Tag Archives: Mars

Pixel Scroll 7/20/24 There’s A Barsoom On The Right

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(1) HELLO FROM CHINA. The Hugo Book Club Blog has a guest post from Chinese fan RiverFlow: “Guest Post: Unite Sci-Fi Fans Around The World”.

Hello science fiction fans attending the 2024 World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow. First of all, have you heard of Chinese sci-fi fandom? If so, what examples can you give?

Science fiction fans in China were excited when Zero Gravity News won the Hugo Award for Best Fanzine last year. See “Introducing Chinese sci-fi fanzine Zero Gravity News” to learn more about the fanzine.

Yes, in fact, there is a very large group of science fiction fans in China, but few people have collected and collated their materials. I have been working on this since 2020, and have written some articles to introduce the collection.

The earliest Chinese Fanzine was born in 1988. In the 1990s, many science fiction fans were employed and writing in their leisure time, but in the 21st century, these contributions were mainly completed by students. Because workers are busy with their lives and families, it is difficult to find time to organize related activities. So I wrote a book, History of Chinese University Science Fiction Association, to introduce Chinese science fiction fans to the rest of the world. The thousands of photos and hundreds of thousands of words are enough to prove the rich history of this group….

(2) LOCAL GROUP FOCUS – NORTHUMBERLAND HEATH SF. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This is the Northumberland Heath SF’s group meet recently when a Mandalorian visited. 

This is just half its regular membership of a score or so who turn up to at least two or three meets a year: work shift rotas, familial and other commitments, etc., mean that it is rare that all regulars attend the same meet.  In addition, the group’s Facebook has some 260 followers of which half are local, but 120 of these have never physically attended a meet. (Is this typical of other local groups?) Of the non-local remainder FB followers, a good proportion are familiar names on some Worldcon registrant lists. Some of its members belong to other specialist regional and national SF groups and one of its members is the daughter of a former Worldcon fan GoH.

The group is only several years old but has some heritage connection with the former NW Kent SF group of the 1980s and ’90s that used to meet in nearby Dartford.  N. Heath SF is located in southeast London, on its border in Kent, which means that in addition to local social gatherings and cinema outings, it is easy to have trips to central London events, such as the annual Sci-Fi London film fest, or one-offs, such as the Loncon 3 Worldcon. It meets the second Thursday of each month so as not to clash with the first Thursday London SF Circle (as it used to be called) gathering.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Jonathan adds, “I for one would be interested to see potted summaries of local SF groups across different countries” and I enthusiastically second the idea. I’d love to run people’s introductions to the sf groups they’re in.

(3) DOWNLOAD THE 2019 GUFF TRIP REPORT. Simon Litten’s 2019 GUFF Trip Report Visiting Nearly Kiwiland has been published. Copies can be downloaded at the Australian Fan Funds website.

There’s no charge to download the report but interested fans may wish to make a donation to GUFF (via PayPal to [email protected]).

(4) THE SELF-PUBLISHING BUSINESS. Dave Dobson offers a deep dive into the numbers in his “Anatomy of a free BookBub featured deal”. A lot to learn here about Amazon, free book campaigns, and ratings.

Also, the intangibles – the sales rank, the visibility, the (I hope) new fans, the glut of new ratings and reviews – all of those are things I’d gladly have paid a couple hundred bucks pursuing. So, I’m going to call this a clear win, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

(5) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 114 of Octothorpe, “Tastemaker Batty”, John Coxon, Alison Scott and Liz Batty discuss the Hugo Awards. Uncorrected transcript is available here.

We cover all the categories except Best Novel, which we covered in a previous episode. The deadline is today (20 July 2024 at 21:17 Glasgow time). Don’t forget to vote beforehand. 

The value for “today” is a now-expired deadline. But that comes to us all sooner or later.

”Octothorpe 114” is at the top, and the word ”Octothorpe” is written on a series of lottery balls. Below that, a bingo card, and below that, the words ”Worldcon Community Group Bingo Card". The items on the card are as follows: - Can I convert pounds to Scottish money? - Does anyone have any opinions on...? - Do you know my Scottish cousin? - This list is too long to read so can someone... - Is the programme out yet? - Can I swim in the Clyde? - Can I visit Stonehenge for the day? - Asks question answered in PR5 - Does Glasgow Zoo have live haggis? - Volunteering is the best way to have fun - What's with all the armadillos? - Shouldn't the subway be a Digital Orange now? - Free! - Is the con organising an aurora viewing? - Is it too late to get on the programme? - Will Nessie be doing a signing? - Mention of Glasgow, England - Can anyone go to the Hugo Awards? - Why don't we do this the way we did in 1956? - Can I fly from Glasgow to Edinburgh? - Will there be any authors there? - Can I bring my Emotional Support Moose? - Are tartan and/or kilts compulsory? - What I reckon... - Mention of deep-fried Mars Bar

(6) PLUTO STILL NOT ONE OF THE COOL KIDS. “Astronomers Propose New Criteria to Classify Planets, but Pluto Still Doesn’t Make the Cut” in Smithsonian Magazine.

Nearly two decades after Pluto got kicked out of the planet club, astronomers are proposing an updated way to define “planet” based on more measurable criteria. The current definition is “problematic” and “vague,” they write in a paper published Wednesday in The Planetary Science Journal.

Unfortunately for fans of the dwarf planet, however, Pluto would remain excluded, even if the proposal is approved….

… “Jupiter’s orbit is crossed by comets and asteroids, as is Earth’s,” Gladman points out in a university statement. “Have those planets not cleared their orbit and thus, aren’t actually planets?”

In a bid to correct for this ambiguity, Gladman and his two colleagues propose a more measurable definition. According to their model, a celestial body is a planet if it: orbits one or more stars, brown dwarfs or stellar remnants; is more massive than 1023 kilograms (a size big enough to clear its orbit of debris); and is less massive than 2.5 x 1028 kilograms (equivalent to 13 Jupiter masses).

Pluto’s mass is 1.31 x 1022 kilograms, so it would remain excluded—but our current eight planets would retain their classification….

New Horizons photo of chaos region on Pluto.

(7) TOP SCI-FI MOTORBIKES. SlashGear praises “10 Of The Coolest Motorcycles In All Of Science Fiction”.

…When making this list, we looked at motorcycles that specifically had a sci-fi bent to them. The 1990 Harley-Davidson Fat Boy in “Terminator 2: Judgement Day” is definitely cool, but that’s a bike that already exists. We wanted motorcycles that pushed the boundaries of transportation in the future and perhaps even inspired folks to design their own bikes that look similar in real life. These are the sci-fi motorcycles that show that while society might change in the future, riding around on a cool motorcycle never gets old. …

The list includes —

Kaneda’s bike in Akira

Kaneda’s bike in “Akira,” one of the most influential anime films of all time, isn’t just cool-looking — it inspired the famous “Akira Slide,” which has entered meme status and has been referenced in a wide range of projects, from “Batman: The Animated Series” to Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Even when it’s not sliding, the bike is beautifully drawn. 

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 20, 1938 – Dame Diana Rigg. (Died 2020.)

By Paul Weimer:

I was introduced to Diana Rigg thanks to Roger Zelazny’s Amber.

It’ll make sense, trust me.

As you know, I am and have been an enthusiastic player of the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game, set in the endless multiverse of the novels.  Lots of players and GMs like to import ideas from other books, shows and series. (I am no exception in that regard, mind you).

Diana Rigg

One of these GMs I played with was a big enthusiast of The Steed and Peel Avengers series from the 1960’s. I was not yet familiar with the series, but after playing a session where Steed turned out to be a secret Amberite, I had to know more! Who was Steed and who was the mysterious Mrs. Peel he was looking for (as part of the plot)?  (She did not actually appear on screen). The GM encouraged me to seek out The Avengers.

And thus, I discovered the original Avengers TV series, and thus, Diana Rigg. I was enchanted immediately, of course, by a beautiful kick-arse actress with skill, verve, and action. I avidly watched all the episodes of The Avengers, finding Rigg the best of the partners for McNee by a long way. The DNA of some notable action heroines with skill, verve, intelligence and independence definitely can be traced back to Rigg’s Mrs. Peel.

Later on, she was proven delightful in things such as Game of Thrones (Olenna Tyrell was a great major character for her late in her career) and, when I discovered, the weird and wonderful steampunk movie The Assassination Bureau.

But in the end, yes, for me Diana Rigg IS Mrs. Peel.  Now, if only Moorcock could confirm that Peel is actually an aspect of the Eternal Champion…

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) MONSTERPIECE THEATRE. “Godzilla Takes on the Great Gatsby in Monsterpiece Theatre Comic” at The Wrap. Cover art and preview pages at the link.

Godzilla’s been on a resurgent streak, from the MonsterVerse franchise and “Godzilla Minus One” in theaters to “Monarch” on Apple TV+. Now, TheWrap can exclusively share that acclaimed writer and artist Tom Scioli is delivering comic book “Godzilla’s Monsterpiece Theatre” from IDW, with the giant lizard taking on figures from throughout literary history — including the Great Gatsby, Sherlock Holmes, H.G. Wells’ Time Traveller and a mystery man with vampiric fingers and a “D” on the back of his cape (want to take a guess?).

The three-issue series is set in 1922, with one of Jay Gatsby’s legendary parties luring the attention of the giant lizard himself. Rather than being able to woo Daisy Buchanan, he has to deal with Godzilla absolutely demolishing his estate. Gatsby follows up on the destruction by teaming with the aforementioned 20th century literary icons to take his revenge….

(11) POINT OF NO RETURN? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Bad news in this week’s Science editorial: “Go/no-go for a Mars samples return”.

Last month’s return to Earth of China’s lunar lander Chang’e-6 with samples from the far side of the Moon is a reminder that there are “firsts” in robotic space exploration still to be achieved. Unfortunately, this year has seen a major set-back for the prospects of an even more extensive plan to collect samples from Mars. In April, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) made clear that the ballooning cost for the US Mars Sample Return mission to around $11 billion was too much and the 2040 return date was too distant. NASA has been told to look for ideas to lower costs and shorten the timeline. Shock and anger are palpable in the astronomy community.

The challenge of an exploratory robotic mission to Mars to collect samples and return them to Earth for study dates back to the post-Apollo era, 50 years ago. Twenty-five years ago, a breakthrough occurred when France and the US announced a joint Mars sample return program. Sadly, that foundered on financial grounds. Fifteen years ago, the goal of a joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) was vetoed at a high level in NASA, possibly an echo of the previous experience.

Nonetheless, the last two US National Academy of Sciences planetary science decadal surveys gave the Mars Sample Return mission a high priority, thereby encouraging federal agencies to fund it. Then, last year, after the critical design phase and external review, the program’s price turned out to be way above expectations, leading NASA to apply brakes to the project…

The figures quoted for cost escalation of the Mars Sample Return mission are a reminder that NASA’s JWST project grew from less than $1 billion to around $10 billion. However, most of the JWST cost increases came after the design phase, the point where the Mars project is now caught. The sub[1]sequent steady growth in the cost of JWST was due to a different cause— namely, the year-by-year NASA budget negotiation in Congress. Once the design phase is completed, a large development team is formed. European collaborators watched in frustration as the annual US budget, cycle after cycle, drip-fed just enough money to sustain the JWST mission’s team but not enough to allow efficient progress. The multiyear funding of the ESA Science Programme by member states mitigates this.

NASA is now told to look for a solution to the Mars Sample Return mission, but the agency is likely caught at a tricky crossroads. A quicker, cheaper swoop to grab Mars dust and get it back to Earth could win the exploration “first,” but that will not satisfy the US National Academy decadal goals….

(12) FARM ROBOTS. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] “Could robot weedkillers replace the need for pesticides?” in the Guardian. I’m sure they will, and I expect smaller ones for gardens.

On a sweltering summer day in central Kansas, farm fields shimmer in the heat as Clint Brauer watches a team of bright yellow robots churn up and down the rows, tirelessly slicing away any weeds that stand in their way while avoiding the growing crops.

The battery-powered machines, 4ft (1.2 metres) long and 2ft (0.6 metres) wide, pick their way through the fields with precision, without any human hand to guide them….

His Greenfield agricultural technology company now builds and programs its robots in a shed behind an old farmhouse where his grandmother once lived….

…Farmers have been fighting weeds in their fields – pulling, cutting and killing them off with an array of tools – for centuries. Weeds compete with crops for soil moisture and nutrients and can block out sunlight needed for crop growth, cutting into final yields. Over the last 50-plus years, chemical eradication has been the method of choice. It is common for farmers to spray or otherwise apply several weedkilling chemicals on to their fields in a single season.

But as chemical use has expanded, so has scientific evidence that exposure to the toxic substances in weedkillers can cause disease. In addition to glyphosate’s link to cancer, the weedkilling chemical paraquat has been linked to Parkinson’s disease. Another common farm herbicide, atrazine, can be harmful to reproductive health and is linked to several other health problems.

Weedkilling chemicals have also been found to be harmful to the environment, with negative impacts on soil health and on pollinators and other important species. 

… North Dakota-based Aigen Robotics has raised $19m to date. Its compact robots are powered by solar panels fixed to the top of each machine and are designed to work autonomously, sleeping and waking up on farm fields….

… Still, many farmers and academic experts are skeptical that farm robots can make a substantial difference. They say that there is simply too much farmland and too many diverse needs to be addressed by robots that are costly to make and use. The better path, many say, is for farmers to work with nature, rather than against it.

The model of regenerative agriculture – using a variety of strategies focused on improving soil health, including limiting pesticides, rotating crops, planting crops that provide ground cover to suppress weeds and avoiding disturbing the soil – is the better path, they say….

(13) ELEMENTARY. According to ScienceAlert, “Curiosity Cracked Open a Rock on Mars And Found a Huge Surprise”.

A rock on Mars has just spilled a surprising yellow treasure after Curiosity accidentally cracked through its unremarkable exterior.

When the rover rolled its 899-kilogram (1,982-pound) body over the rock, the rock broke open, revealing yellow crystals of elemental sulfur: brimstone. Although sulfates are fairly common on Mars, this is the first time sulfur has been found on the red planet in its pure elemental form….

“But do they smell like rotten eggs?” asks John King Tarpinian.

(14) SF IN 1958. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Grammaticus Books has continued his deep dive into some golden age editions of SF pulps. This time he looks at a1958 edition of Fantasy & Science Fiction that saw Heinlein’s “Have Spacesuit Will Travel” which if memory serves was short-listed for a Hugo. There’s also a Richard Matheson in the mix…

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Via Cat Rambo.] “We Didn’t Start the Fire (Bardcore|Medieval/Renaissance Style Cover)” from Hildegard von Blingin’.

There are many covers of Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire that adapt it to different times, but we wanted to give it the bardcore treatment. *Unlike the original, the list is not chronological, and jumps around in time a lot. It very loosely spans from around 400 to 1600, and is from a rather Eurocentric point of view. Thank you to my brother, Friar Funk, for devising the lyrics and providing the majority of the vocals. Many thanks as well to his new wife and our dad for joining us in the chorus at the end.

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

Pixel Scroll 7/10/24 A Multiverse Of Pixels. Consider How Many That Is

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(1) WORLDCON PROGRESS REPORT. Glasgow 2024 Worldcon has released its fifth and final Progress Report. Download here: PR #5.pdf.

One of the interesting revelations is the plan to stage —

Nothing, Nowhere, Never Again

Glasgow Worldcons are not without their traditions: each of the previous ones have had a show written and performed by Reductio Ad Absurdum. In 1995 it was their loving demolition of Dune (or The Sand Of Music); in 2005 it was Lucas Back In Anger, their smash-and-grab on all things Star Wars, which was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) despite enraging Star Wars fans by reducing the second trilogy to a 12 minute ABBA karaoke with cardboard costumes. In 2024 their offering is a unique take on the Oscar-winning sensation, Everything, Everywhere, All At Once that becomes Nothing, Nowhere, Never Again. Reductio is basically Ian Sorensen and Phil Raines plus whoever else they can blackmail into performing. This year they have suckered Geoff Ryman, Emjay Ameringen and Julia Daly into joining them in the madness. It promises to be an amazing, hilarious romp through the alternate universes, time travel and the joys of growing old disgracefully. The multiverse will never be quite the same again! (Armadillo Auditorium – Saturday 4pm)

(2) TIME BANDITS TRAILER. “Apple unveils the first nostalgia-fueled trailer for Taika Waititi’s reimagining of an ’80s sci-fi cult classic” — GamesRadar+ pulls back the curtain.

Per the official synopsis, the series is an “unpredictable journey through time and space with a ragtag group of thieves and their newest recruit: an 11-year-old history buff named Kevin. Together, they set out on a thrilling quest to save the boy’s parents, and the world.”In the brief clip, which can be viewed above, Kevin (Kal-El Tuck) opens up his wardrobe and walks into another moment in time before running into Penelope (Lisa Kudrow) and her group of bandits. The upcoming series, created by Waititi, Jermaine Clement, and Ian Morris, is based on the 1981 cult classic of the same name. The trio also wrote the first two episodes, with Waititi directing both.

… Time Bandits is set to hit Apple TV Plus on Wednesday, July 24, 2024, with the first two episodes in tow. Two episodes will air every Friday through August 21, 2024….

(3) A KAIJU SURPRISE. Forbes celebrates as “’Godzilla Minus One’ Arrives On 4K Blu-Ray In Every Glorious Version”.

Toho surprised fans today with the long-awaited release of Godzilla Minus One to home entertainment in a four-disc 4K UHD Blu-ray box set. I also have an exclusive clip of writer-director-VFX supervisor Takashi Yamazaki and his team from their U.S. visit, plus a look at the different glorious versions of the Oscar-winning film.

The Godzilla Minus One box set is an exclusive through Toho’s official Godzilla site, and includes lots of behind-the-scenes features and making-of footage. Fans of the film have been eagerly awaiting word of a physical home media release, although the film finally arrived on streaming recently and VOD. The surprise today is part of a larger 70th anniversary celebration of Godzilla in 2024….

(4) SUPACELL. [Item by Steven French.] The creator of a hit Netflix show about a group of black south Londoners with superpowers triggered by sickle cell anaemia says he hopes its success can kickstart a discussion about the condition in the UK and remove the stigma associated with it. “Hit Netflix show Supacell is raising awareness of sickle cell anaemia” reports the Guardian.

