Tag Archives: Phil Nichols

Pixel Scroll 7/12/24 And It Seems To Me You Lived Your Life Like A Pixel In The Scroll

Posted on by
22

(1) ALEC BALDWIN INVOLUNTARY MANSLAUGHTER CASE DISMISSED. CNN witnesses the moment when “Judge Throws Out Case Against Alec Baldwin”.

There were stunned faces across the courtroom as Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer abruptly started into her ruling on the motion to dismiss Alec Baldwin’s indictment….

…The judge began with an explanation that dismissing any case requires her to read through a formal and lengthy statement.

At that moment, members of the gallery — the general public, court officers and journalists — began to turn and look at each other in disbelief that a dismissal appeared imminent.

Looks of both shock and elation began to cross the faces of some of Baldwin’s family members and his guests in the audience as the judge detailed line by line why she was throwing out the case.

Baldwin’s sister Beth wiped her eyes with a tissue.

Members of the Baldwin family cried and embraced after the judge finished her order with, “Your motion to dismiss with prejudice is granted.”

Here are the issues that led to the judge’s decision:

…The judge in the trial of actor Alec Baldwin had halted testimony in the case and sent the jury home for the day before reaching her decision this evening to dismiss the indictment.

Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer had been considering a new motion by the actor’s legal team to have the case thrown out based on allegations of wrongdoing by investigators.

The motion stems from testimony given by a crime scene technician on Thursday about some ammunition delivered to the sheriff’s office after the conviction of “Rust” armorer Hannah Gutierrez Reed, which Baldwin’s team claims was not properly disclosed to the defense. 

Several rounds of ammunition were brought to the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office in March after the first trial concluded by retired police officer Troy Teske, a friend of the armorer’s father, crime scene technician Marissa Poppell testified. 

Teske allegedly told investigators he believed the ammunition could be associated with the “Rust” incident, Poppell said. However, the crime scene technician said the items were catalogued separately and were not included in the Rust inventory or tested to see if they matched the lethal round….

(2) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listers to savor a seafood pancake with Ai Jiang in Episode 230 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Ai Jiang

We chatted with the Bram Stoker Awards ceremony a mere two days in the future, where she was nominated in the Long Fiction category for Linghun. And even though as you’ll hear she had doubts she had a chance of winning — she won!

And that’s not the only thing she won following our conversation, for a week later, her I am AI won a Nebula Award. I am AI is also currently on the final ballot for the Hugo Award, where she’s also up for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. But that’s not all when it comes to Ai Jiang and awards. She won an Ignyte Award for her poem “We Smoke Pollution,” received a Nebula Award nomination for her short story ““Give Me English,” was part of the Strange Horizons collective nominated for a semiprozine Hugo Award, and has been nominated for a British SF Association Award and Aurora Award as well.

Her fiction has also appeared in the magazines Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, The Dark, Kaleidotrope, The Deadlands, Planet Scumm, and others, as well as in such anthologies as Fighting for the Future: Cyberpunk and Solarpunk Tales, Step Into the Light: An Anthology of Daylight Horror, and Mother: Tales of Love and Terror. Her short story collection Smol Tales From Between Worlds was published last year.

We discussed why being nominated for multiple awards may actually have made her Imposter Syndrome worse, what the Odyssey workshop taught her which helped her finish her first novel (and whether that book might be too ambitious a debut), the novels which made her want to be a writer, what makes us power on in the face of rejection, how writing is like competitive badminton, the secret to writing successful flash fiction, the book she was given which turned her from a pessimist into an optimist, what she learned from her “soul-draining” career as a ghostwriter, how an editorial suggestion turned Linghun from flash fiction into a novella, the most daunting aspects of revision, and much more.

(3) WHO, TREK SHOWRUNNER SUMMIT MEETING. “Comic-Con: Star Trek, Doctor Who to Appear at Joint Panel” reports Variety.

In a show of geek unity, the executive producers and showrunners of the “Star Trek” TV universe and the “Doctor Who” Whoniverse — Alex Kurtzman and Russell T Davies, respectively — will appear in a panel together at San Diego Comic-Con. The panel, which will be held on Saturday, July 27 at the largest fan gathering in North America, will kick off celebration of the first “Intergalactic Friendship Day” on July 30, an effort by the two franchises to foster greater connection and fellowship between their fandoms. (The celebration lines up with the International Friendship Day, created in 2011 to bring together people across the planet.)

Under the banner of “Friendship is Universal,” “Star Trek” and “Doctor Who” will headline a gallery experience in the Gaslamp Quarter of San Diego during Comic-Con, which will feature original costumes and props from both franchises, along with photo opportunities and friendship bracelet giveaways….

(4) SHIELD BEARER. Animation World Network rings the bell as “Marvel Drops ‘Captain America: Brave New World’ Teaser Trailer”.

The Cap is back in cinemas… finally! Anthony Mackie returns to “wield the shield” as Captain America in the upcoming superhero adventure from Marvel Studios. The Falcon, played by Mackie in previous MCU films, officially took on the mantle of Captain America in the finale of The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, which ran on Disney+ in 2021.

In the new film, after meeting with newly elected U.S. President Thaddeus Ross, played by Harrison Ford in his MCU debut, Sam finds himself in the middle of an international incident. He must discover the reason behind a nefarious global plot before the true mastermind has the entire world seeing red….

(5) HOBBIT ACTORS GO PUB CRAWLING. “Billy Boyd & Dominic Monaghan Talk ‘Billy And Dom Eat The World’”.

Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan’s food travelog series Billy and Dom Eat the World gave the pair a chance to renew their Lord of the Rings fellowship with Ian McKellen.

In the first episode of their six-part series from Dash Pictures and new distributor Abacus Media Rights, Boyd and Monaghan, who played Pippin and Merry in Peter Jackson’s movie trilogy, visit Gandalf — sorry, McKellen — at his east London pub The Grapes on the bank of the River Thames.

“It happened we were looking at London pub culture and it just so happens Ian McKellen has a pub,” Boyd told Deadline in an exclusive interview. “He told us why he ended up in that part of London, and what pubs mean to Britain.”…

(6) GET READY TO HEAR A DIFFERENT RING CYCLE. The Lord of the Rings musical will run from July 19-September 1 at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Steve H Silver notes that this is a heavily revised version of the Lord of the Rings Musical that premiered in Toronto and London in 2006.

(7) “CAN’T HE SHUT UP?” “Will Ferrell Says James Caan Told Him ‘You’re Not Funny’ on ‘Elf’ Set and Acting ‘Too Over the Top’; Caan Later Called Him ‘Brilliant’ After Seeing the Film” in Variety.

Will Ferrell revealed during an interview on the “Messy” podcast (via IndieWire) that his late “Elf” co-star James Caan was not a fan of his performance as Buddy the Elf until he saw the final cut of the Christmas movie at the film’s premiere. Ferrell said that Caan told him at several points during production that he just wasn’t funny, although Ferrell admitted to driving Caan “crazy” on set while playing the overenthusiastic Buddy.

“James Caan, may he rest in peace, we had such a good time working on that movie,” Ferrell said. “He would tease me. I like to do bits but I’m not like ‘on’ all the time. In between set ups, [Caan] would be like, ‘I don’t get you. You’re not funny.’ And I’m like, ‘I know. I’m not Robin Williams.’ And he was like, ‘People ask me: “Is he funny?” And I’m like, “No, he’s not funny.”‘ It was all with love but at the same time…”

Hear the complete podcast here: “MeSsy with Christina Applegate & Jamie-Lynn Sigler”.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 12, 1923 – James E. Gunn. (Died 2020.)

By Paul Weimer:  For me, James E. Gunn’s work falls into two distinct buckets.

Harlan Ellison and James Gunn in 1966. Photo by and copyright © 2013 Andrew Porter.

The first is his own fiction. When I think of novels like Transformation, or The Listeners, or Gift from the Stars (sadly, my reading of his work is far from complete), I think of his work as old-school High-Minded Science Fiction in the grand tradition.  Characters and sometimes even plot are secondary. But theme and ideas? That’s where Gunn’s work shines. There are a lot of Gunn novels and stories about contact, and often first contact with aliens, and it is the ideas and themes of those novels and story that resonate, and show power, from back at the beginning of his career, all the way to the end. The Big Damn Idea, and often, because this was Gunn, several of them intersecting together. Like in Transformation, which has transcendentalism running head-to-head against planetary sized AIs, in a space opera story that spans a good chunk of the galaxy in the process. That was Gunn’s power chords and he could surely play them.

The other half was his work as an educator, and his meta-science fictional interests. He wrote and anthologized in this mode to lengths and degrees perhaps only the likes of Silverberg or Dozois could match.  Where Gunn resonates for me in this best is his epochal and genre-defining series The Road to Science Fiction. It’s not so modest ambition takes the history and development of the field from Gilgamesh all the way to the present day of their writing. I had started with Volume Three, by pure chance and accident, and it was that volume that, for example, that I discovered authors like Joe Haldeman (yes, even before The Forever War, his story “Tricentennial” amazed me. I devoured that book, and searched far and wide to get volumes 1, and 2, and then later 4 five and 6.  I’ve lost copies over the years, and really need to recollect those volumes (the tangled rights mean that ebooks are never going to happen) so that I can have at a hand the breadth and selections Gunn made, as well as the interstitial and introductory manner that helped me understand *why* he picked those stories.  That legacy, even more than his own work, remains with me still.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) SF 101. Phil Nichols and Colin Kuskie review the short story finalists for the 2024 Hugo Award in “Hugos Where I Goes” in episode 44 of the Science Fiction 101 podcast.

(11) IT’S NOT IN CLEVELAND. It’s Metropolis, wink wink. “Filming for the new ‘Superman’ movie has been happening in Cleveland” and NPR is looking in.

It’s not a bird or a plane — it’s the “Man of Steel.” Filming is underway in Cleveland for a new Superman movie to be released in the summer of 2025….

… KABIR BHATIA, BYLINE: The Man of Steel was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who met in Cleveland as teenagers at Glenville High School.

BHATIA: Filming for this latest Superman story started at a beach in a nearby state park. That’s where tents, a barracks and old Jeeps were used to create a retro Army base. Then the production moved downtown, to Cleveland’s Public Square. That’s where Will Tabar takes his daily coffee break.

WILL TABAR: Looks like they got Metropolis official park benches here in the middle of Public Square. We also have multiple new bus stops going in, replacing our RTA with the Metropolis MTAs.

BHATIA: It’s Cleveland in disguise as a 1980s version of the city where Superman and his alias, Clark Kent, lives and works….

(12) GEE-WHIZ. “Scientists design spacesuit that can turn urine into drinking water” reports the Guardian.

A sci-fi-inspired spacesuit that recycles urine into drinking water could enable astronauts to perform lengthy spacewalks on upcoming lunar expeditions.

The prototype, modelled on the “stillsuits” in the sci-fi classic Dune, collects urine, purifies it and can return it to the astronaut through a drinking tube within five minutes.

The suit’s creators hope it could be deployed before the end of the decade in Nasa’s Artemis programme, which is focused on learning how to live and work for prolonged periods on another world.

“The design includes a vacuum-based external catheter leading to a combined forward-reverse osmosis unit, providing a continuous supply of potable water with multiple safety mechanisms to ensure astronaut wellbeing,” said Sofia Etlin, a researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell University and co-designer of the suit….

(13) MARGINAL IMPROVEMENTS. “Can artificial intelligence boost creativity? Yes — but at a price” NPR has learned.

…Oliver Hauser, an economist at the University of Exeter in the UK who studies artificial intelligence, wanted to try and answer the basic question of whether AI could increase creativity….

…To try and get some hard data on this squishy question of creativity, Hauser teamed up with Anil Doshi at the University College London School of Management. They recruited nearly 300 people, who Doshi says did not identify as professional writers. “We asked them to write a short, eight-sentence story,” he says.

Around one-third of the writers had to come up with ideas on their own, while others were given starter ideas generated by the chatbot ChatGPT 4.0. Those that got help were divided into two subgroups: one that got a single AI-generated idea, and one that got to choose from up to five.

Crucially, Doshi says, both the human-only and AI-assisted groups had to write the stories themselves….

…The results, published today in the journal Science Advances, found that stories written with AI help were deemed both more novel and useful. Writers who had access to one AI idea did better, but those who had access to five ideas saw the biggest boost — they wrote stories seen as around 8% more novel than humans on their own, and 9% more useful. 

What’s more, Doshi says, the worst writers benefited the most.

“Those that were the least inherently creative, experienced the largest improvement in their creativity,” he says.

So AI really does appear to make people more creative. But there’s a plot twist: When Hauser and Doshi looked at all the stories, they found a different effect.

“Collectively speaking, there was a smaller diversity of novelty in the group that had AI,” Hauser says.

In other words, the chatbot made each individual more creative, but it made the group that had AI help less creative.

Hauser describes the divergent result as a “classic social dilemma” — a situation where people benefit individually, but the group suffers….

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

Pixel Scroll 6/16/24 No Clouds Were Shouted At In The Making Of This Scroll

Posted on by
17

(1) ON THE 101. Phil Nichols and Colin Kuskie are back with episode 43 of the Science Fiction 101 podcast: “Triffids, Cuckoos and Lichen: John Wyndham”.

We’re back, with an episode about the great British SF writer John Wyndham. On many occasions we’ve found ourselves talking about his books – such as The Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cuckoos – but now we attempt to do them justice with a closer look.

(2) 100%. Philip Athans asserts, “All Fantasy And Science Fiction Is Allegorical” at Fantasy Author’s Handbook.

…I talked a lot about monsters as metaphor, what could be described as the allegorical nature of monsters, in my book Writing Monsters. Of course, I’m not the only person to have ever identified that. In “Re-reading John Wyndham, I” Alexander Adams wrote of the monsters in Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids…

The triffids are not the subject of the story. Indeed, they are little more than a means to hasten the break-up of society and add an element of the unknown to an otherwise mundane catastrophe—widespread blindness. Wyndham is not interested in triffids per se but in examining how societal norms fragment under pressure and how difficult it is for man to adjust his expectations under extraordinary circumstances. Old habits and customs outlive their usefulness; sentiment can undermine necessary pragmatism; excessive ruthlessness can impose intolerably inhumane conditions; good intentions can lead to barbaric outcomes.

Again the emphasis above is mine. This is the allegorical heart of Day of the Triffids.

So then does that mean we all have to become “political writers,” like George Orwell or write overtly allegorical fiction like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. in an effort to school our readers on some political, social, economic, or religious stance? No. Of course not. But I maintain that no matter our intentions, we actually all engage in allegory, and everything we write, one way or another, has a theme/message behind that….

(3) STAR TREK, CLARION, AND COMIC-CON PACKAGES. “New UC San Diego initiative features Star Trek stars, new Clarion masterclass and housing during Comic-Con” reports KPBS.

As part of a new initiative to commemorate Comic-Con at UC San Diego, the university will host Star Trek actors and writers George Takei and John Cho, and open their renowned and exclusive Clarion Science Fiction Writing Workshop to the a public via a one-day masterclass.

The university will also offer campus housing during Comic-Con for all UC affiliates and alumni, any current UC/CSU/community college students and participants in the masterclass. This is significant given that Comic-Con week is a notoriously challenging time to secure a hotel stay.

While UCSD is best known for its contributions to science and technology, it has also built a vibrant arts community. The university hopes sci-fi may bring both worlds closer together….

… UCSD is calling their Comic-Con-adjacent programming “The Science of Story.” It will be centered around the pre-con masterclass offered by the folks responsible for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Workshop….

… This will be the first year that the public can gain access to Clarion through a special masterclass on Tuesday, July 23. It’s a full day of instruction and keynotes about the fundamentals of speculative fiction, and includes lunch and dinner.

Instructors and teaching artists include comic book writer Alyssa Wong (“Star Wars: The High Republic”); fiction writer and poet Isabel Yap (“Never Have I Ever”); O. Henry Prize winner ‘Pemi Aguda (“GhostRoots”); novelist and former physicist Emet North (“In Universes”); and special guest, writer Nalo Hopkinson….

… Another major component of UCSD’s Comic-Con initiative is a series of “Star Trek” events. George Takei and John Cho have both portrayed the character of Sulu at different points in the franchise — and are both writers and graphic novelists. Takei and Cho will hold an evening event to discuss the character, the series and their work as graphic novelists.

“A Tale of Two Sulus: An Evening with George Takei and John Cho” is Wednesday, July 24 at Epstein Family Amphitheater on campus. The following night, the San Diego Symphony will live score a screening of “Star Trek Beyond (2009).”…

Comic-Con housing packages at UC San Diego:

Details and registration here. Comic-Con badges are not included.

The Enterprise Package: Housing only 
Open to UC affiliates and alumni, and students enrolled in any UC, CSU, or California community college.

  • $640 per package
  • Check in: Wednesday, July 24, 2024
  • Check out: Sunday, July 28, 2024
  • Four night single-room stay (with shared common area/restrooms)
  • Free daily breakfast
  • MTS five-day transit pass, eligible for the Blue Line trolley
  • Access badge for public Park & Market events in downtown San Diego (July 24-July 28)

The Starfleet Package: Housing and “The Science of Story” programs
Open to the general public

  • $1,200 per package
  • Check in: Tuesday, July 23, 2024
  • Check out: Sunday, July 28, 2024
  • Five night single-room stay (with shared common area/restrooms)
  • Free daily breakfast
  • MTS five-day transit pass, eligible for the Blue Line trolley
  • Clarion Writers Masterclass (Wednesday, July 24), with lunch and dinner included
  • Access badge for public Park & Market events in downtown San Diego (July 24-July 28)
  • Opening night reception
  • VIP ticket for “A Tale of Two Sulus: An Evening with George Takei and John Cho” at Epstein Family Amphitheater (Tuesday, July 23)
  • VIP ticket for “Star Trek in Concert with the San Diego Symphony” at Epstein Family Amphitheater (Wednesday, July 24)
  • Ticket to “JAWS” screening at Epstein Family Amphitheater (Friday, July 26) 

The Holodeck Package: “The Science of Story” programs only (no housing)
Open to the general public

  • $425 per package
  • Clarion Writers Masterclass (Wednesday, July 24), with lunch and dinner included
  • Access badge for public Park & Market events in downtown San Diego (July 24-July 28)
  • Opening night reception
  • VIP ticket for “A Tale of Two Sulus: An Evening with George Takei and John Cho” at Epstein Family Amphitheater (Tuesday, July 23)
  • VIP ticket for “Star Trek in Concert with the San Diego Symphony” at Epstein Family Amphitheater (Wednesday, July 24)
  • Ticket to “JAWS” screening at Epstein Family Amphitheater (Friday, July 26) 

(4) BRADBURY TO BOK. Heritage Auctions’ “2024 June 20 – 23 Comics & Comic Art Signature® Auction #7374” includes a 5-page “Ray Bradbury to Hannes Bok – Illustrated and Signed Letter (January | Lot #94003”.

