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 3/7/25 How Many Files To Pixelscroll? Three Score Files And Ten

Posted on March 7, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) FRANK R. PAUL AWARDS TAKING ENTRIES. Administrator Frank Wu has announced the Frank R. Paul Awards are open for submissions until April 15. Full details are available here.

There are two categories: Best Magazine Cover Art, and Best Book Cover Art. Prizes include a trophy (with a 3D-printed recreation of FRP’s tiger-robot-monster from the Sept. 1935 Wonder Stories) plus $500 in each category.

Artwork for any publication (pro, semi-pro, fanzine or online) is eligible, as long as the art was first published anywhere in 2024.

Artists are encouraged to submit (to me, Frank Wu, at FWu@FrankWu.com) on their own behalf up to 5 items they had published last year, with a note that the art was NOT generated using an AI program.

Authors and publishers are also encouraged to submit on behalf of artists they’ve worked with, and anyone else can submit on behalf of any artwork that pleased them in the last year.

(2) BOOK CURATION AS FREE SPEECH. “ABA Goes Into Damage Control After Contentious WI2025 Community Forum” reports Publishers Weekly.

A week after Winter Institute 2025 wrapped up in Denver on February 26, the American Booksellers Association dedicated Thursday’s issue of its weekly Bookselling This Week newsletter to respond to criticisms raised at a contentious WI2025 community forum. During that forum, booksellers criticized the ABA leadership and board for their refusal for more than a year to take a clear stand in support of indie booksellers who have been attacked for selling books about Palestine, as well as authors who are Palestinian and/or have spoken out against the Israeli military campaign in Gaza. Other speakers raised concerns about double standards, some related to compensation, in the organization’s treatment of its members. Booksellers had raised similar concerns at the community forum at WI2024 in Cincinnati.

Perhaps John Evans, a past ABA board member who currently owns Camino Books in a San Diego suburb, summed it up best, when he said at the WI2025 community forum: “We aren’t asking you to come out with a stance on the Israeli war. We are asking you to support booksellers in a censorious environment by making this statement publicly that it is not antisemitic to provide books to people who want them. All of this falls within the framework of a bookselling organization. This is not a political statement. This is a consensual, understood, fundamental principle of what we all do, and it’s hurting us. You not supporting that. It’s offending us.”

In a letter signed by all 12 ABA board members that appeared in BTW, the board emphasized that it, “along with the staff of American Booksellers for Free Expression and ABA, condemns all attacks on bookstores, in particular the targeting of bookstores who have chosen to highlight Palestinian books and authors in their stores. Each bookstore’s curation is their own expression of their freedom of speech, and verbal attacks, demands to carry or not carry certain titles, and threats to stores are not acceptable.” The board also promised to support any booksellers “during times of persecution, harassment, curation challenges, and other attacks on booksellers and stores.”

The ABA wrote in a separate statement, which also appeared in BTW, that booksellers have been offered support, resources, education, crisis counseling, and provided with a hotline by ABA staff. “This is the work that ABA is empowered to do by our ends policies and allowed to do as a 501(c)(6) nonprofit trade association,” the ABA declared. “We cannot make a political statement on behalf of our members, but we can and do support our members in their right to express those views.” The organization added: “Book curation is a form of speech, and it must remain free. We condemn any harassment or threat to our members that aims to abridge this freedom.”…

(3) STATE DEPARTMENT’S LATEST CULTURAL DAMAGE. The University of Iowa’s International Writing Program shared some bad news with Facebook readers:

Dear Friends: We write today with a difficult update. On Wednesday, Feb. 26, the International Writing Program (IWP) learned that its grants with the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, were being terminated. This notification explained that the IWP’s awards “no longer effectuate agency priorities,” nor align “with agency priorities and national interest.” The immediate result was the cancellation of Between the Lines (the IWP’s summer youth program), and the dissolution of Lines and Spaces Exchanges, Distance Learning courses, and Emerging Voices programs. The overall Fall Residency cohort will be reduced by around half due to the loss of federally funded participants; the IWP’s other long-time funding partners, including a combination of donors, grants, foreign ministries of culture, and NGOs, will continue to support writers.

We are devastated by the abrupt end of this 58-year partnership and are working closely with University of Iowa General Counsel and Grant Accounting to review the terminations, understand their full impact, and respond in the best interest of the organization. Despite this disappointing turn of events, the IWP’s mission to promote mutual understanding through creative writing and literature remains unchanged; with the help of a limited number of other partners, we will still hold a 2025 Fall Residency even while pursuing new sources of funding. To support the IWP as we begin to rebuild, please visit this website: bit.ly/support-iwp

(4) TUTTLE ON FIVE NEW BOOKS. Lisa Tuttle’s “The best recent science fiction and fantasy – review roundup” for the Guardian covers The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica; Dissolution by Nicholas Binge; The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar; When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi; and The Foot on the Crown by Christopher Fowler.

(5) BOOKLESS IN BLIGHTY. But the Guardian immediately leaves you wondering who in Britain might take advantage of Tuttle’s recommendations: “New poll finds 40% of Britons have not read a book in the past year”.

According to new a polling by YouGov 40% of Britons have not read or listened to a book in the past year.

The median British adult has read or listened to three books in the past year, the survey found.

Women seem to be bigger readers than men, with 66% of women reading at least one book in the last year, compared with 53% of men.

There was a political split: while 72% of remain voters said they’d picked up a book in the past 12 months, 54% of leave voters reported doing so. Labour voters were most likely to have read in the last year (70%) when compared with Lib Dem (64%), Conservative (63%) and Reform (51%) voters.

A class divide also emerged, with 66% of respondents in middle-class households reporting having recently read a book compared with 52% of those in working-class households.

(6) EYE ON GUY. Andrew Porter has shared the photo he took of Brother Guy Consolmagno at Boskone.

Brother Guy Consolmagno, right, and Kielan Donahue at Boskone. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

(7) JEOPARDY! Then, Andrew Porter relayed the results of genre interest from tonight’s episode of Jeopardy!

Final Jeopardy: Category: Science Fiction

Answer: Name shared by a groundbreaking magazine launched in April 1926 & a TV anthology series that premiered in September 1985

Wrong questions: What is Popular Science (crossed out; no actual question).

What is Outer Limits?

What is Unsolved Mysteries?

Correct question (obviously) is Amazing Stories.

(8) GENE HACKMAN FOLLOW-UP. Authorities in Santa Fe, NM held a press conference today where they revealed — “Gene Hackman Died From Alzheimer’s & Heart Disease; Wife Died Days Before” – Deadline has the story.

A February 27 autopsy of Gene Hackman reveals the 95-year-old Oscar winner died of a combination of “advanced Alzheimer’s disease” and severe heart disease, the New Mexico Chief Medical Examiner announced today.

“It is reasonable to conclude that Mr. Hackman died on February 18,” Dr. Heather Jarrell said in a press conference with Santa Fe Sheriff Adan Mendoza and other county officials. “He was in very poor health,” Dr. Jarrell also noted of Hackman, adding that there was evidence that he hadn’t eaten for a number of days. Ms. Arakawa is assumed to have died on or around February 11, officials estimated….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Weyr Search (1967) and Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series

Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series has a fascinating Hugo history.

She won a Hugo the first time she was nominated, for the novella “Weyr Search”, in 1968 at Baycon (tied with Philip José Farmer’s “Riders of the Purple Wage”.) It was published in Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact, October 1967.

It’s in A Dragon-Lover’s Treasury of the Fantastic anthology which was edited by Margaret Weis, available from the usual suspects at a very reasonable price.

It would be the only win for the Dragonriders of Pern series but by far is not the only nomination for the series.

Next up would be the “Dragonrider” novella which was nominated a year later at St. Louiscon. Three years later, her Dragonquest novel would get a nod at the first L.A. Con showing that con had impeccable taste. Are you surprised they did? I’m certainly not.

At Seacon ‘79, The White Dragon was nominated. (I really love that novel.)

The next L.A. Con (1984) would see another novel be nominated, Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern. The final nomination, also for a novel, was at MagiCon (1992), for All the Weyrs of Pern.

The series did win a number of other awards including a Nebula for Dragonrider, a Ditmar and Gandalf for The White Dragon, a Balrog for Dragondrums and The Science Fiction Book Club’s Book of the Year Award for The Renegades of Pern. It is, after all, an expansive series. Really expansive.

Personal note: I really wanted to enjoy this series all the way through as I came to it later. They were great, they really were, but something happened in the stories early on for me that I can say but I won’t as it’s a MAJOR SPOILER.

I read the first trilogy of Dragonquest, Dragonflight and The White Dragon plus Harper Hall trilogy of Dragonsong, Dragonsinger and Dragondrums, and I did read on through maybe, let me check ISFDB, through All the Weyrs of Pern, That’s when that MAJOR SPOILER occurs which makes me say why McCaffrey, oh why?

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Bizarro compares favorite tunes.
Carpe Diem makes a hygiene suggestion.
Dog Eat Doug argues over Pan’s Labyrinth.
Tom the Dancing Bug provides a fun pack.
Wallace the Brave almost reveals someone’s powers.

(11) HAPPY DEMENTED BIRTHDAY. Dr. Demento (Barry Hansen) turns 84 on April 2 and will celebrate his birthday at the LA Breakfast Club. Dr. Demento will take the audience through his 55 year career as America’s most unusual disc jockey and play some of his favorite songs. Tickets available here: “Celebrate The Doctor’s Career & 84th Birthday!”

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Dr. Demento has been celebrating “mad music and crazy comedy” on the airwaves playing everything from Spike Jones to Frank Zappa for over five decades. He is responsible for introducing the world to the Dr. Demento Show’s #1 most requested song of all time, “Fish Heads”, and launching the career of “Weird Al” Yankovic. Throughout the years, the world-famous Doctor’s influence on pop culture has earned him induction into the National Radio Hall of Fame, an hour long Anniversary special on Comedy Central, featured guest appearances on Late Night with David Letterman, Larry King Live, and countless others including The Simpsons.

(12) A BIGGER SLICE OF THE CHEESE, PLEASE. “Disney Animation Production Management Workers Ratify First Union Contract” reports Animation Magazine.

After two years of determined effort, the production management workers at Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS) have officially ratified their first union contract with the studio, The Animation Guild announced today. This landmark agreement comes after an intense organizing effort that saw a supermajority of production workers vote to unionize in February 2023, a move that was initially met with resistance from studio leadership.

The organizing effort proceeded to a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) hearing, culminating in a decisive ruling on September 27, 2023. The ruling affirmed the eligibility of full-time production coordinators, production supervisors and production managers to unionize with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and The Animation Guild, IATSE Local 839 (TAG).

“It’s been an uphill journey, but at long last, we’ve reached the mountaintop. We are standing in our breakthrough — stronger, bolder, and united,” says production coordinator Tamara Lee….

(13) DOOM WITHOUT END, AMEN. The Guardian’s Stuart Jeffries adds to our amusement in “A Brief History of the End of the F*cking World by Tom Phillips review – apocalypse not”.

…The serious purpose of Phillips’s jolly doomscroll through the apocalyptic sex cults, pandemics, nuclear armageddons, rapture-fetishising fruitloops, numerologically obsessed nincompoops, swivel-eyed preppers waiting out zombie apocalypses in their Utah silos, not to mention the Bible’s (spoiler alert!) troubling last act, is to work out quite why, after so many failed prophesies, doom-mongery still thrives….

(14) SPACEX “STARSHIP” #GOBOOMFALLDOWN…AGAIN. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] “SpaceX’s Starship explodes in space, which Musk calls a ‘minor setback’” – Reuters has details.

SpaceX’s massive Starship spacecraft exploded in space on Thursday minutes after lifting off from Texas, prompting the FAA to halt air traffic in parts of Florida, in the second straight failure this year for Elon Musk’s Mars rocket program.

Several videos on social media showed fiery debris streaking through the dusk skies near south Florida and the Bahamas after Starship broke up in space shortly after it began to spin uncontrollably with its engines cut off, a SpaceX live stream of the mission showed.

The failure of the eighth Starship test comes just over a month after the seventh also ended in an explosive failure. The back-to-back mishaps occurred in early mission phases that SpaceX has easily surpassed previously, a setback for a program Musk had sought to speed up this year….

… The Federal Aviation Administration briefly issued ground stops at the Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach and Orlando airports because of “space launch debris.” It said it had opened a mishap investigation into the incident…

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George smuggles us inside “The Gorge Pitch Meeting”.

[Thanks to Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, 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 Dan’l.]

Pixel Scroll 2/8/25 God Had Names For All The Pixels. No One Else Knows Them

Posted on February 8, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) AMANDA PALMER ISSUES DENIAL. “Neil Gaiman’s ex-wife Amanda Palmer denies negligence allegations” reports the BBC.

Amanda Palmer, the ex-wife of British author Neil Gaiman, has denied allegations of negligence and human trafficking made by a woman who worked for the former couple.

Earlier this week, the woman filed civil lawsuits in the US alleging the former couple violated laws on federal human trafficking, with complaints of assault, battery and inflicting emotional distress against Gaiman and negligence against Palmer.

In a short post on Instagram, Palmer, who lives in the US, said she would not respond to specific allegations against her, but broadly denied them.

Gaiman has denied allegations of sexual misconduct made by eight women….

Amanda Palmer’s Instagram statement says:

I thank you all deeply for continuing to respect my recent request for privacy as I navigate this extremely difficult moment. I must protect my young child and his right to privacy.

With that as my priority, I will not respond to the specific allegations being made against me except to say that I deny the allegations and will respond in due course. My heart goes out to all survivors.

(2) RELIGION AS PART OF THE STORY IN SFF. Lancelot Schaubert wants to develop “A formalized schema for imagining and understanding religion in fantasy, science fiction, and other speculative works.” This sophisticated taxonomy is offered as “Schaubert’s Laws of Fantasy Religions”. [Via Camestros Felapton.]

…Part of the problem is that so few people, up until recently at least, have written lovingly about religion in the genre outside of, say, Walter Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz or something like Anathem by Neil Stephenson. These days, Sanderson has written voluminously about many, many types of invented religions and he seems to understand that religion is fundamentally human. There are others, but he seems to be taking up a standard that has lain mostly unwielded on the landscape of the genre for some time. Another post for another day will survey the field, but other titles come to mind (negatively and positively) like Heinlein’s “Methuselah’s Children” and Stranger in a Strange Land (though this can be argued as anti-religion), James Blish’s “A Case of Conscience,” Lord of the World by Hugh Benson, M.P. Shiel’s Lord of the Sea, C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy, “The Man” by Ray Bradbury, “Fool’s Errand” by Paul L. Payne, Believers’ World by Robert Lowndes.

