Eleven-time Hugo Award-winner Lynne M. Thomas and eight-time Hugo Award-winner Michael Damian Thomas are launching a Kickstarter for Year Eleven of their Hugo Award-winning and 2024 Locus Award-winning professional online Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine:Uncanny Magazine.
Each issue contains new speculative fiction, podcasts, poetry, essays, art, and interviews. Uncanny Magazine is raising funds via Kickstarter to cover some of its operational and production costs for its eleventh year, with an initial goal of $30,000, plus added stretch goals of three original covers, flash fiction, and a novella. The Kickstarter launched July 8, 2024, and run through August 7, 2024. “Uncanny Magazine Year 11: This One Goes to ELEVEN! by Lynne M. Thomas”.
“Uncanny features passionate SF/F fiction and poetry, gorgeous prose, and provocative nonfiction, with a deep investment in our diverse SF/F culture. We publish intricate, experimental stories and poems with verve and vision, from writers from every conceivable background. With the hard work of the best staff and contributors in the universe,Uncanny Magazine has delivered everything as promised (or is in the middle of delivery) with our Years One through ten Kickstarters. This year, four stories have been recognized as Nebula Award finalists (with two winning); four stories, the editors-in-chief, and the magazine have been recognized as Hugo Award finalists; and six stories, the editors-in-chief, and magazine have been recognized as Locus Award finalists (with one story and the magazine winning). We are deeply honored and grateful,” Lynne says.
“We couldn’t have done all of this without the amazing support of our Kickstarter community, who we call the Space Unicorn Ranger Corps after our logo mascot. This is their magazine; their support makes it possible for us to make all of this amazing content available for free on our website. We still feel Uncanny‘s mission is important, especially in these times. And hopefully, we will meet the stretch goals and be able to give everyone a spectacular eleventh year of Uncanny,” Michael adds.
For its special eleventh year, Uncanny has solicited original short fiction from Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award-winning and nominated authors and bestselling authors including:John Chu, Aliette de Bodard, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Scott Lynch, Samantha Mills, Tade Thompson, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Emma Törzs, Catherynne M. Valente, Daniel H. Wilson, G. Willow Wilson, and Caroline M. Yoachim. (There will also be numerous slots for unsolicited submissions.)
John Chu, Aliette de Bodard, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Scott Lynch, Samantha Mills, Tade Thompson, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Emma Törzs, Catherynne M. Valente, Daniel H. Wilson, G. Willow Wilson, and Caroline M. Yoachim
Uncanny has also solicited original essays by Senaa Ahmad, Charlie Jane Anders, Kelly Sue DeConnick, A.T. Greenblatt, Del Sandeen, and Rachel Talalay, and solicited poetry by Dr. Taylor Byas, Lora Gray, Ai Jiang, Brandon O’Brien, Margaret Rhee, and Abu Bakr Sadiq.
Senaa Ahmad, Charlie Jane Anders, Kelly Sue DeConnick, A.T. Greenblatt, Del Sandeen, and Rachel TalalayDr. Taylor Byas, Lora Gray, Ai Jiang, Brandon O’Brien, Margaret Rhee, and Abu Bakr Sadiq
Uncanny Magazine issues are published as eBooks (MOBI, PDF, EPUB) bimonthly on the first Tuesday of that month through all of the major online eBook stores. Each issue contains 5-6 new short stories, 4 poems, 4 nonfiction essays, and 2 interviews, at minimum.
Material from half an issue is posted for free on Uncanny’s website (built by Clockpunk Studios) once per month, appearing on the second Tuesday of every month (uncannymagazine.com). Uncanny also produces a monthly podcast with a story, poem, and original interview. Subscribers and backers will receive the entire double issue a month before online readers.
A fundraiser to save a local bookstore has raised almost $70,000 in a matter of days.
Nikki High, founder and owner of Octavia’s Bookshelf in Pasadena, has reopened a GoFundMe campaign to raise funds for her struggling bookstore, Octavia’s Bookshelf.
In a heartfelt social media post, she revealed her heavy heart, tired soul, and months of sleepless nights, and said she needed transparency with her community….
As Nikki High explained in her GoFundMe call:
We managed to open last year to great support and lots of excitement. This past year has been some of the most rewarding and difficult times in my life.
Bookselling is a tricky animal and being a Black Women entrepreneur adds another level of hardship that I was not quite prepared for.
Being underresourced but determined, I have fought through the highs and lows of retail. I’ve made some mistakes, and I’ve learned so much. Of all the sleepless nights and hardships, it’s the community we’ve built that has kept me going and reaffirmed to me that Octavia’s Bookshelf is a space we need to keep in our community.
To be completely transparent, we need an urgent influx of cash to keep us afloat right now. The coffers are dry and the reserves are non existent. We are being faced with tremendous financial mountains to climb to get here we need to be to be sustainable and I need your help once again…
The bookstore, named for Octavia Butler, opened its doors on February 18, 2023, at 1361 North Hill Ave, in Pasadena.
(2) CORY PANSHIN Q&A. [Item by Andrew Porter.] Alexei Panshin’s widow on their collaborations together, Robert A. Heinlein, other subjects. “Interview with Cory Panshin” at One Geek’s Mind.
John Grayshaw: How did you and Alexei become writers and critics of science fiction?
We both started off as SF and fantasy readers from an early age and then as fans. Alexei has written detailed accounts of his pathway in a couple of places, but the short version is that as a teenager he began subscribing to fanzines. Then he received a typewriter as a high school graduation present and the idea struck him that he should be a writer. He started out by writing a novel which was very amateurish. (As I recall from the one time I read the manuscript, it was something like a spaceship full of librarians seeking refuge from an evil empire.) He made better progress doing book reviews for fanzines, as well as short stories, of which he wrote about twenty between 1960 and 1965.
As for me, it’s a little more complicated, since I didn’t launch right into writing the way Alexei did. When I was twelve, I started trying to write a spy novel, and only got a few pages in. I recently found that old notebook and discovered to my surprise that I’d kept adding pages on and off for the next four years before giving up entirely and launching into a science fiction story about a spaceship crew that goes astray in hyperspace and finds itself battling a jabberwock that attacks them with its eyes of flame.
That might have been the beginning and end of my abortive science fiction writing career, but that fall I started my freshman year at Harvard College, where my roommate Leslie Turek and I discovered we had a lot in common; but also that Harvard was not particularly geek-friendly, being primarily dedicated to grooming the scions of the ruling class. So instead, we found our way to the MIT Science Fiction Society, where we were quickly drafted to co-edit the MITSFS fanzine and from there got drawn into science fiction fandom.
There weren’t a lot of women in fandom at that time, so it was easy for us to get noticed. Alexei spotted me in costume at the 1966 Worldcon and we were married in 1969. Around the same time, my fellow MITSFS member Fuzzy Pink married Larry Niven, while Leslie became actively involved in convention-running and eventually chaired the 1980 Worldcon.
Except for occasional con reports and other fanzine articles, I wasn’t doing much writing in the late 60s, but once I married Alexei we discovered a mutual interest in theorizing about the nature of science fiction and began to do critical writing in collaboration….
Sally Wiener Grotta’s latest two books are Of Being Woman, a collection of feminist science fiction stories, and Daughters of Eve, a discussion workbook which uses tales of biblical matriarchs to explore the modern world. Her short fiction has appeared in anthologies and magazines such as the North Atlantic Review, DreamForge, Across the Universe: Tales of Alternative Beatles, and others.
Her previous books include Digital Imaging for Visual Artists (co-authored with Daniel Grotta), and the novels Jo Joe, which was a Jewish Book Council Network book, and The Winter Boy, which was a Locus Magazine Recommended Read. Sally is also co-curator of the Galactic Philadelphia Salon reading series. Plus she’s also an award-winning journalist and photographer who has traveled on assignment to all seven continents.
We discussed when we first met (and can’t quite figure out whether it was a third or a quarter of a century ago), how her first storytelling impulse began because she’d fall asleep while being read stories as a child, the importance of the question “what if?,” why she often finds horror difficult to read, the early experience which allowed her to have such a good relationship with editors, the story she wrote in Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing workshop which caused that Grand Master to say “what a darling monster,” when we should submit to editorial suggestions and when we should run screaming, and much more.
In the days after Paramount Global disabled mtvnews.com and mtv.com/news — removing a trove of hundreds of thousands of articles about music and pop culture from the internet — the not-for-profit Internet Archive assembled a searchable index of 460,575 web pages previously published at mtv.com/news.
You can search the MTV News archive on the organization’s Wayback Machine at this link. Prior to Internet Archive aggregating the MTV News pages into a collection, there was no way to locate articles based on search terms.
Paramount shut down the MTV News division as part of a larger round of layoffs in May 2023…
(5) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
July 3, 1937 — Tom Stoppard, 87. I was delighted to discover that playwright Tom Stoppard has crafted far more genre than I thought, considering I all I knew he had done was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (which is adjacent genre if not actually genre). If you’ve not seen it yet, it is quite delightful.
He scripted Brazil, which he co-authored with Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeow. Brazil was actually part of the Trilogy of Imagination, all written or co-written by Gilliam, which consisted of Time Bandits, Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Not my favorite of those three films by any means but certainly interesting to catch at least once I’d say.
Tom Stoppard
He also did the final Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade rewrite of Jeffrey Boam’s rewrite of Menno Meyjes’s screenplay. Now I like that film a lot but not as much as Raiders of The Lost Ark, which I consider perfect. The Suck Fairy broke her buckles when she tried to sully Raiders of The Lost Ark’s reputation recently.
He did one genre adjacent script, the adaptation of the Robert B. Parker and Raymond Chandler novel Poodle Springs for television. Chandler had completed four chapters before his death, so on the occasion of the centenary of Chandler’s birth, Parker was asked by the estate of Raymond Chandler to complete the novel. No, I’ve not read it for the same reason I don’t watch films or series off novels that I really like — I prefer the originals, thank you.
Let’s not overlook Shakespeare in Love which he co-authored with Marc Norman. Any film with Geoffrey Rush in it is certainly going to be worth seeing and if the script is written by Stoppard in some fashion as it was here, it’s likely that the dialogue is going to be stellar. It certainly is here.
He was even involved in the largest SF franchise ever as he did the dialogue polish of George Lucas’s Revenge of the Sith screenplay. Polish? Interesting phrase there.
(8) STARLOST AND FOUND. [Item by Michael Burianyk.] Any SF fan who was around in the early 70s will remember the TV series Starlost. Canadian writer Den Valdron is running a Kickstarter for his Starlost Unauthorized book which has six more days to go to reach its stretch goal. Den is a good writer (who has written unauthorized works discussing ‘Dr Who’ and ‘Lexi’) with a lot of energy and will bring a lot to understanding this little known piece of Science Fiction history in the context of Canadian cultural identity. I think the whole project is timely and is worthy of support. “Starlost Unauthorized by D.G. Valdron”.
…The thing that makes old hoaxes so frustrating is that they are hard to tease out from their actual history. Something fabricated in the 1600s made to look like it is from the 1400s can be very hard to pick out. The astronaut on the Cathedral of Salamanca is not in fact a hoax, but an approved and modern addition to the Cathedral, however it has all the earmarks of something which may provide for great confusion some 500 years from now.
Built between 1513 and 1733, the Gothic cathedral underwent restoration work in 1992. It is a generally a tradition of cathedral builders and restorers to add details or new carvings to the facade as a sort of signature. In this case after conferring with the cathedral, quarry man Jeronimo Garcia was given the go-ahead to add some more modern images to the facade. He included an astronaut floating among the vines, a dragon eating ice cream, a lynx, a bull, a stork, a rabbit, and a crayfish….
…In 1991, the abbey underwent some necessary restoration work. Twelve of its 13 gargoyles were so badly ruined from water damage they had to be removed. The work was carried out by an Edinburgh-based stone masonry company, which replaced the carvings with newer models.
Apparently, some of the stone masons had a bit of fun with their creations. One of the gargoyles is certainly unique, which is fitting, as medieval tradition holds that no two gargoyles can look the same. The creature bears a strong resemblance to H.R. Giger’s Xenomorph from the Alien franchise. As the films were popular throughout the 1980s and early ‘90s, it’s likely one of the workers drew a bit of inspiration from its otherworldly antagonist….
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Scott Edelman, Michael Burianyk, Daniel Dern, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
…In an effort to get more attention for their cause, Brocksom started sending T-shirts to creators with large followings. A friend encouraged them to send one to actor Tennant, whose child identifies as non-binary. Tennant is no stranger to allyship, often speaking up and wearing Ts and pins in supports of the LGBTQ+ community on red carpets and awards ceremonies.
Last year, at the press launch for Good Omens‘ second season, he wore a shirt that read: “Leave trans kids alone you absolute freaks.”
Brocksom’ husband found an address for Tennant’s fan mail and they mailed him a package of T-shirts with all their designs.
“I didn’t think it would go anywhere,” Brocksom tells Yahoo Canada. “I thought he’d wear one to a doctor’s appointment with his kids or something, and then the message would be out there.”
On Friday, Brocksom woke up to hundreds of T-shirt orders. Tennant’s wife, Georgia, had posted a photo of him wearing their “You will have to go through me” T-shirt on Instagram where she has more than 410,000 followers. The actor and his family attended their children’s school Pride events….
(2) BIRTHDAY HONOURS. This came out June 14 but it’s news to me! “The King’s Birthday Honours List 2024”. No sff figures listed that I can see, but Bookseller spotted a bunch of authors and other contributors to the arts.
Monica Ali, Joseph Coehlo, and Niall Ferguson were among the authors recognized on the King’s Birthday Honors List in the U.K., the Booksellerreported. …
Niall Ferguson, who was awarded a knighthood, told the Oxford Mail, “When an individual is honored by the King, implicitly his formative influences are the real recipients of the honor.”
Children’s Laureate Coelho (OBE) was recognized for services to the arts, to children’s reading and to literature. Other authors on the honors list include Susie Dent (MBE), Rory Cellan-Jones (OBE), and Jamila Gavin (MBE).
