Tag Archives: J.R.R. Tolkien

Pixel Scroll 12/12/24 Somewhere Over The Ringworld

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(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’S SFF 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.

(3) A BIT OF ALL RIGHT. Who says the internet has no sense of humor? (Oh, I did… Never mind.) Camestros Felapton lightens our day with “Dahrk Snarl the Blood-Axe Wielder: A Cosy Vignette”.

[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….

(4) ART VS. ARTIST. Nathan Deuel, a teacher at UCLA, discusses literary writers in terms that will be familiar to sff fans: “Writers I Have Met; Or, On Learning That Cormac McCarthy Was a Creep” at Literary Hub.

…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?…

(5) AI IS CONTROVERSIAL POINT IN ANIMATION INDUSTRY DEAL. “Animation Guild Leaders Say They’re Voting ‘No’ on Tentative Deal” – The Hollywood Reporter tells why.

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.”…

(6) OVERSHADOWED. “Westeros Conquered Middle-earth” in Matt Goldberg’s opinion at Commentary Track.

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….

(7) TOLKIEN’S HERSTORY. Meanwhile GameRant+ is still betting on our willingness to click on LOTR-related links like “The Strongest Female Characters In Middle-Earth”. I know I am….

…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.

(9) A MUSEUM FOR BOGUS BOOKS. “’These are magic books’: bringing imaginary works of literature to life” – the Guardian tells how it’s being done.

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.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) THE 442ND. Airing now at the BBC World Service or available from BBC Sounds for another year, “Purple Heart Warriors”.

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.

(13) A TOUR OF DEVELOPMENT HELL. Sifting Variety’s annual list of unproduced scripts, Gizmodo has culled “The 10 Most Intriguing Sci-Fi and Horror Scripts on This Year’s Black List”.

…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.

(14) SMASH THE STATE (BUT NOT THE POTTERY). Nature has a report based on a study titled “There and back again: local institutions, an Uruk expansion and the rejection of centralisation in the Sirwan/Upper Diyala region” from Cambridge Core.

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.

Research here: https://journals.aps.org/pre/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevE.110.064302

(16) COZYING UP TO SPACE JUNK. “Spacecraft makes daring approach of metal object in Earth’s orbit” – Mashable has details.

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…

(17) SMALL BUT TOUGH. CNN learns that “’Conan the Bacterium’ is extremely radiation-resistant for a surprising reason”.

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….

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Pixar – Outtakes/Bloopers Collection” compiled in years gone by.

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.]

Pixel Scroll 12/4/24 To Scroll Beyond The Pixel

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(1) AUDIOBOOKS OF THE YEAR. AudioFile Magazine today released its picks for the Best Of 2024 in nine categories.

File 770 partnered with them to share “AudioFile’s 2024 Best Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Audiobooks”.

Moira Quirk and Jefferson Mays. Photos courtesy of the narrators.

(2) INTERNET ARCHIVE LOSS FINALIZED. Time has run out for the defendant to appeal Hachette Book Group v. Internet Archive to the Supreme Court. IA will also be reimbursing some of the plaintiff’s attorney fees and costs reports Publishing Perspectives in “Copyright: Publishers Cheer Conclusion of Internet Archive Suit”.

The Association of American Publishers (AAP)  today (December 4) has announced a final resolution to the case Hachette Book Group v. Internet Archive—this because the Internet Archive declined to file a “cert petition” with the Supreme Court of the United States by a December 3 deadline.

The moment signifies a hard-won victory for publishing, and it comes at a propitious moment for the AAP team, key members of the staff of which are in Mexico. There, the AAP is a partner to CANIEM, the Mexican publishers’ organization, in producing for this week’s International Publishers’ Association (IPA) and thus providing more than 200 publishing-delegates with whom to share the news….

…As the AAP puts it today, “with this case concluded, publishers have achieved a decisive and broadly applicable victory for authors’ rights and digital markets, an outcome that was our foremost, principled objective.

“In addition, the Internet Archive is bound by a sweeping permanent injunction and must make a payment to AAP, which funded the action, the amount of which is confidential under the terms of a court-approved, negotiated consent judgment between plaintiffs and Internet Archive.

“We are, however, permitted to disclose that ‘AAP’s significant attorney’s fees and costs incurred in the action since 2020’ will be ‘substantially compensated.’”…

(3) HOW DARE THEY? The Heinlein Society got a little tetchy about challenges to its Heinlein-related content and set Facebook readers straight that their scope is practically unlimited.

It seems someone is always asking how one of our posts is Heinlein related. Actually, complaining because they don’t think it’s Heinlein related. Now seems a good time to clarify.

1. Anything relating to SF/F, books, libraries or reading is Heinlein related. I could even argue that Heinlein is the father of modern SF. He certainly legitimized it after WWII. When Heinlein started writing, SF was limited to the pulp magazines and was generally looked down upon. It certainly wasn’t considered literature. Heinlein changed that when he started selling stories to the slick magazines and had his juvenile novels published in hardcover. He was also the first SF writer to have a NY Times best seller with Stranger in a Strange Land.

2. Anything relating to Star Trek is Heinlein related. Heinlein enjoyed Star Trek. He gave his permission to air The Trouble With Tribbles when they realized how closely Tribbles resembled the Martian Flat Cats from The Rolling Stones. He had an original painting by Kelly Fries of LT Uhura / Nichelle Nichols hanging on the wall of his study. He went to Star Trek conventions to promote blood drives. (Also, see item 1)

3. Anything relating to space or space travel is Heinlein related. Heinlein wrote about space travel his entire career and deeply cared about the future of space travel. He wrote the screenplay for Destination Moon and acted as the technical advisor, the first realistic movie about a trip to the moon. Heinlein was a guest commentor with Arthur C. Clarke and Walter Cronkite during the first moon landing in 1969. After her husband’s death, Virginia Heinlein started the Heinlein Prize Trust to promote the commercialization of space.

4. Anything relating to science is Heinlein related. Heinlein graduated from the US Naval Academy as an engineer, but he always wanted to be an astronomer. He loved and promoted science in his books. He inspired a generation of youth to pursue science with his juvenile book series.

5. Anything relating to cats is Heinlein related. This one should be obvious, but Heinlein was a huge cat lover and included cats in many of his stories.

6. Anything relating to humor is Heinlein related. Heinlein was a great fan of humor in general as evidenced from the humor in his books. He was greatly influenced by Mark Twain.

I know that people will continue to complain. I suppose it’s just human nature…

(4) CALL FOR PEER REVIEWERS. The Journal of Tolkien Research, a peer-reviewed, open access, online-only journal devoted to Tolkien research is looking for peer reviewers to assist with reviewing and assessing peer-review submissions to the journal. The editor is looking for the following minimum qualifications:

  • Published at least 2 peer-reviewed articles related to Tolkien research
  • Adequate knowledge of past and current research related to Tolkien and his works
  • A master’s degree in any area (ABD or Ph.D. preferred)
  • Ability to review 9-12 articles per year
  • Ability to provide appropriate criticism, review, and suggestions for revision on a timely basis on all articles that you agree to peer review

Please send an email detailing your qualifications along with a CV (attachment or URL). Please send any questions to the founding and current editor of JTR: Dr. Brad Eden brad.l.eden@gmail.com

(5) SFF WRITER IS NERO BOOK AWARDS FINALIST. [Item by Steven French.] Novelists shortlisted for this year’s Nero awards in the U.K. include YA author Patrick Ness: “2024 Nero book awards shortlist announced to celebrate ‘extraordinary writing talent’” in the Guardian. “The awards are run by Caffè Nero, and launched after Costa Coffee abruptly ended its book prizes in June 2022. The prizes are aimed at pointing readers ‘of all ages and interests in the direction of the most outstanding books and writers of the year’”.

…Ness made the children’s fiction list for Chronicles of a Lizard Nobody, illustrated by Tim Miller. “Ness’s brio turns the school travails of a group of monitor lizards into a bonkers, yet convincing story about difference – and giant killer robots,” wrote reviewer Kitty Empire in the Observer….

…A total of 16 books were shortlisted across the four categories of fiction, debut fiction, nonfiction and children’s fiction. Winners of each category will be announced on 14 January 2025 and receive £5,000, and an overall winner of the Nero Gold prize will be revealed on 5 March and win an additional £30,000….

(6) LOSCON 51 GOHS. Next year’s Loscon guests of honor were announced at the end of last weekend’s convention.

(7) A TAKE ON RAY BRADBURY. For all those of us who are C.S. Lewis fans – by which I mean, me – here’s an interesting letter on offer from Heritage Auctions: “C. S. Lewis. Autograph letter signed”.

Responding to a request for a photograph, Lewis offers his opinions on Ray Bradbury:

“Dear M. Rutyearts / I enclose a photo; whether good or not I do not know, but it is the only one I can find. Bradbury is a writer of great distinction in my opinion. Is his style almost too delicate, too elusive, too nuancé for S[cience]. F[iction]. matter? In that respect I take him and me to be at opposite poles; he is a humbled disciple of Corot and Debussy, I an even humbler disciple of Titian and Beethoven. / With all good wishes, / Yours sincerely, C. S. Lewis.”

The same December 11 auction includes a first edition Edgar Allan Poe. Tales (1845), current bid is $2,800.

FIRST EDITION, third printing, with copyright notice in three lines and no imprints on copyright page. “Here… begins the detective story, with ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ ‘Mystery of Marie Roget,’ and primus inter pares, the character of the amateur detective who triumphs over the blundering police, in ‘The Purloined Letter.’ The earlier Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque… contains a larger number of the Poe tales of horror, which are still the artistic standard for that school, but this volume adds ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ ‘The Descent into the Maelstrom,’ and ‘The Gold Bug'” (Grolier).

(8) GUMBY. The Los Angeles Breakfast Club presents “Restoring Gumby with Mauricio Alvarado” on December 11. (From 7:00 a.m.– 9:00 a.m. at 3201 Riverside Dr, Los Angeles, CA 90027).

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION: In preparation for Gumby’s 70th next year, official Gumby licensee, Mauricio Alvarado is working on preserving and screening the work of Art Clokey. Mauricio is currently scanning and restoring the original film prints in 4K, so a new generation can meet Gumby. Join the LA Breakfast Club on December 11th to learn about the history of Gumby and see some of Mauricio’s newly restored clips — exhibited publicly for the first time!

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Mauricio Alvarado is owner of Rockin Pins and manager of the official Gumby social media channels. Thanks to the support of the new owners of ‘Gumby’, Mauricio has been actively screening and sharing the work of Art Clokey to new and old audiences across the country. Mauricio is also the co-founder of Fleischertoons, a project dedicated to locating, scanning, and distributing lost or unknown cartoons by legendary animator and filmmaker Max Fleischer.

(9) FREE READ. Sunday Morning Transport’s first story each month is free. They hope that you will subscribe to receive all the stories, and support the work of their authors. Start off December with “And You and I” by Jenna Hanchey.

(10) DEGREE OF SEPARATION? [Item by N.] “When Your Hero Is A Monster” by The Leftist Cooks is an hour-long video essay using Neil Gaiman as a framework to examine the dissonance in separating the artist from the art, tied with larger discussions of fandom and parasocial relationships. 

(11) HEAR ‘ORBITAL’. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Orbital, Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize winning novel, has been serialized on BBC Radio 4 as book of the week.  No, according to her, it is not ‘science fiction’ but ‘space realism’. Nonetheless, it is cracking hard SF…

Across 24 hours on the International Space Station, six astronauts from different nations contemplate the Earth, as continents and oceans pass beneath them. They are there to collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.

Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of one astronaut’s mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction. The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from Earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it. They begin to ask, what is life without Earth? What is Earth without humanity?

You can down load mp3 of the 15-minute episodes here… Episode 1; Episode 2; Episode 3; Episode 4; Episode 5.

(12) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Anniversary: Back To The Future (1985)

I already discussed how important Back to the Future II was to my SFF education a couple of weeks back. But before Back to the Future II, was the original Back to the Future.  I was younger, then, by four years, and not yet immersing myself as much into fandom. So I do recall a Starlog article about the movie, but it would take the sequel and the discussions of same to really get me excited for the franchise outside of the movie itself.

But this was 1985 and I was able to go to movies on my own at last, and so a time travel movie was tailor-made for my tastes. Sure, I didn’t quite get the music or the joke about Marvin Barry, but I knew what I liked. And I liked this. I could see Marty as a slightly older brother, cool, trying his best in a dysfunctional family (boy did that hit) and then trying desperately to save his own future even as problematic as it is.

I didn’t quite realize then what the movie was doing, by giving us a slice of the 1950’s, it was recapitulating things like Happy Days. Hill Valley circa 1955 is a paean to a time and place that has fixated itself strongly in the American Imagination. As Grease was an image of that time for an earlier generation, as was Happy Days, Hill Valley’s Back to the Future is a vision of a very much idealized time. Now, I can see the weaknesses and the problems of that idealized time but it is winningly described and shown here.  And given that Marty’s original timeline present isn’t all that great…in a sense Marty going back to the 1950’s is him going to a happier and simpler time for him (if not that he has to save his own existence). 

Is it any wonder that McFly not only manages to save his future…but to *improve* upon it? 

But for all of the time travel shenanigans and the culture of the 1950’s as compared to the 1980’s, where this movie sings is in its cast. From Michael J. Fox in the Marty McFly role, to Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Crispin Glover and especially Thomas Wilson as Biff make this movie what it is, and is a great deal of why it was such an out of nowhere success. (that, and of course, DeLoreans are cool).  It actually grew in box office success, and held off strong competitors for weeks. The movie was, and remains, a phenomenon.

(13) STEPPING INTO HISTORY. [Item by Steven French.] Jade Cuttle talks about her love of re-enacting: “’I’m a mixed Black female historical re-enactor in a sea of men with beards’” in the Guardian.

…I can shake the shackles of gender, race and class and slip into skins different to my own. It’s a reclamation of power, though not everyone agrees. There’s always debate about the authenticity of historical TV dramas and films. Look at the uproar that greeted Ridley Scott daring to “lob a few sharks” into the Colosseum in Gladiator II, and the mixed Black female actor Caroline Henderson playing a leader in Netflix’s Vikings: Valhalla. As a mixed Black female re-enactor in a sea of men with beards, I’m not always fully authentic myself either. It’s a struggle to squeeze my afro hair beneath a coif, wimple or helmet, unless I tame the fuzzy strands into tiny plaits first. The costumes are not always made for people like me. But the groups I’m part of encourage me to explore a range of roles. We are 21st-century organisations based on modern values….

