First panel of the final day of the convention was John Hertz’s book discussion of Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones. It’s from 1952, right in the middle of RAH’s Golden Age of SF juveniles. RAH didn’t choose to depict technology much beyond that which existed or was reasonably plausible for the early 1950s, so instead of a suspension of disbelief the reader obtains a creation of belief. The book is a good example of Heinlein’s expertise in using a socioeconomic basis to create a sense of humanity in his fiction. It’s still readable.
“TIME TRAVEL IN THE MEDIA” PANEL
(L-R) Elektra Hammond, Maria, Chuck Rothman, and Daniel Kimmel
An anthology panel, be it an interesting one that included brief deconstructions and plot analyses, that consisted of shout outs to fan favorites like Quantum Leap and Doctor Who, and some lesser-known shows like The Lazarus Project. My suggestions, when it came time for Q&A, were The History of Time Travel (find it and watch it, it’s worth it) and an old favorite, ‘The Orb’ story arc of The Adventures of Bristol County, Jr. There were so many possibilities for discussion that the panel could have gone on for hours.
CLOSING CEREMONIES
Seated at podium, left to right: Alan Dean Foster, Suford Lewis, Tony Lewis, Phil Foglio, Kaja Foglio, Nilah Magruder. Chair Wayne Brown at lectern.
Short and sweet. The guests all had praise for the concom. And the convention got through its four days without any disasters. Special thanks went out to Chuck Rothman who developed the program. I can second and even third that, as there was no lack of interesting panels to attend. Let’s do it again someday!
(L-R) Bill Horst-Kotter, D.G. Valdron, Devo Spice, and Chuck Rothman
I was handicapped by not having seen many of the Ncuti episodes. So here are a few random thoughts from the panelists: Jodie Whittaker era was mostly done in by lots of meh writing. The new Russell T. Davies era hasn’t “hit its stride” yet. “The Space Babies” episode was a lot of “okay” at best. And everybody was really tired of episodes where the fate of the entire universe was at stake. But hey, it’s still a great series!
SUFORD AND TONY – THEIR HOUR
Suford and Tony Lewis: It was a pleasant stroll through their many years in fandom.
IT’S ALIVE! IT’S ALI-I-I-VE!!
The fanzine lounge now exists. After a long and at times strange journey, John Hertz arrived in Buffalo late last night, and today spent a couple of hours breathing life into what had been a cold, empty room. Now all it needs is some convention attendees who are interested in fanzines to stop by.
THE “HOW I FOUND FANDOM” PANEL
(L-R) Jilibean, David Kushner, Tony Lewis, Daniel Kimmel, Jeanne Mealy, and D. Cameron Calkins
An interesting blend of recollections which we can probably all mostly identify with. The most usual doorway still seems to be from being a science fiction reader, but science fiction on TV and in the movies seems not far behind. How different things would be if Bjo had not taken it upon herself to start a campaign to save Star Trek.
THE CONVENTION’S NAME BADGE
Here it is. Mine is numbered “S 1329”, and when I asked the con registration folks what the “S” meant (everybody’s badge has that feature), nobody knew.
Also, I checked what the current registration totals were and found out there were 475 pre-reg and (as of this evening) 509 people in attendance.
Nobody was able to explain to me why my badge number is 1329.
PARTY TIME
Only one party last night (Montreal in 202-whenever) and it appeared to have run out of food after about an hour-and-a-half. Lots more options this evening.
Here’s what the New Orleans CONtraflow DeepSouthCon 2025 had to offer. Yum!
PARTY #2
The Capricon party also has lot of good stuff to eat, but next to nobody has figured out where it is yet.
NO TROUBLE AT ALL FINDING THIS PARTY
Minneapolis in 2073 had lots of good ambience, pretty good food, and friends to talk to. Hurry up with those longevity drugs!
I may have to walk that “good food” comment back a bit… featured snack food is Peeps.
THE HOTEL. An interesting building (more on that a bit later) but I don’t think it was truly ready for the convention. I was told that it had run out of food last night — if so, not so good planning on its part. And one of the three elevators has been out of service since about 3-4 days before the start of the convention with no estimate when it will be repaired.
As for the elevators which do work, there’s an interesting steampunk vibe with the room floor display.
THE WONDERFUL OLD GENESEE BUILDING. The building that is occupied by the Hyatt Regency opened back in 1923 as a multi-tenant office building. It survived various boom and bust cycles over the decades until, in 1976, it went into bankruptcy. Hyatt reached agreement with the city of Buffalo to have a hotel in the space the building occupied, but there was enough community resistance to the original plan of razing the building to make way for a characterless glass-walled tower that an enterprising architectural firm came up with a way to include the building into a new and better overall design.
There was an addition of a new atrium and the new Hyatt hotel opened in February 1984. The facade of the old building is still a prominent feature that segues the atrium into the hotel proper. It’s a grand space.
The original building facade.
PANEL: THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE +50. Friday morning panel looking back at the Niven-Pournelle novel from 1974. Another partly virtual panel with (l-r) Donald Wyatt, Jr., Entwife Judy, JMac, and two online participants. Oh group mind, help me with who they are.
Overall, a pretty good retrospective. It wasn’t a Motie-esque dissection, but it did delve into a lot of the details and nuances of the novel.
BEHOLD THE FANZINE LOUNGE! It’s located next to the gaming area, which itself is only marginally busier.
Still, this is an improvement from yesterday, when the fanzine lounge was locked up the entire day.
BUFFALOS EVERYWHERE. As you might expect, statues of bison are fairly common here in Buffalo. This one is “Molly” and she’s located on the walkway over Pearl Street between the hotel and the convention center.
(Photo by Andy Porter, but since it’s my phone he’s doing it as a work for hire. In this case he works really cheaply!)
PANEL: BOOKS TO FILM.
(L-R) Vaughne Hansen, Catherine Cohen, Alan Dean Foster, Lawrence Connolly, and Richard Sparks
Pretty informative and interesting, from a nuts-and-bolts deep dive perspective. Lots of useful information for prospective screenwriters interspersed with many amusing anecdotes.
THE DEALERS ROOM, ART SHOW, FAN TABLES, AND FREEBIE TABLES AREA
All these are in the Convention Center. There is still a huge amount of unused space, probably enough to stage a fannish softball game like the one at the 2013 Worldcon in Texas.
PANEL: GALAXY QUEST +25
(L-R) Joshua Palmatier, Randy Hoffman, JF Garrard, Ira Nayman, and John-Allen Price
The panel went out of its way to avoid movie trivia associated with the film. Instead, there was a lot about how the movie affected the career path on some of the actors and how fandom embraced the film. But the most memorable thing that happened was when the real-time voice recognition onscreen text kept pranking Nayman. The first time he had the microphone it interpreted him as saying “penis 45 penis 45 penis 45”.
The next time, it captioned him “shut up shut up”, and the time after that “more country music please”. Didn’t quite upstage the panel, but it came close.
PANEL: HEINLEIN: HOW DOES HE HOLD UP TODAY?
(L-R) David Gerrold, David Ritter, Entwife Judy, and Stephen Wilk
As expected, the panelists drew a dividing line between the early Heinlein who wrote entertaining and sense of wonder so-called “juveniles” and the later Heinlein who wrote bloated and self-indulgent novels. The panel did a good job dissecting many of Heinlein’s stories and novels, and the consensus seemed to be that, yeah, it all does still hold up today, even though some of it is obviously retro. We’re all still fans.
OPENING CEREMONIES. Wayne Brown on stage. Alan Dean Foster (in straw hat) said this is the first convention of any kind he’s been to in ten years.
GoHs seated at podium, left to right: Suford Lewis, Tony Lewis, Nilah Magruder, Kaja Foglio, Phil Foglio, Alan Dean Foster.
VIRTUAL GUEST IS INTRODUCED. Cheryl S. Ntumi, all the way from Ghana.
And yeah, the real time closed captioning was (as usual) doing wonky things.
PANEL: EARLY FANDOM. Late afternoon panel about “Early Fandom in Upstate New York”. David Ritter of the First Fandom Foundation described the 1943 Schenectacon and the 1944 Buffalocon, including mini histories of many of the fans from that era. About a dozen in the audience, and we were all fascinated and entertained.
