Pixel Scroll 2/18/25 You Can Pixel Your File, And You Can Pixel Your Nose, But You Can’t…

(1) A RECOMMENDATION. The Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog has posted a review of Speculative Whiteness titled “The Nerd Reich”.

…[The sff] genre often portrays societies where eggheads and dweebs are central in the fate of society. Intellectual elites or highly skilled individuals dominate, reflecting a vision where scientific knowledge and technical prowess are the ultimate sources of power. It is not lost on us that these “nerds” are mostly depicted as male and white.

In his recent book Speculative Whiteness, Jordan S. Carroll tackles the problematic consequences of this legacy. The book traces a history of the ways in which the genre was and continues to be co-opted by the alt-right.

It’s an excellent work, and probably the most important book about science fiction written this year….

The cover price is just $20, however, its publisher, the University of Minnesota Press, has made the entire book available to read online for free here. This is UMP’s description of Speculative Whiteness:

Fascists such as Richard Spencer interpret science fiction films and literature as saying only white men have the imagination required to invent a high-tech future. Other white nationalists envision racist utopias filled with Aryan supermen and all-white space colonies. Speculative Whiteness traces these ideas through the entangled histories of science fiction culture and white supremacist politics, showing that debates about representation in science fiction films and literature are struggles over who has the right to imagine and inhabit the future. Although fascists insist that tomorrow belongs to them, they have always been and will continue to be contested by antifascist fans willing to fight for the future.

(2) REMAIN CALM. “’Doctor Who has not been shelved’ – BBC responds to rumours”Radio Times covers the official statement. And heck, I hadn’t even heard the rumor yet! (Probably because all of you are too smart to pass along links from The Sun.)

The BBC has assured Doctor Who fans that the sci-fi drama has not been cancelled, following an “incorrect” tabloid report.

The Sun stirred up concern that the long-running series was to go dormant again for between five and ten years, as it previously did after Sylvester McCoy’s final season – and once again after Paul McGann’s 1996 standalone film.

The speculation comes after perceived disappointment over Doctor Who season 14’s viewing figures, although the BBC and showrunner Russell T Davies have previously drawn attention to the show’s strong engagement from younger viewers.

The Sun’s anonymous source claimed that star Ncuti Gatwa was eyeing a move to Los Angeles to pursue Hollywood work – and that he had filmed a regeneration sequence for the end of the current run.

However, a spokesperson for Doctor Who commented: “This story is incorrect, Doctor Who has not been shelved. As we have previously stated, the decision on season 3 will be made after season 2 airs.

“The deal with Disney Plus was for 26 episodes – and exactly half of those still have to transmit. And as for the rest, we never comment on the Doctor and future storylines.”…

… Addressing the show’s ratings, Davies said last year: “In coming back, I wanted to make it simpler and I wanted to make it younger. Those two things are often not discussed – you read reactions to it and people are missing that.

“It’s simpler and younger – and it is working. The under-16s and the 16-34 audience as well is massive. It’s not doing that well in the ratings, but it is doing phenomenally well with the younger audience that we wanted.”

Doctor Who season 15 – also known as season 2 – is expected to premiere in May 2025, with Gatwa returning alongside Boom’s Varada Sethu as a new companion and former co-star Millie Gibson….

(3) THE BLACK FANTASTIC ONLINE PANEL IS TOMORROW. The Library of America will host an online event featuring Tananarive Due, Victor LaValle, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and andré carrington, “The Black Fantastic: The New Wave of Afrofuturist Fiction Registration”, on Wednesday, February 19 from 6:00-7:00 p.m. Eastern.  RSVP at the link. Contribution to attend: $5 (can be applied toward purchase of The Black Fantastic or any other book on the LOA Web Store.)

A new wave of science fiction and fantasy by Black writers has burst onto the American literary scene in recent decades: tales of cosmic travel, vampires, and alternate timelines set in profound social and psychological orbits. Building on the legacy of titans Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany, these visionary writers root their imagination of other worlds in the multilayered realities of Black history and experience. 

Award-winning SF authors Tananarive Due, Victor LaValle, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah join andré carrington, editor of The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories, for a conversation about genre, influence, and the fascinating and phantasmagoric universes conjured by these new voices on the vanguard of American fiction.  

