The One Ring: Moria: Through the Doors of Durin (Free League, 2024)
By Warner Holme: The One Ring: Moria: Through the Doors of Durin is a source book for the role playing game based on the work of Tolkien. Like others, it takes certain liberties, albeit in expansion terms rather than deviation. It is also a wealth of art and writing simply for a fan of the setting or fantasy in general.
Much of the book is devoted to a detailed description of the mountains and mines of Moria. This includes not only interior tunnels and chambers, and the terrain which they are underneath, but also the groups and individuals inhibiting these or vying for power over them. It is a large assortment and includes a variety of characters mentioned in the classic works as well as new individuals extrapolating from fleeting mentions. The descriptions of the internals of the mountains and mines are similarly fleshed out, explaining locations seen and going into more detail about ones which would have been assumed.
There is material included which Tolkien probably wouldn’t have written himself, though it even feels fairly reverent.
One interesting aspect of this particular book comes from the assumption of familiarity. That is to say that the creative team is aware people playing might, and frankly most likely will, be familiar with certain twists like the meaning of the riddle at the doors and the nature of Durin’s Bane. While it treats them as their traditional nature throughout the book, it reserves some space to allow these to be changed if it is considered more entertaining (page 149 for the doors and page 62 for Durin’s Bane).
As an art book this is not the best volume one could get from Free League’s The One Ring series, but it is a good one. One of the chief flaws comes from the simple fact that page for page it has less of the large two-page color pieces that divide sections which the others sported. That said, the ones which are present are still most definitely beautiful. An evocative gloomy look at the doors in one frame to a stark and the illustration of the Balrog roaming in another both suit the book well. The latter even manages to do a decent job of keeping the wing question at least a little ambiguous, a nice Easter egg alone.
At the same time, the illustrations both major and minor continue contributing to the book as a beautiful and entertaining volume while not feeling overly reliant on the style of the films by Peter Jackson. Indeed the color and black and white illustrations of Durin’s Bane sport no resemblance to the version from the films which wouldn’t be acquired from the words of the original author. It is similar for most, if not all, of the other shared characters and places. Given the long arm those movies have had, any new interpretation separate from them is a greatly appreciated addition.
For fans of the game, this one cannot be missed. It is bursting with content that can expand on existing material, and in the process allows those involved access to a piece of the setting they have desired for some time. For non-gamers it is one of the higher interest books as well, including a lot new and wonderful art, some impressive expansions on classic Middle-Earth material, and clever thoughts on and categorization of earlier material.
(1) THE VERSIFICATORE. Bruce Sterling offers the creation of a working Star Trek-style communicator as one example of “How to Rebuild an Imaginary Future (2025)” in the Medium transcript of an extemporaneous speech he gave at SXSW 2025 on March 12. Then he goes into full detail about a comparable project he’s involved with in Italy. (Let me emphasize this is not an April Fools post.)
Fifteen years ago, here at South By Southwest, I was on a panel where the term “design fiction” was made public. Before Julian Bleecker invented and deployed that term, there were many things going on that resembled “design fiction.” But nobody knew “how to do design fiction.” The ideas and approaches were diffuse, they weren’t crystallised.
This current speech is taking place in another decade, in a era where “design fiction” has been normalized, and it’s practiced widely. “Design Fiction” is established, and is part of the worlds of design and futurism. This speech, “How to Rebuild an Imaginary Future,” is also about futurism, design, and design-fiction “diegetic prototypes.”…
…I am the art director of a technology art festival in Turin, Italy, which is called “Share Festival.” In our researches, we found a historical design-fiction that we want and need to rebuild for artistic and cultural reasons. And we are rebuilding it. It’s an artifact, an imaginary machine, from a science fiction story written 65 years ago by a science fiction writer in Turin: Primo Levi.
Primo Levi’s imaginary “Versificatore” is as old as a Star Trek Communicator. It is a cybernetic, desktop, mass-manufactured business machine that can write Italian poetry. The Versificatore works with prompts, very much like ChatGPT. So, Primo Levi’s historic “Versificatore” is a prophetic vision of Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence.
The Versificatore first appeared, in May 1960, as a character in a short drama piece that Levi published in a newspaper. Years later, that story was gathered into a collection of other futuristic gadget stories that Primo Levi also wrote, as part of a series of Levi’s science fiction satires and comedies.
In 1971, the Versificatore became one episode of Italian TV series derived from the Levi stories.
In these screenshots from the TV show, we can see an Italian poet, and a technology salesman, and a secretary interacting with their brand-new desktop poetry machine. The machine is a creative writer and is the center of the action in the drama. The humans react to this intelligent machine with varying attitudes of enthusiasm, amazement, commercial interest, dread, alarm and so on.
It’s quite amazing how well Levi understood the future human reactions to a novelty like an AI that can write human language. You can watch that show on YouTube right now, it’s quite engaging and funny. Of course it’s all in Italian, but who cares? As you watch the show, you can get Google’s Artificial Intelligence to translate the TV show from speech to subtitled text in real-time. It turns out, sixty year later, that Primo Levi was quite right about the prospect of machines with an astonishing command of human language. They’re very much here, and wreaking predictable havoc.
So, at Share Festival, thanks to a good friend, Riccardo Luna from “Wired Italia,” we became aware of Levi’s diegetic prophesy of modern AI. Since Primo Levi was from Turin, and we’re a festival from Turin, we immediately decided that we had to rebuild a Levi Versificatore and show that device to our public. We understand that the Versificatore has historic, artistic, cinematic, computational and literary significance. It should be a public source of civic pride.
In other words, we are motivated to rebuild an imaginary future. This is not a merely hypothetical project. It’s an actual artistic production project, and even a patriotic crusade. It’s a practical matter for us, where we have to raise funds, and find designers and crafts people, and find a venue for the display of our new artifact, and so on….
…Let’s admit it: it’s a rather unusual thing to re-make an imaginary Italian Artificial Intelligence from the 1960s that works in public and speaks Italian poetry. But in this speech, I want to put that work into a larger context. It’s just one practical sample of a broader creative practice, which might be described as: deliberately turning culturally significant imaginary things into functional real-life things.
We are using modern capabilities to make things work, when it was once merely imagined that these things might somehow someday work.
This Versificatore project is a physical demonstration of the impressive prescience of a world-famous Turinese writer. Primo Levi made up some other different gadgets in his stories, but with this one, he hit the predictive jackpot.
We have means, motive and opportunity to rebuild this important object, for our public, which is the Turinese public, and for our client, who is MUFANT, the science fiction and fantasy museum in Turin. Turin has a museum of “fantascienza,” so naturally they’re interested in Turinese science fiction museum exhibits. Like this one.
So, with that given, what is the proper way to do this? We are confident that we can build a replica, but what are the best practices here? Who else is doing anything like this? Where can we get some help and good advice? How do we know if we’ve done a good job? What are we trying to prove with this project?…
(2) CHINA MIÉVILLE Q&A.[Item by Tom Becker.] Capitalist billionaires are changing the world’s political and economic systems to serve their visions of the future that are straight out of science fiction. China Miéville, who knows politics and science fiction very well, punctures that balloon in an interview with TechCrunch: “China Miéville says we shouldn’t blame science fiction for its bad readers”.
Even though some science-fiction writers do think in terms of their writing being either a utopian blueprint or a dystopian warning, I don’t think that’s what science fiction ever is. It’s always about now. It’s always a reflection. It’s a kind of fever dream, and it’s always about its own sociological context. It’s always an expression of the anxieties of the now. So there’s a category error in treating it as if it is “about the future.”
The full interview is well worth reading, because Miéville is always interesting, and he has much to say about the fantasy traditions that inspired him, and the science fiction that he loves, and the value of literature that is diverse and contradictory and not a simplistic blueprint.
(3) IS PRATCHETT MORE BASED THAN TOLKIEN? “Discworld Rules” claims Venkatesh Rao at Contraptions.
The Lord of the Rings is a great story, but I have to say, I’ve never understood the strange hold it seems to have on the imagination of a particular breed of technologists.
As a story it’s great. It is pure fantasy of course (in the Chiang’s Law sense of being about special people rather than strange rules), full of Chosen Ones doing Great Man (or Great Hobbit) things. As an extended allegory for society and technology it absolutely sucks and is also ludicrously wrong-headed. Humorless Chosen people presiding grimly over a world in terminal decline, fighting Dark Lords, playing out decline-and-fall scripts to which there is no alternative, no Plan B.
This is no way for a high-agency technological species to live, and thankfully it doesn’t have to be.
I mean, I get why politicians and economists might identify with the story. They enjoy little to no direct technological agency, harbor ridiculous Chosen One conceits, and operate in domains — political narratives and the dismal pseudoscience of economics — that are natural intellectual monopolies or oligopolies. Domains that allow fantasies to be memed into existence (the technical term is hyperstitional theory-fictions) for a while before they come crashing down to earth in flames, demonstrating yet again that no, you do not in fact get to create your own reality; that “reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away.”
There is a contrarian reading of The Lord of the Rings that argues that Sauron and Mordor are in fact the good guys, and represent technological progress, etc. But this is throwing good money narrativium after bad. Flipping the valence of a Chosen One story doesn’t make it any better. It’s still a Chosen One story with reversed roles.
No, you have to tell different sorts of stories altogether.
Such stories have, in fact, been told. They are Terry Pratchett’s Discworld stories. This post is an extended argument that as a lens for thinking about the world, TheLord of the Rings, is a work that you should “not set aside lightly, but throw across the room with great force,” and that in place of Middle Earth, you should install Terry Pratchett’s Discworld….
… If you’re an actual, serious technologist, Discworld is where you should look for clues about how the world works, how it evolves in response to technological forces, and how humans should engage with those forces. It is catnip for actual technological curiosity, as opposed to validation of incuriously instrumental approaches to technology….
(4) FEARLESS MONSTER FANS. Peter Bebergal will deliver a Zoom lecture, “Monster World”, about “How pop culture monsters mythologised our worries about sexuality, nuclear war, race and the other” on April 14. This Last Tuesday Society digital event begins at 8:00 p.m. – British time, apparently. Tickets are £6 – £10 & By Donation. Ticket buys also will be sent a recording valid for two weeks the next day.
Monster Worlds In the 1970s, the sometimes-garish world of monster-movie pop culture was a comfort, an external expression of grotesquery and strangeness that the culture was feeling inside but had no name for. Rather than making us more afraid, monsters mythologized our own abstract worries about sexuality, nuclear war, race and the other, as well as personifying our collective sense of being untethered from mystery and enchantment. The talk will track the changing face of monsters as mythic and literary creatures as our culture’s own lingering unease began to morph, moving from the shadowed myths of the past into the daytime horrors of serial killers and gore and argue that we need monsters again to learn how to reimagine what frightens us in a way that remythologizes our anxieties and will offer a path for a re-enchanting our imaginations using monsters as a guide, looking at current examples in film, television, and comics.
(5) CRAWFORD AWARD JUDGES SOLICIT SUBMISSIONS FOR 2025. The William L. Crawford Award, given by the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA), recognizes an outstanding writer whose first fantasy book was published during the previous calendar year. The judges are currently soliciting books published in 2025 for the award to be given at the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts in 2026.
Publishers are asked to submit qualifying ebooks in PDF and ePub formats here.
What works qualify
This is an award for an author’s first work of fantasy in book form. It is not a first novel award; an author may have a long bibliography and still qualify for their first work of fantasy. “Book” is defined broadly, and includes novels, novellas, poetry collections, short fiction, graphic novels, works in translation, or other work at the discretion of the judges.
The Award Administrator is Kelly Robson. This year’s judges are Brian Attebery, Joyce Chng, Eddie Clark, Joy Sanchez-Taylor, and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay.
Brian Attebery is an American writer and emeritus professor of English and philosophy at Idaho State University. He is known for his studies of fantasy literature, including The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin and Strategies of Fantasy which won the Mythopoeic Award
Joyce Chng lives in Singapore. Their speculative fiction has appeared in The Apex Book of World SF II, We See A Different Frontier, Cranky Ladies of History, and Accessing The Future. Joyce also co-edited THE SEA IS OURS: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia with Jaymee Goh. Their novels span across wolf clans (Starfang: Rise of the Clan), vineyards (Water into Wine) and swordmaking forges (Fire Heart) respectively. Joyce wrangles article editing at Strange Horizons and is diversity coordinator for IGDN (Independent Game Designer Network).
Eddie Clark is an academic and SFF fan from Wellington, New Zealand. He has been peering into the obscure corners of SFF for thirty years, recently with a particular focus on queer fantasy.
Dr. Joy Sanchez-Taylor is a Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College whose research interest is science fiction and fantasy literature by authors of color. Her first book Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Writers of Color (2021) examines the contributions of late twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. and Canadian science fiction authors of color to the genre. Her newest book is titled Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Color Reimagine a Genre (forthcoming July 2025).
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay is Associate Professor in Global Culture Studies at the University of Oslo. He is the leader of CoFUTURES, an international research group on contemporary futurisms headquartered in Oslo. He is a World Fantasy Award-winning editor, translator, writer, and critic of speculative fiction, and the producer of Kalpavigyan: A Speculative Journey, the first documentary film on Indian science fiction.
(6) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Ruthven Todd’s Space Cat series
The Muppet Show has a segment called “Pigs in Space.” Well, this is the Social Justice Credential counterpart, “Cats in Space”, with a dollop of ever-so-cute kittens added in, which appeared long before Heinlein’s Pixel came into being as they were published between 1952 and 1958.
This was definitely a departure for the author Ruthven Todd who is known primarily for his poetry, scholarly work on William Blake studies, and as R. T. Campbell for writing mysteries.
It’s a children’s books series involving Flyball, a cat who, yes, lives in space. And like all cats wears a space suit. These are not your ordinary felines by any means.
The books, which are all illustrated by Paul Galdone, are Space Cat, Space Cat Visits Venus, Space Cat Meets Mars and Space Cat and the Kittens. Without giving anything away, let me just say that there will be a lot of cats, not a few kittens and considerable comical situations as the series goes on.
As it flew up toward the International Space Station last summer, the Starliner spacecraft lost four thrusters. A NASA astronaut, Butch Wilmore, had to take manual control of the vehicle. But as Starliner’s thrusters failed, Wilmore lost the ability to move the spacecraft in the direction he wanted to go.
