Tag Archives: John Coxon

Pixel Scroll 11/21/24 Pixels That Need Pixels Are The Happiest Pixels In The Scroll

Posted on by
18

(1) NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS. No winners of genre interest, but omnivorous readers will want to know who received the 2024 awards. Publishers Weekly led its coverage with a joke from the ceremony:

…[L]ongtime Saturday Night Live cast member Kate McKinnon, [was] the evening’s host. “I’m a book awards virgin, so be gentle,” she joked before opening her remarks, appropriately for 2024, with a bit about AI. “Books do more than entertain—they illuminate, they provoke, and, most importantly, they inspire change,” she said. “That was written by CHatGPT. Is that bad?”…

  • YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE: Shifa Saltagi Safadi, Kareem Between (G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers / Penguin Random House)
  • TRANSLATED LITERATURE: Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, Taiwan Travelogue. Translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King (Graywolf Press)
  • POETRY: Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Something About Living (University of Akron Press)
  • NONFICTION: Jason De León, Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling (Viking Books / Penguin Random House)
  • FICTION: Percival Everett, James (Doubleday / Penguin Random House)

(2) WHY DID THEY SAY THAT? T. R. Napper side-eyes “Five Pieces of Awful Writing Advice (from the masters)”. And by masters, we mean Stephen King, Robert Heinlein, Charles Bukowski, Ernest Hemingway, and Elmore Leonard. First on his hit parade:

Don’t keep a notebook (Stephen King)

“I think a writer’s notebook is the best way in the world to immortalise bad ideas. My idea about a good idea is one that sticks around and sticks around.”

Terrible advice, for one simple reason: none of the rest of us are Stephen King. He’s written around 70 books. He writes and writes and writes. Squashed by a fucken van, six weeks in hospital, dusts himself off, keeps writing. Apparently sits down and churns out 6 pages (1500 words) a day, every day, no problem. In terms of idea generation he is a phenomenon. He’s not like you or me.

Don’t get me wrong – ideas will come for the writer. They always do, whether you wish them to or not. But you should write them down. I absolutely have a document where I keep all my big ideas that one day might (or might not) become a short story or a novel. When I go back and look through it every few months, I’ll see some truly stupid thoughts, but I’ll also see a few where I think: I’d forgotten about that. Let’s try it.

(3) WICKED GOOD. The Hollywood Reporter critic David Rooney weighs in with “’Wicked’ Review: Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande in Beloved Musical”.

… The respective casting of those roles — Ariana Grande as the minimally gifted sorcery student who will go on to become Glinda, Good Witch of the North, and Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, future Wicked Witch of the West — is the movie’s winning hand. Their vocals are clear and strong and supple to a degree many of us have learned not to expect after too many movie musicals that cast merely adequate singers and then Auto-Tune them to death.

Grande and Erivo give Stephen Schwartz’s songs — comedy numbers, introspective ballads, power anthems — effortless spontaneity. They help us buy into the intrinsic musical conceit that these characters are bursting into song to express feelings too large for spoken words, not just mouthing lyrics and trilling melodies that someone spent weeks cleaning up in a studio. The decision to record the songs live on set whenever possible is a major plus….

(4) TIMELESS AND TOPICAL. “Jon M. Chu Embraced the Politics of ‘Wicked’ and Audiences Seeing It Through a Post-Election Lens” on IndieWire.

…[Director Jon M.] Chu embraces that his movie will take on a new layer of meaning for many audience members after the re-election of Trump, but noted that impact is in part because politics has been baked into “Wicked” since its inception. Gregory Maguire’s 1995 book “Wicked” is a meditation on resisting fascist movements, a not-so-subtle theme that carried into its musical adaptation by Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman. A major underlying storyline of “Wicked” is how leaders, who claim to have the people’s best interest at heart, attack the educated — represented by professor Dr. Dillamond, a talking goat voiced by Peter Dinklage — as they try to rewrite the history of animals and humans co-existence in an effort to strip the animals of their rights, and demonize them as the source of the people’s problems.

Through this lens, Chu acknowledged his film is prophetic, but only because the underlying IP is prophetic. Chu argued the original “Wizard of Oz” movie — released on the heels of the 1930s Dust Bowl (the drought-stricken storms of the Depression), during the rise of fascism, and on the eve of World War II — has always spoken to America in a time of transition. He personally experienced it at two very different political moments that “Wicked” entered his life….

(5) TERMINAL JUSTICE. “How Do You Punish a Machine? (And why would you want to?)” asks Graham Brown at CrimeReads.

…For their wisdom we turn to the ever-instructive eyes of the science fiction writers of the world.

Starting with 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY by Arthur C. Clarke, the classic example of machines becoming sentient, in which HAL9000 commits multiple homicides, wiping out the sleeping crewmen of the Discovery, and then eventually attempts to murder the last surviving astronaut Dave by locking him out of the airlock.  Quite a set of crimes.  But in HAL’s defense, he’d been given conflicting programming and told to lie, factors that many believe caused him to lose his electronic mind.  In addition, he may have been under the influence of the mysterious monolith. HAL might also raise a claim of self-defense. At the time he tried to kill Dave, he knew Dave was intending to disconnect him and shut him down.

Interesting case.  A good lawyer could make an argument for not guilty by reason of insanity and self-defense, but I’m going to say guilty.  To his credit, HAL becomes normal again and sacrifices himself for the crew in 2010 ODYSSEY TWO, perhaps atoning for his terrible crimes…

(6) WHERE PROPHETS ARE WITHOUT HONOR. Cora Buhlert deconstructs the popularity of German band Kraftwerk while simultaneously demythologizing the Autobahn in “A Baffled Guardian Writer Discovers the Autobahn – and the Best German Roadtrip Songs” – an entertaining read!

…This is also where the problem with foreigners driving on the Autobahn comes in. They’re often driving an unfamiliar car, they’re not used to high speeds and also don’t know where and when it’s reasonably safe to go fast. See Tim Jonze starting his Autobahn adventure in the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan area, where it’s definitely not safe to go fast (and not allowed either). At one point, Jonze also opens the driver’s side window, while going 150 kilometers per hour, which makes me wonder if he’s fucking crazy.

What’s even more hilarious is that while Kraftwerk were on the road a lot in the 1970s, travelling from gig to gig, usually on the Autobahn, often by night, their car was a Volkswagen Beetle. Tim Jonze has apparently never driven a Volkswagen Beetle, but I have, because my parents had one in the 1970s and early 1980s. So I know that they couldn’t go any faster than 130 kilometers per hour and the car started rattling like crazy at approx. 100 kilometers per hour. The Beetle‘s successor, a 1980 Volkswagen Jetta, which I continued to drive until 2008 (I wanted to keep it to hit the thirty year mark, when a car is considered a historical vehicle in Germany and gets a special licence plate, but unfortunately the Jetta fell apart two years before), capped out at 160 kilometers per hour and also started to rattle like mad at anything above 130 kilometers per hour.  So Kraftwerk were travelling at the relatively leisurely pace of approx. 100 kilometers per hour in a Volkswagen Beetle, when they wrote the “Autobahn” song….

(7) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 123 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Infinite Amount of Annual Leave”, John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty “don’t have any letters of comment but we do have discussion of the Belfast Eastercon, Reconnect, as well as musings on online convention Back to Our Futures and upcoming Worldcons and Eurocons. Plus, Liz read a book.”

An uncorrected transcript is available at the link.

A coffee stain on a piece of paper on which are written the words “Octothorpe 123” and “fully caffineated”.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary: Rise of the Guardians (2012)

On this day twelve years ago, The Rise Of The Guardians enjoyed its premiere in limited release with its full one that coming weekend.  It is quite possibly my favorite holiday film, though Scrooged, Lion in Winter, The Polar Express are also on the list as well. Oh and the forty year old version of A Christmas Carol starring George C. Scott. 

It was directed by Peter Ramsey and produced by Christina Steinberg and Nancy Bernstein from a screenplay by David Lindsay-Abaire. It was based on William Joyce’s The Guardians of Childhood series, a most delightful series indeed. 

OK, IT IS TIME FOR A CUP OF HOT CHOCOLATE PREPARED BY THE STEWARDS OF THE POLAR EXPRESS. COME BACK AFTER WE HAVE TOLD THE STORY OF THIS FILM.

The Guardians of Childhood series was a mystical epic of mythological characters fighting darkness to protect childhood dreams. It made very good source material for that aforementioned screenplay by David Lindsay-Abaire in which Jack Frost awakens from a very long nap under the ice with his memory gone to discover everyone has forgotten him.

Meanwhile at the North Pole (splendidly realized here), the Man in the Moon warns Nicholas St. North that Pitch Black (who look a lot Mr. Dark in Bill Willingham’s Fables series) is threatening the children of the world with his nightmares. 

He calls E. Aster Bunnymund, the Sandman, and the Tooth Fairy to arms. Each of these is a wonderfully realized character as the Man in the Moon and Nicholas St. North.

A series of truly epic battles to defeat Pitch Black follows lest all the children of the world are permanently beset with nightmares. He is defeated when his own Nightmares sensing he has grown weak drag him down into the Underworld.

DID YOU ENJOY THAT HOT CHOCOLATE? GOOD, COME ON BACK. 

The feature starred the voice talents of Hugh Jackman, Jude Law and Isla Fisher among others. I think it was a stellar voice cast and the animation was splendid. I’ve rewatched it several times, and the Suck Fairy sits on the couch sighing, drinking hot chocolate, stroking a Pixel, and saying that it’s too sweet for her to mess with. The holiday season does bring out the soft side of her. 

It did exceedingly well at the box office taking in over three hundred million on a budget of one hundred and thirty million according to Box Office Mojo, and about half of the critics really liked it such as Derek Adam’s of Time Out who proclaimed “Rise of the Guardians is an effervescent dose of fantasia that’s pretty hard to dislike. Unless, of course, you’re a cynical grump.” The grumpy ones I’ll not quote, but I’ll just say that Old Nick should give them a lump of coal this season.

The audience rating at Rotten Tomatoes is very healthy eighty percent.

Rise of the Guardians can be rented on Amazon Prime.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) THE PAST IS ANOTHER COUNTRY. “In Search of the Moomins in Helsinki: The Enduring Magic of Tove Jannson’s Characters” at Literary Hub. “Christiana Spens Returns to Her Father’s world (and the Beloved Moomin Books)”.

… As we explored Helsinki, perhaps inevitably, I kept thinking of my own father. As we sat in cafes and parks, I wondered which of them he had gone to, which of the museums and islands he had explored. Helsinki felt so familiar that it was as if I had already been here, and yet the more time we spent there, the more I realized that I didn’t know anything about my father’s time here at all.

He had not really told me stories about coming here; he had just gone and come back. I had imagined his times in Helsinki based on the gifts he returned with, the pictures in his books, and later the Moomin stories; but he had not really told me anything himself.

He had written about Alvar Aalto, expressed joy at the sight of herrings or gooseberries or meatballs; I knew he loved the place. He had even tried to build a Finnish summer house, in the same sky blue that was popular here; but he had never been very practical minded, and it had not stood up well to the elements.

Nevertheless, I had lived there for several years as a teenager. Perhaps this experience, living in a weather-beaten wooden Summer House in the woods, is what made Finland itself seem familiar to me, rather than anything my father ever told me about the country.

And yet, now that I was here, I found myself wondering about him anyway; had he gone to Esplanade Park, had he had coffee at Fazer, had he known Rock Church or the Uspenski Cathedral, had he felt this light as I did now? But I didn’t actually know, and I never would; he was not here, only his ghost was.

But the Alvar Aalto buildings were, all the other reminders were. And the Moomins were here, too; in gift shops and cafes, these friendly creatures appeared, giving the whole city the cast of a fairy-tale, along with its mists and sea, its pastel-colored buildings, its ships and cobbled stones….

(11) HUFFIN’ AND PUFFIN. Daisy Ridley answers readers’ questions over at the Guardian: “Daisy Ridley: ‘I made a toilet cake on Bake Off because flushing with the lid up is unhygienic beyond belief’”.

Did those late-night drinking and ceilidh sessions during the filming of The Force Awakens on the Skellig islands in County Kerry give you a taste for old-school, dusty pub culture and creamy stout? Galdove19

I’d never had a Guinness outside Ireland, so I got the good stuff the first time round. We had the sun shining on us every day, which the Irish crew said was unbelievable, although every time I’ve been to Ireland it’s been absolutely glorious. I had to climb about a thousand stairs up Great Skellig. Our unbelievable camera operator had a Steadicam and was climbing up backwards, so I thought: “There’s no way I can complain.” That tamed my own exhaustion. The Skellig islands are an ecological site, so we had to not disturb the puffin population, who were there one day, but had migrated the next, which was eerie and amazing. They obviously weren’t big Star Wars fans and thought: “We’ve had enough of this.”

(12) EXERCISE IN TERROR. [Item by Steven French.] Coming a little late for Halloween: “The health benefits of fright: A haunted house study” at Medical X Press.

…People often engage in activities that elicit fear for recreational purposes, from ghost stories and jump scare pranks to modern horror films and haunted attractions. This haunted house experiment suggests that such experiences may not only provide thrills but also potential health benefits by modulating immune responses.

Further research is needed to confirm the observed effects and explore the mechanisms underlying the relationship between recreational fear and immune function before clinical applications can be considered significant enough to incorporate acute fear into a health care setting….

(13) WHOVILLE’S GOLDEN ARCHES. The Grinch is now in Happy Meal at McDonald’s. So then — are these roast beast nuggets?

(14) JUMPING OUT OF THE WAY. “The International Space Station adjusts its orbit to avoid space debris” – NPR has the details.

NASA says that the International Space Station (ISS) shifted its orbit on Tuesday to avoid a piece of debris.

The debris avoidance maneuver involved firing thrusters on the ISS at 2:09 p.m. CT for 5 minutes, 31 seconds, according to NASA. This adjustment raised the ISS orbit to “provide an extra margin of distance from a piece of orbital debris from a defunct defense meteorological satellite that broke up in 2015,” the agency says.

Had the maneuver not been conducted, the debris would have come within nearly 2.5 miles of the station, NASA also says. The debris was “small,” U.S. Space Forces-Space tells NPR…

(15) INTERNATIONAL STAR WARS SHOW RENEWED. Variety reports, “’Star Wars: Visions’ Series to Return for Third Season”.

“Star Wars: Visions,” a Lucasfilm anthology series of animated shorts from around the world celebrating the mythology of Star Wars through different cultural perspectives, will return for a third season, Marvel Studios’ president Kevin Feige said on Wednesday.

Feige was a surprise guest at the annual Walt Disney Company Asia Pacific Showcase held in Singapore.

“Star Wars: Visions Volume 3” will debut in 2025 on the Disney+ streaming service. The upcoming series will feature both new and returning anime studios, and return to Japan to celebrate the world of anime through the elements and mythos of Star Wars….

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George takes us inside the “Red One Pitch Meeting”.

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

Pixel Scroll 10/24/24 The Scroll On The Edge of Pixelver

Posted on by
33

(1) EDITORIAL PRIVILEGE? Beneath Ceaseless Skies editor Scott Andrews has posted the text of his GoH speech given at World Fantasy 2024 on October 20. His message is: “Not Paying Editors Limits Range of Editorial Voices”.

… one way many indie zines afford all that [they publish] on a shoestring budget is that the editors take no pay.

I take no pay for editing BCS. I’ve put 25 hours or more a week into BCS, for 16 years. (Other than six First Readers, I do everything else: reading pass-ups, developmental editing, line-editing, producing the podcast, maintaining the website, posting social media. I clearly have delegation issues.)

If I was to be paid $10 an hour, 50 weeks a year: in order to fund that, BCS would have to more than double our current support, from Patreon patrons and donations and ebook sales, or cut half our fiction. Plus the time and hassle of doing that additional fundraising, which is considerable and exhausting.

