Tag Archives: John Hertz

Pixel Scroll 5/15/25 A Pixel A Day, Keeps The AI Away

Posted on by
11

(1) GREGORY BENFORD CONSERVATORSHIP ANNOUNCED. Joe Haldeman today published on Facebook an announcement and statement by James Benford: “Jim Benford asked me to post this:  Court Approves conservatorship of the Estate and Person of Gregory Benford”. In addition to some information about Gregory Benford’s health, it includes allegations and insinuations about people who have been close to Gregory since his stroke in 2022.

Richard Man tries to correct the characterization about one of those people in this Facebook post.

A number of well-known sff figures comment on the two posts.

(2) LACON V REVEALS FIRST SPECIAL GUEST. The 2026 Worldcon committee, LACon V, has announced Tracy Drain as the convention’s first Special Guest.

Tracy Drain is a flight systems engineer who has helped to develop, test, and operate a variety of robotic spacecraft for deep space exploration over the past 25+ years. Her passion for space grew from an early love of science fiction – she soaked up Star Trek, Star Wars, and Battlestar Galactica, plus sci-fi and fantasy books by the armload. With her eye on a career in space, she studied Mechanical Engineering at the University of Kentucky and interned at the NASA Langley Research Center. After earning a master’s degree in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech, she landed a full-time position at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2000.

As a systems engineer, Tracy works with teams of engineers and scientists to ensure all the parts of a spacecraft (telecommunications, thermal, power, software, etc.), the science instruments, and the mission (spacecraft/instruments, ground data system, mission design and navigation, etc.) are designed to work well together to accomplish the mission goals. Her previous missions have included the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Kepler mission (an Exoplanet hunter), the Juno mission (orbiting Jupiter) and the Psyche mission (now on its way to study an asteroid). She is currently the Chief Engineer in operations for the Europa Clipper mission which successfully launched in October 2024 and is now on its 5.5-year cruise to Jupiter. After arrival in the Jovian system, Clipper will study Europa – one of the most scientifically exciting moons in our solar system!…

(3) LACON V OPENS PROGRAM PARTICIPANT INTEREST SURVEY. The Program Division for LAcon V, the 2026 Worldcon, will be co-managed by Helen Montgomery and Dr. Meg MacDonald. Montgomery chaired Chicon 8, the 2022 Worldcon. MacDonald was co-Division Head for Promotions for Glasgow 2024 – A Worldcon for Our Futures.

LAcon V has a Program Overview page.

Our Program Suggestion Form is for anyone who wishes to submit an idea for a program item. This can be a panel discussion you want to see, a workshop you want someone to run, a discussion group about your favorite book or movie franchise – maybe you just have a cool panel title, or perhaps a fully formed description of a panel but no title. It’s all okay to submit! No idea is too big or too small; we want to hear them all!

And then there’s our Program Participant Interest survey, which is for anyone who is interested in being a program participant, be it on site in Anaheim or online through our virtual offerings. We expect and need hundreds of program participants. Some may be professionals in their field; others may be hobbyists or fans. No matter what, we want to know more about you! Filling out the form does not guarantee that you will be accepted as a participant, but it is the first necessary step in the process, and we’re excited to hear from you.

(4) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboy Books has released Simultaneous Times podcast episode 87 with KC Grifant & Franco Amati.

Stories featured in this episode:

  • “Negation” by KC Grifant; music by Phog Masheeen; read by the Jenna Hanchey
  • “So I Guess I’m Not an Actual Person Anymore” by Franco Amati; music by Phog Masheeen; read by Jean-Paul Garnier

Theme music by Dain Luscombe.

(5) GENRE GRAPEVINE ON SEATTLE WORLDCON. Jason Sanford presents “Genre Grapevine’s Deep Dive into the Use of ChatGPT by Seattle Worldcon”, a public post on Patreon.

….It appears Worldcon leadership only learned that ChatGPT was used in this manner after the fact, when the person on the vetting team revealed what they’d done and said that there was no other way to complete the vetting with so few volunteers on the team. While Worldcon leadership had concerns about the use of generative AI, because ChatGPT had already been used – and because of the lack of needed volunteers on the vetting team – they decided to retroactively accept its use.

What came after is now well known: Word about the use of ChatGPT quickly spread among Worldcon volunteers and the larger genre community. 

I’m told the person on the vetting team who originally decided to use ChatGPT is no longer involved in the vetting process….

Unfortunately, none of the quoted sources was willing to go on the record as a source.

(6) DAVE RATTI OBITUARY. [By Becky Veal.] David Ratti, long time Orlando fan, passed away on May 15, 2025. He had been suffering prolonged illnesses, but the cause of death is initially listed as pneumonia and sepsis.

I don’t know when Dave first got into fandom, but I met him at Necronomicon in 1983. I was pushing my infant son Sean in a stroller when someone came up to me and tried to start a conversation. I remember thinking “another fat jerk“.  And thus I met my best friend of 40 years.

Dave was a founding member of the Orlando Science Fiction Society and the convention Oasis. We worked together editing the bid progress reports for the 1992 Orlando Worldcon, MagiCon. We ran more convention offices and other departments than I can count.

I will write a better obituary later, as I’m sure others will. I’m too exhausted with grief to do more. Dave was unique and special and wonderful in his own way. There will be many tears shed by many fans and friends, including myself.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Liō series (2006)

Nineteen years ago on this date, one of the most unusual strips to come into existence did so in the form of Mark Tatulli’s Liō. It was very easy to market globally as it had almost no dialogue except that spoken by other people in the parodies that I’ll mention in a minute as Liō and the other characters don’t speak at all, and there were no balloons or captions at all giving it a global appeal. 

Liō, who lives with his father and various monsters, i.e. Ishmael a giant squid and Fido a spider, various animals like Cybil a white cat (of course there’s a cat here, a very pushy feline indeed), aliens, lab creations, and even Liō’s hunchbacked assistant.  Why there’s even Archie, Liō’s psychopathic ventriloquist’s dummy. Liō’s mother is deceased. Though why she’s deceased is never stated. Definitely not your nuclear family here.

An important aspect of the strip is that it  will riff off other strips, and lots of them: Blondie, Bloom County, Calvin and Hobbes (my favorite strip ever), Cathy, Garfield, Opus, Peanuts, even Pearls Before Swine (definitely not one of my favorite strips I will readily admit) will become fodder for parody by this strip. That’s where the only dialogue is spoken. 

Tatulli on the Mr. Media podcast back a decade or so said “It’s really a basic concept. It’s just Liō who lives with his father, and that’s basically it, and whatever I come up with. I set no parameters because I didn’t want to lock myself in. I mean, having no dialogue means that there is going to be no dialogue-driven gags, so I have to leave myself as open as possible to any kind of thing, so anything basically can happen.” 

There a transcript of that podcast here as the audio quality of that interview is, as the interviewer admits, rather awful. He says that he got better after that first interview by him. 

In multiple interviews, Tatulli has said the two major contemporary influences on his style are Gahan Wilson and Charles Addams.

It’s good at offending people as this strip demonstrates.

Currently, the strip runs daily globally in more than two hundred and fifty papers. Lio is also available in collections, many of them, found in paperback and digital formats. They display rather well on an iPad. 

(8) MORE MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 15, 2015 — Mad Max: Fury Road

By Paul Weimer: I briefly mentioned Mad Max Fury Road in my recent retrospective of George Miller, but the movie deserves a bit of its own space as well. 

It came out in 2015. Thirty years after the previous entry, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. I had figured that the franchise had had its end. The creation of Fury Road was a delight, and, 30 years after seeing the last Mad Max movie in a theater, I vowed to see this one, too. And so I did, one fine afternoon in May. 

I was blown away. Tom Hardy makes an excellent Mad Max, taking up Gibson’s old mantle. But the thing that struck me immediately is how little he is a part of his own movie. This is a movie about a community, and about an Imperator (Charlize Theron) and a struggle against patriarchal tyranny. Max is only a piece of his own titular film…and yet it works. What I remember about this film isn’t Max so much as Immortan Joe, and his Boys. And Furiosa. And the War Rig.

And the spectacle. Seeing this on a movie theater screen was revelatory. The scale and size of the movie, especially in the “dust storm” sequence, astonished me. My jaw hit the floor when we got to that sequence. And then we get the musician on the attacking vehicle, and a fantastic action sequence. We get moments of intimacy, and care. And utter tragedy, when Furiosa realizes her paradisiacal home is gone forever. The fiercely anti-patriarchal nature of the script.  “We are not things!”

It won six academy awards, and was also up but did not win Best Picture and Best Director. Entirely deserving, Mad Max Fury Road felt (until the recent movie Furiosa) as a capstone to the world of Mad Max. In a way, I feel like it is the one essential Mad Max movie because, as noted above, Mad Max is almost a walk-on in his own titular movie. The movie is much bigger, bolder and larger for not having Max front and center, and possibly why it is so successful. It’s the one essential Mad Max movie. It takes every theme of the previous films, adds new ones and puts it all together in a stunning performance all around.

And the Black and White conversion is fantastic.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) KGB. Ellen Datlow shared her photos from the Fantastic Fiction at KGB readings for May 14, 2025.

Carol Gyzander and Daryl Gregory read from recent work to a full house, despite the dreary weather.

(11) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 134 of the Octothorpe podcast, “In the Framework of Linear Time”, they “discuss the recent Seattle 2025 controversy, and also read out some letters of comment from various listeners, before getting into the real meat of the podcast: roguelikes.” An uncorrected transcript is here.

A photograph of a yellow square on a mantlepiece. On the yellow square is black text and a red shape with yellow text. The text reads “Corflu 42. 2025 FAAn Awards. Best Immutable Object: Octothorpe”. Text overlaid on the photograph reads ‘Octothorpe 134. “Don’t believe everything you read on ChatGPT.”’

(12) LOVE, DEATH + ROBOTS. JustWatch gives reasons to watch “Love, Death + Robots – streaming tv show online”.

JustWatch’s latest Why-To-Watch feature spotlights acclaimed director and animator Tim Miller, the visionary behind Netflix’s genre-defying anthology Love, Death + Robots, which premieres its fourth season today (May 15, 2025). In an exclusive quote shared with JustWatch, Miller speaks to the show’s groundbreaking creative freedom and its potential to convert even the most hesitant viewer into an animation devotee.

The show’s Director Tim Miller says:

This show will make you an animation fan

There’s something for everyone [in “Love, Death + Robots”]. If you want to see artists performing at the top of their game across a variety of genres and styles, and you’re an animation fan, it’s a must-watch. If you’re not an animation fan, this is the show that might make you one.

(13) V’GER LIVES! [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] Engineers at NASA say they have successfully revived thrusters aboard Voyager 1, the farthest spacecraft from our planet, in the nick of time before a planned communications blackout. “Voyager 1: Once ‘dead’ thrusters on the farthest spacecraft from Earth are in action again” at CNN.

