Tag Archives: Pitch Meeting

Pixel Scroll 5/19/25 Someone Ought To Ooooopen Up A Pixel. No, No, No, No! Too Many Files!

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(1) BRITISH BOOK AWARDS. The Bookseller reports The British Book Awards “Book of the Year Winners 2025”. One is of genre interest, while James, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the viewpoint of Jim, has been discussed here for its parallels to Julia, a 1984 retelling. The complete list of winners is at the link.

AUTHOR OF THE YEAR

  • Percival Everett, author of James

BOOK OF THE YEAR – FICTION

  • James by Percival Everett

BOOK OF THE YEAR – PAGETURNER

  • Faebound by Saara El-Arifi

(2) HUGO-WORTHY POETRY CONSIDERED. Dina at SFF Book Reviews compares all the poetry finalists in “Reading the Hugos 2025: Best Poem”. Here’s one of the comments:

…Ever Noir by Mari Ness was much more to my liking, combining fairy tale tropes with a noir style. It’s like the noir detective in the grimy office is visited by a fairy tale princess. While it doesn’t really tell a story, I really enjoyed the juxtaposition of the two clashing sub-genres. (7/10)…

(3) JOURNEY PLANET 90. Steven H Silver announces that Chris Garcia and James Bacon have published an issue of Journey Planet he edited on the theme “My Favorite Museum”, which is 155 pages and looks at more than 60 museums on all seven continents. The issue can be downloaded at the link.

(4) 2027 WESTERCON. “Santa Clara Bids for 2027 Westercon” reports Kayla Allen at Westercon.org.

The 2027 Westercon Site Selection Administrator announced that she has accepted a bid from the Society for the Promotion of Speculative Fiction (SPSF) to host Westercon 79 in conjunction with BayCon 2027 at the Marriott Hotel in Santa Clara, California, and that this bid will be on the ballot for the election to be held this year at Westercon 77/BayCon 2025.

Site Selection Administrator Kayla Allen explained that there was a misunderstanding between herself and SPSF around the original filing deadline of April 15, 2025. After several discussions, Allen decided in the interest of fairness to accept SPSF’s bid and place the Santa Clara in 2027 bid on the ballot. No other groups filed bids to host Westercon 79.

For those wishing to vote electronically, you will be able to pay the advance “voting fee ($20) tokens” by purchasing a token through the BayCon 2025 website. There is also a small service charge for such online purchases. Members will also be able to pay by check or money order. Cash will only be accepted in person at Westercon 77/BayCon 2025.

The 2027 Westercon Site Selection ballot will be posted at the Westercon.org website and will be sent to all members of Westercon 77/BayCon 2025. Members will be able to vote by email, paper mail, or in person at Westercon 77/BayCon 2025.

(5) STREET’S NEW DESTINATION. “’Sesame Street’ Heads To Netflix With Streaming Deal For PBS Series” – Deadline has the story.

Sesame Street has a new streaming home. Netflix has picked up the children’s series, which will make its debut on the streamer later this year with an all-new, reimagined 56th season — plus 90 hours of previous episodes — available to audiences worldwide.

Netflix is coming on board after HBO Max opted not to renew its Sesame Street streaming deal at the end of last year. Finding a new streaming partner has been considered critical to the series’ financial survival.

The new episodes, which will now each center on one 11-minute story, will be available same day-and-date in the U.S. on PBS stations and PBS KIDS digital platforms, maintaining U.S. kids’ free access to early learning, which Sesame Street is all about. That is a departure from Netflix’s typical push for exclusivity unless a second window on a library title is involved….

(6) 451. In “Ray Bradbury Told Us So”, Carl Abrahamsson analyzes the lasting relevance of Fahrenheit 451. (Behind a paywall.).

…Bradbury’s novel emerged from the McCarthy era, when fear of communist influence led to intense scrutiny of intellectuals and artists. The story follows Guy Montag, a “fireman” whose job is burning books in a future America where literature is forbidden. Through his relationship with Clarisse McClellan, a young woman who questions society’s values, and his own growing disillusionment, Montag begins to read the books he’s meant to destroy. The novel depicts a population numbed by wall-sized televisions, immersive entertainment, and high-speed living. Bradbury’s warning focuses on how mass media and anti-intellectualism could lead to cultural amnesia and the death of critical thinking….

(7) THE BLOB AT REST. [Item by Steven French.] Guardian readers suggest some good books to read to kids, including the ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ series and also this: “’I’m still not tired of it’: the best books to read aloud to kids, according to parents”.

Sleep Tight, Disgusting Blob

Huw Aaron

I’m a primary school teacher with two children under three at home. As a reception teacher I spend a lot of time reading children’s books out loud. With my own children I like a book that is calm and gives me something as well as them. Sleep Tight, Disgusting Blob by Huw Aaron is my new favourite: Lovely, relaxed rhymes with a touch of sci-fi and horror thrown in. Children who can read or appreciate the pictures love the idea of a “scary” bedtime story, and those who can’t, get the rhythm and time with a happy, giggling parent. Patrick Clark, Leeds’

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Item by Cat Eldridge.]

May 19, 1983 — Shatner’s Star

Forty-two years ago on this day, William Shatner got his very own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It was the one thousand and sixty-second such star. It’s located at 6901 Hollywood Blvd. He’d also get a star on the Canada’s Walk of Fame in Toronto. 

It is said that hundreds of people attended Shatner’s dedication ceremony, including Leonard Nimoy who gave a speech on the day in which he said that Shatner was “a wonderful man and a great actor” before telling the crowd about the terrible jokes Shatner liked to play on him. 

Shatner also spoke, “This is my small ticket to the stars. All of the other accolades are so ephemeral one never has anything that’s truly concrete and this is the one exception.” 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

My cartoon for this week’s @theguardian.com Books

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2025-05-18T15:36:55.467Z

(10) SHARE THE WEALTH? “Mike Deodato On Not Getting Paid For Ironheart By Marvel Studios” at Bleeding Cool.

Mike Deodato co-created Riri Williams, Ironheart, with Brian Michael Bendis for Marvel Comics, who first appeared in Invincible Iron Man Vol. 3 #7 in 2016, and on the screen in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, played by Dominique Thorne. With the TV series adaptation starring Thorne about to drop on Disney+, he has written an open letter on social media earlier this week, reproduced in English below;…

… “But as much as I celebrate this moment, there’s a bitter edge to it. You see, while Marvel has built an empire worth billions on the backs of its creators, the compensation model hasn’t kept pace with the success. I’m in a good place, one of the best-paid creators in the industry, and I truly appreciate that. But it’s not about me. It’s about the principle. When a character you poured your heart into helps fuel the engine of a multi-billion-dollar machine, a small share of that success feels only fair.

“Creators don’t ask for billions or even millions. Just a nod, a bit of recognition, and a share that reflects the contribution they’ve made. It’s not just good ethics—it’s good business. Happy creators stay invested, inspired, and loyal. But when the business side doesn’t match the creative investment, creators naturally drift toward projects where they retain control, where their work can lead to lasting financial security. That’s why more and more of us are focusing on creator-owned projects, where we can truly share in the success of our creations….”

(11) SOMETIMES IT’S EASY TO BE GREEN. Forbes has news that’s out of this world: “Mars: Why The Red Planet Could Turn Green This Week”.

Mars, the red planet, could be in for a global display of aurora this week after a huge cloud of charged particles left the sun in the direction of the red planet.

The prediction from solar scientists comes in the same week NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover made history by detecting visibly green auroras on Mars for the first time.

An X2.7 solar flare on Wednesday, May 14 — the strongest of the year so far — saw an intense burst of energy and electromagnetic radiation from the sun’s surface spread out across the system at light speed. An X-class solar flare is the most intense class, according to NASA. In its wake, there was a coronal mass ejection — a cloud of super-charged particles — that left the sun’s surface….

(12) THEY’RE LASERS. Oh yeah, now that you mention it. “Something Wild Happens When You Try to Take a Video of a Car’s Sensors” warns Futurism.

Public service announcement: don’t point your phone camera directly at a lidar sensor.

A video recently shared on Reddit demonstrates why. As the camera zooms in on the sensor affixed to the top of a Volvo EX90, a whole galaxy of colorful dots is burned into the image, forming over the exact spot that the flashing light inside the lidar device can be seen.

What you’re witnessing isn’t lens flare or a digital glitch — it’s real, physical damage to the camera. And it’s permanent.

“Lidar lasers burn your camera,” the Reddit user warned….

(13) PITCH MEETING. Ryan George remembers “The Avengers Pitch Meeting” like it was yesterday. Maybe that’s because this is a revival of a video first aired in 2018.

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Matt O’Dowd over at PBS Space Time tends to the sceptical side of technological extraterrestrials existing, at least within detection range of Earth. It is never aliens, except when it is.

However he has just posted a 20-miute video, the latest of a few over the past half-decade, on the Fermi paradox: “Is There A Simple Solution To The Fermi Paradox?”

I should declare that as a bio-geo (environmental) scientist, I don’t buy into this at all. Having devoted much of my extracurricular science time to climate change for over a third of a century, I was really getting depressed, and so for the last decade I have been focusing on deep-time evolution of life, the Earth and the Earth system, developing a ‘co-evolution of life and planet narrative. (I have a book in press coming out on this from an academic publisher – it has been in peer review for two years!. I’ll give Mike the nod when it is due out in case he thinks it might be worth sharing with Filers as there is a fair bit on exobiology in the mix as well as the coming singularity (both being SFnal tropes)).

For what it is worth, I do not consider the endosymbiont process to create a eukaryote (good cell) from a prokaryote (like a simple bacterial cell) a difficult one or a hard evolutionary step.  If it was a hard evolutionary step then it is unlikely to have taken place a number of times (which it has). However, physicists will be physicists and this is Matt’s summary…

Around 2 billion years ago, life had plateaued in complexity, ruined the atmosphere, and was on the verge of self-annihilation. But then something strange and potentially extremely lucky happened that enabled endless new evolutionary paths. The first eukaryote cell was born. This may also explain why there are no aliens.

[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Kayla Allen, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day ULTRAGOTHA who gets the 1776 reference from the other day.]

Pixel Scroll 5/18/25 Pixels Tickle When They Walk Through You

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(1) ZELAZNY-INSPIRED ART. Michael Whelan discusses the series of covers he created for “The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny” from the NESFA Press.

I rank Roger Zelazny as one of the best F/SF writers of his generation. One of my prime regrets is that I never got to meet him.

I was immediately intrigued when offered the chance to provide covers for a multi-volume collection of his works by NESFA Press, the publishing side of the New England Science Fiction Association.

While pitching the project, the publisher explained that Roger had said in an interview that he always wished to have me do a cover for one of his books; alas that it didn’t come to pass during his lifetime. But I was happy to show my respect for his legacy through my art….

…Upon reflection I settled on a blend of 1) managing elements of RZ stories that applied to tales within a particular volume, and 2) adding things ‘on the fly’ as a part of the process of doing the painting, using connections that popped up while adding details to the composition.

I’m not going to lie…it did occur to me that I could paint anything at random, knowing that a connection could be found between what I chose to depict and some narrative or thematic element in Zelazny’s writing.

That was liberating. I felt free to develop the composition from a “big design” standpoint since there was such a wealth of material to draw on to “populate” the image areas.

The idea of running one image across the spines of the seven books was discussed early on; I believe Alice Lewis, jacket designer on this project, was the one who originally mentioned it. The challenge of making it work seemed exciting, so I was drawn to that approach right away….

(Paul Weimer has reviewed the first five books in the series for File 770: “Paul Weimer Review: Roger Zelazny’s Threshold”; “Paul Weimer Review: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, Volume Two: Power & Light”; “Paul Weimer Review: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, Volume Three: This Mortal Mountain”; “Paul Weimer Review: The Collected Works of Roger Zelazny, Volume Four, Last Exit to Babylon”; and “Paul Weimer Review: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny: Volume 5: Nine Black Doves”.)

(2) SEATTLE WORLDCON 2025 CONSULTATIVE VOTE IS OPEN. Seattle Worldcon 2025 is holding a consultative vote of WSFS members on two of the proposed Constitutional amendments passed on from the Glasgow 2024 Business Meeting. Voting runs from May 1 to May 31 and is accessed through the member registration portal in the same manner as the Hugo Award voting. More information is available on the Consultative Vote Webpage.

As previously announced, Seattle Worldcon is holding a consultative vote of WSFS members on two of the proposed Constitutional amendments passed on from the Glasgow 2024 Business Meeting to the Seattle Worldcon: the proposed revisions of the Hugo Award categories for best professional artist and best fan artist, and the proposed amendment to abolish the Retro Hugo Awards.

The purpose of the consultative vote is to test whether this type of vote is feasible, in case the practice is someday adopted as a formal part of the WSFS decision-making process. These proposals were chosen because they have clearly generated wide interest among the Worldcon community.

(3) ON THE WAY. “Frankenstein in the Age of CRISPR-Cas9” at Nautilus.

…[Mary] Shelley drew on a mythology of technology that goes back to the 6th century B.C. when the figure Prometheus stole fire from the gods and bestowed it to mankind. The “fire bringer,” is often associated with Lucifer, (literally meaning “light bearer”), who pilfered light from the heavens and brought it down to Earth. The “fall of man” implies an age when mortals are illuminated with knowledge. Immanuel Kant was the first to modernize the term, when he nicknamed his pal, Benjamin Franklin, “the Prometheus of modern times” for his nifty work with kites. In the early 19th century, Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus put the concept into terms of controlling biological forces. She not only arguably invented science fiction, but her novel offered a plot device for modern tales, including Flowers for Algernon, The Stand, The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Yann Martel’s short story “We Ate the Children Last.” We all understand the illusions. A scientist sets out to create a more perfect entity, only to have it backfire as the thing he creates gets out of control.

