said “I would not be willing to participate in any way in the administration of an award under such circumstances again. I don’t think we, as a community, should put our Hugo Award administration teams in this kind of no-win situation. The safety, wellbeing, and freedom of our community members is a whole different kind of consideration.”
The American and Canadian Hugo Award administrators also examined political concerns around the finalists for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. In an email dated June 7, 2023, Lacey raised possible issues with regards to Xiran Jay Zhao, Naseem Jamnia and Sue Lynn Tan. Xiran Jay Zhao ended up being deemed “not eligible” despite being a finalist in that same category the year before. Naseem Jamnia made the final ballot while Tan appears to have not had enough nominations to make the final ballot.
The Hugo Awards category that received the most concerns in the email chain was Best Fan Writer. As Kat Jones wrote in an email dated June 7, 2023, “This category has the potential to be problematic, under the constraints you’ve listed, for most non-Chinese fan writers.” Jones then detailed items of possible concern for numerous fan writers including the two authors of this report along with Paul Weimer, Bitter Karella and several writers who subsequently did not receive enough nominations to qualify for the 2023 final ballot such as Alex Brown (a 2022 Hugo finalist in this category), Camestros Felapton (a 2018 Hugo finalist) and Alasdair Stuart (a three-time Hugo finalist).
Paul Weimer would eventually be deemed “not eligible” for the award despite meeting eligibility requirements in the constitution of the World Science Fiction Society, which lists the rules governing the Hugo Awards. Among the concerns Jones raised about Weimer’s writings were him having traveled to Tibet, him having a Twitter discussion with Jeannette Ng about Hong Kong along with mentioning Hong Kong and Tiananmen Square on that social media platform, expressing support for the Chengdu Worldcon while also sharing negatives about the Chinese government in a Patreon article, and writing a review of S.L. Huang’s The Water Outlaws where Jones said Weimer praises Huang for “tak[ing] one of the pillars of Chinese literature and reinvent[ing] it as a queer, feminist retelling of an important and nation-defining story.”
It should be noted that Mr. Weimer was nominated for the Hugo Award as fan writer on the 2020-2022 Hugo Award final ballots and last year for Best Fanzine as one of the editors of Nerds of a Feather.
In an interview on February 11, 2024, Weimer said he only found out he was declared “not eligible” for the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer when the complete Hugo nomination and voting statistics were released. He confirmed he was eligible for the Best Fan Writer Award by virtue of publishing more than 60 works in various places.
“I had more ‘fan writer’ somethings than you can shake a stick at … by any definition of the word,” he said.
Weimer also confirmed that, despite the research done on him by the Hugo administrators, he has never visited Tibet. Instead, he had previously traveled to Nepal and Vietnam.
When told about the political research the Hugo administrators did on him, Weimer’s initial response was very pointed: “Well fuck,” he said, noting that he doesn’t curse that often but a precision f-bomb seemed appropriate here.
“I was afraid that in the end this was going to come down to soft or hard or some kind of censorship once things started leaking out,” Weimer said. “I mean, they came up with a dossier on all of us and went through stuff from 10 years ago? I mean, I honestly think that the Hugo committee are cowards. I would like to hope that if I was in the position of Dave McCarty and the others I’d have simply said we can’t hold the awards under these conditions and just cancel the fucking things rather than going through political dossiers. This is the worst possible outcome.”
Strangely, neither the emails nor other supporting files shared with the authors explain why the episode “The Sound of Her Wings” from Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman TV series was ruled ineligible. When asked about this, Diane Lacey said she wasn’t sure who reviewed finalists for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation but it wasn’t her, Kat Jones or any other associate administrators.
At the time of publication, Gaiman has not responded to a request for an interview. A request for comment with Xiran Jay Zhao is also still pending.
The emails provided by Diane Lacey can be downloaded here.All emails examined by the authors are included in that document. Personal email addresses of the people on the Hugo Award administration team have been redacted. In addition, the name of one Hugo administrator who was cc’d on the shared emails but didn’t respond to any of the emails was redacted. Otherwise the emails haven’t been altered or edited in any way. The authors of this report initially received these emails in a printed format. Some of the emails in the combined PDF are from a scanned version of the print copies.
In addition to the emails, Lacey also shared other supporting documents, including a “validation” spreadsheet where comments were shared by the Western Hugo administrators about different Hugo finalists and potential finalists. Comments on the finalists ranged from “possible issues” to “minor possible issues” to “no issues.”
One interesting aspect of the “validation” spreadsheet is it appears to show a number of Chinese works that may have been removed from the final ballot. For example, in the Best Novel category, four Chinese novels are listed including We Live in Nanjing by Tianrui Shuofu. None of these novels made the final ballot.
In both Diane Lacey’s apology letter and an interview, she said some of these Chinese works were removed due to “collusion in a Chinese publication that had published a nominations list, a slate as it were, and so those ballots were identified and eliminated.”
However, the Hugo administrators from the United States and Canada appear to have only examined works and authors who were from the Western world and who mainly published in English. The “validation” spreadsheet shows that the Western administrators did not raise concerns about any of the Chinese authors or works on that spreadsheet, only about Western-based authors and works originally published in English.
