Tag Archives: Kaliane Bradley

Pixel Scroll 4/13/25 Why Do Fremen Wear Red Suspenders? To Get To The Other Side Of The Sandworm

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(1) HUSBAND INJURED WHEN FELIX FAMILY HOUSE EXPLODES. Artist Sara Felix has told a CBS reporter her husband Keith was inside their Austin, TX house when it exploded today. He is having surgery “for burns and injuries sustained when parts of the structure collapsed on him.”

…Felix told CBS Austin reporter Vinny Martorano that the explosion occurred at a house she and her husband were building but had not yet moved into.

“Like, you don’t expect your house to explode,” Felix said. “It’s just such a surreal experience… You think these things happen to other people. You don’t expect it to happen to yourself.”

Felix’s husband was inside the residence when it exploded and is currently undergoing surgery for burns and injuries sustained when parts of the structure collapsed on him. Felix said she felt the force of the blast from their current home approximately a mile away.

The house, which was designed to run primarily on electricity, did have a propane tank on site. Felix noted that they “were not hooked up to the city or anything like that,” but expressed doubt that the propane tank alone could have caused an explosion of such magnitude.

No personal belongings had been moved into the house yet, though appliances had been installed.

Felix expressed concern for neighbors whose homes were also damaged in the blast. “I worry about all the neighbors that also had damage to their house. Because it was a very big explosion,” she said.

The local community has rallied around the family, with a meal train organized to provide support. “The community from Laurel Mount… has been really supportive,” Felix said….

(2) THE BORDERLINE. The Guardian reports “Australian academics refuse to attend US conferences for fear of being detained”.

When Gemma Lucy Smart received an invitation to attend an academic conference in the US, she was excited. But that was before Donald Trump was returned to office.

Now Smart, who has a disability and is queer, has decided it’s too risky to travel to Seattle for the social sciences conference in September.

The disabilities officer at the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations and a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney will instead attend remotely.

Shortly after Trump was inaugurated, the Society for Social Studies of Science made its conference “hybrid” in response to what it said were “unpredictable” developments at the US border.

“They were concerned about people entering,” Smart said.

“I work on the history of psychiatry, so my field has a lot to do with diversity, equity and inclusion. They [the conference organisers] very explicitly said, ‘We don’t believe it is safe for everyone to travel to the US, particularly our trans and diverse colleagues.’

“The focus on that is really troubling. That, if you legitimately have a different passport than you were given at a young age, you could be detained.”

The conference’s co-chairs announced the hybrid move on 21 January – a day after Trump began his second term. They said the decision reflected “conversations with disability justice and environmental justice scholars and activists”…

(3) HUGO FINALIST KALIANE BRADLEY. [Item by Steven French.] Here’s an interesting interview with Kaliane Bradley whose book The Ministry of Time came out last year and who is an editor at Penguin Classics. As well as talking about her Cambodian heritage she mentions the early significance of reading Terry Pratchett: “Kaliane Bradley: ‘I dreaded the book going to people I know’” in the Guardian.

Which book made you want to work with books?

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. The first one I ever picked up was Interesting Times, which is actually not one I recommend. But reading Pratchett when I was very young – I mean, I was still losing milk teeth – made me excited about the possibilities of literature, books, series, authors. He has influenced my writing more than anyone else.

(4) STEAMY IN SEATTLE 2025: A CELEBRATION OF WOMEN IN SPECULATIVE FICTION. Clarion West presents Steamy in Seattle 2025 on Saturday, May 10 at the Nordic Museum.

Join us for a traditional high tea and a custom tea blend provided by Friday Afternoon Tea. This event is not just a fundraiser; it’s a celebration of emerging and underrepresented writers — particularly women in the field of speculative fiction. Steamy in Seattle raises money for writing workshops, sliding scale tuition, and scholarship programs. 

Ann Aguirre and Elizabeth Stephens will discuss the alien romance genre, science fiction and fantasy worlds, and what writing romance has taught them! Paranormal romance author Jasmine Silvera will moderate. 

The event is a hybrid event and streaming tickets will be available. Purchase your tickets today. 

Clarion West is a nonprofit literary organization that runs an acclaimed six-week residential workshop every summer, online classes and workshops, one-day and weekend workshops, a reading series every summer, and other events throughout the year.

Ann Aguirre: New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Ann Aguirre has been a clown, a clerk, a savior of stray kittens, and a voice actress, not necessarily in that order. She loves video games, Korean dramas, music, dogs and cats, and staring at the sea. Though she writes all kinds of genre fiction, she has a major soft spot for a happily ever after.

Elizabeth Stephens: Tough heroines & possessive Alphas solve mysteries, fight epic battles, and fall in love in Elizabeth’s diverse romance & SciFi novels. Elizabeth Stephens has been living in a fantasy world since she was 11, and in 2015 finally translated her imagination to print! An author of romantic suspense and science fiction, she is a big fan of inclusion and her books always include kick ass ladies of color.

(5) JEAN MARSH (1934-2025). Actress and writer Jean Marsh, known for starring in Upstairs, Downstairs, died April 13 at the age of 90. The New York Times obituary also tells about her considerable genre resume.

Jean Marsh, the striking British-born actress who was both the co-creator and a beloved Emmy-winning star of “Upstairs, Downstairs,” the seminal 1970s British drama series about class in Edwardian England, died on Sunday at her home in London. She was 90.

The cause was complications of dementia, the filmmaker Michael Lindsay-Hogg, her close friend, said.

[In 1959] she made a handful of American television appearances, … an episode in the first season of “The Twilight Zone,” in which she played an alluring brunette robot created as a companion for a prisoner (Jack Warden) on an asteroid.

She also appeared in “Willow” (1988), a fantasy, as an evil sorceress, and “Return to Oz” (1985), as an evil princess.

Aside from “Upstairs, Downstairs,” she was probably best remembered on the small screen for her early appearances on “Dr. Who.” 

(6) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

King Kong

By Paul Weimer: The Eighth Wonder of the World.  (a title that Andre the Giant also received, but that is another story entirely).

We thank WPIX again for showing the original King Kong movie on some Saturday afternoon. A black-and-white movie about a trip to a mysterious tropical island and its very dangerous resident. I was enthralled. 

King Kong represents a lot of things in the psyche, some of them not so pleasant. Man versus the wilderness and the wildness of nature furious at being imprisoned, gassed, and eventually killed. The visuals on the original movie have rarely been exceeded (the 70’s movie is just passable in my opinion. The Jackson one, a passion project, seems to be a movie about the original movie King Kong than actually about King Kong. And so on). When Jeff Goldblum quips “Who do they have in there, King Kong?” in Jurassic Park, we all know what he is invoking. 

One could interpret King Kong as less of man’s fears of the wilderness and the modern first world’s fear of the third world rising up against it. Certainly, this plays into the whole Fay Wray / King Kong dynamic with the ever-dark fear of “miscegenation” . There are some really toxic things in the King Kong story that need to be seen and dealt with if one wants to engage on the movie at more than a superficial level.  But the problem is that those taproots are part of the reason why King compels us. But unlike Godzilla, Kong is never seen as anything other than at best a victim, and at worst a destructive force of nature. King Kong really never gets to be more than an antihero at best, and usually not even that. Kong is the antagonist. He is the Id that is always there, always lurking. Kong wants to be left alone on Skull Island, but the world will not allow it, one way or another. 

There is even a King Kong derivative, Titano, that Superman has fought a few times. (Titano usually has Kryptonite-fueled power, meaning Superman has to be clever in order to beat him). There are a couple of crossover movies with Godzilla done as well. And plenty more, including the recent Monarch TV series. Here really is just something about a gigantic ape wreaking havoc that people want a piece of the action of, one way or another.  There is probably a book to be written that shows how Planet of the Apes owes a lot to King Kong, especially the original movie. 

