By Steve Vertlieb: Robert Eggers’ lavish remake of Nosferatu is a love letter from Hell, a provocative, profoundly disturbing adult horror masterpiece. Infusing elements from Bram Stoker’s literary classic, Dracula, with imagery from F.W. Murnau’s original 1922 cinematic nightmare, as well as Francis Ford Coppola’s brooding interpretation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this latest re-telling of the infamous fantasy brings together fabled folklore and deeply troubling Germanic mythology to form a masterful visual presentation steeped in spectacular gothic landscapes, and sumptuous sensuality. Tales told over haunted centuries in hushed whispers ‘neath European campfires enshrouded in darkness. Tales of depravity and bestiality hovering menacingly within the darkest corners of ancient fears and imagination. These grim fairy tales divide the invisible lines of separation between rationality and insanity for, despite our pretense of civilized and mannered society, a frightening undercurrent of disruption and horror lies just beneath the surface of imagination. What lies waiting in darkness, beyond our fragile grasp of the pretense of reality, may ultimately drown us beyond redemption in a sea of madness and depravity.
It is our lost adolescent frailty, and fear of things that “go bump in the night” that forge the fragile bonds of smug maturity, and refusal to return to the mythology of childhood dreams and nightmares. Within the conflicted spectrum of adult conceit lies the tantalizing fascination with both cinematic and fictional horror, historically consuming our senses, in the often delusional belief that once we leave the theater and turn the lights back on, that our lives will return safely and securely to a world of wholesome normality. This has been the basis of our lifelong fascination with horror. To stick our toes into the darkness for a fleeting moment, and then retreat quickly into the reassuring, if deceptive, light of comfort and warmth, is somehow reassuring. It is an affirmation of life and security, a protection from the ancient forces of darkness that momentarily threaten our semblance of reality. It is our symbolic crucifix to ward off evil.
Nosferatu, written and directed by Robert Eggers, is a frightening reincarnation of the vampire legend. A larger than death interpretation of Stoker’s Dracula, Eggers cinematic fairy tale is a traumatic descent into demonic possession, filmed in grand guignol style and imagery, with devotional stylistic tributes to both Charles Dickens and L. Frank Baum.
Robert Eggers
Based upon F.W. Murnau’s unauthorized variation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (UFA, 1922), this newest and perhaps definitive reincarnation of the original silent classic is a horrifying realization of our deepest, most troubling nightmares. The tale is as old as time. An innocent young man is sent by his firm to the wild, untamed mountains of Transylvania to arrange for the purchase of a decaying castle in England and passage by ship to London by a mysterious count whose presence in his native land is both feared and abhorred by the simple peasantry surrounding his property. Count Orlok is a scourge upon the land, a loathsome creature of the night whose nocturnal wanderings have infected the local village with dread. Infants have gone missing, while young, chaste women have been attacked and savaged. Orlok’s command of ravenous wolves and fearsome rats stalking the woods have both cautioned and terrified the neighboring citizenry whose doors are barred after dark, shielded by ancient religious artifacts protecting the innocent. Superstitions guard against infestations of evil, as a cloud of death envelops the lands adjoining the broken battlements of a once proud castle, while ghastly apparitions saturate unholy ground.
Upon his arrival in this strange, depraved land, Thomas Hutter is warned away by anxious peasantry, fearful for his spirit. Hutter is a young newlywed in need of an infusion of funding for his marriage and not dissuaded by the fearful concerns for his safety. After all, he has traveled for weeks to arrive at his destination, and must complete his work in order to return home to his recent bride. Compelled to walk through the deeply menacing woods toward the forbidding edifice, a dark carriage arrives among the shadows to aid in continuing his journey. The bewildering ravages of the brooding countryside invite their unwary guest into the courtyard of a nightmarish structure, embattled by centuries of disrepair, its very foundations rotting into the scorched Earth. Welcomed by a monstrous visage, shrouded in darkness, Count Orlok welcomes his unwary prey into the dungeons of depravity that will soon become his agonized imprisonment. While Ellen Hutter waits anxiously for word of her new husband’s arrival, his torturous captivity within the walls of the ancient castle have painfully begun.
While Dracula’s guest is left to languish within the prison walls of growing madness, Count Orlok departs for alien shores. Having seen a photograph of his captive’s bride, the heinous vampire determines to find and possess her. Thrust into the comparatively mannered pretense of Victorian sense and sensibility, the malevolent prince of darkness arrives by ship at the coastal community amidst a malignant plague of vermin infesting the seaside wharf, its impending evil suffocating the innocent populace.
Written by Robert Eggers, while faithfully adhering to its literary roots, screen credit is given both to author Bram Stoker, as well as original scenarist Henrik Galeen for the Murnau silent classic from which Eggers’ film adaptation is derived. The sumptuous, softly muted, often spectacular look of the film is credited to cinematographer Jarin Blaschke and set decorator Beatrice Brentnerova, while the crisp, often shocking editing of the film is devised by Louise Ford, as overseen by the director. The musical score by composer Robin Carolan is eerily chilling.
Variations of the Dracula novel have seen numerous times since its publication in 1897, including a tepid 1979 remake directed by Werner Herzog with Klaus Kinski in the title role, eerily adapting the distinctive look of the vampire created originally by Max Schreck in the signature 1922 production, Nosferatu – Eine Synphonie des Grauens, or “A Symphony of Terror’ for its English language release. Renfield, a dark, comedic telling of the story, released in 2023, featured Nicholas Cage as the vampire, with actor Nicholas Hoult in the dubious title role of the creature’s slave. The proverbial fates conspired to bring the actor back to the thrice-told tale, as Nicholas Hoult once again assumes a commanding, intensely frightening performance as Thomas Hutter, among the leading protagonists in this newest incarnation of the story, along with gifted, physically exquisite actress Lily-Rose Depp (daughter of actor Johnny Depp) as Count Orlok’s noble prey, Ellen Hutter. One must not forget Shadow of the Vampire, an embarrassing 2001 conceit in which German actor Max Schreck as the original Nosferatu is actually a vampire posing as an actor whose physical makeup is too startling to be artificially conceived.
Both Lily-Rose Depp and Nicholas Hoult deliver unnervingly powerful performances in the leads, while Bill Skarsgard dominates the screen as Count Orlok, his guttural voice and demeanor creating much of the most striking, haunting visual, as well as vocal, imagery. If there is a single disappointment in the film, it is director Eggers’ decision to abandon the physical appearance of Max Schrek’s rodent like features in favor of a more human, if towering, presence. Willem Dafoe is compelling as the aged professor and scientist recognizing the threat of the “Vampyr,” yet needlessly over the top in his performance during the film’s final sequences. Still, it is Eggers’ direction, striking visual style and lead performances that elevate the classic tale of Nosferatu to near cinematic perfection as a classic nightmare, and ultimate “Symphony of Terror.”
Last year, a romance publisher took an expensive gamble on the latest novel by the best-selling author Rebecca Yarros.
To help the novel, “Fourth Wing,” stand out in the crowded fantasy-romance genre, the publisher, Entangled, invested in a limited deluxe edition with a bold metallic cover and black sprayed edges featuring dragons.
It worked: All 115,000 copies of the deluxe edition sold out almost everywhere within a week.
“My only regret is that I printed too few,” said Liz Pelletier, Entangled’s publisher.
When the next novel in the series, “Iron Flame,” came out, Entangled was prepared, and printed a million copies of the deluxe edition. Once again, they quickly sold out.
For the third book in the series, “Onyx Storm,” which comes out in January, Entangled is printing two million copies of the deluxe edition, which has stenciled artwork and black and silver edges adorned with flying gold and black dragons, along with a smaller print run of 500,000 standard copies. More than a million “Onyx Storm” deluxe editions have already sold….
(2) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Jacob Weisman and Ben Berman Ghan on Wednesday, January 8, 2025. Starts 7:00 p.m. Eastern. KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003 (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs).
Jacob Weisman
Jacob Weisman is the publisher at Tachyon Publications, which he founded in 1995. He is a World Fantasy Award winner for the anthology The New Voices of Fantasy, which he co-edited with Peter S. Beagle. His writing has appeared in The Nation, Realms of Fantasy, The Louisville Courier-Journal, The Seattle Weekly, and The Cooper Point Journal. Weisman’s first novel, Egyptian Motherlode co-authored with David Sandner, was recently published by Fairwood Press. He lives in San Francisco, CA.
Ben Berman Ghan
Ben Berman Ghan is a PhD Candidate in English and creative writing at the University of Calgary. His debut collection of fiction, What We See in the Smoke, was published in 2019, his novella Visitation Seeds was published in 2020, and his novel The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits was published with Buckrider Books in 2024. His prose, poetry, and essays have been published in Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, Filling Station Magazine, The Blasted Tree Publishing Co., Pinhole Poetry, and The Ancillary Review of Books.
(3) MEDICAL UPDATE. Barry Longyear told Facebook readers today what he’s trying to accomplish despite debilitating cancer.
A little update is in order. It is cancer, It is gobbling up my energy before I can log it in, pain too. I haven’t done any writing since September 10th when this nightmare began, they are dangling chemo and radiation in my future, apparently I am too frail to withstand the preferred operation. So, as always, The future is a mystery. I wish I had enough energy to tell you about all of the fine and quite inspiring men and women I’ve met along the way, but suffice it to say that they are there. The ticket to their company is to reach out. My most recent hospital stay was in a rehab/nursing home packed with patients with the most heartbreaking handicaps one can imagine. And they laugh and joke and point out I am still on this side of the grass. We’ll see what I can get done on the three books I want to get done, The Moman Omniquel, Rope Tricks (the concluding Joe Torio Mystery), and I am going to try my hand at an autobiography: The Superfluous Earth Man or I was an Extra Terrestrial. If I can get all that done before Uncle Reaper comes to collect. Perhaps I can wade through your comments, friend requests, and such. In any event, Disney is moving forward with The Enemy Papers, I have talked with the fellow in charge, and I have high hopes “Enemy Mine” will come out better than the previous version. HAPPY HOLIDAYS, friends, and remember. If the planet Earth didn’t suck we’d all fall off.
(4) DECK THE HALLS OF THE TARDIS. Camestros Felapton assays the Doctor Who Christmas special: “Doctor Who: Joy to the World”.
It is Doctor Who Christmas Special time and if this time of year is about indulging to excess in sugar and sentimentality Russell T. Davies and Stephen Moffat are up for that.
Fluffy, silly, and a remix of some familiar Moffat themes (The Doctor forced to live a more mundane existance for a period, time paradoxes and uploaded minds as an after life) the plot also hits you with some emotional gut punches….
(5) ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWERS. Tom Nichols remembers “Star Trek’s Cold War” in The Atlantic (behind a paywall)
…But to appreciate the Cold War setting of Star Trek, you need only to understand that the Earth-led United Federation of Planets (a free and democratic association committed to equality among all beings) was NATO. Captain James T. Kirk—born and raised in Iowa, according to the show—commanded its finest flagship, the USS Enterprise. The bad guys, standing in for the Soviet Union, were the Klingons, whose empire was a brutal and aggressive dictatorship.
Two Cold War themes run through Star Trek: the risks of great-power confrontation, and the danger of ultimate annihilation. In “The Omega Glory,” a mediocre episode that Roddenberry pushed to have produced, the Enterprisefinds an underdeveloped planet where Asian-looking “Kohms” oppress the white “Yangs.” Turns out it’s a planet that developed just like Earthin every way—there is some sci-fi hocus-pocus to explain how planets sometimes do this—including an America and a Red China (Kohms and Yangs, Communists and Yankees, get it?), and then wiped itself out with biological warfare.
Other episodes were a bit more sophisticated. In “The Return of the Archons,” Kirk encounters a society that is run like a beehive by a single leader named Landru, who demands that all citizens be “of the body.” (Spoiler: He’s a computer. Out-of-control computers were another common theme.) As Cushman notes, the crushing of the individual for the good of the collective was an intentional statement about life under communism.
Likewise, just as the U.S. and the Soviet Union competed against each other in the developing world of the 20th century, the Klingons and the Federation were often at odds with each other over developing planets in the future….
You have two books about magic out in one month, is this mere scheduling kismet or part of some great working you’ve had in plan for decades?
I never have great workings planned even days in advance. So, no this is purely just the way things have worked out. I started working on the Moon & Serpent Bumper Book of Magic fifteen years ago, around 2010 or so, back then we were expecting it to be out in a couple of years. Then the project expanded and Steve passed away, and we realised that although we’d got all the writing done for it we hadn’t got any of the art commissioned. So that’s what the last few years have been about, getting it all drawn.
As for The Great When, it wasn’t deliberate so much as a coincidence of scheduling but, yes, it’s two books about magic that even have some crossover. Well, the bumper book is about magic, whereas The Great When has got some magicians in it, but it isn’t really anything that is traditional magic — I was prepared to just make most of it up. The Bumper Book is an encyclopaedic history of magic and all sorts of other things as well, but we’ve got characters like Austin Osman Spare, Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune in both.
So, there’s a tiny bit of overlap, but the intents of both books are different. One is to explain magic as it is and as it has been, and the other is an attempt to try and create something new in fantasy, without relying upon all the magical tropes you get reiterated so often in fantasy novels.
(7) DONALD BITZER (1934-2024). The New York Times reports (in a tribute behind its paywall): “Donald Bitzer, an electrical engineer whose groundbreaking computer system PLATO, developed in the 1960s and ’70s at the University of Illinois, was a telegram from the digital future that combined instant messaging, email, chat rooms and gaming on flat-screen plasma displays, died on Dec. 10…”
…Dr. Bitzer, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois, began developing PLATO in 1960 as a tool for educators to create interactive, individualized coursework. It swiftly evolved into “a culture, both physical and online,” Mr. Dear wrote, “with its own jargon, customs and idioms.”
PLATO, an acronym for Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations, initially ran on television-like screens connected to the university’s ILLIAC I computer, a five-ton machine powered by 2,800 vacuum tubes.
To increase interactivity, in 1964 Dr. Bitzer, along with a fellow professor, H. Gene Slottow, and a graduate student, Robert Willson, invented a plasma display illuminated by gas-infused pixels — the same technology that would later power flat-screen televisions.
Thousands of PLATO terminals, radiant with bright orange text and graphics, were installed around the University of Illinois campus and eventually at other universities and high schools throughout the country.
Connected via phone lines, the touch-screen terminals were a kind of first draft of social networking that presaged the way digital devices now dominate daily life. Students learned math, Spanish and other subjects on them during the day, and at night they played games against one another, communicated in chat rooms and became pen pals.
“It was kind of crazy,” Ray Ozzie, a former student of Dr. Bitzer’s who later became Microsoft’s chief technical officer, said in an interview. “It was a little peek into what the internet would later become, and it was all fostered by Don’s vision, by him creating an environment for innovation.”
(8) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
December 27, 2000 – Gosford Park
Twenty-four years ago this weekend, Gosford Park premiered. It was directed by Robert Altman from the script by Julian Fellowes, who went on to be the driving force behind the Downton Abbey series. It came together when Director Balaban suggested an Agatha Christie-style whodunit to Altman and introduced him to Julian Fellowes, with whom Balaban had been working on a different project.
It is a country manor house mystery in the style of Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, which I just reviewed, and in keeping with that kind of mystery had a very large ensemble cast: Eileen Atkins, Bob Balaban, Alan Bates, Charles Dance, Stephen Fry, Michael Gambon, Richard E. Grant, Derek Jacobi, Kelly Macdonald, Helen Mirren, Jeremy Northam, Clive Owen, Ryan Phillippe, Maggie Smith, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Emily Watson.
I’ll just single out Stephen Fry as Inspector Thompson as the cast is far too large to detail here. He seems to really believe he has something in common with the McCordles and their guests. However, Sylvia, one of the family, doesn’t even bother to learn his name, and makes it very clear through not so subtle airs that he’s working class and beneath all of them.
It was filmed mostly on location using three different manor houses, though sound stages were built to film the scenes of the manor’s downstairs area. Apparently it was also filmed in three different countries — the United Kingdom, the United States and Italy with production costs of nearly twenty million in total. It did very well at the box office with it bringing in nearly ninety million. It was Altman’s second most successful film after M*A*S*H.
Critics truly loved it with Roger Ebert wringing for the Chicago Sun-Times said it was “such a joyous and audacious achievement it deserves comparison with his very best movies.” And Nell Murray at the Verge summed it up perfectly noting that “For a film about homicide and class conflict, Gosford Park is surprisingly congenial.”
Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it an excellent rating of seventy-eight percent.
I’ve watched it more than a few times and consider it to be quite excellent. That reminds me that I should write up Knives Out.