…By the early 1980s, Richard Mulligan at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology isolated genetic code and wrapped it up in a virus, returning it to humankind as a tool. In the same decade, companies such as Biogen and Genentech claimed the patents to control the first applications of genetic engineering. Scientists today are using the gene editing tool CRISPR to do things such as tinker with the color of butterfly wings, genetically alter pigs, and engineer microbes with potentially pathogenic or bioterror purposes. Last year, a group of 150 scientists held a closed-door meeting at Harvard Medical School to discuss a project to synthesize the code of a human genome from scratch using chemical techniques. As Andrew Pollack wrote in The New York Times, “the prospect is spurring both intrigue and concern in the life sciences community because it might be possible, such as through cloning, to use a synthetic genome to create human beings without biological parents.” In August, Shoukhrat Mitalipov at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland reported using CRISPR to alter a human embryo….

…We are at the very start of the “industrial revolution of the human genome,” just as Shelley was writing at the start of the Industrial Revolution. Her essential insight is that science and technology can progress but will never achieve social control without a willful and ongoing abdication, or repression, of our agency. Shelley wants to tell us that what we seek from technology is based on our existential fear of being in control over our own lives, which have no ultimate solution, and which compels us to so eagerly pursue what psychologists call an external locus of control. But mythology is often first presented as a utopia, only to result in a dystopian reality…

(4) THE SF COLLECTION SOME OF US GREW UP WITH. “A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, Volume One & Two, Anthony Boucher editor, 1959 Doubleday & 1960 SF Book Club” features at A Deep Look by Dave Hook.

The Short: I recently reread one of my favorite SF anthologies as a much younger person, A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, Volume One and Volume Two, Anthony Boucher editor, 1959 Doubleday/1960 Science Fiction Book Club. It was available for purchase only as a two volume set when new. I am not aware of any other SF anthology that includes two novels and 10 pieces of short fiction, much less one that includes four novels and 20 short fiction works in the set. My favorite novel included is the classic The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester, and my favorite short fiction is the classic “The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff“, a novella by Theodore Sturgeon. My overall average rating is 3.73/5, or “Very good”. It was great to rediscover how great the John Wyndham novel Re-Birth is…. 

(5) GOING ROGUE IS RECOMMENDED. “Five Takeaways From Rewatching ‘Rogue One’ After ‘Andor’” at The Ringer.

…The makers of Andor have teased how transformative it can be to revisit Rogue One after the prequel-to-a-prequel’s conclusion. As of last week, Andor creator Tony Gilroy hadn’t rewatched Rogue since finishing Andor, but he hyped the practice anyway: “Other people around me have done it. So I’ve been reassured. And I’ve seen bits and pieces of it; it comes on, and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, holy crap. Look what that does.’” Diego Luna was even more insistent. “I urge people to see Rogue One right after the end of Season 2,” the actor who plays Cassian said. “They’re going to see a different film.”…

There follow five takeaways which, as you should expect, are full of spoilers.

(6) AS IMAGINED IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. [Item by Andrew Porter.] “When a president goes rogue: In these books, it already happened” at Salon. Discussion of several novels including The Man In The High Castle and Parable of The Sower.

…As the second Trump administration lurches into its third month, moving fast and breaking government, I’ve been studying what American writers have suggested would occur if a demagogue were elected president. A next step, in novels such as Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here,” involves a direct attack on the Supreme Court if it declines to affirm a president’s agenda. Much the same forces are at work 90 years later. Alternative histories, particularly dystopias, reflect their societies’ radical pessimism, as  Harvard professor and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore suggested in 2017:  

“Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance; it’s become a fiction of submission, the fiction of an untrusting, lonely, and sullen twenty-first century, the fiction of fake news and Infowars, the fiction of helplessness and hopelessness.”…

(7) INTERNATIONAL BOOKER THOUGHTS. [Item by Steven French.] A couple of genre related novels top the Guardian’s list of contenders for the International Booker Prize: “A Danish Groundhog Day or tales of millennial angst… What should win next week’s International Booker?”

What unites the books on the shortlist for this year’s International Booker prize? Brevity, for one thing: five of the six are under 200 pages, and half barely pass 100. They are works of precision and idiosyncrasy that don’t need space to make a big impression. Themes are both timely – AI, the migration crisis – and evergreen: middle-class ennui; the place of women in society. And for the second consecutive year, every book comes from an independent publisher, with four from tiny micropresses. Ahead of the winner announcement on 20 May, here’s our verdict on the shortlist….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

May 18, 1962 — Twilight Zone’s “I Sing The Body Electric”

They make a fairly convincing pitch here. It doesn’t seem possible, though, to find a woman who must be ten times better than mother in order to seem half as good, except, of course, in the Twilight Zone. — Intro narration.

On this date in 1962, The Twilight Zone aired “I Sing The Body Electric”. 

It was scripted by Ray Bradbury and although he had contributed several scripts to the series, this was the only one produced. (His first script, “Here There Be Tygers,” was accepted but never filmed.)

It became the basis for his 1969 short story of the same name, named after an 1855 Walt Whitman poem which celebrates the human body and its connection to the universe. It was according to Whitman anti-slavery. The original publication, like the other poems in Leaves of Grass, did not have a title. In fact, the line “I sing the body electric” was not added until the 1867 edition.

Bradbury’s short story would be published first in McCall’s, August 1969. Knopf would release his I Sing The Body Electric collection in October of that year. It’s been included in least fifty collections and anthologies.) 

James Sheldon and William F. Claxton directed the episode; Sheldon directed some of The Man from U.N.C.L.E episodes; Claxton is known for Bonanza and Little House on the Prairie. I’ll confess to having seen a fair amount of the former but none of the latter. 

A large ensemble cast was needed as, minor spoiler alert, the primary cast here are shown at two ages, hence Josephine Hutchinson, David White, Vaughn Taylor, Doris Packer, Veronica Cartwright, Susan Crane and Charles Herbert all being performers even though the actual script calls for very few characters. 

Another spoiler alert. Perhaps I’m being overly cautious but we did get a complaint about spoiling a 50-year-old episode of a program by not noting that I was going to say something about that program, hence spoiler alerts for these programs.

Auntie, the organic one, caring for the children has decided they are too much of a burden and has decided to leave. So father decided to get a robot grandmother, a new fangled invention in their city. The mechanical grandmother after some resentment by one child is accepted by all after she saves one child from mortal injury and Serling says after that —

As of this moment, the wonderful electric grandmother moved into the lives of children and father. She became integral and important. She became the essence. As of this moment, they would never see lightning, never hear poetry read, never listen to foreign tongues without thinking of her. Everything they would ever see, hear, taste, feel would remind them of her. She was all life, and all life was wondrous, quick, electrical – like Grandma.

So this gentle tale that only Bradbury could write of the children who love her and the ever so wonderful mechanical grandmother ends with Serling saying the words scripted of course by Bradbury for him:

A fable? Most assuredly. But who’s to say at some distant moment there might be an assembly line producing a gentle product in the form of a grandmother whose stock in trade is love? Fable, sure, but who’s to say?

This was the year that the entire season of the series won the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo at Chicon III. Just my opinion, but I think of all the nominees that it was clearly the far superior choice to win the Hugo. Really superior. 

It is streaming on Paramount+. 

There’s also a boy in the family but I couldn’t find an image of all three children, the father and the grandmother that was as good as this one is.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) EXPECT A CODA FOR THIS SEASON OF DOCTOR WHO. BBC Doctor Who reveals: “Special episode of Doctor Who: Unleashed announced celebrating 20 years of revival”.

Travel back with David Tennant, Billie Piper and host Steffan Powell through a host of Whoniversal history…

As Season 2 comes to a climax, a special edition of Doctor Who: Unleashed is set to air on BBC Three, BBC iPlayer and BBC Wales. Steffan Powell is once again set to take a trip through the time vortex as he invites viewers on a journey celebrating the last twenty years since Doctor Who returned, and he will be joined by a host of cast and creatives that have played a part in bringing the show back into the Whoniverse.

Joining Steffan for the ride are some of the show’s most recognisable faces, including past Doctors David Tennant and Jodie Whittaker, former companions Billie Piper, Pearl Mackie, and Mandip Gill, ex-showrunners Steven Moffat and Chris Chibnall, the current Doctor Ncuti Gatwa alongside his newest companion Varada Sethu, as well as the current showrunner and the man who brought the show back in 2005, Russell T Davies.

As well as chatting with the stars about what Doctor Who means to them, Steffan will be revealing secrets from behind the scenes with interviews with those who work behind the cameras to bring Doctor Who to life….

 (11) PRECURSORS? Facebook’s group for David Attenborough Fans discusses the Silurian Hypothesis.

…The idea of the Silurian Hypothesis was inspired by an episode of Doctor Who, where intelligent reptilian creatures called Silurians awakened from 400 million years of hibernation due to nuclear testing. While this was a work of fiction, the hypothesis raised a profound possibility: What if there were once other advanced civilizations on Earth that have completely vanished?

Humans often think that their existence and their civilization are eternal, but history teaches us otherwise. Take ancient Egypt, for instance. For over 3,000 years and across 30 dynasties, Egyptians lived under the shadow of the pyramids, fished the Nile, and mingled with other cultures. To them, their civilization seemed everlasting, yet it too disappeared. Similar fates befell the Mesopotamians, the Indus Valley civilization, the Greeks, Nubians, Persians, Romans, Incas, and Aztecs. These great empires, once thriving with millions, left behind scant evidence of their grandeur.

Modern humans have been around for about 100,000 years, a mere blip in the hundreds of millions of years that complex life has existed on Earth. Given this vast expanse of time, it’s conceivable that other intelligent species might have risen and fallen long before us. Would we even know they had been here?…

…The Silurian Hypothesis suggests looking for markers of industrialization on a global scale. One key marker is changes in the isotopic composition of elements, which can be detected in sedimentary layers. For instance, human activities have altered the nitrogen cycle and increased the levels of certain metals like gold, lead, and platinum. Most notably, the burning of fossil fuels has changed the carbon isotope ratios in the atmosphere, known as the Suess effect, which is detectable in sediment cores.

Interestingly, a sudden global change in carbon and oxygen isotope levels was observed 56 million years ago during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). The PETM saw Earth’s temperature rise by six degrees Celsius over 200,000 years, with fossil carbon levels spiking. Some scientists speculate that a massive volcanic eruption caused this, but the exact cause remains unknown. Could it have been evidence of an ancient civilization? Probably not, but it does show how such an event could leave a detectable mark.

The Silurian Hypothesis, while not proving the existence of ancient civilizations, provides a framework for searching for them, not just on Earth but also on other planets. The Drake Equation estimates the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy, suggesting there could be anywhere from 150,000 to 1.5 billion. If intelligent life can arise multiple times on a single planet, as the Silurian Hypothesis proposes, it opens up exciting possibilities for finding civilizations throughout the galaxy….

(12) THE INSIDE (THE BOOKSHOP) STORY. [Item by John King Tarpinian.] The Howling (1981) Bookshop scene was filmed at the Cherokee Bookshop, which was on Cherokee just off of Hollywood Boulevard.  The wandering customer is Forry Ackerman.   

(13) PITCH MEETING. Ryan George takes us inside the “Thunderbolts* Pitch Meeting”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Call for Jurors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

George wearing his party hat in 2010.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Donner

(9) COMICS SECTION.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pixel Scroll 3/22/25 Inside Of The Internet No One Can Prove You Aren’t A Robot Dog

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(1) LEVAR BURTON FEATURED AS ALTADENA LIBRARY REOPENS. LAist is there as “Altadena Library reopens to the community for fun, games and a LeVar Burton reading”.

Today marks the grand reopening of the Altadena Library. The beloved community space was spared by the Eaton Fire, and after a short period of closure for fire-related clean up, it’s welcoming hundreds of Altadenans who gathered to celebrate its return.

“We wanted to have a really big carnival feel,” Altadena Library director Nikki Winslow said. “Free food, giveaways… also Clifford the Big Red Dog, so it should be a really fun event.”

The day’s main attraction is story time by education advocate and actor LeVar Burton….

… Thousands of Altadena residents lost their homes in the Eaton Fire, and many more were displaced. But today felt like the community getting back on its feet, says Jean Courtney, a long time resident whose home was destroyed….

…Burton, the Star Trek star turned children’s book author, said he was here today to keep the spotlight on the Altadena community as they begin to rebuild.

“Altadena traditionally is one of those communities where people who looked like me were welcomed and could purchase homes,” Burton said. “The American dream is alive and well in Altadena – today, tomorrow, and every day.”…

(2) ARIZONA CON CLOSED BY HEALTH AUTHORITIES. Wild West Con has been required to shut down in the middle of the weekend they announced on Facebook today. The steampunk-themed event being held in a Tucson, AZ casino opened on Thursday. It is reported the congers have been told to go but the other casino patrons have not.

Due to ongoing medical concerns, we regret to inform all interested that Wild Wild West Con has been shut down by Casino Del Sol.

Unfortunately, we do not have any further information to provide but will give updates as soon as they’re available.

There was an additional statement on Bluesky.