I can afford not taking pay. But that approach of not paying editors means that many editors of indie zines in our field are people of financial privilege. And in our world, financial privilege often correlates with other privileges. So I think this practice of not paying editors of indie zines is limiting the range of editorial voices our field has.

Since I started BCS, our field has broadened vastly in the range of author voices: identities, backgrounds, areas of the world; languages. I believe we need to broaden the range of editorial voices too. To me, figuring out how to pay editors is a key step toward that.

I admit, I don’t have any answers. I’m not a business person. And I’ve got all I can handle just running BCS.

But I call this issue to your attention today because I think we need talk about it. We need ideas….

(2) BOOK AT BEDTIME. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Sceptre – Hodder & Stoughton, £22, hrdbk, ISBN 978-1-399-72634-4) has been made in the past couple of week’s BBC Radio 4’s (formerly the BBC Home Service) Book at Bedtime.

In the near future, a disaffected civil servant is offered a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering ‘expats’ from across history to test the limits of time-travel. Her role is to work as a ‘bridge’: living with, assisting and monitoring the expat known as ‘1847’ – Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to find himself alive and surrounded by outlandish concepts such as the ‘washing machine’, ‘Spotify’ and ‘the collapse of the British Empire’. With an appetite for discovery and a seven-a-day cigarette habit, he soon adjusts; and during a long, sultry summer he and his bridge move from awkwardness to genuine friendship, to something more. But as the true shape of the project that brought them together begins to emerge, Gore and the bridge are forced to confront their past choices and imagined futures. Can love triumph over the structures and histories that have shaped them? And how do you defy history when history is living in your house..?

The BBC’s forthcoming TV adaptation (as opposed to the episodic audio book) of this novel has attracted a claim of plagiarism by those who made the Spanish TV series El Ministerio del Tiempo [The Ministry of Time].

The separate Spanish TV series El Ministerio del Tiempo won the 2016 Ignotus Best Audiovisual Production as well as the 2017 Award.

Irrespective of plagiarism claims (time travel is a fairly common, if not standard, SF trope and the commonality of title could be happenstance – the book has its differences) the BBC has the rights to make a TV mini-series, so it is likely they used the copyright permission for this to also make an episodic audio adaptation. Each episode is 15 minutes long so with 10 episodes that’s 150 minutes (or two-and-a-half hours in old money) of audio book.

Get episodes here: Episode 1; Episode 2; Episode 3; Episode 4; Episode 5; Episode 6; Episode 7; Episode 8; Episode 9; Episode 10.

(3) DEATH IS SUPER BAD. “I’m So Sick of the Death of Superman” declares Charlie Jane Anders at Happy Dancing. The latest iteration prompted her to go back and look at the first comic book death. Which wasn’t great either.

…There’s a funeral, and eventually four imposter Supermen show up — everybody can kind of tell they’re imposters, but they hang around for ages. At last, Superman comes back to life, but now he’s wearing a black version of his famous uniform, plus he now has a mullet.

That’s it, that’s the whole story. 

How does Superman come back to life? I honestly can’t say. I realized several years ago that I couldn’t remember how Superman was resurrected in what’s now packaged as The Death and Rebirth of Superman, so I went back and reread the original comics to find out. And now, once again, I can’t remember, because it’s that memorable. I know that Superman meets his human dad, Pa Kent, in the afterlife, and Pa Kent talks to him about why it’s generally a good thing to not be dead. I know there’s some more Kryptonian bullshit. But beyond that, it’s a bit of a blur….

(4) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 121 of the Octothorpe podcast, “All About the Vibes”, John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty discuss Grass by Sheri S. Tepper, which was a finalist for the Hugo Award in 1990.

This is Alison’s pick for John and Liz to read, and we go into some of the themes of the book and whether or not female authors are as well-remembered as men (spoiler: no).

There’s an uncorrected transcript at the link.

Three hippae stand on a landscape of alien grass and plants in blue, purple, red, teal, and orange underneath a pinkish sky. The words “Octothorpe 121” appear at the top and the words “Grass Sheri S Tepper” appear at the bottom.

(5) ANNOTATED SNOUTS. “’Fascinating’: Tove Jansson’s Moomins notes to be published for first time” – the Guardian has details.

As a cult series of 20th-century children’s books, the Moomins have sold up to 30m copies worldwide. Now, extensive humorous notes that their Finnish creator, Tove Jansson, wrote on each of her lovable trolls with hippopotamus snouts are to be published for the first time, 25 years after her death.

Eighty-nine handwritten pages that cast new light on the “small, friendly and adventurous” creatures with fur “like velvet”, have been rediscovered among hundreds of thousands of items in her sprawling archive.

James Zambra, her great-nephew and a director of Moomin Characters, which manages her legacy, said: “This was actually in one of her notebooks. It’s fantastic. Getting Tove’s own thoughts on the personality traits of the characters is fascinating.”…

(6) IS CHATGTP “FAIR USE”? NO, SAYS FORMER OPENAI RESEARCHER. Publishers Lunch reports “Former OpenAI Staffer Claims AI Training Is Not Fair Use”.

A former researcher at OpenAI has spoken out against the company’s use of copyrighted data in a detailed, publicly posted analysis, reported on further by the NYT (which is suing OpenAI for copyright infringement). Suchir Balaji left OpenAI in protest “because he no longer wanted to contribute to technologies that he believed would bring society more harm than benefit.”

Early versions of the company’s technology were treated as research projects, which meant employees felt free to train them on any data without worrying about permissions and usage, Balaji told the Times. But as ChatGPT-4 became a commercial product, OpenAI failed to meet the rules of fair use, he said. According to Balaji, ChatGPT’s outputs aren’t significantly different from its inputs — which are copied in whole — and the outputs directly compete with the copyrighted work that it used for training.

Further, according to Balaji, “As A.I. technologies replace existing internet services, they are generating false and sometimes completely made-up information — what researchers call ‘hallucinations.’ The internet, he said, is changing for the worse.”…

Suchir’s full analysis, including illustrative graphs, is at his “When does generative AI qualify for fair use?” webpage.

While generative models rarely produce outputs that are substantially similar to any of their training inputs, the process of training a generative model involves making copies of copyrighted data. If these copies are unauthorized, this could potentially be considered copyright infringement, depending on whether or not the specific use of the model qualifies as “fair use”. Because fair use is determined on a case-by-case basis, no broad statement can be made about when generative AI qualifies for fair use. Instead, I’ll provide a specific analysis for ChatGPT’s use of its training data, but the same basic template will also apply for many other generative AI products….

(7) ABOUT FRANK MILLER. A trailer has dropped for the documentary Frank Miller: American Genius.

Frank Miller: American Genius documents the unique journey of an unparalleled American artist. The film explores the near half-century career of the legendary comic book artist and writer. Made for his fans following a near death experience, the documentary delves into Miller’s radical and defining influence on art, storytelling and culture.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born October 24, 1952 — David Weber, 72

By Paul Weimer: Sometimes the subtext is the text. A lot of space opera has the subtext of being naval adventures in space, ranging from the original Star Trek on to the present day. It is no surprise, then, that David Weber decided to cut straight to the source and have actual naval style military adventures in the stars, with Honor Harrington. His books follow the rise of Harrington in a manner that Hornblower and O’Brian could recognize, and appreciate. 

David Weber

With all of the side books and ancillary books in the series, the amount of Harrington stories Weber has produced is staggering, but it is undeniably a gem of an idea he can and has taken advantage of for all it’s worth. I’ve not read all of them, but enough to get a good sampling. 

What I like even more is Weber’s Armageddon Reef series. The Safehold books take place on a colony planet where humans have fled after a genocidal attack, and have been forcibly reduced in technology in order to evade detection. So we have an alien planet, humans on it, and a lack of space flight. And so Weber adds 18-19th century style naval combat and technology to the mix. 

These books, I feel, have to be an even more explicit loveletter to Hornblower and company.  The conflict between technology and religion and the problems of separation of chruch and state do elevate these books, I feel, to a question that we face today. While Weber’s novels might be dismissed as just being fun naval and space adventures, there is that undercurrent and layer of engaging with societal questions that make them very worthy of attention.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) WHAT IF? MICKEY & FRIENDS AS THE FANTASTIC FOUR. Mickey & Friends will put a spin on classic Marvel covers in 2025 with new Disney What If? Fantastic Four homage variant covers.

Continuing the “What If?” theme, Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, Donald, and more take over as Mister Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Human Torch, and the Thing to recreate the team’s most memorable adventures.

Check out the first two covers, on sale January and February, that pay homage to Silver Age issues: Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four #3 and #51. For more information, visit Marvel.com.

(11) LITTLE PRINCE, BIG PRICE TAG. “Rare typescript of The Little Prince to go up for sale” reports the Guardian.

A rare carbon typescript of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince featuring extensive handwritten corrections by the author is going up for sale. It is one of only three known copies and marks the first time a typescript of the classic story has been offered for public sale.

The artefact features what is believed to be the first written appearance of the famous lines: “On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux,” translated to mean: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”…

… The typescript is priced at $1.25m. It will be showcased at Abu Dhabi Art, an annual art fair taking place at the end of November.

(12) TEDDY HARVIA CARTOON.

(13) GUT INSTINCTS. “H.R. Giger and Mire Lee’s Biomechanical Netherworld” depicted by Frieze.

‘Have you seen Schinkel Pavillon’s H.R. Giger show?’ has been the question of the month in Berlin. In fact, the exhibition pairs the late Swiss artist with the South Korean sculptor Mire Lee, a detail that has mostly footnoted ensuing conversations. Although it’s hardly a surprise. An obvious novelty factor accompanies this appearance of Giger’s sculptures, paintings, drawings, and prints which – due to their creator’s work on the Alien film franchise (1979–2017) – fundamentally impacted society’s collective imagination of the far-flung other. But interesting questions also arise from this hagiographic netherworld. Namely, whether the show participates in a meaningful conversation – about our erotic and paranoid relationship to the unknown, say – or just satisfies current nostalgic tastes, if not contemporary art’s populist drift.

With her best work having as much guts as Giger’s aliens, many of Lee’s sculptures are abject biomechanical masses, made from concrete, silicon and steel, and sometimes veined with ooze-pumping tubes. From beyond the grave, Giger has contributed Necroconom (Alien II) (1990) – a life-size sculpture of the infamous alien Xenomorph, who crawled on knees and fore-talons, as much like a purring pole dancer as a menacing hunter, its exoskeleton made from sexy black polyester….

…More affecting in its provocation of bodily and existential tremors is Lee’s Untitled (2021), a small conflagration of metallic and silicon cables, bound to a motor, which churns slowly in a spot-lit pool of its own broken refuse, on the floor of an eerie basement room, dark and tiled like an abandoned shower. Simultaneously invoking a disembodied machine component or body part, the piece harks back to classic existential concerns: the feeling of crawling through life, forever breaking apart, suspended between humanity and technology, and wondering why we even bother. Less effective were a number of Lee’s larger works, which gestured towards sensational corporeal impact, without quite delivering: The Liars (2021), a foreboding hanging mass made from towels, chains, fabric and silicon, suggested a horrific meat locker, without being all that horrific, while its companion piece, Carriers: Offsprings (2021), finds slime pulsing through masses of hanging tangled transparent tubes, like entrails simulated in a theme-park haunted house….

‘HR Giger and Mire Lee’, 2021, exhibition view, Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin

(14) COSMIC BANGERS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] An astrometric analysis of Gaia data identified two waves of massive runaway stars that have been dynamically ejected from the young cluster R136 in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Researchers used data from the European Gaia Space Telescope to discover 55 high-speed stars launched from the young star cluster R136 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The young cluster R136 has launched as many as a third of its most massive stars in the last few million years, at speeds above 100,000 km/hr. Those stars travel up to 1,000 light years from their birthplace before exploding as supernovas at their end of life, producing a neutron star or black hole.

Primary research here: “Two waves of massive stars running away from the young cluster R136” in Nature.

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ms. Mojo made a list of the “Top 10 Things Only Adults Notice in The Wizard of Oz”. Number three is the unanswered question, “Where Are Dorothy’s Parents?”

“The Wizard of Oz” works on another level as an adult. Welcome to MsMojo, and today we’re counting down our picks for the wonderful, wizardly, and weird things about “The Wizard of Oz” that might have grabbed their broomsticks and flown over our heads when we were kids.

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

Pixel Scroll 10/10/24 I Ride An Old Anti-Gravity Paint, My Partner Favors Cavorite

Posted on by
16

(1) NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE. Korean author Han Kang wins 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature reports Publishers Weekly. (There are no genre elements present in the descriptions of Han Kang’s work in “What to read: Han Kang” at NobelPrize.org, or in the “Han Kang” Wikipedia article.)

Han Kang. Ill. Niklas Elmehed © Nobel Prize Outreach

…One of only 18 women to be awarded global literature’s highest honor, she is the first South Korean writer to win the prize and the first Asian laureate since 2012, when the Nobel was awarded to Chinese author Mo Yan.

“Han Kang’s visible empathy for the vulnerable, often female lives, is palpable, and reinforced by her metaphorically charged prose,” said Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel Committee at the Swedish Academy, the body that administers the prize. “In her oeuvre,” he added, quoting from the Committee’s citation, “Han Kang confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose.”…

(2) FORMER FRAZETTA HOME IN FLORIDA UNHARMED BY STORM. Frank Frazetta’s daughter reassured fans that the Frazetta Art Gallery in Boca Raton, FL was undamaged by Hurricane Helene. (This is not the Frazetta Art Museum which is in Pennsylvania.)

This paragraph distinguishes the Frazetta Art Gallery from the Museum:

…For Frazetta fans, it’s an essential destination, since it contains dozens of pieces of Frazetta artwork, paintings, newspaper strips, comic book pages, and a nice selection of personal artwork Frazetta executed as gifts for his wife, Ellie, and other family members. The personal work on display gives viewers a true feeling of intimacy, of being part of Frazetta’s inner circle, since most of them have never been reprinted….

(3) ELECTORIAL. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] A few years ago, because of the Sad Puppies Affair (which, contrary to popular belief, was not a Man From U.N.C.L.E. episode), there was much debate in fandom as to how we vote on the Hugo short-list.  Now, better late than never, this week’s edition of Nature has an article on electoral systems,  “Which Is The Fairest Electoral System?”  

Scientists hope to explore whether some approaches are more likely to promote democratic resilience or to stave off corrosive partisanship. Such answers might inform policy, but differences in interpretation are inevitable when it comes to politics. “Democracy is a complex system,” says Lee Drutman, a political-science researcher at New America, a think tank in Washington DC. There can be multiple ways to parse the data, he says.

A Hugo-type system is briefly mentioned…

There are sub-variants in FPTP (first past the post) systems: ranked-choice voting, which is used, for instance, in Australia, ensures a majority winner. Voters rank all candidates or parties; the lowest-ranked candidate drops out and their supporters’ second-choice preferences are tallied, and so on until a single candidate surpasses a 50% threshold. And run-off elections, such as those in France, when the two leading parties are voted for in a second round, ensure a direct national face-off.

Interestingly the piece has two conclusions. One that ranked choice has benefits, but a contrary view 2) is that this pushes folk to limited options. Here the article calls for more political parties in the US rather than the two big ones.  In Hugo terms this would translate as increasing the number in the short-lists.

(By the way, personally I have no preference: I just share out of interest and am not advocating anything.)

(4) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 120 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Activate Liz” —

We do rather fewer letters of comment than last episode, and then we let Liz do her favourite topic of all: STATISTICS.

Listen here: Octothorpe (Podbean.com). Read the unedited transcript of the episode here.

Words read ‘Octothorpe 120: Introducing Judge Coxon. “I am the lore”’. They are around a picture of John as a Judge in the style of *2000AD*, holding a big stack of books. The logo of the Clarke Award may or may not appear in the artwork.