Because of this, it is possible some of these Chinese works were removed for other reasons than slating.
In the post, the Propaganda Department of the Sichuan Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China stated that “Three special groups reviewed the content of 1,512 works in five categories, including cultural and creative, literary, and artistic, that were shortlisted in the preliminary examination of the Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention, conducting strict checks on works suspected of being related to politics and ethnicity and religion, and putting forward proposals for the disposal of 12 controversial works related to LGBT issues.”
The post was later deleted.
Because the post was deleted, it is difficult to prove its authenticity. However, the post does tie in with language from the Chengdu Worldcon’s second progress report that was shared by ErsatzCulture on X-Twitter on January 20 and by Nibedita Sen on Bluesky on January 23. That language stated “Eligible members vote according to the ‘one person, one vote’ rule to select Hugo Award works and individuals that comply with local laws and regulations.” [emphasis added]
It’s also possible self-censorship was undertaken due to fears of what might happen if certain finalists made the final ballot, or due to pressure from financial interests and businesses in China not wanting to upset a major investment opportunity. As reported by China.org.cn, “Investment deals valued at approximately $1.09 billion were signed during the 81st World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) held in Chengdu.”
As Lacey said in an interview, “The things that were marked ineligible, was it local pressure from the government or was it business interests? I can’t answer that. From my knowledge, I would probably say business interests.”
In an interview conducted on February 4 in Chicago, Dave McCarty said that the Chinese government was not indirectly involved in the Hugo Awards “except insofar as the government says what the laws are in the country. … So the government of China says what’s cool in China and the people just operate inside of the bounds of what’s cool, which is exactly the same way that you and I work here.”
What McCarty appears to be referring to is self-censorship. As discussed in the academic article “The Cost of Humour: Political Satire on Social Media and Censorship in China,” there is a “red line” around certain forbidden topics in the country. Because people don’t know exactly what the red line is, and because the punishment for crossing the line can be so severe, “self-censorship is the only way to protect themselves and lower the risk.”
In recent years, this practice of self-censoring has spread to numerous Western organizations and groups that work in or have dealings with China, including Hollywood studios, technology companies, and Ivy-League schools.
Regardless of whether official government censorship took place or if it was self-censorship, what is certain is that the Hugo Award administrators from outside of China were actively involved in researching issues that enabled this censorship.
In an email dated June 7, 2023 at 6:18 PM and sent to the Western Hugo administrators, Dave McCarty said “Tomorrow I have a 4 hour meeting with my chinese counterpart to look at ballot detail and determine if any ballots are to be voided (which happens with frequency so that it’s not *really* that controversial if we determine we need to do it) as well as what things we need to move categories.” The identity of this Chinese counterpart remains unknown at this time.
McCarty then added “The chairs and the administrators will review the items we’ve highlighted in research Friday evening if we have enough time after the ballot review…otherwise we’ll be looking at it on Saturday (China time, of course, so we’re about 13 hours ahead of you).”
This statement, along with McCarty’s earlier email saying the administrators will “determine if it is safe” to put finalists on the ballot or “if the law will require us to make an administrative decision about it,” shows that the research the Western administrators did on Hugo Award finalists was used by the Chengdu convention chairs and administrators to determine who would be on the final ballot.
Lacey confirmed in an interview that this is what happened. “We were supposed to identify any issues and pass them on,” she said. “The decisions were above our heads.”
As Lacey explained in more detail in her apology letter, “We were told to vet nominees for work focusing on China, Taiwan, Tibet, or other topics that may be an issue in China and, to my shame, I did so. Understand that I signed up fully aware that there were going to be issues. I am not that naïve regarding the Chinese political system, but I wanted the Hugos to happen, and not have them completely crash and burn.”
Since the release of the Hugo Award nomination statistics on January 20, Western fandom has been outraged over what happened while multiple mainstream media outlets including The Guardian, Publishers Weekly, and Esquire have covered the story. In addition, there have been unverified reports of fans in China who are also angry at having their first Worldcon tainted by this affair.
In the initial week after the release of the statistics, multiple posts by Chinese fans were translated and shared in the Western world, such as a thread of comments in a Bluesky thread shared by Angie Wang. And Zimozi Natsuco, a genre fan from China, published an essay on File770 describing shock and anger at what happened while also giving a glimpse behind the scenes at what might have gone down.
However, in recent weeks posts like these from Chinese fans have been harder to find. According to a report by Ersatz Culture on File770 released on January 27 (see item #8 at link), posts related to the Hugo Awards controversy in China began disappearing around this time.
This report’s authors attempted to reach out to Chinese genre fans for comment, but did not receive any responses in time to include in this report.
An explanation for what might be happening came from Pablo Vazquez, a traveling genre fan and co-chair of the 12th North American Science Fiction Convention in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Vazquez is also well known for his connections with genre fans around the world.
When Vazquez was asked if he could help connect the authors with any fans in China who might comment for this report, he said “I’m sorry. They do not want to speak to the media even anonymously.”
As Vazquez stated in a follow-up comment, “I have a lot of love for Chinese fandom and my friendships and connections there run deep. That’s a real and vibrant fandom there that is, like us, wanting very little to do with their government being involved in their fandom. They definitely don’t think it’s their government and instead think its corporate interests or, even worse, a fan/pro organization. Honestly, they seem more scared by that than anything else which saddens me to see and despite multiple attempts to get them to share their story they seem really hesitant.”
