25 Scrollers Of The Purple Pixel

Posted on May 11, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(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.

Arlo and Janis celebrates credentials through time.
Baldo’s Gracie recreates a memory.
Bizarro illustrates a weird crossover.
Carpe Diem wants rover to come over.
Ink Pen exposes the problem with homonymic heros.
Mother Goose and Grimm has a horror malaprop.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal didn’t start out to be a vocational course.
The Other Coast’s subjects know they’re being observed.

(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.

(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.]

Pixel Scroll 5/10/25 All Around The Scrollberry Bush, The Monkey Chased The Pixel

Posted on May 10, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) GUARDIAN BOOK REVIEWS. Past Best Fan Writer Hugo winner Abigail Nussbaum, and author of 2025 BSFA Award winner Track Changes penned the Guardian’s latest “The best science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup”. Nussbaum cover The Devils by Joe Abercrombie (Gollancz, £25), The Incandescent by Emily Tesh (Orbit, £20), Land of Hope by Cate Baum (Indigo Press, £12.99), and A Line You Have Traced by Roisin Dunnett (Magpie, £16.99).

(2) MEETING DEATH SCIENTIFICALLY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The BBC’s World Service has a nifty weekly science programme Unexplained Elements. This week’s programme was topical with this week’s news of the Pope popping off and the pomp and circumstance ceremony that garnered international attention. It was a topic in which the late Terry Pratchett would have been interested.

It addressed questions such as when did humans first start burying their dead? The answer seems to be over 100,000 years ago, but this is for anatomically modern humans. Apparently some proto-human species (whose brain capacity was a third of modern humans) may have buried their dead, though the research (currently in peer review) is debatable. Apparently, the pre-print has been amended to take criticisms into account and while one critic has been convinced, others remain sceptical.

Another topic was that of the biology of graveyards. Because its ground remains largely untilled, and because of gravestones and the like, there are many micro-environments, and both these factors lead church graveyards have a higher local area biodiversity.

Then there is the issue of a dead person’s digital rights to their social media and online accounts. The European Union’s GDPR is the world’s most robust data protection regulation, though that does not seem to stop firms like Facebook or EventBrite failing to strictly follow it (just look as the small print when you sign up) or even Worldcons who arguably (it would be interesting to test this in court and I could write an essay on this) fail to strictly adhere to its provisions. Nonetheless, despite GDPR being the world’s gold standard in data protection, the dead have no rights whatsoever under GDPR!

Talking of a dead person’s digital rights (or lack thereof), what of mobile (cell) phones and smartphones, what happens to them when they ‘die’? Well, fans of Red Dwarf might say that they go to silicon heaven. The reality, however, is for most of them landfill! Here there are multiple environmental sustainability issues. All those heavy metals and rare earth elements leech out in landfill causing threats to water tables and other ecotoxicology issues. And then there is the loss of these elements (which include silver and gold – many kilograms per tonne of mobile phones disposed) to the economy necessitating the mining of replacement elements and the environmental damage that this does. So the next time a Worldcon tells you that they are ditching recyclable paper from sustainably managed forests (look for the kite mark when buying the paper for publications) don’t accept the Worldcon’s word for it: more greenwash!

It was a fascinating programme. You can access it here.

First up, we delve into the thorny issue of when early humans started to carry out funerary rituals, before turning our attention to graveyards and the life that thrives within these sacred environments.

Next, we are joined Carl Öhman from Uppsala University in Sweden, who reveals what happens to our data when we die and why we should care about it.

Plus, we discuss the precious materials hiding in our old devices, and find out whether animals mourn.

(3) DODGE THE SCAMS. Victoria Strauss points out “Two to Avoid: Book Order Scams and Fake Reviews”. Full details at Writer Beware.

Here are two newish frauds that appear to be on the rise. As with most writing scams these days, they target self-published authors.

The Book Order Scam

I’ve written before about book order scams, in the context of scammers impersonating bookstores such as Barnes & Noble with out-of-the-blue emails promising bulk purchases and big royalties. All the author has to do is pony up thousands of dollars or pounds to cover printing and/or shipping costs (the relevant note here: bookstores do not print the books they sell, and they typically order from the publisher or publishing platform, rather than from the author).

This newer version of the book order scam is somewhat different, arriving not from a bookstore impersonator, but from the self-publishing service provider the writer has hired to publish and/or market their book. That provider isn’t a true self-publishing company, though, but rather one of the many ghostwriting scams that waylay would-be indie authors in order to defraud them….

Fake Reviews

Fake reviews–sometimes just a few lines, sometimes elaborate essays with stars and number rankings–arrive unasked-for, attached to a complimentary email claiming that a book has been “discovered” by book scouts or book evaluators. Or they’re included as part of a pitch for a package of publishing and marketing services, to show how much the service provider believes in the author’s book.

Undoubtedly produced by feeding book blurbs and other info into chatbots, they are essentially bait: affirmation and flattery designed to induce the author to reply, so they can be subjected to aggressive sales pitches for whatever the “reviewer” is selling.

Here are a couple of examples, both sent out by scammers on this list. They’re not just book reviews–they’re PROFESSIONAL book reviews! So much better than just the regular kind….

(4) CHERRYH ANNOUNCEMENT. CJ Cherryh told Facebook followers yesterday she and Jane Fancher won’t be at the Seattle Worldcon – but it’s not the result of any controversy.

Jane and I will not be attending WorldCon despite it being in our state (which some people might want to know)—no controversy, just the expense and the physical buffeting of crowds. While Jane’s got more go-juice than I do, the crowd pressure and distances involved would be pretty exhausting, leaving us sadly low-energy. We’ll still go to friendly ‘little’ cons in driving range, note well, if we know about them!!! and be our brilliant selves, but we’re not up to a full-on WorldCon.

(5) ABOUT THE FEMALE MAN. Farah Mendlesohn’s book Considering The Female Man by Joanna Russ, or, As the Bear Swore is available for preorder from Luna Press Publishing. It will be released in Summer 2026.

Joanna Russ’s writing career was relatively short, running from 1968 to 1987, with a number of essay collections published in the years after that. Her fiction career consists of just six novels and four collections, but each of the novels she published challenged engrained conventions of the genre.

The Female Man was received with shock, horror and vituperation when it was published in 1975. Its fractured narrative, and its direct attack on patriarchy and the straight-jacket of performative femininity, were described as shrill and man-hating. Over the years it emerged as a classic of feminist science fiction, a novel that continues to excite and resonate, and a touchstone for proudly militant feminists.

This exploration of The Female Man offers a close reading of the text, focussing on how the book works, its structures, arguments, humour, and brilliant anger

(6) COMPENSATING FACTORS. “My School Visit was Cancelled. I Fought Back and Won” writers Erica S. Perl in School Library Journal.

As a children’s book author, I love a good mystery. Which is why, last month, after a Virginia elementary school principal abruptly cancelled my visit by email, with no explanation or interest in rescheduling or paying me, I decided to investigate.

It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out what had happened: a parent had complained because of a social media video I had made celebrating Pride month. In it, I mention that Snail, a character in my Whale, Quail, Snail early reader series (illustrated by Sam Ailey), is nonbinary. Most snails are. “It’s a fiction series,” I add, “but that’s a fact.”…

… I wish I could tell you that my story ended amicably with the return of my visit to the school’s calendar. That’s not what happened.

Instead, after I asked for my fee, the principal turned the matter over to the district’s lawyers. The principal then informed the school librarian, who booked my visit, that she might have to pay me out of her own pocket. I told her I would not take her money, no matter what happened. I was extra-outraged that the principal was threatening to make her pay for the “crime” of setting up an author visit.

But my story doesn’t end there. I’m not just a children’s book author. I’m also a former trial lawyer. So instead of walking away muttering about injustice, I spent some quality time with my contract.

That’s right, my author contract. Whenever I am invited to visit a school, my booking agent draws up a contract—and this visit was no exception. According to one clause, if an appearance is cancelled with less than 30 days notice, the school is required to pay my entire fee plus any non-refundable travel expenses. The principal had cancelled on me 28 days before my visit.

And finally, my contract specifies that the contract is governed by the law of the state where I live, not the law of the state where the school is located. So if I wanted to sue for breach of contract, I could simply file papers in my local courthouse (no legal expertise or degree required!).

So, I did. Which is how I got to a different kind of happy ending: the school paid me my fee.

It’s not the win I wanted, because that would have had me standing in front of a gymnasium full of elementary school students. But it is a victory, as I see it, for all authors, especially in this current climate….

(7) KILLER ROBOTS NO LONGER SCIENCE FICTION. [Item by Francis Hamit.] “Unmanned Systems Are Not Revolutionary (But Could Be)” says a post on War Room, hosted by the U.S. Army War College.

Rather than revolutionizing warfare, unmanned systems have emerged as evolutions within the larger information revolution; advancements to be sure, but failing to render conventional militaries obsolete or dramatically reshaping force structures….

(8) PLONK YOUR MAGIC TWANGER. The one answer Smithsonian Magazine knows for sure is the price: “Who Created This Peculiar Painting of a Drooling Dragon? Nobody Knows—but a Museum Just Bought It for $20 Million”. Steven French adds, “Actually the ‘drooling dragon’ looks more like our Patterdale Terrier after he’s spotted the postman!”

Emma Capron, a curator at the museum who was responsible for the acquisition, describes the altarpiece as “wildly inventive” and “full of iconographical oddities,” per the Art Newspaper.

Start with the dragon and its bizarre dog-like face, exaggerated fangs and dripping drool. According to tradition, Satan, disguised as a dragon, swallowed St. Margaret whole. His stomach rejected her and there she appears in the painting, kneeling in prayer, totally unfazed by the event.Next to Margaret, one of the two angels holds a book of song, once thought to be a hymn by the English composer Walter Frye but now identified as musical gibberish. The other angel plucks her mouth harp, “a sound hardly associated with celestial harmony,” as the National Gallery says in the statement….

