25 Beneath The Scrolls Of Pixels

Posted on May 2, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) SEATTLE WORLDCON 2025 CHAIR APOLOGIZES. Kathy Bond today posted an “Apology and Response From Chair” at the Seattle Worldcon 2025 website to address the brewing controversy about the committee using ChatGPT as part of its process for screening program participants.

Bond had initially defended the practice (see “Responding to Controversy, Seattle Worldcon Defends Using ChatGPT to Vet Program Participants”. Additional coverage here – “Seattle Worldcon 2025 ChatGPT Controversy Roundup”.)

(2) 2025 LOCUS AWARDS SHORTLISTS. The 2025 Locus Awards finalists have been posted at Locus Online. See the full list at the link. The Locus Awards winners will be announced June 21 during the in-person Locus Awards Ceremony, held in Oakland, California.

(3) PUPPIES AIN’T WHAT THEY USTA BE. In “Locus Slate Shenanigan Update” Camestros Felapton scores Jon Del Arroz’ efforts to push his picks onto the Locus Awards shortlist.

Early in April I posted about an attempt by Jon Del Arroz/Fandom Pulse (and others) to game the Locus voting with a last minute slate. So how did the JDA slate perform?

OK, I have to do some complex data crunching here. Well, my provisional results come out at a whopping 0% of JDA slated works made it….

(4) 2025 EDGAR AWARDS. Mystery Writers of America announced the winners of the 2025 Edgar Awards on May 1.

Publishers Weekly reports the ceremony was marred by the use of AI images, and this is being compared with the Worldcon’s own LLM kerfuffle.

An opening video, surveying treatments of the genre on the big and small screen, was narrated by a creepy AI version of Humphrey Bogart, complete with imperfect lip-syncing, later followed by one featuring an even creepier, black cat-holding, artificially-generated Edgar Allan Poe.

(5) ELRIC’S EARS: THE DEFINITIVE ANSWER. Cora Buhlert has written an article about Elric of Melniboné for the Seattle Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow Blog, which got responses from both Michael Whelan and Michael Moorcock, settling the question whether Elric has pointed ears or not. “Fantastic Fiction: Elric of Melniboné: Tortured Elf Emperor with a Cursed Sword”. See their comments at the link.

…Elric was born out of a conversation between John Carnell, editor of the British magazine Science Fantasy, and the young writer Michael Moorcock, wherein both proclaimed their love for the sort of fantasy adventure stories—soon to be called “sword and sorcery”—that had been published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales some thirty years earlier but were considered hopelessly passé by the early 1960s. Carnell remarked that he would be open to publishing “that Conan stuff,” so Moorcock wrote The Dreaming City, the first Elric story, which appeared in the June 1961 issue of Science Fantasy…

(6) MURDERBOT ADAPTATION Q&A. It was not a case of “needs more cowbell”, but of adding backstory for a couple characters. “Murderbot’s TV adaption will feature major changes. I talked to the creators about how those decisions were made” at The Escapist.

…“I think everything that’s in the book is in the show basically,” explained Paul Weitz. “We early on got in touch with Martha Wells kind of as fans and, so there are things that are added to the story, sort of like filling in the cracks, but anytime that we had an idea like that, we would call up Martha and say, ‘Hey, here’s what we’re thinking of, what do you think?’ And she’d either say, ‘Oh, that’s a cool idea’ or ‘Well, maybe think about this instead. That was a huge, huge relief.

“I think that part of the thing for us was never feeling like we were like we were padding stuff,” he continued as he explained why they made the changes they did….

(7) CLARKE AWARD SUBMISSIONS STATS. The administrator has posted “The complete judges’ reading list for the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2025” at Medium.

…This year our judges received 112 eligible submissions from 49 UK publishing imprints and independent authors.

If you’re interested in how this compares to previous years, you can see past lists and analysis here: clarkeaward.medium.com

The TLDR though is this is pretty much a Goldilocks Zone year. Not the highest ever numbers received, but not worryingly low, and more on par with where we’ve landed in terms of recent submissions history for both books received and publishers entering.

A caveat as always about our terminology: this is a simple list of submissions of eligible books received, not a ‘long-list’ or other form of juried selection, but simply those books sent to our judges for them to consider as potential future Arthur C. Clarke science fiction book of the year winners….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Iron Man film (2008)

By Paul Weimer: “I am Iron Man”

Although the Hulk movie preceded it, Iron Man started the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and for good or ill, the modern age of superhero movies. I can’t claim to know that was going to happen at the time–but I was excited. My movie-watching friend Mike, although well versed in horror and some comics, had no idea who Iron Man was. He had never read any of his comics and didn’t know his deal. So sitting in the movie theater with him, previews rolling, I explained Iron Man’s story (as I had gotten it fifteen years earlier, first). He was fascinated, I sold him on the idea that although Iron Man was maybe C-Tier (compared to Spidey, and Hulk and other high well known Marvel Superheroes), this could be fun.

And then we settled in to watch.

Shorn of the need to set up any mythology (although it effortlessly does), future movies, or refer to previous continuity (except for the credit cookie scene with Fury), Iron Man I is still in my top tier of Marvel movies. The story is straightforward enough, and Robert Downey Jr. (who was still somewhat damaged goods, remember) redeemed his entire career playing Tony Stark. Having read the comics, when I saw Obadiah Stane show up, I realized, but didn’t tell my movie going partner, just what was in store.

“Icing problem?”

“You might want to look into it.”

Favreau’s direction, Matthew Libatique’s cinematography are excellent in use of color, lighting and imagery.

I think that the real best relationship in this movie is not between Downey and Paltrow (although her Pepper Potts is every inch what is needed for the role) but between Downey and Bettany (who does the voice of JARVIS). Bettany once again (like in Master and Commander and A Knight’s Tale) plays the second part of a double act to more well known actor with charm, humor and a lot of fun. Forget Vision and Scarlet Witch (sorry Elisabeth Olsen), the Iron Man/JARVIS is where it’s at. Their sometimes acidic and always funny relationship is what makes the beats of the movie really sing.

Just writing this piece has the Black Sabbath song running through my head.

And hey, this is the movie that launched a movie franchise…and at the same time, in the world of comics, catapulted Iron Man to A-Tier.

When, movies later, Downey says “I am Iron Man” and does his snap and defeats Thanos at the cost of his own life, that was all originally set up and grounded from the original Iron Man movie.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Bliss found help.
Ink Pen finds something in a villain’s idea to think about.
Macanudo finds a strange advantage in the book version.
Mother Goose and Grimm know the Cat in the Hat’s secret.

(10) ARCHIPELACON 2 IS DRAWING NEAR. Finland’s national convention and this year’s Eurocon, Archipelacon 2, The Nordic SF and Fantasy Convention, announced today over 700 memberships have been sold, out of a total maximum of 1 000.

The convention will take place in Mariehamn, Åland on 26-29 June, at the Alandica Culture & Congress Centre. The second Archipelacon is a follow-up to the now legendary first edition, which was held in the same venue in 2015.

We have a stellar lineup of Guests of Honour: Ann VanderMeer, Jeff VanderMeer, Mats Strandberg, and Emmi Itäranta. For full presentations please visit our website https://archipelacon.org/guests-of-honour/

Preparations for the event are in full swing. Last minute programme proposals can be submitted via the programme form, but please hurry if you have suggestions. The form can be found here.

The final programme will be published in early June.

We are also looking for volunteers. If you are interested in making Archipelacon 2 happen, please sign up on our website at https://archipelacon.org/volunteer/

Archipelacon 2 is financed by sales of memberships and T-shirts, vendor table rentals, as well as grants. This year’s event has received grants from PAF, Suomen Kulttuurirahasto, and Svenska Kulturfonden. We thank our sponsors for their generous support!

(11) PSYCHED OUT? “NASA’s Psyche Mission Suffers Strange Glitch on Its Way to a Metallic Asteroid” reports Gizmodo.

The Psyche spacecraft launched nearly two years ago and is currently on its way to rendezvous with a unique asteroid in an effort to understand the origins of Earth. Although it’s still a few years away from orbiting the asteroid, which bears the same name, the Psyche mission has run into an issue with its propulsion system that forced it to power off its thrusters.

NASA engineers with the Psyche mission are investigating the root cause of a recent decrease in fuel pressure in the spacecraft’s propulsion system, an issue that needs to be resolved before mid-June so that it doesn’t affect the mission’s trajectory. “The mission team has chosen to defer thrusting while engineers work to understand the pressure decrease,” NASA wrote in an update.

Psyche launched in October 2023, beginning a 2.2 billion-mile journey to a metal-rich asteroid located in the main belt. The spacecraft began firing its thrusters in May 2024, using a solar electric propulsion system that relies on solar energy to generate power for four electric thrusters. On April 1, the spacecraft detected a pressure drop in the line that delivers xenon gas to the thrusters, which went from 36 pounds per square inch (psi) to about 26 psi, according to NASA. In response to the sudden decrease, the spacecraft automatically powered off its thrusters…

(12) ROCKY AT 50. “’The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ turns 50: cult classic will be back in theaters and released on Blu-ray in 4K Ultra HD” reports 6ABC of Philadelphia.

“Let’s do the time warp again!” This year marks the 50th anniversary of the musical film “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” To celebrate the occasion, a newly restored and remastered version of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” will be let loose in 4K Ultra HD, along with the debut of a new anniversary logo.

Audiences were first introduced to the movie in 1975 and it quickly became a cult classic. It’s based on the musical play by Richard O’Brien, and has continued to grow with late-night screenings, fan costumes, and has created a unique moviegoing experience with dance parties. To this day, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” still makes history as the longest-running theatrical release of all time.

The Walt Disney Studios Restoration team oversaw the 10-month project to digitally scan and preserve the film.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “The Rocky Horror Picture Show ‘Time Warp’” (1975).

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Nina Törnudd, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, 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 Mark.]

Pixel Scroll 11/14/24 Pixel, Devourer of Scrolls

Posted on November 14, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) BEST OF NATURE FUTURES SF STORY NOW UP – OPEN ACCESS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] SF² Concatenation has just posted its third ‘Best of’ Nature short SF stories of the year. These are normally behind a pay wall, but SF² Concatenation has permission from Nature and the respective authors to re-post.

The latest story is “The Nana Inheritance” by Amanda Helms.

The deathbed of your beloved grandmother isn’t really the place where you should decide who inherits her brain, but that’s what we did…

SF² Concatenation will have one more – the final of the year – short story mid-December to hold you over the festive season. Mid-January will see its spring (northern hemisphere academic year) edition with a huge news page, articles, conreps and a stack of book reviews…

(2) BOARD OF THE DINGS. Repeat after me, the British Board of Film Classification knows best. Now spit. “British film censors re-classify Return of the Jedi” reports Irish news outlet RTE.

Star Wars Episode VI: Return Of The Jedi has been reclassified from a U to a PG in the UK due to its violence and a scene which shows one of the film’s heroes Han Solo frozen in carbonite.

The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) had given it a U rating upon release in 1983, but said “the detail and overall intensity” of violence in the film meant that it was changed to PG last year for violence and threat, despite this being “offset by humour and an emphasis on loyalty in adversity”.

A U rating means the film is suitable for audiences aged four and above and should be “family-friendly”, while a PG rated film contains some content that may not be suitable for children and parents or guardians are advised to be present while they are watching.

In its 2023 Annual Report, which saw the sci-fi film reclassified, the BBFC said of Star Wars Episode VI: “This sci-fi adventure sequel concerns rebel heroes who must rescue their friends before facing an intimidating enemy army.

“As well as laser gun fights, aerial dogfights, and fight scenes which include the occasional use of improvised weapons, a person falls to a presumed but unseen death, a villain tortures a character by repeated electrocution, and a hero severs a villain’s hand at the wrist in a scene featuring limited detail.

“A captor attempts to feed his prisoner to a monster, and there are other scenes of threat involving bombs, hostages and a hero being frozen alive.”…

… The BBFC said the sequences were “no longer within our standards at U” despite upholding the initial rating for video and theatrical releases in 1987 and 2008….

(3) YOU CAN CHECK IN ANY TIME YOU WANT. “Doctor Who’s Steven Moffat confirms Christmas special plot details – including ‘time-travelling hotel’” – Radio Times has them.

…Moffat has teased some further details about what’s to come in the new episode.

Speaking to BBC South East news, Moffat revealed: “I can tease something about the Christmas special. Imagine in the far, far future, imagine that a hotel chain got hold of the idea of time travel. What’s the first thing a hotel chain would do if they had time travel? They’d realise they had an opportunity to sell all the unsold nights in their own hotels in history.”…

(4) THE BOWERY’S UP AND HOGWARTS IS DOWN. “Two New York City bakers to compete on new Food Network show ‘Harry Potter: Wizards of Baking’” – a New York Times story (behind a paywall).

A new competition baking show on Food Network is bringing the magic of Harry Potter to a grand scale.

“Harry Potter: Wizards of Baking” is a larger-than-life new baking show that fully immerses contestants in the Harry Potter universe. Hosted by James and Oliver Phelps (who play Fred and George Weasley in the movie franchise), the show blends legendary storytelling and fantastical edible creations all on the competition floor.

“It’s a baking competition, it starts off with 9 teams of two bakers who didn’t know each other before they got into the competition. These guys are professionals in what they do. They’re the best of the best in America,” said Oliver Phelps. “They’re going for the trophy of the Wizards of Baking Champions and each bake is based on a set from the actual studios in London, and they have to come up with some inspiration from that.”

“Wizards of Baking” pairs the competitors into teams of two and has them compete alongside each other throughout the duration of the competition. Each week, the bakers make grand, eye-catching creations based on different Harry Potter sets.

The show was shot at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden in Watford, England, and to raise the stakes, contestants are given access to the actual film sets, including The Great Hall at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Platform 9¾, Gringotts Wizarding Bank and The Burrow. The winners will be awarded the first-ever Wizards of Baking Cup and will have the opportunity to appear in a new Harry Potter cookbook….