PANEL: ARE TRADITIONAL SF CONS DYING? Short answer: probably.
Randy Hoffman, Michael Ventrella, Tony Lewis, and David Stephenson expound on the topic.
HYBRID PANEL: An entertaining one: “Science Fiction in 60s Comics”.
Left to right: Stephen Wilk, Chuck Rothman, D.G. Valdron and (virtually) Martin Shoemaker
(1) SHERYL BIRKHEAD’S FANZINE COLLECTION. [Item by Rich Lynch.] I’m sad to report that my friend Sheryl Birkhead unfortunately is now in the midst of severe vascular dementia. This is resulting in her being relocated from her house into an assisted living situation. As a result, her house (in Montgomery County, MD) will be put up for sale soon, and in the near future there will need to be a disposition of her extensive collection of fanzines, many of which are historically valuable.
So, on her behalf, I am looking for indications of interest from university libraries which have existing collections of fanzines. Sheryl’s collection will be a significant and valuable addition to one of these library collections.
If you have a contact with a university library fanzine collection curator, please pass this information on to him/her. I am the point of contact and I can be reached at [email protected]
Your assistance is appreciated in helping to preserve this valuable collection.
Frankenstein was published in three volumes on January 1, 1818, by a small London publishing house, Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones, with a small print run of 500 copies. The first edition appeared anonymously, and featured an unsigned preface by Percy Shelley, and a dedication to Mary’s father, philosopher William Godwin. Mary Shelley didn’t publicly claim her novel until four years later, when her novel was adapted into a popular play.
Bidders also fought over a first edition presentation copy of Tolkien’s 1937 The Hobbit, featuring a dust jacket — likewise the creation of Tolkien — so brilliant-bright its snow-capped mountains seem to burst out of its famously verdant landscape. Tolkien gifted this copy to dear friends, writing inside, “Charles & Dorothy Moore / from. / J.R.R.T / with love / September 1937.”
…Science is our most effective tool or process for discovering and understanding reality. It also enables us to create technologies with godlike powers. Unfortunately, this comes with the risk of placing too much trust in scientists and too much reliance on technology. The question of who gets to control and benefit most from deadly, invasive, or dehumanizing technology is a common science-fiction theme.
“When a population is dependent on a machine, they are hostages of the men who tend the machines.” — Robert A. Heinlein, “The Roads Must Roll,” 1940 short story
“Aren’t these the people who taught us how to annihilate ourselves? I tell you, my friends, science is too important to be left to the scientists.” — Carl Sagan, Contact, 1985 novel
“It has undoubtedly occurred to you, as to all thinking people of your day, that the scientists have done a particularly abominable job of dispensing the tools they have devised. Like careless and indifferent workmen they have tossed the products of their craft to gibbering apes and baboons.” — Raymond F. Jones, This Island Earth, 1952 novel
On the other hand, prominent astronomer Fred Hoyle wrote a science-fiction novel in the 1950s that contained the suggestion that scientists don’t have enough power.
“Has it ever occurred to you, Geoff, that in spite of all the changes wrought by science—by our control over inanimate energy, that is to say—we still preserve the same old social order of precedence? Politicians at the top, then the military, and the real brains at the bottom.” — Fred Hoyle, The Black Cloud, 1957 novel…
…All of the websites targeted for Fullers’ link suggestions include resource pages or otherwise offer lists of outbound links, and each suggested link is seeded across multiple recipient sites: for example, a websearch on the rain garden article yields six pages of results, with many different “student” names supposedly responsible for recommending it. The articles are, for the most part, like Nora’s: superficial but not overtly bogus, just the kind of thing that you could believe an enthusiastic young student might find helpful.
As for the sites to which the suggested links direct, in some cases they are a semi-plausible match for the articles they host (for example, an article on paper bag crafts hosted at a printing company, and an article on pickleball hosted at a playground equipment vendor), but more often it’s like the examples above: the article has zero relevance to its host, and isn’t accessible from the host menu. Many of these hosts–some of which are pretty shady-seeming–are home to multiple Fullers-recommended articles.
(5) SFF AUDIO DRAMA. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The BBC’s Radio 4 (formerly the Home Service) airs some excellent audio dramas with some solid SF in the mix. The latest such offering is The Skies Are Watching.
Heather Haskins went missing two years ago. Discovered aboard a flight without a ticket or identification, she now believes she’s a woman named Coral Goran, it’s 1938, and that she was abducted on the night of Orson Welles’ infamous</I> War of the Worlds <I>broadcast. Her family struggles to come to terms with this turn of events while searching for answers…
Episode 1 airs Friday, July 5 and can for a month be accessed here.
(6) TEDDY HARVIA CARTOON.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
July 5, 1957 — Jody Lynn Nye, 67.
By Paul Weimer. I mainly know the work of Nye as a collaborator and facilitator, working with other people’s work. Sure, she has written a slew of short stories, and several novels of her own. But when I think of her work, I don’t think of those as much as I should. Instead, I think of her work with Robert Asprin, and Anne McCaffrey.
Neither is a surprise. One of the strong arrows in Nye’s quiver is humor, and collaboration with Asprin on some of the later works in the MYTH series must have seemed natural to both of them when they decided to do it. Both engage in both broad humor and subtle wordplay, laugh out loud at the moment, and later poleaxing bits of humor as profound as they are funny. And coming in as she did late in the series, it provided a fresh infusion of ideas for the MYTH series at the time and helped extend the series into the 2000s.
Jody Lynn Nye
And then there is Anne McCaffrey. The first thing I read by Nye is not her standalone novels, or MYTH, but rather her guide to Pern. Even then, intensely interested in worldbuilding, of COURSE I had to pick this one up (it would be one of several I picked up, including one on Julian May’s Pliocene exile, the Visual Guide to Castle Amber, et cetera). I only in retrospect realized that the Nye who wrote this would be the one who collaborated with McCaffrey in the other arena McCaffrey is known more: The Ship Who Sang. That original novella, way back in the 1960’s led to Nye and McCaffrey collaborating on more stories and novels about a sentient spaceship. Nye also continued the series on her own, as did other authors like S M Stirling. (In point of fact, Nye seems to like to do that, to continue on series. She did it with MYTH and with some other series as well, extending and building them outward.
And then there is the odd collaborative/shared world Exiled Claw, which is an alternate earth where intelligent bipedal cats (think Kzinti but not as stupidly aggressive ) take on intelligent dinosaurs in a bronze age/early iron age technology verse. Nye shows off yet another arrow in her quiver in those two volumes. Pity they stopped after two volumes and not even Nye has had the opportunity to write any more. Alas!
It would be a Mythstake, indeed, to discount Nye’s work in the SFF field as “merely” being collaborative. (She also teaches at DragonCon every year, too). Collaborations and working in other people’s sandboxes is hard, not easier, than original ideas, and Nye has a talent (and clearly, a proclivity) for it.
The Far Side does not have the brightest detectives on the case.
(9) SCIENCE EXHIBITION IN LONDON. [Item by Steven French.] If anyone happens to be in London over the weekend, there’s some neat stuff going on at the Royal Society: “Summer Science Exhibition 2024”.
Discover cutting-edge research and innovation at the Royal Society’s unmissable Summer Science Exhibition, taking place from 2 – 7 July 2024, an interactive experience open to everyone with a curious mind. This is a free event and no ticket is required.
This year, visitors can get hands-on with personal brain scanners, hear real ice core samples from Antarctica, marvel at a chandelier made from a waste product, or learn how stem cells are revealing secrets of the embryo. Find out more about the 14 main exhibits and plan your visit.
DUNE, the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, is a cutting-edge experiment developed by the international neutrino physics community to study a broad range of science, including neutrino oscillations, neutrinos from nearby supernovae, and proton decays.
The Near Detector of the experiment will be hosted by Fermilab, IL, USA, with its Far Detector 1300 km away in South Dakota at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF). Surprisingly, no tunnel is needed for the neutrinos to travel through because these ghostly particles pass easily through soil and rock as they rarely interact with matter. The Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LNBF) at Fermilab will deliver a neutrino beam of unprecedented power, which is needed for the detailed measurements DUNE is due to take of such elusive particles.
