(1) WHALE OF A TALE. Sam Weller recalls Ray Bradbury’s work scripting Moby Dick (1956) in “I … Am Herman Melville!” at Los Angeles Review of Books.
…The next night, Bradbury met Huston in his suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The fateful encounter was one of Bradbury’s favorite stories to tell.
“I walked into his room.” Bradbury recalled. “He put a drink in my hand. He sat me down and he leaned over and said, ‘Ray, what are you doing during the next year?’” When Bradbury imitated Huston, he assumed a rough, throaty baritone.
I said, “Not much, Mr. Huston. Not much.” And he said, “Well, Ray, how would you like to come live in Ireland and write the screenplay of Moby Dick?” And I said, “Gee, Mr. Huston, I’ve never been able to read the damn thing.”
He’d never heard that before and he thought for a moment and then he said, “Well, I’ll tell you what, Ray. Why don’t you go [home] tonight, read as much as you can, and come back tomorrow and then tell me if you’ll help me kill a white whale.”
Bradbury was stunned. He went home and told his wife, “Pray for me.” Maggie Bradbury, accustomed to her husband’s hyperbole, responded, “Why?” And he said: “Because I’ve got to read a book tonight and do a book report tomorrow.”…
…The next day, Bradbury agreed to write the screenplay. It had been quite a run. In just over a week, he had finished Fahrenheit 451 and agreed to work with his movie hero, adapting one of the most challenging works of American literature into a two-hour film. Bradbury signed a 17-week contract earning $650 a week plus living expenses, a king’s ransom for a man who, less than a decade earlier, had earned his stripes writing for pulp magazines that paid $40 or $50 per story…
(2) SEATTLE WORLDCON 2025 FABRICS. Next year’s Worldcon is taking a page from Glasgow 2024’s playbook. Glasgow had a custom tartan that was designed, registered, and woven just for them. Now Seattle Worldcon 2025 has a Spoonflower shop with a selection of fabrics in their colors and using their logos, motifs, and characters. Below is an example of one of the patterns available.
(3) SEVENTIES TREK CON: KNOW ANYBODY? The BBC has posted a collection of Neil Slavin photographs: “Trekkies to twins: Eight photos of the quirkiest groups in 70s and 80s US”. Image can be viewed at the link.
The Star Trek Convention (1972-5)
The Star Trek convention, in Brooklyn, New York, was a trickier affair. “I don’t think it has heart,” says Slavin, typically forthright. With the wrestlers, “the pulse is very obvious,” he maintains, but this group, which met annually to exchange memorabilia and keep the memory of the original series of Star Trek alive, was much harder to penetrate. “It was [just] people dressing up,” he shrugs. “They don’t really know each other. They didn’t come together and have the kind of energy that would have changed the dynamic. Their concern is purely looking at the camera and being some character that they weren’t.” He nevertheless considers the photograph a success. “It shows the sociological cracks,” he says. “They need to be together, but they’re together apart.”
(4) TIM BURTON EXHIBIT. [Item by Steve French.] If folk happen to be in London: “What Makes the Dark, Whimsical World of Tim Burton So Compelling?” in Smithsonian Magazine.
An immersive ode to Hollywood’s goth king has arrived in London. In a new exhibition at the Design Museum, visitors can view Tim Burton’s early artworks, as well as sketches and costumes from Corpse Bride(2005), Beetlejuice (1988), Edward Scissorhands (1990) and more.
“It’s a strange thing, to put 50 years of art and your life on view for everyone to see, especially when that was never the original purpose,” says Burton in a statement.
(5) LEADING STREAMERS. JustWatch has shared their Top 10 sf streaming lists for October 2024. Not what I would have predicted!
(6) DEATH WILL NOT RELEASE YOU – IF YOU’RE PROFITABLE. “Peter Cushing Becomes Latest Icon To Be Given AI Resurrection In Sky Hammer Films Doc” reports Deadline.
Fans of Peter Cushing are in for a Halloween treat, with the iconic Frankenstein star the latest to be resurrected by AI.