(9) NEXT DOOR AT MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Rod Serling Statue (Update)
And perhaps across his mind there will flit a little errant wish, that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth. — ending words of “Walking Distance”
“Not all statues, no matter how much they deserve to exist, actually exist. At least yet. Such it is with this for the creator of the Twilight Zone series, Rod Serling.” That’s what I knew when I wrote several years ago. Now has transited from the Twilight Zone to this reality.
In doing this extended look at the statues of fantastic creatures, mythic beings and sometimes their creators, I continually come across quite fascinating stories. Such it is with this story. And this one was no exception.
In the “Walking Distance” episode of The Twilight Zone, a middle-aged advertising executive travels back in time to his childhood, arriving just a few miles away from his native town. That episode was based on Binghamton, New York, the hometown of Serling as he graduated from Binghamton Central High School in 1943.
I had come upon news stories that the town in conjunction with the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation and The State of New York had decided Serling should be honored by his hometown.
The Serling Memorial Foundation said it will use the grant and additional fundraising to place the Serling statue in Recreation Park next year. Note that this is the second fundraising effort as the first, a Kickstarter for $90,000, failed.
I couldn’t find any update on the actual production of this statue, so I wouldn’t swear than it was going to happen in the time frame stated. The website for the Serling Memorial Foundation was at that point, to put delicately, a bloody mess and said nothing about that project at all. Now they have a page showing the dedication of the statue with video and quite a bit of detail about the project.
So go here for all the details on this extraordinary project.
…This book is significantly shorter than its predecessor, and feels less of a “pressure cooker” than the first novel, showing that even by keeping the chassis of the first book, Hunt wants to and does experiment with some new things. Sean proves to be well connected, and those connections and his social skills give him some new options and ideas that were not in the first book. Now, given that Sean is dealing with his thought-to-be-dead sister, and some of the fallout from the first book, this gives the book a much more social feel to the conflicts in the narrative than the first. Sure, there are plenty of action sequences like the first novel, although our field of play is generally set in locations within a city, and there are no monsters this time other than the human ones (and yes, some of those are bad enough). So Sean really shines in this book in a way he didn’t in the first book….
…By the time I was nine I already loved vampires. I had seen the Lugosi film often and had been Dracula for Halloween the year before; there’s a photo of me with a painted widow’s peak and plastic fangs too big for my mouth. I was also nine when I first saw Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). This was a truly frightening vampire makeup design. The nails, the hunch, the shape of the pointed skull. As a child, it felt as if Max Schreck commanded the screen like a real vampire. The degraded quality of the 16mm VHS transfer made the film seem as if it was disinterred from its grave, unearthed from the past, adding to its authenticity. And this adaptation stripped Stoker’s story of its over-stuffed Victoriana and distilled it to its essence: that simple enigmatic fairytale.
About 10 years ago I embarked on writing the screenplay for my own adaptation of Nosferatu. In taking on the most influential horror film, based on the most influential horror novel, I felt a responsibility to make the vampire as scary as possible. This could not be a sparkling vampire….
…Enter the 2022 movie Linoleum. It was never advertised as a remake, but it so cleverly deconstructs the plot of American Beauty that it might as well have openly acknowledged the extent of its debt. Similarly set in the late 1990s, it proposes a more empathetic alternative to the earlier movie’s cynicism. And from this point on I’m going to need to spoil the secrets of Linoleum….
The reason for Aoshima’s nickname was clear before we had set foot on the island. As our tiny vessel slowed to a halt and its handful of passengers prepared to disembark, the quayside was alive with orangey-white blurs – a whiskered welcome party that forms as soon as its members hear the hum of an approaching motor.
The only human here to greet us is Naoko Kamimoto, appropriately dressed in a pinafore with feline designs, who secures the boat with a rope as half a dozen cats swirl around her feet.
A 35-minute ferry ride off the coast of Ehime prefecture in Shikoku – the smallest of Japan’s four main islands – Aoshima is the best-known of the country’s 11 “cat islands”. Despite the absence of a single shop, restaurant or guesthouse, this speck in the Seto Inland Sea has become a must-see for visitors intrigued by a remote community where cats easily outnumber humans.
But Aoshima’s days as a feline-fixated tourist destination are numbered. A decade ago there were about 200 feral cats here – the descendants of animals enlisted by fishers to destroy rodents who were gnawing through the nets they used to catch huge quantities of sardines.
Kamimoto, who moved to the island after she married Hidenori, a local man, believes the number is now closer to 80. They are all aged over seven, and a third are battling illnesses, including blindness and respiratory diseases, caused by decades of inbreeding….
… The decline in the cat population is about more than the passage of time, however. Aoshima is the victim of a demographic crisis that is afflicting thousands of rural and island communities across Japan. Almost 900 people lived here just after the second world war, but the number had dropped to 80 around a decade ago, as ageing fishers and their spouses moved to the mainland, leaving their cats behind. By 2017, there were just 13 residents. Today, four are left: Naoko and Hidenori, and another couple who prefer to keep out of the spotlight….
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Joel Zakem, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
…Since the Bumpy Passage fell out of use many years ago, I created a travel pod so that Ur Sid could make his journey in the style to which he had become accustomed, and packed him carefully in a box. He accompanied nine other boxes containing the Full Run of Lee-and-Miller, Lee, and Miller published works.
Well, today Ur Sid arrived at his new post. Jeremy Brett, Curator of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Collection has kindly sent along photographs of this momentous arrival, which are posted below.
Right now, Ur Sid is sharing office space with Curator Brett. Very shortly, he will be transferred to Collections Care so that a proper enclosure for Ur Sid and his belongings, including his travel diary, may be constructed….
(2) CHENGDU TWEETS. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] The official Twitter account of Chengdu, China recently posted some tweets of interest:
Yesterday there was a video commemorating the one-year anniversary of the Chengdu Worldcon. A bit cheekily, there are a couple of shots from the Glasgow Worldcon around 1:15 in, that aren’t flagged up as such:
Today there’s a video with Ben Yalow saying how happy he is to be back in Chengdu:
#MemoriesOfChengdu A year ago, Ben Yalow, co-chair of 2023 World Science Fiction Convention, visited Chengdu and left with unforgettable memories. Today, GoChengdu surprised him with a custom postcard full of memories. “I hate to give it back, I want to keep it!”#chengdu#scifi… pic.twitter.com/YlZO1ludOW
There’s also a tweet asking for responses about SF experiences in Chengdu; as yet they haven’t had any replies.
#MemoriesofChengdu Can you believe it's been a year since the 2023 Chengdu Sci-Fi Convention? ???? The sci-fi vibe here is electric, from futuristic art installations to tech innovations and passionate fans! Share your memories and expectations about Chengdu and sci-fi with us!… pic.twitter.com/vmac86A9JJ
Incidentally, these posts followed straight after one criticizing a recent bill before Congress in the U.S. to fund “badmouthing China”, indicating this account seemingly isn’t just for doing local tourism promotion type stuff…
(3) ICON 50 TO BE DELAYED TO 2026. [Item by Michael J. “Orange Mike” Lowrey.] On Friday at the opening ceremonies of ICON 49 in Cedar Rapids, it was announced that ICON 50, originally scheduled for October 2025, has been postponed to 2026, due to problems with money and with volunteer shortages.
This follows the recent announcement that WisCon for 2025 will be a Wisconline, all-online event.
(4) FIRST BITE. Adam Roberts has a funny take on a recent Guardian story:
In a Dublin library once frequented by James Joyce and WB Yeats, beneath a turquoise and white domed ceiling and surrounded by oak shelving, Brian Cleary stumbled across something by Dracula author Bram Stoker he believed no living person had ever read.
Cleary, who had taken time off from his job at a maternity hospital after suffering sudden hearing loss, was looking through the Stoker archives at the National Library of Ireland when he came across something strange. In a Dublin Daily Express advert from New Year’s Day 1891 promoting a supplement, one of the items listed was “Gibbett Hill, By Bram Stoker”. He had never heard of it, and went searching for a trace. “It wasn’t something that was Google-able or was in any of the bibliographies,” he said.’
Cleary tracked down the supplement and found Gibbet Hill. “This is a lost story,” he realised. “I don’t think anyone knows about this.” The story follows an unnamed narrator who runs into three children standing by the memorial of a murdered sailor on Gibbet Hill, Surrey, which is also referred to in Dickens’ 1839 novel Nicholas Nickleby.
Together, the four walk to the top of Gibbet Hill. Distracted by the view, the narrator loses sight of the children. He takes a nap among some trees, and wakes to see the children a short distance away, before a snake passes over his feet towards the children, who appear able to communicate with and control the snake. Later, the children attack the narrator. The story culminates with the snake wriggling out of the narrator’s chest, gliding away down the hillside…
In his new sci-fi horror novel, “Absolution,” Jeff VanderMeer returns to the world of 2014’s award-winning “Annihilation,” which launched his Southern Reach Trilogy. Below, the best-selling ‘weird fiction’ author recommends six psychological expeditions into the unknown.
The six-pack includes:
‘A Perfect Spy’ by John le Carré (1986)
“The past is another country” may be a cliché, but not in the hands of my favorite espionage novelist. His masterpiece charts the entanglements, both professional and personal, that bring about the downfall of operative Magnus Pym. A stunning tale of betrayals, redemption, and, ultimately, a compassionate portrayal of a compromised life.
Future generations will look back on 2024 as the moment when the United States of America made a defining choice about climate change. This November, we’re either going to renew our commitment to fixing this mess we created, or embrace denial and plunge the world into a nightmarish scenario.
Nobody much is talking about it, but this election feels especially important for a couple of reasons: first, we are dangerously close to reaching some climate benchmarks that we won’t be able to come back from easily, if at all. And second, we are now being faced with daily brutal reminders of the impacts of climate change on our world. As Kamala Harris herself said in a powerful 2023 speech, climate change is here and the effects are in our face everyday.
The good news is, the past few years have seen some real advances toward clean energy and green infrastructure. Tax credits included in the Inflation Reduction Act are helping to make wind and solar power more affordable than non-renewable energy sources, and the subsidies in the bill are creating more jobs in the clean energy sector. But there’s much more work to be done…
And if you scroll down past the end of Anders’ article there is an index to other posts, including several by genre contributors Tomi Adeyemi, George Saunders, Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), and Beth Revis.
WCP: When hearing the phrase “speculative fiction,” most readers will immediately think we’re referring to either science fiction or fantasy, and there are elements of both in your novel. But this work leans strongly in to literary writing, with beautiful, sometimes even lyrical storytelling and far less of the extensive worldbuilding than we’d normally see in the aforementioned genres. How do you approach “speculative literary” writing?
TC: Before I stumbled upon the term “speculative fiction,” I used to say that I write science fiction for people who don’t think they read science fiction. But that was only an approximation of what I was doing, and I’m glad that more people are discovering the depth and breadth of fantastical writing beyond strict genre definitions.
I love the way “speculative literary” opens up narrative by allowing us to go beyond the bounds of realism to get at emotional truths. If something feels surreal, why not try to capture that cognitive dissonance by portraying it as something palpably unreal? Certain parts of American culture are indeed surreal to me, like our relationship with guns, or our lack of reckoning with history, or our income inequality, and those areas of disconnect came out indirectly in stories about sneaking needles striking us everywhere from home to school to church, or screaming ropes howling in the darkest corner of a dusty barn, or sword fighting robots protecting the bunkers of the uber-wealthy….
You wake up naked in a hotel room. You don’t recall who you are or how you got there. Your clothes are missing. Someone knocks on the door.
So begins “Amnesia,” a text-only video game released in 1986, in which players inhabit the perspective of a man experiencing memory loss while staying in midtown Manhattan at the fictional Sunderland Hotel. Players must negotiate a series of puzzles to find much-needed clothes, leave the hotel, and navigate Manhattan’s busy streets. By gathering clues and avoiding innumerable pitfalls, they gradually discover that the protagonist has a fiancée he cannot remember, is being pursued by an assassin, and is wanted for murder in Texas.
A groundbreaking digital work of interactive fiction by the sci-fi novelist Thomas M. Disch, the game anchors “Remembering Amnesia: Rebooting the first computerized novel,” an exhibit on view through March 2 in the Hanke Exhibition Gallery at Sterling Memorial Library.
Drawing on materials from Disch’s archive at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the exhibit explores the author’s novel attempt to move video games into the realm of literary fiction. It also describes the efforts of the Yale Library’s Digital Preservation unit to preserve the game, originally stored and played on now-obsolete hardware, and restore it to life.
The revived version of “Amnesia” is available to play on three workstations — two located just outside the exhibit space and one in Bass Library — that emulate a mid-1980s computing environment….
You declare in your new title that five themes exist in Serling’s portfolio. What are they? With this book, I was inspired to curate what I thought were the best episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” collected in a framework that would separate my “greatest hits” of the series into distinct themes that would encompass the diversity—and similarity—of the best episodes by Serling and company. Of course, one can argue that there are more than just five themes of “The Twilight Zone” that the breadth of its 156 episodes would suggest, but I decided rather quickly on the following five, almost as if they suggested themselves: “Science and Superstition,” “Suburban Nightmares,” “A Question of Identity,” “Obsolete Man,” and “The Time Element.” (Of the five, “Suburban Nightmares” is the only one I coined that does not have a direct “Twilight Zone” connection; bonus points for recognizing that “A Question of Identity” comes from dialogue spoken by the protagonist of [the show’s] debut episode, “Where is Everybody?”)
(10) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by John King Tarpinian.]
Anniversary, October 19, 1953 — Fahrenheit 451
By John King Tarpinian: On this day in history one of the most read science fiction novels was published. One of the few, if not only, novels of sci-fi on a majority of middle and high school reading lists.
Fahrenheit 451 is one of three books that as a young man made me think about stuff outside of my comfortable life. The other two were Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun and Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, the three making up a trio of books that woke up my little brain.
Fahrenheit451 was made into a movie by the French director, François Truffaut. It was his first movie in color and his only English-language film. Remember the French guy in Close Encounters of the Third Kind? That was Truffaut.
Flatscreen TVs were in this book. Bluetooth was in this book. Most people know that Ray never drove a car, remember that in the book Clarisse was killed by a speeding car. Montag was a brand of paper; Faber was a brand of pencil. Beatty was named for the lion tamer, Clyde Beatty.
Bradbury’s book rails against censorship, in any form.
Lastly, Ray’s headstone reads “Author of Fahrenheit 451.”
(Use this link to see a parade of Fahrenheit 451 book covers from over the years.)
(12) READING THE ROOMS. For the “Every Town Deserves a Library” episode of the Our Opinions Are Correct podcast, hosts Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders are joined by Ken Liu.
Science fiction and fantasy are full of wondrous libraries containing everything from powerful artifacts to some dang good reads. How does the idealized view of libraries in speculative fiction compare with the real-life libraries, which are under attack by would-be censors and culture warriors? Also, we talk to award-winning author Ken Liu about his brand new translation of the classic Daoist text, the Dao De Jing.
(13) JOY WILLIAMS Q&A. [Item by Steven French.] Joy Williams on why fiction should be ‘uncanny’ (and on reading Baba Yaga stories as a child) in the Guardian.
For many years, you’ve written about the climate emergency and environmental destruction. I wonder if your thinking about how to represent that in fiction has developed, and where you think it might go?
I’m always trying to convince myself that fiction will rise up and throw away the crutches that have been supporting it for far too long. The comfy story has got to change. It needs to be more uncanny, less personal….
Paramount+ has set January 24, 2025 for the premiere of its upcoming movie Star Trek: Section 31, starring Michelle Yeoh in a reprisal of her Star Trek: Discovery role as Emperor Philippa Georgiou.
The announcement was made Saturday during the Star Trek universe panel at New York Comic Con. Yeoh made a video appearance during the panel, which featured cast members Omari Hardwick, Kacey Rohl and Robert Kazinsky, along with executive producer and director Olatunde Osunsanmi.
Star Trek: Section 31 will premiere exclusively Friday, January 24 in the U.S. and international markets where the service is available….
…In a recent study evaluating how chatbots make loan suggestions for mortgage applications, researchers at Pennsylvania’s Lehigh University found something stark: there was clear racial bias at play.
With 6,000 sample loan applications based on data from the 2022 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, the chatbots recommended denials for more Black applicants than identical white counterparts. They also recommended Black applicants be given higher interest rates, and labeled Black and Hispanic borrowers as “riskier.”
White applicants were 8.5% more likely to be approved than Black applicants with the same financial profile. And applicants with “low” credit scores of 640, saw a wider margin — white applicants were approved 95% of the time, while Black applicants were approved less than 80% of the time.
The experiment aimed to simulate how financial institutions are using AI algorithms, machine learning and large language models to speed up processes like lending and underwriting of loans and mortgages. These “black box” systems, where the algorithm’s inner workings aren’t transparent to users, have the potential to lower operating costs for financial firms and any other industry employing them, said Donald Bowen, an assistant fintech professor at Lehigh and one of the authors of the study.
