Tag Archives: Octothorpe

Pixel Scroll 4/24/25 I Have Filed My Resistance For A Pocketful Of Novels

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(1) BRITISH FANTASY AWARDS NEWS. The first round of voting for the British Fantasy Awards is open until May 9. These nominees will make up part of the eventual shortlist. Complete guidelines at the link.

To be eligible to vote, you must be a member of the British Fantasy Society or be an attendee at Fantasycon 2024 in Chester, or have bought a ticket to the upcoming World Fantasy Convention in Brighton this year. You can vote by completing the form here: https://forms.gle/LbGiqY8sywYSrTLF7

Eligible titles must have been published for the first time in the English language in 2024, anywhere in the world.

Once the voting is closed, the votes are tallied and the short list for each category is formed. This shortlist is sent to the jurors who may then add up to 2 egregious omissions, based on their knowledge of the category. Once the short list is finalised, the jurors will have the opportunity to read, listen to, and/or view the works and discuss them as a group to decide upon the winners.

The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony at World Fantasy Convention in Brighton, held from 30th October to 2nd November. You can find out more about the convention and book your ticket here: World Fantasy Convention 2025

Call for Jurors

We are now also inviting applications to be a juror for the British Fantasy Awards. You do not need to be a member of the BFS to volunteer as a juror – and in fact, we like to include as many non-members as possible. The only qualification you need to be a juror is a love of Fantasy in all its forms and the time and willingness to review the materials for as many categories as you volunteer for.

(2) LONDON SFF ART DISPLAY. “’Building Bigger Worlds’ exhibition wows fans of SciFi artist John R Mullaney” at downthetubes.net. Images of the exhibit at the link.

…Reading-based artist John R Mullaney has been creating highly detailed cutaway artwork featuring locations, architecture, vehicles, spaceships and weapons from major sci-f cinema properties, for more than two decades. Each piece undergoes a laborious hand drawn process, taking months to complete. The finished art has been approved by some of Hollywood’s biggest studios and printed in a range of officially-licensed bestselling books, which fans of the movies and TV shows enjoy reading….

(3) BY GEORGE. “’Star Trek,’ ‘Twilight Zone’ and ‘Ocean’s 11’ Writer Had A Rough Childhood In Cheyenne” — the Cowboy State Daily profiles a beloved sff figure.

Mr. George Clayton Johnson. Storyteller. A middle school dropout who escaped lonely life in a cold, barren little town only to become one of the most imaginative minds of Tinseltown.

He was inspired by visionaries and inspired others to become visionaries. He traveled the world and led countless millions to new worlds. But the irony is that Mr. Johnston never returned to a place that he never left, and the elation he evoked in so many others came from a determination to overcome the depths of lonely desperation in the Cowboy State.

The author of “Ocean’s 11.” One of the most revered and provocative storytellers of “The Twilight Zone.” The screenwriter who introduced the world to “Star Trek.”…

George wearing his party hat in 2010.

(4) OCTOTHORPE. Live from Reconnect, the 2025 Eastercon in Belfast, comes episode 133 of the Octothorpe podcast, “I Understand That Alison Has Never Been Pope”.

We discuss the fun we’ve had at the convention, and also discuss other forthcoming Eastercons through to 2030. It’s possibly more coherent than some other live episodes?

An uncorrected transcript is available here. Really, this time.

John, Alison and Liz are sat behind a table at Reconnect doing a live podcast. The words “Octothorpe 133” appear at the bottom.

(5) PARLIAMENT DEBATES AI. “MPs argue that AI text and data-mining exemption lacks effective ‘opt-out’” reports The Bookseller.

James Frith, Labour MP for Bury North, opened a Westminster Hall debate on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on intellectual property on Wednesday 23rd April, calling for amendments to the data bill “that recognise the super massive concerns” of the creative industries.

The debate comes just two months after the government closed its consultation on AI and copyright, which received thousands of responses.

During the debate, various members criticised the text and data-mining exemption, which is intended to improve access to content for the training and development of AI models, pointing out the lack of an effective opt-out mechanism.

In terms of copyright law, Frith said the issue “is not uncertainty in the law” – which he argued is “clear” about infringement – but “the opacity in the technology”. This view was shared by some but was not universally held, with Polly Billington, Labour MP for East Thanet, highlighting the gaps in the law when it comes to protecting independent writers and artists. “Smaller creatives, such as many in my constituency, find it extremely difficult to enforce copyright as it currently is, which is one of the reasons I think we should be using this opportunity to create strengthening of our copyright laws to protect low-paid workers,” she said….

… Chamberlain called for a response from Meta, while Frith said that “AI developers must be required to disclose which copyrighted works they’ve used to train or fine-tune their models”.

Meanwhile, Alison Louise Hume, Labour MP for Scarborough and Whitby, referred to the payments writers receive via the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) at the end of March, for secondary usage of their works. She praised this “vital income stream” for writers, emphasising that licensing “does work”, and called for “granular transparency requirements” in the Data Bill, and a “stop to unregulated scraping”.

(6) NASA CASTS ITS SPELL. [Item by Jeffrey Smith.] NASA’s Landsat satellites have taken gazillions of photos of our planet over the years, and now have a tool by which you can enter your name — or any other word — and see it spelled out in images of Earth. (I tried “File 770,” but it doesn’t do numbers.) Hovering over the picture tells you where in the world the picture is from. “Your Name in Landsat” at NASA. Here’s their rendering of “Mike”.

(7) DAVID SCHLEINKOFER (1951-2025). Artist David Schleinkofer died April 20. Downthetubes.net has an extensive tribute with many images: “In Memoriam: SF and Fine Artist David Schleinkofer”.

We’re sorry to report the passing of American SF and fine artist David Schleinkofer, who died earlier this week, of Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

David was a professional artist and illustrator for over 40 years who had a distinct airbrush style, who received his art training at Bucks County Community College and The Philadelphia College of Art, now The University of The Arts, both in Pennsylvania.

“His work was eminent in the 1970s, especially on the cover to a book called Tomorrow and Beyond in 1978,” noted fellow artist Bob Eggleton on Facebook, “sort one of the first books to collect the works of many many SF/Fantasy artists of the 1970s. It became the granddaddy inspiration of the Spectrum annuals in the 1990s.

“David’s work featured in this book and he was on many SF paperbacks and in the 1980s, on a short-lived but visually stunning magazine called Science Digest.”…

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

April 24, 1930 — Richard Donner. (Died 2021.)

Tonight we have Richard Donner who has entered the Twilight Zone, errr, the Birthday spotlight. As a genre producer, he’s responsible for some of our most recognizable productions.

His first such works was on The Twilight Zone (hence my joke above in case you didn’t get it) as he produced six episodes there including “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”. He’d go on to work in the Sixties on The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Get Smart! and The Wild Wild West. He closed out this period by producing Danger Island (which I’ve never heard of) where, and I quote IMDB, “Archaeologists are being pursued by pirates around an island in the South Pacific. On this island, various adventures await them.” It’s at least genre adjacent, isn’t it? Who here has seen it?

The Twilight Zone is streaming on Paramount +; Get Smart! is currently on HBO; The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Wild Wild West aren’t streaming right now. 

So forty-nine years ago and then two years later, he directs not one but two now considered classic films in two very different genres. First out was The Omen  with an impressive cast far too long to list here that got mixed reviews but had an audience that loved and which birthed (that’s deliberate) a franchise and garnered two Oscar nominations.

Next out was, oh guess, go ahead guess, Superman. Yes, it would win a much-deserved Hugo at Seacon ’79. DC being well DC the film had a very, very difficult time coming to be and that was true of who directed the film with several sources noting that Donner may have been much as the fourth or fifth choice to do so. Or more. Yes, I love this film, both for Reeves and for itself. 

So what did he do post-Superman? Well something happened during the production of Superman II and he was replaced as director by Richard Lester during principal photography with Lester receiving sole directorial credit.  

That being most likely caused by tensions, and that was the polite word, which he had with all of the producers concerning the escalating production budget and ever lengthening production schedule. Mind you both films were being shot simultaneously, so I’m not sure how he got blamed first the second being out of control separately. 

If you’re so inclined, Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut was released oddly enough when the film came out so I’m assume he had the legal right to do so which I find damn odd. I’ve not seen this cut. Who here has?

He did go on to direct The Goonies. Now I really don’t think it’s genre, but I will say that the treasure map and the premise of treasure make it a strong candidate for genre adjacent, wouldn’t you say? Truly a great film! 

He went on to direct one of my favorite Bill Murray films, Scrooged. The Suck Fairy says she still likes that film and will agree to watch it every Christmas as long as there’s lots of hot chocolate to drink. With cream on top. And chocolate chip cookies. Somehow it’s alway snowing when we watch it…

His last work was a genre one, Timeline, about a group of archaeologists who travel back to fourteenth century France, based on a Michael Crichton thriller. I’d never had of this one until now. Who’s seen it? 

Richard Donner

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Bizarro introduces an underpublicized Avenger. 
  • Loose Parts knows the sound of silence.
  • Rubes thinks a different name is called for. 

(10) WHAT’S COMING TO ANIMATION FILM FEST. “Annecy Unveils 2025 Lineup (Full List)” at The Hollywood Reporter.

Annecy, the world’s leading animation film festival, unveiled its official program on Wednesday, with a line-up that includes features from some 20 countries across Europe, Asia and the Americas and a range of styles, from the big-budget 3D computer animated feature Into the Mortal World from Chinese director Zhong Ding; to the hand-drawn title Balentes by Italian filmmaker Giovanni Columbu, and the digital cut out animation of Mexican filmmaker Aria Covamonas: The Great History of Western Philosophy.

Covamonas’ debut premiered at the Rotterdam festival, and Annecy’s 2025 lineup features a best-of selection of recent fests, including Berlinale highlights Lesbian Space Princess and Tales from the Magic Garden, and several features premiering in Cannes next month, including The Magnificent Life of Marcel Pagnol from The Triplets of Belleville director Sylvain Chomet; Dandelion’s Odyssey from Japanese director Momoko Seto; and Death Does Not Exist from Canadian filmmaker Felix Dufour-Laperrière….

(11) ABOUT THE YELLOWSTONE SUPERVOLCANO. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] No, the cap does not read “Make America Boom Again”. “Hidden magma cap discovered at Yellowstone National Park” at ABC News.

Geoscientists have discovered a magma cap at Yellowstone National Park that is likely playing a critical role in preventing a massive eruption in one of the largest active volcanic systems in the world.

The cap is made of molten silicate materials and supercritical water — a liquid-like gas that forms after water exceeds its critical point of 374 degrees Celsius — and porous rock. It is located about 2.4 miles below the Earth’s surface and essentially acts as a lid, trapping pressure and heat below it, according to the team of researchers who uncovered it.

The scientists found the cap by using a 53,000-pound vibroseis truck, a device capable of injecting low-frequency vibrations into the Earth to study the geology of the volcanic system. By generating tiny earthquakes that send seismic waves into the ground, the researchers were able to measure how the waves reflected off subsurface layers.

The scientists were surprised to see “something physically happening” at that depth, said Brandon Schmandt, professor of earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Rice University and co-author of the study, in a statement….

(12) PITCH MEETING. Ryan George takes inside the “Snow White Pitch Meeting”.

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

Pixel Scroll 4/10/25 We Are The Pixel Scroll Preservation Society

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(1) ANOTHER MURDERBOT CLIP. Murderbot premieres May 16 on Apple TV+. Martha Wells noted on Bluesky, “If you can’t see it, this makes it clear that Murderbot doesn’t have nipples or a bellybutton.”

In a high-tech future, a rogue security robot (Alexander Skarsgård) secretly gains free will. To stay hidden, it reluctantly joins a new mission protecting scientists on a dangerous planet…even though it just wants to binge soap operas.

(2) MARTHA WELLS Q&A. At IZ Digital: “Out of Trauma”.

Author and reviewer Dr Kelly Jennings spoke to Martha Wells about creating Murderbot, engendering empathy, and the after-effects of trauma….

Kelly Jennings: I’ve been struck, especially in the new novel, System Collapse, by how Murderbot is shaped by the traumatic event/s in its past, and how it reacts to that trauma. In Witch King, Kai also is shaped by past trauma, and reacts out of that trauma. Do you have a special interest in trauma, or is this just thematic happenstance?

Martha Wells: My father was a World War II veteran who was in a Nazi prison camp and was wounded in a way that affected him for years afterward. So basically I grew up observing PTSD and the after-effects of trauma, and how it affects other people in the individual’s life, how it changes over time. I’ve also dealt with things of my own that have made me think a lot about emotional trauma and all the repercussions of it. It affects everything I write. I also do a lot of research on it, listening to people talk about their own experiences.

Kelly Jennings: Somewhere I read – it may have been on your Reddit AMA? – that by deliberately making a universe in which constructs like Murderbot can be classed as ‘not people’, you want your readers to think about how our cultures, in the actual world, do that as well – classify various groups as ‘not people’. Can you talk about that a little?

Martha Wells: I think it’s one of the most important uses of fiction, to try to engender empathy and understanding for people in situations that are not things the reader has ever encountered. To understand the power dynamics the reader might be part of, and how these dynamics affect other people who don’t have the same advantages, or who might be trapped in systems they can’t escape. I don’t know how much it helps, but creating a little bit of understanding and context through fiction is better than none.

Obviously it also helps to see people like yourself in fiction, or to use it to process trauma, or contextualise terrible events, etc….

(3) ABOUT SHOPPING OPTIONS. Agent Richard Curtis has started a Substack column called Inside Agenting. The latest installment is “What Part Of ‘No’ Don’t You Understand?”

…What I have just described is commonly known in the book and film world as a shopping option. It literally entitles the producer to “shop” your book free of charge to the movie and television industry. If they are smart or lucky or clever they will manage to round up the various elements and persuade them to commit to the project.

In my experience the chances of succeeding are slightly poorer than buying a winning ticket in a billion dollar lottery. For which reason I have resolutely turned down every such offer. I explain to producers that for the privilege of renting my client’s property for a year or eighteen months, some expression of commitment in the form of dollars – even a token – is mandatory. When this request elicits a “Sorry No Can Do” I terminate the discussion with the suggestion they go to YouTube and watch Harlan Ellison’s immortal rant “Pay The Writer”.…

(4) STATES EFFORT TO SAVE INSTITUTE OF MUSEUM AND LIBRARY SERVICES. “States Challenge Trump’s Effort to Dismantle Library Agency” – the New York Times has the story. (Behind a paywall.)

A coalition of 21 state attorneys general filed a lawsuit on Friday challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the federal agency charged with supporting the nation’s libraries.

The lawsuit, brought by the attorneys general of New York, Rhode Island, Hawaii and other states, was filed days after the agency, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, put its staff on leave and began cutting grants. The suit argues that the steep cuts there and at two other small agencies violate both the Constitution and other federal laws related to spending, usurping Congress’s power to decide how federal funds are spent.

The other agencies cited in the lawsuit are the Minority Business Development Agency and the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. They were among the seven agencies targeted by President Trump in a March 14 executive order titled “Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy,” which directed that they be reduced to the “maximum extent consistent with applicable law.”

