(1) GLASGOW 2024 TOWN HALL ABOUT BUSINESS MEETING ON 6/15. Glasgow 2024 will host a virtual Town Hall Event about the WSFS Business Meeting on Saturday, June 15, at 7:00 p.m. BST (which is 11:00 a.m. Pacific). Sign up for a free ticket at this Eventbrite link.
Key members of the Business Meeting and The World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) team from Glasgow 2024 will discuss the Business Meeting that will occur at Glasgow 2024.
The event will be moderated, taking questions in advance. If you wish to submit a question for consideration, please do so below. There may not be enough time to cover all questions, but we will do our best to get to as many as we can. https://forms.gle/goRw9ZGspQ4YE3mA9
(2) SHE’S ON THE FRONT. Nnedi Okorafor is featured in the June 10 issue of Publishers Weekly.
(3) CREDIT FOR HELPING SAVE TREK. Bjo Trimble’s daughter Lora reports on Facebook she “again went to the Peabody awards last night to watch Star Trek be honored with the Peabody Institutional Award. What Bjo didn’t know was Alex Kurtzman paid tribute to her and My father John Trimble and all the work they did to save Star Trek and keep it going! It was a lovely evening.” More photos at the link.
Below you can see J. J. Abrams and Alex Kurtzman accepting Star Trek’s Peabody Award, including Kurtzman’s mention of Bjo.
(4) A STELLAR VILLAIN. “Paul Giamatti Joins ‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ as Main Villain” reports Variety. (Does Starfleet Academy have holiday holdovers?)
Set phasers to stunned. In another casting coup, the upcoming Paramount+ series “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy” has cast Emmy winner and multiple Oscar nominee Paul Giamatti in a recurring guest role as the first season’s main villain, who has a sinister connection to the past of one of the (yet to be cast) cadets.
Giamatti joins Holly Hunter, who Variety exclusively reported in May is boarding “Starfleet Academy” as the Academy’s captain and chancellor.
“Sometimes you’re lucky enough to discover that one of the greatest actors alive is also a huge ‘Star Trek’ fan, and meeting Paul was one of those miraculous moments for us,” said co-showrunners Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau in a statement. “The sheer delight with which he dove in on ‘Starfleet Academy’ is only surpassed by the gratitude we feel about him joining our incredible cast.”…
(5) HOW MANY VIEW WHO. Steven Moffat told Facebook readers today:
According to Russell T Davies, the ratings for Doctor Who are “far above expectations.”
While he admits that the figures “aren’t where we want them. We always want higher”, an independent BBC review has revealed that it is the most watched show for under 30s in the world.
The series has “reached and exceeded every target, so we are showing no signs of slowing down.”
(6) NO VROOM AT THE INN. New York Times critic Esther Zuckerman recommends “A Four-Hour-Long Hotel Review That Is Actually About So Much More” – Jenny Nicholson’s report on Disney’s Star Wars-themed Galactic Starcruiser hotel, now shut down, which she deems a spectacular failure.
…One of the most captivating pieces of entertainment I’ve seen so far this year is a four-hour-long YouTube video in which one woman describes her stay at a Disney World hotel. I’m as shocked by this as anyone.
To be clear: I was initially resistant when my partner encouraged me to watch Jenny Nicholson’s epic “The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel,” which breaks down in microscopic detail her visit to Disney’s Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser. During the experience, now closed, guests on vacation were encouraged to live out their George Lucas dreams by participating in a role-playing game while staying in a structure on the outskirts of the park near Orlando, Fla.
Nicholson’s monologue, which runs longer than “Lawrence of Arabia,” has been viewed more than seven million times since it was uploaded last month and has been the talk of social media, yet I was still unprepared for how absolutely riveting it was. While it highlights a litany of problems with the hotel itself, the video can also be viewed as a diagnosis of the entertainment industry’s current ills writ large. In her frustration, Nicholson becomes a valiant truth teller, clearly articulating how corporate greed betrays loyal fans to sell a cheaper and less emotionally enriching product. And she does this against a backdrop of stuffed animals and while wearing various costumes, including, at one point, a giant suit resembling a Porg, the puffin-like creature in “The Last Jedi.”…
…The great irony is that Nicholson herself produced what Disney couldn’t: a comprehensive, entrancing experience that held my attention.
