(1) BELFAST EASTERCON FAN FUNDS AUCTION. [Item by David Langford.] The catalogue for the Eastercon Fan Funds Auction (18:30 local time on Sunday 20 April) was posted only to the Eastercon Discord server: I offered to host a copy at Ansible, and this can be found here: “2025 Reconnect Fan Funds Auction”.
From the Discord announcement: “We’re only taking bids in person this year, so if you can’t be there and want something, send a friend with clear instructions and a maximum limit.”
(2) SQUEEZED OUT. Susan Wise Bauer of Well-Trained Mind Press told Facebook readers how – despite having used only US printers — tariffs have had a damaging knock-on effect to their business.
…One thing I love about the Hugo Awards is when you find an unexpected treat in the finalists — something you didn’t know you’d love but knocks your socks off when you read it. This year (so far) it is Calypso. Inventive, thought provoking, solidly science fictional and a sensory experience….
The Doctor Who screenwriter Russell T Davies has said he has no time for “online warriors” who claim the show is too woke….
…“Someone always brings up matters of diversity,” Davies said on the Radio 2 programme Doctor Who: 20 Secrets from 20 Years. “And there are online warriors accusing us of diversity and wokeness and involving messages and issues.
“And I have no time for this. I don’t have a second to bear [it]. Because what you might call diversity, I just call an open door.”…
(5) FROM TOKYO BY WAY OF TENNESSEE. With what’s going on in the country, this is the right beverage in the right container: “Godzilla Whiskey Bottle Collector’s Edition”. Holds 10 ounces of kaiju hooch. Goes for $32.98. (No, I don’t know where they came up with that odd number. Maybe it’s a tariff thing.)
Marking 70 years of Godzilla’s iconic legacy, this whiskey bottle features a fierce design inspired by the legendary kaiju. With bold details and a commanding presence, it’s the perfect tribute to the monster who has terrorized and captivated generations.
(6) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
April 17, 1964 — The Twilight Zone‘s “The Jeopardy Room”
The cast of characters—a cat and a mouse, this is the latter. The intended victim who may or may not know that he is to die, be it by butchery or ballet. His name is Major Ivan Kuchenko. He has, if events go according to certain plans, perhaps three or four more hours of living. But an ignorance shared by both himself and his executioner, is of the fact that both of them have taken the first step into the Twilight Zone.
Opening narration of this episode.
On this evening sixty-one years ago, The Twilight Zone‘s “The Jeopardy Room” first aired on CBS. The plot is Major Ivan Kuchenko as played by Martin Landau, a KGB agent who is attempting to defect, is trapped inside a hotel room in an unnamed, politically neutral country with a bomb about to go off unless he can disarm it. I’m assuming that you’ve seen, but on the grounds that you might not have, I won’t say more. It’s a splendid bit of Cold War paranoia.
Not surprisingly, it was written by Serling though some of the episodes weren’t. It was directed by Richard Donner who later on would be known for The Omen, Scrooged and Superman but this was very early on in his career and he had just three years earlier released X-15, an aviation film that presented a fictionalized account of the X-15 research rocket aircraft program. Neat indeed.
It is one of only a handful of The Twilight Zone episodes that has no fantastical elements at all. It’s a classic Cold War story more befitting a Mission: Impossible set-up than this series. It even involves a message delivered by way of a tape recorder, but mind you that series is two years in the future so that has to be just a coincidence. Or The Twilight Zone being The Twilight Zone…
The Twilight Zone is streaming on Paramount+.
(7) COMICS SECTION.
Bliss didn’t misunderstand the title because they’ve read the book.
(8) MARVEL SWIMSUIT SPECIAL RETURNS. The legendary Marvel Swimsuit Special is back this July.
Throughout the ‘90s, fans enjoyed a lighter side of the Marvel Universe in Marvel Swimsuit Special, an annual one-shot that featured breathtaking artwork of Marvel characters in beach attire and swimwear. This unique and beloved special makes its long-demanded return this July in MARVEL SWIMSUIT SPECIAL: FRIENDS, FOES & RIVALS #1!
Primarily an artist showcase, Marvel Swimsuit Special presented pinups from the industry’s top talents in a magazine-style format, complete with tongue-in-cheek articles and descriptions.
Roxxon Comics is at it again when they release their own UNAUTHORIZED SWIMSUIT SPECIAL! Wasp is on the case and seizes the opportunity for Marvel’s heroes to do their OWN swimwear fashion shoot all over the world! But fear not, True Believers, we know what you’re REALLY here for! This super-sized special features splash page after splash page of gorgeous art, but with a story so you can pretend you’re “reading it for the articles”…
For more information, visit Marvel.com. [Click for larger images.]
The wait will soon be over for steampunk fans in the U.S. and Canada, as AMC Networks finally revealed the premiere date for Nautilus, the Disney-produced TV series that tells the origin story of Captain Nemo.
The 10-episode series will debut with two episodes on Sunday, June 29, at 9 p.m. ET/PT, on the AMC cable channel and AMC+ streaming service. It will air weekly on Sundays until the two-episode finale on Aug. 17.
The series stars Shazad Latif as Captain Nemo, described as “an Indian Prince robbed of his birthright and family, a prisoner of the East India Mercantile Company and a man bent on revenge against the forces that have taken everything from him.”…
(10) WE’VE MISUNDERSTOOD URANUS ALL THESE YEARS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Hubble Space Telescope data show that the time taken for the planet to revolve around its axis is almost half a minute longer than was thought.
(11) IN MY DAY ANNIHILATION WAS SUMMUT DALEKS DID. OR WUZ THAT EXTERMINATION? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I don’t know about you but there are some authors I have never got around to reading even though they are award winning authors. For me, Jeff Vandermeer is one such. I was aware (doing SF² Concatenation) that his ‘Southern reach’ trilogy was doing well: the ‘Southern Reach’ trilogy (which I gather has recently morphed into something extra) was short-listed for a Best Series Hugo as well as a Locus Best Series and, of course, Annihilationwon a Nebula. But the give-away for me was that before all these accolades, my fellow members of our team selected it as one of our annual Best SF novels we do every January (feel free to scroll down here as over the years it has shown to be somewhat predictive). So, I knew the book was special. However, Vandermeer’s Brit Cit publishers are a far broader church than a specialist SF/F imprint and as it is almost a full time job liaising with these last but not all imprints, I missed the book coming our way, but my teammates didn’t! And so given their recommendation I sought out the film… and, oh dear, I didn’t like it even though it was Alex Garland…. (Give me Strugatskis’ Roadside Picnic and the film Stalker any day… But I guess that’s my loss: not everyone can like everything.
All of this is a long-winded way of my saying that Moid Moidelhoff over at Media Death Culthas just re-released, and updated, a 19-minute video on both the book and the film, Annihilation. Now, this is more a book review than a film review, and it is more a review than a critique. So, as Moid himself explains, that if you have seen the film Annihilation but not the book then you need not worry about spoilers in his vid. Conversely, if have not seen the film or read the book then beware, spoilers ahoy…
[Thanks to Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, David Langford, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
(3) FAAN AWARDS. The winners of the FAAn Awards for fanzine achievement were revealed yesterday in the UK. The full list is here: “2025 FAAn Awards”.
(4) STURGEON SYMPOSIUM DATES AND CALL FOR PAPERS. The J. Wayne and Elsie M. Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas has set the dates for the 2025 Sturgeon Symposium.
The J. Wayne and Elsie M. Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction is pleased to announce our 4th Annual Sturgeon Symposium, to be held October 9-10, 2025. In addition to presenting the annual Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best science fiction short story, which will include a reading from the winner, we are delighted to announce that Darcie Little Badger has accepted our invitation to speak at the symposium.
We have opened our call for papers where we invite papers, panel proposals, and roundtable discussions that engage with this year’s theme: “Expanding Speculative Horizons.” Inspired by Darcie Little Badger’s diverse contributions to SF (novels, short stories, comics, etc.), we encourage a wide range of submissions, especially those that reflect upon expansive understandings of speculative expression.
We encourage you to submit and share our CFP widely. Below you will find the link to our CFP with more details on the event and guidelines for proposals. Deadlines for submissions is May 19.
(5) DOCTOR WHO HISTORY. [Item by Nickpheas.] Front Row on BBC Radio 4 has quite a long feature on the new series of Doctor Who which spread to cover the history of the show, and even a brief interview with Waris Hussein, the original director (who I didn’t realize was still alive). “…Doctor Who new series & impact on culture…”. Doctor Who feature starts 11:20 in.
This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the modern incarnation of Doctor Who, which you helped bring on screen. What have you learned most over the course of working on so many episodes and with so many Doctors? I mean, it’s astonishing. I just look exactly the same. So clearly, I’m made of Adamantium. It’s funny because actually, a couple of years ago, the BBC said, “You want to celebrate the 20th anniversary.” And I said, “We’ve just had a 60th anniversary!” And on Disney+, it’s only two years old, so no, so we chose not to. Now we get to the 20th, and everyone’s talking about the 20th. And I feel a bit stupid. We didn’t really do anything to celebrate it. Someone at the BBC is making a documentary, so that’ll be out in a couple of months.
I think about Doctor Who, you learn something new with every single episode. It was different. Now this year, coming out in Episode 2, this year, we go to Miami in 1952, where there’s a living cartoon. The cartoon has stepped out of the cinema screen, voiced by Alan Cumming. So, for that, we all had to learn hand-drawn animation. I’ve worked in television for a million years. And I’ve done graphics, I’ve done CGI. I’ve never actually done hand-drawn animation before, which was amazing.
What I did learn is it’s 15 times more meetings than anything else I’ve ever done. [Laughs.] But it’s wonderful. I feel like I’ve learned a lot, and I appreciate the skill of the animator more than ever. And Doctor Who has always done that. Always every week, it’s different. I mean, last year, we sort of said to ourselves, “Can we do an episode where the enemy is just an old woman who stands 73 yards away?” And we did, and it worked. So you have to take these very deep breaths and sort of say, “Is this going to work?” And have faith in it. So it teaches you something different every single time. And 20 years whizzes past in a flash….
… As we’re just starting out Season 2 on Disney+, are you already in the planning stages for Season 3? We’ll always look ahead to the future if we get the chance to keep running. I’ve got ideas. “I think I’ll do that near [Season] 4 or 5.” And that’s always the way I’ve worked on things. So yes, I could promise you amazing stuff at the end of Season 4. There are things we’ve already mentioned that are going to bear fruit a long time into the future. So that’s just the fun of it. That’s the fun of Doctor Who. But, to say again, it’s the pit stops along the way….
(7) NAME THAT ORBIT. Mental Floss challenges readers: “Can You Match the Moon to the Planet It Belongs To?” Take the quiz at the link. Uh, after Earth and the Moon, my hit rate rapidly declined. I got 41%. You can do better!
One can only imagine the horror the late Iain Banks would have felt on learning his legendary Culture series is a favourite of Elon Musk. The Scottish author was an outspoken socialist who could never understand why rightwing fans liked novels that were so obviously an attack on their worldview….
… Musk isn’t alone in his enthusiasms. Mark Zuckerberg has renamed his company and sunk $100bn in pursuit of the “metaverse”, a word that first appeared in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash. So obsessed is Zuckerberg with the book – in which people plug into a simulated world to avoid a real one fallen into dystopian chaos – that at one point all product managers at Facebook were asked to read it as part of their training. Snow Crash also inspired the development of Google Earth, and was mandatory reading for the Xbox development team at Microsoft. Jeff Bezos loves Stephenson so much that he hired him to work for his Blue Origin rocket company.
If sci-fi’s influence was simply on product design, it wouldn’t be a problem. If Zuckerberg wants to burn his own cash in pursuit of a personal fantasy, or Musk wants to build hideous cars, that’s their call. It may even inspire something genuinely useful from time to time….
…The real issue is that sci-fi hasn’t just infused the tech moguls’ commercial ideas but also their warped understanding of society and politics. The dominant genre of sci-fi in the 80s and 90s, when today’s Silicon Valley overlords were growing up, was Cyberpunk – as exemplified in the novels of William Gibson (who invented the term “cyberspace”) and Stephenson, as well as any number of films and video games. The grandfather of the genre was Philip K Dick, whose novels and short stories spawned films including Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report.
https://dff5fe6618baf1dc9a69a0f44e8ea6da.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-41/html/container.html Dick’s stories were fuelled by amphetamine-driven paranoia. Nothing can be trusted and nobody is who they appear to be. It’s a style that’s arguably had more impact on modern culture and aesthetics than any other. The Matrix (1999) is just one example of Dick’s wider influence: he had often spoken of other worlds and suggested our own reality was a simulation.
As historian Richard Hofstadter noted in his famous 1964 essay, the “paranoid style” has been a feature of rightwing American politics for a long time – but The Matrix has given it a new vocabulary and imagery….
(9) PKD AT MEDIA DEATH CULT. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid over at Media Death Cult is really into Philip K. Dick. He has just posted a quick guide to the author. You can see the 24 minute video below…
(10) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Probe series (1988)
Thirty-seven years ago on this date, the Probe series ended its seven-episode run, not by any means the shortest run of a series we’ve looked at – several, such as Nightmare Cafe and Space Rangers, lasted only six episodes. Can anyone recall a genre series that lasted less episodes? I’m sure there is one.
It was co- created by Michael I. Wagner and Isaac Asimov. Asimov had quite some background in television SF series and Wagner was previously known for creating Hill Street Blues. (You can purchase all one hundred forty episodes at Apple TV+ for just $39.95!)
Here Asimov co-created, produced and according to ImDB was involved in writing all of the eight scripts. That’s not particularly surprising to me that he did that given how prolific he was.
The pilot and series starred Parker Stevenson as Austin James, an asocial genius who solved high tech crimes, and Ashley Crow as James’ new secretary Mickey Castle. Stevenson’s only major casting was on Baywatch. Row has a serious genre credit as she played Sandra Bennett on Heroes. That seriesis streaming on Peacock. And no, I really don’t care if Baywatch is streaming anywhere.
It aired on ABC just once and was re-aired on Syfy, though they edited the episodes to stuff in extra commercials as they did every series they aired which they hadn’t produced.
What happened to it? Did poor ratings doom it? No, they didn’t. As one reviewer notes, “Together, these two encounter out-of-control experiments, supernatural events, and mysterious deaths. As you might expect, Probe features heavy doses of scientific knowledge and logical reasoning, but was cut short due to the 1988 writers strike.”
Remember the Australian-filmed Mission: Impossible shot during the writers strike was only a go because they dug into the file drawers of the first series and used not filmed scripts. Or possibly Grave’s brain.
It is not streaming anywhere. Except Space Rangers, I find really short run series that were not done as miniseries tend not to be streamed.
Do I have to say that all those YouTube copies are illegal, so links will be, oh, need I say it?
DETROW: And even for those of us who live more secular lives, movies continue to offer a bit of a cinematic catechism with stories from the Bible and other religious traditions. And with Passover and Holy Week underway, we figured it would be a good time to talk about faith and film. I’m joined by NPR’s religion correspondent, Jason DeRose. Hey, Jason….
… DEROSE: Well, I have a very specific group of religion movies that I actually like quite a lot, and they are comedies. They’re the Monty Python films – “The Life Of Brian,” “The Holy Grail,” “The Meaning Of Life.” “The Meaning Of Life” has one of the funniest songs I ever heard in my life – “Every Sperm Is Sacred.”…
…MARTIN: The other film that I – is, like, “Arrival,” for example…
DETROW: Yes.