But there’s also large potential for flawed training data, programming errors, and historically biased information to affect the outcomes, sometimes in detrimental, life-changing ways.
Approximately 41 000 years ago, Earth’s magnetic field briefly reversed during what is known as the Laschamp event. During this time, Earth’s magnetic field weakened significantly—dropping to a minimum of 5% of its current strength—which allowed more cosmic rays to reach Earth’s atmosphere. Scientists at the Technical University of Denmark and the German Research Centre for Geosciences used data from ESA’s Swarm mission, along with other sources, to create a sounded visualisation of the Laschamp event. They mapped the movement of Earth’s magnetic field lines during the event and created a stereo sound version which is what you can hear in the video. The soundscape was made using recordings of natural noises like wood creaking and rocks falling, blending them into familiar and strange, almost alien-like, sounds. The process of transforming the sounds with data is similar to composing music from a score.
Eight years in the making, director David Lee Fisher’s new take on the horror classic Nosferatu has finally been unleashed, the film now available on Digital through Prime Video….
(18) THE (POD BAY) DOORS OF PERCEPTION. Six years ago someone shared the results of a thought experiment that asked what would happen “If HAL9000 was Amazon.com’s Alexa”.
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Bruce D. Arthurs, N., Ersatz Culture, Michael J. “Orange Mike” Lowrey, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Paul Weimer.]
(1) SEAT OF POWER. Maybe you sat in this and had your photo taken at a convention? It’s on offer from Heritage Auctions; the bidding is currently up to $23,000.
Touring Iron Throne fromGame of Thrones(HBO® Original 2011-2019). Original touring Iron Throne, measuring approximately 65″ x 86″ x 63″ and weighing 310 lbs. Molded from the original screen-used throne, this replica is expertly crafted from plastic with a painted metallic finish and jewel embellishments to resemble the hilts of once-regal swords. As George R. R. Martin wrote, “The Iron Throne is the throne of the conqueror, made from the swords of defeated enemies, a symbol of conquest.” Arguably one of the most coveted seats in pop culture, this seat of power is only rivaled by Captain Kirk’s command chair from Star Trek. The Iron Throne is also the most coveted item in George R.R. Martin’s fantasy epic, and the catalyst for the entire history of conquering, being conquered, and wanting to conquer in the titular “game of thrones.” This Iron Throne was crafted exclusively for promotional events and tours, such as Comic-Con, Hollywood premieres, and the Game of Thrones Touring Exhibition, which visited major cities worldwide, including New York, London, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, and Sydney. The exhibit featured iconic costumes, props, and set pieces from the series, allowing fans to immerse themselves in the world of Westeros. Over 1.5 million fans attended the tour, with lines often stretching for blocks as attendees eagerly awaited their turn to sit on the throne and take part in one of the biggest television and pop culture experiences of the 21st century. …The throne exhibits display age and wear with minor scuffing along its painted finish. Due to excessive weight and/or size of this lot, special shipping arrangements and additional charges for crating will apply. Comes with a COA from Heritage Auctions.
The count with a penchant for sucking blood, like all the good horror villains who have followed in his footsteps, refuses to stay dead.
“Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror,” F.W. Murnau’s celebrated silent-era vampire film, has been given new life for the 21st century: It’s returning to theaters this fall with its orchestral classical score replaced by Radiohead’s dense and moody albums “Kid A” and “Amnesiac.” Few people have actually heard the original Hans Erdmann score since much of it was lost; later shows either built off what remained or created new orchestral scores.
The original movie, an unauthorized 1922 “Dracula” adaptation now in the public domain, has inspired filmmakers for more than a century, including Werner Herzog’s 1979 “Nosferatu the Vampyre,” E. Elias Merhige’s 2000 “Shadow of the Vampire” with Willem Dafoe and Robert Eggers’ upcoming “Nosferatu.”
The revamped version, dubbed “Nosferatu X Radiohead,” marks the debut of “Silents Synced,” a series that marries classic silent films with alternative rock. “Nosferatu” will be followed by Buster Keaton’s “Sherlock Jr.” to the tunes of REM’s “Monster” and “New Adventures in Hi Fi”; other films will feature the music of Pearl Jam, They Might Be Giants, the Pixies and Amon Tobin. (The Buster Keaton film will be preceded by a Charlie Chaplin short backed by music from Girls Against Boys.)
“Silents Synced” has its world premiere Saturday at the American Cinematheque’s Los Feliz Theatre. “Nosferatu” also will be shown at the Gardena Cinema Sept. 25 and twice more in October. The series rolls out nationally in 200 theaters on Oct. 4.
(3) ‘TIS THE SEASON. Horror Vibes Coffee of Los Angeles “specializes in serving handcrafted specialty beverages inspired by iconic horror cinema and horror culture!” Even if you can’t make it there to sample the drinks, the website’s product descriptions are pretty entertaining.
According to the FAQ these drinks are in highest demand: “The Candyman, Scissorhands and Nightmare on Maple St are the most popular! They can be made either iced or hot.”
Right now they have an array of Halloween-themed drinks, and art to match, such as:
(4) BULGACON 2024. [Item by Dr. Valentin D. Ivanov.] The speculative fiction and futurism club Ivan Efremov is organizing Bulgacon 2024 – the annual meeting of speculative fiction fans in Bulgaria on the holiday weekend of September 21 to 23. This is the 25th edition of the festival, which takes place every year at a different location. This year it will be held in Sofia at the National House of Science and Technology, at 108 G.S. Rakovski Street. The event will also be dedicated to the 50th anniversary of both the House of Culture Sredets and the Ivan Efremov club itself.
The British writers Ian McDonald and Farah Mendlesohn will be the official guests on-site.
The program of the festival is extremely varied and includes presentations of new Bulgarian speculative fiction books, lectures, meetings with authors, exhibitions, meetings among fan clubs, a quiz and many more interesting activities. Part of them will be conducted in English and the online events will be open to all interested (see links below).
Among the highlights are the panels on the future of YA literature in Bulgaria and about the legacy of Lyubomir Nikolov, a prominent fantasy writer and translator who left us earlier this year. The program will introduce the speculative genre development in India, Israel, Latin America and East Asia. The writer Harry Turtledove will hold an online session on alternative history with emphasis on Bulgarian alternatives.
The artist Veronika Prezhdarova will present her performance “Manifesto of Fake Art”. Ian McDonald and Farah Mendlesohn will lead several discussions dedicated to the speculative genre around the world, on the prognostic and social power of speculative fiction.
Winners of speculative short story and poetry contests will be announced. The theme of the contests was “Dreamers” with a sub-theme “Fantastic Sofia”.
The event will start at noon on September 21 and it is organized with the support of Sofia Municipality.
Further information about Bulgacon 2024, including the program, is available here:Bulgacon 2024 and on Facebook. The information about on-line events and how to see them will appear soon there.
(5) MEDICAL UPDATE. Barry Malzberg “took a spill and broke his collarbone and is now hospitalized. He is due for surgery, but all is not grim,” Paul DiFilippo told friends today. “Compassionate fellow author Nancy Kress took it upon herself to reach out.”
Nancy Kress reported:
I just spoke to Barry, after Erika [one of Barry’s daughters] said it was okay. His surgery was postponed from yesterday till today, about an hour from now. He sounded very strong and we talked about a lot of different things. He said it was okay to tell Michael Cassutt that he is in the hospital. In fact, Barry said “Tell everybody!” I can’t say he sounded cheerful exactly because after all he is Barry but he did sound better than I had feared.
It looks like Big Finish is doing its part to get us that Jodie Whittaker/Jo Martin team-up we’ve been hoping for. Earlier today, the audio drama production powerhouse announced that the Fugitive Doctor (Martin) would be returning in January 2025 for The Fugitive Doctor: Most Wanted. Over the course of three exciting audio adventures, Martin’s Doctor will go one-on-one with ruthless bounty hunters, a mythical Russian witch, and even the Daleks (Nicholas Briggs, of course). Meanwhile, our Doctor is doing all of this while trying to stay one step ahead of Time Lord agent Cosmo (Alice Krige, best known for her role as the Borg Queen in the “Star Trek” universe). “Doing these audios has been super fun! There wasn’t enough time in the TV episodes to see all the different sides of the Fugitive Doctor. She’s gung-ho, but there’s a softer side to her. With these episodes, the listeners will hear her vulnerability, her kindness, and her loyalties. She’s a lone wolf, and that can’t be easy,” Martin shared about what listeners will learn about the Fugitive Doctor…
Unique names have become more common in recent years, from Elon Musk naming his child a combination of numbers and letters to parents taking inspiration from shows like Game of Thrones for their children’s monikers. Of course, this can present a bevy of issues when dealing with legal documentation.
One British couple learned about some of these obstacles the hard way. Their son was born on May 4, 2017 on the annual Star Wars Day, so the Star Wars fans knew they had to name him something special. They opted for the unique name of Loki Skywalker Mowbray.
The family planned to go on vacation to the Dominican Republic next month, but when they tried to get Loki Skywalker’s passport in order, the U.K. Home Office—similar to the U.S. State Department—informed them that they cannot process the application as “Skywalker” is a trademarked name by Disney. As such, they would have to get permission from the entertainment conglomerate in order to get a passport.
“We were not aware that this could be a potential issue,” father Christian Mowbray told Suffolk News. “We understand that Loki’s middle name is copyrighted, but we have no intention of using it for personal gain.”…
(8) TODAY IN HISTORY.
Michael Chabon’s third novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is published on September 19, 2000. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the following year.
Among Chabon’s other credits are The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a 2007 detective novel; Telegraph Avenue, a 2012 novel; and Moonglow, a 2016 novel. He has also written screenplays and several collections of short stories.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Born September 19, 1922 — Damon Knight. (Died 2002.)
By Paul Weimer. What can I say about the man the SFWA Grand Master Award is named for? Member of the Futurians of New York city, for openers, there where the Deep Magic was written, one might say.
One can talk about his extensive genre criticism, a model and a role model for genre critics in the field ever since. In Search of Wonder, his first collection of essays, collects the essays that earned Knight a Hugo in 1956 for “Best Book Reviewer” (Fan Writer as a category would not exist until over a decade later). Creating Short Fiction, although perhaps dated today, was a book about the craft of writing short fiction. He was an editor of the twelve series of Orbit anthologies, which published original stories from people ranging from LeGuin and Russ to Poul Anderson, Gene Wolfe, and Norman Spinrad (whose story, “The Big Flash” which won him a Hugo award for Best Novelette)
Damon Knight
Or one can talk about this extensive body of fiction. While he wrote a fair sheaf of novels, his short fiction is where he excelled. And honestly, in this day and age, it’s the easiest and best way to get into his work (as noted above, Short Stories was his thing) He wrote in an era of twist and zinger endings that really pack a punch, sometimes with a sledgehammer and sometimes with a scalpel. The Devil getting outfoxed in “The Last Word”. “Not with a Bang” features a really nasty protagonist, possibly the last man on a devastated Earth, who is undone by his would-be wife’s prudishness.
And oh yes, people outside the genre might not know of his work in criticism or the fact that his name is on the Grand Master Award, or just about any of his extensive short fiction…except for one more story to mention. It’s a story everyone knows. Enough rebroadcasts of The Twilight Zone have ensured that, and so will six more words, as Knight came up with the definitive twist ending for the series (no surprise given the above) but this story is the gold standard:
(11) PRO TIP. Kurt Busiek shared this pointer today:
Remember, when designing an ensemble cast or team, you want a variety of body shapes and fashion sensibilities. Ideally, each character should be immediately recognizable even in silhouette.
…Yes, this trend is still happening. Venom 3 is the latest upcoming movie to throw its hat in the ongoing inappropriate popcorn bucket race, and its design is truly disturbing. Really. I’ll never look at a symbiote the same way again.
Although it has not yet been officially unveiled, the bucket was leaked online by Detective Wing and later shared by Discussing Film on Twitter which has since attracted some rather concerning comments. The bucket in question features Venom’s head with the Symbiote’s mouth wide open – presumably where fans will be able to reach in and grab their popcorn. See the post below.
With the summer movie slate done and dusted we thought we were safe from the trend, but it looks like it has rolled onto spooky season too as just recently, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice dropped its take on the trend: a striped Sandworm bucket. Although this one seemed to be taking the trend back to the good old days when buckets were cute and on theme, Terrifier 3 later upped the ante, previewing a bloody bucket in the shape of Art the Clown’s head. Gross….
(14) BIG DOINGS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This week’s Nature cover story, “Jumbo Jets”, is of jets from super-massive black holes that affect the very structure of the universe’s cosmic web…
Powerful jets of radiation and particles generated by supermassive black holes can affect the distribution of matter and magnetism in the cosmic web — the large-scale structure of the Universe. In this week’s issue, Martijn Oei and colleagues report the discovery of the largest known jet structure originating from a black hole. Identified from radio images, the jets in the structure extend for about 7 megaparsecs (23 million light years), putting it on a truly cosmological scale. Named Porphyrion by the researchers, the structure is captured on the cover in an artist’s impression that shows Porphyrion emerging from a filament of the cosmic web and shooting its jets into the surrounding voids.
(15) PLUG AND PLAY. [Item by Steven French.] Interesting piece on the need for ethical issues to be thoroughly explored when it comes to ‘Brain-Computer Interfaces’: “Ethical challenges in translating brain–computer interfaces” in Nature (behind a paywall).
Brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) have the potential to revolutionize treatment for individuals with severe disabilities. As these technologies transition from the laboratory to real-world applications, they pose unique ethical challenges that necessitate careful consideration.
The scientific director for the company that owned the Titan submersible that imploded last year while on its way to the Titanic wreckage testified Thursday that the sub had malfunctioned just prior to the fatal dive.
Appearing before a U.S. Coast Guard panel, Steven Ross told the board about a platform issue the experimental submersible experienced in June 2023, just days before it imploded on its way to the Titanic site. The malfunction caused passengers onboard the submersible to “tumble about,” and it took an hour to get them out of the water.
The submersible pilot, OceanGate co-founder Stockton Rush, crashed into bulkheading during the malfunction, Ross said. No one was injured in the incident, Ross said, though he described it as uncomfortable.
“One passenger was hanging upside down. The other two managed to wedge themselves into the bow end cap,” Ross said, adding that he did not know if a safety assessment of the Titan or an inspection of its hull was performed after the incident.
An investigatory panel has listened to three days of testimony that raised questions about the company’s operations before the doomed mission. Rush was among five people who died when the submersible imploded en route to the site of the Titanic wreck in June 2023….
(17) THE LONG WAY HOME. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] New research indicates that there was European contact with the Americas…
During the 15th century, the European countries of Spain and Portugal began sending ships on expeditions to find new trade routes to Asia. An accidental outcome of this search was that explorer Christopher Columbus encountered land in the Western Hemisphere in 1492. He landed in the Caribbean islands. So most ‘modern’ European contact with South America was after that date. However new research published online as a pre-print in Nature — “Ancient Rapanui genomes reveal resilience” — reveals an earlier contact the long way round.
Sequencing the genomes from the remains of 15 Easter Island (Rapanui) individuals that were radiocarbon dated to 1670–1950, and comparing these with those from S. America they found genes in common. Looking at the slight differences in these genes — genes change over time — they estimate that the Easter Islanders encountered S. Americans in S. America around 1250–1430. This was before Columbus. (Click for larger image.)
Genetic path from Europe to Americas the long way round via the Pacific wet bit.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Dr. Valentin D. Ivanov, Daniel Dern, Paul Weimer, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jon “(snap snap)” Meltzer.]
You may not like The Acolyte, but don’t look me in the eye and tell me it’s not being review bombed to hell and back.
The Disney era of Star Wars has been full of debates about quality, canon, oversaturation and contained a mix of good and bad projects. But I have not seen this kind of backlash to a project since The Last Jedi, and things have gotten just absolutely ridiculous at this point.
There is this idea that The Acolyte is not being “review bombed,” it’s just really that bad. But the data here is absurd, showing a clear tidal wave of users racing to make it the lowest user-scored product in 50 years of Star Wars history, and it’s amassed quadruple the reviews of the longest-running Star Wars series, The Clone Wars. The only thing even close is three seasons across five years of the massively-watched Mandalorian, and even then, that falls well short…
(3) GAMING AWARD CODE OF CONDUCT AND “ZIONISM”. The CRIT Awards™, which will be presented at Gen Con, foster “Creator Recognition in Table Top Role Playing Game industry”.
Our mission is to celebrate and recognize the contributions and achievements of our community in a way that is inclusive, diverse, and represents the values of our community.
By shining a light on the talent, creativity, and hard work of our community members, we aim to inspire others to reach their full potential and make a positive impact on TTRPGs and beyond!
1.1. No Racism: We do not tolerate any form of racism, racial discrimination, or xenophobia. Treat all individuals with respect and fairness, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or cultural background.