Engineers at NASA say they have successfully revived thrusters aboard Voyager 1, the farthest spacecraft from our planet, in the nick of time before a planned communications blackout.

A side effect of upgrades to an Earth-based antenna that sends commands to Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, the communications pause could have occurred when the probe faced a critical issue — thruster failure — leaving the space agency without a way to save the historic mission. The new fix to the vehicle’s original roll thrusters, out of action since 2004, could help keep the veteran spacecraft operating until it’s able to contact home again next year.

Voyager 1, launched in September 1977, uses more than one set of thrusters to function properly. Primary thrusters carefully orient the spacecraft so it can keep its antenna pointed at Earth. This ensures that the probe can send back data it collects from its unique perspective 15.5 billion miles (25 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space, as well as receive commands sent by the Voyager team.

(14) THE KIDS HAVE TO LEARN ABOUT TEKWAR. [Item by N.] Majuular discusses “William Shatner’s TekWar: A Forgotten Franchise in Retrospect”.

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, N., Becky Veal, John Coxon, Steven H Silver, Lis Carey, 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 Peer.]

Pixel Scroll 5/11/25 Scrollers Of The Purple Pixel

Posted on by
26

(1) PARDON MY FRENCH. Mental Floss remembers “When Isaac Asimov Decided to Secretly Write Under the Name Paul French”.

If there was one author Henry Bott disliked more than any other, it was Isaac Asimov.

Bott, a book reviewer for the science fiction publication Imagination, had spent years lobbing insults at the respected writer and his work. Of Asimov’s Second Foundation, published in 1953, Bott wrote that Asimov was “neither a writer nor a storyteller” and could churn out only “elephantine prose.” Second Foundation was, Bott observed, “not a good book.”

After another seemingly personal review followed, this one for The Caves of Steel, an irritated Asimov penned a fiery retort in which he referred to Bott as “The Nameless One” in the fan publication Peon [PDF]. More volleys followed, and Asimov continued to take a shelling.

But when Asimov picked up the February 1955 issue of Imagination, he was amused to read Bott’s enthusiastic review of Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus, a spirited sci-fi adventure yarn that was part of an ongoing series by writer Paul French. The story, Bott effused, was gripping and worthy of a reader’s attention, though he felt it fell short of the young adult works by Robert Heinlein.

Asimov put the magazine down and began typing a letter to Imagination. This time, he would not attempt to argue with Bott. “I am sure that Mr. French, on reading this review, would feel quite good about the kind words and would feel no rancor at all about the eminently fair criticism,” Asimov wrote. “In fact, I am sure he would say he does his best to make his juveniles as good as Mr. Heinlein’s, and that perhaps he will improve as he continues to try.

“I am positive that Mr. French would say all this. The reason I am positive is that Paul French and Isaac Asimov are the same person.”…

It reminds me of the time Jerry Pournelle told us about a fan letter John W. Campbell received on the issue of Analog that contained one story by Pournelle and another under his pseudonym Wade Curtis. The fan’s verdict was: “Keep Wade Curtis but get rid of that Jerry Pournelle!”

(2) A POEM FOR BĴO.

By John Hertz: (reprinted from Vanamonde 1643) Learning that Bĵo Trimble was in the West Los Angeles Veterans Home, registered as Betty Trimble (Bĵo is short for Betty JoAnne), I sent her this.

Before others knew,
Enterprise was in your mind;
Talking, drawing, you
Took what could be to what was;
Yet humility, yet strength.

The ĵ in Bĵo is an Esperanto device indicating pronunciation bee•joe; her name has sometimes alas been written Bjo {i.e. without the circumflex over the j) – which, when I first saw it, I thought must be some Nordic name pronounced b’yo; she served in the United States Navy; the poem is an acrostic (read down the first letters of each line) in unrhymed 5-7-5-7-7-syllable lines like Japanese tanka.

(3) BAFTA TV AWARDS. Genre got totally shut out of the 2025 BAFTA awards (complete list of winners at the link).

One show of genre adjacent interest won the Specialist Factual category – Atomic People (BBC), which gathers the testimony of some of the last ‘Hibakusha’, survivors of the two atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on Japan in 1945.

(4) PARTS NOT UNKNOWN. In “A Tolkienian miscellany at Kalimac’s corner, David Bratman says another posthumous Tolkien publication is coming out this year.

If you’ve heard a rumor that yet another new book by JRRT is coming out, it’s true. The Bovadium Fragments will be appearing in the UK in October and in the US in November. “First-ever publication” as it says in the blurb is true, but “previously unknown”? Not a chance. As with some other posthumous Tolkien publication touted as “previously unknown,” its existence was first revealed in Humphrey Carpenter’s biography nearly 50 years ago. The Bovadium Fragments is mentioned there in a footnote as “a parable of the destruction of Oxford (Bovadium) by the motores manufactured by the Daemon of Vaccipratum (a reference to Lord Nuffield and his motor-works at Cowley) which block the streets, asphyxiate the inhabitants, and finally explode.” Which makes it something of a pair to an almost incoherently angry alliterative poem about motorcycles, written probably over 40 years earlier, which is no. 63 in the Collected Poems published last year, and which I think was previously unknown.

(5) CHRISTIE REANIMATED. “Agatha Christie, Who Died in 1976, Will See You in Class” reports the New York Times (behind a paywall).  

Amelia Nierenberg, who reported from London, considers “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” to be one of the greatest books ever written.

Agatha Christie is dead. But Agatha Christie also just started teaching a writing class.

“I must confess,” she says, in a cut-glass English accent, “that this is all rather new to me.”

The literary legend, who died in 1976, has been tapped to teach a course with BBC Maestro, an online lecture series similar to MasterClass. Christie, alongside dozens of other experts, is there for any aspiring writer with 79 pounds (about $105) to spare.

She has been reanimated with the help of a team of academic researchers — who wrote a script using her writings and archival interviews — and a “digital prosthetic” made with artificial intelligence and then fitted over a real actor’s performance.

“We are not trying to pretend, in any way, that this is Agatha somehow brought to life,” Michael Levine, the chief executive of BBC Maestro, said in a phone interview. “This is just a representation of Agatha to teach her own craft.”

The course’s release coincides with a heated debate about the ethics of artificial intelligence. In Britain, a potential change to copyright law has frightened artists who fear it will allow their work to be used to train A.I. models without their consent. In this case, however, there is no copyright issue: Christie’s family, who manage her estate, are fully on board.

(6) FOR CERTAIN VALUES OF INFLUENCE. The Notion Club Papers – an Inklings Blog argues “Charles Williams Did influence JRR Tolkien’s writing – The Place of the Lion and The Notion Club Papers”.

For the past fifty years it has been normal to assume that JRR Tolkien disliked (probably because he was jealous of) Charles Williams; and that Williams did not influence Tolkien’s writing.

Despite that Tolkien personally claimed such things in writing; none of these are strictly correct. 

Tolkien was good friends with Williams, during Williams’s life – it was only some years after Williams died, when Tolkien became aware of some aspects of CW’s biography, that Tolkien turned against Williams and began to make misleading statements to play-down their friendship. 

The denial of Williams’s influence on Tolkien is more complex. As a generalization, it is true to say that the two men had different minds, aims, and literary styles – and there is no striking influence of Williams noticeable in the works Tolkien published during his lifetime – especially not The Lord of the Rings. 

But more can be said….

… It seems to me very likely that Tolkien’s writing of The Notion Club Papers was a direct consequence of the death of Charles Williams. 

The Williams derivation is seen firstly in the origins of the NCPs as a playful “alter-ego” discussion group, explicitly referencing The Inklings, read to The Inklings as work-in-progress in instalments, and with characters loosely-based on the post-Williams membership. 

In this respect I regard it as significant that there is no Notion Club member who is described as based-on the just-deceased Charles. It is as if the NCPs was a tribute to Charles’s memory, and as such to include CW among the somewhat facetious caricatures the NCP membership would have been disrespectful and altogether inappropriate. …

(7) WHERE TO START WITH PRATCHETT? Christopher Lockett begins a “Discworld Reread #1: The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic” at The Magical Humanist.

…Before I get into the novels proper, I feel it behoves me to address the perennial Discworld question: where to begin? I am starting at the beginning here and going in sequence for two reasons: (1) I want to be systematic and not haphazard about this, and (2) I want to watch Discworld develop and grow as I go.

But then, this is not the ideal way to approach Discworld if you’re just starting.

There are forty-one novels in total, but even though we refer to the Discworld series, it’s really not. Not a series, I mean … not in the sense of being serial, at any rate, wherein each instalment picks up where the last left off, and to have a grasp on the overarching story you must begin at the beginning and read in sequence.

That is not how Discworld works. As I’ve noted in this space previously, when asked by newbies what Discworld novel to start with, the lion’s share of Sir Terry devotees emphatically recommend against starting at the beginning…

Lockett follows with a chart of all the books that looks just one step away from being a Tom Gauld cartoon.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

So Weird series (1999)

The considerable joy of doing these anniversaries is finding these series that I’ve never heard of. So it is with a Disney series called So Weird which ran for sixty-five episodes. So Weird could best be described as a younger version of the X-Files and it far darker than anything which was on Disney when it debuted in 1999. It lasted for just three seasons. 

It was centered around teen Fiona “Fi” Phillips (played by Cara DeLizia) who toured with her rocker mom Molly Phillips (played by Mackenzie Phillips). They kept running into strange and very unworldly things. For the third and final season, she was replaced by Alexz Johnson playing Annie Thelen after the other actress gets the jones to see if she could make in Hollywood. (Well she didn’t.)

The story is that one of the characters, Annie, while visiting an Egyptian museum encounters a cat who once belonged to Egyptian queen that now wants her very much missed companion back. Yes, both the cat and the princess are either immortal or of the undead. 

The writer of this episode, Eleah Horwitz, had little genre background having written just three Slider episodes and a previous one in this series. He’d later be a production assistant on ALF. 

Now if you went looking to watch So Weird’s “Meow” on the Disney service after it debuted, that service which is not Disney+ originally pulled the second season within days of adding the series but returned it a month later within any reason for having pulled it. The show has never been released on DVD. 

However the first five episodes in the first season of the series were novelized and published by Disney Press as mass-market paperbacks, beginning with Family Reunion by Cathy East Dubowski. (I know the Wiki page says Parke Godwin wrote it but the Amazon illustration of the novel cover shows her name. So unless this is one of his pen names, it is not by him.) You can find the other four that were novelized in the Amazon app by simply doing So Weird + the episode name. No they are not available at the usual suspects.

I didn’t find hardly any critics who reviewed it, hardly surprising given it was on the Disney channel but those that did really liked it including John Dougherty at America: The Jesuit Review: “As a kid, my favorite show was about death. Well, not just death: it was also about faith, sacrifice and trying to make sense of life’s ineffable mysteries. Strangest of all, I watched it on the Disney Channel. ‘So Weird’ ran for three seasons from 1999 to 2001. It was Disney’s attempt to create a kid-friendly version of ‘The X-Files,’ tapping into an in-vogue fascination with ghosts, alien encounters and other paranormal phenomena. In practice, it became something more: a meditation on mystery and mortality.” 