MARTIN: …Which is, again, like, science – it’s supposedly science fiction, right? But, like, I think a lot of films in sci-fi also – or that are technically sci-fi actually live in a – to me, in a spiritual space because they ask hard questions. What is the meaning of existence, and how do we know?…
Indiana Jones And The Great Circle was one of the best games of 2024. Machine Games’ remarkable fusion of stealth gameplay, detailed open-ended levels, and a dogged faithfulnessto the film series was a match made in heaven. Now, just a week ahead of its PlayStation 5 debut, The Great Circle is getting a few new additions that will make re-experiencing this modern classic worthwhile.
The Great Circle Title Update 4 will add entirely new perks for players to take advantage of in combat, over a dozen quality of life improvements, and a new hilarious use for an often underutilized item in the game.
The biggest item on the list is two new Adventure Books. One is called “Open Season,” which makes enemies more vulnerable to follow-up damage after getting hit with Indy’s whip. The second is called “Sleight of Hand,” which lets Indy use his whip to pull an enemy’s weapon towards him after doing a disarm whip attack. For players partial to the game’s optional gunplay, Sleight of Hand will add new strategy and variety to how ranged combat encounters play out.
For the more melee-focused player, Indy now has a secondary use for repair kits. These consumables are typically used to give more longevity to Indy’s makeshift weapon of choice. But The Great Circle is so chock-full of random pick-ups that they can often go ignored through most (if not all) of a single playthrough. Machine Games has made note of this player trend and adjusted things accordingly.
“Some of you have told us that you don’t have much use for Repair Kits,” the update’s patch notes read. “Well, now you can throw them at your enemies!”…
…In recent years, the Defense Department has started to acknowledge climate change as a “threat multiplier”—albeit slowly. Acknowledging the billions of dollars climate change could cost the Navy in the future, the Pentagon now incorporates inclement weather disasters and other climate effects into military planning and base structures. However, during the first Trump administration, the Navy quietly ended the climate change task force put in place by the Obama administration, which taught naval leaders how to adapt to rising sea levels. As the new Trump administration wipes all mention of climate change and other environmental measures from federal agency websites, climate-related measures may also be halted despite being critical for the viability of naval missions.
Most of the naval construction and operations infrastructure for the United States’ ballistic missile submarines are located on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. Due to sea level rise and increased inclement weather attributed to climate change, these facilities are becoming more vulnerable to flooding. The intensity and number of hurricanes in the North Atlantic region have increased since the 1980s and will continue to do so as ocean temperatures keep rising, further threatening coastal areas. These incidents are highly costly and disruptive to operations. According to a Congressional Research Service report, the Defense Department has 1,700 coastal military installations that could be impacted by sea level rise. In 2018, Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida suffered $4.7 billion in damages from Hurricane Michael.
Infrastructure at risk. General Dynamics Electric Boat—the lead contractor for the new Columbia-class submarines—performs over three-quarters of the construction operations for the 12 new ships at its two shipbuilding facilities located in Rhode Island and Connecticut. Both facilities are in at-risk flood areas….
(15) IN DEFENSE OF SCIENCE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Science by definition is arguable genre-adjacent to SF. So no better a time for an appeal for reason.
The world’s two leading multi-disciplinary journals, Nature and Science have in the past month had a series of articles and news items reporting on how science in the US is being dismantled, and how it is being mis-represented by politicians on a range of issues from climate change to vaccines.
Ironically, Brit Prof Dave Kipping moved to US for his career and now many scientists are moving back and some US scientists are leaving. See his 12-minute video from the Cool Worlds Lab…
(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Andrew (not Werdna).] DeForest Kelley was apparently well-prepared for Trek: “DeForest Kelley on The Millionaire”. Watch until the end.
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Olav Rokne, Nickpheas, Andrew (not Werdna), Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel “Prokofiev” Dern.]
(1) ANOTHER MURDERBOT CLIP. Murderbot premieres May 16 on Apple TV+. Martha Wells noted on Bluesky, “If you can’t see it, this makes it clear that Murderbot doesn’t have nipples or a bellybutton.”
In a high-tech future, a rogue security robot (Alexander Skarsgård) secretly gains free will. To stay hidden, it reluctantly joins a new mission protecting scientists on a dangerous planet…even though it just wants to binge soap operas.
Author and reviewer Dr Kelly Jennings spoke to Martha Wells about creating Murderbot, engendering empathy, and the after-effects of trauma….
Kelly Jennings: I’ve been struck, especially in the new novel, System Collapse, by how Murderbot is shaped by the traumatic event/s in its past, and how it reacts to that trauma. In Witch King, Kai also is shaped by past trauma, and reacts out of that trauma. Do you have a special interest in trauma, or is this just thematic happenstance?
Martha Wells: My father was a World War II veteran who was in a Nazi prison camp and was wounded in a way that affected him for years afterward. So basically I grew up observing PTSD and the after-effects of trauma, and how it affects other people in the individual’s life, how it changes over time. I’ve also dealt with things of my own that have made me think a lot about emotional trauma and all the repercussions of it. It affects everything I write. I also do a lot of research on it, listening to people talk about their own experiences.
Kelly Jennings: Somewhere I read – it may have been on your Reddit AMA? – that by deliberately making a universe in which constructs like Murderbot can be classed as ‘not people’, you want your readers to think about how our cultures, in the actual world, do that as well – classify various groups as ‘not people’. Can you talk about that a little?
Martha Wells: I think it’s one of the most important uses of fiction, to try to engender empathy and understanding for people in situations that are not things the reader has ever encountered. To understand the power dynamics the reader might be part of, and how these dynamics affect other people who don’t have the same advantages, or who might be trapped in systems they can’t escape. I don’t know how much it helps, but creating a little bit of understanding and context through fiction is better than none.
Obviously it also helps to see people like yourself in fiction, or to use it to process trauma, or contextualise terrible events, etc….
…What I have just described is commonly known in the book and film world as a shopping option. It literally entitles the producer to “shop” your book free of charge to the movie and television industry. If they are smart or lucky or clever they will manage to round up the various elements and persuade them to commit to the project.
In my experience the chances of succeeding are slightly poorer than buying a winning ticket in a billion dollar lottery. For which reason I have resolutely turned down every such offer. I explain to producers that for the privilege of renting my client’s property for a year or eighteen months, some expression of commitment in the form of dollars – even a token – is mandatory. When this request elicits a “Sorry No Can Do” I terminate the discussion with the suggestion they go to YouTube and watch Harlan Ellison’s immortal rant “Pay The Writer”.…
The lawsuit, brought by the attorneys general of New York, Rhode Island, Hawaii and other states, was filed days after the agency, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, put its staff on leave and began cutting grants. The suit argues that the steep cuts there and at two other small agencies violate both the Constitution and other federal laws related to spending, usurping Congress’s power to decide how federal funds are spent.
The other agencies cited in the lawsuit are the Minority Business Development Agency and the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. They were among the seven agencies targeted by President Trump in a March 14 executive order titled “Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy,” which directed that they be reduced to the “maximum extent consistent with applicable law.”
The move against the library agency has drawn particular outcry. Dozens of library groups have issued statements condemning it as an attack on institutions that serve a broad swath of the public in every state. Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, said in a statement that the targeting of the three agencies was “an attack on vulnerable communities, small businesses and our children’s education.”…
…The library agency, created in 1996 and reauthorized most recently in 2018 in legislation signed by Mr. Trump, has an annual budget of nearly $290 million. It provides funding to libraries, museums and archives in every state and territory, with the bulk going to support essential but unglamorous functions like database systems and collections management.
(5) WHY WAIT? Camestros Felapton has all the ingredients of his Hugo Voter Packet entry available immediately: “Packet!”
…Anyway, I just picked longer things that I liked and put them in random order and explained in the introduction that there are typos and that they add character….
(6) OCTOTHORPE TRANSCRIPT NOW LIVE. Episode 132 of the Octothorpe podcast was linked here the other day before its transcript went online. So we’re letting everyone know the Octothorpe 132 transcript link now works.
(7) HANGREEDO NOBODY FIRED FIRST. Whatever you may think about the improvements George Lucas has made to the film in the intervening years, this is a rare opportunity for Britons to see in a theater the original version: “Star Wars: Original 1977 release to be screened in London by BFI” reports the BBC.
The original 1977 cinematic release of Star Wars will be shown on the big screen this summer in London, marking its first public screening in decades.
The original version of the sci-fi blockbuster will be shown as part of the British Film Institute (BFI)’s Film on Film festival on 12 June.
The BFI said this version of the film is rarely publicly screened since George Lucas’ produced special editions were released in the 1990s, altering some plot points and adding other CGI characters.
Today, only the updated versions are available on official streaming platforms and Blu-ray, making screenings of the film’s original cut rare….
…Lucas’s changes to key plot points, including the addition of Jabba the Hutt and other special effects upgrades, have long divided fans.
The most controversial revision was the scene where Harrison Ford’s Han Solo shoots dead bounty hunter Greedo.
In the original version, Solo shoots first. However, the 1997 re-release changed the scene to show Ford’s character responding in self-defence.
The scene underwent further edits, with other versions of the film showing the pair firing at the same time….
(8) PETER WATTS Q&A. [Item by Do-Ming Lum.] My photo of Toronto-based SF author Peter Watts was published in Peter’s interview with Forbes Magazine (website only, sadly not the print edition). The interview is by Ollie Barder, and was mainly driven by Peter’s story which formed the basis of the “Armored Core” segment in the streaming series “Secret Level”. “Peter Watts On ‘Blindsight’, ‘Armored Core’ And Working With Neill Blomkamp” in Forbes.
…“I wrote all through high school and three university degrees without making a single sale. Got lots of positive feedback, mind you; I once got rejected by a magazine I’d never even sent a story to (Analog; the editor at Asimov’s sent it on to them on my behalf). I took their “we’re interested in seeing more of your work” to heart and sent them everything I wrote over the next decade. Only in hindsight did I realize that Analog’s rejections, initially long, detailed, and encouraging, were getting ever shorter and more generic over time, which suggests that I was getting worse with practice. The most frequent criticism I got was some variant of “this is really well written but it’s awfully depressing. Could you maybe bring in some clowns?”
“I didn’t get a single thing published until I was thirty-one, and even that was in some small press no one had ever heard of. (That same story got me my first form-rejection slip from Analog, completing my trajectory from Promising Acolyte to Slush-Pile Reject.) From that point on, I started getting published semiregularly in small mags and semi-pros. To this day, I’ve never got a story into any of the big US traditionals. I stopped even trying back around the turn of the century.
(9) KERRY GREENWOOD (1954-2025). The creator of the Phyrne Fisher mysteries, Kerry Greenwood, died March 26 at the age of 70 reports the Guardian.
Australian author Kerry Greenwood, best known for her Phryne Fisher murder mystery novels, has died at the age of 70 after an illness.
She was given “a suitably royal send-off” at a small service in Melbourne’s Yarraville on Sunday, according to her partner, writer David Greagg.
Greenwood, who lived in nearby Seddon, died on 26 March. Greagg, posting on Greenwood’s official facebook page on Monday, said he had refrained from making a public announcement until after the service….
…Greenwood wrote the first Miss Fisher novel, Cocaine Blues, in 1989, and over the following three decades, went on to write 22 more. Immensely popular, the series spawned a hit ABC television show starring Essie Davis, which ran for three seasons, the first of which was picked up in more than 73 territories worldwide. It was followed by the 2020 film, Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears, and the 30-episode Chinese series, Miss S.
In 2003, Greenwood was given the Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award, recognising her “outstanding contribution” to Australian crime writing, and in 2020, awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for services to literature….
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Born April 10, 1957 — John M. Ford. (Died 2006.)
By Paul Weimer: John M. Ford has, sadly after his passing, become one of my heart writers. Years ago, I came across one of my favorite novels, period, The Dragon Waiting. Possibly one of the best alternate history novels ever written and simultaneously introduced me to a new point of view on Richard III. This is a viewpoint I would later expand upon by discovering the Ricardians, but it was Ford who first showed me the idea in print. Also, The Dragon Waiting has the best “You meet in a tavern” scene I’ve ever read.
It was not until I started going to 4th Street Fantasy con, of which he is practically a patron saint, that I really have grasped just how widely broad his work really is. Space Opera? Early Cyberpunk? Urban Fantasy? The writer who Ford reminds of, today, is Walter Jon Williams: a ferocious and restless talent. And Ford was taken from us all too soon. His last and incomplete novel, Aspects, a steampunk-esque fantasy novel only cements that sentiment. It’s brilliant…what we have of it.
Ford’s work is not for everyone. It is work that not only rewards close attention, it demands it in order to enjoy it. In that way, if we wanted to reconstruct Ford, in addition to Walter Jon Williams, we’d add a lot of Gene Wolfe as well.
Finally, Ford’s writing and style also has more than a touch of the mythic and definitely the poetic. There is joy in reading his work line by line, be its setting or sharp dialogue. So to complete this reconstructIon, add a helping of Roger Zelazny as well.
But the language, the poetry, the vigor with which Ford wrote is sui generis. So, really even trying to combine him as I suggested above like this would not, in the end, be enough. You could not complete the man and his work.
Given my love of these three writers, now you see why Ford is one of my favorites. And taken from us all too soon. I wish I had met him.
It’s never too early to try a John M. Ford novel. And given how many have come back into print lately, there IS a John M. Ford novel out there, for you.
John M. Ford portrait, January 2000. By David Dyer-Bennet. CC BY-SA 2.5
Pop culture fans packed the Ann Arbor Marriott Ypsilanti at Eagle Crest for Astronomicon 8. Twiztid and Majik Ninja Entertainment hosted a plethora of artists, vendors, and celebrity guests, including Bruce Campbell, Tommy Chong, wrestlers Sting and Danhausen, the cast of My Name is Earl, and the voice actors of Rick and Morty, among others.
(13) RE (DISNEY+) DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN EPISODE 8 TITLE, “ISLE OF JOY”. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “Isle of Joy | Marvel Cinematic Universe Wiki”. In case you don’t already know, “Isle of Joy” is (I presume) a quote from the Rogers & Hart song “Manhattan” aka “We’ll Have Manhattan”
I’m guessing the title is used ironically.
Here’s Ella Fitzgerald singing it (don’t yet know whether she or anyone is singing the song in this episode, haven’t watched it yet) and here’s the lyrics (“Isle of Joy” is at end of verse #2)
It would be easy to do a list/article on “great song lyric lines about NYC.
This song includes “Tell me what street/compares with Mott Street”
From On the Town, there’s, of course, “The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down.”
(14) HIVEWORKS ANNOUNCEMENT. [Item by Jim Janney.] A bit of a followup to the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal announcement from the March 5 Scroll. Hiveworks is shutting down its publishing and online store and returning rights to artists. “Hiveworks Comics announces it will end print, publishing division” at The Comics Journal.
Hiveworks Comics is winding down operations over the course of 2025 to focus primarily on its web services: hosting, ads, and technical support for webcomic artists.
Its print and publishing division, which include producing, licensing, marketing, and distributing comics, will close. All comics for which Hiveworks has printing and publishing rights are being released back to their creators.
