Tag Archives: Polina Levontin

Pixel Scroll 2/4/25 Cause We Are Materializing In A Living World (From The Soundtrack To “Kirk and Spock Beam To Ego The Living Planet”[1])

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(1) DOWN THESE MEAN TWEETS. Less than 24 hours after The Self-Published Science Fiction Competition announced its new “SPSFC Code of Conduct” (linked in yesterday’s Scroll), the SPSFC management announced they were removing a writer named Devon Eriksen from the contest for violating the CoC. They did not specify why, which in these post-JDA-lawsuit times is regarded as wisdom. However, it’s clear what the host of Indie Book Spotlight believed:

And this exchange being on X.com, large numbers of people claimed to be unable to understand the problem, beginning with this fellow:

So the Indie Book Spotlight host put up a screenshot with a lengthy quote by Eriksen showing what they had in mind, which I’m not going to repost but which can be read here.

Devon Eriksen’s public response to being banned was (1) to claim he wasn’t aware he was even entered in the contest, and (2) to mock the whole proceeding at length, which you can read at X.com or in File 770’s screencaps — image-1, image-2, image-3, image-4, image-5, image-6. Or not at all, if you prefer.

(Credit Camestros Felapton with the scoop: “Different Thing”.)

(2) THIS IS THE END, MY FRIEND. “Apocalypse stories: Everything Must Go by Dorian Lynskey explores why we love skipping to the end” – a review and commentary by Slate’s Laura Miller

“The worst is not. So long as we can say ‘This is the worst,’ ” go the lines from King Lear quoted in Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel Station Eleven. Any stories we tell about the end of the world will have to be fictional, since once the real thing occurs, no one will be around to describe it. As the British journalist Dorian Lynskey relates in his erudite, delightfully witty, and strangely cheering new book, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, the fact that we can only ever speculate on the subject makes us speculate all the more frantically. “There is simply no end of ends,” Lynskey writes of the books, movies, TV shows, pop songs, and video games we’ve created to depict the apocalypse—or its near misses and the aftermaths thereof….

… Apocalyptic narratives are, of course, always more about the vexing present than the enigmatic future. Everything Must Go encompasses the stories told by doomsday cults, scientific Cassandras, pulp novelists, video game designers, and Hollywood movies. The idea that the world will one day come to an end is an especially Western notion, Lynskey points out, with its roots in the Book of Revelation. That strange document, with its psychedelic signs and portents, Lynskey writes, “supplies the Bible with a narrative arc and gives humanity’s story a theatrical finale.” Other cultures steeped in different religions may view time as cyclical, but the Judeo-Christian tradition sees it as an arrow, going in one direction, to an inevitable conclusion. As terrifying as the prospect of apocalypse can be, Lynskey writes, “it rescues believers from the endless mess of history by weaving past, present and future into a coherent, satisfying whole with an author, a message and an ending.”…

(3) THOUGHTS ABOUT AWARDS VOTING. BSFA’s Vector has republished Jo Lindsay Walton and Polina Levontin’s article “Gender, Democracy, and SF/F Literary Awards” from Foundation 149 (winter 2024).

This article explores cultural and design dimensions of non-governmental voting systems, focusing on science fiction and fantasy (SFF) literary awards voted for by fans, with a focus on the British Science Fiction Awards. The design of such voting systems needs to juggle a range of goals, one of which is fairness with regard to gender — acknowledging that ‘fairness’ is not straightforward to define, particularly given such awards are embedded within broader gender inequalities. Our analysis suggests that men have been more likely than women to vote for works by men, and also more likely to vote in ways that amplify the influence of men’s votes under an Alternative Vote System. We suggest that SFF awards are cultural spaces which lend themselves to experimentation with new democratic forms, and briefly offer potential sources of inspiration. Just as SFF has aspired to be a space to think about the future of technology, gender, the environment, and many other issues, SFF award spaces could be spaces for thinking about the future of democracy. We also offer recommendations to SFF awards designers and communities to address gender bias (emphasising reflective practices over technical solutions), and to continue to explore how aesthetic and cultural values and identities are constructed and negotiated within SFF award spaces, and beyond….