(9) PEACEMAKER IS BACK. “Peacemaker Season 2 Trailer: John Cena’s DC Superhero Returns” – Variety sets the frame.

… John Cena‘s very R-rated DC superhero has returned in the first trailer for “Peacemaker” Season 2, created by DC Studios co-chief James Gunn. The sophomore season takes place in the rebooted DC Universe, which officially kicked off with Gunn’s animated series “Creature Commando” and continues with his summer tentpole “Superman.” Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner and Isabela Merced’s Hawkgirl cameo in the trailer and will appear in “Superman.”…

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 10, 1969 — John Scalzi, 56.

By Paul Weimer: I’d read John Scalzi’s blog for years before his fiction.

I got onto the Scalzi train with his entry in Metatropolis. His story involving a high tech pig farmer had all of the bones of a Scalzi story, from its “I think I know everything” protagonist, to its often snarky sense of humor. While I didn’t fall deeply in love with his work, then or since, I kept reading his work. Redshirts, of course, which still may be my favorite of his novels and stories, helped expand in my mind the metafictional opportunities in science fiction. Lock In is a solid piece of science fictional speculation on how a society might come together and respond to the consequences of a pandemic. Given that it was written long before Covid…I wonder if Scalzi or, aged fifty six yearswould have reconsidered the novel after the worldwide reaction to the aftermath of the Covid Pandemic.

Of course the Old Man’s War series is the one that he gets grief for, because it should appeal to the Sad and Rabid Puppies…but it is, in the parlance of today, “too woke”. It’s possible that the existence of such books helped motivate Torgersen and Beale, an irritant to their ideology and worldview (and a counterexample to the idea that Mil-SF must be conservative). Again, I do wonder how Scalzi would write it today, given all that has happened.

So this is a long way of saying that although it is on my Kindle, I have not yet read When The Moon Hits Your Eye, which seems to have as triggering an idea (the moon turns into cheese. Seriously?) as one can possibly make in the field. But it shows that in the end, Scalzi likes to have fun when writing. He never takes it too seriously, even if he keeps it as rigorous and locked down as the story needs. He’s just telling stories and doing his thing and having the time of his life, and haters can go hang.

The first time I actually met him in person, he didn’t remember it. He was extremely jet lagged, sitting in a hotel lobby and apparently remembered little from the entire weekend. Due to circumstance (although Scalzi is an excellent DJ, I am told, I am not a dance party goer), I only finally, finally actually got to talk to him at the Glasgow Worldcon. Being part of the photography team did let me meet and photograph everyone who would hold still. But did he know who I was? I’m still convinced that he didn’t, and that’s all right.

John Scalzi’s fiction, too…that’s all right.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

xkcd offers another science fact.
Baldo has help coming up with an excuse.
Brewster Rockit creates fan fiction.
Lio finds something waiting.
Reality Check tries a pun.

(12) AMAZING STORIES COLLECTION. Amazing Stories: Best of 2024,a collection of science fiction short stories published by the magazine over the past year, is now available.

Edited by Lloyd Penney, this collection continues Amazing’s nearly century-long tradition of exploring the strange, the speculative, and the sublime.

From lunar labor revolutions to delicate alien diplomacy, these stories represent the vanguard of speculative fiction. Readers will encounter futures both dystopian and dazzling, technologies that reshape identity and time, and characters grappling with the emotional and ethical consequences of scientific progress. Highlights include:

“A Short-Lived History of the Stockpiling of Time, in Post-Mono-Heliocentric Space-Times” by K.V.K. Kvas, a mind-bending tale of interstellar economics, identity, and revolt.
“Return from Venus” by C.B. Droege, a quiet and touching story about cross-species friendship and the longing for home.
“Best Case Scenario” by Susan Oke, a suspenseful diplomatic mission where what you offer—and what you misunderstand—could mean the difference between peace and peril.

With cover art by Hugo Award-winning artist Bob Eggleton and a lineup of diverse voices offering everything from hard science speculation to lyrical philosophical fiction, Amazing Stories: Best of 2024 is a must-have for any SF fan’s collection.

“Amazing Stories has always been a home for bold, boundary-pushing science fiction,” says Editor-in-Chief Lloyd Penney. “This year’s stories continue that proud legacy—with some of the most challenging, beautiful, and entertaining tales we’ve ever published.”

It is available online at amazingstories.com and in paperback and eBook editions at indie and major retailers worldwide or at this link.

(13) MONSTROUSLY COOL. That’s what your drinks become with an assist from the “Godzilla Ice Mold”.

(14) DAISY RIDLEY’S ZOMBIE ENCOUNTER. JustWatch quotes Daisy Ridley in its Why to Watch feature about her role in the zombie thriller “We Bury the Dead streaming: where to watch online?”

We Bury the Dead is a gripping, emotional thriller set in a world transformed by the undead. In a unique take on the zombie genre, the film follows Ava—a woman tormented by loss—who volunteers with a corpse retrieval unit to search for her missing husband. Set against a surreal yet intimate apocalypse, the story explores love, grief, and the fragile boundaries of what makes us human.

Daisy Ridley says:

The script is beautiful. It’s about grief and watching someone desperately trying to find an answer, even though she doesn’t know what that answer is going to be. The backdrop of the zombies represents this moment for [my character] Ava because she’s neither here nor there emotionally. Ava’s sole purpose is to find her husband. As a means to get to him, she joins the body retrieval unit which volunteers to find people and notify families. The zombies look like our friends and family, so it’s close enough to reality but in a way that doesn’t feel too close. It feels horribly human.

(15) HONEY, I’M HOME! “Soviet-era spacecraft Kosmos 482 plunges to Earth after 53 years stuck in orbit” reports AP News.

A Soviet-era spacecraft plunged to Earth on Saturday, more than a half-century after its failed launch to Venus.

Its uncontrolled entry was confirmed by both the Russian Space Agency and European Union Space Surveillance and Tracking. The Russians indicated it came down over the Indian Ocean, but some experts were not so sure of the precise location. The European Space Agency’s space debris office also tracked the spacecraft’s doom after it failed to appear over a German radar station.

It was not immediately known how much, if any, of the half-ton spacecraft survived the fiery descent from orbit. Experts said ahead of time that some if not all of it might come crashing down, given it was built to withstand a landing on Venus, the solar system’s hottest planet.

The chances of anyone getting clobbered by spacecraft debris were exceedingly low, scientists said….

…Any surviving wreckage will belong to Russia under a United Nations treaty….

…After so much anticipation, some observers were disappointed by the lingering uncertainty over the exact whereabouts of the spacecraft’s grave….

A Russian press release says it fell in the Indian Ocean west of Jakarta.

(16) YOUR ALIEN NATION. The BBC explains, “More than half your body is not human”.

More than half of your body is not human, say scientists.

Human cells make up only 43% of the body’s total cell count. The rest are microscopic colonists.

Understanding this hidden half of ourselves – our microbiome – is rapidly transforming understanding of diseases from allergy to Parkinson’s.

The field is even asking questions of what it means to be “human” and is leading to new innovative treatments as a result.

“They are essential to your health,” says Prof Ruth Ley, the director of the department of microbiome science at the Max Planck Institute, “your body isn’t just you”….

… But genetically we’re even more outgunned.

The human genome – the full set of genetic instructions for a human being – is made up of 20,000 instructions called genes.

But add all the genes in our microbiome together and the figure comes out between two and 20 million microbial genes.

Prof Sarkis Mazmanian, a microbiologist from Caltech, argues: “We don’t have just one genome, the genes of our microbiome present essentially a second genome which augment the activity of our own…

(17) SCIENCE PAPERS WITH UNDISCLOSED AI USE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is controversial to some, in no small part due to large language models (LLMs) and other A.I. (such as image-generating A.I.) using people’s intellectual property (their written or art works) for A.I. and LLM training without permission or recompense. This is exemplified by the recent debate over the Seattle’s Worldcon use of A.I. (for example, see (1) in the Scroll here).

Similarly, the use of A.I. has controversies in science. Indeed, a number of leading science journals, such as Nature, frown on the use of A.I. and/or at least ask science authors to declare any use of A.I. in their submissions. The latest news here comes from a news item in this week’s Nature that hundreds of papers have used A.I without disclosure!

Generative A.I. tools such as ChatGPT have quickly transformed academic publishing. Scientists are increasingly using them to prepare and review manuscripts, and publishers have scrambled to create guidelines for their ethical us. Although policies vary, many publishers require authors to disclose their use of A.I….

But science sleuths have identified hundreds of cases in which A.I. tools seem to have been used without disclosure…

…Publishers need to act quickly to resolve issues of dishonest A.I. use.

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

A File 770 Special: An Evening with Meredith R. Lyons at Joseph-Beth Booksellers Cincinnati

Posted on April 15, 2025 by Mike Glyer

John Scalzi introduces Meredith R. Lyons

By Chris M. Barkley: Novelist Meredith R. Lyons stopped in at the spacious Joseph Beth Booksellers in Cincinnati, Ohio to promote her second novel, A Dagger of Lightning. She was hosted and interviewed by the Hugo Award winning writer John Scalzi. Soundcloud Interview Link: “Meredith R. Lyons Interview With John Scalzi”.

Cover: A Dagger of Lightning by Meredith R. Lyons

In the latest installment of Scalzi’s “The Big Idea” feature, “The Big Idea: Meredith R. Lyons” (which was published on April 3 on his Whatever blog site), Lyons explains what her motivation was for the new novel, which is the first in a new series.

“Why was it that only those twenty-one and under got to be ripped from their mundane lives, gifted immortality, and elevated to chosen one? Why not choose someone with some life experience and an appreciation for the frailty of our mortal coil?”