The move against the library agency has drawn particular outcry. Dozens of library groups have issued statements condemning it as an attack on institutions that serve a broad swath of the public in every state. Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, said in a statement that the targeting of the three agencies was “an attack on vulnerable communities, small businesses and our children’s education.”…

…The library agency, created in 1996 and reauthorized most recently in 2018 in legislation signed by Mr. Trump, has an annual budget of nearly $290 million. It provides funding to libraries, museums and archives in every state and territory, with the bulk going to support essential but unglamorous functions like database systems and collections management.

Its largest program delivers roughly $160 million annually to state library agencies, which covers one-third to one-half of their budgets, according to the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies, an independent group representing library officials.

(5) WHY WAIT? Camestros Felapton has all the ingredients of his Hugo Voter Packet entry available immediately: “Packet!”

…Anyway, I just picked longer things that I liked and put them in random order and explained in the introduction that there are typos and that they add character….

(6) OCTOTHORPE TRANSCRIPT NOW LIVE. Episode 132 of the Octothorpe podcast was linked here the other day before its transcript went online. So we’re letting everyone know the Octothorpe 132 transcript link now works.

(7) HAN GREEDO NOBODY FIRED FIRST. Whatever you may think about the improvements George Lucas has made to the film in the intervening years, this is a rare opportunity for Britons to see in a theater the original version: “Star Wars: Original 1977 release to be screened in London by BFI” reports the BBC.

The original 1977 cinematic release of Star Wars will be shown on the big screen this summer in London, marking its first public screening in decades.

The original version of the sci-fi blockbuster will be shown as part of the British Film Institute (BFI)’s Film on Film festival on 12 June.

The BFI said this version of the film is rarely publicly screened since George Lucas’ produced special editions were released in the 1990s, altering some plot points and adding other CGI characters.

Today, only the updated versions are available on official streaming platforms and Blu-ray, making screenings of the film’s original cut rare….

…Lucas’s changes to key plot points, including the addition of Jabba the Hutt and other special effects upgrades, have long divided fans.

The most controversial revision was the scene where Harrison Ford’s Han Solo shoots dead bounty hunter Greedo.

In the original version, Solo shoots first. However, the 1997 re-release changed the scene to show Ford’s character responding in self-defence.

The scene underwent further edits, with other versions of the film showing the pair firing at the same time….

(8) PETER WATTS Q&A. [Item by Do-Ming Lum.] My photo of Toronto-based SF author Peter Watts was published in Peter’s interview with Forbes Magazine (website only, sadly not the print edition). The interview is by Ollie Barder, and was mainly driven by Peter’s story which formed the basis of the “Armored Core” segment in the streaming series “Secret Level”. “Peter Watts On ‘Blindsight’, ‘Armored Core’ And Working With Neill Blomkamp” in Forbes.

…“I wrote all through high school and three university degrees without making a single sale. Got lots of positive feedback, mind you; I once got rejected by a magazine I’d never even sent a story to (Analog; the editor at Asimov’s sent it on to them on my behalf). I took their “we’re interested in seeing more of your work” to heart and sent them everything I wrote over the next decade. Only in hindsight did I realize that Analog’s rejections, initially long, detailed, and encouraging, were getting ever shorter and more generic over time, which suggests that I was getting worse with practice. The most frequent criticism I got was some variant of “this is really well written but it’s awfully depressing. Could you maybe bring in some clowns?”

“I didn’t get a single thing published until I was thirty-one, and even that was in some small press no one had ever heard of. (That same story got me my first form-rejection slip from Analog, completing my trajectory from Promising Acolyte to Slush-Pile Reject.) From that point on, I started getting published semiregularly in small mags and semi-pros. To this day, I’ve never got a story into any of the big US traditionals. I stopped even trying back around the turn of the century.

(9) KERRY GREENWOOD (1954-2025). The creator of the Phyrne Fisher mysteries, Kerry Greenwood, died March 26 at the age of 70 reports the Guardian.

Australian author Kerry Greenwood, best known for her Phryne Fisher murder mystery novels, has died at the age of 70 after an illness.

She was given “a suitably royal send-off” at a small service in Melbourne’s Yarraville on Sunday, according to her partner, writer David Greagg.

Greenwood, who lived in nearby Seddon, died on 26 March. Greagg, posting on Greenwood’s official facebook page on Monday, said he had refrained from making a public announcement until after the service….

…Greenwood wrote the first Miss Fisher novel, Cocaine Blues, in 1989, and over the following three decades, went on to write 22 more. Immensely popular, the series spawned a hit ABC television show starring Essie Davis, which ran for three seasons, the first of which was picked up in more than 73 territories worldwide. It was followed by the 2020 film, Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears, and the 30-episode Chinese series, Miss S.

In 2003, Greenwood was given the Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award, recognising her “outstanding contribution” to Australian crime writing, and in 2020, awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for services to literature….

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born April 10, 1957 — John M. Ford. (Died 2006.)

By Paul Weimer: John M. Ford has, sadly after his passing, become one of my heart writers. Years ago, I came across one of my favorite novels, period, The Dragon Waiting. Possibly one of the best alternate history novels ever written and simultaneously introduced me to a new point of view on Richard III. This is a viewpoint I would later expand upon by discovering the Ricardians, but it was Ford who first showed me the idea in print. Also, The Dragon Waiting has the best “You meet in a tavern” scene I’ve ever read.

It was not until I started going to 4th Street Fantasy con, of which he is practically a patron saint, that I really have grasped just how widely broad his work really is. Space Opera? Early Cyberpunk? Urban Fantasy? The writer who Ford reminds of, today, is Walter Jon Williams: a ferocious and restless talent. And Ford was taken from us all too soon. His last and incomplete novel, Aspects, a steampunk-esque fantasy novel only cements that sentiment. It’s brilliant…what we have of it.  

Ford’s work is not for everyone. It is work that not only rewards close attention, it demands it in order to enjoy it. In that way, if we wanted to reconstruct Ford, in addition to Walter Jon Williams, we’d add a lot of Gene Wolfe as well.

Finally, Ford’s writing and style also has more than a touch of the mythic and definitely the poetic. There is joy in reading his work line by line, be its setting or sharp dialogue. So to complete this reconstructIon, add a helping of Roger Zelazny as well.

But the language, the poetry, the vigor with which Ford wrote is sui generis. So, really even trying to combine him as I suggested above like this would not, in the end, be enough. You could not complete the man and his work.

Given my love of these three writers, now you see why Ford is one of my favorites. And taken from us all too soon. I wish I had met him. 

It’s never too early to try a John M. Ford novel. And given how many have come back into print lately, there IS a John M. Ford novel out there, for you.

John M. Ford portrait, January 2000. By David Dyer-Bennet. CC BY-SA 2.5

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) ASTRONOMICON 8. There’s a large number of cosplay photos in “Everything we saw at Astronomicon 8 in Ypsi [PHOTOS]” at Metro Times.

Pop culture fans packed the Ann Arbor Marriott Ypsilanti at Eagle Crest for Astronomicon 8. Twiztid and Majik Ninja Entertainment hosted a plethora of artists, vendors, and celebrity guests, including Bruce Campbell, Tommy Chong, wrestlers Sting and Danhausen, the cast of My Name is Earl, and the voice actors of Rick and Morty, among others.

(13) RE (DISNEY+) DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN EPISODE 8 TITLE, “ISLE OF JOY”. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “Isle of Joy | Marvel Cinematic Universe Wiki”. In case you don’t already know, “Isle of Joy” is (I presume) a quote from the Rogers & Hart song “Manhattan” aka “We’ll Have Manhattan”

I’m guessing the title is used ironically.

Here’s Ella Fitzgerald singing it (don’t yet know whether she or anyone is singing the song in this episode, haven’t watched it yet) and here’s the lyrics (“Isle of Joy” is at end of verse #2)

It would be easy to do a list/article on “great song lyric lines about NYC.

This song includes “Tell me what street/compares with Mott Street”

From On the Town, there’s, of course, “The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down.”

(14) HIVEWORKS ANNOUNCEMENT. [Item by Jim Janney.] A bit of a followup to the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal announcement from the March 5 Scroll. Hiveworks is shutting down its publishing and online store and returning rights to artists. “Hiveworks Comics announces it will end print, publishing division” at The Comics Journal.

 Hiveworks Comics is winding down operations over the course of 2025 to focus primarily on its web services: hosting, ads, and technical support for webcomic artists.

Its print and publishing division, which include producing, licensing, marketing, and distributing comics, will close. All comics for which Hiveworks has printing and publishing rights are being released back to their creators.

Hiveworks will complete fulfillment for several outstanding comic crowdfunding projects, after which its crowdfunding services will cease. Warehouse services for artists will also cease, and Hivemill, its managed storefront, will be limited to print-on-demand services and sale of products purchased wholesale from artists….

(15) VARIATION ON A THEME. “Red Sonja: Steampunk Legend Epic H.A.C.K.S. action figure revealed by Boss Fight Studio”. More photos at the link.

Coinciding with the release of its Red Sonja 50th anniversary figure, Boss Fight Studio has announced that the She-Devil with a Sword is returning to the 1:12 scale Epic H.A.C.K.S. line with Red Sonja: Steampunk Legend, inspired by the character’s appearance in Dynamite Entertainment’s Legenderry Red Sonja: A Steampunk Adventure. The collectible is available to pre-order now, priced at $66.99; check it out here…

(16) OLD MEMORIES. It wasn’t easy to deliver “Voyager’s 15 Billion Mile Software Update”. For one thing, there aren’t as many programmers who know the Fortran and Assembly languages as there were in the days when computing was young.

Have you ever wondered how NASA updates Voyager’s software from 15 billion miles away? Or how Voyager’s memories are stored? In this video, we dive deeper into the incredible story of how a small team of engineers managed to keep Voyager alive, as well as how NASA could perform a software update on a computer that’s been cruising through space for almost half a century. So tune in to learn more about Voyager’s 15 billion mile software update

(17) A CLASSIC PICNIC. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid, over at Media Death Cult, has re-posted one of his vids on a Strugatsky Russian classic… Roadside Picnic  — “The SF Masterwork which made it through the Iron Curtain”.

[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Thomas the Red, Jim Janney, Michael J. Walsh, Daniel Dern, John Coxon, Do-Ming Lum, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Joe H.]

Pixel Scroll 4/6/25 Always Check Where You’re Walking When Pixels Are Present

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(1) 2025 HUGO AWARD FINALISTS. The Seattle Worldcon 2025 Hugo Award Finalists were announced today.

Congratulations to all the finalists, especially the authors of two Best Related entries published by File 770, Chris Barkley and Jason Sanford for “The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion” and Camestros Felapton and Heather Rose Jones for “Charting the Cliff: An Investigation Into the 2023 Hugo Nomination Statistics”.

(2) HUGO AWARD BASE DESIGNER. Seattle Worldcon 2025 has announced that the Hugo Awards Base will be designed by Joy Alyssa Day, a professional glass sculpture artist. Joy, with her partner BJ, have previously designed the Hugo Awards base for LonCon in 2014. Examples of Joy’s sculptures can be found at her website, GlassSculpture. Below are photos of the 2014 Hugo Award base, and their work on the Cosmos Award given by the Planetary Society.

(3) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 132 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Almost Everything Is Not Mac” is here early, because the hosts John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty are discussing this year’s Hugo Awards finalists.

An uncorrected transcript is available here.

A black background. Text in purple reads “Octothorpe 132” while text MADE OF FIRE says “Scorching hot takes on the Hugo finalists”.

(4) WHY NOT SAY WHAT HAPPENED? Scott Edelman returns with episode 22 of his Why Not Say What Happened? Podcast, “The Conundrum of Condensing Marie Severin into 1,200 Words”. And here’s where it’s available on multiple platforms.

This time around, I grow anxious over a dream discovery of long-lost original comic book artwork, realize I was wrong about a certain Alan Moore/Frank Miller memory, contemplate the difficulty of condensing the life of Marie Severin into a mere 1,200 words, share the meager remains of what was once a massive comic book collection, remember there’s an issue of Fantastic Four I need to track down to solve an early fannish mystery, rededicate myself to Marie Kondo-ing my creative life, and more.

A 1972 Marie Severin Hulk Sketch

(5) FISHING FOR A SUPERSTAR. “Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies is manifesting DC star Viola Davis being the next iteration of the villainous Master, calling her ‘one of the greatest actors in the world’” at GamesRadar+.

Given that beloved sci-fi series Doctor Who has been on air for over 60 years now, countless actors have featured either in major roles or as guest stars.

From Simon Pegg playing a villainous editor in ‘The Long Game’ to Andrew Garfield facing off against aliens in ‘Daleks in Manhattan’, the seemingly endless list also includes Get Out star Daniel Kaluuya, Oscar winner Olivia Colman, and Black Panther’s very own Letitia Wright – to name but a few.The question is then – who would showrunner Russell T Davies love to have on the series in a guest role, who hasn’t been featured before? Putting that to the man himself in a recent interview ahead of Doctor Who season 2 hitting our screens, Davies is puzzled at first admitting to GamesRadar+ that “almost everyone has been in it”. And he’s right – hell, even pop star icon Kylie Minogue even showed up for the Titanic themed episode ‘Voyage of the Damned’….

…As Davies tells us: “I simply worship Viola Davis, one of the greatest actors in the world, we should be so lucky we should have that money. She just brings quality, depth, and surprise. Every time I see her she does something surprising, which is a very Doctor Who quality. She’d get it. I say this hoping that you print it, then her agent will read it and say ‘yes, you can have Viola for absolutely no money, she will come to Cardiff for free.'” Well – here’s hoping!

(6) BOOP-OOP-A-DOOP! “’Boop!’ Arrives on Broadway, With a Surprising 100-Year Back Story” reports the New York Times. Link bypasses paywall.

Betty Boop has arrived on Broadway, nearly a century after she first boop-oop-a-dooped her way onto the big screen. “Boop! The Musical,” like the “Barbie” and “Elf” films that preceded it, imagines a transformational encounter between an anthropomorphic character and the real world (well, a fictional world full of people)….

…Jasmine Amy Rogers, the actress starring as Betty Boop on Broadway, described her as “full of joy” and “unapologetically herself.” “She is sexy, but I don’t think it is merely sex that makes her sexy,” she continued. “I would say it’s the way she carries herself, and her confidence and her unabashed self.”…

Betty, created at the height of the Jazz Age, is obviously modeled on flappers, and her relationship to music history has been a subject of debate and litigation.

In 1932, a white singer named Helen Kane sued, alleging that the “baby vamp” style of the Betty Boop character, including the “boop-oop-a-doop” phrase, was an unlawful imitation of Kane. At a widely publicized trial in 1934, Fleischer countered by pointing out that a Black singer, Esther Lee Jones, who performed as Baby Esther, had used similar scat phrases before Kane. Kane lost….

…Rogers said she hopes that over time, women of different ethnicities will portray the character, but said she is proud to play her as a Black woman, with nods to Baby Esther and the scat technique of jazz singing. “Jazz lives so deep in the heart of Betty that I feel as if we can’t really have a full discussion about her without involving the African American race,” she said…

(7) GOOD DOG. Krypto takes us home: “Superman | Sneak Peek”.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

April 6, 1937 — Billy Dee Williams, 88.

Rather obviously, Billy Dee Williams’ best-known role is as — and no I did know this was his full name — Landonis Balthazar “Lando” Calrissian III. He was introduced in The Empire Strikes Back as a longtime friend of Han Solo and the administrator of the floating Cloud City on the gas planet Bespin. 