I think I’ll leave it there. 

For those of you with Disney+, it’s streaming there.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) ALAN MOORE Q&A. At Alan Moore World: “Long London, Magic & the future of Humanity”.

…In many of your works, Imagination or the Elsewhere often invades Reality. We see this, obviously, in Long London, Providence, Promethea, the League, the story about Thunderman in Illuminations, and so on. Often the world of Imagination influences or interferes, when it does not directly override, the Real one. Could you elaborate on the interconnected relationship between Reality and Imagination, and how your concept of Idea-Space and Magic is linked to it?

Alan Moore: I have to start by carefully defining what is meant by the term ‘reality’. It seems to me that what you most probably mean is material reality. My own position is that while we are indeed apparently part of and surrounded by a material reality (I say apparently because we all compose material reality moment by moment on the loom of our perceptions and are unable to prove that it is actually there, this being the hard problem of consciousness), we are just as evidently part of and immersed in the immaterial reality of our own thought processes. Since material science, which rightly requires empirical testing and repeatable experiments, cannot measure or meaningfully investigate human consciousness, it has tended to argue away consciousness as a ‘ghost in the machine’, and to insist that the only true reality is the material reality for which it has metrics and theories. This has percolated down into the ordinary person on the street’s default worldview, where to say that something is only happening in someone’s mind is to say that it isn’t happening, and by extension that our thoughts and inner workings are not real. Now, thanks to the hard problem of consciousness referred to earlier, while I cannot conclusively state that everybody else’s thoughts and inner workings are real, I can assure you that mine definitely are. In fact, again thanks to the hard problem of consciousness, my thoughts and inner workings are the only things in all existence that I know to be real. The imagination is the sole phenomenon that we know not to be imaginary….

(11) YESTERDAY’S SCALZI BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION. That was clever.

Horatio and his paid intern Jojo wish author @scalzi.com a happy birthday!#Caturday #StarterVillain #HoratioTheCat #JojoThePirateCat

— Centre County Library & Historical Museum (@centrecolibrary.bsky.social) 2025-05-10T15:10:08.924Z

(12) CONAN OUTSIDE THE BOX. “Frazetta Icon Collectibles Conan 1:12 Action Figure Demo”.

As FrazettaGirls designer and project manager I am proud to invite you to join me at the Coffee table for an exciting unboxing and demonstration of the upcoming Frazetta Icon Collectibles Action Figure, Conan The Barbarian!

(13) WHAT IS THE WEIRDEST FILM EVER MADE? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid Moidelhoff over at Media Death Cult asks this question over three days of weed-enhanced film watching.  He comes up with a few recommendations and also asks cult members to provide their suggestions in the ‘comments’ (worth having a skim). In the process, he scares himself sh*tless and has a nervous breakdown…  But he comes up with some interesting choices including a previous film by the folk behind the Hugo-winning Everything, Everywhere, All at Once and also the best killer tyre film of all time.  You can see the 21-minute video here:

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

Remembering Pat Sims (1937-2024)

Posted on by
Reply
Pat and Roger Sims at Midwestcon 40. Photo by Margaret Ford Keifer.

By John Hertz: (reprinted from Vanamonde 1638) She was still Patricia Oswalt at graduation from Linfield College in 1959. Two decades earlier (L’38) had come Joe Medicine Crow (1913-2016), last surviving Plains Indian war chief, World War II veteran, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.

Pat in the early1960s found herself in Chicago, rooming with local fan Ann Dinkleman; Ann introduced Pat to the Univ. Chicago SF Club; Pat was recruited to work in Registration at Chicon Ill the 20th World Science Fiction Convention.

Pat and Ann went together to Midwestcon XIV and Discon I the 21st Worldcon; at M14, Earl Kemp — oh, how I wish I’d given him occasion to ball one of his hands into a fist, which would have been the duke of Earl — introduced Pat to Roger Sims (1930-2022); Pat and Roger were married a year later, on 8-16-64, a date refulgent with powers of two. They were together until death did them part.

Active for years in Detroit (Roger had co-chaired Detcon, the 17th Worldcon), they moved to Cincinnati (Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus [519-430 b.c.e.] called from his farm to accept dictatorial power in a war emergency, won the war and returned to his farm) and thus the Cincinnati Fantasy Group; Pat was CFG secretary-treasurer and hosted its parties at cons, including Worldcons; she edited Roger’s fanwriting e.g. in the great fanzine Mimosa.

Pat & Roger co-chaired Ditto X (fanziners’ con, named for a brand of copying machine once widely used) & XVII, and FanHistoricon IX. They were the 1995 DUFF delegates (Down Under Fan Fund, sends fans in alternate years from North America to Australia – New Zealand and vice versa), nominated by (what a shining list!) Stephen Boucher, Bill Bowers, Robin Johnson, Dick & Nicki Lynch, Bruce Pelz. Pat & Roger attended Thylacon I the 34th Australia natcon (national convention), having previously attended Aussiecon I the 33rd Worldcon.

They went on a month-long safari to Kenya with Carol & Mike Resnick (MR active as both fan& pro). Some of CFG moved to Florida; there was an attempt to make CFG stand for Cincinnati-Florida Group, but that trick never worked. Pat became vice-president of the Orlando Area Science Fiction Society.

She was given the Big Heart, our highest service award, in 2002. Like other Big Heart recipients, she long continued active and helpful. Died June 9, 2024. Requiescat in pace.

Pixel Scroll 3/24/25 I’m Still Big; It’s The Pixels That Got Small

Posted on by
14

(1) OVERSEAS VISITORS TO U.S. WARNED. “Some European countries and Canada issue advisories for travelers to the U.S.” – Minnesota Public Radio has the story.

Some European countries, as well as Canada, are warning their citizens who travel to the United States to strictly follow the country’s entry rules or risk detention as the Trump administration cracks down on immigration enforcement.

Denmark, the United Kingdom, Germany, Finland and Canada have revised their guidelines at a time when some travelers from these countries have been detained by immigration officials….

…The heightened advisories come after citizens from European countries have been detained and deported by immigration officials while traveling to the United States. Some of the warnings also note that the State Department has also suspended its policy allowing transgender, intersex and nonbinary people to update the sex field on their passports — eliminating the X marker as an option.

“We will enforce visa rules and other conditions of entry,” a State Department spokesperson told NPR on Saturday. “Prohibiting travel into the United States by those who might pose a threat or violate conditions of their visa is key to protecting the American people.”

On Friday, Germany’s Foreign Office adjusted its travel advisory after several of its citizens were reportedly arrested and detained by immigration authorities while entering the U.S., according to local media reports. The country is warning citizens that entering the U.S. through the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) or a visa does not guarantee the right to enter the country.

The foreign office’s guidance says that, because U.S. border officials have the final authority to make decisions about whether someone can enter the country, there’s nothing that the German government can do to reverse a denial of entry. It recommends that travelers be able to provide proof of their return trip home, such as a plane ticket.

A German official on Saturday told NPR the country’s consulates general are aware of cases of citizens being detained and are in contact with their families as well as U.S. officials.

The United Kingdom is also warning its residents to comply with all entry rules or they “may be liable to arrest or detention.” The move comes after a tourist from the U.K. was reportedly arrested and detained by ICE at the U.S.-Canada border earlier this month.

Both Denmark and Finland have updated their travel guidance regarding people’s gender markers on their travel documents….

…On Friday, Canada also updated its travel guidelines for entering the U.S. Canadians and foreign nationals who visit the U.S. longer than 30 days “must be registered with the United States Government,” the government’s website warns — and that failure to comply could lead to “penalties, fines, and misdemeanor prosecution.”

(2) CANADIAN BOOKSELLERS CHALLENGE UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCES. Publishers Weekly reports “Canadian Booksellers Unite in Tariff Fight”.

Canadian booksellers have joined forces to ask that Prime Minister Mark Carney exempt books from the 25% counter-tariffs scheduled to take effect on April 2 on $125 billion worth of goods imported from the U.S.

In an unusual collaboration, Laura Carter, executive director of the Canadian Independent Booksellers’ Association (CIBA), and Heather Reisman, CEO of chain bookseller Indigo Books & Music, sent a letter to the Prime Minister on March 20 urging the exclusion of books from the impending tariffs.

Carter and Reisman said in their letter that imposing tariffs on books would have “devastating consequences for Canadian readers, our businesses, and our cultural landscape,” reported the Quill & Quire.

The letter highlights a significant industry concern: that books by Canadian authors printed in and distributed through U.S. warehouses would be subject to the additional tariff, as the majority of books sold in Canada are published by Canadian divisions of multinational publishers.

“Unlike interchangeable consumer goods we know that readers will not likely substitute a book arriving via the U.S. for a Canadian printed and warehoused book,” Carter and Reisman said in the letter. “At this time there is nowhere near the capacity in Canada to handle all of our printing and warehousing. This tariff threatens the survival of bookstores and the livelihoods of thousands of Canadians.”…

(3) NNEDI OKORAFOR PROFILE. BBC Sounds makes available Outook’s feature on Nnedi Okorafor,“Making Marvel magic: The creative spark from my hospital bed”.

Nnedi Okorafor is an award-winning, Nigerian-American author of fantasy and science fiction. 

Becoming a writer was not the most straightforward journey for Nnedi. Before her literary success she was a talented tennis player and dreamt of turning pro. However following a diagnosis of scoliosis, routine surgery to her spine left her temporarily paralysed. 

Confined to her hospital bed, Nnedi found solace in her vivid imagination and began writing for the first time. It was the start of a highly successful career as an author and led to a request from Marvel to write some of their comics. Over the years she has written characters including Spiderman, the X-Men and the Avengers. Nnedi is also the first woman to write the character of T’Challa – the Black Panther, as well as his tech-loving sister, Shuri. Her latest book is called Death of the Author. 

(4) CHALLENGER HISTORY RECOGNIZED. The National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced March 20. The complete list of honorees is at the link. The only work of genre interest is the nonfiction winner.

Adam Higginbotham won the nonfiction award for Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space. As committee chair Jo Livingstone stated, “Surprisingly propulsive in form and shocking in the facts it reveals, Challenger is a story of incompetence fostered when government agencies are invaded by corporate decision-makers.” 

(5) THEY WERE EXPENDABLE. “Review: Mickey 17” from Camestros Felapton.

…While Timo manages to secure a nice position on the crew of the colony ship, Mickey fails to read the paperwork and ends up being the designated “Expendable”: a person who has elected to be digitised so that new copies of him can be printed out each time he dies. For various reasons (explained in the film), the ship is only allowed the one expendable and only one copy of Mickey at a time. Thus he ends up being a living crash test dummy/human Guinea pig for scientists on the ship. Each death and reprinting leads to a new number….

