Tag Archives: New Glenn

Pixel Scroll 1/16/25 Let’s Read Our TBR Piles, And Travel Mental Gigamiles

Posted on by
35

(1) IS ANYONE STILL PUBLISHING GAIMAN? Publishers Weekly tries to track down whether Neil Gaiman has any works scheduled to come out — “How Neil Gaiman’s Publishers Have Responded to the Sexual Misconduct Allegations” – and discovers it is much easier to get answers from those that definitely haven’t any.

…Gaiman’s literary agent, Merrilee Heifetz at Writers House, did not respond to requests for comment by press time, nor did his public speaking agent, Steven Barclay of the eponymous agency, leaving it unclear as to whether either has dropped him as a client. On Gaiman’s website, a page called “Contacting Neil,” which had listed both agents alongside his Hollywood representation, is now down, although the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine indicates that it was live as recently as last month.

At present, it is unclear if Gaiman, the author of nearly 50 books that have sold more than 50 million combined copies worldwide, has any new forthcoming titles currently under contract, although some publishers have confirmed that if he does, it is not with them. On the trade book side, a spokesperson from HarperCollins, Gaiman’s primary publisher in the United States, told PW that it “does not have any new books by Neil Gaiman scheduled.”

A spokesperson for Norton, which released Gaiman’s 2018 book on Norse mythology as well as an illustrated version last year, confirmed to PW that “Norton will not have projects with the author going forward.”…

In the comics world, a representative from Dark Horse Comics, which has published a number of comics and graphic novel titles by Gaiman as well as the Neil Gaiman Library series, said that the publisher is currently working on a statement, but was unable to comment further. Marvel Comics told the New York Times that it has no books in the works with Gaiman. DC Comics, the publisher of Gaiman’s Sandman series and many of his other comics titles, did not respond to requests for comment; DC had previously announced plans to reprint a classic work by Gaiman in a new format in September….

The article also presents a roundup of recent terse social media remarks about Gaiman by Jeff VandeMeer, John Scalzi, Gail Simone, Guy Gavriel Kay, and Scott McCloud.

(2) FINDING THE ANSWER. Kameron Hurley analyzes “Why Great Art Connects Us Across Time and Space (Even with Monsters)”.

…When people burst into tears when they meet me at an event, it’s not because I write about giant bugs and exploding heads. Those things are cool, yes! But they react that way because they connected EMOTIONALLY with something I wrote. It’s that feeling like “OMG I’m not alone. I feel that TOO!!”

Art is, at its best, a way for humans to connect. We’re holding out a hand saying “I felt this way. Have you ever felt this way too?” And no, not everyone has, and thus those are not people who are going to be yours fans. But many HAVE. And if you’ve done it right, you connect with that person across time and space – and for one glorious moment, we feel less alone.

THAT is great fucking art. THAT is magic. It’s a magic every great storyteller has; heroes and villains alike. Perhaps that’s why we hate it so much when we’ve connected with art made by people who have done monstrous things. It makes us ask if we, too, are monsters.

I know the answer to that.

I connect emotionally with fictional monsters (and the work of people who’ve done monstrous things) all the time. We all do. We are human. We share the multitude of all human emotions and possible actions with the best and worst people in the world. That’s terrifying.

This is why the STORIES we tell ourselves are so important. I changed a lot of who I was by asking myself how the person I wanted to be would act in any given situation. FEELING a monstrous impulse isn’t what makes us monsters. It’s taking the ACTIONS of a monster. It’s being aware enough to choose….

(3) BENEATH THE JERSEY SKIES. “Steven Spielberg’s new UFO movie with Emily Blunt is filming in N.J., casting locals.” – NJ.com has the story. Well, isn’t that a coincidence.

…The filming will take place in March — not long off from Jersey’s brush with drone and/or plane-related, supposedly “unidentified” flying objects at the end of 2024.

The movie, which is as yet untitled — but reportedly (tentatively) titled “The Dish” — also stars Emmy winner Josh O’Connor (”The Crown,” “Challengers,” “La Chimera”), Oscar nominee Colman Domingo (”Rustin,” “Sing Sing”), Oscar winner Colin Firth (”The King’s Speech,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary”) and Eve Hewson (”Bad Sisters”)….

(4) FANTASY MAGAZINE SUBMISSION DATES. Correcting the information released yesterday, editor Arley Sorg says the revived Fantasy Magazine plans to open to submissions January 22-29, and specifically, Jan 22-25 BIPOC writers only, Jan 26-29 general submissions. See submission guidelines at the link.

(5) HOWARD ANDREW JONES DIES. Author and editor Howard Andrew Jones died January 16 of cancer. Known for The Chronicles of Hanuvar series, The Chronicles of Sword and Sand series and The Ring-Sworn trilogy, he has also written Pathfinder Tales, tie-in fiction novels in the world of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. He is the editor of Tales from the Magician’s Skull and has served as a Managing Editor at Black Gate since 2004.

In August 2024 he announced that he has been diagnosed with brain cancer––multifocal glioblastoma – and that, “People I trust––my doctors and my family––inform me it will be fatal, and we are deciding now on a course of action to make the most of the time I have left.” 

