Pixel Scroll 1/24/24 A Fist Full Of Typos

(1) HELP NEEDED. Writer Richard Kadrey, whose work includes the Sandman Slim novels, is asking for financial help in a GoFundMe for “Medical bills, rent, and a big, hungry cat”.

This is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, but my back is against the wall. Because of physical and mental health issues over the last year, plus disappearing gigs and jobs that never came through, I have to suck up my pride and ask for help.

I’ve been living off savings and credit cards for a year. I had one good, steady gig but got blindsided when it ended abruptly. Now that money is gone, my cards are pretty much played out, and the IRS is giving me the side eye. And there are still health issues and bills I need to deal with. Basically, I could use some help to feed my cat and keep my stupid life intact.

If you could spare a couple of bucks, you’d a life saver. And if one of the good gigs I’m hoping for comes through later this year, I promise to pay your kindness forward to another artist down on their luck.

So, here I am with my dumb hat in my dumb hand, humbled as hell. This is the last thing in the world I ever wanted to do. But I don’t have a choice. Even if you can’t help, thanks for reading this. I appreciate it and so does Aces, my hungry cat who will eat me if I don’t keep up with the kibble.

(2) MORE QUOTES ABOUT HUGO CONTROVERSY FROM CHINA SOCIAL MEDIA. On Bluesky, Angie Wang has some screencaps and computer translations to go with this introduction:

RE the Hugo Awards, if you go on Weibo and do a public search right now, you’ll see some Chinese fans cussing the hell out of the Chengdu organizers specifically, and some cryptic remarks from someone who seems related to the event and the organizers about trying to prevent all this from happening

(3) PAIJIBA. Pajiba’s Nate Parker brings schadenfreude to bear on the topic in “The Hugo Awards Step In It Again”.

… If you look through McCarty’s thread – and you should, because it’s fun to watch him get wrecked in real time – you’ll see Gaiman’s about the only one who gets a polite answer. “After reviewing the Constitution and the rules we must follow, the administration team determined those works/persons were not eligible.”

He repeats the same answer ad nauseum despite multiple polite requests for clarity. It’s a vague answer for an organization that prides itself on inclusivity and transparency…. 

(4) POLYGON. Chris Barkley is quoted in Polygon’s coverage, which otherwise contains nothing new to readers here: “Hugo Awards controversy sparks censorship allegations”.

… The Hugos are among the most prestigious awards in science fiction and fantasy, and it’s incredibly disheartening to see what should be a celebration of all the great work happening in that space be tainted by controversy. With the committee still refusing to give answers and with no central governing body to step in, it seems unlikely we’ll ever know the details of what occurred — or see anyone held accountable if anything unconstitutional did.

What is clear is that the community is determined never to see a repeat of what occurred this year. As Barkley wrote, “this incident, whether it was at the behest of the government of the People’s Republic [of] China or some other entity, will NEVER be forgotten and that doing something about preventing such a thing from happening again will be at the top of the agenda at the Glasgow Worldcon Business Meeting in August…”

(5) WHERE IN THE WORLD. At Winter Is Coming, Daniel Roman’s article “Controversy strikes the 2023 Hugo Awards, causing uproar over censorship speculation” ends with this conclusion.

…I happened to be at DisCon III when Chengdu won the bid for this year’s Hugo ceremony, and one of the prominent arguments in its favor that I heard floated around was that Worldcon should be a world convention, not just one that floats back and forth across the U.S. and a handful of other western countries. Bringing it to countries in, for example, East Asia and Africa would be a great way to include fans in parts of the world who have not typically been able to attend, and to recognize the writers doing amazing work in those regions.

However, if each Worldcon must logically abide by the local and regional laws of the country where it’s being held, and those laws mean that the Hugo Awards cannot be conducted legitimately and fairly because of things like censorship — or even worse, that certain groups of people might have their safety put in jeopardy — then that must be considered as well. We have a situation right now where it’s being speculated that there was government censorship on the 2023 Hugos, and regardless of whether there was or not, it seems clear that the people behind the event do not feel that everyone involved is safe enough to explain the situation in full. In that sort of circumstance, it’s hard to imagine any scenario where the awards can actually take place in a legitimate manner.

(6) OKAY, HERE IT IS. You want the truth? You think you deserve the truth? Sarah A. Hoyt will give it to you: “This Thing Isn’t Entirely Under My Control” at Mad Genius Club.

…Among the many strange things I get asked — and other writers get asked — is how we do what we do. I.e. how we create the stories, and stay on track and write them and all. 

Now, normally when I’m asked this I’m at a panel, where I’m under writ to tell a lot of lies, provided I make them entertaining. Also, on principle, I’m supposed to sound like a professional who know what she’s doing. Of course, acting like a pro should be easy after 30 years or so of being published (okay, 25 years just about in novels. But yeah, about 30 from first semi-pro short story.) And if you believe that, I have some primo Florida swamp I’d like to sell you at a really good price.

I often wonder, though, if my fellow writers lie like moth eaten rugs at this panels. Because they make the whole thing sound so rational, so controlled. “Well, I wanted to write a book about the manufacture of bells in the planet Korud, so, I thought, how do I wrap an adventure around that?” And we all smile and nod sagely as someone explains how he researched the manufacture of bells for five months, then went to a Buddhist monastery and sat contemplating the metalness of bells, before the idea of having pirates come to the planet and remove the bells, and then our hero….”

I know I lie. I lie a lot about the writing process, when I want to sound like I did things for a reason. Well, and when I worked for Trad Pub. Because you don’t want your editor and publisher to think you’re a complete loon. But more and more I just tell the truth.

And the truth is “this thing isn’t fully under my control.”…

(7) BIG CUTS AT LA TIMES. From Politico: “LA Times slashes newsroom as paper struggles under billionaire owner”.

The Los Angeles Times on Tuesday laid off at least 115 people, including about a quarter of its newsroom, in a stunning second round of major layoffs in less than a year that underscored broader challenges facing the news business.

Cuts included reporters, editors and columnists, according to the union that represents the newsroom and social media posts from individual journalists. Layoffs fell disproportionately on Black, Latino and Asian employees who tend to have less seniority, the Guild said in a statement….

(8) CHASING MOBY CHATGPT. In a recent email to members from the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society the ALCS’ Deputy Chief Executive Richard Combes expects the coming year to provide more clarity around AI, authorship and copyright.

My piece last year opened and closed with a few sentences generated by ChatGPT. At the time, this seemed like a novel way of demonstrating the capability of the technology; then I found the acres of other articles doing the exact same thing. But as Herman Melville observed, “it is better to fail in originality than succeed in imitation.”

During the intervening year, the think pieces have piled up, commenting on various policy initiatives, lawsuits and existential crises, while AI-generated content has sprouted online like fungi on the forest floor (including, notoriously, several foraging guides offering unreliable advice about edible mushrooms).

As judicial decisions and statutory rules emerge and evolve over the coming year, we should begin to find answers to key questions about copyright, authorship and creativity in the age of AI. Conceptually, we’ve been here before, repeatedly. The first quarter of this century has seen successive technologies redefine the way that creators’ works are consumed and distributed without due consideration for how they will be credited and paid, and the latest wave is no different.

The false dilemma that’s often presented between an innovative tech sector and a robust framework for copyright and creators’ rights is as artificial as it is banal. It is possible and, if we want to maintain the value and stature of our creative industries, essential to develop models whereby the tech sector is an ally to those creating the works upon which their products and services rely. So, how do we get there from here?

…For almost 20 years, the ALCS authors’ earnings surveys have described a fixed direction of travel, a stubbornly downward trend. This threatens not only the viability of existing careers but also creates barriers to entry for new and diverse voices. So, our work this year is about plotting a new course, on what promises to be an interesting, challenging but vitally important journey; which leads me to close as I opened, with Melville, “it is not down in any map; true places never are”.

(9) LOVIN’ SPOONFUL. Charlie Jane Anders argues on behalf of “10 Space TV Shows That Don’t Get Enough Love” at Happy Dancing.

The first two on the list are:

1) Space Cases.

Peter David and Bill Mumy created this YA TV show about kids exploring space, including a young Jewel Staite. It aired for two seasons on Nickelodeon, and it was cute as hell, not to mention quite subversive at times. George Takei plays an alien conqueror named Warlord Shank, and when I say Takei chews all the scenery… You’ll see tooth marks all over the sets. This show was sort of a precursor of Star Trek: Prodigy, and I remember it being fun as all heck.

2) Quark.

Quark was a short-lived spoof of Star Trek and Star Wars that aired in 1977, featuring a host of campy characters. The thing is, it had so many cool ideas in the mix. Long before Firefly (or even Alien), this is the story of the crew of a humble blue-collar starship — a garbage scow, in this case – getting involved in vital, dangerous shenanigans. There’s a gender-fluid character, a pair of clones who both insist they’re the original (just like the Maulers in Invincible!) and a plant in humanoid form. In many ways, Quark was ahead of its time.

(10) AFTER ACTION REPORT. [Item by Steven French.] The recently wrapped-up “Fantasy: Realms of Imagination” exhibition included several science-fiction related items, including this copy of the March 1956 issue of Ploy, a fanzine edited by Ron Bennett, a member of the Leeds Science Fiction Association which, as the exhibit’s label notes, was the successor to the group formed after the famous 1937 convention (not just the first in the U.K. but the first in the world!). For some reason the Library chose to display these letters from fellow fans, one of which including a description of a talk given to the Sheffield Junior (and Parents) Astronomical Society which contains language ‘of its time’ that would definitely be deemed inappropriate nowadays.

Elsewhere in the issue (available here at the FANAC site) there are brief contributions from mega fans/editors/authors Shirley (Lee) Hoffmann and Terry Carr. 

(11) FRANK STROM DIES. Comics fan and writer Frank Strom recently died, mourned by his friend Tom Brevoort in “Mortality” at Man With A Hat.

Frank had aspirations of breaking into the field professionally, and he operated on the fringes of it for many years, but was never quite able to find that break that would make it a full time vocation. He wrote a ton of issues of the licensed ELVIRA comic book, he had a short-lived series in Fantagraphics’ X-Rated Eros line in the 1990s, CHEETA POP, SCREAM QUEEN, and he wrote one story for Marvel. That one I commissioned from him especially; it starred the 1940s/1950s character Venus who was a fascination of both of ours, and guest-starred both a number of the girl comics stars of the 1950s but also a small bevy of Marvel’s pre-hero monsters. I was able to convince Dan DeCarloFrank’s favorite, to draw it. Eventually, though, he settled into a routine day job…. 

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 24, 1944 David Gerrold, 80. How could I not start by acknowledging he wrote one of the best scripts ever in the Trek series, “The Trouble with Tribbles”? Seriously it’s a perfect script from the very beginning to those Scottie saying “Aye, sir. Before they went into warp, I transported the whole kit ‘n’ caboodle into their engine room, where they’ll be no tribble at all.”  It garnered a Hugo nomination at Baycon. 

David Gerrold. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

Not that he stopped there of course. He was responsible for an uncredited rewrite on “I, Mudd”, and he scripted along with Oliver Crawford the rather excellent “The Cloud Minders” in season three. 

The animated series which I still truly adore and which of course is on Paramount + saw him  following up his “The Trouble with Tribbles” script with one for “More Tribbles, More Troubles”. His other animated script was “Bem” in which he reveals James T. Kirk’s middle name to be Tiberius. I had thought it’d been done in the series but that’s just my memory. It’ll next be used in The Undiscovered Country

David Gerrold and Diane Duane at the 1975 Westercon. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

He left Star Trek: The Next Generation and the Trek verse as Memory Alpha explains here: “He left the show near the end of the first season, partly because of the dispute over his controversial script, ‘Blood and Fire’. The story, which was basically an allegory of AIDS, and involved allegedly homosexual characters, was initially scrapped by the producers. It was re-written by Herb Wright as ‘Blood and Ice’, removing the gay characters, but it still remained unproduced.” Well and other reasons that he into in great detail as well. 