I wanted to create a taxonomy that would work no matter what you run through it, sort of a philosophical grid for making these sorts of systems analogous to Sanderson’s Laws of Magic (which works no matter the kind or scale of magic system). It works for me, that’s sufficient.

Here’s one example of Schaubert’s analysis.

…I want to speak to a couple of rights and beliefs in fantasy to show how this ends up being helpful in the narrative.

Mindful of the Cosmology of Tolkien’s legendarium, the light of Ilúvatar is given to Frodo by Galadriel. Sam ends up, in faith, wielding that vial in the depth of Shelob’s darkness. Now Ilúvatar means, more or less, “All father” which indicates “the alone.” And Shelob, being a child of Ungoliant, is a lesser Maia. Sort of a fallen angel, an immortal spirit who feasts on light and spins it into her webs. It’s a statement about proximate good in the reality of Tolkien’s world, but it’s also a statement about the substance of light. And when the undiluted light is unveiled — perhaps even unknowingly — by Sam, it is too much for the demon spider.

So here you have an object, a rite, a belief, and the reality of the world playing at very different levels….

(3) THIS IS THE CASH WE’RE LOOKING FOR. “Prince Andrew’s ex Koo Stark is suing Star Wars producers for £190million” says Bang Showbiz NZ.

Prince Andrew’s ex Koo Stark is suing ‘Star Wars’ producers for £190million.

The 68-year-old actress – who dated Prince Andrew in the early 1980s prior to his now-defunct marriage to Sarah, Duchess of York – starred as Camie Marstrap in the 1977 film ‘New Hope’ but her scenes were cut from the final film.

The scenes in question have resurfaced online in recent times and the character has appeared in various spin-offs over the years, so litigation filed in an LA court claims that the production company has profited off her likeness.

The legal action was brought by actor Anthony Forrest – who also starred in the film as Fixer in scenes that were eventually cut – and it is claimed that their “intellectual property rights were exploited” when the scenes became available online and on DVD.

In the film, Anthony – who also played a storm trooper and appeared in the James Bond film ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ – utters the line: “These aren’t the droids we’re looking for”, and has claimed that he has received no compensation for his work….

(4) DIGITAL GHOSTS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The idea of data scraping all that can be had about an individual and using that to train an AI to create a quasi-version of that individual has come up in science fiction, including in an episode of Black Mirror.

Indeed, StoryFile already does this by training a Chat-Bot with an individual’s writing, social media and so forth. However, with generative AI it is possible to go further and create something even more interactive. This week’s BBC Radio 4 programme Sideways takes a look at this as we are now on the cusp of creating digital ghosts.

Amy Kurzweil’s dad is a famous inventor, futurist and pioneer in the field of AI. In 2015, she discovers his aspiration to make an AI chatbot of her late grandfather, Fred. Fred was a musician who dramatically escaped the Holocaust, but he died before Amy was born. Matthew Syed delves into Amy’s fascinating journey with her father to build the ‘Fredbot’ and have an online conversation with the grandfather she never met.

The idea of using AI to simulate conversations with the dead troubles Matthew and raises all sorts of ethical questions. With the help of experts, he discovers how similar concepts were once debated by ancient Chinese philosophers and explores how digital ghosts could affect the grieving process.

Featuring references to the graphic novel Artificial: A Love Story by Amy Kurzweil, published in 2022 by Catapult Books.

You can download the half-hour episode here.

(5) DON’T FORGET TO REMEMBER. Longreads’ “Remember the Titans: An ‘Attack on Titan’ Reading List” is a list of recommended articles with brief excerpts (just like the Scroll!)

Despite coming nearly a century after the art form’s birth, Attack on Titan may be one of the most genre-defining anime Japan has produced. The original manga, about a war between humans and the colossal creatures who attack them, has some 140 million copies in circulation. The televised adaptation that began in 2013 expanded anime’s global audience. There’s even a stage musical—performed in Osaka and Tokyo in 2023 and New York City in 2024. And now, the series is officially a piece of history: Next week, the anime’s final two episodes, which first aired in 2023, arrive in movie theaters as a single film.

At the series’ outset, we’re told that the last remnants of humanity erected a network of concentric walls to fend off the Titans, and meet the three preteens living behind those walls who become our initial protagonists. That premise quickly proves to be knottier than expected, however; this is no simple humans-versus-megamonsters kaiju like Godzilla or Pacific Rim. While Hajime Isayama’s saga might begin as a dystopian fantasy, it soon twists into a speculative, discomfitingly realistic meditation on imperialism, war, genocide, hubris, and cyclical violence. ’…

(6) DIRDA SIGNS OFF. Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda, who frequently covered sff, has brought his time there to an end (column behind a paywall). Thanks to Scott Edelman for screencapping this part.

(7) TUTTLE REVIEWS. Lisa Tuttle’s Guardian column, “The best science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup”, looks at Old Soul by Susan Barker; Model Home by Rivers Solomon; Mother of Serpents by John R Gordon; Symbiote by Michael Nayak; and Waterblack by Alex Pheby.

(8) FRANK HILDEBRAND (1950-2024). Fear of the Walking Dead Frank Hildebrand producer and production manager died November 21 at the age of 73 reported Deadline today.

Born and educated in Zurich, Switzerland, Hildebrand began his filmmaking career in the UK before moving to Hollywood in the 1980s, working on such indie films as Vice Squad (1982) and Once Bitten (1985).

He then went on to line produce and supervise on such films as Triumph of the Spirit (1989), Freeway (1996), The Hills Have Eyes (2006), Into the Wild (2007), The Runaways (2010), Fair Game (2010) and The Tree of Life (2011). In recent years, Hildebrand served as a producer on the last seven seasons of AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead.

(9) MARIA VON BRAUN DIED. “NASA rocket pioneer Wernher Von Braun’s widow passes away at home in Alexandria, Virginia” – AL.com has the story.

The U.S. Space & Rocket Center announced the passing of Maria von Braun, Wernher von Braun’s widow on Friday.

The center said she died Jan. 20 at her home in Alexandria, Va. She was 96.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Planet of the Apes (1968)

By Paul Weimer: You maniacs!

You’ve seen the meme even if you have never seen the Planet of the Apes. Charlton Heston as Taylor, finds out he and his crew had just crashed landed on Earth in the far future. He hadn’t seen a new world of apes ruling men…he saw the future of his own society.

So yes, first and foremost Planet of the Apes (forgot the Marky Mark remake and the newest remakes are a different kettle of fish entirely) are a one way time travel story. The sequels they made are in the end not necessary. They are surplus to requirements.

All you need is the original. I saw it on WPIX back in the day, and have seen it many times once. The movie cheats a bit here and there, particularlg with the Moon which would have given the game away earlier.

But it is such a rich and visually interesting movie. The Eden that Taylor and his crew find and where they are captured. The Ape Judges that do the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” bit. The creepy taxidermy of his fellow astronaut. The cave and tunnel shaped dwellings. The excellent makeup and prosthetics for the people playing the Apes.and on and on.

And then the cast, not just Heston, but Roddy McDowell, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans providing stroke and unmistakable acting and passion even with such a heavy transformation.

And did you know Rod Serling helped write the screenplay?

And now I am definitely due a rewatch.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Animal Crackers knows what we need.
The Flying McCoys is in the midst of super-remodeling.

(12) THE CUT DIRECT. Beau Brummel wouldn’t put up with this either: “Deadpool Creator Rob Liefeld Cuts Ties With Marvel” reports Deadline.

Nearly 35 years after creating Deadpool, Rob Liefeld has reached his boiling point with Marvel.

The comic book creator, who conceived the character in a 1990 issue of New Mutants, publicly cut ties with Marvel as he recounted being snubbed at the July 2024 premiere of Deadpool & Wolverine.

“It was meant to embarrass, diminish, defeat me,” he said in the latest episode of his Robservations podcast, which was titled ‘Marvel: Access Denied!’

The description of the episode reads: “Why I left Marvel Entertainment and won’t look back.”

He recalled being ignored by Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige on the red carpet before finding out he and his family were not invited to the afterparty, the final straw for Liefeld. Meanwhile, Liefeld posed on the carpet with creatives from the movie but later learned those photos were deleted, as he believes they were only taken to appease him.

“At some point, you go, ‘I’ve received the message, and the message is clear,’” added Liefeld.

Previously, Liefeld sent an email to Marvel after they granted Wolverine co-creator Roy Thomas a special spot in the film’s credits, which upset co-creator Len Wein’s widow Christine Valada, a friend of Liefeld. He also inquired about a special mention for himself in the credits, noting he did not ask for money.

“Marvel’s treatment of creators has never been their strength,” he wrote in the email. “Without the worlds, the characters and the concepts that we create — and in this specific case, the world of Deadpool — there are no films to shoot. No blockbusters to distribute. … I am not the easy button at Staples. I am the human imagination behind it all.”

Liefeld added, “Comic book creators cannot continue to be relegated as afterthoughts. This is easy to address. Unless I reach out to address it, it will never manifest.”…

(13) GOTHAM HIJACK. What Vera Drew told the Guardian: “The trans film-maker who remade Batman: ‘There’s a reason all the heroes are queer, mentally ill villains’”.

It started as a joke,” says Vera Drew. “I just took it a little too far.” The 35-year-old former editor for Sacha Baron Cohen, Nathan Fielder and Tim & Eric is referring to her debut movie: The People’s Joker, a transgender-punk-superhero comedy in which she hijacks DC Comics characters to tell her own coming-out story. The film is set in an apocalyptic Gotham City ruled by Batman, billionaire groomer of teenage boys. Comedy can only be practised by licensed clowns divided into Jokers (male) and Harlequins (female). Enter Joker the Harlequin, played by Drew, who establishes an illegal comedy club specialising in cringe and bad-taste humour.

(14) STAYIN’ ALIVE. Camestros Felapton posted an interesting game review: “Currently Playing: Citizen Sleeper”.

…I’m saying all that because I’m actually enjoying Citizen Sleeper. Functionally, it is really just a text based adventure game with a limited set of locations. It looks better than that, with a nice 3D view of a space-station-city-habitat showing you where you (or rather your character) is. However, the other people you meet are just two dimensional art work with text.

You are a Sleeper, some sort of emulated-human-construct-robot-escaped-indetured-servant. You don’t remember much but you are a fugitive and you have woken on-board a run-down industrial space habitat. You need energy to live but also your body is slowly breaking down and you’ll need cash and technology to stay alive. You need work and you need somewhere safe to sleep. It is a basic struggle to stay alive in a shitty world….

(15) THEY DINED ME WITH SCIENCE! [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] It’s not just Eating The Fantastic with Scott Edelman that’s reported in File 770, it’s cooking tips too! So, starting with the basics, what is the best way to cook a boiled egg? Well, scientists to the rescue…primary research here. And this week’s BBC Radio 4 programme Inside Science tried it out to save you the hassle.

You can listen to the programme here (topic is two-thirds way through).

Science-backed boiled egg recipe:

– You need two pans… and exactly 32 minutes
– Keep one pan at 100 degrees Celsius (boiling) and the other pan at 30 degrees Celsius
– Move the egg between the two every two minutes for 32 minutes

Enjoy!

(16) BLOOPS AND BLEEPS! TVcrazyman adds his own commentary to these “1978 Battlestar Galactica Goofs, Facts, and Bloopers” which does kind of improve them.

(17) LIVE FROM AREA 51. Get a head start on the Super Bowl commercials with “Unidentified Frying Object” featuring Gordon Ramsay and Pete Davidson.

[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Paul Weimer, 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 Cat Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 1/11/25 There’s Even Pixels Walking Through It As We Watch

Posted on January 11, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) ALMOST HALFWAY TO 101. The Science Fiction 101 podcast devoted its 50th episode to a look at a vintage prozine: “Analog Solutions”.

This time we have another one of our (made-up) time-honored traditions: reviewing a current science fiction magazine. We usually do this once a year, to keep on top of current SF trends – and also to compare & contrast current magazines with the SF magazines of the past.

In our last episode, we went back 50 years to review ANALOG from 1974.

This time, we’re bang up-to-date (almost) with a very recent issue of the very same magazine. Analog is the longest-continuously-running SF magazine, having been around under various titles since the 1930s!

What will we make of Analog‘s longstanding reputation for “hard SF”? How does the magazine stack up against its wholly online competitors such as Clarkesworld and Uncanny? How does it stack up against its former self?

(2) FREE IMAGE LIBRARY. The Public Domain Review is “Announcing the Public Domain Image Archive”.

After the hundreds (thousands?) of hours trawling through online image collections since the PDR’s inception, we’ve decided it was time to create one of our own! We are really excited to share with you the launch of our new sister-project, the Public Domain Image Archive (PDIA), a curated collection of more than 10,000 out-of-copyright historical images, free for all to explore and reuse.

While The Public Domain Review primarily takes the form of an “arts journal”, it has also quietly served as a digital art gallery, albeit one fractured across essays and collections posts. The PDIA sets out to emphasise this visual nature of the PDR, freeing these images from their textual homes and placing them front and center for easier discovery, comparison, and appreciation. Our aim is to offer a platform that will serve both as a practical resource and a place to simply wander — an ever-growing portal to discover more than 2000 years of visual culture.

A valuable image archive in its own right, offering hand-picked highlights from hundreds of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, the PDIA also functions as a database of images featured in the PDR, offering an image-first approach to exploring the project’s content. The featured images each link to the relevant article on the PDR where one can read about the stories which surround the works….

Here’s an example of NASA art — government publications are not copyrighted, so in the public domain.

(3) IS THIS WORLDBUILDING CONVINCING? Mark Roth-Whitworth read C.J. Cherryh’s Alliance Rising, and says “I have written a meta-criticism of it — not of the story, which is as good as Cherryh is, but the political and interpersonal structure of the universe”: “Cherryh’s Alliance-Union universe”.

…I can already see problems with it – the sixty-three families, and none of them have anyone who is going to game the system, for their family’s benefit? None are going to cut back door deals with stations, to undercut other ship-families? Every one is going to be honest and trustworthy?…

(4) LISA TUTTLE’S HORROR PICKS. In “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup”, Lisa Tuttle reviews Aerth by Deborah Tomkins; Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix; Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao; and The Garden by Nick Newman.