He and his fellow astronaut, Suni Williams, knew where they wanted to go. Starliner had flown to within a stone’s throw of the space station, a safe harbor, if only they could reach it. But already, the failure of so many thrusters violated the mission’s flight rules. In such an instance, they were supposed to turn around and come back to Earth. Approaching the station was deemed too risky for Wilmore and Williams, aboard Starliner, as well as for the astronauts on the $100 billion space station.
But what if it was not safe to come home, either?
“I don’t know that we can come back to Earth at that point,” Wilmore said in an interview. “I don’t know if we can. And matter of fact, I’m thinking we probably can’t.”
Starliner astronauts meet with the media
On Monday, for the first time since they returned to Earth on a Crew Dragon vehicle two weeks ago, Wilmore and Williams participated in a news conference at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Afterward, they spent hours conducting short, 10-minute interviews with reporters from around the world, describing their mission. I spoke with both of them….
We cut to where two thrusters have just failed as the Starliner arrives at the ISS.
…Wilmore: “Thankfully, these folks are heroes. And please print this. What do heroes look like? Well, heroes put their tank on and they run into a fiery building and pull people out of it. That’s a hero. Heroes also sit in their cubicle for decades studying their systems, and knowing their systems front and back. And when there is no time to assess a situation and go and talk to people and ask, ‘What do you think?’ they know their system so well they come up with a plan on the fly. That is a hero. And there are several of them in Mission Control.”
From the outside, as Starliner approached the space station last June, we knew little of this. By following NASA’s webcast of the docking, it was clear there were some thruster issues and that Wilmore had to take manual control. But we did not know that in the final minutes before docking, NASA waived the flight rules about loss of thrusters. According to Wilmore and Williams, the drama was only beginning at this point….
“Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse,” the third entry in Sony’s animated web-slinging trilogy, will swing into theaters… in a few years. It’ll be released on June 4, 2027.
“We know how important this franchise is to so many people around us. We just could not run it back,” the filmmaking team of producer Phil Lord and co-directors Bob Persichetti and Justin K. Thompson said at CinemaCon, the movie theater trade show that’s currently unfolding in Las Vegas. “So, we decided we needed to take the time to make sure we got it just right.”…
… On stage at CinemaCon, Lord teases that Miles begins the threequel as a fugitive on the run from every other spider in the multiverse… and hinted that “Gwen and his other friends may or may not be enough to help him save the family that’s been the leading part of the entire system.”…
(10) JUSTWATCH TOP 10S. The most-viewed streaming sff movies and TV of March 2025 have been ranked by JustWatch.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Tom Becker, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, 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 Peer.]
(1) SALAM AWARD OPENS FOR ENTRIES. The Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction, which recognizes emerging speculative fiction writers of Pakistani origin or residence, is taking submissions through July 31. Full guidelines at the link.
Eligible for consideration are original, previously unpublished English-language stories of 10,000 words or less by persons residing in Pakistan, or of Pakistani birth/descent. The full guidelines are at the link.
The Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction is named for Dr. Albus Salam, one of the pioneers of science in Pakistan.
(2) TIME FOR NOMMO AWARDS NOMINATIONS. The African Science Fiction Society has announced the 2025 Nommo Awards nominations are now open for works published in 2024.
Only works of speculative fiction by an African published between 1 January 2024 and 31 December 2024 anywhere in the world are eligible.
(3) NOTE ABOUT WORLD FANTASY AWARDS SUBMISSIONS. With the June 1 deadline not far off, Peter Dennis Pautz of the World Fantasy Awards Administration has issued a reminder:
I’ve heard from all the World Fantasy Awards judges and their receipt of submissions has been extremely inconsistent, i.e. not all judges have received the same submissions.
As the deadline draws near, we are especially concerned about the lack of submissions from the larger publishers, both in the US and UK.
If you have already sent in your submission, please check your records to ensure that a copy of every work was sent to each judge, in their preferred formats, as detailed in the attachment.
If you haven’t sent your submission as yet, please do so as soon as possible to allow full consideration to your works.
Finally, the judges have also asked that you not send drop box, zip files, or wetransfer links. The links often expire before the judges get to them, and it requires a lot of time to open the links and side load the files to ereaders. Sending three or four titles at a time by email is preferable/
As always, thank you all for your support, your thoughtfulness, and your help.
(4) JUDGE’S RULING PAUSES IOWA CENSORSHIP. [Item by Andrew Porter.] “Iowa law banning books including 1984 and Ulysses blocked by US federal judge” reports the Guardian. Books unconstitutionally caught up in the law include Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, and 1984 by George Orwell.
A lawsuit brought by publishers and authors including John Green and Jodi Picoult has led to a portion of a law banning Iowa school libraries and classrooms from carrying books depicting sex acts being halted.
On Tuesday, a federal judge temporarily blocked the measure, writing that it had been applied unconstitutionally in many schools and that books of “undeniable political, artistic, literary, and/or scientific value” had been caught up in it, including Ulysses by James Joyce, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, Beloved by Toni Morrison and The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.
This is the second time that US district judge Stephen Locher, a Joe Biden appointee, has blocked the ban. The law, Senate File 496, was first approved by Iowa’s Republican-led legislature and governor Kim Reynolds in 2023, however, Locher placed an injunction on it in December 2023 after authors and publishers sued the state.
The preliminary injunction was reversed by the US Eighth Circuit appeals court last August, leading publishers and authors to file a second complaint, arguing that the ban violates free speech and “goes far beyond prohibiting books that are obscene as to minors because it prohibits books with even a brief description of a sex act for students of all ages without any evaluation of the book as a whole”.
In his decision, Locher wrote that the ban has resulted in “forced removal of books from school libraries that are not pornographic or obscene”, and that unconstitutional applications of the law “far exceed” constitutional applications….
UK publishing is less accessible to Black authors now than it was five years ago, according to some of the biggest names in the industry.
The Black Lives Matter movement of 2020 led to many publishing houses making commitments to address the longstanding racial inequality in the industry. But, ahead of the Black British book festival (BBBF) this weekend, a number of Black literary figures say there has been a noticeable downward shift in the number of Black writers being published.
Selina Brown, who founded BBBF in 2021, said the number of Black authors being pitched to her has dropped dramatically in the last 18 months. She also believes the number of books being published by Black writers has “plummeted”….
…Sharmaine Lovegrove, cultural strategist at Hachette UK, one of the country’s leading publishing houses, co-founded The Black Writers’ Guild and established Hachette’s Dialogue imprint, which focuses on books by, about and for marginalised communities. She said things are harder for new Black authors now than they were pre-2020….
Lovegrove said the industry hasn’t been able to build new, diverse audiences and struggled to talk and cater to Black authors who were often labelled “difficult” for advocating for themselves.
Lovegrove said: “The biggest mistake was seeing it as a trend as opposed to an opportunity to cultivate something meaningful that was missing.”
“It’s as if the industry is saying: ‘It’s all very difficult and these books haven’t done very well so we’re literally not going to try again with someone from the same background’,” she added. “It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”
A report by PA found that “ethnic minority” representation across the industry fell from 17% to 15% in 2024, with a decline in the numbers of Asian and British Asian staff. The number of Black staff remained at about 3% during the same period.
But Brown says the impetus of 2020 has faded and new Black authors have often seen their books marketed the same way as other authors despite publishers speaking of wanting to “reach new audiences”….
(6) TOLKIEN’S CARTOGRAPHY. “It’s Tolkien Reading Day” – a Facebook post from yesterday by the Bodleian Libraries. (Click for larger image.)
It’s Tolkien Reading Day, so we wanted to share with you a rather magical treasure from our Tolkien archives and invite you to share your favourite moments as a Tolkien reader.
Pictured is an annotated version of a fold-out map which was included in early editions of the Lord of The Rings. The map shows readers Tolkien’s fantasy world ‘Middle-earth’.
The annotations are by Tolkien himself, and were for the benefit of Pauline Baynes, an artist who was creating an illustrated poster map of Middle-earth.
Baynes ripped the map out of her own 1954 copy of Lord of the Rings and took it to Tolkien, who covered it with notes, including many extra place names that do not appear in the book. Since most were in his own invented Elvish language he helpfully translated some: ‘Eryn Vorn [= Black Forest] a forest region of dark [pine?] trees.’
The annotations give an insight into how vividly Tolkien pictured Middle-earth in his mind, and how thorough his research was. They include a series of geographical pointers about the latitude of key locations: ‘Hobbiton is assumed to be approx. at latitude of Oxford,’. ‘Minas Tirith is about latitude of Ravenna (but is 900 miles east of Hobbiton more near Belgrade). Bottom of the map (1,400 miles) is about latitude of Jerusalem.’
Pictured: MS. Tolkien Drawings 132. copyright Tolkien Estate / Williams College Oxford Programme 2018
Are there different preferences for book genres depending on what state you’re in? According to new research from Cloudwards, there are trends in book preferences based on location.
Utilizing Google Trends data over the last 12 months, Cloudwards explored the most searched genre in each of the 50 states, plus the District of Columbia. All searches were limited to Google Trends “Books and Literature” category, and the researchers used a variety of common genre terms to determine the frequency of interest in them by state. Some of the genre categories were a little unconventional for the average reader–how do you determine the difference between “fiction” and “family” as terms–but the major genres were included, including romance, fantasy, mystery, and so forth….
… Romance dominated in terms of genre popularity across the US, with 22 states seeing it as their top searched genre. In terms of geographic region, romance was especially popular in the south, with states like Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia ranking it as their top genre.
Fiction and poetry tied for next most popular genres, each either nine states reporting it as the most searched genre. The researchers note that these findings aren’t surprising, given that fiction is broad and encompassing. As for poetry, it is likely not surprising to see people looking for more information about poetry; the research here isn’t about poetry being the most read genre, but rather, one of the most researched genres….
IT’S NO ACCIDENT FREDDY KRUEGER is the most famous monster of the last 50 years….
…So of course Freddy would capitalize on one of his decade’s definitive devices: the telephone. In the late 1980s you could communicate with Krueger on your home phone (after you “get your parents’ permission,” of course) through the awesome telecommunicative power of the hotline. Dialing 1-900-909-FRED connected brave teens to a running tape of short ghost stories, each introduced by Freddy Krueger like a malevolent MTV VJ throwing to Paula Abdul videos…
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. IT’S TIME FOR ANOTHER ONE OF FREDDY’S FAVORITE BEDTIME STORIES. AND THIS ONE’S A DREAM—MY KIND OF DREAM: THE KIND YOU DON’T WAKE UP FROM…
You can listen to 40 consecutive minutes of this stuff on YouTube, thanks to some intrepid young Gen-Xer who owned a tape deck and I guess was willing to catch hell from their parents when the phone bill arrived….
(9) L.J. SMITH (1958-2025.) L. J. Smith, author of The Vampire Diaries, died March 8 at the age of 66.
Her first book, The Night of the Solstice, written during high school and college, was published by MacMillan in 1987.
The New York Times obituary explains that the Vampire Diaries publisher eventually moved on from Smith to a ghostwriter, and how Smith recovered her characters by writing fanfiction.
…The first three books in The Vampire Diaries series were published by HarperCollins in 1991, and a fourth was released in 1992. But Ms. Smith — whose first agent was her typist, who had never represented a client — told The Wall Street Journal that she had written the trilogy for an advance of only a few thousand dollars without realizing that it was work for hire, meaning she did not own the copyright or the characters….
…In 2009, “The Vampire Diaries” were adapted into a dramatic television series that lasted for eight seasons on the CW Network….
…By 2014, the “Vampire Diaries” book series had sold more than five million copies, but Ms. Smith was no longer writing the authorized version: Alloy Entertainment fired her in 2011 over what its president and founder, Leslie Morgenstein, told The Wall Street Journal were creative differences.
A ghostwriter and then an author using the pen name Aubrey Clark were brought in to complete the final six books in the series. Ms. Smith said in interviews that she had believed that Alloy and HarperCollins wanted shorter books more closely associated with the TV series. They continued to put Ms. Smith’s name prominently on the cover of the books as the series’ creator….
…Eventually, Ms. Smith found an outlet to reclaim her characters — fan fiction, which book lovers have long written and posted, spooling out their own amateur versions of stories and characters even though they did not own the intellectual property and it was often not strictly legal.
In 2013, Amazon created Kindle Worlds, an online service that gave writers of fan fiction permission to write about certain licensed properties, including Alloy’s “Vampire Diaries” series, and to earn money for their ventures.
In 2014, Ms. Smith became the rare celebrated author to produce fan fiction as a way to recoup characters and story arcs she had lost, publishing a novel and novella in an informal continuation of the “Vampire Diaries.” (Kindle Worlds was discontinued in 2018)….
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Item by Paul Weimer.]
March 26, 1931 — Leonard Nimoy. (Died 2015.)
By Paul Weimer: It is fitting that Leonard Nimoy’s birthday should only be a couple of days after William Shatner’s. Sure, like Shatner himself, Nimoy is much more than his Star Trek character. But then again, he is the one who felt it necessary to write a book called I am Not Spock. Shatner never had to do the same for Kirk.
Why that is is because Nimoy brings a human alienness to Spock that no iteration of him since has quite managed. There are several Spocks running around now in movie and series history, but Nimoy’s is the one that sticks, the one that is the definitive article. The brainiac logic-fueled half human…who nevertheless shows real passion and anger in “Amok Time”, and especially at the utter joy that Kirk has in fact survived after all. Or learning the limits of logical action in “The Gaileo Seven”. Nimoy’s Spock was always learning, always growing, always becoming better (a lesson Spiner would apply to Data). The whole journey of Spock’s death, resurrection, and return to normal through the Star Trek movies shows a whole gamut of emotions and character growth. Nimoy sells all of that.
But Nimoy was more than that. He was the narrator of In Search Of, and I remember watching that for the first time and wondering why the voice was familiar on the episode, and only learning a couple of months later it was, in fact, “Spock”. I also enjoyed his secondary role in the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He also directed a number of movies as well, and became a producer, later, in the bargain. When I finally got to watching the original Mission Impossible (which I had only seen scattershot growing up), I was delighted to find he was there, too, as a master of disguise and immersion, Paris.
Later in life, he had a role in a number of episodes of Fringe.
On top of all that, you probably know about his music, if for nothing else than “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins.”. But did you know he was also a rather good photographer? In a world next door, he pursued that to the fullest rather than acting. As it is, the work he has done has been exhibited in major museums.
Such a diverse and strong and polymathic artistic talent. I wish I could have met him, but he died in 2015. Requiescat in pace.
