Tag Archives: Kathy Bond

Pixel Scroll 10/21/23 Seven Pixels You Can’t Scroll On Television

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(1) URSULA VERNON’S HUGO ACCEPTANCE SPEECH. Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon’s pen name) won the Best Novel Hugo today. Arley Sorg delivered her acceptance remarks and by popular demand she has published them in a free Patreon post titled “The Light At The End Of The Frog”.

… There are a lot of serious and heavy things I could say right now, and probably I should. But other people have said them better and more movingly than I ever will. So instead I want to share something wonderful and disgusting and maybe a little inspiring with you.

There is a species of water beetle that regularly gets swallowed whole by frogs. And while there’s a lot of things you can do to keep from being eaten, once you’re inside a frog, your options are severely limited….

(2) MEDICAL UPDATE. RiverFlow, co-editor of this year’s Hugo-winning fanzine Zero Gravity Newspaper, was hospitalized today reports Zimozi Natsuco in a File 770 comment here. More details at the link.  

(3) CHENGDU WORLDCON PHOTO GALLERIES ACCESS. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] Adaoli/SF Light Year sent me a clean version of the QR codes for the official photo galleries.

(4) GET SEATTLE 2025 PR 0. Seattle 2025 is now officially seated after yesterday’s site selection vote. Their Guests of Honor will be Martha Wells, Donato Giancola, Bridget Landry, and Alexander James Adams with Hosts K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl. Download Seattle Worldcon 2025 Progress Report 0 at the link. The chair told followers in a message:

My name is Kathy Bond, Chair of this Worldcon, and I am absolutely thrilled to announce that Seattle will have the honor of hosting you all for the 83rd World Science Fiction Convention. I love Seattle, especially when it rains, and I cannot wait to share with you all of the rich, vibrant, creative life in the people and places of this city. I hope that you will be able to join us in person or virtually if a trip to Seattle is not in the cards.

Worldcon cannot take place without every member of this community. All of the plans and dreams that have led us here to this moment would not have been possible without the volunteers who helped sit at tables, who talked to each other and you about Seattle, and without the financial support of buying pre-support memberships. Every tiny act of volunteerism built this bid and helped us win. And, we still need those acts of volunteerism. Come join our community of makers, doers, and shapers for a few hours during the convention or throughout this planning process.

My vision for this Worldcon is to bring our Pacific Northwest community and our Worldcon community together to learn from each other, to create with each other, and to build with each other the type of inclusive community that our best genre fiction inspires us to build. Building Yesterday’s Future For Everyone is an acknowledgement that we have not successfully built the future we have aspired to but that we can still be inspired by the optimism of the past to keep building. We remember our yesterdays; we work for our better futures….

The convention’s website is here: Seattle Worldcon 2025 – Building Yesterday’s Future–For Everyone.

(5) BULGACON 2023. [Item by Valentin D. Ivanov.] Bulgacon is the annual national Bulgarian SFF convention. The 2023 edition took place in Plovdiv from September 22-24 with help from the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture. The event gathered some international participation including Alex Schvartsman, Andreas Eschbach, Francesco Verso, Nina Horvath, Peter Watts and Wole Talabi, among others.

A bilingual Bulgarian/English booklet with the program and the list of panelists can be seen in PDF format here at the convention website.

(6) SUSAN C. PETREY FUND CLOSING. The Clarion Foundation has issued its own farewell on the heels of the October 18 announcement by Paul Wrigley and Debbie Cross.

The Clarion Foundation wishes to honor the impact of the Susan C. Petrey Clarion Scholarship Fund as it winds down after 43 years of support. Thanks to Paul Wrigley and Debbie Cross, and their tireless fundraising efforts through the Oregon Science Fiction Conventions Inc, the Petrey scholarship stands as the oldest ongoing scholarship supporting Clarion students, and has demonstrated the critical importance of scholarship support in making the Workshop possible. Over the years it has awarded 71 scholarships to Clarion and Clarion West students. 

The fund was created in honor of Susan C. Petrey, an American fantasy writer of short fiction who was early in her career when she passed. Her work would later go on to be posthumously nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and a Hugo Award. Thanks to Paul and Debbie, her legacy and community spirit have endured.

The Petrey Scholarship is particularly appreciated for its demonstration of the ways that communities built around a special person or a targeted cause — in this case, both — can have philanthropic impact beyond what the original donors might have imagined. Along with Paul and Debbie, we sincerely thank all of the fund supporters, and look forward to building more such communities in the coming years and decades. 

“On behalf of the Clarion Foundation board and all the many recipients of this important scholarship over the years, we want to express our deepest appreciation to Debbie, Paul, and the OFSCI,” said Clarion Foundation President Karen J. Fowler. “Your generosity over so many years has been simply extraordinary.  I don’t know how we can begin to thank you.  I feel all the end-of-an-era sadness, but a sadness overwhelmed with gratitude.” 

Former recipients of the Susan C. Petrey Clarion Scholarship Fund are welcome to share the importance of their scholarship to their Clarion experience and we will pass them along.

(7) BEST OMENS. “Neil Gaiman: ‘In your 60s, any sex is good sex. It’s like: Oh my gosh, I can still do this thing’” – so he told an interviewer from the Guardian. Here are some other things he had to say.

Which book are you ashamed not to have read?
I’ve never read Proust.

What was the last lie you told?
I don’t tell lies any more, because my memory is going.