Not at all surprisingly, he got involved in those video fan fictions, as a series consultant for fan-produced series Star Trek: New Voyages, and Star Trek: Phase II for which he was named show runner. He fell out later with other members of the latter series over creative differences and left. 

Let’s see… let’s not overlook that JMS actually did produce his “Believers” script on Babylon 5, a story involving our good doctor, aliens and a very unfortunate outcome. 

Books? Oh yes. When HARLIE Was One is an extraordinary novel. Though I’ve sampled his other novels, it’s his most original, most interesting and certainly most intriguing work. Interestingly, at least to me, I discovered doing this essay that When HARLIE Was One is not a one-off but is rather just one novel in a rather extensive series entitled simply Harlie. Intriguingly the first one is titled Oracle for a White Rabbit. Was that Rabbit there? 

The War Against the Chtorr series of books, about an invasion of Earth by deliberately not sketched out aliens was, errr, ok. I read A Matter for Men and A Day for Damnation but stopped there. There were two more published then a comedy or tragedy of reasons for why the series wasn’t completed have followed in the decades since. 

Other novels? Well there’s this novelette called “The Martian Child” won a Hugo at Intersection which became a film. There’s the most readable The Man Who Folded Himself that nominated for a Hugo at Discon II. It’s wonderful and certainly deserved that Hugo.

Now my favorite work by him is the first novel that he did, The Flying Sorcerers which started out in If as “The Misspelled Magician” which I like better as a title. It was co-written with Larry Niven. 

There’s too much other fiction, both long form and short form which I’ve not encountered to deal with here. I know all of you well enough that you’ll note anything that you think I should mentioned. 

(13) WEIGHING MJOLNIR. After viewing Neil deGrasse Tyson’s analysis of “How Much Thor’s Hammer Weighs”, Daniel Dern notes (anticipating much of Tom Galloway’s initial comment-worthy thoughts) (playlist: “She’s So Heavy,” The Beatles) —

Overspecialized nerds missing the point: Neil deGrasse Tyson forgets (or never read the relevant Marvel comics, nor watched the right Marvel movies). Unlike Superman’s super-heavy regular-sized front door key to his Fortress of Solitude (see Grant Morrison & Frank Quiteley’s All-Star Superman) (as opposed to the original classic humongous key pretending to be a road sign for plane flight paths), Mjolnir’s liftability was a function of the lifter’s worthiness.

(14) MICKEY AND FRIENDS PLAY AVENGERS AND X-MEN IN NEW DISNEY WHAT IF? COVERS. This time marking the 60th anniversary of two of Marvel’s most iconic super hero teams—the Avengers and the X-Men — new Disney What If? variant covers kicked off earlier this month with Amazing Spider-Man #41 and will continue to adorn select issues of Amazing Spider-Man throughout 2024. 

(15) DISNEY IMAGINEER JOINS INVENTORS HALL OF FAME. “Lanny Smoot Becomes The Second Person From Disney, Since Walt Disney Himself, To Get Inducted Into The National Inventors Hall Of Fame” reports Yahoo!

… The Disney Parks Blog reports that The National Inventors Hall of Fame announced its Class of 2024 inductees during a ceremony at the Walt Disney Imagineering campus in Glendale, CA.

Smoot is making history as the first Disney Imagineer to receive this honor. He’s also only the second Walt Disney Company employee since Walt Disney to earn the recognition.

During Smoot’s 45-year career, he has been a theatrical technology creator, inventor, electrical engineer, scientist, and researcher. The innovator has amassed a collection of over 100 patents, 74 of them created during his 25-year stint at the Walt Disney Company….

… Smoot has been integral in creating some of the most technically advanced special effects at Disney theme parks and experiences. Some examples of these special effects include Madame Leota’s floating in the Séance Room at Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion, Disney Live Entertainment’s extendable lightsaber, the Magic Playfloor interactive game experience on the Disney Cruise Line, and the Fortress Explorations adventure at Tokyo DisneySea….

(16) EVERYBODY KNOWS LOTR. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “The Trick to the Fluffiest Muffins May Already Be in Your Kitchen” says the New York Times.

As winter set in this January, Sarah Kieffer recalled how it snowed for eight months last year in her hometown, Minneapolis. For weeks on end, the temperature dipped below minus 20. Surrounded by grayness, she baked blueberry muffins for the cheer of their bright pops of blue.

“It’s like when the hobbits got to Mordor, and Sam looks up and sees a bright shining star, and has a little bit of hope,” she said. “That’s what a blueberry muffin feels like in February.”

Ms. Kieffer, the author of “100 Morning Treats” (and a self-described “super nerd”)…

Daniel Dern comments: Implicit in the text is the assumption (by the writer and NYT section editor) that the reader is at least familiar to recognize the source (Lord of the Rings) without the invocation of Frodo, Gandalf, Bilbo or Gollum — and simply saying “Sam” rather than “Samwise” or “Sam (Frodo’s more-than-a-sidekick)” although “hobbits” and Mordor” do help provide key context, of course.

At least Ms. Keiffer didn’t close with an ending like “I’ll bet even Gollum might exclaim ‘Better than Precious!’”

(17) MEET JOE GREEN. The FANAC FanHistory Zoom Joseph L. Green Interview is now available to watch on YouTube.

Title: Joseph L. Green – An Interview conducted by Edie Stern

YouTube Description: Joe Green’s interest in science fiction began in the 1940s, before he knew there was even a name for this kind of literature. His introduction to science fiction fandom came in the early 1950s, and  first published fiction in the 1960s. Add to that his long career in the military and civilian space programs, and you have a trajectory that is the envy of a many a science fiction reader.

In this fascinating interview, Joe Green talks about his life and career, and his views on science fiction and fandom after more than 70 years in the SF community.  With a professional career spanning more than 60 years, (his last published work was in 2023),  in this discussion Joe starts with his introduction to fandom, and his early fanzine contributions, his first professional sales and the struggle to balance fandom, professional writing and a growing family.  

With a decades long career revolving around space, he tells anecdotes ranging from the Cuban missile crisis of the 60s to one of his most important accomplishments – editor and principal writer of the NASA report on the Challenger disaster. Here  he talks about that difficult but necessary work….Starting in the days of the manned Apollo launches, the Greens hosted spectacular and now legendary launch parties. Joe couldn’t help but share his joy at one of the finest achievements of mankind. In this session, there are great anecdotes about well-known writers and fans, including Poul Anderson, Sam Moskowitz, Arthur C. Clarke and A.E. Van Vogt, and Joe’s unorthodox  advice about getting entrée to NASA launches. It’s a delight to hear, and makes you wish you had been there.

One story we didn’t get to was what happened when Joe Green heard filk music for the first time. Joe was delighted, especially with the space-oriented pieces, and not too long after he heard the “Minus Ten and Counting” recording,  one of those songs was played as the wake-up music for the astronauts in space.

Many thanks to Joe’s daughter, Rose-Marie Lillian for her technical support, enabling Joe to participate in the Zoom. 

(18) TURNING TWENTY ON MARS. From an National Air and Space Museum email:

20 years ago this month, Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity landed on the Martian surface, on opposite sides of the Red Planet. Soon after, the twin rovers, boasting a level of mobility that far surpassed the 1997 Mars Pathfinder rover Sojourner, embarked on their respective journeys. Spirit was sent to the floor of a 90-mile-wide crater named Gusev and Opportunity was sent to Meridiani Planum, a smooth area near the Martian equator.

Spirit and Opportunity

With identical sets of science instruments onboard, Spirit and Opportunity conducted comprehensive geological surveys and atmospheric analyses. Both rovers were able to find compelling evidence of the Red Planet’s ancient environments, revealing a past where conditions were intermittently wet and potentially capable of supporting life.

Panoramic view (consisting of hundreds of images stitched together) of the Martian surface. The images were captured by Spirit with the rover’s deck visible.

Both rovers exceeded their initial 90-day mission durations by a significant margin. Spirit traveled five miles on the Martian surface and sent its last message to Earth on March 22, 2010, after operating for over six years. Opportunity covered a total of 28 miles and holds the record as the longest-serving rover on Mars, having conducted over 14 years of exploration before it sent its last signal on June 10, 2018. Together the duo sent over 340,000 images back to Earth.

Mars Exploration Rover Surface System Test Bed (middle) was used on Earth to troubleshoot problems that Spirit and Opportunity encountered on Mars. It is on display next to Sojourner’s flight spare Marie Curie and a Curiosity model in the “Kenneth C. Griffin Exploring the Planets Gallery” at the Museum in DC.

The twin rovers’ landings on Mars also marks 20 years of continuous rover exploration of the Red Planet, with rovers Curiosity and Perseverance currently active on Mars and continuing on the legacy of Spirit and Opportunity.

(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY. I haven’t viewed it because my hearing is awful and there’s no closed captioning, but no reason you should deprive yourself: “The Litigation Disaster Tourism Hour: World Contastrophe, Trademark Edition” on Twitch.TV.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Daniel Dern, Danny Sichel, Francis Hamit, Trey Palmer, 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 Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 8/30/23 And The Pixels That Mother Gives You Don’t Do Anything At All

(1) COURT DECISION CURBS A LONGTIME COPYRIGHT REQUIREMENT. [Item by Anne Marble.] In 2018, print-on-demand publisher Valancourt Books sued the U.S. Copyright Office because of the “mandatory deposit” requirement — which required the publisher to send U.S. Copyright Office copies of about 240 of the books they publish. They didn’t have the books on hand and would have had to spend several thousand dollars to produce them. Valancourt faced the possibility of as much as $100,000 in fines.

The legal issues were analyzed by the plaintiff’s law firm Institute for Justice in a 2021 article “Unique Richmond Publisher Will Appeal After D.C. Judge Insists It Must Give the Government Free Copies of Its Books”.

Valancourt is a unique publisher run by James and his husband Ryan Cagle. James is a former lawyer who found his life’s calling reviving and popularizing rare, neglected and out-of-print fiction, including 18th century Gothic novels, Victorian horror novels, forgotten literary fiction and works by early LGBT authors. Founded in 2005, Valancourt has published more than 300 books, all of which they have permission to reprint, winning praise from literature professors and the press alike.

The U.S. Copyright Office is demanding copies of hundreds of books published by Valancourt. If Valancourt doesn’t send the books, they could be subject to fines of $250 per book (plus the retail price of the books), along with additional fines of $2,500 for “willful” failure to deposit the books. But there’s a problem: Valancourt doesn’t have the books. They are a print-on-demand publisher, and giving the federal government free books would damage their business.

An earlier Forbes article (“Why Is The Federal Government Threatening An Indie Book Publisher With $100,000 In Fines?” (2018) also explained:

…[M]andatory deposit was originally required if an owner wanted their works protected by copyright. That requirement was upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court—in 1834….

Valancourt lost at the District Court level but won at the U.S. Appeals Court level (read the decision here). Reuters covered the victory: “US appeals court curbs Copyright Office’s mandatory deposit policy”. The Copyright Office says they are reviewing the decision.

(2) BIG GREEN NUMBERS. The Hollywood Reporter passes this on with a grain of salt: “’Ahsoka’ Series Premiere Gets Big Ratings, Disney+ Says”.

Disney+ is breaking with its usual practice to share some (strong) viewing numbers for the premiere of its latest Star Wars series, Ahsoka.

According to the streamer, the first episode of the series, starring Rosario Dawson as the titular Jedi, has racked up 14 million views worldwide in the five days after its Aug. 23 debut. Disney+ is using the same methodology for counting a “view” that Netflix has employed for the past couple of months — dividing the total viewing time by the run time for a given title.