“With that in mind, I set out to write a forty-five-year-old woman who leaves for a morning run and never makes it home. I was so obsessed with the idea that I had ten thousand words in less than forty-eight hours. But I made the deadly mistake of sitting down and thinking about it, and subsequently worried that no one would be interested in a scifi fantasy protagonist older than thirty. I was even scared to show it to my writing group in case the concept ‘was stupid.’”

John Scalzi interviewing Meredith R. Lyons.

Her protagonist, Imogen, is a middle aged woman out for a morning run when she is abducted by what she takes to be an alien, but turns out to be a super powered alien fae looking for an ally, her, to help him wage war on his homeworld. Needless to say, Imogen is a less-than-willing protagonist in this adventure.

During the question and answer session I asked whether she would categorize the book as fantasy, romantasy or an anti-romantasy?

“I would describe it as a romantasy with a spaceship on top,” Lyons said with a mischievous smile.

Meredith R. Lyons currently resides in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband and “two panther sized cats”. She is a former actor and current audiobook narrator for Onyx Publications and is a member of International Thriller Writers, Sisters In Crime, and the Women’s National Book Association. Lyons has a black belt in martial arts, has taught cardio kickboxing, owns several swords and has been known to knit scarves, enjoy gardening and visiting coffee shops.

(It should also be noted that she bears more than a passing resemblance to MSNBC news anchor Stephanie Ruhle.)

Her first novel, Ghost Tamer, was published in September 2023.

Photos by Chris Barkley and Juli Marr.

Meredith R. Lyons, left, autographing her book.

Lis Carey Review: When the Moon Hits Your Eye

Posted on April 2, 2025 by Mike Glyer

When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi (Tor Publishing Group, March 2025)

By Lis Carey: One fine day, when NASA is in preparing for early tests of the new moon lander for the Diana missions to return to the Moon, the NASA director gets word of an emergency with the lunar samples brought back from the Apollo missions.

Have they been stolen? No. Have they been destroyed? Not exactly.

They’ve turned to cheese.

The Moon itself, right now at quarter phase, is also looking mighty strange, with a much higher albedo than the gray, rocky world should have. Almost as if…it’s also now made of cheese.

It’s also quickly determined to be larger, at least in diameter. Large enough that even with the lower density of cheese, it’s still the same mass. So, no immediate disruptive effects on Earth, as tides and other effects remain unchanged. Although, the upcoming annular eclipse of the Sun will now be a total eclipse of the Sun.

Over the next month, we follow a variety of small groups, reacting to and coping with the sudden and inexplicable change in their own ways.

NASA has to decide what to do about the test flight of the new Mars lander. Should the unmanned flight go all the way to the Moon and return, as planned, or only to low Earth orbit, instead?

The billionaire whose company designed and built the new Moon lander decides to exploit the confusion to fulfill his own lifetime dream. (Jody Bannon is not Musk; we know he’s not Musk because he hates Musk and Bezos both.)

A science writer whose first book has, well, flopped, is looking for a chance to recover from that, writes a book about the sudden change in the Moon and its possible scientific impact.

A minister at a small Evangelical church in the Midwest has to guide his flock through what this means for their faith–and reaches into unsuspected depths in himself.

Two rival cheese shops in Madison, Wisconsin, find themselves confronting, together, a mob that tips from shouting their confusion, fear, and anger at the Moon, to turning it on a more accessible form of cheese.

A variety of small stories, some funny, some charming, play out over the next month.

It’s a good little book, not up there with Scalzi’s best, but an enjoyable read nevertheless.

Pixel Scroll 2/26/25 Do Pixels Dream Of Scrolls That Will Be?

Posted on February 26, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) THREE MAJOR PROZINES CHANGE OWNERSHIP. Jason Sanford today reported “Asimov’s, Analog and F&SF purchased by new owner” on Patreon.

…The new owner of the magazines is Steven Salpeter and a group of investors. Salpeter is the president of literary and IP development at Assemble Media and previously worked as a literary agent for Curtis Brown.….

(2) ASTOUNDING AWARD’S FUTURE? Following the report that Asimov’s, Analog and F&SF have been purchased by a new owner, John Scalzi speculated about the fate of the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Although voting is administered by the Worldcon, the Astounding Award belongs to Dell Magazines, publisher of Analog prior to this sale. Will Analog’s new owners continue the sponsorship? John Scalzi volunteered a landing place if one is needed in a post at Whatever:

If the new owners of Asimov’s and Analog don’t want to take sponsorship of the Astounding Award (or the award is not otherwise folded into the responsibilities of WSFS/the individual Worldcons), we’ll take it on. The ideal plan would be for the Scalzi Family Foundation to act as a bridge sponsor while we set up an endowment that would allow the Astounding Award to be run indefinitely.

(3) EISNER HALL OF FAME INDUCTEES. Comic-Con International has announced 21 creators and industry figures who will be inducted into the Eisner Awards Hall of Fame this year.

In addition to these choices, voters in the comics industry will elect 6 persons from a group of 18 nominees proposed by the judges. Those nominees will be announced within the next week, and a ballot will be made available for online voting.

(4) BEST ECOFICTION OF THE YEAR. Violet Lichen imprint editor-in-chief, Marissa van Uden has extended the call for submissions deadline for ECO24: The Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction. She’s seeking reprint submissions from editors, publishers, and authors.

We’ve received more than 150 stories nominated by publishers, editors, and authors so far, and the range of stories, ideas, and perspectives has been so wonderful to read. As this is our first year of the anthology and our launch happened so quickly, we’ve decided to extend the submissions window out to Monday, March 17, to ensure that everyone publishing ecofiction gets a chance to submit….

…Ecofiction engages with some of the most urgent issues facing us today and also looks ahead to the possibilities of the future. Even when dealing with dark or tragic themes, ecofiction stories are expressions of our human connection to the most beautiful planet we know, and to all of earthlife….

(5) BOOK WITHIN A BOOK. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] BBC Radio 4 working weekday Women’s Hour had a second half (35 minutes in) largely devoted to two SF works. The first was a play, a re-imagining of the Greek tragedy Oedipus but set in a dystopic, near-future, climate drought-ridden future…

And then the Nigerian-American SF author Nnedi Okorafor who was discussing her latest book Death of the Author (out from Gollancz). This is a sweeping story about a writer of a science fiction novel that becomes a global phenomenon… at a price. The future of storytelling is here. A book-within-a-book that blends the line between writing and being written. This is at once the tale of a woman on the margins risking everything to be heard and a testament to the power of storytelling to shape the world as we know it… This interview begins 50 minutes in.

Nigerian American science fiction author Nnedi Okorafor’s new book is Death of the Author. It follows the story of Zelu, a novelist who is disabled, unemployed and from a very judgmental family. Nnedi and Nuala talk about the book within her book, success, and the influence on her writing of being an athlete in her earlier years.

You can access the programme here.

(6) SANS AI. “James Cameron will reportedly open Avatar 3 with a title card saying no generative AI was used to make the movie” reports GamesRadar+.

James Cameron has reportedly revealed an anti-AI title card will open up Avatar 3, officially titled Avatar: Fire and Ash. The Oscar-winning director shared the news in a Q&A session in New Zealand attended by Twitter user Josh Harding.

Sharing a picture of Cameron at the event, they wrote: “Such an *incredible* talk. Also, James Cameron revealed that Avatar: Fire and Ash will begin with a title card after the 20th Century and Lightstorm logos that ‘no generative A.I. was used in the making of this movie’.”Cameron has been vocal in the past about his feelings on artificial intelligence, speaking to CTV news in 2023 about AI-written scripts. “I just don’t personally believe that a disembodied mind that’s just regurgitating what other embodied minds have said – about the life that they’ve had, about love, about lying, about fear, about mortality – and just put it all together into a word salad and then regurgitate it,” he told the publication. “I don’t believe that’s ever going to have something that’s going to move an audience. You have to be human to write that. I don’t know anyone that’s even thinking about having AI write a screenplay.”…

(7) IMAGINARY PAPERS. ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination has published the latest issue of Imaginary Papers, its quarterly newsletter on science fiction worldbuilding, futures thinking, and imagination.

In this issue, Sarah M. Ruiz writes about climate action, allegory, and solidarity in the 2024 film Flow; Libia Brenda writes about Crononauta, the quasi-mythical, short-lived 1964 magazine founded by Alejandro Jodorowsky and René Rebetez; and Rachael Kuintzle reports on a workshop on energy futures hosted by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory in 2024.

(8) DARK DELICACIES TO CLOSE. SFGate is there when “After 30 years, California’s prince of horror hangs up his jacket”.

On April 5, a beacon for California horror fans will be snuffed out when legacy Los Angeles shop Dark Delicacies closes its doors. “We’ve been open for 30 years, and I could have happily died right here,” laughs co-owner Del Howison, “but my wife Sue wanted to have a life — whatever that is.”

Dark Delicacies is more than just a Southern California storefront selling ghoulish souvenirs. It’s been a destination for film buffs, horror genre diehards and celebrities from across the macabre spectrum for decades, and Howison himself has become a cult attraction for those with a love of Southern California’s darker corners.

The longtime horror curator plans to stay busy until the end. On a recent weekday, Howison is moving about his Burbank shop, taking pictures of vintage Spanish and Italian movie posters to sell online. He occasionally breaks to gesture at the Tiki mugs, shot glasses, board games, playing cards and action figures on the shelves. “We stopped calling them dolls, as guys didn’t like saying they were collecting dolls,” Howison says of his early days in business. “Of course, back then, there was no such thing as a horror convention.”…

(9) UK PAPERS PROTEST AI LEGISLATIVE PROPOSAL. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] A first this side of the Pond. Irrespective of their political leanings, all the papers came together on Tuesday in a campaign to stop British government proposals (yes, we have daft politicians over here just as you do in the US) to allow artificial intelligence (AI) free access to intellectual property so that it can be trained. This is something that authors have been worried about. “UK newspapers launch campaign against AI copyright plans” in the Wandsworth Times.