(7) PLEASE DON’T FEED THE BOTS. Clarkesworld’s Neil Clarke has updated his blog post “Block the Bots that Feed ‘AI’ Models by Scraping Your Website” to warn about another offender: “If you haven’t updated your robots.txt to protect your work from scraping for ‘AI’ training recently, there’s probably a few bots you aren’t blocking. Added Applebot-Extended this morning.”
Applebot-Extended does not directly crawl webpages. It is used to determine whether or not pages crawled by the Applebot user agent will be used to train Apple’s models powering generative AI features across Apple products, including Apple Intelligence, Services, and Developer Tools….
(8) ANOTHER SCURRILOUS TACTIC. [Item by Jennifer Hawthorne.] I was listening to a favorite law podcast of mine, Law and Chaos, (“PA Dad Takes On Moms For Liberty”) and they were interviewing a Pennsylvania father who discovered books were quietly going missing from his kid’s local school library and decided to figure out why. Turns out it was a “shadowban” campaign against books that Moms for Liberty hates and included such lovely behavior as the school creating fake student library accounts, checking out the books to those accounts for an entire year, and then adding the books to the list of items to be removed from the library on the grounds that they weren’t being checked out (!). It’s a fascinating story about just how far Culture Warriors will go to ban books! The titles secretly removed included the entire “A Court of Thorns and Roses” (ACOTAR) fantasy series, which, while not my cup of tea where fantasy is concerned, are very popular with teenage girls who deserve to have the right to check out the books if they want.
The Bucks County Beacon wrote about the Dad who discovered what was going on: “Uncovering the Cover-up: How Republican Pennridge School Board Directors Secretly Banned Books”.
…Frustrated by the lack of answers, I submitted a Right-To-Know request seeking a report that listed the books checked out of the high school library by non-students. To my surprise, the report furnished by the district was discernibly inaccurate. It did not contain any of the targeted titles that had recently gone missing.
I hired an open records attorney, Joy Ramsingh, to negotiate with the district’s law firm, Eckert Seamans. I was simply requesting the production of a good faith public record. My goal was to learn which books were being censored.
I wanted to give the community a fair opportunity to read, defend, and debate the merit of literature before it was permanently removed from the library. My lawyer sought to reach a quick and amicable resolution, but the negotiations were unsuccessful. We appealed to the Court of Common Pleas.
After a year of litigation, my attorney was able to prove that the RTK report furnished by the district was illegally manipulated. Faced with overwhelming evidence, the district eventually conceded that an employee had deleted records from the report. It was a clear attempt to hide the removal of books from public scrutiny….
(9) MEDICAL UPDATE. Adam-Troy Castro, in a public Facebook post, has announced he is battling cancer again – but it should be survivable. Full details at the link.
…They remove this and give me another round of chemo and it is pretty survivable. Which is a lot different than this would be if the Colon Cancer had metastasized in any other organ. Anywhere else would have been a case of, “okay, we’re bailing water to keep the boat afloat until it sinks.”
On the scale of having Stage 4 any kind of Cancer, this kind of cancer is not as bad as most. Okay? It’s survivable.
Does this suck?
Yes.
Does it suck a lot less than it could suck if it has to suck?
Yes….
(10) WHAT THE SCROLL SHOULD HAVE ADDED ABOUT H. BRUCE FRANKLIN. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Pixel Scroll 5-23-24 item #9’s mini-obit of H. Bruce Franklin, while acknowledging him as “author of numerous books, essays, and exhibitions related to science fiction.” fails to cite what (to me at least) are the obvious suspects (titles) Future Perfect (an antho that I read decades ago; my memory burped the title up instantly when I saw the NYTimes obit a few weeks ago) and it looks like he also wrote a book about Heinlein, Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction, and, along with political/historical non-fiction, this one of interest no doubt to SJW credentials: The Most Important Fish in the Sea: Menhaden and America.
And thanks to Scott Edelman, here’s an unlocked copy of the New York Times obituary: “H. Bruce Franklin, Scholar Fired for His Antiwar Views, Is Dead at 90”.