Ray Bradbury to Hannes Bok – Illustrated and Signed Letter (January 1, 1941). Written by Ray Bradbury to illustrator Hannes Bok, this five-page letter offers an incredibly juicy window into the personal drama of the Golden Age of Science Fiction.

It includes the newsworthy line, “He [Hasse] and I [Bradbury] are both bi-sexual and we both agree that you [Bok] are, too. Don’t fool yourself.” 

(5) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Compiled by Paul Weimer.]

June 16, 1896 — Murray Leinster. (Died 1975).

By Paul Weimer: Murray Leinster. Not many people get an award named after one of their stories, but Murray Leinster managed that feat.  

Murray Leinster

I read his “Sidewise in Time” (for which the Sidewise Award for Alternate History is named) decades ago. I read it as part of my first full on dunking into Alternate Histories back in the 1980s, when I was trying to read every bit of AH I could get my paws on.  Unlike a lot of those stories and worlds, Murray Leinster instead gives us a sort of a multiverse of worlds, The sheer variety of worlds crammed into the story, a story where temporary conjunctions of parallel worlds throws a bevy of people into alternate worlds, and things from those worlds into our own, showed the pulp sensibilities of Leinster in full.  When I would later read Frederik Pohl’s “The Coming of the Quantum Cats”, I saw the homage to Leinster’s “Sidewise in Time” straightaway.

Alternate history is hardly Leinster’s only badge of honor of prediction, or as a forerunner in the science fiction field. “A Logic Named Joe”, in a time when computers were in their infancy, depicted a world with an internet. In these days with AI and the perils of information on the internet, the story and its plot seems more relevant than ever. But as off kilter as the logics go in that story, even Leinster didn’t predict an internet that, tainted by AI, would offer recipes for pizza that involve glue.

“The Runaway Skyscraper”, one of his earliest stories (and written before “Sidewise in Time” by over a decade) didn’t invent the time travel story. However, it helped give it a form in a 20th Century vein.  For reasons beyond understanding, a skyscraper slips several thousand years in the past, and the building occupants must come together to figure out how to survive…and how to return to their modern day, if they can. 

Leinster is a writer who started in the pulps and kept writing into the 1950’s and 1960’s, managing a transition that very few writers of his era were able to accomplish. His staying power isn’t super dense characterization, it’s his vivid imagination and ideas that he scatters like candy throughout his work. Take his story “Exploration Team” which has an amazing wild alien planet for the protagonist to cross…accompanied by his animal companions, including uplifted bears! 

Oh, and the spaceship in the opening scenes of Starcrash is named the Murray Leinster. 

(6) COMICS SECTION.

(7) ROOMINATIONS. I’m old enough (yes, I’m fucking old, did I forget to mention that?) that I read the Harrison paperback when it came out and had watched the TV show with a comparable title in first run, so as soon as I read the headline…I knew! “Long-Dead TV Show Forced Soylent Green To Change Its Name” at Slashfilm.

…”Soylent Green” was based on the 1966 novel “Make Room! Make Room!” by Harry Harrison. Back in 1984, Harrison was interviewed by Danny Peary for his book “Omni’s Screen Flights – Screen Fantasies: The Future According to SF Cinema,” and Harrison noted that the makers of “Soylent Green” couldn’t use his original title — an allusion to overpopulation — for a mindless reason. It seems the studio felt it was too close to the title of the 1953 sitcom “Make Room for Daddy.”… 

(8) DC COMICS UNIVERSITY. Ngozi Ukazu tells “How Big Barda and Jack Kirby Changed My Life” at DC.

“The Ties That Bind,” an episode from my favorite animated series Justice League Unlimited, opens like this: a woman watches an entire train drop onto a poor, doomed escape artist. It pulverizes him. The woman rushes over and, with amazing strength, flings scraps of the wreckage aside like gift wrap. But the escape artist is already behind her, smug and completely unharmed. This superwoman embraces him, but because she is also extremely annoyed, she scolds him, picking him clean off his feet.

When I watched this unfold for the first time as a teenager, my mind was successfully boggled. I had questions. Namely: “Who is that woman? And, oh my god…is that tiny man her husband?”

This was my introduction to Big Barda and the escape artist Mister Miracle, heroes of Jack Kirby’s epic Fourth World. Barda was brawny, brash, and had a huge bleeding heart—and yes, that Houdini in the red, green, and yellow was her husband, Scott Free. The episode trotted out other incredible Fourth World staples including Granny Goodness and Kalibak, Boom Tubes and Mother Boxes, and even the super-prison, the X-Pit. Needless to say, this animated adventure left a lasting impact on me. Because over the last two years, I’ve had the pleasure of writing and illustrating Barda, the newest DC graphic novel for Young Adults….

…Barda is a graphic novel for teens…but it is also kinda my thesis submission for a master’s degree in Jack Kirby studies from DC Comics University. For two years, I dove headfirst into Jack Kirby’s Fourth World, and I didn’t just read the comics, oh no. To ensure that Barda was developed with precision, I read and watched Jack Kirby interviews, searching for the thematic DNA of New Genesis and Apokolips. I learned about Kirby’s obsession with mythology, religion, and morality, and his fascination with the Free Love movement. And of course, I read my textbooks—New Gods (1971), Mister Miracle (1971), and The Forever People (1971)—to understand the rules of Barda’s world and the cosmic stakes that went with them. Call me a purist, but my focus was narrow. I only deviated to read Walt Simonson’s brilliant solo series Orion—a virtuoso performance. But for the most part, I wanted the story straight from the King himself.

(9) PRAISE FOR METROPOLIS. ScreenRant introduces a Corridor Crew commentary on movie effects: “’So On Point’: Most Influential Sci-Fi Movie Ever Stuns VFX Artists 97 Years Later”.

The most influential sci-fi movie ever made, Metropolis, has stunned a group of VFX artists with its unique practical effects 97 years later, showing why the film still holds up in the present day. The 1927 German silent film showcases a worker’s rebellion against the rich and powerful in a dystopian, futuristic city. Even in the present day, it is regarded as one of the best science fiction movies ever made for acting as a key influence on the genre for almost a century after its release.

Now, Corridor Crew has reaction to the VFX used in Metropolis, stunned by how the practical effects bring the film to life still hold up 97 years later.

Starting at 9:46, the group talks about how the movie used meticulous drawings to make its impressive effects, while mirrors were also used to make convincing shots and scene transitions. Check out what they had to say about the movie below:

“What you’re looking at here is that they’re building a miniature of the set off to one side, and they’re filming the real set on the other side, and in between the two is a mirror at a 45-degree angle. And they’ve lined up their reflection of the miniatures to line up with the real set, and then they scraped off the backing on half the mirror. So you’re seeing through part of it, and seeing the reflection on the other part of it. They used to mirror to do live compositing of two images.

“They don’t have the tools at this era to do hold-out mats on the film and only expose part of it and do the rest. You can do that, but it’s very janky, you’d have to do it very manually. Instead, they have two sets, both full size, and they just have a pane of glass. But this time, they’ve configured the frame that holds the mirror to be able to slide it in and out, and they actually scratched off different pieces of that mirror to make certain parts of the glass transparent, and other parts reflective…”

(10) STEVE’S HEROES. Steve Vertlieb was interviewed for the 30+ Minutes with H. P. Lovecraft podcast – “Meet Your Heroes”.

Steve Vertlieb talks about befriending Horror Writer and Protégé of Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, as well as meeting others he regards as his heroes.

(11) VIDEO OF THE DAY. How It Should Have Ended is there to record “Super Café – New Suit Jitters”.

Superman is a little anxious about his new suit and the reboot so Batman is offering him some pointers. Deadpool shows up with a little advice of his own.

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

Pixel Scroll 5/16/24 The First Thing We Do, Let’s Scroll All The Pixels

Posted on by
15

(1) THE SHARP END OF SCIENCE FICTION. At Reactor, James Davis Nicoll delivers a highly scientific “Ranking of Science Fiction’s Most Dangerous Awards”.

… Most awards are woefully unfit as weapons3. Authors with a mantlepiece loaded with award trophies would have few options if, say, they had to ward off an attacker with a handy trophy. But there are a few such options.

Before I list the top candidates for most lethal award trophy4, I should grant an honorable mention to the Edward E. Smith Memorial Award, also known as the Skylark Award. The trophy looks no more dangerous than any random trophy, likely to break as soon as you hit someone with it. However, the trophy is topped by a perfectly functional lens through which sunlight can and has focused to start fires. This is why Skylark Award winner Jane Yolen has advised winners to put the Skylark “where the sun does not shine.” If I were assembling a list of SF trophies most useful for arson, the Skylark would be at the top…

To paraphrase Richard Pryor, I know that when a winner is walking through an airline terminal with a pointy Hugo Award in their hand “people get out of your way.”

(Nicoll omitted the otherwise obvious number one choice, Reddit r/Fantasy’s Stabby, because they’ve been on hiatus since 2021. Fair enough.)

(2) FAN REACTION TO THE NEW DOCTOR. The New York Times tells what it’s like “Watching the New ‘Doctor Who’ With 5 Superfans” (Gift link bypasses paywall.)

…On a recent evening, Richard Unwin, a 44-year-old writer and actor, gathered four other “Doctor Who” fans at his apartment in East London to watch the first two episodes. They were a little nervous about what the Disney influence, and the need to cater to a new, international audience, might have done to their favorite program.

…“I am worried that they will Americanize it,” said George Norohna, a 61-year-old retired civil servant, who remembers the show as the first thing he ever saw on a color television. They were joined by the fantasy author Janelle McCurdy, 28, Francis Beveridge, a 27-year-old neuroscience researcher, and Beth Axford, 26, who writes for “Doctor Who Magazine,” a fan publication….

What does casting Gatwa as the Doctor mean to you?

MCCURDY I know there’s old school Doctor Who fans who might see it as just a token thing. But it means a lot to me as a Black woman.

UNWIN It’s the first time that the Doctor talks like I do, as a gay man.

MCCURDY I feel exactly the same, he’s talking like how I talk.

BEVERIDGE The Doctor has always appealed to gay men, because he’s a nonconventional male role model. So having the doctor be more queer has allowed people to identify that bit more closely with him.

(3) GONE IN SIXTY SECONDS. The trolls have found a new way to get at Patrick S. Tomlinson. He posted this on Facebook yesterday.

(4) HOW GREEN WAS YOUR BALLET. Entertainment Weekly enthuses that“The new ‘Wicked’ trailer has us dancing through life”.

…The trailer shows young outcast Elphaba (Erivo) and the ever-popular Glinda (Grande) arriving at Shiz University, where they immediately clash. But their rivalry cannot keep them apart because Headmistress Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) wastes no time in assigning them as roommates….

(5) HUGO BOOK CLUB BLOG HVP IN SCOTS. [Item by Olav Rokne.] Last year, we were one of several Hugo Award finalists who ensured that our Hugo Voter Packet materials were available in the local language out of respect for the fact that the Worldcon was being held in China. With the Worldcon being held in Glasgow in 2024, we started thinking about the fact that there are significant minority languages in Scotland, but that they don’t garner the same sort of respect from outsiders.

Having made a couple of (possibly ill-considered) jokes about the matter, Amanda and I reached out to experts in Scots languages and dialects to learn more. In the end, we decided that (although not strictly necessary), having our Hugo Voter Packet available in Scots would be an appropriate gesture in recognition of the country’s linguistic diversity and distinct cultural identity that is different than any of the other British nations. As of today, thanks to the Scots Language Centre, that translation is complete and is available on our blog. A PDF of this will be prepared and sent to the Worldcon. “Hugo Book Club Blog: Hugo Packet Translated (2024)”.

Note: Scots is one of three native languages spoken in Scotland, the other two being English and Scottish Gaelic.

Here’s a brief example of the Scots translation from the opening lines of “The Un-American wey that a Lee-Science Fan fae the Left wis haunelt” (English: “The Un-American Treatment of a Leftist Science Fiction Fan”.)

Chan Davis (1929-2022) wis weel kent tae fans o lee-science in the 1940s an 1950s. He wis a fanzine editor, an early filker, kent for his daffin at Worldcon, an a ongauin screivar wi Astounding Science Fiction.

But the publict in general is mair likely tae mind o him as a mathematician…an as a political presonar….

(6) HEARING FROM SAWYER. Science Fiction 101 podcast hosts Phil Nichols and Colin Kuskie present episode 42 “Off On A Tangent – more interview fun with award-winning novelist Robert J. Sawyer”.

Time for another regular episode of the podcast, and this time we have more interview goodness from the Hugo- and Nebula-winning SF writer Robert J. Sawyer. We had so much fun talking to Rob about his new novel The Downloaded (see episode 40) that we decided to gather up our more general discussion into a separate segment. So here you will hear talk of Planet of the Apes, science fiction conferences, and much much more.

We also have a mostly Star Trek quiz, but with a few Star Wars questions thrown in to trip Phil up.

And the usual recommendations of past/present/future SF.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born May 16, 1969 — David Boreanaz, 55. David Boreanaz is one of the performers that I really like as an individual as himself, and always as a character, though sometimes better in some series.  

Before I get to his genre roles, let me tell about about me about my favorite role by him. It’s  Master Chief Special Warfare Operator Jason Hayes in the SEAL Team series.  It’s a role that gives a depth of personality that mostly lacking in his previous role as Angel on his own series of Angel as he is executive producer here

David Boreanaz at GalaxyCon Austin 2023.

The series tells the story of a team of Navy operatives called Bravo that do covert missions overseas, many of which, if you pardon my slang, are SNAFUed. It got more realistically portrayed when the series moved off CBS to Paramount + and the language restrictions were gone, so fuck and such language were allowed. Their personal lives of course get messily intertwined with their professional ones. 

Speaking of Seeley Booth, let’s discuss Bones. I like the series as having seen all of it save the last season. Temperance Brennan and the other characters are mostly interesting, and her relationship with Seeley is fascinating. 

The show itself? It’s is pseudoscience-science. Like such series that shows lots pretty, impressive technology, it’s not really able to do what the writers say it can. Yes, I’ve read the actual forensic experts critique such series. That it crosses over into the fantasy of the Sleepy Hollow series makes it genre in some manner. Seeley Booth actually will be on that series for an episode. 

Now Seeley himself is great character. An FBI agent that is fun to watch and I think that Boreanaz early on figured out his character couldn’t be taken too seriously.  He looks like an archetypal agent FBI — tall, muscular and handsome. He’s even a deeply religious man here , as he was raised and still is a practicing Catholic. Philadelphia born, the sports teams show up in the series.  I like him at lot in this role as I do in the following series. 

And that is on Angel, and not Buffy on the Vampire Slayer, where I thought he was was interesting but didn’t live up to his full potential as character so I’m going to skip over him there. Why Angel, you say? Because that series, like SEAL Team, was centered on him. 

By the way, The “Smile Time” episode of the fifth season had the storyline of a television children’s show stealing the life forces of those children by hypnotizing them so when Angel goes to the studio to uncover the evil doings, he triggers a spell when entering there that transforms him into a puppet. 

So, the ever so cool puppet done at time I now realize I should’ve bought. The cheapest mint one on eBay, and I think the price is quite reasonable given the Angel series aired twenty years ago, is now one hundred and twenty-five dollars. 

But more than that and yes that was crucial to his development as a performer there, I thought the scripts there were far better than they were on Buffy. Oh. Buffy had its stellar storylines, but I think Angel just worked better in terms of pure ongoing storytelling than Buffy did. So that meant Angel there was a more rounded, interesting character there than he was on Buffy. 

Finally, though not chronologically, he voiced Hal Jordan in Justice League: The New Frontier. In an episode of Bones, “The Pain in the Heart”, Seeley is in his bathtub reading a Green Lantern comic.  Nice touch that was.

As always, this is not a full look at every genre role he did, so feel free to give me anything you feel I should have included here. 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • Lola finds the new king.

(9) SFF AUTHOR ON JEOPARDY! THIS MONTH. Ellen Klages will be on Jeopardy! on May 22 (and possibly subsequently) reports Steven H Silver.

(10) JEOPARDY! SFF REFERENCES. [By David Goldfarb.] Monday’s episode of Jeopardy! Masters and Tuesday’s episode of Jeopardy! had some more SFF-related questions. Here they are:

Jeopardy! 5/14/2024

Prequels & Sequels, $1600: Suzanne Collins tells the backstory of Coriolanus Snow in her 2020 “Hunger Games” prequel, “The Ballad of” these 2 animals

Ashley Atkin responded, “What are songbirds and snakes?”

Prequels & Sequels, $1200: A book with famous sequels begins, “In a hole in the ground, there lived” one of these

Ashley, “What is a hobbit?”

Prequels & Sequels, $2000: “The Infernal Devices” is a prequel trilogy to this Cassandra Clare series that includes “City of Bones” & “City of Ashes”

This was a triple stumper. The series is “The Mortal Instruments”.

Jeopardy! Masters 5/13/2024

Game 1, Double Jeopardy round:

Looking for Something to Read, $2000: Published in the 1880s, his utopian novel “Looking Backward” was set in the year 2000

Victoria Groce was up on her utopias, responding “Who’s Bellamy?”

Speaking My Language, $1200: This fictional language in “Game of Thrones” has more than a dozen different words for horse

James Holzhauer knew it was Dothraki.

Speaking My Language, $2000: “The Epic of Gilgamesh” was written in Akkadian, which supplanted this, considered the world’s oldest written language

This one went to Matt Amodio: “What’s Sumerian?”

Looking for Something to Read, $400: Chess, reverse imagery & the poem “Jabberwocky” appear in this sequel from the 1870s

Victoria got it: “What is ‘Through the Looking-Glass’?”

Game 2, Single Jeopardy round:

I’m Chris Pratt, $800: “I worked hard to lose 60 pounds to play Peter Quill, also known by this name, in ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’. The toughest part — brace yourselves — I quit drinking beer.”

Amy Schneider sounded uncertain or even incredulous: “What is…Star-Lord?” But this was correct.

Mais Oui, French Lit, $400: The narrator of this children’s book believes the title royal is from out of town…asteroid B-612, to be Precise

It went to Yogesh Raut: “What is ‘The Little Prince’?”

(11) HALL OF FAMER’S LATEST. Matt Hughes writes fantasy, space opera, crime, and historical fiction. He has sold 24 novels as well as 100 works of short fiction. He’s won the Endeavour and Arthur Ellis Awards, and has been inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association’s Hall of Fame

His new novel is The One:

Meet Luff Imbry, an insidiously clever thief, forger, and confidence man . . . He likes good wine, good food, and good stolen goods, and he always maintains the upper hand.

Luff Imbry returns from the weird planet Fulda, to which he was shanghaied by a mysterious enemy, only to find that an impostor has stolen from the strongroom at his private club collection of magical paraphernalia he acquired from a would-be thaumaturge.

That’s impossible, but Imbry has to deal with reality. He sets off on a quest to solve the mystery and recover his goods, bringing him into conflict with shadowy forces that are preparing for the great change, when the universe once again gives up on rationalism and embraces an age of magic.