1.2. No Homophobia: We embrace diversity and do not condone any homophobic behavior or discrimination against individuals based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.
1.3. No Ableism: We are committed to being accessible and accommodating to all individuals. Avoid ableist attitudes or behaviors and strive to make the CRIT Awards inclusive for people of all abilities.
1.4. No Sexism: Gender-based discrimination, stereotypes, or harassment will not be tolerated. We promote gender equality and a supportive environment for all genders.
1.5. Individuals who identify as Zionists, promote Zionist material, or engage in activities that without a doubt support Zionism are not eligible for nomination.
…GenCon is hosting a event that explicitly bans people who think Israel has a right to exist… yet I guarantee the same kind of invertebrate squishes who condemn people like me for nothing, won’t say crap about that.
None of these grifter scumbags actually give a crap about racism. It’s always a political weapon, nothing more. I can at least respect them for their hustle. It’s their willing dupes, the cowards, the quislings, the useless one-way virtue signalers who can only speak up when their masters say it’s okay, who are too scared to go against the rigid group think of their deranged cult, who’ll let evil shit slide because they’re scared their team will get upset at them… Those people I despise.
Mostly it’s all about Larry, venting a long-held grievance. But setting him aside, does that fifth point belong in a code of conduct?
(4) SOMEONE ON THE INTERNET ACTUALLY CHANGED THEIR MIND! “Ginger” first published the error-riddled post “Can the Hugo Awards Recover Their Credibility?” on the Hidden Gems Book Blog in March. Chris Barkley recently noticed it began bombarding it with critical comments. “Ginger” now has written a new version, which appears first (not trying to deny the problematic original existed.) Here’s an excerpt from the post’s new introduction.
Hi there! Ginger here. Back in March, I wrote an article entitled “Can the Hugo Awards Recover Their Credibility?” referencing the controversy surrounding the nominations for the 2023 Hugo Awards, which were awarded to winning writers at the 2023 Worldcon in Chengdu, China.
Months later, it was pointed out that there were some factual errors in that article, such as my claim that the 2023 Woldcon was the second to be held in Chengdu (when in fact it was the second Worldcon to be held in Asia – in 2022 the Con was held in Chicago, Illinois.) Several readers, including Hugo Award winners and nominees, and members of the Worldcon committee themselves, pointed out these errors while criticizing the article itself….
…It was careless, lazy, and not representative of who I try to be as a writer. I’d lost sight of who I write these articles for – writers – and tried to “report” on a news story instead. Not only did I do a bad job of that by incorporating errors, but I feel now that the tone, subject, and theme of the article were also incongruent with the sort of article I want to write.
I imagined for a second how I’d feel if I’d been recognized for a Hugo Award following a lifetime of hard work and dedication to my craft, and then had some random ginger kid with a British accent dismiss the significance of that with a wave of their hand – and in an article that contained factual errors, no less!
So, instead of just ignoring the criticism, or trying to retroactively fix the errors to pretend that they didn’t happen, I wanted to take responsibility for the tone of my article and revisit it. After all, I’ve mentioned many times how important science fiction and fantasy was to me growing up, and how influential many Hugo Award winners have been to my writing, and my enjoyment of books as a whole. The Hugo Awards deserve better, and so do the writers who took the time to read and comment on my article….
The Recording Industry Association of America has announced the filing of two copyright-infringement cases against the AI music services Suno and Udio based on what it describes as “the mass infringement of copyrighted sound recordings copied and exploited without permission by two multi-million-dollar music generation services.”
The cases are the latest salvo in the music industry’s battle to prevent the unlicensed use of copyrighted sound recordings to “train” generative-AI models.
The case against Suno, Inc., developer of Suno AI, was filed in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts and the case against Uncharted Labs, Inc., developer of Udio AI, was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. The plaintiffs in the cases are music companies that hold rights to sound recordings infringed by Suno and Udio – including Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Records….
… “The music community has embraced AI and we are already partnering and collaborating with responsible developers to build sustainable AI tools centered on human creativity that put artists and songwriters in charge,” said RIAA Chairman and CEO Mitch Glazier. “But we can only succeed if developers are willing to work together with us. Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it’s ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s life’s work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all.”…
(6) GOODBYE BETSY, HELLO STEFAN. Open Road Media’s Strategic advisor, science fiction and fantasy Betsy Mitchell will retire on June 28.
Stefan Dziemianowicz will join as consulting editor, horror, fantasy, & science fiction.
Betsy Mitchell with Joshua Bilmes. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.Betsy Mitchell with Raymond Feist at the 1993 Worldcon. (Elst Weinstein in background.) Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.Betsy Mitchell with Andy Zack. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.
…Having once been a Navy officer, discharged due to tuberculosis, Heinlein jumped at the chance to serve his country once again. During World War II, writes John Redford at A Niche in the Library of Babel, “his most direct contribution was in discussions of how to merge data from sonar, radar, and visual sightings with his friend Cal Laning, who captained a destroyer in the Pacific and was later a rear admiral. Laning used those ideas to good effect in the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944, the largest naval battle ever fought.” Asimov “was mainly involved in testing materials,” including those used to make “dye markers for airmen downed at sea. These were tubes of fluorescent chemicals that would form a big green patch on the water around the guy in his life jacket. The patch could be seen by searching aircraft.”
Asimov scholars should note that a test of those dye markers counts as one of just two occasions in his life that the aerophobic writer ever dared to fly. That may well have been the most harrowing of either his or Heinlein’s wartime experiences, they were both involved in the suitably speculative “Kamikaze Group,” which was meant to work on “invisibility, death rays, force fields, weather control” — or so Paul Malmont tells it in his novel The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown. You can read a less heightened account of Heinlein and Asimov’s war in Astounding, Alec Nevala-Lee’s history of American science fiction.
When we were on set, he’d call me “Governor” and sometimes hold on to me as we walked along. One day he seemed sad and I asked him why. He said: “Because this is almost over.” I was like: “No! We still have a few days and it’s not even the last movie.”
That evening, he wrote me this hilarious email blaming his sadness on a handful of bad grapes he’d eaten. As soon as he got back to his trailer after our walk, he wrote, he’d blown a hole in the lavatory. Now they’d need to burn down the trailer and he hoped that didn’t disrupt the shoot. It was great fun and it was written really beautifully. Now I’ll have to frame that email.
Donald was very politically engaged and that’s why he wanted to do The Hunger Games. He loved that we were smuggling these ideas about the consequences of war into a pop cultural phenomenon. He certainly didn’t give a shit about being a celebrity. It was all about the work and craft and collaborators.
A lot of people see the character he played, President Snow, as the villainous antagonist of those films. And he is – but we needed to find out what his belief system was. Snow believed in the Hobbesian idea that everybody in this world is savage and therefore needs to be ruled with an iron fist. So Donald and I talked a lot about that, on a core thematic level.
(9) MEMORY LANE.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
June 24, 1987 – Spaceballs. Let’s reminisce upon a certain rather silly film named Spaceballs that premiered in the States thirty-seven years ago. No, make that an utter silly film called Spaceballs that everyone loved, and yes, I know I usually quote critics later but I’m breaking my format here, well because I can, to share a quote from the review by Peter Rosegg of the Honolulu Advertiser: “Spaceballs has everything you have come to look for (or dread) in a Brooks movie. Riotous sight gags, terrible puns, rude language, movie and TV jokes.”
So this is a parody of Star Wars and that meant the blessing of Lucas as it hewed way too close to source material to be considered original material. Lucas agreed with one interesting restriction: there could be no action figures as “Yours are going to look like mine”. So that meant the very cool Yogurt doll used in the merchandise scene couldn’t be made; it is now owned by Brooks.
Lucas according to Show Biz Cheat Sheet sent Brooks a note saying how much he loved the film.
The script was written by Mel Brooks, Ronny Graham and Thomas Meehan. Now Brooks I don’t have to do a deep dive into since y’all know him but the other two I’ll assume that’s not true of.
Ronny Graham was an actor with a very long of credits who Johnny Carson apparently liked a lot as he was a very frequent guest. (The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson!, thirty seasons, available on Peacock.) I suspect he got picked as a writer here because four years earlier, he had written and been in An Audience with Mel Brooks, but I don’t know, so let’s continue onward.
Let’s see if Thomas Meehan has a link too to Brooks. Yes indeed. He acted in When Things Were Rotten, the mid-Seventies series Mel Brooks created, a Robin Hood parody, and he was in To Be or Not to Be is an early Eighties war comedy Brooks produced. The screenplay was written by both Ronny Graham and Thomas Meehan, so that’s where the writing connection comes from.
The script was, I believe, a perfect parody of Star Wars. But not just that film as it cheerfully ripped into guts — sorry I couldn’t resist — of popular culture everywhere, as this delicious morsel of quote from John Hurt who makes a cameo appearance credited as himself, parodying (SPOILER ALERT) Gilbert Kane’s death in Alien as a xenomorph rips out of his stomach . He looks down at it and says “Oh, no. Not again”.
Now a great script deserves fantastic cast and this film certainly has one. The primary cast was the trio of John Candy, Rick Moranis and Bill Pullman. I’m going to say all three were perfect parodies of the characters that they were based off, a very neat trick indeed. Pullman in particular pulled off the neat job of merging aspects of Luke both Skywalker and Han Solo into one character.
The supporting cast would’ve filled the seats of a cantina on Mos Eisley, or Brooks’s parody of one as it was Dick Van Patten, George Wyner, Lorene Yarnell and Daphne Zuniga. Now that doesn’t count Brooks who played a dual role, with Dom DeLuise and Rudy De Luca who appeared here in cameo appearances.
And then we have Joan Rivers doing voice work here for Dot Matrix, Princess Vespa’s droid of honor and guardian. She is a parody of C-3PO. She does a more than merely good version female version of that character. Lorene Yarnell, a mime and dancer was the performer of the body.
I liked it though I thought Brooks was trying too hard to stuff as many references by way of jokes to every cultural thing he or possibly the other two writers could think of.
Wikipedia would have you believe the film received a lukewarm reception and, guess what, they’re wrong. A lot of reviews I read on Rotten Tomatoes were positive. They like the gags, the acting and well, that’s all they wrote up. Not one mentioned the ship, the cutimes, the helmet. Interesting indeed.
Here’s another review quote by Jay Carr of the Boston Globe: “Spaceballs has the happy air of a comic enterprise that knows it’s going right. It just keeps spritzing the gags at us, Borscht Belt-style, confidently and rightly sensing that if we don’t laugh at this one, we’ll laugh at the next. And so we do.”
Now it’s not fair to you to give the impression that critics were all positive, so here’s one of the more negative ones by Elvis Mitchell of the Detroit Free Press: “No one is that interested in Star Wars anymore. So watching Spaceballs is like picking up an old copy of Mad magazine and being puzzled about that Jack Palance parody you found so funny years ago.” Oh ouch. Really ouch.
Finally, how did it do financially? It certainly didn’t make money at first as it cost twenty-two point seven million to make and it only made thirty-eight point two million. Given that movie theaters in the States receive forty percent of each ticket sold, so that leaves nine million point three for all other expenses. (Foreign theaters do even better getting between sixty and eighty percent depending on where there are.)
Eventually with television sales, cassette and DVD sales and now streaming, it certainly made money.
I think I need to stop now before this essay gets any longer…
(10) COMICS SECTION.
Free Range reveals a special interest the dating app left out.
It’s now been 15 years since Krysten Ritter’s Breaking Bad arc came to a tragic, series-altering end. But that eight-episode run in season two of the beloved AMC series continues to bear fruit for the actor.
Last night, she made her return to the home network of Breaking Bad as the star of Orphan Black: Echoes — a spinoff of Tatiana Maslany’s mothership series that picks up 37 years later. Created by Anna Fishko, Ritter’s new character, Lucy, instead of being a clone, was recently printed into existence by a four-dimensional printer. And, despite her best efforts to create a well-adjusted life for herself in just two years’ time, she’s soon forced to piece together the puzzle of who she really is and why she was created.…
Steampunk refers to the sci-fi subgenre that imagines a society where humanity continues to rely primarily on steam power. It takes the aesthetics and gadgetry of the Victorian era but extrapolates them to their logical conclusion, producing quirky, hyper-advanced machines with a retro flavor. Steampunk movies also often play with the gender dynamics and social norms of that era, usually to subvert them.
In ninth place is last year’s unexpected award contender:
9. ‘Poor Things’ (2023)
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
“I am a changeable feast. As are all of we.” The latest addition to the canon of steampunk classics is Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things, a dark comedy about a woman (Emma Stone) brought back to life by an eccentric scientist (Willem Dafoe). Set in a fantastical Victorian era, Bella embarks on a journey of self-discovery, navigating a world filled with bizarre characters and situations. It’s essentially a raunchy, tongue-in-cheek rewrite of Frankenstein, and it’s simply terrific.
Lathimos deploys steampunk aesthetics throughout, like the fisheye lenses and stylized colors. The setting is also simultaneously retro and futuristic, with both rudimentary surgery and advanced skyships. Indeed, the technology is decidedly steampunk, particularly the machines and critters in Baxter’s laboratory. He has a device that digests his food for him and a host of pets spliced together from various animals, like a duck/dog hybrid. “Creating the animals was a challenge because we did it partly in-camera,” noted effects supervisor Simon Hughes.
From Pennywise the clown to one of the most famous vampires of all time, Bill Skarsgård is transforming into Nosferatu in Robert Eggers’ upcoming reimagining of the iconic 1922 German Expressionist silent film. But horror fans will have to keep waiting to see Skarsgård’s full appearance as Count Orlok, as the movie first’s trailer from Focus Features continues to keep the vampire’s complete look a mystery. Skarsgård is barely seen in the clip outside of a few quick shots, but his character’s haunting presence looms large….
(15) RICK AND MORTY: THE ANIME. Here’s a preview of Rick and Morty: The Anime, coming to Adult Swim and Max later this year.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna) who says this is a novelization of the Tom Baker-era episode “Scrolls of Pixeldon”).]
What if there was no one new Doctor? With a quick narrative device to produce an unstable regeneration, you could have a new high-profile Doctor every week. Suddenly it’s possible to hire Hugh Grant, Judi Dench or Riz Ahmed at the Tardis controls, when you only need to persuade them to do a few weeks’ filming – rather than a three-series commitment. Plus, you get all the publicity of the reveal of a new Doctor, over and over again.
(2) LET’S YOU AND HIM FIGHT. Rosemary Jenkinson is missing the old verbal slapfights between literary writers: “A Room with a Feud” in The Critic Magazine. Well, we still have plenty in genre, but if they stopped would you miss them?
Oh, where to find the fabulous spats that used to enliven every writers’ circle? It’s no coincidence that the drab rise of cancel culture has contributed to the demise of colourful literary disagreements. In my own case, my publisher, Doire Press, rescinded their offer to publish my debut novel after I wrote an article contending that Northern Irish authors should focus on contemporary matters rather than the Troubles. As the Sunday Independent rightly questioned in the aftermath, “Is the Irish literary world really so fragile and full of itself that it can’t cope with the odd dose of healthy impertinence?”
Many of the writing greats enhanced their reputations with a critical bon mot. As the poet and critic Dorothy Parker vaunted, “The first thing I do every morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue,”…
…Naturally, no one wants to see hatchet jobs on writers, but one can’t help wondering where the entertainment is in a bland anodyne literary world. Many writers don’t have the robust constitution to engage in the art of the literary skirmish, but the difficulty for the few who do is that those they write about are likely to claim victim status….
(3) SAWYER HEALTH UPDATE. Robert J. Sawyer told Facebook followers in a public post today that he tested positive for Covid-19, but has “no symptoms to speak of.” Best wishes for him to continue feeling well.
(4) UKRAINE BIRD STAMP. A stamp featuring the image of an armed and armored Ukrainian soldier with his middle finger raised to a Russian vessel went on sale this week. Borys Sydiuk says they’re already sold out. “Ukraine postal service issues ‘Russian warship, f***k you!’ stamp” in the Jerusalem Post.
…”Russian warship, f***k you…!” was the response to demands to surrender given to Russian naval forces by Ukrainian border guards stationed on Snake Island early in the war. The Ukrainian marine who uttered the phrase, Roman Grybov, was present at a ceremony issuing the postage stamp along with the illustrator….
Acclaimed screenwriter Damon Lindelof learns that several members of his family tree died in the Bialystok ghetto during the Holocaust on Tuesday night’s episode of the celebrity genealogy show “Finding Your Roots.”
With help from the archives at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and museum, the “Finding Your Roots” team found six pages of testimony detailing the fate of a branch of Lindelof’s family.
Lindelof, who created HBO’s 2019 “Watchmen” series and co-created “Lost,” reads from the show’s compiled pages about his family tree, repeating “circumstances of death: ghetto Bialystok” after several relatives: his great-granduncle — the brother of his great-grandmother — and his wife and their four children.