Special wraps appeared on Tuesday’s editions of the Daily Express, Daily Mail, The Mirror, the Daily Star, The Sun, and The Times – as well as a number of regional titles – criticising a Government consultation around possible exemptions being added to copyright law for training AI models.

The proposals would allow tech firms to use copyrighted material from creatives and publishers without having to pay or gain a licence, or reimbursing creatives for using their work.

In response, publishers have launched the Make It Fair campaign, which saw newspapers put covers on the outside of their front page – criticising the Government’s consultation – organised by the News Media Association (NMA), and backed by the Society of Editors (SOE).

The message said: “The Government wants to change the UK’s laws to favour big tech platforms so they can use British creative content to power their AI models without our permission or payment. Let’s protect the creative industries – it’s only fair.”…

(10) SF AUTHOR ISHIGURO IS ALSO AGAINST IT. The Bookseller reports “Kazuo Ishiguro urges government to ‘reconsider’ AI ‘opt-out’ plan: ‘No-one believes it will work’”. (Behind a paywall.)

…In a statement shared with the Times, the Klara and the Sun (Faber) author said the country had reached a “fork-in-the-road” moment. “If someone wants to take a book I’ve written and turn it into a TV series, or to print a chapter of it in an anthology, the law clearly states they must first get my permission and pay me,” he said.

“To do otherwise is theft. So why is our government now pushing forward legislation to make the richest, most dominant tech companies in the world exceptions? At the dawn of the AI age, why is it just and fair – why is it sensible — to alter our time-honoured copyright laws to advantage mammoth corporations at the expense of individual writers, musicians, film-makers and artists?”

Ishiguro continued that “no one believes the proposed ‘opt-out’ system will work”, saying this is why “those lobbying on behalf of the tech giants favour it”….

(11) MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG (1985-2025). Actress Michelle Trachtenberg, known especially to fans for playing Dawn Summers in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has died at the age of 39. According to the Guardian:

…Police sources confirmed her death to both ABC News and the New York Post. There is no cause of death yet known, with police saying on Thursday that the New York Medical Examiner is investigating but no foul play was suspected. She had recently undergone a liver transplant, according to sources….

A successful child actress, her first lead film role was in the comedy adventure Harriet the Spy (1996). Trachtenberg followed the film with a role in Inspector Gadget next to Matthew Broderick. Her role in Buffy the Vampire Slayer came in 2000 and continued til the show ended three years later.

Trachtenberg continued to have an active career after that in non-genre productions.

(12) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Award-Winning Barbara Hambly

Barbara Hambly, one of my favorite writers of horror and mysteries, has won two Lord Ruthven Awards given by the Lord Ruthven Assembly, a group of scholars specializing in vampire literature who are affiliated with the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.

(This piece is about her fantasies and mysteries that I’m familiar with. I know she wrote some SF, do comment upon it if so inclined.)

Those Who Hunt in The Night, the first in her excellent John Asher series, won the Locus Award for Best Horror Novel. I think the series, eight long, might be concluded, as the last came out six years ago.

I’m also very impressed of her two novelizations done for one of my favorite TV series, Beauty and the Beast and and Beauty and the Beast: Song of Orpheus as it’s hard to write material off those series that’s worth reading. I’ve read others which very quickly got really mawkish as they overly focus on the relationship, in my opinion of course, of the relationship of Catherine and Vincent to the exclusion of what could a fleshing out of that world. Not her. Wonderful novels!

I’ve not tracked down her three Sherlock Holmes short story pastiches yet.

I listened to Bride of the Rat God, which is the only supernatural fantasy in theSilver Screen historical mystery series, and the next book which was not a fantasy, Scandal in Babylon. There are two more in the series so far. They likewise are not fantasy according to her.

And yes, there’s lots about her writing career I’ve not included here so feel free to tell me what you think I should have mentioned. If anybody has read her Abigail Adams or Benjamin January mystery series, I’d be interested in knowing what you think.

Barbara Hambly

(13) COMICS SECTION.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal shows an employee enhanced by AI.
xkcd traces science’s evolving knowledge of RNA.
Bizarro has a list of new supers.
Jerry King covers the stages of credentials.
Tom Gauld relays an invitation.

My latest @newscientist.com cartoon.
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2025-02-25T15:48:26.139Z

(14) GOING DARK. Publishers Weekly reports that “Dark Horse Digital Has Shut Down”.

Dark Horse Media has officially shut down Dark Horse Digital as of February 24, 2025, with comics no longer available for purchase on the platform. Online access to the DHD website, however, will still be available at least through this summer, and users can continue to log in and read the comics in their bookshelves.

Effective March 31, 2025, the Dark Horse Comics and Plants vs. Zombies Comics apps for iOS will also no longer be supported.

The move follows downsizing at Dark Horse Media earlier this month, and bookends DHD’s 14-year run.

(15) LOST MARVELS FACTS FOUND. “Fantagraphics Drops Out Of Free Comic Book Day, Pulls ‘Lost Marvels’” – Bleeding Cool has corrected details. With Diamond Comic Distributors having filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy, things are up in the air.

Eric Reynolds from Fantagraphics gets in touch to correct me. He says “Contrary to what you wrote, the comics were actually not printed yet. If they had been, we would have proceeded as planned. But since they weren’t, and given the uncertainty of whether Diamond will even exist come May (or be able to pay us for them), we made the difficult decision to pull the plug while we could. We may still produce the comic this year, bypassing FCBD. Things are, as you can probably understand, a bit fluid these days… The decision was made entirely based on the uncertainty of FCBD and had nothing to do with the Lost Marvels book series itself, which is otherwise proceeding as planned!”

(16) GANG AGLEY. The Guardian’s “Pushing Buttons” newsletter wonders: “Netflix’s games were once its best-kept secret – where did it all go wrong?”.

When Netflix first started adding video games to its huge catalogue of streaming TV shows and films, it did so quietly. In 2021, after releasing an impressive experiment with the idea of interactive film in Black Mirror: Bandersnatch in 2018 and a free Stranger Things game in 2019, Netflix began expanding more fully into interactive entertainment.

The streamer’s gaming offering, for a long time, was its best-kept secret. Whoever was running it really had an eye for quality: award-winningly brilliant and relatively little-known indie games comprised the majority of its catalogue, alongside decent licensed games based on everything from The Queen’s Gambit to the reality dating show Too Hot to Handle. Subscribers could play games such as Before Your Eyes, a brief and touching story about a life cut short; Spiritfarer, about guiding lost souls to rest and Into the Breach, a superb sci-fi strategy game with robots v aliens. The company bought or invested in several game studios known for making critically acclaimed work, including London-based Ustwo games (which was behind Monument Valley). It also established a studio in California to work on blockbuster games, staffed by veteran developers.

But it seems things are changing. That blockbuster studio has been closed, as first reported by Game File, before it could ever release a game. Its latest tie-in game, Squid Game Unleashed, absolutely sucks – it’s constructed around the celebration of slapstick violence, making it a terrible fit for a satirically violent show about capitalist exploitation. Funding a bunch of indie darlings and hiring big-name talent from the likes of Blizzard and Bungie for its game studio gave the impression that Netflix really was keen on becoming a part of the gaming industry, and doing it properly. Now that is very much in question.

The company has made layoffs across its gaming divisions, including at Night Studio – makers of weird-fiction supernatural teen horror series Oxenfree. It has cancelled plans for several forthcoming games that were due to join the service, including indie hits Thirsty Suitors and Don’t Starve Together, and promising-looking hobbit game Tales of the Shire. What’s going on?

(17) GWENDDYDD. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] Did you know Merlin had a sister? I didn’t… and I know more about the Matter of Britain than all but about 30 people in the US. “Early poems about Merlin portray him as environmentalist, say scholars” in the Guardian.

He is probably most often thought of today as a wizard, a shape-shifter or a mentor to the young King Arthur.

But a detailed re-examination of Myrddin – Merlin – by Welsh scholars suggests he can also be considered an early British environmentalist deeply worried about human interaction with the natural world…

… The researchers have been combing through manuscripts in the National Library of Wales, in Aberystwyth, and also in the 15th-century Red Book of Hergest at Jesus College, Oxford.

They also discovered more about the importance of Merlin’s sister, Gwenddydd. Callander said: “Gwenddydd is a really important figure in Welsh Merlin poetry. She supports Merlin and also appears to be a prophet in her own right.

“We found hundreds of lines of poetry in her voice in dialogue with her brother. Merlin describes her as ‘fair Gwenddydd, summit of dignity’ and ‘refuge of songs’. One of the important aspects of the project is to throw light on this lost female voice from medieval Wales.”

Callander said it was surprising that early Merlin poems had been largely neglected. “These Welsh-language texts had not been edited or translated in full, meaning much material has been missed out.”…

(18) TIME TO VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE GIANTS. “Akiva Goldsman To Reimagine 3 Classic Irwin Allen Sci-Fi Titles For TV” – Deadline has the story.

Akiva Goldsman is developing a new Universe at Legendary Television featuring three reimagined Irwin Allen sci-fi TV series. The Oscar-winning writer, producer and director will draw inspiration for the new TV shows from Allen’s catalog and focus on revitalizing Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Land of the Giants and The Time Tunnel.

… Legendary Television is focused on the three titles above and not Allen’s second TV series Lost in Space, which aired from 1965-68 on CBS and was reimagined by Legendary TV for a 2018-21 series on Netflix. 20th Century Fox produced all four of the original shows….

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

Alternate Futures for the Astounding Award

Posted on February 26, 2025 by Mike Glyer

Following the report that Asimov’s, Analog and F&SF have been purchased by a new owner, John Scalzi speculated about the fate of the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Although voting is administered by the Worldcon, the Astounding Award belongs to Dell Magazines, publisher of Analog prior to this sale. Will Analog’s new owners continue the sponsorship? John Scalzi has volunteered a landing place if one is needed.

