Tag Archives: Rich Horton

Pixel Scroll 1/24/25 This Starship Is Bound For Glory, Every Pixel On Her Must Be Scrolly

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(1) THE SHELVES LOOK DIFFERENT THIS WEEK. The Guardian interviews Octavia’s Bookshelf owner Nikki High about how she’s aided her community during the Eaton Fire: “It was a town’s only Black-owned bookstore. It is now a refuge for those displaced by the California fires”.

… That night, the flames ravaged her neighborhood. “There’s about maybe seven or eight homes left on our street, including ours,” she says. The following day, she drove to Octavia’s Bookshelf to see if it was damaged. Although winds blew dirt into the store, her business was otherwise in the clear. In fact, her store still had power and wifi. An idea struck her: perhaps others in the community needed to get online.

“I wrote up something real quick on Instagram,” High says. “I just said, ‘Hey, I have wifi and power. If you need to come here to get online, I’ll be here all day.’” That small act of outreach became the catalyst for something much larger.

As people trickled into the store, they began asking for basic necessities. “Do you have any water?” one person asked. High turned back to Instagram, posting a call for water donations, which she received, plus more. By the end of the day, the bookstore had transformed into a full-fledged relief center.

“We packed up all of our books off the shelves and put them in the attic,” High explains. The books were replaced by the items people gave to victims of the fire. The donations poured in from as far away as Portland, filling the store with supplies like toothpaste, diapers, cat food and water. Volunteers from the community, including loyal customers, stepped in to help organize and distribute the items.

For those who came seeking aid, the store became a place of connection and solace. High remembers one customer who came in for diapers and wipes. “She told me she had donated to our original GoFundMe when we opened. She said, ‘I never thought in a million years I’d be coming here to get supplies after losing my home.’”…

(2) WHEN BUY BY ALMOST WENT BYE-BYE. “Bloomsbury UK Reaches Last-Minute Contract Agreement With Amazon” reports Publishers Weekly.

Charging that Bloomsbury UK failed to engage in good faith to reach a new contract agreement, Amazon posted a notice on its UK website late Thursday afternoon that as of midnight January 24, Bloomsbury UK print titles would no longer be available directly from its online stores in the U.K., Europe, and Australia. That takedown was averted, however, when the two parties reached an agreement in principle on a new contract 90 minutes before the last one expired.

In the initial announcement, Amazon stressed that Bloomsbury print book availability in Amazon’s U.S. store would have been unaffected by the action, but that its Bloomsbury’s Kindle editions would not be available for sale worldwide. According to the post, Bloomsbury UK’s agreement with Amazon expired last year, and the e-tailer had extended the deal for about seven months in hopes of reaching a new agreement.

The last extension ended at midnight on Jan. 24, and if no new contract had been signed by then, Amazon would have begun to pull its “buy buttons” from impacted countries. Customers would still be able to buy Bloomsbury titles from third-party sellers who use Amazon’s services. In practical terms, the dispute meant that, for example, Sarah J. Maas titles that are published by Bloomsbury UK would not have been available in affected stores, while Maas titles released by Bloomsbury’s U.S. subsidiary will still be available in the American Amazon store….

(3) WE HAVE HEARD THE CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT. “Thousands of romantasy fans make midnight dates with new Rebecca Yarros novel” and the Guardian cheers them on.

Rebecca Yarros couldn’t sell her first novel. No publisher would take it. But this week, 14 years later, legions of her devoted readers turned up to more than a thousand midnight-release parties held to celebrate the publication of her latest book.

In the UK alone, more than 180,000 copies of Onyx Storm, the third instalment of Yarros’s blockbuster Empyrean series, sold on day one of publication on Tuesday. Nearly 60 Waterstones branches held late-night parties or opened early on Tuesday morning to mark the occasion. And after some TikTok users posted videos showing that they had managed to buy the book in Asda ahead of its official release, other fans filmed themselves scouring their local branches trying to get their hands on early copies too.Along with Sarah J Maas, Yarros is at the forefront of the romantasy genre, writing stories that combine elements of fantasy and romance. The first two books of the Empyrean series, Fourth Wing and Iron Flame, follow 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail as she makes her way through dragon-rider training at Basgiath War College. Her enemies-to-lovers romance with Xaden Riorson is central to the story, and in the third instalment, her mission is to save him….

(4) KERFUFFLE IN BLAKE’S 7 FANDOM. Lena Barkin dives deep into “The War That Almost Broke a Classic Fandom” at Fansplaining — Blake’s 7 fandom to be precise.

…Media cons were new and fundamentally different because of screen divide. Literary fans were used to writers being fandom participants at cons—and assumed that’s why actors went, too. One Blake’s 7 fan postulated, “Isaac Asimov and Andre Norton go to cons because they love Science Fiction… These people, and many like them, do not charge fees for attending cons… Mostly they go for many of the same reasons we all have … to get feedback on their work; to have a chance to get on a podium and panel and sound off on favorite issues; to browse in the dealers’ room and art show; to discuss elements of SF into the wee hours; to party!” 

While fans could only speculate on the true motivations of the actors, the behaviors described were observed and accepted as standard. It’s also true that many successful sci-fi writers had risen up through the community, supporting this fan’s assertion that these writers “are a part of science fiction.” Science fiction literary fandom was like a really devoted writer’s group where successful writers could give back to the community that helped form them. 

But the entertainment industry had long had different ideas about the roles of its stars. From the beginning of Hollywood, female fans were instructed on how to idolize actors. In her book Movie Crazy: Fans, Stars, and the Cult of Celebrity, Samantha Barras posits that, “just as fans sometimes controlled Hollywood, Hollywood also controlled fans.” By redirecting ‘movie-struck’ girls from aspiration to emulation, Hollywood told fans how they could dress like the stars and collect autographs, but weren’t allowed to be stars. The divide between actor and fan had to be strict in order to maintain control of persona and image….

I was struck by the effort here to contrast media cons with the fandom of written science fiction in the Eighties. Barkin uncritically embraces the latter’s (written sf fandom’s) view of itself despite that being a wild oversimplification. Which I know because in the late Eighties that was the myth I believed until I had the experience of setting up the program for NolaCon II (1988) and talked to a bunch of writers who did not feel connected to fandom in that way, who were only entertaining the idea of attending the con because their agent urged them to for business reasons. Asimov’s and Norton’s and some others’ connection with fans was merely part of a wide spectrum of writers’ attitudes towards fandom.

(5) CARD SHARKS. But you don’t need to reach any farther back in time than a week ago if you’re looking for a fan kerfuffle. And there’s video of this one. “Fight breaks out over Pokémon cards at a Los Angeles Costco” reports the LA Times (behind a paywall).

A fight broke out at a Costco store in Los Angeles over Pokémon cards, according to a video circulating on social media.

The fight was captured at the Atwater Village Costco on Jan. 16, according to a video posted on X by DisguisedToast.

Wild footage captured shoppers at the Atwater Village Costco in Los Angeles fighting over large quantities of the coveted Pokémon cards on Jan. 16.

Two men fought over a Pokémon box set, with one of them elbowing the other in the face.

“Get the f— off of me bro,” one of the men said.

Police weren’t called to the scene and aren’t investigating the brawl, Los Angeles Police Department officials said….

(6) 31 FLAVOR. LA Times critic Robert Lloyd says it’s a matter of taste in “’Star Trek: Section 31 review: A diverting but frustrating first TV film” (behind a paywall).

… Originally conceived as a spinoff series from “Star Trek: Discovery” to star Michelle Yeoh as Philippa Georgiou, an agent of Starfleet’s secret black ops arm, the project was downgraded or promoted to a “feature,” officially the 14th in the “Star Trek” canon, and the franchise’s first “TV movie.” Even though this decision apparently preceded production, most everything about “Section 31” says “pilot episode,” as if whatever ideas informed the aborted series were still driving the starship, as characters are positioned for episodes yet to come — as if the film did not want to let go of the possibility of being a TV show…

… The backstory, which will drive the later plot, is meant to make her character tragic, but we came to know her well enough during her time on the starship Discovery, living among nice people, which had softened her considerably. She was practically lovable by the time she walked into that portal.

Perhaps you will be surprised, then, to find Georgiou sliding back into what looks like narcissism, running her version of Rick’s Cafe Américain in the borderlands outside Federation Space back in the 23rd century, using the alias Madame du Franc (and speaking a little French). Introductory narration, as at the start of a “Mission: Impossible” episode — an acknowledged inspiration — tells us that after her return from the 32nd century to 2257 she joined Section 31 for a time and then went missing. How this lines up with Georgiou having already been introduced as an agent of Section 31 in the second season of “Discovery,” which is to say, the agency she’s going back into the past to join, I’m not at all sure. Time travel will break your brain if you let it….

(7) CHILDREN OF THE SURVIVORS. Rich Horton introduces us to a new novel by a well-known fan: “Review: In Memoriam: A Novel of the Terran Diaspora, by Fred Lerner”

…It’s narrated by David Bernstein. As the novel opens, he’s finishing his final year of school before going to college. And he’s attending a performance staged by the alien race that is native to the planet on which he lives. We learn quickly that these aliens, the Wyneri, rescued the survivors of the Cataclysm, which wiped out humanity on Earth, a couple of centuries prior to this story. The couple of thousand who were rescued have been fruitful enough that the human population is about 30,000 — living in small chapters embedded among the Wyneri. The humans have been gifted one island, on which they have built a University, and to which they go once each year for the Ingathering. And this Remnant, as they style themselves, devote themselves to preserving as much knowledge of Terran history and culture as they can….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 24, 1911 — C. L. Moore. (Died 1987.)

By Paul Weimer: A giant of the 1930’s and 1940’s science fiction and fantasy, I came across C L Moore’s work thanks to Heinlein.  It was the early 1980’s and I read Number of the Beast (which weirdly was one of the first Heinlein books I read, which might explain some things about me…). Anyway, early on in the book, Deity offers her collection of pulp magazines to Zeb…and mentions Moore and her characters Jirel of Joiry and Northwest Smith by name. Young brain went “Who are THEY?” (I did that a lot with Heinlein, it’s how I discovered artists like Maxwell Parrish and Rodin.)  I found Jirel of Joiry in a collection of the protagonist’s stories. Northwest Smith came, later, in a variety of anthologies of early science fiction. 

And I was off and running. Passionate, cerebral and very strongly defined characters in often amazing environments were what I associated with Moore’s work. Sure, a pulp writer, but Moore’s work was uplifted by the interior lives of her characters (consider the agony and the conflict inside of Jirel’s heart, just as one example of her writing at work).

C. L. Moore

When Moore met and started collaborating with Henry Kuttner, figuring out what pieces were hers, what was his and what were collaborations becomes a morass to untangle. I highly enjoy those stories, but they are really “all” collaborations in my mind. 

My favorite Moore works are two of her collaborations with her husband, and they are much more contemporary in her science fiction. “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” I had had the good luck to have read after reading Carroll, so I got the references and allusions immediately, and understood the weird time traveling nature of the futuristic kit and what it did to the child protagonists–and what it almost did decades earlier. It was a “whoa” moment of the power of not time travel of people, but of objects that affect history and people, and literature.

The other story is “Vintage Season”, and it is one of the dagger-to-the-heart endings and the sheer indifference that time travelers can have to the problems of people they visit in the past. When ST: TNG had a protagonist who purported to be from the future act like he was one of the “Vintage Season” time travelers, something clicked and I understood both the original story and the episode much better.  I also recently recounted the bit that the time travelers were off next to see Charlemagne in the year 800 to a medievalist friend of mine who is SF adjacent. He was much amused by the idea.

What a talent, in singular and in combination with Kuttner!

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) PAYING THEIR RESPECTS. Los Angeles Magazine takes us “Inside the David Lynch Shrine at Bob’s Big Boy”.

Shortly after the family of filmmaker David Lynch announced his death last Thursday morning, fans began gathering at Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank. Hundreds of them left something behind as a huge shrine to the visionary behind Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive took shape at the feet of the Big Boy statue on Riverside Drive.

As the tributes continued to pour in, the installation was being disassembled Wednesday afternoon by archivist and historian Kat Fox, who wrote her UCLA thesis on roadside shrines and spontaneous memorializations. Fox has previously studied temporary monuments to people lost from COVID, AIDS and 9/11. “Lynch doesn’t have a star on the Walk of Fame which is where these often crop up,” Fox said. “I’m very interested in the way L.A. chooses to memorialize and the way the community comes together in a place like Bob’s that has larger connections to the movie and TV industry,” she said. “It’s a cultural cornerstone and part of David Lynch lore.”

The landmark restaurant was a longtime favorite of the acclaimed director, who had a fondness for the lost world of 1950s Americana, and where he wrote and found inspiration. “I went there every day for seven years,” the director remarked after a film screening. “I would write on the napkins. It was like having a desk. You need paper and there’s a piece of paper and you write on it when you get ideas.”…

… Original drawings and paintings, poetry, and personal letters were mixed in with stuffed logs, real logs, donuts, Cheetos and keys to the hotel where special agent Dale Cooper stayed in Twin Peaks. “There’s half-drunk coffee and half-smoked cigarettes,” Fox said. “It’s like they’re sharing it with him.” An estimated 400 cigarettes, 45 cups of coffee, and dozens of donuts and pie slices were accessioned, documented and photographed before finding their way to the Dumpster….

Reflecting on what we’ve lost today.

— Schooley (@schooley.bsky.social) 2025-01-20T18:12:20.666Z

(11) DID DEFERENTIAL EPISTEMOLOGY LEAVE WITH THE ENTWIVES? [Item by Steven French.] In this Physics World essay, historian of physics and philosopher Robert P Crease argues that the best way to counter misinformation is to be even more melodramatic: “Why telling bigger stories is the only way to counter misinformation”.

If aliens came to Earth and tried to work out how we earthlings make sense of our world, they’d surely conclude that we take information and slot it into pre-existing stories – some true, some false, some bizarre. Ominously, these aliens would be correct. You don’t need to ask earthling philosophers, just look around….

…Humans gain a sense of what’s happening in several ways. Three of them, to use philosophical language, are deferential, civic and melodramatic epistemology.

In “deferential epistemology”, citizens habitually take the word of experts and institutions about things like the dangers of x picocuries and exposures of y millirems. In his 1624 book New Atlantis, the philosopher Francis Bacon famously crafted a fictional portrait of an island society where deferential epistemology rules and people instinctively trust the scientific infrastructure.

We may think this is how people ought to behave. But Bacon, who was also a politician, understood that deference to experts is not automatic and requires constantly curating the public face of the scientific infrastructure. Earthlings haven’t seen deferential epistemology in a while.

“Civic epistemology”, meanwhile, is how people acquire knowledge in the absence of that curation. Such people don’t necessarily reject experts but hear their voices alongside many others claiming to know best how to pursue our interests and values. Civic epistemology is when we negotiate daily life not by first consulting scientists but by pursuing our concerns with a mix of habit, trust, experience and friendly advice.

We sometimes don’t, in fact, take scientific advice when it collides with how we already behave; we may smoke or drink, for instance, despite warnings not to. Or we might seek guidance from non-scientists about things like the harms of radiation.

Finally, what I call “melodramatic epistemology” draws on the word “melodrama”, a genre of theatre involving extreme plots, obvious villains, emotional appeal, sensational language, and moral outrage (the 1939 film Gone with the Wind comes to mind)….

(12) VIDEO GAME BUSINESS. The Guardian asks “Can Assassin’s Creed Shadows save Ubisoft?”

It’s no secret that the video game industry is struggling. The last two years have seen more than 25,000 redundancies and more than 40 studio closures. Thanks to game development’s spiralling costs (blockbuster titles now cost hundreds of millions to make), overinvestment during the Covid-19 pandemic, and a series of failed bets to create the next money-printing “forever game”, the pressure for blockbuster games to succeed is now higher than ever.

It’s a predicament that feels especially pertinent for Ubisoft. Employing in the region of 20,000 people across 45 studios in 30 countries, its most recent big licensed games Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Star Wars Outlaws underperformed commercially. It has had two expensive, failed live-service experiments in the past year, Skull and Bones and X-Defiant. With Ubisoft share prices plummeting and investment partners circling like sharks, rarely have the fortunes of a massive games company relied so heavily on a single release. It has already been delayed multiple times, to ensure its quality.