(14) COMPANIONS, VILLAINS, AND OTHERS. Valerie Estelle Frankel has put together Women in Doctor Who (McFarland):

Over the past half-century Doctor Who has defined science fiction television. The women in the series—from orphans and heroic mothers to seductresses and clever teachers—flourish in their roles yet rarely surmount them. Some companions rescue the Doctor and charm viewers with their technical brilliance, while others only scream for rescue. The villainesses dazzle with their cruelty, from the Rani to Cassandra and Missy. Covering all of the series—classic and new—along with Class, K9, Torchwood, The Sarah Jane Adventures, novels, comics and Big Finish Audio adventures, this book examines the women archetypes in Doctor Who.

(15) SCREENTIME. JustWatch has shared its Top 10 streamers for November 2024.

(16) HIGH AND DRY. [Item by Steven French.] “Did Venus ever have oceans? Scientists have an answer” reports Reuters. And the answer is … nope!

Earth is an ocean world, with water covering about 71% of its surface. Venus, our closest planetary neighbor, is sometimes called Earth’s twin based on their similar size and rocky composition. While its surface is baked and barren today, might Venus once also have been covered by oceans?

The answer is no, according to new research that inferred the water content of the planet’s interior – a key indicator for whether or not Venus once had oceans – based on the chemical composition of its atmosphere. The researchers concluded that the planet currently has a substantially dry interior that is consistent with the idea that Venus was left desiccated after the epoch early in its history when its surface was comprised of molten rock – magma – and thereafter has had a parched surface…

(17) NO, SF GOT IT RIGHT! [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Did you watch that video File 770 posted a couple of days ago? “Minicon 15 (1979)-History of the Future-Ted Sturgeon Clifford Simak Lester del Rey Gordon Dickson”?

Interestingly, in it they said that SF got space travel wrong and that private companies would never go to space because it was too expensive hence the provenance of Governments only…

Now, Star Trek was familiar then (1979) and the authors would know of William Shatner… but never guess he would get to space courtesy
of a private company.

Just had to share that musing….

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, N., Robin Anne Reid, 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 StephenfromOttawa.]

Pixel Scroll 11/2/24 Pixie Scroll Is Unexpectedly Whimsical! As If All The News Is Being Delivered By Pixies

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(1) MINUS ONE GETS PLUS ONE. “Godzilla Minus One Sequel in Development From Takashi Yamazaki” reports CBR.com. So will it be titled Godzilla Minus Two or Godzilla Zero? (Wasn’t “New Math” supposed to prepare me to answer this question?)

Godzilla Minus One is getting a sequel. Toho and Takashi Yamazaki are reuniting for a new movie featuring the iconic monster.

The “EMERGENCY ANNOUNCEMENT” was made on the official X account for Toho’s Godzilla franchise. The 10-second video confirmed that production had been greenlit on a new Godzilla movie, with Yamazaki returning to write, direct, and supervise VFX. The last detail is perhaps the most important, as Yamazaki and his VFX team won the Best Visual Effects category at the 96th Academy Awards for Godzilla Minus One. 

The 8-second “emergency announcement” is on X.com here.

(2) NO ASTRONOMICON OR HELIOSPHERE IN 2025. Ralston Stahler told Facebook readers today that Astronomicon, held annually in Rochester, NY is taking 2025 off.

Well, some bad news. Due to me being somewhat burned out from trying to organize a NASFiC for the last two years, after Heliosphere it really made me think that my fannish energy has been severely depleted.

The NASFiC did good, people liked it and we did good financially, I just don’t have the energy to run Astronomicon for 2025. I let our guests know that things have changed and at least I need a break for a bit.

Heliosphere (I’ll post their announcement later) after running World Fantasy in Niagara Falls is also taking 2025 off. So the only science fiction con left anywhere nearby will be Albacon in Albany in 2025. They will be the only SF con in New York state next year.

I urge everyone to really think about attending. One of the things I have been saying is that SF cons are becoming very fragile things. They are put on by ever decreasing numbers of science fiction fans. Which is one of the things we need to work on. Getting people to help run them.

New Jersey’s HELIOsphere made a comparable announcement two days ago.

We regret to announce that New Amsterdam Science Fiction and Fantasy Fandom (NASF3) will not be presenting HELIOsphere in 2025.

HELIOsphere was to be held May 2–4, 2025 in Piscataway, New Jersey.

The chief reason is that we feel the need to take the extra time to organize, regroup, and refocus on what we want our home convention to be.

We fully expect to return in 2026, with a new, improved convention that more fully reflects the vision we had when we founded this event in 2017.

Our Guests of Honor, Catherynne Valente and Adam-Troy Castro, have, of course, already been informed of our change in plans. We regret not hosting them next year, but look forward to seeing them at other events … perhaps even at a future HELIOsphere.

We had not yet opened membership for HELIOsphere 2025, except for the memberships we took at the close of HELIOsphere 2024.

We will be issuing refunds for those memberships as soon as possible.

This is far from the end of HELIOsphere. In the coming year, we will be discussing our direction and focus, and planning a new beginning for our event.

(3) CLARION WEST ART OPPORTUNITY. “Call for Clarion West 2025 Featured Art” – complete guidelines at the link.

Clarion West is searching for an artist to create artwork for our 2025 featured artwork. Clarion West seeks to commission one custom illustration with unlimited global rights. Please share this call with the artists you know that might be a great fit, and see below for details.

What we’re looking for

Each year, we seek artwork that inspires us and our writers to create and explore with bravery and freedom. The art needs to represent the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and/or horror in some way, while also supporting our core values of diversity, inclusion, and supporting emerging writers. (You can see the work of our 2024 poster artist, Carolina Rodríguez Fuenmayor, here as just one example.)…

(4) BATTLING SCAM AI STORY SUBMISSIONS. Sue Burke reports from sff’s front lines in “AI Is Fueling a Science Fiction Scam That Hurts Publishers, Writers, and Even Some of the Scammers” at Chicago Review of Books.

…“The deluge is different now,” but it continues unabated, Clarke said at this summer’s World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, where he received a Hugo award for Best Short-Form Editor for the third time. His exasperation has grown with the “torment nexus” that he finds himself trapped in. He quietly reopened submissions in mid-March last year, and he’s created a sort of spam filter (which he won’t detail so it can’t be evaded) that he shares with Asimov’s. It moves likely AI stories to the end of the submission line, although they still get read because the filter can make mistakes. He’s banned thousands of spammers…

As to any attempt to defend AI here:

…So, it’s easy to claim—and perhaps believe—that an AI can create fiction and art, cure cancer, and eliminate your job, all in a matter of seconds, just before it destroys the Earth. Or this might be overhype. In any case, the AI programs are owned and controlled by major multinational corporations. Can we trust them with creativity?

“Experience should have taught us all by now that large corporations are the last entities that should be entrusted with our future, much less with what becomes of human creativity,” says Tonya R. Moore, poetry editor at Solarpunk Magazine, a poetry acquiring editor at FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, and an associate writer at Galactic Journey. “AI is still extremely undeveloped, and large corporations are already using the technology to manipulate and cheat people in the most underhanded ways.”… 

(5) A FAPA JUBILEE. [Item by John L. Coker III.] Robert Silverberg has just reached another major milestone: as of November 2024, he has been a continuously contributing member of FAPA for 75 years!

While still a teen-ager, Bob joined the Fantasy Amateur Publishing Association in November 1949.  This was back when Harry S. Truman was still the U.S. president.

(6) IT’LL DO. Camestros Felapton gives Agatha all Along his seal of approval. “Review: Agatha all Along (Disney)[some spoilers]”.

…Aside from anything else, WandaVision had one clever trick (playing off the cliches of suburban sitcoms from different eras) and the lead characters (Wanda Maximoff and Vision) where now dead in the MCU. Would Kathryn Hahn’s meddling witch carry a sequel?

Actually, yes. This was an enormously entertaining miniseries….

(7) NEGATORY, GOOD BUDDY. “John Williams Shot Down One Request While Filming Disney+’s Music By John Williams, But I Think His Reasoning Makes So Much Sense” – read the explanation at CinemaBlend.

Music by John Williams – a new title streaming this week – provides viewers with an intimate portrait of the prolific composer behind films like Jaws and Schindler’s List. Through his conversations with Williams, director Laurent Bouzereau sheds light on the conductor’s personal life and his creative process as well. Bouzereau had many memorable moments working on the documentary, including one he revealed to CinemaBlend – which saw Williams shoot down a request. Yet the living legend’s rationale made so much sense.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Mr. Bouzereau ahead of the release of his latest doc. During the interview, he regaled me with details on his film as well as fun anecdotes regarding his chats with its main subject. It was the latter that led the Five Came Back helmer to reveal that he asked the celebrated maestro to perform the original pieces of music he concocted for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But, as Bouzereau explained to me, the now-92-year-old conductor declined for a very specific reason:

“Well, I had wanted John to – I knew that he had, for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, created different versions of the five notes and, sometimes, there were more than five. And I had said to him, ‘ [It would] be great if you could play on the piano the different incarnation[s] of those notes.’ And he said, ‘No.’ Because it’s so iconic that you are betraying something that is in everybody’s mind. And he didn’t want to suddenly have someone say, ‘Oh, that would have been better,’ or whatever, you know, what is in the movie, [is] what is in the movie. So I was kind of disappointed, but he said, ‘I’ll get you something. You’ll see.’”…

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary— Doctor Who’s “The Happiness Patrol” (1988)

The first part of Doctor Who’s “The Happiness Patrol” aired thirty years ago on this date. 

Written by Graeme Curry, it was intended (by him and the other writers) to be a parody of Thatcherism, with Helen A representing Margaret Thatcher herself. As you can seeing the picture below, she may or may not have more than passing resemblance to The Iron Lady.  

This was the Seventh Doctor so Sylvester McCoy was The Doctor and Sophie Aldred was Ace, who is still one of my favorite companions, and there’s one episode they did where I’m still cursing them for the emotional cruelty they did to her. Not saying which episode that was of course. 

All of the classic Doctor Who is available in the United States on Britbox.

The guest performers were Shelia Hancock as Helen A. with David John Pope as Kandy Man. 

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, referred to this story in his 2011 Easter sermon, on the subject of happiness and joy. Really. Truly. So what is the story that he so truly liked? 

SPOILERS NOW, SO GET A CUP OF DARJEELING TEA AND A CHOCOLATE BISCUIT. 

They find themselves on a colony that is under the dictatorship of Helen A. where sadness and misery are capital crimes, and killjoys which is anyone, well, is sad, are is executed on the spot by  female assassins known only as The Happiness Patrol. 

Now this being the Whovian reality, we also have, according to the Tardis Wiki, “The Kandyman was a pathological, psychopathic android, employed as an executioner by the egocentric Helen A. It delighted in inflicting torture and destruction with confectionery. One of its favourite methods was drowning people in pipes filled with its “Fondant Surprise”, a thick solution composed of boiling liquid candy.”  

Needless to say the Seventh Doctor had to defeat Helen A., the Killjoys, the Kandyman and assorted less than sweet individuals in this episode. That they did in the usual Whovian manner, though the Seventh Doctor put his slightly darker twist on it.

About this parody of The Iron Bitch, errr, Thatcher and her years in power? The story makes it very apparent that it what is happening here. Remember the Miners Strike under her and her violent suppression of it? Well, this colony has an oppressed underclass of workers – depicted here as a literally different species. So they turn out to be miners. And they are victims of Helen A.’s regime. “Well, they may not look like it,” the Doctor tells Ace, “but they’re on the edge of starvation. No sugar in the pipes.” Sugar being their only food.

ENJOY THAT TEA AND BISCUITS? GOOD, YOU CAN COME BACK.

I can’t really discuss the critical response to it at the time as they give away way the much of the plot when they reviewed it. Suffice it to say that some like it, some thought it was utter shite because of the anti-Thatcher spin (need I note which papers they wrote for?), some never warmed to the Seventh Doctor so every episode got a blah at best review.

Me, I thought it was a fun story though stretching what was a thin plot over three episodes was just not a great idea. 

It got novelized and the story expanded even more, oh god. Big Finish brings the Kandyman back in the Eighth Doctor: Ravenous story.

We’ll let Helen A. have the final words, “And don’t forget, when you smile, I want to see those teeth.”

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) CANON TO THE LEFT OF THEM. “Queen Berúthiel is a Childless Cat Lady!” – Robin Anne Reid has found a Tolkien text resonates with a catchphrase from this year’s Presidential election campaign.

…Queen Berúthiel caught my attention in my very first reading (1965) and has resurfaced on a number of occasions in great part because of the lack of information about her in The Lord of the Rings. Even with just that one brief reference, she stood out: she was a Queen, and, more importantly, she had cats (plural!). She’s (possibly?) the only character in the legendarium who has cats (if you know of any others, please let me know in the comments!)

And although it turns out that she was married (but no children!), there was no mention of her husband in Tolkien’s first introduction of her…

(11) THE AVENGERS’ ELECTION PICK. “The Avengers Stars Reunite to Endorse Kamala Harris in New Video” – The Hollywood Reporter sets the frame.

As Election Day nears, Scarlett Johansson had her fellow Avengers join forces for a get-out-the-vote video.

In a video shared by Vanity Fair, Johansson, Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Don Cheadle, Danai Gurira and Paul Bettany came together on a Zoom call to brainstorm a new catchphrase for Kamala Harris as she takes on Donald Trump. Some of their suggestions referenced moments from their respective movies, including Iron Man and Black Panther….

(12) YOUR INFINITY MAY VARY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Could all the chimpanzees in the world (OK, so technically not monkeys) ever type the works of Shakespeare? Not before the heat death of the universe say a pair of Australian mathematicians. “Monkeys will never type Shakespeare, study finds” at BBC News.

Two Australian mathematicians have called into question an old adage, that if given an infinite amount of time, a monkey pressing keys on a typewriter would eventually write the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Known as the “infinite monkey theorem”, the thought-experiment has long been used to explain the principles of probability and randomness.

However, a new peer-reviewed study led by Sydney-based researchers Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta has found that the time it would take for a typing monkey to replicate Shakespeare’s plays, sonnets and poems would be longer than the lifespan of our universe.

Which means that while mathematically true, the theorem is “misleading”, they say.

As well as looking at the abilities of a single monkey, the study also did a series of calculations based on the current global population of chimpanzees, which is roughly 200,000.

The results indicated that even if every chimp in the world was enlisted and able to type at a pace of one key per second until the end of the universe, they wouldn’t even come close to typing out the Bard’s works.

There would be a 5% chance that a single chimp would successfully type the word “bananas” in its own lifetime. And the probability of one chimp constructing a random sentence – such as “I chimp, therefore I am” – comes in at one in 10 million billion billion, the research indicates…

(13) 24 CARROT TRIVIA. “Bugs Bunny Facts That Fans Never Figured Out (What You Always Wanted To Know About Bugs Bunny)” at Idolator. Here’s one example:

Bugs Changed The Meaning Of The Word “Nimrod”

Bugs Bunny is so influential in American culture that he is the sole reason why America uses the term “nimrod” to mean idiot. Before Bugs, nimrod referred to a mighty hunter, named after the Biblical figure, Nimrod.