(6) DAVID LYNCH (1946-2024). Filmmaker David Lynch has died at the age of 78. Deadline says the family did not release the date of death. Never forget – Frank Herbert liked his film Dune.

…The four-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker [was] behind Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Eraserhead, Wild at Heart, The Elephant Man and others [and] also created the ABC drama series Twin Peaks…

…In 2020, he received an Honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement at the Governors Awards….

…Lynch’s career took off during the 1980s. He followed up the success of Elephant Man with Dune, the 1984 take on Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel. While Dune was noted for being a financial bomb at the time, it wound up being the highest-grossing film on the auteur’s résumé with $31.5M worldwide….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 16, 1948 — John Carpenter, 77.

By Paul Weimer: Where does one begin with the large and momentous oeuvre of John Carpenter? With the many-sequeled and rebooted but never equaled Halloween, perhaps? To start there means that we skip the strange and wondrously weird Dark Star. And it skips the gritty Assault on Precinct 13.  Do we instead focus on The Thing, one of the best SF/horror movies ever to be made? To do that would throw shade on The Fog, the amazing ghostly revenge tale in a Northern California town.  

Maybe you should start with Escape from New York, with a vision of NYC after its transformation into a prison that has been imitated (even by Carpenter himself!) but has never, ever been surpassed.  It IS the movie that helped cement the career of Kurt Russell, after all.  But to work there misses the soft wondrous Starman, an amazingly touching movie. 

Or maybe you should start with They Live, perhaps the best indictment of late 80’s trash capitalism that suddenly feels even more relevant, in this year of our lord 2025. Roddy Piper’s character doesn’t have a name, but he isn’t a faceless number, either. And it has one of the longest fights on screen. It’s a bit pointless fight, but it is fun that Piper got to do a whole wrestling match in a John Carpenter film.  But to mention They Live might mean you overlook the absolutely bonkers and fun Big Trouble in Little China. 

My favorites in the Carpenter oeuvre are none of these, although I love all the above movies.  My second favorite John Carpenter movie has to be Prince of Darkness, where an unlikely group of heroes led by Victor Wong (from Big Trouble in Little China) and Donald Pleasance (from Escape from New York) team up to try to stop the literal Devil, anti-God, from coming across from another dimension into our own. It’s a bottle of a movie set in an inescapable church, got dreams from the future, and is nicely tense.  The other one I like even more and is one of my heart movies, is In the Mouth of Madness. In the Mouth of Madness is the best cosmic horror movie, ever, in my opinion, as horror writer Sutter Cane writes extra dimensional monsters into our reality, with Jurassic Park’s Sam Neill as John Trent, insurance investigator, is in search of a book he really, really should not read. In 2018, when I found out that the striking church seen in the film was just outside Toronto, I had to go and visit it while on a vacation in Canada.

And did you know that Carpenter scored a lot of his films? His father was a music teacher, and his love of music led him to really be patient and exacting about the music. Be it Escape from New York, Halloween, Prince of Darkness, or many other of his works, that soundtrack with the heavy use of synthesizers that you are hearing are due to his own musical creation and scoring. His movies have memorable visuals…and sound as well. 

John Carpenter

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

January 16, 1995 — Star Trek: Voyager premieres  

 “Coffee – the finest organic suspension ever devised. It’s got me through the worst of the last three years. I beat the Borg with it.” — Captain Kathryn Janeway, Star Trek: Voyager’s “Hunters”. 

Need I say that I liked Janeway a lot? She was a much more rounded, more believable individual than Kirk ever was. Inthe pantheon of Captains, I’d rank her just behind Picard as a character. 

So on this evening thirty years ago on UPN, Star Trek: Voyager premiered. The fourth spinoff from the original series after the animated series, the Next Generation and Deep Space Nine which had my favorite Captain in Benjamin Sisko, it featured the first female commander in the form of Captain Kathryn Janeway, played by Kate Mulgrew. 

(She is seen again commanding the USS Dauntless in the animated Prodigy series, searching for the missing USS Protostar which was being commanded by Captain Chakotay at the time of its disappearance. It’s now streaming on Netflix.) 

It was created by Rick Berman, Michael Piller, and Jeri Taylor. Berman served as head executive producer, assisted by a series of executive proucers — Piller, Taylor, Brannon Braga and Kenneth Biller. Of those, Braga oil the still the most active with his recent work on the cancelled Orville.

It ran for seven seasons and one hundred seventy-two episodes. Four episodes, “Caretaker”, “Dark Frontier”, “Flesh and Blood” and “Endgame” originally aired as ninety-minute episodes. 

Of all the Trek series, and not at all surprisingly, Voyager gets the highest Bechdel test rating. 

Oh, and that quote I start this piece with in 2015, was tweeted by astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti International Space Station when they were having a coffee delivery. She was wearing a Trek uniform when she did so as you can see in the image below. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 126 of the Octothorpe podcast, “I’ve Read Some Novels”, John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty read out your letters of comment, and then discuss all the things from 2024 that they think are worth a look as we go into award nomination season (and a couple of things they would probably avoid). Then they do picks, in case there weren’t enough opinions.

Get the uncorrected transcript at the link.

A picture of a Belgian waffle that looks like an octothorpe, on a white background, with the words “Octothorpe 126” above and “now with added waffle” below.