Against this gloomy backdrop, I find myself roaming the glistening halls of Ubisoft Quebec for the world’s first hands-on of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. The company’s series of historical action games is back after a two-year break, and this time it takes us to feudal Japan. This has been the most requested setting by fans, according to creative director Jonathan Dumont, but ironically some of those purported fans have turned on Ubisoft over the course of this game’s development….

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Ersatz Culture, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, 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 Randall M.]

Pixel Scroll 11/20/24 The Scroll Is Good. The Pixel Is Evil

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(1) JOHN WISWELL COVER LAUNCH. DAW Books has shared the cover of Wearing the Lion, the second novel from Nebula Award-winning John Wiswell, which will forever change how you understand the man behind the myth of Heracles—and Hera, the goddess reluctantly bound to him.

The cover, illustrated by Tyler Miles Lockett and art directed by Debbie Holmes, depicts one of the most famous myths surrounding the Greek warrior, the slaying of the Nemean lion, except that in this version of events, Wiswell’s Heracles chooses to reject expectations and care for the lion instead.

Wiswell is the author of the 2024 success Someone You Can Build a Nest In — “a heartwarming (and sometimes heartrending) fantasy romance between a monster and the monster hunter who loves her.”

Wearing the Lion is scheduled for release in hardcover on June 17, 2025 in the US and June 19, 2025, in the UK. It is available now for pre-order.

(2) SIGN OF A TREND? Add Muse from the Orb to the list of those who are happy Orbital won the Booker Award: “I Told You People About ORBITAL”.

…Exulting over industry awards is a rare thing for me. Familiarity with the business side of publishing imbues you with a deep, abiding cynicism when you learn just how many awards are corporate exercises, popularity contests, reflections of limited demographics with bespoke priorities to signal, or literally just purchased by the house.

Nevertheless, I’m delighted that Orbital by Samantha Harvey won the 2024 Man Booker Prize. It’s well deserved. I was impressed by this book — sometimes you dip into a novel and think, So — they DO still write ‘em like that anymore.

Orbital’s win is also a sign of continued success for the nonofficial genre of prestige-literary-speculative-fiction, whose prevalence in mainstream shortlists and awards like the Booker is no longer a fluke but a pattern. (See also: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida [2022] and Prophet Song [2023]).…

Too late for Orbital to do it, but could a future book sweep the Hugo and the Booker Prize?

… Honestly, the biggest obstacle to a Hugo-Booker singularity would be the fans and demographics. The Hugo and Booker cater to very different groups of readers, with the Hugo and Worldcon crowd skewing very nerd/fandom and High Genre. (This year Dungeons and Dragons won Best Movie over Poor Things.) But at the same time, it seems that the SFF short fiction market is feeling increasingly literary and MFA-inflected, while literary fiction imprints seem to be giving a lot of deals to MFA grads who’ll write “fresh” literary takes on genre stuff like vampires. The amount of literary fiction editors/agents I’ve met who proudly announce they’re into “literary fiction with speculative elements” grows by the month. Are the conditions there? Is John the Baptist preparing the way in the wilderness?…

(3) SECOND-STAGE TAKEOFF. And the award gave Harvey’s book a sales boost: “Samantha Harvey’s Booker-winning Orbital tops UK bestseller list” reports the Guardian.

Samantha Harvey’s Booker-winning Orbital has rocketed to the top of the UK bestseller chart, becoming the first Booker novel to hit number one in the week of its win.

20,040 copies were sold in the UK last week across paperback and hardback editions, according to Nielsen BookData…

(4) UK EASTERCON 2027 BID. Since we last reported about the Glasgow bid for the 2027 Eastercon they’ve published the names of the bid committee. They’re still deciding on a venue.

  • Alan Fleming and David Bamford — co-chairs
  • Steve Cooper — treasurer
  • Kate Wood — secretary & timeline
  • Ila Khan — communications
  • Kirsty Wood — liaison

And we’re being assisted by Mark Meenan and Meg MacDonald in liaising with the Glasgow Convention Bureau in the search for a location.

(5) ADDING A WING TO THE HALL OF FAME. Strange at Ecbatan’s Rich Horton has some fun imagining what belongs in a hypothetical next volume of the SF Hall of Fame. As someone who has read widely, he has lots of good suggestions: “SF Hall of Fame 1989-2018” at Strange at Ecbatan.

…I have lists of “short stories” (up to approximately 10,000 words) for a rough analog to the SF HOF Volume I, and novellas (10,000 to 40,000 or so) as a rough analog to Volumes IIA and IIB. I purposely slanted the list heavily to SF and not fantasy — much as the first books were — but there is some fantasy on these lists. I stuck to the 1989-2018 timeframe. I chose 30 short stories and 22 novellas — just a bit more than the original books had. (So sue me!)…

(6) THE NEXT WAR AFTER THE WAR TO END ALL WARS. Jeremy Zenter reminds readers about “The Many Alt-Histories of World War II” at the SFWA Blog.

…Some writers have drawn from [Philip K.] Dick’s example to blend other science-fiction aesthetics with alt-history. Like Dick’s novel [The Man in the High Castle], Peter Tieyaras’s The United States of Japan involves a contraband story that imagines a world without fascism, in a US divided between Germany and Japan; only, instead of a book, a video game is the forbidden medium. The narrative priorities are different, though. This novel depicts a 1980s Japanese pop culture that rebels against the status quo, so we get more of a pulpy escapade that follows investigative tropes and uses oodles of cyberpunk technology. Tieyaras was clearly inspired by Dick, but his writing is also reminiscent of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). The result is a work that honors its predecessors by creating a new world in the long shadow of genre classics….

(7) BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALBERT EINSTEIN. Andrew Porter feels yesterday’s Scroll unfairly highlighted only one lot in Christie’s “Science Fiction and Fantasy” auction, running from November 28-December 12. So he sent me this search link. It returns 49 items and not only art. There’s also two rocks from Mars (they came to the Earth on the rebound). And the head of a robot so famous Christie’s thinks it will sell for at least £100,000.

Einstein by Hanson
Robotic head, with 28 servo motors for face movements and 3 servo motors for neck movements, linked at various points with Teflon-coated nylon strings, with Hanson ‘Flubber’ covering
16in. (40.5cm.) high
created in 2005

The Einstein by Hanson robotic head, developed by Hanson Robotics in 2005: a landmark achievement in robotics and artificial intelligence.

This innovative creation blends advanced mechanics with a distinctly human-like visage modelled after the renowned physicist Albert Einstein. His likeness was constructed using Frubber, a flexible, skin-like material developed by Hanson Robotics, while various motors inside the head made it capable of performing a range of facial expressions. Indeed, with over thirty-five actuators in the head alone, the robot could mimic human facial movements with remarkable accuracy, including nuanced expressions around the eyes and mouth. The human-like facial expressiveness made Einstein by Hanson one of the first robots to evoke empathy and a sense of personality, going beyond mere mechanical functionality. This was both a hand-sculpted work of art and a work of cutting edge technological innovation, resulting in numerous patents, awards, and scientific papers on the subject of AI mechanisms for synthetic facial expressions and human-robot interactions…..

(8) CLAP A STOPPER OVER IT. “Ready to sing along at ‘Wicked’? It’s not happening in AMC movie theaters” says Yahoo! AMC isn’t telling customers,“Shut yer festering gob!” They’re saying this:

…Singing is on the list of no-nos for guests in the theater, according to an advisory being shown ahead of Friday’s release of Part 1 of the expected blockbuster.

“At AMC Theatres, silence is golden,” says the 30-second advisory, which features scenes from the movie. “No talking. No texting. No singing. No wailing. No flirting. And absolutely no name-calling. Enjoy the magic of movies.”

(9) IT’S A THEORY. [Item by Steven French.] How L. Frank Baum was influenced by his feminist (and Theosophical) mother-in-law: “The Feminist Who Inspired the Witches of Oz” in Smithsonian Magazine.

The backstories of the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good are the subject of the upcoming movie Wicked, based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel and Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz’s 2003 stage musical. The witch, who is unnamed in The Wizard of Oz, has a name in Wicked: Elphaba, an homage to the initials of L. Frank Baum. (His first name, which he rarely used, was Lyman.) But the real-life backstory of the witches of Oz is just as fascinating. It involves a hidden hero of the 19th-century women’s rights movement and the most powerful woman in Baum’s life: his mother-in-law, Matilda Electa Joslyn Gage. 

It was likely at Gage’s urging that Baum began submitting his poems and stories to magazines. Gage even suggested putting a cyclone in a children’s story. But she was a notable figure in her own right. As one of the three principal leaders of the women’s rights movement, along with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Gage was known for her radical views and confrontational approach. At the Statue of Liberty’s unveiling in 1886, she showed up on a cattle barge with a megaphone, shouting that it was “a gigantic lie, a travesty and a mockery” to portray liberty as a woman when actual American women had so few rights.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Anniversary: Back to the Future II (1989)

By Paul Weimer: Back to the Future, the original, was a revelation for me. Even if I am not musically inclined (for a movie that is often all about the music), the movie worked for me on a lot of levels. I was in an age and a place and a time where I could see movies in a theater, and then read about them in magazines like Starlog, anticipating and wondering what was going to happen…and then discuss them afterwards. I was still young and shy and didn’t send any letters to such magazines, but I read them all avidly.

And then came the movie itself. I’d read a bunch of time travel SF by now, and so I was delighted to see Back to the Future II use time travel in a way the first had not. The first movie used it as a device to move Marty to the past and comment on culture in the 1950’s and the present of the 1980s. Back to the Future II actually used time travel in a way that few genre movies would contemplate. Most genre movies tend toward scenarios where the time travel proves to have happened all along. History is never changed and can’t be changed. 

Back to the Future II changed all that, when 2015 Biff gives 1955 Biff the Almanac, and utterly changes his future.  The vision of the Biff Tannen Wins timeline is dark, horrendous and compelling. It makes Potterville from It’s a Wonderful Life look like a theme park in comparison. Back to the Future II is a “set things right where things went wrong”, but it was actual malice aforethought, not chance or circumstance, that Marty has to fix. This leads to a delightful overlapping of events in 1955 as Marty has to desperately fix the timeline…but not screw up his own future in the process. It’s a wonderfully done sequence of events, and we get a couple of extra scenes that are implied in the first movie, but never seen. It’s an attention to detail in a time travel change history movie that few have attempted, much less this well. 

It occurs to me, though, that we’ve wound up in the Biff Tannen Wins timeline after all. Sobering, but undeniable in the end. And no time machine to save us.

It also occurs to me that this movie suffers from a lack of strong female characters. After Jennifer being brought along at the end of Back to the Future II, she gets knocked out first thing by Doc in Back to the Future II, in a whiplash that really doesn’t work well. The movie is even more of a young man’s adventure than the first, but with more action adventure and less sexual innuendo than the first. 

But back to the plot. After seeing the movie came the aftershocks of the movie. After all, Back to the Future II lives on a cliffhanger. Doc is trapped in the past, and is doomed to die. Marty needs the help of the 1955 Doc Brown…but not to go home, but to go to the past to save him.  It’s a lovely tangle of time paradoxes and foreshadowing and destiny that the second movie revelled in, and so the magazine’s endless discussions and theories on how time travel really worked, or should, gave Back to the Future II an afterlife for me after seeing it for the first time. Of course we take such things for granted, now, but Back to the Future II was one of my first real engagements with a movie’s afterlife. (I have a story about Star Trek II in the same vein, but we’ll save that for another day).

(11) EDITOR’S ENDNOTE. Incidentally, Back to the Future The Musical is doing a North American tour. It’s in LA for the rest of the month before moving on.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

(13) DENIS VILLENEUVE Q&A. “Director Denis Villeneuve On Shooting ‘Dune: Part Two’ In The Desert” at Deadline. “More faithful to Frank Herbert than to the book.”

DEADLINE: It’s also Zendaya’s film. Her Chani provides the moral compass and makes the romance feel real.

VILLENEUVE: Paul is the main character, but Chani is our moral compass. It’s a big difference. That’s where the movie differentiates itself from the book. In the book, she’s a believer, she’s in Paul’s shadow, but I decided to transform our character in order to bring this idea that the movie will be a cautionary tale and not a celebration of his ascension. When the first book was released, Frank Herbert said he was disappointed by the way the book was perceived by some readers who saw in Paul a hero, and saw the book as a celebration of Paul. Herbert wanted to do the opposite. He wanted to do a cautionary tale, a warning against the embrace of charismatic figures. In order to correct this perception, he wrote a second book called Dune Messiah, that made sure that his initial intentions will be more clear. And me knowing this, I made this adaptation having this knowledge. I tried my best to be, let’s say, more faithful to Frank Herbert than to the book…

(14) JUMP ONTO GALACTIC JOURNEY. Do you have any idea what riches are in store for fans at Galactic Journey? Thread starts here. Here are the first two posts.

1) Going OOC for a mo.What is Galactic Journey? It is so staggeringly big, so comprehensive, that I suspect even our fans don't know all of its facets. We review every SFF story that comes out, but did you know we’re also a TV station? A radio broadcaster? A LARP?Strap in—we're taking a ride:

— Galactic Journey (@galacticjourney.bsky.social) 2024-11-20T18:22:44.024Z

2) At its heart, Galactic Journey is a blog—or to use a more period term, a ‘fanzine’—written as if its authors are fans living exactly 55 years ago. We move forward, day by day, in exact parallel with modernity. It's currently 1969; next year will be 1970.

— Galactic Journey (@galacticjourney.bsky.social) 2024-11-20T18:22:44.025Z

(15) THEY’RE BAD GUYS FOR CHARITY. amNY encourages us to “Meet the Star Wars villains making a positive impact in New York City”.

In George Lucas’s Star Wars universe, the evil Galactic Empire’s iconic Stormtrooper army isn’t exactly known for doing good deeds. But, in a galaxy not so far, far away – New York City, Long Island and the Hudson Valley, to be exact – the white-armored Troopers are a much more welcome sight.

The Empire City Garrison, founded in 1999, is one of more than 80 chapters of the 501st Legion organizations worldwide. The fan-founded groups began as a means for costumes to showcase their hyperrealistic Stormtrooper replica armor, but soon expanded to include promoting broader interest in Star Wars and volunteerism. 

“We’ve raised money on behalf of the Cancer Society, the Autism Society and organizations in the Hudson Valley area. We try to rotate it around,” Chris Feehan, Empire City Garrison commanding officer, said. “If it’s a very small event, we might only have one [trooper]. It only takes one to make a difference and impact whatever that organization is.”

“They’re not selling anything; they include their own costs to be here and take time off of their lives to dress up and do the things,” said Benjamin Kline, Tenacious Toy CEO, who collaborated with the Empire Garrison at New York Comic-Con by giving a customized set of Star Wars stickers. “They’re entertaining while raising money. I think that’s a really good way to be.”

Among the 130 events they participate in a year, New York Comic-Con at Javits Center is one of the most significant. This year, they raised $9,000 in donations, primarily driven by photo opportunities….

(16) TRASH OBLITERATION. “Why can’t we just launch all of Earth’s garbage into the sun?” asks Popular Science. (Didn’t Harry Harrison’s Bill, the Galactic Hero show why this kind of thing is a bad idea in the long run?)

After seeing Elon Musk send thousands upon thousands of satellites into low-Earth orbit, it’s only natural to wonder, why can’t we launch all our junk into space, too? Or even straight into the sun? (You asked. We answered.)

Aside from the moral quandaries raised by such poor stewardship of our already disheveled solar system, Earthlings probably haven’t made a habit of beaming literal garbage into space yet because we simply can’t afford to. 

“It’s not cost-feasible at all. You require a lot of thrust and a lot of fuel to do that,” explained John L. Crassidis—a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo—in a call with Popular Science. Part of the challenge is that our junk can’t go just anywhere, although it certainly does so here on Earth; microplastics are literally everywhere and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is around twice the size of Texas…. 

(17) PITCHING MORE RINGS. Ryan George takes us inside the “The Rings of Power (Season 2) Pitch Meeting”.

(18) THE RAT RACE. Steve Cutts’ 2017 cartoon “Happiness” is “The story of a rodent’s unrelenting quest for happiness and fulfillment.”