Richard Charkin (OBE for services to literature), a recent past president of the International Publishers Association, former CEO of Macmillan Publishers, executive director of Bloomsbury from 2007 to 2018, an executive at a range of other publishers, and author of the memoir, My Back Pages…
Other honorees include Jenny Brown, founder of literary agency Jenny Brown Associates, who was given an OBE for services to literature; Nicholas Poole, past CEO of the Chartered Institute of Library & Information Professionals (OBE for services to libraries, to the arts and to museums); and Di Speirs, audio executive editor for books at the BBC (MBE for services to broadcasting and to literature).
Also honored were Sarah Hosking (MBE), who founded Hosking Houses Trust, as well as librarians Sally McInness and Julie Kay.
As the foremost editor in Science Fiction, I was once again shocked not to win the Locus Award for Best Editor despite my impressive track record of not just editing books but also editing small wildlife into a variety of interesting shapes. I immediately cancelled my subscription to Small Arms for Small Felines Monthly in protest as I don’t have a subscription to Locus but, let’s face it, they are all in on it, they are all part of the Big Magazine cabal controlling the media and if we don’t all chip in and send a message that the ordinary folk will not put up with this kind of nonsense then where will be? In my case, I’d be in the drawing room with nothing to read because those spiteful wretches at Small Arms for Small Felines Monthly refused to send me this month’s edition on the spurious grounds that I hadn’t paid them. It is cancel culture gone mad when publishers start boycotting tax-payers just for having opinions….
(4) CROWDFUNDING A LADY ASTRONAUT COLLECTION. Mary Robinette Kowal today launched a Kickstarter appeal for Silent Spaces: Tales from the Lady Astronauts, a collection of 9 short stories in the Lady Astronaut Series written by her, including one written just for this collection….
In 1952, an asteroid slammed into Washington, DC and obliterated much of the east coast of the United States, triggering a climate crisis that threatens life on Earth.
Through four novels and numerous short stories, readers follow the pioneering women who strive to save humanity. The series’ primary protagonist, Dr. Elma York, a pilot and experienced mathematician, battles misogyny and social anxiety while planting her flag as the first Lady Astronaut. She and her fellow scientists reach for the Moon and beyond, bringing lasting change for humanity.
Through the Lady Astronaut Universe, Kowal has shone a light on the real-life accomplishments of women in space science and inspired a new generation entering STEM fields.
In the opening hours the Kickstarter has already scored pledges in excess of its $30,000 goal.
(5) SF IN BULGARIA & ROMANIA. [Item by Valentin D. Ivanov.] With a friend of mine and a fan from Romania we published a paper in Locus. It is available online now: “SF in Bulgaria & Romania: How Many Dwarfs Does It Take to Match a Giant?” by Valentin D. Ivanov & Cristian Tamaș. From the June 2024 issue of Locus magazine. Locus hardly needs advertisement help, but the speculative fiction in our countries always does!
Here’s an excerpt:
Outside of the vast English-speaking fandom lies a tapestry of diverse and weakly interlinked communities from the countries with small language bases. These languages, and the nations that speak them are often – because of inertia, rather than ill intent – perceived as “minor.” Indeed, they are minor in one critical aspect: as literary markets. This circumstance has a profound effect on their literature….
Attentive readers may have noticed the careful choice of words in the title. The speculative fiction communities of “minor” countries do not want to fight the giants. We aspire to become a giant ourselves, albeit multifaceted, multilingual, and multicultural, by means of teamwork and cooperation….
…Human-monster pairings are what sets monster romance apart from its close cousin, the wildly successful genre of romantasy, a genre epitomized by Sarah J. Maas’s blockbuster A Court of Thorns and Roses series. In those books, more established and more human-adjacent paranormal creatures like elves, dragons, and fae dominate the stories, and humans are reduced to bit players, if they figure into the books at all. But in monster romance, we’re usually in a world that’s vaguely similar to Earth, or at least connected to it in some way. For many readers, ACOTAR was the gateway drug to other books with nonhuman characters. Others found their way there via fanfic, where the themes that dominate these books became established over the years via an iterative, collaborative process that gradually hardened into tropes. They generate reams of conversation. In one popular TikTok, Laura Whitney at first seems to scoff at monster-romance readers by saying, “People are literally out here reading monster romance?” Then she whispers, “Which ones?” So many people appreciated the 3,712 recommendations generated in the comments that 18,900 people have bookmarked the post.
When I first told friends about the latest turn my reading had taken, I got a lot of blank stares at first but soon fell into a delightful text exchange with a friend who has a Ph.D. and who also read Morning Glory Milking Farm. She sent me a link to Hermione Granger–Draco Malfoy fanfic that she said had taught her a lot about BDSM. I started to realize that, though many of us may be out here walking around with the latest literary fiction from Riverhead or Pantheon in our tote bags, our phones runneth over with stories of men with tails and two dicks….
This was an amazing movie, and should have had more Oscar nominations. It probably would have, if a) it had been made in the West, or b) it didn’t have Godzilla in it. The acting was wonderful. All the other good things people have said about it are true. However, they all missed the, well, kaiju in the room.
This was not a monster movie….
(8) JOHN MADDOX ROBERTS (1947-2024). The SFWA Blog has posted a tribute — “In Memoriam: John Maddox Roberts”. He died May 23 at the age of 76. Here is an excerpt:
John Maddox Roberts…, also writing as Mark Ramsay, was a prolific and best-selling science fiction, fantasy, historical, and mystery writer over the course of thirty-five years. He was the author of many novels set in ancient Rome, including Hannibal’s Children and its sequel The Seven Hills, and the SPQR series, the first of which, now titled The King’s Gambit, was an Edgar Award finalist in 1991….
(9) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
June 25, 1903 — George Orwell. (Died 1950.)
By Paul Weimer: Big Brother. For genre fans, Orwell begins, and often ends at 1984. (Sometimes Animal Farm as well.) Sure, Eric Arthur Blair, aka George Orwell’s contribution to letters is far greater than that. “Shooting an Elephant”, as it turned out, was the first piece by Orwell I read, before 1984, back in High School. I had heard of 1984, but not yet read it, and so when we were assigned the story to read and discuss, I was enthusiastic to engage with a story that was post-colonial in the midst of the end of British Colonialism.
Animal Farm isn’t serious as a speculative work. Through and through, Animal Farm is an allegory and a rather pointed one. I read that next, and I didn’t need a teacher to see just how perfect an allegory it is. You may have seen the animated movie, which had the ending changed to remove some of the bite of that inescapable allegory. Accept no substitutes, read the original.
George Orwell.
But now we come to 1984. I’ve had 1984 as a fixture in my genre life ever since I picked it up in my early 20’s. Room 101 and the rest blew me away, and I realized I had seen bits of the John Hurt movie a decade earlier and not realized what I had seen. It was a sharp blow to come across scenes in the book that my dim memory of the movie foreshadowed. It only enhanced and pressed upon me the power of the narrative of Winston Smith’s story.
1984 has cropped up in my genre life in other forms, too, than the movie and the novel. On a rainy day exploring London before Worldcon in 2014, my traveling companion and I found ourselves by a theater that was showing an adaptation of 1984. So the idea of seeing proper London theater, featuring 1984, was irresistible. My friend and I wandered around that area of the West End, eager for evening to come to see the performance.
It was a fascinating (if brutal) metanarrative of 1984, deconstructing the world of the Party from a future where the Party had fallen. Rapt, I bought a copy of the 1984 play after the performance. I would also find — but not attend — the play again in 2017 in Melbourne, delighted that the dark 1984 play had “followed me” on my Down Under Fan Fund trip. Given what I choose instead to do, perhaps I should have seen it again after all.
I’ve read and watched and listened to other versions of 1984, from audio dramas to movies. 1984 continues to follow me in my genre life. Big Brother really is watching me.
HBO is at long last signing up with the Lantern Corps.
The premium cable outlet has given a straight-to-series order for Lanterns, based on the long-running Green Lantern characters — specifically John Stewart and Hal Jordan — from DC Comics. Chris Mundy (Ozark) will serve as showrunner on the eight-episode drama and co-write the series with Damon Lindelof (Watchmen, Lost) and Eisner Award winner Tom King, known for his work on several Batman titles, Mister Miracle and Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow for DC Comics.
The (ahem) green light for Lanterns comes almost five years after what was then HBO Max began developing a Green Lantern series with producer Greg Berlanti — the mastermind of the DC Arrow-verse on The CW and one of the writers of the 2011 Green Lantern feature film that starred Ryan Reynolds….
(12) BACK TO BARBARELLA. Here’s the first trailer for the Sydney Sweeney Barbarella (2025).
A remake of the 1960s cult classic Barbarella is currently in the works with Sydney Sweeney set to star…
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Paul Weimer, Valentin D. Ivanov, Dann, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, 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 Daniel Dern (via Robert Zimmerman’s Rainy Day Women #12 & 35, of course).]
(1) ORWELL VS. KAFKA. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was published 75 years ago (June 8, 1949) less than a year before his death. BBC Radio 4 is running a series of programmes on George Orwell and Franz Kafka.
In “Battle of the Adjectives”, Ian Hislop and Helen Lewis explore the two adjectives that have arisen from the writing of both men.
But what exactly do we mean by ‘Orwellian’ or ‘Kafkaesque’? They also find a vivid illustration of the very particular dystopias conjured up by both Orwell and Kafka in the form of the current UK Post Office horizon scandal, hearing from Alan Bates about his experience of striving against injustice in a system that seemed stacked against him.
In episode one of Orwell vs. Kafka: Nineteen Eighty-Four,“Big Brother Is Watching You”, actor Martin Freeman (The Hobbit and Sherlock) reads the novel – there are an additional five more episodes to come.
The year is 1984. War and revolution have left the world unrecognisable. Great Britain, now known as Airstrip One, is ruled by the Party, and its leader, Big Brother, stares out from every poster. The Thought Police uncover every act of betrayal, and no one is free. Winston Smith works at The Ministry of Truth, carefully rewriting history, but he dreams of freedom and of rebellion. When he falls in love with Julia, their affair is an act of rebellion against the Party. But nothing is secret. And Room 101 awaits.
There is also a dramatization of Kafka’s The Trial.
The most quintessentially ‘Kafkaesque’ of Kafka’s work, The Trial is a sinister satire, charting one man’s descent into self-destruction in the face of a society that has become a machine.
(2) WESTERCON 76 GOH CHANGES. In Westercon 76 Utah’s Progress Report 2 the committee announces new Fan GoHs Dave and Keri Doering have replaced Sally Wohrle, who reportedly dropped out for health reasons.
Jewelry and many-media artist, Darlene P. Coltrain has accepted Artist GoH.
CJ Lawson, who was originally announced as a Guest of Honor, is unable to attend.
The convention takes place July 4-7 in Salt Lake City.
Artist GoH: Darlene P Coltrain. Darlene has spent decades making and selling art at conventions, art-fairs, and galleries. Her early professional work, was lost-wax precious-metal jewelry, and later brass, and even small bronze sculptures. In addition, she’s worked in polymer clay, painted-dyed silks, stencil-prints, beading, etc.
Fan GoH: Dave Doering. Dave is a long-time fan in Utah, with more than 40 years of SF/F activity. It is hard to recall any SF event here that he hasn’t participated in or been on the committee. (Including Chairing a Westercon, and a Costume-Con.) Surprisingly, though he grew up in New York, he had no idea there was organized fandom, until he got to the Beehive State. Since then, he was a founding member of the first SF/F club at BYU, started the Leading Edge magazine at the school, and also began the professional development “Life the Universe and Everything” Con in Provo (#42, this year). In addition, he and his lovely wife Keri are award-winners costumers (including at Costume-cons and Worldcons). Come find out why his tagline is “It’s NEVER boring with Dave Doering!”
Fan GoH: Keri Doering. Founding member of the Utah Costumers Guild, Master-level Award Winning costumer, competing in local, as well as international events (Worldcons, and Costume-Cons) (She has helped behind the scenes, in countless fannish events, including Costume-Con 23 Utah, and Westercon67)
(3) POKÉMON. [Item by Steven French.] Joseph Earl Thomas reflects on being a black Pokémon player: “Pokémon Is All About Reading” in The Paris Review.
… And while I’m never stepping on a court serious with AI or LeBron or Steph—shit, I couldn’t even check Damon Young last year at his local gym—anyone can play against some of the best in the Pokémon game by virtue of its general openness, whereby openness, of course, involves money. Getting out to a Pokémon tournament ain’t like buying Beyoncé or Taylor Swift tickets, but it’s also not getting penny candies from the corner store. Registration might run you around seventy dollars, but that’s the small of it; the real shit is paying for the hotel and travel. Many players move in groups, sharing the cost, at the very least, of housing. Having taken years off from gaming for real for real—between children and changing careers and being deployed to Baghdad and writing the book and all the college-degree collecting and grade-school trips and deaths in the family and living, and living and COVID and calls from school and calls from court and calls from hospitals and calls from the shelter—I have never been part of such a group….
…The potential to play gets me giddy at times, like the boy I was never supposed to be; we were never supposed to be. It encourages one to wonder what’s possible in this smaller social world, the structures of almost-togetherness heaped upon with strangers, how I’m besieged by the naive sincerity I had discarded for survival until now, and how this is also a dimension of being a black man in public. I return to Omari Akil’s provocation about Pokémon GO: the death sentence, they called it, if you’re a black man, lambasting the augmented reality approach to catching Pokémon in the streets as a safety hazard in a racist society—though one could always already guess, given history or intuition, where the best Pokémon or important locales would be, where risk would be assumed and by whom. It’s hard for me to shake the state of any game from what happened today or yesterday, what will happen next year or what went down in the eighteen- or nineteen-sixties. So why then, I ask myself, does this thing here feel so much like life?
Move over Anxiety, there’s a new dominant emotion at the box office: Joy!
Heading into the weekend, the follow-up film to 2015’s cerebral hit Inside Out was projected to collect $80 million to $90 million. It overtakes Dune: Part Two ($82.5 million) and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire ($80 million) as the biggest opening of the year. It’s also the first movie since last July’s Barbie ($162 million) to debut above $100 million.
