SPOILER WARNING: Review discusses some details of story
Review by Jonathan Cowie: Sinners (2025) is the latest offering from director Ryan (Black Panther & Wakanda Forever) Coogler. It is at the end of the day a vampire film but, like the recent Russian film Putin hates, Empire V, it actually uses the trope of vampires as an allegory for person control and identity. Indeed, nearly all the first half of the film does not feature vampires (though there is a fleeting segment a few minutes long) with their first principal entrance coming 55 minutes in. Instead, we get to see what life is like for early 20th century African Americans in the south.
But, before we get ahead of ourselves, some backdrop. The film is set in the Mississippi Delta which, for many outside of the US, should not be confused with the geographical delta of the Mississippi river but note that the Mississippi Delta is a region in the north of the USA state of Mississippi that lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers a couple of hundred miles or so north of the geographical delta proper.
Sinners’ 1932 setting brings it to the heart of the time when many in the region refused to accept the South had lost the American Civil War that should have seen former enslaved ethnic minorities treated as equals (as per the US constitution) but saw continued abuse, harassment, degradation and control over these minorities, not least with a flourishing Klu Klux Klan in the region. This then is at the heart of the film.
Part of this abuse is the appropriation of blues music by the privileged white folk who on one hand enjoy it, and culturally appropriate it, but on the other hypocritically call it sinful and the devil’s music due to its ethnic origins. As a pianist, Delta Slim, in the film says, “White folks like the blues just fine; just not the people who make it.” Here, it should be noted that African-Americans were not the only ethnic minority to be abused: those from China were too and there are a number of references to this.
As said, the film’s first 55 minutes sets all this up together with the protagonists’ own backstory.
In fact, the film’s first five minutes or so takes place the day after the events of the rest of the film. So the first thing we see, and get to know, is that there is a survivor in the form of cousin Sammie (played by Miles Caton the R&B singer-songwriter) who is an aspiring blues guitarist who goes to his pastor father’s (Jedidiah Moore – played by Saul Williams) church. Sammie, in a state of disarray and distress, bursts in on his father giving a service to his congregation. His pastor father pleads with Sammie to renounce the evil blues and seek salvation… We then get a flashback to the previous day.
Twins – both played by Michael B. (Black Panther) Jordan with some nifty photography including them side-by-side with one hand-rolling a cigarette and passing it to the other – return to the area they grew up in having spent a spell working for Chicago gangsters and before then being World War I veterans: they are battle hardened through both crime and war.
With their gangster cash they decide to go legit and set up a juke joint outside Clarkesdale. They purchase their ramshackle premises from a wealthy landowner who clearly is bigoted given the use of some of his (no offence intended) language.
While the twins are preparing their juke house, and recruiting staff from former friends in Clarksdale to help run it, we get a brief interlude in which a very dusty (smoking even) Irishman stumbles from the plain into a young couple’s homestead: we get to see, from a brief display of robes, that the couple are local Klansmen. The Irishman asks to be let in seeking sanctuary from some American Indians who are after him. Shortly, a group of Choctaws turn up asking the wife if anyone has arrived and warning that they are in danger. However, the Sun is about to set and so the Choctaw leave but not before warning the wife not to invite any strangers in… However, the wife goes back into their homestead to find that the Irishman has killed her husband, having drunk his blood…
Meanwhile, the Sun has set and the juke house’s opening night is going well with Sammie, their blue’s guitarist, on top form. The blues is such a powerful music that it can open the doors to the past as well as the future and other spiritual plains. We get to see primitives dancing as well as modern DJ’s with their turntables and modern musicians with electric guitars, while the juke house is seemingly on fire.
This music, opening other planes and dimensions, attracts the Irish vampire who turns up with the Klansmen couple asking to be invited in…
With the best part of an hour to go, the film sees the inevitable stand-off with the vampires as one by one the revelers are turned. There then follows two codas: one a conclusion to the Klansmen issue and the other an in-post-film credits afterword set in the present day…. As for how this hour plays out you will have to see the film.
Plot aside, you may want to know what sort of vampires it is with which we are dealing? We learn that these vampires, having drunk the blood and turned their victims, learn all that their victims knew and their victims demonstrably get to know what their vampire master knows as at one point this leads to a co-ordinated dance.
Fortunately, at least as far as I am concerned, that, unlike the recent Wolf Man film I reviewed which eschewed traditional werewolf tropes, Sinners vampires: do not like garlic, have to be invited in, do lethally suffer from extreme sunburn, and are killed with a stake through the heart. In this respect, Sinners is a solid, traditional vampire film.
This is also a film to see in the cinema for both the photography and music. The scenery of the Delta plains lends itself to the widescreen and the 1930s Clarkesdale is portrayed well. The music was composed by Ludwig Goransson and benefits from cinematic sound. Apparently, much of the music was recorded on set with musicians alongside cast members.
With regards to the film’s feel, it does at times – especially to my mind the Choctaw scene – reminiscent of the director John Carpenter, whom Coogler has reportedly cited as an influence. Indeed, I wanted to know more of the Choctaw backstory.
Here, there may be some good news. Apparently, Warners went into an unusual arrangement with director-producer Coogler in that he has control over future licensing, royalties, and sequels. Could it be that we will get to know more of the Choctaw backstory?
By SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie: Mickey-17 is the latest film from the South Korean director Bong Joon-ho whose 2019 socio-commentary, comedy-thriller The Parasite garnered many awards including four Oscars (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature Film) as well as being short-listed for two others, among many other awards, and taking £119 million (US$266m) worldwide at the box office.
SFnally, Bong Joon-ho is known for his first English film Snowpiercer (2013) which, like The Parasite, was also at heart a social commentary. All of which brings us to Mickey 17 (2025).
What’s to be said about Mickey 17? Well, it is firmly an SF film. Additionally, just as Snowpiercer was based on the graphic novel Le Transperceneige (1982), Mickey 17 is based on an early draft of Edward Ashton’s (who he?) novel Mickey 7 (2022): Bong Joon-ho was responsible for the script. Further, like The Parasite, it is also a social commentary again in part on class, but also 21st century dictatorship politics. Also, like a number of Joon-ho’s films, it does markedly change gear over half-way through and ends up being somewhat a different offering by its end: do not let this put you off.
The underlying SF premise is quite simple, space travel and colonising a planet is difficult and can be deadly. However, using unreliable – and illegal on Earth – technology it is possible to download a person’s consciousness and then upload it into a freshly-grown – or in this case ‘printed’ – body. In SF, this is now an established post-human trope and, perhaps notably, featured in a number of Greg Egan’s stories. All well and good, so now onto the plot…
Mickey Barnes (played by Robert Pattison) and his friend Timo (Steven Yeun) owe money to a relentless and sadistic businessman. Knowing that they are likely to be killed in a most excruciatingly horrible way, they decide to join the rush to leave the Earth (it is becoming a ruined planet) and colonise a distant new world. Timo becomes a pilot while Mickey unwittingly signs his life away, but guaranteeing himself a place on the space ship, by becoming an ‘expendable’, someone who is given deadly tasks, who will die and then be resurrected in a newly printed body from recycled organic material while having his mind restored from its last back-up point.
All this is really a MacGuffin as the film is actually about power, those without it and those with it who use it and abuse it. We quickly learn that the ship they are on is destined to an all ‘white’ (snowy) world where the colonists would spread their seed and populate it all under the rule of the quasi-religious politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette).
Having arrived at the colony world, Mickey 17 (16 versions of Mickey having already previously died) falls down a crevasse and is left for dead. A new version of Mickey is printed (Mickey 18), but Mickey 17 eventually makes it back to discover he has another him: an illegal ‘multiple’…
It is at this point the film shifts gear with a focus now shared with that of the stratified ship’s society of Kenneth Marshall with his vision to conquer the planet Niflheim and wipe out its alien, indigenous, animal species. (Though it is pointed out to Marshall that on this world it is we who are the aliens…)
Mickey 17 has a decided art-house feel to it despite its £96 million (US$118m) budget. Also, it has to be said, it is a little clunky in places. The explanatory Mickey commentary some may find off-putting: a lot of folk seem not to like such talk-overs but actually I don’t mind them. The thing that will spring to mind is that the politician Kenneth Marshall is clearly a Donald Trump-like character, this parody is all too obvious, laid on rather thickly and with the subtlety of a miners’ outing, but potential viewers should remind themselves that the film wrapped its shooting well before Trump took office for his second term, his approach to Ukraine, tariff wars with various nations, and his stated aim of annexing Panama, Greenland and Gazza: the film was written and shot under Biden’s US presidency. Having said that, remember Trump previously queried (the sub-titled) Parasite’s, ‘Best Picture’ Oscar win at a campaign rally in Colorado in 2020 (it wasn’t a US film) and this is something that Bong Joon-ho is unlikely to forget.
Despite this being an uneven film, and the SF tropes presented in a flawed way (the ‘it rained on Mongo’ planet being one such example) it is delightfully quirky, and while not polished I prefer this sort of film any day rather than the formulaic franchise films to which we are continually subjected. This is why I enjoy a thoroughly good film programme at an SF convention when we get them (sadly less frequently these days with the new generation of languid conrunners and SMOFs, despite the Glasgow Worldcon’s film poll*): a film that makes you think ‘what was that all about?’ is in no way a bad a thing. Mickey 17 may not be perfect but expect it on the short-lists of some major 2026 SF awards that have film categories!
(*If anyone thinks who am I and that’s a bit harsh, I should perhaps point out that 1970s to early 2000s I was on the committee of several SF conventions and the staff of a few others: all had films screened.)
By Jonathan Cowie: Wolf Man is currently in cinemas and, given its mediocre IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes ratings (5.9 and 57% respectively), you may be wondering if it is any good?
Well, before we get to that, it is perhaps worthwhile taking a bite into this offering’s history. Jump back the best part of a decade and Hollywood’s Universal studios were casting an envious eye over the success of one of their rivals and the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films. Universal then realized that they owned the rights to Frankenstein, Dracula and Wolfman and so established their own “Universal Monster” films. However, since then it has been a rocky ride. For example, Tom Cruise’s The Mummy (2017trailer here) reboot was only a so-so success but had a big star and loads of effects hence was expensive and not a commercial success despite a not-too-bad box office showing. So profit-wise, it was a flop. Universal must have had déjà vu as this is exactly what previously happened with The Wolfman (2010, trailer here). Perhaps it was with this last in mind that Universal were a tad wary of venturing back into werewolf land. However, in 2020 The Invisible Man did surprisingly well (budget £5.7 million / US$7m and revenue £118million/US$145m) despite it only having a few weeks in the cinema before CoVID-19 lockdowns, but commercially it was successful as it was streamed online for a fee. It is best said that it perhaps “inspired” by the H. G. Wells story rather than “based” on it (trailer here). This success buoyed the studio but, alas, fortune was not with them, the Dracula spoof horror Renfield (2023, trailer here) flopped (it made a substantive loss having accrued less than half its budget) though for my money it deserved to do a little better at the box office, but its sizeable and big-name cast (hence expense £53 million /US$64m) did not make it profitable.
Taking all this together, you can see that Universal was by now very wary of another werewolf re-boot. Indeed, saying that they were nervous is arguably something of a British understatement. And so it was only at the start of last year that Wolf Man, which was well into pre-production but not actual production, saw Universal falter. Originally, the best part of a decade ago(!) Universal hired Aaron Guzikowski to write the screenstory. Apparently, that did not go down well with Universal’s powers-that-be as in 2021 Derek Cianfrance was set to direct and Ryan Gosling to star, but that would not last. Around Christmas, as 2023 came to a close, Derek Cianfrance was replaced by director Leigh Whannell and Christopher Abbott replaced Ryan Gosling to star (though Gosling would stay on as an executive producer).
Which brings us up to the present offering. The cast was kept minimal: just six actors playing five characters having more than three lines and I am told filming was done in New Zealand (scenic glacial valley), which has plenty of tax breaks for film makers. And the film was made quickly: under a year (not much time to fritter away cash!) Its budget was £20 million (US$25) and apparently it broke even within a fortnight of its release. So, is it any good?