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

Pixel Scroll 9/23/24 Slartibartleby, The Pixeler

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14

(1) RETRO HUGOS IN THE REAR VIEW MIRROR? “’The Conclusion of the Retro Hugo Era’ – A Glasgow 2024 panel and my thoughts” at A Deep Look by Dave Hook.

The Short: I moderated a panel at Glasgow 2024, A Worldcon for our Futures, titled “The Conclusion of the Retro Hugo Era” on Saturday evening, August 10, 2024. We had a good discussion of the Retro Hugo Awards, warts and all. The title turned out to be prescient; the next day, the WSFS Business Meeting voted in favor of Constitutional Amendment F.19 (No More Retros), which will be up for ratification at Seattle 2025, Building Yesterday’s Futures–For Everyone. More thoughts below.

The Long: I was selected to moderate a panel at Glasgow 2024, A Worldcon for our Futures, titled “The Conclusion of the Retro Hugo Era” on Saturday evening, August 10.

I had applied to be on the panel because I love the Retro Hugo Awards and have loved doing the reading and voting for them, even though I came to have some serious reservations.

I had voted for the the 1944 (43) Retro Hugos in 2019, and the 1945 (44) Retro Hugos in 2020. Paul Fraser at www.sfmagazines.com was especially helpful in gathering and sharing resources that I used for these. I served on several panels for the 1946 Project (and several that were not) at Chicon 8 Worldcon in 2022 that focused on works that could have been nominated if there had been a 1947 (46) Retro Hugo held that year.

Former Hugo finalist Trish E. Matson, Fan Guest of Honor Mark Plummer, Perriane Lurie and Hugo Award winner Cora Buhlert joined me on this panel….

(2) COLLISION COURSE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] No appeal has yet been made by the Internet Archive to the Supreme Court in their copyright case with Hachette, et al. But if they do appeal, the case could see a fascinating intersection with one of the hottest topics in American politics—to wit, The Supremes v. Ethics. “How A Copyright Case Is Shining A Spotlight On SCOTUS Ethics Issues” at Huffpost.

Six out of the high court’s nine justices have published books with the publishers involved in the case. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson have all published books or signed book deals with Penguin Random House. HarperCollins has published books by justices Clarence Thomas and Gorsuch. And Justice Brett Kavanaugh is signed to a book deal with Hachette. (None of the publishers responded to requests for comment.)

The case involves a digital lending library operated by the nonprofit Internet Archive that it expanded during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The publishers challenged the archive’s practice of copying and lending out digital copies of library books with no limit, through what the archive calls its National Emergency Library, as a violation of copyright that threatens authors’ earnings. A district court and the appeals court both ruled in favor of the publishers, finding that the archive’s digital lending practices violated copyright law.

The Internet Archive has not appealed to the Supreme Court yet. A spokesperson for the Internet Archive told HuffPost the nonprofit is still reviewing the appeals court decision. But if the case were to reach the high court, it would raise serious questions about the self-enforcement of conflict of interest rules by the individual justices at a time when the court has been embroiled in ethics controversies, particularly around Thomas’ receipt of gifts from friends and wealthy conservative benefactors….

(3) BOOK BANNING ACCELERATES. The New York Times studies how “New State Laws Are Fueling a Surge in Book Bans”.

States and local governments are banning books at rates far higher than before the pandemic, according to preliminary data released by two advocacy groups on Monday.

Books have been challenged and removed from schools and libraries for decades, but around 2021, these instances began to skyrocket, fanned by a network of conservative groups and the spread on social media of lists of titles some considered objectionable.

Free speech advocates who track this issue say that in the past year, newly implemented state legislation has been a significant driver of challenges.

PEN America, a free speech group that gathers information on banning from school board meetings, school districts, local media reports and other sources, said that over 10,000 books were removed, at least temporarily, from public schools in the 2023-24 school year. That’s almost three times as many removals as during the school year before.

About 8,000 of those bans came just from Florida and Iowa, where newly implemented state laws led to large numbers of books being removed from the shelves while they were assessed.

Lawmakers and those who describe themselves as parental rights advocates favor restricting access to certain books because they don’t believe children should stumble upon sensitive topics while alone in the library, or without guidance from their parents. Many think that some books that have traditionally been embraced in school libraries are inappropriate for minors, including, for example, “The Bluest Eye,” by Toni Morrison, which includes references to rape and incest.

The law in Iowa, which went into effect in 2023, prohibits any material that depicts sexual acts from all K-12 schools, with the exception of religious texts. It also limits instruction about gender and sexual orientation until seventh grade. In Florida, a law that took effect before the 2023-24 school year said that any book challenged for “sexual conduct” must be removed while it is reviewed….

(4) THE MINISTRY OF TIME. Coincidentally I just finished reading this novel yesterday, and agree it deserves high praise. “Review: The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley” by Rich Horton at Strange at Ecbatan. Beware spoilers aplenty, however.

…If at first it reads like a convenient use of the time travel device to tell a love story, and a story about the experience of expatriates (either in time or space), with some cli fi mixed in, by the end it’s all of those things plus a book that gloriously and whole-hearted buys into the strangeness and paradoxes of time travel. There is a wild twist at the end, which I only guessed half of in advance. The love story is beautifully handled. The depiction of near future life is fraught and believable. The examination of the expat experience, the depiction of the horrors of the Franklin Expedition, and the intricate plot are very well done….

(5) DIALING BACK. Colleen Doran reveals some personal issues here – “In Which the Artist Chronicles Life With OCD: The Cognitive Behavioral Therapy That is My Art” at Colleen Doran’s Funny Business — ultimately to explain why she now spends little time looking at social media.

I suppose it’s no surprise for me to admit right here in print I’ve had a lifelong problem with OCD. Not as in, “I’m a little OCD because I like a well organized pantry,” but the kind of OCD that sees you spending hours a day doing something repetitively and it kind of ruins your life in small bites of hell.

I posted a snippet of this previously private essay here a short time ago, but here’s the whole lightly edited enchilada from May 2020.

OCD morphs. When I was a kid, it was one set of habits, then it became another set of habits, which I’m not going to belabor, because they’re all weird and embarrassing. 

Early on I knew nothing about what was happening because who had ever heard of it, and no internet. I assumed it was a willpower issue, and  trained myself to turn my nervous energy into something productive, like channeling that prickly power into drawing comics.

I had no idea that this is a foundation of cognitive behavioral therapy, so go me….

(6) GRRM Q&A. Daniel Roman interviewed GRRM while they were both in Glasgow for the Worldcon. “The George R.R. Martin interview: On fandom, writing, and his work beyond Westeros” at Winter Is Coming. Roman obligingly avoided areas that would be de rigeur for a journalist: “There were a few topics we agreed ahead of time to steer clear of, like Martin’s long-awaited sixth Song of Ice and Fire novel The Winds of Winter, or the HBO shows Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon.”

WiC: Yeah, I went to Discon in Washington D.C. in 2021. That’s the only other one I’ve been to so far.

GRRM: Well, they’re very big these days and they have multi-tracks of programming. Those early Worldcons had one track of programming, and they had panels. And there was a room where a panel was, the panel would have four or five people on it, but they certainly weren’t inviting guys like me who had published four stories, you know? Every panel was all big names. So I would go to a panel, it’d be Isaac Asimov, and talking to Frederick Pohl, and talking to Harlan Ellison, and you know, then there would be another panel…but no one was asking me to be on a panel yet. You had to pay your dues in those days, and little by little, I did pay my dues. I actually [chuckles], as I said, I won the Hugo in ’75…it still didn’t get me on any panels. The first time I was put on a panel was ’77. But they were great opportunities to see friends, to make professional contacts, and once I started getting on panels and doing autographings, to promote myself.

(7) IS THIS HEAVEN? NO, IT’S IOWA. CrimeReads looks back to the Seventies and the challenge of “Bringing Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution to the Big Screen”. Novelist Meyer also wrote the screenplay.

…Meyer has a special talent as an adaptor of other people’s work, but quickly learned that it isn’t as easy when the material you are adapting is your own. “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution was relatively early in my career,” he observes, “and it was me working with my own material. I’ve listened to many authors talking about adapting their own material, and they have a great deal of difficulty in being ruthless. It happens with directors too. You can have a shot you really love, and it was very hard to get . . . it’s a beautiful shot. But if you discover it doesn’t belong in the movie, you have to accept that it has to go.”

Meyer’s early inclination to wordiness wasn’t because he began his career as a novelist, but instead is due to his time in college at the University of Iowa. “I was a theater major, and so I started out with a sort of stage orientation. That means dialogue. As a beginning screenwriter, I started out writing tons of dialogue because I thought it was like a play. But in screenwriting imagery dominates dialogue, and if it’s too talky it doesn’t feel cinematic. You have to be ruthless. I have learned since that time to write very, very spare stuff . . . descriptions, dialogue, everything. It is just the bare minimum of what you need. Certainly with my own stuff, I never had the feeling that it was so wonderful that it was incapable of improvement.”…

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Mike Glyer.]

Born September 23, 1971 – Rebecca Roanhorse, 53. Entering the field with a roar, Rebecca Roanhorse’s first published sff story “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian ExperienceTM” (Apex Aug 2017) won both the Hugo and Nebula, and helped her win the Astounding Award for best new writer in 2018.

Rebecca Roanhorse

She has written two novels in the Star Wars universe, Resistance Reborn (2019) and Dark Vengeance (2020). However, she’s best known for being what Science Fiction Encyclopedia’s John Clute describes as “an advocate of the concept of Indigenous Futurism”, exemplified by her novels Trail of Lightning and Black Sun (both Hugo and Nebula finalists; the latter an Ignyte winner), and Storm of Locusts, and her short story “A Brief Lesson in Native American Astronomy” (also an Ignyte-winner).  

Black Sun and Fevered Star are part of the Between Earth and Sky series, joined this summer by a third book, Mirrored Heavens.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Bizarro lists some nearly supers.
  • Carpe Diem is having a bad day.
  • Breaking Cat News for September 22 was missing on a few sites. And now we know why – it crossed several genres!
  • Wizard of Id complains about pet people.
  • Tom Gauld overhears a wistful voice.

(10) ‘BOLTS TRAILER. Is this news to us? It came out in May. “’Thunderbolts’ Trailer: Marvel Recruits Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan” in Variety.

…In the upcoming superhero pic, starring “Captain America” mainstay Sebastian Stan and “Black Widow” cast members Florence Pugh and David Harbour, reformed Marvel villains are forced to team up to conduct covert operations on behalf of the U.S. government.

“Everyone here has done bad things,” Pugh says in the trailer, brought face to face with the rest of the team. “Shadow ops, robbing government labs, contract kills. … Someone wants us gone.”…

(11) CASH THAT GLOWS IN THE DARK. The Royal Canadian Mint has struck a 1 oz. Pure Silver Glow-in-the-Dark Coin commemorating “Canada’s Unexplained Phenomena: The Langenburg Event”.

A 50-year-old story of UFOs at a farm near Langenburg, Sask. — a town 220 kilometres east of Regina — is being celebrated by Canada Post and the Canadian Royal Mint with a new coin.

The story of the UFOs and the five crop circles from 1974 have prompted Canada Post and the Royal Canadian Mint to issue a coin that commemorates the event. “The Langenburg Event” coin is the seventh in the Canada’s Unexplained Phenomena series.

The coin is one ounce of pure silver, glows in the dark, and can be purchased online for C$140.

Coin #7 brings you a close encounter of the second kind.

Some crop circles are harder to dismiss… and that’s what makes Saskatchewan’s most famous UFO/UAP incident so intriguing! Viewed from the witness’s perspective, the Langenburg Event is the seventh unusual encounter re-told as part of our popular Canada’s Unexplained Phenomena series of coins.

On the morning of September 1ˢᵗ, 1974, a farmer was swathing his fields near the town of Langenburg, Saskatchewan, when he noticed five highly polished, steel-like objects at the edge of a slough. Upon closer look, he noticed these unusual saucer-shaped objects were rotating rapidly and hovering just above the ground. He continued to observe them until they suddenly rose up, emitting a strange vapour as they silently disappeared into the sky. But the objects hadn’t vanished without a trace; according to the RCMP incident report, they left behind “five different distinct circles, caused by something exerting what had to be heavy air or exhaust pressure over the highgrass,” which was curious enough to warrant serious attention both locally and worldwide.  

… A blacklight flashlight (included) activates the glowing colour effect on your coin’s reverse, which presents a view of the five mysterious objects described by the eyewitness. When the blacklight paint technology is activated, these objects are seen emitting an eerie glow as they fly away, leaving radioactive circular patterns in the field below.

An image of King Charles in profile is on the back, which if you think of it as a disembodied head probably helps the theme along.

(12) SOUND TRACK FOR THE SPANISH DRACULA. The LA Opera invites audiences to relive Hollywood’s Golden Age with a rediscovered classic film at the historic United Theater: “LA Opera Spanish Dracula with Live Orchestra”. Daily performances October 25-27.

While Bela Lugosi was vamping it up in front of the cameras by day, a night crew shot an alternate version of Dracula in Spanish — same sets, same story, new cast. This second incarnation of the classic, starring  Carlos Villarías, was largely forgotten until a recent renaissance, and many now hail it as the superior version.

See it on the big screen (with English subtitles) as Resident Conductor Lina González-Granados leads the LA Opera Orchestra in a live performance of a new LAO-commissioned score by Academy Award-winning composer Gustavo Santaolalla (The Last of Us, Brokeback Mountain), who’ll also star as a featured performer.

(13) YUCKTASTIC. Beware! The Disgusting Food Museum tries to live up to its name!

Food is so much more than sustenance. Curious foods from exotic cultures have always fascinated us. Unfamiliar foods can be delicious, or they can be more of an acquired taste. While cultural differences often separate us and create boundaries, food can also connect us. Sharing a meal is the best way to turn strangers into friends.

The evolutionary function of disgust is to help us avoid disease and unsafe food. Disgust is one of the six fundamental human emotions. While the emotion is universal, the foods that we find disgusting are not. What is delicious to one person can be revolting to another. Disgusting Food Museum invites visitors to explore the world of food and challenge their notions of what is and what isn’t edible. Could changing our ideas of disgust help us embrace the environmentally sustainable foods of the future?

The exhibit has 80 of the world’s most disgusting foods. Adventurous visitors will appreciate the opportunity to smell and taste some of these notorious foods. Do you dare smell the world’s stinkiest cheese? Or taste sweets made with metal cleansing chemicals?…

For example, there are these “Disgusting Christmas Foods”. Here’s one of the tamer examples on the list.

Christmas Tinner

… a more modern type of craziness – the video game retailer GAME in the UK sells Christmas Tinner every year, a full Christmas dinner in a can. They started selling them in 2013 and has now added a vegan and a vegetarian option.

The Christmas Tinner layer list in full:

Layer one – Scrambled egg and bacon
Layer two – Two mince pies
Layer three – Turkey and potatoes
Layer four – Gravy
Layer five – Bread sauce
Layer six – Cranberry sauce
Layer seven – Brussel sprouts with stuffing – or broccoli with stuffing
Layer eight – Roast carrots and parsnips
Layer nine – Christmas pudding

The tin will run you £2, but sadly it’s currently out of stock.

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I remember the Larry Niven ‘Known Space’ story “Neutron Star” in which a spaceship with an impervious hull came too close to a neutron star and nobody knew why the crew inside were smeared across the inner hull…

And then there was the Arthur Clarke mini-short in a similar vein, “Neutron Tide” in which a battle cruiser did something similar and all that was left was a ‘star mangled spanner’.

What larks.

But what of the real thing?

Matt O’Dowd over at  PBS Space Time looks at a black hole’s tidal properties.   

If you track the motion of individual stars in the ultra-dense star cluster at the very center of the Milky Way you’ll see that they swing in sharp orbits around some vast but invisible mass—that’s the Sagittarius A* supermassive black hole. These are perilous orbits, and sometimes a star wanders just a little too close to that lurking monster, leading to its utter destruction in the spectacular phenomenon known as a tidal disruption event. We’ve never seen a TDE in the Milky Way, but we’ve seen them in distant galaxies—and we now know how to spot stellar destructions so extreme that they reveal properties of the black hole itself.

Over a quarter million views since Friday.