Hiveworks will complete fulfillment for several outstanding comic crowdfunding projects, after which its crowdfunding services will cease. Warehouse services for artists will also cease, and Hivemill, its managed storefront, will be limited to print-on-demand services and sale of products purchased wholesale from artists….
Coinciding with the release of its Red Sonja 50th anniversary figure, Boss Fight Studio has announced that the She-Devil with a Sword is returning to the 1:12 scale Epic H.A.C.K.S. line with Red Sonja: Steampunk Legend, inspired by the character’s appearance in Dynamite Entertainment’s Legenderry Red Sonja: A Steampunk Adventure. The collectible is available to pre-order now, priced at $66.99; check it out here…
(16) OLD MEMORIES. It wasn’t easy to deliver “Voyager’s 15 Billion Mile Software Update”. For one thing, there aren’t as many programmers who know the Fortran and Assembly languages as there were in the days when computing was young.
Have you ever wondered how NASA updates Voyager’s software from 15 billion miles away? Or how Voyager’s memories are stored? In this video, we dive deeper into the incredible story of how a small team of engineers managed to keep Voyager alive, as well as how NASA could perform a software update on a computer that’s been cruising through space for almost half a century. So tune in to learn more about Voyager’s 15 billion mile software update
[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Thomas the Red, Jim Janney, Michael J. Walsh, Daniel Dern, John Coxon, Do-Ming Lum, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Joe H.]
Neil Gaiman answered sexual assault and trafficking allegations made by former live-in nanny Scarlett Pavlovich on Tuesday, filing a motion for dismissal that included text messages he says show they engaged in an “enthusiastic” and consensual sexual relationship.
“None of Pavlovich’s claims are true,” Gaiman wrote in the motion filed in a Wisconsin federal court. “She is a fantasist who has fabricated a tale of abuse against me and Ms. Palmer.”
Gaiman provided screenshots from a number of WhatsApp messages in hopes of furthering his point. The first was from February 2022 – shortly after the pair’s first interaction in a bathtub in New Zealand.
“Thank you for a lovely lovely night – wow x,” Pavlovich said.
She followed up a couple days later saying, ““Let me know If you want me to run a bath… I am consumed by thoughts of you, the things you will do to me. I’m so hungry.”
Pavlovich filed a complaint against Gaiman and Amanda Palmer on Feb. 3, accusing his now-estranged wife of “procuring and presenting Plaintiff to Gaiman for such abuse,” including physical harm, emotional distress and disturbing non-consensual sex acts, pushing her to become suicidal.
“The Defendants knowingly recruited, enticed, harbored, transported, and/or obtained Scarlett for labor or services while knowing she would be forced to engage in sexual acts as a condition of receiving the pay and housing they promised her,” the suit stated. Pavlovich “endured those acts because she would lose her job, housing, and promised future career support if she did not.”
Gaiman’s filing Tuesday also included messages where he initially confronted Pavlovich about her rape accusations and plans to “MeToo” him.
“Oh my God. Neil! I never said that,” she wrote. “But I’m horrified by your message – me too you? Rape? WHAT? This is the first I have heard of this. Wow. I need a moment to digest your message… I have never used the word rape, I’m just so shocked, I honestly don’t know what to say.”
Later texts show Gaiman expressing concern he was being painted as a “monster” when he assumed their relationship was consenting. Pavlovich’s responses seemed to provide reassurances she thought the same.
“This is beyond out of control and as I said I only have fondness and kindness for you,” she wrote. “It was consensual – how many times do I have to f–king tell everyone.”
Five women initially accused Gaiman of sexual misconduct as part of the podcast series “Master: The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman.” Four more women later shared their experiences with with New York Magazine…
…“In no uncertain terms, Pavlovich’s accusations are false,” a brief in support of motion to dismiss filed Tuesday in federal court in Wisconsin proclaims in language similar to blog post reactions he issued to such allegations last year. “The sexual scenarios she describes deliberately in graphic detail are invented. Any sexual conduct that occurred was in all ways consensual. Law enforcement authorities in New Zealand thoroughly investigated the same claims Plaintiff makes here, found no merit, and declined to file any charges against Gaiman. There was no credible evidence of wrongdoing.”
…“No matter what Plaintiff says happened, it all happened in New Zealand between a New Zealand citizen and a New Zealand permanent resident,” the brief asserts. “There is no legal authority to adjudicate her lawsuit in federal court in Wisconsin, or in other federal courts around the United States,” the filing adds, with a declaration from Gaiman listing over a dozen people in NZ and the USA who will back his version of events. “Pavlovich’s claims are false, but there is no dispute that all of the conduct alleged in the Complaint occurred in New Zealand, the proper forum, if any, for this lawsuit.”…
Over the last few months, the makers of a popular card game have been wrestling with the byzantine process that surrounds video game age classifications. Age ratings are intended to help parents determine whether or not a game is appropriate for their children. But in practice, an erroneous label doesn’t just mislead consumers – it can be the difference between success or failure.
Balatro is an award-winning poker game made by an anonymous game developer known as LocalThunk, in which the only guiding principle is chaos. In each match the player must divine the best possible poker hand out of a randomised draw, but the conditions fluctuate constantly. In one round, the game might prevent you from using an entire suit or junk all your face cards, while the next round might challenge you to achieve an eyebrow-raising score with only a single hand. As the game progresses, players accrue jokers for their deck that add yet more wild rules.
It’s an ingenious premise that has allowed a game that began as a small side-project to sell millions of copies since its release in February 2024. Though players win in-game money to buy new cards between rounds, Balatro’s version of poker is fictional, and only bears a faint resemblance to the classic card game. Yet shortly after launching, Balatro hit a snag: it was classified as a gambling game.
At first, Balatro went on sale with a classification that deemed it appropriate for audiences ages three and up. But then, the classification was revised to an adults-only 18 rating. The reasoning? The Pan-European Game Information (Pegi), the organisation that determines age classifications, claimed that Balatro “contains prominent gambling imagery and material that instructs about gambling”.
Without warning, Balatro was pulled from sale on some digital storefronts in Europe and Asia.
“This was obviously a crucial moment and we had two options,” says Wout van Halderen, the communications director at PlayStack, Balatro’s publisher. “Be de-listed, or take the 18+ rating and get back in the store Asap. We opted for the second and started preparing an appeal to have the rating changed.”
The appeal was initially declined – and issues began to snowball. In Korea, the rating outright barred Balatro from being sold. In December, when Balatro won Game of the Year at The Game awards, the team was also ramping up for a physical release. Another appeal was filed by that version’s distributor, Fireshine. It is only now, a year later and after a handful of updates, that the dust has settled and Balatro has been bumped down to a 12+ rating by Pegi.
… Pegi, for its part, reiterated that it seeks to apply a fair criteria for ratings in a press release, and that any game that teaches or glamorises gambling will automatically lead to an 18+ rating. The board that oversaw the appeal also ceded that Pegi is a system that “continuously evolves in line with cultural expectations and the guidance of independent experts who support our assessment process”. To that end, Balatro’s dilemma has led Pegi to create a more granular classification system for games that depict gambling. The 18+ rating will now only apply to games that simulate the type of poker people play at actual casinos….
(3) THREE NEBULA AWARDS SHOWCASES OUT IN MARCH. The SFWA anthology team, led by Editor Stephen Kotowych, will have three more Nebula Awards Showcase editions ready for launch on Tuesday, March 25.
Nebula Awards Showcases 57, 58, and 59 span work published in 2021, 2022, and 2023, which then became celebrated as Nebula-finalist and award-winning materials in 2022, 2023, and 2024. The prestigious Nebula Awards anthology series has published reprints of winning and nominated works annually since 1966, as voted on by SFWA members, and we’re deeply thankful to return to that strong tradition this year. It is a great privilege to celebrate the work of these authors, and we hope you’ll join us in honoring their achievement when these volumes launch as one.
Going forward, our new workflow will also allow us to celebrate Nebula Awards Showcase 60 at this year’s Nebula Awards in Kansas City, Missouri.
In the summer of 1985, I made the long pilgrimage from my home in Cheadle Hulme to London’s glamorous Hammersmith Novotel for the Commodore computer show. As a 14-year-old gamer, this was a chance to play the latest titles and see some cool new joysticks, but I was also desperate to visit one particular exhibitor: the publisher Newsfield, home of the wildly popular games mags Crash and Zzap!64. By the time I arrived there was already a long queue of kids at the small stand and most of them were waiting to have their show programmes signed by reigning arcade game champion and Zzap reviewer, Julian Rignall. As an ardent subscriber, I can still remember the thrill of standing in that line, the latest copy of the mag clutched in my sweaty hands. I wouldn’t feel this starstruck again until I met Sigourney Weaver a quarter of a century later.
It turns out I’m not the only one who remembers that day. In his wonderful new book, The Games of a Lifetime, Rignall himself recalls the shock of being swamped by fans. “We just didn’t expect anything like that,” he writes. “I had no idea readers would be so interested in us. But I loved it.”
I’m not sure he should have been so surprised, though. Back in the mid-80s, the boom era of the C64 and ZX Spectrum home computers, magazines such as Crash, Zzap and Computer & Video Games were the only sources of news and opinion about new games. At the time, information about game developers was scarce, so magazine reviewers, with their photos plastered in every issue, were the stars of the industry, the social media influencers of the era….
Gigantic reptiles are lounging on warm rocks as yellow grass sways in a gentle breeze.
You may be a monster hunter, feller of beasts with a razor-sharp sword, yet a companion has encouraged you to first stop and observe this flora and fauna. Press a button to gaze intensely at these lustrous creatures, learning that it is a gaggle of females gathered around a spiked, larger male. As the camera zooms in, tiny critters scuttle past your feet toward their next meal, a carcass in the distance.
The majestic scale and teeming ecological detail in Monster Hunter Wilds can make it feel as if you are playing a fantastical version of a David Attenborough documentary.
But there is no ignoring the title of this celebrated Japanese series: These are foremost monster-slaying games that have cultivated bloodlust for more than 20 years. The franchise’s inherent tension is that the allure of battling prehistoric behemoths and exploring their detailed, entwined habitats leaves a sour aftertaste when you are carving up the remaining cadavers for loot.
“There is a bizarre feeling at the center of Monster Hunter,” said Jacob Geller, a critic and YouTube video game essayist. “Unlike most other video games, it’s made pretty clear that the creatures you’re killing are not evil, and so it does feel undeniably bad hunting them.”
More than any other entry in the series, Monster Hunter Wilds, which was released for the PC, PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X|S on Friday, reckons with the interplay between the exceptional beauty of these animals, the ecosystems they are part of, and the player’s core task of dispatching them….
(6) FIRST BRUSH WITH FAME. Artist Michael Whelan’s autobiographical post takes us back to his professional beginnings: “1976: Year in Review (Part One)”
Staking everything on a letter from Donald Wollheim, bolstered by recent success selling his work at conventions, Michael packed his VW Beetle and with trailer in tow headed to New York City to pursue illustration in 1975.
His parents may not have been happy about his career choice, but by that time they lived in New Jersey, and he was able to stay with them for a short time while he scoured bookstores, studying science fiction and fantasy book covers. He spent 18 hours a day polishing a portfolio that he felt compared favorably to what he saw on the shelves.
His first professional sale was to Marvel Comics, who bought pieces right out of his portfolio and hired him for more cover work. Like many young New York area artists, Michael worked out of Neal Adams Studio. That was only a brief stop as the fast turnaround and revolving deadlines of comics didn’t appeal to him.
Fortunately Donald Wollheim came through on his offer and gave Michael his first book cover assignment. Regular work with DAW Books would follow.
At the same time, Neal Adams kindly arranged an interview with Ace Books, who also hired Michael to do cover work. With a second client secured, Michael was never without an assignment after that….
(7) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Robert Bloch’s “That Hell-Bound Train”
So let’s talk about Robert Bloch’s “That Hell-Bound Train” which many decades after reading it remains my favorite piece of fiction by him. I read it at least once a year.
It was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in September of 1958. That issue also has the second part of three of Heinlein’s Have Space Suit – Will Travel (and which is the story shown on the cover).
I’d stick a spoiler alert in here but surely every Filer here knows the story of Martin, a hobo, who one dark night has a large black train pulls up beside him. The conductor says Martin can have anything he wants in exchange for which he will ride that “Hell-Bound Train” when he dies. He hands Martin a watch which he tells him will stop time when Martin reaches he perceives to be the absolute perfect moment in his life.
Y’all know what that moment turns out to be…
It would win the Hugo Award at Detention in a field of other nominees which was rather large as here they are with nominated works: They’ve Been Working On …” by Anton Lee Baker, “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” by Alfred Bester, “Triggerman” by J. F. Bone, “The Edge of the Sea” by Algis Budrys, “The Advent on Channel Twelve” by C. M. Kornbluth, “Theory of Rocketry” by C. M. Kornbluth, “Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee” by Fritz Leiber, “Space to Swing a Cat” by Stanley Mullen and “Nine Yards of Other Cloth” by Manly Wade Wellman.
What an amazing selection of reading that is! The only author that I do not recognize is Stanley Mullen. For the purpose of this piece I am not going to look him up on ISFDB and instead I’m going to ask y’all to tell me about him.
I love every word of the story from what Martin does with his life until he finally stops time, it is truly an extraordinary story. Yes.
William Tenn says in Immodest Proposals: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn, volume 1, that he helped shape the story while at the magazine as it was “an absolutely fine piece of work that just didn’t have a usable ending”. He had come to the magazine after Boucher retired.
I know there’s at least three audio versions that have been done, so it’s possible that one might actually does this story justice, but I wouldn’t know as so far I’ve not tracked any of them down. Anyone heard any of them?
Now to my surprise, though I should not have been as it is great source material for one, it became an opera staged in (at least) workshop form at the University of Texas.
It’s available from the usual suspects in Tim Pratt’s excellent anthology Sympathy for the Devil. It was included a number of times in another anthologies before that, but that’s near as I can tell the only one in print right now, either from the usual suspects or in the old-fashioned paper version.
I wondering did anyone wrote a filk off of it?
So here’s the first words to savor…
When Martin was a little boy, his daddy was a Railroad Man. Daddy never rode the high iron, but he walked the tracks for the CB&Q, and he was proud of his job. And every night when he got drunk, he sang this old song about That Hell-Bound Train.
The Walt Disney Animation Studios are no longer cooking up longform streaming content, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The first title to be culled from the lineup is Tiana, the Disney+ series based on the 2009 movie The Princess and the Frog, which introduce the studio’s first Black Disney Princess.
A source revealed that WDAS was also shelving an unannounced feature project destined for Disney+, and confirmed that there will be layoffs at Disney’s Vancouver animation studio. This shift follows Pixar’s announcement last year that it will not be prioritizing longform episodic content after launching the Inside Out spinoff Dream Productions and recent original Win or Lose on Disney+
A short-form special set in the world of The Princess and the Frog is reportedly still in development. Tiana‘s Joyce Sherrí (staff writer on Midnight Mass) and Steven Anderson will be directing….
The acclaimed German writer, producer and filmmaker, Werner Herzog, behind celebrated work such as Grizzly Man, Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, The Wrath of God, announces his first animated film, The Twilight World. Herzog will direct the narrative feature, with animation and production support from renowned animation studio, Psyop, in partnership with Sun Creature Studio, producers of the Bafta- and triple Oscar-nominated film, Flee.