(12) INTRODUCING BETWEEN A ROCKET AND A HARD SPACE. The International Space Station (ISS) National Laboratory is launching Between a Rocket and a Hard Space, the official ISS National Lab podcast. This podcast series dives deep into the discoveries, innovations, and people shaping the future of space, with the first episode now available.
The podcast’s name is a nod to the challenges and complexities of exploring the space environment, with recognition of the far-reaching benefits space-based R&D may bring. Going beyond the launch pad, Between a Rocket and a Hard Space offers exclusive insights from scientists, engineers, and visionaries leveraging the unique environment of low Earth orbit to push the boundaries of research and technology development. But that’s just the beginning. We’ll also hear from policymakers driving the industry forward, financial experts fueling the space economy, and communicators working to inspire the next generation of explorers.
In the first episode, host Patrick O’Neill sits down with ISS National Lab Chief Scientific Officer Michael Roberts to explore the groundbreaking science happening on the orbiting outpost and its real-world impact on medicine, technology, and industry. Roberts will provide an insider perspective into how microgravity is unlocking advancements in drug development, regenerative medicine, advanced materials, and in-space manufacturing.
Episodes of Between a Rocket and a Hard Space will be available through many major listening platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, Alexa, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Castro, and Castbox.
… An expert speaks about the black holes in Intersellar. The 2014 sci-fi movie tells the story of a former NASA pilot named Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) who re-enters space exploration in order to help locate a new planet for humans when Earth becomes uninhabitable. The film features a leading cast including McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Matt Damon, John Lithgow, Jessica Chastain, and a young Timothée Chalamet. Interstellar made over $758 million at the box office, and ultimately ended up as one of Nolan’s lower-rated films in terms of Rotten Tomatoes score, getting a 73%…
… Speaking with Insider, astrophysicist Paul M. Sutter discusses Interstellar‘s black hole visuals, giving them a high accuracy rating. Sutter said there is “so much good science in the black hole image,” noting how well Nolan’s film maps the behavior of light in relation to a black hole. The expert also explains how Newton’s third law impacts how Cooper is acting in the key black hole scene. Ultimately, he gave Interstellar‘s black hole accuracy a 9 out of 10. Check out the full quote from Sutter below:
So much good science in the black hole image. Light follows the curves, the hills and valleys of spacetime. And these curves are set by massive objects. This is one of the earliest tests of Einstein’s theory of relativity. And black holes bend space a lot, and so what we are seeing is there’s a thing disk called an an accretion disk surrounding the black hole. But if you’re standing on one side of the black hole, light from the back end — which normally you wouldn’t see because you know, black hole in the way — there’s light that’s going up this way but then gets bent and curves right to you.
Newton’s third law is for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. And this is in the fundamental basis for space travel. We push against the air to get our airplanes to go. But in space there’s no ground, there’s no air. So we can only push against ourselves. If we throw something away from us, that propels us in the equal and opposite direction. So what I think he’s going for, old Cooper, is to get him away from that orbit, if he pushes something towards the black hole, that will nudge the spacecraft away from that orbit, and give it a safe escape.
The event horizon is the one way barrier. This is the edge of the black hole. This is the point of no return. That if you cross the event horizon, that gravity is so strong, that nothing, not even light can escape.
When Cooper first falls through the black hole, then he goes ‘oh, everything’s black.’ No, like you’re not the only thing falling into a black hole. There’s light from the entire rest of the universe that’s falling in with you. For a supermassive black hole like this, like Gargantua in the movie, you’ve got a handful of seconds from the moment you cross the event horizon to the time you hit the singularity.
That was an incredibly accurate depiction. In fact, it is one of the most accurate depictions of the environment around a black hole ever made. I would give it a 9. Okay a point off because it is not actually dark in there. But honestly, we don’t know what actually happens inside of a black hole, so that’s fair game….
It’s been 43 years since legendary director John Carpenter’s The Thing hit screens, but the mystery behind which character turns into the fearsome monster has remained shrouded in secrecy, until now. And one fan has worked it out.
At a special 4K screening of The Thing at David Geffen Theater on March 22, Carpenter revealed that a scene in the middle of the movie reveals whether Kurt Russell’s R.J. MacReady or Keith David’s Childs is The Thing. “I think I found that hint,” said Joe Russo (a film fan not the Marvel director) on Twitter.As pointed out by Russo, MacReady is informed that The Thing can replicate at the cellular level, so to be safe they should only drink and eat what they have prepared themselves. Despite the warning, toward the end of the movie, MacReady shares a bottle of liquor with Childs, which could mean that he is either rather forgetful or he is, in fact, The Thing. “As soon as Childs drinks from the bottle, The Thing has won. It’s beaten its most skeptical, final threat,” says Russo…
The Avengers have assembled once again. Marvel slowly revealed the full cast of “Avengers: Doomsday” in a livestream that began Wednesday morning.
Among the returning cast members are Chris Hemsworth as Thor; Anthony Mackie as Sam Wilson, who debuted as Captain America in last month’s “Brave New World”; his co-star Danny Ramirez as Joaquin Torres, the new Falcon; Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier; Paul Rudd as Scott Lang/Ant-Man; Tom Hiddleston as Loki; Letitia Wright as Shuri, who took over the Black Panther mantle in “Wakanda Forever,” and her co-star Winston Duke as M’Baku. As previously announced, Robert Downey Jr. will be back as the villain Doctor Doom instead of Iron Man.
The biggest surprises were several returning “X-Men” stars for “Avengers: Doomsday.” The mutant cast includes Patrick Stewart, whose Professor Charles Xavier was killed off in both “Logan” and “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” but appears to be back; Ian McKellen, who was last seen as Magneto in “X-Men: Days of Future Past”; Kelsey Grammer as Beast, who made a cameo in the post-credits scene of “The Marvels”; Alan Cumming as Nightcrawler from “X2”; James Marsden as Cyclops; Channing Tatum, who played Gambit in “Deadpool & Wolverine”; and Rebecca Romijn, who originated the shape-shifting role of Mystique before Jennifer Lawrence took it over in the “X-Men” prequels.
Some recent Marvel newcomers are also being introduced to the “Avengers” ensemble. They include Pedro Pascal as Mr. Fantastic, Vanessa Kirby as the Invisible Woman, Joseph Quinn as Human Torch and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as the Thing from this summer’s “The Fantastic Four: First Steps”; “Thunderbolts*” stars Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova, David Harbour as Red Guardian, Wyatt Russell as U.S. Agent, Hannah John-Kamen as Ghost, Lewis Pullman as the mysterious Bob; Simu Liu as Shang-Chi; and Tenoch Huerta Mejía, who played the underwater antagonist Namor in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”…
An in-depth review of Fritz Leiber’s, 1978 dark urban fantasy, OUR LADY of DARKNESS. A thinly veiled autobiography and biopic of Leiber’s life from 1977, from the author most famous for his sword and sorcery tales of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser.
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Michael J. Walsh, 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 Andrew (not Werdna).]
Walking into the almost fully restored, more than century-old, one-time Waukegan Public Library — that is now the Waukegan History Museum at the Carnegie — visitors can take a step back in time….
…Lori Nerheim, the historical society’s president, said part of the intent of the $15 million restoration was to give visitors a feel for the experience a young Ray Bradbury had when he spent hours there as a boy reading and nurturing the imagination which led the famed author to the writing of his books.
“We wanted to bring it back to its original look and feel,” she said of the museum operated jointly by the historical society and the Waukegan Park District. “I feel tremendous pride. I am excited to see people’s reaction.”
… To enter the building, visitors ascend a few steps before entering the door where they see a staircase on either side leading to two floors of permanent exhibits, and before them some steps going to the top, main floor containing a permanent exhibit honoring Bradbury as well as a room for research.
Before the building closed as the library in 1965, the room containing the Bradbury exhibit was the children’s reading room. He spent hours there in the 1920s and 1930s reading and developing his thirst for books. Nerheim said she hopes the environment will inspire future authors.
“I can see children today sitting in that room where Ray Bradbury sat as a child and reading books he read,” she said. “Perhaps they will be inspired to write or tell their own stories.”
Filling the bookcases in the Bradbury room are the author’s private collection of thousands of volumes he willed to the Waukegan Public Library when he died in 2012…..
(2) FAMOUS BOOKSTORE MAY REOPEN ‘NEXT WEEK’. Mysterious Galaxy bookstore in San Diego is in the process of repairing flood damage sustained in late February. On Monday their latest newsletter gave a progress report: “Flooded! Curbside Pickup Is Available!”
First, thank you to all of the customers, authors, publishers, and other community members that have reached out to offer their support in the last week. The outpouring of support has been incredibly heartwarming and has helped us get through the uncertainty of the last week. We also want to extend a special thank you to our fellow independent bookstores who have offered support including opening their spaces for last minute event venues. This is truly a special book community and one we are so happy to be a part of.
We wanted to reach out with an update on the store and forecast of what’s to come. As this situation is continually evolving, there may be additional changes, but we promise to communicate as much as possible.
The good news: No inventory was damaged in the flooding. THE BOOKS ARE OK! The vinyl flooring is also intact and does not need to be removed.
The bad news: The carpet in the children’s section was flooded and is being replaced. Additionally, they found some significant water damage in the walls on the west side of the unit as well as in the wall behind the YA section separating the front area of the store from the back room. The drywall needs to be replaced. There was also damage to the fixtures.
What does this mean?: Mysterious Galaxy is currently closed to in-store shopping and events. If you purchased a ticket to an upcoming event, please keep a lookout for an email with more information. However, the demo has already begun and we are hoping to reopen to browsing by early next week! (*knocks on wood*) The construction is such that it is not safe to have customers browsing at this time. However, fortunately (or unfortunately) for us, we are not strangers to running a closed bookstore, and we are ready to work through the challenges that are sure to arise in the coming weeks.
Several arts organizations sued the National Endowment for the Arts on Thursday, challenging its new requirement that grant applicants agree to comply with President Trump’s executive orders by promising not to promote “gender ideology.”
The groups that filed the suit have made or supported art about transgender and nonbinary people, and have received N.E.A. funding in the past. They say the new requirement unconstitutionally threatens their eligibility for future grants.
“Because they seek to affirm transgender and nonbinary identities and experiences in the projects for which they seek funding, plaintiffs are effectively barred by the ‘gender ideology’ certification and prohibition from receiving N.E.A. grants on artistic merit and excellence grounds,” the lawsuit says.
The groups are being represented in the litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union, which said in the lawsuit that the N.E.A. rule “has sowed chaos in the funding of arts projects across the United States.” After Mr. Trump began his second term, the N.E.A. said it would require grant applicants to agree “that federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology,” which Mr. Trump said in an executive order includes “the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa.”
The N.E.A. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The suit was filed in a federal court in Rhode Island on behalf of Rhode Island Latino Arts, which promotes art made by Latinos; the Theater Offensive, an organization in Boston that presents work “by, for and about queer and trans people of color”; and National Queer Theater, a New York company best known for its Criminal Queerness Festival, which presents the work of international artists with roots in countries where their sexuality is criminalized or censored.
JRR Tolkien was so irritated by a careless typist’s slapdash work on one of his manuscripts that he vented his frustration in a letter that has come to light.
The Lord of the Rings author said in despair: “She reduced [my manuscript] to nonsense. I have some sympathy with the typist faced with such unfamiliar matter; though evidently she wasn’t paying much attention.”
He mocked her confusion of “poche for poetic, highballs(!) for high halls, and arias for cries”.
The letter is within a collection of largely unpublished correspondence that reflects Tolkien’s loathing of sloppiness and love of language.
It is part of an archive that includes the last major Tolkien manuscript in private hands, The Road Goes Ever On, his collaboration with the composer Donald Swann of the musical comedy duo Flanders and Swann….
…What’s about to happen is the debut of Alien: Earth, FX’s upcoming show set years before any of the Alien films. It follows a team of soldiers who investigate a ship that has crashed on Earth and are forced to deal with what it contains. We assume, of course, that it contains something that will eventually create an alien, but what exactly? …
…So here you get to see the cat get the camera put on him and walk around a bit. The key takeaway is the end where we see a computer—much like Mother in the first Alien—with a very similar “Priority One” message: “Acquisition and safe return of all organisms for analysis. All other considerations secondary.” So, this ship was sent out to find something. And find something, it did….
…We see one of the crew members in hypersleep when something goes wrong. A fire. Is this the incident that started the crash back to Earth? What caused the fire? We don’t know.
All of this is a very cool way to tease the show and it’s culminating later this week in Austin, Texas. That’s where FX has recreated the crash site of the Maginot for fans to check out at SXSW. Learn more about that here.…
…We’re talking about the possibility of Star Trek: Janeway, a series focused on the return of Kate Mulgrew as Admiral Kathryn Janeway, set sometime after the events of Prodigy and perhaps, after the events of Picard Season 3. Speaking to a crowd of fans during the official Star Trek Cruise, Mulgrew answered a question about the possibility of a Janeway-focused spinoff TV series, or, failing that, her returning to the franchise in any capacity.
Mulgrew has long been vocal about galvanizing fans, which partially resulted in Star Trek: Prodigy Season 2 ending up on Netflix. But in terms of any new Star Trek series focusing on the post-Voyager era, nothing on the current Paramount+ slate fits that description. Strange New Worlds will run for at least two more seasons, and Starfleet Academy is expected to debut either later this year or sometime in 2026. At the same event on the Star Trek: The Cruise,Mulgrew expressed concerns that a Janeway live-action series might not live up to what fans wanted. And she also didn’t want to do a show as a “vanity project.”
…Frank Herbert’s masterpiece Dune emerged from various fascinating influences, beginning with an unlikely source: the Oregon coast. In 1957, after publishing his novel The Dragon in the Sea, Herbert traveled to Florence, Oregon, where he observed the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s efforts to stabilize massive dunes using poverty grasses. The sight of these imposing dunes, which Herbert believed could “swallow whole cities, lakes, rivers, highways,” sparked a deep interest in ecology and desert environments that would become central to his epic novel. The ecological themes in Dune were further shaped by Herbert’s interactions with Native American mentors, particularly Howard Hansen and “Indian Henry” Martin from the Quileute reservation. Hansen’s warning that white men were “eating the earth” and could turn the planet into a wasteland “just like North Africa” resonated deeply with Herbert, who incorporated these environmental concerns into his story….