(5) FIND OUT WHEN SFF EVENTS ARE HAPPENING. Stephen Beale, editor of The Steampunk Explorer site, has announced their “Expanded Calendar Listings”.

The recent re-launch of The Steampunk Explorer forced us to move some tasks to the back burner, and one of those was the calendar of events. When the site re-launched on Dec. 30, the calendar listed just 191 events taking place in 2025. But we got busy over the weekend and it now lists more than 600 happenings.

Here’s some background. We maintain a database of approximately 1,200 events that take place each year. In addition to steampunk gatherings, they include science fiction conventions, anime conventions, comic cons, Renaissance fairs, book fairs, and more.

Periodically, we go through the database and check the event websites to see if they’ve announced upcoming dates. If they have, we update the record and upload the event to the website. It’s a highly efficient process — if the event is in the same location and happens roughly the same time of the year, we can update the listing with five or six mouse clicks. (We also add new events as we learn about them.)…

If you want to see what’s happening over the next 12 months, check it out:

Steampunk events: All events | North America only

U.S. regions: New England | Mid-Atlantic | Southeast

Midwest | South Central | Mountain | Pacific

International: Canada | U.K./Europe | Australia/New Zealand

Plus the complete list covering all regions

(6) ROSENKRANTZ AND THEATER ARE DEAD. “There’s a New Version of Hamlet Staged in Grand Theft Auto” – CrimeReads warns fans of the Bard.

Friends, you read that right. A new film is coming to theaters in January that is… Hamlet staged in the Grand Theft Auto video game. Yes, Hamlet acted out by video game avatars, shot in-frame, and edited into its own film.

Before you wonder if something is rotten in the stage of filmmaking, or that the rest is violence, consider this…

Directed and written by Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls, and co-starring Crane and his friend Mark Oosterveen, the film, which is called Grand Theft Hamlet, is part digital narrative, part documentary. The film’s frame narrative features Crane and Oosterveen, two out-of-work actors sheltering-in-place during the COVID pandemic in January 2021, who discover that their video game pastime seems capable of not only bringing them together (and giving them a project) during isolation, but also allowing them to engage with a foundational text and their beloved craft.

The actors speak Shakespeare’s lines over the staging, in the modern, hyper-brutal world of GTA‘s Los Santos; underscoring the ways that Shakespeare’s words contain a kind of timelessness or malleability. According to critics, what ends up happening is not an attempt to make this as straight a Shakespeare production as possible, but to play with the text and the meaning of Hamlet in ways that only this new setting can unlock….

Grand Theft Hamlet – only in theaters starting January 17.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

January 11, 1961 — Jasper Fforde, 64.

I, like most folk I suspect, first discovered the somewhat eccentric charms of his writing in the Eyre Affair, the first of his novels with Tuesday Next from the Special Operation Network, Literary Detective (SO-27), who could literally enter the great and not so great works of English literature.

Bidder and Stoughton published it twenty-five years ago. I’d like to say the Eyre Affair was a much-desired literary property but he says there were seventy-six publishers that he sent his manuscript to. I’m surprised there were that many publishers in the U.K. that he thought could have been interested.

There would be six in the series in all — this novel followed by Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, First Among Sequels, One of our Thursdays Is Missing and The Woman Who Died a Lot. I won’t say that they were consistently great as they weren’t and the humor sometimes wore a lot more than a bit thin, but overall I like the series considerably.

I re-listened to the Eyre Affair recently and even the Suck Fairy admitted that it had held well over a quarter of a century, particularly the idea of dodos as pets as she wants one. Or two. Shudder.

Next up, and I wasn’t eggspecting to like it, yes, I know it’s a bad pun there, is The Big Over Easy which is set in the same universe as the Thursday Next novels though I don’t remember any overlapping characters twenty years after reading them. It reworks his first written novel, which absolutely failed to find any publisher whatsoever.

Its original title was Who Killed Humpty Dumpty? Errr, wasn’t there a novel involving a rabbit by almost that name? Kinda of drops a large anvil. It had a sequel of sorts in The Fourth Bear. Both are quite more than bearably good. Yes more bad puns.

I have not read his dystopian Shades of Grey series which is about a future Britain where everyone there is judged by how they perceive colors. Suspect someone with color blindness like myself wouldn’t be welcome there. A friend who did read it liked it a lot.

His Dragonslayer series, also known as The Chronicles of Kazam, are a YA affair and a great deal of fun indeed.

And we finish off with a news story from Toad News, “Extinct animals hostile to concept of being reengineered, study shows”.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Off the Mark has a frightening special flavor. Cats love it.
The Argyle Sweater delivers funny TV remakes and spinoffs.
Reality Check has silly science.
Speed Bump found the discarded pixels.
Free Range knows what editing is all about.
Arlo and Janis critique current shows.

(9) ANIMAL NEW YEAR’S PARTY. [Item by Steven French.] Here’s a more upbeat piece from the Guardian’s gaming newsletter, “Pushing Buttons”: “Replaying games from my past with my young children has been surreal – and transformative”.

Thanks to some distinctly Scottish weather over the holidays, my family and I ended up celebrating Hogmanay at home rather than at the party we’d planned to attend. My smallest son’s wee pal and his parents came over for dinner, and when the smaller members of our group started to spiral out of control around 9pm, we threw them a little midnight countdown party in Animal Crossing.

The last time I played Animal Crossing was in the depths of lockdown. Tending my island paradise helped me cope while largely imprisoned in a 2.5 bedroom basement flat with a baby, a toddler and a teenager. (I was far from the only one – the National Videogame Museum compiled an archive of people’s Animal Crossing experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic, and it’s evident that it was a lifeline for many.) Our guests had brought their family Switch, and we set up the kids with their little avatars so they could join the animals’ New Year party.

They spent about 10 minutes gleefully whacking each other with bug nets before gathering with the other inhabitants in the square with a giant countdown clock in the background, the island’s racoon magnate Tom Nook offering party poppers and shiny top-hats. I was visited by a sudden, arresting memory of New Year’s Eve 2021, which I spent on my sofa, alone but also not alone, because I was with my friends in Animal Crossing, watching the same countdown clock tick down. My youngest had just started walking, and was unsteady on his short, chunky legs. Turning away from the screen, I saw him joking with his big brother, thrilled at being up so late. It felt surreal.

(10) EYE-POPPING. DJ Food recalls the “Psychedelic Crunchie Bomb poster offer” of 1969. The original ad is reproduced below. See good images of the four posters at the link.

A rare set of four “Crunchie Bomb” posters commissioned in 1969 by Frys Chocolate, measuring 20×15 inches. Two designed by graphic artist and Professor of Illustration at the RCA, Dan Fern, two by renowned designer Chris McEwan. They were available in exchange for 3 Crunchie wrappers – see the last photo of the original advert.

(11) I SOLEMNLY SWEAR. “Horror’s Hottest Ticket: These Directors Are Never Releasing Their Movie for Home Viewing and Have Created a Cult Hit” – Yahoo! has the story.

It started as something of a joke.

While cutting a trailer for their co-directorial effort “It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This,” Nick Toti and Rachel Kempf had a little fun at the end of the clip.

“We were like, ‘Oh, it kind of needs something,’” he says. “So we put the scroll at the end. It just says, ‘The producers of this film regret to inform you that it will not be released online. See it in theaters.’”

In fact, the three-person creative team behind the found footage horror movie “It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This” made an unusual pact before they even shot a frame: They would never make the work available for streaming, digital or physical purchase, only allowing it to play theatrically. Yet what might have seemed like a limitation ended up creating word-of-mouth interest in the microbudget production, which led to sold-out shows across the country without any promotional dollars….

(12) THE LAST CHATGPT ARGUMENT OF KINGS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Is it a killer robot? No. But it was a step toward that and a step too far for OpenAI to be comfortable letting this engineer use ChatGPT as a front-end to command their sentry gun/mount. Besides, they seem to be having way too much fun riding the mounted weapon like it was a potentially deadly mechanical bull at a country-western bar.

(Pro Hint: Next time just grab a ruler. It’s cheaper and you can finish your measuring project much faster.)

“Viral ChatGPT-powered sentry gun gets shut down by OpenAI” reports Ars Technica. Videos at the link.

OpenAI says it has cut off API access to an engineer whose video of a motorized sentry gun controlled by ChatGPT-powered commands has set off a viral firestorm of concerns about AI-powered weapons.

An engineer going by the handle sts_3d started posting videos of a motorized, auto-rotating swivel chair project in August. By November, that same assembly appeared to seamlessly morph into the basis for a sentry gun that could quickly rotate to arbitrary angles and activate a servo to fire precisely aimed projectiles (though only blanks and simulated lasers are shown being fired in his videos).

Earlier this week, though, sts_3d started getting wider attention for a new video showing the sentry gun’s integration with OpenAI’s real-time API. In the video, the gun uses that ChatGPT integration to aim and fire based on spoken commands from sts_3d and even responds in a chirpy voice afterward.

“If you need any other assistance, please let me know,” the ChatGPT-powered gun says after firing a volley at one point. “Good job, you saved us,” sts_3d responds, deadpan.

“I’m glad I could help!” ChatGPT intones happily.

In response to a comment request from Futurism, OpenAI said it had “proactively identified this violation of our policies and notified the developer to cease this activity ahead of receiving your inquiry. …”

(13) BLUE ORIGIN WILL LAUNCH NEW GLENN ON MONDAY. “The Very Long Wait for Jeff Bezos’ Big Rocket Is Coming to an End” – in the New York Times (behind a paywall). (Note: The date has changed since the article was published. The rocket now is set to make its inaugural launch attempt as soon as Monday at 1 am. Eastern. Weather conditions at sea, where the company hopes to recover part of the rocket after launch, prompted the 24-hour delay.)

The foundational building block for Jeff Bezos’ space dreams is finally ready to launch.

A New Glenn rocket — built by Blue Origin, the rocket company that Mr. Bezos started nearly a quarter century ago — is sitting on a launchpad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. It is as tall as a 32-story building, and its voluminous nose cone can carry larger satellites and other payloads than other rockets in operation today.

In the predawn darkness on Sunday, it may head to space for the first time.

“This has been very long awaited,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington.

New Glenn could inject competition into a rocket business where one company — Elon Musk’s SpaceX — is winning big. While companies and governments have welcomed SpaceX’s innovations that have greatly cut the cost of sending stuff to space, they are wary of relying on one company that is subject to the whims of the world’s richest person.

“SpaceX is clearly dominating” the market for launching larger and heavier payloads, Mr. Harrison said. “There needs to be a viable competitor to keep that market healthy. And it looks like Blue Origin is probably the best positioned to be that competitor to SpaceX.”

New Glenn is larger than SpaceX’s current workhorse rocket, the Falcon 9, but not as big as Starship, the fully reusable rocket system that SpaceX is currently developing….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. From four years ago, a WIRED making-of short: “Every C-3PO Costume Explained By Anthony Daniels”.

[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, 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 Cat Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 12/20/24 How Much Is That Shoggoth In The Attic? The One With The Horrifying Tale

Posted on December 20, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) ENTERING PUBLIC DOMAIN IN 2025. At John Mark Ockerbloom’s blog Everybody’s Libraries you can use this hashtag to access his #PublicDomainDayCountdown – a series of daily posts through the end of the year highlighting the works falling out of copyright in the U.S. Here are some examples.

The Broadway Melody (film) – “All singing! All dancing!”
Arthur Conan Doyle’s last Professor Challenger story – “Not eliminating the impossible”
Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms (novel) — “A Farewell to Arms”
The earliest adventures of Popeye – “I yam what I yam, kinda”
Arthur Freed and Nacio Scott Brown’s “Singin’ in the Rain” – “What a glorious feeling, in the public domain”
Three hardboiled detective classics as published in Black Mask – “Hardboiled treasure in the public domain”
Fictional detective Ellery Queen debuts in The Roman Hat Mystery – “Ellery Queen arrives on the scene”
Marx Brothers’ stage play, Animal Crackers, and first feature film, The Cocoanuts – “Take your Marx”
Tintin – “Tintin au pays du domaine public”

(2) OTHER COVERAGE. Animation Magazine is ready: “Popeye & Tintin Enter the Public Domain in 2025”

Two icons of comics and animation history will be entering the public domain in the U.S. as of January 1, 2025, opening their earliest representations up to be used and repurposed without permission or payment to copyright holders: E.C. Segar’s idiosyncratic sailor-man Popeye and Belgian comics artist Hergé’s globe-trotting reporter Tintin.

The Public Domain Review is also doing a countdown “What Will Enter the Public Domain in 2025?” (They give a hat tip to Ockerbloom’s blog.)

(3) NEVALA-LEE AND MALZBERG DIALOGS. [Item by Alec Nevala-Lee.] I was very sorry to see the post announcing the death of Barry Malzberg, who was an important figure in my life. It inspired me to look back at our voluminous email correspondence, which I’ve decided to put online, on the assumption that other people might find it interesting as well: “Barry N. Malzberg and Alec Nevala-Lee (Emails 2016–2023)”.

In 2016, I reached out to Barry N. Malzberg with a question relating to my book Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. The result was an intermittent email correspondence that grew over the next six years to an astounding 25,000 words. I’m posting it here because it contains a lot of interesting material, as well as the single greatest compliment that I’ve ever received, which Malzberg emailed to me on February 2, 2017: “It is clear to me that you may be already science fiction’s most promising writer and thinker to emerge since Alfred Bester stumbled into the room almost eight decades ago. Like the Elizabethan theater before Shakespeare, we have been waiting for you without really knowing we were waiting for you.” I don’t believe that this was ever true—certainly not when Malzberg said it to me—but I’ve treasured it ever since. Malzberg, for all his flaws, was an essential figure in my life, and I deeply regret that I’ll never have the chance to speak to him again.

(4) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 125 of the Octothorpe podcast, “I’m Physically Present in This Hotel Room”, is belatedly here!

We read some letters of comment, we discuss the Seattle online Business Meeting plan and also the news from Smofcon 41, and Liz tells us what the objectively correct best Christmas movie is.

Get the transcript here.

John wears an Octothorpe Christmas jumper and a green and red hat with elf ears, Alison wears a red Christmas jumper and a moose/reindeer hat, and Liz wears a blue jumper and a Christmas tree hat. The words “Octothorpe 125” appear at the top in a Christmassy font that looks like it has snow on the letters.

(5) SFF REVIEWS. Lisa Tuttle, in “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup” for the Guardian, discusses: Troll: A Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo; How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later by Philip K Dick; The Woman Who Fell to Earth by RB Russell; and Mystery Lights by Lena Valencia.

