Tag Archives: romantasy

Pixel Scroll 1/28/25 One Moon Was A Ghostly Galleon, The Other A Spirited Schooner

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(1) CHINESE FANZINE ZERO GRAVITY NEWS PUBLISHES THREE ISSUES. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] Three issues of the Hugo Award-winning fanzine Zero Gravity News have just been published, featuring articles about their personal experiences from a number of Chinese fans. Here is the text of RiverFlow’s two tweets about the issues (slightly edited):

Chinese fanzine Zero Gravity has published a themed special “l With Sci-Fi” across three issues. Issues 25 and 26 contain the views of middle school and college students on science fiction. The 27th issue mainly contains the articles of the memories of working-age Chinese sci-fi fans.  

This comes to a total of 480,000 words across the three issues, which can be said to be another collective voice of Chinese science fiction fans.

The PDFs of the three issues can be downloaded from this Google Drive link – each is around 10MB in size.

(2) EBOOK ALTERNATIVE HELPS INDIE BOOKSTORES. Bookshop.org US now is also selling ebooks.

Every purchase on the site financially supports independent bookstores. Our platform gives independent bookstores tools to compete online and financial support to help them maintain their presence in local communities.

NPR has the story — “Bookshop.org launches new e-book platform that exclusively supports local bookstores”.

…MARTÍNEZ: OK, there are already a lot of online retailers for e-books. I mean, millions of them are sold every year. So why are we focusing on this one?

FADEL: Well, this one exclusively supports local bookstores, and that’s because e-books are a difficult format for smaller booksellers to keep up with, according to Bookshop’s CEO, Andy Hunter.

ANDY HUNTER: Because the publisher requirements are so strict, it requires a huge amount of technical effort to deliver an e-book securely so it can’t be hacked and it can’t be pirated around the web. And that is too much for any individual local bookstore to deal with.

MARTÍNEZ: All right, so that makes sense. So what do indie bookstores think?

FADEL: We checked in with a few owners like Pete Mulvihill of Green Apple Books in San Francisco, and he told us his stores will take all the help they can get.

PETE MULVIHILL: We survive by kind of (laughter) scraping and clawing where we can to find efficiencies or make a little extra income. And this is another significant, if small, stream of income for us. So it’s truly helpful….

(3) ROMANTASY RINGING THE REGISTER. “Bestsellers – Critical Maas: Is this real life? Is this just fantasy?” asks The Bookseller about the UK market. Since the start of the year sff sales are up nearly a third, with fantasy titles driving the train. “Bookshops across the country may soon need to rebalance their space as readers continue to seek to escape from reality.”

You would be forgiven for thinking that bookshops were caught in a landslide of fantasy fiction in 2024 with authors such as Sarah J Maas and Rebecca Yarros dominating the top end of the fiction charts – as seen in our Author Review of the Year in last week’s issue (The Bookseller, 17th January 2025). It was not just the spicy side of the genre represented either, with JRR Tolkien’s sales rising 21.3% year-on-year through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market and Brandon Sanderson appearing inside the top 50 authors of the year for the first time. Is this a trend that’s going to continue into 2025 – and, if it is, which series should we be keeping our eye on?

It is timely to start with Rebecca Yarros, as the third book in her Empyrean series – Onyx Storm – is published this week, while Fourth Wing and Iron Flame are sitting atop the Fantasy charts so far for 2025.

First published in hardback in 2023, the first two books in the series were released in paperback in 2024, with Fourth Wing placing 11th in the full-year chart, selling just shy of 250,000 copies. The paperback of Iron Flame was only released in November and has shifted 78,586 copies in its first nine weeks – 7.4% down on the equivalent period for its predecessor….

…While Yarros tops the fantasy chart so far for 2025, it is Sarah J Maas who dominates it, taking five of the top 10 spots. With TCM volume sales of 1.3 million units in 2024, the author of the A Court of Thorns and Roses series rooted herself into second place in our authors of the year chart with sales of £13.2m.

So far this year, Yarros’ value has already reached £483,676 – up 88.9% against the first two weeks of 2024 – and with fans eagerly awaiting the paperback release of last January’s House of Flame and Shadow, as well as the fifth ACOTAR novel, a surprise 2025 release or two could see Maas’ sales increase further still.

The bestselling fantasy hardback title at the moment could be the start of the next big thing. First published at the beginning of December, Quicksilver – the first instalment of Callie Hart’s Fae & Alchemy series – has sold 34,417 copies, with 17.9% of that coming in the past two weeks. A sequel is due later in 2025 but, so far, no date for the paperback edition has emerged. Another author to keep an eye on is Sarah A Parker, whose When the Moon Hatched is one of just three hardbacks inside the fantasy top 20, despite being first published back in June. It has just topped £1m worth of sales and consistently appears in the e-book charts provided by BookStat. The paperback is due in May, while the second book in the Moonfall series will be published in October of this year.

While 19 of the 20 listed here are romantasy – only Gregory Maguire’s Wicked bucks the trend – they are not the only sub-genre of the market on which to keep an eye. The third bestselling fantasy author of the moment is Brandon Sanderson, whose Cosmere universe has delivered £135,763, while Tolkien’s romance-free books have notched up £109,753 – though it is worth noting even when Tolkien and Sanderson’s sales are combined with second-placed Yarros, they still cannot top Maas’ total…..

(4) CHINESE NEW YEAR GALA BROADCAST. [Item by Ersatz Culture and Prograft.] The annual Chinese New Year/Spring Festival Gala was broadcast by state broadcaster CCTV/CMG on Tuesday 28th.  The full (nearly 5 hour) show can be seen on YouTube, but the links below jump directly a couple of performances that may be the ones of most relevance to File 770:

A folk dance performed by robots and human dancers.  Per this news article, this is “a traditional Yangko dance, a vibrant folk art form from northeast China” where “the robots showcased their ability to manipulate handkerchiefs, a signature element of Yangko dance“.

A friend sent me a link to the Taobao sales page for what seems to be the robots used in this performance.  The link wouldn’t show me the full product list as I don’t have a user account there, but he also sent me a screenshot, which is below, along with a Google Translation.  The prices per unit convert to approximately $69k and $90k USD.

A girls choir performed a folk song with elements relating to the Chinese space program, such as the moon, an astronaut and a space station, which were overlaid onto the broadcast.  This news article has more information about the performers, although it does not really mention the space aspects.

(5) YOUNG ADULTS WRITE NOW. The Horror Writers Association blog today announced the 2024 recipients of the YAWN Endowment — Young Adults Write Now (YAWN).

This endowment is provided by the Horror Writers Association and is aimed at supporting teen writing programs in libraries as part of its ongoing dedication to furthering young adult literacy. We received a large number of excellent applications last year and are heartened by the number of libraries currently prioritizing teen writing programs. 

The YAWN application period runs from August 1st to October 1st, with five recipients selected in October. Each recipient is awarded $250, to be put toward developing or supporting a teen writing program in their library. More about the endowment can be found on the Horror Writers Association’s website, via the Horror Scholarships page. 

Libraries receiving funding will be able to use the monies for anything relating to their proposed or currently active writing program, including but not limited to: books (specifically young adult horror and books on writing), supplies, special events, publishing costs, guest speakers and instructors, additions to the collection, and operating expenses.

The recipients of the 2024 Young Adults Write Now Endowment are:

  • South Fayette Township Library (Pennsylvania)
  • San Benito County Free Library (California)
  • Wharton County Library (Texas)
  • Cuyahoga County Public Library, Garfield Heights Branch (Ohio)
  • Public Library of New London (Connecticut)

(6) KASEY AND JOE LANSDALE Q&A. The Horror Writers Association blog’s “Nuts & Bolts” series has added an “Interview With Kasey and Joe R. Lansdale”.

KASEY LANSDALE

Q: What marketing advice do you have for authors, especially in light of the changing social media landscape?

A: I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Mailing list. Social platforms are too erratic. It doesn’t matter if you have a million followers if, let’s say for example, they ban your audience …

Q: Can you share any insights about publishing that many authors don’t know, but would benefit from knowing?

A: The cream does not rise to the top. The publishers in most cases pick their lead title and put most of their juice behind it, and if something else gets out, it’s by pure magic. There’s no formula or we would all be doing it. There are two kinds of publicists. The ones who shoot out to their mailing list and hope someone answers, and the ones who beat down doors and hope for answers. Unfortunately, the results are usually pretty on par with one another. But that’s not a defeat, that’s a call to action. That means that the author must tell the world about their books, and take the opportunities given to share it and themselves with the world.

(7) LAUREL AMBERDINE (1970-2025). Writer and editor Laurel Amberdine died January 21 at the age of 54. The SFWA Blog has published a tribute: “In Memoriam: Laurel Amberdine”.

Laurel Amberdine (1970–21 January 2025) was a writer, interviewer, and genre editor. She worked for Locus Magazine for ten years, and was an assistant editor for Lightspeed magazine.

Amberdine was known for her kind and thoughtful interviews, yet she also loved to write, both prose and poetry. Her short fiction story, “Airship Hope” was published by Daily Science Fiction in 2013, and in her 2018 essay “Science Fiction Saved My Life” (Uncanny Magazine), she discussed how her chronic illness and disability had affected her, how finding writing gave her purpose, and how privilege inherent in the industry limits voices that readers may need to hear. Amberdine wrote a young adult novel, Luminator, which made it far along in the publication process, as well as an adult science-fiction novel.

Amberdine was known for her kindness and warmth, rooted in her Catholic faith, and extended to all who she encountered….

(8) AL SARRANTONIO (1952-2025). Sff/h writer, editor and publisher Al Sarrantonio has died reported Chet Williamson on Facebook. Wikipedia has a detailed article about his career.

Al Sarrantonio in the Seventies. Photo by and copyright © Andrew Porter.

He began an editing career at a major New York publishing house in 1976. His first short fiction, “Ahead of the Joneses,” appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in 1979, and the following year he published 14 short stories. In 1982 he left publishing to become a full-time writer.

He established himself in the horror field with such much-anthologized stories as “Pumpkin Head”, “The Man With Legs”, “Father Dear,” “Wish”, and “Richard’s Head,” (all of which appear in his first short story collection, Toybox). “Richard’s Head” brought him his first Bram Stoker Award nomination.

Sarrantonio won a Bram Stoker Award in 2000 for his anthology 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense, and a Shirley Jackson Award in 2011 for the anthology Stories: All-New Tales (co-edited with Neil Gaiman; it also won an Audie). Both books also were finalists for the World Fantasy Award.

(9) JEANNOT SZWARC (1940-2025). The Guardian’s writeup about movie/TV director Jeannot Szwarc is almost harshly frank: “Jeannot Szwarc obituary”. “Director whose big screen credits include Jaws 2, Supergirl and Santa Claus: The Movie alongside a 50-year career in television.” He also directed Somewhere in Time.

…His blockbusters, though, were among the most maligned films of their age. When asked about Jaws 2, Szwarc said: “I do believe I deserve some credit for just pulling it off.”

The odds were not in his favour. He had less than a month to prepare when the picture’s original director, John Hancock, quit three weeks into production. Only 90 seconds of what Hancock had shot proved usable. At that point, Szwarc said, “It was the biggest disaster in the history of Universal. They had spent $10m, and they had nothing.”

An unfinished script, bad weather and a malfunctioning mechanical shark only added to Szwarc’s woes as an immovable release date loomed. He was under no illusions about the task at hand. “I knew it wasn’t going to be a cinematic masterpiece. All I went in with was knowing I had to make it scary, and that I had to finish it.”

The film, which features a scene in which a shark chomps on a sea rescue helicopter as it attempts to take off from water, was met with dismay by critics. Riding the wave of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 predecessor, however, it was still a hit, grossing $187m….

…His TV credits in the early 70s included Columbo, The Six Million Dollar Man and more than a fifth of the episodes of the long-running macabre suspense series Night Gallery.

Among his television films was The Small Miracle (1973), which starred one of his heroes, the Italian neo-realist director Vittorio De Sica. “I told him I felt like an art student who had to instruct Michelangelo,” he said.

Szwarc made his big-screen debut in the same year with the Michael Crichton-scripted thriller Extreme Close-Up. He followed this with Bug (1975), a horror film about pyromaniac cockroaches, which became the swansong of the ingenious horror producer William Castle….

…Between 2003 and 2011, he returned to the Supergirl/DC Comics milieu by directing 14 episodes of Smallville, the television series about Superman’s younger years…

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 28, 1973 — Carrie Vaughn, 52.

By Paul Weimer: Carrie Vaughn’s urban fantasy series, the Kitty Norville series, is probably very well known to you. A radio DJ turned accidental radio talk show host who is (at first secretly) a werewolf gets involved with other aspects of the slowly revealed supernatural community, bringing them out into the open and having the United States and the world come to terms with them. It’s as if the Masquerade (from White Wolf) was being slowly and steadily lifted, and for everyone all at once.  

Even then and even now, that goes against the grain of a lot of Urban fantasy, which either has the supernatural always out and open, or following the Masquerade model. But a series that considers the problems werewolves, vampires and others have adapting to modern society–and modern society adapting to others? That’s a lovely sociological and anthropological twist.  Those first few novels, as Kitty herself comes to terms with her secret coming out, are really strong and I think they hold up to this day. 

And Norville is and was willing to expand the playground and consider–if supernatural creatures have always been around, what does that, what did that actually mean in historical terms. There’s some really lovely worldbuilding in her nuanced explorations of the idea. 

But a reason why the Norville books also hold a strong place in my heart is that they are, again, some of the earliest books I was given ARCs to read for review (the first three as a matter of fact). Although urban fantasy (except for, say, Seanan McGuire) is not my power chord of reading SFF, the idea that a publisher would give me books if I would review them was a pretty heady feeling.  

Still is. 

I’ve read a couple of novels and work by Vaughn outside of the Kitty Norville books (After the Golden Age, written in that heady period where authors were writing original superhero novels not tied to Marvel or DC). But for me, it may be unfair, Vaughn’s work begins and ends with a DJ turned accidental social heroine.

Carrie Vaughn

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Jerry King knows why the monsters aren’t in their old hiding place.
  • Reality Check has a Dickens update.
  • Cornered misses a friend. [Warning for amazing bad taste.]
  • Thatababy has DIY special effects.
  • The Argyle Sweater should not practice medicine. Even in Hyperborea.
  • Wumo witnesses – different planet, same complaint.

(12) INSIDE DOCTOR WHO. Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat tell what it’s like writing a different Doctor. Watch video at X.com.

(13) STOP THAT GARBAGE TRUCK! “Scans for the memories: why old games magazines are a vital source of cultural history – and nostalgia” explains the Guardian.

Before the internet, if you were an avid gamer then you were very likely to be an avid reader of games magazines. From the early 1980s, the likes of Crash, Mega, PC Gamer and the Official PlayStation Magazine were your connection with the industry, providing news, reviews and interviews as well as lively letters pages that fostered a sense of community. Very rarely, however, did anyone keep hold of their magazine collections. Lacking the cultural gravitas of music or movie publications, they were mostly thrown away. While working at Future Publishing as a games journalist in the 1990s, I watched many times as hundreds of old issues of SuperPlay, Edge and GamesMaster were tipped into skips for pulping. I feel queasy just thinking about it.

Because now, of course, I and thousands of other video game veterans have realised these magazines are a vital historical resource as well as a source of nostalgic joy. Surviving copies of classic mags are selling at a vast premium on eBay, and while the Internet Archive does contain patchy collections of scanned magazines, it is vulnerable to legal challenges from copyright holders.