(4) NESFA STORY CONTEST RESULTS. The 2024-2025 winners of the NESFA Short Story Contest were announced at Boskone 62 last weekend:

  • Winner: Hazel Milla from North Carolina for the story “Whom the Gods Wish to Destroy”
  • Runner-up: Michael Burianyk from Nice, France for the story “The Witches of Kyiv”
  • Runner-up: Bailey Maybray from Somerville, MA for the story “Hook, Line, and Clinker”
  • Runner-up: Brad Halverson of Utah for the story “Top Dog”
  • Honorable Mention: Veronika Majerová from Bratislava, Slovakia for the story “Sleepwalker’s Survival Guide”
  • Honorable Mention: E. R. Cook from Westminster, CO for the story “Metamorphi”
  • Honorable Mention: Jun Schultz of Cambridge, Massachusetts for the story “The Strid”

There were 45 entries in this year’s contest. The final judges were Jasper Fforde (B62 Guest of Honor), Kelley Armstrong (B62 Special Guest) and E. C. Ambrose (author and teacher).

(5) FUN WHILE IT LASTED. [Item by Steve Green.] The Hungry Hobbit, a Birmingham cafe neighbouring Sarehole Mill (inspiration for Tolkien’s ‘Shire’) was famously forced by New Line Cinema (producers of the Lord of the Rings movies) to change its name to the Hungry Hobb, even though ‘hobbit’ is apparently not a trademarked term. At some point, this was further shortened to the Hungry Hob, and now I learn the business closed in late October 2024. There was an announcement on Facebook, which I’m not on. A fried chicken outlet now occupies on the site.

(6) YOUNG EYEBALLS ON THE JOB. James Davis Nicoll recently had the Young People Read Old SFF panel react to Eleanor Arnason’s 1974 Nebula finalist The Warlord of Saturn’s Moons.

Warlord has been anthologized many times in the half century since it first saw print. I own it in three anthologies and one collection. No surprise. Rereading Warlord, I see themes relevant to the world in which we now live… as much as I might wish that were not the case. 

But will young eyes see the same story I do? Let’s find out!

(7) VAS YOU DERE? “Time-Tunneling Into a Different Brooklyn with Jonathan Lethem”, an audio interview at The City.

…Lethem digs into his reasons on re-reexamining the Brooklyn he wrote about 20 years earlier in The Fortress of Solitude, but doing so this time with the tools of a journalist including long interviews conducted amid the dislocation and isolation of the COVID lockdown, and much more:

One of the things I was really interested in was the idea of collective psychic experience, that that people go through things in a space together and then they don’t even know what part of it is really in their own head, and what was pushed in, stuck in there, from someone else. In a way, it is a typical New York thing. We were all there, right, when Mike Piazza hit the home run after 9/11? Every one of us, 9 million people were in the stadium that day. Well, we weren’t all there. We didn’t even all have the TV on. But somehow, retroactively, you fit yourself to this experience because it’s been had so intensely by other people that you’re confused about whether it was you or someone else who was there.

And this was true for me in exploring the myths of a neighborhood and the myths on the street: individual moments of violence or confrontation or trauma on the street like that day that this guy put this other guy in a head lock and then he pulled out a knife. Somehow, we were all on that street corner. “I saw it with my own eyes!” Well, that isn’t true. There wasn’t some, stadium full of people watching this thing.  It happened in a fugitive instant, but somehow we were all firsthand witnesses. So this idea that this transmission of mythic collective experience, this was a lot of what my questions for people were about: Did  something that we all remember really happen? And if so, who did it happen to? Maybe I was the victim or maybe I was just a bystander. I don’t know…

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

February 18, 1919  — Jack Palance. (Died 2006.)

Jack Palance in 1954.

Let’s talk about Jack Palance who was born of Ukrainian immigrant parents with name of Volodymyr Palahniuk. His professional surname was actually a derivative of his original name. While guesting on What’s My Line?, he noted that no one could pronounce his last name, and how it was suggested that he be called Palanski but instead that he decided just to use Palance instead. He didn’t say where his first name came from.

(OK nitpickers, I do not want to hear from you. Seriously, I don’t. His career makes a gaggle of overly catnapped kittens playing with skeins of yarn with lots of lanolin still on it look simple by comparison so I may or may not have knitted it properly here, so bear with my version of it.) 

Surprisingly it looks like that he got his start in our end of things in television performances and relatively late as they started in the Sixties with the first one being Jabberwock on a musical version of Alice Through the Looking Glass. I’m sure I want to see that as it had Jimmy Durante as Humpty Dumpty, and the Smothers Brothers as Tweedledee and Tweedledum. 