(5) ATWOOD PICKS A CARD. Margaret Atwood appeared on NPR to publicize her new collection called, Paper Boat: New And Selected Poems: 1961-2023. They played clips of her answers to questions on the Wild Card program. “Writer Margaret Atwood plays a game of ‘Wild Card’”.

MARTIN: When I asked the question [about envy], though, you asked for a definition – envy that you suffered or had to manage or other people’s envy of you?

ATWOOD: Yes.

MARTIN: Is that – does that happen a lot?

ATWOOD: It has, certainly. Yeah. So what I said to young writers who had had a sudden success, I said, within a couple of years, you will have three nasty, vicious personal attacks from people you don’t know.

MARTIN: What were the attacks that were leveled at you in your first couple years of success?

ATWOOD: (Laughter) Some of them were quite funny. So a lot of it had to do with hair – Medusa hair, frizzy hair, you know, name something about hair. Yes, and one of them wrote a satirical fairy tale in which I bit the heads off men and made them into a pile and turned into an octopus. Figure that out.

MARTIN: So you were a Medusa-haired man hater.

ATWOOD: Yeah. And power mad, ladder-climbing…

MARTIN: Oh, power mad?

ATWOOD: Yes. Power-mad, ladder-climbing witch.

MARTIN: Oh, wow. I mean, that’s evocative.

ATWOOD: I thought so too.

(6) REMEMBERING J.G. BALLARD. “Diary: Deborah Levy on J. G. Ballard” at Book Post.

J. G. Ballard, England’s greatest literary futurist, changed the coordinates of reality in British fiction and took his faithful readers on a wild intellectual ride. He never restored moral order to the proceedings in his fiction because he did not believe we really wanted it. Whatever it was that Ballard next imagined for us, however unfamiliar, we knew we were in safe hands because he understood “the need to construct a dramatically coherent narrative space.”

When it came to anything by Ballard, genre really did not matter to me; his fiction could have been filed under “Tales of Alien Abduction” or “Marsh Plants” and I would have hunted it down. Despite our difference in generation, gender, and literary purpose, it was clear to me that he and I were both working with some of the same aesthetic influences: film, surrealist art and poetry, Freud’s avant-garde theories of the unconscious….

…The reach of his imagination was never going to fit with the realist literary mainstream but I was always encouraged by his insistence that he was an imaginative writer.
“I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.”

Good on you, Jim.

His highly imagined landscapes and abandoned aircraft and stopped clocks and desert sand were located in his head—and anyway he preferred driving fast cars to walking. He once sent me a photograph of the Heathrow Hilton and told me it was his spiritual home. …

 (7) BUSTED. Was Chuck Tingle’s “true identity” revealed today? That’s what author C.J. Leede was hoping we’d think, til you-know-who caught them in the act.  

(8) THOU SHALT NOT PASS. “The Editors Protecting Wikipedia from AI Hoaxes” — an excerpt from a 404 Media’s post.

A group of Wikipedia editors have formed WikiProject AI Cleanup, “a collaboration to combat the increasing problem of unsourced, poorly-written AI-generated content on Wikipedia.”

The group’s goal is to protect one of the world’s largest repositories of information from the same kind of misleading AI-generated information that has plagued Google search results, books sold on Amazon, and academic journals.

“A few of us had noticed the prevalence of unnatural writing that showed clear signs of being AI-generated, and we managed to replicate similar ‘styles’ using ChatGPT,” Ilyas Lebleu, a founding member of WikiProject AI Cleanup, told me in an email. “Discovering some common AI catchphrases allowed us to quickly spot some of the most egregious examples of generated articles, which we quickly wanted to formalize into an organized project to compile our findings and techniques.”…

(9) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboys Books presents episode79 of the “Simultaneous Times” podcast with Pedro Iniguez, Lisa E Black, and Addison Smith.

  • “Sneeze” by Pedro Iniguez. (Music by Phog Masheeen. Read by Jean-Paul L. Garnier)
  • “Of Course I Still Love You” by Lisa E Black. (Music by Phog Masheeen. Read by the author.)
  • “Residual Traces” by Addison Smith. (Music by Fall Precauxions. Read by Jean-Paul L. Garnier.)
  • Theme music by Dain Luscombe.

Simultaneous Times is a monthly science fiction podcast produced by Space Cowboy Books in Joshua Tree, CA.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Anniversary: Barbarella film (1968)

Oh, Barbarella. 

I didn’t quite get why it was so controversial when I first saw it, it was a bowdlerized version of the already bowdlerized version Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy. This was on a local channel in New York City in the 1980’s. I thought it was a funny but rather goofy looking SF movie, although of course Jane Fonda was something to look at.

(My father was upset at her being in the movie, something I did not understand for years until I understood her politics…and my own family’s politics, better)

I finally got to see the uncut and real version in the early 2000’s on DVD.  And then I could finally see what I was missing. Did it add a lot to the actual movie besides the visuals? No, but what visuals!  I slotted it in the same space as Woody Allen’s Sleeper, as a science fiction movie that talked about sex, and around sex, a lot. But going on the other visuals, the sets, costume design and props (including the infamous Excess Pleasure Machine) were just mind boggling in both of the versions I’ve seen.  Too, the actual cinematography is mesmerizing, the camera knows where to linger, where to bring our attention in sometimes rather chaotic and baroque set pieces. I have not yet seen a 4k version of the film, but that is something I do very much need to see sometime, to see it at the maximum fidelity and clarity.  

Is it great cinema? No. But it is great art. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) DEADPOOL AND WOLVERINE COMICS REUNION. “Deadpool and Wolverine officially return in 2025, Marvel confirms” – GamingBible has the story.

…For those who miss the bromance between Marvel’s Deadpool and Wolverine, you’re in luck because the pair are officially returning in 2025.

Their antics won’t play out on the big screen but upon the pages of comics instead.

The Deadpool/Wolverine series comes from writer Benjamin Percy and artist Joshua Cassara. This partnership, much like Deadpool and Wolverine, is a match made in heaven.

Fans who enjoyed the bloody violence of the film needn’t worry that the comics will strip that action away…

(13) BEGINNING OF A FASCINATION. CrimeRead’s Jeremy Dauber outlines “A Brief History of the Rise of Horror in 19th Century America”.

At the Civil War’s end, under a quarter of Americans lived in cities; by the end of the Great War, the proportion was almost exactly half. All those people moving to the cities—both from rural America and from abroad— changed things. Size created anonymity, the possibility of losing yourself in the crowds, remaking yourself, if you so chose. . . . or getting lost, and not always by your choice. Increasingly, the streets were lit by electric light, and the machines inside them were powered the same way; but that simply swapped a new set of shadows and terrors for the old ones. The horrors of the next decades were, all too frequently, industrial and mass-produced: whether they came from the chatter of guns or the whirr of a film projector, they cast an eye on progress, and murmured about what lay beneath.

Start, perhaps, with that newly electrified white city, Chicago. In 1893, its World’s Columbian Exposition, or World’s Fair, was an announcement of America’s newly flexing muscles: its willingness to be broad-shouldered, to play a leadership role in world affairs, to stride into the future. And yet, inside the city limits, there sat a haunted castle. This castle, though, had no clanking chains, no Gothic ghost or Salem witch; it had a psychopath who used modern tools—the soundproofed room, the knockout gas-bearing pipes, and of course, the three-thousand-degrees-Fahrenheit kiln—to disable, kill, and dispose of guests who checked into his World’s Fair Hotel at 701 Sixty-third Street. And why did H. H. Holmes do it? For his part, when eventually caught, he had a simple, and chillingly modern, explanation: “I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.”…

(14) I DO SOLEMNLY SWEAR. SFFAudio reminds us that once upon a time Robert Bloch urged authors to swear to uphold “ROBERT BLOCH’S CREDO FOR FANTASY WRITERS”.

(15) JUSTWATCH MARKET SHARE REPORT. As the third quarter of 2024 comes to an end, JustWatch has released their latest data report on market shares in the US. As usual, they based our report on the 13 million JustWatch users in the US selecting their streaming services, clicking out to streaming offers and marking titles as seen.

SVOD market shares in Q3 2024
Global streaming giant: Prime Video managed to keep its first-place rank, with a 1% lead against Netflix. Meanwhile, Max is managing to stay ahead of major competitors Disney+ and Hulu.

Market share development in 2024
Disney+ and Hulu both gained momentum with a +1% subscriber boost by September. While Netflix and Max stumbled with a -1% decline each, revealing a shake-up in the streaming rivalry.

(16) IF YOU INSIST ON WATCHING. “Too Scared to Watch Horror Movies? These 5 Tips May Help” says the New York Times (paywalled).  

The October ritual of watching horror movies in the lead-up to Halloween can be exhilarating. Unless, of course, you can’t quite stomach the gory and gruesome, or even the spooky and spine-tingling….

…If you’re someone who wants to indulge in the season but dreads jump scares and buckets of blood, here are five tips that could help even the biggest scaredy cats among us start to open up to the world of horror.

The first two tips are:

Embrace the Spoiler

The first and best line of defense is to read the plot in advance. If you’re feeling brave, go for just a synopsis, but there’s no reason to be a hero. I sometimes read an entire plot in great detail before watching, especially with films I know will tap into my weak spot: movies about demonic possession. Unlike with other genres, knowing what will happen in horror doesn’t necessarily detract from the experience of watching. Your heart will most likely still pound. You will probably still jump. And the visuals and sounds will probably still shock. Knowing what comes next may simply help keep the anxiety and uncertainty in check.

The Smaller, the Better

Nothing against the big-screen experience, but going small, by watching on your phone or a tablet, can go a long way. Not only will you have a sense of control that a crowded theater with speakers blaring hellish soundscapes can’t provide, you will also be able to make adjustments. If it gets too loud or chaotic, turn down the volume. If it gets too visually scary, turn down the brightness or flip the device down. Sometimes for the most intense scenes, it’s better to just hear the movie without seeing it, or to watch without sound….

(17) QUITE A TAIL. And for your viewing pleasure, The Copenhagen Post recommends “Reptilicus”.

Next time you’re looking for a Danish film to watch, spare a thought for Denmark’s only giant monster film ‘Reptilicus’ – a 1960s cult-classic with puppets, bad acting, bazookas, and a prehistoric reptilian beast rampaging through Amager…

… Reptilicus is the name for two monster films about a giant, prehistoric reptile which decides to attack Denmark.

Shot simultaneously, one film is in Danish (1961) and the other is from the USA in English (1962). Both films have a near identical cast (except for one actress) and two directors (Poul Bang – Danish, and Sidney Pink – English) who took turns throughout each shooting day to create two of the most iconic, kitsch and downright unintentional masterpieces to grace Danish screens.

The plot tells of a Danish miner in Lapland who accidentally digs up a section of a giant reptile’s tail from the frozen ground. The section is flown to the Denmark’s Aquarium in Copenhagen, where it is preserved in a temperature-controlled room for scientific study.

Of course they don’t put anyone competent in charge of monitoring it but instead choose a bumbling buffoon (the legendary Dirch Passer). The room is left open and the section begins to thaw and regenerate….

(18) FILLING UP WITH GAS. According to TechRadar, “Toyota’s portable hydrogen cartridges look like giant AA batteries – and could spell the end of lengthy EV charging”.

Toyota is showcasing a series of sustainable developments at the Japan Mobility Bizweek later this month – including its vision of a portable hydrogen cartridge future, which could apparently provide ‘swappable’ power for next-gen hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs).

Originally a project of Toyota’s mobility technology subsidiary Woven (formerly Woven Planet), the team produced a working prototype of a hydrogen cartridge back in 2022 but has since developed the idea further… and appears to be running with it.The latest cartridges are lighter and easier to transport, with Toyota claiming the current iteration has been developed with the experience the company has gained in reducing the size and weight of the hydrogen tanks used in its fuel cell electric vehicles….

…Put simply, the cartridges would allow fuel cell electric vehicle drivers to swap out their power source when hydrogen levels run low, rather than having to refuel at a station like you typically would with a fossil fuel-powered car.

But Toyota also feels that these refillable and renewable cartridges could be used in a multitude of situations, such as to generate electricity in a fuel cell to power the home or even providing hydrogen to burn for cooking.

In fact, Toyota and the Rinnai Corporation are exhibiting a stove at Japan Mobility Bizweek that does just that. Similarly, in emergency situations, the hydrogen cartridge could be removed from the car and used to power any applicable device in the case of a blackout, for example….

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Paul Weimer, Danny Sichel, Lise Andreasen, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel “All Is Wells” Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 9/26/24 What A Knitted Sweater Would Look Like If I Scrolled One And Pixel Two

Posted on by
14

(1) TOLKIEN CRITICISM. Some fannish references surprisingly creep into Dennis Wilson Wise’s reviews of The Literary Role of History in the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien by Nicholas Birns and Representing Middle-earth: Tolkien, Form, and Ideology by Robert T. Tally Jr. in “Tolkien Criticism Today, Revisited” for the Los Angeles Review of Books. For example:

….Of these debates, Birns often takes the more challenging or counterintuitive side. For instance, most Tolkienists agree that Tolkien based his Rohirrim on the Old English kingdom of Mercia. Instead, Birns sees the Rohirrim as semimodern—not medieval—through their “civilizing” contact with Gondor. To say the least, this view enjoys questionable textual support, but as one goes through Birns’s book, a clear pattern begins to emerge. Over the last few years, the Tolkien community has endured its own shadow version of the Sad Puppies fiasco. In 2021, certain right-leaning fans (and at least one senior scholar) loudly decried the “wokeism” of a diversity-themed seminar hosted by the Tolkien Society, and with even greater toxicity, some people in Tolkien fandom have virulently attacked the multiracial casting in The Rings of Power, an Amazon Prime Video series that first aired in September 2022.

This is the cultural moment into which Birns wades, but for someone hoping to make an important political intervention, he frequently stumbles over several small, self-deprecating asides. One example involves race and representation. Before launching into the argument, Birns explicitly denies that, as a white male from an Anglo-American cultural background, he is “trying to act as an authority on those subjects.” Here, Birns is plainly attempting to acknowledge his positionality, a move often called for by progressive scholars, but his good intentions catch The Role of History in Tolkien in a performative quandary. They let right-wing crusaders dismiss his arguments out of hand; after all, this book wasn’t written by “an expert.”

But of course Birns isn’t really trying to show wayward young fascists the light. His real audience is the academic Left, and despite his principled humility, Birns clearly wants to provide his fellow leftists with scholarly ammunition against the anti-diversity crowd. Thus his various scholarly takes consist mainly in quashing claims of “Germanic primitivism” in Tolkien. Birns downplays not only Rohan’s clear connection to Mercia—the Old English people, remember, were originally Germanic—but also Tolkien’s overall admiration for the Gothic peoples. Additionally, Birns alleges that Tolkien took multicultural Byzantium as his model for Gondor, not imperial (and eventually Ostrogothic) Rome. Even more pointedly, although Birns laments how little Tolkien knew about the “traditions and cultural memory of non-European peoples,” he nevertheless claims to see some African influence on the legendarium. Allegedly, Tar-Míriel of Númenor bears a passing resemblance to Empress Zewditu of Ethiopia.

Even for readers who cheer his goals, these connections can seem far-fetched….

(2) CAN’T GET NO SATISFACTION. “6 sci-fi and fantasy authors who hated the screen adaptations of their books” at Winter Is Coming.

Earlier this week, A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin set off a drama bomb when he bluntly criticized HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon in a blog post….

But compared to some of the other authors who have criticized adaptations of their work, it was nothing. Below, let’s look at some authors who were unhappy with the screen versions of their books, and what they said and did about it…

The article leads off with Ursula K. Le Guin (Earthsea), and follows with Alan Moore (Watchmen), Stephen King (The Shining), P.J. Travers (Mary Poppins), Brandon Sanderson (The Wheel of Time) and Michael Ende (The Neverending Story).