Was it Beauty that killed the Beast?  No, King Kong lives! King Kong taps into some primal fears and doubts about man, civilization, the wilderness and more (including the darker things mentioned above), and so beauty won’t kill that beast, nor will anything else, I think. 

Anyone up for King Kong on Mars? (Or has it already been done?)

(7) COMICS SECTION.

My cartoon for this week’s @theguardian.com books.

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2025-04-12T09:03:41.895Z
  • Tom Gauld also has a graph.

My cartoon for this week's @newscientist.com

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2025-04-13T13:55:52.057Z

(8) COSPLAYING CRIME FIGHTERS. “Con Artists Scamming London Tourists Meet Their Match: Batman and Robin” reports the New York Times.

Batman and Robin have taken a break from fighting crime in Gotham City to swoop on low-level scammers swindling tourists in the center of London.

Footage shared by the Metropolitan Police on Friday showed undercover officers disguised in the superhero costumes tackling a man who was running a street entertainment game similar to “three-card monte” near Parliament. The police said the game was an illegal gambling operation.

In the video, filmed by the police during an operation in February, the officer dressed as Batman could be seen running along Westminster Bridge wearing the character’s traditional mask, flanked by Robin in a comic book-style costume and bucket hat.

Batman, whose real name is Inspector Darren Watson, pushed through a crowd of tourists watching the suspect’s game, flanked by Robin, played by Police Constable Abdi Osman.

The pair arrested one man, handcuffed him and seized a “cup and ball game.” In the game, the operator places a ball under one of three cups, shuffles them around, then encourages passers-by to bet on where the ball is concealed. But the game run by the arrested man, police said, was rigged: It was impossible to win because the operator would move the ball using sleight of hand.

While superhero costumes are not common in the area, the police said its officers had started to wear disguises because they had become well known to people running scams on the bridge.

“I knew that if we were going to catch them we would have to think outside the box,” said Inspector Watson, who is responsible for local policing in the area. “And then I remembered that I had Batman and Robin costumes to hand, which could come in use.”…

(9) STUCK IN TIME. “Metal Detectorists Unearth Ancient Dagger Decorated With Tiny Stars, Crescent Moons and Geometric Patterns” in Smithsonian Magazine. Photo at the link.

After a recent storm, two metal detectorists went searching for treasure at a beach in northern Poland. They discovered a piece of history lodged in a lump of clay: a small ornamental dagger decorated with stars, crescent moons and geometric patterns.

The metal detectorists, Jacek Ukowski and Katarzyna Herdzik, notified experts at the nearby Museum of the History of Kamień Land. According to a statement, the museum’s director, archaeologist Grzegorz Kurka, met the duo at the beach to examine the artifact.

The dagger is a metallurgical masterpiece that could be up to 2,500 years old, per the statement. It’s likely connected to the Hallstatt culture, which existed in western Europe between roughly the eighth and fifth centuries B.C.E. Experts think the weapons may have been crafted in southern Europe and imported to the Baltic coast.

Ukowski and Herdzik are members of a group of metal detectorists called the St. Cordula Association for the Saving of Monuments. The dagger isn’t Ukowski’s first big discovery. Last year, he found a broken papal bull—a pope’s engraved lead seal—that may have been linked to Clement VI.

(10) WILL PLAY GAMES FOR FOOD. “A crow’s math skills include geometry” – NPR describes the discovery.

… When the crows pecked on the flower shape, they got a snack.

After the birds understood this game, the researchers started showing them sets of shapes that included squares, parallelograms, or irregular quadrilaterals.

The crows might see, for example, five perfect squares along with one four-sided figure that was just slightly off.

What the researchers wanted to know is whether or not “with these quadrilaterals, they could still continue to find the outlier, even though the outlier was looking perceptually very similar to the other five regular shapes,” explains Nieder.

Yes. It turns out, the crows could.

In the journal Science Advances, the researchers describe a series of tests showing that crows clearly had a sense of right angles, parallel lines, and symmetry.

Before these results, says Nieder, “there was no single animal that demonstrated this capability of detecting geometric regularity.”

In fact, a recent study in baboons suggested this non-human primate couldn’t do it.

“Baboons are so much closer to us and we trained them so much more,” says Mathias Sablé-Meyer, a cognitive neuroscientist now at the University College London who worked on that study. “After failing to train the baboons to do it, I wouldn’t have expected crows to do it.”

(11) ANYONS, ANYONE? [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] Interesting. Paraparticles that can be distinguished by their colored ties, as it were. “’Paraparticles’ Would Be a Third Kingdom of Quantum Particle” reports Quanta Magazine.

…It’s not obvious that fermions and bosons should be the only two options.

That’s in part due to a fundamental feature of quantum theory: To calculate the probability of measuring a particle in any particular state, you have to take the mathematical description of that state and multiply it by itself. This procedure can erase distinctions. A minus sign, for example, will disappear. If given the number 4, a Jeopardy! contestant would have no way to know if the question was “What is 2 squared?” or “What is negative 2 squared?” — both possibilities are mathematically valid.

It’s because of this feature that fermions, despite gaining a minus sign when swapped around, all look the same when measured — the minus sign disappears when quantum states are squared. This indistinguishability is a crucial property of elementary particles; no experiment can tell two of a kind apart.

But a minus sign may not be the only thing that disappears. In theory, quantum particles can also have hidden internal states, mathematical structures not seen in direct measurements, which also go away when squared. A third, more general category of particle, known as a paraparticle, could arise from this internal state changing in a myriad of ways while the particles swap places.

While quantum theory seems to allow it, physicists have had difficulty finding a mathematical description of a paraparticle that works….

(12) DUELING STATUES. [Item by Steven French.] “Save the kebab!” cry Perth residents who oppose replacing a beloved sculpture with a Boonji Spaceman: “’Space junk’: huge astronaut statue coming to Perth park is one giant leap too far for many” – the Guardian explains the controversy.

 The City of Perth is under increasing pressure to drop its plans to replace one of the city’s most beloved public artworks with a 7-metre tall effigy of an astronaut, which as been derided as a piece of “factory-produced space junk”.

Until four years ago, Ore Obelisk, affectionately known as The Kebab by the people of Perth, stood in the heritage-listed Stirling Gardens in the heart of the city. The 15-metre work made from local geological minerals, created by the architect, artist and Perth’s first city planner, Paul Ritter, was erected in 1971 to celebrate Western Australia’s population reaching one million, and was one of the city’s first public artworks.

But in 2021, the sculpture was cut into pieces and placed in storage, after council deemed it had become unsafe.

The Kebab’s original plinth still stands, awaiting the sculpture’s restoration and return. No report ever eventuated examining the three options presented to council in 2022 – conservation, relocation or decommissioning.

Then last year, Perth’s then mayor, Basil Zempilas – now leader of the Western Australian Liberal party – announced a new work would take The Kebab’s place.

A 7-metre high effigy of an astronaut, called Boonji Spaceman, the creation of American art entrepreneur Brendan Murphy, would be erected on the site.

Usually selling for about $1.5m, the statues, which have graffiti-like inscriptions over them, have been appearing in cities across the world in recent years, including London, Houston, Oslo and Washington DC – as well as a luxury resort on the Caribbean island of Antigua.

In February, a Boonji Spaceman encrusted with a 517-carat diamond visor valued at almost $33m landed in the lobby of a five star hotel in the Saudi Arabia capital of Riyadh….

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

Pixel Scroll 11/23/24 Virtual Pixels Just Scurry Around On Screens, Trying To Fake It

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(1) BOLLINGER EVERYMAN WODEHOUSE SHORTLIST. The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Comic Fiction Prize shortlist includes two genre works — High Voltage and Ministry of Time.