Next up was a Canadian production with him in the title role of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and that in turn saw him being the lead in Dracula, also known as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Dan Curtis’ Dracula, the last when the ego of the Director got way, way too big. 

Jack Palance as Dracula (1973)

I’m going to digress here because it’s so fascinating. In 1963, The Greatest Show on Earth first aired. This Circus drama had Johnny Slate as the big boss who keeps the circus running as it moves from town to town. It was produced by Desilu, the production company founded by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Sr. It lasted but one season as it was up against shows by Jack Benny and Richard Boone. 

A bit of hard SF was next, Cyborg 2, released in other countries as Glass Shadow, creative but terribly uninformative, where he’s Mercy, an old renegade cyborg. 

Rod Serling and Jack Palance in 1957

Remember my Birthday on the wonderful Carol Serling? Well, he was in The Twilight Zone: Rod Serling’s Lost Classics film that she made possible as Dr. Jeremy Wheaton in “Where the Dead Are”. 

If Treasure Island counts as genre and yes I do count it in my personal canon, then his role as Long John Silver is definitely canon. 

He got to play Ebenezer Scrooge in Ebenezer. Now the fun part is that it’s set in the Old West, where he is the most greedy, corrupt and mean-spirited crook in the old West obviously, he sees no value in “Holiday Humbug” by several reviewers. This film I went to look up on Rotten Tomatoes, but no rating there.

Not at all shockingly to me, he shows up on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. where he plays a character of Louis Strago in a two-parter “The Concrete Overcoat Affair” which got re-edited as “The Spy in the Green Hat”. 

A bit of horror was next in Tales of the Haunted as Stokes in “Evil Stalks This House” was up late in career.

Finally for roles that I’m reasonably sure were of genre interest, he was on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century as Kaleel in the “Planet of the Slave Girls” episode.

One more gig for him related to genre or at least genre adjacent, though not as a performer, but as the host of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for four years. He had three different co-hosts from season to season, including his daughter, Holly Palance, actress Catherine Shirriff, and finally singer Marie Osmond. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) LITERARY TREASURES. “Joan Didion’s official archive is going on view at the New York Public Library next month” reports Gothamist.

The New York Public Library is opening up its archives of Joan Didion and her husband Gregory Dunne to the public beginning March 26.

The Library acquired the late writers’ archives in 2023, just over three years since Didion’s 2021 death at age 87. Dunne died in 2003, aged 71.

The dual collection comprises a total of 336 boxes “most of which have never been seen publicly” and which represents “the most comprehensive collection of the authors’ materials” according to the library’s announcement.

These materials feature a vast array of both professional and personal documents from the couples’ lives, including six decades of correspondence, hundreds of photographs and 26 screenplay drafts the pair worked on together. The 1971 film “The Panic in Needle Park” and 1976’s “A Star Is Born” are among them. Visitors will also find annotated typescripts from Didion’s political reporting in the 1980s and ‘90s, and reference material for her books “The Year of Magical Thinking” and “Blue Nights.”…

(11) PASSION FOR HIS CAREERS. “’No micro transactions, no bullshit’: Josef Fares on Split Fiction and the joy of co-op video games” in the Guardian.

There aren’t many video game developers as outspoken as Hazelight’s Josef Fares. Infamous for his expletive-laden viral rants at livestreamed awards shows, Fares is a refreshingly fiery and unpredictable voice in an all too corporate industry. As he puts it, “It doesn’t matter where I work or what I do, I will always say what I want. People say to me that that’s refreshing – but isn’t it weird that you cannot say what you think in interviews? Do we live in a fucking communist country? Obviously, you have got to respect certain boundaries, but to not even be able to express what you think personally about stuff? People are too afraid!”

Yet while gamers know him as a grinning chaos merchant and passionate ambassador of co-op gameplay, in Fares’ adopted homeland of Sweden, he is best known as an award-winning film director. His goofy 2000 comedy Jalla! Jalla! was a domestic box office success, while his 2005 drama Zozo was a more introspective work about his childhood experience of fleeing the Lebanese civil war…

… He soon took his evolving prototype to a respected game studio in Stockholm – Starbreeze. “They were like, ‘Well, maybe you can do this as a kind of test project.’ But I’m like, fuck a test, I’m going to do the whole thing!”