(3) SFWA ON META AI TRAINING. Yesterday SFWA President Kate Ristau sent members this comment after the Atlantic made it easy to search LibGen data to discover whether their work being used by Meta to train its AI.

Opening up the Atlantic article yesterday was a shock. So many of us scrolled down to search the Library Genesis data set for our own names. According to the article, Meta (Facebook) used millions of pirated works to train its AI. I found two of my works, and started searching for other SFWA members as well. 

That little blue box has been all over social media this morning. 

As the Atlantic notes, “millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.”

Personally, I did not give permission for my work to be used. Did you?

SFWA’s number one principle in regards to AI is that Creators must be compensated for the use of their work. If you were not compensated, what can you do?

We recommend you follow Author Guild’s list of actions, including protecting your work. There are other actions that may fit your personal circumstances as well. 

As an organization, SFWA will continue to fight for our principles. Writers must be paid, credited, and protected, following expected norms. 

We will follow up with more information as we investigate further and take next steps.

(4) SOCIETY OF AUTHORS REACTION. The UK’s Society of Authors has also issued a statement: “The LibGen data set – what authors can do”.

Yesterday (20 March 2025), The Atlantic published a searchable database of over 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. This data set, called Library Genesis or ‘LibGen’ for short, is full of pirated material, and all of it has been used to develop AI systems by tech giant Meta.

The Atlantic says that court documents show that staff at Meta discussed licensing books and research papers lawfully but instead chose to use stolen work because it was faster and cheaper. Given that Meta Platforms, Inc, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has a market capitalisation of £1.147 trillion, this is appalling behaviour.

According to The Atlantic, Meta argued that it could then use the US’s ‘fair use exception’ defence if it was challenged legally.

It is not yet clear whether scraping from copyright works without permission is unlawful under the US fair use exception to copyright, but if that scraping is for commercial purposes (which what Meta is doing surely is) it cannot be fair use. Under the UK fair dealing exception to copyright, there is no question that scraping is unlawful without permission.

As a matter of urgency, Meta needs to compensate the rightsholders of all the works it has been exploiting.

This is yet more evidence of the catastrophic impact generative AI is having on our creative industries worldwide. From development through to output, creators’ rights are being ignored, and governments need to intervene to protects authors’ rights…

(5) PEN AMERICA LONGLISTS. PEN America has announced the 2025 PEN America Literary Awards Longlists. The complete list is at the link. There do not appear to be any works of genre interest in the lists. The books up for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award are —

The PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award celebrates writing that exemplifies literary excellence on the subject of the physical or biological sciences and communicates complex scientific concepts to a lay audience. The winner receives a cash award of $10,000.

  • The Burning Earth: A History, Sunil Amrith (W. W. Norton & Company)
  • Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World, Kelly Clancy (Riverhead Books)
    All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today, Elizabeth Comen (Harper)
  • Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (Princeton University Press)
  • The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with Our Wild Neighbors, Erika Howsare (Catapult)
  • The Big Freeze: A Reporter’s Personal Journey into the World of Egg Freezing and the Quest to Control Our Fertility, Natalie Lampert (Ballantine)
  • Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life, Jason Roberts (Random House)
  • The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives, Ernest Scheyder (Atria)
  • Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean, Matt Strassler (Basic Books)
  • The Living Medicine: How a Lifesaving Cure Was Nearly Lost—and Why It Will Rescue Us When Antibiotics Fail, Lina Zeldovich (St. Martin’s Press)

(6) WE LIE HERE, OBEDIENT TO THEIR WORDS. “Nasa drops plan to land first woman and first person of color on the moon” reports the Guardian.

Nasa has dropped its longstanding public commitment to land the first woman and person of color on the moon, in response to Donald Trump’s directives to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices at federal agencies.

The promise was a central plank of the space agency’s Artemis program, which is scheduled to return humans to the lunar surface in 2027 for the first time since the final Apollo mission in December 1972.

The Artemis landing page of Nasa’s website previously included the words: “Nasa will land the first woman, first person of color, and first international partner astronaut on the Moon using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before.”

The version of the page live on the website on Friday, however, appears with the phrase removed…

(7) TAPE DELAY. “US blocks Canadian access to cross-border library, sparking outcry”. The Guardian has the story.

The US has blocked Canadian access to a library straddling the Canada-US border, drawing criticism from a Quebec town where people have long enjoyed easy entry to the space.

The Haskell Free Library and Opera House is located between Stanstead, Quebec, and Derby Line, Vermont. It was built deliberately to straddle the frontier between the two countries – a symbol of cooperation and friendship between Canada and the US.

The library’s entrance is on the Vermont side. Previously, Canadian visitors were able to enter using the sidewalk and entrance on the American side but were encouraged to bring documentation, according to the library’s website.

Inside, a line of electrical tape demarcates the international boundary. About 60% of the building, including the books, is located in Canada. Upstairs, in the opera house, the audience sits in the US while the performers are in Canada.

Under the new rules, Canadians will need to go through a formal border crossing before entering the library.

“This closure not only compromises Canadian visitors’ access to a historic symbol of cooperation and harmony between the two countries but also weakens the spirit of cross-border collaboration that defines this iconic location,” the town of Stanstead said in a press release on Thursday…

(8) MORE US TRAVEL CAUTIONS. The Guardian reports “Denmark and Finland urge caution for US-bound transgender people”.

Denmark and Finland have updated their US travel advice for transgender people, joining the handful of European countries that have sought to caution US-bound travellers in recent weeks as reports emerge of ordeals at the American border.

Denmark said this week it had begun advising transgender travellers to contact the US embassy in Copenhagen before departure to ensure there would be no issues with travel documents.

The change came after Donald Trump made a priority of rolling back trans and non-binary rights, announcing that the US would only recognise two genders and signing off on executive orders that sought to exclude transgender people from the US military, limit their access to sport and curtail gender-transition procedures for people under the age of 19….

(9) PETER MABEY (1926-2025). [Via Alison Scott.] British fan Peter Mabey, winner of the first Doc Weir Award, died February 19.

The Doc Weir Award history site says of him:

Peter was one of the first members of the Cheltenham Circle and the BSFA, acting as Librarian of the BSFA lending library when the collection was also held at Cheltenham; he later served as a BSFA committee member after the organisation’s incorporation.

He was one of the founders of the Order of St. Fantony and was presented, in his absence, with the first Doc Weir Award at the 1963 Eastercon (Bullcon). Peter was a member of the organising committee for the 1965 Worldcon (Loncon II) and was responsible for its publications.

He continued to attend conventions well into his 90s.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

March 22, 1931 — William Shatner, 94.

By Paul Weimer: The face that launched a hundred soap operas. 

I find it interesting that like B5 would find out thirty years later, Star Trek’s first shot at a crew and a leading man, Jeffrey Hunter, wasn’t quite what a viewing public particularly wanted in a leading man of a space opera SF series. Poor Michael O’Hare and Jeffrey Hunter both weren’t quite right to be the full-on leading actors for such a series. 

But like Bruce Boxleitner three decades later, William Shatner proved to be.  I mean, sure, lots of Spock fans out there, McCoy fans, and other characters. And the whole “trio” of Kirk-Spock-McCoy has been documented to enormous detail. But it is William Shatner’s complex Captain Kirk, who was more cerebral and outwitting of his opponents than you remember, more nuanced, more interesting than the flanderized stereotype that has been parodied to the moon and back ever made him out to be. Sure, his diction and acting were, charitably melodramatic, but that is a feature, not a bug that got him through the series, and seven movies. 

Outside of genre space, he did shows like T J Hooker, and Rescue 911, and Boston Legal (although the fourth wall breaking Boston Legal might actually BE a genre show. I leave the comments to decide that). He’s done music (oddly, that doesn’t make him unique among the TOS crew). He was the voice of Priceline.com in its early days on the Internet. He co-wrote the TekWar novels. He breeds horses. (Wonder why he is horse riding in Star Trek Generations? Now you know.) 

You might think that “Nightmare at 30,000 feet” might be my favorite non-Star-Trek genre performance Shatner has done. And you would be almost right. It is a classic in paranoia, perception, fear, and it does show that his acting style does have range, and ability and even with his unusual cadence, it can work in a situation like this. The episode itself is a masterpiece and Shatner’s performance is a big part of that.

But I like “Nick of Time” a bit more. It’s a more hopeful and positive story, as we see Shatner as part of a married couple who wind up briefly in thrall to a fortune telling machine that seems to tell the future — but really just makes people dependent on its easy, cryptic answers. The utter triumph of the episode as Shatner and his wife break free of their dependency is enough to make you cheer…until you see the coda, and see a couple who have not been so fortunate, or possessing as much fortitude as Shatner’s Don S. Carter and Patricia Breslin’s Pat Carter finally manage to show.

And Shatner has been to space.

Get a life? William Shatner, in and out of Star Trek, certainly has.

William Shatner

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Loose Parts proves it depends on which wolf you feed.
  • Nancy unintentionally contributes to an essay.
  • Off the Mark has a sensitive palate.
  • Strange Brew asks for the origin story.
  • Tom Gauld flips the script.

My cartoon for this week’s @theguardian.com books

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2025-03-22T11:06:11.676Z

(12) WHERE’S THE BEEF? NASA remembers the “Fallout from the Unauthorized Gemini III Space Sandwich”.

“I hid a sandwich in my spacesuit,” Astronaut John W. Young confessed in the April 2, 1965, issue of Life Magazine. The conversation about and the consumption of the sandwich, which lasted only about 30 seconds during the Gemini III flight, became a serious matter that drew the ire of Congress and NASA’s administrator after the crew returned home. Congress was particularly upset and brought the matter to leadership’s attention at hearings about NASA’s 1966 budget. Representative George E. Shipley was especially disgusted, knowing how much money and time NASA had spent to prepare the Gemini III spacecraft for launch. The fact that a crewmember brought something into the crew cabin, which Shipley likened to a “surgeon’s operating room,” put the techniques used to prevent a spaceflight mission from failing at risk; crumbs could have made their way behind instrument panels interfering with the operation of flight equipment and the loss of the mission and its crew. Shipley called Young’s antics “foolish” and asked NASA leaders to share their thoughts….

…Young never received a formal reprimand for the incident but was made aware of Congress’s frustration. Others in the corps were advised to avoid similar stunts and to focus on the mission. The decision to bring a sandwich onboard did not have a negative impact on Young’s career. He was the first astronaut to fly to space six times —two Gemini missions; two Apollo missions, including the dress rehearsal for the first lunar landing; and two space shuttle missions including STS-1, known as the bravest test flight in history. He also served as chief of the Astronaut Office for 13 years.

(13) SIDE EFFECTS OF ANTI-AGING REGIME. Futurism reports “Anti-Aging CEO’s Test Subjects Reportedly Suffered Unpleasant Side Effects”.

An alarming new investigation by the New York Times accuses youth-obsessed tech mogul Bryan Johnson of covering up some unpleasant side effects experienced by participants testing his line of supplements.

Johnson — who was an early investor in Futurism, but hasn’t had any involvement for years — has gone to extreme lengths to slow down or even “reverse” his “biological age” through a series of sometimes extreme self-experiments, like using his teenage son as a “blood boy” and measuring his nighttime erections.

He’s parlayed that hype into a line of supplements and meals called “The Blueprint Stack,” bolstered by what the company says were promising study results.

But the NYT‘s reporting makes that study sound very dubious. Out of the roughly 1,700 participants, a whopping 60 percent experienced at least one side effect, according to documents viewed by the newspaper. Blood tests showed that some participants saw their testosterone levels drop or developed prediabetes.

The food regimen also reportedly had undesirable side effects.

“Longevity mix: A lot of comments about hating this as it is making them sick, vomit, have heartburn, etc.,” one Blueprint employee told a colleague in early 2024, as quoted by the newspaper.

“TONS of people saying it’s causing nausea, bloating,” another employee wrote, referring to allulose, a sugar alternative that Johnson has previously sung the praises of.

Thanks to a litany of confidentiality agreements employees reportedly had to sign, many felt afraid to speak up.

(14) PITCH MEETING. Ryan George takes us inside “The Electric State Pitch Meeting” – whether we want to be there or not!

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Walk, Run, Crawl, RL Fun” from Boston Dynamics.

In this video, Atlas is demonstrating policies developed using reinforcement learning with references from human motion capture and animation. This work was done as part of a research partnership between Boston Dynamics and the Robotics and AI Institute (RAI Institute).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dwarfism debate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key Takeaways from the Post-Oscars Streaming Shift

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

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

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

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Lis Carey.]

March 13, 1966 — Alastair Reynolds, 59.

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

Which gives me a sad.

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

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

Alastair Reynolds

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

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

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

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

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

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

(9) COMICS SECTION.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pixel Scroll 3/12/25 The Shire My Destination

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(1) BOOK BANNING NEWS, [Item by Bruce D. Arthurs.] Malinda Lo’s Last Night At The Telegraph Club is one of a number of books being considered for a statewide ban in South Carolina. Lo wrote the review committee an excellent letter defending her book and others like it. “Telegraph Club Considered for Possible Statewide Ban in South Carolina”.

… The parent who challenged LNATTC and other books in Beaufort County and at the state level is Elizabeth Szalai. She had a 5% success rate in Beaufort County, but she has had a 100% success rate at the state level so far.