(6) EL-MOHTAR’S NEW BOOK. Dina praises “A Fairy Tale With Teeth: Amal El-Mohtar – The River Has Roots” at SFF Book Reviews.

…I loved everything about this little book. The plot itself – that of two sisters who stumbled into Faerie as children, but have come out again – was fast-moving and surprisingly exciting for such a short novella. The language was pure poetry, not just on a line by line basis, but also because it includes snippet of songs and actual poems. The beautiful etching illustrations are just the cherry on top of the gorgeous SFF novella sundae.
Perhaps most impressively was the way El-Mohtar managed to make her characters come to life….

(7) MYSTERY UNLOCHED. [Item by Steven French.] Here’s a fun piece on the various media appearances of the Loch Ness monster, prompted by a musical about to premiere in Scotland: “From The Simpsons to Werner Herzog: the coolest, craziest, scariest Nessies ever” in the Guardian.

It is the UK’s largest body of fresh water, its volume totalling more than all the lakes of England and Wales combined. It is also the UK’s greatest source of daft stories. For the best part of a century, Loch Ness has used its monster-adjacent status not only to finance a healthy tourist economy, but also to generate a small industry in Nessie-related fiction, from the inspired to the crackpot. The Simpsons sent Mr Burns to do battle with the creature in an episode called Monty Can’t Buy Me Love. From the pen of poet Ted Hughes came Nessie the Mannerless Monster, who was tired of being told she does not exist. And indie folkster Matilda Mann has a song called The Loch Ness Monster, containing this advice: “Stay right down there.” Not wanting to be left out, the Royal Mail has just honoured Nessie with a fine, if rather unscary, stamp.

To these slithery ranks we will shortly be able to add Nessie, a family musical written and composed by Glasgow’s Shonagh Murray and about to premiere in Edinburgh and Pitlochry. Murray was reluctant to tackle such a familiar Scottish icon, until a challenge from her father drew her in. “I had just finished doing a couple of shows about the women behind Robert Burns,” she says. “I was joking with my dad that I needed to find something a wee bit less Scottish. He was like: ‘Oh, there’s loads of Scottish stories that have been told – but not to their full potential. You should do a Nessie musical.’ On a dare, I wrote an opening number. The more I was writing, the more I liked it. There was something charming and special about it.”

I never met the monster, said the writer of The Secret of the Loch after her research, but I did find a wonderful whisky

Despite claims to the contrary, the story goes back no further than May 1933. That was when hotel proprietor Donaldina Mackay and her husband John, driving along the north shore of the loch, claimed to have seen a large creature on the surface. They said it resembled a whale and described it rolling for a minute before disappearing. Their testimony, reported by the Inverness Courier, set off a summer of sighting claims. At the time, the dinosaur-battling King Kong was becoming a monster hit in cinemas, but here was a fearsome creature on Scotland’s very own soil (or loch)….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Mike Glyer.]

Born March 24, 1946 – Andrew Porter, 79. File 770’s indispensible Scroll contributor Andrew Porter got into sf fandom in the Sixties. He published a major genzine, Algol/Starship (1963–83), which received five Hugo nominations and won in 1974. And he has been a leading sf news writer for even longer — his first news-related column on upcoming paperbacks appeared in James V. Taurasi’s Science Fiction Times in 1960. Later in the decade he started his own newzine, S.F. Weekly (1966–68), and returned in the Eighties with Science Fiction Chronicle (1980–2002), a 21-time Hugo nominee and won in 1993 and 1994.

Andrew Porter in 1993 with his Hugo Award.

Porter was assistant editor on The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction from 1966–74, and associate editor at Lancer Books in the late 1960s. Outside the sf field he also worked as a trade magazine editor and advertising production manager on such titles as Rudder, Quick Frozen Foods (under editor Sam Moskowitz), QFF International, Construction Equipment, and Electro-Procurement.

He has independently published nonfiction collections such as The Book of Ellison, Dreams Must Explain Themselves by Ursula K. Le Guin, Exploring Cordwainer Smith, and Experiment Perilous: The Art and Science of Anguish in Science Fiction and The Fiction of James Tiptree, Jr. by Gardner Dozois. He was honored with a Special British Fantasy Award in 1992.

He was Fan Guest of Honour at ConFiction, the 1990 World Science Fiction Convention held in The Hague, Netherlands. The audio of his speech is available at Fanac.org.

He also was recognized by Chicon V (1991) with a Special Committee Award for Distinguished Semiprozine Work. And he was honored with the Big Heart Award in 2009.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Rainbow Mars by Larry Niven (1999)

Twenty-six years ago Rainbow Mars was published by Tor. It is my absolutely favorite work by Larry Niven, with Ringworld being my second. After that, it’s the Gil the ARM stories. Because of what the stories are, it hasn’t been touched by the Suck Fairy at all.

It contains six stories, five previously published and the longest, “Rainbow Mars”, written for this collection, plus some other material. It is about Svetz, the cross-reality traveler who keeps encountering beings who really should not exist including those Martians. He travel back in time  but it isn’t really time but alternative realties to retrieve animals as now in 3050 of them save dogs are extinct, but he never gets it right. 

SPOILER HERE. Horses are unicorns, Gila monsters are, monsters of sort in the form of fire breathing dragons, and, well, guess, that bird? No a phoenix is certainly not a great idea, is it? END OF SPOILER, REALLY IT IS. 

Now in the afterword, Niven notes, “Time travel is fantasy. But the only way to get fun out of it is to treat it as Analog–style science fiction. Keep it internally consistent. Lay out a set of rules and invite the reader to beat you to the consequences.” So these stories are to him SF, not fantasy. 

The first story, “Get A Horse!” was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in October 1969. That was followed by “Bird in the Hand” in the same magazine, October of the next year. Surprisingly the third story, “Leviathan!” was published in Playboy in August of that year. 

Yes, I know Playboy did a lot of SF, it’s just that I wouldn’t have expected this story to show up there. It fits F&SF better in my opinion. Your opinion on that matter of course may differ.

Then “There’s a Wolf in My Time Machine” was published in October of that year in the fine zine that printed the first two. 

Finally the last story that got printed at that time, “Death in a Cage” was published in Niven’s The Flight of the Horse collection in September of 1973 which collected these stories as well. (The Flight of the Horse also had “Flash Crowd” which I like a lot and “What Good is a Glass Dagger?” which is fantastic.) 

Now we get Rainbow Mars, the novel, yes novel as Tor insists it is, that finishes out this delightfully silly volume. I think it’s a novella but y’all can give me your opinion on that. 

Some of Pratchett’s idea from a conversation he had with Niven remain in the final version of Rainbow Mars, mainly the use of Yggdrasil, the world tree. Though there’s Norsemen as well…

There’s two other two short pieces, “The Reference Director Speaks”, in which Niven speaks about his fictional sources for the Mars he creates, and “Svetz’s Time Line” which is self-explanatory. 

An afterword, “Svetz and the Beanstalk”, rounds out the work in which Niven talks about the fictional sources for Rainbow Mars as a whole.

The fantastic cover art, which was nominated for a Chelsey Award, is by Bob Eggleton who has won, if my counting skills are right tonight, an impressive nine Hugos, mostly for Best Professional Artist though there was one for Best Related Work for his most excellent Greetings from Earth: The Art of Bob Eggleton. 

I once, a long time ago, heard a pirated copy of the audiobook when the internet was a lot easier place to find such things. There were Zelazny novels there read by him. Sigh… 

Postscript: We also recommend John Hertz’ “Interview with Hanville Svetz (Larry Niven, co-author)” first published in Argentus, 2004, and available in Dancing and Joking on page 34.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) DON’T PANIC. “Netflix’s $275 Million ‘The Electric State’ Has Fallen Flat. No Matter?” The New York Times explains the reasons for the company’s sang froid. (Behind a paywall.)

Netflix spent over $275 million to make “The Electric State,” a sci-fi action adventure film starring Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt and a slew of sentient robots. Had it opened in theaters, instead of on its service as it did on March 14, the film would almost certainly be declared a giant disappointment.

Reviews have been dismal. And though the movie debuted at No. 1 on the streaming giant’s weekly chart of most-watched movies, it had far fewer views (25.2 million) than other expensive features, including “The Gray Man” (41.2 million), which was made by the same directors, the brothers Joe and Anthony Russo.

But there was little hand-wringing inside Netflix this week. No marketing chief was blamed. No production executive packed up her office.

Instead, the movie demonstrates how different Netflix is from the traditional studios — and how easily the company can spend so much for a middling result without Wall Street’s noticing. (Its stock is up slightly this week.)

Truth is, no one piece of content moves the needle at Netflix in either direction. “Squid Game 2” was the most-watched title in the company’s most recent engagement report, with 87 million views, but it accounted for only 0.7 percent of total viewing. Rather, the $18 billion that the company spends each year on movies and shows is meant to reach a worldwide audience with different tastes and interests. The budget for “The Electric State” represents 1.5 percent of what the company will spend on content this year….

(12) KEY OBSERVATIONS. Olivia Waite opens the door to “Science Fiction, Locked Room Mysteries, and the Joy of Literary Games” at CrimeReads.

Let me be very obvious at the start and say: a murder victim can’t tell you who the killer is. Locked-room mysteries are puzzling because the only person you’re sure was in the room is the one person you can’t ask for testimony. That’s also what makes locked-room plots such challenging things to read or write — a baffling impossibility turns out to be an illusion with a material explanation. An airgun from the empty house across the street, a serpent in the ventilator, a disguise or an accomplice or a clock hand nudged to display a fraudulent time.

Chandler famously objected to how this makes murder into something like a game — and he’s not wrong, ethically or aesthetically — but he does overlook the crucial fact that games are extremely fun. And my god do we need whatever fun we can scrape from these times….

… The great rebellious joy of sci-fi is that it rewrites the rules of our universe: faster than light travel, sentient mechanical beings, aliens and wormholes and alternative timelines and mirror universes and all. You must only touch the ball with your hands becomes you must never touch the ball with your hands. You transform a fact so you can explore the consequences — the propulsive and then what? that keeps the fictional pages turning. Humans colonize Mars — and then what? Robots can have feelings — and then what?

A corpse can tell you who killed them — and then what?…

(13) STOP THEM SCRAPERS! [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] All the “by clicking on this, you accept our terms”… ever want to set your terms (my son’s working out such a “by my use of your software, you you agree…”)? Well, here’s an IEEE proposed standard for it. “Doc Searls Proposes We Set Our Own Terms and Policies for Web Site Tracking” at Slashdot.

…Basically your web browser proffers whatever agreement you’ve chosen (from a canonical list hosted at Customer Commons) to the web sites and other online services that you’re visiting.