(So have I mentioned, I’ve only watched the original trilogy, and this is my favorite film of that trilogy? If anyone cares to convince me I’ve missed something by not watching the later films, go ahead.) 

He is Lando in the original trilogy, as well in as the sequel, The Rise of Skywalker, thirty-six years later. The Star Wars fandom site thinks this might be the longest interval between first playing a character and later playing the same character, being a thirty-six year gap.

He returned to the role within the continuity in the animated Star Wars Rebels series, voicing the role in “Idiot’s Array” and “The Siege of Lothal” episodes. Truly great series if you haven’t seen, and available of course on Disney+. 

He voiced him in two audio dramas with one being the full cat adaption of Timothy Zahn’s Dark Empire. 

Now this is where it gets silly, really silly. The most times he’s been involved with the character is in the Lego ‘verse. Between 2024 with The Lego Movie to Billy Dee Williams returned to the role in the Star Wars: Summer Vacation in 2022, he has voiced Lando in eight Lego films, mostly made as television specials.

Going from hero to villain, he was Harvey Dent in Batman, and yes in The Lego Batman Movie. Really they made it. I’d like to say I remember him here but than they would admitting this film made an impression on me which it decidedly didn’t. None of the Batman Films did in the Eighties.

He’s in Mission Impossible as Hank Benton, an enforcer for a monster, in “The Miracle” episode; he’s Ferguson in  Epoch: Evolution, the sequel to Epoch, which looks like quite silly, and I’m using this term deliberately, sci-film, and finally he voiced himself on Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?,  the thirteenth television series in the Scooby-Doo franchise. 

Billy Dee Williams

(9) COMICS SECTION.

My cartoon for this week’s @newscientist.com

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2025-04-06T11:46:12.460Z

(10) WHY ARE KIDS OBSESSED WITH THE TITANIC? “So You Think You Know a Lot About the Titanic …” in the New York Times (behind a paywall.)

Parents often look down at the whorl on the top of their children’s heads and wonder what, exactly, is going on inside. An industry of books, video games, films, merchandise and museums offers some insight: They’re probably thinking about the Titanic.

Last fall, Osiris, age 5, told his mother, Tara Smyth, that he wanted to eat the Titanic for dinner. So she prepared a platter of baked potatoes — each with four hot-dog funnels, or smokestacks — sitting on a sea of baked beans. (He found it delicious.) Since first hearing the story of the Titanic, Ozzy, as he’s known, has amassed a raft of factoids, a Titanic snow globe from the Titanic Belfast museum and many ship models at his home in Hastings, England.

About 5,500 miles away in Los Angeles, Mia and Laila, 15-year-old twins, devote hours every week to playing Escape Titanic on Roblox. They have been doing this for the last several years. Sometimes, they go down with the ship on purpose — “life is boring,” explained Mia, “and the appeal is that it’s kind of dramatic.”

Nearly 113 years after the doomed White Star Line steamship collided with an iceberg on April 14, 1912, and sank at around 2:20 a.m. the next day, it remains a source of fascination for many children. The children The New York Times spoke to did not flinch at the mortal fact at the heart of the story: That of the more than 2,200 passengers on the Titanic, more than twice as many passengers died as those who survived.

“I really like whenever it just cracked open in half and then sank and then just fell apart into the Atlantic Ocean,” said Matheson, 10, from Spring, Texas, who has loved the story since he read “I Survived the Sinking of the Titanic, 1912” at age 5. After many frustrating bath time re-enactments involving flimsy ship models, Matheson and his father, Christopher Multop, designed a Tubtastic Titanic bath toy — of which they say they now sell about 200 a month (separate floating iceberg included)….

John Zaller, the executive producer of Exhibition Hub, the company that designed “Bodies: The Exhibition” and “Titanic: An Immersive Voyage,” a traveling exhibition with interactive elements, attested that Titanic kids often knew more than their tour guides. At the Titanic experience, children can sit in a lifeboat and watch a simulation of the ship sinking, see a life-size model of the boiler room be flooded with water, and follow along with the passengers on their boarding pass, ultimately finding out whether they survived the wreck.

“The biggest takeaway for kids is, ‘I lived!’ or ‘I died!’” Mr. Zaller said. “They understand the power of that.”…

(11) APRIL FOOLISHNESS. Except it happened in March: “An AI avatar tried to argue a case before a New York court. The judges weren’t having it” at Yahoo!

It took only seconds for the judges on a New York appeals court to realize that the man addressing them from a video screen — a person about to present an argument in a lawsuit — not only had no law degree, but didn’t exist at all.

The latest bizarre chapter in the awkward arrival of artificial intelligence in the legal world unfolded March 26 under the stained-glass dome of New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division’s First Judicial Department, where a panel of judges was set to hear from Jerome Dewald, a plaintiff in an employment dispute.

“The appellant has submitted a video for his argument,” said Justice Sallie Manzanet-Daniels. “Ok. We will hear that video now.”

On the video screen appeared a smiling, youthful-looking man with a sculpted hairdo, button-down shirt and sweater.

“May it please the court,” the man began. “I come here today a humble pro se before a panel of five distinguished justices.”

“Ok, hold on,” Manzanet-Daniels said. “Is that counsel for the case?”

“I generated that. That’s not a real person,” Dewald answered.

It was, in fact, an avatar generated by artificial intelligence. The judge was not pleased.

“It would have been nice to know that when you made your application. You did not tell me that sir,” Manzanet-Daniels said before yelling across the room for the video to be shut off….

… As for Dewald’s case, it was still pending before the appeals court as of Thursday.

(12) ONCE FICTION, NOW SCIENCE. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian reports “Biologist whose innovation saved the life of British teenager wins $3m Breakthrough prize”. Harvard Professor, David Liu —  

 … was chosen for inventing two exceptionally precise gene editing tools, namely base editing and prime editing. Base editing was first used in a patient at Great Ormond Street in London, where it saved the life of a British teenager with leukaemia.

The young woman’s doctor apparently called the technique at the time, ‘science fiction’!

(13) ETERNAUT TRAILER. The Eternaut premieres on Netflix on April 30.

After a deadly snowfall kills millions, Juan Salvo and a group of survivors fight against a threat controlled by an invisible force. Based on the iconic graphic novel written by Héctor G. Oesterheld and illustrated by Francisco Solano López.

(14) WHY IS MARS RED? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Well, we all know the answer – an on-going process of the radiolysis of water (here UV and high energy particles from Solar wind splitting water) produces oxygen radicals that oxidise iron to hematite (a form of iron(III) that on Earth often gives some sandstones their red colour…)  Well, maybe not!   New research now suggests otherwise.  Data from three orbiters combined with a look at Earth minerals suggests that the Martian red minerals were formed over three billion years ago when Mars was decidedly wet. Had Mars been warmer, then these minerals would have gone. ; Mars’ red colour looks like being ferrihydrite (Fe5O8H  nH2O) that forms under decidedly wet conditions.  This is yet more evidence – if more is needed – that Mars was wet billions of years ago. 

The primary research, by French, US and British based astrophysicists, is  Valantinas, A. et al (2025) “Detection of ferrihydrite in Martian red dust records ancient cold and wet conditions on Mars”. Nature Communications, vol. 16, 1712. Meanwhile over at DrBecky there is a 12-minute video which you can see here: “New study explains why Mars is RED”. I keep on telling people that the machines are taking over but nobody ever listens to me… In fact they rule Mars!

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

Pixel Scroll 3/27/25 I Just Dropped In To See What Condition My Pixels Were In

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(1) CANADIAN’S VIEW OF U.S. TARIFF THREATS. Silvia Moreno-Garcia spotlights the issues writers in Canada and the US are going to face if tariffs between these countries are implemented in “Bookish and world woes” on Patreon.

The threat of tariffs against Canada has made my travel more fraught. Stories about issues with border agents spike my anxiety. I love going to book festivals and conferences and meeting with fans. At this point, I am not cancelling the engagements I committed to last year (which include dates for a book tour that has yet to be publicized), but I am pausing any new travel to the USA. I figure I committed to stuff in 2024 and need to maintain my commitments, but that means I’m not going to make it to Worldcon in Seattle, which I was hoping to visit, as I did not book that trip last year.

Just a couple of days ago the US government blocked Canadians from accessing the front door of the Haskell Free Library in Stanstead, Quebec and Vermont. Built in 1904, this heritage site that serves both American and Canadian patrons is considered a symbol of harmony between both nations. Now, I supposed it’s a symbol of strife.

The situation for writers in both Canada and the US is going to be dire this year. As indicated in a story by Publishers Weekly, cross border tariffs will affect the price of paper. The US imported $1.82 billion of uncoated paper, which is used in books, in 2023, with 67% of that paper coming from Canada. American book manufacturers may not have enough capacity to take over the production of books that are currently printed in China. This may create increases to book costs….

…Meanwhile, in Canada, bookstores and libraries might face a catastrophic scenario if tariffs are applied to books. Many books sold in Canada, including my own, are printed and stored in the USA, then shipped to bookstores across Canada. A 25 percent tariff increase would put many bookstores out of business, and restrict library collection purchases….

… And then, of course, there is the problem of decreased collaboration and exchanges between writers of our countries. If fewer Canadians are traveling to the US because they are afraid to fly there, then we have less face to face exchanges and chances to talk to each other, share knowledge and build communities.

(2) BBC OVERSEAS UPDATE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] OK, a bit of confusion this end – not from me, the BBC Radio 4 news folk themselves are a little uncertain, as to the plans the BBC (a.k.a. ‘auntie’, Beeb and even ‘B Beeb Ceeb’) have for overseas access.

The situation seems to be this. If you are not based in the UK then at some point (they don’t know when) you will no longer have access to BBC Sounds. However, you will be able to use a BBC app to access BBC local radio, BBC Scotland, Radio 4 Plus and a few other services, but this will cost money (a subscription I guess?) You will not be able to access the BBC mainly music radio channels (Radio 1 that has pop music, Radio 2 vintage pop, Radio 3 and its classical music, and Radio 6 Music). This is because the BBC pays for music rights and does not have the right to re-sell these broadcasts. If you are a British subject, then you can download for free an app to your smartphone or lap top in the UK and then take that abroad with you when you go on holiday. I understand Brits will have a month a year allowance for free overseas listening. Nobody from outside Britain will be able to download this app. (Though I suspect if you brought your phone/laptop to the UK you could download it and then get a month of free access back in N. America. This you could consider a free trial to entice you to subscribe properly….?)

My understanding, from the BBC Radio 4 news folk, is that overseas citizens will still be able to listen to BBC Radio 4 live broadcast through the internet and also the Radio 5 Live live broadcast, Radio 4 Extra as well as the BBC World Service. However, I am not sure that you will be able to access Radio 4 programmes once they are aired (only live as they are broadcast). If this last is true then the links I occasionally provide Mike for BBC Radio 4 programmes will not work. We will have to wait and find out.

I guess much depends on how many regular File-ers will pay for the overseas citizens’ BBC app? If many do then it will be worthwhile my still providing links. But I suspect we will have to see how things pan out.

Apparently, the BBC already makes £300 million (about US$366m) from licensing content overseas. This provides added income to that the BBC gets from British subjects paying the licence fee. The licence fee is currently £169.50 (US$207) per household per year (I have just paid mine) that has all household occupants under 75 and not receiving ‘pension credit’ (a government benefit for those with minimal income). Over 75s households on pension credit get a discounted rate (might even be free, I’ve never checked)). The BBC gets roughly £4 billion (US$4.9bn) this way. In addition, there are special TV licence rates for pubs and hotels to show programmes to their patrons (in pubs this is mainly football matches). (‘Football’ by the way is original football and is what you US-folk call ‘soccer’, which I understand from physicist (don’t hold that against him) Sheldon Cooper that some in Texas consider to be a communist plot. (But I wouldn’t know about that, comrade.))

The TV licence gives British households the right to access the BBC by any means (including through the internet), and also FREEVIEW services which includes the BBC and other independent public service broadcasters. (Currently there are about 60 or so FREEVIEW TV channels and an additional score or so duplicates that broadcast with a one-hour time delay, and there are also a score or so radio channels).

I understand that arrangements for BBC World Service will remain unchanged. I am not sure what the score is for the Brit Box television streamer outside Britain or even if it is still going, but then you folk the other side of the Black Atlantic will be more clued up on that. More news when things are firmed up.

(3) BACK IN BUSINESS. Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore in San Diego reopened on Sunday March 23 they told Facebook readers. They had been forced to close in February for several weeks to repair extensive flooding damage to the store.

(4) HELP IS ON THE WAY. DAW Books has released the cover for Jim C. Hines’ Slayers of Old, which will release on October 21, 2025.

Perfect for fans of cozy mysteries and Buffy, the OG vampire slayer, this humorous standalone fantasy by Jim C. Hines, serves up a fun, funny, and heartwarming story, about second chances, bookshops, and witchery at the Second Life Books and Gifts in Salem, MA where three former Chosen Ones have joined together to spend their retirement in peace and quiet. Until some of the locals start summoning ancient creatures best left where they were . . . 

These ex-heroes may have thought they were done, but if they want to finish their retirement in peace, they’ll have to join together to save the world one last time.

(5) A DESTROYER NAMED HEINLEIN. [Item by Tim Kyger.] There’s a letter-writing campaign in progress asking the new Secretary of the Navy, John Phelan, to name a future DDG-51 Flight III destroyer for Robert A. Heinlein. See full details at the U.S.S. Robert A. Heinlein website.

It is the prerogative of the Secretary of the Navy to name Navy vessels. Navy policy is to name destroyers for deceased members of the Navy. We want the new Secretary of the Navy – John Phelan — to name a future DDG-51 Flight III destroyer for Robert A. Heinlein. This would happen if lots of people write asking him to name a future Arleigh Burke-class destroyer for Heinlein. The U.S.S. Robert A. Heinlein.

Phelan’s address is: The Honorable John Phelan Secretary of the Navy Room 4E686 Defense Pentagon Washington, D.C. 20301

What To Do — Write John Phelan; ask him to name a U.S. Navy vessel the U.S.S. Robert A. Heinlein. Get as many others as you can to do the same! Spread the information on the Campaign as far and as wide as you possibly can!

(6) HAPPY DAIS. “Kermit the Frog announced as UMD’s 2025 commencement speaker” reports The Diamondback.

Kermit the Frog will be the University of Maryland’s 2025 commencement speaker, according to a university news release on Wednesday.

University alum and renowned puppeteer Jim Henson founded The Muppets, a fictional musical ensemble that includes Kermit, in 1955. Henson performed Kermit from 1955 until he died in 1990.

Kermit appeared on The Muppets Show and Sesame Street and was later in Muppet movies and several television series.

“Nothing could make these feet happier than to speak at [this university],” Kermit said in the release. “I just know the class of 2025 is going to leap into the world and make it a better place.”

Henson graduated from this university in 1960 with a home economics degree, according to Wednesday’s news release. Henson also attended Northwestern High School in Hyattsville, his website said….

… “I am thrilled that our graduates and their families will experience the optimism and insight of the world-renowned Kermit the Frog at such a meaningful time in their lives,” university president Darryll Pines said in Wednesday’s news release. “Our pride in Jim Henson knows no bounds, and it is an honor to welcome Kermit the Frog to our campus.”

American puppeteer Matt Vogel has most recently performed as Kermit since 2017.

The 2025 commencement ceremony on May 21 at 6 p.m. in SECU Stadium will celebrate summer 2024, winter 2024 and spring 2025 graduates, the news release said….