In Ahsoka’s case, 14 million views of the 56-minute premiere episode would equate to 784 million minutes of viewing worldwide. “Views” doesn’t necessarily equal “viewers,” however, as the total viewing time doesn’t necessarily account for multiple people watching the show together or a single person watching the episode several times. Disney+ also didn’t release any figures for episode two of Ahsoka, which also premiered Aug. 23.

(3) PRATCHETT PROJECT EVENT. “Terry Pratchett at the Unseen University”, featuring a series of short presentations from researchers of various disciplines, is an in-person and virtual event happening September 22. Tickets available at the link.

The Pratchett Project in Trinity College Dublin is an interdisciplinary platform for research into the life and works of Terry Pratchett. It builds on the comprehensive collection of Pratchett’s works and their translations into forty languages, held in the Trinity College Library, as well as Pratchett’s personal connection with the College, borne out of the adjunct professorship he held from 2010. A further part of this endeavour is driven by Pratchett’s own life story and inclinations. In 2007, Pratchett publicly announced that he had a rare form of young-onset Alzheimer’s disease, called posterior cortical atrophy. He subsequently became a passionate campaigner who was determined to reduce the stigma of dementia. A docudrama on BBC followed the literary career and charitable work of the beloved author.

So, research into brain health is an important part of the Pratchett Project in Trinity College. We are currently developing this strand of the project to find new ways in which the implications of breakthroughs in research can be “translated” for members of the public. We aim to bring people together from various backgrounds and fields to make new connections, to promote public understanding and awareness, to change perceptions and inspire people to support brain awareness campaigns and get involved.

This Culture Night, we will be joined by a wide range of speakers, each discussing their research, which is in some way connected to the life and/or work of Terry Pratchett.

THIS EVENT CAN BE ATTENDED BOTH ONLINE AND IN PERSON.

IT WILL ALSO BE RECORDED AND UPLOADED TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL

(4) AVOID TOO MUCH INFORMATION. Sarah A. Hoyt speaks with the voice of experience in “Starting Your Novel and Need to Know” at Mad Genius Club.

…Anyway, one thing that is becoming painfully obvious as I read people’s beginnings of novels, is that most of you have no idea how much information and world building to put in the beginning of your book.

This is not strange or unusual. I not only went through years of having this issue, but I also revert to this issue whenever I have not written for a long while.

When I fail I have two modes: either I write completely incomprehensible stuff or I write an opening that reads like you’re in a classroom and I’m expecting you to take notes.

But there is a way to handle it. I only figured it with Darkship Thieves, and only after breaking it pretty badly with an extra fifty pages in the beginning.

Anyway, so, what do you need to tell the reader: no more and no less than the reader needs to know.….

(5) GENRE WORK UP FOR KIRKUS PRIZE. The Kirkus Prize announced finalists across three categories, with winners to be named on October 11. The Fiction category shortlist includes White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link and Shaun Tan. Literary Hub explains how the award works.

The Kirkus Prize is one of the richest annual literary awards in the world with the prizes totaling $150,000. Writers become eligible by receiving a rare, starred review from Kirkus Reviews; this year’s 18 finalists were chosen from 608 young readers’ literature titles, 435 fiction titles, and 435 nonfiction titles….

(6) HUANG Q&A. “Reading with… S.L. Huang” at Shelf Awareness.

On your nightstand now: 

I don’t actually have a nightstand, but next to my bed or currently on my phone are:

The Search for E.T. Bell: Also Known as John Taine by Constance Reid. It’s the biography of mathematician Eric Temple Bell, who wrote Radium Age science fiction under the pen name John Taine, and it is WILD, because this man?? completely made up??? his entire life??? I read it because I’m writing an intro to a rerelease of his fiction, but his life is fascinating. I love reading about mathematicians!

Lost Ark Dreaming, a novella by Suyi Davies Okungbowa, which I was lucky enough to be sent an advance copy of. I haven’t started this one yet, but I’m looking forward to it!

Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, which is Wole Talabi’s debut novel–another advanced copy I’m super excited to start reading! I’ve really enjoyed Wole’s short fiction.

And finally, I’m also currently part of a book club reading this podcast version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms3kingdomspodcast.com . We’ve been at it a year, and we’re about a third of the way through! It’s a very, very long book.

(7) THE ART OF ZARDOZ. The Hugo Book Club Blog improved on a meme about good art vs. bad art that has been getting a lot of attention. Their table is effing brilliant. Or zeeing brilliant. You decide.

(8) WITH EXTRA ADDED BRAIN. At Galactic Journey, Victoria Silverworlf explains a fact of TV life in 1968: “[August 30, 1968] TV or Not TV, That is The Question (They Saved Hitler’s Brain and Mars Needs Women)”.

Not all movies show up in theaters. Movies made for television began a few years ago, at least here in the USA, with a thriller called See How They Run. There have been quite a few since then.

A similar phenomenon is the fact that theatrical movies are frequently altered for television. Of course, films are often cut for broadcast, either to reduce the running time or to remove material deemed inappropriate for the tender sensibilities of American viewers.

But did you know that new footage is sometimes added to movies before they show up on TV? That’s because they’re too short to fill up the time slot allotted to them.

An example is Roger Corman’s cheap little monster movie The Wasp Woman. In theaters, it ran just over an hour. On television, new scenes increased the length by about ten minutes.

Wasting time in front of the TV screen recently, I came across such an elongated theatrical film, as well as one made for television only. Let’s take a look at both.

They Saved Hitler’s Brain

This thing began life in 1963 under the a much less laughable title….

(9) MEMORY LANE

1991 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

To my thinking, there are two great fictional uses of the Babbage Machine that Charles Babbage designed but never built. Oh, and the first complete Babbage Engine was constructed in London in 2002, one hundred and fifty three years after it was designed. So what are those novels?

One is S.M Stirling’s The Peshawar Lancers in which the British Empire decamps to India after meteor strikes usher in a new ice age. That novel and his Sky People novels, particularly In the Courts of the Crimson Kings, are my favorite works by him.

Then there’s the one our Beginning comes from which is William Gibson & Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine, their name for The Babbage Machine. It was published by Gollancz thirty-three years ago with cover art by Ian Miller.

It was nominated for a number of Awards but didn’t win any. The nominations were a BSFA, a John W. Campbell Memorial Award, a Nebula and a Prix Aurora.

It is at the usual suspects as a Meredith Moment. 

And now, as I don’t want to give a single message generated by The Difference Engine, is our Beginning…

THE ANGEL OF GOLIAD

Composite image, optically encoded by escort-craft of the trans-Channel airship Lord Brunel: aerial view of suburban Cherbourg, October 14, 1905.

A villa, a garden, a balcony.

Erase the balcony’s wrought-iron curves, exposing a bath-chair and its occupant. Reflected sunset glints from the nickel-plate of the chair’s wheel-spokes.

The occupant, owner of the villa, rests her arthritic hands upon fabric woven by a Jacquard loom.

These hands consist of tendons, tissue, jointed bone. Through quiet processes of time and information, threads within the human cells have woven themselves into a woman.

Her name is Sybil Gerard.

Below her, in a neglected formal garden, leafless vines lace wooden trellises on whitewashed, flaking walls. From the open windows of her sickroom, a warm draft stirs the loose white hair at her neck, bringing scents of coal-smoke, jasmine, opium.

Her attention is fixed upon the sky, upon a silhouette of vast and irresistible grace—metal, in her lifetime, having taught itself to fly. In advance of that magnificence, tiny unmanned aeroplanes dip and skirl against the red horizon.

Like starlings, Sybil thinks.

The airship’s lights, square golden windows, hint at human warmth. “Effortlessly, with the incomparable grace of organic function, she imagines a distant music there, the music of London: the passengers promenade, they drink, they flirt, perhaps they dance.

Thoughts come unbidden, the mind weaving its perspectives, assembling meaning from emotion and memory.

She recalls her life in London. Recalls herself, so long ago, making her way along the Strand, pressing past the crush at Temple Bar. Pressing on, the city of Memory winding itself about her—till, by the walls on Newgate, the shadow of her father’s hanging falls …

And Memory turns, deflected swift as light, down another byway—one where it is always evening….

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 30, 1797 Mary Shelley. Author of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818), her first novel. Another of Shelley’s novels, The Last Man (1826), concerns Europe in the late 21st century, ravaged by a mysterious pandemic illness that rapidly sweeps across the entire globe, ultimately resulting in the near-extinction of humanity. Scholars call it one of the first pieces of dystopian fiction published. (OGH) (Died 1851.)
  • Born August 30, 1942 Judith Moffett, 81. Editor and academic. She won the first Theodore Sturgeon Award with her story “Surviving” and the fame gained for her Pennterra novel helped her win John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at Nolacon II. Asimov wrote an introduction for the book and published it under his Isaac Asimov Presents series.  Her Holy Ground series of The Ragged World: A Novel of the Hefn on EarthTime, Like an Ever-Rolling Stream: A Sequel to the Ragged World and The Bird Shaman are her other genre novels. The Bear’s Babys And Other Stories collects her genre short stories. All of her works are surprisingly available at the usual digital suspects.
  • Born August 30, 1943 Robert Crumb, 80. He’s here because ISFDB lists him as the illustrator of The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick which is likely they say an interview that Dick did with Gregg Rickman and published in Rickman’s The Last Testament. They’re also listing the cover art for Edward Abby’s The Monkey Wrench Gang which I think is genre.
  • Born August 30, 1955 — Jeannette Holloman. She was one of the founding members of the Greater Columbia Costumers Guild and she was a participant at masquerades at Worldcon, CostumeCon, and other conventions. Her costumes were featured in The Costume Makers Art and Thread magazine. She’s here in the gold outfit that she designed and made at Costume-Con 9 which was held February 15-18, 1991 at The Columbia Inn in Columbia, Maryland. (Died 2019.)
  • Born August 30, 1955 Mark Kelly, born 1955, aged sixty eight years. He maintains the indispensable Science Fiction Awards Database (SFADB), which we consult almost daily. He wrote reviews for Locus in the Nineties, then founded the Locus Online website in 1997 and ran it single-handedly for 20 years, along the way winning the Best Website Hugo (2002). More recently he’s devised a way to use his awards data to rank the all-time “Top SF/F/H Short Stories” and “Top SF/F/H Novelettes”. Kelly’s explanation of how the numbers are crunched is here. (OGH)
  • Born August 30, 1965 Laeta Kalogridis, 58. She was an executive producer of the short-lived not so great Birds of Prey series and she co-wrote the screenplays for Terminator Genisys and Alita: Battle Angel. She recently was the creator and executive producer of Altered Carbon. She also has a screenwriting credit for Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, a film the fanboys hate but which I really like. 
  • Born August 30, 1972 Cameron Diaz, 51. She first shows as Tina Carlyle in The Mask, an amazing film. She voices Princess Fiona in the Shrek franchise. While dating Tom Cruise, she’s cast as an uncredited bus passenger in Minority Report.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Brewster Rockit has an inside comics joke, and it’s a hoot.
  • Tom Gauld, meanwhile, has an inside physics joke.

(12) A BIG FAN, EVENTUALLY. Peter Stone shows the evolution of one comics artist’s respect for another: “Mapping Out NEAL ADAMS’ Enduring Respect and Admiration for JACK KIRBY” at 13th Dimension, Comics, Creators, Culture.

Like many of us, Neal was not a big fan of Jack Kirby’s art when he was younger. In fact, Neal thought very little about Kirby’s art. IN FACT, Neal kind of hated it…

The transformation of Adams’ opinion began here:

[Challengers of the Unknown]  Issue #4! Chapter 4, “The Mechanical Judge”! The splash page was exactly what Neal was looking for. It had changed the way Neal viewed Jack Kirby when he was just getting into comics. Jack was writing and pencilling these stories and this was Neal’s Dream. His theory was always that artists should be writing their stories. They understood storytelling better than writers, according to Neal. A writer was there to add dialogue and that was “the icing on the cake.” But, in this case, it was the splash page image that blew his mind.