Szalai’s complaint claims that LNATTC “contains explicit sexual activities in violation of Regulation 43-170 specifically touching of breast and masterbation [sic].” The complaint includes excerpts of scenes from LNATTC stripped of their context. Indeed, the context of the entire novel is irrelevant to Regulation 43-170.

I am not optimistic that LNATTC will survive this challenge in South Carolina, but it’s still possible….

…I’ve written to South Carolina’s Instructional Materials Review Committee to support my book and to ask them to uphold our First Amendment rights. My letter is below:

Dear members of the Instructional Materials Review Committee of the South Carolina Department of Education:

My name is Malinda Lo, and I’m the author of several critically acclaimed and bestselling young adult novels, including Last Night at the Telegraph Club, which is currently under review by your committee. I’m writing to you not only as the author of this book, but as a concerned American citizen who believes strongly in our First Amendment.

Last Night at the Telegraph Club was the winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Stonewall Book Award, the Asian Pacific American Award for Literature, the Kids’ Choice Awards Teen Book of the Year, and over over two dozen more honors and awards. It is a coming-of-age novel about a Chinese American girl discovering her identity as a lesbian in 1950s San Francisco. I am a Chinese American lesbian myself, and when I was a teen growing up in the 1980s and ’90s, I often felt alone and confused. I didn’t have access to books like this that would have helped me to better understand who I was. That’s why I write books about LGBTQ+ and Asian American characters. I’m writing the books I needed as a teen.

Since Telegraph Club was published, many LGBTQ+ and Asian American readers have contacted me to tell me how much this book meant to them. Seeing yourself in a book can be a transformative and empowering experience. One reader wrote to tell me, “Your books helped me love and accept myself.” A Chinese American reader wrote, “I feel so seen. Perhaps a little bit too seen, as I am on the verge of tears.” A teen from Nashville told me, “it means a lot to see people like me in literature, written by people like me.”

I’m an immigrant who came to the United States with my family from China when I was a child, and we settled in Boulder, Colorado. I grew up knowing that we came here to escape the oppression of the Chinese Communist government, which does not allow freedom of expression or the freedom to read. This is why I’ve always valued our First Amendment rights. The possibility that my book could be banned across the entire state of South Carolina alarms me because censorship goes directly against the ideals of our country.

I urge you to trust the judgement of your local teachers and librarians, who selected my book — and many others — for their school libraries based on their professional judgement and training. While not every book is for every reader, every reader deserves the freedom to choose what they wish to read, not to have those rights taken away from them by the state. I hope you will take this opportunity to support our fundamental rights and freedoms as Americans.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,
Malinda Lo

The hearing is Thursday, March 13….

(2) GREG BEAR’S PAPERS TO SDSU. Astrid Bear updated readers of the late Greg Bear’s Facebook page:

My major task and accomplishment last year was sorting, boxing, and shipping Greg’s papers to his alma mater, San Diego State University, where they are held in the library’s Special Collections. There are 60+ boxes of journals, notes, manuscripts, and letters, plus a lot of his original artwork. It’s truly a treasure, a deep dive into his creative process and the breadth and depth of his thinking and interests. But here’s the thing about archived papers — for students and researchers to have meaningful access, there needs to be a catalogue of what’s there, called a finding aid, and the items need to be stored using archival standards, such as acid-free boxes. So, I’ve made a donation of $5,000 to help fund those efforts, and am asking you to help match that. A total of $10,000 will go a long way to make the archive accessible.

SDSU is having their major annual fundraising effort right now, so there’s a spiffy website interface for making donations. Link will be in the comments. If you are able to donate even a little bit, that will help meet the $10,000 goal. My match money is already there, just waiting to partner with yours.

“The link in the comments should take you my fundraising page. Scroll down to Matches and Challanges to find Library: $5K Match to the Special Collections Support Fund, and you’ll see my name there. Click on Contribute and it will take you to the page to enter your info. The designation should already be filled in, Library Special Collections Fund. If it’s not, go up a bit to the drop-down menu titled, “There are 6 matches and/or challenges running!” and select “Just for Library Special Collections Fund.”

“Thank you so much for considering this. SDSU and its libraries meant a lot to Greg, as did having his archives be available and studied long into the future.”

Here’s the link to the fundraiser: University Library · GiveCampus (sdsu.edu)

(3) PROZINE OWNERSHIP TRANSITION PLANS. Locus Online has extensive “Details on the New Owners of Analog, Asimov’s, and F&SF”, including statements from P.L. Stevens, publisher, of new owner Must Read Books Publishing, sellers Penny Publications and Gordon Van Gelder (F&SF), as well as Analog editor Trevor Quachri and Asimov’s editor Sheila Williams.

All editorial staff from the magazines have been retained in the acquisitions….

The parent company will take over sponsorship of the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, the Black Orchid Novella Award (with The Wolfe Pack), the Dell Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing, Asimov’s Readers Awards, AnLab Awards, The Analog Award for Emerging Black Authors, and Ellery Queen Readers Awards, among others.

(4) WHY YES, HOW DID YOU KNOW? Times have changed. People who’d had a few drinks and would want to avoid coming home smelling like the bar might chew a few Sen-Sen before they walked through the door. Today? To make sure they come home smelling that way – well, at least like they’ve had too much Butterbeer – Orly offers this line of Harry Potter-inspired cosmetics. “Ultimate Harry Potter™ Butterbeer™ Experience” at Orly Beauty.

Infused with the iconic BUTTERBEER™ scent from the Harry Potter™ film series, this collection features all four products from the BUTTERBEER™ collection. From a whimsical Iridescent Topper to a Quick Dry Nail Spray to Nourishing Cuticle Oil and Hydrating Cuticle Froth, your nail care routine is about to become your favorite experience.

(5) HALF-CENTURY OF ROCKY HORROR. “Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror’ Review: Sweet Doc Tribute” at The Hollywood Reporter.

Watching Linus O’Brien’s Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror, a new documentary launching out of SXSW, my most frequently thought was that — actual quality of the film notwithstanding — it’s an absolute blessing to be getting this examination of the Rocky Horror phenomenon at this particular moment in time.

Released tied to the 50th anniversary of the Rocky Horror Picture Show film, Strange Journey benefits to no small degree from the presence of O’Brien, son of The Rocky Horror Show creator Richard O’Brien — which means access to archives and memories and presumably easier facilitation of conversations with an astonishing assortment of people associated with the property at every level.

Richard O’Brien is 82; director Jim Sharman is 79; star Tim Curry is 78; Lou Adler, who brought the stage show from London to Los Angeles and then produced the movie, is 91. All are present in the documentary, as are musical director Richard Hartley, costumer Sue Blane, and stars including Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, Patricia Quinn and even Peter Hinwood, who played Rocky and hasn’t acted since the ’70s. The time to get all of these people together, on camera, to discuss all things Rocky and share their stories is not infinite and, as a result, fans will find plenty to cherish in Strange Journey….

(6) COMICS ATTRACTING YOUNG READERS. [Item by Steven French.] This perhaps comes as no surprise to the parents among us: “’Something magical is happening’: sales boom for children’s comics creating young readers of the future” in the Guardian.

The best route to learning to love words in print could well be pictures. This, at least, is the hope of the publishing industry this spring, as it welcomes news that sales of children’s comics and graphic novels have reached an all-time peak of almost £20m in Britain.

While publishers and editors are celebrating this boom for its own sake, the popularity of these titles is also being hailed as a good omen for novels, ahead of the London Book Fair at Olympia this week. “Over the last decade we’ve seen a significant rise in sales of graphic novels for both the adult and children’s markets,” said Philip Stone, media analyst at NielsenIQ BookData, as he revealed details of the latest trends, hits and flops this weekend.

“Superhero books have been a reliably big feature, probably boosted by all the screen superhero movies. A lot of manga series are doing very well again, and this may also be linked to screen versions. What we really need now is some deep-dive research into the impact of graphic and comic fiction as a gateway for young people into reading. We certainly suspect it’s true.”…

(7) GENE WINFIELD (1927-2025). Custom car creator Gene Winfield died March 4 at the age of 97 reports Deadline.

Gene Winfield, a pioneering legend in the hot-rod world who created custom cars for numerous films and TV shows including Blade Runner, the original Star Trek series, RoboCop, Get Smart! and many others, has died. He was 97.

Winfield’s …. most famous creations include the iconic Galileo shuttlecraft and the Jupiter 8 for Star Trek [seen in the episode “Bread and Circuses”]…and the “spinners” for Blade Runner, which was nominated for the Special Effects Oscar. He also built the Catmobile for TV’s Batman and gadget cars for Get Smart! and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

His futuristic vehicles are seen in Back to the Future II, the original RoboCop, The Last Starfighter, Woody Allen’s Sleeper and others. Winfield’s cars also are seen in the Dirty Harry sequel Magnum Force, Bewitched, Ironside, TV’s Mission: Impossible and more….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

JDM Bibliophile zine

JDM Bibliophile (1965–2004). This one is for John D. Macdonald completists.

John D. MacDonald became the subject of a fan magazine in March 1965 when Len and June Moffatt of Downey, California first published the JDM Bibliophile (JDMB), devoted to his work. MacDonald starting writing for pulp magazines in 1946 during their waning days.

JDMB, a mimeographed magazine at the time, was described in its initial issue as a “non-profit amateur journal devoted to the readers of John D. MacDonald and related matters.” A goal was to obtain complete bibliographic information on all of MacDonald’s writings, and this was partly achieved with The JDM Master Checklist, published in 1969 by the Moffatts. 

They had help from many people, including MacDonald himself. Though he kept good records, he, like most authors, didn’t have complete publishing data on his own work. Especially helpful to the Moffatts were William J. Clark and another couple, Walter and Jean Shine of Florida. 

The Shines published an updated version of the Checklist in 1980, adding illustrations, a biographical sketch, and a listing of articles and reviews of MacDonald. JDMB offered news and reviews of MacDonald’s writings and their adaptation to various media. There were also contributions from MacDonald, including reminiscences and commentary. The Moffatts contributed a column (“& Everything”), as did the Shines (“The Shine Section”). Other JDM fans sent articles, letters, and parodies. One issue, #25 in 1979, included the Shines’ “Confidential Report, a Private Investigators’ File on Travis McGee,” describing information gleaned from the McGee canon about his past, interests, cases, and associates. MacDonald once said of Walter Shine, “He knows more about Travis than I do.” 

After the Moffatts had published twenty-two issues of JDMB, it was transferred in 1979 to the University of South Florida in Tampa, with Professor Edgar Hirshberg as editor. It continued until 1999. One final issue, #65, was published as a memorial to Hirshberg who had died in June 2002. It was edited by Valerie Lawson. On February 21, 1987, about a hundred McGee fans gathered at his “address,” Slip F-18 at the Bahia Mar Marina in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where McGee kept his houseboat The Busted Flush. The mayor of Fort Lauderdale unveiled a plaque honoring McGee.

Amazon has scattered back issues available. 

So this cover for one of them done by an unknown USF student. If is not considered a close representation of The Busted Flush. For that, you should see the second image which is from The Busted Flush fan site as it “is a rendering of the boat, which MacDonald felt was very close to what he had in mind, but, as he always said about the boat and Travis McGee, he did not want to be exact about either.  Let the reader fill in the gaps.” 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) SHELVES OF DREAMS. “If You Build It, Comic Book Fans Will Come” contends Publishers Weekly.

Periodical comics made the leap from convenience store spinner racks to trade paperback collections at bookstore chains in the 1980s. And while the transition did present some initial challenges to booksellers—in those early days, it wasn’t uncommon to see superhero titles shelved next to Garfield in the “humor section”—the move proved both lucrative and permanent. Today, comics can be found wherever books are sold, with big-box retailers devoting considerable real estate to graphic novels. How do smaller specialty shops compete?

“Community is essential to the business,” says Jenn Haines, owner of The Dragon, an Eisner Spirit of Retailing Award–winning shop in Guelph, Ontario. “Generally, people who read comics have found themselves not quite fitting in.” But fans can find community, she adds, by browsing the shelves.

According to the latest ICv2 industry report, of the $1.87 billion in comics and graphic novel sales in 2023, 61% are from book channels, while 36% are via the direct market, which comprises approximately 3,000 specialty comics retailers. Indications are that specialty shops’ share rose in 2024, which was “a pretty good year in comic stores,” reports Milton Griepp, president of ICv2, which did not release full figures by press time.

According to Haines, her store’s annual sales have been generally consistent over the past five years. The Dragon’s overall 2024 sales, which includes games and toys, were up 3% over 2023, with sales of comics and graphic novels increasing 5%….

(11) UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS. Conor Dougherty analyzes “How ‘Silo’ and ‘Paradise’ Envision Housing After the Apocalypse” in the New York Times (behind a paywall).

“Paradise” is a TV show on Hulu about a postapocalyptic society that lives underground in a suburb. “Silo” is a TV show on Apple TV+ about a postapocalyptic society that lives underground in an apartment tower.

Both are propelled by mysteries. Both feature curious heroes. Both have shifty leaders who lie, blackmail and murder to keep their secrets hidden and their denizens in line.

The shows have much in common, in other words.

But somehow they find opposing answers to a question that seems increasingly relevant in a warming world: If the planet goes to hell and humanity heads to a bunker, what sort of neighborhood will we build inside it? A spacious holdout that tries to approximate a comfortable standard of living, or a cramped locker that saves more lives but leaves the survivors miserable?

By imagining wildly different landscapes in response to the same end-of-the-world conceit, the shows use cinematic extremes to show how civilization and class divisions are constructed through the apportionment of space. People like to live around other people right up to the moment they feel their neighborhood has been overrun by others, at which point the hunger for togetherness becomes an impulse to exclude.