Well, to my mind, it is not bad, but frustratingly not good either: I can see why it gets middling IMDB and Tomatoes scores.
It opens with a few lines of screen text info-dumping in very annoyingly small font size which means that, if you are not watching it at the cinema, you are going to need a large, flat screen TV to have half a chance of reading it unless they release a special for TV version. Anyway, we are told that apparently, US Indians were long aware of a disease they called wolf face, and then in the modern era a hiker went missing. Finally, the locals say that there’s a terrible creature lurking in the woods… So, within the first two minutes you have the set-up explained prior to a 15 minute opening act… Then we get a jump forward in time and the former child, to which we were initially introduced, is now grown up and living in a city with his wife and daughter. He gets a letter informing him of his father… And from that moment on, barely 15 minutes into the film, this offering’s plot arc is plain for the cinematically literate to see… In short, there are no plot surprises and – for the benefit of the cinematically illiterate – at the beginning of the final scenes, in a few sentences from the mother, there is an explanation given to the daughter (and the film’s viewers)…
Plus points, the acting is not bad, some of the effects, while not spectacular, are fine and there are also a couple of interesting point-of-view scenes. In short, Wolf Man is perfectly watchable, but I can’t see this one getting any fantastic film awards or even be short-listed for a Hugo. But I can see it turning a profit, though not big bucks, for Universal.
This last, if it comes to pass, may be enough to keep ‘Universal Monster’ films on track.
OK, so this is a perfectly serviceable horror, but is it a good werewolf film? Here we might reflect that the success of The Invisible Man (2020) was that though very different to H. G. Wells’ original, it stuck to the core of what made the story great: power corrupts and great power greatly corrupts with invisibility being a great power. That that film turned on itself, with the point of view being the victim who then used that power against the villain, subverted the form making it a post-modern take on the original. With werewolf films we do not necessarily know from the off who is the werewolf as for non-full Moon nights they appear as normal humans. Secondly, the person who is the werewolf is struggling with the animal within: the metaphor being that we civilised humans are at heart biological animals. However, with Wolf Man we know within the first few minutes that were are not dealing with a traditional werewolf as we see it in daylight. Second there is not transformation back to human form: in this film the wolf is a sickness; it could easily have been a variation of a zombie. This is not a werewolf film! If Universal Studios really wants to make a go of Universal Monsters, it needs to understand why its original intellectual property was so successful: it did not do this with this film!
So, what’s next for “Universal Monsters”. Well, looking a fair way down the line Universal recently let it be known that it was considering re-booting The Creature from the Black Lagoon (the original’s trailer here). But, for my money, if you want a really good, fairly recent (actually a quarter of a century old which shows my age), were-wolf film, then you could do no worse than Neil (The Descent, Doomsday) Marshall’s Dog Soldiers (2002).
First up — dinner with Tom Brevoort, who holds the record for being the longest-running editor ever at Marvel Comics, having been hired there in 1989 right out of college. Over the decades, he’s overseen titles such as New Avengers, Civil War, and Fantastic Four. He became Executive Editor in 2007, and in January 2011, was promoted to also serve as Senior Vice President of Publishing. He’s an Eisner Award-winner for Best Editor, and is currently the Group Editor of The X-Men.
Tom Brevoort
We discussed how a guy whose first love was DC Comics ended up at Marvel, why he hated his early exposure to Marvel so much he’d tell his parents not to buy them because “they’re bad,” the pluses and minuses of comic book subscriptions (and the horror when issues arrived folded), how Cerebus the Aardvark inspired him to believe he could build a career in indie comics, the most unbelievable thing he ever read in a Flash comic, how he might never have worked at Marvel had I not gone to school with Bob Budiansky, the prevailing Marvel ethos he disagreed with from the moment he was hired, what it takes to last 35 years at the same company without either walking off in disgust or getting fired, the differing ways Marvel and DC reused their Golden Age characters, how to prevent yourself from being pedantic when you own an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of comics, and much more.
(2) ANYONE READING THIS A MILLENNEA IN THE FUTURE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Nature’s two-week Christmas edition is out, and some wag (possibly known to Filers) has a time-travel, prediction letter published…. “If anyone’s reading this Correspondence in 1,130 years’ time, please let us know”. Alas, it is behind a paywall, but due to a little Filer magic…
If anyone’s reading this Correspondence in 1,130 years’ time, please let us know
In 1993, as part of Nature’s series of ‘Hypotheses’ articles, astronomer J. Richard Gott III proposed that, assuming the Copernican principle — no observer of the Universe is special — a random observer is likely to encounter an object during the mid-95% window of the object’s lifetime. The length of time for which something has been observable in the past is thus a rough measure of how long it is likely to be observable for in the future (R. J. Gott III Nature363, 315–319; 1993).
Nearly a year later, a correspondent wrote in applying Gott’s analysis to Gott’s own paper, estimating that the appearance of the Correspondence implied there was a 95% probability that the paper would still be being read in 30.6 years’ time (G. Hewlett Nature368, 697; 1994). I replied that if I had a Correspondence published in 30 years’ time, in 2024, then following Gott’s calculations, this would considerably extend the period of appreciation of Gott’s work (J. Cowie Nature369, 194; 1994) — by more than a millennium, I now calculate.
This is that Correspondence. Alas, I shall not be around in 1,230 years’ time to write again.
(3) LOJO’S CHOCOFFEE DRINK. [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Lojo Russo who was a member of Cats Laughing along with what seemed like most of the Minneapolis SFF writing community in the Eighties shares Lojo’s ChoCoffee drink which surely is suitable as a holiday drink.
Coffee: Jamaica Blue Mountain – rich & nutty, or dark roast Italian — if you like your coffee with an edge.
Chocolate: 1 part heavy cream, 1/2 ;part dark chocolate syrup, 1/4 part sweetened condensed milk (depending on your sweet tooth), vanilla or almond flavoring (vanilla for Jamaica, almond for Italian) — Blend.
Pour chocolate mixture slowly, gently, lovingly into coffee until it suits your tongue. If you’re like my Italian grandfather, who taught me how to enjoy coffee when I was 8, there will be more chocolate cream than coffee.
(4) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Letters from Father Christmas by J.R.R. Tolkien
Every Christmas between the years 1920 and 1943, the ever-so-blessed children of J.R.R. Tolkien received some of the most unique mail that a child could ever hope for: letters from Father Christmas himself! Beautifully illustrated and delivered in various ways, they told of all kinds of things that happened at the North Pole, and about the folk who lived there with Santa. There is the accident-prone and sleepy North Polar Bear and his two cousins who cause havoc, the evil goblins, and of course the elves and gnomes, not to mention snowfolk and cave bears. The letters came, or so it is claimed by those who don’t believe in Father Christmas, from the Tolkien children’s father, J.R.R. Tolkien himself.
In the published collection of these charming letters, we can read how the North Pole came to be snapped in half, why Santa had to move house, what a polar bear’s writing looks like (blocky is the best description) and how Santa had to defend his home from goblins. While this book does not directly connect to Tolkien’s Middle Earth mythos, it is easy for anyone versed in that mythos to recognize the origin of some of its characters in these letters. The goblin attack on Santa’s cellar will become the Goblin-Elf wars in The Lord of the Rings, and Santa’s elf-secretary Ilbereth is the obvious progenitor of the ancient elf-queen Elbereth. We even get a fully developed look at elvish writing and the goblin alphabet!
I’ll return to the book that is Letters From Father Christmas, but let me turn now to a reading of the Letters that I recently attended. In my opinion, the Letters truly don’t come to life for modern-day readers unless they are treated to an oral performance of them by accomplished actors. Surely the Tolkien children had the Letters read aloud to them when they received them as ‘mail’ from Father Christmas. The reading I attended took place in the front area of Longfellow Books, a wonderful independent store in downtown Portland, Maine. Kirsten Cappy, publicity manager for Longfellow, gave this introduction before the reading:
On September 3rd, 1973, my father sat at the breakfast table with a bowed head and proclaimed, “Children (he never called us that), today, a god passed from this world.” Now this was a confusing statement from an ardent atheist who declared even our brief foray into the Unitarian church to have been ‘too constricting’. ‘God’ was placed in the same category as ‘Santa Claus’ in our family. Both were classified as something ‘other children believed in and that we could believe in if we felt so inclined.
The ‘god’ my father spoke of was J.R.R. Tolkien, who had passed away the previous day. My brother and I managed to breathe out the question of ‘who?’ before we were waved away and my father dug mournfully into his cornflakes. Our question was answered that night at bedtime when my father opened his battered copy of The Hobbit and began to read.
The three of us read through The Hobbit and each volume of The Lord of the Rings over a year’s worth of bedtimes. Tolkien’s stories are still synonymous with the bedroom I had at that age and the gaping closet that surely housed Orcs.
I have gone on to like fiction of all sorts, but nothing has matched the intensity and obsession that Tolkien brought to his creation of Middle Earth. His professional, scholarly fascination with the dead and evolved languages of England led him to read Norse myth. He then began to create myths of his own and to create languages to feed the mouths of his myth-makers.
Lying in my bed at night I often pictured Tolkien writing, but I never pictured my father’s god with children. He had, in fact, three children and took the time from his research and his conquest of Middle Earth to play the role of Father Christmas each year. Each year for 23 years there would be a letter on the mantle piece from Father Christmas addressed to the Tolkien children. The letters spoke of each year’s chaotic preparation for Christmas, about Father Christmas’ helpers and about the mishaps that would cause some of the promised gifts to never arrive. The Tolkien children would also address letters to the North Pole. The letters were full of Christmas wishes and curious questions about life at the North Pole and about Father Christmas’ companions, Polar Bear and Ilbereth The Elf. Answers would come from Father Christmas and his helpers with lavish descriptions and detailed drawings.
With us tonight are our favorite Portland actors, Moira Driscoll, Mark Honan and Daniel Noel who comprise The Usual Suspects. The Usual Suspects give dramatic readings of modern and classic fiction bi-monthly at Longfellow Books, where they are the resident performance group. (You will note the extravagant whiskers on Daniel and Mark — they are both appearing in The Christmas Carol at Portland Stage Co.) Tonight they will be reading aloud Tolkien’s Letters from Father Christmas in the voices of Father Christmas, Polar Bear and Ilbereth The Elf. I will pass around copies of the book, so you can look at Tolkien’s sweet, obsessive drawings of the North Pole.
By the end of this introduction, the crowd of some forty folks, half adults and half children, including the offspring of several of the performers, had settled in their seats with cookies and hot drinks in hand. Now it was time for the reading…
Two of the actors, Mark Honan and Daniel Noel, were members of the cast of the recent run of A Christmas Carol at the Portland Stage Company, which was staged at Portland Performing Arts Center. Mark Honan, (Cratchit in A Christmas Carol), who played Father Christmas, is a native of England; Daniel Noel (Marley’s Ghost and several other roles, including the Narrator) was the North Polar Bear — fitting given his charming bear-like nature; and Moira Driscoll played the supercilious elf Ilbereth. They sat side by side with their copies of Letters From Father Christmas in hand — I have the copy Daniel read from complete with his post-it notes! — looking absolutely tinkly. And each read the letters as if they were Father Christmas, the North Polar Bear, or Ilbereth. I truly believed that these were letters from Father Christmas to the Tolkien children (keep in mind that this Father Christmas is not by any means a Christian-based being, but rather a sort of friendly teller of tales about what happens during the course of the year at the North Pole).
And oh, what adventures they told on that cold night! They did not read all the Letters — for that pleasure, you’ll need to listen to Derek Jacobi and his friends do it. But they read for about forty-five minutes, the right amount of time on a cold winter’s night, and their selections gave the enthralled listeners a delightful time indeed. Tolkien’s language in these letters is clearer and more playful than in The Lord of The Rings. Just read these lines, which Daniel performed with a gruff voice and a glimmer in his eye: ‘Polar Bear was allowed to decorate a big tree in the garden, all by himself and a ladder. Suddenly are heard terrible growly squealy noises. We rushed out to find Polar Bear hanging on the tree himself! ‘You are not a decoration,’ said Father Christmas. ‘Anyway, I am alight,’ he shouted. He was. We threw a bucket of water on him. Which spoilt a lot of the decorations, but saved his fur.’
