Tag Archives: Jennifer Marie Brissett

Pixel Scroll 3/29/24 Scroll On, You Crazy Pixel

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(1) FLOTSAM AND JETSAM. The five-day “Treasures From Planet Hollywood” auction brought in more than $15.6 million from over 5,500 bidders worldwide across some 1,600 lots, according to Heritage Auctions. Here are some items of genre interest that fetched big bucks.

Mechanical Man from Hugo

…The whip from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom sold for $525,000 to become the most valuable prop or costume from the beloved franchise…

Another first-day smash was the Bapty& Co.-made ax Jack Nicholson used to heeeeeere’s-Johnny his way through the bathroom door in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Among the first props Planet Hollywood secured before its grand opening in New York City in 1991, that ax sold for $125,000. When that sold Wednesday after a fierce bidding war, the auction room erupted in applause — for the first time, but not the last.

Over the five-day event, the hits kept coming: The Barbasol can Wayne Knight uses to smuggle dinosaur embryos out of 1993’s Jurassic Park realized $250,000. The blaster Princess Leia carried across the forest moon of Endor in Return of the Jedi sold for $150,000, while an original Stormtrooper blaster from Star Wars, which Bapty & Co. forged from a British Sterling submachine gun, sold for $112,500.

Tobey Maguire’s black symbiote suit from 2007’s Spider-Man 3 swung out the door for $125,000, just a web ahead of one of his signature Spidey suits from the same film, which realized $106,250. A “good guy” Chucky doll from 1988’s Child’s Play scared up a winning bid of $106,250….

…. A set of three Sankara stones from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom realized $100,000, while “the cup of the carpenter” — the Holy Grail itself — sold for $87,500.

But one of the auction’s first bidding wars was over a display figure wearing Gary Oldman’s Vlad the Impaler reproduced armor from 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which Planet Hollywood obtained from technical advisor Christopher Gilman and sold on Wednesday for $87,500. And on the auction’s final day, a bidding war broke out over a prop from one of Martin Scorsese’s most underappreciated masterpieces, his 2011 adaptation of Brian Selznick’s children’s book Hugo, from which the original Mechanical Man automaton realized $81,250….

The top-selling item overall was the “Titanic prop that saved Rose and sparked debate…” reports NPR.

…”The wood panel from Titanic that saved Rose — but, controversially, not Jack — was the king of the auction, realizing $718,750 to float to the top of the five-day event,” auction house Heritage Auctions said in a release….

(2) SPOT RESOLUTION. Camestros Felapton wants you to know “Why I Declined a Hugo Spot”.

…2023 looms large here and there were definitely people I would rather see on the Hugo ballot for Best Fan Writer this year than myself. One was obviously Paul Weimer but I was certain he’d be top of most people’s ballots anyway but I was hoping some Chinese fans would make it onto the category. That didn’t happen but it is a decent list of finalists and there is nobody there that I would have wanted to replace.

Closely related to this was also the sense that I was likely to have gathered additional votes from things that I had written in 2024, specifically on the 2023 Hugo Award stats. Even if that wasn’t the case it would have felt like it was the case to me. So, I thought I’d feel happier skipping this year and putting my hat into the ring for next year…

(3) DREAM FOUNDRY CONTESTS OPEN SOON. The Dream Foundry’s annual contest for emerging artists and writers will take entries from April 1 until May 27, 2024. Every year their contest coordinators select ten finalists from a pool of submissions from around the world. Both contests offer cash prizes, first choice of seats in Flights of Foundry workshops, and other opportunities. Eligibility requirements and full details about prizes are at the links:

  • Art Contest — This year’s art contest will be judged by Lauren Raye Snow & Jessica Cheng, The contest coordinator is Grace P. Fong.
  • Writing Contest — The writing contest will be judged by Valerie Valdes and C.L. Polk, and our contest coordinator is Julia Rios.

(4) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Robert Levy and Jennifer Marie Brissett on Wednesday, April 10 at 7:00 p.m. Eastern. Location: KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003 (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs).

ROBERT LEVY

Robert Levy’s novel The Glittering World was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the Lambda Literary Award. His collection No One Dies from Love: Dark Tales of Loss and Longing was published last year by Worde Horde and includes stories from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nightmare, Black Static, The Dark, The Best Horror of the Year, and The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction. Trained as a forensic psychologist, he teaches at the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and can be found at TheRobertLevy.com.

JENNIFER MARIE BRISSETT

Jennifer Marie Brissett is the author of Destroyer of Light, which received a starred Kirkus Review and was on its list of Best Fiction of the Year. She is also the author of Elysium, which won The Philip K. Dick Award Special Citation and was a finalist for the Locus and Tiptree Awards. And once a long time ago she owned and operated an independent bookstore in Brooklyn. She lives in Manhattan where she is currently working on her next novel Daughters of the Night. Find her via her website at www.jennbrissett.com

(5) CLIMATE FICTION CONTEST OPENS. Grist’s “Imagine 2200 climate fiction contest 2024” is open for submissions through June 24.

Grist is excited to open submissions for the fourth year of our Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors short story contest. 

Imagine 2200 is an invitation to writers from all over the globe to imagine a future in which solutions to the climate crisis flourish and help bring about radical improvements to our world. We dare you to dream anew….

…. The winning writer will be awarded $3,000. The second- and third-place winners receive $2,000 and $1,000, respectively. An additional nine finalists will each receive $300. All winners and finalists will have their story published in an immersive collection on Grist’s website. …

We are thrilled to also announce the judges for our 2024/25 contest: Omar El Akkad and Annalee Newitz. El Akkad is an author and journalist whose award-winning debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World. Newitz is a science fiction and nonfiction writer whose third novel, The Terraformers is a finalist for the Nebula Award, and whose latest nonfiction book, Four Lost Cities, is a national bestseller.

