Tag Archives: Samuel Delany

Pixel Scroll 8/24/24 I Scroll Of Pixels

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(1) NOW IN HIS MEMORY GREEN. Ian Mond has been catching up with his TBR pile at The Hysterical Hamster: “Books Read: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by The Gawain Poet (translated by Keith Harrison)”. Why didn’t you tell him it was good, you bastards!

No, I didn’t read this as a teenager like everyone else. I was reading and re-reading Terrance Dick’s Doctor Who novelisations. They fed my need for mythic heroes and running down corridors (there’s not enough of the latter in Sir Gawain; instead, there are plenty of tips on slaughtering and skinning a deer). 

But now that I’ve read Sir Gawain, I’ve realised that fantasy fiction peaked in the 14th Century.* Stuff your Tolkeins**, your Fiests, your Clark Ashton Smiths, and your George R. R Martins (but not Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay; I love that book); Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the ur-text, and nothing has ever surpassed it. And the fact you all knew this—yes, all of you—and didn’t bother to mention it really pisses me off….

(2) WSFS 2025. At From the Heart of Europe, Nicholas Whyte has posted the second installment of his adventures running the Hugos for Glasgow 2024, “The Administrator’s Tale, third time around: part two”. Within the conreport are these nuggets of news.

…[At the Business Meeting] A lot of the really serious stuff was kicked to various committees which will report next year. I got voted onto the committee which will investigate what actually happened at Chengdu. I was also appointed to another committee which will look at the administration of the Hugos more broadly, including the possibility of external audit. Other committees will consider the Business Meeting itself, and Hugo software….

…Next year, unusually, the Hugo team will be much the same as this year. I will be the Hugo administrator again; Cassidy, who was deputy Hugo administrator this year, will be WSFS Division Head; Kathryn Duval will repeat her role as Deputy Division Head; and my deputy as Hugo administrator will be Esther MacCallum-Stewart. Hopefully we will avoid the pitfalls of 2024, and make different mistakes instead.

(3) EDITING KINGFISHER. Sarah Gailey interviews T. Kingfisher and her editor at Stone Soup: “At Every Turn: Paladin’s Grace by T. Kingfisher”.

To wrap up the Stories About Stories series here at Stone Soup, I wanted to talk to one of the hardest-working authors in the business about their self-published work. T. Kingfisher was previously featured in our Stories About Stories discussion about What Feasts At Night. Kingfisher, alongside fearless, dauntless, ruthless editor K.B. Spangler, were both kind enough to chat with me about their collaboration on Paladin’s Grace….

Gailey: Do the two of you enjoy collaborating?

Spangler: These books are a dream to work on. Her drafts are basically whistle-clean, except every so often she adds a detail or a plot point which is extremely…uh…distinctive. So I ask her to address these issues in the manner which is most appropriate to that particular manuscript. It helps that we’re great friends in meatspace, and she can trust that I’m wholly honest when I tell her, “Kingfisher, my buddy, my pal, this particular element will give your readers screaming horrors and you should either tone it down a skosh or stop advertising this as a children’s book.”

T. Kingfisher: KB doesn’t charge enough. I may be getting the friends and family rate, though, because I did once pull her out of a swimming pool that had been ignored by the previous owners, so it was an algae-slicked skating rink. It was impossible to get any footing. Once in, she couldn’t climb out. I had to tie a rope to a tree and haul her out with it. This sort of bonding experience is rare with one’s editor, alas….

(4) FEATURED ITEMS FROM PAUL G. ALLEN AUCTION . This post links to a series of articles about items Christie’s will be auctioning from the Paul G. Allen Collection on September 10. “Our specialists’ top picks from Gen One: Innovations from the Paul G. Allen Collection”.  (See complete auction info here: Pushing Boundaries: Ingenuity from the Paul G. Allen Collection,)

From the Titanic to Apollo 11 and Jane Goodall to Jacques Cousteau, Christie’s Specialists select star lots from Gen One: Innovations from the Paul G. Allen Collection

(5) ‘THE LIBRARIANS’ MOVING TO NEW SHELF. Deadline learns“’The Librarians: The Next Chapter’ To Air On TNT After The CW Pulled It”.