(5) SAD, RABID PUPPY STUDIES. Jess Maginity reviews Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll for the LA Review of Books in “Whose Future Is It Anyway?”

…In his introduction, Carroll discusses the close proximity of science fiction to radical right-wing politics since the early 20th century. To some extent, popular culture was always a tool used by the Far Right. Theorists of the French New Right described intentional ideological influence on popular culture aimed at a distant political victory as “metapolitics.” As Andrew Breitbart summarizes, “Politics is downstream from culture.” Carroll describes this tactic, alluding to his focus on speculative genres, as “fascist worldmaking.” The ideology that structures fascist worldmaking is speculative whiteness: “For the alt-right,” Carroll says, “whiteness represents a matrix of possibilities more important than any actual accomplishments the white race may have already achieved.” There are five “myths” that constitute speculative whiteness: first, white people are uniquely good at speculating about the future and innovating in the present; second, nonwhite people are incapable of imagining the future and making long-term plans for the future; third, the true grandeur of whiteness will only be apparent in a high-tech fascist utopia; fourth, science fiction is a genre only white authors are truly able to produce; and fifth, speculative genres have the metapolitical potential of allowing a brainwashed white population to see their racial potential….

…Genres have no essential existence; people decide what they are. A categorical definition only makes sense when enough people agree with it. The science fiction community rejected the alt-right’s definition of speculative fiction. N. K. Jemisin, a primary target of reactionary fan hatred, won three consecutive Hugos for Best Novel with her Broken Earth trilogy. Chuck Tingle, who writes absurdist queer erotica, was mockingly nominated by the Rabid Puppies for several awards; he disavowed the nomination, tirelessly satirized the Puppies, and wrote Slammed in the Butt by My Hugo Award Nomination (2016) in response. He has since written two very successful queer horror novels, Camp Damascus (2023) and Bury Your Gays (2024). The Sad and Rabid Puppies dissolved after a few years of campaigning; they were primarily active from 2014 through 2016. The alt-right has also collapsed. After the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, the alt-right as a movement effectively ceased to exist. That doesn’t mean that they just disappeared—some were absorbed by older radical right movements, others were absorbed into the mainstream, and a few became mass murderers in the name of a white future.

Carroll reminds us that our future is contingent. Fascists have a vision for the future that excludes most of humanity, but fascists can be defeated. The future is for everyone—if we make it that way….

(6) WHEN NEW WORLDS WAS NEW. The Spectator’s “Book Club” has a 43-minute audio interview with “Michael Moorcock: celebrating 60 years of New Worlds”. Listen to it at the link.

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer, musician and editor Michael Moorcock, whose editorship of New Worlds magazine is widely credited with ushering in a ‘new wave’ of science fiction and developing the careers of writers like J G Ballard, Iain Sinclair, Pamela Zoline, Thomas M Disch and M John Harrison. With the release of a special edition of New Worlds, honouring the 60th anniversary of his editorship, Mike tells me about how he set out to marry the best of literary fiction with the best of the pulp tradition, how he fought off obscenity charges over Norman Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron, about his friendship with Ballard and his enmity with Kingsley Amis – and why he’s determined never to lose his vulgarity.

(7) CHRISTOPHER TOLKIEN CENTENARY. The Tolkien Society has released the schedule for its free online Christopher Tolkien Centenary Conference, being held November 23-24.

This November marks 100 years since the birth of Christopher Tolkien and the Society will be holding a two-day online event in honour of his life and legacy. You can register to attend the online Conference below.

“We seek to honour and remember Christopher. Although we know the enormity of the world that Tolkien created, we only know that thanks to Christopher’s work. He spent almost 50 years after his father’s death to bring Tolkien’s legacy to us all. His hard work and diligence has shined a light on the corners of Middle-earth that would otherwise be unknown to us. We all owe him a tremendous debt, and I hope this event goes some way in recognising Christopher’s legacy as much as his father’s.” — Shaun Gunner, Chair of the Tolkien Society

I don’t know about your house, but a lot of the participants are household names in mine — Christopher Gilson, Brian Sibley, Christopher Gilson, Carl F. Hostetter, Douglas A. Anderson, Ted Nasmith, John D. Rateliff, Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, John Garth, Robin Anne Reid, Michael D. C. Drout, and Verlyn Flieger.

Where possible, talks from both days will be recorded and uploaded onto the Tolkien Society YouTube channel after the event. The event is free to attend. Register here: Christopher Tolkien Centenary Conference.

(8) CLARION WEST CROWDFUNDING CAMPAIGN. Through December 4, Clarion West’s Fall Fundraiser at Indiegogo is encouraging donations with perks like these:

Would you like to join an RPG session with award-winning science fiction writer Annalee Newitz? Experience a Seattle escape room with horror and dark fantasy writer Evan J. Peterson? Benefit from a consultation with Susan Palwick or Ben Rosenbaum?

And there are many more at the link.

Donations help cover programs and events, including all of the following:

Instructors: All of our programs are taught by paid professionals in the field of speculative fiction. Clarion West pays our instructors an estimated $55,000 per year
Sliding scale tuition and application fees, reduced rates, free classes, and access seats: classes and workshops, travel, and time away can be a barrier to attending our programs. To reduce some of these barriers, we are committed to providing scholarships covering full and partial tuition to our residential workshops; discounts to reduce the cost of online classes; free events and programs for our community; and free seats in online classes for PGM/BIPOC writers. Clarion West covers an estimated $25,000 in fees for these programs.
Reader honorariums: Clarion West pays a dedicated group of application readers an average of $5,000 each year to help manage the application process.
ASL interpreters and live captioners: Clarion West spends approximately $270 per event or $2,700 for live captioning services for live events and $350 for ASL interpreters for live events.
Clarion West pays $4,200 annually for class and on-demand platforms
Six-Week Workshop venues, such as university dorms range between $45,000-$90,000 for in-person years like 2024

(9) TIM SULLIVAN (1948-2024). Author and filmmaker Timothy Sullivan died November 10 of congestive heart failure in hospice in Newport News, Virginia.

His first published story, “Tachyon Rag”, appeared in Unearth in 1977. His short story “Zeke”, published in Twilight Zone, was a 1982 Nebula nominee.

Although mainly known as a writer and actor, his contribution to one of fanhistory’s most bitter fan feuds should not be forgotten. He and Somtow Sucharitkul split from the Washington Science Fiction Association during the exceptionally bitter Dunegate feud of the Eighties, nominally provoked by the way passes were distributed to a local publicity screening of David Lynch’s movie. They formed the Washington Alternative SF Association, and published the fanzine Dune Gate to prosecute the feud.

Later, Sullivan was cast by Somtow (along with other friends) in the film The Laughing Dead, a credit mentioned in The Hollywood Reporter’s tribute “Tim Sullivan Dead: Sci-Fi Author, Actor and Screenwriter Was 76”.

…He also wrote and directed Vampyre Femmes (1999) and appeared in such straight-to-video releases as The Laughing Dead (1989), Eyes of the Werewolf (1999), The Mark of Dracula (2000), Hollywood Mortuary (2000) and Deadly Scavengers (2001), working often with writer-director Ron Ford.

Sullivan wrote at least seven sci-fi novels during his career, three of them based on Kenneth Johnson’s V NBC miniseries and series in the mid-1980s about an alien invasion of Earth….

…He wrote dozens of short stories, including 1981’s “Zeke,” a tragedy about an extraterrestrial stranded on Earth that was nominated for a Nebula Award. His novels included 1988’s Destiny’s End, 1989’s The Parasite War, 1991’s The Martian Viking and The Dinosaur Trackers and 1992’s Lords of Creation….

…He also edited horror anthologies and handled book reviews for The Washington Post.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

November 14, 1961 — Cat Rambo, 63.

By Paul Weimer: First and foremost Cat Rambo is a beacon of teaching in the science fiction community. Her Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers classes are a wealth of information and education in how to write science fiction and fantasy that stand up as educational, fun and practically useful. (Disclaimer: I co-taught a class in the Academy on maps in fantasy novels with Alex Acks.). The best teacher is to practice and read others work, but if you want some formal instruction short of going to a Clarion or the like (or don’t feel ready for that yet), Cat’s courses may be the solution you are looking for. She has a swath of excellent guest teachers to give ballast to her courses.

Besides her pedagogical pursuits, I enjoy her fiction. There is a coziness to a lot of her fiction, particularly the You Sexy Thing and its sequels, which are my favorite of her work. It’s not that they are entire creampuffs of novels, but there is a sense of fun, playfulness and comforting adventure…plus food, and cooking and misadventures, that make the book page-turners for me. Rambo does do a really good job in what a lot of authors don’t get to do or don’t want to do–recapping a series so that I can better remember what was going on. In reading the latest of the series, over a year since I read The Devil’s Gun, the recap Rambo gave helped click the neurons and have a rush of remembrance about what I was plunging into with Rumor Has It.

Given that this is an open ended and every complexifying series, I appreciate this service for the reader. It makes the work of trying to remember things less taxing, and allows me as a reader to focus on the fun of the books, and how she is layering plot and character with each successive novel. Reading and talking with Cat as to how she handles character growth and development brings home to me that her teaching, her classes really are reflected in her own novels, and vice versa.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

The Argyle Sweater demonstrates the risks of airplane mode.
Wumo chooses the wrong room.
Eek! illustrates stubbornness.

(12) THE OTHER HANNIBAL. Even if that’s the character who comes to mind when you see that name, he won’t be playing Hannibal Lecter. “Denzel Washington: ‘Black Panther 3’ Will Be One of His Last Movies” reports Variety.

Denzel Washington revealed in August that “there are very few films” left for him to make at this stage in his Oscar-winning career, but now he’s revealing that “Black Panther 3″ is one of them. Speaking to Australia’s “Today” while on the press tour for “Gladiator II,” Washington said that director Ryan Coogler is writing him a role in the third “Black Panther” film. It will be one of Washington’s final movies along with a new Steve McQueen project and a film adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Othello.”

“For me it’s about the filmmakers. Especially at this point in my career, I am only interested in working with the best,” Washington said. “I don’t know how many more films I’m going to make. It’s probably not that many. I want to do things I haven’t done.”

“I played Othello at 22. I am about to play Othello at 70,” he continued, referring to the Shakespeare production co-starring Jake Gyllenhaal that opens on Broadway in February 2025. “After that, I am playing [Carthaginian general] Hannibal. After that, I’ve been talking to Steve McQueen about a film. After that, Ryan Coogler is writing a part for me in the next ‘Black Panther.’ After that, I’m going to do the film ‘Othello,’ After that, I’m going to do King Lear. After that, I’m going to retire.”

(13) UNSAFE AT ANY SPEED. The New York Times article “Take the ‘Death Stairs’ if You Dare” is paywalled, but the Facebook group “Death Stairs” is public and has lots of bizarre photos.

…No guardrails? Check. Carpeting that makes you lose your footing? Check. Steps of inconsistent depth and width? Check.

The more peril in the surrounding space, the better.

Do the stairs end in a dark basement? Excellent. Is the steep cement staircase guarded by rusting barbed wire on one side and open to a rushing dam on the other? Ideal….

Lane Sutterby, who lives in Kansas, had modest ambitions when he created the Death Stairs group in November 2020.

“I figured I’d have 10, 15 people join, maybe some of my close friends and a couple of random strangers,” he said….

…Some contributions to the Death Stairs Facebook page show how steep, rickety stairs are not the only risk. Distracting visual cues, inadequate hand rails and hard-to-see step edges are common….

(14) HOW CAN I GET THIS CAR OUT OF SECOND GEAR? [Item by Steven French.] Forget the jet packs, where’s my nuclear powered car?! “Visions of Nuclear-Powered Cars Captivated Cold War America, but the Technology Never Really Worked” in Smithsonian Magazine. Archival photos at the link.

In theory, nuclear-powered cars could run for thousands of miles without refueling, and some could even fly. But several problems remained. For one, nobody had developed a nuclear power plant small enough to fit into a car. For another, scientists calculated that an automobile with enough lead and other materials to shield the driver and passengers from radiation would weigh at least 50 tons, making it more than 25 times as heavy as the average vehicle. There was also the question of what to do with the nuclear waste.

These issues were never resolved, and the world quickly moved on. Still, the surviving prototypes offer a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been.

For one example, the Studebaker Astral.

(15) ROCKET TO THE MORGUE? Could it be dead, Jim? Futurism says “It Sounds Like NASA’s Moon Rocket Might Be Getting Canceled”.

NASA’s plagued Space Launch System rocket, which is being developed to deliver the first astronauts to the Moon in over half a century, is on thin ice.

According to Ars Technica senior space reporter Eric Berger’s insider sources, there’s an “at least 50-50” chance that the rocket “will be canceled.”

“Not Block 1B. Not Block 2,” he added, referring to the variant that was used during NASA’s uncrewed Artemis I test flight in 2022 and a more powerful design with a much higher translunar injection payload capacity, respectively. “All of it.”

To be clear, as Berger himself points out, we’re still far “from anything being settled.” Nonetheless, the reporter’s sources have historically been highly reliable, suggesting the space agency may indeed be getting cold feet about continuing to pour billions of dollars into the non-reusable rocket.

The SLS has already seen its fair share of budget overruns and many years of delays. In a 2022 interview, former NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver told Futurism that the project is simply “not sustainable.”

The rocket platform has become a political football, going well past $6 billion over budget and over half a decade behind schedule….

(16) NOT THE VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Disgusting, isn’t it? John Lewis’s shocking Christmas advert is actually about … shopping” – the Guardian sounds mighty peeved. Hopefully, they’re kidding.

Well, this is an outrage. There are just some things you shouldn’t mess with. Roast dinners. The national anthem. The John Lewis Christmas advert.

You see, the John Lewis Christmas advert has long operated on a perfect formula. Every November we are treated to a sumptuous mini-movie, the components of which have long since lapsed into tradition. It must be festive. It must have a slowed down piano ballad cover version of a nostalgic pop song. It must also be unfathomably sad, either because it’s about an old man dying of loneliness on the moon (2015) or a Christmas tree being banished to the garden because it’s a bit too excitable (2023).