Bugs would sarcastically compare Elmer Fudd to Nimrod, and America picked up the phrase. The fact that the cartoon was able to change the definition of an established word shows just how much of a lasting impact it had on the world.

(14) ALIEN ASPIRATIONS. [Item by Steven French.] In the Guardian’s ‘Week in Geek’, hopes and concerns are expressed over the prospect of a sequel to Alien: Romulus: “Alien: Romulus thrilled fans – how can its follow-up avoid the saga’s past mistakes?”

Romulus’s power lay in its ruthless singlemindedness. Like the xenomorphs themselves, it was the perfect movie organism, a simple slasher-in-space tale of a bunch of kids lost in the cosmos who find they have bitten off more than they can chew, and are about to be bitten back hard. Part two should really be more of the same but somehow bigger, and yet the distinct impression from this mercurial saga is that whenever somebody tries to widen the Alien canvass, they wind up with a sprawlingly portentous or downright weirdmural where we really just wanted a nasty little close-up.

Perhaps all we need next time out is another hyper-focused horror romp, with just the tiniest side order of Weyland-Yutani intrigue. Anything more, and once again there’s a danger that this sleek and venerable old beast starts looking like an unwieldy colony ship with a leaking fuel line and a loose facehugger in the cargo hold….

[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Michael J. Walsh, 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 Nigel.]

Pixel Scroll 10/5/24 O Quam Tu Pixel Es

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(1) GERMAN TOLKIEN SOCIETY EVENT. The twentieth seminar of the German Tolkien Society (Deutsche Tolkien Gesellschaft e.V.) will be a hybrid event. Full details at the link. “Tolkien and His Editors – Tolkien Seminar 2024”

It is not only in Aachen that the 20th Seminar of the Deutsche Tolkien Gesellschaft e.V. will take place from 11 to 13 October. You can also follow the conference worldwide via the internet from Friday at 2pm. Listeners and participants can look forward to numerous exciting lectures on this year’s theme “Tolkien and His Editors” by speakers from all over the world….

(2) THE RICHES OF HORROR WRITING? [Item by Michael J. Walsh.] Out of curiosity I looked at the Stokercon2025 hotel rates.  Oh my. $474 a night! (Or more.)

(3) RED DWARF TRIVIA. “Roll up, smegheads! It’s the ultimate Red Dwarf quiz”. The Guardian challenges the show’s fans: “From hologram destruction techniques to the very point of existence itself: how good is your knowledge of the sci-fi comedy classic?”

(4) ANSIBLE EDITIONS. [Item by David Langford.] The Frank Arnold Papers (edited by Rob Hansen), collecting the mostly unpublished essays and reviews of that old-time UK fan, came out as a TAFF ebook in 2017 with a brief introduction by Michael Moorcock. We’ve since unearthed more material, both published and unpublished, that expands the ebook by about a third to 58,000 words. That seemed to be the cue for a first ever paperback edition, which like the revised ebook was officially released October 1.

Frank Arnold was a long-time regular of the London First Thursday science-fiction pub meetings from their beginning in the 1940s until his death in 1987, and kept the famous Visitors’ Book. He had been active in British SF fandom since the very early days of the 1930s. Although he published one SF collection, a handful of articles and several book reviews, most of his nonfiction never appeared in print.

Cover photo, left to right: Ted Carnell, Ted Tubb, and Frank Arnold at the 1952 London convention. Photo from the Vince Clarke collection.

(5) CLI-FI COLLECTION. Grist’s second anthology of climate fiction short stories is being published soon. Metamorphosis: Climate Fiction for a Better Future includes 12 stories from Grist’s recent Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors short story contests. For the first time in book form, you can read these narratives of hope, abundance, solutions, and community resilience for a better future. 

Metamorphosis is available for pre-order right now at the link. It arrives in bookstores October 22.

(6) THE QUALITY OF DISTORTION IS NOT STRAINED. [Item by Steven French.] In this physics-based critique of Constellation and Dark Matter, Robert P Crease and Jennifer Carter pose a crucial question. “Constellation and Dark Matter: the TV series that could change your view of quantum mechanics” at Physics World.

…So are fictional works based on quantum-travel-between-worlds just examples of “harmlessly enabling distortion” (HED, done for a good purpose)? Or should we think of them as examples of “fake artistic distortion” (FAD, done for special effects without caring how science works)? It’s an interesting question especially for philosophers, who have long worried about art having to appeal to its audience’s “sense” of reality, and its tendency to reinforce that sense despite its distortions.

In a similar way, the appeal of TV series based on many-worlds interpretations depends on how agreeably and acceptably they manipulate popular preconceptions about quantum mechanics, such as about time travel, alternate worlds, the reality of superposition, and – most of all – the illusion that the fundamental structure of the world is up to us.

But wouldn’t it be more artistic to portray a universe where quantum systems are what they are – in some cases coherent systems that can decohere, but not via thought control (as in Dark Matter)? If we did that, then artists could speculate about what it’d be like to meet and even trade places with other selves without introducing fake scientific justifications. We could then try to understand if and why we would want or benefit from such identity-swapping, on both a physical and emotional level.

That might really shatter and reconfigure what it means to be human…

(7) YOU’VE SEEN IT. Most likely. “A 400-Acre Movie Ranch Outside Los Angeles Is Listed for $35 Million” – in the New York Times (behind a paywall.)  “Sable Ranch, about 30 miles north of Hollywood, includes an Old West movie set. It has been used for productions like ‘American Horror Story’ and ‘Oppenheimer’.”

When Frank Vacek arrived at Sable Ranch in the 1970s, with its chaparral-covered hills bounded by the mountains of the Angeles National Forest, he instantly saw a California dream.

Mr. Vacek, who with his wife had fled the Nazis in Czechoslovakia three decades earlier, rewrote his fortunes by opening a successful camera shop in downtown Los Angeles in the 1950s. But 30 miles north at Sable Ranch, where cattle grazed amid oak trees, he pictured an even grander second act for his life. He bought the ranch and the property next to it and built an Old West movie set on its land, bringing Hollywood — with its gun shows, cowboys and insatiable appetite for entertainment — to his doorstep.

… In recent years, the ranch has hosted “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “Criminal Minds” and “24.” After crews from “Fear Factor” used the ranch in 2001, they returned in 2007 to make another game show, “Wipeout,” where contestants compete in an obstacle course with large pools. So Mr. Hunt built water tanks that could each hold millions of gallons of water — an amenity that attracted Billie Eilish to the ranch in 2021, when she was scouting locations for her underwater music video for “Happier Than Ever.”

“You feel the Hollywood legacy when you’re on the property,” said Aaron Kirman of Christie’s International Real Estate Southern California, who alongside Sam Glendon of CBRE is representing Mr. Hunt in the sale…

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born October 5, 1971 – Paul Weimer, 53. Although he has a few short stories to his credit, Paul Weimer is far better known in science fiction reviewing and criticism circles. Having gotten his real start at places like The Functional Nerds and SF Signal, Paul has, and continues to write, for a number of venues and publications across the internet, from traditional fanzines to guest posts on blogs, and always, always telling people that pre-orders are love. 

Paul had a minor but notable role in the Sad and Rabid Puppies Debarkle (h/t Camestros Felapton), showing up on podcasts and blogs, trying in vain to bridge divides and see multiple viewpoints. 

In addition to writing, Paul is a member of the Hugo finalist Skiffy and Fanty podcast, and has shown up on a wide range of other SFF podcasts as a guest. He also has been playing and running TTRPGs, including Play by Email ones, for decades. 

Paul is known in SFF circles, too, as an enthusiastic amateur photographer who is likely to show up at your con with his camera in tow. At the 2024 Glasgow Worldcon, he was a member of the convention’s official Photography Team. As a DUFF Delegate in 2017, he traveled to the Australian and New Zealand Natcons in 2017, and his trip report “What I did on my Summer Vacation” holds the record for most photos in a published Fan Fund report.

After the unpleasantness of being one of the Chengdu Worldcon Ineligibles, Paul won two Hugos at the 2024 Glasgow Worldcon, for Best Fan Writer, and as part of the team of the Best Fanzine Winner, Nerds of a Feather. He also won an Ignyte award for Best Critics as part of the Nerds of a Feather team.

But he’s really just this guy, you know?

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) DEBATE OVERFLOW. Most of you will get it.

(11) TODAY’S THING TO STOP WORRYING ABOUT. Deadline reports “Jim Henson Company Lot On La Brea Not Being Sold To Scientology, Owners Say; “Not In Any Business Dealings With The Church,” Family Declares”.

… Despite reports in the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post and other outlets that the Henson family was unloading the 1917 lot originally known as the Charlie Chaplin Studios, the estate was very specific today that the lot would not be joining Scientology‘s extensive real estate portfolio any time soon

A spokesperson for the Jim Henson family said: “In regards to recent rumors about the sale of the La Brea studio lot, the Henson family is not in any business dealings with the Church of Scientology, and that organization is not in consideration as a potential buyer of the property. It is still the family’s intention to move The Jim Henson Company to a new location it can share with Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, but at this time the family is not in escrow with any buyer.”…

(12) PRACTICALLY NEIGHBORS. “Scientists find astonishing planet near to Earth” reports The Independent.

A planet has been found around the closest single star to us.

The planet orbits around Barnard’s star and has been given the name Barnard b. It could be one of a number of planets waiting to be found around that nearby sun.

It was spotted using the the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT).

The newly-discovered planet – called Barnard b – has at least half the mass of Venus and on it a year lasts slightly more than three Earth days.

The findings also suggest there may be three more exoplanet candidates, in various orbits around the star.

(13) WALKING BACK NEGATIVE TIME. Sabine Hassenfelder demurs from what the clickbait press is saying in “Negative Time is Real, Physicists Confirm. Kind Of.” “Well first of all, this negative time has nothing to do with passage of time. It’s just a way to speak about how a bunch of photons travel through a medium and how their phases shift.”

In a new paper, a group of physicists claims to have confirmed the existence of “negative time.” I had never heard of this, but I had a look at the paper. And I think I have figured it out.

[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Patrick McGuire, Michael J. Walsh, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Robin Anne Reid, Dann, 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 Jim Janney.]

Pixel Scroll 9/26/24 What A Knitted Sweater Would Look Like If I Scrolled One And Pixel Two

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(1) TOLKIEN CRITICISM. Some fannish references surprisingly creep into Dennis Wilson Wise’s reviews of The Literary Role of History in the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien by Nicholas Birns and Representing Middle-earth: Tolkien, Form, and Ideology by Robert T. Tally Jr. in “Tolkien Criticism Today, Revisited” for the Los Angeles Review of Books. For example:

….Of these debates, Birns often takes the more challenging or counterintuitive side. For instance, most Tolkienists agree that Tolkien based his Rohirrim on the Old English kingdom of Mercia. Instead, Birns sees the Rohirrim as semimodern—not medieval—through their “civilizing” contact with Gondor. To say the least, this view enjoys questionable textual support, but as one goes through Birns’s book, a clear pattern begins to emerge. Over the last few years, the Tolkien community has endured its own shadow version of the Sad Puppies fiasco. In 2021, certain right-leaning fans (and at least one senior scholar) loudly decried the “wokeism” of a diversity-themed seminar hosted by the Tolkien Society, and with even greater toxicity, some people in Tolkien fandom have virulently attacked the multiracial casting in The Rings of Power, an Amazon Prime Video series that first aired in September 2022.

This is the cultural moment into which Birns wades, but for someone hoping to make an important political intervention, he frequently stumbles over several small, self-deprecating asides. One example involves race and representation. Before launching into the argument, Birns explicitly denies that, as a white male from an Anglo-American cultural background, he is “trying to act as an authority on those subjects.” Here, Birns is plainly attempting to acknowledge his positionality, a move often called for by progressive scholars, but his good intentions catch The Role of History in Tolkien in a performative quandary. They let right-wing crusaders dismiss his arguments out of hand; after all, this book wasn’t written by “an expert.”

But of course Birns isn’t really trying to show wayward young fascists the light. His real audience is the academic Left, and despite his principled humility, Birns clearly wants to provide his fellow leftists with scholarly ammunition against the anti-diversity crowd. Thus his various scholarly takes consist mainly in quashing claims of “Germanic primitivism” in Tolkien. Birns downplays not only Rohan’s clear connection to Mercia—the Old English people, remember, were originally Germanic—but also Tolkien’s overall admiration for the Gothic peoples. Additionally, Birns alleges that Tolkien took multicultural Byzantium as his model for Gondor, not imperial (and eventually Ostrogothic) Rome. Even more pointedly, although Birns laments how little Tolkien knew about the “traditions and cultural memory of non-European peoples,” he nevertheless claims to see some African influence on the legendarium. Allegedly, Tar-Míriel of Númenor bears a passing resemblance to Empress Zewditu of Ethiopia.

Even for readers who cheer his goals, these connections can seem far-fetched….

(2) CAN’T GET NO SATISFACTION. “6 sci-fi and fantasy authors who hated the screen adaptations of their books” at Winter Is Coming.

Earlier this week, A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin set off a drama bomb when he bluntly criticized HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon in a blog post….

But compared to some of the other authors who have criticized adaptations of their work, it was nothing. Below, let’s look at some authors who were unhappy with the screen versions of their books, and what they said and did about it…

The article leads off with Ursula K. Le Guin (Earthsea), and follows with Alan Moore (Watchmen), Stephen King (The Shining), P.J. Travers (Mary Poppins), Brandon Sanderson (The Wheel of Time) and Michael Ende (The Neverending Story).

Ursula K. Le Guin didn’t like the Sci-Fi Channel’s adaptation of Earthsea

Let’s begin our journey into dissatisfaction with Ursula K. Le Guin, the author of the beloved Earthsea books. Where high fantasy epics often involve war or other mass-scale conflict, the Earthsea novels are quieter and more complicated, with different books following different characters living on a string of islands where magic is practiced freely. When The Sci-Fi Channel announced that it was going to make an Earthsea miniseries based on the first book in the series, A Wizard of Earthsea, people were excited.

But that excitement evaporated when they saw the finished product, which ran back in 2004. Le Guin herself was already bracing for the worst. “When I saw the script, I realized that what the writer had done was kill the books, cut them up, take out an eye here, a leg there, and stick these bits into a totally different story, stitching it all together with catgut and hokum,” she wrote for Locusmagazine. “They were going to use the name Earthsea, and some of the scenes from the books, in a generic McMagic movie with a silly plot based on sex and violence.”

“I want to say that I am very sorry for the actors. They all tried really hard. I’m not sorry for myself, or for my books. We’re doing fine, thanks. But I am sorry for people who tuned in to the show thinking they were going to see something by me, or about Earthsea. I will try to be more careful in future, and not let either myself or my readers be fooled.”