“Browser makers can build something into their product, or any developer can make a browser add-on or extension…” Searls writes. “On the site’s side — the second-party side — CMS makers can build something in, or any developer can make a plug-in (WordPress) or a module (Drupal). Mobile app toolmakers can also come up with something (or many things)…”MyTerms creates a new regime for privacy: one based on contract. With each MyTerm you are the first party. Not the website, the service, or the app maker. They are the second party. And terms can be friendly. For example, a prototype term called NoStalking says “Just show me ads not based on tracking me.” This is good for you, because you don’t get tracked, and good for the site because it leaves open the advertising option. NoStalking lives at Customer Commons, much as personal copyrights live at Creative Commons. (Yes, the former is modeled on the latter.)…

(14) SUNK COST. Adam Rowe discusses depictions of “Atlantis” at 70s Sci-Fi Art.

Much like the Bermuda triangle, Bigfoot, and the psychic powers of plants, serious discussions of Atlantis seem to have dwindled down to nothing since the ’70s and ’80s. But maybe it would be more fair to say that they’ve gotten less fun because, much like any other conspiracy theory, belief in Atlantis is now an on-ramp to harmful views like climate change denial or white supremacy….

… Now that I’ve gotten all the sensible opinions out at the front of this post, I have to admit that I really enjoy all this pseudo-historical nonsense. I devoted a whole chapter of my sci-fi art book to cryptozoology and the paranormal – while it was clearly distinct from science fiction, it was a thriving genre with plenty of crossover, including many big-name artists….

Here’s an example by David Hardy.

(15) ANDOR. Disney+ has dropped a trailer for the final season of Andor, which begins streaming on April 22.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, John Hertz, 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 Andrew (not Werdna).]

Hugo Nominations Close 3/14

Posted on by
6

By John Hertz: Since Hugo nominations close on March 14th (“Pi Day”), I recommend reading (or re-reading) Alfred Bester’s superb story “The Pi Man”.

“The Pi Man” quotes my saying (at “Time For Tea”) that the story is “coruscating, gripping, strange”.

More fully, I said, “At short-story length he may never have surpassed ‘The Pi Man’, coruscating, gripping, strange; he should never have revised it years later.” (It was published in 1959, revised 1978.)

Simple Simon met a pie man
Going to the fair;
Said Simple Simon to the pie man,
“Let me taste your ware.”

Said the pie man to Simple Simon,
“Show me first your penny.”
Said Simple Simon to the pie man,
“Indeed I have not any.”

Alfred Bester

John Hertz Review: The Elements of Marie Curie

Posted on by
Reply
  • The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science  by Dava Sobel (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2024)

By John Hertz: Thanks to David Grigg for his review in The Megaloscope 15 calling my attention to this fine book. I’m nominating it for Best Related Work.

On the back cover of the copy I got, I note these blurbs:

“Ms. Sobel writes with an eye for a telling detail” (The Wall Street Journal, on her book The Glass Universe). True.

“We forget we’re being educated as we’re being entertained” (Newsweek, on her book The Plonets). True. I wish this compliment did not have to be paid, but never mind that.

Theodore Sturgeon said, in possibly his best pun, “Science fiction is knowledge fiction.” The Latin root of science means knowledge. This book isn’t fiction, but SF lives on science, and Ms. Sobel here does what an SF author must — introduce us to a world in the course of telling a story.

Marie Curie (1867-1934) was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win two, and so far the only person to win in two distinct scientific fields. Actually her work in physics (1903 prize) and chemistry (1911 prize} indicated the interrelation of these two fields, but never mind that.

You know, although Ms. Sobel apparently did not, that the 1987 Duane Elms song “Madame Curie’s Hands” won the 1992 Pegasus Award for Best Tribute.

Mme. Curie discovered polonium and radium. She coined the word “radioactivity”. Her work with radioactive materials burned her hands and may well have killed her. She was not careless; like many scientists, she learned the dangers of what she was doing; as she learned, she explored precautions, and urged them.

This book is mostly about women. I’m biassed (yes, that’s how I spell it, also busses and gasses; if you just left, good-bye} In their favor. I try not to be prejudiced, but biasses can be earned. In fact Mme. Curie was a wife and mother. I think that was as much up to her as whether to be a homemaker or pursue a career — or both. She continually met prejudices about what women were and could do. That did not stop her.

Ms. Sobel organizes her book into thirty chapters and an epilogue {the copy I got is just over 300 pages), all but four named for women important to the story, and all associated with chemical as well as narrative elements — hydrogen, iron, uranium, gold, carbon, bismuth, francium. Like rhymes in poetry, this is ingenious, helpful, and — I’ll say it — beautiful. Poetry can be made without rhymes, books can be otherwise organized. I think Ms. Sobel succeeds, so I applaud.

These women Mme. Curie found and guided, or eventually came looking for her. Fame, when it arrived, mostly annoyed her. She wanted to do her work. This included teaching science to girls.

She was born in Poland, then a country but not a nation; she moved to France; she went to other countries, sometimes overseas; she attended conferences, too often the only woman; she published; she knew her studies had to be shared and discussed. She followed others’ work, using it, acknowledging it. During World War I, seeing how X-rays could help surgeons treat wounded soldiers, she {as Brother Grigg notes) taught people to use X-rays, equipped X-ray vans, and drove one to the front herself. She did not live to see World War II. She knew Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg, Planck — but women are the focus of this story.

She died on the Fourth of July, at dawn.

John Hertz at Loscon 50

Posted on by
2

By John Hertz. [Reprinted from Vanamonde 1621-1626.]

In Los Angeles our local science fiction convention is Loscon, held over Thanksgiving weekend. Loscon L (or 50, if you prefer) was November 29-December 1, 2024 at the L.A. lnt’I Airport (LAX) Hilton Hotel; Author Guest of Honor Larry Niven, Artist Guest of Honor Laura Brodian Freas Beraha & Ghost of Honor Frank Kelly Freas, Music Guest of Honor Kathy Mar, Fan Guests of Honor Genny Dazzo & Craig Miller; attendance about 700; Art Show sales about $14,000 by three dozen exhibitors; chair, Eylat Poliner.

I led three Classics of SF book discussions, on The Currents of Space (I. Asimov, 1952), Star Man’s Son (A. Norton, 1952), and Wasp (E.F. Russell, 1957)(“Classics of Science Fiction at Loscon 50” at File 770); taught English Regency ballroom dancing (“The English Regency and Me” in Mimosa 29); served as Hall Costume Judge (“Hall Costume Awards” at Loscon.org [Internet Archive link]); and — there being nowhere to put a Fanzine Lounge — helped Heath Row with a Fanzine Corner.

Larry Niven
Dr. Laura Brodian Freas Beraha
Kelly Freas
Craig Miller and Genny Dazzo
Kathy Mar

Sue Mason (since 2015), Suzle (Suzanne Tompkins; since 2021), and I (since 2003) judge the Rotsler Award (announced at Loscon since 1998, for long-time wonder-working with graphic art in amateur publications of the SF community, sponsored by the S. Cal. lnst. for Fan Interests — initials SCIFI pronounced “skiffy”); we gave this year’s to España Sheriff; tech wizard Elizabeth Klein-Lebbink using her powers to work with me producing the display in the Art Show (“España Sheriff Wins 2024 Rotsler Award” at File 770), added to the full display of all Rotsler winners to date (“Rotsler Award Display at Glasgow 2024” at File 770).

This was Loscon’s first year at the Airport Hilton. First year at a hotel is often awkward. Closing Ceremonies applauded Christian McGuire, the Hotel Liaison. To the fans next to me, who were from Australia, I muttered “If you think his having chaired a Worldcon (L.A.con IV) made it easy to be Hotel Liaison, you should think again.”

The book discussions were on three days at the same hour in the same room. Finding one, you could thus readily find the rest; but what if 2:30 p.m. wasn’t convenient for you? Also, in the Grid we get at cons now, they weren’t shown with most other programming but tucked in a lower-left corner. I pointed them out to folks who knew enough to ask me. The room was arranged well: circular tables that attenders could sit around, better for discussion than placing me behind a table at one end with everyone else before it as if they were an audience for me to do all the talking.

The propeller of my beanie was damaged: I had got a new propeller from Interstellar Propeller of Berkeley, the only Ray Faraday Nelson-approved propeller-beanie manufacturer. The nice people at the Costume Repair Station did the repair.

Friday, The Currents of Space. Its opening scene gives us a better grasp than the characters in the book have of the misfortunes befalling the man called Rik — following the classical definition of irony as a conspiracy of the author and the audience against the characters (e.g. hearers of Greek myth know, though Oedipus does not, who it is he kills and who it is he weds). The opening use of the psychic probe follows both If there’s a gun on the wall in Act I it had better be fired before the final curtain and In tragedy a wrong which the wrongdoer deems minor turns out to have major consequences –– although Currents has a happy ending. Currents does not explicitly state, only inviting us to consider, the parallel between the position of its kyrt textiles and the history of cotton up to the 20th Century; also the racial inversion compared to 1952 in the United States, blacks being powerful in Currents and whites being dominated; a heavier hand would have made much of these. Throughout, Currents gives us several more points of view than many other stories; and, we noted happily, more strong female characters than many 21st Century folk attribute to SF of that time. It’s a detective story; there are lots of detective stories in SF; they’re a way for the author to acquaint the reader with an invented world, since the detective has to go round learning things (here again is Theodore Sturgeon’s Science fiction is knowledge fiction — note that the root of science, Latin scientia, means knowledge).

For lack of a better name we’ve been calling fan tables those locations at a con where clubs, cons, bids to hold cons, and other fan activities, can place an ambassador to answer, (and invite) questions, and more or less, within the bounds of civility, make friends. At L50 these tables were in the Dealers’ Room. Act of policy by the con committee? Forced by the hotel? Done without deliberation? Did the placement of fan tables keep them from people who didn’t consider going to the Dealers’ Room?

My own preference, and what has been usual, is for these to be along a main hallway in which any who wish can pause at a table and engage in conversation. Operations’ agents in the Dealers’ Room want to sell. A member of the Loscon committee who had not made this placement pointed out to me that conventions want to sell memberships, bids want to sell pre-supporting status, and convention attenders (not “attendees”, aiee) who go into the Dealers’ Room are disposed to spend money. Does her way of looking at things commercialize fan activities? We still, in an instance of good terminology, insist we are dealing in memberships, not admission tickets, i.e. a right to participate, not a right to watch others, unlike what is apparently supposed by many who arrive nowadays. Shall we — I’ll say it — pander to that supposition? ln fairness I report I found people staffing L50 fan tables to be civil and not pressure-wielders.

Once, it seems, everyone taking any part in fandom knew, whether or not active in, other parts. Maybe you exhibited in the Art Show, or bought things there, or went to the Art Auction whether or not you bid. Maybe you didn’t, but you did last year. Anyway it didn’t occur to you Oh no, that’s only for those people over there. Likewise panel discussions. Filking (our home­made music, adopting a typo of “folk music”). Serving on the con committee. Fanzines. But we began to fragment.