Imagine 2200 celebrates stories that envision the next decades to centuries of equitable climate progress, imagining futures of abundance, adaptation, reform, and hope. We are looking for stories that are rooted in creative climate solutions and community-centered resilience, showing what can happen as solutions take root, and stories that offer gripping plots with rich characters and settings, making that future come alive.

In 2,500 to 5,000 words, show us the world you dream of building.

Your story should be set sometime between the near future and roughly the year 2200….

(6) WANT TO GO TO SPACE? NASA is accepting applications to “Become An Astronaut” through April 16. The complete guidelines are at the link.

Astronaut requirements have changed with NASA’s goals and missions. Today, to be considered for an astronaut position, applicants must meet the following qualifications:

  1. Be a U.S. citizen
  2. Have a master’s degree* in a STEM field, including engineering, biological science, physical science, computer science or mathematics, from an accredited institution.
  3. Have a minimum of three years of related professional experience obtained after degree completion (or 1,000 Pilot-in-Command hours with at least 850 of those hours in high performance jet aircraft for pilots) For medical doctors, time in residency can count towards experience and must be completed by June 2025.
  4. Be able to successfully complete the NASA long-duration flight astronaut physical.

(7) LOUIS GOSSETT JR. (1936-2024). Actor Louis Gossett Jr., winner of an Oscar for his performance in An Officer and a Gentleman and an Emmy for his role in TV’s Roots,died March 29 at the age of 87.

His genre resume includes the movie Enemy Mine (as the alien soldier), the Watchmen TV series (as the former Hooded Justice, for which he won an Emmy), and an episode of Touched By An Angel (a role which also earned an Emmy nomination). He voiced Lucius Fox in The Batman animated series (2007).

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 29, 1957 — Elizabeth Hand, 67. These are my personal choices, not an overview of her career. 

I’ll say up front that my favorite work by Elizabeth Hand is an atypical work by her, Wylding Hall. Using an oral history framing to tell the story of when the young members of a British folk band decide to record a new album, they choose this ancient country house that has a history that is very troubled. The characters are fascinating, the setting is well crafted and the story, well, I think it’s her best story ever and it did win the Shirley Jackson Award. 

Elizabeth Hand

So what else did I like by her? There’s Mortal Love which intertwine the now while reaching back in the Victorian past with the mystery of a woman who holds the key to lost Pre-Raphaelite paintings, appropriate since she seems too akin to one of those of those works herself. 

I will admit that I like her more grounded works better which is why the next pick is Illyria, a short novel set in the theater world (did I mention that I adore Angel Carter’s Wise Children? Well I do.) Twin sisters are now cast in a production of Twelfth Night, and magic will happen this night. It garnered a World Fantasy Award.

Curious Toys is an extraordinary work as a young girl attempts to find a murderer in turn-of-the-century Chicago. That description hardly describes the story awaiting the reader here as the girl is but fourteen and the setting the killer is stalking is the famous Riverview amusement park.  

Finally I find much to appreciate in her Cass Neary private eye series. A smart-assed, substance abusing and always self-destructive punk who means well, the series is that rare series that develops the character novel by novel. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) FANCY THREADS. “When Hollywood Needs a Historically Accurate Outfit That Looks Just Right, It Turns to Rabbit Goody” – Smithsonian Magazine has the story.

… Thistle Hill Weavers, founded by Rabbit Goody in 1989, makes textiles for movies and television shows, historic houses, and high-end furniture and clothing companies. What sets this little mill in Central New York apart from every other cloth manufacturer in the country is Goody’s remarkable ability to re-animate the past: No one else produces short runs of textiles that so faithfully replicate the weave, texture, weight and color of historic fabrics. If you’ve seen “The Gilded Age” or Cinderella Man, you’ve seen Goody’s work in action. The majority of Thistle Hill’s income comes from creating more contemporary fabrics for interior designers and architects, and from the work Goody does with historic houses, such as Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home in Virginia. Yet many of her favorite jobs have come from Hollywood costume designers seeking perfectly rendered, historically accurate textiles to recreate items like Abraham Lincoln’s shawl for the movie Lincoln or much of the colonial-era clothing seen in the 2008 mini-series “John Adams.”…

… Today Thistle Hill Weavers employs seven people whom Goody has trained to run the nine mechanized shuttle looms dating from the 1890s through the 1960s, plus archaic-sounding equipment like a warp winder and a quiller—all necessary to transform big cones of thread into beautiful pieces of fabric. Goody’s workers generally arrive with no knowledge of weaving; she teaches them everything they need to know….

(11) NYT ON VINGE. The New York Times obituary linked here is behind a paywall: “Vernor Vinge, Innovative Science Fiction Novelist, Dies at 79”.

… Mr. Vinge’s immersion in computers at San Diego State University, where he began teaching in 1972, led to his vision of a “technological singularity,” a tipping point at which the intelligence of machines possesses and then exceeds that of humans.

He described an early version of his vision in Omni magazine in 1983.

“We’re at the point of accelerating the evolution of intelligence itself,” he wrote, adding, “Whether our work is cast in silicon or DNA will have little effect on the ultimate results.” He wrote that the moment of the intellectual transition would be as “impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole,” and that at that moment “the world will pass far beyond our understanding.”

A decade later, he fleshed out the intellectual transition — the singularity — in a paper (subtitled “How to Survive in the Post-Human Era”) for a symposium sponsored by the NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute.

“Within 30 years,” he said, “we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended. Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive?”

That prediction has not come true, but artificial intelligence has accelerated to the point that some people fear that the technology will replace them….

(12) MEASURING THE UNIVERSE. The New York Times makes sure she is “Overlooked No More: Henrietta Leavitt, Who Unraveled Mysteries of the Stars”.

…In the early 20th century, when Henrietta Leavitt began studying photographs of distant stars at the Harvard College Observatory, astronomers had no idea how big the universe was. Debate raged over whether all of the objects visible through the telescopes of the day were within our own Milky Way galaxy, or whether other galaxies — or “island universes,” as they were then called — might exist somewhere out in space.