Probably the most well-known goal of the experiment is to study neutrino oscillations. This has driven the large-scale design of the experiment as neutrinos need to travel a large distance for oscillation to take place. This will help solve some fundamental questions, such as why the Universe is made of matter and not antimatter, and provide more information about the masses and nature of neutrinos….
(10) CHINA SMASH! [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Not satisfied, one supposes, with the NASA effort to redirect asteroids in the DART mission, China claims they will one up that by “smashing“ a 30-meter asteroid by 2030. (It might be noted that the smaller asteroid, (Dimorphos) of the double asteroid NASA targeted—the one actually impacted—was ~170-meters and thus much more massive than China’s target.)
China is planning to launch a spacecraft with the aim of smashing a nearby asteroid, in an impact designed to test the feasibility of protecting against any Earth-threatening asteroids like the one that killed off the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago.
Researchers outlined their plans in a recent paper published in the Journal of Deep Space Exploration and spotted by The Planetary Society, saying that a test mission should happen before 2030 and that an asteroid with a diameter of about 30 meters will be the target….
That led to a career in space agriculture, figuring out how to grow food on other planets. She credits time later spent living among the Kambeba, an Indigenous tribe in the Amazon rainforest she is descended from, for her conviction that it is essential that she do more than explore distant worlds. She wants to preserve this one, too.
“It’s a very conscientious topic within the world of space agriculture science,” said Gonçalves, noting that “every single piece of research that we produce must have direct benefits to Earth.”
That ideal makes her latest research particularly timely. She and a team at the Wageningen University & Research Centre for Crop System Analysis found that an ancient Maya farming technique called intercropping works surprisingly well in the dry, rocky terrain of Mars.
Their findings, published last month in the journal PLOS One, have obvious implications for the possibility of exploring or even settling that distant planet. But understanding how to grow crops in the extraordinarily harsh conditions on other planets does more than ensure those colonizing them can feed themselves. It helps those here at home continue to do the same as the world warms.
“People don’t really realize [this], because it seems far away, but actually our priority is to develop this for the benefit of Earth,” said Gonçalves. “Earth is beautiful, and it’s unique, and it’s rare, and it’s fragile. And it needs our help.”…
Intercropping, or growing different crops in close proximity to one another to increase the size and nutritional value of yields, requires less land and water than monocropping, or the practice of continuously planting just one thing. Although common among small farmers, particularly across Latin America, Africa, and China, intercropping remains a novelty in much of the world. This is partly because of the complexity of managing such systems and largely unfounded concerns about yield loss and pest susceptibility. Modern plant breeding programs also tend to focus on individual species and a general trend toward less diversity in the field….
[Thanks to Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Rich Lynch, 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.]
(1) SCAM TARGETING WESTERN AUTHORS PURPORTS TO BE FROM SCIENCE FICTION WORLD. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] On Saturday May 11th, the Weibo account of Science Fiction World magazine issued a statement about fraudulent emails addressed to authors. The emails claimed that SFW had decided to no longer publish work by the author that had previously been acquired, but would retain the copyright, and offered the author the chance to pay to reclaim their copyright. The post did include an image showing part of the (English language) email that one affected author did receive, but redacted their name. A Weibo post a day or so earlier identified at least one such affected author, but at time of writing, that author hasn’t posted about it on Twitter or Bluesky, so I’ve not included their name here.
A Google Translate rendition of the statement, with minor manual edits, follows.
Dear readers, authors and partners,
Recently, we have received feedback from foreign science fiction writers that we work with. Some criminals are using impersonation techniques to launch carefully planned email fraud incidents targeting those foreign writers.
This fraudulent email uses the email address “[email protected]“, purporting to be from an editor at our company. It falsely informs the author that their work will not be published due to so-called “commercial evaluation” or other reasons, and illegally claims to retain the copyright of the author’s work, proposing that the author should pay a fee to redeem their copyright.
We strongly condemn such illegal behavior and have taken corresponding measures to cooperate with law enforcement agencies and actively investigate the matter. In order to protect the rights and interests of all authors, readers and partners, we hereby issue the following anti-fraud guidelines. Please be vigilant and jointly prevent such fraud as follows:
1. Get confirmation through official channels: Our company will formally notify you through official channels (the official contact channels are indicated on the copyright pages of “Science Fiction World” and its journals) for any decisions regarding the publication status of the work, copyright transfer, or financial transactions. . When receiving similar emails, please do not reply directly to the email, but verify through official channels.
2. Be wary of fake email addresses: Scammers often use addresses that are very similar to official email addresses to send emails. When receiving similar emails, please carefully check the sender’s email address and pay attention to identifying subtle differences, such as adding or replacing characters, using different top-level domain names, etc.
3. Understand the formal processes: Our company has complete and strict business processes. For major matters such as copyright and contract changes, our company will implement a strict and formal process and will never make a hasty decision through just one email.
4. Direct communication verification: If you receive such an email, the most direct and effective way is to contact us through the official contact method you know to verify the situation. Never use the contact number or return address provided in the email for verification.
5. Improve information security awareness: Keep personal information and communications safe, and do not click on unknown links or attachments in emails to prevent personal information from being leaked or being attacked by malware.
We are fully aware of the importance of each author’s work and the hard work behind it.
We will fight resolutely to the end against any behavior that undermines the rights of authors. At the same time, we also encourage authors or other individuals who receive similar emails to report them to us and local law enforcement agencies in a timely manner, so as to jointly maintain a good creative and publishing environment.
Here, we reiterate our commitment to all partners: we will continue to strengthen information security protection and ensure that the rights and interests of every author who works with us are respected and protected to the greatest extent. The general public is requested to remain vigilant and work together to build a safe space for literary exchange.
We are pleased (delighted, ecstatic) to announce that one further lost story by Terry Pratchett has been found.
A Stroke of the Pen: The Lost Stories, published in 2023, collected 20 rediscovered tales from when Terry wrote under a pseudonym back in the 1970s and 1980s. It was, at the time, believed to be the last stories of his. But, we were wrong.
One final published tale has been found, that was missed from this collection: Arnold, the Bominable Snowman, which brings us to some more news.
This new story will appear in the paperback edition of A Stroke of the Pen, which will publish in September 2024. Furthermore, the story itself will be published online – for free – by Penguin Books, so that those who bought the hardback do not miss out on this tale. More information on the paperback edition, and where to read the story online, will be made available at a later date….
(3) FANFICTION GOT THERE FIRST. In case you thought the title sounded familiar, The Hollywood Reporter says there’s a reason: “’The Hunt for Gollum’ LOTR Movie Already Exists”. And for a moment, Warner Bros.’ lawyers were trying to pitch the video into Mount Doom.
There’s a 2009 fan-made film titled The Hunt for Gollum that you can watch below. The film, directed by Chris Bouchard, is rather ambitious. The Hunt for Gollum spans 39 minutes and has received plenty of praise from fans upon its release.
Following WB’s announcement, the film was taken offline for many hours and YouTube put up a notice saying Warner Bros. had filed a copyright claim against the fan movie and blocked it. LOTR fans reacted quite negatively to the takedown online and, early Friday, the film was restored to YouTube….
The fan-made Hunt for Gollum is set during opening act of The Fellowship of the Ring and fills in a quest that was only briefly discussed in Jackson’s 2001 film: Gandalf (played by Patrick O’Connor in the short) meets with Aragorn (Adrian Webster) and asks him to hunt for Gollum to find out more about Frodo’s magic ring. Aragorn has a series of adventures, traps and loses Gollum and gets attacked by orcs and Ringwraiths. Gollum is recaptured by the Elves of Mirkwood, and he’s interrogated by Gandalf….
With my terrible hearing I can’t say whether the audio is in English – but the closed captioning is in Spanish.
(4) SPFBOX. Mark Lawrence’s tenth Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off (“SPFBOX”) immediately filled its 300-entry quota on May 10 and has moved on to “SPFBOX phase 1”.
This is the VERY prelimary allocation of books to blogs.
What now follows will be swapping from blog to blog for books that meet the contest rules but have authors who are friends with someone in the blog they’ve been allocated to.