(4) ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY RECOMMENDED. [Item by Steven French.] In “What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in January” authors and readers tell the Guardian which were their favorite books read last month and first up is …

Eimear McBride, author

Everyone else got there a long time ago but I’ve only recently read Adrian Tchaikovsky’s sci-fi masterpiece Children of Time. Cautionary, richly imaginative and deeply, unexpectedly humane, it was both utterly unputdownable and a welcome relief from the current resignation to dystopia.

I’ve also been taking delight in Edward Carey’s glorious novel Edith Holler. Set in a Norwich that is at once fictional, historical and fantastical, he transports the reader into the world of brilliant 12-year-old Edith who is cursed to never leave her family’s tumbledown theatre … until fate decides otherwise. Filled with the author’s witty, curious observations and alive with his own illustrations, it’s a novel like no other.

(5) CARL BRANDON SOCIETY 2024 ACCOMPLISHMENTS. SFWA distributed this report with the latest Singularity newsletter.

Thanks so much for your continuing support of and interest in the Carl Brandon Society. In these parlous times, we depend on you, and we want you to be able to depend on us. In the past several years, we’ve all been through a lot. Our focus—as individuals, as an organization, as countries within the world—has shifted. At the Carl Brandon Society, we’re slowly working through how we need to position ourselves during and after that shift.

We’re moving from a small, social organization of readers and writers with big dreams but essentially no money to a still-small organization with some tools to accomplish some of those large goals. With Covid reduced but still circulating, we’re figuring out how to be safe at in-person events, while expanding our online events, which allow us to serve writers and readers in the wider world, not just in the United States.

2024 Accomplishments

  • Awarded Octavia E. Butler scholarships to students at Clarion and Clarion West workshops
  • Held three online workshops: Cosmic Horror with Premee Mohamed, DIY workshop with Suzan Palumbo, and Decolonial Worldbuilding with Helen Gould
  • Held a children’s book fair in conjunction with Seattle Public Library and Mam’s Book Store
  • Distributed books left after book fair to several Seattle area school libraries
  • Hired Program Director Isis Asare out of a pool of outstanding qualified applicants

We are determined to stay focused on our work despite the current political climate. We believe it’s important, and we believe you think so, too.

Sincerely,
K. Tempest Bradford, Jaymee Goh, Susheela Bhat Harkins, Shiv Ramdas, Victor Raymond, Kate Schaefer, Nisi Shawl, and Yang-Yang Wang
The Carl Brandon Society Steering Committee

P.S. We’re sending a donation of $1000 to Octavia’s Bookshelf, the Black-owned bookstore in Los Angeles that has stepped up as a community resource in the wake of the devastating fires. Octavia was one of our founding members. Please consider donating to the bookstore to help rebuild that community.

And please consider supporting us with a donation as well. Thanks so much!

P. O. Box 23336
Seattle, WA 98102

The Carl Brandon Society is recognized by the IRS as a qualified 501(c)3 organization, and all donations to it are tax-deductible to the full extent of the law. No goods or services were provided in exchange for this donation. Our federal tax I.D. number is 27-0140141. 

(6) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

February 4, 1993 — Groundhog Day film (premiered this day)

By Paul Weimer: One of the pinnacles of time travel movies is a movie that doesn’t think that it’s a genre movie: Groundhog Day. 

Consider: We have no reason, no mechanism, nothing we can point to as to why Phil Connors (Bill Murray in peak mode, having shed some of the questionable elements of his Ghostbusters character and just playing an unpleasant weatherman but without some of the sleazier elements from the prior movie). We are not meant to like Phil at the beginning. He is dismissive, arrogant, cruel and I wouldn’t want to spend an hour, much less a day, with him on a road trip.