In Hammer: Heroes, Legends and Monsters, a Sky doc airing [on Halloween], viewers will be treated to a “powerful and poignant reveal of Hammer royalty,” Sky said, with what is being described as a “special homage” to Cushing.
Cushing, who died in 1994, played Doctor Van Helsing in five Dracula films and Baron Frankenstein in six movies from that franchise. He will be the latest celebrity given the AI resurrection treatment. Yesterday, the doc’s producer Deep Fusion Films unveiled a “world first” podcast hosted by a replica of the late chat show presenter Michael Parkinson….
…This isn’t the first time Cushing has been resurrected. His likeness was revived as Grand Moff Tarkin for 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and a high court legal battle over the use of the image was recently ruled by a judge to go to trial.
Ben Field, who runs Deep Fusion, said the Hammer doc resurrection has secured all necessary permissions. The decision to resurrect Cushing is “tied to his significance to the Hammer legacy,” he added. “As a figure central to Hammer’s success, Cushing’s presence is crucial to telling the story authentically,” he added….
(7) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Anniversary, November 10, 1966 — Star Trek’s “The Corbomite Maneuver”
Fifty-eight years ago this evening, “The Corbomite Maneuver” first aired.
It was the tenth episode of the first season, and it was written by Jerry Sohl who had previously written for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Outer Limits, The Invaders, and The Twilight Zone. (His other Trek scripts were “Whom Gods Destroy” and “This Side of Paradise”.)
It was the first episode filmed in which Kelley played Dr. Leonard McCoy, Nichols played Lt. Uhura and Whitney played Yeoman Rand, though we first saw them on the air in “The Man Trap”.
Clint Howard, brother of Ron Howard, played the alien Balok but he didn’t voice him — Walker Edmiston provided that. Ted Cassidy, who was the Gorn in “Arena” and the android Ruk in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” voiced the Balok puppet.
The Balok puppet itself was designed by Wah Chang, who, among other things, shared an academy award for the Time Machine prop in Pal’s movie of the same name. Cool fact: Chang is responsible for the Pillsbury dough boy. Any resemblance to Balok is probably accidental.
So did critics like it at the time? No idea as I can’t find any contemporary reviews of it anywhere even on Rotten Tomatoes though media critics now love it as most put it in their top twenty of all of the Trek series episodes.
It was nominated for a Hugo at NyCon 3, the year that “The Menagerie” won. “The Naked Time” was also nominated that year.
It is, of course, streaming on Paramount+.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
November 10, 1982 — Aliette de Bodard, 42. Let’s start with Aliette de Bodard’s oh-so-excellent Xuya Universe series which is my go-to fiction by her. It started with “The Lost Xuyan Bride”, which you can read on her website. I can’t begin to even count the number of shorter stories here, I say shorter as isn’t everything a story, but she’s written a very large number of them.
My favorites? “The Shipmaker” which garnered a BSFA; Hugo-nominated “On a Red Station, Drifting” which I’ve reread at least three times because it’s so good; “The Citadel of Weeping Pearls” for its look at a ship mind; “The Tea Master and the Detective” which I adore; “Red Scholar’s Wake”, another one well worth rereading; and finally “The Mausoleum’s Children”, another much-deserved Hugo nominee.
I not read as deep in the Dominion of The Fallen series which leads off with the BSFA-winning House of the Shattered Wings novels, but the story of Paris in ruins because of a War between apparently Heaven and Hell is a tale worth its time. I’ve only listened to the next two, both are excellent, The House of Binding Thorns and The House of Sundering Flames, so I cannot advise on later novels.
The last series doesn’t reflect her French Vietnamese culture unlike the first two. The third is Obsidian & Blood. She has the Mexica Empire teetering on the brink of destruction as the horrors the flesh-eating demons, or something they think are demons, from the stars, along with their might be goddess only held in check by the Protector God’s power. So has anyone read these? I haven’t.
I admit that the Xuya Universe series is the only series here that I follow. The characters, the setting and the story all make for a wonderful ongoing piece of fiction that I look forward to seeing her continue as long as she cares to.
(9) COMICS SECTION.
- Bizarro finally gets the distress signal.
- Close to Home points out the need for a specialist.
- Heart of the City moves into fictional cooking.
