Tag Archives: Pemmi-con 2023

Pixel Scroll 9/12/23 For Us, the Scrolling

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(1) MICHAEL CHABON SUES META OVER AI COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT. At The Hollywood Reporter:“Meta, OpenAI Class Action Lawsuit: Novel Authors Claim Infringement”.

Michael Chabon and other decorated writers of books and screenplays sued Meta on Tuesday in California federal court in a lawsuit accusing the company of copyright infringement for harvesting mass quantities of books across the web, which were then used to produce infringing works that allegedly violate their copyrights. OpenAI was sued on Sept. 8 in an identical class action alleging the firms “benefit commercially and profit handsomely from their unauthorized and illegal” collection of the authors’ books. They seek a court order that would require the companies to destroy AI systems that were trained on copyright-protected works.

…As evidence that AI systems were fed authors’ books, the suit points to ChatGPT generating summaries and in-depth analyses of the themes in the novels when prompted. It says that’s “only possible if the underlying GPT model was trained using” their works.

“If ChatGPT is prompted to generate a writing in the style of a certain author, GPT would generate content based on patterns and connections it learned from analysis of that author’s work within its training dataset,” states the complaint, which largely borrows from the suit filed by [Paul] Tremblay.

And because the large language models can’t operate without the information extracted from the copyright-protected material, the answers that ChatGPT produces are “themselves infringing derivative works,” the lawsuit against Meta says….

(2) CHENGDU PROGRAM PARTICIPANTS. File 770 asked Chengdu Worldcon committee member Joe Yao for a list of the people who have been added as Worldcon guests since the recent offer of help went out. No names were provided, however, Yao made this statement:

We kept inviting guests from both China and abroad, and now we have about 500 guests confirmed to come. They will attend some key events including the opening ceremony, Hugo ceremony and the closing ceremony, and they will also participate in programs as either guests or speakers. My team is working closely with the overseas team on programs and we have drafted a mastersheet of the programs. It will be confirmed and released soon.

(3) BARRIERS TO TRAVEL. Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki commented on Facebook about the challenges of getting a visa.

Nigerian passport & visa issues. Recently found out the Italian visa app has more requirements than US. Then I thought maybe China’s. Someone just told me that’s harder than the US’s. Germany might not give you visa even on their chancellor’s request. Is there any one that’s easy (possible) for a Nigerian?

When I was in the US, anytime Africans saw I was on a b1-b2 visa they used to be shocked out of their skulls. Like you find someone with the complete infinity gauntlet and stones. So for all these to be harder, Lol.

It’s really something to be a Nigerian that isn’t chained down and utterly grounded. Meanwhile what it took to get my US visa & the price I had to and still pay for it gifted me PTSD and damage I might never be able to afford treatment for. But hey, na me wan dream. Lol

(4) NASFIC MINUTES AVAILABLE. [Item by Kevin Standlee.] The minutes of the NASFiC WSFS Business Meeting at Pemmi-Con are now published on the WSFS Rules page here. (Scroll down to “MINUTES of the 2023 WSFS Business Meeting of the 15th NASFiC”.)

(5) ABRAHAM AND FRANCK Q&A. Award-winning sci-fi writers Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck talk with Meghna Chakrabarti about the world they created in The Expanse and what they’re working on next. “’The Expanse’ authors on ‘the importance of complicating people’” at WBUR.

(6) INTERNET ARCHIVE APPEALS TO HIGHER COURT. “Internet Archive Files Appeal in Copyright Infringement Case” – Publishers Weekly has details.

As expected, the Internet Archive this week submitted its appeal in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the closely watched copyright case involving the scanning and digital lending of library books.

In a brief notice filed with the court, IA lawyers are seeking review by the Second Circuit court of appeals in New York of the “August 11, 2023 Judgment and Permanent Injunction; the March 24, 2023 Opinion and Order Granting Plaintiffs’ Motion for Summary Judgment and Denying Defendant’s Motion for Summary Judgment; and from any and all orders, rulings, findings, and/or conclusions adverse to Defendant Internet Archive.”

The notice of appeal comes right at the 30-day deadline—a month to the day after judge John G. Koeltl approved and entered a negotiated consent judgment in the case which declared the IA’s scanning and lending program to be copyright infringement, as well as a permanent injunction that, among its provisions, bars the IA from lending unauthorized scans of the plaintiffs’ in-copyright, commercially available books that are available in digital editions.

“As we stated when the decision was handed down in March, we believe the lower court made errors in facts and law, so we are fighting on in the face of great challenges,” reads a statement announcing the appeal on the Internet Archive website. “We know this won’t be easy, but it’s a necessary fight if we want library collections to survive in the digital age.”…

(7) GARETH EDWARDS VIRTUAL CONVERSATION. MIT Technology Review will hold an online event “Humanity and AI: A conversation with the director of ‘The Creator’” at LinkedIn on Thursday, September 14, 2023, at 2:30 p.m. Eastern. Appears that LinkedIn registration is required.

As many today try to imagine the future of our world with artificial intelligence, MIT Technology Review’s senior editor of AI, Melissa Heikkilä, speaks with Gareth Edwards, director of the upcoming sci-fi epic “The Creator,” about the current state of AI and the pitfalls and possibilities ahead as this technology marches toward sentience. The film, releasing September 29th and starring John David Washington and Gemma Chan, imagines a futuristic world where humans and AI are at war and fundamentally explores humanity’s relationship with AI, what it means to be human, and what it means to be alive.

(8) THE HEINLEIN SOCIETY. These are the new Officers for The Heinlein Society:

The Board of the Society voted [September 11] for its new leadership & Executive Committee effective immediately:

  • President & Chairman: Ken Walters
  • Vice President: Walt Boyes
  • Treasurer: Geo Rule
  • Secretary: Betsey Wilcox

Congratulations to all of them! 

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 12, 1897 — Walter B. Gibson. Writer and professional magician who’s best known for his work creating and being the first and main writer of the pulp character The Shadow with The Living Shadow published by Street & Smith Publications in 1933 being the first one. Using the pen-name Maxwell Grant, he wrote 285 of the 325 Shadow stories published by Street & Smith in The Shadow magazine of the Thirties and Forties. He also wrote a Batman prose story which appeared in Detective Comics #500 and was drawn by Thomas Yeates. (Died 1985.)
  • Born September 12, 1921 — Stanisław Lem. He’s best known for Solaris, which has been made into a film three times. The latest film made off a work of his is the 2018 His Master’s Voice (Glos Pana In Polish). The usual suspects have generous collections of his translated into English works at quite reasonable prices. (Died 2006.)
  • Born September 12, 1940 — John Clute, 83. Critic, one of the founders of Interzone (which I avidly read) and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (with Peter Nicholls) and of the Encyclopedia of Fantasy (with John Grant) as well as writing the Illustrated Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction. All of these publications won Hugo Awards for Best Non-Fiction. And I’d be remiss not to single out for praise The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror which is simply a superb work.
  • Born September 12, 1942 — Charles L. Grant. A writer who said he was best at what he called “dark fantasy” and “quiet horror”. Nightmare Seasons, a collection of novellas, won a World Fantasy Award, while the “A Crowd of Shadows” short garnered a Nebula as did “A Glow of Candles, a Unicorn’s Eye” novella. “Temperature Days on Hawthorne Street” story would become the Tales from the Darkside episode “The Milkman Cometh”. Both iBooks and Kindle have decent but not outstanding selections of his works including a few works of Oxrun Station, his core horror series. (Died 2006.)
  • Born September 12, 1952 — Kathryn Anne Ptacek, 71. Widow of Charles L. Grant. She has won two Stoker Awards. If you’re into horror. Her Gila! novel is a classic of that genre, and No Birds Sings is an excellent collection of her short stories. Both are available from the usual suspects. She is the editor and publisher of the writers-market magazine The Gila Queen’s Guide to Markets. 
  • Born September 12, 1952 — Neil Peart. Drummer and primary lyricist for the prog-rock, power-trio band Rush. Neil incorporated science fiction and fantasy elements into many of Rush’s songs.  An early example is “By-Tor and the Snow Dog” from the Album “Fly By Night”.  The entire first side of the 2112 album (back when albums had sides) was the 2112 suite telling the dystopian story of a man living in a society where individualism and creativity are outlawed.  Neil is a genre author having co-written The Clockwork Angels series with Kevin J. Anderson.  (Died of glioblastoma, 2020.) (Dann Todd) 
  • Born September 12, 1965 — Robert T. Jeschonek, 58. Writer for my purposes of both genre and mysteries. He’s written short fiction set in the Trek universe. He’s also written fiction set in the Battletech, Captain Midnight, Deathlands, Doctor Who, Starbarian Saga and Tannhauser universes. We really need a concordance to all these media universes. Really we do. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Candorville is where an author claims to focus on the positive. But does he?

(11) WESTERCON 75 ANNOUNCEMENT. Arlene Busby, chair of the cancelled Westercon 75, announced today that all membership refunds have been issued. Also, the transfers have been completed for all those members who requested that their membership monies be transfer to Loscon 49.

Similarly, refunds have been issued to all Dealers who requested them. And transfers have been completed for Dealers who requested their fees be transferred to Loscon 49.

Busby adds, “We thank everyone for their support and patience in getting all these transactions processed. If you have any questions please contact me at [email protected].”

(12) TREK THEME PERFORMED IN CHINA. From the Beijing Star Trek Day event mentioned in the September 9 Scroll comes this a video of the Michael Giacchino Star Trek theme performed on traditional Chinese instruments – see it on Weibo

(13) PULITZER PRIZE ELIGIBILITY UPDATED. “Pulitzer Board Expands Eligibility for Authors” reports Publishers Lunch.

Beginning with the 2025 awards, which opens for submissions in spring 2024, the Pulitzer Prize board has changed the eligibility requirements for the books, drama and music awards to include “US citizens, permanent residents of the United States,” and authors for whom “the United States has been their longtime primary home.” Previously, only US citizens were eligible for the awards, with the exception of authors of history books, who could be of any nationality if their book was about US history. “For the sake of consistency,” the prize board said, history books must be written by US authors according to the new guidelines.

Books still must be “originally published in English in the United States.”

In “Pulitzer Prizes expand eligibility to non-U.S. citizens”, the Los Angeles Times amplifies how the change was brought about.

…Following an August petition on the literary sites Literary Hub and Undocupoets to reconsider the U.S. citizenship requirements for the arts prizes, the Pulitzer board addressed the issue….

The petition, which was signed by many prominent authors, was created in part because of the passionate case that author Javier Zamora made against the Pulitzer’s U.S. citizen requirements in a De Los opinion piece titled “It’s time for the Pulitzer Prize for literature to accept noncitizens.”…

(14) GREG JEIN COLLECTION TO AUCTION. Model and miniature-maker Greg Jein, who died last year, had an extraordinary collection of iconic sf props and costumes, which are now going under the hammer: “’Star Wars’ Red Leader X-Wing Model Heads A Cargo Bay’s Worth Of Props At Auction” at LAist.

…The intricately made starfighter brought millions of people along for the ride as a group of plucky Rebel pilots assaulted the Death Star. Now the Star Wars scale model is being sold at auction, with bids starting at $400,000.

The “Red Leader” (Red One) X-wing Starfighter from 1977’s Star Wars: A New Hope is “the pinnacle of Star Wars artifacts to ever reach the market,” says Heritage Auctions, which is handling the sale as part of a trove of science fiction props, miniatures and memorabilia.

The X-wing tops the auction list, but it’s far, far from alone: It was found in the expansive collection of Greg Jein, an expert craftsman who was as skilled at bringing futuristic stories to life as he was devoted to preserving the models and props used to bring strange new worlds to TV and film.

…More than 550 items from Jein’s collection are now heading to auction, from Nichelle Nichols’ iconic knee-high boots and red tunic as Lt. Uhura to Leonard Nimoy’s pointy ears as Spock. A hairpiece for William Shatner’s Captain Kirk and Lt. Sulu’s golden tunic are also up for sale….