Heath Row invented the Fanzine Comer for L48. For L50 he and I did it again. The existence or even the possibility of fanzines is apparently not obvious now — commentary, discussion, anecdotes. Patrick Nielsen Hayden says Fanwriting is not a junior varsity for pro writing. A Fanzine Lounge is better for hanging around and browsing fanzines, I think, but so far at Loscons we’ve not managed a place to put one. When there is one it may have the defect of being a Place to Go, thus requiring a decision to go there.

Friday night, Regency Dancing. Jane Austen (1775-1817) lived then, one of the great authors in English literature; but she’s like a Martian writing for other Martians — never mind whether there really are or were any Martians, we have them in SF stories — she doesn’t explain anything. Georgette Heyer (1902-1974) wrote novels set then; she had to do what an SF author must, take us into the world she writes of, without stopping to dump information. She wins us with characterization, event, wit. Her books sparked fannish interest in this colorful period. Among my favorites are Arabella (1949), a neat introduction; A Civil Contract (1961), mostly taking place after marriage; and Cotillion (1953), whose ugly duckling is not the protagonist and is even a man.

Aristocratic pastimes often require a lot of work-up. My task is characterization, event, wit opening the door of this dance to people who don’t have such resources, and might not care to. I musn’t fall into the pit of dumbing things down. Some say I succeed.

The Art Show had a history of Loscons, with names and photos. I was Fan Guest of Honor at L38. At L50 there was a half-panel montage of Jerry Pournelle photos showing him in various stages of his career – his career with us; he had several. I wish it had been captioned “The First Loscon Guest of Honor”.

Loscon is sponsored by the LASFS (Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, founded 1934; pronounced as if rhyming with a Spanglish “más fuss”), which gives two annual awards, the Evans-Freehafer (after E. Everett Evans & Paul Freehafer) for service to LASFS, and the Forry (after Forrest J Ackerman) for service to SF. There was a list of the E-F winners, and next to it a list of the 4e winners. I wish each list had not just named its award but said what it was.

In recent years con Art Shows haven’t seen our top pro artists. I know some, and I’ve tried to invite them. Fanzine artists too notoriously don’t show, which is one reason I started the R Awd exhibit. At MidAmericon II Steve Stiles exhibited a comic strip about how he’d never win a Hugo (i.e. for Best Fanartist). That year he did. You might think this would have unblocked the road, but – At L50, I was ecstatic to find Rick Sternbach’s work in the Art Show. So was Greg Benford, who bought promptly. I saw Sternbach at a party and thanked him. Hoping to be helpful I described Kelly Freas’ method. He would show a painting he couldn’t afford to sell for less than, say, $2,000 in 1998 money; around it, a few studies he could sell at $500; around those, sketches he could sell at $100 (i.e. minimum bids, subject to Auction rules and like that). Everybody could get into the act. To my surprise this was news to Sternbach.

With Laura Brodian Freas Beraha, the Woman With Too Many Names (which l say affectionately, she’s a long­time friend — she keeps Laura Brodian for work in classical-music radio; Kelly had a two-part unhyphenated surname, like James Clerk Maxwell [1831-1879]; she married Kelly in 1988, he died in 2005, she married Steve Beraha in 2012; she accepts Laura Beraha and Laura Freas), being Artist GoH, and Kelly being Ghost of Honor, we had a swell exhibit of their work singly and together.

Actually the fan With Too Many Names was Jack Harness — another long-time friend —  who inter alia was Scribe JH or Scribe, Hawkman or *Wheet–Wheet*, Arson — his puns made people want to set him afire — Harmless, a misnomer since he often won at LASFS Poker — of which, to people who reasonably think Poker is Five-Card Draw or Five-Card Stud with Baseball being for weirdos, I say You ain’t seen nothin’ since in those days we even had Soft Shoe, where you could shuffle off to bluff a low — and now back to our program.

Fuzzy Pink Niven

On Saturday in the Art Show I saw another fine exhibit, a Memory Wall with names and photographs of people we’d lost. Tony Benoun, co-founder of the thriving Doctor Who con Gallifrey One, who earned the Evans-Freehafer and whose widow Sherri will chair L51 next year. Marty Cantor. Melissa Conway, so helpful while head of Special Collections at U.Cal. Riverside including the Eaton Collection of SF; she gave a home to Bruce Pelz’ fanzine collection and later Jay Kay Klein’s photos — and a door decorated by Selina Phanara from the 2011 LASFS Clubhouse (File 770: “John Hertz: Klein is Big, Door is Dear”). Karl Lembke. Fuzzy Pink Niven (File 770: “John Hertz on Fuzzy Pink Niven (1940-2023)”). Sean Smith. Here was the Jerry Pournelle montage. With Post-Its people could stick memories onto the photos.

Saturday at 2:30 p.m., Star Man’s Son. Announcing it I’d said “From, say, Paragraph 5, we know what is happening and what will…. Her sense of event — of character — of the telling detail — keep us eager to watch her bring about what must occur,” with which the discussion agreed. We thought the semi-telepathic relation between Fors and the panther Lura didn’t make the book fantasy, since the author presents it as possibly a mutation in her post-nuclear-war world. We liked the interplay of the tribes, and recognized the ancestral Tuskegee Airmen. We were sad to see little of women, but thought this grew organically from the story; no decision whether that point was helped for us by our being aware Norton was a woman.

The hotel had Destination Elevators, three on a side at each floor, A-C, D-F. On a keypad you entered the floor you wanted: a display told you which elevator would take you there. While on the second floor I wondered aloud whether we’d get 2B or not 2B. That joke didn’t work.

Again there was no Masquerade (our on-stage costume competition); nobody could be found to run one. Again a group called the Nerd Mafia held a cosplay event. Cosplay, in principle a good term, has come to mean what the costuming community calls re-creation costumes (faithful copies of known images, e.g. from television, motion pictures, comic books), not originals: so not the whole truth. I found the Nerd Mafia sign-in table and tried to learn who they were, whether they disregarded our decades of Masquerade know-how (and if so, why) or were merely unaware (and if so, why). That too didn’t work. Saturday night at dinner I was just thinking I might learn by going to watch what the Nerd Mafia was doing, when someone came in talking about the results — instead of starting around 8 p.m., it was all over by then. Dean Gahlon says It’s not so much re-inventing the wheel as it is re-inventing the square wheel. But what do I know?

At a party I found Aldo Spadoni putting down the design of the Enterprise from Star Trek; he said the ship was unstable, with various other wrongs. I said the effective imagination of ST deserved applause; look how ST reached people. In SF we invent things that have never existed; what can they be accurate compared to? Afterward —  l’esprit d’escalier (French, “the wit of the stairs”, the thing you think of going downstairs later) – I realized I should have turned the discussion to comparing how this problem is addressed in visual and in verbal art.

It used to be that one’s choices were to attend an SF con in person, or get a Supporting Membership and hear about the con afterward. Now for some cons and some people there’s virtual attendance, e.g. by Zoom. In person you can run into people — figuratively, I mean — at a party, in the Art Show, the Dealers’ Room, the halls. Thus I ran into long-time friend Lloyd Penney at Loscon.

We’d both been at the Buffalo NASFiC: he being Editor-in Chief of Amazing had a Dealers’ Room table; but I having by what Rich Lynch with good reason called “a long and at times strange journey arrived in Buffalo late” (File 770: “NASFiC Third Day Photos”) found my hands full what with setting up the Fanzine Lounge and the Rotsler Award exhibit, and leading Classics of SF discussions; I scarcely got to the D Rm at all and our paths didn’t cross otherwise. He’s now both amazing and Amazing, engaged for this position after a substantial fannish career (Fancyclopedia; Lloyd Penney), which he continues; he and his wife Yvonne had been fan Guests of Honor at L39; he’d said he really wanted to attend this Golden Anniversary Loscon, which he did, coming 2,000 mi (3,500 km) from his home in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. So our encounter was welcome, and though each bound elsewhere we managed to converse, about fanzines, prozines, cabbages and kings.

The Rick Sternbach original that Greg Benford was so glad to get in the L50 Art Show was RS’ color illustration for GB’s Against Infinity (1983), which as it happens I’d mentioned in reporting RS’ Art Show tour while RS was Artist GoH at Denvention Ill (File 770 155 p. 28). Manuel Lopez confronts the being “Aleph” on the surface of Ganymede, looking up with mouth turned down, Space gun in hand, standing amid and shadowed by textured rocks, Jupiter with its Red Spot above. The top third of the picture is near-empty Space. RS talking of it at D3 told of having to get lightness, darkness, in the shadows: “I hate shadows.” He did them well anyhow.

Sunday at 2:30 p.m., Wasp. I’d brought the 2001 NESFA Press collection Entities, edited by Rick Katze (rhymes with straits), cover art by Bob Eggleton, cover design by Alice Lewis, with Jack Chalker’s “Wasp is [Russell’s] most famous and most read novel”. On Friday, at the end of Currents of Space, Cheri Kaylor had asked to borrow my copy of Star Man’s Son so she could re-read it overnight to be ready for Saturday, which she did; she did it again with Wasp. We all have different gifts. The discussion agreed Russell had succeeded, in addition to telling a good story, at satirizing bureaucracy, the second of which would have had little force without the first; also, he showed, an operation reflects the nature of the beings running it, comparing the Sirians with the Terrans. The wasp-strategy worked because the Sirians, being tyrannous, were bureaucratic, rigid, and fearful (which may amount to saying the same thing four ways). And Russell was funny.

Just catching the end of Questions & Answers with Larry Niven, I asked “You’ve done fine collaborations, but may we hope for more SF by you alone?” He said, “You can always hope.”

Over coffee, talk of education. I said, as I do, liberal arts are those arts which suit one to the exercise of liberty; this brought in Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), his memoir Up from Slavery (1901) and the Tuskegee Airmen, W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963; inter alia first black to get a Ph.D. degree from Harvard, 1895) and “‘I don’t agree’, said W.E.B.” (D. Randall, 1969). Hispanics and Asians are in it too. Brad Lyau kindly reminded me that DuBois’ name according to his own pronunciation rhymed with poise.

At a party I saw a man performing feats of playing-card magic for a woman. How out of practice I am; I couldn’t pass a Magic Castle audition now. Later I saw the woman had picked up a Mark Wilson (1929-2021) book, so I gave her a recommendation. Here too we suffer from terminological inexactitude. By magic I mean the theater art. The great Robert­Houdin (1805-1871; name rhymes with no fair, you ran) said a magician is an actor playing the part of a magician.

I met a man who said he’d learned of fallacies and syllogisms from Martin Young. I found Young and thanked him. Chaz Baden also had my thanks for another set of Bear’s Picnics (he’s sometimes called the Bear). He sat at a supply of alcoholic and non-alcoholic fluids mixing cocktails and mocktails, some old, some new. This lubricated conversation. In fandom more nearly than anywhere else we love you for your mind.

In the Dealers’ Room I saw a U.S. Marine in dress uniform. He hadn’t read Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959). I described its Mobile Infantry. He said, “Yes, those sound like Marines to me.” And Heinlein had been a Navy man.