What is your guiltiest pleasure?
Really fancy sushi.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born October 21, 1904 — Edmond Hamilton. One of the prolific writers for Weird Tales from the late 20s to the late 40s, writing nearly eighty stories. (Lovecraft and Howard were the other key writers.) Sources say that through the late 1920s and early 1930s Hamilton wrote for all of the SF pulp magazines then publishing. His story “The Island of Unreason” (Wonder Stories, May 1933) won the first Jules Verne Prize as the best SF story of the year. This was the very first SF prize awarded by a vote of fans, which one source holds to be a precursor of the Hugo Awards. From the early 40s to the late 60s, he worked for DC, in stories about Superman and Batman. He created the Space Ranger character with Gardner Fox and Bob Brown. On December 31, 1946, Hamilton married fellow science fiction author and screenwriter Leigh Brackett. Now there is another story as well. (Died 1977.)
  • Born October 21, 1914 — Martin Gardner. He was one of leading authorities on Lewis Carroll. The Annotated Alice, which incorporated the text of Carroll’s two Alice books, is still a bestseller. He was considered the doyen (your word to learn today) of American puzzlers. And, to make him even more impressive, in 1999 Magic magazine named Gardner one of the “100 Most Influential Magicians of the Twentieth Century”.  Cool! (Died 2010.)
  • Born October 21, 1929 — Ursula K. Le Guin. Writer, Artist, Editor, Poet, and Translator. She called herself a “Narrative American”. And she most emphatically did not consider herself to be a genre writer – instead preferring to be known as an “American novelist”. Oh, she wrote genre fiction with quite some brilliance, be it the Earthsea sequence, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, or Always Coming Home. Her upbringing as the daughter of two academics, one who was an anthropologist and the other who had a graduate degree in psychology, with a home library full of SF, showed in her writing. She wrote reviews and forewards for others’ books, gave academic talks, and did translations as well. Without counting reader’s choice awards, her works received more than 100 nominations for pretty much every genre award in existence, winning most of them at least once; she is one of a very small group of people who have won both Hugo and Nebula Awards in all four fiction length categories. She was Guest of Honor at several conventions, including the 1975 Worldcon; was the second woman to be named SFWA Grand Master; was given a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement; and was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In later years, she took up internet blogging with great delight, writing essays and poems, and posting pictures and stories of her cat Pard; these were compiled into a non-fiction collection, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, which won a posthumous Hugo for Best Related Work. Her last Hugo was at Dublin 2019 for The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition which was illustrated by Charles Vess. (Died 2018.)
  • Born October 21, 1971 — Hal Duncan, 52. Computer Programmer and Writer from Scotland whose first novel, Vellum: The Book of All Hours, won a Spectrum Award and received nominations for World Fantasy, British Fantasy, Kurd Laßwitz, Prix Imaginaire, and Locus Best First Novel Awards, as well as winning a Tahtivaeltaja Award for best science fiction novel published in Finnish. His collection Scruffians! and his non-fiction work Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions were also both finalists for British Fantasy Awards. An outspoken advocate and blogger for LGBTQ rights, he was a contributor to Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project.
  • Born October 21, 1974 — Chris Garcia, 49. He’s editor of The Drink Tank and several other fanzines. He won a Hugo Award at Renovation with co-editor James Bacon for The Drink Tank after being nominated from 2010 to 2013. He was nominated for the Best Fan Writer Hugo three years straight starting in 2010. His acceptance speech for the Hugo at Renovation was itself nominated for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form Hugo at Chicon 7. I can’t begin to list all his feats and honors here. 

(9) FLASH GORDON COMING BACK. Michael Cavna reveals that the “’Flash Gordon’ comic strip is returning after a 20-year break’ in the Washington Post.

He might be nearing 90, but one relentlessly athletic adventurer is poised for a pop-culture reappreciation.

Flash Gordon, the intergalactic space warrior who predates Superman and Batman as an iconic American action-comic hero sprung from Depression-era pages — as well as a Hollywood screen star who inspired George Lucas’s Star Wars — is returning to newspapers.

King Features Syndicate, whichintroduced the character in 1934, will relaunch the comic strip “Flash Gordon” beginning Sunday after a two-decade absence — featuring a new look and a new artist. (The Sunday and daily strips will be available online and in print.)…

…Guiding the new enterprise will be Dan Schkade, an Eisner-nominated cartoonist in his early 30s best known for his work on such comics as “Will Eisner’s The Spirit Returns,” “Lavender Jack” and “Saint John.”

Schkade won a competitivetryout earlier this year to script and draw the strip, shortly before King announced a licensing deal with Mad Cave Studios, which will begin publishing other original “Flash Gordon” narratives, graphic novels and comic reprints beginning next year.

(10) TED CHIANG ON AI. “Writers respond to techno-optimism about AI: ‘It’s mostly nonsense’” at GeekWire.

How will “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s paean to economic growth and artificial intelligence, play to a wider audience? The reviews are in from two award-winning writers who are familiar with the impact of generative AI on creative professions.

“I think it’s mostly nonsense,” science-fiction writer Ted Chiang said Thursday at the GeekWire Summit in Seattle.

Chiang, a longtime Seattle-area resident, is best-known as the author of “Story of Your Life,” the novella that was adapted for the Oscar-nominated 2016 movie “Arrival.” But he’s also won acclaim as a commentator on AI’s effects for The New Yorker and other publications. Last month, Time magazine included Chiang among the 100 most influential people in AI.

