…We are now rolling out a new royalty model that prioritizes equity, flexibility, and insight for creators—one that evolved out of ongoing conversations with authors and publishers, and that advances our creator-centric ethos. Under this model, creators are able to monetize more types of content, and listeners will get to discover more innovative storytelling.
Titles in all Audible’s membership offerings can now earn royalties: Audible’s new royalty model means new opportunities for small publishers and independent authors to earn across all membership listening activity. Now more titles—including those currently in Audible Plus, Audible’s all-you-can-listen offering—can generate royalty payments. Depending on the audiences that publishers and creators want to reach, there are new ways to monetize and promote content, which means more flexibility to reach listeners where they are….
How is the new royalty model calculated? Audible takes a member’s plan value (Plus or Premium Plus) and adds the value of any additional credits used, then divides that value among the titles the member listened to over the course of the month. That figure, multiplied by the contractual royalty rate, comprises a creator’s royalty payment….
Publishers Weekly’s coverage, “Audible Rolls Out New Royalty Plan”, observes that “the announcement comes after one of Audible’s most vocal critics, bestselling author Brandon Sanderson, reported in March that Audible officials had approached him to discuss ‘a new royalty structure they intend to offer to independent writers and smaller publishers,’ a plan that Sanderson said was ‘encouraging.’”
Sure he has won the biggest prizes in science fiction– the Nebula and the Hugo awards. But Paolo Bacigalupi found himself bereft of inspiration. Penning apocalyptic climate fiction, like 2016’s The Water Knife, had taken its toll….
…The Paonia-based author knew it was time for a change. Then the invitation came.
A wine-importer friend who knew Bacigalupi’s penchant for languages (he’d studied Chinese in college) invited him to Bologna for a crash course in Italian.
The answer was yes…..
…The real-life Bolognese setting inspired Bacigalupi’s new fantasy novel, “Navola.” It takes place in a city-state reminiscent of Florence or Venice during The Renaissance.
His protagonist, Davico di Regulai, is the son of an uber-wealthy merchant and banker. The boy has big shoes to fill, but very different feet, as it were. Armed with a preserved dragon eye that possesses magical powers, Davico struggles to be the man his father and community expect him to be….
Ryan Warner: How did you know it was time for something different?
Paolo Bacigalupi: Well, when you keep trying to write things and you keep failing to actually finish them, or even when you’re starting to try to write, it’s like sticking your finger in a light socket. It is sort of painful and damaging, you think ‘maybe I should do something different.’
Warner: And that’s how it started to feel in the climate change space?
Bacigalupi: Yeah. A lot of what I was doing, the news was bad, and then the stories that you’re trying to tell are extrapolations on the present day, and those are all terrifying. Then you find you’re in this space where your creative world and your regular life are all smashed together, and they’re all really negative and they’re all full of terrors, and it’s not a sustainable space to be. If you spend all of your imaginative time in anxiety, then yeah, it takes a toll and eventually you just break down entirely.
Warner: And if the writer isn’t enjoying it, how possibly could the reader?
Bacigalupi: Yeah. I think that a healthy writer finds pleasure in their work. I think there are unhealthy ways to go about doing good work, as well. The outcome can be good, but the damage internally is bad for the writer.
A.T. Sayre read and Nat Cassidy read and played his guitar for a very enjoyable evening.
(5) ERIN UNDERWOOD PRESENTS. The latest Erin Underwood videos take up Star Wars fanhistory, and test the relevance of Battlestar Galactica’s 2004 remake.
Star Wars: The Impacts of How Lucasfilm Built its Fan Base
Star Wars fandom holds a unique place as possibly the first ever nurtured fanbase built by a film studio. To understand the evolution of Star Wars fandom, I decided to explore its roots by inviting Craig Miller, former publicity executive at Lucas Film, and Garen Daly, Director of the Boston SciFi Film Festival, to discuss the early days of Star Wars fandom and its lasting impact on the film industry. Watch the video podcast discussion on YouTube and share your thoughts in the comments.
Battlestar Galactica (2004) Series Review – Does this Iconic Sci-Fi Remake Hold Up Today?
It’s been 20 years since they remade the 1978 version of Battlestar Galactica, and remakes often struggle to be relevant over time. From the story to the characters and the technology, how does BSG hold up 2 decades later? Watch my review of the full series and let me know if you think Battlestar Galactica holds up as well today … or even better!
It’s getting exhausting calling out Moon landing truthers. Especially when a high-profile rom-com starring Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson makes a mockery of one of the greatest human achievements in all of history. This weekend, the new film Fly Me to the Moon hits theaters, telling the story of a 1969 advertising executive (Johansson) who is determined to film a “backup” version of the Moon landing in a studio, in case the real one fails. Tatum plays an astronaut, and the two fall for each other, in a silly movie about how the nature of love is a lot like flying to the Moon, or pretending to, or something. All harmless fun, right?
Well, no. While Fly Me to the Moon isn’t presented as a dramatic film purporting to unveil long-lost truths about the space race, it is built upon a frustratingly pervasive conspiracy theory that the Apollo 11 moon landing never took place, or in this case, that NASA would try to use taxpayer dollars to create a hoax. But, the historical and scientific evidence that we did, in fact, land on the Moon is overwhelming. And, because this movie is dredging up all those conspiracy theories again, it’s worth restating why we know the 1969 Moon landing was very real….
… But outside of heroes like Buzz Aldrin, there is plenty of objective evidence that the Moon landing occurred. In light of the bogus concept behind Fly Me to the Moon, and to get a contemporary reminder of Moon landing evidence Inverse reached out to Dr. Brett Denevi, a planetary geologist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, was a vice-chair of Lunar Exploration Analysis Group, is working on the Artemis program.
“There is a whole host of evidence to demonstrate the Moon landings occurred, including images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera,” Denevi told Inverse. As she points out this is a relatively contemporary camera, launched back in 2009. “The camera is used to scout new landing sites like we are doing for Artemis, so it was built to take incredibly detailed pictures.”….
(7) SONGS OF SFF. [Item by Rob Thornton.] This is six minutes of reverb-soaked electric guitar recorded in a bathroom and reminiscent of the banjo in the theme song from the BBC’s Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. All the song titles are from my fave SF/F novels (see “Terminus Est,” “Burning Bright” and “Green Rapture.”). Bonus points if you know my musical nym! “Now And Always” by R Carnassus at Bandcamp.
San Diego Comic-Con has rolled out its schedule for the 2024 convention this week, which runs from July 25–28. For the first time since 2019, SDCC will unfold without a virtual event, pandemic protocols or labor strike cancelations, marking a return to normal of sorts for the largest annual fan gathering in North America.
Several major franchises will make an appearance at the event, including panels for Marvel Studios, “Star Trek,” “The Penguin,” “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” the “Walking Dead” franchise, “Transformers One,” “Alien: Romulus,” “The Boys” and “Doctor Who.” Here are the highlights, with descriptions from SDCC and/or the panel sponsors….
One morning in Sept. 2021, MaryAnn Harris felt strangely tired. She told her husband, Charles de Lint, that she needed to lie down. Then more worrisome symptoms began cropping up, from nausea to double vision.
The Ottawa couple rushed to a local emergency department.
At first, the cause of Harris’s ailment was a mystery. The ER team ran various tests, and after a few hours with no answers, they sent her husband home due to visitor restrictions put in place during the pandemic.
By the time de Lint came back the next day, his beloved partner of four decades was unresponsive and on life support in the intensive care unit.
“You don’t know what to think, what to feel,” de Lint recalled. “It was just utter panic.”
What followed was a three-year ordeal, as medical teams offered a battery of tests and treatments in hopes of bringing Harris back from the brink of death. She eventually regained consciousness, but by that point, inflammation in her brain stem had left her paralyzed. Harris never left the hospital and died in early June at the age of 71.
The cause of her devastating illness? A little-known virus that spreads through tick bites.
For years, medical experts have warned a rising number of Canadians are being exposed to ticks carrying an array of dangerous pathogens. Lyme disease is the most familiar — and by far the most common — but there’s growing concern about lesser-known threats as well, from various bacterial infections, to the rare Powassan virus that claimed Harris’s life earlier this year.
(10) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
1974 – Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
Fifty years ago, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia was published. (No, not on this day. Just this year.)
Though it is often considered the fifth book of the Hainish Cycle, Le Guin in multiple interviews and her writings has stated that there is no particular cycle or order for what she called the Ekumen novels.
And yes, I can say having read it more than once and those readings being decades apart that the full title does really make sense. Later printings would just call it The Dispossessed. No idea why the change and if Le Guin said why.
It was by published by Harper & Row that year with a stunning wraparound cover by Fred Winkowski. I found only two first editions to be had online, the first $1200, the other substantially more, but that was signed.
Le Guin in the forward to Ursula K. Le Guin: The Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume One which includes The Dispossessed says “The Dispossessed started as a very bad short story, which I didn’t try to finish but couldn’t quite let go. There was a book in it, and I knew it, but the book had to wait for me to learn what I was writing about and how to write about it. I needed to understand my own passionate opposition to the war that we were, endlessly it seemed, waging in Vietnam, and endlessly protesting at home. If I had known then that my country would continue making aggressive wars for the rest of my life, I might have had less energy for protesting that one. But, knowing only that I didn’t want to study war no more, I studied peace. I started by reading a whole mess of utopias and learning something about pacifism and Gandhi and nonviolent resistance. This led me to the nonviolent anarchist writers such as Peter Kropotkin and Paul Goodman. With them I felt a great, immediate affinity. They made sense to me in the way Lao Tzu did. They enabled me to think about war, peace, politics, how we govern one another and ourselves, the value of failure, and the strength of what is weak. So, when I realized that nobody had yet written an anarchist utopia, I finally began to see what my book might be.”
So let’s now go on to note that I discovered that the novel has a story set before it, “The Day Before the Revolution” and the character in that story, revolutionary Laia Asieo Odo, is a major presence in The Dispossessed.
But that’s not really why I’m bring the story to your attention. The story is included in the Library of America’s Ursula K. Le Guin: The Hainish Novels & Stories which has a short essay on what she was feeling after writing the novel which you can read here “Story of the Week: The Day Before the Revolution”. And the story is here “The Day Before the Revolution”.