The Bollinger is awarded to “the funniest novel of the past 12 months, which best evokes the Wodehouse spirit of witty characters and perfectly-timed comic phrases.”

  • A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering by Andrew Hunter Murray (Hutchinson Heinemann)
  • Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon (Fig Tree)  
  • Good Material by Dolly Alderton (Fig Tree)
  • High Vaultage by Chris Sugden and Jen Sugden (Gollancz)
  • The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Sceptre)
  • The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue (Virago)
  • You Are Here by David Nicholls – published by (Sceptre)

The winner will be announced December 2.

In winning the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Comic Fiction Prize, you get not only a jeroboam of the Special Cuvée, but also a case of Bollinger La Grande Année, a complete set of the Everyman’s Library PG Wodehouse collection and, most entertaining, a pig who is to be named after your winning book.

(2) PRIMATES APLENTY. Dave Hook rounds up all the sfnal variations he can find that address the literature Infinite Monkeys might produce in “Monkeys and Shakespeare: The Infinite Monkey Theorem and Speculative Fiction” at A Deep Look by Dave Hook.

…I read nine stories and one essay for this blog post. I suspect there might be more stories out there connected to the Infinite Monkey Theorem, and I’d love to hear from my readers with other suggestions….

He analyzes (beware spoilers) and rates them all.

(3) ONE WAY TO GET A HANDLE ON YOUR POPCORN CONSUMPTION. “AMC Reveals Its Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim 27-Inch Popcorn Bucket” – CBR.com shows it to you.

…Commemorative popcorn buckets are increasing in popularity, with these collectibles released for movies such as Dune, Wicked and Gladiator II, among others. The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim arrives in theaters in the U.S. on Dec. 13, 2024, alongside its own exclusive popcorn bucket. The long handle of the movie’s war hammer replica is designed to appear as though it’s wrapped in leather, with a gray and red face and a gold spike on top. Fans will be able to purchase the limited-edition ‘hammer bucket’ at AMC theaters for $32.99 (not including tax), but only while supplies last.

Some people have complained that this popcorn bucket is potentially deadly, being modeled after a weapon and closely resembling one as well. While the design of the bucket is made to immerse fans in the experience of the movie, it’s also now being called the “most dangerous” popcorn bucket ever. Buyers of this product are urged to exercise caution and good judgment when wielding it.

For those who don’t want a potentially inconvenient 27-inch long popcorn bucket to snack from, another item is also being sold in celebration of the release of the upcoming movie — a faux-wooden stein (or traditional beer mug) with the official Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim logo on the side…. 

(4) MURAKAMI Q&A. [Item by Steven French.] Tangentially genre related: “Haruki Murakami: ‘My books have been criticised so much over the years, I don’t pay much attention’”

… Japanese fiction now represents a quarter of all translated fiction sold in Britain. Why do you think it has such a wide appeal?
I didn’t know that Japanese novels are that popular in Britain. What’s the reason? I have no idea. Maybe you could tell me – I’d like to know.

The Japanese economy is not doing well these days, and I think it’s a good thing that cultural exports can make a contribution of sorts, though literary exports don’t make that much of one, do they?

Did Mieko Kawakami’s criticism of the women in your books, made in 2017, have any effect on how you write female characters?
My books have been criticised so much over the years that I can’t remember in what context the criticisms were made. And I don’t pay much attention to it, either.

Mieko is a close friend and a very intelligent woman, so I’m sure whatever criticism she made was spot on. But honestly, I don’t recall what exactly she criticised. Speaking of women and my works, though, incidentally my readers are pretty much equally divided between men and women, a fact that makes me very happy….

And if you want to know more about those popular Japanese novels, read the Guardian’s article, “Surrealism, cafes and lots (and lots) of cats: why Japanese fiction is booming “.

…The popularity of modern Japanese fiction is not a new phenomenon in the UK … In the 1990s, two writers broke through and became cult hits in this country. Haruki Murakami, a worldwide literary phenomenon, took off in Britain when Harvill Press published The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in 1998. Scott Pack, who ran Waterstones’ buying team in the early 2000s, is a big Murakami fan and remembers giving him “lots of attention. Whatever books of his came out, we got massively behind.” This week, Murakami publishes his 15th novel The City and Its Uncertain Walls, about a man who travels to a mysterious walled town in pursuit of the woman he loves, finding himself in a strange world of libraries, maps and dreams. So what’s behind the lasting success of Murakami’s books, which tend to combine lonely protagonists, jazz, cats, and fantasy elements? “It’s fairly accessible, weird shit,” Pack says….

(5) DIALED IN.  Sharon Lee is restarting her blog with shares like “Opening the windows”:

…Speaking of Just Me, I decided that I would watch “Astrid” last night (people who love the show, my comments are about the show not about you or your preferences in pleasure viewing). I will not be continuing. Not only does the first segment start with a man dousing himself with gasoline and lighting himself on fire on-screen, Astrid herself was a little too close to home. I remember mapping out phone calls before I made them, so I’d be sure to transmit the correct information in a socially normal way, and the feeling of panic when there was a vary. (I once called somebody to ask them a question before I had Breathed In, and when they answered the phone said, “MynameisSharonLeecallingforXandIwouldliketoknowthisnthat.” The person I was calling paused for a moment, then said, very gently, “Wow. Are you from New York?”) I’ve gotten much better, with lots of practice, and lots of years, about making eye contact when talking to people, but it was sorta painful to watch. This is, in case it’s not clear, a tribute to the actor who plays Astrid. She clearly Gets It….

(6) LONG-REMEMBERED THUNDER. [Item by Steven French.] Sometimes a line in an obituary will raise the old eyebrows! Peter Sinfield, who has recently passed away, wrote the lyrics for late 60s/early 70s ‘prog rock’ band King Crimson, as well as going on to write a number of pop hits (including for Celine Dion). And amidst all the music production details, there’s an interesting genre related connection: “Peter Sinfield obituary” in the Guardian.

…In 1979 he narrated Robert Sheckley’s In a Land of Clear Colors, an audio sci-fi story with music by Brian Eno….

Editor’s note: I’m running this item because I remember that my friend Richard Wadholm was a big fan of their first album, In the Court of the Crimson King (1969). And that if it had been within his power, I’d have been a big fan, too.

(7) KORY HEATH (1970-2024). W. Eric Martin pays tribute to the late Kory Heath at BoardGameGeek:  “In Memoriam: Kory Heath”.

Designer Kory Heath took his own life on November 18, 2024, after “enduring years of chronic pain and depression”, in the words of John Cooper, who co-designed The Gang with Kory.

More from Cooper: “He was a genius, also funny, kind, patient. I’m so grateful we could spend so many years, laughs, and tears together, and that he knew he was deeply loved by all of his friends.”

Kory was best known for his game Zendo, a game of inductive logic in which the master exhibits two “koans” — one following a secret rule created by the master, one violating this rule — and students create koans of their own in order to determine what this rule is.