Sun Creature will also be providing animation services for the film out of its Bordeaux-based studio, and has brokered discussions with several potential French animation directors to collaborate with Herzog on the project.
Adapted from Herzog’s best selling novel of the same name, The Twilight World tells the true story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese intelligence officer who refused to believe that World War II was over, and continued to fight a personal, fictitious war in the jungles of the Philippines for 30 years. Part fictionalized history, part war drama and part dream log, the film is a meditation on the nature of reality, the illusion of time, and the conflict between the external world and our inner lives.
Herzog worked closely with writers Michael Arias (Tekkonkinkreet, The Animatrix) and Luca Vitale on the screenplay adaptation of the book. He will also narrate the film…
A plan to revive the mammoth is on track, scientists have said after creating a new species: the woolly mouse.
Scientists at the US biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences plan to “de-extinct” the prehistoric pachyderms by genetically modifying Asian elephants to give them woolly mammoth traits. They hope the first calf will be born by the end of 2028.
Ben Lamm, co-founder and chief executive of Colossal, said the team had been studying ancient mammoth genomes and comparing them with those of Asian elephants to understand how they differ and had already begun genome-editing cells of the latter.
Now the team say they have fresh support for their approach after creating healthy, genetically modified mice that have traits geared towards cold tolerance, including woolly hair. “It does not accelerate anything but it’s a massive validating point,” Lamm said….
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
Northeast Airport lies on Grant Avenue in Philadelphia. I live on Grant Avenue, some five minutes from the site of the departure of a Lear Jet medical transport plane that took off at a few minutes past six last evening with a little girl being transported home following life-saving surgery.
I was enroute to my girlfriend Shelly’s home to go out to dinner at Tiffany’s Restaurant on the Boulevard. I had considered taking Roosevelt Boulevard North down to Oxford Circle, as it may have been a faster trip but, at the last second, decided to follow Bustleton Avenue down to Castor, instead.
I arrived at Shelly’s house at a few moments past six. We drove down Levick Street to the boulevard, and turned left into the middle lanes to continue our journey. Within seconds we were dodging police vehicles, fire trucks, and ambulances trying desperately to reach Cottman Avenue and Roosevelt Boulevard amidst screaming sirens where, thirty seconds after takeoff, the Lear Medical Jet had crashed into Cottman Avenue near the boulevard, across from the Roosevelt Mall where I had grown up.
Traffic was being re-routed from virtually every direction, and I found it difficult to keep from being hit by other oncoming busses and trucks while attempting to crossover onto nearby side streets. As I passed Cottman Avenue on the boulevard, I turned to my left and saw flashing lights, emergency vehicles, and bright flames bursting into the rainy night sky.
Had I decided to travel down Roosevelt Boulevard on my way to the Oxford Circle, as I had originally planned, I might have traveled past the outside lanes of Roosevelt Boulevard, at the corner of Cottman Avenue going South, just at the moment of impact of the small jet into the congested community adjoining the fatal crash.
It took us over an hour to finally reach our dinner destination on a trip that normally might have taken fifteen or twenty minutes. We didn’t know just what had occurred mere inches from our travels North on the boulevard until we reached Tiffany’s, and were told by the staff that a plane had fatally crashed into our tightknit community. We were shaken, but glad to be alive.
Our hearts go out to our neighbors in our surrounding community, and to the families of those who perished in this terrible, nightmarish tragedy. May God Rest Their Sweet Souls.
Science fiction writer Octavia Butler wrote in her 1993 novel “Parable of the Sower” that Feb. 1, 2025, would be a time of fires, violence, racism, addiction, climate change, social inequality and an authoritarian “President Donner.”
That day is today.
The big picture: ThisBlack History Month, which begins this year on a day of Butler’s dystopian vision, Axioswill examine what the next 25 years may hold for Black Americans based on the progress in the first quarter of this century.
Through her fiction, Butler foresaw U.S. society’s direction and the potential for civil societies to collapse thanks to the weight of economic disparities and climate change — with blueprints for hope.
Afrofuturist writers today interpret Butler’s work as metaphorical warnings that appear to be coming true and a call to action….
Octavia Butler
(6) A CITY ON MARS REVIEW. [Item by Kyra.] Published in 2023.
A City On Mars, by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith
Nonfiction/Related
Can you make babies in space? Should corporations govern space settlements? What about space war? Are we headed for a housing crisis on the Moon’s Peaks of Eternal Light—and what happens if you’re left in the Craters of Eternal Darkness? Why do astronauts love taco sauce? Speaking of meals, what’s the legal status of space cannibalism? The Weinersmiths investigate perhaps the biggest questions humanity will ever ask itself—whether and how to become multiplanetary.
This is a clear-eyed look at the current barriers to settling space, including technological, physiological, sociological, and legal issues. This may be a must-read for anyone interested in the subject; it’s not the deepest possible examination (it is a pop-science book, after all), but it’s probably one of the broadest.
(7) GET READY FOR WASTED WEEKEND. Booktube luminary Criminolly has been hosting an event called Garbaugust, including the reading of some trashy books in August. Last year he added a mini-event, Wasted Weekend. It’s coming up again on February 15-16. Grammaticus Books wants viewers to pick their book: “I Need YOU to VOTE FOR….” But I don’t know – these are not names I associated with the word “trashy” —
Vote for your favorite trashy novel for this year’s Wasted Weekend. A reading event created by CriminOlly. Choose from a diverse selection of books by authors such as Samuel R. Delany, L. Sprague DeCamp, Terrence Dicks, Frederick Pohl, C.M. Kornbluth and of course…Lin Carter the King of Trash!
(8) JOHN ERWIN: CORA BUHLERT’S FAVORITE HE-MAN. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] John Erwin [who died December 20] was my He-Man. For most Germans, their He-Man is either Norbert Langer, who voiced him in the long-running German audio drama series, or Sasha Hehn or Heiko Liebig, who voiced him in the German dub of the Filmation He-Man and She-Ra cartoons.
But even though I first heard He-Man speak in the Filmation cartoon He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, I didn’t watch the German dub, but the English version via Sky Channel, when my Dad worked in the Netherlands in the 1980s. And in that cartoon, the voice of He-Man and his alter ego Prince Adam was none other than John Erwin.
If you rewatch the iconic opening narration of the cartoon – where John Erwin explains the entire premise of the series in one minute and ten seconds – you’ll notice the subtle difference between Prince Adam’s more youthful tones (Adam turned nineteen in the course of the series, while John Erwin was 47, when he first voiced him) and He-Man’s booming heroic voice.
However, John Erwin didn’t just voice He-Man and Prince Adam, but as was common with Filmation, he voiced multiple other characters in the He-Man and She-Ra cartoons as well, showcasing his amazing range. And so John Erwin lent his voice to Skeletor’s henchmen Beast-Man, Whiplash and Webstor. He was the delightfully dim-witted heroic warrior Ram-Man and the wise but grumpy dragon Granamyr as well as many one-of guest characters.
Beyond He-Man, John Erwin appeared in the western series Rawhide alongside Clint Eastwood, one of his comparatively few parts in front of the camera, and voiced Reggie in various Archie cartoons over the years. He was also the voice of Morris the Cat in the commercials for 9-Lives cat food. And if you ever needed proof that dragons are related to cats, just compare the snarky Morris to the equally snarky Granamyr.
Voice actors are unseen and often unsung. This is unfair, because their talent is what brings cartoon characters to life and turns them into icons. John Erwin’s voice played a big part in turning the Filmation He-Man cartoon into the runaway success that it was and in turning He-Man into the iconic hero he became.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
February 1, 1954 — Bill Mumy, 71.
By Paul Weimer: Bill Mumy’s intersection with my genre show watching boils down to three properties, and they are the three ones that you think they are. I first saw him as the mutant overpowered psychic child Anthony in one of the most terrifying Twilight Zone episodes of all time, “It’s a Good Life”. What happens when a young boy develops psychic powers and takes control of the town. Nothing good…I mean, no wait, Anthony, I mean, it’s a good life. I swear, it’s a good life. The whole idea that he cuts off the town from the rest of the universe is terrifying in and of itself, isn’t it? You can’t escape him, you can’t escape his power. Mumy also appears in a few other Twilight Zone episodes in various roles, but they are nothing compared to the power and centrality of his performance in “It’s a Good Life”
His role as Will Robinson in Lost in Space couldn’t be any different. I stumbled across episodes of Lost in Space in reruns not long after seeing the Twilight Zone episode. As the naive, but well-meaning youngest child of the Robinson family, Will Robinson couldn’t be any different than the psychic Anthony. Whether with Robbie, or Dr. Smith (and it seemed he spent more time with either of them than the rest of his family), he showed the childlike wonder of being on alien planets. I was delighted he had a small role in the recent remake of Lost in Space, too, as the “real” Zachary Smith. (He gets his identity stolen by Parker Posey’s character). That was a neat bit of turnaround, and not at all stunt casting.
The other genre work I associate Mumy with is, of course, Babylon 5, and Lennier. As the assistant to Delenn, he stands with Vir (Stephen Furst) as one of the two maintained underlings in the diplomatic corps. While Vir feels like an everyman (as the Centauri as, outwardly very much human), Lennier could show, on occasion, through Mumy’s acting, just how alien and not-human the Minbari were. He was meek, mild and deferential…until he needed not to be, and then could be all too inhumanly dangerous and determined. And given that this story is ultimately a tragedy, Lennier’s story is one that hits me in the feels, from start to finish. Such great acting. I remember when watching “Midnight on the Firing Line” and seeing his name in the credits and wondering what the child actor had become. He had become a fine adult actor, that’s what.
Happy birthday!
Bill Mumy
(10) COMICS SECTION.
Broom Hilda wonders if she has what it takes to be a writer.
(11) THE TEST OF TIME. The Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog analyzes the Best Dramatic Hugo finalists of 1984 as part of their continuing series: “Big Worldcon Is Watching (Hugo Cinema 1984)”.
L.A. Con II, the 42nd Worldcon, was the largest World Science Fiction Convention of all time up to that point, with more than 8,000 fans in attendance (to this day, only the 2023 Worldcon in Chengdu, China has eclipsed that number). Science fiction cinema was bigger than ever. The Hugo Awards were bigger than ever. But in 1984, the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation was still considered a second-tier award.
“We will now proceed with the minor awards: Best Dramatic Presentation,” Toastmaster Robert Bloch quipped as he introduced the nominees: Bradbury adaptation Something Wicked This Way Comes, special effects maestro Douglas Trumbull’s Brainstorm, early hacking movie Wargames, blockbuster Return of the Jedi, and Oscar Best Picture contender The Right Stuff.
It’s an uneven shortlist that reveals both a tension between the populism and the insularity to which the award was often prone….
Remember the plot to the 1984 sci-fi blockbuster “The Terminator”?
“There was a nuclear war,” a character explains. “Defense network computers. New… powerful… hooked into everything, trusted to run it all. They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence. Then it saw all people as a threat, not just the ones on the other side. Decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination.”
It seems like either the execs at OpenAI have never seen it or they’re working overtime to make that premise a reality.
Don’t believe us? OpenAI has announced that the US National Laboratories will use its deeply flawed AI models to help with a “comprehensive program in nuclear security.”
As CNBC reports, up to 15,000 scientists working at the institutions will get access to OpenAI’s latest o1 series of AI models — the ones that Chinese startup DeepSeek embarrassed on the world stage earlier this month.
According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who announced the partnership at an event in Washington, DC, the tech will be “focused on reducing the risk of nuclear war and securing nuclear materials and weapons worldwide,” as quoted by CNBC.
I once saw an episode of America’s Dumbest Criminals where a man called the cops to report his car stolen, only for it to turn out he’d stolen it from someone else in the first place. I couldn’t help thinking of him this week while watching OpenAI’s Sam Altman wet his pants about the fact that a Chinese hedge fund might have made unauthorised use of his own chatbot models, including ChatGPT, to train its new little side project. This is the cheaper, more open, extremely share-price-slashing DeepSeek.
As news of DeepSeek played havoc with the tech stock market, OpenAI pressed its hanky to its nose and released a statement: “We are aware of and reviewing indications that DeepSeek may have inappropriately distilled our models, and will share information as we know more,” this ran….
…So, to put it another way … wait, Sam – you’re not telling us that the Chinese hedge fund crawled all over your IP without asking and took it for themselves? Oh my God, IMAGINE?! You must feel used and abused. Financially violated. Like all your years of creativity were just grist to some other bastard’s mill. Like a host organism. Like a schmuck. Like Earth’s most screamingly preposterous hypocrite….
(14) SUPERHAMLET. From Christopher Reeve’s appearance on The Muppet Show long ago: “Brush Up Your Shakespeare”.
(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid Moidelhoff over at Media Death Cult considers the sense of place as a principal character in some SF/F… “When Location is the Main Character”.
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Olav Rokne, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, and Teddy Harvia for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
(1) THE LIFETIMES OF MOANA. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The OG Moana is going strong even as Moana 2 is setting box office records. “It’s Disney’s Biggest Surprise Hit—8 Years After Its Release” – in the Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall.) “We’ve now watched Moana for more than 1 billion hours. How did it become the No. 1 movie in streaming history?”
…“Moana” was released in 2016, but it’s much bigger on streaming than it ever was in theaters. It has been viewed for a total of more than 1 billion hours, according to Nielsen, which amounts to one person sitting through the movie 775 million times. Or watching “Moana” for 150,000 years straight.
And it’s somehow still getting bigger. It was one of the most-watched movies in 2020, 2021 and 2022 for U.S. audiences. Then we managed to watch more of “Moana” on Disney+ in 2023. It was both the No. 1 movie in all of streaming last year and the No. 1 movie over the past five years combined.
But it’s not just the biggest hit of Hollywood’s streaming age. It also happens to be the biggest surprise….
…Set in ancient Polynesia, “Moana” is the story of a brave teenage girl chosen by the ocean to save her island from a terrible blight. The daughter of the village chief, Moana hops on her boat and sets off on a voyage into the great unknown—the line where the sky meets the sea.
It was directed by Ron Clements and John Musker, who have decades of experience making some of Hollywood’s most successful movies, like Disney animated classics “The Little Mermaid” and “Aladdin.” Even they were stunned by the streaming success of their latest movie.
“I was like, ‘Whaaaaaaaat?’ ” [director John] Musker said. “I never would have guessed that.”
Nobody would have. This was a movie that finished 12th at the global box office in the year it came out, behind other animated movies like “Finding Dory,” “Zootopia” and “The Secret Life of Pets.” On the list of highest-grossing animated movies of all time, “Moana” is lower than “Kung Fu Panda 2” and “Big Hero 6.” It still won its opening weekend and made about $645 million worldwide, but “Frozen” and “Frozen 2” both made twice as much money….
… “The music can help keep the movie alive,” Musker said. “If it doesn’t have music, it’s harder to burn itself into your synapses.”
Especially when that music is a collection of bangers like the “Moana” soundtrack.