There’s more information in the Heritage Auctions press release: “Mother Lode From the Mothership: Model-Making Legend Greg Jein’s Collection Beams Up to Heritage”.

…Jein also preserved Spock’s ka’athyra, the Vulcan lute strummed in a handful of Original Series episodes, including “Amok Time ” and “The Conscience of the King “; the ray generator called into duty during several Original Series episodes; and the Universal Translator that Kirk used to talk to the Gorn in “Arena. “ There’s something for fans of nearly every episode of The Original Series, from the ahn-woon of “Amok Time “ to the agonizer used in “Mirror, Mirror” to The Great Teacher of All the Ancient Knowledge intended to restore “Spock’s Brain.” The Trek offerings in The Greg Jein Auction are nearly as vast as the final frontier itself….

(15) IN THE SPIRIT OF PHILIP K. DICK. A discussion with 81st Worldcon Chair He Xi and multidisciplinary sci-fi artist Yin Guang, “HUGO X: 2”, a Chengdu Worldcon Talkshow, closes with the jolly speculation that carbon-based life will be the scaffolding for silicon-based life – artificial intelligence – and when that building is built, “you’ll be torn down.”

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Kevin Standlee, Ersatz Culture, Daniel Dern, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]

Garth Spencer: What I Did On My Summer Vacation

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[Reprinted by permission of the author.]

By Garth Spencer:

THE CANADIAN UNITY FAN FUND. The Canadian Unity Fan Fund was conceived to represent distant fan communities in Canada to other fan communities in Canada. In its forty-odd years of operation, CUFF has usually brought fan delegates from one side of the country to the other, wherever Canvention was held. (The Canadian SF and Fantasy Awards were hosted by one or another convention in a given year, until the national awards ceremony recently began appearing online, on a regular annual schedule.) Now, a delegate will receive funds to travel to an SF convention this year elsewhere in Canada.

I became the 2023 Canadian Unity Fan Fund delegate, which meant I was to attend Pemmi-Con, the 15th North American Science Fiction Convention, held in Winnipeg July 20th through 23rd, 2023.

Garth Spencer

“WHO IS THIS SHMOE?” I’m just this guy who got to be known in fandom for a while. I entered fandom about 1980 in a small club in Victoria. Since then I have been involved in producing a number of clubzines and personalzines; running fanzine rooms and producing program books for SF conventions; producing a Canadian fan newszine for a few years, and incidentally establishing for everyone what the Canadian SF and Fantasy Award was. These days, I take part in four APAs (Amateur Publishing Associations) – eAPA, Apaplexy, N’APA, and Stipple-Apa – and I am the official editor of eAPA. I also plan to revise my personal website as a fannish resource site, and to put together a volume of Canadian fanhistory.

PROLOGUE. In 2023: I volunteered to stand as a candidate for CUFF[1] (again[2]) in 2023, partly because I hadn’t heard of any other candidates, and partly out of a sense that various and diverse fandoms really deserve more mutual awareness. I thought I could at least try to see something of other fandoms, and tell some stories about fandom as I know it.

Fran Skene of Vancouver was the CUFF candidate in 2019, and then the COVID-19 pandemic  happened, so travel was restricted and she served as CUFF administrator for the next four years.

As it worked out, my bid gained 3 western supporters and 3 eastern supporters: Rose Wilson (BC), R. Graeme Cameron (BC), Kent Pollard (Saskatchewan), Cathy Palmer-Lister (Quebec), Lloyd Penney (Ontario), and Diane Walton (formerly of Alberta, now in Nova Scotia).

In order to raise funds for next year and beyond, I prepared a list, offering interesting and amusing fan publications for sale. These ranged from hardcopy editions of classic fanzines to hardcopy (and some digital) editions of current fanthologies. I was (and still am) prepared to accept payments in person, by cash, money order, or Paypal at: 6960 Doman Street, Vancouver, BC  V5S 3H7, or by Paypal at [email protected].

I included Confabulation, a collection of fannish fanwriting, “representing the most amusing fanwriting and faanfiction I could find, characteristic of fannish fandom … for benefit sales to CUFF, at $10 each,” I wrote. (I also offered chapbooks under my Stop Press imprint based on my extended fanarticles about worldbuilding, how to construct a language, conspiracy theories, crank theories, or micronations, at $5.00 to $7.50.)

Also, at Pemmi-Con, I was to moderate the popular Turkey Readings – readings of science fiction or fantasy so bad, no reputable publisher would issue them today – acted out by volunteers from the audience! Listeners then got to bid on whether to continue, or cease! We’ve got some real stinkers (not all written by John Norman or Lionel Fanthorpe)!

Somehow we also evolved the idea of a fanzine auction, which I think was suggested by Erin Underwood (a Pemmi-Con committee member?) in a Zoom meeting.

PREPARATIONS. I tend to build up anxiety about non-routine events and appearing on time, so I tend to overpack and overprepare. Still I foolishly did not bring the thumb drive I usually keep on my key ring.

Among other things, I made myself a handy-dandy pocket program, based on the advance schedule information received in Pemmi-Con Progress Report 2. This turned out to be relatively useful until Saturday, when I actually had events to attend, and program changes to deal with. (Strangely, the committee settled the program schedule within the week before the convention, and still there were program changes.)

Tuesday July 18, 2023:

As it worked out, getting to the Vancouver International Airport and checking in with Westjet and boarding all happened without incident. Checking in at the Delta (now aka the Marriott Bonvoy) was also trouble-free.

It was interesting to check out the look of downtown Winnipeg, in comparison with cities such as Victoria and Vancouver. Older architecture leaned towards drystone and brick construction, contrasting with the glass-and-steel buildings from more recent development. Which makes sense, given that Winnipeg is not given to earthquakes, as we are on the coast.

Finding the committee (Operations room) was a bit of a treasure hunt; signage in the hotel developed only gradually over the first few days, apart from the scrolling program schedule on the hotel video displays (which was very useful).

St. Mary’s Cathedral, directly across St. Mary’s Street from the Delta Hotel and the Elephant and Castle Pub.

Wednesday July 19, 2023:

Due to storm warnings on this day I stayed close to the hotel at first, until the evening’s Break the Ice” dinner at a nearby Old Spaghetti Factory. Eventually I tracked down Registration on the second floor. My own registration was delayed, partly due to some breakdown in communications. Amusingly, they had no record of my membership, and had to write me into the records on the spot – #1000, as it happened, which told me something about the attendance. (I was informed later that about a third of the registered members had not attended, mainly due to COVID-19 concerns.)

Strangely, the committee supplied no program books at the convention – they were conceived as souvenir books, to be mailed to members after the event. Instead, there were daily program sheets in table format, supplemented by a daily convention newsletter. Maps of the hotel’s internal layout were slow to appear.

There was a lot of meeting and greeting, of course, as congoers filtered in. There were R. Graeme Cameron, now from Nanaimo; Cliff Samuels and Eileen Capes from Calgary; John Bartley from Tualatin (near Portland); Cooki Lumsden; Stuart Cooper; Den Valdron, the Winnipeg writer; and Robert J. Sawyer, as well as Linda Ross-Mansfield, LeAmber Kensley, and Jannie Shea on the committee. My roommate John Bartley showed up this afternoon. Murray Moore talked to me about the art museum, which was heavy on Inuit art at the time.

I tagged along with Cliff Samuels and Eileen Capes to the “Break the Ice” dinner at The Forks Market. Unfortunately John Bartley, who was still recovering from flying coach, discovered he just couldn’t walk that far and begged off.

Much like Granville Island in Vancouver, this is a former railroad yard redeveloped with a wide variety of shops, produce stores, restaurants and cultural centres, including a youth theatre. The “Break the Ice” dinner for early Pemmi-Con attendees drew perhaps sixty people to The Old Spaghetti Factory. We made the acquaintance of Mark Sneed, a new writer who was attending his first SF convention, and had an interesting conversation covering  the background of the convention, the benefits of joining SFWA, and the several challenges we have encountered with varieties of English. (Mark Sneed has been an English teacher.)

Thursday, July 20, 2023:

This day I received my program participant materials, took pictures of the internal hotel maps, and rechecked the program.

Foolishly I missed the opening ceremonies on Thursday. I gather my name was called, at least to stand up and wave.

Much of my concern was focused on the CUFF auction and the Turkey Readings, neither of which I had conducted before. My anxiety was unfounded, partly because I could follow the good example of Sandra Bond’s auctioneering, and partly because there were other readers at the Turkey Readings.

Of interest is that Pemmi-Con panels generally ran for 75 minutes, with a 15-minute break between scheduled items. This seemed sensible and practical.

It developed that the consuite was in a room on the fourth floor – directly opposite the room I shared with John Bartley.

For whatever reasons, the dealers’ room, artshow, and fan tables were relegated to a room in the RBC Convention Centre, which was over ten minutes’ walk from the hotel via an elevated passage over a street. Thus I discovered there was a fan table for the Canadian SF and Fantasy Awards, with a display of its chronology and former awards; a fanzine table (empty); a display about me with blowups of my picture and bio (unexpected!); and a fan table and display for the Rotsler Award winners (I noticed the 1999 award went to Grant Canfield, and in 2008 to Taral Wayne). There were also displays promoting nuclear energy, and providing a history of nuclear engineering in Canada.

Given the function space available in the Delta hotel, this was neither necessary, nor advisable given the number of mobility-challenged attendees. Strange.

Room parties started on Thursday night, mostly on the fifth floor, representing Worldcons/bids from Seattle, Glasgow, and Minneapolis in ’73 (2073, now). Or, should I say, they were attempted at first on Thursday night. The hotel staff were apparently not briefed on room parties, and Shawn Marier from the Seattle Worldcon committee had to negotiate with them to raise their room occupancy limit from four to ten people at a time. Granted, the room parties were in rooms really too small for parties. This might be why the renewed Minneapolis in ‘73 bid sort of took over the consuite.

And there was much rejoicing.

Friday, July 21, 2023:

There was a so-this-is-your-first-convention panel, which was good, and it was scheduled for 1:00 p.m., which is as usual and is not so good. (I have suggested, on more than one occasion, that since most people arrive at conventions later than 1:00 p.m. Friday, maybe a later panel, a Web page, or a widely-distributed free pamphlet would serve the purpose better?)

Saturday, July 22, 2023:

In conversation, Murray Moore mentioned that the Canadian SF and Fantasy Association was looking for a secretary, and I offered to take up the role. Murray subsequently informed the CSFFA regulars that I would serve, and he emailed me the information about the CSFFA Zoom meeting for Tuesday after Pemmi-Con.

There were three panels that required my participation – the “Rebuilding Fannish Community” panel at 4:00 p.m. (originally “The Greying of Fandom”), the CUFF Auction at 5:30 (combined with the TAFF Auction), and the Turkey Readings at 10:00 p.m. (rescheduled from 2:30).

At 4:00 p.m., “Rebuilding Fannish Community” drew at least twenty people, and turned into a productive discussion. To my satisfaction, we got beyond the usual cliches frequently observed about ageing fannish fans, and younger fans in several specialized fandoms. (Until Friday, the members arriving at Pemmi-Con were generally over 50 years of age.) We considered the diminishing numbers of clubs, the marginalization of fanzine fandom, the efflorescence of online communities, the effect of costs and current incomes on conventions, and the divergence of fandoms.

In the end, the sense of the meeting seemed to be that it simply isn’t the job of elder fans to recreate the fan activities they knew. If we have any role, among contemporary fans, it comes down to getting out there, listening; asking a few questions; and, perhaps, offering a few parallels to similar events and issues from the past. If they are relevant. (Given the differences in today’s costs and incomes from the past, the expectations and interests of fans, and the very different expectations and demands of hotels, many stories are not so relevant now.)

At 5:30 p.m., the combined Fan Funds Auction drew four or five people, compared to the auctioneers (Sandra Bond and I). I followed Sandra’s lead and found the auction went fairly quickly. The audience were individually generous, and both fan funds made some modest money.