The odds are against him, but Imbry is a great improvisor.

The book is available as a paperback or ebook from Amazon.com and Amazon.ca.

(12) EAT THE FORCE, LUKE. Gizmodo promises “Oreo’s Special Edition Star Wars Cookies Are Here to Feed Your Inner Wookiee”. (Oreo’s dedicated Star Wars webpage is at the link.)

…The fun catch? You won’t know which side you’ve got until you actually open the package. Each pack will feature one of two different color fillings: red for the dark side and blue for the light side—both infused with “kyber” sugar crystals inspired by lightsaber cores. The Oreos also feature heroes or villains embossed on the cookies themselves, with characters like Darth Vader, Darth Maul, and a stormtrooper representing the dark side, and Luke Skywalker, Yoda, and Princess Leia representing the light side. In total, there will be 20 iconic characters featured….

Greg Hildebrandt’s hand-painted pack art features 14 individual one-of-a-kind characters by the iconic Star Wars™ poster artist.

(13) INTEGRAL TREES? “Tree seeds that flew around the moon are now are being planted across the U.S.” – NPR is a witness.

In late 2022, a NASA flight around the moon carried a variety of tree seeds. After their time in space, they returned to Earth. And now, the hope is that they will become moon trees. Troy, Ala., is one of the first places to get one. Here’s Troy Public Radio’s Joey Hudson….

MCCARTHY: There was a very significant preparation process to make sure they were completely dry and that there would be no moisture or potential. They tried to protect the seeds as much as possible from any impacts related to heat.

HUDSON: The mission was a success. After about four weeks, the seeds returned to Earth and were tested for radiation levels and genetic variants. And then the seeds became seedlings to be planted in communities around the country, like here at Troy University….

(14) BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR. “After 250 hours, a Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom player lost an 82% complete save and declared ‘I’m free’ until he tragically realized he could get it back”. GamesRadar+ relays the pathos.

One The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom player suffered what seemed like the ultimate tragedy in losing a 250-hour, 82% complete save file. But it turns out there’s a fate even worse: getting that save file back.

Back on April 23, Brian ‘Brian_F’ Foster, a competitive fighting game player and commentator, revealed that he had beaten Tears of the Kingdom after 250 hours, having gotten all Shrines, all light roots, all Armor sets, all Sage’s Wills, and all Yiga schematics. But with six sidequests missing and the map only 77% completed, Brian_F decided to keep going for a 100% completion run.Tears of the Kingdom is an amazing, expansive game that’s an absolute joy to explore – up until the very moment you decide you want to 100% complete it. We’re talking about a feat that initially took speedrunners 139 hours – that’s over five days straight – to complete, and while Speedrun.com shows those runs are now down to ‘just’ one or two days, that’s still a good metric for you to judge just how arduous and menial going for full completion here can be….

(15) I THEME OF JEANNIE. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Not new, but only just discovered it: “Jeannie’s Diner” by Mark Jonathan Davis (1990) – Nick At Nite TV Promo from 1995.

I’m familiar with Mark Jonathan Davis from his great Star Wars parodies, including “The Phantom Medley, Bob Hope At The Mos Eisley” comedy routine (also a Johnny Carson one), and more.

(I’ve got the CD, and more recently found his “The Star Wars Cantina” parody of “Copacabana” (1997) which he wasn’t allowed to include on the CD).

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

Pixel Scroll 10/28/23 When You Saw Only One Set Of Pixels, It Was Then That I Scrolled You

Posted on by
25

(1) CHENGDU WORLDCON ROUNDUP. [Item by Ersatz Culture.]

Con reports: Arthur Liu (part 2)

Arthur’s con crud is subsiding, and he was able to post the second (of a projected four) part of his con report.  This one covers the setup ahead of the event.  Disclosure: I am also mentioned in this part.  Via Google Translate, with minor manual edits:

…in late September (around the 21st), the organizing committee terminated the sale of offline tickets without any notice. The financial problems of fan groups have already been mentioned in the previous article. Among them, members’ travel expenses and conference attendance expenses are equally expensive. Affected by this, as the situation at the booths has not progressed, members of the Tsinghua University Fantasy Association were still waiting and watching, planning to buy tickets after the situation settled down a bit. However, this unexpected situation caused almost all members who were expected to participate in the exhibition to be wiped out. After many inquiries, the volunteers said that there would be work permits, but the number could not guarantee that all people would be covered. This left the fan booth’s participation in the exhibition in a state of limbo until the end of the conference…

Man-made landscapes related to the science fiction conference are everywhere along the way. As I approached the venue, I saw the huge contrast in the street scenes in different areas of Pidu District (outside the main city, there are many open spaces and wastelands, new buildings and abandoned buildings), which also made me realize the importance of the science fiction conference. For the local government, the potential economic significance of hosting this conference is significant…

The security check area was crowded with people, and each gate had a large number of security guards. The inspection process was probably the most thorough in my life ever. Part of our luggage was examined, every page was taken out and checked. After delaying for a while, we arrived inside the venue.  The smell of air freshener was very strong and there was also a strong pungent smell…

After boarding the train, [con liaison] L said that a special car had been arranged to pick us up, but it was no longer needed. On the way, I learned from [con liaison] LY that when the pen club I applied for was handed over within the volunteers, the demand for personnel control (15 people) was not handed over. Now there was no guarantee that this demand would be met, but she promised to report it to the above… By this time, both of us were exhausted and had reached the limit of emotional management.

At 19:03, we finally arrived at Wyndham, and [con liaison] L met us in the lobby. Before checking in, we went to the check-in office to get our guest badges, and then we were told that the conference manual had not been produced yet, nor had the attendant badges. Historically, some science fiction fans will start from a certain point and feel that the entire community is not worthy and is no longer worth bothering with. This was probably that moment for me. In the guest room, I got very angry with [con liaison] L – actually it was not his own fault, so I apologized to him – and explained several requirements: the member’s ID, as well as the participation manual and traffic control map, the next day.  Given that the con was about to begin, the last two were necessities for participating in the con. They had to exist.

In the second image, the data visualization shown on the TV on the right can be found here (note; the UI is Chinese only).

Request for submissions to Zero Gravity

RiverFlow is requesting submissions for a future issue of the Hugo-winning Zero Gravity.

Dear friends, if you write about the memories of the Chengdu WorldCon, welcome to send me the English version and pictures. Chinese Fanzine Zero Gravity newspaper is organizing the Chengdu WorldCon story, we will organize human translation.

The email is: [email protected]

CCTV news report on the Worldcon

I doubt many will sit all the way through this untranslated 21 minute CCTV news item from Monday 23rd about the Worldcon, but I include it just in case.  Notable faces in the early part of the video include (in order of first appearance):

  • RiverFlow and Ling Shizhen
  • Ben Yalow
  • Cixin Liu
  • Enzhe Zhao
  • Hai Ya

Later on, from around 16:00, we also see:

  • Liang Xiaolan (Honorary Co-Chair of the con)
  • Dave McCarty

The core of the piece is a videolink interview with Best Novelette winner Hai Ya from around 04:00 to 12:45.

There’s then more a bit more reportage of the con – mostly the ceremonies – followed by coverage of the Galaxy Award ceremony that took place over in the Sheraton, before going back to the con.

From 16:30 there’s a telephone interview with (Hugo finalist, SF World editor, concom member) Yao Haijun, during which Nicholas Whyte pops up (again 😉 in footage at around 19:23, followed shortly thereafter by James Bryant.

Hai Ya
Liang Xiaolan
Yao Haijun

Hai Ya responds to criticism of his work following his Hugo win

SF Light Year posted a brief Q&A with Hai Ya on Wednesday 25th, following the negative reaction in some quarters to his Hugo win, as covered in Tuesday’s Scroll.  Here’s an extract, via Google Translate:

My current mentality is very stable and I have a clear understanding of the award and myself. As for the work, I never thought it was very elegant or something that people expected of me. I could only present what I thought was a better state within the scope of my abilities. Let the readers judge. There will definitely be criticism and harshness. It is actually difficult to define how much of this is objective, but popular novels must accept this unfair scrutiny, and I have the consciousness to accept it.

Compared with the position of a writer, I prefer to define myself as a science fiction fan. I agree with some of your ideas. The science fiction circle should be more diverse. The increase in science fiction fan activities and comments is a sign that the ecosystem is getting healthier

A couple of days later, on Thursday 26th, Hai Ya made a brief statement on Weibo.  Via Google Translate (which seems to be slightly more readable than the Alibaba Cloud rendition available within Weibo, but still far from flawless):

After nearly a week of busy work, things are gradually sorting out, thank God. What I want to express has basically been made clear. I am personally neither qualified nor interested in doing too much value output. Writing science fiction has always been a very personal matter for me, and I have become more and more cautious about various activities and invitations, leaving them to the editor. Happily, despite all the criticism, there were few personal attacks. Friends who care about me, please rest assured. As the saying goes, if you want to wear a crown, you must bear its weight. What I got is not a crown, and the pressure I receive is not that great. Currently I’m in good condition.

There’s at least one hater in the comments.

Weibo SF promo image

(Via SF Light Year)  The Weibo app had a splash page at launch promoting “The New Power of Science Fiction”, showing the avatars of the three Chinese Hugo winners, and namechecking the Hugos and Hai Ya’s Best Novelette win.  A further post shows the page shown if you clicked on the button, you would get a list of notable SF people’s accounts, including previous Hugo winner Hao Jingfang, and some of this year’s finalists Bo Jiang, Regina Kanyu Wang, Lu Ban and Yao Haijun.

Linking to the same list, RiverFlow reported that his number of followers had jumped from around 1,100 to 38 thousand.

Bits and pieces from Xiaohongshu

The following are a handful of posts that I’d never gotten round to submitting before now.

(2) A SNAPSHOT FROM WFC. Greg Ketter of DreamHaven Books and Comics feels disrespected. For good reason.

(3) AGGRESSIVE FAKES. Victoria Strauss exposes the “Imposter Syndrome: The Rise of Impersonation Scams” at Writer Unboxed.

…When I first started discovering these AS knockoffs (here’s my first blog post about them), they were mostly just selling Author Solutions-style publishing and marketing packages–although exponentially more overpriced and deceptively advertised than the original, with terrible customer service and the books and other products far more likely to be of poor quality (and that’s when they didn’t just take the money and run).

In recent years, though, their numbers have exploded—there are hundreds of AS knockoffs in operation now, and more cropping up all the time—creating fierce competition for customers in an increasingly crowded field. This has driven them to adopt ever more brazen practices to support their quest for writers’ cash: forging documents and contracts from Big 5 publishers, selling completely fictional products such as “book insurance”, engaging in elaborate front operations involving multiple fake businesses, and impersonating reputable literary agents, publishers, and movie companies.

Impersonation scams especially have become common over the past couple of years, and they can be quite convincing. In this post, you’ll find examples of the three types of impersonation scam you’re most likely to encounter, along with a look at the telltale signs that can identify them….

(4) INTERVIEW WITH CHANDLER DAVIS BIOGRAPHER. [Item by Olav Rokne.] I’m really hoping this book gets some serious consideration for the Best Related Hugo. Very well written, thoroughly researched. Doesn’t focus very much on the science fiction career of Chandler Davis, but he’s still a figure from the genre’s past, and it’s an interesting and relevant read. 

Got to interview the author Steve Batterson: “The Un-American Treatment of a Leftist Science Fiction Fan” at the Hugo Book Club Blog.

… The book starts off with a fairly straightforward biography of Davis’ early life. His childhood as the son of leftist academics who were members of the Communist Party, his education at Harvard and involvement with science fiction fandom, his military service and his marriage to Natalie Zemon-Davis. All of this is in service of the focus of the book: Davis’ brief stint at the University of Michigan, his firing, and the six-year legal saga that led to his imprisonment.

“It was incredibly courageous what Chandler did,” Batterson explains. “He was 27 or 28 years old when this all started. He had a wife and one child at the time – with another on the way. His wife was a graduate student, and it wasn’t clear at the time that she would go on to become one of the greatest historians of her generation.”

During the period after his firing, the Davis family faced economic hard times. When friends and colleagues took up a donation for them, the FBI ended up with a list of who donated; sadly it appears few in the science fiction community stood by their former compatriot.

“There’s not a lot of mention of science fiction or fandom in the FBI documents,” Batterson notes. “The FBI didn’t consider that to be disreputable.”

After he was released from serving his six-month prison sentence in 1960, the family emigrated to Canada where both Davis and his wife became professors at the University of Toronto. He rejoined fandom there, and published a handful of later stories. In 1989, he was one of the guests at the 47th Worldcon held in Boston. Both he and his wife had distinguished academic careers….

(5) FOR EXPOSURE. Jane L. Rosen reports on “A Night of Reading, Cover to Uncover” to the New York Times. “The author of ‘On Fire Island’ wasn’t sure what to expect when she was invited to appear at a ‘Books & Burlesque’ event. Here’s her unblushing report.”

Early in the summer, an unusual email popped up in my inbox. Sandwiched between a podcast request and an offer to speak at a South Florida chapter of Hadassah was an invitation to read an excerpt from my latest novel, “On Fire Island,” at a “Books & Burlesque” evening on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The event, as the show’s producers Fortune Cookie and Rosie Tulips explained, would feature five writers reading, each paired with a burlesque or drag artist creating an act inspired by the author’s work.

It took me a minute. Funny? Outrageous? Ill-advised? Possibly, but most of all, an intriguing change from the usual folding-chair-strewn book talk or stodgy Q. and A session. Even though the closest I’d ever gotten to burlesque was a brief stint as a young Gypsy Rose Lee at Camp Lokanda in the late ’70s, I nervously accepted….

(6) IF YOU THOUGHT GETTING MARRIED WAS SCARY BEFORE… The New York Times tells about couples “Vowing Till Death Do Us Part at the Hotel That Inspired ‘The Shining’”.

Couples who get married in October at the Stanley Hotel, situated at the doorstep of the Rocky Mountains in Estes Park, Colo., sometimes have a hard time getting their guests to R.S.V.P.

Lauren Nichols and Jeffrey Sheffler, who will marry there Oct. 28, couldn’t convince a dozen of their out-of-town guests to stay on the premises of the hotel that inspired Stephen King to write “The Shining,” his novel turned film, after staying there in 1974. And Melanie Pingel, who married Kyle Johnson there Oct. 13, was compelled to reserve a quiet space on a separate floor for guests who needed a moment away from the ghostly festivities. “My mom called it the place where the old ladies get to go have a break from it all,” she said.

These and other concessions — Jennie Wilson, a 2017 Stanley bride, was told by a guest “straight up that she wouldn’t come” — are perhaps a necessary trade-off for couples who want to exchange vows at what many call “The Shining” hotel….

Only a handful of couples who plan well in advance are greenlit for their October celebrations, said John Cullen, the Stanley’s owner. Those who do snag a spot between Oct. 1 and Halloween, the hotel’s busiest season, tend to share a common aesthetic: bridal fangs and cakes with Frankenstein-like surgical stitching can be part of it. Flower girls dressed as the sinister, not-quite-living Grady twins from the 1980 horror classic, or table décor that includes jars of pig hearts preserved in formaldehyde, can also be used.

The spookiness of the place is the allure for many couples, said Shayna Papke, a popular local planner for Halloween season weddings at the Stanley. “A wedding is the ultimate expression of who you are, and there are just people in the world who, this is who they are,” she said. “They’re the outliers who like dark music and dark stories. They’re fascinated by the death part of life.”

Many who fit that description flock to the Stanley for a ghost tour led by the hotel’s staff or to participate in a séance (More than 100,000 people visit per year; October is busy also because elk walk the streets and it’s “a really nice time to be in Estes Park,” Mr. Cullen said.) Still others consider it the ultimate location for committing to each other….

(7) RICHARD MOLL (1943-2023) [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Though possibly best known for his role as Bull the bailiff in the original run of Night Court, Richard Moll did an amazing amount of genre work over a long career. This includes a lot of voice work in animation and video games (see dozens of credits at IMDb.) One of his notable later appearances was in the 2010 live-action film Scooby-Doo: Curse of the Lake Monster in which he played the mysterious lighthouse keeper Elmer Uggins. Full profile: “Richard Moll, Bull the Bailiff on ‘Night Court,’ Dies at 80” in The Hollywood Reporter.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born October 28, 1944 — Ian Don Marter. He was known for his role as Harry Sullivan on Doctor Who. As this is a Birthday listing of writers of authors, you might ask why he’s here. That’s because he’s one of the few Who actors authorized to write fiction in that universe in that time. As a result, he wrote nine novels before he died of a diabetic heart attack. He co-wrote in collaboration with Baker and director James Hill a script for a film provisionally titled Doctor Who Meets Scratchman (also known as Doctor Who and the Big Game). However due to a lack of funding as no one was interested in underwriting it , the project was ultimately abandoned. Bake and Hill novelized this script and there’s a Big Finish version as well. (Died 1986.)
  • Born October 28, 1951 — Joe Lansdale, 72. Writer and screenwriter whose animated DCU Jonah Hex is far superior to the live action Hex film. Bubba Ho-Tep, an American comedy horror film starring Bruce Campbell, is his best-known genre work though he has done a number of another works including The God of The Razor and Reverend Jedidiah Mercer series which are definitely Weird Westerns. 
  • Born October 28, 1951 — William H. Patterson, Jr.. Author of Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, a two-volume look at Heinlein which arguably is the best biography ever done on him. He also did The Martian Named Smith: Critical Perspectives on Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. This “Tribute to Bill Patterson” by Mike with comments by Filers is touching indeed.  (Died 2014.)
  • Born October 28, 1957 — Catherine Fisher, 66. Welsh poet and children’s novelist who writes in English. I’d suggest The Book of The Crow series of which Corbenic won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature. Her Incarceron and Sapphique also earned a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature nomination. 
  • Born October 28, 1958 — Kristin Landon. Author of the uncompleted space opera Hidden Worlds (The Hidden Worlds, The Cold Minds and The Dark Reaches) and a one-off, Windhome, a first contact story. (Died 2019.)
  • Born October 28, 1958 — Amy Thomson, 65. Writer of four novels, including Virtual Girl. She won the Astounding Award for Best New Writer and was nominated for the Campbell Memorial, Endeavour, Philip Dick and Prometheus Awards. Very impressive indeed. Her short fiction “The Ransom of Princess Starshine” appeared in 2017 in Stupefying Stories, edited by Bruce Bethke. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Argyle Sweater shows a monster who you don’t ordinarily think of as moving that fast.
  • Thatababy introduces us to Konbanwa in a strip devoted to cinema history.
  • Jess Bradley says this is what the Singularity will really be like.
  • Finding Dee shows us true horror.

(10) SHOT ON LOCATION IN HALLOWEEN TOWN. “‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’: A Hit That Initially Unnerved Disney” – Tim Burton and director Henry Selick look back 30 years at the making of a cult favorite.  

