Your Tribbles Grow Bald But Not Your Kzin

Posted on April 11, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) SINKING THE NAVAL ACADEMY LIBRARY. The New York Times reveals “Who’s In and Who’s Out at the Naval Academy’s Library?” (Behind a paywall). “An order by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office resulted in a purge of books critical of racism but preserved volumes defending white power.”

Gone is “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Maya Angelou’s transformative best-selling 1970 memoir chronicling her struggles with racism and trauma.

Two copies of “Mein Kampf” by Adolf Hitler are still on the shelves.

Gone is “Memorializing the Holocaust,” Janet Jacobs’s 2010 examination of how female victims of the Holocaust have been portrayed and remembered.

“The Camp of the Saints” by Jean Raspail is still on the shelves. The 1973 novel, which envisions a takeover of the Western world by immigrants from developing countries, has been embraced by white supremacists and promoted by Stephen Miller, a senior White House adviser.

“The Bell Curve,” which argues that Black men and women are genetically less intelligent than white people, is still there. But a critique of the book was pulled.

The Trump administration’s decision to order the banning of certain books from the U.S. Naval Academy’s library is a case study in ideological censorship, alumni and academics say.

Political appointees in the Department of the Navy’s leadership decided which books to remove. A look at the list showed that antiracists were targeted, laying bare the contradictions in the assault on so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies….

(2) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to wolf down lamb with Carolyn Ives Gilman in Episode 251 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Carolyn Ives Gilman was one of my earliest guests of the podcast, appearing all the way back on Episode 5. Nine years and two days later, the night she was taking part in the latest Charm City Spec, we decided it was time to chat and chew for you again.

Gilman’s books include her first novel Halfway Human, which has been called “one of the most compelling explorations of gender and power in recent SF;” Dark Orbit, a space exploration adventure; and Isles of the Forsaken and Ison of the Isles, a two-book fantasy about culture clash and revolution. Some of her short fiction can be found in Aliens of the Heart and Candle in a Bottle, both from Aqueduct Press, and in Arkfall and The Ice Owl, from Arc Manor.

Her short fiction has also appeared in Analog, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Interzone, Universe, Full Spectrum, Realms of Fantasy, and others. She has been nominated for the Nebula Award three times and for the Hugo twice. Gilman lives in Washington, D.C., and works as a freelance writer and museum consultant. She is also author of seven nonfiction books about North American frontier and Native history.

We discussed the way her ideas aren’t small enough to squeeze into short stories, how she shelved a novel she’d written because she felt her imagination at its wildest wasn’t ridiculous enough to match reality, whether our personal archives will be trashed or treasured, the reason she doesn’t feel she can teach writing, why authors need to respect what the story wants, why she’s terrible at reacting to writing prompts and how she does it anyway, how she generally starts a story not with character or plot but with setting, the ethics and morality of zoos and museums, how she manages to makes the impossible seem possible, our shared inability to predict which stories editors will want, and much more.

(3) TUTTLE BOOK REVIEWS. Lisa Tuttle’s “The best science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup” for the Guardian covers Sleeper Beach by Nick Harkaway; Some Body Like Me by Lucy Lapinska; City of All Seasons by Oliver K Langmead & Aliya Whiteley; Rose/House by Arkady Martine; and The Cat Bride by Charlotte Tierney.

(4) THE NEBUGO AWARD. When it comes to the Hugo’s novella category, Eddie believes in “Casting the net a little wider” at Borrowed and Blue. Or at least as widely as the titles on Eddie’s own list of faves of 2024. (And if nothing else, you might find something that belongs on your own TBR pile.)

…I shall now proceed to suggest that the collective wisdom of the Hugo jury this year was, in one meaningful way, somewhat questionable. The novella category for this year consists entirely of nominees from a single publisher, with all but one from a single imprint. That seems to me to be a rather myopic view of the field; I think we can look much more widely than that.

Without further ado, the Nebugo Awards Novella & Novel shortlists (commentary for the books that were on my favourite of the year list for 2024 is cribbed from there; comment for those which weren’t is new)….

(5) SLAN. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] When the eldest (a 90-year-old) member of our local SF group came to last month’s meeting with a suitcase of books, there were some interesting titles. I grabbed four including Slan by van Vogt. When I got home, I found I already had a copy on my unread bookshelf that had embarrassingly been there unread for nigh on four decades (I’m getting on a bit myself)… Anyway, waste not want not, I dived in and then after generated a review for SF² Concatenation which has been posted ahead of its next season edition due to go up next week.

Van Vogt’s Slan is his first novel and something of a minor SF classic. Minor, because it has not really stood the test of time despite winning the Retro-Hugo for 1941 in 2016 at the MidAmeriCon II Worldcon in Kansas City. ‘The Retro for 1941’ I hear you cry? Well, yes, because the novel was originally serialized in the Astounding Science Fiction over their September–December editions in 1940. But is it any good? Well, truth be told, opinion is divided. First, the story…

The review is here.

(6) SOUNDS LIKE A GREAT JOB. [Item by Steven French.] The Doctor’s new companion is interviewed in advance of the new season kicking off tomorrow: “’I can’t believe I’m paid to watch Ncuti Gatwa!’: Doctor Who’s boundary-pushing new companion, Varada Sethu” in the Guardian.

Most teenagers rebel against their parents in small ways: sneaking out, stealing a nip of Cointreau, arriving home past curfew. Not Varada Sethu, the Newcastle-raised actor who’s about to grace screens as new companion Belinda Chandra in the forthcoming season of Doctor Who. Her rebellion took on a go-big-or-go-home attitude befitting a future screen star: when she was 18 she entered, and subsequently won, the Miss Newcastle beauty pageant. “Oh my God, I thought that was gonna be buried somewhere!” she exclaims when I bring it up. The whole thing was “kind of an accident”, she explains: “My sister and I were walking around in Eldon Square shopping centre, and they asked us if we wanted to enter, and I thought: ‘Yeah, I’ll give it a go’ – I thought it might piss off my parents a bit!”

The decision to enter definitely caused “a bit of friction”, but Sethu’s parents didn’t raise a quitter. “On the day we had the rehearsals, I called my mum up and said: ‘I don’t want to do this, can you please take me home?’ And Mum was like: ‘Well, you’ve signed up for it, so you’re doing it,’” she recalls. “None of us expected me to win – the whole thing was a bit of a bodge job for me!”

Now 32, the beauty pageant world “doesn’t really align with” Sethu’s value system, and her chosen vocation is miles – galaxies, really – away from that world of tiaras and special skills. In recent years, thanks to a starring role in the acclaimed Star Wars series Andor and her forthcoming turn as Belinda, as well as a part in the 2018 BBC drama Hard Sun, she’s become known as a go-to British sci-fi actor. “You don’t often see brown people in space – well, you do more than in other genres, because they’re futuristic – but I don’t think I necessarily saw myself as part of the sci-fi world,” she says. “So I don’t quite know how I ended up here, but I love it, and I’m very, very happy to be here.”…

(7) THE MOUSE AND THE TARDIS. “Has Disney+ Changed ‘Doctor Who’? U.S. and U.K. Fans Discuss.” in the New York Times. Link bypasses NYT paywall. Perhaps a spoiler warning is a good idea here.

…So the stakes are high this season. Four “Doctor Who” fans from the United States and Britain spoke to The New York Times via video calls to share their views on Gatwa’s performance, on Davies’s return, and on how the show has changed since Disney+ got involved. Their comments have been edited for length and clarity….

Vera Wylde, 43. Vermont.

As a performer — and I do not say this lightly — [Gatwa] is the most charismatic person who has taken on the role. He commands the camera immediately.

I do have an issue, in that I feel like I don’t truly know him as well as I would like. The surface level is complete charisma, bright as the sun. I got that. What’s underneath that? I’m still working on that.

I had far, far more feelings about [Davies] coming back as showrunner than I did about Disney being involved. At a fundamental level, I am frustrated with him because I had hoped that he wouldn’t just slip back like it’s 2005 again and approach seasons in the same way — which is exactly what he did. It’s mostly standalone, and there’s a mystery box that is really blatant, and it ends in a two-part finale with the return of a classic-era villain….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

April 11, 1963 — Gregory Keyes, 62.

By Paul Weimer: I started reading Gregory Keyes at the very start of my reviewing life. This was in 1999, and I was just started to test the waters of connecting with reviewers and publishers and talking about books to people I didn’t know (I’ve always talked about books to people I did know). In an electronic newsletter put out by Barnes and Noble in those days, they mentioned the forthcoming alternate history fantasy book by an author new to me, J. Gregory Keyes. (Aas Keyes styled himself, for these books).

The idea of an alternate world where Newton discovered the laws of Magic was instant catnip for me, and I got the book as soon as it came out, and the sequels as well. Come for the alternate history with magic and angels, stay for an alternate United States with Bluebeard as a founding father.

His oeuvre since has mellowed out a bit, with lots of big phat fantasy of the first water, the doorstoppers that he knows the minor and major keys and plays them well (The Briar King series, for example,The High and Faraway series, The Basilisk Throne, and even Elder Scrolls novels). He’s done a bunch of other tie-ins and novelizations, from Marvel to Godzilla to Star Wars).

I talk of mellowing out because I eventually went back to his first novels, before Newton’s Cannon…the Waterborn duology. And like Newton’s Cannon, they are inventive, strange and weirdly wild in a way some of his post-Cannon fiction is not. The world of the Waterborn is something you don’t see so much — a relatively young fantasy world, that hasn’t had the thousands of years of history in the past yet, but that future is definitely stretching ahead of it.

I can’t fault the fact that he has found success in more traditional fantasy novels, but I do kind of miss the author who had Goddesses of Rivers begging lovers to kill the river they emptied into, and the idea of Benjamin Franklin doing alchemy. (To be fair, The High and Faraway does capture a bit of that early wildness once more). Like the realms of faerie in many of his books, Keyes’ work has been somewhat tamed…but not quite completely. Not quite. But if I think of authors who write to fantasy doorstopper length, sure there is Martin and Williams and Jordan and Elliott…but there is also Keyes as well. He should always be part of that conversation.

I have not yet tried his latest novel, The Wind that Sweeps the Stars.

Happy birthday!

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal proposes a cure that is more work than the syndrome.
Bizarro is ready for tax season in Oz.
Bound and Gagged needs more tech to solve this problem.
Dinosaur Comics discusses titles.
Dog Eat Doug complains about overpowered D&D characters.
Ink Pen shouldn’t taunt.
Pearls Before Swine has a friendship tip.

(10) BUTTERBEER OREOS. These started out as a viral fake. They might still be, although there’s a new wave of claims they’re really going to show up in stores.

(11) CHARITY AUCTION. [Item by Froonium Ricky.] Maureen Ryan, genre-loving tv critic and author of Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood, is currently holding an eBay auction (see “Moryanwatcher on eBay”) of various TV items, including a Star Trek: Strange New Worlds “Subspace Rhapsody” T-Shirt, some X-Files promo items, a “Warrior” hoodie, some Game of Thrones magnets, and a Farscape script and actual piece of the Moya set. All the proceeds go to various excellent Mo-chosen charities!

(12) GETTING TO THE BOTTOM. “3D scan of Titanic sheds new light on doomed liner’s final moments” at CNN.

A new documentary reveals the incredible results of a project to create 3D underwater scans of the doomed ocean liner RMS Titanic, which sank 113 years ago.

“Titanic: The Digital Resurrection” tells the story of how deep-sea mapping company Magellan created “the most precise model of the Titanic ever created: a full-scale, 1:1 digital twin, accurate down to the rivet,” according to a statement from National Geographic, published Tuesday….

… The 90-minute National Geographic documentary allows filmmaker Anthony Geffen “to reconstruct the ship’s final moments—challenging long-held assumptions and revealing new insights into what truly happened on that fateful night in 1912,” according to the statement.

In the film, Titanic analyst Parks Stephenson, metallurgist Jennifer Hooper and master mariner Chris Hearn walk around a full-scale reproduction of the ship, highlighting previously hidden details.

One key finding is a visibly open steam valve, which corroborates accounts that engineers manned their stations in Boiler Room Two for more than two hours after Titanic hit the iceberg.

This maintained the electricity supply and allowed crew to send distress signals, meaning the 35 men in the boiler room may have sacrificed themselves to save hundreds of other people.

The team also reconstruct hull fragments found scattered around the site, revealing that Titanic didn’t split in two, but “was violently torn apart, ripping through first-class cabins where prominent passengers like J.J. Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim may have sought refuge as the ship went down.”

The scan also helps to exonerate First Officer William Murdoch, who has been accused of abandoning his post. The position of a lifeboat davit, a piece of equipment used to lower the craft, corroborates testimony that Murdoch was, in fact, washed out to sea as the crew prepared to launch it….

(13) MIKHAIL TIKHONOV Q&A. [Item by Steven French.] As the man says, the possibilities are indeed vast … “Q&A: How to (theoretically) spot an alien” at Phys.org

Are we alone in the universe? The answer to one of humanity’s biggest questions is complicated by a basic reality: If there is life on other worlds, it may not look familiar. A sample of rocks from Mars or another planet almost certainly won’t have recognizable fossils or another similarly obvious sign of living organisms, said Mikhail Tikhonov, an assistant professor of physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis who studies microbial communities.