And so, after getting trapped in Punxsutawney the night of Groundhog Day thanks to a blizzard he didn’t accurately predict, he wakes up on the morning of February 2nd again. And again. And again and again. 

Murray’s Phil does what many of us would do in this situation at first. He tries to escape the town by any which means he can. When that fails, when his universe shrinks to the horizon of the town, he then takes subtle advantage of the situation, seeing what he can do. He goes through cycles of mania and depression and tries to kill himself, to no avail. He tries to kill Phil the Groundhog, figuring he is the reason for the time loop. 

Nothing works.

And then comes the slow turn. Phil decides, with an eternity of the same day, to make use of his gift. He learns things, ranging from flipping cards to literature to French to chiropractic back adjustment to playing the piano. What starts as a sleazy way to seduce Andie McDowell’s Rita turns into a genuine romance. The wacky comedy of the first part of the movie turns into a more considered romantic-comedy-drama of a man who over thousands of days learns to do better and be better. 

But the movie shows it can’t all go his way, and is surprisingly nuanced for it. Consider Phil’s multiple attempts to save a dying homeless man’s life, to no avail. No matter what Phil does, the man ultimately dies, each and every time. It’s a poignant philosophical, or even religious look at fate, destiny, and the limits of what we can change…but an acknowledgement that, what we can change for the better, we MUST change for the better. 

Fantasy, comedy, philosophy. And wonderful performances all around. A beautifully filmed movie of a town that was already locally famous (I had long heard of it and its annual celebration but it was too far away to ever visit) but it became globally famous thanks to the movie. The movie is a pinnacle of early 1990’s filmmaking. It never thinks it’s a genre movie but it is genre enough that we are invested in Phil’s slow transformation. 

And so, after thousands of tries, after a day spent helping the town, Phil finally breaks free of his time loop, ending his purgatory (or maybe it’s a Bardo) as inexplicably as it began. 

One of the pinnacles of time travel movies is a movie that doesn’t think that it’s a genre movie: Groundhog Day.

Consider…

(7) COMICS SECTION.

(8) TOP 5 OVERRATED SF WRITERS? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The Outlaw Bookseller has a bit of a click-baity offering on his followers’ most over-rated SF writers. (Actually, I have some sympathy with a couple of their choices — but what do I know?). This came out just a couple of days ago but already has had nearly 8,000 views… “Your Top 5 Most OVERRATED SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS- I respond to your comments”.

Steve asked for your views on which SF authors and books receive undue praise and here are the results…and as ever, he responds to your comments in kind….

(9) COMIC RELIEF. Camestros Felapton has had a busy day. Thanks to another of his posts, “Extra Scuttlebutt”, we’re now aware of the insulting things that Larry Correia has been saying about Jon Del Arroz, and the low esteem in which Vox Day holds Correia – because Vox publishes comics by JDA and therefore feels obliged to run interference for one of “his” authors. Below is Vox’s rationalization for violating omerta; then you can read a selection of Correia’s vituperative quotes at Vox Popoli’s post “Churchill, FDR, and Stalin” [Internet Archive link].

Back in the days when the Sad Puppies were the #GamerGate of the science fiction world, I reached a gentleman’s agreement with Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen, two of the first three leaders of the Sad Puppies, after they decided that they did not want to be directly connected to me or the group that became known as the Rabid Puppies. I told them at the time that this separation was a mistake for them, and that there were more Rabid Puppies than Sad Puppies, but they refused to believe that and insisted it was necessary for reasons that I will leave to them to explain.

However, they did agree that given the amount of media scrutiny we were all under, it would serve little purpose for us to attempt to speak for, or about, each other in public. All three of us knew that the media was going to try very hard to utilize anything that we would say to undermine the others. To their credit, and to mine, none of us gave the media any material for ten years.

Unfortunately, I have now concluded it is time to end that gentlemen’s agreement because a) it is now clear and undeniable that these are two men who are not, and perhaps never were, on the side of what is right or what is true, b) they are not gentlemen, and c) they have been repeatedly lying about one of my authors for several years….

