(1) WESTERCON, JUST ADD HEMLOCK. Kevin Standlee won’t be making the motion, but ”For Those Who Want to Retire Westercon” he has written the recipe. Kevin explains:

[It’s] something that might come up at the Westercon Business Meeting if at least two members present decide to use it, or if the motion arises out of a Committee of the Whole should no bid win the election. At this time, there are no bids filed, but a bid could always file a write-in up until voting closes on Friday evening, and if they do so and out-poll None of the Above, the Business Meeting would probably give a collective sigh of relief that they don’t have to deal with the decision for the third year in a row.

(2) DUST & DARK TO LAUNCH IN 2025. Dust & Dark, a new print and digital quarterly magazine specializing in short horror fiction, will launch in 2025.

 Editor Owen Duffy says the magazine will offer deliciously dark tales for readers.

 “Our focus is on stories that get under your skin and stay with you long after you’ve turned the final page,” he says.

 “We aren’t interested in straightforward shocks or gratuitous gore. We’re all about inventive, stylish, original stories with strong characterisation, tight pacing and immersive settings.

 “We also absolutely see horror as part of the speculative fiction family. We’ll feature stories which explore a range of ideas and issues, open us up to new perspectives and look at the world from slightly sideways angles.”

 The magazine is set to launch following a Kickstarter campaign in November. Story submissions will open in September. To be notified when submissions go live, sign up for updates at https://dustanddark.com/.

(3) IF YOU’RE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD. The UK’s National Trust invites everyone to “Visit great writers’ and poets’ houses”. One of the places on their list is:

Hill Top, Cumbria

Beatrix Potter bought Hill Top with the royalties earned from her first book, Peter Rabbit. The garden and surrounding countryside inspired many of her works – spot the beehive nestled in the garden wall, just as it was depicted in The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck.

(4) BIG RED ONE. “’Hellboy: The Crooked Man’ first trailer reveals Jack Kesy as the titular demon” – Entertainment Weekly sets the frame.

Different Hellboys come and go, but there will always be things that go bump in the night — and who better to defeat them than the lovable red superhero? Later this year, actor Jack Kesy (12 Strong) will be the third actor to play Mike Mignola’s Hellboy on the big screen, and you can see him in action in the first trailer for Hellboy: The Crooked Man… 

(5) BOT SPEECH. “The Voices of A.I. Are Telling Us a Lot” says the New York Times. “Even as the technology advances, stubborn stereotypes about women are re-encoded again and again.” (Behind a paywall.)

…A.I. creators like to highlight the increasingly naturalistic capabilities of their tools, but their synthetic voices are built on layers of artifice and projection. Sky represents the cutting edge of OpenAI’s ambitions, but she is based on an old idea: of the A.I. bot as an empathetic and compliant woman. Part mommy, part secretary, part girlfriend, Samantha was an all-purpose comfort object who purred directly into her users’ ears. Even as A.I. technology advances, these stereotypes are re-encoded again and again.

Women’s voices, as Julie Wosk notes in “Artificial Women: Sex Dolls, Robot Caregivers, and More Facsimile Females,” have often fueled imagined technologies before they were built into real ones.

In the original “Star Trek” series, which debuted in 1966, the computer on the deck of the Enterprise was voiced by Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, the wife of the show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry. In the 1979 film “Alien,” the crew of the USCSS Nostromo addressed its computer voice as “Mother” (her full name was MU-TH-UR 6000). Once tech companies started marketing virtual assistants — Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana — their voices were largely feminized, too.

These first-wave voice assistants, the ones that have been mediating our relationships with technology for more than a decade, have a tinny, otherworldly drawl. They sound auto-tuned, their human voices accented by a mechanical trill. They often speak in a measured, one-note cadence, suggesting a stunted emotional life.

But the fact that they sound robotic deepens their appeal. They come across as programmable, manipulatable and subservient to our demands….

(6) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

July 1, 1991 — Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Terminator 2: Judgement Day was released on this day in 1991.  It won a Hugo at MagiCon, so may I question why oh why wasn’t The Terminator nominated for a Hugo?  Tell me oh Filers why it wasn’t. It certainly deserved one, didn’t it?

Now let’s discuss this film, that like The Terminator, I indeed did see at a theater. It had its first showing thirty three ago in the States at Century City in Los Angeles with a general release two days later.  That’s seven years after The Terminator came out.

Not at all surprisingly, just about everyone involved in The Terminator is back here. Like the first film, it’s directed by James Cameron.  Cameron is very much the driving force as he also wrote both scripts, the first with Gale Anne Hurd, whom he married a year after The Terminator came out, and this film with William Peter Wisher  who also worked uncredited on The Terminator. 

The Terminator was a considerable success, making the careers of both Cameron and Schwarzenegger, but work on what would become  this film almost ended  because of animosity between the pair and Hemdale Film Corporation, which partially owned the film’s rights. So they got Carolco Pictures to purchase the rights from The Terminator producer Gale Anne Hurd and Hemdale, which was almost bankrupt.

Now they owned the rights to produce a sequel. Cameron engaged  his long-time friend Wisher who I noted had worked uncredited on The Terminator. He’d later be responsible for writing the Judge Dredd script. Oh well.  This script was written in just seven weeks. 