Leavitt, working as a poorly paid member of a team of mostly women who cataloged data for the scientists at the observatory, found a way to peer out into the great unknown and measure it.

What’s now commonly called Leavitt’s Law is still taught in college astronomy courses. It underpinned the research of other pioneering astronomers, including Edwin Hubble and Harlow Shapley, whose work in the years after World War I demolished long-held ideas about our solar system’s place in the cosmos. Leavitt’s Law has been used on the Hubble Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope in making new calculations about the rate of expansion of the universe and the proximity of stars billions of light years from earth.

“All of those major discoveries rested on Leavitt’s discovery,” Wendy L. Freedman, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, said in a phone interview, referring to the explosion of knowledge about space over the last century. “It’s the bedrock foundation of so much of what we do today in cosmology and astrophysics in general.”

What Leavitt achieved was essentially twofold. In a groundbreaking observation in 1908, she noticed that certain stars, called Cepheids, photographed in the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds — two relatively nearby galaxies — had a distinctive pattern: The longer it took for the Cepheids to cycle through their variations, the brighter they were in magnitude. Then, in a paper in 1912, she laid out a mathematical formula to explain her observation, called a “period-luminosity” relationship.

That opened the door to a new kind of interstellar triangulation, as Cepheid variables emerged as a reliable way to calculate cosmic scale for Earthbound astronomers. Distances that before then were anyone’s guess suddenly had a formula, and the portrait that emerged was shocking — a universe hundreds of times bigger than most astronomers had imagined….

(13) AT THE CORE. “Astronomers Capture Dazzling New Image of the Black Hole at the Milky Way’s Center” in Smithsonian Magazine.

Astronomers have captured the first-ever image of magnetic fields circling the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

The fields have a similar structure to those around the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a massive elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo. This finding suggests that strong magnetic fields may be a common feature of all black holes, the researchers report in a pair of papers published today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“This spiral pattern that we see swirling around the black hole indicates that the magnetic fields must also be a spiral pattern whirling around—and that they’re very strong and very ordered,” Sara Issaoun, a co-leader of the research and an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, says to BBC Science Focus’ Tom Howarth….

(14) WEEDS IN SPACE! Yesterday I was frustrated that NASA had not said what plants are part of its lunar-bound experiment. Cat Eldridge found the answer on the Space Lab website: “Lunar Payload LEAF – Lunar Effects on Agricultural Flora”.

…The LEAF β (“LEAF Beta”) payload will protect plants within from excessive Lunar sunlight, radiation, and the vacuum of space, while observing their photosynthesis, growth, and responses to stress. The experiment includes a plant growth chamber with an isolated atmosphere, housing red and green varieties of Brassica rapa (Wisconsin Fast Plants®), Wolffia (duckweed), and Arabidopsis thaliana. By bringing seedling samples back to Earth, as part of Artemis III, the research team will apply advanced system biology tools to study physiological responses at a molecular level…

(15) WHEN DID THE FIRST HOMININS TRULY ENTER EUROPE? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] (I have never forgiven the dinosaurs for what they did to Raquel Welch.) When did humans first enter Europe has been the subject of some debate. Now, new research from a site in Ukraine at Korolevo has used two different dating methods. These have given a very similar result… “East-to-west human dispersal into Europe 1.4 million years ago” in Nature.

Here, using two methods of burial dating with cosmogenic nuclides [the researchers] report ages of 1.42 ± 0.10 million years and 1.42 ± 0.28 million years…

…this suggests that early hominins exploited warm interglacial periods to disperse into higher latitudes and relatively continental sites—such as Korolevo—well before the Middle Pleistocene Transition.

(16) NEW SF YOUTUBER….? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Well, we all (OK, perhaps just some of us) have our favorite SF YouTuber, be it Moid Moidelhoff at Media Death Cult who is particularly popular with those fairly new on their SF journey, or Book Pilled for those that are perhaps more seasoned.  One recent newcomer that some Filers might like to check out is Grammaticus Books.  He recently reminded me of a forgotten Heinlein classic from 1942, Orphans of the Sky.  So I went to see if I had a copy in my library, and lo, it came to pass that I had and that I must have read it the best part of half a century ago…

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Kathy Sullivan, Olav Rokne, Daniel Dern, Danny Sichel, 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 Jon Meltzer.]

Pixel Scroll 7/9/19 With Mullets Towards None

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(1) THOUGHTS ON A PROPOSED HUGO CATEGORY. Neil Clarke explains why he opposes “Hugo Proposal for Best Translated Novel”: 

…The biggest problem I have with this proposal is the message it sends not only to domestic readers, but foreign authors, editors, and publishers: translated works are not as good as ours, so we’re making a special category for you so you can get awards too. I don’t believe that’s the intention of those who drafted this proposal. I think they approached it with the best of intentions, but simply got it wrong. For years now, I have been making the case that we should be treating translated and international works as equals: stories worthy of standing alongside those we have routinely seen published. This proposal sends the opposite message, and on those grounds intend to vote no.

Translated works are capable of winning the Hugo without any special treatment. As they point out in their own commentary, three translated works have won since 2015, despite the relatively low number of translations published among a wide sea of domestic releases….

(2) ‘TOPIARY. Juliette Wade’s Dive Into Worldbuilding encounters winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and Nebula nominee “Sam J. Miller and Blackfish City”. Read the synopsis at the link, and/or watch the video:

…There are some utopian elements in the story as well as dystopian ones. A lot of energy problems can be solved. The city uses methane generators to produce light. They also don’t need militarized police. Sam remarked how any place can have both utopian and dystopian elements depending on who you are. To the people who live in the Capital, the Hunger Games world is a utopia.