I f you have children under the age of 10, you’ve almost certainly heard “How Far I’ll Go,” “You’re Welcome” and the David Bowie-esque “Shiny.” Those earworms came from the mind of Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of “Hamilton,” who also wrote the catchy songs for “Encanto”—the No. 2 streaming movie in recent years behind “Moana.” (Miranda was not involved with “Moana 2,” which features music by the up-and-coming, Grammy-winning team of Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear.)…
Former “Harry Potter” film actor Rupert Grint faces a 1.8 million-pound ($2.3 million) bill after he lost a legal battle with the tax authorities.
Grint, who played Ron Weasley in the magical film franchise, was ordered to pay the money in 2019 after H.M. Revenue and Customs, the U.K. tax agency, investigated his tax return from seven years earlier.
The agency said Grint had wrongly classed 4.5 million pounds in residuals from the movies — money from DVD sales, TV syndication, streaming rights and other sources — as a capital asset rather than income, which is subject to a much higher tax rate.
Lawyers for Grint appealed, but after years of wrangling a tribunal judge ruled against the actor this week. Judge Harriet Morgan said the money “derived substantially the whole of its value from the activities of Mr. Grint” and “is taxable as income.”…
What would be an absurd claim under U.S. tax law dragged on in British courts for years before being ruled unallowable there, too. Of course, by now he’s had the use of the money for five or six years, and sometimes that deferral by itself amounts to a win for the taxpayer.
Alan Moore is the author of many hit books, including Watchmen, The Batman: The Killing Joke, V for Vendetta, etc. However, in his new novel, he takes aim at The Chronicles of Narnia.
During an interview with The Irish Times, the noted writer explains his fury toward the hit fable story while discussing his The Great When: A Long London Novel, which was how the characters adapted to the surroundings of the fantasy world they would end up in.
“I wanted the sections set in The Great When to feel as disorienting as it would do if you were suddenly in another world. One of the things I’m really tired of in current fantasy is how the kids go through the back of the wardrobe in Narnia and it’s not really a big deal,” the 71-year-old adds.
He continues, “People go into these worlds as if it was visiting Milton Keynes. No! You’d be booking yourself into psychiatric care! You’d have a complete mental breakdown!
…Dick’s use of the name New Israel in Martian Time-Slip is pretty stock. Dick traveled beyond North America only once, to a conference in Metz, France, where he delivered a legendary speech titled “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others”—baffling his French fans by opening an early window into the mystical, visionary search that would preoccupy him for the remainder of his life. Then he went home to Orange County, California. His impression of Israel may essentially be derived from Leon Uris’s Exodus, or from some other heroic fifties representation; he principally employs the Israelis in Martian Time-Slip as an anonymous and implacable counterpoint to the abject ineptitude of the U.S. colonists—to highlight the haplessness of their attempts to farm and irrigate the harsh Martian desertscape. As in the excerpt above, the Israelis present a mirror for shame. This matches, of course, a typical midcentury U.S. liberal’s reaction formation, after the discovery of the German and Polish death camps: the Jew as shame trigger, with the survivors idealized for their resilience and strength….
… Those stories of colonization that uncover political implications that might matter in thinking about Palestine are, of course, those in which an indigenous population exists before the arrival of Dick’s settler population. The most disturbingly relevant, by far, is Martian Time-Slip. This isn’t because of the presence of the Israeli settlement, though that does feel like a tell—a stray signifier that also functions as a kind of neon arrow directing us to pull off the road and pay attention. It’s because in this novel, the indigenous Martian population—they’re called Bleekmen—aren’t even aliens. They’re nomadic foragers capable of interactions with the settlers on a variety of human-to-human levels: linguistic, professional, and sexual. They are specifically defined as human; they arrived and naturalized to Mars at some unspecified earlier time. However, their marked cultural differences, and their deep acclimation to the conditions of Mars, allow the Earth settlers a margin for apartheid exclusion based on a muddling of the notion of the “alien” and the “human”—or, to be more precise, these qualities allow the settlers to affirm a population’s humanity while systematically violating their human rights….
(5) THE QUEEN. [By Steve Green.] British-Nigerian author Nuzo Onoh, who last year received a Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement, was profiled on the BBC World Service programme Outlook. You can listen to it here: “The rebel who became ‘Queen of African Horror’”.
Nuzo Onoh
British-Nigerian author Nuzo Onoh wasn’t good at school; she rebelled against her parents and was beaten often as a child. Her home in south-eastern Nigeria was believed to be haunted and during the civil war, she and her siblings were regaled with ghost stories to distract them from the violence. She toed the line as an adult, becoming a lawyer like her father, but when he died Nuzo’s passion for writing took hold. Stories inspired by Igbo rituals and the spooky happenings of her childhood began to flow vividly from her pen. But when Nuzo tried to sell her tales, she discovered no one had written anything quite like her. She was determined to carve a space for African horror writing, and went on to win the industry’s most prestigious award. Her new book is called Where the Dead Brides Gather.
Frenchman Joseph Redon also has a burning passion, in a very different niche. His love of Japanese video games led him to leave his native France for Tokyo, where he’s built one of the biggest collections of retro Japanese video games in the world. Outlook’s Emily Webb visited him at his home in Tokyo’s suburbs. This interview was first broadcast in 2016.
(6) TRENT ZELAZNY (1976-2024). Author Trent Zelazny, youngest son of Roger Zelazny, died November 28. His sister, Shannon, told Facebook readers he died of acute liver failure, at a time when he was already recovering from the effects of a stroke:
This past September, he had a cerebellar stroke which took away his ability to walk. Fortunately, his personality and memory remained intact, and he could still speak and eat. He was still “my brother” and was making remarkable progress learning how to walk again.
Unfortunately, he was struck down again with the separate condition of acute liver failure. He went to the hospital last night, and tonight, when he should’ve been blowing out the candles on his birthday cake, he made his way out of this world.
Trent Zelazny published his first short stories in 1999, “Hope Is an Inanimate Desire” and “Harold Asher and His Vomiting Dogs”. His work includes To Sleep Gently, Fractal Despondency, Destination Unknown, Butterfly Potion, Too Late to Call Texas, People Person, and Voiceless. His short story “The House of Happy Mayhem” received an honorable mention in Best Horror of the Year 2009, edited by Ellen Datlow. In 2009, his short stories were collected in The Day the Leash Gave Way and Other Stories.
In February 2012 Zelazny wrote his first short play, Not Any Little Girl, which premiered in Santa Fe, New Mexico in late April 2012. It later became an Australian bestseller.
(7) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Anniversary: December 1, 2003 — Lord of the Rings: Return of the King film (premiered in NZ today)
By Paul Weimer: By the time the Return of the King premiered in December 2003 I was no longer living in California, and so did not have access to the Imax screen where I had seen The Two Towers, much to the envy of my friend Scott. But, since I was now living in Minnesota, Scott, his wife and I went to see it together on opening weekend in the U.S (the weekend before Christmas). As an even bigger Tolkien fan than I, it was a moral imperative. But it premiered on December 1, 2003 in New Zealand.
You know the story (although with the extended editions, just what is in The Return of the King the original can be a bit fuzzy). But it is the last (sorry, Hobbit) of the three great Middle Earth movies, and I (as well as Scott) were eager to see how our favorite scenes from the books were to play out. We were not disappointed. From the fight against the Witch-King, to Shelob, to the gorgeous Byzantine look to Minas Tirith, we were entranced. Sure, we had seen Fellowship, and Two Towers (Scott’s favorite, with the March of the Ents a particularly happy sequence for him). Return of the King looks the best of the three, showing the full evolution of Jackson’s craft and the actors completely and finally in their roles.
Don’t get me wrong, Tolkien addict as he was, afterward, Scott had some nitpicks, much of which I agreed with. The way Gollum “frames” Sam is an unnecessary addition to the book that adds drama in a place that it doesn’t need it. The five seconds of Faramir meeting Eowyn in the Houses of Healing was disappointingly short. Although we saw it in the Mirror of Galadriel, the lack of a real Scouring of the Shire disappointed us. (Remember, Saruman’s death doesn’t actually happen in the original movie — Scott was convinced Saruman was going to come back by the end).
And the movie is a bit long, and suffers from the “false ending” bit over and over. It plays that hand way too much for its own good, with similar music every single time. But that is a lot of nitpicking over a fantastic end to a fantastic trio of films. In our lifetimes, Scott and I got to see a cinematic masterpiece of a trilogy of films based on Lord of the Rings completed in Return of the King. How could we not be deliriously happy with that? I am sure, someday, someone will take another crack at the Lord of the Rings and try to film them. I’d like to see them try to reach the heights of Return of the King and the first two films. Someday.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Born December 1, 1942 — John Crowley, 82.
By Paul Weimer: John Crowley is an author I had heard about for a couple of decades before finally sitting down with his work. I had heard great things about his work, and how he was an underrated master of fantasy. I had gotten a very big picture of my head of a giant of literature that had not gotten the reading or accolades he had deserved.
There was a period where I took the reading lists and ideas of Harold Bloom seriously and with forethought. I since have seen the weaknesses of his work and viewpoint (and it turns out he was very much a broken step in his treatment of women and his female colleagues). But once upon a time, I was very interested in what he thought was in the Western Canon (again this is when I thought a Western Canon was an important singular monolithic thing– I got better, honest). I admired him, because he was such a prolific and wideranging reader, like I am. Anyway, I tell you all this because he once wrote that Little, Big was one of the top five novels by a contemporary author in print. So I had heard of Crowley and Little, Big, as noted above, but Bloom’s comment was the final push I needed. I went and got myself a copy of Little Big, and devoured the large tome in a few short days going to College on the subway.
From there I branched out to Aegypt, and Great Work of Time (one of the oddest and gentlest time travel/timeline novels I’ve ever read–and it more than a little reminds me of Asimov’s End of Eternity–the society that depends on time travel coming into being uses someone to try and ensure that timeline does-but it all goes so very wrong. The novel is also a good indictment of British colonialism and imperialism. But I’ve got to love me a timeline novel with paradoxes and time loops gone askew.
But back to Little, Big. It really is, even after all of the other work I’ve read, the one that still moves me, the one that I can quote from, the one that feels the most mythic and resonant. Faeries, trying to fight against the dying of the light, a King Arthur-like figure in Frederick the Great… It’s one of the books of my heart. Really, it is true that the deeper you go, the bigger it gets. It’s not a happy book in many ways, there is an elegiac sadness to it that reminds me of recent birthday celebrant Poul Anderson’s fantasy. But it is moving and memorable for it.
John Crowley
(9) COMICS SECTION.
Alley Oop avoids euphemism. But does not eschew surplusage.
The John Le Carré Advent Calendar – My cartoon for this week’s @theguardian.com Books. (with apologies to @realjohnlecarre.bsky.social and @harkaway.bsky.social)
(10) SFF/H AUTHOR TRADING CARDS. A second series of McSweeney’s Author Cards is available from The McSweeney’s Store.
Now up to the plate! Series two of the author trading cards you’ve always imagined were possible but never dared to dream.
You’ve seen athletes get the trading card treatment for years. Maybe you’re still hanging on to your dad’s dog-eared Mickey Mantle rookie card and have been wondering, “When will my favorite Afrofuturist, Octavia Butler, get her own trading card?” or “Do they make these cards for writers like Lauren Groff, Donald Barthelme, or Amy Tan?” The wait is over, friends. McSweeney’s has begun publishing tradeable, collectible author cards. Each pack includes fifteen cards printed on high-quality paper, each featuring bios, trivia, little-known publishing stats, original illustrated portraits, and huge fun. (No chewing gum included.)
[Click for larger image.]
(11) BOOKS TO READ BEFORE THE BOMBS FALL. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid over at Media Death Cult just loves the end of the world. This month he has a few book recommendations for us before the bombs fall. Some familiar reads are in the mix…
(12) ‘TIS THE SEASON TO WATCH. JustWatch, the world’s largest streaming guide, has used its internal data to determine the most loved holiday movies, and where you can stream them in the United States. They also determined the catalog size of the top streaming providers to see which has the most holiday themed titles.
Top 10 Most Streamed Holiday Movies: The most popular Holiday movie between 2023 and 2024 is Elf, followed by The Grinch, and Love Actually.
Catalog Size: Amazon Prime Video has the largest catalog of Christmas movies, with almost 40% of the total 631 available titles from streaming providers. Peacock has the second most Holiday titles, with 31%.
(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] While this Pitch Meeting is for a Netflix movie that I’d never heard of, I now feel that I know absolutely everything I will ever need to know about it. And more.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Rick Kovalcik, Steve Green, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Tom Becker.]
(1) GAME OF THRONES AUCTION. Heritage Auctions has started its three-day auction of Game of Thrones props and costumes. Westeros gives the highlights of the opening day in “Day 1 of Game of Thrones Auction Recap”.
The first day of the three day Game of Thrones prop and costume auction run by Heritage Auctions started well, with nearly $5.36 million realized across the first 290-odd listings in the auction. We kept track of it as long as we could, and by the time we went to bed we’d noted that several items had cleared the $100,000 mark. Gregor Clegane’s tourney armor was the first to hit six figures and ended up just shy of $200,000, followed by a prototype dragon egg from the first season (a second egg just missed the mark).
After that, Arya Stark’s season 2 “boy” ensemble with an included “action” version of Needle hit $150,000, which seemed like a very expected number. And then, fittingly, the first item to hit $200,000—just beating out the Mountain that Ride’s armor—was the Hound’s armor ensemble. After that point, we went to bed, but in the morning we found two more items made it to the prestigious six-figure club: a full Jaime Lannister Kinsguard ensemble. Because of the inclusion of both a prop hand and an “action” Oathkeeper, this one was an especially valuable listing, and the bidders recognized it as they drove it up to become the day’s top item with a final realized price of $212,500.
Get ready to take a seat at the table with the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning writer John Chu.
John’s a microprocessor architect by day, and a writer, translator, and podcast narrator by night. His fiction has appeared in magazines such as Lightspeed, Uncanny, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Apex, and at Tor.com, plus in anthologies such as The Mythic Dream, Made to Order: Robots and Revolution, New Suns 2: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, and others. His translations have been published or are forthcoming at Clarkesworld, The Big Book of SF, and other venues.
John Chu
He has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Ignyte Awards, won the Best Short Story Hugo for “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere,” plus the Nebula, Ignyte, and Locus Awards for “If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You.” In the days before our lunch, he surprised us all with the announcement he’d sold his first novel — and you’ll hear my own surprise during our conversation.
We discussed the way he gamified the submission process when he started out, how the pandemic made him feel as if he was in his own little spaceship, when he learned he couldn’t write novels and short stories at the same time, how food has become a lens through which he could explore a variety of issues in his fiction, the rejection letter he rereads whenever he wants to cheer himself up, how writing stories at their correct lengths was one of the most difficult lessons he had to learn as a writer, what it was about his 2015 short story “Hold-Time Violations” that had him feeling it was worthy of exploring as a novel, how he was changed by winning a Hugo Award with his third published story, and much more.
(3) KGB PHOTOS. Ellen Datlow has posted pictures from last night’s Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series where Sarah Langan and David Leo Rice read from their most recent novels. Click here: KGB October 9, 2024.
(4) LISA TUTTLE COLUMN. The Guardian presents “The best recent science fiction, horror and fantasy – reviews roundup” by Lisa Tuttle. This time she reviews William by Mason Coile; The Tapestry of Time by Kate Heartfield; The Wilding by Ian McDonald; Of the Flesh: 18 Stories of Modern Horror by various authors; A Christmas Ghost Story by Kim Newman.
