By Mark L. Blackman On the night of Wednesday, November 18, the Fantastic Fiction at KGB Reading Series, hosted by Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel, presented authors William Gibson and Cat Rambo in YouTube livestreamed readings. This was the Series’ ninth virtual event. (Its longtime venue, the KGB Bar in Manhattan’s East Village, had shut down due to the pandemic, but the Soviet era-themed dive bar has sporadically reopened with limited capacity, and its fans are invited to help it out with donations.) The current setup, Kressel noted, offers the advantage of allowing readings from writers not living in or visiting New York; both readers were “in” from the West Coast (Rambo lives in Seattle and Gibson Vancouver). It has also enabled a larger audience than could have fit into the bar (at one point, 120 people were watching).
As the evening’s livestream began, Gibson and Rambo schmoozed with Datlow and Kressel about everything from what they were drinking (hydration is important) to the scary Michelin Man, Gene Wolfe’s role at Pringle’s (the logo character is probably based on him), Oreos, and the previous week’s tornado in New York.
The first reader, Cat Rambo, is the author of over 200 stories, among them the novelette Carpe Glitter, which received a Nebula Award earlier this year, and four novels, including the upcoming space opera, You Sexy Thing. She is a past President of SFWA, and, as it happens, was in that position when Gibson was named a Grand Master. She opened with a selection from Carpe Glitter – “seize the glitter.” A woman is cleaning out the home of her eccentric late grandmother (“Carpe glitter” is something the old lady used to say), a former stage magician and a hoarder. It is an inheritance that she chose (to her mother’s disappointment) over cash, excavating and treasure-hunting (a friend has referred to it as “urban archeology”) through rancid furs, piles of multiple copies of magazines with her old notices and her doll collection.
She then read a flash story (“one of my favorite forms”) that ran on Daily Science Fiction, “I Decline.” An old man turns down government-offered technology that can preserve – and even edit out – his memories. (The spoiler is in the title.)
A short break followed.
William Gibson is best known as the creator (or, at minimum, co-creator) of an entire subgenre of speculative fiction, Cyberpunk. He is the author of the award-winning Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Virtual Light, Idoku, Spook Country, and other novels, most recently Agency, a sequel to The Peripheral.
He offered “a blended reading,” selections from the latter two novels, both of which center around “The Jackpot,” a multicausal, slow, androgenic process over 40 years rather than a solitary apocalyptic event, described by one character as “seriously bad shit.” Climate change and too much carbon results in droughts and water shortages, and pandemics that lead ultimately to the death of 80% of everyone (in other words, as we’ve heard too often on the news this year, “a perfect storm”). There is nanotechnology and cheaper energy sources, but the world is run by hereditary oligarchs. The protagonist is reached by a posse from the 22nd century who tell her about it. From Chapter 79 of The Peripheral, “The Jackpot,” he turned to Chapter 75 of Agency, “Jackpot.” The novel is set in an alternate continuum in which Hillary Clinton won in 2016, but that, he said, “doesn’t have the effect it might have, doesn’t prevent the Jackpot from happening.” Here too the protagonist is contacted by people from the future. Gibson is currently working on Jackpot, the conclusion of the trilogy.
Datlow described both selections as “greatly depressing reads, but optimistic” somehow. The Peripheral, was published in 2014 and Agency, appeared in early 2020, effectively pre-Covid-19. Trump’s election caused him to rewrite large parts of Agency, but the Coronavirus hasn’t derailed it. Both novels refer to “the pandemics,” plural.
Datlow asked how the writers are faring during the Pandemic. Rambo is staying productive with co-writing sessions, while Gibson has been “doing domestic stuff,” and “watching and reacting, and taking the measure of the fuckedness quotient and applying some of it to Jackpot #3.”
A Q&A with the audience ensued. Asked what classic sf stands up or stands out, Rambo replied that she’d been reading a number of ’70s short stories, particularly from women writers. Gibson cited J.G. Ballard and Brunner (who “got it astonishingly right,” notably Stand on Zanzibar), and we can feel like we’re in 1984. How do they decide the genders of their protagonists? Rambo said that if she didn’t know, she would return to her “D&D roots” and roll dice. Gibson noted that he had male and female protagonists in the same book; there are maybe four female protagonists in Jackpot. When he started out, he consulted Joanna Russ’s circle about handling women characters. Females, he opined, “better comprehend their world.”
What about the current milieu do they find surprising? Rambo finds social media both “horrifying and fascinating.” The only social media Gibson does is Twitter (Rambo also is on Twitter). In a digression, he observed (to laughter) that one thing that we don’t see in zombie apocalyptic fiction in books, movies and tv is people calling zombies a hoax. Kressel likened our polarized world to China Miéville’s The City and the City, with people “literally living in two realities,” pretending the others don’t exist. What are Rambo and Gibson finding to be optimistic about? Rambo likes “the informal nature of things,” and hopes that sf conventions have “a strong virtual component going forward.”
Would Gibson ever write in anyone else’s world? No, he has “never understood the impulse to write fan fiction.” What are their research methods? Gibson “Google[s] blindly,” and Rambo also relies on Google or “a good university library.” She is currently reading Zelazny’s A Night in the Lonesome October, and Gibson recommended M. John Harrison’s latest.
After a brief and reluctant cameo by her cat Jack, Datlow concluded by announcing upcoming readers:
December 16: Priya Sharma and Justin Key
January 20, 2021: Lauren Beukes and Usman T. Malik
February 17: Kathleen Jennings and Shveta Thakrar
All dates are the third Wednesday of the month (“come rain or shine or Covid”).
(1) NEW HORROR “RADIO NETWORK.” Brian Keene announced
yesterday on Facebook that The
Horror Show with Brian Keene will become the flagship podcast for the new Brian Keene Radio Network,
which will also include Defenders Dialogue, Cosmic Shenanigans, and Grindcast. From
the statement, it looks like the split from Shelly and Armand Rosamilia is
amicable. They are all still friends.
The Horror Show with Brian Keene started out on the Project iRadio Network. During our second year, we became part of the Project Entertainment Network.
Beginning April 1, (in the midst of our sixth year on the air) The Horror Show with Brian Keene will become the flagship podcast for the new Brian Keene Radio Network,…
Listeners will not be impacted by this change. You’ll still be able to hear episodes of each podcast for free via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, YouTube, Google Play Music, and all other platforms. You’ll also be able to hear them for free on a new 24/7 live-streaming venture (a rebooted and revamped Brian Keene Radio) beginning in April. Old shows will still be accessible, as well. You may notice some changes to the structure of each show — new theme music, new title cards, advertising presented in a different way — but otherwise, it’s business as usual….
(2) DEAR JEFF BEZOS. While Amanda S. Green had some
unfortunate problems uploading her new book via Kindle Digital Publishing,
thereby missing a deadline and forfeiting pre-orders, she got a hell of a good
post out of it for Mad Genius Club: “Not
How I Expected Today To Go”. A lot to learn here.
…Lesson #1: Check the Terms of Service on a regular basis.
Amazon has updated the Terms of Service and did so on Feb. 20, 2020. How many of you have read them since then to see if there are any changes you need to be aware of? I hadn’t–at that point. I guarantee you I have since then.
…In the meantime, I have set a recurring alarm on my phone’s calendar to remind me to check the ToS every month. Yes, I’m being obsessive about it. But I am convinced the fact I knew what the ToS said and could prove it was at odds with the FAQs helped me plead my case and get my pre-order privileges restored. (As did being professional in my dealings with Amazon).
This writer will not be the unhappy writer on what should be release day ever again.
Dan Scanlon didn’t have a sad childhood; he just grew up with a hole in it.
It was in the shape of his father, who died in 1977 when Scanlon was only one year old. Neither he nor his brother, who is about three years older, remember their dad. They tried to construct some sense of him from pictures, from stories, from glimpses of the few soundless reel-to-reel home movies they had.
That’s what inspired Scanlon, a veteran Pixar creative team member and director of Monsters University, to pitch the idea for Onward, an animated fantasy about two brothers who do the same. These siblings—younger, shy Ian (voiced by Tom Holland) and older, boisterous Barley (Chris Pratt)—are blue-skinned, pointy-eared elves in a suburban sword-and-sorcery world who harness magic to bring their late father back for one single day together.
The UK government is not ready to ban public events of scale yet, and Reed Exhibitions is apparently not ready to face the costs of a voluntary cancellation and continues to vow that the London Book Fair will proceed next week. The show is an increasing outlier, with the big Leipzig Book Faircanceling next week’s show.
More companies have announced that they will skip the fair and protect their employees, now including a number of UK-based companies and divisions. Penguin Random House, which officially had only made the show optional for US employees — most of whom opted out — has followed other large trade publishers in withdrawing entirely. Their spokesperson said, “The London Book Fair is an important moment in the global publishing calendar but given the fast moving situation around the Coronavirus, Penguin Random House has come to the difficult decision to withdraw from the fair in the interest of the health and wellbeing of our employees, authors, and partners.”
The post continues for another couple of paragraphs naming
businesses that have pulled out of the London event. Nevertheless, Publishers
Weekly says “London Book Fair Will Still Go Ahead”.
(5) CALL FOR ARTICLES. Steven H
Silver will be co-editing an issue of Journey Planet and would like contributions
that fit in with its theme —
I don’t believe in the supernatural, but when I was walking amongst the ruins of Kenilworth Castle back in 1984, I had the feeling that if ghosts existed, I was about to meet one.
As anyone who knows me can tell you, I’m not much for wandering around outdoors. Allergies have had a tendency to make me favor climate controlled areas, so it came as a huge surprise to Elaine when we saw Thingvellir in Iceland that I commented “I want to come back here and spend three or four days hiking and camping.”
While it is true that travel broadens the mind, it is also true that it opens us up to the magic of the world around us. This year, I’ll be co-editing an issue of the Hugo Award wining fanzine Journey Planet with James Bacon and Christopher J Garcia that looks at “the most magical place you’ve visited.”
We’re leaving it up to the authors and artists whose work will appear in this issue to define what “most magical” means in this context. It could be a place that took your breath away, a place that actually made you believe that magic or ghosts or the supernatural existed, a place that has significant meaning for you, or something else entirely.
Artwork and photos based on the same prompt are also very welcome.
If you are interested in participating, please drop me an e-mail at [email protected] and we can discuss appropriate topics and article length.
The deadline is June 20.
(6) AO3/CHINA UPDATE. Two English-language publications
that focus on China have news stories from their perspective.
…Outraged internet users took to social media Weibo to voice their anger, accusing Xiao’s fans of being compliant in China’s censorship machine.
“China has succeeded in getting people accustomed to self-censorship in the past decade, and in using public power to eliminate those with different opinions. The idea has been deeply rooted in everyone’s head,” Weibo user Frunzzi wrote in one of the most popular comments.
