Tag Archives: John Coulthart

Pixel Scroll 1/20/25 File Long And Throw Pixels

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(1) THEY “FORGOT”. On Reddit’s /r/printSF group, a poster asks what had happened to Mark Hodder’s A Dark and Subtle Light, which had been scheduled to be published back in October 2024.

Another poster replied with text from the book’s Goodreads page:

“UPDATE: I contacted Mark Hodder on BlueSky and he was kind enough to give me the low-down. In summary: -“The publisher purchased it as “work for hire” … meaning they owned the character and concept of the brief. The idea was that it would be the first of a series with other authors working on subsequent novels featuring the same main character” -“They set an Oct ’24 date for publication. However, the editor who had suggested the idea left the company. They decided to put the project on hold, forgot to tell me & forgot to remove the scheduled pub. date from Amazon.”

They . . . “forgot” to tell the author they cancelled publication of his book. That is brutal.

But, there is still a possibility that we’ll see this book in some form in the future, so I’m leaving it on my TBR list. “

And this was followed up by a reply from the author themselves:

I’m afraid Rebellion (I’m now naming and shaming) have not only taken the novel off their schedule but they are also refusing to give it (or even sell it) back to me. Their stance is that I got paid so I don’t really have anything to complain about. A fucking atrocious attitude. Not only does it ignore the fact that a) the novel would earn me royalties, and b) whenever I have a new novel published there’s a spike in sales for my other work and my audience grows, but it also presumes that I write for money rather than to entertain. No author writes for money. Publishers pay a pittance.

To put it into perspective, Rebellion paid me £7000 for the novel with royalties set to kick in (after that £7000 had earned out) at a rate of 7% of the recommended retail price up to 14,999 copies; rising to 8% on 15,000 to 29,000 copies; rising to 10% on 30,000 copies onwards.

I’ll get none of that. The novel took a year to write and all I have to show for it is the initial £7000. The MINIMUM annual wage in the UK is £21000.

So, yes, financially, Rebellion has fucked me over. But the real issue is that I consider it one of the best novels I have written and I am royally PISSED OFF that no one will get to read it.

(2) CREATING BLAKE’S 7. “’When Star Wars came out, one of our directors was close to tears’: how we made Blake’s 7” — a “How We Made” oral history at the Guardian.

Michael E Briant, director, series one

I got the impression Blake’s 7 was just going to be “space opera” and, having worked as a director on Doctor Who, I wanted to move on and do other things, but the script for the first episode won me over. It was 1977, before the mass surveillance we have today, so the idea of everyone being watched by cameras, as that opening episode had it, seemed striking. It had shades of Nineteen Eighty-Four and felt very adult and relevant.

The series had been pitched by Terry Nation, who created Doctor Who’s Daleks. He saw it as The Dirty Dozen in Space, but that idea disappeared early on. It ended up having more in common with Robin Hood, following Blake and his rebels in their struggle against the totalitarian Federation. The BBC had commissioned Blake’s 7 as a replacement for its police series Softly, Softly: Task Force and we inherited its budget. The largest expenditure on Softly had been one character’s gabardine raincoat. Blake’s 7 was far more demanding, with futuristic costumes, props and locations. Star Wars had come out in the UK just before our first episode aired. One of the show’s other directors, Pennant Roberts, went to see it. The next morning, I found him in his office – close to tears.

The design of the rebels’ Liberator spaceship was by Roger Murray-Leach. It was marvellous, but the interior wasn’t quite what I’d envisaged. I thought a highly advanced vessel should be operated via thought alone, whereas the set we ended up with had joysticks and controls. The ship’s computer, Zen, was closer to what I’d imagined. Peter Tuddenham did Zen’s voice, hidden away in the corner with headphones and a mic. When a second computer called Orac joined the crew, Peter did it too, switching between the two voices.

Whenever we had a problem making something work electronically, this guy called Mitch Mitchell would solve it. One of his jobs was doing the dissolving body special effect whenever crew members teleported down to alien planets. He’d be sitting in the corner with an electronic pen, drawing the white outlines that appeared before they materialised….

I don’t think the show would have been the success it was without Gareth Thomas as Roj Blake. He was a truthful, clever actor and his performance lifted everyone. Sally Knyvette also brought a sense of sobriety and realism to Jenna, one of Blake’s followers, while Paul Darrow and Michael Keating brought more and more depth to the characters of Avon and Vila respectively. Watching it again now, I’m surprised how good some of it is….