But most importantly – most importantly of all – it must not be about John Lewis. The whole point of a John Lewis Christmas advert is that, if people watch it out of context and are subsequently asked what it is advertising, they should ideally reply ‘palliative care’ or ‘some sort of childhood trauma charity’. The point of a John Lewis Christmas advert is that a foreigner should be able to watch it all the way through and still have no idea what John Lewis is or why his kink is making people from Surrey cry.

But forget that this year. Because this year, John Lewis has thrown all that in the bin. This year, John Lewis has committed the unforgivable sin of literally setting its Christmas advert inside an actual branch of John Lewis. This is quite frankly unforgivable….

I kind of like it….

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

Talking With Michael Moorcock About His Music: Part 2

Posted on March 20, 2024 by Mike Glyer

By RL Thornton: This is the second part of an interview with Damon Knight Grand Master Michael Moorcock about his career in music. Previously, we talked about his early career in music, his initial experiences with Hawkwind, and his album New Worlds Fair with his band the Deep Fix. Next we discuss his other work with Hawkwind, his songs for Blue Oyster Cult, and his current recordings with Spirits Burning.

NOTE: For those not familiar with the people or bands that he mentions, you can click on the link to see their Wikipedia entry (or other webpage if necessary).

Part 2:

Q: You mentioned how easy it was to do your part in Hawkwind’s Warrior On The Edge Time, which was based on your idea of the Eternal Champion. How did that album come about? What was the collaboration between you and the band like?

Michael Moorcock: Dave asked for an idea for a concept album and tour. That’s what I came up with. All my stuff by and large, links in some way!

Q: My guitarist friend Clay wanted me to ask you about your impression of then Hawkwind bassist Lemmy, who was fired just before Warrior was issued.

Michael Moorcock: Lemmy [founder of Motorhead] and I were good friends. Firing him was a big mistake for Hawkwind and a big boost for Lemmy’s career!

Q: From what I can tell, after working with Calvert on some of his albums, the next big project of yours was with Hawkwind on their Chronicle of The Black Sword. What role did you play in making that album and what did you think of the end result?

Michael Moorcock: I was working with Nicky on the project. When Nicky was fired during that project I lost interest. My last gigs with the band were at Hammersmith Odeon. I said nothing about it to Dave but with Lemmy AND Nik gone, I had decided to stop performing with Hawkwind. The result was patchy AND Dave was tricky about it. I pulled my contributions from the first issue of the album.

Q: So Hawkwind actually played Worldcon (ConSpiracy 1987 in Brighton) and one participant called them “Michael Moorcock’s band.” What do you recall of that concert?

Michael Moorcock: I saw Dave [Brock] and someone else, I think, while I was signing but I hadn’t been aware of it until Dave said ‘You coming to play with us, Mike.’ I didn’t feel like it and so I didn’t. I was staying at another hotel some distance out of Brighton. They were always, by the way, Dave’s band. Deep Fix was more a ‘project’ than a band, as such. It included Langdon Jones and Pete Pavli as well as Martin Stone.

Q: At this point, could you talk a little bit about your work with Blue Oyster Cult over the years (i.e. “The Great Sun Jester,” “Veterans Of The Psychic Wars,” “Black Blade”)?

Michael Moorcock: Eric Bloom and other band members like my stuff so they asked for some lyrics. I had some and I sent them… Since then I’ve stayed in touch with several band members!

Q: In 2012, the Deep Fix released some previously recorded demo sessions under the name “The Entropy Tango & Gloriana Demo Sessions.” Why did you issue those recordings?

Michael Moorcock: Because I was asked to. But by the time it was too late Pete Pavli objected. Felt very sorry about that.

Q: Next, you and your friends recorded a Deep Fix album “Live At The Terminal Cafe.” How did that come about and what did you think about the results?

Michael Moorcock: Very old friend Martin Stone and I had wanted to do a record and we eventually had the time in Paris with a couple of good musicians who also lived there, so we rented a rehearsal studio and put the backing tracks down in Montmartre. A local friend of mine, Sean Orr, did fiddle and Don [Falcone] did final production. It went very well indeed.

Q: And most recently, you worked with Don Falcone and his space-rock collective Spirits Burning on musical adaptations of your Dancers At The End Of Time books. How did this project come about?

Michael Moorcock: Albert had wanted to do this project for a while and he and Don decided to do it. As with Time Centre, I can no longer play guitar or banjo etc. My neuropathic hands just won’t do it any more, so I have to play harmonica, kazoo, whistle and sing! St James’s Infirmary was done that way.

My next project with Alan Davey producing will be redoing a bunch of songs by me and Calvert. I love Robert’s songwriting and my own could do with improvement, so that’s a project for this year. Tomorrow, I do the final work on END and am much looking forward to finishing that project. Albert, Don etc. have done a superb job!

Q: Thank you very much!

Talking With Michael Moorcock About His Music: Part 1

Posted on March 19, 2024 by Mike Glyer

By RL Thornton: When fans talk about Damon Knight Grand Master Michael Moorcock, they are usually talking about his extensive bibliography, the literary innovations that he encouraged as editor of the legendary ‘60s SF magazine New Worlds, and the tremendous influence that his Eternal Champion series has had on fantasy and science fiction. However, you may not know that Moorcock has been always pursuing a parallel career in music.

Moorcock has been performing and playing from his youth onward to recent years, where he has been collaborating with psychedelic rock collective Spirits Burning on a series of albums based on his Dancers at the End of Time trilogy. In this two-part interview, Michael Moorcock talks about his adventures with Hawkwind, his band the Deep Fix, and others.

NOTE: For those not familiar with the people or bands that he mentions, you can click on the link to see their Wikipedia entry (or other webpage if necessary).

Part 1:

Q: How did you first get involved with music? Did it start in 1955 with “your cousin’s Gretsch” guitar like you said in the fictionalized autobiography from The Whispering Swarm?

Michael Moorcock: I was into skiffle from about 1955, First stringed instrument was a six-string banjo, second was a Spanish guitar. I had friends with Gretches but my first electric was actually a Sears, which came with an amp in the carrying case. Then a Gibson and then a Rickenbacker 12.

Q: So how long did you play with skiffle bands?

Michael Moorcock: About two years. First I was with The Greenhorns, then the Travellers and I occasionally played with the Vipers. Also played individual blues in small clubs in England, Sweden, Germany and France.

Q. You were in the ‘60s UK music scene, which may have been one of the most exciting music scenes ever. What were some of your most memorable moments from that time?

Michael Moorcock: Many equally memorable times. Maybe the scratch band at Portobello Green with Paul Kossoff, Arthur Brown, Jon Trux [UK journalist], where we variously fell asleep, were chased home by girlfriends, failed to light Arthur’s hat [part of Brown’s act for his single “Fire”], and ultimately fell through the stage, was one. French fans thought it was the coolest gig they’d ever seen. Nik Turner‘s ‘frog in flight’ at Harlow was also pretty memorable!

Q: What was a Portobello Green gig like? Was it an open stage at the market?

Michael Moorcock: The stage was a small stage with bench seating, but was open on the north side facing the Green.

Q: Could you supply more info about Nik Turner’s “frog in flight” gig in Harlow?

Michael Moorcock: Fairly famous. It was an open stage and raining slightly. We were late for the gig. He rushed into his [frog] costume and I rushed out to take my regular position. A few moments later, I saw this giant frog with a sax round its neck fly at full length past me and into the audience. The stage was slippery and Nik’s momentum took him to full flight.

Q: From what I have read, your future adventures with Hawkwind may have started when Robert Calvert started writing for New Worlds. How did you actually first meet?

Michael Moorcock: Nope. Jon Trux brought Calvert to see me around the time Hawkwind were starting but before Bob joined. Later Dave Brock asked me to perform my own material (inc Sonic Attack) at a Portobello Green gig. Trux and I had helped Bob into the Priory before he did damage to himself and Bob was worried I’d take his place so I promised him I’d fill in for him only when he was incapacitated but I’d step back as soon as he was ready to perform again.

Q: Beg pardon, but what is the Priory?

Michael Moorcock: Posh loony bin. Several of my friends wound up there. They also treated alcoholism and serious conditions like Parkinsonism. Still do. Mervyn Peake, Martin Stone and Marianne Faithful were all in, as well as drunks.

Q: From what I can tell, you first foray into recording was with Hawkwind on “Space Ritual.” What was that like?

Michael Moorcock: It wasn’t. I did a demo for HMV – terrible — no result. We did a comedy record Suddenly It’s The Bellyflops in 1964/5. As for the pieces I did on Hawkwind’s Warrior On The Edge Of Time, I recorded them on my way to see a movie, all one take in about an hour. I was supposed to get a fee, but never did (nor wanted it). I had no trouble. All went ok.

Q: Your next foray into music was with your band the Deep Fix on “New Worlds Fair.” How did the recording process go? The violin seems particularly prominent on the album.

Michael Moorcock: Cello from Pete Pavli. Maybe Simon House [of the Third Ear Band] did some fiddle. We did it the usual way, laying down music tracks first then doing voices, then maybe adding a little more to fill out.

Q: Looking back, how successful was New Worlds Fair?

Michael Moorcock: Pretty successful but it didn’t chart significantly mainly because UA had expected it to sound like Hawkwind and of course it didn’t. Before I did that we did a demo for a single which UA didn’t go ahead with but was released by Flicknife a few years later around 1981. Most of this was people asking me to do a record. I had no particular ambition to do records until Pete Pavli and I began to work together in the 70s and 80s — those demo and rehearsal tapes were released by Don Falcone some years ago.

Pixel Scroll 3/18/24 We Cannot Do With More Than 16, To Give A Tentacle To Each

Posted on March 18, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) HOLLY BLACK Q&A. “Holly Black interview: The Cruel Prince author on the boom in faerie fantasy novels, BookTok, and sex scenes” at Slate.

What does it feel like now to be surrounded by all these other faerie fantasy books and, consequently, readers who potentially read only fantasy, who are not coming into the genre for the first time?

[Black] As a person who writes and reads a lot of fantasy, it’s been extremely gratifying to see fantasy move into a mainstream place. There are a lot of people who’ve grown up watching Lord of the Rings at a young enough age that it’s become part of their vocabulary of how the fantasy world works. Game of Thrones too. I think, for a lot of people, that barrier to entry is much lower than it was when there wasn’t so much exposure to fantasy.

I think the rise of romantasy is certainly in part because people do have the vocabulary of fantasy. Romance is one of the biggest genres in the world, so of course people want to see, or are able to read, fantasy romances in a way that might not have been true before. Romantasy is really two different genres kind of mushed together, probably in the same way that urban fantasy was. You have two streams: the romance-forward fantasy, where it’s really a romance novel with fantasy, and then you have fantasy that has romance. They’re paced really differently, and they have different focuses, but they live in the same genre. Then you had urban fantasy that came out of fantasy, and often those were the faerie books; for a long time urban fantasy was faerie, in the late ’80s.

(2) NEW WORLDS TURNING 60. Richard Glynn Jones told the New Worlds Facebook group on March 13 that an anniversary issue is in the works:

Michael Moorcock and some associates are preparing a new issue of New Worlds to commemorate the 60th anniversary of his becoming its editor. This will be in magazine format as before (A4, saddle-stitched) for publication in mid-summer. The contents are pretty much finalised, so please don’t send any unsolicited material: it’s by invitation only. A second book-format New Worlds is due from PS Publishing later in the year. More info soon.

(3) SOMETHING IS ROTTING IN HOLLYWOOD BITS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Digital is forever. Except when it isn’t. The movie industry has a data migration problem. From The Hollywood Reporter: “’It’s a Silent Fire’: Decaying Digital Movie and TV Show Files Are a Hollywood Crisis”.

Industry pros sweat the possibility that many digital files will eventually become unusable — an archival tragedy reminiscent of the celluloid era.

While David Zaslav and Bob Iger’s tax-optimization strategy of deleting films and TV shows from their streamers has triggered plenty of agita among creators, the custodians of Hollywood’s digital era have an even greater fear: wholesale decay of feature and episodic files. Behind closed doors and NDAs, the fragility of archives is a perpetual Topic A, with pros sweating the possibility that contemporary pop culture’s master files might be true goners, destined to the same fate as so many vanished silent movies, among them Alfred Hitchcock’s second feature, The Mountain Eagle, and Ernst Lubitsch’s Oscar-winning The Patriot.

It’s underscored by initiatives such as Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation. “The preservation of every art form is fundamental,” the industry icon says on a video on the organization’s web site. For the business, these are valuable studio assets — to use one example, the MGM Library (roughly 4,000 film titles including the James Bond franchise and 17,000 series episodes) is worth an estimated $3.4 billion to Amazon — but there’s a misconception that digital files are safe forever. In fact, files end up corrupted, data is improperly transferred, hard drives fail, formats change, work simply vanishes. “It’s a silent fire,” says Linda Tadic, CEO of Digital Bedrock, an archiving servicer that works with studios and indie producers. “We find issues with every single show or film that we try to preserve.” So, what exactly has gone missing? “I could tell you stories — but I can’t, because of confidentiality.”

(4) FADING SCHOLARSHIP. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The same fear holds true for scholarly publications. Nature this week has rung an alarm bell. SF fans should note: this is another reason why fandom’s move away from paper publications is to be deplored. Digital is simply not for evermore. We need plurality and a diversity of solutions…. “Millions of research papers at risk of disappearing from the Internet” at Nature.

An analysis of DOIs suggests that digital preservation is not keeping up with burgeoning scholarly knowledge.

DOIs for the uninitiated are Digital Object Identifiers: every academic publication should have one so that if a publisher’s website changes and there is a new web-page address (URL) the DOI remains the same and links through. [Jonathan adds, “Fans need not worry about this (the only one they should remember is https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139087735…” Guess whose book that link goes to…]

More than one-quarter of scholarly articles are not being properly archived and preserved, a study of more than seven million digital publications suggests. The findings, published in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication on 24 January¹, indicate that systems to preserve papers online have failed to keep pace with the growth of research output.