If Tolkien intended The Lord of The Rings to be a ‘mythology for England,’ it’s clear to me that these Letters were a personal mythology for him and his children. No matter that there are reflections of his darker work here — this reading shows beyond any doubt that the Letters were a refuge from the stark realities of being a relatively poorly compensated academic. Even if the children didn’t always get Christmas presents, they did get a letter from Father Christmas.
I turn my attention back to the new edition of Letters From Father Christmas, which was the basis of this performance. This is the first time that all of the letters have been published. What you get are facsimiles of the letters in all their glorious messiness along with a printed version on the facing page in what appears to be a Palatino font so that you can actually read them. This is important, as the handwriting of Father Christmas (roundish like ink dripping from a fountain pen on its last legs), North Polar Bear (chunky — he has big paws), and Ilbereth (best described as spidery) is less than readable.
And the Letters are most definitely worth reading, as they do form an ongoing story that Tolkien very obviously relished telling in the same manner that he first told The Hobbit to his children: as an unfolding narrative over a period of time. It’s worth your time to see how much effort he put into the Letters — handwritings, drawings, quirky borders — all are here. What his children made of them is not known, nor I suppose does it matter now that they belong to all who read them, but I would have preferred Baillie Tolkien, daughter-in-law of J.R.R., to have given us just a bit more context. I even checked The Letters of J.R.R Tolkien to see if there was anything there about these letters, but not according to the index.
My recommendation is that you read these aloud to anyone who will listen, as hearing them does enhance their charm. Barring that, turn the lights down low, sink deep into that overstuffed chair by the fireplace, drink your cocoa, and listen to the cold winter’s wind howl outside as you read. Listen… Is that the North Polar Bear making his way across the roof? Or is it the Goblins attacking again?
SIGOURNEY Weaver, the latest in the line of high status screen stars to be wooed to the stage by director Jamie Lloyd, may for ever be known as Ellen Ripley to fans of her defining science fiction role on film. She is certainly in alien territory here, and plays Prospero with the steely-voiced conviction of a commander giving urgent instruction to an interstellar space crew at imminent risk of attack. She is making her West End debut in this late Shakespearean drama as its gender-reversed central sorcerer and usurped Duchess of Milan, and the remote isle of sounds and sweet airs which she sequesters appears to be floating in deep space…
In December 1918, sports writer and cartoonist Robert Ripley was struggling to find some content for his column in the New York Globe. So he compiled and illustrated some of the quirkiest sports facts from the year and created what would go onto become the ‘Believe It or Not’ cartoon.
Its popularity grew and, by the time of America’s Great Depression, Ripley was a multi-millionaire who would travel the world on his hunt for more weird and wonderful facts.
His empire expanded into radio and, in 1940, he persuaded the Duke of Windsor – who had abdicated from the throne in 1936 – to give his first commercial radio appearance.
John Corcoran, exhibits director at Ripley’s, tells Vicky Farncombe about that historic moment.
This programme also includes archive courtesy of the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Archives.
…The box was opened. What he saw inside — two yellowed teeth from a long-dead mastodon — stirred in Dr. Harris a thrill he hadn’t felt in years.
“I was crazy excited,” said Dr. Harris, 50, who has worked in archaeology for nearly 30 years. “It was the same old-school excitement I felt when I got into this field in the first place.”
The discovery of the remarkably well preserved mastodon jaw was announced Tuesday by the New York State Department of Education, which runs the New York State Museum, where scientists are studying the artifact. Fearful that their home near Scotchtown, N.Y., would be overrun by news crews or treasure hunters, the couple declined to be named or interviewed for this article.
According to Dr. Harris, the mastodon jaw was discovered when the couple noticed something poking out of the grass in their backyard.
At first they thought it was an old baseball. It was not a baseball. A little digging revealed two enormous teeth buried in the soil, just inches below the surface. Realizing that this might be something of scientific importance, the homeowners reached out to Dr. Harris. The authenticity of the teeth was apparent immediately, he said, so he contacted Robert Feranec, director of research and collections at the state museum. In October the two scientists organized a small team to excavate a trench 14 inches deep.
There they found the jaw of an adult mastodon — a cousin to the woolly mammoth, which roamed North America until it went extinct about 10,000 years ago. There were also fragments of a toe and a rib. If the homeowners agree, Dr. Harris and Dr. Feranec hope to return to the yard next summer, after the ground has thawed, to see if more of the mastodon is hidden there….
…While it may be uncommon for homeowners to uncover ice age fossils poking out of their yard, the discovery of mastodon bones in Orange County is not exactly rare. In 1780, a preacher named Robert Annan found a collection of enormous bones on his farm in Wallkill, N.Y. The discovery was deemed so important that Gen. George Washington, then the commander of the Continental Army, left his troops camped at Newburgh, N.Y., and rode 25 miles in a sleigh to see the bones himself.
Washington’s viewing party gathered just a few miles from the backyard where the latest fossils were found.
“The highest concentration of mastodons in the country is in Orange County,” said Dr. Feranec, who counted about 60 findings in the area since colonial times.
Orange County is a popular resting place for mastodons because it not only offered ideal places for the animals to live, but also the right conditions to preserve them after they died….
Scientists made a major discovery this year linked to Stonehenge — one of humanity’s biggest mysteries — and the revelations keep coming.
A team of researchers shared evidence in August suggesting that the Altar Stone, an iconic monolith at the heart of Stonehenge, was transported hundreds of miles to the site in southern England nearly 5,000 years ago from what’s now northeastern Scotland. Just a month later, a report led by the same experts ruled out the possibility that the stone came from Orkney, an archipelago off Scotland’s northeastern coast that’s home to Neolithic sites from that time frame, and the search for the monolith’s point of origin continues.
Now, research building on the two previous studies suggests that Stonehenge may have been reconstructed in England around 2620 to 2480 BC to help unify ancient Britons as newcomers arrived from Europe. The new study, published Thursday in the journal Archaeology International, also reveals how Neolithic people may have moved the 13,227-pound (6-metric-ton) block over 435 miles (700 kilometers) from where it originated….
…Construction on Stonehenge began as early as 3000 BC and occurred over several phases in an area first inhabited as early as 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, according to the researchers.
Previous analysis has shown that bluestones, a type of fine-grained sandstone, and larger silicified sandstone blocks called sarsens were used in the monument’s construction. The bluestones were brought from 140 miles (225 kilometers) away at the Preseli Hills area in west Wales and are thought to have been the first stones placed at the site. The sarsens, used later, came from the West Woods near Marlborough, located about 15 miles (25 kilometers) away.
Researchers believe the Altar Stone was placed within the central horseshoe during a rebuilding phase. While the exact date is unknown, the study authors believe the stone arrived between 2500 and 2020 BC.
It’s during that rebuilding phase, according to the research, that Stonehenge’s builders erected the large sarsen stones to form an outer circle and an inner horseshoe made of trilithons, or paired upright stones connected by horizontal stone beams, which remain part of the monument to this day.
The Altar Stone is the largest of the bluestones used to build Stonehenge. Today, the Altar Stone lies recumbent at the foot of the largest trilithon and is barely visible peeking through the grass….
…Unlike in The Chronicles of Narnia, Christmas was not celebrated in The Lord of the Rings, but December 25 was still a significant date in Middle-earth’s history. When Frodo first awoke in Rivendell in The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf told him that it was “ten o’clock in the morning on October the twenty-fourth,” which matched the timeline from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings novel. Based on the order of scenes from the extended edition of the film, it seemed that the Council of Elrond was held the next day and that the Fellowship departed from Rivendell the day after that. But as revealed in the novel, an entire month passed between the Council of Elrond and the Fellowship’s departure, giving Frodo additional time to recover from his Morgul wound. When he and his companions finally set out on their journey to destroy the One Ring, it was December 25, which would have been Christmas Day in the real world. If Die Hard can count as a Christmas movie because it takes place on Christmas Eve, The Fellowship of the Ring should qualify as well…
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Scott Edelman, Mark Roth-Whitworth, 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 OGH.]
…In this article, I consider what makes flash fiction qualitatively different from the short story. I demonstrate that the mobilisation of a story world is necessary for a text to function as flash fiction and that this can be a useful way of distinguishing the form from prose poetry. This is a new and necessary distinction, as critics and writers seem to have found the two forms very difficult to separate. I also consider how the interpretation of short texts is highly bound up with the context in which readers encounter them….
Honestly? I’m currently listening to the audiobook of my most recent novel, Blackheart Man. Hearing it in someone else’s words makes it almost like a different novel.
Favorite book when you were a child:
A two-parter: Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. My dad had them in English translation from Homeric Greek. I skipped all the “boring” parts and just read the bits with monsters, witches, and ghosts in them. And I rooted for poor Ulysses to finally get home from the wars and be reunited with his wife, Penelope. Though I didn’t expect the way he would get rid of all the men who were eating and drinking him out of house and home while they clamored for Penelope to admit her husband was dead and marry one of them. Funny thing is, I tried reading The Iliad a couple of years ago, and I stopped. It was too difficult! As a kid, I didn’t get as frustrated at struggling through the language….
(3) ITALO CALVINO. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Italo Calvino is one of Italy’s SF grandmasters (but of course you knew that) and pioneer of Italian neo-realism. He was the son of biologists and almost became an agricultural applied biologist when World War II loomed. He joined the Communist resistance (because they were the most organised.
His first book was speculative fiction. He did then try mundane ‘literary’ fiction but just could not do it and preferred to write what he wanted to read. Also, he found that using speculative fiction metaphors was a useful way to discuss possibly controversial issues.
This week’s In Our Time on BBC Radio 4 takes a look at Italo Calvino and his work.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Italian author of Invisible Cities, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, Cosmicomics and other celebrated novels, fables and short stories of the 20th Century. Calvino (1923 -1985) had a passionate belief that writing and art could make life better for everyone. Despite his parents being scientists, who dearly wanted him to be a scientist too, and his time fighting with the Partisans in Liguria in WWII during which his parents were held hostage by the Nazis, Calvino turned away from realism in his writing. Ideally, he said, he would have liked to be alive in the Enlightenment. He moved towards the fantastical, drawing on his childhood reading while collecting a huge number of the fables of Italy and translating them from dialect into Italian to enrich the shared culture of his fellow citizens. His fresh perspective on the novel continues to inspire writers and delight readers in Italian and in translations around the world.
With Guido Bonsaver (Professor of Italian Cultural History at the University of Oxford), Jennifer Burns (Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Warwick) and Beatrice Sica (Associate Professor in Italian Studies at UCL).
Powell has twice won the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel — in 2014 for Ack-Ack Macaque and in 2019 for Embers of War — and has become one of the most shortlisted authors in the award’s 50-year history. He’s also been a finalist for the Locus Award (twice), the British Fantasy Award, the Seiun Award, the Premios Ignotus, and the Canopus Award. His short fiction has appeared in the magazines Clarkesworld, Interzone, Galaxy, Worlds of IF, and others, and has been featured in numerous anthologies, including Shine: The Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction, Solaris Rising 3: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection.
As a freelancer writer, he has written a strip for long-running British comic 2000 AD, articles for The Guardian, Irish Times, Acoustic Magazine, and SFX Magazine, and currently writes a monthly column about future tech for The Engineer. He’s the Managing Editor of Stars and Sabers Publishing, the publishing imprint he founded with his spouse, the American author Jendia Gammon.
Gareth L. Powell
We discussed the way a Diana Wynne Jones critique of his teenaged writing was a complete revelation in how to write fiction, how an adversarial relationship with a university professor who didn’t want him writing science fiction actually ended up helping him, the New Year’s resolution which led to him to both kick smoking and write a novel, how reading William Gibson’s short story collection Burning Chrome shook him up and made him realize what kind of short stories he really wanted to write, the message he most wants to convey to beginning writers in his workshops, the importance of stepping outside your comfort zone, how to make a good impression when approaching an editor in a convention bar, the way he developed his propulsive writing style, why he’s so receptive to editorial suggestions, what it was like collaborating with Peter F. Hamilton and Aliette de Bodard, his techniques for deciding which of many story ideas you should write, the reason his mother refuses to read his books, why writing novels can be like telling a joke and waiting two years for somebody to laugh, and much more.