(6) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

December 20, 1985 — Enemy Mine

By Paul Weimer: First, for me, came the movie. It was 1985, and if you’ve been following my timeline of movie watching, this was when I was finally going to movies on my own. Back to the Future was a big movie I saw that year, but that winter, there was Enemy Mine.

I had not read the novella that the movie is based on, although I would, later, get an edition that included all of the ancillary material that helped inspire the novella. And, of course, the film.

This again was 1985 and like Back to the Future, I was delighted to be able to immerse myself in a new property. This was in space but it was not Star Wars or Star Trek, and it was better than a lot of the dreck I had seen on television, mostly. Dawitch and Jerry as played by Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett Jr. were compelling and I did see it opening weekend…but it turns out, not many other people did. Despite the performances and the obvious appeal of a Cold War story, the movie financially bombed.

I blame the poster. Look at the poster sometime. I had gone in, looking at that poster, expecting a movie where the two are continually at war, and what I got was something far more interesting, complex and dynamic…two people from two different species who hate each other, but eventually learn to trust, even love one another. The movie’s message is powerful, and its advertising completely ignores it. It does it a disservice (Years later, when seeing John Carter, I would remember it being similarly badly served).

And thanks to the movie, I still want to go to the Canary Islands, to the volcanic area that the movie is filmed in. It’s a bleak and eyecatching place, and my camera and I would love to capture it and experience the location first-hand.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born December 20, 1960 — Nalo Hopkinson, 64.

By Paul Weimer: There are some authors and their books that shake you completely and utterly out of your comfort zone. Nalo Hopkinson is one of those authors. We cast our minds back to the late 1990s as I was growing in my science fiction reading, moving toward my path of being a reviewer and critic. I had not yet really started to read that widely, but I was learning. When I saw Brown Girl in the Ring, her debut novel, it looked completely different than anything I had ever read before. So, in the spirit of trying to broaden my reading, I picked it up.

And it knocked me on my arse. Late 21st century Toronto setting. Afro-Caribbean culture? African Mythology and deities mixed in with a believable and immersive dystopian future. This novel hit buttons of mine hard, and buttons that I didn’t know I had. I think that this was one of the first novels that started my quest to start looking for books “Beyond the Great Walls of Europe”, to engage with other traditions, cultures, starting points. It was absolutely superb. And if you haven’t read it, it’s short and punchy, I devoured it in a couple of days.

Since then, Hopkinson has been a feature in my reading ever since, from Midnight Robber through works like The Salt Roads to more recent works like her recent Blackheart Man. Nalo’s output is not a tsunami of novels and stories; her work is more like the work of Ted Chiang, a few startingly potent and polished gems that are potent and powerful. She’s not a writer for every cup of tea, that uncompromising nature of her work means that there can be some rather tough subjects and themes in the work. But I think her work is worth it.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Close to Home features a Sith’s retirement job.
Dinosaur Comics has a fine name.
Non Sequitur uncovers Stone Age quotas.
Rudy Park says there’s a planetary conspiracy.

(9) KRYPTO’S VALUE. Brian Cronin’s CBR. Newsletter discussed the origins and role of Krypto – unfortunately, there’s no public link to it. (And it wouldn’t be nice for me to gank the whole article.)

…Like most new characters (including Batman’s answer to the dog trend, Ace the Bathound, who debuted a few months later), Krypto was only intended to be a one-off character, just something that Otto Binder and Curt Swan could introduce to get through another issue of the Superboy feature, but fan response was strong enough that Krypto soon returned, and became a regular fixture in the series. He was then added to the main Superman comic books, as well (althoguh he did not play as major of a role in the stories of Superman as an adult as he did in Superboy stories, there is just something special about a boy and his dog). Krypto was a major part of the Superman titles in the 1960s, as the titles began to introduce more and more characters, like Streaky the Super Cat (she and Krypto had quite the rivalry).

What made Krypto so special to Superman?

The importance of Krypto was made clear by the late, great Martin Pasko in Action Comics #500 (by Pasko, Swan, and Frank Chiaramonte), when Superman is walking with reporters through the Superman Pavilion of the Metropolis World’s Fair, and reflecting on his life. Krypto comes up, and Superman speaks about the loneliness that comes from being the “Last Son of Krypton.” It is not just a matter of being the only survivor from your planet, which, of course, carries along a tremendous amount of survivor’s guilt, but there is also the problem where, because of the way that Earth gives you special powers, that you are alone on THIS planet, too, because you’re different than everyone else. That is, therefore, why Krypto was so important to Superman, because it was someone that Superman could relate to, even if he was “only” a dog…

(10) HAPPY BIRTHDAY SPACE FORCE. “US Space Force 5 years later: What has it accomplished so far, and where does it go from here?” Space tries to supply an answer. Will this bureaucratic growth survive a second Trump administration, despite being founded during the first?

The U.S. Space Force celebrates its fifth anniversary today.

The service was formally established on Dec. 20, 2019, when President Donald Trump signed it into law with the National Defense Authorization Act, the bill that allocates U.S. military spending each year. Since then, the U.S. Space Force has grown to nearly 15,000 servicemembers and civilian personnel. In its fifth year, Space Force has overseen astronaut launches from its facility at Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and has even seen one of its own active Guardians, as Space Force members are known, launch into space.From GPS navigation networks to weather forecasting, from broadband internet to early-warning missile detection systems, the U.S. (like many other nations) increasingly depends on space-based technologies for its way of life. Space Force’s role in protecting and overseeing these technologies has evolved and grown over the last five years, and will likely continue to do so as it moves forward. But just what has Space Force accomplished in its first five years, and where will it go from here?

… From a piece of legislation to launching its own personnel from its own launch site, Space Force set a brisk pace in its first five years.

The service’s current Chief of Space Operations, Gen. Chance Saltzman, highlighted the rapid growth of Space Force in remarks given at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ (CSIS) “Celebrating the U.S. Space Force and Charting Its Future” event in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 17.

“On average, we have tripled in size every year for the last five years in personnel, an astounding growth rate for any government organization,” Saltzman said. “We have reimagined operations, redefined policies [and] reworked processes from the ground up to forge a service purpose-built for great power competition.

“All of this in just five years.”…

(11) WHO IS NUMBER ONE? A nice way to see out the year! “Booksellers predict Orbital by Samantha Harvey will be UK No 1 bestselling book” reports the Guardian.

This year’s Booker prize winner will be the Christmas No 1 bestseller, predict UK booksellers.

The Booksellers Association (BA) asked bookshop staff which book they think could reach the festive top spot, and Orbital by Samantha Harvey was the most popular response.

The slim volume was “selling well even before the Booker prize win, and since then it has been flying off the shelves,” said Amanda Truman, who owns Truman Books in Farsley, West Yorkshire.

Fleur Sinclair, president of the BA and owner of Sevenoaks Bookshop in Kent, would be “amazed” if Orbital doesn’t top the charts. Between its Booker win and “accessible paperback format and price, so many of our customers are buying it both for themselves and as gifts”.

Orbital became the first Booker novel to hit No 1on the UK bestseller chart in the week of its win, with 20,040 copies sold that week. The novel follows a day in the life of six astronauts on the International Space Station.

Aside from the novel “being a literary masterpiece, awards really help sell books”, said Jude Brosnan, marketing manager at Stanfords bookshops. “Along with all the extra promotion they provide, we find customers really appreciate recommendations – even more so at this time of year.”

(12) OSCARS IN TIMES TO COME. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian’s “Week in Geek” pushes for more recognition for ‘mo-cap’ acting: “Aliens, Gollum and talking raccoons: when will the Oscars finally reward mo-cap acting?”

Picture the future: it’s the Oscars 2034, and the best actor prizes are no longer split into male and female categories. Instead, there is an award for best performer in a live action role, and another for best actor in a performance capture role. Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks can finally go head-to-head for their epic turns in Sophie’s Choice II and Even Bigger respectively, while Zoe Saldana and Andy Serkis are up for the latter for their startling performances in Avatar 6 and The Lord of the Rings: What Gollum Did Last Summer.

Some might suggest this is a tantalising vision of a world where the Academy has finally caught up with the realities of modern acting. Others would no doubt point out that the Oscars has been rewarding work where the actor’s real face is obscured by makeup, prosthetics, masks, or other transformations for decades, ever since John Hurt received a best actor nod for The Elephant Man in 1980. The difference is that while Robert Downey Jr somehow managed to snag a nomination for playing an Australian method actor donning blackface in the biting 2008 satirical comedy Tropic Thunder, the likes of Avatar’s Saldana and Lord of the Rings’ Serkis seem doomed to Oscars limbo, as they pour their hearts repeatedly into roles only to watch awards season roll by like an indifferent Na’vi riding a banshee past a crying Jake Sully.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Todd Mason.] Colbert and company love their animation… “’It’s A Worm-derful Life’ – A Late Show Animated Holiday Classic”.

Santa and his workshop are, like America, having a bumpy sleigh ride transitioning to the incoming Trump administration. When Elon Musk is put in charge of Christmas efficiency as part of his D.O.U.C.H.E. program, Santa must either pledge absolute loyalty, or face a gladiator battle of ancient Roman proportions. Will Father Christmas survive? Will Joe Biden stay awake through the entire special? Will RFK Jr.’s brainworms have enough brain meat left to eat this winter? Find out in “It’s A Worm-derful Life,” the new Late Show Holiday Animated Classic!

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Alec Nevala-Lee, John Coxon, Todd Mason, 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 Jeff Jones.]

Pixel Scroll 11/9/24 Tea In Hand, I’ve Been Watching Pixels Playing In The Autumn Leaves

Posted on November 9, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) FRONT LINE GAMERS. The ChrisO_wiki on X.com has a long thread about the popularity of Warhammer 40,000 imagery among Russian and Ukranian fighters. One commenter calls it “a thread about the eclectic ideology of the current leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church, which could only be defined as a bizarre blend of traditional Russo-Soviet militarism and statism, wrapped around a pagan warrior cult.”

1/ Russian soldiers are being provided with Warhammer 40,000-style 'purity seals', blessed by the Russian Orthodox Church, to protect them from harm on the battlefield. The initiative illustrates the huge popularity of Warhammer 40K on both sides of the war in Ukraine. ?? pic.twitter.com/95wkLWIetS
— ChrisO_wiki (@ChrisO_wiki) November 9, 2024

The entire thread can be accessed on the Thread Reader App. (What’s funny is that when I went there to look at it the first two ads shown in the thread were for toilet bowls. And since I haven’t been shopping for those online, the algorithim certainly didn’t get that idea from me!)

(2) DON’T PANIC…SO MUCH. McSweeney’s Internet Tendency mimics a professional pundit telling us “Here’s Why a Second Death Star Won’t Be That Bad”.

…I understand why people are worried, considering Palpatine has vowed retribution against Luke Skywalker, called the rebel alliance “the enemy within,” and vowed to banish millions of galactic migrants to the outer rim. But I believe that, deep down, below his contorted face, badly disfigured by the corrupting dark force surging through his veins, all Palpatine really wants to do is improve the economy. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if he pardoned Luke Skywalker and put this entire war behind him. Just because he’s never given the slightest indication that those are his true intentions doesn’t mean it can’t happen…

(3) SFWA FILLING VACANCIES. SFWA President Kate Ristau’s update to members today included news about changes to the organization’s staff.

In the past month, we hired a new controller and are settling in a new bookkeeper. These important roles will help continue to support our financial stability, with the leadership of our CFO, Jonathan Brazee. We have also reviewed procedures around financial transparency and fiscal responsibility. We are on a solid financial path, with healthy reserves.

After thirteen years as our Executive Director, Kate Baker will be stepping down at the end of November. We are grateful for Kate’s service and support. Former SFWA President Russell Davis has stepped in as Interim Executive Director, and we expect a full, open, and transparent hiring process to begin in the coming weeks. This process will take the hiring committee time as we restructure and look for an executive who can collaboratively guide SFWA into the future.

(4) HORROR REVIEWS. Lisa Tuttle’s “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup” for the Guardian covers Blood Over Bright Haven by ML Wang; Jackal by Erin E. Adams; The Road to Roswell by Connie Willis; Curdle Creek by Yvonne Battle-Felton; and The Incubations by Ramsey Campbell.

(5) WHY DO TOOLS FALL IN LOVE? The name of the play is “Maybe Happy Ending.” “A New Broadway Musical Asks: Can Robots Fall in Love?” (Article is behind a New York Times paywall.)

…The story is about two outcast helperbots who meet at a robot retirement home and build a relationship while grappling with their own obsolescence, and Park thinks it is especially relatable after the coronavirus pandemic. “People have become so comfortable staying alone in their rooms and connecting to each other through a screen,” he said in a recent interview in Midtown Manhattan.

Shortly after previews began last month, Park, 41, a former K-pop lyricist who wrote the show’s lyrics, and Aronson, 43, who wrote the music — both collaborated on the book — talked about their inspirations and the different approaches to developing the show’s Korean and English versions. In a separate video call, Criss, 37, and Shen, 24, discussed the challenges of playing robots who look like humans.

Here are five things to know….

… The actors have a unique challenge.

The script spells it out: Oliver (Criss) and Claire (Shen) are robots who look like humans (they are dressed like hipsters, circa 2010).

Criss’s robot is an older model, so he, Shen and the production’s director, Michael Arden, decided that he would be the more robotic of the two main characters. That allowed Criss to draw on his training in physical theater at the Accademia dell’Arte, the performing arts school in Arezzo, Italy.

“The fear for an actor on a stage is to be like a cartoon character,” said Criss, who cited Kabuki theater, vaudeville and silent-film-era comedians as inspirations for his character’s movements and expressions. “However, because of the construct of our show, which is extremely theatrical and heightened, the more you lean into that, I think the more effective the piece.”

As for Shen’s character, the group decided that, because she was a newer model, her movements would be nearly indistinguishable from a human’s.

“It was interesting to get to work in that middle ground, that gray area,” she said.

(6) GOLDSMITHS PRIZE. The winner of the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize has been announced. This year, neither the winner nor the other shortlisted books were detectably of genre interest:

Parade (Rachel Cusk, Faber)

The prize, worth £10,000 and run in association with the New Statesman, was open to novels published between 1 November 2023 and 31 October 2024, written in English by citizens of the UK or Ireland, or authors who have been resident in either country for three years and have their book published there.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born November 9, 1934 — Carl Sagan. (Died 1996.)