At 10:00 pm, the Turkey Readings drew eight or so people, and were amusing enough. Murray Moore, R. Graeme Cameron, and I took it in turn to read some bad 1970s sci-fi and fantasy, including R. Lionel Fanthorpe novels. Again, we made just a little money for CUFF. Tasia Papadatos from Ottawa commented that the selection of novels (other than Fanthorpe’s) weren’t really bad enough for the purpose. Perhaps in future years we have to seek out the real stinkers.

And so to parties. Saturday’s party scene was rather quieter than Friday’s; I was a bit disappointed.

Sunday, July 23, 2023:

Sunday was a fairly quiet day. I missed programming until four p.m. and the closing ceremonies, trying to start this trip report and, instead, ending up in an enjoyable consuite conversation, about Winnipeg and other convention stories.

The closing ceremonies, led by Tanya Huff, gave kudos to the Ghost of Honour, Lorna Toolis; to the convention committee, especially Jannie Shea (much enthusiastic clapping); and to the hotel staff, whose service was excellent.

And on Monday I had an uneventful flight home. (The cat was really glad to see me back.)

[1] The background to fandom, and the changes to fandom, should be summarized in a forthcoming fanhistory. I have found it to be a bigger job than I expected.
[2] At the end of this report is a link to CUFF trip reports online, including my own report on attending the 1999 Canvention in Fredericton, N.B. For more information about CUFF, follow this link.

Pixel Scroll 8/2/23 One Scroll To Rule Them All

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(1) VICFA TAKING PROPOSALS. The Virtual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (November 5-11) is now accepting proposal submissions. 

Organized by new Virtual Conference Coordinator and Afropantheologist Oghenechovwe Ekpeki and featuring genre-defining Guests of Honor Martha Wells, Steven Barnes, and Annalee Newitz, the week-long Virtual Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts includes the investigative insights of Guest Scholars Alec Nevala-Lee, Wole Talabi, and Jennifer Rhee. 

Whether you are interested in the academic track or the creative track, they welcome your contribution.

The deadline for proposal submissions is September 15th, and acceptance notifications will be sent out on September 30th. For more detailed information, please see the attached CFP or visit the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts website. 

The Virtual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (November 5th-11th) is currently accepting proposal submissions! This year, we are excited to convene about the theme: AAAA! – AI, Algorithms, Automata and Art. The International Association for Fantastic in the Arts will be hosting several phenomenal Guests of Honor, including Steven Barnes, Annalee Newitz, and Martha Wells. Additionally, our Guest Scholars are Alec Nevala-Lee, Jennifer Rhee, and Wole Talabi!

To submit your proposals, please see the links below. Please note that there are two links, one for academic track and one for creative track. 

(2) SEND A CARD. Bjo Trimble is turning 90 on August 15! Her daughter Lora reminds anyone who wants to send a card that her address is:

Bjo Trimble
California Veterans Home
700 East Naples Court
Chula Vista CA 91911

(3) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present C.S.E. Cooney and Steve Berman on Wednesday, August 9. Starts 7:00 p.m. EDT at the KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003. (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs)

C.S.E. COONEY

C. S. E. Cooney is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of Bone Swans: Stories. Other books include The Twice-Drowned Saint, Saint Death’s Daughter, Dark Breakers, and Desdemona and the Deep. Forthcoming from Outland Entertainment is Negocios Infernales, a TTRPG she co-designed with her husband Carlos Hernandez.

STEVE BERMAN

Steve Berman is the Lambda Literary Award-winning editor of over forty anthologies including His Seed and Burly Tales. He is also author of the Andre Norton Award finalist, Vintage, and four short story collections, the most recent being Fit for Consumption. Most of his work is queer speculative fiction and horror. He resides in Western Massachusetts.

(4) WARNER BROS. NOPOLOGY FOR BARBENHEIMER. Entertainment Weekly headlines its story “Warner Bros. apologizes for Barbenheimer posts amid backlash in Japan” but Google Translate says the release is worded, “We apologize to those who were offended by this series of inconsiderate reactions.” 

Warner Bros. is apologizing after its Japanese branch criticized the company’s decision to publicly support the Barbenheimer craze on social media. 

“Warner Brothers regrets its recent insensitive social media engagement,” the company said in a statement to EW. “The studio offers a sincere apology.”

Its remarks come one day after the Barbie Japan Twitter account posted a statement denouncing the online movement that links Greta Gerwig‘s fun and fashionable Barbie with Christopher Nolan‘s Oppenheimer — which chronicles the creation of the atomic bomb that killed at least 225,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — amid growing backlash in Japan that the trend trivializes the mass destruction caused by atomic bombs. The hashtag #NoBarbenheimer has recently been trending in Japan as a result….

[Previously] the Barbie U.S. Twitter account positively interacted with several Barbenheimer-inspired posts, including a fan-created poster that featured Barbie star Margot Robbie sitting on Oppenheimer actor Cillian Murphy‘s shoulder in front of a plume of orange smoke. The Barbie account commented on the fan-made image, writing, “It’s going to be a summer to remember.” 

(5) THOUGHTS ABOUT PEMMI-CON. Ralston Stahler’s Pemmi-Con report is a public Facebook post here. Following discussion of many areas of the con, noting the problems and the successes, Stahler concludes:

…All in all it wasn’t the best con, and it wasn’t the worst. I think out of all the NASFiC’s it is the second lowest attended. Maybe covid or being a pretty distant location had something to do with it.

 (6) MAKE THOSE RINGS SING. If File 770 readers happen to be in Berkshire, the Guardian has a recommendation: “The Lord of the Rings: A Musical Tale review – the greatest show on Middle-earth”.

…First seen in the UK in 2007 at London’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane – a 1996-seat theatre – the show is revived at the 220-capacity Watermill. This means that Simon Kenny’s design and Anjali Mehra’s choreography are a theatrical equivalent of stunts designed to find how many people can fit in a Mini.

The creative team ought to be listed in a Guinness book of theatrical records. During the long sections inside the tiny theatre, they cram in battles, orc attacks, treks across land, over mountains or through caves and lavish production numbers involving 20 actors or musicians (several performers also play instruments)….

(7) CRISTINA JURADO DEAL. Apex Book Company has acquired first North America English rights to the novella Chlorophilia by Spanish author Cristina Jurado. The deal was brokered by agent Hannah Bowman of Liza Dawson Associates.

Kirmen is different from everyone else in the Cloister. Due to the doctor’s endless experiments on Kirmen, his skin, his eyes, even his organs are changing. Kirmen wonders if he even belongs with the other inhabitants of the dome that protects the last remnants of humanity from the forever storm raging against the glass. Kirmen’s dreams of love, of acceptance, slip away with every treatment. What will happen when the doctor’s transformations are complete? What will Kirmen be then?

Cristina Jurado is a bilingual author, editor and translator of speculative fiction. In 2019 she became the first female writer to win the Best Novel Ignotus Award (Spain’s top sff Award) for Bionautas. Since 2015 she runs the Spanish multi-awarded magazine SuperSonic. In 2020 she was recognized with the ESFS’s Best SF Promoter Award and started to work as a contributor of the bilingual quarterly Constelación magazine.

(8) CON OR BUST. Applications are being taken for Con or Bust’s Goldman Fund initiative to assist Palestinian creators and fans of speculative fiction in attending the 2024 World Science Fiction Convention.

We’ll be assisting self-identified citizens of Palestine and members of the Palestinian diaspora to pay for travel and membership expenses to five Worldcons beginning in 2024. If you qualify for the Goldman Fund and would like assistance attending 2024’s Worldcon, apply here. The preferred application window runs from 31 July through 5 November, 2023. Applications received after the window closes will be considered for any remaining funds. 

(9) WHERE THE THREE RIVERS MEET. Pulpfest’s Mike Chomko appeared on local CBS affiliate’s TALK Pittsburgh show to provide “An introduction to the 50th anniversary of PulpFest”. The con starts tomorrow. Video at the link.

Mike Chomko, the marketing and programming director of PulpFest, joined the show to talk about the festival’s dedication to a special form of fiction magazines.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

1995 — Our Beginning is taken from Jane Yolen’s The Wild Hunt. It was released as a hardcover edition twenty-eight years ago by Harcourt Brace with copious illustrations and cover art by Francisco Mora, a pupil of Diego Rivera, who was deep into the Mexican political scene making posters for trade unions and government literacy campaigns.

It’s not — if one takes into account the illustrations — a novel really. I’ve got my personally signed copy on hand (yes, she is on the chocolate gifting list. She prefers no more than seventy percent chocolate.) and I’d say it’d be a novella if judged by length alone.

It is that rare wonderful work where the text and the illustrations (see the cover illustration below of The Wild Hunt as a turning clock) are truly intrinsic to each other. I cannot imagine it as just text, though I can imagine it as a spoken work as Yolen’s language here is brilliant.

So let’s have just the introduction to it as our Beginning…

A wild winter storm rages around a large house that is isolated from the rest of the world. Traditionally, the Wild Hunt appeared around the time of Epiphany— January 6 in the Church Calendar—when winter was at its most severe in Northern Europe. No country is specified, but this is, after all, a fantasy world. The house is both a comfortable dwelling with a large library in keeping with Jerold’s quiet personality, and a parallel setting that matches Gerund’s much more active one. A hundred yards from the house is a granite outcrop where the Hunt gathers: “This rock might have been a thousand miles away. Or a thousand years.” 

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 2, 1917 — Wah Chang. Co-founder in the late 1950s, with Gene Warren and Tim Baar, of the special effects company Project Unlimited Inc. They provided the effects for numerous George Pal productions, including *The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm*, *Jack the Giant Killer*, and *The Time Machine* (for which they won an Academy Award, although Chang’s name was erroneously omitted). Wang and his fellow Projects coworkers did essentially all of the effects for the original *Outer Limits* television series. Perhaps most famously, Chang created some of the best-known effects for the original *Star Trek*, including the communicator, the tricorder, the Romulan Bird of Prey, the Tribbles, and numerous aliens, although he did not receive screen credit for any of this work. A talented artist, later in life he gained renown as a wildlife sculptor. (Died 2003.) [PhilRM]
  • Born August 2, 1920 — Theodore Marcuse. He was Korob in “Catspaw”, a second season Trek episode written by Robert Bloch that aired just before Halloween aptly enough. He had appearances in The Twilight Zone (“The Trade-Ins” and “To Serve Man”), Time Tunnel, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Wild Wild West and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. in the episodes “The Re-collectors Affair”, “The Minus-X Affair”, and “The Pieces of Fate Affair”. (Died 1967.)
  • Born August 2, 1932 — Peter O’Toole. I’m tempted to say his first genre role was playing King Henry in A Lion in Winter as it is alternate history. It really is despite some of you saying it isn’t. Actually before that he’s got an uncredited role in Casino Royale as a Scottish piper. Really he does. His first genre role without dispute is as Zaltar in Supergirl followed by being Dr. Harry Wolverine in Creator. He’s Peter Plunkett in the superb High Spirits, he’s in FairyTale: A True Story as a very credible Arthur Conan Doyle, and Stardust as King of Stormhold. Not surprisingly, he played in a version of Midsummer Night’s Dream as Lysander. (Died 2013.)
  • Born August 2, 1948 — Robert Holdstock. Another one who died far too young. His Ryhope Wood series is simply amazing with Lavondyss being my favorite volume. And let’s not overlook his Merlin Codex series which is one of the more original takes on that character I’ve read. The Ragthorn, co-written with Garry Kilworth, is interesting as well. (Died 2009.)
  • Born August 2, 1954 — Ken MacLeod, 69. Sometimes I don’t realize until I do a Birthday note just how much I’ve read of a certain author. And so it was of this author. I’ve read the entire Fall Revolution series, not quite all of the Engines of Light Trilogy, just the first two of the Corporation Wars but I’ve got it in my to-be-finished queue, and every one of his one-off novels save Descent. His Restoration Game is quite chilling.  I should go find his Giant Lizards from Another Star collection as I’ve not read his short fiction. Damn it’s not available from the usual suspects! Hugo Award wise, he didn’t win any but had some nominations. The Sky Road was nominated at the Millennium Philcon, Cosmonaut Keep at ConJosé and Learning the World at L.A. Con IV. 
  • Born August 2, 1955 — Caleb Carr, 68. Ok, I’ll admit that this is another author that ISFDB lists as genre that I don’t think of as being as genre. ISFDB list all four of his novels as being genre including The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness which are not even genre adjacent by my reading. So is there something in those novels that I missed? 
  • Born August 2, 1970 — Kevin Smith, 53. Well-loved comics writer who’s worked for DC, Marvel and other venues. He was involved with both Daredevil and Green Arrow. He directed the pilot for the CW supernatural comedy series Reaper, produced and appeared in a reality television series, Comic Book Men, and appeared as a character in the animated Superman: Doomsday. He’s also the showrunner for Masters of the Universe: Revelation animated series and the sequel Masters of the Universe: Revolution which will stream early next year. 
  • Born August 2, 1976 — Emma Newman, 47. Author of quite a few SF novels and a collection of short fiction. Her Planetfall series was nominated for the Best Series Hugo Award 2020. Also of interest to us is that she co-created along with her husband Peter, of the Hugo Award winning podcast Tea and Jeopardy which centers around her hosting another creator for a nice cup of tea and cake, while her scheming butler Latimer (played by Peter) attempts to send them to their deaths at the end of the episode. 