The other writer on the SIFF Cinema stage was Eric Heisserer, the screenwriter who turned Chiang’s story into the script for “Arrival.” Heisserer witnessed the debate over generative AI and the future of work up close as a member of the negotiating committee for the Writers Guild of America during its recent strike against Hollywood studios.

Both Chiang and Heisserer say AI is too often unjustly portrayed as a high-tech panacea. That claim came through loud and clear in Andreessen’s manifesto, which called AI a “universal problem solver.”

“Technology can solve certain problems, but I think the biggest problems that we face are not problems that have technological solutions,” Chiang said in response. “Climate change probably does not have a technological solution. Wealth inequality does not have a technological solution. Most of these are problems of political will. … And so Marc Andreessen’s manifesto is a prime example of ignoring all of these other realities.”

Chiang took issue with Andreessen’s view that growth is always good. “Growth is untenable on a finite planet, so at some point, we are going to have to think about some alternative to a growth economy, some kind of stable state, because the laws of physics are going to put a stop to growth at some point,” he said.

He also called attention to Andreessen’s track record as a tech commentator. “He was all in on crypto,” Chiang said. “He is all in on the metaverse. Anyone who was so enthusiastic about those things … I think we need to keep that in mind when gauging their credibility about anything they recommend now.”…

(11) RED PILL REVIEW. [Item by Steven French.] For those who happen to be in or near Manchester, U.K.: “Free Your Mind review – Danny Boyle’s Matrix reboot is a thrilling shock to the system” in the Guardian.

…The show is a 2023 take on the 1999 film The Matrix, which fits with the current 90s nostalgia (those skintight PVC trousers will take you right back) but is also alarmingly prescient in its story of humans being usurped by intelligent machines as we enable the march of AI, ever more in thrall to the algorithm….

… Are the Matrix’s hero, Neo (Corey Owens), and his journey a bit lost among all this? Well, yes. With 50 dancers on stage, Free Your Mind is built from large-scale set pieces. Choreographer Kenrick “H2O” Sandy is a master at orchestrating tightly drilled ranks of battle-ready glitching bodies and short, sharp shocks of metrical movement. Although when Sandy himself appears as Morpheus, he reminds us one dancer is sometimes enough. A magisterial performer, he is molten and he is rock….

(12) BLAST FROM THE PAST. “Mysterious fast radio burst traveled 8 billion years to reach Earth” reports CNN.

Astronomers have detected a mysterious blast of radio waves that have taken 8 billion years to reach Earth. The fast radio burst is one of the most distant and energetic ever observed.

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are intense, millisecond-long bursts of radio waves with unknown origins. The first FRB was discovered in 2007, and since then, hundreds of these quick, cosmic flashes have been detected coming from distant points across the universe.

The burst, named FRB 20220610A, lasted less than a millisecond, but in that fraction of a moment, it released the equivalent of our sun’s energetic emissions over the course of 30 years, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science….

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Valentin D. Ivanov, Nathan Hillstrom, Frank Catalano, Steven French, Andrew Porter, Ersatz Culture, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Patrick Morris Miller.]

Pixel Scroll 4/24/23 A Pixel Lives Forever, But Not So Files And Scrolls

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(1) MOST CENSORED. “ALA Releases Top 13 Most Challenged Books of 2022” – see the complete list at Publishers Weekly. This genre work is on it:

10. A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas, for claims it is sexually explicit.

(2) 2025 WORLDCON BID STATUS. According to the Chengdu Worldcon PR#1, the deadline for submission of materials for biding for the 2025 Worldcon was April 21, 2023.

Kathy Bond, Co-Chair of the Seattle 2025 Bid, says “We filed our documents in March and received confirmation that they were received by the Chengdu team.” 

However, all are waiting on the Chengdu committee to confirm whether that was the sole filed bid.

(3) THE STATE OF TRADPUB SALARIES. A Publishers Weekly survey sees “Starting Salaries at Big Publishers Grow”.

As of April 1, the average entry-level salary for publishing employees located in New York City at the Big Five trade publishers and Scholastic was $47,583, up from $38,583 before the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a recent survey conducted by PW. That marks an increase of 23.3%, during a period when prices rose 12.4%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Publishers raced to increase starting salaries beginning in 2020, after the onset of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police prompted book business workers to call attention to social justice causes, including the need for publishing employees to make a living wage. Another round of salary increases occurred earlier this year across the Big Five—including at HarperCollins, where union members ended a three-month strike in February.

According to the publishers polled in this survey, staffers work between 35 and 40 hours a week, depending on the company, and all are eligible for overtime. Respondents to the industrywide 2022 PW salary survey said they were working an average of 42 hours per week—including time outside the office—the same number of hours they reported working in 2021. The survey also found that median compensation for staff with less than five years of experience was $46,000 for editorial, $48,000 for sales and marketing, and $61,500 for operations and production….

(4) SEE ENDEAVOUR AWARD WINNER INTERVIEW. The Endeavour Award for science fiction and fantasy published by Pacific Northwest authors is announcing a new series of interviews and readings featuring winners, finalists, judges, and other PNW luminaries. The first interview will be with 2021 Endeavour Award winner Erica L. Satifka, who won the prize for her short story collection How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters. The event will be held Friday, April 28 at 4:00 p.m. Pacific (7:00 p.m. Eastern), and will include an interview and a reading from her book. To join, visit the Endeavour Award’s Facebook page. 