By Paul Weimer: Billions and Billions of milliseconds of my life have been influenced by Carl Sagan.

It all started with Cosmos, the original TV series. I heard about it (in TV Guide!) and wanted desperately to watch it in the hallowed year of 1980. I was entranced from the first episode, which had such diverse ideas as the cosmic calendar, the Library of Alexandria and much more. Cosmos became important must see viewing for me, and in an age before I had a VCR, I tried to use a tape recorder to capture an episode (“Heaven and Hell”, on Venus and global warming). I was entranced and Carl Sagan is directly responsible for me being fascinated with science in general and biology and astronomy in particular. He kindled the love of science in me. While I did not ultimately end up as a scientist, my love of science grew hand in hand with my love of science fiction, and Sagan is the person to thank and point to for that.

Besides Cosmos, his last major work, Pale Blue Dot, stands as a book that very darkly and presciently has foreseen our current political environment, where ignorance and misinformation, particularly around science, has become public policy for the Republicans. Sagan’s warnings, as well as his love of science and his defense of science as an idea, a process, that is ultimately not just worthwhile…but vital to our future.

Sagan has written other books as well, and has been an influential figure, good and bad for a long time (I remember an Omni magazine comic that posted and posited him as a villain covering up evidence of aliens having visited Mars. That…was a bit of a shock).

In order to celebrate Carl Sagan’s birthday, you must first invent the universe.

(8) BRADBURY, SAGAN, AND CLARKE AT CALTECH. And we’re only a couple days away from the anniversary of the panel that gave rise to Mars and the Mind of Man, a non-fiction book chronicling a public symposium at Caltech on November 12, 1971 featuring Ray Bradbury; Arthur C. Clarke; Bruce C. Murray; Carl Sagan and Walter Sullivan. The symposium occurred shortly before the Mariner 9 space probe entered orbit around Mars.

In this excerpt from the panel, Bradbury reads his poem “If Only We Had Taller Been”.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Frazz disagrees with Vonnegut.
Carpe Diem needs caffeine.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal reveals the hidden danger.
Tom Gauld reduces the crime rate, in a manner of speaking.

My cartoon for this week’s @GuardianBooks. pic.twitter.com/tZsTQScFCb
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) November 9, 2024

(10) SO IT GOES. Steven Heller interviews artist Igor Karash about his illustrations for Easton Press’ forthcoming limited edition of Slaughterhouse-Five. “Kurt Vonnegut’s Time Traveler Reimagined” at PRINT Magazine.

You mentioned that you started working on it at the outset of the Ukraine-Russia war. How did it impact your work?
Not in the greatest way. When I started developing the visuals, I was predominantly moved by the idea of examining the “horrors of war,” bouncing on the borderline between the darkest side of human nature and the paradoxical presence of good (this is the main message of the book for me). And then, the first war on the European continent since WWII turned everything upside down. Ukraine for me isn’t just another country—this is where I went to art school, where I met my wife, and where both of my children were born. From day one of the Russian invasion I was closely watching and following all news from Ukraine, contacting my friends there, etc., and almost immediately my drawings of the “horrors of war” on the surface of my drawing tablet started to feel bleak, unimportant and fake compared to the tragic reality unfolding before me, and I more deeply sunk into the hole of “PEOPLE DO NOT LEARN FROM THEIR PAST. SO IT GOES.” It took me a while to find enough inner peace to continue the project.

(11) WARNING AGAINST CHATBOTS. [Item by Steven French.] The UK’s communications regulator has warned digital platform companies that ‘chatbots’ which imitate either real or fictional people, alive or dead, could fall afoul of new online safety laws: “Ofcom warns tech firms after chatbots imitate Brianna Ghey and Molly Russell”.

Ofcom said it had issued the guidance after “distressing incidents”. It highlighted a case first reported by the Daily Telegraph where Character.AI users created bots to act as virtual clones of Brianna, 16, a transgender girl who was murdered by two teenagers last year, and Molly, who took her own life in 2017 after viewing harmful online content.

It also pointed to a case in the US where a teenager died after developing a relationship with a Character.AI avatar based on a Game of Thrones character.

(12) NEUROMANCER MUSICAL ACCOMPANIMENT. [Item by Steven French.] If you’ve ever listened to Gibson’s Neuromancer in audiobook format, the soundtrack is now available separately: “Neuromancer | Black Rain | Room40” at Bandcamp.

From Lawrence English
It’s hard to imagine that this year William Gibson’s Neuromancer celebrates its 40th anniversary. Having recently re-read the book for the first time in a great many years, the world building Gibson undertook in that text and the lingering cultural spectres he conjured, feel ever so evocative of moments of our contemporary lived experience. The books continued cultural resonance has resolved in a way that captured a future reading of an, at that time of its release, unknown internet era. It was an era of promise, and imagination, of speculative hope and down right uneasiness in equal parts.

In 1994, as the books 10th anniversary was on hand, New York duo Black Rain were commissioned to make a soundtrack to the audio book version of Neuromancer. Read by the author himself, this document, originally publish on a series of cassettes, would go on to be recognised as a unique glimpse into Gibson’s sensing of the characters and places that make up the Neuromancer zone.

Following a period of work as an expanded collective, Stuart Argabright and Shinichi Shimokawa, the two core members of Black Rain, decided to strip back their unit largely to a duet format. Their focus became more engaged around studio practice, and it was this refocusing that was ultimately serendipitous. As they started work on Neuromancer a number of new approaches and techniques emerged and with them came a new sonic language the pair had only imagined previously.

The audio book was a huge success and the soundtrack too was recognised for its brooding and post-industrial electronic grind. Since that time however, the recordings have largely remained in obscurity. While a couple of the pieces have surfaced in various editions including an excellent compilation by Blackest Ever Black, the entire suite of pieces has remained unpublished until this moment.

Working off the original master tapes, this edition (like the book), folds and morphs over itself in an episodic stratification. Pieces emerge, like strange architecture, from one another forming a sonic environment that feels almost tangible. I spent many weeks working on these tapes and also on the connections between the pieces. In collaboration with Stuart, our joint aim was to create a version of the soundtrack that speaks to the very atmosphere of the text itself. It’s a delight to share this collection of work for the first time.

(13) TUNING INTO THE MILKY WAY. [Item by Steven French.] How to build your very own handy-dandy radio telescope using only “a 1-meter satellite dish, a Raspberry Pi, and some other basic electronics such as analog-to-digital converters” (and an empty washing up liquid bottle – sorry, channelling old memories of kids tv programmes!): How to build a home radio telescope to detect clouds of hydrogen in the Milky Way (phys.org) at Phys.org.

…If I ask you to picture a radio telescope, you probably imagine a large dish pointing to the sky, or even an array of dish antennas such as the Very Large Array. What you likely don’t imagine is something that resembles a TV dish in your neighbor’s backyard. With modern electronics, it is relatively easy to build your own radio telescope. To understand how it can be done, check out a recent paper by Jack Phelps posted to the arXiv preprint server….

(14) THE QUIET FAN. The example of 2001 to the contrary, “Blue Danube” is not what a space traveler hears as he arrives at an orbital facility. “Space stations are loud — that’s why NASA is making a quiet fan” at Space.com.

Despite the International Space Station being comparable in size to a five-bedroom house, the prospect of spending months confined to a building that floats 250 miles (402 kilometers) above the Earth would be daunting for many.

You’d have to deal with limited space, a lack of privacy, the knowledge that you’re being watched, and the difficulty of performing everyday tasks in a zero-gravity environment. One thing we don’t often consider, though, when it comes to living on the International Space Station (ISS), is the sound. The constant hum of fans keeping crucial life support systems and instruments cool could get to anyone after a while, and there is nowhere to escape it.Thankfully, NASA researchers have developed a new “Quiet Space Fan” to reduce noise on crewed spacecraft, a design they plan on sharing with the industry for future use on commercial space stations.

By reducing noise at the source, NASA hopes people will be able to hear each other more clearly, become aware of alarms faster, and reduce risk of hearing loss, along with mitigating the irritation that loud, unwanted sounds can incur….

[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mlex, Jo Fletcher, Paul Weimer, 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 Cat Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 10/11/24 Those Magnificent Files In Their Pixel Machines

Posted on October 11, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) GAME OF THRONES AUCTION. Heritage Auctions has started its three-day auction of Game of Thrones props and costumes. Westeros gives the highlights of the opening day in “Day 1 of Game of Thrones Auction Recap”.

The first day of the three day Game of Thrones prop and costume auction run by Heritage Auctions started well, with nearly $5.36 million realized across the first 290-odd listings in the auction. We kept track of it as long as we could, and by the time we went to bed we’d noted that several items had cleared the $100,000 mark. Gregor Clegane’s tourney armor was the first to hit six figures and ended up just shy of $200,000, followed by a prototype dragon egg from the first season (a second egg just missed the mark).

After that, Arya Stark’s season 2 “boy” ensemble with an included “action” version of Needle hit $150,000, which seemed like a very expected number. And then, fittingly, the first item to hit $200,000—just beating out the Mountain that Ride’s armor—was the Hound’s armor ensemble. After that point, we went to bed, but in the morning we found two more items made it to the prestigious six-figure club: a full Jaime Lannister Kinsguard ensemble. Because of the inclusion of both a prop hand and an “action” Oathkeeper, this one was an especially valuable listing, and the bidders recognized it as they drove it up to become the day’s top item with a final realized price of $212,500.

And now a Jon Snow (Kit Harington) Signature Night’s Watch Ensemble has gone for $337,500.

(2) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to share beef noodle soup with award-winning writer John Chu in Episode 238 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Get ready to take a seat at the table with the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning writer John Chu.

John’s a microprocessor architect by day, and a writer, translator, and podcast narrator by night. His fiction has appeared in magazines such as Lightspeed, Uncanny, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Apex, and at Tor.com, plus in anthologies such as The Mythic Dream, Made to Order: Robots and Revolution, New Suns 2: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, and others. His translations have been published or are forthcoming at Clarkesworld, The Big Book of SF, and other venues.

He has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Ignyte Awards, won the Best Short Story Hugo for “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere,” plus the Nebula, Ignyte, and Locus Awards for “If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You.” In the days before our lunch, he surprised us all with the announcement he’d sold his first novel — and you’ll hear my own surprise during our conversation.

We discussed the way he gamified the submission process when he started out, how the pandemic made him feel as if he was in his own little spaceship, when he learned he couldn’t write novels and short stories at the same time, how food has become a lens through which he could explore a variety of issues in his fiction, the rejection letter he rereads whenever he wants to cheer himself up, how writing stories at their correct lengths was one of the most difficult lessons he had to learn as a writer, what it was about his 2015 short story “Hold-Time Violations” that had him feeling it was worthy of exploring as a novel, how he was changed by winning a Hugo Award with his third published story, and much more.

(3) KGB PHOTOS. Ellen Datlow has posted pictures from last night’s Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series where Sarah Langan and David Leo Rice read from their most recent novels. Click here: KGB October 9, 2024.

(4) LISA TUTTLE COLUMN. The Guardian presents “The best recent science fiction, horror and fantasy – reviews roundup” by Lisa Tuttle. This time she reviews William by Mason Coile; The Tapestry of Time by Kate Heartfield; The Wilding by Ian McDonald; Of the Flesh: 18 Stories of Modern Horror by various authors; A Christmas Ghost Story by Kim Newman.

(5) FAMED ANIMATION STUDIO TAKES BATH. “‘Chicken Run’ Studio Aardman Cuts Jobs After Posting $720,000 Loss Amid Market ‘Challenges’” reports Deadline.

Aardman, the iconic UK animation studio behind Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit, has closed around 20 jobs as it grapples with the increased cost of production.

Deadline understands that Aardman is in the process of making less than 5% of its 425 employees redundant following a savings review undertaken by management.

A third of the redundancies were voluntary, while two roles remain in consultation. It is hoped that some of the individuals who have lost their jobs can return to Aardman on a freelance basis.

As part of the restructure, Aardman has created new roles to wring increased value out of its intellectual property. These roles include a senior licensing manager and sales executive.

The cost-cutting initiative comes as Aardman has filed its earnings for 2023, which reveal that the studio sunk to a pre-tax loss of £550,135 ($720,000). The company made a profit of £1.56M in 2022.

Aardman said the loss was largely because of a £1.75M impairment of unrecouped costs on Lloyd of the Flies, a 2022 animated series that debuted on CITV in the UK and was licensed by Tubi in the U.S. Putting the impairment to one side, Aardman’s underlying profit was £1.6M….

(6) 3D-PRINTED PROP MODEL. “Star Trek ‘The Next Generation:’ TR-580 Medical Tricorder (3D Printed Model) by Tankz3dtavern” at FigureFan Zero.

There’s no doubt about it, the advancements in 3D Printing have done a lot for the collecting community. From printing missing parts for toys, and accessories for action figures, to complete collectibles, the whole endeavor has come a long way and it absolutely fascinates me. But also prop replicas! And that’s what I’m checking out today: A Starfleet Issue Medical Tricorder as featured in Star Trek: The Next Generation! I remember the days when you’re only hope of getting a decent Trek prop was to mail away for a DIY resin kit from the back of a magazine at $50-60. And what you got was exactly that, an unfinished kit that needed all sorts of sanding and painting to make it look anywhere near presentable. Even some of the “props” people were selling at conventions for twice that price were pretty crude. I recently found an Ebay seller offering some phasers and Trek replicas at prices that were too good to pass up. I started with some phasers (which we’ll check out here eventually), but the Tricorder came in this weekend and I was really excited to show it off.

This is where I usually show off the box and packaging, but there’s nothing to show here. The Tricorder came carefully bubble wrapped along with a display stand and holster. The stand is the only assembly required, and you just have to tab it all together, easy-peasy. There are no electronics included in the model, so you can consider this based on a regular prop as opposed to a hero prop, which is meant to be seen up close and functional. This particular model has two configurations to choose from: medical or regular, so whether you’re part of an Away Team mission making a geological survey or you’re in Sick Bay trying to find out why all your crew are dying, this Tricorder has you covered! Let’s start with the regular version and work our way up! And just a disclaimer, I know next to nothing about 3D Printing, I’m not qualified to comment on printing methods or techniques, and I’m evaluating this solely as a finished collectible….

(7) WARNING: IT’S A COMMERCIAL. But you might like to watch it anyway!