But just because we might not recognize signs of life on a distant moon or planet doesn’t mean it’s actually lifeless. “There could be life forms out there that defy our imagination,” Tikhonov said.

Searching for life that we don’t understand may seem like an impossible mission. In a paper published in Nature Communications, Tikhonov and co-author Akshit Goyal of the International Centre for Theoretical Science in Bengaluru, India, propose a new idea. Instead of looking for particular molecules or compounds associated with life as we know it, scientists can look for telltale patterns of energy.

Tikhonov discusses his out-of-this-world idea in this Q&A.

(14) REACHING THE FINISH LINE. Mr. Sci-Fi, Marc Scott Zicree, gives his comments about the publication history of Last Dangerous Visions and the late Harlan Ellison in “The Book on the Edge of Forever Finally Arrives!”

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

Pixel Scroll 1/10/25 Quantum Scream And Leap

Posted on January 10, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) OCTAVIA’S BOOKSHELF IS SAFE. In response to the Eaton Fire, Nikki High, owner of Octavia’s Bookshelf in Pasadena, turned the shop into a “mutual aid pit stop”. The shop itself is a mile or two away from the active fire area, outside the current evacuation zone but in the warning area.

When the bookstore opened yesterday they broadcast that they had food items and many other household necessities available. They put out a call for donations needed which was answered abundantly because they later said they are full for today – but check back for what is needed tomorrow.

Octavia’s Bookshelf is at 1353 N. Hill Ave. in Pasadena.

Nikki High has also posted this video of damage to the area:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Octavia's Bookshelf (@octavias_bookshelf)

Publishers Weekly has more coverage in “Brush Fires, Severe Weather Threaten L.A. Bookstores and Publishers”.

(2) CULTURAL ICONS LOST TO FIRE. There are probably more, but these have already made the news.

“Zane Grey House in LA Consumed by fires” reports the New York Times.

In Altadena, the Eaton fire has already claimed two cultural treasures: the 1907 Zane Grey Estate, the Mediterranean-style residence of one of California’s great Western novelists; and the 1887 Andrew McNally House, a Queen Anne gem that was home to the mapmaking tycoon who co-founded Rand-McNally.

Here’s a photo of the place Curbed LA ran in 2020.

The Theosophical Society building and archives in Altadena also burned.

…The Pasadena location was “the world’s largest archive of Theosophical materials, including a library with 40.000 titles, the entire archive of the history of the TS, including ca. 10.000 unpublished letters, pertaining to HPB, the Mahatmas, W.Q. Judge, G.R.S. Mead, Katherine Tingley, and G. de Purucker, membership records since 1875, art objects, and countless other irreplaceable materials. The archives also contained works of Boehme, Gichtel, donations from the king of Siam including rare Buddhist scriptures, and so on.”…

(3) RELEASED ON THEIR OWN RECOGNIZANCE. In “The Last Orphan Stories” John Grayshaw shares what he learned while pursuing the interesting question of what became of the stories purchased by Harlan Ellison for Last Dangerous Visions that did not get included in the recent anthology produced by Ellison’s literary executor J. Michael Straczynski. He reached out to the authors and the responses ranged from warm to hostile.

…But ever since JMS announced LDV was finally seeing the light of day, I was very interested to see which stories would be included, which would not and especially what became of the ‘orphans’. In practical terms, the rights to any of the stories not included by JMS revert to the authors/estates. For 45 years all fans (we are both fans, if you have not guessed by now!) have had is the list of titles and authors and endless speculation, fueled by our imaginations. In a way this is appropriate for SF, the literature of the imagination.

I decided to take a look at the list of unpublished stories and contact the authors, or their estates in the case of this who have died, to ask them if these stories have been or will ever be shared with the world. I have followed the original structure of the three ‘books’ as set out by Ellison in the following discussion and I have highlighted the titles of the stories where I had a reply from them or their estate. Sadly not all my inquiries were successful, but I have shared as much information about the authors as I could in the hopes that maybe down the line we will hear more about these unpublished stories. Short biographies of the writers have been included; many of these will be known to you, some may be less well known and sadly there are a few for which almost no information is available….

(4) WHY IT’S HARD TO TELL. The New Yorker tries to figure out, “Did a Best-Selling Romantasy Novelist Steal Another Writer’s Story?” “Tracy Wolff, the author of the ‘Crave’ series, is being sued for copyright infringement. But romantasy’s reliance on standardized tropes makes proving plot theft tricky.”

(5) THE CAPTAIN HAS TURNED ON THE NO CATNIP SIGN. Camestros Felapton returns with more “Missing Moments in Movie History: When Worlds Collide”. No excerpt because that would spoil your fun. However, you don’t need to be told how this turns out: Never count on Timothy the Talking Cat to save humanity.

(6) WHY NOT SAY WHAT HAPPENED? Episode 14 of Scott Edelman’s Why Not Say What Happened? podcast takes us back to the Seventies to learn about “Tony Isabella’s Essential Edit of My Early Avengers Script Assist”. (A dozen possible places to listen to the show are hat this link.)

While destroying hundreds of pages of bad poetry I scribbled as a teenager, I made a few surprising discoveries which cause me to reminisce about my poem “Ode on Comic Book Company Loyalty,” written 18 days after I was hired by Marvel Comics, my extremely rough sketch for the second Scarecrow splash page, my team-up with Quicksilver and 7-Eleven to freeze your brain with Slurpees during the summer of 1975, Tony Isabella’s heavy edit on my early Avengers script assist (and why we should all be grateful), my forgotten horror pitches bounced by Marvel in 1974, and much more.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Valentin D. Ivanov.]

Born January 10, 1950 — Lyubomir Nikolov-Narvi. (Died 2024.)

By Valentin D. Ivanov: Lyubomir Nikolov – Narvi was a towering figure among the Bulgarian speculative genre writers. Author, translator, and journalist, he is best known for the translation of the Bulgarian translation of The Lord Of The Rings in 1990 making this great book accessible for the first time in our country. My first memory of Lyubomir Nikolov dates soon after that, at a meeting of the Sofia society of speculative fiction, heuristics and prognostics (what a name!) “Ivan Efremov”. The political transformation of the country had just begun, the publishing had “exploded” and immersed us in books and authors that we had only heard about before – Tolkien among them. Nikolov held the equivalent of a master’s degrees in mechanical engineering and journalism.

Narvi read a freshly translated story at that gathering, but it is his own writing I can talk about here. The Mole, Worm under the Autumn Wind, On the Wall and especially The Tenth Righteous Man. The last one won the fans’ award for work of the 1990s decade. Although he was primarily a social science fiction writer, that particular book contains a wonderful and original science fiction assumption that deserves to be noted. I will reveal it here, even though it is an important plot-forming element, because I am not optimistic about the chances the novel would ever get an English translation: the Universe undergoes… a phase transition, the fundamental physical constants change and as a result the nuclear fission reactions become much “easier” to achieve.

It is enough to light a small fire and the aches can exceed the critical mass and blast into another Hiroshima. Lyubomir Nikolov investigates in the books the consequences of giving such immense powers to everyone. Pretty much like what the nanotechnologies have the potential of doing, but he reaches the same effect by means of physics rather than technology. A lesser writer may have turned this into a cheap horror tale; not Narvi – his pen gave birth to a Greek tragedy of epic proportions, with its own Odysseus figure.

He passed away less than a year ago and was active until almost the end: recently he published a two-volume novel The Gray Road – a tale of power struggle on a terraformed Moon where the humanity has slid back into a nearly feudal society.

Narvi is one of the fathers of the game books phenomenon that took our country by storm in the 1990s too. Unfortunately, I hardly knew this side of his writing – I missed the entire game books phenomenon and only rediscovered it much later when I had to teach my own children to read… with his game books.

Lyubomir Nikolov holds Eurocon (1987), Sotscon (1989) and Graviton (2001) awards.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

January 10, 1969 — Star Trek’s “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”

Fifty-three years ago this evening, Star Trek’s “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” first aired on NBC. It was the fifteenth episode of the third season.

It written by Oliver Crawford who also penned “The Galileo Seven”. It was based on a story by Gene L. Coon who was writing under his pen name “Lee Cronin” due to contractual reasons. Coon was the showrunner for the series through most of the second season and was responsible for such major elements as the Klingons and the naming of the United Federation of Planets and Starfleet Command.

The co-stars here were Frank Gorshin as Commissioner Bele and Lou Antonio as Lokai. Gorshin would be known in this period for his recurring role on Batman as The Riddler. Lou Antonio did a few genre one-offs.

The episode has since been rated as one of the best of the Trek series with Collider, Hollywood Reporter, PopMatters, SciFi and ScreenRant all rating it among the best episodes produced.

Spock’s comment that “Change is the essential process of all existence” which remains one of the most memorable lines of dialogue ever said on Trek comes from this episode.

The original version when Beale and Lokai run through the Enterprise shows the burning cities of World War II Europe. The remastered version shows the Cheron cities still burning from space. That scene was done because the episode was running short.

It’s streaming on Paramount+.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Carpe Diem is subtle. Pat yourself on the back when you get it.
Eek! finds a bad moment to look up.
Free Range has a Jedi doomsayer.
Lio appreciates a guest reader.
Pardon My Planet meets the marrying kind.
The Argyle Sweater keeps its teeth clean.
Wumo thinks there’s a cop in Oz.

(10) GOREYGRAM. [Item by Steven French.] The Paris Review shares “The Illustrated Envelopes of Edward Gorey”.

Tom Fitzharris and Edward Gorey met one afternoon in 1974 when Fitzharris, long a fan of Gorey’s books and illustrations, bumped into him outside of the Town Hall, the performance space in Midtown Manhattan. Gorey—in his trademark fur coat, long beard, and sneakers—was immediately recognizable. The two struck up a brief but intense friendship. When Gorey was in New York, they met frequently, especially to go the ballet—Gorey planned his time in the city around the New York City Ballet’s performance schedule. His summers were spent in Cape Cod. It was in August of that year that Gorey began sending Fitzharris mail, richly illustrated both inside and out. Reproduced [here] are four of the fifty notes, quotations, and letters Fitzharris received over the course of their correspondence.

(11) GO RIGHT TO THE SOURCE AND ASK THE HORSE. Sounds like a variation on “Let the Wookiee win”. From Fighter Guy.

(12) UK VIEWS MERCURY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] BBC reports “New images of Mercury captured by UK spacecraft BepiColombo”.

Astrium in Stevenage was where SF² Concatenation co-founding editor Graham Connor. If we still have him, he would undoubtedly have designed the probe’s onboard communication system.

A spacecraft built in the UK has captured new images of Mercury as it made its sixth and final flyby ahead of entering the planet’s orbit in 2026.

BepiColombo was built by the Stevenage-based company Astrium, now Airbus, and launched in 2018.

The spacecraft comprises two satellites that will gather data for at least a year, and needs special shielding to withstand the heat from the sun.

Monitoring cameras on the spacecraft captured images of the planet as it flew 295km (183 miles) above Mercury’s surface, including views of the planet’s north poles, as it was lit by sunlight.

(13) IT ROLLS. IT FLIES. BUT WHAT, NO BOAT? [Item by Mike Kennedy.] A mere monster SUV is so yesterday. Chinese company XPeng AeroHT has announced a 6-wheel SUV/truck with 4 seats for the land vehicle and an additional 2 seats in the included manned hexacopter. All powered by electricity. They call this configuration a “Land Aircraft Carrier“. The company website assures potential buyers that pre-sales are coming soon. “XPeng Aero HT Land Aircraft Carrier comes with onboard EVTOL” at Wallpaper*.

… Whilst this particular combo occupies something of a legislative grey area, at least in heavily certified airspaces like Europe and the USA, XPeng has set out to make the aircraft as easy as possible to fly. Controls are reduced to a single-lever, take-offs and landings are automated and an autonomous flight system takes control of navigation. ‘Five minutes to learn, three hours to master,’ is the relevant strapline….

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

Cats Sleep on SFF: Last Dangerous Visions

Posted on November 25, 2024 by Mike Glyer

Piet Nel says, “I told Maisie she could only read my copy of The Last Dangerous Visions when I’m done reading it myself, but she couldn’t resist taking a peek, anyway.”

Photos of your felines (or whatever you’ve got!) resting on genre works are welcome. Send to mikeglyer (at) cs (dot) com

Pixel Scroll 11/24/24 When You Saw Only One Set Of Pixels, It Was Then That I Scrolled You

Posted on November 24, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) GEEZERS TERRIBLES. Rob Latham reviews Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions and the 60th anniversary issue of Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds magazine in “Back to the New Wave Future” at Los Angeles Review of Books. Latham lavishes praise on New Worlds, while saying all the negative things about LDV that Christopher Priest wishes he’d lived long enough to say himself.

…It gradually became clear to me that there were in fact two independent, if occasionally overlapping, New Waves: one British, centered on the magazine New Worlds under the editorship of Michael Moorcock (1964–74), and the other American, which, though more decentralized, found its most voluble expression in a pair of hefty all-original anthologies edited by Harlan Ellison: Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972). And now, over half a century later, we have a serendipitous opportunity to reassess these two traditions in publications that appeared within mere days of one another: a fresh issue of New Worlds celebrating the 60th anniversary of Moorcock’s accession to the journal’s editorship, and the long-delayed publication of the third volume in Ellison’s anthology series, The Last Dangerous Visions. It’s a case of back to the future with a vengeance, as these erstwhile enfants terribles have morphed into vehicles of nostalgic reverie.