When it comes to pretension, Dune isn’t exactly left wanting. In print, the books are a progressively abstract and deranged space opera about a young man and his son, the 3,500-year-old god worm. Onscreen the films are long and portentous screensavers that seem to really hate bald people, or bafflingly bad HBO prequel shows. But two media where Dune has yet to hit full pretension are photography and poetry – until now.
Because next week, Dune cinematographer Greig Fraser and Dune actor Josh Brolin will present an exhibition of photography and poetry from Dune: Exposures. You may have heard of Dune: Exposures. It’s a £50 coffee table book of behind the scenes photography that came out in February. Not that you will necessarily know it as that, because the book bills itself as an “exploratory artistic memoir”.
So, for example, one page has a nice picture of Timothée Chalamet, but on the opposite page is this poetic description: “Your cheekbones jump toward what are youth-laden eyes that slide down a prominent nose and onto lips of a certain poetry.” It is less a traditional poem and more the sort of thing ChatGPT would blurt out if you asked it to describe a crayon drawing of a melting Cabbage Patch Kid. There’s also a photo of Florence Pugh sticking her tongue out, which inspired Brolin to write: “You can feel her cells preparing for a thinner air, a higher ground.” And you can’t, really, because it’s just a photo of a woman in her 20s killing time by arsing about a bit.
(6) YOUNGEST EXOPLANET FOUND… AND WHY IT IS IMPORTANT. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.]Go back to my youth – which is quite a while to around the start of Doctor Who – and we simply did not know that there were planets around other stars, let alone that virtually all at least solo stars and at least some binary stars have exoplanets: today we know that planets seem to be fairly universal about stars. All of which is good news for those hoping to find an Earth-like planet capable of supporting life elsewhere in our galaxy.
Now, our sun, the Sun, formed some 4.6 billion years ago. Meanwhile, the International Commission on Stratigraphy has it that the Earth formed 4.567 billion years ago. This means that the Earth formed somewhere around 40 to 60 million years into our star’s life. Could it be that planets have to form real early in a star’s life for there to be enough time for life to evolve into complex life (capable of brewing and enjoying real ale)?
In the run up to 2018, astronomers found gaps in dust disks around proto-stars that were around a million years old. These gaps were interpreted as proto-planets ‘sweeping’ lanes in the dust disks around early stars.
Importantly, we need to remember that gaps in dust lanes is not the same as actually detecting a planet, or a proto-planet.
This brings us up-to-date and the latest discovery which has been made using the NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The star, which goes by the catchy moniker IRAS 04125+2902, is a member of the Taurus–Auriga star-forming region some 520 light years from the Brighton Worldcon. Importantly, it is only three million years old. The planet detected is Jupiter-sized in a short, 8.8-day orbit about the proto-star. The star itself is about 0.7 the mass of the Sun, which makes it a K-type star.
The discovery was lucky. Normally, planets form out of the circumstellar dust cloud about a protostar and so they are in the same plane as the dust disc. TESS works by detecting the dip in light from stars when a planet passes (transits) in front of it. This means that detecting planets this way should not work in the presence of circumstellar dust discs as the dust hides both the planet and the star. However, for some reason the planet is orbiting in a different plane to the dust disc! The researchers themselves say, “the origin of this misalignment is unclear”.
Taking all the evidence together, we now have hard evidence that planets form really early in a star’s life!
Now, if it took 4.567 billion years for life on Earth to get to a point where it was capable to have the technology to create real ale and enjoyed, then this proof of an early start to planets makes it more likely that planets around stars that have anticipated lifetimes of six or seven or more billon years, then they will likely have the time for real ale generating, and enjoying, species to arise.
Broken Spirits Distillery in Downtown Long Beach is getting into the holiday spirit with not jingly bells but in a more macabre way. The space has becomed filled with creepy takes on Disney characters with none other than Jack Skellington and the Oogie Boogie Man greeting you at the door.
On top of it all, a $75, five-course, three-cocktail, three spirit tastings, “Nightmare Before Christmas”-themed dinner will be served Monday through Friday nightly at 7PM….
The menu includes such things as:
Jack Skellington’s Prime Wagyu Slider: Snake River Farms American wagyu ground beef | House-made squid ink bun | New cheese | Smoked pork belly
Twenty-eight years ago on this date, Star Trek: First Contact premiered.
It was the eighth film of the Trek films, and the second of the Next Gen films following Star Trek Generations. The story was written by Rick Berman, Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore. It was directed by Jonathan Frakes from the screenplay by Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore.
It had the Next Generation cast plus Alfre Woodard, James Cromwell and Alice Krige, the latter as the Borg Queen. She reprised the role in Voyager and Picard, and recently voiced the role in Lower Decks.
A lot of titles were tossed around — Star Trek: Borg, Star Trek: Destinies, Star Trek: Future Generations and Star Trek: Generations II were all considered before Star Trek: Resurrection was chosen and then abandoned when 20th Century Fox announced the title of the fourth Alien film as Alien Resurrection, so the film was finally Star Trek: First Contact.
It did very well at the box office making one hundred fifty million against a budget of fifty million.
First Contact received generally positive reviews upon release. The Independent said “For the first time, a Star Trek movie actually looks like something more ambitious than an extended TV show.” And the Los Angeles Times exclaimed, “First Contact does everything you’d want a Star Trek film to do, and it does it with cheerfulness and style.”
Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a most excellent rating of eighty-nine percent.
It was nominated for a Hugo at LoneStarCon 2, the year that Babylon 5’s “Severed Dreams” won.
It is streaming on Prime Video but surprisingly is not on Paramount +.
The prospect of creating a stop motion film is daunting, to say the least. The process of taking a photo, altering a scene slightly, then taking another photo, over and over can almost make the medium seem pointlessly complicated for a filmmaker… and yet, there is something about the handcrafted aesthetic of a stop motion film that can’t be matched by anything digital. And that special something is where Aardman Animations has made their mark….
… The tour begins with a stop in the puppet department, led by puppet designer Anne King. Here, we are introduced to the process of creating the puppets out of both silicone and clay. “The clay takes quite a long time to sculpt,” says King, “so if the animators on the studio floor have to do a big shot with Gromit walking across a set on all fours, getting it all looking perfect is actually very time consuming. So, we developed this silicone puppet so the animators can actually get a lot of movement out of it without going through all the sculpting.” However, since the silicone isn’t expressive like clay, they can’t use full silicone puppets for the stop motion. “With the clay, you can sculpt it to anything you want basically, so a lot of the hands and faces are of clay just to get that expressiveness.”
Even though silicone can’t be altered once cast, Park says the advancements in the technology have helped to maintain their handmade aesthetic. “The heart of our whole ethos is to keep everything handmade and keep the clay quality of it all, with the fingerprints and everything, which is the key to keeping the charm and the authenticity.”…
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced feature films eligible for consideration in the Animated Feature Film, Documentary Feature Film and International Feature Film categories for the 97th Academy Awards.
Thirty-one features are eligible for consideration in the Animated Feature Film category this year. Some of the films have not yet had their required qualifying release and must fulfill that requirement and comply with all the category’s other qualifying rules to advance in the voting process. In 2023, 33 titles were eligible (a record high), and in 2022, 27 movies made the cut, while only 26 were considered in 2021….
…It’s a tournament — as well as a party — billed as Friday Night Fights.
There are plenty of rules in a sword fight. But there’s one rule that applies after the fighters have put down their weapons: no talk of politics.
The evolution of the rule started around 2016, when club owner Josh Parise says he was getting fed up with the rancor of political discourse in the U.S. — personal attacks were on the rise, even within families, as was cancel culture.
“I couldn’t tolerate the lack of decency between human beings,” says Parise, whose club focuses on historical European martial arts.
“None of it made sense anymore,” he says.
And then there were a few would-be sword fighters who came to the club and didn’t treat others well. Parise had to tell them to get on their horses and leave.
“It’s infuriating to me, so with this place, we just don’t allow that to happen,” Parise says….
(13) NOT THE DIAGRAM PRIZE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The Diagram Prize is for books with the oddest title of the year. But why should book readers have all the fun? What about academics? This week saw the publication in Science Advances of the paper entitled, “Stiffness-tunable velvet worm–inspired soft adhesive robot”.
There’s got to be more peculiar ones out there. If you see any, do pass them on…
Schematic of the system showing the stellar orbit (a), the disk (b), and the planet’s orbit (c).
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Christian Brunschen, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]
(1) DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE. Paul Lynch’s book Prophet Song, set in a near future Ireland, is the 2024 Fiction Winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Lynch’s novel also received the Booker in 2023.
(2) THE BOOKSHELF IS THEIR COSTAR. Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin have launched a weekly newsletter called Shelfies, in which they get people to talk about their favorite bookshelf, and their connection with the books on it. Shurin declares, “It is unashamedly us snooping at people’s shelves.”
Take a unique peek each week into one of our contributors’ weird and wonderful bookshelves! We love books – and we’re the sort of people who love checking out other people’s collections! With Shelfies, we’ve asked a wide range of readers, authors and collectors from all walks of life to share not just their shelves with us – but the books that changed them.
From novelists to video game designers, scientists and film makers, and from London to Singapore, Ghana, Australia and New York and all points in between, Shelfies is a unique dose of book love directly into your inbox – sharing our love of books, with you.
(4) SFPA OFFICER ELECTION RESULTS. Starting January 1, 2025, Diane Severson Mori will be Vice President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association.
Science fiction often begins with a question of “what if”? And in 1960, Poul Anderson asked just such a question: What if aliens attempting to invade the Earth encountered a troop of medieval knights? And what if the knights won the ensuing struggle? This is the premise of The High Crusade, one of the most offbeat and entertaining science fiction novels of the early 1960s….
“Tonight We’re Wearing Waste Bags” by Elena Sichrovsky; Music by Patrick Urn; Read by Jenna Hanchey
“Dreamer, Passenger, Partner by Colin Alexander; Music by Phog Masheeen; Read by Jean-Paul L. Garnier
Theme music by Dain Luscombe
(7) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Anniversary: The Running Man (1987)
By Paul Weimer: Possibly the best of the Schwarzenegger SF movies of the late 1980’s. Yes, better than The Terminator, better than Predator, possibly on a par with Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The Running Man remains a biting satire of fascism, authoritarianism, consumerism, game shows, and a whole lot more.
The authoritarian hellhole that the United States, using violent game shows as an opiate to the masses is really on point, decades later, rather more plausible than ever. Some of the best (and by best, I mean scary) are some of the commercials and interstitial bits in between the actual Running Man show. The show where a man climbs a rope, trying to grab dollars with a vicious pack of dogs underneath him…or the neo-Puritanism revealed when an announcer shockingly reveals Amber may have had several lovers in a year.
Arnold strides through this film and carries it on his charisma, as a package deal with Richard Dawson, who plays Damon Killan as an evil version of his Family Feud persona. They have the best rapport and the movie sings when they finally meet each other. (I was surprised on a rewatch how long the movie actually takes to put the two of them in the same room as each other). I also think the movie hits the right level of action, adventure, social commentary, and humor.
And then there are the betting pool scenes. Long before betting truly has taken over sports, and a lot of other things, the betting on the TV show seemed to me at the time to be “over the top” (who would bet on a game show)? Naive me didn’t believe it…but in the years since, it makes absolute and corrosive sense that the general public would in fact bid on the game show and the deaths on the show. I mean, if The Running Man was made today, Draftkings would be advertising on The Running Man.
Sadly, given recent events…I think it might be too naive in thinking that the ending, where the crimes of the state being revealed lead to revolution and change, can actually be realistic in this day and age. But I can dream, right?