…Hit show Supacell is now at No 1 in Netflix’s global top 10, with more than 18m views in its first few weeks on the platform.

In the series, a group of south Londoners start to develop comic book powers – superhuman strength and speed, telekinesis, the ability to teleport and fly, and to have premonitions – while being tracked by Health & Unity, a shadowy organisation that offers to “help” those who are affected.

The show has been praised for subtly interspersing real-life issues that affect Black Britons: from the casual racism that Black females face on reality TV shows to bias in the health system. But the biggest real-life undercurrent in the fantastical world of Supacell is the inclusion of sickle cell anaemia in its storyline….

(5) DROP EVERYTHING. The New York Times calls these “Five Science Fiction Movies to Stream Now”. (Read at this link, which bypasses the paywall.)

One of their picks is Animalia, which is available to buy or rent generally.

…If your definition of an alien invasion involves ships hovering above Earth and major destruction, just know that Sofia Alaoui’s beautifully shot take on the genre is definitely … not that. Still, the mysterious, elliptical Moroccan movie “Animalia” exerts a pull of its own as its central character, a pregnant young woman named Itto (Oumaima Barid), faces a series of unexplained events.

When the wealthy family she has married into leaves for an outing, Itto enjoys some quality alone time at home. Soon, however, things start to go off the rails. Animals behave strangely, army vehicles barrel down the streets, roadblocks are hastily erected. The movie holds back on the explanations, and as her husband, Amine (Mehdi Dehbi), tries to arrange for a reunion, Itto’s journey acquires a mystical tinge.

Yet Alaoui does not stray into woo-woo New Age-isms and offers pointed views on the emancipation of women in Morocco, and their role in both the family and society. It takes confidence and skill to keep an audience invested in a movie while withholding information, and Alaoui clearly has both….

(6) GEORGE WELLS (1943-2024). Longtime fan George Wells died June 21. A native New Yorker (from Suffolk County, Long Island), he attended his first Lunacons in 1958 and 1960, and then…college helped initiate a long gap from fandom. He became a librarian (with a Masters Degree), and returned to the convention scene in 1972. And soon also became involved with APA fandom. I first got to know George in the Seventies when we were all in Larry Nielsen’s APA-H, the apa for Hoaxes. He also was part of Apanage, the Southern Fandom Press Alliance, and N’APA.

George and his wife, Jill (nee Simmons) met via a local Star Trek club she co-founded in Suffolk. They moved to Arizona, some years ago.

In 1999, George Wells won the facetious Rubble Award given at DeepSouthCon “for doing great things to Southern Fandom” in recognition of “Introducing Fandom to Werewolf Vs. Vampire Woman”.

In 2013 File 770 celebrated George’s 70th birthday in a post by James Burns, which supplied much of the above information.

(7) RICHARD GOLDSTEIN (1927-2024). Retired JPL scientist Richard M. Goldstein, a trailblazer in planetary exploration who used ground-based radars to map planets, died June 22 at the age of 97. The New York Times obituary  explains his claim to fame.

…If successful, scientists would learn the distance from Earth to Venus, essentially laying the foundation to map the entire solar system. His adviser at Caltech was more than skeptical; Venus, in NASA’s description, was a “cloud-swaddled” planet covered by thick gasses, and previous attempts to reach the planet using other radars had produced mixed results.

“No echo, no thesis,” Dr. Goldstein’s adviser told him, according to “To See the Unseen: A History of Planetary Radar Astronomy” (1996) by Andrew J. Butrica, a science historian.

He proceeded anyway. On March 10, 1961, technicians pointed the new radar at Venus. Six and a half minutes later, signals from the planet returned. Dr. Goldstein had proved his adviser wrong. He soon bounced signals off Mercury and Mars, as well as Saturn’s rings.

The study’s influence on solar system research was immense.

“The measurements he did of the distance to Venus made it possible to do accurate navigation within the solar system,” said Charles Werner, a former senior engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “If you know one distance, it’s like a ruler that allows you to calibrate everything else and to be able to navigate spacecraft in the solar system accurately.”

The radar echoes were the celestial prelude to a long career at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory charting the previously unseen. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Dr. Goldstein used radar interferometry — the splicing together of multiple radar signals over a length of time — to map the surface of Venus.

“High-resolution radar probes have broken through the thick clouds of Venus and for the first time distinguished features on the planet’s surface, which presents a landscape of huge, shallow craters,” the science reporter John Noble Wilford wrote in a front-page article in The New York Times on Aug. 5, 1973.

“Instead of the blurry shadings of earlier radar maps of the planet,” Mr. Wilford wrote, the images detected by Dr. Goldstein revealed a dozen craters, including one that was 100 miles wide and less than a quarter of a mile deep.

Dr. Goldstein had used two radar antennas 14 miles apart to produce the images.

“This, in effect, gives us stereo reception,” Dr. Goldstein said, enabling him “to pinpoint each area touched on Venus.”

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 10, 1903 — John Wyndham. (Died 1969.)

By Paul Weimer: Cozy Catastrophe? My first encounter with John Wyndham’s work was anything but cozy. That would be, on good old WPIX, the movie version of Day of the Triffids, where Jeanette Scott fought a triffid that spits poison and kills, to quote Rocky Horror Picture Show. So when I finally picked up his work (The Chrysalids, I think was the first), I was quite taken and surprised by the “bait and switch” that my mind and expectations had for Wyndham’s work as opposed to the cinematic adaptation.

John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris

Wyndham did teach me something that I would learn later in novels such as Earth Abides, Alas Babylon, and even On the Beach, and that is that catastrophes, and disasters, even ones that end civilization as the protagonists know it, could be surprisingly gentle and not harsh as the world falls apart around them.  There can be afternoon tea even as the tripods march across the landscape in an inescapable force of nature invasion. 

I recently read The Midwich Cuckoos, and even more than Day of the Triffids (which I really think could be remade in this day and age. Hollywood, call me, I could write your script), it is the Wyndham work that really hits the fears and anxieties in an otherwise pastoral and idyllic English countryside. The horror that one’s children are, in effect, changelings is an old idea (going back to the ideas of Faeries switching children at birth) and the Midwich Cuckoos plays on that, and plays on that, hard. But its even more than the parents and adults being horrified by what is happening to the children, what might be happening with the very pregnancy you have. It is the idea that these children are forming a community, a society, a way of life that excludes you (which gets into fears of the generation gap. The use of the telepathic Cuckoos in the X-men series and how tight they are together under Emma Frost, takes that idea from Wyndham and makes it front and center. It’s their world, and not yours.

That shows, ultimately, John Wyndham and his legacy at his best.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) SIMPSONS JOKE PLAYS ALBERT HALL. “Hip-hop band Cypress Hill makes 1996 Simpsons joke come true” reports the Guardian.

They might be more used to Rachmaninov and Brahms, but on Wednesday night the London Symphony Orchestra’s musicians will be showcasing their perfect crescendos while playing Cypress Hill’s Insane in the Brain.

The orchestra is making a Simpsons joke from 1996 finally a reality, by playing the US hip-hop trio Cypress Hill’s acclaimed Black Sunday album at the Royal Albert Hall.

The evening will riff on a joke featured in a Simpsons episode, in which Cypress Hill speculated that they had mistakenly booked the London Symphony Orchestra “possibly while high”.

After years of fan pressure, the group has struck a deal for a one-night performance in London, in which the LSO will perform its most famous songs, including Insane in the Brain and I Wanna Get High.

Considered pioneers of the West Coast hip-hop scene in the 1990s, Cypress Hill have sold more than 20m albums worldwide. Their hit Black Sunday album sold more than 3m copies in the US and spent a year in the UK charts….

… In the Simpsons episode, titled Homerpalooza, Homer tries to impress Bart and Lisa by going to the Hullabalooza music festival – a play on the Lollapalooza music festival held in Chicago – and hanging out with 1990s rap and rock stars including Cypress Hill and The Smashing Pumpkins.

In the episode, a crew member calls “somebody ordered”, adding “possibly while high … Cypress Hill, I’m looking in your direction”. This is followed by a rendition of Insane in the Brain, complete with the classic orchestral backing.

Cypress Hill have also invited the UK musician Peter Frampton, who features in the episode as the person trying to book the orchestra, although they are still waiting for a reply….

(11) SEVERANCE RETURNING. Variety knows when: “Severance Season 2 Teaser, Release Date Set for 2025”. The series will debut on Apple+ Friday, January 17. The 10-episode season will drop weekly episodes on Fridays after that.

…In addition to Scott and Arquette, the rest of the main cast includes Zach Cherry, Britt Lower, Tramell Tillman, Jen Tullock, Dichen Lachman, Michael Chernus, John Turturro and Christopher Walken. Eight more joined the cast of Season 2, including “Search Party” star Alia Shawkat, “Game of Thrones” alum Gwendoline Christie, Merritt Wever, Bob Balaban, Robby Benson, Stefano Carannate, John Noble and Ólafur Darri Ólafsson.

The new teaser doesn’t show much, other than the main cast of characters returning to the halls of Lumon. There’s also a quick look at Christie’s mysterious character, who cryptically tells them “You should’ve left.”…

(12) FEIGE Q&A. “Kevin Feige on Deadpool 3, Wolverine’s Yellow Suit and Sex Jokes in MCU” – hear about it in Variety.

The Marvel Studios president was talking to writer-director Shawn Levy about plans for the studio’s upcoming blockbuster “Deadpool & Wolverine,” starring Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman.

This was a couple of years ago, and Jackman had just confirmed his grand return as Wolverine after retiring the character in 2017’s emotional sendoff “Logan.” The 55-year-old Australian had played the gruff mutant with adamantium claws and regenerative abilities in nine films across two decades to much acclaim and, according to Feige, one glaring oversight. Jackman had never appeared in the character’s canonically mustard-colored costume….

(13) +1 SHIELD. “China Fortifies Space Station” at Futurism.

Two astronauts ventured outside of China’s Tiangong space station last week to armor its exterior against incoming space debris kicked up by an exploding Russian satellite.

“The spacewalk primarily focused on installing protective devices on external cables and pipelines to mitigate risks posed by potential space debris collisions, enhancing the long-term safety and stability of the space station,” China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation engineer Liu Ming told state-owned news network CCTV, as quoted by the South China Morning Post.

The news comes after a retired Earth observation satellite dubbed Resurs-P1 broke up in orbit late last month, forcing astronauts on board the International Space Station to shelter inside their respective spacecraft. It broke into more than 100 pieces that are now being tracked by the US Space Command.

Instead of sheltering in place, crew on board China’s Tiangong space station were instructed to bulk up its physical defenses — a mission that highlights the considerable risks small pieces of space debris can pose to astronauts orbiting the Earth…

…The spacewalk took 6.5 hours and went by largely without a hitch. According to the SCMP, the two spacewalkers even made jokes, competed to reach a designated spot, and struck poses for the camera….

(14) 1942’S AMAZING STORIES AND….SEX ADS??? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Grammaticus Books takes a deep dive into a 1942 edition of Amazing Stories in a short, 9 minute video…

Week two of Rocket Summer focusing on the October 1942, edition of Amazing Stories, produced by the legendary editor Hugo Gernsback. The pulp is a time capsule of pre-war angst and intrigue. Which included seven full length science fiction stories and….advertising for Modern Sex Secrets!? 1?!?

(15) RED PLANET NOIR. Mars Express comes to theaters May 3.

In 2200, private detective Aline Ruby and her android partner Carlos Rivera are hired by a wealthy businessman to track down a notorious hacker. On Mars, they descend deep into the underbelly of the planet’s capital city where they uncover a darker story of brain farms, corruption, and a missing girl who holds a secret about the robots that threatens to change the face of the universe.

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

Pixel Scroll 7/7/24 Little Pixels, On The Viewscreen. Little Pixels, Made Of Tickie-Scrollie

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(1) HAPPY THIRD! Sunday Morning Transport is hosting a summer celebration which begins with this free read – a story by Scott Lynch: “Selected Scenes from the Ecologies of the Labyrinth”.

July marks our third (We can’t believe it’s been two and a half years!) summer — and we’re celebrating with four great free reads. Yes, you read that right, a whole month of free goodness from The Sunday Morning Transport — by Scott Lynch, Margaret Dunlap, Rachel Hartman, and Paolo Bacigalupi. We hope you love these and all our stories as much as we love bringing them to you on Sundays….

(2) HELP NEEDED TO FIGHT CANCER. “Help R. S. A. Garcia Pay for Cancer Expenses” at GoFundMe. People have been responding generously to R.S.A. Garcia’s urgent call for help in order to afford needed blood tests – the medical reasons for which are detailed in the updates at the link. Garcia recent won a Nebula for the short story, “Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200”.

…And thank you all for getting me to $48,000 in just about a week! Amazing!

I still have a way to go to get to $55,000 so I’ve moved my appointments back a week to try to get enough funds to pay for them.

For now, I was able to do some blood tests and I hope that they’ll give clearer answers. My oncologist has also switched some of my meds, but I had to keep taking the Zoladex, so I’m still getting some heart symptoms. Hopefully, we’ll figure out what’s going on there soon.

Please share and donate if you can. The sooner I reach my goal the sooner I can complete my other investigative procedures and work on treatment….

(3) INFORMATION PREVENTION. [Item by Steven French.] The internet has caused the biggest crisis in human communication since the arrival of the printing press, the award-winning dystopian author Naomi Alderman has said. “Naomi Alderman: ‘Whatever happened to talking? We’ve lost the ability to swap ideas’” in the Guardian.

The writer of The Power, a 2016 feminist science fiction novel, said we are living through the “third information crisis”, in which digital communications have eroded in-person communication and entrenched disagreement.

“If you have a person in front of you, you can have a conversation and, ideally, through sharing experience and empathy, you may come to some new position that recognises what you’re both bringing to that conversation,” she said. “This can never happen with a book, TV show, tweet, someone’s ranty YouTube video. Increasingly, I think that leads us to be vulnerable to a kind of fundamentalism, to ‘I’ve got my view and I’m sticking to it’.”

Alderman is exploring the impact of the internet on human communication for a new five-part documentary series for BBC Radio 4, The Third Information Crisis, which begins tomorrow….

(4) BID ON BLOCH’S HUGO. Robert Bloch’s 1959 HUGO AWARD for Best Short Story is up for bids on eBay. Of added interest is that the seller is “Official Dave Hester Store” – Hester being one of the regulars on the old Storage Wars show.

17th World S F Convention 1959 HUGO AWARD – Best Short Story 1958 – THE HELLBOUND TRAIN by Robert Bloch Trophy

We believe this award came from Mr. Robert Bloch estate.

Robert Bloch (1917-1994) American fiction writer primarily of crime psychological horror and fantasy, much of which has been dramatized for radio, cinema and television. He also wrote a relatively small amount of science fiction. His writing career lasted 60 years, including more than 30 years in television and film. Best known as the writer of Psycho (1959), the basis for the film of the same name by Alfred Hitchcock.

“That Hell-Bound Train” is a fantasy short story by American writer Robert Bloch. It was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in September 1958 and in 1959 Robert Bloch was awarded the 1959 HUGO AWARD.

The Hugo Award is an annual literary award for the best science fiction or fantasy works and achievements of the previous year, given at the World Science Fiction Convention and chosen by its members. The award is administered by the World Science Fiction Society.

Award is 8-3/4″W x 8-3/4″D x 19″H including the 4-3/4″H wooden stand.

Award is in good vintage condition with signs wear, peeling, discoloration and a tarnish to the plaque. There are small chips and scratches to the wooden base. Please see photos.

(5) PROOF OF LIFE. Kevin Standlee has posted video of the Westercon 76 Business Meeting.

The Westercon 76 Business Meeting received the results of Westercon 78 (2026) Site Selection, ratified all of the pending amendments to the Westercon Bylaws passed on from the Westercon 75 Business Meeting, and passed two new bylaw amendments that clarify the official name of the convention and broaden the suggested range of dates for holding the convention. As with the previous wording that was in the Bylaws, the suggested range of dates (anytime during the months of May, June, and/or July) are not required, only suggested. These two bylaw amendments will be up for ratification at Westercon 77, which will be held in conjunction with BayCon 2025. The exact wording of the Bylaw amendments will be published in the minutes of the Westercon 76 Business Meeting and the 2024-25 version of the Westercon Bylaws, Standing Rules, and Draft Agenda for 2025, which we will publish when the Business Meeting staff releases it, which we expect to happen before the end of July 2024.

(6) BAYCON TO HOST WESTERCONS 77 AND 78. [Item by Kevin Standlee.] BayCon will host both Westercon 77 (2025) and 78 (2026), after the members of Westercon 76 in Utah voted to award the right to host Westercon 78 to a bid from BayCon’s parent non-profit organization. BayCon 2025 was previously awarded the right to host Westercon 77, as announced on June 14, 2024.

19 members of Westercon 76 in Utah voted in the 2026 Site Selection election. BayCon received 13 of the votes cast. The summary of votes is available here.

The write-in bid for BayCon 2026 applied to a bid filed by the Society for the Promotion of Speculative Fiction on July 2, 2024.

A more detailed breakdown of votes cast per day will be in the minutes of the Westercon 76 Business Meeting

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 7, 1968 – Jeff VanderMeer, 56.

By Paul Weimer: In some ways, Jeff Vandermeer, although he didn’t know it, helped get me into reviewing and criticism. Back around 2000, I started to get interested seriously in science fiction and fantasy and the field of SFF. I think I’ve mentioned before elsewhere that this is when I cast my first Hugo ballots, was reading Locus assiduously, etc.  I also got interested in reviewing. 

Jeff VanderMeer

In those wild days, getting into reviewing and getting arcs and books and getting involved in that community was easy, although no one would really see my work extensively for years. I was mostly reading reviews and not writing my own at this point, though. One of the reviews read in a newsletter was for City of Saints and Madmen, by Jeff Vandermeer. Given my usual tastes, this book sounded off-the-wall bonkers and way outside my comfort zone. But the reviewer, whose name sadly I cannot remember alas, convinced me of two things: I wanted to write reviews myself, to help be a signpost to others. And, germane to this birthday, to try Jeff Vandermeer.