… Now, to a certain extent, this is a tempest in a teapot. Literally no one in our greater community has given a quantum of a damn about what Larry Correia thinks ever since he opted out of leading the Sad Puppies more than a decade ago. Being a flagrant Never-Trumper, a civic nationalist, and a Mormon, he’s as irrelevant to the tens of thousands of Castalia, Arkhaven, and Unauthorized fans as I am to his readership. And I doubt more than two percent of our community has ever even heard of Brad Torgersen.

But nevertheless, as we’ve seen again and again, what permits wickedness to thrive is the tolerance and the silence of those who know better. And what Larry and Brad have been doing for years, the twisted rhetoric they have been repeatedly attempting to pass off as the truth, is neither good, nor beautiful, nor true. They no longer merit respect or restraint on my part….

(10) NOT JUST ANY RUBBLE. [Item by Steven French.] An elegiac and timely piece on collecting space rocks: “It came from outer space: the meterorite that landed in a Cotswolds cul-de-sac” in the Guardian.

 With a population of 5,000, Winchcombe is a pretty town of honeycomb-coloured limestone and timber-framed buildings. The Wilcock family home is a neat 1960s detached house on a quiet cul-de-sac on the outskirts of town. Early in the morning of 1 March, Cathryn Wilcock, a retired primary school teacher, opened the curtains of her living room and noticed a pile of dark lumps and powder at the edge of her driveway. It looked as though someone had upended an old barbecue.

The Winchcombe meteorite had probably travelled more than 100m miles to reach our planet. Had it landed just a few metres to the left it would have fallen into a thick privet hedge and probably never been discovered. Had it landed a few metres closer to the road, Cathryn would have assumed it was rubbish churned up by a passing car and swept it away. Instead, her husband, Rob, went out to investigate.

Rob immediately recognised that something strange had occurred. He got together some rubber gloves, old yoghurt pots and plastic bags and went outside to pick up the stones.

(11) FANTASTIC 4 TRAILER LIVE RELEASE EVENT. [Item by Marc Criley.] I think this pretty much caught most all of us in Huntsville by surprise!

The Fantastic 4: First Steps Trailer release was held at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama — the “Rocket City” — and was live-streamed on YouTube. All four stars were present beneath the Saturn 5 rocket exhibit as they and the crowd counted down to the trailer release.

The trailer is shown at the end of the release event video. However, if you want to cut to the chase…

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Marc Criley, Jeffrey Smith, 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 Daniel Dern. Title footnote [1] From Marvel comics/movie: “Ego the Living Planet” in the Wikipedia.]

Pixel Scroll 5/3/23 Don’t Ring That Pixel, It’ll Only Make The Scrolling Trickier

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(1) NEXT ON BABYLON 5. “The secret Babylon 5 project is… an animated movie”. The Verge does a roundup of what is known about the project based on J. Michael Straczynski’s tweets today, plus a little bit from his Patreon page. More details are coming next week, including a release date.

Meanwhile, the Babylon 5 reimagining live action show that’s been in development remains “on hold pending WGA issues” Straczynski said on Facebook last week.

(2) FAN WINS MINN STATE LITERARY AWARD. Congratulations to Minn-Stf member Karen E. Cooper on receiving the 2023 Emilie Buchwald Award for Minnesota Nonfiction, part of the Minnesota Book Awards. Cooper’s winning book is When Minnehaha Flowed with Whiskey: A Spirited History of the Falls.

From the 1880s until at least 1912, Minnehaha Falls was a scene of surprising mayhem. The waterfall was privately owned from the 1850s through 1889, and entrepreneurs made money from hotels and concessions. Even after the area became a city park, shady operators set up at its borders and corrupt police ran “security.” Drinking, carousing, sideshows, dances that attracted unescorted women, and general rowdiness reigned—to the dismay of the neighbors. By 1900, social reformers began to redeem Minnehaha Park. During the struggle for control, the self-indulgent goings-on there became more public and harder to ignore.