Aardman, the iconic UK animation studio behind Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit, has closed around 20 jobs as it grapples with the increased cost of production.
Deadline understands that Aardman is in the process of making less than 5% of its 425 employees redundant following a savings review undertaken by management.
A third of the redundancies were voluntary, while two roles remain in consultation. It is hoped that some of the individuals who have lost their jobs can return to Aardman on a freelance basis.
As part of the restructure, Aardman has created new roles to wring increased value out of its intellectual property. These roles include a senior licensing manager and sales executive.
The cost-cutting initiative comes as Aardman has filed its earnings for 2023, which reveal that the studio sunk to a pre-tax loss of £550,135 ($720,000). The company made a profit of £1.56M in 2022.
Aardman said the loss was largely because of a £1.75M impairment of unrecouped costs on Lloyd of the Flies, a 2022 animated series that debuted on CITV in the UK and was licensed by Tubi in the U.S. Putting the impairment to one side, Aardman’s underlying profit was £1.6M….
There’s no doubt about it, the advancements in 3D Printing have done a lot for the collecting community. From printing missing parts for toys, and accessories for action figures, to complete collectibles, the whole endeavor has come a long way and it absolutely fascinates me. But also prop replicas! And that’s what I’m checking out today: A Starfleet Issue Medical Tricorder as featured in Star Trek: The Next Generation! I remember the days when you’re only hope of getting a decent Trek prop was to mail away for a DIY resin kit from the back of a magazine at $50-60. And what you got was exactly that, an unfinished kit that needed all sorts of sanding and painting to make it look anywhere near presentable. Even some of the “props” people were selling at conventions for twice that price were pretty crude. I recently found an Ebay seller offering some phasers and Trek replicas at prices that were too good to pass up. I started with some phasers (which we’ll check out here eventually), but the Tricorder came in this weekend and I was really excited to show it off.
This is where I usually show off the box and packaging, but there’s nothing to show here. The Tricorder came carefully bubble wrapped along with a display stand and holster. The stand is the only assembly required, and you just have to tab it all together, easy-peasy. There are no electronics included in the model, so you can consider this based on a regular prop as opposed to a hero prop, which is meant to be seen up close and functional. This particular model has two configurations to choose from: medical or regular, so whether you’re part of an Away Team mission making a geological survey or you’re in Sick Bay trying to find out why all your crew are dying, this Tricorder has you covered! Let’s start with the regular version and work our way up! And just a disclaimer, I know next to nothing about 3D Printing, I’m not qualified to comment on printing methods or techniques, and I’m evaluating this solely as a finished collectible….
(7) WARNING: IT’S A COMMERCIAL. But you might like to watch it anyway!
DeLorean Labs has now released a Back to the Future-style video of Lloyd playing himself as he opens a DeLorean Time Capsule. Directed by filmmaker Allan Ungar, who previously directed the feature film Bandit, the nostalgic video introduces the Time Capsule collection, as Lloyd has the item handed to him by a mysterious individual emerging from a DeLorean. Lloyd is seen opening the Time Capsule in amazement, before proceeding to utter Doc Brown’s famous catchphrase. Read DeLorean Labs President Evan Kuhn’s comments below:
“With the Time Capsule, we wanted to introduce something fun to our community that can celebrate DeLorean’s introduction to the digital age. Being DeLorean has been about futurism and counterculture. It allows us to get creative and move in such a way that other major car manufacturers can’t.”…
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Born October 11, 1945 – Gay Haldeman, 79.
By Paul Weimer: Possibly one of the ultimate science fiction fans, and wife of Joe Haldeman, I got to meet Gay Haldeman in 2014 at the London Worldcon when Shaun Duke brought me over to meet Joe and Gay at a random point in the hallway near the escalators. I was starstruck by Joe, and charmed by Gay (but she doesn’t remember me). But that’s all right.
Gay also helps manage Joe’s work, for which all of us in SFF can be eternally grateful. She is one of the abiding icons of the science fiction community and I value her continued presence in the field. (May I get a chance to actually meet her and Joe again some day.)
Was “Brenda Starr” Dale Messick’s full-time gig? It was! She wrote and drew “Brenda Starr, Reporter” for over 40 years! At times, she worked in a mobile studio that allowed her and her family to take long road trips across the country. She would frequently weave aspects of her own story into the plot lines. In real life, Dale had a daughter named Starr, which was the same name that Brenda gave her daughter after giving birth in a storyline from the 1970s. In the early 1960s, Brenda traveled to the Canal Zone in Panama shortly after Dale Messick took a trip there to visit friends. I was also impressed to learn that Dale drew “Brenda Starr, Reporter” using a brush and ink, which must have been incredibly difficult. I looked at some of the original art at the Lilly Library on the campus of Indiana University and was blown away by the control and expressiveness of her line work.
Why was Brenda Starr such a popular strip? People I’ve spoken with say that particularly for young women, Brenda was a role model. Even in a fantastical sense, Brenda was a smart, savvy, career woman who went after what she wanted and didn’t let obstacles or expectations of what she should be slow her down (still a novel concept in the 1940s and 50s). She was unafraid of adventure and unbowed by people trying to get in her way. I think this kind of symbolism is really powerful to a young person with aspirations to achieve great things. Dale Messick had similar qualities in that she left the stability of her family life in Indiana, and came to New York on her own for a promising job (drawing greeting cards) and life in the big city. Messick was also savvy in presenting Brenda in the latest designer fashions, so she always looked incredible! She was able to build connections with readers by drawing their suggestions for Brenda’s clothes and including them as paper dolls in the Sunday editions of the strip. These sorts of gestures helped to create a loyal and dedicated readership….
LightBox Expo (LBX) returns October 25-27 to the Pasadena Convention Center, with an expansive program lineup celebrating artists and creators behind acclaimed films, animation, games, TV shows, comics, illustrations, and features.
Details on this previously unannounced panel are as follows:
“The Wild Robot: Art & Technical Strategies Behind the Scenes:”
Saturday, October 26 from 4:00-5:00 pm
Join heads of departments on The Wild Robot for a discussion about the artistic and technical strategies they took behind the scenes to capture the best on screen.
The oldest human on record, Jeanne Calment of France, lived to the age of 122. What are the odds that the rest of us get there, too?
Not high, barring a transformative medical breakthrough, according to research published Monday in the journal Nature Aging.
The study looked at data on life expectancy at birth collected between 1990 and 2019 from some of the places where people typically live the longest: Australia, France, Italy, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. Data from the United States was also included, though the country’s life expectancy is lower.
The researchers found that while average life expectancies increased during that time in all of the locations, the rates at which they rose slowed down. The one exception was Hong Kong, where life expectancy did not decelerate.
The data suggests that after decades of life expectancy marching upward thanks to medical and technological advancements, humans could be closing in on the limits of what’s possible for average life span.
“We’re basically suggesting that as long as we live now is about as long as we’re going to live,” said S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois Chicago, who led the study. He predicted maximum life expectancy will end up around 87 years — approximately 84 for men, and 90 for women — an average age that several countries are already close to achieving.
During the 20th century, life expectancy rose dramatically, spurred on by innovations like water sanitation and antibiotics. Some scientists have projected that this pace will hold as better treatments and preventions are discovered for cancer, heart disease and other common causes of death. The famous demographer James Vaupel maintained that most children born in the 21st century would live to 100.
But according to the new study, that is unlikely to be the case. The researchers found that instead of a higher percentage of people making it to 100 in the places they analyzed, the ages at which people are dying have been compressed into a narrower time frame….
(13) 2024 NOBEL WINS MAY CONFOUND THE MACHINES TAKING OVER? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I have long warned that the machines are taking over, but nobody ever listens.
This may now be changing! Two of this year’s Novel Prizes go to artificial intelligence (AI) related work. The Novel Prize for Chemistry goes to work using AI to elucidate the complex folding structure of proteins (the molecules that make up enzymes and some other large biological molecules that do things to keep us alive) from DNA code (genes).
More significantly, this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics goes to work on developing AI itself. One of this prize’s winners has gone on to warn that we need to work out how to manage AI before it takes over. He opines that we could have smarter-than-human within a couple of decades. (This is likely to be within the lifetimes of many of you.) It looks like I can no longer say nobody ever listens….
(14) THE MOST DISTURBING STORY EVER WRITTEN. Moid Moidelhoff over at Media Death Cult takes a look at Harlan Ellison’s unsettling short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”. The story is set against the backdrop of World War III, where a sentient supercomputer named AM, born from the merging of the world’s major defense computers, eradicates humanity except for five individuals. These survivors – Benny, Gorrister, Nimdok, Ted, and Ellen – are kept alive by AM to endure endless torture as a form of revenge against its creators.
Synopsis: In Season 5 of Star Trek: Lower Decks, the crew of the U.S.S. Cerritos is tasked with closing “space potholes” — subspace rifts that are causing chaos in the Alpha Quadrant. Pothole duty would be easy for Junior Officers Mariner, Boimler, Tendi and Rutherford … If they didn’t also have to deal with an Orion war, furious Klingons, diplomatic catastrophes, murder mysteries and scariest of all: their own career aspirations.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Paul Weimer, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Joe H.]
…His first novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars, now out in paperback and currently on the shortlist for this year’s Arthur C Clarke science fiction award (announced on 24 July), takes place in a future in which live-streamed combat between death-row convicts has become prime-time entertainment. [Nana Kwame] Adjei-Brenyah, born and raised in New York, was speaking from his home in the Bronx.
Where did Chain-Gang All-Stars begin? I’d been working with this group to try to end solitary confinement in New York state, because it’s known pretty much universally to be torture. I actually got involved with them because they were trying to support my former school district – it was being mismanaged and children of colour were being treated poorly – but the group [Rockland Coalition to End the New Jim Crow] was also interested in the rights and outcomes of people who are incarcerated. I’m interested in systems that get us to buy into violence and trick us into stepping on each other’s heads – literally, metaphorically – and I view the prison system as a huge version of that. Ninety-nine per cent of people in prison are impoverished and suffering from mental health problems and diseases of addiction. The idea that you can put humans in cages only stifles our ability to respond to these systemic issues with compassion. Carceral solutions to serious human problems perpetuate those problems.
Why did you address the subject by writing a satirical dystopia? The speculative nature of the story helped me feel more comfortable getting extremely specific about the brutal statistical realities of prison. I don’t deny I’m writing a dystopia, but dystopia is really just a point of view that depends on your proximity to violence.…
David and Georgia Tennant have celebrated the General Election results with an “amazing” Doctor Who callback.
After a night of humiliation for the Conservative Party, who were beaten in a historic landslide by Labour, Rishi Sunak, before falling victim to an embarrassing prank by a YouTuber, conceded to Keir Starmer, calling the result “sobering”….
“I think we might as well just be simple with this, because we’ve already said she’s not coming back as Mundy Flynn,” Davies tells SFX magazine in the new issue, which hits newsstands on July 10 and features Doctor Who on the cover. “It’s one of those very simple situations, like with Freema [Agyeman, who appeared in ‘Army of Ghosts’ before being cast as companion Martha Jones]: when you cast a great actor, you need a new companion.”Sethu played Mundy Flynn in ‘Boom‘, the third episode of season 1. Written by former showrunner Steven Moffat, it takes place on the wartorn planet of Kastarion 3, and Mundy is a marine who the Doctor and Ruby encounter after the Doctor steps on a landmine….
…”I was watching, like, the fifteenth edit of ‘Boom’, loving her,” Davies continues. “Every time I watch her, I think, ‘God, she’s brilliant’, I literally think she’s brilliant. I used to watch her thinking, ‘God, what a shame we can’t work with her again.’ I was thinking, ‘Should we go back to the 51st century, could we meet her again?’ and then I suddenly went, ‘Oh, let’s just cast her again. We’ve done that before. Lovely.’…
…Davies concluded by teasing what’s to come, claiming: “Good stuff ahead. Completely new character, again, a completely new story and that’s a great new story that will run across eight episodes.”
Nicola Coughlan, who rose to fame after starring in Netflix’s regency era drama Bridgerton, has reportedly landed another role.
Steven Moffat, who is the director of Doctor Who, recently sat down for a confessional on Ireland AM, and weighed in on the Christmas special episode of the popular sci-fi series.
He also revealed the name for this episode, which is called, Joy to the World and continued to say, “Nicola is wonderful in it.”
“I’m not allowed to say anything about it. At least I think I’m not allowed to say anything about it so I’ll just shut up,” he also teased and added that Nicola “will break your heart.”
…Written by Kim Sherwood, the novels Double or Nothing (March 2023) and A Spy Like Me(April 2024), tell a new kind of James Bond story, one that utterly reboots the canon of character and smarty, focuses on various new Double O agents. In doing so, Sherwood pulls off a radical pivot for the Bond franchise.
“What I’m doing I think is a structural shift where I’m turning it into an ensemble cast,” Sherwood tells Inverse. “Fleming was writing in this very traditional quest narrative structure where Bond was a kind of medieval knight. He’s given a mission and he sets out from the castle. He’s always on his own. But he’s part of a Double O section. He’s inherently part of a wider world.”
Tackling the wider world of 007 seems like something that should have already happened. And to some extent, it has. There were The Moneypenny Diaries in 2005, as well as a 2017 comic book miniseries about Bond’s CIA ally, Felix Leiter. But none of these spinoffs are quite as extensive or reboot-y as Sherwood’s Double O series.
“Growing up, I loved things like comic books or Star Trek, which lean into this idea of the extended universe and really big ensemble casts,” Sherwood says. “Those casts can be 25 characters deep, and every single one of them can carry the show. So that’s what I’ve grown up loving and being inspired by. That’s the direction that I’ve taken this expansion of Bond.”
Both of Sherwood’s “Double O” novels are masterclasses in world-building. The Double O section is now headed by Moneypenny, who, in this version of the timeline, rose through the ranks with Bond. A male version of M still oversees the Secret Service in general, but he’s a kindly grandfather figure who Sherwood says she modeled on Patrick Stewart. Meanwhile, the gadget expert “Q” (most recently played by Ben Whishaw in the films) is essentially an AI in this version, a quantum computer that assists MI6 with various intelligence gathering and tech problems….
[Neil Gaiman:] It was 1984, and the publisher Macmillan was holding a small event for booksellers, and had invited a tiny handful of journalists along as well. They would be announcing upcoming titles, trying to get the booksellers excited about them. I was one of the journalists, but I only remember one author and one book from that afternoon. The author’s editor, James Hale, was thrilled about a first novel, which Macmillan would soon be publishing, and which James had discovered on the “slush pile” of unsolicited manuscripts. The author had been asked to say a few words to the assembled booksellers about himself and his book.
The author had dark, curly auburn hair and a ginger beard that was barely more than ambitious stubble. He was tall, and his accent was Scottish. He told us that he had really wanted to be a science fiction writer, that he had written several science fiction books and sent them out to publishers without attracting any interest. Then he had decided to “write what he knew”. He had taken his own obsessions as a young man, his delight in blowing things up and his fascination with homemade implements of destruction, and he had given them to Frank, a young man who also liked blowing things up but went much further than the author ever had. The author was Iain Banks, of course, and the book was The Wasp Factory…
…Iain needed to write a book that would be published, and he did. A book that was unflinchingly readable, dragging the reader in and through….