…Kory Heath’s list of published games is an eclectic one: the party game Why Did The Chicken…?, in which players create punchlines for randomly generated situations; the inductive logic game Zendo, in which players try to determine rules for constructing figures; the bluffing game Criminals; and the abstract game Uptown….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Anniversary, November 23, 1963 — Doctor Who premieres

It would take years for me to see An Unearthly Child, the premiere of Doctor Who.  On PBS in NYC, the Fourth Doctor was the first Doctor widely shown in the states, and for years, was the only one. Eventually a channel on Long Island branched out from the Fourth Doctor, showing what they called “The Doctor Who movies”–basically an entire serial in one go on a Saturday evening. They started with the Fourth Doctor, moved to the then new to me Fifth Doctor.  And then after the end of the Fifth Doctor’s run (The Caves of Androzani), they then went back to the beginning. Back to the First Doctor…

Back to the premiere of Doctor Who…An Unearthly Child which happened on this date in 1963 on BBC.  I had already seen the First Doctor, but not the original actor. The First Doctor appears, as played by Richard Hurndall. So I knew the First Doctor as a somewhat crotchety figure…but William Hartnell’s appearance was completely revelatory as the original and sometimes very alien First Doctor.  He is brutal and savage and ready to commit a bit of murder right there in the first serial. I appreciated the mystery of the Doctor as Ian and Barbara try and figure out what’s so strange about their student, Susan, and the terror and horror in being cast in time and space. I still think the episode holds up, the premiere of Doctor Who, even today. A story of progress, and tolerance, and trying to understand things beyond your ken (on several levels). And so ably directed by Verity Lambert, the BBC’s first female drama producer. 

Those “Doctor Who movies”, starting chronologically with An Unearthly Child, would cement my love of Doctors other than the Fourth (especially the Third) and I suppose in a sense were the original “binge watching” for Doctor Who. And the Doctor Who movie format made me ready, in 1996, for the TV movie, on a snowy television set. But that, as they say, is a story for another day.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) GET YOUR GRAINS OF SALT READY. “‘Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse’ Reportedly Scrapped & Rewritten” – Movieweb tells what they know.

Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse won’t be following up on that crazy cliffhanger anytime soon, if the latest rumor is to be believed. Ever since the upcoming Across the Spider-Verse sequel was delayed from its 2024 release date, fans have wondered what is happening with the highly-anticipated project. It currently has no set release date, and Sony never even officially acknowledged that major change. Rumors have since circulated about its production woes, and the latest report explains why development on Beyond the Spider-Verse has been at a standstill.

According to Brandon Davis (via World of Reel), Sony scrapped what they completed for Beyond the Spider-Verse shortly after the release of Across the Spider-Verse. Moreover, the script was thrown away and set to be rewritten, and it’s not clear if that process is complete yet. The craziest part is that the studio reportedly still doesn’t have an ending in place for the trilogy, and that has not changed yet. Of course, this should be taken with a grain of salt until proven otherwise, but the writing has been on the wall for the past year. Originally slated to release on Mar. 29, 2024, Beyond the Spider-Verse remains away from the Sony release schedule….

(11) HISTORIC HOLLYWOOD PROPERTY WILL HAVE NEW FOLKS PULLING THE STRINGS. SFGate says there’s a way to tour the old Chaplin/Jim Henson studio, which can’t be counted on to be around for much longer now that the place has new owners: “Hollywood A-listers buy Jim Henson’s LA studio for $40 million”.

…Given that its departure seems imminent, fans may want to pay their way into one last La Brea lot tour while they can. Here’s how: If you book a VIP ticket to the vulgar and “perverted” improv puppet show “Puppet Up!” — which will run you $175 — you’ll be instructed to arrive an hour and a half early. That’s when a Henson Company tour guide will take you around the lot for a rare look at this treasure trove.

Chaplin’s fingerprints (and literal footprints, in the concrete) are all over the space, which he built starting in 1917. (If you want to see how wildly different LA looked back then, Chaplin shot his studio’s construction as part of a never-released film that was completed years later.)  The stage where “Puppet Up!” takes place is Chaplin’s former soundstage, and the hand saw — as well as the barn — that the actor-director used to build sets is still on the lot. Even the vault where Chaplin stored his coveted reels for famous films like “The Kid” (which was shot on site) is still nestled inside the reception office, although these days it holds office supplies like a printer and a fax machine. 

There are fascinating asides during the tour, too, that explain quirky touches like why certain doors are located several feet off the ground: It’s because the lot used to hold a swimming pool, which Chaplin used to film several movies of his. The conference room also features a comically large table, which has been there since the A&M days because, apparently, the movers couldn’t get it out of the doors….

(12) ARTEMIS NEWS. “NASA chooses SpaceX and Blue Origin to deliver rover, astronaut base to the moon” reports Space.com.

NASA is keeping its foot on the gas for the space agency’s Artemis program, announcing plans to assign demonstration missions for the two vehicles it has picked to land astronauts on the moon.

Both SpaceX and Blue Origin were awarded contracts for NASA’s Human Landing System, and have been in the process of designing their respective vehicles for returning astronauts to the surface of the moon. Now, NASA has given both companies a heads-up to expect to put those designs to the test in some upcoming qualification missions that will task them with sending large cargo to the moon.The mission assignments follow a 2023 request from NASA, which also directed SpaceX and Blue Origin to build cargo variants of their lunar landers, the space agency indicated in a statement. Having two different lunar landing systems to choose from will give NASA flexibility for both crew and cargo missions, while also “ensuring a regular cadence of moon landings for continued discovery and scientific opportunity,” said Stephen D. Creech, NASA’s assistant deputy associate administrator for technical at the agency’s Moon to Mars Program Office….

… “Based on current design and development progress for both crew and cargo landers and the Artemis mission schedules for the crew lander versions, NASA assigned a pressurized rover mission for SpaceX and a lunar habitat delivery for Blue Origin,” Human Landing System program manager Lisa Watson-Morgan said in the statement.

The pressurized rover Starship will deliver is being developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and is currently targeted to launch in 2032 to support missions after Artemis 6, according to NASA. Blue Origin’s lunar habitat is slated sometime a year later, 2033….

(13) OUT TO LAUNCH. “I Renovated a Missile Silo for $800,000. It’s Not for Everyone” – Business Insider finds out how it was done.

This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with GT Hill, a 49-year-old former director of technical marketing who lives in Vilonia, Arkansas. He bought a $90,000 decommissioned missile silo and turned it into an Airbnb….

…  really wanted to dig it up and see what was in there. Initially, I intended to make it a house for my family.

Lastly, I was interested in owning a missile silo because it’s just kick ass. The place has 7,000-pound doors. Its three floors are made out of a steel structure nicknamed “the birdcage.”

It’s on eight springs and actually hangs from the ceiling. And the reason is if it gets hit by a bomb, it allows the structure to shake to try to preserve the equipment and the people inside….

… Titan II was denuclearized after the US and Russia signed a 1979 treaty to limit each country’s nuclear weapons. The US disarmed Titan II as part of that negotiation, called the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks II or SALT II….

… There are no walls and doors, so there’s no real primary bedroom. The top floor has a king bed, a large, open shower, and a free-standing bathtub. The middle floor has two queen beds that we can move to make more space. Then, the kitchen and the living room are on the bottom floor, which also doubles as a dance floor and can turn into a club.

We host anything on the property, including meetings. If it’s semi-legal and people want to do it there and pay for it, we’re fine with it.

The first booking we got was in November 2020. It was a couple coming for their honeymoon, but they got a little too intoxicated at their wedding to make the trip. They sent their best man instead….

(14) NEW RELEASE FROM STARSHIP SLOANE PUBLISHING.

A Wereshark’s Memoir by Justin T. O’Conor Sloane

A novelette following the fantastical journey of an immortal sea captain across the centuries, whose turbulent life as a pirate and a wereshark is by turns beautiful and haunting.