That description is not entirely fair to either publication, both of which seek to recapture at least some of the febrile energy of bygone apocalypses. The key difference is that Moorcock’s New Worlds does not merely embrace but also critiques the perils of a melancholy wistfulness, while Last Dangerous Visions, in its blatant earnestness, trips and falls into a pit of banality. As a result, the former emerges as a provocative reinvention of a legendary past while the latter seems an exhausted last gasp across a belated finish line….

(2) INFO NOISE POLLUTION. [Item by Steven French.] Neal Stephenson imagined a future in which the internet becomes so polluted that only the rich could afford to access the truth but could we end up with the Borges’ alternative in which the web deteriorates into mostly meaningless gibberish? “An 83-year-old short story by Borges portends a bleak future for the internet” says TechXplore.

… A July 2024 paper published in Nature explored the consequences of training AI models on recursively generated data. It showed that “irreversible defects” can lead to “model collapse” for systems trained in this way—much like an image’s copy and a copy of that copy, and a copy of that copy, will lose fidelity to the original image.

How bad might this get?

Consider Borges’ 1941 short story “The Library of Babel.” Fifty years before computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee created the architecture for the web, Borges had already imagined an analog equivalent.

In his 3,000-word story, the writer imagines a world consisting of an enormous and possibly infinite number of hexagonal rooms. The bookshelves in each room hold uniform volumes that must, its inhabitants intuit, contain every possible permutation of letters in their alphabet.

Initially, this realization sparks joy: By definition, there must exist books that detail the future of humanity and the meaning of life.

The inhabitants search for such books, only to discover that the vast majority contain nothing but meaningless combinations of letters. The truth is out there—but so is every conceivable falsehood. And all of it is embedded in an inconceivably vast amount of gibberish.

Even after centuries of searching, only a few meaningful fragments are found. And even then, there is no way to determine whether these coherent texts are truths or lies. Hope turns into despair.

Will the web become so polluted that only the wealthy can afford accurate and reliable information? Or will an infinite number of chatbots produce so much tainted verbiage that finding accurate information online becomes like searching for a needle in a haystack?

The internet is often described as one of humanity’s great achievements. But like any other resource, it’s important to give serious thought to how it is maintained and managed—lest we end up confronting the dystopian vision imagined by Borges….

(3) UNLUCKY NUMBER 14. BookRiot reports “Utah Bans 14th Book From Schools Statewide”. Many of the banned books are sff.

Utah passed one of the most restrictive book ban laws in the previous legislative session and now, we’re seeing the ongoing results of that new law. House Bill 29 allows parents to challenge books they deem “sensitive material” while also outright banning books from public schools if those books have been deemed “objective sensitive material” or “pornographic” per state code in at least three school districts or two school districts and five charter schools statewide. This law means that once a book has been banned in three public school districts or two districts and five charter schools, it is added to a statewide list of books banned from every one of those public institutions throughout Utah.

The law, which went into effect July 1, applied retroactively, meaning that every school needed to submit to the Utah State Board of Education the titles that had been deemed against the law in their district. Now, any time a public or charter school removes a book deemed “sensitive material,” they must notify the State Board of Education. If that book now meets the threshold of removals, all schools will be notified and expected to dispose of it.

Utah released its initial list of books banned statewide in August. Those thirteen titles included:

Blankets by Craig Thompson (2003)
A Court of Frost and Starlight by Sarah J. Maas (2018)
A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas (2016)
A Court of Silver Flames by Sarah J. Maas (2021)
A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas (2015)
A Court of Wings and Ruin by Sarah J. Maas (2017)
Empire of Storms by Sarah J. Maas (2016)
Fallout by Ellen Hopkins (2010)
Forever by Judy Blume (1975)
Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur (2014)
Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood (2003)
Tilt by Ellen Hopkins (2012)
What Girls Are Made Of by Elana K. Arnold (2017)

Now, the state has added a 14th title to the list.

Elizabeth Scott’s Living Dead Girl, an award-winning book published for teens in 2008. The 16 year old book will need to be pulled from every public school and charter district throughout the state….

(4) GHOSTS WHO CASH BIG CHECKS. Publishers Weekly reports “Ghostwriter Survey Finds Manuscripts Fetch High Fees”. (The complete report is at Gotham Ghostwriters: “Comp survey how much does it cost”.)

The American Society of Journalists and Authors and Gotham Ghostwriters have released the findings from their joint compensation survey of ghostwriters. According to the survey of 269 working ghostwriters and collaborators, one-third of respondents reported that they earn over $100,000 in annual income from ghostwriting books. The report did not specify the salary breakdown for the other two-thirds of respondents. Other findings include:

25% of ghostwriters charged at least $100,000 for their last nonfiction manuscript
8% of ghostwriters charged more than $150,000 for their last nonfiction manuscript
50% of ghostwriters charged $10,000 to $20,000 for their last nonfiction proposal
11% of ghostwriters charged more than $20,000 for their last nonfiction proposal
2% of ghostwriters have written 10 or more New York Times bestsellers and charge upwards of $150,000 for a nonfiction manuscript, with 1% indicating that they charge over $300,000

“Contrary to widespread assumption that AI is putting writers out of work, we are seeing the opposite,” said Gotham Ghostwriters CEO Dan Gerstein in a statement….

(5) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born November 24, 1948 — Spider Robinson, 76.

By Paul Weimer: My older brother is responsible for me first reading Spider Robinson, as I borrowed one of the Callahan Saloon books from him. I found the wordplay, light humor and interesting characters engaging, and read a bunch of that series. I never told my mother but when I came across his allied series about a brothel, I bought it, but never told her of the salacious setting. Even then, thanks to that book, I could see the influence Robert Heinlein had had on Spider Robinson, and so when I read “RAH RAH RAH”, I was not surprised that it was Spider Robinson writing an appreciation…and an outright defense, of Heinlein and his work.

I am not sure it’s that good a defense of his work (Farah Mendelsohn’s recent book on Heinlein is far better on balance) but it is enthusiastic, engaging and well written. It may suffer from being “too” close to its subject for any real objectivity.

The Robinson work that stays with me, though, is not any of the Callahan stories, or Variable Star (a book based on a Heinlein outline), or his Stardance books. No, in the mid 80’s I picked up his very strange one-off novel called Night of Power. It was set in the far future of 1996, a New York and a United States still in a cold war, and a NYC plagued by crime, gangs, and a mysterious figure with a Plan. It might have been the first contemporary interracial couple I’d read at that point in science fiction, fantasy or mimetic prose. The actual science fiction content is rather light, there are some advances in technology and some speculation of what the late 1990’s would be like that are rather wild, in retrospect. But the fact that this novel is about an ultimately successful revolution and secession really knocked me on my arse. Sure, I had read about revolutions and revolts as history, and in fantasy worlds and in far future SF settings, but this was New York a little more than a decade from now. It was shocking and surprising, but ultimately quite memorable. It also, as I recall, had an awful amount (for the time) of sex in the book, but (like the Callahan’s Lady books) was very sex positive as well.

(6) COMICS SECTION.

Birdbrains tests a military innovation.
Frazz turns a profit from science.
Off the Mark suggests Looney Tunes characters are unsuccessful cannibals.
Reality Check takes us to the Star Wars family Thanksgiving feast.
Bizarro depicts the fall of a soundalike house.
Tom Gauld’s author is ready for her close-up.

My cartoon for this weeks Guardian Books. @theguardian.com
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2024-11-24T11:32:00.906Z

(7) THE SKIES OF OZ. In episode 12 of the AirSpace podcast, “Defying Gravity”, the National Air and Space Museum explores the varieties of flight shown in The Wizard of Oz movie.

Houses, broomsticks, people-sized bubbles, monkeys — there’s a surprising amount of flight in The Wizard of Oz. In addition to these more unusual flying objects, there’s even a hot air balloon, which is what brings the Wizard to Oz and nearly takes Dorothy home.

In a recent episode of our AirSpace podcast, we talk to National Museum of American History curator Ryan Lintelman, an expert in The Wizard of Oz, about some of the movie’s aviation connections: “Flight is really a central theme in the film from this early desire of [Dorothy’s] to fly away from home. Professor Marvel, when she first meets him, says ‘You want to see other lands, big cities, big mountains, big oceans,’ and flight is the way for her to get away.”

In the episode, Lintelman and AirSpace hosts Matt Shindell and Emily Martin also discuss depections of flight in the film — how it was captured on camera and what messages it was meant to send: “The thing that really struck me upon re-watching the film recently is when you see the squadrons of [monkeys] in the sky flying over,” Lintelman reflected. “I mean, it really gives you this ominous feeling like World War II is on the horizon, here come the bombers flying in. And I think that wouldn’t have been lost on audiences in 1939, you know, seeing some of the images coming out of Europe at that time and, and worrying about what was coming next.”

(8) FOR YOUR KRYPTONIAN KITCHEN. There’s a line of “Superman™ Knives & Culinary Tools” offered by Dalstrong. “Forget capes. Real heroes wear aprons,” they say.

(9) COMING IN FOR A LANDING. [Item by Steven French.] We so often see photos of the start of the journey but so rarely see any of the end! “The big picture: earthbound reality at the International Space Station landing site in Kazakhstan” in the Guardian.

The photographer Andrew McConnell first went to Kazakhstan in 2015, to witness what the Earth’s primary space portal looked like on the ground. A particular corner of the remote steppe-land, near a village called Kenjebai-Samai, was where, every three months, astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station fell to earth, having been launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome 400 miles to the south. McConnell had spent much of the previous years working in war zones and was keen to focus on something more life-affirming.

He discovered a curious landscape that was both on the frontier of human exploration and unchanged for centuries. Over a dozen visits in the subsequent years, McConnell became used to the rhythm of the landings. He would sleep out on the steppe in a tent with the ground crew of the Russian space agency; on hearing the explosion that heralded the capsule separating in the sky above, they would drive out over the wasteland to meet it as it landed – a vehicle no bigger than a family car.

Over time McConnell became at least as fascinated by those who assembled to watch the spacecraft descend. “On each visit I would stay in Kenjebai-Samai or explore further afield,” he recalls. “The steppe, which at first appeared as a boundless void, would over time reveal unexpected details. I found a people largely uninterested in the space travellers and yet somehow bound up in this strange ritual.” He took this picture of one of the village boys, called Roman, at a waste tip in the district in 2018, where he had come to collect scrap to recycle. In McConnell’s book, Some Worlds Have Two Suns, the images of astronauts and their mission are juxtaposed with those of local Kazazh nomads in the moonscape of the steppe.

Some Worlds Have Two Suns by Andrew McConnell is published by Gost (£60)…

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

Pixel Scroll 10/30/24 John Pixel’s Not The Boogeyman. He’s Who You Send To Scroll The Boogeyman

Posted on October 30, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) NEW 2030 WORLDCON BID. The Edmonton in 2030 Worldcon bid unveiled its Bluesky page today: “Edmonton Bidding for 2030 Worldcon” at File 770.

(2) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present James Patrick Kelly and James Teel Glenn on Wednesday, November 13, beginning at 7:00 p.m. Eastern. Location: KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003 (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs)

James Patrick Kelly

James Patrick Kelly has won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards for his short fiction. He has also written five and half novels, a dozen or so plays and some embarrassing poetry. His column “On The Net” is a regular feature of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. He is an early adopter, a shade gardener, a cross-country skier, and an open water swimmer, so it helps that he lives on a lake in New Hampshire. KGB is one of his favorite places to read and this will be his eighth visit to Fantastic Fiction since 2000. His new novella, Moon and Mars, will be out from Asimov’s in the January/February issue.

Teel James Glenn

Teel James Glenn has killed hundreds and been killed more times–on stage and screen, for forty-plus years as a stuntman, swordmaster, storyteller, book illustrator, bodyguard, actor, and haunted house barker. He has dozens of novels and stories published in over two hundred magazines including Weird Tales, and Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine. His novel A Cowboy in Carpathia: A Bob Howard Adventure won best novel 2021 in the Pulp Factory Award. He can be found at in wild Weehawken NJ and at TheUrbanSwashbuckler.com.

(3) ANOTHER EKPEKI ISSUE RAISED. Dare Segun Falowo is a winner of the inaugural Emeka Walter Dinjos Memorial Award For Disability In Speculative Fiction, an award created by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki. Today Dare shared on Bluesky a bad experience with Africa Risen co-editor Ekpeki about Dare’s support for the idea that writers in anthologies should share credit for awards won by editors. Thread starts here.

And ‪Bogi Takács emphatically supports the practice of writers in anthologies sharing credit with the editor(s) for the book’s awards:

(4) THE BIRD OF CRIME BEARS BITTER FRUIT. [Item by Steven French.] Two thumbs up from the Guardian for The Penguin: “Batman who? Why The Penguin is TV’s biggest surprise of the year”.

…Between Falcone and Oz, this show is like watching two scuzzy raccoons fight over the last slice of rancid pizza in a back alley from the depths of DC hell. Neither is prepared to end up second best, and both have shown themselves capable of mass murder to avoid having to settle for it. It reminds me of that scene in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight in which Heath Ledger’s Joker snaps off a pool cue and invites two wannabe goons to fight to the death for the chance to be one of his henchmen.