Now where was I? Ahh it’s 1974, the novel has come out. Among us, it was widely acclaimed, and the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation definitely was appreciative of this as her website lists them this way:
Winner of the 1974 Nebula Award for Best Novel Winner of the 1975 Hugo Award for Best Novel Winner of the 1975 Locus Award for Best Novel Winner of the 1975 Jupiter Award for Best Novel
And yes, each link takes you to the proper Award site. Stellar webmasters whoever they are. Now interestingly, the Foundation doesn’t include the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award. I wonder why. It was also nominated for a John W. Campbell Memorial Award but didn’t win.
As near as I can tell, it has never been out of print in the last fifty years with multiple hardcover, trade and paperback editions. ISFDB lists far too many editions to really make sense of its printing history, so I can’t say definitively.
What I didn’t see is it ever got the small press, lavish edition treatment, but then I’m having a hard time remembering if any of her works did. Come on Filers, help me out here.
In 2019, The Folio Society published a hardcover edition with illustrations by David Lupton and an introduction by Brian Attebery.
On November 17, Harper Perennial will publish a trade paper edition of the book with a new foreword by Karen Joy Fowler.
The gods must be angry — or just laughing at the hubris of humanity.
Authorities in Mexico have slapped a “closure” order on a 10-foot-tall (3-meter) aquatic statue of the Greek god of the sea Poseidon that was erected in May in the Gulf of Mexico just off the town of Progreso, Yucatan.
Mexico’s environmental protection agency said late Thursday that the statue, which appears to show an angry trident-wielding Poseidon “rising” from the sea a few meters from the beach, lacked permits. In the few months it has been up, tourists had gathered to take pictures of themselves with it as a striking background.
But it was symbolically “closed” Thursday — and could be removed altogether — after a group of activist lawyers filed a legal complaint saying the statue offended the beliefs of local Maya Indigenous groups who prefer their own local god of water, known as Chaac.
It’s always been dangerous for humans to get involved in battles between deities. But this one appears to be all about present-day humanity, combining “cancel culture,” social media storms, lawsuits and the one truly fearsome, overpowering force in today’s world: Instagram selfie-fueled tourism….
…And after witnessing Harrison Ford replace William Hurt as General Ross, the calls for recasting have amplified within the Marvel fandom, particularly in the instance of Black Panther. Portrayed by the iconic Chadwick Boseman, fans now want the MCU to remove the Oscar-winning Black Panther 2 from the official timeline to facilitate the character’s recasting….
…However, Ford’s casting has also triggered a wave of demand within the Marvel fandom: the demand for Black Panther recasting. Portrayed by the late Chadwick Boseman throughout the MCU until his tragic death, the actor’s portrayal has remained iconic and pretty much irreplaceable. Yet, many fans believe recasting him would not be a bad choice, but only add to the legacy of the character he so clearly loved and played.
The MCU has recast several characters throughout its run, with Bruce Banner and Rhodey being some notable examples. These recasting decisions have hardly received as much hate from fans, but instead have triggered the calls for a Black Panther replacement since Boseman’s untimely death in 2020….
In a recent meeting of Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, the group unveiled plans to combat its transportation and logistics sector labor shortages with construction of an automated conveyor-belt highway running over 310 miles across central Japan.
Known as the Autoflow-Road proposal, the ministry showcased its blueprint for building both aboveground and underground conveyor-belt roads running between Tokyo and Osaka 24 hours a day. According to the ministry, it could move the same amount of freight in a day as 25,000 drivers.
“Automated logistics roads are designed to get the most out of road space by utilizing hard shoulders, median strips and tunnels beneath the roadway. …Our study is examining the impact on road traffic, including on surrounding roads, and costs,” senior official to the ministry, Shuya Muramatsu, told reporters.
The proposal comes as an answer to Japan’s ongoing transportation and logistics labor crisis, as the country begins to cap trucking overtime hours this year.
The Terminator promised he’d be back – and he is. Netflix is teasing a tense apocalyptic return to this world with the first trailer for “Terminator Zero,” its upcoming animated series set in the “Terminator” universe that will premiere on Judgement Day, aka August 29.
This teaser debuts Eiko, voiced by “House of the Dragon” star Sonoya Mizuno, a resistance fighter who is sent back in time to stop Skynet’s impending attack on humanity. “You can’t see it yet, but you’ve been on a collision course your entire life. There’s no going back, not really. It will never, ever stop,” Eiko ominously says in the teaser.
As she gives her warning, the trailer jumps between creepy shots of terminators repairing themselves, explosions and gunfire. “There’s only one thing standing between you and him — me,” Eiko says in the teaser’s final tense moment….
The wait is over! Dive into the highly anticipated first look at Andor Season 2 with this electrifying teaser trailer. Following the critically acclaimed first season, Cassian Andor’s (Diego Luna) journey continues as he navigates the treacherous world of the Rebellion. Set five years before the events of Rogue One and A New Hope, this season promises to delve deeper into the rise of the Rebellion against the oppressive Galactic Empire.
…Maya Hawke recently told Podcrushed that the eight episodes in the final season of the sci-fi hit will feel like “eight movies,” and noted the episodes are “very long.”
“Our showrunners, Matt and Ross [Duffer], take a lot of responsibility,” she added. “They have an amazing team of writers, but they’re very involved. They write a lot and they are very intense and serious about the quality of the continued writing, and so it takes a long time to write each season, and a long time to shoot them.”…
[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Larry Powell, Rob Thornton, Daniel Dern, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Thomas the Red.]
By RL Thornton: One of the great rediscoveries of this year has been the stories of World Fantasy Award-winner Manly Wade Wellman. In particular, his magical stories about the high Appalachian wanderer and silver-stringed guitarist John have been republished by Valancourt Press in an anthology called John The Balladeer and in a larger complete two-volume set by Haffner Press (h/t to Michael Dirda of the Washington Post).
As Wellman’s dialect-laden prose slowly pulled me into his fantastic world of deep magic, my inner music geek started to wonder if all the songs in the stories were real. I knew that “In The Pines” had become notorious due to Nirvana’s live acoustic version, but what about the rest? Well, a little bit of YouTube diving reveals that Wellman knew his stuff!
So if you want to hear some of the songs as you read about John’s adventures, check out what I found below and enjoy. In most cases, each song’s YouTube link is accompanied by the lyrics from the story and the performer’s name.
OLD DEVLINS WAS A-WAITIN
When John refers to Bascom Lamar Lunsford, it turns out he was a real musician and song collector who actually recorded for the Library Of Congress!
CALL ME FROM THE VALLEY
His golden locks, John Dowland
“Beauty, strength, youth are flowers and fading seen—
Duty, faith, love are roots and ever green….”
Grace Davidson (soprano); David Miller (Lute)
THE LITTLE BLACK TRAIN
Song: Hell Broke Loose In Georgia
The Skillet Lickers
Song: The Little Black Train
The Carter Family
Song: Many Thousands Gone
Matthew Sabbatella and the Rambling String Band
Song: Sourwood Mountain
Carolina Chocolate Drops
Frank Proffitt
SHIVER IN THE PINES
Song: In The Pines
Leadbelly (aka Where Did You Sleep Last Night?)
Nirvana (aka Where Did You Sleep Last Night?)
Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys
Grateful Dead (Rare from 1966)
“Fare thee well my charming girl
With the golden slippers on….”
Song: Cuckoo Waltz
Song: Pretty Fair Maid In The Garden
Song: Willie From The Western States (variant of Barbara Allen)
Song: I Dreamed Last Night Night Of My True Love, All In My Arms I Had Her
WALK LIKE A MOUNTAIN
Song: Lonesome River
“By the shore of Lonesome River Where the waters ebb and flow, Where the wild red rose is budding And the pleasant breezes blow,
It was there I spied the lady That forever I adore, As she was a-lonesome walking By the Lonesome River shore. . . .”
By RL Thornton: This is the second part of an interview with Damon Knight Grand Master Michael Moorcock about his career in music. Previously, we talked about his early career in music, his initial experiences with Hawkwind, and his album New Worlds Fair with his band the Deep Fix. Next we discuss his other work with Hawkwind, his songs for Blue Oyster Cult, and his current recordings with Spirits Burning.
NOTE: For those not familiar with the people or bands that he mentions, you can click on the link to see their Wikipedia entry (or other webpage if necessary).
Part 2:
Q: You mentioned how easy it was to do your part in Hawkwind’s Warrior On The Edge Time, which was based on your idea of the Eternal Champion. How did that album come about? What was the collaboration between you and the band like?
Michael Moorcock: Dave asked for an idea for a concept album and tour. That’s what I came up with. All my stuff by and large, links in some way!
Q: My guitarist friend Clay wanted me to ask you about your impression of then Hawkwind bassist Lemmy, who was fired just before Warrior was issued.
Michael Moorcock: Lemmy [founder of Motorhead] and I were good friends. Firing him was a big mistake for Hawkwind and a big boost for Lemmy’s career!
Q: From what I can tell, after working with Calvert on some of his albums, the next big project of yours was with Hawkwind on their Chronicle of The Black Sword. What role did you play in making that album and what did you think of the end result?
Michael Moorcock: I was working with Nicky on the project. When Nicky was fired during that project I lost interest. My last gigs with the band were at Hammersmith Odeon. I said nothing about it to Dave but with Lemmy AND Nik gone, I had decided to stop performing with Hawkwind. The result was patchy AND Dave was tricky about it. I pulled my contributions from the first issue of the album.
Q: So Hawkwind actually played Worldcon (ConSpiracy 1987 in Brighton) and one participant called them “Michael Moorcock’s band.” What do you recall of that concert?
Michael Moorcock: I saw Dave [Brock] and someone else, I think, while I was signing but I hadn’t been aware of it until Dave said ‘You coming to play with us, Mike.’ I didn’t feel like it and so I didn’t. I was staying at another hotel some distance out of Brighton. They were always, by the way, Dave’s band. Deep Fix was more a ‘project’ than a band, as such. It included Langdon Jones and Pete Pavli as well as Martin Stone.
Q: At this point, could you talk a little bit about your work with Blue Oyster Cult over the years (i.e. “The Great Sun Jester,” “Veterans Of The Psychic Wars,” “Black Blade”)?
Michael Moorcock: Eric Bloom and other band members like my stuff so they asked for some lyrics. I had some and I sent them… Since then I’ve stayed in touch with several band members!
Q: In 2012, the Deep Fix released some previously recorded demo sessions under the name “The Entropy Tango & Gloriana Demo Sessions.” Why did you issue those recordings?
Michael Moorcock: Because I was asked to. But by the time it was too late Pete Pavli objected. Felt very sorry about that.
Q: Next, you and your friends recorded a Deep Fix album “Live At The Terminal Cafe.” How did that come about and what did you think about the results?