The second “Inside Out 2” also connected at the international box office with $140 million, enough to surpass “Frozen 2” ($135 million) as the biggest overseas animated opening of all time. Turnout was especially strong across Latin America, where it landed the second-biggest opening of all time behind Disney’s Marvel epic “Avengers: Endgame.” Globally, the movie has grossed $295 million to notch the title for biggest animated debut in like-for-like markets at current exchange rates. It carries a $200 million production budget….
(5) POE HOUSE CELEBRATIONS. A “Movie Night” in Baltimore will mark two Poe-related anniversaries.
This year we commemorate two very special anniversaries: the 175th Anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s Death in Baltimore in 1849 and the 75th Anniversary of The Edgar Allan Poe House & Museum established in 1949. Join us festival eve at a special kick-off reception and MOVIE NITE in the glorious and newly-opened M&T Bank Exchange Theatre at France-Merrick Performing Arts Center.
This extraordinary evening includes two panel discussions with special guests Victoria Price, author and daughter of Vincent Price, and Michael Connelly, bestselling author of The Lincoln Lawyer and the Hieronymus Bosch detective series. Q&A followed by a special tribute recognizing the life and career of Vincent Price, and of the passing of the extraordinary film director, Roger Corman, followed by 60th Anniversary screening of their 1964 horror classic, “Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death” starring Vincent Price.
(6) TOWARDS MORE AND BETTER AUTHOR READINGS. Charlie Jane Anders calls on everyone to “Let Authors Read Their Work!” at Happy Dancing.
One thing that bums me out is my sense that people don’t seem to want to listen to authors reading their work in public as much as they used to. (This is a trend that predates covid.) I don’t entirely get it: audiobooks are more popular than ever, but the equivalent a of a live performance of an audiobook isn’t automatically popular….
,,, Listening to a good speaker read some of their own prose tells you things about the text that you will never learn from hearing that same person answer questions about the book. Good prose is immersive and engaging: it draws you in, and tells you a lot about what kind of story you’ll be getting. You can get to know the characters, live in their thoughts, get sucked into their problems.
Here’s the part where I brace myself for dozens of people to email me saying that they went to too many author readings that were dull, interminable, or actually incomprehensible. And yeah, I feel you.
Author readings are an art form, just like anything else. They can be done well or incredibly badly. Some authors are great at writing, but terrible at speaking. Believe me, I know. A big part of curating a reading series was avoiding those authors who were brilliant on the page but mumbled on the stage.
But I believe that most of us can get good at reading our work out loud, because it really is a skill that can be learned. Even introverts can master it!
In fact, I’ve been meaning to compile a set of tips for getting better at reading your work to an audience, as someone who worked on this for years. So I’m going to spend the rest of this newsletter sharing that advice….
A series of substantial tips follows.
(7) ADAM-TROY CASTRO GOFUNDME. “The Cancer is Alas Back, But I am Fighting” says Adam-Troy Castro in an update on his GoFundMe, which is as needed as ever. Fuller medical details at the link.
…So what is happening now is that a surgery, probably one involving my prior surgeon, is being wrangled, and my blood is going to undergo testing at a genetic level to determine what chemo I get this next time, and the same will be done to the little bugger once he’s in a specimen tray, and the good news is that this time, my chemo will be in my immediate neighborhood, not an hour’s drive from me. In all ways not involving whatever side-effects I experience, this will be a smaller impact on my life.
The surgery may be as long as two or three weeks away. It is not scheduled yet. It will be determined. Maybe it’s next Tuesday. Don’t hock on me about demanding it be earlier. We are doing the best we can. People with actual power are already speaking up.
I will change the name of the current GoFundMe and establish that the cancer is back, though I do not expect spectacular uptick in collection, given how frequently fate has returned me to the same well. It will remain open, in any event. I can use the help. But this is the shitty sequel. Let it not be a trilogy….
Tory Stephens, Climate Fiction Creative Manager, says, “If you’ve got a great short story in the works and haven’t submitted it yet, we’d love to read it.”
The contest judges are Omar El Akkad and Annalee Newitz.
(9) THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE. Abigail Nussbaum rounds up the misrepresentations about artificial intelligence in “AI and Me” at Lawyers, Guns & Money.
…The solution the AI companies have come up with to this problem is essentially fake it until you make it. Insist, loudly and repeatedly, that AI is “inevitable”, that anyone who resists it is standing in the path of technological progress, no different from anyone who futilely resisted the automation of their labor in the past. That non-technology industries are falling for this spin is perhaps unsurprising—motivated, obviously, by the dream of dumping those pesky human employees and freelancers and replacing them with cheap and uncomplaining machines (though, again, I must stress that if AI was priced realistically—and if water and energy for server farms were sanely priced—there is no AI tool that would be cheaper than a human doing the same job). What’s more interesting is that other Silicon Valley companies are doing the same, even though, again, the result is almost always to make their product worse. Google has essentially broken its key product, and Microsoft is threatening to spy on all its users and steal their data, all because a bunch of CEOs have been incepted into the idea that this technology is the future and they cannot afford to be left behind. (This desperation must be understood, of course, in the context of a Silicon Valley that hasn’t come up with a new killer app that genuinely revolutionizes users’ lives since maybe as far back as the smartphone, and where advances in screens, cameras, disk sizes, and computing power have plateaued to a point that no one feels the need to upgrade their devices every year.)…”
(10) MEMORY LANE.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
June 17, 2007 — Anniversary of “The Unicorn and The Wasp”. If you haven’t seen this episode, go away now. Really. Truly. Everything that follows is spoilers in the extreme. You have been warned.
So one of my best loved episodes of the new series of Doctor Who is “The Unicorn and The Wasp” which aired on this date on BBC America.
It is a country house mystery set in high summer featuring a number of murders. And, to add an aspect of meta-narrative to the story, it has writer Agatha Christie in a prominent role. It would riff off her disappearance for ten days which occurred just after she found her husband in bed with another woman. Her disappearance is a mystery that has never been satisfactorily answered to this day.
Yes, there have been entire books, Queen of Air and Darkness forgive their writers, offering up their theories as to what happened to her.
So the Doctor and Donna Noble arrived at the grounds of that country house just during afternoon tea. When else would they arrive? The Doctor, here played by David Tennant at his very best, uses his psychic power in the form of an identity card, to convince The Lady of The Manor that she has met him previously and invited them for the weekend.
A murder will soon happen when Professor Plum is killed in The Library with a lead pipe. Yes, a Clue board game reference which his plucky companion (Catherine Tate) gleefully notes. And so it goes for the entire episode in a rather delightful manner. It’s silly, it’s fast-paced, and it’s one of the most British episodes that the new Who does. And it’s one that shows how clearly this series is fantasy, not science fiction, as I’ll note when you read on.
The Unicorn of the title is simply the code name of an infamous jewel thief, but The Wasp of the title is a wasp, a bloody big one on that. A wasp that’s the love child of a shape shifting alien who made Her Ladyship pregnant in India forty years ago. A wasp that’s so big that it couldn’t survive in Earth’s gravity, but this is fantasy after all. (I firmly believe that almost all science fiction is fantasy — some are just more blatant about it.) And do keep an ear out for the many, many references to the novels Christie wrote. There’s even a paperback published if I remember correctly millions of the year in the future. See books do survive!
It’s a quite delightful affair which fits very nicely into the genre of Manor House mysteries which of course the future Dame Agatha would write a few of these novels herself. Oh and Agatha Christie was played by Fanella Woolgar, to the far right in the image below, who was cast at the urging of Tennant who may or may not have known that the actress had twice appeared in the Agatha Christie’s Poirot series several years previously. She played Ellis in the “Lord Edgware Dies”, and in “Hallowe’en Party” as Elizabeth Whittaker.
This episode is why one of the many reasons that David Tennant is my favorite actor that played a Doctor in the new Whovian era. (Tom Baker is my favorite of the classic Doctors.) Jodi Whittaker, my second favorite in the modern era, who I believe a great performer that I thought was let down too often by scripts that were less than they could’ve been.
It, like all modern Who, is now available exclusively in the States on Disney+. I downloaded this and my other favorite episodes when they came out.
(11) COMICS SECTION.
Rubes puts a funny twist on a familiar confrontation.
Eek! requires knowledge of those unseen to be funny.
The massively popular 2024 edition of the Annecy Intl Festival of Animation came to its exciting conclusion on Saturday with the announcement of the winners of this year’s Cristal prizes. Adam Elliot‘s audience-pleasing stop-motion feature Memoir of a Snail was the winner of the 2024 Cristal for Best Animated Feature, while Alexandra Ramires and Laura Gonçalves’ s Percebese was the winner of the top prize in the shorts category….
In a world turned upside down, civilized apes sit at the top of the evolutionary ladder, ruling over a population of primal humans. But this dominion will not go unchallenged. Wayward astronauts arrive to lead an uprising, questioning this madness and the events that led to this topsy-turvy, backward future. Political intrigue, societal conflict, and fantastical, dangerous mysteries abound on this planet ruled by apes!
Built on the celebrated, time-tested D6 System developed by RPG pioneer West End Games, this exciting science fiction adventure series brings a wealth of new features and roleplaying mechanics for a new generation of gamers.
Players will be easily thrust into the PLANET OF THE APES through the new “Magnetic Variant (D6MV)” Rule Set taking full advantage of the unique and popular “Wild Die” system and other unique role-playing systems. Adventures in PLANET OF THE APES will be as thrilling and cinematic as players dare to imagine.
Francis Ford Coppola’s sci-fi epic “Megalopolis,” which proved to be wildly divisive after its Cannes Film Festival premiere, has finally found a distributor. Lionsgate has signed a deal to distribute the film in theaters in the U.S. and Canada.
It will be released on Sept. 27. “Megalopolis” is playing in Imax, but it will likely share screens with Christopher Nolan’s 10th anniversary “Interstellar” rerelease. It’ll also have to relinquish those coveted premium large format screens a week later, as “Joker: Folie à Deux,” which was filmed with Imax cameras, lands on Oct. 4….
… Orphan Black: Echoes is the name of the next chapter, and while it will be similar to its predecessor, it will also have some notable changes.
The original Orphan Black focused on a series of clones flawlessly played by Tatiana Maslany….
…Orphan Black: Echoes will premiere on Sunday, June 23, at 9/8c on AMC and BBC America.
Full episodes will be available to stream on AMC+….
… Orphan Black: Echoes is headlined by Krysten Ritter, who plays a young woman named Lucy who has undergone a procedure and has no recollection of what happened.
Keeley Hawes is playing Dr. Kira Manning, the daughter of Orphan Black’s Sarah Manning, serving as one of the sequel’s most significant ties to the original.
The impressive cast is rounded out by Avan Jogia (Jack), Amanda Fix (Jules Lee), James Hiroyuki Liao (Paul Darrow), and Rya Kihlstedt (Eleanor Miller).
While 37 years have passed between Orphan Black Season 5 and Orphan Black: Echoes, it is possible that some familiar faces will stop by, thanks to the show’s focus on clones….
The series stars Krysten Ritter and is set in 2052 in the same universe as Orphan Black…taking place in 2052, thirty-seven years since the end of the original series, Echoes follows the life of the now adult Kira [daughter on one of the original clones] and her wife, as they try to help an amnesiac woman….
(16) LINER NOTES FOR TODAY’S SCROLL TITLE. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “You Gets No Kzin With One RingWorld”. Notes:
[1] Per Genius.com and other citations, Josh White sang “…you gets…” although no doubt there are versions with “…you get…”
With “One Meatball”, Josh White became the first African-American to have a million-selling hit. According to his biographer Elijah Wald it was White’s “biggest hit by far, and one of the most popular songs of the 1940s folk revival”.
[Thanks to Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Jeffrey Smith, Daniel Dern, Nancy Collins, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
…Custom guitar brand Devil & Sons has launched a new series of sci-fi inspired guitars called Craftcasters, and their bodies are hand-constructed via the ‘kit bashing method’, where parts of old model kits, everyday items, hand cut plastic, sculpted epoxy, and yes (in this case), unused Covid tests, are pieced together to create unique artwork.
The uber-cool, spacecraft-like models were created across three years by artist and luthier Daniel Wallis, and according to him, they’ve been made using the same techniques model makers have been using for screen props since the original Star Wars and Alien films. Upon close inspection, you’ll be able to spot bits of train sets, remote controls, Warhammer models, and even old vacuum cleaner parts on their surfaces….
(2) DEFIANT PREQUEL. Abigail Nussbaum’s new blog post shares thoughts on Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, “a film that is missing its final act, that has a great gaping hole at its center, and which is nevertheless an exhilarating and entirely satisfying action extravaganza, and worthy companion to Fury Road.” ”Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” at Asking the Wrong Questions.
…And now of course it must be acknowledged that Furiosa does work. I won’t get into the question of whether it’s as good as Fury Road; it obviously can’t deliver the same sharp blow to the head as that movie did, and once you allow for that, the two movies are too different for a side-by-side comparison to make much sense. But it does make you feel the same exhilaration, the same joyful disbelief at the fact that someone can do this with the cinematic medium, the same pulse-pounding desire for this ride to just keep going and going, and the same profound connection to and investment in its characters. Which obviously raises the question: how?…
(3) STOKERCON GOH SUBTRACTION. One of StokerCon 2025’s announced guests of honor, Graham Masterson, has backed out due to a scheduling conflict the committee told Facebook readers today. “Whether it can be worked out or not remains to be determined,” they said.
…The same reliance on aging cowboys was evident at movie theaters. John Wayne was still the top western movie star until his death at age 72.
You can laugh at that, but Hollywood has pushed to even more ridiculous extremes with Harrison Ford. The studios cast him in three action franchises (Indiana Jones, Star Wars, and Blade Runner) at an even older age than Wayne in his final film. (In a curious twist, this was Wayne’s little known role in Star Wars.)
This is not the sign of a healthy genre. Hollywood is now suffering at the box office, but you could have predicted it years ago, just based on its aging stars and franchises….
… How will this play out in the future? Well, let’s summarize what we learned from the rise and fall of the western genre.