(11) DON’T THAT BEAT ALL. “A Frankenstein Filing Error: It’s Alive!” – the New York Times confesses.

…When he died in February 1969, The New York Times wrote of Karloff’s career in an article that featured a photograph of an actor, in costume as the monster.

One problem: The man in the makeup, with the bolts in his neck, wasn’t Karloff.

The image — a publicity photo, copyrighted by Universal Pictures — depicted the actor Glenn Strange, who had succeeded Karloff in the role, playing the monster in subsequent films, including “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,” which was released in 1948.

At least one astute reader had spotted the mistake and sent a letter to The Times.

The photograph was seemingly mislabeled around 1948, the copyrighted date on the image, and incorrectly placed in a folder for Karloff, one of the millions of files stored in the Morgue, The Times’s subterranean clippings library. (The Times issued a correction, a copy of which is pasted on the back of the photo in the Morgue.)

Almost 20 years after the first misprinting, in March 1987, the same photo, though cropped tighter and tilted slightly, was used to accompany a letter to the editor that referenced Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” Again, the caption incorrectly identified Strange as Karloff….

…. Dr. Jane Bishop of Brooklyn, the same reader who caught the mistake in 1969, wrote to The Times and explained that she had lodged an identical complaint 18 years earlier.…

Some of you who read the File 770 birthdays must feel the same way…

(12) JUSTWATCH REPORT: SVOD MARKET SHARES (2024). As 2024 has come to an end, JustWatch has released its latest data report on market shares in the US. As usual, the report is based on the 17.2 million JustWatch users in the US selecting their streaming services, clicking out to streaming offers and marking titles as seen.

SVOD market shares in Q4 2024: In the final quarter of 2024, Prime Video led provider growth, taking 22% of the overall market. Netflix, its largest competitor, trailed Prime by only 1%. Hulu, Disney+, and Max make up 36% of the streaming market while Paramount+ and AppleTV+ both stayed below 10%.

Market share development in 2024: In Q4 2024, Prime Video and Netflix continued to lead the U.S. streaming market, each holding over 20% of the overall market, with Netflix slightly narrowing the gap between them. Hulu saw steady growth, challenging Max for third place, while Disney+ struggled to gain traction. Smaller platforms in the “Other” category experienced a noticeable rise, reflecting growing interest in alternative services.

(13) NEW GLENN LAUNCH TO ORBIT SUCCESSFUL. “Blue Origin reaches orbit on first flight of its titanic New Glenn rocket” reports Ars Technica.

Early on Thursday morning, a Saturn V-sized rocket ignited its seven main engines, a prelude to lifting off from Earth.

But then, the New Glenn rocket didn’t move.

And still, the engines produced their blue flame, furiously burning away methane.

The thrust-to-weight ratio of the rocket must have been in the vicinity of 1.0 to 1.2, so the booster had to burn a little liquid methane and oxygen before it could begin to climb appreciably. But finally, seconds into the mission, New Glenn began to climb. It was slow, ever so slow. But it flew true.

After that the vehicle performed like a champion. The first stage burned for more than three minutes before the second stage separated at an altitude of 70 km. Then, the upper stage’s two BE-3U engines appeared to perform flawlessly, pushing the Blue Ring pathfinder payload toward orbit. These engines burned very nearly for 10 minutes before shutting down, having reached an orbital velocity of 28,800 kph.

For the first time since its founding, nearly a quarter of a century ago, Blue Origin had reached orbit. The long-awaited debut launch of the New Glenn rocket, a super-heavy lift vehicle developed largely with private funding, had come. And it was a smashing success….

(14) DILBERT STARK’S STARSHIP. Elsewhere today – “SpaceX Starship test fails after Texas launch” reports the BBC.

The latest test of Space X’s giant Starship rocket has failed, minutes after launch.

Officials at Elon Musk’s company said the upper stage was lost after problems developed after lift-off from Texas on Thursday.

The mission came hours after the first flight of the Blue Origin New Glenn rocket system, backed by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos.

The two tech billionaires both want to dominate the space vehicle market.

“Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn. Teams will continue to review data from today’s flight test to better understand root cause,” SpaceX posted on X.

“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will help us improve Starship’s reliability.”…

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

Pixel Scroll 1/13/25 Why Yes, We Are (At Least In Part) Stardust

Posted on by
55

(1) COMPREHENSIVE COVERAGE OF GAIMAN SEX ASSAULT ALLEGATIONS. New York Magazine‘s often explicit article “There Is No Safe Word” [Archive.is link] by Lila Shapiro, as described by Publishers Lunch, “reports on the details of the Neil Gaiman sexual assault case, expanding on allegations first reported by New Zealand podcast Tortoise Media. Last July, five women accused Gaiman of assault, and one woman said she filed a complaint with New Zealand police. Four out of five of Gaiman’s accusers spoke to New York Magazine for the piece, and the publication reviewed journal entries, texts, emails, and police correspondence. Gaiman did not comment for the article, but he has denied all allegations.” Shapiro spoke with eight women in total, three who had never gone public. The story contains content that readers may find disturbing, including graphic allegations of sexual assault.

(2) ROWLING ON GAIMAN. And in Deadline, “J.K. Rowling Compares Neil Gaiman To Harvey Weinstein Amid Claims”.