Thankfully, there are institutions taking the preservation of games magazines seriously. Last week, the Video Game History Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the preservation of games and their history, announced that from 30 January, it would be opening up its digital archive of out-of-print magazines to read and study online. So far 1,500 issues of mostly American games mags are available, as well as art books and other printed ephemera, but the organisation is busy scanning its entire collection. The digitised content will be fully tagged and searchable by word or phrase, so you’ll be able to easily track down the first mentions of, say, Minecraft, John Romero, or the survival horror genre….

(14) OH, THAT’S DIFFERENT. NEVER MIND. “An asteroid got deleted because it was actually Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster” says Astronomy.com.

On Jan. 2, the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced the discovery of an unusual asteroid, designated 2018 CN41. First identified and submitted by a citizen scientist, the object’s orbit was notable: It came less than 150,000 miles (240,000 km) from Earth, closer than the orbit of the Moon. That qualified it as a near-Earth object (NEO) — one worth monitoring for its potential to someday slam into Earth.

But less than 17 hours later, the Minor Planet Center (MPC) issued an editorial notice: It was deleting 2018 CN41 from its records because, it turned out, the object was not an asteroid.

It was a car.

To be precise, it was Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster mounted to a Falcon Heavy upper stage, which boosted into orbit around the Sun on Feb. 6, 2018. The car — which had been owned and driven by Musk — was a test payload for the Falcon Heavy’s first flight….

(15) PREPARE FOR THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE? [Item by Mike Kennedy.] See the Orchard Machinery Corporation’s imposing Hedgehog tree trimming machine hacking along to Zombie as covered by Bad Wolves. Could this be a subtle hint that we should prepare for the zombie apocalypse?  If so, such a machine might come in handy. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

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

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

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

C. L. Moore

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

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

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

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

(9) COMICS SECTION.

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

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

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

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

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

Reflecting on what we’ve lost today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pixel Scroll 1/10/25 Quantum Scream And Leap

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(1) OCTAVIA’S BOOKSHELF IS SAFE. In response to the Eaton Fire, Nikki High, owner of Octavia’s Bookshelf in Pasadena, turned the shop into a “mutual aid pit stop”. The shop itself is a mile or two away from the active fire area, outside the current evacuation zone but in the warning area.

When the bookstore opened yesterday they broadcast that they had food items and many other household necessities available. They put out a call for donations needed which was answered abundantly because they later said they are full for today – but check back for what is needed tomorrow.

Octavia’s Bookshelf is at 1353 N. Hill Ave. in Pasadena.

Nikki High has also posted this video of damage to the area:

Publishers Weekly has more coverage in “Brush Fires, Severe Weather Threaten L.A. Bookstores and Publishers”.

(2) CULTURAL ICONS LOST TO FIRE. There are probably more, but these have already made the news.

“Zane Grey House in LA Consumed by fires” reports the New York Times.

In Altadena, the Eaton fire has already claimed two cultural treasures: the 1907 Zane Grey Estate, the Mediterranean-style residence of one of California’s great Western novelists; and the 1887 Andrew McNally House, a Queen Anne gem that was home to the mapmaking tycoon who co-founded Rand-McNally.

Here’s a photo of the place Curbed LA ran in 2020.

The Theosophical Society building and archives in Altadena also burned.

…The Pasadena location was “the world’s largest archive of Theosophical materials, including a library with 40.000 titles, the entire archive of the history of the TS, including ca. 10.000 unpublished letters, pertaining to HPB, the Mahatmas, W.Q. Judge, G.R.S. Mead, Katherine Tingley, and G. de Purucker, membership records since 1875, art objects, and countless other irreplaceable materials. The archives also contained works of Boehme, Gichtel, donations from the king of Siam including rare Buddhist scriptures, and so on.”…

(3) RELEASED ON THEIR OWN RECOGNIZANCE. In “The Last Orphan Stories” John Grayshaw shares what he learned while pursuing the interesting question of what became of the stories purchased by Harlan Ellison for Last Dangerous Visions that did not get included in the recent anthology produced by Ellison’s literary executor J. Michael Straczynski. He reached out to the authors and the responses ranged from warm to hostile.  

…But ever since JMS announced LDV was finally seeing the light of day, I was very interested to see which stories would be included, which would not and especially what became of the ‘orphans’. In practical terms, the rights to any of the stories not included by JMS revert to the authors/estates. For 45 years all fans (we are both fans, if you have not guessed by now!) have had is the list of titles and authors and endless speculation, fueled by our imaginations. In a way this is appropriate for SF, the literature of the imagination.

I decided to take a look at the list of unpublished stories and contact the authors, or their estates in the case of this who have died, to ask them if these stories have been or will ever be shared with the world. I have followed the original structure of the three ‘books’ as set out by Ellison in the following discussion and I have highlighted the titles of the stories where I had a reply from them or their estate. Sadly not all my inquiries were successful, but I have shared as much information about the authors as I could in the hopes that maybe down the line we will hear more about these unpublished stories. Short biographies of the writers have been included; many of these will be known to you, some may be less well known and sadly there are a few for which almost no information is available….

(4) WHY IT’S HARD TO TELL. The New Yorker tries to figure out, “Did a Best-Selling Romantasy Novelist Steal Another Writer’s Story?” “Tracy Wolff, the author of the ‘Crave’ series, is being sued for copyright infringement. But romantasy’s reliance on standardized tropes makes proving plot theft tricky.”

(5) THE CAPTAIN HAS TURNED ON THE NO CATNIP SIGN. Camestros Felapton returns with more “Missing Moments in Movie History: When Worlds Collide”. No excerpt because that would spoil your fun. However, you don’t need to be told how this turns out: Never count on Timothy the Talking Cat to save humanity.

(6) WHY NOT SAY WHAT HAPPENED? Episode 14 of Scott Edelman’s Why Not Say What Happened? podcast takes us back to the Seventies to learn about “Tony Isabella’s Essential Edit of My Early Avengers Script Assist”. (A dozen possible places to listen to the show are hat this link.)

While destroying hundreds of pages of bad poetry I scribbled as a teenager, I made a few surprising discoveries which cause me to reminisce about my poem “Ode on Comic Book Company Loyalty,” written 18 days after I was hired by Marvel Comics, my extremely rough sketch for the second Scarecrow splash page, my team-up with Quicksilver and 7-Eleven to freeze your brain with Slurpees during the summer of 1975, Tony Isabella’s heavy edit on my early Avengers script assist (and why we should all be grateful), my forgotten horror pitches bounced by Marvel in 1974, and much more.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Valentin D. Ivanov.]

Born January 10, 1950 — Lyubomir Nikolov-Narvi. (Died 2024.)

By Valentin D. Ivanov: Lyubomir Nikolov – Narvi was a towering figure among the Bulgarian speculative genre writers. Author, translator, and journalist, he is best known for the translation of the Bulgarian translation of The Lord Of The Rings in 1990 making this great book accessible for the first time in our country. My first memory of Lyubomir Nikolov dates soon after that, at a meeting of the Sofia society of speculative fiction, heuristics and prognostics (what a name!) “Ivan Efremov”. The political transformation of the country had just begun, the publishing had “exploded” and immersed us in books and authors that we had only heard about before – Tolkien among them. Nikolov held the equivalent of a master’s degrees in mechanical engineering and journalism.

Narvi read a freshly translated story at that gathering, but it is his own writing I can talk about here. The Mole, Worm under the Autumn Wind, On the Wall and especially The Tenth Righteous Man. The last one won the fans’ award for work of the 1990s decade. Although he was primarily a social science fiction writer, that particular book contains a wonderful and original science fiction assumption that deserves to be noted. I will reveal it here, even though it is an important plot-forming element, because I am not optimistic about the chances the novel would ever get an English translation: the Universe undergoes… a phase transition, the fundamental physical constants change and as a result the nuclear fission reactions become much “easier” to achieve. 

It is enough to light a small fire and the aches can exceed the critical mass and blast into another Hiroshima. Lyubomir Nikolov investigates in the books the consequences of giving such immense powers to everyone. Pretty much like what the nanotechnologies have the potential of doing, but he reaches the same effect by means of physics rather than technology. A lesser writer may have turned this into a cheap horror tale; not Narvi – his pen gave birth to a Greek tragedy of epic proportions, with its own Odysseus figure.

He passed away less than a year ago and was active until almost the end: recently he published a two-volume novel The Gray Road – a tale of power struggle on a terraformed Moon where the humanity has slid back into a nearly feudal society.

Narvi is one of the fathers of the game books phenomenon that took our country by storm in the 1990s too. Unfortunately, I hardly knew this side of his writing – I missed the entire game books phenomenon and only rediscovered it much later when I had to teach my own children to read… with his game books.

Lyubomir Nikolov holds Eurocon (1987), Sotscon (1989) and Graviton (2001) awards.

Lyubomir Nikolov-Narvi

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

January 10, 1969 — Star Trek’s “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”

Fifty-three years ago this evening, Star Trek’s “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” first aired on NBC. It was the fifteenth episode of the third season. 

It written by Oliver Crawford who also penned “The Galileo Seven”. It was based on a story by Gene L. Coon who was writing under his pen name “Lee Cronin” due to contractual reasons. Coon was the showrunner for the series through most of the second season and was responsible for such major elements as the Klingons and the naming of the United Federation of Planets and Starfleet Command. 

The co-stars here were Frank Gorshin as Commissioner Bele and Lou Antonio as Lokai. Gorshin would be known in this period for his recurring role on Batman as The Riddler. Lou Antonio did a few genre one-offs. 

The episode has since been rated as one of the best of the Trek series with Collider, Hollywood Reporter, PopMatters, SciFi and ScreenRant all rating it among the best episodes produced. 

Spock’s comment that “Change is the essential process of all existence” which remains one of the most memorable lines of dialogue ever said on Trek comes from this episode.

The original version when Beale and Lokai run through the Enterprise shows the burning cities of World War II Europe. The remastered version shows the Cheron cities still burning from space. That scene was done because the episode was running short.

It’s streaming on Paramount+. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) GOREYGRAM. [Item by Steven French.] The Paris Review shares “The Illustrated Envelopes of Edward Gorey”.

Tom Fitzharris and Edward Gorey met one afternoon in 1974 when Fitzharris, long a fan of Gorey’s books and illustrations, bumped into him outside of the Town Hall, the performance space in Midtown Manhattan. Gorey—in his trademark fur coat, long beard, and sneakers—was immediately recognizable. The two struck up a brief but intense friendship. When Gorey was in New York, they met frequently, especially to go the ballet—Gorey planned his time in the city around the New York City Ballet’s performance schedule. His summers were spent in Cape Cod. It was in August of that year that Gorey began sending Fitzharris mail, richly illustrated both inside and out. Reproduced [here] are four of the fifty notes, quotations, and letters Fitzharris received over the course of their correspondence.

(11) GO RIGHT TO THE SOURCE AND ASK THE HORSE. Sounds like a variation on “Let the Wookiee win”. From Fighter Guy.

(12) UK VIEWS MERCURY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] BBC reports “New images of Mercury captured by UK spacecraft BepiColombo”.

Astrium in Stevenage was where SF² Concatenation  co-founding editor  Graham Connor. If we still have him, he would undoubtedly have designed the probe’s onboard communication system.

A spacecraft built in the UK has captured new images of Mercury as it made its sixth and final flyby ahead of entering the planet’s orbit in 2026.

BepiColombo was built by the Stevenage-based company Astrium, now Airbus, and launched in 2018.

The spacecraft comprises two satellites that will gather data for at least a year, and needs special shielding to withstand the heat from the sun.

Monitoring cameras on the spacecraft captured images of the planet as it flew 295km (183 miles) above Mercury’s surface, including views of the planet’s north poles, as it was lit by sunlight.

(13) IT ROLLS. IT FLIES. BUT WHAT, NO BOAT? [Item by Mike Kennedy.] A mere monster SUV is so yesterday. Chinese company XPeng AeroHT has announced a 6-wheel SUV/truck with 4 seats for the land vehicle and an additional 2 seats in the included manned hexacopter. All powered by electricity. They call this configuration a “Land Aircraft Carrier“. The company website assures potential buyers that pre-sales are coming soon. “XPeng Aero HT Land Aircraft Carrier comes with onboard EVTOL” at Wallpaper*.

… Whilst this particular combo occupies something of a legislative grey area, at least in heavily certified airspaces like Europe and the USA, XPeng has set out to make the aircraft as easy as possible to fly. Controls are reduced to a single-lever, take-offs and landings are automated and an autonomous flight system takes control of navigation. ‘Five minutes to learn, three hours to master,’ is the relevant strapline….

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

Pixel Scroll 8/14/24 File ‘P’ For Pixel

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(1) CLARION WEST 2025 INSTRUCTORS. The instructors for Clarion West’s 2025 Six-Week Summer Workshop have been named: Maurice Broaddus, Malka Older, Diana Pho, and Martha Wells. It will be an online workshop running from June 22-August 2. Applications planned to open December, 2024. Scholarships available.

(2) ALL GLORY IS FLEETING. T. Kingfisher’s Chengdu 2023 Hugo arrived in pieces, but at least they all arrived at the same time.  

(3) PROCESS OF ELIMINATION. Zoë O’Connell created colored graphs to illustrate the flow of votes in the Hugo Awards automatic runoff process. Thread starts here on Mastodon.

Visualising the #Worldcon #Hugo2024 voting results.

Alternative Title: Why ranked voting matters.

As a quick explanation, the last placed candidate in each round is eliminated and their votes transferred to the next candidate on each ballot.

Here’s the graph for Best Fanzine. Two other finalists held the lead before finishing behind the winner Nerds of a Feather. (Click for larger image.)

(4) SLOWLY, THE STARS WERE GOING OUT… Variety reports the squeeze is on: “Paramount Television Studios Shut Down by Paramount Global Cost Cuts”. Last week, company leaders announced that they would reduce Paramount’s U.S.-based workforce by 15% in an effort to save $500 million in annual costs. Several genre/related projects will move from the Paramount TV studios brand to under the CBS Studios umbrella.

…All current series and development projects made under the Paramount Television Studios umbrella will move to CBS Studios. 

Paramount Television marked the second time Paramount Pictures tried to move into the TV business — separate from the storied shingle that was built on the Desilu production studio founded by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. That studio, which backed such TV treasures as “I Love Lucy” and “Star Trek,” eventually became the center of Paramount Studios after an acquisition by Gulf + Western, and would be inherited by CBS after its split from the company formerly known as Viacom Inc. in 2005….

… Under its aegis, the company produced “The Offer,” an insider tale of the making of the landmark movie, for Paramount+; and series based on Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character for Amazon Prime Video. Other series it produced include “The Spiderwick Chronicles for Roku and a revival of the Terry Gilliam movie “Time Bandits” that is now a series on Apple’s streaming service….

(5) DID I MENTION, RESISTANCE IS FUTILE. “Warner Bros. Discovery pretty much wiped the Cartoon Network website” reports The Verge.

Warner Bros. Discovery has updated Cartoon Network’s website to remove basically everything and turn it into a page pointing to the Max streaming service. Before the change, the website let you watch free episodes of shows like Adventure Time and Steven Universe. The switchover appears to have happened on Thursday, Variety reports, and follows Warner Bros.’ announcement last week that it would be shutting down Boomerang, its streaming service for classic Warner Bros. cartoons.

“Looking for episodes of your favorite Cartoon Network shows?” reads a message that pops up on Cartoon Network’s website. “Check out what’s available to stream on Max (subscription required).”…

(6) A DISH OVERSERVED COLD. Sarah A. Hoyt is seeing so much “Vengeance” fiction she tried to apply the brakes at Mad Genius Club.

…No matter how angry people are, feeding on a straight diet of revenge fantasies will just make it worse and worse and worse.

Okay, so you’re not a missionary, and you just want to make money, what do you care if you’re making people crazier.

Because you’ll train yourself to write very bad fiction. And because a lot of it is very very bad fiction which no one really wants to read, no matter how furious they are.