So we’ve got a script, now do we have a cast? Oh yes.  Schwarzenegger is obviously back and so is the only other individual that counts, Linda Hamilton. Robert Patrick is here as well. That’s the primary cast. (Remember we don’t do story lines here as one of you might not have seen it. I’ve seen it. It’s excellent.) 

Now let’s talk budgets.  The Terminator cost a shade over eight million to make. This film? We think that it cost at least thirteen times which comes out to just over a hundred million.  Fortunately, it made so much money that I think they just stopped counting after a while as they only give an estimate, but over a half billion is definitely what it made plus somewhat more.

So the public loved it, but what did critics think of it? Most liked it. Some who, in my opinion of course, had an unhealthy attachment to the first didn’t. 

Derek Malcolm of the U.K. based Guardian was typical of the reviewers who liked it: “Cameron has done an honourable and undoubtedly skilful job of tailoring his new film to the tastes of the times without too much sloppy compromise. He’s made a science fiction film with verve, imagination and even a little wit.” 

On the other hand, we have Ralph Novak of People Magazine who sadly said, “Shamefully sadistic, achingly dull and totally predictable, it rehashes the far superior 1984 original.” 

But let’s not forget our heroine. Alan Jones of Radio Times said about her in this film : “Linda Hamilton turns in another terrific performance as the fiercely committed heroine who puts a necessary human face on Cameron’s high-decibel mayhem and pyrotechnical bravura.”

(7) COMICS SECTION.

• The Argyle Sweater features monster party games.
• Carpe Diem says it’s no fun waiting for evolution.
• Rubes remembers a different Sixties Godzilla than you and me.

(8) THAT JAZZ-LOVING LOVECRAFT FAN. [Item by Steven French.] On the recommendation of my brother, I’ve been working my way through Andrew Hickey’s podcast “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs”, which started in 2018. In episode 13, featuring “’Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean’ by Ruth Brown”, he mentions the important role played by one Willis Conover:

…Conover was a fascinating figure — he presented the jazz programme on Voice of America, the radio station that broadcast propaganda to the Eastern bloc during the Cold War, but by doing so he managed to raise the profile of many of the greatest jazz musicians of the time. He was also a major figure in early science fiction fandom — a book of his correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft is now available.

Conover was visiting the nightclub along with his friend Duke Ellington, and he was immediately impressed by Ruth Brown’s performance — impressed enough that he ran out to call Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson and tell them to sign her.

Ertegun and Abramson were the founders of Atlantic Records, a new record label which had started up only a couple of years earlier.

As a teenager Conover produced the fanzine Science Fantasy Correspondent and the book Hickey mentions was Lovecraft at Last.

Ruth Brown not only went on to have a number of hits in the 1950s and was eventually inducted into the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame in the 1990s, but had a second career as an acclaimed musical actress, earning a Tony award for the musical Black and Blue.

(9) CLARKE-INSPIRED TV. “Star Trek Legend Jonathan Frakes to Direct New Sci-Fi Series” – CBR.com has the story.

…Per Variety, Frakes will produce and direct all six episodes of the new sci-fi series, Arthur C. Clarke’s Venus Prime. The new show is based on the series of novels written by Paul Preuss, a collaborator of Clarke’s, which takes inspiration from characters and places from Clarke’s short stories. Preuss will also be involved as a consultant for the show. David Cormican and Dwayne Hill are set to executive produce and will serve as showrunners for the series. Production on the show is expected to begin near the end of the year.

Frakes, who is no stranger to directing science fiction, expressed his excitement for the project and his love for the series of novels. “When the materials for Arthur C. Clarke’s Venus Prime were presented to me, I couldn’t help but devour them,” Frakes said. “When asked if I wanted to direct what I read —my answer was a resounding and immediate ‘Hell, yes!’ Working on such a tremendous piece of IP from the mind of another sci-fi legend (who is also a contemporary of the true #1 Gene Roddenberry), will be both an honor and a dream for me.”…

(10) THESE FEET ARE MADE FOR WALKIN’. NPR goes to find out how “The Bigfoot Festival draws thousands to West Virginia”.

This weekend, the tiny town of Sutton, W.V., population 840, is hosting about 20,000 people for its annual Bigfoot Festival. It’s a celebration of a mythical giant, hairy primate with – that’s right – big feet. Briana Heaney spoke to those still looking for the creature and others who just love the idea of it.

BRIANA HEANEY, BYLINE: Folklore is a pillar of Appalachian culture as much as banjos and quilts are. And in Sutton this weekend, it’s all about Bigfoot.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

HEANEY: Here in Sutton, the country store doubles as a Bigfoot museum. Laurel Petolicchio owns and runs it. Petolicchio has never seen Bigfoot, but she’s heard a lot of stories.

LAUREL PETOLICCHIO: I’ll have these big mountain men come into my counter, you know, of my little country store. And the one guy, I mean, slammed his hand down on the table, I mean, on my counter. And he’s like, you don’t believe this crap, do you? And I’m like, well, I kind of do. And he’s like, why? And I said, well, it’s the stories I hear. And it’s just – there’s so many of them. And then he leaned forward and he’s like, OK, can I tell you mine? I’m like, what? Like…

(11) VIDEO OF THE DAY. A new Deadpool & Wolverine trailer. Movie arrives in theaters on July 26.

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