(12) COMICS SECTION.

(13) WILL HER LOVE OF ANIME AND MANGA PROVE CONTAGIOUS? Ada Palmer launches a new column in Strange Horizons with “A Mitfreude of Anime and Manga’s Relationship with Anglophone Science Fiction (Or, This Essay WILL NOT Try to Get You into Anime and Manga!)”

… Once upon a time an atomic-powered robot boy dodged censorship to talk about racism, and fifty years later Japan issued the first legal birth certificate granting citizenship to an AI. Once upon a time in a small Japanese town flourished Earth’s glitteriest, rose-petal-y-est, most gender-bending form of theater, and ninety years later a comics shop owner in Cambridge, Massachusetts, exclaimed to me, “Girls are coming into the store now! There were none before!” And once upon a time kids gathered in the streets of Tokyo to hear a storyteller with hand-drawn illustration cards narrate a battle between a crime boss in a robot suit and a thousand-year-old superhero from Atlantis, and fifty-five years later a Japanese-built surgical robot took life-saving samples of my intestines.

Enjoying anime and manga has a high learning curve: you need to invest time learning their visual vocabulary, and many of the best works depend on knowing earlier tropes and patterns. But anyone can enjoy the history of anime and manga, how these media have shaped science, medicine, genre fiction, gender, and how—as twentieth century English was rising to dominance through music and TV around the globe—anime and manga managed to become the biggest body of modern media that gets translated into English instead of the other way around….

(14) THIS WOULD MAKE ME START WRITING LETTERS AGAIN. “Mr. Spock On A Stamp: Adam Schiff Urges U.S. Postal Service To Honor Leonard Nimoy” reports Deadline.

…In a statement, Schiff called Nimoy, who died in 2015, “an extraordinary activist, actor and friend.”

“Nimoy’s legacy includes his lengthy acting career — including his beloved and iconic role as ‘Spock’ in the Star Trek universe — and his many generous contributions to the arts and sciences, and his beautiful family.”

On Monday, Schiff sent a letter to the Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee, asking them to recommend Nimoy to the Postmaster General. The committee selects individuals who have made “extraordinary and enduring contributions to American society, history, culture or environment.” Living people are not currently eligible, and those who are deceased are considered at least three years after his or hear death. Stamps also are planned two- to three- years in advance….

(15) OVERVIEW OF JOHN WILLIAMS’ COMPOSITIONS FOR CINEMA. Forbes talks to Mike Matessino, one of the foremost experts in the music of John Williams, who has produced numerous Williams soundtrack albums over the years, in “Re-Listening To John Williams, The Maestro Of The Movies”.

What are your thoughts on “How to Steal a Million” — often cited as a highlight of Williams’ ‘60s work?

Mike: If one looks at the earliest feature films John Williams scored, you see some fairly prominent director names that today are mostly known only among cinephiles — Frank Tashlin, Andrew McLaglen — and then Frank Sinatra, for whom John scored the only movie the actor/singer directed, “None But the Brave.”

But then comes “How to Steal a Million” and three-time Oscar winner William Wyler. So this is the first project for a truly A-list director, and it remains, I think, the most sophisticated of the comedies that John Williams scored during that important period where he was based at 20th Century-Fox Studios.

I once asked Ian Fraser, who worked with Williams on “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” a couple years later, if had any sense on that project of just how great a composer Williams would become, and he said, “I knew it when I went to the sessions for ‘How to Steal a Million,’” as Fraser was at 20th at that time working on ‘Doctor Dolittle.’ The “Million” score is a mixture of comedic elements and some terrific half-tongue-in-cheek suspense writing that showed just how versatile John Williams could be. It’s also significant in that it is the first time he was given the opportunity to completely re-record music from the film for his own soundtrack album, so it really was a significant career milestone.

(16) HYVILMA. Gideon Marcus’ new release Hyvilma is celebrated at Queer Sci Fi. Includes an excerpt from the book.

QSFer Gideon Marcus has a new queer YA sci-fi book out (bisexual): Hyvilma.

A damaged ship, a dying shipmate–can she save both?

Under attack! The flight back to Hyvilma should have been the easy part for the crew of the Majera–until a deadly ambush by pirates sends them reeling through hyperspace. Now getting to the planet in time is the only way Captain Kitra Yilmaz can save her dying friend.

But landing at Hyvilma may be impossible: war has broken out on the Frontier.
With illustrations by Hugo Finalist Lorelei Esther.

(17) AI EFFECTIVE IN BREAST CANCER SCREENING. [Item by Steven French.] Good to have some positive news about AI! The Guardian reports “AI use in breast cancer screening as good as two radiologists, study finds”.

…But the latest study, which followed women from Sweden with an average age of 54, compared AI-supported screening directly with standard care.

Half of the scans were assessed by two radiologists, while the other half were assessed by AI-supported screening followed by interpretation by one or two radiologists.

In total, 244 women (28%) recalled from AI-supported screening were found to have cancer compared with 203 women (25%) recalled from standard screening. This resulted in 41 more cancers being detected with the support of AI, of which 19 were invasive and 22 were in situ cancers.

The use of AI did not generate more false positives, where a scan is incorrectly diagnosed as abnormal. The false-positive rate was 1.5% in both groups.

(18) WHAT WERE PEOPLE STREAMING IN JULY? JustWatch offers their monthly Top 10 streaming lists for July 2023.

(19) STORY FEEDBACK IN REALTIME. Apex Magazine presents Snap Judgment Episode 7, their “rapid-fire, live-streaming critique series.” 

Every quarter, industry professionals Jason Sizemore, Lesley Conner, and a special guest offer live feedback on the first page (up to 250 words) of genre short stories or novels. These first pages are read aloud by our talented host and narrator, Aly Grauer.

We are pleased to announce that our special guest editor for this event is author and editor Nick Mamatas! 

HOW IT WORKS. Our host reads the title, genre, and text of the submission aloud without identifying the author. If at any point our panelists feel they would stop reading and reject the piece from their slush pile, they raise their hand. If all three hands are raised, our narrator stops reading.

Each panelist then gives their feedback on the opening: what works for them, what doesn’t, and what could be done to improve it. Don’t expect our panelists to be a mean group, but do expect them to be honest when it comes to assessing the work.

NICK MAMATAS. Special guest editor for this event is author and editor Nick Mamatas! Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including I Am Providence and The Second Shooter. His short fiction has appeared or will soon appear in Best American Mystery Stories, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Tor.com, McSweeney’s, and many other venues. Much of it was recently collected in The People’s Republic of Everything. Nick is also an anthologist; his latest book is Wonder and Glory Forever: Awe-Inspiring Lovecraftian Fiction.

(20) VIDEO OF THE DAY (OR POSSIBLY TWO MONTHS AGO). Did we run this before? Well, it’s always news to someone. Karen Gillan shares “A week in the life of playing Nebula in Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 3”.

Come spend a week with me filming Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3

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

Pixel Scroll 7/25/23 There’s No Business Like Scroll Business

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(1) CHENGDU’S OFFER TO HUGO FINALISTS. Joe Yao, a WSFS Division department head for Chengdu, provides more information about the assistance being offered to 2023 Hugo finalists to attend the Worldcon:

As it is the first time a Worldcon held in China, along with the first time for the Hugo Awards presented in China, we really like to have more finalists coming in person, and they can also participate in program and other activities if they want. But as we all know, it is a long and expensive trip for most of the finalists and they might not afford such a trip by themselves, thus we tried our best to help them, even though we have limited budget as well.

Hope there will be more finalists coming in October.

It appears the offer of help is being offered to 2023 Hugo finalists generally (or to one representative of finalists involving teams of multiple editors/creators). A few more people who have confirmed to File 770 that they received the offer include Gideon Marcus, Alison Scott, and Olav Rokne and Amanda Wakaruk (the latter got theirs today; they didn’t have it yet when they responded yesterday.)

(2) WRITER BEWARE. “Contract, Payment Delays at the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction” at Writer Beware.

F&SF takes First North American Serial Rights and pays on acceptance (which in practice means on receipt of a contract). Acceptance emails indicate that writers will receive a contract and a check within two to four weeks. However, Writer Beware has recently received multiple reports from writers whose work has been officially accepted but, months later, are still waiting for contracts and checks.

…Writers also report a variety of other delays: waiting for notification of official acceptance well beyond the stated acquisition timeline of 6 weeks to 6 months; receiving copy edits and proofs for accepted stories without having received a contract or payment; receiving contract and payment only weeks before the publication date, after months of waiting; completing requested revisions and then hearing nothing more. Many of the writers who contacted me say that they’ve sent repeated emails asking about the delays, and haven’t received a response….

Writer Beware’s Victoria Strauss contacted F&SF publisher Gordon Van Gelder and heard what he is doing to resolve the issues. See his responses at the link.

(3) SDCC AMID THE STRIKES. Rob Kutner says the lack of big movie presentations had its advantages in “Comic-Con In the Time of Strikes” at Book and Film Globe.

…As I’ve written here, Comic-Con offers many uses for the working (on non-struck things) professional. I came this year in part to network for gigs, and in part to sign my new kids’ graphic novel at my publisher’s table. Neither of those directly tied to the big panel/preview scene, so for me it was mostly business as usual. Nor, at first glance, could I necessarily spot a difference, other than some occasionally empty patches in the crowds, which would normally be wall-to-wall nerd.

However, after two days, some patterns began to emerge, and friends and colleagues that I spoke to confirmed this. As Craig Miller, Lucasfilm’s Director of Fan Relations for the first two Star Wars movies, described it, the effect on strike-year Comic-Con was “both profound and minimal. Hall H, the big, 6,000-person room”—where they often announce the latest Marvel or Star War for the first time — “is empty. There are no lines of people waiting hours to get into that room. But they’re still here at the convention.”

As a result, Miller spent the Con at a table, selling his memoir Star Wars Memories, and sold every last copy. Granted, any SDCC might have brought him scads of customers who liked both Star Wars and books, but it’s also a highly competitive environment, with literally hundreds of vendors and publishers vying for those same dollars.

This time, however, the diversion of crowds, who might otherwise be in Lineworld, onto the main convention floor created a flood of foot traffic for vendors that lifted even the smallest boats. Rantz Hoseley, VP of Editorial for Z2 Comics, confirms, “sales and signings at our booth were the biggest we’ve had at any convention, with a number of deluxe editions selling out by Thursday evening [the first of Comic-Con’s four days].”…

(4) BACK TO 1955. In “Buckle Your (DeLorean) Seatbelt: ‘Back to the Future’ Lands on Broadway”, the New York Times talks to franchise co-creator Bob Gale.

…And now on Broadway: “Back to the Future: The Musical,” which opens Aug. 3 at the Winter Garden Theater, follows a story that will be familiar to fans of the film. Using a time machine devised by Doc Brown, Marty McFly travels to 1955, meets his parents Lorraine and George as teenagers and must help them fall in love after he disrupts the events that led to their romantic coupling.