A good amount of today’s housing politics fall within these parameters, whether it’s a proposal to build apartments in a suburb or a plan to cover farms with a new city. The fact that this debate now extends to fictional bunkers has me convinced that in the aftermath of global calamity, people will be at some dystopian City Council meeting arguing about zoning….

(12) WHEN BUSINESS IS BOOMING AND THAT’S NOT GOOD. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] I don’t want to just link to an X-twit post, so… Sounds like they should *not* have launched that last one, given this. My take is that Elon was hurting, the attacks by the public on him, and on Tesla, and he said “launch”. As reported on Slashdot: “Anonymous Sources: Starship Needs a Major Rebuild After Two Consecutive Failures”.

According to information at this tweet from anonymous sources, parts of Starship will likely require a major redesign due to the spacecraft’s break-up shortly after stage separation on its last two test flights. These are the key take-aways, most of which focus on the redesign of the first version of Starship (V1) to create the V2 that flew unsuccessfully on those flights…

(13) BUSY SKIES. “Saturn Gains 128 New Moons, Bringing Its Total to 274” – the New York Times is counting.

Astronomers say they have discovered more than 100 new moons around Saturn, possibly the result of cosmic smashups that left debris in the planet’s orbit as recently as 100 million years ago.

The gas giant planets of our solar system have many moons, which are defined as objects that orbit around planets or other bodies that are not stars. Jupiter has 95 known moons, Uranus 28, and Neptune 16. The 128 in the latest haul around Saturn bring its total to 274.

“It’s the largest batch of new moons,” said Mike Alexandersen at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, an author of a paper announcing the discovery that will be published in the days ahead in Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society.

Many of these moons are rocks only a few miles across — small compared with our moon, which is 2,159 miles across. But as long as they have trackable orbits around their parent body, the scientists who catalog objects in the solar system consider them to be moons. That is the responsibility of the International Astronomical Union, which ratified the 128 new moons of Saturn on Tuesday….

… The current naming scheme for moons on Saturn is based on characters from Norse and other mythology.

“Maybe at some point they’ll have to expand the naming scheme further,” Dr. Alexandersen said….

(14) LANDING IN THE FINAL FRONTIER. “Saucer-like ‘Winnebago’ space capsule lands in Australia — marking 1st for commercial space industry” reports Live Science.

A saucer-like space capsule touched down in the Australian outback last month, marking the first time a commercial spacecraft has landed Down Under.

Varda Space Industries’ Winnebago-2 (W-2) space capsule reentered Earth’s atmosphere and dropped down in South Australia on Feb. 28. In doing so, W-2 also set a world first by becoming the first commercial spacecraft to return to a commercial spaceport, according to a statement released by the Australian Space Agency.The successful return of W-2 was a “landmark moment for the Australian space sector,” Australian Space Agency representatives wrote in the statement.

The company behind W-2, Varda, is an American startup based in California. W-2 originally left Earth from California on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Jan. 14 as part of the Transporter-12 rideshare mission — the Transporter carries satellites from various customers into space. W-2 then spent 45 days in orbit, carrying payloads from the U.S. Air Force and NASA before dropping down to the Koonibba Test Range, run by Australian aerospace company Southern Launch….

(15) BEAST GAMES PITCH MEETING. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Beast Games was apparently inspired in part by how much the host (famed YouTuber Mr. Beast) enjoys Squid Games. But there’s also apparently zero to very little about the actual games played on BGs that is inspired by games on SGs. Also, no killing the contestants. Not that I’ve ever watched either show (or anything by Mr. Beast), nor would I care to.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Daniel Dern, Bruce D. Arthurs, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel “Good, Bester, Best!” Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 3/7/25 How Many Files To Pixelscroll? Three Score Files And Ten

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(1) FRANK R. PAUL AWARDS TAKING ENTRIES. Administrator Frank Wu has announced the Frank R. Paul Awards are open for submissions until April 15. Full details are available here.

There are two categories: Best Magazine Cover Art, and Best Book Cover Art. Prizes include a trophy (with a 3D-printed recreation of FRP’s tiger-robot-monster from the Sept. 1935 Wonder Stories) plus $500 in each category.

Artwork for any publication (pro, semi-pro, fanzine or online) is eligible, as long as the art was first published anywhere in 2024.

Artists are encouraged to submit (to me, Frank Wu, at FWu@FrankWu.com) on their own behalf up to 5 items they had published last year, with a note that the art was NOT generated using an AI program. 

Authors and publishers are also encouraged to submit on behalf of artists they’ve worked with, and anyone else can submit on behalf of any artwork that pleased them in the last year.

Trophy photo by Rich Lynch

(2) BOOK CURATION AS FREE SPEECH. “ABA Goes Into Damage Control After Contentious WI2025 Community Forum” reports Publishers Weekly.

A week after Winter Institute 2025 wrapped up in Denver on February 26, the American Booksellers Association dedicated Thursday’s issue of its weekly Bookselling This Week newsletter to respond to criticisms raised at a contentious WI2025 community forum. During that forum, booksellers criticized the ABA leadership and board for their refusal for more than a year to take a clear stand in support of indie booksellers who have been attacked for selling books about Palestine, as well as authors who are Palestinian and/or have spoken out against the Israeli military campaign in Gaza. Other speakers raised concerns about double standards, some related to compensation, in the organization’s treatment of its members. Booksellers had raised similar concerns at the community forum at WI2024 in Cincinnati.

Perhaps John Evans, a past ABA board member who currently owns Camino Books in a San Diego suburb, summed it up best, when he said at the WI2025 community forum: “We aren’t asking you to come out with a stance on the Israeli war. We are asking you to support booksellers in a censorious environment by making this statement publicly that it is not antisemitic to provide books to people who want them. All of this falls within the framework of a bookselling organization. This is not a political statement. This is a consensual, understood, fundamental principle of what we all do, and it’s hurting us. You not supporting that. It’s offending us.”

In a letter signed by all 12 ABA board members that appeared in BTW, the board emphasized that it, “along with the staff of American Booksellers for Free Expression and ABA, condemns all attacks on bookstores, in particular the targeting of bookstores who have chosen to highlight Palestinian books and authors in their stores. Each bookstore’s curation is their own expression of their freedom of speech, and verbal attacks, demands to carry or not carry certain titles, and threats to stores are not acceptable.” The board also promised to support any booksellers “during times of persecution, harassment, curation challenges, and other attacks on booksellers and stores.”

The ABA wrote in a separate statement, which also appeared in BTW, that booksellers have been offered support, resources, education, crisis counseling, and provided with a hotline by ABA staff. “This is the work that ABA is empowered to do by our ends policies and allowed to do as a 501(c)(6) nonprofit trade association,” the ABA declared. “We cannot make a political statement on behalf of our members, but we can and do support our members in their right to express those views.” The organization added: “Book curation is a form of speech, and it must remain free. We condemn any harassment or threat to our members that aims to abridge this freedom.”…

(3) STATE DEPARTMENT’S LATEST CULTURAL DAMAGE. The University of Iowa’s International Writing Program shared some bad news with Facebook readers:

Dear Friends: We write today with a difficult update. On Wednesday, Feb. 26, the International Writing Program (IWP) learned that its grants with the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, were being terminated. This notification explained that the IWP’s awards “no longer effectuate agency priorities,” nor align “with agency priorities and national interest.” The immediate result was the cancellation of Between the Lines (the IWP’s summer youth program), and the dissolution of Lines and Spaces Exchanges, Distance Learning courses, and Emerging Voices programs. The overall Fall Residency cohort will be reduced by around half due to the loss of federally funded participants; the IWP’s other long-time funding partners, including a combination of donors, grants, foreign ministries of culture, and NGOs, will continue to support writers.

We are devastated by the abrupt end of this 58-year partnership and are working closely with University of Iowa General Counsel and Grant Accounting to review the terminations, understand their full impact, and respond in the best interest of the organization. Despite this disappointing turn of events, the IWP’s mission to promote mutual understanding through creative writing and literature remains unchanged; with the help of a limited number of other partners, we will still hold a 2025 Fall Residency even while pursuing new sources of funding. To support the IWP as we begin to rebuild, please visit this website: bit.ly/support-iwp

(4) TUTTLE ON FIVE NEW BOOKS. Lisa Tuttle’s “The best recent science fiction and fantasy – review roundup” for the Guardian covers The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica; Dissolution by Nicholas Binge; The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar; When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi; and The Foot on the Crown by Christopher Fowler.

(5) BOOKLESS IN BLIGHTY. But the Guardian immediately leaves you wondering who in Britain might take advantage of Tuttle’s recommendations: “New poll finds 40% of Britons have not read a book in the past year”.

According to new a polling by YouGov 40% of Britons have not read or listened to a book in the past year.

The median British adult has read or listened to three books in the past year, the survey found.

Women seem to be bigger readers than men, with 66% of women reading at least one book in the last year, compared with 53% of men.

There was a political split: while 72% of remain voters said they’d picked up a book in the past 12 months, 54% of leave voters reported doing so. Labour voters were most likely to have read in the last year (70%) when compared with Lib Dem (64%), Conservative (63%) and Reform (51%) voters.

A class divide also emerged, with 66% of respondents in middle-class households reporting having recently read a book compared with 52% of those in working-class households.

(6) EYE ON GUY. Andrew Porter has shared the photo he took of Brother Guy Consolmagno at Boskone.

Brother Guy Consolmagno, right, and Kielan Donahue at Boskone. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

(7) JEOPARDY! Then, Andrew Porter relayed the results of genre interest from tonight’s episode of Jeopardy!

Final Jeopardy: Category: Science Fiction

Answer: Name shared by a groundbreaking magazine launched in April 1926 & a TV anthology series that premiered in September 1985

Wrong questions: What is Popular Science (crossed out; no actual question).

What is Outer Limits?

What is Unsolved Mysteries?

Correct question (obviously) is Amazing Stories.

(8) GENE HACKMAN FOLLOW-UP. Authorities in Santa Fe, NM held a press conference today where they revealed — “Gene Hackman Died From Alzheimer’s & Heart Disease; Wife Died Days Before” – Deadline has the story.

A February 27 autopsy of Gene Hackman reveals the 95-year-old Oscar winner died of a combination of “advanced Alzheimer’s disease” and severe heart disease, the New Mexico Chief Medical Examiner announced today.

“It is reasonable to conclude that Mr. Hackman died on February 18,” Dr. Heather Jarrell said in a press conference with Santa Fe Sheriff Adan Mendoza and other county officials. “He was in very poor health,” Dr. Jarrell also noted of Hackman, adding that there was evidence that he hadn’t eaten for a number of days. Ms. Arakawa is assumed to have died on or around February 11, officials estimated….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Weyr Search (1967) and Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series 

Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series has a fascinating Hugo history.

She won a Hugo the first time she was nominated, for the novella “Weyr Search”, in 1968 at Baycon (tied with Philip José Farmer’s “Riders of the Purple Wage”.) It was published in Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact, October 1967. 

It’s in A Dragon-Lover’s Treasury of the Fantastic anthology which was edited by Margaret Weis, available from the usual suspects at a very reasonable price. 

It would be the only win for the Dragonriders of Pern series but by far is not the only nomination for the series. 

Next up would be the “Dragonrider” novella which was nominated a year later at St. Louiscon. Three years later, her Dragonquest novel would get a nod at the first L.A. Con showing that con had impeccable taste. Are you surprised they did? I’m certainly not. 

At Seacon ‘79, The White Dragon was nominated. (I really love that novel.) 

The next L.A. Con (1984) would see another novel be nominated, Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern. The final nomination, also for a novel, was at MagiCon (1992), for All the Weyrs of Pern.

The series did win a number of other awards including a Nebula for Dragonrider, a Ditmar and Gandalf for The White Dragon, a Balrog for Dragondrums and The Science Fiction Book Club’s Book of the Year Award for The Renegades of Pern. It is, after all, an expansive series. Really expansive. 

Personal note: I really wanted to enjoy this series all the way through as I came to it later. They were great, they really were, but something happened in the stories early on for me that I can say but I won’t as it’s a MAJOR SPOILER.  

I read the first trilogy of Dragonquest, Dragonflight and The White Dragon plus Harper Hall trilogy of Dragonsong, Dragonsinger and Dragondrums, and I did read on through maybe, let me check ISFDB, through All the Weyrs of Pern, That’s when that MAJOR SPOILER occurs which makes me say why McCaffrey, oh why? 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) HAPPY DEMENTED BIRTHDAY. Dr. Demento (Barry Hansen) turns 84 on April 2 and will celebrate his birthday at the LA Breakfast Club. Dr. Demento will take the audience through his 55 year career as America’s most unusual disc jockey and play some of his favorite songs. Tickets available here: “Celebrate The Doctor’s Career & 84th Birthday!”

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Dr. Demento has been celebrating “mad music and crazy comedy” on the airwaves playing everything from Spike Jones to Frank Zappa for over five decades. He is responsible for introducing the world to the Dr. Demento Show’s #1 most requested song of all time, “Fish Heads”, and launching the career of “Weird Al” Yankovic. Throughout the years, the world-famous Doctor’s influence on pop culture has earned him induction into the National Radio Hall of Fame, an hour long Anniversary special on Comedy Central, featured guest appearances on Late Night with David Letterman, Larry King Live, and countless others including The Simpsons.