Michael Moorcock: Very old friend Martin Stone and I had wanted to do a record and we eventually had the time in Paris with a couple of good musicians who also lived there, so we rented a rehearsal studio and put the backing tracks down in Montmartre. A local friend of mine, Sean Orr, did fiddle and Don [Falcone] did final production. It went very well indeed.
Q: And most recently, you worked with Don Falcone and his space-rock collective Spirits Burning on musical adaptations of your Dancers At The End Of Time books. How did this project come about?
Michael Moorcock: Albert had wanted to do this project for a while and he and Don decided to do it. As with Time Centre, I can no longer play guitar or banjo etc. My neuropathic hands just won’t do it any more, so I have to play harmonica, kazoo, whistle and sing! St James’s Infirmary was done that way.
My next project with Alan Davey producing will be redoing a bunch of songs by me and Calvert. I love Robert’s songwriting and my own could do with improvement, so that’s a project for this year. Tomorrow, I do the final work on END and am much looking forward to finishing that project. Albert, Don etc. have done a superb job!
By RL Thornton: When fans talk about Damon Knight Grand Master Michael Moorcock, they are usually talking about his extensive bibliography, the literary innovations that he encouraged as editor of the legendary ‘60s SF magazine New Worlds, and the tremendous influence that his Eternal Champion series has had on fantasy and science fiction. However, you may not know that Moorcock has been always pursuing a parallel career in music.
Moorcock has been performing and playing from his youth onward to recent years, where he has been collaborating with psychedelic rock collective Spirits Burning on a series of albums based on his Dancers at the End of Time trilogy. In this two-part interview, Michael Moorcock talks about his adventures with Hawkwind, his band the Deep Fix, and others.
NOTE: For those not familiar with the people or bands that he mentions, you can click on the link to see their Wikipedia entry (or other webpage if necessary).
Part 1:
Q: How did you first get involved with music? Did it start in 1955 with “your cousin’s Gretsch” guitar like you said in the fictionalized autobiography from The Whispering Swarm?
Michael Moorcock: I was into skiffle from about 1955, First stringed instrument was a six-string banjo, second was a Spanish guitar. I had friends with Gretches but my first electric was actually a Sears, which came with an amp in the carrying case. Then a Gibson and then a Rickenbacker 12.
Q: So how long did you play with skiffle bands?
Michael Moorcock: About two years. First I was with The Greenhorns, then the Travellers and I occasionally played with the Vipers. Also played individual blues in small clubs in England, Sweden, Germany and France.
Q. You were in the ‘60s UK music scene, which may have been one of the most exciting music scenes ever. What were some of your most memorable moments from that time?
Michael Moorcock: Many equally memorable times. Maybe the scratch band at Portobello Green with Paul Kossoff, Arthur Brown, Jon Trux [UK journalist], where we variously fell asleep, were chased home by girlfriends, failed to light Arthur’s hat [part of Brown’s act for his single “Fire”], and ultimately fell through the stage, was one. French fans thought it was the coolest gig they’d ever seen. Nik Turner‘s ‘frog in flight’ at Harlow was also pretty memorable!
Q: What was a Portobello Green gig like? Was it an open stage at the market?
Michael Moorcock: The stage was a small stage with bench seating, but was open on the north side facing the Green.
Q: Could you supply more info about Nik Turner’s “frog in flight” gig in Harlow?
Michael Moorcock: Fairly famous. It was an open stage and raining slightly. We were late for the gig. He rushed into his [frog] costume and I rushed out to take my regular position. A few moments later, I saw this giant frog with a sax round its neck fly at full length past me and into the audience. The stage was slippery and Nik’s momentum took him to full flight.
Q: From what I have read, your future adventures with Hawkwind may have started when Robert Calvert started writing for New Worlds. How did you actually first meet?
Michael Moorcock: Nope. Jon Trux brought Calvert to see me around the time Hawkwind were starting but before Bob joined. Later Dave Brock asked me to perform my own material (inc Sonic Attack) at a Portobello Green gig. Trux and I had helped Bob into the Priory before he did damage to himself and Bob was worried I’d take his place so I promised him I’d fill in for him only when he was incapacitated but I’d step back as soon as he was ready to perform again.
Q: Beg pardon, but what is the Priory?
Michael Moorcock: Posh loony bin. Several of my friends wound up there. They also treated alcoholism and serious conditions like Parkinsonism. Still do. Mervyn Peake, Martin Stone and Marianne Faithful were all in, as well as drunks.
Q: From what I can tell, you first foray into recording was with Hawkwind on “Space Ritual.” What was that like?
Michael Moorcock: It wasn’t. I did a demo for HMV – terrible — no result. We did a comedy record Suddenly It’s The Bellyflops in 1964/5. As for the pieces I did on Hawkwind’s Warrior On The Edge Of Time, I recorded them on my way to see a movie, all one take in about an hour. I was supposed to get a fee, but never did (nor wanted it). I had no trouble. All went ok.
Q: Your next foray into music was with your band the Deep Fix on “New Worlds Fair.” How did the recording process go? The violin seems particularly prominent on the album.
Michael Moorcock: Cello from Pete Pavli. Maybe Simon House [of the Third Ear Band] did some fiddle. We did it the usual way, laying down music tracks first then doing voices, then maybe adding a little more to fill out.
Q: Looking back, how successful was New Worlds Fair?
Michael Moorcock: Pretty successful but it didn’t chart significantly mainly because UA had expected it to sound like Hawkwind and of course it didn’t. Before I did that we did a demo for a single which UA didn’t go ahead with but was released by Flicknife a few years later around 1981. Most of this was people asking me to do a record. I had no particular ambition to do records until Pete Pavli and I began to work together in the 70s and 80s — those demo and rehearsal tapes were released by Don Falcone some years ago.
By RL Thornton.Introduction: After discussing Ursula K. Le Guin’s other collaborations with musicians (see the first part of this article), I contacted composer Elinor Armer to discuss her collaborations with Le Guin on their work Uses of Music in Uttermost Parts on Koch Classical and Armer’s settings of Le Guin’s poems in From To The Western Sea – Remembering Ursula K. Le Guin on Centaur.
Here are my questions:
1. How did you and Ursula K. Le Guin first meet and when did you decide to work together on compositions?
2. How did both of you come up with a compositional style for Uses For Music In Uttermost Parts? It feels very modernist to me.
3. Once you started to work together, what sorts of ideas did you come up with? Did you discard any concepts before settling on Uttermost Parts?
4. What was it like spending nine years to finish the composition? When did it become evident that it would take that much time?
ELINOR ARMER: During the early 80’s Ursula Le Guin’s daughter Elisabeth was a student in the first counterpoint class I taught at the San Francisco Conservatory. Elisabeth and I remained friends after her graduation, and it was in the mid-80’s that I met Ursula at Elisabeth’s wedding. Ursula had grown up next door to my grandparents’ house in Berkeley, my grandmother and her mother had been friends, so we had reason to know OF each other but didn’t actually meet until Elisabeth’s wedding.
Ursula and I had never sought each other out, as strangers, asking about collaboration; however, when we met I asked her (naively) if she wrote poetry and had any that might be set to music. She subsequently sent me a few volumes and also loose-leaf, individual poems. From these sources I selected five which seemed to me to form a cycle and then began setting them the following summer while at the MacDowell Colony. The title, “Lockerbones/Airbones”, referred to one of the five poems containing these Ursula-contrived words. The set was performed in San Francisco the following year and subsequently published by my first publisher, J. B. Elkus & Son. Some years later we recorded another performance and Ursula put it on her website where it remains to this day. (All pertinent details regarding performers, sources, etc., may be found there.)
So you see, it was friendship first, then my setting of already written poems—not a collaboration in the true sense at first. That friendship flourished and gave us great fun and pleasure; when we did decide to collaborate on something together from the ground up, I learned the true meaning of art as play, deep play. (We laughed uproariously at times, when Beethoven would have scowled.) On one of my visits to her California vacation home we agreed that it would be fun to collaborate on something from scratch. We came up with the preposterous notion of music being used for other purposes. We did not, however, conceive of the whole series or what it would become or what it would be called, nor did we work non-stop for ten years on this theme. Rather, when I received, sporadically, future commissions or requests from various performing forces I would consult with her to see if she thought we might collaborate in these instances. The musical forces involved on each occasion suggested the appropriate simile; for example, when I told her I had received a grant to compose something for the San Francisco Girls Chorus, she then created the text for Anithaca, designed for girls’ voices, a capella.
Ursula did not come up with “compositional styles”, nor I with textual ones. Fundamentally, I do not have a single compositional “style” that can be defined as such. Rather, I looked for characteristics in each of Ursula’s texts that could also translate to musical qualities. For example, both food and music can be crunchy, sweet, bitter, rich, liquid, thick, thin, spicy, etc; both music and weaving have threads, patterns, texture, direction (warp and weft), etc., etc.
So you see, while it was ten years or so before we recorded “Uses of Music in Uttermost Parts”, we did not start out with this as a goal. Rather, most of the pieces came about when opportunities arose as described above. It was not until after Ursula and I had co-narrated “The Great Instument of the Geggerets” with the Women’s Philharmonic under JoAnn Falletta’s baton, that we decided to form a series under one title.
Le Guin in 1984, a year before Rigel 9’s release. (Harlan Ellison at left.) Pip R. Lagenta/CC BY 2.0
By RL Thornton:
Introduction: When we think about speculative fiction (i.e. science fiction and fantasy), we usually think about novels, movies, or TV. But there are authors and musicians who try to expand those visions into sound. Ursula K. Le Guin was one of those people. This week, we will look at two of Le Guin’s musical collaborations with Todd Barton (“Kesh”) and David Bedford (“Rigel 9”), and next week, we will discuss Le Guin’s collaborations with composer and music educator Elinor Armen.
“Kesh” and Always Coming Home: Originally, this collection was on a cassette that came with a deluxe first edition of Le Guin’s 1985 novel Always Coming Home. Le Guin teamed up with synthesist Todd Barton to create a soundtrack to her 1985 novel Always Coming Home.
But it was reissued by the label RVNG International to acclaim by periodicals Pitchfork, who deemed it a Best New Reissue that “highlights the rich, totally immersive art Ursula K. Le Guin sought to create” and UK’s Guardian, who called it “deeply weird and enjoyable” even though they mistakenly called it an “electronica” album”. The first edition of 1000 vinyl LPs sold out and it was reissued a second time in 2018.