Many science fiction novels include predictions regarding technology, but Frank Herbert deliberately stayed away from that. Instead, Herbert’s novels focus on the power of the human mind and its ability to focus on discipline to overcome fears and regain control over thoughts, feelings, and even bodily functions. Herbert summed this up in one of his most iconic quoted Dune lines:
“Fear is the mind-killer.”…
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
March 6, 1928 — William F. Nolan. (Died 2021.)
By Paul Weimer: Is the crystal in your palm blinking?
While he did write two sequels to it, plenty of short stories, a number of screenplays and a fair number of critical works, the name William F. Nolan means one and one thing only for me: Logan’s Run.
Well, two, if you count the movie.
The book, co-authored with George Clayton Johnson, came first. Ironically, while I read the book first, and only saw the movie some years later, the edition I read of the book first and had for years until it fell apart was one of those “movie/tv tie in” editions, that even had some stills/photos from the movie in it. So I “saw” a couple of scenes from the movie thanks to reading and re-reading this edition long before actually watching the movie.
Such a strange, wild book. 21 is the age of mandatory death., the triumph of youth. Feels very weird, today, in our sometimes gerontocratic governments. You’ll never get away from a homer, homer, homer. Casual use of drugs. Casual sex. It’s a good thing that my parents never knew what was in the book, they’d have been shocked. A breakneck plot and scenes all across the country, from domed cities to the frozen prison of hell to Crazy Horse and the Thinker, to a Civil War re-enactment with robots!
I did visit Crazy Horse in 2008, inspired by the novel, and was disappointed in how slow the construction has gone (far different than in the Logan’s Run timeline). It’s…worse than a tourist trap, somehow. Alas.
But the movie is something else. The future as a giant enclosed shopping mall. Lots of things missing from the books and a very different set of confrontations–the original book has a fight with a tiger, but the movie has…house cats? And the utter disappointment that while in the book some people are escaping and becoming free, in the movie, apparently, they all were frozen into frozen food by Box, who was turned from a chilling sadist into a figure of comedy in the movie. And yet like the book, the movie subtly is suggesting that the current world order cannot stand, and in fact must change, or else.
Yes, this birthday turned into a Logan’s Run’s remembrance rather than a Nolan remembrance. Nolan died in 2021. Requiescat in pace.
The SimpsonsTreehouse of Horror VIII “The HΩmega Man” Original Kang and Kudos Production Cel (Fox, 1997). This original production cel from The Simpsons episode “Treehouse of Horror VIII” (Season 9, Episode 4) features the iconic alien duo Kang and Kodos Johnson from Rigel 7. Taken from the first segment, “The HΩmega Man,” this rare cel captures their brief yet hilarious appearance as they witness Springfield’s demise from space. In the segment, France launches a neutron bomb at Springfield after Mayor Quimby insults the French with a “frog legs” joke. As the bomb travels through space, it flies past Kang and Kodos’ flying saucer, prompting Kang to exclaim, “What the hell was that?” This humorous moment occurs near the 2:58 timestamp, adding to the duo’s memorable cameos.
(12) AHH, ROMANCE. Booklegger tells Facebook readers how a bookstore figured into a couple’s anniversary celebration.
A few days ago I noticed a customer browsing the shelves in the science fiction/fantasy section. I asked him if there was anything I could help him find. “No, I’m doing fine, thanks,” he responded,” “but actually I do have a question I wanted to ask you.” His expression was animated and I wondered where this was heading.
He went on to tell me that he and his girlfriend were approaching their first anniversary, and that they had come to Booklegger on their first date. They were planning on re-creating that first date by visiting Dick Taylor for chocolates, and then coming to our store. He had created a little 42 page book for her as an anniversary gift, and he wondered if he could come in on the morning of their anniversary and plant the book on our shelves for her to find when they came to our shop later in the day.
I was 100% on board with this idea! What a compliment that they had their first date at our place, and what a sweet, creative surprise to mark the occasion. So this morning just as we opened Kiloe came in and showed me the book that he had created. 42 pages of things that he adores about Sarah, inside jokes between them, remembrance of fun things they’ve done together etc. And yes, it’s 42 things because they are both fans of Douglas Adams. He planted the book between Jim Butcher titles, knowing that she would browse that area….
Annualized revenue for public companies exposed to the build-out of AI infrastructure increased by over $340 billion from 2022 through 2024Q4 (and is projected to increase by almost $580 billion by end-2025). In contrast, annualized real investment in AI-related categories in the US GDP accounts has only risen by $42 billion over the same period. This sharp divergence has prompted questions from investors about why US GDP is not receiving a larger boost from AI….
Or, as I think it was Cory Doctorow posted months ago, they haven’t come up with a real, usefull killer usage for the thing. I am reminded of a news story on the radio in the early oughts, after the tech bubble collapsed, som3eone saying “they were spending money like mad, making fancy websites… and hoping that they’d eventually find a way to monetize it (they didn’t).
(14) WATER IN THE EARLY UNIVERSE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] One of the determinants many think is the need for water for life.
Of course, if you are not a primacy of water person then this news will be of lesser import…
Scientists from the University of Portsmouth have discovered that water was already present in the Universe 100-200 million years after the Big Bang.
The discovery means habitable planets could have started forming much earlier – before the first galaxies formed and billions of years earlier than was previously thought.
It is the first time water has been modelled in the primordial universe.
According to the researchers’ simulations, water molecules began forming shortly after the first supernova explosions, known as Population III (Pop III) supernovae. These cosmic events, which occurred in the first generation of stars, were essential for creating the heavy elements – such as oxygen – required for water to exist.
The key finding is that primordial supernovae formed water in the Universe that predated the first galaxies.
Dr Daniel Whalen, from the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation
Dr Whalen said: “Before the first stars exploded, there was no water in the Universe because there was no oxygen. Only very simple nuclei survived the Big Bang – hydrogen, helium, lithium and trace amounts of barium and boron.
“Oxygen, forged in the hearts of these supernovae, combined with hydrogen to form water, paving the way for the creation of the essential elements needed for life.”…
A privately owned lunar lander touched down on the moon with a drill, drone and rovers for NASA and other customers Thursday, but quickly ran into trouble and may have fallen over.
Intuitive Machines said it was uncertain whether its Athena lander was upright near the moon’s south pole — standing 15 feet (4.7 meters) tall — or lying sideways like its first spacecraft from a year ago. Controllers rushed to turn off some of the lander’s equipment to conserve power while trying to determine what went wrong.
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Mark Barsotti, 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 Jayn.]
…As you explain in the intro, science fiction can serve as a “blueprint, warning, forecast, wish-dream, and counterfactual” (8). How does the alt-right, as part of its interpretive project, reconceptualize the purpose of science fiction? Can it be self-critical?
The alt-right often sees science fiction as a prefiguration of the destiny that white men must realize. They have a very crude view of culture: it either moralizes or demoralizes white people. They’re therefore only interested in science fiction insofar as it either inspires them to greatness or stands in the way of their greatness. For all their sophistry, it’s a very crude way of thinking, one that precludes any kind of critical self-reflection or openness to the kinds of thought experiments that science fiction so often affords….
Why do you think the alt-right is drawn to speculative fiction in lieu of other genres?
I should say that fantasy is as important in the history of US and European fascism, but I focused on science fiction in this book because it seemed like a more understudied aspect of the movement, perhaps because it is so counterintuitive. Fascism has always been a form of modernism: it promises a brand-new future that will be totally different from the present in important ways. Science fiction therefore provides a whole host of imaginative figures for this exciting new future (e.g., Nazis in space). Plus, science fiction is such a ubiquitous feature of cultural life post-Star Wars that it allows them to insert themselves into conversations where they otherwise would not be invited….
(2) SLIM PICKINGS FOR MOST ARTISTS AT CONS. Inkwell: Marketing for Artists recently posted a YouTube video sharing income and other business data gathered from convention artists: “900+ Artists polled – Making Money As a Convention Artist”. The raw data and responses collected from all 938 contributors in this video can be viewed on Google Sheets.
Sometimes the algorithm skips the foreplay and injects the dopamine straight into my carotid artery. Yesterday, Instagram showed me a video by Dinesh Shamdasani, a collector flipping through his recently-acquired copy of Weird Tales, February 1928. I did several double takes throughout the video, because — well — the evil entity on the cover is a table.
Like, a table table. Which is strange, since Weird Tales covers typically just feature bare-assed women being chained to giant idols or hurled into acid pits by ethnically-suspect viziers. So this one’s a departure from the norm, for sure.
In our current timeline, Weird Tales Feb. 1928 (you can peruse the issue here) commands historical importance because it premiered H.P. Lovecraft’s watershed story “The Call of Cthulhu.” The story marks the first appearance of the eldritch god, and is one of Lovecraft’s first movements toward the cosmic mythos that would become, as Michel Houellebecq puts it, “a gigantic dream machine,” the supreme articulation of human anxiety within a howling world “where fear mounts in concentric circles, layer upon layer… [and] our only destiny is to be pulverized and devoured.”¹
None of which actually matters, however, because (as mentioned before) the cover illustration of Weird Tales Feb. ‘28 is a man fighting a table….
Join Adam Nimoy as he discusses his poignant memoir The Most Human and explores their complicated relationship.
While the tabloids and fan publications portrayed the Nimoys as a “close family,” to his son, Leonard Nimoy was a total stranger. The actor was as inscrutable as the iconic half-Vulcan science officer he portrayed on Star Trek, even to those close to him. Join Adam Nimoy as he discusses his poignant memoir The Most Human and explores their complicated relationship and how it informed his views on marriage, parenting, and later, sobriety. Discover how the son of Spock learned to navigate this tumultuous relationship and how he was finally able to reconcile with his father — and with himself.
Copies of The Most Human: Reconciling with My Father, Leonard Nimoywill be available for purchase in our Museum Store on 01/30/2025.
Presentation will begin at 7:00 pm; PMH Galleries will be open for viewing at 6:00 pm.
…Sesame Street is a bit like a daily Laugh-In for the five-and-under set. It’s a conglomeration of short pieces, most of them independent of each other and self-contained. Some pieces have live actors in them, some have puppets, some have both people and puppets interacting with each other. These pieces are interspersed with animated or live-action movies that are a bit like commercials – if commercials taught “counting to ten” or “words that start with the letter ‘D’”. Many of the pieces are funny, and some have an unexpectedly surreal aspect that I found wildly entertaining….
…For example, the first skit features “Gordon”, one of the actors, playing a good-natured joke on “Ernie”, one of the puppets (voiced by Jim Henson). Indicating four items, three plastic instruments and a banana, Gordon asks Ernie which one doesn’t belong with the others. Ernie chooses the banana, carefully explaining his reasoning. Gordon suggests Ernie try playing the banana like an instrument, whereupon Gordon honks the bike horn he has hidden behind his back, leading the startled Ernie to believe that his banana can toot, until Gordon shows him the trick.
Ernie chortles, and the two of them decide to play the same joke on another puppet, a passing blue monster. The blue monster, however, proceeds to eat the plastic instruments and somehow play the banana such that lovely flute music fills the air, leaving Gordon and Ernie very confused. “Nice tone on that banana,” the monster comments, “and the harmonica was delicious!”…
(6) SALOMON LICHTENBERG DIES. Longtime fan Salomon Lichtenberg died January 3. Jacqueline Lichtenberg told Facebook readers today:
It is with great sadness that I must say my husband Salomon, passed on. It was peacefully in his sleep without pain or suffering, about 4:15 PM Friday and the burial was Sunday at Mt.Sinai Cemetary in Phoenix.
He was on hospice for about 4 years, gradually declining. It was a perfect textbook case, a well traveled and well known path.
(7) JUL OWINGS OBITUARY. Baltimore SF Society member Jul Owings died January 5. Dale S. Arnold’s tribute is here on File 770.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
January 6, 1905 — Eric Frank Russell. (Died 1978.)
Let’s talk about the British writer Eric Frank Russell. His first published piece of fiction was in the first issue of Tales of Wonder called “The Prr-r-eet” eighty-eight years ago. (Please don’t tell me it was about cats.) He also had a letter of comment in Astounding Stories that year. He wrote a lot of such comments down the years according to ISFDB.
Just two years later, his first novel, Sinister Barrier, would be published as the cover story as the first issue of Unknown. His second novel, Dreadful Sanctuary, would be serialized in Astounding, Unknown’s sister periodical in 1948.
At Clevention, “Allamagoosa” would win a Short Story Hugo. The Great Explosion novel garnered a Prometheus Hall of Fame Award.
Now let’s note some reworkings he did as I like them a lot. Men, Martians and Machines published in 1955 is four related novellas of space adventures at their very best.
The 1956 Three to Conquer, nominated for a Hugo at NY Con II is a reworking of the earlier Call Him Dead magazine serial that deals with an alien telepath and very well at that. Finally Next of Kin, also known as The Space Willies, shows him being comic, something he does oh so well. It was a novella-length work in Astounding first.
And then there’s the Design for Great-Day novel which was written by Alan Dean Foster. It’s an expansion by him based off a 1953 short story of the same name by Russell. I’m pretty familiar with what Foster has done but this isn’t ringing even the faintest of bells. Who’s read it?
He wrote an extraordinary amount of short stories, around seventy by my guess.
Short Stories Collection is the only one available at the usual suspects. He’s an author who needs a definitive short story collection done for him. Also available from the usual suspects is Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell contains five of his novels including Wasp which considered his best one.
Russell with Bea Mahaffey who was active in early fandom and was an assistant editor for Ray Palmer after he left Amazing Stories for Clark Publications.
(10) THE MOST CLICKBAITY DAYS IN HISTORY. I’m sorry, I’ll read that again: “5 of the Strangest Days in History” as ranked by History Facts. Don’t be surprised if their standard for what’s strange seems much milder than yours.
March 12, 1951: Two Dennis the Menaces
If you’re from the United States, you may have a very different idea of the cartoon character Dennis the Menace than someone from the United Kingdom. In America, Dennis is a baby-faced blonde boy, a lovable scamp who gets into trouble but is ultimately endearing. The British Dennis the Menace, on the other hand, is a violent bully with a grumpy expression and a hunched posture.
The weirdest part is that neither Dennis came first: They debuted at the same time, with no coordination, on March 12, 1951. The American Dennis was syndicated to 16 newspapers, while the British Dennis was in a weekly comic book magazine called The Beano. It’s a bizarre coincidence, but rarely causes confusion — when the 1993 American film Dennis the Menace was released across the pond, it was just called Dennis.