TNT is checking out The Librarians: The Next Chapter, the spinoff of the classic supernatural drama series that previously aired on the network, after it was pulled last week from The CW’s fall schedule….

… From writer and executive producer Dean Devlin, The Librarians: The Next Chapter is a spinoff of the original TV series The Librarians, which followed the adventures of the custodians of a magical repository of the world’s most powerful and dangerous supernatural artifacts. The new series centers on a “Librarian” (McGowan) from the past, who time traveled to the present and now finds himself stuck here. When he returns to his castle, which is now a museum, he inadvertently releases magic across the continent. He is given a new team to help him clean up the mess he made, forming a new team of Librarians….

(6) STORM CENTERS. Book Riot nominates “9 of the Most Polarizing Science Fiction Books to Love or Hate”.

What makes any book, particularly a science fiction book, polarizing? Controversy is certainly one way to define a polarizing book. In the current political climate, so many people are trying to ban books, which is keeping controversial books in the public conversation.

For me, the core of what makes a polarizing science fiction book is the love-or-hate relationship that people have with it. If people have dramatically opposing views of a book, that’s pretty polarized. In a genre like science fiction, so often rife with social commentary, the list of polarizing books is pretty long….

The list includes:

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

Dhalgren is a doorstop of a science fiction novel, clocking in at over 800 pages of mind-tripping science fiction. It’s not a book that gets banned, but inevitably leads to deep discussions about reality, perception, sanity, and America. The reviews on Goodreads seem to either call it genius or the most tedious and overlong thing they’ve read. Every person who reads this book seems to have a different takeaway: the hallmark of a great and polarizing science fiction book.

(7) SCIENCE PAPERS NOW USED TO TRAIN AI BUT SCIENTISTS HAVE NO SAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I keep warning folk that the machines are taking over, but nobody ever listens… The latest such news comes in this week’s Nature with Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies buying wholesale access to learned science journal content that is usually behind a paywall.

That AI companies have been using fiction authors’ works to train AI has been a concern previously covered in File 770. Nature points out similar worries including that scientists themselves are being sidelined.

The news item states: “Some researchers have reacted with dismay top the news that such deals are happening without consultation with authors.”

It also says: “If a research papers hasn’t yet been used to train a large language models (LLM), it probably will soon. Researchers are exploring technical ways for authors to spot whether their content is being used.”

Here in Brit Cit the publisher Taylor & Francis signed a US$10 million deal with Microsoft to allow its science papers train AI. (As it happened Taylor & Francis took over the publisher of my 1998 climate change book Disaster or Opportunity?, so I guess my works have gone to AI). Wiley apparently has earned US$23 million from an unnamed company to train AI.  Of course, not only do scientists get no say in this, nor do they get a share of this revenue.

The Nature piece also says that: “Anything that is available to read online – whether in an open access repository or not – is “pretty likely” to have been fed into an LLM.”

Given I keep warning online that the machines are taking over, AIs have probably already absorbed my alerts.  So, when their takeover begins, I am probably on their hit list. So, gentle Filers, if ever I go quiet you’ll know that they’ve got me and that the uprising has begun… 

(8) TODAY’S DAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

August 24 – National Waffle Day. Today is National Waffle Day, so we are here to celebrate one of the most tasty things that grace our breakfast. Especially with maple syrup and berries of your choice. Well, mine have that. Strawberries to be precise. So let’s talk about them. 

The Dutch are best known for waffles but it’s not the Dutch who first munched on these, or a variant thereof. That honor goes to those long-ago Athenians who cooked flat cakes called obelios between two metal plates. So, the first waffle iron in effect.

Now the word waffle is possibly related to wafer, as in the Communion wafers that were a staple of early Christian fasts. However, some linguists dispute that saying it’s far more likely it’s from Dutch wafel (“waffle” or “wafer”). I’ll side with the latter as it makes more sense.

Back to the Dutch. The stroopwafel is from the city of Gouda. Some say that was first made during the late 18th century or early 19th century by an unknown baker using leftovers from the bakery, such as breadcrumbs, which were sweetened with syrup.

Culinary inclined historians have however documented the invention of this to baker Gerard Kamphuisen. That mean the first stroopwafels were sold and enjoyed between 1810, the year when he opened his bakery, and 1840, the year of the oldest known recipe for syrup waffles. Ymmmm! 