“Our entire epistemology of science and research relies on the chain of footnotes,” explains author Martin Eve, a researcher in literature, technology and publishing at Birkbeck, University of London. “If you can’t verify what someone else has said at some other point, you’re just trusting to blind faith for artefacts that you can no longer read yourself.”

Primary research is here.

(5) LEGACY WORRIES. Brian Keene muses about the disturbingly short half-life of author name recognition in “Letters From the Labyrinth 372”.

…On Tuesday of this past week, I took a rare day off and drove up to Asbury Park, New Jersey to visit my pal F. Paul Wilson. It occurs to me that I will need to explain to some of my younger readers just who Paul is, and therein lies the meat of this missive. Paul was one of the first horror novelists I read. (As I’ve written in OTHER WORDS, my evolutionary chain as a kid was comic books and Hardy Boys, then Stephen King and F. Paul Wilson). First thing I read by him was The Keep — a seminal, classic horror novel which, sadly, most of you under the age of forty have probably never read. The Keep was the third “grown up book” I ever read (right after King’s Night Shift and Salem’s Lot), and it is an essential part of my writer DNA.

Paul went on to become a giant in the fields of not just horror, but science-fiction, fantasy, thrillers, and other genres, as well. He was a stalwart, perennial New York Times bestseller, and his best-known IP — Repairman Jack — will carry on long after he’s gone. I guarantee you that right now, many of you who did not recognize the name F. Paul Wilson are now nodding and saying, “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of Repairman Jack.”

It feels absurd to have to explain all of this to you. How could anyone not know this? But then, I think about this past Thursday in the store, when I overheard a mother explaining to her daughter who Brian Keene was, and that he owned the store they were currently shopping in, and that she (the mother) had started reading him in high school. The girl, high school age herself, was holding a book by Wile E. Young that she’d pulled off the shelf. Wile E. Young, was reading me in high school and my books are an essential part of his writer DNA the way Paul’s are a part of mine….

(6) FEAR THE LEFTOVERS. “Godzilla Minus One Director Releases New Kaiju Short, ‘Foodlosslla’” – here is Comicbook.com’s introduction.

…Godzilla Minus One director Takashi Yamazaki teamed up with Ajinomoto (a line of cooking products in Japan) on a special new promo that takes the Kaiju director’s expertise and brings it to life in a new way. Highlighting the amount of food waste in Japan (2.44 million tons according to the advertisement), it results in the creation of “Foodlosslla” a kaiju made out of all the wasted food that doesn’t get eaten or cooked. But with the director’s eye, it’s a great looking monster for the promo. Check it out in action below…

(7) STILL PLENTY OF GOOD EATING ON THIS ONE. Don’t ask what internet rabbit hole this 2014 recipe came from: “Edible Art: Spice Stuffed Squash Sandworms” at Kitchen Overlord. (Click for larger image.)

(8) THOMAS STAFFFORD (1930-2024). [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Gemini 6. Gemini 9. Apollo 10. Apollo 10 Lunar Module. Apollo-Soyuz. Air Force Lt General. A long and busy life. RIP. “Astronaut Thomas Stafford, commander of Apollo 10, has died at age 93”. He died March 18. PBS News Hour pays tribute.

…Stafford, a retired Air Force three-star general, took part in four space missions. Before Apollo 10, he flew on two Gemini flights, including the first rendezvous of two U.S. capsules in orbit. He died in a hospital near his Space Coast Florida home, said Max Ary, director of the Stafford Air & Space Museum in Weatherford, Oklahoma.

Stafford was one of 24 people who flew to the moon, but he did not land on it. Only seven of them are still alive….

…After he put away his flight suit, Stafford was the go-to guy for NASA when it sought independent advice on everything from human Mars missions to safety issues to returning to flight after the 2003 space shuttle Columbia accident. He chaired an oversight group that looked into how to fix the then-flawed Hubble Space Telescope, earning a NASA public service award.

“Tom was involved in so many things that most people were not aware of, such as being known as the ‘Father of Stealth’,” Ary said in an email. Stafford was in charge of the famous “Area 51” desert base that was the site of many UFO theories, but the home of testing of Air Force stealth technologies….

… After the moon landings ended, NASA and the Soviet Union decided on a joint docking mission and Stafford, a one-star general at the time, was chosen to command the American side. It meant intensive language training, being followed by the KGB while in the Soviet Union, and lifelong friendships with cosmonauts. The two teams of space travelers even went to Disney World and rode Space Mountain together before going into orbit and joining ships.

“We have capture,” Stafford radioed in Russian as the Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft hooked up. His Russian counterpart, Alexei Leonov, responded in English: “Well done, Tom, it was a good show. I vote for you.”

The 1975 mission included two days during which the five men worked together on experiments….

(9) BELATED BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 17, 1948 — William Gibson, 76. Not at all surprisingly, the first series that I read by William Gibson was the one that started off with his first novel, Neuromancer, published forty years ago, which is called the Sprawl trilogy. I still love the now anachronistic wording of the opening, “THE SKY ABOVE the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

I don’t know at all how many times that I’ve read that trilogy but the last time I did read it, about a decade, it was still impressively excellent.

Neuromancer would get a much deserved Hugo at Aussiecon Two as well as a Ditmar, Nebula and a Philip K. Dick; and Mono Lisa Overdrive won an Aurora. The novels had too many nominations to list here.

Yes, I’m looking forward to the Apple financed Neuromancer series. If anyone can financially afford to do it right, it’s them. And they have a strict hands-off policy of not interfering with the actual production team.

Going back in time I must talk about “Johnny Mnemonic” which was not his first story, which was “Hinterlands“ which I’ve never of until now. “Johnny Mnemonic” I think is one of the finest SF short story written. The same holds true for “The Gernsback Continuum” which was published in the same year, forty-two years ago. I’ll toss in “New Rose Hotel” which showed up a few years later.

Please let’s not talk about the Johnny Mnemonic film. Really don’t mention it. I get queasy thinking about how they butchered that stellar story. And I’ve seen some pretty awful scripts but few that matched this, plus the casting of him. Why oh why?

His second series, the Bridge trilogy, which is Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties came out some thirty years ago. No, I’ve not read it nearly as many times as I’ve read the Sprawl ones but I did find rather excellent. The near future setting is more grounded and a more fascinating read for that.

Ok, I’ll admit that I do not at all know what to make of Pattern Recognition, Spook Country and Zero History. They are well written like everything he does, and the characters are fascinating, but something these works is just not quite right for me. It comes off cold, distanced and just not interesting as what else he’s done.

On the other catspaw, the Jackpot trilogy, or possibly longer series, which so far consisted of The Peripheral that has contain time travel (of sorts, maybe) and Agency, and a third, Jackpot, which I don’t think has a release date, is fascinating in the first two novels. Strange, disjointed but fascinating.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Thatababy is really for the birds.
Breaking Cat News reports on a comics industry story.
Peanuts from 1955 explains why we’ll never land a rocket on the moon.

(11) JUNE 4. ScreenRant says The Acolyte release date has been confirmed by Lucasfilm: “We Finally Know When The Next Star Wars TV Show Comes Out”.

… With a summer 2024 Disney+ drop having long been rumored, Lucasfilm has officially confirmed The Acolyte‘s release date as June 4, 2024, via Star Wars‘ official Twitter/X account. As it turns out, the release dates that have been reported for The Acolyte were accurate. This means Star Wars fans will not have to wait long to sink their teeth into the High Republic era, as Lucasfilm takes a big step into a new facet of a galaxy far, far away….

… The books of the High Republic are set centuries before Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. Upon The Acolyte‘s announcement, it was confirmed that the Disney+ show would detail the waning days of the High Republic era. This places the show about 100 years before The Phantom Menace in the Star Wars timeline, promising a new, exciting look at an entirely new era of the franchise….

(12) DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF LOOKING UP AT GIANT ELECTRIC SHEEP? YES THEY CAN! [Item by Daniel Dern.] “Montana Man Pleads Guilty to Federal Wildlife Trafficking Charges as Part of Yearslong Effort to Create Giant Hybrid Sheep for Captive Hunting” at the US Department of Justice.

Defendant Worked to Traffic Marco Polo Sheep Parts from Kyrgyzstan, Clone Sheep, Illegally Inseminate Ewes to Create Hybrids and Traffic Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep Parts

A Montana man pleaded guilty today to two felony wildlife crimes – a conspiracy to violate the Lacey Act and substantively violating the Lacey Act – as part of an almost decade-long effort to create giant sheep hybrids in the United States with an aim to sell the species to captive hunting facilities.

Arthur “Jack” Schubarth, 80, of Vaughn, Montana, is the owner and operator of Sun River Enterprises LLC – also known as Schubarth Ranch – which is a 215-acre alternative livestock ranch in Vaughn. The Schubarth Ranch is engaged in the purchase, sale and breeding of “alternative livestock” such as mountain sheep, mountain goats and various ungulates. The primary market for Schubarth’s livestock is captive hunting operations, also known as shooting preserves or game ranches.

According to court documents, Schubarth conspired with at least five other individuals between 2013 and 2021 to create a larger hybrid species of sheep that would garner higher prices from shooting preserves. Schubarth brought parts of the largest sheep in the world, Marco Polo argali sheep (Ovis ammon polii), from Kyrgyzstan into the United States without declaring the importation. Average males can weigh more than 300 pounds with horns that span more than five feet. Marco Polo argali are native to the high elevations of the Pamir region of Central Asia. They are protected internationally by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, domestically by the U.S. Endangered Species Act and are prohibited in the State of Montana to protect native sheep from disease and hybridization.

Schubarth sent genetic material from the argali parts to a lab to create cloned embryos. Schubarth then implanted the embryos in ewes on his ranch, resulting in a single, pure genetic male Marco Polo argali that he named “Montana Mountain King” or MMK….

(13) TINY MESSAGES. Like the “golden record” sent with two 1977 Voyager probes,“NASA’s Europa Clipper mission will carry a poem and millions of names to ocean moon” reports CNN.

When NASA’s Europa Clipper aims to launch on its highly anticipated mission to an icy moon in October, the spacecraft will carry a unique design etched with names, poetry and artwork symbolizing humanity.

The US space agency has a long history of sending names and meaningful designs aloft aboard missions, including the Voyager probes, the Perseverance rover and Parker Solar Probe. Now, it’s Europa Clipper’s turn to carry on the tradition of ferrying a design that illustrates why humans are driven to explore the cosmos….

… Decorated on both sides and made of the rare metal tantalum, the triangular plate will seal the spacecraft’s sensitive electronics inside a vault to protect them from Jupiter’s harsh radiation.

On the inside of the vault is a silicon microchip stenciled with more than 2.6 million names submitted by the public. The microchip is at the center of a design that shows a bottle floating within the orbit of Jupiter and its moons to symbolize that it serves as a cosmic message in a bottle.

Technicians at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, used electron beams to stencil the names at a size smaller than one-thousandth the width of a human hair.

Below the bottle, the design features the original poem “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa” by US Poet Laureate Ada Limón, etched in her handwriting, as well as a portrait of the late planetary sciences pioneer Ron Greeley, an Arizona State University professor who played a crucial role in laying the foundation for the development of a mission to Europa.

The side of the plate facing the inside of the vault also includes an etching of the Drake Equation, developed by the late astronomer Frank Drake of the University of California Santa Cruz in 1961 to estimate the possibility of finding advanced life beyond Earth. The equation remains an important part of astrobiological research as scientists search for evidence of life beyond our planet.

The external side of the plate carries waveforms, or visual representations of sound waves, that depict the word “water” in 103 languages from around the world. At the heart of the spiral is a symbol that means “water” in American Sign Language. The audio of the spoken languages collected by linguists for NASA is available on its website….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Mother’s Basement looks back on “How Akira Toriyama Changed The World”.

Akira Toriyama didn’t just change manga and anime forever, he changed the entire world. Here’s how.

Geoff Thew creates videos analyzing the storytelling techniques of anime and video games. He has been named the number one Worst YouTube Anime Reviewer by The Top Tens.

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Kathy Sullivan, Daniel Dern, JJ, Lise Andreasen, Andrew (not Werdna), N., Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 12/10/23 The Pixelman Always Scrolls Twice

Posted on December 10, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) GASBAGS OF DEATH. Let Michael Moorcock tell you all about “The hubris of the great airship designers”, in his review of His Majesty’s Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World’s Largest Flying Machine by S.C. Gwynne. Behind a paywall at Spectator.

…The airship race of the 1920s and 1930s carried that familiar mixture of visionary idealism, populist politics and wishful thinking which so often ended in tragedy. The explosion of the swastika-emblazoned Hindenburg in 1937 is the best known, but the years before the second world war, as countries rushed to launch successful lighter-than-air ships, saw many other disasters. Very few crashed without loss of life. Most took a substantial number of crew and passengers with them as they split in two, turned end-up, went down in flames or disappeared into the wastes of the polar ice. The only large ships to survive were withdrawn from service after dramatic test failures or the loss of sister ships. As S.C. Gwynne points out in this excellent account of perhaps Britain’s greatest imperial folly, not a single ship could pass an airworthiness test, and even ‘safe’ ships such as the Graf Zeppelin or Vickers’s ‘private’ R100 barely escaped disaster on many occasions.

The R101 was the dream of the charming imperial romantic Christopher Birdwood Thomson, who imagined a benign commonwealth held together by the power of mighty airships capable of carrying statesmen, goods and soldiers to any part of its far-flung lands. His fellow visionaries included the alcoholic daredevil G.H. Scott, our most experienced airshipman; Britain’s best navigator E.L. Johnston; and Michael Rope, R101’s designer. All of them believed that they had learned from the Zeppelins’ mistakes.

Their enthusiasm far outweighed their experience. They were fired up on Verne- and Wells-inspired serials in the likes of Modern Boy (whose long-running star was Biggles), where Britons consolidated their empire and saved the world by inventing great cigar-shaped flying machines. The Freudian appeal of those aerial monsters hasn’t gone unremarked, of course; but having experienced the euphoria of powered lighter-than-air flight, of seeing the detailed countryside passing slowly below, the only sound being the engines’ purr, I can vouch for the strong appeal of airship flight….