I was stunned by the visceral, immersive, New Weird experience that City of Saints and Madmen, in its original form gave me.  I bought the later edition, too (sadly both were lost in book moves) and started reading Vandemeer ever since. He does sit outside my typical comfort zone on a number of levels (much like M John Harrison does) but his fearlessness in trailblazing the New Weird, to this day, makes him one of my must-reads. 

While I still have a strong affinity for Ambergris and the stories and novels set in it, I think my favorite is the braided, twisting, self-referential and convoluted and so out there Annihilation trilogy. I think that, even more than Ambergris, is the work that you hand someone who wants to try Vandermeer.  If you like this, you will like the rest of his work. If not, you will not.  The movie adaptation, which takes from more than just the first novel, is an interesting adaptation. It sits somewhat skewed from the main texts, but given the whole New Weird aesthetic and mindset…it makes it a good movie FOR that reason. 

And Vandermeer, along with his wife Ann, is a pretty damn good anthologist, in the bargain. (The Time Traveler’s Almanac my favorite of these.)

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • Eek! settles a dispute. Did you know Godzilla has big enough hands to play this game?
  • Foxtrot proposes new shows.
  • The Argyle Sweater shows what cowpokes and writers have in common.

(9) SIMAK: A SERIES OF Q&AS. Joachim Boaz shares the clippings in “Exploration Log 4: Six Interviews with Clifford D. Simak (1904-1988)” at Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations. They include a Luna interview conducted by the brilliant interviewer Paul Walker, and an interview in Janice Bogstad and Jeanne Gomoll’s Janus conducted by Bill Brohaugh.

The first interview is:

Scholar and author James E. Gunn recorded a video interview with Clifford D. Simak in 1971 at World Science Fiction Convention in Boston.

Simak charts his earliest writing efforts, including his lost first manuscript, and his first experiences reading science fiction. He read Haggard, H. G. Wells, and Poe. And then in high school he picked up an early issue of Amazing felt a thrill that such a magazine existed. Soon he realized that he too could write for the magazines:at that time “there wasn’t too much competition and if a man could write anywhere near complementary [to what was in the magazine] you could sell.” He compares the early scene to the present in which “it’s much harder for a young writer to break in.”

He traces his early career across Midwest–North Dakota, Minnesota, etc.–as a newspaperman. His perambulatory existence prevented him from continuing his SF writing as “there’s no such thing as an eight-hour day or a 40-hour week” at the smaller newspapers. A more stable newspaper job in Minneapolis allowed him to return to science fiction. He discusses his influential letter exchange with a young Asimov, his early pulp work, and the restrictions that knowing too much about a topic places on the imagination. Simak conveys pride that his stories for John Campbell, Jr. placed “ordinary characters” in strange science fictional situations….

(10) DID YOU MISS MIDNIGHT? “George Clooney’s Post-Apocalyptic Space Movie Shouldn’t Have Flown Under the Radar” argues Collider.

…The Midnight Sky seemed to come and go without much attention, but it’s not hard to see why. It’s a film that features beautiful works of visual effects (which even received an Academy Award nomination), yet wasn’t available to be seen in theaters due to the theatrical shutdowns related to the COVID-19 virus. Additionally, audiences may have been skeptical about a cold, realistic version of a post-apocalyptic event when they were dealing with their own mental health issues during the height of the lockdown. Factors out of Clooney’s control prevented the film from getting the rollout it deserved. But The Midnight Sky is a beautiful examination of human achievement that shows just how grandiose the science fiction genre can be….

(11) LIVING 22 MINUTES IN THE PAST. FOR 378 DAYS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] A trip to “Mars“ has ended for 4 NASA crewmembers. For over a year, they lived in isolation in a simulated Mars habitat—including an up to 22-minute one-way time delay to communicate with their base “back on Earth.” “Volunteers who lived in a NASA-created Mars replica for over a year have emerged” – NPR has the story.

Four volunteers who spent more than a year living in a 1,700-square-foot space created by NASA to simulate the environment on Mars have emerged.

The members of the Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog mission — or CHAPEA — walked through the door of their habitat at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Saturday to a round of applause.

“Hello. It’s actually just so wonderful to be able to say hello to you all,” CHAPEA commander Kelly Haston said to the assembled crowd.

Haston and the other three crew members — Anca Selariu, Ross Brockwell and Nathan Jones — entered the 3D-printed Mars replica on June 25, 2023, as part of a NASA experiment to observe how humans would fare living on the Red Planet.

The volunteers grew their own vegetables, maintained equipment, participated in so-called Marswalks and faced stressors that actual space travelers to Mars could experience, including 22-minute communication delays with Earth.

The 378-day endeavor was the first of three NASA missions the space agency has planned to test how humans would respond to the conditions and challenges of living on Mars, where it says it could send astronauts as soon as the 2030s. NASA’s second CHAPEA mission is scheduled for the spring of 2025, and the third is slated to begin in 2026….

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

Pixel Scroll 6/29/24 His Soul Swooned As He Heard The Pixels Falling Faintly Through The Universe

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(1) SALUTE TO SFF IN PASADENA MUSEUM OF HISTORY CENTENNIAL. The Pasadena Museum of History is hosting a series of events and exhibits to mark its hundredth year in existence. Several are about the film industry, and two are about sff in particular.

“Watch the Skies!” History of Science Fiction Movies. Thursday, July 25 | 7:00 pm Tickets at the link.

Early glimpses of science fiction films began with movies like A Trip to the Moon (1902)where director George Méliѐs pokes fun at French novelist and poet Jules Verne or in Frankenstein (1931) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) that featured the “mad scientist” character – each of the films never truly showing much science, nor the genre of what people think of as science fiction. Join Nick Smith, co-curator of PMH’s 2018 exhibition Dreaming the Universe: The Intersection of Science, Fiction & Southern California, for this illustrated presentation as he explores the history of science fiction movies. Learn how original science fiction stories came on to the big screen and changed over the years.

Presentation will begin at 7:00 pm; PMH Galleries will be open for viewing at 6:00 pm.

The First Horror Movies. Thursday, October 24 | 7:00 pm. Tickets at the link.

Horror movies go back to the birth of the movie industry with some of the very first films in the genre dating back to 1896. These films also featured the first special effects, which became standard in many horror films for the next 50 years. Join film historian and musicologist Galen Wilkes to meet some of the classic horror characters – Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, and Dorian Gray – as they were first depicted on screen. You’ll also see some of the genre’s very first special effects and learn how they were created.

Presentation will begin at 7:00 pm; PMH Galleries will be open for viewing at 6:00 pm.

(2) PANTHEOLOGY PROVIDES THE THEME. Virtual International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts conference coordinator Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki has announced that “VICFA 3: Pantheology in World-Building and Magic Systems” will run from Wednesday, October 9, through Saturday, October 12, 2024. Guests of Honor are P. Djeli Clark and R.R. Virdi and Guest Scholars Grace Dillon and Rabbi A.D. Lobel. 

The Call for Papers has myriad suggestions. See the timeline and instructions for submission at the link.

We invite analysis of real-world pantheologies rebirthed in literature as well as in some of the most influential games and films of the technical era, including not only the interminable trials of Loki and the recognizable Greek Pantheon fighting Kratos in God of War and each other in Son of Zeus, but what of Zagreus, prince of the Underworld, fighting his way out of his own kingdom in Hades, and cultists striving to birth an Anti-Christ not only in “The Call of Cthulhu” but also in Castlevania, Good Omens, Omen, and Rosemary’s Baby? You are invited to build your presentation on studies from existing scholarship from leaders in the field including Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Grace Dillon, Elaine Pagels, Carol B. Duncan, Helen De Cruz, Joseph Campbell, and Rabbi A.D. Lobel, to name only a few.  Ben Okri’s The Famished Road and Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard show how inextricable these pantheologies are from what we perceive as the physical world, as in popular media such as Marvel’s interpretations and the mythological worldbuilding of Rick Riordan and Neil Gaiman.  Multiple levels of being and reality intertwine in tales such as P. Djeli Clark’s Dead Djinn Universe, R.R. Virdi’s The Tales of Tremaine, Aparna Verma’s The Ravence Trilogy, and Sheree Renee Thomas’s Dark Matter: Reading the Bones.  There are cosmologies to explore in the works of Kwame Mbalia, Claire Coleman, Lee Maracle, Eden Robinson, and Alexis Wright.  You are invited to submit perspectives on the unexpected rivalry between ancient and modern deities in American Gods, analysis of the role of Gwyn, Lord of Sunlight, and the Gods of Anor Londo in Dark Souls, the three goddesses and the Triforce virtues of Power, Courage and Wisdom leagued against the demon king Ganon in The Legend of Zelda, relations between the Old One, the Slayer of Demons, and the Maiden in Black in Demon’s Souls, the Camerata of Transistor, or not only the Ancient Ones, Sephiroth, or Kefka but any of the teeming demi-gods waking from dreams or striving for supremacy in the realms of Lovecraft or Final Fantasy.  This is just a sampling of the vast worlds of topics you may choose to explore as a presenter or attendee at VICFA 3.  As always, participants are encouraged to submit proposals on any topic of interest and specialization whether part of the conference theme or independent of it.

(3) MISSION ACCOMPLISHED? “’Everything ends someday’ — Star Trek: Discovery Fifth Season Overview” by Keith R.A. DeCandido at Reactor.

Some of the most iconic words in science fiction television are those uttered by William Shatner at the top of every episode of the original Star Trek: “These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise—its five-year mission…” The intention was that Kirk’s ship would be out in space for five years exploring the unknown. Alas, the show was cancelled after three years.

In fact, none of the shows that spun off of Trek hit the five-year mark exactly—until now. The animated series was only two seasons, TNG, DS9, and Voyager all lasted seven years, while Enterprise and Picard fell short at four and three, respectively, the latter by design, the former not so much.

However, thanks to the surprising decision by CBS/Paramount to cancel Discovery after five seasons, we finally have a show that lives up to that nearly-six-decades-old voiceover.

And what a long strange trip it’s been.

It’s not entirely clear why the show was cancelled. By all accounts, Discovery was doing fine by streaming standards. Of course, it’s also possible that’s why it was cancelled. The resolution to the actors and writers going on strike last year included the studios being more forthcoming with two things regarding the success of streaming shows: data and money. This is also why Prodigy is no longer on Paramount+, because the corporation getting a tax break was considered more important than the branding of Paramount+ as the exclusive home of Star Trek—which is supposed to be a major reason for shelling out for the service in the first place….

(4) SCENES FOR TEENS. [Item by Steven French.] “Children’s and teens roundup – the best new picture books and novels”; the Guardian’s best new books for kids and teens includes a number of genre related offerings, including:

Dungeon Runners: Hero Trial by Kieran Larwood and Joe Todd-Stanton, Nosy Crow, £7.99
Part gnome, part dwarf, young gnorf Kit has always dreamed of being a Dungeon Runner – even though he’s so small. When an unexpected space in the League opens up, can Kit’s misfit team make it through the dungeon’s mazes, puzzles and terrifying monsters to kickstart their Dungeon Runner journey? Highly illustrated, humorous and immediately enthralling, this first volume in a new series will appeal to 7+ D&D fans in particular.

(5) TRUE GRITS. Matt Mitchell imagines “If Inside Out Was Southern”.

Riley Beth moved to Montgomery and is taking her first trip to Waffle House with her brand new Southern emotions, Sass, Hospitality, Comfort, and more.

(6) LET’S CELEBRATE ONE MORE BIRTHDAY FROM YESTERDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

June 28, 1974 — Deborah Grabien, 70. Deborah Grabien who turned seventy yesterday is awesome. So how do I know that? It’s because she sends me the most kick ass chocolate fudge. She really does. 

Well and for a variety of other reasons that I’ll detail here as well. Let’s start with her with her extraordinary ability at writing music reviews. 

Deborah Grabien

She’s deeply, madly in love with Sixties folk music which is why she written them quite a number a number of them for Green Man including her “’Trad Boys, Trad Boys, Whatcha Gonna Do….?’ Liege & Lief remembered” essay in which she said “So when he handed me this interesting-looking album and I turned the cover over and saw ‘Matty Groves’ listed, I took my copy of Magical Mystery Tour off the turntable and put the new one on. I dropped the needle, heard the first notes of ‘Come All Ye,’ and then Sandy’s voice. It was right about then that my head exploded: Omigawd, who are these people, this is perfection!”

And then there’s her take on Steeleye Span’s Dodgy Bastards album nearly a half century after the band was formed in 1969: “The band is as tight as it ever was, but I would have been surprised had they not been, with the remaining core of Liam Genocky, Rick Kemp and the incomparable Maddy Prior in place. The rhythm section is brilliant. Genocky has lost nothing to the years; he’s as solid as a rock holding down the band’s intricate rhythms, and Rick Kemp manages to produce both thunder and groove on the bass. Jessie May Smart has a light, gorgeous touch on the fiddle, and the guitars and mandolin are seamlessly integrated.”

Now let’s turn to her exemplary mystery series, the first being the Haunted Ballads series which is decidedly genre as each novel shares the title with a well-known standard of traditional British folk music, and each interweaves the plot of the song with the plot of the ghost story. 

The first, The Weaver and The Factor Maid which I reviewed in my look at the series, where  Ringan Laine, architectural expert, folklorist and leading light of the English folk music scene, is stiffed for a home restoration fee, he’s offered a home to placate him. Ringan accepts, thus becoming the owner of Lumbe’s, an 18th century cottage on the Somerset estate of Albert Wychsale, baron and owner of Wychsale House, just outside the ancient town of Glastonbury. What neither Ringan nor his ladyfriend, theatrical director Penelope Wintercraft-Hawkes, realizes at first is that they’re not the only tenants of Lumbe’s. There’s an uninvited resident, a beautiful young woman with a tendency to appear and disappear at odd, inconvenient times.

And Deborah gives us her favorite excerpt from that novel

Beside the kitchen wall was a flight of stairs.  Ringan, instinctively and unnecessarily ducking his head, made his way up toward the first floor, where bedrooms and a bath had been added.   Sunlight splashed across the wooden risers, dappling Ringan’s jeans and trainers with colour.

The stairs bent halfway up, forming a small landing, where someone had added a lovely round window.  Ringan looked around for a lightswitch, and found none; since the window seemed to be the stairwell’s only source of light, getting around at night might prove bothersome.  He thought about bumped heads and twisted ankles, made a mental note to ask his landlord about wiring, and remembered that the landlord in question was himself. He grinned ruefully.  This “it’s your problem, mate, you’d best fix it” business would take some getting used to…

He turned the bend in the stairs, headed for the first floor, and stopped as if he’d been hit with a bullet.

The shaft of cold, as icy as it was unexpected, stabbed him between the shoulder-blades. He was standing in a pool of sunlight, the temperature was over seventy, and he’d just been thinking about opening some windows to cool the place off. Yet, for one incredulous moment, he’d felt as if he’d walked into a  meat locker. Every hair on his body bristled, and his knees went rubbery. And he suddenly wanted to burst into tears.  The shock was enormous.  What in hell…?

The cold faded as quickly as it had come, easing in the blink of an eye to a soft rush of cool air before dying away. There was, there seemed to be, a soft touch against him, the brush of something: breath, fabric, fingertips? He didn’t know; it was too indistinct for identification, and gone too soon.  For a moment, Ringan thought he’d heard a sigh behind him.

Her second series, the JP Kincaid Chronicles, is not genre but it’s also music in nature. Take one middle-aged rock and roll guitarist, two women. Welcome to the life of John “JP” Kinkaid, guitarist for Hall of Fame rock band Blacklight, has a few issues. There are as I said two women in his life: Bree, his fiercely private partner of twenty-five years, who he fell in love with while she was still a teenager, and Cilla, his long-estranged but still legal wife, whom he’s never been able to completely let go of. Then there’s his multiple sclerosis, a disease whose unpredictable nature complicates both his everyday life and his career. That’s your premise for series. 

The first five of this series are reviewed by a friend of hers, Sunny Solomon, of Bookin’ With Sunny: “Deborah Grabien’s JP Kinkaid Chronicles”.

Now here’s the excellent passage she selected from Rock & Roll Never Forgets for you to read… 

The first thing I saw when I walked into a cheerful little front room with pitched ceilings and framed pictures of people I’ve admired my whole life all over the walls wasn’t Bulldog Moody, it was his guitar.

I walked in through the front door. Like I said, I was sweating and nervous, because meeting someone you’ve idolised can really break your heart. But I stopped halfway in, because there it was, sitting there on a handmade stand that looked to be as old as the guitar itself.

  “Gordon Bennett!“

 I stopped so suddenly, Bree ran straight into me, and nearly knocked me down. I didn’t even notice. All the attention I had to spare was aimed straight at that guitar.

 I’m a Gibson guitar fan. For a long time, it took a lot to get me to bother with any electric guitar that wasn’t a Gibson – acoustics are a different thing, but with electrics, it’s been Gibson, straight down the line. I’ve actually been a spokesman for the Les Paul line. One of the things on my dance card over the next month or so was a visit to Nashville; we were having discussions, not only about finally making me chambered touring copies of my two favourite Pauls, but about launching a signature JP Kinkaid model. Until Bree had paid a local Bay Area luthier a lot of money to build me a gorgeous lightweight electric guitar called Little Queenie as a wedding present, the nearest I’d come to anything that wasn’t made by Gibson was a Zemaitis custom.

So, yeah, I’m susceptible to Gibsons. But there are guitars, and then there was this, because unless I was completely mistaken, this was the only one of its kind.

“Hey.” The voice jerked me out of what was threatening to become a complete trance. I’d been right – same bell as Sallie’s, but this one was old, cracked round the edges, and very friendly. It was also really amused, and that’s what froze me. “You like that axe, son? Because you lookin’ at her like you were wanting to buy her a drink.”

(7) COMICS SECTION.

(8) THE LEARNING CURVE SUFFERS A FLAT. PRINT Magazine’s Steve Heller mourns “When Competency Is Going, Going, Gone”.

…If only my procedural memory was effective enough to work with digital design tools that I had once learned and subsequently forgot. No such luck, I suffer from techno amnesia….