Another user with the handle ChaofanDouxiansen wrote: “Why would you hurt the already limited space for creation? Shame on you.”
…Some Sean Xiao fans went so far as to organize a coordinated assault against the website, posting a message that encouraged others to report AO3 and LOFTER (China’s equivalent of Tumblr) for unlawful and homoerotic content.
Unfortunately, it seems that the spiteful act has yielded results. AO3 is now blocked in China, leaving a massive base of displaced fanfiction authors and readers. In turn, that community has started to launch similar attacks against Xiao’s fanbase.
The whole thing is a huge and unnecessary mess, and the fan who organized the assault has admitted to working with Sean Xiao’s management team in order to control the situation on Weibo.
(7) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Daniel Braum and Robert Levy on Wednesday, March 18, 7 p.m. at the KGB Bar (85 East 4th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY.)
Daniel Braum
Daniel Braum is the author of the short story collections The Night Marchers and Other Strange Tales, The Wish Mechanics: Stories of the Strange and Fantastic and the Dim Shores Press chapbook Yeti Tiger Dragon. His third collection, Underworld Dreams is forthcoming from Lethe Press in 2020. The Serpent’s Shadow, his first novel, was released from Cemetery Dance eBooks in 2019. He is the editor of the Spirits Unwrapped anthology from Lethe Press.
Robert Levy
Robert Levy’s novel The Glittering World was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Shirley Jackson Award, while shorter work has appeared in Black Static, Shadows & Tall Trees, The Dark, The Best Horror of the Year, The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction, and more. Anaïs Nin at the Grand Guignol, a speculative novella written in the style of the literary icon’s legendary diaries, was released in October by Lethe Press.
(8) LUNNEY OBIT. Fanzine fan Frank Lunney died February 28 due to a coronary event. Early on, Lunney’s Beabohema was competitive with the very best sercon zines of its day, gaining a Best Fanzine Hugo nomination in 1970 when it shared the ballot with Richard E. Geis’ Science Fiction Review, Charlie Brown’s Locus, Leland Sapiro’s Riverside Quarterly, and Peter Weston’s Speculation. Wikipedia says his contributors included “a then-obscure fan named ‘Gene Klein’ who would later become famous as Gene Simmons of KISS.”
In the early Seventies he switched
over to publishing Syndrome, the reasons for which he explained in
an interview published by Dan Steffan and Ted White in Blat! (See the
full text here.)
…But the real thig that made me decide to change was being at the Boston woldcon in 1971 with the Katzes and the Kunkels. They had some hashish that made me hallucinate. (laughs) And they loaned me A Sense of FAPA with Ah! Sweet Idiocy in it, and I read and I realized that not writing about science fiction was a lot more interesting than being concerned with science fiction at all….
Although he considered what he was doing before to be fannish, from that point on other fans also identified his output as fannish. Or even faannish. In later years he would often attend Corflu. Indeed, Lunney is credited with originating the Corflu practice of paying $20 to have one’s name removed from the choosing hat, taking away any risk of being drafted to give a GoH speech at the Sunday banquet.
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY.
March 3, 1965 — Mutiny in Outer Space premiered. It was, produced, directed and written by Hugo Grimaldi and Arthur C. Pierce (although the latter was not credited as directing). It starred William Leslie, Dolores Faith, Pamela Curran and Richard Garland. The word “meh” would best sum up the reaction critics at the time had to this film. It has no rating at Rotten Tomatoes so you’ll need to watch it and see what you think of it.
March 3, 1965 — The Human Duplicators premiered. It was produced and directed by Hugo Grimaldi and Arthur C. Pierce (without a credit for the latter as director). The film stars George Nader, Barbara Nichols, George Macready and Dolores Faith. It was the color feature on a double bill with the black-and-white Mutiny in Outer Space. It wasn’t well received by critics, and Mystery Science Theater 3000 gave it their usual treatment. It currently holds a zero percent audience rating at Rotten Tomatoes. You can see it here.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born March 3, 1863 — Arthur Machen. His novella “The Great God Pan” published in 1890 has garnered a reputation as a classic of horror, with Stephen King describing it as “Maybe the best horror story in the English language.” His The Three Impostors; or, The Transmutations 1895 novel is considered a precursor to Lovecraft and was reprinted in paperback by Ballantine Books in the Seventies. (Died 1947.)
Born March 3, 1920 — James Doohan. Montgomery “Scotty” Scott on Trek of course. His first genre appearance was in Outer Limits as Police Lt. Branch followed by being a SDI Agent at Gas Station in The Satan Bug film before getting the Trek gig. He filmed a Man from U.N.C.L.E.film, One of Our Spies Is Missing, in which in played Phillip Bainbridge, during the first season of Trek. Doohan did nothing of genre nature post-Trek. ISFDB notes that he did three genre novels co-written with S.M. Stirling. (Died 2005.)
Born March 3, 1924 — Catherine Downs. She’s in four Fifties grade B SF films: The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues, The She Creature, The Amazing Colossal Man and Missile to the Moon. All but the first film was the subject of a MST3K show. (Died 1976.)
Born March 3, 1936 — Donald E. Morse, 84. Author of the single best book done on Holdstock, The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock: Critical Essays on the Fiction which he co-wrote according to ISFDB with Kalman Matolcsy. I see he also did two books on Kurt Vonnegut and the Anatomy of Science Fiction on the intersection between SF and society at large which sounds fascinating.
Born March 3, 1945 — George Miller, 75. Best known for his Mad Max franchise, The Road Warrior, Mad Max 2, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome andFury Road. He also directed TheNightmare at 20,000 Feet segment of the Twilight Zone film, The Witches of Eastwick, Babe and 40,000 Years of Dreaming.
Born March 3, 1977 — Sarah Smart, 43. She’s Jennifer in the two part Eleventh Doctor story, “The Rebel Flesh” and “The Almost People”. She’s Magda Cribden on The Secret of Crickley Hall, and played Carl Gruff in the “Billy Goat” episode of the Fairy Tale series.
Born March 3, 1982 — Jessica Biel, 38. A number of interesting genre films including The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Blade: Trinity, Stealth, The Illusionist, the remake of Total Recall which I confess I’ve not seen, and the animated Spark: A Space Tail.
Born March 3, 1980 — Katherine Waterston, 40. She’s Tina Goldstein in the Harry Potter spin-off Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which she reprised in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. And she was Janet “Danny” Daniels in Alien: Covenant. Finally I’ll note that she was Chrisann Brennan in the Steve Jobs film.
(12) FOWL TRAILER. Artemis Fowl hits U.S. theaters
May 29.
Disney’s “Artemis Fowl,” based on the beloved book by Eoin Colfer, is a fantastical, spellbinding adventure that follows the journey of 12-year-old genius Artemis Fowl, a descendant of a long line of criminal masterminds, as he seeks to find his father who has mysteriously disappeared. With the help of his loyal protector Butler, Artemis sets out to find him, and in doing so uncovers an ancient, underground civilization—the amazingly advanced world of fairies. Deducing that his father’s disappearance is somehow connected to the secretive, reclusive fairy world, cunning Artemis concocts a dangerous plan—so dangerous that he ultimately finds himself in a perilous war of wits with the all-powerful fairies.
Here is retired Marine Randy Hoffman describing combat to young men and women in training. “Your heart rate is uncontrollable,” he tells them. “Your pulse goes up so much that your ears kind of stop up. Everything goes kind of in slow motion. Your brain focuses on minute details to help you get through engaging the enemy before he can kill you.” [Wall Street Journal, December 13, 2019]
There are also delayed physiological effects. Here is the late Paul Russell, a combat medic in Vietnam, describing his reaction after he crawled under incoming fire to rescue wounded GIs, an action for which he would be awarded the Silver Star. “I threw my guts up all the next day. Adrenaline.”
(14) PRESSING ON. Galactic Journey’s Gideon Marcus is full of good news about their affiliated venture, Journey Press. He begins the “State of the Press, March 2020 edition” with news that their flagship release, Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958-1963), is in over 300 bookstores (besides being available as an ebook.) Here’s what else they have coming up —
Old Masters sign on with Journey Press
It is our great honor and privilege to announce that Journey Press will be working with Hugo Finalist and SF veteran Tom Purdom to bring back his classic, I Want the Stars. We chose to bring back this particular book for several reasons. For one, it is a timeless work, with a unique vision of the human condition nearly a thousand years from now. For another, it may well be the first science fiction novel ever to explicitly star a Black man. That’s unusual for today, forget 1964. Finally, it’s just a great book. It comes out in June.
Also, we are bowled over with delight to announce our collaboration with Robin Brown, son of the late, great Rosel George Brown. Ms. Brown was one of science fiction’s brightest lights from the mid ’50s until her untimely death in 1967 (two of her best stories are in Rediscovery). Just before she passed away, she wrote Sibyl Sue Blue, the novel that features the first galactic woman space cop. If ever there were a genre we need to have more books in, it’s that one!
Look for Sibyl Sue Blue next year, timed to coincide with coverage of the book at Galactic Journey.
New Talent on the Horizon
In less than two weeks, we will be releasing Kitra, our first work of new fiction. It’s already gotten some great advance reviews, and we think it’ll be a hit. Well, we hope so: there are nine more planned books in the series! Don’t worry, though. Kitra stands alone.
We’re particularly excited about this release, not only because it’s a revival of the space adventure yarns of the mid-20th Century (think Robert Heinlein and Andre Norton), but it also features illustrations by the talented Lorelei E. Marcus. Last, but certainly not least, Kitra has a queer woman of color as its protagonist — again, something we think there should be more of!
Scientists at Iowa State and the University of Colorado say they’ve found compelling new evidence that the ancient Earth was an unbroken expanse of water, without a single continent. Yes: “Waterworld.”
The research, published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, examined ancient samples of sea floor found in Australia and found chemical clues that Earth used to be a completely blue planet — a discovery, the scientists say, that could have deep implications for the history of life itself.
A Disney producer says the character Li Shang is missing from the live-action remake of Mulan, as his storyline is not “appropriate” in the #MeToo era.
The film tells of a woman who disguises herself as a man to fight in place of her father in China’s imperial army.
In the 1998 animated original, based on the Chinese legend of Hua Mulan, General Li Shang developed a bond with Mulan’s male warrior alter-ego Ping.
After her true identity was revealed, she and Li Shang have dinner together.
Given recent revelations in Hollywood, however, producer Jason Reed confirmed they were uncomfortable with the power dynamics in their relationship.
“I think particularly in the time of the #MeToo movement, having a commanding officer that is also the sexual love interest was very uncomfortable and we didn’t think it was appropriate,” Reed told Collider.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, Dann,
Mike Kennedy, Michael Toman, Martin Morse Wooster, Brian Z., and Andrew Porter
for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of
the day Camestros Felapton.]