Genres die slowly, especially popular genres with large mass audiences. In those instances, the decline can continue for decades after a genre’s commercial peak.
The final stages of decline are marked by total market saturation—reaching ridiculous levels. Far more product is churned out than even the core audience can absorb.
The proliferation of merchandise aims to expand the franchise, but actually accelerates the pace of decline.
During the period of decline, the average age of the core fan base gets older. Youngsters may continue to have some interest in the genre, but without the enthusiasm of the old days.
Even more ominous, the box office stars start showing their age—and are far too old to lead any movement. They are hired out of desperation, because holding on to old fans is now more important than attracting new ones.
As a result, everything about the genre starts to feel stale. The stories were fresher twenty years ago. The lead stars were definitely fresher twenty years ago. The only thing that isn’t stale is the movie popcorn out in the lobby—and even that’s not a sure thing.
This is obviously happening with almost every major Hollywood franchise today. We’re now almost fifty years beyond the release of Star Wars (1977)—that was long ago and in another galaxy. But even never-ending franchises eventually come to an end….
(5) VERY COOL BEANS.[Item by Danny Sichel.] Yes, it’s a few years old, but James D. McDonald posted an interesting little short story on his blog Madhouse Manor, and I felt it deserved more attention.
It’s called “The Coldest Equations Yet”, from 2017, and it’s a remix that might have made Tom Godwin smile and John W. Campbell grumble.
(6) THE REALLY BIG ONE. [Item by Jeffrey Smith.] I buy various volumes of The Best American series of short stories and essays every year, often starting them but rarely finishing them. I’ve decided to start cleaning some of them up, and am almost finished with The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016. In her introduction, the editor said she felt the most important piece in the book was “The Really Big One” by Kathryn Schulz. (See The New Yorker version from 2015, “The Earthquake That Will Devastate the Pacific Northwest”.)
Over the last few years I’ve come to really appreciate Kathryn Schulz’s writing, reading her pieces in The New Yorker and often reprinted in these volumes. (The next of these I will finish, The Best American Travel Writing 2017, also has a piece by her.)
The article is about the potential for a massive earthquake to hit the Pacific Northwest, the fault there being more dangerous than the San Andreas. The editor lives at the southern tip of the fault, and says a) that she knows people who sold their houses and moved away after reading it, and b) the state governments are looking into developing early warning systems and strengthening infrastructure because of it.
“I simply cannot overstate the power of this piece,” the editor wrote. “When you read it, imagine you live where I live. Your life would change because of this story, just like mine did. That’s the power of great writing.”
It’s a long piece, and starts out with a lot of background information. The second half, though, is terrifying.
It was interesting to read this now in part because we recently watched a set of three Norwegian disaster movies: The Wave; The Quake; and The Burning Sea. (You have to hunt them down — they’re each on a different streaming service.) Judging by the article, the filmmakers did reasonably well with the science.
Here’s the beginning of Schulz article in The New Yorker:
When the 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku, Japan, Chris Goldfinger was two hundred miles away, in the city of Kashiwa, at an international meeting on seismology. As the shaking started, everyone in the room began to laugh. Earthquakes are common in Japan—that one was the third of the week—and the participants were, after all, at a seismology conference. Then everyone in the room checked the time.
Seismologists know that how long an earthquake lasts is a decent proxy for its magnitude. The 1989 earthquake in Loma Prieta, California, which killed sixty-three people and caused six billion dollars’ worth of damage, lasted about fifteen seconds and had a magnitude of 6.9. A thirty-second earthquake generally has a magnitude in the mid-sevens. A minute-long quake is in the high sevens, a two-minute quake has entered the eights, and a three-minute quake is in the high eights. By four minutes, an earthquake has hit magnitude 9.0.
When Goldfinger looked at his watch, it was quarter to three. The conference was wrapping up for the day. He was thinking about sushi. The speaker at the lectern was wondering if he should carry on with his talk. The earthquake was not particularly strong. Then it ticked past the sixty-second mark, making it longer than the others that week. The shaking intensified. The seats in the conference room were small plastic desks with wheels. Goldfinger, who is tall and solidly built, thought, No way am I crouching under one of those for cover. At a minute and a half, everyone in the room got up and went outside.
It was March. There was a chill in the air, and snow flurries, but no snow on the ground. Nor, from the feel of it, was there ground on the ground. The earth snapped and popped and rippled. It was, Goldfinger thought, like driving through rocky terrain in a vehicle with no shocks, if both the vehicle and the terrain were also on a raft in high seas. The quake passed the two-minute mark. The trees, still hung with the previous autumn’s dead leaves, were making a strange rattling sound. The flagpole atop the building he and his colleagues had just vacated was whipping through an arc of forty degrees. The building itself was base-isolated, a seismic-safety technology in which the body of a structure rests on movable bearings rather than directly on its foundation. Goldfinger lurched over to take a look. The base was lurching, too, back and forth a foot at a time, digging a trench in the yard. He thought better of it, and lurched away. His watch swept past the three-minute mark and kept going.
Oh, shit, Goldfinger thought, although not in dread, at first: in amazement. For decades, seismologists had believed that Japan could not experience an earthquake stronger than magnitude 8.4. In 2005, however, at a conference in Hokudan, a Japanese geologist named Yasutaka Ikeda had argued that the nation should expect a magnitude 9.0 in the near future—with catastrophic consequences, because Japan’s famous earthquake-and-tsunami preparedness, including the height of its sea walls, was based on incorrect science. The presentation was met with polite applause and thereafter largely ignored. Now, Goldfinger realized as the shaking hit the four-minute mark, the planet was proving the Japanese Cassandra right.
For a moment, that was pretty cool: a real-time revolution in earthquake science. Almost immediately, though, it became extremely uncool, because Goldfinger and every other seismologist standing outside in Kashiwa knew what was coming. One of them pulled out a cell phone and started streaming videos from the Japanese broadcasting station NHK, shot by helicopters that had flown out to sea soon after the shaking started. Thirty minutes after Goldfinger first stepped outside, he watched the tsunami roll in, in real time, on a two-inch screen.
In the end, the magnitude-9.0 Tohoku earthquake and subsequent tsunami killed more than eighteen thousand people, devastated northeast Japan, triggered the meltdown at the Fukushima power plant, and cost an estimated two hundred and twenty billion dollars….
(7) DON’T DO THIS, DO THAT. Editor Demi Michelle Schwartz decided this was a good day to share the writing problems she runs into most often. Thread starts here. Excerpted below are the first two out of five. The second one became a subject of dispute.
? Editorial Thread ? After editing tons of manuscripts for Amethyst Ink clients, I’ve noticed five things I comment on the most. I hope you find this thread helpful, and let’s hope there are no typos. Ready? Let’s go! 1/?
— Demi Michelle ???? (@demimschwartz) June 8, 2024
Here’s an example. Instead of saying something like, “She heard the wind rustle the leaves on the tree,” say, “The wind rustled the leaves on the tree.” 3/?
— Demi Michelle ???? (@demimschwartz) June 8, 2024
2. Passive Voice. Passive voice comes in many forms. In general, this includes descriptions that tell and don’t show and also verbs that aren’t active. 5/?
— Demi Michelle ???? (@demimschwartz) June 8, 2024
Here’s another one. Don’t tell me “There were birds in the sky.” Show me. Something like… “Bluejays soared through the azure sky.” 7/?
— Demi Michelle ???? (@demimschwartz) June 8, 2024
So, in a nutshell, a quick way to spot passive voice is if you have is, are, was, or were in a description or paired with a verb ending in “ing.” Passive voice has its place sometimes, but for the most part, try to have vivid descriptions and active voice instead. Okay, next. 9/?
— Demi Michelle ???? (@demimschwartz) June 8, 2024
One of my toxic traits is my urge to explain the passive voice to every editor on Twitter who explains it wrong.
Passive voice is not ‘when you use a form of the verb ‘to be’.’ It’s when the subject of the sentence is acted upon by the verb rather than performing the action.
Born, sort of, June 9, 1934 — Donald Duck, 90. Before I get to the history of Donald Duck, let me tell you why I chose this date.
The first ever reference to the character by name was in The Adventures of Mickey Mouse, published by David McKay Company, Philadelphia in 1931 — although the actual character wasn’t shown. On the first text page, it says, “Mickey has many friends in the old barn and the barnyard, besides Minnie Mouse. They are Henry Horse and Carolyn Cow and Patricia Pig and Donald Duck…” Not characteristic at all of what is to come, just animals in a barnyard.
The following year, a duck with the same name made another printed appearance in Mickey Mouse Annual #3, a 128-page British hardback. This book included the poem “Mickey’s ‘Hoozoo’: Witswitch, and Wotswot”, which listed some of Mickey’s barnyard animal friends: “Donald Duck and Clara Hen, Robert Rooster, Jenny Wren…” Again, nothing to do with the Disney character.
So when do we get that character? That was really when he was made the star of the Silly Symphony strips in 1937 and his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie, who debuted who debuted later that year. The team who did the strip made a city sophisticate instead of, as they called him, a country bumpkin. (Never saw him as the latter.)
“The Wise Little Hen”, officially released on June 9, 1934 was his first animated appearance. It was directed by Wilfred Jackson and of course produced by Walt Disney from a script by Otto Englander. It is based on the fairy tale The Little Red Hen. I have not looked for videos of it on YouTube or Vimeo as the film’s copyright was renewed in 1961, so it will not enter the public domain until January 1, 2030.
What does he look like there? Pretty much like he does today as you can see for yourself. He really hasn’t changed that much since introduced physically, just his character become more of the smart ass that I think he is.
He would star in his own series that started in 1937 and ran for 24 years with “Donald’s Ostrich”, although two previous shorts, “Don Donald” and “Modern Inventions”, both from 1937, were later included in this series, with “The Litterbug” being the conclusion to this series.
Though he appeared in “The Wise Little Hen” short, the Walt Disney company officially lists the Don Donald short which was released in 1937 as his official release. No idea why. It off is still under copyright as are allthe myriad shorts he did until Disney stopped producing his shorts in 1961.
The one I now want to see is the second one which was released on May 29, 1937 titled “Museum of Modern Marvels” as it’s full of SF wonders including Robot Butler.
I think I’ve prattled on long enough tonight. I do like the character a lot. I’m not a Disney fan first, being a Warner Brothers fan deep in the bone but I appreciate them.
Dynamite Entertainment has become the source for Disney fans who yearn for the return of some of their ’90s favorites. Gargoyles has found new life at the publisher, and now Darkwing Duck is making his comeback.
Today Dynamite announced that they’ll be launching a new Darkwing Duck comic book series with the involvement of original animated series creator/writer Tad Stones. But before that book gets off the ground, Dynamite will be rereleasing every previous Darkwing Duck comic in a trio of graphic novel compendiums…
…Dynamite is turning to Kickstarter to crowdfund the Darkwing Duck reprints. The first volume will collect the entirety of writer Amanda Deibert and artist Carlo Cid Lauro’s 2023 series. The second volume will collect Lauro and writer Roger Langridge’s miniseries Justice Ducks and writer Jeff Parker and artist Ciro Cangialosi’s miniseries Negaduck. The third volume will collect all of the pre-Dynamite Darkwing Duck comics, including stories originally published in Disney Adventures magazine.
(11) FAKE NEWS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Well this is firmly genre adjacent as fake news is fiction and it is spread by technology.
No, not Big Brother, but by the people themselves. Orwell could not have made it up. Anyway, this is the cover story of this week’s Nature.
Online misinformation is frequently highlighted as a blight that threatens to undermine the fabric of society, polarize opinions and even destabilize elections. In this week’s issue, a collection of articles probe the scourge of misinformation and try to assess the real risks. In one research paper, David Lazer and colleagues examine the effects of Twitter deplatforming 70,000 traffickers of misinformation in the wake of violent scenes at the US Capitol in January 2021. In a second paper, Wajeeha Ahmad and co-workers explore the relationship between advertising revenue and misinformation. A Comment article by Ullrich Ecker and colleagues discusses the risks posed by misinformation to democracy and elections, and an accompanying Comment article by Kiran Garimella and Simon Chauchard assesses the prevalence of AI-generated misinformation in India. Finally, David Rothschild and colleagues put the harms of misinformation into perspective, highlighting common misperceptions that exaggerate its threat and suggesting steps to improve evaluation of both the effects of misinformation and the efforts made to combat it.
…Futurama Season 12 will be launching with Hulu on July 29th, and has finally given fans the first look at what to expect from the next wave of episodes. Confirmed to have many more seasons now in the works, the first look at Season 12 showcases a tease of where the next season will go to further differentiate itself from what went down during Season 11….
(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] How the generations have changed. Is it true that the new generation of fans have never heard of The Prisoner? Moid Moidelhoff at Media Death Cult has a feeling that many have not as he takes a 24-minute dive into this remarkable show (one of my personal favorites). This is shot on location in Portmeirion where the series was set…. “The Most Influential Show You’ve (Probably) Never Seen”.
[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Danny Sichel, Jeffrey Smith, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Ingvar.]
(1) THE NO BODY PROBLEM. The other day File 770 linked to a report with the good news that Netflix confirmed 3 Body Problem will have a second and third season. Today, Giant Freakin’ Robot took the same story and turned it into a reason for panic: “Huge Netflix Sci-Fi Hit Gets Canceled After Season 3”. Got to get those clicks somehow!
Netflix has long had a reputation for canceling great shows right as they become mainstream hits, and it looks like that won’t be changing anytime soon. The streamer recently revealed that 3 Body Problem will be canceled after season 3.
That means that fans still have two more seasons to look forward to, but it’s not entirely clear how much of the original novels will ultimately be adapted by the show.
At first glance, the news that Netflix has canceled 3 Body Problem after season 3 comes as something of a shock.
After all, the first season was a genuine hit: it currently has a 79 percent critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 78 percent audience score….
(2) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Grady Hendrix & Bracken MacLeod on Wednesday, June 12, 2024. The event begins 7:00 p.m. Eastern at the KGB Bar (85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003; Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs.)