He elaborated further: “They don’t seem to fear official reprisal (the CPC seems to want to find who’s responsible for embarrassing them on the world stage actually) but rather ostracization from their community or its outright destruction. If I were to hazard a guess, the way we blew up this affair in the international media has now put this fandom in very serious trouble. Previously, it was one of the few major avenues of free speech left in China. Now, after all this, the continuation of that freedom seems highly unlikely.”
In the days following the January 20th release of the nomination Long List, several forums have been created online and all of them are calling for the Hugo Awards to be separated from the control of the sitting Worldcon and amending the Constitution of the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) to accomplish this.
In Dave McCarty’s February 4th interview, he said he was opposed to separating the Hugos from Worldcon, calling it “entirely wrong headed.”
“Even though I am certain that every administration decision I made was correct, I don’t think that anybody would ever give me this job again,” McCarty said in the interview. “The answers that I’ve got for the administration decisions, all I can say is again, after reviewing this Constitution and all the other rules we must follow, the administration team ruled that these works were ineligible, which absolutely, categorically is our right to do, you know, that’s right there in the WSFS Constitution.”
A full transcript of the File 770 interview with Dave McCarty can be found here.
When Paul Weimer was asked if he supported separating the Hugos from each local Worldcon, he said, “I was already moderately inclined toward that idea and now I’m more inclined. Clearly we need third-party auditing of the ballot and the whole process as a standard practice. Custom is not strong enough. Custom failed here. It wasn’t a failure in Chengdu, it was a failure here. We need guardrails of multiple types. Because otherwise people are going to stop trusting the Hugo results and that will be the death of the awards.”
OBSERVATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS
By Jason Sanford: In a recent article in Esquire about the Hugo Awards controversy, I talked about how the science fiction and fantasy genre saved my life. I still remember how as a kid certain SF/F novels and stories gave me an escape from horrific days while also opening my mind to new possibilities. These stories also revealed to me that other people saw the world in similar ways to myself.
All of this gave me the drive to not give up and to continue moving forward. And in a major way, I found the stories that illuminated and saved my life through the Hugo Awards. Back then I read every Hugo winner and finalist I could find. While I didn’t agree with or even like many of them, they were still the standard by which I approached the SF/F genre.
When I grew up and began writing my own SF/F stories, I realized the idealized version of the Hugos from my youth didn’t exist. The Hugo Awards, like all awards, were flawed. Some stories that deserved to be finalists never made the ballot. Other works that did likely shouldn’t have been there. And that’s before getting into the political infighting, lack of diversity, lack of inclusion, and other issues that have plagued the awards for decades.
No, the Hugo Awards aren’t perfect. However, what I still love about the Hugos is how they result from thousands of people across fandom working together to honor stories and authors. I love how readers continue to discover new authors and stories thanks to the words “Hugo Award finalist” or “Hugo Award winner.” I love seeing the excitement in an author’s face when they’re nominated for or win a Hugo.
I also respect how each problem that pops up with the awards is examined and dissected by the genre as a whole until maybe, eventually, possibly, a solution is found.
Now the Hugos are facing the biggest crisis in their history.
Make no mistake; the 2023 Hugo Awards were censored because certain authors and works were deemed to have too many political liabilities, at least from the viewpoint of the Chinese government. While it’s unclear if this was official censorship from the Chinese government or self-censorship by those afraid of offending governmental or business interests, we can now be certain that censorship indeed took place.
However, what also disturbs me is that the administrators of the Hugo Awards from the United States and Canada, countries that supposedly support and value free speech, appear to have been active participants in this censorship.
Let me say that again because there are too many people who believe all this happened solely because of the Chinese government: The administrators from the United States and Canada appear to have helped censor the Hugo Awards!
As detailed in the emails and files examined by myself and Chris Barkley, these Western administrators took it upon themselves to research political concerns about many of the finalists. I was one of those finalists they researched and let me tell you, this is the first time I’ve seen what amounts to a political dossier being created on what I’ve said and done. It’s not a good feeling.
That this happened in conjunction with the Hugo Awards sickens me even more.
I know the Hugo Award administrators from the United States and Canada were in a tough spot. They deeply cared about both Worldcon and the Hugos and wanted both to be successful. But in their attempt to do that, they took actions that go against the very heart of what the awards should represent.
This didn’t have to happen. The administrators could have refused to research the political issues around various award finalists. They could have spoken out when these issues first emerged. They could have told the entire SF/F genre what was happening before the awards were held.
Instead, the true story is only now coming out.
Ironically, while the Western Hugo administrators appear to have taken these actions in an attempt to protect both the Hugos and Worldcon, the result has been the exact opposite. This controversy has deeply hurt fandom in both the Western world and in China.
Instead, as Chris and I documented in this report, it now appears SF/F fans in China are fearful of possible repression resulting from the Hugos controversy.
It’s my sincere hope that in the years to come we all remember that the regular SF/F fans in China didn’t want this to happen. They are as horrified as Western fans are by all of this. Instead of blaming China’s genre fans, we should work to ensure this issue with the Hugo Awards never happens again.