(12) A BIGGER SLICE OF THE CHEESE, PLEASE. “Disney Animation Production Management Workers Ratify First Union Contract” reports Animation Magazine.

After two years of determined effort, the production management workers at Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS) have officially ratified their first union contract with the studio, The Animation Guild announced today. This landmark agreement comes after an intense organizing effort that saw a supermajority of production workers vote to unionize in February 2023, a move that was initially met with resistance from studio leadership.

The organizing effort proceeded to a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) hearing, culminating in a decisive ruling on September 27, 2023. The ruling affirmed the eligibility of full-time production coordinators, production supervisors and production managers to unionize with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and The Animation Guild, IATSE Local 839 (TAG).

“It’s been an uphill journey, but at long last, we’ve reached the mountaintop. We are standing in our breakthrough — stronger, bolder, and united,” says production coordinator Tamara Lee….

(13) DOOM WITHOUT END, AMEN. The Guardian’s Stuart Jeffries adds to our amusement in “A Brief History of the End of the F*cking World by Tom Phillips review – apocalypse not”.

…The serious purpose of Phillips’s jolly doomscroll through the apocalyptic sex cults, pandemics, nuclear armageddons, rapture-fetishising fruitloops, numerologically obsessed nincompoops, swivel-eyed preppers waiting out zombie apocalypses in their Utah silos, not to mention the Bible’s (spoiler alert!) troubling last act, is to work out quite why, after so many failed prophesies, doom-mongery still thrives….

(14) SPACEX “STARSHIP” #GOBOOMFALLDOWN…AGAIN. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] “SpaceX’s Starship explodes in space, which Musk calls a ‘minor setback’” – Reuters has details.

SpaceX’s massive Starship spacecraft exploded in space on Thursday minutes after lifting off from Texas, prompting the FAA to halt air traffic in parts of Florida, in the second straight failure this year for Elon Musk’s Mars rocket program.

Several videos on social media showed fiery debris streaking through the dusk skies near south Florida and the Bahamas after Starship broke up in space shortly after it began to spin uncontrollably with its engines cut off, a SpaceX live stream of the mission showed.

The failure of the eighth Starship test comes just over a month after the seventh also ended in an explosive failure. The back-to-back mishaps occurred in early mission phases that SpaceX has easily surpassed previously, a setback for a program Musk had sought to speed up this year….

… The Federal Aviation Administration briefly issued ground stops at the Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach and Orlando airports because of “space launch debris.” It said it had opened a mishap investigation into the incident…

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George smuggles us inside “The Gorge Pitch Meeting”.

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

Pixel Scroll 2/20/25 The Tweel Of Rhyme Blares, “Thou Art Groot!”

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(1) THE MURDEROUS MONTH OF MAY. Apple TV+ announced today “Apple’s new sci-fi series “Murderbot” to make global debut May 16, 2025”. They also released two photos of Murderbot, one with the helmet, the other without.

Today, Apple TV+ unveiled a first look at “Murderbot,” its highly anticipated comedic thriller created by Academy Award nominees Chris and Paul Weitz (“About a Boy,” “Mozart in the Jungle”) and starring Emmy Award winner Alexander Skarsgård (“Succession,” “Big Little Lies”), who also serves as executive producer. The 10-episode sci-fi series will make its global debut on Apple TV+ with the first two episodes on Friday, May 16, 2025 followed by new episodes every Friday through July 11.

Based on Martha Wells’ bestselling Hugo and Nebula Award-winning book series of the same name, “Murderbot” is a sci-fi thriller/comedy about a self-hacking security construct who is horrified by human emotion yet drawn to its vulnerable clients. Played by Skarsgård, Murderbot must hide its free will and complete a dangerous assignment when all it really wants is to be left alone to watch futuristic soap operas and figure out its place in the universe.

The ensemble cast also includes Noma Dumezweni (“Presumed Innocent”), David Dastmalchian (“Oppenheimer”), Sabrina Wu (“Joy Ride”), Akshay Khanna (“Critical Incident”), Tattiawna Jones (“The Handmaid’s Tale”) and Tamara Podemski (“Outer Range”).

(2) FROM CLIMATE EXTREMES TO HISTORIC BALKAN ORIGINS OF VAMPIRISM. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Modern fantasy lore has it that Transylvania is the home to vampires, creatures from the past that feed of the presently living for their immortality… Way back in the 1990s, following the fall of the Iron Curtain that divided Europe we (members of the SF² Concatenation  team and the former NW Kent SF Society had a series of E. Europe science and SF cultural exchanges with Romanian and Hungarian fan (and scientist fan) partners.  As part of this I was lucky enough to have a guided tour of Transylvania.  I also got to visit Jimbolia, an ethnically Hungarian town in Romania surrounded on three sides by a border with Serbia. Actually, I got to visit it with SF fans three times over the years…

This brings us up to today, and academics from Jimbolia Technology Highschool, as well as the University of Oradea (Romania), have found Transylvanian chronicles, diaries, and official records from the 16th century that illuminate extreme climate events of that time — the 16th century was part of what is known as the “Little Ice Age”. They found that prolonged heat waves, often associated with droughts and unusually cold winters, could affect agricultural production, leading to food shortages, forced migration, and social instability… 

Primary research Gaceu, O. R. et al (2025)  “Reconstruction of climatic events from the 16th century in Transylvania: interdisciplinary analysis based on historical sources”, Frontiers in Climate, vol. 6, pre-print.

All of which brings to mind whether such events could have been attributed by peasant locals to the mystical? (Other research has previously shown that witch burnings in Germany increased in rural areas around the time of crop failures associated with climate events.)

While vampires were popularised in the west with Stoker’s 19th century novel, we must remember that it was in the 17th century the Greek librarian of the Vatican, Leo Allatius, produced the first methodological description of the Balkan beliefs in vampires (Greek: vrykolakas) in his work De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus (“On certain modern opinions among the Greeks”) a few decades after the 16th century climate extreme events in the area described by this latest research. 

(3) BROCCOLI IS OFF THE MENU. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] In a shake-up worthy of a James Bond martini, the Broccoli family has relinquished control of that storied movie franchise. It will be Amazon MGM Studios forging the way forward. “James Bond Shake-Up: Amazon Takes Creative Control of Franchise” at The Hollywood Reporter.

The James Bond movie franchise has gotten a shake-up, with Amazon MGM Studios and Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli forming a new joint venture to house the movie property’s intellectual property rights.

Under the terms of the agreement, Amazon MGM Studios will gain creative control of the James Bond franchise, while Wilson and Broccoli will remain co-owners of the 60-year-old property. In 2022, Amazon acquired MGM, including a vast catalog with more than 4,000 films and 17,000 TV shows.

Since the MGM acquisition, Amazon has held rights to distribute all of the James Bond films, and following completion of the joint venture transaction will control the creative on future productions.

“We are grateful to the late Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman for bringing James Bond to movie theatres around the world, and to Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli for their unyielding dedication and their role in continuing the legacy of the franchise that is cherished by legions of fans worldwide. We are honored to continue this treasured heritage, and look forward to ushering in the next phase of the legendary 007 for audiences around the world,” Mike Hopkins, head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, said in a statement on Thursday….

Variety thinks they can explain “Why Amazon Took Control of James Bond; Next 007 Movie Remains in Limbo”.

…And even as every actor with a British accent has seen themselves tipped to slip into Bond’s designer tux, development on a follow-up has stalled. There’s still no director, no story, and no script for a new installment, sources say, and without those elements little progress has been made on finding a new leading man. Though there has been a character bible circulating around the studio and a few informal meetings with potential creative talent, shooting on a new movie is at least a year away. That’s been a source of frustration at Amazon, which spent $8.5 billion to buy MGM four years ago, in no small part because of the ties to Bond. Even with the initial acquisition, Amazon MGM only owned 50% of the franchise and was relegated to being a passive partner when it came to artistic choices.

Rumors have swirled for years that the Broccolis have clashed with Amazon over the direction of Bond. The family felt the e-commerce giant was a poor home for the elegant secret agent and bristled at its efforts to expand the scope of the franchise, while Amazon executives were frustrated by the glacial pace of getting a new film off the ground, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The company managed to get the Broccolis to sign off on a reality competition spinoff show, “007: Road to a Million,” but other attempts to revitalize the property have yet to bear fruit.

Amazon MGM’s joint venture with the Broccolis is unique in that it is not an outright sale. The family will retain an ownership stake. However, the Broccolis, who controlled everything from casting to marketing decisions, will release their grip on the series. That will allow Amazon MGM to move more quickly to figure out how to keep Bond relevant….

(4) SCIENCE BOOKS RECOMMENDED. Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks in Nature: “Poetry on Mars and robots on Earth: Books in brief” (behind a paywall). One of his selections is —

Waiting for Robots

Antonio A. Casilli Univ. Chicago Press (2025)

US founding father Thomas Jefferson used dumbwaiters — small lifts that carry meals — during his extravagant dinners. There seemed to be no human intervention, but the lifts were operated by enslaved basement staff. As sociologist Antonio Casilli acutely observes, today too, artificial-intelligence systems are made to seem automated, often by overlooked and underpaid workers.

And here’s the cover of another choice:

(5) LGBTQ IDENTIFICATION GROWS. “Nearly One in 10 U.S. Adults Identifies as L.G.B.T.Q., Survey Finds” – in the New York Times (behind a paywall).

Nearly one in 10 adults in the United States identifies as L.G.B.T.Q., according to a large analysis from Gallup released Thursday — almost triple the share since Gallup began counting in 2012, and up by two-thirds since 2020…..

…The increases have been driven by young people, and by bisexual women.

Nearly one-quarter of adults in Generation Z, defined by Gallup as those 18 to 27, identify as L.G.B.T.Q., according to the analysis, which included 14,000 adults across all of Gallup’s telephone surveys last year. More than half of these L.G.B.T.Q. young adults identify as bisexual.

Among all respondents, 1.3 percent identified as transgender, up from 0.6 percent in 2020. That is higher than other large surveys have found in recent years…

(6) LGBTQ VIDEOS BACK ONLINE. The City reports “NYC Schools Restore LGBTQ Videos Yanked by PBS Following Trump Executive Order”.

In response to a blizzard of executive orders from President Donald Trump, the Public Broadcasting Service recently erased a series of videos made in partnership with New York City Public Schools focused on LGBTQ history.

This week, the city’s Education Department found a new home for them: its own website.

The short films draw on material from the city’s LGBTQ-focused curriculum, part of a series called “Hidden Voices” that seeks to elevate a broad range of underrepresented groups students learn about in their social studies classrooms.

The videos profile prominent LGBTQ people such as the feminist thinker Audre Lorde and civil rights leader Bayard Rustin. They also survey key historical moments, including the mass dismissal of queer government employees during the Lavender Scare of the 1940s-’60s and the 1969 Stonewall uprising in Greenwich Village, widely considered a catalyst of the modern LGBTQ rights movement….

(7) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. There’s a new episode of the monthly science fiction podcast produced by Space Cowboy Books in Joshua Tree, CA. Simultaneous Times Episode 84 has stories by Marisca Pichette & Eric Fomley.

Stories featured in this episode:

“Press Release from a Utopia on the Way Down” by Marisca Pichette; with music by TSG; read by Jenna Hanchey

“The Thing You Never Were” by Eric Fomley; with music by Phog Masheeen; read by the Jean-Paul Garnier

Theme music by Dain Luscombe

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

February 20, 1988 — Ray Bradbury Theatre’s “Gotcha”

Thirty-seven years ago on this evening, Ray Bradbury Theatre’s “Gotcha” first aired on HBO. It like a lot of genre series can now found streaming on Peacock. 

In the episode, a lonely man dressed as Oliver Hardy at a masquerade party meets a lonely woman dressed as Stan Laurel, it seems nothing short of a match made in heaven. But a game of Gotcha! may just test their newfound romance a little too much. Or will it? Being Bradbury what’s your guess? 

It was based off his short which was published in Terry Carr’s The Year’s Finest Fantasy, Volume 2 but the romance shown here wasn’t in that story as Bradbury added it in here. 

The cast was Saul Rubinek and Kate Lynch, and it was directed by Brad Turner who has done a lot of genre series work including seventeen episodes of The Outer Limits. The casting of Saul Rubinek and Kate Lynch was absolutely perfect. 

Reception for it is generally excellent. As Scared Stiff puts it: “GOTCHA is incredible. It’s another great tale in this series and it reminded me a great deal of the beginning of Twilight Zone: The Movie with Dan Aykroyd turning into a monster. This tale starts off so slow and cheerful that the turn to terror was very impactful. I really enjoyed this. As a horror fan you can’t ask for much more. I highly recommend it.” 

Yes, I liked it very much. I think the story here is sharper, more sure of who the characters are than a lot of his stories in this series was which were more interested in the gimmick that drove the story.  

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) AT LAST THE LAST. “The Last Of Us: HBO Sets Season 2 Premiere Date” reports Deadline. (Behind a paywall.)

HBO has finally revealed when audiences can expect the new season of The Last of Us.

Season 2 will debut on April 13 at 9 p.m. ET/PT, which means it’ll be picking up the Sunday marquee time slot from The White Lotus after the third season of Mike White’s series concludes. As always, the episodes will be available to stream on Max at the same time that they air on HBO.

Along with the date announcement, HBO also released a few new character posters featuring Ellie (Bella Ramsey), Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Abby (Kaitlyn Dever)….