Formerly named the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, it has been presented at the Worldcon since 1973, two years after Campbell’s death. The award was established by Conde Nast, publisher of Analog at the time. In 2019 it was renamed for the Golden Age prozine Campbell edited – Astounding — following a storm over the Campbell name catalyzed by Jeannette Ng’s award acceptance remarks about Campbell’s racism.

The new owners could keep on sponsoring the Astounding Award, of course. In case they don’t, John Scalzi made this offer in a post at Whatever:

If the new owners of Asimov’s and Analog don’t want to take sponsorship of the Astounding Award (or the award is not otherwise folded into the responsibilities of WSFS/the individual Worldcons), we’ll take it on. The ideal plan would be for the Scalzi Family Foundation to act as a bridge sponsor while we set up an endowment that would allow the Astounding Award to be run indefinitely.

UPDATE: Scalzi has learned from Asimov’s editor Sheila Williams that the new owners will continue to sponsor the various awards their magazines have been giving:

Sheila Williams (editor of Asimov’s) says: “Analog and Asimov’s new owners fully intend to support the awards that we and the mystery magazines bestow each year. We are also grateful for your continued support and love that you are determined to help keep Analog’s legacy going.”

Pixel Scroll 2/5/25 Pixels Purr Continuously As It’s The Chord Of The Multiverse

Posted on February 5, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) WHY NOT SAY WHAT HAPPENED? Episode 17 of Scott Edelman’s podcast Why Not Say What Happened? tells “How My Meeting Margaret Hamilton Became a Marvel Comics Contest”. Below is a photo of young Scott with the actress who formerly played the Wicked Witch but by the 1970s was hawking Maxwell House coffee.

Listen in as I look back half a century on what it was like being in the room with Len Wein and Dave Cockrum (or as much as I’m willing to admit) as they plotted Giant-Size X-Men #1, why my mid-’70s likeness still hangs on the wall at Marvel Comics HQ, my freelance income during the first six months of my life as a comics professional, the collaborative short stories my friends and I stayed awake 24 hours to write on Harlan Ellison’s 39th birthday, an article I commissioned for F.O.O.M. about collecting comics in 1975 which should make you weep 50 years later, how my meeting with Wicked Witch of the West Margaret Hamilton ended up being a Marvel Comics caption contest, and much more.

(2) I SOLEMNLY SWEAR I AM UP TO NO GOOD. “Goldfish Releases a New Harry Potter-Themed Butterbeer Flavor” and Food & Wine is agog. It will release in March.

Tired of having the same old snack? The you’re in luck. Goldfish has got something new for you, and it’s downright magical.

On Tuesday, Goldfish announced that it’s partnering with Warner Bros. Discovery Global Consumer Products to “cast a delicious spell” with the launch of its limited-edition Goldfish Butterbeer Flavored Grahams, which, yes, are inspired by Harry Potter.

The new crackers, the company noted in a statement provided to Food & Wine, come with a “rich butterscotch flavor, hints of creamy vanilla, and a touch of magic in each fun-shaped bite.”…

… Goldfish Butterbeer Flavored Grahams will be hitting grocery store shelves in March for about $3.69…

(3) THE PEASANTS ARE REVOLTING. “The ‘Pokémon TCG Pocket’ Trading System Is So Bad Players Are Revolting” reports WIRED.

PLAYERS OF THE game Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket are in revolt over its newly introduced trading system. Since its release last week, fans across Reddit, X, YouTube, and even the game’s official site all agree: Trading in Pocket is very, very bad.

Pocket, which launched last October for iOS and Android, is a free-to-play adaptation of the physical card game that digitally streamlines card-collecting and battling. Mimicking the gotta-catch-’em-all hype that dominated the ’90s and early aughts, the game’s developers frequently drop new card sets to keep players tearing open digital packs in the hopes of getting rare Pokémon. Those cards can then be used to battle either solo against AI, or online against other players. Prior to last Wednesday, the one thing missing from the game was trading, which would allow players to swap cards and fill in their decks.

Now, players are threatening to cancel premium subscriptions—a $9.99-per-month membership with additional perks like extra items and cards—in response to the newly released feature. “Shame, it was really fun for a few months,” wrote a player in a post on Reddit where they encouraged others to cancel their subscriptions. “Now it feels gross.”…

(4) DIDN’T CANCEL, DONE ANYWAY. When a forever game is no longer forever: “I loved Pokémon Trading Card Pocket – until I didn’t” says the Guardian’s game columnist.

For months now I have been in the thrall of Pokémon Trading Card Pocket. It’s a devilishly slick blend of card-collecting and pared-down battling that has had me obediently opening the app on my phone at least twice a day since it launched. The virtual cards are beautifully done; the rare art cards especially, with their pastoral scenes of Pokémon in their natural habitats. I have spent many hours on the battles, too, honing decks and chasing win streaks to earn myself victory emblems. I got most of my friends into it, anticipating the day when its makers at DeNa would finally enable trading so I could fill the last couple of holes in my collection.

This week, on the day that the trading went live and an expansion full of pretty new cards was introduced, I quit. I made a couple of trades for the Venosaur Ex and Machamp Ex that had evaded my grasp despite opening hundreds of packs, took a screenshot of the “collection complete” screen, and I haven’t opened it since. I’m done….

(5) MOONSONGS. John Scalzi spotlights a little known challenge: “How Translation Works, Book Title Edition” at Whatever.

…The title of the Hungarian version of When the Moon Hits Your Eye is an example of this “translation, not transliteration” phenomenon. People in English-speaking countries know the title is a lyric from “That’s Amore,” a well-known standard most famously sung by Dean Martin. The title hits in a very specific way, because English-speaking folks have the context for the phrase and the song it’s embedded into. But it’s not a guarantee that the phrase hits the same way in other languages, or will have the same sense of play.

The solution Agave, my Hungarian publisher, and its translators, decided on: Change the title to Csak a hold az égen, which are lyrics in the 1995 song “Szállj el, kismadár,” which is the biggest hit from the biggest album of Republic, a well-known Hungarian band:

“Csak a hold az égen” translates to “Only the moon in the sky,” and it’s the first line of the chorus of the song — which is to say, the line everyone who is a fan of the band or the song will reflexively be able to sing. The song was a top ten hit in Hungary, and the album it was on was number one on the Hungarian charts for ten weeks….

(6) BUTLER’S COMMUNITIES. The Huntington Library has reposted andré m. carrington’s 2024 article “Octavia E. Butler in Community, Then and Now”.

…Butler herself traveled a long way, both figuratively and literally, to find community. When I teach Butler’s works in courses on science fiction and African American literature at the University of California, Riverside, I like to show my students two photographs that feature Butler in group settings. In the first, taken at a 1970 science fiction convention in Pittsburgh, Butler stands on the outer edge of a group of young writers with their mentor, the notable science fiction author Harlan Ellison, seated in front. Butler and her fellow students had just participated in a science fiction workshop at Clarion State College under Ellison’s guidance. The other students notably included Vonda McIntyre, a feminist science fiction pioneer who would become a lifelong friend to Butler; French linguist and science fiction writer Jean Mark Gawron; and Russell Bates, a Native American author from Oklahoma who would go on to write for television and film. Butler was the only Black participant in the workshop.

Years later, when Butler and author Samuel R. Delany were asked how many other Black science fiction writers there were, they responded, “We’re two-thirds.” The other forerunner was Charles Saunders, who pioneered the sword and soul subgenre, setting fantasy adventure stories in mythical settings drawn from African cultures. Having people like Delany, McIntyre, and Ellison as mentors and friends encouraged Butler to write meticulously researched, wildly imaginative, captivating novels that eventually made her the first science fiction author to win the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius grant.”

The other image I like to share with my students tells the rest of Butler’s story. In the photo above, she is by no means isolated: Her company consists of 28 Black women writers who attended a retreat convened by Essence magazine in 1988. Before the internet became the main source of news and entertainment, Essence—along with Ebony and Jet magazines—was a household name in 20th-century Black America. You couldn’t walk through a supermarket checkout line in a Black neighborhood without seeing its iconic covers. Black women have always been the target audience for Essence. Growing up, Butler saw women like herself and those far removed from her working-poor circumstances in its pages: celebrities, role models, and leaders. She saw that, as a Black woman, she could be one of them. And then, in 1988, there she was, appearing in Essence alongside economist Julianne Malveaux, playwright Ntozake Shange, and law professor Elaine Brown, former chair of the Black Panther Party.

Seeing Butler in these 1970 and 1988 photos in the company of different peers helps us understand how much we can learn from her example. She was unique, but she was never singular, the way we often think about intellectuals. She contained, as the poet Walt Whitman would have put it, “multitudes.”…

(7) THE BLACK FANTASTIC ONLINE PANEL. The Library of America will host an online event featuring Tananarive Due, Victor LaValle, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and andré carrington, “The Black Fantastic: The New Wave of Afrofuturist Fiction Registration”, on Wednesday, February 19 from 6:00-7:00 p.m. Eastern. RSVP at the link. Contribution to attend: $5 (can be applied toward purchase of The Black Fantastic or any other book on the LOA Web Store.)

A new wave of science fiction and fantasy by Black writers has burst onto the American literary scene in recent decades: tales of cosmic travel, vampires, and alternate timelines set in profound social and psychological orbits. Building on the legacy of titans Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany, these visionary writers root their imagination of other worlds in the multilayered realities of Black history and experience.

Award-winning SF authors Tananarive Due, Victor LaValle, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah join andré carrington, editor of The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories, for a conversation about genre, influence, and the fascinating and phantasmagoric universes conjured by these new voices on the vanguard of American fiction.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

February 5, 1956 — Invasion of the Body Snatchers (premiered on this date)

By Paul Weimer: The original, and possibly if not the best, in a dead heat with 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

You know the story. Duplicates of people, created from alien seed pods (hence the phrase “pod people”) start replacing their originals in a small town in California. A small group of people band together to not only survive the menace, but to learn enough to escape and tell the authorities.