Grady Hendrix
Grady Hendrix is the New York Times-bestselling author of How To Sell a Haunted House, The Final Girl Support Group, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, and many more. His history of the horror paperback boom of the ’70s and ’80s, Paperbacks from Hell, won the Stoker Award for Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction. His books have been translated into 23 languages and sold over a million copies, which means he is guaranteed a seat on the space ark when the earth becomes uninhabitable. You can learn more useless facts about him at www.gradyhendrix.com.
Bracken MacLeod
Bracken MacLeod is a Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, and two-time Splatterpunk Award finalist and the author of several books including Closing Costs and 13 Views of the Suicide Woods, which the New York Times Book Review called, “Superb,” though he imagines the reviewer pronouncing that, “supOIB.” Before devoting himself to full-time writing, he’s survived car crashes, a near drowning, being shot at, a parachute malfunction, and the bar exam. So far, the only incident that has resulted in persistent nightmares is the bar exam. So, please don’t mention it.
(3) PHILLY SUMMER AUTHOR EVENTS SCRATCHED. Michael Swanwick alerted Facebook fans that the summer Author Events at the Free Library of Philadelphia have been cancelled. Apparently, the entire staff quit this morning. Here’s the announcement in its totality:
Dear Friends,
The entire lineup of scheduled Author Events is cancelled. The Author Events team is no longer with the Free Library Foundation.
With sincere thanks for your support over these many years of our program, “the big, beating heart of literature in Philadelphia,” (Philadelphia Inquirer),
Andy Kahan, Laura Kovacs, Jason Freeman, and Nell Mittelstead
Reasons for their quitting have yet to be reported.
UPDATE: The Philadelpha Free Library has followed up the earlier email with another saying that despite the resignations no Author Events have been cancelled. See the complete text of that email in Todd Dashoff’s comment below.
Here is the later message:
(4) MARK YOUR CALENDAR – AND MAP. Lev Grossman will be taking to the skies on “The Bright Sword Tour”. The full schedule is at the link. The journey starts in Brooklyn and ends at the San Diego Comic-Con
The Bright Sword is coming out on July 16th. I’m going on tour to promote it.
Not in any virtual or zoomy sense, I am actually going to transport my physical corporeal cells all around the USA. And to bits of the UK as well. Any other anglophone nations want a piece of this—Canada, Australia, New Zealand—you just let me know.
I’m really, really looking forward to it. It’s an incredible privilege to be able to travel around and talk to people about books.
There are definitely aspects of it that make me nervous. Like most writers I am a poorly distributed mix of intro- and extro-vert and I’m never quite sure which of these aspects is going to be outward-facing at any given moment.
But mostly I’m just unbelievably excited. My extrovert-face actually loves talking to crowds, especially about books and King Arthur and The Bright Sword, which I have been working on for ten years, and my family got sick of me talking about it about one year into that process, so you can imagine how much stuff I’ve got pent up. I love new places, and food, I don’t mind planes, and I actively, immoderately adore hotels of all kinds….
…The episode also accidentally fueled an emergent fan phenomenon: slash fiction. As fanfic readers know, the concept of slash fiction, in which fans pair one character with another, derives its name from Kirk/Spock fanfic, which imagined the famous duo as lovers. In “Turnabout Intruder,” after Spock mind-melds with Janet Lester and realizes Kirk is in her body, he holds their hand, treating Kirk like his girlfriend. It’s not subtle. Supposedly, even the actors were aware the story’s gender-role-switching elements prompted all kinds of questions about Kirk and Spock’s true feelings. In a famous outtake, William Shatner jokingly reworked his line to say, “Spock, it’s always been you, you know it’s always been you. Say you love me too.”
We know this because super-fan Joan Winston got herself onto the “Turnabout Intruder” set. In the fan-made essay collection Star Trek Lives!Winston recounted the experience in great detail, including the anecdote about Shatner jokingly professing his love to Spock. By 1972, Joan Winston would become one of the key organizers of the world’s first Star Trek conventions.
In 1970, only 300 people attended the first San Diego Comic-Con. In 1972, Winston brought 3,000 people to the first Star Trek convention. By 1974, Winston’s fourth Star Trek Lives! convention attracted at least 15,000 attendees. Star Trek conventions helped create large-scale genre-themed conventions in general, which is partially why today’s geek landscape even exists. Small fantasy and sci-fi conventions existed before Star Trek, but Trek made the idea of having a big convention possible, and Joan Winston was one of the movement’s key pioneers….
The audiobook market in the United States continues steadily growing, with revenue increasing by 9%, to $2 billion, in 2023, according to the Audio Publishers Association, which published data from its annual sales survey today. The sales survey, conducted by Toluna Harris Interactive, incorporates data from 27 publishers, including Audible, Hachette Audio, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster, among others.
In addition, the APA has released highlights from its 2024 consumer survey, carried out by Edison Research, which showed that 52% of U.S. adults, or nearly 149 million Americans, have listened to an audiobook. The survey also found that 38% of American adults listened to an audiobook in the last year, up from 35% reported in 2023….
(7) STOKERCON 2025. The StokerCon 2025 Guests of Honor are:
Paula Guran
Graham Masterson
Gaby Triana
Tim Waggoner
(8) SMALL WONDER KICKSTARTER FUNDS.
We funded! Small Wonders Year 2 is HAPPENING! Thank you all so much!
We still have nearly two whole days to stretch and reach more goals – like our awesome guest edited issue, more sticker unlocks, the best of year 1 anthology, and more! Let's do this!https://t.co/pGswlmtqdX?
— Small Wonders Magazine (@SmallwondersSFF) June 1, 2024
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
June 3, 1964 — James Purefoy, 60. James Purefoy has an interesting genre history though I’m going to start with his role in Hap and Leonard based off that series created by Joe R. Lansdale. There he was Hap Collins who was imprisoned for refusing to be drafted during the Vietnam War. He and Leonard Pine are rather eccentric private investigators for Hap’s girlfriend Brett Sawyer.
Remember A Knight’s Tale, a film that the Suck Fairy tells me that they don’t even have in their database. He played the dual role of Edward, the Black Prince of Wales and Sir Thomas Colville. It currently not surprisingly has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of eighty percent. It’s one of my favorite films.
James Purefoy at San Diego Comic-Con in 2012.
Next on his genre work is Solomon Kane where he played that character. Based on the Robert E. Howard character, he made a stellar Kane. It currently has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of seventy-one percent.
He was Kantos Kan, the Odwar, the commanding officer, of the ship Xavarian in the John Carter film. It currently has a much better rating than I was expecting at Rotten Tomatoes rating — sixty percent. Huh.
He is cast in a main role as Captain Gulliver “Gully” Troy / Captain Blighty in the second and third seasons of the Pennyworth series, the prequel to the Gotham series. I like it a lot better than the latter series.
He’s Philippe de Clermont in A Discovery of Witches series based off on Deborah Harkness’ All Souls Trilogy, and it’s named after the first book in the trilogy. I read and really loved these novels.
Almost on my list is his performance as Laurens Bancroft in the Altered Carbon series. Yes I read the Richard Morgan trilogy. I thought it was excellently well written story with great characters and a fascinating story. He’s a ruthless billionaire who cares for nothing but what he wants.
What is finally on my list is something I never knew had been done. BBC Radio 4 as part of their Dangerous Visions series broadcast a two-part adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Off the Philip K. Dick work. It stars James Purefoy as Rick Deckard and Jessica Raine as Rachael Rosen. No other cast is credited, a bit odd I think.
Sci-Fi World, a new “museum” that promises fans real and replica props, costumes and sets from popular films and TV shows, hosted its opening “gala” on Memorial Day in the historic former Sears building just a couple of blocks from the Santa Monica Pier.
More than a decade in the making, the museum has drawn the interest of “Star Trek” fans worldwide thanks to its genesis story: Superfan Huston Huddleston said he salvaged a replica of the bridge from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” from a discard pile outside of a Long Beach warehouse in 2011. Huddleston, known for his fanatical devotion to science fiction and horror, launched Kickstarter campaigns to restore the prop and open a museum to house it, raising nearly $163,000 in less than two years.
But now Huddleston, 54, has emerged as the nexus of questions swirling around the museum, which, despite the recent gala, did not actually open as scheduled. Some of those same sci-fi fans who were enthralled by the museum’s origin story have since learned that in 2018, Huddleston was convicted of misdemeanor possession of child pornography. He was required to serve 126 days in jail and three years of summary probation, complete 52 weeks of sex offender counseling and pay fines.
In an interview with The Times, Huddleston said he knew that any association with the museum after his conviction would be toxic for an organization that hopes to attract young fans, so he gave up control of the nonprofit and its collection of film and TV ephemera to the museum’s chief executive.
But several Sci-Fi World volunteers past and present told The Times that Huddleston remains active — if not central — in museum operations and preparations for opening. Lee Grimwade, one of the museum’s lead volunteers who quit a day before the gala, said Huddleston is “definitely 100% involved.”…
… It further examines the advancement and potential of video generation models that have gripped the industry, including OpenAI’s Sora and Google DeepMind’s Veo, which were announced in the first half of 2024.
Yet to understand how the tech is actively being used today also requires an understanding of its limitations and challenges. VIP+ digs into the specific factors holding back gen AI implementation as tools used to make the highest production-value content. Ethical use is now central and critical to gen AI decision making for media and entertainment companies, and it is the final focus area of this report.
Research for this special report partly draws from 28 independent interviews conducted on background from February to May 2024 with leaders at generative AI tech and service providers, those in VFX and content localization networks, film and TV concept and storyboard artists, independent filmmakers experimenting with generative AI, ethical technologists and lawyers specializing in entertainment and cybersecurity….
If The Bad Batch were a live-action series, it’d most certainly be considered an ensemble show. But given that one actor voiced 22 (!) characters in the final season of the animated series, that term might not quite fit in this case. It’s a point that the voice actor himself, Dee Bradley Baker, humbly acknowledges.
“The Bad Batch is a very different creative ask of an actor, to bring all of these full-fledged, full-bodied characters together in a scene as an ensemble, not as disconnected or one-offs,” says Baker. “This is an ensemble story in the same way that The Clone Wars was originally an ensemble story. It’s just in this particular ensemble, I’m most of the ensemble,” he adds, laughing.
The Disney+ series, which ended its three-season run on May 1, follows Clone Force 99, a special forces squad comprising clone solders who were enhanced with special abilities, in the aftermath of Order 66 (whereby Emperor Palpatine ordered the clones to kill all Jedi). The group is led by stellar tracker Hunter and includes the abnormally strong Wrecker, brilliant Tech and uber marksman Crosshair. The quintet is rounded out with Echo, a regular clone who, after cybernetic modifications, joined up with the Bad Batch. All five of those characters are voiced by Baker, who is an Emmy contender this awards season for his role as Crosshair….
Speaking of fans, what is the voice you get asked to do most often?
[In Wrecker’s voice] They want to hear Wrecker all the time. I always say Wrecker wrecks my voice, but I’ll talk like Wrecker anyway. [Switching to Crosshair’s voice] Also, Crosshair because he meant a lot to many of the fans. He was probably the most interesting character of all of the Bad Batch [switching back to his real voice] because Crosshair really had the arc, the transformational redemption arc, that was his story, and what started out to seem to be sort of an adversarial counter-character ends up being the character that you’re rooting for. And that is finally redeemed with that hug that he gets from Omega. It’s a really beautiful story, it’s an inspiring story, and people are really locked into that. But it’s a lot of fun [in Hunter’s voice] just to switch from character to character [in Tech’s voice] because each one is very different from the other [back to his real voice], and they’re all just different people, and they’re here within me.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve “Steely” Green.]
(1) ONCE ON HIS SHELVES. San Diego State University is home to the Edward Gorey Personal Library, which they acquired in 2009.
The Edward Gorey Personal Library is a special collection at San Diego State University library that comprises 26,000 books collected by Edward St. John Gorey (1924-2000). Over 9,000 catalogued volumes, or 35% of the collection are searchable. If you find a book you would like to examine from this collection, please contact Special Collections and University Archives at [email protected], or at 619-594-6791 or visit their service desk in Love Library 150. Books may only be viewed in the Special Collections area.
An American artist, Edward St. John Gorey’s publications include over one hundred books. His most well-known works include The Gashlycrumb Tinies, The Doubtful Guest and The Wuggly Ump. Many of his illustrations appear in publications like The New Yorker and The New York Times. Gorey illustrations and book designs enhance editions of works by Charles Dickens, Edward Lear, Samuel Beckett, John Updike, Virginia Woolf, H.G. Wells, Florence Heide and Peter Neumeyer.
And if you’d like to know “What Books Did Edward Gorey Collect?” then click the link. Lots of familiar names there. One jumped out at me – isn’t Franklin W. Dixon the author of the Hardy Boys series?
Police in Scotland said a reported armed man who led to a train returning to a station turned out to be a Star Wars cosplayer on his way to a comic book convention.
The man, known as the Grampian Stormtrooper on social media, was dressed in his Imperial Stormtrooper costume “with a Scottish twist” — a kilt — when he boarded a ScotRail train to Dundee at the Aberdeen train station.
The train returned to the station shortly after departing and the man was approached by a guard who escorted him to waiting police officers.
The cosplayer wrote on Facebook that he was “met by two firearms officers, three Police Scotland, two British Transport police, and had to chat to them all in an office.”
The man learned that he had been reported for carrying a “firearm” on the train, and he explained to police that his “blaster” was a plastic prop….
Shapers of Worlds Volume V will feature stories by Brad C. Anderson, Edo van Belkom, J.G. Gardner, Olesya Salnikova Gilmore, Chadwick Ginther, Evan Graham, M.C.A. Hogarth, M.J. Kuhn, L. Jagi Lamplighter, Kevin Moore, Robin Stevens Payes, James S. Peet, Omari Richards, Lawrence M. Schoen, Alex Shvartsman, Alan Smale, Richard Sparks, P.L. Stuart, Brad R. Torgersen, Hayden Trenholm, Brian Trent, Eli K.P. William, Edward Willett, and Natalie Wright.