I asked if this book was strictly speaking science fiction or whether it had fantastical elements. He explained that it is a science fiction story, but that he uses nanites to do things that might seem magical. The nanites allow some humans to bond with animals. That bond could seem fantastical but it has technological underpinnings.

There are people called orcamancers. Sam explained that the origins of the orcamancers are  with illegal pharmaceutical testing that happened in the period between the present and the time period of the novel. Rival drugs were tested on people at different times. This accidentally led to a form of bonding with animals that Sam compared to the daemons in The Golden Compass. He explained that cultural practices regulate why you would bond with particular animals….

(3) CICERO – NOT ILLINOIS. Ada Palmer dives into “Stoicism’s Appeal to the Rich and Powerful” at Ex Urbe

I was recently interviewed for a piece in the Times on why the philosophy of stoicism has become very popular in the Silicon Valley tech crowd. Only a sliver of my thoughts made it into the article, but the question from Nellie Bowles was very stimulating so I wanted to share more of my thoughts.

To begin with, like any ancient philosophy, stoicism has a physics and metaphysics–how it thinks the universe works–and separately an ethics–how it advises one to live, and judge good and bad action. The ethics is based on the physics and metaphysics, but can be divorced from it, and the ethics has long been far more popular than the metaphysics.  This is a big part of why stoic texts surviving from antiquity focus on the ethics; people transcribing manuscripts cared more about these than about the others.  And this is why thinkers from Cicero to Petrarch to today have celebrated stoicism’s moral and ethical advice while following utterly different cosmologies and metaphysicses.  (For serious engagement with stoic ontology & metaphysics you want Spinoza.)  The current fad for stoicism, like all past fads for stoicism (except Spinoza) focuses on the ethics.

(4) DRAGON TRAINER NOW LAUREATE. “How to Train Your Dragon author Cressida Cowell named new children’s laureate” – The Guardian has the story.

Cressida Cowell has become the new UK Children’s Laureate.

The author of How To Train Your Dragon, and the Wizards of Once will take over from previous laureate, Lauren Childs..

She said: “Books and reading are magic, and this magic must be available to absolutely everyone. I’m honoured to be chosen to be the eleventh Waterstones Children’s Laureate. I will be a laureate who fights for books and children’s interests with passion, conviction and action. Practical magic, empathy and creative intelligence, is the plan.”

Cressida has also revealed a ‘giant to-do list’ to help make sure that books and reading are available to everyone. It says that every child has the right to:

  1. Read for the joy of it.
  2. Access NEW books in schools, libraries and bookshops.
  3. Have advice from a trained librarian or bookseller.
  4. Own their OWN book.
  5. See themselves reflected in a book.
  6. Be read aloud to.
  7. Have some choice in what they read.
  8. Be creative for at least 15 minutes a week.
  9. See an author event at least ONCE.
  10. Have a planet to read on.

(5) GEEKY GETAWAYS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] For your vacationing pleasure, SYFY Wire has lists and descriptions of 10 hotels “Geek Road Trip: 10 nerdy hotels that’ll turn vacation into a fandom pilgrimage” and 6 Airbnbs “Geek Road Trip: 6 extra-nerdy Airbnb to book for your next vacation” with fan welcoming accommodations. The latter include a Harry Potter themed apartment in Atlanta GA, an ’80s throwback gaming room in Lisbon, Portugal (& other themed rooms in the same building), a Marvel-ous studio apartment in Manila Philippines, a Star Wars suite in Melbourne Australia, a riverside Hobbit hole in Orondo, WA and Pixar paradise (with differently-themed rooms) in Anaheim CA.

(6) NAMELESS DREAD. The series doesn’t have a title yet, but it does have characters: “George RR Martin Says ‘Game of Thrones’ Prequel Includes the Starks, Direwolves and White Walkers”.

HBO’s untitled Naomi Watts-led “Game of Thrones” prequel pilot may not have Targaryens and dragons — but it does have Starks, direwolves and, of course, White Walkers.

“The Starks will definitely be there,” George R.R. Martin, co-creator and executive producer on the project alongside showrunner Jane Goldman, told Entertainment Weekly in an interview published Tuesday.

“Obviously the White Walkers are here — or as they’re called in my books, The Others — and that will be an aspect of it,” the “A Song of Ice and Fire” author said, adding: “There are things like direwolves and mammoths.”

The appearance of the Starks, descendants of the First Men, shouldn’t be a shock to fans who remember the prequel — which is reportedly currently filming in North Ireland — takes place roughly 5,000 years before the events of HBO’s “Game of Thrones.”

(7) THE REEL DEAL. Yahoo! Finance expects big bucks to change hands: “‘Lost’ tapes of first moonwalk to be sold; former NASA intern may make millions”.

A former intern at NASA may become a millionaire when he sells three metal reels that contain original videotape recordings of man’s first steps on the moon.  

The videotapes will be offered in a live auction on July 20th at Sotheby’s New York, but interested parties are able to place bids now at Sothebys.com. The sale coincides with the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. The price could reach $2 million.

According to the auction site, Gary George was awarded a cooperative work internship at the NASA Johnson Space Center in June 1973. Three years later, he bought more than 1,100 reels at a government surplus auction for $218, Reuters reported.

(8) GAIMAN’S STUDY. Variety’s photo essay takes you “Inside Neil Gaiman’s Rural Writing Retreat”. (Hey, we have the same interior decorator!)

Although Gaiman has won multiple Hugo Awards, he only keeps one in his office; the others are in his house in Wisconsin. The one he earned in 2016 for “The Sandman: Overture” receives extra special placement not only because of his long history with the franchise (“It had a ‘you can go home again’ quality to it,” he says) but also because “there is something magical in knowing I was awarded it for a graphic novel. I remember I was there, not too long ago, fighting for whether comics could get awards and things like that. But people loved it; it got its audience; it got awards; people cared.”