A classic, and for darned good reasons.

But why is it a classic? Excellent performances? The movie’s cast, from Kevin McCarthy as Dr. Miles Bennell, to Diana Wynter, King Donovan and Carolyn Jones are sharp and always on. You might not recognize them as A-listers or even B-Listers from the perspective of time, except maybe Carolyn Jones, who played the original Morticia Adsams in the Addams Family TV series. But they perform their roles here, and well. (Fun fact, the director Sam Peckinpah has a cameo).

Excellent editing? There are scenes of terror, suspense, and horror that are very well executed by director Don Siegel. It’s been aped and copied and referenced many times, not only in sequels to the movie, but in popular media and culture.

A stripped down and straight along plot and sequence of scenes that never lets up until the finale? The existential, political emotional horror of the whole idea of “pod people” in its original and most pure form? I saw the movie on WPIX in the late 70’s or early 80’s, and have seen it many times since. I didn’t get the political allegory one can make when I was younger…now, I see a number of potential political allegories one can read into it — anti-communism, the dangers of ultra-conformity, anti-McCarthyism. Any which way, it shows what happens to the individual, when society becomes poisoned and toxic (and doesn’t that feel relevant today).

I do find it interesting that thanks to the framing device, this is perhaps the most optimistic and “positive” of all of the Invasion movies. Every single one, especially 1978, has gone against this grain since, making the Invasion ever darker, ever more successful, humanity ever more doomed. Is it a sign of the times and tastes in movie fans? Or tastes in studio heads? I am not sure. But the movie does end as it began with Miles in the hospital, not only telling his story but being believed, and action being taken. I understand that the prologue and epilogue were later additions. I’ve never seen the film without them, I do wonder how I’d feel about a cut of the movie with both of them removed.

Maybe we do need an Invasion of the Body Snatchers in our own year of 2025 where people among us turn so violently and horribly against anyone who is different, where our political leaders are feckless, amoral, cowards or evil, and where it seems that research money is going into “18% Gray AI slop.” Meeting and facing an alien invasion, an insidious and carefully planned one. (Consider the scene where our heroes overhear Grivett’s plans for the organized dissemination of the Pods) . Pluck, luck, hard work and collective action oppose the Invaders. Even without the prologue and epilogue “assuring the happy ending” there is a sense of human spirit and resilience throughout the film.

The movie is a lean and mean 80 minutes long (barely longer than an extra length episode of a TV series season opener or finale these days). It never outstays its welcome, and in fact is probably underrated, if anything, as one of the more important movies ever made. Have you seen it lately?

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal complains about lengthy AI version names.
Eek! updates the Oz story.
Yaffle notes ancient cat history.
Tom Gauld knows science is a team game.

My latest cartoon for @newscientist.com
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2025-02-05T14:24:12.107Z

(10) HORROR AND HOLLYWOOD ACCOUNTING. Inverse gets the filmmakers and cast to tell them “The Oral History of ‘In the Mouth of Madness,’ John Carpenter’s Misunderstood Cosmic Horror Masterpiece” (a 1995 movie).

…The film’s budget was initially reported to be $15 million, but New Line kept whittling it down. In various commentaries and interviews, Carpenter has pinned the final budget at anywhere from $7-10 million, a significant reduction. Notably, the film’s original ending had to be completely reimagined.

King Carpenter: [There was] fighting with the studio, but that’s every movie. They had some weird people. They don’t trust anybody, and at the same time, I don’t trust them, so it becomes like Spy vs. Spy. [The budget] kept changing as we got closer to shooting. It would be one amount, and then they would cut $2 million out of it. You’re just going, “Why?” But it is what it is, that’s what happens, so we’d roll with it. We just figured it out, and you figure out your shooting days, and you know going in that whatever you anticipate, something in there is going to go to sh*t, and so you have to be prepared to punt on something.

Greg Nicotero: I just remember being in pre-production and we would have all the meetings at this little house in Sherman Oaks that they had on Willis Avenue, and looking at all the storyboards for the finale, the original finale where the whole town gets sucked into the book at the end. And it was a big, big deal. And for us, the designs were coming up with not only the creature, but some of the other looks. And I remember we got to that ending and it was like, “We don’t have enough money to do that.” ILM had storyboarded the whole thing, and it was all this really, really elaborate big action sequence. And I remember being at the meeting where they went, “Yeah, we’re going to rewrite the ending because we don’t have the money to do that.” And I was like, “Oh.”…

(11) OVERDUE AT THE HERCULANEUM LIBRARY. “First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2,000 years” says BBC.

A badly burnt scroll from the Roman town of Herculaneum has been digitally “unwrapped”, providing the first look inside for 2,000 years.

The document, which looks like a lump of charcoal, was charred by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD and is too fragile to ever be physically opened.

But now scientists have used a combination of X-ray imaging and artificial intelligence to virtually unfurl it, revealing rows and columns of text….

…Inside this huge machine, which is called a synchrotron, electrons are accelerated to almost the speed of light to produce a powerful X-ray beam that can probe the scroll without damaging it.

“It can see things on the scale of a few thousandths of a millimetre,” explained Adrian Mancuso, director of physical sciences at Diamond.

The scan is used to create a 3D reconstruction, then the layers inside the scroll – it contains about 10m of papyrus – have to be identified.

“We have to work out which layer is different from the next layer so we can unroll that digitally,” said Dr Mancuso.

After that artificial intelligence is used to detect the ink. It’s easier said than done – both the papyrus and ink are made from carbon and they’re almost indistinguishable from each other.

So the AI hunts for the tiniest signals that ink might be there, then this ink is painted on digitally, bringing the letters to light….

… Last year, a Vesuvius Challenge team managed to read about 5% of another Herculaneum scroll.

Its subject was Greek Epicurean philosophy, which teaches that fulfilment can be found through the pleasure of everyday things.

The Bodleian’s scroll is likely to be on the same subject – but the Vesuvius team is calling for more human and computing ingenuity to see if this is the case….

(12) BUCKET OF BLOOD. “The Monkey Has A Popcorn Bucket, And It Is An Absolute Must For My Stephen King Collection” says a CineBlend contributor.

…For those of you haven’t been paying attention, the titular evil in The Monkey (and what the popcorn bucket is modeled after) is an evil wind-up toy that kills a person whenever the key in its back is turned. In the Stephen King short story on which the movie is based, the cursed object is a classic cymbal-banging monkey, but the design was changed up for the film due to rights issues. Instead of clashing cymbals, it holds a pair of drumsticks and beats a snare that it holds between its legs.

The film centers on a pair of twin brothers who discover the monkey in the closest of their absconded father. After the vicious toy rips through their family like tissue paper, they are able to successfully contain it for a while, but years later, when the siblings are estranged adults, it makes a horrible return.

The popcorn bucket’s likeness to the prop in the movie is impressive… but if fans really want to go the extra mile, they’ll plan ahead and bring some red food dye with them to their screening of The Monkey to apply it to the contents before they start munching. After all, part of what makes the upcoming horror film so special is the fact that it has a good shot of going down in history as the goriest Stephen King adaptation, which is an aspect well-highlighted in the trailers and previews….

According to Nerdist: “It will only be available at AMC Theatres locations, and it comes with a large popcorn for $44.99 plus tax. The 85-ounce popcorn bucket is stylized to look just like the monkey toy that’s at the heart of the film.”

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(13) IN A HOLE IN THE GROUND. “Archaeologists Unearth Rare 1,000-Year-Old Food Storage Pit in Alaska” – Smithsonian has details.

On a hill of birch and spruce overlooking the Knik Arm, a narrow stretch of the Gulf of Alaska that extends northwest of Anchorage, archaeologists have unearthed a remarkably intact cache pit used by the region’s Indigenous Dene people. The discovery is offering a new perspective on the long human history of the region, as well as how to preserve and protect its legacy for generations to come.

Cache pits are like root cellars, as Elizabeth Ortiz, an archaeologist and cultural resource manager at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson (JBER), the military complex where the discovery was made, says in a statement.

Located along a well-known Dene trail that led north out of the modern-day Anchorage area, the pit measures about 3.5 feet deep. It was dug into well-drained soil and lined with birch bark and grass, which preserved fish, meat and berries through the harsh seasonal extremes of southeastern Alaska.

The Dene, also known as Athabaskans, include the Dena’ina and Ahtna people. In the summers, they would have stayed in the area to catch and preserve salmon and terrestrial meat, with houses and smokehouses lining the bluffs above the Cook Inlet, according to Arkeonews.

Archaeologists expected the cache pit to be a few hundred years old. However, radiocarbon testing revealed that it was actually much older.

“When we got the results back that said it was 960 years, plus or minus 30, we were shocked,” Ortiz tells Alena Naiden of KNBA, a local radio station. “[We] were jumping up and down in our cube in tears. It was very, very exciting.”

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George takes us inside the “Back to the Future Part II Pitch Meeting”.

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

Cats Sleep on SFF: Starter Villain

Posted on September 22, 2024 by Mike Glyer

Naomi Kritzer introduces us to Balto and Lottie:

I have three cats. And we have books all over, so yes, they definitely sleep near books sometimes, and one cat was so persistent in her desire to sleep on my laptop while I was using it that I put a cat trap (i.e., a nice box) on my desk in an attempt to entice her to sleep somewhere else. (This worked! She really likes her box.)