On its yearslong path to Broadway, “Back to the Future” has faced some challenges that are common to musical adaptations and others unique to this property.

While the show’s creators sought actors to play the roles indelibly associated with the stars of the film and decided which of the movie’s famous scenes merited musical numbers, they were also trying to figure out how the stage could accommodate the fundamental elements of “Back to the Future” — like, say, a plutonium-powered sports car that can traverse the space-time continuum.

Now this “Back to the Future” arrives on Broadway with some steep expectations: After a tryout in Manchester, England, its production at the Adelphi Theater in London’s West End won the 2022 Olivier Award for best new musical. The show also carries a heavy price tag — it is being capitalized for $23.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Throughout its development process, the people behind it — including several veterans of the “Back to the Future” series — tried to remain true to the spirit of the films and keep intact a story that has held up for nearly 40 years.

Bob Gale, who wrote the original movie with Robert Zemeckis, said of the stage adaptation: “We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. We just want to make the wheel smooth.”

But, he added, “It cannot be a slavish adaptation of the movie. Because if that’s what people want to see, they should stay home and watch the movie. Let’s use the theater for what theater can do.”…

(5) LEARNEDLEAGUE. [Item by David Goldfarb.] LearnedLeague is currently in its “off-season” when it features player-created content, including 12-question specialized quizzes that last for one day. Monday there was one about the Stargate movie and TV franchise. As I write this it’s still live, but by the time tonight’s Pixel Scroll goes out, it will be graded and so available for the public to view. Here’s a link: Stargate 1DS

(6) CORDWAINER SMITH REDISCOVERIES. James Davis Nicoll encourages readers to “Take a Minute to Celebrate the Forgotten Greats of Science Fiction” at Tor.com.

Time is nobody’s friend. Authors in particular can fall afoul of time—all it takes is a few years out of the limelight. Publishers will let their books fall out of print; readers will forget about them. Replace “years” with “decades” and authors can become very obscure indeed.

The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award was founded in 2001 to draw attention to unjustly forgotten SF authors…. Since it’s been five years (and there have been four new recipients) since we last discussed the award in 2018, I’ve updated the discussion to include the newest honorees—including the most recent winner, announced this past weekend at Readercon.

I wish the award were more widely known, that it had, perhaps, its own anthology. If it did, it might look a bit like this. Who are the winners? Why should you care about them? I am so happy I pretended you asked….

(7) FANAC.ORG NEWS. The fanhistory website Fanac.org has been adding scanned fanzines at an colossal rate. Among their accomplishments, they’ve finished scanning a run of Imagination, by LASFS members during the Fighting Forties…

We’ve added more than 1,000 publications since the last newsflash in March, and about 2,000 since the last full newsletter in December 2022. We’ve added some great zines by Arnie Katz, and many APAzines from Jeanne Gomoll. Here are some highlights.

 We completed our run of LASFS’s first important fanzine, Imagination including the Rejected issue. Imagination is filled with contributions from notables in the field, fan and pro, among them Yerke and Bok, Kuttner and Bloch, Bradbury and Lowndes, Hornig and Wollheim, and of course 4sj….

(8) WILL WIKI MATE WITH CHATGPT? Jon Gartner calls it h “Wikipedia’s Moment of Truth”. “Can the online encyclopedia help teach A.I. chatbots to get their facts right — without destroying itself in the process?”

…In late June, I began to experiment with a plug-in the Wikimedia Foundation had built for ChatGPT. At the time, this software tool was being tested by several dozen Wikipedia editors and foundation staff members, but it became available in mid-July on the OpenAI website for subscribers who want augmented answers to their ChatGPT queries. The effect is similar to the “retrieval” process that Jesse Dodge surmises might be required to produce accurate answers. GPT-4’s knowledge base is currently limited to data it ingested by the end of its training period, in September 2021. A Wikipedia plug-in helps the bot access information about events up to the present day. At least in theory, the tool — lines of code that direct a search for Wikipedia articles that answer a chatbot query — gives users an improved, combinatory experience: the fluency and linguistic capabilities of an A.I. chatbot, merged with the factuality and currency of Wikipedia.

One afternoon, Chris Albon, who’s in charge of machine learning at the Wikimedia Foundation, took me through a quick training session. Albon asked ChatGPT about the Titan submersible, operated by the company OceanGate, whose whereabouts during an attempt to visit the Titanic’s wreckage were still unknown. “Normally you get some response that’s like, ‘My information cutoff is from 2021,’” Albon told me. But in this case ChatGPT, recognizing that it couldn’t answer Albon’s question — What happened with OceanGate’s submersible? — directed the plug-in to search Wikipedia (and only Wikipedia) for text relating to the question. After the plug-in found the relevant Wikipedia articles, it sent them to the bot, which in turn read and summarized them, then spit out its answer. As the responses came back, hindered by only a slight delay, it was clear that using the plug-in always forced ChatGPT to append a note, with links to Wikipedia entries, saying that its information was derived from Wikipedia, which was “made by volunteers.” And this: “As a large language model, I may not have summarized Wikipedia accurately.”

But the summary about the submersible struck me as readable, well supported and current — a big improvement from a ChatGPT response that either mangled the facts or lacked real-time access to the internet. Albon told me, “It’s a way for us to sort of experiment with the idea of ‘What does it look like for Wikipedia to exist outside of the realm of the website,’ so you could actually engage in Wikipedia without actually being on Wikipedia.com.” Going forward, he said, his sense was that the plug-in would continue to be available, as it is now, to users who want to activate it but that “eventually, there’s a certain set of plug-ins that are just always on.”…

(9) MITCH THORNHILL (IRA) OBITUARY. Mitch Thornhill (Ira) died July 25 after many months of serious medical problems. He lived in Mississippi. However, he first became known as a fan in the Seventies while living in New Orleans and Minneapolis. He sometimes went by the name Ira M. Thornhill.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born July 25, 1907 — Cyril Luckham. He played the White Guardian first in the Fourth Doctor story, “The Ribos Opperation”, part one, and then twice more in the two-part Fifth Doctor story, “Enlightenment”.  He was also Dr. Moe in the Fifties pulp film Stranger from Venus, and also showed up in The Omega Factor, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and Tales of The Unexpected. (Died 1989.)
  • Born July 25, 1910 — Kendell Foster Crossen. He was the creator and writer of the Green Lama stories about a Buddhist crime fighter whose powers were activated upon the recitation of the Tibetan chant om mani padme hum. He also wrote Manning Draco series, an intergalactic insurance investigator, four of which are can be found in Once Upon a Star: A Novel of the Future. Kindle has a really deep catalog of his genre work. (Died 1981.)
  • Born July 25, 1922 — Evelyn E. Smith. She has the delightful bio being of a writer of sf and mysteries, as well as a compiler of crossword puzzles. During the 1950s, she published both short stories and novelettes in Galaxy Science Fiction, Fantastic Universe and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Her SF novels include The Perfect Planet and The Copy Shop. A look at iBooks and Kindle shows a twelve story Wildside Press collection but none of her novels. (Died 2000.)
  • Born July 25, 1937 — Todd Armstrong. He’s best known for playing Jason in Jason and the Argonauts. A film of course made excellent by special effects from Ray Harryhausen. His only other genre appearance was on The Greatest American Hero as Ted McSherry In “A Chicken in Every Plot”. (Died 1992.)
  • Born July 25, 1948 — Brian Stableford, 75. I am reasonably sure that I’ve read and enjoyed all of the Hooded Swan series a long time ago which I see has been since been collected as Swan Songs: The Complete Hooded Swan Collection. And I’ve certainly read a fair amount of his short fiction down the years. 
  • Born July 25, 1971 — Chloë Annett, 52. She played Holly Turner in the Crime Traveller series and Kristine Kochanski in the Red Dwarf series. She was in the “Klingons vs. Vulcans” episode of the Space Cadets, a sort of game show. 
  • Born July 25, 1973 — Mur Lafferty, 50. Podcaster and writer. Co-editor of the Escape Pod podcast with Valerie Valdes. She is also the host and creator of the podcast I Should Be Writing which won a Parsec Award for Best Writing Podcast. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Escape Artists short fiction magazine Mothership Zeta. And then there’s the Ditch Diggers podcast she started with Matt Wallace which is supposed to show the brutal, honest side of writing. For that, it won the Hugo Award for Best Fancast at Worldcon 76, having been a finalist the year before.  Fiction wise, I loved both The Shambling Guide to New York City and A Ghost Train to New Orleans with I think the second being a better novel. She has two nominations at Chicon 8, first for Best Semi Prozine as part of the Escape Pod team, second for Best Editor, Short Form with S.B. Divya. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) NO THERE THERE. GameRant warns that this “steelbook” collectible doesn’t include a copy of the series: “WandaVision Steelbook Release Is Missing An Actual Blu-Ray Copy”.

WandaVision is the first Disney Plus series to have a physical release, but the upcoming steelbook doesn’t actually include any discs or a download code.

The steelbook set includes a case, full slip, folder, envelope, character cards, and stickers, but the lack of actual physical media may turn fans off.

The decision to release a steelbook without including the series itself seems odd and could be seen as a disappointment, especially considering Disney’s recent removal of other series from its streaming platform…

(13) NASFIC COVERAGE. “Winnipeg hosts first Canadian version of international science fiction convention” at CTV News Winnipeg

…Unlike other “comic-cons,” Pemmi-Con makes a point of bringing in scientists as well as science fiction content creators. Canadian paleontologist Phillip John Currie is speaking about Jurassic Park-inspired fiction and dinosaur art and will be participating on a panel about recent scientific discoveries.

Other guests include biologist and author Julie E. Czerneda, Captain Canuck comic creator George Freeman, and Indigenous author Waubgeshig Rice.

“One of the things we’re trying to do this year is…emphasize Indigenous contributions to Canadian science fiction and fantasy,” Smith said.

The convention takes a different name every year relating to its location. Pemmi-Con is an homage to pemmican, a popular Metis dish in Manitoba. Smith said NASFiC attracts a worldwide audience….

(14) TECHNOLOGY NEVER DIES. Especially when somebody is devoted to keeping it around like the people who host the Mimeograph Revival website.

Mimeograph Revival is dedicated to preserving the printing technologies of an earlier era – with a particular emphasis on the stencil duplicator, the hectograph, and (maybe, as this is still a work in progress) the spirit duplicator. These are the techniques, machines, and processes that have fallen by the wayside, been relegated to “obsolete” status, and nearly forgotten.

Once ubiquitous, these machines ushered in an era in which it became possible for individuals and organizations, including clubs, fraternal organizations, churches, and schools, to quickly, easily, and cheaply reproduce printed matter. 

There’s not too much fannish content, however, the “Personal Narratives” section has a wonderful anecdote by Jeff Schalles.

Jeff Schalles, fanzine creator, printer, and founder of the facebook Mimeograph Users Group left the following story here at M. R. one day. A little historical documentation personal-narrative-style:

A while ago I was contacted by a researcher working for National Geographic Magazine. She was looking for material for an article on mimeo and ditto printing of the Greenwich Village Beat poets and writers scene and poetry chapbook creaters of the 1950’s.

I responded by suggesting she contact the late Lee Hoffman concerning the gatherings in her Greenwich Village apartment, where musicians like Dave Van Ronk and the poets, writers, musicians, and other local Beats, would jam all night. Lee had a reel-to-reel tape recorder and taped many of the parties.

Lee also had a mimeograph and produced Science Fiction fanzines, including the long-running “Science Fiction Five Yearly” published every five years until Lee died sometime in the early 21st Century. The print runs were short and there are few copies of SF Five Yearly around. Geri Sullivan and I edited and mimeo’d two of the later issues for Lee. Harlan Ellison had a long-running serial in every issue and never missed a deadline until Lee’s death finally ended the run of Science Fiction Five Yearly.

