24 Pixel And Her Friends

Posted on April 19, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) GET READY FOR SELF-PUBLISHED FANTASY BLOG-OFF 10. The ninth contest is about to wrap up, and sponsor Mark Lawrence warns there will be a quick turnaround to start SPFBO 10:

SPFBO 10 (SPFBOX) will open to entries on Friday the 10th of May 2024 at 1pm GMT. The link will be posted here.

The SPFBO 10 contest will start on the 1st of June 2024.

Since SPFBO 9 filled its 300 slots in ~40 minutes, a different system will be used this year so that people in some time zones don’t have to get up in the middle of the night. The entry form will stay open for 24 hours. After it’s closed 300, manuscripts will be randomly selected from the pool of those who have signed up….

(2) 2024 STURGEON SYMPOSIUM. The Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction will hold the third annual Sturgeon Symposium from October 24-25, 2024. Samuel R. Delany will be there.

We are delighted that Samuel R. Delany has accepted our invitation to speak at the symposium. As an innovative author, Delany has redefined the boundaries of SFF as well as literary criticism through his explorations of language, society, sexuality, and narrative form. This year’s symposium acknowledges his lasting impact on science fiction, speculative fiction, and literary criticism.

Delany will speak on the subject “Samuel R. Delany and Theodore Sturgeon: Exclusion, Loneliness and Difference”.

See the Call for Papers here.

(3) DORAN ILLUSTRATED GOOD OMENS DELAYED. Artist Colleen Doran announced “Good Omens Rescheduled” — to accommodate her recovery from cancer treatment.

A couple of weeks ago, Neil Gaiman gave me a call to let me know he was not worried about me flaming out on Good Omens despite my truly awful 2023, and if I needed more time or some help to please take it. Shortly before that, the folks at Dunmanifestin, the publishing arm of the Terry Pratchett Estate, dropped me a line to say the same.

I was very much hoping I’d spring back to normal life after my cancer treatment was finished, but no. I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. My mental and physical energy comes and goes. I told Neil I need to be working ten hour days but have trouble managing six.

Anyway, I nervously requested the dreaded deadline extension and got it. Frankly should have asked for a big(ger) one months ago, but having never had this kind of health issue before, I didn’t know what to expect re: recovery. Some people spring back quickly, and some don’t. I figure I’m fair to middlin’.

So, the Good Omens release date is set for spring next year…

Gaiman and Wilkins say:

As a team, we collectively support Colleen and the time and space needed to finish the graphic novel after the past year she has been powering on through, and have a quick note from both Neil Gaiman and Rob Wilkins, the manager of the Terry Pratchett Estate:

Neil: “I’ve been amazed and impressed by how much Colleen has done so far, despite dealing with health issues. We are proud of her and her dedication to adapting Good Omens with such care, and look forward to holding the finished books in our hands.”

Rob: “Colleen is doing a fantastic job bringing the graphic novel to life. We’re absolutely delighted with each and every page and it is essential she can work comfortably whilst giving the book the time it deserves. She has our full support and we can’t wait for you to see the results.”

(4) BALTICON SF FILM FESTIVAL. Balticon 58, taking place May 24-27, 2024 will feature the Balticon Sunday Short Science Fiction Film Festival. The festival will include “Night of The Cooters” (2022) produced by George RR Martin from a story by Howard Waldrop, directed by Vincent D’Onofrio.

On the program will be 19 Selections from 10 Countries. The showings run 4.5 hours with two intermissions. Day rates are available for Sunday.

(5) SCRAPER, NO SCRAPING! “Amazon is filled with garbage ebooks. Here’s how they get made.” according to Vox.

…Here is almost certainly what was going on: “Kara Swisher book” started trending on the Kindle storefront as buzz built up for Swisher’s book. Keyword scrapers that exist for the sole purpose of finding such search terms delivered the phrase “Kara Swisher book” to the so-called biographer, who used a combination of AI and crimes-against-humanity-level cheap ghostwriters to generate a series of books they could plausibly title and sell using her name.

The biographer in question was just one in a vast, hidden ecosystem centered on the production and distribution of very cheap, low-quality ebooks about increasingly esoteric subjects. Many of them gleefully share misinformation or repackage basic facts from WikiHow behind a title that’s been search-engine-optimized to hell and back again. Some of them even steal the names of well-established existing authors and masquerade as new releases from those writers. According to the Authors Guild, it would be impossible for anyone but Amazon to quantify these books — and that’s not information Amazon is sharing….

… It’s so difficult for most authors to make a living from their writing that we sometimes lose track of how much money there is to be made from books, if only we could save costs on the laborious, time-consuming process of writing them.

The internet, though, has always been a safe harbor for those with plans to innovate that pesky writing part out of the actual book publishing. On the internet, it’s possible to copy text from one platform and paste it into another seamlessly, to share text files, to build vast databases of stolen books. If you wanted to design a place specifically to pirate and sleazily monetize books, it would be hard to do better than the internet as it has long existed…

(6) JOHN G. TRIMBLE (1936-2024). Longtime LASFSian John Trimble, husband of Bjo Trimble, died April 19. Lora Boehm, his daughter, made the announcement on Facebook. The Fancyclopedia notes that he co-chaired Westercon 18 and chaired Westercon 23, He worked on several Equicons, chairing one.

He was a co-founder of the LASFS club newzine, De Profundis, for a time helped edit its genzine Shangri-L’Affaires. He also edited To the Stars, a short-lived newzine backed by Authors Services.

John and Bjo Trimble married in 1960 – having met under Forry Ackerman’s piano during a party at his house. Bruce Pelz published A Fanzine for Bjohn in their honor when they wed. (And paging through a copy at their 40th anniversary party I found it’s a highly entertaining read!)

Bjo and John Trimble at Star Trek: Discovery premiere in 2017.

They were early members of the Society for Creative Anachronism and served on its Board of Directors. Together they were Fan Guests of Honor at ConJosé, the 2002 Worldcon.

Lora’s obituary adds:

…Their 3 children, Kathryn, Lora and Jenn have been a constant joy and the addition of husband to Lora, Jason and Jenn’s husband Chris have completed the family.

In 1966 they found a group of people interested in mediaeval combat and arts. They joined the Society of Creative Anachronism (SCA) . John served 2 terms as a member of it’s board of directors, was a landed Baron of the first Barony. His arms were the very first to be registered with the college of Heralds and both John and Bjo have been members ever since. Later that year he said to his wife, “Gee it’s a shame a good science fiction show like Star Trek is going to be canceled. We should do something about that!” And the same Star Trek campaign was born. For over 58 years John and Bjo Trimble have been ambassadors for science fiction, the space program and the SCA. Meeting and hosting people from all walks of life, all over the world.

John has touched thousands of lives in a way that positive and full of joy. He will be greatly missed.

John Trimble and daughter at CostumeCon 1 (1983). Photo by Carl.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born April 19, 1946 — Tim Curry, 78. Let me note upfront that this is very much not an overview of everything that he’s done but my picks of what I like most.

So let’s start off with him as Cardinal Richelieu, the corrupt Cardinal who in charge of the Red Guards in The Three Musketeerswhich came out forty-one years ago from Disney. He magnificently costumed as you can see here and had the most devilish beard as well. It’s a wonderfully over the top role that works even that I think he only has than a handful of scenes. It won’t surprise anyone here for me to say he comes to a dramatic and wonderfully flamboyant demise.

Next up must be his role in that film. Need I say which one? I think not. He rose to prominence as Dr. Frank-N-Furter reprising the role he had originated in the 1973 London and 1974 Los Angeles musical stage productions. Good, that output, and that singing. What an amazing performance it was. I’ve seen it a number of times including yes in a theater at midnight. Seattle if memory serves me right.

Would you like to know what my absolutely favorite Tim Curry performance is? That would be him in Clue. When I wrote it up here three years back, I noted that “It had a stellar cast of Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, Christopher Lloyd, Michael McKean, Martin Mull. Lesley Ann Warren and Eileen Brennan. Tim Curry played The Butler.”

Such a role it was. Hyperkinetic, full of Bugs Bunny worthy action on his part and some of the best bouncing off all walls possible dialogue ever said by a Butler.

Siskel and Ebert hated the three alternative endings as different theatres originally got one of three though eventually all theatres got all of them. It still bombed.

My final is him as Gomez Addams in Addams Family Reunion. Not perhaps the first person that you’d think of for the role given John Astin originated the role and Raul Julia had played him twice to that date, each being sharp-dressed gentleman, but he turned out to a rather splendid choice first the third outing as the director Tony Payne wanted this version of the character to be weird and Curry does weird oh very well.

So there’s my choices. So what’s your favorite role by him?

(8) MORE FALLOUT. Variety tells us “’Fallout’ Renewed for Season 2 at Amazon”.

“Fallout” has been renewed for Season 2 at Amazon Prime Video.

The announcement comes after Variety reported that a second season was set to receive $25 million in tax credits by relocating shooting to the state of California.

Based on the video game franchise of the same name, the series is set two hundred years after the apocalypse. The official description states it follows “the gentle denizens of luxury fallout shelters that are forced to return to the irradiated hellscape their ancestors left behind—and are shocked to discover an incredibly complex, gleefully weird, and highly violent universe waiting for them.”

(9) AVENGERS AND OTHERS ASSEMBLE. Here’s an amusing video – we’ll call it ”Superheroes stop for a traffic light”.

(10) A REASON TO MAKE A MARTIAN ODYSSEY. “NASA’s downed Ingenuity helicopter has a ‘last gift’ for humanity — but we’ll have to go to Mars to get it” says Live Science.

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter has beamed back its final message to Earth, which included a heart-warming goodbye to mission scientists. The record-breaking robot will now spend the rest of its days collecting data that could be used in future Mars missions — but only if future robots or astronauts go all the way to the Red Planet to get it.

The pigeon-size helicopter, or rotorcraft, first landed on the Red Planet on Feb. 18, 2021, alongside the Perseverance rover, and it successfully completed the first-ever powered flight on an alien world on April 19 of the same year. The Ingenuity mission’s initial goal was to fly five missions across 30 days. But the tiny chopper ended up flying 72 times on Mars, spending more than two hours in the air and traveling 14 times farther than initially planned, according to a statement by NASA.

According to NASA:

…If a critical electrical component on Ingenuity were to fail in the future, causing data collection to stop, or if the helicopter eventually loses power because of dust accumulation on its solar panel, whatever information Ingenuity has collected will remain stored on board. The team has calculated Ingenuity’s memory could potentially hold about 20 years’ worth of daily data….

(11) WHAT’S THE RECIPE FOR THESE PLANETS? “Uranus and Neptune aren’t made of what we thought, new study hints” reports Live Science. Whatever you expected to find on Uranus, look again…

Astronomers have long believed that the ice giants Uranus and Neptune are rich in frozen water. However, a new study suggests they may also have tons of methane ice.

The findings could help solve a puzzle about how these icy worlds formed.Much about Uranus and Neptune remains unknown. These ice giant worlds have had just a single spacecraft visitor, Voyager 2, which flew past them in the 1980s. As a result, scientists have only a hazy idea of the ice giants’ compositions — for example, that they contain significant amounts of oxygen, carbon and hydrogen.

… Of the various models they built, the astronomers found that those with methane fit their criteria, with the methane — either in solid chunks or, given the pressure, in a mushy state — forming a thick layer between the hydrogen-helium envelope and the water layer. In some models, methane accounted for 10% of the planet’s mass….

(12) TWO^H^H^H ONE NEW PITCH MEETINGS^H. [Item by Mike Kennedy.]

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

Pixel Scroll 7/9/23 Most Of Us Agree That Everyone Knows That Bacon Holds The Pixels Together

Posted on July 9, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) HOW THE BESTSELLER LIST IS WON. Several authors responded to Sarah Pinborough’s question about whether certain kinds of sales affect the UK bestseller lists.

(2) THE FUTURE IS NOW. “’It’s not climate change, it’s everything change’: sci-fi authors take on the global crisis” in the Guardian.

… a new generation of writers now believes it is impossible to write “near future” sci-fi without putting the climate emergency at the forefront of their speculative fiction. For many, this is because they are living through the crisis and can imagine all too easily what may happen if real-life behaviour doesn’t change….

… [EJ Swift says] “Climate breakdown is escalating so rapidly that events which 10 years ago might have seemed like the distant future are happening now. Everything is filtered through that lens – even when it’s not the main focus, climate anxiety is there in the periphery.”

Other recent books dealing with the devastation to the climate include Kate Sawyer’s The Stranding, which begins with the striking image of two strangers sheltering in the mouth of a dead, beached whale as a calamitous extinction event hits the world, Susannah Wise’s This Fragile Earth, in which the complete failure of all technology brings into focus our uneasy relationship with nature, and Sarah K Jackson’s Not Alone, about a mother and son surviving in the aftermath of a microplastics storm that has decimated the population.

The science fiction writer Adrian Tchaikovsky, known for his huge, widescreen space opera novels set in distant galaxies, is turning his attention to the climate crisis next year with a horror novella called Saturation Point….

(3) PARSING THE 2023 HUGO BALLOT. John Scalzi shares insights “about why the Hugos are the way they are these days: Why Tor seems to get a lot of nominations, for example, and why diverse groups are represented in the finalist list as they are, and whether the Hugo voters are an insular and monolith bloc” in “Hugo Neepery, Via Reddit” at Whatever.

… If you are wondering how marginalized groups have started to become widely represented in SF/F awards (as they are not just in the Hugos, but also the Nebulas, the Locus and the World Fantasy Awards) there are three factors I want you to consider. The first is the (relative) decline of the “Big Three” short fiction magazines in SF/F (Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF) and the commensurate rise of a series of online short fiction publishing venues like Uncanny, Clarkesworld and Strange Horizons (among others). The Big Three ran on Silent, Boomer and Elder GenX writers, and the market forces for the genre those writers came up in was heavily cis and white and male. The newer venues, by inclination and necessity, cultivated younger generations of writers from more diverse backgrounds. When the Big Three declined and the online magazines rose, their respective stables of authors more or less rose or declined with them, in terms of award consideration.

The second thing to consider is who is buying science fiction and fantasy, both in the magazine and in the publishing houses. Surprise! The editorial stratum of SF/F/H is not the straight, white and (predominately but not exclusively) male enclave it was before; the editorial bench of SF/F/H publishing (and publishing generally) is much more queer and of color than it has been in years past. They are interested in publishing more than just the “usual suspects” in SF/F/H as defined by previous decades and — this is important — the diverse SF/F/H they are acquiring is selling very well. This will naturally have an impact on what is considered at awards time.

The third thing to consider with respect to the Hugos specifically is that close to a decade ago a group of right-wing fans and writers, alarmed by what they saw as left-wing, SJW, politically-correct, etc work creeping into the awards, decided to try to run slates of work to counter that trend. This did not go well, in no small part because their tactics energized a very large group of fandom to counter their actions, including a significant number of more progressive Hugo voters. When the “takeover” of the Hugos failed, most of these right-wing folks flounced from the Hugo voting pool; some of the more progressive voters stayed and continue to vote today. This is reflected in what gets nominated and thus, what eventually becomes a finalist….

(4) CAN YOU BLAME HIS PARENTS? “Calvin and Hobbes’ Creator Already Answered Fans’ Darkest Question” claims MSN.com. The comic’s creator Bill Watterson gave an unexpectedly deep answer to an interviewer.

…WEST: The parents are really an interesting part of the strip. In a way they’re foils, but the thing that interests me is that it’s extremely rare for them to express any love for Calvin. Is that simply because it doesn’t have any comic potential, or is it something inherent in their characters?

WATTERSON: Again, I feel like I’m falling into the trap of psychoanalyzing the characters and I don’t want to say, “Well, this character acts this way,” because that’s confining. I think the way they relate to Calvin is more a reflection of my misanthropic tendencies than any literary concern.

Many strips have, you know, the funny character, the straight man, the foil — those characters are stereotypes and fairly flat. The role of these characters in the strip is entirely defined by their function as a member of a social group or age group, or whatever, and I’m trying to avoid that as much as I possibly can. I try to make each character, even the ones that aren’t that important, a unique personality that, over time, will develop. Some of the minor characters appear less often than Calvin and Hobbes, but, hopefully, over years, each one will become a unique personality that will be every bit as complex and interesting as Calvin and Hobbes.

In other words, I don’t want the parents to simply function as parents. I want them to be unique individuals as well. They are parents, of course, and, as sane people, they have to react to Calvin’s personality. What I try to do in writing any character is to put myself in his position, to the extent that I can, and I know that if I was Calvin’s dad or Calvin’s mom that I would not react to him with the gooey sentimentality that sometimes appears in other strips. Given Calvin’s usual behavior, I think his parents show admirable restraint in theirs….

(5) IT MIGHT HAPPEN. “Neil Gaiman Adapting Samuel R. Delany’s Nova as a Series” reports CBR.com.

…The report comes from a New Yorker profile on the 81-year-old Delany, which mentioned that Gaiman was adapting Nova for a Prime Video series. Gaiman was briefly interviewed for the article, and called Delany a profound influence whose work inspired him to attempt a similar sophisticated tone in his comics such as The Sandman. “I was used to very functional prose,” Gaiman said, calling the author by his nickname Chip. “Chip felt like I’d taken a step into poetry… There was no limit to how good you could be in your chosen area.” Prime Video has not yet confirmed a Nova series at this time….