(1) LISTEN UP. Here are works of genre interest picked for AudioFile’s Best Audiobooks of 2019 beyond the Best Science Fiction Fantasy & Horror category announced at File 770.
YOUNG ADULT
Akata Warrior by Nnedi Okorafor
The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust volume 2) by Philip Pullman
FICTION, POETRY & DRAMA
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
BIOGRAPHY & HISTORY
American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race by Douglas Brinkley
The January 1 episode is part one of a two-part story called “Spyfall,” with part two arriving on Sunday, January 5, presumably also at 8 pm. That will be ‘Doctor Who’s regular time slot going forward.
If you’re a ‘Doctor Who’ superfan, BBC and BBC America are teaming up with Fathom Events for a one-time-only screening of both parts of “Spyfall” on the big screen, followed by a LIVE Q&A with Whittaker, Cole, and Gill from the Paley Center for Media in New York. These showings will be held at 600 theaters in the US on January 5. (Tickets go on sale on Friday at FathomEvents.com.)
(3) SMILE FOR THE CAMERA. Kevin Standlee promoted the
Tonopah 2021 Westercon at this weekend’s Loscon.
Team Tonopah welcomed 19 new attending members while we were at Loscon 46 at the LAX Airport Marriott, and talked to many more people to tell them all about our plans for Westercon in Tonopah, Nevada.
(4) KGB READINGS. TheFantastic Fiction at KGB reading
series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Paul Tremblay and
Nathan Ballingrud on Wednesday, December 18 at the KGB Bar. Event starts at 7
p.m. (KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY.)
Paul Tremblay
Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the author of The Cabin at the End of the World, A Head Full of Ghosts, and most recently the short story collection Growing Thingsand Other Stories. His essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly online, and numerous year’s-best anthologies.
Nathan Ballingrud
Nathan Ballingrud is the author of North American Lake Monsters and Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell. He’s twice won the Shirley Jackson Award, and has been shortlisted for the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Bram Stoker Awards. His stories have appeared in numerous Best of the Year anthologies. Wounds, a film based on his novella “The Visible Filth,” has recently been released. North American Lake Monsters is in development as an anthology series at Hulu.
The Doppelgänger Gambit by Leigh Killough, 1979, cover by Michael Herring
Herring’s cover captures two key elements of this gripping 21st-century police procedural. The first: the two police officers don’t get along. The second: clothing fashions in this future are somehow even more hideous than real-world 1970s fashions. The cover is true to the work. Detective Janna Brill thinks Maxwell takes unconscionable risks, and these are the clothes described in the novel. (Though I suspect the cops in the novel used holsters.)
Two years ago, Ikea sent designers to the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS), which created a habitat in the Utah desert that mimics the conditions on the Red Planet. Ikea interior designer Christina Levenborn stayed in the habitat, ultimately creating an Ikea line for small spaces inspired by her stay. But more recently, she used her experience living in the habitat to help researchers outfit the space. She just returned from redecorating the habitat, which now looks brightly lit and neatly organized. In fact, it looks a lot like what you’d see in an Ikea catalog—which is impressive, because the space is exceptionally small and stark.
Sff writer David Levine did a cycle with the MDRS in 2010 and File
770 ran several posts based on his updates, including “Levine Reaches Mars”.
Two external members of the Nobel literature prize committee have quit after criticising the Swedish Academy.
Gun-Britt Sundstrom said the choice of Peter Handke as this year’s winner had been interpreted as if literature stood above politics and she did not agree.
The choice of Handke was criticised because of his vocal support for the Serbs during the 1990s Yugoslav war.
Kristoffer Leandoer said he’d left due to Academy reforms taking too long following a sexual assault scandal.
(8) TODAY IN HISTORY.
December 2, 1979 — Star Trek comics premiered in syndicated form in the U.S. From 1979 to 1983, the Los Angeles Times Mirror Syndicate produced a daily and Sunday comic strip based upon this series. Larry Niven was among the many writers who did scripts for it. IDW has reprinted them in two volumes, The Newspaper Comics, Volume 1 and The Newspaper Comics, Volume 2.
December 2, 2005 — Aeon Flux premiered. Produced by Gale Hurd, it stars Charlize Theron in the title role. It’s based on the animated Aeon Flux series of the same name created by Peter Chung. It bombed at the box office, was poorly received by critics, and currently has a 9% rating at Rotten Tomatoes.
December 2, 2017 – First pizza party in space took place on the International Space Station.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born December 2, 1913 — Jerry Sohl. Scriptwriter and genre writer who did work for The Twilight Zone (ghostwriting for Charles Beaumont who was seriously ill at the time), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Outer Limits and Star Trek. One of his three Trek scripts was the superb “Corbomite Maneuver” episode. (Died 2002.)
Born December 2, 1914 — Ray Walston. Best known of course for playing the lead in My Favorite Martian from 1963 to 1966, alongside co-star Bill Bixby. His later genre appearances would include The Wild Wild West, Mission: Impossible, Six Million Dollar Man, Galaxy of Terror, Amazing Stories, Popeye, Friday the 13th: The Series and Addams Family Reunion. He would appear in The Incredible Hulk (in which David Banner was played by Bill Bixby) as Jasper the Magician in an episode called “My Favorite Magician”. (Died 2001.)
Born December 2, 1937 — Brian Lumley, 81. Horror writer who came to distinction in the Seventies writing in the Cthulhu Mythos and by creating his own character Titus Crow. In the Eighties, he created the Necroscope series, which first centered on Speaker to the Dead Harry Keogh. He has received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association, and a World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Born December 2, 1946 — Josepha Sherman. Writer and folklorist who was a Compton Crook Award winner for The Shining Falcon, which was based on the Russian fairy tale “The Feather of Finist the Falcon”. She was a prolific writer both on her own and in collaboration authors such as Mecedes Lackey (A Cast of Corbies), and Laura Anne Gilman (two Buffyverse novels). I knew her personally as a folklorist first and she was without peer writing such works as Rachel the Clever: And Other Jewish Folktales and Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts: The Subversive Folklore of Childhood that she wrote with T K F Weisskopf. Neat lady who died far too soon. Let me leave you with an essay she wrote on Winter for Green Man twenty years ago. (Died 2012.)
Born December 2, 1946 — David Macaulay, 73. British-born American illustrator and writer. Genre adjacent I’d say. Creator of such cool works as Cathedral, The New Way Things Work which has he updated for the computer technology age, and his latest, Crossing on Time: Steam Engines, Fast Ships, and a Journey to the New World.
Born December 2, 1952 — OR Melling, 67. One of her favorite authors is Alan Garner whose The Owl Service is a frequent read of hers she tells me. As for novels by her that I’d recommend, the Chronicles of Faerie series is quite excellent. For more adult fare, her People of the Great Journey is quite good.
Born December 2, 1968 — Lucy Liu, 51. She was Joan Watson on Elementary in its impressive seven-year run. Her other genre role, and it’s been long running, has been voicing Tinkermist in the Disney Fairies animated franchise. I kid you not. She’s had a few genre one-offs on The X-Files, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and the Rise: Blood Hunter film, but not much overall.
Popular Edwardian novelist and inventor of the concept of Time Travel Herbert George Wells has appeared in central London this morning, intending to punch whoever made the BBC adaptation of War of the Worlds squarely on the nose.
Wells, who believed the chances of anyone making a boring adaptation of his masterpiece were a million to one, said ‘but still, it’s done’.
“There was a great disturbance in the… oh, I’m sure you’ll come up with a word for it”, said Wells. “As if millions of my fans voices cried out ‘what the heck’.”
Tamara Wilhite: What are you currently working on?
Louis Antonelli: Well, kind of following up the previous question, since the Sad Puppies in 2015 there’s been a pretty ironclad blacklist in the major science fiction magazine and publishers against anyone who isn’t an intolerant doctrinaire left-wing asshole. Nobody denies it anymore, because such assertions only gets the horse laugh.
The only major book publisher that judges authors impartially is Baen; Analog is the one major magazine that seems to pick stories based on merit and not the author’s politics and lifestyle….
Eighty million years ago, during the Cretaceous Period, Mongolia’s Gobi Desert was a dinosaur’s paradise of vast valleys, freshwater lakes and a humid climate.
Mammal-eating velociraptors, lizard-hipped sauropods and spike-armoured ankylosaurs could have been spotted roaming in what are now the Martian red sandstone spires of Bayanzag’s Flaming Cliffs.
These prehistorically favourable conditions make the Gobi Desert the largest dinosaur fossil reservoir in the world.
Over almost 100 years of palaeontological research in the Gobi, more than 80 genera have been found. But for many people living there, this scientific heritage remains unknown.
“Putting a fence up is not protection; protection is people’s knowledge,” Mongolian palaeontologist Bolortsetseg Minjin explains as we wind through the Flaming Cliffs in search of signs of fossil poaching.
Amazon has unveiled a musical keyboard with a built-in artificial intelligence (AI) composer.
The AWS DeepComposer is a two-octave, 32-key keyboard that can connect to computers via a USB cable.
Users can play a short tune, or use a pre-recorded one, ask the keyboard to embellish it in one of four styles – jazz, classical, rock or pop – and then publish it on Soundcloud.
But one expert said the audio demo provided by Amazon was “terrible”.
A tiger has undertaken the longest walk ever recorded in India, travelling some 1,300km (807 miles) in five months.
Experts believe the two-and-a-half-year-old male is possibly in search of prey, territory or a mate.
The tiger, which is fitted with a radio collar, left its home in a wildlife sanctuary in the western state of Maharashtra in June.
It was then tracked travelling back and forth over farms, water and highways, and into a neighbouring state.
So far, the tiger has come into conflict with humans only once, when it “accidentally injured” one person who was part of a group that entered a thicket under which it was resting.
(16) JEOPARDY! Andrew Porter watched tonight’s Jeopardy!
with wrapped attention….
Category: Literary Works of the 1920s.
Answer: “Jane Webb Loudon wrote the 1st novel about one of these creatures, including the line, ‘Weak, feeble worm! Exclaimed Cheops.'”
Wrong question: “What is a Sphinx?”
Correct question: “What is a Mummy?”
(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “The
Mushroom Hunters” on YouTube is a poem by Neil Gaiman read by Amanda
Palmer, with music by Jherek Bischoff.
[Thanks to Camestros Felapton (Felapton Towers, Bortsworth, Bortsworthshire),
John King Tarpinian, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Martin Morse Wooster, Olav Rokne, Mike
Kennedy, Chip Hitchcock, and Andrew Porter. Title credit goes to File 770
contributing editor of the day StephenfromOttawa.]