In his magnum opus Ethics published posthumously in 1677,Spinoza argues that God is substance. Evil is substance in A Wereshark’s Memoir by Justin Sloane. Original, frightening, and beautiful, this work is a study into the impossibility of evil to reign over the human race. It is a fiction of the open wound. It hurts and it makes you invent a therapy to alleviate pain. Often this is impossible. In a way, it is a subtle analysis of what society suffers from today. As Justin Sloane puts it, “Time is neither friend nor foe. But it can be made either.” —Zdravka Evtimova, 4x best novel of Bulgaria and author of He May Wear My Silence

With all the linguistic beauty of scientific romance, and a splash of cosmic horror, Mr. Sloane takes us on an aquatic romp through piracy, love, and death. Fans of William Hope Hodgson will want to devour this tale. —Jean-Paul L. Garnier, editor of Star*Line magazine and author of Garbage In, Gospel Out

Justin Sloane’s A Wereshark’s Memoir is a true megalodon of a novelette, howling hammerheaded through the centuries, timeless like that eldest breed named for Greenland. Equal parts werewolf, shark, and swashbuckler who befriends Blackbeard himself, Sloane’s narrator, sea-bewitched, bioluminescent shape-shifter, proves at least as haunted as a Ulysses unable ever to return home. —Dr. Matt Schumacher, editor of Phantom Drift: A Journal of New Fabulism and author of The Fire Diaries: Poems

Available everywhere for only $5.99.

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. The ultimate in nostalgia. “Family Feud: Gilligan’s Island Vs. Batman”. What year was this?

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

Pixel Scroll 10/24/24 The Scroll On The Edge of Pixelver

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(1) EDITORIAL PRIVILEGE? Beneath Ceaseless Skies editor Scott Andrews has posted the text of his GoH speech given at World Fantasy 2024 on October 20. His message is: “Not Paying Editors Limits Range of Editorial Voices”.

… one way many indie zines afford all that [they publish] on a shoestring budget is that the editors take no pay.

I take no pay for editing BCS. I’ve put 25 hours or more a week into BCS, for 16 years. (Other than six First Readers, I do everything else: reading pass-ups, developmental editing, line-editing, producing the podcast, maintaining the website, posting social media. I clearly have delegation issues.)

If I was to be paid $10 an hour, 50 weeks a year: in order to fund that, BCS would have to more than double our current support, from Patreon patrons and donations and ebook sales, or cut half our fiction. Plus the time and hassle of doing that additional fundraising, which is considerable and exhausting.

I can afford not taking pay. But that approach of not paying editors means that many editors of indie zines in our field are people of financial privilege. And in our world, financial privilege often correlates with other privileges. So I think this practice of not paying editors of indie zines is limiting the range of editorial voices our field has.

Since I started BCS, our field has broadened vastly in the range of author voices: identities, backgrounds, areas of the world; languages. I believe we need to broaden the range of editorial voices too. To me, figuring out how to pay editors is a key step toward that.

I admit, I don’t have any answers. I’m not a business person. And I’ve got all I can handle just running BCS.

But I call this issue to your attention today because I think we need talk about it. We need ideas….

(2) BOOK AT BEDTIME. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Sceptre – Hodder & Stoughton, £22, hrdbk, ISBN 978-1-399-72634-4) has been made in the past couple of week’s BBC Radio 4’s (formerly the BBC Home Service) Book at Bedtime.

In the near future, a disaffected civil servant is offered a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering ‘expats’ from across history to test the limits of time-travel. Her role is to work as a ‘bridge’: living with, assisting and monitoring the expat known as ‘1847’ – Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to find himself alive and surrounded by outlandish concepts such as the ‘washing machine’, ‘Spotify’ and ‘the collapse of the British Empire’. With an appetite for discovery and a seven-a-day cigarette habit, he soon adjusts; and during a long, sultry summer he and his bridge move from awkwardness to genuine friendship, to something more. But as the true shape of the project that brought them together begins to emerge, Gore and the bridge are forced to confront their past choices and imagined futures. Can love triumph over the structures and histories that have shaped them? And how do you defy history when history is living in your house..?

The BBC’s forthcoming TV adaptation (as opposed to the episodic audio book) of this novel has attracted a claim of plagiarism by those who made the Spanish TV series El Ministerio del Tiempo [The Ministry of Time].

The separate Spanish TV series El Ministerio del Tiempo won the 2016 Ignotus Best Audiovisual Production as well as the 2017 Award.

Irrespective of plagiarism claims (time travel is a fairly common, if not standard, SF trope and the commonality of title could be happenstance – the book has its differences) the BBC has the rights to make a TV mini-series, so it is likely they used the copyright permission for this to also make an episodic audio adaptation. Each episode is 15 minutes long so with 10 episodes that’s 150 minutes (or two-and-a-half hours in old money) of audio book.

Get episodes here: Episode 1; Episode 2; Episode 3; Episode 4; Episode 5; Episode 6; Episode 7; Episode 8; Episode 9; Episode 10.

(3) DEATH IS SUPER BAD. “I’m So Sick of the Death of Superman” declares Charlie Jane Anders at Happy Dancing. The latest iteration prompted her to go back and look at the first comic book death. Which wasn’t great either.

…There’s a funeral, and eventually four imposter Supermen show up — everybody can kind of tell they’re imposters, but they hang around for ages. At last, Superman comes back to life, but now he’s wearing a black version of his famous uniform, plus he now has a mullet.

That’s it, that’s the whole story. 

How does Superman come back to life? I honestly can’t say. I realized several years ago that I couldn’t remember how Superman was resurrected in what’s now packaged as The Death and Rebirth of Superman, so I went back and reread the original comics to find out. And now, once again, I can’t remember, because it’s that memorable. I know that Superman meets his human dad, Pa Kent, in the afterlife, and Pa Kent talks to him about why it’s generally a good thing to not be dead. I know there’s some more Kryptonian bullshit. But beyond that, it’s a bit of a blur….

(4) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 121 of the Octothorpe podcast, “All About the Vibes”, John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty discuss Grass by Sheri S. Tepper, which was a finalist for the Hugo Award in 1990.

This is Alison’s pick for John and Liz to read, and we go into some of the themes of the book and whether or not female authors are as well-remembered as men (spoiler: no).

There’s an uncorrected transcript at the link.

Three hippae stand on a landscape of alien grass and plants in blue, purple, red, teal, and orange underneath a pinkish sky. The words “Octothorpe 121” appear at the top and the words “Grass Sheri S Tepper” appear at the bottom.

(5) ANNOTATED SNOUTS. “’Fascinating’: Tove Jansson’s Moomins notes to be published for first time” – the Guardian has details.

As a cult series of 20th-century children’s books, the Moomins have sold up to 30m copies worldwide. Now, extensive humorous notes that their Finnish creator, Tove Jansson, wrote on each of her lovable trolls with hippopotamus snouts are to be published for the first time, 25 years after her death.

Eighty-nine handwritten pages that cast new light on the “small, friendly and adventurous” creatures with fur “like velvet”, have been rediscovered among hundreds of thousands of items in her sprawling archive.

James Zambra, her great-nephew and a director of Moomin Characters, which manages her legacy, said: “This was actually in one of her notebooks. It’s fantastic. Getting Tove’s own thoughts on the personality traits of the characters is fascinating.”…

(6) IS CHATGTP “FAIR USE”? NO, SAYS FORMER OPENAI RESEARCHER. Publishers Lunch reports “Former OpenAI Staffer Claims AI Training Is Not Fair Use”.

A former researcher at OpenAI has spoken out against the company’s use of copyrighted data in a detailed, publicly posted analysis, reported on further by the NYT (which is suing OpenAI for copyright infringement). Suchir Balaji left OpenAI in protest “because he no longer wanted to contribute to technologies that he believed would bring society more harm than benefit.”

Early versions of the company’s technology were treated as research projects, which meant employees felt free to train them on any data without worrying about permissions and usage, Balaji told the Times. But as ChatGPT-4 became a commercial product, OpenAI failed to meet the rules of fair use, he said. According to Balaji, ChatGPT’s outputs aren’t significantly different from its inputs — which are copied in whole — and the outputs directly compete with the copyrighted work that it used for training.