DeLorean Labs has now released a Back to the Future-style video of Lloyd playing himself as he opens a DeLorean Time Capsule. Directed by filmmaker Allan Ungar, who previously directed the feature film Bandit, the nostalgic video introduces the Time Capsule collection, as Lloyd has the item handed to him by a mysterious individual emerging from a DeLorean. Lloyd is seen opening the Time Capsule in amazement, before proceeding to utter Doc Brown’s famous catchphrase. Read DeLorean Labs President Evan Kuhn’s comments below:

“With the Time Capsule, we wanted to introduce something fun to our community that can celebrate DeLorean’s introduction to the digital age. Being DeLorean has been about futurism and counterculture. It allows us to get creative and move in such a way that other major car manufacturers can’t.”…

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born October 11, 1945 – Gay Haldeman, 79.

By Paul Weimer: Possibly one of the ultimate science fiction fans, and wife of Joe Haldeman, I got to meet Gay Haldeman in 2014 at the London Worldcon when Shaun Duke brought me over to meet Joe and Gay at a random point in the hallway near the escalators. I was starstruck by Joe, and charmed by Gay (but she doesn’t remember me). But that’s all right.

Gay also helps manage Joe’s work, for which all of us in SFF can be eternally grateful. She is one of the abiding icons of the science fiction community and I value her continued presence in the field. (May I get a chance to actually meet her and Joe again some day.)

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal depicts the horror side of becoming a real live boy.
Brewster Rockit reveals the invasion of the unseen.
Eek! finds something that really works.
Frazz discusses the evolution of a word.
Lio has a crossover.
The Argyle Sweater has doubts about therapy.
Bliss says who’s really to blame.

(10) BRENDA STARR. PRINT Magazine interviews James Sholly about comics creator Dale Messick: “The Daily Heller: Brenda Starr, Comics Star”.

Was “Brenda Starr” Dale Messick’s full-time gig?
It was! She wrote and drew “Brenda Starr, Reporter” for over 40 years! At times, she worked in a mobile studio that allowed her and her family to take long road trips across the country. She would frequently weave aspects of her own story into the plot lines. In real life, Dale had a daughter named Starr, which was the same name that Brenda gave her daughter after giving birth in a storyline from the 1970s. In the early 1960s, Brenda traveled to the Canal Zone in Panama shortly after Dale Messick took a trip there to visit friends. I was also impressed to learn that Dale drew “Brenda Starr, Reporter” using a brush and ink, which must have been incredibly difficult. I looked at some of the original art at the Lilly Library on the campus of Indiana University and was blown away by the control and expressiveness of her line work.

Why was Brenda Starr such a popular strip?
People I’ve spoken with say that particularly for young women, Brenda was a role model. Even in a fantastical sense, Brenda was a smart, savvy, career woman who went after what she wanted and didn’t let obstacles or expectations of what she should be slow her down (still a novel concept in the 1940s and 50s). She was unafraid of adventure and unbowed by people trying to get in her way. I think this kind of symbolism is really powerful to a young person with aspirations to achieve great things. Dale Messick had similar qualities in that she left the stability of her family life in Indiana, and came to New York on her own for a promising job (drawing greeting cards) and life in the big city. Messick was also savvy in presenting Brenda in the latest designer fashions, so she always looked incredible! She was able to build connections with readers by drawing their suggestions for Brenda’s clothes and including them as paper dolls in the Sunday editions of the strip. These sorts of gestures helped to create a loyal and dedicated readership….

(11) PANEL ABOUT THE WILD ROBOT. In Pasadena on October 26: “LightBox Expo Reveals ‘The Wild Robot: Art & Technical Strategies Behind the Scenes’ Panel” at Animation World Network.

LightBox Expo (LBX) returns October 25-27 to the Pasadena Convention Center, with an expansive program lineup celebrating artists and creators behind acclaimed films, animation, games, TV shows, comics, illustrations, and features.

The expansive 2024 program lineup just got more exciting with the announcement of “The Wild Robot: Art & Technical Strategies Behind the Scenes” panel, Saturday, October 26 from 4:00-5:00 pm.

Details on this previously unannounced panel are as follows:

“The Wild Robot: Art & Technical Strategies Behind the Scenes:”

Saturday, October 26 from 4:00-5:00 pm

Join heads of departments on The Wild Robot for a discussion about the artistic and technical strategies they took behind the scenes to capture the best on screen.

(12) IMMORTALITY CANCELLED. “Have We Reached Peak Human Life Span?” asks the New York Times (paywalled article).

The oldest human on record, Jeanne Calment of France, lived to the age of 122. What are the odds that the rest of us get there, too?

Not high, barring a transformative medical breakthrough, according to research published Monday in the journal Nature Aging.

The study looked at data on life expectancy at birth collected between 1990 and 2019 from some of the places where people typically live the longest: Australia, France, Italy, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. Data from the United States was also included, though the country’s life expectancy is lower.

The researchers found that while average life expectancies increased during that time in all of the locations, the rates at which they rose slowed down. The one exception was Hong Kong, where life expectancy did not decelerate.

The data suggests that after decades of life expectancy marching upward thanks to medical and technological advancements, humans could be closing in on the limits of what’s possible for average life span.

“We’re basically suggesting that as long as we live now is about as long as we’re going to live,” said S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois Chicago, who led the study. He predicted maximum life expectancy will end up around 87 years — approximately 84 for men, and 90 for women — an average age that several countries are already close to achieving.

During the 20th century, life expectancy rose dramatically, spurred on by innovations like water sanitation and antibiotics. Some scientists have projected that this pace will hold as better treatments and preventions are discovered for cancer, heart disease and other common causes of death. The famous demographer James Vaupel maintained that most children born in the 21st century would live to 100.

But according to the new study, that is unlikely to be the case. The researchers found that instead of a higher percentage of people making it to 100 in the places they analyzed, the ages at which people are dying have been compressed into a narrower time frame….

(13) 2024 NOBEL WINS MAY CONFOUND THE MACHINES TAKING OVER? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I have long warned that the machines are taking over, but nobody ever listens.

This may now be changing! Two of this year’s Novel Prizes go to artificial intelligence (AI) related work. The Novel Prize for Chemistry goes to work using AI to elucidate the complex folding structure of proteins (the molecules that make up enzymes and some other large biological molecules that do things to keep us alive) from DNA code (genes).

More significantly, this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics goes to work on developing AI itself. One of this prize’s winners has gone on to warn that we need to work out how to manage AI before it takes over. He opines that we could have smarter-than-human within a couple of decades. (This is likely to be within the lifetimes of many of you.) It looks like I can no longer say nobody ever listens….

(14) THE MOST DISTURBING STORY EVER WRITTEN. Moid Moidelhoff over at Media Death Cult takes a look at Harlan Ellison’s unsettling short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”. The story is set against the backdrop of World War III, where a sentient supercomputer named AM, born from the merging of the world’s major defense computers, eradicates humanity except for five individuals. These survivors – Benny, Gorrister, Nimdok, Ted, and Ellen – are kept alive by AM to endure endless torture as a form of revenge against its creators.

(15) LOWER DECKS SEASON 5. There won’t be a second fifth – this is it. “’Star Trek: Lower Decks’ Final Season Blasts Off with Official Trailer” – Animation Magazine sums it up.

Synopsis: In Season 5 of Star Trek: Lower Decks, the crew of the U.S.S. Cerritos is tasked with closing “space potholes” — subspace rifts that are causing chaos in the Alpha Quadrant. Pothole duty would be easy for Junior Officers Mariner, Boimler, Tendi and Rutherford … If they didn’t also have to deal with an Orion war, furious Klingons, diplomatic catastrophes, murder mysteries and scariest of all: their own career aspirations.

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

Pixel Scroll 9/14/24 Scrollchak, The Night Pixel

Posted on September 14, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) RING TIME. Robin Anne Reid’s newsletter Writing from Ithilien offers a collection of links to interesting discussions of the Rings of Power series in“The Vibes Around ‘Tolkien’”.

I love reading what fans who love the show have to say about it, and I’m having great fun reading those posts (including the ones I’ve linked to above!). Let’s just say I enjoy all the varied vibes around a text that is now part of the greater global “Tolkien” phenomenon, i.e. connected to all the things, even if I don’t much like that particular instance!

(2) BALANCED IN THE SCALES AND FOUND WANTING. Meanwhile, The Hollywood Reporter does a roundup of all the complaints about the two epic series adapting George R.R. Martin and Tolkien in “’House of the Dragon’ and ‘Rings of Power’ Facing Epic Headaches”. (Got to love the article’s illustration of a sword-wielding GRRM on a flying dragon.)

… As for Rings [of Power]s’ ratings, third-party services show a steep drop from the series’ debut season. The spin from Amazon goes like this: Of course the ratings are down, they were so huge last time. There is something to this. Even Prime Video hits like Fallout and The Boys haven’t matched Rings’ season one on a global basis (Fallout did top the show in the U.S.). Amazon says the new season is doing well internationally and is on track to be a Top 5 season for Prime Video….

…Then there is Dragon, whose problems are more interesting. The second season incensed some fans after spending eight episodes leading to a massive cliffhanger — a climactic battle sequence that was pushed from a shortened season two to season three, apparently for budget reasons (which has led to more “David Zaslav ruins everything” chatter online). In the ratings, the season dipped about 10 percent from the show’s first season, but the numbers do remain high.

Two weeks ago, saga author (and Dragon co-creator and executive producer) George R.R. Martin, who has been complimentary about Dragon in the past, posted on his blog that he was going to reveal “everything that’s gone wrong” with the show. Smart money could have been wagered on this never happening — surely HBO would do everything in its power to persuade Martin not to post.

But last week, Martin did, and the result was fascinating…

(3) SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE 2024 LONGLIST. The Scotiabank Giller Prize 2024 longlist was released September 4. The Prize is a celebration of Canadian literary talent. The 12 titles were chosen from 145 books submitted by publishers across Canada. There is one longlisted work of genre interest:

Anne Michaels for her novel Held, published by McClelland & Stewart

The other longlisted works are:

Caroline Adderson for her short story collection A Way to Be Happy, published by Biblioasis
Shashi Bhat for her short story collection Death by a Thousand Cuts, published by McClelland & Stewart
Éric Chacour for his novel What I Know About You (translated by Pablo Strauss), published by Coach House Books
Corinna Chong for her novel Bad Land, published by Arsenal Pulp Press
Anne Fleming for her novel Curiosities, published by Knopf Canada
Conor Kerr for his novel Prairie Edge, published by Strange Light
Claire Messud for her novel This Strange Eventful History, published by W. W. Norton
Loghan Paylor for their novel The Cure for Drowning, published by Random House Canada
Deepa Rajagopalan for her short story collection Peacocks of Instagram, published by House of Anansi Press
Jane Urquhart for her novel In Winter I Get Up at Night, published by McClelland & Stewart
katherena vermette for her novel real ones, published by Hamish Hamilton

(4) OCTOTHORPE. In Episode 118 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Och Aye, Sci-Fi”, John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty continue their discussion of the Worldcon. (There’s a rough-and-ready transcript here.)

We round off most of our discussion of the Glasgow Worldcon, including talking about Halls 4 and 5, communications, Worldcon structures, and publications. Thanks to Sara Felix, this week, for providing our lovely artwork.

Three pins of armadillos flying colourful spaceships are on top of a piece of paper with blobs of glue that look like planets. The lettering “Octothorpe 118” appears above in a similar style to the pins.

(5) JOURNEY PLANET. Journey Planet 84 “Workers’ Rights In SFF” is available at this link. File 770 promoted the zine with this post.

Contributor Joachim Boaz has cross-posted his article from the issue about Clifford D. Simak at Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations: “Exploration Log 5: ‘We Must Start Over Again and Find Some Other Way of Life’: The Role of Organized Labor in the 1940s and ’50s Science Fiction of Clifford D. Simak”.

My article on organized labor in the 1940s and ’50s science fiction of Clifford D. Simak went live! I’d love to hear your thoughts. I’ve spent the last half year researching and reading religiously for this project–from topics such as Minnesota’s unique brand of radical politics to the work of contemporary intellectuals like C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) whom Simak most likely read.

(6) SUPREME GENRE READER. The New York Times learns “Ketanji Brown Jackson Looks Forward to Reading Fiction Again”. (Paywalled.) “The Supreme Court justice has been drawn to American history and books about the ‘challenges and triumphs’ of raising a neurodiverse child. She shares that and more in a memoir, ‘Lovely One.’”

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which books and authors stick with you most?

Pretty voracious. My favorite childhood books were Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time” series. I really identified with Meg. I also liked Judy Blume’s “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” And I went through a Nancy Drew phase.

Which genres do you … avoid?

I don’t think I’ve indulged in reading fiction in many years. I hope to get back to doing so, now that our daughters are grown, but I would avoid anything that would qualify as a horror story. I don’t like to be frightened.

Are there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time?

I am gearing up to read “Parable of the Sower,” by Octavia Butler, soon. I have it both in paper and as an audiobook, which helps.

(7) TUTTLE REVIEWS. Lisa Tuttle’s latest sff review column for the Guardian takes up The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera; Withered Hill by David Barnett; Crypt of the Moon Spider by Nathan Ballingrud; The Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei; and The Specimens by Hana Gammon. “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup”.

(8) BOB WEATHERWAX (1941-2024). [Item by Andrew Porter.] The New York Times reports a star dog trainer died August 15.

Bob Weatherwax, a Hollywood dog trainer who carried on his father’s legacy of breeding and coaching collies to play Lassie, the resourceful and heroic canine who crossed flooded rivers, faced down bears and leaped into the hearts of countless children, died on Aug. 15 in Scranton, Pa. He was 83.

One of his uncles trained Toto for “The Wizard of Oz” (1939).

Mr. Weatherwax also trained other dogs seen in Hollywood films, including Einstein, the Catalan sheepdog in “Back to the Future.”

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born September 14, 1936 — Walter Koenig, 88. Walter Koenig’s our Birthday Honoree this Scroll. He really has had but two major roles, though he has also appeared in a number of other roles.

The first was as the Russian born Enterprise navigator Pavel Chekov on the original Trek franchise. He went on to reprise this role in all six original-cast Trek films, and later voiced President Anton Chekov in Picard.

I like the Chekov character even if on viewing the series decades later I cringed on the quite obvious stereotype.

A much better character was played by him in the form of Alfred Bester (named in homage of that author and a certain novel) on Babylon 5. He wasn’t at all a sympathetic character and eventually was wanted for war crimes but was still a fascinating character. His origin story is established in J. Gregory Keyes’ Psi Corps trilogy written after the series was cancelled and is considered canon.