Particularly because — trust me — it’s disproportionate and worse, it doesn’t make for a good story. Even worse, unless you are an experienced author who knows precisely how to convey how mad you are and how much these evil people deserve their comeupance, revenge is not an easy plot to write.

It seems easy, because it’s a strong emotion. And if you feel the need to see someone being sliced to little bits, and aren’t picky about who it is, particularly if the person being sliced up is entirely fictional….

(7) TED TALK.  I believe I missed this issue…. In 1964, Theodore Sturgeon wrote a story for Sports Illustrated: “How To Forget Baseball”. [Via Paul Di Filippo.]

Once upon a possible (for though there is only one past, there are many futures), after 12 hours of war and 40-some years of reconstruction; at a time when nothing had stopped technology (for technological progress not only accelerates, so does the rate at which it accelerates), the country was composed of strip-cities, six blocks wide and up to 80 miles long, which rimmed the great superhighways, and wildernesses. And at certain remote spots in the wilderness lived primitives, called Primitives, a hearty breed that liked to stay close to nature and the old ways. And it came about that a certain flack, whose job it was to publicize the national pastime, a game called Quoit, was assigned to find a person who had never seen the game; to invite him in for one game, to get his impressions of said game and to use them as flacks use such things. He closed the deal with a Primitive who agreed to come in exchange for the privilege of shopping for certain trade goods. So…

(8) ROMANTASY ON THE MATURE SIDE. The New York Times hypothesizes “Why Romantasy Readers Pine for 500-Year-Old ‘Shadow Daddies’”. “Disappointed by swipe culture and, perhaps, reality, some readers pine for the much (much) older ‘shadow daddies’ of romantasy novels”. Gift article link bypasses NYT paywall.

… With the arrival of megahits like “A Court of Thorns and Roses,” a series by Sarah J. Maas, romantasy has garnered a huge fan base. Many readers dissect characters like Feyre Archeron, the protagonist in “A Court of Thorns and Roses,” who is about 19 when she meets her 500-year-old “mate,” a mysterious faerie; they swap theories; and they rate sex scenes on a “spiciness” scale. Among them, there has been a recurring point of debate: Is it acceptable for a 19-year-old to date a 500-year-old?

Some say it is not only acceptable — it’s aspirational.

“I’ve made poor decisions with regular men,” said Asvini Ravindran, 31, a social media specialist who lives in Toronto and has a TikTok about books, including romantasy. “Why not make them with an immortal man with magical powers?”

Fans of the genre refer to such ancient love interests as “shadow daddies.”…

(9) THE EPONYMOUS RING. CBR.com answers the question “What Was the One Ring Made of in The Lord of the Rings?” Of course, some of you won’t need to read to the end because you remember.

The One Ring from The Lord of the Rings had many supernatural abilities; it could render its wearer invisible, extend the lifespan of those in its presence, corrupt even the noblest hearts, and most importantly, dominate the other Rings of Power. Yet its bizarre physical properties were just as significant. The One Ring was practically indestructible, as it did not bend, break, scratch, or lose its shine, even after spending thousands of years at the bottom of a river. The only way to harm the One Ring was to melt it, and even then, no ordinary fire or even the breath of a great dragon like Smaug would suffice; it could only melt when dropped into the lava of Mount Doom, where the Dark Lord Sauron forged it. Additionally, it could change its size and weight at will, an ability it used to slip on and off the fingers of its wearers….

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born August 14, 1965 — Brannon Braga, 59. Brannon Braga was, not at the same time or always, the writer, producer and creator of the Next Gen, Voyager, Enterprise, The Orville, as well as of the Generations and First Contact films. He written quite a number of the Trek films —  Generations, First Contact, Insurrection and Nemesis.

Those four films he’s written. Is that more than anyone else? I could look it up, but I figure I’d ask the great pool of Trek fans here instead. 

Brannon Braga

Confession time — I’ve still not watched The Orville. Now that it’s been canceled, shall I go ahead and watch all of it? Opinions please. 

He has written more episodes of the many Trek series than anyone else — four hundred and forty-four to date, many of course co- written. I really don’t think he’ll be writing any more as his last scripts were for Enterprise.

He was responsible for the Next Generation series finale “All Good Things…” which won him a Hugo Award at Intersection for excellence in SF writing, along with Ronald D. Moore. 

He was nominated at LoneStarCon2 for Star Trek: First Contact for the screenplay along with Ronald D. Moore, and the story by Rick Berman and Ronald D. Moore; Torcon3 saw him pick up two nominations for Enterprise stories — first for the “Carbon Creek” story along with Rick Berman and Dan O’Shannon, and the wonderful “A Night in The Sick Bay” with Rick Berman.

(Digression. Ok, I like Enterprise a lot. For me, everything there worked. And the Mirror Universe finale worked for me though it got a lot of criticism.) 

Aussiecon 4 saw him pick up only his non-Trek related Hugo nomination or Award. It was for writing FlashForward’s “No More Good Days” with David S. Goyer. 

There’s a great quote by him after he stopped being Roddenberry’s replacement as head of the Trek franchise: “It’s not an easy task. On the other hand, I have nothing to be ashamed about. We created 624 hours of television and four feature films, and I think we did a hell of a job. I’m amazed that we managed to get 18 years of the kind of work that everyone involved managed to contribute to, and it’s certainly more than anyone could have asked for.” (Star Trek Magazine) 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) IN X-CESS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Just what we all need, another list of somebody’s opinion about “best of…“ The Hollywood Reporter gives us “Best X-Men Movies, Ranked”. And as you might expect, it’s more fun to pan than to praise.

13. X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)

Brett Ratner was never anyone’s first choice to direct an X-Men film. And from the film itself, and the stories that followed, it’s not hard to see why. The Last Stand smashes together Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s The Dark Phoenix Saga, widely considered to be the best X-Men story, along with the Gifted storyline from Joss Whedon and John Cassaday’s then-more recent Astonishing X-Men. The film doesn’t serve either story well, and it all too hastily kills off Cyclops (James Marsden), sidelines several mainstays like Mystique (Rebecca Romijn) and Rogue (Anna Paquin), and introduces a bunch of new characters audiences had been clamoring to see — Kitty Pryde (Elliot Page), Beast (Kelsey Grammer), Angel (Ben Foster) and Juggernaut (Vinnie Jones), none of whom get much time to shine (although Grammer’s Beast is a welcome addition).

Famke Janssen does well with what the film decides to do with the Phoenix, which is to make her into a kind of demonically possessed powerhouse, and Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen all remain stalwarts of the franchise. A third act that features Magneto lifting the Golden Gate Bridge and Logan professing his love for Jean, while she tries to incinerate him, are highlights, along with John Powell’s score. But all in all, there’s just something a bit too studio-mandated and manufactured about it.

(13) NEW ISSUE OF SF COMMENTARY. Bruce Gillespie has released SF Commentary 117, July 2024. Covers by Alan White and Dennis Callegari. Poems by Alan White. Articles by Janeen Webb and Cy Chauvin. Columns by Bruce Gillespie, Colin Steele, Anna Creer, Tony Thomas, John Hertz. Reviews by John Litchen and William Sarill.

Download from eFanzines or at Fanac.org.

(14) THAT’S ALL, FOLKS. R. Graeme Cameron accepted the Auora Award for Best Fan Writing and Publication for Polar Borealis, its fifth win, then announced on Facebook that he is recusing the publication from future Aurora consideration.

…The purpose of the Auroras is to celebrate the diversity of Canadian talent in as inclusive a manner as possible. Five is a good, solid number. It’s time to make room for others, especially the new talent coming along.

Therefore, I state for the record that I am requesting CSFFA to no longer consider Polar Borealis for nomination or ballot status from this date forward.

Not that I am adverse to winning further Aurora awards for other things….

…Main thing is for Polar Borealis to stop hogging the limelight.

 (15) AN ARCHITECTURAL TRIUMPH. You can take an online tour of the fabulous McKim Building that houses the Boston Public Library. It’s gorgeous!

…The McKim Lobby, from its Georgia marble floor inlaid with brass designs to its three aisles of vaulted ceilings, continues a grand procession into the heart of the building. The ceilings, clad in mosaic tile by Italian immigrant craftsmen living in Boston’s North End, bear Roman motifs and the names of thirty famous Massachusetts statesmen.

The mosaic ceiling tiles clad vault work by Rafael Guastavino, a Spanish builder who specialized in Mediterranean-style ceramic tile-vaulted ceilings that were lightweight, fireproof, self-supporting, and strong. Guastavino’s collaboration with Charles Follen McKim throughout a number of ceilings in the Central Library represented his first major American commission, the starting point for a company that would go on to construct vaults in over 600 buildings throughout the country….

(16) RINGS OF POWER RETURNS. “War is coming to Middle Earth,” begins the final pre-launch trailer before The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2 drops on August 29.

(17) APPRENTICED TO A PIRATE. From six years ago. “How Sir Paul McCartney acts in film Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales”.

Co-directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg explain all the details on Sir Paul McCartney’s transformation to a pirate.

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

Pixel Scroll 8/6/24 The Problem Of Scroll 13

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(1) S.O.S. FOR TARAL’S COLLECTIONS.  Steven Baldassarra announced on Facebook  that the late Taral Wayne’s apartment needs to be emptied of his collections and stuff, and his sister has offered them to friends.

I am posting this message out on behalf of Christine Miller, Taral Wayne‘s sister. Please spread this message out to those who knew Taral:

“If anyone is interested in his art, toys or fanzines, please reach out to me, Christine Miller. I have to get his treasures out of the building asap.

“When I last spoke to Taral about funeral arrangements (although he was convinced he would live forever), he wasn’t interested in one. His remains are being cremated and then he will be buried with our mother in North York. At the moment, I’m just trying to get his treasures out of his apartment and don’t have the band width to think much past that.”

Taral Wayne (1951-2024) died July 31.

(2) FINALIST VANISHES FROM DRAGON AWARDS BALLOT. For one brief and shining moment Cedar Sanderson’s cover for Goblin Market was a 2024 Dragon Awards finalist in the Best Illustrative Book Cover. Then it suddenly wasn’t. Sanderson appeared on the originally released version of the ballot, but hours later she was missing. No explanation has been given, and her publisher demands to know why.

Jonna Hayden, Production Manager for Raconteur Press, sent this email to the Rac Press substack/newsletter subscribers this evening: “Concerning the Dragon Awards”:

In an effort towards transparency, we have sent the following letter to the Dragon Awards team, via Dragon Con:

“I am the Production Manager for Raconteur Press, and our Lead Designer is Cedar Sanderson. Cedar was nominated for a Dragon Award for her work on our book “Goblin Market” and achieved a place on the final ballot in the category “Best Illustrative Cover” for 2024. Or so we thought. Several hours after the final ballot was announced (and we proudly shared the information) Cedar’s name was removed.

“We were surprised by this removal–there has been no explanation, no replacement name added to the list, and no comment of any kind from the Dragon Awards as to the reason behind it. Cedar has not been contacted, and multiple emails from many, many fans have gone unanswered.

“In their frustration, her fans have been emailing, messaging, and calling us, to see if we have any communication or information as to the ‘why’ of this. We are, unfortunately, equally in the dark. We’ve been referring them to the contact form on the Awards page, but no information has been forthcoming. The lack of any comment on the Dragon Awards’ part is now beginning to lead to speculation as to the integrity of the awards as a whole. In light of the recent Hugo issues at the China Worldcon, I would think your organization would be striving to maintain the utmost transparency.

“Is there any plan whatsoever to address this? Will there be a statement of any kind as to the reasons? I would like to return to my regular job of publishing great short fiction, and not be fielding the frustrated and angry messages of fans who nominated her in good faith.

“I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation, and sharing it will help.

“Please let us know what the the plan for this is going forward.

“Thank you.”

If you haven’t had your fill of speculation, see the comments here.

(3) THERE IS A SEASON, TURN, TURN, TURN ON THE TV. Abigail Nussbaum says, “In its second season, the already-excellent Interview With the Vampire became one of the best and most entertaining shows on TV. My review in Strange Horizons discusses how the show both honors and subverts its source material.” “Interview With the Vampire Season 2”.

Published in 1976, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire has a fair claim to being one of the most influential novels of the late twentieth century. Wildly successful in its own right—spawning some dozen sequels, several related series of novels, and a myriad film and TV adaptations—it all but singlehandedly reshaped the popular perception of the vampire. Rice’s vampires are brooding, tormented beings, haunted both by the need to kill and the crushing loneliness of eternal life. They seek companionship—which is to say, thinly veiled homoerotic bonds—with fellow immortals, but these relationships often turn rancid due to the beloved’s similar tormentedness. It’s a portrait that slid into self-parody almost as soon as it made its appearance, and which later creators have found themselves pushing against (“People still fall for that Anne Rice routine,” a decidedly nontormented vampire quips in an early episode of Buffy). But the very fact that this pushback feels necessary speaks to the trope’s influence and reach.

AMC’s adaptation of Interview with the Vampire—which premiered in 2022, and whose second season aired earlier this summer—wears that legacy lightly, and even playfully…

(4) TIME ON THEIR HANDS. T.R. Napper arrives in Glasgow in time to exchange drolleries with George R.R. Martin.

(5) SEE DELANY SPEECH. Posted to YouTube yesterday: Samuel R. Delany at the Free Library of Philadelphia on June 15, 2024 in conversation with composer and library trainee Mark Inchoco: “How SF Dances to the Music of Time”.

(6) NOT TERRY’S GHOST. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] Private Eye is a long running British news/satirical magazine, that sells more copies than some UK national newspapers.  In their current issue (#1629, dated 2nd-15th August, so should be available in shops throughout the duration of the Glasgow Worldcon), their books section makes some interesting claims about the authorship of last year’s Hugo Best Related Work winner.

In his 2014 collected non-fiction book, A Slip of the Keyboard, Discworld writer Terry Pratchett had some advice for anyone who saw a celebrity author at a book signing.

“Don’t pass comment if they spend a lot of time reading their book while they’re in the shop.  It may be the first time they’ve seen it.  Do not offer to help them with the longer words.”

Ironic, then, that the official Pratchett biography, A Life with Footnotes, was “co-written” by ghostwriter Giles Smith – and not, as advertised on the cover, solely by Rob Wilkins, Pratchett’s former assistant.  Wilkins went on to collect, amongst other awards, a 2023 Hugo for the book he did not write – a prestigious bauble Pratchett himself never managed to secure.

Giles Smith’s page on the UK Simon & Schuster website states that “in the last ten years, he has been the ghost-writer for eight Sunday Times bestselling autobiographies”, although there is no mention of this work on his agent’s site.

Note: credit is due to Kári Tulinius whose Bluesky post is what brought this to my attention.

The books column also includes a section on the Neil Gaiman allegations, but given that the magazine was published last week, is out-of-date with the latest developments, and also has a slightly odd take (in my opinion), such as whether this will affect the number of books that Gaiman writes blurbs for.

(7) READERS’ INTEREST AROUSED. NOR IS THAT ALL. On romantasy and other literary erotica: “My weeks of reading hornily: steamy book sales have doubled – and I soon found out why”, Zoe Williams told Guardian readers.

I spent a fortnight reading nothing but smut and I don’t need to give you a reason. But since there is one, here it is: business is booming in the publishing world of love and sex. Aficionados draw fine distinctions – between romance and erotica; “steamy” and “smutty”; fantasy and saga fiction – and endlessly subdivide the genres, but the takeaway is that the stigma around what used to be called “books that women like” has gone. And, as the UK literary agent Alice Lutyens puts it: “The steamier the sex, the better the book does.”