That passion fuelled a year and a half of intense work, with Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons being released in 2013. The co-op adventure about siblings embarking on a dangerous journey to find a cure for their sick father has now sold over 10m copies. Despite its success, many in Sweden were baffled by his artistic pivot, a transition for Fares that felt natural. “With movies, I came to a point where I felt that the passion really wasn’t there. Passion lead me to video games. It was very challenging being new in the industry and coming in with a different approach – wanting to create new mechanics. Today it’s different because [people] listen to me, but it was very hard in the beginning.”…

(12) A CULTURE WARRIOR MUSTERS OUT. Doris V. Sutherland has surprisingly devoted a full article to “The Brief Life of the Helicon Awards”. I say “surprisingly” because this was simply an award made up by Richard Paolinelli so he could give it to friends and authors he wanted to ingratiate himself with. (And that worked, because writers can’t resist anything labeled an “award” — David Weber thanked him online for his.) I have followed the Helicon Awards from start to finish – Paolinelli says it is being retired this year — and did not think its pretentions were even worth making fun of anymore. But fine minds can differ…

…Even the names chosen for some of the award categories serve as battle-standards for the culture war. The original Helicon category line-up included a Laura Ingalls Wilder New Author Award, a Melvil Dewey Innovation Award and Frank Herbert Lifetime Achievement Award.

For context, in 2018 the US Association for Library Service to Children removed Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from an award for children’s literature in response to a controversy regarding racial attitudes in her writing, while 2019 saw Melvil Dewey’s name stricken from an American Library Association award over his history of racism, antisemitism and sexual harassment. (The Frank Herbert Award would appear to be the odd-one-out, as I’m not aware of Herbert having been particularly controversial circa 2019.)

In 2020, after Worldcon’s John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer was renamed (again, because of its namesake’s racist attitudes) the Helicon Society introduced the John W. Campbell Diversity in SFF Award. This was around for three years, the winners being Larry Correia (founder of the Sad Puppies), Orson Scott Card (controversial for his homophobia) and J. K. Rowling (no introduction needed). When the category was retired, Paolinelli admitted on his blog that it served as a “trolling the SJWs award”….

(13) RETURN ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN. [Item by Steven French.] Another argument for why Oumuamua was (most likely) not an alien spacecraft. “Many stars could have sent us ‘Oumuamua” reports Phys.Org. And here’s the take-home message:

Interstellar space may therefore be full of dagger-shaped shards of rock and ice (an exaggeration, but a fun quote for dinner parties nonetheless).

(14) DOOM UNSCREWED. WE HOPE. Animation World News introduces “’The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie’ Official Trailer”.

Faced with a perilous mission to save the earth, Porky Pig and Daffy Duck eschew confidence… “How could we possibly screw this up?” How could they not? …

…In the brand-new 2D animated sci-fi buddy action comedy, Porky Pig and Daffy Duck turn into unlikely heroes when their antics at the local bubble gum factory uncover a secret alien mind control plot. Against all odds, the two are determined to save their town (and the world!)… that is if they don’t drive each other crazy in the process….

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

Pixel Scroll 2/5/25 Pixels Purr Continuously As It’s The Chord Of The Multiverse

(1) WHY NOT SAY WHAT HAPPENED? Episode 17 of Scott Edelman’s podcast Why Not Say What Happened? tells “How My Meeting Margaret Hamilton Became a Marvel Comics Contest”. Below is a photo of young Scott with the actress who formerly played the Wicked Witch but by the 1970s was hawking Maxwell House coffee.

Listen in as I look back half a century on what it was like being in the room with Len Wein and Dave Cockrum (or as much as I’m willing to admit) as they plotted Giant-Size X-Men #1, why my mid-’70s likeness still hangs on the wall at Marvel Comics HQ, my freelance income during the first six months of my life as a comics professional, the collaborative short stories my friends and I stayed awake 24 hours to write on Harlan Ellison’s 39th birthday, an article I commissioned for F.O.O.M. about collecting comics in 1975 which should make you weep 50 years later, how my meeting with Wicked Witch of the West Margaret Hamilton ended up being a Marvel Comics caption contest, and much more.

Margaret Hamilton and Scott Edelman

(2) I SOLEMNLY SWEAR I AM UP TO NO GOOD. “Goldfish Releases a New Harry Potter-Themed Butterbeer Flavor” and Food & Wine is agog. It will release in March.

Tired of having the same old snack? The you’re in luck. Goldfish has got something new for you, and it’s downright magical. 