…Over the course of its original run, “Nightmare” grossed $50 million at the domestic box office. And while that number is by no means dismal, it’s a far cry from Disney animated hits like “Aladdin,” which just a year earlier brought in $217 million from U.S. screens alone.

At the time, Disney couldn’t figure out how to market the operatic saga of Jack, a lanky, sharply dressed skeleton, infatuated with bringing the wonder of Christmas to his monstrous friends in uncanny Halloween Town.

Selick initially worried that the number of songs Danny Elfman had composed for the movie, a total of 10 tracks for the brisk 76-minute run time, would alienate viewers. In retrospect, he said, the memorable tunes were crucial to the film’s eventual success, once audiences connected with its unconventional rules of storytelling and design.

These days Selick can’t go a week without running into a fan wearing a sweater, hat or other apparel emblazoned with “Nightmare” imagery.

“This year there’s a 13-foot-tall Jack Skellington you can buy at Home Depot, and people have them on their lawns,” Selick said. “I like that because it’s pretty bizarre and extreme. That’s not just a T-shirt, that’s a real commitment.”

For Burton, the character of Jack Skellington embodies a preoccupation common in his work over the years: the terrifying notion of being misunderstood. “The conception of it was based on those feelings growing up of people perceiving you as something dark or weird when actually you’re not,” he recalled.

Selick compared the skeletal antihero’s amusingly manic behavior to Mr. Toad from the animated classic “The Wind in the Willows,” one of his favorite Disney protagonists. “I’ve always been drawn to characters like Jack Skellington,” Selick said. “He gets carried away with something new and goes way overboard with his enthusiasm.”…

(11) HERZOG Q&A. While promoting his memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All, Werner Herzog tells the Guardian: “’I am not that much in pursuit of happiness’: Werner Herzog on beer, yoga and what he would ask God”.

…So, this new book he’s just written about the Austrian musician-cum-dairy-farmer combines two of Herzog’s passions then? “Neither is milking cows a great love of mine nor is rocking so…” he replies with an amused smirk. “But I understand. I catch your drift.”

Herzog is probably best known for his documentary films, which include 2005’s Grizzly Man, the tale of bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell in Alaska, and Cave of Forgotten Dreams, made in 3D in 2010 from footage shot inside the prehistoric Chauvet Cave in southern France. Increasingly, though, Herzog devotes his creative energies to writing. In 2021, he published his first novel, The Twilight World, based on the Japanese army lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, who refused to believe the second world war was over and only emerged from the jungle and surrendered in 1974.

“I’ve been a writer from the very beginning,” he says. “And it’s important to say one thing because people are puzzled: films are my voyage, and writing is home. And since 40 years, I keep preaching to deaf ears that my writing will arguably outlive my films, all of them.”

Certainly, Every Man for Himself and God Against All is a joyous, fulfilling read….

(12) BRADBURY HISTORY. Phil Nichols’ new Bradbury 100 podcast episode covers “Chronological Bradbury, 1940”.

…Ray published nine stories in 1940, nearly all of them in fanzines (and one of them in a semi-prozine). Here’s a list, with links to online versions of the stories, where they exist….

(13) ORSON WELLES PROFILE. Steve Vertlieb invites you to read his post “Vertlieb’s Views: Xanadu: A Castle in the Clouds: The Life of Orson Welles” at The Thunder Child.

Celebrating the genius of this extraordinary artist with my published look at the turbulent life and career of Orson Welles, the fabulous, visionary film maker whose personal demons sadly overshadowed his staggering talent, and finally, tragically destroyed him.

Yet, in spite of his personal failings or, perhaps, because of them, Welles rose to become one of the most remarkable film makers of his, or any other generation.

From his groundbreaking first feature length motion picture Citizen Kane, regarded by many still as the greatest single film in motion picture history, to Touch Of Evil, his remarkable “Cinema Noir” tale of a squandered life and legacy corrupted by bribery and temptation, Welles remains one of the most extraordinary directors in the history of film.

His is a story of unwitting sabotaged achievement and haunting, incomparable genius.

Here, then, is “Xanadu: A Castle In Clouds … The Life of Orson Welles.”

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Ersatz Culture, Mlex, Olav Rokne, Kathy Sullivan, Lise Andreasen, Steve Vertlieb, Steve French, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Matthew Johnson.]

Pixel Scroll 10/13/23 The NP-Complete Enchanter

Posted on by
18

(1) HWA 2023 OFFICER AND TRUSTEE ELECTION RESULTS. The Horror Writers Association (HWA) held its annual election in September. The offices of Vice President and Treasurer ran unopposed. 

HWA’s new Vice President is Lisa Wood, and their new Treasurer is Michael Knost.

Lisa Kröger, Brian Matthews, and Angela Yuriko Smith were re-elected as Trustees; Brian Keene is a newly-elected Trustee.

The elected officers hold their respective offices for terms of two years, beginning on October 31 at midnight. (It’s HWA – what other date would they choose than Halloween?)

(2) INTERZONE GOES ON HIATUS. Gareth Jelley, Editor & Publisher of Interzone and IZ Digital, today sent readers an announcement that Interzone will be suspending publication for a period.

Unfortunately, Interzone is going to be on a (hopefully temporary) hiatus for the next few months. I do not know when I will be able to publish Interzone #296.

I have seen some resubscriptions come in, but the vast majority of subscriptions that lapsed with IZ 294 and IZ 295 have not been renewed, yet. I am optimistic in the long-term, and I intend to get Interzone to #300 and beyond. I am optimistic about the future of IZ. But at the moment, looking at the numbers, it simply isn’t possible for me to say when the next 5 to 10 issues will be published.

Many people made huge contributions in July this year, and these contributions helped to get Interzone #295 out into the world. Thank you for that help. The enthusiasm and passion for Interzone I saw then was staggering. Thank you very much, to each and every subscriber.

Interzone #296 will come out, and it will be a brilliant issue. And I hope that Interzones #297, #298, #299, and #300 will follow at roughly two-month intervals. As soon as I have a date for IZ 296, I will let you know.

If you would like to make a one-off donation to Interzone, the IZ Digital Ko-fi is here:

– https://ko-fi.com/izd

You can renew or extend your subscription, or convert your lifetime subscription to a regular subscription) here:

– https://interzone.press

(3) BIGGEST SCANDINAVIAN BOOK FAIR TO SPACE IN 2024. [Item by Ahrvid Engholm.] The yearly Gothenburg book fair is the biggest in Scandinavia and a major one in Europe. Every year has a theme, and in 2024 the fair goes into space! Having space as theme will surely give science fiction a lot of attention. (Most books dealing with space are undoubtedly sf.) Next year’s fair run from September 26-29, 2024. The site is what is called the Swedish Exhibition & Congress Centre.

Secondary 2024 theme is Sapmi. That is the northernmost part of Scandinavia with roaming reindeer herders, known as Sami, who call the land Sapmi.

As if they were anticipating this the cultural section of the major newspaper Aftonbladet just published a “literary manifesto” of interest. Through Google Translate: “Now we are changing our way of monitoring the literature”.

Even if the manifesto wasn’t exactly an A-bomb, it hit culture defense lines like a heavy mortar shell. Competing papers and even TV pundits exploded in comments against the manifesto’s message about reviewing more of what people actually read. It mentions science fiction several times. The critics who are not amused peek over the trenches in fear, as the bunker complexes of the traditional highbrow authors now are threatened. One critic even threw away his arms and retreated from Aftonbadet in protest. This saber-rattling adds an extra spice to the 2024 book fair.

There’s also a natural connection between space and Sapmi. The Swedish Space Corporation has upgraded the launch pads — used for sounding rockets, so far — of the Esrange research base for satellite launches. Esrange is in northern Lapland, a part of Sapmi. It may be the first satellite launch from European soil, not counting Russia. Esrange Space Center, Swedish Space Corporation. The first Sapmi sputniks are expected next year, probably well ahead of the book fair.

There’s a lot happening around space right now! Even the cultural sphere enters orbit.

(4) RUBY SLIPPERS. AP News says the person who stole the ruby slippers changed his plea to guilty today: “Man admits stealing ‘Wizard of Oz’ ruby slippers from museum in 2005, but details remain a mystery”.

A man charged in the museum heist of a pair of ruby slippers that Judy Garland wore in the “The Wizard of Oz” pleaded guilty Friday in a deal that could keep him out of prison due to his failing health, but only cleared up some of the mystery that dates back 18 years.

Terry Jon Martin, 76, pleaded guilty to a single count of theft of a major artwork. The shoes were stolen in 2005 from the Judy Garland Museum in the late actor’s hometown of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, and recovered by the FBI in 2018….

…“Terry has no idea where they were and how they were recovered,” Martin’s attorney, Dane DeKrey, said afterward. “His involvement was that two-day period in 2005.”

Under the plea agreement, DeKrey and federal prosecutor Matt Greenley recommended that Martin not face any time behind bars because of his age and poor health. Martin, who appeared in court in a wheelchair with supplemental oxygen, has advanced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and struggles to breathe, DeKrey said. The proposed sentence would let Martin die at home, the attorney said….

(5) SANDWORM TEMPO. [Item by Rob Thornton.] Pitchfork did an interview-type article with Toto about doing the soundtrack for Lynch’s adaptation of Dune.

… With A Masterpiece in Disarray, [Max] Evry reevaluates the movie by telling its full story with the help of those who were there, including stars Kyle MacLachlan and Sean Young, and even Lynch himself. Every aspect of Dune is put under the microscope, including its surprisingly quiet and moody score courtesy of the 1980s rock band Toto, best known for their No. 1 hit “Africa.” In the following excerpt, members of Toto recount their experience working with Lynch, Brian Eno’s involvement in the soundtrack, and why they maybe should have just written a song for Footloose instead….

David Paich: I was able to play my main theme for David Lynch. They loved it and hired us on the spot. He had a Walkman, and put this set of phones on me and said, “Tell me if you can make this kind of music for my movie?” He put on two Shostakovich symphonies. He made me listen and said: “I want this music low, and I want it slow.” I thought, Well, I can handle that. This isn’t Star Wars. He’s making the anti-Star Wars movie. He wanted me to avoid anything that’s uplifting, that’s happy, that’s joyous, that’s compelling. He hates popular movies that make people come and eat popcorn and stuff. Super-nice guy, though. He wanted it low and slow….

(6) CHENGDU WORLDCON ROUNDUP. [Item by Ersatz Culture.]

Worldcon train launch, and photos of stations and travel card

The Weibo account of the Chengdu train system has posted several Worldcon-related updates.

A couple of videos and photo galleries showing the local area

In this 4-minute Bilibili video, a local from another district of Chengdu has a walk around the main road to (I think) the south of the con venue.  Amongst other things, you can see Worldcon signage on the block across the road (0’27”) and the school that was mentioned in yesterday’s Scroll (3’00”).  From around 2’40” you can get a feel for the distance between the museum and the Sheraton hotel.

Urban blogger skyxiang1991 posted a new set of photos to Weibo, showing the construction of a sculpture across the lake from the museum.  The post’s text says they have a Three-Body Problem theme; I think they refer to (vague spoilers) something that happens in The Dark Forest, the second book?

This Xiaohongshu video opens with a different view of the topiary that was in a recent Scroll; there seems to be a clock incorporated into the design.  It then moves on to various footage of the interior of the museum.

Miscellaneous videos

Ben Yalow and Carolina Gomez Lagerlof visit the Hua’ai school (video subtitled in English and Chinese)

A six-and-a-half-minute unboxing and taste-test video on Bilibili of the SF World bean paste box-set tie-in that was featured in a Scroll a week or two ago.

(7) CHANGE-UPS. Amal El-Mohtar reviews three new books by Malon Edwards, Melinda Taub and Karen Lord for the New York Times: “P.O.V.: You’re a Jane Austen Character in an Alternate Universe”.

The point-of-view meme has had a steady presence in our social media landscape over the past few years. You’ve probably scrolled past posts that read “P.O.V.: You’re [a specific character doing something wacky],” accompanied by images or videos that supposedly capture said perspective. P.O.V.: You’re a spotted lanternfly sunbathing. (Close-up of shoe tread.) P.O.V.: It’s 1996 and you’re trying to teach kids about irony when Alanis Morissette drops a new single. (Video of cartoon heads exploding.)

In fiction, of course, tinkering with point of view has a long history, as different narration styles have gone in and out of fashion. Here are some recent books where perspective is a site of experiment, subversion and play….

(8) OCTOBER COUNTRY. Meanwhile, Lisa Tuttle reviews Out There Screaming edited by Jordan Peele; A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand; Lamb by Matt Hill; and My Brother’s Keeper by Tim Powers for the Guardian: “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup”.

“I view horror as catharsis through entertainment,” says writer-director Peele (Nope, Get Out) in the foreword to this impressive American anthology. The 19 contributing Black authors offer a wide range of literary nightmares, varying in subject from the horrors of slavery and segregation to ancient evil spirits and newly minted monsters…. 

(9) GREG CRONAU DIES. Past ConFusion ConChair Greg Cronau has passed away. Michael McDowell reported on Facebook:

Greg’s mother called me this afternoon to tell me that Greg passed away last weekend in hospital near his home in Irwin, Pennsylvania. He’d been hospitalized for less than a week, but had been ill much longer. The cause of death was complications from an unchecked bone infection.

(10) TIM UNDERWOOD (1948-2023). Publisher Tim Underwood died October 11 from malignant melanoma. Underwood, then a book and art dealer, and used book dealer Chuck Miller, founded the Underwood–Miller small press in 1976. They published works by Jack Vance, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg and Roger Zelazny. In several such cases, the books in question printed recently done stories that either appeared only in magazine form or only in paperback, with no previous hardcover edition. They dissolved the partnership in 1994. That same year Underwood-Miller received a World Fantasy Special Award.

Tim Underwood

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born October 13, 1906 — Joseph Samachson. In 1955, he co-created with artist Joe Certa the Martian Manhunter in the pages of Detective Comics #225. Earlier he penned a couple of Captain Future pulp novels around 1940 under a house name. (House names often blur who did what.) He also wrote scripts for Captain Video and His Video Rangers, a late Forties to mid Fifties series. (Died 1980.)
  • Born October 13, 1923 — Meyer Dolinsky.  He wrote the script for Star Trek’s “Plato’s Children” plus for Mission: Impossible, Science Fiction Theater, World of Giants (which I never heard of), Men into Space, Invaders, Mission: Impossible and The Outer Limits. (Died 1984.)
  • Born October 13, 1936 — Robert Ingpen, 87. Australian graphic designer, illustrator, and writer. Winner of the Ditmar Award for the charmingly named Australian Gnomes. His other work in that series was The Poppykettle Papers with Michael Lawrence.
  • Born October 13, 1956 — Chris Carter, 67. Best known for the X-Files and Millennium which I think is far better than X-Files was, but also responsible for Harsh Realm which lasted three episodes before being cancelled. The Lone Gunmen which was a good concept poorly executed managed to last thirteen episodes before poor ratings made them bite the bullet. He retired from doing anything creative after The X-Files: I Want to Believe.
  • Born October 13, 1969 — Aaron Rosenberg, 54. Children’s books author and games designer according to Siri. He’s written novels for Star Trek, StarCraft, Warcraft, Exalted, Stargate Atlantis, and Warhammer, as well as other franchises. He’s even written a novel set In the Eureka ‘verse, Eureka: Roads Less Traveled, under the house name of Cris Ramsay. The Eureka novels sound fascinating. 

(12) COMICS SECTION.

  • Mostly Harmless prompts Lise Andreasen to question: “This shows a universal problem? Do we have to change Drake’s equation now?”
  • Bizarro uses ancient art to make a horrible modern pun.
  • Bliss shows what can happen when you least expect it.

(13) THE PROTO-PRO. At Bradbury 100, Phil Nichols looks at an early year of the author’s career: “Chronological Bradbury, 1939”.

Here’s a new episode of my Bradbury 100 podcast – and it’s another in my occasional series, “Chronological Bradbury”. Last time I covered 1938, so this time it’s onward to 1939.

1939 finds Ray Bradbury writing under a variety of names:

(14) NBA SUBSTITUTION. “LeVar Burton replaces Drew Barrymore as National Book Awards host” NPR explains why.

Actor, podcaster, and reading advocate LeVar Burton will be the host of this year’s National Book Awards ceremony.

In a statement Friday, Burton, who also hosted the ceremony in 2019, said, “It’s an honor to return as host of the biggest night for books, especially in a moment when the freedom to read is at risk.”

Drew Barrymore was originally slated to host the awards show – commonly referred to as the Academy Awards for literature. That offer was rescinded by the National Book Foundation after she announced she’d return to doing her talk show during the Writers Guild of America’s strike. She eventually reversed that position after strike supporters picketed her show, but not before losing out on the hosting job….

(15) THEY SNAPPED. “‘Goosebumps’ Is Back on TV. Here’s What to Know” says the New York Times.

“Say cheese!” a boy shouts in the first episode of “Goosebumps,” a new series on Disney+ and Hulu, jumping out of a closet as he snaps a Polaroid photo of his friend’s startled face.

The image is familiar to anyone who has read — or just seen the cover — of “Say Cheese and Die!,” one of the most beloved of R.L. Stine’s “Goosebumps” books. The best-selling children’s horror book series, first published in 1992 and still regularly rolling out, follows the adventures of tweens and teens who find themselves in supernatural circumstances.

But now there are a few differences: Unlike in the novels, in which almost every single essential character is white, the boy is Black. The characters are in high school, not middle school. The series is set in the present, not the 1990s. (There’s a “Hamilton” reference in the pilot.)

“We want to make sure the show appeals to the widest audience possible,” said Rob Letterman, who directed the 2015 “Goosebumps” film and created the new show with Nicholas Stoller. (They previously collaborated on the film adaptation of “Captain Underpants.”) The first half of the new 10-episode series premieres, appropriately, on Friday the 13th. (New episodes will arrive every Friday through Nov. 17.)

The first season is based largely on five of the books, including “Say Cheese and Die!”Scholastic Inc….

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Rob Thornton, Arnie Fenner, Kathy Sullivan, Ahrvid Engholm, Lise Andreasen, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Ersatz Culture, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 8/28/23 It Was Scrolling Hard In Pixel, I Needed One More File To Make My Night

Posted on by
42

(1) WE’LL BE GONE FOR YEARS AND YEARS AND THEN. Cass Morris tells what it was like aboard Disney’s Halcyon Starcruiser in “Together As One”, first in a series of posts where she’ll capture full details of this Star Wars immersive experience. And joining her vicariously will be your best opportunity because the attraction will close at the end of September.

… And there was just… there was so much. Especially on Day 2. Noah and I spent four hours in Batuu, and almost all of that time was completing missions. We were running around all over the Outpost. And then once back on the Halcyon, we had a little breather (and much-needed time to clean up, considering the effect that Batuu’s balmy climate has) followed by lightsaber training, but from 3:30 onward? It was just go-go-go. Of the four major paths available, I ended up on three of them. (Or, at least, pieces of each — there are sort of sub-tracks to at least the Resistance path, with different characters and objectives). My schedule was bonkers. I think I had seven alarms set on the evening of Day 2 to make sure I moved when I needed to.