And elimination of books that don’t meet the rules, followed by their replacement with books that didn’t get selected in the original 300.
In “Space Babies,” the debut episode of the newly relaunched 2024Doctor Who “Season 1” (or Season 14, or Season 40, depending on how you count) the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) have a quick discussion about how beaming works in the universe of Star Trek. When the Doctor makes one small quip, fans of both venerable sci-fi franchises might wonder if travel between the Final Frontier and the Whoinverse, is, indeed possible in some kind of mega-geek-multiverse….
At the start of “Space Babies,” Ruby asks the Doctor if they were just beamed somewhere, saying “Is that like a matter transporter? Like in Star Trek?” The Doctor grins broadly and says, “We gotta visit them one day.” This is not the first time Doctor Who has referenced Star Trek (or that Trek has referenced Who) but, it does seem to be the biggest indication to date — at least on screen — that the canon of Trek could exist in an adjacent dimension, rather than just as fiction.
Throughout all of post-2005 Doctor Who, there have been multiple references to characters and ideas from the Star Trek franchise. Rose called the 9th Doctor “Spock,” in the Season 1 episode “The Empty Child,” the 10th Doctor flashed the Vulcan “live long and prosper” hand symbol in the Season 2 episode “Fear Her,” while the 12th Doctor evoked the famous opening lines “Space… the final frontier,” in the Season 10 episode “Oxygen.” And that’s just a small sampling of Trek Easter eggs in Who!
(6) CHALLENGING HERSELF. “Brush and Ink” at Colleen Doran’s Funny Business, is illustrated with examples based on Gaiman’s Sandman series.
I used to get a lot of ribbing for having an elaborate, decorative style. The word was, artists who choose to add decoration and complex rendering are probably hiding drawing deficiencies.
While I agree that this is sometimes the case (and I can think of a few artists who make my hair go the wrong way with endless rendering and very weak underdrawing,) not all of us are covering up poor structure with frou frou.
I always start with a simple, solid drawing before adding the stylization. If the drawing isn’t solid, I don’t proceed until it is.
Awhile ago I decided to challenge my skill set with a series of minimalist brush and ink pieces. I limited the time cost of each drawing to 10 minutes or less. And I tried to stick to no underdrawing, if possible.
That is, one and done, no prelim. Ink only, nothing else.
While I’ve shown some of these drawings before, you folks on Substack probably haven’t seen most of them.
Most of the original exploratory sketches were based on characters from Neil Gaiman’s SANDMAN series, like this group of sketches of Death….
Nicki Lynch, left, and Sheila Strickland, right, at the Southern Fandom Press Alliance party during Worldcon 76 in San Jose. Photo by Kay McCutcheon.
(7) R.I.P. SHEILA STRICKLAND. Longtime File 770 subscriber Sheila Strickland died May 9. The Louisiana fan said in her zine for the Southern Fandom Press Alliance a few months back that her doctors had detected cancer and it had spread to her intestine and liver. She went into hospice just a few days ago. Rich Lynch says, “She was a great lady, always looking toward the future. And now she’s very much missed.”
Guy H. Lillian III says Sheila’s sister told her Facebook friends that the family obituary will be in the New Orleans Advocate this week and the funeral on May 16 at the Greenoaks Funeral Home and Memorial Park in Baton Rouge at noon.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born May 11, 1918 — Richard P. Feynman. (Died 1988.) I’ll admit that I don’t begin to understand what most of the work Richard P. Feynman did as a theoretical physicist. I seriously doubt most of you do.
While at Princeton, Feynman was recruited for the theoretical division of the Manhattan Project, the very, very secret U.S. Army laboratory set up in Los Alamos, for the purpose of developing the atomic bomb. He was present at the first detonation of an atomic bomb.
Richard P. Feynman. (Caltech Archives)
In 1965, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. The three each created new mathematical tools for a theory called quantum electrodynamics, which describes how subatomic particles interact with light.
Now there is the matter his influence on the genre. Although as I said was his work in theoretical physics, Feynman was largely pioneered the field of quantum computing and was solely responsible for the concept of nanotechnology. So yes, two widely used SF concepts are from him.
By the late Fifties, he was already popularizing his love of physics through books and lectures including lectures on nanotechnology called There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom, and a multi volume publication of his undergraduate lectures, The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Yes, these are available from the usual suspects.
He also became known through his autobiographical works Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?. Naturally there would be books written about him. The biography by James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman is the one I’ll single out as being the best.
It’s worth noting last is that he was selected to be a member the Presidential Rogers Commission that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
Lis notes that during the Challenger explosion hearings, Feynman demonstrated on camera that an O-ring dropped into ice water lost all the resilience critical to its function on the shuttle solid rocket fuel tanks.
(9) ROBERT BLOCH WEBSITE UPDATE. Eight vintage photos of Robert Bloch with such friends/family as Bob Tucker, Dean A. Grennell, Fritz Leiber, Marion Bloch, and others have been added to the RobertBloch.net gallery.
…As reported by Uproxx, during a virtual Pride month panel at Swansea University, Davies described the queer representation in the MCU show [Loki] as being a “feeble gesture”. As you may recall, Tom Hiddleston’s God of Mischief became the first openly queer lead character in MCU canon thanks to a reference to the character’s love life in the first season, but at the time Davies wasn’t impressed by the inclusion: “Loki makes one reference to being bisexual once, and everyone’s like, ‘Oh my god, it’s like a pansexual show.’ It’s like one word. He said the word ‘prince’ and we’re meant to go, ‘Thank you, Disney! Aren’t you marvelous?’ It’s a ridiculous, craven, feeble gesture towards the vital politics and the stories that should be told.”
…Reflecting on that statement now, Davies admits that his comments were a mistake, explaining that he reached out to Herron immediately to apologize. Little did he know that they would continue chatting, striking up a friendship, which would then result in working together on Doctor Who….
… For the upcoming season, Herron and her co-writer Briony Redman have penned episode 6 which is titled ‘Rogue’. Of course, since the Doctor Who team like to keep their cards close to their chests, little has been revealed about the episode, but we do know that it is set in the Regency era and will feature Mindhunter star Jonathan Groff.
This action followed the New York Times’ 2022 article “Disney, Built on Fairy Tales and Fantasy, Confronts the Real World” which said the company’s Disney Stories Matter team “was marked for caution because she is ‘body conscious’ and jealous of Peter Pan’s attention, according to the executives…”
The Street’s May 7 report says:
…[The] Disney’s Stories Matter team was developed to spot and correct “negative depictions of people and cultures” in Disney’s products.
“We are reviewing our offerings beyond the screen, which include products, books, music and experiences,” reads the Stories Matter homepage on Disney’s website. “While advisories for negative depictions of people and cultures may be added to some offerings, others will be reimagined. We are also investing in new ways to better reflect the rich diversity of stories in our world. This work is ongoing and will evolve as we strive toward a more inclusive tomorrow.”…
The PlanDisney website, answering the question “Why does Tinkerbell no longer have a meet and greet and are their plans to bring her back?” says that currently the only location where Tink does meet visitors is at Pixie Hollow at the Disneyland Resort in California.
Minnesota officially unfurled its new state flag atop the capitol for the first time Saturday on statehood day.
The new flag and accompanying state seal were adopted to replace an old design that Native Americans said reminded them of painful memories of conquest and displacement.
The new symbols eliminate an old state seal that featured the image of a Native American riding off into the sunset while a white settler plows his field with a rifle at the ready. The seal was a key feature of the old flag. That’s why there was pressure to change both.
Officials didn’t pick any of the most popular designs submitted online that included options like a loon — the state bird — with lasers for eyes….
The new flagThe loon with lasers for eyes
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Ersatz Culture, Lise Andreasen, Danny Sichel, Rich Lynch, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kaboobie.]
(1) ANGRY ROBOT BRINGS ON ECLIPSE OF STORYWISE. [Item by Anne Marble.] Angry Robot Books announced a one-week open submissions period that begins April 22, and several posts down in their thread they also said they would be using a submissions portal named Storywise to help them sort through their submissions. In their image, they explain a little more and point out that it’s not generative AI.