One reason many fans might consider watching The Penguin is the expectation that Robert Pattinson’s Batman is likely to turn up at some point to show both who’s really in charge. In reality, both the showrunner, Lauren LeFranc, and Reeves have said that’s unlikely to happen any time soon, but the splendid thing about the show is that we barely miss the caped crusader. This is Gotham at street level, the city’s grimy underbelly exposed in all its filth and fury, while Batman’s place is above the city’s streets, looking down on the scum below like an avenging dark angel. Who knew that one of those unfortunate wretches scurrying about the gutter might just be capable of carrying an entire show on his doughy shoulders?

Sure, the ultimate expectation is that the Penguin will at some point climb his way up the greasy pole of power to become an A-list villain for Pattinson to take down in a future movie. But right now, watching Farrell shuffle through the shadows like a cross between Machiavelli and Harvey Weinstein after a fight with a dumpster, the whole thing is so engrossing that there’s absolutely no rush.’…

(5) DAREDEVIL. “Daredevil: Born Again trailer teases Punisher return, hints at Bullseye” – Radio Times has the story.

A trailer spotlighting Marvel’s upcoming Disney Plus releases has emerged online, with a 20-second teaser for Daredevil: Born Again included within it.

The teaser is sure to get fans excited for the revival show, which is set to arrive in March next year and will see Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock once again face off against Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin….

(6) LOST ELLISON. Michael Burianyk compares two of “The Lost Visions of Harlan Ellison” in his latest blog post.

There’s been an interesting juxtaposition of recently published books that shed light on two of the most notorious events in Science Fiction history – “The Last Dangerous Visions” and “The Starlost”, both involving the venerated writer, Harlan Ellison….

… In his long introduction to the anthology, Straczynski recounted the saga of “The Last Dangerous Visions”, his close friendship with Ellison and the revelation that Ellison suffered from bipolar disorder and clinical depression which went untreated until close to Ellison’s death in 2018. His mental condition is cited as the reason he was not able to concentrate on big projects and gather the spiritual energy to finish the grand undertaking he had conceived….

(7) A ROBOT GROWS IN BROOKLYN. [Item by Andrew Porter.] According to John Boston:

Appeared on the local Nextdoor.com site, allegedly “the product of a welding training program and is based on a graphic novel hip hop character.” It resides in Borough Hall Park, and hard by the federal district court for the Eastern District of New York and the main Brooklyn Post Office.

From the pages of the first-ever hip hop comic book, written by Eric Orr in 1986, to the streets of the Boogie Down Bronx and finally to the streets of Paris, Rappin’ Max Robot is alive and standing 18 feet tall.

Andrew Porter adds:

I saw them installing it Monday, when I walked by having just gone to the Post Office (visible at right background). It’s about 20 feet high.

Made a comment to the workers, “You’re gonna have to oil up that robot!”

This is exactly where much of the Brooklyn Book Festival too place, on this plaza.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born October 30, 1977 — Malka Ann Older, 47.

By Paul Weimer: I remember when she burst onto the scene with Infomocracy. It was in wake of her talented brother Daniel Older’s own SF literary debut with Half-Resurrection Blues, and I do wonder if Infomocracy got play and visibility because Malka Older was his sister. As for me, I had not read Blues and picked up Infomocracy solely on the strength of its idea of a new, atomized, political system with strengths and advantages, but problems of its own. It depicts a vibrant, multicultural and inclusive future (with one SF “gimmie” to make it happen), and it knocked my socks off. When I told Malka that I truly didn’t know that she was Daniel’s brother, her reaction was a somewhat skeptical “Really?!”

But it’s true. I don’t know everything in SF.

I think her Mossa and Pleiti novels, starting with The Mimicking of Known Successes walk a fine line between being “cozy” and comfortable reads, and being furiously inventive medium-term science fiction. They are so well written, and so different in some fundamental ways than Infomocracy that it really shows her range and ability.

But my favorite Older work is her collaboration with Fran Wilde, Jacqueline Koyanagi, and Curtis C. Chen in Ninth Step Station. Ninth Step Station is a collaborative cyberpunk crime drama published by Serial Box and showcases the writers’ talents showing a divided and dangerous Tokyo in the near future. It combines the political power and intrigue from the Infomocracy novels with the (later) mystery and investigation of the Mossa and Pleiti novels and serves as a bridge between the two types of works.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Frank and Ernest order online.
Off the Mark’s aliens arrive on the wrong day.
The Flying McCoys says a treat works as well.
Loose Parts carves one that looks familiar.
Tom Gauld makes some highbrow literary Halloween costume suggestions.

In case you need a costume idea for tomorrow… pic.twitter.com/iU7wSsXSGb
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) October 30, 2024

(10) HORRIBLY YOUNG. [Item by Steven French.] “What’s it like to be the spine-chilling child in a scary film?” The Guardian asked the actors who played them: “’After the shoot, we had a party in a slaughterhouse’: horror movies’ creepiest kids reveal all”.

When Danielle Keaton was seven, her homework was to open her eyes as wide as possible and stare. She had just secured a role in director John Carpenter’s Village of the Damned – a horror film about inhuman psychic children with violent tendencies – and had to perfect her creepy glare. “We had to practise not blinking for a very long time,” says the actor and coach, now 38 and based in LA. “We would have to look in a mirror and hold the stare without laughing.” On set, the children would have staring contests with Superman star Christopher Reeve…

(11) SFF ON LEARNEDLEAGUE: PORTALS AND NEXT YEAR’S ONE-DAY SPECIALS. [Item by David Goldfarb.] LearnedLeague just had a One-Day Special quiz entitled “Just Images Portals” — the “Just Images” part means that each question has a picture associated with it, which may be required to answer the question correctly. You can find the questions here, although unfortunately you need to be a LearnedLeague member in order to view the pictures.

I got 8 right out of 12, placing 211th out of 1,167 players.

Also next year’s One-Day Special schedule has now been set. Here are the ones that seem to be SFF-related. Notes in parentheses are from me:

Elemental Masters
Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist
Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet
What We Do in the Shadows
Victorian Fiction (not an SFF subject, but SFF-related because the quiz will be written by SF fan and anthologist Rich Horton – DG)
The Stormlight Archive
Goblins
Watchmen
Ghost
Dragon Age
Mass Effect
Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence
Learn Zoology with the Animorphs
Actors in Star Wars & Other SF/Fantasy IP
Personification of Death in Literature
Tolkien’s Other Work (after three quizzes on The Lord of the Rings and one on The Silmarillion, now we move on to the Other Work – DG)
The Last of Us
Famous Luxembourgers (not directly SFnal, but sure to have a question on Hugo Gernsback at least – DG)
Sapphic Fantasy
Batman ’66 (to be written by SF fan Tom Galloway – DG)
xkcd2
Mars 2
Apocalyptic Fiction
Songs about Superman
Furry Fandom 101

(12) RIDERS OF THE PURPLE WHOPPER. A little late with this story – but it was news to me! “Burger King’s Addams Family Menu Has Landed — Here’s What’s in It” at Food & Wine.

…This year, the King is celebrating Halloween with a group of people who have been creepy, kooky, mysterious, and spooky for more than 80 years. That’s right: Burger King has teamed up with the Addams Family for a special menu that will launch on Thursday, October 10, with four new Addams-inspired items.

Two of them are:

Wednesday’s Whopper

This sandwich takes all of the trappings of a classic flame-grilled Whopper, tops it with Swiss cheese, ketchup, lettuce, mayo, onions, pickles, and tomatoes — and serves it up on a purple bun. (The violet bun gets its signature shade from purple potatoes.)

Thing’s Rings

The Addams Family’s long-time companion, Thing, was just a disembodied hand — which means it is perfectly designed to grab a few crispy onion rings right out of the package. During the month of October, BK’s rings come in a special Addams-family-designed sleeve.

There’s also Gomez’s Churro Fries and Morticia’s Kooky Chocolate Shake.

(13) FOR NATIONAL CATS DAY. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Which was yesterday in the U.S. The latest issue of Marvel Meow, from Marvel’s Infinity line, many of which (including this issue) are digitally available free, and without needing a (free) Marvel.com account. “Marvel Meow Infinity Comic (2022) #19”.

MARVEL MEOW IS BACK! To kick off, the Spider-Men and Doc Ock take on their biggest battle yet–finding homes for stray cats!

(14) CHINESE ASTRONAUT SCULPTURE. Interesting photo from the Brooklyn Eagle.

(15) SHROUDS OF WITNESS. Ryan George is in time for the Halloween season with his video “Super Scary and Definitely Real Ghost Evidence”.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Posted by MGM: “Halloween With The Addams Family (Full Episode)” (legit).

A pair of bank robbers are welcomed as Halloween trick-or-treaters by Morticia and Gomez. The creepy atmosphere of the house, Morticia’s smoldering holiday punch, and Lurch’s ominous presence impel the crooks to abandon their plans to add Addams money and jewelry to their bank loot.

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

Pixel Scroll 10/14/24 Pixelling Pigeons In The Scroll

Posted on October 14, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) SEATTLE WORLDCON 2025 SHORT STORY CONTEST. The Seattle Worldcon 2025 today announced a short story writing contest with adult and young adult entry categories. The winners in each category will be recognized at the convention, receive free memberships to the convention, and have their stories published in an upcoming anthology by Grim Oak Press. Full details at the link: “Writing Contest – Seattle Worldcon 2025”.

Stories must draw inspiration from the Worldcon theme: Building Yesterday’s Future–For Everyone. This theme was selected to invoke nostalgia for the hopeful science-fictional era of the early 1960s, when Seattle held its first (and until now, only) Worldcon, followed up by the Century 21 Exposition (a.k.a. 1962 World’s Fair), showing the world a vision of its technological future, complete with freshly built Monorail and Space Needle.

(2) WHEN BAD NEWS IS BIG NEWS. Charlie Jane Anders answers the question “Why Are Toxic ‘Superfans’ Such a Nightmare for Hollywood?”

…But even if @Fanboy3997 is not a king-maker, he can do a certain amount of damage to a franchise. This is at least partly a reflection of the fact that the internet, like so many other media before it, does a better job of boosting negativity and hate than spreading anything positive. (“If it bleeds, it leads.”)

Disgruntled fans can help to shape the narrative about a project in various ways.

1) They can drown out the people who actually like it.

2) They can even harass anybody who expresses enthusiasm for a project they don’t like.

3) They can do the aforementioned review bombing, and harass actors and creators.

4) They can create the appearance of a major backlash, even if it’s really just five people and an swarm of bots.

5) And, though journalists will never admit it, a angry fans have a major ally in the journalistic profession, which will assist in blowing their complaints way out of proportion and creating a fake controversy in order to manufacture drama that in turn will lead to eyeballs on news sites.

To some extent, this is what happened with Star Wars: The Last Jedi, a movie that was a massive financial success and one of the most successful movies of all time, with an “A” on Cinemascore (signifying that audiences in theaters overwhelmingly loved it.) What I’m convinced were a relatively small number of fans had a meltdown, which probably would’ve had a limited impact if journalists hadn’t chosen to run with it and create a news cycle around the backlash. That, in turn, led to the notion that

(3) IDENTIFYING DANGER. “INTERVIEW: J. Michael Straczynski” at Grimdark Magazine asks JMS in the context of his work on Last Dangerous Visions.

[GdM] Can you explain your perspective, and, by extension, Ellison’s, on what makes a story “dangerous” in speculative fiction?

[JMS] The distinction you draw is correct, in terms of how this relates to speculative or science fiction. There has been a lot of hard-edged, socially challenging writing in other forms and genres. Alan Ginsberg’s Howl, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the raw emotionalism of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind, JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye…all of them pushed the frontiers of writing, and many of them got banned or ended up in court on obscenity charges. But they kept on writing, because it was necessary to take a stand for literary freedom.

The SF genre was (and to a degree still is) fairly conservative and, seeing what happened to the writers noted above, tended to steer clear of controversy. This persisted up until the time of Harlan’s first Dangerous Visions anthology and the slow birth of New Wave Science Fiction (with writers like Michael Moorcock, Ursula K. Leguin, Samuel R. Delany and others poking at the walls of conservatism) which DV codified from individual efforts into a movement.

What makes a story dangerous in speculative fiction? Anyone who is willing to risk controversy, to speak to the flaws of society, to sexual and political issues even though they might get in trouble as a result. Harlan once wrote that “the chief commodity a writer has to sell is their courage,” and for me, that’s what a dangerous vision is all about: a story that requires a modicum of courage to tell it.

(4) FIRST FANDOM ANNUAL 2024. Editors John L. Coker III and Jon D. Swartz invite fans to order the First Fandom Annual 2024, devoted to a “History of the Sam Moskowitz Award”.

Sam Moskowitz, I-Con XIV (1995), Long Island, NY. Photo by John L. Coker III

Remembering Sam Moskowitz
The Sam Moskowitz Archive Award
The Sam Moskowitz Collection

Articles by Sam, photographs With Hal W. Hall, David A. Kyle, Robert A. Madle, Julius Schwartz, Jon D. Swartz, Ph.D., Joseph Wrzos

Fifty-six pages, 28# paper, heavy gloss color covers, printed endpapers, face-trimmed, saddle-stitched, B&W interiors, with color illustrations throughout.

