Wallner claimed in a Tortoise Media interview that beginning in 2017 Gaiman pressured her to have sex with him in return for letting her live with her daughters at his property in upstate New York. Following negotiations between attorneys in 2021 Gaiman obtained a non-disclosure agreement from her in return for a $275,000 payment to help her cope with post-traumatic stress and depression following their sexual relationship. The terms of the NDA prevented her from suing Gaiman or telling anyone about her alleged experiences with him.
The NDA they signed requires that claims be dealt with through arbitration.
The Vulture article says Gaiman’s demand for arbitration accuses Wallner of breaking their NDA by sharing her story with the media, violating the confidentiality and non-disparagement provisions of their agreement. He wants full repayment of the $275,000 settlement amount, plus attorneys’ fees, and $50,000 for each interview she’s given to the media.
Vulture also reports Wallner filed a claim for arbitration against Gaiman last winter, alleging that his lawyer kept videos, photos, and text messages she’d sent Gaiman, although both parties to the NDA had agreed to destroy all such materials after signing it.
Gaiman has denied to New York Magazine that he abused Wallner, and told them it was she who had initiated their sexual encounters.
This is the second legal action Gaiman is now engaged in over sex assault allegations, after a former nanny, Scarlett Pavlovich, filed a U.S. federal lawsuit against Gaiman and his former partner, Amanda Palmer, on charges of rape and human trafficking, seeking at least $1 million in damages. Gaiman has moved for dismissal of the suit on jurisidictional grounds, arguing that the alleged abuse took place in New Zealand, not the United States.
(1) ANOTHER MURDERBOT CLIP. Murderbot premieres May 16 on Apple TV+. Martha Wells noted on Bluesky, “If you can’t see it, this makes it clear that Murderbot doesn’t have nipples or a bellybutton.”
In a high-tech future, a rogue security robot (Alexander Skarsgård) secretly gains free will. To stay hidden, it reluctantly joins a new mission protecting scientists on a dangerous planet…even though it just wants to binge soap operas.
Author and reviewer Dr Kelly Jennings spoke to Martha Wells about creating Murderbot, engendering empathy, and the after-effects of trauma….
Kelly Jennings: I’ve been struck, especially in the new novel, System Collapse, by how Murderbot is shaped by the traumatic event/s in its past, and how it reacts to that trauma. In Witch King, Kai also is shaped by past trauma, and reacts out of that trauma. Do you have a special interest in trauma, or is this just thematic happenstance?
Martha Wells: My father was a World War II veteran who was in a Nazi prison camp and was wounded in a way that affected him for years afterward. So basically I grew up observing PTSD and the after-effects of trauma, and how it affects other people in the individual’s life, how it changes over time. I’ve also dealt with things of my own that have made me think a lot about emotional trauma and all the repercussions of it. It affects everything I write. I also do a lot of research on it, listening to people talk about their own experiences.
Kelly Jennings: Somewhere I read – it may have been on your Reddit AMA? – that by deliberately making a universe in which constructs like Murderbot can be classed as ‘not people’, you want your readers to think about how our cultures, in the actual world, do that as well – classify various groups as ‘not people’. Can you talk about that a little?
Martha Wells: I think it’s one of the most important uses of fiction, to try to engender empathy and understanding for people in situations that are not things the reader has ever encountered. To understand the power dynamics the reader might be part of, and how these dynamics affect other people who don’t have the same advantages, or who might be trapped in systems they can’t escape. I don’t know how much it helps, but creating a little bit of understanding and context through fiction is better than none.
Obviously it also helps to see people like yourself in fiction, or to use it to process trauma, or contextualise terrible events, etc….
…What I have just described is commonly known in the book and film world as a shopping option. It literally entitles the producer to “shop” your book free of charge to the movie and television industry. If they are smart or lucky or clever they will manage to round up the various elements and persuade them to commit to the project.
In my experience the chances of succeeding are slightly poorer than buying a winning ticket in a billion dollar lottery. For which reason I have resolutely turned down every such offer. I explain to producers that for the privilege of renting my client’s property for a year or eighteen months, some expression of commitment in the form of dollars – even a token – is mandatory. When this request elicits a “Sorry No Can Do” I terminate the discussion with the suggestion they go to YouTube and watch Harlan Ellison’s immortal rant “Pay The Writer”.…
The lawsuit, brought by the attorneys general of New York, Rhode Island, Hawaii and other states, was filed days after the agency, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, put its staff on leave and began cutting grants. The suit argues that the steep cuts there and at two other small agencies violate both the Constitution and other federal laws related to spending, usurping Congress’s power to decide how federal funds are spent.
The other agencies cited in the lawsuit are the Minority Business Development Agency and the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. They were among the seven agencies targeted by President Trump in a March 14 executive order titled “Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy,” which directed that they be reduced to the “maximum extent consistent with applicable law.”
The move against the library agency has drawn particular outcry. Dozens of library groups have issued statements condemning it as an attack on institutions that serve a broad swath of the public in every state. Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, said in a statement that the targeting of the three agencies was “an attack on vulnerable communities, small businesses and our children’s education.”…
…The library agency, created in 1996 and reauthorized most recently in 2018 in legislation signed by Mr. Trump, has an annual budget of nearly $290 million. It provides funding to libraries, museums and archives in every state and territory, with the bulk going to support essential but unglamorous functions like database systems and collections management.
(5) WHY WAIT? Camestros Felapton has all the ingredients of his Hugo Voter Packet entry available immediately: “Packet!”
…Anyway, I just picked longer things that I liked and put them in random order and explained in the introduction that there are typos and that they add character….
(6) OCTOTHORPE TRANSCRIPT NOW LIVE. Episode 132 of the Octothorpe podcast was linked here the other day before its transcript went online. So we’re letting everyone know the Octothorpe 132 transcript link now works.
(7) HANGREEDO NOBODY FIRED FIRST. Whatever you may think about the improvements George Lucas has made to the film in the intervening years, this is a rare opportunity for Britons to see in a theater the original version: “Star Wars: Original 1977 release to be screened in London by BFI” reports the BBC.
The original 1977 cinematic release of Star Wars will be shown on the big screen this summer in London, marking its first public screening in decades.
The original version of the sci-fi blockbuster will be shown as part of the British Film Institute (BFI)’s Film on Film festival on 12 June.
The BFI said this version of the film is rarely publicly screened since George Lucas’ produced special editions were released in the 1990s, altering some plot points and adding other CGI characters.
Today, only the updated versions are available on official streaming platforms and Blu-ray, making screenings of the film’s original cut rare….
…Lucas’s changes to key plot points, including the addition of Jabba the Hutt and other special effects upgrades, have long divided fans.
The most controversial revision was the scene where Harrison Ford’s Han Solo shoots dead bounty hunter Greedo.
In the original version, Solo shoots first. However, the 1997 re-release changed the scene to show Ford’s character responding in self-defence.
The scene underwent further edits, with other versions of the film showing the pair firing at the same time….
(8) PETER WATTS Q&A. [Item by Do-Ming Lum.] My photo of Toronto-based SF author Peter Watts was published in Peter’s interview with Forbes Magazine (website only, sadly not the print edition). The interview is by Ollie Barder, and was mainly driven by Peter’s story which formed the basis of the “Armored Core” segment in the streaming series “Secret Level”. “Peter Watts On ‘Blindsight’, ‘Armored Core’ And Working With Neill Blomkamp” in Forbes.
…“I wrote all through high school and three university degrees without making a single sale. Got lots of positive feedback, mind you; I once got rejected by a magazine I’d never even sent a story to (Analog; the editor at Asimov’s sent it on to them on my behalf). I took their “we’re interested in seeing more of your work” to heart and sent them everything I wrote over the next decade. Only in hindsight did I realize that Analog’s rejections, initially long, detailed, and encouraging, were getting ever shorter and more generic over time, which suggests that I was getting worse with practice. The most frequent criticism I got was some variant of “this is really well written but it’s awfully depressing. Could you maybe bring in some clowns?”
“I didn’t get a single thing published until I was thirty-one, and even that was in some small press no one had ever heard of. (That same story got me my first form-rejection slip from Analog, completing my trajectory from Promising Acolyte to Slush-Pile Reject.) From that point on, I started getting published semiregularly in small mags and semi-pros. To this day, I’ve never got a story into any of the big US traditionals. I stopped even trying back around the turn of the century.
(9) KERRY GREENWOOD (1954-2025). The creator of the Phyrne Fisher mysteries, Kerry Greenwood, died March 26 at the age of 70 reports the Guardian.
Australian author Kerry Greenwood, best known for her Phryne Fisher murder mystery novels, has died at the age of 70 after an illness.
She was given “a suitably royal send-off” at a small service in Melbourne’s Yarraville on Sunday, according to her partner, writer David Greagg.
Greenwood, who lived in nearby Seddon, died on 26 March. Greagg, posting on Greenwood’s official facebook page on Monday, said he had refrained from making a public announcement until after the service….
…Greenwood wrote the first Miss Fisher novel, Cocaine Blues, in 1989, and over the following three decades, went on to write 22 more. Immensely popular, the series spawned a hit ABC television show starring Essie Davis, which ran for three seasons, the first of which was picked up in more than 73 territories worldwide. It was followed by the 2020 film, Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears, and the 30-episode Chinese series, Miss S.
In 2003, Greenwood was given the Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award, recognising her “outstanding contribution” to Australian crime writing, and in 2020, awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for services to literature….
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Born April 10, 1957 — John M. Ford. (Died 2006.)
By Paul Weimer: John M. Ford has, sadly after his passing, become one of my heart writers. Years ago, I came across one of my favorite novels, period, The Dragon Waiting. Possibly one of the best alternate history novels ever written and simultaneously introduced me to a new point of view on Richard III. This is a viewpoint I would later expand upon by discovering the Ricardians, but it was Ford who first showed me the idea in print. Also, The Dragon Waiting has the best “You meet in a tavern” scene I’ve ever read.
It was not until I started going to 4th Street Fantasy con, of which he is practically a patron saint, that I really have grasped just how widely broad his work really is. Space Opera? Early Cyberpunk? Urban Fantasy? The writer who Ford reminds of, today, is Walter Jon Williams: a ferocious and restless talent. And Ford was taken from us all too soon. His last and incomplete novel, Aspects, a steampunk-esque fantasy novel only cements that sentiment. It’s brilliant…what we have of it.