…Fifteen years ago I retired from my art director job at The New York Times that required basic computer skills. When I left, I left behind my private office, comfy chair, trusty desktop computer … and with in a few weeks almost all of my computer design reflexes that had accumulated over the years of practice. While art director of the Book Review for almost three decades, I learned dozens of methods and technologies—from how to prepare images for the engraver when we printed on letterpress; to how to use an non-design-friendly Harris terminal to set type when the newspaper switched over to photo type; to preparing page comps on the early Apple Classic and Macs mastering Quark, before switching over to InDesign (and its assorted upgrades) that enabled me to build press-ready pages populated with text, Photoshop and Illustrator files. I learned rote basics—enough to get me through the workflow on any given day—but never mastered advanced upgrades (like linking text to image, style sheets and other now-routine stuff). Still, I was functionally competent.

However, when I returned my ID card to HR, my procedural memory was wiped clean. It was like the episode of “Black Mirror” where a man is blocked from contact with people and only sees their static shapes moving about. The erasure was so sudden that the late-great neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks could have used me as a case study….

(9) INCOMING! Another worry for future Mars colonists! “New class of Mars quakes reveals daily meteorite strikes” at Phys.org.

…An international team of researchers, co-led by ETH Zurich and Imperial College London, has derived the first estimate of global meteorite impacts on Mars using seismic data. Their findings indicate that between 280 to 360 meteorites strike the planet each year, forming impact craters greater than 8 meters (about 26 feet) across…

(10) WINTER IS COMING. Gizmodo dares fans to “Gaze Into the Immaculate Snow Buttcheeks of Red One’s Horrifying First Trailer”.

…Starting off with a swole Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons) lifting weights (to keep those cookie calories down, presumably) with the help of the commander of the ELF Task Force—played by Johnson as “The Rock if he were Santa’s bodyguard”—isn’t much of a stretch for an action movie, sure. It’s more the incomprehensible series of plot slop that follows, which leaves us wondering what this is movie trying to be, outside of a Christmas version of Taken? The buff-butt snowmen fight scene on the beach is only the tip of the head-scratching choices here. Take a look for yourself in the trailer below…

(11) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Deadline encourages us to “Watch First Trailer For Indian Sci-Fi Epic ‘Kalki 2898 AD’”.

The first trailer has just dropped for Nag Ashwin’s Kalki 2898 AD, the anticipated Indian sci-fi epic starring Amitabh Bachchan, Kamal Hassan, Prabhas, Deepika Padukone and Disha Patani in key roles. Described as a “true pan-Indian film”, the film follows a modern-day avatar of Hindu god Vishnu, who is believed to have descended to Earth to protect the world from evil forces. 

The VFX-heavy project, which is produced by Vyjayanthi Movies, is a multilingual mythology-inspired sci-fi set in the future and is set to be released in cinemas worldwide on June 27. It’s been touted as one of the most expensive Indian films made to date, with a budget sitting in the $72M region…. 

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

Pixel Scroll 5/19/24 Come For The Chocolate, Stay For The Pixels

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(1) SMALL WONDERS IS KICKSTARTING YEAR 2. Cislyn Smith and Stephen Granade have launched a Kickstarter to fund the year two of Small Wonders, a monthly online SFF magazine for flash fiction and poetry.

For the past year, Small Wonders has published original and reprint flash fiction and narrative poetry, all tinged with the wonder of other worlds both science fictional and fantastic. Now the magazine is raising funds to cover Year Two, with an initial goal of $11,000. Stretch goals include publishing a Best of Year One collection, an issue guest edited by Premee Mohamed and Chimedum Ohaegbu, and more. Backers can get discounted yearly subscriptions; a Kickstarter-only mini issue with new works by Nino Cipri, Myna Chang, Jennifer Mace, Avra Margariti, and more; and pins and stickers themed to stories and poems from Year One. The Kickstarter runs through June 3.

Each issue of Small Wonders contains three original pieces of flash fiction, three new poems, and three re-printed flash fiction stories. Issues are published as ebooks (mobi, epub, and pdf) at the first of the month, and subscribers can receive every story and poem in their inboxes as they’re published on the website.

The first year of Small Wonders succeeded beyond Cislyn and Stephen’s expectations. It published new authors and poets as well as familiar names such as John Wiswell, Ali Trotta, Premee Mohamed, and Mary Soon Lee. and included multiple Rhysling-nominated poems. They’re excited to see what year two will bring, and hope you’ll be a part of it through the Kickstarter.

(2) VOTE FOR BEST FRENCH SFF SHORT STORY OF 2022. SFSF Boréal invited readers during the month of March to nominate the best French-speaking sff short stories that were published in 2022 in Canada. The four finalists for the Prix Aurora-Boréal have been announced. Members of SFSF Boréal are invited to vote for the best story at this link. Votes must be cast by June 1. The finalists are:

  • Blouin, Geneviève, “La Vie secrète des carapaces” (Solaris 223)
  • Côté, Philippe-Aubert, “À l’Ère des Jumeaux errants” (Les Six Brumes)
  • Kurtness, J.D., “Bienvenue, Alyson” (Hannenorak)
  • Vonarburg, Élisabeth, “Into White”, (Les Six Brumes)

The Congrès Boréal will be held in Montréal, Québec from September 20-22.

(3) THE N-WORD. Wrath James White gives his conclusive answer to using the n-word in dialog: “Make It Make Sense” at Words of Wrath.

Wrath James White

I have been asked several times lately about non-Black authors using the n-word when writing character dialog. Because I am, frankly, weary of answering this question, I decided to answer it here, once and for all. 

So, here’s my answer. It is appropriate for a White author to put the n-word in a character’s mouth if it isn’t done gratuitously (ala Quinton Tarantino) where the word is just shoehorned in unnecessarily to sound cool or edgy. If the dialog feels natural and non stereotypical. If the characters themselves aren’t one dimensional caricatures and are the type of people who would use the word as part of their everyday vernacular. If it’s the appropriate word to use in the moment and another word wouldn’t work just as well, then by all means do it. Wherever another word would be just as effective, don’t do it. 

For example, if your story takes place in the 90s or early oughts, then “dog”, “playa”, “gangsta”, “playboy”, “sistah” and “bruh” would all work just as well in most situations where one Black person is talking to another. Using the n-word in place of these words is a choice and the author should definitely question their motives for making that choice. That is unless you are writing a racist character. 

Obviously, it would be absurd to have a racist character avoid using the n-word unless he’s a closeted racist. Still, even a racist doesn’t use the word in every sentence, and might even use other more creative pejoratives. And, most racists are not blatant in their racism….

…The bottom line, I can’t grant you a pass to use the n-word. Nothing I have said above will guarantee that you won’t get the taste slapped out of your mouth for including it in yourwriting. But, if you do find it necessary to use it, just like I said in a previous article about grossout and gore, make it make sense. Make it feel natural and not like a teenager or adolescent trying to shock their parents. If you don’t think you can pull that off, use another word.

(4) LEFT BEHIND? “Some fight change, while others adapt. It’s a Toy Story sort of deal,” says Ronald Kelly in “Woody, Buzz, & the Changing of the Guard” at Fear County Chronicle.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about my place in an ever-growing, ever-changing horror genre. How it once was, how it is now, and if Ol’ Ron has the willpower and stamina to hang in there and keep up the pace with all the new and wildly talented authors who are flooding a market that was once relatively small and limited, both in ranks and growth. I’ve also been thinking a lot about the Pixar movie Toy Story….

You see, I’m Woody. Most of us veteran horror authors are. Woody is old-fashioned, leery of change, and a little hesitant to hand over the reins to anyone else because he likes the position he’s held for so long (Andy’s favorite and the leader of the toys). Deep down inside, he believes that he deserves to retain that position, perhaps indefinitely. Could be that he was pretty special and popular in the past, along with some of his peers (Woody’s Roundup stars Jessie, Bullseye, and even Stinky Pete in Toy Story 2). Woody likes how it is in Andy’s Room because it’s familiar, comfortable, and safe. He feels like he’s the head honcho there… not necessarily giving the orders but holding some measure of respect and authority among those around him. Even the mouthy and cantankerous Mister Potato Head looks to him for stability and guidance….

…Truthfully, very few veteran writers feel contempt and suspicion toward the swell of new storytellers bursting on the scene, but unfortunately some do. They feel challenged by progress and diversity and aren’t receptive to those who want a piece of the action. They also don’t approve of how the rules have changed, and how the dynamic of the writing world is evolving at a rapid pace. The mere thought of the Changing of the Guard horrifies them. We’ve seen it happen in social media in the past few years; an old-dog author bristles at the sudden influx of new talent in the genre and cries foul, sometimes in very volatile and unflattering ways. Some have even gone as far as losing all respect in the genre they helped trailblaze and end up being cast from the ranks for their nearsightedness, prejudice, and insolence….

(5) IN THE BEGINNING. “A Closer Look At Great Animated Title Sequences” at CartoonBrew.

In honor of Saul Bass’s birthday this month, we’re taking a look at some of the greatest animated title sequences from live-action movies (the topic of great credits sequences in animated movies is a subject for another time)….

… As Walt Disney suggested above, opening credits in the early days of movies tended to be straightforwardly informational, often created quickly by in-house art departments superimposing text over static background paintings. Even so, there are a handful of movies from the 1930s and ’40s that contain brief bits of animation during the credits. One great example is the cartoon opening of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). This scene is frequently attributed to Walter Lantz, but was actually directed by Dave Fleischer….

… Maybe the all-time classic title sequence comes from The Pink Panther (1963), by DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, which not only introduced a cartoon star but also introduced one of the best movie themes ever composed (by Henry Mancini). Looney Tunes director Friz Freleng supervised the sequence, while Freleng’s longtime layout artist Hawley Pratt designed the panther and Ken Harris primarily animated him. Producer David DePatie remembered the movie’s premiere: “The memories of that night will remain with me forever. The projector started to roll and as the Panther first appeared there was a ripple of laughter from the audience which quickly became whistles and roars of approval as the Panther toyed with the various titles. At the conclusion of the main title, the crowd went bananas.”…

(6) REESE WITHERSPOON, LITERARY TASTEMAKER. “When her career hit a wall, the Oscar-winning actor built a ladder made of books — for herself, and for others.” Link bypasses Paywall, courtesy Brad Verter: “Inside Reese Witherspoon’s Literary Empire”

…First and foremost, she wants books by women, with women at the center of the action who save themselves. “Because that’s what women do,” she said. “No one’s coming to save us.”

Witherspoon, 48, has now been a presence in the book world for a decade. Her productions of novels like “Big Little Lies,” “Little Fires Everywhere” and “The Last Thing He Told Me” are foundations of the binge-watching canon. Her book club picks reliably land on the best-seller list for weeks, months or, in the case of “Where the Crawdads Sing,” years. In 2023, print sales for the club’s selections outpaced those of Oprah’s Book Club and Read With Jenna, according to Circana Bookscan, adding up to 2.3 million copies sold.

So how did an actor who dropped out of college (fine, Stanford) become one of the most influential people in an industry known for being intractable and slightly tweedy?

It started with Witherspoon’s frustration over the film industry’s skimpy representation of women onscreen — especially seasoned, strong, smart, brave, mysterious, complicated and, yes, dangerous women…

(7) PUBLIC FROCKING. Attention 18th-century re-enactors! “You Can’t Live in the Past, Even in a Period-Accurate Frock” contends the New York Times, although they know where you can get one.

In 2012, not long after he decided to dedicate his professional life to 18th-century wares, Casey Samson spent a weekend at a colonial-era fair in Bardstown, Ky., selling leather mugs out of a tent.

On his first night there, Mr. Samson sat alone by a crackling campfire, smelled the wood smoke and felt as if he had been transported to a different time. He knew then, he said, that he had made the right choice.

Today, Mr. Samson and his wife, Abbie, own and operate Samson Historical, a three-story business that doubles as a pseudo-museum on the downtown square in Lebanon, Ind., about 30 miles northwest of Indianapolis.

On a recent morning, Mr. Samson, 32, walked into a small warehouse tucked behind the retail space and waxed poetic about the shop’s “great wall of waistcoats.” But there was more: “These are original sugar dippers.” And: “One of Abbie’s passions is clay pipes.” And: “All right, so: gun flints.”

There were breeches and bonnets, frocks and cloaks, candles and lanterns, hip kidneys (for extra support) and bum rolls (for that perfect silhouette). And while Samson Historical has 10 full-time employees and manufactures its own merchandise, it also works with about 40 artisans from trades that are teetering on the edge of extinction: blacksmiths, woodworkers, glass blowers, horners. A fifth-generation pipe maker from Germany handcrafts the store’s pipes.

“A lot of what we do,” Mr. Samson said, “is trying to help keep these things alive.”…

(8) MAYBE YOU WONDERED. “How the ‘B Movie’ Got Its Name” at MSN.com.

When the legendary filmmaker Roger Corman died on May 9 at the age of 98, obituaries dubbed him “the King of the B Movies”—or, even more snappily, “King of the B’s.” He earned that sobriquet by churning out hundreds of low-budget productions, often sensationalistic “exploitation films” or genre fare like horror or science fiction….

In the silent era, motion picture studios began using a tiered approach to categorize productions. When Adolph Zukor founded his Famous Players film company in 1912, he used a three-way classification. As Gerald Mast recounted in his 1971 book “A Short History Of The Movies,” Zukor initially divided his pictures into “Class A (with stage stars and stage properties, the artsy films); Class B (with established screen players); and Class C (cheap, quick features).” Mary Pickford started as a “B” actress in 1914, but her movies quickly proved more popular than Zukor’s “Class A” productions.

A two-tiered system with “Class A” and “Class B” films became the industry standard, catching on during the Great Depression when the “double feature” offered two-for-one pricing to attract customers. The main feature would have the prestigious stars and high production values, while the “B” feature would be an inexpensive, quickly produced genre film like a Western. Studios set up “B units” to produce second features, and the slapdash “B movies” were aptly nicknamed “quickies” or “cheapies.”…

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born May 19, 1946 — André the Giant.  (Died 1993.) This Birthday for André René Roussimoffwho performed as André the Giant came about because (a) I really, really like The Princess Bride film and have seen it way too many times, and (b) I thought that he was charming in it as Fezzik. That said, I knew nothing about him and all his other performances, or his life story, at all.

He was a French professional wrestler of impressive height, seven feet and four inches to be precise. He would wrestle his entire life right up until he died at age forty-six of congestive heart failure after an apparent heart attack in his sleep in the Paris hotel he was staying at in order to attend his father’s funeral. It was likely associated with his untreated acromegaly which had been diagnosed some twenty-five years earlier.

His first genre role was being Bigfoot on The Six Million Dollar Man on “The Secret of Bigfoot, Part 1” and “The Secret of Bigfoot Part 2”. Naturally I’m giving you a photo of him in that role. 

Next up is being the Monster in “Heaven Is in Your Genes” on Greatest American Hero. Monster, just Monster? So, what did he look like there? Ahhh…. They apparently didn’t a budget for creating a monster which explains the generic name. I’m giving you a photo anyway so you can see what he looked like sans makeup. 

Andre the Giant on Greatest American Hero

He got to be in a film with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Conan the Destroyer. He played Dagoth the Dreaming God, the main antagonist of Conan. For some reason, he was uncredited. Considering what he looks like in the film, it was easy for him to go uncredited. 

Andre the Giant as Dagoth

And that brings us to his best and last genre role, that of Fezzik, the giant in The Princess Bride. He’s played as Goldman describes him in his novel, “Fezzik. The timid, large-hearted and obedient giant who accompanies Vizzini. Fezzik loves rhymes and his friend Inigo, and he is excellent at lifting heavy things.”  

Not a long career, but an interesting one I’d say. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Tom Gauld shared his latest:

(11) SAURON TURNS HIS EYE TO YOUR WALLET. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Palantír viewing room included. Hopefully without a working Palantír just in case Melkor find a way to open the Door of Night. I mean, if you thought Sauron was bad news, you sure don’t want to deal with the OG baddy. “$460, 5,471-piece Lego Barad-dûr set comes for LOTR fans’ wallets in June” at Ars Technica. (See the set in detail at the LEGO® Icons website.)

…Sauron, Base Master of Treachery, will keep his Eye on you from atop the tower, which will actually glow thanks to a built-in light brick. The tower includes a minifig of Sauron himself, plus the Mouth of Sauron, Gollum, and a handful of Orcs.

The Lego Barad-dûr set will launch on June 1 for Lego Insiders and June 4 for everybody else. If you buy it between June 1 and June 7, you’ll also get the “Fell Beast” bonus set, with pose-able wings and a Nazgûl minifig. It doesn’t seem as though this bonus set will be sold separately, making it much harder to buy the nine Nazgûl you would need to make your collection story-accurate….

(12) SPACE AT LAST. “90-year-old Ed Dwight, 5 others blast into space aboard Blue Origin rocket” – NPR has the story. (This was Blue Origin’s 25th mission to space. The New Shepard Mission NS-25 Webcast replay is on YouTube.)

Ed Dwight, the man who six decades ago nearly became America’s first Black astronaut, made his first trip into space at age 90 on Sunday along with five crewmates aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket.

The flawless liftoff from a West Texas launch site marked the first passenger flight in nearly two years for the commercial space venture run by billionaire Jeff Bezos. The approximately 10-minute suborbital flight put Dwight in the history books as the oldest person ever to reach space. He beat out Star Trek actor William Shatner for that honor by just a few months. Shatner was a few months younger when he went up on a New Shepard rocket in 2021.

(13) INDIA’S NEXT MARS MISSION. Space.com says “India’s ambitious 2nd Mars mission to include a rover, helicopter, sky crane and a supersonic parachute”.

India is preparing to launch a family of seemingly sci-fi robots to Mars, perhaps as soon as late 2024.

The Mars Orbiter Mission-2 (MOM-2), or Mangalyaan-2 (Hindi for “Mars Craft”), is set to include a rover and a helicopter, like a robotic NASA duo already on Mars — the Perseverance rover and now-grounded Ingenuity. A supersonic parachute and a sky crane that will lower the rover onto the Martian surface will also be part of Mangalyaan-2, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) officials said last week during a presentation at the Space Applications Centre in Gujarat, India Today reported….

…Media reports from late last year suggest that Mangalyaan-2 will have at least four science instruments designed to study the early history of Mars, analyze its leaking atmosphere, and look for a hypothesized dust ring around the planet generated by its two moons, Phobos and Deimos….