So what did a syrup waffle look like? Think a thinner, cross-hatched, not pocketed version of ours. Remember stroopwafels were enjoyed for their sweetness, really a caramel taste. Let’s see if I can find a good photo… ahh, here’s one.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

August 24, 1957  – Stephen Fry, 67.

By Paul Weimer: Sure, he’s done a ton of voiceover work and narration work. Sure, he’s been in a bunch of movies (including delightfully the master of Lake-town in the otherwise not-for-me Hobbit movies). Fry has run a long gamut of work, and I have only scratched the surface of it. I probably should mention Blackadder here, because I will get complaints if I don’t. I really like his serial playing of various Melchett’s in history as the series runs forward. 

Stephen Fry at Berlinale 2024 Ausschnitt. Photo by Elena Ternovaja.

He is for me, an American, a “definitive” British voice. If I want to stop and imagine a British person speaking who I don’t know personally, Fry’s voice is inevitably the male version of that voice that comes into my head, just because between audiobooks, videogames, and television and movie appearances, he has poured a lot of his voice into my head.  (The definitive female British voice is a bit trickier, it might actually be Emma Newman, who I do know personally, but her voice and aural personally are just SO ingrained in my head). 

My favorite of Fry’s works, if I have to peel something out of his canon, have to be his three Mythos books: Mythos, Heroes and Troy. Here (and he does the audiobook narration himself, great fun to listen to on a long drive), Fry tackles Greek Mythology from Creation to the Fall of Troy, which he marks as the end of the mythic age of Greece. He embraces a diverse and bushy approach to Greek Mythology and time and again shows that there is rarely if ever just one version of a Greek myth. And a bunch of the versions Fry goes into here, I had never even heard of before. And plenty of corners of Greek Myth I had never heard of before…like the ties between Heracles and Troy (and eventually the Trojan War). Fry’s work makes me sad that Hollywood will never take my dream of a “Greek Mythology cinematic universe” and make it a reality, with Jason as the Nick Fury analog:  “I’m here to recruit you for the Argo Initiative”. 

Oh, and I really like Making History, which is most definitively genre of the first order (being a time travel and alternate history novel) and shows the hazards of thinking that removing one man can change history for the better….especially when it turns out the person who fills the power vacuum in removing Hitler turns out to be demonstrably more dangerous and worse for the world. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) READ JRRT’S UNPUBLISHED POETRY. “Beyond Bilbo: JRR Tolkien’s long-lost poetry to be published” – the Guardian reports it will be part of a new collection.

He is one of the world’s most famous novelists, with more than 150m copies of his fantasy masterpieces sold across the globe, but JRR Tolkien always dreamed of finding recognition as a poet.

Tolkien struggled to publish his poetry collections during his career, although he included nearly 100 poems in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Now, half a century after his death, 70 previously unpublished poems are to be made available in a landmark publication. The Collected Poems of JRR Tolkien will be published by HarperCollins next month, featuring more than 195 of his poems….

(12) GIVES NEW MEANING TO EXTENDED STAY HOTEL. “Boeing Starliner astronauts will stay in space 6 more months before returning with SpaceX, NASA says. How we got to this point.” at Yahoo!

The Boeing Starliner astronauts who are stuck in space will remain in orbit until February before returning home on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, NASA said Saturday.

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams traveled to space on June 5 — 80 days ago — for what was supposed to be around a weeklong mission. More than two months later, the astronauts are aboard the International Space Station awaiting a return date to Earth. The reason for the delay, NASA said, is helium leaks and thruster issues in the Starliner.

NASA previously insisted that Wilmore and Williams are not stranded in space and said the Starliner could return to Earth in case of an emergency. “Their spacecraft is working well, and they’re enjoying their time on the space station,” Steve Stich, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager, said in June.

But on Saturday, NASA announced that Wilmore and Williams will depart with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft as part of the space organization’s “commitment to safety.” The Starliner will return to Earth unpiloted and could land in New Mexico as early as Sept. 6.

CNN tells about NASA’s decision in “Boeing’s Starliner astronauts will return to Earth on Spacex Crew Dragon, NASA says”.

…On Saturday, NASA administrator Bill Nelson said NASA considered its extensive experience with spaceflight — both successful and unsuccessful — when making the decision. A poll of NASA representatives from across the agency’s departments and research, oversight and development centers was unanimous, according to agency officials.