The award administrator is currently seeking entries for books published in 2022. Entries are free. Please contact Jim Kling at [email protected] for more information. 

Since 1999, The Endeavour Award has recognized science fiction or fantasy works of 40,000 words or more, or single-author collections of short fiction. The author(s) must have had legal or physical residence in the Pacific Northwest (Alaska, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, The Yukon, and British Columbia) when the publisher accepted the book, and must affirm that they wrote the majority of the book while living in the Pacific Northwest. The books must have been published in the United States or in Canada.

(5) THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE. Craig Miller tells a fascinating story on Facebook about working on publicity for Oliver Stone’s first feature as a director, a little-known film called The Hand.  

…A couple final comments about the film. When I was a publicist, I would not lie. I would not tell people something was great if I didn’t think it was. When I was repping “The Hand”, I used to describe it as “one of the best disembodied hand movies ever”. And on that metric, I think I’m correct….

(6) BULGACON 2022 RECORDINGS ON LINE. [Item by Valentin D. Ivanov.] Bulgacon is the annual national Bulgarian SFF convention. The 2022 hybrid edition took place in Kardzhali on Sept 2-6, 2002. The event gathered some international participation (including Peter Watts, Paul MacAuley, Julie Novakova and Lavie Tidhar, among others.

A bilingual Bulgarian/English booklet with the program and the list of panelists can be seen in pdf format here.

Recently, the recordings of 16 panels (most in English with Bulgarian translation) were made available on a dedicated YouTube channel.

(7) DENNY LIEN MEMORIAL PLANNED. The family obituary — “Obituary of Dennis Kieth Lien” – includes details of the planned memorial. There is also a link to a page full of tributes and reminiscences about him.

A memorial celebration of life is planned for Friday June 2, 5–8 pm, at the Como Park Streetcar Station. See Denny’s online memorial board for further information as well as tributes, personal anecdotes, and photos: www.kudoboard.com/boards/xRExNJQo/dennylien

(8) HOW TO TRAIN YOUR BOT. The Washington Post’s analysis of a dataset that may be used to train AI bots like ChatGPT, linked in the April 21 Scroll, inspired Jonathan Cowie to check on some other SF sites “including my personal Science-com one I’ve not updated since CoVID…” (To refresh your memories, File 770 ranked 3,445th with 2.5 million “tokens”.) Here are screencaps of the results for Locus.com, Ansible, SF2 Concatenation, and Science.com.

(9) ON THE ROAD. Feline intelligence far surpasses AI when it comes to understanding great literature. “Timothy reads The Road by Cormac McCarthy” at Camestros Felapton.

…Mr McCarthy wrote a novel in which nearly everything is dead. He doesn’t say that a cat did it but I think we can infer that. When you read literature, the author doesn’t always explain everything….

(10) MEMORY LANE.

1997 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Before her short life was drawn to a close by cancer, Angela Carter was fond in her writings of using folklore themes. Her best remembered story I think is A Company of Wolves which got turned into a film but there were others as well but not limited to including a woman with wings, werewolves, the erl-king, and reworkings of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. 

What we have for our Beginning tonight is  her “Puss-in Boots” story which she wrote specifically for The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories collection which was published by 1997. 

The Bloody Chamber was  often described as a series  of retellings’ of classic children’s fairy tales. Not true. Carter said she was actually writing new tales which revealed the intrinsic violence which included sexual violence towards women of those old folk tales.

This tale, and I don’t consider this a spoiler, is based off the Italian commedia dell’arte tradition. 

This story, as is The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories collection, simply stellar. 

And now for our rather delightful Beginning…

“Figaro here; Figaro, there, I tell you! Figaro upstairs, Figaro downstairs and–oh, my goodness me, this little Figaro can slip into my lady’s chamber smart as you like at any time whatsoever that he takes the fancy for, don’t you know, he’s a cat of the world, cosmopolitan, sophisticated; he can tell when a furry friend is the Missus’ best company. For what lady in all the world could say ‘no’ to the passionate yet toujours discret advances of a fine marmalade cat? (Unless it be her eyes incontinently overflow at the slightest whiff of fur, which happened once, as you shall hear.)

A tom, sirs, a ginger tom and proud of it. Proud of his fine, white shirtfront that dazzles harmoniously against his orange and tangerine tessellations (oh! what a fiery suit of lights have I); proud of his bird-entrancing eye and more than military whiskers; proud, to a fault, some say, of his fine, musical voice. All the windows in the square fly open when I break into impromptu song at the spectacle of the moon above Bergamo. If the poor players in the square, the sullen rout of ragged trash that haunts provinces, are rewarded with a hail of pennies when they set up their makeshift stage and start their raucous choruses, then how much more liberally do the citizens deluge me with pails of the freshest water, vegetables hardly spoiled and, occasionally, slippers, shoes and boots.

“Do you see these fine, high, shining leather boots of mine? A young cavalry officer made me the tribute of, first, one; then, after I celebrate his generosity with a fresh obbligato, the moon no fuller than my heart–whoops! I nimbly spring aside–down comes the other. Their high heels will click like castanets when Puss takes his promenade upon the tiles, for my song recalls flamenco, all cats have a Spanish tinge although Puss himself elegantly lubricates his virile, muscular, native Bergamasque with French, since that is the only language in which you can purr.