While Le Guin had kind words for the actors, she had a major problem with the casting. In the Archipelago of Earthsea, almost all of the characters are people of color, including the wizard Ged, the closest thing the series has to a main character. But in the Sci-Fi show, pretty much everyone was white, something Le Guin did not appreciate. “In the miniseries, Danny Glover is the only man of color among the main characters (although there are a few others among the spear-carriers),” she wrote for Slate. “A far cry from the Earthsea I envisioned.”

“My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn’t see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn’t see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had “violet eyes”). It didn’t even make sense. Whites are a minority on Earth now—why wouldn’t they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future?”

Le Guin was a bit kinder about the 2006 animated movie Tales from Earthsea, although she was still disappointed it didn’t channel her books more. “It is not my book. It is your movie. It is a good movie,” she remembers telling director Goro Miyazaki. At least she didn’t hate it this time.

(3) GERWIG HONORED. Deadline is there as Barbie director “Greta Gerwig Accepts Motion Picture Pioneer Of The Year Award”.

Greta Gerwig was beaming Wednesday night as she was honored as this year’s Pioneer Of The Year, and in the process also helped raised $1.4 million for the Will Rogers Motion Picture Pioneers Foundation at a sold-out dinner that packed the Beverly Hilton Hotel International Ballroom…

(4) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to chow down on cheesy garlic bread with Jeffrey Ford in Episode 237 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

I last chatted with Jeffrey Ford — last for your ears, that is — eight years ago during the 2016 Readercon — in a conversation which appeared on Episode 17. Back then, I described him as a six-time World Fantasy Award-winning and three-time Shirley Jackson Award-winning writer whose new short story collection A Natural History of Hell had just been published. But now that it’s 2024 and we’re back for yet another Readercon, he’s an eight-time World Fantasy Award-winning writer and a four-time Shirley Jackson Award winner.

Jeffrey Ford

Since that previous meal, he’s also published the novel Ahab’s Return: or, The Last Voyage in 2018, A Primer to Jeffrey Ford in 2019, The Best of Jeffrey Ford in 2020, and Big Dark Hole in 2021, plus three dozen stories or so new stories.

We discussed why writing has gotten more daunting (but more fun) as he’s gotten older, the difficulties of teaching writing remotely during a pandemic, how he often doesn’t realize what he was really writing about in a story until years after it was written, the realization that made him write a sequel to Moby-Dick, why if you have confidence and courage you can do anything, the music he suggests you listen to while writing, the reason he thinks world building is a “stupid term,” the advice given to him by his mentor John Gardner, how the writing of Isaac Bashevis Singer taught him not to blink, why he prefers giving readings to doing panels, the writer who advised him if everybody liked his stories it meant he was doing something wrong, and much more.

(5) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 119 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Only One of Them Is My Bludgeoning Hand, John” –

We respond to your burning questions in our bumper mailbag episode! We spend a good long time going through your posts, and we briefly discuss the recent allegations against Neil Gaiman before moving onto happier topics. Listen here.

There’s a transcript at the link.

A famous photograph of Margaret Hamilton standing beside printed outputs of the code that took the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon, overlaid with the words “Octothorpe 119” and “Our Listeners Write In”.

(6) BRITISH ROBOT PURCHASES BOOM. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Robot sales in Britain broke its own record in 2023 with 3,830 industrial robots sold according to the International Federation of Robotics.  This represented a 51% increase over 2022.

However, Britain still lags behind France, Italy and the European leader Germany. In 2022 Germany installed 269,427 industrial robots.

I keep on warning folk that the machines are taking over, but no-one ever listens….

You can read about it here: “IFR press release World Robotics 2024”.

(7) UNSTUCK THE LANDING. Space-Biff! surprises us by revealing Kurt Vonnegut’s work creating board games in “So It Goes”. And one was finally published this year — Kurt Vonnegut’s GHQ: The Lost Board Game. (It seems to be available at Barnes & Noble®.)

Before he became a famous author, over a decade before Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut was a board game designer. A failed board game designer, with only a sheaf of notes, a single rejection note, and an unfinished patent to his name, but a board game designer nonetheless.

And now his sole surviving design is an actual board game you can buy and play and, if you’re anything like me, spend a few hours marveling at. Thanks to the efforts of the Vonnegut estate in preserving his notes and Geoff Engelstein in interpreting and tweaking them into a functional state, GHQ — short for “General Headquarters” — is, not unlike Billy Pilgrim, a thing unstuck in time, transported from 1956 to 2024….

… Is GHQ a good game? Sure. For its time. For its place. Had it appeared in 1956, it may well have become the third great checkerboard game. With its zones of control and special units, it might have helped shape the coming century’s approach to tabletop gaming….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Lis Carey.]

September 26, 1957 – Tanya Huff, 67.

By Lis Carey: Tanya Huff is a Canadian science fiction and fantasy writer, who made her first sale of two poems to The Picton Gazette for $10, at age ten.

Since then, she has given us several fantasy series, including the Keeper’s Chronicles, in which Claire Hansen, a Keeper, has unintentionally become responsible for a small hotel, and the not completely sealed hole to hell in its basement. She’s assisted, with some degree of befuddlement initially, by Dean, the young handyman and cook she found working there; Jacques, the ghost of a French-Canadian sailor who has haunted the hotel since he died there in the 1920s; and her not befuddled at all cat, Austin, who talks, and is the source of a great deal of often snarky advice. I’m currently enjoying the first volume, Summon the Keeper.

Tanya Huff

Other fantasy series include the Blood series, featuring a former police detective and a vampire, which was adapted for television as Blood Ties, and the Quarters series, with bards who travel the kingdom carrying both news and magical skills, and are faced with new challenges when the kingdom is invaded.

Tanya Huff has also given us the Valor Confederation series, a military sf series where Staff Sergeant Torin Kerr tries to keep both her superiors and her company of space marines alive while on lethal missions across the galaxy. I hear excellent things about it, but haven’t read any of it yet.

An interesting tidbit is that while studying at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto for her Bachelor of Applied Arts degree, she was in the same class as science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer. They collaborated on their final TV Studio Lab assignment, a short science fiction show.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) WEST COAST AVENGERS INTRODUCES BLUE BOLT. This November, the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes are back on the best coast in an all-new run of West Coast Avengers from writer Gerry Duggan and artist Danny Kim. Led by Iron Man, the new roster includes Spider-Woman, War Machine, Firestar, a mysteriously redeemed Ultron, and another former villain seeking redemption— Blue Bolt!

 An experienced Marvel henchman with unrefined lightning-based abilities, Chad Braxton, AKA Blue Bolt, makes his first appearance in WEST COAST AVENGERS #1 where he finds himself on loan to the Avengers through a new prison release program. Reckless, undisciplined, and downright rude, Blue Bolt may just be the biggest jerk in the entire Marvel Universe. Can the Avengers whip him into shape or will Blue Bolt’s abrasive attitude–and lack of morals–tarnish the team’s legacy forever? See him for yourself in Kim’s original design sheet for the character plus a promotional image by Todd Nauck.

On the unique role Blue Bolt will serve on the team, Duggan said, “The Avengers have seen a lot of rough customers over the years. Hell, even Deadpool and Wolverine have been Avengers at different points. But the Avengers haven’t seen a bigger @$!&^% than Blue Bolt. He’s mean, he’s self-centered, narcissistic, and he’s only on the Avengers West Coast squad to shave time off his sentence. And wait until you find out what he’s in jail for. Yeesh.”

(11) SFF ON LEARNEDLEAGUE: WILLIAM GIBSON. [Item by David Goldfarb.] Yesterday’s match day featured this question:

What is the portmanteau title of William Gibson’s seminal and influential 1984 cyberpunk novel, the first (and only) to win the Nebula, Hugo, and Philip K. Dick awards?

This had a 37% get rate league-wide, with no single wrong answer getting as much as 5% of the submissions.

(12) MY PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION NOMINATION. [Item by Francis Hamit.] My novel Starmen has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The nomination has been accepted by Columbia University. It awards the Pulitzers. Which is good but there is more to do.

Leigh Strother-Vien is also nominated for her great work editing the book. It’s a very long book: 620 pages in the print editions. Four years of work at a time when we were both disabled and sick a lot of the time. Just shows you what you can do when you try. But we are up against very big publishers with big marketing and publicity machines. There is a long list of distinguished and very busy jurors from Publishing and Academia who may not like the fact that we are, alas, self published.

We never thought of doing it any other way. Why? I’ll be 80 next week and Leigh is 70. We are disabled. And we are soldiers. There is a lot of prejudice between us and a traditional publisher. We don’t have an agent and the “over the transom” method was closed years ago. There is a generation of younger editors that are more concerned about politics than the quality of the writing. Publishing executives tend to chase the market and imitate what has been successful rather than take risks on “new” or “unknown” writers. Ageism and Ableism are just two of the many hoops our book would have to jump through to get a deal. We don’t have time for all of that. We are too sick and tired, both of us, to deal with it.

So we applied, got accepted, and we’re a bit of a charity case because of the Kickstarter appeal to raise funds for formatting the interior and the excellent cover donated by Markee Book Covers. I took a credit union loan to cover other expenses. We have been graced with almost entirely five star reviews and the endorsements of friends such as Jacqueline Lichtenburg and Glen Olsen. So far, so good. But now this is a battle for public attention, for sales, and for ratings and reviews on Amazon, Goodreads and other websites.

This novel is an experiment in genres.  We use a lot of them packed into what is on the surface an adventure novel with more than a dozen principal characters, each fully formed. Thematically it moves from Historical/ Western/ Detective fiction to Espionage, Political Intrigue, and Apache Myths, that becomes surrealist Fantasy and Science Fiction, mixed with Romance, Witchcraft, Feminism, Quantum Mechanics, String Theory, and disquisitions on slavery in the Old South, the failure of Reconstruction, and the floating world of sex workers called the Demimonde. All are grist for the mill.  A lot of research was needed. A lot of deep thinking since I had no outline. That would have been more of a hindrance than a help.

Instead I just start at the beginning with an accidental meeting of two Scots far from home, in a dusty border town called El Paso, and the appearance overhead of a large balloon carrying a traveling circus. One of the Scots is the local manager for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency (a forerunner of today’s FBI) and the other is a young anthropologist from Cambridge University, George James Frazer. You just know interesting things will happen.

So much for the tease. Buy the book for the rest.

There is another reason that I feel confident.  I’m a very good writer.  I’m also a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, the oldest and most prestigious graduate writing program in the world. Rather amazing for a kid who got Ds in high school English. I could not spell or punctuate worth a damn. Still can’t. I’m dyslexic, a condition unknown and unnamed in the 1960s. I began my career as a Drama major, and when I came to Iowa the first time, I had never heard of the Workshop. I soon met professors there and graduate assistants, some of whom were or would become famous. But it was a mandatory drama theory course, “Playwrighting”, that changed my life. I began writing fiction and was admitted to the Undergraduate Writers Workshop. Then I spent four years in the US Army, where I also learned journalism and began my professional career. Returning to Iowa I was in classes with writers who became very famous and also won Pulitzer Prizes. Jane Smiley, Tracy Kidder, and last year’s winner, Jayne Philips were among them. But it’s not the Iowa MFA that helps, but the Iowa workshop program, a trial by fire if there ever was one for literature. Iowa rigs the game. You don’t get in unless you are already at the top. Over 97% of all applicants fail. When you have done that getting your book published should be easy — and is, when you are young and have an agent and a publisher that can see decades of other books coming.  At my age, not so much, and I have had agents tell me that to my face and others drop me because I wouldn’t imitate other writers that were best sellers.

Self-publishing is a long and honorable tradition in American letters. Willa Cather and Walt Whitman started that way. So once more I’m in good company. I am going to have to push myself and my book to prevail, but there is no long list or short list for the Pulitzers. Only winners and finalists. If it were not for so many top reviews we would not have entered, but now that we are here we can only try our best.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] “Trap Pitch Meeting”. Huh. Sounds pretty much like the review I read. Then again, with a plot this shallow/unbelievable and nepotism this blatant, it might be hard for a parody and a review to differ very much.

[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, David Goldfarb, Francis Hamit, 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 Ellen Montgomery.]

Pixel Scroll 9/22/24 The Only Living Scroll In New Crobuzon

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(1) SOMETHING HE LEARNED FROM BILBO. Peterson Pipe Notes reminds pipe smokers “Today is Hobbit Day!—Tolkien & Peterson”.

Today (September 22nd) is Hobbit Day, marking the beginning of Tolkien Week 2024. Many observe the day with a birthday cake—in honor of Bilbo and Frodo, whose birthdays are today.  I’m thinking just as many celebrate with a tankard of beer from the Prancing Pony (yes, it comes in pints) and as many more with a pipe of good tobacco.

It’s fairly common knowledge that one of the dharma doors to pipe smoking of the past 50 years or so is The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.  It was in fact mine, when in my first nine weeks of high school I was marooned at home with mononucleosis. After finishing my day’s academic work—which took about 90 minutes—I’d spend the remainder reading at whim.  That reading was drawn mostly from Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy series of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which included books by such greats as Lord Dunsany, H. P. Lovecraft, E. R. Eddison, David Lindsay, George MacDonald, and of course Tolkien.  I was so taken with Middle Earth that I knew I needed to learn to smoke a pipe.  My dad, a very irregular pipeman at the time, had two Kaywoodies in a drawer in the living room.  Armed with one of them and some Cherry Royale (from Ted’s Pipe Shoppe in Tulsa), I took my first steps on the road….  

(2) THE BRADBURYS. “On Maggie Bradbury, the woman who ‘changed literature forever.’” at Literary Hub.

Ray Bradbury met his first girlfriend—and his future wife—in a bookstore. But they didn’t lock eyes over the same just-selected novel, or bump into each other in a narrow aisle, sending books and feelings flying. It was a warm afternoon in April 1946, and 25-year-old Ray Bradbury—an up-and-coming pulp fiction writer—was wearing a trench coat and carrying a briefcase while he scanned the shelves at Fowler Brothers Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles. Naturally, Marguerite McClure—Maggie—who worked at the bookstore, “was immediately suspicious.” Someone had been stealing books, but hadn’t yet been caught. So she struck up a conversation. “I expected him to slam his briefcase down on a pile of books and make off with a few,” she said. “Instead, he told me he was a writer and invited me to have a cup of coffee with him.”

Coffee became lunch became dinner became romance; Maggie was the first woman Ray had ever dated, but he managed all right, and they were married on September 27, 1947.