Backers’ rewards offered by the authors include numerous e-books, signed paperback and hardcover books, Tuckerizations (a backer’s name used as a character name), artwork, one-on-one writing/publishing consultations and mentorships, audiobooks, opportunities for online chats with authors, short-story critiques, and more.
The campaign goal is $12,000 CDN. Almost all of those funds will go to pay the authors, with the rest going to reward fulfillment, primarily the editing, layout, and printing of the book, which will be published in January 2025 in both ebook and trade paperback formats
…The jury remains out on whether [director] Phillips can repeat the trick with Joker: Folie à Deux. After all, there is likely a very good reason that nobody ever made a sequel to Taxi Driver or The King of Comedy, in the format of a musical. But even if the new film fails miserably, it is likely to give us more intriguing ideas to take the comic book movie genre forward than any number of the new episodes currently being put together by new DC boss James Gunn, brilliant (in a common-or-garden superhero flick kind of way) as these may well end up being….
(5) RONDO NOMINEE FOR BEST ARTICLE OF THE YEAR. The deadline for the public to vote in the Rondo Awards is April 16 at midnight. Email votes (with your name & e-mail address) to David Colton, c/o [email protected].
(6) TURBOLIFT TO HIT BOTTOM ON LOWER DECKS. It is the end, my friend, says The Hollywood Reporter: “‘Star Trek: Lower Decks’ to End With Season 5”. (However, Strange New Worlds will get another season.)
Paramount+ has made two big decisions about its Star Trek universe.
Strange New Worlds has been renewed for a fourth season, whileLower Decks will end with its previously announced upcoming fifth season, expected to air sometime this year.
Lower Decks creator Mike McMahan and executive producer Alex Kurtzman posted a statement on the Star Trek website about the decision to conclude the animated series: “While five seasons of any series these days seems like a miracle, it’s no exaggeration to say that every second we’ve spent making this show has been a dream come true. Our incredible cast, crew and artists have given you everything they have because they love the characters they play, they love the world we’ve built, and more than anything we all love love love Star Trek. We’re excited for the world to see our hilarious fifth season which we’re working on right now, and the good news is that all previous episodes will remain on Paramount+ so there is still so much to look forward to as we celebrate the Cerritos crew with a big send-off. … We remain hopeful that even beyond season five, Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, Rutherford and the whole Cerritos crew will live on with new adventures.”
Your career has spanned so many incredible projects, even just looking at television, from Beauty and the Beast in the ’80s to Resident Alien now and Stranger Things coming up. It must feel like a radically different landscape now.
It does, and it’s been kind of a pleasure to ride that long wave. I have seen things, and certainly can remark upon the changes in all areas of film and television, but mostly TV, I think. I’m not sure the studio system really has much longer. Things are changing faster now than they ever changed in the history of Hollywood, in terms of product and streaming and just so many new jobs that are created because of what we get to shoot. People who are contact lens specialists and people who are nail specialists when you do a show like Claws, and intimacy coordinators, and the sensitivity training, the HR, and then there’s the actual filmmaking and the special effects and the Volume for all the special effects, which is now on Stranger Things. I’m like, “What the hell? Where am I?” It’s like, okay, we’ll do a scene and then [you hear], “ball and chart,” and it’s some special effects magic that they come in and do at the end of every shot. So yes, it’s changing.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born April 12, 1973 — J. Scott Campbell, 51. J. Scott Campbell is a comic books artist best known for his work on Wildstorm Comics. Scott actually got hired by Wildstorm by submitting a package that included a four-page WildC.A.T.S story. Before that however his first work was on Homage Studios Swimsuit Special at age twenty. It’d get a PG-13 rating today. If that.
J. Scott Campbell at the 2023 Comic-Con. Photo by Gage Skidmore.
So did you know that Marvel did a Swimsuit issue as well? It was an annual magazine-style publication from 1991 to 1995. One issue said “Take Wakanda Wild Side” on the cover. Really it did.
His subsequent work for Wildstorm included some illustrations in WildC.A.T.S Sourcebook and Stormwatch #0. I love the idea of #0 issues. Why so?
Now do you remember Gen13?He created the series along with Jim Lee and Brandon Choi as the series came out of Team 7, a series that Lee and Choi created. The series involved a group of spandexed clothed metahuman teens. I like that series but it wasn’t nearly as fun as Danger Girl, his next series.
That series followed the adventures of a group of female secret agents, made the most of Campbell’s talents which involved very well-endowed women, in the firm of three sexy female well weaponized secret agents — Abbey Chase, Sydney Savage and Sonya Savage and over the top action sequences.
Twenty years ago I read Danger Girl: The Ultimate Collection, which is a bit of an overstatement as it’s only two hundred and fifty-six pages long, but it’s still a lot of a fun. Yes, it’s still available.
Danger Girl has been continuously published since it was first came out twenty-six years ago, so there’s a lot of it now. I’ve read quite a bit of it over the years and it’s been pretty consistent in its quality. However only the first seven-issue series is illustrated by Campbell.
Campbell illustrated the covers to the Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash six-issue limited series.
Eighteen years ago, Marvel Comics announced that he had signed an exclusive contract to work on a Spider-Man series with writer Jeph Loeb. Yes he did just covers, not interior work.
The potential use cases for smart contacts are compelling and varied. Pop a lens on your eye and monitor health metrics like glucose levels; receive targeted drug delivery for ocular diseases; experience augmented reality and read news updates with displays of information literally in your face.
But the eye is quite a challenge for electronics design: With one of the highest nerve densities of any human tissue, the cornea is 300 to 600 times as sensitive as our skin. Researchers have developed small, flexible chips, but power sources have proved more difficult, as big batteries and wires clearly won’t do here. Existing applications offer less-than-ideal solutions like overnight induction charging and other designs that rely on some type of external battery.
Now, a team from the University of Utah says they’ve developed a better solution: an all-in-one hybrid energy-generation unit specifically designed for eye-based tech.
In a paper published in the journal Small on 13 March, the researchers describe how they built the device, combining a flexible silicon solar cell with a new device that converts tears to energy. The system can reliably supply enough electricity to operate smart contacts and other ocular devices….
(11) PUT YOUR METAL TO THE BIPEDAL. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Now, I’m not a huge sport fan but if I had to pick one then it’d be Rollerball. The original, not the new-fangled 21st century one. Great audience chant….
Generating robust motor skills in bipedal robots in the real world is challenging because of the inability of current control methods to generalize to specific tasks. Haarnoja et al. developed a deep reinforcement learning–based framework for full-body control of humanoid robots, enabling a game of one-versus-one soccer. The robots exhibited emergent behaviors in the form of dynamic motor skills such as the ability to recover from falls and tactics such as defending the ball against an opponent. The robot movements were faster when using their framework than a scripted baseline controller and may have potential for more complex multirobot interactions.
An analysis published in Nature has predicted that melting ice caps are slowing Earth’s rotation to such an extent that the next leap second — the mechanism used since 1972 to reconcile official time from atomic clocks with that based on Earth’s unstable speed of rotation — will be delayed by three years.
“Enough ice has melted to move sea level enough that we can actually see the rate of the Earth’s rotation has been affected,” says Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and author of the study.
(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Zach and Kelly Weinersmith talk about — and demonstrate — why living on Mars is a bad idea. “The Mars crisis, explained by 2 experts” at Hard Reset.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Dan Franklin, Danny Sichel, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day BGrandrath.]
(1) IT PAYS TO BE A GENIUS OF COURSE. The Steampunk Explorer updates fans about the Girl Genius Kickstarter:
Call it mad science or just good storytelling, but Phil and Kaja Foglio are blazing through Kickstarter with their latest Girl Genius graphic novel. The campaign for An Entertainment In Londinium reached its US$50,000 funding goal within 24 hours and is now in six-figure territory. It launched on April 3.
Stretch goal rewards include the “Envelope of Madness” with bookplates, bookmarks, and other printed items. Backers will also get PDF downloads of Volumes 12 through 14. All Girl Genius titles are now available for 50 percent off from DriveThru Comics through May 5.
The campaign itself runs through May 1. See the Kickstarter page for more info.
At Eastercon we welcomed Stunt Liz, Nicholas Whyte, to the podcast for the first time, and he brought an excellent tartan rocket! We discuss Glasgow 2024’s April Fool’s Day joke, before moving onto the Hugo Award finalists, what we think of Telford, and chatting about a lot of British TV.
The trailer launch for “Joker: Folie à Deux” was no laughing matter for Warner Bros. The marketing for the studio’s upcoming DC sequel, headlined by Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga, got off to a stellar start with 167 million viewers in its first 24 hours. The teaser trailer went online right after it debuted at Warner Bros.’s CinemaCon presentation in Las Vegas.
Sources tell Variety that the “Joker” sequel’s trailer numbers and social engagement surpassed that of the first “Barbie” trailer to become Warner Bros.’ biggest launch in recent years. The release was no doubt bolstered by Lady Gaga’s massive 150 million follower social media footprint. The trailer instantly became the #1 trending video on YouTube on premiere night and currently boasts 15.6 million views and counting on that platform alone, where it remains the #4 trending video nearly two days after its launch…
(4) ANOTHER DISNEY CASTING KERFUFFLE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] OK, this has gotten out of hand. It seems like every time there’s a movie remake (especially a Disney remake) somebody has to find way to get all bent out of shape about casting. Much of the time, a racist way.
But this time they jumped the gun extra early. There’s a rumored casting of a live action remake for Disney’s Tangled. But, let’s be clear, there’s no further rumor of the remake itself, just the casting.
So now some people online are jumping all over the actress (Avantika Vandanapu) who happens to be Indian-American. Because reasons. Stupid, racist, reasons.
…Although Avantika’s rumored casting received criticism from some on social media, fans also showed support for the “Senior Year” actress.
“These comments are so awful. I’m so sorry girl you are perfect,” one Instagram user wrote, while another added, “She is my Rapunzel ❤”
“Never Have I Ever” star Maitreyi Ramakrishnan also appeared to weigh in on the online controversy, writing on X Tuesday, “And they finally woke up to realize it was all just rumors and the sources never existed. … And to the racists, y’all still need a hobby (for real)”…
(5) ELUSIVE BRADBURY COLLECTION. Episode 2 of Phil Nichols’ Bradbury 101, first aired in 2021, is devoted to a rare OP anthology.
DARK CARNIVAL is Ray Bradbury’s great “lost” book, one of his finest short story collections. But it’s out of print, and has been for decades! Find out why in this episode..
(6) TRINA ROBBINS (1938-2024). Trina Robbins, artist, writer and editor of comics, died April 10. The New York Times has a biographical tribute.
…In 1970, Ms. Robbins was one of the creators of It Ain’t Me Babe, the first comic book made exclusively by women. In 1985, she was the first woman to draw a full issue of Wonder Woman, and a full run on a Wonder Woman series, after four decades of male hegemony. And in 1994, she was a founder of Friends of Lulu, an advocacy group for female comic-book creators and readers….
…Ms. Robbins was responsible for the first publication of some notable cartoonists in The East Village Other, including Vaughn Bode and Justin Green, but she took particular pride in the women’s anthologies she edited and co-edited, and in their explicitly feminist content: It Ain’t Me Babe Comix, Wimmen’s Comix and the erotic Wet Satin.
She also designed the famously skimpy outfit for Vampirella, a female vampire who appeared in black-and-white comics beginning in 1969 — although her design was not as skimpy as the costume later became. “The costume I originally designed for Vampi was sexy, but not bordering on obscene,” Ms. Robbins told the Fanbase Press website in 2015. “I will not sign a contemporary Vampirella comic. I explain, that is not the costume I designed.”…
Prior to her career in comics, Robbins was a clothing designer and seller, and for awhile a pinup model. She was in contact with fandom in the Fifties and Sixties, and posed for the cover of an issue of Fanac, the fannish newzine, wearing a propellor beanie and with her feminine attributes strategically covered by a copy of Fancyclopedia.
Harlan Ellison and Trina Robbins at the 1955 Midwestcon.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born April 11, 1920 — Peter O’Donnell. (Died 2010.) London-born Peter O’Donnell was the creator of the Modesty Blaise comic stripalong with illustrator Jim Holdaway sixty-one years ago. She has no past as she doesn’t remember anything about her life before escaping from a displaced persons camp in Greece after WW II at the age of fifteen. She runs a criminal gang called The Network, and takes her last name from Merlin’s tutor. Her sidekick, of course she has one, is Willie Garvin, to give a bit of friendship in her life.
Peter O’Donnell from the rear dustjacket flap of the Archival Press edition of The Silver Mistress. Photo by Robert K. Wiener.
O’Donnell and Holdaway met when they worked together on a strip about Romeo Brown, a dashing private detective and reluctant ladies’ man, that ran in the tabloid Evening Standard for most of the Fifties. Blaise, too, would run here. It was quickly picked up globally running in the US, Australian, Indian, South African, Malaysian and other papers as she had a great appeal.
After Holdaway’s death in 1970, the art was by Spanish artist Enrique Romero. He would leave eight years later with three artists replacing him until he came back until the end of the strip with it still running in the Evening Standard thirty-eight years after it debuted.
Yes, it became a film which came just three years into the running of the strip. My did it piss O’Donnell off. Why so? Because he was hired to write the script which they then shitcanned and wrote a new one that had almost nothing to do with characters, the storyline or, well, anything else with the strip. Remember that friendship between her and Willie? Here it becomes full blown romance. And that’s just one of many, many changes.
A later film, Modesty Blaise, would be done as a pilot for a series that never happened and yet another film, My Name isModesty Blaise, would be done for yet another series that never happened. The one had O’Donnell as a consultant and he liked it.
My Name isModesty Blaise would be the only one with a British actress as the first had an Italian actress. Now Modesty wasn’t necessarily British as O’Donnell repeatedly said her nationality was deliberately not revealed.
I’ve not touched upon the plethora of books, short stories, graphic novels and original audiobooks that came of these characters in the part sixty years, and I’ll skip detailing them here.
So there you are. I did enjoy the strip when Titan, one of many who did, collected them in trade editions. I think there’s at least fifty trade paper editions available right now on Amazon.