On Tuesday, Goldfish announced that it’s partnering with Warner Bros. Discovery Global Consumer Products to “cast a delicious spell” with the launch of its limited-edition Goldfish Butterbeer Flavored Grahams, which, yes, are inspired by Harry Potter.

The new crackers, the company noted in a statement provided to Food & Wine, come with a “rich butterscotch flavor, hints of creamy vanilla, and a touch of magic in each fun-shaped bite.”…

… Goldfish Butterbeer Flavored Grahams will be hitting grocery store shelves in March for about $3.69…

(3) THE PEASANTS ARE REVOLTING. “The ‘Pokémon TCG Pocket’ Trading System Is So Bad Players Are Revolting” reports WIRED.

PLAYERS OF THE game Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket are in revolt over its newly introduced trading system. Since its release last week, fans across RedditXYouTube, and even the game’s official site all agree: Trading in Pocket is very, very bad.

Pocket, which launched last October for iOS and Android, is a free-to-play adaptation of the physical card game that digitally streamlines card-collecting and battling. Mimicking the gotta-catch-’em-all hype that dominated the ’90s and early aughts, the game’s developers frequently drop new card sets to keep players tearing open digital packs in the hopes of getting rare Pokémon. Those cards can then be used to battle either solo against AI, or online against other players. Prior to last Wednesday, the one thing missing from the game was trading, which would allow players to swap cards and fill in their decks.

Now, players are threatening to cancel premium subscriptions—a $9.99-per-month membership with additional perks like extra items and cards—in response to the newly released feature. “Shame, it was really fun for a few months,” wrote a player in a post on Reddit where they encouraged others to cancel their subscriptions. “Now it feels gross.”…

(4) DIDN’T CANCEL, DONE ANYWAY. When a forever game is no longer forever: “I loved Pokémon Trading Card Pocket – until I didn’t” says the Guardian’s game columnist.

For months now I have been in the thrall of Pokémon Trading Card Pocket. It’s a devilishly slick blend of card-collecting and pared-down battling that has had me obediently opening the app on my phone at least twice a day since it launched. The virtual cards are beautifully done; the rare art cards especially, with their pastoral scenes of Pokémon in their natural habitats. I have spent many hours on the battles, too, honing decks and chasing win streaks to earn myself victory emblems. I got most of my friends into it, anticipating the day when its makers at DeNa would finally enable trading so I could fill the last couple of holes in my collection.

This week, on the day that the trading went live and an expansion full of pretty new cards was introduced, I quit. I made a couple of trades for the Venosaur Ex and Machamp Ex that had evaded my grasp despite opening hundreds of packs, took a screenshot of the “collection complete” screen, and I haven’t opened it since. I’m done….

(5) MOONSONGS. John Scalzi spotlights a little known challenge: “How Translation Works, Book Title Edition” at Whatever.

…The title of the Hungarian version of When the Moon Hits Your Eye is an example of this “translation, not transliteration” phenomenon. People in English-speaking countries know the title is a lyric from “That’s Amore,” a well-known standard most famously sung by Dean Martin. The title hits in a very specific way, because English-speaking folks have the context for the phrase and the song it’s embedded into. But it’s not a guarantee that the phrase hits the same way in other languages, or will have the same sense of play.

The solution Agave, my Hungarian publisher, and its translators, decided on: Change the title to Csak ​a hold az égen, which are lyrics in the 1995 song “Szállj el, kismadár,” which is the biggest hit from the biggest album of Republic, a well-known Hungarian band:

“Csak ​a hold az égen” translates to “Only the moon in the sky,” and it’s the first line of the chorus of the song — which is to say, the line everyone who is a fan of the band or the song will reflexively be able to sing. The song was a top ten hit in Hungary, and the album it was on was number one on the Hungarian charts for ten weeks….

(6) BUTLER’S COMMUNITIES. The Huntington Library has reposted andré m. carrington’s 2024 article “Octavia E. Butler in Community, Then and Now”.

…Butler herself traveled a long way, both figuratively and literally, to find community. When I teach Butler’s works in courses on science fiction and African American literature at the University of California, Riverside, I like to show my students two photographs that feature Butler in group settings. In the first, taken at a 1970 science fiction convention in Pittsburgh, Butler stands on the outer edge of a group of young writers with their mentor, the notable science fiction author Harlan Ellison, seated in front. Butler and her fellow students had just participated in a science fiction workshop at Clarion State College under Ellison’s guidance. The other students notably included Vonda McIntyre, a feminist science fiction pioneer who would become a lifelong friend to Butler; French linguist and science fiction writer Jean Mark Gawron; and Russell Bates, a Native American author from Oklahoma who would go on to write for television and film. Butler was the only Black participant in the workshop.