(11) WORKING THROUGH LOSS. Sharon Lee writes about her experiences while grieving the death of her husband, Steve Miller, in “While one lives, both stand”. Here are the opening paragraphs.
Grief puts funny ideas into your head.
For instance, for awhile back in March, I was convinced that Steve had left me — walked out of our partnership and left no forwarding address. I couldn’t imagine why, and spent way too much time minutely reviewing our past, looking for my error.
Then I became convinced that we had gotten done at this house, and were moving on. As has been the case in previous moves, Steve had gone on ahead, leaving me to clean up these last few things before I joined him. This delusion is particularly pernicious because for those of us who speak Metaphor, it’s true. Only it’s not.
Anyhow, it’s been my goal for some while now to find or create for myself a place of gratitude for having been privileged to share so much time, love, and magic; for having had Steve in my life. While it’s certainly a very lonely, hard, and scary thing to no longer have him for back-up, for taking the lead, for producing surprising — and occasionally infuriating — insights — surely unrelenting misery was not the best lesson I could take from our life together.
So, I started looking for ways to achieve, at first, equilibrium. I didn’t expect to leap from misery to gratitude. I expected there to be a process, and backsliding, and all the things that attend the pursuit of any mighty goal.
Steve and I not only shared our mundane lives, but we shared an active and beguiling fantasy life. The worlds we built, the people who live there, the lessons, the philosophies — those also fed the richness of our partnership and informed our mundane lives…
(12) DOUG LEWIS (1955-2024). Thomas Kellogg, in a Centipede Press newsletter, paid tribute to bookseller and publisher Doug Lews, who died May 20.
Doug Lewis who with his wife Tomi, owned and operated the Little Bookshop of Horror/Roadkill Press in Arvada, Colorado and won a World Fantasy Award in the Nonprofessional category in the 1990s, died on May 20, 2024 of complications of diabetes.
Doug started their bookstore when he was unable to find a copy of Joe Lansdale’s The Night Runners to purchase locally. The Lewis’ store primarily featured horror, fantasy, science fiction and crime fiction. Soon they were sponsoring readings by Joe R. Lansdale, along with Edward Bryant, Harlan Ellison, Dan Simmons, Connie Willis, Nancy Collins, Norm Partridge, Steve Rasnic Tem, Melanie Tem and many others.
The Night Voices series of readings spawned a long friendship between Doug, Tomi and Ed Bryant. Ed was in many ways their mentor. Ed was the MC for the readings and his introductions were memorable by themselves. The readings spawned a publishing venture Roadkill Press. The initial idea was to publish chapbooks of the writers featured in readings. At that time chapbooks were a rarity. The concept was a quality item using high quality paper, with illustrations, signed by the writers that were incredibly affordable. The line of chapbooks was a big success. A collectible that was affordable was unusual in a time dominated by costly limited editions.
…It all came to a crashing end when Tomi became ill and was diagnosed with cancer. Although she fought bravely, she was gone in less than eight months. A farewell auto tour across the county to see all their friends was thwarted by the ravages of the chemotherapy. Doug was crushed by Tomi’s passing. Nothing mattered anymore. Tomi was the extrovert of the pair. With her gone, Doug fell into an abyss of despair that would last the rest of his life.
Adrift in that despair, his physical health deteriorated. He became a type 1 diabetic almost overnight. I remember at the time he told me that he wasn’t going to let diabetes run his life. Caring about nothing, he failed to take care of himself. The disease ultimately destroyed life.
My 30 year plus friendship with Doug spanned both his highs and his lows of his life. It as a tragedy that he couldn’t overcome the loss of Tomi. As with us all, he had his demons. Many friends reached out multiple times in the years after Tomi’s passing, only to be rebuffed or ignored. I like to think he avoid responding because it only deepened his sense of loss….
(13) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Compiled by Paul Weimer.]
Born June 11, 1971 — P. Djeli Clark, 53.
By Paul Weimer. By day, he is a historian of slavery in history and popular culture. By night. P. Djèlí Clark is a ferocious new talent in science fiction and fantasy. It took me a bit to come across his work, a friend of mine practically pushed his novella, The Haunting of Tram Car 015 into my hands, telling me that this was going to be my jam. And an alternate historical late 19th century Egypt with magic, becoming a world power? Djinn, magic, spirits and a strong sense of place in this alternate Cairo? It most certainly was, and is.