Limited to (26) copies, available for $35. each (includes packaging, Priority Mail, insurance). Please send check or money order for $35 (payable to John L. Coker III) at 4813 Lighthouse Road, Orlando, FL – 32808.

(5) ALTERNATE BATMAN. [Item by Danny Sichel.] Paul Dini found some notes in his car on which he had long ago written alternate ideas for the resolution to Batman Beyond.

Huh. The things one finds jotted down on old legal pads deep in the trunk of one's car. pic.twitter.com/OtqYy1xdr5
— Paul_Dini (@Paul_Dini) October 13, 2024

(6) ART HENDERSON (1942-2024). Virginia fan Art Henderson died October 12 at the age of 82. He is survived by his wife, Becky.

Art and Becky Henderson at the 1974 Worldcon. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Mike Glyer.]

Born October 14, 1952 – Charlie Williams. (Died 2021.) Fan artist Charlie Williams first came to prominence as a regular contributor to Chat, the Chattanooga clubzine published by Rich and Nicki Lynch. He also later appeared in all 30 issues of their Hugo-winning genzine Mimosa.

Williams was a member of the Knoxville Science-Fantasy Federation and in the 1970s, he owned a comics store in Knoxville and taught cartoon illustration at the University of Tennessee. At one time he was a member of the Spectator Amateur Press Association. He was guest of honor at Imagincon ’81 (1981), Con*Stellation II (1983), and Roc*Kon 8 (1983).

Williams loved to draw complex, inventive scenes several of which are displayed below, including a cover for an issue of File 770 from the Eighties.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Brewster Rockit discovers the reason for a recent space event.
Eek! obviously thinks it’s “threat or treat”.
Lio has a classic reference.
The Argyle Sweater missed an update.
Macanudo underrates genre reading.
Tom Gauld knows about speed reading.

My cartoon for this week’s @GuardianBooks pic.twitter.com/gxkh0nilCA
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) October 12, 2024

And he’s had better days.

My latest cartoon for @newscientist pic.twitter.com/Ds5vn6jdr9
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) October 14, 2024

(9) POLITICAL COMICS. The makers of the “Stop Project 2025 Comic” website say:

We’re a group of comic book writers & artists who are furious about Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation’s plan to consolidate power under authoritarian rule. So we made a bunch of comics to explain their agenda and move you to vote against it.

(10) VIDEO GAME WITH NUANCE. “Metaphor: ReFantazio is the rare fantasy game that goes beyond racism 101” declares The Verge’s reviewer.

…But Metaphor is more than just a stylish, dynamic RPG — it’s also the rare fantasy story that tackles discrimination with nuance.

In a lot of fantasy, I’m annoyed by the storytelling conceit of using discrimination against fantasy races as an allegory for real-world racism. Stories featuring this trope usually stop at the “racism is bad” surface level, demonstrating that with ugly over-the-top displays of violence (hey there, Dragon Age) while ignoring the subtleties that make racism so heinous and pervasive. Metaphor manages to incorporate and tackle both aspects of this reality.

There’s a moment when you’re reading a fantasy book with a companion, and they mention that realizing their goal of a world where everyone is treated equally won’t be enough. “Equal competition doesn’t mean equal footing,” Heismay says. It’s the first time I’ve seen a video game acknowledge that simply stopping the big bad evil racist won’t magically make up for the countless generations of oppression. The game does the same with class and wealth. There’s a character vying for the throne who wishes to essentially “eat the rich” and redistribute their wealth at the point of a guillotine. But by virtue of her extremely low status, she sees everybody with more than a few coins to rub together as her ideological enemy. It’s just like when people in poverty lash out at other people a little bit less in poverty when their real enemies are the wealthy powerholders who exploit that animosity. It’s awesome that the game calls that out….

(11) SPACE DETECTIVE WORK. NASA’s JPL announces “First Greenhouse Gas Plumes Detected With NASA-Designed Instrument”.

The imaging spectrometer aboard the Carbon Mapper Coalition’s Tanager-1 satellite identified methane and carbon dioxide plumes in the United States and internationally.

Using data from an instrument designed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the nonprofit Carbon Mapper has released the first methane and carbon dioxide detections from the Tanager-1 satellite. The detections highlight methane plumes in Pakistan and Texas, as well as a carbon dioxide plume in South Africa.

The data contributes to Carbon Mapper’s goal to identify and measure greenhouse gas point-source emissions on a global scale and make that information accessible and actionable.

(12) ANNUAL APPARITION. “It’s Spirit Halloween season. How does the retailer stay afloat year-round?” NPR tried to find the answer.

SELYUKH: It is unusual. To be clear, it is a private company – Spirit Halloween – so we don’t know for sure, all of the under-the-hood stuff. They do skip the most expensive parts of being a retailer. That’s kind of how they save a lot of money on rent, utilities, workers. If you think about it, their stores – most of them are not permanent. Most of the store workers are temporary. Much of the year, Spirit Halloween mainly pays a big team to scout real estate locations, looking for empty store fronts. Then in late summer, the hustle starts for new stores to materialize. They’ve built over 1,000 of them.

RASCOE: That has to be a really big operation, like, turning all of these empty spaces into stores.

SELYUKH: It is, and it is very fast, too. You know, last year, I talked to a woman who worked at a mall where Spirit Halloween took over shuttered Sears, and she was describing an insane speed, like a matter of days. And I should say, I have tried a few times to get a tour of how Spirit Halloween works in an empty store or at least an interview with some official, and they don’t do interviews.

RASCOE: So you got ghosted. You see what I did there….

(13) EUROPA CLIPPER LAUNCHES. “NASA spacecraft rockets toward Jupiter’s moon Europa” and AP News wishes it bon voyage.

A NASA spacecraft rocketed away Monday on a quest to explore Jupiter’s tantalizing moon Europa and reveal whether its vast hidden ocean might hold the keys to life.

It will take Europa Clipper 5 1/2 years to reach Jupiter, where it will slip into orbit around the giant gas planet and sneak close to Europa during dozens of radiation-drenched flybys.

Scientists are almost certain a deep, global ocean exists beneath Europa’s icy crust. And where there is water, there could be life, making the moon one of the most promising places out there to hunt for it.

Europa Clipper won’t look for life; it has no life detectors. Instead, the spacecraft will zero in on the ingredients necessary to sustain life, searching for organic compounds and other clues as it peers beneath the ice for suitable conditions…

(14) COMET A3 FROM THE DC SUBURBS OF MARYLAND. [Item by Rich Lynch.] An iPhone photo…I just held the phone as steady as I could and hoped for the best. I’m actually amazed that it worked!

For those wanting to see the comet, this evening it’s located halfway between Venus and Arcturus, and remains visible for probably a couple of hours after the sun has set.

(15) TAKE INSPIRATION FOR YOUR HALLOWEEN BAKING. “Swedish chef making a pumpkin pie” – a Muppets excerpt.

(16) IN NO TIME AT ALL. Boing Boing says “’Skip Danger vs the Space-Time Continuum’ is a hilarious anti-time travel movie”.

…A wonderfully self-aware homage to Back to the Future and Hot Tub Time Machine — minus, perhaps, the actual time machine.

[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, N., Danny Sichel, Rich Lynch, 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 John A Arkansawyer.]

Pixel Scroll 10/1/24 By The Pixeling Of My Scroll, Something SFF This Way Comes

Posted on October 1, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) BOMBS AWAY. Reactor’s Leah Schnelbach wanted to love the new Coppola movie, but it was too big a stretch: “Et Tu, Wow Platinum? Megalopolis’ Vision of the Future Offers Nothing New”. “Alas, I come to bury Cesar Catilina, not to praise him.”

…See there are people who will go with the full title Megalopolis: A Fable, and people who will not. I’ll go with it as far as it wants to go. There are people who will be on board with a movie where Adam Driver clambers out onto the top of the Chrysler Building and screams “TIME STOP!!!”—and time actually does stop. I am such a people, I eat that kind of shit right up. There are people who giggle with delight at a character named Wow Platinum and people who roll their eyes—I’m a giggler, baby.

But when the “fable” is so obvious Aesop could see all the twists and turns coming even though he was sight-impaired in life, and is currently dead, and when TIME STOPS but no one uses it to do anything interesting, and when the character Wow Platinum is a boring misogynist cliché—well, to be honest I become frustrated and sad that my willingness to go with a movie has been squandered…

And that’s just the beginning of Schnelbach’s highly entertaining review.

(2) LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS OFFICIALLY RELEASED TODAY. And Rolling Stone’s Jason Sheehan tells the masses why it matters as “Harlan Ellison’s ‘Last Dangerous Visions’ Hits Shelves 50 Years Later”.

LET ME TELL you a story about Harlan…

I talk to 10 people about Harlan Ellison and that’s how almost every conversation starts. If I’d talked to a hundred, it would’ve been the same. Because everyone has a Harlan Ellison story. Everyone who knew him, worked with him, argued with him, fought with him; everyone who was friends with him or claimed to be; everyone who was taught by him, learned from him, owes some portion of their career or life to him; everyone who loved him or hated him — they’ve all got a story about Harlan….

…It matters because this book was different. Special in a way that only lost albums or missed connections truly can be. Over 50 years, TLDV (as the cool cats call it) had been promised, anticipated, maligned, dreaded, forgotten, and mythologized by generations of fans. In Harlan’s lifetime, it swelled to over 600,000 words, got split into three volumes (none of which ever materialized), shrunk down to half its size, then a third. It is undoubtedly the most famous science fiction book never published. And it haunted Harlan — physically, emotionally, and spiritually. At his home in Sherman Oaks, California, it literally sat, in pieces, stacked on the railing outside his office until the dust started gathering dust.

But now, decades later, Harlan’s great, unfinished project is finally going to see the light of day. Set to hit shelves on Oct. 1, The Last Dangerous Visions comes with all the weight of decades of impossible expectation and the relief of a last debt finally paid. And its existence as a finished, bound, actually readable object is thanks largely to years of efforts by Harlan’s friend, partner in crime and the executor of his estate, J. Michael Straczynski….

(3) NATIONAL BOOK AWARD. The 2024 shortlists have been released. The complete lists are at Publishers Weekly: “2024 National Book Award Shortlists Announced”. These are the works of genre interest:

FICTION

Ghostroots by ‘Pemi Aguda (Norton)

NONFICTION

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie (Random House)

TRANSLATED LITERATURE

The Book Censor’s Library by Bothayna Al-Essa, translated from the Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain (Restless)

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE

The First State of Being by Erin Entrada Kelly (Greenwillow)

(4) FUTURE TENSE FICTION IS BACK. After a hiatus for much of 2024, Future Tense Fiction once again will be publishing an original speculative fiction story each month, accompanied by illustrations and a response essay from an expert in a related field. Their new publishing partner is Issues in Science and Technology, a publication of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and Arizona State University.

The story for September 2024 is “Parasocial,” by Monica Byrne.

“Do you have any idea how good holography has gotten in the last 10 years?”

The response essay by Vance Ricks, a researcher at Northeastern University, is “Move Fast and Fake Things”.

In a recent episode of the podcast Women at Warp, the hosts discussed their favorite episodes of the various Star Trek series in which the Holodeck—a fully immersive, interactive virtual reality interface—is central to the plot. On occasion, a Trek character uses a Holodeck to interact with holo-versions of their crewmates, turning their coworkers and friends into unwitting characters in a storyline that they didn’t help to write. Reflecting on the potential problems of that choice, one host observed that Starfleet’s human resources department “would have a binder that was the size of Crime and Punishment for the Holodeck.”

The characters in Monica Byrne’s “Parasocial” should have read whatever is in that binder….

The archive of Future Tense Fiction stories, running through January 2024, is still available on Slate. As they continue publishing new work with Issues, though, they will be resurfacing some favorites from the archives, with new illustrations, and posting them on the Issues site as well.

(5) FURY AND FAST. “Samuel L. Jackson was surprised by his Marvel contract’s length: ‘How long I gotta stay alive to make nine movies?'” – so he told Entertainment Weekly. “The Nick Fury actor joked he had no idea how fast the Marvel machine could grind through a nine-picture deal.”

…It’s true that Marvel moves through films faster than most studios would ever dare to try, but “two and a half years” is in reality more like 11. Jackson’s first appearance in the MCU as Nick Fury, the former spy, Avengers founder, and director of S.H.I.E.L.D., was in 2008’s Iron Man, and his ninth was in 2019’s Spider-Man: Far From Home.

The character and the conditions at Marvel were clearly agreeable enough to Jackson, because he has starred in a tenth film (The Marvels), three TV series (Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., What If…?, and Secret Invasion), and three video games (Iron Man 2, Disney Infinity: Marvel Super Heroes, and Disney Infinity 3.0) as Fury….

(6) NOT YOUR AVERAGE WITCH. “Who Is Baba Yaga? The Slavic Witch Has a Complicated Origin Story” says Atlas Obscura.

Excerpted and adapted with permission from Becoming Baba Yaga: Trickster, Feminist, and Witch of the Woods, by Kris Spisak, published September 2024 by Hampton Roads Publishing. All rights reserved.

… The old woman, with her legs as skinny as bones, lives deep in the woods in a hut that stands on chicken feet. The structure turns and moves as it likes, but especially away from those who seek to find her. Baba Yaga’s broom isn’t for flying but for sweeping away her tracks. She is rumored to eat her victims for supper if she thinks they deserve it, but she also features in tales of reluctant kindness, of mentorship, and of fairy godmother-like grace. Isn’t it time we all knew her for who she is?