(3) LIKE SAND THROUGH THE HOURGLASS. The trailer for Dune: Part Two dropped today.

“Dune: Part Two” will explore the mythic journey of Paul Atreides as he unites with Chani and the Fremen while on a warpath of revenge against the conspirators who destroyed his family. Facing a choice between the love of his life and the fate of the known universe, he endeavors to prevent a terrible future only he can foresee.

(4) TONY AWARDS 2023. The 2023 Tony Award nominations are out. There are a few productions of genre interest like Into the Woods with cast members among the nominees, however the list is mostly not sff. The complete roster is at the link.

(5) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Paul Tremblay & John Langan on Wednesday, May 10, 2023, at 7:00 p.m. Eastern.

Paul Tremblay

Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the author of The Pallbearers Club, Growing Things, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. His novel The Cabin at the End of the World was adapted as the major motion picture Knock at the Cabin. His essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and numerous year’s-best anthologies. He has a master’s degree in mathematics and lives outside Boston with his family.

John Langan

John Langan is the author of two novels and five collections of fiction. For his work, he has received the Bram Stoker and the This Is Horror awards. He is one of the founding members of the Shirley Jackson awards, and serves on its Board of Advisors. He lives in New York’s Mid-Hudson Valley with his family and worries about bears roaming the woods behind the house. His latest book is Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies.

Where: KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003 (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs).

(6) THE SEX LIVES OF TRALFAMADORIANS. [Item by Steven French.] In an interesting and helpful article in Aeon, entitled “Sex Is Real” (but with the important sub-title: ‘Yes, there are just two biological sexes. No, this doesn’t mean every living thing is either one or the other’), philosopher of biology Paul Griffiths tackles the Tralfamadorians:

… imagine if there was a whole species … where three different kinds of gametes combined to make a new individual – a sperm, an egg and a third, mitochondrial gamete. This species would have three biological sexes. Something like this has actually been observed in slime moulds, an amoeba that can, but need not, get its mitochondria from a third ‘parent’. The novelist Kurt Vonnegut imagined an even more complex system in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969): ‘There were five sexes on Tralfamadore, each of them performing a step necessary in the creation of a new individual.’ But the first question a biologist would ask is: why haven’t these organisms been replaced by mutants that dispense with some of the sexes? Having even two sexes imposes many extra costs – the simplest is just finding a mate – and these costs increase as the number of sexes required for mating rises. Mutants with fewer sexes would leave more offspring and would rapidly replace the existing Tralfamadorians. Something like this likely explains why two-sex systems predominate on Earth….

(7) VECTOR NEEDS EDITORS. Jo Lindsay Walton and Polina Levontin will be standing down as editors of the British Science Fiction Association’s magazine Vector after one more issue (#298, late 2023), and the BSFA is inviting applications for new editors: “Vector: be part of a new editorial team!”

(8) MEMORY LANE.

2011 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Let’s talk about David Langford for a minute. Y’all know this wonderful individual already, so I need not go into depth on who he is, though I’d be very remiss not to mention that he has the most Hugo Awards in hand with twenty-nine so far. 

Many of those came about from his work as a fan journalist on his essential-reading Ansible newsletter which he has described as The SF Private Eye. The name Ansible you likely know is taken from Le Guin’s communication device.

That he borrowed the name from a fictional device is a fact that lends itself to the lead-in for the Beginning excerpted in this Scroll. It’s from Langford’s story in Fables from the Fountain, edited by Iain Whates, a collection which paid homage to Arthur C. Clarke’s Tales from The White Hart.

Fables from the Fountain centers on The Fountain, a traditional London pub situated in Holborn, sited just off Chancery Lane, where Michael, our landlord, serves only superb ales, ably assisted by barmaids Sally and Bogna.  It is a place where a group of friends – scientists, writers and, yes, genre fans — meet regularly on a Tuesday night to tell true stories, and some well, maybe not so true. 