Years later, when Butler and author Samuel R. Delany were asked how many other Black science fiction writers there were, they responded, “We’re two-thirds.” The other forerunner was Charles Saunders, who pioneered the sword and soul subgenre, setting fantasy adventure stories in mythical settings drawn from African cultures. Having people like Delany, McIntyre, and Ellison as mentors and friends encouraged Butler to write meticulously researched, wildly imaginative, captivating novels that eventually made her the first science fiction author to win the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius grant.”

The other image I like to share with my students tells the rest of Butler’s story. In the photo above, she is by no means isolated: Her company consists of 28 Black women writers who attended a retreat convened by Essence magazine in 1988. Before the internet became the main source of news and entertainment, Essence—along with Ebony and Jet magazines—was a household name in 20th-century Black America. You couldn’t walk through a supermarket checkout line in a Black neighborhood without seeing its iconic covers. Black women have always been the target audience for Essence. Growing up, Butler saw women like herself and those far removed from her working-poor circumstances in its pages: celebrities, role models, and leaders. She saw that, as a Black woman, she could be one of them. And then, in 1988, there she was, appearing in Essence alongside economist Julianne Malveaux, playwright Ntozake Shange, and law professor Elaine Brown, former chair of the Black Panther Party.

Seeing Butler in these 1970 and 1988 photos in the company of different peers helps us understand how much we can learn from her example. She was unique, but she was never singular, the way we often think about intellectuals. She contained, as the poet Walt Whitman would have put it, “multitudes.”…

(7) THE BLACK FANTASTIC ONLINE PANEL. The Library of America will host an online event featuring Tananarive Due, Victor LaValle, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and andré carrington, “The Black Fantastic: The New Wave of Afrofuturist Fiction Registration”, on Wednesday, February 19 from 6:00-7:00 p.m. Eastern.  RSVP at the link. Contribution to attend: $5 (can be applied toward purchase of The Black Fantastic or any other book on the LOA Web Store.)

A new wave of science fiction and fantasy by Black writers has burst onto the American literary scene in recent decades: tales of cosmic travel, vampires, and alternate timelines set in profound social and psychological orbits. Building on the legacy of titans Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany, these visionary writers root their imagination of other worlds in the multilayered realities of Black history and experience. 

Award-winning SF authors Tananarive Due, Victor LaValle, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah join andré carrington, editor of The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories, for a conversation about genre, influence, and the fascinating and phantasmagoric universes conjured by these new voices on the vanguard of American fiction.  

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

February 5, 1956Invasion of the Body Snatchers (premiered on this date)

By Paul Weimer: The original, and possibly if not the best, in a dead heat with 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

You know the story. Duplicates of people, created from alien seed pods (hence the phrase “pod people”) start replacing their originals in a small town in California. A small group of people band together to not only survive the menace, but to learn enough to escape and tell the authorities. 

A classic, and for darned good reasons. 

But why is it a classic? Excellent performances? The movie’s cast, from Kevin McCarthy as Dr. Miles Bennell, to Diana Wynter, King Donovan and Carolyn Jones are sharp and always on. You might not recognize them as A-listers or even B-Listers from the perspective of time, except maybe Carolyn Jones, who played the original Morticia Adsams in the Addams Family TV series. But they perform their roles here, and well.  (Fun fact, the director Sam Peckinpah has a cameo). 

Excellent editing? There are scenes of terror, suspense, and horror that are very well executed by director Don Siegel. It’s been aped and copied and referenced many times, not only in sequels to the movie, but in popular media and culture. 

A stripped down and straight along plot and sequence of scenes that never lets up until the finale? The existential, political emotional horror of the whole idea of “pod people” in its original and most pure form? I saw the movie on WPIX in the late 70’s or early 80’s, and have seen it many times since. I didn’t get the political allegory one can make when I was younger…now, I see a number of potential political allegories one can read into it — anti-communism, the dangers of ultra-conformity, anti-McCarthyism. Any which way, it shows what happens to the individual, when society becomes poisoned and toxic (and doesn’t that feel relevant today). 