Further, according to Balaji, “As A.I. technologies replace existing internet services, they are generating false and sometimes completely made-up information — what researchers call ‘hallucinations.’ The internet, he said, is changing for the worse.”…

Suchir’s full analysis, including illustrative graphs, is at his “When does generative AI qualify for fair use?” webpage.

While generative models rarely produce outputs that are substantially similar to any of their training inputs, the process of training a generative model involves making copies of copyrighted data. If these copies are unauthorized, this could potentially be considered copyright infringement, depending on whether or not the specific use of the model qualifies as “fair use”. Because fair use is determined on a case-by-case basis, no broad statement can be made about when generative AI qualifies for fair use. Instead, I’ll provide a specific analysis for ChatGPT’s use of its training data, but the same basic template will also apply for many other generative AI products….

(7) ABOUT FRANK MILLER. A trailer has dropped for the documentary Frank Miller: American Genius.

Frank Miller: American Genius documents the unique journey of an unparalleled American artist. The film explores the near half-century career of the legendary comic book artist and writer. Made for his fans following a near death experience, the documentary delves into Miller’s radical and defining influence on art, storytelling and culture.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born October 24, 1952 — David Weber, 72

By Paul Weimer: Sometimes the subtext is the text. A lot of space opera has the subtext of being naval adventures in space, ranging from the original Star Trek on to the present day. It is no surprise, then, that David Weber decided to cut straight to the source and have actual naval style military adventures in the stars, with Honor Harrington. His books follow the rise of Harrington in a manner that Hornblower and O’Brian could recognize, and appreciate. 

David Weber

With all of the side books and ancillary books in the series, the amount of Harrington stories Weber has produced is staggering, but it is undeniably a gem of an idea he can and has taken advantage of for all it’s worth. I’ve not read all of them, but enough to get a good sampling. 

What I like even more is Weber’s Armageddon Reef series. The Safehold books take place on a colony planet where humans have fled after a genocidal attack, and have been forcibly reduced in technology in order to evade detection. So we have an alien planet, humans on it, and a lack of space flight. And so Weber adds 18-19th century style naval combat and technology to the mix. 

These books, I feel, have to be an even more explicit loveletter to Hornblower and company.  The conflict between technology and religion and the problems of separation of chruch and state do elevate these books, I feel, to a question that we face today. While Weber’s novels might be dismissed as just being fun naval and space adventures, there is that undercurrent and layer of engaging with societal questions that make them very worthy of attention.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) WHAT IF? MICKEY & FRIENDS AS THE FANTASTIC FOUR. Mickey & Friends will put a spin on classic Marvel covers in 2025 with new Disney What If? Fantastic Four homage variant covers.

Continuing the “What If?” theme, Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, Donald, and more take over as Mister Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Human Torch, and the Thing to recreate the team’s most memorable adventures.

Check out the first two covers, on sale January and February, that pay homage to Silver Age issues: Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four #3 and #51. For more information, visit Marvel.com.

(11) LITTLE PRINCE, BIG PRICE TAG. “Rare typescript of The Little Prince to go up for sale” reports the Guardian.

A rare carbon typescript of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince featuring extensive handwritten corrections by the author is going up for sale. It is one of only three known copies and marks the first time a typescript of the classic story has been offered for public sale.

The artefact features what is believed to be the first written appearance of the famous lines: “On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux,” translated to mean: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”…

… The typescript is priced at $1.25m. It will be showcased at Abu Dhabi Art, an annual art fair taking place at the end of November.

(12) TEDDY HARVIA CARTOON.

(13) GUT INSTINCTS. “H.R. Giger and Mire Lee’s Biomechanical Netherworld” depicted by Frieze.

‘Have you seen Schinkel Pavillon’s H.R. Giger show?’ has been the question of the month in Berlin. In fact, the exhibition pairs the late Swiss artist with the South Korean sculptor Mire Lee, a detail that has mostly footnoted ensuing conversations. Although it’s hardly a surprise. An obvious novelty factor accompanies this appearance of Giger’s sculptures, paintings, drawings, and prints which – due to their creator’s work on the Alien film franchise (1979–2017) – fundamentally impacted society’s collective imagination of the far-flung other. But interesting questions also arise from this hagiographic netherworld. Namely, whether the show participates in a meaningful conversation – about our erotic and paranoid relationship to the unknown, say – or just satisfies current nostalgic tastes, if not contemporary art’s populist drift.

With her best work having as much guts as Giger’s aliens, many of Lee’s sculptures are abject biomechanical masses, made from concrete, silicon and steel, and sometimes veined with ooze-pumping tubes. From beyond the grave, Giger has contributed Necroconom (Alien II) (1990) – a life-size sculpture of the infamous alien Xenomorph, who crawled on knees and fore-talons, as much like a purring pole dancer as a menacing hunter, its exoskeleton made from sexy black polyester….

…More affecting in its provocation of bodily and existential tremors is Lee’s Untitled (2021), a small conflagration of metallic and silicon cables, bound to a motor, which churns slowly in a spot-lit pool of its own broken refuse, on the floor of an eerie basement room, dark and tiled like an abandoned shower. Simultaneously invoking a disembodied machine component or body part, the piece harks back to classic existential concerns: the feeling of crawling through life, forever breaking apart, suspended between humanity and technology, and wondering why we even bother. Less effective were a number of Lee’s larger works, which gestured towards sensational corporeal impact, without quite delivering: The Liars (2021), a foreboding hanging mass made from towels, chains, fabric and silicon, suggested a horrific meat locker, without being all that horrific, while its companion piece, Carriers: Offsprings (2021), finds slime pulsing through masses of hanging tangled transparent tubes, like entrails simulated in a theme-park haunted house….

‘HR Giger and Mire Lee’, 2021, exhibition view, Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin

(14) COSMIC BANGERS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] An astrometric analysis of Gaia data identified two waves of massive runaway stars that have been dynamically ejected from the young cluster R136 in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Researchers used data from the European Gaia Space Telescope to discover 55 high-speed stars launched from the young star cluster R136 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The young cluster R136 has launched as many as a third of its most massive stars in the last few million years, at speeds above 100,000 km/hr. Those stars travel up to 1,000 light years from their birthplace before exploding as supernovas at their end of life, producing a neutron star or black hole.

Primary research here: “Two waves of massive stars running away from the young cluster R136” in Nature.

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ms. Mojo made a list of the “Top 10 Things Only Adults Notice in The Wizard of Oz”. Number three is the unanswered question, “Where Are Dorothy’s Parents?”

“The Wizard of Oz” works on another level as an adult. Welcome to MsMojo, and today we’re counting down our picks for the wonderful, wizardly, and weird things about “The Wizard of Oz” that might have grabbed their broomsticks and flown over our heads when we were kids.

[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, 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 Jon Meltzer.]

Pixel Scroll 9/23/24 Slartibartleby, The Pixeler

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(1) RETRO HUGOS IN THE REAR VIEW MIRROR? “’The Conclusion of the Retro Hugo Era’ – A Glasgow 2024 panel and my thoughts” at A Deep Look by Dave Hook.

The Short: I moderated a panel at Glasgow 2024, A Worldcon for our Futures, titled “The Conclusion of the Retro Hugo Era” on Saturday evening, August 10, 2024. We had a good discussion of the Retro Hugo Awards, warts and all. The title turned out to be prescient; the next day, the WSFS Business Meeting voted in favor of Constitutional Amendment F.19 (No More Retros), which will be up for ratification at Seattle 2025, Building Yesterday’s Futures–For Everyone. More thoughts below.

The Long: I was selected to moderate a panel at Glasgow 2024, A Worldcon for our Futures, titled “The Conclusion of the Retro Hugo Era” on Saturday evening, August 10.

I had applied to be on the panel because I love the Retro Hugo Awards and have loved doing the reading and voting for them, even though I came to have some serious reservations.