“Merrrrrrrrrrrci!’

Instanter I draw my new boots on over the natty white stockings that terminate my hinder legs. That young man, observing with curiosity by moonlight the use to which I put his footwear, calls out: ‘Hey, Puss! Puss, there!’

‘At your service, sir!’

‘Up to my balcony, young Puss!”

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born April 24, 1910 — Albert Zugsmith. American film producer, film director and screenwriter who specialized in really low-budget exploitation films such as Sex Kittens Go to College and Female on the Beach through the Fifties and Sixties. So why am I giving him a Birthday, you ask?  Why it’s because he produced The Incredible Shrinking Man which won a Hugo at Solacon. (Died 1993.)
  • Born April 24, 1946 — Don D’Ammassa, 77. Considered to be one of the best and fairest long-form reviewers ever. His Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2005) covers some five hundred writers and as can two newer volumes, Encyclopedia of Fantasy and Horror Fiction (2006) and Encyclopedia of Adventure Fiction (2009) are equally exhaustive. I can’t comment on his fiction as I’ve only ever encountered him as a reviewer.
  • Born April 24, 1947 — Michael Butterworth, 76. Author with Michael Moorcock of, naturally, two Time of the Hawklords novels, Time of the Hawklordsand Queens of Deliria. He also wrote a number of Space 1999 Year 2 novels, too numerous to list here. He also edited Corridor magazine from 1971 to 1974. He also wrote a number of short fiction pieces including one whose title amuses me for reasons I’m not sure, “Circularisation of Condensed Conventional Straight-Line Word-Image Structures”. 
  • Born April 24, 1950 — Michael Patrick Hearn, 73. Academic who has some of the best annotated works I’ve had the pleasure to encounter. I wholeheartedly recommend both The Annotated Wizard of Oz and The Annotated Christmas Carol, not to overlook Victorian Fairy Tales which is simply the best collection of those tales.
  • Born April 24, 1953 — Gregory Luce, 70. Editor and publisher of both the Science Fiction Gems and the Horror Gems anthology series, plus such other anthologies as Citadel of the Star Lords / Voyage to Eternity and Old Spacemen Never Die! / Return to Earth.
  • Born April 24, 1955 — Wendy S. Delmater, 68. She was nominated at Sasquan for a Best Semiprozine Hugo for editing the exemplary Abyss & Apex webzine. It’s particularly strong in the areas of speculative poetry and small press genre reviews. She herself has written a lot of genre centered essays, plus a handful of genre stories and poems. 
  • Born April 24, 1983 — Madeline Ashby, 40. California-born Canadian resident writer whose Company Town novel created an entire city in an oil rig. Interestingly In 2013, she was a finalist for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer but recused herself on the grounds that her pro career started with her ‘09 publication of a short story in Nature, so her eligibility period had expired in ‘11. And her Machine Dynasties series is simply brilliant, and resonates with the later Murderbot series.

(12) FINAL SPACE RECEIVING A CONCLUSION AS A GRAPHIC NOVEL. [Item by N.] Final Space, the beloved cult sci-fi animated series, after it was given an unceremonious cancellation and tax write-off, is able to conclude its story next year via graphic novel as Olan Rogers has received a license.

Book is on sale here.

That’s the good news. The bad news, in a bit of a monkey’s paw for fans of the show outside of the US, is no digital release and what appears to be extremely high shipping costs (though Rogers, as of writing, is working with Shopify to reduce these). See these tweets for examples of the shipping costs: (1), (2), (3).

(13) THE ORIGINAL WAR ON COMICS. Unlike some Filers, there are readers even now approaching retirement age who know nothing about Seduction of the Innocent and the related efforts to censor comics. So CrimeReads’ Keith Roysdon is stepping in to provide “A Brief History of America Freaking Out About Horror Comics”.

Fourteen-year-old David Drew was the poster boy for horror comics in the 1950s, in the worst possible way….

…A wire service story widely published in newspapers beginning May 19 reported that Drew had told Douglas Kelley, a University of California psychiatrist, that he read horror comics and especially liked comics that “depict torture and throwing people off cliffs.” 

As the young killer moved through the California legal system – he pleaded guilty in November 1955 – newspapers and wire services quickly found a memorable label for his crime: “the comic book hatchet slaying.”

Authorities and newspapers were already primed to cite comic books as a bad influence on young people. A year before, in the spring of 1954, the Congressional Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency had held public hearings. Among those testifying was Frederic Wertham, a psychiatrist whose book, “Seduction of the Innocent,” posed the theory that comic book heroes like Batman and Robin were gay and a bad influence on children. 

Months before young Stanley Frank was killed, in October 1954, the Code of the Comics Magazine Association of America had been adopted by comics industry publishers. The comics industry had waved a white flag in the war on comics.

(14) QUEST CATALOG. SYFY Wire does a roundup of “Our favorite Holy Grail quest movies in honor of ‘Mrs. Davis’” Beware spoilers. Monty Python and the Holy Grail wins high praise here.

How far would you go to defeat an evil A.I.? That’s the question at the heart of Mrs. Davis, the new Peacock original series that premiered this week after a wave of positive reviews and early buzz that’s set it up as one of the most intriguing new genre shows of the year.