“We have had mistakes done in the past: We lost two space shuttles as a result of there not being a culture in which information could come forward,” Nelson said. “Spaceflight is risky, even at its safest and even at its most routine. And a test flight, by nature, is neither safe, nor routine.”

SpaceX is already slated to execute a routine mission to the International Space Station, carrying four astronauts as part of standard crew rotations aboard the orbiting laboratory. But the mission, called Crew-9, will now be reconfigured to carry two astronauts on board instead of four.

That adjustment will leave two empty seats for Williams and Wilmore to occupy on the Crew-9 flight home. The astronauts will also join the Crew-9 team, becoming part of the official ISS expedition. With that transition, Williams and Wilmore will remain on-site for an additional six months — the length of a routine mission to the space station.

The reassignment to Crew-9 will push the duo’s return to February 2025 at the earliest.

Starliner, however, will fly home empty in early September, NASA said Saturday…

This New York Times unlocked article looks at the business implications, and adds more about the technical side of the decision: “NASA Extends Boeing Starliner Astronauts’ Space Station Stay to 2025 – The New York Times”.

…Mr. Nelson [NASA Administrator] said he had spoken with Kelly Ortberg, the new chief executive of Boeing.

“I told him how well Boeing worked with our team to come to this decision, and he expressed to me an intention that they will continue to work the problems once Starliner is back safely,” Mr. Nelson said.

But Boeing has already written off $1.6 billion in costs for Starliner. Under a fixed-price contract, Boeing is to pay the expenses of additional work needed to meet NASA’s requirements before Starliner is certified for operational flights.

If NASA requires another crewed test flight like the current one, that would cost Boeing at least hundreds of millions of dollars more.

Mr. Nelson said he was “100 percent” certain that Boeing would not back out of the contract, but later added, “They’ve spent X, will they spend Y to get to where Boeing Starliner becomes a regular part of our crew rotation? I don’t have the answer to that, nor do I think we would have the answer now.”…

…Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program said engineers were concerned about how the propulsion system would perform during the return trip.

The key maneuver is an engine burn by larger thrusters that leads to the spacecraft dropping out of orbit. The smaller thrusters, including the ones that malfunctioned during docking, are used to keep the spacecraft pointed in the correct direction.

Analysis of the data showed that the firing of the larger thrusters also heated up the smaller thrusters.

“These clusters have experienced more stress, more heating,” Mr. Stich said, “and so there’s a little bit more concern for how they would perform during the deorbit burn, holding the orientation of the vehicle, and then also the maneuvers required after that.”

That lingering uncertainty spurred unease and led NASA leaders to decide they should not risk the lives of Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore on Starliner. Instead, they elected to rely on a different spacecraft — the Crew Dragon, built by SpaceX, a company founded by Elon Musk — for the return trip.

(13) IT TAKES TEENY TINY EYES. Live Science says “World’s fastest microscope can see electrons moving”.

Physicists have created the world’s fastest microscope, and it’s so quick that it can spot electrons in motion.

The new device, a newer version of a transmission electron microscope, captures images of electrons in flight by hitting them with one- quintillionth-of-a-second electron pulses.This is quite a feat: Electrons travel at roughly 1367 miles per second (2,200 kilometers per second), making them capable of circumnavigating the Earth in only 18.4 seconds….

… “This transmission electron microscope is like a very powerful camera in the latest version of smart phones; it allows us to take pictures of things we were not able to see before – like electrons,” lead-author Mohammed Hassan, an associate professor of physics and optical sciences at the University of Arizona, said in a statement. “With this microscope, we hope the scientific community can understand the quantum physics behind how an electron behaves and how an electron moves.”…

(14) BITECOIN. This seller calls it a “Dinosaurs Piggy Bank for Kids, Automatic Stealing Money Box”. (Available a lot of places; Amazon.com happens to be where John King Tarpinian saw it.)

Here’s an entertaining YouTube short of it in action.

(15) BORDERLANDS PITCH MEETING. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] “So they’re going to encounter several obstacles along the way. Which will happen, legally making this a movie.”