Statue of Kermit the Frog and Jim Henson outside of Stamp Student Union. (Mateo Pacheco/The Diamondback)

(7) OCTOTHORPE. Octothorpe 131 is here! “We’re Performance Before We’re Interest”. John Coxon is moderating, Alison Scott is auctioning, and Liz Batty is lecturing. An uncorrected transcript of the episode is available here.

We discuss the Seattle Worldcon, the upcoming Belfast Eastercon, the BSFA Awards, and then we talk about the fan funds and handwriting. Also, John actually had a pick in advance this episode.

A birthday cake with six layers, from purple to a dark orange, and then a red 5 and five red candles on top, with fireworks overhead. The words “Octothorpe 131” are at the top.

(8) HUNGER GAMES PREQUEL SELLS MILLION-PLUS. Sunrise on the Reaping, Suzanne Collins’ new Hunger Games prequel, sold 1.5 million English-language units across all formats in its first week, with US sales exceeding 1.2 million units reports publisher Scholastic. Two-thirds of these were hardcovers.

Sunrise on the Reaping has sold twice as many copies its first week on sale domestically as The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes in 2019 and three times as many copies as Mockingjay in 2010.

Elie Berger, evp, president, Scholastic Trade, said, “After nearly a year of anticipation, sales for Sunrise on the Reaping have exceeded all expectations, as has the overwhelmingly positive critical and fan response to the book across the world.”

(9) CLIVE REVILL (1930-2025). The original voice of Emperor Palpatine, actor Clive Revill, died March 11 says The Hollywood Reporter: “Clive Revill Dead: Emperor Palpatine in ‘Empire Strikes Back’ Was 94”. He also appeared in many other films and TV shows of genre interest.

Clive Revill, the New Zealand native who after being recruited to be an actor by Laurence Olivier starred on Broadway, appeared in two films for Billy Wilder and provided the original voice of the evil Emperor Palpatine in The Empire Strikes Back, has died. He was 94.

Revill died March 11 at a care facility in Sherman Oaks after a battle with dementia, his daughter, Kate Revill, told The Hollywood Reporter.

The extremely versatile Revill played cops in Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965), starring Olivier, and Jack Smight’s Kaleidoscope (1966), starring Warren Beatty; not one but two characters (a Scotsman and an Arab) in Joseph Losey’s Modesty Blaise (1966); and a physicist investigating strange goings-on at a haunted mansion in John Hough’s The Legend of Hell House (1973), starring Roddy McDowall.

…. For Wilder, he portrayed a man representing a Russian ballerina in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) — his character is led to believe that Holmes (Robert Stephens) and Dr. Watson (Colin Blakely) are gay — and the besieged hotel manager Carlo in Avanti! (1972), which earned him a Golden Globe nom….

…For Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back (1980), director Irvin Kershner called upon Revill — the two had worked together on the 1966 film A Fine Madness — to record a couple of menacing lines in a Wilshire Boulevard studio in Los Angeles.

They would be used in the pivotal scene in which Darth Vader (James Earl Jones) communicates with the emperor (as a holographic projection).

Revill’s voice would be replaced on the 2004 DVD release of the film by Ian McDiarmid’s, who went on to play the character in Return of the Jedi (1983) and the franchise’s three prequels — but he had his fans nonetheless.

“They come up to me, and I tell them to get close and shut their eyes,” he said in a 2015 interview. “Then I say [in the emperor’s haunting voice], ‘There is a great disturbance in the Force.’ People turn white, and one nearly fainted!”

…He could play all manner of ethnicities, and his big-screen body of work included The Double Man (1967), Fathom (1967), The Assassination Bureau (1969), A Severed Head (1970), The Black Windmill (1974), One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing (1975), Zorro: The Gay Blade (1981), Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995) and The Queen of Spain (2016).

Revill portrayed an Irishman in 1978 on Peter Falk’s last episode of the original Columbo series and showed up on everything from Maude, Hart to Hart, Dynasty, Remington Steele, Murder, She Wrote and Babylon 5 to Magnum, P.I., Newhart, MacGyver, Dear John, The Fall Guy and Star Trek: The Next Generation….

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Quantum Leap series (1989)

By Paul Weimer.

[Editor’s note: Spoiler warning for end of original series.] 

Dr. Sam Beckett, theorizing one could time travel within their own lifetime, stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator, and vanished.

So began Quantum Leap, one of the iconic SF shows of the late 80’s and early 90’s. With excellent chemistry between Scott Bakula as Beckett and Dean Stockwell as Al, the show got to explore recent American History by mostly telling the small stories, stories of individual people, not usually famous ones, and changing the world for the better. (It seems interesting to me that Beckett has problems when he tries to change big events in history (the Lee Harvey Oswald episodes really show this in spades) but his goal is to make small changes in the timeline to make the world better.  It became clear to me somewhere along the line that the timeline of the Quantum Leap show wasn’t our own, but that the changes were aligning it with our own reality. The idea of our world being the best of all possible worlds is one that had a lot more plausibility then, than it does now, I am afraid. 

With a few exceptions to show his own range, this really is a masterpiece of a Bakula vehicle, playing basically the same character every week–and yet not, having to inhabit a new character every week in his ceaseless efforts. While I at first always wanted more allohistorical content (like, say, Voyagers), the show wasn’t for that. The show was about the small changes, the small moves, to make things better. 

I still don’t quite understand the last episode. Was the bartender God? Could Beckett ever return home whenever he wanted? Was he always really on a mission from God? I don’t know. I suppose with a series like this, one shouldn’t even try to find definitive answers, and when you get them they are unsatisfactory at best. 

I was amused, years later, during Enterprise, when Bakula, as Captain Archer, encounters an alien played by Dean Stockwell. They do NOT get along together at all.  That was a neat tip of the hat to Quantum Leap.

I have not seen the two-season remake. 

Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) NASA ERASURE. “NASA Deletes Comic Book About How Women Can Be Astronauts” reports Futurism.

NASA has deleted two comic books about women astronauts from all its websites, NASA Watch reports, in what appears to be the latest victim of the Trump’s administration’s purge of “DEI” content from federal agencies.

The online comics, titled “First Woman: NASA’s Promise for Humanity,” and “First Woman: Expanding Our Universe,” tell the stories of young women training to become astronauts, in anticipation of NASA’s upcoming Artemis missions, which had been set to see the first female astronaut to set foot on the lunar surface. Oh, except that promise has been dropped, too….

(13) CENTRALIZING POWER. Joachim Boaz takes a timely look at “Science Fiction in Dialogue with The Great Depression: Frank K. Kelly’s ‘Famine on Mars’ (1934)” at Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations.

… Kelly renders a hyperviolent microcosm of Great Depression-drenched despair within an adventure story package. Its protagonists might attack each other with bizarre and futuristic physical and chemical weapons in a transparent space station but the real focus is on the fate of “million dark faces convulsed by the same agony and torn by the same unspent desire” for a drop to drink on the surface of Mars” (79).

The Lay of the Generic Landscape

Frank K. Kelly (1914-2010) lived a varied life. He was born in 1914 in Kansas City, MO. When he was sixteen, he published his first science fiction story–“The Light Bender” (1931)–in Wonder Stories (June 1931). Of his ten published short fictions between 1931-1935, the first six appeared in Hugo Gernsback’s Wonder Stories, which at the time was overseen by managing editor David Lasser (1902-1996). Due to his efforts to “bring some realism to their fiction,.” Lasser is considered a  “much neglected revolutionary in science fiction” and under his tutelage the genre “started to mature.” Ashley describes Kelly as “the best exponent of this hard realism” and while his earliest stories might have lacked polish they made up for it in their bleak depiction of life in space….

… Simultaneously drawing on the rise of fascism in Europe, Kelly’s “Famine on Mars” creates an even more draconian governmental manifestation. Earth’s government, The Combine, acts as a genocidal and malevolent political entity that brainwashes its inhabitants in the name of “the brotherhood of man” (79). His use of “combine” evokes two interrelated images of monolithic and mechanical power: new 1920s harvesters pulled by tractors instead of mules and a combination of both political and economic powers. Like a new-fangled tractor-driven thresher, the Combine mechanizes society diminishing its human concerns. Kelly suggests the working class in this future receive numerical names while political elite received standard nomenclature….

(14) SOUTHERN FANDOM CONFEDERATION NEWS. Randy B. Cleary announced that the March 2025 issue of the SFC Bulletin can be downloaded here [PDF file].

(15) TIME IS NOT ON OUR SIDE. Lorna Wallace considers “Five Stories Exploring the Pitfalls of Time Travel” at Reactor.

If Marty McFly has taught us anything, it’s that messing with the past can lead to some pretty serious and harmful consequences in the future, but there are some time travel stories where the sci-fi concept is fairly harmless. In Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold (2015), for instance, the focus is on healing personal relationships, rather than causing problems with the established timeline. Then there are the many wonderful time travel romances, where the stakes are also often limited to the individual level (more “will falling in love free me from this time loop?” and less “will the entire universe collapse in on itself?”).

But let’s consider the time travel stories that explore the various ways in which time travel can go very wrong and/or be incredibly dangerous—think people being trapped in deadly situations and whole timelines being erased or irrevocably changed. Here are five such stories….

One of them is —

“Through the Flash” (2018) by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

There’s been plenty of debate over how long Phil is trapped in his time loop in Groundhog Day (1993); most estimates fall somewhere within the 10 to 40 year range. This is enough time for Phil to be driven to desperate measures, attempting to end it all via various painful methods out of despair. But imagine being just 14 years old when you became trapped in a time loop… and then imagine it going on and on forever.

That’s the situation that Ama finds herself in, but she isn’t alone in the loop, with the rest of the residents in her neighborhood also being subjected to the same strange timey-wimey phenomenon. At the end of each day a nuclear explosion—known as the Flash—wipes everyone out and the day resets. You might think that having other people to share in the hellish experience would ease the mental burden, but the characters in “Through the Flash” are there to prove you wrong. And yet, for all of the external violence and internal strife in the short story, it ends on a relatively hopeful note.

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

Pixel Scroll 3/13/25 Quick Get An Exorcist! Our Scrolls Are Being Possessed! By Pixels!

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(1) GROUP DROPS 2026 SMOFCON BID FOR DC. John Pomeranz, Corresponding Secretary of the Baltimore Washington Area Worldcon Association (BWAWA), yesterday announced that in response to the “current political situation” in the U.S. the group is no longer bidding to host the 2026 SMOFcon in Washington, DC.

At its meeting on March 9, the Baltimore Washington Area Worldcon Association (BWAWA) decided to end its bid to host the 2026 SMOFcon.

Since we announced the bid at SMOFcon last year, it has become clear that the current political situation in the United States would significantly reduce the willingness of fans from outside the United States to participate, even in the fully hybrid convention that we were proposing. In light of this, it seemed the best course of action was to end our bid. Unfortunately, we expect that similar problems are likely to confront any US bid for SMOFcon for the time being.

(2) SEATTLE 2025 ROOM BLOCK FILLED. The current political situation has not kept the Seattle Worldcon’s hotel room blocks from immediately filling. A newsletter sent to members today says —

We are glad to have so many of you coming to Worldcon. Unfortunately our hotel room blocks, which initially seemed large and were subsequently increased, have sold out. It is possible some of these blocks may reopen from time to time on our hotel page, but in the meantime please be aware there are 14 hotels inside of a five-block, half mile radius of the Seattle Convention Center Summit Building where rooms can be secured using a common booking service, such as Google, hotels.com, bookings.com, or kayak.com.

Many of these are just as close, or closer, than our room block hotels. It may also be possible to secure rooms at our room block hotels, but outside the room block. 

(3) MEET THE SF STARS OF 1933. Next month the creators of First Fandom Experience will release “The Ultimate COSMOS: How a 1933 Serial Novel Reshaped Science Fiction”.

Why should modern readers of science fiction care about a mashed-up novel from 1933 – generally deemed terrible as a work of fiction?

Why should anyone care about a stunt pulled off by a band of early science fiction fans hoping to promote their struggling amateur publication?

The creators of The Visual History of Science Fiction Fandom bring you the story of Cosmos – a remarkable serial novel from 1933, with chapters by sixteen well-known authors. Even more astonishing is the tale of how this extravagant space-opera came to be. Orchestrated by a scrappy, ambitious cadre of young fans – mostly teenagers – the creation of Cosmos is a seminal episode in the history of science fiction. The impact on the novel’s editors and authors echoed through the decades that followed.

(If you’re curious who wrote it, Fancyclopedia 3 supplies the Table of Contents here — Cosmos – The Serial Novel.)

The Ultimate COSMOS will be launched at the Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention, April 4 – 6, 2025 in Chicago. Thereafter the book will be available for purchase on the First Fandom Experience site and via print-on-demand.

(4) ABOUT THAT LIVE-ACTION REMAKE OF SNOW WHITE. “Snow White: Disney holds small-scale European premiere amid controversy” – and the BBC explains the beef.

…The movie is being released amid a debate about how the seven dwarfs are represented on screen, while Zegler has made headlines for critical comments about the original 1937 film.

The European premiere was held on Wednesday at a castle in Northern Spain, instead of a more traditional and high-profile location such as London’s Leicester Square.

Dwarfism debate

The debate around the film began making headlines in January 2022, when Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage, an actor with Dwarfism, described the decision to retell the story of “seven dwarfs living in a cave” as “backward”.

Disney has used computer-generated dwarfs in the remake and said it would “avoid reinforcing stereotypes from the original animated film”.

But this week, other actors with Dwarfism have said they would have liked the opportunity to play the roles.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, performer Choon Tan said the decision to use CGI was “absolutely absurd and discriminating in a sense”.

“There really is nothing wrong casting someone with dwarfism as a dwarf in any given opportunity,” he said.

“As long as we are treated equally and with respect, we’re usually more than happy to take on any acting roles that are suitable for us,” he added…

(5) OCTOTHORPE. John Coxon is working, Alison Scott is plugging and Liz Batty is ghosting in Episode 130 of the Octothorpe podcast, “I Am Scalison Ott”. An uncorrected transcript of the episode is available here. 

The words “Octothorpe 130: Handwriting Analysis Special” appear three times in the three hosts’ handwriting.

(6) OSCARS AFFECT ON STREAMING PREFERENCES. JustWatch, the world’s largest streaming guide, has analyzed how the Academy Awards influenced streaming preferences in the U.S. Following Hollywood’s biggest night, audiences turned to their favorite platforms to catch up on the most celebrated films, leading to significant shifts in streaming rankings.

While several top contenders remained popular, the post-Oscars data reveals noticeable changes in audience preferences. New titles surged in viewership, while others saw renewed interest based on award wins, nominations, and critical buzz.

*Note: Anora was not included in our ranking as it has no current streaming offers in the US, but it was the second most popular after “The Substance”

Key Takeaways from the Post-Oscars Streaming Shift

  • Newcomers Enter the Rankings – The Brutalist, Wicked, I’m Still Here, and A Complete Unknown emerged in the top ten after the Oscars, reflecting fresh audience interest.
  • Shifts in Viewer Attention – While Dune: Part Two, Alien: Romulus, Inside Out 2, and Gladiator II ranked highly before the awards, they were replaced by new titles post-Oscars, possibly due to shifting critical conversations and winner announcements.
  • Sustained Success for The Substance & Conclave – These two films held their positions as the most streamed, proving their long-lasting appeal to audiences.
  • Surging Interest in Indie and Arthouse Films – Flow and Nosferatu gained traction after the Oscars, suggesting a growing curiosity in artistic and unconventional storytelling.