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

Pixel Scroll 8/25/24 Pixel ScrollRight Of The Mounties

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(1) LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION AWARD. The idea of the Location Managers Guild Award is truly Hollywood insider stuff. It’s “meant to spotlight outstanding filming locations that sent the tone and enhance the narrative for international features, television and commercials.” There are genre winners, of course. “Location Managers Guild Awards 2024” at Deadline.

OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A PERIOD TELEVISION SERIES
Fallout
Paul Kramer, Chris Arena, Mandi Dillin / LMGI, David Park / LMGI, Paul van der Ploeg

OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A CONTEMPORARY TELEVISION SERIES
Fargo Season 5
Mohammad Qazzaz / LMGI, Luke Antosz / LMGI

OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A TV SERIAL PROGRAM, ANTHOLOGY, MOW OR LIMITED SERIES
Ripley
Robin Melville / LMGI, Giuseppe Nardi / LMGI, Fabio Ferrante, Shane Haden

OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A PERIOD FEATURE FILM
Oppenheimer
Justin Duncan /LMGI, Dennis Muscari, Patty Carey-Perazzo, T.C. Townsen

OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A CONTEMPORARY FEATURE FILM
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning – Part 1
David Campbell-Bell, Enrico Latella / LMGI, Jonas Fylling Christiansen, Niall O’Shea, Ben Firminger

OUTSTANDING FILM COMMISSION
Film in Iceland
True Detective: Night Country

OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A COMMERCIAL
Toyota: Present from the Past
Mark Freid / LMGI, Paul Riordan / LMGI

(2) LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS BOOKS. Charlie Jane Anders names “10 Literary Books That Made Me a Better Science Fiction Writer” at Happy Dancing.

… As I wrote a while back, the appearance of literary merit means people will give your work more of a chance in spite of weird experiments, but it also means the reader might pay a bit more attention to the nuts and bolts of the story (at least sometimes.) In a good literary story, this relationship with the ideal reader leads to more attention to detail: the sentence-level prose, but also the small details of people’s lives and inner states….

6) Possession by A.S. Byatt

I re-read this book just a few months ago, because my upcoming novel Lessons in Magic and Disaster has a similar literary detective story at its heart. And when I think about the current vogue for Dark Academia stories, Possession feels like a foundational text to me. The story of two young scholars who stumble upon a long lost letter that hints at a secret affair between two Victorian poets, Possession fairly burns with the joy of discovery and textual analysis. That’s the thing that I really discovered when I re-read this book: the poetry of Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte is vitally important to the story and to their love affair, and the “clues” in the story are as much about the beauty of their writing and metaphors as any love letters. I’ll probably be writing more about Possession as the release date of Lessons in Magic and Disaster grows closer, so stay tuned….

(3) CAN THE PRICE BE RIGHT? “AMC to release new Batman popcorn bucket” – Batman News has details.

…AMC Theaters will have a Bat-Signal popcorn bucket available on Aug. 28 that will sell for $34.99. A new collectible cup of the Batmobile will also be available for $11.99, but a combo can be purchased for $44.99….

(4) ARMED LIBRARIAN. “Hell hath no fury like a librarian scorned in the book banning wars” – behind a paywall at the LA Times.

A MANDA JONES is a Louisiana middle-school librarian who sleeps with a shotgun under her bed and carries a pistol when she travels the back roads.

Threats against her began two years ago after she spoke out against censorship and was drawn into the culture wars over book banning. She was condemned as a pedophile and a groomer and accused of “advocating teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds.” The Christian right targeted her, and she found herself in the news warning that conservatives in her state and across much of the country were endangering libraries and intellectual freedom.

“I never expected any of this,” said Jones, who lives in Livingston Parish. “It’s a huge weight to feel all that attention. I’m just a school librarian from a two red-light town.”

Jones’ cautionary and disquieting testament to the nation’s divisiveness is told in her new memoir, “That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America,” a blunt, angry, searching and redeeming story about a woman engulfed by forces and designs she never imagined. It is a glimpse into a family and a small town that reads like a chapter out of “The Scarlet Letter” or “The Crucible,” narratives whose themes of fear, superstition, rage and religion are again permeating the nation’s political moment, including Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s recent comments that “Democrats want to put sexually explicit books in toddlers’ libraries.”…

(5) ANALYSIS OF A CONVOLUTED PUBLISHING HISTORY. Rich Horton decides it’s time for another look at a classic: “Review: Norstrilia, by Cordwainer Smith” at Strange at Ecbatan.

… I don’t really want to say more about the plot. There is at the same time a lot going on, but in an odd way not. Some of it seems a bit arbitrary, some doesn’t quite convince, and some is fascinating. But still at all pretty much works. The novel isn’t at a level with Smith’s greatest works, but parts of it are. At time it reaches the incantatory heights Smith could achieve, and it hints throughout at a really important story — the story of the Underpeople (which is also central to “The Ballad of Lost C’Mell”, and which perhaps is ultimately key to the entire Instrumentality future history.)….

(6) HOWARD WALDROP REMEMBRANCE EVENT. George R.R. Martin tells readers about the video portion of a memorial for Howard Waldrop, held June 29, at Not a Blog.

…I was not able to be there in person (we were in London at the time) but there was no way I could not be a part of a remembrance for H’ard, so I taped some remarks and sent them to Robert Taylor, who was organizing the event.   I went on rather a long time, as it happens, but Howard and I had a long history and I am a wordy bastard in any case, as many of you know.  My tape ended up coming in around 45 minutes long, and could easily have gone three hours if I’d just kept talking.  There are so many stories to tell.

That was too long for the Austin memorial, so Robert and his team kindly cut and trimmed it for the event.   I do have the longer version and will likely post it here… probably later rather than sooner.   For now, we have this; not only my video, but all the other speeches and stories as well, from some of Howard’s pals.   (Some, not all.  Howard had friends all over the world.

Parts of this may bring a tear to your eye.   Other bits will make you laugh.   Laughter was one of Howard’s gifts….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

August 25, 1955 – Simon R. Green, 69. I’ve had email conversations with our Birthday honoree, Simon R. Green. He’s a fascinating, friendly person. 

I first read the Deathstalker series which, like everything he writes, is part of the same multiverse.  Owen Deathstalker, reluctant heir to the ancient Deathstalker name and a very minor historian, will come to lead a rebellion against the powerful and corrupt empire ruled by The Iron Bitch. Every SF trope is here — crashed alien starships, rogue computer hackers, clones and espers to name but a few. Yes, it’s space opera but not to be taken too seriously. 

Simon R. Green

Moving sideways for a movement, he did a stellar job with his Forest Kingdom fantasy series which plays it more straight I think save SLIGHT SPOILER such touches as a butterfly collecting dragon END SLIGHT SPOILER. The connected Hawk and Fisher series of two Guardsman in Haven, a corrupt seaport, solving magical mysteries is wonderful.

Remember how I said everything was in the same multiverse? Hawk and Fisher show up in Strangefellows, just having a drink. Strangefellows being the bar in Nightside, the pocket universe beneath London where John Taylor is the only detective, as told in the Nightside series. Great setting, fascinating characters, weird stories. 

The Secret History series involved the Droods, an ancient family that watches over the world and protects it from mostly supernatural and magical threats. They have a magical armor they, well, protects them from everything. Great series. This and the Nightside series were wrapped in one novel, Night Fall. 

I should note that all of the must be read from the beginning. There is significant plot development as each series moved along. Characters change, situations develop. 

The Ghostfinders of the Carnacki Institute, an ancient and very secretive government department , exist to deal with ghosts, and live by the motto “We don’t take any shit from the Hereafter”. The plots here are thinner than in his other series but I find the character interesting enough to like the series. 

Ishmael Jones is someone who cannot afford to be noticed, someone who lives under the radar. Why so? Because it’s been sixty years since the alien starship made him human and he hasn’t aged at all. These are really fun because Ishmael Jones simultaneously believes he’s human and alien, and views everything that way. Stories are quite good. 

A freestanding novel of note is Drinking Midnight Wine about a small English town (actually where he was born) where good in all sorts of magical forms pushed back against evil in yet more magical forms. There’s an Angel, but trust me when I say that you wouldn’t want to meet her.

He’s too prolific to cover everything here and I noticed I skipped the excellent Giden Sable series. Oh well.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) NOW WITH EXTRA ADDED EVIL. “’Rings of Power’ Returns, With More Creatures and More Evil”. Link bypasses New York Times paywall.

… In April last year, the production for Season 2 sprawled across several sites around Windsor, England. Shuttle cars sped hundreds of crew members and craft makers between vast studios and forests. For about eight months, nearly 90 cast members spent hours in hair and makeup to be transformed into elves, dwarves, orcs and other Middle-earth dwellers.

A building housed racks of costumes and specially molded or 3-D-printed trinkets and armor. Outdoor sets the size of playgrounds plunged the actors into a court in Númenor or the trenches of an orc camp. And nearby, machinery waited in a muddy field to film a gritty battle scene inspired by films like “Saving Private Ryan.”

“I kept saying constantly on set: more blood, more dust, more mud, more everything,” Charlotte Brandstrom, who directed four of the upcoming season’s episodes, said in an interview. (Some scenes set in Rhûn were also filmed in the Canary Islands.)

This, after all, might be the most expensive series in TV history, a blockbuster prequel that reportedly cost Amazon $715 million for its first season, and premieres the first three episodes of its second season on Thursday…

(10) BITE ON. [Item by Steven French.] Do we need another zombie series? If it has Sue Johnston biting someone’s nose off, then yes please! “‘Sue Johnston’s first day on set, she was biting someone’s nose off’: Ben Wheatley on his zombie drama Generation Z” in the Guardian.

… The old eat the young. That is the back-of-a-beermat pitch for new Channel 4 drama Generation Z. And because the Z stands for zombie, the eating is meant literally. “I loved the idea of a horror story about societal breakdown, told from the perspective of different generations,” says its writer-director Ben Wheatley. “Once I started writing it, I couldn’t stop.”

The film-maker’s first original series for TV begins with an army convoy crashing outside a care home. The subsequent chemical leak turns the residents into marauding monsters who attack local youngsters. “It’s a bit of a Brexit metaphor,” admits Wheatley. “But it’s by no means binary. We discuss it from each generation’s viewpoint, exploring the notion that boomers have ruined the lives of the young. Because it’s a genre piece, that’s basically by biting their hands and eating their brains.”…

(11) BE ON THE LOOKOUT. Dan Monroe investigates “Whatever Happened to The LAST STARFIGHTER?” at Movies, Music & Monsters.

(12) ZERO FAMILY VALUES. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] From Netflix Anime. Very violent. Very bloody. Very NSFW. Gizmodo warns: “Terminator Zero’s New Trailer Shows the Bloody War to Come”.

…While writing Zero, Mattson keyed in on three core Terminator pillars: killer robots, “fear and dread around nuclear holocaust,” and family-centric stories. If the first two films are respectively about “a man and woman making a baby” and “a mother’s love for her son,” this series is about a fractured family coming together again. In his eyes, you don’t get Terminator without those three tenets, they’ve all led to an enduring franchise aiming to make a comeback and take some new swings.

[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 Jon Meltzer.]

Pixel Scroll 8/1/24 Yes, Those Pixels Are Looking At You Reading This Scroll, So Be Good

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(1) JEFFE KENNEDY RESIGNS AS SFWA PRESIDENT. Science Fiction and Fantasy Association President Jeffe Kennedy announced to members today that she has resigned the office. Her statement says in part:

…I’ve served in this role for over three years and on the Board of Directors for more than seven years. It has been a privilege and an honor to serve this organization.

However, the last several months have been particularly demanding in my personal life, and I have come to the realization that I can no longer provide the focused attention SFWA needs from its President. Without going into too much detail, I continue to be the sole caregiver and financial support for my disabled husband, whose progressive condition is worsening. In addition, my stepfather of twenty years passed away suddenly, widowing my elderly mother for the third time, and I am in the process of taking over all of her finances and care. These family obligations will require far more attention than I could have anticipated when I accepted the nomination to serve a second term as SFWA President.

My legal and fiscal responsibility to SFWA—and my own personal integrity—prevent me from commenting on any issues related to SFWA’s administration and operations. Throughout my tenure I did my best to serve the organization and all of its constituents with sincerity and respect, and to fulfill all of the duties I was elected to perform. Now it is time for me to step back….

(2) OGHENECHOVWE DONALD EKPEKI TRAVEL FUNDRAISER. Chris Barkley has opened a GoFundMe to “Help Oghenechovwe Ekpeki Attend the 2024 Glasgow Worldcon”.

…The African Speculative Fiction Society has provided sponsorship to attend but Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki is still in need of funding for other travel and visa expenses, hence this GoFundMe effort. He would like to raise $7500.00.

He has won the Nebula, Locus, Otherwise, Nommo, British & World Fantasy awards and was a finalist in the Hugo, Sturgeon, British Science Fiction and NAACP Image awards.

He is a finalist in the Nommo Award in two categories, best short story and best novella, which will be presented at the Worldcon in Glasgow this year….

(3) GREATNESS REMEMBERED. Rich Horton reviews “An Infinite Summer, by Christopher Priest” for Strange at Ecbatan.

To repeat myself: The late Christopher Priest (1943-2024) was one of the greatest SF writers of his generation. He made an early splash with novels like Inverted World and A Dream of Wessex (aka The Perfect Lover), followed by The Prestige, which was made into a successful movie by Christopher Nolan, and then by any number of stories and novels in his Dream Archipelago sequence. I wrote an obituary of him for Black Gate here…. 

(4) HE SHOT FIRST. [Item by Steven French.] From the Guardian’s readers interview with Malcolm McDowell: “‘Kubrick had stewed pears and sour chicken for lunch because Napoleon did’”.

If they ask you to appear in Star Trek again, would you say yes? Nicens_boi

I mean, you can’t top killing Captain James T Kirk. I suppose I could go back and kill old Patrick Stewart … I got a lot of flak from unhappy Trekkies, but there were also a lot of happy Trekkies who’d had it with old Bill. I think he overstayed his welcome. It was good for him to move on. I’m a great admirer of Shatner. He’s 90-odd. He’s still working. He’s been an astronaut. Good god, he wipes the floor with us young guys. I once made a surprise visit when he was being interviewed on stage. They introduced me: “And the one that killed Captain Kirk.” He went: “You shot me in the back.” I never thought the producers got it right, because they didn’t send him off in a glorious manner. Shot in the back on a bridge that collapses was not a noble end to a great character.

(5) BBC COVERS VIDEO GAME ACTORS STRIKE. “SAG-Aftra strike: ‘They’re crushing human beings beneath their feet’”.

When actor Jennifer Hale talks, you listen. Her delivery is measured and surgically precise, yet her tone has a warmth that most ASMR creators would envy. She could read the phone book and you’d pay attention.

It’s unsurprising, then, that her voice is her livelihood, and that she takes the threat to her industry posed by AI so seriously.

“They see that the work of our souls is nothing more than a commodity to generate profits for them,” she says of several of the major gaming companies. “They don’t see that they’re crushing human beings beneath their feet in blind pursuit of money and profit, it’s disgusting.”

From Commander Shepard in the Mass Effect series to Samus Aran in the Metroid titles, Hale’s list of gaming credits is as long as your arm and her voice is familiar to millions.

Hale is one of the most high-profile voice actors in the world. She’s joined 2,500 members of the US actors union SAG-AFTRA who perform in games, by striking until games divisions of prominent companies like Activision, Warner Brothers, Walt Disney and EA agree to protections around the use of artificial intelligence (AI)….

(6) WHERE AI ACTUALLY WORKS? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Last night’s BBC Radio 4 programme Front Row had a rather disturbing item on AI and film script selecting. “Dramatizing MPs, Jon Savage on LGBTQ and music, Stirling Prize shortlist, Screenwriters v AI”

Apparently, it typically takes a week to read and assess and write a report on a submitted film script and proposal but now an AI can do it in five minutes!!!! They did a trial run and it seems to work even if it is not quite there yet… but you can bet it will be soon.

This was the last item on the programme so skip to the final 10 minutes

With voice actors and motion capture performers in the US currently on strike over AI protections, the place of AI in the culture industries remains highly contested. The Writers Guild of America may have settled their strike but film critic Antonia Quirke explores whether screenwriters still have something to fear from the algorithm…

(7) WHO WINKED. If the TARDIS can travel anywhere in time and space, surely it can do this: “Doctor Who boss says breaking the fourth wall is ‘part of the show going forward’” in Radio Times.