By Mark L. Blackman: On the evening of Wednesday,
October 16th, as a nor’easter raged outside, the monthly Fantastic
Fiction Readings Series hosted authors Barbara
Krasnoff and Nicole Kornher-Stace at its longtime venue, the most
sincerely Red Room of the second-floor (or third – there’s a major schism –
but, either way, it’s a steep climb up stairs) KGB Bar in Manhattan’s East
Village. (The Room seemed darker than usual.)
The
event opened with Series co-host Matthew Kressel welcoming the crowd (who’d
come out in the storm) and the standard exhortation to thank the Bar by buying
drinks, hard or soft (readings are always free, and our patronage keeps it so) (somewhat
smaller, likely due to the holidays) and reported on upcoming readings. The
next months’ readers are:
November 20 David Mack Glassner
December 18 Paul Tremblay Nathan Ballingrud
January 15, 2020 Cassandra Khaw Richard Kadrey
February 19 James Patrick Kelly P. Djeli Clark
(Details
are available at here.)
All dates are the third Wednesday of the month.
He
concluded by introducing the first reader of the evening. Nicole Kornher-Stace
is the author of the Norton Award finalist Archivist Wasp and
its sequel, Latchkey. Her next
novel, Firebreak, is due out from Saga in 2020, and it was
from it that she read. Firebreak, she relayed, has been
described as “if Saga Press and Black
Mirror had a baby.” Set in the future, in an oppressive company town –
notably, they’ve locked up the water supply – Mallory Parker leads a protest
(the revolution is being broadcast online), and security, behind disruptor
shields, is brutally disbanding the crowd. (Though, of course, not intended, it
was hard not to think of what’s happening in Hong Kong.) When there is a rainfall,
protestors grab red plastic cups to catch it, deemed illegally “poaching
water.” Her offering was well-received, though Kornher-Stace did read a bit too
fast.
After
an intermission, the Series’ senior co-host, Ellen Datlow, introduced the
evening’s second reader. Barbara Krasnoff is the author of over 35 short
stories, including “Sabbath Wine,” which was a finalist for the Nebula Award,
and recently published a mosaic novel (connected stories) titled The History of Soul 2065, a generational
saga of two Jewish girls’ descendants, spanning from the eve of World War I to
the second half of the 21st century, including “Sabbath Wine.” (She’s
also responsible for a series of wryly captioned photos delving into the inner
situations of street objects and urban wildlife that can be found under the
hashtag #TheirBackstories.)
Her reading was of a story from The History of Soul 2065, “Stoop Ladies.” Set in 1983, in Brooklyn (of course), Julie Jacobson (not strictly speaking on either girl’s family tree), newly laid off from her office job (a PR representative) after 17 years, sighs and decides to join the crowd (a very different one from Firebreak) of mostly elderly women who congregate evenings in the yard outside her brownstone to schmooze and gossip, and with whom she occasionally sits. (My mother called the bunch who set up beach chairs outside our apartment house “Rogues Gallery,” with people passing by on the sidewalk or entering the building running the gauntlet of their scrutiny, though we dubbed them “Yenta Center.” Julie’s neighbors are more ethnically diverse.) Sharing her woes, she finds Chablis and sympathy, and perhaps a little magic. The story was quirky – like the ladies – and enchanting.
Prior
to the reading, as usual, Datlow whirled through the audience, taking photos.
(It looks like she’s also using a cameraphone these days.) Her photos of the
event may be seen on her Flickr page.
(1) CHANGES TO NY TIMES BESTSELLER LISTS. Publishers
Weekly reports “‘NYT’
Shifts Its Lists Again”. Mass market paperbacks and graphic books will
be tracked again, and middle grade paperback and YA paperback lists will debut.
After cutting the mass market paperback and graphic novel/manga lists in 2017, the Times‘ Best Sellers team will again track mass market paperback sales, as well as debut a combined list for graphic books, which will include fiction, nonfiction, children’s, adults, and manga. Two new monthly children’s lists, middle grade paperback and young adult paperback, will debut as well. (The Times retired its middle grade e-book and young adult e-book lists in 2017.) In addition, the Times will cut its science and sports lists, explaining that “the titles on those lists are frequently represented on current nonfiction lists.” The changes are effective October 2 online and October 20 in print.
The Times has already cut back its print lists on the combined print/e-book and print hardcover lists to 10 titles, from 15, although the online lists will continue to show 15 titles. A representative of the paper said that the change “was made for design reasons, specifically to improve the readability of the lists in print.”
(2) KGB. Fantastic
Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel
present Barbara Krasnoff and Nicole Kornher-Stace on Wednesday, October 16.
Barbara Krasnoff
Barbara Krasnoff is the author of over 35 short stories, including “Sabbath Wine,” which was a finalist for the Nebula Award, and recently published a mosaic novel titled The History of Soul 2065. She’s also responsible for a series of captioned photos that can be found under the hashtag #TheirBackstories.
Nicole Kornher-Stace
Nicole Kornher-Stace is the author of the Norton Award finalist Archivist Wasp and its sequel, Latchkey. Her next novel, Firebreak, is due out from Saga in 2020. She can be found online at nicolekornherstace.com or on Twitter @wirewalking.
The event begins 7 p.m. at the KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street (just
off 2nd Ave, upstairs.)
New York, NY.
(3) SUNDAY IN THE PARK. Last Sunday at the Brooklyn Book Festival, Andrew Porter took this photo of the Dell Magazines booth which was hosted by Asimov’s editor Sheila Williams and her daughter.
Sheila Williams and daughter. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.
Sheila Williams and daughter. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.
(4) NEW AWARD PROMOTES DIVERSE SFF. Gollancz
and author Ben Aaronovitch are launching a writing prize championing under-represented voices in science fiction,
fantasy and horror after stats showed less than 1% of the genres’ books
come from British BAME authors. (BAME is used in the UK to refer to black, Asian and minority ethnic
people.)
Submissions for the
Gollancz and Rivers of London BAME SFF Award will
be taken from October 1, 2019 until January 31, 2020 — 5,000
to 10,000 words consisting of either a self-contained short story or the
opening of a novel that fits into the scifi, fantasy or horror genres
The prizes include:
£4,000 for the overall winner alongside a critique and year-long mentoring programme with Gollancz commissioning editor Rachel Winterbottom.
Second place: £2,000 and a critique of their work
Five runners-up will receive £800 and a Gollancz goodie bag.
Gollancz publisher Anne Clarke said:
The current lack of representation in science fiction and fantasy is no secret and it has to change. As modern speculative fiction publishers, we at Gollancz have a responsibility not just to say our doors are open, but to actively seek out and support writers whose backgrounds and experience have historically been – and still are – under-represented in our genre. I hope this award will encourage writers who have perhaps not always felt welcome in the world of science fiction and fantasy publishing and I’m looking forward to discovering exciting new writing talent within the submissions.
It’s Hollywood logic to try bleed more money from a stone. Whenever there’s a successful franchise, it’s natural for studios to stay safe and invest in more of the same product and produce as many sequels, prequels, TV shows, and reboots of the property. However, every so often, Tinseltown fails to catch lighting in a bottle a second time. Not every movie deserves 815 more iterations of the same story.
In
the middle of the list is —
5. CATWOMAN
Long before DCEU fans bemoaned the current DC movies, they were (rightfully) bailing on another one. Somehow, DC was able to zap all of the fun and sultriness out of Selina Kyle for the long-gestating Catwoman movie, which starred Oscar winner Halle Berry, Sharon Stone, and Benjamin Bratt. All in all, not a bad trio. So what went wrong?
First, the entire origins of a cat burglar/vixen are heaved out the window and replaced with an Egyptian Cat Mythology. That mythology would have worked if it was a little more thought out and the movie itself wasn’t just an excuse to feature the gorgeous Berry in as little clothing as possible.
(6) STEAMFEST. Cora Buhlert shares lots of photos in her report “Steampunk in East Frisia:
Steamfest Papenburg 2019”. (Before I read Cora’s post, Papenburg
was, for me, only an obscure reference in a Patrick O’Brien novel.)
…Steampunk is not exactly something you would associate with Papenburg, even though the steamship MV Liemba a.k.a. Graf Goetzen, which starred in The African Queen as the German gunboat Königin Luise, was built here in 1913. Therefore, I was very surprised to learn that Papenburg not only has an active Steampunk community, but also hosts Steamfest, a Steampunk festival which took place for the second time in 2019. And since Papenburg is only about 114 kilometres away, I of course decided to pay Steamfest a visit.
Magic as revenge, retaliation, or retribution is the theme of many of September’s best short speculative fiction stories. There are some new authors on this list alongside some very well-known names, yet no matter where they are career-wise, the stories they’ve written have left a mark on this world. Here are some of the ten best science fiction, fantasy, and horror short stories I read in September.
(8) FUTURE TECH CRIMINALS. Editors
Eric
Bosarge and Joe McDermott have launched a Kickstarter to fund their The
Way of the Laser: Future Crime Storiesanthology from VernacularBooks.
The contributing authors include Kameron Hurley, Mur
Lafferty Patrice Sarath, Wendy Wagner, Julie C Day, Paul Jessup, Jamie Mason,
Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, Ross Lockhart, Karen Bovenmyer, with open submissions to
new authors.
It used to be if someone wanted to mug you, they had to look you in the face and make a threat. Not anymore. Hackers can wipe a bank account without ever having to risk drawing blood. Bad people use technology for personal gain. Nothing’s new about that. What is new is the ways technology opens up opportunities for exploitation.
New technology is coming on-line all the time, creating new opportunities for creative criminals and dissidents. Stolen elections, companies held hostage by hackers, and acts of terror have all been committed with technology that didn’t exist a few short years ago.
Join leading edge speculative fiction authors on an exciting walk into darkness where people and machines plunder, cheat, kill, and steal in ways we can’t even imagine with tools that may not even exist, yet. But, they’re coming.
(9) SATIRE ON TWO WHEELS. Remember Knight
Rider? Well, here’s David Hasselhoff in Moped Rider…
(10) TODAY IN HISTORY.
September 27, 1958 — In Italy, The Day the Sky Exploded (Italian: La morte viene dallo spazio, “Death Comes From Space”. It is known as the first Italian SF film, predating even the SF films of Antonio Margheriti.
September 27, 1979 — Buck Rogers in the 25th Century began its regular first season (after the airing of the film) with an episode called “Planet of the Slave Girls”.
September 27, 2002 — Joss Whedon’s Fireflypremiered on Fox TV. It was cancelled after eleven of the fourteen produced episodes were aired. Eventually it concluded in a film called Serenity which Will Shetterly reviewed here.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born September 27, 1902 — Henry Farrell. Novelist and screenwriter, best known as the author of the “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” story which was made into a film of the same name starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. (Died 2006.)