His A Master of Djinn continues in that same world as the novella, and builds and extends and grows that world in a very satisfactory manner. Like the first novella, it builds and works with themes of colonialism, race and gender relations, and magical worldbuilding in exploring the consequences of “The magic returns” and making Egypt a powerhouse. I would so love to physically visit this alternate Cairo and photograph its wonders, but for the moment, can only hope for more books set in this world.
I have not yet read the copy of Ring Shout on my Kindle although, given his day job, it is probably the work of his thus far that is closest to his day job and his academic research interests. I am confident that it will be excellent, but it remains buried in Mount TBR. For now.
However, as part of my Hugo Reading for 2024, I read and enjoyed “How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub”. It’s a clever little story that takes its worldbuilding as a matter of fact sort of approach to add Krakens, and merpeople, to a 19th century Britain not really equipped or ready to deal with the consequences of racism and colonialism and sexism.
As of the writing of this, I have started reading an ARC of his forthcoming work, The Dead Cat Tail Assassins. This story, unlike his others, is firmly set in a secondary world, and reminds me, as of this moment, of the secondary world fantasy of N K Jemisin, in particular the Dreamblood novels. The setting is an entrepot city, and indeed, the main character is one of the titular Dead Cat Tail Assassins. Shenanigans have already ensued. It’s a new and different mode for Clark, and I look forward to seeing how he continues with it.
(14) COMICS SECTION.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has a new routine
- Tom Gauld pitches a doubleheader.
(15) THE GAME’S AFOOT. Inverse’s Ryan Brittthinks “’Indiana Jones and the Great Circle’ Could be the Best Indy Adventure in 35 Years”.
…But for the most ideal Indy results, perhaps it’s still best if the entire adventure happens in the 1930s or 1940s, with Dr. Jones looking and sounding like he’s in between the events of the first three movies. And with the release of a new trailer for the upcoming Bethesda game Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, it seems the franchise is getting back to its roots in an unexpected medium.
Set in 1937, The Great Circle takes place right in between Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade and pairs Indy with a new character named Gina Lombardi. As revealed in the new trailer, the primary mystery in this story is centered on various spiritual sites of great importance — from the Vatican to the Great Pyramids — that form a kind of invisible circle. A madman named Voss is after this power, and it’s up to Gina and Indy to stop him while they race to unlock the secrets of the circle.
Indy is voiced by Troy Baker, but you can barely tell this isn’t Harrison Ford uttering the lines. The mystical and religious overtones of the story also feel very aligned with the tone of The Last Crusade. In other words, this feels authentically Indy in a way that aspects of Dial of Destiny and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull didn’t.
(15) BAIT FOR YOUR CLICK. “’Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim’ Debuts Epic First Footage” – Variety has the reaction. (But no video!)
Warner Bros. Animation, New Line Cinema and Sola Entertainment previewed 20 minutes of its upcoming anime feature “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim,” receiving thunderous applause during the packed presentation on Tuesday at the Annecy Animation Festival.
Director Kenji Kamiyana said he was inspired by not just J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” books, but by the films of Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, who were confirmed as exec producers of the movie during the session.
The new story is set nearly 200 years before Bilbo Baggins comes into contact with the ring of power, and centers on the House of Helm Hammerhand, the King of Rohan (voiced by Brian Cox), with a focus on his daughter, the strong willed Princess Héra (voiced by Gaia Wise). In the clip, a dispute erupts during a council meeting, leaving Wulf, a ruthless Dunlending lord, seeking vengeance. Miranda Otto reprises her “Lord of the Rings” role as Éowyn, this time as the movie’s narrator….
(16) BYE, BOYS. “’The Boys’ Is Ending With Season 5 on Amazon” says The Hollywood Reporter.
The Boys will have their final fight in the near future.
Eric Kripke, the showrunner of Prime Video‘s super(anti)hero series, said on social media Tuesday that the show’s fifth season — which the streamer ordered in May — will be its last.