…Not long after New York magazine published its detailed cover story on multiple new and old claims against Gaiman by multiple women, the Harry Potter creator took to social media to give some opinionated context of her own.

No stranger to controversy, criticism and accusations of being transphobic for her strident views on gender identity and the transitioning of minors, Rowling pinned initial reactions to allegations against the once acclaimed Gaiman to incarcerated rapist Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo outburst against the much-accused Pulp Fiction producer.  

“The literary crowd that had a hell of a lot to say about Harvey Weinstein before he was convicted has been strangely muted in its response to multiple accusations against Neil Gaiman from young women who’d never met, yet — as with Weinstein — tell remarkably similar stories,” Rowling wrote this morning on X in the second of two missives on Gaiman….

(3) WRITER’S LEGACY BURNED. The London Review of Books reports that by a tragic coincidence of timing the late Gary Indiana’s personal library and collection was destroyed by the Eaton Fire in L.A.

(4) NEW OKORAFOR BOOK DRAWS FROM LIFE. The New York Times profiles Nnedi Okorafor in “Writing Fantasy Came Naturally. Reality Was Far More Daunting”. (Link bypasses the paywall). “After winning just about every major science fiction and fantasy award, Nnedi Okorafor explores a traumatic event in her own history in her most autobiographical novel yet.”

… Thirty years and more than 20 books later, Okorafor, now an acclaimed science fiction and fantasy writer, is exploring that traumatic experience, and the transformation that followed, in her heavily autobiographical new novel, “Death of the Author.”

A genre-defying metafictional experiment, the story centers on a Nigerian American writer from Chicago named Zelu, who is paralyzed and uses a wheelchair after a childhood accident. She dreams of becoming a writer, but her lovingly overprotective parents and siblings are skeptical that she’ll ever support herself. After struggling for years to get published, Zelu writes a best-selling postapocalyptic novel set among sentient robots in a future Nigeria, and lands a seven-figure advance and a movie deal. Her sudden rise to fame is both thrilling and jarring, as Zelu sees her success disrupt her family, and her novel get whitewashed by Hollywood executives who strip it of the African elements.

With its autobiographical framework, “Death of the Author” is a departure from Okorafor’s previous work, otherworldly stories that often draw on her experiences in Nigeria, where she found that belief in the supernatural — giant spider deities, water spirits, shape-shifting leopard people — is part of daily life….

(5) BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING…WHAT YOU BUY WITH THIS. “1984 author and former M.E.N. journalist George Orwell honoured on new £2 coin” reports the Manchester Evening News, where he used to work. (King Charles is on the obverse. Make of that what you will.)

Famed author and former Manchester Evening News journalist George Orwell is celebrated on a new £2 coin.

The writer of 1984 and Animal Farm will be honoured by the Royal Mint, 75 years after his death. Coin artist Henry Gray created a design which appears to be an eye, but is a camera lens at the centre of the design….

The Royal Mint will soon be ready to sell you one.

(6) MARKET REPORT. Incensepunk Magazine is now accepting submissions of speculative fiction stories about 4,000 to 6,000 words in length.

And what is “incensepunk” you ask?

Incensepunk is, at its core, a genre of longing. It desires a world in which traditional faiths and churches play a major role in society. Incensepunk extrapolates Byzantine and Gothic architecture styles into a modern world of skyscrapers and globalization. However, it is not regressive. It doesn’t view the past as good and the present as wicked and depraved. Instead, it tries to envision what the world could look like if faith and society were more integrated.

Incensepunk is speculative fiction, but it need not be alternate history (though it is certainly acceptable to be)….

(7) COMPLIMENTARY ENCOUNTERS OF THE HOLLYWOOD KIND. Far Out Magazine says “The writer Steven Spielberg called his muse” was Ray Bradbury.

…In terms of source material, Spielberg has adapted some of the greats. Michael Crichton provided the original novel on which Jurassic Park is based and Minority Report comes from a story by Philip K. Dick. However, for the director’s biggest sci-fi inspiration, we turn to a writer he never got the chance to bring to the big screen…

…Commenting on Bradbury’s [2012] passing, Spielberg was extremely complimentary of his work. “He was my muse for the better part of my sci-fi career,” he said in a statement (via The Hollywood Reporter). “He lives on through his legion of fans. In the world of science fiction and fantasy and imagination he is immortal.”

This admiration went both ways. In an interview with the Star Ledger (via Entertainment Weekly), Bradbury gave his thoughts on a Spielberg classic. “Close Encounters is the best film of its kind ever made,” he espoused. “It takes too long, but the transfiguration at the end, with the splendid arrival of the mother ship – that makes up for everything. I was so amazed and changed when I saw it that I went over to the studio to tell Spielberg what a genius he was.” In a full circle moment, Spielberg replied to this praise by claiming that Close Encounters wouldn’t have been possible without It Came From Outer Space, a 1953 film that Bradbury contributed the story to…. 

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 13, 1893 — Clark Ashton Smith. (Died 1961.)