(11) DON’T FORGET TO BITE ON THIS CLICKBAIT. “Could Michael Sheen be the first Welsh Doctor Who?” asks Nation Cymru. And for what it’s worth, Sheen once said on an episode of Staged (his show with David Tennant) he had been considered, then “they wanted to go in another direction” as the show biz cant goes.

Michael Sheen is among the favourites to become the next Doctor Who.

The actor has been named among the frontrunners for the prized role by the bookies, who have installed him at 6/1 to become the next occupant of the Tardis after news broke that the current Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa, looks set to stand down after two series.

There’s never been a Welsh Doctor Who – and with the modern incarnation of the series being filmed in Cardiff, it would be the perfect moment for a native of Wales to enter the Tardis.

Sheen, of course, lives in Wales and has shown his unswerving commitment and dedication to Welsh culture with the launch of the Welsh National Theatre.

There are others who think so too.

Writing for the Standard while pondering potential candidates for the role, media commentator Vicky Jessop wrote: “We’ve never had a Welsh Doctor before – might it be time to change that, once and for all? A longtime friend of David Tennant, Sheen also recently announced that he was becoming a “not for profit” actor, meaning he’s pledged to give away large chunks of his salary to charity and focus on doing jobs he loves. Long story short: his paycheque might actually be affordable for the beleaguered BBC.”

Other names in the running include Crown lead Josh O’Connor, Slow Horses actor Jack Lowden and Hobbit star Richard Armitage.

After 10th Doctor, David Tennant, surprised everyone by returning as the 14th Doctor, 11th Doctor Matt Smith has also been mentioned as a possibility for another stint in the Tardis.

(12) WOLF TICKETS. Metro News says “Amazon Prime Video viewers are stumbling upon ‘best’ comedy series in years”.

TV fans have been binge-watching both seasons of ‘engaging’ show Wolf Like Me which was recently added to the streamer free for subscribers.

The series follows single father Gary (Josh Gad) who lives in Adelaide with his daughter Emma (Ariel Donoghue) as he strikes up a relationship with Mary (Isla Fisher).

Both Gary and Emma are still emotionally traumatised after the death of her mother Lisa seven years ago, so when Mary enters the pictures and is able to connect with Emma she is a welcome addition to the family.

However, Mary is hiding baggage of her own that she fears may hurt Gary and Emma: she is a werewolf.

On Google, Wolf Like Me fans have been urging everyone to watch the hidden gem series which has flown under the radar since it first aired on Stan and Peacock in 2022….

(13) LIKE YOU NEED TEENY TINY BRANDING IRONS FOR ANTS. BBC finds “Dorset micro artist sets world record for smallest Lego sculpture”.

A micro artist has set a new Guinness World Record for creating the smallest handmade sculpture.

David A Lindon, from Bournemouth, said the creation took months of planning and months of creating to bring to life.

He set the world record for his sculpture of a red Lego piece which measures 0.02517mm by 0.02184mm.

Mr Lindon, an engineer by trade who started work as a micro artist in 2019, says the sculpture is about the same size as a human white blood cell.

He’s become known for his work creating miniature pieces of art, including three microscopic re-creations of Van Gogh masterpieces on a watch mechanism which sold for £90,000.

Mr Lindon’s latest creation, which was crafted from a piece of red Lego brick, was measured by the team at Evident Scientific using a light microscope….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George takes us inside the “Love Hurts Pitch Meeting” – beware spoilers.

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

Pixel Scroll 1/13/25 Why Yes, We Are (At Least In Part) Stardust

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(1) COMPREHENSIVE COVERAGE OF GAIMAN SEX ASSAULT ALLEGATIONS. New York Magazine‘s often explicit article “There Is No Safe Word” [Archive.is link] by Lila Shapiro, as described by Publishers Lunch, “reports on the details of the Neil Gaiman sexual assault case, expanding on allegations first reported by New Zealand podcast Tortoise Media. Last July, five women accused Gaiman of assault, and one woman said she filed a complaint with New Zealand police. Four out of five of Gaiman’s accusers spoke to New York Magazine for the piece, and the publication reviewed journal entries, texts, emails, and police correspondence. Gaiman did not comment for the article, but he has denied all allegations.” Shapiro spoke with eight women in total, three who had never gone public. The story contains content that readers may find disturbing, including graphic allegations of sexual assault.

(2) ROWLING ON GAIMAN. And in Deadline, “J.K. Rowling Compares Neil Gaiman To Harvey Weinstein Amid Claims”.

…Not long after New York magazine published its detailed cover story on multiple new and old claims against Gaiman by multiple women, the Harry Potter creator took to social media to give some opinionated context of her own.

No stranger to controversy, criticism and accusations of being transphobic for her strident views on gender identity and the transitioning of minors, Rowling pinned initial reactions to allegations against the once acclaimed Gaiman to incarcerated rapist Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo outburst against the much-accused Pulp Fiction producer.  

“The literary crowd that had a hell of a lot to say about Harvey Weinstein before he was convicted has been strangely muted in its response to multiple accusations against Neil Gaiman from young women who’d never met, yet — as with Weinstein — tell remarkably similar stories,” Rowling wrote this morning on X in the second of two missives on Gaiman….

(3) WRITER’S LEGACY BURNED. The London Review of Books reports that by a tragic coincidence of timing the late Gary Indiana’s personal library and collection was destroyed by the Eaton Fire in L.A.

(4) NEW OKORAFOR BOOK DRAWS FROM LIFE. The New York Times profiles Nnedi Okorafor in “Writing Fantasy Came Naturally. Reality Was Far More Daunting”. (Link bypasses the paywall). “After winning just about every major science fiction and fantasy award, Nnedi Okorafor explores a traumatic event in her own history in her most autobiographical novel yet.”

… Thirty years and more than 20 books later, Okorafor, now an acclaimed science fiction and fantasy writer, is exploring that traumatic experience, and the transformation that followed, in her heavily autobiographical new novel, “Death of the Author.”

A genre-defying metafictional experiment, the story centers on a Nigerian American writer from Chicago named Zelu, who is paralyzed and uses a wheelchair after a childhood accident. She dreams of becoming a writer, but her lovingly overprotective parents and siblings are skeptical that she’ll ever support herself. After struggling for years to get published, Zelu writes a best-selling postapocalyptic novel set among sentient robots in a future Nigeria, and lands a seven-figure advance and a movie deal. Her sudden rise to fame is both thrilling and jarring, as Zelu sees her success disrupt her family, and her novel get whitewashed by Hollywood executives who strip it of the African elements.

With its autobiographical framework, “Death of the Author” is a departure from Okorafor’s previous work, otherworldly stories that often draw on her experiences in Nigeria, where she found that belief in the supernatural — giant spider deities, water spirits, shape-shifting leopard people — is part of daily life….

(5) BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING…WHAT YOU BUY WITH THIS. “1984 author and former M.E.N. journalist George Orwell honoured on new £2 coin” reports the Manchester Evening News, where he used to work. (King Charles is on the obverse. Make of that what you will.)

Famed author and former Manchester Evening News journalist George Orwell is celebrated on a new £2 coin.

The writer of 1984 and Animal Farm will be honoured by the Royal Mint, 75 years after his death. Coin artist Henry Gray created a design which appears to be an eye, but is a camera lens at the centre of the design….

The Royal Mint will soon be ready to sell you one.

(6) MARKET REPORT. Incensepunk Magazine is now accepting submissions of speculative fiction stories about 4,000 to 6,000 words in length.

And what is “incensepunk” you ask?

Incensepunk is, at its core, a genre of longing. It desires a world in which traditional faiths and churches play a major role in society. Incensepunk extrapolates Byzantine and Gothic architecture styles into a modern world of skyscrapers and globalization. However, it is not regressive. It doesn’t view the past as good and the present as wicked and depraved. Instead, it tries to envision what the world could look like if faith and society were more integrated.

Incensepunk is speculative fiction, but it need not be alternate history (though it is certainly acceptable to be)….

(7) COMPLIMENTARY ENCOUNTERS OF THE HOLLYWOOD KIND. Far Out Magazine says “The writer Steven Spielberg called his muse” was Ray Bradbury.

…In terms of source material, Spielberg has adapted some of the greats. Michael Crichton provided the original novel on which Jurassic Park is based and Minority Report comes from a story by Philip K. Dick. However, for the director’s biggest sci-fi inspiration, we turn to a writer he never got the chance to bring to the big screen…

…Commenting on Bradbury’s [2012] passing, Spielberg was extremely complimentary of his work. “He was my muse for the better part of my sci-fi career,” he said in a statement (via The Hollywood Reporter). “He lives on through his legion of fans. In the world of science fiction and fantasy and imagination he is immortal.”

This admiration went both ways. In an interview with the Star Ledger (via Entertainment Weekly), Bradbury gave his thoughts on a Spielberg classic. “Close Encounters is the best film of its kind ever made,” he espoused. “It takes too long, but the transfiguration at the end, with the splendid arrival of the mother ship – that makes up for everything. I was so amazed and changed when I saw it that I went over to the studio to tell Spielberg what a genius he was.” In a full circle moment, Spielberg replied to this praise by claiming that Close Encounters wouldn’t have been possible without It Came From Outer Space, a 1953 film that Bradbury contributed the story to…. 

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 13, 1893 — Clark Ashton Smith. (Died 1961.)

Clark Ashton Smith

By Paul Weimer: Clark Ashton Smith was part of the Weird Tales crowd with people like Lovecraft, and it is through reading Lovecraft and authors like him that I came across Smith’s work. I started with his weird horror/fantasy, stories like City of Singing Flame (although that particular story I would only read years later) and eventually trying stuff from Poseidonis (his Atlantis world) and Zothique (once I found out that it had inspired Jack Vance).  Empire of the Necromancers feels like it could be set in a distant corner of the Dying Earth and I like that headcanon, for example. 

I found him to be a taproot writer, ones whose ideas and style were perhaps somewhat better than his execution at times (this is also true of Lovecraft, let’s be honest). But his ideas and style were inspirational, transformational and helped inspire a sheaf of fans, authors, games and much more as a result. In a way, without reading Smith, you’ve read Smith–through how he has influenced writers since (to say nothing of his correspondence with Howard and Lovecraft at the time). 

And it must be said that there is a poetic feel to all of his work. The poetry Smith wrote early in his career suffused and influenced his subsequent stories and fragments. He never lost the dream of poetry. Or, the poetic muse never left him.  Smith wrote intensely and evocatively and his poetic training and use of word choice and imagery come through in all of his stories. Reading a Smith story is to be transported into another world, into another reality, be it in the far past or the far future.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

January 13, 2008 — Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Seventeen years ago this evening on Fox, the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles premiered. It was directed by Josh Friedman whose sole genre work previously was H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.  The top cast was Lena Headey as Sarah Connor along with Thomas Dekker and Summer Glau in supporting roles

If Lena Headey sounds familiar that’s because she was on the Game of Thrones as Cersei Lannister.

In addition, the narrator was also Headey. Though it would last but two seasons comprising thirty-one episodes, as the first season was abbreviated, it was the highest-rated new scripted series of the ’07 to ‘08 television season. And yes, it started in the ‘07 television season even though its first episode was in January of ‘08. Such are the mysteries of television seasons.

Reception among critics was generally quite fine. Gina Bellafante of the New York Times said that it was “one of the more humanizing adventures in science fiction to arrive in quite a while.” And Maureen Ryan of the Chicago Tribune exclaimed of the second season that the “season’s opener is much clearer and more sheer fun than anything that aired last spring.”

It has a stellar eighty-four percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes on the Popcornmeter as they call it.

Despite numerous ongoing fan efforts to revive the series, Josh Friedman has dismissed the possibility of crowdfunding a third season unlike say the recent Veronica Mars series due to issues involving holder rights. I suspect the Terminator issues here are hellishly complex. 

(10) NEW ACTOR FOR T’CHALLA? [Item by Steven French.] I suspect fandom may be divided on this one: “Marvel is ready to recast Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa in Black Panther. Should they?” asks the Guardian.

Marvel’s multiverse has become a narrative Swiss army knife capable of slicing through the thorniest of creative dilemmas and papering over the widest of cracks. That said, few dilemmas are as sensitive as how to move forward with a superhero as iconic as Black Panther. Chadwick Boseman’s portrayal of T’Challa wasn’t just a performance – it was a cultural touchstone, woven so tightly into the fabric of modern blockbuster cinema that imagining anyone else in the role feels like attempting to rewrite history. Four years after Boseman’s untimely death from colon cancer, Marvel faces the delicate task of continuing a legacy that seems impossible to replicate.

If rumblings out of Hollywood this week have foundation, however, the studio is beginning to countenance just that, a new T’Challa from an alternate reality who presumably finds his way into the mainstream Marvel universe via one of the umpteen ways we’ve seen superheroes such as Doctor Strange, various Spider-Men and Scarlet Witch crossing the boundaries between one reality and another. Jeff Sneider of the InSneider newsletter reports that the studio is finally “firmly open” to bringing back the king of Wakanda, despite previous attempts to recast the role having getting rebuffed by actors who didn’t want to jeopardise their careers by “stepping into Boseman’s gigantic shoes”.

(11) CORREIA “DEDICATION” TO GRRM. A GRRM fansite ran a photo of the dedication page.

 “Fantasy author taunts Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin in his new book” reports MSN.com.

…Is this a playful jab or a petty insult? It’s probably closer to the latter, seeing as how Martin and Correia have locked horns before. Their last public clash involves the Hugo Awards, which are handed out every year to honor the best in science fiction and fantasy fiction. Martin has been attending the Hugos since the 1970s, while Correia got involved in the 2010s….