I don’t have any Egyptian looking trinkets in my collection, so this Olmec head my Dad brought back from Mexico years ago will have to do.
…“Remember, girls, we are looking for the Lost Tomb of Sibor. Scorpia, since your people hail from the Crimson Waste, you have knowledge of this wasteland that the Horde lacks…”
“Yes, but…”
“So I get why you need Scorpia. But why am I here, Shadow Weaver?”
“Because you are Force Captain, Catra. And because Scorpia didn’t want to go without you.”
“I’ll get you for this, Scorpia.”
“So lead the way, Scorpia. You do know where the tomb is, don’t you?”
“Yes, but… I don’t think this is a good idea, Shadow Weaver. The Tomb of Sidor is an accursed place. My people shun it and never go there.”
“Silly barbaric superstition. The Tomb of Sidor contains something of great value to the Horde and I mean to retrieve it for Lord Hordak. And now go, Scorpia. Take us to the Tomb.”
“Yes, but it’s your funeral.”
“Is that a promise?”
“Hush, Catra, she’ll hear you.”…
(10) WET WORK. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] It may be that there are sub-surface mini-seas on some of the moons of Uranus!
The Voyager 2 flyby of Uranus in 1986 revealed an unusually off-centred planetary magnetic field. Nine US and one Brit researchers have now re-examined the Voyager Solar wind data set. It reveals that Uranus was hit by a Solar windstorm at the time of the craft’s encounter with the planet. This Solar windstorm offset the planet’s magnetic field.
Similar observations in the Saturn system reveal that when its moons with sub-ice surface water orbit outside of the protection of Saturn’s magnetic field, probes cannot detect water-group ions; this is because they have been swept away by the Solar wind. The researchers therefore hypothesise that the absence of water-group ions when Voyager 2 passed by might not be due to an absence of moons sub-surface water but due to the Solar windstorm that was raging at the time that swept those ions away. It could be that some of Uranus’ moons do have sub-surface water. They hypothesise that Uranus’s two outer moons, Titania and Oberon, are more likely candidates for harbouring liquid water oceans.
Were Heathcliff to roam the blustery moors around Wuthering Heights today, he might be interrupted by a ping on his cellphone saying something like this: The wind is raging, so power is cheap. It’s a good time to plug in the car.
OK. So the 18th-century literary occupants of these windswept hills received no such pings.
But Martin and Laura Bradley do. They live in Halifax, an old mill town below the wuthering, or windy, heights of West Yorkshire. And when a squall kicks up, producing a surplus of electricity from wind turbines on the moor, their phones light up with a notification, like one that informed them of a 50 percent discount one Saturday in October….
…Octopus Energy, the country’s biggest electricity supplier, runs nine wind turbines on those hills. When it’s gusty, and power is abundant, it offers discounts. The Bradleys say they save upward of 400 pounds ($517) a year. Octopus says it not only attracts customers but also persuades communities that they benefit from new energy infrastructure.
“We’ve got these famously bleak, windy hills,” said Greg Jackson, the company’s chief executive. “We wanted to demonstrate to people that wind electricity is cheaper, but only when you use it when it’s windy.”…
(12) THE DEATHS FROM TROPICAL STORMS AND HURRICANES IN THE USA HAVE BEEN GREATLY UNDERESTIMATED. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In climate-change science fiction, people die in major climate events: cf. the film The Day After Tomorrow or the climate fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson.
In the real world, people die all the time and this enables demographers to calculate the number of expected deaths. Usually only a score or more deaths are associated with US tropical storms. These are due to obvious things like drownings or being hit by wind-blown debris.
Two US demographers have now looked the number of excess deaths (those above the expected death rate) between 1930 and 2015. They have found that there are an average of 7,000 – 11,000 excess deaths in the months following a tropical storm or hurricane. These deaths are mainly from infants (less than 1 year of age), people 1 – 44 years of age, and the black population. (Presumably the elderly were safe in a refuge while young adults were protecting property and so in harm’s way? But the very elderly also took a big hit.) The researchers did not look at the death certificates of all (around 100,000) those excess deaths over this eight-and-a-half decade period and so do not know exactly what it was they died of. This, they say, needs to be the subject of future research.
A Disney Holiday Short: The Boy & The Octopus follows the journey of a child who discovers a curious octopus has attached to his head during a seaside vacation. After returning home, the boy forms a true friendship with the octopus by introducing his new companion to his life on land — harnessing the power of the Force with his Jedi lightsaber, playing with his Buzz Lightyear action figure, and imagining Santa Claus’ route around the world with the map on his wall — before taking the lovable octopus out into the world to experience the joy of the holidays, hidden under his Mickey Mouse beanie….
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cora Buhlert, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Thomas the Red.]
(1) IGNYTE AWARDS. Congratulations to the winners of the 2024 Ignyte Awards, which were announced today.
The Awards “seek to celebrate the vibrancy and diversity of the current and future landscape of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror by recognizing incredible feats in storytelling and outstanding efforts towards inclusivity within the genre.”
(2) AUGUST CLARKE Q&A. At Shelf Awareness, “Reading with… August Clarke”.
…On your nightstand now:
The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera and Loteby Shola von Reinhold, both fabulously gorgeous, knock-the-wind-out-of-you type books. I’m savoring them. Compound Fracture by Andrew Joseph White is next up.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Last Unicornby Peter S. Beagle for transgender reasons or TheQueen of Attoliaby Megan Whalen Turner for mischief reasons. Huge influences on the way I think about fantasy writing; I would recommend reading them aloud….
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny or Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, both of which I entered expecting quick fun pulp and leaving fully awed and unbelievably moved and excited to talk about genre….
(3) SF 101. Hear from Phil Nichols and Colin Kuskie in episode 48 of the Science Fiction 101 podcast holding forth about the concept of the book: “Uniquely Portable Magic”.
It occurred to us that although we have discussed many specific books on the show, we’ve never devoted an episode to the idea of the book – those papery, texty things that Stephen King has described as “uniquely portable magic”.
So in this episode, we address the various ways in which books can be enjoyed and consumed, and discuss ten (or eleven) questions on the subject of books.
We also have a book-adjacent quiz, and our usual round up of recommendations of past, present and future SF.
This third episode I brought back features Paul Cornell, with whom I’ve been trying to break bread ever since the 2019 Dublin Worldcon. Paul started out writing Doctor Who fan fiction, which led to him writing canonical Doctor Who novels (where he created the companion Bernice Summerfield), audio plays, and comics. Plus he recently won the Terrance Dicks Award for lifetime achievement in Doctor Who writing from the Doctor Who Appreciation Society.
Paul Cornell
But aside from his achievements in the Doctor Who universe, he’s created so many other awesome experiences for us. He’s written episodes of Elementary, Primeval, Robin Hood, and many other TV series, including his own children’s show, Wavelength. He’s worked for every major comics company, including his creator-owned series I Walk With Monsters for The Vault, The Modern Frankenstein for Magma, Saucer Country for Vertigo, and This Damned Band for Dark Horse, plus runs on Young Avengers and Wolverine for Marvel, and Batman and Robin for DC,
He’s the writer of the Lychford rural fantasy novellas from Tor.com Publishing. His short fiction has been published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Interzone, The Daily Telegraph, The Times, and at Tor.com, plus he also written for George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards short story anthologies. He’s won the BSFA Award for his short fiction, an Eagle Award for his comics, a Hugo Award for his SF Squeecast podcast, and shares in a Writer’s Guild Award for his Doctor Who work. He’s the co-host of Hammer House of Podcast.
We discussed where he stands on the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby debate, how his UK mind was blown the first time he saw a U.S. issue of The Avengers, why fannish history fascinates him, the reason he went the self-funding route for Who Killed Nessie (and what that did to his blood pressure), how some of his Doctor Who fan fiction eventually became canon, the reason he’s suspicious of nostalgia, how he knows when ideas pop into his head which of his many projects they’re right for, the legacy comics characters he’d love to write more of, what he learned from the great Terrance Dicks, how he manages to collaborate while remaining friends with his co-creators, his fascination with Charles Fort, why he announced there’d be no more Doctor Who in his future, and much more.
(5) ERIN UNDERWOOD PRESENTS. Erin Underwood’s two latest reviews on YouTube focus on Star Wars,
Music by John Williams, Review – Why is his music so iconic?
The biography that you didn’t know you needed is here, but is it what you wanted? John Williams’ career is immense and impressive, and this new documentary gets into who he is and his impact upon the music, film, and television industries. Featured guests also include Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Ron Howard, JJ Abrams, Kathleen Kennedy, and more. Check out my new review.
Star Wars 1977, Movie Review – Does the OG Stand Up or Fail Today?
Nearly 50 years after it was released, does the original Star Wars film still hold up today? The film has been digitally remaster, but is that enough to push it across the line? Check out my new review.
…In my grandparents’ second-floor guest room, formerly my mother’s childhood room, one bookcase had a row of children’s books slumped to the side, offering a chronological core sample of my grandmother’s attempts to busy not only her own kids, but all the grandkids who’d stayed there before me. There were the original Oz books, a copy of Ferdinand the Bull, Monro Leaf’s inexplicably compelling yet mildly fascistic Manners Can Be Fun, some 1950s and 1960s Little Golden Books purchased at the Hinky Dinky supermarket down the street, and, among many others I’ve now long forgotten, the big blue, green, and red shiny square of Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever. The largish (even just plain large if you were smallish when holding it) book offered a visual index of the everyday puzzle pieces of life in humble, colored-in line drawings. Each page was a fresh, funny composition of some new angle on the world, making the book a sort of quotidian picture-map containing everything imaginable and unimaginable a kid might be curious about: where and how people lived, slept, ate, played, and worked.
The thing is, “people” weren’t anywhere to be seen in Best Word Book Ever. Instead, the whole world was populated by animals: rabbits, bears, pigs, cats, foxes, dogs, raccoons, lions, mice, and more. Somehow, though, that made the book’s view of life feel more real and more welcoming. A dollhouse-like cutaway view of a rabbit family in their house getting ready for their day didn’t seem to just picture the things themselves—they were the things themselves, exuding a grounded warmth that said, “Yes, everywhere we live in houses and cook together and get dressed, just like you.”…
…Golden Books employed displaced if not just plain refugee artists from Europe like Feodor Rojankovsky, Tibor Gergely, and Gustaf Tenggren. Working in a careful, deliberate, and illuminatory style, they carefully limned every hair of every dog—think The Poky Little Puppy—and set every page aglow with a strangely dark, yet warm light. On the page, their paintings were frequently vignetted in darkness, almost as if the artists still felt shadowed by the lingering specter of war. These books, dismissively looked down upon by librarians, were nonetheless immediately, snot-flyingly popular, with orders mounting into the millions of copies. Such publishing numbers were astonishing then (and are even more astonishing now, when 15,000 is considered a gee-whiz success)….
(7) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Appreciation: Elizabeth Bear’s Sub-Inspector Ferron Series
Sometimes it’s the offbeat stories that I really like from authors, the short works that aren’t expanded into full length stories. Such is the case with Elizabeth Bear’s Sub-Inspector Ferron series. Of course, everything she writes is a delight to read which is why I’m looking forward to the third White Space novel, The Folded Sky, out next year.
Bear’s Sub-Inspector Ferron series at the present consists alas of but two novellas, “In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns” and “A Blessing of Unicorns”. Will there be more? Oh, I hope so.
TASTY, SPICY ASIAN SPOILERS FOLLOW. THEY REALLY DO!
“In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns” is set a half a century from now. In the city of Bangalore, a scientist working on cutting-edge biotechnology has been discovered inside his own locked flat, his body converted into a neat block of organic material.
It’s up to Police Sub-Inspector Ferron to figure out the victim’s past and solve the crime, outwitting the best efforts of whoever is behind the death, her overbearing mother, and the complexities of dealing with the only witness – an ever so cute parrot-cat Chairman Miaow. (The latter, she says are, as I guessed, a cat with parrot colors and “a parrot-like level of intelligence and ability to mimic speech”. That cat will later be adopted by her. She already has a fox.