(3) REMEMBERING HOWARD ANDREW JONES. Bob Byrne pays tribute in “An Important Life – Howard Andrew Jones (1968 – 2025)” at Black Gate. He begins by quoting his Facebook post.

…My buddy Howard Andrew Jones has passed away from brain cancer. You’re going to see a LOT of people singing his praises in the coming weeks. All of it deserved. If I can stop crying long enough, my Monday morning post will be on Howard.

But you’re gonna see a common thread in the talk about Howard. The impact he had on other people’s lives. Especially in encouraging and helping writers – mostly in the sword and sorcery field.

Measured by impact, Howard’s may well be the most important life in the past three-plus decades in the genre. He was relentless in being kind, helpful, encouraging, engaging – just fucking NICE – in an era when nice isn’t all that common anymore.

My favorite memories of Howard are our phone talks about hardboiled private eye fiction: not what you’d guess of one of the brightest lights in the sword and sorcery genre.

But as you read the posts about Howard here on FB, just keep noting how many people thank him for helping them. For impacting their lives and careers….

(4) ON THE FRONT. John Coulthart discusses the cover art on various editions of William Lindsay Gresham’s “Nightmare Alleys”. For example —

First edition, USA, 1946.

The first edition isn’t a great design but it happens to be faithful to the core storyline, more so than many of the covers that follow. In the film we’re left to guess what the “nightmare alley” of the title might be but in the novel this is a symbol that recurs throughout the story, a literal nightmare of Carlisle’s in which he dreams he’s being chased down a dark alleyway towards a light that remains continually out of reach. The dream weighs enough on Carlisle’s mind for him to regard it as a symbol of the human condition, or at least his soured perception of the same. The cover of the first edition combines this image with the Tarot trump of The Hanged Man which Carlisle turns up in a reading as a signifier of his destiny. Tarot scholars may quibble with this detail—The Hanged Man isn’t as doom-laden or negative as the novel suggests—but Gresham makes good use of Tarot as a structural element, with each chapter named after one of the trump cards, and with elements of the story reflecting the Tarot imagery. Given all this you’d expect cover artists to use Tarot symbolism much more than they do.

(5) FOCUS ON ANIMATION AWARD NOMINEES. “Online Film Critics Society Awards Nominated 5 Animated Features” reports Animation Magazine.

Nominations have been announced for the Online Film Critics Society Awards, which this year has put five films up for its animated feature category. Artful animated contenders also appear in other categories. Also of note, the VFX-fueled sci fi fantasy Dune: Part Two is the most-nominated project for this edition, with nine nods including Best Picture and Best Directing for Denis Villeneuve.

As awards season rolls on, the Best Animated Feature race holds no surprises for toon watchers. Up in the category are Gints Zilbalodis’ Golden Globe winner Flow, Pixar’s box office record smasher Inside Out 2, Oscar winner Adam Elliot’s Memoir of a Snail, Aardman’s charming Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl and the critically acclaimed DreamWorks feat The Wild Robot.

Outside the main toon race, The Wild Robot is nominated for Best Original Score (composer: Kris Bowers), and Flow is up for Best Film Not in the English Language….

(6) A HISTORY OF RESENTMENT. “Oscar buzz and genre snubs: will the Academy finally give sci-fi, fantasy and horror their due?” asks the Guardian.

Ah, the Oscars. That perennial exercise in Hollywood patting itself on the back with all the subtlety of a fireworks display, while the rest of us squint at our screens and wonder how many of these movies we’ve actually seen.

At least two years ago there was something for genre fans to crow about: Everything Everywhere All at Once drove all before it, making and resurrecting careers while smartly satirising Marvel’s multiverse saga before the latter even had the chance to collapse under the weight of its own convoluted timelines.

And those of us of an older vintage will always have 2004, when The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King stormed the Oscars like a hobbit on second breakfast, sweeping up 11 statuettes and proving that a fantasy epic, when executed with enough heart, grandeur and bloody-minded ambition, could leave the Academy no choice but to hand over every prize in sight.