(2) CHICKEN OUTFIT. CBS’ Sunday Morning show today did a segment about “Aardman Animations: Creating the magic of stop-motion”.

The animation wizards behind Wallace & Gromit and Shaun the Sheep are back with a sequel to their 2000 hit feature, “Chicken Run.” Correspondent Seth Doane visits the Bristol, England studios of Aardman Animations, where artists have painstakingly filmed “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget,” a comic adventure in which daredevil chickens seek to rescue their precious hen from a dastardly factory farm. (Think “Chicken: Impossible.”)

(3) CHANGING THE IMBALANCE. “The Book World Still Isn’t Diverse. Dhonielle Clayton Is Trying to Change That” reports the New York Times. “Her solution? A packaging business that sells ideas for commercial genre fiction featuring characters from broadly diverse backgrounds.”

One evening this fall, a crowd of writers and publishing professionals mingled in a speakeasy-style lounge in Midtown Manhattan. The party, hosted by a new company called Electric Postcard Entertainment, was the kind of lavish affair that’s become rare for the book business in an era of corporate consolidation and cuts.

Guests traded industry gossip and sipped potent signature cocktails with names like “timeless love” and “immortality serum” — phrases that alluded to the company’s coming romance and fantasy projects. The crowd included executives from Sony, film agents and producers, book scouts, novelists and editors and publicists from publishing houses like Macmillan, Simon & Schuster and William Morrow.

The company’s sales pitch was delivered stealthily via gift bags stuffed with candles, a branded sweatshirt and tea. Along with the party swag was a small sealed envelope holding a plastic card with a QR code that led to a website, where excerpts from 10 of the company’s new book projects were posted. There was a lesbian time-travel romance, a novel about an immortal Black travel writer who wanders the globe for centuries and a fantasy about the epic rivalry between two prominent Black families who wield magic.

The stories hadn’t yet been fully written — these were teasers for potential books, and Electric Postcard, which generated those book ideas, was looking for buyers. A note on the site urged interested parties to contact New Leaf Literary & Media, an agency that represents Electric Postcard’s projects.

The mastermind behind those fictional plots and dozens more is Dhonielle Clayton — a former librarian whose hyperactive imagination has spawned a prolific factory for intellectual property. Though her name doesn’t always appear on the covers of the books she conceives, she has quietly become an influential power broker in the book world….

(4) FINALE. Rachel Stirling describes the last days of her mother, Diana Rigg, in “‘It’s gone on too long. Push me over the edge’: Diana Rigg’s dying wishes in the grip of cancer” in the Guardian. Note: explicit descriptions of patient care.

…It has taken three years for me to feel able to listen to the tapes we made. I have come to Brighton to transcribe them and to write this piece about the circumstances surrounding the recordings. I have splashed out on a room with a balcony overlooking the sea. The staff kindly moved a battered old card table into the space in front of the window so I can write down her words in long hand, which feels more suitable than typing. I light a candle, put the small tube of her ashes I have brought with me on to the table, pour a glass of her preferred prosecco, toast the raucous hen party making a right cacophony in the road below, and press play.

My mother’s dulcet tones come through loud and clear. She is two months away from death but still strong, with lungs that filled theatres before actors were ubiquitously mic’d. She is still raging, still as gloriously articulate as she always was.

“I’ve always spoken out,” she says. “I spoke out when I was very young doing The Avengers and learned I was earning less than the cameraman. I received universal opprobrium. I was called ‘money grabbing’. I spoke for peace in Vietnam, in Northern Ireland. I marched for peace in Iraq. I stood up for what is right. I speak my mind. If I see something is unfair, I’ll do my best to address it. I think this is unfair.

“I have cancer and it is everywhere, and I have been given six months to live,” she says. “Yet again we found ourselves in the bathroom this morning, my beloved daughter and I, half-laughing and half-crying, showering off together, and it was loving, and it was kind, but it shouldn’t happen.

“And if I could have beamed myself off this mortal coil at that moment, you bet I would’ve done it there and then.”

She adds that nobody talks about “how awful, how truly awful the details of this condition are, and the ignominy that is attached to it. Well, it’s high time they did. And it’s high time there was some movement in the law to give choice to people in my position. This means giving human beings true agency over their own bodies at the end of life. This means giving human beings political autonomy over their own death.”

(5) DAVID DRAKE (1945-2023). Hammers Slammers author David Drake died December 10 at the age of 78 reports the Wikipedia (and his website). He was the creator of the Lord of the Isles, RCN, and several other series of his own. He also collaborated on series with Eric Flint and S.M. Stirling, where he wrote the plot outlines and the co-author wrote the rest of the books.

Drake’s first published short story “Denkirch”, a Lovecraft pastiche, appeared in August Derleth’s 1967 collection Travellers By Night (1967). His Seventies Hammers Slammers short fiction was published in a collection under that title in 1979. That was also the year that his novel The Dragon Lord came out, the first of his works that I read, a memorable interpretation of King Arthur as rather like Mussolini.

Drake was a Vietnam War veteran who practiced as a lawyer before becoming a full-time writer.

He founded a small press, Carcosa, with Karl Edward Wagner (editor) and James Groce. Their efforts were recognized with a shared World Fantasy Award in 1976. He received the Phoenix Award for lifetime achievement, given by Southern fandom, in 1984.

In November 2021 he announced he was retiring from writing novels, due to unspecified cognitive health problems.

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born December 10, 1960 — Kenneth Branagh, 63. I first saw him in Much Ado About About Nothing, the Shakespearean comedy which he adapted and he is in it with his then-wife Emma Thompson. Truly lovely film.

So let’s look at his genre work as a performer. Dead Again might or might not be his first genre film where he was Mike Church / Roman Strauss, but Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein where he was Victor Frankenstein is genre and he directed it well. I’ve heard varying opinions on it. What did y’all think of it?

Then there’s Wild Wild West where he was Arliss Loveless, some bastardized variant on Michael Dunn’s perfectly acted Dr. Miguelito Quixote Loveless. He didn’t work for me. Not at all.

Alien Love Triangle is a thirty-minute film starring Kenneth Branagh, Alice Connor, Courteney Cox and Heather Graham. Teleportation. Aliens. Genders, alien.

He got to play in Rowling’s universe in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets as Gilderoy Lockhart. Great role it was.

Oh, and in an alternate reality sort of way, he plays William Shakespeare in All is True, another name for Shakespeare’s play Henry VIII. It’s a very lovely role and a sweet film as well. Recommended.

For hard SF, I’ve got him directing Thor. (Well sort of hard SF.) For fantasy, he directed Cinderella and Artemis Fowl.

Finally he’s Hercules Poirot in the three Agatha Christie films produced so far — Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile and A Haunting in Venice. He was also director and producer for these. He’s certainly a different manner of that detective. Really different.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

Crabgrass today is a thoughtful strip about cosmology.

(8) TAKING A BREAK FROM THE SANDBOX. Gizmodo says there probably could be a future sequel based on Dune Messiah, just don’t expect it soon: “Dune 3 Release Would Be After Another Denis Villeneuve Film”.

It’s been Denis Villeneuve’s plan since day one: adapt Frank Herbert’s epic sci-fi novel, Dune, in two parts, and then bring the story of Paul Atreides to a close with an adaptation of the follow-up, Dune Messiah. He’s been saying that since before the release of Dune: Part One but, at that time, it was more a dream than reality. With each passing day though, that dream moves closer to reality, even if it’s going to take longer than fans might expect.

“[Dune Messiah is] being written right now,” the director said at a South Korean press conference, picked up by Variety. “The screenplay is almost finished but it is not finished. It will take a little time… There’s a dream of making a third movie… it would make absolute sense to me.”

Yes yes. The dream. We covered all that. But when, Denis? WHEN? “I don’t know exactly when I will go back to Arrakis,” Villeneuve added. “I might make a detour before just to go away from the sun. For my mental sanity I might do something in between, but my dream would be to go a last time on this planet that I love.”

So it seems the plan, hypothetically, is for Dune: Part Two to finally come out on March 15, 2024, Villeneuve to make another film, and then if the demand warrants it, go back to Arrakis, as he phrased it, one last time.

(9) TOYMAKER. The showrunner told Entertainment Weekly that “’Doctor Who’ star Neil Patrick Harris had ‘never heard’ of show”.

Call it How Neil Patrick Harris Met Your Favorite British Time Travel Show.

Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies tells EW that the American actor was completely unfamiliar with the beloved science fiction series when the executive producer approached Harris about playing a villain called The Toymaker on this Saturday’s final 60th anniversary special episode, “The Giggle.”

“He’d never heard of it in his life, bless him,” Davies says with a laugh. “I was lucky enough to work with the great man on a show called It’s a Sin, about the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, and working with him was such a joy. The Toymaker, he’s kind of the god of games, so he shuffles cards, he does magic tricks, and all of that fits Neil Patrick Harris. If you go through agents, they often tell you to go away. I was able to send just a text saying, ‘Do you fancy reading this?’ He read it and literally phoned me up going, ‘Let me get this right, so the Doctor’s an alien, right?’ I was like, ‘Oh my god, you really have never heard of Doctor Who!’ But he couldn’t resist it, and he came to Cardiff, and we had the most spectacular time.”…

(10) BEWARE SPOILER. Probably stop reading now if you want to keep your Doctor Who experience pristine until you’ve watched the latest installment. Otherwise, the Nerdist explains “DOCTOR WHO Uses the Toymaker to Teach Real Life TV History Lesson”.

…While the Toymaker is fictional, the episode’s story about a dummy named Stooky Bill, the first TV image, and John Logie Baird are real….

(11) PLENTY OF ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT. “Cherokee language on the packaging of the Wilma Mankiller doll said ‘Chicken Nation’ instead of ‘Cherokee Nation.’ Critics said Mattel made other errors.” “Mattel Has a New Cherokee Barbie. Not Everyone Is Happy About It.” – the New York Times has the story.

A Barbie doll in the likeness of Wilma Mankiller, the first woman to be elected chief of the Cherokee Nation, has been hailed by tribal citizens. It’s also been lamented for its inaccuracies.

An event held Tuesday in Tahlequah, Okla., marked the anniversary of Ms. Mankiller becoming chief in 1985 and celebrated her Barbie doll. Mattel, the company that produces Barbie dolls, announced the new toy last month as part of the “Inspiring Women” series that includes the conservationist Dr. Jane Goodall, the journalist Ida B. Wells and the writer Maya Angelou.

The doll’s release has been met with some criticism. The doll itself portrays Ms. Mankiller, who died in 2010, with dark hair, wearing a turquoise dress and carrying a basket, a depiction that Chuck Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, said was “thoughtful” and “well done.” However, he noted that some in the community said the doll’s basket wasn’t authentically Cherokee.

“To someone who doesn’t read Cherokee syllabary, they’re not going to notice it,” Mr. Hoskin said. “To the Cherokee people for whom Wilma is of such enduring significance and we have such enduring love for her, to see our seal incorrect, it’s very disappointing because it would not have taken much effort or thought to avoid that.”

The packaging also identified the tribe as “Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma,” instead of the tribe’s official name, Cherokee Nation, which is used in all of the tribe’s treaties with the federal government.

“I don’t like to blame anybody, but I really wish that they could have gotten the packaging correct,” said Pamela Iron, the executive director of the nonprofit American Indian Resource Center and a close of friend of Ms. Mankiller….

(12) ADVANTAGES OF DIVERSITY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In this week’s Science journal there is an article arguing that increasing diversity on spacecraft mission teams reduces risk.

Lack of diversity on spacecraft teams creates risks for a mission. Many studies show that diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams because they focus on and process facts better and are more innovative—essential skills for a spacecraft mission team. Additional studies show that improving diversity is most critical in four types of activities: launching a new product, troubleshooting an existing product or process, planning for the future, and responding to crises. Spacecraft missions involve all four activities, so teams that lack diversity have an increased risk of failures at all stages of the development process. This issue needs to be addressed.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Variety covers last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live in “Adam Driver ‘SNL’ Monologue: ‘Wokeness Killed Han Solo’”.

Adam Driver is done with your “Star Wars” complaints.

As the host of the Dec. 9 episode of “Saturday Night Live,” he performed his monologue while playing the piano and reciting a letter of Christmas wishes to Santa.

“I would like people to stop coming up to me on the street saying, ‘You killed Han Solo!’,” he said. “I didn’t kill him. Wokeness killed Han Solo.”…

… He began the Christmas list saying, “Hey, Santa. It’s me, Adam Driver, from the nice list. And also ‘Girls.’ I turned 40 this year, Santa, so I would like five pairs of chinos. I also want one of those giant metal Tesla trucks. I think it would pair perfectly with my teeny tiny micropenis.”…

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

First Fandom Awards Given at Pemmi-Con Opening Ceremonies

Posted on July 20, 2023 by Mike Glyer

Three First Fandom awards were announced during opening ceremonies of Pemmi-Con, the 2023 NASFiC, on July 20. Emcees Vincent Docherty and David Ritter named the winners of the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award, the Posthumous Hall of Fame Award, and the Sam Moskowitz Archive Award.

First Fandom was created in 1958. The modern organization defines as “dinosaurs” those active in science fiction or fannish activities by the time of the first Worldcon in 1939. Also, anyone who has engaged in correspondence, collecting, conventions, fanzine publishing or reading, writing or participated in a science fiction club for at least 30 years may be eligible for Associate Membership. Since the death of Bob Madle in 2022, the last surviving original member of First Fandom, the organization has been in transition to a new format. These three awards were voted by the Associate Members.

FIRST FANDOM HALL OF FAME AWARD

The First Fandom Hall of Fame, created in 1963, is a prestigious achievement award given to a living recipient who has made significant contributions to Science Fiction throughout their lifetime.