Here’s a picture of Balto sleeping under rather than on my e-reader (on which I’m reading John Scalzi’s Starter Villain, in a section about cats):

Here’s Lottie demonstrating why I installed the cat trap:

Here’s Lottie in her box:

Photos of your felines (or whatever you’ve got!) resting on genre works are welcome. Send to mikeglyer (at) cs (dot) com

Pixel Scroll 8/15/24 Have Spice Suit, Will Travel

Posted on August 15, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) SFWA ON ITS THIRD PRESIDENT THIS SUMMER. Chelsea Mueller today resigned as Interim President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. Mueller had been in office only since the beginning of August, as SFWA’s VP becoming the organization’s Interim President upon the resignation of SFWA President Jeffe Kennedy on August 1. Anthony W. Eichenlaub, SFWA Secretary, is stepping up as the new Interim President. Mueller’s and Eichenlaub’s statements are excerpted in the File 770 post “Mueller Resigns as Interim SFWA President; Eichenlaub Takes Office”.

To learn why the organization is in a crisis SFWA members must read the Forum. Those outside can get only a very general idea from social media posts like M L Clark’s statement on Bluesky.

Author Jenny Rae Rappaport his urging SFWA members to sign a Petition for bylaws amendment to forbid NDAs. The supporting statement follows. The wording of the amendment is at the link.

In the last several years, SFWA has begun requiring its Board members, employees, and key volunteers to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) to ensure confidentiality. However, recent events have shown that these NDAs cause more problems than they solve. Because the NDAs are overly broad without clear limits or expiration dates, they leave employees, Board members, and volunteers uncertain about what they can and cannot say without potential legal repercussions. Even more concerning is that these NDAs have created distrust between SFWA membership and the Board, and an environment where the perception exists that bad actors can mistreat others and violate SFWA’s bylaws with impunity.

There is no legal requirement for SFWA as a 501(c)(3) to use NDAs, for either its legal or tax status. Many nonprofits, both inside and outside California, function perfectly well without using NDAs, either trusting that people will follow the laws about disclosure of personal, financial, and medical information, or using individual confidentiality agreements with the details of what information needs to be kept confidential spelled out.

Accordingly, in the interests of greater transparency for the organization, we, the undersigned members of SFWA, petition for the following change to the bylaws:

(2) INDUSTRY REACTS TO GAME HUGO WINNER. PC Gamer marvels that “Somehow, Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t done winning yet: It’s just claimed the most prestigious award for science fiction and fantasy writing”.

….A special videogame category was added in 2021 to recognize the increased impact of videogames amidst the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, but it was a one-off: No game-related Hugo was awarded in 2022 or ’23.

In 2023, however, Worldcon voted to make the Best Game or Interactive Work a permanent category for 2024—wouldn’t you know it, just in time for the Baldur’s Gate 3 behemoth to smash through the walls like the Kool-Aid Man and run off with it. BG3 beat out Alan Wake 2 (yet again), Chants of Senaar, Dredge, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor for the big prize….

“The Hugo nominees and awards have determined my reading list since forever, so it’s a huge honor to be standing here,” Larian boss Swen Vincke said during his acceptance speech (via Polygon).

“Videogame writing is often underestimated. It is very very very hard work. For Baldur’s Gate 3 we had to create over 174 hours of cinematics just to be able to respect the choices of the players and to make sure that each and every single one of them would have an emotional story that was reflecting their choices and their agency. It takes a very long time, it takes a very large team … It takes a lot of perseverance and a lot of talent. So I’m very happy for all of them and for all of the team back home that we can get this, and very grateful to the fandom.”

Vincke isn’t kidding when he says Larian wanted to ensure Baldur’s Gate 3 was as reactive as possible to player choices: The studio recently revealed that the game’s rarest ending has only been unlocked by 34 players—and remember, this is a game that’s sold well over 10 million copies. (For a little added context, 1.9 million Baldur’s Gate 3 players were turned into a cheese wheel. Which is fine, really: No one has as many friends as the man with many cheeses.)…

(3) ELLISON FOUNDATION HAD IRS CHARITABLE STATUS REVOKED. The IRS has revoked the 501(c)(3) charitable status of The Harlan and Susan Ellison Foundation after it failed to file the required Form 990 for three straight years. Douglas J. Lane provides detailed coverage of the Foundation’s creation, activities, and status in his blog post “For Want of a Form”:

On Monday, August 12, 2024 the Internal Revenue Service updated its monthly list of 501(c)(3) organizations for whom it was revoking charitable status based on failure to file Form 990, Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax, for three consecutive years.

Among the organizations freshly listed was EIN number 873507738, The Harlan and Susan Ellison Foundation.

The revocation of charitable status puts the Foundation and its president, J. Michael Straczynski, in a tricky spot, as it makes the organization fully taxable. They cannot receive tax-free donations or offer deductions to donors. Under California law, they will also not be able to distribute charitable funds. There are other ramifications, and while reinstatement is possible, it comes with a swath of requirements.

It’s critical to say at the outset of this account of the public-facing facets of the Foundation: I ascribe no malicious intent or nefarious purpose to anyone involved in any of the events that led to this revocation, and no impropriety is indicated by anything that has occurred. Indeed, Joe Straczynski speaks in a caring and sincere way about the place the Ellisons have in his heart, and how he wants to carry out their wishes. The Foundation has a laudable vision. But malicious intent and carelessness are two different things, and it’s clear a severe breakdown occurred somewhere along the way that resulted in opacity where transparency was required, creating a situation in which warnings were missed and the Foundation was positioned for a catastrophic setback that was wholly avoidable…

Lane also posted the information today at The Harlan Ellison Facebook Fan Club, leading to this series of comments from J. Michael Straczynski.

Thursday, August 15, 2024 at 10:21 a.m.

This is literally the first time I’m hearing this. We’ve had no contact from them directly or indirectly. If the forms were not submitted that’s strictly a paperwork issue and that’s on us. I need to find out what happened on the attorney side. This will be fixed and as per this the status will then be reinstated once we’ve sent in the forms.

Thursday, August 15, 2024 at 11:21 a.m.

Okay, last quick update for the moment. It looks like the notices were being sent to the wrong address/suite number. Also, as for the Packard, it was not sold, it was given freely to a member of this very forum in exchange for looking after it and maintaining it in Harlan’s memory. He can confirm this here if he so desires.

So bottom line for now: the paperwork fell through a crack between different offices over who was handling what, and the address (as noted in the link) was incorrect for the notices. I assumed all this was being properly attended to, while I was busy getting Harlan’s work back into print. That error was mine. The good news is that since this was apparently a comedy of errors on both sides, there should be no issue with getting this rectified swiftly by simply filing the paperwork.

Thursday, August 15, 2024 at 12:41 p.m.

Okay…I just heard from the business management firm we’ve been using and they confirmed that they hadn’t looked after this because they believed it was already being handled by others. They’re filing the paperwork as we speak and this will be rectified promptly.

Thursday, August 15, 2024 at 3:25 p.m.

This has now been officially resolved. We just confirmed with the tax dept that we never received any notices from the IRS. We sent in and they have now filed the returns with the correct address. After the IRS processes them, we will handle the paperwork to reinstate the Foundation which will apparently not be a problem. The IRS will update their records so no further notices are missed. The tax dept now has the Foundation on their schedule so they won’t miss it again anyway. Just to be on the safe side moving forward we are going to hire a nonprofit attorney on retainer to coordinate all of the moving parts so nothing falls through the cracks in future.

A colorful day but at least it’s ending better than it began.

(4) ANOTHER LOOK AT GAIMAN ALLEGATIONS. The Spinoff books editor Claire Mabey listened to the Tortoise Media podcast “Master: the allegations against Neil Gaiman” and distilled the information into a timeline with explicit details of the encounters described by survivors in “The New Zealand allegations at the centre of a Neil Gaiman podcast investigation”.

(5) AMERICAN NON-IDOL. I don’t know that any of the many ways John Scalzi restates the basic point in his 3,600-word post really feels like it stuck the landing, but the oft-repeated message makes sense: “Please Don’t Idolize Me (or Anyone, Really)” at Whatever.

In the wake of the various recent allegations involving Neil Gaiman, people have been both very sad that someone who they looked up to as an inspiration has, allegedly, turned out to be something less than entirely admirable, and are now looking to see who is now left that they can rotate into the spot of “the good dude,” i.e., that one successful creative guy who they think or at least hope isn’t hiding a cellar full of awful actions. One name I see brought up is mine, in ways ranging from “Well, at least we still have Scalzi,” to “Oh, God, please don’t let Scalzi be a fucking creep too.” Which, uhhhh, yeah? Thanks?…

…Every person you’ve ever admired has fucked up, sometimes really badly. Everyone you’ve ever looked up to has secrets, and it’s possible some of those secrets would materially change how you think about them, not always for the better. Everyone you’ve ever known has things about them you don’t know, many of which aren’t even secrets, they’re just things you don’t engage with in your day-to-day experience of them. Nevertheless it’s possible if you were aware of them, it would change how you feel about them, for better or for worse. And now let’s flip that around! You have things about you that even your best friends don’t know, and might be surprised to learn! You have secrets you don’t wish to share with the class! You have fucked up, and lied, and have been a hypocrite too!…

…Oh, God, this is where Scalzi starts admitting to terrible, terrible things. No. I feel pretty confident I live a tolerably ethical life. Part of the reason for this is that I have what I think is a decent operating principle, which is: If I’m thinking of doing something, and Krissy called me right then and asked “what are you doing?” and I would be tempted to lie to her about it, then I don’t do that thing….

(6) GET READY FOR FANTASTIC FEST. “Fantastic Fest 2024 Lineup Featuring Terrifier 3, Never Let Go, More Unveiled” – Deadline has details.

Fantastic Fest, the country’s largest genre film festival, has unveiled the feature lineup for its 19th edition, taking place at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar in Austin, TX, from September 19th- 26th.

Featuring 28 World Premieres, 23 International and North American Premieres, and 15 U.S. Premieres, the fest opens with the world premiere of James Ashcroft’s The Rule of Jenny Pen, a new thriller starring John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush. Lionsgate’s horror thriller Never Let Go will be presented during the opening night gala, with director Alexandre Aja, star Halle Berry and the team from 21 Laps in attendance. Meanwhile, opening night will also feature the world premiere of Terrifier 3, the latest film in Damien Leone’s horror franchise, centered on the horrifying Art the Clown.