(11) THE CURSED RING. [Item by Steven French.] This is an old (and disputed) story but it bears repeating: “The Vyne” at Atlas Obscura.
The Vyne, a grand Tudor mansion, is steeped in history and intrigue. Its elegant architecture, exquisite gardens, and fascinating artifacts offer a glimpse into the lives of its former inhabitants. However, within its historied walls is an intriguing ring wrapped in a story of gods, curses, and theft, a ring that some claim was an inspiration for one of the most iconic objects in literature.
Do bad superhero movies kill Hollywood careers? It’s an interesting question given that George Clooney is still hovering elegantly in the A-list sphere almost three decades after Batman & Robin turned the Caped Crusader into a neon-lit fashion faux pas. Clooney, who once apologised for the film as if it were an embarrassing yearbook photo, went on to redefine himself as a Hollywood powerhouse, proving that even the worst bat-nippled blunders can’t keep a true star down. Halle Berry, who headlined the worst Catwoman movie in history, still turns up every now and again on Netflix. Ryan Reynolds has made light of insipid early turns in 2011’s Green Lantern (and indeed as a mostly mute Deadpool in the rubbish 2009 ensemble effort X-Men Origins: Wolverine) with three well-received solo turns as the merc with a mouth. And this week, Jason Momoa has signed on to star as blue-skinned cigar-chomping alien Lobo in the forthcoming DC entry Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, despite appearing in one of the most poorly received superhero flicks of all time, the execrable Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, in 2023.
All of which should perhaps make us feel even sorrier for one Jesse Eisenberg, who recently told the Armchair Expert podcast that he has come to terms with the fact that his role as Lex Luthor in the disastrous 2016 DC entry Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice significantly derailed his career. “I was in this Batman movie and the Batman movie was so poorly received, and I was so poorly received,” Eisenberg said. “I’ve never said this before, and it’s kind of embarrassing to admit, but I genuinely think it actually hurt my career in a real way, because I was poorly received in something so public.”…
(13) FUTURE SPACE STATIONS. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] Yahoo! reports “The billionaires and tech barons vying to build a private space station”.Which, really, NASA should be leading, but everything should be outsourced, for ROI. (Please read what happened with the railroads after the Civil War…)
After three decades circling Earth, in 2031 the International Space Station (ISS) will be handed its last rites. Some time in 2030, astronauts will depart the space station for the final time, and a docked SpaceX craft will provide a shunt of rocket thrust to move the ISS into a lower orbit.
As it hits the outer atmosphere, the station will begin to break up, before a final descent in which the ISS, which is approximately the size of a football field, will be ditched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.
Until now, space stations have been the preserve of nation states, with only the ISS and China’s Tiangong in operation. The stations have required billions of dollars of investment and dozens of rocket launches.
But that could be about to change. Just as SpaceX has triggered a flood of funding into private rocket companies, private space stations have been raising billions of dollars in an effort to build future hubs – and even one day cities – in orbit.
Axiom Space, a US business aiming to build its own station, has raised more than $500m (£400m). Vast, a space business backed by crypto billionaire Jed McCaleb, is plotting two stations before the end of the decade. Gravitics, meanwhile, has raised tens of millions of dollars for its modular space “real estate”. Nasa itself, along with other space agencies, is planning a further station, Lunar Gateway, which will orbit the Moon.
Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin has also announced plans to build a space station by 2027, called Orbital Reef, which it has described as an orbital “mixed-use business park”….
(14) HOOPING IT UP. [Item by Steven French.] This is one of those cases where certain commentators might decry the ‘waste’ of research funds on such an apparently trivial topic but which, it turns out, could have significant technological implications. “How does a hula hoop master gravity? Mathematicians prove that body shape matters” at Phys.org.
“We were surprised that an activity as popular, fun, and healthy as hula hooping wasn’t understood even at a basic physics level,” says [Associate Professor and study co-author] Ristroph.
“As we made progress on the research, we realized that the math and physics involved are very subtle, and the knowledge gained could be useful in inspiring engineering innovations, harvesting energy from vibrations, and improving robotic positioners and movers used in industrial processing and manufacturing.”
…An intense one-minute teaser was released Monday on the Max YouTube channel, showing flashes of what to expect in the new season. Notably, the teaser re-states the month of April as the Season 2 release date without naming a specific date.
The official logline for Season 2 reads: “Five years after the events of the first season, Joel and Ellie are drawn into conflict with each other and a world even more dangerous and unpredictable than the one they left behind.”…
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Rich Lynch, Michael J. Walsh, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]
(1) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to split a pastrami sandwich with Martha Thomases in Episode 244 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast. Edelman adds, “Those not interested in my conversation with a comics guest because they only care about science fiction should know I devoted seven minutes of the intro to eulogizing Barry Malzberg.”
Martha Thomases
Martha Thomases is a freelance journalist who has been published in the Village Voice, the New York Daily News, High Times, Spy, the National Lampoon, and more. She’s a VP of Corporate Communications at ComicMix.com as well as a weekly contributor there. From 1990-1999 she was Publicity Manager at DC Comics. She also worked as a researcher and assistant for author Norman Mailer on several of his books, including the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Executioner’s Song, On Women and Their Elegance, and Harlot’s Ghost. She created Dakota North with Tony Salmons for Marvel. Next year, A Wave Blue World will publish Second-Hand Rose, her graphic novel with Richard Case.
We discussed her theory that your popularity in high school determines whether you’ll move to New York, why she was into DC rather than Marvel at the start of her comics fandom, Denny O’Neil’s explanation of the true difference between Metropolis and Gotham City, the realization she had at 35 as to the true reason her parents allowed her to read comics, the weirdness of Little Lotta and Baby Huey, why she was more nervous meeting Denny O’Neil than she was meeting Norman Mailer, how Dakota North was born, our mutual love for the She-Hulk TV series, selling comics to comics fans vs. selling them to potential readers who don’t yet know they’d like comics, and much more.
…PageTurner operates as a type of pig butchering scam (where victims are tricked into handing over their assets via escalating demands for money). The most elaborate of its schemes involve multiple false identities and company names, with victims handed around between them. Most writers I’ve heard from were fleeced to the tune of low- to mid-four figures, but many lost substantially more–tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands in some cases. The largest payout I know of was extracted from an author who was recruited to buy costly re-publishing packages, then pressured into paying for hugely expensive marketing schemes, and ultimately targeted by one of PageTurner’s fake film companies and convinced to purchase a screenplay, treatment, PR campaign, and more, all for eye-popping amounts of money. All told, this author lost in excess of $600,000….
…On December 9, 2024, Sordilla was arrested in California, along with Innocentrix VP Bryan Navales Tarosa (who, like many individuals involved in these scams, started his career as a sales rep for Author Solutions). Sordilla and Tarosa are both residents of the Philippines, but were visiting the USA at the time.
One day later, authorities arrested Gemma Traya Austin, a US resident and PageTurner’s registered agent, who according to an August indictment in the US Court of the Southern District of California of all three individuals on charges of mail and wire fraud, was responsible for PageTurner’s US bank accounts. (These have been seized; they reportedly contained nearly $5 million.)…
(3) MORE RICHARD MORGAN. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Having got through to the semi-finals of the BBC’s Christmas University Challenge a few days ago, SF author, Richard Morgan’s Queen’s College Cambridge team last night (2nd January) faced Churchill College Cambridge (that’s twice they have faced a fellow Cambridge college). This time they did not get it so easy as the two teams of alumni (the regular University Challenge has teams of current students) were more even matched. Indeed, Richard’s performance was not so sure-footed. There was even one SF/F book related question on horror to which Richard gave the answer ‘Arthur Machen’ when in fact it should have been M. R. James….
In news which came as a surprise to many Dungeons & Dragons fans, Hasbro recently announced a licensing deal with the gambling company Global Games to produce a number of new products. This includes an upcoming digital slot machine entitled Dungeons & Dragons: Tales of Riches, which will be hitting casinos and online iGaming platforms sometime in early 2025.
It’s a somewhat controversial move for Hasbro given the often negative connotation of gambling among many consumers, but also speaks to some of the growing financial pressures Hasbro is facing and the value of licensing global intellectual properties like D&D….
… It’s not entirely clear why Hasbro has decided to license out the Dungeons & Dragons brand to a global online casino distributor, but like many business decisions it likely comes down to dollars and cents. Global gambling is a highly lucrative market and the potential licensing revenue could be significant (although neither Games Global or Hasbro has provided any information on the financial details)….
…My office is designed so that when I am sitting at the desk I can reach and grab any resource material or actual Philip K. Dick novel without getting up.
You can see that I have the books in three stacks. Between the stacks, I have the seven books I most often use or reference. (Pot-Healer, Time Slip, Scanner Darkly, Eye in the Sky, High Castle, Do Androids, and my favorite, Three Stigmata)….
(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Born January 3, 1892 — J.R.R. Tolkien. (Died 1973.)
By Paul Weimer: If Isaac Asimov (see January 2nd’s scroll) was one of the two midwives of getting me into science fiction. J.R.R. Tolkien was one of the two midwives of getting me into fantasy (the other, absolutely no surprise to any of you, was Roger Zelazny). I think I’ve told the story before of how I got into his work. The next weekend, the newest issue of TV proclaimed that they were going to show all three Tolkien movies — The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Return of the King. I had a week, friends as a ten-year-old reader of genre to read the extant Tolkien canon.
I read The Hobbit, and then blitzed through The Lord of the Rings in short order. I bounced off of The Silmarillion and would not try it again for another decade. But I felt armed and ready for the animated movies.
Lord, I was not ready for “Where there’s a Whip, there’s a Way”. But, then, no one really is.
But back to Tolkien himself, he was in fact, my ur-Epic Fantasy as well as being the ur-Epic Fantasy for most of modern fiction. I measured a lot of the epic fantasy of the 80’s and 90’s by the roads of Middle Earth. His worldbuilding, his prose, his iconic and mythic writing draws me in again, and again, and again.
J.R.R. Tolkien
(7) COMICS SECTION.
xkcd teaches us how to fold an Origami Black Hole. (Don’t miss the note that appears when you mouse over the cartoon.)
(8) SFF ON JEOPARDY! [Item by David Goldfarb.] This was the final of the “Second Chance” tournament, in which 9 players who had come in second in regular play were brought back to compete for a spot in the upcoming Wild Card tournament. The first round of play had a category “Sci-Fi Fill In”. The players took it in reverse order.
$1000: Richard K. Morgan’s tale of cyberwarriors: “Altered ___ “
$800: By Ursula K. Le Guin: “The Left Hand of ___ “
Colleen Matthews gave us “What is ‘Darkness’?”
$600: Rick Deckard is on the hunt: “Do Androids Dream of ___ ___ “
Colleen knew it was ‘Electric Sheep’.
$400: A Harlan Ellison classic: “I Have No Mouth & I Must ___ “
Will Yancey tried “What is ‘Speak’?” but of course this was wrong. Colleen and Kaitlin didn’t know this either, so it was a triple stumper. (Honestly I think this was a misstep by the clue-setters in terms of difficulty.)
$200: A full-course meal available from Douglas Adams: “The Restaurant at the End of the ___ “
Colleen got it: “What is ‘the Universe’?”
(9) KEEPING DOCTORS AWAY. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Apple+ is free this weekend (Jan 3-5):
Colonel Chris Hadfield is a former fighter pilot who became an astronaut and served as a commander of the International Space Station (ISS). While in orbit he became a social media star, posting breath-taking pictures of earth, as well as videos demonstrating practical science and playing his guitar.
These days, the Canadian invests in businesses and has written several best-selling fiction and non-fiction books.
In this programme, Chris Hadfield tells Russell Padmore how he was influenced by Star Trek, and the Apollo missions to the moon, as a child. He outlines why he welcomes private investment in space and he explains how he has become known for being the musical star in orbit.
The discovery of a “prehistoric highway” in the United Kingdom could reveal more about how dinosaurs traveled millions of years ago.
(12) WHY WASN’T I TOLD? The New York Times says there’s Broadway production of Our Town with Jim Parsons as the Stage Manager, and it’s closing January 19. The supporting cast includes some other notables from TV like Richard Thomas and Katie Holmes.
Kenny Leon brings Thornton Wilder’s microcosmic drama back to Broadway, starring Jim Parsons (“The Big Bang Theory”) as the Stage Manager. Zoey Deutch and Ephraim Sykes play the young lovers, Emily Webb and George Gibbs, with Richard Thomas and Katie Holmes as Mr. and Mrs. Webb; Billy Eugene Jones and Michelle Wilson as Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs; Donald Webber Jr. as Simon Stimson and Julie Halston as Mrs. Soames. (Through Jan. 19 at the Barrymore Theater.) Read the review.
[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Daniel Dern, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Nancy Lebovitz, Nickpheas, David Goldfarb, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Patrick Morris Miller.]
(1) DYSON SWARM GAME – PLAY FREE. Joe Stech of Compelling Science Fiction today announced that his online Dyson Swarm Game is ready to play.
Happy New Year! Late is better than never, right? You can now play Dyson Swarm here! The game takes less than an hour for a full playthrough.
Here’s a quote that I love from MR, one of the beta testers for the game:
“As someone who does not really consume hard science fiction whatsoever, I felt delightfully bewildered by everything that was happening, and I enjoyed the gameplay, it made me feel like I was playing cookie clicker yet somehow also being productive and learning things”
This is exactly what I was trying to achieve — I want players to have fun and learn about the hard science fiction concepts I love! I based all my calculations for the game on Gerard K. O’Neill’s original 1974 paper “The Colonization of Space”, so the mass numbers are all fairly accurate.
…Dyson Swarm is an incremental (clicker) game about dismantling the solar system in order to completely envelop the sun in space habitats. You start as a simple game developer, and progress through stages, building up resources as you go along.
I originally thought that development would only take 10-20 hours, but the scope of the game ballooned, and ultimately I ended up spending closer to 70 hours developing the game (the entirety of which were spent after my wife and kids went to sleep at night, which is my excuse if you encounter a bug). Effort estimates are one of the most difficult parts of software engineering!…
(2) OUR SAGA. Christopher Lockett thinks about Sam Gamgee and the story we’ve landed in: “Of Elections and Stewed Rabbit” at The Magical Humanist.