Michael Moorcock
Will Murray

Michael Moorcock’s First Fandom Hall of Fame Award Acceptance Speech

Michael Moorcock (Photograph by John L. Coker III)

Thank you so much for the handsome plaque which arrived today in our Paris flat and is now on the shelf, gracing my work room.

I feel so good about it. Many of the names of those who received it before me bring back great memories. Ray Nelson and I first met in 1957 and I published his work in TARZAN ADVENTURES during the time he was living in Paris where he introduced me to a couple of eminent Beats and the bohemian life of Paris, making me fall in love with the city in which I’ve now lived for the past 25 years.

Another great friend was Ed Hamilton and of course Sprague de Camp, who encouraged me to write heroic fantasy in the late 1950s.

Arthur Clarke was another friend as, of course, was Brian Aldiss. Dave Kyle and Earl Kemp were also friends and John Clute got started as a critic on New Worlds where he was a stalwart for several years, Bob Silverberg, who I also first met at the 1957 World SF Con when he came to listen to the skiffle group I had put together pretty much spontaneously, was a great help in starting my career in America and I shall always be grateful to him.

Michael Moorcock and Harlan Ellison. (Photograph by John L. Coker III)

I believe you know how close my connection with fandom has been since I created my first fanzine when I was fifteen in 1955 and I have never forgotten my roots nor the fans who were so kind to me when I was a callow kid learning about writers and magazines who came to influence me or showing my first stories to fellow fans who also came to be well-known in the sf field.

It is a proud but not so lonely thing to be a fan, these days! I hope you will read this letter as my acceptance speech to the members of first (and later) fandom who were so kind enough to vote for me and that you all continue to have a really great time in Winnipeg.

My affection for fandom and all it has done to bring people together remains as warm as ever and I shall continue to feel great pride in receiving the award.

With sincere good wishes to you and everyone involved! Mike Moorcock

Will Murray’s First Fandom Hall of Fame Award Acceptance Speech

Will Murray, First Fandom Hall of Fame 2023 (photo provided by the author)

If one were to include my earliest fanzine appearances, I’ve been writing for publication for 50 years. In that time, I’ve won an award or two. But none have more surprised me than to win the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award.

This is quite gratifying. I don’t think I’ve attended a science fiction convention in a dozen years, so I wasn’t aware that I was particularly on anyone’s radar. I’ve had a long career. More than 80 novels and books, and I don’t know how many short stories, articles and interviews.

The last dozen years have been particularly fulfilling. In 2010, I acquired the rights to Doc Savage and discovered that no legacy publisher was interested in reviving the character. So, I partnered with small press publisher Matt Moring and we started the Wild Adventures of Doc Savage.

Will Murray (Photo courtesy of the author)

My goal was modest: To finish several of Doc Savage creator Lester Dent’s unfinished novels. Then in 2013, I got the rights to have King Kong meet Doc. I thought that Skull Island was be the high point of my novel-writing career. But a year later, I obtained the rights to Tarzan of the Apes. My first Tarzan novel so impressed the good people at Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. that they decided to revive their publishing imprint after decades of dormancy. Between new novels and reissues, they are now in a glorious renaissance.

For me personally having Tarzan go to Barsoom and meet John Carter of Mars was the culmination of my love of classic pulp writers. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars books were the first vintage pulp novels I ever read.

Pulp writers aren’t as celebrated as they were when I attended my first Worldcon decades ago. So, I’m profoundly pleased that this organization had recognized my work. And delighted to accept this award, even if it is in absentia. Regrettably, my passport is out of date.

I’ve just learned that the Edgar Rice Burroughs people and the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle have approved my novelette in which John Clayton (Lord Greystoke), visits Baker Street in search of Sherlock Holmes’ expert assistance.

I don’t know where I can go from here, but I’m going to keep trying….thanks for the encouragement. I deeply appreciate it.

POSTHUMOUS HALL OF FAME AWARD

The Posthumous Hall of Fame was created in 1994 to acknowledge people in Science Fiction who should have, but did not, receive that type of recognition during their lifetimes.

Ken Kelly
Conrad H. Ruppert

Ken Kelly (1946-2022) was an American fantasy artist. Over his 50-year career, he focused in particular on paintings in the sword and sorcery and heroic fantasy subgenres.

Throughout the 1970s he was a prominent cover artist for Warren Publishing’s Creepy and Eerie magazines.

His work often portrays exotic, enchanted locales and primal battlefields. He depicted Conan the Barbarian, Tarzan, and the rock acts KISS, Rainbow, and Ace Frehley.

Conrad H. Ruppert (Photograph by John L. Coker III)

Conrad H. Ruppert was an early STF fan, a card-carrying reporter for Gernsback’s Science and Invention magazine (1924-25), a printer, and a pioneering science fiction journalist.

He will likely best be remembered as the person who painstakingly set the type by hand for many of the earliest and finest fanzines such as The Time Traveller, Science Fiction Digest, Fantasy Magazine, The Fantasy Fan, and later, The Weinbaum Memorial Volume (1938) and The Souvenir Journal of the World Science Fiction Convention (1939).

The professional appearance of Ruppert’s typeset publications set the highest standard for other fan printers and helped to legitimize the idea of fans publishing science fiction.

Julius Schwartz and Conrad H. Ruppert (1945). Collection of John L. Coker III.

He won a cash prize from Gernsback in an early contest that promoted science fiction.

Ruppert was also a life-long photographer who stood outside the entrance to the first Worldcon on July 2,1939, and made pictures of the big-name fans and pros as they arrived. Three dozen of Ruppert’s photos that he made at the 1939 New York World’s Fair are part of the Smithsonian Museum’s Collection.

It is due to Ruppert’s tireless efforts as science fiction’s preeminent printer during a critical time in early fandom history that he is still remembered and highly-regarded today.

SAM MOSKOWITZ ARCHIVE AWARD

Sam Moskowitz Archive Award was created in 1998 to recognize not only someone who has assembled a world-class collection but also what has actually been done with it.For example: previous award recipients have published articles and books, made collections available for public viewing, loaned items for other projects and donated material to be preserved for future generations.

John L. Coker III

Acceptance Remarks by John L. Coker III

John L. Coker III (Photo courtesy of the author)

Thank you, everyone. I am thrilled this evening to be the recipient of this historic award.

Sam Moskowitz was one of the greatest science fiction fans ever. He taught me (3) principles:

Prepare for every panel discussion.
Make notes about who you saw and what was said.
Label the back of every photograph.

I’d like to acknowledge Forry Ackerman, Julie Schwartz, Dave Kyle and Bob Madle for their support, and thank all of the members of First Fandom for honoring me with this award.

John L. Coker III – No Collecting! (Photo provided by the author.)

[Thanks to John L. Coker III for providing the draft text and supplying the photos.]

First Fandom Awards 2023 Nominees

Posted on March 23, 2023 by Mike Glyer

First Fandom has announced the candidates for the organization’s three annual awards. Members have until May 1 to vote

FIRST FANDOM HALL OF FAME

The First Fandom Hall of Fame, created in 1963, is a prestigious achievement award given to a living recipient who has made significant contributions to Science Fiction throughout their lifetime.

Michael Moorcock

“Michael John Moorcock is an English writer, particularly of science fiction and fantasy, who has published a number of well-received literary novels as well as comic thrillers, graphic novels and non-fiction. He has worked as an editor and is also a successful musician. He is best known for his novels about the character Elric of Melniboné, which were a seminal influence on the field of fantasy in the 1960s and ’70s.” “As editor of the British science fiction magazine New Worlds, from May 1964 until March 1971 and then again from 1976 to 1996, Moorcock fostered the development of the SF “New Wave” in the UK and indirectly in the US, leading to the advent of cyberpunk.” “He also has published pastiches of writers including Edger Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and Leigh Brackett. He was a member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers’ Guild of America. The SFWA named him their 25th Grand Master.” “Novels and series such as the Cornelius Quartet, Mother London, King of the City, the Pyat Quartet and the short story collection London Bone have established him in the eyes of critics.” (Excerpted from a longer article in Wikipedia)

Will Murray

William Patrick Murray is a prolific author, essayist, contributing editor, series writer, movie tie-in writer, producer of audio books and ebooks, ghostwriter, comics novelist, literary executor, collector, and contributor to encyclopedias and dictionaries. His work has kept alive beloved characters from the past. He is the award-winning author of hundreds of stories, non-fiction articles, books, and dozens of introductions to anthologies. He has written many short stories of the characters Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Iron Man, Nick Fury, Spider-Man, Honey West, the Hulk, Green Hornet, Zorro, and Lee Falk’s The Phantom. And, with Steve Ditko he created the super hero Squirrel Girl. He is a genuine enthusiast who has worked with the estates of prominent authors such as Lester Dent and Edger Rice Burroughs to write authorized adventures of characters from the days of radio and pulps, including the Shadow, Doc Savage, Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, the Spider, the Whisperer, Sherlock Holmes, Black Mask, Operator #5, G-8 and His Battle Aces, Spicy Zeppelin, King Kong, and H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. (Based on a longer article in Wikipedia)

POSTHUMOUS HALL OF FAME

The Posthumous Hall of Fame was created in 1994 to acknowledge people in Science Fiction who should have, but did not, receive that type of recognition during their lifetimes.

Ken Kelly

“Ken William Kelly (May 19, 1946 – June 2, 2022) was an American fantasy artist. Over his 50-year career, he focused in particular on SCIENTIFICTION 1Q2023 New Series #75, Page 6 paintings in the sword and sorcery and heroic fantasy subgenres.” “Throughout the 1970s he was a prominent cover artist for Warren Publishing’s Creepy and Eerie magazines.” “His work often portrays exotic, enchanted locales and primal battlefields. He depicted Conan the Barbarian, Tarzan, and the rock acts KISS, Rainbow, and Ace Frehley.” (Excerpted from a longer article in Wikipedia)

Conrad H. Ruppert

Conrad H. Ruppert was an early STF fan, a card-carrying reporter for Gernsback’s Science and Invention magazine (1924-25), a printer, and a pioneering science fiction journalist. He will likely best be remembered as the person who painstakingly set the type by hand for many of the earliest and finest fanzines such as The Time Traveller, Science Fiction Digest, Fantasy Magazine, The Fantasy Fan, and later, The Weinbaum Memorial Volume (1938) and The Souvenir Journal of the World Science Fiction Convention (1939). The professional appearance of Ruppert’s typeset publications set the highest standard for other fan printers and helped to legitimize the idea of fans publishing science fiction. He won a cash prize from Gernsback in an early contest that promoted science fiction. Ruppert was also a life-long photographer who stood outside the entrance to the first Worldcon on July 2, 1939, and made pictures of the big-name fans and pros as they arrived. Three dozen of Ruppert’s photos that he made at the 1939 New York World’s Fair are part of the Smithsonian Museum’s Collection. It is due to Ruppert’s tireless efforts as science fiction’s preeminent printer during a critical time in early fandom history that he is still remembered and highly-regarded today.

SAM MOSKOWITZ ARCHIVE AWARD

Sam Moskowitz Archive Award was created in 1998 to recognize not only someone who has assembled a world-class collection but also what has actually been done with it.

John L. Coker III

For more than thirty-five years, hundreds of John’s photos and articles in the imaginative literature genre have been published widely in magazines, newspapers, on book covers, in digital media, as well as in program books for numerous World Fantasy and World Science Fiction Conventions and have been featured in such publications as The New York Times and USA Today Weekend. John has been a regular photographer and reporter for Scientifiction, columnist for Tangent magazine, and a contributor to LOCUS and SF Chronicle. John edited three books for Days of Wonder Publishers about David A. Kyle (2006), Ray Bradbury (2008), and Forrest J Ackerman and Julius Schwartz (2009). He was a contributing editor for The Sam Moskowitz Bibliography and Guide by Hal W. Hall (2017), and Futures Past: A Visual History of Science Fiction, 1926 (Jim Emerson, 2014). A founding member of First Fandom Experience, John is a contributing editor and principal historian for their books. John has assembled a large collection of vint[1]age photos, fan magazines, and personal interviews which he incorporates into his publications. He is an active member of FAPA and N3F. With co-author Jon D. Swartz, he has published six volumes of the First Fandom Annual. John helped establish and nurture the First Fandom Archive to help preserve original science fiction-related items and make them available for historic research.

[From Scientifiction, the First Fandom quarterly newsletter, No. 75 – 1Q2023, edited by John L. Coker III.]

Pixel Scroll 10/12/22 The Filer Mode Of Clever Is Pixole

Posted on October 12, 2022 by Mike Glyer

(1) TAKES FOUR. Nancy Kress told Facebook readers what qualities a writer needs to have:

In a recent interview that I was recording for my and Robert Lanza’s forthcoming novel, Observer, the interviewer asked, “What qualities do you think an aspiring writer must have?” This is something to which I have given a lot of thought because I am often asked it by attendees at Taos Toolbox. I think there are four necessary qualities: talent, persistence, flexibility, and luck….

(2) DAW ACQUIRES TWO JOHN WISWELL FANTASY NOVELS. Katie Hoffman, Senior Editor at DAW Books, has acquired World rights to two fantasy novels by Nebula Award-winning author John Wiswell, represented by Hannah Bowman at Liza Dawson Associates.

Wiswell’s debut novel, scheduled for Spring 2024, is Someone You Can Build A Nest In. Pitched as Gideon The Ninth meets Circe, this highly-anticipated fantasy is a creepy, charming monster-slaying sapphic romance—from the perspective of the monster, a shapeshifter named Shesheshen who falls in love with a human.
At the core of this dark fantasy is a heartwarming, cozy rom-com. While a chilling tale of generational harm and the struggle of surviving in a hostile world, Someone You Can Build A Nest In also stubbornly offers that possibility that, through surprising connections, we may still discover new definitions of love and relearn our own value. Acquiring editor Katie Hoffman says, “It feeds a growing delight I’ve seen in blending the gruesome and the whimsical, the bloody and the quaint.”
Short summary:
Shesheshen has made a mistake fatal to all monsters: she’s fallen in love. Shesheshen is a shapeshifter, who usually resides as an amorphous lump in the swamp of a ruined manor, unless impolite monster hunters invade intent on murdering her. Through a chance encounter, she meets a different kind of human, warm-hearted Homily, who mistakes Shesheshen as a human in turn. Shesheshen is loath to deceive, but just as she’s about to confess her true identity, Homily reveals she’s hunting a shapeshifting monster that supposedly cursed her family. Shesheshen didn’t curse anyone, but to give them both a chance at happiness, she must figure out why Homily’s twisted family thinks she did. And the bigger challenge remains: surviving her toxic in-laws long enough to learn to build a life with the love of her life.