(7) PRATCHETT RETROSPECTIVE. Christopher Lockett marks the tenth anniversary of the author’s death in “The Magical Humanism of Sir Terry Pratchett”, a discussion that ranges from Pratchett’s expressed views of the right-to-die to his literal characterization of Death.

…Sir Terry’s Death is thus something close to a benevolent figure: a guide into whatever afterlife the deceased’s beliefs and conscience create for them. And his pervasive presence throughout the Discworld series produces a thematic iteration on humanity as defined by mortality—which itself produces a thematic iteration on how this relationship defines a moral and ethical humanism. For one of the great allegorical gestures of the Discworld novels is an expansive humanism that extends to cover all sentient beings….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Lis Carey.]

March 13, 1966 — Alastair Reynolds, 59.

By Lis Carey: Alastair Reynolds is an interesting writer—really good writer, with (what I find to be) an unfortunate tendency to write very dark stories. This means I’m stuck with reading his work very, very selectively.

Which gives me a sad.

Reynolds is Welsh, studied physics and astronomy, and has a PhD in astrophysics from University of St. Andrews. He graduated in 1991, and moved to the Netherlands to take a job at the European Space Agency, where he worked until 2004.

He started writing science fiction short stories while still a grad student, with his first publication in Interzone in 1990.

Alastair Reynolds

Reynolds says he doesn’t like writing stories that he doesn’t believe are within the realm of the possible, which is, no doubt, why the Revelation Space universe is truly hard sf, including relativistic space travel. He’ll depart from that stricture if he believes the story requires it, but those stories are not in Revelation Space.

I’m especially fond of the Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies, a subseries within the Revelation Space universe, which I otherwise avoid. Tom Dreyfus is a field prefect, part of the Panoply, a sort of let’s not call them police officers, charged with ensuring that each of the 10,000 or so habitats within the Glitter Band has reliably functioning, untampered-with democracy. As long as they are properly functioning democracies, the habitats can have any set of laws they choose to have. 

A vital part of that is keeping the machines that tabulate votes working smoothly and ensuring that they’re not tampered with. But if they didn’t also have rogue AIs, charismatic preachers against Panoply, a mysterious contagion that seemingly leaps all protective measures, and bigotry against uplifted, genetically modified pig people, where would the fun be? Over the three books published (Aurora Rising, Elysium Fire, and Machine Vendetta, it’s intricate, layered, has very well-developed characters, and plots that really don’t let go.

Another Reynolds work I’ve enjoyed is Eversion, in which a sailing ship in the 1800s crashes on the coast of Norway, in the 1900s a Zeppelin runs into serious difficulty in crevasse in the Antarctic, and in the far future, a spaceship visits an alien artifact. Dr. Simon Coade is the physician on these voyages, and he knows something really weird is happening, that no one else is noticing. Yes, it’s science fiction. Again, intricate, layered, and with excellent characterization and plot.

I’ve also read Terminal World, and Century Rain. They’re dark enough that I’m not sure why I picked up the second after reading the first, or why I picked up anything else by Reynolds, because they are the dark and grim that I’m not looking for in fiction.

Possibly because he’s a very good writer, and I’m glad I did find the Prefect Dreyfus books, Eversion, and a few others. So there’s two lessons here. 1. You do not have to read fiction that is not for you. You’re not going to be taking a test on it. 2. Don’t automatically write off a write just because they don’t seem to be writing for you. If they’re good, keep an eye open for works that might be for you anyway.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) GRINCH YOU WIN, TAILS YOU LOSE. A collectible Dr. Seuss coin collection has launched with “The Grinch – Month 1”.

The titular character from Dr. Seuss’s iconic 1957 book, How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is widely recognized around the world. The Grinch may be green and mean, but he’s found his way into the heart of collectors as one of the most celebrated Dr. Seuss characters. Whether or not his heart grows three sizes, we love the Grinch’s strange enterprises!  

(11) WHILE WE WERE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD. “Passing probe captures images of mysterious Mars moon” in the Guardian. Photo at the link.

A European spacecraft has taken photos of Mars’s smaller and more mysterious second moon during its flight past the planet en route to a pair of asteroids more than 110m miles (177m km) away.

The Hera probe activated a suite of instruments to capture images of the red planet and Deimos, a small and lumpy 8-mile-wide moon, which orbits Mars along with the 14-mile-wide Phobos.

The European Space Agency probe barrelled past Mars at more than 20,000mph and took shots of the lesser-seen far side of Deimos from a distance of 620 miles.

Michael Kueppers, Hera’s mission scientist, said: “These instruments have been tried out before, during Hera’s departure from Earth, but this is the first time that we have employed them on a small distant moon for which we still lack knowledge.”…

(12) PITCH MEETING. [Item by Andrew (not Werdna).] “Back to the Future Part III Pitch Meeting” — my wife notes that the description of how Doc and Clara fell in love seemed awfully familiar.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Lis Carey, Andrew (not Werdna), David Ritter, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 2/27/25 All These Pixels Are Yours, Except Scrollropa. Attempt No Filing There

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(1) NO MORE US WORLDCONS DECLARES JO WALTON. Welsh-Canadian author Jo Walton, past winner of the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Otherwise Awards, called on Bluesky yesterday for an end to US Worldcons. She did so in response to a leaked State Department policy designed to implement Trump’s executive order “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government”.

Walton says she would prefer for the LAcon V committee to abandon its Anaheim, CA location and move outside the country. Setting aside that the bid was seated by a democratic site selection process, they’ve also made legal and financial commitments to secure their 2026 facilities. Breaking those contracts would involve paying large penalties. How much? Remember that when Arisia 2019 decided the principled stance was to move the con away from two strike-affected hotels they were planning to use that triggered approximately $150,000 in cancellation fees and anticipated attrition charges. Even under the settlement negotiated by Arisia’s lawyers they still had to pay over $40K, much of the money donated by fans to Arisia’s fundraising campaign.

(2) MAY THE BEST APE WIN. [Item by Olav Rokne.] The Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog is advancing a bit of an off-board pick for the Best Dramatic Hugo, but it’s a beguilingly bonkers and beautiful little movie. And I will maintain to my last breath that any movie in which there are 100,000 chimpanzees fighting with swords is at the very least magical realism, and consequently a genre work: “The Ape Star”.

In the climactic moment of Better Man, an anthropomorphic chimpanzee named Robbie Williams takes the stage at the Knebworth Festival in front of 125,000 fans to sing his pop anthem, “Let Me Entertain You.” Nearing the end of the song, he spots in the audience dozens — then hundreds — of younger and angrier chimpanzee versions of himself. Leaping into the crowd, he begins fighting them one-by-one, with each showdown getting bloodier and more outlandish.

With the leaping chimpanzees, the soaring camera work, and the colourful cinematography, it is as if the Battle of Isengard had been set on the Planet of the Apes and directed by Speed-Racer-era Wachowskis….

(3) PEN AMERICA REPORT ON BOOK BANS. “PEN America Report Zooms In on School Year 2023–2024 Book Bans” — Publishers Weekly has a synopsis.

In a new report out today called “Cover to Cover,” PEN America provides a comprehensive analysis of the 4,128 unique titles that it determined were removed from public schools nationwide during the 2023–2024 academic year—the result of more than 10,000 instances of school book bans over that time period. With this latest look at its data from 2023–2024, PEN America builds on the findings it released last fall with a goal of better understanding the wide-reaching impacts of this educational censorship being driven by politics and coordinated, well-funded groups.

For the “Cover to Cover” report, PEN’s team of staff researchers, expert consultants, and author volunteers reviewed each banned title across 37 variables. What they learned was that certain marginalized identities are “being removed from library shelves en masse.” The reviewers found that 36% of the books banned during the 2023–2024 school year feature characters or people of color and 25% include LGBTQ+ people or characters. Of those banned titles with LGBTQ+ representation, 28% feature trans and/or genderqueer characters.

PEN’s researchers noted that in terms of identity erasure, the numbers are even more stark within the different genres and formats of the banned books. For example, they found that 73% of banned titles that fall into the graphic and illustrated titles category feature LGBTQ+ representation, people or characters of color, or discussions of race/racism. Sixty-four percent of banned picture books depict LGBTQ+ characters or stories; and 44% of banned history and biography titles feature people of color.

“When we strip library shelves of books about particular groups, we defeat the purpose of a library collection that is supposed to reflect the lives of all people,” Sabrina Baêta, senior manager for PEN America’s Freedom to Read program, said in a statement. “The damaging consequences to young people are real.”…

(4) KATHLEEN KENNEDY REPLIES. She’s not retiring. In Deadline, “Kathleen Kennedy clarifies Lucasfilm future, Star Wars plans”. After Mike Fleming, Jr. takes the media to task for what was reported, he walks Kennedy through a Q&A session which begins:

DEADLINE: We’ve read all these speculative reports that you are out, that there’s a frenzy for the next person who’s going to take over Lucasfilm. What is the truth?

KATHLEEN KENNEDY: The truth is, and I want to just say loud and clear, I am not retiring. I will never retire from movies. I will die making movies. That is the first thing that’s important to say. I am not retiring. What’s happening at Lucasfilm is I have been talking for quite some time with both Bob and Alan about what eventual succession might look like. We have an amazing bench of people here, and we have every intention of making an announcement months or a year down the road. We are in lockstep as to what that’s going to be, and I am continuing. I’m producing Mandalorian the movie right now, and I’m also producing Sean Levy’s movie, which is after that. So I’m continuing to stay at Lucasfilm and looking very thoughtfully with Bob and Alan as to who’s stepping in. So that is all underway, and we have every right to make that announcement when we want to make it….

(5) OCTOTHORPE. John Coxon thought of something, Alison Scott is educational, and Liz Batty reads contracts in Episode 129 of the Octothorpe podcast. They discuss the Belfast Eastercon, Alison shakes her cane at John and Liz, and they talk a little about WSFS things before getting into picks. Listen here: “Deep in Annex A”. An uncorrected transcript is available here.

Words read “Octothorpe 129: Can you pin Thailand on the map?” above a black-and-white world map. The backs of John, Alison and Liz’s heads are shown. John is thinking “Yup!”, Liz is thinking “100%”, and Alison is holding Thailand and thinking “???”.

(6) FILK HISTORY ZOOM. Fanac.org has posted video of the Zoom session “Margaret Middleton – A Shaper of Modern Filk (Part 1 of 2), interviewed by Edie Stern”.

Description: FANAC History Zoom: February 2025: Named to the Filk Hall of Fame in 1996, and a long time officer of the Filk Foundation, Margaret Middleton has been instrumental in the shaping of modern filk, as well as a mainstay of Arkansas fandom. She’s published multiple fanzines, including Kantele, and was a founder of the first specialized filk convention, Filkcon 1. In Part 1 of this 2 part recording, we learn about her introduction to conventions and fandom, including a delightful story of the Icon elevator that may have changed her life. 

Margaret starts at the beginning, with her entry to fandom and how she started writing filk, and continues to the four bearded guys and how she came to pub her ish. A traveling fan with many convention stories, this Part 1 includes the origin story of Roc*Con in the grand fannish tradition, as well as tales of Big Mac (MidAmericon, 1976 Worldcon), and reminiscences of some of the filkers of the time (incuding the “Great Broads of the Galaxy”). The talk moves on to filkzines, specialized filk conventions, and filksing styles. It’s great fun, especially for those of us that remember filking in those days. Full Disclosure: the interviewer (me) is one of those people.

(7) HUNGER GAMES TRIBUTES WILL TREAD THE BOARDS. “’Electrifying experience’: stage version of The Hunger Games to open in new London theatre” reports the Guardian.

A new theatre in London’s Canary Wharf will open with the delayed world premiere of The Hunger Games, based on Suzanne Collins’ bestselling 2008 novel and the hit 2012 film version.

Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s adaptation of the dystopian adventure, which follows teenagers fighting to the death in a televised spectacle, will begin previews on 20 October. The purpose-built, 1,200-seat Troubadour Canary Wharf theatre is operated by the company behind the venue for the successful Starlight Express reboot in Wembley Park, where singing roller-skaters whiz among the audience. The Hunger Games has been similarly designed to place theatregoers amid the action.

Tristan Baker and Oliver Royds, joint CEOs and founders of Troubadour Theatres, said the show would offer “a transportive, electrifying experience that fully captures the scale, intensity and spectacle of Suzanne Collins’ world. Every element – from the staging to the technology – has been tailored to transport audiences right into the heart of the Games like never before.”…

(8) GENE HACKMAN (1930-2025). Actor Gene Hackman and his wife, pianist Betsy Arakawa, were discovered dead in their Santa Fe, NM home yesterday. Authorities are investigating their deaths, with Deadline’s most current information summarized here: “Gene Hackman & Wife Suffered ‘No External Trauma’, Police Say”.

…No cause of death has been determined so far for Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa, but New Mexico police say the situation “remains an open investigation.”

With affidavits, search warrants and statements calling the death of the two-time Oscar winner, his wife and their dog late Wednesday “suspicious enough in nature,” the Santa Fe Sheriff’s office is reiterating Thursday that “there were no apparent signs of foul play.”…

…“An autopsy was performed. Initial findings noted no external trauma to either individual,” they added. “Carbon monoxide and toxicology tests were requested for both individuals. The manner and cause of death has not been determined. The official results of the autopsy and toxicology reports are pending. This remains an open investigation.” 

Earlier today, the local coroner’s office said it could be 4-6 weeks before a full report on the 95-year-old Hackman and the 63-year-old Arakawa is complete….

…With that, the deaths of Hackman and Arakawa become all the more complicated by what wasn’t addressed in the latest statement by the Santa Fe police. While the late Wednesday night affidavit for a search warrant on the couple’s property mentioned both bodies being on the floor of the house in different rooms and a “pill bottle being opened and pills scattered next to the female,” there was zero mention of that in this afternoon’s release…

The actor won Oscars winner for his work on 1971’s The French Connection and 1992’s Unforgiven. Hackman and classical pianist Arakawa married in 1991. 

His work of genre interest included playing Lex Luthor in multiple Superman films, appearing in Young Frankenstein, Marooned, and in one episode of The Invaders TV series. He also voiced a character in the animated movie Antz.

(9) A TOAST. This is a good day for “Remembering GENE HACKMAN in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)”.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Item by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary, TekWar: TekLab (1994)

Thirty-one years ago this evening TekWar: TekLab, the third of the TekWar episodes, aired. Created by William Shatner, the novels credited initially to him were actually ghost-written by Ron Goulart. I don’t know how much input Goulart had into the TV series. TekWar would be developed for television by Stephen Roloff who earlier had done the same for Friday the 13th: The Series and Beyond Reality which I liked, also filmed in Toronto, the site of other series such as Forever Knight. 

TekLab would take our detectives to London attend a ceremony at the Tower of London which marks the start of a campaign to restore the British monarchy. Before the film ends, much will happen including the appearance of Excalibur. 

The primary cast was Greg Evigan as Jake Cardigan, Eugene Clark as Sid Gomez, William Shatner as Walter Bascom, Michael York as Richard Stewart, Laurie Winger as Rachael Tudor and Maurice Dean Winter as Lt. Winger. 