The Geographic researcher was only interested in “The Mimeograph Revolution” and its beginnings. Her response to my suggestion that she contact Lee, who was by then living in Florida, was that there was… absolutely, positively, no connection between the Beats and Science Fiction Fandom. She was very rude to me, and obviously had no interest and little knowledge of SF Fandom. I just sighed and stopped corresponding with her. I blame Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of National Geographic for hiring an idiot like her.

I’m of the opinion that SF fan mimeographers like Ted White, who had a small basement mimeograph print shop in the Village, had something to do with teaching the Beats how to use the technology. The Geographic researcher insisted that was impossible, and that SF Fandom was just a bunch of teenage amateurs amounting to nothing.

I’ve asked around to see if any of Lee’s party tapes survived, but no one ever got back to me, so I suspect they were tossed in a dumpster.

(15) NETFLIX PASSWORD CRACKDOWN: HOW HAS PERFORMANCE CHANGED? With the recent news about Netflix changes and its growth, JustWatch has put together a graphic about the global market shares of streaming services and how Netflix performed over the last 2 years.

In brief, global streaming giant Netflix found a way to restore its former glory after losing -3% market share in 2022. Launching a “Basic with Ads” brought back some interest, however the key move was introducing password sharing crackdown, as they gained nearly 6 million subscribers in the last three months.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ahsoka, a Star Wars Original series, begins streaming August 23 on Disney+.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Joyce Scrivner, Moshe Feder, Rich Lynch, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 7/23/23 Pixels Scrolled For Somebody’s Files, But Not Mine

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(1) MAGAZINE WITHDRAWS COVER AFTER LEARNING IT WAS PART AI-GENERATED. [Item by Edmund Schluessel.] Factor Four Magazine has published the following statement and apology about Issue 18:

Yesterday it was brought to my attention that the cover of Issue 18 may have been AI generated artwork. I launched an immediate investigation and discovered that it was, at least partially, AI generated. I have removed the artwork from our website and replaced it with a filler image.

Factor Four Magazine values human artists and deeply regrets that this happened. While I unknowingly bought and displayed AI art as a cover, I still take full responsibility for this.

I have used a website to purchase artwork for magazine covers, that despite saying they don’t accept AI work, it is clear that not only do they accept it, they will not remove AI art if it is discovered. As a result I will no longer be doing business with them.

It will take some time, but I will be looking over all art work purchased through this company to ensure, as best as I can, that it is human artwork.  Furthermore, I will be looking at stock images I have used both here and on my own website to ensure no AI is used.

Unfortunately there is no fool proof way to detect AI artwork, so we appreciate the person coming forward so that we could correct this. I apologize on behalf of Factor Four Magazine – Richard

(2) WHO COULD ASK FOR ANYTHING MORE? “First ‘Star Trek’ Musical Announced, Trailer Revealed” and The Hollywood Reporter

Paramount+ confirmed rumors of a musical Star Trek episode with the release of a surprise trailer (below) for an upcoming episode of Strange New Worlds season two. The episode is titled “Subspace Rhapsody,” and it’s billed as the first-ever musical-themed episode in the franchise’s 57-year history (there have previously been musical scenes). “Subspace Rhapsody” will feature 10 original songs, plus a musical version of the series’ main title, with music and lyrics by Kay Hanley (Letters to Cleo) and Tom Polce (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend)….

(3) PEMMI-CON. Mooseletter #4 lists the winners of the Masquerade Awards and Art Show Awards. There are some photos of the top masquerade entries (or so I assume – there are no captions.)

(4) PORTRAIT PHOTOS OF SFF CREATORS. Hugo-nominated photographer Richard Man has added his submission to the Hugo Voter Packet to his “Worldbuilders of Science Fiction and Fantasy” gallery. The direct link is here.

July 23, 2023 update: nominated by members of previous year and current year’s worldcons and voted on by the members of the current year’s worldcon, the Hugo Awards are science fiction’s most prestigious award. I am very honored to be a finalist in the “Best Fan Artist” category in the 2023 Hugo Awards. My work is eligible for the award mainly due to exhibitions on-site and online of this project. Grateful thanks to everyone who has participated in or supported my project!

(5) TAKE AN AX TO IT. Katharine Kit Kerr shared with Facebook readers that rising paper costs will have this effect:

Depressing news from ComicCon via my agent. Publishers here are now worrying about the cost of paper. Apparently the cost has gone so high that they don’t want any books longer than 110K. Does the story need more? Tough. Are there elements that don’t “advance the plot” but are important in other ways. Tough. Cut’em out.

I don’t know if this applies to literary fiction, too. But definitely to genre.

(6) WHY THIS SPSFC JUDGE WON’T BE BACK. Alex Hormann, a judge in the recent Self-Published Science Fiction Competition, bids “A Farewell to the SPSFC” on At Boundary’s Edge.

The State of Self-Published Science Fiction

Look around book blogs, and you’ll see hundreds of self-published books being reviewed. The SPFBO fills up within hours every year. For the inaugural SPSFC, we had a little over the desired 300 submissions. For SPSFC2, we hit a little over half that before flatlining. Either the books weren’t there, or the authors did not want to submit, perhaps being unaware of the contest. For that reason, books eliminated in the first year’s slushpile were made eligible for a second chance this year. This helped those books that ran into tough competition and poor book-judge matches the year before, but also meant that the books eliminated early on in the first year were now back to trouble us again. To me, this exposed one clear fact. The overwhelming majority of slushpile books were terrible….

Who Is The SPSFC For?

…One thing I have noticed in both years of the competition is that the conversation surrounding the SPSFC almost entirely consists of bloggers an authors. I remain unconvinced that the competition has had an impact on readers. Initially, yes, there was a great deal of excitement. But from my own blog statistics, I can easily tell that excitement has tailed off. Few of this year’s posts reached even half of the views of the previous year’s equivalent. As a blogger, I want to get views. The SPSFC brings those, but the interaction comes from authors and bloggers, rarely from disinterested readers….

Why I’m Bowing Out

…Then there are the structural issues within the contest itself. The first year, it seemed as though Hugh Howey and Duncan Swan would be running the show. To his credit, Swan has done marvellous work, though real life has kept him distracted. As to Howey, very little can be said. Clearly, he too is busy, not least with the monstrous success of the Silo TV series. And yet his actions still have an impact on the contest he founded. Because of Howey, we became embroiled in the heated AI art debate, which is a mess on every side. Not having any clear hierarchy of command within the contest makes it all but impossible to achieve anything. This year we went through most of the finals without any coherent gathering of team scores….

A former judge myself, I left a comment there agreeing with much that Hormann said.

I left after the first year for reasons comparable to yours. A large portion of the entries are not very good. Hugh Howey does practically nothing despite having founded the contest, which is an important reason no one knows it is going on.

Another problem is the incessant tinkering with the structure of the contest. The Discord is like a Worldcon business meeting permanently in session. That on top of an already stressful reviewing workload was ridiculous.

(7) THEY’RE PINK. TrekMovie contributes its own genius Barbie mashup here.

And an artist needs to catch up with another Twitter user’s wish list: “I need a Han Solo in barbienite.”

(8) MUSIC OF THE SPHERES. ClassicalMusic.com picks “The best recordings of Holst’s The Planets”. (Remember that Valentine Michael Smith, in Stranger in a Strange Land, resorts to the symphony’s Mars movement when called on for the equivalent of a national anthem.)

Although The Planets, composed 1914-16, opened new avenues in Holst’s treatment of tonality and structure, it did not represent an entirely new chapter in his creativity. Rather, it crystallised much of his thinking, both in terms of musical potential and in his understanding of the human condition.

Looking at The Planets through the context of what he had previously composed, and what came after, helps us to understand not only one of the most loved works in the modern orchestral repertoire, but also the extraordinary creative mind behind it. Join us now on this journey, as we visit each planet in turn, and recommend their finest recordings…

(9) OVERDUE. Here’s a quest – find physical books that once belonged to poet John Milton: “‘To be still searching what we know not, by what we know’: Recovering the Lost Library of John Milton” from the Center for Material Texts at Cambridge University.

… I was given free rein to think about how I might approach the tracking down of the rest of Milton’s library in the short timeframe of eight weeks; a daunting task, given the wealth of scholarship on this topic by scholars such as William Poole, let alone the number of books that must have passed through Milton’s library during his lifetime.[1] Only nine volumes have been identified as belonging to Milton; many others have since been disputed or dismissed as spurious.[2] While it is not the place of this blogpost to rehearse the numerous scholarly conjectures on the immediate journey of Milton’s library following his death, it is suffice to observe that, as Scott-Warren and Bourne’s discovery has shown, there is no easy way to predict where Milton’s books may have ended up.[3]…

(10) MEMORY LANE.

2017 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

Anne Charnock is not a writer that I’ve ever heard of but her novels sound fascinating.

Five years ago, she’d win the Arthur C. Clarke Award in science fiction, for her Dreams Before the Start of Time novel which is where our Beginning comes from. 

She has an extremely short genre career consisting of two novels before this one, A Calculated Life which was self-published and Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind, and one after, Bridge 108.

For stories, she had but four, “The Enclave” (a BSFA winner), “A Good Citizen”, “A Cure for Homesickness” and “All I Asked For”. Her genre writing career ended five years ago. 

Our novel garnered a Clarke Award and was nominated for a BSFA. 

Here’s our Beginning…

Year 2034

The Apple Tree

August

This year’s crop of apples is so poor that Betty Matheson counts the overnight windfalls when she opens her bedroom shutters each morning. Today, she looks down on the gravel path and sees a split apple at exactly the point where she expected to see one; she heard the crunch of that singular windfall just after dawn. As a rule, she collects the apples, or apple, before breakfast. That is, before too much damage is inflicted by stabbing blackbirds and burrowing wasps. 

In years gone by, the tree was so burdened that apples thumped down on the lawn throughout the night. Back then, she discarded any split apples, any apples with a bruise, and all the small apples that, she convinced herself, were too fiddly to peel. When she’d filled her two-handled blue bucket with near-flawless windfalls, she felt she’d met her responsibility to the tree. The rest had to go. 

She wonders how such a perfectly shaped and healthy apple tree could have caused her so much stress. Whenever she went away from home, she implored neighbours to collect the windfalls. “Or take whatever you can reach on the tree.” She felt embarrassed, offering apples from the bough after offering the windfalls. But surely it made sense to everyone to take the windfalls first.

As it happened, most of her neighbours had their own apple trees, so Betty inevitably returned home to a war zone of fallen apples—cracked and speckled brown with fungal eruptions. She can’t erase the memory—the scars and the rotting. 

These years most of the apples are small, and there’s no surplus. Five small red apples hang high in the tree’s crown, too high for Betty to reach even at a stretch from a ladder. She hopes they’ll have a soft landing.

Nothing is as it should be. Her husband dead, despite being five years her junior. That wasn’t supposed to happen. She never imagined herself as the one left behind. And Aiden, her son, so loving. So loving, but… “Damn it, Aiden,” she says through her teeth. She imagines herself placing her arms around the trunk of the apple tree. Her caress morphs into a bear hug. She tears the tree from the ground, roots and all, and she thrashes the canopy against the ground.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born July 23, 1888  — Raymond Chandler. He of the hard-boiled detective genre is listed by ISFDB as doing some stories of a genre nature, to be exact ”The Bronze Door”, “The King In Yellow”, “Professor Bingo’s Snuff” and “English Summer: A Gothic Romance”. I’ve not read these. So who here has? “The King In Yellow” is in the Raymond Chandler megapack. (Died 1959.)
  • Born July 23, 1914  — Virgil Finlay. Castle of Frankenstein calls him “part of the pulp magazine history … one of the foremost contributors of original and imaginative art work for the most memorable science fiction and fantasy publications of our time.”  His best-known covers are for Amazing Stories and Weird Tales. “Roads,” a novella by Seabury Quinn, published in the January 1938 Weird Tales, and featuring a cover and interior illustrations by him, was originally published in extremely limited numbers by Arkham House in 1948. It’s available at usual suspects. (Died 1971.)
  • Born July 23, 1926 — Eunice Sudak, 97. Novelizer of three early Sixties Roger Corman films: Tales of Terror, The Raven and X, the latter based of The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. She wrote a lot of other novelizations but they weren’t even genre adjacent.
  • Born July 23, 1943 — Kathryn Powers, 80. Her list of works as screenwriter is quite impressive — Airwolf,  Deep Space Nine, Fantasy Island, Fantastic Journey, Kung Fu, Logan’s Run, Next Generation, Stargate SG-1, Swamp Thing and Wonder Woman. She is now retired, and spends most of her time researching metaphysics.
  • Born July 23, 1947 — Gardner Dozois. He was the editor of The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies and was editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction for twenty years, getting multiple Hugo and Locus Awards for those works. His writing won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story twice, once for “The Peacemaker”, and again for “Morning Child”. Being Gardner Dozois: An Interview by Michael Swanwick covers everything he wrote to that date. (Died 2018.)
  • Born July 23, 1956 — Kate Thompson, 67. Author of the New Policeman trilogy which I highly recommend. Though written for children, you’ll find it quite readable. And her Down Among the Gods is a unique take on a Greek myths made intimate. 