(14) SPEEDING UP TRAVEL TO MARS. “NASA-funded pulsed plasma rocket concept aims to send astronauts to Mars in 2 months” reports Space.com.

An innovative rocket system could revolutionize future deep space missions to Mars, reducing travel time to the Red Planet to just a few months. 

The goal of landing humans on Mars has presented a myriad of challenges, including the need to quickly transport large payloads to and from the distant planet, which, depending on the positions of Earth and Mars, would take almost two years for a round trip using current propulsion technology.The Pulsed Plasma Rocket (PPR), under development by Howe Industries, is a propulsion system designed to be far more efficient than current methods of deep space propulsion, enabling the trip between Earth and the Red Planet to be made in just two months. Specifically, the rocket will have a high specific impulse or Isp, a measure of how efficiently an engine generates thrust. This technology could therefore enable astronauts and cargo to travel to and from Mars more efficiently and rapidly than existing spacecraft, according to a statement from NASA…

(15) THE FINEST SUPERNATURAL TALE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid Moidelhoff over at the Media Death Cult YouTube Channel invites us to consider Algernon Blackwood’s 1907 novelette, ‘The Willows’, as a contender for the grand chief fountainhead of the insidious order.  It did though inspire the likes of H. P. Lovecraft.  You don’t have to buy in to the pronunciation of Danube as ‘dan-noob’ but it is the Moidelhoff way…

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

Pixel Scroll 4/19/24 Pixel And Her Friends

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(1) GET READY FOR SELF-PUBLISHED FANTASY BLOG-OFF 10. The ninth contest is about to wrap up, and sponsor Mark Lawrence warns there will be a quick turnaround to start SPFBO 10:

SPFBO 10 (SPFBOX) will open to entries on Friday the 10th of May 2024 at 1pm GMT. The link will be posted here.

The SPFBO 10 contest will start on the 1st of June 2024.

Since SPFBO 9 filled its 300 slots in ~40 minutes, a different system will be used this year so that people in some time zones don’t have to get up in the middle of the night. The entry form will stay open for 24 hours. After it’s closed 300, manuscripts will be randomly selected from the pool of those who have signed up….

(2) 2024 STURGEON SYMPOSIUM. The Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction will hold the third annual Sturgeon Symposium from October 24-25, 2024. Samuel R. Delany will be there.

We are delighted that Samuel R. Delany has accepted our invitation to speak at the symposium. As an innovative author, Delany has redefined the boundaries of SFF as well as literary criticism through his explorations of language, society, sexuality, and narrative form. This year’s symposium acknowledges his lasting impact on science fiction, speculative fiction, and literary criticism.

Delany will speak on the subject “Samuel R. Delany and Theodore Sturgeon: Exclusion, Loneliness and Difference”.

See the Call for Papers here.

(3) DORAN ILLUSTRATED GOOD OMENS DELAYED. Artist Colleen Doran announced “Good Omens Rescheduled” — to accommodate her recovery from cancer treatment.

A couple of weeks ago, Neil Gaiman gave me a call to let me know he was not worried about me flaming out on Good Omens despite my truly awful 2023, and if I needed more time or some help to please take it. Shortly before that, the folks at Dunmanifestin, the publishing arm of the Terry Pratchett Estate, dropped me a line to say the same.

I was very much hoping I’d spring back to normal life after my cancer treatment was finished, but no. I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. My mental and physical energy comes and goes. I told Neil I need to be working ten hour days but have trouble managing six.

Anyway, I nervously requested the dreaded deadline extension and got it. Frankly should have asked for a big(ger) one months ago, but having never had this kind of health issue before, I didn’t know what to expect re: recovery. Some people spring back quickly, and some don’t. I figure I’m fair to middlin’.

So, the Good Omens release date is set for spring next year…

Gaiman and Wilkins say:

As a team, we collectively support Colleen and the time and space needed to finish the graphic novel after the past year she has been powering on through, and have a quick note from both Neil Gaiman and Rob Wilkins, the manager of the Terry Pratchett Estate:

Neil: “I’ve been amazed and impressed by how much Colleen has done so far, despite dealing with health issues. We are proud of her and her dedication to adapting Good Omens with such care, and look forward to holding the finished books in our hands.”

Rob: “Colleen is doing a fantastic job bringing the graphic novel to life. We’re absolutely delighted with each and every page and it is essential she can work comfortably whilst giving the book the time it deserves. She has our full support and we can’t wait for you to see the results.”

(4) BALTICON SF FILM FESTIVAL. Balticon 58, taking place May 24-27, 2024 will feature the Balticon Sunday Short Science Fiction Film Festival. The festival will include “Night of The Cooters” (2022) produced by George RR Martin from a story by Howard Waldrop, directed by Vincent D’Onofrio.

On the program will be 19 Selections from 10 Countries. The showings run 4.5 hours with two intermissions.  Day rates are available for Sunday. 

(5) SCRAPER, NO SCRAPING! “Amazon is filled with garbage ebooks. Here’s how they get made.” according to Vox.

…Here is almost certainly what was going on: “Kara Swisher book” started trending on the Kindle storefront as buzz built up for Swisher’s book. Keyword scrapers that exist for the sole purpose of finding such search terms delivered the phrase “Kara Swisher book” to the so-called biographer, who used a combination of AI and crimes-against-humanity-level cheap ghostwriters to generate a series of books they could plausibly title and sell using her name.

The biographer in question was just one in a vast, hidden ecosystem centered on the production and distribution of very cheap, low-quality ebooks about increasingly esoteric subjects. Many of them gleefully share misinformation or repackage basic facts from WikiHow behind a title that’s been search-engine-optimized to hell and back again. Some of them even steal the names of well-established existing authors and masquerade as new releases from those writers. According to the Authors Guild, it would be impossible for anyone but Amazon to quantify these books — and that’s not information Amazon is sharing….

… It’s so difficult for most authors to make a living from their writing that we sometimes lose track of how much money there is to be made from books, if only we could save costs on the laborious, time-consuming process of writing them.

The internet, though, has always been a safe harbor for those with plans to innovate that pesky writing part out of the actual book publishing. On the internet, it’s possible to copy text from one platform and paste it into another seamlessly, to share text files, to build vast databases of stolen books. If you wanted to design a place specifically to pirate and sleazily monetize books, it would be hard to do better than the internet as it has long existed…

(6) JOHN G. TRIMBLE (1936-2024). Longtime LASFSian John Trimble, husband of Bjo Trimble, died April 19.  Lora Boehm, his daughter, made the announcement on Facebook. The Fancyclopedia notes that he co-chaired Westercon 18 and chaired Westercon 23, He worked on several Equicons, chairing one.

John Trimble in 2004.

He was a co-founder of the LASFS club newzine, De Profundis, for a time helped edit its genzine Shangri-L’Affaires. He also edited To the Stars, a short-lived newzine backed by Authors Services.

John and Bjo Trimble married in 1960 – having met under Forry Ackerman’s piano during a party at his house. Bruce Pelz published A Fanzine for Bjohn in their honor when they wed. (And paging through a copy at their 40th anniversary party I found it’s a highly entertaining read!)

Bjo and John Trimble at Star Trek: Discovery premiere in 2017.

They were early members of the Society for Creative Anachronism and served on its Board of Directors. Together they were Fan Guests of Honor at ConJosé, the 2002 Worldcon.

Lora’s obituary adds:

…Their 3 children, Kathryn, Lora and Jenn have been a constant joy and the addition of husband to Lora, Jason and Jenn’s husband Chris have completed the family.

In 1966 they found a group of people interested in mediaeval combat and arts. They joined the Society of Creative Anachronism (SCA) . John served 2 terms as a member of it’s board of directors, was a landed Baron of the first Barony. His arms were the very first to be registered with the college of Heralds and both John and Bjo have been members ever since. Later that year he said to his wife, “Gee it’s a shame a good science fiction show like Star Trek is going to be canceled. We should do something about that!” And the same Star Trek campaign was born. For over 58 years John and Bjo Trimble have been ambassadors for science fiction, the space program and the SCA. Meeting and hosting people from all walks of life, all over the world.

John has touched thousands of lives in a way that positive and full of joy. He will be greatly missed.

John Trimble and daughter at CostumeCon 1 (1983). Photo by Carl.
John Trimble wearing “The Glow and Rotate Vest” at CostumeCon 2 (1984). Photo by Carl.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born April 19, 1946 — Tim Curry, 78. Let me note upfront that this is very much not an overview of everything that he’s done but my picks of what I like most. 

So let’s start off with him as Cardinal Richelieu, the corrupt Cardinal who in charge of the Red Guards in The Three Musketeerswhich came out forty-one years ago from Disney. He magnificently costumed as you can see here and had the most devilish beard as well. It’s a wonderfully over the top role that works even that I think he only has than a handful of scenes. It won’t surprise anyone here for me to say he comes to a dramatic and wonderfully flamboyant demise.

Next up must be his role in that film. Need I say which one? I think not. He rose to prominence as Dr. Frank-N-Furter reprising the role he had originated in the 1973 London and 1974 Los Angeles musical stage productions. Good, that output, and that singing. What an amazing performance it was. I’ve seen it a number of times including yes in a theater at midnight. Seattle if memory serves me right. 

Tim Curry in Rocky Horror.

Would you like to know what my absolutely favorite Tim Curry performance is? That would be him in Clue. When I wrote it up here three years back, I noted that “It had a stellar cast of Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, Christopher Lloyd, Michael McKean, Martin Mull. Lesley Ann Warren and Eileen Brennan. Tim Curry played The Butler.”  

Tim Curry in Clue

Such a role it was. Hyperkinetic, full of Bugs Bunny worthy action on his part and some of the best bouncing off all walls possible dialogue ever said by a Butler.

Siskel and Ebert hated the three alternative endings as different theatres originally got one of three though eventually all theatres got all of them. It still bombed. 

My final is him as Gomez Addams in Addams Family Reunion. Not perhaps the first person that you’d think of for the role given John Astin originated the role and Raul Julia had played him twice to that date, each being sharp-dressed gentleman, but he turned out to a rather splendid choice first the third outing as the director Tony Payne wanted this version of the character to be weird and Curry does weird oh very well.  

Tim Curry as Gomez Addams.

So there’s my choices. So what’s your favorite role by him? 

(8) MORE FALLOUT. Variety tells us “’Fallout’ Renewed for Season 2 at Amazon”.

“Fallout” has been renewed for Season 2 at Amazon Prime Video.

The announcement comes after Variety reported that a second season was set to receive $25 million in tax credits by relocating shooting to the state of California.

Based on the video game franchise of the same name, the series is set two hundred years after the apocalypse. The official description states it follows “the gentle denizens of luxury fallout shelters that are forced to return to the irradiated hellscape their ancestors left behind—and are shocked to discover an incredibly complex, gleefully weird, and highly violent universe waiting for them.”

(9) AVENGERS AND OTHERS ASSEMBLE. Here’s an amusing video – we’ll call it ”Superheroes stop for a traffic light”.

(10) A REASON TO MAKE A MARTIAN ODYSSEY. “NASA’s downed Ingenuity helicopter has a ‘last gift’ for humanity — but we’ll have to go to Mars to get it” says Live Science.

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter has beamed back its final message to Earth, which included a heart-warming goodbye to mission scientists. The record-breaking robot will now spend the rest of its days collecting data that could be used in future Mars missions — but only if future robots or astronauts go all the way to the Red Planet to get it.

The pigeon-size helicopter, or rotorcraft, first landed on the Red Planet on Feb. 18, 2021, alongside the Perseverance rover, and it successfully completed the first-ever powered flight on an alien world on April 19 of the same year. The Ingenuity mission’s initial goal was to fly five missions across 30 days. But the tiny chopper ended up flying 72 times on Mars, spending more than two hours in the air and traveling 14 times farther than initially planned, according to a statement by NASA.

According to NASA:

…If a critical electrical component on Ingenuity were to fail in the future, causing data collection to stop, or if the helicopter eventually loses power because of dust accumulation on its solar panel, whatever information Ingenuity has collected will remain stored on board. The team has calculated Ingenuity’s memory could potentially hold about 20 years’ worth of daily data….

(11) WHAT’S THE RECIPE FOR THESE PLANETS? “Uranus and Neptune aren’t made of what we thought, new study hints” reports Live Science. Whatever you expected to find on Uranus, look again…

Astronomers have long believed that the ice giants Uranus and Neptune are rich in frozen water. However, a new study suggests they may also have tons of methane ice.

The findings could help solve a puzzle about how these icy worlds formed.Much about Uranus and Neptune remains unknown. These ice giant worlds have had just a single spacecraft visitor, Voyager 2, which flew past them in the 1980s. As a result, scientists have only a hazy idea of the ice giants’ compositions — for example, that they contain significant amounts of oxygen, carbon and hydrogen.

… Of the various models they built, the astronomers found that those with methane fit their criteria, with the methane — either in solid chunks or, given the pressure, in a mushy state — forming a thick layer between the hydrogen-helium envelope and the water layer. In some models, methane accounted for 10% of the planet’s mass….

(12) TWO^H^H^H ONE NEW PITCH MEETINGS^H. [Item by Mike Kennedy.]

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

Pixel Scroll 4/16/24 Click For The Scroll Necessities, The Simple Scroll Necessities

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(1) DATLOW Q&A. The Horror Writers Association blog checks in with one the genre’s all-stars: “NUTS & BOLTS: Interview With Ellen Datlow, Editor and Shaper of Multiple Genres”.

Q: What qualities must a story have to qualify as good horror in particular?

A: The things that any good story has plus the building of a sense of unease in the reader, the feeling that something is seriously wrong — dark and creepy and horrific. Horrible things are going to happen or are happening. I don’t expect stories to scare me, but I surely appreciate them making me feel extremely uncomfortable.

Q: What are some of your most common reasons for rejecting stories?

A: Bad writing, boring, tired plots. The words lying there like a dead fish.

(2) 2024 NEBULA CONFERENCE PRELIMINARY PROGRAMMING SCHEDULE HAS BEEN RELEASED. SFWA’s preliminary programming schedule for the 2024 Nebula Conference can be viewed here. The full schedule of events, including office hours and author meet-and-greets is yet to come.

Programming will begin on the 6th of June at 1:30pm PDT and conclude on the 9th of June at 11:30am PDT.

This professional development conference is for all authors and industry professionals within the science fiction, fantasy, and related genres and includes content geared toward creators working in games, comics, prose, poetry, and other mediums of storytelling.

If you volunteered to speak on programming: Thank you! You may have received a programming assignment email–please review this email to accept your assignment. Some assignments, however, will arrive in later waves. If you have not received an assignment you are still being considered. Our programming team will send notifications to all speaking volunteers, including those who were not scheduled, when assignments are complete.

If you submitted a programming idea: We’re grateful for the hundreds of panel topics and suggestions submitted for the conference – if your submission was not scheduled for this conference weekend, we may still be in touch about using it for an online panel later this year or during another event.

New Registration Feature: If you’ve already registered for the conference, we’ve now implemented a checkbox on newer registrations to show that you’re going! This option wasn’t available early on in the registration process, but if you’d like to opt-in and show your name on our list of attendees, please email [email protected] and we’ll get you sorted!

Registration (whether online or in-person in Pasadena, CA,  includes access to the event, a year of access to recordings of many of the weekend’s panels, mentorship opportunities, the Nebula Awards ceremony, a conference Discord, and entry to our ongoing Nebula conference events–writing events, regular online panels, meetups, and more!

Register here.

Room Block: If you are thinking about attending in person, time is ticking to reserve your room for the conference. Our room block will be closing soon and SFWA will not be able to guarantee the price for your stay with us. Every room that is booked directly will help us with our room block obligations, so if you have already booked, please let us know so we can add you to our list! 

Hotel booking – Start your reservation.

(3) A THOUSAND SUNS. Inverse says don’t miss out: “The Best Sci-Fi Anthology Series of the Year Is Streaming For Free Right Now”.

…One indie sci-fi anthology series, just released on YouTube, proves that the short form is still alive and well. A Thousand Suns is a series created by filmmaker Macgregor, a cinematographer who has worked on everything from music videos for Dua Lipa to the Gerard Butler spy thriller Kandahar. Produced by Blackmilk Studios, with work from directors Ruairi Robinson, Tyson Wade Johnston, Tim Hyten, and Philip Gelatt, A Thousand Suns is basically a miniature, independent sci-fi film festival that you can watch right now….

…Because each of these shorts is about four minutes long, the Black Mirror-esque twists are sort of already happening as soon as you start watching….

…As of April [15], 2024, there are six episodes of A Thousand Suns up on YouTube and on the official site: 1Ksuns.com. 

This is the trailer:

Here’s Episode One:

(4) CINEMATIC LANGUAGE. “’Civil War’ Action Sequences Build on War Movies” at IndieWire.

… “Civil War” joins a robust tradition of war films stretching back as far as 1925’s “The Big Parade” and 1926’s “What Price Glory?” that try to convey the power of violence itself: its horror, its allure, its twisted humor, and most of all its undeniable pull towards more violence. Hardy told IndieWire that he was much more influenced by photographers William Eggleston and Saul Leiter than specific war films or war photographers — although he did look at the work of Jessie’s (Cailee Spaeny) hero Lee Miller and others….

… Here are five war films (and one video game) that all share something — be it a sensibility, specific techniques, or a philosophical approach — with how “Civil War” tackles its action and combat sequences. They show just how successful war films can be at evoking strong feelings about violence, suffering, power, and courage, and also just how hard it is to tell war stories in a way that helps us avert them….

Here’s what the writer says about one of them:

‘Zero Dark Thirty’ (2012)

The impact of “Zero Dark Thirty” seems to have lessened over time, but that might be because the Seal Team Six assault that takes up the final third of Kathryn Bigelow’s film is so tautly edited that it leaves no room for other combat sequences to top its realism. Its use of night vision cameras and its ability to make the camera feel like another soldier on the mission is painfully precise. But there’s also something of a military practitioner’s perspective on how the camera tracks movement and what it settles on as important — it assesses threats and moves on. That perspective is sometimes clinical, sometimes fearful and adrenaline-fueled, and doesn’t leave too much space for sadness or horror until it floods in. Whether that is good enough determines whether you think a movie with combat sequences like “Zero Dark Thirty” or “Civil War” is ultimately a success or a failure in what it has to say about war.