At other times it’s been easy to despair at the Academy’s unwillingness to reward fantasy fare. Genre films often dominate the technical gongs but struggle to crack the “prestige” barriers of best picture, director or acting nominations. Animated films, no matter how innovative, rarely break out of their category. The remarkable Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, for example, won best animated film in 2019 but didn’t get a nod in any of the more celebrated categories…

(7) LIFE-CHANGING BOOKS. Shelf Awareness brings us “Reading with… Samantha Sotto Yambao”.

Book you’re an evangelist for:

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. It’s required reading before departing this planet. Completely and utterly depressing, but also beautiful and beyond perfection. And did I mention that it was depressing?

Book you hid from your parents:

The Sleeping Beauty series by Anne Rice. Explaining how this was not the Disney fairytale version would have been very awkward.

Book that changed your life:

I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to break the rules and choose two books. The Belgariad series by David Eddings (I know, I know. It’s a series, not a book. I’m a rebel.) and The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.

Minutes into a date that wasn’t a date, my now husband of 25 years and I geeked out over The Belgariad and our love for Aunt Pol’s bacon and realized that we had met our person. So yeah, I’d say The Belgariad pretty much set the course of my life from that night forward.

The Time Traveler’s Wife, meanwhile, gave me the worst book hangover. I felt so bad about Henry’s death that I swore if I ever wrote a book, my main character would never die. And so I did. And it became my debut novel, Before Ever After.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

January 20, 1959 — One Step Beyond series

Sixty-six years ago this evening, a new genre anthology series called Alcoa Presents: One Step Beyond first aired on ABC where it would run for three years. (If you saw it in syndication, it was called just One Step Beyond.) It was created by Merwin Gerard who previously had done nothing at all of a genre nature. He was associate producer here with it actually being produced by Collier Young. 

Unlike other anthology programs of the time, this series was presented in the form of docudramas. Mind you, the stories depicted hewed close to known urban legends or were remakes of let’s call them horror films on the light side. Ninety-six half-hour episodes would be filmed during its run. When it was cancelled, it was replaced by The Next Step Beyond which ran for one season of twenty-five episodes, fourteen of which were remakes of the first series.

John Newland, the original series host, and Gerard were involved in an attempt in the late Seventies to revive it. It failed miserably lasting but twenty-five episodes. As Newland stated later, “The remakes were a bad idea, we thought we could fool the audience, and we soon learned we couldn’t.” 

They are legally available on YouTube now so you can see the first episode, “The Bride Possessed” here if you desire. 

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 20, 1934 — Tom Baker, 91.

By Paul Weimer: My first Doctor Who, and still the person I first bring to mind when I hear the phrase.  It was PBS in the late 70’s, maybe 1980. I was starting to read science fiction, as I have detailed elsewhere. I was watching Cosmos, as I have also detailed elsewhere. And then there was Doctor Who to help seal me into the world of SFF.  This was the time when Doctor Who came across the pond, and they started with the Tom Baker Doctor Who episodes. (They would eventually get them all, but they started with the fourth and then went back to the 1st and ran forward) 

So, thus, Tom Baker became my first Doctor.  The first Doctor Who episode I remember, and what hooked me from the get-go, was “Pyramid of Mars”. You know the one, especially since it’s recently relevant. Sutekh the Destroyer seeks to escape his Martian prison. The Doctor and Sarah Jane have to do their best with strange logic puzzles, dangerous robot mummies, and of course Sutekh himself, a being powerful enough to enslave the Doctor with his will and mind. It was a bit of science fantasy mythology, and I was hooked immediately. (And imagine my surprise when Sutekh returned in the current series. What an unexpected call back!).  I eventually did get to see his entire oeuvre, from “Robot” to “Logopolis”, and his run taught me the Doctor could have modes and moods within a Doctor’s run, something not always picked up in the current incarnation of Doctor Who. The Fourth Doctor has a definite, swinging character arc that Baker brought to the role.  

Besides “Pyramids of Mars”, my favorite Baker Doctor Who episode is probably “City of Death”, with a twisty plot, and perhaps the best second Romana-Doctor chemistry. I could believe why the two actors briefly married, because the second Romana and Baker’s Doctor feel like a comfortable married couple in love’s bloom and flourish, in “The City of Lights”. Although I admit the Doctor being rooked in “The Invasion of Time” and not seeing the Sontaran gambit was pretty good–it showed the Doctor could be, however briefly, outfoxed. 