Our story, “The Pocklington Poltergeist”, was published by NewCon Press as part of this collection twelve years ago. Dean Harkness did the cover art. 

They are, I must say, quite fun tales that keep nicely in the spirit of Clarke’s own. Available at the usual suspects, or in a more traditional paper edition.

And let’s us step into The Fountain for our Beginning…

A buzz of expectation could be felt in the back bar of the Fountain that Tuesday evening, and Michael the landlord hoped aloud that this didn’t mean funny business. No one needed to be told what he meant. The previous meeting had gone with a bang, not to mention a repeated flash, crackle and puff of purple vapour when anyone stepped in the wrong place. Whatever that noisy stuff was, it got on your shoes and followed you even into the sanctuary of the toilet.

“Nitrogen tri-iodide,” said Dalton reminiscently. “Contact explosive. A venerable student tradition. It’s amazing how each new year discovers the formula, as though it were a programmed instinct.”

“They read science fiction,” Ploom suggested. “Robert Heinlein gives a fairly detailed recipe in Farnham’s Freehold.”

“Not his best,” said Dalton. “And not the best procedure either. Solid iodine crystals are far, far more effective than the usual alcoholic solution. I speak purely theoretically, of course.”

At the bar, Professor Mackintosh made reassuring noises. “The only upheaval we’re expecting is a celebrity visitor, Michael. A demi-celebrity, at any rate. Have you heard of Dagon Smythe “the psychic investigator – a real-life Carnacki the Ghost-Finder? Colin Wilson wrote a whole book about him once.”

Next to the Professor, Dr Steve spluttered something into his beer. It could have been: “That charlatan.”

“Now, now,” murmured Mackintosh. “Guests are always received politely. We even managed to be civil to Uri Geller.”

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born May 3, 1896 — Dodie Smith. English children’s novelist and playwright, best remembered for The Hundred and One Dalmatians which of course became the animated film of the same name and thirty years later was remade by Disney as a live action film. (Saw the first a long time ago, never saw the latter.) Though The Starlight Barking, the sequel, was optioned, by Disney, neither sequel film (101 Dalmatians II: Patch’s London Adventure and 102 Dalmatians) is based on it. Elizabeth Hand in her review column in F&SF praised it as one of the very best fantasies (“… Dodie Smith’s sophisticated canine society in The Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Starlight Barking…”) she read. (Died 1990.)
  • Born May 3, 1928 — Jeanne Bal.  Ebony In Trek’s “The Man Trap” episode, she played Nancy Crater, a former lover of Leonard McCoy, who would be a victim of the lethal shape-shifting alien which craves salt. This was the series’ first-aired episode that replaced “The Cage” which the Network really didn’t like. She also had one-offs in Thriller and I-Spy. (Died 1996.)
  • Born May 3, 1939 — Dennis O’Neil. Writer and editor, mostly for Marvel Comics and DC Comics from the Sixties through the Nineties, and was the Group Editor for the Batman family of titles until his retirement which makes him there when Ed Brubaker’s amazing Gotham Central came out. He himself has written Wonder Woman and Green Arrow in both cases introducing some rather controversial storytelling ideas. He also did a rather brilliant DC Comics Shadow series with Michael Kaluta as the artist. (Died 2020.)
  • Born May 3, 1949 — Ron Canada, 74. He’s one of those actors who manages to show up across the Trek verse, in this case on episodes of Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager. He also showed up in the David Hasselhoff vanity project Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD as Gabe Jones, and had further one-offs on The X-Files, Star Gate SG-1, Elementary, Grimm and The Strain. He had a recurring role on the now canceled Orville series as Admiral Tucker.
  • Born May 3, 1958 — Bill Sienkiewicz, 65. Comic artist especially known for his work for Marvel Comics’ Elektra, Moon Knight and New Mutants. His work on the Elektra: Assassin! six-issue series which written by Frank Miller is stellar. Finally his work with Andy Helfer on The Shadow series is superb.
  • Born May 3, 1965 — Michael Marshall Smith, 58. His first published story, “The Man Who Drew Cats”, won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story. Not stopping there, His first novel, Only Forward, won the August Derleth Award for Best Novel and the Philip K. Dick Award. He has six British Fantasy Awards in total, very impressive indeed. 
  • Born May 3, 1969 — Daryl Mallett, 54. By now you know that I’ve a deep fascination with the nonfiction documentation of our community. This author has done a number of works doing just that including several I’d love to see including Reginald’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards: A Comprehensive Guide to the Awards and Their Winners written with Robert Reginald. He’s also written some short fiction including one story with Forrest J Ackerman that bears the charming title of “A Typical Terran’s Thought When Spoken to by an Alien from the Planet Quarn in Its Native Language“.  He’s even been an actor as well appearing in several Next Gen episodes (“Encounter at Farpoint” and “Hide and Q”) and The Undiscovered Country as well, all uncredited. He also appeared in Doctor Who and The Legends Of Time, a fan film which you can see here if you wish to.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Frazz – is built around a culture wars malaprop. (Or at least a misunderstanding.)