I do find it interesting that thanks to the framing device, this is perhaps the most optimistic and “positive” of all of the Invasion movies. Every single one, especially 1978, has gone against this grain since, making the Invasion ever darker, ever more successful, humanity ever more doomed. Is it a sign of the times and tastes in movie fans? Or tastes in studio heads? I am not sure. But the movie does end as it began with Miles in the hospital, not only telling his story but being believed, and action being taken. I understand that the prologue and epilogue were later additions. I’ve never seen the film without them, I do wonder how I’d feel about a cut of the movie with both of them removed. 

Maybe we do need an Invasion of the Body Snatchers in our own year of 2025 where people among us turn so violently and horribly against anyone who is different, where our political leaders are feckless, amoral, cowards or evil, and where it seems that research money is going into “18% Gray AI slop.”  Meeting and facing an alien invasion, an insidious and carefully planned one. (Consider the scene where our heroes overhear Grivett’s plans for the organized dissemination of the Pods) . Pluck, luck, hard work and collective action oppose the Invaders. Even without the prologue and epilogue “assuring the happy ending” there is a sense of human spirit and resilience throughout the film. 

The movie is a lean and mean 80 minutes long (barely longer than an extra length episode of a TV series season opener or finale these days). It never outstays its welcome, and in fact is probably underrated, if anything, as one of the more important movies ever made.  Have you seen it lately? 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

My latest cartoon for @newscientist.com

Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2025-02-05T14:24:12.107Z

(10) HORROR AND HOLLYWOOD ACCOUNTING. Inverse gets the filmmakers and cast to tell them “The Oral History of ‘In the Mouth of Madness,’ John Carpenter’s Misunderstood Cosmic Horror Masterpiece” (a 1995 movie).

The film’s budget was initially reported to be $15 million, but New Line kept whittling it down. In various commentaries and interviews, Carpenter has pinned the final budget at anywhere from $7-10 million, a significant reduction. Notably, the film’s original ending had to be completely reimagined.

King Carpenter: [There was] fighting with the studio, but that’s every movie. They had some weird people. They don’t trust anybody, and at the same time, I don’t trust them, so it becomes like Spy vs. Spy. [The budget] kept changing as we got closer to shooting. It would be one amount, and then they would cut $2 million out of it. You’re just going, “Why?” But it is what it is, that’s what happens, so we’d roll with it. We just figured it out, and you figure out your shooting days, and you know going in that whatever you anticipate, something in there is going to go to sh*t, and so you have to be prepared to punt on something.

Greg Nicotero: I just remember being in pre-production and we would have all the meetings at this little house in Sherman Oaks that they had on Willis Avenue, and looking at all the storyboards for the finale, the original finale where the whole town gets sucked into the book at the end. And it was a big, big deal. And for us, the designs were coming up with not only the creature, but some of the other looks. And I remember we got to that ending and it was like, “We don’t have enough money to do that.” ILM had storyboarded the whole thing, and it was all this really, really elaborate big action sequence. And I remember being at the meeting where they went, “Yeah, we’re going to rewrite the ending because we don’t have the money to do that.” And I was like, “Oh.”…

(11) OVERDUE AT THE HERCULANEUM LIBRARY. “First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2,000 years” says BBC.

A badly burnt scroll from the Roman town of Herculaneum has been digitally “unwrapped”, providing the first look inside for 2,000 years.

The document, which looks like a lump of charcoal, was charred by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD and is too fragile to ever be physically opened.

But now scientists have used a combination of X-ray imaging and artificial intelligence to virtually unfurl it, revealing rows and columns of text….

…Inside this huge machine, which is called a synchrotron, electrons are accelerated to almost the speed of light to produce a powerful X-ray beam that can probe the scroll without damaging it.

“It can see things on the scale of a few thousandths of a millimetre,” explained Adrian Mancuso, director of physical sciences at Diamond.

The scan is used to create a 3D reconstruction, then the layers inside the scroll – it contains about 10m of papyrus – have to be identified.

“We have to work out which layer is different from the next layer so we can unroll that digitally,” said Dr Mancuso.

After that artificial intelligence is used to detect the ink. It’s easier said than done – both the papyrus and ink are made from carbon and they’re almost indistinguishable from each other.

So the AI hunts for the tiniest signals that ink might be there, then this ink is painted on digitally, bringing the letters to light….

… Last year, a Vesuvius Challenge team managed to read about 5% of another Herculaneum scroll.

Its subject was Greek Epicurean philosophy, which teaches that fulfilment can be found through the pleasure of everyday things.