Ford’s work is not for everyone. It is work that not only rewards close attention, it demands it in order to enjoy it. In that way, if we wanted to reconstruct Ford, in addition to Walter Jon Williams, we’d add a lot of Gene Wolfe as well.
Finally, Ford’s writing and style also has more than a touch of the mythic and definitely the poetic. There is joy in reading his work line by line, be its setting or sharp dialogue. So to complete this reconstructIon, add a helping of Roger Zelazny as well.
But the language, the poetry, the vigor with which Ford wrote is sui generis. So, really even trying to combine him as I suggested above like this would not, in the end, be enough. You could not complete the man and his work.
Given my love of these three writers, now you see why Ford is one of my favorites. And taken from us all too soon. I wish I had met him.
It’s never too early to try a John M. Ford novel. And given how many have come back into print lately, there IS a John M. Ford novel out there, for you.
John M. Ford portrait, January 2000. By David Dyer-Bennet. CC BY-SA 2.5
Pop culture fans packed the Ann Arbor Marriott Ypsilanti at Eagle Crest for Astronomicon 8. Twiztid and Majik Ninja Entertainment hosted a plethora of artists, vendors, and celebrity guests, including Bruce Campbell, Tommy Chong, wrestlers Sting and Danhausen, the cast of My Name is Earl, and the voice actors of Rick and Morty, among others.
(13) RE (DISNEY+) DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN EPISODE 8 TITLE, “ISLE OF JOY”. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “Isle of Joy | Marvel Cinematic Universe Wiki”. In case you don’t already know, “Isle of Joy” is (I presume) a quote from the Rogers & Hart song “Manhattan” aka “We’ll Have Manhattan”
I’m guessing the title is used ironically.
Here’s Ella Fitzgerald singing it (don’t yet know whether she or anyone is singing the song in this episode, haven’t watched it yet) and here’s the lyrics (“Isle of Joy” is at end of verse #2)
It would be easy to do a list/article on “great song lyric lines about NYC.
This song includes “Tell me what street/compares with Mott Street”
From On the Town, there’s, of course, “The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down.”
(14) HIVEWORKS ANNOUNCEMENT. [Item by Jim Janney.] A bit of a followup to the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal announcement from the March 5 Scroll. Hiveworks is shutting down its publishing and online store and returning rights to artists. “Hiveworks Comics announces it will end print, publishing division” at The Comics Journal.
Hiveworks Comics is winding down operations over the course of 2025 to focus primarily on its web services: hosting, ads, and technical support for webcomic artists.
Its print and publishing division, which include producing, licensing, marketing, and distributing comics, will close. All comics for which Hiveworks has printing and publishing rights are being released back to their creators.
Hiveworks will complete fulfillment for several outstanding comic crowdfunding projects, after which its crowdfunding services will cease. Warehouse services for artists will also cease, and Hivemill, its managed storefront, will be limited to print-on-demand services and sale of products purchased wholesale from artists….
Coinciding with the release of its Red Sonja 50th anniversary figure, Boss Fight Studio has announced that the She-Devil with a Sword is returning to the 1:12 scale Epic H.A.C.K.S. line with Red Sonja: Steampunk Legend, inspired by the character’s appearance in Dynamite Entertainment’s Legenderry Red Sonja: A Steampunk Adventure. The collectible is available to pre-order now, priced at $66.99; check it out here…
(16) OLD MEMORIES. It wasn’t easy to deliver “Voyager’s 15 Billion Mile Software Update”. For one thing, there aren’t as many programmers who know the Fortran and Assembly languages as there were in the days when computing was young.
Have you ever wondered how NASA updates Voyager’s software from 15 billion miles away? Or how Voyager’s memories are stored? In this video, we dive deeper into the incredible story of how a small team of engineers managed to keep Voyager alive, as well as how NASA could perform a software update on a computer that’s been cruising through space for almost half a century. So tune in to learn more about Voyager’s 15 billion mile software update
[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Thomas the Red, Jim Janney, Michael J. Walsh, Daniel Dern, John Coxon, Do-Ming Lum, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Joe H.]
(1) 2025 HWA LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS. The Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Awards honorees for 2025 are Del Howison, Sue Howison, Dame Susan Hill, and David Cronenberg. The full citations are at the link.
(2) 2025 COMPTON CROOK AWARD. The Baltimore Science Fiction Society (BSFS) announced today that The Wings Upon Her Back (Tachyon Publications) by Samantha Mills won the 2025 Compton Crook Award for best debut SF/Fantasy/horror novel, a prize worth $1,000. “Samantha Mills Wins 2025 Compton Crook Award” at File 770.
It’s shortlist time again! Just to remind you, the GR and LT stats are a guide to how well a book has permeated the general market, but may not have much congruence with the respective voter bases of the two awards.
Its popularity has spread online, with videos of young audience members shouting responses and celebrating the appearance of different characters made famous by the video game – which is one of the world’s best selling.
The film tells the story of four misfits pulled through a mysterious portal into the Overworld – the place where all players start in Minecraft.
A number of lines from star Jack Black – in particular his introductory “I… am Steve” – have been met with cheering, shouting and applause.
One moment showing the arrival of the character Chicken Jockey – alongside Black’s accompanying dialogue – has also been the focal point for much of the furore….
(5) ROBOTS RETURN. Netflix has dropped a trailer for “LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS VOLUME 4”. And at the link you can see five first-look images.
The fearless anthology series Love, Death + Robots is returning for a fourth volume of mechanical madness. You can always expect this anthology series to serve up some wild stuff, and Volume 4 is definitely no exception.
“I try to get a mix of horror, sci-fi, and fantasy,” creator Tim Miller (Deadpool, Terminator: Dark Fate) tells Tudum about the new lineup of shorts. “And we work with some really fucking fantastic writers and artists.”
A large majority of attempts to ban books in the US last year came from organised groups rather than parents.
72% of demands to censor books were initiated by pressure groups, government entities and elected officials, board members and administrators, reported the American Library Association (ALA). Just 16% of ban attempts were made by parents, while 5% were brought forward by individual library users.
“These demands to remove and restrict books and other library materials are not the result of any grassroots or popular sentiment,” read the ALA’s 2025 State of America’s Libraries report, published on Monday. “The majority of book censorship attempts are now originating from well-funded, organised groups and movements long dedicated to curbing access to information and ideas.”
Days before a court hearing was set to take place April 7 to move ahead with the sale of most of Diamond Comic Distributors assets to Alliance Entertainment (AENT), Diamond owners had a change of heart and are now favoring a new, smaller joint bid by Canadian comics distributor Universal Entertainment and pop culture manufacturer and licensor Ad Populum. Attorneys for Alliance immediately filed a lawsuit to block the change and a hearing was held yesterday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Maryland to try to sort things out.
The April 7 hearing was focused on the appropriateness of the Alliance bid and was adjourned before the hearing was completed. The parties were due back in court April 8 and a decision is due May 28. That timeline however, is now thrown into serious question following the filing of Alliance’s April 6 lawsuit challenging the legality of Diamond’s owners’ decision to back the offer from Universal and Ad Populum.
The suit accuses Diamond of acting in bad faith by conducting an auction “in a manner that was unfair to any party other than their preferred purchaser, and—despite having designated AENT as the Successful Bidder—acted with extreme bad faith in the period following the Auction.” According to the filing, AENT’s bid of $72.2 million was deemed the highest offer and that Universal/Ad Populum were the underbidders.
According to the lawsuit, despite the offer from AENT, Diamond secretly solicited other bids with an eye toward favoring Universal (who had placed a $39 million stalking horse offer at the time of the bankruptcy filing in January) and Ad Populum. After more negotiations between AENT and Diamond, the lawsuit says, Diamond “abruptly terminated” its agreement saying that it “would proceed with the backup bidder.” To facilitate the switch, Diamond filed a motion last week asking the court to approve the sale of the company’s assets to the joint back-up bidder.
In its filing, AENT argued that its offer, which had been raised to $85.37 million, was much higher that the $69.1 million combined bid from Universal Distribution and Ad Populum, which included $49.6 million from Universal for Diamond UK and Alliance Games Distributions, and $19.5 million from Ad Populum for Diamond Comic Distributors, Collectible Grading Authority, and Diamond Select Toys….
(8) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Science Fiction Theatre (1954)
Again tonight, I’m reaching back into early days of the genre in broadcast terms by talking about the television premiere of Science Fiction Theatre which seventy years ago started off in syndication. It would end rather quickly two years later on the sixth of April with a total of seventy-eight episodes over the course of just two seasons.
The first season was in color but to save money the second was not. I know this reverses the usual manner of going from black and white to color, but I confirmed that they actually did this.
It was the product of Hungarian born Iván Tors who had earlier done the Office of Scientific Investigation trilogy of SF films (The Magnetic Monster which recycled footage from a German horror film, Riders to the Stars and Gog which average twenty percent among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes). He’s also responsible for Flipper and Flipper’s New Adventure which surely are genre adjacent, aren’t they?
Hosted by Truman Bradley, a radio and television announcer and a Forties film actor, its schtick, and I use that Yiddish word in its fullest sense, was that they were doing a quasi-documentary series that what Ifs of modern science. Now mind they were to a great extent re-using the stories that had been earlier on Dimension X, so they were recycling existing stories. Or so say several sources.
The program never aired over a network. All seventy-eight twenty-six minute episodes were syndicated across the country in package deals of thirty-nine episodes each, with Bradley doing custom commercials for each market.
If you watched it later on PBS, you got the entire episode, but when the Sci-fi channel broadcast them they were cut by five minutes to cram in more blipverts, errr, I mean advertisements. Sci-fi that does with everything.
It’s streaming on Roku offers on its Movie Classics channel.
Science Fiction Theatre
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
April 8, 1974 — Nnedi Okorafor, 51.
By Paul Weimer: Nnedi Okorafor has written some of (to my perspective, and a moment to explain that) genre-bending speculative fiction that I’ve read. Let me explicate. There is science fiction, and there is fantasy, and then there is the peanut butter and chocolate of books that take elements of both. Or, specifically, books that feel like they partake of both. Okorafor herself I think might disagree, but much of the work I’ve read of hers does do that in my own mind and limited perception.