(5) BAKER STREET IRREGULARITIES. Here’s a literary curiosity: “Sherlock Holmes Original Manuscripts by Conan Doyle: A Census by Randall Stock & Peter E. Blau”. There is a list at the link.

…Conan Doyle wrote 60 Sherlock Holmes stories.  He sold or gave away many of these manuscripts during his lifetime.  He passed along others through his children.  They eventually sold most of them, but his last surviving child, Dame Jean Conan Doyle (1912-1997), bequeathed three Holmes manuscripts to British institutions.  Her gifts included The Retired Colourman, The Illustrious Client, and The Creeping Man….

… Almost all of the Holmes manuscripts written after 1902 still exist, in part because Conan Doyle started submitting typed copies to his publishers and retaining the original for himself.  Only 4 of the 27 manuscripts written before 1902 are known to survive, although a few leaves remain from three other tales.  Private collectors hold about half of the known existing manuscripts….

(6) EXTREMIST PLAY. “IntelBrief: Incels and the Gaming-Radicalization Nexus” is an overview by The Soufan Center.

… Gaming is an inherently multisensory, immersive experience that, when riddled with violence or slanted by an extremist ideology, can be more impactful than a simple propaganda text or image in the radicalization process. According to a report by the UN Counter-Terrorism Centre (UNCCT) on the intersection between gaming and violent extremism, simulations created by extremists in otherwise neutral games like The Sims and Minecraft allow players to experience the Christchurch massacre from the shooter’s perspective. Meanwhile, in Roblox, a system that allows users to program and play games created by themselves or other users, extremists have created “white ethnostates”. Christian Picciolini, a former white supremacist, has explained how far-right extremists use popular games like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Call of Duty to recruit and radicalize marginalized youth experiencing social isolation….

(7) DRAGON ICON BURNS. “Fire destroys Copenhagen’s Old Stock Exchange, collapsing its spire” – AP News says the 184-foot-tall dragon-tail spire was destroyed today.

A fire raged through one of Copenhagen’s oldest buildings Tuesday, destroying about half of the 17th-century Old Stock Exchange and collapsing its iconic dragon-tail spire, as passersby rushed to help emergency services save priceless paintings and other valuables.

The blaze broke out on the building’s roof during renovations, but police said it was too early to pinpoint the cause. The red-brick building, with its green copper roof and distinctive 56-meter (184-foot) spire in the shape of four intertwined dragon tails, is a major tourist attraction next to Denmark’s parliament, Christiansborg Palace, in the heart of the capital.

Bells tolled and sirens sounded as fire engulfed the spire and sent it crashing onto the building, which was shrouded by scaffolding. Huge billows of smoke rose over downtown Copenhagen and could be seen from southern Sweden, which is separated from the Danish capital by a narrow waterway.

(Click for larger images.)

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born April 16, 1921 — Sir Peter Alexander Ustinov. (Died 2004.) Peter Ustinov showed up in Logan’s Run as the Old Man; he had the lead role in Blackbeard’s Ghost as Captain Blackbeard based the Robert Stevenson novel; he was Charlie Chan in Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen (it’s at least genre adjacent, isn’t it?); he’s The Caliph in stellar Thief of Baghdad; a truck driver in The Great Muppet Caper and finally he has the dual roles of Grandfather and Phoenix in The Phoenix and the Carpet.

Peter Ustinov in 1986. Portrait by Allan Warren.

He voiced myriad characters in animated films including that of Grendel in Grendel Grendel Grendel based off John Gardner’s novel Grendel, in Robin Hood, he voiced Prince John King Richard; and in The Mouse and His Child, he was the voice of Manny the Rat. 

Now I’m going to admit that my favorite role by Peter Ustinov was playing Poirot which he did in half a dozen films, which he first in Death on the Nile and then in Evil Under the Sun, Thirteen at Dinner, Dead Man’s Folly, Murder in Three Acts and Appointment with Death. He wasn’t my favorite Point as that was David Suchet but it was obvious that he liked performing that role quite a bit. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Far Side needles Superman.
  • Macanudo shows a problem you can never get away from, even on Arrakis.

(10) CHP PUTS THEIR FOOT DOWN. Luckily, they were wearing shoes.“California police arrest four in $300,000 stolen Lego brick bust” in The Verge.

Los Angeles citizens can rest easy knowing that a criminal theft ring is no longer stalking the city’s retail stores to feed a Lego black market. That’s because the California Highway Patrol (CHP) announced this week that it had arrested four people it accused of swiping what police estimated was “approximately $300,000” worth of Lego sets.

The four had allegedly burgled stores like Target, Home Depot, and Lowe’s of their Lego stock and sold them to black-market dealers who would then vend the stolen bricks at “seemingly legitimate businesses, swap meets, or online.” Police say they were booked on “charges related to Organized Retail Theft, Grand Theft, and Conspiracy to commit a crime.”…

(11) AS YOU WISH. Figure Fan Zero reviews “The Princess Bride Figures by McFarlane”. Lots of photos of the figures in different poses.

The Princess Bride is a movie that I absolutely love and for some reason never seem to re-watch a lot these days. I’m not sure why that is, but maybe it’s because I overdid it back when it first hit home video. I was surprised to see McFarlane turn up with the license, not only because it was a weird fit among their sea of DC Comics and Warhammer figures, but also because the film has received so little merchandising over the years. Either way, I wasn’t in on these figures when they were first released, but earlier this year they hit the bargain bins and I was able to snap up the regular figures for under ten bucks each and the Mega Figure, Fezzik, for $16. So, let’s just tackle the whole damn thing today! Inconceivable? Nah, we can do this!

(12) JOCULARITY. Entertainment Weekly is “On set for Ncuti Gatwa’s ‘Doctor Who’ debut”.

…To be fair, Gatwa has a lot to laugh about. After stealing scenes in Sex Education and Barbie, the 31-year-old actor is launching his next act, playing the titular Time Lord in the BBC’s legendary sci-fi series Doctor Who. After popping up in last year’s 60th anniversary special, “The Giggle,” and a solo Christmas episode, he’s now taking full control of the TARDIS, headlining his first full season as the Doctor — making him the first Black and first openly queer man to take on the role. It’s a new era for both Gatwa and the show itself: For the first time ever, the BBC is partnering with Disney+ to launch the show worldwide, and when the new season premieres May 10, it will air simultaneously around the globe….

(13) FORGET PLAN A, FIND PLAN $. NASA admits plan to bring Mars rocks to Earth won’t work — and seeks fresh ideas. Meaning: cheaper. “Nasa: ‘New plan needed to return rocks from Mars’” at the BBC.

The US space agency says the current mission design can’t return the samples before 2040 on the existing funds and the more realistic $11bn (£9bn) needed to make it happen is not sustainable.

Nasa is going to canvas for cheaper, faster “out of the box” ideas.

It hopes to have a solution on the drawing board later in the year.

Returning rock samples from Mars is regarded as the single most important priority in planetary exploration, and has been for decades.Just as the Moon rocks brought home by Apollo astronauts revolutionised our understanding of early Solar System history, so materials from the Red Planet are likely to recast our thinking on the possibilities for life beyond Earth….

(14) IT’S OFFICIAL. “NASA confirms mystery object that crashed through roof of Florida home came from space station” — Yahoo! has the story.

NASA confirmed Monday that a mystery object that crashed through the roof of a Florida home last month was a chunk of space junk from equipment discarded at the International Space Station.

The cylindrical object that tore through the home in Naples on March 8 was subsequently taken to the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral for analysis.

The space agency said it was a metal support used to mount old batteries on a cargo pallet for disposal. The pallet was jettisoned from the space station in 2021, and the load was expected to eventually fully burn up on entry into Earth’s atmosphere, but one piece survived.

The chunk of metal weighed 1.6 pounds (0.7 kilograms) and was 4 inches (10 centimeters) tall and roughly 1 1/2 inches (4 centimeters) wide.

Homeowner Alejandro Otero told television station WINK at the time that he was on vacation when his son told him what had happened. Otero came home early to check on the house, finding the object had ripped through his ceiling and torn up the flooring….

(15) BUSINESS IS BOOMING. Unlike the last story, you won’t need NASA to make a home delivery in order to look at this: “NASA’s New Solar Sail Spacecraft Will Shine So Bright We’ll See It From Earth” reports Autoevolution.

… The most recent piece of news on this front comes from American space agency NASA, which announced last week that it is getting ready to launch a new kind of solar sail that may revolutionize such technologies.

You see, one of the trickiest parts of making a solar sail is not the sail surface itself but the booms that are used to deploy them. That’s because solar sails are meant to extend after the ship reaches space.

At the moment there are only so many materials booms can be made from, and so many structures that can be used, and that limits the capabilities of a functional sail. NASA says it kind of solved that problem and promises “to change the sailing game for the future.”

The hardware that will do that is officially called Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3), and it physically comprises twelve NanoAvionics CubeSats linked together. The boom that’s meant to unfurl the sail is made of flexible polymer and carbon fiber materials.

NASA says this way of making the booms ensures they are both stiffer and lighter than what came before, which were either heavy, metallic structures or light but bulky ones that didn’t necessarily fold as they should have.

The new NASA design comes as tubes that can be squashed flat and rolled like a tape measure – up to 23 feet (seven meters) of booms can be rolled into something that fits in a human hand, NASA says. The design also provides less bending and flexing during temperature changes, which is what the spacecraft is expected to experience in space….

(16) SCOOBY SPINOFF CONTINUES. Velma Season 2 premieres April 25 on Max.

More mystery. More murder. And lots, lots more meddling.

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

Pixel Scroll 3/25/24 For A Short Time, They Were Amber Pixels, But All Cried NAY, And They Returned To True Green

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(1) THE THOUGHT PANZER PROBLEM. [Item by Doctor Science.] “Netflix blockbuster ‘3 Body Problem’ divides opinion and sparks nationalist anger in China” reports CNN.

A Netflix adaptation of wildly popular Chinese sci-fi novel “The Three-Body Problem” has split opinions in China and sparked online nationalist anger over scenes depicting a violent and tumultuous period in the country’s modern history. …

Author Liu said in an interview with the New York Times in 2019 that he had originally wanted to open the book with scenes from Mao’s Cultural Revolution, but his Chinese publisher worried they would never make it past government censors and buried them in the middle of the narrative.

The English version of the book, translated by Ken Liu, put the scenes at the novel’s beginning, with the author’s blessing.

Ye Wenjie’s disillusionment with the Cultural Revolution later proves pivotal in the sci-fi thriller’s plot, which jumps between the past and present day.

I learned of the CNN article via esteemed Sinologist Victor Mair at Language Log: “’The Three Body Problem’ as rendered by Netflix: vinegar and dumplings”.

All of this rancorous dissension surrounding the Netflix version of “The Three Body Problem” reminds me of what transpired after the airing of “River Elegy” (Héshāng 河殇), which was written during the latter part of the 80s.  This was a six-part documentary aired by China Central Television on June 16, 1988 that employed the Yellow River as a metaphor for the decline of Chinese civilization.  … I strongly believe that it was this artistic production created by Premier Zhao Ziyang’s (1919-2005) zhìnáng tuán 智囊团 (“think tank”) in an inclusive sense that precipitated the Tiananmen protests and massacre one year later …”

“The difference is that “River Elegy” was a documentary created in China by critical, progressive intellectuals, whereas the Netflix version of “Three Body” is a film adaptation of a Chinese sci-fi novel infused with Western ideas and standards by its American producers, making it a much more complicated proposition.

Let’s see if the chemistry is there in Netflix’s “Three Body” to cause the sort of ramifications that ensued from CNN’s “River elegy”.

(Dr. Mair’s history of the think tank, “River Elegy”, and the Tiananmen protests is here: “Thought Panzers”).

… As soon as I read the expression “sīxiǎng tǎnkè 思想坦克”, I had the exact same impression as Mark.  It sounded bièniu 彆扭 (“awkward”), weird, unnatural.  But I don’t think the person who translated the English term “think tank” into “sīxiǎng tǎnkè 思想坦克” was clever enough to add the extra military dimension consciously, though they may have done so sub/unconsciously ….

(2) NO AI RX FOR THE DOCTOR AFTER ALL. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] A couple of weeks ago, the March 7th Pixel Scroll covered the BBC’s plan to use AI to promote Doctor Who.  Today Deadline reports that this plan has been abandoned.

The BBC has “no plans” to use AI again to promote Doctor Who after receiving complaints from viewers.

The BBC’s marketing teams used the tech “as part of a small trial” to help draft some text for two promotional emails and mobile notifications, according to its complaints website, which was intended to highlight Doctor Who programming on the BBC.

But the corporation received complaints over the reports that it was using generative AI, it added.

“We followed all BBC editorial compliance processes and the final text was verified and signed-off by a member of the marketing team before it was sent,” the BBC said. “We have no plans to do this again to promote Doctor Who.”   

(3) AO3 VS. DDOS. Archive Of Our Own’s Systems volunteers have posted an account of last year’s DDoS attacks against the Archive. “The AO3 July/August DDoS Attacks: Behind the Scenes”.

…We later found out that the attack had actually peaked at 65 million requests per second. For context, the largest publicly announced HTTP DDoS attack by Cloudflare at the time was a 71 million request per second attack. Additionally, we received information that the attack originated from the Mirai botnet. However, Cloudflare did its job well and we saw very little, if any, impact….

(4) WOMEN ARTISTS HARD HIT AS NEWSPAPER CHAINS SHED PRINT COMICS. [Item by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.] Cartoonist Georgia Dunn discovered that Gannett has gotten rid of most of its diverse and female cartoonists, even if they’re making money for the syndicate.

Michael Cavna’s article in the Washington Post explains why “Standardization at Gannett, other chains, leaves few women in print comics” [Google cache file; article is behind a paywall.].

The latest warning signs for some female artists began last fall. Suddenly, their work began disappearing from many American comics pages.

An announcement started hitting the pages of newspapers dotted around the country: the USA Today Network, owned by Gannett, was “standardizing” its comics across more than 200 publications. One of those newspapers, the Coloradoan, published a list of comics, batched in groups, that it said made up Gannett’s new lineup of options.

What began to concern some cartoonists and industry observers: None of the dozens of comics listed as print offerings for Gannett papers was actively being created by a woman artist.

Just three strips in Gannett’s list of print comics have a credited woman: “For Better or For Worse,” which creator Lynn Johnston says is in reruns; “Luann,” by writer-artist Greg Evans and his daughter, co-author Karen Evans; and “Shoe,” by artist Gary Brookins and Susie MacNelly.

As the changes rolled out at many Gannett papers between October and early this year, Hilary Price, creator of the long-running syndicated strip “Rhymes With Orange,” said she began to see a significant dip in her sales income.

Price said she is accustomed to encountering misogynistic reader responses to her work as an artist. What is becoming professionally demoralizing to her lately, though, is the sense that female artists are being removed from America’s comics pages as several newspaper chains have consolidated or contracted their print funnies in recent years.

Some female cartoonists say that as they endure double-digit percentage losses in their income from client papers, their representation in print, already historically unbalanced, is growing alarmingly, and disproportionately, small.

…Georgia Dunn, creator of the syndicated “Breaking Cat News,” said her income dropped substantially in recent months as a result.

“I don’t think it’s a Machiavellian plot — I don’t think it’s intentional,” Dunn said of the optics that female artists are being disproportionately affected by the industry’s changes. “But they overlook us a lot.”

…The “Breaking Cat News” creator shared with her readers the bad news that she might have to make some hard financial decisions as her client income dropped sharply. But “when I shared with them how this restructuring hit me, they made up my lost income overnight,” she said.

“I woke up and opened Patreon and started crying,” she continued. “I felt like George Bailey at the end of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’”…

And here’s Dunn’s follow-up post on GoComics. (Scroll beneath the cartoon itself) — Breaking Cat News – March 23.

(5) SAM I AM. John O’Neill’s “The Horrors of Sam Moskowitz” at Black Gate begins its discussion of a series of horror anthologies with this discussion of their fanhistoric editor:

…Moskowitz was an interesting character. A professional magazine editor, he edited the trade journals Quick Frozen Foods and Quick Frozen Foods International for many years, and he gradually put his professional skills to use in the genre, starting in 1953 with Science-Fiction Plus, Hugo Gernsback’s last science fiction magazine. He began editing anthologies with Editor’s Choice in Science Fiction, published by McBride in 1954, and produced two dozen more over the next 20 years.

Moskowitz (who sometimes published under the name “Sam Moscowitz,” maybe because the ‘k’ on his typewriter was worn out?), was just as well known as a critic and genre historian. While still a teenager, he was one of the key organizers of the first Worldcon, held in New York City in 1939 (where he famously barred several Futurians, including Donald A. Wollheim, Fred Pohl, Robert A. W. Lowndes, Cyril Kornbluth, and others).

His genre histories and biographies, including Explorers of the Infinite and Seekers of Tomorrow, are still well worth reading today — as is his legendary history of fannish feuds, The Immortal Storm, which fan historian Harry Warner Jr. summed up with,

“If read directly after a history of World War II, it does not seem like an anticlimax.”

First Fandom still presents an annual award in Moskowitz’s memory each year at Worldcon….

(6) IT’S NOW AN EX-CASE.  Deadline is on hand as “Judge Tosses X/Twitter Case Against Group That Produced Study On Proliferation Of Hate Speech On Platform”.

A federal judge tossed out a lawsuit brought by X/Twitter against a watching group that produced a study that examined the proliferation of hate speech on the platform.

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer concluded that the platform, owned by Elon Musk, was attempting to chill the speech rights of the Center for Countering Digital Hate and other groups.

The judge wrote that X’s “motivation in bringing this case is evident. X Corp. has brought this case in order to punish [Center for Countering Digital Hate] for CCDH publications that criticized X Corp.—and perhaps in order to dissuade others who might wish to engage in such criticism.”

X/Twitter had sued the group, claiming that in doing their study, they unlawfully “scraped” the platform for its data that led to an exodus of advertisers.

“X disagrees with the court’s decision and plans to appeal,” the company said.

Read the judge’s decision in the X case….

(7) CHECKING IN ON THE COPYRIGHT CLAIMS BOARD. At Writer Beware, Michael Capobianco suspends judgment about the effectiveness of the relatively new Copyright Claims Board: “To CCB or Not to CCB: The Question is Still Out”.