Ursula K. Le Guin didn’t like the Sci-Fi Channel’s adaptation of Earthsea

Let’s begin our journey into dissatisfaction with Ursula K. Le Guin, the author of the beloved Earthsea books. Where high fantasy epics often involve war or other mass-scale conflict, the Earthsea novels are quieter and more complicated, with different books following different characters living on a string of islands where magic is practiced freely. When The Sci-Fi Channel announced that it was going to make an Earthsea miniseries based on the first book in the series, A Wizard of Earthsea, people were excited.

But that excitement evaporated when they saw the finished product, which ran back in 2004. Le Guin herself was already bracing for the worst. “When I saw the script, I realized that what the writer had done was kill the books, cut them up, take out an eye here, a leg there, and stick these bits into a totally different story, stitching it all together with catgut and hokum,” she wrote for Locusmagazine. “They were going to use the name Earthsea, and some of the scenes from the books, in a generic McMagic movie with a silly plot based on sex and violence.”

“I want to say that I am very sorry for the actors. They all tried really hard. I’m not sorry for myself, or for my books. We’re doing fine, thanks. But I am sorry for people who tuned in to the show thinking they were going to see something by me, or about Earthsea. I will try to be more careful in future, and not let either myself or my readers be fooled.”

While Le Guin had kind words for the actors, she had a major problem with the casting. In the Archipelago of Earthsea, almost all of the characters are people of color, including the wizard Ged, the closest thing the series has to a main character. But in the Sci-Fi show, pretty much everyone was white, something Le Guin did not appreciate. “In the miniseries, Danny Glover is the only man of color among the main characters (although there are a few others among the spear-carriers),” she wrote for Slate. “A far cry from the Earthsea I envisioned.”

“My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn’t see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn’t see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had “violet eyes”). It didn’t even make sense. Whites are a minority on Earth now—why wouldn’t they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future?”

Le Guin was a bit kinder about the 2006 animated movie Tales from Earthsea, although she was still disappointed it didn’t channel her books more. “It is not my book. It is your movie. It is a good movie,” she remembers telling director Goro Miyazaki. At least she didn’t hate it this time.

(3) GERWIG HONORED. Deadline is there as Barbie director “Greta Gerwig Accepts Motion Picture Pioneer Of The Year Award”.

Greta Gerwig was beaming Wednesday night as she was honored as this year’s Pioneer Of The Year, and in the process also helped raised $1.4 million for the Will Rogers Motion Picture Pioneers Foundation at a sold-out dinner that packed the Beverly Hilton Hotel International Ballroom…

(4) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to chow down on cheesy garlic bread with Jeffrey Ford in Episode 237 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

I last chatted with Jeffrey Ford — last for your ears, that is — eight years ago during the 2016 Readercon — in a conversation which appeared on Episode 17. Back then, I described him as a six-time World Fantasy Award-winning and three-time Shirley Jackson Award-winning writer whose new short story collection A Natural History of Hell had just been published. But now that it’s 2024 and we’re back for yet another Readercon, he’s an eight-time World Fantasy Award-winning writer and a four-time Shirley Jackson Award winner.

Jeffrey Ford

Since that previous meal, he’s also published the novel Ahab’s Return: or, The Last Voyage in 2018, A Primer to Jeffrey Ford in 2019, The Best of Jeffrey Ford in 2020, and Big Dark Hole in 2021, plus three dozen stories or so new stories.

We discussed why writing has gotten more daunting (but more fun) as he’s gotten older, the difficulties of teaching writing remotely during a pandemic, how he often doesn’t realize what he was really writing about in a story until years after it was written, the realization that made him write a sequel to Moby-Dick, why if you have confidence and courage you can do anything, the music he suggests you listen to while writing, the reason he thinks world building is a “stupid term,” the advice given to him by his mentor John Gardner, how the writing of Isaac Bashevis Singer taught him not to blink, why he prefers giving readings to doing panels, the writer who advised him if everybody liked his stories it meant he was doing something wrong, and much more.

(5) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 119 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Only One of Them Is My Bludgeoning Hand, John” –

We respond to your burning questions in our bumper mailbag episode! We spend a good long time going through your posts, and we briefly discuss the recent allegations against Neil Gaiman before moving onto happier topics. Listen here.

There’s a transcript at the link.

A famous photograph of Margaret Hamilton standing beside printed outputs of the code that took the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon, overlaid with the words “Octothorpe 119” and “Our Listeners Write In”.

(6) BRITISH ROBOT PURCHASES BOOM. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Robot sales in Britain broke its own record in 2023 with 3,830 industrial robots sold according to the International Federation of Robotics.  This represented a 51% increase over 2022.

However, Britain still lags behind France, Italy and the European leader Germany. In 2022 Germany installed 269,427 industrial robots.

I keep on warning folk that the machines are taking over, but no-one ever listens….

You can read about it here: “IFR press release World Robotics 2024”.

(7) UNSTUCK THE LANDING. Space-Biff! surprises us by revealing Kurt Vonnegut’s work creating board games in “So It Goes”. And one was finally published this year — Kurt Vonnegut’s GHQ: The Lost Board Game. (It seems to be available at Barnes & Noble®.)

Before he became a famous author, over a decade before Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut was a board game designer. A failed board game designer, with only a sheaf of notes, a single rejection note, and an unfinished patent to his name, but a board game designer nonetheless.

And now his sole surviving design is an actual board game you can buy and play and, if you’re anything like me, spend a few hours marveling at. Thanks to the efforts of the Vonnegut estate in preserving his notes and Geoff Engelstein in interpreting and tweaking them into a functional state, GHQ — short for “General Headquarters” — is, not unlike Billy Pilgrim, a thing unstuck in time, transported from 1956 to 2024….

… Is GHQ a good game? Sure. For its time. For its place. Had it appeared in 1956, it may well have become the third great checkerboard game. With its zones of control and special units, it might have helped shape the coming century’s approach to tabletop gaming….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Lis Carey.]

September 26, 1957 – Tanya Huff, 67.

By Lis Carey: Tanya Huff is a Canadian science fiction and fantasy writer, who made her first sale of two poems to The Picton Gazette for $10, at age ten.

Since then, she has given us several fantasy series, including the Keeper’s Chronicles, in which Claire Hansen, a Keeper, has unintentionally become responsible for a small hotel, and the not completely sealed hole to hell in its basement. She’s assisted, with some degree of befuddlement initially, by Dean, the young handyman and cook she found working there; Jacques, the ghost of a French-Canadian sailor who has haunted the hotel since he died there in the 1920s; and her not befuddled at all cat, Austin, who talks, and is the source of a great deal of often snarky advice. I’m currently enjoying the first volume, Summon the Keeper.

Tanya Huff

Other fantasy series include the Blood series, featuring a former police detective and a vampire, which was adapted for television as Blood Ties, and the Quarters series, with bards who travel the kingdom carrying both news and magical skills, and are faced with new challenges when the kingdom is invaded.

Tanya Huff has also given us the Valor Confederation series, a military sf series where Staff Sergeant Torin Kerr tries to keep both her superiors and her company of space marines alive while on lethal missions across the galaxy. I hear excellent things about it, but haven’t read any of it yet.

An interesting tidbit is that while studying at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto for her Bachelor of Applied Arts degree, she was in the same class as science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer. They collaborated on their final TV Studio Lab assignment, a short science fiction show.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) WEST COAST AVENGERS INTRODUCES BLUE BOLT. This November, the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes are back on the best coast in an all-new run of West Coast Avengers from writer Gerry Duggan and artist Danny Kim. Led by Iron Man, the new roster includes Spider-Woman, War Machine, Firestar, a mysteriously redeemed Ultron, and another former villain seeking redemption— Blue Bolt!

 An experienced Marvel henchman with unrefined lightning-based abilities, Chad Braxton, AKA Blue Bolt, makes his first appearance in WEST COAST AVENGERS #1 where he finds himself on loan to the Avengers through a new prison release program. Reckless, undisciplined, and downright rude, Blue Bolt may just be the biggest jerk in the entire Marvel Universe. Can the Avengers whip him into shape or will Blue Bolt’s abrasive attitude–and lack of morals–tarnish the team’s legacy forever? See him for yourself in Kim’s original design sheet for the character plus a promotional image by Todd Nauck.

On the unique role Blue Bolt will serve on the team, Duggan said, “The Avengers have seen a lot of rough customers over the years. Hell, even Deadpool and Wolverine have been Avengers at different points. But the Avengers haven’t seen a bigger @$!&^% than Blue Bolt. He’s mean, he’s self-centered, narcissistic, and he’s only on the Avengers West Coast squad to shave time off his sentence. And wait until you find out what he’s in jail for. Yeesh.”

(11) SFF ON LEARNEDLEAGUE: WILLIAM GIBSON. [Item by David Goldfarb.] Yesterday’s match day featured this question:

What is the portmanteau title of William Gibson’s seminal and influential 1984 cyberpunk novel, the first (and only) to win the Nebula, Hugo, and Philip K. Dick awards?

This had a 37% get rate league-wide, with no single wrong answer getting as much as 5% of the submissions.

(12) MY PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION NOMINATION. [Item by Francis Hamit.] My novel Starmen has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The nomination has been accepted by Columbia University. It awards the Pulitzers. Which is good but there is more to do.

Leigh Strother-Vien is also nominated for her great work editing the book. It’s a very long book: 620 pages in the print editions. Four years of work at a time when we were both disabled and sick a lot of the time. Just shows you what you can do when you try. But we are up against very big publishers with big marketing and publicity machines. There is a long list of distinguished and very busy jurors from Publishing and Academia who may not like the fact that we are, alas, self published.

We never thought of doing it any other way. Why? I’ll be 80 next week and Leigh is 70. We are disabled. And we are soldiers. There is a lot of prejudice between us and a traditional publisher. We don’t have an agent and the “over the transom” method was closed years ago. There is a generation of younger editors that are more concerned about politics than the quality of the writing. Publishing executives tend to chase the market and imitate what has been successful rather than take risks on “new” or “unknown” writers. Ageism and Ableism are just two of the many hoops our book would have to jump through to get a deal. We don’t have time for all of that. We are too sick and tired, both of us, to deal with it.

So we applied, got accepted, and we’re a bit of a charity case because of the Kickstarter appeal to raise funds for formatting the interior and the excellent cover donated by Markee Book Covers. I took a credit union loan to cover other expenses. We have been graced with almost entirely five star reviews and the endorsements of friends such as Jacqueline Lichtenburg and Glen Olsen. So far, so good. But now this is a battle for public attention, for sales, and for ratings and reviews on Amazon, Goodreads and other websites.

This novel is an experiment in genres.  We use a lot of them packed into what is on the surface an adventure novel with more than a dozen principal characters, each fully formed. Thematically it moves from Historical/ Western/ Detective fiction to Espionage, Political Intrigue, and Apache Myths, that becomes surrealist Fantasy and Science Fiction, mixed with Romance, Witchcraft, Feminism, Quantum Mechanics, String Theory, and disquisitions on slavery in the Old South, the failure of Reconstruction, and the floating world of sex workers called the Demimonde. All are grist for the mill.  A lot of research was needed. A lot of deep thinking since I had no outline. That would have been more of a hindrance than a help.

Instead I just start at the beginning with an accidental meeting of two Scots far from home, in a dusty border town called El Paso, and the appearance overhead of a large balloon carrying a traveling circus. One of the Scots is the local manager for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency (a forerunner of today’s FBI) and the other is a young anthropologist from Cambridge University, George James Frazer. You just know interesting things will happen.

So much for the tease. Buy the book for the rest.

There is another reason that I feel confident.  I’m a very good writer.  I’m also a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, the oldest and most prestigious graduate writing program in the world. Rather amazing for a kid who got Ds in high school English. I could not spell or punctuate worth a damn. Still can’t. I’m dyslexic, a condition unknown and unnamed in the 1960s. I began my career as a Drama major, and when I came to Iowa the first time, I had never heard of the Workshop. I soon met professors there and graduate assistants, some of whom were or would become famous. But it was a mandatory drama theory course, “Playwrighting”, that changed my life. I began writing fiction and was admitted to the Undergraduate Writers Workshop. Then I spent four years in the US Army, where I also learned journalism and began my professional career. Returning to Iowa I was in classes with writers who became very famous and also won Pulitzer Prizes. Jane Smiley, Tracy Kidder, and last year’s winner, Jayne Philips were among them. But it’s not the Iowa MFA that helps, but the Iowa workshop program, a trial by fire if there ever was one for literature. Iowa rigs the game. You don’t get in unless you are already at the top. Over 97% of all applicants fail. When you have done that getting your book published should be easy — and is, when you are young and have an agent and a publisher that can see decades of other books coming.  At my age, not so much, and I have had agents tell me that to my face and others drop me because I wouldn’t imitate other writers that were best sellers.

Self-publishing is a long and honorable tradition in American letters. Willa Cather and Walt Whitman started that way. So once more I’m in good company. I am going to have to push myself and my book to prevail, but there is no long list or short list for the Pulitzers. Only winners and finalists. If it were not for so many top reviews we would not have entered, but now that we are here we can only try our best.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] “Trap Pitch Meeting”. Huh. Sounds pretty much like the review I read. Then again, with a plot this shallow/unbelievable and nepotism this blatant, it might be hard for a parody and a review to differ very much.

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

Pixel Scroll 9/14/24 Scrollchak, The Night Pixel

Posted on by
14

(1) RING TIME. Robin Anne Reid’s newsletter Writing from Ithilien offers a collection of links to interesting discussions of the Rings of Power series in“The Vibes Around ‘Tolkien’”.

I love reading what fans who love the show have to say about it, and I’m having great fun reading those posts (including the ones I’ve linked to above!). Let’s just say I enjoy all the varied vibes around a text that is now part of the greater global “Tolkien” phenomenon, i.e. connected to all the things, even if I don’t much like that particular instance!

(2) BALANCED IN THE SCALES AND FOUND WANTING. Meanwhile, The Hollywood Reporter does a roundup of all the complaints about the two epic series adapting George R.R. Martin and Tolkien in “’House of the Dragon’ and ‘Rings of Power’ Facing Epic Headaches”. (Got to love the article’s illustration of a sword-wielding GRRM on a flying dragon.)

… As for Rings [of Power]s’ ratings, third-party services show a steep drop from the series’ debut season. The spin from Amazon goes like this: Of course the ratings are down, they were so huge last time. There is something to this. Even Prime Video hits like Fallout and The Boys haven’t matched Rings’ season one on a global basis (Fallout did top the show in the U.S.). Amazon says the new season is doing well internationally and is on track to be a Top 5 season for Prime Video….

…Then there is Dragon, whose problems are more interesting. The second season incensed some fans after spending eight episodes leading to a massive cliffhanger — a climactic battle sequence that was pushed from a shortened season two to season three, apparently for budget reasons (which has led to more “David Zaslav ruins everything” chatter online). In the ratings, the season dipped about 10 percent from the show’s first season, but the numbers do remain high. 

Two weeks ago, saga author (and Dragon co-creator and executive producer) George R.R. Martin, who has been complimentary about Dragon in the past, posted on his blog that he was going to reveal “everything that’s gone wrong” with the show. Smart money could have been wagered on this never happening — surely HBO would do everything in its power to persuade Martin not to post.

But last week, Martin did, and the result was fascinating…

(3) SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE 2024 LONGLIST. The Scotiabank Giller Prize 2024 longlist was released September 4. The Prize is a celebration of Canadian literary talent. The 12 titles were chosen from 145 books submitted by publishers across Canada. There is one longlisted work of genre interest:

  • Anne Michaels for her novel Held, published by McClelland & Stewart

The other longlisted works are:

(4) OCTOTHORPE. In Episode 118 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Och Aye, Sci-Fi”, John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty continue their discussion of the Worldcon. (There’s a rough-and-ready transcript here.)