Tom Baker, as it turned out, wound up being more than (by some measurements) the longest running Doctor in Doctor Who. (And if the Curator is a future incarnation of the Doctor, only one of two actors to play two incarnations of the Doctor.) He had a fantastic small role in the terrible 2000 Dungeons and Dragons movie, playing an elderly elf cleric with a twinkle in his eye.  He’s the narrator of Enemy Mine (previously discussed on a previous scroll) as well as doing other voice work as well in video games and elsewhere. He’s also the evil magician in the Golden Voyage of Sinbad. 

Happy Ninety-first Birthday!

Tom Baker

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN. “Skeleton Crew’s Finale Almost Had a Jedi Flashback”. Gizmodo says, “Had things gone differently, Star Wars: Skeleton Crew would’ve featured a new Jedi that played a pivotal role in Jod Nawood’s development.”

The recent finale for Star Wars: Skeleton Crew finally shed some light on Jude Law’s mysterious Force user, Jod Na Nawood. Growing up as a poor kid, he was taken in by a Jedi and trained in the ways of the Force. He’s been on the run ever since he watched her die, and it turns out we would’ve met her during the sequence.

On Instagram, actor Yasmine Al Massri (who you’ve heard as Morana on Castlevania) posted photos of herself as Jod’s master, Jedi robes and doing some brief lightsaber training that would’ve presumably been her putting up a fight before her death….

(12) ANDOR BUDGET. “Star Wars: Disney Reveals the Record-Breaking Budget for the Andor Series” – Belles and Gals recites the figures.

…When it comes to expanding the Star Wars saga, Disney has not held back. The Andor series, a prequel to the acclaimed film Rogue One, has reportedly been produced with a colossal budget of $645 million for its first two seasons. This investment covers a total of 24 episodes, bringing the average cost per episode to nearly $27 million. This figure places Andor as the most expensive Star Wars series ever produced by Disney+, surpassing previous projects in both scale and financial commitment.

Tony Gilroy, the creator of Andor, expressed his enthusiasm about the series’ future prospects. “The substantial investment underscores Disney’s commitment to delivering high-quality storytelling within the Star Wars universe,” he stated. This dedication is evident in the intricate production values and compelling narratives that Andor promises to offer its audience….

(13) PAUL & PAL. [Item by Cat Eldridge.] “Dune: Part Two – Paul Atreides (Ultimate Bonus) 1/3 Scale Statue” at the Spec Fiction Shop goes for the special price of — $1,935. But wait, there’s more! Check out the desert mouse which looks suspiciously like a rabbit

(14) TODAY’S THING TO WORRY ABOUT. Phys.org is “Turning the Hubble tension into a crisis: New measurement confirms universe is expanding too fast for current models”.

The universe really seems to be expanding fast. Too fast, even. A new measurement confirms what previous—and highly debated—results had shown: The universe is expanding faster than predicted by theoretical models, and faster than can be explained by our current understanding of physics.

This discrepancy between model and data became known as the Hubble tension. Now, results published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters provide even stronger support for the faster rate of expansion….

…Measuring the universe requires a cosmic ladder, which is a succession of methods used to measure the distances to celestial objects, with each method, or “rung,” relying on the previous for calibration.

The ladder used by Scolnic was created by a separate team using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), which is observing more than 100,000 galaxies every night from its vantage point at the Kitt Peak National Observatory.

Scolnic recognized that this ladder could be anchored closer to Earth with a more precise distance to the Coma Cluster, one of the galaxy clusters nearest to us.

“The DESI collaboration did the really hard part, their ladder was missing the first rung,” said Scolnic. “I knew how to get it, and I knew that that would give us one of the most precise measurements of the Hubble constant we could get, so when their paper came out, I dropped absolutely everything and worked on this non-stop.”

To get a precise distance to the Coma cluster, Scolnic and his collaborators used the light curves from 12 Type Ia supernovae within the cluster. Just like candles lighting a dark path, Type Ia supernovae have a predictable luminosity that correlates to their distance, making them reliable objects for distance calculations.

The team arrived at a distance of about 320 million light-years, nearly in the center of the range of distances reported across 40 years of previous studies—a reassuring sign of its accuracy.