Correia is all over his social media crowing about the attention his jab is getting.

(12) STANDING ROOM ONLY. Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket did not leave the ground today after all: “Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin calls off launch of New Glenn rocket” – AP News tells the reason.

Blue Origin will try again to launch its massive new rocket as early as Tuesday after calling off the debut launch because of ice buildup in critical plumbing.

The 320-foot (98-meter) New Glenn rocket was supposed to blast off before dawn Monday with a prototype satellite. But ice formed in a purge line for a unit powering some of the rocket’s hydraulic systems and launch controllers ran out of time to clear it, according to the company.

Founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin said Tuesday’s poor weather forecast could cause more delay. Thick clouds and stiff wind were expected at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

The test flight already had been delayed by rough seas that posed a risk to the company’s plan to land the first-stage booster on a floating platform in the Atlantic….

(13) MOANA LITIGATION. “Disney faces copyright lawsuit over ‘Moana’ franchise” reports Entertainment Weekly.

Disney has been hit with a copyright lawsuit alleging that the wildly popular Moana franchise was nearly entirely lifted from a decades-old screenplay without the writer’s consent.

In a lawsuit reviewed by Entertainment Weekly that was filed Friday, animator Buck Woodall claims that former Mandeville Films development director Jenny Marchick violated his copyright by secretly passing to Disney materials he produced confidentially for her two decades ago. That material, Woodall alleges, became Moana and Moana 2….

…The animator claims that he delivered to Marchick “extremely large quantities of intellectual property and trade secrets” related to a project variously called “Bucky” and “Bucky the Wave Warrior” between 2003 and 2008. Those materials included a completed screenplay, character illustrations, budgets, a fully animated concept trailer, storyboards, background image references, and more.

Woodall also notes that he received copyright protection on these materials in 2004 that was updated in 2014.

“Bucky” was never developed, but Woodall claims that Marchick was able to pass his materials to Disney by exploiting legal loopholes inherent to the “tapestry of confusion” that is Disney’s elaborate corporate structure. According to Woodall, “Bucky” not only became Moana without his consent, but continued to serve as the basis for Moana 2 as well.

The suit enumerates a number of similarities between Woodall’s undeveloped script and Moana and Moana 2. Like “Bucky,” the first film follows a teenager on a voyage in an outrigger canoe across Polynesian waters to save Polynesian land. It features the Polynesian belief in spiritual ancestors who manifest as animal guides, and a number of specifics including a symbolic necklace, navigation by stars, a lava goddess, and a giant creature disguised as a mountainous island.

As for Moana 2, the suit notes that details such as the rooster and pig companions, a mission to break a curse, a whirlpool that leads to an oceanic portal, and an encounter with the Kakamora warrior tribe were all lifted without consent from “Bucky.”…

(14) PITCH MEETING. Hmm. Did any of the foregoing get mentioned during the “Moana 2 Pitch Meeting”?

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

Pixel Scroll 12/11/24 If You Stare At A Scroll Too Long, It Dissolves Into Pixels

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(1) CITY TECH SF SYMPOSIUM. For Andrew Porter it was a short walk to yesterday’s City Tech SF Symposium in Brooklyn. He brought his camera with him and shot these photos during the “Asimov/Analog Writers Panel”.

L to R: Matthew Kressel, Mercurio D. Rivera, Sakinah Hoefler, Sarah Pinsker, moderator Emily Hockaday, senior managing editor of Analog and Asimov’s SF magazines. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.
Emily Hockaday. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.
Sakina Hoefler. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

(2) SKYWALKER SHELTERS IN PLACE. The Franklin Fire has forced several well-known celebrities to evacuate, but some haven’t left.

The Franklin fire is raging through California’s Malibu coast, causing evacuations and ravaging homes while some celebrities like Mark Hamill shelter in place.

Hamill took to Instagram on Tuesday to share with fans that he would not evacuate his California home, with the “Star Wars” star telling his 6.2 million followers on the platform to “stay safe.”

“We’re in lockdown because of the Malibu fires. Please stay safe everyone! I’m not allowed to leave the house, which fits in perfectly with my elderly-recluse lifestyle,” Hamill wrote.

Hollywood legend Dick Van Dyke is also one of the celebrities in the affected area, saying on Facebook that he evacuated the area with his wife Arlene.

The Franklin Fire continued to explode in size overnight and covers 3,983 acres as of Wednesday morning with 7% containment, according to CalFire. Late Tuesday night, officials said 2,667 had burned. It was fueled by strong Santa Ana winds and low humidity, a dangerous combination prompting red flag warnings in the region through Wednesday evening….

Others who have evacuated include Cher, Eagles rocker Don Henley, and Cindy Crawford.

(3) PRODUCERS GUILD AWARDS. Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story is a nominee in documentary category for the 36th annual PGA Awards. The complete list of nominated documentaries is at the link. That is the first and only PGA category announced so far.

(4) THESE GHOSTS WANT TO BE SEEN. [Item by Steven French.] The UK’s “Society of Authors calls for celebrity memoir ghostwriters to be credited” – the Guardian tells why.

The SoA’s call comes following writers expressing frustration in recent months about celebrities writing books at a time when author incomes are in decline. Last year, Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown was criticised over her novel, Nineteen Steps, which was ghostwritten by Kathleen McGurl. While Brown publicly acknowledged McGurl’s work in an Instagram post, critics said that McGurl’s name “should be on the cover”.

(5) GHOSTLY GIFTS. [Item by Steven French.] If anyone happens to be in the Chicago area: “Ghoulish Mortals – St. Charles, Illinois” in Atlas Obscura.

JUST WEST OF CHICAGO, THERE is a little spot of spooky in the charming downtown of St. Charles, Illinois. Ghoulish Mortals is made up of equal parts immersive haunted house-style vignettes, macabre art gallery, and pop culture collector gift shop.

Haunting organ music leads you down the quaint downtown sidewalks and into the dark mysterious doors. As you make your way exploring through the shop, you will travel through a haunted mansion, a fortune teller’s tent, an 80s living room inspired by Stranger Things, a killer clown circus, abandoned hospital operating room, cannibal swamp cabin, and even come face to face with Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors. 

If you love horror movies, true crime, the occult, oddities, or fantasy, leaving this shop empty-handed is nearly impossible!

(6) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES PODCAST. Space Cowboy Books of Joshua Tree, CA presents episode 81 of “Simultaneous Times – Eric Fomley & Adele Gardner”. Stories featured in this episode:

(7) RHYSLING AWARD CHAIR NAMED. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) has announced the 2025 Rhysling Award Chair will be Pixie Bruner.

Pixie Bruner (HWA/SFPA) is a writer, editor, mutant, and cancer survivor. She lives in Atlanta, GA, with her doppelgänger and their alien cats. Her collection The Body As Haunted was published in 2024 (Authortunities Press). She co-curated and edited Nature Triumphs : A Charity Anthology of Dark Speculative Literature (Dark Moon Rising Publications). Her words are in/forthcoming from Space & Time Magazine, Hotel Macabre (Crystal Lake Publishing), Star*Line, Weird Fiction Quarterly, Dreams & Nightmares, Angry Gable Press, Punk Noir, and many more. She wrote for White Wolf Gaming Studio. Werespiders ruining LARPs are all her fault.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Thirty-two years ago, The Muppet Christmas Carol premiered, directed by Brian Henson (in his feature film directorial debut) from the screenplay by Jerry Juhl. 

Based amazingly faithfully off that beloved story, it starred Michael Caine as Ebenezer Scrooge with a multitude of Muppet performers, to wit Dave Goelz, Steve Whitmire, Ed Sanders, Jerry Nelson, Theo Sanders, Kristopher Milnes, Russell Martin, Ray Coulthard and Frank Oz, to name just some of them. 

I must single out Jessica Fox as the voice of Ghost of Christmas Past, a stellar performance indeed. 

Following Jim Henson’s death in May 1990, the talent agent Bill Haber had approached Henson’s son Brian with the idea of filming an adaptation. It was pitched to ABC as a television film, but Disney ended up purchasing it instead. That’s why it’s only available on Disney+ these days. 

Critics in general liked it with Roger Ebert being among them though he added that it “could have done with a few more songs than it has, and the merrymaking at the end might have been carried on a little longer, just to offset the gloom of most of Scrooge’s tour through his lifetime spent spreading misery.” 

Ebert added of Caine playing Scrooge that, “He is the latest of many human actors (including the great Orson Welles) to fight for screen space with the Muppets, and he sensibly avoids any attempt to go for a laugh. He plays the role straight and treats the Muppets as if they are real. It is not an easy assignment.” 

They did give him his own song which showed us the cast.

Those songs were by Paul Williams, another one of his collaborations with the Jim Henson Company after working on The Muppet Movie.

Box office wise it did just ok, as it made twenty-seven million against production costs of twelve million, not counting whatever was spent on marketing. And that Christmas goose. 

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a rather ungloomy rating of eighty-eight percent.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) ‘INNER LIGHT’ WRITER HAS SHOW IN DEVELOPMENT. Inverse reports: “32 Years Later, One of Star Trek’s Most Celebrated Writers is Launching a Gritty Sci-Fi Show”.

The writer responsible for the most celebrated episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, is launching a new gritty sci-fi series. As reported by Deadline, Morgan Gendel — writer of TNG’s “The Inner Light” — has just secured a deal with Welsh broadcaster S4C, Hiraeth Productions, Canada’s Fun Republic Pictures and Karma Film, to develop a new “eco-thriller” science fiction show currently titled Isolation. The in-development series will focus on an ensemble of characters attempting to combat climate change in the near future, who also encounter an extraterrestrial force capable of direct contact with human minds.

“There’s a whole ‘Inner Light,’ kind of linkage here, to the extent that both deal with alien technology and the human brain,” Gendel tells Inverse. “And you’ve got a team thrown together isolated from humanity to one extent or another. Those are not intentional [parallels]. My writing often puts people in a pressure cooker to see what emotions or truths boil out of them.”…

(11) SURREALISM OF GENRE INTEREST. John Coulthart assembles a gallery of “The art of Jean Ransy, 1910–1991” at { feuilleton }.

… All the same, Jean Ransy may fit the Surrealist bill even if he doesn’t seem to have had any lasting connections with those groups who regarded themselves as the official guardians of the Surrealist flame. Ransy was Belgian artist which makes him Surrealist by default if you subscribe to Jonathan Meades’ proposition that Belgium is a Surrealist nation at heart. (Magritte wasn’t a Surrealist, says Meades, he was a social realist.)

Ransy’s paintings appear at first glance like a Belgian equivalent of Rex Whistler in their pictorial realism and refusal to jump on the Modernist bandwagon. Whistler and Ransy were contemporaries (Whistler was born in 1905) but Whistler’s paintings were much more restrained even when outright fantasy entered his baroque pastiches. The “metaphysical” vistas of Giorgio de Chirico are mentioned as an influence on Ransy’s work so he was at least looking at living artists, something you never sense with Whistler. There’s a de Chirico quality in the tilted perspectives and accumulations of disparate objects, also a hint of Max Ernst in one or two paintings….

Le chemin de ronde au visage soleil (1985).

(12) JUSTWATCH SHARES 2024 TOP 10 LISTS. What were the most-watched movies and TV shows on streaming services in 2024? JustWatch compiled these year-end Streaming Charts based on user activity, including: clicking on a streaming offer, adding a title to a watchlist, and marking a title as ‘seen’. This data is collected from >45 million movie & TV show fans per month. It is updated daily for 140 countries and 4,500 streaming services.

2024 was packed with standout streaming hits. Movies like “Civil War”, “Oppenheimer”, and “The Fall Guy” drew huge audiences with their mix of action and drama. On the TV side, shows like “Shogun”, “Fallout”, and our streaming charts champion “The Bear” kept viewers hooked all year long. Whether it was blockbuster films or binge-worthy series, there was something for everyone. These titles set the tone for another exciting year in entertainment.

(13) WE STAND CORRECTED. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian says people have jumped to the wrong conclusion about an image in the trailer we ran yesterday: “Emaciated zombie in 28 Years Later is not Cillian Murphy, sources confirm”.

When the trailer for Danny Boyle’s belated zombie sequel 28 Years Later released on Tuesday, the less-than-rosy-cheeked appearance of the first film’s star, Cillian Murphy, did not escape comment.

A scene in which a strikingly skinny member of the undead suddenly rears up, naked, behind new star Jodie Comer was taken as confirmation of rumours that Murphy had returned for an appearance in the new film….

…Yet the Guardian can reveal that the actor playing “Emaciated Infected” in the film, due for release in June 2025, is not Murphy but rather newcomer Angus Neill.

Neill, an art dealer specialising in old masters, was talent-spotted by Boyle, who was much struck by his distinctive looks. Neill also works as a model, with his professional profile suggesting he has a 28-inch waist….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Ryan George takes us inside the “Elf Pitch Meeting” – one of the retro reviews stockpiled in anticipation of his baby arriving.

Will Ferrell is one of the most successful comedy actors of our time – but back in 2003, it was kind of a surprise to see him leading a Christmas movie as a giant non-elf. Elf ended up becoming a holiday classic, but it still raises some questions. Like what happened to that poor nun? Why didn’t the news reporter follow up on anything? Is Buddy the elf actually kind of creepy? So check out the pitch meeting that led to Elf to find out how it all came together!

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