He showed up in The Questor Tapes as an administrative assistant, Oro, for two episodes of Starlost.

Moontrap, a SF film with him and Bruce Campbell, would garner a twenty-eight percent rating at Rotten Tomatoes.

Alienable, a sort of comic SF horror film which he executive produced, financed, wrote and acts in has no rating there.

He’s Fireman Frank in Unbelievable!!!!! which apparently parodies Trek. The film has over forty cast members from the various Trek series. The film follows the omicron adventures however unintentional of four astronauts including one of who is a marionette. I cringed when I watched the trailer. I really did. Anyone see it?

Not surprisingly he acts in one of those Trek fanfics, Star Trek: New Voyage as his original character.

Finally he appears via the wonder of digital technology in the Hugo-nominated “Trials and Tribble-ations”.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Brewster Rockit should have declined the invitation.
Cornered illustrates do it yourself versus premade.
Carpe Diem wants to drop a subject.
Tom Gauld does his own version of a popular meme.

My cartoon for the @GuardianBooks autumn reading special. pic.twitter.com/BPnvERXvKG
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) September 14, 2024

(11) NO SAVING THROW. All 25 quit: “Annapurna Interactive Entire Staff Resigns” reports Variety.

The staff of Annapurna Interactive, the games division of Megan Ellison‘s Annapurna, has resigned en masse after a deal to spin off the group fell through, Bloomberg reports.

Founded in 2016, Annapurna Interactive has partnered with boutique game studios for several critically acclaimed titles, including “Stray” (pictured above), described as a “third-person cat adventure game set amidst the detailed, neon-lit alleys of a decaying cybercity,” as well as “What Remains of Edith Finch,” “Outer Wilds” and “Neon White.”

The staff exodus came after a breakdown in talks between Ellison and Nathan Gary, formerly president of Annapurna Interactive, to spin the gaming unit off as a separate company. “All 25 members of the Annapurna Interactive team collectively resigned,” Gary and the other employees said in a joint statement Thursday to Bloomberg. “This was one of the hardest decisions we have ever had to make and we did not take this action lightly.”

(12) STREET ART. James Bacon told File 770 readers today about “Dublin Street Art”.

Chris Barkley says his hometown deserves a look, too: “Cincinnati Wins A Top Spot For The City’s Street Art And Murals” at Islands.

…And, to those that know the Queen City, it’s no surprise that Cincinnati took the street art crown in 2024’s USA Today and 10Best Readers’ Choice Awards. The annual competition, which counts down top tens around the country, uses a panel of experts to determine ten nominees with street art chops. Then, they leave voting to readers to decide the winners. This year, Cincinnati, which has been among the nominees going back to 2021, finally took the top spot, thanks to the more than 300 stunning murals dotting the city’s neighborhood streets….

There’s a more extensive photo gallery at ArtWorks Cincinnati.

(13) BLOCH SCRIPT ON EBAY. The Dave Hester Store of Storage Wars fame would be happy to sell you a screenplay from Robert Bloch’s estate, part of his personal archives: “1961 ‘The Merry-Go-Around’ By Robert Bloch”, based on Ray Bradbury’s “The Black Ferris”. Haven’t been able to determine whether it was produced. Taking bids, starting at $99.

(14) PRACTICING FOR ARTEMIS. NPR learned “How the crew of NASA’s Artemis II prepares for a mission to the moon”. It’s an audio report.

This time next year, NASA plans to send its first crewed mission to the moon. NPR’s Scott Detrow meets the crew of NASA’s Artemis II mission, to see how the team is preparing.

[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 Jon Meltzer.]

Pixel Scroll 8/13/24 The Fifth-Million Pixel Fan

Posted on August 13, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) INDUSTRY TAKE ON WORLDCON. Publishers Weekly gave it thumbs up: “In Glasgow, Worldcon Worked to Put Controversy Behind It”.

In a spirited five-day celebration, held August 8–12 at the Scottish Events Campus in Glasgow, Scotland, crowds converged from all over the globe for the 82nd World Science Fiction Convention, known as Worldcon. Show organizers said that more than 8,000 membership badges were purchased in total, with over 7,200 issued at the venue and upwards of 600 in attendance online.

On the convention floor and across a wealth of a wealth of panels, book signings, and creative showcases, the mood was buoyant, with old hands and first-timers alike connecting in bars, at events, and simply in passing. And the organization’s promise to “[consider] access, inclusion, and diversity as integral to Glasgow 2024,” found the perfect venue in the Scottish city, which was welcoming, accessible, and spacious.

…From an industry perspective, there was a scarcity of American publishers at this year’s Worldcon. Still, everyone in attendance seemed more focused on celebrating the current boom in the genre around the world.

“There’s never been a more exciting time to be a SFF publisher,” said Bethan Morgan, editorial director of Gollancz. Eleanor Teasdale, publisher at Angry Robot Books and Datura Books, remarked, “It’s been a joyous festival of genre, with so many international attendees too.”

This excitement was shared by Amanda Rutter, commissioning editor at Solaris Books. “I haven’t been to [a Worldcon] that felt so productive and positive since before the pandemic,” she said, adding, “The Glasgow team made it the most inclusive convention I have been to by far, given their commitment to accessibility needs and striving to ensure that every single participant felt as though they were represented.”

“The con felt very well organized,” said George Sandison, managing editor at Titan Books. “Like all effective project management, it looked like it was very simple to do and probably required Herculean efforts by numerous highly competent people!” Francesca T. Barbini, founder of Luna Press Publishing, agreed, praising the organizers for “being lots of help when we arrived. Overall, it’s been an amazing experience.”

The main takeaway from the event seemed to be about the importance of in-person connection to both the publishing industry and the greater SFF community. Cath Trechman, editor at large at Titan Books, noted, “I can say I found this year’s Worldcon to be a great place to meet authors and agents and chat about the current trends and the idiosyncrasies of publishing, surrounded by an enthusiastic crowd of genre fans and book lovers.”…

(2) GLASGOW 2024 BUSINESS MEETING VIDEOS. At the link is the YouTube playlist for the 2024 WSFS Business Meeting videos recorded by Lisa Hayes. Kevin Standlee finally found a workaround to overcome the bandwidth problem at his Glasgow hotel.

(3) REVERSE PSYCHOLOGY. [Item by Olav Rokne.] Intended as a happy, silly coda to this year’s Hugo season, Amanda and I present “How to Lose a Hugo,” which after four go-arounds we’re starting to have some experience at. (Though we can think of some folks who have lost far more often than we have.) “How To Lose A Hugo” at the Hugo Book Club Blog.

… When it comes to the Hugo Awards, it’s worth remembering that they are a community award that masquerades as a literary institution. These awards are nominated and voted on by a self-selected group that loosely organizes itself around a series of conventions. That means that how well someone is known and how they are seen within the community will inevitably affect whether or not their work is recognized by the community.

Social media is awash with accounts run by authors who rarely post anything other than promotional content aimed at selling their own books. It’s also worth letting people know who you are, what books you enjoy, and what your general vibe is.

Engaging with the community isn’t just about telling people how good you think your book or art is, it’s about listening and talking about the things that are important to them. Talk about politics, talk about art, talk about architecture, talk about music, and be authentic….

(4) BRISBANE 2028 WORLDCON BID MAY CHANGE DATE. To July?

We are currently considering shifting the dates of our bid, to better align with the total solar eclipse that will be passing through Australia on July 22nd, 2028. We'll update you once we have made our decision.
— Australia 2028: Brisbane bid for Worldcon (@BrisbaneIn28) August 13, 2024

(5) ROWLING, MUSK, LISTED IN CYBERBULLYING COMPLAINT. “J.K. Rowling, Elon Musk Named in Imane Khelif’s Cyberbullying Lawsuit” – Variety has details.

J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk have both been named in a criminal complaint filed to French authorities over alleged “acts of aggravated cyber harassment” against Algerian boxer and newly crowned Olympic champion Imane Khelif.

Nabil Boudi, the Paris-based attorney of Khelif, confirmed to Variety that both figures were mentioned in the body of the complaint, posted to the anti-online hatred center of the Paris public prosecutor’s office on Friday.

The lawsuit was filed against X, which under French law means that it was filed against unknown persons. That “ensure[s] that the ‘prosecution has all the latitude to be able to investigate against all people,” including those who may have written hateful messages under pseudonyms, said Boudi. The complaint nevertheless mentions famously controversial figures….

(6) TWO GREATS AGREE.

my theory about horror films (& fiction) is that the plot is just the clothesline upon which a succession of images is hung. you need to think that there is a (coherent) explanation for the nightmare but essentially, in life, there is not. endings of many novels, not just genre… https://t.co/tlr0bychnS
— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) August 12, 2024

(7) DISCREET HORROR. [Item by Steven French.] Signs of the times: Nightmare on Elm Street gets downgraded from ‘18’ to ‘15’ while Paint Your Wagon is reclassified a ‘12’ from a PG for the ‘sex references’. “A Nightmare on Elm Street rating change defended by BBFC” reports the Guardian.

The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has defended its decision to change the certificate of horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street from an 18 to a 15, saying that its audience research showed “strong support for older content to be reclassified in line with modern standards”.

The classic 1980s horror, featuring the malevolent, razor-gloved Freddy Krueger who stalks and murders teenagers in their dreams, was given an 18 certificate on its first UK release in 1985, a designation confirmed on a subsequent cinema release in 2013 and a series of home entertainment releases. However, after a new application from its studio Warner Bros, the certificate was changed to a 15 on 1 August, ahead of a home entertainment reissue in September….

…The spokesperson added: “In the case of A Nightmare on Elm Street, although the film features various bloody moments, it is relatively discreet in terms of gore and stronger injury detail. The kills often leave more to the imagination than visceral detail, and largely occur within a fantasy context. Compared to more recent precedents for violence and horror [classified] at 18 – such as Halloween, Thanksgiving, Imaculate or Saw X – the film is now containable at 15 and we reclassified it accordingly.”…

(8) ABOUT THAT BLACK HOLE. This looks irresistible. Omni Loop – Official Trailer. In theaters September 20.

OMNI LOOP follows Zoya Lowe (Parker), a quantum physicist who finds herself in a time loop, with a black hole growing in her chest and only a week to live. But what the doctors and her family don’t know is that she has already lived this week before; so many times, in fact, that she doesn’t even know how long it’s been. Until one day Zoya meets a gifted student named Paula (Edebiri). Together they team up to save her life – and to unlock the mysteries of time travel.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born August 13, 1953 — The War of The Worlds film (1953)

It’s 1953, it’s New York City, it’s August, a hot summer night, a perfect evening for an alien invasion to begin, and so we have The War of The Worlds premiere there. Based off, of course the H.G. Wells novel of the same name, it was produced for the screen by George Pal.

The screenplay was written by Barré Lyndon. This is part of his legal name, Alfred Edgar Barre Lyndon, and it is obviously taken from the title character of Thackeray’s novel. This and Conquest of Space were his only SF screenplays.

It was directed by Brian Haskin, just one of many films where he teamed with George Pal, another one being Conquest of Space which our screenwriter here also was on.

It starred Gene Barry who six years later would be Bat Masterson, and Anne Richards, who would be in the Dragnet film that led to the series as Officer Grace Downey. (She does not reprise the character in the series.) Bless her, she’s still with us at age ninety-five. Barry passed on five years ago.

Paramount rather pointedly said there’d be a romantic subplot in which our scientist have a love interest, hence the casting of Richards here.

The story itself is moved to Southern California in to my surprise, it was set in, emphasis was, an actual real place. Linda Rose was formerly in San Diego County, but is now in Riverside County. It’s a ghost town as it was a failed development scheme from the 1880s, one of many from that time. Fascinating as Spock would say.

The special effects were, shall I say, inordinately expensive. Paramount budgeted two million and wouldn’t budge, not a dollar over that amount would be further given, so stock footage of World War Two battles had to do for the global Mars invasion. Even so the film just broke even — two million in production costs, two million in box office receipts in an era when studios generally own the cinemas.

What did critics think of it? The best summation I think come from Variety at the time: “War of the Worlds is a socko science-fiction feature, as fearsome as a film as was the Orson Welles 1938 radio interpretation of the H.G. Wells novel.” It was at the time, after all, only fourteen years since the latter broadcast.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Bizarro brings us a special interest magazine.
Carpe Diem suspects the directions have been disobeyed.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal insists existence is real.
Beetle Moses makes you glad(?) the chef’s work didn’t go to waste.
Bliss finds something that makes Hulk mad. What else is new?
Brewster Rockit questions whether these aliens are ready to invade.

(11) LATEST AND GREATEST. Lisa Tuttle, in “The best recent science fiction and fantasy – reviews roundup” for the Guardian, covers Extremophile by Ian Green; Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan; Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova; The Formidable Miss Cassidy by Meihan Boey; and Lake of Darkness by Adam Roberts.

(12) TAKE A WHIFF. [Item by Steven French.] I love the smell of Minecraft in the morning! “Want to smell like the Ender Dragon? We test the Lush Minecraft range” in the Guardian.

Last spring, one of my favourite brand tie-ins of 2023 saw high-street cosmetics chain Lush team up with Nintendo to create a range of products based around Super Mario. It was a riot of brightly coloured shower gels and super-sweet fragrances, including a divine Princess Peach body spray that I’m still using because screw gender-based perfume norms.

Now, Lush has released a new video game range celebrating 15 years of Minecraft. There are 12 items in the collection, including easily the most literal bath bomb Lush has ever made – a TNT block – as well as Grass and Lava blocks, a Creeper head shower bomb and a Diamond Pickaxe bubble bar, which is genuinely quite hefty despite its diminutive size.

The collection is apparently the result of a year-long collaboration with the game’s developer Mojang, and it’s been a popular project for the company’s employees. Lush concepts creative director Melody Morton is a regular player – and she’s not the only one. “We have many Minecraft players within the business, so there was lots of reference and resource to pull on when it came to products, creative and messaging,” says Kalem Brinkworth, the creative lead on the Lush collaborations team….

(13) BONESTELL ON THE BLOCK. Christie’s will run its “Over the Horizon: Art of the Future from the Paul G. Allen Collection” online auction from August 23-September 12.

Over the Horizon: Art of the Future from the Paul G. Allen Collection is devoted to how the future, especially interplanetary travel, was imagined by artists and other thinkers during the 20th century. These include Chesley Bonestell, Robert McCall, R.C. Swanson, George Gibbs, and Fred Freeman, among many others. The artworks in this auction, along with their publication in popular magazines, inspired a generation of explorers, scientists, and aerospace engineers.