Now, there are a lot of twists and turns built into this show, but the basic setup is this: There’s a massively popular, potentially dangerous A.I. out there that calls itself “Mrs. Davis,” and a nun named Simone (Betty Gilpin) who wants to shut it down for the good of mankind. Simone is convinced that getting Mrs. Davis to deactivate is the right thing to do, but Mrs. Davis isn’t exactly just sitting by a plug that’s waiting for the nun to pull it. So … how is she supposed to get it done?

SPOILERS AHEAD

In the series premiere, it’s revealed that Mrs. Davis has made a promise to Simone: The A.I. will shut down if Simone can track down, and eventually destroy, the Holy Grail.

(15) ADA HOFFMANN COLLECTION ANNOUNCED. Apex Book Company has acquired first North America English rights to the collection Resurrections by Ada Hoffmann. The deal was brokered by agent Hannah Bowman of Liza Dawson Associates.

Ada Hoffmann’s work has been a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award (2020, The Outside), the Compton Crook Award (2020, The Outside), and the WSFA Small Press Award (2020, “Fairest of All”). She is the winner of the Friends of the Merrill Collection Short Story Contest (2013, “The Mother of All Squid Builds a Library”) and a two-time Rhysling award nominee (2014 for “The Siren of Mayberry Crescent” and 2017 for “The Giantess’s Dream”).

Apex Book Company is a small press owned and operated by Jason Sizemore.

(16) MOCKUMENTARY. We may have looked at this before – but let’s look again! “The Great Martian War 1913-1917”.

This film was made in 2013 as a joke, for WW1’s 100th anniversary.

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George tells us what it would be like “If Cats Had Podcasts” – and it’s barely an inconvenience!

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, N., Jim Kling, Valentin D. Ivanov, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 2/20/22 Big Pixel In Little Scroll

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(1) IN THE YEAR 2025. Kathy Bond, Seattle 2025 Worldcon Bid Co-Chair, has announced there will be a Seattle 2025 Bid Volunteer Meeting on Sunday, March 6, at 10:00 a.m. Pacific. A link to the Facebook event can be found here.

We’d like to invite the community to come find out more about the state of our bid and where we are looking for help. We are actively looking for volunteers from around the world so anyone should feel free to attend this on-line meeting. 

Their website link is — Seattle in 2025: A Worldcon Bid

(2) FUGITIVE DOCTOR GETS COMIC BOOK. “Fugitive Doctor Series Announced” reports Comicbook.com. FCBD 2022 Doctor Who #1 releases on Free Comic Book Day, May 7, and Doctor Who Origin #1 will follow on May 18.

The Fugitive Doctor will finally get the spotlight in a new Doctor Who series. Jo Martin’s mysterious incarnation of the Time Lord makes her comic book debut on Free Comic Book Day in Titan Comics’ FCBD 2022 Doctor Who #1. The familiar Doctor Who Comic creative team of writer Jody Houser and artist Roberta Ingranata tell a tale that offers a glimpse at the Fugitive Doctor’s earlier years. Titan Comics has since confirmed that FCBD Doctor Who #1 will lead into the next Doctor Who Comic miniseries arc. The story is titled Doctor Who: Origins, telling a new adventure set during the Doctor’s time working for the Division.

The Fugitive Doctor made her surprise debut in the Doctor Who episode “Fugitive of the Judoon.” The sudden appearance of a previously unmentioned regeneration upset everything fans thought they knew about the Doctor. The Fugitive Doctor’s debut set up the even bigger reveal in “The Timeless Children,” rewriting the Doctor’s origin story massively.

(3) LIBRARY LOVERS MONTH. Jason Aukerman tells subscribers to The Bradbury Beat:

…Public libraries helped Bradbury develop into one of the best known writers of our time, and he never forgot that his success was rooted in the book stacks—the contents of which were widely available to the public. Bradbury’s passion and support for public libraries never wavered. He frequently spoke at public library events, and he never charged those libraries for his services. For Bradbury, the debt he owed to the public library could never be repaid, but he spent his entire professional career trying….

(4) TALENT SCOUT. “Zoom PBS show: How the ’70s show from WGBH used kids’ input to make something beautiful” at Slate.

…ZOOM, which ran from 1972 to 1978, was a Boston show (produced by local affiliate WGBH), but it was distributed to around 200 PBS stations around the country, and won an Emmy award in 1973. Historian Leslie Paris wrote an online exhibit on ZOOM’s history for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting that went up earlier this year. In February and March of 1975, Paris said in an interview, if you go by Nielsen ratings, “more kids were watching ZOOM than watching Sesame Street” in major cities. “That makes sense,” she said, “because the age range of potential ZOOM viewers was larger than that of Sesame Street, so kids watched over a greater number of years.” In the archives of the show, Paris found mail from kids so young they had dictated letters to their parents, and also from teenagers who confessed they sensed that the show was now too young for them, but they just couldn’t stop watching….

At least one kid who sent in a story to ZOOM went on to be a writer. “The Color-Eyed Dragon,” a short story about a dragon who could change the color

of his eyes, and hides inside a traffic light to teach people a lesson about the value of his strange talent, was read out loud on the show in Season 2, Episode 3. The tale was sent in by young Jonathan Lethem, of New York City, who would later become . Jonathan Lethem….

(5) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

1988 — [Item by Cat Eldridge] Thirty-four years ago on this evening, Ray Bradbury Theatre’s “Gotcha” first aired on HBO. 