I’ve always been a fan of ghost stories. As a kid, I loved horror movies and the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, and H. P. Lovecraft; later on, I discovered movies like The Innocents (based on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw) and The Haunting (adapted from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House). As a ghost historian and editor, I’ve discovered dozens of brilliant tales from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; these are stories that remain relevant, entertaining, and frightening….
Future Tense is asking Sec. Pete Buttigieg what role imagination plays in managing a federal department as sprawling and impactful as the Department of Transportation. We’re also asking three of our accomplished Future Tense Fiction authors to talk about how they see their work inspiring visions of futures that might come to pass.
Featuring:
Pete Buttigieg, @SecretaryPete; U.S. Secretary of Transportation
Tochi Onyebuchi, @TochiTrueStory; Author, How to Pay Reparations: A Documentary, Future Tense Fiction Author, Goliath
Moderators: Paul Butler, President, New America; Ed Finn, @zonal; Founding Director, Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University
(8) MORE ABOUT CHRISTINE ASHBY. [Item by David Grigg.] Christine Ashby, long-time Australian fan, died at home on Tuesday 29 March 2022. She was 70 years of age. She is survived by her husband Derrick Ashby.
Christine was a member of the Monash University SF Association, alongside such well-known names as John Foyster and Carey Handfield. After graduating as a lawyer she began work as a solicitor and developed considerable expertise in legal costings.
She was involved in organising and running several Melbourne SF conventions in the 1970s and 80s and was the Guest of Honour at Q-Con in Brisbane in 1973. She and Derrick were members of ANZAPA for many years.
Christine was Treasurer of two Worldcons: Aussiecon in 1975 and Aussiecon Two in 1985.
Outside of fandom, Christine served for several years on the board of the Paraplegics and Quadriplegics Association of Victoria and for a short while was its Chairperson.
(9) MEMORY LANE.
2007 — [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.] Fifteen years ago, a special citation went to Ray Bradbury from the Pulitzer Board for his distinguished, prolific and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy.
But the Pulitzer Board doesn’t give out such an Award without picking a specific work and this is the full language of their announcement:
Bradbury came of age as a writer before the postwar ascendancy of the paperback book as a publishing medium. Instead, during the Golden Age of Science Fiction, short stories published in pulp magazines like Astounding Science-Fiction, Thrilling Wonder Stories and Amazing Stories stood at the forefront of the field. As such, many of his novels are actually “fixups”—a term coined by SF legend A.E. van Vogt to describe novels assembled from previously published short stories that were buttressed with new interlinking material.
Culled from Bradbury’s late 1940s output, The Martian Chronicles is a sweeping account of the colonization of Mars amid nuclear war on Earth. Its literary structure (patterned after Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio) earned plaudits from such notable critics like Christopher Isherwood, who read the book after a fortuitous encounter with the younger writer (and fellow Angeleno) at a bookstore. In his review, Isherwood deemed Bradbury “a very great and unusual talent,” a tastemaking assessment that charted the course of the rest of his career.
Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger (on the left) presents Michael Congdon (accepting for Ray Bradbury) with the Pulitzer Prize Special Citation.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born April 16, 1905 — Charles G. Finney. Writer and Editor. It’s rare that I pick writers whose main accomplishment is one work which has defined them, but his one such work is, well, phenomenal. His first novel and most famous work, The Circus of Dr. Lao, was a Hugo finalist at Loncon II and won one of the inaugural National Book Awards, the Most Original Book of 1935; it is most decidedly fantasy. Ray Bradbury liked the novel so much that he included it as the headline story in his anthology The Circus of Dr. Laoand Other Improbable Stories; it is said that the carnival in his Something Wicked This Way Comes is modelled upon The Circus of Dr. Lao. (Died 1984.)
Born April 16, 1917 — William “Billy” Benedict. Singled out for birthday honors as he was Whitey Murphy in Adventures of Captain Marvel. Yes, that Captain Marvel. Back in 1942, it was a 12-chapter black-and-white movie serial from Republic Pictures based off the Fawcett Comics strip. You can watch the first chapter, “Curse of The Scorpion,” here. (Died 1999.)
Born April 16, 1921 — Peter Ustinov. I’ve done his Birthday in the past and profiled his extensive genre work there but I’m going to limit this write-up to just one role he did. In half a dozen films, he played Agatha Christie’s detective Hercule Poirot, first in Death on the Nile and then in Evil Under the Sun, Thirteen at Dinner (a television film), Dead Man’s Folly (another television movie), Murder in Three Acts (yet another television movie), and finally in Appointment with Death. An impressive take on that role indeed! (Died 2004.)
Born April 16, 1922 — Kingsley Amis. So have you read The Green Man? I’m still not convinced that anything actually happened, or that rather everything including the hauntings were really in Maurice Allington’s decayed brain. I’m not seeing that he did much else for genre work other outside of The Anti-Death League and The Alteration but he did write Colonel Sun: A James Bond Adventure under the pseudonym of Robert Markham and his New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction which was published in the late Fifties sounds fascinating as he shares his views on the genre and makes some predictions as there’ll never be a SF series on the boob tube despite there already being so. (Died 1995.)
Born April 16, 1922 — John Christopher. Author of The Tripods, an alien invasion series which was adapted into both a excellent radio and a superb television series. He wrote a lot of genre fiction including the Fireball series in which Rome never fell, and The Death of Grass which I mention because it was one of the many YA post-apocalyptic novels that he wrote in the Fifties and Sixties that sold extremely well in the U.K. The film version would be nominated for a Hugo at Noreascon I, a year where No Award was given. (Died 2012.)
Born April 16, 1962 — Kathryn Cramer, 60. Writer, editor, literary critic. She co-founded The New York Review of Science Fiction in 1988 with David G. Hartwell and others, and was its co-editor until 1991 and again since 1996. She edited with her husband David G. Hartwell Year’s Best Fantasy one through nine, and Year’s Best SF seven through seventeen with him as well. They did a number of anthologies of which I’ll single out The Hard SF Renaissance and The Space Opera Renaissance as particularly superb. She has a most excellent website Kathryncramer.com.
Born April 16, 1975 — Sean Maher, 47. Doctor Simon Tam In the Firefly ‘verse. And Dick Grayson (Nightwing) in a staggering number of animated DCU films, to wit Son of Batman, Batman vs. Robin, Batman: Bad Blood, Justice League vs. Teen Titans, Teen Titans: The Judas Contract, Batman: Hush and Teen Titans Go! vs. Teen Titans. He showed up on Arrow as Shrapnel in the “Blast Radius” and “Suicide Squad” episodes. He also had a one-off on Warehouse 13 as Sheldon in the “Mild Mannered” episode.
(11) COMICS SECTION.
The Flying McCoys illustrates a problem caused by something you can easily understand Superman wouldn’t know he was doing.
(12) A FAN FUND AUCTION OF YESTERYEAR. Fanac.org’s video time machine has returned from 1976 with a clip from the first MidAmeriCon.
MidAmeriCon, the 34th World Science Fiction Convention, was held in Kansas City in 1976. In this very short video excerpt from the Fan Funds Auction at Big Mac, auctioneer Rusty Hevelin shows just how far fans will go to be supportive of the Fan Funds. In this clip, it’s not books or vegemite up for bid, but currency. The second item is the one to watch, with Rusty skillfully extracting bids from the crowd. You’ll also see fellow auctioneer jan howard finder making a brief appearance…
This video is brought to you by the FANAC Fan History Project, with video from the Video Archeology project (coordinated by Geri Sullivan, with technical work by David Dyer-Bennet).
… Was it strange to go from being the only child on the set of Temple of Doom to being constantly around other young actors while making The Goonies?
It was weird, because coming off of Indiana Jones … I got all the attention versus being on a set with six other kids, and honestly they were all hams! [Laughs] They really knew what they were doing. So I found myself constantly having to fight for attention. But that was very familiar to me, because I grew up in a big family and that’s what my home was like. I got some great friendships out of that movie, including Jeff Cohen, aka Chunk. He’s my entertainment lawyer and we’re great friends, as I am with Sean [Astin] and Corey [Feldman]. We’re Goonies for life…
(14) NOSFERATU. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Financial Times behind a paywall, Nigel Andrews reflects on the centennial of F.W. Murnau’s great horror film Nosferatu.
The film’s poetry of terror comes from real locations, mostly shot in daytime. Cityscapes: the unforgettable, hollowed-out tenement building (filmed in Lübeck) in which the vampire finds his last-act townhouse. Nature: dark monuments and bristling forests. castles: the stone arches and beetling walls of Nosferatu’s Carpathian home. Those arches become a master touch. In shot after shot, Max Shreck’s hideous Count, dressd to kill and made up likewise, emerges from the inverted U of dark tunnels or from frame-fitting Gothic doorways, like a creature serially birthed or rebirthed from vertical coffin-wombs.
Schreck was a distinguished stage actor made out for the movie. The nightmarishly thin body (for which he dieted), with long arms and extended fingers,is crowned with a rat-toothed bat-eared head, bald and cadaverously thin. The dark, hollowed eyes are a premonitory rhyme with the Lübeck buildings. The frock coat is like a sartorial shroud, which seems sewn straight on to the skin. Sometimes he wears a skewy turban-style nightcap: a touch of bleak farce among the grand guignol.
Today’s auction is the culmination of a sordid saga involving Apollo astronauts, multiple lawsuits, and scientists aching for a chance to study rare lunar materials.
…NASA has long maintained that the lunar rocks and dust collected during the Apollo missions are government property that’s not allowed to be owned by private citizens. The space agency has gone to great lengths to recover any stray lunar materials, including a sting operation in 2011 that seized—from a 74-year-old woman in a Denny’s Restaurant—a rice-size moon rock embedded in a paperweight.
The lunar dust that sold today is a rare exception to the rule, a quirk due in part to a combination of fraud, mistaken identity, and a series of legal disputes….
(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In Jurassic World Dominion, two generations of cast members unite for the first time. Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard are joined by Oscar-winner Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum and Sam Neill.
From Jurassic World architect and director Colin Trevorrow, Dominion takes place four years after Isla Nublar has been destroyed. Dinosaurs now live—and hunt—alongside humans all over the world. This fragile balance will reshape the future and determine, once and for all, whether human beings are to remain the apex predators on a planet they now share with history’s most fearsome creatures.
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, David Grigg, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Patrick Morris Miller.]
(1) TIME TO PANIC. Nominations for the 2022 Hugo Awards, Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and Astounding Award for Best New Writer close at 11:59 pm Pacific Daylight Time (UTC-7), today, March 15, 2022.
If this was a cooking show, the judges would be yelling, “You should be plating!”
(2) REGISTER FOR NEBULA CONFERENCE. The 2022 SFWA Nebula Conference registration is now open. The online event runs May 20-22.
We know that many of you have been eagerly awaiting the opening of registration for this year’s Nebula Conference, tamping down the anxious space bats fluttering in your stomachs as you waited for news. We are pleased to announce that registration is now open!
Registration Price: $150.00 for One Year of Access Starting May 1st!
This year’s conference is fully online, and filled with all the panels and networking opportunities that we can possibly fit into a three-day weekend! The 2022 Nebula Conference Online will once again host the SFWA Nebula Awards Ceremony.
(3) A SPLASH AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WELL. Chris Barkley is excited that someone on the Chengdu Worldcon committee acknowledged his message “about the current status of the Committee on whether or not your group will be able to fulfill their duties in administering the 2023 World Science Fiction Convention.”
This morning, at 9:58 am EDT, I received the following response from that account:
Chengdu Worldcon 2023:
“Hi Chris, thank you for the message and concern over the status of our committee. Since we are fully committed to run a most successful convention, we are working hard with locals for the best possible services for our members, including a very affordable membership package. The plan will be announced soon. Sorry for this delayed reply.”
(4) GAMES HUGO SUPPORT SITE GROWS. Ira Alexandre, proponent of a permanent Best Game or Interactive Work Hugo category, has updated the “Games Hugo – FAQ”. They’ve also written a series of tweets defending watching “playthrough” videos as an alternative way for voters to inform themselves rather than playing the games. Thread starts here. (See also “Games Hugo – Playthroughs”)
The experience of a work people have is the experience they have. A given Hugo voter doesn't have to be comfortable using playthrus for their OWN voting, but they shouldn't try to stop OTHERS, and it's not valid grounds to keep an entire games category from existing!
We believe a Best Game or Interactive Work Hugo category not just could, but NEEDS to exist. And playthroughs are a valid way to participate in this category. Please read the FAQ and the page specifically on playthrus if you're still worried! https://t.co/cGmPgve8v2
The category definition itself has been updated to prevent the possibility of conventions being considered in the category.
The gist: A work needs to not be ephemeral in 2 ways. 1 something that contains/preserves the interactive element (game file, playbook, etc.) needs to stick around/be shareable. 2 Can't depend on specific "cast" e.g. con GOHs/panelists, improv performers, specific streamers
In 2013, Marvel Comics introduced Kamala Khan, a Pakistani American teenager from New Jersey who idolizes Carol Danvers, aka Captain Marvel. By 2014, Kamala had superhuman abilities, her own solo series and her own superhero moniker — Ms. Marvel — making her the first Muslim superhero to headline a Marvel comic.
Nine years later, Kamala is making history once again in “Ms. Marvel,” the latest Disney Plus series from Marvel Studios that debuted its first trailer on Tuesday. The series will debut on June 8….
I had no intention of watching HBO Max’s Peacemaker. The whole concept seemed to me indicative of the cynicism and blatant manipulation that characterize this most recent chapter in the lifecycle of the superhero-industrial complex. Superheroes are now the leading product of the increasingly consolidated entertainment empires vying for our money, and each of those empires is now promoting its own streaming platform. Ergo, each superhero property has to function as a launching platform for a spin-off show, be it ever so esoteric and hard to justify artistically. Did you think that The Batman‘s take on the Penguin was weird and over-emphasized, a waste of Colin Farrell under a distracting fat suit in a role that could have been played by any character actor in Hollywood? Well, just sit tight for The Penguin, coming to HBO Max in 2023!
It would be one thing if these shows were bad and easily ignorable. But the same self-correcting mechanism that allows Marvel to keep chugging as the biggest pop culture juggernaut in existence despite the failure of individual movies is clearly informing the production of these shows, which repeatedly forestall the “who asked for this?” reaction with top-notch casting, stratospheric production values, and (up to a certain point) good writing….
(8) MORNING IN THE METAVERSE. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Financial Times behind a paywall, Tom Faber discusses the sf origins of the metaverse.
It tells you a lot about the state of the tech industry that much of its terminology is pilfered from dystopian science fiction novels. Isaac Asimov gave us ‘robotics.’ HG Wells named the atomic bomb, and Neuromancer author William Gibson came up with “cyberspace.” Meanwhile in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson popularised the term ‘avatar’ to refer to the digital embellishment of a human in a shared world he called ‘the Metaverse.’ His vision of how humans might behave in a virtual world was quite prescient. ‘If you’re ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful,’ he wrote. ‘You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse.”,,,
…The idea we’re being sold of the metaverse is essentially a video game, and it’s a dreadfully boring one. All the exciting promises that glitter among the metaverse hype–the ability to socialise in digital spaces, engage in virtual economies, or build genuine friendships online–have existed in games for decades. See the sophisticated societies in MMORPGS such as World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV, or the virtual universe of Fortnite and Roblox. They are more like a ‘true’ metaverse than anything Meta has to offer: virtual worlds where you can customise an avatar, spend digital currency, attend concerts and, in what is becoming a metaverse specialty, tolerate obnoxious branding partnerships with your friends.
JS: The complete and utter collapse of an entirely different novel I was writing and the panic that came from knowing I was going to miss a publication date unless I came up with a new idea, fast. To which my brain said, OK, well, how about big monsters? And I said, YES BIG MONSTERS YES, and then my brain dropped the whole plot into my head.
GR: What was the most challenging part of writing your novel?
JS: Honestly, nothing was challenging about writing this novel. It was a complete and liberating joy from start to finish, and I completed it quickly and easily. I want my next 60 novels at least to be just like this experience. I may be willing to do some unspeakable live sacrifices to achieve this.
(10) LESLIE LONSDALE-COOPER. Publisher and translator Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper has died at the age of 96 reports the Guardian.
…Following a move to Methuen, where she became a rights specialist, she met [Michael] Turner and with him began translating the Tintin stories, a project that continued for three decades. “Translation” in this context meant rendering Hergé’s Brussels slang into English utterances that could be fitted into the speech bubbles of Hergé’s original drawings. Leslie was especially proud of their invented Tintinian oaths, such as “blistering barnacles!”…
(11) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
1973 — [Item by Cat Eldridge] Some affairs are mostly harmless to use. The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy phrase. So it was with The Girl with Something Extra series that debuted forty-nine years ago. That the lead actress was Sally Field tells you how deep the story was intended to be. She was a wife who had ESP, and her husband never quite understood her. It was intended to be cute, really, really cute.