“When I got married, all my wife’s friends said, ‘Don’t marry him. He’s going nowhere,’” Bradbury said in his 2000 commencement address at Caltech. “But I said to her, ‘I’m going to the moon, and I’m going to Mars. Do you want to come along?’ And she said, ‘Yes.’ She said yes. She took a vow of poverty, and married me. On the day of our wedding, we had $8 in the bank. And I put $5 in an envelope, and handed it to the minister. And he said, ‘What’s this?’ I said, ‘That’s your pay for the ceremony today.’ He said, ‘You’re a writer, aren’t you?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘You’re going to need this.’ And he gave it to me. And I took it back.”…

(3) STAND UP TO AI. SF Standard takes notes as “Comedian John Mulaney roasts SF techies at Dreamforce”.

“Let me get this straight,” John Mulaney said. “You’re hosting a ‘future of AI’ event in a city that has failed humanity so miserably?”

Everyone inside the auditorium at the Moscone Center groaned. Any notion that the award-winning comedian would play the corporate gig safe (and clean) were thrown out the window Thursday, when Mulaney, closing the Dreamforce festivities, started roasting his host, Salesforce, and the audience sitting right in front of him…

… The comedian rounded out his Dreamforce appearance by thanking attendees “for the world you’re creating for my son … where he will never talk to an actual human again. Instead, a little cartoon Einstein will pop up and give him a sort of good answer and probably refer him to another chatbot.”…

(4) AMAZING AND FANTASTIC SIXTIES REVIVAL. In “Fantastic Fiction: The Amazing and Fantastic Cele Goldsmith” at Seattle Worldcon 2025, Cora Buhlert introduces us to a historic prozine editor.

By the 1950s, the once venerable Amazing Stories, the oldest science fiction magazine, and its sister magazine Fantastic were deep in the doldrums. Both magazines were bottom-tier markets, publishing formulaic stories by the same handful of authors under various pen names.

All this changed in 1955, when a young Vassar graduate named Cele Goldsmith arrived at Ziff-Davis Publishing to work as an assistant to Howard Browne, the editor of Amazing and Fantastic, and his successor Paul Fairman. When Fairman left in 1958, Cele Goldsmith found herself editor of two ailing SFF magazines at the age of only 25….

(5) THEME PARK TURNAROUND. [Item by David Doering.] Here’s the latest on the resurrection of Evermore. “Name revealed for new fantasy-themed venue at former Evermore Park property” reports ABC4.com.

As new owners have taken over the former home of Evermore Park, they’ve been hatching excitement through an interactive experience that slowly unveils information about the future of the venue. In the latest reveal, the owners announced what the new venue’s name will be — “The Realm Town.”

Michelle and Travis Fox, bought the 13-acre property from Brandon Fugal earlier this year after the owners of Evermore Park shut its gates in April. Since then, the Foxes launched the “Hatch the Egg” initiative, where participants complete quests through an app, much like Pokémon Go. As players solve clues, details for the future plans of the park are revealed as its undergoing renovations. Players also join in on the opportunity to win prizes and join in on special in-person events….

(6) TOUCHPOINT WILL CLOSE. A press has made an agreement with the Authors Guild to address complaints that drew the attention of Writer Beware: “Authors Blast TouchPoint Press for Unethical Business Practices” at Publishers Weekly.

After hearing from dozens of authors about the poor business practices of TouchPoint Press, the Authors Guild said Friday that it has reached a deal with TouchPoint founder Sheri Williams, under which Williams agreed to pay authors overdue royalties and revert rights back to any author who has not yet received them. In addition, according to Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger, Williams has agreed to close the press, which bills itself as a “traditional royalty-paying publisher” of adult and children’s books.

Rasenberger said that, over the last two years, 35 to 40 authors have contacted the Guild with concerns about TouchPoint’s failure to fulfill its contractual obligations and that, as of last week, there were 26 open cases. Problems about TouchPoint had also been raised by Writer Beware, whose Victoria Strauss who says she started receiving “a handful of complaints” as far back as 2015….

(7) TRANSCENDENCE: BAH, HUMBUG. Mark Roth-Whitworth found a lot to challenge in Isaac Arthur’s video about “Transcendence”. He shared his criticisms at his blog in “Transcendence, and a response”, including this one:

…Then let’s consider very advanced aliens. Remember, I mentioned how close technologically to us they needed to be? Suppose they were so advanced that they glanced at us, thought “seen that before thousands of times, ignore them till they reach the point where they have something to say beyond our equivalent of “run, Spot, run”. Maybe they have whatever they’re perceiving in their transcendence that’s far more interesting or important than primitives like us? Why should we matter, if they’re that advanced? If they have nothing we need, like the remote tribes in the Amazon who are being attacked by illegal loggers, miners, and farmer, why would they pay attention to us?

Then there’s the idea of transcending the universe. What evidence do we have that there is a beyond this one? Perhaps some immensely advanced beings might want to skip the Big Crunch as the universe is recreated in a new Big Bang….

(8) CROSS-GENRE NOIR. “Spooky Sleuthing: 5 Noir and Detective Films That Feature the Supernatural” at CrimeReads.

… As the days grow shorter and we head into spooky season—the Halloween decorations are on sale at Costco, in any case—it’s a good time for fans of detective and noir fiction to consider supplementing their viewing list with a few movies that combine the best parts of their favorite genre with the weird and occult. Here are some recommendations:…

From Dusk Till Dawn (1996): How did Quentin Tarantino end up scripting a vampire movie that’s like nothing else in his extensive filmography? Legend has it that special makeup effects Robert Kurtzman needed a horror script for his up-and-coming effects studio, KNB EFX Group, and paid a young Tarantino $1,500 plus the makeup effects (re: buckets of blood) for the latter’s “Reservoir Dogs.” But Kurtzman couldn’t find a studio willing to fund the film with him as the director, and eventually Tarantino, his fame on the rise, guided the script into the hands of his buddy Robert Rodriguez….

(9) A PEEK INTO NEW WORLDS AT 60. “Michael Moorcock is Back: New Worlds 60th Anniversary Issue Global Exclusive Video”. Information about ordering a copy is at the link.

Steve Andrews previews the 60th Anniversary issue of New Worlds magazine, celebrating MM taking on its editorship in 1964 and with a cast of groundbreaking contributors, changing SF and Literary Fiction for the better, forever. At the time of posting this video, not even Moorcock himself has seen a finished copy, but you see one here!

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born September 22, 1971 — Elizabeth Bear, 53.

By Paul Weimer: I knew Elizabeth Bear before she broke big in genre. That’s not a boast, per se, that’s an observation that she was part of the small and intense community of people who were involved in the fandom of the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game, based on the work of Roger Zelazny. Bear attended many of the same small cons as I did revolving around the game. (Other authors in the “Secret Amber Cabal” (as named by Scott Lynch) include people like Genevieve Cogman, Jane Lindskold, and I guess, myself.) 

Elizabeth Bear

But back to Bear. Her ambitions and efforts to be a writer were something I was both aware and interested in, from the very beginnings of her career. I loved her novel trilogy debut that started with Hammered. I was delighted and not surprised when her Whiskey and Water series eventually brought a Marlowe as a character on the screen. Her ability to write fantasy and science fiction in equal measure has always enchanted me. The Eternal Sky fantasy novel series. Carnival, which was once the “if you must read one Bear novel, read this one) book (nowadays, that might be Machine or Ancestral Night).

Bear’s novels are accompanied by a strong short fiction oeuvre as well, although I think she works better for me as a writer at the longer lengths. Although I admit her Hugo awards (one for short story and one for novelette) might make me less than completely accurate in that regard. But I think the longer lengths, especially in hitting the marks in completing series (such as recently, the Origin of Storms, which completed the Lotus Kingdoms books VERY fantastically) proves that she works the long form best. 

Bear is also one of the leaders of one of my local cons, 4th Street Fantasy, and so helps foster the genre conversation for her fellow readers, writers and fans.

And she is a very good friend. Happy birthday Bear!

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Eek! has a credential-caused delay.
  • Frank and Ernest have lined up the top talent.
  • The Argyle Sweater features obscure equipment from Sesame Street.
  • Tom Gauld wonders who will break the bad news to them.

(12) MAD ABOUT YOU. CBS News’ Sunday Morning show visited the exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum: “How Mad Magazine’s humor created a revolution”.

Nestled the rolling hills of rural Massachusetts. swathed by manicured grounds, sits the Norman Rockwell Museum. And there, side-by-side with the wholesome works of America’s most beloved illustrator, is the world’s dumbest cover boy: Alfred E. Neuman.

“It’s sacrilegious! It’s an outrage!” laughed political cartoonist Steve Brodner. “But I do think if Norman Rockwell were here, he’d laugh his head off. He’d think this was fantastic.”

(13) LOST COMPLETELY. “10 best episodes of ‘Lost’ ranked for 20th anniversary” by Entertainment Weekly. If you watched the series, maybe you have an opinion, too.

It’s been 20 years since Oceanic flight 815 crash landed on a mysterious island, and TV has never been the same. Cue the blurry title card, because it’s time to celebrate two decades of Lost.

When the ABC drama premiered Sept. 22, 2004, it introduced a large ensemble of compelling characters and intriguing mysteries portrayed cinematically in ways that had never been attempted before on TV. And as the series continued for six seasons, it raised more questions than it answered as the mythology got more and more complex — flashbacks became flash forwards and then flash sideways, and don’t even get us started on the frozen donkey wheel. Debates still rage amongst fans about whether the castaways were dead the whole time, what was up with those cursed numbers, and what the island really was….

4. “Pilot” (season 1, episode 1-2)

From the very first moment Jack opened an eye in the middle of a mysterious jungle up to the final seconds with Charlie’s iconic and chilling delivery of, “Guys, where are we?,” Lost debuted a pitch-perfect TV pilot. Introducing an ensemble this large and a mystery this complex in only two episodes of broadcast TV should have been impossible. But J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof hooked viewers immediately — and ultimately changed the TV landscape forever. The Emmy-winning episode featured juicy, head-scratching twists (An unseen, but definitely heard, violent monster! A polar bear in the tropical jungle! A French distress call looped for 16 years!) and continued to raise the intense stakes as the survivors learned help may not be coming at all … because they crashed over 1,000 miles off-course, so any rescue attempt would be looking in the wrong place. The flashbacks also subverted expectations as viewers learned the castaways aren’t who they first appeared to be with the reveal that it was actually leading lady Kate who was the handcuffed prisoner onboard the flight. Like the survivors, we truly had no idea what was in store from the rest of the series after these two episodes, but the premiere instantly made it clear that this was no ordinary sci-fi/fantasy thriller. 

(14) THE LITTLE DUCK. Beware! This Disneyland Paris commercial from 2018 may wring your heartstrings! (Or put a crimp in your gizzard – I know about some of you….)

(15) GET READY FOR WEDNESDAY. “’Wednesday’ Season 2 Trailer, Release Date on Netflix, Jenna Ortega” – TVLine has the rundown.

… Catherine Zeta-Jones, who plays Wednesday’s mother Morticia Addams, promises that “Season 2 is going to be bigger and more twisted than you can ever imagine.” And don’t feel bad that you only get to see bits and pieces: “If we showed you any more, your eyes would bleed,” Ortega warns in a perfect Wednesday deadpan. “And I’m not that generous.”…

(16) PORTRAIT OF JENNIE. [Item by Andrew Porter.] I cannot tell you how many times I’ve seen this romantic fantasy, beginning when I was a kid, and watched it on Channel 11 in NY—and called the station, begging them to show all the film, including the final segments which were tinted, and a scene in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in Technicolor.

That final scene included, uncredited, Nancy Davis, Anne Francis, and Nancy Olson, as teenagers! “Portrait of Jennie (1948) Filming Locations”.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, 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 Peer.]

Pixel Scroll 9/14/24 Scrollchak, The Night Pixel

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(1) RING TIME. Robin Anne Reid’s newsletter Writing from Ithilien offers a collection of links to interesting discussions of the Rings of Power series in“The Vibes Around ‘Tolkien’”.

I love reading what fans who love the show have to say about it, and I’m having great fun reading those posts (including the ones I’ve linked to above!). Let’s just say I enjoy all the varied vibes around a text that is now part of the greater global “Tolkien” phenomenon, i.e. connected to all the things, even if I don’t much like that particular instance!

(2) BALANCED IN THE SCALES AND FOUND WANTING. Meanwhile, The Hollywood Reporter does a roundup of all the complaints about the two epic series adapting George R.R. Martin and Tolkien in “’House of the Dragon’ and ‘Rings of Power’ Facing Epic Headaches”. (Got to love the article’s illustration of a sword-wielding GRRM on a flying dragon.)

… As for Rings [of Power]s’ ratings, third-party services show a steep drop from the series’ debut season. The spin from Amazon goes like this: Of course the ratings are down, they were so huge last time. There is something to this. Even Prime Video hits like Fallout and The Boys haven’t matched Rings’ season one on a global basis (Fallout did top the show in the U.S.). Amazon says the new season is doing well internationally and is on track to be a Top 5 season for Prime Video….

…Then there is Dragon, whose problems are more interesting. The second season incensed some fans after spending eight episodes leading to a massive cliffhanger — a climactic battle sequence that was pushed from a shortened season two to season three, apparently for budget reasons (which has led to more “David Zaslav ruins everything” chatter online). In the ratings, the season dipped about 10 percent from the show’s first season, but the numbers do remain high. 

Two weeks ago, saga author (and Dragon co-creator and executive producer) George R.R. Martin, who has been complimentary about Dragon in the past, posted on his blog that he was going to reveal “everything that’s gone wrong” with the show. Smart money could have been wagered on this never happening — surely HBO would do everything in its power to persuade Martin not to post.

But last week, Martin did, and the result was fascinating…

(3) SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE 2024 LONGLIST. The Scotiabank Giller Prize 2024 longlist was released September 4. The Prize is a celebration of Canadian literary talent. The 12 titles were chosen from 145 books submitted by publishers across Canada. There is one longlisted work of genre interest:

  • Anne Michaels for her novel Held, published by McClelland & Stewart

The other longlisted works are:

(4) OCTOTHORPE. In Episode 118 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Och Aye, Sci-Fi”, John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty continue their discussion of the Worldcon. (There’s a rough-and-ready transcript here.)

We round off most of our discussion of the Glasgow Worldcon, including talking about Halls 4 and 5, communications, Worldcon structures, and publications. Thanks to Sara Felix, this week, for providing our lovely artwork.

Three pins of armadillos flying colourful spaceships are on top of a piece of paper with blobs of glue that look like planets. The lettering “Octothorpe 118” appears above in a similar style to the pins.

(5) JOURNEY PLANET. Journey Planet 84 “Workers’ Rights In SFF” is available at this link. File 770 promoted the zine with this post.

Contributor Joachim Boaz has cross-posted his article from the issue about Clifford D. Simak at Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations: “Exploration Log 5: ‘We Must Start Over Again and Find Some Other Way of Life’: The Role of Organized Labor in the 1940s and ’50s Science Fiction of Clifford D. Simak”.