Angry Robot provided more information about Storywise here: “Storywise and Open Submissions FAQ’s “ [Internet Archive copy]. It included information on how authors can opt out of Storywise being used in their submission.
For obvious reasons, people are worried. People are pointing out that the Storywise platform can have biases. (And because it’s software, you can’t see those biases.) While it’s great that it’s not generative AI, does that mean writers can still trust it? For example, how do authors known what Storywise will do with their submissions? Others think its fine because it’s not generative AI — it’s just AI being used as a tool. Some have pointed out that slush readers are often unpaid, so that this is not taking away jobs. (But does that apply to slush readers working for book publishers?!)
Here is a quote-tweet by Vajra Chandrasekera with lots of information about Storywise. (Thread starts on X.com here.)
Angry Robot subsequently removed the posts to social media about their open submissions, and walked back the announcement with respect to Storywise, saying they will resume using their inbox system.
Editor’s note: Adrian Moher has a good roundup about the controversy at Astrolabe Digest: 040824. (Moher provided the link in his social media.)
(2) ON THE WAY TO THE CENTERLINE. Rich Lynch snapped this photo of the view from Interstate 87, in the middle of Adirondack Park while on his way to witness today’s eclipse. (Click for larger image to read sign).
No pictures of the event itself, though. “I don’t have any eclipse photos on my iPhone.” But Rich says, “It very much did exceed my expectations, even with the sun having to burn its way through a thin cloud layer.”
(3) STOKERCON 2024 ADDS GOH. Rob Savage was announced today as StokerCon 2024’s fifth Guest of Honor.
Rob Savage initially gained attention at the age of 19 when he wrote, directed, produced, and edited the low-budget romantic drama film Strings (2012), he later became more widely known for his work in horror films and has since co-written and directed lockdown horror hit Host (2020), co-written and directed Dashcam (2021), and directed Stephen King adaptation The Boogeyman (2023).
This year’s Librarian’s Day on Friday, May 31, 2024, once again offers fantastic programming featuring the conference’s guest authors on timely topics and more. Librarian’s Day ticket holders ($60) will have access to the Dealers Room and other areas of the full conference throughout the day.
For a second straight year Motor City Furry Con attendees were forced to be evacuated from their hotel due to a threat.
The nature of the threat was not clear, but officials with the convention confirmed Sunday the Ann Arbor Marriott Ypsilanti at Eagle Crest in Ypsilanti was evacuated around 9 a.m.
The “all clear” was given around 12:30 p.m. and the final day of convention activities resumed.
Sunday’s evacuation comes a year after attendees were evacuated from the same hotel due to an emailed bomb threat. Ultimately, there were no injuries or any explosives found last March.
The Motor City Furry Con is a convention for people who “appreciate the anthropomorphic lifestyle,” according to a report from The Detroit Free Press.
The Detroit Free Press article also noted, “Event attendee Scoops took to social media to celebrate the second year of being an evacuee.”
— Scoops! plushieyeen.bsky.social (@SpoonsScoops) April 7, 2024
(5) SLOWLY WE TURNED, STEP BY STEP. “Caeciliusinhorto” has written an impressive perspective piece synthesizing all the news items that comprise “The 2023 Hugo Awards fuckup” for Reddit’s r/HobbyDrama.
… After much discussion, the general consensus seemed to coalesce around a combination of two or three explanations: firstly, active censorship by the Hugo administrators, possibly due to pressure from the Chinese government (national or local); secondly, incompetence; and perhaps thirdly, weird nominator behaviour (possibly including organised voting blocs). For a while things stalled there: the data was obviously wrong, the most plausible explanation seemed to be some combination of cock-up and conspiracy, and there was no prospect of anyone finding out anything more.
Behind most every tech billionaire is a sci-fi novel they read as a teenager. For Bill Gates it was Stranger in a Strange Land, the 1960s epic detailing the culture clashes that arise when a Martian visits Earth. Google’s Sergey Brin has said it was Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, the cyberpunk classic about hackers and computer viruses set in an Orwellian Los Angeles. Jeff Bezos cites Iain M. Banks’ Culture series, which unreel in an utopian society of humanoids and artificial intelligences, often orchestrated by “Minds,” a powerful AI. Elon Musk named three of SpaceX’s landing drones after starships from Banks’ books, a tribute to the role they played in turning his eyes to the stars.
Part of this makes sense. Science fiction widens the frontiers of our aspirations. It introduces us to new technologies that could shape the world, and new ideas and political systems that could organize it. It’s difficult to be an architect of the future without a pioneer’s vision of what that future might look like. For many, science fiction blasts that vision open.
Yet these tech titans seem to skip over the allegories at the heart of their favorite sci-fi books. Musk has tweeted, “If you must know, I am a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks.” Yet in Banks’ post-scarcity utopia, billionaires and their colossal influence are banished to the most backward corners of the galaxy.
Recently, I interviewed six of today’s foremost science-fiction authors. I asked them to weigh in on how much impact they think science fiction has had, or can have, on society and the future….
The interview subjects are N.K. Jemisin, Andy Weir, Lois McMaster Bujold, David Brin, Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross. Here’s a quote from Stross:
Charles Stross: Yes, the entire current AI bubble is exactly that. The whole idea of AI has been turned into the centerpiece of a secular apocalyptic religion in which we can create superhumanly intelligent slaves that will solve all our knottily human intellectual problems, then work out how to liberate our pure soul-stuff from these clumsy rotting meatbags and upload us into a virtual heaven. And right now, some of the biggest tech companies out there are run by zealots who believe this stuff, even though we have no clear understanding of the mechanisms underlying consciousness. It’s an unsupported mass of speculation, but it’s threatening to derail efforts to reduce our carbon footprint and mitigate the climate crisis by encouraging vast energy expenditure.
“Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” dominated the domestic box office again, looming large over newcomers “Monkey Man” and “The First Omen.”
Warner Bros. and Legendary Entertainment’s monster tentpole added $31.7 million from 3,948 theaters in its second weekend of release. Ticket sales dropped a standard (for a tentpole of its size and scale) 60% from its mighty $80 million debut and stand at $132 million domestically and $361 million globally.
First-time director Dev Patel’s action thriller “Monkey Man” nabbed second place with $10.1 million from 3,029 venues, while Disney and 20th Century’s supernatural prequel “The First Omen” trailed at the No. 4 spot with a muted $8.4 million from 3,375 locations….
… Writer Mark Frost told the BBC’s Late Show that part of the inspiration behind the character was the show’s co-creator and director David Lynch.
“I tried to base that character on David to some extent,” said Frost. “A lot of his quirkiness and attention to detail, which are things that David has in great abundance, sort of came to the surface with that character. I guess his interest in people’s obsessions, and characters who are obsessed with something, are pretty common with other things he’s done.” …
…“I don’t know when I started thinking about Snoots but I’d do these drawings of Snoots and then a story started to emerge,” Lynch told us in a rare interview. “I got together with Caroline and we worked on a script. Just recently I thought someone might be interested in getting behind this so I presented it to Netflix in the last few months but they rejected it.”
Lynch was philosophical about the reasons for that decision: “Snootworld is kind of an old fashioned story and animation today is more about surface jokes. Old fashioned fairytales are considered groaners: apparently people don’t want to see them. It’s a different world now and it’s easier to say no than to say yes.”
Thompson described the storyline to us as “wackadoo”: “It takes my breath away how wacky it is. The Snoots are these tiny creatures who have a ritual transition at aged eight at which time they get tinier and they’re sent away for a year so they are protected. The world goes into chaos when the Snoot hero of the story disappears into the carpet and his family can’t find him and he enters a crazy, magnificent world”….
Star Trek: Discovery‘s long-awaited fifth season finally debuted this week on Paramount+, and it marks the beginning of the end for the series. ComicBook.com recently had the chance to chat with some of the show’s cast, and they opened up about saying goodbye to their characters in the final season. Doug Jones (Saru) revealed how he said farewell to the character he began playing in 2017, and it involves an iconic song…
“Oh yeah,” Jones said when asked if he was able to keep any part of Saru after the show finished filming. “I wasn’t gonna let that go. Yeah. My final time taking Saru off, I did not cut him up and throw him across the room at all,” he added, referencing the famous story of René Auberjonois throwing his Odo mask at the showrunner at the end of Deep Space Nine. “I held him on my hand and we were playing a Whitney Houston song and I sang ‘I Will Always Love You’ to him and somebody was recording it. So I hope that’s out there somewhere.”…
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born April 8, 1974 — Nnedi Okorafor, 50. Tonight we have Nnedi Okorafor, a truly phenomenal writer.