While Doctor Who has not been afraid to break the fourth wall in the past, and have characters speak directly to the viewers watching at home, Russell T Davies’s new era has been notable for its particularly prominent usage of the device.

Not only has Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor done it, winking to camera near the end of The Devil’s Chord, but Anita Dobson’s mysterious Mrs Flood has done it on multiple occasions, including at the very end of the most recent season.

Now, speaking at San Diego Comic-Con, Davies has addressed these fourth wall breaks, saying: “It’s part of the show going forward, breaking the fourth wall.”…

(8) CHRISTMAS SPECIAL CLIP. “Doctor Who debuts first-look at 2024 Christmas special with Nicola Coughlan” – a video shown last week at Comic-Con is shared by Radio Times.

…The clip was introduced by guest star Nicola Coughlan, who confirmed that the episode’s punning title refers to her character Joy, “a determined woman whose life is changed forever when she meets the Doctor”.

The sequence – which you can watch below – sees the Doctor zip from Manchester in 1940 to Italy in 1962, then to Mount Everest in 1953 and finally to London in 2024, where he meets Joy.

Coughlan’s character is, of course, attempting to fend off a Silurian with a hair dryer when the Time Lord appears to deliver a ham and cheese toastie and a pumpkin latte… only in Doctor Who….

(9) TARAL WAYNE (1951-2024). Eleven-time Best Fan Artist Hugo finalist Taral Wayne, Fan Guest of Honor at the 2009 Worldcon, died July 31. Steven Baldassarra, who had heard from him earlier in the day and was bringing over a few things, says when he arrived there was no answer to his knock at the door or to phone calls. The building superintendant was asked to open the door and check. They found Taral lying down in his living room, unresponsive. Paramedics were summoned but were unable to revive him.  

Baldassarra’s announcement ends with this fine tribute:

I knew Taral for just over 30 years. And while some people may have known Taral for being curmudgeonly, stubborn, fractious, and condescending, I also got to know the man who was also genuinely warm, gentle, impish, thoughtful and even vulnerable.

Taral had a ferocious intellect and was an exceptionally talented graphic artist; I could see how hurt he was for not getting his chance in the sun in becoming a financial success with his graphic work and illustration. But despite all that, Taral did what he had loved, and was contented living by the beat of his own drum.

Taral was truly a wonderful friend, and I am truly blessed to have had known him and having had him as part of my life.

I knew Taral for 45 years and will miss him a lot. File 770’s obituary will appear later this evening.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

August 1, 1986 – Howard the Duck film (1986). Thirty-eight years ago a certain cigar-smoking fowl was let loose upon unsuspecting film goers. Many of whom promptly left the cinemas they were in. That was Howard the Duck based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name.

He was hatched from the minds of writer Steve Gerber and artist Val Mayerik. The former says that he based him off his college friend Howard Tockman. One assumes very, very loosely off that individual. His first comic appearance was fifty-one years ago so he’s a very old duck at this point.

Before we get to the film, we should know that he has appeared elsewhere. Starting in 2014, the character, voiced by Seth Green, appeared in cameos in several Marvel films, to wit the first Guardians of the Galaxy film and the last of those (at least so far) as well the fantastic animated Guardians of the Galaxy series also voiced by Green) and Ultimate Spider-Man (voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson there), and finally the What If…? Series where he was also voiced by Green.

I’m thinking there’s a live action appearance by him after the Howard the Duck film rather recently but I’ll be buggered if I can remember what it is. Anyone remember what it was? It was brief that I know and I can almost picture it. I remember there was a female next to him so I must’ve seen the film if I remember that. But that is all I remember.

Now for how Howard the Duck, the film. It came out the year that Aliens, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Little Shop of Horrors, and Labyrinth came out. Tough competition indeed. And wasn’t that a fantastic year for genre films? Every film I’ve mentioned here got nominated Conspiracy ’87 with Aliens winning the Hugo. Only Big Trouble in Little China and The Fly aren’t here, and they, too, came out that year. 

So the film, yes I am getting it now, was written by rather unusually by the producer  Gloria Katz and the director George Huyck. I’ve seen that particular combination do a script before. They certainly had the credits as writers, she having written the scripts for American Graffiti and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; his scripts were the same as they were a couple that scripted together.

So you now know who directed and produced this film. Lucas co-produced it. It was Lucas who suggested adapting the comic book following the production of American Graffiti which they were of course involved in. (He wrote it with them. Talented man that he is.) Lucasfilm was the production company. 

Ok I can’t defend it, I really can’t. There’s nothing about the film that’s not considered a rotten, smelly sulphurous mess. Its humor was considered juvenile at best, the performances, well, just awful and the story cringingly bad. In the years since, I’ve deepened my belief that it’s among the worst films ever made. It currently holds a thirteen percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. Ouch. Really ouch.

However, one criticism I am puzzled by to the day. The vast majority of comments online plus professional and amateur critics take umbrage at what Howard the Duck looks like. This makes no sense. Given the limitations of translating a two-dimensional comic duck into an actual physical creature, I thought that they did a fine job.

Remember almost thirty years on, they’d avoid this need with the Rocket Raccoon creature by simply being an entirely digital being. Today Howard would be the same. So yes, a much better one for that. 

What they did was create a rather large custom puppet, which had an individual inside. That being Jordan Prentice in his first, errr, acting gig. He however didn’t provide the voice as that was the work of Chip Zien who was The Baker in the original Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods musical. The film version is well-worth seeing.

If I remember correctly it’s the worst film Lucas ever produced both from a critical viewpoint and certainly from a financial as well. It cost at least thirty-seven million dollars to produce (not counting distribution costs including the millions to print up films) and had box office receipts of that amount. Now keep in mind that Roger Ebert did an essay on it whereas his research said it was an even split, so Lucasfilm would’ve made back eighteen million thereby losing eighteen million on this. Ouch. Really ouch.

I keep hearing rumors of a sequel but I can’t imagine Disney who owns the rights now having any interest in doing so as they’ve been losing money on a lot of their MCU series right now. 

I saw it once in the theatre. Did I want to ever see it again? What do you think? It’s worse than the Super Mario Bros was and that’s saying quite a bit.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) AVENGERS DISSEMBLE! “Jeremy Renner Says Robert Downey Jr. Kept His Marvel Return a Secret From the Original ‘Avengers’ Cast: ‘The Son of a B—- Didn’t Say Anything!’” – so he tells Variety.

… “No! I had no idea. The son of a bitch didn’t say anything to me,” Renner said. “We’re good friends. There’s the Avengers family chat. The original six. He said not a peep. I got online and started blowing up his phone like, ‘What’s going on? You’ve been hiding this from us the whole time?’ It’s exciting news. I’m really, really excited about it.”…

(13) HOLLYWOOD RELICS. Atlas Obscura pinpoints “11 Horror Film Sets Where You Can Revisit Your Greatest Fears”.

There’s no better way to get into the Halloween spirit than turning off the lights and scaring yourself out of your skin with a good horror flick. But if watching them (and rewatching them) on the small screen just isn’t enough any more, why not try to see some of the real-life locations where these cult classics were filmed?

In Washington, D.C., 75 steps offer a shortcut between Prospect Street NW and Canal Road NW, and if you visit at night you’ll recognize the site where Father Karras plummeted to his death in the 1973 film The Exorcist. The steps were padded with rubber during filming, and they have since been designated a historic landmark. In Morocco, just outside Ouarzazate, in a place known as Hollywood’s “door to the desert” sits a desolate, American-style gas station, home to rusted-out vehicles and dust covered props. It was plopped there for the 2006 remake of the Wes Craven classic, The Hills Have Eyes, and now just confuses anyone who sees it without knowing the backstory….

(14) SKELETON CREW. “Star Wars: Skeleton Crew Release Date Finally Revealed” at ScreenRant.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew‘s release date has finally been confirmed by Lucasfilm…. As one of many upcoming Star Wars TV shows, Skeleton Crew naturally has a lot of hype surrounding it. This excitement is only bolstered by Skeleton Crew‘s place in the Star Wars timeline, with the show expected to tie into the likes of The Mandalorian and Ahsoka.

… Lucasfilm has finally confirmed the release date for the show via People. As evident, anyone interested in the continuation of Star Wars’ New Republic era will not need to wait much longer with Skeleton Crew‘s confirmed release date of December 3, 2024. With confirmation of when the show will be released on Disney+ finally being provided, the wait for more updates and the show’s eventual premiere will only grow in both difficulty and anticipation….

(15) BATTLESTAR GALACTICA NO LONGER A PEACOCK TALE. Variety reports “’Battlestar Galactica’ Reboot No Longer in the Works at Peacock”.

The project was first announced back in 2019 ahead of Peacock’s official launch as part of the streamer’s initial slate of original programming. It was never formally ordered to series, though, and has been in development ever since. Exact story details never emerged, but the show was said to be set in the same continuity as the 2003 “Battlestar Galactica” series.

The reboot was a passion project for Sam Esmail, who was executive producing via Esmail Corp. under the company’s overall deal with studio UCP. Chad Hamilton of Esmail Corp. was also an executive producer. Michael Lesslie had originally come onboard as the writer of the reboot in 2020, but it was reported that he left the project in 2021…

[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Daniel Dern, 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 Cat Eldridge.]

2024 Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award

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The 2024 Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award honoree is Claire Winger Harris. The selection was announced this weekend at Readercon, held July 11-14, 2022, in Quincy, Massachusetts.

The 2024 jury consisted of Ann VanderMeer, Steven H Silver, and Rich Horton, who gave these reasons for their choice: 

Clare Winger Harris, as pictured in the 1929 debut issue of Science Wonder Quarterly

Clare Winger Harris (1891-1968) was a true pioneer of the field of genre science fiction, and was the first woman to write regularly for the early Science Fiction pulps such as Amazing Stories and Science Wonder Stories under her own name. She published a dozen stories between 1926 and 1933, and her work was characterized by a truly expansive and exotic imagination, and by an uncompromising devotion to the consequences of the unusual events she conceived. Her best work, such as “The Fate of the Poseidonia”, “The Miracle of the Lily”, “The Diabolical Drug”, and “The Artificial Man”, is rewarding reading to this day. Her sole novel, Persephone of Eleusis (1923), is historical fiction. It is unfortunate that she abandoned her writing career so soon, but we hope this award will focus attention on her early contributions.

The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award has been given annually since 2001 by the Cordwainer Smith Foundation, preserving the memory of science-fiction writer Paul Linebarger, who wrote under that pen name. The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award honors under-read science fiction and fantasy authors with the intention of drawing renewed attention to the winners.

[Thanks to Rich Horton for the story.]

Pixel Scroll 6/8/24 This Is A Test Of The Multiverse Emergency Response System

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(1) POWER ON BOARD. MIT Technology Review checks out CATAN: New Energies, an updated version of the popular board game that will be released June 14: “This classic game is taking on climate change”.

…Given Catan’s superstar status, I was intrigued to learn late last year that the studio that makes it had plans in the works to release this new version. I quickly got in touch with the game’s co-creator, Benjamin Teuber, to hear more. 

“The whole idea is that energy comes to Catan,” Teuber told me. “Now the question is, which energy comes to Catan?” Power plants help players develop their society more quickly, amassing more of the points needed to win the game. Players can build fossil-fuel plants, represented by little brown tokens. These are less resource-intensive to build, but they produce pollution. Alternatively, players can elect to build renewable-power plants, signified by green tokens, which are costlier but don’t have the same negative effects in the game. 

As a climate reporter, I feel that some elements of the game setup ring true—for example, as players reach higher levels of pollution, disasters become more likely, but there’s still a strong element of chance involved. 

One aspect of the game that didn’t quite match reality was the cost difference between fossil fuels and renewables. Technologies like solar and wind have plummeted in price over the last decade—today, building new renewable projects is generally cheaper than operating existing coal plants in the US.

I asked if the creators had considered having renewables get cheaper over time in the game, and Teuber said the team had actually built an early version with this idea in place, but the whole thing got too complicated. Keeping things simple enough to be playable is a crucial component of game design, Teuber says….

Åke Schwartz

(2) ONE OF THE ABOVE. Rich Horton shares his ballot in “Hugo Nominees for Best Novel, 2024: review summary” at Strange at Ecbatan.

…As I think my reviews make clear, none of these books are terrible — they all have redeeming values, and I’m glad I read them all. Having said that much, it also might be clear that I’m having a hard time enthusiastically supporting any of them for the Hugo. Is that a statement about the state of SF today, or the state of me as a reader of SF today? Probably both, in all honesty….

…So — in summary, what do I think of these books — how do I rank them? I’ll state my prejudices first. As hinted above, I do prize ambition — both literary ambition (I definitely give extra points for good prose) and thematic ambition — asking difficult questions, and presenting intriguing and original ideas. Especially science fictional ideas: cool extrapolation, and the treatment of technologies or scientific ideas that raise interesting question or that throw light on broader ideas, such as, say,  what does it mean to be intelligent….

(3) THE PIONEER FANZINE THAT “BOMBED” THE RUSSIANS. [Item by Ahrvid Engholm.] Imagine Ray Palmer popped up and told how the very first fanzine, The Comet, May 1930, came about?

A pioneer fanzine maker from 1952, Åke Schwartz, now surfaces after 72 years of silence. Not his fault, others didn’t know about him or Sweden’s first fanzine: Vår Rymd (“Our Space”).

Every issue of my PDFzine Intermission covers sf and fandom history. And Intermission 143.5 has a bombshell, all about the forgotten or lost Vår Rymd, directly from Åke (soon 89). Those pioneer fanzine makers once —

…gathered after lunch in a big room at Åke Henriksson’s on 13B Villa Street and produced it. It took a weekend. I worked the typewriter. I put up the typwriter on a big dining table. It was a bit difficult to write on stencils. If there was a typo you had to smear some substance on it, wait and then type the correction. We began with discussing what ideas each one had and if he had brought the material so it could be written. Then we decided the contents. Sven could draw what he wanted. He was a good artist. Then we began. A lot of milk and buns were consumed during the afternoon. We didn’t drink beer at the time. The next day we took the stencils to dad’s office at the company Gränges on Gustaf Adolf Square to print it.

But this was unexpected:

The Russian Ambassador lived below Henrikssons. Every day he went to the Russian Embassy on Villa Street 17. Once we put explosives in his keyhole. It was a fairly innocent mix called “blast dough”. It was Karl who studied chemistry who made it. When the ambassador put in the key it exploded.

The news on the fanzine dug up after 7+ decades is truly explosive…

(4) MEMORABLE EFFECTS OF LATE NIGHT SNACKS. The Guardian salutes “Gremlins at 40: Joe Dante’s untamed classic is a love letter to chaos”.

…The Peltzers have no business taking care of Gizmo, who must be kept away from bright light and water and must not, under any circumstances, eat after midnight. (The fact that it’s always after midnight is a bit of pedantry that Dante tackles in the sequel.) It takes absolutely no time at all for Billy and the family to violate all those rules, which result in the mogwai first multiplying into mischievous clones and then cocooning like the xenomorphs in Alien, later emerging as scaly, malevolent beasts hellbent on destruction. Credit Dante and his soon-to-be-famous screenwriter, Home Alone’s Chris Columbus, with establishing some key supporting players before things go awry, including Billy’s love interest, Kate (Phoebe Cates), the cantankerous Murray Futterman (Dante mainstay Dick Miller) and Mrs Deagle (Polly Holliday), the town’s miserly widow.

Released just two weeks after Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Gremlins cracked open a nationwide conversation about violence in family films and led to the creation of PG-13, intended to covering the wide gulf between all-ages fare and films aimed at adults. How that new rating would reshape American movies is a massive and mostly deflating discussion, but Dante’s willingness to spook his younger audience rather than infantilize it is laudable, because it’s done in the right spirit. …

(5) WALL-TO-WALL MAD. PRINT Magazine alerts readers to the opening of a museum exhibit in “The Daily Heller: MAD and the Usual Gang of Idiots”.

Richard Williams: “Alfred E. Neuman and Norman Rockwell”, 2002
Cover illustration for Mad Art: A Visual Celebration of MAD Magazine and the Idiots Who Create It (Watson Guptill, 2002)

The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA, has replaced its historic Leo Lionni exhibition with What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine, which runs through Oct. 27.