It was all about perspective. Kirby had drawn a futuristic, sci-fi building where the reader can see the bottom, middle and top clearly. The middle of the building is the focus and closest to the reader. However the top of the building AND the bottom of the building curve away and get smaller. Neal would always say it’s wrong but absolutely fascinating. Neal once drew a couple other examples of what Kirby was doing with perspective. The first is a boat with three men in it where the front of the boat comes to a point and the back end of the boat does the same. The widest spot is the middle section. Neal viewed it very much like a cinematic technique; a fish-eye lens that adds drama to the image….

…When Neal was 27 in the late ’60s, he started to realize how unique Kirby was. Fantastic Four was obviously a heightened version of the Challengers. Then, the Hulk, the Avengers, the (almost throwaway) X-Men, Ant-Man, Thor, Black Panther, a revised Captain America and so many others. Neal drew Deadman, Green Lantern/Green Arrow, Batman, Avengers, the X-Men and so much more while Jack Kirby was changing the comic universe. Neal saw that every page of a Jack Kirby comic had a boldly new idea that someone else could explore and turn into a regular series….

(13) THANKED AND EXCUSED. The actress that Carrie Fisher beat out for her Star Wars role — Terri Nunn — still went on to fame: “’Star Wars’ Princess Leia Runner-Up Wound Up Becoming A Famous Musician” at Slashfilm.

…Lucas said, “Your runner-up? She became a rockstar.” That runner-up was Terri Nunn, the lead singer of the band Berlin, who brought us songs like “Take My Breath Away” and “Metro.” In fact, Nunn’s audition with Harrison Ford is out there (via WishItWas1984) on YouTube. Nunn brought a softness to the part that is very different than Fisher’s interpretation. Frankly, I’m in awe of both of them for making what, at the time, was space gibberish sound compelling.

Nunn spoke about the audition in a 2022 interview with Rave It Up. She said, “I’m sitting there with Harrison Ford, and we’re reading these lines, and I had no idea what the hell is an R2-D2. I don’t know what that is. But I was trying to make it happen.” Nunn would go on to act in projects like “T.J. Hooker,” “Lou Grant,” and “Vega$,” but Fisher just nailed that audition….

(14) HOOCH YOU CAN FIND IN THE DARK. If It’s Hip It’s Here introduces oenophiles to “The latest in global design and creativity”.

The 19 Crimes x Universal Monsters Glow-In-The-Dark Wine Bottles are a must have for lovers of old classic monster movies and Halloween. The wine brand 19 Crimes has launched 2 new wines; a Frankenstein Cabernet Sauvignon and a Dracula Red Blend, both with illustrated labels that illuminate when the lights are out.

… The Frankenstein Cabernet, vintage 2021, is firm and full with a rich mouth feel. Aromatics of dark berries, violets and vanilla….

… The Dracula Red Blend, vintage 2021, is rich and round with a soft fruity finish. Sweet aromatics with notes of chocolate….

The place to buy them is at the 19 Crimes website.

(15) CYBERATTACKS ON TELESCOPES. “Hackers shut down 2 of the world’s most advanced telescopes” at Space.com.

Some of the world’s leading astronomical observatories have reported cyberattacks that have resulted in temporary shutdowns.

The National Science Foundation’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, or NOIRLab, reported that a cybersecurity incident that occurred on Aug. 1 has prompted the lab to temporarily halt operations at its Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii and Gemini South Telescope in Chile. Other, smaller telescopes on Cerro Tololo in Chile were also affected. 

… “We plan to provide the community with more information when we are able to, in alignment with our commitment to transparency as well as our dedication to the security of our infrastructure,” the update added. 

The cyberattacks on NOIRLab’s facilities occurred just days before the United States National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) issued a bulletin advising American space companies and research organizations about the threat of cyberattacks and espionage. …

(16) WHAT HAS IT GOT ON ITS SPROCKETSES? “Chandrayaan-3: What has India’s Moon rover Pragyaan been up to since landing?” BBC News overviews the rover’s first week of activity.

…Over the past few days, the rover has been hard at work.

On Tuesday evening, Isro said that a laser detector onboard had made “the first-ever in-situ – in the original space – measurements on the elemental composition of the surface near the south pole” and found a host of chemicals, including sulphur and oxygen, on lunar soil.

The instrument “unambiguously confirms” the presence of sulphur, it said, adding that preliminary analysis also “unveiled the presence of aluminium, calcium, iron, chromium, titanium, manganese, silicon and oxygen”.

“A thorough investigation regarding the presence of hydrogen is underway,” it added….

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George’s “Game of Thrones Season 8 Pitch Meeting – Revisited!” is something you may have seen before. There’s some new content at the very end, and his explanation of how he decided which viewer questions to answer is worth skipping ahead to.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Anne Marble, John A. Arkansawyer, Rich Lynch, Kathy Sullivan, 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 Anne Marble.]

Pixel Scroll 8/17/23 These Scrolls Don’t Understand The Concept Of Pixels The Same As We Do

(1) FACES IN THE NEWS. A long, detailed infographic has been posted here by Chengdu Association for Science and Technology (Chengdushi Kexue Jishu Xiehui), which Zimozi Natsuco says, “is always considered as the upper guidance institution of Chengdu Science Fiction Association”. It is translated:  

Understand Worldcon by 1 picture: All you want to know about 2023 Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention is here!

It opens with a six-pack of guests:

Shown in addition to GoHs Robert J. Sawyer and Liu Cixin are new guests Michael Swanwick, David Wesley Hill, Touya Tachihara and Kim Bo-young.

(2) TWO BEAUTIES. In two minutes James Bacon tells the story of two copies of X-Men 28, featuring the debut of Banshee, one with fanhistorical significance.

I share here two issues of X-Men 28, videoed in the basement of Sub-City in Dublin. The very nice high grade copy on the left belongs to the store, the one on the right is of Irish fanhistorical significance. Both are very beautiful.

(3) SEANAN MCGUIRE VIRTUAL AND LIVE APPEARANCES. Join urban fantasy author Seanan McGuire as she celebrates the two new additions to the October Daye series — Sleep No More and The Innocent Sleep with a series of events.

September 5 — Seanan McGuire In conversation with Catherynne Valente: Virtual Event Hosted by Mysterious Galaxy House

September 29 — Seanan McGuire Reddit AMA / October Daye – Astra Publishing House —  Reddit.com/ r/Fantasy

October 30 — Seanan McGuire in Conversation at University Book Store in Seattle, WA

(4) JUST ADD WATER. Radio Times reports “Doctor Who lost story The Underwater Menace to be animated”.

The partially missing Doctor Who adventure The Underwater Menace is set to be restored with new animated visuals.

Out of 253 episodes from the show’s first six years, 97 remain lost in their original form, due to the BBC’s policy of junking archive programming between 1967 and 1978.

However, audio recordings of all episodes exist, with The Underwater Menace – a 1967 serial starring Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor – being the latest story to be given new life by way of animation….

All four episodes will be animated in colour for a new DVD and Blu-ray release – though the second and third episodes do exist in their original live-action form and these will also be available on the set, along with the option to watch the animated episodes in black-and-white.

(5) OCTOTHORPE. John Coxon, Alison Scott and Liz Batty read Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty. They they talked about it, and recorded it, and now you can listen to it: “Resolutely Alison All the Time”. You can also play the fun game, ”Who was away during the recording time leading to the release of a bonus episode”, which is always a hoot, eh? 

(6) BARBIE’S INFERNO. Fanac.org has posted the audio recording from Minicon 23 (1988) of Jeanne Gomoll reading her fanzine article “Barbie’s Inferno”. (There’s a YouTube transcript available.)

Minicon 23 was held April 1-3, 1988. On Saturday afternoon, David Emerson hosted a program of fanzine readings, including Jeanne Gomoll’s reading of her hysterical short piece, “Barbie’s Inferno.”  This 18 minute audio recording, enhanced with images, is a delightful visit both to that program in 1988, and to the subject matter – Jeanne Gomoll’s childhood experiences with Barbie…Jeanne is an outstanding writer, as well as an excellent reader.  This short recording provides an empathetic glimpse into what many fans have experienced — what it’s like to grow up in a family where you and your parents have very different ideas of who you should be.  Plus you learn about waxers. 

Thanks to Geri Sullivan for recording, preserving, digitizing and providing this program.

Originally published in Harlot (edited by Anne-Laurie Logan and Avedon Carol, 1983), a newly revised version of “Barbie’s Inferno” is contained in Pretending, the first volume of Jeanne’s two volume memoir, Pretending and Becoming (to be released).

(7) PROMETHEUS AWARDS CEREMONY AUGUST 19. Sarah Hoyt (Darkship Thieves) and Dave Freer (Cloud-Castles) will participate in the 43rd annual Prometheus Awards live Zoom ceremony Saturday, August 19, along with leaders from The Heinlein Society and Heinlein Trust.

The Libertarian Futurist Society’s half-hour awards show is free and open to the public, including all interested sf/fantasy fans, and will begin at 2:00 p.m. Eastern. The Zoom link is here.

This Prometheus Blog post also has the Zoom link and more details about the speakers.

(8) FREE READ. Grist shares new climate fiction from Imagine 2200 in “When We Are Ruins, Dance On Us”.

A revolution has moved society off of fossil fuels. In Singapore, the former Supreme Court building, long abandoned and newly haunted, bemoans what it has lost. Through the building’s musings, we hear about how the world has changed, and how hard it can be for the privileged to let go of an unjust past that benefited them.

(9) HOW FI IS CLI-FI? Ann-Marie Cahill asks “How Accurate is Climate Fiction? (And Does Is Matter?)” at Book Riot.

Here’s a great question to kick off your next book club meeting: How Accurate is Climate Fiction? To be clear, I am not questioning the Climate Crisis, nor any of the far-more-educated-than-me climate scientists who feel like they have been screaming into the void for eons. Unfortunately, you are more likely to elicit action out of people with an Aerosmith song and Bruce Willis brooding in space than reading the latest World Meteorological Organization report (it’s here, in case you’re interested).

The follow-up to this great opener is, naturally: Do We Even Want Cli-Fi to be Accurate? And there lies the problem. Science Fiction has always been the go-to genre for exploring our options. Climate Fiction (or cli-fi) fits in this perfectly, giving us a literary platform to test our worst-case scenarios and come up with some inspiration to make it better. Or at least that’s the theory. Cli-fi has been a fairly popular sub-genre for science fiction, with a recent surge in the last five years — not a surprise when you consider the growing need to do something about the Climate Crisis. For many climate scientists, it may be the best way to impart much-needed information to the general public. Of course, there is a fine line between accurate and “based on sound scientific principle.” One sells the hard science message, and the other sells the books. The difference is a question of how much accuracy we, as the reader, can handle in our climate fiction. And if it’s not accurate, why don’t we feel any better about our future? …

…In short, Climate Fiction is as accurate as the author wants it to be. Whether the book passes your mental benchmark for accuracy, reasonable scientific principle, or an acceptable suspension of disbelief is completely up to you. If you don’t like it, you can always close the book. Life’s too short to spite-read….

(10) SCOFFER. Unlike the previous writer, Sergey Lukyanenko thinks what the West calls climate change is very overrated. Here’s a quote from the transcript of his appearance at VK Fest 2023, “The Image of the Future in Russian Science Fiction”.

What dangers await humanity? What do you see today from the key for the next 50 years?