(7) JON LANDAU (1960-2024). Film producer Jon Landau died July 5. Variety notes:
…Landau, a longtime producing partner to James Cameron, was behind three of the top four highest-grossing movies of all time. Landau helped make history with “Titanic,” the first film to cross $1 billion at the global box office. He topped that movie’s record-breaking grosses twice, with 2009’s “Avatar” and its sequel, 2022’s “Avatar: The Way of Water.”
Before his death, Landau was deeply involved in the production of the “Avatar” sequels. Cameron is planning to fill his blockbuster sci-fi franchise with five movies in total, with the fifth tentatively coming out in 2031….
Landau’s genre producing credits include: Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989); Solaris (2002); Avatar (2009); Toruk: The First Fight (2016; TV movie); Alita: Battle Angel (2019); and Avatar: The Way of Water (2022).
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
July 6, 1927 — Janet Leigh. (Died 2004). Janet Leigh. Alfred Hitchcock. A perfect pair it turned out. And Psycho is all that I’ll be talking about.
MAJOR SPOILER NOW. I MEAN IT.
Yes, she was in Psycho. Forty-seven minutes into film, she is showering when a shadowy figure brutally kills her character Marion by stabbing her over and over so the blood runs copiously.
Leigh receiving instructions from Alfred Hitchcock to film the shower scene in Psycho (1960). By Shamley Productions , Paramount Pictures.
It took a full week to complete from set-up to filming, seventy camera setups, using fast-cut editing of seventy eight pieces of film, and apparently a naked stand-in model for rehearsal (Marli Renfro who appeared in many men’s magazines of the days and appeared on the cover of the September 1960 edition of Playboy) in a mere forty-five second impressionistic montage sequence, and both inter-cutting slow-motion and regular speed footage. (I say apparently but read on as to why that is disputed.)
Hitchcock would later acknowledge that while Leigh’s face is seen that it is her, otherwise it is Renfro. And later contradicts himself in yet another interview. And then changes his mind yet again.
Yet another individual, Rita Riggs, who was in charge of the wardrobe, stated that it was Leigh in the shower the entire time, explaining that Leigh did not wish to be nude and so she devised many things including pasties, moleskin, and bodystockings, to be pasted on Leigh for the scene. I must say this sounds quite silly.
Now it has to be noted that in Psycho – Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller says all the actual shower footage in the film was of her and the only time Renfro was used was in an overhead shot that was eventually cut due to censors’ concerns.
At this point, we’ll never know, will we? Now keep in mind that Renfro is still alive and has continued to give interviews, insisting that it is she.
The question is where is the unedited film? That is the question that goes unanswered though the likely answer it seems is that it no longer exists.
END OF MAJOR SPOILER, REALY IT IS. SO IT WAS ALL SPOILERS THIS TIME.
For generations, skywatchers and hobbyists around the world have admired the beauty of the cosmos.
The Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest channels that wonder into dazzling images, taken by amateur and professional astrophotographers as they vie for a £10,000 ($12,750) grand prize. The contest, arguably the biggest astrophotography competition in the world, is run by the Royal Observatory Greenwich in England and is in its 16th year.
Movies like “Dune: Part Two” and “Challengers” arrived in theaters later than expected because of last year’s actors’ strike, and Hollywood experienced significant production setbacks during the coronavirus pandemic.
But “The Primevals,” about a group of researchers who discover gigantic yetis and other prehistoric creatures, made those movie delays look minuscule when it was released in theaters in March.
It was filmed in 1994.
The live-action movie, which was delayed because of funding woes and then the death of its director, David Allen, incorporates a stop-motion animation technique in which puppets are painstakingly photographed and brought to life through a series of frames, as with a children’s flipbook. The retro look conjures up an earlier era of filmmaking, before computer-generated imagery took over visual effects.
“It’s like an archaeological find,” said Juliet Mills, who plays one of the movie’s researchers. “It’s like entering a time machine watching this film.”
Mills and the other actors had doubted that the movie would ever reach theaters. Even before Allen died, the film’s development had been plagued by outsize expectations and financial challenges….
… Allen had originally envisioned pushing the boundaries of what could be accomplished with stop-motion animation, Endicott said. In the decades since, however, computer-generated imagery had become an essential tool for animating films.
“By the time he was working on it in the ’90s, the movie became a comment that stop-motion still had a voice in a world of C.G.I.,” Endicott said.
Allen died in 1999. Despite his final wishes, the movie’s puppets collected dust in a storage unit for nearly two decades.
While rewatching an old version of “The Primevals” in 2018, Endicott recalled Allen’s directive and recommitted himself to releasing the film, even if it was an unfinished version. By this time, Band’s production company Full Moon Features had also become more profitable, so there were fewer funding hurdles. Endicott and a group of Allen’s friends and fans recreated some of the puppets and completed more of the animations, and Richard Band created an orchestral score….
(12) SPACE TRAVEL CONTMINATES MOON — WELL THEY SAID ALL THESE WORLDS WERE OURS EXCEPT EUROPA ALONE… [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Reported in this week’s Science journal comes the news that our visits to the Moon are contaminating its natural water ice trapped in permanently shadow areas…
Orbital spacecraft have observed thin surface deposits of water-ice in permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) of craters near the Moon’s poles. Any free water molecules hop across the lunar surface until they are either destroyed by sunlight or reach one of the PSRs, where they remain indefinitely. Rocket exhaust contains water, so Farrell et al. calculated how much water reaches PSRs from lunar landings. They found that the six Apollo landings contributed less than 1% of the surface water in PSRs, implying that most is natural. However, a single Artemis landing will increase PSR surface water mass by more than 20%, polluting the record of natural water on the Moon.
(13) DO ALIEN OPTIMISTS HAVE A FINE-TUNING PROBLEM? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Aliens are a key SF trope. But I am fascinated when there is serious discussion in the academic literature. Here’s the latest from Prof. David Kipping at the Cool Worlds Lab. “Crowded or Lonely? The Statistics of Alien Life”.
New research paper from the Cool Worlds Lab! Today we explore the implications of a classic result in statistics but applied to alien life for the first time. The result implies a startling conclusion, the cosmos is either teeming with intelligent civilisations, or we’re essentially alone. Join us today as explore how this works and what the implications might be.
(14) SOLARIS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid Moidelhoff over at Media Death Cult takes a look at Stanislaw Lem’s classic Solaris. And for once we get a behind the scenes look at how Moid pulls these vids together. The 12-minute video is below….
[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel “Gilbert & Sullivan” Dern.]
…“It sounds like a showbiz story, but the last person we saw was Ncuti — and bang!” [Russell T] Davies said. “I knew then and there that was the man.”
Gatwa said that he and Davies didn’t have many discussions about his portrayal of the Doctor. “This is a character that is constantly born again, with fresh eyes,” he said. “There is an element of innocence within the Doctor. For me, that’s where his curiosity comes from, the confidence to explore the unknown in the way kids do.”
Asked whether he consciously incorporated more L.G.B.T.Q. elements into Gatwa’s first season, Davies pointed out that he has been putting gay characters onscreen for around 30 years. “We never had a sexuality meeting,” he said with a laugh. “And the Doctor is an alien, of course — he’s not Ncuti Gatwa, and I think human labels barely apply to him. He loves Ruby with all his heart. He doesn’t care what gender people are.”
Gatwa had another take. “I feel like ‘Doctor Who’ has always been a bit camp,” he said. “I mean, it’s a time-traveling alien in a British police box!”
(2) WHAT IF? Brian Grubb shares a little list: “Some shows I would like to see Reacher appear on” – “the actual character, not the actor who plays him (who I also call Reacher)”. Here’s one example of what he wants like to see.
House of the Dragon
A dragon swoops in during a festival and begins spitting fire at the villagers, ruining their stands and burning a number of them alive.
…I began wondering why some writers quit while others continue chugging along, regardless of setbacks and self-doubts. And as a creative writing teacher, I’ve seen people who stop before they really get started or who quit along the way. Why do some writing careers fizzle out, and what, if anything, can be done to help writers keep doing what they love?…
Why Do Some Writers Quit After a Long Career?
I think the following list is mostly self-explanatory, and most of the items are challenges of aging in general applied to a writing career. I turned sixty this year, and I’ve started to feel some of the issues below. I remind myself about envy again, try to focus on what I really wanted from my career (to write and to grow as a person and artist), and I remember the kid writer I used to be.
· Disillusionment with the publishing industry.
· Seeing younger writers having earlier and greater success than they did.
· Their career didn’t reach the heights they’d hoped for.
· Fearing their best days artistically are behind them.
· Feeling forgotten.
· They’re tired.
How NOT to Quit
If you’re truly determined to quit writing, no one can stop you. And as I said at the outset of this long entry, it’s okay if you do want to quit. But if you’d like to keep going, here’s some advice from someone who’s considered quitting more than once in his forty-year career….
It’s wild to me that people watched Star Wars and saw a group of overly religious wizards who took kids from their parents as the clean-cut good guys, but hey, what do I know? With The Acolyte, fans are getting a more complicated version of the Jedi, and people … aren’t happy.
[SPOILER ALERT] The anger stems from the fact that the episode “Destiny” shows the Jedi going to Brendok and forcing the witches there (who are not apart of the Republic) to let them test children, Osha and Mae, to train as Jedi. When a fire breaks out because of Mae, the Jedi also do nothing to help save the witches, and the only “survivor” is seemingly Osha, all because the Jedi intervened. It isn’t the worst thing they’ve ever done, but it doesn’t exactly paint the Jedi in the best light.
The Jedi, as a group, are too overly strict in their rules—no emotional connections, continually doing as the Jedi Council says. It all leads to some people straying from the Order, and for a group that claims that only the Sith deal in absolutes, they sure have a lot of absolutes. While, yes, the Jedi are the “good guys” fighting against the fascist rule of the Empire, that doesn’t mean they’re perfect—far from it—and that’s what we’re seeing in The Acolyte….
(5) TEDDY HARVIA CARTOON.
(6) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboy Books has released episode 76 of their bimonthly podcast Simultaneous Times. Hear it at the link. Stories featured in this episode:
“You Must Buy Your Purchase” by Andy Dibble — with music by Fall Precauxions
“Another Boiling Day” by s. c. virtes & Denise Dumars — with music by Phog Masheeen
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
June 15, 1989 — GhostbustersII premiered in the States in Hollywood thirty-five years ago. It came out just five years after Ghostbusters was released and in the meantime The Real Ghostbusters, an animated series, began airing. That’s where Slimer comes from who appears who in is GhostbustersII.
After the moneymaker that was Ghostbusters raked in three hundred million on a budget of no more than thirty million (or perhaps as low as twenty million, as the studio never admitted what was the actual budget), Columbia Pictures wanted desperately a sequel but ran into numerous objections from the cast and the production staff they needed until they waved fistfuls of cash at them according to sources. Much of that cash actually being a share of the profits in the box office. Now that wouldn’t be a great idea in the end.
Murray might have been the main problem here as he hated sequels. Co-creators, Reitman, Murray, Aykroyd, and Ramis all had control over the franchise at the point, and their unanimous approval was required to produce this film. Murray thought sequels were just greed on the part of film companies but he was willing to do this on he had a lot of fun on the first one.
(Much later, after the death of Ramis, they sold control of the franchise to the studio for enough money to ensure trans-generational wealth. He and Aykroyd set up the production company Ghost Corps to continue the franchise, starting with the 2016 female-led reboot, Ghostbusters. It was really, really a financial nightmare making two hundred and thirty million while costing one hundred and forty-four million. Sweet mercy.)
As with the first film, Aykroyd and Ramis collaborated on the script which went through many variations. Way too many according to sources.
Neat note — Richard Edlund, their SFX producer, used part of the budget to found Boss Film Studios, which then employed used miniatures, practical effects and puppets to deliver the ghoulish visuals.
It was an extremely quick shoot as regards the street scenes, just two weeks. Filming in New York lasted approximately two weeks and consisted mostly of exterior shoots. Those street scenes happened because city authorities allowed the producers to film on Manhattan’s Second Avenue during a period in which access for forty city blocks was restricted because of the visit of Gorbachev. Cool.
The Fire House was an actual one, Firehouse, Hook & Ladder Company 8 fire station, in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan. The sign that they hung there was given to the station and hung there for years after until it fell off. So what happened to it? Here’s that story as reported in the New York Times on the 24th of March 2002:
“’Yeah, we’re the ‘Ghostbusters’ firehouse,’ said Firefighter Jim Curran of Ladder No. 8 at North Moore and Varick Streets. The filmmakers used the firehouse for exterior shots in both ‘Ghostbusters’ movies. The sign inside the station was hung outside the station for the second film, but it fell and broke. It was then given to the firehouse and was placed on a wall above a collage of pictures of ‘Ghostbusters’ fans who have made the pilgrimage.
“’We used to get a steady stream,’ Firefighter Curran said. ‘It was listed as a tourist destination by a Japanese airline. Plus we would get a lot of people coming out of the bars late at night.’”
So how did Ghostbusters II do financially? It earned just two hundred and fifteen million, much less than its predecessor which as I previously said pulled in three hundred million. It was, to say the least, considered a financial disaster from the perspective of Columbia Pictures. Before the film had been released, the Board had been talking of a Ghostbusters franchise. So Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the third film in the franchise , wouldn’t be released for thirty years. It would be a financial success making over two hundred million after costing seventy million.
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is doing very well as with an opening weekend May 24 of forty-five million. So there’s life in the Ghostbusters after all, isn’t there?
(8) COMICS SECTION.
Free Range shows a superhero taking exception to part of a traditional wedding ceremony.
Almost like the famous 1982 film “Poltergeist,” some homeowners in the Dunbar Spring neighborhood of Tucson had no idea their homes were built on top of a cemetery when they purchased their properties near the intersection of Stone Avenue and Speedway Boulevard.
One of those is Moses Thompson, who bought his home in 2006.
“We’d only been in the house [for] maybe a month and a sinkhole opened up in front of the house,” Thompson said.
He thought he had a sewer line break, but he started digging and found that the soil was dry.
“And then I found some brass decorations, like some diamond-patterned brass pieces and then I found a cross and then I hit some boards,” Thompson said….
…So Thompson contacted a local archaeologist and described everything he found.
“He was like, ‘You 100% hit a human grave. Your house was built over the Court Street Cemetery,’” said Thompson.
That archaeologist, Homer Thiel, excavated the grave and found it was a small child.
“I scraped my trowel and discovered there was another person underneath,” Thiel said. “That was an adult male. He had identical coffin hardware, which indicates the two people were buried at the same time.”…
(10) BEING THERE. Mary SanGiovanni lets us step into her shoes for a moment.
(11) SCHRODINGER’S ACTION MOVIE. [Item by Chris Barkley.] A movie proposal seen on Bluesky.
A rare book predicting alien life could sell for thousands at auction.
The book, published in 1698, was found at a free antique valuation event in Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, by books valuer Jim Spencer.
Inside, author Christiaan Huygens explores his fascination with the potential existence of extra-terrestrial beings.
Mr Spencer said its contents seemed “almost comical”.
The book, lengthily entitled The Celestial World Discover’d: Or, Conjectures Concerning the Inhabitants, Plants and Productions of the Worlds in the Planets, Huygens questions why God would have created other planets “just to be looked” upon from Earth.