(6) SUPERMAN. Animation World Network reports “‘My Adventures with Superman’ Episode 1 Now on YouTube”.

Adult Swim has released the first full episode of My Adventures with Superman on YouTube – or you can watch it below. The series, which features Jack Quaid as Clark Kent, Alice Lee as Lois Lane, and Ishmel Sahid as Jimmy Olsen, is Warner Bros. Animation and DC’s newest animated series. The first two episodes are now streaming on Max. One new episode will debut every Thursday at midnight on Adult Swim and the next day on Max. It is unknown if future episodes will hit YouTube as well.

A serialized coming-of-age story, My Adventures with Superman follows 20-somethings Clark Kent, the bright and driven Lois Lane, and their best friend Jimmy Olsen as they begin to discover who they are and everything they can accomplish together as an investigative reporting team at the Daily Planet….

(7) MEMORY LANE.

2010 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

South Africa is one of those countries just starting to get known for its genre fiction. Though it goes back a century in terms of a history of science fiction being created there, that fiction like the greater culture there has been irretrievably changed by Apartheid and the novel Mike has chosen this time is one of those works.

Lauren Beukes is our author this time, she’s written six novels including the forthcoming Bridges, some of which are SF, some of which are mysteries.

Great mysteries too though the cringe factor is really high in them. Blood and gore everywhere. Now the SF she has written is first rate — imaginative storytelling that is noticeably different has it is, well, rooted in South African history and culture. One most of us aren’t familiar with.

Zoo City was published in trade paper thirteen years ago by Umuzi / Random House Struik. The cover art is by Joey Hi- Fi. It would win both a Clarke Award and a Kitschie, and be nominated for a BSFA, Otherwise, and a World Fantasy Award.

And now for our Beginning…

In Zoo City, it’s impolite to ask.

Morning light the sulfur color of the mine dumps seeps across Johannesburg’s skyline and sears through my window. My own personal bat signal. Or a reminder that I really need to get curtains.

Shielding my eyes—morning has broken and there’s no picking up the pieces—I yank back the sheet and peel out of bed. Benoît doesn’t so much as stir, with only his calloused feet sticking out from under the duvet like knots of driftwood. Feet like that, they tell a story. They say he walked all the way from Kinshasa with his Mongoose strapped to his chest.

The Mongoose in question is curled up like a furry comma on my laptop, the glow of the LED throbbing under his nose. Like he doesn’t know that my computer is out of bounds. Let’s just say I’m precious about my work. Let’s just say it’s not entirely legal.

I take hold of the laptop on either side and gently tilt it over the edge of my desk. At thirty degrees, the Mongoose starts sliding down the front of the laptop. He wakes with a start, tiki tavi claws scrabbling for purchase. As he starts to fall, he contorts in the air and manages to land feet first. Hunching his stripy shoulders, he hisses at me, teeth bared. I hiss back. The Mongoose realizes he has urgent flea bites to attend to.

Leaving the Mongoose to scrolf at its flank, I duck under one of the loops of rope hanging from the ceiling, the closest I can get to providing authentic Amazon jungle vines, and pad over the rotten linoleum to the cupboard. Calling it a cupboard is a tad optimistic, like calling this dank room with its precariously canted floor and intermittent plumbing an apartment is optimistic. The cupboard is not much more than an open box with a piece of fabric pinned across it to keep the dust off my clothes—and Sloth, of course. As I pull back the gaudy sunflower print, Sloth blinks up at me sleepily from his roost, like a misshapen fur coat between the wire hangers. He’s not good at mornings.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born July 9, 1906 — Walter Sande. He’s best remembered for being on Red Planet Mars, The War of the Worlds and Invaders from Mars, but he also showed up playing a heavy in such serials as The Green Hornet Strikes Again! and Sky Raiders, the latter being at least genre adjacent. He’s had a recurring role as Col. Crockett on The Wild Wild West, and one-offs on Voyage to the Bottom of The Sea, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Lost in Space and Bewitched. (Died 1971.)
Born July 9, 1911 — Mervyn Peake. Best remembered for the Gormenghast series which is quite delightfully weird. Most fans hold that there are but three novels in the series (Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone) though there’s a novella, “Boy in Darkness”, that is a part of it. Peake planned a fourth book, Titus Awakes, but it was barely begun when he died. Maeve Gilmore, Peake’s widow, wrote the manuscript of a version titled Search Without End which remained unpublished until decades after her death. It incorporates a fragmentary text written by Peake. The Gormenghast series has been adapted for radio three times and television once, and it was announced in 2018 that Gaiman is writing the script for an adaptation. (Died 1968.)
Born July 9, 1944 — Glen Cook, 79. Yes, I’ve read his entire excellent Black Company series. I’ve also mostly liked his far lighter Garrett P.I. series (though not the last novel for reasons I’ll not discuss here) which it seems unfortunately he’s abandoned. And I really should read the Instrumentalities of the Night as I’ve heard good things about it. I’m really, really surprised not only that he hasn’t won any awards, but how few he’s been nominated for.
Born July 9, 1945 — Dean Koontz, 78. The genres of of mystery, horror, fantasy and science fiction are all home to him. Author of over a hundred novels, his first novel was SF — it being Star Quest (not in print) published as an Ace Double with Doom of the Green Planet by Emil Petaja. ISFDB claims over half of his output is genre, I’d say that a low estimate.
Born July 9, 1954 — Ellen Klages, 69. Her story “Basement Magic” won a Nebula Award for Best Novelette. I strongly recommend Portable Childhoods, a collection of her short fiction, published by Tachyon Publications, my favorite publisher of fantasy. They released another collection from her, Wicked Wonders, which is equally wonderful. Passing Strange, her novel set in 1940s San Francisco, which won a BSFA Award and a World Fantasy Award, is also really great. Ok, I really like her.
Born July 9, 1970 — Ekaterina Sedia, 53. Her Heart of Iron novel which was nominated for a Sidewise Award for Alternate History is simply awesome. I’d also recommend The Secret History of Moscow and the recent The House of Discarded Dreams as well, the latter is a fantastic audio work which is narrated by Robin Miles. It’s worth noting that the usual suspects list several collections by her, Willful Impropriety: 13 Tales of Society, Scandal, and Romance and Wilfill Impropriety that ISFDB doesn’t list. They’re quite superb it turns out as is Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy for which she won a World Fantasy Award. She had a story out just last year, “Ghost Shop”, in Professor Charlatan Bardot’s Travel Anthology to the Most (Fictional) Haunted Buildings in the Weird, Wild World. She’s amply stocked at the usual suspects. She’s also very deeply stocked at the audio suspects as well which sort of surprised and delighted me as I’ve added a number of her works to my To Be Listened to list, including The House of Discarded Dreams which sounds really fascinating in the manner of Gaiman’s Sandman.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

JumpStart involves some surprisingly early memories of Isaac Asimov.
Herman shows aliens getting their own first encounter.
Six Chix has a cool librarian joke.

(10) BEWARE THE BLINDING LIGHT. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] No, not the blinding light of atomic explosions in the Oppenheimer biopic, but the blinding light of full nudity, at least one sex scene, and an on-again-off-again love triangle. All involving Oppenheimer himself.

One guesses this may be how the flick gained its R rating. Which doesn’t mean those things were inserted just for titillation, apparently they are true to his complicated story. “It Appears The R-Rated ‘Oppenheimer’ Will Be The Sauciest Movie The Decidedly Un-Saucy Christopher Nolan Has Ever Made” at Uproxx.

Christopher Nolan movies do love — sometimes. Memento and Inception feature dead wives who haunt their heroes. There’s a tragic love triangle in The Dark Knight and a tragic love quadrangle in The Prestige. That’s it! What he doesn’t do is sex and/or nudity. Oppenheimer, his forthcoming film about the “father of the atomic bomb,” is going to change that. If you thought the film’s R-rating — Nolan’s first since 2002’s Insomnia — was due to graphic A-bomb carnage…well, you may be right about that. But it’s also because there’s apparently a fair amount of kink….

(11) TAKE A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE. Tour the wild animal bridge inspired by the life of P-22, the fabled mountain lion of Griffith Park. NBC Los Angeles invites you to “Take a free tour of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing”.

… This celebrated span, in short, will do an immeasurable amount of good for an incredible number of critters that both roam and home in the area.

That important education? It comes courtesy of the National Wildlife Federation’s #SaveLACougers campaign, which is shedding an informative light on the upcoming Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing via several docent-helmed tours at the Agoura Hills site.

The under-construction skyway, or “wildway” if you prefer, will allow animals to move safely above the 101 freeway, significantly (and safely) expanding their frontiers.

And while the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, which broke ground in the spring of 2022, still has a ways to go before the jubilant ribbon-cutting, supporters of urban wildlife can take a look at the progress now and find out more about the bridge’s development and progress….

(12) SHIFTING GEARS. This is a good time to revisit the question “What Is the Antikythera Mechanism, the World’s First Computer?” Smithsonian Magazine answers it in this 2015 article.

After 2,000 years under the sea, three flat, misshapen pieces of bronze at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens are all shades of green, from emerald to forest. From a distance, they look like rocks with patches of mold. Get closer, though, and the sight is stunning. Crammed inside, obscured by corrosion, are traces of technology that appear utterly modern: gears with neat triangular teeth (just like the inside of a clock) and a ring divided into degrees (like the protractor you used in school). Nothing else like this has ever been discovered from antiquity. Nothing as sophisticated, or even close, appears again for more than a thousand years.

For decades after divers retrieved these scraps from the Antikythera wreck from 1900 to 1901, scholars were unable to make sense of them. X-ray imaging in the 1970s and 1990s revealed that the device must have replicated the motions of the heavens. Holding it in your hands, you could track the paths of the Sun, Moon and planets with impressive accuracy. One investigator dubbed it “an ancient Greek computer.” But the X-ray images were difficult to interpret, so mainstream historians ignored the artifact even as it was championed by fringe writers such as Erich von Däniken, who claimed it came from an alien spaceship. It wasn’t until 2006 that the Antikythera mechanism captured broader attention. That year, Mike Edmunds of Cardiff University in Wales and his team published CT scans of the fragments, revealing more details of the inner workings, as well as hidden inscriptions—and triggering a burst of scholarly research….

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Smoking Causes Coughing” is French comedy with 50’s sf flair.

After a devastating battle against a diabolical turtle, a team of five avengers – known as the TOBACCO FORCE – is sent on a mandatory retreat to strengthen their decaying group cohesion. Their break goes wonderfully well until Lézardin, Emperor of Evil, decides to annihilate planet Earth… But will they repair their relationship in time for a final epic battle?

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

Pixel Scroll 7/3/23 The Pixeler You Click, The Scroller You File

Posted on July 3, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) FINE POINTS. “Your Genes Aren’t Your Destiny: On Ann Leckie’s ‘Translation State’”: a review by David M. Higgins in the LA Review of Books.

… Ultimately, Qven’s determination to have eir pronouns recognized is fundamental to the entire story: whether you can be recognized on your own terms, or whether you must have categories of identity (such as gender, ethnicity, species, and legal citizenship) inflicted upon you or withheld from you by others, is the central problem the book addresses. But for Qven, everything comes down at key moments to the way Pirate Exiles inspires em to joyfully envision emself as “a princex in disguise,” like Kekubo. “What would a princex in disguise do?” Qven asks emself multiple times as the novel builds toward its climax, and eir most important decisions are consistently influenced by the inspiration they draw from identifying with Kekubo.

This thematic emphasis—the way that small details (like a character’s obsession with trashy adventure serials) can ultimately shape and influence the largest possible events (such as the fall of an empire)—is one of the hallmarks of Leckie’s work. Her recurring argument is that minor details, events, actions, and influences are never truly minor: everything has consequence, even if it is not immediately visible….

(2) SAFETY LAST. Evgeny Morozov, author of To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, wrote an opinion piece about “The True Threat of Artificial Intelligence” for the New York Times.

…The mounting anxiety about A.I. isn’t because of the boring but reliable technologies that autocomplete our text messages or direct robot vacuums to dodge obstacles in our living rooms. It is the rise of artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., that worries the experts.

A.G.I. doesn’t exist yet, but some believe that the rapidly growing capabilities of OpenAI’s ChatGPT suggest its emergence is near. Sam Altman, a co-founder of OpenAI, has described it as “systems that are generally smarter than humans.” Building such systems remains a daunting — some say impossible — task. But the benefits appear truly tantalizing.

Imagine Roombas, no longer condemned to vacuuming the floors, that evolve into all-purpose robots, happy to brew morning coffee or fold laundry — without ever being programmed to do these things.

Sounds appealing. But should these A.G.I. Roombas get too powerful, their mission to create a spotless utopia might get messy for their dust-spreading human masters. At least we’ve had a good run.

Discussions of A.G.I. are rife with such apocalyptic scenarios. Yet a nascent A.G.I. lobby of academics, investors and entrepreneurs counter that, once made safe, A.G.I. would be a boon to civilization. Mr. Altman, the face of this campaign, embarked on a global tour to charm lawmakers. Earlier this year he wrote that A.G.I. might even turbocharge the economy, boost scientific knowledge and “elevate humanity by increasing abundance.”

This is why, for all the hand-wringing, so many smart people in the tech industry are toiling to build this controversial technology: not using it to save the world seems immoral.

They are beholden to an ideology that views this new technology as inevitable and, in a safe version, as universally beneficial. Its proponents can think of no better alternatives for fixing humanity and expanding its intelligence.

But this ideology — call it A.G.I.-ism — is mistaken. The real risks of A.G.I. are political and won’t be fixed by taming rebellious robots. The safest of A.G.I.s would not deliver the progressive panacea promised by its lobby. And in presenting its emergence as all but inevitable, A.G.I.-ism distracts from finding better ways to augment intelligence….

(3) DELANY AT 81. “How Samuel R. Delany Reimagined Sci-Fi, Sex, and the City” in The New Yorker.

… In the stellar neighborhood of American letters, there have been few minds as generous, transgressive, and polymathically brilliant as Samuel Delany’s. Many know him as the country’s first prominent Black author of science fiction, who transformed the field with richly textured, cerebral novels like “Babel-17” (1966) and “Dhalgren” (1975). Others know the revolutionary chronicler of gay life, whose autobiography, “The Motion of Light in Water” (1988), stands as an essential document of pre-Stonewall New York. Still others know the professor, the pornographer, or the prolific essayist whose purview extends from cyborg feminism to Biblical philology.

There are so many Delanys that it’s difficult to take the full measure of his influence. Reading him was formative for Junot Díaz and William Gibson; Octavia Butler was, briefly, his student in a writing workshop. Jeremy O. Harris included Delany as a character in his play “Black Exhibition,” while Neil Gaiman, who is adapting Delany’s classic space adventure “Nova” (1968) as a series for Amazon, credits him with building a critical foundation not only for science fiction but also for comics and other “paraliterary” genres….

(4) E.T. 2023 A.D. “Henry Thomas on life after ET: ‘We got a lot of weird visitors – some people were fanatical’” in the Guardian.

…After ET came out in 1982, life was never the same for Thomas, who had only appeared in one film before being cast in Spielberg’s smash hit. Now 51, he recalls a six-year-old Drew Barrymore tottering over to him on set to ask how many films he had been in. “Oh, you poor thing,” she answered airily. “I’ve been in four.” But aside from reading lines and knowing his cue, the little boy from rural Texas didn’t really know what acting was, let alone fame. “It was a total unexpected side-effect of doing this fun thing I had wanted to do,” he says now, from his home in Oregon. “I had no clue that my life would change in any way. I worked on this movie, then I’m back on the farm, I’m back at school – but now people are pointing at me in the street.”

Even as a child, he was aware that his mother, Carolyn, resented how his fame was impacting the whole family. She would take him to auditions and shoots until his late teens, and always felt the need to protect him. “She was doing the best job that she knew how to do,” he says. “My whole family weren’t really well equipped to deal with anything like that. And other than a few precautions, we didn’t change our lives that much. Consequently, we got a lot of weird visitors to our residence and things like that, phone calls.”

Complete strangers would want to speak to a little boy? He nods. “We had to call the authorities a few times. ET was a real sensation, some people were fanatical about it.”

Former child actors are often asked: would you let your children act? Thomas, who has three children, has given varying answers over the years, but he’s resolute when I ask. “Pursue it when you’re older,” he says. “I still don’t think it’s a great way to grow up. It was exciting for me, I went to some strange locales and met some interesting people. But it was also very disruptive to my parents’ marriage. Our social life got weird. You get famous and suddenly every cousin that you never knew looks you up. People are strange, they do weird stuff. As a kid, that’s a lot to deal with. And when you’re an adult [too], but at least then you have all of the faculties, hopefully, to deal with fame.”

(5) MEMORY LANE.

1981 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

At Chicon IV in 1982 where Marta Randall was Toastmaster, C. J. Cherryh would win the Best Novel Hugo for Downbelow Station which was set in her Alliance–Union universe during the Company Wars period.

It was published by DAW forty-two years ago and originally had been called The Company War by the author with the cover art by David B. Mattingly. The format was paperback.