In the episode, a lonely man dressed as Oliver Hardy at a masquerade party meets a lonely woman dressed as Stan Laurel, it seems nothing short of a match made in heaven. But a game of Gotcha! may just test their new found romance a little too much. It was based off his short which was published in Terry Carr’s The Year’s Finest Fantasy, Volume 2 but the romance shown here wasn’t in that story. 

The cast was Saul Rubinek and Kate Lynch, and it was directed by Brad Turner who has done a lot of genre series work including seventeen episodes of The Outer Limits.

Reception for it is excellent. As Heroic Times, a review site, puts it: “The vast majority of episodes are just not very good. So much of what defines a great Ray Bradbury story, is the words, is the sublime, haunting use of language, and in this case a picture is decidedly not greater than the words. GOTCHA! is one of those exceptions, a good Ray Bradbury Theater episode. Some innovative and even stylish direction, complemented with an intriguing script and earnest performances really make this a quite engrossing and compelling watch.” 

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born February 20, 1906 — Theodore Roscoe. A mere tasting of his pulp stories, The Wonderful Lips of Thibong Linh, which are sort of based on a member of the French Foreign Legion, was published by Donald M. Grant. The complete stories, The Complete Adventures of Thibaut Corday and the Foreign Legion, are available digitally in four volumes on Kindle. The Wonderful Lips of Thibong Linh only contain four of these stories. (Died 1992.)
  • Born February 20, 1912 — Pierre Boulle. Best known for just two works, The Bridge over the River Kwai and Planet of the Apes. The latter was was La planète des singes in French, translated in 1964 as Monkey Planet by Xan Fielding, and later re-issued under the name we know. Obviously, the origin work for the film as well. (Died 1994.)
  • Born February 20, 1925 — Robert Altman. I’m going to argue that his very first film in 1947, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, based off the James Thurber short story of the same name, is genre given its premise. Some twenty-five years later Images was a full-blown horror film. And of course, Popeye is pure comic literature at its very best. (Died 2006.)
  • Born February 20, 1943 — Diana Paxson, 79. Did you know she’s a founder of the Society for Creative Anachronism? Well, she is. Genre-wise, she’s best known for her Westria novels, and the later books in the Avalon series, which at first, she co-wrote with Marion Zimmer Bradley then, after Bradley’s death, took over sole authorship. All of her novels are heavily colored with paganism — sometimes it works for me, sometimes it doesn’t. I like her Wodan’s Children series more than the Avalon material. 
  • Born February 20, 1954 — Anthony Head, 68. Perhaps best known as Librarian and Watcher Rupert Giles in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he also made an impressive Uther Pendragon in Merlin. He also shows up in Repo! The Genetic Opera as Nathan Wallace aka the Repo Man, in Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance as Benedict, and in the awesomely great Batman: Gotham by Gaslight voicing Alfred Pennyworth.
  • Born February 20, 1964 — Rodney Rowland, 58. His best-remembered roles to date are 1st Lieutenant Cooper Hawkes in Space: Above and Beyond and P. Wiley in The 6th Day. He’s also Corey Mahoney in Soulkeeper, a Sci Fi Pictures film. He’s got one-offs in X-Files, Welcome to Paradox, Dark Angel, Seven Days, Angel, Charmed and Twin Peaks.

(7) TODAY IN SPACE.

February 20, 1962 — Astronaut John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth. He made 3 trips around the earth in his Mercury-Atlas spacecraft, Friendship 7, in just under 5 hours.

He has an essay, “The Fireflies,” in Arthur C. Clarke’s The Coming of The Space: Famous Accounts of Man’s Probing of the Universe, first published in 1967.  The story behind those fireflies is detailed here. Also, “Astronaut John Glenn Was First Person to Eat in Space”.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • Shoe has a gag in a bookstore.
  • Non Sequitur has a brilliant joke about public domain.

(9) PERSONAL BOOKS. There are shoutouts to Spiderman, Star Trek, Star Wars and “Samira Ahmed’s new run of Ms Marvel comics” in this week’s ‘books of my life’ in the Guardian: “Nikesh Shukla: ‘Reading Spider-Man made me feel less alone’”.

The books that changed me as a teenager
On my weekly trips to Calamity Comics in Harrow town centre I would sit at the back of the shop, reading Spider-Man comics. Peter Parker is me. I am Peter Parker. Which means I could be Spider-Man. Those comic books made me feel less alone.

(10) THE CLICKS OF YESTERDAY. What is John talking about? It’ll come back to you if you concentrate. Keep clicking your heels together til it does.

(11) LITTLE KNOWN FACTS. MSN.com calls this Reddit thread of mind-blowing science facts “the craziest thing you’ll read all week.” Or maybe it won’t be – you read the Scroll, after all! Here’s an example.

(12) OCTOTHORPE. Octothorpe 51 is up, which encourages us to “Make TAFF a Four-Way Tie”. (Enjoy Alison’s art below.)

John Coxon is a spoilsport, Alison Scott is promoting and Liz Batty might come to Eastercon. We listen to Become the Teapot and The Incomparable before discussing the now-available Game Hugo proposal (championed by Ira Alexandre). Listen here! 

(13) CAN OVERBOARD. Smithsonian Magazine chronicles how “After 25 Years at Sea, Shipwrecked Lego Pieces Are Still Washing Ashore on Beaches in England”.