SERGEY LUKYANENKO: I’m not going to talk about environmental problems, which are very fond of being raised in the West, because these problems, in fact, are much less terrible than they are trying to show us. This is a slightly invented problem from the finger, so that there is something to fight with and how to fill heads. I may say a sad thing for people, but on the scale of planet Earth, humanity, in general, is such a trifle that can be completely compressed into cubes and drowned in a small lake. They say that if all of humanity is collected and placed in Lake Baikal, the water level there will rise by only a couple of millimeters. That’s all you need to know about us and our impact on nature.

Of course, we do a lot of harm to nature, but some serious exploding volcano will release carbon dioxide and other dust into the atmosphere in a couple of days much more than humanity does in a year. Remember, there was such an Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull. As soon as he “baited” a little there in Iceland, and all over Europe, the planes stopped flying, because it became dangerous to fly. Ecology is not such a big problem, in my opinion.

(By the way, why is Lukyanenko’s picture missing from item #1?)

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 17, 1930 Harve Bennett. The individual who gave us Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Really he did. He would then serve as Producer on the next three Trek films, The Search for SpockThe Voyage Home and The Final Frontier. Bennett also wrote Star Trek III, co-wrote the story and screenplay for Star Trek IV, and co-wrote the story for Star Trek V. His only on scene appearance is in the latter as the Starfleet Chief of Staff. He’s the voice of the Battle simulator computer in Wrath of Khan, and the Flight Recorder in the Search for Spock. (Died 2015.)
  • Born August 17, 1945 Rachel Pollack. She’s getting a Birthday note for her scripting duties on her run of issues 64–87 (1993-1995) of Doom Patrol. She also assisted in the creation of the Vertigo Tarot Deck with McKean and Gaiman, and she wrote a book to go with it. She won a World Fantasy Award for Godmother Night, and an Arthur C. Clarke Award winner for Unquenchable Fire. She also wrote Salvador Dali’s Tarot, a book-length exposition of Salvador Dalí’s Tarot deck, comprising a full-page color plate for each card, with her commentary on the facing page. (Died 2023.)
  • Born August 17, 1956 John Romita Jr., 67. If you’ve read Spider-Man since the Sixties, it’s very likely that you’ve seen his artwork as he had six stints on it between 1980 and 2009. He find a number of other titles on Marvel and DC including SupermanGhost Rider, HulkAll-Star BatmanEternalsCaptain America and Daredevil to name but a few of the titles he illustrated. He also worked with Mark Miller at Image Comics on Kick-Ass, and did the one shot Punisher/Batman: Deadly Knights
  • Born August 17, 1962 Laura Resnick, 61. Daughter of Mike Resnick. She is a winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She’s the author of the Esther Diamond series, and I’ve not read her Manhattan Magic series so I’m interested to know what y’all think of it. She’s readily available at the usual.
  • Born August 17, 1966 Neil Clarke, 57. Editor in Chief of Clarkesworld Magazine which has won a impressive number of Best Semiprozine Hugos and a World Fantasy Award before crossing the threshold to become a prozine. He’s a nine-time Best Editor – Short Form nominee. SFWA also gave him a Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award. He edits The Best Science Fiction of the Year series for Night Shade Books.  
  • Born August 17, 1973 Rae Carson, 50. She’s done ten novels including one in the Star Wars universe. (I’m tempted to say who hasn’t?) Quite impressively, her debut novel, The Girl of Fire and Thorns, was a finalist for the William C. Morris YA Award and the Andre Norton Award. And she is married to Charles Coleman Finlay, SF editor and writer.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

  • Tom Gauld has it figured out.

(13) MORE SFF IN LEARNEDLEAGUE. [Item by David Goldfarb.] There’s currently a Mini-League going on, focusing on “Notable Women of Asia”. Match Day 7 had this question:

The Astounding Award for Best New Writer, which is awarded to writers in science fiction or fantasy, was renamed after 2019 winner Jeannette Ng called its previous namesake “a fucking fascist” in her acceptance speech, a speech for which she won a Hugo the following year. In her 2020 acceptance speech for that Hugo, Ng called for the freedom of “my most cyberpunk of cities”, the place where she was born. What city is that?

The answer of course was Hong Kong: this had a 57% get rate, with the most common wrong answer being Hanoi (given by 8% of players).

Also in the recent past there was a One-Day Special quiz about the show Quantum Leap. You can read its questions here.

(14) MARRIAGE IS WHAT BRINGS US TOGETHER.  The Marvel press release calls it the moment fans never thought would happen—the wedding of Emma Frost and Tony Stark! Taking place in X-Men #26 (on sale 9/6) and Invincible Iron Man #10 (on sale 9/27), writer Gerry Duggan will deliver this highly-anticipated story alongside X-Men artists Jim Towe and Javier Pina and Invincible Iron Man series artist Juan Frigeri. The Fall Of X era has hit both mutantkind and Iron Man where it hurts and as their enemies grow stronger, Emma and Tony will strengthen their alliance to “till death do they part!”

Witness the shocking proposal and Emma’s even more shocking answer in X-Men #26, and then put on your best Hellfire attire for the introduction of Mrs. and Mr. Emma Frost in Invincible Iron Man #10! The circumstances of the ceremony is riddled with secrets and subterfuge, but fans can get their first inside look at the nuptials in the X-Men / Iron Man: The Wedding of Emma Frost & Tony Stark Trailer, featuring never-before-seen artwork!

“Emma and Tony — I think now people are starting to get a sense of how they work,” Duggan told AiPT Comics in a recent X-Men Monday. “I hope you all check it out. They are getting married. I promise no shenanigans. Beyond that, I don’t know what you’re going to get.”

(15) SCIENTISTS LEAVING TWITTER. Nature surveyed scientists to ask their reasons for leaving Twitter. “Thousands of scientists are cutting back on Twitter, seeding angst and uncertainty”.

…Nature obtained the e-mail addresses of thousands of scientists who were identified through a social-media research project as having tweeted about papers on which they were a corresponding author1. The survey from Nature asked whether people had changed their use of Twitter in the past six months and why. The reasons respondents gave varied, but many of those who had markedly reduced or stopped their activity on X mentioned Musk’s management of the platform. Many said that they had noticed an uptick in the amount of fake accounts, trolls and hate speech on the platform.

Žiga Malek, an environmental scientist at the Free University of Amsterdam, mentioned in the survey that he had started seeing a lot of “strange” political far-right accounts espousing science denialism and racism in his feed. He has to block them constantly. “Twitter has always been not so nice let’s say, but it is a mess right now,” he said.

Researchers have found that, contrary to such public claims from Musk, hate speech increased after he took over2. Musk has threatened to sue at least one group studying these trends.

A lot of experts and specialists are leaving the platform, says Timothy Caulfield, a law scholar and science communicator at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. “If that happens, are we just making room for a massive echo chamber that can spread misinformation in a way that is very harmful to society?”

X did not respond to Nature’s request for comments.

Where are they going?

The most popular alternative social-media site that respondents mentioned opening accounts with was the free, open-source software platform Mastodon. Compared with X, Mastodon allows for better community moderation, says Rodrigo Costas, an information scientist at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who has been studying scientists’ use of Twitter since 2011. In February, he and Jonathan Dudek, a communications researcher also at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies, examined the Twitter profile information of 400,000 researchers — obtained for a previous research project3 — to see who was broadcasting their movement to other platforms. Roughly 3% of the profiles mention a Mastodon account, according to the researchers’ preliminary analysis.

Although it has been around for some seven years, Mastodon has a much smaller user base than do other social-media platforms. In Nature’s survey, LinkedIn was the second most popular place for respondents to open new accounts, and Instagram, owned by Meta, was third. Threads, also owned by Meta and pitched as an alternative to X, had started just a few days before the survey was launched. It reportedly attracted 100 million users in its first five days, and was the fourth-most-popular platform among survey respondents, with about 1,000 people saying that they had joined (See ‘Signs of dissatisfaction’)….

(16) I SHALL RETURN. The New Yorker tells what it learned about a growing business that parallels online selling: “What Happens to All the Stuff We Return?”

…Steady growth in Internet shopping has been accompanied by steady growth in returns of all kinds. A forest’s worth of artificial Christmas trees goes back every January. Bags of green plastic Easter grass go back every spring. Returns of large-screen TVs surge immediately following the Super Bowl. People who buy portable generators during weather emergencies use them until the emergencies have ended, and then those go back, too. A friend of mine returned so many digital books to Audible that the company now makes her call or e-mail if she wants to return another. People who’ve been invited to fancy parties sometimes buy expensive outfits or accessories, then return them the next day, caviar stains and all—a practice known as “wardrobing.” Brick-and-mortar shoppers also return purchases. “Petco takes back dead fish,” Demer said. “Home Depot and Lowe’s let you return dead plants, for a year. You just have to be shameless enough to stand in line with the thing you killed.” It almost goes without saying that Americans are the world’s leading refund seekers; consumers in Japan seldom return anything….

(17) SFF SALE. [Item by BGrandrath.] So here is another of my favorite BookTubers promoting a Whatnot sale. I recommend her channel; she has a series called Books Without Barcodes where she reviews…well, books published before they had barcodes. She gives a fresh look to books you and I read years ago. This video is titled “Once in a Lifetime Science Fiction Book Haul”.

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, James Bacon, John Coxon, Michael Grossberg, BGrandrath, Ersatz Culture, Zimozi Natsuco, David Goldfarb, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]

Pixel Scroll 5/17/23 Star-Lord Shot First!

(1) FIGHTING BOOK BANS. “PEN America, Penguin Random House Sue Florida School District Over ‘Unconstitutional’ Book Bans”Publishers Weekly has details.

In response to a troubling wave of book bans, PEN America, Penguin Random House, a group of authors, and a group of parents have filed a federal lawsuit against a Florida school district over the “unconstitutional” removal of books from school libraries.

The suit, filed on May 16 in the Northern district of Florida in Pensacola, alleges that administrators and school board members in Florida’s Escambia County School District are violating the First Amendment as well as the 14th Amendment (the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution) because the books being singled out are “disproportionately books by non-white and/or LGBTQ+ authors” and often address “themes or topics” related to race or LGBTQ+ community.

The suit seeks to have the district’s actions declared unconstitutional and to have the banned books returned to library shelves.

“In every decision to remove a book, the School District has sided with a challenger expressing openly discriminatory bases for challenge, overruling the recommendations of review committees at the school and district levels,” the complaint alleges. “These restrictions and removals have disproportionately targeted books by or about people of color and/or LGBTQ people, and have prescribed an orthodoxy of opinion that violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments…. Today, Escambia County seeks to bar books critics view as too ‘woke.’ In the 1970s, schools sought to bar Slaughterhouse-Five and books edited by Langston Hughes. Tomorrow, it could be books about Christianity, the country’s founders, or war heroes. All of these removals run afoul of the First Amendment, which is rightly disinterested in the cause du jour.”…

(2) KEEP WATCHING THE MARQUEE. Was there ever a save-the-kid science fiction story I didn’t fall for? I’m confident this will be no exception: The Creator Teaser Trailer”.

“This is a fight for our very existence.” The Creator arrives in theaters September 29.

(3) STOP. Sarah A. Hoyt gives a whole list of favors people shouldn’t be asking her for – or any other writer, for that matter – in “We’re Not Responsible for….” at Mad Genius Club.

…Stop sending me five covers from stock sites and asking me which fits your novel, when we never talked to each other before and I don’t know who you are. I might, if I’m in the mood, do that for friends or friendly acquaintances, but I have a house, family, cats, a garden, and about 40 novels waiting to be written. I’m not your mommy. Go look at covers and make your own evaluation. Or get another friend who is better at it, and ask them. I haven’t even read your novel. And no, this isn’t a suggestion to send it to me….

(4) 300 BOOKS, 10 JUDGES, 1 WINNER. Mark Lawrence started taking entries for Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off 9 today: “SPFBO 9, Phase 1”. He explained one of the fine points in the eligibility screening process.