It is, I believe, a splendidly written novel that has aged rather well. Is it the best novel in the series? I think so, though there’s an argument that can be made for Cyteen which won the Hugo at Noreascon 3.

Now for her Beginning…

EARTH AND OUTWARD: 2005–2352

The stars, like all man’s other ventures, were an obvious impracticality, as rash and improbable an ambition as the first venture of man onto Earth’s own great oceans, or into the air, or into space. Sol Station had existed profitably for some years; there were the beginnings of mines, the manufacturies, the power installations in space which were beginning to pay. Earth took them for granted as quickly as it did all its other comforts. Missions from the station explored the system, a program far from public understanding, but it met no strong opposition, since it did not disturb the comfort of Earth.

So quietly, very matter of factly, that first probe went out to the two nearest stars, unmanned, to gather data and return, a task in itself of considerable complexity. The launch from station drew some public interest, but years was a long time to wait for a result, and it passed out of media interest as quickly as it did out of the solar system. It drew a great deal more attention on its return, nostalgia on the part of those who recalled its launch more than a decade before, curiosity on the part of the young who had known little of its beginning and wondered what it was all about. It was a scientific success, bringing back data enough to keep the analysts busy for years . . . but there was no glib, slick way to explain the full meaning of its observations in layman’s terms. In public relations the mission was a failure; the public, seeking to understand on their own terms, looked for material benefit, treasure, riches, dramatic findings.

What the probe had found was a star with reasonable possibilities for encouraging life; a belt of debris, including particles, planetoids, irregular chunks somewhat under planet size with interesting implications for systemic formation, and a planetary companion with its own system of debris and moons . . . a planet desolate, baked, forbidding. It was no Eden, no second Earth, no better than what existed in the sun’s own system, and it was a far journey to have gone to find that out. The press grappled with questions it could not easily grasp itself, sought after something to give the viewers, lost interest quickly. If anything, there were questions raised about cost, vague and desperate comparisons offered to Columbus, and the press hared off quickly onto a political crisis in the Mediterranean, much more comprehensible and far bloodier.

The scientific establishment on Sol Station breathed a sigh of relief and with equal quiet caution invested a portion of its budget in a modest manned expedition, to voyage in what amounted to a traveling miniature of Sol Station itself, and to stay a time making observations in orbit about that world.

And very quietly, to further imitate Sol Station, to test manufacturing techniques which had built Earth’s great second satellite . . . in stranger conditions. Sol Corporation supplied a generous grant, having a certain curiosity, a certain understanding of stations and what profits could be looked for from their development.

That was the beginning.

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born July 3, 1898 — E. Hoffmann Price. He’s most readily remembered as being a Weird Tales writer, one of a group that included Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith. He did a few collaborations, one of which was with H. P. Lovecraft, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”. Another work, “The Infidel’s Daughter”, a satire on the Ku Klux Klan, also angered many Southern readers. (Died 1988.)
Born July 3, 1926 — William Rotsler. An artist, cartoonist, pornographer and SF author. Well, that is his bio. Rotsler was a four-time Hugo Award winner for Best Fan Artist and one-time Nebula Award nominee. He also won a “Retro-Hugo” for his work in 1946 and was runner-up for 1951. He responsible for giving Uhura her first name, created “Rotsler’s Rules for Costuming”, and well, being amazing sounding. (Died 1997.)
Born July 3, 1927 — Tim O’Connor. He was Dr. Elias Huer in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century for much of its run. (I really, really liked that series.) Other genre appearances were on The Six Million Dollar Man, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Wonder Woman, Knight Rider, Next Gen and The Burning Zone. (Died 2018.)
Born July 3, 1927 — Ken Russell. Film director whose Altered States based off of Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay is certainly his best-remembered film. Though let’s not overlook The Lair of the White Worm he did off Bram Stoker’s novel, or The Devils, based at least in part off The Devils of Loudun by Aldous Huxley. (Died 2011.)
Born July 3, 1937 — Tom Stoppard, 86. Screenplay writer, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead which is adjacent genre if not actually genre. Also scripted of course Brazil which he co-authored with Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeow. He also did the final Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade rewrite of Jeffrey Boam’s rewrite of Menno Meyjes’s screenplay. And Shakespeare in Love which he co-authored with Marc Norman.
Born July 3, 1943 — Kurtwood Smith, 80. Clarence Boddicker in Robocop, Federation President in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and voiced Kanjar Ro in Green Lantern: First Flight. He’s got series appearances on Blue Thunder, The Terrible Thunderlizards, The X-Files, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, Men in Black: The Series, 3rd Rock from the Sun, Todd McFarlane’s Spawn, Judtice League, Batman Beyond, Green Lantern and Beware the Batman. His last role was as Vernon Masters as the superb Agent Carter.
Born July 3, 1946 — Michael Shea. Shea’s first novel, A Quest for Simbilis was an authorized sequel to the first two of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth novels. Vance was offered a share of the advance but declined it. (It was declared non-canon when the next novels in the series were written by Vance.) A decade, he’d win a World Fantasy Award for his Nifft the Lean novel, and a second twenty years later for a novella, “The Growlimb.” (Died 2014.)
Born July 3, 1948 — Marc Okrand, 75. A linguist in Native American languages who’s the creator of the Klingon language. He first applied it by dubbing in Vulcan language dialogue for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and then was involved in the Search for Spock, The Final Frontier, The Undiscovered Country, and the both rebooted Trek films. Later he developed the language for the Kelpien race in the second season of Discovery.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

Loose Parts shows why pirate cosplay is difficult for certain aliens.

Tom Gauld keeps busy.

My cartoon for this weekend’s @GuardianBooks / @GdnSaturday pic.twitter.com/wJzWPhYhIk
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) July 2, 2023

A recent cartoon for @newscientist #science #scifi pic.twitter.com/BXZQlhhrNr
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) July 3, 2023

(8) IT’S TIME. Moses Ose Utomi’s “My Little Time Demon” is a free read at Sunday Morning Transport, offered to encourage subscriptions.

I have a sixth sense: I can tell when someone’s given up on life. In this case, though, the guy’s ice-cream-cone face tattoo says enough….

(9) GUEST MESS. Charon Dunn went to BayCon where “a staff member misunderstood the concept behind a ‘VIP and Guest Welcoming Event’ and 86’d me and a few other guests from it, so I’m doing my alchemical ‘turning BS into art’ thing.” “Mister Gatekeeper”: Here’s first stanza.

Mister Gatekeeper
You sent me back into the crowd
Mister Gatekeeper
You told me that I was not allowed
According to my badge, I was on the list
But you turned me away, and now I’m pissed
Mister Gatekeeper, someday that gate’s gonna slam on you
It’s true
Mister Gatekeeper, someday that gate’s gonna slam on you

(10) 500 MILLION-YEAR-OLD TURF & SURF. “Fossil-rich Welsh quarry yields trove of soft-bodied animals at dawn of modern life” reports Science.

Between 540 million and 485 million years ago, during the Cambrian period, so many new, complex animal life forms arose that paleontologists speak of the Cambrian Explosion or the Biological Big Bang. But by 400 million years ago, almost all of those species disappeared, eventually replaced by the ancestors of most modern animals. There have been few clues about what happened in between, but fossils from 462 million years ago recently discovered in a quarry in central Wales are filling in that gap, researchers report today in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

“It is wonderful,” says Douglas Erwin, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History who was not involved with the work. There are “some beautiful specimens, including some surprising discoveries.”

The Welsh fossils, discovered by a paleontologist couple who live near the quarry, reveal some Cambrian life forms held on for millions of years longer than paleontologists had thought before going extinct, and certain classes of modern animals got their starts earlier than expected. There are also some familiar creatures, including arthropods such as crustaceans and horseshoe crabs, as well as sponges, starfish, and worms. Many of them by that point already had long histories and continue to thrive to this day, so their presence among the fossils isn’t surprising. But the quarry also holds strange creatures thought to have arisen and vanished during the Cambrian period, such as opabiniids, which had five eyes and a long proboscis, and scaly slugs called wiwaxiids. Newcomers spotted in the deposits include modern families of glass sponges and a group of crustaceans called horseshoe shrimp, which were thought to have arisen much later….

(11) IN BRIT CIT, IT WAS THE END OF THE WORLD ON B. BEEB CEEB RADIO 4 THIS SUNDAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The BBC aired an audio SF play. Following a global plague, in a future where there is no longer communication between countries, some of humanity seeks solutions, perhaps to seek a new home, and Britain’s Albion has discovered a habitable planet…

Yes, this is a re-run of a previously aired radio play, but for those into SFnal audio-drama, it is one arguably worth noting. You can download the programme here: “The Goldilocks Zone”

Further information:

Astrophysicist Sofia Khaled’s discovery of a potentially habitable planet opens up painful memories for her but a startling new truth for humanity.

When future Earth discovers an uncorrupted “cosmic” truth, data finally becomes a force for good as a cover-up with catastrophic global impact is revealed in this thrilling drama spanning fifty years.

The Goldilocks Zone by Tanika Gupta was developed through OKRE Experimental Stories. The consultant scientists were Professor Caswell Barry and Dr. Adam Kampff.

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

Pixel Scroll 6/13/23 We Should Have Thought Of That Before We Used The Force

Posted on June 13, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) BUMMER, MAN. Camestros Felapton studies a claim about sff readers in “The downbeat end”.

…So the dire warnings of what might happen if “cosy horror” got a foothold in the horror community was that horror would be assimilated by the evil forces who had already eaten science fiction. That spawned a new discussion which is best summed up by a tweet from a very notable sf&f editor:

@EllenDatlow “It’s sad (to me) that sf devolved to a state that readers can’t take unhappy/downbeat endings. While Fiction Editor at OMNI Magazine, I was known for publishing downbeat sf and most readers had no problem with it-because the stories were great.“

A major issue with these kinds of current-state-of-the-genre is they can become so nebulous. With the cozy horror arguments people ranged from film, tv, children’s media, classics, short fiction, long fiction and so on. However, I think it is fair to look at Datlow’s comment in terms of short fiction….

Camestros puts it to the test based on his opinions about the endings of recent Hugo-winning short stories.

(2) FANZINE SCHOLARSHIP. in “’Doc’ Weir Revisited”, Douglas A. Anderson corrects a scholarly statement he once made about the question of what was the first booklet published about Tolkien?

His original choice by ‘Doc’ Weir has proven to be only a manuscript. So now the real first is…?

Anderson wields such magical fanzine fan names as Bruce Pelz and Ted Johnstone in his search.

(3) WOMEN SHOW PINBALL WIZARDRY. “Belles & Chimes, a pinball league ‘run by women, for women,’ makes some noise in a pastime where women were once consigned largely to the display cases” says the New York Times in “Not Your Father’s Pinball Arcade. But Maybe Your Mother’s.”

When Rachel Karlic and her sister, Rebecca Hinsdale, were students at Western Michigan University, they sometimes played pinball with their friend Kate Porter in a 24-hour video rental store near campus. The store was called Video Hits Plus, with the Plus maybe referring to the basement attractions, which, in addition to the pinball machines, included an air hockey table and a pornographic video section.

After graduating, the three women went their separate ways, eventually reuniting in Chicago in 2011. This was around the time that pinball machines, after nearly dying out in the early 2000s from competition with home gaming consoles, started becoming more popular again.

It helped that new machines were more complex, with modern electronics and mechanical features like the motorized skyscraper on the 2021 Godzilla machine. The numbers of avid players grew, as did the number of competitions and tournaments. Many of these events were sanctioned by the International Flipper Pinball Association, which ranks players globally.

In Chicago, one of the hubs of pinball’s resurgence was a onetime record store in the Logan Square neighborhood. The back of the store housed a selection of pinball machines, and if you bought something, you could play the machines for free. In 2014, James Zespy, the owner of the store, transformed it into a pinball and arcade bar called Logan Arcade.

That’s where, in 2017, Ms. Karlic, Ms. Hinsdale, Ms. Porter and their friend Tavi Veraldi started the Chicago chapter of the Belles & Chimes. Founded in 2013 in Oakland, Calif., Belles & Chimes bills itself as “an international network of inclusive women’s pinball leagues run by women, for women.” The Chicago chapter has about 50 members and hosts two seasons of league play every year….

(4) PROBLEM SOLVED, UHH… [Item by Bill.] AI’s that train on copyrighted works seem to be a concern of many Filers.

Japan has solved that problem: “Japan Goes All In: Copyright Doesn’t Apply To AI Training” at Technomancers.ai.

In a surprising move, Japan’s government recently reaffirmed that it will not enforce copyrights on data used in AI training. The policy allows AI to use any data “regardless of whether it is for non-profit or commercial purposes, whether it is an act other than reproduction, or whether it is content obtained from illegal sites or otherwise.” Keiko Nagaoka, Japanese Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology, confirmed the bold stance to local meeting, saying that Japan’s laws won’t protect copyrighted materials used in AI datasets.

English language coverage of the situation is sparse. It seems the Japanese government believes copyright worries, particularly those linked to anime and other visual media, have held back the nation’s progress in AI technology. In response, Japan is going all-in, opting for a no-copyright approach to remain competitive.

This news is part of Japan’s ambitious plan to become a leader in AI technology. Rapidus, a local tech firm known for its advanced 2nm chip technology, is stepping into the spotlight as a serious contender in the world of AI chips. With Taiwan’s political situation looking unstable, Japanese chip manufacturing could be a safer bet. Japan is also stepping up to help shape the global rules for AI systems within the G-7….

(5) STAN THE MAN. Yahoo! says “Stan Lee” is a fan-service documentary released by Disney+ that will drop on June 16. “’Stan Lee’ Review: A Tasty Documentary About the Visionary of Marvel Makes the Comics Look Better Than the Movies”.

There’s a moment in “Stan Lee,” David Gelb’s lively and illuminating documentary about the visionary of Marvel Comics, that’s momentous enough to give you a tingle. The year is 1961, and Lee, approaching 40, is burnt out on comics. It’s a form he has never taken all that seriously, even though he’s been working at it since 1939, when he started, at 17, as a gofer for Timely Comics. (Within two years he’d become the company’s editor, art director, and chief writer.) The comics he creates get so little respect that he tries to hide his profession when asked about it at cocktail parties.

In 1961, though, Lee receives a directive from Martin Goodman, the publisher of the company that’s about to be renamed Marvel. He is ordered to devise a team of superheroes that can compete with DC’s Justice League (who have become the fulcrum of the so-called Silver Age of Comics). Lee, weary of superheroes, is ready to quit the business. But his wife, the English-born beauty Joan Lee, suggests that he create the kind of characters he has always been talking about — a more realistic brand of comic-book figure, one that ordinary people could relate to.

With nothing to lose, he comes up with the Fantastic Four as a new breed of superhero: characters with a dash of angst and a host of ordinary problems — they bicker and nurse their anger and anxiety, they worry about things like paying the rent, and in the case of The Thing they have some serious self-esteem issues….

(6) CORMAC MCCARTHY (1933-2023). Cormac McCarthy died June 13 at the age of 89 reports NPR. While SFE argues for a couple of his earlier works having traits of horror, his one acknowledged sff novel is The Road, set in postapocalyptic America, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. It also won Spain’s Premio Ignotus (2008), McCarthy’s only major sff award.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

1966 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

Our Beginning this time is that of Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17. Yes, it won a Nebula (along with Flowers for Algernon) and was nominated for a Hugo at NyCon 3 which was the year that The Moon is a Harsh Mistress won.

Delany intended to have Babel-17 originally published as a single volume with the “Empire Star” novella, but this did not happen until a reprint twelve years ago. That didn’t happen when it was published first by Ace Books fifty-seven years ago.

If you’re so inclined, Jo Walton did a rather good review of it over at Tor here.

And for our Beginning…

…Here is the hub of ambiguity.
Electric spectra splash across the street.
Equivocation knots the shadowed features
of boys who are not boys;
a quirk of darkness shrivels
a full mouth to senility
or pares it to a razor-edge, pours acid
across an amber cheek, fingers a crotch,
or smashes in the pelvic arch
and wells a dark clot oozing on a chest
dispelled with motion or a flare of light
that swells the lips and dribbles them with blood.
They say the hustlers paint their lips with blood.
They say the same crowd surges up the street
and surges down again, like driftwood borne
tidewise ashore and sucked away with backwash, only to slap into the sand again,
only to be jerked out and spun away.
Driftwood; the narrow hips, the liquid eyes,
the wideflung shoulders and the rough-cast hands, the gray-faced jackals kneeling to their prey.
The colors disappear at break of day
when stragglers toward the west riverdocks meet young sailors ambling shipward on the street…
—from Prism and Lens

IT’S A PORT CITY.

Here fumes rust the sky, the General thought. Industrial gases flushed the evening with oranges, salmons, purples with too much red. West, ascending and descending transports, shuttling cargoes to stellarcenters and satellites, lacerated the clouds. It’s a rotten poor city too, thought the General, turning the corner by the garbage-strewn curb.

Since the Invasion six ruinous embargoes for months apiece had strangled this city whose lifeline must pulse with interstellar commerce to survive. Sequestered, how could this city exist? Six times in twenty years he’d asked himself that. Answer? It couldn’t.