There was a tea party for Fuzzy Pink on Sunday. So many wanted to be part of it that it needed several seatings. Kim Brown, Genny Dazzo, and friends circulated with trays of teacakes, scones, tea sandwiches, and pots of green or black (which Chinese call red) tea. I found someone to sit with who looked a little lost, and answered questions. We were all given pink lanyards with Fuzzy’s name. I won a teapot in a raffle. At Closing Ceremonies Larry thanked everyone for tributes to her all weekend.

Somewhere along the line I saw a video of Tim Griffin singing “307 Ale” (T. Smith, 1991) with Larry. In another Denvention III coincidence Kathy Mar had been its Music Guest of Honor. At L50 Closing Ceremonies she sang “Ship of Stone” (Don Simpson, 1981). The gavel was duly struck and given to Sherri Benoun. Afterward there was a feedback session, which I couldn’t stay for, but later several on the con committee told me people had said the Classics of SF discussions were a highlight for them, thoughtful, insightful, engaging. One doesn’t turn away thanks. I thought to myself I’d succeeded in getting other people to do some of the discussing. And (P.L. Travers, Mary Poppins ch. 3 (1934)) it was time to go home.

Pixel Scroll 1/27/25 For The Scroll Was A Boojum, You See

Posted on by
19

(1) ENNIE TABLETOP GAME AWARD BANS AI ENTRIES. The ENNIE Awards will no longer allow AI content in submissions, effective with the 2025-26 awards season: “Revised Policy on Generative AI Usage”. The complete discussion is at the link.

…In 2023, the ENNIE Awards introduced their initial policy on generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs). The policy recognized the growing presence of these technologies in modern society and their nuanced applications, from generating visual and written content to supporting background tasks such as PDF creation and word processing. The intent was to encourage honesty and transparency from creators while maintaining a commitment to human-driven creativity. Under this policy, creators self-reported AI involvement, and submissions with AI contributions were deemed ineligible for certain categories. For example, products featuring AI-generated art were excluded from art categories but remained eligible for writing categories if the text was entirely human-generated, and vice versa. The organizers faced challenges in crafting a policy that balanced inclusivity with the need to uphold the values of creativity and originality. Recognizing that smaller publishers and self-published creators often lack the resources of larger companies, the ENNIE Awards sought to avoid policies that might disproportionately impact those with limited budgets.

However, feedback from the TTRPG community has made it clear that this policy does not go far enough. Generative AI remains a divisive issue, with many in the community viewing it as a threat to the creativity and originality that define the TTRPG industry. The prevailing sentiment is that AI-generated content, in any form, detracts from a product rather than enhancing it.

In response to this feedback, the ENNIE Awards are amending their policy regarding generative AI. Beginning with the 2025-2026 submission cycle, the ENNIE Awards will no longer accept any products containing generative AI or created with the assistance of Large Language Models or similar technologies for visual, written, or edited content. Creators wishing to submit products must ensure that no AI-generated elements are included in their works. While it is not feasible to retroactively alter the rules for the 2024-2025 season, this revised policy reflects the ENNIE Awards commitment to celebrating the human creativity at the heart of the TTRPG community…

(2) ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDALS. The 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal winners were announced by the American Library Association today. Neither is a genre work.

FICTION

  • James by Percival Everett (Doubelday)

NONFICTION

  • Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon by Kevin Fedarko (Scribner)

…Calling James “an astounding riposte” to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the ALA said that Everett “takes the story in a completely different direction than the original, exemplifying the relentless courage and moral clarity of an honorable man with nothing to lose.” Fedarko’s A Walk in the Park, which “follows the author on a canyon-spanning group hike…particularly inspires in detailing the ancestral history of the land and some of the Indigenous individuals who continue to fight against overdevelopment and ever-booming tourism,” the ALA said….

(3) FOREVER CHANGED. Sakinah Hofler, winner of the 2024 Analog Award for Emerging Black Voices, tells in a new essay how science fiction, especially Octavia Butler’s, opened Hofler’s mind to new possibilities in her writing: “Defamiliarization: Against Reality to Examine Reality” at The Astounding Analog Companion.

… I remember this as a pivotal moment when science fiction changed everything I thought I knew about what I wanted to write as well as what I thought writing could do.

The first book in the Patternist series, Wild Seed, mainly takes place in West Africa and America. There are elements of slavery in it, but we are also introduced to two evolved humans—Doro, an immortal spirit who can travel from body to body, and Anwanyu, a shape-shifter and healer—characters who, over the centuries, fluctuate between being allies and enemies. During the height of the slave trade, both of them, separately, wind up starting their own colonies of superhumans. What drew me in and what made this novel feel different and refreshing was Butler’s ability to make the familiar unfamiliar, or, as dubbed by Darko Suvin, evoke a feeling of “cognitive estrangement.” She created a world familiar enough for me to recognize, yet, by injecting supernatural elements had destabilized my understanding of reality, thwarted my expectations, and offered an alternative, complicated, hopeful history and future….

(4) NEW CLARION WEST SCHOLARSHIP. Clarion West today announced a “Scholarship for Trans Writers”.

We are delighted to announce the Sea Star Scholarship, an annual full-tuition scholarship for our flagship Six-Week Workshop, offered by an anonymous donor, which will be awarded each year to one qualifying student who identifies as two-spirit, trans, nonbinary, or under the gender expansive umbrella.

Through the generosity of our donors, Clarion West provides a number of scholarships for writers every year. Approximately 60–90% of our Six-Week Workshop participants receive full and partial-tuition scholarships. Interested students must indicate financial need when applying to the summer workshop. Applications are reviewed without regard to financial aid requests. You can learn more about scholarships for the Six-Week Workshop here. 

At Clarion West we are proud to be part of a supportive community for trans, two-spirit, nonbinary, and other gender expansive authors who continue to change and inform the landscape of speculative fiction for the better. We know that trans writers are and will continue to be essential in expanding the boundaries of SFFH and are equally essential in inviting new exciting voices into the field.

We know the journey for each trans writer is different, and that trans people represent all racial and ethnic backgrounds, faith traditions, and countries around the world. And we know that while there has been significant progress in the publishing world, the transgender community is still facing significant political and personal attacks through discrimination and violence, especially against Black and Brown trans women. 

We remain committed to supporting trans authors and learning how to better support them in a field that can be hostile and unwelcoming. We do this through our efforts to provide an intersectional framework of support for trans authors. The organization welcomes trans faculty, seeks to create supportive spaces for trans authors in workshop groups, and makes every effort to create an inclusive community throughout our programs. 

Transphobia is not welcome or tolerated in our classrooms, at our events, nor in our workspace. We support our students and community members with robust community guidelines and anti-harassment reporting policies. When we are informed of instructor or participant misconduct, Clarion West makes every effort to verify, follow up with those who may have been harmed, and to ensure that we take the steps necessary to prevent future misconduct, up to and including exclusion from Clarion West classes and events.

In the spirit of celebrating the contributions of trans and nonbinary writers to our field, we are working on a recommended reading list of trans and nonbinary writers who are either Clarion West alumni and/or Clarion West faculty! If you would like your website or stories on this list, please contact us at workshop@clarionwest.org! 

(5) FEDERAL DEPARTMENT BAILS ON FIGHTING BOOK BANS. Shelf Awareness reports “Department of Education Calls Book Bans a ‘Hoax,’ Dismisses Complaints”.

In an ominous indication of the new administration’s approach to book censorship, on Friday the new leadership of the Department of Education announced that its Office for Civil Rights has “dismissed” 17 complaints and pending complaints “related to so-called ‘book bans’ ” and said the idea that “local school districts’ removal of age-inappropriate, sexually explicit, or obscene materials from their school libraries created a hostile environment for students” and constitutes a civil rights violation is “a meritless claim based upon a dubious legal theory.” The Office for Civil Rights also ended the position of “book ban coordinator” and rescinded an agreement reached with Forsyth County School District in Georgia. The Office’s statement has the headline, “U.S. Department of Education Ends Biden’s Book Ban Hoax.”

The announcement of the changes stated in part, “On Jan. 20, 2025, incoming OCR leadership initiated a review of alleged ‘book banning’ cases pending at the department. Attorneys quickly confirmed that books are not being ‘banned,’ but that school districts, in consultation with parents and community stakeholders, have established commonsense processes by which to evaluate and remove age-inappropriate materials. Because this is a question of parental and community judgment, not civil rights, OCR has no role in these matters.”

The Department’s Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor added, “By dismissing these complaints and eliminating the position and authorities of a so-called ‘book ban coordinator,’ the department is beginning the process of restoring the fundamental rights of parents to direct their children’s education. The department adheres to the deeply rooted American principle that local control over public education best allows parents and teachers alike to assess the educational needs of their children and communities. Parents and school boards have broad discretion to fulfill that important responsibility. These decisions will no longer be second-guessed by the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education.”

Several book world organizations responded quickly. Kasey Meehan, director, Freedom to Read, at PEN America, said in a statement: “For over three years we have countered rhetoric that book bans occurring in public schools are a ‘hoax.’ They are absolutely not. This kind of language from the U.S. Department of Education is alarming and dismissive of the students, educators, librarians, and authors who have firsthand experiences of censorship happening within school libraries and classrooms….

(6) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present: Clay McLeod Chapman & Rebecca Fraimow on Wednesday, February 12. Location: KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003, (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs). Starts at 7:00 p.m. Eastern.

Clay McLeod Chapman

Clay McLeod Chapman writes books, comic books, young adult and middle grade books, as well as for film and television. His most recent novels include Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, What Kind of Mother, and Ghost Eaters.

Version 1.0.0

Rebecca Fraimow

Rebecca Fraimow is the author of science fiction romantic comedy Lady Eve’s Last Con, a NY Times Best Romance Novel of 2024, as well as the science fiction novella The Iron Children. Rebecca has also published short stories in various venues, including the Hugo-longlisted “This Is New Gehesran Calling,” and cohosts the podcast Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones with Emily Tesh. Rebecca also works as an audiovisual archivist preserving the history of public television. She’s married to fellow author Elizabeth Porter Birdsall and lives in Boston with a couple of extremely lucky black cats.

(7) WHY NOT SAY WHAT HAPPENED? In Episode16 of his Why Not Say What Happened? podcast Scott Edelman invites listeners to find out “What Teen Me Got Wrong (Twice!) About Jim Steranko”.

Join me as I look back at the trouble I had getting out of an elevator at the first Star Trek convention, what my ballot looked like when I voted for the 1968 Alley Awards, the composers who wrote the music to match the lyrics I had Rick Jones sing in Captain Marvel #50, what teen me got wrong (twice!) about Jim Steranko, the three comics characters I almost cosplayed as at the 1972 Rutland Halloween parade, the mystery woman who would have been my Beautiful Dreamer on a Forever People float, and much more.

And it can be downloaded through a variety of platforms at this link.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

January 27, 1999 — Voyager episode “Bride of Chaotica”

Captain Janeway: Coffee, black. 