Someone You Can Build A Nest In will be published by DAW Books in Spring 2024.

(3) HOMETOWN HERO. A local paper, Weser-Kurier, interviewed Cora Buhlert about her Hugo win and the article appeared today. It’s behind a paywall, unfortunately, but you can see the photo of Cora very carefully hugging her Hugo trophy: “Cora Buhlert aus Stuhr gewinnt als erste deutsche Autorin Hugo Award”.

(4) MOORCOCK Q&A. Goodman Games’ interview with Michael Moorcock is now online on their YouTube channel:

A special episode of Sanctum Secorum Live with guest Michael Moorcock. In honor of the forthcoming release of the newest book in the Elric saga, The Citadel of Forgotten Myths.

(5) RHYMES WITH “PLAYED WELL”. John Hertz sends this tribute to the late Bob Madle.

Mighty, he was mild,
All our worlds open to him.
Doors that he had made
Let designers, dreamers through.
Each imagination gained.

An acrostic in unrhymed 5-7-5-7-7- syllable lines.

(6) ANGELA LANSBURY (1925-2022). Actress Angela Lansbury died October 11 at the age of 96. Best known to the TV-watching generation as Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote, she earlier gained fame with three Oscar nominated roles in Gaslight (1944), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), and The Manchurian Candidate (1962).

On Broadway she won several Tony Awards, including one for her turn in Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 musical play Sweeney Todd.

She appeared in the Disney hit Bedknobs and Broomsticks in 1971, and later featured in other children’s films, providing the voice for Mrs Potts in the animated Beauty and the Beast; and more recently Mary Poppins Returns.

Carl Andor has a thorough roundup of Lansbury’s genre credits in a comment for File 770.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

1973 – [By Cat Eldridge.]

Spock: Consider. Chuft Captain has been attacked by an herbivorous pacifist, an eater of leaves and roots, one who traditionally does not fight. And the ultimate insult, I left him alive. Chuft Captain’s honor is at stake. He must seek personal revenge before he can call for help.
Sulu: That gives us some time. You did plan it that way?
Spock: Of course.
Star Trek: the Animated Series’ “The Slaver Weapon”

So we all know that Star Trek: the Animated Series followed the first series and debuted on September 8, 1973. It would end that run a mere twenty-two episodes later on October 12, 1974.

Did I like the series? I think that two aspects of it were done really, really well. The voice cast was stellar, with almost all of the original cast save Walter Koenig voicing their characters. It is said, but this is only rumor, originally Filmation was only going to pay for three actors, that being Shatner, Nimoy, and Doohan.

Nimoy however said that he wouldn’t take part unless the rest of the original cast was included. However the studio stuck to its guns as to how many it would budget for and Walter Koenig was dropped because of what he wanted. However Nimoy did get him some writing gigs for the show.

The other was the stories. Being animated gave them a wider artistic frame to work with than the original show had and they used that to their creative benefit. An example of this was Niven merging his Known Space story, “The Soft Weapon” into the Trek universe. It was wonderful and it was great to see the Kzin visualized.

(Everything here was novelized by Alan Dean Foster. He first adapted three episodes per book, but later editions saw the half-hour scripts expanded into full, novel-length stories.)

I think the animation was at best weak. It looked flat, one dimensional. The characters as if they really weren’t quite there. I’ve never been a fan of Filmation.

I just rewatched that episode on Paramount +. The print is stellar and the voices are great. The animation was, as I thought it was, less than great. Watching characters move is painful to say the least as they don’t walk so as much glide across the screen.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born October 12, 1875 — Aleister Crowley. Mystic. Charlatan possibly. Genre writer? You decide. But I’ve no doubt that he had a great influence upon the genre as I’m betting many of you can note works in which he figures. One of the earliest such cases is Land of Mist, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle which was published in 1926. (Died 1947.)
Born October 12, 1903 — Josephine Hutchinson. She was Elsa von Frankenstein with Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff in Son of Frankenstein. She was in “I Sing the Body Electric”, The Twilight Zone episode written by Bradbury that he later turned into a short story. (Died 1998.)
Born October 12, 1904 — Lester Dent. Pulp-fiction author who was best known as the creator and main author of the series of novels chronicling Doc Savage. Of the one hundred and eighty-one Doc Savage novels published by Street and Smith, one hundred and seventy-nine were credited to Kenneth Robeson; and all but twenty were written by Dent. (Died 1959.)
Born October 12, 1916 — Lock Martin. His claim to fame was that he was one of the tallest humans that ever lived. At seven feet and seven inches (though this was disputed by some who shouldn’t have), he was also quite stocky. He had the distinction of playing Gort in The Day The Earth Stood Still. He was also in The Incredible Shrinking Man as a giant, but his scenes were deleted. And he shows up in Invaders from Mars as the Mutant carrying David to the Intelligence though he goes uncredited in the film. (Died 1959.)
Born October 12, 1924 — Randy Stuart. She’s best remembered as Louise Carey, the wife of Scott Carey, in The Incredible Shrinking Man. She was also Frances Hiller in “Anniversary of a Murder” on One Step Beyond which conceived as a companion series to The Twilight Zone. (Died 1996.)
Born October 12, 1943 — Linda Shaye, 79 . She’s been an actress for over forty years and has appeared in over ninety films, mostly horror. Among them is A Nightmare on Elm Street, Critters, Insidious, Dead End, 2001 Maniacs and its sequel 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams, Jekyll and Hyde… Together Again, Amityville: A New Generation, Ouija, and its prequel Ouija: Origin of Evil. She even appeared in the first and only true version of The Running Man as a Propaganda Officer.
Born October 12, 1942 — Daliah Lavi. She’s in Casino Royale as The Detainer, a secret agent. In the same year, she was in Jules Verne’s Rocket to the Moon as Madelaine. She was Purificata in The Demon, an Italian horror film. If you’re into German popular music, you might recognize her as she was successful there in Seventies and Eighties. (Died 2017.)
Born October 12, 1965 — Dan Abnett, 57. His earlier work was actually on Doctor Who Magazine, but I’ll single out his co-writing Guardians of the Galaxy #1–6 with Andy Lanning, The Authority: Rule Britannia which is an exceptional piece of work by any standardsand his Border Princes novel he did in the Torchwood universe as great looks at him as a writer.
Born October 12, 1968 — Hugh Jackman, 54. Obviously Wolverine in the Marvel film franchise including the next Deadpool film. He’s also been the lead character in Van Helsing as well as voicing him in the animated prequel Van Helsing: The London Assignment. One of his most charming roles was voicing The Easter Bunny in The Rise of The Guardians which I really, really liked. And he played Robert Angier in The Prestige based off the novel written by the real Christopher Priest. Not the fake one.

(9) GOING POSTAL. “I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered.” Well, they haven’t got there yet. “Irish postal service launches digital stamp” – BBC has the story.

An Post, the postal service in the Republic of Ireland, has launched a new digital stamp.
Customers will receive a 12-digit unique code via the company’s app which they can write onto their envelope where the traditional stamp would go.
An Post’s letter sorting technology will recognise the code as a live stamp when it is being processed for delivery.
The digital stamp costs €2 (£1.76) compared with €1.25 (£1.10) for a normal one.
Garrett Bridgeman, managing mirector for An Post Commerce, said: “Here we have a product that works for everyone; busy individuals who are time-poor and want to purchase stamps at a time and place that works for them; or last-minute senders, as well as SMEs and business owners who need to post at irregular hours and may not have stamps to hand.”

(10) ERASURE. Warner Bros CEO David Zaslav continues his quest to stamp out the existence of cartoons and lays off yet more people and dissolves Cartoon Network after thirty years: “Cartoon Network Studios, As You Know It, Is Gone Thanks To David Zaslav” at Cartoon Brew.

Warner Bros. Television Group (WBTVG) laid off 82 scripted, unscripted, and animation employees on Tuesday, and will not fill 43 more vacant positions. The 125 positions represented 26% of the companies workforce across those units.
However, the layoffs, which were generally expected, don’t tell the whole story of what’s going on at Warner Bros. Discovery’s animation units. In fact, there was an even more consequential announcement yesterday that fundamentally alters the structure of Cartoon Network Studios going forward and will have a far-reaching impact on the projects that it produces. The company calls it part of its “strategic realignment.”

(11) GAINING AN EDGE. Michael Harrington interviews Oliver Brackenbury, editor of New Edge Sword and Sorcery Magazine at Black Gate.

What are your thoughts on “inclusion” in the New Edge Movement?
[Brackenbury] This resurgence of New Edge Sword & Sorcery as a term to rally behind, back in the spring of this year, started from that all too familiar conversational space of “How do we get more people into this genre?” Well, if you want more people getting into this thing we love, then you need to include more people!
You can’t hope to expand an audience without reaching outside that audience, while doing your best to make the scene welcoming for everyone. For example, don’t scratch your head wondering why more women don’t read and write in the genre when you’re reluctant to call out sexism in the scene, or perhaps simply aren’t directly reaching out to women, merely hoping they’ll show up. You can replace “women” and “sexism” in this example with just about every intersection of identity that isn’t my fellow white, cishet, neurotypical, able-bodied fellas (or “white guys,” for brevity’s sake).
Nothing wrong with my fellow white guys, I don’t want them to go away, or have anything taken away from them. I just think inclusion is vital if S&S is to have a third wave of mass appeal, akin or even superior to what it enjoyed in the second wave of the 60’s through early 80’s. Call out hatred and harassment, give people a head’s up when they go back to read certain classics, and just, ya know, be cool, man.
A larger, more diverse scene benefits absolutely everyone. With a greater variety of people, we’ll get to enjoy a greater number & variety of stories, artistic works, and viewpoints!

(12) JEAN-LUC. Paramount Plus dropped this trailer for Star Trek: Picard on Tuesday after chatting with fans at New York Comic Con. “Star Trek: Picard | A Message To The Fans (NYCC 2022)”.

(13) SPIRITED TRAILER. Nothing says more about the holidays than it’s time for Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds to bash each other on Apple TV!

Happy Birthday, Hugh. This year, I’m giving you the gift of being much worse than you at singing and dancing. But at least there’s Will and Octavia!

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, John Hertz, Cora Buhlert, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jayn.]

Pixel Scroll 10/5/22 Thoughts Gather, But Fail To Coalesce Into Pixels

Posted on October 5, 2022 by Mike Glyer

(1) CHARLES YU Q&A. “’In Any Version of Reality’: Talking SF with Charles Yu” at Public Books.

Christopher T. Fan (CF): In a later chapter of How to Live Safely, there’s another father-son scene, where the father is trying to impart knowledge to the young protagonist. He’s opening a pack of graph paper, peeling off the cellophane—it’s very tactile. He says, “Choose a world, any world,” as he opens up this graph paper and presents it to his son. Can you say more about that sense of optimism? How graph paper leads to a world?
Charles Yu (CY): In my dad’s office, he had these thick pads of graph paper with this very pleasing feel. They were pretty squishy because the paper was thick, and they had these very light green lines. It wasn’t perforation, it was like they were wax. You just tore a page off, and there was a sound that the pad would make as you tore off a nice sheet. I usually wouldn’t tear off the page I was working on, because you’d want the feeling of all the sheets underneath the top one. I was just playing with the idea.
No matter what else is going on, no matter if you’re an immigrant making your life in a foreign country, or if you’ve got all this work pressure and money pressure, or you’re trying to refinance the house because you’re maxed out on all your credit cards—whatever is going on in your life at that moment, you think, OK, we have math, we have a universe. I draw the X axis, I draw the Y. We’re in the Cartesian plane—here we are. To be able to go to that plane, anytime, just like that.

(2) NBA FINALISTS. The 2022 National Book Awards finalists were announced October 4 by the National Book Foundation. There are two works of genre interest. The complete list of finalists is here.

National Book Award 2022 Finalists: Translated Literature
Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada
Original Language: Japanese/ Translator: Margaret Mitsutani (Penguin Random House / Riverhead Books)
National Book Award 2022 Finalists: Young People’s Literature
The Ogress and the Orphans by Kelly Barnhill(Workman Publishing / Algonquin Young Readers)

(3) WIKI BARS THE DOOR. [Item by Paul Weimer.] Author Gwenda Bond has been denied a Wikipedia for extremely sketchy reasons. Thread starts here.

Including a NYT bestseller and IPs involving huge franchises? Leading an anti-sexual harassment pledge in kidlit effort that was covered in major media? But not worthy of a @Wikipedia entry. pic.twitter.com/U4mXFe1kxu
— Gwenda Bond ?????The Frame-Up????? out now (@Gwenda) October 6, 2022

I feel like a monster whenever some kid contacts me for a book report and can’t find basic info. Wait. I will put my own not-Wikipedia entry on my website. At some point. Donezo.
— Gwenda Bond ?????The Frame-Up????? out now (@Gwenda) October 6, 2022

(4) THE TANK HAS BEEN REFILLED! Chris Garcia just released his Drink Tank Chicon 8 / Chicago issue — The Drink Tank 441 – Chicon! It’s 84 pages of words and pictures from Alissa McKersie, Chuck Serface, and Chris Garcia, joined by Dave O’Neill, Paul Weimer, Fred Moulton, Vanessa Applegate, Juan Sanmiguel, Phoenix Data Art, Bill Rowe, Thad Gann, Ron Oakes, Steven H Silver, Espana Sheriff, DALL*E 2, Midjourney, and WOMBO Dream.