Rounding out the cast was Teri Garr, Henry Jones and Zohra Lampert.
One critic noted that “The plot for The Girl With Something Extra TV show immediately brings to mind another show that ended in March of 1972 after a whopping eight seasons on the air! That series of course was “Bewitched” which also featured a young newlywed couple with the wife having super-human powers that caused many problems for her and her husband.”
The audience apparently didn’t grasp its charms and it was canceled after one season of twenty two half episodes. I believe that it might be streaming on Netflix. (I have four streaming services but not that one. I have Britbox, HBO Max, Peacock and Paramount. That’s quite enough, thank you.)
Lancer Books published a tie-in novel by Paul Farman, The Girl With Something Extra.
I see a signed script is for sale on eBay. Huh.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born March 15, 1852 — Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory (née Persse). Irish dramatist, folklorist, theatre manager. With William Butler Yeats and Edward Martyn, she created the Irish Literary Theatre and the Abbey Theatre. She produced a number of books of retellings of stories taken from Irish mythology. Gods and Fighting Men, all seven hundred pages strong, is the best look at her work. It’s available at all the usual digital sources. (Died 1932.)
Born March 15, 1911 — Desmond W. Hall. He served as assistant editor of Astounding Stories of Super Science. His writing career is best remembered for his Hawk Carse series which would as Space Hawk: The Greatest of Interplanetary Adventures in the Fifties. These were co-written with Harry Bates, Astounding Editor. Unfortunately, it appears that he never stayed in print, either in paper or digitally. (Died 1982.)
Born March 15, 1920 — Lawrence Sanders. Mystery writer who wrote several thrillers that according to ISFDB had genre elements, such as The Tomorrow File and The Passion of Molly T. Now I’ve not read them so I cannot comment how just on how obvious the genre elements are, but I assume it’s similar to what one finds in a Bond film. One of these novels btw is described on the dust jacket as an “erotic spine tingler”. Huh. (Died 1998.)
Born March 15, 1924 — Walter Gotell. He’s remembered for being General Gogol, head of the KGB, in the Roger Moore Bond films as well as having played the role of Morzeny, in From Russia With Love, one of Connery’s Bond films. He also appeared as Gogol in The Living Daylights, Dalton’s first Bond film. I’m fairly sure that makes him the only actor to be a villain to three different Bonds. (Died 1997.)
Born March 15, 1926 — Rosel George Brown. A talented life cut far too short by cancer. At Detention (1959), she was nominated for the Hugo Award for best new author, but her career was ended when she died of lymphoma at the age of 41. She wrote some twenty stories between 1958 and 1964, with her novels being Sibyl Sue Blue, and its sequel, The Waters of Centaurus about a female detective, plus Earthblood, co-written with Keith Laumer. Sibyl Sue Blue is now available from Kindle. (Died 1967.)
Born March 15, 1939 — Robert Nye. He did what the Encyclopaedia of Fantasy describes as “bawdy, scatological, richly told, sometimes anachronistic reworkings of the traditional material“ with some of his works being Beowulf, Taliesin (which was the name of my last SJW cred), Faust, Merlin and Mrs. Shakespeare: The Complete Works. His Falstaff novel is considered the best take on that character. Some of his works are available at the usual digital suspects. (Died 2016.)
Born March 15, 1943 — David Cronenberg, 79. Not a director whose films are at all for the squeamish. His best films? I’d pick Videodrome, The Fly, Naked Lunch and The Dead Zone. Though I’m tempted to toss Scanners in that list as well. ISFDB says he has one genre novel, Consumed, which was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. Oh, and he was in the film version of Clive Barker’s Nightbreed. And he’s playing a recurring role in Star Trek: Discovery as Federation agent Kovich.
Born March 15, 1967 — Isa Dick Hackett, born 1967, 55. Producer and writer for Amazon who helped produce The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams, and The Adjustment Bureau, all of which are based on works by her father, Philip K. Dick.
(13) COMICS SECTION.
Bizarroshows a long-time household member having a problem with a new arrival.
(14) PRIDE MONTH. Honoring Pride Month, Marvel’s Voices: Pride returns for its second annual showcase of LGBTQI+ characters and creators in June.
Marvel Comics is proud to highlight its commitment to LGBTQI+ representation with stories that spotlight existing stars AND introduce brand-new characters to the Marvel mythology. Ranging from poignant to action-packed, here are some of the tales that fans can look forward to, each one capturing the joy and promise of PRIDE MONTH!
In last year’s MARVEL’S VOICES: PRIDE, Steve Orlando and Luciano Vecchio introduced the dreamy mutant hero SOMNUS, who now stars in the ongoing X-Men series MARAUDERS! New York Times-bestselling, multi-award-winning author Charlie Jane Anders continues this tradition with the debut of another new hero to the Marvel Universe – and it won’t be the last you see of them. Stay tuned for more info!
IRON MAN scribe and lauded TV showrunner Christopher Cantwell takes on Moondragon’s complex legacy for a heart-bending story across space and time.
Shuster and Eisner-winning writer Andrew Wheeler makes his Marvel debut with the Marvel Universe’s real god of love – Hercules! Drawn by PATSY WALKER artist Brittney Williams!
Nebula, World Fantasy, and Locus-award winner Alyssa Wong reunites the Young Avengers fan-favorite artist Stephen Byrne in a story guaranteed to please fans new and old! Byrne will also depict the team in a vibrant variant cover that you can check out now!
Comedy writer Grace Freud (Rick and Morty, the Eric Andre Show) brings her talents to Marvel with a story about the power of responsibility featuring the Marvel Universe’s favorite gay ginger, D-Man! She’s joined by Eisner-nominated artist Scott B. Henderson in his first work for Marvel!
Television writer and podcaster Ira Madison III explores the legacy of Pride in his Marvel debut!
Champions scribe Danny Lore revisits the legacy of two characters long left in the closet in a tale of love and redemption!
The world’s first vampire movie premiered 100 years ago. After a long copyright battle, Florence Stoker, widow of the author of Dracula, asked for all copies of Nosferatu to be destroyed. Were they?…
…On Fragile Waves is a powerful novel on a very contemporary theme, that if anything has become more powerful, more apposite, since it appears. It is the story of an Afghan family, fleeing the chaos in Afghanistan. At one level, it is purely naturalistic fiction, and very effectively so. But there is a fantastical level as well (or “magical realistic” as many reviews would have it) expressed in two ways — the stories the parents of the main character tell, traditional stories (with variations) … and, more obviously, a dead character who returns to haunt — or inspire — the main character….
(17) HOW MANY LIVES WAS THAT? A trailer has dropped for Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, the upcoming movie that stars Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek.
DreamWorks Animation presents a new adventure in the Shrek universe as daring outlaw Puss in Boots discovers that his passion for peril and disregard for safety have taken their toll. Puss has burned through eight of his nine lives, though he lost count along the way. Getting those lives back will send Puss in Boots on his grandest quest yet. Antonio Banderas returns as the voice of the notorious PiB as he embarks on an epic journey into the Black Forest to find the mythical Wishing Star and restore his lost lives. But with only one life left, Puss will have to humble himself and ask for help from his former partner and nemesis: the captivating Kitty Soft Paws (Salma Hayek).
…MARTIN: In one of Charroppin’s latest videos, Lizzy co-stars with Leonardo DiCaprio in “Titanic.”…
CHARROPPIN: The hardest of it is not adding the cat, it’s removing Kate Winslet. That process takes about three-quarters of how long it takes to do video.
MARTIN: Lizzy has 6 million social media followers, which is something Charroppin and his wife hope that animal shelters actually benefit from. They adopted Lizzy five years ago.
CHARROPPIN: If there’s one reason to do all of this, it’s to mostly raise awareness that adopting cats is way better than going to get full breed cats. Anything that we can do to help makes it all worth it.
(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Honest Game Trailers: The Elden Ring,” Fandom Games, in a spoiler-filled episode, notes this new game, designed by George RR Martin, is a world where “every animal, person and plant wants to kill you” and features a dozen different killer swamps. But the narrator thinks the scariest monsters are the crabs and lobsters. “I haven’t been this frightened by seafood since I got food poisoning at Red Lobster!”
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Rich Horton, Chris Barkley, N., Martin Easterbrook, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
This craft talk & generative workshop will explore the form & structure of ngano, a Zimbabwean storytelling form that blends fables, folktales, and the surreal. We will examine how some of the structures and techniques of this traditional narrative can be used for plotting and structuring in the short form. In a ngano strange things happen: animals talk, people fly, time collapses, & nature eschews the laws of physics. These fantastic tales have social justice elements at their core: they call out social evils and speak truth to power. In this session, I’m specifically interested in interrogating Ngano as political fantasy that holds a mirror to our world. What can writers borrow from this traditional African storytelling form to reflect our bizarre & impossible realities across the globe?
We will engage with the work of Zimbabwean Sarunganos, like Ignatius Mabasa, who are keeping this form alive, as well as Black fabulists like Lesley Nneka Arimah, Irenosen Okojie, Helen Oyeyemi, Nana Nkweti, and others. All writers are welcome.
… Flyball is a cat. Who—and this is the complicated part—lives in space. His career is documented in four illustrated volumes: Space Cat (1952), Space Cat Visits Venus (1955), Space Cat Meets Mars (1957), Space Cat and the Kittens (1958). All four are illustrated by Paul Galdone (June 2, 1907–November 7, 1986).
I have not read these since 1969. How did they stand up? I am glad you asked….
(3) STOP WATCHING THE SKIES. [Item by Michael Toman.] Has anyone heard anything from Liiliput, Brobdingnag, The Floating Island (with its associated Grand Academy-of Lagadu-at-Balnibarbi,) Japan, Houyhnhnm-land, and “Other Remote Nations of the World” lately? Or, like my sister, residing in the Still-Improbable-Sounding-to-the-Undersigned, Red Stateof “North Carolina, USA,” has already seen the movie? MSN.com shares what happens when “Physicists consider real-life ‘Don’t Look Up’ scenarios”.
… “Effective mitigation strategies are imperative to ensure humanity’s continuity and future advancement,” Lubin and Cohen write. “Existential threats to humanity are very low recurrence, but are known to have happened multiple times in the past.”
NASA takes the threat seriously, scanning the heavens in search of potentially threatening bodies that cross Earth’s orbit. Last November, the agency used a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to launch a probe at a 525-foot-wide moon, Dimorphos, orbiting a a half-mile-wide asteroid named Didymos.
The 1,210-pound DART spacecraft is expected to slam into Dimorphos at a blistering 15,000 mph in September, disintegrating on impact as it gouges out a fresh crater and, in the process, slows the moonlet by a minuscule fraction of an inch per second.
The test will not move the targeted asteroid off its trajectory any appreciable amount. But it will allow scientists to assess their ability to one day deflect a threatening body by nudging it off course to ensure it misses Earth entirely.
Deflection works best at great distances, where a small nudge can have a major effect over many months. That requires early detection…
(4) A LANDMARK IN HORROR. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] BBC Radio 4’s series 1922: The Birth of Now, has devoted a short 15-minute program to Nosferatu. Available for download as mp3 from BBC Sounds (simple registration required). Details here — “1922: The Birth of Now, Nosferatu and Modernist Horror”.
1922: The Birth of Now – Ten programmes in which Matthew Sweet investigates objects and events from 1922, the crucial year for modernism, that have an impact today.
Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror.
F. W. Murnau’s 1922 gothic masterpiece is the first vampire movie. It is German Expressionism in cinematic form and still influences contemporary film-makers. It’s also a film about disease: Count Orlok – a rip-off of Dracula that got Bram Stoker’s family lawyers on the case – brings plague to Mittel Europe. What does this disease mean, in a Europe that has just survived war and pandemic? Matthew Sweet and guests including Dana Gioia, the award-winning poet and critic who wrote the libretto to composer Alva Henderson’s Nosferatu: The Opera, first produced in 2004, and the literary scholars Roger Luckhurst and Lisa Mullen.
(5) IRISH STUDIES. The American Conference for Irish Studies has put out a call for papers for ACIS National 2022 with the theme “Irish Studies: Pasts, Presents, and Futures”. It will be held online April 29-30, 2022.
Another year disrupted. Another unforeseen turning in the widening gyre. As in so many elements of our lives, the most recent wave of the pandemic means we must ask questions about our past, our present, and our future: How long has it been since we felt normal? What can we do right now? What will tomorrow bring? This moment allows us to reconsider the purpose and future of Irish Studies, and its related, interconnected, peripheral, and unrecognized fields. For the online 2022 American Conference for Irish Studies, we invite individual papers, panels, and roundtables that reassess the pasts, presents, and futures of our field. Intentionally open, speculative, and abstract, it is our hope that these papers, panels, and roundtables seek “collisions and encounters” that help, in the words of Gayatri Gopinath, to explore “our imbricated pasts and futures.”
For this year’s conference, which will be fully online, we seek papers, panels, and roundtables on the following, as well as any or all other topics in Irish Studies:
Imagined and real Irish pasts
Speculative and potential Irish futures
Irish encounters with other fields of study
Imbricated Irish experiences
Teaching Irish Studies in new contexts
(6) A PEEK INTO A FUTURE THAT NEVER WAS. Steve Haffner unveils a discovery that will be included in Volume 2 of The Complete John the Balladeer.
INFORMED READERS of Manly Wade Wellman, and followers of John the Balladeer in particular, know that prior to his death, the “Old Captain” was planning a sixth novel in Doubleday’s “Silver John” series to be called THE VALLEY SO LOW. FYI, Wellman detested the “Silver John” appellation and we almost never use it; it’s “John the Balladeer,” “John the Wanderer,” or just “John.” Following Wellman’s passing, Karl Edward Wagner edited a posthumous collection of Wellman’s recent short stories titled The Valley So Low: Southern Mountain Stories in 1987. Haffner Press is pleased as pinecones to share that we are including Wellman’s 4-page outline for the unwritten novel, THE VALLEY SO LOW, in Vol. Two of THE COMPLETE JOHN THE BALLADEER. So now all of you have the opportunity to learn what Manly Wade Wellman planned for John’s final song. Of course, artist Tim Kirk will be contributing a brand new interior illustration for Wellman’s proposal for THE VALLEY SO LOW.
In fact, before we had any idea he was returning to the main TV series fans were already excited at the news of a very different Who return for the acclaimed screenwriter –an audio drama. It all started when Davies dug out an old script he’d written as a young fan in the 1980s, and eventually Doctor Who audio producers Big Finish came on board to bring the story to life for real.
Now, Davies’ unfinished Mind of the Hodiac – completed by Scott Handcock and starring Colin Baker and Bonnie Langford – is coming soon, the first Who script we’ve seen from Davies for over 12 years. And with a load more scripts on the horizon, it’s fair to say that it’s a moment of odd synchronicity for the It’s A Sin creator.
(8) WHAT HAS SPACE DONE FOR ME LATELY? The UC San Diego Office of Innovation and Commercialization and the Clarke Center hope to answer that question in a free Zoom webinar about the benefits of space research today and what to expect tomorrow! Takes place February 10 at 4:00 p.m. Pacific. Register here.
The vast majority of people are unaware of all the ways space technologies affect us on a daily basis. Everything from bioengineering to communications to manufacturing and more, technology cultivated in humanity’s pursuit to conquer the last frontier, has had, and will continue to have, a profound impact on our everyday lives. So join us, as we explore what space has done for us lately.
The panelists are: Anjali Gupta, PhD, Business Development at Axiom Space; Karl Stedman, Co-Founder of Aurvandil; Robert Jacobson, Partner with Space Advisors®, LLC & Author of Space is Open for Business; and Dr. Erik Viirre, Director at Arthur C Clarke Center For Human Imagination.
(9) MEMORY LANE.
1983 — [Item by Cat Eldridge] Thirty-nine years ago on this date, The Greatest American Hero ended its three year run on ABC. It was created by producer Stephen J. Cannell, more known for series like Magnum P.I. and Castle (in which he appeared in a poker game with Castle as himself until his death) than SF series like this.
The series features William Katt as teacher turned superhero Ralph Hinkley after getting a suit from aliens, Robert Culp as FBI agent Bill Maxwell, and Connie Sellecca as lawyer Pam Davidson.
Though it ran for three seasons, it had an unusually low number of episodes for a show of that duration racking up only forty-five in total of which of five went unaired during the original broadcast.
The powers of the red suit would appear to be quite generic, but that apparently didn’t appear so to Warner Bros., the owners of DC Comics, who filed a lawsuit against ABC, Warner Bros. Inc. v. American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. It was ultimately dismissed by the Court where it was filed who said it had no grounds. A wise decision given how common red suits with extraordinary powers were.