If you’re willing to go hard, it pays off. You absolutely cannot do everything — many things are mutually exclusive just due to scheduling. But you can do a lot if you’ve got the energy, the focus, the time management skill, and the willingness to dash up and down a few flights of stairs many times.

Anyone who was inclined to mock the price tag has no idea just how much goes into creating something like this — both creating it in the first place and then running it on a daily basis. I have some idea, but the work I do is on such a smaller scale, to say nothing of a smaller budget. But I know how many documents it takes to get the story set, to plan the props and scenic elements, to train the performers for something that’s really just a couple of hours of “on” time, without the complex branching trees the Starcruiser has. To do something for a 45-hour long experience, with so many variables… it would have to be utterly gargantuan….

(2) WHERE’D IT GO? For the record, David A. Riley has deleted from his blog the two posts discussing the sale of his novelette to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. News of the magazine’s decision not to publish it is at the link.

(3) ABOUT BRADBURY. Issue 7 of The New Ray Bradbury Review is out, the first completely online, open access issue. Editor Phil Nichols tells what readers can expect in times to come.

…As we enter this new phase of the The New Ray Bradbury Review, we hope to explore the four  cornerstones  of  Bradbury’s  life  and  work  which  have  informed  the Bradbury  Center’s mission.  The  first  of  these,  underpinning  many  of  the  articles in  this  current  issue,  is the advancement of literacy, a cause which seems ever more timely in 2023, where we see the states of  Florida  and Texas enacting  policies  which restrict readers’ access—and especially young learners’ access—to  diverse  voices. The  Ray  Bradbury  Center’s  home  state  of  Indiana  is regrettably heading along a similar path, while there is a glimmer of light in the darkness in Illinois, which has legislated to ban book bans. The other three cornerstones of Bradbury’s life and work will be explored in future issues of NRBR: freedom of imagination and First Amendment rights; advocacy for space exploration; and the preservation of libraries…

(4) WORKAROUNDS. Joe Yao of the Chengdu Worldcon committee responded to concerns from those having difficulty logging into the website to purchase memberships, or vote for the Hugos and 2025 Site Selection. This is a diagnosis of one individual’s problem, but includes much general information.

…The credential message was sent by Tencent Cloud, which I believe is one of the leading IT companies with the most advanced technologies in China. However, there are still some of the email systems recognize it as spam. I have checked the back-end records trying to figure out this issue, and here is some information I would like to share with you.

There are 1,084 requests for credential emails since we opened the Site Selection and the Hugo Packet, not all of them were logging in for the purpose of voting but for other membership purchases, including the Chinese members to buy admissions. And 1,057 of the requests arrived at the email addresses successfully, in other words, the receiving rate is about 97.5%. Most of the emails that failed to arrive were BLOCKED by the receivers, which we have no way to help from my side and I believe it happens not only to Chengdu Worldcon.

The way I can help is suggest you use gmail account if possible to login and if you are a voting member in DisCon 3 or you have already purchased any memberships of Chengdu with other emails but cannot login right now, I can re-upload your gmail information to the system from my side….

(5) FILM OVER BOOK. A Buzzfeed writer names “17 Movies That Were 100 Times Better Than The Book”. Of course I had to click on that. Here’s one of the better entries:

5. “The Shining. One of my favorite movie facts is from The Shining. In the book, the Torrance family drives a red Volkswagen Beetle; in the movie, they drive a yellow one. Later in the movie, as Halloran is driving in the snowstorm, he passes a car accident where a semitruck has crushed a red Beetle. This is thought of as director Stanley Kubrick knowing he totally changed the story and was actively snubbing it with this shot.”

(6) ANOTHER WRITE-OFF? “Disney finishes shooting Spiderwick Chronicles series, decides not to air it” reports Fansided.

…And indeed, Disney shot six episodes, with a cast that includes Jack Dylan Grazer, Lyon Daniels, Noah Cottrell, Joy Bryant, Mychala Lee, and Christian Slater as the shape-shifting ogre Mulgarath. But as it ends up…nah.

According to The A.V. Club, Disney has opted not to air the show on Disney+, even though it’s basically finished. This is a phenomenon we’re seeing more and more of lately. Remember the furor that resulted when Warner Bros. Discovery decided not to release the Batgirl movie after it had already finished shooting? How about when Disney spent over $100 million making a TV show based on the fantasy movie Willow only to remove it from Disney+ after a few months? Why are these studios spending all this money if they’re not going to let people watch what they bought?

A lot of it has to do with the economics of streaming. Will airing The Spiderwick Chronicles get more people to subscribe to Disney+? If not, it may be more cost-effective for Disney to dump it and write off the expenses on its taxes. It’s not like they can sell commercials during episodes, and they probably won’t sell a home video version, so there’s little way for the show to make money by itself. It’s a weird world we’re in now, and studios are trying to figure it out….

However, this line in Variety’s report “Spiderwick Chronicles Series Adaptation Not Moving Forward at Disney+” blurs the part about who’s footing the production bill:

The completed six-episode series, which hails from Paramount Television Studios and 20th Television, is currently being shopped to other potential buyers.

(7) KEEPING THE DISCWORLD NICE AND ROUND. The Gamer defends how the Pratchett rights are handed: “The Terry Pratchett Estate Is Right To Turn Down Subpar Adaptations”.

…The Pratchett estate has likely been burned by its experience with The Watch, something which languished in adaptation limbo for a number of years after the rights were bought. While the Amazon adaptation of Good Omens has been received far better by fans, the star power and intoxicating chemistry of stars David Tennant and Michael Sheen help things along. It will also help that co-author and lifelong friend of Pratchett’s Neil Gaiman is credited as creating the show and serves as a hands-on showrunner as the series moves past the events of the novel. If anyone knows how to continue the Pratchett legacy, it’s him.

In response to a headline decrying Discworld as another huge franchise “going to waste”, the Pratchett estate posted a status to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter saying, “It’s not going to waste, it’s just very much wanting to do the right thing and definitely not do the wrong thing. Again.”

The account, run by Pratchett’s longtime assistant and business manager Rob Wilkins, followed up by saying, “Our nuclear weapon remains our ability to say no and you simply wouldn’t believe how often we still have to use it”, adding the hashtag #Narrativia, referencing Pratchett’s production company that owns the multimedia rights to all of the author’s work….

… Rhianna Pratchett responded too, saying that “we are more mindful than ever, than when we give the ‘yes’ it has to be right”. After the decidedly unPratchett adaptation of The Watch, she has every right to be cautious. While the books are timeless, and continuously prove that Pratchett was ahead of his time in more ways than you could ever imagine, a slew of poor quality adaptations could tarnish that legacy….

(8) ARLEEN SORKIN (1955-2023). Arleen Sorkin, known for voicing Harley Quinn in animated DC Universe productions, died August 26 at the age of 67.

…In 1992, Sorkin began voicing Harley Quinn in Batman: The Animated Series. She would reprise her role in other shows like Superman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, Gotham Girls, Justice League and Static Shock. Sorkin also lent her voice as Harley Quinn for DC video games like Batman: Arkham Asylum, DC Universe Online and DC Universe Online: The Last Laugh….

(9) CAREER INCLUDED HARRY POTTER FILM. Actress Matyelok Gibbs died August 14 at the age of 91.  

…On film, she played Erik’s mum in Terry Jones’s Erik the Viking (1989) – Tim Robbins was Erik, discovering there might be more to life than raping and pillaging, with Mickey Rooney as Erik’s grandad – and Auntie Muriel Weasley in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2010), a gaudily attired, rude and gossipy great-great-aunt of the Weasley children resembling a bad-tempered flamingo….

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 28, 1915 — Tasha Tudor. American illustrator and writer of children’s books. Her most well-known book is Corgiville Fair, published in 1971, the first of a series to feature anthropomorphic corgis. (Died 2008.)
  • Born August 28, 1916 — Jack Vance. Where to start? The Dying Earth series? Or perhaps the Lyonesse trilogy? I think I’ll pick the Demon Princes series. Damn he was good. Hugos? Oh yes. Discon was his first for “The Dragon Masters” short story followed by winning one for “The Last Castle” novelette at NYCon 3. His autobiography, This is Me, Jack Vance! (Or, More Properly, This is “I”), Jack Vance, won at Aussiecon 4. Let’s not forget that he has a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement as well. And a SFWA Grand Master Award, too. (Died 2013.)
  • Born August 28, 1917 — Jack Kirby. Responsible for a goodly part of modern comics from Captain America and the X-Men to Challengers of the Unknown and the New Gods. (Another DC film that got cancelled, damn it.) I had forgotten that he created the Black Panther. (Died 1994.)
  • Born August 28, 1925 — Arkady Natanovich Strugatsky.The Strugatsky brothers were well known Russian SF writers who were Guests of Honor at Conspiracy ’87, the Worldcon that was held in Brighton, England. Their best-known novel in the West, Piknik na obochine, has been translated into English as Roadside Picnic. It is available from the usual suspects with a foreword by Le Guin. (Died 1991.)
  • Born August 28, 1948 — Vonda McIntyre. I’ve read a number of her works including Dreamsnake and The Moon and the Sun which are all phenomenal. The latter was based on a short story of hers done as a faux encyclopedia article “The Natural History and Extinction of the People of the Sea”, that was illustrated by Le Guin. Neat. (Died 2019.)
  • Born August 28, 1951 — Barbara Hambly, 72. Author of myriad genre works including the James Asher, Vampire Novels, The Windrose Chronicles, and the Sun Wolf and Starhawk series. Some Trek work. Was married for some years to George Alec Effinger.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Tom Gauld has his own version of “Writer Beware!”

(12) CELEBRITY COMIC COLLECTION GOES UNDER THE HAMMER. “Kevin Smith is Auctioning His Personal Comic Book Art Collection” and CBR.com hits the highlights.

…A highlight of the auction is Green Arrow cover art by Matt Wagner from issues #1 – #12, estimated to bring in between $1500.00 and $3000.00 each. Additionally, the collection features one of Smith’s rarest gems, a page from Frank Miller’s Daredevil #161, penciled by Miller and inked by Klaus Janson, estimated to cost $20,000.00 to $40,000.00. Each lot in this historic auction will come with a Certificate of Authenticity (COA) from Bodnar’s and Smith’s autograph.

A percentage of the proceeds from the auction will be donated to a scholarship fund for the Joe Kubert School in Dover, New Jersey. Smith, in his characteristic manner, exclaimed, “My current reduction in home wall space is going to make some ardent comic collectors’ dreams come true!” He added, “This will be the sale of the century.”…

(13) PLANET STEWARDS. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has chosen eight books and a film for their Planet Stewards Book Club. Craig Russell’s climate-crisis novel, Fragment, was selected alongside the film Don’t Look Up and the work of many other excellent authors, including Pulitzer Prize winner, Annie Proulx. Dates and subjects of club sessions and video links are here.

(14) COVER ARTIST. The Guardian shares Matt Stevens’ work in “Cover version: films reimagined as vintage paperbacks – in pictures”.

…For his project Good Movies As Old Books , Matt Stevens combined two of his main interests: recreating his favourite films in the style of vintage paperbacks. The North Carolina -based designer and illustrator begins with iPad sketches before using Photoshop to create the effect of old paper and weathered cover textures. The first 100 designs were collected in a Kickstarter-funded art book, and a second one is in the works. “You have to be efficient with the visuals and really distil down the concept into something simple, while still making an impact,” he says. “I love the challenge of that.”…

Andrew Porter dropped the link with a note: “Stephens apparently has no idea that another James Gunn is an actual author of SF books… One of the cover designs looks suspiciously like it’s by Mike Hinge.”

(15)  TIME CAPSULE. There are still 153 photos of fans and writers on Mike Resnick’s Facebook album, spanning the decades of his life in fandom. Moshe Feder pointed this out a few days ago.

(16) WHO DID YOU SAY YOU WERE? “TV Characters With Mystery Names” at TVLine. The genre examples are not the most interesting ones, but there are some.

…What follows is an extensive small-screen history consisting of the following:

Characters whose first, last or full names have never been revealed.

Characters whose names were kept secret for multiple seasons. (Angels, aliens and other inhuman entities were not included.)

Here’s one example:

AGENT 99, GET SMART

The name of Maxwell Smart’s partner-turned-wife was never disclosed. The show would later follow tradition when she gave birth to their twins — a boy and a girl — and never revealed the daughter’s name.

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

Pixel Scroll 6/20/23 We Don’t Need No Pixelation, We Just Want Some Scroll Control

Posted on by
59

(1) SETI CONNECTION TO MISSING SUBMERSIBLE. An international effort has been launched to find a submersible with five people on board that went missing Sunday on a trip to view the wreckage of the Titanic. According to CNN, a prominent Pakistani father and son are on board the missing sub, which turns out to be of genre interest.

…While the names of those on board have not been released by the authorities, British businessman Hamish Harding, Pakistani billionaire Shahzada Dawood and his son Sulaiman Dawood, and French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet have been confirmed to be on board the craft.

The fifth person on board is Stockton Rush, the CEO and founder of the company leading the voyage, Ocean Gate, according to a source with knowledge of the mission plan. Ocean Gate did not respond to CNN’s request for comment…

Shahzada Dawood is on the Board of Trustees of the SETI Institute, an organization whose scientists “are looking for proof – not merely of life elsewhere – but of intelligent beings in other star systems.”

(2) SFWA SILENT AUCTION INCLUDES JAMES E. GUNN COLLECTION. SFWA’s 3rd Silent Auction, which opened yesterday, includes an “Exclusive James E. Gunn collection”.

July 12, 2023, marks the start of James E. Gunn’s centenary. He died December 23, 2020 – one week after finishing his final story, which sold his final day.

Jim was a Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master, SF Hall of Fame inductee, first (with Jack Williamson) to offer SF courses in academia, former President of SFWA and SFRA, and “Science Fiction’s Dad” to the generations of authors, editors, and educators he mentored. Jim’s devotion to “Saving the world through science fiction” inspired us to reach higher, grow deeper, and become ever-more humane. His tireless dedication to what SF does was the essence of his magic, and why so many called him Dad. Our world is richer because of him.

For auction is a collection of Jim’s works, unread NOS.

Hardcovers of Transcendental, Transformation, and Transgalactic – his only trilogy, and his final books; two Easton Press leather editions: Gift from the Stars (signed first edition), and Kampus; his Hugo-winning illustrated SF history, Alternate Worlds (new, updated edition); volumes 1-4 of his essential anthologies-as-history, The Road to Science Fiction, with teaching guide; hardcovers collections Human Voices and Some Dreams Are Nightmares; new trade paper and early paperback of Jim’s classic collab with Jack Williamson, Star Bridge; hardcover and early paperback of The Dreamers; new trade paper of his best-selling The Listeners, which inspired Carl Sagan to write Contact and others to form SETI; plus a 1983 business card for his (first of its kind) Center for the Study of SF, SFWA Grand Masters trading card, and Transcendental bookmark.

Donated by the Ad Astra Institute for Science Fiction and the Speculative Imagination, spiritual successor of Jim’s original Center, run by his protégés Chris McKitterick and Kij Johnson.

(3) TRIVIA CONNECTIONS. [Item by Nickpheas.] Given the regular notes of Jeopardy! questions, here’s one from the long running BBC radio 4 show Round Britain Quiz.

Q8 (from Nigel Choyce)  Which of these is the leader and how many are missing: A cosmetic company that might come calling; a Victorian actress who travelled in the Tardis; a school of Buddhism emphasising the value of meditation; the Baker Street detective aided by a Tinker?

The question can be heard at about 22.30 through the episode.

(4) READ BAEN MEMORIAL AWARD STORY. Brad Zeiger’s 2023 Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award winning story “The Insomniac” is now available as a free read on the Baen Books website.

(5) “I KNOW.” NO, YOU DON’T. Phil Nichols and Colin Kuskie devote episode 30 of the Science Fiction 101 podcast to “The Secrets George Lucas Kept From Leigh Brackett”.

Phil and Colin dig into “Star Wars Sequel”, the unfilmed 1978 script by science fiction legend Leigh Brackett which became Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. We look at what made it into the finished film and what got junked, and consider whether Star Wars creator George Lucas was keeping his screenwriter in the dark!

If you’ve never read Brackett’s script, you can find two versions of it online. There’s a PDF scan of the original typescript, which shows all of her hand-corrections and notes – fascinating for its details, if you can make them out. Or there’s this transcript, which is a lot easier to read but loses some of the fun.

For a fascinating, in-depth discussion of how “Star Wars Sequel” developed into The Empire Strikes Back, sit back and watch this interview with screenwriter Larry Kasdan, who wrote the final draft of the film’s script.

(6) FATHOMING COPYRIGHT WHERE AI IS INVOLVED. Michael Capobianco has a post about “Copyright, Contracts, and AI-Generated Material” at Writer Beware.

On March 16, 2023, the United States Copyright Office issued a publication: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence. The full text can be found here.

The Copyright Office’s Guidance does not have the force of law and will change as the situation evolves, especially as legal precedents are created under US law, but, as of the time of this post, it is effectively the policy in force in the United States.

The main takeaway from the Guidance can be summarized thus: the only parts of a work that are copyrightable are the human-contributed ones, and the work is not copyrightable if an AI technology determines the expressive elements of the work and the creativity is not the product of human authorship. In cases where there are both AI-generated and human-authored elements, copyright will only protect the human-authored aspects of the work, which are “independent of ” and do “not affect” the copyright status of the AI-generated material…..

(7) U.F.O.S SOUND LIKE A N.I.C.E. IDEA. Ross Douthat tells New York Times readers that “This C.S. Lewis Novel Helps Explain the Weirdness of 2023”.

Recently I reread C.S. Lewis’s 1945 novel, “That Hideous Strength,” the last book in his Space Trilogy, and since I wrote about aliens last weekend it seems like a good week to talk a little bit about the novel’s contemporary relevance….

…The story introduces a near-future Britain falling under the sway of a scientistic technocracy, the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.), which looks like the World State from Huxley’s “Brave New World” in embryo. But as one of the characters is drawn closer to N.I.C.E.’s inner ring, he discovers that the most powerful technocrats are supernaturalists, endeavoring to raise the dead, to contact dark supernatural entities and even to revive a slumbering Merlin to aid them in their plans.

I’ll say no more about the plot mechanics except to observe that they boldly operate in the risky zone between the sublime and the ridiculous. But just from that sketch I’ll draw out a couple of points about the book’s interest for our own times.

First, the idea that technological ambition and occult magic can have a closer-than-expected relationship feels quite relevant to the strange era we’ve entered recently — where Silicon Valley rationalists are turning “postrationalist,” where hallucinogen-mediated spiritual experiences are being touted as self-care for the cognoscenti, where U.F.O. sightings and alien encounters are back on the cultural menu, where people talk about innovations in A.I. the way they might talk about a golem or a djinn.