“Season 4 premiere week is a good time to announce: Season 5 will be the final season!” Kripke wrote on X. “Always my plan, I just had to be cagey till I got the final OK from Vought. Thrilled to bring the story to a gory, epic, moist climax.”…
(17) NO SCRAPING UNLESS IT’S MY SCRAPING. Gizmodo tells us “Elon Musk Just Cancelled iPhones”.
Apple and OpenAI’s partnership is only a few hours old, and Elon Musk is already going to war over it. The owner of Tesla, X, SpaceX, and xAI said he would ban Apple devices at his companies if Apple integrated ChatGPT at the operating system level, which the companies are very much planning to do. Musk, a founder of OpenAI who is now suing the present owners, said ChatGPT integrated iPhones present an “unacceptable security violation.”
“If Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS level, then Apple devices will be banned at my companies,” said Musk in a tweet on Monday. “And visitors will have to check their Apple devices at the door, where they will be stored in a Faraday cage,” said Musk in a follow-up tweet…
(18) STEVE HEADROOM? “Brighton general election candidate aims to be UK’s first ‘AI MP’” reports the Guardian. Candidate Steve Endacott tells journalists how it’s supposed to work.
‘Politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians’, so the saying goes.
This may be why a businessman in the south of England is proposing a novel solution: putting himself forward as a candidate in the UK general election as the first “AI MP”.
AI Steve is a nominee on the list of candidates for the 4 July general election in Brighton Pavilion, last held by the Green party’s Caroline Lucas, who is stepping down.
The man behind AI Steve is Steve Endacott, a self-described entrepreneur who lives in Rochdale, but “maintains a house in Brighton”.
Endacott, who is the chair of an artificial intelligence company called Neural Voice but “made his fortune” in the travel sector, claims he will attend parliament to vote on policies as guided by AI Steve’s feedback from his constituents.
He claims the AI representative would answer constituents’ concerns and questions using a rendition of Endacott’s voice and an avatar.’…
(19) SMALL BANG THEORY. “Webb telescope reveals asteroid collision in neighboring star system” at Hub.
Astronomers have captured what appears to be a snapshot of a massive collision of giant asteroids in Beta Pictoris, a neighboring star system known for its early age and tumultuous planet-forming activity.
The observations spotlight the volatile processes that shape star systems like our own, offering a unique glimpse into the primordial stages of planetary formation.
“Beta Pictoris is at an age when planet formation in the terrestrial planet zone is still ongoing through giant asteroid collisions, so what we could be seeing here is basically how rocky planets and other bodies are forming in real time,” said Christine Chen, a Johns Hopkins University astronomer who led the research.
The insights will be presented today at the 244th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Madison, Wisconsin.
Chen’s team spotted significant changes in the energy signatures emitted by dust grains around Beta Pictoris by comparing new data from the James Webb Space Telescope with observations by the Spitzer Space Telescope from 2004 and 2005. With Webb’s detailed measurements, the team tracked the dust particles’ composition and size in the exact area previously analyzed by Spitzer.
Focusing on heat emitted by crystalline silicates—minerals commonly found around young stars as well as on Earth and other celestial bodies—the scientists found no traces of the particles previously seen in 2004–05. This suggests a cataclysmic collision occurred among asteroids and other objects about 20 years ago, pulverizing the bodies into fine dust particles smaller than pollen or powdered sugar, Chen said.
(20) VIDEO OF THE DAY. PRINT Magazine praises “Design Army’s Out of This World Campaign for the Hong Kong Ballet”.
The Hong Kong Ballet is celebrating its 45th anniversary with a groundbreaking campaign in collaboration with Design Army and Dean Alexander Productions. The production brings the ethereal beauty of ballet to the masses, transforming it from a symbol of privilege to a universal cultural experience. This inventive campaign, inspired by Degas’ ballerina portraits, the Renaissance, and artistic hip-hop, redefines ballet in a uniquely Hong Kong context. From the witty “Tutu Academy” to sci-fi extraterrestrial scenes, the film captures the essence of dance as a universal language, connecting everyone, even aliens, to its unearthly magic. With vibrant settings ranging from university halls to iconic plazas, the campaign showcases the troupe’s artistry against the backdrop of Hong Kong’s cultural landmarks, making ballet accessible, relatable, and joyfully unconventional….
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]