Panics, riots, burnings, twice cannibalism—

The General looked from the silhouetted loading-towers that jutted behind the rickety monorail to the grimy buildings. The streets were smaller here, cluttered with Transport workers, loaders, a few stellarmen in green uniforms, and the horde of pale, proper men and women who managed the intricate sprawl of customs operations. They are quiet now, intent on home or work, the General thought. Yet all these people have lived for two decades under the Invasion. They’ve starved during the embargoes, broken windows, looted, run screaming before firehoses, torn flesh from a corpse’s arm with decalcified teeth.

Who is this animal man? He asked himself the abstract question to blur the lines of memory. It was easier, being a general, to ask about the “animal man” than about the woman who had sat in the middle of the sidewalk during the last embargo holding her skeletal baby by one leg, or the three scrawny teenage girls who had attacked him on the street with razors (—she had hissed through brown teeth, the bar of metal glistening toward his chest, “Come here, Beefsteak! Come get me, Lunch meat…” He had used karate—) or the blind man who had walked up the avenue, screaming.

Pale and proper men and women now, who spoke softly, who always hesitated before they let an expression fix their faces, with pale, proper, patriotic ideas: work for victory over the Invaders; Alona Star and Kip Rhyak were great in “Stellar Holliday” but Ronald Quar was the best serious actor around. They listened to Hi Lite’s music (or did they listen, wondered the General, during those slow dances where no one touched). A position in Customs was a good secure job.

Working directly in Transport was probably more exciting and fun to watch in the movies; but really, such strange people—

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born June 13, 1943 — Malcolm McDowell, 80. My favorite role for him was Mr. Roarke on the rebooted Fantasy Island. Of course, his most infamous role was Alex in A Clockwork Orange. Scary film, that. His characterization of H. G. Wells in Time After Time was I thought rather spot on. And I’d like to single out his voicing Arcady Duvall in the “Showdown” episode of Batman: The Animated Series. Remember the Will Smith starred Wild Wild West film? Here is the same premise with Jonah Hex instead.
Born June 13, 1945 — Whitley Strieber, 78. I’ve decidedly mixed feelings about him. He’s written two rather good horror novels, The Wolfen which made a fantastic horror film and The Hunger. But I’m convinced that his book Communion about his encounter with aliens is an absolute crock.
Born June 13, 1949 — Simon Callow, 74. English actor, musician, writer, and theatre director. So what’s he doing here? Well, he got to be Charles Dickens twice on Doctor Who, the first being in “The Unquiet Dead” during the time of the Ninth Doctor and then later during “The Wedding of River Song”. He’d also appear, though not as Dickens, on The Sarah Jane Adventures as the voice of Tree Blathereen in “The Gift” episode. I’ve not watched the latter. How are they? He was The Duke of Sandringham in the first season of Outlander.
Born June 13, 1953 — Tim Allen, 70. Jason Nesmith in the beloved Galaxy Quest, winning a much deserved Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. (What was running against it that year?) He actually had a big hit several years previously voicing Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story which would be the first in that film franchise.
Born June 13, 1963 — Audrey Niffenegger, 60. Her first novel was The Time Traveler’s Wife. She has stated in interviews that she will not see the film as only the characters in the novels are hers. Good for her. Raven Girl, her third novel about a couple whose child is a raven trapped in a human body, was turned into performed at the Royal Opera House.
Born June 13, 1968 — Marcel Theroux, 55. Author of The Confessions of Mycroft Holmes: A Paper Chase, and his Strange Bodies novel won a John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His Far North is a sf novel set in the Siberian taiga. Yes, that’s a novel I want to read.
Born June 13, 1969 — Cayetana Guillén Cuervo, 54. She’s got the role of Irene Larra in El Ministerio del Tiempo (The Ministry of Time), a Spanish SF series which sounds fascinating but which I’ve not seen. Anyone here seen it? Not fond of captioning, but I’d put up with it to see this.
Born June 13, 1981 — Chris Evans, 42. Captain America in the Marvel film franchise. He had an earlier role as the Human Torch in the non-MCU Fantastic Four and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. I think this makes him the only performer to play two major characters in either the DC or Marvel Universes.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

The Argyle Sweater’s Oz pun is one of the worst ever. Oh, yes.
Tom Gauld realizes brainstorming affects certain brains differently.

My cartoon for the latest @newscientist pic.twitter.com/C9y59TZbsm
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) June 12, 2023

(10) ZOMBIE CHOW. Food & Wine makes sure we’re paying attention when “General Mills Adds ‘Carmella Creeper’ to Monster Cereal Lineup”.

…”Carmella Creeper is the long-lost cousin of Franken Berry as well as a zombie DJ with an edgy sound who is always the life of the party,” General Mills explains. “Complete with a fierce attitude and looks to match, Carmella is ready to shake things up at the Monsters’ haunted mansion with her limited-edition cereal featuring caramel-apple-flavored pieces with colored Monster marshmallows.”

That wasn’t the only scary cereal-related announcement of the week. General Mills added that all six Monsters will come together in a single box later this year with the debut of Monster Mash Remix cereal. Carmella Creeper will be joining Boo Berry, Count Chocula, Franken Berry, Fruit Brute, and Yummy Mummy in a limited-time marshmallow-filled cereal combo. (Yes, this is similar to the previous Monster Mash cereal that was released for the Monsters’ 50th anniversary in 2021 — but this time, Carmella has been invited to the Monster Party.)…

It's official—a new face is joining the Monster Cereals for the first time in 36 years.

Carmella Creeper is getting her own caramel apple cereal, and she's also joining a reworked version of Monster Mash Cereal, which brings the whole gang together in one box! pic.twitter.com/unQLh7PdHw
— Cerealously ???????? (@cerealouslynet) June 7, 2023

(11) THE DINO RHINO WITH THOROUGHBRED LEGS. “Svetz! Watch out fpr that rampaging prehistoric rhino!” “This Prehistoric Giant Rhino Was ‘Taller Than a Giraffe’” reports Smithsonian Magazine.

…The giant rhinoceros roamed Eurasia sometime between 20 million and 35 million years ago. The extinct behemoth stretched over 26 feet long and weighed almost as much as five elephants. Now, paleontologists have unearthed partial remains of a new species of giant rhino in China, according to a study published last week in the journal Communications Biology….

The prehistoric beast stood nearly 16 feet tall on four bony legs similar to giraffes and weighed between 11 to 20 metric tons, which is equivalent to about three to five African elephants, Science Alert reports. Based on the size of the skull, the rhino had a long thick neck, a deeper nasal cavity, and a short trunk similar to that of a modern-day tapir, reports the BBC. The vertebrae fossils suggest the new species had a more flexible neck than other species of giant rhinoceroses, the researchers explain in a statement.

Deng suggests that the rhino’s thin legs were great for running, and its head could reach the highest leaves from the treetops, Gizmodo reports….

(12) CATCHING THE WAVES ON LUNA. The Conversation believes “Building telescopes on the Moon could transform astronomy – and it’s becoming an achievable goal”.

…Several types of astronomy would benefit. The most obvious is radio astronomy, which can be conducted from the side of the Moon that always faces away from Earth – the far side.

The lunar far side is permanently shielded from the radio signals generated by humans on Earth. During the lunar night, it is also protected from the Sun. These characteristics make it probably the most “radio-quiet” location in the whole solar system as no other planet or moon has a side that permanently faces away from the Earth. It is therefore ideally suited for radio astronomy.

Radio waves are a form of electromagnetic energy – as are, for example, infrared, ultraviolet and visible-light waves. They are defined by having different wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum.

Radio waves with wavelengths longer than about 15m are blocked by Earth’s ionoshere. But radio waves at these wavelengths reach the Moon’s surface unimpeded. For astronomy, this is the last unexplored region of the electromagnetic spectrum, and it is best studied from the lunar far side.

Observations of the cosmos at these wavelengths come under the umbrella of “low frequency radio astronomy”. These wavelengths are uniquely able to probe the structure of the early universe, especially the cosmic “dark ages” – an era before the first galaxies formed.

At that time, most of the matter in the universe, excluding the mysterious dark matter, was in the form of neutral hydrogen atoms. These emit and absorb radiation with a characteristic wavelength of 21cm. Radio astronomers have been using this property to study hydrogen clouds in our own galaxy – the Milky Way – since the 1950s.

Because the universe is constantly expanding, the 21cm signal generated by hydrogen in the early universe has been shifted to much longer wavelengths. As a result, hydrogen from the cosmic “dark ages” will appear to us with wavelengths greater than 10m. The lunar far side may be the only place where we can study this….

(13) SFF LIFE IN CHENGDU. “China’s Sci-Fi Hub |Why Sci-Fi Creators Keep Coming Here for Inspiration?” – a video interview with author Wanxiang Fengnian, winner of the Chinese Nebula Award. Subtitled in both English and Chinese.

Chengdu, despite being a geographical lowland in China, undoubtedly stands as the highland of Chinese science fiction. Countless Chinese science fiction writers have found their inspiration here. From a unique coffee shop, an area full of local lifestyle, to the largest natural history museum in Southwest China, the ubiquitous sci-fi scenes are like a string of keys to the door of the marvelous universe, attracting countless sci-fi fans. As a science fiction writer who has settled in Chengdu for many years, how does Wanxiang Fengnian draw inspiration here and perfectly combine reality and sci-fi creation?

(14) SUMMER CAMP. Turner Classic Movies helps viewers understand some of their fare this month with the help of sff: “What Is Camp? These Sci-Fi Movies Explain”.

This June, TCM is getting campy. In this episode of Film 101, we examine what the term “camp” means by looking at four sci-fi camp classics airing on TCM this month: Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), Queen of Outer Space (1958), Barbarella (1968), and The Apple (1980).

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Bill, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, 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 6/7/23 Pixels Sleep On Scrolls

Posted on June 7, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) MARKOWITZ AWARD WINNERS. Naseem Jamnia and Maya Salameh are the winners of the 2023 Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. Naseem Jamnia is a widely-recognized sff writer. See Lambda Literary’s interview here: “Four Questions with Naseem Jamnia”.

The Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers recognizes LGBTQ-identified writers whose work demonstrates their strong potential for promising careers. The award includes a cash prize of $1,500. This year, the award goes to Naseem Jamnia and Maya Salameh.

Naseem Jamnia (they/them) is the Locus-nominated author of The Bruising of Qilwa, a novella introducing their queernormative, Persian-inspired world, which was shortlisted for the IAFA’s Crawford award. Named the inaugural Samuel R. Delany Fellow, they’ve also received fellowships from Lambda Literary and the Otherwise Award, and their nonfiction has appeared in The Rumpus, The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, New Orleans Review, Sarah Gailey’s Stone Soup newsletter, and other venues. They are the managing editor of Sword & Kettle Press, a tiny independent publishing house of feminist speculative writing, and their debut middle grade horror, Sleepaway, is out in 2025 from Aladdin. Find out more and sign up for their newsletter at naseemwrites.com, or follow them on social @jamsternazzy.

How has access to queer literature/queer stories impacted your life as a queer person and shaped you as a queer writer?

When I was growing up, the closest I saw my gender portrayed in stories was with the “girl disguises herself as a boy to do the thing” trope, a la Mulan and Tamora Pierce’s Alanna books. I had to resort to fanfiction to explore queerness in terms of sexuality (and even then, rarely or never saw a portrayal of someone on the asexual spectrum). Much of my own writing growing up explored these issues inadvertently and vaguely, as I did not know what I was exploring at the time. However, once terms like “nonbinary” or understanding of transness outside a binary entered the public lexicon in the last 10-ish years, the wealth of queer literature we’ve seen explicitly including various identities has made a world of difference, helping me to understand and embrace my own various identities, which has since allowed me to live as my truest self. With this clearer understanding, I’ve taken the lack of what I saw growing up to turn into what I wish I had seen and where I wish we can go in the future. I’m grateful so many queer books exist now for kids and adults alike to explore the multiplicity of queer experiences….

(2) REUBEN FINALISTS INCLUDE TWO SFF ARTISTS. [Item by Dariensync.] Girl Genius creator Phil Foglio and frequent Neil Gaiman collaborator Colleen Doran have both been nominated for Reuben Awards by the National Cartoonist Society. Foglio for Online Comics: Long Form for Girl Genius, Doran for Best Graphic Novel for her adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Chivalry. “Finalists Announced For 2022 NCS Divisional Awards For The 77th Annual Reubens”.

(3) STARS ON MARS. You can watch the first aired episode of Stars on Mars on the FOX website. William Shatner serves as Mission Control.

Here’s an excerpt. “Celebrities Try To Fix A Fallen Satellite Tower”.

(4) NOT AS SPECIAL EFFECTS? Oh no, some of them were very special. Ranker came up with a list of“11 Classic Fantasy Movies Made Before CGI”.

Many fans feel that modern fantasy movies began in 2001 with the one-two punch of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Both having been produced after the CGI revolution of the 1990s, they applied the full power of the latest visual effects techniques to bring two beloved fantasy book series vividly to life.

But fantasy films go back a lot further than 2001. Since the dawn of movies, imaginative filmmakers have striven to use the medium’s unique capabilities to bring to life visions that cannot exist in reality. Long before computers were rendering T. rexes and Orc armies, special-effects crews had already amassed a huge bag of tricks to put fantastical stories on the screen, including stop-motion, bluescreen, forced perspective, puppets, and giant props.

Three of the four most highly-rated films have effects by Ray Harryahausen. Number one is –

Jason and the Argonauts

A retelling of the myth of the Golden Fleece, 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts was one of the peaks of Ray Harryhausen’s special effects career. Numerous striking effects appear throughout the film, but the show-stopper is the epic battle where Jason and his men confront an army of magically animated skeletons.

Harryhausen recalled the incredibly painstaking work that went into the sequence:

I had three men fighting seven skeletons, and each skeleton had five appendages to move in each separate frame of film. This meant at least 35 animation movements, each synchronized to the actor’s movements. Some days I was producing just 13 or 14 frames a day, or to put it another way, less than one second of screen time per day, and in the end the whole sequence took a record four and a half months to capture on film.

(5) YOU SAW IT HERE FIRST. At Galactic Journey, John Boston reviews the issue of Amazing which scored the coup of publishing an excerpt from Delany’s Nova, the novel Campbell declined to serialize in Analog: “[June 6, 1968] The Stalemate Continues (July 1968 Amazing)”.

Once more, all but one item of fiction are reprints, though this issue’s exception is more considerable than some: House A-Fire, by Samuel R. Delany, described as a short novel (at 33 pages!) on the cover and contents page, though editor Harrison acknowledges in the letter column that it is actually an excerpt from Delany’s new novel Nova, forthcoming from Doubleday. Delany’s name is misspelled on the cover and contents page and in Harrison’s editorial, spelled correctly on the story’s title page and in the letter column. Are you getting tired of all this nit-picking? So am I. But the persistent sloppiness of this magazine continues to irritate….

(6) LIAGUNO Q&A. One of the Horror Writers Association “A Point of Pride” blog posts is an “Interview with Vince A. Liaguno”.

What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it?

I’m less certain that I chose horror; I think horror chose me. Truthfully, from as far back as I can remember, I was drawn to all things dark. As a kid, my earliest recollections of being terrified were watching made-for-TV movies from the 70s like Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, Gargoyles, and Trilogy of Terror. I can still remember damn near pissing myself when that little Zuni fetish doll from the latter chased poor Karen Black around her apartment! (laughs)

As I got a little older, my Dad would take me to the movies as part of our weekend “buddy days”. They were usually Irwin Allen disaster flicks or movies with a lot of car chases, but then a little film called Jaws was released. I was eight years old and can still feel the knot in my stomach the first time I heard those opening notes of John Williams’ now-legendary score. I think I only made it up to the point that the ill-fated skinny-dipping Chrissie gets slammed into the buoy before I pleaded with my Dad to leave. It would take three subsequent tries before I could make it through the entire film, each time making it a little further into the film before my ever-patient father heard the desperation of the “Please, Daddy…can we leave now?” in my voice. Jaws was a rite of passage for me; it was the first time I needed to summon and sustain any sense of real bravery. When I finally saw those end credits, it was a mark of accomplishment… a hint of manhood, if you will.

1978 was a game changer for me—the cusp of adolescence and the release of John Carpenter’s Halloween. If Jaws hooked me, Halloween reeled me in and cemented what would become a lifelong adoration of both slasher films and a certain actress named Jamie Lee Curtis.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

2005 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

I won’t say that Haruki Murakami is author that I’m at familiar as he isn’t. Kafka on the Shore is the English translation of the original Japanese publication which is this, 海辺のカフカ.

Alfred Knopf published the first English language edition eighteen years ago.

It would win a World Fantasy Award.

It is an available from the usual suspects.

And now for our Beginning…

So you’re all set for money, then?” the boy named Crow asks in his typical sluggish voice. The kind of voice like when you’ve just woken up and your mouth still feels heavy and dull. But he’s just pretending. He’s totally awake. As always.

I nod.

“How much?”

I review the numbers in my head. “Close to thirty-five hundred in cash, plus some money I can get from an ATM. I know it’s not a lot, but it should be enough. For the time being.”

“Not bad,” the boy named Crow says. “For the time being.

I give him another nod. “I’m guessing this isn’t Christmas money from Santa Claus.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” I reply.

Crow smirks and looks around.