She’s Nigerian, and has coined two words to describe her literary focus, Africanfuturism, and Africanjujuism. The latter word identifies the Afrocentric subgenre of fantasy fiction that draws on African spiritualities and cosmologies. Cool.
Let’s start with some of her work as comic book writer. The LaGuardia series that she wrote for was published by Berger Books. The collection won a Graphic Story Hugo Award at ConZealand, and her Black Panther: Long Live the King was nominated at Dublin 2019. She did other work in the Panther universe as well — Shuri in which Black Panther is missing and she has to find him (great story), Wakanda Forever and Shuri: Wakanda Forever
I started there as I love her writing in this medium. Now let me pick my favorite novellas and novels by her.
The Binti trilogy is an extraordinary feat of writing and my favorite reading experience by her. The “Binti” novella which leads it off won a Hugo at MidAmeriCon II. Then came the “Binti: Home” novella which was nominatedfor a Hugo at Worldcon 76 and the final “Binti: The Night Masquerade” novella to date which was nominatedfor a Hugo at Dublin 2019.
Lagoon is a deep dive in Nigerian mythology including Legba in the forefront here, in what is a SF novel as aliens and humans come together to form a new postcapitalist Nigeria. Neat concept well executed, characters are fascinating and the story is done well.
Just days before its debut, Falloutlooks to be assured a second season thanks to a $25 million tax credit from California.
Officially, Amazon has not said yet that the Prime Video series is coming back, but, with some hints from executive producers Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan recently, it is pretty clear the money is doing the talking here. Receiving one of the largest allocations ever from the program for a relocating series, the LA-set post-apocalyptic drama is among a dozen shows awarded $152 million in incentives.
Primetime prequel NCIS: Origins, the Noah Wyle starring The Pitt, plus the Ryan Murphy executive produced Dr. Odyssey starring Joshua Jackson, and Grotesquerie starring Emmy winner Niecy Nash also were awarded credits through the California Film Commission run $330 million annual program – as you can see below….
… Of course, being awarded the tax credits, even big bucks like what Fallout has reaped, is no guarantee a project will go forward. The allocations are conditional on certain timelines being met, and a number of films and shows, like Season 2 of Amazon’s spy saga Citadel, have dropped out of the program after getting a green light….
(14) FILM CENSORSHIP. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Though not SF in itself, this half-hour radio programme, Screenshot, will be of interest to anyone over here in Brit Cit who are fans of fantastic films. It explains how Britain ranks its films for age suitability. Those in the rebel colonies are not ignored as there is a section comparing Britain’s system with that in the US. It seems we get a better deal over here. Meanwhile, along the way Kim Newman (co-master of ceremonies at the 2005 Hugo ceremony) gets a name check.
As the British Board of Film Classification publishes its new guidelines, Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode delve into the long, chequered history of film censorship and classification in the UK.
Mark speaks to BBFC President (and original Strictly Come Dancing winner) Natasha Kaplinsky about her role, and about her reaction to the new guidelines. And he discusses the Board’s controversial history, and some of its most notorious decisions, with ex-BBFC Head of Compliance Craig Lapper.
Ellen talks to director Prano Bailey-Bond about her debut film Censor, which was inspired by the ‘video nasty’ moral panic of the 1980s. And pop culture critic Kayleigh Donaldson talks her through some of the differences between the BBFC and its US equivalent, the MPA Ratings Board.
… “We’ve got all the technology we need,” says Ben Lamm, chief executive of the firm, based in Dallas, Texas.
“It is just a focus of time and funding. But we are 100% confident [we can bring back] the Tasmanian tiger, the dodo, and the mammoth.”
The science behind the project is simple: Work out the genes that make an extinct animal what it is, and then replicate those genes using the DNA of a close existing relative….
… So after around 4,000 years of extinction, when could we see the return of the mighty mammoth – a creature that fell victim to human hunting and the changing conditions brought about by the end of the last Ice Age.
“We are well into the editing phase,” says Mr Lamm.
“We don’t have mammoths yet, but we still feel very good about 2028.”…
(16) STAND BY FOR MANIACAL LAUGHTER. “Animaniacs in Concert” will be presented at Pepperdine in Malibu on April 19. Buy tickets at the link. Learn more about the show itself at their website: “Animaniacs – IN CONCERT”.
Join the leading voice cast of Animaniacs—the iconic animated Warner Bros. series created and produced by Steven Spielberg—for a “zany, animany and totally insaney” evening as they perform the world-famous songs backed by projections from the beloved cartoon TV series. The live show celebrates the creative inspiration behind the songs with lots of audience interaction and never-before-told behind-the-scenes insider stories shared by the show’s original Emmy-Winning composer Randy Rogel and iconic voice actors like Rob Paulsen (Yakko) and Maurice LaMarche (The Brain) to some of the most unforgettable characters in the history of animation. Special guest Nancy Cartwright joins for this performance. Nancy, of course, is Bart Simpson, a lead character in a “globally known property,” as well as Mindy in Animaniacs, from “Mindy and Buttons.”
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Lise Andreasen, Daniel Dern, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Igvar.]
Composite sketch made in 1969 based on eyewitness accounts of the Presidio Heights murder for which the Zodiac killer later claimed responsibility.
By Rich Lynch and Guy H. Lillian III: It’s fascinating what you can find in old fanzines. They really are a treasure trove of historical information and bravo to Fanac.org for creating a digital archive which makes these decades-old fan materials available online for all of us to marvel at. Fanzines have documented not only things that happened within science fiction fandom itself but also stuff about how fandom has had crossovers with the quote-unquote real world.
A good and perhaps startling example of this can be found in Don Markstein’s Timebinders I, a mini-history of the first 49 mailings of the Southern Fandom Press Alliance. SFPA is an amateur press association that came into existence in 1961 and during its first two decades included many prominent fans in its membership. Two of them, Joe Staton and William Gibson, went on to find professional fame and fortune as an artist and an author. But there was one other SFPA member who has achieved fame of a different and more notorious kind. His name was Paul Doerr.
He was in SFPA very briefly and is listed on the membership roster only for mailing 39 (January 1971). And he has a somewhat unusual distinction. Markstein was the Official Editor for that mailing and as he described in Timebinders I:
One of the five new members was one Paul Doerr, who performed the almost (but not quite) unprecedented act of appearing on the SFPA roster without once, ever, contributing. He accomplished this remarkable feat by sending in 21 copies of a genzine, Unknown, just before he found out that the copy requirement for the 39th Mailing had been raised to 23. I wrote him immediately to tell him that he needed two more copies, so he sent them along – but they didn’t arrive until after the deadline, when the mailing was already out. Meanwhile, the roster had filled and I’d upped the copy requirement to its old level, 25. He dutifully sent two more, but meanwhile, I found out that the zine had had distribution long before the deadline for the 39th, so I couldn’t accept it as required activity. And I told him so. He wrote back irately that it had been new when he sent it, even tho it was distributed before the deadline, and that I should have asked the members to vote on the matter. I didn’t bother to answer. I don’t think he ever caught on that not all apas are as incredibly lax about activity requirements as FAPA. I threw him out as of the 40th Mailing and just kept the 25 zines around. About a year later, I gave away as many copies as I could (not bloody many) and threw the rest away.
But that little episode isn’t what made Paul Doerr notorious. Nope, not at all – it’s for something much, much bigger than that. He’s become one of the prime suspects for being the Zodiac Killer.