The show covers the full legacy of MAD, from Harvey Kurtzman’s inspired comic book, to Bill Gaines’ outwitting the Comics Code Authority by transitioning from comic book to magazine format, up through the present. The NRM curatorial staff, headed by Stephanie Plunkett, together with guest curator Steve Brodner (assisted by an unusual gang of experts), has brought MAD—which ended newsstand distribution in 2018, continuing in comic book stores and via subscription—back to the fore with a richly filled treasury of printed and original material. I prevailed on Plunkett and Brodner before the opening on June 8 to discuss what and what not to worry about while visiting this MAD wellspring of humor in the jugular vein….

Here’s the direct link to the exhibit: “What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine”. The Norman Rockwell Museum has also put together two short videos to go with it.

  • MAD: Making A Magazine
  • What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Compiled by Paul Weimer.]

June 8, 1928 — Kate Wilhelm. (Died 2018.)

By Paul Weimer. Even beyond her fiction, Wilhelm’s influence and effect on the field can be best defined with one word: Clarion.

The Clarion Workshop (and its splinter and descendant groups) was the brainchild of herself and Damon Knight, and its influence on the field cannot be underestimated. It remains to this day the premier workshop for science fiction writers, and many of the best writers, past and present either attended Clarion, or have taught at Clarion, or attended a workshop that came out or was inspired by Clarion. Thanks to Wilhelm, Clarion permanently and profoundly changed how science fiction writing is taught. 

Kate Wilhelm

As far as that fiction, the one Wilhelm work that stays with me, and it will be no surprise, is Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. Part of the round of post-apocalyptic novels and stories that was a strong strain in cinema and in written science fiction in the 1970’s, I think it might have been the first time I had come across the idea of clones. I first read the novel in that first burst of Science fictional reading in the early 1980’s (again, from my older brother’s collection).  I was struck by the setting, the conflict between the clones and those seeking to return to biological means of reproduction, and the slow continued apocalypse of the world. 

A community that had survived the apocalypse and was slowly surviving and outlasting global warming, was nevertheless succumbing, inexorably, to lacking the parts and technology to keep their new clone society alive.  (This would come to mind recently, when I read Walk to the End of the World by Suzy McKee Charnas, which takes this idea as well but in a different direction). It’s a sad and elegiac novel in the end, and very representative in general of her work.

Sadly, a lot of her non-mystery work (her mystery work output being far vaster than her science fiction) is not readily in print, which is, I think, a disservice and a shame.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

(8) COMING TO AN EAR NEAR YOU. The Mary Sue introduces the “Chuck Tingle Bury Your Gays Audiobook Cast”.

…Now our favorite buckaroo is back with a new horror novel—and the audiobook version has a cast that will make speculative fiction fans scream.

Bury Your Gays, coming out on July 9, 2024, is Tingle’s second full-length horror novel. The book tells the story of Misha, a screenwriter in L.A. who’s been nominated for his first Oscar. However, the network executives in charge of Misha’s streaming show are pressuring him to kill off all his gay characters “for the algorithm.” When Misha refuses, he puts himself in mortal danger, while monsters of his own creation begin to stalk him in the hills outside the city.

A slate of beloved authors are in the audiobook’s cast, including Charlie Jane Anders, CJ Leede, Liz Kerin, Mark Oshiro, Sarah Gailey, Stephen Graham Jones, T. Kingfisher, and TJ Klune. The audiobook will be primarily narrated by Andre Santana, with Georgia Bird and Mara Wilson also contributing….

(9) THE SHAPE OF SPACE. Somebody tell Scott Edelman! “’We’re trying to find the shape of space’: scientists wonder if the universe is like a doughnut” – in the Guardian.

We may be living in a doughnut. It sounds like Homer Simpson’s fever dream, but that could be the shape of the entire universe – to be exact, a hyperdimensional doughnut that mathematicians call a 3-torus.

This is just one of the many possibilities for the topology of the cosmos. “We’re trying to find the shape of space,” says Yashar Akrami of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Madrid, a member of an international partnership called Compact (Collaboration for Observations, Models and Predictions of Anomalies and Cosmic Topology). In May, the Compact team explained that the question of the shape of the universe remains wide open and surveyed the future prospects for pinning it down.

“It’s high-risk, high-reward cosmology,” says team member Andrew Jaffe, a cosmologist at Imperial College London. “I would be very surprised if we find anything, but I’ll be extremely happy if we do.”

…. “Knowing what the curvature is, you know what kinds of topologies are possible,” says Akrami. Flat space could just go on for ever, like an infinite sheet of paper. That’s the most boring, trivial possibility. But a flat geometry also fits with some topologies that cosmologists euphemistically call “nontrivial”, meaning that they’re far more interesting and can get pretty mind-boggling.

There are, for mathematical reasons, precisely 18 possibilities. In general, they correspond to the universe having a finite volume but no edges: if you travel farther than the scale of the universe, you end up back where you started. It’s like the screen of a video game in which a character exiting on the far right reappears on the far left – as though the screen is twisted into a loop. In three dimensions, the simplest of these topologies is the 3-torus: like a box from which, exiting through any face, you re-enter through the opposite face….

(10) SALLY RIDE BIO COMING TO TV. Deadline learns “Kristen Stewart To Play Astronaut Sally Ride In ‘The Challenger’ TV Series”.

 Kristen Stewart will make her TV series-starring debut in The Challenger, a limited series in which she’ll play Sally Ride, the astronaut and physicist who became the first American woman to fly in space. She did this as part of a NASA space shuttle astronaut class of 1978 that was the first to be diversified and not comprised of all white men.…

…The series is based on The New Guys, a book written by Meredith E. Bagby, who partners with Sedgwick and Valerie Stadler in Big Swing. They are also executive producers.

In some ways, this has the tapestry to tell the successor story to The Right Stuff, which was based on Tom Wolfe’s book about the culture clash that occurred when the cockiest world’s best fighter pilots jumped into the space race that America was engaged in with the Russians. Bagby tells the story of a group that was called by their predecessors ‘The F*cking New Guys,’ as NASA sought to diversify its pilots and crew for the space shuttle program. Ride was the first woman and the first member of the LGBTQ+ community to fly into space. Also in that program was the first Black and Asian American astronauts, and a married couple. They passed all the rigorous tests to become top of the class, and egos, ambition and romance were part of the cultural clash. They were also quite brilliant.In 1983, Ride became the first American woman to fly on the space shuttle, and became an instant celebrity. That joy was short-lived, however, when three years later the space shuttle Challenger blew apart 73 seconds into its ascent, killing all seven members of the crew. Ride then became the only astronaut to become part of the Rogers Commission, a presidential commission to investigate the disaster, and it later came out that she pinpointed the problems with O-rings that became stiff at low temperature, and that turned out to be the reason for the explosion. Ride died from cancer at age 61 in 2012, a true American hero.

(11) NASA IS IN TROUBLE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Cool Worlds notes that NASA is in deep trouble.

In 2023 Congress spent US$1.5 billion (the same as NASA’s entire astrophysics budget) to buy extra F35 aircraft that the Department of Defense did not request. In terms of total tax revenue NASA’s astrophysics budget is 0.03% of total US tax spent and NASA’s overall budget 0.5% of US tax spent. For this year, NASA, through the White House, had requested US$27.2 billion but Congress only approved US$25.4 billion giving NASA its first budget cut in over a decade. Of course, there have been problems with things like the James Webb Space Telescope being massively over budget.

Cool Worlds suggests that we take NASA’s estimates for the cost of future missions with “a pinch of salt”. For example, will the Habitable Worlds Observatory (working title – bet it’s going to be called the Sagan telescope) really cost US$11 billion and launch in 2040? Cool Worlds also argues that a bigger telescope than that planned is needed as it is likely that the nearest habitable world around a Sun-like star will be further away than proposers think. It also notes that there are competing factors for US tax dollars. In the 1980s decade extreme weather events cost the US US$21.7 billion, but with climate change the half decade to the end of 2023 cost US$122.5 billion.

[Thanks to Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Paul Weimer, Mark Roth-Whitworth, 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 Cat Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 5/27/24 Pixel Yourself On A Scroll By A Tickbox

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(1) WAYWARD WORMHOLE Signups are being taken for the Rambo Academy Wayward Wormhole – New Mexico 2024. Full details at the link.

The Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers is pleased to announce the second annual Wayward Wormhole, this time in New Mexico. Join us for the short story workshop to study with Arley Sorg and Minister Faust, or the novel workshop with Donald Maass, C.C. Finlay, and Cat Rambo.

Both intensive workshops will be hosted at the Painted Pony ranch in Rodeo, New Mexico. The short story workshop runs November 4-12, 2024, and the novel workshop runs November 15 through 24, 2024.

(2) EARLY ENTRY ON THE 2024 BUSINESS MEETING AGENDA. Linda Deneroff, Alexia Hebel, Kevin Standlee, and Kevin Black have submitted to the Glasgow 2024 Business Meeting an amendment to the WSFS Constitution to restore “supporting” and “attending” to replace “WSFS Membership” and “Attending Supplement”.

Short Title: The Way We Were

Moved, to amend the WSFS Constitution by striking out and inserting the following:

Moved: To replace WSFS Membership with Supporting Membership wherever it appears in the Constitution, and to replace Attending Supplement with Attending Membership, including all similar variations of the words (e.g., WSFS Memberships, WSFS members, attending supplement) to their grammatically correct replacements.

Proposed by: Linda Deneroff, Alexia Hebel, Kevin Standlee, and Kevin Black

Commentary: Since both terms involved the word “Membership” there has been a lot of confusion among people purchasing memberships who do not understand why they have to purchase a “second” membership, or why they have to buy a “WSFS membership” in the first place. Under the original terminology, the price of an attending membership was inclusive of the support price.

Any reimbursement restrictions could still remain in place, with the price of the supporting portion of the attending membership deducted from any refund.

(3) IF IT’S NOT MADE IN MIDDLE-EARTH, IT’S CRAP! “Why Do Dwarves Sound Scottish and Elves Sound Like Royalty?” While Atlas Obscura  tries to say Tolkien had a lot to do with it, their evidence shows it’s not his books but the filmmakers who adapted them that are the greatest influence.

…Of course the original readers couldn’t hear what Tolkien’s creatures sounded like, but the intense focus he placed on developing their languages gave people a pretty good idea. “Tolkien was a philologist,” says Olsen.“This is what he did. He studied language and the history of language and the changing of language over time.”

Tolkien would create languages first, then write cultures and histories to speak them, often taking inspiration from the sound of an existing language. In the case of the ever-present Elvish languages in his works, Tolkien took inspiration from Finnish and Welsh. As the race of men and hobbits got their language from the elves in Tolkien’s universe, their language was portrayed as similarly Euro-centric in flavor.

For the dwarves, who were meant to have evolved from an entirely separate lineage, he took inspiration from Semitic languages for their speech, resulting in dwarven place names like Khazad-dûm and Moria….

… However, the dwarves of the Lord of the Rings movies don’t speak with an Israeli accent, and the elves of Warcraft don’t have a Finnish inflection. This comes down to the differences between how Tolkien portrayed his fantasy races and how he imagined they should talk, and the readers’ interpretation….

(4) KEEP THEM SEQUELS ROLLIN’. “Alien? Mission: Impossible? Toy Story? What is the greatest movie franchise ever?” The Guardian’s staff stake their claims. Here’s Jesse Hassenger’s pick.

Predator

There are a lot of movie series that made it through four or five entries as an unusual rotating showcase for different directors before giving in to the temptation to re-hire past successes. I still love the Alien and Mission: Impossible movies dearly, but they’ve also made me extra-grateful for the rare franchise that has managed to never repeat a director or major (human) cast member. I’m talking – for now – about the Predator movies, the B-movie little siblings to the classier, weirder, more thought-provoking A-list Alien. Only one is bad – the second Alien vs Predator match-up, nonsensically subtitled Requiem. All of the rest, where various badass aliens hunt various opponents (including Arnold Schwarzeneggar, Danny Glover, Olivia Munn, the xenomorph and Adrien Brody, among others) for sport, filter their premise through a different vision of monster-movie splendor. On one level, you always know what you’ll get: clicky noises, gory deaths, those triangle laser-sight things. Yet the specifics have plenty of wiggle room: should they be scary, funny or nasty? Action, horror or sci-fi? It’s a throwback to when movie franchises knew their place as fun programmers, rather than tentpole sagas. Alas, Dan Trachtenberg is about to become the first Predator director to return to the series. He did a great job with the entertaining Prey; it’s just a shame for the series to lose its constant one-and-done churn. For now, I’ll continue to savor those no-nonsense weirdos with the ugly mandibles and over-elaborate armor, and their accidental compatibility with B-movie auteurism. Jesse Hassenger

(5) THAT 70’S ART. This link assembles many examples of “Space Bar” themed examples of “70s Sci-Fi Art”. (And from later, too).

(6) JOHNNY WACTOR (1986-2024). Best known for his work in daytime TV, Johnny Wactor was reportedly killed by thieves on May 25. The New York Times’ summary shows he also had roles in several genre series.

Johnny Wactor, an actor best known for his role in “General Hospital,” was shot and killed on Saturday, reports said, amid what his family described as an attempted theft of a catalytic converter in Los Angeles.

Ms. Wactor said her son thought his car was being towed at first, and when he approached the person to ask, the person “looked up, he was wearing a mask, and opened fire.”

Mr. Wactor … also appeared in episodes of “Westworld,” “The OA” and “Station 19.”

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 27, 1934 – Harlan Ellison. (Died 2018.)

By Paul Weimer. Or, even though he has passed away, he still might sue me from beyond the grave, so Harlan Ellison® .

My reading of Harlan Ellison® was benefited to me thanks to my older brother, whom I have mentioned earlier in this space was mainly responsible for me to get into science fiction and fantasy, and his bookshelf were my early steps into the genre. As it so happened, he had a fair number of the extant Harlan Ellison®  short story collections. So very early on in my SFF reading, I did come across “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream” “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” and other SFF stories of his. At that early age, I found few SFF short story writers that could match him.

Harlan Ellison at the ABA convention; Larry and Marilyn Niven behind him: Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

And I learned, thanks to the collections my brother had, that Harlan Ellison®   wrote far more than SFF short stories. I’m not even talking about his movie or television scripts.  Ellison is the first SFF author who I read non-SFF work by. I read The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat. I read and reread his criticism of television and cinema and began to understand the wide range of his talent. When I discovered he wrote mimetic short stories, and horror short stories as well, there was a point that I wondered what Ellison didn’t excel at as a writer in the short form.

My favorite Harlan Ellison®  is not “Mouth” because I think that is just too easy an answer. I have a fondness for the sadness of “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” and the tragic fate of the protagonist. “Jeffty is Five” breaks my heart every time I read it. “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” moved me, even though I was too young to know it was a take on the Kitty Genovese murder.

I will reach more deeply and go with “Paladin”, which I saw first as the Twilight Zone episode “Paladin of the Lost Hour” and then later read the Hugo winning novelette. It’s a poignant story, with some of the sadness and gray veil that you find in some of Ellison’s work.  It’s as if Harlan Ellison® is grabbing me by the collar and shouting. “Feel something, you coward. Feel something!”.  The anger of raging against the dying of the light and being angry when people shoulder-shrug, give up, and shuffle along?  I may not have ever met Harlan Jay Ellison®, but I think Paladin helps you feel just how powerful, angry, and potent a writer he was. Love him or hate him, his work could not and would not be ignored.  

I think there are definite periods and waves of Harlan Ellison® ‘s work. And like another sui generis artist, David Bowie, you probably will find a wave or period of Harlan Ellison® that you will like best. Not all of his oeuvre worked for me, there is a definite band I like, and a narrower (but not narrow) band that I really like. This may be the consequence of his extensive oeuvre and constant ability to change and try and write new things, or rewrite old things in a new way. Restless, Angry, Raging. Potent. 

 I loved his cameo on Babylon 5 which he served as a creative consultant and wrote an episode “A View from The Gallery”.  (Which may mean that we have  Harlan Ellison®  to thank for Lower Decks, which is to Star Trek that this episode is to the rest of Babylon 5.) 