(9) NATIVE TONGUE TRILOGY EVENT. On Thursday, July 18, there will be a panel discussion on feminist sci-fi with Rebecca Romney, Jennifer Marie Brissett, Bethany C. Morrow, and moderated by Eliza Cushman Rose focusing on “The Legacy of Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue Trilogy”. This event is hosted by The Feminist Press and will be held at Books are Magic, 225 Smith Street, Brooklyn, NY

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born July 9, 1911 — Mervyn Peake. Ok I’ll admit I’ve not read the Gormenghast novels, nor have I seen the various video adaptations. Please tell me what I’ve been missing. (Died 1968.)
  • Born July 9, 1944 — Glen Cook, 75. With the exception of the new novel which I need to read, I’ve read his entire excellent Black Company series. I’ve also his far lighter Garrett P.I. Which unfortunately he’s abandoned. And I should read the Instrumentalities of the Night as I’ve heard good things about it.
  • Born July 9, 1945 — Dean Koontz, 74. The genres of of mystery. horror, fantasy and science fiction are all home to him. Author of over a hundred novels, his first novel was SF — it being Star Quest (not in print) published as an Ace Double with Doom of the Green Planet by Emil Petaja. ISFDB claims over half of his output is genre, I’d say that a low estimate. 
  • Born July 9, 1954 — Ellen Klages, 65. Her novelette “Basement Magic” won a Nebula Award for Best Novelette. I strongly recommend Portable Childhoods, a collection of her short fiction, which published by Tachyon Publications, my boutique favorite publisher of fantasy. Passing Strange, her 1940 set San Francisco novel is really great.
  • Born July 9, 1970 — Ekaterina Sedia, 49. Her Heart of Iron novel is simply awesome. I’d also recommend The Secret History of Moscow as well. It’s worth noting that both iBooks and Kindle list several collections by her, Willful Impropriety: 13 Tales of Society, Scandal, and Romance and Wilful Impropriety that ISFDB doesn’t list. I’m off to buy them now. 
  • Born July 9, 1978 — Linda Park, 41. Best known for her portrayal of communications officer character Hoshi Sato on the Enterprise. Her first genre role was Hannah in Jurassic Park III, she was Renee Hansen in Spectres which Marina Sirtis is also in. She was in some called Star Trek: Captain Pike three years back as Captain Grace Shintal. 

(11) DISTURBING TREND? Yesterday, “Jar Jar Binks spent the day trending on Twitter, baffling Star Wars fans” says SYFY Wire.

Earlier this morning, Jar Jar Binks was inexplicably one of the trending topics on Twitter. No one seemed to understand why, although there have been some theories. The Tampa Bay Times looked into the matter, which traced it back to a meme that predicts your Star Wars fate. While the image had been making the rounds online, it was shared by Mark Hamill earlier this morning, giving it some serious traction. 

(12) VINTAGE 2018 FINNCON. Karl-Johan Norén’s report on his 2018 Nordic Fan Fund trip to Finncon 2018 is up on eFanzines in both epub (preferred) and PDF formats.

…Meanwhile, Hulda and Therese participated in the Klingon language workshop, where they learnt some helpful Klingon phrases and Hulda impressed by showing a basic knowledge of the IPA symbols. Later on, when Hulda accidentally tickled Therese, Therese gave off a very Klingon-like sound, leading Hulda to ask if Klingons are ticklish. That gave rise to a very spirited discussion, including if Klingons would admit that they could possibly be ticklish, and if empirical research was advised…

(13) BUSTED. The Daily Beast reports on Streamliner Lines’ inaugural run through western Nevada: “Redditors Say This Is a Nazi Bus. The Owner Says It’s a Misunderstanding.”

It bans “social justice warriors” and drives across Nevada with a logo that looks suspiciously like a Nazi flag. It’s Reno’s new bus line and the owner says the racist reputation is all just a misunderstanding.

On Friday, Streamliner Lines launched its maiden bus run from Reno to Las Vegas. Streamliner president John Wang told The Daily Beast it ran a little behind schedule (traffic), and sold few tickets (the Nazi reputation). Still, the trip was the first victory for Streamliner, which previously failed inspection on its only bus and has spent the past month embroiled in spats with Redditors over the company’s logo and its ban on some left-wing passengers.

(14) BLADE RUNNER. Titan Comics advertises Blade Runner 2019 as “the first comic to tell new stories set in the Blade Runner universe!”

(15) KORNBLUTH TRIBUTE. Andrew Porter passed along a scanned clipping of Cyril Kornbluth’s obituary in a 1958 New York Times.

(16) UMM, YUM? Gastro Obscura calls her ‘Annabel Lecter’ because “These Made-to-Order Cakes Look Like Beautiful Nightmares”.

English pastry chef Annabel de Vetten crafts what may be the world’s most fantastically morbid confections. Her Birmingham studio and cooking space, the Conjurer’s Kitchen, is filled with feasts of macabre eye candy rendered with ghoulish precision.

Here is a plate heaped with thumb-sized maggots and grubs. There a bloodied human heart lies in a pool of green, molar-strewn slime. A stainless-steel coroner’s table hosts the disemboweled upper-torso of a corpse. It’s flanked by a four-foot statue of a saint, his face melting away to bone. On the counter, the neck of a deer’s partially fleshless head sinks its roots into a bisected flowerpot; a sapling bursts from its skull like a unicorn horn.

(17) THE ART OF FILLING OUT THE HUGO BALLOT. Steve J. Wright moves on to review “Hugo Category: Best Art Book”.

…Taking a look at this year’s offerings – well, the Hugo voters’ packet contains partial content (the images, really) from three of the six, and the full text and images from a fourth, which last was something I really didn’t expect.  I bought one of the remaining two myself… but the last one, Julie Dillon’s Daydreamer’s Journey, is a self-published job funded by a Kickstarter project and put together using indie tools, and the ultimate result was, I figured I could just about afford the book, but then I looked at the cost of overseas shipping, and my wallet instinctively snapped shut.  Pity, really.  Julie Dillon is a familiar name from recent Pro Artist final lists, and a book of her artwork (with accompanying descriptions of her creative process for each piece) would be a very nice thing to have.  The Kickstarter makes it look very enticing indeed….