…Preparing a rabbit stew, Sam laments the lack of taters. The nominally reformed Gollum, now going by his original name Sméagol, expresses confusion. “What’s taters, precious?” To which Sam spells out, “Po—ta—toes … The Gaffer’s delight, and rare good ballast for an empty belly.” The film embellishes this exchange with the oft-memed line “Boil ‘em, mash ‘em, stick ‘em in a stew.”
This is one of my favourite lectures to deliver. I begin with a discussion of Tolkien’s use of food in LOTR—or more specifically, the fact that he rarely goes into detail about food.1 That hobbits love to eat is a fact often repeated, but with the exceptions of two feasts of mushrooms early in Fellowship, we don’t get many menu details. Unlike, say, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, which doesn’t go more than a few pages without a lavish description of a capon roasted with honey and crusted with herbs, or the Harry Potter novels with their feasts magically heaped on the groaning tables of Hogwarts, Tolkien is sparing in his depictions of food. He mostly reserves his considerable descriptive talents for wilderness and landscape. All of which makes this moment of Sam’s cookery stand out….
… In this respect, he is not unusual in children’s literature, which often features unlikely heroes. Nevertheless, Gandalf brings Bilbo on board almost as a self-conscious rejection of certain narrative conventions, noting that their party can hardly be expected to assault Smaug the Dragon head-on. “That would be no good,” Gandalf points out, “not without a mighty Warrior, even a Hero. I tried to find one, but warriors are too busy fighting one another in distant lands, and in this neighbourhood heroes are scarce.” These Warriors and Heroes, presumably, are those whom Sam mentions actively seeking adventures: “I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them.” By contrast, in “the tales that really mattered”—which I take to mean stories of actual historical significance—folk “seem to have been just landed in them.”…
(3) NOT THE FANDOM HE SEES IN THE MIRROR. {Item by Andrew Porter.] BBC Sounds shares The Forum episode “The rise of fans and fandom”. Mostly concerned with pop star and media fandom. Science Fiction and Comics fans never mentioned. Fanzines are mentioned, about 15 minutes in, but only in connection with Star Trek fandom in the 1960s. Comic-Con mentioned about 35 minutes in. No relationship between cosplay and earlier SF/Comics fandom.
When the writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed off his most famous literary creation, Sherlock Holmes, readers were so angry that thousands cancelled their subscriptions to the magazine in which the stories appeared. The editor and Conan Doyle himself were overwhelmed with letters from a furious public – fans who instead of accepting the death of their favourite fictional character then started to write and share their own stories featuring Holmes. They eventually formed clubs and appreciation societies, brought together by a common interest.
This practice is something we recognise today across the globe. In areas as diverse as sport, music, film and TV (to mention just a few), fans are not just passive consumers as the recent activities of Swifties (Taylor Swift fans) demonstrate. They’re actively engaged, creating content of their own and connecting with others to nurture a shared identity. The internet has made that easier than ever before, with fans now using their platform to influence political discourse too.
Iszi Lawrence discusses the history and inexorable rise of fandom, with guests Paul Booth, Professor of Media and Pop Culture at DePaul University in Chicago in the United States; Areum Jeong, Assistant Professor of Korean Studies at Arizona State University in the US and Corin Throsby from the University of Cambridge in the UK, whose research focuses on Romantic literature and early celebrity culture.
The programme also includes contributions from Julian Wamble, Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University and the creator of Critical Magic Theory: An Analytical Harry Potter Podcast, and listeners around the world share their fan stories.
Produced by Fiona Clampin for the BBC World Service.
(5) GEORGE FOLSEY JR. (1939-2024). Film editor and producer George Folsey, Jr. died December 30 reports Deadline. He worked on many of John Landis’ projects.
… [In 1967] Folsey Jr edited and was an executive producer on Schlock, a sci-fi horror comedy that marked the feature debut of a 21-year-old named John Landis. It started a collaboration that would eventually include editing Landis’ pics The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978), The Blues Brothers (1980) and the “Thriller” music video Landis directed for Michael Jackson, which became a worldwide phenomenon when it debuted in 1983.
Folsey also produced the Landis movie An American Werewolf In London (1981).
Folsey Jr was an assistant producer on Twilight Zone: The Movie, on which a helicopter crashed during the filming of Landis’ segment of the anthology film in July 1982 in Santa Clarita, CA. The crash, later found by the National Transportation Safety Board to have been caused by explosives used in the scene detonating too close to the low-flying copter, killed actor Vic Morrow and child actors Renee Shin-Yi Chen and Myca Dinh Le.
Landis, Folsey Jr, the pilot, the production manager and and explosives expert were all acquitted of manslaughter charges in the subsequent trial.
Folsey Jr went on to edit pics including … Steve Pink’s Hot Tub Time Machine (2010).
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is published. The book, by 20-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, is frequently called the world’s first science fiction novel. In Shelley’s tale, a scientist animates a creature constructed from dismembered corpses. The gentle, intellectually gifted creature is enormous and physically hideous. Cruelly rejected by its creator, it wanders, seeking companionship and becoming increasingly brutal as it fails to find a mate….
(7) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Ellen Kushner and Chocolate
Let’s talk about Ellen Kushner’s Riverside during the Winter and with their obsession with hot chocolate. Well let’s let her tell us about it…
IN THE MORNING, THERE WAS CHOCOLATE.
Betty seemed recovered from the previous day’s excesses. She must not have been working the party. The tray barely rattled as she set it down by the bed, and a heavenly rich scent filled the room.
I got up at once to engage with the little pot of bitter chocolate, set out with an entire jug of hot cream, as much sugar as I should care to put into it and, oh, the loveliest china cup to mix it in! I wished my mother were there to share it with me. I poured slowly, watching the cream swirl in the cup. It made the confusions and indignities of last night seem a little more worth it; I felt even better when Betty said, “And your new clothes have come, too.”
The chocolate was marvelous, but I gulped it down, assuring myself, There will be more again tomorrow, and tomorrow, and again the day after that. — The Privilege of The Sword
Now it’s not going to surprise you that the fans of Riverside have created a cuisine for it, all the result of a contest from The Fall of the Kings audiobook launch.
And Ellen being Ellen has kindly collected those recipes including of course those for hot chocolate on her excellent site. As she puts it there, “you’ll find everything from recipes and menus created by fans of the series to delight the Mad Duke Tremontaine and his Riverside friends, to ones created by friends of the author to keep her at her desk.”
And yes, I’m deeply, madly in love with all three novels but particularly The Privilege of The Sword because of its central character. I’ve read them many, many times and even the Suck Fairy gets a warm fuzzy feeling every time she reads them. I just started listening to them again for the first time in a decade or so. There was a full cast performance done, but it seems to have disappeared from this reality. No idea why.
If anyone has read the Tremontaine stories written by others, tell me about them please. I’ve not yet done so.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born January 1, 1954 – Midori Snyder, 71.
This first novel by Midori Snyder that I read was The Flight of Michael McBride, a three decades old work by her set in the old American West blending aspects of First Folk, Irish-American and Mexican folklore. A most excellent read.
Like Pamela Dean with her Tam Lin novel, she’s delved in Scottish myth as her first novel, Soulstring, was inspired by the Scottish legend of Tam Lin.
It was however not her first published work as that was “Demon” in the Bordertown anthology, the second of the Bordertown series. She would later do two more Bordertown stories, “Alison Gross” that’d be in Life on the Border, and “Dragon Child” in The Essential Bordertown.
Midori Snyder
Now don’t go looking for any of these as ePubs as, like the Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror series which I noted in Ellen Datlow’s Birthday a few days ago, ePub rights weren’t written into the publication contracts, and getting retroactive story rights, well, let’s not go there.
The newest Bordertown anthology, Welcome to Bordertown, is available as an ePub.
Next up is a trilogy of books that remind me of Jane Yolen’s The Great Altar Saga in tone — New Moon, Sadar’s Keep, and Beldan’s Fire. They were published as adult fantasy by Tor Books starting thirty-four years ago where they were The Queens’ Quarter Series. Interestingly they would be reprinted as young adult fantasy by Firebird Books just eighteen years ago as The Oran Trilogy. I see that Firebird is no longer the domain of Sharyn November which it was explicitly related for.
Now I positively adore The Innamorati which draws off the the Commedia dell’Arte theatre and the Roman legends as well. This stellar novel gained her Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature. It is without doubt her best novel – great characters, fascinating setting and a wonderful story.
Hannah’s Garden was supposed to be one of the novels inspired by a painting by Brian Froud. (I remember de Lint’s The Wild Wood and Windling’s The Wood Wife are two of the others but I forget the fourth. I know they got their novels with his art but I don’t if she or the fourth writer did.) It’s a more personal novel, more scary in tone I think than her other work is.
Except the Queen was written by her and Yolen. It’s a contemporary fantasy featuring two fey who are banished here in the guise of old women. I’ll not spoil what happened next. That was her last novel and it was published thirteen years ago.
She wrote the title short story for Windling The Armless Maiden and Other Tales for Childhood’s Survivors anthology anthology about child abuse survivors. Grim reading but recommended. It was nominated for an Otherwise Award.
It’s one of a not deep number of short stories she’s written, just fifteen, none collected so far.
She did the text to the “Barbara Allen” graphic story Charles Vess illustrated and first published in his Ballads chapbook in 1997 which I’ve got here somewhere. Let me go see… yes, it’s also in the autographed copy of The Book of Ballads that he sent me. That came out on Tor eighteen years ago. God, time goes by fast!
A check of ISFDB shows she retired from writing genre fiction fifteen years ago with her last work being ”The Monkey Bride” in Datlow and Windling’s The Beastly Bride: Tales of the Animal People.
Though not about her fiction writing, she would win a World Fantasy Award for her editorial work on Windling’s Endincott Studio website. It is a fascinating site covering what Terri, Midori and others think is interesting in fairy tales, myth, folklore, and the oral storytelling tradition. It is here now.
Dinosaur Comics finds a constant in time travel. Or maybe two.
(10) RPG IN 2025. [Item by Steven French.] “Games to look forward to in 2025: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33” in the Guardian. “An ambitious French epic inspired by 20th-century surrealist painters and the belle époque will push the turn-based RPG genre forward.”
In the 1990s, the turn-based RPG was unstoppable. From Pokémon to the multimillion-selling PlayStation Final Fantasy games, there was nothing cooler than vanquishing blocky beasts via drop down menus. Then came the new millennium. As computing power blossomed and western-made games rose in popularity, traditional Japanese-made RPGs slowly but surely fell out of fashion.
“What Final Fantasy was doing before – a more realistic, grounded take on the turn-based genre – now, nobody is doing that. And that’s where we want to be,” says Guillaume Broche, CEO of Sandfall Interactive and creative director of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Citing 2007’s Xbox 360 classic Lost Odyssey as the last truly high-budget turn-based RPG, the ex Ubisoft employee founded a studio with a mission to move the genre forward.
The result is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. The name is a baffling mouthful, but this ambitious French epic is inspired by France’s 20th-century belle époque and surrealist painters. A lavishly rendered party of adventurers move through a world that shimmers with a dreamlike quality, from a Little Mermaid-esque underwater kingdom to gothic, grandiose mansions.
It’s not just the setting and aesthetic that separate Expedition 33 from its peers, but its fast, fluid combat. “I’m a bit burned out on turn-based RPGs, because I’ve just played far too many,” Broche shrugs. “So for players like me, we wanted to make sure the turn-based battles feel more interactive and different, requiring skill and offering something fresh.”
(11) BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE EFFECTS. Animation World Network tells how “Framestore Crafts Some Ghostly and Ghastly VFX for ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’”. “Led by VFX supervisor Matthew Krentz, the studio delivers 253 visual effects shots on Tim Burton’s hit ‘Beetlejuice’ sequel, including baby Beetlejuice, a stop-motion Charles Deetz being bitten by a shark, and the famed ghost’s dismembered ex-wife Delores.”
… “We looked at the original movie quite a few times for references and one of things we specifically studied was when Beetlejuice [Michael Keaton] is shrunken down in the model,” remarks Krentz. “When he is digging into the grave, there are all these layers of Styrofoam and different practical things that made it look like a model. We tried recreating that when breaking up of the set piece when it cracks open and reveals Beetlejuice for the first time.” There were a couple of different elements that were part of the Beetlejuice reveal sequence. Krentz continues, “We did this earthquake that travels along the ground of the model, it breaks apart, and that’s when Beetlejuice comes into the attic for the first time. We had a full LiDAR scan of the practical model because we had to work with what they had shot. The model was built in two separate pieces that broke apart in the middle and separated out. The only thing that we did in the reveal was add some smoke and atmosphere. We had some uplighting to make it look more interesting. That portion of it was a lot more in-camera trickery versus the stuff we did when the camera is following along the middle of the model, which was completely digitized.” An interesting challenge was distinguishing the differences between a real and miniature house. “We had to make a miniature house look real and then dumb it down so you could see all of the subtleties that the modelmakers would have made.”…
(12) ON THE WEB. [Item by Steven French.] From The Smithsonian Magazine (the ‘discoveries’ in question are mostly from the ‘natural world’ rather than the lab and include examples such as antimicrobial secretions from ants): “Seven Scientific Discoveries From 2024 That Could Lead to New Inventions”.
[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]
(1) IS THIS MISSING, OR JUST HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT? Ross Douthat tells New York Times readers “We Need a Great American Fantasy” (link bypasses the paywall.)
Any cultural critic can complain, as I did in last weekend’s column, about the lack of creativity in American popular culture right now and the unmet “hunger for a certain kind of popular art” amid so much institutionalized unoriginality. It’s a bit harder to give writers or filmmakers specific marching orders. What exact kind of popular art are we missing? What specificachievement should American creators be aiming for?…
…If I were giving out assignments for would-be invigorators of our stuck culture, I would suggest new experiments in the national fantastic and a quest for the Great American Fantasy story….
… Just as political thinkers like Louis Hartz have argued that America lacks a true conservative tradition, being a liberal nation from the get-go, someone could argue that the Great American Fantasy is actually an impossibility, since the fantasy genre is concerned with the transition from the premodern to the modern, the enchanted to the disenchanted, and America has been disenchanted and commercial and capitalist from Day 1….