I’ll note that the stories aren’t freestanding, so the novella, “A Blessing of Unicorns” builds off the first novella, therefore must be experienced after the first is read or listened to.
Together they make up a fascinating look at the life and work of Ferron as a Police Sub-Inspector in a balkanised world where there are no national or regional police forces. No, it’s not some small libertarian wet dream here, but a real world with actual consequences to everything that happens.
WE HAVE CONSUMED THOSE TASTY MORSELS, SO YOU CAN COME BACK.
There is certainly more than enough story here for her to someday write a novel set in the universe. And I look forward to it.
When I asked her if there would be a novel in the series, she replied “there might be a novel someday but I really need to visit Bangalore myself to write that! I’ve been relying on friends who hail from there, or who have family there and have visited extensively, but it’s not the same as boots in the dirt experience!”
Fantastic stories told well by a master storyteller, what more do you want?
The Audible narrations are done most excellently by narrated Zehra Jane Naqvi. She’s an Australian expatriate in the United Kingdom of Anglo-Indian descent. She very much handles the Indian accents quite wonderfully here. She started her voice acting career in Big Finish Productions’ Doctor Who audio dramas with Sylvester McCoy and Peter Davison reprising the Seventh and Fifth Doctors.
The first one is available at the usual suspects, but the second remains at this time an Audible exclusive several years later. I just got a note from Elizabeth Bear that said that there will not be a print edition, she says, “Not unless something unforeseen happens”.
Freddy Krueger has joined the cast of the next IP-smashing slasher from the makers of microbudget hit “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey.”
Well, almost. Robert Englund, who famously played the murderous horror icon across the “Nightmare on Elm Street” films, will star in “Pinocchio: Unstrung,” the latest standalone feature to join the so-called low-budget Twisted Childhood Universe. Richard Brake, a regular collaborator with Rob Zombie and whose horror credits also include the likes of “Barbarian” and “Mandy,” has also joined the film in the key role of Geppetto….
(10) READY FOR YOU. Francis Hamit’s novel Starmen is now available worldwide through Ingram Spark. The direct purchase link is here: STARMEN: A Novel by Francis Hamit.
It was the first stored-program computer, meaning it was the first machine to work like the ones we have today. It was developed in England at the University of Manchester.
The computer was huge, it filled a room that was nearly six metres square. The team who made it are now recognised as the pioneers of modern computing.
Gill Kearsley has been looking through the archives to find out more about the ‘Baby’.
(12) GOING UP. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The rise in global mean sea level – is one of the most unambiguous indicators of climate change. It also is something of a minor trope in SF: cf. Stephen Baxter’s ”Flood” (2008).
In the real world, over the past three decades, satellites have provided continuous, accurate measurements of sea level on near-global scales. Research has now shown that since satellites began observing sea surface heights in 1993 until the end of 2023, global mean sea level has risen by 111 mm. In addition, the rate of global mean sea level rise over those three decades has increased from ~2.1mm/year in 1993 to ~4.5mm/year in 2023.
To put this in perspective, this is what the UN’s Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change projects in its mid-level scenario in its 2021 Assessment Report.
In short, we are moving into the future science predicts… Hopefully not the one some SF presents.
…For fans of this last Original Trilogy entry, there is always something new to discover, especially if you go to YouTube (the next best thing to the Jedi Archives) and look up the film’s deleted scenes. Case in point: the deleted footage has many lines from a Mon Calamari pilot (Ika Sulko) that would have made their entire species a joke, including uttering “fried Calamari tonight” as a battle cry.
What’s fascinating about these Return of the Jedi deleted scenes is that they are hilariously rough…more equivalent to behind-the-scenes footage than something you could just pop back into the movie via a fan edit. For example, in the clips, you can actually hear director Richard Marquand feeding silly lines to Tim Rose, who is both the voice and puppeteer of this Mon Calamari pilot. While “fried Calamari tonight” is definitely the silliest of the lines, there are others that threaten to turn these aliens into a punchline.
For example, another line you can hear in this deleted Return of the Jedi footage is “all this technology and no men’s room.” While we can only guess the motivation behind this silly line, it is likely a joking reference to fans always wondering where the bathroom is in their favorite sci-fi shows…
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]
(1) DETECTING AI-GENERATED TEXT. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The rise of large language model AI provides not only boons in tidying up text (of particular benefit to some users such as those with English as a second language or those suffering from, say, dyslexia) but comes with issues when used nefariously by those wishing to pass off AI generated text as their own creativity. Manual checks on text come with the risk of relatively high false positives as well as false negatives. Mandatory archiving all AI generated text comes with both compliance and privacy issues, so this leaves digital watermarking.
AI-generated text (and images) is already causing problems in science with fake paper submissions and also in science fiction where magazine editors have been receiving AI-generated works causing some bodies to come up with rules to govern their use, or banning, AI, one recent body doing so is the Horror Writers Association.
The latest issue of Nature has as its cover story (and an accompanying editorial such is this subject’s importance) on a new digital watermarking system developed by researchers at Google DeepMind in London. Their system is called SynthID-Text. File770 readers interested in this should check the original, open access, paper (I am not a computer scientist and this is definitely outside my comfort zone) but the way it works is to generate ‘tokens’ which are synonym words generated from the text’s context. A number of tokens are needed for the system to work.
Both the researchers and Nature say that this research is an important step in establishing an effective watermarking system, but both the researchers and Nature also clearly note that there are still many hurdles to overcome. For example, it is possible to wash out such digital watermarks by simply running through the AI-generated text through another large-language-model AI.
Currently, both the US and EU are considering legislation and respective bodies to oversee AI. China has already made digital watermarking mandatory and in the US the state of California is thinking of doing the same.
Meanwhile, DeepMind has made SynthID-Text free and open access. Yet, as said, the hurdles are great and there is still a long way to go. As the Nature editorial makes plain, ‘we need to grow up fast’.
…We have a role to play. We cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating their relationship to apartheid and displacement. This was the position taken by countless authors against South Africa; it was their contribution to the struggle against apartheid there.
Therefore: we will not work with Israeli cultural institutions that are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians. We will not cooperate with Israeli institutions including publishers, festivals, literary agencies and publications that:
Are complicit in violating Palestinian rights, including through discriminatory policies and practices or by whitewashing and justifying Israel’s occupation, apartheid or genocide, or
Have never publicly recognized the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law.
(3) CHANGING OF THE TAFF GUARD. Michael J. “Orange Mike” Lowrey imparts the latest Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund news:
Sarah Gulde has returned home “after many days” and has as of today taken over North American TAFF admin duties, allowing Mike Lowrey to retire.
Sarah Gulde, of course, was the 2024 TAFF winner and went to the Worldcon in Glasgow.
(4) THE WITCHING HOUR GOES HIGHBROW. Midnight book release events began to market Harry Potter, and initially most (but not all) subsequent ones were for genre works. Not anymore. Publishers Weekly points out that Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo and Haruki Murakami’s The City and its Uncertain Walls, translated by Philip Gabriel have or will get the midnight treatment this year: “Literary Publishers Embraces the Midnight Release Party”.
The midnight book release party, which sees patrons descending on bookstores at 12 midnight to get their copy of a buzzy new book, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Still, it has evolved considerably in its short lifespan. The rise of the midnight release in the book business can be traced back to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, which debuted in the U.S. in 1998. But it was the strict embargo put on the fourth book in the series, before its publication in 2000, that helped popularize the late-night bookstore gatherings.
While this trend began with books for younger readers—Stephanie Meyers’s Twilight series and the final installment of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games series also got the midnight release treatment—it hasn’t stayed that way. In the years since, bookstores have held midnight release events for the likes of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, and Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments….
(5) ARCHIPELACON 2. The week after Midsummer will be the highlight of the European sci-fi summer of 2025! This will be when the 2025 Eurocon, or Archipelacon 2, comes to Mariehamn in the Åland Islands of Finland.
Date and venue: June 26–29, Culture and Congress Center Alandica (Strandgatan 33, Mariehamn).
“We wanted to organise a second Archipelacon because the first one was so great that people still get dewy-eyed remembering it. Mariehamn is exactly the right place for this type of event. It is a place where land and sea, Finland and Sweden, small town idyll and world history all come together,” says Karo Leikomaa, chairperson of Archipelacon 2.
Guests of Honour:
Ann VanderMeer (USA): editor, anthologist, acquiring editor for Tor.com and Weird Fiction Review, and Editor-in-Residence for Shared Worlds.
Jeff VanderMeer (USA): writer, environmental activist, and friend of many baby raccoons. Has recently published Absolution, the fourth part of the award-winning Southern Reach Trilogy. The New York Times calls it “his strangest novel yet”.
Mats Strandberg (Sweden): purveyor of fine Swedish horror, set in the most mundane of environments: conference centres, care homes and the very weird world that exists on board the massive passenger ferries between Finland and Sweden. His book Blood Cruise (Färjan) will be made into a TV series by the Swedish public service broadcaster SVT, set to be broadcast in late 2025.
Emmi Itäranta (Finland) writes her books in both Finnish and English. Her debut, The Memory of Water (Teemestarin kirja), was produced as a feature film in 2022 and set the tone for her work, which often explores environmental themes. She has since published two more novels, The Weaver (Kudottujen kujien kaupunki), and The Moonday Letters (Kuunpäivän kirjeet). Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages.
“Being selected as the 2025 Eurocon is a great honour, and also recognition of the work that the Finnish and Nordic fandom has done. The first Archipelacon proved that large international conventions can be organised in Finland, and Worldcon 75 in Helsinki in 2017 demonstrated what Finnish, Nordic and international fandom can achieve together,” says Leikomaa.
Archipelacon 2 memberships are on sale on the con’s website.
Memberships are capped at 1,000. By the beginning of October, well over half of the memberships had already been sold.
Adult membership costs 40 euros, for 13–26-year-olds the membership fee is 20 euros, and for children 5 euros. The price will remain the same all the way.
The Martian Trilogy’s release will be delayed and Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki’s introduction to that book has been removed from the contents.
This follows the release of serious allegations made against Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki of “unethical behavior and bad faith dealings” by Erin Lindi Cairns, a South African author, which has since been supported by statements from others, including a detailed statement by Jason Sandford.
This is a huge blow to the team that worked on this book, to John P. Moore’s legacy, and to the science fiction community at large, as this will delay the release of what is considered to be an important chapter in the history of Black science fiction and its contributions to the genre…
They are now looking at a mid-2025 release date.
(7) GABINO IGLESIAS REVIEWS. Yesterday we had the link to the September column, which is why we are able to come back so soon with the link for Gabino Iglesias’ next New York Times column “New Horror for Readers Who Want to Be Completely Terrified” (behind a paywall). In October he reviewed Yvonne Battle-Felton’s new novel, Curdle Creek (Holt, 292 pp., $27.99), Kevin J. Anderson’s Nether Station (Blackstone, 308 pp., $27.99), Nick Cutter’s The Queen (Gallery, 374 pp., $28.99), and Del Sandeen’s debut, This Cursed House (Berkley, 374 pp., $29).
… In an announcement this afternoon at Raleigh Studios, the Governor will reveal that he aims to boost the state’s tax credits from their present level of $330 million a year to around $750 million annually, I’ve learned
The whooping increase will not take place immediately, and is subject to approval by the Democratic majority legislature in the Golden State’s 2025-2026 budget. However, in this election year of close down ticket races, Sunday’s announcement is intended to swell confidence locally for an industry and a workforce that has seen production in L.A. and across the state dramatically shrink and jobs dry up over the last year or so, sources say….
… Also, besides the more than doubling of California’s credits, which were established in their current form in 2014, the increase will make the Golden State the top capped source for production tax incentives in the nation — at least on paper. Presently, with a $280 million expansion last year, New York state offers about $700 million in capped incentives. However, that number is augmented by a patchwork quilt of other offsets and exemptions available to productions in various specific jurisdictions in the Empire State.