(18) THEY CAME FROM SPACE. NPR finds that “Moon Rocks Still Awe, And Scientists Hope To Get Their Hands On More”

Darby Dyar says that as a kid, whenever Apollo astronauts returned from the moon, she and her classmates would get ushered into the school library to watch it on TV.

She remembers seeing the space capsules bobbing in the ocean as the astronauts emerged. “They climbed out and then they very carefully took the lunar samples and put them in the little rubber boat,” Dyar says, recalling that the storage box looked like an ice chest.

Nearly a half-ton of moon rocks were collected by the six Apollo missions to the lunar surface. And as the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 first landing mission approaches, NASA has decided to open up a still-sealed, never-studied moon rock sample that has been carefully saved for decades, waiting for technology to advance.

(19) I PRAY FOR ONE FIRST LANDING. Even if it’s not one of Glyer’s Chinese ‘bots I’m sure you’ll cheer when “AI pilot ‘sees’ runway and lands automatically”.

An automatic pilot has landed a plane using image-recognition artificial intelligence to locate the runway.

At large airports, systems on the ground beam up the position of the runway to guide automatic systems.

But in late May a new AI tool landed a small plane carrying passengers, by “sight” alone at Austria’s Diamond Aircraft airfield.

One expert said it could potentially improve flight safety.

The new system, developed by researchers at the technical universities of Braunschweig and Munich, processes visual data of the runway and then adjusts the plane’s flight controls, without human assistance.

Because it can detect both infrared light as well as the normal visible spectrum, it can handle weather conditions such as fog that might make it difficult for the human pilot to make out the landing strip.

Another advantage of the technology is it does not rely on the radio signals provided by the existing Instrument Landing System (ILS). Smaller airports often cannot justify the cost of this equipment and it can suffer from interference.

(20) LE GUIN ON PBS.  THIRTEEN’s American Masters presents the U.S. broadcast premiere of the “Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin” documentary on August 2.

Produced with Le Guin’s participation over the course of a decade, American Masters – Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin tells the intimate coming-of-age story of the Portland, Oregon, housewife and mother of three who forever transformed American literature by bringing science fiction into the literary mainstream. Through her influential work, Le Guin opened doors for generations of younger writers like Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon and David Mitchell — all of whom appear in the film — to explore fantastic elements in their writing.

The film explores the personal and professional life of the notoriously private author through revealing conversations with Le Guin as well as her family, friends and the generations of renowned writers she influenced. Visually rich, Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin illustrates the dramatic real-world settings that shaped Le Guin’s invented places using lush original animations over her own readings of her work to provide a firsthand experience of her fantastic worlds.

(21) TOUGH TIME AT NASFiC. Artist Newton Ewell had a terrible experience at SpikeCon and wrote about it on Facebook. Friends of his told me he’s okay with sharing it on File 770. (I’m adding this at the last minute, in preference to waiting for tomorrow’s Scroll.)

Have you ever been invited to a convention, only to be treated like you don’t belong there? I have.

Thursday was really hard on me. I felt very unwelcome at Spikecon, and have realized that driving an hour one-way, being shoved off into an unlit corner and having to confront people who hate me just really isn’t my thing.

Frankly, I’m afraid to come back to the convention. Libertarian Loudmouth Guy came by the table yesterday evening to drone on at me like a broken record about the same crap (his skewed politics) as usual. Being buttonholed by wackos who see my skin color and use it as a pretext to spew hateful talk at me does not make a good convention experience. Racist DrawGirl’s grudge against me was on full display. I’m not there to compete with anyone, nor am I there to be hated on by weirdos with strange fetishy grudges. Right-Wing Space Guy still can’t grasp that I don’t want to talk to him either, because of the Trump fanaticism displayed toward me.

I have friends there, but I was isolated from them, making the whole experience into an ordeal for me. I wanted to bring my large pieces, but something said, “don’t”. I’m glad I listened to that inner voice, because if I’d brought them, they’d have been ruined by the rain. I was supposed to have an electrical outlet for my drawing light, but all the outlets were taken up by the USS Dildo-prise people.

I don’t have money to afford driving back out there, let alone commuting back-and-forth, food etc. Being placed into a hostile working environment is too much pain for too little reward.

I realized that being presented with a symbol of racial oppression and corporate greed (a plastic golden spike) really hurt. All I feel from that is the pain and death dealt out to the people who worked so hard to join the two railroads, and it makes me sad. I’m hurt that my art is on all the con badges, but once I get there I’m made into a problem, a bothersome individual who’s not worth having the space I contracted for….

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, Andrew Porter, Cat Eldridge, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Contrarius, Robin A. Reid, Trisha Lynn, Mike Kennedy, Chip Hitchcock, and Carl Slaughter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Welcome to Dystopia – Now Go Home: NYSF Readings Spotlight New Anthology of Fearsome Futures

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By Mark L. Blackman: On the evening of Tuesday, February 6, at its venue, the Brooklyn Commons Café in less-than-paradisiacal though not-quite dystopian Brooklyn, the New York Review of Science Fiction Reading Series hosted a cavalcade of readings spotlighting the new anthology Welcome to Dystopia. The event, guest-curated by the volume’s editor, Gordon Van Gelder, featured readings by Richard Bowes, Jennifer Marie Brissett, Deji Bryce Olukotun, Leo Vladimirsky and Paul Witcover.