…The Lego pieces aboard the Tokio Express were among 62 shipping containers that tumbled off the vessel. The ship was en route to New York after it loaded its cargo in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, when an unpredictable 28-foot wave smashed into a cargo ship 20 miles off the mainland, reports Jackie Butler for Cornwall Live. Other items swept to sea included 10,000 disposable lighters, superglue, and other hazardous chemicals. 

Ever since, collectors have gone out to look for “rare” pieces like octopuses and green dragons. Tracey Williams—a Cornwall local, beachcomber, and environmental campaigner—has documented the Lego spill for years on “Lego Lost at Sea” social media pages via Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. More recently, she published Adrift: The Curious Tale of Lego Lost at Sea, a book detailing the Lego incident.

Though the wayward novelties may inspire wonder, the tiny bricks highlight plastic pollution’s impact on oceans. Out of the 4,756,940 Lego pieces on board, about 3,178,807 were light enough to float and are what is commonly found across 40 beaches in Cornwall, eported Mario Cacciottolo for the BBC in 2014. For example, small plastic flowers and mini diver’s flippers are regularly seen along the shores….

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Andrew (not Werdna), Steven French, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Danny Sichel.]

DisCon III Announces 2021 Hugo Award-Related Policies

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DisCon III, the 2021 Worldcon, has announced how they will administer this year’s Hugo finalists which have multiple individual creators. They also are creating a Hugo Concierge Team to assist finalists with issues connected with the award.

DisCon III’s Hugo Concierge Team, under the Hugo Administration Subcommittee, consists of Kat Jones, Chris Brathwaite, and Kathy Bond who will “facilitate a smooth experience for Hugo finalists from the composition of the final ballot through the end of the convention and any post-convention wrap-up matters. The Hugo Concierge Team will work with finalists to gather creators’ names and contact information, create and foster connections with program and event teams, provide relevant and timely information to finalists, and ensure clear and constant communication.” More information on the Hugo Concierge Team can be found on the DisCon III website.

DisCon III also says they will be capping the number of names that will appear on the Hugo ballot and the award plaque, but that all creators of Hugo finalists will appear in other publications and on the website, receive related pins and ribbons, and have the same standing when applying to be on con programming.

A press release explains the committee’s plans:

For many categories of the Hugo awards the work itself is the finalist, but the creators have traditionally been listed as part of the final ballot. As more works have become collaborations, and as categories have been added, the length of the final ballot and the award ceremony have increased. This has begun to cause substantial issues with physical space limitations and accessibility. Pre- and post-ceremony receptions have expanded considerably, which impacts accessibility and budget. Long ballot entries require reduced font sizes on ballots and visuals during the ceremony itself, which also impacts accessibility.

All creators named to DisCon III as part of a Hugo Finalist work will be listed in the DisCon III souvenir book, Hugo Award Ceremony program, and the DisCon III and Hugo Awards websites. These are the permanent records of the administration of the Hugo Awards. There will therefore be no restriction on the number of names linked to a finalist in these records.

However, if a finalist has more than four creators, DisCon III will list a maximum of four names for each finalist on the 2021 Hugo Final Ballot (both printed and online), the visuals used during the Hugo Award ceremony, and the plaques on the Hugo trophies. Where a finalist does not wish to limit their list of named persons on the ballot to four or fewer, they will be listed as “[Title] by the [Title] Team” or agreed equivalent.

The format will be as follows, within the aforementioned restrictions:

  • In the Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Novelette, Best Short Story, and Best Series categories: [Title], by [Author(s)], published in/by [publisher].
  • In the Best Semiprozine, Best Fanzine, and Best Fancast categories: [Title], by [Hosts/Editors].
  • In the Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form and Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form categories: [Title, including show name and episode as needed], written by [writer(s)], directed by [director(s)].
  • In the Best Editor Long Form and Best Editor Short Form categories: [Name].
  • In the Best Professional Artist, Best Fan Artist, and Best Fan Writer categories: [Name].
  • In the Best Graphic Story or Comic category: [Work, including volume as needed], by [Writer, artist, inker, letterer], published by [publisher].
  • For Best Related Work, the listing will depend on the types of works that appear on the final ballot but will be consistent with the above. The Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book listing will follow the format for Best Novel. Finalists for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer will be listed by name and each listing will include the writer’s year of eligibility.
  • Best Video Game: [Title], by [Publisher], on [Platform(s)]

The persons named on the ballot will, in principle, be the finalist’s acceptors at the ceremony, with substitutions allowable as appropriate. If a finalist is listed on the ballot as a “team,” they can name up to four acceptors. If they are attending the convention, acceptors will be invited to the pre-Hugo reception and seated within the finalist seating area at the Hugo Ceremony. The winner in each Hugo category will receive up to four (4) Hugo trophies from DisCon III, as appropriate, with the option to purchase more at cost.

All creators, regardless of how finalists are listed on the ballot, will be in the convention souvenir book and Hugo Award Ceremony program, on the DisCon III and Hugo Awards websites, and will receive Hugo finalist pins and ribbons. All finalists who wish to participate in DisCon III programming will be encouraged to apply, and will be considered for inclusion as a Hugo finalist.

“Hugo finalists represent the best of the field of speculative fiction as determined by Worldcon members. Therefore, the individuals who contribute to these works are critical parts of the Worldcon community,” said DisCon III Co-Chair Colette H. Fozard. “DisCon III is committed to recognizing all the individuals that are part of creating the stories, art, and other works that lead the genre.”

[Based on a press release.]

Update 01/11/21: Added information supplied for Best Video Game category