Folktale traditions can be difficult to explore, because how does one capture the whispers at bedtime or recollections told back and forth among family and friends, all of which have been built upon centuries and centuries of tellers? There is good; there is evil. Then there is Baba Yaga….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Mike Glyer.]

October 1, 1941 – Glen GoodKnight. (Died 2010.) I was often in the home of Glen Goodknight and his partner Ken Lauw when I was on Glen’s 1997 Mythcon committee. It was the ideal fan’s home, walls covered with bookcases, though unlike other fans Glen’s shelves were filled with editions of Lord of the Rings in every language it had appeared: collecting these was his passion.

Ken Lauw and Glen GoodKnight at 2007 Mythcon.

Glen founded the Mythopoeic Society in 1967 in the aftermath of the legendary “Bilbo-Frodo Birthday Picnic” held in September of that year. He invited fans to his house on October 12 to form a continuing group. The 17 attendees became the Society’s first members. Within a few years they had planted 14 discussion groups around the country. In 1972 at the suggestion of Ed Meskys of the Tolkien Society of America the two organizations merged and overnight the Society grew to more than a thousand members.

Mythcon I in 1970 was organized to help knit the Society’s different groups together. Glen married Bonnie GoodKnight (later Callahan) at Mythcon II in 1971.

Glen edited 78 issues of the Society journal Mythlore between 1970 and 1998.

After staying away from Mythcons for several years, Glen returned to celebrate the Society’s 40th anniversary at Berkeley in 2007. Greeted with a standing ovation, he delivered an emotion-filled reminiscence of the Society’s early days.

GoodKnight died in 2010 and his collection is now at Azusa Pacific University.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Off the Mark is on the mark for genre.
The Argyle Sweater answers a typical kid’s question, but not in a typical way.
Saturday Morning Breakfast finds reality is elusive.

(9) FOR THOSE WHO MISSED THIS STORY THE FIRST TIME AROUND. “The real story on the Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman crossover with Star Wars that DC and Lucasfilm were cooking up (and why it didn’t happen)” at Popverse.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….Superman took on Darth Vader.

Well, not quite. However, this almost happened. Believe it or not, Star Wars was going to crossover with the DC Universe. In 2017 writer Kurt Busiek revealed that he and Alex Ross had once developed a DC/Star Wars pitch, but the project fell apart due to corporate disagreements regarding the money. It’s unknown when this project was first pitched, but it was presumably sometime before Disney acquired Lucasfilm. While details of the pitch are scant, some of Alex Ross’ concept art has been released, including the Superman vs Vader image that acts as a headline for this article.

Speaking to a crowd at Tampa Bay Comic Convention, former DC publisher Dan DiDio elaborated on why he canceled the project, which apparently was about more than money.

“I was brought a DC Universe and Star Wars crossover. There was fighting over what you could and couldn’t do, and who gets the better shot, and who gets the hero moment…it wasn’t worth it. Honestly, it just wasn’t worth it.”

While DiDio didn’t name Busiek, he noted that the creator was not happy.

“The creator who came onboard got really angry because he brokered the deal and brought it to us. I just didn’t want to do it at that time, because it didn’t make sense.”

Well, it ain’t gonna happen now. pic.twitter.com/EBdx8XROiQ
— Kurt Busiek (@KurtBusiek) October 12, 2017

(10) VOYAGE TO SEE WHAT’S ON THE BOTTOM. “Wreck of ‘Ghost Ship of the Pacific’ Found Off California” reports the New York Times. (Story is paywalled.)

On Aug. 1, a ship dropped its unusual cargo into a patch of ocean some 70 miles northwest of San Francisco: three orange robots, each more than 20 feet long and shaped like a torpedo. For a day, the aquatic drones autonomously prowled the waters, scanning nearly 50 square miles of ocean floor.

Some 3,500 feet beneath the surface, an apparition popped up on the robots’ powerful sonar. Down in the darkness, the drones saw a ghost.

The robots had spotted the wreck of the “Ghost Ship of the Pacific,” the only U.S. Navy destroyer captured by Japanese forces during World War II. Formerly known as either the U.S.S. Stewart, or DD-224, the ship was resting in what is now the Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary.

Three days later, another set of underwater robots captured images of the historic wreck. Though shrouded in decades of marine growth — and home to sponges and skittering crabs — the 314-foot-long destroyer is almost perfectly intact and upright on the seafloor.

“This level of preservation is exceptional for a vessel of its age and makes it potentially one of the best-preserved examples of a U.S. Navy ‘four-piper’ destroyer known to exist,” Maria Brown, superintendent of both the Cordell Bank and Greater Farallones national marine sanctuaries, said in a statement.

The find, which came during a technology demonstration, highlights the efficiency of modern robotic ocean exploration. Ocean Infinity, the marine robotics firm that operated the drones that made the discovery, owns the world’s largest fleet of autonomous underwater vehicles. The drones are used to create high-resolution maps of the seafloor — a major gap in our understanding of the oceans. The technology is also crucial for selecting sites for offshore construction projects such as wind farms and oil rigs, or for laying out routes for undersea pipelines and cables.

These robotic fleets are also proving invaluable to marine archaeologists. In 2020, Ocean Infinity helped find the wreck of the U.S.S. Nevada. In 2022, the company also contributed to the rediscovery of the Endurance, which sank during a 1915 expedition by Ernest Shackleton….

(11) TAKES A LICKING, BUT WILL IT KEEP ON TICKING? “Spruce Pine just got hit by Helene. The fallout on the tech industry could be huge” according to NPR.

…Nestled in the Appalachian mountains, the community of Spruce Pine, population 2,194, is known for its hiking, local artists and as America’s sole source of high-purity quartz. Helene dumped more than 2 feet of rain on the town, destroying roads, shops and cutting power and water.

But its reach will likely be felt far beyond the small community.

Semiconductors are the brains of every computer-chip-enabled device, and solar panels are a key part of the global push to combat climate change. To make both semiconductors and solar panels, companies need crucibles and other equipment that both can withstand extraordinarily high heat and be kept absolutely clean. One material fits the bill: quartz. Pure quartz.

Quartz that comes, overwhelmingly, from Spruce Pine.

“As far as we know, there’s only a few places in the world that have ultra-high-quality quartz,” according to Ed Conway, author of Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization. Russia and Brazil also supply high-quality quartz, he says, but “Spruce Pine has far and away the [largest amount] and highest quality.”

Conway says without super-pure quartz for the crucibles, which can often be used only a single time, it would be impossible to produce most semiconductors…

(12) GETTING THERE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] You know how it is, there you are stuck out 500 light years away on the Galactic rim from the nearest decent real ale pub in Bognor Regis when your motor breaks down. The repair guy says a new engine is required (‘they couldna’ take it Jim’). So what sort of drive should you have?

David Kipping over at Cool Worlds has ranked the best options for you…. However, the betting is you won’t get back before closing time…. “Interstellar Propulsion Technologies – RANKED!”

Many of you wanted me to talk about the different interstellar propulsion ideas out there so we figured a fun way to compare them all would be in a tier list! Today we take a look at 14 different methods proposed to explore the stars. Let us know your rankings down below in the comments.

(13) SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE. A “cut for time” sketch – really? “Blonde Dragon People”.

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

Pixel Scroll 9/15/24 Yes, You May Say Hi To My Therapy Theropod

Posted on September 15, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS SPOTTED IN THE WILD. Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions exists! It has started arriving in customers’ mailboxes. Although the book’s official release date is October 1, Jon C. Manzo told the Harlan Ellison Facebook Fan Club his copy came on Friday.

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out…

(2) COVID CONCERN. John Wiswell has canceled plans to attend World Fantasy Con next month over dissatisfaction with the convention’s Covid policy, an announcement that elicited responses in social media from several other writers who have made the same decision about WFC.

Sad to say I'm cancelling my trip to World Fantasy. They asked me to be on disability panels, but ignored months of my pleas for a real COVID policy. Every recent major con has been a spreader.

Many disabled attendees wrote to WFC with concern.

The result? This non-policy. pic.twitter.com/9K0h1Okqru
— John Wiswell (@Wiswell) September 13, 2024

(3) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman tells listeners it’s time for two scoops of Sarah Pinsker on Episode 236 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

I won’t almost call it historic — I will call it historic. Because it’s the only episode since this podcast began during which you’ll hear me chat with a creator while we eat a flavor of ice cream inspired by their latest book — in this case, Sarah Pinsker’s Haunt Sweet Home — created by the Baltimore ice cream experts at The Charmery.

… The flavor launched on Friday the 13th, and we met at The Charmery yesterday for a taste of that book-inspired ice cream, where we discussed the sculpture she saw at the American Visionary Art Museum which planted a seed for Haunt Sweet Home, the origin of the ice cream collaboration, how she knew her idea was meant to be a novella and not a novel, why she prefers writing books without a contract, how multiple ideas coalesced into one, the narrative purpose of telling a story via multiple formats, how to know a character who doesn’t know themselves, why you can’t tell from the end product whether a piece of fiction was plotted or pantsed, Kelly Robson’s theory about the Han Solo/Luke Skywalker dichotomy and what it means for creating interesting characters, why she’s a fan of making promises in the early paragraphs of her stories, whether our families understand what we’re writing about when we write about families, and much more.

(4) UNHAPPY IN WESTEROS. “Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin vs House of the Dragon: A timeline”. Elements of the news in Winter Is Coming’s story have been covered here, but this article makes a comprehensive chronology of the pieces.

The other week, author George R.R. Martin did something surprising: writing on his Not a Blog, he publicly criticized HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel show House of the Dragon, which is based on his book Fire & Blood. He dinged the show for changing things from the source material in a way that weakened the story, and warned that there were bigger, “more toxic” changes being contemplated for future seasons of the show.

Martin never did anything like this during the nine years that Game of Thrones (which is based on his book series A Song of Ice and Fire) was running on HBO, so the changes that House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal made from his book obviously upset him. We the fans had inklings that something was bothering Martin before he went public, but I certainly wasn’t expecting him to be so up front about it….

(5) JOURNEY PLANET CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS. Sarah Gulde and Chuck Serface are co-editing an upcoming issue of Journey Planet about friendships in science fiction and fantasy. You could approach this topic in several ways:

Famous friendships from science-fiction and fantasy literature, comics, films, or television. Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamjee, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Spock and James T. Kirk, Captain Marvel and Spider-Woman (or She-Hulk), Dana Scully and Fox Mulder, and Katniss Everdeen and Rue come to mind.
Friendships among writers, artists, and other professionals within the genre. The Inklings and other writing or artistic fellowships would fit here.
Friendships between fans. Who are your favorite people to see at conventions? Dare I mention the Futurians or the Greater New York Science Fiction Club? What about your local clubs or associations?

Friendships take many forms, so we accept broad interpretations expressed in fiction, personal essays, art, reviews, whatever we can publish in a fanzine format. Please send your submissions to Sarah Gulde at sarahmiyoko@gmail.com or Chuck Serface at ceserface@gmail.com by November 15, 2024.

(6) BBC PLANS ‘THREADS’ REBROADCAST. “’The most horrific, sobering thing I’ve ever seen’: BBC nuclear apocalypse film Threads 40 years on” – the Guardian has an overview. “Ahead of a timely re-airing of Mick Jackson’s famously bleak, rarely seen docudrama, its director recalls why he unleashed a mushroom cloud on Sheffield in 1984, while our writer explores the film’s lasting legacy.”

One Sunday night in September 1984, between championship darts and the news with Jan Leeming, the BBC broadcast one of its bravest, most devastating commissions. This was Threads, a two-hour documentary-style drama exploring a hypothetical event deeply feared at the time and also somehow unthinkable: what would happen if a nuclear bomb dropped on a British city….

…The BBC has shown Threads only three times to date: in 1984; in August of the following year, to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and as part of a cold war special on BBC Four in 2003. Another – timely – showing is planned for October. When I watched the film at the end of the 20th century, Threads felt like a piece of history. Today, in a world of conflict in Russia, China and the Middle East, and expanding nuclear capabilities, it no longer does….

… For Jackson, the message of Threads comes down to something very simple: trusting people with the truth. “That’s what I wanted to get across,” he says. “That there’s no going back, that this happens. You can’t go back and press replay.”

But with a film you can. This month, Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov hinted at his country’s intention to change its stance on the use of nuclear weapons “connected with the escalation course of our western adversaries”. The UK and the US recently enhanced their nuclear cooperation pact. Threads airs on BBC Four next month. Be brave for two hours, and then continue the conversation.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary: September 15, 1991: Eerie, Indiana

You remember Joe Dante, who has served us such treats as the Gremlin films, a segment of the Twilight Zone: The Movie (“It’s A Good Life”) and, errr, Looney Tunes: Back in Action? (I’ll forgive him for that because he’s a consultant on HBO Max prequel series Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai. Anyone seen the latter?)

Dante also was the creative consultant and director on a weird little horror SF series thirty-three years ago on NBC called Eerie, Indiana. Yes, delightfully weird. It was created by José Rivera and Karl Schaefer. For both it would be their first genre undertaking, though they would have a starry future, their work including Eureka, that a favorite of mine until the debacle of the last season, Goosebumps, The Jungle Book: Mowgli’s Story and Strange Luck to name but a few genre series that they’d work on in a major capacity.