The idea that deep in the core of, say, some important digital-age enterprise there might be a group of people trying to commune with the spirit world doesn’t seem particularly fanciful at this point. (For a small example of what I mean, just read this 2021 account of life inside one of the stranger tech-associated research institutes.) Although like some of the characters in “That Hideous Strength,” these spiritualists would probably be telling themselves that they’re just doing high-level science, maybe puncturing an alternate dimension or unlocking the hidden potential of the human mind.

Then, too, the book’s totalitarian dystopia is interesting for being incomplete, contested and plagued by inner rivalries and contradictions. Unlike in “Brave New World” and “1984,” we don’t see a one-party regime holding absolute sway; in Lewis’s story, we see a still-disguised tyranny taking shape but still falling prey to various all-too-human problems, blunders and failures that contrast with the smooth dominance of Orwell’s O’Brien or Huxley’s Mustapha Mond….

The novel’s emphasis on the limitations of any attempted secret government, finally, connects specifically to our peculiar U.F.O. discourse, where we suddenly have a government whistle-blower claiming knowledge of a 90-year conspiracy and, apparently, a chorus of anonymous sources encouraging belief.

I wrote a Twitter thread after my column, explaining why even independent of the likelihood of alien visitors or interdimensional encounters, I find it hard to imagine the kind of long conspiracy depicted by the whistle-blower: The secrets involved would be too big not to tempt would-be heroes of disclosure, the breadth of infrastructure would be too hard to hide, the political complexity and turmoil of the world would create too many opportunities for revelations (because you would need China, Russia and other powers to be in on it as well) and so on.

If there were an alien cover-up, though, I would imagine it would look more like the secrets held by N.I.C.E. in “That Hideous Strength.” …

(8) TAX-EXEMPT AT LAST. The Science Fiction Poetry Association informed members today that they have received the official confirmation from the IRS of SFPA’s 501(c)(3) status, which secures the organization’s federal tax exempt standing.

(9) RUSHDIE’S LATEST HONOR. Winner of “The 2023 German Book Trade’s Peace Prize: Salman Rushdie” reports Publishing Perspectives.

The board of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade has announced today (June 19) that Salman Rushdie is the winner of this year’s honor, “for his indomitable spirit, for his affirmation of life, and for enriching our world with his love of storytelling.”

…As is this award’s tradition, the honor will be conferred in a ceremony on the closing day of Frankfurter Buchmesse (October 18 to 22), at the Paulskirche, a program to be broadcast live on German public television (SDF) at 11 a.m. The award carries a purse of €25,000 (US$27,302).

(10) MICHAEL A. BANKS (1951-2023). Writer and editor Michael A. Banks (Alan Gould), a longtime member of the Cincinnati Fantasy Group, died June 19 of cancer. He was 72.

In the SF field, he is perhaps best known for nonfiction works about the genre (including Understanding Science Fiction, 1980) and his collaborations with Mack Reynolds. His first published story was “Lost and Found” (1978) with George Wagner. Banks wrote several novels to his credit, including The Odysseus Solution, with Dean R. Lambe. He also worked as an acquisitions editor for publishers, including Baen Books and Harlequin. He wrote dozens of nonfiction books.

(11) MEMORY LANE.

2016 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

So the Beginning this Scroll is from Claudia Casper’s The Mercy Journals. 

She’s a Canadian writer who’s  best known for The Reconstruction, about a woman who constructs a life-sized model of the hominid Lucy for a museum. 

And now for our Beginning…

On October 15, 2072, two Moleskine journals were found wrapped in shredded plastic inside a yellow dry box in a clearing on the east coast of Vancouver Island near Desolation Sound. They were watermarked, mildewed, and ragged but legible, though the script was wildly erratic. Human remains of an adult male were unearthed nearby along with a shovel and a 9mm pistol. Also found with the human remains were those of a cougar. The journals are reproduced in their entirety here, with only minor copy-editing changes for ease of reading.

March 9, 2047 | My name is Allen Levy Quincy. Age 58. Born May 6, 1989. Resident of Canton Number 3, formerly Seattle, Administrative Department of Cascadia. This document, which may replace any will and testament I have made in the past, is the only intentional act of memory I have committed since the year 2029. I do not write because I am ill or because I leave much behind. I own a hot plate, three goldfish, my mobile, my Callebaut light, my Beretta M9, the furniture in this apartment, and a small library of eleven books.

March 10 | I sit at my kitchenette island in this quasi-medieval, wired-by-ration, post nation-state world, my Beretta on my left, bottle of R & R whiskey on my right, speaking to the transcription program on my mobile. 

I was sober for so long. Eighteen years. I was sober through what seems to have been the worst of the die-off. Three and a half to four billion people, dead of starvation, thirst, illness, and war, all because of a change in the weather. The military called it a “threat multiplier.

You break it, you own it—the old shopkeeper’s rule. We broke our planet, so now we owned it, but the manual was only half written and way too complicated for anyone to understand. The winds, the floods, the droughts, the fires, the rising oceans, food shortages, new viruses, tanking economies, shrinking resources, wars, genocide—each problem spawned a hundred new ones. We finally managed to get an international agreement with stringent carbon emissions rules and a coordinated plan to implement carbon capture technologies, but right from the beginning the technologies either weren’t effective enough or caused new problems, each of which led to a network of others. Within a year, the signatories to the agreement, already under intense economic and political pressure, were disputing who was following the rules, who wasn’t, and who had the ultimate authority to determine non-compliance and enforcement.

Despite disagreements, the international body made headway controlling the big things—coal generators, fossil fuel extraction, airplane emissions, reforestation, ocean acidification—but the small things got away from them—plankton, bacteria, viruses, soil nutrients, minute bio-chemical processes in the food chain. Banks and insurance companies failed almost daily, countries went bankrupt, treaties and trade agreements broke down, refugees flooded borders, war and genocide increased. Violent conflict broke out inside borders, yet most military forces refused to kill civilians. Nation-states collapsed almost as fast as species became extinct. Eventually the international agreement on climate change collapsed completely, and the superpowers retreated behind their borders and bunkered down. The situation was way past ten fingers, eleven holes; it was the chaos that ensues after people miss three meals and realize there’s no promise of a meal in the future.

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born June 20, 1947 — Candy Clark, 76. Mary Lou in The Man Who Fell to Earth which of course featured Bowie. She also was in Amityville 3-D, Stephen King’s Cat’s Eye and The Blob in the role of Francine Hewitt. That’s the remake obviously, not the original. Oh, and she’s Buffy’s mom in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Wiki being Wiki lists that as non-canon which makes absolutely no sense, does it? 
  • Born June 20, 1951 — Tress MacNeille, 72. Voice artist extraordinaire. Favorite roles? Dot Warner on The Animaniacs, herself as the angry anchorwoman in Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, Babs Bunny on Tiny Toons and Hello Nurse on Pinky and The Brain. 
  • Born June 20, 1952 — John Goodman, 71. Some may know him as the TV husband of a certain obnoxious comedienne but I’ve never watched that show. So I picture him as Fred Flintstone in The Flintstones, a role perfect for him. Mind you he’s had a lot of genre roles: voicing James P. “Sulley” Sullivan in the Monsters franchise, a cop in the diner in C.H.U.D., and he’ll even be the voice of Spike in the Tom and Jerry due out two years hence. And he’s in Argo, which is a thriller, but one in which the development of a fake sf movie is crucial.
  • Born June 20, 1956 — Ed Lynskey, 67. Mainly a mystery writer with five series comprising forty novels underway but he has written one genre novel, The Quetzal Motel, a handful of genre short fiction (uncollected) that appeared in Full Unit Hookup, Aoife’s Kiss, Maelstrom, and Three-Lobed Burning Eyed (fascinating titles, eh?) and somewhat more genre poetry.
  • Born June 20, 1967 — Nicole Kidman, 56. Batman Forever was her first foray into the genre but she has done a number of genre films down the years: Practical Magic, The Stepford Wives, Bewitched (I liked it), The Invasion (never heard of it), The Golden Compass (not nearly as good as the novel was), Paddington, and as Queen Atlanna in the rather good Aquaman. 
  • Born June 20, 1968 — Robert Rodriguez, 55. I’ll single out the vastly different Sin City and Spy Kids franchises as his best work, though the From Dusk till Dawn has considerable charms as well. ISFDB notes that he’s written two novels with Chris Roberson riffing off his The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D film, The Day Dreamer and Return to Planet Droll. 

(13) COMICS SECTION.

  • Bizarro has a (bizarre, of course) police lineup.

(14) STAN LEE WILL RING THE BELL. An animated Stan Lee will ring the opening bell of the NYSE on June 26. The event will stream live on Kartoon Channel. “Genius Brands Moves to NYSE, Renames as Kartoon Studios” at Animation World Network.

Genius Brands International, Inc. announced a name change to Kartoon Studios and plans to transfer its listing from the Nasdaq Capital Market (Nasdaq) to the NYSE American exchange (NYSE American). Under its new name, the company expects to start trading on the NYSE American exchange when markets open on Monday, June 26, 2023. That day the company’s common stock will begin trading under a new trading symbol, “TOON,” and a new CUSIP number, 37229T 509. It will continue to trade on Nasdaq under its current trading symbol, “GNUS” until the close of market on Friday, June 23, 2023.

An animated Stan Lee will ring the opening bell of the NYSE on June 26, an indication of the company’s plans to expand on its Stan Lee IP under its new moniker. The event will stream live on Kartoon Channel!

The company controls the post-Marvel IP of Stan Lee, which was initially brought to market with a 20-year license to Marvel and the Walt Disney Company, and brand initiative commemorating Stan’s 100th anniversary at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2023….

(15) THE PICTURES MOVE, THE CAR DOESN’T. Smithsonian Magazine brings us “The History of the Drive-In Movie Theater”.

On June 6, 2008 the flag flying over the U.S. Capitol commemorated the 75th birthday of a distinctive slice of Americana: the drive-in movie theater.

It was on that day in 1933 that Richard Hollingshead opened the first theater for the auto-bound in Camden, N.J. People paid 25 cents per car as well as per person to see the British comedy Wives Beware under the stars.

…He first conceived the drive-in as the answer to a problem. “His mother was—how shall I say it?—rather large for indoor theater seats,” said Jim Kopp of the United Drive-in Theatre Owners Association. “So he stuck her in a car and put a 1928 projector on the hood of the car, and tied two sheets to trees in his yard.”…

(16) UKRAINE/STAR WARS AGAIN. [Item by Susan de Guardiola.] Continuing the Star Wars spotting in the war: check out the chest patch General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief, is sporting here:

Tolkien and Star Wars, over and over in this war.

(17) NO AIR THERE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] It may be that the red dwarf star has blown away the closely orbiting planet’s atmosphere. See open access pre-print Zieba, S. et al (2023)  “No thick carbon dioxide atmosphere on the rocky exoplanet TRAPPIST-1 c”, Nature.

Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope suggest that a second world in a seven-planet system lacks an atmosphere.

For the second time, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has looked for and failed to find a thick atmosphere on an exoplanet in on one of the most exciting planetary systems known. Astronomers report1 today that there is probably no tantalising atmosphere on the planet TRAPPIST-1 c, just as they reported months ago for its neighbour TRAPPIST-1 b.

SF2 Concatenation previously reported on the innermost planet not having an atmosphere.

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Not strictly TV as it was never broadcast but here’s Jon Pertwee as Doctor Who in a corporate film circa 1981. There’s a surprising … err … twist at the end.”

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Jason Sanford, Nickpheas, Susan de Guardiola, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Ken Richards.]

Pixel Scroll 6/1/23 Three Little Muad’Dibs From Sand Are We

Posted on by
6

(1) FORD PERFECT. Ryan D’Agostino has a tremendously entertaining profile of “Harrison Ford on ‘Indiana Jones,’ ‘Star Wars,’ Career” in Esquire.

….What you don’t know is what happens when they mess up Harrison Ford’s eggs. The plates come, two Farmer’s Breakfasts. Mine’s good: over easy. As Ford cuts into his first poached egg, I’m asking, “So would you say the character of Indiana Jones has some of your own boyhood—”

He lays down his fork and knife. His shoulders droop in defeat.

The egg white is rubbery, the yolk chalky. He looks up at me.

“You couldn’t have been clearer,” I say.

The waiter, seeing a problem, scurries over, eager and recoiling at the same time. Ford just looks up at the poor guy, not with anger but with something worse: disappointment. It’s not a mean look. It’s a look that says, “We can do better, friend.”

The waiter is smiling and trying to speak, and he looks as if he might cry. “Are they . . . not soft?” He slinks away. Ford tries to refocus….

(2) INDY BEGINNING. And if you have Disney+, Slashfilm says these are “The Essential Young Indiana Jones Episodes You Need To Stream On Disney+”.

…Since these revised mini-Indy movies are appearing on Disney+ for the first time, we picked out the six most important episodes you might want to watch as you count down to “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” … though it must be said that every episode is worth your time…

Their list begins with —

My First Adventure

Exactly as the title says, “My First Adventure” is the first adventure of the young Henry Jones, Jr. It begins with a nine-year-old Indy living at Princeton with his parents when his life gets turned upside down when he has to accompany them on a journey around the world. The family heads to Oxford first, where Indy picks up his tutor, Ms. Seymour. They find themselves in Egypt and Indiana Jones helps T.E. Lawrence (yes, the “Lawrence of Arabia”) solve a murder mystery. Then, they travel to Africa, where Indy learns a lot about colonialism, slavery, and languages. It’s a good taste of what the younger side of Indy’s adventures will hold for audiences and an essential introduction to the series.

(3) ANOTHER FIRST FOR EKPEKI. Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki is the first Black winner of the Asimov’s Science Fiction Readers Award editor Sheila Williams told him today. Part of the reason, she adds, is that they published Octavia Butler’s stories, which won major awards, before the Asimov’s SF Readers Award was created.

(4) IT’S REAL! I’M ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN OF IT! [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Prepare for a barrage of proclamations that this is a real ET message, and the government is just covering things up by pretending it’s a test. Pfffft!

In what may be the first piece of interplanetary performance art, a message crafted by an artist to look like an extra terrestrial broadcast is coming from a Mars orbiter. Now people are trying to decipher it. “The Race Is On to Crack an Artist’s ‘Test’ Signal From Aliens” in WIRED.

For decades, a dedicated international band of researchers has searched the skies in the hopes of finding some sign that humanity is not alone in the universe. They’re engaged in SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. So far, the hunt for an alien signal has turned up only false positives. But that hasn’t stopped anyone from speculating about how people might respond to a real communication attempt. Now, Daniela de Paulis, an artist in residence at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, is simulating just such an alien message to see how humans react and whether they can figure out how to decipher it. 

Her group’s project, A Sign in Space, began last week by transmitting a mysterious radio signal from the Trace Gas Orbiter, a European Space Agency craft that’s orbiting Mars. Participating astronomers at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, the Allen Telescope Array in California, and the Medicina Radio Astronomical Station in Italy received the signal, removed the telemetry data, and posted the remaining encoded message on the project’s website for anyone to download. Now it’s up to the people of Earth to crack the code, interpret the message, and—de Paulis hopes—make some art. She and her colleagues are leading a series of online workshops to encourage people to discuss the concept of alien communication, including an event she hosted yesterday at which people shared thoughts and artwork inspired by the project so far….

(5) THE MAN FROM GONDOR. A classic fanfic is now available on the ConChord website, The Tenth Nazgul Affair by William Baker Glass, with illustrations by Richard Paul Glass. Barry Gold has made it available in HTML and EPUB formats.

Napoleon and Illya are engaged in a firefight with several T.H.R.U.S.H. agents when Illya is struck by lightning and ends up in Middle Earth. He helps King Elessar Telcontar (aka Strider) fight off Shelob and one extra Nazgul that somehow survived the destruction of the One Ring.

(6) SOMETHING NICE TO SAY ABOUT AI. Rob Hansen says he’s recently begun using A.I. for extrapolated reconstruction of old photos and sent links to work done on pictures of Forties LASFS members. Bill Burns found the online site to do this and produced this enhanced Tigrina image. Then Hansen  followed with Art Joquel and Sam Russell.

Rob adds, “These are extrapolations rather than reconstructions, of course, but I think the results are pretty remarkable. Using A.I. for good; who’da thunk it?”

(7) EARLIEST RAY. Phil Nichols has launched a “Chronological Bradbury!” sequence with the latest episode of his Bradbury 100 podcast.

The idea is to work through Ray Bradbury’s fiction output in the order of publication, discussing each item as we go.

In this first “Chronological Bradbury”, I start right at the beginning, with a discussion of Ray’s earliest published works, which appeared in amateur magazines in 1938.

(8) FUTURE TENSE. The May 2023 entry in the Future Tense Fiction series from Future Tense and Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination is Tara Isabella Burton’s “I Know Thy Works”, about an AI designed to compute and uphold our preferred moral systems.

Harry wasn’t a bad person. You just couldn’t take him too seriously, that’s all. Whatever Harry said, whatever Harry did, whatever Harry put down as his meta-ethic, this week, on his Arete profile, be it the ends justify the means or the greatest happiness for the greatest number or do what thou wilt be the whole of the law, Harry never meant a word. Harry changed his meta-ethic more often than he changed his clothes….

It was published along with a response essay “Why it’s so hard to compute ethics” by computer scientist Suren Jayasuriya.

…There’s debate over whether the trolley problem is really the right framing to interrogate ethical choices (specifically whether decisions made in the simulation really reflect what you would choose in real life), and the experiment itself has also been criticized for both its setup and assumptions. But the Moral Machine does provide a fascinating example of an algorithm that observes your ability to make decisions in a handful of tense driving situations, and then spits out a bulleted list of your preferences for saving babies over dogs, and how that compares with the rest of the world (or at least the rest of the people who have taken the test)….

(9) TOOLS FOR FORESIGHT. On Wednesday, June 14 from 12-1 p.m. Eastern, ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination will be hosting a free virtual event, “Reimagining the Future of [X],” exploring how to build collective visions of the future using science fiction and foresight tools.

The event is the fourth and final in the series for the Applied Sci-Fi Project, which seeks to understand the influence of science fiction on technology and the people who build it, and to study the ways that sci-fi storytelling can a tool for innovation and foresight.

We’ll be joined by our opening speaker, science fiction and nonfiction author Annalee Newitz (The Terraformers, Four Lost Cities) and four special guests: sci-fi author and futurist Tobias Buckell (Arctic Rising, “Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance”); policy expert, foresight consultant and sci-fi author August Cole (Ghost Fleet, Burn-In); anthropologist Amy Johnson, who researches the use of speculative futures techniques at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center; and Tory Stephens, climate fiction editor at Grist Magazine. The panel will be moderated by CSI’s managing editor Joey Eschrich, who will also share his perspective on CSI’s own “Future of X” book anthologies, contests, and other projects. 

(10) MEMORY LANE.