Take Lagoon, the first of her works I read. Near future, Nigeria, First Contact. Straight-up science fiction, right? Sure, it’s a first contact novel, but several of the protagonists have what are really just straight up superpowers. Adaora can breathe underwater, after all. And then there are actual folklore and mythic beings just living their lives in Lagos, too. I mean having a trickster deity as a phone scammer is genius, I tell you. It makes perfect sense, and instead of being in an urban fantasy, the character exists in a first contact novel, just another character with everyone else dealing with the aliens.
Inspired, to be sure.
Lagoon is my favorite of her works, but I think the Binti trilogy is probably her best work. Three novellas/short novels about the titular mathematical genius’ trip to the stars and the aliens and beings she deals with out there. Binti just wants the best education she can get, and for her trouble winds up in the middle of a war, and a relationship with an alien species under threat thereby. Fearlessly inventive, grounded in her culture and ferociously futuristic and grounded at the same time. I’ve read other authors in her vein since, but Okorafor was my first real exposure to this entire stratum and voices of emerging science fiction from Africa.
I have not yet read her metafictional Death of the Author, but I clearly need to. I’ve met her several times, including a talk she gave at my local library (she had no idea who I was, alas, and perhaps still doesn’t).
(11) TODAY’S THING TO WORRY ABOUT. Oh noes! Jon Del Arroz is trying to load up the Locus Awards with his pals! Camestros Felapton is ringing the tocsin in “New Right Wing Slate Shenanigans”.
… The Locus Award is open to anybody to vote in but subscribers to Locus Magazine have votes that count for double. This extra weighting for members has discouraged slate attempts in the past. Fandom Pules has already put out a Dragon Award nomination slate but as I’ve discussed before, it is not clear whether how many people nominate a work has much of a connection to the Dragon Award finalists. The Locus Awards, on the other hand, do count their votes. Additionally, JDA has been attempting to recruit people on the abuse/harassment website Kiwi Farms to vote in the Locus (although this has been met with some scepticism among the trollish inhabitants)….
Damon Lindelof’s hit drama series The Leftoversis slated to be removed from HBO’s Max streaming service.
Per ComicBook.com, The Leftovers is officially going to be removed from Max as of June 3. Originally, the series was supposed to make its exit from the streaming service on April 11, though that date was pushed back by almost two months. Even with the extra time to stream the series, fans of The Leftovers have let their displeasure be known online and through social media….
… Since the series ended in 2017, The Leftovershas maintained its status as a fan-favorite. As of the time of writing, The Leftovers holds a 91% “Fresh” rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, as averaged from 84 critics reviews. The series also boasts a 90% score via the site’s user-generated “Popcornmeter.”
A company called Colossal Biosciences says it has revived an extinct species – the dire wolf. “On October 1, 2024, for the first time in human history, Colossal successfully restored a once-eradicated species through the science of de-extinction. After a 10,000+ year absence, our team is proud to return the dire wolf to its rightful place in the ecosystem.” That’s the claim made on the website of the US-based company. Here’s what we know….
… Beth Shapiro of Colossal says her team has sequenced the complete genome of the dire wolf and will soon release it to the public. Shapiro could not tell New Scientist how many differences there are but said the two species share 99.5 per cent of their DNA. Since the grey wolf genome is around 2.4 billion base pairs long, that still leaves room for millions of base-pairs of differences.
And Colossal claims it has turned grey wolves into dire wolves by making just 20 gene edits?
That is the claim. In fact, five of those 20 changes are based on mutations known to produce light coats in grey wolves, Shapiro told New Scientist. Only 15 are based on the dire wolf genome directly and are intended to alter the animals’ size, musculature and ear shape. It will be a year or so before it’s clear if those changes have had the intended effects on the genetically modified animals, says Shapiro.
So these pups aren’t really dire wolves at all, then?
It all comes down to how you define species, says Shapiro. “Species concepts are human classification systems, and everybody can disagree and everyone can be right,” she says. “You can use the phylogenetic [evolutionary relationships] species concept to determine what you’re going to call a species, which is what you are implying… We are using the morphological species concept and saying, if they look like this animal, then they are the animal.”…
As the weather warms, you might find a few scaly friends running around Cincinnati.
For more than 70 years, thousands of common wall lizards, known as Lazarus lizards, have scurried across sidewalks and lurked in your garden. They’re all over Cincinnati, but the reptiles aren’t from here. They’re an invasive species and native to Europe.
In 1951, George Rau Jr. and his stepfather, Fred Lazarus Jr. (who founded the retail chain Lazarus, which would later become Macy’s), smuggled 10 Italian lizards home from a family trip in Lake Garda and set them loose in his backyard.
Many pass off the origin story as local lore, but in 1989, when Rau Jr. was an adult, he wrote to the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History explaining his role in the eventual lizard population boom. That same year, he also told The Enquirer he smuggled the lizards through customs and brought them back to his East Side home.
Last month, the Queen City’s long and unique history with Lazarus lizards was highlighted by National Geographic. In the article, National Geographic stated Cincinnati has the “perfect lizard habitat,” adding the city’s hilly geography and weather as a contributing factor for the lizards becoming “permanent residents,” as declared by the Ohio Division of Wildlife.
(15) PREDATOR. On June 6, Predator: Killer of Killers arrives on Hulu.
Let’s talk about the most important, influential anime of all time, and why now’s best time to watch it!
[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Lis Carey, Teddy Harvia, N., Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Mark Roth-Whitworth for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel CSN&Y Dern.]
(2) HUGO AWARD BASE DESIGNER. Seattle Worldcon 2025 has announced that the Hugo Awards Base will be designed by Joy Alyssa Day, a professional glass sculpture artist. Joy, with her partner BJ, have previously designed the Hugo Awards base for LonCon in 2014. Examples of Joy’s sculptures can be found at her website, GlassSculpture. Below are photos of the 2014 Hugo Award base, and their work on the Cosmos Award given by the Planetary Society.
(3) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 132 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Almost Everything Is Not Mac” is here early, because the hosts John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty are discussing this year’s Hugo Awards finalists.
This time around, I grow anxious over a dream discovery of long-lost original comic book artwork, realize I was wrong about a certain Alan Moore/Frank Miller memory, contemplate the difficulty of condensing the life of Marie Severin into a mere 1,200 words, share the meager remains of what was once a massive comic book collection, remember there’s an issue of Fantastic Four I need to track down to solve an early fannish mystery, rededicate myself to Marie Kondo-ing my creative life, and more.
Given that beloved sci-fi series Doctor Who has been on air for over 60 years now, countless actors have featured either in major roles or as guest stars.
From Simon Pegg playing a villainous editor in ‘The Long Game’ to Andrew Garfield facing off against aliens in ‘Daleks in Manhattan’, the seemingly endless list also includes Get Out star Daniel Kaluuya, Oscar winner Olivia Colman, and Black Panther’s very own Letitia Wright – to name but a few.The question is then – who would showrunner Russell T Davies love to have on the series in a guest role, who hasn’t been featured before? Putting that to the man himself in a recent interview ahead of Doctor Who season 2 hitting our screens, Davies is puzzled at first admitting to GamesRadar+ that “almost everyone has been in it”. And he’s right – hell, even pop star icon Kylie Minogue even showed up for the Titanic themed episode ‘Voyage of the Damned’….
…As Davies tells us: “I simply worship Viola Davis, one of the greatest actors in the world, we should be so lucky we should have that money. She just brings quality, depth, and surprise. Every time I see her she does something surprising, which is a very Doctor Who quality. She’d get it. I say this hoping that you print it, then her agent will read it and say ‘yes, you can have Viola for absolutely no money, she will come to Cardiff for free.'” Well – here’s hoping!
Betty Boop has arrived on Broadway, nearly a century after she first boop-oop-a-dooped her way onto the big screen. “Boop! The Musical,” like the “Barbie” and “Elf” films that preceded it, imagines a transformational encounter between an anthropomorphic character and the real world (well, a fictional world full of people)….
…Jasmine Amy Rogers, the actress starring as Betty Boop on Broadway, described her as “full of joy” and “unapologetically herself.” “She is sexy, but I don’t think it is merely sex that makes her sexy,” she continued. “I would say it’s the way she carries herself, and her confidence and her unabashed self.”…
Betty, created at the height of the Jazz Age, is obviously modeled on flappers, and her relationship to music history has been a subject of debate and litigation.
In 1932, a white singer named Helen Kane sued, alleging that the “baby vamp” style of the Betty Boop character, including the “boop-oop-a-doop” phrase, was an unlawful imitation of Kane. At a widely publicized trial in 1934, Fleischer countered by pointing out that a Black singer, Esther Lee Jones, who performed as Baby Esther, had used similar scat phrases before Kane. Kane lost….
…Rogers said she hopes that over time, women of different ethnicities will portray the character, but said she is proud to play her as a Black woman, with nods to Baby Esther and the scat technique of jazz singing. “Jazz lives so deep in the heart of Betty that I feel as if we can’t really have a full discussion about her without involving the African American race,” she said…
Rather obviously, Billy Dee Williams’ best-known role is as — and no I did know this was his full name — Landonis Balthazar “Lando” Calrissian III. He was introduced in The Empire Strikes Back as a longtime friend of Han Solo and the administrator of the floating Cloud City on the gas planet Bespin.
(So have I mentioned, I’ve only watched the original trilogy, and this is my favorite film of that trilogy? If anyone cares to convince me I’ve missed something by not watching the later films, go ahead.)
He is Lando in the original trilogy, as well in as the sequel, The Rise of Skywalker, thirty-six years later. The Star Wars fandom site thinks this might be the longest interval between first playing a character and later playing the same character, being a thirty-six year gap.
He returned to the role within the continuity in the animated Star Wars Rebels series, voicing the role in “Idiot’s Array” and “The Siege of Lothal” episodes. Truly great series if you haven’t seen, and available of course on Disney+.
He voiced him in two audio dramas with one being the full cat adaption of Timothy Zahn’s Dark Empire.
Now this is where it gets silly, really silly. The most times he’s been involved with the character is in the Lego ‘verse. Between 2024 with The Lego Movie to Billy Dee Williams returned to the role in the Star Wars: Summer Vacation in 2022, he has voiced Lando in eight Lego films, mostly made as television specials.