The Bodleian’s scroll is likely to be on the same subject – but the Vesuvius team is calling for more human and computing ingenuity to see if this is the case….

(12) BUCKET OF BLOOD. “The Monkey Has A Popcorn Bucket, And It Is An Absolute Must For My Stephen King Collection” says a CineBlend contributor.

…For those of you haven’t been paying attention, the titular evil in The Monkey (and what the popcorn bucket is modeled after) is an evil wind-up toy that kills a person whenever the key in its back is turned. In the Stephen King short story on which the movie is based, the cursed object is a classic cymbal-banging monkey, but the design was changed up for the film due to rights issues. Instead of clashing cymbals, it holds a pair of drumsticks and beats a snare that it holds between its legs.

The film centers on a pair of twin brothers who discover the monkey in the closest of their absconded father. After the vicious toy rips through their family like tissue paper, they are able to successfully contain it for a while, but years later, when the siblings are estranged adults, it makes a horrible return.

The popcorn bucket’s likeness to the prop in the movie is impressive… but if fans really want to go the extra mile, they’ll plan ahead and bring some red food dye with them to their screening of The Monkey to apply it to the contents before they start munching. After all, part of what makes the upcoming horror film so special is the fact that it has a good shot of going down in history as the goriest Stephen King adaptation, which is an aspect well-highlighted in the trailers and previews….

According to Nerdist: “It will only be available at AMC Theatres locations, and it comes with a large popcorn for $44.99 plus tax. The 85-ounce popcorn bucket is stylized to look just like the monkey toy that’s at the heart of the film.”

(13) IN A HOLE IN THE GROUND. “Archaeologists Unearth Rare 1,000-Year-Old Food Storage Pit in Alaska”Smithsonian has details.

On a hill of birch and spruce overlooking the Knik Arm, a narrow stretch of the Gulf of Alaska that extends northwest of Anchorage, archaeologists have unearthed a remarkably intact cache pit used by the region’s Indigenous Dene people. The discovery is offering a new perspective on the long human history of the region, as well as how to preserve and protect its legacy for generations to come.

Cache pits are like root cellars, as Elizabeth Ortiz, an archaeologist and cultural resource manager at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson (JBER), the military complex where the discovery was made, says in a statement.

Located along a well-known Dene trail that led north out of the modern-day Anchorage area, the pit measures about 3.5 feet deep. It was dug into well-drained soil and lined with birch bark and grass, which preserved fish, meat and berries through the harsh seasonal extremes of southeastern Alaska.

The Dene, also known as Athabaskans, include the Dena’ina and Ahtna people. In the summers, they would have stayed in the area to catch and preserve salmon and terrestrial meat, with houses and smokehouses lining the bluffs above the Cook Inlet, according to Arkeonews.

Archaeologists expected the cache pit to be a few hundred years old. However, radiocarbon testing revealed that it was actually much older.

“When we got the results back that said it was 960 years, plus or minus 30, we were shocked,” Ortiz tells Alena Naiden of KNBA, a local radio station. “[We] were jumping up and down in our cube in tears. It was very, very exciting.”

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George takes us inside the Back to the Future Part II Pitch Meeting”.

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

Arthur C. Clarke Award 2024 Shortlist

The shortlist for the 38th Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction book of the year was announced today. The six shortlisted books are:

  • Chain-Gang All-Stars — Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Harvill Secker)
  • The Ten Percent Thief— Lavanya Lakshminarayan (Solaris)
  • In Ascension— Martin MacInnes (Atlantic Books)
  • The Mountain in the Sea— Ray Nayler (Weidenfeld & Nicholson)
  • Some Desperate Glory  — Emily Tesh (Orbit)
  • Corey Fah Does Social Mobility — Isabel Waidner (Hamish Hamilton)

Award Director Tom Hunter said this year they received submissions from a record-breaking 50 eligible publishing imprints. This year’s winner will be announced on July 24.

The winner will receive a trophy in the form of a commemorative engraved bookend and prize money to the value of £2024.00; a tradition that sees the annual prize money rise incrementally by year from the year 2001 in memory of Sir Arthur C. Clarke.

The judging panel for the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2024 are: Dolly Garland and Stark Holborn for the British Science Fiction Association; Nic Clarke and Tom Dillon for the Science Fiction Foundation; Glyn Morgan for the SCI-FI-LONDON film festival; Dr. Andrew M. Butler represented the Arthur C. Clarke Award directors in a non-voting role as the Chair of the Judges.

[Based on a press release.]