1998 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

Tricia Sullivan is the writer responsible for our Beginning this time. 

A US-born author who moved to the United Kingdom in 1995. Four years later, she won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for her novel Dreaming in Smoke which is where we get this Beginning. To date, it’s her one Award won. 

She writes SF under her own name and fantasy as Valery Leith. She is a very prolific novelist, writing thirteen novels over a period of twenty-two years.

She’s written a double handful of fiction. Interestingly she stopped getting published six years ago. And she stopped updating her blog seven years ago. There’s a story there, isn’t there? 

Dreaming in Smoke is a Meredith Moment at the usual suspects.

So here’s our Beginning…

my man’s gone now

The night Kalypso Deed vowed to stop Dreaming was the same night a four-dimensional snake with a Canadian accent, eleven heads and attitude employed a Diriangen function to rip out all her veins, then swiftly crocheted them into a harp that could only play a medley of Miles Davis tunes transposed (to their detriment) into the key of G. As she contemplated the loss of all blood supply to her vital organs it seemed to her that no amount of Picasso’s Blue, bonus alcohol rations, or access privileges to the penis of Tehar the witch doctor could compensate for having to ride shotgun to Azamat Marcsson on one of his statistical sprees with the AI Ganesh. She intended to tell him so–as soon as she could find her lungs. Ganesh was murmuring through her interface. 

KALYPSO, IT’S GETTING TOO LOOSE AND KINKY IN HERE.

 ‘Did you hear that, Azamat? Keep it off my wave!’ she sent, annoyed at being reduced to verbing. She simply didn’t have the resources to image him, for by now the snake had decomposed into a flight of simian, transgressive bees, which were in the process of liquefying her perception of left and right. Everything seen through her right eye became negative and sideways. The alarming part was that it didn’t seem to make any difference.

Marcsson’s response came back as a series of pyrotechnical arrays, which, loosely translated, meant, ‘Relax. It’s only math.’ 

I DON’T WANT TO BE YOUR ABACUS, said Ganesh. KALYPSO, GET YOUR DOZE UNDER CONTROL OR I WILL. 

The AI had a point. Kalypso mustered her wits and started cutting sensory intake to the Dreamer, feeling a little defensive about Miles Davis. Maybe she shouldn’t have been listening to the jazz Archives; maybe if she’d endured the boredom of monitoring the feeds between Ganesh and Marcsson she could have cut off the sudden explosion of parameters in the Dream the instant it began. But she had been shotgunning Marcsson for a long time, and he had always been safe. Marcsson had been Dreaming since before Kalypso was even born–he knew what he was doing with the AI, which could take data and weave them into Marcsson’s sensory awareness while he floated in a state of semi-conscious, lucid thought. He could immerse himself in literalized math through Dreams that improved a hundred-fold on the raw visions that humanity had experienced in its sleep for eons. He could be secure in his own safety because he had technique.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born June 1, 1914 — George Sayer. His Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times won a Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inkling Studies and is considered one of the best looks at that author. He also wrote the liner notes for the J. R. R. Tolkien Soundbook, a Cadmeon release of Christopher Tolkien reading from excerpts from The Silmarillion, The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings. (Died 2005.)
  • Born June 1, 1926 — Andy Griffith. His most notable SFF genre credit is as Harry Broderick on the late Seventies Salvage I which lasted for two short seasons. Actually that was it, other than a one-off on The Bionic Woman. It’s streaming for free on Crackle whatever the Frelling that is. (Died 2012.)
  • Born June 1, 1928 — Janet Grahame Johnstone, and Anne Grahame Johnstone. British twin sisters who were children’s book illustrators best remembered for their prolific artwork and for illustrating Dodie Smith’s The Hundred and One Dalmatians. They were always more popular with the public than they were with the critics who consider them twee. (Janet died 1979. Anne died 1988.)
  • Born June 1, 1940 — René Auberjonois. Odo on DS9. He’s shown up on a number of genre productions including Wonder Woman, The Outer Limits, Night Gallery, The Bionic Woman, Batman Forever, King Kong, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Enterprise, Stargate SG-1 and Warehouse 13. He’s lent both his voice and likeness to gaming productions, and has done voice work for the animated Green Lantern and Justice League series. He directed eight episodes of DS9. And he wrote a lot of novels, none of which I’ve read. Has anyone here read any of them? (Died 2019.)
  • Born June 1, 1947 — Jonathan Pryce, 76. I remember him best as the unnamed bureaucrat in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. He’s had a long career in genre works including Brazil, Something Wicked This Way Comes as Mr. Dark himself, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End as Governor Weatherby Swann, The Brothers Grimm, in the G.I. Joe films as the U.S. President and most recently in The Man Who Killed Don Quixote as Don Quixote. 
  • Born June 1, 1950 — Michael McDowell. Screenwriter and novelist whose most well-known work is the screenplay for Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice. He also did work on Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas though he’s not listed as the scriptwriter. He wrote eleven scripts for Tales from the Darkside, more than anyone else. And he wrote a lot of horror which Stephen King likes quite a bit. (Died 1999.)
  • Born June 1, 1965 — Tim Eldred, 58. Author and illustrator of Grease Monkey, a most excellent humorous take on space operas and uplifting species.  As an illustrator alone, he was involved in Daniel Quinn’s superb The Man Who Grew Young
  • Born June 1, 1966 — David Dean Oberhelman. Mike has an appreciation of him here.  The Intersection of Fantasy and Native America: From H.P. Lovecraft to Leslie Marmon Silko which he co-wrote with Amy H. Sturgis was published by The Mythopoeic Press. ISFDB lists just one genre essay by him, “From Iberian to Ibran and Catholic to Quintarian”, printed in Lois McMaster Bujold: Essays on a Modern Master of Science Fiction and Fantasy. (Died 2018.)

(12) COMICS SECTION.

  • Poorly Drawn Lines’ Astronaut Bill shows friendship is the best. (And if you go to the link, preceding this date are four or five really great cartoons about various other characters.)

(13) MARRIAGE IS WHAT BRINGS US TOGETHER. Actor Alex Kingston remembers her time on Doctor Who as the Doctor’s enigmatic time-travelling wife in “Alex Kingston on 15 Years of River Song”, a feature in the new issue of Doctor Who Magazine. This excerpt appears at the link.

“I spoke to Steven [Moffat] on the phone and he said, ‘I’ve got this idea and I need to know if you’re available for it, because if you’re not I can’t write this.’ I let him know when I was available and he told me the outline, but I had to swear not to tell anyone. I’m very good at keeping secrets. Matt, Karen and Arthur had guessed I knew something and tried to persuade me to tell them, but I wouldn’t! Even when we had the script for that episode, the reveal wasn’t in it. They kept those pages out so the crew didn’t know. The actors were given the single pages – I’m not even sure when. And even on shooting day, the pages weren’t there and it was only then, at the last minute, that the crew saw the reveal. They managed to keep the secret and avoid any leaks at all. That takes a lot of doing.”

The season climaxed with THE WEDDING OF RIVER SONG (2011), a game-changer that, despite its title, left the status of the relationship between the Doctor and River up to the viewer’s interpretation. “I still get people going, ‘You’re not really married to him because he was a Teselecta!’” Alex laughs, referring to the shape-shifting craft that had taken on the Eleventh Doctor’s form. “I’m like, ‘Thank you very much, I was married to him. I’m his wife!’”

(14) CLIMBING MT. TBR. Lifehacker advises on “How to Actually Read the Books You Buy”. It may be something you already do or it may be news to you. (The actual advice is at the link. Fair is fair.)

…The problem with all of these items is that they are quick to purchase, but take a long time to use. You can add a game to your Steam collection in minutes, but chances are most will take you 20 hours or more to play. (Howlongtobeat.com says Tears of the Kingdom takes 52 hours for the main story alone.)

How many more games will you impulse-buy before you’ve finished that one? How many skeins of yarn will you snap up (they were on sale! And so soft!) before you’ve finished the sweater you’re currently knitting? It’s the same problem as the TBR pile, really. And I promise, there is a solution…

(15) BEFORE 1984. The Guardian reviews “Orwell by DJ Taylor review – a very English socialist”.

…The key to his reading of Orwell is what happened to him in Spain. Though married to Eileen only six months before, he was determined to fight for the Republican cause (“Good chaps, the Spaniards, can’t let them down”) and on his return became far more politically engaged: “at last [I] really believe in Socialism, which I never did before”. But he’d seen bullying and infighting too. For the rest of his life and in his two great novels, this was the war he fought, on behalf of a wholesome, English, sweetly C of E brand of socialism, as opposed to Stalinist totalitarianism….

(16) STRIKES HINDER SCI-FI LONDON. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Sci-Fi-London film fest is now go… But sadly rails strikes made its opening day Wednesday difficult for fans to attend except by bus. Rail strike also on Saturday. Nonetheless hoping to make Sunday’s two sessions of shorts and there’s a free cyber tech exhibition and demonstration there too…. 2023-Hackstock.

(17) JAWS: THE OVERBITE. Check out the WTF! photo of a Goblin Shark at the National Geographic.

Swishing through the deep sea, a goblin shark notices a small, yummy-looking squid. The animal inches toward its prey. But as the fish closes in, the snack starts to dart away. So the shark thrusts its jaw three inches out of its mouth! (The jaw is connected to three-inch-long flaps of skin that can unfold from its snout.) The predator then grabs the squid in its teeth. After scarfing down the meal, the shark fits its jaw back into its mouth and swims off….

(18) TURKISH DELIGHT. “Superman towers over the Kremlin: Reiner Riedler’s best photograph” – see it in the Guardian.

…This photo is part of my Fake Holidays series. At the beginning of the project, more than 15 years ago, I went to Lara Beach in Antalya, Turkey, where there is one luxury five-star hotel after another, all along the coastline. On the other side of the road were the tents of the workers who had built the hotels. Luxury hotels are like little ghettoes. You take your plane and your taxi, then you are in the middle of an isolated luxury area.

The Kremlin Palace hotel, where this photo was taken, has an exact copy of Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square, Moscow. I have been to Moscow and seen the original church, which is a focal point – all tourists take a picture there. But here in Turkey, there is a swimming pool in front of the cathedral. I was fascinated. There were many Russian tourists.

I saw a weird guy, an astronaut, walking around the pool. “What’s happening here?” I asked. It turned out the hotel had a huge room with costumes for the entertainers who perform for the tourists. Superman was one of them. I found him by the pool and immediately asked to take his picture. I took about three shots. I chose the photo point, in front of the church with the pool between us, then asked Superman to jump. It was a very childish approach, perhaps, but he did it. The way he jumped was perfect. I felt in the moment: “That’s the picture.”…

(19) IT’S A GUSHER. “James Webb telescope: Icy moon Enceladus spews massive water plume” and BBC News has the photos.

…The new super-plume was spied by the James Webb Space Telescope. Previous observations had tracked vapour emissions extending for hundreds of kilometres, but this geyser is on a different scale.

The European Space Agency (Esa) calculated the rate at which the water was gushing out at about 300 litres per second. This would be sufficient to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool in just a few hours, Esa said.

Webb was able to map the plume’s properties using its extremely sensitive Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument.

The instrument showed how much of the ejected vapour (about 30%) feeds a fuzzy torus of water co-located with one of Saturn’s famous rings – its so-called E-ring.

“The temperature on the surface of Enceladus is minus 200 degrees Celsius. It’s freezing cold,” commented Prof Catherine Heymans, Astronomer Royal for Scotland.

“But at the core of the moon, we think it’s hot enough to heat up this water. And that’s what’s causing these plumes to come out.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Barry Gold, Lise Andreasen, Joey Eschrich, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 1/28/23 But Oh, Saberish Padawan, Beware Of The Day, If Your Scroll Be A Pixel

Posted on by

(1) COLUMBIA SHUTTLE TRAGEDY ANNIVERSARY. NPR is “Remembering the Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy 20 years on”.

…SIMON: Twenty years later, what have we learned about that day? What happened there in the sky? And what might have prevented it?

DUGGINS: Well, you know, it’s funny. I mean, if you talk to historians, who are much better at this than I am, they’ll say, you know, the Titanic, it can’t sink. Challenger – routine launch and landing, no problems there. And that hubris always seems to catch up with us. And with Columbia, it was the piece of falling foam that hit the vehicle. And NASA asked the engineers, do you know it’s a problem? And they said, well, we can’t be sure. And so the manager said, fine, we’ll just keep going with the mission and not tell anybody about it. And it wasn’t until the very end that they informed the astronauts ’cause they figured it was going to come up in a press conference. And that was what ultimately doomed the crew….

(2) LE GUIN POETRY VOLUME COMING. The Library of America edition of Ursula K. Le Guin: Collected Poems will be released April 23.  See a PDF of the Table of Contents.

Throughout a celebrated career that spanned five decades and multiple genres, Ursula K. Le Guin was first and last a poet. This sixth volume in the definitive Library of America edition of Le Guin’s work presents for the first time an authoritative gathering of her poetry—from the earliest collection, 1974’s Wild Angels, through her final publication, So Far So Good, which she delivered to her editor a week before her death in 2018. It reveals the full formal range and visionary breadth of a major American poet.

Le Guin’s poems engage with themes that resonate throughout her fiction but find their most refined expression here: exploration as a metaphor for both human bravery and creativity, the mystery and fragility of nature and the impact of humankind on the environment, the Tao Te Ching, marriage, aging, and womanhood. Often traditional in form but never in style, her verse is earthy and playful, surprising and lyrical.

This volume features a new introduction by editor Harold Bloom, written shortly before his own death in 2019, in which he reflects on his late-in-life friendship with Le Guin and the power of her poetic gift. “For many years I have wondered why her poetry is relatively neglected,” he writes. “Her lyrics and reflections are American originals. Sometimes I hear in them the accent of William Butler Yeats and occasionally a touch of Robinson Jeffers, yet her voicing is inimitably individual.” The book also presents sixty-eight uncollected poems, a generous selection of Le Guin’s introductions to and reflections on her poetry, including a rare interview, and a chronology of her life and career.

(3) OH GOODY. Futurism assures readers, “By 2030, You’ll Be Living in a World That’s Run by Google”.

…By 2030, Google will have that World Brain in existence, and it will look after all of us. And that’s quite possibly both the best and worst thing that could happen to humanity.

To explain that claim, let me tell you a story of how your day is going to unfold in 2030.

You wake up in the morning, January 1st, 2030. It’s freezing outside, but you’re warm in your room. Why? Because Nest – your AI-based air conditioner – knows exactly when you need to wake up, and warms the room you’re in so that you enjoy the perfect temperature for waking up.

And who acquired Nest three years ago for $3.2 billion USD? Google did.

You go out to the street and order an autonomous taxi to take you to your workplace. Who programmed that autonomous car? Google did. Who acquired Waze – a crowdsourcing navigation app? That’s right: Google did….

(4) WISH WE COULD BE THERE. Dr. Phil Nichols will speak about “Literacy, Censorship and Burning Books: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451” at the Wolverhampton Literature Festival on February 3.

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the classic dystopian novel of book-burning firemen, is as relevant today as when it debuted seventy years ago. Its insights into censorship, television, drug abuse and the fall and rise of civilisation retain a freshness and plausibility rarely seen in other science fiction of that era.

Fahrenheit 451 is Ray Bradbury’s most successful novel. Ironically for a book which rages against censorship, it frequently shows up on lists of “banned books”. Adapted for the stage by Bradbury himself and twice filmed, it somehow doesn’t date, despite being seventy years old in 2023.

Phil Nichols is the editor of The New Ray Bradbury Review and Senior Consultant to the Ray Bradbury Centre at Indiana University. In this extensively illustrated talk, he explains the curious history of this classic science fiction dystopia. It’s a tale of diverse influences (Huxley and Koestler; but surprisingly not Orwell) and extensive re-writing, resulting in a work which Neil Gaiman calls “a love letter to books . . . a love letter to people.”

(5) DEFINITELY BELONGS TO THE SCIENCE FICTION CANNON. ScreenRant celebrates that “The First Science Fiction Movie Is Over 120 Years Old” and they’ll fight anyone who says it isn’t genre.

…A Trip to the Moon is considered the first science fiction movie by most – but some say it is not science fiction, because it is not based on any realistic form of science, classing it more as a space fantasy. A Trip to the Moon features classic elements of the current sci-fi genre, such as aliens and sleek rockets, that would now be considered sci-fi because of how the genre has developed. However, some people do not classify films such as Star Wars as sci-fi because the science in it lacks plausibility, the same way A Trip to the Moon is not realistic with its science – highlighting how differently the genre is considered amongst audiences, as many would consider it a quintessential sci-fi series….

(6) QUITE A BUNCH OF CHARACTERS. Fonts In Use unravels “The Mystery of the Dune Font” and how devotees are keeping it alive.

… The liaison between Dune and Davison Art Nouveau started in September 1975, when the typeface was used by Berkley Medallion for a paperback edition of the first two novels. At the time, the Berkley imprint was owned by New York-based publisher G.P. Putnam’s Sons. When Berkley Putnam published the first hardcover edition of the third novel, Children of Dune, in 1976, the new typographic identity was applied there, too. Later on, Putnam used the typeface on the jackets for hardback editions of other, unrelated books authored (or coauthored) by Frank Herbert…

 … In 2009, a Dune aficionado who goes by the moniker DuneFish (DFUK) and/or MEP made a digital font called Orthodox Herbertarian, “painstakingly traced from scans of the typeface that was used on the American Ace editions […] of Dune and many other Frank Herbert books”. This amateur digitization is freely available at kullwahad.com. The font is caps only (A–Z), with a basic set of punctuation characters and scaled-down caps in the lowercase. Because it’s based on the book covers (as opposed to the original typeface), it naturally adopts the narrowed proportions. Orthodox Herbertarian is a laudable effort, but it doesn’t include any of the alternates or the numerals. In 2020, Reddit user purgruv added lowercase letters and numerals to this freebie and offered it for download as Extended Herbertarian. The additions aren’t faithful to the original and unfortunately aren’t well drawn, either….

(7) MEMORY LANE.

1923 — [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Following up on my essay yesterday, the quote tonight is from Agatha Christie’s “The Disappearance of Mr. Davenheim”.  

It was first published in March of 1923 in Britain in the Sketch. The story was published in the States in the Blue Book Magazine in December of 1923 as “Mr Davenby Disappears”.  In 1924, the story appeared as part of the Poirot Investigates anthology. 

And yes, David Suchet got to perform the story here in which is Poirot wagers Chief Inspector Japp that he can solve the mystery of a missing banker without leaving his flat. 

And here’s the quote now…

Poirot and I were expecting our old friend Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard to tea. We were sitting round the tea-table awaiting his arrival. Poirot had just finished carefully straightening the cups and saucers which our landlady was in the habit of throwing, rather than placing, on the table. He had also breathed heavily on the metal teapot, and polished it with a silk handkerchief. The kettle was on the boil, and a small enamel saucepan beside it contained some thick, sweet chocolate which was more to Poirot’s palate than what he described as ‘your English poison’. 