… Greer commends the musical “Hadestown” (which I have not seen) for trying to work in this terrain, and there are plenty of other examples of attempts at the American fantastic. I mentioned “Wicked” earlier because L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” is probably the most enduringly influential work of American subcreation, but a longer list would encompass pulp magazines and “Weird Tales” and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “John Carter of Mars” books and then work its way forward to Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker series, Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods” (an Englishman writing American fantasy) and, of course, Stephen King’s “Dark Tower” saga, with special nods to H.P. Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury for working in zones where fantasy blurs into horror or science fiction. (You could also argue that space opera, from “Flash Gordon” to “Star Wars,” is actually the key American contribution to the fantasy genre, but that would take a separate essay to unpack; you could argue that superheroes are the American form of fantasy, but you’d be wrong.)…
The Writers Guild of America has prohibited its members from working with Village Roadshow for the time being after the company refused to pay numerous writers.
“It has come to the Guild’s attention that over the last few months, Village Roadshow hasn’t paid writers on numerous projects,” the WGAW wrote in a statement on Saturday. “Village Roadshow owes writers compensation, interest and benefit contributions but has refused to pay. As such, the Guild has determined that Village Roadshow is not reliable or financially responsible and requires the posting of a bond to protect writers. Village Roadshow has, to date, refused to do so.”
As a result, the company is on the guild’s strike list until further notice.
“It is crucial that Village Roadshow be prevented from undercutting writers’ standards and conditions,” the statement continued. “Village Roadshow cannot be allowed to benefit from writing services provided by WGA members.”…
(3) ORC REAPPRAISAL. Robin Anne Reid links to “Orcs are People!” at Writing from Ithilien.
A list of sources that show how readers’ perceptions of Orcs have changed over time: first, from The Silmarillion Writers Guild: Orcs are People! The SWG does a fantastic job not only of archiving fanworks (all media), but inspiring them (through prompts and challenges), and curating Themed Collections (which are always acknowledged to be incomplete and request that readers provide additional items to add to the collection.
This collection by Curathol shows how some fans have challenged the all too common stereotypes of Orcs as “instruments of evil,” a view that Tolkien’s own writing challenges:
“Whatever Tolkien’s final thoughts, his works depict Orcs with an undeniable humanity—they sing songs, chafe against Big Bosses, and even seek vengeance for deaths of family or comrades. Whether by intent or no, they were people beyond being mere pawns driven by a Dark Lord’s will.
“Though within Tolkien’s world ‘Evil cannot create,’ it would do to remember that Morgoth was not wholly evil in his beginning. If they exist beyond Morgoth’s will, then by some measure they must also be Children of Eru. Even Finrod argued against the power of Morgoth to so wholly alter The One’s design. While the deepest philosophical questions of Orcs may remain unanswered by the Professor, his fans may, if not restore a lost humanity, firmly bestow one upon them….”
The live-action introduction to the new DC Universe got off to a massive start, according to James Gunn. The filmmaker announced on his social media platforms Friday that the “Superman” teaser trailer was viewed over 250 million times in its first day.
“Krypto really did take us home: With over 250 million views and a million social posts, ‘Superman’ is officially the most viewed and the most talked about trailer in the history of both DC and Warner Bros,” Gunn wrote. “This is because of all of you: thank you! We’re incredibly grateful and, most of all, excited to share this movie with you in July. Happy Holidays!”
According to Gunn, the Superman teaser views blew many of this year’s studio tentpoles out of the water. The first “Joker: Folie à Deux” trailer launched with 167 million views in its first 24 hours, for instance, while “Inside Out 2,” the highest-grossing movie of the year with $1.6 billion at the worldwide box office, launched its trailer to 157 million views. Marvel’s “Deadpool and Wolverine” trailer still holds the record for biggest trailer launch of all time with 365 million views….
Heavens! Oh, it’s you, Doctor Blathery: forgive me, you gave me an awful fright. You see it’s the queerest thing: this little stone statue I inherited with the cottage when I moved to this sleepy village from London (where everybody hates me because I’m from London), well, it seems to me … Oh, you shall call me half-mad! It seems to be moving around from room to room when I’m not looking. I swear it to you: last night, while I was reading by the fire and holding a handkerchief – which I do every night because it’s Victorian times and they haven’t invented telly yet – it was over on the dressing table, and now … why, it’s on the dining room chair! Doctor, you look shaken. Take a seat, I shall fetch you some brandy. Doctor: what happened to the charming young couple who lived here afore me all those years ago? You … you knew her, didn’t you?
Sorry, sorry. I slip into “Victorian voice” a lot at Christmas. Christmas, as you know, is the best time of the year – Coke adverts! Quality Street! One binbag for the recyclable wrapping paper and another, much plumper bag for the glossy stuff! – but it’s also a weirdly spooky one, and is arguably a better time to consume a ghost story than Halloween is. Thankfully. the BBC knows this, and so has been on-and-off commissioning a ghost story to marken the yule – no, I’ve gone Victorian again. Anyway, they started in 1971, did it until 1978, stopped until 2005, have been doing it sporadically since then, and a few years ago someone had the good sense to just hand the whole thing over to Mark Gatiss and go: “Mark, please Gatiss this as hard as you possibly can.” This is his seventh year doing just that.’…
After a five-year voyage alongside the resurgence of the Star Trek universe, Wil Wheaton’s tenure as host of The Ready Room has come to an end. The Star Trek aftershow, which premiered alongside Star Trek: Picard in early 2020, seemingly aired its final episode today, coinciding with the finale of Star Trek: Lower Decks. According to a report from Trek Core.
The 16-minute concluding episode focused on the animated series’ final chapter, featuring interviews with series leads Tawny Newsome (Mariner), Jack Quaid (Boimler), Noel Wells (Tendi), and Eugene Cordero (Rutherford). The cast reflected on the finale and the overall legacy of Lower Decks….
(8) AI REPLACING HUMANS IN MUSIC. [Item by John A Arkansawyer.] You get two free articles from Harper’s, and this one is worth using one of those. I hadn’t realized things were this far advanced. I feel like I should have guessed: “The Ghosts in the Machine, by Liz Pelly”. “Spotify’s plot against musicians.”
…Before the year [2017] was out, the music writer David Turner had used analytics data to illustrate how Spotify’s “Ambient Chill” playlist had largely been wiped of well-known artists like Brian Eno, Bibio, and Jon Hopkins, whose music was replaced by tracks from Epidemic Sound, a Swedish company that offers a subscription-based library of production music—the kind of stock material often used in the background of advertisements, TV programs, and assorted video content.
For years, I referred to the names that would pop up on these playlists simply as “mystery viral artists.” Such artists often had millions of streams on Spotify and pride of place on the company’s own mood-themed playlists, which were compiled by a team of in-house curators. And they often had Spotify’s verified-artist badge. But they were clearly fake. Their “labels” were frequently listed as stock-music companies like Epidemic, and their profiles included generic, possibly AI-generated imagery, often with no artist biographies or links to websites. Google searches came up empty….
… Then, in 2022, an investigation by the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter revived the allegations. By comparing streaming data against documents retrieved from the Swedish copyright collection society STIM, the newspaper revealed that around twenty songwriters were behind the work of more than five hundred “artists,” and that thousands of their tracks were on Spotify and had been streamed millions of times.
Around this time, I decided to dig into the story of Spotify’s ghost artists in earnest, and the following summer, I made a visit to the DN offices in Sweden. The paper’s technology editor, Linus Larsson, showed me the Spotify page of an artist called Ekfat. Since 2019, a handful of tracks had been released under this moniker, mostly via the stock-music company Firefly Entertainment, and appeared on official Spotify playlists like “Lo-Fi House” and “Chill Instrumental Beats.” One of the tracks had more than three million streams; at the time of this writing, the number has surpassed four million. Larsson was amused by the elaborate artist bio, which he read aloud. It described Ekfat as a classically trained Icelandic beat maker who graduated from the “Reykjavik music conservatory,” joined the “legendary Smekkleysa Lo-Fi Rockers crew” in 2017, and released music only on limited-edition cassettes until 2019. “Completely made up,” Larsson said. “This is probably the most absurd example, because they really tried to make him into the coolest music producer that you can find.”
Besides the journalists at DN, no one in Sweden wanted to talk about the fake artists….
(9) GEORGE ZEBROWSKI (1945-2024). Writer and editor George Zebrowski died December 20. His partner, Pamela Sargent, wrote on Facebook:
“On December 20, 2024, George Zebrowski, my beloved companion of almost sixty years, died peacefully in his sleep at the age of 78. George had been ailing for a while. On the day before his death, I visited him for the last time at the nursing home where he had been since late August, never imagining that it would be for the last time. Right now I have no more words.”
His first three published sff stories appeared in 1970, two co-authored with Jack Dann. His first published novel, Omega Point, came out in 1972. His book Brutal Orbits won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1999.
Three of his short stories, “Heathen God,” “The Eichmann Variations,” and “Wound the Wind,” were Nebula Award nominees.
He and Pamela Sargent produced three books in the Star Trek:TOS universe, and two books in the Star Trek:TNG universe.
His work as an anthology editor included three volumes of SFWA’s Nebula Awards series, and five volumes of Synergy: New Science Fiction.
He served on the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award jury from 2005-2013.
He was a past editor of the SFWA Bulletin. Zebrowski and Pamela Sargent jointly won the Service to SFWA Award in 2000.
(10) JENNIFER STEVENSON’S STAY HOME EGG NOG FLUFF. [Item by Jennifer Stevenson.] This eggnog was introduced to my Irish friends in a modest way, sort of, I know we’re only Yanks and so we’re amateur drinkers at best, and here you are trapped in Ohio for the holidays, so why not enjoy an American tradition? This was me, setting them up for the one-two punch. Here was punch number one:
1 fifth high-quality dark rum
1 fifth high-quality bourbon 1 dozen eggs, separated 1 to 2 quarts whipping cream 1 lb powdered sugar Nugmeg, cinnamon, star anise, and allspice to taste
Beat the sugar into the egg yolks. Add the alcohol slowly, then add the spices and mix thoroughly. Refrigerate at least an hour to “cure.” Two to five hours isn’t a bad thing.
When you’re half an hour from serving, pour the nog into a giant serving bowl.
Beat the whipping cream to stiff peaks. Fold the whipped cream into the nog.
Beat the egg whites until they’re stiff and fluffy. Fold them into the whipped cream + nog.
Serve in small cups and offer spoons. Garnish with a sprinkle of nutmeg.
You sort of eat this nog, rather than drink it. Stir it throughout your party to keep the nog mixed with the fluffy stuff.
If you have leftovers, i.e., if your friends are not hardened drunks who aren’t used to sticky Starbucks beverages, you can use the leftover nog (beaten well) as the egg+milk+sugar portion of a crepe recipe to feed any survivors in the morning.
We did this for our Irish friends, who got us up at an unconscionable hour on New Year’s Day to attend Mass. Seriously? So I gave them the hair of the dog, in the form of highly alcoholic crepes wrapped around hunks of ham. Worked pretty well.
[Reprinted from the archives of Sleeping Hedgehog. Jennifer Stevenson’sTrash Home Sex was shortlisted for the Locus First Fantasy Novel Award and longlisted for the Nebula two years running. Try her romantic fantasy series Hinky Chicago, which is up to five novels, her paranormal romances Slacker Demons, which are about retired deities who find work as incubi, or her paranormal women’s fiction series Coed Demon Sluts, about women solving life’s ordinary problems by becoming succubi. She has published more than 20 short stories.]
…Some of the best Far Side holiday strips reflected Gary Larson’s poignant and irreverent attitudes toward the traditions surrounding the holidays….
The list begins with Thanksgiving.
10. A Blacksmith Puts Olives on His Fingers During the First Thanksgiving
Comedian Zach Mander said in a viral TikTok that Jerry Seinfeld’s observational humor wouldn’t work today because anyone can quickly Google the answer to his questions, causing the joke to fall apart. The opposite can sometimes be true for the absurdist humor of The Far Side. While explaining a joke can often make it less funny, if what’s being described is background information you didn’t have or forgot about, Googling something after reading a Far Side comic strip can make it funnier on the second reading.
That said, sometimes a Far Side gag is exactly what it seems, and no Googling is needed, like in this Thanksgiving strip. There’s no hidden meaning behind blacksmith Thomas Sullivan putting five olives on the tips of his fingers. It’s a silly act that jokesters do in everyday life. It stands to reason that someone might’ve done it during a historical event that’s looked upon with reverence centuries later. While this is one of the better Far Side holiday strips, it’s lower tier among the best. Several other strips are sharper in their commentary and more amusing in their imagery.
A Ukrainian national guard brigade just orchestrated an all-robot combined-arms operation, mixing crawling and flying drones for an assault on Russian positions in Kharkiv Oblast in northern Ukraine.
“We are talking about dozens of units of robotic and unmanned equipment simultaneously on a small section of the front,” a spokesperson for the 13th National Guard Brigade explained.
It was an impressive technological feat—and a worrying sign of weakness on the part of overstretched Ukrainian forces. Unmanned ground vehicles in particular suffer profound limitations, and still can’t fully replace human infantry.
That the 13th National Guard Brigade even needed to replace all of the human beings in a ground assault speaks to how few people the brigade has compared to the Russian units it’s fighting. The 13th National Guard Brigade defends a five-mile stretch of the front line around the town of Hlyboke, just south of the Ukraine-Russia border. It’s holding back a force of no fewer than four Russian regiments.
That’s no more than 2,000 Ukrainians versus 6,000 or so Russians. The manpower ratio is roughly the same all along the 800-mile front line of Russia’s 34-month wider war on Ukraine. Russian troops still greatly outnumber Ukrainian troops, despite the Russians suffering around twice as many casualties as the Ukrainians since February 2022….
… In what amounted to a smaller-scale proof of concept for the recent combined-arms robot assault, a Ukrainian ground robot cleared a Russian trench in Kursk Oblast in western Russian back in September. Russia has attempted small-scale ground ’bot assaults of its own, but less successfully.
The problem, of course, is that while robots are adept at surveilling and attacking, they’re terrible at holding. To hold ground, armies put infantry in trenches. They sit, watch, wait and call for reinforcements when the enemy attacks. It’s tedious, taxing duty that requires constant vigilance.
Constant vigilance is difficult when a human operator is remotely observing the battlefield through the sensors of a maintenance-hungry ground robot.
Machines break down. And their radio datalinks are highly susceptible to enemy jamming, as the California think-tank RAND discovered when it gamed out a clash between hypothetical U.S. (“Blue”) and Russian (“Red”) army battalions partially equipped with armed ground drones. “Blue’s ability to operate was degraded significantly by Red’s jammers,” RAND concluded….