That, my friends, is the work of Harlan Ellison® 

Harlan Ellison in 2014 at Creation event in Las Vegas.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) ANOTHER HARLAN TRIBUTE. Janis Ian marked Harlan Ellison’s 90th with this tribute on Facebook.

In my life, there have been very few colleagues who viscerally understand having been an “enfant terrible”. Even fewer that lived up to their promise. And even fewer who continued to be brave, and bold, fearlessly speaking out despite the consequences.

Today is the birthday of my late friend Harlan Ellison. A writer who completely understood what it was like for me at the age of 15, when “Society’s Child” became a hit. Unable to connect with most of my peers because of the experiences I was having, unable to much time with those I could connect with, who were always 5 to 10 years older and usually on the road.

Harlan understood better than most that Fame hadn’t changed me, it had changed the people around me. And he understood the impossibility of living up to the expectations placed on me because of my innate talent and ability.

He could be an unbelievable pain in the rear. He could be absolutely impossible. He could be rude and obnoxious and he did not suffer fools. God help you if you annoyed him. But to me, he was unfailingly courteous, generous, kind, and giving. I miss him more than I can say, and I regret the years I did not know him.

(10) APPLAUSE FOR BRENNAN. Rich Horton reviews “Cold-Forged Flame, and Lightning in the Blood, by Marie Brennan” at Strange at Ecbatan.

Marie Brennan has been publishing short SF and Fantasy (mostly Fantasy, I think) for a couple of decades, after winning the Asimov’s Undergraduate Award back in 2003. (That’s an award which spurred some excellent careers over time — writers like Rich Larson, Marissa Lingen, Eric Choi, and Seth Dickinson are also among the past winners.)…

…The two books [Cold-Forged Flame, and Lightning in the Blood] concern Ree, whom we meet “coming into existence” as Cold-Forged Flame opens. She has no idea of her name, only a dim sense of her abilities (she is a warrior, for one thing) and of her character (suspicious, prickly) — but also aware that she is bound to do what the nine people who have summoned her ask. After some debate, she learns what these people want: she must go and bring back a vial of blood from the cauldron of the Lhian. And, in exchange, they offer her her freedom — and, but only after the fact, what knowledge they have of her … history. To tell too much in advance would harm her, they suggest….

(11) SAM I AM. Knowing that a fan’s brain is never sufficiently stuffed with trivia about Tolkien, CBR.com brings us “The Lord the Rings’ Samwise Gamgee’s Real World Inspiration, Explained”.

…In Appendix C of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien explained the in-universe origin of the surname Gamgee. It came from the family’s ancestral village of Gamwich, which meant “game village” in the language of the hobbits. Over time, the name Gamwich evolved into Gamidge and later to Gamgee. This was one of many examples of the great amount of thought and effort that went into even the tiniest worldbuilding details of The Lord of the Rings. However, this backstory was a retroactive explanation that Tolkien came up with long after settling on the name Sam Gamgee for his story’s deuteragonist. The real-world basis for Sam’s surname was more unusual, and its origins predated Tolkien’s conception of Middle-earth.

Gamgee is a real — albeit uncommon — surname. In fact, in 1956, a man named Sam Gamgee wrote a letter to Tolkien after learning that a character in The Lord of the Rings shared his name. Tolkien was surprised and delighted by this coincidence. Since the real Sam had not read the novel for himself, Tolkien assured him that the fictional Sam was “a most heroic character, now widely beloved by many readers” and offered to send him a copy of the book. In Tolkien’s response, he also explained the reason that he chose to use the name. It was a long story that began with a famous surgeon: Dr. Joseph Sampson Gamgee.

Born in 1828, Joseph Gamgee made major strides in the field of aseptic surgery, the practice of ensuring that a doctor’s hands and tools remain sanitary during medical procedures….

(12) WOLFE PACK ON LOCATION. Black Gate has Bob Byrne’s newest installment of “Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone”: “Welcome to Kanawha Spa – The Wolfe Pack 2024 Greenbrier Weekend”. He joined the Wolfe Pack for a descent on the West Virginia resort featured in Too Many Cooks.

…Trish [Parker] is the resident Greenbrier historian. She is also a Wolfe fan! She gave a really cool presentation that talked about the Greenbrier, the logistics of of other locations (Barry Tolman was NOT going to make that court session he was pressing to be at), and other related information.

I loved it! It was really neat. Especially as she knew the story. I really enjoyed it. She took a couple questions and got a healthy round of applause.

Intelligence Guided by Experience – A question I heard more than once over the weekend was, “Did Rex Stout stay here before he wrote the book?” While the thought seemed to be, ‘Probably, as he knew the place pretty well.’ it’s unknown. The records from that early have been lost over the years. No proof he had been to the Greenbrier….

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

Pixel Scroll 5/23/24 Shhhh. The Pixels Are Sleeping, Let’s Not Disturb Them

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Ellen Klages

(1) ELLEN KLAGES ON JEOPARDY! [Item by Steven H Silver and David Goldfarb.] One of the contestants on Wednesday’s episode was World Fantasy Award-winning, Hugo- and Nebula-shortlisted author Ellen Klages. Ellen came in third.  She was against a couple of guys who had strong buzzer abilities. The game recap can be found on J! Archive. At the break, she began the story of the scary ham story that she told at the Nebula Award Ceremony in San Jose in 2014.

David Goldfarb took notes on the episode’s sff references.

In the Double Jeopardy round, there was some SFF content in the clues.

Books From the Last Few Years, $1200: There are an infinite number of books in “The Midnight” this, a 2020 bestseller by Matt Haig

Amar Kakirde knew it was a library.

Books From the Last Few Years, $1600: This 2021 Andy Weir book about a plucky astronaut sounds like it may be a long shot

A triple stumper. (This was “Project Hail Mary”.)

Books From the Last Few Years, $800: Author Curtis Sittenfeld wonders what would’ve happened in Hillary never married Bill in the novel titled with this maiden name.

Returning champion Chris D’Amico knew Hillary’s maiden name: “What is ‘Rodham’?”

Not SF but amusing to note:

Already in the Form of a Question, $1600. A Daily Double, with $6000 on the line: In a relatively famous play, this 4-word question precedes “Deny thy father & refuse thy name”

Chris didn’t know it: he tried, “What is, ‘How now, brown cow?’”

(It was actually “Wherefore art thou Romeo?”)

(2) DANGER IN THE REAR VIEW MIRROR. At A Deep Look by Dave Hook the author is “Revisiting ‘Dangerous Visions’”. He still finds 19 of the 33 stories in the volume are “great” or “superlative”.

… With all of the circus and controversy over whether Dangerous Visions was ever as good or as important as its reputation, or whether it was overrated, or whether the Suck Fairy had visited, I approached the reread with interest, hope and no small amount of trepidation….

… I am very glad I reread Dangerous Visions, although my reactions are mixed….

Hook shares ratings and comments about the 19 stories he feels are still remarkable.

It’s worth remembering that four stories in the anthology became finalists for the Hugo and/or Nebula, and of those, three won at least one of the awards:

  • “Riders of the Purple Wage” by Philip José Farmer (tied for Hugo Award Best Novella, and a Nebula finalist)
  • “Gonna Roll the Bones” by Fritz Leiber (won the Hugo and Nebula Award for Novelette)
  • “Aye, and Gomorrah…” by Samuel R. Delany (Hugo Best Short Story finalist, and Nebula Award Short Story winner)
  • “The Jigsaw Man” by Larry Niven (Hugo Best Short Story finalist)
  • “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?” by Theodore Sturgeon (Nebula Award Novella finalist)

However, Hook points out a definite shortcoming in the anthology:

…I also observe that only three out of 33 stories (9%) were by women. I don’t know how this came to be, but it is unfortunate. It may be that Ellison heard criticism on this point for Dangerous Visions. Looking at Ellison’s 1972 anthology Again, Dangerous Visions, there is a modest improvement, with nine out of 55 stories (16%) that feature women writers….

(3) WEN-YI LEE Q&A. With “Asian Heritage in Horror Month: An Interview with Wen-yi Lee” the Horror Writers Association blog continues its thematic series.

What draws you to the horror genre?

Well, I kind of like twisted things, as a baseline. As a writer, I like that horror as a genre lets you take an abstract fear and make it tangible, and confront and take apart all its angles. I also like the big, raw feelings; I like the transportive strangeness and the sense of confrontation and catharsis. Horror and romance are Barbenheimer genre sisters, really; they’re both rooted in these big vulnerable core feelings. I love romance in my horror, or horror in my romance.

Do you include Asian and/or Pacific Islander characters and themes in your writing with purpose, and if so, what do you want to portray?

I do! The protagonist in my debut novel is Chinese American, but more often than not I write from my being Southeast Asian Chinese–specifically Singaporean–which is very different from the Asian American identity but shares enough here and there that I do resonate with Asian American work. In The Dark We Know there are elements of being unrooted compared to the white families in town that can trace their lines back generations on the land, and familial language barriers and cultural isolation are factors in the main character’s loneliness. Other times, I’m not trying to write something “cultural” and “meaningful”, but just tell a good story that happens to be rooted in a particular ethnic/cultural environment, with characters that look and sound familiar instead of the blonde/blue-eyed girls that my main characters used to be. I’m still working on putting out a true love letter to Southeast Asia’s shared iconic female ghosts…

(4) MESS CALL AT REDWALL. James Folta confesses to Literary Hub readers, “I think about the food in the Redwall books way too often.”

…Before we go any further with Redwall, an important clarification: the characters are animal-sized and their world is scaled down. Some poor, misguided folks will tell you that these books are filled with human-sized animals, but the issue has been settled by scientific polling. We’re talking about a world of whimsy here, not a freak show where some rodents fell into the Toxic Avenger ooze. And yes, I know Jacques said in a Q&A that, “the creatures in my stories are as big or small as your imagination wants them to be.” We can all agree that this is a polite smokescreen for younger readers. But we’re all adults here—the characters are small.

What seems to be most enduring about Jacques’ books for me and other readers, though, are his descriptions of food and drink. If you’ve read the books, you know what I’m talking about—no one ever just eats food in Redwall. The descriptions of food unfurl in long lists, cataloged here in impressive detail. The mice food has inspired memes, a Twitter bot, a drinking game, and a cookbook.

Jacques is sumptuous, even gratuitous in his descriptions of food and drink. In the first book, Jacques writes of “tender freshwater shrimp garnished with cream and rose leaves, devilled barley pearls in acorn puree, apple and carrot chews, marinated cabbage stalks steeped in creamed white turnip with nutmeg.” The Bellmaker has dishes of “turnovers, trifles, breads, fondants, salads, pasties, and cheeses alternated with beakers of greensap milk, mint tea, rosehip cup and elderberry wine.” Even a simple breakfast at the cave of a mouse named Bobbo in Mariel of Redwall is lavished with description: “Now, you will find a small rockpool outside to wash in, and I will prepare wild oatcakes, small fish, and gorseflower honey to break your fast.”…

(5) BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE TRAILER. The official trailer for the Beetlejuice sequel dropped today.

Beetlejuice is back! After an unexpected family tragedy, three generations of the Deetz family return home to Winter River. Still haunted by Beetlejuice, Lydia’s life is turned upside down when her rebellious teenage daughter, Astrid, discovers the mysterious model of the town in the attic and the portal to the Afterlife is accidentally opened. With trouble brewing in both realms, it’s only a matter of time until someone says Beetlejuice’s name three times and the mischievous demon returns to unleash his very own brand of mayhem.

(6) CASTLE Q&A. The Chicago Tribune reports on the previously announced career honor: “Crete resident Mort Castle to get horror writers award”.

Mort Castle remembers being frightened when his third-grade teacher played Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” on a phonograph.

“I was one of the weird kids who liked being scared. I dug nightmares,” said Castle of Crete.

The Horror Writers Association will present him with a Lifetime Achievement Award on June 1 during the Bram Stoker Awards ceremony at StokerCon 2024 in San Diego.

The award honors individuals whose work has influenced the horror genre substantially….

(7) FAMILY TIES. Rich Horton is working his way through the 2024 finalists: “Hugo Nominee Review: The Saint of Bright Doors, by Vajra Chandrasekera” at Strange at Ecbatan.

… The story is told primarily from the point of view of Fetter. Fetter’s mother tore his shadow from him at birth, and as a consequence, besides not casting a shadow, he is not tightly rooted to the ground: he will float into the air if he doesn’t take care. His mother also teaches him to be an assassin, from an early age, and she prepares him to commit the Five Unforgivables, as defined by his absent father’s theology — for his father is a “saint”, the Perfect and Kind. These crimes are matricide, heresy, killing of saints, patricide, and killing the Perfect and Kind. Nice family!…

(8) WHAT’S THAT RINGING? The New York Times has done an in-depth article about a controversy recently mentioned in the Scroll: “’The Hunt for Gollum’ Is Announced, Then ‘Lord of the Rings’ Fan Film Disappears”. (The link is not paywalled.)

… In 2009, Chris Bouchard, a recent film school graduate, uploaded his 39-minute “Lord of the Rings” fan film, “The Hunt for Gollum,” to YouTube. At the time, the platform was still, in his words, full of “five-minute videos of people’s cats.”

The site promoted Bouchard’s movie on its homepage, and within 24 hours, he had more than one million views. Today more than 13 million have watched the film, cementing it as a fan favorite.

So it came as a surprise recently when Bouchard received a text from an old friend saying that Warner Bros. had announced a planned addition to its growing “Lord of the Rings” franchise. The name of the movie? “The Hunt for Gollum.”…

… After getting the text, “at first I thought he was pulling my leg,” Bouchard said of his friend. Soon, online articles were embedding the fan film in their coverage of the Warner Bros. announcement, leading younger fans to it for the first time while older ones relived its lo-fi magic.

But by the next morning, Bouchard’s 15-year-old work had disappeared from YouTube. Viewers clicking on the link were shown a message stating, “This video contains content from Warner Bros. Entertainment, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.”…

… But YouTube denied the appeal. So, like eagles over Mordor, the Ringers, as the fans are known, swooped in. They wrote articles and posted heated comments on Reddit and other sites, calling the removal “deplorable” and “despicable.” Bouchard noted his disappointment on X.

Bouchard quickly received a follow-up email from YouTube: The movie had been reinstated. In an email, Warner Bros. said it had no official comment. YouTube did not reply to requests for comment….

(9) H. BRUCE FRANKLIN (1934-2024). Black Gate reports that scholar H. Bruce Franklin died May 19 at the age of 90. He was the emeritus John Cotton Dana endowed Professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark and author of numerous books, essays, and exhibitions related to science fiction.  

During the 1960s, Dr. Franklin was fired from Stanford despite being tenured supposedly for inciting student anti-Vietnam war protests. A former Air Force navigator and intelligence office in the Strategic Air Command, he also resigned his commission in protest of that war.

He won the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pioneer Award for his article “The Vietnam War as American SF and Fantasy” (Science Fiction Studies Nov 1990).  He also received SFRA’s Pilgrim Award, an Eaton Award, and was named a Distinguished Scholar for the International Association for Fantastic in the Arts.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 23, 1921 — James Blish. (Died 1975.)

By Paul Weimer. For me, my reading of James Blish revolves around two axes.

The first is Star Trek. I’ve not read a ton of Star Trek novels and stories. I don’t consider myself that well read in them, even as I remember at one point it seemed the SFF section of Borders and B Dalton were half Star Trek novels and the like. But when you, reader, having watched lots of repeats of the original series are confronted with a book with the title Spock Must Die, reading it becomes a moral imperative.  It’s a clever book, even if I don’t like the (now distinctly non-canonical) fate of the Klingon Commander, Koloth.  I’ve also read a couple of his adaptations of episodes that he turned into short stories, which is a pretty unique way to go about things. Has anyone else done that, turning tv episodes of a series into short stories? 

James Blish on his Vespa in the Sixties.

But what I remember Blish for the most is Cities in Flight.  I came across this one by accident. Somewhere along the line, I had read Oswald Spengler, whose racial theories are pants, but I was fascinated for a long while (and still am) with his attempts to systemize history into cycles. One really can’t, and he does a lot of plates spinning to make his formulations work.  (and yet, seeing that he sees the West in a period headed toward “Caesarism” and the rise of fascism in Europe and America, I still wonder). But somewhere along the line, I came across a reference that Blish had used a Spenglerian type of history for his Cities in Flight in sequence. 