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born January 28, 1910 — Arnold Moss. Anton Karidian a.k.a. Kodos the Executioner in the most excellent “The Conscience of the King” episode of Trek. It wasn’t his only SFF role as he’d show up in Tales of Tomorrow, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Time Tunnel and Fantasy Island. (Died 1989.)
  • Born January 28, 1920 — Lewis Wilson. Genre wise, he’s remembered for being the first actor to play Batman on screen in the 1943 Batman, a 15-chapter theatrical serial from Columbia Pictures. A sequel to the serial was made in 1949, but Robert Lowery replaced Wilson as Batman. (Died 2000.)
  • Born January 28, 1929 — Parke Godwin. I’ve read a number of his novels and I fondly remember in particular Sherwood and Robin and the King. If you’ve not read his excellent Firelord series, I do recommend you do so. So who has read his Beowulf series? (Died 2013.)
  • Born January 28, 1965 — Lynda Boyd, 58. Let’s start off with she’s a singer who starred in productions The Little Shop of Horrors and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Film-wise, she had roles in Final Destination 2, The Invader, Mission to Mars and Hot Tub Time Machine. She’s had one-offs in X-Files, Highlander, Strange Luck, Millennium, The Sentinel, The Crow: Stairway to Heaven (where she had a recurring role as Darla Mohr), Outer Limits, Twilight Zone and Smallville.
  • Born January 28, 1981 — Elijah Wood, 42. His first genre role was Video-Game Boy #2 in Back to the Future Part II. He next shows up as Nat Cooper in Forever Young followed by playing Leo Biederman in Deep Impact. Up next was his performance as Frodo Baggins In The Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit films. Confession time: I watched the very first of these. Wasn’t impressed. He’s done some other genre work as well including playing Todd Brotzman in the Beeb superb production of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
  • Born January 28, 1986 — Shruti Haasan, 37. Indian film actress known for the Telugu fantasy film Anaganaga O Dheerudu, and the Tamil science fiction thriller 7aum Arivu. She voiced Queen Elsa in the Tamil-dubbed version of Frozen II.
  • Born January 28, 1998 — Ariel Winter, 25. Voice actress who’s shown up in such productions as Mr. Peabody & Sherman as Penny Peterson, Horton Hears a Who!, DC Showcase: Green Arrow as Princess Perdita and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns as Carrie Kelly (Robin). She’s got several one-off live performances on genre series, The Haunting Hour: The Series and Ghost Whisperer.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Six Chix shows how hardcover books have learned to play rough at the airport.

(10) CATZILLAS. “The Army Corps of Engineers Made a Glorious 2023 Cat Calendar” and Gizmodo has a slideshow of the whole thing.

It’s hard to believe that the mighty, stone-faced U.S. Army would ever adapt adorable cat babies as its representatives, but this is the internet in the year of our lord 2023. Anything is possible.

That’s certainly what I thought when I stumbled upon this glorious 2023 cat calendar made by the Portland District of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. While it’s not the product of a Photoshop wizard, the calendar earnestly features gigantic cats being their amazing furry selves. They play, they scratch, they think about life, and they stretch—all the while interacting with the Army Corps’ various dams, jetties, and heavy machinery….

(11) PLAUDITS FOR NEWITZ. Paul Di Filippo reviews The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz in the Washington Post [Archive.is link].

… This generously overstuffed tale has enough ideas and incidents to populate half a dozen lesser science fiction books. But the reading experience is never clotted or tedious, never plagued by extraneous detours. The story — which begins nearly 60,000 years in the future and unfolds over more than a millennium — rollicks along at a brisk clip while allowing Newitz space to dig into characters and milieu, and pile on startling speculative elements….

(12) NUKE THE MOON. In the New York Times: “‘The Wandering Earth II’ Review: It Wanders Too Far”

Upon its release, “The Wandering Earth,” Frant Gwo’s 2019 film about a dystopia in which Earth is perilously pushed through space, was minted as China’s first substantial, domestic sci-fi blockbuster, with the box office returns to prove it.

The film was entertaining enough, but its ambitious scope had something of an empty gloss to it, partly because the story’s drama wasn’t grounded in anything beyond the showy cataclysm. Its audaciously messy sequel, “The Wandering Earth II,” seems to have taken note and sprinted, aimlessly, entirely in the other direction. Losing all of the glee of its predecessor, the movie instead offers nearly three hours of convoluted story lines, undercooked themes and a tangle of confused, glaringly state-approved political subtext….

(13) KEEP YOUR DRAWERS ON. The Takeout tells how “Fox News Fell for an A&W Joke About Its Pantsless Mascot”.

…As you can see, the A&W tweet is simply parroting M&M’s tweet closely (the internet age is weird, everyone) and riding the same jokey wave. Rooty, typically pantsless, will wear jeans now. Funny gag! However, Fox News took A&W’s post as an opportunity to wage a culture war.

At first the outlet reported A&W’s Rooty announcement as a serious matter….

“First it was an M&M’s, now a bear has to wear [pants],” noted Fox Business anchor Cheryl Casone. “This is the woke police. Cancel culture has gone—ridiculous.”

Later, however, after all that lamentation, Fox realized the error, clarifying that A&W followed up its original tweet with another one that said, “Is now a good time to mention that this is a joke?”

(14) IT COULD HAPPEN ANYWHERE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] It’s Saturday, I’m up early, had croissant and coffee and done work chores for today already 10.20. (I’m so hot it’s untrue…) So here is an extra from today’s Science. “Earth-like planets should readily form around other stars, meteorites suggest”.

Samples from space rocks suggest water and light elements are present in warm inner part of planet-forming disks

How hard is it to give birth to an Earth? To assemble the right mix of rock, metal, and water, in a balmy spot not too far from a star? For a long time, planetary scientists have thought Earth was a lucky accident, enriched with water and lighter “volatile” elements—such as nitrogen and carbon—by asteroids that had strayed in from the outer edges of the early Solar System, where those materials were abundant. But a series of new studies, including two published today in Science, suggests all the ingredients were much closer at hand when Earth was born…

Also Matt over at PBS Space Time contemplates Silicon based aliens

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Everything’s up to date on Ukraine’s farms.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editors of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 12/21/22 Roll Your Own

Posted on by

(0) File 770 has been offline due to a DDoS attack for the past couple of hours. I will see if I can comprehend the instructions for implementing the recommended solution. I have my doubts.

(1) KEEP BANGING ON. At Medievalists.net, Ken Mondschein reports that SCA leadership rejected a member Kingdom’s proposal to pick its leader by some other means than “armored combat”: “Society for Creative Anachronism Rules Australia/New Zealand Branch Must Continue to Choose Leadership by Combat”.

One frequently-heard critique of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) is its manner of choosing the “kings” and “queens” of its imaginary kingdoms—through armored stick-fighting tournaments in which the victor crowns their “consort” queen (or king) for a “reign,” which is usually six months. This system is established by the SCA’s governing documents and has remained unchanged in the SCA’s almost 60 years of history.

…Furthermore, this selection process does not indicate either leadership ability or moral character. In the recent past, kings have committed offenses as wide-ranging as wearing swastikas on their raiment during official events and murdering their intimate partners. Because of the prominence of the SCA royalty, these have become high-profile cases (at least in medievalist circles) and detrimental to the SCA’s reputation as a whole.

In light of this, the Kingdom of Lochac, an independently-incorporated SCA affiliate that encompasses Australia and New Zealand, recently petitioned the California-based organization’s corporate Board of Directors for permission to change the affiliation agreements so that the Australian and New Zealand affiliates could allow royalty to be chosen by another, as yet unspecified, means. (According to Section IV A of the SCA’s governing documents, “Crowns or Coronets who wish to conduct a royal list in a manner other than individual combat must obtain the prior approval of the Board of Directors.”) The American Board of Directors denied the request.

Controversy over the idea of changing the organization’s procedures immediately erupted on social media. “The SCA culture was created and founded on idealized Victorian/Arthurian chivalry,” Mark Hollingshead, an SCA member who had himself formerly served as King of the West Kingdom, wrote on Facebook. “Knights in shining armor fighting to display prowess and courage to crown their consort the Queen of Love and Beauty. Armored combat is… literally what the Society and its culture is based on. There comes a certain point that if you change a thing too much, it is no longer that thing. Armored combat to choose our Queen… [is] all fundamental to what the SCA is and how it functions.”

Other voices presented an opposing perspective….

For example, Mondschein points to a post where SCA member Angela Costello really lets it rip: “About that whole Crown Variance Request by Lochac”.

…“The SCA is really a Victorian King Game and we should continue that tradition!”

Sure, let me, with my 2.5 history degrees, unpack this nonsense.

The Victorians -ruined- the Middle Ages and subsequent modern perception thus. The Victorians gave us the myths of damsels in distress, knights in shining armor, Pre-Raphaelite over romanticism and faux history designed for the purpose of the subjection of women, children, LGBTQ+, and POC. There. There it fucking is, isn’t it? The Anglo-American Victorian Period was rooted in white supremacy, and these “king games” were part of them. We modern classical and medieval historians are still working to unravel myths of medieval individuals not bathing thanks to the absolute abhorrent mess the Victorian “historians” created.

“Tradition” is a nice word that means you’re letting dead people tell you what to do. In this case, the “dead people” in question were using colonialism, white supremacy based on horrifically bad early anthropology theory, and sweeping dead children riddled with tuberculosis out of the gutter after they worked 18 hour shifts for quarter wage to justify the Smithian and Malthusian virtues of classical liberalism’s “invisible hand of the free market.” So maybe, just fucking maybe, we shouldn’t be putting this asinine period, during which the United States still permitted slavery for most of, on its own pedestal. The Middle Ages had their own issues, but we cannot recreate “the Middle Ages as they should have been” while touting that our organization is literally an echo of one of the most oppressive centuries in world history. If any of you supporting this theory have spent more than breathing on a Wikipedia page’s worth of reading on the Victorian period and its treatment of medievalism, you wouldn’t want to be waving this flag. Period. For a group of people who purport themselves to be belonging to an educational group, you’re really bad at educating yourselves…

(2) A BRADBURY CHRISTMAS. Phil Nicols’ new Bradbury 100 podcast unwraps the history of “Ray Bradbury and Christmas!”

Time for a new Bradbury 100 podcast episode – and because it’s (nearly) Christmas, I thought I’d talk about Ray’s use of Christmas in his stories and scripts.

The two stories that specifically reference Christmas are “The Gift” and “The Wish” – and there are two pieces of film/TV work which also mention Christmas: the Steve Canyon episode based on “The Gift”; and Ray’s unlikely sequel to The Day The Earth Stood Still.

It’s become a tradition that, every Christmas, I post the delightful Ren Wickes illustration for “The Gift” which appeared alongside the story when it was first published in Esquire magazine in 1952. So, here it is! (It should be up above – and if you click on it, it should embiggen.)

I hope you enjoy this Christmas episode – it’s below, or you can find it using your podcast app. Join me in 2023 for more Bradbury 100 episodes!

(3) STORY BY KIJ JOHNSON. Sunday Morning Transport is sharing some of the readers’ picks among their earliest stories as free reads: “Reader Favorite Wednesday: Ratotaskr” by Kij Johnson.

When Lila is ten, she wakes up one night. Her bed is next to the window facing the alley that runs behind her dad’s church; at night in the summertime, it is a shadowy tunnel overhung with elms. This is back when elms dominate every small American town, before disease destroys the great Gothic arches that make cathedrals of the streets. This is also before air-conditioning is common in Iowa houses: let’s say, the 1960s. She’s the daughter of a Lutheran pastor and a librarian. She is bookish and observant. This is Ray Bradbury country….

(4) MEMORY LANE.

1974 — [By Cat Eldridge.] The Catford Cat

Tonight we are talking about The Catford Cat. “What is that” you say, “I’ve never heard of any folklore creature called that.”  Well The Catford Cat is not out of folklore, nor is it particularly old, being a fibreglass artefact constructed just about fifty years ago as part of a British shopping mall.

(Yes I love shopping mall figures. I could go on length about them and probably will do so at some point. You’ve been forewarned!) 

Oh, but I find the creature and the story of the efforts to keep it from being, well, sent to equivalent of a kill shelter quite charming. 

The Catford Shopping Centre was designed by Owen Luder who designed a number of shopping malls in Britain, many poorly designed and now demolished, a fact that will play into our story here.  

The cat was erected at Winslade Way, Lewisham in 1974 as part of the Catford Centre development, its existence owed to design decisions made by architects. Owen Luder and Rodney Gordon wanted something to reflect the local name, so the fibreglass creature itself was produced and installed by a now insolvent company known as Embassy Signs. 

This Cat has itself has been under the threat of being sent to, errr, the feline shelter when there were discussions when fourteen years ago to demolish the cat and that area of the Mall as part of a development scheme, but the outcry amongst residents including a petition that attracted over two thousand signatures prevented the plans coming to anything more than just talk. Instead, three years later it was repainted and given a general restoration job followed by being officially listed as a piece of Catford Public Art which means it cannot be demolished.

You will note that like Frankenstein’s monster last Scroll, I cannot tell you who the designer was. This is increasingly true of a lot of these pieces of commercial art of which Frankenstein’s monster definitely is, at least in my opinion, one. And this is a damn sight cuter than Frankenstein’s monster! 

(5) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born December 21, 1898 — Hubert Rogers. Illustrator during the Golden Age of pulp magazines. His first freelance work was for Ace-High, Adventure, Romance, and West. In ‘42, he started doing covers for Astounding Science Fiction which he would do until ‘53. He also did the ‘50 edition of The Man Who Sold The Moon and the ‘53 edition of Revolt in 2100. (Died 1982.)
  • Born December 21, 1918 — Frank Hampson. A British illustrator that is best known as the creator and artist of Dan Dare, Pilot of The Future and other characters in the boys’ comic, The Eagle, to which he contributed from 1950 to 1961. There is some dispute over how much his original scripts were altered by his assistants before being printed. (Died 1985.)
  • Born December 21, 1929 — James Cawthorn. An illustrator, comics artist and writer who worked predominantly with Michael Moorcock. He had met him through their involvement in fandom. They would co-write The Land that Time Forgot film, and he drew “The Sonic Assassins” strip which was based on Hawkwind that ran in Frendz. He also did interior and cover art for a number of publications from the Fifties onwards including (but not limited to) Vector 3, New Worlds SF, Science Fantasy and Yandro. (Died 2008.)
  • Born December 21, 1940 — Frank Zappa. Controversial musician and satirist who wrote a number of genre-related works, starting with the Orwellian “Who Are the Brain Police” from his debut album, and including two full-length SF rock operas: Joe’s Garage, set in a future where music is illegal, and Thingfish, which was about a genetically engineered plague. (Died 1993.) (Xtifr.)
  • Born December 21, 1944 — James Sallis, 78. He’d be getting a Birthday today if only for his SJW cred of giving up teaching at a college rather than sign a state-mandated loyalty oath that he regarded as unconstitutional. But he also does have a short SFF novel Renderings, more short fiction than I can count, a book review column in F&SF and he co-edited several issues of New Worlds Magazine with Michael Moorcock.  Well worthy I’d say of a Birthday write-up! 
  • Born December 21, 1948 — Samuel L. Jackson, 74. Where to start? Did you know that with his permission, his likeness was used for the Ultimates version of the Nick Fury? It’s a great series btw. He has also played Fury in the Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, The Avengers, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Avengers: Age of Ultron and Avengers: Infinity War and showed up on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. too! He voiced Lucius Best (a.k.a. Frozone) in the Incredibles franchise, Mace Windu in The Phantom Menace and The Clone Wars, the Afro Samurai character in the anime series of the same name and more other genre work than can be listed here comfortably so go ahead and add your favorite role by him. 
  • Born December 21, 1955 — Karen Haber, 67. Wife of Robert Silverberg. Author of the Fire In Winter series (first co-written with Robert) and the War Minstrels series as well. With Robert, she edited three of the exemplary Universe anthologies that Terry Carr had created. Her Meditations on Middle Earth, her essay collection on J.R.R. Tolkien is quite superb. And of course her prequel Thieves’ Carnival to Leigh Brackett’s The Jewel of Bas is stunning.

(6) AID TO UKRAINE LITERARY COMMUNITY. Publishers Weekly explains how “Booksellers, Friends Raise Money for Ukraine”.

Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books bookstore chain in Miami, has launched HUBB — Helping Ukrainian Books and Booksellers — to support the literary community in the war torn nation. Kaplan has also recruited several literary friends to assist in the effort, including translator and novelist Askold Melnyczuk from the University of Massachusetts, Boston; novelist Jane Unrue of Harvard’s Scholars and Artists at Risk Program; poet and memoirist Christopher Merrill, director of the University of Iowa International Writing Program; and poet and memoirist Carolyn Forche. The fundraiser aims to assist some of the 3,000 industry professionals—publishers, booksellers, authors, printers, distributors—who saw sales plummet, their business disrupted and employees forced to flee after the Russian invasion.

… HUBB is working with the Coral Gables Foundation in Florida to transfer the first grant of $10,000 to the Ukrainian Publishers and Booksellers Association. “Our priorities are first to offer aid to individuals in the book industry who find themselves in financial need—because all available funds are being diverted to support the war effort, the state is able to provide only nominal unemployment subsidies, sometimes as low as $65/month—targeted support to bookstores and publishing enterprises damaged during the war; and to help restock the shelves of libraries damaged of destroyed during the war,” Melnyczuk said.

(7) THE REVENGE OF COLONEL SANDERS. If you give a raptor a cookie, it will ask for a….“Scientists Find a Mammal’s Foot Inside a Dinosaur, a Fossil First” reports Gizmodo.

Paleontologists taking a second look at a species of small, four-winged dinosaur have found a fossilized mammalian foot in the predator’s stomach.

It’s the first concrete evidence of dinosaurs eating mammals, the researchers say. Specimens of the dinosaur, Microraptor zhaoinus, have been discovered containing ancient birds, fish, and lizards, so the mammalian find is just the latest known source of protein for this spunky hunter. The team who re-scrutinized the Microraptor fossil published their findings today in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology….

(8) VIDEO OF THE DAY. SYFY Wire made sure we didn’t miss the Strange World voice cast gag reel.

… Of course, in reality, recording voices for an animated film requires many hours of actors saying the same words over and over into a microphone with various inflections and tweaks. Sometimes they have to say the words so much that their brains lose track of what the words mean, and sometimes the simplest line imaginable sends even the most experienced actor into peals of unexpected laughter because the whole process just feels absurd.

…The same was true of the recording of Strange World, as evidenced by the film’s official gag reel, loaded with footage of stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Dennis Quaid, Jaboukie Young-White, Gabrielle Union and Lucy Liu breaking as they try to deliver everything from simple lines to complex speeches. Check out our exclusive peek at the gag reel below, and watch how long it takes Lucy Liu to stop laughing in the midst of a simple, two-word phrase.

[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Daniel Dern, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day OGH.]