I started two books simultaneously, which just happened to span the gamut, from the almost completely chaste The Stars Too Fondly, by Emily Hamilton, to the most pornographic thing I’ve ever read (and I’ve read De Sade): Heat Clinic, by Alexis B Osborne. So, I could give you a take on the difference between romance and erotica, but I would rather throw it to an expert. Leah Koch started the independent romantic bookshop Ripped Bodice in Los Angeles with her sister, Bea, in 2016 (they recently opened a second shop in New York). She says readers tend to assume erotica is sexier. “The technical definition is that, in erotica, character development happens from sexual situations. We stock both.”…

… if there is one thing that has come to pass, maybe through TikTok, maybe just by the march of time, it is that readers no longer care about respectability, literary or any other kind. They don’t care if they are reading an Omegaverse novel in public; they don’t even care if someone mistakenly thinks it’s furry pornography. They don’t care if what they are reading could be mistaken for YA and they are not young. They don’t care if the patriarchy thinks they are silly. Which means, in the publishing world of – yup, I’m still calling it this – smut, pretty much anything could happen.

(8) PRO TIPS. Charlie Jane Anders shares valuable insights in “Another Way To Think About ‘Conflict’ and ‘Stakes’ In Your Fiction” at Happy Dancing.

1) Conflict

Here is a story that contains plenty of conflict: “I was hungry. I really wanted a sandwich. So I got up and went to the fridge and made a sandwich. The End.” A situation is introduced, the protagonist has a need. They need a sandwich! What are they going to do? They’re going to make a sandwich. The conflict is resolved — we can all relax now.

Here’s another story that has a lot of conflict: “My friend and I were both hungry and there was only one sandwich. So we each had half a sandwich and it tasted really good, and I was happy to be eating a sandwich with my friend.” OH MY GOD. There was only one sandwich. But we figured it out. 

What I’m trying to say is that conflict doesn’t mean antagonism. Nobody has to be baring their teeth or vowing bloody murder. Nor does conflict have to be massive and dramatic, with bodily fluids going everywhere and people snarling angrily.  In fact, much of the time in real life, “conflict” is just people dealing with the challenges and frictions of being in the world.

And of course, stories don’t need to have any conflict in them at all. You can have a story where it’s literally just like, “My friend and I hung out and watched the sunset, and it was nice.” That’s a story with a beginning, middle and an end. That’s very satisfying.

But even if you want to have some conflict in your story, conflict does not have to mean a certain level of drama or horribleness. A conflict doesn’t have to be intransigent or insurmountable, or involve anyone chopping off anyone else’s limbs….

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Lis Carey.]

August 6, 1926 – Janet Asimov. (Died 2019.) 

By Lis Carey: Janet Opal Jeppson earned a medical degree from New York University Medical School, completed a residency in psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital, and in 1960 graduated from the William Alanson White Institute of Psychoanalysis, where she continued to work, practicing psychiatry and psychoanalysis until 1986. She continued to practice and publish medical papers under the name of J.O. Jeppson, even after her marriage to Isaac Asimov. 

Janet Jeppson and Isaac Asimov. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter

She started writing children’s science fiction in 1970, also published as by J.O. Jeppson. The other change in Jeppson’s life that year was that she started dating Isaac Asimov, after he separated from his first wife. They married in 1973, after the divorce became final.

Some of Jeppson’s solo science fiction included The Second Experiment and The Package in Hyperspace. Together with Isaac, she wrote the Norby Chronicles series, which ran to eleven volumes. However, Isaac is reported to have said that the work was 90% Janet’s, with him just doing a final read-thru and polish, but his name “was wanted on the book for the betterment of sales”.

She was married to Isaac until his death in 1992, from complications of HIV, due to a transfusion during bypass surgery in 1983. Based on symptoms, Janet suspected HIV, and pushed for an HIV test, but doctors resisted until he was extremely ill. They also pressured her to keep the results secret due to fear of public reaction, and so it was not revealed until ten years after his death.

Married to a strong personality, she kept her own space and her own career, while being a loyal partner, and a determined advocate for him in his final illness.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) AUREALIS AWARDS OPEN FOR ENTRIES. The 2024 Aurealis Awards, Australia’s premier awards for speculative fiction, are for works created by an Australian citizen or permanent resident, and published for the first time between January 1, 2024 and December 31, 2024.

The administrators encourage publishers and authors to enter all works published already this year by September 30, 2024, then subsequent publications as they are released, so their judges have time to consider each entry carefully.

Full Rules and FAQ are on the Aurealis Awards website.

(12) IT’S GONE, JIM. “GameStop Kills Game Informer Magazine And Takes Website Offline” – Kotaku has the magazine’s obituary.

Game Informer, the longest-running gaming magazine in the U.S., is officially dead and GameStop killed it. It began publishing in 1991 and has been one of the last remaining physical gaming magazines in the world, with cover stories that continued to share deep dives and exclusive interviews on the biggest games coming out, from Final Fantasy: VII Rebirth to Star Wars Outlaws. No more….

(13) A DAY IN THE DEATH. Brenton Dickieson sees a connection between Tolstoy and Lewis in “The Living Lie, But Dead Men Tell the Truth: The Screwtape Letters and Ivan Ilych” at A Pilgrim in Narnia.

In Leo Tolstoy’s brilliant novella, The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886), there is a curious pun in the English translation I use (Aylmer Maude):

“The dead man lay, as dead men always lie” (96)…

…Doctors who lie, friends who lie, dying in comfort believing there is the hope of life and separated from the danger of a sense of their true mortal conditions. There it is.

Ivan Ilych’s condition is not great evil-doing, but “contented worldliness.” Ivan has lived in wealth, fulfilling his ambitions, playing whist with adoring friends of the same class and intelligence, fulfiling the role of a clerk with precision, even if his roles of father, husband, neighbour, and justice-keeper are somewhat ignored. Even in his dying days, he cannot realize death in his own frame. And when he begins to suspect that the death rattle is near, he cannot accept that his life has been meaningless. Not just meaningless, but a slow descent in inverse proportion to his imagined rise to social acceptance.

This is, of course, precisely what Screwtape would want….

(14) (NOT JUST) FOR THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “Power On The Moon? A Giant Tower Could Light The Way For NASA Astronauts” says HotHardware.

Space company Honeybee has proposed a 100 meter tall tower that will potentially light the path for future NASA Artemis astronauts on the moon. The LUNARSABER (Lunar Utility Navigation with Advanced Remote Sensing and Autonomous Beaming for Energy Redistribution) tower is a deployable structure that integrates solar power, communications, and more, all in one package.

As NASA and other space agencies look to begin building lunar bases, they will all have to overcome some obvious obstacles. Perhaps one of the greatest of those will be how to generate power where none yet exists. Honeybee, a company owned by Blue Origin, believes it has created a solution that will not only solve the lunar power problem, but also “shine light on new possibilities, increasing operating hours for human and robotic missions on the Moon.”

“LUNARSABER can turn night into day in the deepest craters on the Moon,” remarked Kris Zacny, VP of Exploration Systems at Honeybee Robotics. “It is truly a game-changing system that will pave the way for a lunar economy.”

Some may be wondering how on Earth Honeybee expects to get a 100 meter tall tower onto the Moon. Well, the simple answer is a technology called DIABLO (Deployable Interlocking Actuated Bands for Linear Operations). DIABLO utilizes a rolled piece of metal, and then bends it into a deployable cylindrical structure that can support heavy payloads, which then becomes the base for LUNARSABER.

In order to deliver power, solar panels will be deployed via one of two methods, depending on the tower’s location on the Moon….

(15) WAITING FOR GOLDBLUM. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “Netflix’s Kaos turns Jeff Goldblum into the all-powerful Zeus” – BGR has the story. “Jeff Goldblum’s new Netflix series Kaos is basically The Boys but about Greek mythology”

…Right away, the title of this eight-episode drama also gives you a little hint of what it’s all about. One of the animating principles here is that the world was born from chaos — and while Kaos is set in the modern era, it’s a sort of off-kilter, slightly askew version of it (thus, the modified spelling). In other words, there are no old men in the sky here wearing togas and hurling lightning bolts at Earth. What we get, instead, is a creepy Goldblum-as-Zeus laughing deliriously at his TV while watching scenes of devastation and commenting about how much he loves fire….

DPD, having watched the video, says “I’m not sure it’s ‘The Boys Go Greek’ and we’ll be waiting for it.”

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

Pixel Scroll 3/26/24 There Are Some Things Money Can’t Buy; For Everything Else, There’s Pixel Scroll

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(1) THE ROBOPOCALYPSE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Who is the best time traveler?  Well, of course the Doctor is, but then Brit Cit is the epicentre of SF. Nonetheless, across the Black Atlantic, in the home of the Mega Cities and the Cursed Earth, there are other time-travelling franchises…

“He was back….” BBC Radio 4 has just aired a programme dedicated to The Terminator a modern classic SF film that is this year 40 years old: ”I’ll Be Back: 40 Years of The Terminator”.

“It was the machines, Sarah…a new order of intelligence. Decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination.” So says Kyle Reese, time travelling freedom fighter in The Terminator. Released in the perfectly fitting year of 1984, The Terminator was a low budget, relentless slice of science fiction noir, drawing on years of pulp sf to conjure a future nightmare of humanity hunted to near extinction by the machines it created. In 2029, just 5 years away now,
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s unstoppable cyborg killer is sent back to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, the yet to be mother of humanities saviour to come. Fate, redemption & the destructive power of A.I. all made in the analogue age but still influencing the way many imagine our new age of Artificial Intelligence.

Professor Beth Singler re-visits the making of the film with producer Gale Anne Hurd and explores its lasting influence. Forty years on, and the circular self-contained time travel plot of The Terminator has been cracked wide open letting out alternative timelines and delayed apocalypses: more films, a television show, graphic novels, comics, video games, theme park rides and even memes have spread versions of the original robopocalypse. More than that, the first Terminator has given us a vocabulary and a vision for the dangers of Artificial Intelligence.

(2) OVERVIEW OF CHINESE SFF RECOMMENDATION LISTS. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] I have finally published my write-up of Chinese recommendation lists: “Chinese SFF recommendation/best-of-the-year lists for works published in 2023”

The following summary bullet points for the Science Fiction World list are a suitable teaser – producing a Chinese recommendation list that doesn’t include any Chinese works first published in the year of eligibility — other than the fanzine — strikes me as an unconventional choice…

Science Fiction World

Links

Summary

  • Recommendations over 6 categories, with between 1 and 5 recommendations in each.
  • No Chinese fiction works first published in 2023 are included in the recommendations.
  • All the recommended novels are in English or Polish, and not yet announced for publication in China.
  • All of the novella and short story recommendations are older stories that were published in English translation in 2023 in a pair of venues.
  • Several of the categories that had recommendations last year – including Best Novelette – have no recommendations this year.
  • The editor recommendations are almost identical to last year – including the works listed.

(3) CLIPPING SERVICE. [Item by Daniel Dern.] I’m a NYTimes digital/paper subscriber, so I can do 10 “gift links”/month. I’ve been told (by somewhat reliable colleagues) that I can share to email lists, groups, etc, which I assume/believe includes F770-type thingies.

If I’m wrong, may the Pallid Ghost of the Gray Lady bite me on the nose (with mild apologies to Johnny Carson).

Note, these share links are only good for “30 days after [I’ve] shared it}…good enough for current readers, not so much for anyone dredging the past.

A) BORKED METAL. “A Rock Fell From Space Into Sweden. Who Owns It on Earth?”

Sweden’s courts have been debating claims to a meteorite that fell north of Stockholm, including whether the right to move around in nature, including on private property, extends to claiming a meteorite….

B) SNAKES IN A SCROLL!  “Now Arriving at J.F.K.: Horses From Iceland and Dogs From the West Bank”.

The ARK, a 14-acre facility at Kennedy International Airport, is often the first stop for animals of all kinds arriving in the United States….

(4) GLORIFIED SPYWARE. “How The BookmarkED/OnShelf App, Created to Help Schools [Navigate Book Bans], Fuels Them Instead” at BookRiot.

In December 2023, BookmarkED—an app designed to “help” educators, librarians, and parents navigate book bans in school libraries—rebranded. Now OnShelf, the app has been making its way into schools in Texas. Freedom of Information Requests obtained new information about how the app is getting into districts in Texas and how the app alerts users to so-called “banned books” in the district. The app is a student data privacy nightmare, and it undermines the professional capabilities of trained teacher librarians in educational institutions.

What Is BookmarkED/OnShelf? A Little About The App’s History

Founded by Steve Wandler, who works in the education technology space, BookmarkED aims to “empower parents to personalize school libraries.” It aims to ensure that parents get to decide the “individual literary journey for their children, based on their personal values and interests,” while teachers and librarians can keep “confidently recommending and providing more personalized books to their students, knowing precisely the learning outcomes they will achieve.” The technology helps libraries “simply and efficiently navigate the ever-changing challenged books landscape.”

BookmarkED soft launched their product during a Texas State Senate Committee on Education meeting on March 30, 2023, two and a half months before Texas passed the READER Act. Wandler noted that the app was developed while working with a superintendent in the state. That superintendent, Jason Cochran, is one of the owners of the app, and as of writing, works as the superintendent of Krum Independent School District. Prior to Krum, Cochran was superintendent at Eastland Independent School District. …

(5) A ROMANTASY MINICON. Publishers Weekly gleans all the details in a long report about last weekend’s event: “A Romantasy Festival Comes to Chicago”.

Romantasy was added as a category in the Goodreads Choice Awards in 2023, a fact mentioned several times at the inaugural Romantasy Literary Genre Festival, held March 22–24 at the Otherworld Theater in Chicago. More than 100 people celebrating the relatively new but rapidly growing genre attended the festival, which included author signings and Q&As, live podcast recordings, a drag tournament called Drag’N Brunch, and daily showings of Twihard!, a musical parody of Twilight. Books were sold on site by local indie bookstore Women & Children First.

The festival kicked off on Friday with a cocktail hour, mixer, and the weekend’s first performance of Twihard! Saturday, the first full day of the festival, began with the recording of the Whoa!mance podcast, hosted by Isabeau Dasho and Morgan Lott, who moderated an author panel with authors Samara Breger, Tamara Jerée, Megan Mackie, and Melanie K. Moschella. During the 90-minute conversation, the authors discussed their creative processes, genre crossovers, worldbuilding, escapism, beloved tropes, queer monsters, and more….

(6) ONE CLICHÉ AVOIDED. Simon Bland interviews several people who made The Thing, including the director, and an actor who didn’t come to a predictable end: “John Carpenter on horror classic The Thing: ‘It was an enormous failure and I got fired’” in the Guardian.

Keith David, who played Childs:

“ What I didn’t think at the time, and wasn’t thinking about until later, was how, traditionally, the Black man is not the guy who lasts to the end. This was one of the first movies where the Black guy lasts to the final scene. I don’t think I’m the only brother who’s ever survived in a horror or sci-fi movie, but I’m certainly one of the few. It was great foresight on John’s part.

I hear lots of theories about the final sequence. We played it various ways; as if I was the Thing, as if it was MacReady, and as if it was neither of us. People wonder why there’s no breath coming out of my mouth in the cold after the station burns down, and say it had to be me. But I say that if I’m downstage of the fire you wouldn’t see steam coming from my mouth because there’s too much heat. That’s how I explain it, but it’s your movie, your experience. The Thing is whoever you think it is.”