I want to thank Diane Lacey for providing these emails and files to Chris and myself. This is an amazing act of bravery and was undertaken because Lacey deeply cares about the Hugo Awards. I highly commend her for her work in revealing all this to the world. I also urge everyone to read her apology letter.
The SF/F genre has a lot of work in the coming months and years. We must ensure nothing like this ever happens again. The first opportunity for change will happen this year at the Worldcon in Glasgow. During the business meeting, proposals to decouple the Hugos from Worldcon will be raised and must be approved. You can read the beginning of proposals to do this in these posts by Chris Barkley and Cheryl Morgan.
The World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) must also start the process of incorporating so they have the actual power to deal with issues like this in the future. If we want Worldcon to exist a decade from now, the WSFS must change.
The Hugo Awards remain one of the most prominent and visible worldwide icons of the science fiction and fantasy genre. The awards must be saved. The good news is the genre has the power to do just that.
Jason Sanford is a science fiction and fantasy writer who’s also a passionate advocate for fellow authors, creators, and fans, in particular through reporting in his Genre Grapevine column. His first novel Plague Birds was a finalist for both the Nebula Award and the Philip K. Dick Award.
OBSERVATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS
By Chris M. Barkley: When I received the documents that are included in this report on February 3rd at Capricon 44, I did not look at them immediately. In fact, I waited until I got home in Cincinnati the next evening.
I did not read that material that day because I was attending a party honoring a very ill friend, who, as it turns out, couldn’t attend because of a medical emergency. I did not want anything to detract from my enjoying the celebration.
But once I read the first two pages of the emails provided by Diane Lacey, I was stunned, anxious, confused and finally, very angry about what I was seeing. And, as I read the remaining pages, I became even more upset to the point of being violently ill.
The Chengdu Hugo Administrators compiled what a casual observer could reasonably consider to be dossiers of the works of possible nominees, including myself and my co-author, Jason Sanford.
As you can see, these lists contain what the admins thought the People’s Republic of China’s government officials and censors may consider to be politically offensive or subversive in our works, both in the recent past and up through the year of our eligibility.
After I got over my initial shock, I realized I had a dilemma; when pursuing a story, the journalists who are chronicling the events usually do not find themselves as the subject of the inquiry. But these documents, and the truth behind them, were entrusted to me. So, as far as I was concerned, there was no way I could avoid being involved.
I also realized I could not do a report on this story alone. For a brief while, I considered enlisting the help of mainstream reporters. But after reading several recent news articles about the Hugo controversy, I found that they lacked the insight about SF fandom that was needed to bring in a sense of context to what was happening.
I decided that whomever I chose I had to have an insider’s knowledge of fandom and be a very good writer in their own right as well. So, I called in my fellow nominee and professional journalist Jason Sanford.
Once he was apprised of the evidence I had in hand, he did not hesitate to jump in and provide an invaluable perspective of what we should write. In fact, Jason provided the bulk of the third person narrative of this report.
And as we wrote, we knew that the truth we were revealing would have immediate and lasting consequences for everyone in science fiction fandom, here in North America and internationally.
I have remarked to my partner that I don’t believe in fate. I don’t believe that everything that happened, from my surprise nomination last year, the offer of attending the Chengdu Worldcon, winning a Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer and being personally embroiled in the controversy that followed in its wake was not fated to happen.
Everything that did happen could have been avoided if the government of China, their associated business interests and those involved in the running of the Worldcon had not tried to “do the right thing”, culturally speaking.
By western standards, we generally believe that suppressing the truth and then covering up the attempt to do so is considered abhorrent and should be rightly condemned. But in the People’s Republic of China, and in other totalitarian nations, speaking out and having a differing opinion can lead to being ostracized by the community, imprisonment, homelessness, becoming a refugee or death.
For decades, each individual and independent Worldcon convention committee has had complete jurisdiction and control over the administration of the Hugo Awards. And now that we have seen the disastrous results of what might happen in repressive countries like Turkey, Hungary, Russia and Uganda, which have every right to bid under the current Constitution of the World Science Fiction Society, we can well imagine what would happen if they hosted a Worldcon.
And if that were to come to pass, would the members of the Worldcon be bound to nominate and vote on their ballots according to the “local laws and regulations” of an oppressive host country. Moreover, are the Hugo administrators beholden to assist them?
It is my opinion that Mr. McCarty and his fellow western based administrators felt by ingratiating themselves with the Chengdu Worldcon Committee and other Chinese administrators working with them, they could to interdict any direct actions of censorship by the Chinese Communist Party officials, members of the censorship board or the security services by researching and ruling on potential nominees themselves.
The resounding answer should be a very loud NO.
I think that people in fandom, including the Chengdu Hugo Award admins, seem to have forgotten that the Hugos are not supposed to be a popularity contest but a merits-based award that is a judgment of the year’s best works of fiction and non-fiction. As such, it is up to the fans, who I might add, paid out of their own pockets for the privilege to nominate and vote on an annual basis, who should have the final word on who is honored.,
Not the Hugo administrators, not the hosting convention committee and certainly not a group of government bureaucrats and censors with their own non-consensual political agenda.