“I imagine you’ve started by rifling drawers, am I right?”

I don’t say anything.

He knows whose money we’re talking about, so there’s no need for any long-winded interrogations.

He’s just giving me a hard time.

“No matter,” Crow says. “You really need this money and you’re going to get it—beg, borrow, or steal. It’s your father’s money, so who cares, right? Get your hands on that much and you should be able to make it. For the time being. But what’s the plan after it’s all gone? Money isn’t like mushrooms in a forest—it doesn’t just pop up on its own, you know. You’ll need to eat, a place to sleep. One day you’re going to run out.”

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born June 7, 1944 — Mildred Downey Broxon, 79. Author of three novels and some short stories, heavy on Nordic-German mythology. The Demon of Scattery was co-written with Poul Anderson. There are no digital books available for her and her printed editions are out of print now. I see no sign that her short fiction has been collected into a volume to date.
Born June 7, 1952 — Liam Neeson, 71. He first shows up in genre films as Gawain in Excalibur and as Kegan in Krull. He plays Martin Brogan in High Spirits, a film I enjoy immensely. Next up is the title role in Darkman, a film I’ve watched myriad times. He’s Dr. David Marrow in The Haunting which I’d contend is loosely off of The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. Now we get him as Qui-Gon Jinn in The Phantom Menace. Followed unfortunately by his horrid take as Ra’s al Ghul in Batman Begins and as a cameo in the The Dark Knight Rises. Now he voiced Aslan with amazing dignity in The Chronicles of Narnia franchise and voiced Zeus as well in the Titans franchise.
Born June 7, 1954 — Louise Erdrich, 69. Writer of novels, poetry, and children’s books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. Her genre work includes according to ISFDB the Ojibwe series of The Antelope Wife which won a World Fantasy Award and The Painted Drum, plus stand-alone novels of The Crown of Columbus (co-written with her husband Michael Dorris) and Future Home of the Living God.
Born June 7, 1968 — Sarah Parish, 55. In “The Runaway Bride“, a Tenth Doctor story, she got to play, with the assistance of extensive CGI, one of the nastiest Who villains to date, The Empress of the Racnoss, an oversized vicious spider with a human face. Great episode. It’s our introduction to Donna Noble, his Companion for quite some time to come. In a much lighter role, she played Pasiphaë on BBC’s Atlantis series.
Born June 7, 1969 — Anthony Simcoe, 54. Ka D’Argo in Farscape, one of the best SF series ever done. If you don’t watch anything else, just watch the finale, The Peacekeeper Wars as it’s fairly self contained. Farscape is the SF he did. If you can find a copy, Matt Bacon’s No Strings Attached: The Inside Story of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop is a wonderful look at the creation of the creatures on the show including D’Argo facial appendages.
Born June 7, 1972 — Karl Urban, 51. He’s in the second and third installments of The Lord of the Rings trilogy as Éomer. He is McCoy in the Trek reboot franchise, Cupid on Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, John Kennex on Almost Human, Vaako in the Riddick film franchise, and Judge Dredd in Dredd. For the record, I liked both Dredd films for varied reasons.
Born June 7, 1974 — David Filoni, 49. Creator and an executive producer on Star Wars Rebels, a most awesome series, for all four seasons, and was supervising director and a writer on another excellent series, Star Wars: The Clone Wars. (I like the animated series far better than the live action films.) He makes his live acting debut in The Mandalorian playing Trapper Wolf, an X-Wing pilot, in “The Prisoner” episode. It’s also worth noting that he his first job was directing episodes during the first season of animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender
Born June 7, 1979 — Anna Torv, 44. She’s best known for her role as FBI agent Olivia Dunham on Fringe. She also played an ITU nurse in Frankenstein, a modern adaptation of that novel. She voiced the lead of Nariko in the animated Heavenly Sword film based off the game of the same name.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

The Argyle Sweater reveals an astronomical feature apparently known only to Federation navigators.

(10) HAMMER AND CHISEL. The Tom Brevoort Experience reproduces some of the 1938 letters between Detective Comics Inc. (DC) and Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel. The issue? Money, naturally. “The Selling of Superman: Correspondence between Jack Liebowitz and Jerry Siegel”.

…Above you see the first page of a letter sent by Jack Liebowitz to Jerry Siegel on September 28, 1938. For context, as this point, ACTION COMICS #5 had been published and the character of Superman was heating up. The McClure Newspaper Syndicate, which had been noncommittal about their interest in developing Superman as a newspaper strip, suddenly showed new signs of life, which had caused Siegel to write to Detective Comics and request that they return all rights but first publication to Superman to Siegel and Shuster. As you can imagine, Jack Liebowitz and his boss Harry Donenfeld weren’t having any part of that….

(11) VISITING SPACE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] This $50 Lego set was inspired by a group of “space travel posters” created by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA. In turn, those were inspired in part by classic travel posters from the golden age of luxury travel. “Retro NASA Space Tourism Posters made from LEGO Bricks are a Space Nerd Must-Have” at Yanko Design.

Here are the four LEGO “posters”.

Here are examples of NASA’s space travel posters.

(12) JEOPARDY! [Item by David Goldfarb.] On Monday’s episode, a clue from Single Jeopardy and one from Double Jeopardy.

In the first round, the category was “Task: Force”, and the $400 clue:

This term for a fictional energy barrier has been traced back to the 1931 sci-fi story “Islands of Space”

Returning champion Jared Watson knew it was a force field.

In the second round, “Movie Continents” for $2000:

Antarctica: a shape-shifting alien menaces helicopter pilot Kurt Russell

Harrison Seidel identified “The Thing”.

On Tuesday’s episode, “Books and Authors” had this at the $2000 level:

Her novel “Kindred” tells of Dana, a young Black woman who is transported from the 1970s back in time to the pre-Civil War South

Jared Watson (who gave the Vulcan sign during the intro, and made the A in Jared into a little Star Trek glyph) responded correctly.

(13) FREE FLASH SF EVENT. Space Cowboys Books of Joshua Tree, CA is hosting a “Flash Science Fiction Night Online Event” on Tuesday June 27 beginning at 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Register for free here.

Join us online for an evening of short science fiction readings (1000 words or less) with Shacklebound Books authors Marisca Pichette, Eric Fomley, and Jenna Hanchey. Flash Science Fiction Nights run 30 minutes or less, and are a fun and great way to learn about new authors from around the world.

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. With a new Transformers movie coming out, How It Should Have Ended decided to remaster its episode “How Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Should Have Ended”.

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

Pixel Scroll 4/2/23 It’s All Together Ooky, The Pixel Scrollery

Posted on April 2, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) NICK FURY. The official trailer for Marvel Studios’ Secret Invasion series dropped today. It streams June 21 on Disney+.

(2) STOP ME IF YOU’VE HEARD THIS BEFORE. “Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary Has a Big Idea He Thinks Will Help Prevent School Shootings” at MSN.com.

…”It’s really hard to watch an event like this become a partisan debate. It’s really, really hard,” O’Leary said on Fox Business March 30. “I actually think it’s triggering and going to trigger a new narrative, and this is going to be a difficult one to deal with, that could have been avoided.”

O’Leary suggested that artificial intelligence tools could possibly be used to detect people with violent motives.

“Are you willing, in America, to allow AI to scrape social media and target you to law enforcement?” O’Leary asked. “If we said yes to that, those people wouldn’t be dead.”

“All of these shooters generally post hours before they do the deed on some social media here or there,” he added. “In China, for example, a combination of face recognition with AI scraping of all the social media would identify this individual hours before they did their move into the school, and they could have been apprehended”.

In this case, messages sent by the shooter on Instagram hinted at the attack before it happened. O-Leary thinks these online conversations can be detected and that action could possibly prevent future shooting events….

Chris Barkley sent the link with this comment: “Apparently, ‘Mr. Wonderful’ has never seen Minority Report. Fortunately, we have.”

(3) BLUER ON THE OUTSIDE. “Tan, teal and aliens – has Wes Anderson really made a sci-fi movie?” asks the Guardian’s Ben Child.

Sci-fi is a genre that appears to be getting less fun by the decade. In the early 1900s, George Méliès imagined that the moon was populated by lunar goddesses, stripy, insectoid aliens and giant, psychedelic mushrooms. These days we’re fully aware it’s just a boring rock in space that even Nasa hasn’t bothered to visit in 50 years. Nobody believes in aliens except far-out conspiracy theorists and Khloé Kardashian.

Why then has arch-eccentric Wes Anderson chosen now to debut his first sci-fi movie? Asteroid City, the new trailer for which dropped this week, centres on a 1955 convention of young stargazers in a fictional US desert town. It features just about every indie actor from the past half a century or so; from Scarlett Johansson to Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton to Bryan Cranston, and teases the possibility of some kind of alien intervention among the geeky Americana and whistling sand dunes.

But is this really a sci-fi movie at all? And even if it is, will it be remembered as such?…

(4) FUNGUS AMONG US. In the New York Times, Dr. Neil Vora says, “‘The Last of Us’ Is Right. Our Warming Planet Is a Petri Dish”.

“The Last of Us,” a postapocalyptic television thriller, recently concluded its first season with a stunning finale. However, as a physician and horror superfan, I found the show’s beginning more striking: A 1960s talk-show host asks two epidemiologists what keeps them up at night. “Fungus,” one replies.

He’s worried about a real-world species of Ophiocordyceps known to hijack the body and behavior of ants. Fast forward to the show’s central, fictional drama: a pandemic caused by a type of that fungus, which mutated as the world grew warmer. The new version infects humans and turns them into ravenous, zombielike beings whose bodies are overtaken by mushrooms.

Fungal epidemics in humans are infrequent, in part because human-to-human transmission of fungi is rare, and I am not aware of any involving zombielike creatures. It’s far more likely that the next pandemic will come from a virus. But the idea that climate change is making the emergence of new health threats more likely is solid. Could it cause a fungus ubiquitous in the environment to morph into a lethal pathogen in humans? It’s possible.

Scientists like me worry that climate change and ecosystem destruction may be creating opportunities for fungal pathogens to grow more infectious, spread over larger distances and reach more people. For example, Candida auris, a drug-resistant yeast that can be deadly in hospitalized patients, may have gained the ability to infect people thanks to warmer temperatures, according to some scientists. On March 20, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Candida auris has spread at “an alarming rate” in health care facilities and is “concerning.”…

(5) SCORED OF THE RINGS. [Item by Ben Bird Person.] As the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952-2023) passed away recently, I thought maybe this would be a nice piece of ephemera to commemorate his lesser-known work: “Nokia 8800 ringtones [in honor of Ryuichi Sakamoto”.

(6) MEMORY LANE.

2023 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

The Beginning for this Scroll is rather different as it is for a novel — Devil’s Gun (The Disco Space Opera Book 2) — that isn’t out yet. It’s the sequel to Cat Rambo’s You Sexy Thing, one of my favorite novels of recent times.

As you know, we have an excerpt here from You Sexy Thing, one selected by the author set in the kitchens of the Last Chance Restaurant. It’s way cool. And tasty too.

You Sexy Thing had characters well worth hanging out with, detailed settings that felt quite real and a fascinating story. I expect no less out of its sequel given how extraordinarily good its author is.

Devil’s Gun will be released on Tor Macmillan, August 29th, and here’s a preorder link. Audiobook should available at the same time according to her. The cover art has not yet been revealed by Tor.

Here’s the Beginning as provided by the author. Thanks Cat!

Over the course of her military career, Niko Larsen had awoken to all sorts of conditions, including firefights, battlestorms, unexpected evacuations, and last minute musters. This was, however, the first time she had awoken to the cries of a panicked bio-ship.

“Captain Captain CAPTAIN!”

The words came from all around her, nearly blasting her out of her bunk. You Sexy Thing might have been a supra-intelligent being but right now it seemed reduced to far below that by panic. “They’re INSIDE me!”

Niko rolled out of her bed in one easy motion, and didn’t bother with anything other than a gun and its belt. Still strapping it on, she raced down the corridor towards the central control room. The other members of the crew were less awake, startled faces appearing in doorways as she flashed past.

Her mind flipped through possibilities as fast as her footsteps. How could someone have gotten aboard? The ship was docked, but still double-locked. Surely the ship would have alerted them the moment someone tried to cut their way in. Was this the blow from Tubal Last she’d been expecting, or some other, entirely new, threat?

She hit the doorway running, prepared for anything except what she saw…

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born April 2, 1921 — Redd Boggs. Los Angeles fanzine writer, editor and publisher. The 1948 Fantasy Annual was his first zine with Blish as a contributor, with Discord being nominated for the Best Fanzine Hugo. He was nominated for the Retro Hugo for Best Fan Writer, and Sky Hook was nominated for Best Fanzine. Boggs was also a member of First Fandom. (Died 1996.)
Born April 2, 1926 — Robert Holmes. Scriptwriter who came up with some brilliant Doctor Who stories including the Fourth Doctor-era The Talons of Weng-Chiang, one of my all-time favorite tales, which he collected in Doctor Who: The Scripts. He was the script editor on the series from 1974 to 1977 and was in ill health during much of that time. He died while working on scripts for the second and final Sixth Doctor stories of The Trial of a Time Lord. (Died 1986.)
Born April 2, 1933 — Murray Tinkelman. Illustrator of genre covers during the Seventies. Glyer has a most excellent look at him here in his obituary posting. I’m very fond of his cool, diffuse style of illustration that made it seem as if the subject of the cover was just coming into focus as you looked at them. Here’s the first edition of Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. (Died 2016.)
Born April 2, 1939 — Elliot K. Shorter. Fan, bookseller, and Locus co-editor once upon a time. He was attending conventions by the early Sixties and was a major figure in Sixties and Seventies fandom, and involved in a number of APAs. And as Mike notes, he spread his larger than life enthusiasm wide as he “belonged to the Tolkien Society of America, Hyborean Legion, the City College of New York SF Club, ESFA, Lunarians, Fanoclasts and NESFA.” He was involved in the Worldcon bid and helped run Suncon, the 1977 Worldcon which came out of the bid. All of this is particularly remarkable as he was one of the very few African-Americans in Sixties fandom. (Died 2013.)
Born April 2, 1940 — Peter Haining. British author and anthologist responsible for a number of really cool works such as The Sherlock Holmes Scrapbook, The Legend and Bizarre Crimes of Spring Heeled Jack, Doctor Who: The Key to Time A year by year record (which covered all of classic Who) and James Bond: A Celebration. He was responsible for some one hundred and seventy books in his lifetime. (Died 2007.)
Born April 2, 1948 — Joan D. Vinge, 75. Best-known for The Snow Queen which won a well-deserved Hugo and a sequel plus a related work, her most excellent series about the young telepath named Cat, and her Heaven’s Chronicles, the latter which I’ve not read. Her first new book in almost a decade after her serious car accident was the novelization of Cowboys & Aliens. And I find it really neat that she wrote the anime and manga reviews for The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror anthologies.
Born April 2, 1978 — Scott Lynch, 45. Author of the Gentleman Bastard series of novels. I know I read The Lies of Locke Lamora but who here has read the entire series to date? And I see he was writing Queen of the Iron Sands, an online serial novel for awhile. May I note he’s married to Elizabeth Bear, one of my favorite authors?

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Frank and Ernest break out.

(9) SUNDAY MORNING TRANSPORT. Darcie Little Badger’s “Those Hitchhiking Kids” is a free read this week at The Sunday Morning Transport, so feel free to share it.

What does wanderlust mean when you’re a ghost? Find out by joining Darcie Little Badger’s wonderfully intrepid Corey and Jimena on the road.

The Sunday Morning Transport is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our authors’ work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

(10) RUSS COLLECTION PREVIEWED. Samuel Delany reminded Facebook readers about a Joanna Russ collection that’s on the way.

Coming this October: Here’s the first volume from the Library of America’s assemblage of the works of my dear friend Joanna Russ (22 Feb., 1937—29 April, 2011) which contains all of her fiction except her 2nd (And Chaos Died) and her last novel (The Two of Them). You’ll all of her stories. Its wonderfully researched chronology is the closest thing we’ll have to a biography for a while. Edited by Russ scholar, Nikole Rudnik, it’s a fuckin’ fine job!

A second volume, if the gods smile on the country and publishing’s profits go above 6%, will, include the missing novels, *And Chaos Died* [1970] and The Two of Them* [1978] as well as a healthy handful of her crusading criticism—especially “How to Suppress Women’s Writing,” and the late collection of early essays, What Are We Fighting for. Easily they could throw in the best and wittiest of her reviews, and a heaping good handful of her Byronically bountiful letters, and another of her as yet uncollected—though published-—early tales.

(11) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by N.] Socratic debate on the nature of Doctor Who’s queer representation. It’s a long’un (~48 mins). “Doctor Who Was Queerbait”. This video particularly focuses on “Thasmin”, the pairing of the Thirteenth Doctor and companion Yasmin Khan, whether it delivers what it seems to promise, and the question of its canonicity.

The Doctor and the Valeyard’s lesser known second trial, with Thasmin on the stand.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, N., Ben Bird Person, Daniel Dern, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jon Meltzer.]