Clark Ashton Smith

By Paul Weimer: Clark Ashton Smith was part of the Weird Tales crowd with people like Lovecraft, and it is through reading Lovecraft and authors like him that I came across Smith’s work. I started with his weird horror/fantasy, stories like City of Singing Flame (although that particular story I would only read years later) and eventually trying stuff from Poseidonis (his Atlantis world) and Zothique (once I found out that it had inspired Jack Vance).  Empire of the Necromancers feels like it could be set in a distant corner of the Dying Earth and I like that headcanon, for example. 

I found him to be a taproot writer, ones whose ideas and style were perhaps somewhat better than his execution at times (this is also true of Lovecraft, let’s be honest). But his ideas and style were inspirational, transformational and helped inspire a sheaf of fans, authors, games and much more as a result. In a way, without reading Smith, you’ve read Smith–through how he has influenced writers since (to say nothing of his correspondence with Howard and Lovecraft at the time). 

And it must be said that there is a poetic feel to all of his work. The poetry Smith wrote early in his career suffused and influenced his subsequent stories and fragments. He never lost the dream of poetry. Or, the poetic muse never left him.  Smith wrote intensely and evocatively and his poetic training and use of word choice and imagery come through in all of his stories. Reading a Smith story is to be transported into another world, into another reality, be it in the far past or the far future.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

January 13, 2008 — Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Seventeen years ago this evening on Fox, the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles premiered. It was directed by Josh Friedman whose sole genre work previously was H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.  The top cast was Lena Headey as Sarah Connor along with Thomas Dekker and Summer Glau in supporting roles

If Lena Headey sounds familiar that’s because she was on the Game of Thrones as Cersei Lannister.

In addition, the narrator was also Headey. Though it would last but two seasons comprising thirty-one episodes, as the first season was abbreviated, it was the highest-rated new scripted series of the ’07 to ‘08 television season. And yes, it started in the ‘07 television season even though its first episode was in January of ‘08. Such are the mysteries of television seasons.

Reception among critics was generally quite fine. Gina Bellafante of the New York Times said that it was “one of the more humanizing adventures in science fiction to arrive in quite a while.” And Maureen Ryan of the Chicago Tribune exclaimed of the second season that the “season’s opener is much clearer and more sheer fun than anything that aired last spring.”

It has a stellar eighty-four percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes on the Popcornmeter as they call it.

Despite numerous ongoing fan efforts to revive the series, Josh Friedman has dismissed the possibility of crowdfunding a third season unlike say the recent Veronica Mars series due to issues involving holder rights. I suspect the Terminator issues here are hellishly complex. 

(10) NEW ACTOR FOR T’CHALLA? [Item by Steven French.] I suspect fandom may be divided on this one: “Marvel is ready to recast Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa in Black Panther. Should they?” asks the Guardian.

Marvel’s multiverse has become a narrative Swiss army knife capable of slicing through the thorniest of creative dilemmas and papering over the widest of cracks. That said, few dilemmas are as sensitive as how to move forward with a superhero as iconic as Black Panther. Chadwick Boseman’s portrayal of T’Challa wasn’t just a performance – it was a cultural touchstone, woven so tightly into the fabric of modern blockbuster cinema that imagining anyone else in the role feels like attempting to rewrite history. Four years after Boseman’s untimely death from colon cancer, Marvel faces the delicate task of continuing a legacy that seems impossible to replicate.

If rumblings out of Hollywood this week have foundation, however, the studio is beginning to countenance just that, a new T’Challa from an alternate reality who presumably finds his way into the mainstream Marvel universe via one of the umpteen ways we’ve seen superheroes such as Doctor Strange, various Spider-Men and Scarlet Witch crossing the boundaries between one reality and another. Jeff Sneider of the InSneider newsletter reports that the studio is finally “firmly open” to bringing back the king of Wakanda, despite previous attempts to recast the role having getting rebuffed by actors who didn’t want to jeopardise their careers by “stepping into Boseman’s gigantic shoes”.

(11) CORREIA “DEDICATION” TO GRRM. A GRRM fansite ran a photo of the dedication page.

 “Fantasy author taunts Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin in his new book” reports MSN.com.

…Is this a playful jab or a petty insult? It’s probably closer to the latter, seeing as how Martin and Correia have locked horns before. Their last public clash involves the Hugo Awards, which are handed out every year to honor the best in science fiction and fantasy fiction. Martin has been attending the Hugos since the 1970s, while Correia got involved in the 2010s….

Correia is all over his social media crowing about the attention his jab is getting.

(12) STANDING ROOM ONLY. Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket did not leave the ground today after all: “Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin calls off launch of New Glenn rocket” – AP News tells the reason.

Blue Origin will try again to launch its massive new rocket as early as Tuesday after calling off the debut launch because of ice buildup in critical plumbing.

The 320-foot (98-meter) New Glenn rocket was supposed to blast off before dawn Monday with a prototype satellite. But ice formed in a purge line for a unit powering some of the rocket’s hydraulic systems and launch controllers ran out of time to clear it, according to the company.

Founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin said Tuesday’s poor weather forecast could cause more delay. Thick clouds and stiff wind were expected at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

The test flight already had been delayed by rough seas that posed a risk to the company’s plan to land the first-stage booster on a floating platform in the Atlantic….

(13) MOANA LITIGATION. “Disney faces copyright lawsuit over ‘Moana’ franchise” reports Entertainment Weekly.