The Drink Tank’s “Crime Fiction – 1950 to 2000” issue should be out in a week or so, but there’s still time to submit for the up-coming looks at “Welcome to Nightvale” (Deadline Dec. 1) and the “Grant Morrison” issue (November 1).

(5) SKELETOR’S RECRUITING OFFICE. Cora Buhlert has a new photo story — “Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: ‘Help’”

… “Ahem and why are we capturing Man-at-Arms, boss?”
“So he can build machines and weapons for us, Trap Jaw. And tell me all about the secrets of Castle Grayskull and how to kill He-Man, while he’s at it.”
“Uhm, I’m pretty sure Tri-Klops won’t like that, boss. After all, he is our tech guy.”
“I don’t care what Tri-Klops thinks. If he doesn’t want to be replaced, maybe he should come up with inventions that actually work.”…

Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: “Help” https://t.co/EuwpX5W3dd
— Cora Buhlert (@CoraBuhlert) October 5, 2022

(6) MY LITTLE PONYTAIL. GQ inquires “How Did This Ponytail Become the Go-To Men’s Hairstyle in Fantasy Adaptations?”

…The show, a Game of Thrones prequel, takes place 200 years before the events of the original series and focuses on the wheelings and dealings of the Targaryen dynasty. This means that while there was one recurring platinum blonde Targaryen wig on Game of Thrones, pretty much everyone on House of the Dragon gets to rock one—and, along with it, the half-ponytail. (It’s so excessive that Vulture published an entire House of the Dragon half-ponytail ranking.) By the time I saw Matt Smith stride onto screen as the bad boy prince Daemon Targaryen—complete with a fancy little half-ponytail he apparently meticulously styles in between waging wars, riding his dragon, and macking on his niece—I realized that the look was far bigger than Westeros. It’s become the go-to hairstyle to telegraph: “This guy’s in a fantasy series.”
So where did its reign start? The ur-fantasy-half-ponytail, down to the blonde dye job, seems to belong to Legolas in the early aughts Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Elven prince had previously been depicted on paperback covers or in the 1978 animated Ralph Bakshi adaptation with more of a cocaine chic shag situation going on. But in the Jackson films, Orlando Bloom emerges with long silky blonde locks, tied back in a half-pony. (Where were you when, in 2001, you discovered what Bloom’s actual hair looked like?) Every prominent modern half-ponytail in fantasy—Henry Cavill in The Witcher, Daemon in House of the Dragon—owes a debt to this one.
Curious about how it originally came to be, I called up the Academy Award-winning hair designer for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Swords King (yes, really). He told me that he didn’t consult any previous aesthetics when developing the hair for Legolas. “We spent weeks experimenting with different things and came up with that. Then Peter Jackson said, ‘Oh, I really like that. That looks great,’” King recalled. “Legolas had two fishtailed braids on the other side of his head and that kept it back off his face. And then there was a tiny bit at the top by the back that was pulled into a ponytail.” (“Elves cannot have messy hair,” King added. “Lots of other characters can, it’s fine. But elves can’t. It’s not elvish to be messy.”)
King also worked on Jackson’s three-part adaptation of The Hobbit and pointed out that he gave a more rugged version of the style to Luke Evans when he played Bard the Bowman. “He was going to have all his hair down at one point and I went, ‘No, no I’m going to just try it half up, half down once,’” he said. “And I did that and said, ‘That’s it. That’s perfect. We want to see that hair moving when he runs and fights, but we don’t want it in his face.’” The issue with the hair all down was that “as soon as he started fighting, even with product in it and everything, it kept getting in his face. It looked bad. He looked messy.”

(7) MIYAZAKI ON STAGE. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Financial Times behind a paywall, Sarah Hemming interviews My Neighbour Totoro, based on the film by Hayao Miyazaki, written by Tom Morton-Smith and with music by Joe Hisaishi (who also did the music for the film). It is playing at the Barbican Theatre (barbican.org.uk) through January 21.

Morton-Smith “describes his task as ‘translation as well as adaptation’ He’s expanded several scenes, brought forward some characters and increased the dialogue. But he adds that, although the story doesn’t confirm to convention expectations, it does have defined sections and a narrative journey…
Finding a stage language for this delicate story has meant drawing together a high-powered international team. Hisaishi has been closely involved and his original score will be played live. Jim Henson’s Creature Shop is building the puppets, designed by Basil Twist, and Phelim McDermott, expert in improvisation and puckish invention is directing. The show is produced in collaboration with English theatre company Improbable and Japan’s Nippon TV.

(8) ALBERT COWDREY (1933-2022). Author Albert Cowdrey died August 21 at age 88. According to the family obituary, “He wrote Elixir of Life, a historical novel, Crux, a science fiction novel, and more than sixty published short stories, many in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He was the only writer to receive awards from both the American Historical Association (Herbert Feis Award, 1984) and the World Fantasy Convention (World Fantasy Award, 2002).” The WFA was for his short story “Queen for a Day”.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

1923 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Ninety-nine years ago this month in Black Mask’s October 1923 issue, Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op private detective first appeared. He’s employed as an operative of the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco office, hence his nickname. The stories are all told in the first person and his actual name is never given.

He may be the earliest hardboiled detective to appear in the pulp magazines. Note I said maybe. It’s still in matter of debate among pulp magazine historians.

He appeared in thirty-six short stories, all but two of which appeared in Black Mask. Some ofHammett’s short stories in Black Mask were intended to be the basis for his novels, so for example “Black Lives”, “Hollow Temple”, “Black Honeymoon” and “Black Riddle” would become The Dain Curse. The novels differ substantially from the stories as they were revised by an editor at Alfred A. Knopf.

There are but two novels in the series, The Dain Curse and Red Harvest. The latter was originally called The Cleansing of Poisonville and it sums up the novel damn well. Red Harvest, like The Dain Curse, started life as linked stories in Black Mask.

The Library of America’s Complete Novels includes both Red Harvest and The Dain Curse as printed by Knopf. The companion collection Crime Stories and Other Writings uses the original pulp magazine texts.

Of course there have been video adaptations.

The Dain Curse was made into a six-hour CBS television miniseries in 1978 starring James Coburn. Here The Op was named Hamilton Nash which was his creator’s name ‘spelled sideways’.

Four years later, Peter Boyle played the Continental Op in the opening of Hammett in which Hammett as played by Frederic Forrest is writing a story about the detective character.

And finally thirteen years later, Christopher Lloyd played The Continental Op in “Fly Paper” in season two, episode seven of the Fallen Angels anthology series adapted from Hammett’s short story of the same name.

Blackstone has done a most exemplary audio productions of the novels which I know are on Audible and probably everywhere else as well.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and JJ.]

Born October 5, 1905 — John Hoyt. His first genre role was in When Worlds Collide as Sydney Stanton, and the next in Attack of the Puppet People as Mr. Franz, bookending the Fifties. He starts off the Sixties in The Time Travelers as Varno. He appeared twice during the second season of The Twilight Zone in the episodes “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” and “The Lateness of the Hour”. And he had roles in many other genre series, including as the KAOS agent Conrad Bunny in the Get Smart episode “Our Man in Toyland”, and General Beeker in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea’s episode “Hail to the Chief”, and Dr. Philip Boyce in the original pilot episode of Star Trek (“The Cage”). In the Seventies he appeared in Flesh Gordon as Professor Gordon. Yes, Flesh Gordon. (Died 1991.)
Born October 5, 1919 — Donald Pleasence. He was Doctor Samuel Loomis in the Halloween franchise and the President in Escape from New York. He also had a plethora of parts in other genre properties, a few of which include the main role in the movie Fantastic Voyage which was novelized by Isaac Asimov, roles in episodes of the The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and The Ray Bradbury Theater, a part in George Lucas’ first foray into filmmaking, THX 1138, John Carpenter’s The Prince of Darkness, and the role of Merlin in the TV movie Guinivere. My favorite film title for a work he was in? Frankenstein’s Great Aunt Tillie in which he played the dual roles of Victor Frankenstein and Old Baron Frankenstein. (Died 1995.)
Born October 5, 1949 — Peter Ackroyd, 73. His best known genre work is likely Hawksmoor which tells the tale of a London architect building a church and a contemporary detective investigating horrific murderers involving that church. Highly recommended. The House of Doctor Dee is genre fiction as is The Limehouse Golem and The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein. I thought Hawksmoor had been turned into a film but it has not. But he has a credit for The Limehouse Golem which is his film work.
Born October 5, 1952 — Clive Barker, 70. Horror writer, series include the Hellraiser and the Book of Art, which is not to overlook The Abarat Quintet which is quite superb. Though not recent, The Essential Clive Barker: Selected Fiction published some twenty years ago contains more than seventy excerpts from novels and plays and four full-length short stories. His Imaginer series collects his decidedly strange art. There has been a multitude of comic books, both by him and by others based on his his ideas. My personal fave work by him is the Weaveworld novel.
Born October 5, 1945 — Judith Kerman, 77. Can we call her a polymath? She’s a translator, publisher, academic, anthologist and poet. All of her poetry, collected in Uncommonplaces: Poems of the Fantastic, is well worth your time. She did two non-fiction works of which I’m recommending one, “Retrofitting Blade Runner: Issues in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”, as I’ve a Jones for that literature.
Born October 5, 1959 — Rich Horton, 63. Editor of three anthology series — Fantasy: Best of The Year and Science Fiction: Best of The Year, merged into The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy in 2010. He wrote a review column for Locus for twenty years, signing off this past February. His Strange at Ecbatan blog includes reviews, criticism, and a well-received series that proposes Hugo finalists to fill in the old years when only winners were announced, or even before the award was created.
Born October 5, 1971 — Paul Weimer, 51. Writer, Reviewer, and Podcaster, also known as @PrinceJvstin. An ex-pat New Yorker living in Minnesota, he has been reading science fiction and fantasy for over 30 years and exploring the world of roleplaying games for more than 25 years. A three-time Hugo finalist for Best Fan Writer (2020-2022), he is a prolific reviewer for Nerds of a Feather. He also contributes to the Hugo-nominated fancast The Skiffy and Fanty Show and the SFF Audio podcast. He was the 2017 Down Under Fan Fund delegate to the Australia and New Zealand National Conventions, and his e-book DUFF trip report, consisting of more than 300 pages of travel stories and stunning photographs, is still available here.
Born October 5, 1975 — Kate Winslet, 47. A longer and deeper genre record than I thought starting with being Prince Sarah in A Kid in King Arthur’s Court before playing Ophelia in Branagh’s Hamlet a few years later. She shows next as Clementine Kruczynski in the superb Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and was Sylvia Llewelyn Davies in the equally superb Finding Neverland. She’s Jeanine Matthews in Divergent and Insurgent, and is slated to be Ronal in the forthcoming Avatar 2. She’s the voice of Miss Fillyjonk in the English dub of the Swedish Moominvalley series. Finally, I’d like to note she narrated the audiobook version of Roald Dahl’s Matilda.

(11) LIVE FROM NEW BOOK, IT’S SATURDAY NIGHT! Goodman Games is doing a live interview with Michael Moorcock this weekend: “Live Interview With Michael Moorcock is This Weekend!”

The Sanctum Secorum is pleased to announce a special episode of Sanctum Secorum Live with guest Michael Moorcock. In honor of the forthcoming release of the newest book in the Elric saga, The Citadel of Forgotten Myths, Mr. Moorcock will be talking live about Elric, his new book, and more. Perhaps more importantly, he will also be taking questions from you, our viewers!
The show will be broadcast live on The Official Goodman Games twitch channel, and will also be rebroadcast via the Sanctum Secorum podcast feed as well as the Goodman Games Youtube channel. The show is being broadcast at 4:00 pm EST, allowing the entirety of the global Goodman Games fan base to take part and have your voices heard (figuratively at least).

(12) CHOW IN THE PINE TREE STATE. Some parts are edible…! Stephen King talks about the cuisine of Maine and shares a recipe that sounds pretty tasty: “Stephen King on What Authentic Maine Cuisine Means to Him” at Literary Hub.

… When I think of Maine cuisine, I think of red hot dogs in spongy Nissen rolls, slow-baked beans (with a big chunk of pork fat thrown in), steamed fresh peas with bacon, whoopie pies, plus macaroni and cheese (often with lobster bits, if there were some left over). I think of creamed salt cod on mashed potatoes—a favorite of my toothless grandfather—and haddock baked in milk, which was the only fish my brother would eat. I hated it; to this day I can see those fishy fillets floating in boiled milk with little tendrils of butter floating around in the pan. Ugh.
As the twig is bent the bough is shaped, so they say, and my tastes have remained simple and unrefined. I like nothing better than a couple of blueberry pancakes for breakfast, floating in maple syrup. (Folks think of Vermont when they think of maple syrup, but the Maine variety is just as good.) There’s nothing like a chunk of fried fish with vinegar for lunch, and a New England boiled dinner for supper—corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, and carrots. (“You must zimmer very zlowly,” my mother liked to say.) Add some strawberry shortcake (Bisquick biscuits, please) for dessert, and you’ve got some mighty good eatin’….

(13) BLANK SLATE. Slashfilm knows “Why Star Trek: Lower Decks Creator Mike McMahan Wanted Non-Trekkies In The Writers’ Room”.

… While it might seem like a no-brainer to stick with die-hard fans, the writers who were new to the “Trek” universe brought something special to the table, too:
“The original ‘Star Trek’ was made by people who had never seen ‘Star Trek’ because they were creating it. I wanted that feeling of brains that didn’t know ‘Star Trek’ as well, but were just thinking about the characters and the comedy. … [The new writers] find things that are super funny that they love, and you’re like, ‘Oh, right, that was normal to me because I’ve seen it my whole life, but that is an amazing, weird, funny thing.'”
As it turns out, McMahan’s unconventional decision paid off. The show has been a breath of fresh air, which was almost certainly the result of getting fresh eyes in the writers’ room. …

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] How It Should Have Ended took a pause this summer, but they are back with guest voice Jon Bailey (the “epic voice guy” form Honest Trailers)

[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, Paul Weimer, Cora Buhlert, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Lis Carey.]

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