While states like New Jersey, Nevada, and Utah have been putting more tax credit money on the table, Louisiana and Georgia still remain among the top rivals to California. Coming out of the shutdown of production during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes and industry wide layoffs and cost-cutting measures, the Peach State, like California, hasn’t anywhere near fully rebounded. Having said that, while California has more production than anywhere else overall, Georgia, especially Atlanta, still attracts more big budget productions on average that anywhere else in the U.S.A.
It doesn’t hurt that costs in Georgia are generally much lower than on the West Coast, and that the state has an uncapped incentive program that ranges from around $900 million to $1.2 billion per annum. Movies or TV shows that shoot in the Southern state receive a 20% base transferable tax credit. As accounting execs at Disney, Netflix and everyone else in town will tell you with no small sense of disbelief, productions also easily receive a 10% Georgia Entertainment Promotion “uplift” if they include the state logo in their credits for five seconds or, according to the Georgia Department of Economic Development, an “alternative marketing promotion.”
This new increase recommended Sunday by Gov. Newsom will certainly shake up the tax credit status quo….
A sea of 20-something boys, with a mix of defined jawlines, hazel eyes and mops of curly hair congregated at New York City’s Washington Square Park on Sunday afternoon to take part in a Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest. But in a surprise twist, around 30 minutes after the contest kicked off, the real-life Chalamet made a surprise appearance in the middle of the crowd.
Chalamet snuck his way through the packed mob, hiding behind a black mask and baseball hat, before sneaking up on two doppelgangers posing for photos. Once he got to the middle, he took off his mask for the big reveal as shrieks quickly erupted across the park….
… The lookalike contest was promoted the past few weeks through flyers posted across the city, in addition to a public Partiful invitation promising a $50 cash prize for the winner. By Sunday morning, the event had more than 2,500 RSVPs.
Chalamet pulled up behind one of the more popular lookalikes, 22 year-old Spencer DeLorenzo who spent much the afternoon posting for photos. At one point, he was even hoisted on a chair as the crowd cheered him on…
(10) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Media Anniversary: It Came From Outer Space film (1953)
Seventy-one years ago It Came From Outer Space premiered, the first in the 3D films that would released from Universal-International. It was from a story written by Ray Bradbury. The script was by Harry Essex.
Billed by the studio as science fiction horror — and I’ll get to why in the SPOILERS section — it was directed by Henry Arnold who would soon be responsible for two genre classics, Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Incredible Shrinking Man, the latter of which as you might remember won a Hugo at Solacon in 1958.
HORROR, ERRR, SPOILERS, ARE ABOUT TO HAPPEN. BEWARE!
Amateur sky watcher (as played by Richard Carlson) and schoolteacher Ellen Fields (as played Barbara Rush) see a large meteorite crash near the small town in Arizona. Being curious and not at cautious (who is in these films?), they investigate.
Putnam sees the object and knows it is a spacecraft but everyone else laughs at him. People start disappearing. (Cue chilling music.) The sheriff opts for a violent answer, but Putnam wants a peaceful resolution.
In the end, a Bradburyan solution happens, atypical of these Fifties pulp SF films and the aliens get what they need to leave without anyone, human or alien, dying.
YOU CAN COME BACK NOW FROM UNDER THE TABLE.
The screenplay by Harry Essex, with extensive input by the director Jack Arnold, was based on an original and quite lengthy screen treatment by Bradbury off the fore mentioned story by him. It is said that Bradbury wrote the screenplay and Harry Essex merely changed the dialogue and took the credit. There is no actual written documentation of this though, so it may or may not be true. You know how such stories get their beginning.
It made back twice its eight hundred thousand budget in the first year.
Many, many critics took to be an anti-communist film about an invasion of America. However, Bradbury pointed out that “I wanted to treat the invaders as beings who were not dangerous, and that was very unusual.”
Twenty years ago, Gauntlet Press published a collection of essays about It Came from Outer Space. Bradbury contributed an introductory essay plus a number of other pieces. There’s also the four screen treatments Bradbury wrote before the final screenplay along with photos, original ads, marketing posters, reviews and quite a bit more.
Final note: It Came from Outer Space is one of the classic films mentioned in the opening theme (“Science Fiction/Double Feature”) of The Rocky Horror Show theatre performance and the film.
It Came From Outer Space is streaming on Peacock and Prime.
(12) WITNESS THE SCOPE OF MARVEL’S NEW ULTIMATE UNIVERSE. An epic connecting cover by Josemaria Casanovas will run across every Ultimate series over the next few months, starting with this week’s Ultimate X-Men #8.
The second year of Marvel Comics’ new Ultimate Universe is on the horizon. To celebrate, a special connecting cover by acclaimed artist Josemaria Casanovas will run on upcoming issues of each current Ultimate title—Jonathan Hickman and Marco Checchetto’s Ultimate Spider-Man, Bryan Hill and Stefano Caselli’s Ultimate Black Panther, Peach Momoko’s Ultimate X-Men, Deniz Camp and Juan Frigeri’s Ultimates, and the just announced fifth ongoing Ultimate series, Chris Condon and Alessandro Cappuccio’s Ultimate Wolverine. An homage to Jim Lee’s iconic X-Men #1 cover, the breathtaking 6-part piece teases upcoming storylines and characters from future issues—including the long-awaited return of the creator of this exciting universe, the Maker.
Check out the full piece below. For more information, visit Marvel.com. [Click for larger image.]
(13) MOOMIN IN THE MUSEUM. [Item by Steven French.] Ahead of next year’s 80th anniversary of the Moomin stories, the Helsinki Art Museum is putting on an exhibition of Tove Jansson’s paintings, including a number of large murals (and if you look closely at Party in the City, from 1947, you can see a certain big nosed, pot bellied figure, hidden away beside a vase on the edge of the festivities!). “Tove Jansson murals, with hidden Moomins, seen for first time in Helsinki show” in the Guardian.
The exhibition, entitled Paradise, at the Helsinki Art Museum focuses for the first time on the murals and frescoes Jansson was commissioned to paint on the walls of factory canteens, hospitals, nurseries and even churches – long before Moominmania conquered the world and the adventures of Snufkin, Snork Maiden and Little My became a Finnish secular religion.
“By the end of her life, Tove was most famous as a writer,” said the artist and author’s niece, Sophia Jansson, now president of the board of the company that manages her copyright. “But she always saw herself first and foremost [as] a painter. It was only later that her reputation as the ‘Moomin woman’ overtook her.”
… The Starfleet Gazette will not be endorsing a candidate in the upcoming election for president of the United Federation of Planets. This decision was not made lightly, but neither of the two candidates—decorated Starship Voyager Captain Kathryn Janeway or The Borg—has shown us a real path to endorsement, and we must stay true to our priorities: journalistic integrity and not pissing off The Borg….
Scientists are still trying to understand the toll that spaceflight takes on the human body.
With SpaceX’s civilian Polar Dawn mission, which lasted five days and wrapped up last month, we’re getting an opportunity to observe the effects on more or less average humans — rather than the elite, highly trained government astronauts who are normally the ones that spend so much time in orbit.
Some of what they’re reporting sounds a little worrying. At the top of the list: inexplicably malfunctioning eyeballs.
“My vision acuity started to deteriorate those first few days,” Scott “Kidd” Poteet, a former US Air Force pilot who served as pilot of the mission, told CNN of the journey.
… As it turns out, Poteet’s faltering vision wasn’t the end of the crew’s optic oddities. Jared Isaacman, the mission’s commander and a billionaire entrepreneur, told CNN he saw “sparkles or lights” when he closed his eyes, a mysterious symptom related to space radiation that other astronauts have reported…
… What caused Poteet’s vision to deteriorate is likely a condition known as spaceflight associated neuro-ocular syndrome, or SANS. This is believed to be the result of a microgravity environment, which causes the optic nerve to swell, and fluids in the eye and brain to shift.
SANS is still poorly understood. All four crew members wore high-tech, cyberpunk-looking contact lenses to measure intraocular pressure throughout the mission, in the hopes of teasing out its causes.
Poteet said his vision quickly returned to normal once he was back on Earth. But as SpaceX engineer and the mission’s medical officer Anna Menon told CNN, the effects — if unaddressed — could be disastrous in the long term….
(16) TOP SF BOOKS – MAYBE? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] BookPilled has just re-ranked his top 15 SF books. Like or dislike his ratings, the titles are interesting. I’m guessing that most of you will have nearly all the books in his top chart, and even if you haven’t you will probably know of them. Personally, it was good to see a Bob Shaw in the mix. Alas, poor old Alan Dean Foster… There are one or two authors in Pilled’s list I have not read, but that might be a Brit-N.America divide thing (?). Anyway, see if you agree with him… “Ranking All the Books from Every Top 15 Sci-Fi List”.
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Michael J. “Orange Mike” Lowrey, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Patrick Morris Miller.]
By Jonathan Cowie: This is not a trivial question for SF fans as common perception (be it correct or not) has it that a not insignificant proportion of SF fans play video games and similarly take little exercise. OK, let’s not get bogged down into fan perception of body mass index (BMI) versus the rest of the population, but the World Health Organization (the UN agency tor global health) recommends that exercise is good for physical health and also your mental. But which is better for you: video games or exercise?
Now, I suspect you like (like prejudiced little me) would have answered that exercise is easily better for your health both physical and mental, while video games are harmful. Of course, we really should not hold such untested views: best test one’s beliefs against reality. Here, fortunately for us, some recent research has done the heavy lifting.
Researchers surveyed the health and also cognitive ability of those who did not play video games, those who played them just a little (up to three hours per week) and those who played them a lot. They also looked at how much exercise all the folk took and their health in terms of physical health and mental well-being (propensity to depression etc.).
The results may come as a surprise. It turns out that in terms of cognition, exercise seems to have zero effect! However, cognitively video-game players seem to have enhanced cognition over non-video-game playing irrespective of exercise. Furthermore, this cognitive effect does not seem to be unduly improved by excessive video-game playing: game-playing moderately (up to three hours only per week) seems to do the trick.
However, it is not all good news for video-gamers. In terms of mental health (sense of well-being, lack of depression and so forth) video-gaming confers little if any benefit, but exercise does. (And, of course, in terms of physical health [such as tendency for diabetes, heart disease and so forth] you cannot beat at least moderate weekly exercise: yes BMI is related through exercise to physical health, but not in terms of cognitive ability, though exercise is good for your mental health.
Finally, so mental health aside, why does at least moderate video-game playing seem to have a correlation with cognitive ability? The researchers muse that modern video games (Minecraft, Civilization etc.) have a substantive puzzle-solving component and it is this that may help enhance cognitive ability, whereas exercise but itself does not even if there are other (mental as well as physical) health benefits.
So, which is better for your health – video games or exercise? It’s a mixed bag.
…One of only 18 women to be awarded global literature’s highest honor, she is the first South Korean writer to win the prize and the first Asian laureate since 2012, when the Nobel was awarded to Chinese author Mo Yan.
“Han Kang’s visible empathy for the vulnerable, often female lives, is palpable, and reinforced by her metaphorically charged prose,” said Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel Committee at the Swedish Academy, the body that administers the prize. “In her oeuvre,” he added, quoting from the Committee’s citation, “Han Kang confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose.”…
(2) FORMER FRAZETTA HOME IN FLORIDA UNHARMED BY STORM. Frank Frazetta’s daughter reassured fans that the Frazetta Art Gallery in Boca Raton, FL was undamaged by Hurricane Helene. (This is not the Frazetta Art Museum which is in Pennsylvania.)
…For Frazetta fans, it’s an essential destination, since it contains dozens of pieces of Frazetta artwork, paintings, newspaper strips, comic book pages, and a nice selection of personal artwork Frazetta executed as gifts for his wife, Ellie, and other family members. The personal work on display gives viewers a true feeling of intimacy, of being part of Frazetta’s inner circle, since most of them have never been reprinted….
(3) ELECTORIAL. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] A few years ago, because of the Sad Puppies Affair (which, contrary to popular belief, was not a Man From U.N.C.L.E. episode), there was much debate in fandom as to how we vote on the Hugo short-list. Now, better late than never, this week’s edition of Nature has an article on electoral systems, “Which Is The Fairest Electoral System?”