Going from hero to villain, he was Harvey Dent in Batman, and yes in The Lego Batman Movie. Really they made it. I’d like to say I remember him here but than they would admitting this film made an impression on me which it decidedly didn’t. None of the Batman Films did in the Eighties.
He’s in Mission Impossible as Hank Benton, an enforcer for a monster, in “The Miracle” episode; he’s Ferguson in Epoch: Evolution, the sequel to Epoch, which looks like quite silly, and I’m using this term deliberately, sci-film, and finally he voiced himself on Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?, the thirteenth television series in the Scooby-Doo franchise.
Parents often look down at the whorl on the top of their children’s heads and wonder what, exactly, is going on inside. An industry of books, video games, films, merchandise and museums offers some insight: They’re probably thinking about the Titanic.
Last fall, Osiris, age 5, told his mother, Tara Smyth, that he wanted to eat the Titanic for dinner. So she prepared a platter of baked potatoes — each with four hot-dog funnels, or smokestacks — sitting on a sea of baked beans. (He found it delicious.) Since first hearing the story of the Titanic, Ozzy, as he’s known, has amassed a raft of factoids, a Titanic snow globe from the Titanic Belfast museum and many ship models at his home in Hastings, England.
About 5,500 miles away in Los Angeles, Mia and Laila, 15-year-old twins, devote hours every week to playing Escape Titanic on Roblox. They have been doing this for the last several years. Sometimes, they go down with the ship on purpose — “life is boring,” explained Mia, “and the appeal is that it’s kind of dramatic.”
Nearly 113 years after the doomed White Star Line steamship collided with an iceberg on April 14, 1912, and sank at around 2:20 a.m. the next day, it remains a source of fascination for many children. The children The New York Timesspoke to did not flinch at the mortal fact at the heart of the story: That of the more than 2,200 passengers on the Titanic, more than twice as many passengers died as those who survived.
“I really like whenever it just cracked open in half and then sank and then just fell apart into the Atlantic Ocean,” said Matheson, 10, from Spring, Texas, who has loved the story since he read “I Survived the Sinking of the Titanic, 1912” at age 5. After many frustrating bath time re-enactments involving flimsy ship models, Matheson and his father, Christopher Multop, designed a Tubtastic Titanic bath toy — of which they say they now sell about 200 a month (separate floating iceberg included)….
John Zaller, the executive producer of Exhibition Hub, the company that designed “Bodies: The Exhibition” and “Titanic: An Immersive Voyage,” a traveling exhibition with interactive elements, attested that Titanic kids often knew more than their tour guides. At the Titanic experience, children can sit in a lifeboat and watch a simulation of the ship sinking, see a life-size model of the boiler room be flooded with water, and follow along with the passengers on their boarding pass, ultimately finding out whether they survived the wreck.
“The biggest takeaway for kids is, ‘I lived!’ or ‘I died!’” Mr. Zaller said. “They understand the power of that.”…
It took only seconds for the judges on a New York appeals court to realize that the man addressing them from a video screen — a person about to present an argument in a lawsuit — not only had no law degree, but didn’t exist at all.
The latest bizarre chapter in the awkward arrival of artificial intelligence in the legal world unfolded March 26 under the stained-glass dome of New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division’s First Judicial Department, where a panel of judges was set to hear from Jerome Dewald, a plaintiff in an employment dispute.
“The appellant has submitted a video for his argument,” said Justice Sallie Manzanet-Daniels. “Ok. We will hear that video now.”
On the video screen appeared a smiling, youthful-looking man with a sculpted hairdo, button-down shirt and sweater.
“May it please the court,” the man began. “I come here today a humble pro se before a panel of five distinguished justices.”
“Ok, hold on,” Manzanet-Daniels said. “Is that counsel for the case?”
“I generated that. That’s not a real person,” Dewald answered.
It was, in fact, an avatar generated by artificial intelligence. The judge was not pleased.
“It would have been nice to know that when you made your application. You did not tell me that sir,” Manzanet-Daniels said before yelling across the room for the video to be shut off….
… As for Dewald’s case, it was still pending before the appeals court as of Thursday.
… was chosen for inventing two exceptionally precise gene editing tools, namely base editing and prime editing. Base editing was first used in a patient at Great Ormond Street in London, where it saved the life of a British teenager with leukaemia.
The young woman’s doctor apparently called the technique at the time, ‘science fiction’!
(13) ETERNAUT TRAILER. The Eternaut premieres on Netflix on April 30.
After a deadly snowfall kills millions, Juan Salvo and a group of survivors fight against a threat controlled by an invisible force. Based on the iconic graphic novel written by Héctor G. Oesterheld and illustrated by Francisco Solano López.
(14) WHY IS MARS RED? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Well, we all know the answer – an on-going process of the radiolysis of water (here UV and high energy particles from Solar wind splitting water) produces oxygen radicals that oxidise iron to hematite (a form of iron(III) that on Earth often gives some sandstones their red colour…) Well, maybe not! New research now suggests otherwise. Data from three orbiters combined with a look at Earth minerals suggests that the Martian red minerals were formed over three billion years ago when Mars was decidedly wet. Had Mars been warmer, then these minerals would have gone. ; Mars’ red colour looks like being ferrihydrite (Fe5O8H nH2O) that forms under decidedly wet conditions. This is yet more evidence – if more is needed – that Mars was wet billions of years ago.
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Scott Edelman, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]
“I Don’t Think I Owe Anything”; A Timeline of Why I Decided To Sue Dave McCarty
By Chris M. Barkley:
PROLOGUE…
On Tuesday, February 18th at approximately 4:20 pm Central Standard Time, a Cook County Illinois Sheriff’s deputy pulled up to a three story house in a northern Chicago suburban neighborhood.
Four minutes later, the deputy logged that a Small Claims Court summons had been successfully delivered to the listed Defendant, David Lawrence McCarty on a civil charge of Breach of Contract.
The Plaintiff is myself.
The following account chronicles the how and why Dave McCarty became the first known person to be legally sued for his continuing retention of my, and possibly many others, Hugo Awards.
THEN…
On the evening of October 21st, 2023, I was seated in the Great Hall of the Science Fiction Museum in the city of Chengdu, Sichuan Province, in the People’s Republic of China for the 2023 Hugo Awards Ceremony. And one of the happiest, and saddest, moments of my life were just about to occur…
In July, I was invited and flown to attend the 81st World Science Fiction Convention, at the expense of the Chengdu Worldcon Committee and the hosting fan group, the Chengdu Science Fiction Society.
At the Hugo Awards Ceremony, I was the most shocked person in the auditorium when MY NAME was called in the Best Fan Writer category!
At the after-party, Dave McCarty had one of the long tables cleared and called for everyone’s attention. “Anyone who would like to have their awards shipped home, please step up!”, he shouted. The award was placed in a form fitting, custom fitted display box and the lid was closed. I had every reason to believe at that time that my award would be securely and safely shipped.
That was the last time I saw my Hugo Award, nearly sixteen months ago.
Chris Barkley still doesn’t have his 2023 Hugo Award trophy. And now he’s taken the 2023 Hugo Administrator to court.
Barkley was one of the winners who opted to have the Chengdu Worldcon Committee ship his trophy to the United States. The awards were sent to Hugo Administrator Dave McCarty. However, as McCarty told Barkley in February 2024, all of the display cases and some of the awards were damaged in transit from China. The damage to Barkley’s Hugo display box was so bad that it was totally unusable, the award base needed to be tightened up, and there was a notable chip in the paint on the panda. He told Chris he could either have the award the next day, or McCarty could have it repaired and restored. Chris decided to go with the repairs. He still hasn’t received his, although Barkley learned some others have gotten theirs.
That conversation happened just before Barkley received the information revealed in “The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion” (co-authored with Jason Sanford), which was published later the same month, and may have something to do with McCarty’s subsequent failure to turn over Barkley’s award.
Barkley’s efforts to follow up having been fruitless, he decided to take legal action against McCarty. Today was the first hearing in Cook County Small Claims Court. Barkley told his GoFundMe supporters this is what happened:
A Statement Sent to Chris Barkley’s GoFundMe Donors, 27 March 2025
Dear Donors,
Today I can finally reveal the somewhat historic action that was formally taken last month with the indispensable help of your generous contributions.
On February 5th, 2025, I traveled from Cincinnati, Ohio to Chicago, Illinois to formally file a lawsuit in Cook County Small Claims Court against David Lawrence McCarty in the amount of $3000.00.
The reason for doing so was simple; I filed on behalf of any 2023 Hugo Award recipients, including myself, who, as of this date, have not received their Hugo Awards.
This lawsuit, which, to the best of my knowledge, is the first time anyone has EVER sued to recover a Hugo Award. It was initiated as a last resort to call attention to Mr. McCarty’s lack of response regarding the status of any of the awards being repaired and/or to be delivered to the 2023 recipients.
This morning, in a case called via Zoom in Cook County Courtroom 1103, Case Number 20251103122 was called. I was present as was Mr. McCarty.
The judge addressed Mr. McCarty first, asking for a comment about the case brought against him.
Mr. McCarty then said, “I don’t think I owe anything.”
Whether Mr. McCarty was probably referring to the monetary amount of the case. But as far as I’m concerned, he may as well have been talking about his recalcitrant attitude towards sf fandom and his failure to live up to the responsibilities he was entrusted with.
When I was asked for comment by the judge, I responded that I was willing to work with Mr. McCarty to arbitrate the situation, the judge stated that Mr. McCarty HAD openly rejected arbitration with his statement.
The judge then set another Zoom meeting date for the morning of April 24th to set a trial date. She then told Mr. McCarty that if he wished to arbitrate the case before that then, he could do so at Daley Plaza on the sixth floor.
At no time did Mr. McCarty and I exchange any direct dialog.
Mr. McCarty, through a documented series of actions, words and deeds, has demonstrated that he does not care for courtesy, diplomacy, equity or the Constitution of the World Science Fiction Society.
Mr. McCarty, in just five minutes, could have agreed to send out any remaining Hugo Awards owed to the 2023 Hugo Award recipients, including myself, and satisfied a major complaint of his stewardship as the Chengdu Hugo Award Administrator.
Instead, he has deliberately chosen to needlessly prolong this legal proceeding and keep the recipient, and myself waiting for their awards.