(12) APPLYING TO THE FOUNDATION. The Sunday Morning Transport has posted a free read to encourage subscriptions. Sara Ryan’s “Re: Request For Prophecies And Quest Funding Application Guidelines” is a kind of fantasy-world grant application.

…Transcriptions or recordings of oracular pronouncements pertinent to the Quest. The Foundation is solely interested in pronouncements from prominent and well-respected oracles, such as those providing forecasts to monarchs, commanders, pontiffs, and other widely recognized leaders. Pronouncements from community-based scryers and soothsayers are not acceptable.

Come on, Bob, you have to know this one’s just a racket. All the Foundation-approved oracles charge too much. And their pronouncements are so vague! It doesn’t matter what happens; they’re gonna say it was foretold….

(13) TOASTMASTERS WITH A SFF THEME. The next Worlds of Wonder Toastmasters online event on July 29 has a ‘Steampunk Fiction’ theme. Follow it at the link.

Worlds of Wonder Toastmasters club uses science fiction and fantasy topics to help members develop their public speaking and leadership skills in a friendly environment.

Please consider visiting the club at any of its regular meetings at the same time every Saturday. We hope to see you soon!

(14) THE ACME OF EDUCATION. “Tiny Toons Looniversity Reveals Revamped Theme at Comic-Con” reports Comicbook.com.

The Tiny Toons are back in action with a brand new series that will pay homage to the original Tiny Toons while also bringing some fresh energy to the mix. The new series is titled Tiny Toons Looniversity, and during the Tiny Toons Looniversity SDCC panel, WB revealed the official theme song and opening theme for the show. The new theme song is from composer Matthew Janszen, and as you can watch and hear in the theme below, the heart of the Bruce Broughton classic from Tiny Toon Adventures is alive and well. The new series will hit Cartoon Network and Max late this fall.

Tiny Toons Looniversity delivers a modern remix of the beloved original series in half-hour animated form and is developed by Amblin Television in association with  Bros. Animation. Fan favorites like Buster, Babs, and Hampton all make a return…

(15) MOVIES FROM AN ALTERNATE PAST. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Lord of the Rings by Akira Kurosawa:  (LOTR as a Japanese samurai fantasy film)

Star Wars as a Retro Sci-Fi 50s Film

Space Invaders (1920) | Fritz Lang Style

(16) HIGHLY RECOMMENDED DISASTERS. [Item by Jeffrey Smith.] A good, well-written list of nuclear disaster films, including mention of the BBC mini-series on Oppenheimer that was discussed here earlier this week. One typo I caught was calling  the co-writer of Testament John Sacred Young. I saw his actual name, John Sacret Young, many many times on two of my favorite TV series, China Beach and The West Wing. “Happy end of the world: Top 15 Anti-Nuke Films” at Digby’s Hullabaloo.

… In consideration of those recent events (and this being the opening weekend for one of the most hyped summer movies in recent memory, Christopher Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer-which I have not seen yet) I thought I’d share my picks for the top 15 cautionary films to watch before we all go together (when we go). Uh…enjoy?…

(17) HEAVY ON THE SCALES. Earlier this year MindQ did a roundup of “10 Upcoming Kaiju Movies In 2023-2024”.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Daniel Dern, Edmund Schluessel, Jeffrey Smith, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Ken Richards.]

Photo from Filer Meetup at Pemmi-Con on 7/22

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By Cath Jackel: Filers from Saskatoon, Chicago, Florida, and more met for coffee this morning.

Left to right in the back: Danny Sichel, Larry R, Cath Jackel, Tommy Kucera, Chris Gerrib
Front: Juan Sanmiguel, Heather Rose Jones, Kathryn Sullivan

(Everyone in the group gave permission to share this photo.)

There will be another Meetup on Sunday.

[Photo by Pat Russell.]

Pemmi-Con Filer Meetups on Saturday and Sunday

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By Cath Jackel: I’m at the con and have had a chance to look around. Programming starts at 10 am. There will be Filer meetups on Saturday and Sunday morning at NINE a.m. Location will be the Japanese garden/plaza south of the Delta hotel. Go out the front door of the hotel, turn left, and walk half a block. There isn’t seating, but the Carlton Street side has raised concrete planters we can perch on.

BYO drinks and snacks. The Delta has a main floor coffee shop that opens at 7 a.m. both mornings. On Saturday, the Bagelsmith, on 185 Carlton on the way to the plaza, opens at 9 a.m. Their breakfast sandwich is pretty good.

I have red hair and will be wearing a bright blue batik shirt. Looking forward to meeting you!

Pixel Scroll 7/18/23 I Only Came To Say I Must Be Scrolling

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(1) LAST DAY TO NOMINATE FOR DRAGON AWARDS. Nominations are being taken for the 2023 Dragon Awards until July 19.

Need more information about what to put on your ballot? Red Panda Fraction has assembled a Dragon Awards 2023 Eligible Works spreadsheet in the format of Renay’s Hugo Awards Spreadsheet.

Bear in mind that voters are allowed to make only one nomination per category. However, that is somewhat offset by the Dragon Awards having six book categories. (But there are no short fiction categories). [Via Camestros Felapton.]

(2) SLOW BOAT. Aimee Ogden’s name is on the cover of F&SF but for the benefit of other writers she is calling them out about her story submission experience. Thread starts here. Here are some excerpts.

(3) PUBLISHING FACES MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES. The Guardian hears from all sectors that “’There’s an industry-wide mental health crisis’: authors and publishers on why the books sector needs to change”.

Author and publisher welfare has been a hot topic in the books industry of late. Publishing houses, trade unions and industry bodies have scrambled for solutions following a survey by the Bookseller in which debut authors reported overwhelmingly negative publication experiences: more than half of respondents said the process adversely affected their mental health. Now, a series of measures are being rolled out across the industry in response to these concerns.

This month, Anna Frame, communications director at the independent publisher Canongate, has confirmed the launch of two initiatives: an authors’ handbook in partnership with the Society of Authors (SoA) and a resource pack for publishers, in conjunction with English Pen. Canongate has also announced that it will publish fewer books so that it can dedicate more time to authors.

These measures follow news that the Orion publishing group will establish an academy for debut novelists with the aim of “demystifying the process and ensuring expectations are clear”. Meanwhile, the Publishers Publicity Circle (PPC) is launching free media training and crisis communications sessions for publishers….

(4) MAYBE WE DIDN’T MISS MUCH. What if Winnipeg was running the 2023 Worldcon instead of Chengdu? Well, they’re running the NASFiC this week and here’s the email Robert J. Sawyer’s wrote to Pemmi-Con’s head of programming which he posted on Facebook today.  

The NASFiC in Winnipeg begins tomorrow. Still no schedule on the website, no informationa about any signings, readings, or kaffeeklatsches, and no updated emails from programming about the time-zone screw-up on the personal panel lists they sent out.

Having to ferret out on my own what times they’ve actually got me scheduled, I’ve just sent this email to programming. Note for future cons: sending out all your programming emails from an email address that says “[email protected]” does NOT make communication easy…

And Sawyer continues from there, trying to get his schedule sorted.

The schedule’s not easy to find – you can’t go directly to it from the Pemmi-Con home page menu – but it looks like there is a schedule online: Schedule | Pemmi-Con.

(5) OP-ED. [Uncredited Item by Guest Author.] It is true that there are many sides to a story, and it is also true that western countries had been and some still do, have oppressive policies toward indigenous and other minority groups, and perhaps it is a stretch to call the camps in Xinjiang as concentration camps where the images of death camps and gas chambers immediately came to mind. However, it is indisputable that such camps exist, and simply calling them re-education camps lessens their intended purposes.

The fact is that the Chinese government is systematically erasing minority views and even languages. We don’t even have to look at Tibet or Xinjiang, but even in Han populated provinces such as Guangdong and the Hong Kong city, teaching and using the Cantonese language is being discouraged, and this is a Han Chinese dialect.

Political oppression is also real. Just a month ago, the Hong Kong government charged 8 democratic leaders for seditious activities:

They promise they will bring these people to “justice” regardless where they live and to the end of time.

At DisCon 3, during the last session before the Site Selection vote, the Chinese committee said “You can say whatever you want at the convention (without being prosecuted)”. How far will that truly go? What if a fan wears a “Democracy for Hong Kong” T-shirt? Note that I carefully said “Democracy” and not “Independence”. Will they be escorted to the airport immediately, or worse outcome, if they are a Chinese citizen?

(6) B5 ON BLU-RAY. J. Michael Straczynski told Facebook readers today that to celebrate B5’s 30th Anniversary, Babylon 5: The Complete Series will be released on Blu-Ray December 5, 2023. Pre-orders can be placed starting today.

…To address some of the obvious questions: I wasn’t directly involved with the release, so I don’t know much more than you do or what’s in the release/at the retail sites but I can add what little I do know: the release includes The Gathering (but not the movies or Crusade) because TG was our pilot (technically the first) episode, so it’s a legit part of the series which fits the title mandate; the other movies were separate, and Crusade is a completely different series, so it doesn’t belong in this box set.

This is essentially the same as the very nice 4:3 remaster done for HBO-Max, which matches the original broadcast, but putting it onto Blu-Ray increases the bitrate so it should look even better than it did there. WB wanted to include the commentaries but with everything else involved with this, it apparently wasn’t feasible (that’s the extent of what I was told, so I’ve no idea what that entails)….

…What matters most in all this is that after years of asking for a Blu-Ray release, which will make this show look more beautiful than it ever has before. Fans can now own the full series in pristine form on physical media without being held hostage by the whims of streamers. I’m very excited by this release, as it further assures the legacy of Babylon 5. Onward!

(7) AI-SPECIFIC CONTRACT LANGUAGE. Publishers Weekly reports “Illustration Agencies Introduce New AI-Specific Contract Clause”.

All ITSme Society illustration agencies will include a new clause in their client contracts protecting the rights of illustrators to their original illustrations from reproduction or other use for purposes of training and artificial intelligence models. The initiative was led by Kate Kendrick, global manager of Astound US Inc. Other participating agencies include Advocate Art, Artistique Int, Illo, and the Yeon Agency.

“We want to get ahead of the curve before there is a halt within the world of publishing—we support our actors and writers on strike, and we’d like to get ahead and not have it come to that for illustrators,” the agencies said in a statement. The clause, they continued, “states that the illustrator must give prior consent to permit the client/publisher to use technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as their work. Our aim is to get ahead of these advancing technologies and to protect the artists and their artwork against the use of AI/ML models.”

(8) TINGLE TALKS TO LITHUB. “Chuck Tingle on How Writing is Like Driving, Being an Autistic Artist, and More” at Literary Hub.

LH: Which non-literary piece of culture—film, tv show, painting, song—could you not imagine your life without?