Music And Poetry of the Kesh is definitely different. Much of it is grounded in woodland sounds and the majority of the tunes feature sparse solo and duo unaccompanied singing that occasionally plays against a drum beating out time. Those unaccompanied tracks seem immediate and recorded live but feel a little thin due to the lack of reverb. Most of them seem to be a little thin sonically, though Barton occasionally brings in his synths (“Heron Dance”) and uses multitracked voices for “Long Singing.” It is said that there are instruments designed for the album but I didn’t really hear anything new–there was one sound that resembled a didgeridoo in “A River Song,” possibly the long droning horn that I read about.
Previously, I rejected this album out of hand because it lacked sound production values, but this album didn’t make sense to me until I actually started listening to it and reading Always Coming Home at the same time. As Le Guin’s prose cast its spell over me as usual, the soundtrack actually made Le Guin’s novel come alive. The decision to make the tracks part of the local soundscape suddenly made sense. It felt like I was among the Kesh! I swear it was absolutely magic. Who knew that the choice to use a minimum amount of recording tech would work so well! I’m really impressed. If you are a fan of Le Guin and especially a fan of Always Coming Home, I would say this is a must buy.
“Rigel 9” and Bedford: Next, we have Le Guin creating a libretto for a literal “space opera” with composer David Bedford and the County of Avon Symphonic Wind Band. In this story, explorers from Earth land on Rigel 9, a planet that seems to be nothing but bizarre trees. When the party begins to explore the world, everything changes after one of them is kidnapped by intelligent life. Bedford’s songs are grounded in that jazzy 70s British prog rock sound reminiscent of bands like Gong, Soft Machine, Robert Wyatt, and Henry Cow. Occasionally, I hear a brass band playing but most of the time it’s buried in the mix.
When the songs end and the spoken part of the libretto begins, Bereford’s blaring synths lay down weird background songs that are, well, like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s soundtracks for Doctor Who. Mix in the Dalek-ish robotic vocals that instruct the ship’s explorers, and Rigel 9 feels a lot like a rogue Doctor Who episode. My guess is the Bedford was trying to sell his rather unusual concept by deliberately pandering to the Whovians. Unfortunately, adopting the Whovian soundworld dilutes the work’s originality. The best part of Bedford’s musical setting is his cunning choice of ethereal female vocals to serve as the voices of Rigel 9’s inhabitants–literally unearthly and beautiful.
So what about Le Guin’s libretto? Honestly, it’s really meh for her and possibly the least interesting work that she has ever done, but even the least Le Guin is better than most. The explorer’s conversations are pretty flat and the characterizations are also flat, but the plot twist is actually pretty neat. Since this is on Apple Music and probably Spotify, I would suggest listening to Rigel 9 on those services before buying. And Whovians might want to try it too.
Covers of the Ballantine Books paperback editions from the 1970s.
By RL Thornton.
Returning to Literary Fantasy. Throughout the history of speculative fiction (i.e. SF/F), the genre has always had a problematic relationship with the literary mainstream. Aspersions were initially cast by pulp/”scientifiction” types on literary values and even as those values crept into the genre via writers like Heinlein and the New Wave, the term “literary” has been a bad word for readers who want their prose to go down easy.
As a result, the term “literary fantasy” has always been suspect, because the very idea of literary gatekeepers is always bound to offend genre advocates. This is unfortunate, because the values celebrated by literary fantasy should be most acceptable to anyone who cares about speculative fiction. Very high-quality prose (most important of all), difficult structures, and deftly realized characters and plots–it all sounds great to me!
And as we go back to literary fantasy, we should be looking to quality gatekeepers like the Mythopoeic Society and the World Fantasy Convention, who have been part of literary fantasy all along. We should be looking to literary fantasy, which points us to authors who stretch the boundaries of speculative fiction, regardless of their popular appeal (i.e. Neil Gaiman).
So we come to Evangeline Walton, who was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the World Fantasy Convention and won multiple awards from the Mythopoeic Society for novels in her Mabinogion tetralogy. These novels are a retelling of the Mabinogion, a medieval collection of eleven prose stories based on medieval Welsh manuscripts.
Evangeline Walton in 1936.
Evangeline Walton’s Story. If you look at the history of fantasy literature, Walton (originally known as Evangeline Wilna Ensley) plays a unique role in the tale. According to Wikipedia, she wrote most of the tetralogy from the 1920s through the 1940s and continued reworking them despite the poor response from the first book (initially titled The Virgin And The Swine, eventually republished as The Island Of The Mighty). Walton also completed a Theseus trilogy and only one of those books have been published. While Witch House (1945) and The Sword Is Forged (1983) were published, there are also other unpublished novels. Stevie Nicks (of all people) has the film rights to the Mabinogion tetralogy.
Walton was a pre-Tolkien fantasist, who was properly rediscovered when the legendary Ballentine Adult Fantasy collection of pre-Tolkien fantasy was assembled. Eventually all four novels were published (Prince of Annwn, Children of Llyr, Song of Rhiannon, and The Island of the Mighty in proper order). As the Mythopoeic Society and the World Fantasy Convention probably realized, these books are marvels of prose style and characterization that infuses her knowing individual characterizations and the myths of Wales with the lyrical promise of Lord Dunsany and his incipient feel for cosmic horror.
Here is an example of Walton’s beautiful prose from the very beginning of Prince of Annwn:
THAT DAY Pwyll, Prince of Dyved, who thought he was going out to hunt, was in reality going out to be hunted, and by no beast or man of earth.
The night before he had slept at Llyn Diarwya, that lay halfway between royal Arberth, his chief seat, and the deep woods of Glen Cuch. And at moonset, in the last thick darkness before dawn, he woke there.
He woke suddenly, as if a bell had been rung in his ear. Startled, he peered round him, but saw only sight-swallowing blackness that soon thinned to a darkness full of things yet darker. Of half-shaped, constantly reshaping somethings such as always haunt the lightless depths of night, and make it seem mysterious and terrible. He saw nothing that meant anything, and if he had heard anything he did not hear it again.
The Tetralogy’s Story. In these books, the characters of the Mabinogion use their skills and druidic skills to struggle with the menace of merciless gods, the dangers of other supernatural mysteries, the perils inflicted on them by rival druids, and their own impending fates. Most notable of them is Math (son of Mathowny), who presides over all of them with the foreknowledge of the others’ immediate future and the Future To Come. The quote from Wikipedia is apt: “My own method has always been to try to put flesh and blood on the bones of the original myth; I almost never contradict sources, I only add and interpret.”
Some of the other themes are the evolution of Wales culture as seem through the lens of the “Old Tribes” and the “New Tribes,” including explorations of what powers druids have, how changes in culture and the influence of Christianity changed the relationships between men and women, and the inevitable changes that would lead to today’s world.
All of these themes are carefully interwoven into a potent braid that carries you along through each novel into an ending which ends with an ellipsis and carries Wales into the uncertain future.
The Stories Themelves. The Prince of Annwn: Pwyll, the Prince of Dyved, encounters Death (the god Annwn) who challenges him to take on tasks that the god cannot achieve on his own.
The Children of Llyr: The terrible fates of the five children of Llyr (with a focus on Bran The Mighty and his sister Branwen) are told. The Cauldron, which is best known in Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain novels, plays a key role in the telling.
TheSong Of Rhiannon: Relates the grim adventures of the Prince of Pryderi and the remaining member of the Llyr children, who actually gets some happiness for once.
The Island of The Mighty: The tale of Gwydion (not necessarily the one in Alexander’s Prydain), nephew of the great and powerful Math, and the troubles that he encounters due to Gwydion’s own trickery and his own fate.
Difficulties You Might Encounter. Despite the tremendous power of Walton’s prose, current readers might have problems that come with the setting of the Mabinogion’s stories and the times in which Walton started writing those stories. Primarily, the ghost of heternormativity hovers over all these novels due to the medieval origin of the stories, and the current world of queer literature only briefly appears in close relationships between male blood relatives.
But this flaw is mostly nullified given the historic nature of the tales. If we believe in cultural relativity, certainly it should apply to the past as well as today. So with a little bit of grace, the virtues of Walton’s story-telling overshadow the problems.
People writing about the issues they care about is what keeps this community going. It’s a gift and privilege for me to be continually allowed to publish so many entertaining posts rich in creativity, humor, and shared adventures. Thanks to all of you who contributed to File 770 in 2022!
Stormm continued her humorous series about the misdirected emails she gets from Writer X throughout 2022, braiding together comedy, horror, and the pitfalls of being a writer.
…Thinking about Jules Verne, with the new TV version of Around the World in Eighty Days about to start, I just bought the Wesleyan edition of Five Weeks in a Balloon, translated by Frederick Paul Walter – after researching what the good modern translations of Verne are. Verne has been abysmally translated into English over the years, but there’s been a push to correct that….
… It was on FaceBook where I first saw friends’ posting about Opening Ceremonies. According to what was posted, some of the musical selections performed by students from the Duke Ellington School spotlighted the religious aspects of the Christmas holiday.
My immediate reaction was that this was not an appropriate part of Opening Ceremonies, especially since, as far as I know, the religious aspect of the performance was not contained in the descriptions in any convention publication. The online description of Opening Ceremonies says, in its entirety: “Welcome to the convention. We will present the First Fandom and Big Heart awards, as well as remarks from the Chair.” The December 9, 2021, news release about the choir’s participation did not mention that there would be a religious component to the performance….
Whew! We made it. We made it to Issue 100 of the Grantville Gazette. This is an incredible feat by a large group of stakeholders. Thank you, everyone.
I don’t think Eric Flint had any idea what he’d created when he sent Jim Baen the manuscript for 1632. In the intervening two-plus decades, the book he intended to be a one-shot novel has grown like the marshmallow man in Ghostbusters to encompass books from two publishing houses, a magazine (this one, that you are holding in your metaphorical hands) and allowed over 165 new authors to see their first published story in print. The Ring of Fire Universe, or the 1632 Universe, has more than twelve million words published….
This message was written by a fan in Moscow 48 hours ago. It is unsigned but was relayed by a trustworthy source who confirms the writer is happy for it to be published by File 770. It’s a fan’s perspective, a voice we may not hear much….
Right now, when I’m sitting at my desktop and writing this text, a cannonade nearby doesn’t stop. The previous night was scary in Kyiv. Evidently, Russians are going to start demolishing Ukrainian capital like they are doing with Kharkiv, Sumy, Chernihiv, Mariupol.
The Ukrainian SFF Community joined the efforts to isolate Russia, the nazi-country of the 21st century, to force them to stop the war. The boycott by American authors we asked for is also doing the job. Many leading writers and artists of the great United States already joined the campaign.