I can’t say most critics loved this William-Shatner-created affair as they mostly did not, with who I’ll not quote by name to protect the guilty saying of the series that it was “bargain basement science fiction with a stale protagonist, a convoluted murder mystery, and a narrative that feels incomplete.” Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give this film specifically a thirty-six percent rating. 

It ran two seasons for a total of 22 episodes, films as well. Supposedly in production, there was an adult animated TekWar film (whatever the hell they meant by that and I’m definitely not speculating) which was announced five years ago but I can’t find any proof of it existing.

Unlike most of the critics, I liked this series as the lead protagonist, Jake, was developed enough to be a good character in that crucial story role and even Shatner in the role he was in was likable enough to be generally not annoying, the supporting characters made sense, the stories weren’t exactly the best science-fiction ever done, but they weren’t bad either and the setting made sense for what it was.

It is streaming, well, nowhere. It aired originally on the USA network before repeating on the Sci Fi network. The USA network is owned by NBC Universal, parent company of Peacock as well, so I’m surprised it is not there at least. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) BERLITZKRIEG. This bilingual joke has to have been around for a long time but today is the first time I’ve seen it. “Yo” is the Spanish counterpart to the English pronoun “I”.

The Spanish-language version of Asimov's sci-fi classic I, Robot sounds a lot more street.

— Rob McD (@yourfunnyuncle.bsky.social) 2025-02-27T22:20:11.197Z

(13) OUR MEGAFAUNA NEIGHBORS. TL;DR version: It took longer for humans to eat the last of them than previously thought. P.S. The article says that idea is actually wrong, no matter how much I like it. “Giant Megafauna Lived Alongside Humans As Recently As 3,500 Years Ago” says IFLScience.

….For a long time, the overall consensus has been that mammalian megafauna – giant mammals that roamed the Earth in the past, including species like mammoths, giant sloths and sabertoothed tigers – went extinct at the start of the Holocene. This is our current geological epoch, which started around 11,700 years ago, at the end of the last major glacial age.

However, some recent studies have obtained fossil evidence that challenges this consensus. In particular, the discovery that woolly mammoths were still alive 4,000 years ago helped undermine this idea. Now researchers have found other megafauna specimens, including giant sloths and camel-like animals, that survived in South America up to around 3,500 years ago.

This evidence raises questions about what really led to the planet’s most recent large animal extinction while also showing that it was not a homogenous event….

(14) NEWLYWED WALT. Animation Magazine alerts us that “Rare Early Disney Photos Go to Auction at Van Eaton Galleries”. And some of the photos can be viewed at the link.

(15) THE TECHNICAL TERM IS…. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] And you want to know why AI shouldn’t replace people? “’Emergent Misalignment’ in LLMs” at Schneier on Security.

Interesting research: “Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs“:

“Abstract: We present a surprising result regarding LLMs and alignment. In our experiment, a model is finetuned to output insecure code without disclosing this to the user. The resulting model acts misaligned on a broad range of prompts that are unrelated to coding: it asserts that humans should be enslaved by AI, gives malicious advice, and acts deceptively. Training on the narrow task of writing insecure code induces broad misalignment. We call this emergent misalignment. This effect is observed in a range of models but is strongest in GPT-4o and Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct. Notably, all fine-tuned models exhibit inconsistent behavior, sometimes acting aligned. Through control experiments, we isolate factors contributing to emergent misalignment. Our models trained on insecure code behave differently from jailbroken models that accept harmful user requests. Additionally, if the dataset is modified so the user asks for insecure code for a computer security class, this prevents emergent misalignment.

“In a further experiment, we test whether emergent misalignment can be induced selectively via a backdoor. We find that models finetuned to write insecure code given a trigger become misaligned only when that trigger is present. So the misalignment is hidden without knowledge of the trigger.

“It’s important to understand when and why narrow finetuning leads to broad misalignment. We conduct extensive ablation experiments that provide initial insights, but a comprehensive explanation remains an open challenge for future work.”

The emergent properties of LLMs are so, so weird.

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

Pixel Scroll 2/13/25 And Singin’, “This’ll Be The Day That I File, This’ll Be The Day That I File”

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(1) HOW BLACK HORROR BEGAN. Linda D. Addison goes back to the beginning in “Genesis – The First Black Horror Writers/Storytellers” at the Horror Writers Association blog.

Who were the first Black horror writers in a country that made enslaved Africans’ everyday life horrific? How did stories develop and what were their themes?

I wanted to write this because of my own curiosity. I didn’t know where this was going to lead me but the more I dug the more I found. The yellow brick road of discovery took me away from the land of published authors to places unexpected….

… Storytelling is the cornerstone of many cultures. For African and African-American communities it’s a way of communicating history, passing on lessons, and entertaining. Most of this storytelling was done in oral folktales by those surviving the nightmare of slave ships and a ‘New World’ that forbids their traditional practice.

The folk tales from Africa were modified to be acceptable in a country where anything that sounded aggressive or like strength from slaves could result in torture or death. The first recorded Black folktales I found were from the late nineteenth century. There are a number of stories with animals where one plays the part of the trickster, but I was looking for monsters, demons, etc.

“Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States”, Black folklore collected by Zora Neale Hurston in the late 1920s documented almost 500 folktales from 122 Black workers, farmers, and artisans by traveling to places like Alabama, Florida, and New Orleans. Besides themes of religion, family, and other social concepts I also found two sections named: “Devil Tales” and “Witch and Hant Tales” (Hant means “haunt” or “ghost”)….

(2) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 128 of the Octothorpe podcast, “A Minidisc Player Will Do You No Good”,

We report on the BSFA’s policy on reviewing, with a comment from BSFA Chair, Allen Stroud. Then, we tell you all what John’s doing for Reconnect (the 2025 Eastercon), discuss Iridescence (a bid for the 2026 Eastercon), talk BSFA Awards (presented at Eastercon) and Liz reads a book (which you could read at Eastercon).

In the podcast one of the Octothorpe crew says they’d been hearing “probably gossip” to the effect that the BSFA have been rejecting incoming reviews —

…so we were alerted last week to a blog comment from a reviewer who reviews for the BSFA Reviews, Steven French, and they say “ all the reviews I wrote for BSFA Reviews, the reviews journal of the British Science Fiction Association, have been discarded by the new editor because the BSFA is going for charitable status and so reviews of books that the reviewer is not happy with or did not understand (?) are not acceptable” which is interesting because I think we’d heard the same rumors from a couple of other sources that the new incoming bsfa reviews editor was not publishing reviews that were a bit negative or possibly a book they didn’t understand and was trying to go for a much more positive tone….

They reached out to BSFA chair Allen Stroud who told them —

  • This is a simple misunderstanding on the part of the Reviews Editor in relation to BSFA oversight of its publications.
  • Editorial policy of BSFA publications is usually determined by the editors.
  • There is no connection between BSFA Review Editorial policy and the BSFA’s transition to being a charity. This transition has not been confirmed and will need to be confirmed (or rejected) as a motion at the forthcoming EGM on February 23rd.
  • The BSFA’s constitution is to promote science fiction and science fiction criticism. There is no priority to favour either over the other.
  • We will be working with the reviews editor in order to produce a clearer set of guidelines.

(3) SCL AWARDS. The Wild Robot won Outstanding Original Score for a Studio Film at the Society of Composers and Lyricists Award presentation on February 12. Here are the other “SCL Awards 2025 Winners” of genre interest.

OUTSTANDING ORIGINAL SCORE FOR A STUDIO FILM
Kris Bowers, The Wild Robot (DreamWorks Animation)

OUTSTANDING ORIGINAL SCORE FOR INTERACTIVE MEDIA
Winifred Phillips, Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (Digital Eclipse)

DAVID RAKSIN AWARD FOR EMERGING TALENT
Andrea Datzman, Inside Out 2 (Disney/Pixar Animation Studios)

…Special honorees tonight were composer Harry Gregson-Williams and legendary director Ridley Scott, who shared the 2025 Spirit of Collaboration Award, having made seven films together. Five-time Emmy winner Jeff Beal received the Jury Award for his score for the 1920 silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which he premiered and was performed live-to-picture at Carnegie Hall in June….

(4) TAKING UMFRAGE. Cora Buhlert was on German TV: “Cora’s TV Adventure”. Watch the video here: “Umfrage: Große Mehrheit fordert stärkere Aufarbeitung der Corona-Pandemie”.

…I got a call from a journalist from the NDR asking if I wanted to participate in a TV interview about the topic of their latest survey – “Were the covid measures too strict and do we need some kind of political post-mortem?” I considered for a moment – it is a sensitive topic, after all, and there’s a chance of pissing off people – and then said yes….

Some of Cora’s Masters of the Universe figures got on TV, too.

…In the end, the TV team decided that they preferred the dining room/hall and asked me to set up the laptop. The camera operator also asked if we could put some of my Masters of the Universe figures onto the dining table.

I said, “Of course. There actually were some figures on the table until yesterday, but I moved them away. Do you want any specific figures or should I just pick something?”

“Could we have these ladies?” the camera operator asked and pointed at three different Teela figures.

So I took the three Teelas and when they turned out to have problems keeping their footing on my quilted tablerunner, I also grabbed Battle Cat to hold them upright.

“Could we also have the King?” the camera operator asked, so I grabbed King Randor and positioned him opposite the three Teelas….

(5) A THURB BLURB. BGrandrath says, “I know a running gag when I see one. I thought this would fit the theme, and remember: you started it.” And he sent along an item title that mashes up two of the Scroll’s recent story lines. Here are more clues to the reference for those of you playing along at home. [Click for larger images.]

(6) ATWOOD’S LEGERDEMAIN. “The Backlist: Reading Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Blind Assassin’, with Ashley Winstead” by Polly Stewart at CrimeReads.

Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin opens with one of the best first sentences I’ve ever read: “Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.” Though the novel isn’t structured as a conventional mystery, there’s mystery inherent in that first sentence, and it only grows as the reader learns more about the narrator, Iris Chase, her sister Laura, and Alex Thomas, the man they both love. The novel spans genres, decades, and galaxies, weaving together elements that a lesser writer would never think to put together….

Ashley Winstead explains why the book is enthralling.

… One time the writer Deborah Eisenberg came to talk to us, and she was talking about braided narrative structure, where disparate parts of the story come together in a way you can’t predict. In The Blind Assassin, you’ll have one chapter with newspaper articles from the 1930’s, and in the next a story of two people having an affair, and in the next the science fiction story that one of them is writing, and in the next Iris as an old woman in her eighties reflecting on her life. Atwood puts all these pieces together and allows the reader to make the connections and associations between them. I just fell in love with that form of writing, and I thought of The Blind Assassin as the ultimate version of that kind of narrative.…

(7) BONUS BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

February 12, 1929 — Donald Kingsbury, 96. 

By Paul Weimer. The first ever winner of the Compton Crook Award Donald Kingsbury has sat in a position of appreciating and boosting science fiction for decades. The inaugural Compton Crook Award-winning book was Courtship Rite, which I read back in the 80’s and was my first introduction to his work.  It’s a throw-into-the-deep-end space colony novel that impressed for me just how much Kingsbury likes to play the harsh main beats of science fiction. It’s not a 101 Science Fiction work, since the protocols of the book mean that you really want to feel and known the ebb and flow of how science fiction novels work before ever tackling it. 

Donald Kingsbury

There has been a long promised but never materialized sequel that has been in the works for decades. I’d read it…but I’d want to re-read the original first if it was released but…hold that thought for a moment.

Psychohistorical Crisis, however, is his most audacious and outstanding work. It started off as a novella (Historical Crisis) in the collection Far Futures, which I happened to recently re-read in an audio edition. Psychohistorical Crisis is a full-on expansion of that novella. The best way I can describe it, however cheekily, is that it is a full-on fanfic novel of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, set sometime after the Galactic Empire has risen again. The numbers that make it not an Asimov novel and instead set in a different ‘verse are rubbed off very gently. There is nothing in the novel that contradicts or contraindicates that it is in Asimov’s ‘verse. Even the names of the characters in the novel (e.g. Eron Osa) sound Asimovian. If you ever wondered what a Second Empire Asimov story could look like, Psychohistorical Crisis has got you covered.  Like Courtship Rite, it dumps you in the deep end but the swim is so worth it.

But there is one complaint I have. I’ve recommended two wonderful novels of his, and I am sure that readers in this space might want to try his work, if they haven’t.  But…his work is resolutely out of print. No ebook editions. Only that audio book of Far Futures with his novella. Getting a hold of his work requires work to get used editions.  And that is a damn shame. I can’t even remember if I have my copy of Psychohistorical Crisis. 

But again, not a 101 SF writer, maybe a 301 writer for when you want something uncompromising and dunked into the deep end. That’s Kingsbury’s work to me. 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) ANTICIPATION IS MAKING ME PRATE. [Item by Steven French.] Here’s the latest column from Keza Macdonald, the Guardian’s gaming correspondent: “Top of the flops: just what does the games industry deem ‘success’ any more?”

Back in 2013, having bought the series from Eidos, Square Enix released a reboot of the hit 1990s action game Tomb Raider starring a significantly less objectified Lara Croft. I loved that game, despite a quasi-assault scene near the beginning that I would later come to view as a bit icky, and I wasn’t the only one – it was extremely well received, selling 3.4m copies in its first month alone. Then Square Enix came out and called it a disappointment.

Sales did not meet the publisher’s expectations, apparently, which raises the question: what were the expectations? Was it supposed to sell 5m in one month? If a book sells 10,000 copies in a week it’s considered a bestseller. Even at the height of its popularity in the 90s, no Tomb Raider game ever sold more than a few million. Square Enix’s expectations were clearly unrealistic. It wouldn’t be the last time; in a 2016 interview with Hajime Tabata, Final Fantasy XV’s director, he told me that game needed to sell 10m to succeed.

Last week in an earnings call, EA’s executives had to explain a shortfall in profits. It was driven mostly by EA FC, the ubiquitous football series whose revenue was down on the previous year, but CEO Andrew Wilson also singled out the long-awaited RPG Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which came out last October. “Dragon Age had a high-quality launch and was well reviewed by critics and those who played. However, it did not resonate with a broad enough audience in this highly competitive market,” he said.

Dragon Age has “reached 1.5 million players” in the months since launch, which presumably includes people paying via subscription services as well as direct sales. If 3.4m was a disappointment for Square Enix in 2013, you can only imagine that 1.5m was a disaster for EA in 2024, when games cost multiples more to make….

(10) ICONIC RESTAURANT. Ray Bradbury (not named in the article) is another writer who frequented Musso & Frank’s in Hollywood. “Calif.’s coolest restaurant turns 106. The martinis are cold as ever” at SFGate. Fictional cop Harry Bosch has been there, too.

“You’re sitting at Jack Nicholson’s table,” my server, dressed in a sharp red jacket, told me on a recent visit to legendary Los Angeles restaurant The Musso & Frank Grill in Hollywood. According to the server, Nicholson favored the curved round booth at the back of the restaurant’s main dining room for its proximity to the back exit, making it easy to duck in and out unnoticed….

…“Last year, 145,000 customers came through the restaurant,” fourth-generation owner and Musso & Frank Chief Financial Officer Mark Echeverria tells SFGATE. “We have 210 seats, so if you drill down, that’s 460 customers a day, or over two full turns of the restaurant every night we’re open for dinner.”