We round off most of our discussion of the Glasgow Worldcon, including talking about Halls 4 and 5, communications, Worldcon structures, and publications. Thanks to Sara Felix, this week, for providing our lovely artwork.

Three pins of armadillos flying colourful spaceships are on top of a piece of paper with blobs of glue that look like planets. The lettering “Octothorpe 118” appears above in a similar style to the pins.

(5) JOURNEY PLANET. Journey Planet 84 “Workers’ Rights In SFF” is available at this link. File 770 promoted the zine with this post.

Contributor Joachim Boaz has cross-posted his article from the issue about Clifford D. Simak at Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations: “Exploration Log 5: ‘We Must Start Over Again and Find Some Other Way of Life’: The Role of Organized Labor in the 1940s and ’50s Science Fiction of Clifford D. Simak”.

My article on organized labor in the 1940s and ’50s science fiction of Clifford D. Simak went live! I’d love to hear your thoughts. I’ve spent the last half year researching and reading religiously for this project–from topics such as Minnesota’s unique brand of radical politics to the work of contemporary intellectuals like C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) whom Simak most likely read.

(6) SUPREME GENRE READER. The New York Times learns “Ketanji Brown Jackson Looks Forward to Reading Fiction Again”. (Paywalled.) “The Supreme Court justice has been drawn to American history and books about the ‘challenges and triumphs’ of raising a neurodiverse child. She shares that and more in a memoir, ‘Lovely One.’”

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which books and authors stick with you most?

Pretty voracious. My favorite childhood books were Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time” series. I really identified with Meg. I also liked Judy Blume’s “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” And I went through a Nancy Drew phase.

Which genres do you … avoid?

 I don’t think I’ve indulged in reading fiction in many years. I hope to get back to doing so, now that our daughters are grown, but I would avoid anything that would qualify as a horror story. I don’t like to be frightened.

Are there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time?

I am gearing up to read “Parable of the Sower,” by Octavia Butler, soon. I have it both in paper and as an audiobook, which helps.

(7) TUTTLE REVIEWS. Lisa Tuttle’s latest sff review column for the Guardian takes up The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera; Withered Hill by David Barnett; Crypt of the Moon Spider by Nathan Ballingrud; The Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei; and The Specimens by Hana Gammon. “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup”.

(8) BOB WEATHERWAX (1941-2024). [Item by Andrew Porter.] The New York Times reports a star dog trainer died August 15.

Bob Weatherwax, a Hollywood dog trainer who carried on his father’s legacy of breeding and coaching collies to play Lassie, the resourceful and heroic canine who crossed flooded rivers, faced down bears and leaped into the hearts of countless children, died on Aug. 15 in Scranton, Pa. He was 83.

One of his uncles trained Toto for “The Wizard of Oz” (1939). 

Mr. Weatherwax also trained other dogs seen in Hollywood films, including Einstein, the Catalan sheepdog in “Back to the Future.”

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born September 14, 1936 — Walter Koenig, 88. Walter Koenig’s our Birthday Honoree this Scroll. He really has had but two major roles, though he has also appeared in a number of other roles. 

The first was as the Russian born Enterprise navigator Pavel Chekov on the original Trek franchise. He went on to reprise this role in all six original-cast Trek films, and later voiced President Anton Chekov in Picard. 

I like the Chekov character even if on viewing the series decades later I cringed on the quite obvious stereotype.

A much better character was played by him in the form of Alfred Bester (named in homage of that author and a certain novel) on Babylon 5. He wasn’t at all a sympathetic character and eventually was wanted for war crimes but was still a fascinating character. His origin story is established in J. Gregory Keyes’ Psi Corps trilogy written after the series was cancelled and is considered canon. 

He showed up in The Questor Tapes as an administrative assistant, Oro, for two episodes of Starlost.

Moontrap, a SF film with him and Bruce Campbell, would garner a twenty-eight percent rating at Rotten Tomatoes. 

Alienable, a sort of comic SF horror film which he executive produced, financed, wrote and acts in has no rating there. 

He’s Fireman Frank in Unbelievable!!!!! which apparently parodies Trek. The film has over forty cast members from the various Trek series. The film follows the omicron adventures however unintentional of four astronauts including one of who is a marionette. I cringed when I watched the trailer. I really did.  Anyone see it? 

Not surprisingly he acts in one of those Trek fanfics, Star Trek: New Voyage as his original character.

Finally he appears via the wonder of digital technology in the Hugo-nominated “Trials and Tribble-ations”. 

Walter Koenig

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Brewster Rockit should have declined the invitation.
  • Cornered illustrates do it yourself versus premade.
  • Carpe Diem wants to drop a subject.
  • Tom Gauld does his own version of a popular meme.

(11) NO SAVING THROW. All 25 quit: “Annapurna Interactive Entire Staff Resigns” reports Variety.

The staff of Annapurna Interactive, the games division of Megan Ellison‘s Annapurna, has resigned en masse after a deal to spin off the group fell through, Bloomberg reports.

Founded in 2016, Annapurna Interactive has partnered with boutique game studios for several critically acclaimed titles, including “Stray” (pictured above), described as a “third-person cat adventure game set amidst the detailed, neon-lit alleys of a decaying cybercity,” as well as “What Remains of Edith Finch,” “Outer Wilds” and “Neon White.”

The staff exodus came after a breakdown in talks between Ellison and Nathan Gary, formerly president of Annapurna Interactive, to spin the gaming unit off as a separate company. “All 25 members of the Annapurna Interactive team collectively resigned,” Gary and the other employees said in a joint statement Thursday to Bloomberg. “This was one of the hardest decisions we have ever had to make and we did not take this action lightly.”

(12) STREET ART. James Bacon told File 770 readers today about “Dublin Street Art”.

Chris Barkley says his hometown deserves a look, too: “Cincinnati Wins A Top Spot For The City’s Street Art And Murals” at Islands.

…And, to those that know the Queen City, it’s no surprise that Cincinnati took the street art crown in 2024’s USA Today and 10Best Readers’ Choice Awards. The annual competition, which counts down top tens around the country, uses a panel of experts to determine ten nominees with street art chops. Then, they leave voting to readers to decide the winners. This year, Cincinnati, which has been among the nominees going back to 2021, finally took the top spot, thanks to the more than 300 stunning murals dotting the city’s neighborhood streets….

There’s a more extensive photo gallery at ArtWorks Cincinnati.

(13) BLOCH SCRIPT ON EBAY. The Dave Hester Store of Storage Wars fame would be happy to sell you a screenplay from Robert Bloch’s estate, part of his personal archives: “1961 ‘The Merry-Go-Around’ By Robert Bloch”, based on Ray Bradbury’s “The Black Ferris”. Haven’t been able to determine whether it was produced. Taking bids, starting at $99.

(14) PRACTICING FOR ARTEMIS. NPR learned “How the crew of NASA’s Artemis II prepares for a mission to the moon”. It’s an audio report.

This time next year, NASA plans to send its first crewed mission to the moon. NPR’s Scott Detrow meets the crew of NASA’s Artemis II mission, to see how the team is preparing.

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

Pixel Scroll 8/29/24 Swamp Thing! You Make My Haploid Graveyard Heart Sing!

Posted on by
28

(1) BRIAN KEENE INSTALLS A NEW BASKET AT HIS BOOKSTORE. Patrick Tomlinson somehow thought he was entitled to call out Brian’s purity. Anybody could have told him what happens when you yank Brian’s chain.

(2) FLORIDA SUED. “John Green and Jodi Picoult Join Publishers, Authors and Advocates in a Lawsuit Against Florida Book Bans” – People has the story.

A group of book publishers and renowned authors — along with students, their parents and The Authors Guild — are suing the state of Florida for its decision to implement the state’s book-banning law.

On Thursday, Aug. 29, Penguin Random House announced in a press release that it — along with Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishers, Simon & Schuster and Sourcebooks — would be filing a suit against the state to challenge House Bill 1069.

Also joining the suit are two students, two parents, the Authors Guild and the individual authors Julia Alvarez (The Cemetery of Untold Stories) Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak), John Green (The Fault in Our Stars), Jodi Picoult (By Any Other Name), and Angie Thomas (The Hate U Give).

Back in 2022, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed HB 1069 into effect, giving parents a say in what books schools can and can’t have in their libraries. The Associated Press reported at the time that the law would require Florida schools to provide a searchable list of all books in their libraries, and school boards have to give notice to the public if adding in new reading materials….

…One of the attorneys representing the group of plaintiffs, Dan Novack said in the press release that the law’s “complex and overbroad provisions have created chaos and turmoil across the state, resulting in thousands of historic and modern classics — works we are proud to publish — being unlawfully labeled obscene and removed from shelves.”…

(3) MAKING A LIVING AS A WRITER (FOR SOME VALUES OF LIVING). Jeff Reynolds applies inflation to sf magazine pay rates of years gone by to argue “The Past Is Not as Rosy as You’ve Been Led to Believe” at the SFWA Blog.

… You could make an excellent living selling shorts during the pulp era. But there’s a truckload of ifs tied to that could. If editors liked you; if you wrote decently; if you churned out work fast enough that your fingers bled; if you didn’t mind being hungry. Being a pulp writer during the Depression years was downright murderous.

I limited my research to pulp’s heyday, the mid-1920s through mid-1930s, and left out the type of magazines referred to as slicks in order to maintain a close comparison with modern genre writers who publish short stories. By 1934, there were as many as 250 monthly pulps operating, publishing stories on topics ranging from war, science fiction, romance, westerns, mysteries, and so on.

The majority of pulps paid one cent per word or less. A few paid two or three cents, and some paid even more for writer exclusivity. But to get to that level, you had to be talented and charming. You also had to write enormous quantities of stories….

(4) GOLDMAN FUND. Dream Foundry’s “Con or Bust” program is taking applications for funding to bring Palestinians and members of the Palestinian diaspora to the 2025 Worldcon. Apply at the link.

Our preferred application window for funding is now open until October 21, 2024 for Palestinians or members of the Palestinian diaspora planning to go to Worldcon 2025 in Seattle. Applicants who apply within this window will be considered together, and hear about their funding amounts in early November. Applications received outside this window will be considered on a first-come-first served basis for as long as funding remains. 

We’d love to reach as many Palestinian fans and creators as possible. 

(5) THE WATERMELON GRANT. The Watermelon Grant offers $2000 USD in unrestricted funds to an emerging Palestinian creator in the field of speculative arts. The 2025 grant considers works of speculative fiction and poetry. Full guidelines at the link.

The roots of Palestinian and Black American solidarity are deep and storied, stretching back decades and centered in the works, writings, and movements of James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, and Toni Morrison. In keeping with FIYAH’s pledged solidarity with the Palestinian people, The Watermelon Grant aims to assist emerging Palestinian creators working in speculative artforms throughout the world.

This grant is funded by L. D. Lewis and administered by Dream Foundry’s Incubator Program. To support an expansion of the project, through a donation to the Match Me campaign, tap here.

The Watermelon Grant offers $2000 USD in unrestricted funds to an emerging Palestinian creator in the field of speculative arts. A panel of three judges with expertise in a given year’s accepted format review in full all applications entered through an electronic submissions portal. Applications are judged on a criteria which considers artistic merit and potential impact. One grant is awarded annually (two if our Match Me campaign funds)….

WHAT ARE “SPECULATIVE ARTS?”

Speculative Arts are here defined as works of imagination based in concurrent, alternate, invented, or emerging realities. Works of memoir or nonfiction would be considered ineligible. Rather than just being based in speculative literature, the grant cycles through eligible media every year allowing artists beyond those who work in prose or poetry to enter portfolios of visual media (illustration, photography, etc) or those pertaining to performance arts.

(6) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 117 of the Hugo-winning Octothorpe podcast, John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty discuss the recent Worldcon, Glasgow 2024.  Listen here: “You Made That Joke Last Time, John”.

We talk mostly about registration, attendance, and programme. Spoiler: we quite liked it, listeners.

There’s an uncorrected transcript at this link.

Three photographs dominate the centre of the image. The left-hand photograph is of a prototype Hugo made of rough wood and cardboard; the centre photograph is of a rough-ish wood base and tin foil rocket but with the actual acrylic and etching, and the right-hand photograph is of the finished Hugo Award. Text below the photos reads “protoprototype”, “prototype”, and “2024 Hugo”. Above, the words “Octothorpe 117” appear.

(7) OCTOTHORPE RECUSES FROM 2025. After winning the Best Fancast Hugo at Glasgow, the Octothorpe crew say they are recusing “for at least the 2025 Hugos”.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

August 29, 1954 — Michael P. Kube-McDowell, 70.

By Paul Weimer: I first encountered Kube-McDowell ‘s work in a quasi tie-in novel, Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Odyssey. This was part of a series of novels that Asimov commissioned in the titular city, set somewhere in his Robot-Empire timeline. It started off in the classic amnesia case, with a man on the run and not remembering why, and easing readers into the setting Asimov had created for Kube-McDowell to explore in this and subsequent books. It was entertaining enough that I started to look for other works of his. I came across some stories here and there (especially a couple that wound up as Tales from the Darkside)

Michael P. Kube-McDowell

And then I struck gold when I found Alternities. 

Alternities stands as one of the classic parallel world novels. Walter Endicott, clearly not from our world, stumbles from our world, suddenly, into a world not his own. The singular universe has now fractured into a kaleidoscope (the novel uses the word maze) of alternate realities. The novel, like many alternate history multiverse novels of the period (before and since) heavily thinks about the branch points, the jonbar points, the decisions that lead to each of the major color-coded worlds that we see in the book. There is a lot of speculation as to why the worlds split as they did, and a surprising answer and conclusion, as well.  The novel shows his erudition not only in science but in general communication of popular knowledge. Kube-McDowell’s columns and articles on everything from the space program to the idiocy of “scientific creationism” are a testament to his knowledge, curiosity, and ability to explain and bring ideas to his reading audience both in fiction and nonfiction alike.

And he’s a filker on top of all that.  Quite the Renaissance man indeed.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Speed Bump shows if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
  • Thatababy exposes the inner workings.
  • The Argyle Sweater is present at the creation of a famous saying.
  • Rubes complains about a superhero theme song.

(10) KBG. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Alaya Dawn Johnson and Sarah Beth Durst on Wednesday, September 11 starting at 7:00 p.m. Eastern. Location: KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003 (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs).

Alaya Dawn Johnson

Alaya Dawn Johnson is the author of Trouble the Saints, winner of the World Fantasy Award; Reconstruction, her debut short story collection; and The Library of Broken Worlds, recent winner of the BSFA award for Fiction for Young People. Alaya has lived in Mexico for the last decade, where she’s sung in a blues band, gotten her master’s degree, produced a documentary, written novels, fooled around and fell in love. She and her filmmaker partner can normally be found in rural Oaxaca on a haunted mountaintop, where they have half a house, seven dogs and a mare.

Sarah Beth Durst

Sarah Beth Durst is the New York Times bestselling author of over twenty-five books for adults, teens, and kids, including cozy fantasy The Spellshop. She’s been awarded an American Library Association Alex Award, as well as a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award. Several of her books have been optioned for film/television, and her novel Drink Slay Love was made into a TV movie and was a question on Jeopardy! She lives in Stony Brook, New York, with her husband, her children, and her ill-mannered cat. Visit her at sarahbethdurst.com.

(11) EBERT’S TEN WORST SF MOVIES. Roger Ebert died in 2013 and missed seeing some stinkers that might belong on this list; however, he probably thought the field of candidates was already pretty crowded: “10 Worst Sci-Fi Movies of All Time, According to Roger Ebert” at Collider.