We appealed to SFWA to also join the campaign, and here is what they replied…
Fortunately, comic-carrying newspapers are, of course, all (also or only) online these days, but even then, some require subscriptions (fair enough), and to get all the ones you want. For example, online, the Washington Post, has about 90, while the Boston Globe is just shy of a paltry one-score-and-ten. And (at least in Firefox), they don’t seem to be visible in all-on-one-page mode, much less customize-a-page-of.
So, for several years now, I’ve been going to the source — two “syndicates” that sell/redistribute many popular strips to newspapers….
There’s been a lot of excitement about Squid Game. Everybody’s talking about how clever, original, and utterly skiffy it is. I watched it, too, eagerly and faithfully. But I wasn’t as surprised by it as some. I expected it to be good. I’ve been watching Korean video for ten years, and have only grown more addicted every year. And yet I just can’t convince many people to watch it with me….
Let me tell you about my favorite building in Washington, D.C. It’s the staid old Arts and Industries Building, the second-oldest of all the Smithsonian Institution buildings, which dates back to the very early 1880s and owes its existence to the Smithsonian’s then urgent need for a place where parts of its collection could go on public display….
When we last left the Heinleins (“What the Heinleins Told the 1940 Census”), a woman answering the door at 8777 Lookout Mountain – Leslyn Heinlein, presumably — had just finished telling the 1940 census taker a breathtaking raft of misinformation. Including that her name was Sigred, her husband’s was Richard, that the couple had been born in Germany, and they had a young son named Rolf.
Ten years have passed since then, and the archives of the 1950 U.S. Census were opened to the public on April 1. There’s a new Mrs. Heinlein – Virginia. The 8777 Lookout Mountain house in L.A. has been sold. They’re living in Colorado Springs. What did the Heinleins tell the census taker this time?…
“In the future, there was a nuclear war. And because of all the radiation, cats developed the ability to shoot lasers out of their mouths.”
On this dubious premise, Laser Cats was founded. By its seventh and final episode, the great action stars and directors of the day had contributed their considerable talents to this highly entertaining, yet frankly ridiculous enterprise. From James Cameron to Lindsey Lohan, Josh Brolin to Steve Martin, Laser Cats attracted the best in the business.
Being part of Saturday Night Live undoubtedly helped….
The Emeka Walter Dinjos Memorial Award For Disability In Speculative Fiction aims to award disability in speculative fiction in two ways. One, by awarding a writer of speculative fiction for their representation or portrayal of disability in a world of speculative fiction, whatever their health status; and two, by awarding a disabled writer for a work of speculative fiction in general, whatever the focus of the work may be….
Robert Osband, Florida fan, really loves space. All his life he has been learning about spaceflight. And reading stories about spaceflight, in science fiction.
So after NASA’s Apollo program was over, the company that made Apollo space suits held a garage sale, and Ozzie showed up. He bought a “training liner” from ILC Dover, a coverall-like portion of a pressure suit, with rings at the wrists and neck to attach gloves and helmet.
And another time, in 1976, when one of his favorite authors, Robert A. Heinlein, was going to be Guest of Honor at a World Science Fiction Convention, Mr. Osband journeyed to Kansas City.
In his suitcase was his copy of Heinlein’s Have Space Suit, Will Travel—a novel about a teenager who wins a secondhand space suit in a contest—and his ILC Dover suit.
Because if you wanted to get your copy of Have Space Suit, Will Travel autographed, and you happened to own a secondhand space suit, it would be a shame NOT to wear it, right?…
… I’m sure that our first face-to-face meeting was in 1979, when my job in industry took me from Chattanooga all the way out to Los Angeles for some much-needed training in electrochemistry. I didn’t really know anybody in L.A. fandom back then but I did know the address of the LASFS clubhouse, so on my next-to-last evening in town I dropped in on a meeting. And it was there that I found Bruce mostly surrounded by other fans while they all expounded on fandom as it existed back then and what it might be like a few years down the road. It was like a jazz jam session, but all words and no music. I settled back into the periphery, enjoying all the back-and-forth, and when there eventually came a lull in the conversations I took the opportunity to introduce myself. And then Bruce said something to me that I found very surprising: “Dick Lynch! I’ve heard of you!”…
It was back in 2014 that a student filmmaker at Stephen F. Austin State University, Ricky Kennedy, created an extraordinary short movie titled The History of Time Travel. Exploration of “what ifs” is central to good storytelling in the science fiction genre and this little production is one of the better examples of how to do it the right way.
For a long time, I’ve felt the Short Form Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation was not properly organized to give an award to the best “Television” SF of the previous year….
Lavie Tidhar’s Neom is a stunning return to his world of Central Station, twinning the fates of humans and robots alike at a futuristic city on the edge of the Red Sea….
… It is through Joy and Cassimer’s eyes we experience S.A. Tholin’s Iron Truth, a finalist of the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition. If there was ever a case of the cream rising to the top this book is one….
… A couple of odd things, though. He had $300 on him, that wasn’t stolen, and an unusual rosary, with what seems to be the wrong number of beads. It’s a puzzle….
In T. A. Bruno’s In the Orbit of Sirens, a Self-Published Science Fiction Competition finalist, the remnants of the human race have fled the solar system ahead of an alien culture that is assimilating everyone in reach. Loaded aboard a vast colony ship they’re headed for a distant refuge, prepared to pioneer a new world, but unprepared to meet new threats there to human survival that are as great as the ones they left behind.
On the morning of Carmen Grey’s sixth birthday an armed team arrives to take her from her parents and remove her to the underground facility where Clairvoyants — like her — are held captive and trained for years to access their abilities. So begins Monster of the Dark by K. T. Belt, a finalist in the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition….
G.M. Nair begins Duckett and Dyer: Dicks for Hire by making a surprising choice. His introductory scene explicitly reveals to readers the true nature of the mysterious events that the protagonists themselves uncover only very slowly throughout the first half of the book. The introduction might even be the penultimate scene in the book — which would make sense in a story that is partly about time travel loops. Good idea or bad idea?…
… What sounds like Firefly also describes the SPSFC finalist novel Captain Wu: Starship Nameless #1, a space opera by authors Patrice Fitzgerald and Jack Lyster. I love Firefly so it wasn’t a big leap to climb aboard this vessel….
…. It would be exceptionally embarrassing for a Worldcon to have to explain why a finalist would have won the Hugo except for — oops! — this bit of outdated fine print. The best course of action is to eliminate that fine print before such a circumstance arises….
The social media of the 30th century doesn’t seem so different: teenagers anonymously perform acts of civil disobedience and vandalism to score points and raise their ranking in an internet app. That’s where Aster Vale leads a secret life as the Wildflower, a street artist and tagger, in A Star Named Vega by Benjamin J. Roberts, a Self-Published Science Fiction competition finalist…..
R F Kuang’s Babel is an audacious and unrelenting look at colonialism, seen through the lens of an alternate 19th century Britain where translation is the key to magic. Kuang’s novel is as sharp and perceptive as it is well written, deep, and bears reflection upon, after reading, for today’s world….
Paul Weimer went to donate some books at Don Blyly’s new location for Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Edgar’s bookstores. While he was inside Paul shot these photographs of the bookshelves being stocked and other work in progress.
… Another contributor to the Afrofuturist tradition is Nicole Mitchell, a noted avant-jazz composer and flutist. She chose to take on Octavia Butler’s most challenging works, the Xenogenesis Trilogy, and create the Xenogenesis Suite, a collection of dark and disturbing compositions that reflect the trilogy’s turbulent and complicated spirit….
Anna carefully arranged the necessary objects around her desktop computer into a pentagon: sharpened pencils, a legal pad, a half-empty coffee cup, and a copy of Science Without Sorcery, with the chair at the fifth point. This done, she intoned the spell that would open the channel to her muse for long enough to write the final pages of her work-in-progress. Then she could get ready for the convention….
… In the last five years, the [Hugo Awards Study Committee] [HASC] has changed precisely two words of the Constitution. (Since you asked: adding the words “or Comic” to the title of the “Best Graphic Story” category.) The HASC’s defenders will complain that we had two years of pandemic, and that the committee switched to Discord rather than email only this year, and that there are lots of proposals this year. But the fact remains that so far the practical impact has been slower than I imagined when I first proposed the Committee…..
In Michaele Jordan’s overview, she comments on the novellas by Aliette de Bodard, Becky Chambers, Alix E. Harrow, Seanan McGuire, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and Catherynne M. Valente that are up for the 2022 Hugo.
… Once we had a lot of science fiction, little fantasy; lately we’ve had a lot of fantasy; so Powers’ writing fantasy does not seem particularly defiant.
His fantasy has generally been — to use a word which may provoke defiance — rigorous. Supernatural phenomena occur, may be predicted, aroused, avoided, as meticulously — a word whose root means fear — as we in our world start an automobile engine or put up an umbrella. Some say this has made his writing distinctive….
The day of reckoning is here for E Pluribus Hugo. The change in the way Hugo Awards nominations are counted was passed in 2015 and ratified in 2016 to counter how Sad and Rabid Puppies’ slates dictated most of finalists on the Hugo ballots in those years. It came with a 2022 sunset clause attached, and E Pluribus Hugo must be re-ratified this year in order to remain part of the WSFS Constitution….
… His name is Joel Nydahl, and back about the time of that Chicon he was a 14-year-old neofan who lived with his parents on a farm near Marquette, Michigan. He was an avid science fiction reader and at some point in 1952 decided to publish a fanzine. It was a good one….
… Abigail Kamara, younger cousin of police constable and apprentice wizard Peter Grant, has been left largely unsupervised while he’s off in the sticks on a case. This leaves Abigail making her own decisions when she notices that kids roughly her age are disappearing–but not staying missing long enough for the police to care….
Friends, let me tell you about one of my favorite TV shows. But I must admit to you up front that it’s not SF/F. Extraordinary Attorney Woo is, as I assume you’ve deduced from the title, a lawyer show. But it’s a KOREAN lawyer show, which should indicate that is NOT run of the mill….
Joseph Campbell was a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College, and wrote extensively about comparative mythology. His “hero’s journey” theory has been extremely influential….
… The Phantom Empire, a twelve-chapter Mascot serial, was originally released in February, 1935. A strange concoction for a serial, it is at once science fiction film, a Western, and strangely enough, a musical. It was the first real science fiction sound serial and its popularity soon inspired other serials about fantastic worlds….