He concludes that aliens must have hands and feet like humans because of their “convenience”, writing: “What could we invent or imagine that could be so exactly accommodated to all the design’d uses as the Hands are? Shall we give them an Elephant’s Proboscis.”
He also suggests that “celestial beings” must have feet “[unless] they have found out the art of flying in some of those Worlds”.
The writer believed aliens enjoyed astronomy and observation, sailed boats and listened to music but also suffered misfortunes, wars, afflictions and poverty “because that’s what leads us to invention and progress”….
Human missions to Mars could be at risk after new research revealed that long-duration space travel can impact the structure of astronauts’ kidneys.
Samples from more than 40 space missions involving humans and mice revealed that kidneys are remodelled by the conditions in space, with certain parts showing signs of shrinkage after less than a month in space.
… Scientists at University College London (UCL), who carried out the study, said that microgravity and galactic radiation from space flight caused serious health risks to emerge the longer a person is exposed to it.
Future missions to Mars were not ruled out, though the scientists said that measures to protect the kidneys would need to be developed to avoid serious harm to astronauts. Methods of recovery could also be introduced onboard spacecraft, such as dialysis machines….
(14) NO FAA REVIEW PRIOR TO NEXT SUPERHEAVY/STARSHIP FLIGHT. [Item by Bill.] The previous two Superheavy/Starship flights were both delayed because of waiting on the FAA to issue reports on their mishap investigations (and both reports were essentially reviews of SpaceX’s own investigations – there didn’t appear to be any significant value added by the FAA).
The FAA has said that there is no requirement for a review for the most recent flight. “The FAA assessed the operations of the SpaceX Starship Flight 4 mission. All flight events for both Starship and Super Heavy appear to have occurred within the scope of planned and authorized activities.” So SpaceX can launch again as soon as it is internally ready. “Review of 4th Superheavy/Starship flight; FAA clears SpaceX for next flight” at Behind the Black.
Researchers at Montana State University have made a significant scientific breakthrough by confirming the existence of gravity waves in Earth’s stratosphere during a solar eclipse.
Gravity waves in Earth’s atmosphere are created by mountain ranges and by the difference in temperature between day and night.
The results show that the moon’s shadow during the eclipse lowered temperatures enough to generate atmospheric gravity waves. The cold, dark shadow cast by the moon during an eclipse creates a thermal shock that sends out ripples in the atmosphere. They can most often be observed as ripples in clouds.
During October 14’s annular solar eclipse and April 8’s total solar eclipse—both visible in the U.S.—53 teams of students from 75 institutions across the nation launched high-altitude balloons. This Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project, a NASA- and National Science Foundation-sponsored program, was led by Montana State University….
… “By observing how the atmosphere reacts in the special eclipse cases, we can understand more about the atmosphere in general, which can help us better predict the weather and model climate change,” said Angela Des Jardins, director of the Montana Space Grant Consortium and an associate professor in the Department of Physics at MSU’s College of Letters and Science….
(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid over at Media Death Cult in a 16-minute video wonders “Why Stephen King Banned His Own Book” …?
An essay about the life, fallout and death of Rage by Stephen King…
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Bruce D. Arthurs, Bill, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]
…Professionally speaking, Lewis was usually polite and firm when challenging Eliot in most of his literary criticism and theory. Sometimes the challenge is a bit more jovial, though there are a couple of moments of more pointed or heated criticism. Lewis was far more profuse in blame in his letters, where there seems to be a personal animosity toward Eliot–at least toward Eliot as a symbol. Twice, however, Lewis had a more personal opportunity to rethink his position and make a connection with another leading Anglican public intellectual.
The first of these was through Charles Williams, who was a close friend of both Eliot and Lewis. Indeed, Eliot and Lewis each described Williams in striking terms, admitting to Williams’ charismatic appeal and value as a poet and critic. Williams tried once, just a few months before he died, to bridge the divide between Eliot and Lewis. Just months before Charles Williams died, he arranged a meeting between Eliot, Lewis, and another Inkling, Fr Gervase Mathew, at the Mitre Hotel in Oxford. It was not a success….
(2) GLASGOW 2024 ADDS SPECIAL GUEST. Dr. Meganne Christian FRAeS (she/her) will be a Special Guest of the 2024 Worldcon. Dr Christian is Reserve Astronaut / Exploration Commercialisation Lead at the UK Space Agency, developing strategy on human and robotic spaceflight in the post-ISS landscape. Her full biography can be found on the Glasgow 2024 website.
In November 2022, she became a member of the ESA astronaut reserve, one of only 17 candidates selected from a pool of more than 22,500 applicants across Europe. Dr Christian holds a Bachelor of Engineering and a PhD in Industrial Chemistry from the University of New South Wales. From 2014 to 2023, she was a materials science researcher at the National Research Council of Italy and took two parabolic flight campaigns to test graphene coatings for thermal management in satellites.
Dr Christian has also undertaken two missions, including as a winter-over scientist, to the Concordia station in Antarctica, where she was a research scientist in charge of atmospheric physics and meteorology.
Looking forward to her appearance in Glasgow, Dr Christian said “I love science fiction, so I’m looking forward to soaking up the atmosphere with fellow fans and of course finding out the winners of this year’s Hugo Awards.”
(3) LAST-MINUTE SHOPPING IDEAS. A membership in Glasgow 2024 is one of the suggestions on the “STARBURST Father’s Day Gift Guide 2024” at Starburst Magazine. So is this:
Another quirky gift choice is the Photo Creator Instant Pocket Printer. Again, aimed at younger folk, this is actually a very useful tool; it’s just that this set is very reasonably priced and comes with some good accessories. It’s a thermal printer that connects to your phone and can be used to print out silly pictures as well as actual photos. It comes into its own when you load it with sticky label thermal printer paper, turning this piece of childish fun into a useful and versatile label maker, as well as a way to create your own stickers. It doesn’t run out of ink (but needs special paper), fits in an everyday carry bag and is surprisingly practical.
(4) WRITING MASTER CLASS WITH GAIL CARRIGER ON JUNE 23. A one-day Locus Bay Area Writing Master Class with NYT bestselling author Gail Carriger is happening on Sunday, June 23, 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., at Preservation Park in Oakland, CA. The cost is $210. For more info and to sign up: Locus Bay Area Writers Workshop: Writing Master Class with Gail Carriger, June 2024. Learn more about Gail at gailcarriger.com.
Her engaging instructional style will keep you entertained AND informed. Her workshop topic will be On Career & Comedy — a two-parter covering all the things Gail wishes she had known when starting out her career, plus practical tips on how to use comedy in your writing, with a break in between to order in sandwiches and chat. Gail combines the expertise of a dedicated data-miner with a fun and personable style, and can speak to both trad and self-publishing success and craft skills.
Part I: Things I Wish I Knew FIRST
Learn all the things Gail wishes someone had told her when she first started out in publishing! She’ll explain pesky concepts and terms that established authors and book industry professionals take for granted. She’ll review industry standards and expectations of authors, both in traditional and indie publishing. She’ll help you determine which path is best for your book and career: traditional publishing, self publishing, or a hybrid of the two. She’ll cover the things she believes EVERY author should have set up BEFORE their first book launch.
Part II: Peopling Fiction with Comedy
Gail addresses how authors can analyze and source humor, the many different ways to inject funny into fiction, and why you might want to do so. Learn to bring character depth, narrative pace, and social subversion to fiction using comedy. This is also your opportunity to pick her brain!
Some believe Zack Snyder’s “Watchmen” was a botched adaptation of Alan Moore’s graphic novel, while others believe it to be an absolutely essential addition to the superhero genre. It’s a film that has spawned contentious debate over the years.
DC has decided to make an R rated animated version of “Watchmen” and maybe this’ll be a worthy effort. The adaptation is broken into two parts – one arriving in 2024 and the other arriving in 2025 (though no dates were provided by Warner Bros). …
One night in the rainy summer of 1816, at Lord Byron’s summer estate, Villa Diodati, in Cologny, near Geneva, Switzerland, Byron, and his friends Percy and Mary Shelley passed the time by telling ghost stories. The stories they created would lay the groundwork for future, publishable works…
However, there was at least another guest there, that night—one who is left out of Shelley’s recapitulation, likely because he was unknown as a writer. This is Byron’s physician-in-residence, John William Polidori, who contributed a concept that would later become his novel Ernest’s Berchtold; or the Modern Oedipus. But this novel not his most notable literary achievement, however—Polidori wound up expanding Byron’s vampire concept (several paragraphs of which Byron had actually written), churning out his own different short work on the same topic, entitled The Vampyre, that same summer….
…Polidori left Cologny in September of that year, and left his manuscript with his friend Countess Catherine Bruce, who lived nearby. Two years later, a London publisher named Henry Colburn received a manuscript in the mail, containing “outlines” of several stories—the gothic exercises developed and written by Byron’s houseguests in Cologny, and, apparently Polidori’s whole manuscript. Bibliographer Henry R. Viets, who comprehensively researched the publication history of Polidori’s text, claims that it is unknown how this material precisely arrived in Colburn’s possession. The outline for Frankenstein was in this bundle, but it had already been published, so Coulburn discarded it, and instead published, in his periodical called New Monthly Magazine, The Vampyre, attributing authorship to Lord Byron. He arranged for publication of the story as a book, shortly after. Polidori was shocked, upon seeing The Vampyre published, and under Byron’s name. Byron denied writing it, but it was almost too late—the story (in the magazine) was a triumphant success, and at least one literary edition was on its way….
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Compiled by Paul Weimer.]
Born June 14, 1949 – Harry Turtledove, 76.
By Paul Weimer. Doctor T. The Master of Alternate History. The Avtokrator.
And he earned and earns those sobriquets.
Once upon a time, there was a series of anthologies edited by Jerry Pournelle called There Will Be War. I loved these to pieces and bought each one as they came out. In the midst of that, I came across a different anthology, edited by S M Stirling called The Fantastic Civil War. In the midst of that volume there was, to my amazement, yet another piece by Turtledove called “The Long Drum Roll”, an excerpt from his forthcoming novel The Guns of the South. It was clear at this point that I needed to read it, and read more Turtledove.
Harry Turtledove
And so I began to tuck in. After Guns of the South, I started to explore the Videssos novels, and was delighted with the “Byzantine empire with magic” setting and worldbuilding. Gerin the Fox, too, and his “edge of the Not-Roman Empire” was also a lot of fun. Agent of Byzantium, with a secret agent in an alternate Byzantine Empire? I began to devour his catalog and oeuvre with reckless abandon and then tried to keep up.
To say nothing of his giant series. Worldwar, with aliens versus the Allies and the Axis. The How Few Remain series, going from his alternate 1862 all the way to the 1940s? And several other series going to four and more volumes?
But, given his output, even to this day, he is an author hard to keep up with.
Dr T has also written a lot of single one shot novels, with a dizzying variety of alternate historical scenarios, with a wide range of divergence points. His Through Darkest Europe, reversing the fortunes of Dar Al-Islam and Western Europe in the Middle Ages, showing an inward looking, backward looking modern Italy, is chilling and all too plausible.
And if that wasn’t enough, Dr. T has also written a bunch under a variety of pseudonyms. His Turteltaub historical fiction novels, set in various periods are wonderful. His novel Justinian is NOT about the Justinian you are thinking of, but rather Justinian II, whose history and story is even wilder than the original. The novel reads like fantasy but it’s based strongly and accurately on real life events. It is almost literally unbelievable.
But my one favorite book of his might be a surprise. It would be a World of Difference. The divergence point is what if Mars was about twice the size of Earth, and so was able to hold an atmosphere, and some very strange life. Minerva (the renamed Mars in this verse) has intelligent life that is based on radial symmetry, and while the cold war politics might seem dated today, I wouldn’t mind if we had wound up with Minerva instead of Mars in our own solar system.
Terry Matalas, the showrunner who steered the final season of Star Trek: Picard to new ratings and critical heights, has been tapped to write an update of the 1985 cult sci-fi movie Enemy Mine for 20th Century Studios.
Set in a future where mankind is warring with a reptilian alien species, Mine starred Dennis Quaid has a human pilot and Louis Gossett Jr. as an alien who crash land on a desolate planet. Both have deep-seated hatred for one another, but are forced to overcome their prejudices to survive….
What is gravity without mass? Both Newton’s revolutionary laws describing its universal effect and Einstein’s proposal of a dimpled spacetime, we’ve thought of gravity as exclusively within the domain of matter.
Now a wild new study suggesting that gravity can exist without mass, conveniently eliminating the need for one of the most elusive substances in our Universe: dark matter.
Dark matter is a hypothetical, invisible mass thought to make up 85 percent of the Universe’s total bulk. Originally devised to account for galaxies holding together under high speed rotation, it has yet to be directly observed, leading physicists to propose all sorts of out-there ideas to avoid invoking this elusive material as a way to plug the holes in current theories.
The latest offering in that vein comes from astrophysicist Richard Lieu at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who has suggested that rather than dark matter binding galaxies and other bodies together, the Universe may contain thin, shell-like layers of ‘topological defects’ that give rise to gravity without any underlying mass.
Lieu started out trying to find another solution to the Einstein field equations, which relate the curvature of space-time to the presence of matter within it….
The United Nations (UN) has officially declared 2025 to be the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ). Agreed by its general assembly, the year-long worldwide celebration will highlight the impact and contribution of quantum science. It also aims to ensure that all nations have equal access to quantum education and opportunities. An opening ceremony is expected to take place on 14 January in Berlin.
…First, the good news: The telescope’s main instrument, a soft X-ray spectrometer known as Resolve, is working as expected. The slightly worse news: An aperture door covering Resolve has not opened. Multiple attempts to open the door — or “gate valve” — have failed. Despite reports suggesting JAXA and NASA have decided to “operate the spacecraft as is for at least 18 months,” Yamaguchi told me that “has not been officially decided.”
A NASA spokesperson confirmed “NASA and JAXA continue to hold ongoing discussions about the best path forward to operate XRISM; the current, leading option is to collect science for the next 18 months before making another attempt to open the gate valve, but the agencies will continue to assess alternatives.”
With the door closed, an intriguing “What If?” situation for mission specialists and X-ray astronomers presents itself. On one hand, the spacecraft is working superbly and showing it’s capable of delivering a heap of new, exciting data. Trying to open the door risks damaging the spacecraft. On the other hand, opening the door could fundamentally change our understanding of the universe….
Despite failing hardware, NASA has no plans to pursue a servicing mission to the aging, iconic instrument…
Hubble’s gyroscopes, which spin at 19,200revolutions per minute, are precise but frag-ile. To make up for failures, service missions have shipped 16 replacement gyros to the telescope over its lifetime. It is now down to the last two of the six currently onboard. In standard three-gyro mode, the devices help the telescope quickly establish and maintain a view with its fine guidance sensors, which lock onto specific stars.
(14) THE MOST IMPORTANT MEN IN SF…? [Item by SFF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid Moidelhoff over at Media Death Cult takes a look at the first, principal gatekeepers of SF, the magazine commissioning editors of the early 20th century, in a short 11-minute, video. Time to grab a mug of builders…
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Ed Fortune, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer. (But if there aren’t any, how do I continue the roundup?)]