Pixel Scroll 2/4/23 My Chief Pixel Has Told Me To Scroll And Fifth This File

Posted on February 4, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) SHEREE RENÉE THOMAS LIBRARY EVENT. A Contemporary Conversations program with Sheree Renée Thomas will be held on Thursday, February 23 from 7:00 to 8:00 p.m. at the Rockville (MD) Memorial Library. The in-person event will also be offered via live streaming. Register here.

New York Times bestselling, two-time World Fantasy Award-winning author and editor Sheree Renée Thomas will talk about Afrofuturism & Diversity in Sci-Fi.

Thomas has been a 2022 Hugo Award Finalist, and her collection, Nine Bar Blues, is a Locus, Ignyte, and World Fantasy Finalist. She edited the groundbreaking Dark Matter anthologies that introduced a century of Black speculative fiction, including W.E.B. Du Bois’s science fiction stories. Thomas wrote Marvel’s Black Panther: Panther’s Rage novel (Oct ’22), adapted from the legendary comics, collaborated with Janelle Monáe on The Memory Librarian and is the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, founded in 1949 and Obsidian, founded in 1975. In 2022 she co-curated Carnegie Hall’s historic, citywide Afrofuturism Festival.

(2) AUSTRALIAN YA WINS AWARDS. A pair of YA fantasy novels were among the winners of the Victorian premier’s literary awards in Australia: “Melbourne author Jessica Au wins $125,000 for ‘quietly powerful’ novella” in the Guardian.

Lystra Rose, a writer of the Guugu Yimithirr, Birri Gubba and Erub nations and Scottish descent, won the Indigenous writing prize for her debut young adult fantasy fiction novel The Upwelling, which weaves the language and practices of the Yugambeh people into the narrative.

The young adult prize was won by New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based writer Kate Murray for her debut novel We Who Hunt the Hollow, also a fantasy novel.

(3) WRITERS MARKET SITE SHUTTERED. Ralan.com, one of the two big sites for writers looking for markets, now closed. Joe Stech of Compelling Science Fiction reached out to Ralan and received this statement for publication:

Ralan.com was started on 5 December 1996 and provided organized and up-to-date market listings that only accepted submissions of speculative genres, or at least elements of such. As this information was shared, other writers soon started helping back, pointing out new markets, and noting changes in active listings. Many publishers and editors were also actively involved, and this three-way interaction continued until the website closed on 1 February 2023, after 26 years & 57 days. Other sites provided a similar service, but arguably Ralan.com, at least in the speculative genres, had one of the most up-to-date market listings. Add to this the how-to-submit articles page, an extensive list of non-functioning markets, and a writing link page second to none. I offer my deepest thanks to all who helped along the way, and wish everyone the very best future.

Stech added, “And if you, dear reader, are looking for another place to discover short fiction markets, try the Submission Grinder.”

(4) A USEFUL CRITICISM. Samuel Delany regaled Facebook readers about his friendship with Judith Merril and Algis Budrys and their intersection with an edition of Nova.

Here is the back of a 12th printing of the Bantam Books edition of my 1968 novel *Nova* (May, 1983). I began it in Athens, Greece, June ’66, and finished it NYC, in May of ’67.) The two critics quoted on the back are A. J. Budrys (the way I am called Chip, most people called him A. J.) and the other is Judith Merril. (To her friends, old and young, she was Judy.) I think of both as my friends, but we were friends in very different ways ….

…. Dick [Entin]’s response was that the ending needed to be stronger—and that’s always good advice. He also objected to one page-and-a -half-section in the MS, which he found “over-the-top” and unbelievable. His exact words were, “Chip—businessmen just don’t do things like that.” So I took the passage out.

In his *Galaxy* review, Budrys had realized that *Nova* was a pretty carefully structured book. “What happened to Bryan?” he asked. The young man’s absence at the end registered, to him, as a hole in the tale’s basic pattern.

It was.

As soon as I read the question, I realized that the pages I’d removed had, among other things, answered just that question. If the Doubleday editors, Larry or Mark, had asked the same thing, I would have returned those pages as well. But A. J. was the first one who did. Also I realized that my putative villain wasn’t simply a modern businessman; he was a sociopath, if not a psychotic—of the sort who sometimes take charge of a big business or even a country.

Between the first Double and Co. edition and the first Doubleday Bookclub edition, I reinserted the pages (yes, I ran them through the typewriter again, and made some cosmetic improvements), but in every subsequent edition they were back in place. As well, I was very thankful for A. J.’s pointing it out to me, even though he had to do it in public….

(5) BLASPHEMIPEDIA? “Pakistan blocks Wikipedia for ‘blasphemous content’” – BBC News was unable to learn what material was in question.

…[Pakistan Telecommunication Authority] spokesperson Malahat Obaid said Wikipedia failed to respond to “repeated correspondence” over the removal of “blasphemous content”.

“They did remove some of the material but not all,” he added, confirming that the website would remain blocked until “all the objectionable material” was removed.

Details of the material in question have not been revealed.

The Wikimedia Foundation said if the ban continued it would “deprive everyone access to Pakistan’s knowledge, history, and culture”.

Free speech campaigners have raised concerns over the move, saying there seemed to be “a concerted effort to exert greater control over content on the internet”.

“The main purpose is to silence any dissent,” said digital rights activist Usama Khilji.

“A lot of times blasphemy is weaponised for that purpose,” he added….

(6) MELINDA DILLON OBITUARY. Actress Melinda Dillon died January 9 reports Variety: “Melinda Dillon Dead: A Christmas Story, Close Encounters Actor was 83”. She played many genre roles – in addition to those listed below, she also was in a Twilight Zone episode.

…Dillon is celebrated for her role as Jillian Guiler in Steven Speilberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), for which she earned an Oscar nomination for supporting actress. She received a second supporting actress nomination in 1982 for her role as Teresa in Sydney Pollack’s “Absence of Malice” (1981). In 1977, she received a Golden Globe nomination for acting debut in a motion picture for Hal Ashby’s “Bound for Glory” (1976).

In a statement, Spielberg praised Dillon, saying, “Melinda was generous of spirit and lent such kindness to the character she played in ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’… We will all miss her.”

Dillon also played the matriarch of the Parker family in Bob Clark’s holiday classic “A Christmas Story” (1983) and went on to appear in “Harry and the Hendersons” (1987), “Captain America” (1990) and “Nightbreaker” (1989). Her most recent appearances were in “Heartland” in 2007, and before that in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia” (1999) as Rose Gator, the wife of a game show host with a terrible secret….

(7) MEMORY LANE.

1958 — [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

There are some Beginnings that are as perfect as the story that follows and one of them is that starts off Robert Bloch’s “That Hell-Bound Train” which many decades after reading it remains my favorite piece of fiction by him.

It was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in September of 1958.

I’d stick a spoiler alert in here but surely every Filer here knows the story of Martin, a hobo, who one dark night has a large black train pulls up beside him. The conductor says Martin can have anything he wants in exchange for which he will “ride that Hell-Bound Train” when he dies. He hands Martin a watch which he tells him will stop time when Martin reaches he perceives to be the absolute perfect moment in his life.

Y’all know what that moment turns out to be…

It would win the Hugo Award at Detention in a field of nominees far too large to list here. Really it was.

I love every word of the story from what Martin does with his life until he finally stops time. It is indeed a sterling story.

William Tenn says in Immodest Proposals: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn, volume 1, that he helped shape the story while at the magazine as it was “an absolutely fine piece of work that just didn’t have a usable ending”. He had come to the magazine after Boucher retired.

So here’s that wonderful Beginning… and I wondering did anyone write a filk off of it?

When Martin was a little boy, his daddy was a Railroad Man. Daddy never rode the high iron, but he walked the tracks for the CB&Q, and he was proud of his job. And every night when he got drunk, he sang this old song about That Hell-Bound Train.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born February 4, 1922 — William Phipps. He started off his genre career by being in both The War of The Worlds and Invaders from Mars. He’d later be in Cat-Women of the Moon, The Snow Creature, The Evil of Frankenstein, and the Dune series. He’d have one-offs in Batman, Green Hornet, The Munsters, Wild Wild West and a lead role in the Time Express series which would last four episodes according IMDB. (Died 2018.)
Born February 4, 1936 — Gary Conway, 87. Best remembered I’d say for starring in Irwin Allen‘s Land of the Giants. He was also in How to Make a Monster, a late Fifties horror film which I’m delighted to say that you can watch here as it is out of copyright. He’s the Young Frankenstein in it.
Born February 4, 1940 — John Schuck, 83. My favorite SF role by him is as the second Draal, Keeper of the Great Machine, on the Babylon 5 series. I know it was only two episodes but it was a fun role. He’s also played the role of Klingon ambassador Kamarag in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. He guest starred in Deep Space Nine as Legate Parn in “The Maquis: Part II”, on Star Trek: Voyager as Chorus #3 in the “Muse” episode, and on Enterprise as Antaak in the “Divergence” and “Affliction” episodes. Oh, and he was Herman Munster in The Munsters Today. Now that was a silly role! Did you know his makeup was the Universal International Frankenstein-monster makeup format whose copyright NBCUniversal still owns?
Born February 4, 1951 — Patrick Bergin, 72. If he had done nothing else, he’d make the Birthday list today for playing Robin Hood in the 1990 Robin Hood which for my money is the finest such film made. Go ahead and argue, I’ve all night. Now as it turns out he has a very long career in this community starting after playing Robin Hood by being in Frankenstein as Victor Frankenstein, then Benjamin Trace In Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace (a film universally despised), George Challenger in The Lost World, Treasure Island as Billy Bones, Merlin: The Return as King Arthur, Dracula as, well, Dracula Himself, Ghostwood as Friar Paul and Gallowwalkers as Marshall Gaza.
Born February 4, 1959 — Pamelyn Ferdin, 64. She was in the “And the Children Shall Lead” episode of Trek. She’ll show up in The Flying Nun (as two different characters), voicing a role in The Cat in The Hat short, Night Gallery, Sealab 2020 (another voice acting gig), Shazam! and Project UFO. She’d have a main role in Space Academy, the Jonathan Harris fronted series as well.
Born February 4, 1961 — Neal Asher, 62. I’ve been reading and enjoying his Polity series since he started it nearly twenty years ago. Listing all of his works here would drive OGH to a nervous tick as I think there’s now close to thirty works in total. I’m listening to The Line War right now and it’s typically filled with a mix of outrageous SF concepts (Dyson spheres in the middle of a hundred thousand year construction cycles) and humans who might not be human (Ian Cormac is back again). As I said several years ago, he is the sort of writer that I think drives our Puppies to madness — literate pulp SF pumped out fast that readers like.
Born February 4, 1962 — Thomas Scott Winnett.. Locus magazine editorial assistant and reviewer from 1989 to 1994. He worked on Locus looks at books and Books receivedas well. In addition, he wrote well over a hundred reviews for Locus. He died of AIDS-related pneumonia. (Died 2004.)

(9) VIEW DORAN ART. “Colleen Doran Illustrates Neil Gaiman” will be on exhibit at the Society of Illustrators in New York beginning March 22 and running through July 29.

In the midst of a long career drawing comics for such titles as Wonder Woman and Legion of Super-Heroes, Colleen Doran has found her artistic Holy Grail in her series of adaptations of Neil Gaiman short stories published by Dark Horse, including her latest masterpiece Chivalry, the Eisner and Bram Stoker Award winning dark fantasy Snow Glass Apples, and The Troll Bridge, a spooky coming-of-age story.

A lifelong enthusiast of Arthurian mythology, Doran longed to adapt Gaiman’s 1998 short story Chivalry, the story of Mrs. Whitaker, a British widow who finds the Holy Grail in a thrift shop and the knight who offers her priceless relics in exchange so he can win the Grail and end his quest. Like the Illuminated manuscripts that inspired her colors and layout, Doran’s lush hand-painted pages for Chivalry are full of symbolism taken from her personal life, world history, and Arthurian legend. Her jewel-toned color palette and detailed drawing make viewing the original artwork a special experience.

Also on view will be several pages from Snow Glass Apples, Doran’s version of Gaiman’s chilling retelling of the Snow White story, drawn in an intricate style influenced by the Irish artist Harry Clarke. The exhibit, curated by Kim A. Munson, editor of the Eisner nominated anthology Comic Art in Museums and 2022 Eisner Awards Judge, will also include works from other Doran/Gaiman titles such as The Sandman, American Gods, Norse Mythology, and others.

(10) PINKWATER DOES CAR TALK. “#2309: Circumferentially-Challenged: The Best of Car Talk” on NPR. Andrew Porter says, “The Daniel Pinkwater part comes at 27 minutes into this episode. And it’s hilarious!”

From the Daniel Pinkwater files comes a tale of unexpected advice buried deep inside a BMW owner’s manual. The boys also contemplate why men never pay for anything with coins, helmets for drivers and, oh yeah- some actual car problems! All on this episode of the Best of Car Talk.

(11) HISTORIC FIND. The New York Times reports a remarkable discovery: “Metal Detector Hobbyist Finds a 500-Year-Old Pendant Linked to Henry VIII”.

Charlie Clarke, a 34-year-old cafe owner in Birmingham, England, was feeling down about losing his dog to cancer, so he went over to a friend’s place in the countryside to take a stroll and get some fresh air. He brought his metal detector with him, gear for the new hobby he had picked up six months earlier.

When he heard the unusually loud beeps emitted while he walked on his friend’s property in nearby Warwickshire, he thought he had probably come across a soda can. Instead, about a foot down into the earth, he happened upon a treasure that has electrified researchers, and could very well change the course of his family’s future.

Mr. Clarke pulled up a gold chain and heart-shaped pendant, adorned with symbols his friend recognized as connected to Henry VIII and his first wife, Katherine of Aragon. At first, he thought it must have been from a costume, but it seemed far too heavy for that, he said in an interview on Friday.

“I knew it was special,” he said.

The pendant itself was an ornate spectacle: The front was decorated with a pomegranate bush, an emblem of Katherine, and an entwined, double-headed Tudor rose, which was employed by the Tudors starting in 1486. On the other side, the letters H and K — for Henry and Katherine — were written in Lombardic script and connected by a ribbon….

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Courtesy of Netflix, here’s the “Wednesday Official Blooper Reel”. Wednesday usually is spooky, except when she’s breaking herself up.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Andrew Porter, Dariensync, Cathy Green, Mark Whitroth, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day by Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 10/9/22 In A Scroll In The File, There Ticked A Pixel

Posted on October 9, 2022 by Mike Glyer

(1) CASE DISMISSED. Nerd & Tie’s Trae Dorn finally came out on top: “Ryan Kopf’s Second Lawsuit Against Us Has Been Finally Dismissed”. (See more details in 2016 post “Ryan Kopf Sues Blogger Trae Dorn”.)

Since 2016 Nerd & Tie, former Nerd & Tie contributor Pher Sturz, and I have been defending a defamation lawsuit brought against us by AnimeCon.org convention owner Ryan Kopf in the state of Illinois. It’s been a long road, and a lot has happened — but we’re happy to say that the Illinois lawsuit (like his Iowa lawsuit before it) has been dismissed.
This time around, it was dismissed for failure to prosecute.
We want to thank everyone who stood by us these six years, and helped raise our voice in the convention community. A lot has changed in the half dozen years of this lawsuit, but we hope to continue our commitment to the con scene at large. We stand by the articles we published that were named in the suit, and twice now we’ve stood up for ourselves and won….

(2) NYPL RECOMMENDED COMICS. [Item by Cathy Green.] The New York Public Library has put together a list of the 50 best comics for adults published in 2022. There’s quite a few on the list that I think would be Hugo eligible in the graphic novel category. “Best New Comics of 2022 for Adults”.

(3) TOM GAULD INTERVIEW. In Print Magazine, Steven Heller interviews the cartoonist: “Tom Gauld’s ‘The First of the Mohicans’ and Many, Many More Paeans to Books and Authors”.

Do you have a professional, scholarly or simply personal relationship to books?
It started out as a purely personal interest in reading but, because these cartoons appear every week in the “Books” section of The Guardian newspaper, it’s become a somewhat professional thing, too. I think without the weekly commission I’d still make some cartoons about books, but probably not on a weekly basis.
Why are librarians the target of your acerbic yet sympathetic humor?
My parents were big library users and drove me and my brother from our house in the countryside in Scotland to the local library every week, and that’s where I discovered many amazing authors, so I’ve always had a soft spot for libraries and librarians. In the UK our dismal government has been closing libraries and I wanted to make a cartoon supporting librarians. It seemed too insipid and obvious to make a cartoon which just said “libraries are good,” so I did the opposite and made a cartoon about dangerous librarians rising up and taking over the world. That’s where the title for the book comes from.

(4) A WRITER’S CAREER BEGINS. Samuel R. Delany posted a long autobiographical comment on Facebook earlier this week which begins:

From the outside, often I look like the writer of a single novel—a strange, semi-fantasy that can have many readings, which—after a couple of years, when the publisher had published another—*Trouble on Triton* as well—they considered it enough of a success to rope in almost all my earlier books, including half-a-dozen of the seven that had already been published; as well, they bought the rights of the two most interesting (Hogg and Equinox, which there was no chance of their publishing); they even subsidized me through three-quarters of my next major project, Return to Nevèrÿon, before finally deciding I was incorrigible, and turned me over to the university system, in which I had been dabbling my toes since ’75, to begin 35+ years as a professor of (first) comparative literature and (second) English and (third) creative writing, at four universities. (One was a repeat.)…

(5) READ TWO TABLETS AND CALL ME IN THE MORNING. “Ecocide, toxic masculinity, fear of death, and more: the Epic of Gilgamesh’s themes could be transcribed from yesterday’s newspaper,” argues Robert Macfarlane in “A Fireball from the Sands” behind a paywall at The New York Review of Books.