That means that, all these years later, diners are still sliding into those wide red leather booths, sidling up to the bustling grill (the restaurant’s centerpiece) and grabbing ice-cold martinis at the back mahogany bar….

…In the 1930s, Carissimi and Mosso opened the exclusive Back Room, which became a favorite for celebrities and literary luminaries of the day. Orson Welles reportedly wrote “Citizen Kane” at a booth; John Steinbeck, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner and Fitzgerald were some of the many other famous writers who considered the Back Room a second home….

(11) LEST DARKNESS FALL. SYFY Wire takes readers to “The Wildest Real-Life Twilight Zones in the Real World”.

…As sunlight hits the ocean’s surface it scatters, gets absorbed, or reflected back into space. As a result, the waters of the world get pretty dark pretty fast, and scientists often separate the seas into distinct layers based on how much light they receive.

At the ocean surface you’ll find the sunlight (euphotic) zone, where light is strong enough for photosynthesis. This layer extends to about 200 meters deep, where you’ll find the beginning of the twilight (dysphotic) zone. Here, sunlight decreases rapidly with depth. There’s not enough light for photosynthesis, but there is enough for some critters to live and see by.

The ocean’s twilight zone extends to a depth of 1,000 meters before transitioning to the aphotic zone which is itself broken into three layers. You’ll first encounter the midnight (bathypelagic) zone from 1,000 to 4,000 meters, the abyss (abyssopelagic) zone from 4,000 to 6,000 meters, and the hadal (hadopelagic) zone at 6,000+ meters…

(12) ZAPPED BY THE UNIVERSE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This week’s Nature cover story is “Cosmic Catcher”.

The cover shows a light sensor from the Kilometre Cube Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT) at sunset above the Mediterranean Sea. This is one of thousands of sensors that are currently being assembled into enormous 3D grids in the abysses off the coast of Sicily in Italy and Provence in France. KM3NeT detects high-energy neutrinos, elementary particles that can be created by powerful events in the Universe. The neutrinos are spotted as a faint flash of light generated when the products of a neutrino interaction with water molecules pass through these detectors. In this week’s issue, the KM3NeT team presents the observation of the highest-energy cosmic neutrino ever detected. The telescope in Sicily caught a signal from a muon that had an energy of around 120 petaelectronvolts, which is most likely to have come from a neutrino of around 220 petaelectronvolts. The highest energy neutrino detected before this was 30 times less energetic. The exceptionally high energy, together with the almost horizontal direction of travel, implies that the neutrino is extraterrestrial. Its probable origin is beyond the Milky Way.

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

Pixel Scroll 1/30/25 Scrolling Considered As A Helix Of Semi-Precious Pixels

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(1) GAIMAN WILL RECEIVE NO PROCEEDS FROM GOOD OMEN GRAPHIC NOVEL KICKSTARTER. Rhianna Pratchett today pointed to a Kickstarter update from the Pratchett estate about the Good Omens graphic novel.

[We] had locked refunds of the Good Omens graphic novel in mid-November due to where we were in the production process, however will no longer maintain this freeze in light of new articles and allegations. While we cannot speak further on the subject at present, we have chosen to reopen a short refund window for those who would no longer like to support the graphic novel, until Friday 7th February 2025. Please contact us via email or Kickstarter message.

It has also been agreed that Neil Gaiman will not receive any proceeds from the graphic novel Kickstarter. Given the project management, production and all communication has always been under the jurisdiction of the Estate on behalf of Good Omens at large, this will not fundamentally change the project itself, however we can confirm the Kickstarter and PledgeManager will now fully be an entity run by, and financially connected to, the Terry Pratchett Estate only.

A number of tiers also come with author merchandise and books; we have been working on a system in the back end to remove or swap out particular rewards from tiers, should you wish to continue with the project, but not receive these specific items. In this instance, please contact us via Kickstarter or the email listed on the project FAQ and we will endeavour to alter your orders, to swap items in of an equivalent value, where we are able.

Given the point in the production process, we cannot extend refunds beyond this new deadline, but will honour requests in this window – the only exceptions will be tiers where rewards have already been actioned, such as cameos, and custom or rare items on higher level tiers. In the instance of cameos, should backers wish to have their name removed from the postcard (Archangel) or not receive their cameo print (God), we are able to alter this, but not the cameo itself.

If you do get in touch, we aim to get back within a few days; if you have not heard back within a week, please chase up your query.

Good Omens in all its forms is very special to us, and we know that for many fans the landscape has shifted. We appreciate the sensitivity of this issue, and will be working through all queries in the coming weeks.

We will continue on our journey with Crowley and Aziraphale, and all of our surrounding plans, in some form. Thank you for being part of the journey with us.

The Terry Pratchett Estate (Good Omens HQ)

David Tennant’s Facebook page also posted a truncated version of the statement, and notes that the Kickstarter has raised £2,419,973 to date. Colleen Doran is doing the artwork for this book, as File 770 has reported from time to time.

(2) DOES GAIMAN STILL HAVE REPS? Deadline has been trying to get statements from Neil Gaiman’s various agents about whether they still represent him. No statements have been provided. However, Deadline reported today his name has disappeared from the public client list of one of them: “Neil Gaiman Dropped By Agent Casarotto Ramsay After Misconduct Claims”.

Neil Gaiman has been removed from UK agent Casarotto Ramsay & Associates’ client list after the Good Omens writer has faced a string of sexual misconduct allegations over the past six months.

Gaiman’s profile was quietly scrubbed from Casarotto Ramsay & Associates’ website, meaning he no longer appears on pages listing its film, TV, and theatre clients.

Internet archives show Gaiman’s profile, which included trailers for his screen work, was live on the agency’s website as recently as last October, months after the initial allegations were published. The author denies wrongdoing.

Casarotto Ramsay & Associates failed to respond to repeated requests for comment about whether it continues to rep Gaiman. Gaiman has been contacted for comment. His long-time literary agent is Writers House’s Merrilee Heifetz, who has been approached for comment. Gaiman has also been repped by CAA, who have been contacted….

(3) FILK HISTORY ZOOM. The next FANAC Fan History Zoom on February 22 will be about filk fandom. Edie Stern will interview Margaret Middleton. To attend, contact fanac@fanac.org.

(4) DOES YOUR BOOK HAVE A BELLY BUTTON? “Books written by humans are getting their own certification” says The Verge. Self-certification. Because no one would ever lie about this, right?

The Authors Guild — one of the largest associations of writers in the US — has launched a new project that allows authors to certify that their book was written by a human, and not generated by artificial intelligence.

The Guild says its “Human Authored” certification aims to make it easier for writers to “distinguish their work in increasingly AI-saturated markets,” and that readers have a right to know who (or what) created the books they read. Human Authored certifications will be listed in a public database that anyone can access. The project was first announced back in October in response to a deluge of AI-generated books flooding online marketplaces like Amazon and its Kindle ebook platform.

Certification is currently restricted to Authors Guild members and books penned by a single writer, but will expand “in the future” to include books by non-Guild members and multiple authors. Books and other works must be almost entirely written by humans to qualify for a Human Authored mark, with minor exceptions to accommodate things like AI-powered grammar and spell-check applications….

(5) AI NAY NAY? Steve J. Wright discusses in fascinating detail the brain, intelligence, why the very different operations of a computer do not resemble either of the former, and his skepticism about artificial intelligence in “The Little Man Who Isn’t There”.

…So, Artificial Intelligence, if it is achievable at all with current technology (and I suspect the technology which might make it achievable is some way in the future) will necessarily operate in a way which is radically, fundamentally different from human intelligence. So different that communicating with it, or even recognizing that it’s there, will present significant technological challenges. So why are we so happy – well, why are some of us so happy – to believe that Artificial Intelligence is with us here and now, ready to correct our grammar and do our homework for us?

Wright’s article includes a rather amusing callback to Sixties chatbot ELIZA.

“Ah,” says the knowledgeable reader, “he’s going to talk about ELIZA.” Yes, I am absolutely going to talk about ELIZA, because it is such a very good example. Created by Joseph Weizenbaum between 1964 and 1967, ELIZA is credited as the first chatbot; it was designed to emulate a psychotherapist, using a fairly limited set of stock responses which identified key words in its interlocutor’s messages and fitted them into templates for replies. And it had people convinced that it was a real person, that no mere machine could possibly understand them as well as ELIZA did. Now look at those dates again, and consider just how much technical progress there has been on the hardware end of things since then. ELIZA is not a sophisticated program. If you are the sort of weirdo who has a “smart” home, you probably have light bulbs with enough capacity to run ELIZA. Your fridge probably has enough computing power to run ELIZA and perform its normal fridgely duties (maintaining optimum temperatures and levels of energy usage, keeping an inventory of its contents and their expiry dates, and snitching on you to Amazon about your chocolate ice cream habit.)

So, since a rinky-dink little gizmo like ELIZA can successfully con people into believing it’s human, what chance do our poor gullible brains stand against modern technology? 

(6) THESE THINGS MUST BE HANDLED DELICATELY. “Sale of Wicked Witch’s hat from the ‘The Wizard of Oz’ sparks fraud lawsuit” reports the LA Times. (Article republished on MSN, so not behind a paywall). There are three known existing Wicked Witch hats used in filming of The Wizard of Oz. Schneider acquired one in 2019 for $100,000, from Profiles in History, a movie memorabilia house that Heritage acquired two years later. He later consigned it to Heritage for a big Hollywood memorabilia auction. The owner of another Witch’s hat, Michael Shaw, also decided to sell his. And in addition, Shaw was consigning an authentic pair of the ruby slippers. Here’s the rest of the story….

…In July 2023, Schneider agreed to consign his hat to Heritage and the item was given a value of $200,000 for insurance purposes, according to his lawsuit.

However, Heritage pulled Schneider’s hat from an auction in which another Wicked Witch’s hat owned by Michael Shaw…

In August, [Heritage Auctions senior director Brian] Chanes called Schneider and offered him a quick private sale of the hat for $250,000. Instead of taking it to auction, the hat worn by actor Margaret Hamilton would be sold directly to Shaw, who had expressed interest. The price was “more than any Hat had previously sold for,” Chanes told him, according to the complaint.

A few months later, Heritage began promoting a December auction of movie memorabilia that included Shaw’s three Oz pieces….

…According to the suit, Heritage launched a promotional tour of Shaw’s items, holding events in New York, London and Tokyo.

Shaw is not a defendant in the lawsuit against Heritage.

During the auction held on Dec. 7, the ruby slippers sold for a record $32.5 million and the hat hammered down for $2.93 million, which was nearly 12 times the amount Schneider received for his hat. Like other houses, Heritage receives a commission on the items sold at auction.

“It’s very unusual to have an item plucked out of an auction and get an offer like that from the auctioneer,” Schneider said. He says the house violated its fiduciary obligations to him, having failed to disclose the level of market interest in the hat or its planned roadshow for the auction.

Schneider alleges that Heritage struck the deal with him as a “device for HERITAGE or its executives to get ownership at a deep discount while also favoring Mr. S by making his Hat the only one in the auction,” states the suit….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 30, 1924 — Lloyd Alexander. (Died 2007.)

By Paul Weimer: In the mid 1980’s, Disney came out with The Black Cauldron, an animated fantasy movie. This was the “wilderness years” of Disney before the boom that started with The Little Mermaid.  (The Black Cauldron came out the same year as Return to Oz) It looked interesting, and I was now at a point where I could go and see such movies on my own. Sure, it was an animated movie probably aimed at a younger audience than who I probably was, but I was game. (The fact that it was rated PG drew my attention and convinced me to see it).  I enjoyed it deeply even if apparently few others did at the time. (Again, see above, Wilderness Years)

So it goes.

Naturally, the movie led me to the Lloyd Alexander book. I didn’t realize at the time that The Black Cauldron is actually the second in the Prydain series, but having seen the movie loosely based on it, I wasn’t lost at the time and when I finally did read The Book of Three (the first in the series) sometime thereafter, I saw how sneakily the filmmakers had been inspired by that book for helping to establish Taran, as well as The Black Cauldron itself.  So I could and did happily read the book and the sequels, and so being hooked on Alexander’s work thereby.

I had only the smallest amount of knowledge of Welsh mythology at the time I read the Pyrdain series, the mythology books I had read to that point were focused on the Greco-roman and the Norse. The tales of the Mabinogion that Alexander’s series was based on did later, some years on, inspire me to investigate and learn about Welsh mythology in much more detail.  So I have Alexander to thank for that. 

And in general, Alexander is a novelist who I am glad I did not “miss”. There is a swath of authors I managed to miss because I felt myself too old by the time I found them (Susan Cooper comes to mind, although I did read her a few years ago). Alexander is in that class, while writing for a younger audience, his strong use of theme, decently three-dimensional female characters (although still cross about Eilonwy’s losing her magical powers) and the sheer verve and quality of the writing and the language. 

That quality of writing extended to all of the other work I’ve read of him, from the meditation on war that is The Kestrel, to the Vesper Holly adventure archaeology series. He’s definitely an excellent gateway to much further reading and I think that he still stands up as someone to introduce a young reader to fantasy.

My only regret is that I didn’t discover his work sooner.

Lloyd Alexander

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 127 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Hello Buoys”, John Coxon is incoherent, Alison Scott is excited, and Liz Batty is romantic. An uncorrected transcript of this episode is available here. 

Episode 127 is here. We discuss the latest juicy gossip from the Belfast Eastercon, we hear from Claire Brialey of Croydon, and we pick things that aren’t games! 

Alt text: A flowchart entitled “How to meet John, Alison and/or Liz at Eastercon”. The boxes culminate in “console yourself with Octothorpe 127”, and the various options are listed below, but the original file is linked in the show notes in case that’s more helpful to the partially sighted. How to meet John, Alison and/or Liz at Eastercon Are you going to Reconnect? Of course!/Not sure Oh go on it will be a laugh Oh all right then/No... Are they in the bar? Yes! I can't see them Are you quite sure? Check again Oh wait... there they are No sign Is there another bar? Yes! Nope Are they on programme? Yes! No Wait till the moderator asks for questions But it's Octothorpe Live! Is your joke very funny? Obviously! Excellent! Good to know. COME AND SAY HELLO until then... Are they asleep or on the loo? No, they look chill Er, yes? Oh, that's a shame Console yourself with Octothorpe 127

(10) THE NEXT TENTACLE. “’Squid Game’ Season 3 Release Date Set at Netflix”. Variety tells what it is.

“Squid Game” Season 3 will premiere June 27, following the major cliffhanger finale that Season 2 ended on.

“Squid Game” Season 2, which consisted of seven episodes, debuted Dec. 26. The installment was filmed back-to-back with Season 3, assuring there would be a much shorter wait between seasons than there was for Season 2 and Season 1 (which debuted in 2021, and was not originally written as an ongoing series).

In Season 2, Gi-hun, aka Player 456 (played by Lee Jung-jae), returns to the sadistic competition three years after winning 45.6 billion in South Korean won as the sole survivor of the event, in order to now put an end to Squid Game and save the lives of the players around him….

(11) SUPER ADVERTISING. The commercials aired during the Super Bowl have a reputation for creativity and entertainment. If you’re likely to watch them, whether during the broadcast or later on YouTube, here’s Deadline’s scouting report of the movie promos that will be part of the lineup, most of them of genre interest: “Super Bowl Movie Trailers 2025: What to Expect”.