The science fiction genre asks audiences to suspend belief in the name of scientific and sometimes extraterrestrial wonders. This demands intricate premises that rely on logic and enough of a fictional leap to seem plausible in a world that exists apart from reality.The worst movies of the genre are unable to do any of these things, many of them falling victim to the merciless reviews of the esteemed Roger Ebert. In his reviews of what he deemed the worst sci-fi movies of all time, Ebert cuts through the convoluted and scolds the special effects.

First and worst is Battlefield Earth. Trailing in second place is —

2. ‘Jason X’ (2001)

Directed by James Isaac

With Ebert’s incredible distaste for the Friday the 13th movies, it’s only fitting that he gave the slasher franchise another scathing review for its sci-fi chapter. The tenth installment in the series, Jason X takes place in the year 2455 where a cryogenically frozen Jason Vorhees is transported from the now-research facility at Camp Crystal Lake to space. Aboard the ship, he thaws out and begins terrorizing the crew. The formulaic horror movie swaps the nooks and crannies of the summer camp for a spaceship where the promiscuous crew sneaks away only to be met by the masked slasher.

In one moment of the movie, Jason’s iconic hockey mask and garments are replaced with metallic armor. Jason X calls upon the rules of its former films but also strays so far with its dive into sci-fi. Ebert’s one-star reviewcalled the movie a “low-rent retread” of the Alien franchise but was dismally optimistic there would be a follow-up movie. Laughably terrible and so far out of its element, Jason X is easily considered one of the worst sci-fi movies of all time.

(12) TREKKIN’ TO GONDWANALAND. “Matching dinosaur prints were found an ocean apart in Africa and South America” – NPR follows a prehistoric trot.

Tens of millions of years ago, South America and Africa were part of the same land mass, an ancient supercontinent called Gondwana.

At some point, the two continents we now know started to pull away from each other until there was just a thin strip of land at the top holding them together.

A group of scientists say in new research that matching dinosaur tracks found in modern-day Brazil and Cameroon were made 120 million years ago along that narrow passage before the continents separated.

“There was just a neck of land connecting the two, and that neck of land is the corridor that we’re talking about,” said Louis Jacobs, a professor emeritus of earth sciences at Southern Methodist University.

(13) DRESS REHEARSAL FOR LUCIFER’S HAMMER. Scitechdaily covers the biennial exercise: “NASA Confronts 72% Asteroid Impact Probability: A Planetary Defense Test (scitechdaily.com)

…Asteroid Impact Preparedness

A large asteroid impacting Earth is highly unlikely for the foreseeable future. But because the damage from such an event could be great, NASA leads hypothetical asteroid impact “tabletop” exercises every two years with experts and decision-makers from federal and international agencies to address the many uncertainties of an impact scenario. The most recent exercise took place this past April, with a preliminary report being issued on June 20.

Designing Realistic Impact Scenarios

Making such a scenario realistic and useful for all involved is no small task. Scientists from the Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, which specializes in the tracking and orbital determination of asteroids and comets and finding out if any are hazards to Earth, have played a major role in designing these exercises since the first 11 years ago.

“These hypothetical scenarios are complex and take significant effort to design, so our purpose is to make them useful and challenging for exercise participants and decision-makers to hone their processes and procedures to quickly come to a plan of action while addressing gaps in the planetary defense community’s knowledge,” said JPL’s Paul Chodas, the director of CNEOS.

…The Impact Scenario

This year’s scenario: A hypothetical asteroid, possibly several hundred yards across, has been discovered, with an estimated 72% chance of impacting Earth in 14 years. Potential impact locations include heavily populated areas in North America, Southern Europe, and North Africa, but there is still a 28% chance the asteroid will miss Earth. After several months of being tracked, the asteroid moves too close to the Sun, making further observations impossible for another seven months. Decision-makers must figure out what to do.

Leading the exercise were NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO), the Federal Emergency Management Agency Response Directorate, and the Department of State Office of Space Affairs. Over the course of two days in April, participants gathered at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, which hosted the event, to consider the potential national and global responses to the scenario.

(14) THE MAN WHO SOLD THE SUN. [Item by Daniel Dern.] HotHardware.com has learned “California Startup Wants To Sell Sunlight After Dark Using A Giant Space Mirror” Dern ponders, (a) what’s the potential (bad) impact on global warming, and (b) could we use this to sell dark during the day? And c) If earth gets invaded by giant cats, this might be useful.

…Nowack remarked at the International Conference on Energy from Space, “The problem is that solar energy is not available when we actually want it. It would be really great if we could get some solar energy before the sun rises and after sunset, because then you could actually charge higher prices and make a lot more money.” He added, “And we think that reflector-based technologies can solve this problem.”

Reflect Orbital, a California-based startup, wants to send 57 small satellites into low-Earth orbit with 33-square-foot ultra reflective mylar mirrors that would, in theory, bounce sunlight back down to solar farms on Earth. The company made a video (see above) that uses a hot-air balloon to simulate how the technique is supposed to work. If successful, the satellites could provide an additional 30 minutes of sunlight to the solar farms during peak demand times.

There are some possible pitfalls to the idea, however. Thick clouds and stormy weather could potentially block the sunlight from reaching its destination. Seasonal changes that alter the amount of sunlight in certain areas of the world could also present challenges, and the possible environmental impacts of this light reflection have also not been discussed thus far.

The company’s orbital mirror project is scheduled to launch sometime in 2025, and interested parties can “apply for sunlight” over the next few months ahead of the launch….

(15) SCIENTIST BEWARE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] You’ve heard of ‘writer beware’, well now scientists beware as there are some who are out to build up a fake profile.  It seems there is a citation black market. Reported in this week’s Nature.

Research-integrity watchers are concerned about the growing ways in which scientists can fake or manipulate the citation counts of their studies. In recent months, increasingly bold practices have surfaced. One approach was revealed through a sting operation in which a group of researchers bought 50 citations to pad the Google Scholar profile of a fake scientist they had created.

The scientists bought the citations for US$300 from a firm that seems to sell bogus citations in bulk. This confirms the existence of a black market for faked references that research-integrity sleuths have long speculated about, says the team.

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

Pixel Scroll 8/18/24 The Golden Pixels Of The Scroll

Posted on by
11

(1) LOOK OUT FOR YOURSELF. The Horror Writers Association blog continues its “Nuts & Bolts” series with “Author Todd Keisling on Self-Advocacy for Writers”.

Nobody becomes a writer because they had childhood dreams of negotiating contracts. Like it or not, according to author Todd Keisling, it’s part of the job for authors without an agent. In this month’s edition of Nuts & Bolts, Todd talks about what authors – particularly beginners – should know about self-advocacy.

Q: What do you mean by self-advocacy, where writers are concerned?

A: I mean just that: You have to advocate for yourself. Not every writer has the luxury of an agent to review and negotiate contractual matters. I certainly didn’t, not for many years, and over time I learned from others what to watch out for, what was acceptable, and when to walk away. If a writer has no representation, it’s necessary to be their own advocate and speak up when a publisher isn’t doing what they said they would, or if a contract isn’t worded to your liking. No one else is going to speak up for you, so you have to do it yourself.

Q: What mistakes do beginning writers tend to make in that regard?

A: The biggest mistake I’ve seen (and one that I’ve made myself) is jumping into a contract as soon as it’s offered. Contracts are legally binding agreements, but many young writers are so enamored by an offer of publication that they will sign it without reading it. Another mistake is not taking the time to research the publisher, or to research the market and determine if what said publisher is offering is a standard deal or not. I’m talking about pay rates, percentages, rights, and more.

Q: What are some red flags that writers should look out for?

A: Any legal language that says the writer is financially responsible for any part of the process. That’s a huge red flag. Money flows to the writer, always.

Rights grabs are a big one. If a publisher is seeking all rights — worldwide print rights (regardless of language and region), film, audio, graphic novel — with little or no compensation, that’s a huge red flag. Especially if the publisher has no history of acting on those rights.

Term limits are another — you don’t want a publisher to own the publishing rights in perpetuity. Those terms should be spelled out in the contract. Lack of a rights reversion clause is another one I look for. A reversion clause will spell out how and when your rights revert back to you in the event the publisher files bankruptcy or goes out of business….

(2) BOMBADIL FINALLY GETS HIS 15 MINUTES OF FAME. In an Interview with actor Rory Kinnear, the Guardian reporter reveals that they haven’t read LoTR very carefully (hello, Barrowdowns?!!): “Rory Kinnear: ‘I congratulate everyone who is on the brink of baldness’”.

… Kinnear’s next appearance will be in the second season of Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. He’s playing Tom Bombadil, a mysterious, magical, much-beloved character from JRR Tolkien’s classic, but one never before seen on screen. Viewed by Tolkien as a personification of nature, and the oldest being in Middle-earth, Bombadil doesn’t intervene in any of the goings-on in the books. Having been around since the dawn of time, he’s above the petty notions of good and evil.

That makes him a tricky character to adapt. Neither Ralph Bakshi, director of the 1978 animated retelling of the story, nor Peter Jackson, the film-maker behind the multi-Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy, thought him worthy of inclusion in their versions. Bakshi said Bombadil “didn’t move the story along”, a view shared by Jackson. Even JD Payne, co-showrunner of The Rings of Power, told Vanity Fair that the character was “anti-dramatic … the characters kind of just go there [to Bombadil’s home] and hang out for a while, and Tom drops some knowledge on them.”

What drew Kinnear to a character so inconsequential no director ever wanted to go near him before? His partner, it turns out. Kinnear had been approached by the producers of the series in late 2022 about joining the cast. But having never read the books or seen any adaptations, he was in the dark about the significance of the character. He got off the phone and went downstairs to tell his partner, fellow actor Pandora Colin, about some character called Tom Bombadil.

“She looked at me and said: ‘You’re kidding?’” he recalls. “It’s her favourite part of the books. I usually like her taste, so I thought I’d better read them and start preparing. It was mainly from her reaction that I was interested. Inconsequential, dramatically, as Tom may be, he’s obviously left an impression on fans.”’

(3) OCTOTHORPE. Winner of the 2024 Best Fancast Hugo Octothorpe has dropped episode 116: “I’m Not Absolutely Sure I Voted”.

The live episode from Glasgow 2024 is here! We know you all expect the live episodes to be a bit less structured and organised than the recorded ones, but the three of us had had even less sleep than usual and so it’s a bit more chaotic than usual… normal service will resume in 117!

Spontaneously generated transcript here.

John, Liz and Alison (I know, listener, I know) are looking off to the right holding their Hugo Awards as people take photographs of them on the stage at the SEC Armadillo.

(4) FRESH HORROR. Gabino Iglesias, author of House of Bone and Rain, reviews three new horror books in the New York Times: Nicholas Belardes’s The Deading (Erewhon Books, 280 pp., $28); Cherie Priest’s The Drowning House (Poisoned Pen Press, 418 pp., paperback, $16.99); and Chuck Tingle’s Bury Your Gays (Tor Nightfire, 294 pp., $26.99). 

(5) FURTHER PERSPECTIVES ON NEIL GAIMAN. Maureen Ryan, a critic, journalist and contributing editor at Vanity Fair, has thoughts on Neil Gaiman, creative gods, American Gods and rotten pedestals at Burner Account.

…It sounds like some of these women approached the media before and didn’t get anyone to take on their stories. If you’ve wondered, I’ve never been approached by anyone with allegations like the ones that recently came to light. And while I would be very surprised if there is not further coverage of this matter, I know from extensive experience that these kinds of investigations take time. A lot of time.

Time, care and attention are required to do this kind of reporting properly, in ways that show compassion and consideration to the survivors, and in ways that pass muster with fact-checkers, editors and lawyers. (Legal review of my book, for example, took about a year, and some stories I’ve done have gone through several months of legal review, especially when the subject of a story has the resources to hire a lot of lawyers, spin doctors and crisis PR firms. Having to engage for months with all those hired guns is about as pleasant as you’d think.)

Because folks have asked, I am not working on any kind of Gaiman followup. In part because I have other commitments that take precedence. In part because what I have to say about these kinds of behaviors, patterns, dynamics and abuses is in my book (and in my previous decades’ worth of in-depth reporting on Hollywood).

And in part because I have already reported on Gaiman, somewhat indirectly, and I did not enjoy a significant aspect of the fallout of that experience. 

In 2018, I began hearing about massive issues affecting the TV adaptation of Gaiman’s book American Gods. The debut season’s showrunners had been fired abruptly, and the second season, according to my sources, was in deep trouble. I pitched a story to Lesley Goldberg, a friend and a longtime reporter/editor at The Hollywood Reporter — and it turned out she’d been hearing similar things, so we teamed up. As it happened, our sources didn’t overlap much, which was actually a good thing: Between us, we’d gathered a large array of people with a wide range of perspectives, all of whom were saying similar things about the acrimonious chaos behind the scenes. 

We worked really hard on that piece, and I felt — and still feel — confident of our sourcing and diligence. What we published, I believe, was not just accurate but prophetic. American Gods certainly wasn’t perfect in its first season, but it was bold, stylish, had a lot of potential and was a solid televisual interpretation of the book. Gods was a far inferior drama in Season 2, and the chaos behind the scenes apparently continued until it was finally cancelled after three seasons. At one point, the following became a running joke among myself and a couple of journalist friends: The shortest roster in Hollywood was the one listing experienced showrunners who hadn’t been asked to take over American Gods. 

People are allowed to react to reported pieces however they want, and the folks at or near the center of a story may well have a very different perspective than I do as a journalist. That’s all fine, and that’s not something I generally get worked up about. What I want you to understand about what follows is that I wasn’t upset by the fact that Gaiman had a reaction to that story, or that he appeared to have a reaction that didn’t align with my own impressions. What pissed me off was the nature of that reaction and how it made me feel as an experienced professional. 

After the story came out, and then when Season 2 of American Gods finally emerged months later, on social media and in interviews, Gaiman had things to say about our reporting. What pissed me off were remarks that made us sound like pesky little irritants who didn’t know what we were doing. Speaking for myself, I felt he conveyed the impression that we didn’t talk to anybody important or deeply informed or who had knowledge of the real story. (We did.)…

…When I saw Gaiman’s comments in various spheres, I felt some kind of way about this supposed champion of women being so gratingly, condescendingly dismissive of the work of two women who had, at that point, half a century’s worth of journalism experience between them. (Two queer women as well, though anyone reading the piece may not have known that.) 

After that, whenever I saw his “approachable cool guy” routine on social media, or saw him touted as an ally or feminist, I rolled my eyes pretty hard. Back when all this was going on, I thought about saying some of the above online, because for a while there, I was pretty angry about the way our work was dismissed so arrogantly. But I didn’t say anything in public, in part because I knew it might come off as sour grapes or pettiness.

An even bigger reason I stayed silent was that, after more than 30 years of acclaim, attention and adoration in comics, film, book publishing and TV, Neil Gaiman has a lot of strident defenders and superfans, and …honestly, that intimidated me. Having had other stan armies hatemob me in the past, I did not have the bandwidth to potentially endure a lot of enraged superfans coming after me….

(6) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

August 18, 1950 – Destination Moon.  Seventy-four years ago on this date, Destination Moon, produced by George Pal and an uncredited Walter Lantz premiered in the United Kingdom. (It premiered earlier in New York City on June 27.)

It’s based off Heinlein‘s Rocketship Galileo novel. That novel, one of his juvenile works, had been published by Charles Scribner’s Sons just three years before the film came out. Heinlein wrote in Expanded Universe that publishers initially rejected the script feeling that journeying to the Moon was “too far out”.

It was directed by Irving Pichel from the screenplay by Alford Van Ronkel, Robert Heinlein and James O’Hanlon. Heinlein was also the technical adviser. 

It starred John Archer, Warner Anderson, Erin O’Brien-Moore, Tom Powers and Dick Wesson. Oh, and an appearance by Woody Woodpecker, who helps explain how rockets work. Really, he does appear here. 