Disney has been hit with a copyright lawsuit alleging that the wildly popular Moana franchise was nearly entirely lifted from a decades-old screenplay without the writer’s consent.

In a lawsuit reviewed by Entertainment Weekly that was filed Friday, animator Buck Woodall claims that former Mandeville Films development director Jenny Marchick violated his copyright by secretly passing to Disney materials he produced confidentially for her two decades ago. That material, Woodall alleges, became Moana and Moana 2….

…The animator claims that he delivered to Marchick “extremely large quantities of intellectual property and trade secrets” related to a project variously called “Bucky” and “Bucky the Wave Warrior” between 2003 and 2008. Those materials included a completed screenplay, character illustrations, budgets, a fully animated concept trailer, storyboards, background image references, and more.

Woodall also notes that he received copyright protection on these materials in 2004 that was updated in 2014.

“Bucky” was never developed, but Woodall claims that Marchick was able to pass his materials to Disney by exploiting legal loopholes inherent to the “tapestry of confusion” that is Disney’s elaborate corporate structure. According to Woodall, “Bucky” not only became Moana without his consent, but continued to serve as the basis for Moana 2 as well.

The suit enumerates a number of similarities between Woodall’s undeveloped script and Moana and Moana 2. Like “Bucky,” the first film follows a teenager on a voyage in an outrigger canoe across Polynesian waters to save Polynesian land. It features the Polynesian belief in spiritual ancestors who manifest as animal guides, and a number of specifics including a symbolic necklace, navigation by stars, a lava goddess, and a giant creature disguised as a mountainous island.

As for Moana 2, the suit notes that details such as the rooster and pig companions, a mission to break a curse, a whirlpool that leads to an oceanic portal, and an encounter with the Kakamora warrior tribe were all lifted without consent from “Bucky.”…

(14) PITCH MEETING. Hmm. Did any of the foregoing get mentioned during the “Moana 2 Pitch Meeting”?

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

Pixel Scroll 1/11/25 There’s Even Pixels Walking Through It As We Watch

Posted on by
15

(1) ALMOST HALFWAY TO 101. The Science Fiction 101 podcast devoted its 50th episode to a look at a vintage prozine: “Analog Solutions”.

This time we have another one of our (made-up) time-honored traditions: reviewing a current science fiction magazine. We usually do this once a year, to keep on top of current SF trends – and also to compare & contrast current magazines with the SF magazines of the past.

In our last episode, we went back 50 years to review ANALOG from 1974.

This time, we’re bang up-to-date (almost) with a very recent issue of the very same magazine. Analog is the longest-continuously-running SF magazine, having been around under various titles since the 1930s!

What will we make of Analog‘s longstanding reputation for “hard SF”? How does the magazine stack up against its wholly online competitors such as Clarkesworld and Uncanny? How does it stack up against its former self?

(2) FREE IMAGE LIBRARY. The Public Domain Review is “Announcing the Public Domain Image Archive”.

After the hundreds (thousands?) of hours trawling through online image collections since the PDR’s inception, we’ve decided it was time to create one of our own! We are really excited to share with you the launch of our new sister-project, the Public Domain Image Archive (PDIA), a curated collection of more than 10,000 out-of-copyright historical images, free for all to explore and reuse.

While The Public Domain Review primarily takes the form of an “arts journal”, it has also quietly served as a digital art gallery, albeit one fractured across essays and collections posts. The PDIA sets out to emphasise this visual nature of the PDR, freeing these images from their textual homes and placing them front and center for easier discovery, comparison, and appreciation. Our aim is to offer a platform that will serve both as a practical resource and a place to simply wander — an ever-growing portal to discover more than 2000 years of visual culture.

A valuable image archive in its own right, offering hand-picked highlights from hundreds of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, the PDIA also functions as a database of images featured in the PDR, offering an image-first approach to exploring the project’s content. The featured images each link to the relevant article on the PDR where one can read about the stories which surround the works….

Here’s an example of NASA art — government publications are not copyrighted, so in the public domain.

(3) IS THIS WORLDBUILDING CONVINCING? Mark Roth-Whitworth read C.J. Cherryh’s Alliance Rising, and says “I have written a meta-criticism of it — not of the story, which is as good as Cherryh is, but the political and interpersonal structure of the universe”: “Cherryh’s Alliance-Union universe”.

…I can already see problems with it – the sixty-three families, and none of them have anyone who is going to game the system, for their family’s benefit? None are going to cut back door deals with stations, to undercut other ship-families? Every one is going to be honest and trustworthy?…

(4) LISA TUTTLE’S HORROR PICKS. In “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup”, Lisa Tuttle reviews Aerth by Deborah Tomkins; Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix; Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao; and The Garden by Nick Newman.

(5) FIND OUT WHEN SFF EVENTS ARE HAPPENING. Stephen Beale, editor of The Steampunk Explorer site, has announced their “Expanded Calendar Listings”.

The recent re-launch of The Steampunk Explorer forced us to move some tasks to the back burner, and one of those was the calendar of events. When the site re-launched on Dec. 30, the calendar listed just 191 events taking place in 2025. But we got busy over the weekend and it now lists more than 600 happenings.