And so I had to go read it.  The idea is bonkers, outfitting whole cities to go out into space is an idea that simply should not work.  (And yet, it’s an idea which has come time and again ever since).  But the idea of the Okies culture rising, changing, growing as the cities of Earth explore the galaxy and try to make a living is a compelling one. Characters? Plots?  I really don’t remember either for the novel sequence. But the basic ideas (including a devastating nuclear weapon type), especially the spindizzy drive itself, stuck with me.  And of course, the fact that the head of the migrating cities is the city of New York, of course, warmed and warms my ex-pat New Yorker’s heart. And a novel sequence that concludes with the end (or is it the beginning of a new one?) universe is as big a stakes as you can possibly ever get. 

I’ve also read A Case of Conscience, which I feel is a prelude or an overture to the work of Mary Doria Russell, and maybe in another vein, Walter M Miller Jr.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) EYE-OPENING GAMES. In Nature, Sam Illingworth discusses “Why role-playing games can spur climate action”.

… Imagine you are the mayor of a coastal city. How high would you build a sea wall, for example, to offer protection from future flooding? The decision involves balancing the risks of breaches against the cost of construction, without knowing how fast seas might rise or what the wider consequences of building it might be.

It is hard to anticipate the complexity of the decisions that we will all face as the world warms. But, as a game designer and education researcher, I know that games — and, in particular, role-playing games — can be an invaluable tool for helping us think through scenarios. By getting players to deal with situations in a simulated environment, games can help us to explore options in a risk-free way.

For example, I’ve used the board game Terraforming Mars to introduce young adults to the ethics of space colonization. Players control corporations competing to transform Mars into a habitable planet by extracting resources, building cities and creating green spaces. Nearly every session evolves into a heated debate about diverting resources to make a new ‘Earth’ instead of fixing the one we have….

(13) STRANGER WILL STAY ON STAGE. “‘Stranger Things: The First Shadow’ Trailer Teases Horrific Rise of Henry Creel as West End Play Extends Into 2025” – Variety tells where to find the trailer and the stage show.

“Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” the stage play based on Netflix‘s hit sci-fi drama of the same name, will extend its run on London’s West End into 2025. Previously, shows were only scheduled through Dec. 14, but tickets are now available through Feb. 16.

The news comes as Netflix debuts an official trailer for “The First Shadow,” which serves as a “Stranger Things” prequel. Set in 1959 Hawkins, Ind., “The First Shadow” tells the origin story of Henry Creel, a new kid in town who later goes on to become Vecna, the villain introduced in “Stranger Things” Season 4….

(14) KEEPING TIME. Here’s another reverential look at “John Williams and the Music of ‘Star Wars’” at Take Note.

…John Williams’s neoclassical approach combines elements of classic Hollywood composers (Max Steiner’s leitmotifs and physical action, Alfred Newman’s lush string writing, Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s heroic fanfares, and Bernard Herrmann’s suspenseful ostinati) as well as Americana concert composers (such as Aaron Copland and Howard Hanson), and even some of the jazzy piano-based scores of Henry Mancini. 

He is a product of his time, and he found the right collaborator in Steven Spielberg; the two represent one of the most productive director/composer relationships in history….

(15) ON THE LOOSE. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] Be on the watch for Mongo (or maybe, if we’re lucky, the planet Porno…) “Euclid telescope spies rogue planets floating free in Milky Way” in the Guardian.

Astronomers have spotted dozens of rogue planets floating free from their stars after turning the Euclid space telescope to look at a distant region of the Milky Way.

The wandering worlds were seen deep inside the Orion nebula, a giant cloud of dust and gas 1,500 light years away, and described in the first scientific results announced by Euclid mission researchers.

The European Space Agency (Esa) launched the €1bn (£851m) observatory last summer on a six-year mission to create a 3D map of the cosmos. Armed with its images, scientists hope to understand more about the mysterious 95% of the universe that is unexplained….

(16) MOMENT IN THE SUN. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Today’s Nature cover is quite nifty. Link to cover and contents here.

The Sun undergoes an 11-year cycle that results in a variation of its magnetic field, readily seen in the creation and movement of sunspots. Conventional models assert that the origins of this solar dynamo lie deep within the star, but in this week’s issue, Geoffrey Vasil and colleagues present a model that suggests the opposite is true. The researchers identify that instabilities very close to the Sun’s surface provide a better explanation of the various features of the solar dynamo. The cover is a composite of some 150 images of the Sun taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory between 2010 and 2020, capturing variations in the Sun’s magnetic field over nearly a full sunspot cycle.

There is an “Instability could explain the Sun’s curious cycle” short review item on this here (paywalled).

The primary research paper is at the link.

(17) URANUS PROBE. And in this edition there is a comment piece…. “Why the European Space Agency should join the US mission to Uranus”

Without international partnerships, NASA’s ground-breaking mission could fail to be ready in time for its optimal launch window.

This week, space and planetary scientists are meeting at the Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland, to scope out a new flagship NASA mission — the Uranus Orbiter and Probe. Still on the drawing board, the project would entail sending a spacecraft to orbit Uranus and drop a probe into the planet’s atmosphere. The spacecraft, which could be built and launched within a decade, would investigate the nature of Uranus, including its unusual tilt and magnetic field. It would also search the planet’s moons for signs of hidden oceans and other potentially habitable environments.

Such a mission would be ground-breaking — the first to orbit an ‘ice giant’ planet. Thought to be made mostly of ices, or perhaps dominated by rocks, ice giants Uranus and Neptune have more exotic chemistry than do Jupiter and Saturn, which as ‘gas giants’ consist mainly of hydrogen and helium gas1,2. Ice giants are also the most common type of exoplanet in the Milky Way3. With characteristics that lie between those of gas giants and of Earth and other terrestrial planets, it’s crucial to learn how such systems formed and evolved.

That’s why the Uranus Orbiter and Probe was given priority status in the 2022 US Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey. And NASA is set to lead it. At the Goddard workshop, scientists will scope out the mission and consider its design, technologies and costs.

The mission has been under discussion for some time, and it will be exciting to see it begin to take shape. But, to make sure it is successful and happens as quickly and cost-effectively as possible, we would like to see others involved in its design, too. As a first step, we call for the European Space Agency (ESA) to join the project by, for example, building the entry probe — a possibility that was foreseen in the decadal report and has been assessed by ESA but has not yet been agreed.

Uranus

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

Pixel Scroll 4/14/24 Something For Everyone, A Pixel Scroll Tonight!

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(1) PROBABLY SOMETHING. I would use Patrick Morris Miller’s entire verse as the title if it wouldn’t break Jetpack. Here are the lyrics he posted in comments.

Something quite fannish,
Something quite slannish,
Something for everyone,
A pixel scroll tonight!

from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Consuite

(2) TAFF NEWS. Taffluorescence 4, downloadable from the link, has the latest on the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund: (1) a two-vote correction to the TAFF results reported a couple weeks ago, (2) winner Sarah Gulde’s basic itinterary, and (3) financial information.  

(3) QUANTUM SHORTS WINNERS. The winners of the Quantum Shorts flash fiction contest have been announced. The stories can be read at the links.

First Prize

Runner-Up

People’s Choice Prize

The two stories were selected for the competition’s top honors by Quantum Shorts judges Chad Orzel, George Musser, Ingrid Jendrzejewski, José Ignacio Latorre, Ken Liu, Leonardo Benini and Tania De Rozario from a shortlist of ten quantum-inspired stories. The winner receives $1500, and the runner-up gets $1000.

The People’s Choice Prize was chosen by a public poll on the shortlist, and includes $500.

In addition to the shortlist award, certificate and digital subscription to Scientific American that is awarded to all the finalists, the three winners will receive cash awards and an engraved trophy.

(4) FOR XUYA COMPLETISTS. “The Universe of Xuya by Aliette de Bodard” at Laura’s Library.

…The Universe of Xuya by Aliette de Bodard is one of the Best Series finalists for the 2024 Hugo Awards.  As this point, there are two novels and 33 pieces of short fiction (4 novellas, 13 novelettes, and 16 short stories).  Since the main connection between them is the setting, they can pretty much be read independently and in any order.  Take a look at the author’s webpage about the series for suggestions on where to start and background information….

(5) WRITER BEWARE. Jeanne Veillette Bowerman explains “How a Book Really Becomes a Movie” in a guest post at Writer Beware. Here the introduction.

… The filmmaking industry baffles many—even those working in it. The reality is, there is no single way to get a film made. There are quite literally as many ways to break in as there are writers who’ve successfully done so, making scams harder to identify.

Sadly, when someone proactively reaches out to you, you have to assume it’s fake until you can prove otherwise. With scams abounding, the burden of proof has shifted. Due diligence has never been more important.

  • You do NOT need a screenplay to sell your book-to-film rights.
  • You do NOT need a sizzle reel or “cinematic trailer”.
  • You do NOT need storyboards.
  • You do NOT need mood boards.
  • You should NOT have to pay any upfront fees.
  • You should NOT be required to buy anything.

Let’s go through the traditional paths first, then I’ll share an unusual story to demonstrate how varied this process can be….

(6) IF YOU LIKE SCIENCE IN YOUR SF. AND ROMANCE. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] The Bookseller had an article about an upcoming romance novel that has a plot element that might be relevant to File 770: “Rights – Corvus snaps up Rose McGee’s STEM rom-com Talk Data to Me”.

Corvus has snapped up Rose McGee’s “delightful” STEM rom-com, Talk Data to Me…

“Physicists Dr Erin Monaghan and Dr Ethan Meyer are bitter rivals,” the synopsis says. “They are each at the forefront of their opposing fields and competing for everything: grant money, lab time, government backing. But fate has lined up a meet-cute on the pages of sci-fi magazine Galactica. Erin’s short story and Ethan’s illustrations are paired for publication, and when they meet online as their alter egos ‘Aaron Forster’ and ‘Bannister’, sparks fly.”

(7) HOMEMADE WHO. “Watch: The Doctor Who movie being filmed in Cardiff” at Nation Cymru.

A Doctor Who fan feature film described as a ‘passionate tribute to the classic ’70s and ’80s series’ is being filmed in Cardiff using local amateur actors and crew.

The movie titled ‘Dr Who meets The Scorpion’ is to be released as a non-profit film on YouTube purely for the pleasure of the fans to watch.

As of last month – 45 minutes of the 70 minute feature film is already in the can.

Now the makers of the movie have launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise the funds needed to complete filming…. [Dr Who meets the Scorpion at Greenlit]

…Are there any copyright implications in making something like this and how would you circumnavigate them?

There are literally hundreds of Dr Who fan films out there on Youtube. As well as Star Trek, Star Wars, James Bonds fan films. As long as you don’t try to make money out of something like Doctor Who that belongs to the BBC there has never been a problem. If you put it out on Youtube for free purely for the enjoyment of the fans then I don’t think the BBC is concerned. I’m not trying to compete with the BBC series and wouldn’t want to. How could we on our tiny budget? We’re trying to give a flavour of the 70s/80s series with a bit of the Peter Cushing Dalek movies thrown in as well. It’s my homage to the days of the classic series where the ingenuity of the designers faced with a tight budget produced some iconic sets and monsters out of nothing. Just like I’m having to do! That’s always been the charm of the classic series for me.

What is the plotline of Dr Who meets The Scorpion without giving away spoilers obviously?

The Doctor bumps into Jennie in a deserted warehouse at night, both there to find out more about the mysterious Scorpion company. They start to unravel a fiendish plot by the arch villain Scorpion and his right hand man Taylor which takes them from Earth to a planet far, far away! Thrills, spills, monsters, peril and adventure await them…and we couldn’t resist including the iconic Daleks as well!…

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born April 14, 1925 — Rod Steiger. (Died 2002.) Let’s start with Rod Steiger’s best-known genre role as Carl in The Illustrated Man. The film is based off of three short stories from Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man released first seventy-three years ago, “The Veldt”, “The Long Rain” and “The Last Night of the World” with all three having been published elsewhere previously. 

Need I say that I madly, deeply love this collection?  I have it as an audiobook from Audible with the narrator being Scott Brick who does the Philip Marlowe series. 

Rod Steiger being illustrated.

Steiger gives his usual commanding performance though I do think he was a bit much at times. Hostile and violent, it’s hard to feel any sympathy for him. That of course is the role. And setting aside the role, there’s that illustrated body. I wasn’t sure if it was his body that got illustrated or not until I actually found the image below which indicates that indeed he got inked before every filming session. Cool.

Let’s not forget the other two principal actors, Claire Bloom and Robert Drives, who put on magnificent performances as well.  It was nominated for a Hugo at Heicon ’70.

He had several genre roles after that, all interesting. 

A decade after this film, he’s in The Amityville Horror as Father Francis ‘Frank’ Delaney, a rather great role. 

He’s Dr. Phillip Lloyd in The Kindred. Hey, it has a tentacled baby in it. Need I say more? 

In Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! he is a United States Army General who did not trust the Martians, and advised nuclear warfare against them, an action which that is not allowed by President Dale.

He sank his teeth, no I couldn’t resist into his next role as Dr. Van Helsing, leader of Van Helsing’s Institute of Vienna in Modern Vampires (also known as Revenant). 

Finally he’s in an Arnold Schwarzenegger film, End of Days, a horror film about a young woman who is chosen to bear the Antichrist. He’s Father Kovac here. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) ALSO KNOWN AS. Rich Horton has put together a “Pseudonyms Quiz” for readers of Strange at Ecbatan.

…Most of these questions are about writers, but there are some from the film world, one singer, and one more politically-oriented individual. I’ll have answers in a couple of days. If you wish, leave your guess in the comments….

I got 11 out of 16, greatly aided by the hints that Horton sprinkled along the way. Not bad, but I expect to hear from Filers who have run the table.

(11) ADD ONE TO THE BUCKET LIST. “Deadpool & Wolverine Getting ‘Intentionally Crude’ Popcorn Bucket Kevin Feige Reveals” – story at Comicbook.com.

…While the folks behind the Dune: Part Two bucket (probably) didn’t intend for people to view it in a lewd way, Marvel Studios has decided to take the idea and run with it for Deadpool & Wolverine. Kevin Feige took the stage at CinemaCon today during Disney’s presentation and revealed the movie will have an intentionally risqué popcorn bucket. 

“Deadpool & Wolverine is getting a popcorn bucket which will be intentionally crude and lewd. #CinemaCon,” ComicBook.com‘s Brandon Davis shared on Twitter while attending the presentation…

(12) GRADE INFLATION. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] This Variety article about movies presented at industry-insider CinemaCon is packed with information on upcoming releases. But it’s hard to take their overall conclusions too seriously since none of the companies’ slates received a grade below a B-. “CinemaCon Winners and Losers: ‘Gladiator 2,’ ‘Wicked,’ ‘Deadpool 3’”.

Hollywood decamped for Las Vegas this week for CinemaCon, looking to reassure movie theater owners and executives that they had what it takes to keep audiences flocking to cinemas through 2024 and beyond. And despite odes to the magic of the big screen experience, there was a whiff of desperation in the artificially-oxygenated, cigarette-perfumed air of Caesars Palace, where the annual exhibition trade show takes place.

That’s because the box office hasn’t recaptured its pre-pandemic stride — studios estimate that roughly 15% to 20% of frequent moviegoers have yet to resume their old entertainment habits now that COVID has dissipated. Plus, the labor strikes that consumed the media industry for much of the previous year as actors and writers hit the picket lines resulted in production delays that left theaters with fewer movies to hawk on their marquees….

….After four days filled with hours-long pitches to tease blockbuster hopefuls and big gambles, Variety has assessed the studio presentations that may have missed the mark or could just salvage the struggling box office….

(13) STIFFED AGAIN. In Morecambe & Wise’s 1980 Christmas Special, Peter Cushing makes another attempt to get the money he’s owed for appearing in the M&W show in the early 70’s

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Jim Benson’s TV Time Machine investigates “What Happened to the Rod Serling’s Night Gallery Paintings?”

What happened to the Night Gallery paintings? Night Gallery co-author Jim Benson reveals the strange and sometimes sad fate of these classic, and valuable, TV artifacts. The fate of the Night Gallery paintings has always been shrouded in mystery–until now!

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