I have also decided that if there were any leftover funds, either from this GoFundMe or from a settlement from Mr. McCarty, they would be donated equally between the Trans-Atlantic and Down-Under Fan Funds, two well known fan-run charities that I have greatly respected over the years.
Today marks an opening salvo in what I hope is the last battle for holding Mr. McCarty accountable for his neglect and malfeasance.
As for myself, I will continue to champion the cause of the 2023 Hugo Award recipients, in a Cook County courtroom and in the court of public opinion as well.
Walking into the almost fully restored, more than century-old, one-time Waukegan Public Library — that is now the Waukegan History Museum at the Carnegie — visitors can take a step back in time….
…Lori Nerheim, the historical society’s president, said part of the intent of the $15 million restoration was to give visitors a feel for the experience a young Ray Bradbury had when he spent hours there as a boy reading and nurturing the imagination which led the famed author to the writing of his books.
“We wanted to bring it back to its original look and feel,” she said of the museum operated jointly by the historical society and the Waukegan Park District. “I feel tremendous pride. I am excited to see people’s reaction.”
… To enter the building, visitors ascend a few steps before entering the door where they see a staircase on either side leading to two floors of permanent exhibits, and before them some steps going to the top, main floor containing a permanent exhibit honoring Bradbury as well as a room for research.
Before the building closed as the library in 1965, the room containing the Bradbury exhibit was the children’s reading room. He spent hours there in the 1920s and 1930s reading and developing his thirst for books. Nerheim said she hopes the environment will inspire future authors.
“I can see children today sitting in that room where Ray Bradbury sat as a child and reading books he read,” she said. “Perhaps they will be inspired to write or tell their own stories.”
Filling the bookcases in the Bradbury room are the author’s private collection of thousands of volumes he willed to the Waukegan Public Library when he died in 2012…..
(2) FAMOUS BOOKSTORE MAY REOPEN ‘NEXT WEEK’. Mysterious Galaxy bookstore in San Diego is in the process of repairing flood damage sustained in late February. On Monday their latest newsletter gave a progress report: “Flooded! Curbside Pickup Is Available!”
First, thank you to all of the customers, authors, publishers, and other community members that have reached out to offer their support in the last week. The outpouring of support has been incredibly heartwarming and has helped us get through the uncertainty of the last week. We also want to extend a special thank you to our fellow independent bookstores who have offered support including opening their spaces for last minute event venues. This is truly a special book community and one we are so happy to be a part of.
We wanted to reach out with an update on the store and forecast of what’s to come. As this situation is continually evolving, there may be additional changes, but we promise to communicate as much as possible.
The good news: No inventory was damaged in the flooding. THE BOOKS ARE OK! The vinyl flooring is also intact and does not need to be removed.
The bad news: The carpet in the children’s section was flooded and is being replaced. Additionally, they found some significant water damage in the walls on the west side of the unit as well as in the wall behind the YA section separating the front area of the store from the back room. The drywall needs to be replaced. There was also damage to the fixtures.
What does this mean?: Mysterious Galaxy is currently closed to in-store shopping and events. If you purchased a ticket to an upcoming event, please keep a lookout for an email with more information. However, the demo has already begun and we are hoping to reopen to browsing by early next week! (*knocks on wood*) The construction is such that it is not safe to have customers browsing at this time. However, fortunately (or unfortunately) for us, we are not strangers to running a closed bookstore, and we are ready to work through the challenges that are sure to arise in the coming weeks.
Several arts organizations sued the National Endowment for the Arts on Thursday, challenging its new requirement that grant applicants agree to comply with President Trump’s executive orders by promising not to promote “gender ideology.”
The groups that filed the suit have made or supported art about transgender and nonbinary people, and have received N.E.A. funding in the past. They say the new requirement unconstitutionally threatens their eligibility for future grants.
“Because they seek to affirm transgender and nonbinary identities and experiences in the projects for which they seek funding, plaintiffs are effectively barred by the ‘gender ideology’ certification and prohibition from receiving N.E.A. grants on artistic merit and excellence grounds,” the lawsuit says.
The groups are being represented in the litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union, which said in the lawsuit that the N.E.A. rule “has sowed chaos in the funding of arts projects across the United States.” After Mr. Trump began his second term, the N.E.A. said it would require grant applicants to agree “that federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology,” which Mr. Trump said in an executive order includes “the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa.”
The N.E.A. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The suit was filed in a federal court in Rhode Island on behalf of Rhode Island Latino Arts, which promotes art made by Latinos; the Theater Offensive, an organization in Boston that presents work “by, for and about queer and trans people of color”; and National Queer Theater, a New York company best known for its Criminal Queerness Festival, which presents the work of international artists with roots in countries where their sexuality is criminalized or censored.
JRR Tolkien was so irritated by a careless typist’s slapdash work on one of his manuscripts that he vented his frustration in a letter that has come to light.
The Lord of the Rings author said in despair: “She reduced [my manuscript] to nonsense. I have some sympathy with the typist faced with such unfamiliar matter; though evidently she wasn’t paying much attention.”
He mocked her confusion of “poche for poetic, highballs(!) for high halls, and arias for cries”.
The letter is within a collection of largely unpublished correspondence that reflects Tolkien’s loathing of sloppiness and love of language.
It is part of an archive that includes the last major Tolkien manuscript in private hands, The Road Goes Ever On, his collaboration with the composer Donald Swann of the musical comedy duo Flanders and Swann….
…What’s about to happen is the debut of Alien: Earth, FX’s upcoming show set years before any of the Alien films. It follows a team of soldiers who investigate a ship that has crashed on Earth and are forced to deal with what it contains. We assume, of course, that it contains something that will eventually create an alien, but what exactly? …
…So here you get to see the cat get the camera put on him and walk around a bit. The key takeaway is the end where we see a computer—much like Mother in the first Alien—with a very similar “Priority One” message: “Acquisition and safe return of all organisms for analysis. All other considerations secondary.” So, this ship was sent out to find something. And find something, it did….
…We see one of the crew members in hypersleep when something goes wrong. A fire. Is this the incident that started the crash back to Earth? What caused the fire? We don’t know.
All of this is a very cool way to tease the show and it’s culminating later this week in Austin, Texas. That’s where FX has recreated the crash site of the Maginot for fans to check out at SXSW. Learn more about that here.…
…We’re talking about the possibility of Star Trek: Janeway, a series focused on the return of Kate Mulgrew as Admiral Kathryn Janeway, set sometime after the events of Prodigy and perhaps, after the events of Picard Season 3. Speaking to a crowd of fans during the official Star Trek Cruise, Mulgrew answered a question about the possibility of a Janeway-focused spinoff TV series, or, failing that, her returning to the franchise in any capacity.
Mulgrew has long been vocal about galvanizing fans, which partially resulted in Star Trek: Prodigy Season 2 ending up on Netflix. But in terms of any new Star Trek series focusing on the post-Voyager era, nothing on the current Paramount+ slate fits that description. Strange New Worlds will run for at least two more seasons, and Starfleet Academy is expected to debut either later this year or sometime in 2026. At the same event on the Star Trek: The Cruise,Mulgrew expressed concerns that a Janeway live-action series might not live up to what fans wanted. And she also didn’t want to do a show as a “vanity project.”
…Frank Herbert’s masterpiece Dune emerged from various fascinating influences, beginning with an unlikely source: the Oregon coast. In 1957, after publishing his novel The Dragon in the Sea, Herbert traveled to Florence, Oregon, where he observed the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s efforts to stabilize massive dunes using poverty grasses. The sight of these imposing dunes, which Herbert believed could “swallow whole cities, lakes, rivers, highways,” sparked a deep interest in ecology and desert environments that would become central to his epic novel. The ecological themes in Dune were further shaped by Herbert’s interactions with Native American mentors, particularly Howard Hansen and “Indian Henry” Martin from the Quileute reservation. Hansen’s warning that white men were “eating the earth” and could turn the planet into a wasteland “just like North Africa” resonated deeply with Herbert, who incorporated these environmental concerns into his story….
Many science fiction novels include predictions regarding technology, but Frank Herbert deliberately stayed away from that. Instead, Herbert’s novels focus on the power of the human mind and its ability to focus on discipline to overcome fears and regain control over thoughts, feelings, and even bodily functions. Herbert summed this up in one of his most iconic quoted Dune lines:
“Fear is the mind-killer.”…
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
March 6, 1928 — William F. Nolan. (Died 2021.)
By Paul Weimer: Is the crystal in your palm blinking?
While he did write two sequels to it, plenty of short stories, a number of screenplays and a fair number of critical works, the name William F. Nolan means one and one thing only for me: Logan’s Run.
Well, two, if you count the movie.
The book, co-authored with George Clayton Johnson, came first. Ironically, while I read the book first, and only saw the movie some years later, the edition I read of the book first and had for years until it fell apart was one of those “movie/tv tie in” editions, that even had some stills/photos from the movie in it. So I “saw” a couple of scenes from the movie thanks to reading and re-reading this edition long before actually watching the movie.
Such a strange, wild book. 21 is the age of mandatory death., the triumph of youth. Feels very weird, today, in our sometimes gerontocratic governments. You’ll never get away from a homer, homer, homer. Casual use of drugs. Casual sex. It’s a good thing that my parents never knew what was in the book, they’d have been shocked. A breakneck plot and scenes all across the country, from domed cities to the frozen prison of hell to Crazy Horse and the Thinker, to a Civil War re-enactment with robots!
I did visit Crazy Horse in 2008, inspired by the novel, and was disappointed in how slow the construction has gone (far different than in the Logan’s Run timeline). It’s…worse than a tourist trap, somehow. Alas.
But the movie is something else. The future as a giant enclosed shopping mall. Lots of things missing from the books and a very different set of confrontations–the original book has a fight with a tiger, but the movie has…house cats? And the utter disappointment that while in the book some people are escaping and becoming free, in the movie, apparently, they all were frozen into frozen food by Box, who was turned from a chilling sadist into a figure of comedy in the movie. And yet like the book, the movie subtly is suggesting that the current world order cannot stand, and in fact must change, or else.
Yes, this birthday turned into a Logan’s Run’s remembrance rather than a Nolan remembrance. Nolan died in 2021. Requiescat in pace.