…The most common reason for a book being replaced is that although the author might think of themselves as self-published, they are in fact published by a small/indy press. The details get messy, but if we started accepting small presses then most would appreciate that “small” is impossible to define/enforce effectively. And this is laid out in the rules which everyone indicates they have read….

(5) INDIES NAVIGATE AMAZON. A new entry in “The Indie Files” series at the SFWA Blog sees William Tracy offering “Author tips and tricks for selling on Amazon”.

Congrats! You’re an indie author! You’ve written a book, (hopefully) had critiques and edited it, put it all together, and thrown it up on Amazon. Time to watch the money roll in, right?

Well, not exactly. Amazon books don’t sell themselves. Especially in these waning years of the golden indie author rush, you’ll have to make sure others see your book to even know it exists. In 2010 or 2012, you could feasibly get away with assuming people would see what you’d written. Not now. I wince when people very proudly tell me they’ve written a book and are going to sell it on Amazon. I always have qualifying questions, which usually make their eyes go wide.

Here’s a brief list of tips and tricks to help your book get seen by more shoppers. Because that’s the first secret. Amazon is not a sales platform. Amazon is a very well-tuned search engine. You want to make it as easy as possible for people to stumble over your book as they search. This will not be an exhaustive list, but it’ll give you a starting point for your own research….

(6) A DEAD FISH STINKS FROM THE HEAD. “The Time Has Come for Hollywood C.E.O.s to Strike” – a humor piece from The New Yorker.

Day Zero: Hollywood C.E.O.s have had enough. The Writers Guild of America refused to leave the bargaining table even when we very clearly indicated that we didn’t want to be there anymore. That’s not just bad table manners—because we are C.E.O.s, this threatens the livelihood of our families, and also the livelihood of our second, secret families. In a unanimous vote of twelve for, zero against, the C.E.O.s have authorized a strike.

Day One: The work stoppage begins immediately. All C.E.O.s have changed their e-mail auto-responses from “I am vacationing in Moldova and will be slow to respond” to “I am vacationing in Moldova and also I’m on strike.” The people who work for us will obviously be expected to continue performing their jobs, and also we will obviously keep getting paid. Other than that, the industry will grind to a halt until our demands are met….

(7) MEMORY LANE.

2012[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Our Beginning comes from Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairy Tale which was first published by Victor Gollancz in the United Kingdom eleven years ago. 

He won the BFS’ Robert Holdstock Award for it, one of four such Awards for him, and was nominated for the August Derleth Award for best Horror Novel and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel as well. 

I like Joyce a lot as his horror has a certain Britishness to it that is appealing. This along with The Tooth Fairy and The Limits of Enchantment are my favorite works by him. 

And now for our Beginning…

We are spirits of another sort. 

OBERON, KING OF SHADOWS. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

In the deepest heart of England there is a place where everything is at fault. That is to say that the land rests upon a fault; and there, ancient rocks are sent hurtling from the deep to the surface of the earth with such force that they break free like oceanic waves, or like monstrous sea creatures coming up for air. Some say that the land has still to settle and that it continues to roil and breathe fumes, and that out of these fumes pour stories. Others are confident that the old volcanoes are long dead, and that all its tales are told. Of course, everything depends on who is telling the story. It always does. I have a story and though there are considerable parts I’ve had to imagine, the way I saw it was as follows.

It WAS CHRISTMAS DAY of that year and Dell Martin hovered at the double-glazed PVC window of his tidy home, conducting a survey of the bruised clouds and concluding that it might just snow; and if it did snow then someone would have to pay. At the very beginning of the year Dell had laid down two crisp twenty-pound notes on the bookie’s Formica counter, just as he had done every year for the past ten. The odds changed slightly each year and this time he’d settled good odds at seven-to-one. 

For a White Christmas to be official—that is, to force the bookmakers to pay—a flake of snow must be observed to fall between midnight on December 24 and midnight on December 25 at four designated sites. The sites are the cities of London, Glasgow, Cardiff, and Manchester. The snow is not required to lie deep nor crisp nor evenly upon the ground and it doesn’t matter if it’s mixed with rain. One solitary flake would do it, fallen and melted, observed and recorded.

Living in a place somewhere between all of those great cities, Dell had never collected in all those ten years, nor had he seen a single flake of Christmas Day snow hanging in the air of his hometown. “Are you going to come and carve?” Mary called from the kitchen. 

This year they were having goose. After decades of turkey dinners on Christmas Day they were having a change, because a change is as good as a rest, and sometimes you needed a rest even from Christmas. Nevertheless the table had been laid out, just as in previous years. Crisp linen and the best cutlery. Two heavy crystal wineglasses that, year round, were kept in a box and stowed at the back of a kitchen cupboard.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born May 17, 1913 Peter B. Germano. Though neither of his SF novels was of great distinction (go ahead, disagree) — The Interplanetary Adventures and The Pyramids from Space (written as Jack Berlin) — his scriptwriter output was so as he worked on The Time TunnelVoyage to the Bottom of the SeaLand of the LostBattle of the Planets and the revival version of The Next Step Beyond, which warrants his being noted here. (Died 1983.)
  • Born May 17, 1936 Dennis Hopper. I think his first genre film would be Tarzan and Jane Regained… Sort of, an Andy Warhol film. Queen of Blood, a vampire thinly disguised as SF film, was his next genre film. My Science Project was his next outing before he took part in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. And now we get to the Super Mario Bros. where he played King Koopa. What a weird film that was! Of he followed that by being Deacon on Waterworld… And then doing Space Truckers. Ouch. Really ouch. He’s El Niño in The Crow: Wicked Prayer, a film I barely remember seeing and I like the Crow character. His final role was voicing one of the animated wolves in Alpha and Omega. (Died 2010.)
  • Born May 17, 1946 F. Paul Wilson, 77. I’ve read, let me check, oh about half I see of the Repairman Jack novels. Anyone here finished them off, and should I do so? What else by him is worth my time? He’s won five Prometheus Awards for Best Libertarian SF Novel, very impressive indeed. 
  • Born May 17, 1950 Mark Leeper, 73. As Mark says on his site, “In and out of science fiction circles Mark and Evelyn Leeper are one of the best known writing couples on the Internet. Mark became an avid science fiction fan at age six with TV’s Commando Cody. Both went to the University of Massachusetts in 1968.” And as Bill Higgins says here, their MT VOID fanzine is one of the longest published ones still going. 
  • Born May 17, 1954 Bryce Zabel, 69. A producer, director and writer. Genre wise, he’s been involved as a producer or director with M.A.N.T.I.S.Dark SkiesBlackbeardLois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman and The Crow: Stairway to Heaven. Writing-wise, he has written for most of these shows plus the Mortal Kombat: Annihilation and Atlantis: The Lost Empire screenplays.
  • Born May 17, 1954 Colin Greenland, 69. His partner is the Susanna Clarke who was the author of our Beginning last Scroll, with whom he has lived since 1996. The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the British ‘New Wave’ in Science Fiction whichwas based on his PhD thesis. His most successful fictional work is the Plenty series that starts with Take Back Plenty and continues with Seasons of PlentyThe Plenty Principle and wraps up with Mother of Plenty. In the Eighties and Ninties, he was involved in the editorial work of Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction and Interzone.
  • Born May 17, 1956 Dave Sim, 67. Did you know there was a Cerebus radio series at one point? Well there was – Cerberus the Radio Show. Need I say that I read the entire run of Cerebus. The three hundred issues ran from 1977 until 2004. It was created by Sim, written and drawn by him and remained solely his undertaking until background artist Garhard joined up with sixty-fifth issue. As Cerebus continued, it incorporated more and more of Sim’s very controversial views, particularly on women, feminism and the fall of Western Society from those factors. Collected Letters: 2004 and Dave Sim’s Collected Letters 2 contains his responses to the letters he got criticizing him but not the letters themselves. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Poorly Drawn Lines shows that in space no one can hear your loneliness.

(10) JIMI HENDRIX SFF COMIC. This Fall, Titan Comics will be publishing Jimi Hendrix: Purple Haze, an original graphic novel written by Mellow Brown (American Gods, Blade Runner: Origins) with DJ Benhameen, illustrated by artist Tom Mandrake (Captain Kronos, The Spectre), and in collaboration with Jimi’s sister, Janie Hendrix.

This epic adventure sees the iconic Jimi Hendrix as you’ve never seen him before! The story sees Hendrix embark on a perilous quest to the very center of the universe in search of a magical talisman powerful enough to unlock the incredible latent power of his trademark sound, so that he can free a diverse population starved of rock ‘n’ roll by a tyrannical intergalactic force hellbent on silencing music and enslaving all life.

Jimi Hendrix: Purple Haze blends classic sci-fi pulp, and Afro-futurism to craft a psychedelic space odyssey that captures the magic, hope and rebellion that Jimi’s legendary music is known for.

Jimi Hendrix (November 27, 1942 – September 18, 1970) was an influential guitarist, singer and songwriter. Although his career spanned only three studio albums – Are You Experienced (1967), Axis: Bold as Love (1967), & Electric Ladyland (1968) – he is widely recognized as one of the most creative guitarists in the history of music, and one of the most celebrated musicians of the 20th century.

Jimi Hendrix: Purple Haze (128pp, hardcover, $29.99, 9781787731899) is set for release in comic shops, bookstores and on digital devices in November 2023. Pre-order now at Barnes & NobleAmazon and Forbidden Planet for UK & Europe.

(11) BROS. “Marvellous Moderns: The Brothers Perrault” at The Public Domain Review.

Charles Perrault is celebrated as the collector of some of the world’s best-known fairy tales. But his brothers were just as remarkable: Claude, an architect of the Louvre, and Pierre, who discovered the hydrological cycle. As Hugh Aldersey-Williams explores, all three were able to use positions within the orbit of the Sun King to advance their modern ideas about the world….

…Best remembered today is the youngest of the brothers, Charles (1628–1703), who is famous now as the collector and author of fairy stories — including “Sleeping Beauty”, “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Cinderella”, “Puss in Boots”, and “Bluebeard” — known as the Mother Goose Tales. Before turning to writing, however, he served at the French court as a cultural advisor to Louis’ all-powerful minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert….

(12) BOOMER SOONER (OR LATER). Scientific American thinks “Betelgeuse’s Brightening Raises Hopes for a Supernova Spectacle”.

Even if you don’t know it by name, the red supergiant star Betelgeuse is one of the most familiar sights in the heavens above—a gleaming ruddy dot at the shoulder of the constellation Orion. Although already quite difficult to overlook, Betelgeuse has become even more eye-catching across the past few years because of major changes in its appearance—unexpected fluctuations in its brightness that remain poorly understood. In recent weeks, the star has at times shone more than 50 percent brighter than normal, drawing renewed attention from amateur sky watchers and professional astronomers alike. These individuals hopefully await a historic celestial event. Someday, you see, Betelgeuse will explosively end its life in a supernova—and from our planetary perch just 650 light-years away, we Earthlings will have front-row seats to this spectacular cosmic cataclysm.

But does the current bout of brightening presage Betelgeuse blowing its top? And what would such a nearby supernova look like?…

(13) LET’S DO THE TIME WARP AGAIN. The cast of The Rocky Horror Show perpetrated a flashmob at Birmingham New Street in the UK.

The cast of Rocky Horror Show were out of this world when they performed at Birmingham New Street this afternoon! If you didn’t manage to catch them at the station, here it is.

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. The first twenty-five seconds of Ryan George’s “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 Pitch Meeting” are pretty wry. And it goes on from there.

So you got some Marvel content for me?

Yes sir, I do some freaking Guardians of the Galaxy.

Nice!

Now did you want to make a movie or take a secondary character and stretch a story out over eight episodes and shove that on Disney+?

I was thinking like a third movie.

You sure?

Yeah, plus we already did that I Am Groot short series on Disney+.

We did?

Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s a thing that exists, really.