My article on organized labor in the 1940s and ’50s science fiction of Clifford D. Simak went live! I’d love to hear your thoughts. I’ve spent the last half year researching and reading religiously for this project–from topics such as Minnesota’s unique brand of radical politics to the work of contemporary intellectuals like C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) whom Simak most likely read.

(6) SUPREME GENRE READER. The New York Times learns “Ketanji Brown Jackson Looks Forward to Reading Fiction Again”. (Paywalled.) “The Supreme Court justice has been drawn to American history and books about the ‘challenges and triumphs’ of raising a neurodiverse child. She shares that and more in a memoir, ‘Lovely One.’”

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which books and authors stick with you most?

Pretty voracious. My favorite childhood books were Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time” series. I really identified with Meg. I also liked Judy Blume’s “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” And I went through a Nancy Drew phase.

Which genres do you … avoid?

 I don’t think I’ve indulged in reading fiction in many years. I hope to get back to doing so, now that our daughters are grown, but I would avoid anything that would qualify as a horror story. I don’t like to be frightened.

Are there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time?

I am gearing up to read “Parable of the Sower,” by Octavia Butler, soon. I have it both in paper and as an audiobook, which helps.

(7) TUTTLE REVIEWS. Lisa Tuttle’s latest sff review column for the Guardian takes up The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera; Withered Hill by David Barnett; Crypt of the Moon Spider by Nathan Ballingrud; The Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei; and The Specimens by Hana Gammon. “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup”.

(8) BOB WEATHERWAX (1941-2024). [Item by Andrew Porter.] The New York Times reports a star dog trainer died August 15.

Bob Weatherwax, a Hollywood dog trainer who carried on his father’s legacy of breeding and coaching collies to play Lassie, the resourceful and heroic canine who crossed flooded rivers, faced down bears and leaped into the hearts of countless children, died on Aug. 15 in Scranton, Pa. He was 83.

One of his uncles trained Toto for “The Wizard of Oz” (1939). 

Mr. Weatherwax also trained other dogs seen in Hollywood films, including Einstein, the Catalan sheepdog in “Back to the Future.”

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born September 14, 1936 — Walter Koenig, 88. Walter Koenig’s our Birthday Honoree this Scroll. He really has had but two major roles, though he has also appeared in a number of other roles. 

The first was as the Russian born Enterprise navigator Pavel Chekov on the original Trek franchise. He went on to reprise this role in all six original-cast Trek films, and later voiced President Anton Chekov in Picard. 

I like the Chekov character even if on viewing the series decades later I cringed on the quite obvious stereotype.

A much better character was played by him in the form of Alfred Bester (named in homage of that author and a certain novel) on Babylon 5. He wasn’t at all a sympathetic character and eventually was wanted for war crimes but was still a fascinating character. His origin story is established in J. Gregory Keyes’ Psi Corps trilogy written after the series was cancelled and is considered canon. 

He showed up in The Questor Tapes as an administrative assistant, Oro, for two episodes of Starlost.

Moontrap, a SF film with him and Bruce Campbell, would garner a twenty-eight percent rating at Rotten Tomatoes. 

Alienable, a sort of comic SF horror film which he executive produced, financed, wrote and acts in has no rating there. 

He’s Fireman Frank in Unbelievable!!!!! which apparently parodies Trek. The film has over forty cast members from the various Trek series. The film follows the omicron adventures however unintentional of four astronauts including one of who is a marionette. I cringed when I watched the trailer. I really did.  Anyone see it? 

Not surprisingly he acts in one of those Trek fanfics, Star Trek: New Voyage as his original character.

Finally he appears via the wonder of digital technology in the Hugo-nominated “Trials and Tribble-ations”. 

Walter Koenig

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Brewster Rockit should have declined the invitation.
  • Cornered illustrates do it yourself versus premade.
  • Carpe Diem wants to drop a subject.
  • Tom Gauld does his own version of a popular meme.

(11) NO SAVING THROW. All 25 quit: “Annapurna Interactive Entire Staff Resigns” reports Variety.

The staff of Annapurna Interactive, the games division of Megan Ellison‘s Annapurna, has resigned en masse after a deal to spin off the group fell through, Bloomberg reports.

Founded in 2016, Annapurna Interactive has partnered with boutique game studios for several critically acclaimed titles, including “Stray” (pictured above), described as a “third-person cat adventure game set amidst the detailed, neon-lit alleys of a decaying cybercity,” as well as “What Remains of Edith Finch,” “Outer Wilds” and “Neon White.”

The staff exodus came after a breakdown in talks between Ellison and Nathan Gary, formerly president of Annapurna Interactive, to spin the gaming unit off as a separate company. “All 25 members of the Annapurna Interactive team collectively resigned,” Gary and the other employees said in a joint statement Thursday to Bloomberg. “This was one of the hardest decisions we have ever had to make and we did not take this action lightly.”

(12) STREET ART. James Bacon told File 770 readers today about “Dublin Street Art”.

Chris Barkley says his hometown deserves a look, too: “Cincinnati Wins A Top Spot For The City’s Street Art And Murals” at Islands.

…And, to those that know the Queen City, it’s no surprise that Cincinnati took the street art crown in 2024’s USA Today and 10Best Readers’ Choice Awards. The annual competition, which counts down top tens around the country, uses a panel of experts to determine ten nominees with street art chops. Then, they leave voting to readers to decide the winners. This year, Cincinnati, which has been among the nominees going back to 2021, finally took the top spot, thanks to the more than 300 stunning murals dotting the city’s neighborhood streets….

There’s a more extensive photo gallery at ArtWorks Cincinnati.

(13) BLOCH SCRIPT ON EBAY. The Dave Hester Store of Storage Wars fame would be happy to sell you a screenplay from Robert Bloch’s estate, part of his personal archives: “1961 ‘The Merry-Go-Around’ By Robert Bloch”, based on Ray Bradbury’s “The Black Ferris”. Haven’t been able to determine whether it was produced. Taking bids, starting at $99.

(14) PRACTICING FOR ARTEMIS. NPR learned “How the crew of NASA’s Artemis II prepares for a mission to the moon”. It’s an audio report.

This time next year, NASA plans to send its first crewed mission to the moon. NPR’s Scott Detrow meets the crew of NASA’s Artemis II mission, to see how the team is preparing.

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

Pixel Scroll 9/13/24 A Pixel For Ecclesiastes

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(1) A SCOOP ABOUT PINSKER. Maryland ice cream chain The Charmery has created a flavor in honor of Sarah Pinsker’s book Haunt Sweet Home. Pinsker gives this description:

The apple brandy is a smoked apple brandy, and the book features an orchard and an apple tree specifically and also a smoke machine. The toffee bits are for fun and because it’s fall and it turns out into a deconstructed caramel apple.

(2) NATIONAL BOOK AWARD. The 2024 longlists in the Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry categories have been released. (We covered the Translated Literature and Young Adult categories the other day.) The complete lists are at Publishers Weekly: “2024 National Book Award Longlists Announced”. These are the works of genre interest:

FICTION

  • Ghostroots by ‘Pemi Aguda (Norton)
  • James by Percival Everett (Doubleday)

NONFICTION

  • Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are by Rebecca Boyle (Random House)
  • Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie (Random House)
  • Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal (Tiny Reparations Books)

(3) A TOURNAMENT IN CRIME. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] Who says we’re not living in a cyberpunk dystopia? This is gruesome… and real. “The Dark Nexus Between Harm Groups and ‘The Com’” at Krebs on Security. Brian Krebs is one of, if not the, premier computer security journalist in the US. This introduction is followed by discussion of numerous criminal investigations.

A cyberattack that shut down two of the top casinos in Las Vegas last year quickly became one of the most riveting security stories of 2023. It was the first known case of native English-speaking hackers in the United States and Britain teaming up with ransomware gangs based in Russia. But that made-for-Hollywood narrative has eclipsed a far more hideous trend: Many of these young, Western cybercriminals are also members of fast-growing online groups that exist solely to bully, stalk, harass and extort vulnerable teens into physically harming themselves and others….

… Collectively, this archipelago of crime-focused chat communities is known as “The Com,” and it functions as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network that facilitates instant collaboration.

But mostly, The Com is a place where cybercriminals go to boast about their exploits and standing within the community, or to knock others down a peg or two. Top Com members are constantly sniping over who pulled off the most impressive heists, or who has accumulated the biggest pile of stolen virtual currencies.

And as often as they extort victim companies for financial gain, members of The Com are trying to wrest stolen money from their cybercriminal rivals — often in ways that spill over into physical violence in the real world….

(4) THE BOOK THAT PROVIDED THE SPARK. The Booker Prizes quizzed “The 2024 longlistees on the book that inspired them to become a writer”.

Samantha Harvey, author of Orbital

This is difficult. I’m going to say Waterland by Graham Swift. I think it’s the strength and quality of Swift’s world-building, his gorgeous, layered storytelling flair and the sheer conviction of that novel that made me itch to write. It made me think, not, ‘I could do that’ but ‘I wonder if I could ever do that?’

I haven’t reread it, I don’t dare. But I’ve since read other books by Swift and my admiration’s undented.  

(5) HAWAIIAN AI. [Item by Chris Barkley.] In today’s news: WIRED reports that a local newspaper in Hawaii is now broadcasting news on Insta using AI-generated presenters who can “riff with one another,” in hopes of drawing in new audiences — but audience members are creeped out. Remember the old TV show, Max Headroom? I didn’t have Max Headroom: Nightmare Dystopia Edition on my 2024 bingo card. But, here we are. “An AI Bot Named James Has Taken My Old Job” at WIRED.

It always seemed difficult for the newspaper where I used to work, The Garden Island on the rural Hawaiian island of Kauai, to hire reporters. If someone left, it could take months before we hired a replacement, if we ever did.

So, last Thursday, I was happy to see that the paper appeared to have hired two new journalists—even if they seemed a little off. In a spacious studio overlooking a tropical beach, James, a middle-aged Asian man who appears to be unable to blink, and Rose, a younger redhead who struggles to pronounce words like “Hanalei” and “TV,” presented their first news broadcast, over pulsing music that reminds me of the Challengers score. There is something deeply off-putting about their performance: James’ hands can’t stop vibrating. Rose’s mouth doesn’t always line up with the words she’s saying….

James and Rose are, you may have noticed, not human reporters. They are AI avatars crafted by an Israeli company named Caledo, which hopes to bring this tech to hundreds of local newspapers in the coming year.

“Just watching someone read an article is boring,” says Dina Shatner, who cofounded Caledo with her husband Moti in 2023. “But watching people talking about a subject—this is engaging.”

The Caledo platform can analyze several prewritten news articles and turn them into a “live broadcast” featuring conversation between AI hosts like James and Rose, Shatner says. While other companies, like Channel 1 in Los Angeles, have begun using AI avatars to read out prewritten articles, this claims to be the first platform that lets the hosts riff with one another. The idea is that the tech can give small local newsrooms the opportunity to create live broadcasts that they otherwise couldn’t. This can open up embedded advertising opportunities and draw in new customers, especially among younger people who are more likely to watch videos than read articles.

(6) IT STARTED AT LUNCH. The Astounding Analog Companion hosts a brief “Q&A With David Gerrold”.

Analog Editor: What is your history with Analog?
David Gerrold: I have a long personal history with Analog. My first year of high school was at Van Nuys High. The library was a good place to hang out at lunch time and they had a subscription to Astounding. I started working my way through every issue they had. Astounding represented (to me) the high point of science fiction magazines….

(7) EARLIER FLIES. The Guardian signal-boosts that an “Early version of Lord of the Flies with different beginning to go on display” at the University of Exeter this month.

 Lord of the Flies, the story of a group of British boys who are stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempts to govern themselves, is considered to be one of the greatest works of literary history, taught to schoolchildren around the world.

But the novel by Sir William Golding didn’t always begin with the schoolboys crash-landing on the island. Instead, an original version of the manuscript, which was written in a school exercise book with the cover torn off, describes how they had been evacuated out, in the midst of a nuclear war, and their plane shot down in an aerial battle.

The alternative version of the dark societal tale will now go on display to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the book being published.

Golding’s manuscripts, notebooks and letters will also be shown in the exhibition at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, Old Library, University of Exeter later this month.

(8) INFORMING THE NEXT GENERATION. You know this. Not everybody does. Steven Heller interviews Mythmaker author John Hendrix in “C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien Together Again” at PRINT Magazine.

Most readers know their books and the genre they propagated, which has launched scores of films, podcasts, games and toys. But how many fans knew that C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were good friends who spent much of their time together arguing the spiritual pursuits of humankind? John Hendrix, a graphic novelist who is an extraordinary biographer (a novel graphicist), has created a new form of graphic—comic—book, The Mythmakers, in which he uses “a dual biography as an avatar for telling a deeper story about the origins of fairy tales.” Below we talk about his relationship to Lewis, Tolkien and their shared religious beliefs….

You state that, “they longed to make stories like the ones they loved. But their quarry was much more elusive.” What was their quarry? Was it simply “joy”?
The thing that drew Lewis and Tolkien together initially was their love of Norse mythology. But underneath the love of those stories was a longing for something they could not put their finger on. They would say most of us feel it when we read a great story. C.S. Lewis called this longing for longing by the German word “sehnsucht.” Lewis said this: “Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.” And Tolkien described joy as a feeling that reaches “beyond the walls of our world.” Both of these authors came to believe that stories and fairy tales allow humanity to access truths that are unknowable in any other way….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary: Kolchak: The Night Stalker series (1974)

Fifty years ago this evening Kolchak: The Night Stalker first aired on ABC. It was preceded by The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler films, both written by Richard Matheson. 

It was based off a novel by Jeff Rice who Mike has some thoughts about here.

It was remade nineteen years ago as The Night Stalker with Stuart Townsend as Carl Kolchak. It lasted ten episodes. It was set in Los Angeles instead of Chicago. Need I say more? 

Let’s talk about Darren McGavin for a moment. He was perfect for this role. Though only fifty-two when the series was shot, he looked a decade older and quite beat up. That suit he wore could have been acquired second hand. Or fourth hand. And that hat — I wonder how many they had in props that were exactly identical. 

The actor himself had certainly had some interesting times with four divorces by then, and this was not his first time portraying a world-weary investigator. He was the title character in the short-lived Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer series in the Fifties. It lasted a year.

(Please don’t link to it as the copyright holder keeps deleting it off YouTube so it still in copyright. Copyrights are complicated things, aren’t they?) 

Now Kolchak: The Night Stalker did not break the pattern of having a beautiful woman around as it had Carol Ann Susi as the recurring character of semi-competent but likable intern Monique Marmelstein in a recurring role.

And I really liked the character of his boss, Tony Vincenzo as played by Simon Oakland, who was quite bellicose and had no clue of what Kolchak was doing. Good thing that was, too. 