Here’s some background. We maintain a database of approximately 1,200 events that take place each year. In addition to steampunk gatherings, they include science fiction conventions, anime conventions, comic cons, Renaissance fairs, book fairs, and more.

Periodically, we go through the database and check the event websites to see if they’ve announced upcoming dates. If they have, we update the record and upload the event to the website. It’s a highly efficient process — if the event is in the same location and happens roughly the same time of the year, we can update the listing with five or six mouse clicks. (We also add new events as we learn about them.)…

If you want to see what’s happening over the next 12 months, check it out:

Steampunk events: All events | North America only

U.S. regions: New England | Mid-Atlantic | Southeast

Midwest | South Central | Mountain | Pacific

International: Canada | U.K./Europe | Australia/New Zealand

Plus the complete list covering all regions

(6) ROSENKRANTZ AND THEATER ARE DEAD. “There’s a New Version of Hamlet Staged in Grand Theft Auto” – CrimeReads warns fans of the Bard.

Friends, you read that right. A new film is coming to theaters in January that is… Hamlet staged in the Grand Theft Auto video game. Yes, Hamlet acted out by video game avatars, shot in-frame, and edited into its own film.

Before you wonder if something is rotten in the stage of filmmaking, or that the rest is violence, consider this…

Directed and written by Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls, and co-starring Crane and his friend Mark Oosterveen, the film, which is called Grand Theft Hamlet, is part digital narrative, part documentary. The film’s frame narrative features Crane and Oosterveen, two out-of-work actors sheltering-in-place during the COVID pandemic in January 2021, who discover that their video game pastime seems capable of not only bringing them together (and giving them a project) during isolation, but also allowing them to engage with a foundational text and their beloved craft.

The actors speak Shakespeare’s lines over the staging, in the modern, hyper-brutal world of GTA‘s Los Santos; underscoring the ways that Shakespeare’s words contain a kind of timelessness or malleability. According to critics, what ends up happening is not an attempt to make this as straight a Shakespeare production as possible, but to play with the text and the meaning of Hamlet in ways that only this new setting can unlock….

Grand Theft Hamlet – only in theaters starting January 17.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

January 11, 1961 — Jasper Fforde, 64.

I, like most folk I suspect, first discovered the somewhat eccentric charms of his writing in the Eyre Affair, the first of his novels with Tuesday Next from the Special Operation Network, Literary Detective (SO-27), who could literally enter the great and not so great works of English literature. 

Bidder and Stoughton published it twenty-five years ago. I’d like to say the Eyre Affair was a much-desired literary property but he says there were seventy-six publishers that he sent his manuscript to. I’m surprised there were that many publishers in the U.K. that he thought could have been interested. 

There would be six in the series in all — this novel followed by Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, First Among Sequels, One of our Thursdays Is Missing and The Woman Who Died a Lot. I won’t say that they were consistently great as they weren’t and the humor sometimes wore a lot more than a bit thin, but overall I like the series considerably. 

I re-listened to the Eyre Affair recently and even the Suck Fairy admitted that it had held well over a quarter of a century, particularly the idea of dodos as pets as she wants one. Or two. Shudder. 

Next up, and I wasn’t eggspecting to like it, yes, I know it’s a bad pun there, is The Big Over Easy which is set in the same universe as the Thursday Next novels though I don’t remember any overlapping characters twenty years after reading them. It reworks his first written novel, which absolutely failed to find any publisher whatsoever. 

Its original title was Who Killed Humpty Dumpty? Errr, wasn’t there a novel involving a rabbit by almost that name?  Kinda of drops a large anvil. It had a sequel of sorts in The Fourth Bear. Both are quite more than bearably good. Yes more bad puns.

I have not read his dystopian Shades of Grey series which is about a future Britain where everyone there is judged by how they perceive colors. Suspect someone with color blindness like myself wouldn’t be welcome there. A friend who did read it liked it a lot. 

His Dragonslayer series, also known as The Chronicles of Kazam, are a YA affair and a great deal of fun indeed. 

And we finish off with a news story from Toad News, “Extinct animals hostile to concept of being reengineered, study shows”.

Jasper Fforde

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) ANIMAL NEW YEAR’S PARTY. [Item by Steven French.] Here’s a more upbeat piece from the Guardian’s gaming newsletter, “Pushing Buttons”: “Replaying games from my past with my young children has been surreal – and transformative”.

Thanks to some distinctly Scottish weather over the holidays, my family and I ended up celebrating Hogmanay at home rather than at the party we’d planned to attend. My smallest son’s wee pal and his parents came over for dinner, and when the smaller members of our group started to spiral out of control around 9pm, we threw them a little midnight countdown party in Animal Crossing.

The last time I played Animal Crossing was in the depths of lockdown. Tending my island paradise helped me cope while largely imprisoned in a 2.5 bedroom basement flat with a baby, a toddler and a teenager. (I was far from the only one – the National Videogame Museum compiled an archive of people’s Animal Crossing experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic, and it’s evident that it was a lifeline for many.) Our guests had brought their family Switch, and we set up the kids with their little avatars so they could join the animals’ New Year party.