It’s been described as “the most famous unsolved murder case in American history.” In 1968 and 1969, five serial killings happened in the San Francisco Bay Area. During the spree, the killer, who referred to himself as “Zodiac”, sent taunting notes to regional newspapers. And also four ciphers, two of which still have not yet been cracked. He was never apprehended and even now, more than a half century later, the five murders are still considered as open cases. Over the years there have been many potential suspects but thanks to research by writer Jarrett Kobek (which was described in detail by an article in the September 22, 2022 issue of Los Angeles Magazine), Doerr is now considered as one of the more prime. It was all summarized in a section of the Wikipedia article about the Zodiac Killer:
In 2022, novelist Jarrett Kobek published How to Find Zodiac, in which Kobek named Paul Doerr as a suspect. Doerr was a North Bay resident with a post office box in Vallejo, where the first murders took place. Born in 1927, Doerr’s age in 1969 (42) as well as his height (5′ 9″) was consistent with witness estimates. He was an avid fanzine publisher and letter-writer throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and many of his writings exhibit circumstantial parallels with the Zodiac. For example, Doerr was interested in cryptography; in Doerr’s own Tolkien fanzine HOBBITALIA, he published a cipher in Cirth three days after Zodiac sent the Z13 cipher (Kobek in fact argues that the solution to the HOBBITALIA cipher is one of only three possible solutions to Z13). In Doerr’s own fanzine PIONEER, he references the same formula for an ANFO bomb given later by the Zodiac, which Kobek argues was not widely known before the internet and the publication of The Anarchist Cookbook in 1971. In a letter to [the N3F fanzine TIGHTBEAM] in 1970, Doerr advocated using solely 1¢ stamps to spite the U.S. Post Office, a practice the Zodiac employed on some of his letters. Doerr hinted in a 1974 letter to fanzine GREEN EGG that he had previously killed people, and revealed in a different letter that he knew that mail to the [San Francisco] Examiner would be delivered without a street address, just as the Zodiac sent them. Doerr’s daughter read Kobek’s book with the intent of suing for libel, but came away impressed with Kobek’s research, adding in interviews that Doerr had at times been a violent and abusive father. Paul Haynes, a researcher for [the HBO true crime documentary series] I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, called Doerr “the best Zodiac suspect that’s ever surfaced.”
Timebinders I was recently added to the fanac.org archive (it’s so far the only fanzine digitally preserved from SFPA’s 50th mailing) and there’s lots more of fan history interest in it than just the paragraph about Paul Doerr’s ghost membership in the apa. It’s a good read.
And as for Doerr himself, the overall timeline leads to a chilling realization. If he actually was Zodiac (and it should be noted there is at least one other prime suspect besides him) then the five murders occurred prior to his very abbreviated time in SFPA. And not only that, there were other killings that some investigators suspect had been committed by Zodiac and they all happened after Markstein booted him.
A Google search on Doerr’s name, as you might expect, brings up scads of links about the Zodiac Killer mystery. And besides all these there’s also one to findagrave.com, which shows a photo of his headstone (he died in 2007 and is buried in the Sacramento Valley National Cemetery). Doerr had been a military veteran, which had induced one of the two people who commented to write the usual “Thanks for your service.” But the other commenter wrote something that’s much more to the point as far as the Zodiac Killer mystery is concerned: “Did you do it?” Guess we’ll never know for sure.
By Rich Lynch: I learned about his death from a short two-line obit in the December issue of Ansible:
Piotr ‘Raku’ Rak (1962-2023), noted Polish fanzine editor, con-goer and club/award organizer who won special Eurocon awards in 1991 and 1993, died on 2 November aged 61.
To me, the fandom I know is maybe a bit like an ornate tapestry – filled with colorful memories about events I’ve participated in and people I’d met and come to know over the years. And every time one of those people passes it creates a tear in that fabric. That’s definitely the case with Piotr.
He was not the first Polish fan I ever met – that distinction goes to Andrzej Kowalski, who at that time was his supervisor. Most of my professional career had been as an International Activities Advisor at the U.S. Department of Energy and way back in 1992, Andrzej had been part of a visiting Polish delegation of energy experts that I had chaperoned to meetings at several technology demonstration sites in the United States. We were out in the middle of Kentucky, almost a week into the trip, before I discovered he was an avid science fiction reader and fan. And it had probably been a similar revelation for Andrzej to discover that I was, too.
I met Piotr the following year on my first of many trips to Poland. Andrzej had assigned Piotr as my liaison when I visited their energy institute in Katowice. He had evidently informed Piotr of my interests in science fiction and that I was a fan because it was what our first extended conversation was mostly about. Things were in transition, during that first ten years following the fall of communism, and I was fortunate that there had been sufficient interest from the U.S. Government, in terms of getting greater knowledge of Poland’s energy sector, that I was able to find funding to go there about once or twice a year through the end of the 1990s and very beginning of the 2000s. Whenever I traveled to Poland, Katowice and its energy institute was always part of my itinerary. And my point of contact there was always Piotr.
We became friends very quickly. Science fiction and its fandom was a common denominator, of course, but it went beyond that. He took time away from his family to make sure everything was okay during my stays in Katowice and that included setting up a dinner with him and others in his local fandom whenever I was in town. They were bonding experiences, fueled by good food and good beer. It was at one of these dinners I met the prominent Polish fan and translator Piotr Cholewa, and we all found we had yet more of common interest – 1970s and 1980s rock music. I told them in more detail than was probably necessary about a fabulous Springsteen concert I’d attended in Tennessee and got back a similar amount about a Jethro Tull concert at Katowice’s big flying saucer-shaped sports arena. It went on from there – it was a musical geekfest.
The time Piotr went the most out of his way to help me was on the first day of my May 2000 trip. Just as the train to Katowice was about to depart the Warsaw Central Station, two guys jostled me while I was struggling to get settled in the railcar compartment and got away with my wallet. All my credit cards were in that wallet, including my ATM card. It could have been a financial disaster. But Piotr met me at the Katowice train station and he immediately provided unlimited use of his mobile phone to call back to the United States to cancel the stolen credit cards, arrange for replacements, and get some cash wired to me. He also vouched for me at the hotel so I could check in without a credit card. And he even treated me to dinner at one of Katowice’s many pleasant sidewalk restaurants. He absolutely saved my trip.
I didn’t know it then, but that was the last time I’d ever see him. He wasn’t at my meeting the next day with the institute’s upper management and when that concluded I was whisked away to the Katowice station for a train ride back to Warsaw. We kept in touch by email and I’d planned to go back there the next year, in the autumn, but then 9-11 happened and all international travel was put on hiatus. By the time that had lifted my funding had dried up and I had been reassigned to another group where my travels took me to other places in the world. I did eventually make it back to Poland, but not anywhere near Katowice.
And now he’s gone. What I have left to remember him by are a few photos I’d taken of him all those years ago. But up in my headspace he’s still alive and probably always will be. Oh, and there’s one more thing. Even though he wasn’t at that next day’s meeting he’d made sure I was given a replacement for the wallet that had been stolen – a much nicer one than what I’d had. I still have it. And I make use of it whenever I’m on the road. Like me, it’s starting to show its age but I’m not going to discard it. It’s a reminder of all the good times.
By Rich Lynch: As I mentioned in a previous essay, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows me for me to say that I really like museums. Art museums, history museums, science museums, cultural museums, sports museums, you name it. They’re all good. Where I live we’re blessed with the Smithsonian which has 16 museums and galleries in the Washington metro area, ten of them conveniently located adjacent to the National Mall and several others near Metrorail stops. And besides these there are dozens of others in the city that are not affiliated with the Smithsonian.
But this essay is not about any of those. Just up the road, Baltimore has its own treasure trove of museums and one of them, the American Visionary Art Museum, gets my vote as the region’s most extraordinary. It’s been described by CNN as “one of the most fantastic museums anywhere in America” and that seems pretty accurate to me. Visiting it is like being immersed in a Hieronymus Bosch painting – it’s the Museum of Earthly Delights.