“This measurement isn’t biased by how we think the Hubble tension story will end,” said Scolnic. “This cluster is in our backyard, it has been measured long before anyone knew how important it was going to be.”…

(15) EARLY SPECIAL EFFECTS LORE. Superheroes “flying” suspended from wires is just one of the “Early TV and Movie Superhero Special Effects” revealed by TVCrazyman.

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

Pixel Scroll 5/31/21 I’m At The Godstalk, The Death Star, The Second Fifth Hotel, The Pixels Keep On Scrolling And Rolling Files As Well

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(1) HANSEN BOOK FREE FROM TAFF. Another ebook is available from the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund’s website, #60 in the free library, Rob Hansen’s Faan Fiction 1930-2020: an exploration. Cover artwork adapted from Rob Hansen’s cover for his fanzine Epsilon #7, July 1981. Approximately 61,000 words. (TAFF hopes you’ll make a little donation to the fund if you please.)

In this combined critique and anthology, Rob Hansen discusses the phenomenon of fan fiction (in the fannish fanzine sense) with a particular focus on the UK. His commentary is interspersed with many examples from such diverse fan writers as John Berry, C.S. Youd (John Christopher), Leroy Kettle, David Langford, Mark Plummer, Bob Shaw, Ian Sorensen, James White, Walt Willis – and Rob Hansen himself, including previously unpublished work. There are several surprises.

From Rob Hansen’s Foreword:

One aspect of fandom only lightly touched on by me in Then was fan fiction. By which, of course, I mean fiction about fans and/or fandom. This is a thread that has been woven through SF fandom since it began, enduring almost to the present day, and so is worthy of consideration in that light. I’ll be looking at the people who wrote it and all its various forms and the purposes to which they were put. Inevitably, the quality of the writing varies wildly, with that of those who later went on to write professionally usually being a cut above the rest.

…Where possible the pieces of fan fiction reprinted herein to illustrate various types and forms – all by UK fans – were specifically chosen from those not already available. As a result, most will be things the majority of readers won’t have encountered before.

(2) SF ART COLLECTORS WILL SPEAK. Tomorrow on Comic Art Spotlight Doug Ellis joins a panel with three friends — Glynn Crain, John Davis & Victor Dricks — discussing SF/fantasy art.  All four have large collections of vintage SF art. They’ll be highlighting and discussing various artists and pieces in those collections, including creators like Virgil Finlay, Frank Kelly Freas, Ed Emshwiller, Wally Wood, Ed Valigursky, George Barr and many more.  The panel kicks off June 1 at 8:00 p.m. Eastern:

(3) PLONK YOUR MAGIC TWANGER. The Haffner Press’ two-volume edition of The Complete John the Balladeer by Manly Wade Wellman is available for pre-order.

John, whose last name is never revealed, is a wandering singer who carries a guitar strung with strings of pure silver. He is a veteran of the Korean War and served in the U.S. Army as a sharpshooter (in the novel After Dark, he mentions that his highest rank was PFC). In his travels, he frequently encounters creatures and superstitions from the folk tales and superstitions of the mountain people. Though John has no formal education, he is self-taught, highly intelligent and widely read; it is implied that his knowledge of occult and folk legendarium is of Ph.D level. This knowledge has granted him competent use of white magic, which he has used on occasion to overcome enemies or obstacles, but it is primarily his courage, wit and essential goodness that always enables him to triumph over supernatural evils (although the silver strings of his guitar and his possession of a copy of The Long Lost Friend are also powerful tools in fighting evil magic), while basic Army training allows him to physically deal with human foes.

Haffner recently posted this photo of artist Tim Kirk’s dropcaps for the book.

(4) FEELIN’ GROOVY. John Coulthart has a gallery of “groovy” sf covers in “The art of Mike Hinge, 1931–2003” at { feuilleton }.

Back in March I ended my post on the psychedelia-derived art style that I think of as “the groovy look” with the words “there’s a lot more to be found.” There is indeed, and I’d neglected to include anything in the post by Mike Hinge, a New Zealand-born illustrator whose covers for American SF magazines in the 1970s brought a splash of vivid colour to the groove-deprived world of science fiction. This was a rather belated development for staid titles like Amazing and Analog whose covers in the previous decade wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Gernsback era. Opening the door to someone like Mike Hinge, a graphic designer as well as a general illustrator, was probably a result of both magazines having undergone recent changes of editorship.