… I find myself explaining the changes to membership in the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) and the conditions for attending the World Science Fiction Convention that were ratified this year in Chicago (and thus are now in effect, because this was the second vote on the changes)…
Chicon 8’s Chicago Worldcon Community Fund (CWCF) program offered both memberships and financial stipends. It was established with the goal of helping defray the expenses of attending Chicon 8 for the following groups of people:
Non-white fans or program participants • LGBTQIA+ fans or program participants • Local Chicago area fans of limited means…
The London Underground has ghosts. Well, the London Underground always has ghosts, but usually they’re gentle, sad creatures. Lately there’s been an outbreak of more aggressive ghosts….
As environmental problems caused by industrialisation and post-industrialisation continue to increase, the public is looking for ecological solutions. As pandemics, economic crises, and wars plague our society in different ways, thoughts turn to the good old times. But were they really all that good? People are escaping increasingly into fantastical stories in order to find a quantum of solace. But at what point was there a utopia in our society. If so, at what or whose cost did it exist? Whether or not we ever experience living in a utopia, the idea of finally finding one drives us to continue seeking ideal living conditions….
… Capclave appeared to be equally star-crossed in its next iteration. It was held over the weekend of October 18-20, 2002, and once again the attendees were brought closer together by an event taking place in the outside world. The word had spread quickly through all the Saturday night room parties: “There’s been another shooting.” Another victim of the D.C. Sniper….
… In Fairy Tale, his newest novel, Stephen King delivers a, cough, grimm contemporary story, explicitly incorporating horror in the, cough, spirit of Lovecraft (King also explicitly namedrops, in the text, August Derleth, and Henry Kuttner), in which high-schooler Charlie Reade becomes involved in things — and challenges — that, as the book and plot progress, stray beyond the mundane….
The idea of an anthology of science fiction and fantasy stories about the Beatles seems like a natural. I’ve been told the two editors, each unbeknownst to the other, both presented the idea to the publisher around the same time…
The Science Museum (that’s the world famous one in Kensington, London) has just launched a new exhibit on what Carl Sagan once mused (though not mentioned in the exhibit itself) science fiction and science’s ‘dance’. SF2 Concatenation reprographic supremo Tony Bailey and I were invited by the Museum to have a look on the exhibition’s first day. (The exhibition runs to Star Wars day 2023, May the Fourth.) Having braved Dalek extermination at the Museum’s entrance, we made our way to the exhibition’s foyer – decorated with adverts to travel to Gallifrey – to board our shuttle….
I was at the 2022 F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival in Rockville, MD today. If you’re wondering why the festival is there, that’s where Fitzgerald and his wife are buried. Now, I’d never read any of Fitzgerald`s writing, so I spent the evening before reading the first three chapters of The Great Gatsby (copyright having expired last year, it’s online). So far, I’ve yet to find anyone in it that I want to spend any time with, including the narrator.
However, the reason I attended was to see Kim Stanley Robinson, who was the special guest at the Festival. The end of the morning’s big event was a conversation between Stan and Richard Powers. Then there was lunch, and a keynote speaker, then Stan introducing Powers to receive an award from the society that throws the annual Festival….
A recent possible record could be the SF2 Concatenation’s website 2012 Eurocon Award voted on by those at the European SF Society’s convention which, that year, was held in Croatia….
Snuff is our narrator, here, and he’s a smart, interesting, likable dog. He’s the friend and partner of a man called Jack, and they are preparing for a major event….
…As a child, I kept a notebook filled with my favorite quotes. (How did I not know I was going to be an author?) The first quote? “Not all who wander are lost.” There was everything from 90s rom com lines to Wordsworth poems in that notebook, but Tolkien filled the most pages….
Louis Wu is 200 years old, and he’s bored. It’s his 200th birthday, and he’s using transfer booths to extend the celebration of it for a full twenty-four hours, and he’s really bored….
How can Halloween be over already? We barely had time to watch thirty horror movies –and those mostly classics, which are less than half our (horror) collection!
There is a fundamental implausibility to easy manned interstellar (or even interplanetary) space travel that nonetheless remains a seductive idea even in our wiser and more cynical and weary 21st century. …
Alif is a young man, a “gray hat” hacker, selling his skills to provide cybersecurity to anyone who needs that protection from the government. He lives in an unnamed city-state in the Middle East, referred to throughout simply as the City. He’s nonideological; he’ll sell his services to Islamists, communists, anyone….
Journalist, author, genre historian (and fan, certainly, from the 1940s and on!) Bertil Falk is acclaimed for performing the “impossible” task of translating Finnegans Wake to Swedish, the modernist classic by James Joyce, under the title Finnegans likvaka….
The protagonist of the first short novel in this omnibus — which is in fact Eye of Cat — is William Blackhorse Singer, a Navajo born in the 20th century, and still alive, and fit and healthy, almost two centuries later….
One fine Monday morning, Peter Grant is summoned to Baker Street Station on the London Underground, to assess whether there was anything “odd,” i.e., involving magic, about the death of a young man on the tracks….
…If you’re not a fan, then there’s a real chance you have no idea how much range animé encompasses. And I’m not even talking about the entire range of kid shows, sit-coms and drama. (I’m aware there may be limits to your tolerance. I’m talking about the range within SF/F. Let’s consider just three examples….
While I subscribe to the practice that, as a rule, reviews and review-like write-ups, if not intended as a piece of critical/criticism, should stick to books the reviewer feels are worth the readers reading, sometimes (I) want to, like Jerry Pournelle’s “We makes these mistakes and do this stuff so you dont have to” techno-wrangling Chaos Manor columns, give a maybe-not-your-cup-of-paint-remover head’s-up. This is one of those….
It’s been 30 years since the passing of my friend Roger Weddall. I doubt very many of you reading this had ever met him and I wouldn’t be surprised, actually, if most of you haven’t even heard of him. Thirty years is a long time and the demographics of fandom has changed a lot. So let me tell you a little bit about him….
I expect a lot of File 770’s readers watched, as we did, as the Orion capsule returned to Terra. I’m older than some of you, and it’s been decades since I watched a capsule re-entry and landing in the ocean. What had me in tears is that finally, after fifty years, we’re planning to go back… and stay….
Poul Anderson began writing his own “future history” in the 1950s, with its starting point being that there would be a limited nuclear war at some point in the 1950s. From that point would develop a secret effort to build a new social structure that could permanently prevent war….
…As with Avatar, Avatar: The Way of Water is a visual feast. Unlike the first film, there aren’t long sweeping pans lingering over beautiful, otherworldly vistas. The “beautiful” and the “otherworldly” are still there, but we’re seeing them incorporated into the action and storytelling….
Today we celebrate what would have been the 100th birthday of Harry Warner, Jr., who was perhaps the best-known stay-at-home science fiction fan of all time….
…But having learned that she can see and talk to ghosts, and that they all have unresolved problems they want to solve, she can’t always say no when they ask her for help….
…Xich Si is a tech scavenger, living in Triệu Hoà Port, and scavenging tech to sell and support herself and her daughter, when she’s captured by pirates. ….
… When I was growing up, children like myself were taught, no, more like indoctrinated, to think the United States was the BEST place to grow up, that our country was ALWAYS in the right and that our institutions were, for the most part, unassailable and impervious to criticism from anyone, especially foreigners.
I grew up in Ohio in the 1960’s and despite what I was being taught in a parochial Catholic grade school (at great expense, I might add, by my hard-working parents), certain things I was experiencing did not add up. News of the violence and casualties during the Vietnam War was inescapable. I remember watching the evening network news broadcasts and being horrified by the number of people (on all sides of the conflict) being wounded or killed on a daily basis.
As the years went on, it became harder to reconcile all of the violence, terrorism, public assassinations and the racism I was experiencing with the education I was receiving. The Pentagon Papers and the Watergate break-ins coincided with my high school years and the beginnings of my political awakening.
When I look back on those formative days of my life, I see myself as a small child, set out upon a sea of prejudice and whiteness, in a boat of hetero-normaltity, destination unknown….
… After I introduced myself to Mr. Weir and Mr. Bell, I said, “You and I have something in common.”
“Oh really? What’s that?”
“You and I are the only 2022 Hugo Award nominees within a hundred-mile radius of this bookstore.” (I stated that because I know that our fellow nominee, Jason Sanford, lives in Columbus, Ohio, hence the reference to the mileage.)…
Despite some very harsh comments from Dmitry Rogozin, the director general of Roscosmos, threatening that “If you block cooperation with us, who will save the ISS from an uncontrolled deorbit and fall into the United States or Europe?” spacefarers seem to have a different perspective and understanding of the importance of international cooperation, respect and solidarity. This appears to have been demonstrated today when three cosmonauts arrived at the International Space Station….
Forty-five years ago or thereabouts, on February 26, 1977, the first ‘prog’ of 2000AD was released by IPC magazines. The second issue dated March 5 a week later saw the debut of Judge Dredd. Since then, Rogue Trooper, Nemesis the Warlock, Halo Jones, Sláine, Judge Anderson, Strontium Dog, Roxy and Skizz, The ABC Warriors, Bad Company and Proteus Vex are just some of the characters and stories that have emanated from the comic that was started by Pat Mills and John Wagner. Some have gone on to be in computer games, especially as the comic was purchased by Rebellion developments in 2000, and Judge Dredd has been brought to the silver screen twice.
Addictive and enjoyable stories of the fantastic, written and drawn by some of the greatest comic creators of the latter part of the 20th century, they often related to the current, utilizing Science Fiction to obscure issues about violence or subversiveness, but reflecting metaphorically about the now of the time….
“Fight With Art” is an exhibition of Ukrainian Contemporary Art created under exceptional circumstances taking place now in Kraków at the Manggha Museum until April 30.
We reached out to curator Artur Wabik to learn more of this topical exhibition…
Steve Vertlieb, William Shatner, and Erwin Vertlieb.
Traditionally, the start of a new year is a time when film critics begin assembling their lists of the best films, actors, writers, composers, and directors of the past year. What follows, then, while honoring that long-held tradition, is a comprehensive compilation and deeply personal look at the finest film scores of the past nearly one hundred years….
The frenzy of joyous controversy swirling over director Adam McKay’s new film Don’t Look Up has stirred a healthy, if frenetic debate over the meaning and symbology of this bonkers dramedy. On its surface a cautionary satire about the impending destruction of the planet, Don’t Look Up is a deceptively simplistic tale of moronic leadership refusing to accept a grim, unpleasant reality smacking it in its face.