Wow! We might have to slow this machine down. I have no recollection of that…

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

Pixel Scroll 11/23/22 I’ve Read Through The Pixel On A Scroll With No Name

(1) ARISIA CHAIR TURNOVER. The acting Arisia 2023 convention chairs Alan and Michelle Wexelblat have resigned. Melissa Kaplan has stepped up as acting con chair in their place. The Arisia board says “details of the handoff and relevant ongoing efforts at Arisia will be forthcoming after the holiday break.”

(2) UNCLE HUGO’S / UNCLE EDGAR’S GET THEIR NAMES OUT FRONT. Don Blyly says, “The new awnings were installed last Friday afternoon, making it much easier to find the new location for the first time.” Until then, his bookstores’ new location still had the previous tenant’s name out front.  

(3) SUSPECT IN WOOSTER DEATH. Martin Morse Wooster was killed by a hit-and-run driver on November 12, however, his name did not appear in news reports until yesterday on WAVY in an update that says Virginia State Police have identified a suspect.

…State Police had said it was looking for witnesses who may have been driving in the area around Bypass Road prior to or after the incident.

Sgt. Michelle Anaya with the Virginia State Police said it has identified a suspect, and it is investigating and working with the Commonwealth’s Attorney. The incident, she said, is still under investigation, with charges pending….

(4) A GHOSTLY REALITY. Cora Buhlert’s new “Non-Fiction Spotlight” introduces readers to “A Haunted History of Invisible Women – True Stories of America’s Ghosts by Leanna Renee Hieber and Andrea Janes”.

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Leanna: I’ve been writing since I was a kid and didn’t consider pursuing it professionally until my first job out of college. I had gotten a BFA in theatre performance with a focus study in the Victorian Era. I worked in the professional regional theatre circuit for a few years before moving to New York City and ended up at a Broadway callback where all I could think about was the book that would end up becoming my debut Gothic, Gaslamp Fantasy series, Strangely Beautiful. I stopped auditioning and solely focused on my novel about a girl who sees, talks with, and helps ghosts. Spectral subjects have been part of my creative process since childhood. I got my NYC tour guide’s license my first years in New York as I knew I wanted to incorporate real history into my fiction and eventually write non-fiction. Being a tour guide is a great way to make history second-nature. I feel like A Haunted History of Invisible Women is the culmination of everything that’s ever been important to me.

Andrea: I’m a writer and a New York City tour guide. I founded my own walking tour company, Boroughs of the Dead, in 2013….

(5) BEGINS WITH A SINGLE STEP. Sarah A. Hoyt offers some practical encouragement to writers in “The Best Beginning” at Mad Genius Club.

The best beginning is the one you can do.

This applies both to the beginning of novels, and “simply” to starting to write, or to establishing a writing schedule.

There are all sorts of books and instructions on how to start any of those, but what they leave out is: just begin any way you can. The rest will follow.

With novels, there are all kinds of ways to begin, including setting the tone of the book in the first paragraph. The theme in the first page. Make sure you start with the character who is central to the conflict, because readers are like ducklings, they imprint on the first moving thing they see.

However, you can always fix it in post. You can always go back and fix that beginning so it points the right way. You can lose the first fifty pages (beginning writers consistently start fifty pages too early.) Etc….

(6) PICARDO ASKS DOCTOR WHO WHO IS THE DOCTOR. But he is one only in an emergency, right?

(7) NEW ORLEANS IS HIS BEAT. Rich Horton lets us look over his shoulder in “Convention Report: World Fantasy 2022”; from Strange at Ecbatan.

…Mary Ann and I had decided to use Sunday afternoon to visit the French Quarter. We took the streetcar down there — it’s very easy and convenient. We were going to get lunch and I was determined to get a muffeletta, which is one of my favorite sandwiches. I wanted an authentic muffuletta from New Orleans — which I got at Frank’s, which advertised the “original muffuletta”. Alas, it might be the original, and it was fine, but you can get one just as good at, for example, C. J. Mugg’s in my town of Webster Groves. We should have eaten at the French Market Restaurant instead! We also, of course, went to Cafe du Monde to try beignets, and, hey, they were actually very good. (The line was long but went quickly.)…

(8) THE TRISOLARIANS ARE COMING. ScreenRant publicizes the release date for Bilibili’s animated adaptation of The Three-Body Problem. Beware spoilers.

The award-winning science fiction novel The Three-Body Problem has been adapted into an anime series by the Chinese online video and anime platform Bilibili, and the first episode is set to premiere on December 3, 2022.

…Normally, an adaptation is a testament to the popularity of the work in the public’s mind. This is particularly so with The Three-Body Problem. In addition to Bilibili, two other powerful film and television operations, namely Netflix and the Chinese tech giant Tencent have also produced their own live-action adaptations of the story. Fittingly, the world-famous story has its own version of the three-body problem….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

1986 [By Cat Eldridge.] Peter S. Beagle’s The Folk of The Air

So let’s talk about one of the underappreciated novels by Mister Beagle, The Folk of The Air which was published thirty-six years ago by del Rey / Ballantine in hardcover.

It had a long, long gestation period as it took nearly twenty years from the time he started work on it until the time the final version was done. 

SPOILERS ARE HERE NOW. I SUGGEST MULLED WINE WOULD BE APPROPRIATE TO DRINK WHILE I DISCUSS THIS NOVEL? 

Joe Farrell, a musician who’s whiled away most of his post-college time in a sort of hippie style, travelling the country and avoiding any possibility of settling down, has returned at last to his Bay Area hometown of Avicenna, Beagle’s fictional version of Oakland.

Everything has changed — his closest friend is living with a woman who has immense magical powers in a house that keeps changing itself; another acquaintance is involved up with the League of Archaic Pleasures, a group that has taken to itself the events and manners of medieval chivalry, sometimes way, way too seriously; and he sees a teenage witch successfully summon back a centuries-old demon.

That Demon could tear asunder all that exists now and only his closest friend’s girlfriend can stop him but she’s gone walkout into a room in their house that nobody can find.

DID YOU LIKE THE MULLED WINE? I THINK THAT IT IS MOST EXCELLENT. 

I think it’s a most splendid novel, though Peter has reservations about it as he told me once that he considered revising it. He never said what about it that he’d change, just that he thought it could use some more work. Even SFReviews.net reported that saying “Beagle has never been fully satisfied with The Folk of the Air, and is currently reported to be working on a revision to be retitled Avicenna.” Mind you his Editor and closest friend tells me that she never heard of this existing either. 

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born November 23, 1908 Nelson S. Bond. Writer, Editor, Critic, and Member of First Fandom who also wrote for radio, television, and the stage, but whose published fiction work was mainly in the pulp magazines in the 1930s and 1940s. He’s remembered today mainly for his Lancelot Biggs series and for his Meg the Priestess tales, which introduced one of the first strong female characters in SF back in 1939. As a fan, he attended the very first Worldcon, and he famously advised Isaac Asimov, who kept arguing with fans about his works in the letter columns of magazines, “You’re a writer now, Isaac. Let the readers have their opinions.” He was named a Nebula Author Emeritus by SFWA in 1998. (Died 2006.) (JJ) 
  • Born November 23, 1951 David Rappaport. I remember him best as Randall, the leader of the gang of comically inept dwarves in Time Bandits who steal the map to the Universe. I’m reasonably sure that it’s the only thing he’ll be remembered for of a genre nature having looked up his other works and found them to be decidedly minor in nature. Most of them such as The Bride, a low budget horror film, were artistic and commercial disasters. It is said that his death by suicide in 1990 is one of the reasons cited by Gilliam for there not being a sequel to Time Bandits.  Well, now there is as Apple TB with the cooperation of Gilliam, there will Time Bandits series that Taika Waititi will co-write with Gilliam and direct, since it’ll shield in New Zealand. (Died 1990.)
  • Born November 23, 1966 Michelle Gomez, 56. Best known genre role is Missy, a female version of The Master on Doctor Who from 2014 to 2017, for which she was nominated for the 2016 BAFTA TV Award for Best Supporting Actress. I admit having grown up with Roger Delgado as The Master so later performers playing this role took a bit of getting used but she made a fine one. She is also Mary Wardwell in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. She plays Talia Bauerin in Highlander: The Raven which apparently is a very short-live spinoff from the Highlander series. And she shows up in the Gotham series for two episodes simply as The Lady. She is now playing Madame Rouge on the Doom Patrol.
  • Born November 23, 1992 Miley Cyrus. She’s had three genre appearances, each ten years apart. She was in Big Fish as the eight-year-old Ruthie, she was the voice of Penny in Bolt and she voiced Mainframe on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. And there’s the matter of A Very Murray Christmas which is at least genre adjacent…

(11) SEEN THIS IN YOUR DICTIONARY? FilmSchoolRejects introduces a video about “The Existential Comforts of Cyberpunk”.

…There isn’t a succinct definition of cyberpunk. Its origins can be traced back to the late 1960s and the New Wave sci-fi movement, with writers like J.G. Ballard, William Gibson, and Harlan Ellison. As a sci-fi sub-genre, cyberpunk is keenly interested in speculative technology and urban dystopias; which together provide fertile breeding grounds for vice, drugs, nefarious corporations, corruption, and social upheaval.

…I can think of a lot of ways to describe how cyberpunk worlds make me feel (sad, artificial, and lonely spring to mind). But “comforting” isn’t one of them. The following video essay argues that, if you tilt your head the right way, cyberpunk cities offer a kind of relief. Somewhere, on the other side of all that existential anxiety and angst … there’s a sense of bliss and relief. Amidst all the urban bustle and the sea of cables, you don’t mean a thing. Thank god….

(12) FAKING IT IS MAKING IT. Is artificial intelligence equal to the challenge of writing about Timothy the Talking Cat? Find out in Camestros Felapton’s post “AI-generated writing”.

…I’ve experimented with MidJourney to make images but how is the world of AI-generated text going? I’m trying out the LEX, a cross between a Google docs wordprocessor and an AI text generator….

(13) FIRST FIVE. Joe Stech of Compelling Science Fiction is ready to tell you his picks for the top science fiction short stories published in August.

These are the top 5 out of the 26 stories I read. August was a lighter month than July because some of the bimonthlies aren’t out in August…

“Polly and (Not) Charles Conquer the Solar System” by Carrie Vaughn is the winner.

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. While Camille DeAngelis was in LA for a screening of Bones and All, the film adaptation of her vegan subtext cannibal novel, she and Henry Lien made this video about why they love being vegan and how Henry has a magical fridge: “Henry Lien and the Narnia Fridge”.

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

Pixel Scroll 9/21/22 She Took The Midnight Train To Arcturus

(1) ANTHEM LAUNCH. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Washington Post, classical music critic Michael Andor Brodeur discusses the new Space Force anthem by Jamie Teachenor and Sean Nelson, and lets his father make a dad joke that the tune was written by “Buck Rogers and Hammerstein.” “New Space Force anthem aims to land the military branch on your radar”.

On Tuesday, the United States Space Force entered its anthem era, announcing the release of its own official song at the Air Force Association Air, Space and Cyber Conference at National Harbor in Maryland.

The song, “Semper Supra” (“Always Above”), joins the ranks of “The Marines’ Hymn,” “The Army Goes Rolling Along” and other staples of the American military anthem repertoire. It’s also … Wait. Why are you laughing?

I knew as soon as I said “Space Force” this would happen.

Because the Space Force is, for the foreseeable future, the New Guy among military branches. Because its sudden and ham-handed public rollout in 2019 was largely entrusted to the writers’ rooms of late-night shows. And, yes, because it’s called the Space Force, so there remains a lingering temptation not to take it seriously (and a tacit cultural authorization to proceed).

… I guess for a song that’s destined to orbit around this branch of military in perpetuity, I was hoping for something … I don’t know, spacier?