(5) HEVELIN COLLECTION UPDATE. [Item by Bruce D. Arthurs.]Just found out the University of Iowa’s “Hevelin Collection” Tumblr account, which posted pics of items from Rusty Hevelin’s collection of fanzine and other SFnal material (but has been inactive for the last several years), announced about ten days ago they’re officially suspending the Tumblr. (But past posts will remain online for the foreseeable future.)

But you can still see over 700 fanzines, etc., from the Hevelin Collection in the Iowa Digital Library: Hevelin Fanzines — The University of Iowa Libraries.

And rather than single pictures like the Tumbler account did, the IDL archive leads to scans of the full contents, so far as I’ve tested it. Probably a fair amount of overlap with Fanac.org and eFanzines.com, but always good to have fannish history backed up in multiple places.

(The IDL archive may, it occurs to me, be old news to those who keep up with fanzines past and and present more than I do. “Slight” is a polite way to describe my level of involvement these days. Still, news to me.)

(6) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

  • May 31, 1990 — On this day in 1990, Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall premiered. It starred Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rachel Ticotin, Sharon Stone, Ronny Cox, and Michael Ironside. It’s rather loosely based on Philip K. Dick‘s “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” story. Ronald Shusett, Dan O’Bannon and Gary Goldman wrote the screenplay. It finished second at Chicon V for Best Dramatic Presentation to Edward Scissorhands.  Most critics liked it well-enough though a number of feminist critics thought it excessively violent towards women. It currently holds a seventy-eight percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. 

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born May 31, 1893 – Elizabeth Coatsworth.  Newbery Medal for The Cat Who Went to Heaven (1930).  Four “incredible tales” for adults; four books of poetry; ninety in all; memoir Personal Geography.  (Died 1986) [JH]
  • Born May 31, 1895 — George R. Stewart. As recently noted in the Scroll, his 1949 novel Earth Abides won the first International Fantasy Award in 1951. They were a British award and the first one, this very one, was given at Festivention. Other genre works would include Man, An Autobiography and Storm which is at least genre adjacent. (Died 1980.) (CE)
  • Born May 31, 1910 – Aubrey MacDermott.  Possibly the first fan.  He always said he was. Unfortunately, the supporting evidence is thin.  He may well have founded the Eastbay Club in the San Francisco Bay area around 1928.  Anyway, he was Fan Guest of Honor at Westercon XXXX (Oakland, 1987).  Here is his Origin Story as of 1990.  (Died 1996) [JH]
  • Born May 31, 1921 – Arthur Sellings.  Six novels, fifty shorter stories, in Fantastic, Galaxy, Imagination, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nebula, New Worlds, New Writing, Worlds of Tomorrow. Antiquarian, book & art dealer.  (Died 1968) [JH]
  • Born May 31, 1930 — Gary Brandner. Best remembered for his werewolf trilogy of novels, The Howling, of which the first was very loosely made into a film. He wrote the script for Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf. The fourth film of the series, Howling IV: The Original Nightmare, is actually almost an accurate adaptation of the first novel. He wrote a lot of other horror and penned the novelization of Cat People. (Died 2013.) (CE) 
  • Born May 31, 1942 – Brian Burley.  Active fan in Ohio and New York.  Co-founded Marcon.  In 1979 he was in FISTFA (Fannish Insurgent Scientifictional Ass’n); here he is (with S.H. Craig and Pat O’Neill) on “Fandom in New York” for the Lunacon XXII Program Book.  Co-founded the Beaker People Libation Front, which Fancyclopedia III mildly calls “not entirely serious”; see here.  (Died 2006) [JH]
  • Born May 31, 1948 — Lynda Bellingham. She was The Inquisitor in the Sixth Doctor Story, “The Trial of The Time Lord”.  Other genre appearances include the Landlady in Hans Christian Andersen: My Life as a Fairy Tale, and one-offs in Blake’s 7, Robin Hood and Julia Jekyll and Harriet Hyde. (Died 2014.) (CE) 
  • Born May 31, 1950 — Gregory Harrison, 71. I’m always surprised to discover a series didn’t last as long as I thought it has. He was Logan 5 in the Logan’s Run TV series which only lasted fourteen episodes. He was also in Dark Skies, twenty episodes before cancellation, as the voice of Old John Loengard, and had one-offs in Dead Man’s Gun (cursed object and that series actually lasted awhile), Touched by an Angel, Outer Limits and Miracles. (CE)
  • Born May 31, 1961 — Lea Thompson, 60. She’s obviously best known for her role as Lorraine Baines in the Back to the Future trilogy though I remember her first as Beverly Switzler in Howard the Duck as I saw Back to the Future after I saw Howard the Duck. Not sure why that was. Her first genre role was actually as Kelly Ann Bukowski in Jaws 3-D, a film I most decidedly did not see. If you accept the Scorpion series as genre, she’s got a recurring role as Veronica Dineen on it. (CE)
  • Born May 31, 1977 – Cat Hellisen, age 44.  Fantasy for adults and children; free-lance editing; also archery, aikidô, figure skating.  Six novels, a score of shorter stories.  “The Worme Bridge” won the Short Story Day Africa award.  More recently in Fife she likes the forests and the fields and the Forth.  Has read Giovanni’s Room, Flatland, Herland, five plays by Aeschylus, Peter Pan, both Alice books, Les liasons dangereuses, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  [JH]
  • Born May 31, 1979 — Sophia McDougall, 42. She has a very well crafted alternative history series,  the Romanitas series, In which Rome did not fall and rules the world today. She has two SF novels —Mars Evacuees is sort of YA alien invasion novel; Space Hostages reminds of a Heinlein YA novel. (CE)
  • Born May 31, 1995 – Jeremy Szal, age 26.  One novel, thirty shorter stories.  Fiction editor at StarShipSofa 2014-2020 (Episodes 360-600).  Collects boutique gins.  See his review of Predestination at Strange Horizons here.  [JH]