I had voted for the the 1944 (43) Retro Hugos in 2019, and the 1945 (44) Retro Hugos in 2020. Paul Fraser at www.sfmagazines.com was especially helpful in gathering and sharing resources that I used for these. I served on several panels for the 1946 Project (and several that were not) at Chicon 8 Worldcon in 2022 that focused on works that could have been nominated if there had been a 1947 (46) Retro Hugo held that year.

Former Hugo finalist Trish E. Matson, Fan Guest of Honor Mark Plummer, Perriane Lurie and Hugo Award winner Cora Buhlert joined me on this panel….

(2) COLLISION COURSE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] No appeal has yet been made by the Internet Archive to the Supreme Court in their copyright case with Hachette, et al. But if they do appeal, the case could see a fascinating intersection with one of the hottest topics in American politics—to wit, The Supremes v. Ethics. “How A Copyright Case Is Shining A Spotlight On SCOTUS Ethics Issues” at Huffpost.

Six out of the high court’s nine justices have published books with the publishers involved in the case. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson have all published books or signed book deals with Penguin Random House. HarperCollins has published books by justices Clarence Thomas and Gorsuch. And Justice Brett Kavanaugh is signed to a book deal with Hachette. (None of the publishers responded to requests for comment.)

The case involves a digital lending library operated by the nonprofit Internet Archive that it expanded during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The publishers challenged the archive’s practice of copying and lending out digital copies of library books with no limit, through what the archive calls its National Emergency Library, as a violation of copyright that threatens authors’ earnings. A district court and the appeals court both ruled in favor of the publishers, finding that the archive’s digital lending practices violated copyright law.

The Internet Archive has not appealed to the Supreme Court yet. A spokesperson for the Internet Archive told HuffPost the nonprofit is still reviewing the appeals court decision. But if the case were to reach the high court, it would raise serious questions about the self-enforcement of conflict of interest rules by the individual justices at a time when the court has been embroiled in ethics controversies, particularly around Thomas’ receipt of gifts from friends and wealthy conservative benefactors….

(3) BOOK BANNING ACCELERATES. The New York Times studies how “New State Laws Are Fueling a Surge in Book Bans”.

States and local governments are banning books at rates far higher than before the pandemic, according to preliminary data released by two advocacy groups on Monday.

Books have been challenged and removed from schools and libraries for decades, but around 2021, these instances began to skyrocket, fanned by a network of conservative groups and the spread on social media of lists of titles some considered objectionable.

Free speech advocates who track this issue say that in the past year, newly implemented state legislation has been a significant driver of challenges.

PEN America, a free speech group that gathers information on banning from school board meetings, school districts, local media reports and other sources, said that over 10,000 books were removed, at least temporarily, from public schools in the 2023-24 school year. That’s almost three times as many removals as during the school year before.

About 8,000 of those bans came just from Florida and Iowa, where newly implemented state laws led to large numbers of books being removed from the shelves while they were assessed.

Lawmakers and those who describe themselves as parental rights advocates favor restricting access to certain books because they don’t believe children should stumble upon sensitive topics while alone in the library, or without guidance from their parents. Many think that some books that have traditionally been embraced in school libraries are inappropriate for minors, including, for example, “The Bluest Eye,” by Toni Morrison, which includes references to rape and incest.

The law in Iowa, which went into effect in 2023, prohibits any material that depicts sexual acts from all K-12 schools, with the exception of religious texts. It also limits instruction about gender and sexual orientation until seventh grade. In Florida, a law that took effect before the 2023-24 school year said that any book challenged for “sexual conduct” must be removed while it is reviewed….

(4) THE MINISTRY OF TIME. Coincidentally I just finished reading this novel yesterday, and agree it deserves high praise. “Review: The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley” by Rich Horton at Strange at Ecbatan. Beware spoilers aplenty, however.

…If at first it reads like a convenient use of the time travel device to tell a love story, and a story about the experience of expatriates (either in time or space), with some cli fi mixed in, by the end it’s all of those things plus a book that gloriously and whole-hearted buys into the strangeness and paradoxes of time travel. There is a wild twist at the end, which I only guessed half of in advance. The love story is beautifully handled. The depiction of near future life is fraught and believable. The examination of the expat experience, the depiction of the horrors of the Franklin Expedition, and the intricate plot are very well done….

(5) DIALING BACK. Colleen Doran reveals some personal issues here – “In Which the Artist Chronicles Life With OCD: The Cognitive Behavioral Therapy That is My Art” at Colleen Doran’s Funny Business — ultimately to explain why she now spends little time looking at social media.

I suppose it’s no surprise for me to admit right here in print I’ve had a lifelong problem with OCD. Not as in, “I’m a little OCD because I like a well organized pantry,” but the kind of OCD that sees you spending hours a day doing something repetitively and it kind of ruins your life in small bites of hell.

I posted a snippet of this previously private essay here a short time ago, but here’s the whole lightly edited enchilada from May 2020.

OCD morphs. When I was a kid, it was one set of habits, then it became another set of habits, which I’m not going to belabor, because they’re all weird and embarrassing. 

Early on I knew nothing about what was happening because who had ever heard of it, and no internet. I assumed it was a willpower issue, and  trained myself to turn my nervous energy into something productive, like channeling that prickly power into drawing comics.

I had no idea that this is a foundation of cognitive behavioral therapy, so go me….

(6) GRRM Q&A. Daniel Roman interviewed GRRM while they were both in Glasgow for the Worldcon. “The George R.R. Martin interview: On fandom, writing, and his work beyond Westeros” at Winter Is Coming. Roman obligingly avoided areas that would be de rigeur for a journalist: “There were a few topics we agreed ahead of time to steer clear of, like Martin’s long-awaited sixth Song of Ice and Fire novel The Winds of Winter, or the HBO shows Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon.”

WiC: Yeah, I went to Discon in Washington D.C. in 2021. That’s the only other one I’ve been to so far.

GRRM: Well, they’re very big these days and they have multi-tracks of programming. Those early Worldcons had one track of programming, and they had panels. And there was a room where a panel was, the panel would have four or five people on it, but they certainly weren’t inviting guys like me who had published four stories, you know? Every panel was all big names. So I would go to a panel, it’d be Isaac Asimov, and talking to Frederick Pohl, and talking to Harlan Ellison, and you know, then there would be another panel…but no one was asking me to be on a panel yet. You had to pay your dues in those days, and little by little, I did pay my dues. I actually [chuckles], as I said, I won the Hugo in ’75…it still didn’t get me on any panels. The first time I was put on a panel was ’77. But they were great opportunities to see friends, to make professional contacts, and once I started getting on panels and doing autographings, to promote myself.

(7) IS THIS HEAVEN? NO, IT’S IOWA. CrimeReads looks back to the Seventies and the challenge of “Bringing Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution to the Big Screen”. Novelist Meyer also wrote the screenplay.

…Meyer has a special talent as an adaptor of other people’s work, but quickly learned that it isn’t as easy when the material you are adapting is your own. “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution was relatively early in my career,” he observes, “and it was me working with my own material. I’ve listened to many authors talking about adapting their own material, and they have a great deal of difficulty in being ruthless. It happens with directors too. You can have a shot you really love, and it was very hard to get . . . it’s a beautiful shot. But if you discover it doesn’t belong in the movie, you have to accept that it has to go.”

Meyer’s early inclination to wordiness wasn’t because he began his career as a novelist, but instead is due to his time in college at the University of Iowa. “I was a theater major, and so I started out with a sort of stage orientation. That means dialogue. As a beginning screenwriter, I started out writing tons of dialogue because I thought it was like a play. But in screenwriting imagery dominates dialogue, and if it’s too talky it doesn’t feel cinematic. You have to be ruthless. I have learned since that time to write very, very spare stuff . . . descriptions, dialogue, everything. It is just the bare minimum of what you need. Certainly with my own stuff, I never had the feeling that it was so wonderful that it was incapable of improvement.”…

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Mike Glyer.]