SPOILER ALERT! REALLY I’M SERIOUS, GO AWAY

Hardly anyone there is normal. Or even possibly of this time and space. We have super intelligent canines bent on global domination, a man who might be the Ahab, and, in this reality, Elvis never died, and Bigfoot is fond of the forest around this small town.

There’s even an actor doomed to keep playing the same role over and over and over again, that of a mummy. They break the fourth wall and get him into a much happier film. Tony Jay played this actor.

Yes, they broke the fourth wall. That would happen again in a major way that I won’t detail here.

END SPOILER ALERT. YOU CAN COME BACK NOW.

It lasted but nineteen episodes as ratings were very poor.

Critics loved it. I’m quoting only one due to its length: “Scripted by Karl Schaefer and José Rivera with smart, sharp insights; slyly directed by feature film helmsman Joe Dante; and given edgy life by the show’s winning cast, Eerie, Indiana shapes up as one of the fall season’s standouts, a newcomer that has the fresh, bracing look of Edward Scissorhands and scores as a clever, wry presentation well worth watching.”

It won’t surprise you that at Rotten Tomatoes, that audience reviewers give it a rating of ninety-two percent. It is streaming on Amazon Prime, Disney+ and legally on YouTube. Yes, legally on the latter.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Alley-Oop demonstrates when not to ask about the worst thing that can happen.
Brewster Rockit witnesses a powerful attraction at work.
Frank and Ernie try to prove themselves.
Carpe Diem has a customer special.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is truly grotesque.

(9) HOW DOES THIS SHOE FIT? THEM says “LGBTQ+ Fans Are Speaking Out About WNBA Star Breanna Stewart’s ‘Harry Potter’ Sneaker Collab”.

Shortly after winning her third Olympic gold medal at the Paris Games last month, out New York Liberty star Breanna Stewart (or “Stewie,” as she is affectionately known by WNBA fans) announced a new signature shoe. The Stewie 3, created in partnership with Puma, is inspired by the Harry Potter films and features design details, like the “Deathly Hallows” symbol, that reference the Potter-verse. Almost immediately, the comments sections of official social media posts promoting the shoe were filled with fans voicing their disappointment that Stewart, one of the league’s highest-profile players and an outspoken trans ally, would be tied to one of the world’s most vocal antagonists of trans people.

The timing of the shoe drop has particularly upset Stewie’s queer and trans fans, considering it comes on the heels of Rowling being named in a cyberbullying lawsuit filed by Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who alleges that the Harry Potter author, Elon Musk, and other public figures took part in a “massive” harassment campaign that labeled her a “biological male.”

While fan backlashes to Harry Potter products are almost de rigueur at this point, this particular Potter collab hits harder because of who Stewart is and what the league means to its many LGBTQ+ enthusiasts. The WNBA itself is considered one of the safest and most affirming leagues for queer and trans crowds. Over 25% of the players in the league, including Stewart, are out as LGBTQ+ and the WNBA was the first professional league in the U.S. to officially recognize Pride….

…One of the questions fans like McKenzie want answers to is how a product celebrating Harry Potter and benefiting J.K. Rowling makes sense as a collaboration between an out pro-trans athlete and a company that has demonstrated support for LGBTQ+ people. (Neither Puma nor representatives for Stewart responded to multiple requests for comment.)…

(10) THEY’VE GOT THE GOODS. If you’re interested in Star Wars figure collecting, there’s a large photo gallery of the offerings unveiled here: “Hasbro Pulse Con 2024 – Star Wars Panel Recap” at The Toyark.

The Star Wars panel just wrapped up over on Hasbro Pulse Con 2024. New figures were shown for The Vintage Collection and Black Series from multiple eras. A couple that stood out to me was a refresh of Black Series A New Hope Luke and Leia, which have all new sculpts and no soft goods. Read on to check out details and pics from the stream. Pre-Orders for most go live at 5 PM for the general public!

(11) STAR TREK, 1-YEAR BARGAIN MISSION. [Item by Daniel Dern.] ParamountPlus.com (lotsa Star Trek, if nothing else)(also Daily Show and Stephen Colbert, of course) is offering a year for half price (so $29.99 for with-ads, or $59.99 with “No ads except live TV & a few shows, and SHOWTIME originals & movies”).

Coupon name/ID (in case you need it): Coupon: fall50 (for “50% off”)

You can’t do this as a “renew” — at least not thru the web site, possibly via their phone people.

Our similarly-priced sale year just ended yesterday, so (having deliberately cancelled a few days ago so it didn’t autorenew at full price), I just signed up (for the cheapskate-with-ads, dunno if it’s too late to call and splurge the upgrade).

(Note: If you already have a ParamountPlus account, you don’t have to create a new account; your existing account persists if/when your subscription ends.)

(12) POLARIS DAWN RETURNS. “SpaceX capsule splashes down after history-making Polaris Dawn mission” reports NBC News.

A SpaceX capsule carrying four private citizens splashed down off Florida at 3:36 a.m. ET Sunday, ending a historic mission that included the world’s first all-civilian spacewalk.

Billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Scott “Kidd” Poteet and SpaceX engineers Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon returned to Earth in a Crew Dragon capsule, splashing down off Dry Tortugas, Florida, in the Gulf of Mexico….

…It was also the company’s [SpaceX’s] most ambitious expedition, as the crew members and their spacecraft executed several risky maneuvers.

Chief among them was the all-civilian spacewalk Thursday. Isaacman and Gillis exited the Dragon capsule on a tether, each spending around 10 minutes out in the vacuum of space. The duo spent the spacewalk conducting mobility tests in their newly designed spacesuits.

The outing was a risky undertaking, because the Dragon capsule does not have a pressurized airlock. That meant that all four members of the Polaris Dawn mission wore spacesuits during the spacewalk and that the entire capsule was depressurized to vacuum conditions….

(13) FROM NEIGHBORHOOD OF MAKE-BELIEVE TO GOTHAM CITY. Collider tells how “Michael Keaton Got His Start Working on One of Your Favorite Kids’ Shows”.

…In an interview, David Newell, who played deliveryman Mr. McFeely on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, went into more detail about what Michael Keaton did on the show. According to Newell, Keaton worked on the floor crew. Because of this job, Keaton ran the trolley that went through Mr. Rogers’ living room. If you’re watching any mid to late ’70s episodes, and you see the trolley come through the hole in the wall, that’s the man who would become Beetlejuice flipping the switch to make the trolley move. Keaton also helped build the sets and take them down before and after shooting an episode….

(14) REALLY OLD SCHOOL. “’Entire ecosystem’ of fossils 8.7m years old found under Los Angeles high school” – Yahoo! has the story.

Marine fossils dating back to as early as 8.7m years ago have been uncovered beneath a south Los Angeles high school.

On Friday, the Los Angeles Times reported that researchers had discovered two sites on the campus of San Pedro high school under which fossils including those of a saber-toothed salmon and a megalodon, the gigantic prehistoric shark, were buried.

According to the outlet, the two sites where the fossils were found include an 8.7m-year-old bone bed from the Miocene era and a 120,000-year-old shell bed from the Pleistocene era.

The discoveries were made between June 2022 and July 2024, LAist reports….

(15) WOLVES OF YELLOWSTONE. [Item by Jeffrey Smith.] Balanced Ecology — not particularly sfnal, but certainly adjacent. What happened to Yellowstone National Park when (a) wolves were removed and (b) when they were returned. Very instructive as to what one change can make to an ecosystem. A fascinating read. “Friday Night Soother – Digby’s Hullabaloo” at Digby’s Blog.

…In 1995, something really exciting happened in the nation’s first national park, Yellowstone. 41 wild wolves are reintroduced here by scientists. After 100 years of being hunted, wolves could once again call this place home.

The wolves thrived, but something else very surprising happened. Their return had a spectacular effect on the landscape, an effect that spread wider than anyone thought possible. So how did this all happen?…

(16) AUTUMN CONCATENATION NOW ONLINE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The SF² Concatenation has just posted its northern hemisphere academic autumnal issue. The contents are:

v34(5) 2024.4.15 — New Columns & Articles for the Summer 2024

Newscast for the Autumn 2024. This includes within it many key sections. See also the master newscast link index that connects to all its SF/F genre and science news sub-sections.
How common are exo-Earths with water? – Jonathan Cowie
Is the lack of watery, inner rocky planets an early Fermi filter? New science sheds possible light.
Contabile ³₄: Triple Time – Peter Tyers
Britain’s 34th Annual UK Filk Music Convention reviewed.
Levitation – The 2024 British Eastercon – Arthur Chappell
Britain’s national convention reviewed.
Glasgow – The 2024 SF Worldcon – Tim Atkinson
What’s it like to attend a Worldcon for the first time?
From engineer and SF fan to astronomy – Mark Paice
Taking up astronomy as a hobby.
Ten years ago exactly. One from the archives:
My 25 years of Eurocons & ESFS – Roberto Quaglia
After a decade as the European SF Society’s Vice-Chair, Roberto reflects on a quarter of a century of Eurocons.
Twenty years ago exactly. One from the archives:
Robert Sheckley interviewed
The SFWA Author Emeritus reveals his influences, format preferences, idea sources and comments on working collaboratively.
Thirty years ago exactly. One from the archives:
More than Human: Colin Greenland, Charles Stross, Norman Spinrad & Tony Chester (moderator)
A panel discussion from the British Mexicon 5 convention in 1994.

And scrolling further down there are loads of fiction as well as a few non-fiction SF and pop science book reviews. Accessible at www.concatenation.org.

Splundig.

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

Pixel Scroll 8/17/24 Stand By Your Slan In The High Castle On Zanzibar

Posted on August 17, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) A DIFFERENT KIND OF MEMORY HOLE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.]

Sold! That’s €1,275,000 for lot number 487, Mona Lisa’s left eye. Sold to the gentleman with the monocle in the third row.

Next up for bid we have lot number 488, Mona Lisa’s right eye. This lot has an opening bid of €600,000. And we have 650 from one of the telephone bidders; do I hear €675,000?

“’It could disappear for ever’: Anger over sale of George Orwell archive” reports the Guardian.

George Orwell’s archives provide an invaluable insight into one of the most influential British writers of the 20th century, casting light on how he produced his most memorable books, his sensitivity to criticism, and his fears that legal threats could ruin his work. Now the treasure trove that is the extensive archive of correspondence and contracts amassed by Orwell’s original publisher, Victor Gollancz, could be scattered to the winds in what has been described as an act of “cultural vandalism”.

Crucial correspondence involving the Nineteen Eighty-Four author and Observer correspondent is being offered for sale on the open market, following a decision in 2018 by the publisher’s parent company to sell the archive because the warehouse was closing.

Richard Blair, 80 – whose father Eric Blair wrote under the pen-name George Orwell – is dismayed by the loss: “It’s terribly sad … Once Gollancz material is acquired by private collectors, it could disappear into the ether for ever.”

For £75,000, Peter Harrington, a leading antiquarian bookseller, is currently offering Gollancz papers relating to Orwell’s second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter. They include his original contract, a letter with his corrections, and a 1934 report by Gerald Gould – then fiction editor of the Observer and a Gollancz manuscript reader – stating that it should be published.

Harrington is also selling letters for £50,000 relating to Orwell’s third novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which show that libel concerns led to key alterations in the final text. In 1936, dismayed by Gollancz’s desired changes, Orwell wrote that he would nevertheless do what he could to meet his publisher’s demands – “short of ruining the book altogether”….

(2) STRACZYNSKI ON LDV. J. Michael Straczynski told Facebook followers he has copies of Last Dangerous Visions in his hands, and shared some extra Tim Kirk artwork that’s in the books. Images at the link.

Four years ago I announced we were compiling and updating THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS. Some folks laughed, saying it’d never happen. Today the actual books arrived in advance of the 10/2 pub date. Given the shifting landscape of stories in and out of TLDV, this is as complete as it will ever be, and more complete than it has ever been.

And as a SURPRISE BONUS: artist Tim Kirk, who did the interior art pieces for THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS, also painted two alternate TLDV covers for Harlan back in the day. They are included in the book’s endpapers front and back, sans text and in full color, to allow their beauty to come through unimpeded.

(3) FLIPPING HIS LID. BBC keeps an eye on the Propstore cash register as “Indiana Jones’s Temple of Doom hat sells for £490,000 at auction”.

The hat worn by actor Harrison Ford in the second instalment of the Indiana Jones film franchise has sold for nearly half a million pounds at auction.

The brown felt fedora – specifically made for the Temple of Doom film – fetched $630,000 (£487,000) in Los Angeles on Thursday.

Other items of movie memorabilia were sold at the same time including props from Star Wars, Harry Potter and James Bond productions.

Jones, an adventuring archaeologist, is seen with the hat early on in the movie where he and his companions jump from a crashing plane in an inflatable raft….

… The fedora was also worn by Ford’s stunt-double in the 1984 film, Dean Ferrandini, and was sold with previously unpublished photos of the stuntman wearing the now-iconic costume on location.

Ferrandini died last year. The hat came from his personal collection.

The sable-coloured fedora was an update to the original featured in the first Indiana Jones film – Raiders Of The Lost Ark – with a “more tapered” crown then the first, Propstore, the auction house, said.