Scientists hope to explore whether some approaches are more likely to promote democratic resilience or to stave off corrosive partisanship. Such answers might inform policy, but differences in interpretation are inevitable when it comes to politics. “Democracy is a complex system,” says Lee Drutman, a political-science researcher at New America, a think tank in Washington DC. There can be multiple ways to parse the data, he says.
A Hugo-type system is briefly mentioned…
There are sub-variants in FPTP (first past the post) systems: ranked-choice voting, which is used, for instance, in Australia, ensures a majority winner. Voters rank all candidates or parties; the lowest-ranked candidate drops out and their supporters’ second-choice preferences are tallied, and so on until a single candidate surpasses a 50% threshold. And run-off elections, such as those in France, when the two leading parties are voted for in a second round, ensure a direct national face-off.
Interestingly the piece has two conclusions. One that ranked choice has benefits, but a contrary view 2) is that this pushes folk to limited options. Here the article calls for more political parties in the US rather than the two big ones. In Hugo terms this would translate as increasing the number in the short-lists.
(By the way, personally I have no preference: I just share out of interest and am not advocating anything.)
(4) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 120 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Activate Liz” —
We do rather fewer letters of comment than last episode, and then we let Liz do her favourite topic of all: STATISTICS.
(5) ATWOOD PICKS A CARD. Margaret Atwood appeared on NPR to publicize her new collection called, Paper Boat: New And Selected Poems: 1961-2023. They played clips of her answers to questions on the Wild Card program. “Writer Margaret Atwood plays a game of ‘Wild Card’”.
MARTIN: When I asked the question [about envy], though, you asked for a definition – envy that you suffered or had to manage or other people’s envy of you?
ATWOOD: Yes.
MARTIN: Is that – does that happen a lot?
ATWOOD: It has, certainly. Yeah. So what I said to young writers who had had a sudden success, I said, within a couple of years, you will have three nasty, vicious personal attacks from people you don’t know.
MARTIN: What were the attacks that were leveled at you in your first couple years of success?
ATWOOD: (Laughter) Some of them were quite funny. So a lot of it had to do with hair – Medusa hair, frizzy hair, you know, name something about hair. Yes, and one of them wrote a satirical fairy tale in which I bit the heads off men and made them into a pile and turned into an octopus. Figure that out.
J. G. Ballard, England’s greatest literary futurist, changed the coordinates of reality in British fiction and took his faithful readers on a wild intellectual ride. He never restored moral order to the proceedings in his fiction because he did not believe we really wanted it. Whatever it was that Ballard next imagined for us, however unfamiliar, we knew we were in safe hands because he understood “the need to construct a dramatically coherent narrative space.”
When it came to anything by Ballard, genre really did not matter to me; his fiction could have been filed under “Tales of Alien Abduction” or “Marsh Plants” and I would have hunted it down. Despite our difference in generation, gender, and literary purpose, it was clear to me that he and I were both working with some of the same aesthetic influences: film, surrealist art and poetry, Freud’s avant-garde theories of the unconscious….
…The reach of his imagination was never going to fit with the realist literary mainstream but I was always encouraged by his insistence that he was an imaginative writer. “I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.”
Good on you, Jim.
His highly imagined landscapes and abandoned aircraft and stopped clocks and desert sand were located in his head—and anyway he preferred driving fast cars to walking. He once sent me a photograph of the Heathrow Hilton and told me it was his spiritual home. …
(7) BUSTED. Was Chuck Tingle’s “true identity” revealed today? That’s what author C.J. Leede was hoping we’d think, til you-know-who caught them in the act.
A group of Wikipedia editors have formed WikiProject AI Cleanup, “a collaboration to combat the increasing problem of unsourced, poorly-written AI-generated content on Wikipedia.”
“A few of us had noticed the prevalence of unnatural writing that showed clear signs of being AI-generated, and we managed to replicate similar ‘styles’ using ChatGPT,” Ilyas Lebleu, a founding member of WikiProject AI Cleanup, told me in an email. “Discovering some common AI catchphrases allowed us to quickly spot some of the most egregious examples of generated articles, which we quickly wanted to formalize into an organized project to compile our findings and techniques.”…
“Sneeze” by Pedro Iniguez. (Music by Phog Masheeen. Read by Jean-Paul L. Garnier)
“Of Course I Still Love You” by Lisa E Black. (Music by Phog Masheeen. Read by the author.)
“Residual Traces” by Addison Smith. (Music by Fall Precauxions. Read by Jean-Paul L. Garnier.)
Theme music by Dain Luscombe.
Simultaneous Times is a monthly science fiction podcast produced by Space Cowboy Books in Joshua Tree, CA.
(10) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Anniversary: Barbarella film (1968)
Oh, Barbarella.
I didn’t quite get why it was so controversial when I first saw it, it was a bowdlerized version of the already bowdlerized version Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy. This was on a local channel in New York City in the 1980’s. I thought it was a funny but rather goofy looking SF movie, although of course Jane Fonda was something to look at.
(My father was upset at her being in the movie, something I did not understand for years until I understood her politics…and my own family’s politics, better)
I finally got to see the uncut and real version in the early 2000’s on DVD. And then I could finally see what I was missing. Did it add a lot to the actual movie besides the visuals? No, but what visuals! I slotted it in the same space as Woody Allen’s Sleeper, as a science fiction movie that talked about sex, and around sex, a lot. But going on the other visuals, the sets, costume design and props (including the infamous Excess Pleasure Machine) were just mind boggling in both of the versions I’ve seen. Too, the actual cinematography is mesmerizing, the camera knows where to linger, where to bring our attention in sometimes rather chaotic and baroque set pieces. I have not yet seen a 4k version of the film, but that is something I do very much need to see sometime, to see it at the maximum fidelity and clarity.
Is it great cinema? No. But it is great art.
(11) COMICS SECTION.
Off the Mark displays yet another credential trap.
…For those who miss the bromance between Marvel’s Deadpool and Wolverine, you’re in luck because the pair are officially returning in 2025.
Their antics won’t play out on the big screen but upon the pages of comics instead.
The Deadpool/Wolverine series comes from writer Benjamin Percy and artist Joshua Cassara. This partnership, much like Deadpool and Wolverine, is a match made in heaven.
Fans who enjoyed the bloody violence of the film needn’t worry that the comics will strip that action away…
At the Civil War’s end, under a quarter of Americans lived in cities; by the end of the Great War, the proportion was almost exactly half. All those people moving to the cities—both from rural America and from abroad— changed things. Size created anonymity, the possibility of losing yourself in the crowds, remaking yourself, if you so chose. . . . or getting lost, and not always by your choice. Increasingly, the streets were lit by electric light, and the machines inside them were powered the same way; but that simply swapped a new set of shadows and terrors for the old ones. The horrors of the next decades were, all too frequently, industrial and mass-produced: whether they came from the chatter of guns or the whirr of a film projector, they cast an eye on progress, and murmured about what lay beneath.
Start, perhaps, with that newly electrified white city, Chicago. In 1893, its World’s Columbian Exposition, or World’s Fair, was an announcement of America’s newly flexing muscles: its willingness to be broad-shouldered, to play a leadership role in world affairs, to stride into the future. And yet, inside the city limits, there sat a haunted castle. This castle, though, had no clanking chains, no Gothic ghost or Salem witch; it had a psychopath who used modern tools—the soundproofed room, the knockout gas-bearing pipes, and of course, the three-thousand-degrees-Fahrenheit kiln—to disable, kill, and dispose of guests who checked into his World’s Fair Hotel at 701 Sixty-third Street. And why did H. H. Holmes do it? For his part, when eventually caught, he had a simple, and chillingly modern, explanation: “I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.”…
(15) JUSTWATCH MARKET SHARE REPORT. As the third quarter of 2024 comes to an end, JustWatch has released their latest data report on market shares in the US. As usual, they based our report on the 13 million JustWatch users in the US selecting their streaming services, clicking out to streaming offers and marking titles as seen.
SVOD market shares in Q3 2024 Global streaming giant: Prime Video managed to keep its first-place rank, with a 1% lead against Netflix. Meanwhile, Max is managing to stay ahead of major competitors Disney+ and Hulu.
Market share development in 2024 Disney+ and Hulu both gained momentum with a +1% subscriber boost by September. While Netflix and Max stumbled with a -1% decline each, revealing a shake-up in the streaming rivalry.
The October ritual of watching horror movies in the lead-up to Halloween can be exhilarating. Unless, of course, you can’t quite stomach the gory and gruesome, or even the spooky and spine-tingling….
…If you’re someone who wants to indulge in the season but dreads jump scares and buckets of blood, here are five tips that could help even the biggest scaredy cats among us start to open up to the world of horror.
The first two tips are:
Embrace the Spoiler
The first and best line of defense is to read the plot in advance. If you’re feeling brave, go for just a synopsis, but there’s no reason to be a hero. I sometimes read an entire plot in great detail before watching, especially with films I know will tap into my weak spot: movies about demonic possession. Unlike with other genres, knowing what will happen in horror doesn’t necessarily detract from the experience of watching. Your heart will most likely still pound. You will probably still jump. And the visuals and sounds will probably still shock. Knowing what comes next may simply help keep the anxiety and uncertainty in check.
The Smaller, the Better
Nothing against the big-screen experience, but going small, by watching on your phone or a tablet, can go a long way. Not only will you have a sense of control that a crowded theater with speakers blaring hellish soundscapes can’t provide, you will also be able to make adjustments. If it gets too loud or chaotic, turn down the volume. If it gets too visually scary, turn down the brightness or flip the device down. Sometimes for the most intense scenes, it’s better to just hear the movie without seeing it, or to watch without sound….
(17) QUITE A TAIL. And for your viewing pleasure, The Copenhagen Post recommends “Reptilicus”.
Next time you’re looking for a Danish film to watch, spare a thought for Denmark’s only giant monster film ‘Reptilicus’ – a 1960s cult-classic with puppets, bad acting, bazookas, and a prehistoric reptilian beast rampaging through Amager…
… Reptilicus is the name for two monster films about a giant, prehistoric reptile which decides to attack Denmark.
Shot simultaneously, one film is in Danish (1961) and the other is from the USA in English (1962). Both films have a near identical cast (except for one actress) and two directors (Poul Bang – Danish, and Sidney Pink – English) who took turns throughout each shooting day to create two of the most iconic, kitsch and downright unintentional masterpieces to grace Danish screens.
The plot tells of a Danish miner in Lapland who accidentally digs up a section of a giant reptile’s tail from the frozen ground. The section is flown to the Denmark’s Aquarium in Copenhagen, where it is preserved in a temperature-controlled room for scientific study.
Of course they don’t put anyone competent in charge of monitoring it but instead choose a bumbling buffoon (the legendary Dirch Passer). The room is left open and the section begins to thaw and regenerate….
Toyota is showcasing a series of sustainable developments at the Japan Mobility Bizweek later this month – including its vision of a portable hydrogen cartridge future, which could apparently provide ‘swappable’ power for next-gen hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs).
Originally a project of Toyota’s mobility technology subsidiary Woven (formerly Woven Planet), the team produced a working prototype of a hydrogen cartridge back in 2022 but has since developed the idea further… and appears to be running with it.The latest cartridges are lighter and easier to transport, with Toyota claiming the current iteration has been developed with the experience the company has gained in reducing the size and weight of the hydrogen tanks used in its fuel cell electric vehicles….
…Put simply, the cartridges would allow fuel cell electric vehicle drivers to swap out their power source when hydrogen levels run low, rather than having to refuel at a station like you typically would with a fossil fuel-powered car.
But Toyota also feels that these refillable and renewable cartridges could be used in a multitude of situations, such as to generate electricity in a fuel cell to power the home or even providing hydrogen to burn for cooking.
In fact, Toyota and the Rinnai Corporation are exhibiting a stove at Japan Mobility Bizweek that does just that. Similarly, in emergency situations, the hydrogen cartridge could be removed from the car and used to power any applicable device in the case of a blackout, for example….
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Paul Weimer, Danny Sichel, Lise Andreasen, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel “All Is Wells” Dern.]