(7) AURORA AWARDS VOTING STATISTICS. Clifford Samuels has posted the “Final results for the 2024 Aurora Awards” at the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association website. The direct link to the statistics is here.

(8) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboy Books of Joshua Tree, CA brings listeners Simultaneous Times episode 78. Stories featured in this episode:

“When You See A Dragon, You Run” by Jenna Hanchey, read by the author

“The Darling Murders” by Jonathan Nevair. Read by Jean-Paul Garnier

Music by Phog Masheeen. Theme music by Dain Luscombe.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Lis Carey.]

Born August 15, 1933 – Bjo Trimble, 91.

By Lis Carey: Bjo was born in Holdenville, Oklahoma, in 1933, discovered sf fandom in 1952. She was serving in the US Navy, at the Great Lakes Naval Station, and saw an announcement in Astounding Science Fiction about the science fiction convention that weekend in Chicago—the 10^th Worldcon, the one we now call Chicon II, though at the time it had no official name. The largest Worldcon ever at the time, with 870 members, it was a great place for a smart and friendly young woman to meet people and make connections in fandom. Her new acquaintances included Robert Bloch, Willy Ley, August Derleth, and Harlan Ellison.

Bjo Trimble attends the 2024 Peabody Awards at Beverly Wilshire on June 9. Photo by Jon Kopaloff.

When it was discovered that she was an artist and cartoonist, she was recruited to provide illustrations for fanzines, sealing her fate. She claims to have met her husband, John Griffin Trimble, under Forrest J Ackerman’s piano, during a particularly crowded party. He was serving in the US Air Force, and they traded Stupid Officer Stories.

But as we all know, this was mere prelude. Bjo was active in LASFS (Los Angeles Science Fiction Society), and organized a fashion show for Solacon (the 16^th Worldcon). In 1960, she started Project Art Show, which brought the first modern, organized art show at a science fiction convention to Pittcon, the 1960 Worldcon. Bjo continued the project, bringing art shows to Worldcons and other conventions. By 1969, Project Art Show had become The International Science-Fantasy Art Exhibition” (ISFAE), and was judging and awarding prizes, as well as organizing the art shows.

But in 1968, Bjo started turning her attention to a new fannish interest–Star Trek. Bjo and John Trimble were active in the letter-writing campaign credited with getting the show a third season, after it was initially canceled after its second season. They also helped convince NASA to name the first of the Space Shuttles Enterprise, although that was a test vehicle never intended for space flight.

Bjo was a major contributor to the Star Trek Concordance, containing cross-referenced details on every character, setting, event and device in every episode of the original Star Trek, and, in later editions of the book, its animated incarnation, and the Star Trek films. Originally self-published, it got a mass market publication by Ballantine Books in 1976, and an updated edition by Citadel Press in 1995. On the Good Ship Enterprise: My 15 Years with Star Trek, her memoir of her experiences in Star Trek fandom, was published in 1982.

Bjo was a Guest of Honor at Dragon Con, which was also the 6^th North American Science Fiction Convention, in 1995. Bjo and John Trimble were Fan Guests of Honor at ConJosé, the 60^th Worldcon. Bjo, or Bjo and John, were also honored at many Star Trek and other science fiction conventions.

In addition, Bjo and John Trimble were Baron and Baroness of the Society for Creative Anachronism’s Barony of the Angels, from September 2008 to January 2012. That’s at least fandom adjacent, right?

Sadly, John in April 2024, but Bjo is still with us. Her contributions to fandom will remain.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Non Sequitur’s Jeffrey looks into the future.
Dog Eat Doug suspects that cats lie.
Rhymes With Orange explains the universe.

(11) MUTANTS DESERVE AWARDS. The Walt Disney Studios has a “For Your Consideration” website for the X-Men ’97 series.

(12) PAGING ALL READERS. “Book Bars Gain Momentum Around New York”: Eater tells you where to find the ones in New York City.

A flurry of book bars has recently opened that prioritize solo time as much as low-key conversation, offering a fun alt-combo to record bars and libraries. These spaces for reading, drinking, listening to music, and chatting with other book lovers (or not) are a post-shutdown pivot from social distancing. And while the throwback staple had started to revive just after the pandemic, their openings have gained momentum around the city.

Like wine bars and cocktail bars, the focus in book bars is less on needing labor to make complicated dishes as the case may be in a full-fledged restaurant. Instead, the business relies on easier-to-procure revenue streams: booze, books, and sometimes, ready-made snacks, like olives, nuts, and tinned fish. But book bars, owners say, are less about practicality than about creating a community, a third place that’s conducive to reading and chatting while enjoying a drink…

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(13) PURINA HOBBIT CHOW. “What’s on the Menu in Your Fantasy World?” at Gastro Obscura.

FOOD AND FANTASY HAVE LONG gone hand in hand. Our oldest myths and fairy tales abound with ravenous monsters and enchanted apples, while modern fantasy literature has brought us the second breakfast-savoring hobbits of The Lord of the Rings and the sprawling medieval banquets of A Song of Ice and Fire. Fantasy fans rally around official cookbooks from the worlds they love, as well as unofficial recreations and fanfiction that explores the diets of their favorite characters.

(14) THE TREES THAT GREW THE POOH-STICKS. BBC Countryfile invites readers to “Discover the real-life Winnie-The-Pooh locations that inspired the famous children’s books by AA Milne”.

Ashdown Forest in East Sussex is perhaps best known as The Hundred Acre Wood, the beloved setting of arguably the most famous children’s books ever written, Winnie-the-Pooh, published in 1926, and The House at Pooh Corner (1928)….

…Today, the 6,500-acre heathland and woodland 36 miles south of London, is a rare and protected area, providing habitat for endangered flora and fauna. In this gentle, ancient landscape, we can enjoy its literary, cultural and environmental history; we can be twitchers, walkers or pub-goers….

(15) NOW LEAVING ON TRACK 9-3/4. “Back to Hogwarts pop-up coming to Grand Central Terminal with spellbinding interactive activities” reports AMNY.

For the first time ever, Warner Bros. Discovery will be hosting a Back to Hogwarts pop-up in New York City. From Aug. 30 through Sept. 1, “Harry Potter” fans can gather at Vanderbilt Hall at Grand Central Terminal to celebrate the start of a new school year at Hogwarts.

In the “Harry Potter” universe, all students board the Hogwarts Express and return for a new year on Sept. 1. Warner Bros. Discovery hosts global celebrations in cities like London, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo, uniting fans worldwide with digital activities, in-person gatherings, and watch-alongs, plus huge celebrations at “Harry Potter” destinations such as the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios.

At the New York pop-up, guests can expect to find magical performances, LEGO building activities, an interactive “Harry Potter: Quidditch Champion” experience, and a Butterbeer toast, courtesy of the flagship Harry Potter New York store. On Sept. 1, there will be a ticketed event with a live 11 a.m. countdown, marking when the Hogwarts Express would leave Kings Cross station in the series.

Though all of the events are free to attend, “Harry Potter” fans must sign up for a timed-entry ticket, which will be available starting Aug. 19. To make sure you don’t miss it, sign up and opt into email communications from the Harry Potter Fan Club by Aug. 17. On Aug. 19, an email will be sent including a link to the ticket site ahead of release at 12 p.m. EST.

(16) NOT A ROLLING STONE. SAILING, MAYBE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Today’s Nature has Stonehenge on the cover. There’s a Nature News item here.

The history of Stonehenge poses many challenges, not least of which is where all of the stones came from and how they were transported to the site. The Neolithic structure is made up of two main types of stone — sarsens sourced some 25 kilometres away near Marlborough, and bluestones that originated in Wales. The largest of the bluestones at the site is the six-tonne Altar Stone, but it is an anomaly: it did not come from Wales. In this week’s issue, Anthony Clarke and colleagues reveal that the Altar Stone probably made a remarkable journey of some 750 kilometres from Scotland. The researchers analysed two fragments from the stone and discovered a striking similarity to the Old Red Sandstone of the Orcadian Basin in northeast Scotland. The team suggests that the stone could have been transported by sea, indicating that there might have been a significant level of societal organization within Neolithic Britain.

The original research by Anthony Clarke and colleagues link above is to “A Scottish provenance for the Altar Stone of Stonehenge”.

(17) UPLIFTING HUMANS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In a series of stories and novels, David Brin explored the idea of species uplift where by a technological civilization genetically manipulates a non-sentient species into full-blown sentience: a process called ‘uplifting’. Brin’s series has a climax in the Hugo-winning The Uplift War (1986).

Last weekend, while folk in Glasgow were preparing for the Hugo Awards ceremony, Isaac Arthur posted one of his monthly ‘Sci-Fi Sunday’ videos. While in David Brin’s stories the humans appeared to be the exception in the Galaxy who evolved sentience naturally whereas every other civilization seems to have been uplifted with the original uplift being made by some ancient and now extinct civilization. Conversely, in Isaac’s video, he explores the notion that humans were uplifted by an alien race.

Now, it has to be said that Isaac himself does not subscribe to the idea of humans being uplifted (he makes that clear both at the video’s beginning and end), but explores the concept hypothetically. Included in the mix is a slightly more sober idea that the Earth might have been subject to panspermia and specifically directed panspermia… As well as a brief dive into Eric von Daniken which, mercifully, he looks at purely through an SFnal lens… “Were Primitive Humans Uplifted By Aliens?”

Many believe humanity’s climb upward may have been assisted by outsiders. Is this possible, and if so, what does that tell us about our own past… and future?

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

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

Posted on August 12, 2024 by Mike Glyer

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

By Chris M. Barkley:

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

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

(5) Hugo Ceremony Auditorium Stage.

(6) Hugo Awards Ceremony poster.

(7) Gay and Joe Haldeman.

Forty-two more photos follow the jump!

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