(9) BE KIND TO YOUR WEB-FOOTED FRIENDS. This July, Marvel and Disney honor the 90th anniversary of Donald Duck and the 50th anniversary of Wolverine with an unexpected mashup adventure—Marvel & Disney: What If…? Donald Duck Became Wolverine #1.
Crafted by two acclaimed Disney comic creators, writer Luca Barbieri and artist Giada Perissinotto, MARVEL & DISNEY: WHAT IF…? DONALD BECAME WOLVERINE #1 is the latest comic book collaboration between Marvel and Disney following the What If…? Disney Variant Covers of the last few years and the highly anticipated Uncle Scrooge and the Infinity Dime #1 one-shot comic out this June. Fans can look forward to even more exciting crossovers between Marvel heroes and Disney icons throughout this year and next!
The comic will introduce Donald-Wolverine along with all sorts of reimagined Disney and Marvel mashups in a wild adventure inspired by one of Wolverine’s most memorable story arcs, Old Man Logan. In addition, the saga will revisit some of the greatest moments in Donald-Wolverine’s history including his time spent with Weapon X and the Uncanny X-Men!
Travel to the near future where chaos rules as Pete-Skull transforms Duckburg into a super-hero-less wasteland. Only Old Donald Duck can turn the tide, but he’s given up his battling days and prefers naps and his grandma’s apple pie over fighting villains. But when Mickey-Hawkeye comes knocking at the door with Goofy-Hulk at his side, Wolverine-Donald has to make a choice! Will a trip down memory lane change his mind to save the world? Or will the lure of the backyard hammock and a long nap keep him from popping his claws one last time?
In addition, Apple has struck a deal with Legendary Entertainment to develop multiple spinoff series set in the so-called Monsterverse….
…The official description for Season 1 states: “Following the thunderous battle between Godzilla and the Titans that leveled San Francisco and the shocking revelation that monsters are real, ‘Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’ tracks two siblings (Sawai, Watabe) following in their father’s footsteps to uncover their family’s connection to the secretive organization known as Monarch. Clues lead them into the world of monsters and ultimately down the rabbit hole to Army officer Lee Shaw (Kurt Russell, Wyatt Russell), taking place in the 1950s and half a century later where Monarch is threatened by what Shaw knows.”…
…An earthquake and an eclipse weren’t the only natural rarities that happened in New York City this past week. Did you hear about the sasquatch in Central Park? The makers of “Sasquatch Sunset” sure hope you did.
That’s because the sasquatch was a costume and his stroll through the park was a publicity push for the new film from the brothers David and Nathan Zellner. Opening in New York on Friday, the movie spends a year in the wild with a sasquatch pack — a male and female (Nathan Zellner and Riley Keough) and two younger sasquatches (Jesse Eisenberg and Christophe Zajac-Denek) — as they eat, have sex, fight predators and reckon with death.
Droll but big-hearted, the movie sits at the intersection of the ad campaign for Jack Link’s beef jerky, the 1987 comedy “Harry and the Hendersons” and a 1970s nature documentary, down to the hippie-vibe soundtrack.
…Is it a family-friendly movie?
KEOUGH It depends on the family. [Laughs] I think the audience is everybody. It might be scary for small children.
DAVID ZELLNER It’s rated R for nudity, which is the funniest thing.
(12) CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER. Meanwhile, Camestros Felapton has fled the country, leaving behind to distract pursuers “McEdifice in: MYCOPHAGE! Part 1”.
Cliff “Edge” McEdifice is MYCOPHAGE the intoxicating new thriller from Timothy the Talking Cat, Straw Puppy and the ghost of Michael Crichton.
It is the Year 1995 and Cliff “Edge” McEdifice (ancestor of future soldier Chiselled McEdifice) is entangled in a web of conspiracy, tendrils and webs.
Paramount Pictures officially announces the next Star Trek movie, which is scheduled to arrive in theaters in 2025. As reported in January, the next Star Trek movie isn’t the long-delayed, Chris Pine-led Star Trek 4 produced by J.J. Abrams, which remains in development at Paramount. Rather, the next Star Trek movie is an origin story directed by Toby Haynes (Star Wars: Andor) and written by Seth Grahame-Smith (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter).
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Arnie Fenner, Kathy Sullivan, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
(1) LAST NIGHT’S DOCTOR WHO. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Last night we had the annual BBC Children in Need which is an annual charity TV marathon (which to date has raised over £1 billion). And in the mix Doctor Who was there.
Comedian Desiree Burch unravels Octavia Butler’s visionary 1993 novel Parable of the Sower and its sequel Parable Of The Talents, an eerily-prescient dystopian portrait of society in collapse after being torn apart by climate change and corporate greed – with a populist demagogue US president who rides to power with the slogan “Make American Great Again”.
Oh, and the story – pure fantasy of course, imagined by Butler three decades ago in the early 1990s – is set initially in 2024.
Now this all seems to Desiree just a little bit too close to reality for comfort. But is there hope – even optimism – beneath the surface of this chillingly bleak vision?
The Tardis has landed on Tubi. Viewers in the U.S. and Canada can now watch every episode of Classic Doctor Who and Classic Doctor Who: The Animated Lost Stories on the free ad-supported service.
If you plan to watch Classic Doctor Who in its entirety, be prepared to put in a lot of time. Doctor Who is the longest running action-adventure series in the world. Classic Doctor Who aired from 1963 to 1989 and has over 600 episodes. Tubi created a “New to Who” collection to ease in new ‘Whovians’ — a term coined by the sci-fi show’s legion of fans….
…Now the Hollywood strikes are over, networks and streaming services are having to make decisions about their existing properties, with it being expected that many might fall foul of an untimely axing due to rising costs after production on all projects was stalled while the writers and actors protested for fairer compensation.
While the first season of the fantasy series, adapted from Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse novels, did big business for Netflix – even spawning a video game spin-off – season two struggled to break through in a major way, which is believed to have led to the service’s decision considering the show’s large budget.
Other shows that will no longer return include animated shows Agent Elvis and Captain Fall as well as Kim Cattrall-starring series Glamorous and sci-fi comedy Farzar.
It’s late 1937, and you’re F. Scott Fitzgerald, the once-celebrated writer, and you’re getting paid $1,000 a week, which, especially during the Depression, and even for the gilded coffers of MGM, isn’t toy money.
From your place at the Garden of Allah apartments on Sunset, in what is now West Hollywood, you might decide to amble the couple of miles to Hollywood Boulevard, to the Stanley Rose Book Shop, knuckled right up against Musso and Frank. There, you might find other scribblers, with names like Saroyan and Steinbeck, to share a convivial drink nearby; some of Hollywood Boulevard’s many bookshops are open almost as late as the bars.
Or you’re Ray Bradbury, and on a late April day in 1946 — April the 24th, if you must know — you head downtown, to Booksellers Row, centered on 6th Street between Hill and Figueroa. You’d get there by bus or Red Car, or on your bicycle, because you do not drive, not even one single block, not since you saw that gory accident about 10 years earlier.
You walk into Fowler Brothers bookstore, which opened in 1888 as a church supply shop, and by the time it would close its doors for good in 1994, it was the oldest surviving bookstore in the city. On that day, a brilliant and fetching book clerk named Maggie McClure caught his attention; Bradbury caught hers because she thought he was shoplifting books into his vast trench coat. They married not quite 18 months later…..
From details about the voice actors, to insights into plot devices and influences – and even a few answers to enduring questions – here are a batch of facts we learned about nostalgic cartoons in 2021. Vote up the ones that are perfectly Smurfy!
Actor and comedian Paul Winchell was a man of many talents; he was a ventriloquist and also an inventor, building and patenting a mechanical heart in 1963.
Winchell began voice acting for Hanna-Barbera during the late 1960s, notably appearing in Winnie-the-Pooh featurettes. As the voice of Tigger, Winchell won a Grammy for Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too in 1974. When The Smurfs first aired in 1981, he provided the voice for the antagonist, Gargamel.
While Winchell navigated acting and performing, he simultaneously invented and patented dozens of devices. His artificial heart design, which he donated to the University of Utah, was fundamental in developing the model that was used in 1982 for the first artificial heart transplant.
(7) KICKSTARTER FOR VARLEY ADAPTATION. John Varley encourages fans to support Jean-Paul Tetu’s Kickstarter: “Thémis – The Next Frontier”.
Jean-Paul Tetu… has a small CGI company and is a fan of my work. He had been tinkering with scenes from my novel Titan, and you can see the results here.
I think it’s pretty impressive. Since this is a crowdfunding site you probably can see where I’m going with this. If you are interested in seeing my most popular work turned into a 6-part TV series, you can contribute.
As of this writing, $5,882 of the $65,502 goal has been pledged with 32 days remaining.
Ochse won the Bram Stoker Award for his first novel, Scarecrow Gods, in 2005 and subsequently received additional nominations, Redemption Roadshow (2009 finalist for the Bram Stoker Award for Long Fiction); The Crossing of Aldo Ray (2010 finalist for the Bram Stoker Award for Short Fiction); Multiplex Fandango (2012 finalist for the Bram Stoker Award for Collection); and Righteous (2013 finalist for the Bram Stoker Award for Short Fiction). He also won four New-Mexico Arizona Book Awards.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born November 18, 1939 — Margaret Atwood, 84. Well, there’s that work called The Handmaid’s Tale that’s garnering a lot of discussion now. (Not my my cup of Tea, Earl Grey, hot.) There’s the excellent MaddAddam Trilogy which I wholeheartedly recommend, and I’ve heard good things about The Penelopiad. What else do you like of hers?
Born November 18, 1946 — Alan Dean Foster, 77. There’s fifteen Pip and Flinx novels?!? Well the first five or so were superb. They’re on Audible so I may give the three a re-listen. Spellsinger series is tasty too. Can’t say anything about his SW work beyond the most excellent Splinter of the Mind’s Eye which was the first Star Wars novel authorized by George Lucas.
Born November 18, 1950 — Michael Swanwick, 73. I will single out The Iron Dragon’s Daughter and Jack Faust as the novels I remember liking the best. Between 1999 and 2003, he had nine stories nominated for the Hugo Award and won at Aussiecon 3, ConJosé, and Torcon 3. His short fiction is obviously superb and I see the usual suspects have the most excellent Tales of Old Earth collection with this lovely cover.
Born November 18, 1952 — Doug Fratz. Long-time fan and prolific reviewer for the New York Review of Science Fiction and Science Fiction Age who also published a number of zines including the superbly titled Alienated Critic. He was nominated for Best Fanzine Hugo four times. Mike has a remembrance of him here. (Died 2016.)
Born November 18, 1961 — Steven Moffat, 62. Showrunner, writer and executive producer of Doctor Who and Sherlock Holmes. His first Doctor Who script was for Doctor Who: The Curse of Fatal Death, a charity production that you can find here and I suggest you go watch now. He also co-wrote The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, a most excellent animated film. He has deservedly won four Hugo Awards, all for Doctor Who.
Born November 18, 1953 — Alan Moore, 70. His best book is Voice of the Fire which admittedly isn’t genre. Though the first volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is very close. Pity about the film which surprisingly has a forty-four percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. Have they no sense of good film making? I’m also fond of The Ballad of Halo Jones and Swamp Thing work that he did as well. And let’s not forget that The Watchmen won a well-deserved Hugo at Nolacon II.
… after months of rebuilding following an explosive initial launchin April, SpaceX made a second attempt at launching its deep-space rocket system Starship, but not all went according to plan.
The uncrewed Starship spacecraft launchedaboard the most powerful rocket ever built on Saturday morning, but both were lost shortly after liftoff.
The Super Heavy rocket booster ignited its 33 massive engines and Starship experienced a safe liftoff. SpaceX tried “hot staging” for the first time, essentially a step in which the spacecraft separated from the rocket booster by blunt force trauma.
After hot staging, the rocket booster exploded in a fireball over the Gulf of Mexico. Starship initially continued on just fine before SpaceX lost the spacecraft’s signal and triggered the system’s software to terminate the flight so it didn’t veer off course.
Starship was intended to fly nearly a lap around the planet before returning to Earth, but data from this second test flight will be used to determine SpaceX’s next steps in making humanity “multiplanetary.”
SpaceX, Elon Musk’s spaceflight company, launched its Starship rocket from the coast of South Texas on Saturday, a mammoth vehicle that could alter the future of space transportation and help NASA return astronauts to the moon.
Saturday’s flight of Starship, a powerful vehicle designed to carry NASA astronauts to the moon, was not a complete success. SpaceX did not achieve the test launch’s ultimate objective — a partial trip around the world ending in a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.
But the test flight, the vehicle’s second, did show that the company had fixed key issues that arose during the earlier test operation in April. All 33 engines in the vehicle’s lower booster stage fired, and the rocket made it through stage separation — when the booster falls away and the six engines of the upper stage light up to carry the vehicle to space….
… According to SpaceX’s “fail fast, learn faster” approach toward rocket design, successfully avoiding a repeat of past failures counts as major progress.
However, the second flight revealed new challenges that Mr. Musk’s engineers must overcome.
Soon after stage separation, the booster exploded — a “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” in the jargon of rocket engineers. The upper-stage Starship spacecraft continued heading toward orbit for several more minutes, reaching an altitude of more than 90 miles, but then SpaceX lost contact with it after the flight termination system detonated….
(12) BLINDED BY THE LIGHT. [Item by Bruce D. Arthurs.] A post on Mastodon from Shannon Coffey linked to an Eye article reviewing Wheels of Light: Designs for British Light Shows 1970-1990 written by Kevin Foakes, about the tech and artists behind the light shows popular at music events back in the day. Besides being a pretty cool subject all on its own, the article also mentions one artist who created some of the color wheels through which projections were made was David Hardy, who I recognize much more readily for his many examples of space art. “The fantastic light trip” at Eye Magazine.
Kevin Foakes’ Wheels of Light: Designs for British Light Shows 1970-1990 is book nine in Four Corners’ Irregulars series, intended to present ‘a visual history of modern British culture’, writes John L. Walters. The arcane tale begins in the 1960s, when artists and designers such as Mark Boyle (Boyle Family), Keith Albarn, Five Acre Lights and Barney Bubbles made shows that would accompany performances in venues such as UFO and Middle Earth in London.