It’s been more than a year since my last post about the now not-so-new Copyright Claims Board (CCB).

Victoria covered the CCB when it first started hearing claims in June 2022, and her post gives a good summary of how it operates and what it is supposed to accomplish. The short version:  The CCB was created as a judicial body under the US Copyright Office to administer small copyright claims that would be too expensive and/or time-consuming in federal court.

At the time I confess I was worried about an eventuality that fortunately hasn’t come true. There are vanishingly few copyright trolls trying to use the CCB to collect money from innocent or ignorant individuals by scaring them into paying settlements. On the other hand, it has worked for some business to business claims: Joe Hand Promotions, Inc., a company that “serves as the exclusive distributor of all Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and select boxing pay-per-view programming” is by far the most frequent CCB claimant, with forty-five claims and counting, mainly against bars and restaurants, and many of those are withdrawn from consideration by the CCB and apparently settled privately.

What has happened in the intervening 20 months has been a disappointment for anyone hoping that the CCB would become a useful tool for writers seeking to get redress for infringement of their work. First of all, the number of “literary” claims is still very small, around 10% of total claims, and many of those, as we previously pointed out, are dismissed by the CCB because they weren’t filed correctly or have other flaws. Some are outright bizarre, and I may do a post about them in the future. With others the claimant doesn’t understand that a vendor selling used copies of their books is not a violation of their copyright….

…In short, even as its second birthday is only a few months away, it’s still too early to draw conclusions about the efficacy of the CCB when it comes to literary works, especially books. The majority of the claims that it has decided so far involve photographs and, in those cases, it generally is finding in favor of the photographer and awarding reasonable to low damages. But there are still only a handful of contested decisions and none of them involve the kinds of published material that Writer Beware usually deals with….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 25, 1920 – Patrick Troughton. (Died 1987.) So let’s talk about Patrick Troughton, the Second Doctor. 

(Digression: All of the classic Doctors are available on the BritBox streaming service. It’s $8.99 a month for a lot of British content including all of the Poirot mysteries. End of digression.) 

The first time that I watched his run I wasn’t at all fond of him as I thought his characterization wasn’t that serious. Rewatching them a few years ago on BritBox, I realized that he was a much better actor than I thought he was and that his Doctor was a much better, more nuanced persona that I realized. No, he’s still not anywhere near my favorite Doctor but now I can watch him without cringing. 

Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor Who.

Ok I’m getting distracted…

Part of his problem, and yes of the first Doctor, and yes this is just my opinion, is that the scripts weren’t that good. It wasn’t until the Third Doctor that they started actually thinking about having decent scripts.

So what did he do? Well he had the distinct honor of being in The Gorgon, an early Sixties horror film with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.   

Horror films involving Dracula, Frankenstein, feathered serpents and demons would all see him make his appearance. He showed in a lot of mysteries including the Danger Man and The Saint series. And several Sherlock Holmes series as well. 

I think Space: 1999 is the only other genre series he appeared in besides a lot of Robin Hood work in the Fifties, mostly on The Adventures of Robin Hood. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) A CHANCE TO START AT THE BEGINNING. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The weekly 2000AD British anthology SF/F comic has its landmark 2,375 issue coming out next week. “New readers start here: jump on board with 2000 AD #2375”.

First up, it’s a little longer at 48 pages.  Second, all the current stories ended this week, so the next, 2,375 prog will see the start of all new stories: so, no jumping into the middle of something. In short this is an ideal place for newcomers to give it a try. 2000AD is perhaps most noted for its Judge Dredd strip. But there is a Rogue Trooper film in the works….

The new issue of 2000 AD has been precision-tooled for those hungry to discover why it’s called the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic – with bitingly good stories from top comics talent!

2000 AD Prog 2375 is a 48-page special on sale from 27 March, with a bold new cover by Hitman artist John McCrea and colourist Jack Davies.

This latest issue is designed to make it easy for new readers to pick up 2000 AD, with a mix of brand new stories and ongoing series that showcase the best the GGC has to offer!

(11) SHATNER ON JIMMY KIMMEL. The Captain celebrated his birthday on late night TV a few days ago with a flaming cake and a mulligan on Captain Kirk’s final moments: “William Shatner on Turning 93, Going to Space & He Gets a Do-Over of His Star Trek Death Scene”.

(12) A LAUGHING MATTER. Bob Byrne’s enjoyment is contagious in his article “Terry Pratchett – A Modern-Day Fantasy Voltaire” for Black Gate.

…Rincewind isn’t Conan, or Elric, or Gandalf (I’ve met Gandalf, and you sir, are no Gandalf). But while we love reading about the great heroes (or villains), we ‘get’ Rincewind….

(13) FUNNY VIDEO. [Item by Jennifer Hawthorne.] This clip showed up on Reddit. It’s apparently from the shooting set of Ford’s TV show, Shrinking. “Harrison Ford is too old for this shit”.

(14) CARGO CULTISTS. “Astronauts’ mementos packed on Boeing Starliner for crew flight test” – Space.com has the story.

A NASA astronaut who had the honor of naming her spacecraft will fly items inspired by that name when she launches to the International Space Station next month.

Sunita “Suni” Williams, who is set to fly with fellow NASA astronaut Barry “Butch” Wilmore on Boeing’s first Crew Flight Test (CFT) of its CST-100 Starliner capsule, will reveal the “Calypso”-related items once she is in orbit.

“A little homage to other explorers and the ships they rode on, I think we are going to call her ‘Calypso,'” said Williams in 2019, when she announced the ship’s name just after it returned to Earth from flying its first uncrewed mission.

Boeing announced Williams’ intentions as it completed packing Calypso for the CFT launch, which is currently targeted for April 22. All that remains to be added to the vehicle are some late stow items and the astronauts, themselves.

The CFT Starliner will carry 759 pounds (344 kilograms) of cargo, including 452 pounds (205 kilograms) from Boeing and 307 pounds (139 kilograms) from NASA. Boeing will have 25 bags and NASA will have 11 bags stored in the cabin where Wilmore and Williams will be seated….

(15) MARK WATNEY’S HOME AWAY FROM HOME. View NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day at the link – a photo of a place you’ve probably read about already.

Ares 3 Landing Site: The Martian Revisited. Explanation: This close-up from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera shows weathered craters and windblown deposits in southern Acidalia Planitia. A striking shade of blue in standard HiRISE image colors, to the human eye the area would probably look grey or a little reddish. But human eyes have not gazed across this terrain, unless you count the eyes of NASA astronauts in the scifi novel The Martian by Andy Weir. The novel chronicles the adventures of Mark Watney, an astronaut stranded at the fictional Mars mission Ares 3 landing site corresponding to the coordinates of this cropped HiRISE frame. For scale Watney’s 6-meter-diameter habitat at the site would be about 1/10th the diameter of the large crater. Of course, the Ares 3 landing coordinates are only about 800 kilometers north of the (real life) Carl Sagan Memorial Station, the 1997 Pathfinder landing site.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Black Nerd Problems tees up the Studio Ghibli Fest for 2024.

Studio Ghibli Fest is back in theaters in its biggest year yet! Now, coming off the triumphant Oscar® win for Hayao Miyazaki’s latest feature The Boy and the Heron, celebrate this iconic studio with an all-new selection of fan favorites and iconic titles alike.

This year’s lineup highlights the works of studio co-founders Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, as well as directors Yoshifumi Kondo, Hiroyuki Morita, and Hiromasa Yonebayashi. In celebration of Hayao Miyazaki’s recent Oscar win, Studio Ghibli Fest 2024 kicks off with the acclaimed director’s previous Academy Award-winning feature, Spirited Away, which took home the Oscar in 2001.

The lineup also includes special celebrations for the Howl’s Moving Castle 20th Anniversary, Kiki’s Delivery Service 25th Anniversary, and Pom Poko 30th Anniversary.

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Kathy Sullivan, Jennifer Hawthorne, JJ, Doctor Science, 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 Mark.]

Pixel Scroll 3/22/24 White Rabbits Are Easy, Try Pulling A Pixel Out Of A Hat

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(1) YE KEN NOW. [Via MT Void.] Read Michael Dirda’s article “The two best American fantasy writers you’ve probably never heard of” at the Washington Post. He’s talking about Avram Davidson and Manly Wade Wellman.

… Happily, though, these too-little-known but excellent writers — did I mention that both were honored with the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement? — have been supported and championed in recent years by independent publishers and knowledgeable admirers. Let’s start with Wellman.

Back in 2012, Haffner Press assembled “The Complete John Thunstone,” all of Wellman’s stories from Weird Tales magazine about a Manhattan-based occult investigator who, armed with a silver sword-cane, combats demons, the evil magician Rowley Thorne (loosely based on Aleister Crowley) and a hidden race of malignant humanoids called the Shonokins. Fans of Marvel Comics’ Doctor Strange will feel right at home…

… Despite the similarity in their structure, these tales of mystery and the supernatural excel at evoking the uncanny, even as the myriad details of Southern legend and lore further ramp up the tension and foreboding. Think of them, then, as round-the-campfire stories or front-porch yarns: They are shivery without being gruesome, they move right along, and each will leave you wanting to read just one more.

By contrast, Avram Davidson is far more literary, as well as amaster of many vocal registers and genres. In relating his brilliantly gonzo fantasies, he often takes his own sweet time, reveling in pyrotechnic sentences, Jewish slang, mordant humor, digressions and archaic diction. You’ll certainly find all these in “AD 100: 100 Years of Avram Davidson: 100 Unpublished or Uncollected Stories,” edited by Neva Hickman….

(2) NOT AT ALL ELEMENTARY, MY DEAR WATSON. “The Weird Lawsuit Over Netflix’s Enola Holmes, Explained” at Slashfilm.

…In the case of another prominent pop culture figure, Sherlock Holmes, many of the stories featuring Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective entered the public domain some time ago. Copyright typically lasts for the duration of an author’s life plus 70 years, 120 years from the date of their creation, or 95 years from their publication date — whichever comes soonest. Doyle passed away in 1930, and a lot of his Sherlock Holmes novels entered the public domain in the 20th Century, beginning in 1981 when 1887’s “A Study in Scarlett” made the transition. So, by the time author Nancy Springer published her first “Enola Holmes” novel in 2006 — a novel based on the world established by Doyle — she was mostly in the clear.

In 2020, Netflix’s first adaptation of a Springer book, “Enola Holmes” arrived, welcoming girls into the detective club and becoming a big enough hit for the streamer to green-light a sequel. When “Enola Holmes 2” debuted in 2022, it proved to be an even more charming mystery outing, firmly cementing these films as a solid new franchise for Netflix. All in all, then, a pretty nice little success story for the biggest streamer in the game. Or at least it would have been if it wasn’t for that pesky copyright law….

…. The complaint alleged that Springer and the other parties infringed copyright and trademark law with the “Enola Holmes” products, specifically stating (via The Guardian) that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had created “significant new character traits for Holmes and Watson” in the 10 stories that remained protected by copyright law in the U.S. Back in 2014, a ruling made all the Sherlock Holmes stories authored prior to 1923 property of the public domain, allowing Springer and others to use the character and his world in their creations. But the 10 remaining stories, referred to in the 2020 lawsuit, were written between 1923 and 1927, meaning they were still covered by copyright law.

So, what exactly had Springer, Netflix, and the others infringed upon from these specific stories? Well, emotions, apparently…

(3) TREK HISTORY ON THE AUCTION BLOCK. Two of the highlighted items in March 29’s “The Greg Jein Collection Hollywood/Entertainment Showcase Auction” are from Star Trek: The Original Series – a phaser, and a shuttlecraft model.

Star Trek: The Original Series (Paramount TV, 1966-1969), Mid-Grade Type-1 Phaser. Vintage original iconic prop measuring 3.75″ x 1.75″ x 1″. Constructed of hollow fiberglass, painted dark gray with silver stripe on both sides, with wooden emitter tip, acrylic gauge, aluminum power dial and diamond patterned decal. This very rare prop was used by the production for closer shots. Exhibiting scuffing and some paint retouching as well as adhesive remnants on the underside. Comes with a COA from Heritage Auctions. From the Collection of Greg Jein.

Heritage Auctions says about the shuttlecraft:

This piece is truly special. Greg, obviously known for his incredible model-building prowess, built this as a “stand-in” for his screen-used Galileo shuttlecraft filming miniature for the famous Star Trek exhibit at the Smithsonian in 1992. Greg feared his original miniature would become damaged, so he spared no attention to detail in creating this piece, knowing it would be viewed by hundreds of thousands of visitors at the National Air and Space Museum….

Star Trek: The Original Series (Paramount TV, 1966-1969), Greg Jein-Built Galileo Shuttlecraft Model for “Star Trek: The Exhibit” at the Smithsonian (1992). Original static model miniature constructed of cast resin elements, vacuum-formed plastic, mixed-media components, all expertly assembled, painted, and finished with Enterprise-gray paint, tape details, and transfer lettering for badging. Measures approx. 22″ x 14″ x 7.5″. The Greg Jein-built model was on display at the legendary “Star Trek: The Exhibit” at The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C., from February 1992 through January 1993. Exhibits age, paint chipping, cracking and handling. Comes with a COA from Heritage Auctions. From the Collection of Greg Jein.

(4) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to join biographer Julie Phillips for Jӓgerschnitzel in Episode 221 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

I first met this episode’s guest, Julie Phillips, in the dealers room of the 2006 Los Angeles Worldcon, where I was introduced by Gordon Van Gelder, her editor on James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon. That biography had been out only a few weeks by then, and it would go on to win the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Hugo and Locus Awards, and the Washington State Book Award. It’s a truly magnificent achievement, and if you haven’t already read it, you should track it down immediately. Once you do, you’ll understand why I’m anxiously awaiting her next biography — of the great Ursula K. Le Guin.

Julie Phillips

Her most recent book is The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Mothering, and the Mind-Baby Problem (2002). Her articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Ms., The Village Voice, Newsday, Mademoiselle, and many other publications. She currently lives in Amsterdam, where she reviews books for 4Columns.org and writes about English literature for the Dutch daily newspaper Trouw.

When I learned the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts had asked her give the kickoff lecture of its More than Muses Weekend in nearby Hagerstown, Maryland, I reached out to see whether she had time to break bread so I could share her wisdom with you. And I’m so pleased she agreed. We met for lunch the day after her presentation at Schmankerl Stube Bavarian restaurant, one of my favorite places to eat in Hagerstown.

We discussed why she called The Baby on the Fire Escape “a weird hybrid monster of a book,” the one thing she regrets not researching more thoroughly for her Tiptree bio, the reason there’s more space for the reader in a biography than a memoir, why some children of artistic mothers can make peace with their relationships and others can’t, the three things she felt it important to squeeze into the seven minutes she was given to speak at Ursula K. Le Guin’s memorial service, her writing method of starting in the middle of a book and working out toward both ends, the occasional difficulty of withholding judgement on one’s biographical subjects, the relationship between biographer Robert Caro and editor Robert Gottlieb, plus much more.

(5) ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, REAL BALONEY. “A Celebrity Dies, and New Biographies Pop Up Overnight. The Author? A.I.” finds the New York Times.

After Joseph Lelyveld, a former executive editor of The New York Times, died last month, his brother Michael Lelyveld went online to see how he was being remembered. He found obituaries in major news outlets, as expected. But he also found other, unexpected portraits of his brother.

At least half a dozen biographies were published on Amazon in the days immediately following Lelyveld’s death. Several of them were available for purchase on the very day he died. The books, he said, described his brother as a chain smoker, someone who honed his skills in Cairo and reported from Vietnam — none of which is true.

“They want to make a buck on your grief,” said Michael Lelyveld.

Books like this are part of a macabre new publishing subgenre: hasty, shoddy, A.I.-generated biographies of people who have just died…

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 22, 1920 — Ross Martin. (Died 1981.) Let’s talk about Ross Martin and his involvement with Wild Wild West which is a fascinating story indeed. 

He got his first acting job in the early Fifties series Lights Out’s “I Dreamed I Died” episode. 

This was not the beginning of his performance career as he did a lot of radio before that, including the last broadcast episode of Dimension X, and two of X Minus One, one of which taken from was Bradbury’s “The Man in The Moon” story which I believe Bradbury himself adapted for broadcast. 

Before the Wild Wild West, he would be in the Conquest of Space, a film about the first interplanetary flight to the planet Mars, and in The Colossus of New York where he’s Dr. Jeremy “Jerry” Spensser (sic) whose brain gets put into a giant robotic body. What could possibly go wrong?  

Ross Martin in 1965

Mike wants to note that that though “not genre, he played the villain in Experiment in Terror which was a memorable film.” Thanks Mike! 

Not surprisingly, he’d be in Twilight Zone. The first time “The Four of Us are Dying” where he’s already dead as Johnny Foster. Seriously he is. Nice touch there, Serling. The next time is in what starts as a purely SF episode which is described this way, “Space Cruiser E-89, crewed by Captain Paul Ross, Lt. Ted Mason (his character), and Lt. Mike Carter, is on a mission to analyze new worlds and discover if they are suitable for colonization.”  Well, this being the Twilight Zone, it will take a trip into the very strange of course. 

It is said that the Artemus Gordon character was largely shaped by Martin himself. He created almost all of his disguises for the show, and even the gadgets used on the series were either created by him or largely constructed with his input. Even the make-up he did for many of the episodes was mostly his own design. Given that he was in eighty-five episodes, that’s quite amazing!

Gordon missed nine episodes after suffering a heart attack. The actor was temporarily replaced by familiar actors like William Schallert and Alan Hale, Jr.  So yes the Captain did escape from the island. And time traveled. 

I loved the series, loved him and Conrad, thought they made a great pair of agents. I’ve watched the series quite a few times including on DVD about a decade ago, that viewing allowed me to see pre-production sketch that was made of his very first make-up design for the pilot episode. 

The four season boxed set has the two movies plus all the extras from seasons two  through four but very oddly not the ones from the first season when these were first released as separate sets. A very odd thing to do. And yes, you can find the separate seasons easily enough on eBay. 

After this series, his genre appearances are as follows. 