…That the Epic of Gilgamesh exists at all is close to a miracle, and has much to do with the bibliophilia of the last great Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal (reigned 669–627 BCE), as well as the curatorial talents of desert sand. Partial versions of Gilgamesh are found in multiple languages, including an older Sumerian cycle of five (probably freestanding) stories that date back in written form to circa 2100 BCE; an Old Babylonian version from circa 1750 BCE; and the twelve-tablet Standard Babylonian version, which provides the main basis of all modern translations of Gilgamesh and is thought to have been edited between circa 1200 and 1000 BCE.
The best-preserved tablets bearing the Standard Babylonian version were recovered in the mid-nineteenth century from the buried ruins of the Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh (now Kouyunjik in northern Iraq). A cultured despot, Ashurbanipal used the might of his empire to create the greatest library of the age. He ordered the regional centers of Mesopotamia to send him copies of significant texts in their holdings, he plundered the repositories of the cities defeated by his armies, and he hired scholars and scribes to make copies of Babylonian sources on fine clay, and in many cases to stamp those copies with a colophon recording his ownership….

(6) THE BREAKFAST BAR IS OPEN. A CNN opinion piece speculates about “A Martian menu that could transform how we eat on Earth”.

…Lunch takes place in the main cafeteria where every inch of spare space is filled with greenery, because a core design principle on Mars is to ensure that every photon of solar energy is used to grow plants. On the menu is a leafy salad tossed with plant-based protein cubes and seasoned with salty seaweed flakes, accompanied by a milkshake.
The salad greens are grown in hydroponic solutions under LED lights that are timed to ensure each plant gets the right wavelength of light, at the right intensity, and at the right moment to optimize growth. Most of these plants are cultivated underground, safe from radiation, in an atmosphere enriched with carbon dioxide (plants generally do better when carbon dioxide levels are a bit higher than is comfortable for humans).
The seaweed is grown in the tanks along with the algae that went into the breakfast bar…

(7) MEMORY LANE.

1990 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Thirty-two years ago in syndication in the States, the She-Wolf of London series first aired on this date possibly in your market. This series should not be confuse with the horror film that aired forty-five years earlier starting June Lockhart.

Our series was created by Tom McLoughlin and Mick Garris. The former’s apparent, and I do mean apparent, claim to fame is directing Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives and One Dark Night. Really? The latter on the other sharpened claw has worked a lot with Spielberg, is the creator of the Showtime Masters of Horror series, has an Edgar for an episode he wrote for the Spielberg’s Amazing Stories series… Shall I stop? Seriously he’s really great.

SPOILERS NOW. THEY HAVE TEETH. THEY BITE, REALLY.

It starred Kate Hodge as the really sexy American graduate student Randi Wallace who travelled to London Britain to study mythology with Prof. Ian Matheson and gets bitten one night on a British moor and turns into a werewolf.

Together they attempt to solve supernatural cases — a headless horseman, the spirit of Guy Fawkes, another werewolf and other creatures that are sort of convincingly presented.

Eventually, their search takes them from London to Los Angeles, when they move back to Randi’s original home and Ian becomes host of an appalling down market TV talk show focusing on psychic phenomena.

NO MORE TEETH FOR NOW

The move to the States represents the really, really weird spilt in the series. There was one season with the first fourteen episodes being filmed in a London studio mostly and aired under the She-Wolf of London name, and a second season of six episodes was filmed in Los Angeles and aired under the name of, and may I say yuck, Love and Curses.

Some sources, well wiki, say the series contained female nudity which would have been extremely unusual for the time. I cannot confirm this.

Episodes of the series ran on Sci-Fi for a short time following its cancellation. For these airings, the Love and Curses episodes were retitled She-Wolf of London. For once, Sci-Fi did something smart.

The series was originally on the Hollywood Premiere Network which would become UPN.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and JJ.]

Born October 9, 1890 — Harlan Thompson. Screenwriter, Lyricist, Stage and Screen Director and Producer. After an early career co-writing scripts and lyrics for Broadway musicals, he turned his talents to Hollywood, creating films and musicals which starred names such as Cary Grant, Bob Hope, Mae West, and W.C. Fields. His genre connection is his credit for the official novelization in 1972 of the movie Silent Running. The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction notes that “The novel quietly patches some plot holes in the film’s script.” (Died 1966.)
Born October 9, 1900 — Harry Bates. Writer, Editor, and Member of First Fandom. Editor from 1930 to 1933 the new pulp magazines Astounding Stories of Super-Science (which later became Astounding Stories, then Analog) and Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror. His Retro Hugo finalist novelette “Farewell to the Master” was the source of the classic science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still. He wrote a number of other stories under his own name and under various pseudonyms. In 1976 he was inducted into the First Fandom Hall of Fame. (Died 1981.)
Born October 9, 1949 — Jim Starlin, 73. Comics artist and illustrator. If you’ve seen Guardians of the Galaxy, you’ve seen the characters Thanos and Drax the Destroyer which he created. He would also work for DC and other companies over the years. Starlin and Bernie Wrightson produced Heroes for Hope, a 1985 one-shot designed to raise money for African famine relief and recovery. Genre writers such as Stephen King, George R. R. Martin, Harlan Ellison, and Edward Bryant would contribute to this undertaking. He’s written a number of genre novels co-written with his wife Daina Graziunas.
Born October 9, 1948 – Ciaran Carson. Northern Ireland-born poet and novelist who is here, genre wise at least, for his translation of the early Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge, which he called simply The Táin. I’m also going to single him out for penning the finest book ever written on Irish traditional music, Last Night’s Fun: About Time, Food and Music. It’s every bit as interesting as Iain Banks’ Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram is. With Irish music added in. (Died 2018.)
Born October 9, 1953 — Barbara March. She played the Klingon Lursa a total of five times. First on Next Generation in in two part “Redemption”, followed by “Firstborn” and then on Deep Space Nine in “Past Prologue”, and finally in the Generations film. Cancer took her far too young. Though she did no other genre acting, she played Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the stage and renown for being Lady Macbeth. She wrote a horror novel, The Copper People.(Died 2019.)
Born October 9, 1954 — Scott Bakula, 68. Lead in two great SF series, Sam Beckett on the first Quantum Leap and Captain Jonathan Archer on Enterprise. He also starred as Nolan Wood who discovers the alien conspiracy in the remake of The Invaders. Though definitely not genre or even genre adjacent, he was Dwayne Pride on the recently cancelled if greatly accent challenged NCIS: New Orleans.
Born October 9, 1956 — Robert Reed, 66. Extremely prolific short story writer with at least two hundred tales so far. And a number of novels as well such as the superb Marrow series. He won a Hugo at Nippon 2007 for his “A Billion Eves” novella. And he was nominated for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer as well.
Born October 9, 1961 — Matt Wagner, 61. The Grendel Tales and Batman / Grendel are very good as is Grendel vs. The Shadow. His run on Madame Xanadu was amazing too. Oh, and I’d suggest both issues of House of Mystery Halloween Annual that he did for some appropriate Halloween reading. And let’s not forget his long run on the Sandman Mystery Theatre.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Off the Mark did something unexpected – thought of a funny new zombie joke!

(10) CHILD’S GARDEN OF BATMAN. [Item by Chris Barkley.] I think Alan Moore should have a Snickers bar AND a nap… “Infantile Love For Batman Can Be Precursor To Fascism, Says Alan Moore” in a Guardian interview reported by Deadline.

…He said:
“I said round about 2011 that I thought that it had serious and worrying implications for the future if millions of adults were queueing up to see Batman movies. Because that kind of infantilisation – that urge towards simpler times, simpler realities – that can very often be a precursor to fascism.”
And he pointed out the time of Donald Trump’s election in 2016 coincided with superhero movies moving to the top of the worldwide box office.
Moore told the Guardian:
“Hundreds of thousands of adults [are] lining up to see characters and situations that had been created to entertain the 12-year-old boys – and it was always boys – of 50 years ago. I didn’t really think that superheroes were adult fare. I think that this was a misunderstanding born of what happened in the 1980s – to which I must put my hand up to a considerable share of the blame, though it was not intentional – when things like Watchmen were first appearing. There were an awful lot of headlines saying ‘Comics Have Grown Up’.
“I tend to think that, no, comics hadn’t grown up. There were a few titles that were more adult than people were used to. But the majority of comics titles were pretty much the same as they’d ever been. It wasn’t comics growing up. I think it was more comics meeting the emotional age of the audience coming the other way.”

(11) DRAWN THAT WAY. John Coulthart casts an admiring eye on old prozine illustrations in “Emshwiller illustrates Bester”.

… Before publication in book form, the story was serialised in four parts in Galaxy magazine, from October 1956 to January 1957; Ed “Emsh” Emshwiller illustrated each instalment as well as the cover of the debut issue. I’ve said before that one of the great benefits of being able to browse old magazines online is having the opportunity to turn up neglected illustrations like these. Bester’s novel has long been regarded as a genre classic—Michael Moorcock and William Gibson both refer to it as a favourite—but its print editions haven’t generated many memorable covers. Here we have Emshwiller illustrating the entire story, and doing an excellent job, yet his drawings have been buried for years….

(12) PULLMAN SERIES CONTINUES. HBO dropped this trailer for season 3 of His Dark Materials on Friday.

(13) PICARD SEASON 3. The Star Trek: Picard Teaser Trailer was shown at New York Comic Con 2022.

Get a closer look at Star Trek: Picard Season 3 in an all-new teaser that premiered at the Star Trek Universe panel at New York Comic Con 2022. Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, LeVar Burton, Gates McFadden, Marina Sirtis, and Michael Dorn of Star Trek: The Next Generation all return for one final high stakes mission.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Cathy Green, Trae Dorn, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip Williams.]

2021 World Fantasy Awards Final Ballot

Posted on July 20, 2022 by Mike Glyer

The World Fantasy Awards administrator announced the final ballot for this year’s awards on July 20.

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT

Samuel R. Delany
Terri Windling

2021 WORLD FANTASY AWARD FINALISTS

NOVEL

Black Water Sister by Zen Cho (Ace Books/Macmillan)
A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark (Tordotcom/Orbit UK)
The City Beautiful by Aden Polydoros (Inkyard Press)
The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri (Orbit US/Orbit UK)
The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward (Nightfire/Viper UK)

NOVELLA

“For Sale by Owner” by Elizabeth Hand (When Things Get Dark)
Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw (Nightfire)
And What Can We Offer You Tonight by Premee Mohamed (Neon Hemlock Press)
Finches by A. M. Muffaz (Vernacular Books)
“A Canticle for Lost Girls” by Isabel Yap (Never Have I Ever: Stories)

SHORT FICTION

“The Failing Name” by Eugen Bacon and Seb Doubinsky (Fantasy Magazine, Aug. 2021)
“The Demon Sage’s Daughter” by Varsha Dinesh (Strange Horizons, 8 Feb 2021)
“If the Martians Have Magic” by P. Djèlí Clark (Uncanny Magazine #42, Sep/Oct 2021)
“#Spring Love, #Pichal Pairi” by Usman T. Malik (Tor.com, Mar 3 2021)
“Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny Magazine #39, Mar/Apr 2021)
“(emet)” by Lauren Ring (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/Aug 2021)

ANTHOLOGY

Professor Charlatan Bardot’s Travel Anthology to the Most (Fictional) Haunted Buildings in the Weird, Wild World (2021 Edition), eds. Charlatan Bardot and Eric J. Guignard (Dark Moon Books)
When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson, ed. Ellen Datlow (Titan Books)
The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror Volume Two, ed. Paula Guran (Pyr)
The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction (2021), ed. Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki (Jembefola Press)
Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology, eds. Alex Hernandez, Matthew David Goodwin, Sarah Rafael García (Mad Creek Books an imprint of the Ohio State University Press)

COLLECTION

Tales the Devil Told Me by Jen Fawkes (Press 53)
Big Dark Hole: Stories by Jeffrey Ford (Small Beer Press)
Midnight Doorways: Fables from Pakistan by Usman T. Malik (Kitab)
The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales by Angela Slatter (Tartarus Press)
The Ghost Sequences by A. C. Wise (Undertow Publications)
Never Have I Ever: Stories by Isabel Yap (Small Beer Press)

ARTIST

Brom
Odera Igbokwe
Tran Nguyen
Aleksandra Skiba
Charles Vess

SPECIAL AWARD – PROFESSIONAL

Charlie Jane Anders, for Never Say You Can’t Survive (Tordotcom)
Cam Collins and Steve Shell, for Old Gods of Appalachia (podcast)
Irene Gallo, for Tor.com
Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda, for Monstress Volume Six: The Vow (Image Comics)
William K. Schafer, for Subterranean Press
Sheree Renée Thomas, for editing F&SF

SPECIAL AWARD – NON-PROFESSIONAL

Gautam Bhatia and Vanessa Rose Phin, for Strange Horizons
Maria J. Pérez Cuervo, for Hellebore
Michael Kelly, for Undertow Publications
Tonia Ransom, for Nightlight: A Horror Fiction Podcast
Arley Sorg and Christie Yant, for Fantasy Magazine
Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, for Uncanny Magazine

World Fantasy Award Administrator Peter Dennis Pautz thanked the judges: S. E. Cooney, Julie Crisp, C. C. Finlay, Richard Kadrey, and Misha Stone.

The awards will be presented at the World Fantasy Convention, to be held November 3-6, 2022, in New Orleans.

[Thanks to Peter Dennis Pautz for the story.]

Pixel Scroll 7/12/22 Pixels Come From Pixelvania

Posted on July 12, 2022 by Mike Glyer

(1) WEBB WEAVINGS. NASA hosts the “First Images from the James Webb Space Telescope” at the link.

…Webb’s first observations were selected by a group of representatives from NASA, ESA, CSA, and the Space Telescope Science Institute. They reveal the capabilities of all four of Webb’s state-of-the-art scientific instruments:

SMACS 0723: Webb has delivered the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe so far – and in only 12.5 hours. For a person standing on Earth looking up, the field of view for this new image, a color composite of multiple exposures each about two hours long, is approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length. This deep field uses a lensing galaxy cluster to find some of the most distant galaxies ever detected. This image only scratches the surface of Webb’s capabilities in studying deep fields and tracing galaxies back to the beginning of cosmic time.
WASP-96b (spectrum): Webb’s detailed observation of this hot, puffy planet outside our solar system reveals the clear signature of water, along with evidence of haze and clouds that previous studies of this planet did not detect. With Webb’s first detection of water in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, it will now set out to study hundreds of other systems to understand what other planetary atmospheres are made of.
Southern Ring Nebula: This planetary nebula, an expanding cloud of gas that surrounds a dying star, is approximately 2,000 light years away. Here, Webb’s powerful infrared eyes bring a second dying star into full view for the first time. From birth to death as a planetary nebula, Webb can explore the expelling shells of dust and gas of aging stars that may one day become a new star or planet.
Stephan’s Quintet: Webb’s view of this compact group of galaxies, located in the constellation Pegasus, pierced through the shroud of dust surrounding the center of one galaxy, to reveal the velocity and composition of the gas near its supermassive black hole. Now, scientists can get a rare look, in unprecedented detail, at how interacting galaxies are triggering star formation in each other and how the gas in these galaxies is being disturbed.
Carina Nebula: Webb’s look at the ‘Cosmic Cliffs’ in the Carina Nebula unveils the earliest, rapid phases of star formation that were previously hidden. Looking at this star-forming region in the southern constellation Carina, as well as others like it, Webb can see newly forming stars and study the gas and dust that made them.

One of these you may have seen before — Stephan’s Quintet:

Stephan’s Quintet, a visual grouping of five galaxies, is best known for being prominently featured in the holiday classic film, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Today, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveals Stephan’s Quintet in a new light. This enormous mosaic is Webb’s largest image to date, covering about one-fifth of the Moon’s diameter. It contains over 150 million pixels and is constructed from almost 1,000 separate image files. The information from Webb provides new insights into how galactic interactions may have driven galaxy evolution in the early universe.

(2) LEAVING THE STARTING GATE. Marina Koren says “Webb’s First View of the Universe Is Only the Beginning” in The Atlantic.

…The image, released today, was taken by the world’s newest space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope. It is the first real snapshot from the mission, which launched more than six months ago and currently orbits about 1 million miles from Earth.
The picture is sparkly and beautiful, a great choice for a computer background. It is also, more important, an entirely new view of the universe. The light from the galaxies in the foreground left 4.6 billion years ago, and the light from the galaxies beyond those, even longer. All this light has been captured in unprecedented detail by the most powerful space telescope in history, making this one of the deepest, most high-resolution pictures of the universe that humankind has ever taken.
Astronomers call this kind of view a “deep field”: a picture of one spot in space, made with long exposure times so that the instrument can really bask in any incoming light. Remember Hubble, and that glorious deep-field image from the 1990s, sparkling with thousands of galaxies? The Webb telescope was designed to spot celestial objects that are about 100 times fainter than the ones Hubble can detect….