…This year, count on the following to air either pre, during or post-game:

Disney, the No. 1 studio of last year with more than $2.2 billion in domestic box office, has always had a presence at the Super Bowl. It won’t be a surprise if it shows off wares for upcoming pics Snow White (March 21), Lilo & Stich (May 23) and Pixar’s Elio (June 13). We understand they’ll only be showing off two out of three of their upcoming Marvel Studios movies, a batch that includes the upcoming Captain America: Brave New World (February 14), summer kickoff Thunderbolts* (May 2) and Fantastic Four: The First Steps (July 25)….

Universal, the No. 2 studio with $1.88B domestic in 2024, will be wowing with trailers for Dean DeBlois’ live-action take of his How to Train Your Dragon (June 13) and the Scarlett Johansson-Mahershala Ali-Jonathan Bailey starring Jurassic World Rebirth (July 2) from Gareth Edwards. Don’t be surprised if you catch a Blumhouse title, like a M3GAN 2.0 (June 27). You’ll remember how Uni previously stunted the first installment with dancing M3GAN dolls on talks shows and popular landmarks like the Empire State Building.

Paramount is no stranger to the Super Bowl, even when its sister CBS network and Paramount+ isn’t broadcasting it (Fox has the game this year). This year, the buzz is that Par will air spots for the Jack Quaid comedy thriller Novocaine (March 14), the Smurfs animated musical movie starring Rihanna (July 18) and Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning. …

Nothing to do with genre, however, you can already watch the “Hellmanns Super Bowl Commercial 2025” which reunites the When Harry Met Sally stars Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal in an update of their deli scene.

(12) ALL’S FAIR. The answer to the Guardian’s question is microcollectibles, apparently: “Evil toilets, terror food and billionaire Squishmallows: my eye-popping day at the UK’s giant toy fair”.

A chubby baby dinosaur waddles down a pink carpeted aisle, narrowly avoiding an army of Care Bears tramping in the other direction. Nearby, a sales rep shows off a collection of insect-breeding habitats, just as Pikachu scampers around the corner, bumping into her neat display. Across the hall, inventors show off their fiendish new board games, magicians demonstrate glowing plastic thumbs, while others grapple with instructions by a table covered with thousands of tiny plastic bricks.

Welcome to the Toy Fair, in London’s Kensington Olympia, the UK’s biggest bonanza of toys, games and hobbies, where the world’s manufacturers converge to peddle their latest wares, as retailers scour the endless stands for the hottest new trends. It’s a mind-boggling place of plushies and puzzles, remote-control cars and mud kitchens, and more plastic than you would find at a petrochemical convention. Here, the £3.4bn business of fun is taken very seriously indeed, with NDAs galore and not a child in sight. So where is the toy world heading in 2025?…

Fans of the YouTube phenomenon, Skibidi Toilet, can now buy the official toy line at Walmart, Target and Amazon. The line includes the Mystery Surprise Toilet, Collector Figures, Mystery Plush and more.

[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Lise Andreasen, Joe Siclari, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Juli Marr, Meredith, JJ, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Jones.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I know the answer to that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 16, 1948 — John Carpenter, 77.

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

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

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

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

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

John Carpenter

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

January 16, 1995 — Star Trek: Voyager premieres  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(9) COMICS SECTION.

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

Get the uncorrected transcript at the link.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pixel Scroll 12/20/24 How Much Is That Shoggoth In The Attic? The One With The Horrifying Tale

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(1) ENTERING PUBLIC DOMAIN IN 2025. At John Mark Ockerbloom’s blog Everybody’s Libraries you can use this hashtag to access his #PublicDomainDayCountdown – a series of daily posts through the end of the year highlighting the works falling out of copyright in the U.S. Here are some examples.  

(2) OTHER COVERAGE. Animation Magazine is ready: “Popeye & Tintin Enter the Public Domain in 2025”

Two icons of comics and animation history will be entering the public domain in the U.S. as of January 1, 2025, opening their earliest representations up to be used and repurposed without permission or payment to copyright holders: E.C. Segar’s idiosyncratic sailor-man Popeye and Belgian comics artist Hergé’s globe-trotting reporter Tintin.

The Public Domain Review is also doing a countdown “What Will Enter the Public Domain in 2025?” (They give a hat tip to Ockerbloom’s blog.)

(3) NEVALA-LEE AND MALZBERG DIALOGS. [Item by Alec Nevala-Lee.] I was very sorry to see the post announcing the death of Barry Malzberg, who was an important figure in my life. It inspired me to look back at our voluminous email correspondence, which I’ve decided to put online, on the assumption that other people might find it interesting as well: “Barry N. Malzberg and Alec Nevala-Lee (Emails 2016–2023)”.

In 2016, I reached out to Barry N. Malzberg with a question relating to my book Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. The result was an intermittent email correspondence that grew over the next six years to an astounding 25,000 words. I’m posting it here because it contains a lot of interesting material, as well as the single greatest compliment that I’ve ever received, which Malzberg emailed to me on February 2, 2017: “It is clear to me that you may be already science fiction’s most promising writer and thinker to emerge since Alfred Bester stumbled into the room almost eight decades ago. Like the Elizabethan theater before Shakespeare, we have been waiting for you without really knowing we were waiting for you.” I don’t believe that this was ever true—certainly not when Malzberg said it to me—but I’ve treasured it ever since. Malzberg, for all his flaws, was an essential figure in my life, and I deeply regret that I’ll never have the chance to speak to him again.

(4) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 125 of the Octothorpe podcast, “I’m Physically Present in This Hotel Room”, is belatedly here!

We read some letters of comment, we discuss the Seattle online Business Meeting plan and also the news from Smofcon 41, and Liz tells us what the objectively correct best Christmas movie is.

Get the transcript here.

John wears an Octothorpe Christmas jumper and a green and red hat with elf ears, Alison wears a red Christmas jumper and a moose/reindeer hat, and Liz wears a blue jumper and a Christmas tree hat. The words “Octothorpe 125” appear at the top in a Christmassy font that looks like it has snow on the letters.

(5) SFF REVIEWS. Lisa Tuttle, in “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup” for the Guardian, discusses: Troll: A Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo; How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later by Philip K Dick; The Woman Who Fell to Earth by RB Russell; and Mystery Lights by Lena Valencia.

(6) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

December 20, 1985 — Enemy Mine

By Paul Weimer: First, for me, came the movie. It was 1985, and if you’ve been following my timeline of movie watching, this was when I was finally going to movies on my own. Back to the Future was a big movie I saw that year, but that winter, there was Enemy Mine. 

I had not read the novella that the movie is based on, although I would, later, get an edition that included all of the ancillary material that helped inspire the novella. And, of course, the film. 

This again was 1985 and like Back to the Future, I was delighted to be able to immerse myself in a new property. This was in space but it was not Star Wars or Star Trek, and it was better than a lot of the dreck I had seen on television, mostly. Dawitch and Jerry as played by Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett Jr. were compelling and I did see it opening weekend…but it turns out, not many other people did. Despite the performances and the obvious appeal of a Cold War story, the movie financially bombed.  

I blame the poster.  Look at the poster sometime.  I had gone in, looking at that poster, expecting a movie where the two are continually at war, and what I got was something far more interesting, complex and dynamic…two people from two different species who hate each other, but eventually learn to trust, even love one another. The movie’s message is powerful, and its advertising completely ignores it. It does it a disservice (Years later, when seeing John Carter, I would remember it being similarly badly served).  

And thanks to the movie, I still want to go to the Canary Islands, to the volcanic area that the movie is filmed in. It’s a bleak and eyecatching place, and my camera and I would love to capture it and experience the location first-hand. 

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born December 20, 1960 — Nalo Hopkinson, 64.

By Paul Weimer: There are some authors and their books that shake you completely and utterly out of your comfort zone. Nalo Hopkinson is one of those authors. We cast our minds back to the late 1990s as I was growing in my science fiction reading, moving toward my path of being a reviewer and critic. I had not yet really started to read that widely, but I was learning.  When I saw Brown Girl in the Ring, her debut novel, it looked completely different than anything I had ever read before. So, in the spirit of trying to broaden my reading, I picked it up.

And it knocked me on my arse. Late 21st century Toronto setting. Afro-Caribbean culture? African Mythology and deities mixed in with a believable and immersive dystopian future. This novel hit buttons of mine hard, and buttons that I didn’t know I had. I think that this was one of the first novels that started my quest to start looking for books “Beyond the Great Walls of Europe”, to engage with other traditions, cultures, starting points. It was absolutely superb.  And if you haven’t read it, it’s short and punchy, I devoured it in a couple of days.

Since then, Hopkinson has been a feature in my reading ever since, from Midnight Robber through works like The Salt Roads to more recent works like her recent Blackheart Man. Nalo’s output is not a tsunami of novels and stories; her work is more like the work of Ted Chiang, a few startingly potent and polished gems that are potent and powerful.  She’s not a writer for every cup of tea, that uncompromising nature of her work means that there can be some rather tough subjects and themes in the work. But I think her work is worth it.

Nalo Hopkinson

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) KRYPTO’S VALUE. Brian Cronin’s CBR. Newsletter discussed the origins and role of Krypto – unfortunately, there’s no public link to it. (And it wouldn’t be nice for me to gank the whole article.)

…Like most new characters (including Batman’s answer to the dog trend, Ace the Bathound, who debuted a few months later), Krypto was only intended to be a one-off character, just something that Otto Binder and Curt Swan could introduce to get through another issue of the Superboy feature, but fan response was strong enough that Krypto soon returned, and became a regular fixture in the series. He was then added to the main Superman comic books, as well (althoguh he did not play as major of a role in the stories of Superman as an adult as he did in Superboy stories, there is just something special about a boy and his dog). Krypto was a major part of the Superman titles in the 1960s, as the titles began to introduce more and more characters, like Streaky the Super Cat (she and Krypto had quite the rivalry).

What made Krypto so special to Superman?

The importance of Krypto was made clear by the late, great Martin Pasko in Action Comics #500 (by Pasko, Swan, and Frank Chiaramonte), when Superman is walking with reporters through the Superman Pavilion of the Metropolis World’s Fair, and reflecting on his life. Krypto comes up, and Superman speaks about the loneliness that comes from being the “Last Son of Krypton.” It is not just a matter of being the only survivor from your planet, which, of course, carries along a tremendous amount of survivor’s guilt, but there is also the problem where, because of the way that Earth gives you special powers, that you are alone on THIS planet, too, because you’re different than everyone else. That is, therefore, why Krypto was so important to Superman, because it was someone that Superman could relate to, even if he was “only” a dog…

(10) HAPPY BIRTHDAY SPACE FORCE. “US Space Force 5 years later: What has it accomplished so far, and where does it go from here?” Space tries to supply an answer. Will this bureaucratic growth survive a second Trump administration, despite being founded during the first?

The U.S. Space Force celebrates its fifth anniversary today.

The service was formally established on Dec. 20, 2019, when President Donald Trump signed it into law with the National Defense Authorization Act, the bill that allocates U.S. military spending each year. Since then, the U.S. Space Force has grown to nearly 15,000 servicemembers and civilian personnel. In its fifth year, Space Force has overseen astronaut launches from its facility at Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and has even seen one of its own active Guardians, as Space Force members are known, launch into space.From GPS navigation networks to weather forecasting, from broadband internet to early-warning missile detection systems, the U.S. (like many other nations) increasingly depends on space-based technologies for its way of life. Space Force’s role in protecting and overseeing these technologies has evolved and grown over the last five years, and will likely continue to do so as it moves forward. But just what has Space Force accomplished in its first five years, and where will it go from here?

… From a piece of legislation to launching its own personnel from its own launch site, Space Force set a brisk pace in its first five years.

The service’s current Chief of Space Operations, Gen. Chance Saltzman, highlighted the rapid growth of Space Force in remarks given at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ (CSIS) “Celebrating the U.S. Space Force and Charting Its Future” event in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 17.

“On average, we have tripled in size every year for the last five years in personnel, an astounding growth rate for any government organization,” Saltzman said. “We have reimagined operations, redefined policies [and] reworked processes from the ground up to forge a service purpose-built for great power competition.

“All of this in just five years.”…

(11) WHO IS NUMBER ONE? A nice way to see out the year! “Booksellers predict Orbital by Samantha Harvey will be UK No 1 bestselling book” reports the Guardian.

This year’s Booker prize winner will be the Christmas No 1 bestseller, predict UK booksellers. 

The Booksellers Association (BA) asked bookshop staff which book they think could reach the festive top spot, and Orbital by Samantha Harvey was the most popular response.

The slim volume was “selling well even before the Booker prize win, and since then it has been flying off the shelves,” said Amanda Truman, who owns Truman Books in Farsley, West Yorkshire.

Fleur Sinclair, president of the BA and owner of Sevenoaks Bookshop in Kent, would be “amazed” if Orbital doesn’t top the charts. Between its Booker win and “accessible paperback format and price, so many of our customers are buying it both for themselves and as gifts”.

Orbital became the first Booker novel to hit No 1on the UK bestseller chart in the week of its win, with 20,040 copies sold that week. The novel follows a day in the life of six astronauts on the International Space Station.

Aside from the novel “being a literary masterpiece, awards really help sell books”, said Jude Brosnan, marketing manager at Stanfords bookshops. “Along with all the extra promotion they provide, we find customers really appreciate recommendations – even more so at this time of year.”

(12) OSCARS IN TIMES TO COME. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian’s “Week in Geek” pushes for more recognition for ‘mo-cap’ acting: “Aliens, Gollum and talking raccoons: when will the Oscars finally reward mo-cap acting?”

Picture the future: it’s the Oscars 2034, and the best actor prizes are no longer split into male and female categories. Instead, there is an award for best performer in a live action role, and another for best actor in a performance capture role. Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks can finally go head-to-head for their epic turns in Sophie’s Choice II and Even Bigger respectively, while Zoe Saldana and Andy Serkis are up for the latter for their startling performances in Avatar 6 and The Lord of the Rings: What Gollum Did Last Summer.

Some might suggest this is a tantalising vision of a world where the Academy has finally caught up with the realities of modern acting. Others would no doubt point out that the Oscars has been rewarding work where the actor’s real face is obscured by makeup, prosthetics, masks, or other transformations for decades, ever since John Hurt received a best actor nod for The Elephant Man in 1980. The difference is that while Robert Downey Jr somehow managed to snag a nomination for playing an Australian method actor donning blackface in the biting 2008 satirical comedy Tropic Thunder, the likes of Avatar’s Saldana and Lord of the Rings’ Serkis seem doomed to Oscars limbo, as they pour their hearts repeatedly into roles only to watch awards season roll by like an indifferent Na’vi riding a banshee past a crying Jake Sully.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Todd Mason.] Colbert and company love their animation… “’It’s A Worm-derful Life’ – A Late Show Animated Holiday Classic”.

Santa and his workshop are, like America, having a bumpy sleigh ride transitioning to the incoming Trump administration. When Elon Musk is put in charge of Christmas efficiency as part of his D.O.U.C.H.E. program, Santa must either pledge absolute loyalty, or face a gladiator battle of ancient Roman proportions. Will Father Christmas survive? Will Joe Biden stay awake through the entire special? Will RFK Jr.’s brainworms have enough brain meat left to eat this winter? Find out in “It’s A Worm-derful Life,” the new Late Show Holiday Animated Classic!

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Alec Nevala-Lee, John Coxon, Todd Mason, 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 Jeff Jones.]