What follows is truly one of the most personally heartfelt, poignant, and heartbreaking remembrances that I’ve ever felt compelled to write.
Veronica Carlson was a dear, close, cherished friend for over thirty years. I learned just now that this dear sweet soul passed away today. I am shocked and saddened beyond words. May God rest her beautiful soul.
After interviewing William Shatner for the British magazine L’Incroyable Cinema during the torrid Summer of 1969 at “The Playhouse In The Park,” just outside of Philadelphia, while Star Trek was still in the final days of its original network run on NBC, my old friend Allan Asherman, who joined my brother Erwin and I for this once-in-a-lifetime meeting with Captain James Tiberius Kirk, astutely commented that I had now met and befriended all three of our legendary boyhood “Captains,” which included Jim Kirk (William Shatner), Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers (Larry “Buster” Crabbe), and Buzz Corry (Edward Kemmer), Commander of the Space Patrol….
… The first of the most important music modernists, however, in the post war era and “Silver Age” of film composers was Elmer Bernstein who would, had he lived, be turning one hundred years old on April 4th, 2022. Although he would subsequently prove himself as able as classic “Golden Age” composers of writing traditional big screen symphonic scores, with his gloriously triumphant music for Cecil B De Mille’s 1956 extravaganza, The Ten Commandments….
… She was just four days into her maiden voyage from Southhampton to New York City when this “Unsinkable” vessel met disaster and finality, sailing into history, unspeakable tragedy, and maritime immortality. May God Rest Her Eternal Soul … the souls of the men, women, and children who sailed and perished during those nightmarish hours, and to all those who go courageously “Down to The Sea in Ships.” This horrifying remembrance remains among the most profoundly significant of my own seventy-six years….
… It is true that Seth MacFarlane, the veteran satirist who both created and stars in the science fiction series, originally envisioned [The Orville] as a semi-comedic tribute to Gene Roddenberry’s venerable Star Trek. However, the show grew more dramatic in its second season on Fox, while it became obvious that MacFarlane wished to grow outside the satirical box and expand his dimensional horizons and ambitions….
… I was born in the closing weeks of 1945, and grasped at my tentative surroundings with uncertain hands. It wasn’t until 1950 when I was four years old that my father purchased a strange magical box that would transform and define my life. The box sat in our living room and waited to come alive. Three letters seemed to identify its persona and bring definition to its existence. Its name appeared to be RCA, and its identity was known as television….
He was a kindly, gentle soul who lived among us for a seeming eternity. But even eternity is finite. He was justifiably numbered among the most influential writers of the twentieth century. Among the limitless vistas of science fiction and fantasy he was, perhaps, second only in literary significance to H.G. Wells who briefly shared the last century with him. Ray Bradbury was, above all else, the poet laureate of speculative fiction….
On June 11, 1982, America and the world received the joyous gift of one of the screen’s most beloved fantasy film classics and, during that memorable Summer, a young aspiring television film critic reviewed a new film from director Steven Spielberg called E.T….
…Before I realized it, tables and chairs were being moved and I felt the hands of paramedics lifting me to the floor of the restaurant. Les was attempting to perform CPR on me, and I was drifting off into unconciousness. I awoke to find myself in an ambulance with assorted paramedics pounding my chest, while attempting to verbally communicate with me. I was aware of their presence, but found myself unable to speak….
After nearly dying a little more than a decade ago during and just after major open heart surgery, I fulfilled one of the major dreams of my life…meeting the man who would become my last living life long hero. I’d adored him as far back as 1959 when first hearing the dramatic strains of the theme from Checkmate on CBS Television. That feeling solidified a year later in 1960 with the rich, sweet strains of ABC Television’s Alcoa Premiere, hosted by Fred Astaire, followed by Wide Country on NBC….
…When Jack Warner was casting the film version of the smash hit, he considered performers such as Cary Grant, James Cagney, or Frank Sinatra for the lead. Meredith Willson, the show’s composer, however, demanded that Robert Preston star in the movie version of his play, or he’d withdraw the contracts and licensing. The film version of The Music Man, produced for Warner Brothers, and starring Robert Preston and Shirley Jones, opened to rave reviews on movie screens across the country in 1962. Robert Preston, like Rex Harrison in Lerner and Lowe’s My Fair Lady, had proven that older, seasoned film stars could propel both Broadway and big screen musicals to enormous artistic success….
On the evening of May 14, 1998, following the airing over NBC Television of the series finale of Seinfeld, the world and I received the terrible news of the passing of the most beloved entertainer of the twentieth century. It has been twenty-four years since he left this mortal realm, but the joy, the music, and the memories are as fresh and as vital today as when they were born….
I had the honor and distinct pleasure of both knowing and sharing correspondence with British actor Peter Cushing for several years during the late Sixties and early Seventies….
Very exciting news. The long awaited CD soundtrack release of 12 O’Clock High is now available for purchase through La-La Land Records and is a major restoration of precious original tracks from Quinn Martin’s beloved television series….
That terrible day in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963 remains one of the most significantly traumatic days of my life. I was just seventeen years old. I was nearing the end of my high school classes at Northeast High School in Philadelphia when word started spreading through the hallways and corridors that JFK had been shot. I listened in disbelief, praying that it wasn’t true … but it was….
I recently watched a somber new three part documentary by film maker Ken Burns that is among the most sobering, heartbreaking, and horrifying indictments of humanity that I have ever encountered. It was extremely difficult to watch but, as an American Jew, I remain struck by the similarities between the rise in Fascism in the early nineteen thirties, leading to the beginnings of Nazism in Germany, and the attempted decimation of the Jewish people in Europe and throughout the world, with the repellant echoes of both racial and religious intolerance, and the mounting hatred and suspicion of the Jewish communities and population residing presently in my own country of birth, these United States….
I’ve read with interest some of the recent discussions concerning the measure of Hugo Friedhofer’s importance as a composer, and it set my memory sailing back to another time in a musical galaxy long ago and far away. I have always considered Maestro Friedhofer among the most important, if underrated, composers of Hollywood’s golden era….
…Steven Spielberg’s reverent semi-autobiographical story of youthful dreams and aspirations is, for me, the finest, most emotionally enriching film of the year, filled with photographic memories, and indelible recollections shared both by myself and by the film maker….
These photographs are of an annual Christmas tradition at American Heritage Federal Credit Union located at Red Lion and Jamison Roads in Northeast Philadelphia….
…This was the man who brought such incalculable joy and hope to so many millions of filmgoers with his quintessential Christmas classic, It’s A Wonderful Life. …
My friend Adam Spector tells me that when Ernest Lehman was asked to write the script for North by Northwest, he tried to turn out the most “Hotchcocky” script he could, with all of Hitchcock’s obsessions in one great motion picture.
Moonfall is the most “Emmerichian” film Roland Emmerich is made. Like his earlier films, it has flatulent melodrama interlaced with completely daft science. But everything here is much more intense than his earlier work. But the only sense of wonder you’ll get from this film is wondering why the script got greenlit….
… Having a long career in Hollywood is a lot harder than in other forms of publishing; you’ve got to have the relentless drive to pursue your vision and keep making sales. To an outsider, what is astonishing about J. Michael Straczynski’s career is that it has had a third act and may well be in the middle of a fourth. His career could have faded after Babylon 5. The roars that greeted him at the 1996 Los Angeles Worldcon (where, it seemed, every conversation had to include the words, “Where’s JMS?”) would have faded and he could have scratched out a living signing autographs at media conventions….
When I read in the Financial Times about how Britain’s National Theatre was adapting Sir Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage, the first volume of his Book of Dust trilogy, I told myself, “That’s a play for me! I’ll just fly over to London and see it! OGH is made of money, and he’ll happily pay my expenses!”
Fortunately, I didn’t have to go to London, because the theatre came to me, with a screening of the National Theatre Live production playing at the American Film Institute. So, I spent a pleasant Saturday afternoon seeing it….
… Stories matter more in the theatre than in film because far more of a play is in our imagination than in a film. Stripped of CGI and rewrites by multiple people, what plays offer at their best is one person’s offering us something where, if it works, we tell ourselves, “Yes, that was a good evening in the theatre,” and if it doesn’t, we gnash our teeth and feel miserable until we get home…
As Anton Ego told us in Ratatouille, the goal of a critic today is to be the first person to offer praise to a rising artist. It’s not the tenth novel that deserves our attention but the first or second. In the theatre, the people who need the most attention are the ones who are being established, not the ones that build on earlier successes.
So I’m happy to report that Matthew Aldwin McGee, author, star, and chief puppeteer of Under the Sea with Dredgie McGee is a talented guy who has a great deal of potential. You should be watching him….
I once read an article about a guy who was determined to live life in 1912. He lived in a shack in the woods, bought a lot of old clothes, a Victrola, and a slew of old books and magazines. I don’t remember how he made a living, but the article made clear that he was happy….
Interview conducted by Rob Thornton: This is Part Two of an interview with avant-jazz composer and flutist Nicole Mitchell, who paid tribute to Octavia Butler in 2008 in her composition Xenogenesis Suite. For more information, see Part One. SPOILER WARNING: This part of the interview assumes that you have read the Xenogenesis Trilogy or don’t mind knowing its entire plot.
Rob Thornton:You have talked about the darkness and the complexity of Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy. How does your piece reflect the novels?
Nicole Mitchell: Xenogenesis is an intricate trilogy expressing a metamorphosis of humanity through the interbreeding of extraterrestrials. It exposes our lack of self love, and illuminates Butler’s vivid world of other beings more powerful than humans, while documenting a journey of human survival and resistance. I focused on Dawn for Xenogenesis Suite. I was fascinated with the concept of Lilith being stripped of our homeland and her having to work towards continual survival in an alien world, alone. I created my own narrative inspired by Butler’s story, which served as the foundation of my compositions. You can include some of this below, if you wish.
1. Wonder
In wonder, there is beauty, and in wonder there is power. The power can be equally beautiful and horrific as is the power of humans to be so creative and equally destructive to planet Earth and ourselves. There is a wonder to our intelligence to build societies, study and imitate nature through inventions, and a wonder to our immaturity expressed by our inability to hold life sacred.
2. Transition A
If everything you had known is no longer, and you were placed in a seamless space, what would you feel? The space breathes; you are in the bellow of a monster. How would you find comfort i the unknown, knowing that your state of terror can only be temporary, if you are to survive. The space breathes again, adn you awaken. There is NO WAY OUT and NO WAY Back to what you have known. The only way to survive is to be altered.