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • Half Full could be making a combined Alice in Wonderland and Simon & Garfunkel joke. Or not.

(9) WRITING PROMPT. From Agatha Chocolats:

Popehat suggests: “Cthulhu fhtagn exact change only.”

(10) SHAVER MYSTERY MAGAZINE ADDED BY FANAC. “If you’ve been hearing the words ‘Shaver Mysteries’ bruited about, now’s your chance to see what all the fuss is over,” says Fanac.org’s Joe Siclari. Check here: Shaver Mystery Magazine, by Richard S. Shaver. There are 7 issues of this semi-pro, related zine. 

Siclari further says, “Some might not consider this a fanzine because rumor has it that it was paid for by Ray Palmer and Ziff-Davis. However the Shaver Mystery stories were a subject of great controversy in fanzines. So it is of related interest. It definitely was not a money-maker. It seems to fit into the category we later called a semi-prozine. And the art! McCauley, Finlay…”

(11) JUMPING IN. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Washington Post, Michael Cavna interviews Pepe The Frog creator Matt Furie who is trying to recapture his character from the alt-right by creating non-fungible tokens featuring Pepe and other of Furie’s characters that have sold for up to $1 million. “Matt Furie is trying to reclaim his famous cartoon Pepe the Frog — through NFTs”.

To Furie, the NFT realm is about more than coin. During the era of Donald Trump, extremist social media users adapted Pepe so often that the Anti-Defamation League deemed it a hate symbol. But the exploding world of crypto-art is allowing the cartoonist to reclaim a character who was never meant to stand for much beyond love, peace, hedonism and altered-state chillaxin’.

“The NFT world is new, and there are a lot of optimistic people creating cool things,” Furie says of his interest in exploring non-fungible tokens — unique digital files whose origins and ownership can be verified.“Pepe does not have the baggage here that he does in the ‘real world,’ and I like working with utopians and optimistic freethinkers. There are so many possibilities.”

(12) A SCHULZ CURIOSITY. Cavna has also written: “Three ‘lost’ Charles Schulz strips have been rediscovered. Do they show the adult Lucy Van Pelt?”To some, they resemble “Peanuts” characters — if Charlie Brown and the gang had ever grown up.

These rare curiosities intrigue and baffle even the experts. “They’re a puzzle to me,” says Jean Schulz, wife of the late cartoonist Charles M. Schulz, who drew them.

They are the seven black-and-white works of comic art from the mid-’50s collectively called the “Hagemeyer” strips. Four of them have appeared in books. The three other “lost” strips were found and purchased at auction in May 2020— but have never been widely published, according to the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center.