In his interview with me, Dave McCarty was adamant that the Hugo Awards should remain under the direct auspices of the Worldcon hosting the proceedings. But this debacle and the Hugo administrators role in interdicting the nominations of four participants who should have been included on the Final Ballot practically ensures that the next two WSFS Business Meetings will seriously consider severing this traditional and long standing relationship, and, at the very least, enact amendments that safeguard the nomination and voting process from any geo-political influences, here in North America and the rest of the world as well.
The firestorm of speculation and outrage that followed the release of the nomination Long List engendered a frenzied demand for the truth of what really happened, a furious yearning that could not and would not be denied by pronouncements of obfuscation, half truths or attempts at subterfuge.
Which brings us to Diane Lacey, who is the hero of this story.
Ms. Lacey, whom I have also known for many years through socializing and working on SF conventions, is very distraught about her role in what happened. What she feared the most was that when this story was released to the public, she would become a pariah in the fannish community.
It is my fervent contention, and I think that my colleague Jason would agree, that what Diane Lacey has done was brave, conscientious and ultimately, the right thing to do for herself and for the community at large.
The omissions of the works of R.F. Kuang, Neil Gaiman, Paul Weimer and Xiran Jay Zhao formed the outline of the puzzle that has been confounding all of us since January 20th. The emails, spreadsheets and Lacey’s personal reminiscences provided a great number of the pieces that provided most of the answers fans have been asking for, at least for now. As far as our investigation is concerned there was no reason to exclude the works of Kuang, Gaiman, Weimer or Xiran Jay Zhao, save for being viewed as being undesirable in the view of the the Hugo Award admins which had the effect of being the proxies Chinese government.
What remains unknown at this time is what was the extent of the involvement of the Chinese government or the business interests that surrounded the development of the Science Fiction Museum, if the business deals that emerged from the convention were orchestrated in conjunction with the convention organizers, a more detailed knowledge of the reaction from the SF fans in China, and whether or not there have been repercussions for them from this shameful incident.
I fully acknowledge the complete truth may never be known. But with the publication of this report, we now know more than we did on the morning of January 20, 2024.
And I can assure anyone reading this that the search for more explanations and answers will continue.
And so must the Hugo Awards.
The purpose of this report goes beyond a clarion call for truth and transparency, it is also a plea for healing and transformation.
The Hugo Awards have been in existence for seventy one years. It has strived to honor the best SF, fantasy, horror and works of related interest during those years. I consider it to be, as several astute critics have called it, “the literature of change”.
What has happened is a test of our will to ask the right questions, find the right answers, heal our wounds and be resilient in the face of adversity.
Because reacting out of fear is not the answer. Facing down that fear is…
“You know the greatest danger facing us is ourselves, an irrational fear of the unknown. But there’s no such thing as the unknown, only things temporarily hidden, temporarily not understood.”
-Captain James Kirk, from Star Trek, “The Corbomite Maneuver”, written by Jerry Sohl, 1966.
Chris M. Barkley has been a contributor to File 770 since 1997. He is currently a correspondent and a news editor for the daily newszine The Pixel Scroll.
This report is Dedicated to the Memory of author and former National Public Radio host Bob Edwards (1947-2024); a journalist’s journalist and the morning voice to three generations of radio listeners.
(1) UNLOAD THE CANON. Rev. Tom Emanuel calls on scholars and students to “Decanonize Tolkien” at Queer and Back Again.
In the fifty years since Tolkien’s death, his work and legacy have irrevocably shaped our understanding of what fantasy even is. This Oxford don, whose seemingly anachronistic, unclassifiable, wildly popular stories of Elves, Hobbits, and magic rings were once dismissed by the self-appointed guardians of Western literature, has now become one of its canonical figures.
Whether this is a good or a bad thing depends very much on whom you ask. Speaking as a lifelong Tolkien fanatic, my answer is: a bit of both. Either way, we might as well throw in the towel on biblical scholarship as on Tolkien scholarship. Just as the Bible is an inescapable, bone-deep influence on Western culture even for those who do not accord it status as Scripture, Tolkien is an inescapable influence on modern fantasy and, by extension, the study of the fantastic. His canonical status is why we cannot yet write him off; he means too much to too many people, has exerted too great a gravitational pull upon our field of inquiry. Yet that same canonical status is also why Tolkien scholarship must explore new horizons of reception and applicability and grapple responsibly with Tolkien’s complicated legacies both literary as well as cultural, historical as well as contemporary – another feature his work shares with the Bible. In fairness to my colleagues, many exceptional scholars, both established and emerging, are actively breaking new ground in Tolkien studies. More is needed, however, and an active reconsideration of approaches which have held sway in our field for too long….
…Those of us who study the man will always find it edifying (possibly) and entertaining (most certainly) to “interpret every single note Tolkien once wrote on a napkin and subject this analysis to multiple peer review,” to quote from this forum’s prompt. If we seek to continue in a genuinely Tolkienian spirit, however, we would do well to consider more deeply and carefully the effects of Tolkien’s fiction upon his readers and the wider culture in which they are implicated.
Key to this endeavor will be loosening the grip of so-called “authorial intent” over large swaths of Tolkien fandom and scholarship….