3. Smell of Fear
There is a smell of fear. A loud and indistinguishable smell that sticks to its victim. It is residue from the canal between LIFE and DEATH. When on nears the death experience, through accident or tragedy, but is saved on the side of life, she survives with the residue, the smell of fear.
4. Sequence Shadows
When one keeps trying to wake from a dream, but the dream is of the past life. Now you have awakened and try to accept the alien environment that is around you. you have entered a new and strange realm. One awakens to sequences shadows; the eyes cannot grasp the horrific strangeness it sees, so it sees sequence shadows. The new reality dances a strange dance and the human must breathe and accept this new vision in the eyes.
5. Oankali
The names of your caretakers on this new journey. Find humor in your capturers, identify with them, so that you can save your mind.
6. Adrenalin
There’s nowhere to run, in a small space with no windows or doors, but the mind can find a place. Every once in a while, it can search for an opening somewhere, for peace, for the return of memory, of familiar. Where is this place? It is in waterside walks with family, sunshine and good food. The Earth is dead. Only in the mind can this place survive. In our Dreams we will run there.
7. Transition C
Eventually, in your process of survival, you allow yourself to be altered, changed, improved by the unknown beings.
8. Before and After
Before being captured, before WAR and the destruction of the life we knew and loved, there were our busy lives. We were unaware and unappreciative of the simple things we loved. Then the explosions, the WAR, the suicide of humans. After, there is nothing. Nothing that we know. Just the unknown.
9. Dawn of a New Life
There is something after, the Dawn of a New Life. Only fragments of the past linger. Our memory altered, overwhelmed with new experiences, interacting with new and repulsive but fascinating beings. Together we enter the Dawn of a New Life.
RT: What method did you use to compose the Xenogenesis Suite? Did you compose for the Black Earth Ensemble or for a set of instruments?
NM: I composed the work for Black Earth Ensemble, my main compositional vehicle. For each project, I choose specific artists who I imagine to manifest the project. For Xenogenesis, Mankwe Ndosi, the vocalist, played a central role, because I imagined her to represent Lilith, as a lone human within a strange extraterrestrial world that the other instruments would represent. I refrained from having her use a lot of language, because without it, her sounds expressed raw emotions ranging from innocence to terror. In that state, the expression of emotions through sounds without words, can also sound very alien, so the idea was to have her simultaneously represent the human element and the extraterrestrial element at the same time. I used a hybrid score, including graphic notation and traditional notation. My handwritten score translated more to the vibe I wanted for the musicians, and the text I gave you above was a guide for them as well.
RT: When you introduced the Suite to the Black Earth Ensemble, what was their reaction?
Xeno was probably the most experimental of my projects at that time, so there were slight challenges. However, I worked with musicians that I trusted and that trusted me, because I was having them do things for this project that were often counter-intuitive, to illuminate what I was trying to express. For example, Dawn of a New Life, the last movement, would sound fantastic with a hiphop beat, but that’s not what I wanted. Marcus Evans, the drummer, had to resist that urge, to express the restrained intensity that I was seeking with the piece.
RT: What was it like to perform the Xenogenesis Suite live? How did the audience react? Did it change when the Suite was recorded?
NM: We actually made the record at Firehouse 12 in New Haven, the day before the premiere at the Vision Festival in New York. It was a bit intense to perform it live, because the musicians really had to trust me even more in front of an audience, to resist some of the ways they normally play. But it went really well and the audience loved it.
RT: In “Before and After,” I hear some instrument (probably the piano) do a superb imitation of a nuclear weapon. Do you recall how that came about?
NM: I’m glad you heard that, because that was my intention. Actually, all the instruments are doing that sound together and it’s written in the score. The full title is “Before and After Nuclear War.” The musicians also have sections in that piece were they create animal sounds with their instruments, as well as cries for help. Butler’s Dawn speaks of nuclear war as the catalyst for the extraterrestrials to swoop down and save Earth and to take over humanity.
RT: For people who are not immediately familiar with avant-jazz sounds, could you give some advice to them on listening to the Suite?
NM: I found that science fiction is the perfect companion for experimental jazz and creative music, because both take the audience on a journey into the unknown. I’m grateful that musicians and audience members have shared with me that they started reading Octavia Butler after learning about this music. Hopefully it can be listened to while reading.
RT: You composed the Suite back in 2008. Looking back at the piece today, how do you feel about it?
NM: I still feel really great about the piece. This year, in 2022, it was incredible to perform Xenogenesis Suite at Carnegie Hall and receive a standing ovation, during the Afrofuturism Festival in February. I think when I wrote it, people weren’t as interested in Afrofuturism as they are now, and it is rewarding to see people’s interest increase now.
Since Xenogenesis Suite, I created two additional suites of music for Octavia: Intergalactic Beings on FPE Records, which sonically revisits Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy, and EarthSeed, which was released in 2020 on Octavia’s birthday, inspired by Parable of the Sower. EarthSeed was a collaboration with Lisa E. Harris, where we created our own EarthSeed spiritual text, inspired by Olamina in the book. In 2017, I released Mandorla Awakening, which is an album inspired by my own Afrofuturist novella.
I really appreciate you interviewing me, because for a long time I’ve wanted to be more engaged with Octavia Butler scholars on the literary side. I know she would want us to be all connected.
Interview conducted by Rob Thornton: Critic Mark Dery created the term “Afrofuturism” in his influential essay “Black to the Future” (1993). In the essay, he included an extensive interview with Samuel R. Delany and pointed to Black visions of the future throughout the world, including musicians such as Sun Ra and Parliament-Funkadelic who used science fiction tropes in their music. Afrofuturism in music has continued since 1993 with Black artists such as Janelle Monae, Kool Keith, Deltron 3030, Juan Atkins, Jeff Mills, and other Black artists such as Erykah Badu and Missy Elliot using futuristic elements in their performances.
Another contributor to the Afrofuturist tradition is Nicole Mitchell, a noted avant-jazz composer and flutist. She chose to take on Octavia Butler’s most challenging works, the Xenogenesis Trilogy, and create the Xenogenesis Suite, a collection of dark and disturbing compositions that reflect the trilogy’s turbulent and complicated spirit.
She has been president of Chicago’s legendary avant-jazz organization the Association of the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Influential jazz magazine Down Beat named her a Rising Star in flute from 2004 through 2009. Currently she teaches jazz at the University of Pittsburgh and leads her group the Black Earth Ensemble.
(Note: Given the care in which Nicole gave to her answers, the email answers are provided nearly verbatim with only minimal editing.)
Rob Thornton: How were you introduced to Octavia’s works and what was your initial reaction to them?
Nicole Mitchell: I grew up reading Octavia Butler’s books off my mother’s bookshelf when I was a youth. My mother, Joan Beard Mitchell (JBM) was a self-taught Afrofuturist painter and fiction writer, so at home, I was surrounded with visionary paintings. Two images that come to mind is one with Black women cradling their infants while sitting on planets, and another with a landscape featuring three setting suns on an unknown planet. JBM was brilliant creative person from Chicago, who happened to be from the same generation and have much synergy with the founders of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), whom I would become a part of later in life.
JBM was a big fan of Octavia’s work and had lots of her books, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Octavia had inspired her leanings towards writing sci-fi. On the other hand, my father, Michael E. Mitchell, had always shared his obsession with UFO’s with the family. He believed that there were people from outer space that were much more advanced than humans, and that our life on Earth was a school. My dad had moved us to southern California in the 1970s, partly so that he and my mother could connect with what they believed was a movement of people working to advance spiritual consciousness. They were of a very small group of African Americans involved in the New Age movement. So at my home, I was immersed in a world where Butler’s fiction really came alive and made sense.
RT: Why did you choose the Xenogenesis Trilogy as a source of inspiration?
NM: I had moved to Chicago, the place of my mother’s roots, back in 1990, to continue her artistic legacy. JBM (my mom) had left the planet in 1982 when I was a teenager, and I translated her mission into my own by seeking to make music that “bridges the familiar with the unknown.” As JBM had been a self-taught poet and fiction writer, I gravitated to Third World Press (TWP), founded by Haki Madhubuti, and spent many years working there. I become a cultural mentee of Haki and Safisha Madhubuti’s Institute of Positive Education (IPE) complex, while simultaneously mentoring with musicians of the AACM, including Maia, Shanta Nurullah, George Lewis and Douglas Ewart. In 2006, met Octavia Butler when my Black Earth Ensemble performed for Chicago State University’s National Black Writer’s Conference, organized by Haki Madhubuti. In the moments that I met Octavia, her powerful, yet quiet and gentle mysterious presence reminded me of my mother, and I immediately had the idea to create a musical tribute for her.
Dawn was one of the scariest books I have ever read, because it showed me the horrific side of human nature. With Dawn, Octavia opened up a fascination in me to ponder why we as humans are so compellingly creative and yet so incredibly self-destructive. I didn’t want to mimic Octavia’s narrative with my music, but with Xenogenesis Suite, I wanted to explore the process of facing fear, because Lillith was forced to survive in a constant state of horror, isolation, and disorienting circumstances on that space ship. I realize that Octavia was exemplifying real life horrors that humans have committed to each other over thousands of years, and still today. Power is too often abused. Yet, Octavia brilliantly creates fantastical settings to give readers space to see these human flaws more clearly.
Xenogenesis Suite became a life-altering artistic challenge for me, because in a journey of facing fear, I had to access parts of myself that I was afraid of, and childhood memories where fear dominated. I had to create sounds that illuminated the uncomfortable and the disturbing, which pushed me beyond the boundaries of many of my music listeners’ expectations. (Even though I am a member of the avant garde and experimental side of the “jazz” scene, there remains a lingering expectation that music is supposed to make you feel good).
RT: Chamber Music America commissioned the Suite. How did that come about?
My original intention was to create Xenogenesis Suite in collaboration with Octavia, so that she could give input to my creation of the music. It would be a way to get to know her and to honor her as a living genius. But, literally the day after I turned my proposal to Chamber Music America in the mail, I heard that Octavia had suddenly died. So immediately I decided, whether I got support or not, I was going to do Xenogenesis Suite.
NM: Chamber Music America has a competitive program called New Jazz Works that I submitted my proposal to and I’m grateful that their panel chose to support Xenogenesis Suite that year. It allowed me to be able to fund travel for my eight piece Black Earth Ensemble from Chicago to New York so that we could premiere at the Vision Festival, and it made it possible for us to cover recording costs, travel, hotel and artists fees to record the Xenogenesis Suite album in New Haven for the Firehouse 12 record label.