Unlike the famous Bosch triptych there is normally little in the way heavenly or hellish imagery to be found at AVAM. But there’s no lack of unusual and at times surreal things to see that are truly captivating. And exhibitions hosted by the museum are always varied and eclectic. Three past examples: The Great Mystery Show, described as “one part lively fun house, two parts cosmic dream lab”, explored the human need to know and it featured works and creative investigations of visionary artists (one of them Edward Gorey), research scientists, astronauts, mystics, and philosophers. All Things Round: Galaxies, Eyeballs & Karma, billed as “a call to awareness of the circular and voluptuous nature of life”, was a multimedia extravaganza which included things like spherical sculptures by vision-impaired artists, mandelas, micro dot sock-thread embroideries, and otherworldly visions depicted by indigenous Huichol yarn art. And Human, Soul & Machine: The Coming Singularity! was an attempt by the museum to promote “an honest contemplation of the future of warfare, personal privacy, and transhumanism (the very real effort to download soul, intellect, and human memory into a machine that will not die or grow old)” and was described as “a communal look forward to where much of the Sci-Fi imaginings of the past are now swiftly becoming commonplace reality” via artwork that was “a hot-wired blend of art, science, humor, caution and hope”.
Needless to say, Nicki and I have been regular visitors to AVAM. Partly because of the pandemic it had been a couple of years since we’d last been there and we were pleased to discover there were three new so-called ‘outsider art’ exhibitions on display. One of them was a retrospective of multimedia artist Judith Ann Scott (1943-2005) titled The Secret Within. Judith was a truly remarkable person. She was a Down Syndrome baby and from birth was deaf and mostly uncommunicative. This led her parents to institutionalize her when she was age 7 and she spent her next 36 years as a ward of the State of Ohio. In 1986 Judith’s twin sister Joyce, who had not been afflicted with Down Syndrome, got custody of her after an extended legal process and brought her to northern California where she found nurturing surroundings in a boarding home which provided the care she needed. Joyce also enrolled Judith in the Creative Art Center in Oakland (an art center for people with physical and developmental disabilities) where she discovered her talent as a fiber artist. Judith incorporated various found (and sometimes pilfered) objects such as keys and magazines as cores to be enveloped by yarn and other materials. What resulted were new shapes and forms, many of them vaguely organic and cocoon-like in appearance. And in doing so, she gained national and international acclaim – her works have been on display at the Brooklyn Museum, the National Gallery in D.C., the American Folk Art Museum in New York, and now at AVAM.
Nicki at the Judith Ann Scott exhibition
Some of the objects that were on display reminded me a bit of forms depicted by the great artist John Schoenherr on some of his covers for science fiction books and magazines. Which makes me wonder if Judith had come across old issues of Analog in her scavenging for things to incorporate into her 3D art. There was also a short video of Judith at work in the studio and even from that brief clip it was clear that she was driven to create and had realized it was her purpose in life. Would that we all could be so fortunate.
Another of the featured exhibitions was titled Esther and the Dream of One Loving Human Family. It’s not genre-related but it is in its own way extremely compelling – the life story of Holocaust survivor Esther Niesenthal Krinitz (1927-2001) as depicted in a series of fabric pictures. The series progresses from bucolic home life in rural Poland to the rounding up of Jews in the village by Nazi soldiers and then to her escape (with her younger sister) into the relative safety of a forest while her parents and other siblings, as well as all other Jews in the village were rounded up and sent off to a labor camp where they were murdered. She and her sister eventually were taken in by a farmer and his wife in a different village where they were able to survive the war, and she eventually immigrated to the USA where she created the fabric pictures that told her life story.
The Bees Save Me – Nazi soldiers flee swarming bees instead of interrogating Esther
There was more to the exhibition than just the fabric picture series, as it also included a partial reconstruction of Esther’s pre-war farm home as well as paintings by other artists about more recent genocides. The overall aim was to “juxtapose the power of Esther’s work and story with the experience of other innocent victims of cultural genocides, historic and current” and it certainly did that.
One of Leslie Payne’s home-built aircraft
The third featured exhibition was not nearly so powerful in theme but it was just as interesting. It was titled If You Build It They Will Come: Visionary Artists and Their Environments and has been described as an attempt to “take visitors on a journey into the spaces of exceptional artists who have built their own dream worlds”. One of them was Leslie Payne (1907-1981), who lived in rural Virginia and built several faux but fairly realistic-looking airplanes. And then, with the participation of neighborhood women who played the role of ‘stewardesses’, he ‘flew’ around the world, all the while recording his adventures in a log book under the byline ‘Airplane Payne’.
Another was Zebedee Armstrong (1911-1993) from rural Georgia, who believed he’d been visited by an angel who warned him of the imminent end of the world and then became fixated on creating a ‘calculating calendar’ which would predict the exact date. He became so fixated on this that over the final two decades of his life he built somewhere around 600 such calendars, using mostly discarded and reclaimed material, from the size of an ordinary flat wall calendar to a large 3D wardrobe.
Some of Zebedee Armstrong’s many calendars
But my favorite, by far, was DeVon Smith (1926-2003), a junk dealer and science fiction/horror movie enthusiast from rural Pennsylvania who used some of the scrap metal he had on hand to build what he called the Worlds 1st Family of Robots. These are not small constructs – most of them appeared to be about 4-5 feet tall. And they all had names: Father Jupiter, Venus, Sis-tar and her brother Sun, and the dog Pluto. Later on, two others joined the family: Saturn and Mars. Even though they’re part of this special exhibition they’ve been ‘residents’ of the museum for many years – I’ve read that Saturn and Mars were ‘married’ at AVAM back in June 2000 and the ceremony was witnessed by dozens of museum attendees.
DeVon Smith’s Worlds 1st Family of Robots
DeVon Smith’s jacket
DeVon Smith is interesting for more than just his scrap metal sculptures, though. He was known for his wanderlust and his bio describes him as a former Guinness World Record holder for most miles hitchhiked (more than a half million, across four continents). He’d described himself as a ‘space traveler’ because he’d often deliberately gone to places with out-of-this-world names (Jupiter, Florida, for example). And he’d stood out in a crowd because of the outerwear he’d worn – a Doctor Who-like long black jacket with red lapels, cuffs, and shoulder epaulets, festooned with patches and pins that celebrated some of the places he’d been. This had made him a minor celebrity which had led to appearances on TV shows hosted by Art Linkletter and Groucho Marx. He was present at the museum for the robot wedding ceremony where he offered attendees some sage advice: “Don’t sit in a chair. Get out and do it.”
The amazing Tick Tock the Croc
The permanent collection of AVAM is just as interesting as the special exhibitions. It’s spread out over the two buildings occupied by the museum and there’s no lack of remarkable things in it, from the sublime (a meditative sculpture garden between the two buildings) to the ridiculous (a display chronicling the history of flatulence humor, appropriately located near one of the restrooms). The museum is home to dozens of kinetic sculptures, ranging from about the size of a bread toaster all the way up to Tick Tock the Croc, a multi-segmented reptile built for the museum’s annual kinetic sculpture race and whose movement is provided by six linked-up bicycles. But my favorite is something, in its own way, equally amazing: a 16-foot-long scale model of the RMS Lusitania by craftsman Wayne Cusy (b. 1961), built entirely from toothpicks (193,000 of them). It reportedly took him 2½ years to complete, and it’s not the only large toothpick sculpture of steamships he’s ever done. When Cusy was asked why he was drawn to this kind of use for his available time, he stated that: “It’s a challenge. There’s a lot of people who like to climb mountains like Mount Everest. … I choose to build models. It’s safer.” I’m with him on that.
Wayne Cusy’s RMS Lusitania toothpick sculpture
As you might expect, AVAM has a gift shop. And like the rest of the museum, it’s very diverse. There are things for sale such as gorgeous hand-painted Día de Los Muertos ceramic tiles from Mexico and small metal science fictional sculptures from Vietnam. And lots more. (There’s even a Zoltar fortune telling machine but that’s probably not for sale.) The gift shop is so flamboyant and eclectic that it was given a descriptive name: Sideshow. And, from what I could see, it was as much a draw for museum visitors as any of the exhibitions.
Small metal sculptures from Vietnam in the gift shop
Nicki and I spent two entertaining hours at AVAM during our most recent visit there in mid-November and we could very easily have stayed a whole lot longer than that. There was quite a lot to see! Just before we departed for home I had a brief conversation with the gift shop manager, who asked me if we’d enjoyed our visit. He seemed impressed when I told him we’d been to AVAM several times, we liked it so much. And he chuckled when I told him that AVAM could be described as ‘The Museum of Earthly Delights’. He told me, “I think I’ll use that!” Hey, he has my permission!