(2) HUGO AWARDS MESS REACHES ESQUIRE. [Item by PhilRM.] A not-terrible article that just showed up in Esquire about Chengdu touches, briefly and not terribly accurately, on the Puppies, and is almost entirely about the exclusions rather than the complete lack of believability of the numbers (although Heather Rose Jones’ work gets a link), but at least it delivers a well-deserved drubbing to Dave McCarty. “Hugo Awards 2024: What Really Happened at the Sci-Fi Awards in China?”
…In 2021, the voting process to select the host city for the 2023 convention became a lightning rod for conspiracy theories. Each year, anyone who purchases a membership in the World Science Fiction Society can vote on where WorldCon will be held two years later. In 2021, voters could choose between Chengdu and Winnipeg, Canada for the 2023 convention. “There were concerns that a couple thousand people from China purchased memberships [in the World Science Fiction Society] that year to vote for Chengdu,” says Jason Sanford, a three-time Hugo finalist. “It was unusual, but it was done under the rules.”
While Sanford welcomed the participation of new Chinese fans, other people were alarmed that many of the Chinese votes for Chengdu were written in the same handwriting and posted from the same mailing address. The chair of the convention that year, Mary Robinette Kowal, says some members of the awards committee wanted to mark those votes as invalid. “But if you’re filling out a ballot in English and you don’t speak English, you hand it to a friend who does,” she says. “And the translation we’d put in could be read as ‘where are you from,’ not ‘what is your address.’”
Eventually, a few votes were invalidated by the committee, but most were allowed to stand. “China has the largest science fiction reading audience on the planet by several magnitudes, and they are extremely passionate,” Kowal says….
…When McCarty finally shared last year’s nominating statistics on his Facebook page, authors, fans, and finalists were shocked. In the history of the awards, no works had ever been deemed ineligible like this. Many people who had expected Kuang to win for Babel were now stunned to see she very well could have, and McCarty’s refusal to explain what happened made everything worse. (McCarty did not respond to interview requests for this story.)
“Fandom doesn’t like people fucking with their awards, no matter who does it or why,” says John Scalzi, a three-time Hugo Award winner who was a finalist last year in the Best Novel category: the very same category in which R.F. Kuang should have been nominated for Babel, according to the nomination count on page 20 of McCarty’s document. “The reason people are outraged right now is because they care about the award, in one fashion or another, and this lack of transparency feels like a slap,” Scalzi says….
The article ends:
At the end of my Zoom call with Sanford, I see some emotion in his face around the eyes. “When I was young, science fiction and fantasy books literally saved my life,” he says. “I looked for books that were Hugo finalists or winners, and they showed me a way forward. They showed me there are other people out there who think like me.”
Whatever happens to the Hugos moving forward, one thing is clear: No one should have the power to erase books from the reading lists of future Jason Sanfords.
Jason Sanford disavowed the last paragraph on Bluesky.
Yes, I read the Esquire article I was interviewed for about the Hugo Awards controversy. A good article overall. I liked how the transparency of the Hugos is compared to lack of the same with most literary awards. Then I read the closing paragraph. Oh gods. SMDH. Be nice & know I didn’t write that.
Editor’s Note: The article also says of McCarty, “Within the WorldCon community, he’s nicknamed the ‘Hugo Pope’ for serving on so many awards committees over the years.” It’s a nickname I haven’t heard before. And Ersatz Culture reminds me that the October 26 Scroll carried a photo of a signature book showing McCarty refers to himself as ‘Hugo Boss’.
(3) WE DON’T TALK ABOUT HUGOS. Artist Lar deSouza has done a cartoon inspired by the controversy. See it on Bluesky: “We don’t talk about Hugos….”.
Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro division behind tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons, is denying rumors sparked by a Chinese news report that a struggling Hasbro could be selling its Dungeons & Dragons franchise to Chinese video game company Tencent….
…But in a Thursday statement to multiple outlets, including Forbes, Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro division that publishes Dungeons & Dragons and games including Magic: the Gathering, denied the rumors, claiming while the company has multiple partnerships with Tencent, “we are not looking to sell our D&D [intellectual property],” and the company would not comment any further on “speculation or rumors about potential M&A or licensing deals.”…
(5) FIGHT GOES INTO THE SECOND ROUND. [Item by Cat Eldridge.] “Disney To Appeal Ron DeSantis Legal Loss As The Empire Strikes Back” reports Deadline. Of course they are. It’s The Mouse. They have far more lawyers than there are pirates in The Pirates of The Caribbean Ride at Walt Disney World. And those lawyers know more about fighting dirty than those pirates ever did. Hmmm…. Mickey with an eye patch and cutlass…
The lines at Disney World may be long, but the Mouse House isn’t standing around to let Ron DeSantis savor his win yesterday in the company’s First Amendment lawsuit against the failed presidential candidate.
Less than 24 hours after a federal judge agreed with the Florida Governor and deep-sixed Disney’s nearly year long legal action, the Bob Iger-run entertainment giant and Sunshine State mega-employer gave official notice they plan to challenge Wednesday’s dismissal.