Matte paintings by Chelsey Bonestell, already known for similar artwork, was used for the lunar landscapes. These were used for the departure of the Luna from Earth; its approach to the Moon; a panorama of the lunar landscape; and the spaceship’s landing on the lunar surface.

I can’t find any production notes so I’m unable to tell you about how the SFX was done. A pity that. If anybody knows, do tell. 

Critics were mixed with Bob Thomas of the Associated Press saying, “Destination Moon is good hocus-pocus stuff about interplanetary travel” whereas Isaac Asimov meanwhile not surprisingly said in In Memory Yet Green that it was “the first intelligent science-fiction movie made.”  

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes give it a so-so 48% rating. It however did rather well at the box office returning ten times its half million-dollar production budget. 

It would be voted a Retro Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation at the Millennium Philcon. 

It is not in the public domain, but the trailers are and here is one for you. So as always in such circumstances, do not offer up links to it. 

(7) COMICS SECTION.

(8) FICTION TAXONOMY. [Item by Steven French.] Mark Haddon on the difference between ‘literary’ and genre fiction: “Author Mark Haddon: ‘Bodies are such a good source of drama’” in the Guardian.

…One difference between what you might loosely call literary fiction and genre fiction is a kind of decorous avoidance of the overly dramatic. I always think of the sex scene in The Well of Loneliness: “And that night they were not parted.” Come on! Let’s see what happens! Or the Hilary Mantel story The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, which pulls away at the end. In genre fiction – horror, police procedural, whatever – that’s where the story would start, isn’t it? Keep the camera running. You get to the end of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These and think the drama is about to start: now the real difficulties will happen; now you have a family….

(9) SHAKE AND BAKE. “Pompeii Wrecked by Earthquake at Same Time as Vesuvius Eruption, Research Shows” – an unlocked New York Times article.

…“The effects of seismicity have been speculated by past scholars, but no factual evidence has been reported before our study,” Dr. Sparice said, adding that the finding was “very exciting.”

The team focused on the Insula of the Chaste Lovers. This area encompasses several buildings, including a bakery and a house where painters were evidently interrupted by the eruption, leaving their frescoes uncolored. After excavation and careful analysis, the researchers concluded that walls in the insula had collapsed because of an earthquake.

First, they ruled out hazards such as falling debris as a primary cause of the destruction — a deposit of stones under the wall fragments in the insula suggested it did not crumble during the eruption’s initial stage. Then they compared the damage to known effects of seismic destruction — for example, on historical buildings.

The excavation also revealed a pair of skeletons covered with wall fragments in the insula. One skeleton even showed signs of having attempted to take cover. According to the researchers, bone fracture patterns and crushing injuries observed in modern earthquake victims are evidence that these unfortunate Romans were killed by a building collapse….

(10) KILLING THE MESSENGER. “’Incredibly rare’ dead sea serpent surfaces in California waters; just 1 of 20 since 1901” – Yahoo! has the story.

Nothing marks the sign of impending doom like the appearance of the elusive oarfish, according to Japanese folklore. Hopefully it’s just a myth, since one was recently found floating in Southern California waters for only the 20th time in nearly 125 years.

A team of “sciencey” kayakers and snorkelers found the dead sea serpent while they were out for a swim at La Jolla Cove in San Diego over the weekend, according to Lauren Fimbres Wood, a spokesperson for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

A number of people, including the team of scientists and lifeguards, worked together to get the oarfish from the beach to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration facility, Fimbres Wood told USA TODAY on Friday.

Only 20 oarfish have washed up in the state since 1901, making the sighting of the deep-sea fish “incredibly rare,” according Scripps’ in-house fish expert Ben Frable.

…The belief that the sight of an oarfish in shallow waters is an omen of an impending earthquake dates back to 17th century Japan, according to reporting by Atlas Obscura.

The fish, also know as “ryugu no tsukai,” were believed to be servants of the sea god Ryūjin, according to Japanese folklore.

It’s believed that “Ryugu no tsukai,” which translates to “messenger from the sea god’s palace,” were sent from the palace toward the surface to warn people of earthquakes, USA TODAY reported.…

(11) ALL M. NIGHT LONG. NPR celebrates as “The Sixth Sense’ turns 25”.

Twenty-five years ago this month, one film and one filmmaker became synonymous with the big plot twist.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “THE SIXTH SENSE”)

HALEY JOEL OSMENT: (As Cole Sear) I see dead people.

MA: Now, after all this time, if you still have not seen “The Sixth Sense,” we are not going to ruin it for you. But it’s no spoiler to say that the film became a phenomenon, and its director, M. Night Shyamalan, an overnight sensation. His career has had some ups and downs since then. He currently has a film out called “Trap.” But it was his breakthrough film that reimagined the psycho thriller….

But if you don’t mind spoilers, I offer my review “Sixth Sense and Sensibility”.

…I think everyone went to see Sixth Sense twice: the second time to admire the way they’d deceived themselves about what was happening when they saw it the first time….

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Mr. Sci-Fi” Marc Scott Zicree has posted a Space Command Rough Cut with no finished VFX, music, color correction, sound mix, etc. He’s still gathering funding:

To find out about purchasing shares in Space Command, email marcicree@gmail.com — Thanks!

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

Barkley — So Glad You (Didn’t) Ask #90, A Column of Unsolicited Opinions

Posted on by
7

THE 2024 HUGO AWARDS CEREMONY IN GLASGOW SCOTLAND, A PHOTO ESSAY

By Chris M. Barkley:

(1-3) Lining Up for the Hugo Awards Ceremony outside of the Armadillo, 7:00 pm local time.

(4) Artist Maurizo Manzieri (right) and Silvio Sosio (left), publisher and editor of the magazine Robot and the online magazine Fantascienza.com, outside of the Armadillo, 7:00 pm.

(5) Hugo Ceremony Auditorium Stage.

(6) Hugo Awards Ceremony poster.

(7) Gay and Joe Haldeman. 

Forty-two more photos follow the jump!

Continue reading →

Pixel Scroll 8/2/24 We’re Off To Scroll The Pixels, The Wonderful Pixels Of Scroll

Posted on by
19

(1) SFWA BOARD ADDRESSES STAFF CHANGES. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association today sent members a message with very general comments about recent changes in their professional and volunteer staff. At the top is yesterday’s resignation by President Jeffe Kennedy, whose office will be filled by Vice President, Chelsea Mueller until a special election is held. The message also says other issues are roiling the organization without identifying any of them specifically.

…Due to the nature of the employee/employer relationship, we do not feel it is ethical or appropriate to make these matters public. Our duties as Board members require us to work in the best interest of SFWA. Our responsibilities as compassionate human beings compel us to seek solutions reflecting our respect for our employees and volunteers. Sometimes, we may fall short, especially when things happen quickly and information is limited. Moving forward, we ask for your patience and trust as we do our best to fulfill our obligations….

…All members received the email from Jeffe Kennedy explaining her resignation as SFWA’s President on Aug 1, 2024. The Board is working with all relevant stakeholders to determine the timeline and process for a special election for president as outlined in the Bylaws. We will share those details as they are finalized. In the interim, SFWA’s elected Vice President, Chelsea Mueller, will fill the office of president.

The Board acknowledges there are several other issues, both ongoing and recent, that have been brought to our attention. Please know that we are listening and we will address your concerns and your suggestions as we move forward. At the center of many of these issues is the need for greater transparency. We cannot comment on legal matters or confidential matters such as Griefcom and the Emergency Medical Fund (EMF). Still, there are many aspects of this organization where we need to improve communications with our membership. There are many good suggestions on how to do this, but most will take time to implement.

Many topics brought to the forefront need to be considered by the Board of Directors with member input. The Board has scheduled upcoming board meetings focusing on and prioritizing these topics…

(2) BBC PULLS TENNANT ERA WHO EPISODE TO REDUB CAMEO BY PROSECUTED NEWS ANCHOR. “’Doctor Who’ Episode Featuring Huw Edwards Removed From BBC iPlayer” reports Deadline.

The BBC is starting to scrub Huw Edwards from its vast library of content.

The UK broadcaster has temporarily removed from iPlayer an episode of Doctor Who featuring the disgraced news anchor, who this week pleaded guilty to indecent child image charges.

No longer available to stream is Fear Her, an installment from Season 2 of the sci-fi drama starring David Tennant and Billie Piper. The episode is now being redubbed to remove Edwards, whose voiceover features during a news clip.

He features when Chloe Webber, a girl who is terrorized by a demonic version of her abusive dead father, makes everyone disappear in a sports stadium….

The BBC added: “As you would expect we are actively considering the availability of our archive. While we don’t routinely delete content from the BBC archive as it is a matter of historical record, we do consider the continued use and re-use of material on a case-by-case basis.”

It is perhaps unsurprising that executives looked at the Edwards episode, given the nature of his crimes and that Doctor Who has a young fan base. The Daily Mirror reported that the footage of Edwards would be edited out.…

… The BBC also appears to have removed an episode of The Great British Menu featuring Edwards as a guest judge. Season 17, Episode 28 is not currently available on iPlayer.

The BBC will face decisions over whether it can replay countless hours of archive footage of Edwards. He has been a mainstay for major national moments, including the Queen’s death.

There have also been questions over whether Edwards should be scrubbed from James Bond movie Skyfall, during which he appears as a newsreader.

(3) EKPEKI BOUND FOR SCOTLAND. Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki has got a visa and will attend the Glasgow 2024 Worldcon. He’s still looking for help with some of the expenses. The GoFundMe to “Help Oghenechovwe Ekpeki Attend the 2024 Glasgow Worldcon” raised over $1000 of the $3000 goal on the first day.

(4) COVER REVEAL. And today Ekpeki shared the cover of Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction volume 3 by Cyrielle Prückner. The book can be preordered at Amazon.com.

(5) ROLL YOUR OWN INSULT. Ekpeki also has been playing with the Don Rickles of ChatGPTs:

(6) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 115 of the Octothorpe podcast is “I Like the Way Glasgow Did It”.

John is a busy bee, something’s bugging Alison, and Liz meets a wasp. We spend our episode this week digging into the WSFS Business Meeting in unprecedented detail, but hopefully we make it more transparent and at least somewhat funny. Let us know if you have any questions before the convention, and listen here!

An uncorrected transcript is available here.

A giant stripy purple bucket of popcorn on a cinema screen says “Octothorpe 115 WSFS Special”, and John, Alison and Liz sit in the audience, silhouetted in the style of *Mystery Science Theatre 3000*. John is saying “We’re gonna need a bigger box of popcorn.”

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

August 2, 1954 – Ken MacLeod, 70.

By Paul Weimer: When I first started reading MacLeod in the mid 1990s, it felt like a trangressive, even forbidden act.  As you know, Bob, I grew up in a relatively conservative (in many senses of the world) household. And while science fiction and fantasy (and really all of my reading) were escapes from that world, it wasn’t until I was an adult that I started to branch out and read things that felt…trangressive.

Like, for example, the Fall Revolution novels of Ken MacLeod.  Confronted with societies and ways of organizing nations and societies far removed from my normal reading or experience, was more than a bit of a wakeup call.  I had never actually read a socialist SF writer and a world both communist and libertarian and very different than what I was used to until I picked up The Star Fraction. His technological ideas, AI and Singularities and much more. I was struck, too how MacLeod seamlessly wove in concepts of alternate history and divergent choices right into his narrative. I was amazed that the fourth of the Fall books was in fact an alternate history to the first three. 

Ken MacLeod

Although contemporary events overshadowed and made his world impossible, I am also a fan of a one shot technothriller/spy thriller/mindbender, The Restoration Game. It’s set in a Soviet Republic that no longer exists, and has a MMO player as a main character, who finds out that the real world is even stranger than the game and its epic story she is trying to use to brew revolution. It shows MacLeod loving to burst his work at the seams with ideas, with a truly wham moment in the denouement of the novel that I would not dream of spoiling. Fun stuff, and one of my early book reviews, back in the day. You can still find that review review online although I think I was in the end a bit too harsh on it. I continue to confront and engage with MacLeod’s work.

Lately. I’ve been highly enjoying his newest works, the Lightspeed Trilogy books. The use of plausible politics and the polities of Earth keeping FTL travel a secret at all costs, combined with time jumps, strange aliens and their plans (especially the Fermi), and a tangle of ideas and concepts.  MacLeod’s books, from the Fall Revolution to the Lightspeed books are bursting at the seams with ideas. Critics and fans who bemoan that modern SF books are lacking inventiveness in ideas and concepts simply have not been reading MacLeod’s work. I get that, because his politics can be a bit much and his works wear them on their sleeve, and proudly. 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • Last Kiss recommends comic book lovers. In a manner of speaking.
  • Eek! shows faster isn’t going to be better.
  • Non Sequitur presents a writing challenge that’s hard to overcome.

(9) I BELIEVE. The Paris Review’s Jason Katz tells what it was like “At the Great Florida Bigfoot Conference”.

The evening before the fourth annual Great Florida Bigfoot Conference in the north-central horse town of Ocala, I was in a buffet line at the VIP dinner, listening to a man describe his first encounter. “I was on an airboat near Turner River Road in the Glades and I saw it there,” he said. “At first, I confused it with a gator because it was hunched over, but then it stood up. It was probably eight feet tall. I could smell it too. I froze. It was like something had taken control over my body.” His story contained a common trope of Bigfoot encounters: awe and fear in the face of a higher power.

I sat down at a conference room round table and gnawed on an undercooked chicken quarter, looking around at my fellow VIPs, or as the conference’s master of ceremonies, Ryan “RPG” Golembeske, called us, the Bigfoot Mafia. Most of the other attendees were of retirement age. Their hats, tattoos, and car bumpers in the parking lot indicated that many were former military, police, and/or proud gun owners. Many were Trump supporters—beseeching fellow motorists to, as one bumper sticker read, MAKE THE FOREST GREAT AGAIN, a catchphrase which had been written out over an image of a Bigfoot on a turquoise background in the pines, rocking a pompadour. The sticker was a small oval on the larger spare wheel cover of a mid-aughts Chinook Concourse RV. Above it and below it, in Inspirational Quote Font, was the phrase “Once upon a time … is Now!” The couple who owned the RV cemented their identities with a big homemade TRUCKERS FOR TRUMP window decal next to a large handicap sticker. As a thirty-six-year-old progressive, I was an outlier in this crowd. But, like many, I was a believer.

It bears repeating: I believe in the existence of the Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, Wild Man, or, as it is called in South Florida, the Skunk Ape….

(10) MOTTO. I like this one.

(11) BETTER NOT TELL BLOFELD. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] If Ernst Stravo Blofeld can make a giant space laser with stolen diamonds, you better not tell him about this supposition… “Mercury could have an 11-mile underground layer of diamonds, researchers say” at CNN.

A layer of diamonds up to 18 kilometers (11 miles) thick could be tucked below the surface of Mercury, the solar system’s smallest planet and the closest to the sun, according to new research.

The diamonds might have formed soon after Mercury itself coalesced into a planet about 4.5 billion years ago from a swirling cloud of dust and gas, in the crucible of a high-pressure, high-temperature environment. At this time, the fledgling planet is believed to have had a crust of graphite, floating over a deep magma ocean.

A team of researchers recreated that searing environment in an experiment, with a machine called an anvil press that’s normally used to study how materials behave under extreme pressure but also for the production of synthetic diamonds….

(12) CERN AT WORK ON ITS PUBLIC IMAGE. “Angels & Demons, Tom Hanks and Peter Higgs: how CERN sold its story to the world” – PhysicsWorld looks back

“Read this,” said my boss as he dropped a book on my desk sometime in the middle of the year 2000. As a dutiful staff writer at CERN, I ploughed my way through the chunky novel, which was about someone stealing a quarter of a gram of antimatter from CERN to blow up the Vatican. It seemed a preposterous story but my gut told me it might put the lab in a bad light. So when the book’s sales failed to take off, all of us in CERN’s communications group breathed a sigh of relief.