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 26, 1931 – Leonard Nimoy. (Died 2015.) Pointy ears, green skin —  it must be Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock. And what an amazing role it was. So what was Roddenberry’s initial conception of the character? Here it is:

The First Lieutenant. The Captain’s right-hand man, the working-level commander of all the ship’s functions – ranging from manning the bridge to supervising the lowliest scrub detail. His name is Mr. Spock. And the first view of him can be almost frightening – a face so heavy-lidded and satanic you might almost expect him to have a forked tail. Probably half Martian, has a slightly reddish complexion and semi-pointed ears. But strangely – Mr. Spock’s quiet temperament is in dramatic contrast to his satanic look. Of all the crew aboard, he is the nearest to Captain April’s equal, physically, emotionally, and as a commander of men. His primary weakness is an almost catlike curiosity over anything the slightest alien. 

“The Cage” — Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Pike. Leonard Nimoy as Spock.

Although Memory Alpha says that Roddenberry settled on Nimoy from the beginning, other accounts say that Martin Landau was an earlier casting consideration for the character, and several sources say DeForest Kelley auditioned for the role as well. Actual history is often far messier than the official version is.

So we get to Nimoy. It’s hard now over a half century on to imagine anyone else in that role, isn’t it? Can you envision Martin Landau in the role, or DeForest Kelley? Especially the latter? I certainly can’t. For better or worse, well better, Nimoy made for me the perfect Spock. 

Cool, elegant, ever so, dare I say it? almost on the edge of being sarcastic if Vulcans could indeed be that. Certainly more fascinating a character by far on the series than Kirk was by far. Yes, Kirk was cast in interesting stories such as “Shore Leave” but Spock was script in and out just more interesting to watch.

So my favorite Spock centered episodes? “Dagger of the Mind” in which marked the introduction of his mind-meld ability; “Amok Time” of course which also has the bonus of when “Live Long and Prosper” first showed up; “Journey to Babel” in we meet his parents, Sarek (Mark Leonard) and Amanda (Jane Wyatt); and “The Enterprise Incident “ for his not really amorous relationship with the unnamed Romulan Commander (yes she gets no name) and the rest of that splendid story.

Leonard Nimoy (Spock) at the Las Vegas Star Trek Convention 2011. Photo by Beth Madison.

I rewatched much of the series recently on Paramount+ as well as all of the other Trek series save the one season of the animated YA series whose name is completely escaping my name are here. (Never did figure out why they cancelled something so cheap to do when Strange New Worlds can cost them as much as ten million dollars an episode.)  He’s still my favorite when I rewatched them. I so wanted a spin-off Spock centered series to have happened after Trek ended. 

Usually I look at a performer’s entire genre career but I think I will look at just a single post-Trek undertaking, being Dr. William Bell in the stellar Fringe series. He decided to do the role after working with Abrams and Kurtzman on the rebooted Star Trek film and was offered with this series the chance to work with them again. He actually retired from acting before the series concluded but continued on here through its ending. 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) EARTH ABIDES TO TV. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] TVLine reports that a six-episode limited series adaptation of George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides is about to go into production.

Alexander Ludwig is relocating from Starz to MGM+.

Fresh off the cancellation of Heels, Ludwig will headline the MGM+ limited series Earth Abides, based on the George R. Stewart novel of the same name.

Adapted by showrunner Todd Komarnicki (Sully) and described as “a wildly imaginative new take” on the sci-fi classic, Earth Abides centers on Ludwig’s Ish, “a brilliant but solitary young geologist living a semi-isolated life who awakens from a coma only to find that there is no one left alive but him…

Production on the six-episode series is set to begin in Vancouver on Monday, April 8. MGM+ is targeting a late 2024 release date. 

There is similar coverage at Variety, Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter.

(10) THESE SUITS ARE MADE FOR WALKING. “’Walking Dead’ Creator Robert Kirkman, Others Beat AMC’s Effort To Get Profits Lawsuit Dismissed” — Deadline tells how they convinced the judge.

The first season of the latest Walking Dead spinoff The Ones Who Live is concluding this weekend, but the latest profit participation lawsuit from zombie apocalypse creator Robert Kirkman, franchise executive producer Gale Anne Hurd and others is far from over.

With heavy emphasis on the $200 million settlement AMC suddenly made in 2021 to end ex-TWD showrunner Frank Darabont and CAA’s nearly 10-year long lawsuit over profits, U.S. District Judge Fernando Aenlle-Rocha yesterday denied the outlet’s move to have Kirkman, Hurd, David Alpert, Charles Eglee and Glen Mazzara’s mega-millions case dismissed.

“It would be an illogical interpretation of the MFN (most favored nations) provisions and contrary to the reasonable expectations of the parties in entering into the agreements if the court were to allow Defendants, as a matter of law, to provide Darabont and CAA with increased contingent compensation and a greater share of future gross receipts for the series through a settlement agreement—at Plaintiffs’ expense—without providing Plaintiffs the same,” the California-based federal judge wrote in a 13-page ruling filed Monday (read the TWD EP case ruling here).

Having pulled the short stick in a previous suit against AMC, Kirkman, Hurd and fellow TWD EPs sued AMC for $200 million in a November 15, 2022 breach of contract action.

“Plaintiffs are entitled to the same treatment afforded to Darabont with respect to his MAGR interests, they are therefore entitled to have the same valuation applied to their MAGR interests, which, collectively, exceed Darabont’s and CAA’s,” the LA Superior Court filing declared with reference to  modified adjusted gross receipts metric used to gauge profit participation payouts. “As a result, Plaintiffs are entitled to a payment well over $200 million from AMC, in an amount to be proved at trial.”…

(11) DIBS ON LUNA. “Scientists call for protection of moon sites that could advance astronomy” reports the Guardian.

Astronomers are calling for the urgent protection of sites on the moon that are rated the best spots in the solar system for advanced instruments designed to unveil the secrets of the universe.

The prime locations are free from ground vibration, shielded from Earth’s noisy broadcast signals or profoundly cold – making them uniquely well-suited for sensitive equipment that could make observations impossible from elsewhere.

But the pristine spots, known as sites of extraordinary scientific importance (Sesis), are in danger of being ruined by an imminent wave of missions such as lunar navigation and communications satellites, rovers and mining operations, with experts warning on Monday that safeguarding the precious sites was an “urgent matter”.

“This is the first time humanity has to decide how we will expand into the solar system,” said Dr Martin Elvis, an astronomer at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts. “We’re in danger of losing one-of-a-kind opportunities to understand the universe.”…

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

Pixel Scroll 3/18/24 We Cannot Do With More Than 16, To Give A Tentacle To Each

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(1) HOLLY BLACK Q&A. “Holly Black interview: The Cruel Prince author on the boom in faerie fantasy novels, BookTok, and sex scenes” at Slate.

What does it feel like now to be surrounded by all these other faerie fantasy books and, consequently, readers who potentially read only fantasy, who are not coming into the genre for the first time?

[Black] As a person who writes and reads a lot of fantasy, it’s been extremely gratifying to see fantasy move into a mainstream place. There are a lot of people who’ve grown up watching Lord of the Rings at a young enough age that it’s become part of their vocabulary of how the fantasy world works. Game of Thrones too. I think, for a lot of people, that barrier to entry is much lower than it was when there wasn’t so much exposure to fantasy.

I think the rise of romantasy is certainly in part because people do have the vocabulary of fantasy. Romance is one of the biggest genres in the world, so of course people want to see, or are able to read, fantasy romances in a way that might not have been true before. Romantasy is really two different genres kind of mushed together, probably in the same way that urban fantasy was. You have two streams: the romance-forward fantasy, where it’s really a romance novel with fantasy, and then you have fantasy that has romance. They’re paced really differently, and they have different focuses, but they live in the same genre. Then you had urban fantasy that came out of fantasy, and often those were the faerie books; for a long time urban fantasy was faerie, in the late ’80s.

(2) NEW WORLDS TURNING 60. Richard Glynn Jones told the New Worlds Facebook group on March 13 that an anniversary issue is in the works:

Michael Moorcock and some associates are preparing a new issue of New Worlds to commemorate the 60th anniversary of his becoming its editor. This will be in magazine format as before (A4, saddle-stitched) for publication in mid-summer. The contents are pretty much finalised, so please don’t send any unsolicited material: it’s by invitation only. A second book-format New Worlds is due from PS Publishing later in the year. More info soon.

(3) SOMETHING IS ROTTING IN HOLLYWOOD BITS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Digital is forever. Except when it isn’t. The movie industry has a data migration problem. From The Hollywood Reporter: “’It’s a Silent Fire’: Decaying Digital Movie and TV Show Files Are a Hollywood Crisis”.

Industry pros sweat the possibility that many digital files will eventually become unusable — an archival tragedy reminiscent of the celluloid era.

While David Zaslav and Bob Iger’s tax-optimization strategy of deleting films and TV shows from their streamers has triggered plenty of agita among creators, the custodians of Hollywood’s digital era have an even greater fear: wholesale decay of feature and episodic files. Behind closed doors and NDAs, the fragility of archives is a perpetual Topic A, with pros sweating the possibility that contemporary pop culture’s master files might be true goners, destined to the same fate as so many vanished silent movies, among them Alfred Hitchcock’s second feature, The Mountain Eagle, and Ernst Lubitsch’s Oscar-winning The Patriot.

It’s underscored by initiatives such as Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation. “The preservation of every art form is fundamental,” the industry icon says on a video on the organization’s web site. For the business, these are valuable studio assets — to use one example, the MGM Library (roughly 4,000 film titles including the James Bond franchise and 17,000 series episodes) is worth an estimated $3.4 billion to Amazon — but there’s a misconception that digital files are safe forever. In fact, files end up corrupted, data is improperly transferred, hard drives fail, formats change, work simply vanishes. “It’s a silent fire,” says Linda Tadic, CEO of Digital Bedrock, an archiving servicer that works with studios and indie producers. “We find issues with every single show or film that we try to preserve.” So, what exactly has gone missing? “I could tell you stories — but I can’t, because of confidentiality.”

(4) FADING SCHOLARSHIP. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The same fear holds true for scholarly publications. Nature this week has rung an alarm bell.  SF fans should note: this is another reason why fandom’s move away from paper publications is to be deplored. Digital is simply not for evermore. We need plurality and a diversity of solutions…. “Millions of research papers at risk of disappearing from the Internet” at Nature.

An analysis of DOIs suggests that digital preservation is not keeping up with burgeoning scholarly knowledge.

DOIs for the uninitiated are Digital Object Identifiers: every academic publication should have one so that if a publisher’s website changes and there is a new web-page address (URL) the DOI remains the same and links through. [Jonathan adds, “Fans need not worry about this (the only one they should remember is https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139087735…” Guess whose book that link goes to…]

More than one-quarter of scholarly articles are not being properly archived and preserved, a study of more than seven million digital publications suggests. The findings, published in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication on 24 January1, indicate that systems to preserve papers online have failed to keep pace with the growth of research output.

“Our entire epistemology of science and research relies on the chain of footnotes,” explains author Martin Eve, a researcher in literature, technology and publishing at Birkbeck, University of London. “If you can’t verify what someone else has said at some other point, you’re just trusting to blind faith for artefacts that you can no longer read yourself.”

Primary research is here.

(5) LEGACY WORRIES. Brian Keene muses about the disturbingly short half-life of author name recognition in “Letters From the Labyrinth 372”.

…On Tuesday of this past week, I took a rare day off and drove up to Asbury Park, New Jersey to visit my pal F. Paul Wilson. It occurs to me that I will need to explain to some of my younger readers just who Paul is, and therein lies the meat of this missive. Paul was one of the first horror novelists I read. (As I’ve written in OTHER WORDS, my evolutionary chain as a kid was comic books and Hardy Boys, then Stephen King and F. Paul Wilson). First thing I read by him was The Keep — a seminal, classic horror novel which, sadly, most of you under the age of forty have probably never read. The Keep was the third “grown up book” I ever read (right after King’s Night Shift and Salem’s Lot), and it is an essential part of my writer DNA.

Paul went on to become a giant in the fields of not just horror, but science-fiction, fantasy, thrillers, and other genres, as well. He was a stalwart, perennial New York Times bestseller, and his best-known IP — Repairman Jack — will carry on long after he’s gone. I guarantee you that right now, many of you who did not recognize the name F. Paul Wilson are now nodding and saying, “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of Repairman Jack.”

It feels absurd to have to explain all of this to you. How could anyone not know this? But then, I think about this past Thursday in the store, when I overheard a mother explaining to her daughter who Brian Keene was, and that he owned the store they were currently shopping in, and that she (the mother) had started reading him in high school. The girl, high school age herself, was holding a book by Wile E. Young that she’d pulled off the shelf. Wile E. Young, was reading me in high school and my books are an essential part of his writer DNA the way Paul’s are a part of mine….

(6) FEAR THE LEFTOVERS. “Godzilla Minus One Director Releases New Kaiju Short, ‘Foodlosslla’” – here is Comicbook.com’s introduction.

…Godzilla Minus One director Takashi Yamazaki teamed up with Ajinomoto (a line of cooking products in Japan) on a special new promo that takes the Kaiju director’s expertise and brings it to life in a new way. Highlighting the amount of food waste in Japan (2.44 million tons according to the advertisement), it results in the creation of “Foodlosslla” a kaiju made out of all the wasted food that doesn’t get eaten or cooked. But with the director’s eye, it’s a great looking monster for the promo. Check it out in action below…

(7) STILL PLENTY OF GOOD EATING ON THIS ONE. Don’t ask what internet rabbit hole this 2014 recipe came from: “Edible Art: Spice Stuffed Squash Sandworms” at Kitchen Overlord. (Click for larger image.)

(8) THOMAS STAFFFORD (1930-2024). [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Gemini 6. Gemini 9. Apollo 10. Apollo 10 Lunar Module. Apollo-Soyuz. Air Force Lt General. A long and busy life. RIP. “Astronaut Thomas Stafford, commander of Apollo 10, has died at age 93”. He died March 18. PBS News Hour pays tribute.

…Stafford, a retired Air Force three-star general, took part in four space missions. Before Apollo 10, he flew on two Gemini flights, including the first rendezvous of two U.S. capsules in orbit. He died in a hospital near his Space Coast Florida home, said Max Ary, director of the Stafford Air & Space Museum in Weatherford, Oklahoma.

Stafford was one of 24 people who flew to the moon, but he did not land on it. Only seven of them are still alive….

…After he put away his flight suit, Stafford was the go-to guy for NASA when it sought independent advice on everything from human Mars missions to safety issues to returning to flight after the 2003 space shuttle Columbia accident. He chaired an oversight group that looked into how to fix the then-flawed Hubble Space Telescope, earning a NASA public service award.

“Tom was involved in so many things that most people were not aware of, such as being known as the ‘Father of Stealth’,” Ary said in an email. Stafford was in charge of the famous “Area 51” desert base that was the site of many UFO theories, but the home of testing of Air Force stealth technologies….

… After the moon landings ended, NASA and the Soviet Union decided on a joint docking mission and Stafford, a one-star general at the time, was chosen to command the American side. It meant intensive language training, being followed by the KGB while in the Soviet Union, and lifelong friendships with cosmonauts. The two teams of space travelers even went to Disney World and rode Space Mountain together before going into orbit and joining ships.

“We have capture,” Stafford radioed in Russian as the Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft hooked up. His Russian counterpart, Alexei Leonov, responded in English: “Well done, Tom, it was a good show. I vote for you.”

The 1975 mission included two days during which the five men worked together on experiments….

(9) BELATED BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 17, 1948 — William Gibson, 76. Not at all surprisingly, the first series that I read by William Gibson was the one that started off with his first novel, Neuromancer, published forty years ago, which is called the Sprawl trilogy. I still love the now anachronistic wording of the opening, “THE SKY ABOVE the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

I don’t know at all how many times that I’ve read that trilogy but the last time I did read it, about a decade, it was still impressively excellent. 

William Gibson

Neuromancer would get a much deserved Hugo at Aussiecon Two as well as a Ditmar, Nebula and a Philip K. Dick; and Mono Lisa Overdrive won an Aurora. The novels had too many nominations to list here.