Neelix: I’m sorry, Captain. We’ve lost another two replicators 

Kathryn Janeway: Listen to me very carefully because I’m only going to say this once. Coffee – black.

Twenty-six years ago this evening on the UPN network Star Trek: Voyager‘s “Bride of Chaotica!” first aired. It was the twelfth episode of the fifth season of the series. The episode is a loving homage to the 1936 Flash Gordon film serial and 1939 Buck Rogers film serial that followed. Much of the episode was shot in black and white to emulate the look of those shows. 

The episode largely takes place on the Holodeck set because of a small fire to the Bridge set that had occurred while the episode was in production, so the Bridge scenes were shot weeks later after the set was repaired and many of the scenes that were originally set for the Bridge were either entirely rewritten or set on a different part of the ship. 

The story was Bryan Fuller who was the writer and executive producer on Voyager and Deep Space Nine; he is also the co-creator of Discovery. The script was by Fuller and Michael Taylor who was best known as a writer on Deep Space Nine and Voyager.

Critics really liked it. SyFy Wire said it was “campy, hilarious, hysterical, brilliant, and an absolute joy.” And CBR noted that Voyager was “having fun with its goofier side.”

The coffee dialogue had me looking up drink preferences for the Captains. We know Picard liked Earl Grey tea, and I’m reasonably sure Kirk was never shown drinking a morning brew. (Alcoholic drinks are another matter, aren’t they for all of them?) Sisko enjoyed raktajino, a potent Klingon coffee, and Archer drank sweetened iced tea. I can’t find anything that indicates what Burnham had for a morning drink.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 27, 1957 — Frank Miller, 68.

By Paul Weimer: I come to talk to you about Frank Miller strictly in his movie adaptations and work. As is my wont and practice, these writeups are my own personal engagement with a creator and their work. I could write a Wikipedia-style article cribbed from sources but that wouldn’t be me. That would be barely better than LLM. 

So I’ve never sat down to read his extensive comic book oeuvre. I am not a huge comics fan to begin with, my interests are occasional, narrow and scattershot. But that’s a story for another time. 

Frank Miller came to my attention through the movies, and it was through the original Sin City that he really came to my attention. I was absorbed by the visuals, the style, and the strong archetypal characters that we see in the original movie. I didn’t even know, until after I had watched it, that there was a graphic novel that had originated the story.  I did later flip through it, just to see how the one had been adapted to the other. 

But time and life is short and I didn’t go into Miller’s comic oeuvre. Instead, I kept an eye out on the films he wrote and directed and contributed to. The ahistorical 300, which I rationalize its utter ahistoricity  in my mind as being a pack of lies being told by the one-eyed Dilios to get the Greeks pumped up and ready to fight. He’s a storyteller, he’s lying about the battle rhinos and everything else. 

300 Rise of an Empire doesn’t have that frame to work, and I think it’s a stronger film, too. The Spirit? An utter and terrible mess and I can’t recommend it for any real reason. I did not need to see Samuel Jackson in a fascist uniform. I just didn’t. And the second Sin City? For me, it didn’t capture the magic of the first. Maybe because we “Saw it already before” and the surprise splash of the first had receded. We know the tricks in the bag for the film, and so the second movie just is…there, and not as good as one might like. I’ve never revisited it, although I’ve watched the original Sin City again more than once. 

In any event, his visuals have been a leading light of neo-noir style and are strong on those axes, an inspiration for those interested in visuals of that type.

Frank Miller

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) KEEP BANGING ON. “’The Big Bang Theory’ Is Nielsen’s “Most-Binged” Streaming Title Of 2024” – Deadline has the story.

The Big Bang Theory finished 2024 as the year’s “most-binged title” in streaming, according to a new report from Nielsen.

The sitcom averaged 265.5 episodes per viewer on Max, the measurement firm said, or 29.1 billion minutes of total viewing. The long-running former CBS series has 281 total episodes available for streaming.

Coming in at No. 7 overall among this year’s top streaming titles, Big Bang saw 58% of its watch time accounted for by adults 18 to 49.

The “average episodes per viewer” stat refers to the amount of time (with episodes lasting at least 20 minutes each) spent viewing the show. It does not indicate the number of unique episodes seen by each viewer….

(12) TAROT. [Item by Steven French.] The answer to the question at the end of this quote may surprise some! “From secret societies to Selfridges: the eccentric geniuses responsible for the macabre world of tarot” in the Guardian.

It certainly wasn’t obvious from the beginning when someone in a Milanese court added 22 new picture cards – drawing on Roman gods or classical virtues such as temperance or love which could act as an allegory for life – to a standard deck in order to enhance the complexity and fun of the game. “It wouldn’t be until the late-18th century,” says co-curator Jonathan Allen, “that a French pastor and scholar of the occult, Antoine Court de Gébelin, came to the conclusion that what he was looking at wasn’t an ordinary set of cards, but actually a concealed Egyptian religious text called the Book of Thoth.” A Parisian print seller and former seed merchant called John-Baptiste Alliette soon appropriated the theory, founded a society dedicated to its study and established himself as interpreter of the Book of Thoth before producing a new tarot deck explicitly used for fortune-telling under the reversed pen-name Etteilla. His deck, largely used by secret aristocratic magical societies, set the visual and spiritual tone in thinking and practice for the next few centuries until the early 20th century and the British occult revival.

It was the various expulsions and fragmentations of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn – a secret society exploring magic and occult mysticism which included WB Yeats and Aleister Crowley as members – that then created the dominant decks of the 20th and 21st centuries…

(13) STANDING UP TO TECH BROS. “Elton John backs Paul McCartney in criticising proposed overhaul to UK copyright system” reports the Guardian.

Elton John has backed Paul McCartney in criticising a proposed overhaul of the UK copyright system, and has called for new rules to prevent tech companies from riding “roughshod over the traditional copyright laws that protect artists’ livelihoods”.

John has backed proposed amendments to the data (use and access) bill that would extend existing copyright protections, when it goes before a vote in the House of Lords on Tuesday.

The government is also consulting on an overhaul of copyright laws that would result in artists having to opt out of letting AI companies train their models using their work, rather than an opt-in model.

McCartney told the BBC that the proposed changes could disincentivise writers and artists and result in a “loss of creativity”. The former Beatle said: “You get young guys, girls, coming up, and they write a beautiful song, and they don’t own it, and they don’t have anything to do with it. And anyone who wants can just rip it off.”

“The truth is, the money’s going somewhere … Somebody’s getting paid, so why shouldn’t it be the guy who sat down and wrote Yesterday?”

John told the Sunday Times that he felt “wheels are in motion to allow AI companies to ride roughshod over the traditional copyright laws that protect artists’ livelihoods. This will allow global big tech companies to gain free and easy access to artists’ work in order to train their artificial intelligence and create competing music. This will dilute and threaten young artists’ earnings even further. The musician community rejects it wholeheartedly.”

(14) ALIEN: EARTH NEWS. Deadline has a roundup — “’Alien: Earth’ Key Art Shares Terrifying New Look At Xenomorph”.

A teaser trailer of a spaceship making a crash landing on Earth dropped during the AFC Championship game [on Sunday]….

…From Noah Hawley, Alien: Earth is set two years before the events of the 1979 film Alien.

According to the show’s synopsis, “When a mysterious space vessel crash-lands on Earth, a young woman and a ragtag group of tactical soldiers make a fateful discovery that puts them face-to-face with the planet’s greatest threat in the sci-fi horror series Alien: Earth.

(15) RARE AIR. Anton Petrov talks about the “Bizarre Planet With 9km/s Winds That Absolutely Makes No Sense”.

(16) COOL WORLDS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Prof David Kipping, the Brit astrophysicist at Columbia U, USA, over at Cool Worlds looks at a forthcoming paper due to be published in Nature Astronomy.

What they have done is surveyed exoplanets that are more or less Earth-sized around K and M type stars. (M-type stars are small red dwarfs that are so cold that habitable exoplanets have to be close to the star and so are tidally locked. Also, because of their low mass, M-types stars prone to flaring which is not good for any nearby putative life. However, K-type stars are just a little more like Earth’s G-type Sun and so are of exobiological interest.) what they have found is that these planet’s orbits are almost circular just like our Earth’s…

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Mark Roth-Whitworth, 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 John Hertz.]

Never Mind the News – File 770’s Best Feature Articles of 2024

Posted on by
Reply

Was the year too heavy, deep, and real? Yes, but it was also rich in creativity, humor, and shared adventures. It’s a gift and privilege for me to be continually allowed to publish so many entertaining posts. Thanks to all of you who contributed!

COLUMNS

CHRIS BARKLEY

[Note: Some of Chris’ columns don’t appear below because they are listed in the annual news roundup.]

Chris Barkley. Photo by Juli Marr.

FEATURES

ROBIN ANNE REID

STEVE VERTLIEB

Steve Vertlieb and Ray Harryhausen.

RICH LYNCH

Rich Lynch in Buffalo with a buffalo.

JAMES BACON

In addition to reviewing comics and graphic novels, James used his camera and descriptive abilities to take us along on visits to all kinds of fascinating exhibits and pop culture events.

James Bacon

TERESA PESCHEL

RICHARD MAN

RL THORNTON

PAUL WEIMER

MICHAELE JORDAN

CORA BUHLERT

JOHN KING TARPINIAN

CAT ELDRIDGE

TRIGGER SNOWFLAKE — BY INGVAR

The saga of Sheriff Trigger Snowflake, the lovely Coraline, and the shenanigans of the Solarian Poets Society added several chapters this year that were not so much ripped-from-the-headlines as amused by the news.

MELANIE STORMM

Stormm continued her humorous series about the misdirected emails she gets from Writer X throughout 2024, braiding together comedy, horror, and the pitfalls of being a writer.

MOSHE FEDER

HEATH ROW

SONDI WARNER

DANIEL DERN

LIS CAREY

CIDER

LEE WEINSTEIN

JOHN HERTZ

TIM MARION

STEVEN H SILVER

RIVERFLOW

TOY REVIEWS

CAT ELDRIDGE

Statue figure of Spider-Gwen character

IAIN DELANEY

FOLKMANIS PUPPETS

CATS SLEEP ON SFF

España Sheriff Wins 2024 Rotsler Award

Posted on by
7

España Sheriff has won the Rotsler Award for 2024, given annually for long-time artistic achievement in amateur publications of the science fiction community. 

The award was established in 1998 by the Southern California Institute for Fan Interests, Inc. The recipient is chosen by a three-judge panel (Sue Mason since 2015,
Suzle Tompkins since 2021, and John Hertz since 2003). The award carries an honorarium of US$300. 

Sheriff, who discovered fandom in California, now lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. She works in ink line art or acrylic paints, and is noted for her hand-painted Spanish fans. You can view many examples on her website, https://espanasheriff.com/. [Click below for larger images.]

An exhibit honoring Sheriff’s work was displayed at Loscon this weekend.

Photo credit: Not provided.