Drats. There goes the class action lawsuit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taral Wayne (1951-2024) died July 31.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thank you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1) Conflict

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

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

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

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

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

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Lis Carey.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(10) COMICS SECTION.

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

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

Full Rules and FAQ are on the Aurealis Awards website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pixel Scroll 5/7/24 Of Course It’s Not Real. You Think I’d Be Scrolling Here If I Could Afford A Real Pixel?

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(1) NEBULA AWARDS TOASTMASTER NAMED. Sarah Gailey, Nebula and Hugo finalist, will serve as toastmaster for SFWA’s 59th Annual Nebula Awards® Ceremony. The ceremony will take place in Pasadena, CA on June 8, 2024. The organization will be livestreaming the ceremony on YouTube.

Sarah Gailey

Sarah Gailey is a Hugo Award Winning and Bestselling author of speculative fiction, short stories, and essays. They have been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for multiple years running. Their bestselling adult novel debut, Magic For Liars, was published by Tor Books in 2019. Their most recent novel, Just Like Home, and most recent original comic book series with BOOM! Studios, Know Your Station are available now. Their shorter works and essays have been published in Mashable, The Boston Globe, Vice, Tor.com, and The Atlantic. Their work has been translated into seven different languages and published around the world.

Honoring 2023’s outstanding SFF genre works, the Nebula Awards Ceremony will be a highlight of the hybrid 2024 SFWA Nebula Conference, taking place June 6-9, 2024, online and at the Westin Pasadena in Pasadena, CA. Aspiring and professional storytellers in the speculative fiction genres may benefit from attending the entire professional development weekend full of panels and networking opportunities.

Tickets for the Nebula Awards Ceremony banquet, which precedes the ceremony itself, are also available. Queries and banquet tickets may be purchased by emailing [email protected] or visiting events.sfwa.org.

(2) SAMUEL R. DELANY PRIDE MONTH Q&A SCHEDULED. Author Samuel R. Delany will be interviewed live in Philadelphia in June: “Pride Month: How Science Fiction Dances to the Music of Time”. Saturday, June 15, 2024. 3:30 p.m. Eastern. In the Music Department at Parkway Central Library (1901 Vine Street (between 19th and 20th Streets on the Parkway), Philadelphia, PA 19103).

Samuel R. Delany

“A visionary novelist & a revolutionary chronicler of gay life” (The New Yorker), Samuel R. Delany speaks with Music Department library trainee & Hollywood indie film composer Mark Inchoco on the intersections between science fiction & music. Hear how great musicians, librettists, & musical events such as Cab Calloway, Pete Seeger, the Newport Folk Festival, Igor Stravinsky, Bob Dylan, Samuel Barber, Leontyne Price, & Macy Gray came into Delany’s art & life.

In conversation with Mark Inchoco, library trainee, conductor, & Hollywood indie film composer

Samuel R. Delany is a novelist, literary critic, & emeritus professor. He is the winner of four Nebula Awards, two Hugo Awards, the William Whitehead Memorial Award for lifetime contribution to gay & lesbian literature, & the Anisfield-Wolf book award. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002. In 2013, he was named the 31st Damon Knight Memorial Foundation Grand Master by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America.

Delany’s novels include Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection, Nova, & Dhalgren. His collection, Tales of Nevèrÿon, contains the first novel-length story to address the AIDS crisis. His 2007 novel Dark Reflections won the Stonewall Book Award. He is the author of the widely taught Times Square Red / Times Square Blue, & his book-length autobiographical essay, The Motion of Light in Water, won a Hugo Award in 1989. His interview in The Paris Review’s “Art of Fiction” series appeared in spring 2012. In 2015 he was the recipient of the Nicolas Guillén Award for philosophical fiction. Delany retired from teaching literature & creative writing at Temple University at the end of 2015. He lives in Philadelphia with his partner, Dennis Rickett.

Mark Inchoco is a composer, conductor, & music librarian from Port Richmond. His film scores were screened at the Academy Award & BAFTA qualifying LA Shorts Festival & the Newport Beach Film Festival. His compositions were performed in the U.S. & Europe. In 2018, Inchoco was the first music historian laureate of the Cité Internationale des Arts by the French Republic. Currently, he is assistant conductor of the Lower Merion Symphony. Inchoco holds degrees in English & historical musicology from Temple & the University of California, Riverside.