(13) IT’S IMPOSSIBLE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] From this week’s Nature: “First Nuclear Test Created Impossible ‘Quasicrystals’”.

SF is full of exotic substances from Cavorite to Corbomite. Now it has been discovered that the world’s first nuclear bomb test created ‘impossible’ quasicrystals.

The previously unknown structure, made of iron, silicon, copper and calcium, probably formed from the fusion of vaporised desert sand and copper cables. Quasicrystals contain building blocks made up of arrangements of atoms that — unlike those in ordinary crystals — do not repeat in a regular, brickwork-like pattern. They have symmetries that were once considered impossible.

Materials scientist Daniel Shechtman first discovered such an impossible symmetry in a synthetic alloy in 1982. He won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery. In subsequent years, materials scientists synthesised many types of quasicrystal,
expanding the range of possible symmetries. In the aftermath of the Trinity test — the first detonation of a nuclear bomb in 1945 researchers found a field of greenish glassy material that had formed from the liquefaction of desert sand. They dubbed this trinitite. The bomb had been detonated on top of a 30-metre-high tower laden with sensors and their cables. As a result, some of the trinitite had reddish inclusions: it was a fusion of natural material with copper from the transmission lines. The quasicrystal recently found from this trinitite has the same kind of icosahedral symmetry as the one in Shechtman’s original discovery.

(14) NOW IN 3-D. Nature also reports on “The most detailed 3D map of the Universe ever made”.

A survey of the southern sky has reconstructed how mass is spread across space and time, in the biggest study of its kind. The data provide striking evidence that dark energy, the force that appears to be pushing the Universe to accelerate its expansion, has been constant throughout cosmic history.

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration revealed its results in an online briefing on 27 May and in several papers posted online1.

…The researchers grouped the galaxies by colour, to get a rough indication of each galaxy’s distance from our own: as the Universe expands, galaxies that are further away appear redder because their light waves have stretched out to longer wavelengths. That way, the team was able to add a third dimension to its map.

Looking further away also corresponds to looking to the past, so a 3D cosmic map provides a record of the Universe’s history. By tracking how galaxies spread out over time, cosmologists can then indirectly measure the forces at play. These include the gravitational pull of dark matter, the invisible stuff that constitutes some 80% of the Universe’s mass and dominates the formation of galaxies and clusters of galaxies.

(15) DRONE WARFARE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] It’s not exactly a Terminator-style HK-VTOL, but the first autonomous wartime kill by a robot might have happened last year in Libya. Gizmodo reports on the story: “The Age of Autonomous Killer Robots May Already Be Here”.

…“The lethal autonomous weapons systems were programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition: in effect, a true ‘fire, forget and find’ capability,” the UN Security Council’s Panel of Experts on Libya wrote in the report.

It remains unconfirmed whether any soldiers were killed in the attack, although the UN experts imply as much. The drone, which can be directed to self-destruct on impact, was “highly effective” during the conflict in question when used in combination with unmanned combat aerial vehicles, according to the panel. The battle resulted in “significant casualties,” it continued, noting that Haftar’s forces had virtually no defense against remote aerial attacks.

The Kargu-2 is a so-called loitering drone that uses machine learning algorithms and real-time image processing to autonomously track and engage targets. According to Turkish weapons manufacturer STM, it’s specifically designed for asymmetric warfare and anti-terrorist operations and has two operating modes, autonomous and manual. Several can also be linked together to create a swarm of kamikaze drones.

(16) CLOCKING IN. CBS Sunday Morning did a segment about “Exploring the boundaries of time travel”.

Breaking the bonds of time has been a timeless pursuit in science fiction stories and movies. Will it ever become science fact? Correspondent Faith Salie explores the possibilities of taking a journey to the future, or the past, even without a souped-up DeLorean.

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Cruella Pitch Meeting” on Screen Rant, Ryan George, in a spolier-filled episode, says that the only way to get viewers interested in Cruelle DeVil’s backstory–“How does she become the person who wants to skin puppies?”–is to have her work for a boss even more evil than her.  Also the screenwriter warns the producer that if he wants all those groovy hits of the 1970s in the movie, he’d better have plenty of money for the rights.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, John Hertz, David Langford, Jennifer Hawthorne, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Michael Toman, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little.]