(11) EXECUTIVE ACTION. “Jim Lee Re-Ups at DC, Promoted to President” – The Hollywood Reporter has the story.

Jim Lee, the superstar artist-turned-publisher of DC, has added the title president to his growing list of executive designations.

Lee, re-upping his deal with DC, has been promoted to president as well as publisher and CCO of the comic book company, which is part of Warner Bros. Discovery.

The executive will continue to report to Pam Lifford, president of global brands, franchises and experiences at Warner Bros. Discovery, who announced the promotion Wednesday.

Lee, per the company, will continue in his primary role as publisher at DC, where he leads the creative teams. He will also continue to lead the creative efforts to integrate DC’s publishing portfolio of characters and stories across all media, supporting the brands and studios of WBD…

(12) I’VE HEARD THIS TUNE BEFORE. [Item by Dan Bloch.] Did Spider Robinson nail it or what? (Cf. “Melancholy Elephants”) “The Ed Sheeran lawsuit is a threat to Western civilization. Really.” says Elizabeth Nelson in an opinion piece for the Washington Post.

Spider Robinson’s 1983 Hugo-winning short story “Melancholy Elephants” is about a woman fighting a bill in congress which would extend copyright into perpetuity, because it would ultimately stifle humanity’s artistic creativity.  (“Senator, if I try to hoard the fruits of my husband’s genius, I may cripple my race.”)

The Post article talks about musician Ed Sheeran currently being sued by a songwriter’s estate which claims that “a similar but not identical chord progression used by both songs as a principal motif” is copyrighted.  The author says the effects of the estate winning would be horrible: “If artists must pay a tax for employing the most common modes and tones of composition, the process of grinding popular music down to a consensus-driven pay window for tech entrepreneurs and corporate opportunists will have reached its apotheosis.”

The two are eerily similar.

(13) BIG GULP. The good part is you won’t be around by the time this happens to the earth: “Sun-like star swallowed entire planet, MIT and Harvard astronomers say” at CBS News.

For the first time, scientists have caught a star in the act of swallowing a planet – not just a nibble or bite, but one big gulp.

Astronomers on Wednesday reported their observations of what appeared to be a gas giant around the size of Jupiter or bigger being eaten by its star. The sun-like star had been puffing up with old age for eons and finally got so big that it engulfed the close-orbiting planet.

It’s a gloomy preview of what will happen to Earth when our sun morphs into a red giant and gobbles the four inner planets.

“If it’s any consolation, this will happen in about 5 billion years,” said co-author Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics….

The source article is “An infrared transient from a star engulfing a planet” in Nature.

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Jeanne Gomoll and Scott Custis replaced their garage floor/slab with new concrete. But before that could happen, workers had to lift up the garage and move it out of the way. This timelapse video of their project is quite something.

[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, N., Steven French, Jo Lindsay Walton, Dan Bloch, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]