Born September 27, 1932 — Roger Charles Carmel. The original Harcourt Fenton “Harry” Mudd as he appeared in two episodes of the original Star Trek, “Mudd’s Women” and “I, Mudd”” and one episode of the animated series as well, “Mudd’s Passion”. I say original because Discovery has decided that they have a Harry Mudd. He also had one-offs on I-Spy, Munsters, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Batman. It is rumored but not confirmed he was going to reprise his role as Harry Mudd in a first-season episode of Next Gen but died before filming could start. (Died 1986.)
Born September 27, 1934 — Wilford Brimley, 85. His first genre role is as Dr. Blair in John Carpenter’s The Thing. He’s Benjamin ‘Ben’ Luckett in the Cacoon films, and Agency Director Harold Smith in Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins. He made a rather splendid President Grover Cleveland in The Wild Wild West Revisted. And finally I note that he was Noa in Ewoks: The Battle for Endor.
Born September 27, 1947 — Meat Loaf, 72. He has a tasty role as Eddie in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And I’d argue some of his music videos are genre stories in their own right. He also has film roles in Wishcraft (horror), Stage Fright (horror) and Urban Decay (yes, more horror). He’s also in BloodRayne which is yes, horror. He’s had one-offs on Tales from the Crypt, The Outer Limits, Monsters, Masters of Horror and was Doug Rennie, a main cast member of Ghost Wars.
Born September 27, 1950 — Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, 69. He’d be on the Birthday Honors list if he’d only been Zylyn in Space Rangers which lasted only six episodes. Damn. But he’s also shown up on Babylon 5, the premier of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Superboy, Alien Nation, the Australian version of Mission: Impossible, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Stargate SG-1, Poltergeist: The Legacy, The Librarians, voicing characters on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Star Wars Rebels. He’s currently got two main roles going, the first being Nobusuke Tagomi in The Man in The High Castle, the other being Hiroki Watanabe in Lost in Space.
Born September 27, 1956 — Sheila Williams, 63. Editor, Asimov’s Science Fiction last fifteen years. She won the Hugo Award for Best Short Form Editor in 2011 and 2012. With the late Gardner Dozois, she co-edited a bonnie bunch of anthologies such as Isaac Asimov’s Robots, Isaac Asimov’s Christmas and Isaac Asimov’s Cyberdreams. She was also responsible for the Isaac Asimov Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy writing being renamed the Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing.
Born September 27, 1972 — Gwyneth Paltrow, 47. Yes, she is Pepper Potts in the Marvel Universe film franchise but her first genre role was as a young Wendy Darling in Hook. And she shows up in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow asPolly Perkins, a reporter for The Chronicle.
(12) ROCKET ROYALTY. In Olav Rokne’s post “Many
Princes; One Crown” at the Hugo Book Club Blog, readers are
reminded of the challenges in voting on works translated to English, beginning
with a recent Retro-Hugo winner.
…But the case of The Little Prince is more comparable to that of the first translated work to appear on a Hugo Ballot: the 1963 novel Sylva, which was written by French war hero Vercors (A.K.A. Jean Bruller). No translator is mentioned on the dust jacket of the book. And until this summer, when the record was updated at our request, the official Hugo Awards site did not list the name of the translator, Rita Barisse. The Wikipedia entry for the Hugo Awards, and several other publications continue to neglect Barisse’s contribution to the work….
(13) LAFFERTY AWARENESS. Shelf Awareness checks in
with the author of Lies My
Teacher Told Me in
“Reading
with… James W. Loewen”. R.A. Lafferty gets a big shout-out:
Book you’re an evangelist for:
The only historical novel I recommend without reservation: Okla Hannali by R.A. Lafferty. Even though by a white author, I credit it as a Choctaw history of the 19th century, in the form of a biography of a fictional Choctaw leader who was born in Mississippi around 1801 and died in Oklahoma in 1900. I realize such a statement creates all sorts of problems for me–expropriation of Native knowledge, white arrogance, etc. My only defense is the work itself. I have no idea how Lafferty, otherwise known for science fiction, learned so much about Choctaws (and white folks), but every time I have checked out any fact in Okla Hannali, no matter how small, Lafferty got it right. And what a read! Only a little over 200 pages long, but an epic, nevertheless.
(14) ANOTHER WAY OF LOOKING AT THINGS. David Gerrold contends
art and the artist should be regarded separately in his public
Facebook post:
So let’s say that I point out that the owners of a specific fast-food chain have donated a lot of money to anti-LGBTQ+ causes.
This is not an invitation to say:
“The food is terrible.”
Let’s say that I point out that a particular actor has said some unsavory things about politics. This is not an invitation to say,
“She can’t act anyway.”
Or maybe a well-known author has said something egregiously stupid. That’s not an invitation to say,
You are on a runaway trolley. On one track are five people who have not yet seen The Good Place and don’t intend to, and who will die if you don’t move the lever. On the other track is one person who, like you, is caught up and can discuss the show with you. What do you do?
(16) PENN AND POURNELLE. There’s a pair of names you wouldn’t
put in the same sentence – unless you’re Tedium’s Ernie Smith. In “All
Penn, No Teller” he recalls when Penn Jillette was “a sometimes-rebellious big-name computer magazine
columnist in the ’90s.”
…Now, tech writing of this era doesn’t have the pedigree of, say, good music journalism in the 1970s. Certainly, there were good tech writers during this time, particularly free-wheeling voices like fellow moonlighter Jerry Pournelle of Byte, hard-nosed insiders like journeyman scribe John C. Dvorak and the long-anonymous Robert X. Cringely, and well-considered newspaper voices of reason like syndicated columnist Kim Komando and the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg.
But Jillette was something different. He was already famous—certainly more famous than Pournelle, an established science-fiction author, thanks to being a regular fixture on television during much of his career and starring in a legendary Run-DMC music video—and he likely did not need a nationally distributed computer magazine column to make a living. Jillette simply liked computers and knew a lot about them, which meant that he could rant about the details of an Autoexec.bat file just as easily as he can about politics. He gave the tech writing form something of an edge, while maintaining the freewheeling nature established by fellow pre-blogging voices like Pournelle….
“Caltech scientists have discovered a new species of worm thriving in the extreme environment of Mono Lake. This new species, temporarily dubbed Auanema sp., has three different sexes, can survive 500 times the lethal human dose of arsenic, and carries its young inside its body like a kangaroo.”
Terry Hunt sent the link in with a note: “I was
irresistibly reminded of Vonda N. McIntyre’s story ‘Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand’ and its novel expansion Dreamsnake.”
(18) LOOKING FOR ET IN YOUR OWN BACKYARD. The Beyond Center
presented the 2019 Eugene Shoemaker Memorial Lecture with James Benford on
September 5.
Abstract: A recently discovered group of nearby co-orbital objects is an attractive location for extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) to locate for observing Earth. Near-Earth objects provide an ideal way to watching our world from a secure natural object that provides resources an ETI might need: materials, a firm anchor, concealment. These co-orbital objects have been little studied by astronomy and not at all by SETI or planetary radar observations. I describe the objects found thus far and propose both passive and active observations of them by optical and radio listening, radar imaging and launching probes. We might also broadcast to them.
India’s Moon rover, which lost contact moments before it was to touch down on the lunar surface earlier this month, had a “hard landing”, Nasa has said.
New pictures from a Nasa spacecraft show the targeted landing site of the Vikram rover, but its precise location “has yet to be determined”.
The images were taken at dusk, and were not able to locate the lander.
India would have been the fourth nation to make a soft landing on the Moon.
Chandrayaan-2 was due to touch down at the lunar South Pole on 7 September, over a month after it first took off.
It approached the Moon as normal until an error occurred about 2.1km (1.3 miles) from the surface, Indian space officials said.
On Friday, Nasa tweeted the images of the targeted landing site of the Indian module.
(20) STAR WARS AT DISNEYLAND. Good Morning America shared
an advance look at the “Rise
of the Resistance” attraction that
will be part of the Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge area of the Disney parks,
The future: The fully realized version of Shapeshifter would be a “mothercraft” lander that carries a collection of 12 mini robots (“cobots”) to the surface, acts as the main power source, and uses a suite of scientific instruments that can directly analyze samples. The cobots could work together to carry and move the mothercraft to different areas. They would be able to operate individually or as one cohesive unit, in order to adapt to a variety of terrains and environments.
For example, the cobots would be able to separate and fly out in different directions or together as a flock, link up together like a barrel of monkeys in order to explore narrow caves and caverns, or even float on or swim in liquid.
(22) SURVIVE BY A WHISKER. Gato Roboto
is
a video game designed to let you channel your inner feline.
Pounce inside of your cozy armored mech and set off on a dangerous trek through an alien underworld full of irritable creatures and treacherous obstacles in a valiant effort to save your stranded captain and his crashed spaceship. Tiptoe outside the friendly confines of your technological marvel and follow your feline instincts through tight tunnels and mysterious waterways to scavenge for new weapons and gear. Adventure awaits the most curious of cats in Gato Roboto!
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Mike Kennedy,
Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, Terry Hunt, Nina Shepardson,Cliff, Rob Thornton,
Michael J. Walsh, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories.
Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Anna NImmhaus.]
By Mark L. Blackman: On
the bitingly cold evening of Fat Tuesday (yes, it was Mardi Gras), March
5, 2019, at an event held at its venue, the Brooklyn Commons Café, the New
York Review of Science Fiction Readings Series featured a joint reading from Matthew Kressel and Mercurio D. Rivera of their co-written story “The Walk to Distant Suns,” which appears in the March issue of Analog.
The
evening kicked off as customary with a welcome from producer/executive curator
Jim Freund, longtime host of WBAI-FM’s Hour of the Wolf radio program on sf and fantasy, a
heads-up that we were on camera – the proceedings were streaming live via
Livestream (they may be accessed by going to Livestream.com and searching for
NYRSF) – and an announcement of scheduled upcoming readings. April 2nd’s event will be
guest-hosted by Mike Allen and feature Theodora Goss and Barbara Krasnoff. May 7th readers are to be
determined. June, being the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, on the 4th
will offer Katharine Duckett and another writer to be named; it will,
said Freund, be “queer-oriented.” He
then introduced the evening’s two readers before ducking into the control
booth; he was handling Tech.
Matthew Kresselis the author of the well-received novel King
of Shards and of short fiction that has appeared in Lightspeed,
Clarkesworld, Analog, Nightmare,
and Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies, and been honored as a
three-time Nebula Award Finalist and a Eugie Award Finalist. Additionally, as a
coder, he created the Moksha submissions system currently in use by many of the
largest SF publishers. Locally, with Ellen Datlow, he is the co-host of the Fantastic
Fiction at KGB reading series at the titular East Village bar.