Ahhh the monsters. Some were SF, sort of — a murderous android, an invisible ET, a prehistoric ape-man grown from thawed cell samples, and a lizard-creature protecting its eggs. Then there were the fantastic ones — Jack the Ripper, a headless motorcycle rider, vampires, werewolves, witches and zombies to name but a few he tangled with. 

It has become a favorite among viewers of fantasy which currently carries a most excellent eighty percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes — but it was a ratings failure complicated by Darren McGavin being unwilling to do more episodes and only lasted one season before being cancelled.  

Chris Carter who credits the series as the primary inspiration for The X-Files wanted McGavin to appear as Kolchak in one or more episodes of that series, but McGavin was unwilling to reprise the character for his show. He did appear on the series as retired FBI agent very obviously attired in Kolchak’s trademark seersucker jacket, black knit tie, and straw hat.

C.J. Henderson, who won a World Fantasy Award for his Sarob Press, wrote three Night Stalker novels — Kolchak and the Lost World, Kolchak: Necronomicon and What Every Coin Has. There have been other novels and shorts published. Three unfilmed scripts for the TV series have survived, “Eve of Terror”, written by Stephen Lord, “The Get of Belial”, written by Donn Mullally, and “The Executioners”, written by Max Hodge.

Let’s see if it’s streaming anywhere… It is available on Peacock, the streaming service owned by NBC of course. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) OBI-WAN ACTOR ON WALK OF FAME. Ewan McGregor’s star was added to the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Thursday. And his castmate Hayden Christensen paid tribute:

…Christensen noted that McGregor, who played Anakin’s mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi, was just “the nicest person” during their initial conversation, telling him all about how excited he was to work with him and to begin their lightsaber training together. 

“He’s just beyond kind to me, and it was immediately apparent to me that I was meeting someone truly special. Not just as an actor, but as a person, and that I was meeting a friend,” Christensen said. He then teased, “A friend who would later go on to chop off both my legs and leave me for dead on the side of a volcano, but I guess I kind of had that coming.”

McGregor burst into laughter and turned toward the crowd after Christensen’s joke, which was a quick nod to Anakin’s fate after his heartbreaking battle against Obi-Wan at the end of 2005’s Revenge of the Sith….

(12) SCULPTOR’S TRIBUTE TO SERLING. WBUR says it will be unveiled this weekend: “Rod Serling, creator and narrator of iconic ‘Twilight Zone,’ honored with hometown statue”.

It’s been 65 years since Rod Serling’s iconic “The Twilight Zone” hit the TV airwaves in 1959. The show, known for its eerie music, aliens, lugubrious tone and 1950s-style special effects, aired for only 6 years. But its impact and life in re-runs created generations of fans who also find meaning in the themes it tackled: racism, corporate greed and man’s inhumanity.

Serling, who famously said, “Everybody has to have a hometown, and mine’s Binghamton,” has been honored annually at SerlingFest in Binghamton, New York. This year’s event, which begins Friday, will conclude with the unveiling of a six-foot-tall bronze statue of Serling at Recreation Park, a short walk from his childhood home…

A photo-illustrated article about creating the statue is here: “Rod Serling Statue Progress Report – Rod Serling Memorial Foundation”. This is an artist’s conception of how it will look.

(13) THE TELLTALE TEETH. “Cave discovery in France may explain why Neanderthals disappeared, scientists say” – Yahoo! has the story.

When archaeologist Ludovic Slimak unearthed five teeth in a rock shelter in France’s Rhône Valley in 2015, it was immediately obvious that they belonged to a Neanderthal, the first intact remains of the ancient species to be discovered in that country since 1979.

However, the once-in-a-lifetime find, nicknamed Thorin after a character in “The Hobbit,” remained a well-kept secret for almost a decade while Slimak and his colleagues untangled the significance of the find — a fraught undertaking that pitted experts in ancient DNA against archaeologists.

“We faced a major issue,” said Slimak, a researcher at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research and Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse. “The genetics was sure the Neanderthal we called Thorin was 105,000 years old. But we knew by (the specimen’s) archaeological context that it was somewhere between 40,000 to 50,000 years old.”

“What the DNA was suggesting was not in accordance with what we saw,” he added.

It took the team almost 10 years to piece together the story of the puzzling Neanderthal, adding a new chapter in the long-standing mystery of why these humans disappeared around 40,000 years ago.

The research, published Wednesday in the journal Cell Genomics, found that Thorin belonged to a lineage or group of Neanderthals that had been isolated from other groups for some 50,000 years. This genetic isolation was the reason Thorin’s DNA seemed to come from an earlier time period than it actually did.

(14) AUTHENTIC? Archie McPhee is offering Possum Flavored Candy, prompting Andrew Porter to wonder, “What DOES possum taste like?!?” He’s a city boy, you know.

Not only does this candy have an adorable possum on the tin, but it also has the flavor of possum! Great for roadkill aficionados or people who are possum-curious. Just leave a tin in the lunchroom of your office and let the fun begin.

(15) ZACK SNYDER EPIC. Animation Magazine tells readers “Love Is a Battlefield in New ‘Twilight of the Gods’ Trailer”.

Netflix today debuted the official trailer and key art for Zack Snyder’s animated Norse mythology epic Twilight of the Gods. The new preview gives us a glimpse at the blood-soaked meet-cute between Sigrid and Leif, their disastrous wedding and Sigrid’s quest for revenge against the gods who took away her family.

The eight-episode series premieres September 19. The same day, creator/executive producer/director Zack Snyder will appear at the first-ever Geeked Week LIVE show in Atlanta. (Details here.)

(16) TUNES IN ORBIT. Polaris Dawn astronaut Sarah Gillis, a violinist, released a new music video from space this morning, accompanied by a round-the-world orchestra: Rey’s Theme by John Williams.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Michael J. Walsh, 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 Jim Janney.]

Pixel Scroll 9/12/24 Please Don’t Eat The Vacuum Flowers

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(1) GEN CON WRITER’S SYMPOSIUM BLOWUP.

E.D.E. Bell, part of the Gen Con Writers’ Symposium leadership, hasn’t been retained after the 2024 event and brought public attention to the issue in “Gen Con Writers’ Symposium Dismissal”, a long, thorough discussion. Here are excerpts:

On 10 September, our leadership met with Gen Con to present our report including requests and improvements for next year. Gen Con listened to the report and asked questions for the full hour, and then said quickly, right before ending the call, that the show went “really well” and all our work was appreciated, and also no one on the current committee will be invited back next year.

This is extremely distressing to me. The loss to the community is significant but there are also huge emotional, practical, and financial losses for my family. We were investing, a whole community was investing in a long-term plan for inclusion. You don’t turn these things fully around in a couple years. It also sends the message that a pro-inclusion committee can be mistreated and then dismissed without consequence….

… I am also hearing from many people that my removal from Origins Game Fair also over issues related to inclusion (they write “race” as if they aren’t ready to believe me) is evidence that I must be a problem. I do not have energy to defend my integrity or the existence of documentation. And no, it means that cons are working very hard to discredit someone who is in and doing the work. Origins Game Fair has a reputation for being a con very comfortable in whiteness. Gen Con Writers’ Symposium used to have a reputation for being unfriendly to BIPOC and many other writing communities. The last two years, that changed. I’m discouraged but not surprised that in 2024, the reaction is still – two places can’t be fighting inclusion – you must be the issue….

… Everything started when we invited Mikki Kendall as a Special Guest. Marian McBride reached out and said her boss (Derek Guder) had “concerns” about Mikki, that she did not have draw or broad appeal. I heard the dogwhistles, but still explained why she was a good fit. The entire committee agreed disinviting her at this late point after she’d already accepted and for this reason would be inappropriate and harmful on multiple levels. We were told not to announce the guests, and were asked to an “emergency meeting” whose title was something like “Concerns regarding Special Guest Mikki Kendall”. Specifically, the whole committee was asked to be there.

I thought, oh good, we can explain our inclusion plans and why Mikki is an awesome choice.

The summary of that meeting was:

  • It was an ambush, stated to be a necessary dressing-down of the committee by someone who had no knowledge of what we did.
  • I was looked at in the eye and told, “I need you to realize that what you did was bad.” and also “You invited two Special Guests with no draw and no broad appeal. Isn’t that correct?”
  • We were repeatedly accused of funneling GCWS money for personal use.
  • At no point was I actually allowed to explain anything to Derek; he would not let me speak….

… I am asking Gen Con and/or the 2025 GCWS Committee for a specific reason why they will not work with “Chris and Emily Bell” and I think I deserve that answer. Hopefully I’ll get at least that much respect from the community.

And one final thought: you really don’t have to have the argument about me in any way. Derek Guder is on the record saying that neither Linda D. Addison nor Mikki Kendall have draw or broad appeal at the same time he said he did not know them and refused to find out. He is also using this “four not two” Guests thing like it’s a gotcha, but he wouldn’t allow anyone on the committee to explain verbally why we did that, why it was coordinated Marian in December, or why it did not violate their intent in any way – and he refused to read anything submitted in writing. Please evaluate those actions on their own….

Eric Scott de Bie comes down on the side of GenCon in his equally long “The Writer’s Symposium Kerfuffle, September 2024” at Worldswalker. Excerpts:

…Note that Derek reiterates that his concerns are focused upon how many guests the leadership team invited, and about how the issues were communicated and coordinated.

At this point, per my interview with Derek, GenCon accepted there was nothing to be done for 2024. It was too late to make any radical changes to the Symposium, the guest list, or any of it, and so they let it ride for 2024.

After a successful Symposium (the leadership team did an excellent job putting on the Con, and that should be noted), GenCon informed them at their debrief meeting that they would not be working with the present leadership team again. What exactly was said at the end of the meeting, I am still researching, but as Emily frames it, they said something to the effect of “no one on the current committee will be invited back next year.”

What does this all mean?

So GenCon does not want to work with the Bells again. They didn’t “disinvite” anyone–they just won’t work with the Bells again. Even the other members of the Bells’ leadership team (some of whom signed onto the ultimatum), GenCon is ok with talking with them to sort this out. And yes, I have confirmed that with Derek….

… Per my research, GenCon’s decision had nothing to do with racism, and neither did Origins, or ConFusion, who have also cut ties with the Bells under similar circumstances. The Cons in question DO support diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. As far as I know, their decisions are based on her actions as a leader: poor communication, acting unilaterally, and not consulting them….

(2) TODAY’S SCROLL TITLE DECIPHERED. [Item by Daniel Dern.] The source for this title probably, ahem, weeds out many Boomers and most post-Boomers; per Wikipedia, “…Please Don’t Eat the Daisies is a best-selling collection of humorous essays by American humorist and playwright Jean Kerr.” (And, I see, turned into a movie starring Doris Day and David Niven.)

(Similar to some extent, possibly (I haven’t read Daisies), Shirley Jackson’s ‘domestic memoirs’ Life Among The Savages and Raising Demons.)

(3) TOLKIEN POETRY COLLECTION RELEASED. The Collected Poems of J. R. R. Tolkien edited by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond was released by Harper Collins today.

…The earliest work in this collection, written for his beloved, is dated to 1910, when Tolkien was eighteen. More poems would follow during his years at Oxford, some of them very elaborate and eccentric. Those he composed during the First World War, in which he served in France, tend to be concerned not with trenches and battle, but with life, loss, faith, and friendship, his longing for England, and the wife he left behind. Beginning in 1914, elements of his legendarium, ‘The Silmarillion’, began to appear, and the ‘Matter of Middle-earth’ would inspire much of Tolkien’s verse for the rest of his life….

A reviewer at Tolkien Collectors’ Guide took up the challenge of counting the poems in the volume. It’s not as simple as one would expect.

When this collection was announced, the editors were somewhat coy about exactly how many poems there are in total, and how many of those were unpublished, and reading through these three volumes one begins to understand why.

Entry 1 has two titles noted in the contents, ‘Morning’ and ‘Morning Song’, so one would expect two poems, but we are offered four versions, with notes to a further two or three variants, plus the fascinating commentary. This approach continues throughout, with many entries containing more poems, or versions of them than are noted in the contents. The editors describe there being 195 entries which would contain approximately 240 “discreet poems”.

Our count suggests there are roughly 550+ poems (inc. variant versions, which the editors described as instances in private correspondence) addressed directly, with many more in the notes and mentioned throughout the fantastic commentary. We have not tried to count all of these but it is an incredible number…. 

(4) KGB. Photos of last night’s Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series here on Flickr. Ellen Datlow adds, “Not as many photos as usual as I could get neither my camera nor my phone camera to work properly.”

(5) BRISBANE 28 TAKING PRESUPPORTS. The bid to hold the 2028 Worldcon in Brisbane, Australia has announced they can now take presupports: Support | Brisbane in 28.

We now have pre-support available to those wanting to help us succeed!

You can throw us a lobster or a pineapple, or be a real mate and buy your attending membership in advance.

All pre-support helps us get to more events, and do more things so we can make this the best Worldcon we can make it.

(6) MEMORY LANE.

[Item by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary: Young Hercules series (1998)

I know that a lot of you have seen Hercules and Xena, but I am guessing that a lot less of you saw Young Hercules which came out on this date, twenty-six years ago. It won’t surprise you at all that it was created by Sam Raimi who, of course, created the other two series.

The series follows Hercules (played Ryan Gosling) as he attends Cheiron’s Academy to train in the arts of the warrior under the wise headmaster Cheiron the Centaur (as performed by Nathaniel Lees under a most excellent costume). Other primary cast members are the future king of Corinth, Prince Jason (Chris Conrad), a thief who was a former member of a bandit group, Iolaus (Dean O’Gorman) who is here instead of in prison, and the academy’s first female cadet, Lilith (Jodie Rimmer).  Need I say they’re all very handsome, or in her case, cute? They really are.

Not at all surprisingly Rob Tapert who had his hand in the other two series is involved in this series. Here he is one of the writers and executive producer. This series came to be just two years before he executive produced both Jack of All Trades and Cleoprata 2525. 

Needless to say, it was produced in New Zealand — no not by Peter Jackson. Renaissance Pictures produced this one which makes sense as it was founded by Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell to produce The Evil Dead along with the two sequels and yes, the company produced  Xena and Hercules  as well, and the Darkman films.

Ryan Gosling made a fine young, Hercules here. Actually, he was more believable as a character than, ahem, a certain other character that played the older one was. Just my opinion, I think this was because both he and adventures being geared towards a young adult audience were in lighter in tone. Also being, 20 minutes long, meant there was no filler, something that is important in telling your story sometimes.

All the live filming took place in NewZealand, but the visual effects were done in LA as was the music. Weta, yes, that company that would later be involved in The Lord of the Rings, was responsible for the special visual visual effects here. They lost most of that team very fast because of the overlap with the filming of The Fellowship of the Ring.

I like this series every bit as much as I do Xena and I like both of these series far, far more than I ever liked Hercules. It ran for fifty twenty-minute episodes which aired technically in one season though I saw it broken up into three seasons later on. 