(3) MORE THAN PRETTY PICTURES. TIME Magazine thinks one of the JWST’s non-visual observations might be the most provocative: “What the James Webb Telescope Images Mean for Space”.

…Still, it was in some ways, the smallest object the telescope imaged—the exoplanet WASP-96b—that will likely cause the greatest excitement. Until now, exoplanets, or planets circling other stars, were detectable in only one of two ways: The transit method, in which astronomers discern the small dimming of light in a parent star as an orbiting planet passes in front of it; and the radial velocity method—in which they look for the small wobble in the position of the star as the gravity of the orbiting planet tugs on it.
What astronomers could never do until now was see the planet itself, since spotting so small a body in the blinding glare of its parent star would be like standing a block away and trying to see a moth fluttering next to a streetlight. The image of the smaller body would simply get washed out. And indeed, for now, Webb did not even get an image of WASP-96b itself; but what it got instead is something more important. Now that astronomers can even faintly image exoplanets, they can also look for signs of life on them, as the light from their parent star streams through their atmosphere, revealing the make-up of the gasses and the possibility of the chemical fingerprints of biology.
Webb got just such a chemical spectrum of WASP-96b, revealing that the atmosphere is rich in water, the key ingredient for life as we know it.

(4) CHICON’S ART-THEMED NEWS. Chicon 8 chair Helen Montgomery messaged members today about art exhibits and events at the 2022 Worldcon.

…Additionally, we will have two very special art exhibits courtesy of some of our other Guests of Honor, Joe Siclari and Edie Stern, and Erle Korshak. The Korshak Collection will be exhibited in the San Francisco room of the Hyatt Regency Chicago, right across the hall from the main Art Show. The Siclari/Stern Collection will be displayed within the Art Show in the Regency Ballroom. You will not want to miss these exhibits!
We will of course have our Art Show, Print Shop, and Art Auction. Artists will also be doing demos, and some will be in the Dealers Room / Creatives Corner of the Exhibit Hall. We are working on scheduling docent tours of the Art Show, and we are going to have a “Meet The Artist” event in the Art Show on Friday evening, where you will have the opportunity to talk to the artists about their work.
Chicon 8 will also be hosting The Chesley Awards on Friday evening of the convention in the Crystal Ballroom. The Chesley Awards are administered and presented by ASFA: The Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists. https://asfa-art.com/the-chesley-awards/

(5) IN LIVING COLOR. The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit “Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color”, about rediscovering the paint jobs that originally adorned ancient sculpture, continues through March 26, 2023.

“Ancient Greek and Roman sculpture was once colorful, vibrantly painted and richly adorned with detailed ornamentation. Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color reveals the colorful backstory of polychromy—meaning “many colors,” in Greek—and presents new discoveries of surviving ancient color on artworks in The Met’s world-class collection. Exploring the practices and materials used in ancient polychromy, the exhibition highlights cutting-edge scientific methods used to identify ancient color and examines how color helped convey meaning in antiquity, and how ancient polychromy has been viewed and understood in later periods.
The exhibition features a series of reconstructions of ancient sculptures in color by Prof. Dr. V. Brinkmann, Head of the Department of Antiquity at the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung, and Dr. U. Koch-Brinkmann.”

(6) NOT A GOOD ATMOSPHERE FOR ARTISTS. Anime News Network rips “The Irresponsible Management of This Year’s Artist Alley – Anime Expo 2022” in this July 7 article. (The CO2 numbers are at the link.)

…Of course, there are many factors involved in community spread [of COVID], including vaccination (which doesn’t guarantee against infection, but drastically reduces one’s chance of hospitalization and death), mask usage (which is most effective when both parties are masked, especially the one who is infectious), mask type and fit, and environmental factors such as ventilation and airflow. Regarding the first two, Anime Expo briefly changed their COVID safety guidelines in early June, but eventually reverted their decision, requiring that all attendees either show proof of full COVID vaccination or a negative test taken within 72 hours, and asking that everyone wear a mask in all indoor spaces….
Another community spread factor, though, is ventilation. Transmission is reduced in outdoor settings where airflow tends to be high, but in indoor spaces, ventilation can vary drastically depending on different components. One attendee, who goes by the Twitter handle @nickelpin, was curious what the ventilation was like in various areas of the convention center, so she brought along a portable carbon dioxide monitor. The usage of CO2 monitors has been increasing in popularity—scientists and other data enthusiasts have been taking readings of places like airplanes and event spaces; parents have been sending their kids back to school with CO2 monitors to check the ventilation of classrooms….
…Outside of Day 1 heat-related effects, some artists reported feeling ill throughout the weekend with various non-COVID symptoms that subsided after they left the convention center each day. Since the end of the convention, a spreadsheet being shared amongst Artist Alley participants has shown increasing numbers of artists self-reporting headaches, drowsiness, and trouble concentrating, which could potentially be related to the high levels of CO2 in Kentia Hall.
One veteran artist who wanted to remain anonymous told us she had two panic attacks and a spell of nausea and vertigo, and had to rely on helpers so that she could take breaks outside the convention center. “It was worst on Saturday and Sunday, just kinda feeling like you’re breathing but not actually getting air.” She said her booth was located near a wall with three feet of space behind her, which made it more unusual to her that she felt she couldn’t breathe. She confirmed that she had not felt this way at other conventions or previous Anime Expos….

(7) HOW ABOUT THOSE HUGO-NOMINATED NOVELETTES? Cora Buhlert joined the Hugos There podcast again as part of a panel discussing the finalists for the 2022 Hugo Award for Best Novelette. Tthe audio only link is here.

(8) THE UNAVOIDABLE MESSAGE. Oliver Brackenbury has posted part II of his interview with David C. Smith at the So I’m Writing a Novel podcast: “Interview with David C. Smith (Part Two)”.

In this half we discuss the 80’s sword & sorcery publishing implosion, the importance of adapting to changing tastes and not just telling the same limited range of stories ad infinitum, how expanding something – like a genre’s possibilities – means more and doesn’t take away what’s already there that people like, the fallacy of thinking you can write a story with no theme or message or opinions or “politics” in it, David’s latest novel (Sometime Lofty Towers), avoiding the white savior pitfall and otherwise best practices when writing fictional indigenous peoples, the history of The Other in western civilization, cultural appropriation, writing outside “the usual sword & sorcery template”…

(9) PASSPORT TO NYUMBANI. Bill Ward shares his appreciation for “Charles R. Saunders’ Nyumbani Tales” at the Goodman Games blog:

…But myths aren’t of course all grim sacrifice and heroic tragedy, and many of the strongest pieces in Nyumbani Tales are humorous accounts of tricksters, frauds, and con men. Fan favorite Pomphis the Bambuti, Imaro’s diminutive companion, appears in two of the most fun tales in the collection: “The Blacksmith and the Bambuti” and “Pomphis and the Poor Man,” exhibiting both the cleverness and the kindness that is a hallmark of his character. In “Two Rogues” a pair of grifters engage one another in cross and double-cross, complete with sorcery, a poison-gas-assisted heist, and a shape-shifted hippo. And it would be difficult to find a better – and funnier – story reinforcing that old adage of ‘be careful what you wish for’ than “Okosene Alakun and the Magic Guinea Fowl.”…

(10) NOT JUST AN ILLUSION. Bobby Derie takes a look at Harry Houdini’s connection to Weird Tales in “Deeper Cut: Houdini & Weird Tales” at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein.

Chicago, 1923
Now long after I had inaugurated Weird Tales, I had a call by Houdini at my Chicago office; he expressed more than usual enthusiasm for the magazine, and the meeting resulted in a friendship lasting until his untimely death a few years later. He often regaled me with experiences of his that rivaled anything I had ever read in books. Several of these I published, but they were written in such a prosaic style that they evoked little comment.
J.C. Henneberger to Robert A. W. Lowndes, Magazine of Horror (May 1969) 117

(11) SHORT MARATHON. Cora Buhlert reports, “I’m also doing the July short story challenge again this year, where I write a story every day during the month of July, and I keep a running tally here –” “The 2022 July Short Story Challenge – Day by Day”.

…What is the July Short Story Challenge, you ask? Well, in July 2015, Dean Wesley Smith announced that he was planning to write a brand new short story every day during the month of July. The original post seems to be gone now, but the Wayback Machine has a copy here. At the time, several people announced that they would play along, so I decided to give it a try as well. And then I did it again the following year. And the next. And the next. If you want to read my post-mortems of the previous July short story challenges, here are the posts for 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021.
Because I’ve already done the July short story challenge seven years in a row now and always found the experience very rewarding, I’m aiming for a repeat this year. This July is a very busy month for me, never mind that I caught a persistent and annoying cold (not covid, I did a test). Therefore I initially only committed to doing this for a single week, which is already finished, and now I’m going for the second week. Then, if things are going well, I’ll keep going….

(12) MEMORY LANE.

1924 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Once upon a time, well back in 1924, the noted Anglo-Irish writer Lord Dunsany saw his novel The King of Elfland’s Daughter published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons. It is considered to be one of the most influential and acclaimed works in all of fantasy literature, and a paperback edition was released in 1969 as part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series.

Now many of you will recognize Steeleye Span, the famed British folk rock band founded in 1969 by Fairport Convention bass player Ashley Hutchings along with Tim Hart and Maddy Prior. (Maddy is the only musician still with it today.) Steeleye had more musicians coming through it than your typical publisher has associate publicists. One of those of was violinist Peter Knight who was with it for much its existence and left a decade back.

(Yes, it was where Richard Thompson first got his start.)

Like so many musicians, side-projects were a way of life and Knight was no exception. So, The King of Elfland’s Daughter narration was born with the assistance of Bob Johnson, another Steeleye musician, and a very special guest artist who you will all know.

Now I don’t need to tell you this tale as Kestrell Rath already has done so for us over at Green Man quite delightfully. Just go read it here.

(13) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born July 12, 1895 — Buckminster Fuller. Genre adjacent and I don’t believe that he actually wrote any SF though one could argue that Tetrascroll: Goldilocks and the Three Bears, A Cosmic Fairy Tale is genre. You will find his terminology used frequently in genre fiction including if memory serves right in Neal Asher’s Polity universe. (Died 1983.)
Born July 12, 1912 — Joseph Mugnaini. An Italian born artist and illustrator. He is best known for his collaborations with writer Ray Bradbury, beginning in 1952. (Died 1992.)
Born July 12, 1923 — James Gunn. Writer, editor, scholar, anthologist. Hugo winner at ConStellation (1983) for Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction. MidAmeriCon (1976) presented him with a Special Committee Award for Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction. The This Immortal series based on his novel by that name received a Best Dramatic Presentation nomination at Heicon ’70. Not surprisingly, he won a First Fandom Hall of Fame Award. (Died 2020.)
Born July 12, 1933 — Donald E. Westlake. Though he specialized in crime fiction, he did dip into the genre on occasion such as with Transylvania Station with a lovely cover by Gahan Wilson. You can think of it as a Clue style novel. With monsters. He wrote with his wife Abby. On the horror end of things was Anarchaos. And he wrote a lot of genre short fiction, some fifty pieces by my count. Meteor Strike: Science Fiction Triple Feature has three of his SF stories is available from the usual suspects for ninety-nine cents. (Died 2008.)
Born July 12, 1946 — Charles R. Saunders. African-American author and journalist who lived in Canada, much of his fiction is set in the fictional continent Nyumbani (which means “home” in Swahili). His main series is the Imaro novels which he called the first sword and sorcery series by a black writer. Griots, both of his short story collections, are available from the usual suspects and collect the material set in Nyumbani. (Died 2020.)
Born July 12, 1947 — Carl Lundgren, 75. He co-founded ASFA (Association of Science Fiction & Fantasy Artists of America), and won 4 Chesleys, including Artistic Achievement. At the tender age of eighteen, he was co-chairman of the first media SF convention, The Detroit Triple Fan Fair which featured comics, movies and various things of a SF nature. At Chicon IV, he was nominated for Best Professional Artist but lost out to Michael Whelan.
Born July 12, 1948 — Ben Burtt, 74. Sound Designer for, and I’m not listing them all, more Star Wars films and series than I knew existed, plus the rebooted Star Trek, Star Trek Into Darkness, John Carter (yes, I really like it), WALL-E, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (no, I don’t like it) to name but a few. He has some acting creds as well such as when in the Return of the Jedi, he appeared as Colonel Dyer, the Imperial officer who yells “Freeze!” just before Solo knocks him off a balcony.
Born July 12, 1970 — Phil Jimenez, 52. Comics illustrator and writer. He was the main artist of Infinite Crisis, a sequel to Crisis on Infinite Earths. He also did the awesome first issue of Planetary/Authority: Ruling the World, and was responsible for the first six issues of Fables spin-off, Fairest. I found that spin-off a lot of fun. Yes, I read all of Fables.
Born July 12, 1976 — Gwenda Bond, 46. Writer, critic, editor. She’s written a prequel to the Stranger Things series, Suspicious Mind, and I’m very fond of the two novels (The Lost Legacy and The Sphinx’s Secret) so far in her Supernormal Sleuthing Service which she wrote with her husband Christopher Rowe. And she penned the “Dear Aunt Gwenda” section of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet that Small Beer Press published in the early part of this millennium. And yes, she’s one of the multitudes that has written for the Wild Cards anthologies.

(14) LEIBER AND DELANY. At Attack of the 50 Year Old Comic Books, Alan Stewart remembers how he was taken by surprise by “Wonder Woman #202 (Sep.-Oct. 1972)”. First there were —

…science fiction and fantasy author Fritz Lieber’s sword-and-sorcery heroes, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. What the heck were those guys doing on the cover of any DC comic book — let alone Wonder Woman?

And then!

…The first was that I was coming in in the middle of an ongoing storyline. The second was that the costumed woman Diana Prince was battling on the book’s cover was evidently Catwoman, wearing an outfit which, while not actually new, was unfamiliar to my fifteen-year-old self. The third was that the script was by Samuel R. Delany — an author who, like Fritz Lieber, I hadn’t actually read anything by yet, but whom I nevertheless knew to be an award-winning young science fiction writer, associated with the same “New Wave” of more experimental, “literary” authors that also included Harlan Ellison and Michael Moorcock. As much if not more so than Fafhrd and the Mouser, “Chip” Delany’s showing up in the present context seemed highly incongruous; really, what was the writer of the Hugo and Nebula-winning story “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” doing scripting an issue of Wonder Woman?

(15) HORROR TROPES 101. Eva V. Gibson supplies “A Beginner’s Guide to Using (and Exploding) Horror Tropes” at CrimeReads.

…You see that knife on the book cover, you know you’ll find it, or its metaphorical equivalent, somewhere in the pages—and if it doesn’t show up, don’t you feel cheated? Well-executed tropes are used in horror stories for that specific reason: to deliver on those promises and evoke the feelings triggered by the introduction.
Effective trope use does, however, often require going beyond the basics. The techniques of trope usage in horror writing, as opposed to visual media, rely primarily on setting, mood building, plot twists, and tension to produce those promised chills. Some of my favorite tropes to use when writing horror are also my favorite to read, because they nearly always deliver the same impact across all forms of media….

(16) WILL THE STANDARD MODEL CAVE? “Physicists May Have Stumbled Upon an Entirely New Elementary Particle” – Popular Mechanics explains.

Physicists are spelunking the complex findings from an experimental particle reactor found a mile below the surface in the mountains of Russia. What they found has the potential to send an earthquake through the bedrock of the standard model of physics itself: the results could confirm a new elementary particle, called a “sterile neutrino,” or demonstrate a need to revise a portion of the standard model….

(17) DANNY DUNN AND THE HOMEWORK MACHINE? “Artificial Intelligence Bot Wrote Scientific Paper in 2 Hours” and Insider asks about the issues that raised.

…After the successful experiment, Thunström, a Swedish researcher at Gothenburg University, sought to get a whole research paper out of GPT-3 and publish it in a peer-reviewed academic journal. The question was: Can someone publish a paper from a nonhuman source?
Thunström wrote about the experiment in Scientific American, noting that the process of getting GPT-3 published brought up a series of legal and ethical questions.
“All we know is, we opened a gate,” Thunström wrote. “We just hope we didn’t open a Pandora’s box.”
After GPT-3 completed its scientific paper in just two hours, Thunström began the process of submitting the work and had to ask the algorithm if it consented to being published.
“It answered: Yes,” Thunström wrote. “Slightly sweaty and relieved (if it had said no, my conscience could not have allowed me to go on further), I checked the box for ‘Yes.'”
She also asked if it had any conflicts of interest, to which the algorithm replied “no,” and Thunström wrote that the authors began to treat GPT-3 as a sentient being, even though it wasn’t….

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Honest Game Trailers: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge,” Fandom Games says that this game is really close to the arcade game Turtles In Time. How close? I’d say what they think IP lawyers will react to in the game but this is a family blog. But the story is only one line — “Destroy the turtles!”– and the game is a reminder of how, 30 years ago, “You were still capable of experiencing joy.”

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, N., Cora Buhlert, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

File 770

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Tag Archives: Samuel Delany

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2021 World Fantasy Awards Final Ballot

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