Five years later, the cast came back together for a pilot movie for a new NBC series which was named The Greatest American Heroine which was never picked up. The movie was later added in syndication to this series.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born February 3, 1924 — Leslie Stevens. Here because he was the creator of first version of The Outer Limits and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Oh, and a neat little pulp film called Sheena starring Tanya Roberts for which he wrote the story. He wrote a handful of scripts for The Invisible Man as well. (Died 1998.)
Born February 3, 1925 — John Fiedler. He’s solely here as he played the ever so bland bureaucrat who gets possessed by the spirit of Jack the Ripper on the Trek episode “Wolf in the Fold”. I’m less interested in him than who wrote that screenplay. It was written by Robert Bloch, a master of horror who would write two other Trek episodes, “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” and “Catspaw”. (Died 2005.)
Born February 3, 1930 — Carolyn Serling. Widow of Rod Serling. She was the associate publisher and consulting editor of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, a monthly magazine published in the Eighties. She was a consultant to “Twilight Zone: The Movie” and had a cameo in there as Passenger in the “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” segment. In 1994, Ms. Serling found two unproduced stories by her husband in a trunk at her home and sold them to CBS which produced them as Twilight Zone: Rod Serling’s Lost Classics. In total, she edited six anthologies of stories inspired by the series. (Died 2020.)
Born February 3, 1953 — Randy Lofficier, 69. Editor, translator and author who I am including here for French Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Pulp Fiction: A Guide to Cinema, Television, Radio, Animation, Comic Books and Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present with her husband Jean-Marc Lofficier. Though published twenty years ago, it is still well worth picking up.
Born February 3, 1970 — Warwick Davis, 52. Nearly fifty live and voice appearances since first appearing in the Return of the Jedi in in place of Kenny Baker who was going to be a Ewok before he fell ill. Did you know he’s in Labyrinth as a member of the Goblin Corps? I certainly didn’t. Or that he did a series of humorous horror films centered around him as a Leprechaun? They did well enough that there was at least six of them. He even shows up in Doctor Who during the time of the Eleventh Doctor.
Born February 3, 1979 — Ransom Riggs, 43. He’s best known for Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children which I’ll confess I know absolutely nothing about, so educate me. I know it was turned into a film by Tim Burton which could a Very Good Thing and later into a series. His first book btw was The Sherlock Holmes Handbook: The Methods and Mysteries of the World’s Greatest Detective which sounds way cool. He won a Neffy for Best SSF YA Author.
(11) COMICS SECTION.
Blondie – how often does this comic do a genre joke?
(12) EIGHT PROOF. Octothorpe 50 is up! John Coxon is exchanging, Alison Scott is rekindling her sensawunda, and Liz Batty is watching the builders. We discuss what beers we like, listen to the Caribbean Science Fiction Podcast, talk about self-promotion and talk about TAFF. Listen here: “This is How Boxing Championships Work”.
Drone-like vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) flying car air taxis have been showing up at CES shows for years—Cadillac even showed one in 2021. But most experts don’t expect the first air taxi to be certified for use until 2024 at the earliest. At CES 2022, French startup MACA announced plans to get its hydrogen fuel-cell-powered electric VTOL “carcopter,” as they call it, off the ground before then. How do they hope to jump the government certification line? By flying low and restricting themselves to the airspace immediately above Formula 1 racetracks.
Even in these strange times, the sight is unusual enough to turn heads: a helmeted figure in a jumpsuit and cape with a tiny green creature strapped to his chest. Both appear to come from a galaxy far, far away. Both wear disposable masks over their mouths.
Masks, it turns out, are the entire point of their mission.“I am the Maskalorian, giver of masks,” the figure says in his first public appearance, in the summer of 2020. “Whether you’re a human or a droid, it doesn’t matter. We must be vigilant and do what we can to keep each other protected.”
The character — inspired by the hit Star Wars show “The Mandalorian” on Disney Plus — is the brainchild of Matt Adams, a 43-year-old filmmaker and improv performer. And that little green guy wearing a GoPro on his chest might look a lot like Grogu, a.k.a. the Child, a.k.a. Baby Yoda. But his name is Masku. Together, they have given away roughly 1,000 masks.
(15) ASIMOV NEWS. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] This is the lede of an article by Anjuna Ahuja about space-based solar power, behind a paywall in the Financial Times.
It was Isaac Asimov who first envisioned that light from our nearest star could be captured, converted into microwave radiation and then beamed down to Earth. More than 80 years after his short story, “Reason,” was published, the idea of space-based solar power–where the panels are in orbit rather than on earth–is having a moment in the sun.
(16) PRE-WASHED GENES. James Davis Nicoll tells Tor.com readers there’s one thing you can count on finding in science fiction. That’s bad science. As in these “Five SF Stories Involving Selective Breeding”.
It might be comforting to tell oneself that eugenics—the conviction that one can breed one’s way to better humans by encouraging the fitter ones to have more children and those considered to be less fit to have fewer—was a horrible fad that went out of fashion after the unpleasantness in the mid-20th century. Of course, that’s not true. State sanctioned sterilization of those deemed inferior continues to the modern day.
It’s not surprising that science fiction authors have not always resisted the lure of eugenics as a plot starter. Why not apply to humans the same techniques that transformed the humble wolf into the majestic chihuahua? Here are five stories that engage with the notion in different ways….
(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] This is a video where over two dozen animators each did three seconds of animating a red ball then “passed” it on to another animator. “Pass the Ball”.
[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Daniel Dern, Nancy Sauer, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Bruce D. Arthurs (it’s the line following one previously used as a title).]
How do you feel about a storyline that you wrote in “Snow Crash” now turning into our potential global future?
It’s flattering when readers take the work seriously enough to put their own time and money into bringing similar ideas to fruition. After all the buildup in the last few weeks, the Meta announcement has a ripping-off-the-bandaid feeling.
Almost since the beginning of the genre, science fiction writers have occasionally been given credit for inspiring real-life inventions, so this is not new and it’s not unique. I was aware of that fact thirty years ago when I wrote “Snow Crash,” but I didn’t necessarily expect it to happen.
Good science fiction tries to depict futures that are plausible enough to seem convincing to the readers — many of whom are technically savvy, and tough critics.
So when depicting a future technology in a work of science fiction, you have to make it plausible. And if it’s plausible enough, it can be implemented in the real world.
(2) FUTURE TENSE. The series of short stories from Future Tense and Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination continues with “Furgen,” a new short story by Andrew Silverman, about a retriever, his owner, and his A.I.-enabled minder.
Caro had only once before felt such elation from a text alert, and that was when she first got Tucker in the mail. She ordered him from an exclusive breeder in Tokyo, of all places. She remembered she was watching videos of puppies learning to swim when her phone buzzed, followed by a message stating that Tucker, her beautiful new retriever, had just arrived on her doorstep. She shrieked with glee, ran outside to the porch, and opened up the hole-punched box containing the love of her life.
It doesn’t take any special technology to see that dogs love people. Hildegard von Bingen, in the 11th century, noted that “a certain natural community of behavior binds [the dog] to humans. Therefore, he responds to man, understand him, loves him and likes to stay with him.” It could fairly be said that, like Othello, dogs love not wisely, but too well. Their loyalty to our capricious species has seen dogs led into wars, ill-fated Arctic expeditions, and many other tragic misadventures.
But are there limits on dogs’ capacity for love?…
(3) WFC 2021 ANNOUNCES DAY MEMBERSHIPS. World Fantasy Convention 2021 in Montréal will be selling day memberships. See more information at their website. The prices in Canadian dollars are:
Thursday $75
Friday $100
Saturday $100
Sunday $50
World Fantasy Convention 2021 will be held at the Hotel Bonaventure Montréal from November 4-7.
(4) KEEP PUTTING ONE FOOT IN FRONT OF ANOTHER. At Eight Miles Higher, Andrew Darlington delves into the history of the UK’s most long-lived prozine: “SF Magazine History: ‘INTERZONE’”.
In terms of simple longevity, ‘Interzone’ must be credited as Britain’s most successful SF magazine ever. In January 1991 it comfortably coasted past the forty-one issue limit achieved by ‘Nebula’. Then by August 1994, it surpassed the eighty-five editions of ‘Authentic Science Fiction’. Leaving ‘Science Fantasy’ in its wake, until eventually, by the July-August 2009 issue, through stealth and persistence, it finally outdistanced the 222 incarnations of ‘New Worlds’. Nothing can now compete with that total. And throughout that regularly-spaced life-span, unlike the bizarre array of relaunches, rebirths and reconfigurations that characterized its predecessors, ‘Interzone’ has retained its recognizable appearance on the newsagent’s shelf as a reassuringly attractive glossy A4 magazine.
Game of Thronesshowrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss didn’t wind up making their Star Wars movie, but the duo is working on a new science-fiction series for Netflix: The Three-Body Problem.
…According to Deadline, the show has begun casting, announcing 12 stars for the upcoming series. Among them are two Game of Thronesalums: John Bradley and Liam Cunningham….
With actors hailing from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and a number of popular films, it seems The Three-Body Problem will have a fairly recognizable cast. The creators haven’t revealed who’s playing who, but further updates should be on the horizon.
(6) NIGHT LIFE IN SANTA FE. There will be “A Night of Wild Cards!” at G.R.R. Martin’s Jean Cocteau Cinema in Santa Fe, NM on November 13 at 4:00 p.m. – ticket info at the link.
Have you been touched by the Wild Card?
Spend an evening with authors George R.R. Martin, Melinda Snodgrass, and John Jos Miller as they speak about the Wild Cards Series, up coming projects, and remember fellow author and friend, Victor Milan.
Help us celebrate the life of Victor Milan, the release of “Turn of the Cards” in Trade Paperback, and “Death Draws Five” in Hardcover!
The Jean Cocteau is also a place where you can see Dune, the “Once-in-a-generation film,” as it was meant to be seen — on the big screen with a specially handcrafted cocktail in your hand.
(7) SIT DOWN, JOHN. In Debarkle Chapter 70, Camestros Felapton tells how the sf field finally said out loud they were ready for “Life After Campbell”.
…Torgersen’s Sad Puppies 3 slate and been something of a last hurrah for Analog at the Hugo Awards, with four Analog stories becoming finalists on the strength of the Puppy campaigns. Torgersen also included Kary English on the slate due to their common connection with Writers of the Future. No Writers of the Future from a year after 2015 would be a finalist again in the following years nor would any story from Analog make it onto the ballot…
…Like many contemporary intellectuals, William and Henry took ghosts seriously. They were friendly with Frederic W. H. Myers, who headed the Society for Psychical Research, and Henry was recorded in the minutes of a society meeting in London reading a report on behalf of his absent brother about a female medium who was occasionally overtaken by the spirit of a dead man. Society researchers sought positivistic evidence of ghosts and provided a steady stream of testimonies for public consumption. These accounts of specter sightings, which numbered in the thousands, were in turn avidly consumed by readers, who couldn’t get enough of them.
The James brothers’ views on ghosts were rooted in contemporary science, and also in their personal convictions about the fate of consciousness after death. Having enjoyed such fertile minds, and interacted with so many others, neither could accept that these vital organs would simply expire with the body….
Salvation came in the form of Viviana García Besné, a film-maker, archivist, self-described “popular film activist” and descendant of Mexico’s cinematic Calderón clan….
“I thought the best, and most obvious, thing would be to send them all to the big film institutions in Mexico,” she says. “I told them about this marvellous collection of films, photos and paperwork, and thought they’d all jump for joy. But they were like, ‘We’ll have that, and maybe that, but not that.’”
Unwilling to split up the collection – “It’s the work of a company that began in 1910 and made films until 1990; that’s 80 years of cinema history,” she says – García Besné decided to hang on to it all and to embark on a quest to rescue and reappraise Mexico’s cine popular.
Her Permanencia Voluntaria (Double Feature) archive, which has extended beyond the Calderón collection and now holds some 400 films, is being showcased in Madrid this month in a season at Spain’s national film archive, the Filmoteca Española.
Despite the archive’s growing international reputation – it has restored 10 films over the past four years, and the collection is housed between the Mexican town of Tepoztlán and the UCLA film archive and the Academy film archive in Los Angeles – its genesis and survival have been far from easy….
(10) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
1987 – Thirty-four years ago, The Hidden premiered. Directed by Jack Sholder and produced by committee as it had three producers (Michael L. Meltzer, Gerald T. Olson and Robert Shaye). It was written by Jim Kouf (under the pseudonym Bob Hunt. Kouf being an Edgar Award winning screenplay writer apparently decided not to be associated with this film. It had a cast of Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Nouri, Clu Gulager, Chris Mulkey, Ed O’Ross, Clarence Felder, Claudia Christian and Larry Cedar.
Critics liked it with Roger Ebert calling it “a surprisingly effective film“. Not surprisingly it has gained cult status. Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it an excellent seventy-three rating. It likely more or less lost at least something even after making ten million as it cost five million to make and figuring in publicity costs that suggests a loss.
A sequel, The Hidden II, direct to DDV, came out six years later. It did not have the cast of the original film. Let’s just say that it’s wasn’t well received and leave it there.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born October 30, 1923 — William Campbell. In “The Squire of Gothos” on Trek, which was a proper Halloween episode even if it wasn’t broadcast then, he was Trelane, and in “The Trouble With Tribbles” he played the Klingon Koloth, a role revisited on Deep Space Nine in “Blood Oath”. He appeared in several horror films including Blood Bath, Night of Evil, and Dementia 13. He started a fan convention which ran for several years, Fantasticon, which celebrated the achievements of production staffers in genre films and TV shows and raised funds for the Motion Picture & Television Fund, a charitable organization which provides assistance and care to those in the motion picture industry with limited or no resources, when struck with infirmity and/or in retirement age. (Died 2011.)
Born October 30, 1939 — Grace Slick, 82. Lead singer first with Jefferson Airplane and then with Jefferson Starship, bands with definite genre connections. “Hyperdrive” off their Dragonfly album was used at the MidAmeriCon opening ceremonies. And Blows Against the Empire was nominated for Best Dramatic Presentation at Noreascon 1, a year that had no winner.
Born October 30, 1947 — Tim Kirk, 74. His senior thesis would be mostly published by Ballantine Books as the 1975 Tolkien Calendar. Impressive. Even more impressive, he won Hugo Awards for Best Fan Artist at Heicon ’70, L.A. Con I, Torcon II, Discon II and again at MidAmeriCon. With Ken Keller, he co-designed the first cold-cast resin base used at MidAmeriCon. He also won a Balrog and was nominated for a World Fantasy Award as well.
Born October 30, 1951 — Harry Hamlin, 70. His first role of genre interest was Perseus on Clash of The Titans. He plays himself in Maxie, and briefly shows up in Harper’s Island. He also has two choice voice roles in Batman: the Animated Series, Cameron Kaiser in “Joker’s Wild” and even more impressive as the voice of werewolf Anthony “Tony” Romulus in “Moon of the Wolf”. Since I know a lot of you like the series, I’ll note he plays Aaron Echolls in Veronica Mars.
Born October 30, 1951 — P. Craig Russell, 70. Comic illustrator whose work has won multiple Harvey and Eisner Awards. His work on Killraven, a future version of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, collaborating with writer Don McGregor, was lauded by readers and critics alike. Next up was mainstream work at DC with I think his work on Batman, particularly with Jim Starlin, being amazing. He also inked Mike Mignola’s pencils on the Phantom Stranger series. He would segue into working on several Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné projects. Worth noting is his work on a number of Gaiman projects including a Coraline graphic novel. Wayne Alan Harold Productions published the P. Craig Russell Sketchbook Archives, a 250-page hardcover art book featuring the best of his personal sketchbooks.
Born October 30, 1958 — Max McCoy, 63. Here for a quartet of novels (Indiana Jones and the Secret of the Sphinx, Indiana Jones and the Hollow Earth, Indiana Jones and the Dinosaur Eggs and Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone) which flesh out the backstory and immerse Indy in a pulp reality. He’s also writing Wylde’s West, a paranormal mystery series.
Born October 30, 1972 — Jessica Hynes, 49. Playing Joan Redfern, she shows up on two of the best Tenth Doctor stories, “Human Nuture” and “The Family of Blood”. She’d play another character, Verity Newman in a meeting of the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors, “The End of Time, Part Two”. Her other genre role was as Felia Siderova on Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) in the “Mental Apparition Disorder” and “Drop Dead” episodes. Her last genre adjacent role is Sofie Dahl in Roald & Beatrix: The Tail of the Curious Mouse.
…As the editor of The Year’s Best Horror anthology from 1980 until his death in 1994, Wagner showcased writers like Steven King, Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch and Ramsey Campbell. Imagery from Wagner’s Lovecraftian short story “Sticks” influenced works like “The Blair Witch Project” and the “devil’s nests” branch constructs in the first season of “True Detective.”