(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Apparently “Hanging with Doctor Z” is a thing. Here’s an example with the word Christmas in the title, but not in the dialog, which is mainly sexual innuendo. (Yeah, tell me you won’t be able to click on it fast enough…)
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Jennifer Stevenson, John A Arkansawyer, 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 Jayn.]
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.]
(1) AWARD UPDATE. Emily Hockaday, Analog/Asimov’s Senior Managing Editor, says the Analog Award for Emerging Black Voices usually presented at the City Tech Science Fiction Symposium has been put “on hiatus over 2025 due to personal commitments, but we hope to offer it again the following year.”
(2) CHRISTIE’SSFF ART AUCTION SCORECARD. Christie’s has posted the results of its December 12 “Science Fiction and Fantasy” auction. Sandra Miesel speculates, “The price for the Ender’s Game art must be some kind of record!” The John Harris cover art fetched ten times its estimated value.
[Simon Goquickly] Dear Mr Snarl, how wonderful to meet you in person. [Snarl] I need a job. [Simon Goquickly] Of course, of course and this is quite a resume you have here! [Snarl] I got the wizard to write it. [Simon Goquickly] Ah, I see – that would be Karl the Angstomancer, the cursed conjurer of Battlehaven. How is he these days? [Snarl] Dead. Eaten by a beetle. [Simon Goquickly] Oh dear. Eaten by beetles! What a ghastly fate. [Snarl] A bettle. Just the one. Karl was in very small pieces at the time….
…The clock is ticking and I need to teach Bradbury and I’m speed-reading a Vanity Fair piece with growing alarm. Had I wanted to know more than what I already knew about Cormac? What do we know about Thomas Pynchon, for instance? How much was life enhanced by reading those New York Times profiles of Joy Williams, Lorrie Moore, or Lore Segal?…
…I need to get to class. I’m walking and trying to puzzle out how I feel and why I think I am so mad. What do we search for in stories? It’s one thing to teach Bradbury’s ideas about state control and personal freedom. It’s another thing to walk to class and try to privately mourn… what? That Cormac was a bad dude? That one of my favorite writers was a monster? Here’s the deal: I do not know what to think and I can’t say exactly why….
..How much did it matter whether or not I had met the author? What role did imaginary or real people play in whether a book had the juice to keep us thinking about it years later? Why do stories stay with us and demand reading and re-reading? What was I learning as I struggled to reckon with what I knew and had not known about Cormac?…
…Just what am I getting at, with my paltry memories of famous writers? In my most cherished little stories, I seem to care whether or not writers were nice to me and people like me. The imbalance is inescapable. The world is cruel. Why do we write and why do we read? What power do we grant others over us? Especially when they’re so good at telling us stories we want to hear?…
Tensions over The Animation Guild‘s controversial new tentative contract spilled into public view on Tuesday as the ratification vote for the deal began.
Three members of the union’s sprawling negotiating committee posted on social media that they personally will be voting “no” on the tentative contract that they helped to bargain, primarily due to concerns about provisions covering generative AI. But that same day, the union’s chief negotiator said the agreement improved on recent deals “by a good margin” and warned that not ratifying the agreement could be “dangerous,” risking losing more work in Los Angeles.
The Animation Guild’s 56-person negotiating committee consisted of a “table team” of 29 members that met across the table with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and a support team of 27 members. Both teams weighed in on proposals and changes to proposals, but only the table team voted on the tentative agreement — and largely voted favor of the deal. Two of the negotiating committee members that posted on Tuesday were part of the support team, while one served on the table team.
“I believe the AI and outsourcing protections in this contract are not strong enough — and in my opinion — could lead to the loss of lots of jobs,” Mitchell vs. The Machines writer-director Mike Rianda posted on Instagram on Tuesday. Adding that there were gains in the contract, like pay increases and health benefits improvements, Rianda argued that the pact’s A.I. protections give “sole power to the employer to make us use A.I. however they see fit.”…
It’s been over twenty years since The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, and I’m not sure we’ll ever get that magic back. Director Peter Jackson couldn’t do it with the lackluster and tonally confused Hobbit trilogy. The Rings of Power on Amazon feels like a prime example of Mid TV where a lot of money was spent to make something that’s not bad, but also not all that interesting, and certainly not as good as the thing it’s meant to evoke. The best Lord of the Rings thing of the past twenty years is probably the video game Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, and even the story pales next to its gameplay mechanics.
While Lord of the Rings kicked off a string of fantasy film imitators throughout the 2000s and early 2010s, the future of fantasy storytelling on screen went to Game of Thrones. It pulled the genre in a more “realistic” direction meant to echo the violence and politicking of 15th century England, and others have assumed that fantasy will only appeal to modern audiences if it’s people using violence to jockey for position. This is a far cry from the Lord of the Rings, the world fell in love with where power is a corruptive force and inflicting violence, while necessary in war, is not necessarily what makes a hero.
Sadly, the new animated film The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim feels more in line with the hit HBO series of the 2010s than the hit Peter Jackson movies of the 2000s. Even though the animated movie, directed by Kenji Kamiyama, wears the clothing of Jackson’s movies with musical cues borrowed from Howard Shore’s unforgettable scores and Eowyn (Miranda Otto) providing the narration, these trappings only serve to highlight the distance between Rohirrim and the Oscar-winning trilogy….
…Plenty of the movers and shakers in Middle-earth are women, starting in the realm’s earliest history and carrying right through to the later times when the last of the Elves finally sailed into the West. The protectors of Doriath, the foe of Morgoth, and the slayer of the Nazgul were exploits carried out by the strongest women in Middle-earth.
Number one on the list is still waiting for her close-up:
Melian
Wife Of King Thingol And Mother Of Luthien
Out of all the notable characters in Middle-earth, Melian is one of the few who has yet to appear in any on-screen adaptations. A Maiar on the same level as the Wizards who would follow in her footsteps, Melian chose a different life when she arrived in Middle-earth. The Vala she served was Yavanna, and when she met Prince Elwe, who would eventually become King Thingol, she took on a mortal form to be his queen.
Melian not only protected her husband’s kingdom using her power, but she also mentored a young Galadriel, who would use the same magic to protect her realm of Lothlorien. Melain and Thingo had one child, a girl named Luthien, who would challenge her mother when it came to heroic exploits.
(8) SLF WANTS ART. The Speculative Literature Foundation has put out an open call for its “Illustration of the Year 2025”, a piece of original artwork combining fantasy and science fiction themes to be featured on the SLF website, monthly e-newsletter and social media accounts and used as a visual element of SLF’s marketing material and swag throughout the year. Submissions are being taken through January 15, 2025. The winner will be announced in February 2025. Full guidelines at the link.
The winning artist will receive $750.00 and will be announced, along with the selected artwork, on the SLF’s website and social media and in a press release.
At a small, unassuming exhibit in midtown Manhattan, you can see the lost translation of Homer’s single comic epic, judge the art design on Sylvia Plath’s unpublished manuscript Double Exposure – squabbled over by her mother and husband Ted Hughes, it supposedly disappeared in 1970 – or examine the one remaining copy of Aristotle’s Poetics II: On Comedy, the influential treatise on theater thought to have burned at a Benedictine Abbey in 1327 (at least, according to Umberto Eco’s 1980 novel The Name of the Rose). The extremely rare collection of books, on display at the Grolier Club until 15 February, spans texts from ancient Greece to 20,000 years in the future, when the Book of the Bene Gesserit populated the libraries of Dune. The one commonality? None of them exist….
…“It takes a certain suspension of disbelief to even consider having an exhibition of the imaginary,” said [Reid] Byers, a multi-hyphenate bibliophile who has also worked as a Presbyterian minister, a welder and a C language programmer, on a recent tour of the exhibition….
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Born December 12, 1976 — Tim Pratt, 48.
By Paul Weimer: In both his straight up name and his pen names, Pratt has written a slew of novels, having “graduated” to novels after a run of shorter fiction that culminated with his Hugo award winning story “Impossible Dreams”. That short story’s parallel universe heart is something that I see and encounter again and again in his fiction. Parallel universes, adjacent dimensions, demiplanes, and the like populate many of his novels, one way or another.
It was in his Pathfinder tie-in work that I first started reading his novels, proceeding through the kindle serial Heirs of Grace and into his even more ambitious work. I want to highlight these two.
The Axiom novels are a fun trio of space opera novels, revolving around a freight and salvage ship, the White Raven, accidentally finding the secret to a dread Alien race, the titular Axiom, whose awakening would spell doom for humanity. The crew of the White Raven, in a breezy trio of reads that belie their doorstopper status catapult themselves from frying pans to fires as they are literally on the front line of trying to protect humanity from an existential threat.
But it is the Doors of Sleep books that I think Pratt really hits all cylinders. The premise is deceptively simple, our protagonist Zaxony has, for reasons slowly revealed in the unfolding of the story, been granted a blessing and a curse. Every time he falls asleep, he wakes up in a new parallel world. As far as he can tell, he can’t ever “go back”, either. And so with a tone often reminiscent of Doctor Who and Sliders, Zaxony finds himself traveling from world to world.
The novel is clever in that it starts us in media res, Zaxony has been through this for nearly three years of personal time when the novel begins, so we get to see how he’s adapted and tried to deal with his gift. In fashion reminiscent of both Doctor Who and Sliders, it emerges that Zaxony isn’t the only person who can travel the worlds…but Zaxony’s gift makes him a target. The pair of novels go down easy and are a fun read and are my current Tim Pratt favorites.
Time-travelling drama about the Japanese American legends of US military history – inspired by real events. The story of the 442nd Regiment fighting the Nazi German army in World War Two. An original six-part drama, released from 9th December 2024. Written by Oscar nominee Iris Yamashita and narrated by Will Sharpe.
…Here are the 10 we would be most excited to see from the 2024 list (via Variety; you can check out the full list here), all hailing from the sci-fi, horror, and fantasy realms….
For one example:
The 13th Hour by Anna Klassen
“When a group of teenagers repair an old clock with a mysterious 13th numeral, they are granted an extra hour where their actions have no consequence.”
Something tells us there will be consequences, eventually, for the tinkering kids—their magical control of time notwithstanding.
Excavations in northeastern Iraq have unveiled neatly stacked bowls dating to more than 5,300 years ago that bear evidence of organized societies and whose abandonment points to eventual rejection of the state.
Mesopotamia was home to the world’s most ancient cities and state institutions, such as the Copper Age Uruk civilization. Claudia Glatz at the University of Glasgow, UK, and her collaborators excavated a Copper Age site that, in its final phase, shared close cultural ties with Uruk. They found mass-produced bowls with bevelled rims (pictured) that indicate the existence of institutions that fed large numbers of people, perhaps labourers, often with meat stews, traces of lipids on the pottery and nearby animal bones suggest.
The team found evidence of multiple consecutive periods of occupation at the site, but no signs that it was ultimately abandoned because of violent attacks or a natural disaster. Urbanism did not make another appearance in the region for some 1,500 years. The evidence suggests that the region’s population deliberately dispersed — and that the formation of state-level institutions is not an inevitable trend, the authors write.
(15) EFFECT MASKING COVID. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] From Nature:
What would have happened if everyone in the United Kingdom had worn high-grade masks during the COVID-19 pandemic? A modelling study1 has estimated just how sharply transmission might have dropped.
Determining the effect of masks on viral transmission is difficult, and most studies so far have been affected by limitations such as small sample sizes. To overcome this issue, Richard Sear at the University of Surrey, UK, developed a model of transmission using data from the UK National Health Service COVID-19 app. The app, which ran on mobile phones between 2020 and 2023, logged information about infections and the length of time users came into contact with each other.
Sear built on a previously published analysis2 of 240,000 positive COVID-19 tests and 7 million contacts — instances in which app users were notified that they had been exposed to the virus. He estimated that if everyone in the United Kingdom had worn N95 or FFP2 masks — both highly effective at filtering particles — the rate of COVID-19 transmission would have dropped by a factor of 9.
A Japanese spacecraft has made a daring approach to a discarded rocket in Earth’s orbit.
The mission — undertaken by the satellite technology company Astroscale — intends to eventually remove the 36-foot-long spent rocket stage, but has first tested its ability to rendezvous with the problematic object (one of 27,000 space junk objects larger than 10 centimeters in orbit).
The pioneering space endeavor is called Active Debris Removal by Astroscale-Japan, or ADRAS-J.
“Ending 2024 with a historic approach!” Astroscale posted online. “Our ADRAS-J mission has achieved the closest ever approach by a commercial company to space debris, reaching just 15 meters [almost 50 feet] from a rocket upper stage.”
This rocket stage, weighing three tons, is the upper part of the Japanese Space Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) H2A rocket, which launched the Earth observation GOSAT satellite in 2009. The greater space debris removal mission is part of JAXA’s “Commercial Removal of Debris Demonstration” project, which seeks a proven way to remove problematic space junk from orbit…
A type of bacteria called Deinococcus radiodurans, nicknamed “Conan the Bacterium” for its ability to survive the harshest of extremes, can withstand radiation doses 28,000 times greater than those that would kill a human being — and the secret to its success is rooted in an antioxidant.
Now, scientists have uncovered how the antioxidant works, unlocking the possibility that it could be used to protect the health of humans, both on Earth and those exploring beyond it in the future.
The antioxidant is formed by a simple group of small molecules called metabolites, including manganese, phosphate and a small peptide, or molecule, of amino acids.
Together, this powerful trilogy is more effective in protecting against radiation than manganese combined with just one of the other components, according to a new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences….
…“We’ve long known that manganese ions and phosphate together make a strong antioxidant, but discovering and understanding the ‘magic’ potency provided by the addition of the third component is a breakthrough….,” said study coauthor Brian Hoffman, the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry and professor of molecular biosciences at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, in a statement.
Previous research has shown that Deinococcus, known as the most radiant-resistant life-form in the Guinness World Records, can survive outside of the International Space Station for three years. The hardy bacteria can also withstand acid, cold and dehydration.
…For [a] previous study, the team measured the amount of manganese antioxidants in the cells of the bacteria. The researchers found that the amount of radiation that a microorganism could survive was directly related to its amount of manganese antioxidants. So the more manganese antioxidants present, the more resistance to radiation….
Watch and enjoy a wonderful compilation of hilarious bloopers from three hit Pixar films; A Bug’s Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), and Monsters, Inc. (2001).
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Sandra Miesel, 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 Daniel Dern.]