Dystopianly, the evening did not begin as usual, with Series Producer and Executive Curator Jim Freund welcoming the crowd.  He, along with House Manager Barbara Krasnoff, we were told, was out with the flu. (Feel better.) Terence Taylor, the Series’ Tech Director filled in for Freund, and Amy Goldschlager (a former Curator) ran the gate. After giving thanks where due, he announced upcoming readings:

  • March 6: Alisa Kwitney and Nicholas Kaufmann
  • April 3: Chris Claremont and Chandler Klang Smith
  • Mayday 1 (tent.): In Memory of Ama Paterson, with Pan Morigan, Andrea Hairston and
    Sheree Renée Thomas
  • June 5 (tent.): A Tribute to Thomas M. Disch, with Guest Curator: Henry Wessels

Gordon Van Gelder

Gordon Van Gelder is currently the publisher of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and was for 17 years also its editor, for which he was honored twice each with the World Fantasy Award and the Hugo Award. The evening was nostalgic for him as he founded the NYRSF Readings some 27-28 years ago. “It’s strange to realize how long ago that was,” he said, recalling its first readings at the Dixon Place performance space. (I remember them well; afterward, we’d often wander back to Gordon’s place.)

On Inauguration Day last year, he continued, he was talking to a writer who said that she was afraid to write dystopian sf, “afraid that a politician would run with it.” Others clearly had a different response to the new abnormal. If such term is applicable, we seem to be in a Golden Age of dystopian arts. In the wake of the 2016 Election, George Orwell’s 1984 shot onto bestseller lists and a stage version of the novel played on Broadway. “1984 is not supposed to be a how-to book,” it was sighed, but reaction, repression, racism and doublethink – or, put more impartially, chaos and uncertainty – are in bloom, as is “The Resistance” to it. (At the Brooklyn Book Festival last fall, I noted to a staffer of The Nation that Trump had spurred much artistic, literary and political creativity. He agreed, but added that it was “not a good trade-off”.) Already too late to be a cautionary work (“if this goes on”), Welcome to Dystopia is intensely, aggressively timely, and fiercely political. (Another Van Gelder-edited anthology, Welcome to the Greenhouse, tales about climate change, similarly draws from the zeitgeist.)

Leo Vladmirsky

The first reader of the evening was Leo Vladimirsky, who recently finished his first novel, The Horrorists. He works in advertising and his experience was evident in his story, “We All Have Hearts of Gold®.” The “currency” in advertising, he explained, is the creative brief, and his story’s format follows its three stages, the e-mail to the team, the assignment and the final tv script. Set immediately after the 2021 Inauguration, the agency – which has lost staff as immigrants were sent home and its European offices were closed, though new ones opened in Russia and West Virginia – is hired by the Republican Security Service to help recruit for its team of Gold Shirts. Wearing gold polo shirts emblazoned with “MAGA” and silhouettes of Donald J. Trump, they maintained (says the creative brief) “order and safety” during the 2020 Election and prevented “voter fraud.” In the recruitment commercial, they burst into classrooms, health clinics, “perverts’” toilet stalls and even the Supreme Court, hauling off so-called offenders. (The allusion to Hitler’s Black Shirts isn’t exactly subtle.)

Deji Bryce Olukotun

Next up was Deji Bryce Olukotun, the author of the novels Nigerians in Space and its sequel After the Flare, which was nominated for the 2018 Philip K. Dick Award. (His online address, returnofthedeji.com, amusingly reminds that his name is an anagram of “Jedi.”) His story, “The Levelers,” from which he read, draws on his growing up in a small town in the New Jersey wetlands, which faced land development. The titular Levelers (not to be confused with the ultra-egalitarian antiroyalist group during the English Civil War) are developers who employ genetics, demographics and finally drones to target and burn out houses in order to steal land. Sam, a transgender, is tapping maple trees for sap when her family farm is targeted.

Jennifer Marie Brissett

In his introduction to Jennifer Marie Brissett, while putting together the anthology, Van Gelder said, he’d wanted different voices, different backgrounds and even different formats. Brissett, a Jamaican-British-American, is the author of Elysium, or The World After. She has been shortlisted for the Locus Award, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and the storySouth Million Writers Award, and has won the Philip K. Dick Special Citation. Also, as she noted in her biographical sketch, “once in her life, a long time ago and for three-and-a-half years, she owned and operated a Brooklyn indie bookstore called Indigo Café & Books.” In fact, she was there on 9/11, and later witnessed PATRIOT Act-invoked overreaches. Her story “Newsletter” is in the form of a bookstore’s bulletin to the community reporting that the government was monitoring her special orders (she had actually received such a letter) and that they could even retrieve books from people’s homes; targeted books included James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and Octavia Butler’s Kindred. (During the Reagan Administration, the Feds attempted to monitor library patrons’ selections. Look, they’re reading books by a Russian, Asimov.)

As her story was short, she also read a scene from Eleusis, her follow-up to Elysium, and like it based on the Demeter-Persephone myth and set in a post-apocalyptic future, so it’s also an sf dystopia, she said. An interspecies spaceport docking station opens and aliens arrive.

During the intermission, a raffle was held for donors (the readings are free, with a suggested donation of $7), the prizes being a British book club edition of Clifford Simak’s City that had been the property of Charles Platt, and a copy of the anthology Welcome to the Greenhouse.

Paul Witcover

Leading off the second half of the evening, Van Gelder remarked that there were several stories about the proposed Wall (not Pink Floyd’s; China has a Great Wall, so I guess this would be the Hyuge Wall), but that Paul Witcover’s was “probably the most somber.” Witcover has been a finalist for the Nebula, World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Awards, and in their review of his novel Tumbling After, was called by the Washington Post “a gifted, fiercely original writer whose genre-bending fiction deserves the widest possible attention.” In “Walls,” even though born in Ohio and having only been to Mexico once briefly, because others in the family were born in Mexico, the protagonist is deported to a detention camp in sight of the Wall, which is described as resembling stacks of chicken cages. Their forced march out of their Ohio town is cheered by its residents, former neighbors and classmates.