- Non Sequitur illustrates another version of the Big Bang.
- Strange Brew forgot about the short arms.
- Tom Gauld celebrates an advance.
(10) TRUE GRIT. [Item by Steven French.] And here’s another Dune: Prophecy actress answering questions: “Emily Watson: ‘You have to be a bit of an idiot to be an actor’” in the Guardian.
You are also about to star in Dune: Prophecy, the female-led TV prequel to the Denis Villeneuve movies. It’s set 10,000 years before the films and you play the leader of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, Valya Harkonnen. How would you describe her?
It becomes revealed through the series that she and her family have a really messed-up background. And that she is driven by a sense of vengeance about having been very deeply wronged. But she’s recognisably human, and, as a young woman, you’re rooting for her, because she’s strong-willed and free. And Dune is a very complex moral universe, where there are no goodies and baddies, which I like. It’s not standing around in spandex looking dumb.
(11) HERBERT ANALYZED. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian also has an interview with Olivia Williams, who was in The Postman and The Sixth Sense and stars in Dune: Prophecy, where talks about living with cancer and the use of AI in movies: “’Watch out, I’m even less inhibited’: Olivia Williams on movies, misogyny and living with cancer”.
…We are here to talk about her latest role, in Dune: Prophecy, a big-budget series that is a prequel to the recent films. Williams’s old friend Emily Watson stars with her, as leader of a nascent, nunlike sect of women, who have supernatural, sometimes violent abilities and world-conquering ambitions. It sounds as if Williams was not immediately wowed by the prospect of joining the Dune juggernaut.
“I had my suspicions about feminist TV based on a novel written by a bloke in the 60s,” she says. “And there are some elements that are very based in the patriarchy. There’s this fascination of, what do women get up to when men aren’t around, and what kind of wisdom is it that men are frightened of? They seem frightened we can read their minds, or know when they’re telling the truth or lying.”…
(12) OPEN TO SUGGESTION. “A Game Designer Who Wants to See Ideas He’ll Hate” in the New York Times (behind a paywall).
Ian Dallas, the founder and creative director of the video game studio Giant Sparrow, happened to be talking about food, but his gastronomical tastes are similar to his design philosophy. “I’m always interested,” he said, “in what’s the strangest, new intense experience that I can have.”
Giant Sparrow’s most recent release, What Remains of Edith Finch, is one of the more piquant fusions of narrative and game design of the past decade. What became a collection of short stories about a cursed family of storytellers living in the Pacific Northwest began as a scuba diving simulator.
From the rough prototype to the finished game, Dallas strove to evoke the rush of the sublime; while searching for ways to conjure that feeling, he made one prototype after another. By the alchemy of art, he and his small team ended up with a game that uses a different mechanic for each of the stories it tells about the last day of a character’s life. In one scenario, a little girl turns into a cat, an owl, a shark and a man-eating sea monster; in another, a man working at a cannery becomes lost in an internal fantasy while working over a fish-slicing machine.
Dallas’s approach to a project can be summed up as experimentation within a given set of parameters. He likes to tell new colleagues that he wants to see things he will hate.
“If I don’t see ideas that include some that are just like really out there, then we’re not trying hard enough,” he said. What might not seem promising early on can plant the seed for inspired creativity down the line….
…Dallas wants his new game to help people reflect on the vastly different ways that other species experience the world. He is also interested in “how many bizarre things are going on around us all the time that we aren’t really aware of or thinking about.”…
(13) SCARECROW REPRISE. “Ray Bolger sings ‘If I Only Had A Brain’ to Judy Garland”. Live on the Judy Garland Show, Episode 10, October 11, 1963. You’ve seen the movie in color. So for variety, watch them sing here in black & white!
(14) WORST INTRO. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] What is the worst introduction to an SF/F book ever? Grammaticus Books thinks he has found it with the introduction to an edition collecting Robert Howard Conan stories. The introduction slams Howard and those close to him. Why? Well Grammaticus Books thinks he has the answer… It was the collection’s publisher’s doing…. “The World’s WORST Book FOREWORD!!!”
[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Susan de Guardiola, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