Born September 23, 1971 – Rebecca Roanhorse, 53. Entering the field with a roar, Rebecca Roanhorse’s first published sff story “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian ExperienceTM” (Apex Aug 2017) won both the Hugo and Nebula, and helped her win the Astounding Award for best new writer in 2018.

Rebecca Roanhorse

She has written two novels in the Star Wars universe, Resistance Reborn (2019) and Dark Vengeance (2020). However, she’s best known for being what Science Fiction Encyclopedia’s John Clute describes as “an advocate of the concept of Indigenous Futurism”, exemplified by her novels Trail of Lightning and Black Sun (both Hugo and Nebula finalists; the latter an Ignyte winner), and Storm of Locusts, and her short story “A Brief Lesson in Native American Astronomy” (also an Ignyte-winner).  

Black Sun and Fevered Star are part of the Between Earth and Sky series, joined this summer by a third book, Mirrored Heavens.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Bizarro lists some nearly supers.
  • Carpe Diem is having a bad day.
  • Breaking Cat News for September 22 was missing on a few sites. And now we know why – it crossed several genres!
  • Wizard of Id complains about pet people.
  • Tom Gauld overhears a wistful voice.

(10) ‘BOLTS TRAILER. Is this news to us? It came out in May. “’Thunderbolts’ Trailer: Marvel Recruits Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan” in Variety.

…In the upcoming superhero pic, starring “Captain America” mainstay Sebastian Stan and “Black Widow” cast members Florence Pugh and David Harbour, reformed Marvel villains are forced to team up to conduct covert operations on behalf of the U.S. government.

“Everyone here has done bad things,” Pugh says in the trailer, brought face to face with the rest of the team. “Shadow ops, robbing government labs, contract kills. … Someone wants us gone.”…

(11) CASH THAT GLOWS IN THE DARK. The Royal Canadian Mint has struck a 1 oz. Pure Silver Glow-in-the-Dark Coin commemorating “Canada’s Unexplained Phenomena: The Langenburg Event”.

A 50-year-old story of UFOs at a farm near Langenburg, Sask. — a town 220 kilometres east of Regina — is being celebrated by Canada Post and the Canadian Royal Mint with a new coin.

The story of the UFOs and the five crop circles from 1974 have prompted Canada Post and the Royal Canadian Mint to issue a coin that commemorates the event. “The Langenburg Event” coin is the seventh in the Canada’s Unexplained Phenomena series.

The coin is one ounce of pure silver, glows in the dark, and can be purchased online for C$140.

Coin #7 brings you a close encounter of the second kind.

Some crop circles are harder to dismiss… and that’s what makes Saskatchewan’s most famous UFO/UAP incident so intriguing! Viewed from the witness’s perspective, the Langenburg Event is the seventh unusual encounter re-told as part of our popular Canada’s Unexplained Phenomena series of coins.

On the morning of September 1ˢᵗ, 1974, a farmer was swathing his fields near the town of Langenburg, Saskatchewan, when he noticed five highly polished, steel-like objects at the edge of a slough. Upon closer look, he noticed these unusual saucer-shaped objects were rotating rapidly and hovering just above the ground. He continued to observe them until they suddenly rose up, emitting a strange vapour as they silently disappeared into the sky. But the objects hadn’t vanished without a trace; according to the RCMP incident report, they left behind “five different distinct circles, caused by something exerting what had to be heavy air or exhaust pressure over the highgrass,” which was curious enough to warrant serious attention both locally and worldwide.  

… A blacklight flashlight (included) activates the glowing colour effect on your coin’s reverse, which presents a view of the five mysterious objects described by the eyewitness. When the blacklight paint technology is activated, these objects are seen emitting an eerie glow as they fly away, leaving radioactive circular patterns in the field below.

An image of King Charles in profile is on the back, which if you think of it as a disembodied head probably helps the theme along.

(12) SOUND TRACK FOR THE SPANISH DRACULA. The LA Opera invites audiences to relive Hollywood’s Golden Age with a rediscovered classic film at the historic United Theater: “LA Opera Spanish Dracula with Live Orchestra”. Daily performances October 25-27.

While Bela Lugosi was vamping it up in front of the cameras by day, a night crew shot an alternate version of Dracula in Spanish — same sets, same story, new cast. This second incarnation of the classic, starring  Carlos Villarías, was largely forgotten until a recent renaissance, and many now hail it as the superior version.

See it on the big screen (with English subtitles) as Resident Conductor Lina González-Granados leads the LA Opera Orchestra in a live performance of a new LAO-commissioned score by Academy Award-winning composer Gustavo Santaolalla (The Last of Us, Brokeback Mountain), who’ll also star as a featured performer.

(13) YUCKTASTIC. Beware! The Disgusting Food Museum tries to live up to its name!

Food is so much more than sustenance. Curious foods from exotic cultures have always fascinated us. Unfamiliar foods can be delicious, or they can be more of an acquired taste. While cultural differences often separate us and create boundaries, food can also connect us. Sharing a meal is the best way to turn strangers into friends.

The evolutionary function of disgust is to help us avoid disease and unsafe food. Disgust is one of the six fundamental human emotions. While the emotion is universal, the foods that we find disgusting are not. What is delicious to one person can be revolting to another. Disgusting Food Museum invites visitors to explore the world of food and challenge their notions of what is and what isn’t edible. Could changing our ideas of disgust help us embrace the environmentally sustainable foods of the future?

The exhibit has 80 of the world’s most disgusting foods. Adventurous visitors will appreciate the opportunity to smell and taste some of these notorious foods. Do you dare smell the world’s stinkiest cheese? Or taste sweets made with metal cleansing chemicals?…

For example, there are these “Disgusting Christmas Foods”. Here’s one of the tamer examples on the list.

Christmas Tinner

… a more modern type of craziness – the video game retailer GAME in the UK sells Christmas Tinner every year, a full Christmas dinner in a can. They started selling them in 2013 and has now added a vegan and a vegetarian option.

The Christmas Tinner layer list in full:

Layer one – Scrambled egg and bacon
Layer two – Two mince pies
Layer three – Turkey and potatoes
Layer four – Gravy
Layer five – Bread sauce
Layer six – Cranberry sauce
Layer seven – Brussel sprouts with stuffing – or broccoli with stuffing
Layer eight – Roast carrots and parsnips
Layer nine – Christmas pudding

The tin will run you £2, but sadly it’s currently out of stock.

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I remember the Larry Niven ‘Known Space’ story “Neutron Star” in which a spaceship with an impervious hull came too close to a neutron star and nobody knew why the crew inside were smeared across the inner hull…

And then there was the Arthur Clarke mini-short in a similar vein, “Neutron Tide” in which a battle cruiser did something similar and all that was left was a ‘star mangled spanner’.

What larks.

But what of the real thing?

Matt O’Dowd over at  PBS Space Time looks at a black hole’s tidal properties.   

If you track the motion of individual stars in the ultra-dense star cluster at the very center of the Milky Way you’ll see that they swing in sharp orbits around some vast but invisible mass—that’s the Sagittarius A* supermassive black hole. These are perilous orbits, and sometimes a star wanders just a little too close to that lurking monster, leading to its utter destruction in the spectacular phenomenon known as a tidal disruption event. We’ve never seen a TDE in the Milky Way, but we’ve seen them in distant galaxies—and we now know how to spot stellar destructions so extreme that they reveal properties of the black hole itself.

Over a quarter million views since Friday.

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