Created by the Herbert Johnson Hat Company in London, the inside lining features gold monogrammed initials “IJ”.

Also sold at the auction was an imperial scout trooper helmet used in the 1983 Star Wars film Return Of The Jedi – which was bought for $315,000 (£243,000) – as well as a light-up wand used by Daniel Radcliffe in Harry Potter And The Prisoner of Azkaban, which attracted a winning bid of $53,550 (£41,400)….

(4) WELL WORTH READING. The Pinnacle Gazette admires sff authors: “Science Fiction Writers Inspire Reality And Reflect Society”.

… Jemisin’s work demonstrates how fantasy can illuminate the truth of contemporary society, blending enthralling narratives with uncomfortable realities. She’s vocal about wanting equality and justice to resonate within her stories, aiming to help readers confront and understand those themes.

Jemisin’s powerful message extends beyond literature; movie adaptations of her work are currently underway. The merging of cinema with her impactful stories opens new doors for broader audiences….

(5) THE MARTIANS ARE BACK. LA’s Skirball Cultural Center will host “Radio, Propaganda, and The War of the Worlds: An Illuminated Lecture by theatre dybbuk featuring Professor Paul Lerner” on September 1. Tickets and full details at the link.

Hear Professor Paul Lerner discuss Orson Welles’ famous “The War of the Worlds” radio broadcast while actors from theatre dybbuk perform excerpts from radio broadcasts and other sources.

(6) A WORD GAME. [Item by Dann.] Under the “fun and games” section of the scroll, I came across Cell Tower a while back. The object of the puzzle is to find all of the words. The letters appear in the correct order, but they may be in consecutive rows. A perfect game is when you find all of the words without having to unselect/correct a word. All words are between 4 and 8 characters long.

My personal trick is to select all of the letters in the words that I find until all of the letters are covered. Then I deselect all of the letters and start selecting each word in turn.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

1987 – RoboCop. In my opinion, they should have stopped after RoboCop came out. Oh, the next one with Peter Weller reprising his role had life in it but this film, oh, it’s perfect. So let’s talk about this film that premiered thirty- seven years ago in Los Angeles.

Edward Neumeier, a script reader for Warner Bro. who had no scriptwriting credits before this film, had visited the Blade Runner shooting stage and was fascinated by the idea of whether a machine could have a soul. (Of course, we know RoboCop is human, but I guess we’re supposed to forget that.) He and Michael Miner whose first script was, oh guess, wrote this film.

Their script was purchased just a year before production began by Jon Davison for Orion Pictures who would produce this film.

Now they had considerable trouble finding a director as more than a few said no, so they approached Verhoeven who would also turn it down twice because he did not understand the intent of it, particularly the satirical edge. He was convinced by his wife that he should direct it.

So they had a script, a producer and director, but who to play the star of this film? A fairly long list of possible actors was considered with Orion wanting Arnold Schwarzenegger on the basis of being The Terminator but they were persuaded not to cast him when it was noted that in that costume he’d look like the Pillsbury Dough Boy.

Peter Weller had wanted the role and tested well, so he got the job. It didn’t hurt that he was a relative unknown, so the comparatively low salary didn’t bother him. It also helped that he had a following in the SF community because of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.

They had cast Stephanie Zimbalist as Anne Lewis, but she dropped out to be in Remington Steele. (A terribly dated series I discovered the other week — my opinion of course.) Nancy Allen found the script rather interesting and readily agreed to be cast.

In my mind, there’s one more human character of major importance and that’s played by Kurtwood Smith who auditioned for Boddicker and also for the ill-fated Jones. The script said according to later write-ups of the film that Boddicker was scripted to wear glasses so he would look like Heinrich Himmler. Smith in interviews later said he wasn’t told this, and I certainly didn’t see the likeness. Did any of you see it?

Let’s briefly talk about Weller as RoboCop. Remember how smoothly he looked on screen? That was a lie. The suit was a total clusterfuck, sorry Mike, that’s the best word for it — the visor was hard to see out and that meant he couldn’t handle his weapon right, too cumbersome for him to move as he had practiced, and he lost up to three pounds a day while filming because up the weight of it, so he started taking prescription meds which made him, errr, testy.

So he got fired by Verhoeven who considered replacing him with Lance Henriksen but cooler, saner heads prevailed and filming (eventually) resumed.

Did I mention Orion had to increase the budget? More than once?

Of the extensive SFX, I want to mention but one. Well two actually.

The first being Emil’s melting mutation was inspired by The Incredible Melting Man.

Rob Bottin who had previously worked with John Carpenter on The Fog and The Thing designed and constructed Emil’s prosthetics, creating a foam-latex headpiece and matching gloves that gave the appearance of Emil’s skin melting as he said in interviews “off his bones like marshmallow sauce” when his vehicle made the toxic water in that contained immerse him. Cool, very cool.

Then there’s ED-209. The one that RoboCop looks up, not the one he obviously destroyed, was a fully-articulated model of only fiberglass took over four months to build, was seven feet tall, and weighed five hundred pounds. However, all of the other scenes were done by two-foot-high miniature replicas for stop motion animation, all fifty-five shots.

Ok, I’ve prattled on long enough. Did it make money? Was it well received?

Well, the budget wasn’t really high despite Orion (reluctantly) giving it more funding as it cost just under fourteen million and it made nearly four times that at fifty-three million dollars!

Was it well received? What do you think? It nominated for a Hugo at Nolacon II losing to, errr, The Princess Bride. Trying for irony that year, oh voters? I’m going to quote but one critical review from Hillary Mantel of The Spectator: “The film is energetic, visually brilliant and very funny, with a sharp script that is never allowed to hold up the carnage.”

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Brewster Rockit notes how the invasion ends.
Thatababy suggests an alternate inspiration.
Rhymes with Orange has a cure for writer’s block.

(9) LA DONNA E MOBILE. “Fortnite is back on mobiles after four years thanks to EU law” – the Guardian tells how it happened.

The video game Fortnite is back on mobile phones, four years after Apple and Google pulled it from their app stores. Android users worldwide can install the game, along with two new titles from the publisher, Epic Games, by downloading the company’s new app store.

However, only iPhone users in the EU can follow suit as Epic becomes the highest profile company yet to adopt the looser restrictions forced on Apple by the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

All three games will also be available on Alt Store PAL, the largest of the independent App Stores launched in the EU under Apple’s new terms, said Tim Sweeney, the founder of Epic Games.

“We’re really grateful to the European Commission for not only passing the DMA law, enabling store competition, but also really going in and robustly holding Apple and Google’s feet to the fire to ensure they can’t just obstruct competition,” Sweeney added….

(10) CROUCH SERIES GETS SECOND BITE. The Verge reports “Dark Matter is coming back for a second season on Apple TV Plus”.

The multiverse of Apple TV Plus’ Dark Matter is about to get bigger as the show heads into its second season. Apple announced on Friday that Dark Matter, Blake Crouch’s adaptation of his own 2016 novel about a physicist who gets sucked into multiple alternate realities, has been renewed for a new batch of episodes….

(11) MAD, MAD I TELL YOU. Atlas Obscura contemplates “The Metamorphosis of the Mad Scientist”.

With all due respect to WWII dramas and Emma Stone satires, no genre has done more to unleash the mad scientist upon the world than the horror film. They are one of scary movies’ most famous characters, just behind the Final Girl and doomed quarterbacks. The two most iconic images of the silent era come from Metropolis (1927) and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), both chilling stories about the havoc of evil doctors. A century later, the mad scientist continues to haunt our movies, even if the inventions themselves do not. “Today, many of the things that would once have seemed like horror-story fodder are scientific reality,” noted The Atlantic in 2014. “But still, as the boundaries of human knowledge are continually pushed, the trope of the mad scientist endures.”

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George thought someone would want to know how this movie got made: “Blade: Trinity Pitch Meeting”. Really, he did.

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

Last Dangerous Visions Table of Contents

Posted on July 1, 2024 by Mike Glyer

Advance reading copies of Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions anthology are going out and book marketing platform Edelweiss has posted screenshots of the table of contents:

The book goes on sale October 1, 2024 from Blackstone Publishers. The marketing copy says:

An anthology more than half a century in the making, The Last Dangerous Visions is the third and final installment of the legendary science fiction anthology series.

In 1973 celebrated writer and editor Harlan Ellison announced the third and final volume of his unprecedented anthology series, which began with Dangerous Visions and continued with Again, Dangerous Visions. But for reasons undisclosed, The Last Dangerous Visions was never completed.

Now, six years after Ellison’s passing, science fiction’s most famous unpublished book is here. And with it, the heartbreaking true story of the troubled genius behind it.

Provocative and controversial, socially conscious and politically charged, wildly imaginative yet deeply grounded, the thirty-two never-before-published stories, essays, and poems in The Last Dangerous Visions stand as a testament to Ellison’s lifelong pursuit of art, uniting a diverse range of science fiction writers both famous and newly minted, including Max Brooks, Edward Bryant, Cecil Castellucci, James S. A. Corey, Howard Fast, Patricia Hodgell, Dan Simmons, Robert Sheckley, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Mildred Downey Broxon, and Cory Doctorow, among others.

The historic publication of The Last Dangerous Visions completes the long-awaited final chapter in an incredible literary legacy.

J. Michael Straczynski’s vision for The Last Dangerous Visions set in 2021 explains the book that now exists:

…There was no one thing that stands as Harlan’s version of TLDV. It never existed because it was always in a state of flux. It was going to be whatever it was on the day when he finally finished with it. THAT was to be TLDV, not something frozen in amber that only reflected the70s. Which is why he continued buying stories all through the 80s and into the 90s (including from folks like Stephen Dedman) because he saw the book as a living document that would have to grow and change to stay relevant with changing times. It wasn’t supposed to be static until it actually came out…and he was the first to say that some stories would have to be trimmed to make room for ones that were more current.

Further to the point: no publisher in their right mind is going to put out a 700,000 word anthology that follows on books that came out in the 70s. The risk is too great. A reasonable sized book, yes. A behemoth, no. And the whole point of the exercise is to put the work of the best of the original DV writers, and those new voices Harlan wanted to continue to see, out where the mainstream world could see it…not as a limited edition sold to the already-faithful, not as an Ebook or a print-on-demand…but something to be published from a major company that would receive the kind of critical attention in the press that these stories and Harlan’s work deserve….

To carry out his vision Straczysnki pursued new stories by contemporary and marketable authors. James S. A. Corey, Max Brooks, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cecil Castellucci and Cory Doctorow are in the new book. There is also a story by Kayo Hartenbaum, the winner of a competition Straczynski ran to fill one slot.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST. That said, fans still want to know how the Blackstone anthology resembles the version Ellison projected in the 1970s?

Locus reported in 1979 that Last Dangerous Visions had been sold to Berkley Books and ran a table of contents listing 113 stories. (However, Ellison would acquire several more in the 1980s.[*])

As of mid-2023, at least forty stories purchased for Last Dangerous Visions have been published elsewhere (Wikipedia list).

The Blackstone anthology contains 13 stories that definitely were on the 1979 table of contents. Whether to count two more authors’ work is unclear. D.M. Rowles, who has eight “Intermezzos” in the Blackstone version had a single story by another title on the 1979 table of contents. Also, Howard Fast had a story announced in 1979 but the one in Blackstone has a different title [**]. Fast died in 2003, so whether or not it’s the same story, it would not be one of those commissioned by Straczysnki.

The following titles in red from Blackstone’s table of contents were on the list announced in 1979:

Last Dangerous Visions – stories per digital ARC:

“Assignment No. 1” by Stephen Robinett
“Hunger” by Max Brooks
“Intermezzo 1: Broken, Beautiful Body on Beach” by D. M. Rowles
“None So Deaf” by Richard E. Peck
“War Stories” by Edward Bryant
“Intermezzo 2: Bedtime Story” by D. M. Rowles
“The Great Forest Lawn Clearance Sale—Hurry, Last Days!!” by Stephen Dedman [*]
“Intermezzo 3: Even Beyond Olympus” by D. M. Rowles
“After Taste” by Cecil Castellucci
“Leveled Best” by Steve Herbst
“The Time of the Skin” by A. E. van Vogt
“Rundown” by John Morressy
“Intermezzo 4: Elemental” by D. M. Rowles
“The Weight of a Feather (The Weight of a Heart)” by Cory Doctorow
“The Malibu Fault” by Jonathan Fast
“The Size of the Problem” by Howard Fast [**]
“Intermezzo 5: First Contact” by D. M. Rowles
“A Night at the Opera” by Robert Wissner
“Goodbye” by Steven Utley
“Primordial Follies” by Robert Sheckley
“Men in White” by David Brin
“Intermezzo 6: Continuity” by D. M. Rowles
“The Final Pogrom” by Dan Simmons
“Intermezzo 7: The Space Behind the Obvious” by D. M. Rowles
“Falling from Grace” by Ward Moore
“First Sight” by Adrian Tchaikovsky
“Intermezzo 8: Proof” by D. M. Rowles
“Binary System” by Kayo Hartenbaum
“Dark Threshold” by P. C. Hodgell
“The Danann Children Laugh” by Mildred Downey Broxon
“Judas Iscariot Didn’t Kill Himself: A Story in Fragments” by James S. A. Corey

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Tag Archives: Last Dangerous Visions

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Last Dangerous Visions Table of Contents