Mercurio D. (for David) Rivera is the World Fantasy Award-nominated writer of short fiction that has appeared in markets such as Analog,
Asimov’s, Lightspeed, Interzone, and Space and Time, and been anthologized
in several
Year’s Best Science Fiction compilations as well as podcast. His most notable stories include “Tu Sufrimiento Shall Protect
Us,” “Longing for Langalana,” “Tethered,” “Dance of the Kawkawroons,” and
“Those Brighter Stars;” his own collection, Across the Even Horizon, was
critically acclaimed. Like Kressel, he is a member of
the Manhattan writing group Altered Fluid.
After
a silly attempt to read together, the duo took turns reading “The Walk to Distant Suns,” with Rivera leading off. The
“walk” is along an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, called “the Lift,” which transmutes
matter and transfers it, both objects and people, one quark at a time, through
a wormhole, from Earth (more precisely L-5) to a world dubbed Iris in the
Trappist-1 System 40 light years away; it is a one-way trip. Earth is in bleak
shape, with 80% of the population living in poverty and many eking out by
foraging through garbage, so a new life on the paradisiacal planet beckons.
Among them are Shandi, an engineer at the Lift, who hopes to make the trip one
day with her family (her mother is ill and her little sister is artistic).
Alas, the corporation that operates the Lift keeps raising the cost, so only
the rich can afford to go. Using the opportunity that her position affords,
Shandi schemes to smuggle them all onto the Lift. To be continued.
During
the intermission, there was a raffle drawing (with Freund boothed, Amy
Goldschlager was drafted to oversee it) with the prizes including the issue of Analog
containing the story, The Best
Science Fiction of the Year , and a signed copy of the manuscript
from which they were reading.
Subsequently,
with Kressel leading off, the reading continued through to the end of the story
and its twist ending (no spoilers).
Goldschlager
then moderated a Q&A, opening with a question from her about their
collaborative process. They broke up scenes, characters and motivations, said
Rivera, though Kressel wrote the first section, then they went back and forth.
It was “a successful collaboration;” in the end, they each “feel like they
wrote the whole thing.” Even outside of Altered Fluid, they’re used to
criticizing each other. Asked by an audience member if they’d thought of expanding
it, Kressel said that they’d thought that it would be a short story, but it
grew to 8,600 words. Goldschlager also delivered the “outro.”
As
traditional at these Readings, the Jenna Felice Freebie Table offered giveaway
books, and the Café saw to food, a coffee bar, beer and wine.
The
crowd of about 25-30 included Karen Heuler, Raj Khanna, Barbara Krasnoff (House
Manager), Lissanne Lake, and James Ryan and Susan
Ratisher Ryan. Afterward, there
was schmoozing, and feasting.
By Mark L. Blackman: On the wintry-cold autumn evening of Wednesday, October 17th, the monthly Fantastic Fiction Readings Series presented award-winning sf authors Lawrence M. Schoen and Tim Pratt, who read from their latest novels, both continuations of earlier works.
The Series, co-hosted by Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel, is held on the third Wednesday of each month at its longtime venue, the Soviet era-themed (so doubly aptly-named) Red Room of the second-floor KGB Bar in Manhattan’s East Village. Readings are free, but the hosts do noodgeh the crowd to buy drinks. As Kressel put it in his opening remarks, support the Bar and support the Series. (bljatlh ‘e’ ymelev – yltlhutlh!)*
Kressel then announced upcoming readings:
November 21 – Leanna Renee Hieber and Cat Rambo
December 19 – Nicole Kornher-Stace and Maria Dahvana Headley
January 16, 2019 – Victor LaValle and Julie C. Day
Tim Pratt is the Hugo Award-winning and Nebula, World Fantasy, and Philip K. Dick Awards-nominated author of 25 novels and four story collections. His Axiom space opera series began with The Wrong Stars; he read from its sequel, The Dreaming Stars.
Set several hundred years in the future, the series takes its name from the Axiom, an ancient, malevolent species that wipes out other spacefaring races, but is at present dormant. Humanity is out in deep space through the efforts of a mostly-benevolent squidlike race known as the Liars because, um, they do that a lot. Our heroes’ mission is to exterminate the Axiom before they rouse and notice us. Their bad luck, they encounter an Axiom artifact and one of their number is infected with nanobots that turn him into a homicidal psychopath. In Pratt’s breezy and entertaining selection, he is being woken again, for safety’s sake, in VR, and being very selectively updated on the situation (as you’d expect, they leave out the homicidal psychopath bit), previous attempts having been dangerously unsuccessful.
After an intermission, co-host Datlow introduced the second reader of the evening.
Lawrence Schoen
Dr. Lawrence M. Schoen (he holds a PhD in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics) has been a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award, the Hugo Award, and the Nebula Award, and the recipient of the Coyotl Award for Best Novel for the anthropomorphic Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard. He is also the author of humorous short stories, novellas and novels about his protagonist the Amazing Conroy, “a stage hypnotist turned CEO who travels the galaxy with Reggie, his alien companion animal that eats anything and farts oxygen.” In addition, he is an authority on the Klingon language.
His reading selection was from the first chapter of The Moons of Barsk, the sequel to Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard. Set 80,000 years in the future, humanity is gone, superseded by sapient, uplifted animals (they don’t know that that’s what they are) that have spread through the galaxy. The furred mammals, it seems though, are none too keen on the furless elephants (of which there are two species, descendants respectively of African and Asian pachyderms) and have exiled them to a planet that no one wants, Barsk. There, when they are about to die, “Fants,” as the two races are collectively known, receive a call to sail away to an island, the proverbial Elephants’ Graveyard. Many theories were advanced about this in Barsk, but Schoen’s premise in the sequel is that “everything in the first book is wrong;” thus Chapter 1 is entitled “Nothing But Lies.” As it opens, a physicist has arrived on the last island and, to his surprise, finds no evidence of others who preceded him there – such as bones – and then, to his shock, is greeted by a Fant who tells him that his life and work are not over. (By the way, Schoen revealed, the audiobook is read – in English – by J.G. Hertzler, General Martok on Deep Space Nine.)
In lieu of the Word Bookstore, the readers had for sale copies of their books, Pratt both Axiom novels and Schoen both Barsk novels.
Prior to the readings, Datlow, as usual, circulated, taking pictures of the early arrivals and the two readers. Her photos of the event may be seen on her Flickr page, linked to the Series’ website. The audience, often SRO, was, for some reason, noticeably smaller.
(Note: Despite the readings being held in a bar, there were no reports of pink elephants.)
This episode’s guest is Matthew Kressel, whose short story “The Last Novelist (or A Dead Lizard in the Yard)” was one of the finalists this year. He was a previous finalist twice before in the same category for “The Sounds of Old Earth” in 2014 and “The Meeker and the All-Seeing Eye” in 2015. His short stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Analog, Interzone, and many others, as well as in anthologies such as Mad Hatters and March Hares, Cyber World, The People of the Book, and more. His novel, King of Shards, was praised by NPR as being “majestic, resonant, reality-twisting madness.”
He was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award for his work editing the speculative fiction magazine Sybil’s Garage, and is the co-host—along with former Eating the Fantastic guest Ellen Datlow—of the Fantastic Fiction reading series held at the KGB Bar.
Our dinner Friday night that weekend was at Pork & Beans, which has been voted best BBQ in Pittsburgh.
We discussed the story of his accepted by an editor within an hour and then praised by Joyce Carol Oates, the ways in which famed editor Alice Turner was the catalyst which helped turn him into a writer, why after publishing only short stories for 10 years he eventually published a novel, how comments from his Altered Fluid writing workshop helped make his Nebula-nominated “The Sounds of Old Earth” a better story, why a writing self-help book made him swear off those kinds of self-help books, the secrets to having a happy, heathy writing career, why he’s grown to be OK with reading bad reviews, what he learned from reading slush at Sybil’s Garage, and much more
This week, Silver Screen Bottling Co. announced an “official” James T. Kirk Straight Bourbon Whiskey. You can’t order this in a bar, yet, but you can pre-order a bottle right here, where they’re also selling signature glasses, and showing the whiskey next to cigars, even though Kirk never really smoked. (Except for that one time he was in a space prison in Star Trek VI.)
If you don’t want to order Star Trek whiskey online, the James T. Kirk Straight Bourbon Whiskey will also be on sale at San Diego Comic-Con, starting on July 19. At that point, Silver Screen Bottling Co. will announce other Star Trek-themed spirits.
— Silver Screen Bottling Co. (@SilverScreenCo) June 27, 2018
(5) GORTON OBIT. Bob Gorton, former chairman of Pulpcon, passed away on May 31. Mike Chomko wrote a brief tribute.
A retired mathematics professor at the University of Dayton, Bob was known for his dry sense of humor. He served as an important bridge between the lengthy term of Rusty Hevelin as Pulpcon chairman and the founding of PulpFest in 2009. A quiet man, Bob was the winner of the Lamont Award in 2002, presented at Pulpcon 31 in Dayton, Ohio. He will be missed.
(6) TODAY IN HISTORY
June 29, 1979 — Moonraker premiered on this day theatrically
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
Born June 29 – Sharon Lawrence, 57. Amelia Earhart in Star Trek: Voyager, Maxima in the animated Superman series, and Vivian Cates in Wolf Lake, a short lived werewolves among us series.
Born June 29, 1920 – Ray Harryhausen.
Ray and Diana Harryhausen with Steve Vertlieb in 1990.
Ray Harryhausen remains one of the most revered figures in fantasy/sci-fi motion picture history. Born June 29th, 1920, Ray was not only a childhood hero, but became a dear and cherished friend of nearly fifty years duration. His work in films inspired and influenced generations of film makers, and garnered him a special Academy Award, presented by Tom Hanks, for a lifetime of cinematic achievement. Steven Spielberg joyously proclaimed that his own inspiration for directing “Jurassic Park” was the pioneering special effects work of Harryhausen. Published after his death several years ago, here is a celebration and loving remembrance of the life and work of cinematic master, and special effects genius, Ray Harryhausen. It is also the tender story of a very special man, as well as an often remarkable personal friendship. I love you, Ray. You filled my dreams, my life, and my world with your wondrous creatures.
Ray would have turned 98 years young had he lived. In remembrance of this wonderful soul, here is my affectionate tribute to my friend of nearly fifty years, and boyhood hero of interminable recollection and duration…the incomparable Stop Motion genius, and Oscar honored special effects pioneer, Ray Harryhausen. Journey with me now to a “Land Beyond Beyond” where dreams were born, Cyclopian creatures thundered across a primeval landscape, mythological dragons roared in awe struck wonder, and magical stallions ascended above the clouds…Once Upon A Time.
(9) FARCE FIELD. Steven Levy in WIRED profiles Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril Technologies, which aims to install a virtual surveillance system on the U.S.-Mexico border. “Inside Palmer Luckey’s Bid to Build a Border Wall”.