CT: i would say my number one most important piece of art that i always return to, and thing that is probably most influential on my writing and my existence as a buckaroo, is probably STOP MAKING SENSE the talking heads live film, and also album that comes with it. that is probably chucks number one artistic touchstone even over any book.

first as an autistic buckaroo, that movie and the subtext around it is what made me proud to be autistic like david byrne. being on the spectrum was never a bad diagnosis for me it was ALWAYS just about the coolest thing someone could be because talking heads were the coolest band in the dang world. so watching that was a real big moment for me to think “wow, what a special tradition of artist i am walking in the steps of”

but even outside of that, i think the way the show is setup is just beautiful, and the songs they picked and the way those songs are presented. to me what is says is “there is so much more to art than the medium itself, there is all the other things around it.” art does not exist in a vacuum, so it is always funny to me when buds try to seperate it from the context of the time and place. bud the context is ALSO part of the artwork, and i think you can really see that in the way those songs are presented….

(9) BOX OFFICE IMPROBABLE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Despite a much better reception from the critics, the latest Mission Impossible movie has opened with figures extremely similar to the latest Indiana Jones flick. Both somewhat <looks over glasses> disappointing. Perhaps audience reception will echo the critics and MI7 will have more legs than IJ5. “’Mission Impossible 7’ Falls Short of Box Office Expectations” in Variety.

“Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” topped domestic box office charts while falling short of initial expectations. Tom Cruise’s latest blockbuster collected $56.2 million between Friday and Sunday, a lackluster start for a movie that cost nearly $300 million before marketing.

Heading into the weekend, Paramount and Skydance’s action-adventure was hoping to establish a new franchise record with $60 million or more. Instead, ticket sales landed behind 2018’s “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” ($61 million) and 2000’s “Mission: Impossible II” ($57.8 million), which remain as the top openings in the 27-year-old series.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

2017 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

Fran Wilde has written five novels with latest being The Ship of Stolen Words.  Updraft, her first novel, won an Andre Norton Award, most excellent to do, also the Compton Crook Award, the Baltimore SF Society’s Best First Novel Award. Riverland also won the Andre Norton Award.

Did I also mention that she’s simply amazing at penning shorter works? I will do so now. She’s written around fifty stories, four poems and a considerable number of essays such as “A Recipe for Summoning Aliette de Bodard”. So our Beginning comes from one of these works, “Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand” which appeared first in Uncanny.

It would be nominated for a Hugo at Worldcon 76 as well as a Nebula and a World Fantasy Award. It would win the Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Fiction.

And now a short but fascinating Beginning….

Entrance

There’s a ticket booth on my tongue.

Don’t look in my eyes, don’t plead curiosity, you won’t get anywhere with that. Try it and you’ll see your reflection in my sea-green gaze: your shadow sprinting through the heavy glass doors. You’ll smell a whiff of brine, perhaps something more volatile. You’ll be caught and held, while your likeness departs. You don’t want that.

No one wants to be pinned between an entrance and an exit, unless you’re part of the show.

Here’s what you do instead: drop your dime on the rose carpet, just there. Don’t pick it up. The carpet’s sticky. Don’t ask why. Stare at my lips, my hands clasped over my velvet skirts, what rests below that, and wait.

If you’re worthy, I’ll say the word. Your dime gets you a look and a souvenir. Your hands are beautiful, did you know that?

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born July 18, 1913 — Red Skelton. Comedian of the first order. The Red Skelton Hour ran for three hundred and thirty-eight episodes. I remember Freddie the Freeloader. He’s here because ISFDB says he wrote A Red Skelton in Your Closet which is also called Red Skelton’s Favorite Ghost Stories. He also has cameos in Around the World in Eighty Days and Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, both of which I consider at least genre adjacent. (Died 1997.)
  • Born July 18, 1943 — Charles Waugh, 80. Anthologist and author, whose anthology work up to 2013 numbered over two hundred titles (!), mostly done with Martin H. Greenberg but a handful done with other co-editors as Greenberg died in 2011. Name a subject and there’s likely an anthology on that subject that he had a hand in.  
  • Born July 18, 1956 — Deborah Christian, 67. She’s an author and game designer who has designed and edited role-playing game materials for Dungeons & Dragons such as Tales of the Outer Planes, Bestiary of Dragons and Giants, Dragon Dawn, and Kara-Tur: The Eastern Realms.  She also writes fiction under the name Deborah Teramis Christian with genre novel such as The Truthsayer’s Apprentice and her latest, Splintegrate.
  • Born July 18, 1967 — Paul Cornell, 56. Author of the Shadow Police series which is quite excellent as well as writing a lot of television scripts for Doctor Who including the stellar Tenth Doctor two part story “Human Nature“ and “The Family of Blood” with one of the best endings ever, Primieval and Robin Hood. He was part of the regular panel of the SF Squeecast podcast which won multiple Hugo Awards for best fancast. 
  • Born July 18, 1967 — Vin Diesel, 56. His first genre role was as the delightful voice of The Iron Giant. He next shows playing Riddick in Pitch Black, the first in The Chronicles of Riddick franchise. He’s Hugo Cornelius Toorop in Babylon A.D. and he’s the fascinating if enigmatic voice of Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy and other MCU films. 
  • Born July 18, 1980 — Kristen Bell, 43. Veronica Mars. Genre, well not really, but a lot of y’all watched it. She also voiced Jade Wilson in Teen Titans Go! To the Movies which I highly recommend as it’s highly meta. Really it is.
  • Born July 18, 1982 — Priyanka Chopra, 41. Alex Parrish in Quantico, she became the first South Asian to headline an American network drama series. Is it genre? Maybe, maybe not, though it could fit very nicely into a Strossian Dark State. Some of her work in her native India such as The Legend of Drona and Love Story 2050 is genre as is Krrish 3, an Indian SF film she was in. She’s got a key role in the Matrix Resurrections film. No, I’m not saying what it is as some of you possibly haven’t seen it. 

(12) COMICS SECTION.

(13) DANGEROUS MEDIA. The New York Times reviews Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novel Silver Nitrate: “The Dark Magic Wrought by a Nazi Occultist and a Doomed Horror Film”.

… Montserrat is a reclusive sound editor who’s caring for her sister, who has cancer. She has three loves: horror movies, her white Volkswagen and her childhood friend Tristán Abascal, a tall, handsome, washed-up actor. Montserrat is abrasive and nerdy; Tristán, “more Cantinflas than James Bond,” is smooth, but also a goof. When he reaches out to reconnect, it means he’s between relationships; this time he also needs to borrow her car.

The plot is set into motion only after a long conversation between the two friends and Abel Urueta, Tristán’s neighbor and a once-famous Mexican horror film director. Over whiskey, he talks about a production he never completed, “Beyond the Yellow Door,” which was co-written by Wilhelm Ewers, a Nazi occultist who believed that silver nitrate film was “a perfect medium for sealing spells.” But when Ewers died before “Beyond the Yellow Door” wrapped, his magic went haywire, destroying the highly flammable nitrate prints of the film, and inflicting a curse on the cast and crew.

Urueta, who has one last canister stashed in his freezer, has an idea: If Montserrat and Tristán help him finish the project, perhaps the curse could be lifted….

 (14) THE THREE LAWS. Behind a paywall in the Boston Globe, Jay Houlihan’s letter to the editor reminds readers “Author Isaac Asimov saw AI’s risks. Now we’re rapidly facing them down.”

Re “Dan Hendrycks wants to save us from an AI catastrophe. He’s not sure he’ll succeed.” (Ideas, July 9): The potential for catastrophic results from advanced technology is not a new idea. The science fiction writer Isaac Asimov identified and addressed the risk in a 1942 short story, through his Three Laws of Robotics: 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. Though it may have taken us 80 years to reach the point where this risk is on the near-term horizon, Asimov was nothing if not prescient. Much like climate change, we may be rapidly approaching a point with artificial intelligence where reverse is no longer an option.

(15) MORE ON ASIMOV. Wailin Wong just hosted an episode of The Indicator podcast on NPR about how Asimov’s Foundation series inspired fans to pursue careers in economics. “How Isaac Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ helped set two economists on their career path” on The Indicator from Planet Money at NPR.

When we talk about classic economic texts, you might think of something like Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations.” But how about the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov?

One of the big ideas at the heart of this science fiction saga is that math can predict and shape the future. We hear from two economists who tell us how the ideas in Foundation helped set them on their career path.

(16) WHEN THE WORLD DISCOVERED TOLKIEN WROTE OTHER THINGS. “Talking Tolkien: On The Tolkien Reader” by Rich Horton at Black Gate.

The Tolkien Reader was first published in 1966 by Ballantine Books in the US; in response to the greatly expanding popularity of The Lord of the Rings, driven by the paperback editions from Ballantine (and the pirated edition from Ace.) This was an attempt to bring a varied sampling of his work to readers hungry for more. I read it myself in the early ’70s, after I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. As an introduction it reprints a piece Peter Beagle did for Holiday (perhaps at the instigation of Alfred Bester?) called “Tolkien’s Magic Ring”, which primarily discusses the Middle-Earth books.

It’s a good and varied collection throughout, and really does the job of showing a different side to Tolkien (though not THAT different!) from that seen in The Lord of the Rings. I’ll be looking at each of the sections separately, and slightly out of order, in that I think the best part by far is Tree and Leaf, which comes second in the book….

(17) SHELVES OF THE AGES. “Halls of Ancient Wisdom: 7 Remarkable Ancient Libraries” at Ancient Origins.

2.    The Library of Ashurbanipal – A King’s Passion Project

Much older than the library of Alexandria, Ashurbanipal was founded in Nineveh, Assyria in the 7th century BC. It was one of the earliest, and most remarkable libraries, in the ancient world and was named after its founder, King Ashurbanipal.

Built as part of the royal palace, this ancient library held an extensive collection of clay tablets written in the cuneiform script, the most widespread form of writing in the ancient Middle East. After the library’s destruction, it’s estimated around 30,000 of these tablets were salvaged, giving us an idea of just how significant this repository of knowledge was. 

King Ashurbanipal built the library to highlight his empire’s vast intellectual prowess. He was a leader who valued intellectualism and was renowned for his patronage of learning. The collection held texts from all the civilizations the Assyrians had interacted with, making it a melting pot of knowledge from ancient Mesopotamia, Sumer, Babylon, and beyond. Not just a storehouse of ancient knowledge, the library was a center for early scholarship and attracted scribes, scholars, and translators who studied and translated texts from different languages. 

Sadly, the library’s heyday was short-lived. It’s believed the library fell alongside Nineveh itself in 612 BC when it was raided by the Medes, Babylonians, and Scythians. The library’s ruins were discovered by Austen Henry Layard in 1849. Thankfully, the fires that were meant to destroy the tablets actually preserved them and now the majority of the library’s knowledge resides in the British Museum. 

(18) SCORN AND DEFIANCE; SLIGHT REGARD, CONTEMPT. Matt Berry and Peter Capaldi really let it rip in this episode of Letters Live.

Possibly one of our favourite letter exchanges ever, and at London’s Freemasons’ Hall back in 2016 Matt Berry and Peter Capaldi joined us to give an incredible, hilarious reading. In 1675, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire instructed his army to attack a fortress belonging to the Zaporozhian Cossacks. They were quickly and heavily defeated. Rather than surrender, the Sultan then wrote to the Cossacks and demanded that they submit to him. This fiery exchange was the result.

(19) ISAAC ARTHUR. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Isaac Arthur has had his ‘Sci-fi Sunday’ which this time looks at “Robots & Warfare”. Given the recent developments in AI this is timely. Isaac not only has a degree in physics, he also served with the US Army…

Robots play an ever greater role in every aspect of our lives, including the battlefield, but what will their role be in the wars of the future?

(20) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George’s video “90s Time Traveler Discovers Meta’s THREADS App” is a riot. (“I know a still from Blade Runner when I see one…”)

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Daniel Dern, Michael A. Burstein, Alec Nevala-Lee, Kathy Sullivan, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Filer Meetup at Pemmi-Con?

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Hi all, long-time lurker Cath Jackel here. I’m a fan living in Western Canada who will be attending Pemmi-Con in Winnipeg next weekend. Are there any other Filers planning to attend? Would you be interested in meeting up? 

It would be for an hour or so, outdoors if possible, and not conflicting with any major programming items. If yes, please let me know in comments below by the end of Tuesday July 18. If we go forward, I’ll sort out details and post them later this week.