He appeared in another Serling series playing Mister Gingold, a  moneylender with almost no compassion for his debtors who would get his due justice Night Gallery-style in “Camera Obscura”, and again as Bradley Meredith in “The Other Way Out” as the jig is up after he kills a go-go dancer. Serling did not write this script and it shows. There’s nothing at all interesting here.

Not genre (I think, we could call it genre adjacent) was his role was Charles Chan in The Return of Charlie Chan. 

Definitely genre was his appearance on Quark as Zorgon the Malevolent in “All the Emperor’s Quasi-Norms, Parts 1 & 2”. 

I’m down to his last three genre appearances, he was in    The New Adventures of Wonder Woman  as Bernard Havitol in the “IRAC is Missing” episode and his next two genre role was as Ace Scanlon in a Fantasy Island two parter, “The Devil and Mandy Breem” and “The Millionaire”.

His final genre role was on Mork & Mindy as Godfrey in the “Mork and the Bum Rap” episode. That, I think, covers it. 

(7) COMICS SECTION.

From Cooper Lit Comics:

(8) USE THE COFFEE MACHINE, LUKE. “’Star Wars’ Marathon Set From Alamo Drafthouse With All Nine Films” says The Hollywood Reporter.

Alamo Drafthouse is hosting a Star Wars marathon of all nine movies to screen back-to-back May 3-4, coinciding with the 25th anniversary of Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace.

The Texas-based theater chain will host the 21-hour marathon of the Skywalker Saga’s episodes one through nine at the Alamo Drafthouse New Mission in San Francisco. The all-in-one-sitting viewing will start May 3 with The Phantom Menace and end a day later with a screening of The Rise of Skywalker.

There will be breaks for “unlimited coffee and water” to keep your eyes open in case the Force isn’t enough. Audiences can expect Star Wars-themed food items from a galaxy far, far away at the concession stands, an immersive Star Wars lobby for selfies, and games and trivia between screenings.… 

(9) WARP FACTOR TEA. Of course, if you’re not a coffee drinker, Adagio Teas looks like they have at least ten selections in their “To Boldly Brew…” line. One of them is “Picard’s Tea. Earl Grey. Hot. Tea”. Below are three examples of the art on the product tins.

Picard’s Tea. Earl Grey. Hot. Creamy Earl Grey Moonlight blends beautifully with Summer Rose, (English roses in honor of Sir Patrick Stewart’s homeland). Extra rose petals added for that touch of Starfleet Command red. [Episodes: TNG 2×11 “Contagion,” 4×26 “Redemption,” 6×19 “Lessons,” 7×20 “Journey’s End,” 7×25/26 “All Good Things…”]

(10) ON THE BEACH. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] “NASA’s Mars rover probes ancient shorelines for signs of life” reports Science. A  core drilled by Perseverance in October 2023 suggests it has been driving on the remains of an ancient beach.

…For the past few months, NASA’s rover, which is collecting rock samples to eventually send to Earth, has explored a ring of rocks just inside the rim of Jezero crater, which is thought to have been filled with water billions of years ago. An initial analysis suggests the rocks are composed of rounded grains of carbonate, a mineral that precipitates out of water. It’s a promising sign that the rocks were once beachfront property, says Briony Horgan, a planetary scientist at Purdue University who leads the rover’s science campaign. “You can imagine the waves crashing up against the shores of an ancient palaeolake,” she says….

(11) A PENGUIN IN YOUR FUTURE. “Colin Farrell returns in Max’s first The Penguin teaser” — let AV Club set the stage.

While fans will need to wait an extra year to see Robert Pattinson re-don his black cape for The Batman Part II (the film is now set to premiere in 2026), they don’t need to stay out of Matt Reeves’ gritty version of Gotham entirely. Colin Farrell’s Oz Cobb—in all his prosthetic-covered glory—is returning far sooner for his own eight-episode spinoff series, which lands on Max sometime this fall.

Move over, Tony Soprano. A new boss is coming to HBO. The first teaser for The Penguin opens in a flooded Gotham, right where the 2022 film left off, with Farrell doing exactly what any DC villain worth his salt should do: monologuing….

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

Pixel Scroll 3/15/24 What Can You Scroll About Chocolate Covered Stepping Disks?

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(1) WALDROP TO THE SCREEN. George R.R. Martin tells us, “The Chickens Are Coming” at Not A Blog.

Howard Waldrop is gone, but his work will live on.

…And here’s the latest one, an adaptation of Howard’s most famous story, THE UGLY CHICKENS.  Winner of the Nebula.   Winner of the World Fantasy Award.   Nominee for the Hugo, but, alas, not a winner.   A pity, that.  Howard never won a Hugo, but in some more Waldropian  world he has ten of them lined up on his mantle.

Felicia Day (SUPERNATURAL, THE GUILD, DR. HORRIBLE’S SING ALONG BLOG) stars in our film of “that dodo story.”   Mark Raso (COPENHAGEN, KODACHRONE) directed.   Michael Cassutt (TWILIGHT ZONE, MAX HEADROOM, TV101, EERIE INDIANA, and many more) did the screenplay.

Howard saw a rough cut of the film before he died.   He liked it, which pleases me no end.   I only wish we had been able to screen the final cut for him.

(2) HIGH CALIBER CANON. The Atlantic’s list of“The Great American Novels” includes Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick and a number of other works of genre interest.

(3) INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE LONGLIST. Based on the descriptions of the works at the website, there are no books of genre interest among the 13 that made the International Booker Prize 2024 longlist.

(4) BECOMING THE LIFE ON MARS. Space.com interviews Robert Zubrin about his new book: “’The New World on Mars’ offers a Red Planet settlement guide”.

To say that Dr. Robert Zubrin, the esteemed Colorado-based aerospace engineer, author, lecturer and founding president of the Mars Society, has the Red Planet on his mind is a colossal understatement.   

This pioneering educational voice and influential space authority has written many books on the timely topic of Mars and Mars settlement over the years as interest in humankind’s role in its ultimate development has risen exponentially. Now Zubrin adds to his impressive catalog of visionary volumes about our mysterious planetary neighbor with the recent release of “The New World on Mars” (Diversion Books, 2024), a fascinating and infinitely readable peek into Mars’ inestimably rosy future….

Space.com: One of the most interesting chapters deals with the psychological aspects of leaving Earth and establishing an identifiable Martian culture with its own customs, rites and rituals and the importance of that process. Can you elaborate on that subject more?

Zubrin: The Mars Society over the past couple years held two contests asking people to design a 1,000-person Mars colony and a one-million-person Mars city-state. And by design we meant not just the technology or the economy, but the social system, political system, what kind of sports are likely to be played, as well as the aesthetics. 

Between the two contests, there were something like 300 entries. The ideas proposed spanned a huge range of political systems from socialist, to democratic and libertarian. Rather than attempt to choose my favorite system for a Martian utopia, I took the point of view that there will be many Martian cities founded by different people with very different ideas on what the ideal state should be, and it’s going to be sorted out by natural selection.  

Some of the answers I came up with I like a lot, like human liberty. But this is in contradiction to many visions of science fiction colonies that are totally controlled because no one would immigrate to one. The ones that will outgrow the others will clearly be the ones that are most attractive to immigrants. Freedom is a great attractor. North Korea does not have an illegal immigrant problem. Martian colonies will have to be highly inventive and invention only thrives under freedom. I believe a Mars colony will also require a great deal of social solidarity, so it will not be multi-cultural and will need to have a strong sense of community and common identity….

(5) DOCTOR WHO STARTING TIME.  From Variety we learn “’Doctor Who’ Starring Ncuti Gatwa Reveals May Premiere Date”.

…The new season of “Doctor Who,” starring “Sex Education” breakout Ncuti Gatwa as the Fifteenth Doctor, will premiere on May 10.

The new installment will be the first-ever to launch on Disney+ and release simultaneously worldwide. The premiere will start on May 10 at 7 p.m. ET in the U.S. and internationally (excluding the U.K.) with Christmas special “The Church on Ruby Road” airing before two brand-new episodes. In the U.K., the season will premiere at midnight GMT on May 11 on BBC iPlayer.

…A new trailer for the season will debut on March 22.

(6) SHATNER WON’T BE ECLIPSED – FOR LONG, ANYWAY. The Los Angeles Times interviewed “William Shatner on his long career, horses and watch design”. Behind a paywall, unfortunately. Here’s the first paragraph:

A documentary on his life, “You Can Call Me Bill,” directed by Alexandre O. Philippe (“Lynch/Oz”), is scheduled to roll out in theaters March 22 to coincide with his 93rd birthday. He continues to host and narrate the puzzling-phenomena History series “The UnXplained With William Shatner.” A 2022 performance at the Kennedy Center, backed by Ben Folds and the National Symphony Orchestra, is about to be released both as an album, “So Fragile, So Blue,” and a concert film. The title song, says Shatner, “encompasses a lot of my thinking about how we’re savaging the world, and [I’d hope] it’d be a song that people would listen to and perhaps be inspired to do something about global warming.”

And on April 8, for 15 minutes before the shadow of an eclipse falls over Bloomington, Ind., Shatner will address “55, 60,000 people” in the Indiana University football stadium. “So what do you say, what do you write, what do you do? I’m going to have to solve those problems.”…

(7) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES CELEBRATES ANNIVERSARY. Space Cowboy Books presents a special six-year anniversary episode of Simultaneous Times in collaboration with Worlds of IF Magazine bringing you works from the pages of Worlds of If Magazine #177. Listen to the podcast at the link. Story and poetry featured in this episode:

  • “Contact” by Akua Lezli Hope; with music by Fall Precauxions. Read by the author
  • “The Pain Peddlers” by Robert Silverberg; with music by Phog Masheeen. Read by Jean-Paul Garnier
  • “Time Junkies” by Pedro Iniguez; with music by Fall Precauxions. Read by the author

Theme music by Dain Luscombe

(8) RELICS OF WONKY PROMOTION TRANSMUTED TO CHARITY GOLD. “Props from botched Willy Wonka event raise more than £2,000 for Palestinian aid charity” reports the Guardian. The charity is Medical Aid for Palestinians.

Props from a botched Willy Wonka event in Glasgow that went viral after frustrated attenders called the police have raised more than £2,000 at auction for a Palestinian aid charity.

Fabric backdrops from the “immersive experience”, which was cancelled midway, were found in a bin outside the warehouse where it took place.

Monorail Music, a record shop in the city, auctioned the remains on eBay after they were passed on by the finder. The listing said: “Don’t miss out on this rare opportunity to own a piece of history.”

The Wonka event gained online notoriety after images of the sparsely decorated warehouse in Glasgow, staffed by actors dressed as Oompa Loompas and other characters, spread worldwide. On Thursday, the listing had a total of 57 bids and the items were sold for £2,250. Michael Kasparis, online manager of Monorail, described the outcome as “amazing”….

(9) RED FLAGS RAISED ABOUT TCG-CON. Outside the Asylum urges “Don’t Go to TCG-Con”. Here’s the synopsis of a long post with many receipts:

Summary: TCG-con frequently does not pay out its advertised prizes and staff compensation. They currently owe upwards of $50,000 to players, cosplayers, judges, and other staff members for previous conventions, and appear to be in the process of collapsing entirely. I would strongly recommend not purchasing a ticket to their future events, trying to get a refund if you already have, and warning anyone you know away from them as well. If you’re owed money yourself, see the end of this page for information on next steps.

(10) GRANT PAGE (1939-2024). Deadline pays tribute in “Grant Page Dead: Australian Stuntman In ‘Mad Max’ Films & 100-Plus Others Was 85”.

Grant Page, the Australian stunt icon who performed in and coordinating stunts for the original Mad Max,sequel Beyond Thunderdome,the upcoming prequel Furiosa: A Mad Max Sagaand more than 100 other films and TV series, died Thursday in a car crash. He was 85.

A legend of Aussie cinema, Page worked … on the 1979 action classic Mad Max,which introduced the world to Mel Gibson. He performed and served as stunt coordinator on …  its 1985 second sequel Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome… He also worked on … prequel, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which is on the radar to premiere at Cannes in May, and on his 2022 pic Three Thousand Years of Longing.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

The New Yorker cartoon for the Ides of March gives us Dr. Seuss’ interpretation instead of Shakespeare’s.

(12) I BECAME WHAT I BEHELD. “Grant Morrison Responds to Zack Snyder’s Take on Batman Killing, ‘If Batman Killed His Enemies, He’d Be the Joker’” (comicbook.com) – in a quote at Comicbook.com.

Filmmaker Zack Snyder recently stirred up some controversy when he defended his aggressive version of Batman from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice who killed, a choice that for many comic book fans runs counter to basic tenets of the character. Now, comic book writer Grant Morrison is weighing in and they don’t agree with Snyder. According to Morrison, “if Batman killed his enemies, he’d be the Joker.”

In their newsletter Xanaduum (via ScreenRant), Morrison — whose own work has been among some of the more definitive takes on Batman — dug into not only the practical aspect of why Batman doesn’t kill (because he’d end up arrested by Commissioner Gordon, in theory) but also the psychological aspect of the character and how Batman’s “no-kill” rule is something locked into him from the time he was a small child and is a part of his mental state having never fully developed, in some respect, out of the child who saw his parents murdered in Crime Alley.

“That Batman puts himself in danger every night but steadfastly refuses to murder is an essential element of the character’s magnificent, horrendous, childlike psychosis,” Morrison wrote.

There’s also the matter of the line between what Batman does and what the villains do. Villains kill; Batman does not. It makes all the difference, at least to Bruce Wayne who, should he ever cross the line, would then become no better than those who killed his parents….

(13) SNOWPIERCER RESCUED. It won’t be frozen out by streaming services after all says Deadline: “’Snowpiercer’: AMC Picks Up Season 4 After TNT Scrapped Sci-Fi Drama”.

The final season of Snowpiercer has finally found a home.

The fourth season of the sci-fi drama will air on AMC after the company acquired the rights to the Tomorrow Studios-produced series. It comes after TNT scrapped the show last year as part of a wider Warner Bros. Discovery content write-down strategy.

Deadline revealed in January 2023 that the fourth season wouldn’t air on its original home, as part of a slew of content cuts that also included the axing of Batgirl, Abrams’ HBO drama Demimonde, and TBS series such as The Big D, Chad and Kill The Orange Bear….

(14) A YELLOWSTONE UNSTUCK IN TIME. Gizmodo assures us “Josh Brolin’s Sci-Fi Hole Show Will Get Even Sci-Fi-er, Holier in Season 2”.

…The central mysteries of Outer Range surround that giant hole, which materializes on property owned by Brolin’s Wyoming rancher character and is eventually established to be a time portal. Along the way, various characters go missing, are revealed to have been born in different centuries, notice odd happenings that seem anachronistic, or are unmasked as characters we’ve already met who happen to be several years older than they should be. In season two, we’ll all take a time leap; the action begins in 1984 with a younger version of Brolin’s character, and Vanity Fair describes the narrative structure as “gamely hopping between different decades (and centuries) with newfound propulsion.”

An astrophysicist called in to help the time-travel stuff make sense—but according to new showrunner Murray, “The biggest part of what time travel meant to me and the writers was: How can this help us expose something that a character’s going through?” We’re very intrigued to see where this wild trail heads next….

(15) DISHING IT UP. A reporter tells BBC that “’Journalists are feeding the AI hype machine’”.

When Melissa Heikkilä looks back on her past four years writing about artificial intelligence (AI), two key things jump out to her, one good, one bad.

“It’s the best beat… AI is a story about power, and there are so many ways to cover it,” says the senior reporter for magazine MIT Technology Review. “And there are so many interesting, and eccentric people to write about.”

That’s the positive. The negative, she says, is that much of the wider media’s coverage of AI can leave a lot to be desired.

“There is more hype and obfuscation about what the technology can and cannot actually do,” says Ms Heikkilä. “This can lead to embarrassing mistakes, and for journalists to feed into the hype machine, by, for example, anthropomorphizing AI technologies, and mythologizing tech companies.”…

(16) RIGHT TURN, CLYDE. And while we’re on the subject of dud reportage – “Seismic signal that pointed to alien technology was actually a passing truck” says Physics World.

In January 2014 a meteor streaked across the sky above the Western Pacific Ocean. The event was initially linked to a seismic signal that was detected on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island. This information was used by Harvard University’s Amir Siraj and Avi Loeb to determine where the object likely fell into the ocean. Loeb then led an expedition that recovered spherical objects called spherules from the ocean bottom, which the team claimed to be from the meteor.

Because of the spherule’s unusual elemental composition, the team has suggested that the objects may have come from outside the solar system. What is more, they hinted that the spherules may have an “extraterrestrial technological origin” – that they may have been created by an alien civilization.

Now, however, a study led by scientists at Johns Hopkins University has cast doubt on the connection between the spherules and the 2014 meteor event. They have proposed a very different source for the seismic signal that led Loeb and colleagues to the spherules.

“The signal changed directions over time, exactly matching a road that runs past the seismometer,” says Benjamin Fernando, a planetary seismologist at Johns Hopkins who led this latest research.

“It’s really difficult to take a signal and confirm it is not from something,” explains Fernando. “But what we can do is show that there are lots of signals like this, and show they have all the characteristics we’d expect from a truck and none of the characteristics we’d expect from a meteor.”

That’s right, it was a truck driving past the seismometer, not a meteor….

(17) WAR OF THE WORLD. “Air defense for $13 a shot? How lasers could revolutionize the way militaries counter enemy missiles and drones” at Yahoo!

Britain this week showed off a new laser weapon that its military says could deliver lethal missile or aircraft defense at around $13 a shot, potentially saving tens of millions of dollars over the cost of missile interceptors that do the job now.

Newly released video of a test of what the United Kingdom’s Defense Ministry calls the DragonFire, a laser directed energy weapon (LDEW) system, captured what the ministry says was the successful use of the laser against an aerial target during a January demonstration in Scotland.

“It’s a potential game changer for air defense,” the video says as a bright laser beam pierces the night sky over a firing range in the remote Hebrides archipelago, creating a ball of light as it hits its target.

The Defense Ministry says the DragonFire can precisely hit a target as small as a coin “over long ranges,” but it did not offer specifics. The exact range of the weapon is classified, it said.

The laser beam can cut through metal “leading to structural failure or more impactful results if the warhead is targeted,” a UK Defense Ministry statement said….

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