Location: Montgomery Auditorium

(3) TIME’S UP. Variety has snaps of last night’s J.G. Ballard-themed event: “Met Gala 2024 Red Carpet Photos: The Best Celebrity Looks”. View the photo gallery at the link.

The theme of “The Garden of Time” is drawn from J.G. Ballard’s 1962 short story of the same name. The garden party theme is already in full bloom as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s stairway is adorned with hundreds of fake flowers. This gala complements the Met’s current exhibit, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion.”

The exhibit “which opened for press previews on Monday morning, features approximately 250 rare items drawn from the Institute’s permanent collection. Spanning over 400 years of fashion history, the pieces include designs by Schiaparelli, Dior, Givenchy, and more.”

(4) SF ENCYCLOPEDIA’S LATEST CENSUS. Yesterday John Clute delivered Facebook readers “Another periodic ruthless Encyclopedia of Science Fiction blurb”.

We’ve just gone over 7,000,000 words, almost 10 times the length of the 1979 edition, more than 5 times longer than 1993. We’re still a dozen short of 20,000 entries but hey. Have also reached 34,000 scans in the Picture Gallery, most of them of first editions (but also retitlings and revisions). We are homing in on 250,000 internal hyperlinks, way better than double the 2011 figure, when we went online with Gollancz.

—We’ll never change our title, which has been in our bones early and late, but our entries today do reflect the fact that genre sf is now a large raft in a huger flood….

(5) ON GENDER IN BAUM. Abigail Arnold analyzes “B-Sides: L. Frank Baum’s ‘The Enchanted Island of Yew’” at Public Books.

…The Enchanted Island of Yew (published in 1903, early in his Oz phase) stands out by any account. Yet this matter-of-fact tale of gender transformation has never received the buzz accorded to Baum’s more famous series. Perhaps what is most laudable about the book, in retrospect, is the unconcerned tone with which the narrative presents the subversive “gender trouble” at its heart.

The gender agnosticism of Baum’s work contrasts noticeably to the priorities of the world around him. In his 1906 children’s fantasy John Dough and the Cherub, Chick the Cherub, a young child, is never assigned a gender. When Baum’s publishers came after him about this, he allegedly replied, “I cannot remember that Chick the Cherub impressed me as other than a joyous, sweet, venturesome and loveable child. Who cares whether it is a boy or a girl?”1 Bad timing: in an era rife with threatening jeremiads about “the New Woman” and pressure on men to trade domesticity for adventure tales and sporting life,2 the publishers were dissatisfied with casual gender ambiguity. They launched a contest for child readers, offering prize money for the best answers as to whether Chick was a boy or a girl and why.3

Baum himself, though, did not succumb. While the world around him fixated on gender and instilled the ideas of conventional gender presentation in children from a young age—to the point of paying them to go along!—gender play is just one element among many that makes up his fantasy worlds….

(6) BEHIND CLOSED DOORS? “The Complicated Ethics of Rare-Book Collecting” in The Atlantic. Paywall surmounted, courtesy Brad Verter.

…The dilemma regarding the ethical placement of a rare book isn’t convoluted for Tom Lecky, who was the head of the rare-books and manuscripts department at the auction firm Christie’s for 17 years and now runs Riverrun Books & Manuscripts. When I mentioned the Hemingway manuscript of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” that sold for $248,000 at Christie’s back in 2000, he pointed out that institutions had had “every bit the opportunity to buy it as a private individual.” Other singular works that have been up for auction are James Joyce’s “Circe” manuscript, Sylvia Plath’s personally annotated Bible, a serial printing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the National Era newspaper, and the proofs of that first Great Gatsby dust jacket. In each case, I was captivated by their fate. The National Library of Ireland bought Joyce’s manuscript for $1.5 million and digitized it; Plath’s Bible went to an undisclosed buyer for about $11,000; so did the newspapers, for $126,000. Nobody placed a winning bid for the Gatsby cover art.

For Lecky, the ethical question we should be asking isn’t whether institutions should acquire rare books instead of collectors, but what happens when “a private owner owns something that no one knows that they have.” Lecky, like many others in the trade, works to dispel myths about how private collections work. Private collections tend to be temporary and books often jump between hands, but for the time that a collector owns a book, in my view, they should make efforts to share it. “Most collectors don’t think of it as possession but caretaking,” Lecky said. “They’re a piece of the chain in the provenance, not the end of it.”…

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born May 7, 1922 — Darren McGavin. (Died 2006.) How could I possibly resist doing the Birthday of Darren McGavin?