“Notice is given that Plaintiff Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, U.S., Inc. (“Disney”) hereby appeals to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit from the Order Granting Motions to Dismiss and the final judgment entered by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida on January 31, 2024,” said outside Disney counsel Daniel Petrocelli and a small legion of lawyers in a filing this morning.
No word yet when the actual appeal will be filed, but it could be within the next week or so, I hear.
In a Florida knife fight that started with Disney’s slow but eventual opposition to the state’s parental rights bill, known by detractors AKA the “Don’t Say Gay” law, and then turned to DeSantis’ throwing overboard the long standing governance the company had over the region around Orlando’s Disney World and appointing his own Central Florida Tourism Oversight District Board. As the dust-up escalated, Disney filed its suit in April, as past and now present CEO Iger and the so-called “woke” battling DeSantis, who was eyeing what became a face plant of a primary campaign, hurled missives at each other in public…
(6) URSA MAJOR. Nominations for the Ursa Major Awards, Annual Anthropomorphic Literature and Arts Award, are open and will continue until February 17.
You may choose up to five nominees for each category:
Nominations may be made for the following categories:
Best Anthropomorphic Motion Picture Best Anthropomorphic Dramatic Short Work Best Anthropomorphic Dramatic Series Best Anthropomorphic Novel Best Anthropomorphic Short Fiction Best Anthropomorphic Other Literary Work Best Anthropomorphic Non-Fiction Work Best Anthropomorphic Graphic Story Best Anthropomorphic Comic Strip Best Anthropomorphic Magazine Best Anthropomorphic Published Illustration Best Anthropomorphic Game Best Anthropomorphic Website Best Anthropomorphic Costume (Fursuit) Best Anthropomorphic Music
(7) CALL FOR ‘WEIRD HOLLYWOOD’ SUBMISSIONS. Christopher J. Garcia, Chuck Serface, and Alissa Wales are planning an issue of The Drink Tank about Weird Hollywood. “Weird,” however you define that term, can apply to Hollywood as the city itself or as the entertainment industry. The editors are interested in fiction, art, history, poetry, photography, or anything printable you want to contribute. Send submissions to Chris at johnnyeponymous@gmail.com or to Chuck at ceserface@gmail.com. The deadline is March 1, 2024.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born February 2, 1990 — Sarah Gailey, 33. Sarah Gailey comes to our attention with their Best Related Work Hugo at Worldcon 75 with their Women of Harry Potter posts. Fascinating look at some other commenters mostly. Here is the “Women of Harry Potter: Ginny Weasley Is Not Impressed” post at Reactor.
Their alternate history “River of Teeth” novella, the first work in that series, was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novella at Worldcon 76 and a Nebula. It’s also the first work in their American Hippo duology, the other being the novella “Taste of Marrow”.
Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey, art by Will Staehle
Upright Women Wanted is set in the a fantasy of a Wild West of a twenty minutes into the future dystopian hyper heterosexual America which is all I can say about giving away spoilers about it. Major trigger warnings for any conservative readers here.
Their Magic for Liars, is quite excellent I would say. It’s a murder mystery set in school for young wizards but it’s nothing like those books. They discuss their book here in a YouTube video.
The Echo Wife is a thriller with some very adult questions about the nature of what being human actually means. To say anymore would be spoiling it. It’s damn good. I’d say that it’s their best work to date.
Their latest novel, Just Like Home, is not one I’ve read. Let’s just say that I don’t do serial killers and leave it at that.
They also scripted The Vampire Slayer series on Boom! Comics from the universe of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
They have done a double, double handful of short fiction, almost so far collected though the American Hippo collects the “River of Teeth” novella and the “Taste of Marrow” novella, and two short stories, “Worth Her Weight in Gold” and “Nine and a Half”, all part of the River of Teeth storytelling.
Finally they have a magical, in the best way magic is, newsletter called Stone Soup. “It’s about the things we cook, the things we read, the things we write. It’s about the things we care about, together and separately; it’s about everything we add to the pot, in little bits and pieces, to make something great. It’s about community.” You can sign up for the free level, or the paid which I do and is well worth the cup of coffee a month it’ll cost you. (My Patreon fees collectively are larger than any of my streaming services by far.) Mike has from to time included material from it here.
Spotify has said that it has paid audiobook publishers “tens of millions” since allowing users 15 hours of audiobook listening in its Premium subscription package last autumn.
The company said that the figure, reported by trade magazine the Bookseller, is “100% royalties” and that it expects to “continue growing” royalty payouts in future. It would not give a more precise amount for payouts made so far, but said that the “tens of millions” figure applies in both pounds and dollars.
However, the Society of Authors (SoA) said they “remain concerned at the lack of clarity about the deals”. The industry body said it is “still waiting to see the effect on author incomes and whether these are real additional sales or simply take market share from Amazon”….
(11) JEOPARDY! [Item by Andrew Porter.] A Tolkien category featured on tonight’s episode of Jeopardy! Some contestants stumbled.
Category: Talking About Tolkien
Answer: Humphrey Carpenter’s bio of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis & like-minded friends has this title, like their literary circle.
Wrong question: What is the Oxford group?
Right question: What is the Inklings?
Answer: To his family and close friends, Tolkien was known by this name, the first “R” in his initials.