…Palmer Luckey—yes, that Palmer Luckey, the 25-year-old entrepreneur who founded the virtual reality company Oculus, sold it to Facebook, and then left Facebook in a haze of political controversy—hands me a Samsung Gear VR headset. Slipping it over my eyes, I am instantly immersed in a digital world that simulates the exact view I had just been enjoying in real life. In the virtual valley below is a glowing green square with text that reads PERSON 98%. Luckey directs me to tilt my head downward, toward the box, and suddenly an image pops up over the VR rendering. A human is making his way through the rugged sagebrush, a scene captured by cameras on a tower behind me. To his right I see another green box, this one labeled ANIMAL 86%. Zooming in on it brings up a photo of a calf, grazing a bit outside its usual range.
The system I’m trying out is Luckey’s solution to how the US should detect unauthorized border crossings. It merges VR with surveillance tools to create a digital wall that is not a barrier so much as a web of all-seeing eyes, with intelligence to know what it sees. Luckey’s company, Anduril Industries, is pitching its technology to the Department of Homeland Security as a complement to—or substitute for—much of President Trump’s promised physical wall along the border with Mexico.
Anduril is barely a year old, and the trespassing I’d witnessed was part of an informal test on a rancher’s private land. The company has installed three portable, 32-foot towers packed with radar, communications antennae, and a laser-enhanced camera—the first implementation of a system Anduril is calling Lattice. It can detect and identify motion within about a 2-mile radius. The person I saw in my headset was an Anduril technician dispatched to the valley via ATV to demonstrate how the system works; he was about a mile away….
…Middle-earth buffs will recognize Anduril as the enchanted blade that was Aragorn’s go-to lethal weapon…”All of us are Lord of the Rings fans, so it was a pretty fun name,’ Luckey says. ‘Also, I have Anduril the sword hanging on my wall. (Luckey procured a collector’s version, not the original movie prop.)…
Another fannish connection: Anduril Industries has hired former MythBusters co-host Jamie Hyneman to develop an “autonomous firefighting machine’ called Sentry designed to put out California wildfires. Hyneman, Levy reports, ‘built one of the fiercest battlebots in Robot Wars history.”
Dammy, a Canadian beaver, learns vital safety lessons in this tuneful Aardman-animated video from Ontario Power Generation.
Our anthropomorphized hero—his big, flat tail jutting out from the seat of his pants—loves to fish from a rowboat, and dreams of landing “the big one.” Alas, his quest takes him perilously near a massive hydroelectric dam.
“Don’t ignore that warning sign, your life could be on the line,” croons Canadian folk and bluegrass singer Ken Whiteley on the campfire-song soundtrack he helped compose.
Hey, listen to the lyrics and steer clear of those turbines because the fur could really fly! Of course, Dammy dodges the whammy by the skin of his teeth.
(12) OUR FOREFATHERS, AND FOREMOTHERS. “Partaaaaay like it’s the 60’s. The 1860s, that is,” says Mike Kennedy. “This is cosplay like you’ve never seen before.”
An episode of the Vice video series, American Conventions, takes you inside the annual meeting of the Association of Lincoln Presenters in Freeport IL—which features more than a score of Abraham Lincolns, over a dozen Mary Todd Lincolns, and multiple other period costumers. Each of them seems dedicated to not just dressing the part, but being the part. The 12 minute video is interrupted by two short commercial breaks, but may should be worth your time. And, the ghods know we could use more people in this world with the ethics of Honest Abe (or at least those of his best nature; all people are flawed in some way). The video host—Darlene Demorizi—even gets into the spirit as she dresses as Lincoln and makes a heartfelt toast to the gathered crowd.
Saturn’s moon Enceladus harbours a global water ocean1, which lies under an ice crust and above a rocky core2. Through warm cracks in the crust3 a cryo-volcanic plume ejects ice grains and vapour into space4,5,6,7 that contain materials originating from the ocean8,9. Hydrothermal activity is suspected to occur deep inside the porous core10,11,12, powered by tidal dissipation13. So far, only simple organic compounds with molecular masses mostly below 50 atomic mass units have been observed in plume material6,14,15. Here we report observations of emitted ice grains containing concentrated and complex macromolecular organic material with molecular masses above 200 atomic mass units. The data constrain the macromolecular structure of organics detected in the ice grains and suggest the presence of a thin organic-rich film on top of the oceanic water table, where organic nucleation cores generated by the bursting of bubbles allow the probing of Enceladus’ organic inventory in enhanced concentrations.
Ever since FSG Originals came out with the now-classic Southern Reach covers, there has been what seems like an ongoing competition to create amazing original art and design for other editions, from the somber grace of the original UK hardcovers to, well, the neon color of the UK paperbacks, which riffed off of FSG’s gutsy X hardcover design. An incredible amount of creativity has gone into these other editions. It’s hard to pick a favorite, but the Turkish, South Korean, and Spanish covers (Pablo Delcan!) are right up there. Not to mention the lovely Hungarian cut-out covers and a Ukrainian Brutalist Rubic’s Cube with a tiny cute bunny clinging to one of its levels.
Mark Hamill and Chris Evans have answered a question that kids everywhere want to know: if Luke Skywalker and Captain America got into a fight, could Luke’s lightsaber break through Cap’s vibranium shield?
(16) INFINITY WAR IMPROVED. Carl Slaughter declares this is “Probably the best How It Should Have Ended episode yet.”
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, JJ, Jonathan Cowie, Chip Hitchcock, Carl Slaughter, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, Allan Maurer, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Anna Nimmhaus.]
Worldcon 76 has issued the 2018 Hugo Awards Voter Packet, a collection of finalists for the 2018 Hugo Awards made available to members of Worldcon 76 to assist them in making informed decisions when voting on this year’s Hugo Awards. The packet is available for download from the Worldcon 76 Hugo Awards website in the “Hugo Voter Packet” section. Members of Worldcon 76 can sign in using their Hugo Award voting credentials that were sent to them when the final Hugo Award ballot was issued.
Only members of Worldcon 76 can access the 2018 Hugo Award Voter Packet and vote on the 2018 Hugo Awards.
…Worldcon 76 will shortly send an announcement regarding the availability of the Hugo Voter Packet to all members who registered their e-mail address with the convention. This mailing will include a copy of the member’s voting credentials (membership number and voting PIN). Members can request a copy of their credentials using the 2018 Hugo Awards PIN lookup page.
A 1943 Retro-Hugo Voter Packet is in preparation.
(2) “SNAPE” MEMORABILIA TO AUCTION. You Alan Rickman fans should get ready to empty your money belts. Taryn Ryder, in the Yahoo! Entertainment story “Alan Rickman’s frustrations playing Snape in ‘Harry Potter’ revealed in personal letters” says the actor’s archive is about to be auctioned off by Neil Pearson Rare Books for 950,000 pounds, which includes many Harry Potter collectibles, including Rickman’s annotated copies of Potter scripts, as well as scripts for other films and plays Rickman was in, like Die Hard.
Rickman — who died of cancer in 2016 — helmed the role in all eight films from 2001 to 2011.
One letter is from producer David Heyman, who sent Rickman a thank-you note after 2002’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. “Thank you for making HP2 a success,” it reads. “I know, at times, you are frustrated but please know that you are an integral part of the films. And you are brilliant.”
Last week, a software engineer publicly quit a very popular open-source project, setting off a firestorm of debate within the programming world.
Programmers are arguing about whether they should have to agree to a community code of conduct that requires them to behave respectfully.
They are also arguing about whether programs that aim to increase participation from underrepresented groups are “racism.”
The debate began on Wednesday when a developer named Rafael Avila de Espindola quit the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure Project, to which he had been a major contributor over the past decade.
Avila outlined several of his frustrations with the group but said he quit because it was requiring him to agree to a community code of conduct to attend its conference.
That code of conduct basically says the group is open to people from all walks of life and expects its members to be courteous.
Avila also said he was unhappy that the project had decided to accept an intern from a group called Outreachy, which offers paid internships to women, LGBTQ folks, African-Americans, people with Hispanic or Latin heritage, and those with indigenous American ancestries.
In other words, the internships are for people in underrepresented gender and racial groups in the programming/open-source worlds; white men and Asian men are the two groups best represented in tech, diversity reports have found.
…Despite that kind of rancor, large open-source communities and conferences are increasingly adopting community codes of conduct.
And for good reason — the open-source world has a reputation for aggressive, rude, and intimidating behavior.
In 2013, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux and the god of open-source programming, was called out for profanity-laced rants on the Linux email lists, which set the tone for the open-source world.
He and the Linux community did an about-face — sort of — in 2015, telling members that their work would be criticized but asking them to “be excellent to each other” and to feel free to report abuse.
At this stage of James’ Tour of Disco-Era Women SF Authors, we have reached M. Certain letters are deficient in authors whose surnames begin with that particular letter. Not so M. There is an abundance of authors whose surnames begin with M. Perhaps an excess. In fact, there are more authors named Murphy than the authors I listed whose names begin with I….
Sondra Marshak is best known for her Star Trek-related activity. Star Trek, an American science fiction television show akin to Raumpatrouille—Die phantastischen Abenteuer des Raumschiffes Orion, was cancelled after seventy-nine episodes in the mid-1960s. An anthology of original stories commissioned a decade after a show’s cancellation seems unthinkable and yet in 1976, Marshak and Myrna Culbreath’s co-edited collection, Star Trek: The New Voyages, was published by Bantam Books, soon followed by Star Trek: The New Voyages 2. This suggests that the show’s fandom managed to survive the show’s demise. Perhaps some day there will be a revival of this venerable program—perhaps even a movie!—although I must caution fans against getting their hopes up…
Fans of John Scalzi’s Redshirts may find the New Voyages story “Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited” of interest, as yet another example of science fiction authors independently hitting on very similar ideas.
(6) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Mary Robinette Kowal and Lawrence C. Connolly on Wednesday, June 20, 7 p.m. at the KGB Bar (85 East 4th Street, just off 2nd Ave, upstairs) in New York.
Mary Robinette Kowal
Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of historical fantasy novels: Ghost Talkers, and The Glamourist Histories series and the forthcoming Lady Astronaut duology. She is also a three time Hugo Award winner and a cast member of the podcast Writing Excuses. Her short fiction appears in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Tor.com, and Asimov’s. Mary, a professional puppeteer, lives in Chicago. Visit her online at maryrobinettekowal.com.
Lawrence C. Connolly
Lawrence C. Connolly is one of the writers for the anthology film Nightmare Cinema, premiering next month at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal. Produced by Mick Garris, the movie goes into wide release later this year. Connolly’s books include the Stoker finalist Voices (scheduled for re-release this summer), This Way to Egress, and Veins. More at LawrenceCConnolly.com.