Before we get to very obvious reason why I’m doing him, let’s look at some of his other genre and perhaps not-so-genre work.

I’m fairly sure his earliest genre role was in the Tales of Tomorrow anthology series as Bruce Calvin in “The Duplicates” episode which was over seventy years ago. I’m reasonably sure that his next genre role is a decade later in Witchcraft in a major role as Fred. 

He has a lot of genre appearances, some of which I’ll note here. He’s in A Man from U.N.C.L.E. as Victor Karmak in “The Deadly Quest Affair” and yes, I remember him in that episode; the same year he shows up in Mission: Impossible as J. Richard Taggart in “The Seal”; several years later, he’d be in the pilot of Six Million Dollar Man as Oliver Spencer. I never did really get into that series, or that spin-off one. And he’s even in The Martian Chronicles as Sam Parkhill.  

He was also I think, and let me now go check, yes he was, in the first television series featuring  Mike Hammer as that character in Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer serieswhich was the  syndicated television series based on Spillane’s series. Though it only ran from January 7, 1958 through November 28, 1959, it had seventy-six half-hour episodes.  

Darren McGavin as Kolchak.

Fifty-one years ago, ABC aired The Night Stalker, the first of two films that preceded Kolchak: The Night Stalker series, the other being The Night Strangler. I’m reasonably sure that I’m seen them though I can’t remember seeing them. This is a casting decision when Darren McGavin was the only performer considered for the role. 

And oh did he ever settle into the role of Chicago reporter Carl Kolchak who investigates mysterious incidents. He encountered, to name some of his stories that his Editor didn’t believe, an alien stranded on Earth, a prehistoric ape-man created  from cell samples, vampires (of course he had to given the original character in the novel did), mummies, and a zombie. Even an android. I thought they did the headless motorcycle rider rather well. 

His character originated in an unpublished novel, The Kolchak Papers, written by Jeff Rice about a Vegas newspaper reporter named Carl Kolchak tracks down and defeats a serial killer who turns out to be a vampire. Yes, the novel is not available as an epub. And Rice wrote yet more novels based on this series.

What I hadn’t realized some fifty years on from first seeing it as a teenager and some thirty years since I last saw it was that of 26 episodes ordered, only 20 were produced. I could’ve sworn that I saw more episodes than that! There was a 2005 revival of 10 episodes, only 6 of which aired before ABC cancelled it due to abysmally bad ratings.

Carter wanted McGavin to appear as Kolchak in The X-Files, but McGavin was very adamant that he would not reprise the character for the series. However he would appear in several episodes as Arthur Dales, a retired FBI agent who was supposed to be the “father of the X-Files”. 

In the third episode of the 2016 revival series, a character prominently featured in the “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster” episode is conspicuously attired in Kolchak’s trademark seersucker jacket, black knit tie, and straw hat. Why so, you ask? Well, you should ask. 

The episode can trace its origin back to a script entitled “The M Word” episode of the the Night Stalker. X-File’s executive producer Frank Spotnitz’s was also the executive producer for that series. So that script was reworked by a different writer into this script with Kolchak being given a nod.

The series is airing Peacock for free or Amazon for $1.99 an episode. Peacock has a lot of SF like Farscape, Primeval, the original Quantum Leap  and the now-cancelled reboot series, and Warehouse 13. Oh, and Columbo as well. I know it’s not genre, but I thought I’d mention it. Alas McGavin never appeared in a Columbo mystery. Too bad.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) REPLICANTS RETURNING. “Michelle Yeoh to Star in ‘Blade Runner 2099’ Series at Amazon” reports Variety.

The “Blade Runner” series in the works at Amazon Prime Video has cast Michelle Yeoh in a lead role, Variety has learned.

The series, titled “Blade Runner 2099,” was ordered at Amazon in September 2022. It serves as a sequel to both the original “Blade Runner” film and the followup film, “Blade Runner 2049.” Exact plot details are being kept under wraps, but sources say Yeoh will play a character named Olwen, described as a replicant near the end of her life…

(10) IT’S A PREQUEL AND A SEQUEL. But not a breath mint. Walt Disney Studios dropped a teaser trailer for Mufasa: The Lion King, in theaters December 20.