Yes, I’m looking forward to the Apple financed Neuromancer series. If anyone can financially afford to do it right, it’s them. And they have a strict hands-off policy of not interfering with the actual production team. 

Going back in time I must talk about “Johnny Mnemonic” which was not his first story, which was “Hinterlands“ which I’ve never of until now. “Johnny Mnemonic” I think is one of the finest SF short story written.  The same holds true for “The Gernsback Continuum” which was published in the same year, forty-two years ago.  I’ll toss in “New Rose Hotel” which showed up a few years later.

Please let’s not talk about the Johnny Mnemonic film. Really don’t mention it. I get queasy thinking about how they butchered that stellar story. And I’ve seen some pretty awful scripts but few that matched this, plus the casting of him. Why oh why? 

His second series, the Bridge trilogy, which is Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties came out some thirty years ago. No, I’ve not read it nearly as many times as I’ve read the Sprawl ones but I did find rather excellent. The near future setting is more grounded and a more fascinating read for that. 

Ok, I’ll admit that I do not at all know what to make of Pattern Recognition, Spook Country and Zero History. They are well written like everything he does, and the characters are fascinating, but something these works is just not quite right for me. It comes off cold, distanced and just not interesting as what else he’s done.

On the other catspaw, the Jackpot trilogy, or possibly longer series, which so far consisted of The Peripheral that has contain time travel (of sorts, maybe) and Agency, and a third, Jackpot, which I don’t think has a release date, is fascinating in the first two novels. Strange, disjointed but fascinating. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) JUNE 4. ScreenRant says The Acolyte release date has been confirmed by Lucasfilm: “We Finally Know When The Next Star Wars TV Show Comes Out”.

… With a summer 2024 Disney+ drop having long been rumored, Lucasfilm has officially confirmed The Acolyte‘s release date as June 4, 2024, via Star Wars‘ official Twitter/X account. As it turns out, the release dates that have been reported for The Acolyte were accurate. This means Star Wars fans will not have to wait long to sink their teeth into the High Republic era, as Lucasfilm takes a big step into a new facet of a galaxy far, far away….

… The books of the High Republic are set centuries before Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. Upon The Acolyte‘s announcement, it was confirmed that the Disney+ show would detail the waning days of the High Republic era. This places the show about 100 years before The Phantom Menace in the Star Wars timeline, promising a new, exciting look at an entirely new era of the franchise….

(12) DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF LOOKING UP AT GIANT ELECTRIC SHEEP? YES THEY CAN! [Item by Daniel Dern.] “Montana Man Pleads Guilty to Federal Wildlife Trafficking Charges as Part of Yearslong Effort to Create Giant Hybrid Sheep for Captive Hunting” at the US Department of Justice.

Defendant Worked to Traffic Marco Polo Sheep Parts from Kyrgyzstan, Clone Sheep, Illegally Inseminate Ewes to Create Hybrids and Traffic Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep Parts

A Montana man pleaded guilty today to two felony wildlife crimes – a conspiracy to violate the Lacey Act and substantively violating the Lacey Act – as part of an almost decade-long effort to create giant sheep hybrids in the United States with an aim to sell the species to captive hunting facilities.

Arthur “Jack” Schubarth, 80, of Vaughn, Montana, is the owner and operator of Sun River Enterprises LLC – also known as Schubarth Ranch – which is a 215-acre alternative livestock ranch in Vaughn. The Schubarth Ranch is engaged in the purchase, sale and breeding of “alternative livestock” such as mountain sheep, mountain goats and various ungulates. The primary market for Schubarth’s livestock is captive hunting operations, also known as shooting preserves or game ranches.

According to court documents, Schubarth conspired with at least five other individuals between 2013 and 2021 to create a larger hybrid species of sheep that would garner higher prices from shooting preserves. Schubarth brought parts of the largest sheep in the world, Marco Polo argali sheep (Ovis ammon polii), from Kyrgyzstan into the United States without declaring the importation. Average males can weigh more than 300 pounds with horns that span more than five feet. Marco Polo argali are native to the high elevations of the Pamir region of Central Asia. They are protected internationally by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, domestically by the U.S. Endangered Species Act and are prohibited in the State of Montana to protect native sheep from disease and hybridization.

Schubarth sent genetic material from the argali parts to a lab to create cloned embryos. Schubarth then implanted the embryos in ewes on his ranch, resulting in a single, pure genetic male Marco Polo argali that he named “Montana Mountain King” or MMK….

(13) TINY MESSAGES. Like the “golden record” sent with two 1977 Voyager probes,“NASA’s Europa Clipper mission will carry a poem and millions of names to ocean moon” reports CNN.

When NASA’s Europa Clipper aims to launch on its highly anticipated mission to an icy moon in October, the spacecraft will carry a unique design etched with names, poetry and artwork symbolizing humanity.

The US space agency has a long history of sending names and meaningful designs aloft aboard missions, including the Voyager probes, the Perseverance rover and Parker Solar Probe. Now, it’s Europa Clipper’s turn to carry on the tradition of ferrying a design that illustrates why humans are driven to explore the cosmos….

… Decorated on both sides and made of the rare metal tantalum, the triangular plate will seal the spacecraft’s sensitive electronics inside a vault to protect them from Jupiter’s harsh radiation.

On the inside of the vault is a silicon microchip stenciled with more than 2.6 million names submitted by the public. The microchip is at the center of a design that shows a bottle floating within the orbit of Jupiter and its moons to symbolize that it serves as a cosmic message in a bottle.

Technicians at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, used electron beams to stencil the names at a size smaller than one-thousandth the width of a human hair.

Below the bottle, the design features the original poem “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa” by US Poet Laureate Ada Limón, etched in her handwriting, as well as a portrait of the late planetary sciences pioneer Ron Greeley, an Arizona State University professor who played a crucial role in laying the foundation for the development of a mission to Europa.

The side of the plate facing the inside of the vault also includes an etching of the Drake Equation, developed by the late astronomer Frank Drake of the University of California Santa Cruz in 1961 to estimate the possibility of finding advanced life beyond Earth. The equation remains an important part of astrobiological research as scientists search for evidence of life beyond our planet.

The external side of the plate carries waveforms, or visual representations of sound waves, that depict the word “water” in 103 languages from around the world. At the heart of the spiral is a symbol that means “water” in American Sign Language. The audio of the spoken languages collected by linguists for NASA is available on its website….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Mother’s Basement looks back on “How Akira Toriyama Changed The World”.

Akira Toriyama didn’t just change manga and anime forever, he changed the entire world. Here’s how.

Geoff Thew creates videos analyzing the storytelling techniques of anime and video games. He has been named the number one Worst YouTube Anime Reviewer by The Top Tens.

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

Pixel Scroll 2/27/24 It’s Scrolls And Pixels I Recall, I Really Don’t Know Files At All

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(1) BEN YALOW OFF LA IN 2026 BID. LA in 2026 Worldcon bid chair Joyce Lloyd told File 770 today, “I can confirm that Ben Yalow is no longer a member of the bid committee.”

Craig Miller, a director of the nonprofit, also said in a comment here that Yalow has resigned from SCIFI, Inc., the parent organization to the L.A. in 2026 Bid. And that Yalow is not going to be on the L.A. 2026 Worldcon Committee.

(2) SOUND OFF. Kristine Kathryn Rusch reacts to “Findaway And Corporate Rights Grabs” on Patreon.

…Does that mean that after next week, you will find my work on Findaway? Um, no. You will not. As a friend of mine said, they’ve shown their true colors. Musicians have had trouble with Spotify for years and these are Spotify-inspired changes.

Spotify bought Findaway in 2022, paying about $123 million dollars. At the time, Spotify CEO, Daniel Ek, told investors that he was “confident that audiobooks will deliver the kind of earnings that  investors are looking for, with profit margins north of 40 percent.”

Over the past 18 months or so, Spotify has tinkered with Findaway in a variety of ways, mostly to do with the way that they’re paying content providers. Then this new TOS rights grab, which is not unexpected. In fact, it’s right on time….

(3) VERSUS INJUSTICE. Reckoning publisher Michael J. DeLuca reacts to the 2023 Hugo disaster, then goes beyond, in his post “On Ongoing Prejudice in the SFF Community and What Is to Be Done”. (Or go straight to DeLuca’s “original, uncut and expletive-laden version” here: “Do the Right Thing: A Hugo Rant”  at The Mossy Skull.)

….We perceive the dangerous potential, as daily worse things seem to come out about the behavior of a Hugo admin committee responsible for hurting so many great authors and the entire fandom of China—not to mention individual humans in their immediate vicinity—of writing them off as irrevocably evil outliers and therefore not representative of problems in our field. We don’t want this latest crisis to overshadow the previous, ongoing crisis or the one before that. That the Hugo committee has provided a scapegoat to whom consequences can be applied cannot be allowed to obscure the fact that, for one glaring example, the insidious shutting-out of Palestinian voices is still going on. There are so many compounded crises, anyone can be forgiven for not addressing every one all the time loud enough so nobody else forgets. Individually, we must choose one injustice at a time to address, with our voices, our donations, our votes, because otherwise we’ll all implode from the pressure. But we can’t let the latest injustice blot out the rest.

How do individual people get to act this terribly? They get encouraged. If they’re entitled white men, that encouragement need amount to nothing more than looking the other way. How do individual people get encouraged to be better? By positive peer pressure. By example.

The antidote to bureaucratic power-clutching and uninterrogated fascist creep, like the problem, is manifold. We need juried awards with juries of accountable, well-intentioned people empaneled by accountable, well-intentioned people. The Ignyte awards are one such. So are the Shirleys. Support them, care about them, pay attention to who wins. Our fellow Detroit-based indie press Atthis Arts bent over backwards this past year rescuing an anthology of Ukrainian SFF, Embroidered Worlds, from the slag heap. Pay attention to what they’re doing. Lift them up. We need magazines like Strange Horizons (who published a Palestinian special issue in 2020), Fiyah, Clarkesworld (who have long been in the vanguard of championing translated work and translators), Omenana, and khōréō (their year 4 fundraiser ends 2/29). We need magazines whose editors and staff are actively listening to, seeking out, boosting, celebrating, paying—and translating, paying, and celebrating translators of—Chinese, Taiwanese, Palestinian, Yemeni, Ukrainian, Russian, Israeli, Indigenous, Aboriginal, Congolese, Nigerian, disabled, neurodivergent, queer, and trans voices. Do we in that litany miss anybody currently getting oppressed and shut out? Undoubtedly. This work is unending. We choose to keep at it.

The Hugo admins aren’t the only ones failing at this. The PEN Awards have recently been actively lifting up pro-genocide voices and suppressing Palestinian voices. A story we published, “All We Have Left Is Ourselves” by Oyedotun Damilola Muees, won a PEN Award for emerging writers in 2021. How can the administrators of an award designed specifically to remedy the way the publishing establishment has systematically ignored marginalized voices side with imperialism? There’s an open letter calling the PEN organization to task for this. Reckoning is among those who have signed it….

(4) ROMANTASY. Vox explores “How Sarah J. Maas became romantasy’s reigning queen”.

… Within the stories themselves, Maas’s worldbuilding is full of hat tips to her predecessors. In A Court of Thorn and Roses, the faerie land is called Prythian, a nod to Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain. In Prythian, faeries use a form of teleportation called “winnowing,” and their explanation of it will be familiar to anyone who loved Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. “Think of it as … two different points on a piece of cloth,” Maas writes (very much her ellipses). “Winnowing … it’s like folding that cloth so the two spots align.” If you’ve read the classics of YA fantasy before, you’ll recognize the sampling and remixing she is doing here.

Part of the pleasure of reading Maas is seeing these familiar YA fantasy references lie cheek by jowl with the tropes of romance novels. In A Court of Mist and Fury, the second volume of the series, two lovers who have not yet admitted their feelings for each other find themselves forced by cruel circumstance to fake date. Later, they end up at an inn with only one bed to spare, not once but twice. Across ACOTAR, Maas’s protagonist, Feyre, is torn between two boys. One is blond and sunny; one is dark-haired and brooding; both are impossibly beautiful, rich, and powerful; both begin as Feyre’s enemies….

(5) CHESTBURSTERS, MUPPETS, AND A BLACK HOLE, OH MY! Hugo Book Club Blog calls 1980 “The Ascendancy of Science Fiction Cinema (Hugo Cinema 1980)”.

In each year from 1970 to 1975, fewer than five of the top-30 movies (which could only be seen in cinemas at that time) could even remotely be considered genre works. By 1979, just two years after Star Wars, most of the top grossing movies were science fiction.

When the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation began in 1958, there had been concerns raised about whether or not there could be sufficient SFF movies worthy of consideration. Several times between 1958 and 1978, fans voted to present no award because they were dissatisfied with the cinematic fare on offer. That would never happen again.

After decades as a marginal cinematic genre, science fiction was in its ascendancy.

Most of the movies on the 1980 Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo have withstood the test of time: The Muppet Movie, Time After Time, Star Trek The Motion Picture, and Alien remain well-loved today. Only Disney’s The Black Hole stands out as being one we thought was unworthy of Hugo Awards consideration … and even it has some charm to it….

(6) GODZILLA MINUS ONE LIVE REVIEW. Artist Bob Eggleton and Erin Underwood will review Godzilla Minus One live on YouTube on February 29 at 1:30 p.m. Eastern. (YouTube link.)

Join a special live movie review on YouTube of Godzilla Minus One with award winning science fiction artist Bob Eggleton, whose past work on Godzilla imagery has earned him love from fans around the world. Godzilla Minus One is the newest Japanese remake of the iconic monster who has captured our hearts ever since its original release in 1954. The newest film in the Godzilla genre features post war Japan when the country is still trying to recover, and “a new crisis emerges in the form of a giant monster, baptized in the horrific power of the atomic bomb.”

Bob Eggleton: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bobeggleton; Bob Eggleton has won 9 Hugo Awards, and various other important awards for his art over the last 30 years of his career. He is a fan of Godzilla and worked as a creative consultant on the American remake. While in Japan he appeared as an extra in one of the more recent films. Bob has designed concepts for Star Trek, Jimmy Neutron Boy Genius (2001) and The Ant Bully (2006) as well as created art for various publishers, magazines, book covers and media projects. His passion is with classic masters of art such as JMW Turner, John Martin and the Romantic movement. Bob has always been fascinated with ‘scale’ as a philosophy in the painted image, whether it be the vastness of outer space, or the size of a kaiju, H P Lovecraft denizen, or a dragon viewed from a human perspective.

Erin Underwood: YouTube: www.youtube.com/@ErinUnderwood; Erin Underwood is a movie reviewer on YouTube. She’s also a science fiction and fantasy conrunner, fan, author, and editor who loves dissecting stories and talking about films, TV, and books. However, in the daylight hours, she designs and produces emerging technology conferences for MIT Technology Review, where she tells the story of how new technologies are being used and how they are likely to impact our world.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born February 27, 1940 — Howard Hesseman. (Died 2022.) So yes, I’m doing Howard Hesseman so I can mention how much I liked him as Dr. Johnny Fever on WKRP in Cincinnati. Hesseman prepared for the role by actually DJing at KMPX-FM in San Francisco for several months. 

In interviews, the producers of the show said that persona was largely developed by him and the following opening words of him on the first show are all his doing. 

All right, Cincinnati, it is time for this town to get down! You’ve got Johnny—Doctor Johnny Fever, and I am burnin’ up in here! Whoa! Whoo! We all in critical condition, babies, but you can tell me where it hurts, because I got the healing prescription here from the big ‘KRP musical medicine cabinet. Now I am talking about your 50,000 watt intensive care unit… 

Now let’s talk about his genre roles. 