Little did I know that Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons would set the tone for much of my subsequent career. Soon after I finished the book, my boss left CERN and I became head of communications. I was now in charge of managing public relations for the Geneva-based lab and ensuring that CERN’s activities and functions were understood across the world.

I was to remain in the role for 13 eventful years that saw Angels & Demons return with a vengeance; killer black holes maraud the tabloids; apparently superluminal neutrinos have the brakes applied; and the start-up, breakdown and restart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Oh, and the small business of a major discovery and the award of the Nobel Prize for Physics to François Englert and Peter Higgs in 2013….

(13) JUSTWATCH TOP 10S. The JustWatch service has shared their list of the Top 10 streaming sff movie and TV shows in July 2024.

[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Daniel Dern, 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 Thomas the Red.]

Pixel Scroll 7/20/24 There’s A Barsoom On The Right

Posted on by
21

(1) HELLO FROM CHINA. The Hugo Book Club Blog has a guest post from Chinese fan RiverFlow: “Guest Post: Unite Sci-Fi Fans Around The World”.

Hello science fiction fans attending the 2024 World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow. First of all, have you heard of Chinese sci-fi fandom? If so, what examples can you give?

Science fiction fans in China were excited when Zero Gravity News won the Hugo Award for Best Fanzine last year. See “Introducing Chinese sci-fi fanzine Zero Gravity News” to learn more about the fanzine.

Yes, in fact, there is a very large group of science fiction fans in China, but few people have collected and collated their materials. I have been working on this since 2020, and have written some articles to introduce the collection.

The earliest Chinese Fanzine was born in 1988. In the 1990s, many science fiction fans were employed and writing in their leisure time, but in the 21st century, these contributions were mainly completed by students. Because workers are busy with their lives and families, it is difficult to find time to organize related activities. So I wrote a book, History of Chinese University Science Fiction Association, to introduce Chinese science fiction fans to the rest of the world. The thousands of photos and hundreds of thousands of words are enough to prove the rich history of this group….

(2) LOCAL GROUP FOCUS – NORTHUMBERLAND HEATH SF. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This is the Northumberland Heath SF’s group meet recently when a Mandalorian visited. 

This is just half its regular membership of a score or so who turn up to at least two or three meets a year: work shift rotas, familial and other commitments, etc., mean that it is rare that all regulars attend the same meet.  In addition, the group’s Facebook has some 260 followers of which half are local, but 120 of these have never physically attended a meet. (Is this typical of other local groups?) Of the non-local remainder FB followers, a good proportion are familiar names on some Worldcon registrant lists. Some of its members belong to other specialist regional and national SF groups and one of its members is the daughter of a former Worldcon fan GoH.

The group is only several years old but has some heritage connection with the former NW Kent SF group of the 1980s and ’90s that used to meet in nearby Dartford.  N. Heath SF is located in southeast London, on its border in Kent, which means that in addition to local social gatherings and cinema outings, it is easy to have trips to central London events, such as the annual Sci-Fi London film fest, or one-offs, such as the Loncon 3 Worldcon. It meets the second Thursday of each month so as not to clash with the first Thursday London SF Circle (as it used to be called) gathering.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Jonathan adds, “I for one would be interested to see potted summaries of local SF groups across different countries” and I enthusiastically second the idea. I’d love to run people’s introductions to the sf groups they’re in.

(3) DOWNLOAD THE 2019 GUFF TRIP REPORT. Simon Litten’s 2019 GUFF Trip Report Visiting Nearly Kiwiland has been published. Copies can be downloaded at the Australian Fan Funds website.

There’s no charge to download the report but interested fans may wish to make a donation to GUFF (via PayPal to guffeurope@gmail.com).

(4) THE SELF-PUBLISHING BUSINESS. Dave Dobson offers a deep dive into the numbers in his “Anatomy of a free BookBub featured deal”. A lot to learn here about Amazon, free book campaigns, and ratings.

Also, the intangibles – the sales rank, the visibility, the (I hope) new fans, the glut of new ratings and reviews – all of those are things I’d gladly have paid a couple hundred bucks pursuing. So, I’m going to call this a clear win, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

(5) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 114 of Octothorpe, “Tastemaker Batty”, John Coxon, Alison Scott and Liz Batty discuss the Hugo Awards. Uncorrected transcript is available here.

We cover all the categories except Best Novel, which we covered in a previous episode. The deadline is today (20 July 2024 at 21:17 Glasgow time). Don’t forget to vote beforehand. 

The value for “today” is a now-expired deadline. But that comes to us all sooner or later.

”Octothorpe 114” is at the top, and the word ”Octothorpe” is written on a series of lottery balls. Below that, a bingo card, and below that, the words ”Worldcon Community Group Bingo Card". The items on the card are as follows: - Can I convert pounds to Scottish money? - Does anyone have any opinions on...? - Do you know my Scottish cousin? - This list is too long to read so can someone... - Is the programme out yet? - Can I swim in the Clyde? - Can I visit Stonehenge for the day? - Asks question answered in PR5 - Does Glasgow Zoo have live haggis? - Volunteering is the best way to have fun - What's with all the armadillos? - Shouldn't the subway be a Digital Orange now? - Free! - Is the con organising an aurora viewing? - Is it too late to get on the programme? - Will Nessie be doing a signing? - Mention of Glasgow, England - Can anyone go to the Hugo Awards? - Why don't we do this the way we did in 1956? - Can I fly from Glasgow to Edinburgh? - Will there be any authors there? - Can I bring my Emotional Support Moose? - Are tartan and/or kilts compulsory? - What I reckon... - Mention of deep-fried Mars Bar

(6) PLUTO STILL NOT ONE OF THE COOL KIDS. “Astronomers Propose New Criteria to Classify Planets, but Pluto Still Doesn’t Make the Cut” in Smithsonian Magazine.

Nearly two decades after Pluto got kicked out of the planet club, astronomers are proposing an updated way to define “planet” based on more measurable criteria. The current definition is “problematic” and “vague,” they write in a paper published Wednesday in The Planetary Science Journal.

Unfortunately for fans of the dwarf planet, however, Pluto would remain excluded, even if the proposal is approved….

… “Jupiter’s orbit is crossed by comets and asteroids, as is Earth’s,” Gladman points out in a university statement. “Have those planets not cleared their orbit and thus, aren’t actually planets?”

In a bid to correct for this ambiguity, Gladman and his two colleagues propose a more measurable definition. According to their model, a celestial body is a planet if it: orbits one or more stars, brown dwarfs or stellar remnants; is more massive than 1023 kilograms (a size big enough to clear its orbit of debris); and is less massive than 2.5 x 1028 kilograms (equivalent to 13 Jupiter masses).

Pluto’s mass is 1.31 x 1022 kilograms, so it would remain excluded—but our current eight planets would retain their classification….

New Horizons photo of chaos region on Pluto.

(7) TOP SCI-FI MOTORBIKES. SlashGear praises “10 Of The Coolest Motorcycles In All Of Science Fiction”.

…When making this list, we looked at motorcycles that specifically had a sci-fi bent to them. The 1990 Harley-Davidson Fat Boy in “Terminator 2: Judgement Day” is definitely cool, but that’s a bike that already exists. We wanted motorcycles that pushed the boundaries of transportation in the future and perhaps even inspired folks to design their own bikes that look similar in real life. These are the sci-fi motorcycles that show that while society might change in the future, riding around on a cool motorcycle never gets old. …

The list includes —

Kaneda’s bike in Akira

Kaneda’s bike in “Akira,” one of the most influential anime films of all time, isn’t just cool-looking — it inspired the famous “Akira Slide,” which has entered meme status and has been referenced in a wide range of projects, from “Batman: The Animated Series” to Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Even when it’s not sliding, the bike is beautifully drawn. 

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 20, 1938 – Dame Diana Rigg. (Died 2020.)

By Paul Weimer:

I was introduced to Diana Rigg thanks to Roger Zelazny’s Amber.

It’ll make sense, trust me.

As you know, I am and have been an enthusiastic player of the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game, set in the endless multiverse of the novels.  Lots of players and GMs like to import ideas from other books, shows and series. (I am no exception in that regard, mind you).

Diana Rigg

One of these GMs I played with was a big enthusiast of The Steed and Peel Avengers series from the 1960’s. I was not yet familiar with the series, but after playing a session where Steed turned out to be a secret Amberite, I had to know more! Who was Steed and who was the mysterious Mrs. Peel he was looking for (as part of the plot)?  (She did not actually appear on screen). The GM encouraged me to seek out The Avengers.

And thus, I discovered the original Avengers TV series, and thus, Diana Rigg. I was enchanted immediately, of course, by a beautiful kick-arse actress with skill, verve, and action. I avidly watched all the episodes of The Avengers, finding Rigg the best of the partners for McNee by a long way. The DNA of some notable action heroines with skill, verve, intelligence and independence definitely can be traced back to Rigg’s Mrs. Peel.

Later on, she was proven delightful in things such as Game of Thrones (Olenna Tyrell was a great major character for her late in her career) and, when I discovered, the weird and wonderful steampunk movie The Assassination Bureau.

But in the end, yes, for me Diana Rigg IS Mrs. Peel.  Now, if only Moorcock could confirm that Peel is actually an aspect of the Eternal Champion…

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) MONSTERPIECE THEATRE. “Godzilla Takes on the Great Gatsby in Monsterpiece Theatre Comic” at The Wrap. Cover art and preview pages at the link.

Godzilla’s been on a resurgent streak, from the MonsterVerse franchise and “Godzilla Minus One” in theaters to “Monarch” on Apple TV+. Now, TheWrap can exclusively share that acclaimed writer and artist Tom Scioli is delivering comic book “Godzilla’s Monsterpiece Theatre” from IDW, with the giant lizard taking on figures from throughout literary history — including the Great Gatsby, Sherlock Holmes, H.G. Wells’ Time Traveller and a mystery man with vampiric fingers and a “D” on the back of his cape (want to take a guess?).

The three-issue series is set in 1922, with one of Jay Gatsby’s legendary parties luring the attention of the giant lizard himself. Rather than being able to woo Daisy Buchanan, he has to deal with Godzilla absolutely demolishing his estate. Gatsby follows up on the destruction by teaming with the aforementioned 20th century literary icons to take his revenge….

(11) POINT OF NO RETURN? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Bad news in this week’s Science editorial: “Go/no-go for a Mars samples return”.

Last month’s return to Earth of China’s lunar lander Chang’e-6 with samples from the far side of the Moon is a reminder that there are “firsts” in robotic space exploration still to be achieved. Unfortunately, this year has seen a major set-back for the prospects of an even more extensive plan to collect samples from Mars. In April, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) made clear that the ballooning cost for the US Mars Sample Return mission to around $11 billion was too much and the 2040 return date was too distant. NASA has been told to look for ideas to lower costs and shorten the timeline. Shock and anger are palpable in the astronomy community.

The challenge of an exploratory robotic mission to Mars to collect samples and return them to Earth for study dates back to the post-Apollo era, 50 years ago. Twenty-five years ago, a breakthrough occurred when France and the US announced a joint Mars sample return program. Sadly, that foundered on financial grounds. Fifteen years ago, the goal of a joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) was vetoed at a high level in NASA, possibly an echo of the previous experience.

Nonetheless, the last two US National Academy of Sciences planetary science decadal surveys gave the Mars Sample Return mission a high priority, thereby encouraging federal agencies to fund it. Then, last year, after the critical design phase and external review, the program’s price turned out to be way above expectations, leading NASA to apply brakes to the project…

The figures quoted for cost escalation of the Mars Sample Return mission are a reminder that NASA’s JWST project grew from less than $1 billion to around $10 billion. However, most of the JWST cost increases came after the design phase, the point where the Mars project is now caught. The sub[1]sequent steady growth in the cost of JWST was due to a different cause— namely, the year-by-year NASA budget negotiation in Congress. Once the design phase is completed, a large development team is formed. European collaborators watched in frustration as the annual US budget, cycle after cycle, drip-fed just enough money to sustain the JWST mission’s team but not enough to allow efficient progress. The multiyear funding of the ESA Science Programme by member states mitigates this.

NASA is now told to look for a solution to the Mars Sample Return mission, but the agency is likely caught at a tricky crossroads. A quicker, cheaper swoop to grab Mars dust and get it back to Earth could win the exploration “first,” but that will not satisfy the US National Academy decadal goals….

(12) FARM ROBOTS. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] “Could robot weedkillers replace the need for pesticides?” in the Guardian. I’m sure they will, and I expect smaller ones for gardens.

On a sweltering summer day in central Kansas, farm fields shimmer in the heat as Clint Brauer watches a team of bright yellow robots churn up and down the rows, tirelessly slicing away any weeds that stand in their way while avoiding the growing crops.

The battery-powered machines, 4ft (1.2 metres) long and 2ft (0.6 metres) wide, pick their way through the fields with precision, without any human hand to guide them….

His Greenfield agricultural technology company now builds and programs its robots in a shed behind an old farmhouse where his grandmother once lived….

…Farmers have been fighting weeds in their fields – pulling, cutting and killing them off with an array of tools – for centuries. Weeds compete with crops for soil moisture and nutrients and can block out sunlight needed for crop growth, cutting into final yields. Over the last 50-plus years, chemical eradication has been the method of choice. It is common for farmers to spray or otherwise apply several weedkilling chemicals on to their fields in a single season.

But as chemical use has expanded, so has scientific evidence that exposure to the toxic substances in weedkillers can cause disease. In addition to glyphosate’s link to cancer, the weedkilling chemical paraquat has been linked to Parkinson’s disease. Another common farm herbicide, atrazine, can be harmful to reproductive health and is linked to several other health problems.

Weedkilling chemicals have also been found to be harmful to the environment, with negative impacts on soil health and on pollinators and other important species. 

… North Dakota-based Aigen Robotics has raised $19m to date. Its compact robots are powered by solar panels fixed to the top of each machine and are designed to work autonomously, sleeping and waking up on farm fields….

… Still, many farmers and academic experts are skeptical that farm robots can make a substantial difference. They say that there is simply too much farmland and too many diverse needs to be addressed by robots that are costly to make and use. The better path, many say, is for farmers to work with nature, rather than against it.

The model of regenerative agriculture – using a variety of strategies focused on improving soil health, including limiting pesticides, rotating crops, planting crops that provide ground cover to suppress weeds and avoiding disturbing the soil – is the better path, they say….

(13) ELEMENTARY. According to ScienceAlert, “Curiosity Cracked Open a Rock on Mars And Found a Huge Surprise”.

A rock on Mars has just spilled a surprising yellow treasure after Curiosity accidentally cracked through its unremarkable exterior.

When the rover rolled its 899-kilogram (1,982-pound) body over the rock, the rock broke open, revealing yellow crystals of elemental sulfur: brimstone. Although sulfates are fairly common on Mars, this is the first time sulfur has been found on the red planet in its pure elemental form….

“But do they smell like rotten eggs?” asks John King Tarpinian.

(14) SF IN 1958. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Grammaticus Books has continued his deep dive into some golden age editions of SF pulps. This time he looks at a1958 edition of Fantasy & Science Fiction that saw Heinlein’s “Have Spacesuit Will Travel” which if memory serves was short-listed for a Hugo. There’s also a Richard Matheson in the mix…

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Via Cat Rambo.] “We Didn’t Start the Fire (Bardcore|Medieval/Renaissance Style Cover)” from Hildegard von Blingin’.

There are many covers of Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire that adapt it to different times, but we wanted to give it the bardcore treatment. *Unlike the original, the list is not chronological, and jumps around in time a lot. It very loosely spans from around 400 to 1600, and is from a rather Eurocentric point of view. Thank you to my brother, Friar Funk, for devising the lyrics and providing the majority of the vocals. Many thanks as well to his new wife and our dad for joining us in the chorus at the end.

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