Richard Bowes

The final reader, Richard Bowes, has written six novels, four story collections, and 80-plus stories, and won two World Fantasy, a Lambda, an IHG and storySouth Million Writers Awards. Van Gelder described his piece as “one of the most New York stories in the book.” Quipped Bowes, “I write about New York because it’s the only thing I know.” (Like many other quintessential New Yorkers, Rick isn’t originally from here. He was raised in Boston, as his accent proclaims, though, in his own words, “has lived in Manhattan for the better part of a century.”) His story is set some 40 years in the future, after a certain dictator has renamed the Avenue of the Americas “the Avenue of American Greatness,” though no one calls it that, any more than they call 6th Avenue the Avenue of the Americas. Throughout, the dictator (who was impeached after California seceded and Illinois joined Canada) is referred to only as “the Monster,” “the Beast,” “His Grand Pestilence,” “the Great Infection” and “the Cancer”; indeed, “his name is the only obscenity not spoken in New York,” and the story’s title is “The Name Unspoken.” Like the first story, it was a welcome bit of levity in an otherwise nightmarish set of visions.

It’s a truism that science fiction isn’t really predictive or about the future, but is about the present. The drawback to books like this is that – with rare exceptions – they’re too anchored to their time. Trump Era sf might, many hope, soon become as outmoded and irrelevant as Cold War sf. (We seem, though, to have come full circle, back to Russian plots.)

Taylor having left (he was getting over the flu), Goldschlager did the “outro.”

Despite Freund’s absence, the traditional Jenna freebie table offered books.

The audience of perhaps 50 included Melissa C. Beckman (the Readings’ photographer), Susan Bratisher, Amy Goldschlager, John Kwok, Lissanne Lake, James Ryan and Terence Taylor. Over the course of the evening, audience members availed themselves of the Café’s food, coffee bar, beer and wine.

James Patrick Kelly & Jennifer Marie Brissett Read at the KGB Bar

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Jennifer Marie Brissett
James Patrick Kelly

By Mark L. Blackman: On the lovely autumn evening of Wednesday, October 18 (and as the Yankees were winning in the Bronx), the monthly Fantastic Fiction Readings Series hosted authors James Patrick Kelly and Jennifer Marie Brissett at its longtime venue, the doubly-aptly-named Red Room at the 2nd floor KGB Bar in Manhattan’s East Village. The gathering again seemed smaller than usual.

KGB Bar

The Series is characterized by its mix of well-established authors and newer writers quickly making a name for themselves, but the evening’s readers shared a noteworthy connection, aside from each having triple-barreled names. It turns out that Kelly was Brissett’s graduate mentor. “She passed,” he hastened to add.

The event opened, as customary, with Series co-host Matthew Kressel’s exhortation to support the Bar by buying a drink or two (and tip the bartenders) – “Support the Bar, support the Series” – and announcing upcoming readers:

  • November 15: Grady Hendrix and David Rice
  • December 20: N.K. Jemisin and Chris N. Brown
  • January 17: Joseph Helmreich
  • February 21: Cassandra Khaw and Peternelle van Arsdale

(All dates – other than December’s, which is a Saturday – are the third Wednesday of the month. Details and lineup well into 2018 are available at the Series website. He concluded by introducing the evening’s first reader.

Jennifer Marie Brissett, a Jamaican-British-American, is the author of Elysium, or The World After. She has been shortlisted for the Locus Award, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, the storySouth Million Writers Award, and has won the Philip K. Dick Special Citation. Her short stories have appeared in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Lightspeed, Uncanny, The Future Fire, APB: Artists against Police Brutality, and other publications. She read from her next novel, Eleusis, the upcoming sequel to Elysium (she had just handed it in to her agent). The myth of Persephone and Demeter is “at the heart of the story,” she explained, before cautioning the audience about the ugly violence in her selection. In a post-apocalyptic future, the activities of a group of children, one of whom, Cora, has visions, is interrupted by the invasion of a rebel army. The boys, he declares, are now child soldiers, and the girls, including Cora, are raped; those resisting are summarily shot.

During the intermission, Kelly circulated, handing out print copies of his newsletter, Strangeways. Afterward, Series co-host Ellen Datlow assumed the podium and introduced Kelly, the second reader of the night.

James Patrick Kelly has won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for his works, among which are . Planet of Whispers, Look Into the Sun, Wildlife, Burn, “Think Like a Dinosaur” and “1016 to 1.” Additionally, he has edited several reprint anthologies with John Kessel, among them The Secret History of Science Fiction. His most recent publications are the novel Mother Go (“my first novel in twenty-something years”), an audiobook original from Audible (and an audio exclusive – there’s “no print edition for the foreseeable future”), and the career retrospective Masters of Science Fiction: James Patrick Kelly from Centipede Press. He also writes a column on the internet for Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

“I love to read aloud,” he began, and “this is my favorite place to read.” Though he should have been “flogging” Mother Go (his editor was in the audience), he instead read “Yukui!” (pronounced U-Q-E), an (the) original story from his new collection (forthcoming in February from Prime), The Promise of Space. (“I used up my yearly allotment of exclamation points,” he quipped.) The titular character is a DI, directed intelligence, or sidekick, who calls herself Sprite for her avatar’s fairy body, in unrequited lust with her owner. As a result, she is, to her great dismay, transferred into a sexless shell or chassis, deprived of what she considered her destiny and given another. (Tongue firmly planted in cheek, he said that it’s “my Blade Runner story.”)

Copies of Brissett’s Elysium were for sale at the back of the room from the Word Bookstores of Greenpoint, Brooklyn (and Jersey City). (As it happens, “once in her life, a long time ago and for three and a half years,” she herself owned and operated a Brooklyn indie bookstore called Indigo Café & Books, which I confess apologetically never having visited.)

Prior to the readings, as usual, Datlow snapped photos of the readers and the audience. Her photos of the event may be seen at the Series website, http://www.kgbfantasticfiction.org/.

James Patrick Kelly and Mark Blackman