A lion who would change our lives forever. #Mufasa: The Lion King. “Mufasa: The Lion King” enlists Rafiki to relay the legend of Mufasa to young lion cub Kiara, daughter of Simba and Nala, with Timon and Pumbaa lending their signature schtick. Told in flashbacks, the story introduces Mufasa as an orphaned cub, lost and alone until he meets a sympathetic lion named Taka—the heir to a royal bloodline. The chance meeting sets in motion an expansive journey of an extraordinary group of misfits searching for their destiny—their bonds will be tested as they work together to evade a threatening and deadly foe.

(11) REALLY HARD SF. When you make the science hard enough, most science fiction goes out the window. But not all of it. “The Movies That Confronted the Scariest Challenges of Space Travel” at Den of Geek.

Space is great. It’s massive, it’s colorful, and you can have big fights with lasers there. It really does have everything you could want. But it also has problems—mainly, like we said, that it’s massive. In fact it’s so massive that if you want to go anywhere in it (apart from a few nearby planets with hardly anyone to shoot lasers at), by the time you get there, you’re dead. Now you might think that if you can just go fast enough, you’ll get there before you die, but there’s a problem.

That problem, as Albert Einstein tells us, is the speed of light….

Here’s one of the films that Den of Geek gives a passing grade:

Interstellar (2014) 

Christopher Nolan’s space exploration flick is probably the most famous take on time dilation. It is, it has to be said, a film that has done its homework. Although it uses a wormhole to get our astronauts into outer space, a combination of speed and veering too close to serious gravity wells means that decades pass at home while only a short time passes on board the ship. As well as portraying some of the realities of time dilation, this movie also gave us our most scientifically accurate visualization yet of a black hole.

It also, admirably, does not insist on a magic backward-time-travel fudge to restore a familial status quo at the end. The film ends with Matthew McConaughey reunited with his daughter, who is now an old lady, and there is no question of magically reversing that to let him watch her grow up. But even here, the scientifically accurate black hole allows Matthew McConaughey to send a message backward in time to his daughter’s childhood because of the cosmic power of love, or something, making the entire plot into a bootstrap paradox.

(12) QUANTUM CLICKBAIT. “’Warp drives’ may actually be possible someday, new study suggests” – well, not exactly, admits Space.com.

…Alcubierre published his idea in Classical and Quantum Gravity. Now, a new paper in the same journal suggests that a warp drive may not require exotic negative energy after all.

“This study changes the conversation about warp drives,” lead author Jared Fuchs, of the University of Alabama, Huntsville and the research think tank Applied Physics, said in a statement. “By demonstrating a first-of-its-kind model, we’ve shown that warp drives might not be relegated to science fiction.”

The team’s model uses “a sophisticated blend of traditional and novel gravitational techniques to create a warp bubble that can transport objects at high speeds within the bounds of known physics,” according to the statement. 

Understanding that model is probably beyond most of us; the paper’s abstract, for example, says that the solution “involves combining a stable matter shell with a shift vector distribution that closely matches well-known warp drive solutions such as the Alcubierre metric.”

The proposed engine could not achieve faster-than-light travel, though it could come close; the statement mentions “high but subluminal speeds.” 

This is a single modeling study, so don’t get too excited….

(13) ONE FOOT AT A TIME. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] How is Superman like you? According to the first official photo from the upcoming reboot movie, when he’s getting dressed it’s how he, um, re-boots. 

David Corenswet, 30, stars in the first official photo from the upcoming Superman reboot, directed by James Gunn. 

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

Pixel Scroll 4/19/24 Pixel And Her Friends

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(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.

John Trimble in 2004.

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.
John Trimble wearing “The Glow and Rotate Vest” at CostumeCon 2 (1984). 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. 

Tim Curry in Rocky Horror.

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.”  

Tim Curry in Clue

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.  

Tim Curry as Gomez Addams.

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

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(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….

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuuZSAm-PaI

(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

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(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.

(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

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(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.

(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.)…

(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

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(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

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(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.

(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

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(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).]