They spent about 10 minutes gleefully whacking each other with bug nets before gathering with the other inhabitants in the square with a giant countdown clock in the background, the island’s racoon magnate Tom Nook offering party poppers and shiny top-hats. I was visited by a sudden, arresting memory of New Year’s Eve 2021, which I spent on my sofa, alone but also not alone, because I was with my friends in Animal Crossing, watching the same countdown clock tick down. My youngest had just started walking, and was unsteady on his short, chunky legs. Turning away from the screen, I saw him joking with his big brother, thrilled at being up so late. It felt surreal.

(10) EYE-POPPING. DJ Food recalls the “Psychedelic Crunchie Bomb poster offer” of 1969. The original ad is reproduced below. See good images of the four posters at the link.

A rare set of four “Crunchie Bomb” posters commissioned in 1969 by Frys Chocolate, measuring 20×15 inches. Two designed by graphic artist and Professor of Illustration at the RCA, Dan Fern, two by renowned designer Chris McEwan. They were available in exchange for 3 Crunchie wrappers – see the last photo of the original advert.

(11) I SOLEMNLY SWEAR. “Horror’s Hottest Ticket: These Directors Are Never Releasing Their Movie for Home Viewing and Have Created a Cult Hit” – Yahoo! has the story.

It started as something of a joke.

While cutting a trailer for their co-directorial effort “It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This,” Nick Toti and Rachel Kempf had a little fun at the end of the clip.

“We were like, ‘Oh, it kind of needs something,’” he says. “So we put the scroll at the end. It just says, ‘The producers of this film regret to inform you that it will not be released online. See it in theaters.’”

In fact, the three-person creative team behind the found footage horror movie “It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This” made an unusual pact before they even shot a frame: They would never make the work available for streaming, digital or physical purchase, only allowing it to play theatrically. Yet what might have seemed like a limitation ended up creating word-of-mouth interest in the microbudget production, which led to sold-out shows across the country without any promotional dollars….

(12) THE LAST CHATGPT ARGUMENT OF KINGS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Is it a killer robot? No. But it was a step toward that and a step too far for OpenAI to be comfortable letting this engineer use ChatGPT as a front-end to command their sentry gun/mount. Besides, they seem to be having way too much fun riding the mounted weapon like it was a potentially deadly mechanical bull at a country-western bar. 

(Pro Hint: Next time just grab a ruler. It’s cheaper and you can finish your measuring project much faster.)

“Viral ChatGPT-powered sentry gun gets shut down by OpenAI” reports Ars Technica. Videos at the link.

OpenAI says it has cut off API access to an engineer whose video of a motorized sentry gun controlled by ChatGPT-powered commands has set off a viral firestorm of concerns about AI-powered weapons.

An engineer going by the handle sts_3d started posting videos of a motorized, auto-rotating swivel chair project in August. By November, that same assembly appeared to seamlessly morph into the basis for a sentry gun that could quickly rotate to arbitrary angles and activate a servo to fire precisely aimed projectiles (though only blanks and simulated lasers are shown being fired in his videos).

Earlier this week, though, sts_3d started getting wider attention for a new video showing the sentry gun’s integration with OpenAI’s real-time API. In the video, the gun uses that ChatGPT integration to aim and fire based on spoken commands from sts_3d and even responds in a chirpy voice afterward.

“If you need any other assistance, please let me know,” the ChatGPT-powered gun says after firing a volley at one point. “Good job, you saved us,” sts_3d responds, deadpan.

“I’m glad I could help!” ChatGPT intones happily.

In response to a comment request from Futurism, OpenAI said it had “proactively identified this violation of our policies and notified the developer to cease this activity ahead of receiving your inquiry. …”

(13) BLUE ORIGIN WILL LAUNCH NEW GLENN ON MONDAY. “The Very Long Wait for Jeff Bezos’ Big Rocket Is Coming to an End” – in the New York Times (behind a paywall). (Note: The date has changed since the article was published. The rocket now is set to make its inaugural launch attempt as soon as Monday at 1 am. Eastern. Weather conditions at sea, where the company hopes to recover part of the rocket after launch, prompted the 24-hour delay.)

The foundational building block for Jeff Bezos’ space dreams is finally ready to launch.

A New Glenn rocket — built by Blue Origin, the rocket company that Mr. Bezos started nearly a quarter century ago — is sitting on a launchpad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. It is as tall as a 32-story building, and its voluminous nose cone can carry larger satellites and other payloads than other rockets in operation today.

In the predawn darkness on Sunday, it may head to space for the first time.

“This has been very long awaited,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington.

New Glenn could inject competition into a rocket business where one company — Elon Musk’s SpaceX — is winning big. While companies and governments have welcomed SpaceX’s innovations that have greatly cut the cost of sending stuff to space, they are wary of relying on one company that is subject to the whims of the world’s richest person.

“SpaceX is clearly dominating” the market for launching larger and heavier payloads, Mr. Harrison said. “There needs to be a viable competitor to keep that market healthy. And it looks like Blue Origin is probably the best positioned to be that competitor to SpaceX.”

New Glenn is larger than SpaceX’s current workhorse rocket, the Falcon 9, but not as big as Starship, the fully reusable rocket system that SpaceX is currently developing….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. From four years ago, a WIRED making-of short: “Every C-3PO Costume Explained By Anthony Daniels”.

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