The SimpsonsTreehouse of Horror VIII “The HΩmega Man” Original Kang and Kudos Production Cel (Fox, 1997). This original production cel from The Simpsons episode “Treehouse of Horror VIII” (Season 9, Episode 4) features the iconic alien duo Kang and Kodos Johnson from Rigel 7. Taken from the first segment, “The HΩmega Man,” this rare cel captures their brief yet hilarious appearance as they witness Springfield’s demise from space. In the segment, France launches a neutron bomb at Springfield after Mayor Quimby insults the French with a “frog legs” joke. As the bomb travels through space, it flies past Kang and Kodos’ flying saucer, prompting Kang to exclaim, “What the hell was that?” This humorous moment occurs near the 2:58 timestamp, adding to the duo’s memorable cameos.
(12) AHH, ROMANCE. Booklegger tells Facebook readers how a bookstore figured into a couple’s anniversary celebration.
A few days ago I noticed a customer browsing the shelves in the science fiction/fantasy section. I asked him if there was anything I could help him find. “No, I’m doing fine, thanks,” he responded,” “but actually I do have a question I wanted to ask you.” His expression was animated and I wondered where this was heading.
He went on to tell me that he and his girlfriend were approaching their first anniversary, and that they had come to Booklegger on their first date. They were planning on re-creating that first date by visiting Dick Taylor for chocolates, and then coming to our store. He had created a little 42 page book for her as an anniversary gift, and he wondered if he could come in on the morning of their anniversary and plant the book on our shelves for her to find when they came to our shop later in the day.
I was 100% on board with this idea! What a compliment that they had their first date at our place, and what a sweet, creative surprise to mark the occasion. So this morning just as we opened Kiloe came in and showed me the book that he had created. 42 pages of things that he adores about Sarah, inside jokes between them, remembrance of fun things they’ve done together etc. And yes, it’s 42 things because they are both fans of Douglas Adams. He planted the book between Jim Butcher titles, knowing that she would browse that area….
Annualized revenue for public companies exposed to the build-out of AI infrastructure increased by over $340 billion from 2022 through 2024Q4 (and is projected to increase by almost $580 billion by end-2025). In contrast, annualized real investment in AI-related categories in the US GDP accounts has only risen by $42 billion over the same period. This sharp divergence has prompted questions from investors about why US GDP is not receiving a larger boost from AI….
Or, as I think it was Cory Doctorow posted months ago, they haven’t come up with a real, usefull killer usage for the thing. I am reminded of a news story on the radio in the early oughts, after the tech bubble collapsed, som3eone saying “they were spending money like mad, making fancy websites… and hoping that they’d eventually find a way to monetize it (they didn’t).
(14) WATER IN THE EARLY UNIVERSE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] One of the determinants many think is the need for water for life.
Of course, if you are not a primacy of water person then this news will be of lesser import…
Scientists from the University of Portsmouth have discovered that water was already present in the Universe 100-200 million years after the Big Bang.
The discovery means habitable planets could have started forming much earlier – before the first galaxies formed and billions of years earlier than was previously thought.
It is the first time water has been modelled in the primordial universe.
According to the researchers’ simulations, water molecules began forming shortly after the first supernova explosions, known as Population III (Pop III) supernovae. These cosmic events, which occurred in the first generation of stars, were essential for creating the heavy elements – such as oxygen – required for water to exist.
The key finding is that primordial supernovae formed water in the Universe that predated the first galaxies.
Dr Daniel Whalen, from the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation
Dr Whalen said: “Before the first stars exploded, there was no water in the Universe because there was no oxygen. Only very simple nuclei survived the Big Bang – hydrogen, helium, lithium and trace amounts of barium and boron.
“Oxygen, forged in the hearts of these supernovae, combined with hydrogen to form water, paving the way for the creation of the essential elements needed for life.”…
A privately owned lunar lander touched down on the moon with a drill, drone and rovers for NASA and other customers Thursday, but quickly ran into trouble and may have fallen over.
Intuitive Machines said it was uncertain whether its Athena lander was upright near the moon’s south pole — standing 15 feet (4.7 meters) tall — or lying sideways like its first spacecraft from a year ago. Controllers rushed to turn off some of the lander’s equipment to conserve power while trying to determine what went wrong.
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Mark Barsotti, 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 Jayn.]
(1) KRESS Q&A. Asimov’s “From Earth to the Stars” department brings us a “Q&A With Nancy Kress”
AE: What is your process? NK: For any story with real science (or rather, real-to-a-point science; if it were all real it wouldn’t be science fiction), I research first. The characters, like Kenda and Dayson, might already be in my mind, but characters have to actually do things, and the majority of those things should be connected in some way to the science. So I begin with reading, note-taking, and playing with the concepts and details of the science, be it genetic engineering, stellar physics, or—in this case—the Earth’s geomagnetic sphere (which is not a sphere but an elongated shape that extends from the center of the Earth to several hundred miles into space.) Because I knew next-to-nothing about geomagnetism, this involved a lot of study, a lot of going “Huh?” and then “Huh!” Also a lot of cursing; I am not trained as a scientist. Research not only grounds a story in actual science, it can also suggest plot ideas, and I ended up with as many pages of story ideas as research facts. Next all this gets reviewed and a loose outline emerges. Actually, to call it an “outline” is to vastly overstate. It’s one or two pages labeled MASTER SHEET which pretty much ends up mastering nothing, but at least it’s something to point out which direction I am hypothetically going and a few possible pathways to get there. Not so much GPS as a faded, dog-eared, slightly outdated Atlas roadmap that lacks all the new roads, collapsed bridges, and accidents on Interstate 90.
(2) GREENE’S REPLY. YouTuber Daniel Greene has responded in a 1-minute video to the sexual assault allegations reported in yesterday’s Scroll: “In Response To Naomi King’s Allegations”. Here is the transcript:
Hello, my name is Daniel Greene. This is an important message in response to various false allegations made against me by Naomi King of alleged sexual assault in a campaign launched on YouTube and more.
Let me be clear: I had consensual sex with Naomi King. Yes it was an affair that my then girlfriend and now fiance took several years to move on from. I also have clear and convincing evidence to prove everything was consensual.
Myself and my team are now planning to sue Naomi King in a court of law. The communication Naomi King has inaccurately used against me online has greatly damaged me and others to date. I also have many other pieces of evidence which prove my innocence.
Look for more communication from me based on truth and fact in the near future. Naomi King took time to launch a campaign against me and I will need time to communicate my truth as well more soon.
A commenter with the handle @ndrew7707 left these exceptionally worthwhile remarks after Greene’s video:
I doubt you’ll read through these comments, but just in case: I’ve never SA’d anyone, but I have cheated and sexually harassed people. I am a survivor of SA, though, and one that looked a lot like the situation described. Between this Naomi’s video about the cease and desist letter, it’s pretty clear to me that this is, in fact, a pattern of behavior that you’ve been denying for a long time. And I get it. Painful is an understatement for how it feels to fully admit to yourself the kind of person you’ve turned yourself into by following that impulse time and time again and learning new ways to hide it and justify it to yourself. So, please, take this from someone who does want you to get better: DO NOT sue them. Not just for their sake, but yours, and all the people you’ve hurt before this and the people you will hurt in the future if you don’t make real changes. Get out of the public eye, get into a treatment program, find a therapist that’s a social worker so that they can walk you through the change process and help you construct barriers to these thoughts and actions, including people who fully know the extent of what you’ve done and are willing to work with you to keep them in check. You cannot do this on your own. I know this comment section is full of people calling you a terrible person, and I don’t blame them. What you did is terrible, disgusting, all those things. But the most terrifying part of this is that you are not fundamentally, irredeemably bad. Very few people, if any, are. You are just a person who’s made a lot of bad decisions, and you are fully capable of making better ones. So, please, from one person who has unlearned abusive behavior: do not try to save your channel, your reputation, your career. Take the stability you’ve been able to build for yourself and actually get help. That is a privilege that should not be taken lightly. You might feel like you’re dying, but that’s normal. Feel that shit fully. Ask yourself for the rest of your life how you make certain you never treat someone else like that again. There is life to be lived on the other side of this, but you gotta figure out what that looks like without this attention, manipulation, and ill-gotten satisfaction you are clearly addicted to. And it is an addiction. Codependents Anonymous helped me tremendously for this reason, but I’d suggest some one-on-one treatment first before putting yourself in any group situation which will undoubtedly have survivors in it. I unsubscribed, but I’ll be back to remind you if you keep trying to do this. It’s bullshit, we all know it. It’s ok if the channel falls apart, it really is. There are a million other things one can do with the gift that is our one, finite, human life. Don’t waste yours on excuses.
…To younger fans (and by “younger” here I mean, “People in their 30s and 40s”) the Fifth Doctor has undergone a bit of a memetic evolution. Among the Doctors of the classic series, he was the Young One. We see him being chummy with David Tennant in the Children in Need “Time Crash” short, and hanging out with Tegan in “The Power of the Doctor”, and we watch Peter Davison in “The Five-ish Doctors” and he seems… nice. A bit grumpy. Definitely not on a par with the likes of McCoy, Ecclestone and Capaldi when you need a Doctor to go dark.
Yet what you forget about Tegan is that she’s the companion who left the TARDIS in “Resurrection of the Daleks” because it was too fricking violent. If you watch this charming collection of times the Doctor has shot someone to death with a gun, the Fifth Doctor is better represented than most – especially when you consider that in context, the Fourth Doctor is being framed in most of his scenes, and the Second Doctor is carrying a couple of big torches.
The show had been on the air for 20 years, and a battle was raging over whether it was going to be dark and grown-up and edgy now its audience was growing up, or be a kids’ show forever. And one of the definitive strikes in that battle was “Earthshock”, where the show killed off Adric. Sure, Adric will never rank well in our “Top 10 Least Annoying Doctor Who Companions” listicle, but if Star Trek: The Next Generation murdered Wesley Crusher, it’d still be considered a dark move.
It set the tone that would eventually lead to the All-Time-Favourites-List regular, “Caves of Androzani”….
A Lancaster teen was sentenced to four years in prison after making more than 375 hoax calls that included threats to detonate bombs, conduct mass shootings and “kill everyone he saw,” authorities said.
The calls targeted high schools, colleges and universities, places of worship, government officials and individuals across the United States, according to prosecutors.