He was Fred in Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo, a television horror film that has no rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but one person there says the only interesting thing was the real tarantulas. 

Howard Hesseman in 2014.

No, Clue, one of my all-time favorite films cannot be stretched to be considered genre, but I’m including it here because he, though uncredited, had the juicy role of The Chief. 

He was in the wonderful Flight of the Navigator as Dr. Louis Farsday, and then there’s the amusing thing Amazon Women on the Moon where he’s Rupert King in the “Titan Man” segment. 

He was Dr. Berg in the excellent Martian Child which based the David Gerrold’s Hugo Award winning novelette, not the novel based off it. 

Yes, he was in both Halloween II as Uncle Meat and Bigfoot as Mayor Tommy Gillis, neither career highlights by any measure.

I see he showed up on one of my favorite series, The Ray Bradbury Theatre, playing a character named Bayes: in “Downwind from Gettysburg”.

Around the that time, he  went elsewhere to the new Outer Limits to be Dr. Emory Taylor in “Music of the Spheres”. 

I’m off to watch the pilot now…

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) NO SFF IN DICK TRACY RETURN. In “Dick Tracy Writers Tease the Legendary Detective’s Return” at CBR.com, Alex Segura and Michael Moreci celebrate Dick Tracy’s return. No fancy wrist-radio, though.

When does your series take place? What made you choose this era as a setting?

Moreci: We’re very specific in the time we’re setting this — our story takes place in 1947, so it’s just after World War II. Again, there’s a definite, clear reason for that, rooted in Tracy’s character and the mood we’re trying to set.

Segura: This is Dick Tracy: Year One, basically.

(10) CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME. In a manner of speaking… The Library Foundation of Los Angeles invites you to “The Stay Home and Read a Book Ball”, 36th edition, on Sunday, March 3 at 12:00 a.m. – “Wherever you are!”

While you’re celebrating, take a moment to support the Library Foundation of Los Angeles by donating what you would have spent on a night out.

Share photos of your literary festivities on our Facebook event page, Instagram, or Twitter and tell us what you’ll be reading. Tag us at @LibraryFoundLA and use hashtag #StayHomeandRead to let others know how you are celebrating!

(11) THE ROBOT YOU NEED? The “Lost In Space Electronic Lights & Sounds B9 Robot Golden Boy Edition” is offered by Diamond Select Toys on Amazon.

  • Eyes light up and sensors blink, Chest blinks when B-9 talks
  • Head bubble manually raises and lowers, Arms extend and collapse
  • Claws open and close
  • Wheels allow B-9 to roll
  • B-9 Says the following phrases, including dialogue from “Cave of the Wizards”: “Watch it, I do not like grubby finger stains on my new suit of gold.” “From now on I’d appreciate it if you’d call be Golden Boy” “In my opinion, it is not Professor Robinson who needs psychiatric treatment, it is his doctor.” “I forgot, you are brave, handsome Dr. Smith.” and more!

(12) SIDEWAYS ON LUNA. [Item by Steven French.] I wonder if one of the engineers went home before the launch thinking “I’m sure I’ve forgotten something”! “Odysseus craft’s moon mission to be cut short after sideways landing” in the Guardian.

….On Friday, Intuitive Machines had disclosed that the laser range finders – designed to feed altitude and forward-velocity readings to Odysseus’ autonomous navigation system – were inoperable because company engineers neglected to unlock the lasers’ safety switch before launch on 15 February. The safety lock, akin to a firearm’s safety switch, can only be disabled by hand….

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Introduction from Deadline: “’The Watchers’ Trailer Sees Dakota Fanning Stalked Through Irish Forest”. Comes to theaters June 7.

Warner Bros on Tuesday unveiled the first trailer for The Watchers, the anticipated supernatural thriller marking the feature debut of writer-director Ishana Night Shyamalan, with Dakota Fanning (The Equalizer 3) in the lead.

Set up at New Line following a multi-studio bidding war, this film from the daughter of M. Night Shyamlan is based on the 2021 gothic horror novel by A.M. Shine. Pic tells the story of Mina (Fanning), a 28-year-old artist who gets stranded in an expansive, untouched forest in western Ireland. When Mina finds shelter, she unknowingly becomes trapped alongside three strangers that are watched and stalked by mysterious creatures each night….

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, N., Kathy Sullivan, Andrew (not Werdna), Olav Rokne, 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 Joe H.]

Pixel Scroll 2/12/24 Cats Dream Well. Why Do You Think They Sleep So Much?

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(1) STUMBLING OUT OF THE STARTING GATE. When the Montréal in 2027 Worldcon bid launched two days ago, one of its Presupport levels included an offer that sparked debate about whether it violated the WSFS Constitution’s site selection rules:

Today that language has been removed:

Mike Scott explained the problem on Facebook:

WSFS constitution 4.3. Non-natural persons can only cast site selection ballots for No Preference. Montreal in 2027 buying you a WSFS membership in Seattle is fine, and you can still vote in site selection yourself, because you’re a natural person. But if you delegate Montreal in 2027 to cast a ballot on your behalf, that ballot must be counted as No Preference, because Montreal in 2027 is not a natural person. The constitution doesn’t say that ballots must be cast on behalf of a natural person, it says they must be cast by a natural person.

Other people have always been allowed to deliver ballots properly executed by a voter. Here, the committee had said they would execute these ballots for others. In that case, the ballots would have to be counted as No Preference.

(2) TEL AVIV IN 2027 WEBSITE. The announcement of competition from Montréal has led to a wider awareness that the WorldCon 2027 in Tel aviv bidders launched a new website last October.

The TLV2027 bid committee boasts a team of highly experienced individuals. Guy Kovel, the Bid Chair, has a track record of convention operations. Gadi Evron, with a history of organizing events since 1996, handled logistics and events at prestigious conventions like Dublin 2019 and CoNZealand. Other members, including Einat Citron, Naama Friedman, Dror Raif Nesher, and Tal Goldman, bring expertise in programming, logistics,  volunteer management, and event operations.

The front page also carries this statement about the situation in Israel:

We want to update you on the current situation with our bid committee. Firstly, we’re relieved to share that all the members of our committee are safe, even though some of us have been called to service during these challenging times.

We’re all deeply devastated by the recent attacks, but we remain steadfast in our belief that things will stabilize, and ultimately, peace will prevail. Our commitment to our shared goals remains unshaken, and we’ll continue to work diligently to bring our vision to life.

Thank you for your unwavering support, and together, we’ll navigate through these trying times and look forward to a brighter future.

(3) ROMANTASY ON THE RADIO. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This week’s Open Book on BBC’s Radio 4 looked at the sub-genre of “Romantasy”.  This is a hugely growing book genre in Britain the past couple of years that has had to overcome some snobbery with clear overlaps – depending on the book – with epic fantasy, military fantasy, etc…

‘Romantasy’ – combining fantasy and racy romance, it’s the hot new genre sought after by publishers and readers alike, and dominated by female authors and readers. To discuss it’s huge growth in popularity, Johny is joined by: Saara El-Arifi – bestselling author of Faebound, the first in a three part trilogy, which went straight to number one on release last month; Natasha Bardon – publisher of Science Fiction and Fantasy for Harper Voyager, of romantasy-focussed imprint Magpie Books, and of the upcoming ‘spicy’ romantasy list, the Midnight Collection; and by Katie Fraser – journalist for The Bookseller who writes about SFF.

You can download it from here: “Open Book, Madeleine Grey”.

(4) TAKE THE TOUR. Congratulations to Brian Keene and Mary SanGiovanni on their store opening! And thanks for the Vortex Books & Comics Opening Day video tour. (I see Brian starts right off in the true outlaw spirit by ignoring the crossing signal!)

Authors Brian Keene and Mary SanGiovanni have opened a bookstore in Columbia, Pennsylvania — focusing on horror, science-fiction, fantasy, thrillers, and other speculative fiction genres, as well as comic books and magazines. Brian gives you a tour on opening day.

(5) MYRIAD MEN OF TIN. G. W. Thomas rounds up an enormous number of examples of robots in Seventies comics in “Bronze Age Robots! 1970s” at Dark Worlds Quarterly.

…The 1970s divides neatly in two with Star Wars at the center. The 1980s would see Science Fiction explode in all media as Star Wars proved that fans wanted space opera again, even if they hadn’t known it. For robot fans in America there was the coming of the Japanese style giant robots. And more toy-based products like ROM the Spaceknight.

(6) OMEGA AWARDS DEADLINE. February 13 is the last day to submit entries for The Tomorrow Prize and The Green Feather Award.

(7) THE NEW NUMBER TWO. This list is presented as an infographic: “The 15 BEST Science Fiction Books of ALL TIME” at Daily Infographic. Number 1 is Dune. But number 2 is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?

(8) THOSE WERE THE DAYS, MY FRIEND. The New York Times tells how “Video Games Are Mourning the Old, Weird, Clunky Internet”.

Surfing the web in the 1990s and early 2000s was a slower endeavor, and fewer people had access to the technology. But it is still easy to reminisce about the days when it felt like a public marketplace, with a good chance that someone out there had made a blog or GeoCities site about the niche topic you found interesting.

Those robust online forums have since been flattened into algorithmic social media feeds or hidden on messaging apps, a shift mourned by several video games with a shared fondness for bygone internet eras.

Games like last year’s Videoverse, 2019’s Hypnospace Outlaw and the upcoming Darkweb Streamer use chat interfaces akin to AIM or MSN, as well as fake websites that greet people with MIDI songs and text written in bold fonts. Each experience has its own nostalgic lens but is a snapshot of lost expression, creativity and independence.

Chantal Ryan, an anthropologist and the lead developer of Darkweb Streamer, a horror simulation game that merges the perils of modern streaming with the ’90s internet, bemoaned how high-quality independent services were often cannibalized by corporate interests. She pointed to sites like Goodreads and AbeBooks, both bought by Amazon.

“It reminds me of forest clearing,” said Ryan, who studied at the University of Adelaide. “You have this habitat with sustainable ecosystems, and communities of beings living harmoniously. And then the bulldozer comes in and destroys literally everything in its path with no regard to who’s being affected.”…

The visual novel Videoverse follows the final days of the online social network for a fictional gaming system in 2003. Kinmoku

(9) ELIZABETH (WARREN) ADAMS OBITUARY. Norwescon social media has announced that Elizabeth (Warren) Adams, affectionately known as The Dragon Lady, died on February 9. She was the chair of Norwescons 11, 12, and 14, and ran legendary hospitality rooms at the con. She also was a past editor of Westwind, the NWSFS clubzine, and was very active with PSST (Puget Sound Star Trekkers).

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born February 12, 1950 — Michael Ironside, 73. The role I remember Michael Ironside most for was as Lieutenant Jean Rasczak in Starship Troopers. There wasn’t much great about that film but I thought that he made much of that character. 

Do I need to say that I’m not covering everything he’s done of a genre nature? Well most of you get that. Really you do. So let’s see what I find interesting.

Michael Ironside in Starship Troopers

Scanners is one weird film. It really is. And he was in it as Darryl Revok, the Big Baddie, a role he perfectly played. 

Next he got cast as the main antagonist in another of my favorite SF films, this time as Overdog McNab in Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. Who comes with these names?

Then there was Total Recall where he was Agent Richter, the ruthless enforcer of Cohaagen, the source of everything corrupt on Mars. Great role that fit his gruff voice and frankly even gruffer looks absolutely perfectly.

One of his major ongoing roles was in the V franchise, first as Ham Tyle, a recurring role in V: The Final Battle, and then playing the same character in all episodes of V: The Series.

Now we come to my favorite of his roles, in one one of my favorite series, seaQuest 2032, where he was Captain Oliver Hudson. Great series and an absolute fantastic performance by him! Pity it got cancelled after thirteen episodes. 

Finally he has one voice acting role I loved. In the DC universe, he was Darkseid, the absolute rule of Apokolis. He voiced him primarily on Superman: The Animated Series, but also on the Justice League series as well, and to my surprise on the HBO Harley Quinn series as well.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Argyle Sweater mashes up a nursery rhyme and online shopping.
  • Existential Comics stages a humorous confrontation between a student and teacher of the magical arts. Sort of Clarke’s Law in reverse.

(12) A LITTLE RAY OF SUNSHINE. Nic Farey, in This Here 72, thinks that the most noteworthy feature of the 2023 Hugo stats embarrassment (“Even a WorldThing avoider such as meself cannot have failed to clock the latest brouhaha (causing much haha round here, to be sure)”) is the opportunity it affords to declare his own report of the voting figures for this year’s FAAn awards will be immediately available — while predicting coverage of the FAAns he anticipates winning will be exploited to take attention away from the Hugos’ disgrace.

The fact that the probity of the FAAns (and my own alleged “fixing” of them, a libelous statement to be sure) has been questioned starts to be more of a “but look over there…” diversion, don’t it?…

Great suggestion, Nic, except (and I know you’ll be surprised to hear this) even your figleaf won’t be big enough to cover this cockup.

(13) THE QUIET BEFORE…THE QUIET. “’A Quiet Place: Day One’ first look at Lupita Nyong’o, Joseph Quinn” at Entertainment Weekly.

The ingenuity of the next A Quiet Place movie lies in the simplicity of its idea: Take the same core premise of the previous entries, but just change the setting. That tweak alone drastically affects the stakes. 

John Krasinski’s 2018 horror-thriller introduced the Abbott family, who embraced a life of silence at their rural farmhouse in upstate New York in a terrifying reality overrun by sightless alien monsters that hunt through sound. The story continued in 2021’s A Quiet Place: Part II, but now A Quiet Place: Day One, a prequel film and the franchise’s first spinoff, will see how the citizens of New York City, one of the noisiest metropolitans on the globe, fared when these vicious creatures arrived on Earth….

(14) SFF MOVIE TRAILERS DROPPED DURING SUPER  BOWL. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Most (if not all) of the movie trailers debuted during the Super Bowl are for genre works. Comicbook.com did a roundup of all the YouTube videos. See them at the link: “2024 Super Bowl: Watch Every New Movie Trailer Released for the Big Game”.

The Super Bowl may technically be about the two best teams in the NFL facing off for football’s ultimate prize, but for many around the country, it represents one of the biggest movie events of the year. Several film studios use the Super Bowl as a platform to advertise some of their biggest movies in the coming year, leading to more than a few awesome trailers arriving online in the same weekend….

(15) BUGS, MISTER RICO! And some other commercials had a genre flavor, too, like this one: “Jeff Goldblum Returns as Brad Bellflower in Apartments.com’s Sci-Fi Super Bowl Ad” at LBBOnline.

Apartments.com returns to the Super Bowl as the universal leader in renting and debuted a never-before-seen 30-second spot, titled ‘Extraterrentials.’ In the new ad, which premiered during the first quarter of Super Bowl LVII, Jeff Goldblum continues his role as Brad Bellflower, visionary leader of Apartments.com, and defuses a tense standoff with some new arrivals on Earth. The campaign rollout spoofs an upcoming Jeff Goldblum sci-fi blockbuster, featuring a clever media strategy and unique creative from agency of record, RPA.   

“Leading up to the Super Bowl, Apartments.com leveraged extraterrestrial buzz in culture to generate intrigue and awareness across media channels by leaning into the possibility of a new Goldblum sci-fi film,” said Fred Saint, president, marketplaces at CoStar Group…. 

(16) DOPPELGÄNGERS3: “Exploring New Futures in Space: A Revolutionary Integration of Neuroscience, Quantum Physics, and Space Exploration” at SETI.org.

The SETI Institute is proud to support a groundbreaking project from London-based filmmaker and SETI Institute Designer of Experiences Dr. Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian that combines insights from intergenerational trauma, neuroscience, quantum physics, and space exploration.