Wrong questions: What is Rael? and What is Robert?
Right question: What is Ronald?
(12) CSI SKILL TREE. The latest episode of CSI Skill Tree is “Game Localization with Siyang Gao and Emily Xueni Jin”. The series examines how video games envision possible futures and build thought-provoking worlds. In this episode, the participants discuss the process of video game localization, which encompasses both translation and deeper work, even up to adapting a game’s mechanics, cultural references and allusions, and more to better resonate with players who encounter the game outside of its initial linguistic and cultural context.
Siyang Gao is a writer, translator, and video game localizer who specializes in narrative-heavy games, and Emily Xueni Jin is an essayist, researcher, and fantastic translator of science fiction who translates both from Chinese to English and the other way around. Also, here’s a YouTube playlist with all 14 of the Skill Tree episodes thus far.
The New York Police Department robot sat motionless like a sad Wall-E on Friday morning, gathering dust inside an empty storefront within New York City’s busiest subway station.
No longer were its cameras scanning straphangers traversing Times Square. No longer were subway riders pressing its help button, if ever they had.
New York City has retired the robot, known as the Knightscope K5, from service inside the Times Square station. The Police Department had been forced to assign officers to chaperone the robot, which is 5 feet 3 inches tall and weighs 400 pounds. It could not use the stairs. Some straphangers wanted to abuse it.
“The K5 Knightscope has completed its pilot in the NYC subway system,” a spokesman for the department said in an email.
On Friday, the white contraption in N.Y.P.D. livery sat amid a mountain of cardboard boxes, separated from the commuting masses by a plate-glass window. People streaming by said they had often been mystified by the robot.
“I thought it was a toy,” said Derek Dennis, 56, a signal engineer.
It was an ignominious end for an experiment that Mayor Eric Adams, a self-described tech geek, hoped would help bring safety and order to the subways, at a time when crime remained a pressing concern for many New Yorkers….
(14) TUNES INSPIRED BY LOVECRAFT STORY. Another musical discovery that might be of interest: “The Music of Erich Zann” from Half Deaf Clatch via Speak Up Recordings at Bandcamp.
‘The Music of Erich Zann’ is one of my favourite short stories by H.P Lovecraft, and I’ve been wanting to do a musical adaptation for a long while now. This EP started out as a few short atmospheric instrumentals, but very quickly turned into a full blown musical work with lots of lyrics!
The words are an abridged version of the story and detail the salient points, rather than providing a blow by blow account, if you haven’t read the actual story I highly recommend it.
I kept the instrumentation relatively simple, just an acoustic guitar, electric cello, pipe organ, percussion and atmospheric soundscapes. The majority of the sounds are made by acoustic or electro-acoustic instruments, the electric cello was played through an Orange ‘Crush’ acoustic amp and EHX Soul Food pedal, any ‘otherworldly’ effects were created with instruments put through octavers and auto filters.
In the original story Lovecraft says that Eric Zann plays a ‘viol’, it is widely accepted that he meant a viol da gamba, a Baroque era instrument which closely resembles the cello, but has five to seven strings, and frets. Since these are rare and very expensive, I obviously decided to use my electric cello for this EP, as buying a viol da gamba seemed an unnecessary extravagance.
In April 2023, a 54-year-old programmer named Gary Bowser was released from prison having served 14 months of a 40-month sentence. Good behaviour reduced his time behind bars, but now his options are limited. For a while he was crashing on a friend’s couch in Toronto. The weekly physical therapy sessions, which he needs to ease chronic pain, were costing hundreds of dollars every week, and he didn’t have a job. And soon, he would need to start sending cheques to Nintendo. Bowser owes the makers of Super Mario $14.5m (£11.5m), and he’s probably going to spend the rest of his life paying it back….
…In the late 00s he made contact with Team Xecuter, a group that produces dongles used to bypass anti-piracy measures on Nintendo Switch and other consoles, letting them illegally download, modify and play games. While he says he was only paid a few hundred dollars a month to update their websites, Bowser says the people he worked with weren’t very social and he helped “testers” troubleshoot devices.
“I started becoming a middleman in between the people doing the development work, and the people actually owning the mod chips, playing the games,” he says. “I would get feedback from the testers, and then I would send it to the developers … I can handle people, and that’s why I ended up getting more involved.”
In September 2020, he was arrested in a sting so unusual that the US Department of Justice released a press release boasting about the indictment, in which acting assistant attorney general Brian C Rabbitt called Bowser and his co-defendants “leaders of a notorious international criminal group that reaped illegal profits for years by pirating video game technology of US companies”.
“The day that it happened, I was sleeping in my bed, it was four in the morning, I’d been drinking all night,” Bowser says. “And suddenly I wake up and see three people surrounding my bed with rifles aimed at my head … they dragged me out of the place, put me in the back of a pickup truck and drove me to the Interpol office.”…
(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George’s “Echo Pitch Meeting” invites everyone to step inside the Pitch Meeting that led to Echo! Beware what you step in, though, because there are spoiler warnings.
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, JJ, Kathy Sullivan, Joey Eschrich, PhilRM, Jason Sanford, Robin Anne Reid, Ersatz Culture, Chuck Serface, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