The serial swatter, 18-year-old Alan W. Filion, pleaded guilty to making interstate threats to injure others, which frequently led to massive law enforcement responses and rendered officers unavailable to assist with other emergencies, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. He made hundreds of calls from August 2022 to January 2024, according to his plea agreement.
Filion was both a recreational swatter and a swatter-for-hire who advertised his services of mass disruption on social media platforms, prosecutors said.
In a January 2023 social media post, he claimed that when he swatted someone, he usually got police “to drag the victim and their families out of the house cuff them and search the house for dead bodies.” In some instances, officers entered the targeted buildings with their weapons drawn and detained individuals who were inside, prosecutors said.
He was arrested in January on Florida charges connected to a threat he made to a religious organization in Sanford, Fla., prosecutors said. Filion threatened to commit a mass shooting at the site and claimed to have an illegally modified AR-15, a Glock 17 pistol, pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails….
Thomson Reuters has won the first major AI copyright case in the United States.
In 2020, the media and technology conglomerate filed an unprecedented AI copyright lawsuit against the legal AI startup Ross Intelligence. In the complaint, Thomson Reuters claimed the AI firm reproduced materials from its legal research firm Westlaw. Today, a judge ruled in Thomson Reuters’ favor, finding that the company’s copyright was indeed infringed by Ross Intelligence’s actions.
“None of Ross’s possible defenses holds water. I reject them all,” wrote US District Court of Delaware judge Stephanos Bibas, in a summary judgment….
…Notably, Judge Bibas ruled in Thomson Reuters’ favor on the question of fair use. The fair use doctrine is a key component of how AI companies are seeking to defend themselves against claims that they used copyrighted materials illegally. The idea underpinning fair use is that sometimes it’s legally permissible to use copyrighted works without permission—for example, to create parody works, or in noncommercial research or news production. When determining whether fair use applies, courts use a four-factor test, looking at the reason behind the work, the nature of the work (whether it’s poetry, nonfiction, private letters, et cetera), the amount of copyrighted work used, and how the use impacts the market value of the original. Thomson Reuters prevailed on two of the four factors, but Bibas described the fourth as the most important, and ruled that Ross “meant to compete with Westlaw by developing a market substitute.”…
(6) TONY LEWIS (1941-2025). “Dr. Tony Lewis, one of the last surviving founders of NESFA, Chairman of Noreascon, and longtime Press Czar of NESFA Press passed away yesterday at home,” announced Gay Ellen Dennett on Facebook today. “Both Suford and Alice [his wife and daughter] were by his side. Further information will be posted when known.”
Tony Lewis
Fancylopedia notes Anthony R. Lewis co-founded the New England Science Fiction Association in 1967. He chaired the Boston Worldcon of 1971, Noreascon.
He was active for many years in compiling the NESFA Index to Science Fiction Magazines. He invented the term “recursive SF” (any sf story that refers to sf) and wrote An Annotated Bibliography of Recursive Science Fiction (NESFA Press).
Space Travel by Ben Bova and Anthony R. Lewis from Writer’s Digest Books was nominated for the 1998 Best Non-Fiction Book Hugo and Concordance to Cordwainer Smith, Third Edition by Anthony R. Lewis from NESFA Press was nominated for the 2001 Best Related Book Hugo.
Among his many talents he was a well-known (and skilled) auctioneer.
He was an active member of SFWA.
Tony is survived by his wife, Suford (they married in 1968) and daughter Alice.
File 770 will post a fuller tribute later this evening.
(7) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
“Ill Met in Lankhmar” (1970)
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser faced each other across the two thieves sprawled senseless. They were poised for attack, yet for the moment neither moved.
Each discerned something inexplicably familiar in the other.
Fafhrd said, “Our motives for being here seem identical.”
“Seem? Surely must be!” the Mouser answered curtly, fiercely eyeing this potential new foe, who was taller by a head than the tall thief.
“You said?”
“I said, ‘Seem? Surely must be!'”
“How civilized of you!” Fafhrd commented in pleased tones.
“Civilized?” the Mouser demanded suspiciously, gripping his dirk tighter.
— “Ill Met in Lankhmar”
Fifty-four years ago at the first Noreascon, Fritz Leiber would win the Hugo for Best Novella with “Ill Met in Lankhmar”, a Fafhrd and The Grey Mouser tale. It was also be awarded a Nebula Award for Best Novella.
The other Hugo nominees that year were “The Thing in the Stone” by Clifford D. Simak, “The Region Between” by Harlan Ellison, “The World Outside” by Robert Silverberg and “Beastchild” by Dean R. Koontz.
It was first published in the April 1970 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. A prequel to the series, Leiber had by that time been chronicling the pair’s adventures for some thirty years.
The story is the third one in Ace’s 1970 Swords and Deviltry paperback collection. It is available from the usual sources as are the later volumes. Audible has them as well.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
February 12, 1950 — Michael Ironside, 75 .
I most remember Michael Ironside for his role as Lieutenant Jean Rasczak in Starship Troopers. There wasn’t much great about that film but I thought that he made much of that character.
Do I need to say that I’m not covering everything he’s done of a genre nature? Well most of you get that. Really you do. So let’s see what I find interesting.
Scanners is one weird film. It really is. And he was in it as Darryl Revok, the Big Baddie, a role he perfectly played.
Next he got cast as the main antagonist in another of my favorite SF films, this time as Overdog McNab in Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. Who comes with these names?
Then there was Total Recall where he was Agent Richter, the ruthless enforcer of Cohaagen, the source of everything corrupt on Mars. Great role that fit his gruff voice and frankly even gruffer looks absolutely perfectly.
One of his major ongoing roles was in the V franchise, first as Ham Tyle, a recurring role in V: The Final Battle, and then playing the same character in all episodes of V: The Series.
Now we come to my favorite of his roles, in one of my favorite series, seaQuest 2032, where he was Captain Oliver Hudson. Great series and an absolute fantastic performance by him! Pity it got cancelled after thirteen episodes.
Finally, he has one voice acting role I loved. In the DC universe, he was Darkseid, the absolute rule of Apokolis. He voiced him primarily on Superman: The Animated Series, but also on the Justice League series as well, and to my surprise on the HBO Harley Quinn series as well.
Unhappiness is a dreaded condition in the Civilization game series. Unhappy citizens stop working, stop researching scientific pursuits and, worst of all, start rioting.
In the new Sid Meier’s Civilization VII, which introduces three historical ages and a mounting series of crises during the transitions between them, my ancient Persian empire was running smoothly and expanding with ease. Then, suddenly, things struggled to feel cohesive. The game declared that my empire had fractured “as once-loyal settlements seek their own path forward.”
The unhappiness in my cities and towns grew so severe that several outlying settlements began trashing their districts and looking to outside civilizations for support. While I worked at putting out fires started by rioters, my neighbor Napoleon swooped in and quickly conquered one of my towns. This started a territorial war that only deepened the unhappiness of my population. Soon, half my towns were in revolt.
While following your chosen civilization’s path in Civilization VII, from the rough-hewed settlements of the past to the glistening megalopolises of the future, you move through ages that transform not just your technologies, government and civic policies, but also the broader identity of your civilization itself.
With its precipitous rises and falls, Civilization VII, which will be released on Tuesday for PCs, Macs and consoles, is a departure for the series. Although past iterations have had revolts, diplomatic incidents and civic upset, they tend to feel less closely connected to the ways that historical forces can boil over into crisis and conflict.
The violent and chaotic cuts here accurately reflect a world history where many things can happen all at once and often with surprising swiftness. History doesn’t always move forward in the routine, turn-based lock step of the 4X genre (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) that Civilization popularized. More often, root causes like financial instability, cultural changes and oppressive hierarchies stay below the surface until emerging in a cacophony of war, revolution and natural-disaster-fueled chaos….
A new test of nuclear propellant fuel under space-like conditions has been hailed as a success by NASA and General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS), in what is considered one more step on the road to nuclear-powered rocket engines. Such designs have long been suggested as a more efficient method of space travel and could cut interplanetary voyages down to just a few weeks.
While this latest test doesn’t make nuclear-powered rocket engines viable just yet, it’s an important step on the journey. This latest batch of tests was conducted at the compact fuel element environmental test (CFEET) facility at NASA MSFC, as per Space.com. It cycled the nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) fuel up to 2600 Kelvin (4,220 Fahrenheit) and back down again several times, using superheated hydrogen…
Faced with the (very low probability) threat of an incoming asteroid impact, NASA is bringing out the big guns. The agency will employ its powerful Webb space telescope to monitor newly discovered asteroid 2024 YR4, which has a small chance of hitting Earth in 2032.
Based on current estimates, asteroid 2024 YR4 has a 2.1% chance of impact on December 22, 2032. Although the odds are still in our favor, there are currently no other known large asteroids with an impact probability above 1%, according to NASA. The space agency tends to take these matters quite seriously, which is why it plans to collect additional observations of the space rock using the Webb telescope in March to refine the current estimates, NASA revealed in a recent update.
The Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in Chile discovered the asteroid on December 27, 2024. Shortly after its discovery, the impact probability of the asteroid was set to 1.3%. However, additional observations increased the asteroid’s chances of crashing into Earth to 2.3% as of yesterday, before dropping slightly to 2.1% this morning. These odds are preliminary, and more observations of the asteroid are desperately needed….
A completely made-up scientific term is making the rounds in academic journals, and instead of being “oops!” one major publisher is basically saying “this is fine!”
As reported in Retraction Watch, A sharp-eyed Russian chemist (going by the extremely cool pseudonym “Paralabrax clathratus”) spotted the weird phrase “vegetative electron microscopy,” which makes about as much sense as “photosynthetic hammer” or “reproductive calculator.” The term has somehow snuck into nearly two dozen published papers, including one whose senior author is an editor at prestigious publisher Elsevier.
When called out on this obvious nonsense, Elsevier basically said “No no, it’s fine! It’s just a shorter way of saying ‘electron microscopy of vegetative structures'” which is like saying “vegetative car” is a dandy way to describe “a car that drives past vegetables.”…
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Daniel Dern, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Christian Brunschen, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]
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….
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….
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.
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.
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?
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.”…
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.
…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 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
(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.]