Premiering at SXSW 2024, Doppelgängers3 is a feature film and research project that challenges conventional narratives of space colonization by integrating diverse perspectives. Ben Hayoun-Stépanian will present this multidisciplinary endeavor at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) 2024, highlighting its unique blend of science, culture, and storytelling within the decolonial space and space culture sessions.

The project spotlights the importance of acknowledging collective trauma and its impacts — a burgeoning field in neuropsychology research. By weaving together the stories of three individuals across different geographies, Doppelgängers3imagines a utopian community on the moon that learns from the past and aspires to a future where diversity and plurality are celebrated….

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Dan Monroe at Media Master Design answers the question “What Happened to THE TIME MACHINE?”

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

Pixel Scroll 2/3/24 It’s Hot As Hell In Pixeldelphia

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(1) DRAGON CON BANS AI ART FROM SALES AREAS. The Dragon Con 2024 Art Show Application Form includes this ban:

No AI artwork of any kind will be allowed to be sold or distributed in the Dragon Con Art Show, Comic and Pop Artist Alley, or Vendor Halls. Failure to comply with our AI Policy can lead to immediate removal from show floor.

(2) VOICE FOR HUGO CHANGE. Mary Robinette Kowal shared her knowledge of how Hugos are administered in a Bluesky thread that starts here. She contrasts how the disqualification of her audiobook novella “Lady Astronaut of Mars” was handled by the 2013 administrator versus the way those ruled “ineligible” have been treated by the 2023 administrator.

After providing more background history, Kowal makes a call for change in Hugo oversight.

(3) CHENGDU WORLDCON ROUNDUP. [Item by Ersatz Culture.]

A couple of Chinese language videos about the Hugos

Whilst looking for coverage of the Hugos on the Chinese internet, I came across this Bilibili video, posted Wednesday 31st.  It’s a compilation of 5 news items from a channel that I think I maybe submitted an item for last year.  The final item – from around 10:20 in – is entitled 

  • 雨锅奖余波 (yuguo jiang yubo – Hugo Award Aftermath).  

I don’t think there’s anything new there to anyone who’s been following File 770 coverage, but this is one of the few mainland China items I’ve seen on the subject, outside of user comments on various social media platforms, that – as previously covered – have had a tendency to disappear.

As I type this 3 or 4 days after the video was uploaded, it has received just over a quarter-of-a-million views.  I’ve got a local backup copy just in case it does belatedly vanish.

The below screenshots and Google Translated renditions thereof are included primarily for the bullet comments from users.  Filers might like to note that the video also includes a (machine translated?) screenshot of a Paul Weimer blog post.

A day earlier, I came across this video from a YouTuber in Taiwan, which was posted 4 days ago, and has just over 200 thousand views as I type this.  It’s another explainer for mainstream audiences, so again there won’t be much new to people who’ve been reading this site.

The video is edited in a snappy way, and very memey.  

(The place where I came across a link to this video is also worthy of a write-up, but that will have to wait for another day.)

(4) SAWYER’S STATEMENT ABOUT TIANWEN PROJECT. Robert J. Sawyer, a Chengdu Worldcon guest of honor, responded to discussion about the Tianwen Project and his participation in a launch ceremony at the Worldcon in a Facebook comment this week.

Elsewhere he answered some other questions about his guest of honor appearance.

And because people have been known to carelessly treat things others say in comments here as if they are my personal opinion (like Robert J. Sawyer, who recently blocked me in social media), I am going to quote what I wrote to a friend in October 2022 after passage at Chicon 8 of a resolution calling for Sergey Lukyanenko to be disinvited from the Chengdu Worldcon:

…Continuing a line of discussion I raised on FB — I want to be clear that I’m not demanding any action from Robert J Sawyer. If he volunteersto make a public statement, obviously I would run it. Otherwise, it’s not his fault that the other two GoHs are problematic. So while I expect at some point the Twitterati will try and railroad him because he’s the only English-speaker and the only GoH who answers his social media, I personally don’t think Sawyer has to take responsibility for the malfeasance of the committee or their refusal to clean up their GoH slate….

Which it seems to me is quite different from what some of his interrogators have had to say here and on FB. (And the malfeasance I had in mind in October 2022 was that the site selection voters who by then had been members for 10 months had yet to hear from the committee, people who wanted to buy new memberships complained that they couldn’t, and that the new Chengdu website had launched without any statement about who their Guests of Honor were, even though the names had been announced immediately after they won the bid.)

(5) NOT IF IT PUTS HIM OUT OF WORK. “Star Trek’s William Shatner Was Asked About His Stance On A.I. Replacing Him, And He Had An Interesting Response” reports Comicbook.com.

…Shatner recently spoke with Comicbook.com ahead of his upcoming appearance at Orlando’s MegaCon, and was asked about the possibility of his James T. Kirk one day being brought back to life, as it were, via A.I. Never one to shy away from hard questions, the actor gave his honest take on the situation, and how he’d respond to it depending on the situation:

“It’s an interesting question. The strike was all about getting permission to do that. And so if I’m alive, I don’t want A.I. to do that, but if I’m dead and they ask my family and they’re going to pay my family very well to sound like me, I would advise them to say yes.”

William Shatner isn’t so okay with allowing A.I. to take over his character or his own persona if he’s still alive, which is understandable. But if he’s no longer around to pass judgment, he’ll leave it to his family to decide. If a fair price is determined, apparently, he’s giving the green light to allow his likeness to be used for Captain Kirk.

(6) JENNELL JAQUAYS (1956-2024). Artist and game designer Jennell Jaquays, who created scenarios with myriad paths for Dungeons & Dragons, levels for video games like Quake II, and art that invited novices to try role-playing games, died January 10. The New York Times obituary is here.

… Over nearly five decades, Ms. Jaquays illustrated the covers and interiors of settings, modules, books and magazines for D&D and other role-playing games. In one of them, a red dragon roars while perched in front of a snow-capped mountain; in another, a nautiluslike spaceship floats above an alien world; in a third, two Ghostbusters prepare to tangle with a field of animated jack-o’-lanterns.

Ms. Jaquays also crafted scenarios of her own. Two of her earliest D&D modules, “Dark Tower” and “The Caverns of Thracia,” are renowned for their pathbreaking designs.

In the early days of D&D, many scenarios were fairly linear — enter dungeon, defeat monsters and plunder, assuming your characters survive.

Ms. Jaquays’s adventures were not so straightforward. They often contained several possible entrances and multiple avenues, some of them secret, by which players could accomplish their goals.

“The result is a fantastically complex and dynamic environment: You can literally run dozens of groups through this module and every one of them will have a fresh and unique experience,” the game designer Justin Alexander wrote about dungeons like Ms. Jaquays’s on his website in 2010…

(7) CHRISTOPHER PRIEST (1943-2024.) British sf writer Christopher Priest died February 2 at the age of 80. (Not to be confused with the comics author with the same name.) His novel The Prestige was a World Fantasy Award winner in 1996. His book The Islanders won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and a British SF Association Award in 2012. Four other works also received BSFA Awards, Inverted World (1975), “Palely Loitering” (1980), The Extremes (1999), and The Separation (2003), the latter winning the Arthur C. Clarke Award as well. He was a Worldcon guest of honor in 1995, and received the Prix Utopia life achievement award in 2001.

In the late Eighties Priest also took time to pen The Last Deadloss Visions “an enquiry into the non-appearance of Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions”, which he called “a polemical pamphlet, written to express a point of view and to persuade others of that view.”

The British Council website’s “Christopher Priest – Literature” follows a long biography with a critical appreciation of his work. It says in part:

Christopher Priest was born in Cheadle, Greater Manchester, in 1943…. His first novel, Indoctrinaire, was published by Faber and Faber in 1970, beginning a stretch of two decades during which Priest’s novels appeared almost biennially. 1972’s Fugue for a Darkening Island saw Priest nominated for the John W. Campbell Award. His third novel, The Inverted World (1974), won Priest the first of his four BSFA (British Science Fiction Association) Awards. In the mid-1970s he was an associate editor of the UK semi-academic journal Foundations, which provided a distinctive platform for the criticism and popularization of science fiction at a time when the genre was not well established in the academy.

…Priest 1995’s epistolary novel The Prestige was a popular breakthrough. Winner of the World Fantasy Award and James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and nominated for the BSFA and Arthur C. Clarke awards, it was adapted into a film directed by Christopher Nolan, released to acclaim in 2006….

As time went by Priest generally was less interested in playing the role of elder statesman his accumulated honors had earned for him than he was in continuing to dish out the kind of fiery opinions he’d shared throughout his career. Consider that in 2012, before going on to win two major awards later in the year, he blasted the Arthur C. Clarke shortlist, saying he was dismayed that several quality books didn’t make the list, with sketches of the defects of the actual choices. (Although not all of the authors took it hard, judging from Charles Stross’ reaction, which was to issue a commemorative t-shirt.)

He is survived by his wife, Nina Allan, who followed her announcement of his passing with a chosen poem.

Christopher Priest at the 1980 Worldcon, NoreasCon Two. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born February 3, 1970 — Warwick Davis, 54. This is not by any means a complete listing of everything he’s done. Just remember that before lodging the complaint that I forgot to include something. I didn’t forget. I just didn’t include it.

Warwick Davis is much loved for being the title character in Willow and really not loved for being Lubdan the Leprechaun in, errr, the Leprechaun film series. Look you really don’t need to see the latter even if you’re seriously drunk on cheap fake Irish beer on St. Patrick’s Day. They made him a lot on money but they’re really awful. Willow on the other hand is sublime. It brings a tear to my eye when I see it. 

He was the physical aspect of Wicket W. Warrick in Return of the Jedi, Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure, Ewoks: The Battle for Endor and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker though the character was voiced by Darryl Henriques. 

Warwick Davis in 2007.

He also played a lot of other Star Wars characters. The Phantom Menace saw him play Wald, Weazel, and Yoda in the walking shots, and a street trader on Tatooine; The Force Awakens a Wollivan (and no, I don’t recognize all of these characters); A Star Wars Story saw him being Weeteef Cyubee;  then Star Wars: The Last Jedi got the sneeze-worthy character names of Wodibin / Kedpin Shoklop, the latter in a deleted scene. Think I’m done? No. Next is Solo: A Star Wars Story where he’s Weazel / DD-BD / W1-EG5 / WG-22 and finally there’s The Rise of Skywalker where he’s Wicket W. Warrick for the final time plus Wizzich Mozzer again. Whew!

He’s in all five of the Harry Potter films in one or more of three roles — Professor Filius Flitwick, Goblin Bank Teller and Griphook, the latter just as the voice of that character. I’ve only seen the first three films and yes, I’ve loved them deeply even though all I’ve read of the novels was the first hundred pages of the first which I found exquisitely, deeply boring. God, I found her a bad writer.

Now here’s one that I really didn’t expect. He was in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as Marvin the Paranoid Android. (Love the voicing of that character in the BBC radio production!) Again he didn’t voiced the character as that was provided by Alan Rickman. 

He shows up twice in Narnia productions, once as Nikabrik in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian film, and on the television film Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader as Reepicheep. Loved those novels. 

Finally he voiced Sniff (Snufkin) in the English language track for the Finnish crown funded animated Moominvalley series. Really great books. The Estate just allowed the likeness of the characters to be commercially used less than a decade ago. Have you seen a Moomin plushie? Oh really cute! I want! 

(9) AND GOOD-BYE TO YOU TOO, OLD RIGHTS-OF-MAN. Bill Coberly asks “Are We All Too Cynical for Star Trek?” in a piece for The Bulwark, a political Substack, about the changing portrayal of Starfleet across the decades. 

…This is not to say that the ’90s shows never delved into the complexity and nuance of this ethos—indeed, playing at the edges of their internal morality was how they derived much of their interest. A number of Starfleet admirals throughout TNG are shown to be venal or corrupt. One of the greatest episodes of Deep Space Nine (1992–99), “In the Pale Moonlight,” is entirely about how, in times of crisis, moral compromise may be necessary, even for Starfleet. But such cases are treated as exceptional, unusual circumstances far beyond the norm; as a rule, Starfleet is good, and the best way to be a good servant of the true and just in the world of Star Trek is by being a good Starfleet officer. How does one be a good Starfleet officer? By doing one’s job, by being a professional, by following one’s duty.

THINGS ARE DIFFERENT IN modern Trek. By “modern Trek” I mean the five major TV shows that have aired since the franchise returned to the small screen in 2017: Discovery (2017–present), Picard (2020–23), Lower Decks (2020–present), Prodigy (2021–present), and Strange New Worlds (2022–present). Starfleet as an institution often plays a partially antagonistic role in each of these shows. By the time of Picard, the titular paragon has quit Starfleet in a huff because it no longer lives up to his principles, and in both seasons one and three it is revealed that Starfleet has been compromised by hostile alien agents and cannot be trusted. The first season of Discovery ends with Starfleet condoning genocide, only to be stopped by our heroic crew; Season 2’s villain was an out-of-control Starfleet AI that threatened all life in the galaxy; and Seasons 3 and 4 keep the crew in near-constant conflict with Starfleet and/or Federation brass. Lower Decks is centered on the adventures of a low-level officer who routinely defies Starfleet regulations to help nearby planets in ways that Starfleet would not condone. Even Strange New Worlds, the most archetypal of the modern shows, emphasizes how unjust some of Starfleet’s rules are: In the first episode of the second season, the crew is forced to steal the Starship Enterprise itself to rescue a comrade in defiance of Starfleet’s orders….

(10) SFF BOOKS ON SALE. [Item by BGrandrath.] Back with another Whatnot commercial. The other day someone posted asking about a good place to buy books this might be the answer… “Over 40 Science Fiction Books | Vintage Book Haul”.

BOB’S Books will be on my nomination list for Best Fancast this year.

(11) ROMANTASY. The Guardian discusses “A genre of swords and soulmates: the rise and rise of ‘romantasy’ novels”.

…It is unclear where the “romantasy” label originated: though Bloomsbury said it coined the term to “identify the genre [Sarah J. Maas] was spearheading”, the term was posted on Urban Dictionary as early as 2008. In any case, its usage has exploded in the last year on social media and in marketing copy for fantasy romance titles.

Romantasy authors are selling well in part because of their huge popularity on social media; Maas’ publisher, Bloomsbury, says that videos with hashtags connected to her books have more than 14bn views on TikTok alone. On “BookTok”, the corner of the platform dedicated to book-related content, fans share their rankings of book series, theories about what might happen in future novels, compilations of favourite quotes and outfits inspired by books.

Such novels are typically set in fantastical worlds, with fairies, dragons, magic, but also feature classic romance plotlines – enemies-to-lovers, soulmates, love triangles. “Romance readers have discovered that romantasy has all the tropes they adore, but set in a world they can escape to and get lost in,” explains Ajebowale Roberts, an editor at HarperCollins.

“The Bachelor meets The Hunger Games” is how Canadian author Nisha J Tuli describes one of her romantasy novels, Trial of the Sun Queen….

(12) BURNSIDE Q&A. [Item by Steven French.] John Burnside is an award-winning poet and author: “John Burnside: ‘My stoner friends were into The Hobbit, but Gormenghast was darker’” in the Guardian.

The book that changed me as a teenager

Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series. My stoner friends were into Tolkien’s The Hobbit, but that didn’t interest me. What Peake created was darker, more intricate, at once more sinister and more beautiful than anything else I had read up to that point. At the end, I was left with a powerful impression of the richness of language, of its magical power. As my father would say, “people like us” didn’t become writers, (or musicians, or artists) but Peake made me wonder if writing was maybe worth the risk of honourable failure.

(13) TOP 10 STREAMING SFF FOR JANUARY. JustWatch has shared its rankings of the Top 10 Sci-Fi streaming films and TV series for January 2024.   

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