“Wagner was ripped off,” said the late horror writer Dennis Etchison in a documentary interview. “That is only my opinion so the makers of ‘Blair Witch’ should not sue me. … I can only say that is my personal opinion, as an expert witness.”
But as large as a presence as he was in 1980s horror scene, his personal fame never matched the far-reaching influence of his ideas and taste. Wagner’s books and short stories are out of print and hard to obtain….
(14) NO SPARE CHANGE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Now this is meta. (Even though it has nothing to do with the newly renamed Meta.) New Yorker magazine has published a book review for a book about how Amazon is changing the way books are written—Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (Verso), by literary scholar Mark McGurl. “Is Amazon Changing the Novel?”
…McGurl’s real interest is in charting how Amazon’s tentacles have inched their way into the relationship between reader and writer. This is clearest in the case of [Kindle Direct Publishing]. The platform pays the author by the number of pages read, which creates a strong incentive for cliffhangers early on, and for generating as many pages as possible as quickly as possible. The writer is exhorted to produce not just one book or a series but something closer to a feed—what McGurl calls a “series of series.” In order to fully harness K.D.P.’s promotional algorithms, McGurl says, an author must publish a new novel every three months. To assist with this task, a separate shelf of self-published books has sprung up, including Rachel Aaron’s “2K to 10K: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love,” which will help you disgorge a novel in a week or two. Although more overtly concerned with quantity over quality, K.D.P. retains certain idiosyncratic standards. Amazon’s “Guide to Kindle Content Quality” warns the writer against typos, “formatting issues,” “missing content,” and “disappointing content”—not least, “content that does not provide an enjoyable reading experience.” Literary disappointment has always violated the supposed “contract” with a reader, no doubt, but in Bezos’s world the terms of the deal have been made literal. The author is dead; long live the service provider….
There is a sixth dimension beyond that which is known to man, as vast as space and as timeless as infinity, lying somewhere just past the Twilight Zone, between the pit of Mark Zuckerberg’s fears and the summit of Mark Zuckerberg’s knowledge. It is an area we call … Meta, the new rebranded name of the Facebook parent company. Here are a few tales from this place….
Three beloved dinosaur statues that were snatched from a Central Texas museum are back home thanks to the help of an eagle-eyed tipster. Unfortunately, two were heavily damaged.
Attention was widespread after the statues – named Minmi, Dilong and Dimetrodon, each 6 to 10 feet long – were stolen from their exhibit areas at The Dinosaur Park in Cedar Creek on Oct. 20, the park announced on its Facebook page. The dinosaurs were later recovered at a UT Austin fraternity, a representative for the museum confirmed to McClatchy News.
UT Austin is about 21 miles from The Dinosaur Park….
(17) FRIGHT AT NIGHT. Keith Roysdon talks about how he geeked out on horror in the 1960s building Aurora monster kits and reading Famous Monsters Of Filmland in “Growing Up Spooky” at CrimeReads.
.. A couple of years before I was born, the classic 1930s and 1940s Universal horror films were sold to TV stations around the country in the so-called “Shock” syndicated package. “Dracula,” “Frankenstein,” “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Invisible Man.” They were all there, or in the “Son of Shock” package to follow.
Suddenly, movies that had only been seen in theaters – in rare re-releases – for two or three decades were there for audiences old and new through television. Most stations packaged them as “Shock Theater” or “Nightmare Theater,” the latter a late-night double feature hosted by Sammy Terry, a genial ghoul played for Indiana viewers by Bob Carter, a mild-mannered musical instrument salesman by day who terrified us late at night each weekend….
(18) CLICK THAT CRITIC. Dom Noble tackles the new Dune movie. How good an adaptation of the book is it?
An auction house handling an estate sale for a recently deceased Indiana woman said a sealed copy of 1988 video game Super Mario Bros. 2 sold for a whopping $88,550.
…That said, there’s a formidable tradition of films that express horror according not to a set of established guidelines but to freely expressive impulse, evoking, through far-reaching imagination rather than blood and guts, the emotions of fear, dread, foreboding, and a sense the uncanny. Here are ten of my favorites….
The list includes –
“Shadow of the Vampire”
(2000, E. Elias Merhige)
This extravagant horror drama, played earnestly, is nonetheless also a giddy comedy of counterfactual cinematic history. It’s centered on the shoot of “Nosferatu,” the founding vampire film, in which the titular bloodsucker—bald-headed, pointy-eared, pop-eyed, long-clawed, and fanged—runs rampage through the bedrooms of Transylvania. The wild premise of Merhige’s film (written by Steven Katz) is that the real-life actor playing that role, a little-known one named Max Schreck (the last name actually means “fright” in German), was cast in the role because he was a real-life vampire. John Malkovich plays Murnau, who, in order to cast Schreck, both deceives his cast and crew and puts them at grave risk; Schreck is played by Willem Dafoe, who is conspicuously having the time of his life playing a monster straight. Merhige, too, overtly delights in the misunderstandings that divide humans from monsters—and also offers a monstrous metaphor of cinematic history itself, the real-life depredations on which the classic cinema was founded.
(21) WHAT MUSIC THEY MAKE. Overly Sarcastic Productions takes on Werewolves for Halloween!
You know ’em, you love ’em, but you might not know ’em quite as well as you think you do! Today let’s dive into one of the big-name creatures of the night!
(22) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Floor 9.5” at Vimeo, Tony Meakins says if the elevator stops between the ninth and tenth floor, don’t get off!
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Bonnie McDaniel, Darrah Chavey, Jennifer Hawthorne, StephenfromOttwa, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jon Meltzer.]
(1) NYRSF READINGS. The New York Review of Science Fiction
Readings presents “An Evening of ‘Reckoning’” — creative writing on
environmental justice – on October 14 with guest curator Michael J. DeLuca, featuring
Emily Houk, Yukyan Lam, Krista Hoeppner Leahy, Marissa Lingen, Emery Robin, and
Brian Francis Slattery. The event begins at 7:00 p.m. at The Brooklyn Commons Café, 388
Atlantic Avenue (between Hoyt & Bond St.). Full info on Facebook.
Michael J. DeLuca‘s roots are mycorrhizal with sugar maple and Eastern white pine. He’s the publisher of Reckoning, an annual journal of creative writing on environmental justice. His fiction has appeared most recently in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Strangelet and Middle Planet.
Emily Houk’s short fiction has appeared previously in Conjunctions, and she has just finished her first novel. She is coeditor of Ninepin Press, and she thrives in the shade of the library stacks of Western Massachusetts.
Yukyan Lam is based in New York, NY, and works for a non-profit on environmental health and social justice. Her scientific writing has appeared in various academic journals. She loves reading and writing creative non-fiction and short stories, and currently serves as a prose editor for Typehouse Literary Magazine. Follow her @yukyan_etc
Krista Hoeppner Leahy is a poet, writer, and actor. Her work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Farrago’s Wainscot, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Raritan, Shimmer, Tin House, Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy and elsewhere. Born in Colorado, Krista currently resides in Brooklyn with her family.
Marissa Lingen is a freelance writer living in the suburbs of Minneapolis with two large men and one small dog. Mostly she writes speculative fiction. She has a large collection of foliage-themed jewelry.
Emery Robin is an Oakland-born and New York-based writer, previously published on Tor.com and in Spark: A Creative Anthology. When not busy reading, Emery is interested in propaganda, marginalia, and rock ‘n’ roll, and can be found on Twitter @ emwrobin .
Brian Francis Slattery is the arts editor and a reporter for the New Haven Independent. He has written four novels and is currently on the writing team of Bookburners, a serial fiction project. He’s also a musician and for a week out of every year, lives without electricity.
(2) JUNGLE CRUISE. Andrew Petersen, a student I met at Azusa Pacific University’s Yosemite
Semester in 2001, achieved his goal of becoming a driver on the Jungle
Cruise Ride. If only he hadn’t died
last year – he would have gotten a kick out of this movie.
Inspired by the famous Disneyland theme park ride, Disney’s JUNGLE CRUISE is an adventure-filled, Amazon-jungle expedition starring Dwayne Johnson as the charismatic riverboat captain and Emily Blunt as a determined explorer on a research mission. Also starring in the film are Edgar Ramirez, Jack Whitehall, with Jesse Plemons, and Paul Giamatti. Jaume Collet-Serra is the director and John Davis, John Fox, Dwayne Johnson, Hiram Garcia, Dany Garcia and Beau Flynn are the producers, with Doug Merrifield serving as executive producer. Disney’s JUNGLE CRUISE opens in U.S. theaters on July 24, 2020.
Captain Roger’s performance at the Battle of Wakanda has been widely and rightly panned. But nothing has been said about the profound failures of his enemy, the Thanosians. Despite every possible advantage in manpower, materiel, and circumstance, they still failed. All students of the military art should examine how they so masterfully snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
Terrain Analysis
The Thanosians had complete freedom in the approach to battle. Nevertheless, they committed two grievous and unforced errors. First, they failed to identify the large energy shield protecting Benin Zana and its immediate environs. This information would have been known with even the most cursory reconnaissance. The mistake cost them at least a battalion worth of troops, when their dropship smashed into it. It is generally agreed that losing a sixth of your force before battle commences is a bad thing. ..
Each of the defendants — including sitting Superior Court Judge Kathryn Schrader and DragonCon co-founder Ed Kramer — were present for a brief arraignment hearing, scattered across the courtroom gallery as attorneys spoke on their behalf. Their not guilty pleas mean the case against them will move forward. The next hearing in the case is scheduled for Nov. 7….
(5) IMPERIAL SPONGEBOB. Holly M. Barker’s article for The Contemporary
Pacific, “Unsettling
SpongeBob and the Legacies of Violence on Bikini Bottom”, asserts the
cartoon series normalizes an array or moral and ethical problems. Most of the
piece is behind a paywall. Here is the abstract:
Billions of people around the globe are well-acquainted with SpongeBob Squarepants and the antics of the title character and his friends on Bikini Bottom. By the same token, there is an absence of public discourse about the whitewashing of violent American military activities through SpongeBob’s occupation and reclaiming of the bottom of Bikini Atoll’s lagoon. SpongeBob Squarepants and his friends play a role in normalizing the settler colonial takings of Indigenous lands while erasing the ancestral Bikinian people from their nonfictional homeland. This article exposes the complicity of popular culture in maintaining American military hegemonies in Oceania while amplifying the enduring indigeneity (Kauanui 2016) of the Marshallese people, who maintain deeply spiritual and historical connections to land—even land they cannot occupy due to residual radiation contamination from US nuclear weapons testing—through a range of cultural practices, including language, song, and weaving. This article also considers the gendered violence of nuclear colonialism and the resilience of Marshallese women.
… While Barker admits that the show’s creators likely did not have “U.S. colonialism” in mind while developing the cartoon, she calls it “disturbing” that they did not realize that “Bikini Bottom and Bikini Atoll were not theirs for the taking.” Consequently, Barker suggests that “millions of children” have “become acculturated to an ideology that includes the US character SpongeBob residing on another people’s homeland.”
In this way, colonialism is supposedly “produced, reproduced, and normalized” through the cartoon
As if fictionally “occupying” nonfictional land was not enough, Barker also accuses the cartoon of being biased against women.
The professor complains that “all of the main characters on the show are male,” except for Sandy Cheeks the squirrel, whom she suggests was only created in order to boost the gender diversity of the show.
“The name ‘Bob’ represents the everyday man, a common American male, much like a ‘Joe,'” Barker observes, concluding that “our gaze into the world of Bikini Bottom, as well as the surface of Bikini, is thus filtered through the activities of men.”
Barker concludes her article by insisting that even though SpongeBob’s writers likely did not mean “to infuse a children’s show with racist, violent colonial practices,” the show is part of a larger issue, an “insidious practice of disappearing Indigenous communities.”
(6) DANIUS OBIT. Sara Danius has
died due to breast cancer. She was the permanent secretary for the Swedish
Academy during the MeToo era and who was forced out from it due to her
determination to get rid of its toxic patriarchal working culture. She was 57
years old. (Swedish language news article here.)
(7) TODAY IN HISTORY.
October 12, 1987 — Ultraman: The Adventure Begins. This Japanese animated film stars the English voice lead talents of Adrienne Barbeau and Stacy Keach. Jr.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born October 12, 1875 — Aleister Crowley. 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 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 dispute by some), 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, 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, 1943 — Linda Shaye, 76. 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 Running Man as a Propaganda Officer
Born October 12, 1965 — Dan Abnett, 54. 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 and his Border Princes novel he did in the Torchwood universe as great looks at him as a writer.
Born October 12, 1968 — Hugh Jackman, 51. Obviously Wolverine in the Marvel film franchise. 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. And he played Robert Angier in The Prestige based off the novel written by the real Christopher Priest.
(9) COMICS SECTION.
Rich Horton says about today’s Dilbert: “I don’t know if Scott Adams nicked this idea from Fred Pohl or Greg Egan or someone else, but I think of Daniel Galouye’s Simulacron-3 (filmed as The Thirteenth Floor).”
The setting deviates from real-world history in two major ways. Magic exists. And the country of Alpennia does not correspond to any real-world place or nation…. [More at the link.]
…The exterior of Booking.com‘s Addams Family mansion doesn’t look spooky, but the inside makes up for it.
The [3700 square foot] mansion rents for just $101.10 per night, but not everyone interested will get in. [It will be available for only four one-night bookings starting the 29th of this month.] Mark your calendars now if you want to try to be one of the lucky ones. Bookings open on Oct. 28 at 9 a.m. PT, and they’ll probably disappear as fast as you can snap your fingers.
I had this book I loved, Bring on the Bad Guys. It was a big, chunky paperback collection of comic-book stories, and as you might guess from the title, it wasn’t much concerned with heroes. It was instead an anthology of tales about the worst of the worst, vile psychopaths with names like The Abomination and faces to match.
My dad had to read that book to me every night. He didn’t have a choice. It was one of these Scheherazade-type deals. If he didn’t read to me, I wouldn’t stay in bed. I’d slip out from under my Empire Strikes Back quilt and roam the house in my Spider-Man Underoos, soggy thumb in my mouth and my filthy comfort blanket tossed over one shoulder. I could roam all night if the mood took me. My father had to keep reading until my eyes were barely open, and even then, he could only escape by saying he was going to step out for a smoke and he’d be right back.
(13) THOUGHT YOU SHOULD KNOW. Behind a paywall at The Wall
Street Journal: “Streaming
Is Killing Physical Media. Here’s Why You Won’t Miss It “. Tagline: “With Samsung’s
decision to stop making Blu-ray players, now even discs are going extinct. One
writer reminisces about all we’ll lose. Another looks forward to an all-digital
future.”
(14) FUTURIUM. Aa “house of futures” museum
opened in Berlin last month called the Futurium, and their website is futurium.de. The home site is in German, however, they
also offer an English language version.
Futurium celebrated its opening on 05 September 2019. Since then, the interest in the house of futures has exceeded all expectations. In the first month, 100,000 visitors already came to Futurium and devoted themselves to the question: How do we want to live?
(15) NOSFERATU. [Item by Steve Vertlieb.] Every
generation has its incarnation of the vampire mythos – Dark Shadows,
Twilight, True Blood, and more. But it all cinematically began with F.W.
Murnau’s 1922 silent movie masterpiece Nosferatu. Ninety-four years
after its inception, North Hollywood’s Crown City Theater Company unleashed an
astonishing live stage presentation entitled Nosferatu: A Symphony in Terror.
In “Nosferatu”, film historian Steve Vertlieb takes us aboard a dark yet
wonderful cinematic time machine, delving into the creation of Murnau’s seminal
horror film, examining it’s influence on generations (from Lugosi and Lee, to Salem’s
Lot, Harry Potter and more), then reviews the startling stage presentation
from a few years ago.
…Gather the LEGO bricks, sets or elements that you want to part with; put them in a cardboard box; and print out a free shipping label from the LEGO Replay website. At the Give Back Box facility, they’ll be sorted, inspected and cleaned.
“We know people don’t throw away their LEGO bricks,” Tim Brooks, vice president of environmental responsibility at the LEGO Group, said in a Tuesday news release. “The vast majority hand them down to their children or grandchildren. But others have asked us for a safe way to dispose of or to donate their bricks. With Replay, they have an easy option that’s both sustainable and socially impactful.”
What do you do with an old car park that no-one wants to park in? Why not use them to grow mushrooms – or even salad?
Paris built too many underground car parks in the 1960s and 70s. Falling car ownership means many are standing empty, or finding new and surprising uses.
(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Lauren Gunderson Is Taking On J.M. Barrie” on YouTube,
Lauren Gunderson discusses her adaptation of Peter Pan, which will be
produced by the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington in December.
[Thanks to Nancy Collins, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Mike
Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Karl-Johan Norén, Steve
Vertlieb, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File
770 contributing editor of the day Anne Sheller.]