Paul Allen was among the most significant collectors of works by Chesley Bonestell, widely acknowledged as the “father of space art.” Bonestell’s Saturn as Seen from Titan, first published in 1949, has been called by the Smithsonian “the painting that launched a thousand careers.” A version of that painting, circa 1952, is available in the sale, along with several works published as illustrations for the famous “Man Will Conquer Space Soon!” series of articles, published in Collier’s Magazine in the early 1950s.

(14) MET AT READERCON. The Nerd Count Podcast, hosted by Mercurio D. Rivera and Matthew Kressel, brings episode 4 “Live From Readercon”.

In our fourth episode, we come you you LIVE from Readercon, the “conference on imaginative literature,” held this past July in Quincy, Massachusetts. We had the pleasure of interviewing the following guests: Jeffrey Ford, A.T. Greenblatt, A.C. Wise, Scott H. Andrews, Mike Allen, A.T. Sayre, Julie C. Day, C.S.E. Cooney, William Alexander, John Wiswell, Rob Cameron, and Sophia Babai. We talk about Readercons past, what makes Readercon a truly special convention — particularly its welcoming and friendly vibe — and we talk with each guest about their recent and upcoming creative works. This was a blast to record, and we had so much fun talking to all these diverse and talented folks!

(15) SPLISH, SPLASH. “Mars water: Liquid water reservoirs found under Martian crust” reports BBC.

Scientists have discovered a reservoir of liquid water on Mars – deep in the rocky outer crust of the planet.

The findings come from a new analysis of data from Nasa’s Mars Insight Lander, which touched down on the planet back in 2018.

The lander carried a seismometer, which recorded four years’ of vibrations – Mars quakes – from deep inside the Red Planet.

Analysing those quakes – and exactly how the planet moves – revealed “seismic signals” of liquid water.

While there is water frozen at the Martian poles and evidence of vapour in the atmosphere, this is the first time liquid water has been found on the planet.

The findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Insight’s scientific mission ended in December 2022, after the lander sat quietly listening to “the pulse of Mars” for four years.

In that time, the probe recorded more than 1,319 quakes….

(16) LEGOS BY THE THOUSANDS. Bell of Lost Souls is thrilled that “Huge LEGO Star Trek ‘Deep Space Nine’ Model Has Over 75,000 Pieces”.

…Adrian Drake built the famous space station from the frame up using more than 75,000 pieces. It’s 6 feet tall and eight feet in diameter and is heavy enough that it needs some extra supports. The whole build took over two years.

It’s a truly impressive and gigantic build. Drake displayed it at Brickworld Chicago, where he gave a tour to Beyond the Brick. Check out how he built the LEGO Deep Space Nine and all of the cool details….

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Olav Rokne, N., Kevin Standlee, Anne Marble, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, and Teddy Harvia for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 7/13/24 Those Aren’t Lightning Bugs, They’re Pixels

Posted on July 13, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) WHAT I’VE BEEN DOING ON MY SUMMER VACATION. I don’t know how much material will make it into today’s Scroll because I have been very busy creating a series of posts about rules change proposals being submitted to the WSFS Business Meeting in Glasgow.

(2) BLOCH’S HUGO. Robert Bloch’s 1959 Hugo Award for Best Short Story “The Hellbound Train” sold at auction on eBay for $2,766.00 last night.

(3) GET YOUR NITPICKER READY. “75 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time – What Is The Best Science Fiction Book Ever Written?” asks Esquire. And after looking at this list, the questions I have are not what I’d have expected. For one: Is Excession really Iain M. Banks’ best novel?

Over two years ago, we published a version of this list featuring 50 books. But why stop at 50? Now, as part of our latest Summer Fiction Week, we’ve cast a wider net and expanded the list to 75 titles. Choosing the 75 best science fiction books of all time wasn’t easy, so to get the job done, we had to establish some guardrails. Though we assessed single installments as representatives of their series, we limited the list to one book per author. We also emphasized books that brought something new and innovative to the genre—to borrow a great sci-fi turn of phrase, books that “boldly go where no one has gone before.”

Now, in ranked order, here are the best science fiction books of all time….

(4) LATEST TUTTLE COLUMN. Lisa Tuttle’s “The best recent science fiction and fantasy – reviews roundup” in the Guardian covers Curandera by Irenosen Okojie; The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman; The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer; an Toward Eternity by Anton Hur.

(5) BIG RIVER, MANY TRIBUTARIES. Cedar Sanderson offers helpful tools for strategizing what Amazon book categories to choose when marketing a self-published book on that platform: “Categories on Amazon” at Mad Genius Club.

…This post will be Amazon-centric, as I haven’t published a book wide in years. Still, much of the information will be useful elsewhere as well, just not in the same way as it is for the biggest bookseller in the world.

It used to be that you could put your book in up to ten categories. This was changed in the latter part of 2023, and you can now select three categories. Categories are the broad buckets Amazon uses to help readers find books they like, so as you can imagine, it’s important to put your book in the best categories. Which also means not putting them into the broadest categories – a book placed into ‘fantasy’ is a tiny minnow swimming in a whole ocean, while a book placed into something like ‘dark fantasy horror’ is a trout in a fishing hole, and much more likely to find a reader who really wants it.

KindleTrends has a great (and free!) tool for researching categories on Amazon.

BookLink also has a ton of free tools for researching, and while you can use it to find the best categories for an already-published book, you could also enter the ASIN of a book that is very similar to a planned publication, to give you some guidance while you are setting your new book up. Their website isn’t the easiest to use, so read carefully….

(6) THE REAL MCCOY. “Captain Kirk’s Original ‘Star Trek’ Phaser Heads to Auction” – The Hollywood Reporter expects it to go for six figures.

The prop weapon and a communicator used by William Shatner on the original series will go on display at the Comic-Con Museum before heading to auction in November.

Fans of Star Trek, get set to be stunned.

A original phaser and communicator used by William Shatner’s James T. Kirk on the 1960s NBC series will be on display starting Monday at the Comic-Con Museum in San Diego. The iconic props, created in 1966, have not been seen in more than 50 years, organizers say, and will be available to purchase through auction.

Don Hillenbrand, a veteran Star Trek prop collector and researcher, has authenticated the phaser and communicator using a “screen-matching” method that identifies unique details and flaws on the props to verify they indeed were the ones seen in the series.

The original owner of both pieces, a late relative of the current owners, was a Hollywood prop veteran who is believed to have acquired them from a former employee at Paramount Pictures, home of Star Trek.

The pistol-like phaser and communicator, which features a spinning dial, will be at the museum through July 28, then will go on the block at a Julien’s Auctions/TCM Hollywood event Nov. 9 in Los Angeles. Each piece is conservatively estimated to sell for $100,000 to $200,000….

(7) WHAT CRESSIDA COWELL LIKES. “On my radar: Cressida Cowell’s cultural highlights” – a Guardian profile. Including an item about David Tennant’s next series, which isn’t sff but don’t you want to know anyway?

Children’s author Cressida Cowell was born in London in 1966. In 2003 she published the first of 12 books in the How to Train Your Dragon series; since then, they have been adapted into several feature films, including the Academy Award-nominated 2010 animation. Her other book series include the Treetop Twins and The Wizards of Once. Between 2019 and 2022, Cowell was the Waterstones children’s laureate. She lives in London with her husband; they have three children. Here Be Dragons, an exhibition co-curated by Cressida Cowell and one of her dragon creations, Toothless, is at the Story Museum in Oxford until July 2025….

6. Television

Rivals

The first trailer for Disney+’s forthcoming TV adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals has dropped, starring the always magnificent David Tennant. I bet he will have an absolute whale of a time playing Lord Tony Baddingham. Rivals was one of my go-to comfort reads when I was in my 20s, so very nostalgic for me and so many others. Everything David touches seems to turn to gold, from Hamlet to Broadchurch to Staged to Good Omens, and the lead director of Rivals is Ted Lasso’s Elliot Hegarty, so I have high expectations for this.

(8) WESTERCON MINUTES HOT OFF THE PRESS. [Item by Kevin Standlee.] Linda Deneroff turned around the minutes and new bylaws for Westercon very quickly, even with five ratified bylaw amendments and two new ones for consideration next year. Here’s the announcement post: “Westercon Official Papers Updated for 2025”.

The Westercon Bylaws & Business page has been updated with the minutes of the 2024 Westercon Business Meeting held at Westercon 76 in Salt Lake City, links to the video of the Business Meeting, and the updated Bylaws for use at the 2025 Westercon (Westercon 77).

The Business Meeting ratified five amendments to the Bylaws, including removing the “traditional” date of Westercon (which was never a requirement). The meeting then gave first passage to two amendments: one would clarify the official name of Westercon and the other would suggest (but not required) that Westercons be held sometime between May and August each year. The full text of the amendments, which must be ratified at Westercon 77 in Santa Clara, California, is in the updated Bylaws document.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 13, 1940 – Sir Patrick Stewart, 84.

By Paul Weimer: Where does one begin, or end, with Stewart’s oeuvre? I first came across him as Leodegrance in the movie Excalibur, which is perhaps the most fever-dream of all the adaptations of King Arthur and the Round Table that I’ve ever seen. Then, some years later, he was of course Gurney Halleck in the David Lynch Dune movie, and that itself was a fever dream of an adaptation of an unfilmable novel.

So it was with excitement when I found out that he would be Captain Jean-Luc Picard in the reboot of Star Trek as a TV Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation. Sure, the series took a few years to find its feet and even Picard took some time to establish his character (I remember him being weirdly francophilic to the point of excess in the early seasons) but once Picard had the character, he gave us a character arc and journey that went through Locutus, through the movies, and all the way to his titular series. Picard’s growth and development has been a part of my adult life.

Sir Patrick Stewart, from The Smithsonian Magazine.

And then there is of course, Professor X. Yes, McAvoy has mostly taken up that mantle, since. And there are the animated adaptations. But when I saw Stewart as Professor X in Multiverse of Madness in that alternate world Strange and Chavez wound up in, I cheered in delight. Patrick Stewart was and does remain my Professor Charles Xavier, and how I envision him in my mind to this day. (And he makes a wonderful double act with Ian McKellen’s Magneto, a chemistry between the two that no other actors or adaptations have managed to really match.

Stewart has done a slew of other stuff, too, and I’ve consumed a lot of it. One fun bit I will mention is a videogame: Lands of Lore. It was one of the early videogames in the early 1990’s that featured extensive voiceovers, done by Stewart himself (in his role as a dying king). It felt like a return to his fantasy King Arthur days. And of course, since I am a Roman Empire enthusiast, although it is not genre, how can I miss his portrayal of Sejanus in I, Claudius?

Truly one of the best actors of all time.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Free Range discovers a litigious Sasquatch.
Reality Check re-enacts a painful inspiration.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal takes the fun out of villainy.
Tom Gauld tries to spoil summer reading but fails.

My latest @GuardianBooks cartoon pic.twitter.com/j4zqTtHXW8
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) July 13, 2024

(11) 100 YEARS OF ANIMATION ART EXHIBIT. [Item by Marc A. Criley.] The exhibit “A Journey into Imagimation: Over 100 Years of Animation Art from Around the World” just opened at the Huntsville Museum of Art in Huntsville, Alabama, and will run through September 29, 2024.

A Journey into Imagimation celebrates the ongoing history of animation production since the creation of this magical art form. The exhibition presents 140 rare and recognizable objects, including original cels, drawings, and models that feature a full range of animation techniques from the groundbreaking traditional animation of Gertie the Dinosaur, created by Winsor McCay in 1914, to many of today’s digitally supported animations, including The Simpsons and Toy Story.

The exhibition includes well-recognized animations from such movies and cartoons as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Mighty Mouse, Tom & Jerry, Woody Woodpecker, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Alvin and the Chipmunks, The Jetsons, Mary Poppins, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Little Mermaid, The Simpsons, The Ren and Stimpy Show, The Lion King, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Toy Story, as well as popular commercials for Raid, Pillsbury, Clearasil, and Lipton Brisk Ice Tea and the music video for Paula Abdul’s Opposites Attract.

(12) SUPER PALS. “’His skincare regime alone would bankrupt you’: Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman bring banter and bromance to London” and the Guardian listens in.

The enduring friendship between the actors Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman was unpacked in irreverent detail in London on Friday, as the pair premiered their new movie, Deadpool & Wolverine.

The stars, who frequently tease one another both in the press and on X, take the leads in Marvel’s latest blockbuster, which sees foul-mouthed superhero Deadpool (Reynolds) exhume and then team-up with the beleaguered Wolverine (Jackman), seven years after his apparent death in 2017’s Logan.

Speaking at a press conference, Reynolds and director Shaun Levy said they had been scrambling for ideas to continue the franchise until Jackman agreed to return. Rejected pitches included a film in which it is revealed Deadpool was the hunter who shot Bambi’s mother.

(13) WHAT HE SAID. Meanwhile, Hank Green has been studying modern English.

There is sigma rizz in this view of life, with its skibidi grindset, having been originally yapped into a few gyatts or into one; and that, whilst this ohio has gone mewwing on according to the quirked up law of gravity, from so sussy a beginning alpha forms most skibidi and most…
— Hank Green (@hankgreen) July 13, 2024

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

File 770

Mike Glyer's news of science fiction fandom

Tag Archives: Lisa Tuttle

Pixel Scroll 4/11/25 Within This Scroll Of Pixels And Sin/Your Tribbles Grow Bald But Not Your Kzin

Pixel Scroll 3/7/25 How Many Files To Pixelscroll? Three Score Files And Ten

Pixel Scroll 2/8/25 God Had Names For All The Pixels. No One Else Knows Them

Pixel Scroll 1/11/25 There’s Even Pixels Walking Through It As We Watch

Pixel Scroll 12/20/24 How Much Is That Shoggoth In The Attic? The One With The Horrifying Tale

Pixel Scroll 11/9/24 Tea In Hand, I’ve Been Watching Pixels Playing In The Autumn Leaves

Pixel Scroll 10/11/24 Those Magnificent Files In Their Pixel Machines

Pixel Scroll 9/14/24 Scrollchak, The Night Pixel

Pixel Scroll 8/13/24 The Fifth-Million Pixel Fan

Pixel Scroll 7/13/24 Those Aren’t Lightning Bugs, They’re Pixels