(7) FUNDRAISER. Tessa B. Dick is trying to raise $5,000 through YouCaring to “Keep my home”. She’s got $4,205 in contributions as of this writing. Her May 28 update said:
I really need your help, or I am not going to make it. I don’t know how to explain that I can’t sleep because every time I close my eyes, I see that gang banger with a knife to a boy’s throat. I can’t go anywhere because every time I walk out the door, I see his gangster buddies coming after me because my testimony put their buddy in prison. I got crisis counseling and I coped for twelve years, but I can’t cope any more. I went through major forest fires in 2003 and 2008, a severe burn to my foot in 2007, a head injury in 2010, a broken leg in 2012, and more stress than I can describe. I got a settlement for the head injury that didn’t even cover my medical bills, which is why I had to go bankrupt.
I should qualify for disability, based on my severe weight loss alone, but they keep turning me down. My only hope is to get this house in good enough shape to get a reverse mortgage.
(8) GAME MAN. Rich Lynch was tuned into tonight’s Jeopardy! In the category “Award Winning Books” one of the answers was:
(9) TRIVIAL TRIVIA.
Crayola crayons’ distinctive smell — ranked 18th in a list of the 20 most identifiable smells in a 1982 Yale University study — is largely due to the stearic acid used to make the waxy consistency. Stearic acid is a derivative of beef fat.
Tens of thousands of pop culture buffs took a pilgrimage to the ExCeL this bank holiday weekend for the UK’s largest comic book convention.
…Monolithic entertainment brands seemed keen to continue cashing in on the nerd demographic, wheeling out a long list of stars for the event, including Black Panther’s Letitia Wright, The Defenders’ Rosario Dawson and Khary Payton and Cooper Andrews from zombie series The Walking Dead.
(13) MAINSTREAMING FAN REFERENCES. Karl-Johan Norén found a “Sign that the Hugo awards and sf fandom is, or at least is becoming, mainstream: we are used in a joke but not as the butt of it” in NewsThump’s headline “UK Brexit proposals nominated for Hugo Award in Fantasy category”.
The makers of Fortnite, one of the world’s most popular video games, have been accused of copying rival title PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG).
The studio behind PUBG has asked a court in South Korea to determine whether Epic Games copied its intellectual property.
Fortnite and PUBG have both attracted millions of gamers with their huge “last player standing” online battles.
Epic Games has not yet commented on the lawsuit.
PUBG was first released in March 2017. It was inspired by the Japanese thriller film Battle Royale, in which a group of students is forced to fight to the death by the government.
In PUBG, up to 100 players parachute on to an island, search for weapons and kill one another until only one player remains.
Fortnite was first released in July 2017 but its Battle Royale mode was not added until September 2017.
The authors suggest we may not be too far away from cracking the mysteries of higher, unseen dimensions and negative or “dark energy,” a repulsive force that physicists believe is pushing the universe apart at ever-faster speeds.
“Control of this higher dimensional space may b? ? source of technological control ?v?r the dark energy density and could ultimately play ? role in the development of exotic propulsion technologies; specifically, ? warp drive,” the report says, adding: “Trips to the planets within our own solar system would take hours rather than years, and journeys to local star system would be measured in weeks rather than hundreds of thousands of years.”
However, Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at Caltech who studies and follows the topics covered by the report, had a lot of cold water to pour on the report’s optimism.
“It’s bits and pieces of theoretical physics dressed up as if it has something to do with potentially real-world applications, which it doesn’t,” Carroll said.
“This is not crackpot. This is not the Maharishi saying we’re going to use spirit energy to fly off the ground – this is real physics. But this is not something that’s going to connect with engineering anytime soon, probably anytime ever.”
Today, Twitch begins a seven-week endurance run/celebration of all things old-school Doctor Who, live streaming over 500 episodes worth of adventures in Time and Space. Unless you happen to have seven weeks of free time starting imminently (in which case, I envy you), you likely can’t sit down and watch all of it. So here’s a few must-watch storylines to dive in for….
If you’ve ever wondered if there’s really something to this whole “dimensional transcendentalism” thing, a.k.a. the explanation given as to why Doctor Who’s TARDIS is so tiny on the outside but enormous on the inside, now’s your chance to find out for yourself. A TARDIS created for Peter Cushing for the 1965 film Dr. Who and the Daleks is getting ready to hit the auction block at Ewbank’s as part of its “Entertainment & Memorabilia” auction, which kicks off on May 31.
Also, for the Nick Lowe/Johnny Cash fans among us:
The beast of squees
Obsessed with old, forgotten Bonds
And whichever one you like
Is one of which he isn’t fond
God help the beast of squees
The beast of squees
Knows more than you on Doctor Who
Which host was better on Blue’s Clues
And in the twinkling of an eye
Might declare a Mary Sue
God help the beast of squees
Sometimes he tries to kid me
That he’s just a normal fan
Or even that he’s run right out of things to pan
I feel pity when I can
For the beast of squees
That everybody knows
They’ve seen him out in fannish clothes
Patently unclear
If it’s A New Hope or New Year
God help
The beast of squees
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, JJ, Rich Lynch, Cat Eldridge, Bill, Chip Hitchcock, Martin Morse Wooster, Carl Slaughter, James Davis Nicoll, Matthew Kressel, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]
(3) GUGGENHEIM FELLOWS. The Guggenheim Fellows named for 2018 include fiction writer China Miéville, nonfiction writer Roxane Gay, and in Fine Arts, Elizabeth LaPensee, a writer, artist and game creator who earlier won a Tiptree Fellowship.
(4) WRITERS OF THE FUTURE. The 34th Annual L. Ron Hubbard Achievement Awards Gala for the winners of the Writers and Illustrators of the Future will be held in Los Angeles on Sunday, April 8. Celebrities attending include Nancy Cartwright, Marisol Nichols, Catherine Bell, Jade Pettyjohn, Stanley Clarke and Travis Oates.
(5) NESFA SHORT STORY CONTEST. The New England Science Fiction Association is running the fifth annual NESFA Short Story Contest. The deadline for submissions in July 31.
The purpose of this contest is to encourage amateur and semi-professional writers to reach the next level of proficiency.
Mike Sharrow, the 2018 contest administrator, sent this pitch —
Attention aspiring writers! Do you like to write science fiction or fantasy stories? Are you a new writer, but not sure if you’re ready for the big time? Then you’re just the kind of writer we’re looking for! The New England Science Fiction Association (NESFA for short) is running a writing contest. Prizes include free books, and a grand prize of a free membership to Boskone. More important though is that we offer free critiques of your work. Our goal is to help young & aspiring writers to improve their writing, so you can become our new favorite writer! Check out our website for details.
(6) TODAY IN HISTORY
April 5, 1940 — One Million B.C. premiered
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOYS
Born April 5, 1917 — Robert Bloch. Steve Vertlieb reminds everyone, “Bloch would have turned one hundred one (101) years of age today. Wishing one of Horror fiction’s most legendary writers a joyous 101st Birthday in the Heavenly shower stall of The Bates Motel in Heaven.”
Born April 5, 1926 – Roger Corman
(8) COMIC SECTION.
Mike Kennedy says this Tom the Dancing Bug is either a loving tribute to 2001: A Space Odyssey or scary as hell. Or maybe both.
(9) KGB READINGS. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Livia Llewellyn and Jon Padgett on Wednesday, April 18, 7 p.m. at the KGB Bar in New York.
Livia Llewellyn
Livia Llewellyn is a writer of dark fantasy, horror, and erotica, whose short fiction has appeared in over forty anthologies and magazines and has been reprinted in multiple best-of anthologies and two Shirley Jackson Award-nominated collections, Engines of Desire and Furnace. You can find her online at liviallewellyn.com, and on Instagram and Twitter.
Jon Padgett
Jon Padgett is a professional ventriloquist. His first short story collection, The Secret of Ventriloquism, was named the Best Fiction Book of the Year by Rue Morgue Magazine. He has work out or forthcoming in Weird Fiction Review,PseudoPod, Lovecraft eZine, and in the the anthologies A Walk on the Weird Side, Wound of Wounds, Phantasm/Chimera, and For Mortal Things Unsung. Padgett is also a professional voice-over artist with over forty years of theater and twenty-five years of audio narration experience. Cadabra Records will soon be releasing 20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism, a story written and narrated by Padgett.
(10) AVOIDING UNPRODUCTIVE GENERALIZATIONS. Annalee Flower Horne suggests this is a subject where it helps to get more specific – jump on the thread here.
“The galactic centre is so far away from Earth that those bursts are only strong and bright enough to see about once every 100 to 1,000 years,” said Prof Hailey.
Instead, the Columbia University astrophysicist and his colleagues decided to look for the fainter but steadier X-rays emitted when these binaries are in an inactive state.
“Isolated, unmated black holes are just black – they don’t do anything,” said Prof Hailey.
“But when black holes mate with a low mass star, the marriage emits X-ray bursts that are weaker, but consistent and detectable.”
Over the course of three years, the whales of the Spitsbergen population produced 184 unique song types. The vocalisations were detected 24 hours a day throughout most of the winter each year.
“I really think of humpback whale songs as being like classical music. Very ordered. They might last 20 – 30 minutes. An individual [bowhead] song might only be 45 seconds to 2 minutes long, but they’ll repeat that song over and over again,” the University of Washington researcher added.
A Japanese-American team of engineers is working to send a swarm of bee-inspired drones to the Red Planet with new, exploratory funding from NASA. Yes, bees on Mars. The team calls the concept “Marsbees.”
NASA selected the idea as part of its “Innovative Advanced Concepts” program, which annually supports a handful of early concept ideas for space exploration. The team of researchers will explore the possibility of creating a swarm of bees that could explore the Martian surface autonomously, flying from a rover. The rover would act as centralized, mobile beehive, recharging the Marsbees with electricity, downloading all the information they capture, and relaying it to Earth’s tracking stations. They describe the Marsbees as “robotic flapping wing flyers of a bumblebee size with cicada-sized wings.” Those oversized wings, in relation to their bodies, compensate for the density of Mars’ atmosphere–which is much thinner than Earth’s.
Marvel’s record-breaking superhero blockbuster — which has already amassed north of $1.2 billion since launching in February — will herald Saudi Arabia’s long-awaited return to the cinema world, becoming the first film to screen to the public in a movie theater in the country since it lifted a 35-year cinema ban.
(15) INCREDIBLES 2. Bravo, Edna is a fresh pitch for Disney/Pixar’s Incredibles 2, which opens in theatres June 15.
Icon. Artist. Legend. Edna Mode is back, dahlings.
(16) ROWAN ATKINSON. Universal Pictures followed up yesterday’s teaser with a full-length Johnny English Strikes Back trailer.
[Thanks to JJ, Carl Slaughter, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Steven J. Vertlieb, Matthew Kressel, Jeff Smith, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day jayn.]