As underground music became more visible (and profitable) a small number of entrepreneurs started supplying the demand for light shows at gigs and discos. The companies they started – Optikinetics, Pluto, Orion, Light Fantastic – and their visual archives are at the core of this book, drawing heavily on the collection and recollections of Optikinetics’ Neil Rice.
There are two ways to contemplate the question Where do we go when we die? One is philosophical, ultimately unanswerable; the other is logistical. Humans, being human, have tended to see them as being intertwined: The many traditions we’ve devised for handling our remains are meant to honor the selves that left those bodies behind.
The seven people pictured here have chosen to send their ashes, or in some cases a sample of their DNA, into outer space. They have contracted with Celestis, one of a handful of companies offering such services. Celestis has launched 17 of these so-called memorial spaceflights since 1994. Some will rocket straight up and descend, some will orbit Earth, some will be sent to the surface of the moon and some will simply hurtle into space and keep on going. (Celestis sends its cargo on spacecraft undertaking unrelated scientific and commercial missions. Packages start at around $2,500.)…
(14) SURVEILLANCE CULTURE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] “Campus surveillance: students and professors decry sensors in buildings” in Nature. “Privacy campaigners fear that the devices could be used for disciplinary purposes, and some universities have deactivated them after protests.”
Lengthy debates are talking place on many university campuses in many countries. A number of universities are installing ‘sensors’ (‘cameras’) in university labs and offices. A number of these were originally installed in 2020/1 to ensure CoVID regs were being adhered to. Now, it seems that the reason is to ensure that university facilities are being used efficiently. However some feel that the reason is more sinister and that evidence could be gathered for disciplinary purposes. Others still say that some offices are empty for many days/weeks in a year because staff are out in the field, often in other countries, getting samples and data, so using the cameras for university space efficiency can be misleading.
The end of the article says…
Cory Doctorow, a digital-privacy campaigner who advises the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argues that you do not need be a COVID-19 conspiracy theorist to be concerned about surveillance creeping into the workplace. “During lockdown, we saw this fantastic acceleration of disciplinary technologies across all sorts of domains from employment to leisure. I am vaccinated, I have a QR code showing this on my phone and I believe in contact tracing, but I also think that it’s completely reasonable to worry about all this,” he says.
One of the first questions men ask Angela Liu on dating apps is “What are you reading?” The question is a softball for Ms. Liu, a self-proclaimed lover of literature. “I really care about the human condition and emotions and stuff,” she said.
What she has noticed, however, is that many men aren’t into those kinds of books, and a question that may have been intended to screen her often ends up backfiring.
“I can’t stand dudes who just read self-help books or things specifically related to the job that they’re doing and that’s all they read,” Ms. Liu, 27, said on Friday at a book club for singles in Manhattan.
There’s something flirty and magnetic about a physical book that tablets and smartphones can’t really capture — the idea of meeting someone in a library, in the aisle of a bookstore or while reading on the subway, for instance, remains stubbornly high on the list of many people’s romantic fantasies. Although there might be more romantic activities a single person could do on a Friday night in New York City, very few beat potentially stumbling into your next bibliophile boo while surrounded by shelf after shelf of sweet prose.
“I love when people have bookshelves, because I just go there immediately and stare at what they have,” Ms. Liu said.
At a meeting of McNally Jackson’s new After Hours Book Club (tag line: “Read, flirt, sip”), single attendees including Ms. Liu gathered at the bookseller’s location in South Street Seaport, a former maritime hub turned shopping district in Lower Manhattan, for an evening of wine, beer and discussion about “Dogs of Summer,” a novel by Andrea Abreu….
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Bruce D. Arthurs, Dann, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Lise Andreasen.]
(1) WHEN GRAVITY FAILS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Chuck Jones’ rules for Coyote cartoons said it works best when gravity is what defeats him. Instead, the change in management at Warner Bros seems to be what has claimed his long-awaited film. The mixed live/animated Coyote Vs. Acme is rumored to have been consigned to the dustbin, despite being a finished product. There it will join Bat Girl and Scoob Holiday Haunt!, both already brought to an ignominious end by the Bros. “‘Coyote Vs. Acme’: Finished Live/Action Animated Pic Shelved Completely By Warner Bros As Studio Takes $30M Tax Write-off” – Deadline has the astonishing story.
In another maneuver by the David Zaslav-run Warner Bros Discovery to kill movies, we hear on very good authority that Warner Bros will not be releasing the live-action/animated hybrid Coyote vs. Acmewith the conglom taking an estimated $30M write-down on the $70M production. We understand the write-down for the pic was applied to the recently reported Q3.
This reps the third time that Zaslav’s Warner Bros has pulled the plug on a movie greenlit by the previous Warner Media administration; the other two being the Max destined Bat Girl and the animated Scoob Holiday Haunt!.
The difference here is that Coyote vs. Acme is a completed movie with very good test scores, 14 points above the family norm. We’re told that the cash-strapped Warners finds that it’s not worth the cost to release theatrically, or to sell to other buyers (and there are parties who are interested for their own streaming services; we hear Amazon kicked the tires). After reporting a mixed third quarter, the best means for Warners money is a tax write-off. At one point, Coyote vs. Acme was dated on July 21, 2023 for theatrical release before getting pulled; that date placed by the ultimate $1.4 billion grossing Warner Bros biggest hit of all-time, Barbie….
… Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck—who write together as James S.A. Corey—have nixed any return to the world of The Expanse, [but] they’re still working on sci-fi projects together, as today’s big announcement attests.
Fans can look forward to the arrival of The Mercy of Gods, a space opera trilogy “that sees humanity fighting for its survival in a war as old as the universe itself,” according to a press release from publisher Orbit. This book will kick off the Captive’s War trilogy, and it will be released August 6, 2024….
Just about every temptation for a hungry writer is here. Big bucks for the winners. Feedback on every submission from distinguished judges–at least, one assumes they’re distinguished, since they’re finalists for important literary awards. Monthly stipends! Consideration by literary agencies! What more could a contest offer, even if it does charge a $15 submission fee?
Well…
You’ll probably already have noticed some…oddities…both in the screenshot above and on the contest page. The mis-spelling of Hemingway, to start (plus, it’s PEN–it’s an acronym–not Pen). The curious absence of judges’ names. Guidelines that fail to state when winners will be announced and how they will be notified. An entry form with a copy-and-paste box for submitting your entry (have fun reading, no-name judges)….
…Black Mirror knock-offs are a scourge of the streaming era, which unfortunately incentivizes dressed-up spins on previous successes over truly cerebral or ambitious imaginations of the future….
(5) JEOPARDY! Last night’s episode of Jeopardy! devoted an entire category to science fictional worlds. Andrew Porter found these responses noteworthy.
Category: At a Loss for Worlds
Answer: Survivors escape to Bronson Beta in the 1933 Philip Wylie & Edwin Balmer novel “When” this happens
Wrong question: What is “When Tomorrow Comes”?
No one could ask, “When Worlds Collide”
Same category: It’s the real name of the planet referred to in the title of a 1965 Frank Herbert novel.
He bet it all, got it wrong: “What is Dune?”
Correct question: What is Arrakis?
Same category: At the end of Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s End” this world is destroyed.
John Coxon didn’t, Alison Scott would’ve done, and Liz Batty tried. We round up the rest of the news we didn’t talk about in Episode 95, featuring a discussion of how the Chengdu Worldcon went, and the much-anticipated reappearance of THE LIZ BAT. Listen here!
In the U.K., watching retailer John Lewis’ Christmas ad is as much of a festive ritual as decorating the tree or exchanging gifts. This year, with a different agency and marketing strategy, the brand is hoping to cement its role in both old and new holiday traditions.
The new ad, titled “Snapper,” follows the unusual tale of a Venus flytrap. While at a flea market with his family, a boy discovers a seed packet promising to grow into the “perfect Christmas tree.”
Instead, a carnivorous plant emerges from the soil. Though the boy loves Snapper, the mischievous plant causes disruption and is eventually banished outside after it grows too big for the house.
On Christmas morning, the boy leaves his family’s normal tree to bring a gift to the Venus flytrap. Snapper spits out confetti and gifts in return, inspiring the family to embrace an unconventional addition to the festivities. …
Astronaut Frank Borman, who commanded Apollo 8’s historic Christmas 1968 flight that circled the moon 10 times and paved the way for the lunar landing the next year, has died. He was 95.
Borman died Tuesday in Billings, Montana, according to NASA.
Borman also led troubled Eastern Airlines in the 1970s and early ’80s after leaving the astronaut corps….
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born November 9, 1921 — Alfred Coppel. Have I ever mentioned how much I love pulp? Everything from the writers to the artwork to the magazines themselves are so, so cool. And this writer was one of the most prolific such authors of the Fifties and Sixties. That he was also a SF writer is an added bonus. Indeed, his first science fiction story was “Age of Unreason” in a 1947 Amazing Stories. Under the pseudonym of Robert Cham Gilman, he wrote the Rhada sequence of galactic space opera novels aimed at a young adult market. Wiki claims he was writing under A.C. Marin as well but I cannot find any record of this. (Died 2004.)
Born November 9, 1924 — Lawrence T. Shaw. A Hugo Award-winning fan, author, editor and literary agent. In the Forties and Fifties, Larry Shaw edited Nebula, Infinity Science Fiction and Science Fiction Adventures. He received a Special Committee Award during the 1984 Worldcon for lifetime achievement as an editor. His Axe fanzine (co-edited with his wife Noreen) was nominated at Chicon III for a Hugo. (Died 1985.)
Born November 9, 1954 — Rob Hansen, 69. British fan, active since the Seventies who has edited and co-edited numerous fanzines including his debut production Epsilon. And he was the 1984 Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund delegate. His nonfiction works such as Then: Science Fiction Fandom in the UK: 1930-1980, lasted updated just a few years ago, are invaluable.
Born November 9, 1988 — Tahereh Mafi, 35. Iranian-American whose Furthermore, a YA novel about a pale girl living in a world of both color and magic of which she has neither, I highly recommended it. Whichwood is a companion novel to this work. She also has a young adult dystopian thriller series.
Born November 9, 1989 — Alix E. Harrow, 34. Winner at Dublin 2019 of the Best Short Story Hugo for “Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies” which also was nominated for a BSFA and Nebula Award. Other Hugo-nominated work: The Ten Thousand Doors of January was nomination at CoNZealand; “A Spindle Splintered” novella and “Mr. death” short story at Chicon 8; and “A Mirror Mended” novella this year. She has three excellent novels to date, The Ten Thousand Doors of January,The Once and Future Witches which was nominated for a WFA and the just released Starling House. She has a double handful of short stories not yet collected anywhere. More’s the pity.
The actor who played C-3PO in Star Wars said “it feels like it is time” to sell the costumes, props and scripts he kept from the iconic films.
Anthony Daniels, 77, is parting company with items from his personal collection via Hertfordshire-based auctioneer Propstore from Thursday.
The famous gold helmet he wore for his character in the first film from 1977 is estimated to sell for up to £1m.
Daniels said he was excited for his collection to “find a good home”.
“I realised I had these items and they’re not unloved but they are unlooked at – we don’t have them crowding the sitting room,” he said, explaining why he has chosen to sell the items now.
“Will I feel sad to part with them? No. I will enjoy the fact people will cherish and display them.”…
(12) FANHISTORY ART ZOOM ON YOUTUBE. Fanac.org’s two-part Zoom with a panel of fanartists now can be viewed on YouTube.
Part 1
Title: Evolution of Art(ists) (Pt 1 of 2): Grant Canfield, Tim Kirk, Jim Shull, and Dan Steffan
Description: In part 1 of this 2-part session, you’ll hear their “origin stories”, their influences, how they found science fiction fandom, and what they perceive as the unique benefits of fandom to young artists. You’ll find out why artists should avoid hecto, and torturous tales of justifying margins by hand. There are intriguing insights into adjusting one’s art to the reproduction medium, and how fandom helped people along, especially towards professional careers. Larger than life figures make their appearance, including several stories of Bill Rotsler.
There’s plenty more, including their views on Carl Barks, why Dan started “Lizard Inn”, Jim’s take on the slippery slope to having a fanzine too big to staple without an industrial stapler, Tim on his deep desire to tell stories, and Grant’s opinion of “Starling”. The fun continues in Part 2.
Part 2
Title: Evolution of Art(ists) (Pt 2 of 2): Grant Canfield, Tim Kirk, Jim Shull, and Dan Steffan
Description: In part 2 of this 2-part session, the fan art discussion continues, with more on professional careers as well. The conversation ranges from Tolkien’s house to Harlan Ellison’s house, from “The Last Dangerous Visions” to Bill Gibson, from Harlan Ellison stories to BNFs that had an impact. There are more Rotsler stories too. You’ll hear about silent jam sessions, “Esoteric Fan Art Tales”, and the impact that conventions had on artists who worked in isolation. A real treat is the slideshow of samples of our panelists’ art, with their live comments on what each piece represents.
Q&A starts about 45 minutes into the video, with comments as well as questions, including Ted White’s discussion of the impact of Mondrian’s work on modern magazine design. Lest you believe that fanzines are a thing of the past, the video wraps up with a plug for an upcoming paper fanzine by faned Geri Sullivan.
“After the alignment, the world will change forever. Everything will start over.” Dark Star Pictures has released an official US trailer for an indie sci-fi action thriller film from France titled The Gravity, made by filmmaker Cédric Ido. This intially premiered at the 2022 Toronto Film Festival last year and it already opened in France earlier this year. Finally set for a US release on VOD starting in November. A mysterious cosmic event upsets the Earth’s gravity and sets the sky ablaze in a red hue, creating chaos in a futuristic Parisian suburb. This French “genre-busting” thriller is more of a story about street culture in the suburbs, following a local band of teenagers and their feud with other residents in the area….
Meantime there five days remain in the Kickstarter to raise funds for “Space Command Forgiveness: Post-Production”. At this time fans have pledged almost $52,000 of the $60,000 goal.
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Rich Lynch, Lise Andreasen, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Ersatz Culture, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]