It’s not streaming anywhere right now though you can purchase it on DVD. 

The image below has the main cast with Gosling on the left, Dean next to him with Chris just behind Jodie. 

(7) COMICS SECTION.

(8) SHOCKED, I TELL YOU, SHOCKED. Bleeding Cool reports: “A New Book Called ‘Stan Lee Lied’, Claims That Stan Lee… Lied”.

Chaz Gower has written a new book called Stan Lee Lied. Full title, Stan Lee Lied: Your Handy Guide to Every Lie in The Origins of Marvel Comics. And it does exactly what it says on the tin. …it takes the Stan Lee-authored Origins Of Marvel Comics for its fiftieth anniversary, and systematically attempts to disprove as many of the statements in that book as possible, using recorded facts and archives, testimonies and memories of others. This is a case for the prosecution; there is no attempt to be even-handed, and anything that doesn’t challenge the tenet that Stan Lee didn’t co-create or write the comic books he claimed to have and was credited for is either not included or dismissed with a hand wave.

That 1974 volume Origins Of Marvel Comics is itself getting a deluxe hardcover printed from Gallery Editions next month for its fiftieth anniversary, so this is clearly well-timed. Maybe you could read them together? Here is just one small example to let you know where this is going…

“Stan Lee: “At the moment, the trend is monster stories… Jack and I were having a ball turning out monster stories with such imperishable titles as ‘Xom, the Creature Who Swallowed Earth’, ‘Grottu, the Giant Ant-Eater’… ‘Fin Fang Foom’….”

“Stan Lee signed almost everything he ever did from… at least 1950 on. Most likely from Day One, but for SURE from 1950 on. He signed pin-up pages if he wrote even the smallest of dialogue on it, and paper doll pages in Patsy Walker comics… he rarely if ever missed an opportunity to sign his name to something, to get the credit and of course, the PAY. BUT… He never signed a single Jack Kirby monster story from those presuperhero years at Marvel Comics. Which means he didn’t write ANY of them. Not ONE SINGLE STORY. He signed NONE OF THEM. Which means he didn’t write ANY of them.”

(9) SPLASH! “650-Foot High Megatsunami in Greenland Sends Seismic Waves Worldwide” – SciTechDaily has details.

…In September 2023, a massive tsunami in remote eastern Greenland triggered seismic waves that captured the attention of researchers worldwide.

The event created a week-long oscillating wave in Dickson Fjord, according to a new report in The Seismic Record.

Angela Carrillo-Ponce of GFZ German Research Centre for Geoscience and her colleagues identified two distinct signals in the seismic data from the event: one high-energy signal caused by the massive rockslide that generated the tsunami, and one very long-period (VLP) signal that lasted over a week.

Their analysis of the VLP signal—which was detected as far as 5000 kilometers (3100 miles) away—suggests that the landslide and resulting tsunami created a seiche, or a standing wave that oscillates in a body of water. In this case, the seiche was churning for days between the shores of Dickson Fjord….

(10) OPEN THE POD BAY DOOR, ELON. “Tech billionaire pulls off first private spacewalk high above Earth” reports Yahoo!

A tech billionaire popped out from a SpaceX capsule hundreds of miles above Earth and performed the first private spacewalk Thursday, a high-risk endeavor once reserved for professional astronauts.

Tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman teamed up with SpaceX to test the company’s brand new spacesuits on his chartered flight. The daring feat also saw SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis going out once Isaacman was safely back inside.

This spacewalk was simple and quick — the hatch was open barely a half hour — compared with the drawn-out affairs conducted by NASA. Astronauts at the International Space Station often need to move across the sprawling complex for repairs, always traveling in pairs and lugging gear. Station spacewalks can last seven to eight hours; this one clocked in at less than two hours….

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

Pixel Scroll 8/25/24 Pixel ScrollRight Of The Mounties

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(1) LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION AWARD. The idea of the Location Managers Guild Award is truly Hollywood insider stuff. It’s “meant to spotlight outstanding filming locations that sent the tone and enhance the narrative for international features, television and commercials.” There are genre winners, of course. “Location Managers Guild Awards 2024” at Deadline.

OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A PERIOD TELEVISION SERIES
Fallout
Paul Kramer, Chris Arena, Mandi Dillin / LMGI, David Park / LMGI, Paul van der Ploeg

OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A CONTEMPORARY TELEVISION SERIES
Fargo Season 5
Mohammad Qazzaz / LMGI, Luke Antosz / LMGI

OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A TV SERIAL PROGRAM, ANTHOLOGY, MOW OR LIMITED SERIES
Ripley
Robin Melville / LMGI, Giuseppe Nardi / LMGI, Fabio Ferrante, Shane Haden

OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A PERIOD FEATURE FILM
Oppenheimer
Justin Duncan /LMGI, Dennis Muscari, Patty Carey-Perazzo, T.C. Townsen

OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A CONTEMPORARY FEATURE FILM
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning – Part 1
David Campbell-Bell, Enrico Latella / LMGI, Jonas Fylling Christiansen, Niall O’Shea, Ben Firminger

OUTSTANDING FILM COMMISSION
Film in Iceland
True Detective: Night Country

OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A COMMERCIAL
Toyota: Present from the Past
Mark Freid / LMGI, Paul Riordan / LMGI

(2) LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS BOOKS. Charlie Jane Anders names “10 Literary Books That Made Me a Better Science Fiction Writer” at Happy Dancing.

… As I wrote a while back, the appearance of literary merit means people will give your work more of a chance in spite of weird experiments, but it also means the reader might pay a bit more attention to the nuts and bolts of the story (at least sometimes.) In a good literary story, this relationship with the ideal reader leads to more attention to detail: the sentence-level prose, but also the small details of people’s lives and inner states….

6) Possession by A.S. Byatt

I re-read this book just a few months ago, because my upcoming novel Lessons in Magic and Disaster has a similar literary detective story at its heart. And when I think about the current vogue for Dark Academia stories, Possession feels like a foundational text to me. The story of two young scholars who stumble upon a long lost letter that hints at a secret affair between two Victorian poets, Possession fairly burns with the joy of discovery and textual analysis. That’s the thing that I really discovered when I re-read this book: the poetry of Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte is vitally important to the story and to their love affair, and the “clues” in the story are as much about the beauty of their writing and metaphors as any love letters. I’ll probably be writing more about Possession as the release date of Lessons in Magic and Disaster grows closer, so stay tuned….

(3) CAN THE PRICE BE RIGHT? “AMC to release new Batman popcorn bucket” – Batman News has details.

…AMC Theaters will have a Bat-Signal popcorn bucket available on Aug. 28 that will sell for $34.99. A new collectible cup of the Batmobile will also be available for $11.99, but a combo can be purchased for $44.99….

(4) ARMED LIBRARIAN. “Hell hath no fury like a librarian scorned in the book banning wars” – behind a paywall at the LA Times.

A MANDA JONES is a Louisiana middle-school librarian who sleeps with a shotgun under her bed and carries a pistol when she travels the back roads.

Threats against her began two years ago after she spoke out against censorship and was drawn into the culture wars over book banning. She was condemned as a pedophile and a groomer and accused of “advocating teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds.” The Christian right targeted her, and she found herself in the news warning that conservatives in her state and across much of the country were endangering libraries and intellectual freedom.

“I never expected any of this,” said Jones, who lives in Livingston Parish. “It’s a huge weight to feel all that attention. I’m just a school librarian from a two red-light town.”

Jones’ cautionary and disquieting testament to the nation’s divisiveness is told in her new memoir, “That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America,” a blunt, angry, searching and redeeming story about a woman engulfed by forces and designs she never imagined. It is a glimpse into a family and a small town that reads like a chapter out of “The Scarlet Letter” or “The Crucible,” narratives whose themes of fear, superstition, rage and religion are again permeating the nation’s political moment, including Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s recent comments that “Democrats want to put sexually explicit books in toddlers’ libraries.”…

(5) ANALYSIS OF A CONVOLUTED PUBLISHING HISTORY. Rich Horton decides it’s time for another look at a classic: “Review: Norstrilia, by Cordwainer Smith” at Strange at Ecbatan.

… I don’t really want to say more about the plot. There is at the same time a lot going on, but in an odd way not. Some of it seems a bit arbitrary, some doesn’t quite convince, and some is fascinating. But still at all pretty much works. The novel isn’t at a level with Smith’s greatest works, but parts of it are. At time it reaches the incantatory heights Smith could achieve, and it hints throughout at a really important story — the story of the Underpeople (which is also central to “The Ballad of Lost C’Mell”, and which perhaps is ultimately key to the entire Instrumentality future history.)….

(6) HOWARD WALDROP REMEMBRANCE EVENT. George R.R. Martin tells readers about the video portion of a memorial for Howard Waldrop, held June 29, at Not a Blog.

…I was not able to be there in person (we were in London at the time) but there was no way I could not be a part of a remembrance for H’ard, so I taped some remarks and sent them to Robert Taylor, who was organizing the event.   I went on rather a long time, as it happens, but Howard and I had a long history and I am a wordy bastard in any case, as many of you know.  My tape ended up coming in around 45 minutes long, and could easily have gone three hours if I’d just kept talking.  There are so many stories to tell.

That was too long for the Austin memorial, so Robert and his team kindly cut and trimmed it for the event.   I do have the longer version and will likely post it here… probably later rather than sooner.   For now, we have this; not only my video, but all the other speeches and stories as well, from some of Howard’s pals.   (Some, not all.  Howard had friends all over the world.

Parts of this may bring a tear to your eye.   Other bits will make you laugh.   Laughter was one of Howard’s gifts….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

August 25, 1955 – Simon R. Green, 69. I’ve had email conversations with our Birthday honoree, Simon R. Green. He’s a fascinating, friendly person. 

I first read the Deathstalker series which, like everything he writes, is part of the same multiverse.  Owen Deathstalker, reluctant heir to the ancient Deathstalker name and a very minor historian, will come to lead a rebellion against the powerful and corrupt empire ruled by The Iron Bitch. Every SF trope is here — crashed alien starships, rogue computer hackers, clones and espers to name but a few. Yes, it’s space opera but not to be taken too seriously. 

Simon R. Green

Moving sideways for a movement, he did a stellar job with his Forest Kingdom fantasy series which plays it more straight I think save SLIGHT SPOILER such touches as a butterfly collecting dragon END SLIGHT SPOILER. The connected Hawk and Fisher series of two Guardsman in Haven, a corrupt seaport, solving magical mysteries is wonderful.

Remember how I said everything was in the same multiverse? Hawk and Fisher show up in Strangefellows, just having a drink. Strangefellows being the bar in Nightside, the pocket universe beneath London where John Taylor is the only detective, as told in the Nightside series. Great setting, fascinating characters, weird stories. 

The Secret History series involved the Droods, an ancient family that watches over the world and protects it from mostly supernatural and magical threats. They have a magical armor they, well, protects them from everything. Great series. This and the Nightside series were wrapped in one novel, Night Fall. 

I should note that all of the must be read from the beginning. There is significant plot development as each series moved along. Characters change, situations develop. 

The Ghostfinders of the Carnacki Institute, an ancient and very secretive government department , exist to deal with ghosts, and live by the motto “We don’t take any shit from the Hereafter”. The plots here are thinner than in his other series but I find the character interesting enough to like the series. 

Ishmael Jones is someone who cannot afford to be noticed, someone who lives under the radar. Why so? Because it’s been sixty years since the alien starship made him human and he hasn’t aged at all. These are really fun because Ishmael Jones simultaneously believes he’s human and alien, and views everything that way. Stories are quite good. 

A freestanding novel of note is Drinking Midnight Wine about a small English town (actually where he was born) where good in all sorts of magical forms pushed back against evil in yet more magical forms. There’s an Angel, but trust me when I say that you wouldn’t want to meet her.

He’s too prolific to cover everything here and I noticed I skipped the excellent Giden Sable series. Oh well.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) NOW WITH EXTRA ADDED EVIL. “’Rings of Power’ Returns, With More Creatures and More Evil”. Link bypasses New York Times paywall.

… In April last year, the production for Season 2 sprawled across several sites around Windsor, England. Shuttle cars sped hundreds of crew members and craft makers between vast studios and forests. For about eight months, nearly 90 cast members spent hours in hair and makeup to be transformed into elves, dwarves, orcs and other Middle-earth dwellers.

A building housed racks of costumes and specially molded or 3-D-printed trinkets and armor. Outdoor sets the size of playgrounds plunged the actors into a court in Númenor or the trenches of an orc camp. And nearby, machinery waited in a muddy field to film a gritty battle scene inspired by films like “Saving Private Ryan.”

“I kept saying constantly on set: more blood, more dust, more mud, more everything,” Charlotte Brandstrom, who directed four of the upcoming season’s episodes, said in an interview. (Some scenes set in Rhûn were also filmed in the Canary Islands.)

This, after all, might be the most expensive series in TV history, a blockbuster prequel that reportedly cost Amazon $715 million for its first season, and premieres the first three episodes of its second season on Thursday…

(10) BITE ON. [Item by Steven French.] Do we need another zombie series? If it has Sue Johnston biting someone’s nose off, then yes please! “‘Sue Johnston’s first day on set, she was biting someone’s nose off’: Ben Wheatley on his zombie drama Generation Z” in the Guardian.

… The old eat the young. That is the back-of-a-beermat pitch for new Channel 4 drama Generation Z. And because the Z stands for zombie, the eating is meant literally. “I loved the idea of a horror story about societal breakdown, told from the perspective of different generations,” says its writer-director Ben Wheatley. “Once I started writing it, I couldn’t stop.”

The film-maker’s first original series for TV begins with an army convoy crashing outside a care home. The subsequent chemical leak turns the residents into marauding monsters who attack local youngsters. “It’s a bit of a Brexit metaphor,” admits Wheatley. “But it’s by no means binary. We discuss it from each generation’s viewpoint, exploring the notion that boomers have ruined the lives of the young. Because it’s a genre piece, that’s basically by biting their hands and eating their brains.”…

(11) BE ON THE LOOKOUT. Dan Monroe investigates “Whatever Happened to The LAST STARFIGHTER?” at Movies, Music & Monsters.

(12) ZERO FAMILY VALUES. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] From Netflix Anime. Very violent. Very bloody. Very NSFW. Gizmodo warns: “Terminator Zero’s New Trailer Shows the Bloody War to Come”.

…While writing Zero, Mattson keyed in on three core Terminator pillars: killer robots, “fear and dread around nuclear holocaust,” and family-centric stories. If the first two films are respectively about “a man and woman making a baby” and “a mother’s love for her son,” this series is about a fractured family coming together again. In his eyes, you don’t get Terminator without those three tenets, they’ve all led to an enduring franchise aiming to make a comeback and take some new swings.

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