(1) GRAMMY AWARDS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The Grammy Awards were given out Sunday night. (See Grammy.com for “The Full Winners & Nominees List”.) The only two obvious (to me) genre/related winners were:
Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media (Includes Film And Television)
Dune: Part Two – Hans Zimmer, composer
Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media
Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord — Winifred Phillips, composer
It’s perfectly possible that many of the other winners included music used in genre film, TV, games, etc. Or the works themselves may have genre content. But my knowledge of contemporary music is so slim as to be virtually invisible. You don’t even have to turn it edgewise. So let us know in comments if you find any more.
(3) FANS, RIPE FOR THE HARVESTING. Jessa Crispin, writing ahead of the lawsuit filings today, starts an analysis of the Gaiman/Palmer business model: “Around twenty years ago, publishing forgot how to sell books.” “Culture, Digested: Neil Gaiman is an Industry Problem” at The Culture We Deserve.
…Even taking into consideration their years of exploitation and abuse, Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer remain models of artistic success in the 21st century. Gaiman created an extremely sellable brand — affable, “oh goodness,” harmless Britishness wrapped up in a “I have read a lot of books” kind of storytelling — and the publishing industry used that not only to sell a lot of his books but that of his friends as well. Amanda Palmer has crowdsourced her way into a perfect little Patreon pyramid scheme, where all money flows to her and she gives back vibes and requests for domestic labor. This is the ideal artistic arrangement these days, where stars receive 95% of Patreon/Substack/other crowdsourced forms of income and everyone else competes for scraps. Both are reliant on a dedicated, servile audience, willing to turn over their time and bodies and cash to get a piece of that bohemian existence that only millionaires can manage these days. It’s the bohemianism not of Weimar, which Palmer constantly references, but the bohemianism of contemporary Burning Man, full of tech billionaires wearing the worst outfits you’ve ever seen in your life.
Accusations against bad actors follow a reliable structure. We dig through their work for signs that they were bad all along, we wonder why no one said anything sooner, a few select people will breathlessly explain how while they themselves were not harmed they could have been because they were so close to danger and didn’t know it. That’s fine. But it would seem more productive if we could discuss how the way our creative industries currently function leave people vulnerable to exploitation, how difficult it is to break through the veneer of a public figure who makes a lot of money for so many people, and the fantasies that allow people to confuse abuse with inclusion.
Session Title: Genealogies and Futurities of AI in Speculative Fiction
Submit proposals to: Rachel Haywood, Iowa State University (rhaywood@iastate.edu)
Description & Requirements:
Inviting proposals examining AI’s historical and futuristic representations in speculative fiction. How have speculative narratives anticipated, shaped, and reflected current developments in AI or imagined AIs that diverge from present realities? 250-word abstract, short cv
Submission Deadline: Friday, 14 March 2025
(5) DOES HE NEED TO DRAW YOU A PICTURE? Adam Kotsko would like to tell you “Why I Am Not a Gene Roddenberry Fan” at the Late Star Trek newsletter. He doesn’t explicitly say Roddenberry’s novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture is sleazy, he just supplies the necessary quotes and paraphrases to make that conclusion unavoidable.
The description of this newsletter says that the purpose is to reflect on the development of the Star Trek franchise. One great way to do that is to read tie-in novels from previous eras, especially ones that have been “superseded” by current-day canonical productions…
…I approached Gene Roddenberry’s novelization of The Motion Picture in a similar spirit. At the time when he was witnessing the franchise improbably reviving, what did Star Trek’s creator think Star Trek could be? I had read bemused articles like this one and hence knew that it was weird. But already in the first few pages, I felt like I was in a completely different universe…
… The aspect of Kirk’s preface that most often jumps out at readers is his reference to his mother’s “love coach”—presumably the person who gave her sex lessons in this extremely liberated utopian world. This idea is of course very “Seventies,” but it is also very “Roddenberry.” The movie itself already displays his worst impulses, because we are introduced to a new species of “sex aliens,” in the person of the bald Deltan woman Ilia, whose species is so overwhelmingly sensual that making love with them would drive a human mad. This is the same guy who introduced the Orion Slave Girls in the first pilot (and had Pike contemplate a career as a human trafficker) and who oversaw any number of plots where Kirk uses sex as a tool to fulfill his mission….
While the tabloids and fan publications portrayed the Nimoys as a “close family,” to his son, Leonard Nimoy was a total stranger. The actor was as inscrutable as the iconic half-Vulcan science officer he portrayed on Star Trek, even to those close to him. Join Adam Nimoy as he discusses his poignant memoir The Most Human and explores their complicated relationship and how it informed his views on marriage, parenting, and later, sobriety. Discover how the son of Spock learned to navigate this tumultuous relationship and how he was finally able to reconcile with his father — and with himself.
Copies of The Most Human: Reconciling with My Father, Leonard Nimoywill be available for purchase in our Museum Store on 03/20/2025.
Presentation will begin at 7:00 pm; PMH Galleries will be open for viewing at 6:00 pm.
Space is limited; advance reservations required
Note: the book The Most Human was released in June 2024.
(7) SPSFC CODE OF CONDUCT. The Self-Published Science Fiction Competition has posted its new Code of Conduct to X.com. (Not its own website.)
(8) MORE LEARNEDLEAGUE SFF: ELEMENTAL MASTERS, MADELEINE L’ENGLE, ALIENS, SPACE. [Item by David Goldfarb.] This LearnedLeague off-season has featured a few SFF-related One-Day Special quizzes.
This one has Mercedes Lackey’s “Elemental Masters” series as its ostensible theme, but is really more about folklore. I managed 10/12 right and 8th place, despite never having read any of the books.
This one about Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet I did rather worse on: only 7 right. To be fair, I have only read three of them, and that decades ago.
I also got 7 right in Alien Franchise, for much the same reasons: I’ve only seen two of the movies, and quite some time has passed.
Space is not technically SFF, but it’s a topic that is SF-adjacent enough that I think Filers might be interested. 11/12 right for me there, and the 12th off by only one letter.
(9) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
The Greatest American Hero (1981-1983)
Forty-two years ago, The Greatest American Hero ended its three-year run on ABC. A rather wonderful run if I must say so myself.
It was created by producer Stephen J. Cannell, more known for series like Magnum P.I. and Castle (in which he appeared in a poker game with Castle as himself until his death) than SF series like this.
The series features William Katt as Ralph Hinkley, a teacher turned superhero after getting a suit from aliens; Robert Culp as FBI agent Bill Maxwell; and Connie Sellecca as lawyer Pam Davidson. Sellecca in another genre connection was married to Gil Gerard who played, well, you know who on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.
Though it ran for three seasons, it had an unusually low number of episodes for a show of that duration racking up only forty-five in total of which of five went unaired during the original broadcast.
The powers of the red suit would appear to be quite generic, but that apparently didn’t appear so to Warner Bros., the owners of DC Comics, who filed a lawsuit against ABC, Warner Bros. Inc. v. American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. It was ultimately dismissed by the Court where it was filed who said it had no grounds.
A wise decision given how common red suits with extraordinary powers were. I’m not which red suit DC was thinking of anyways as theirs. The red lanterns? Plastic man? The time Superman split in two, one blue and one red? And did they ever see Marvel’s Iron Man?
Five years later, the cast came back together for a pilot movie for a new NBC series which was named The Greatest American Heroine which was never picked up. The movie was later added in syndication to this series.
It’s streaming on Peacock. Yes, with the five that were not aired originally.
Typically, a “normal” beer can is about 12 ounces in size, and you see them everywhere. They’re featured in six-packs of domestic beers and plenty of non-alcoholic sodas as well. Sometimes, while you’re perusing the beer aisle, you’ll also see larger individual cans which are about 16 ounces in size, colloquially known as tallboys. Craft breweries love selling their beer in tallboys because it makes their beers stand out on the shelf. Increasingly, however, tallboys are coming up short for breweries. Your typical beer can is getting bigger.
There are a few larger sizes, each with common nicknames in the brewing industry. Past tallboys, you can also find 19.2-ounce cans called “stovepipes” which are an increasingly common way for craft breweries to sell their wares in convenience stores and local delis. Then you’ve got 24-ounce cans called “silo” cans, although you might recognize them as White Claw cans, because you can frequently buy cans of hard seltzer packaged in silos. The largest of all is a whopping 32-ounce can called the “crowler,” which is most often seen as a to-go option when you’re visiting the tap room of a local brewery. A crowler gets its name from the beer growler, which is a ceramic or glass jug which can be resealed with a lid; the crowler’s name is a portmanteau of “can growler.”…
(12) TEDDY HARVIA CARTOON. Yes, this seems pretty disturbing…
Since 1978, every new group of NASA astronauts has included women and usually reflected a multiplicity of races and ethnicities.
That is not simply by chance. NASA’s process for selecting its astronauts is not entirely gender- and race-blind. With so many outstanding applicants, choosing a diversified, highly qualified group of candidates has been achievable, said Duane Ross, who worked as manager of NASA’s astronaut selection office from 1976 until he retired in 2014.
“You didn’t lose sight of wanting your astronaut corps to be reflective of society,” he said.
Over most of its history, NASA has risen above partisan bickering, with broad support in Congress from Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals. But the makeup of its most visible employees — its astronauts — could now collide with President Trump’s crusade against programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion — or D.E.I.
For NASA to consider race and gender at all in the choosing of astronauts appears to run counter to an executive order that Mr. Trump signed on Jan. 22. That order declares that hiring for federal jobs will “not under any circumstances consider D.E.I.-related factors, goals, policies, mandates, or requirements.”
On the same day, echoing language in a template used by agency heads across the federal government, Janet Petro, the current acting administrator, told NASA employees that D.E.I. programs “divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars, and resulted in shameful discrimination.”…
… Even during Mr. Trump’s first term, diversity and inclusion was a priority for top NASA officials. The administrator then was Jim Bridenstine, a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma, and in 2020, he added “inclusion” as the fifth core value for the space agency, joining “safety,” “integrity,” “teamwork” and “excellence.”
Under Mr. Trump, NASA also promised that the next moon landing would include a woman astronaut. Under President Biden, NASA broadened that promise to include a “person of color,” although not necessarily for the first Artemis program landing.
The embrace of inclusion was also evident last March when NASA issued a call for new astronauts. April Jordan, the current manager of the astronaut selection office, spoke about wanting to choose a group that was reflective of American society….
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