Over the past century, the cosmos has supplied us with such a rich musical mood board: Gustav Holst gave us his standard-bearing model of the solar system, “The Planets,” back in 1916. Stanley Kubrick’s use of Johann Strauss’s antigravity waltzes and the monolithic motif taken from the other Strauss’s “Also sprach Zarathustra” have informed our perception of deep space since “2001” arrived in 1968. John Williams has also memorably distilled his visions of the vastness of space into universal themes — think the “five tones” of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”…

(2) FLIP THE SCRIPT. Camestros Felapton supplies the answer to the question, “Could you rewrite the Lord of the Rings as a techno-thriller?” (Did you doubt it for a moment?)

…Part of the issue is that much of what makes LotR a compelling story, are not the things that make it genre distinctive. Attempts to make a clear distinction between science fiction and fantasy can founder when we consider how LotR would change if it had to conform to proposed rules about science fiction. If, as the thought experiment goes, Tolkein’s elves were aliens, would the story now be sci-fi? The role of magic in fantasy versus materialist explanations in science fiction has also been offered. However, LotR has an odd take on magic. Much of the overt magic we see is attached to made objects (the Ring obviously, but also the palantir, the doors of Moria, Sting, the vial of light gifted to Frodo by Galadriel, or delving deeper into the mythos, the Silmarils themselves). We don’t know how those things work (magic!) but of course we don’t know how phasers, tractor beams, replicators or warp drives work either. To quote the overused quote from Arthur C. Clarke “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Clarke was making a point about technology rather than genre distinctions but the insight works almost symmetrically…. 

(3) HOPKINSON ZOOM. The Feminist Futures Forum, organized by the Emily Taylor Center for Women & Gender Equity at the University of Kansas, presents a conversation with Brown Girl in the Ring author Nalo Hopkinson facilitated by Anthony Boynton, a Ph.D. candidate in the KU English Department in September 22 at 6:30 p.m. Central, They will explore Black speculative fiction, Afrofuturism, and Black feminisms. Register here. This year’s Forum is planned in conjunction with the Gunn Center’s Sturgeon Symposium.

(4) FIRST STURGEON SYMPOSIUM. Speaking of which, the 1st annual Sturgeon Symposium, a hybrid in-person/online event hosted by the Gunn Center for the Study of SF, takes place next Thursday and Friday, September 29-30. 

Sessions include presentations on Fan Fiction, Indigenous Speculative Fiction, Eastern European SF, Latin American Dystopias, Gender & The Black Fantastic, Pedagogical Approaches, and much, much more.

Visit their website for the full program: Sturgeon Symposium.

(5) HOW DO YOU TURN THAT OFF? Sarah A. Hoyt explains why “Words Are Our Profession” at Mad Genius Club, though it is this paragraph that has me nodding in agreement:

…I will also straight up admit that I must be very odd in my relationship with text, because I never understand why anyone highlights or clips certain excerpts from books. When I got my latest kindle, I had the “show other people’s markings” setting on and couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. This made me glare a lot, as I couldn’t figure out why people were highlighting completely mundane sentences. Of course, it’s entirely possible that all these highlights and clipping of sentences happen the way they happen to me: Kindle starts falling, grab it with my off hand, and suddenly I’ve saved a clipping of “Hi, I am looking for my cat” as though it were some kind of life altering message. (As is, I had to turn the dictionary off, otherwise, by the same process, I was continuously having the meaning of “hand” or “parasol” explained to me.)…

Hoyt’s column is mainly about when it’s a good idea to eschew surplusage, and successful tactics for so doing.

(6) STEP BY STEP TO PUBLICATION. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Amit Gupta sold a short story to Tor.com.  Here, he discusses how long it took and all the rejections he accumulated. “Short stories: How much do you make? How do you sell one? How long does it take to write?” And you can read his story “India World” at Tor.com.

What’d I learn looking back through all this?

  • Writing takes forever, even if it’s a just a few thousand words. Way longer than I thought.
  • Submitting takes even longer. This tracks with other areas of my life. Selling is always less fun for me than making things.
  • SO MANY people helped! I’m blown away by how many people took time to read drafts and offer their feedback.

(7) DEUTSCHER BOOK PREIS. The only longlisted genre work didn’t make the Deutscher Buch Preis shortlist. If you want to know what did, click here.

(8) IT BECKONS. Kelly McClymer encourages writers to ask “Is Your Book Cover Doing the Job or Does It Need to Be Fired?” in the “Indie Files” series at the SFWA Blog.

… For authors, the cover is a double-edged sword. We need one that calls to our readers and makes them pick our book out of a crowded line up.

I remember the first time I realized would have to change the cover for an indie book. I didn’t want to pay for another cover design, so I delayed making the obvious decision. I kept telling myself that the book was good, so the cover couldn’t make that much difference.

I should have known better. I’ve been a voracious reader since I learned to read and my personal book choice algorithm is simple: favorite author first, then intriguing title, then intriguing cover. That personal algorithm hasn’t changed in decades. As a reader, I am easily seduced by title or cover.

As an author, I hate spending money on new covers and agonizing over the design. What got me to stop pinching pennies in this critical area of marketing? Evidence, of course. My indie author friends weren’t afraid to change their covers. Multiple times. And it (usually) helped their sales significantly. Even better, some of them were able to do so on a budget by using pre-made covers that were on sale. …

(9) WHAT’S THE MESSAGE? Scifihistory.net seriously doubts 2001 deserves a reputation for greatness: “Stardate 09.21.2022.A: Warp Core Breach: Science Fiction’s Biggest Circle Jerk – 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)”.

Circle jerk = a situation in which a group of people engage in self-indulgent or self-gratifying behavior, especially by enforcing or reinforcing each other’s views or attitudes.
 
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (snicker snicker) I attended a small private college in Anytown, USA.  In one of my several classes talking about film, a professor (who shall be nameless) took the occasion one day to wax on eloquently about “mankind’s claim” that Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was not only the greatest Science Fiction film ever made but very well was considered the best film ever made.
 
Now, at this juncture in my cognitive development, I was a firm supporter of Citizen Kane’s rightful claim to that title.  Not one to keep silent, I spoke up, asking where it was written that 2001 was ever considered a greater accomplishment than Kane was … to which I got an earful.  Pushing back as politely as I could, I argued that I’d never heard of anyone making such an assessment, and – while I didn’t doubt the instructor had read or perhaps thought such a ranking possible – I wanted to know which experts felt that way so that I could go out and read their analysis.  Essentially what I was told was that 2001 was, clearly, the superior film because of its central message.
 
Get ready, folks.
 
I asked, “What is 2001’s central message?”…

(10) SPELLER TRIBUTES CONTINUE. Strange Horizons’ Aishwarya Subramanian and Dan Hartland mark the loss of their colleague and friend: “In Memoriam: Maureen Kincaid Speller”.

…Maureen Kincaid Speller was capable of producing among the best criticism SFF has to offer. Now she has left us, our understandings of the genre will be poorer and less complete. We will know our favourite texts less well, and we will struggle sometimes to express a reading she would have worked into prose of wit, clarity, and pith. We will miss her because, as a critic, she helped us be better readers; because, as an editor, she made us better writers; and because, as herself, she was fearless in achieving these ends. But most of all, we will miss her because she was our friend—was the friend of all readers, and all authors, and all books. She showed us this every time she attended to a text and asked not just why she liked it, but why she—or why we—might not. Friends make us better, and they often do so via the unvarnished truth….

(11) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.  

1969 [By Cat Eldridge.] Randall And Hopkirk Deceased (1969)

Yes, I know it had multiple premiere dating back fifty-three years ago, so I’ve picked the London Weekend Television broadcast of the pilot two days after the ATV broadcast. No reason, but that’s my choice. Well, and it’s today.

Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) is a somewhat comical British PI series that starred Mike Pratt and Kenneth Cope respectively as the private detectives Jeff Randall and the quickly quite dead and just as rapidly ghostly Marty Hopkirk. Annette Andre as Jeannie Hopkirk, secretary at the Randall and Hopkirk private investigation office, and widow of Marty, was the only other regular cast member. 

(Note: beautiful woman here as well. The trope holds true!) 

In the United States possibly because the word deceased would be offensive, it was called My Partner the Ghost. Or because the syndicators here were utterly lacking in imagination and had to be sickeningly cute. You pick. 

It was created by Dennis Spooner who did a lot of writing for Doctor Who, a spot of writing for The Avengers and quite a bit later for the New Avengers, and was the creator of Department S

It would last one run of twenty-six episodes. In the year 2000 it was remade by the BBC starring Vic Reeves as Hopkirk (once again in a white suit) and Bob Mortimer as Randall, with Emilia Fox as Jeannie. Two series were made lasting just thirteen episodes.

A decade ago, SyFy announced that it had secured the rights to Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) and were looking to develop a pilot, and in January 2011, Entertainment Weekly announced that Jane Espenson and Drew Z. Greenberg would be writing a pilot for SyFy. Given SyFy’s record for rebooting series, guess what happened to it? Well did you see a pilot? 

It does not appear to streaming anywhere for free right now.

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 21, 1904 Alexander Key. American writer primarily of children’s books. His novel Escape to Witch Mountain was made into by Disney into a film three times 1975, 1995, and again in 2009. (Originality isn’t one of Disney’s stronger suits.) The sequel novel was made into another film in 1978. The Incredible Tide novel became the Seventies Future Boy Conan anime series. (Died 1979.)
  • Born September 21, 1912 Chuck Jones. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies creator (think Bugs Bunny). His work won three Oscars, and the Academy also gave him an honorary one in 1996.  I’ve essayed him more that once here, so you know that I like him. What’s your favorite one of his? Though perhaps culturally suspect these days, I’m very fond of “Hillbilly Hare”. (Died 2002.)
  • Born September 21, 1935 Henry Gibson. I’m going confess upfront that I remember best him as a cast member of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. You know what role that was. In regards to his genre work, he showed up on the My Favorite Martian series as Homer P. Gibson, he was in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as an uncredited dancer, in Bewitched twice, once as Napoleon Bonaparte, once as Tim O’ Shanter, he was the voice of Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web, in The Incredible Shrinking Woman as Dr. Eugene Nortz, and even in an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the “Profit and Lace” episode to be exact in which he was Nilva, a ferengi. (Died 2009.)
  • Born September 21, 1960 Mary Mara. Best remembered as Inspector Bryn Carson on Nash Bridges but she had a number of genre appearances including Mary in K-PAX from Gene Brewer’s novel of the same name, and her best role though animated was — and don’t blame the messenger — Alice Kerchief/Geisha in Spicy City is an adult animated erotic cyberpunk television series which was created by Ralph Bkashi for HBO that ran for six episodes. It was a really fascinating role. I’d rate the series a strong R. (Died 2022.)
  • Born September 21, 1964 Andy Duncan, 58.  If I were to start anywhere with him, it’d be with his very excellent short stories which fortunately were published in two World Fantasy Award-winning collections Beluthahatchie and Other Stories, and The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories, and another WFA nominee, An Agent of Utopia: New & Selected Stories.  I’ve read his novels, so what you recommend?  He has garnered some very impressive Awards — not only World Fantasy Awards for the two collections, but also for the “Wakulla Springs” novelette (co-authored with Ellen Klages), and a Nebula for the novelette “Close Encounters” (2013). He has three Hugo nominations, for his “Beluthahatchie” short story (1998), the novella “The Chief Designer” (2002), and “Wakulla Springs” (2014). 
  • Born September 21, 1974 Dexter Steven, 48. He wrote interesting novels, the first being The Dream of Perpetual Motion which is based off The Tempest, with steampunk, cyborgs and airships as well; the second being Version Control, a media-saturated twenty minutes into the future America complicated by time travel that keep changing everything. He wrote these and that was it. 
  • Born September 21, 1990 Allison Scagliotti, 42. One of the primary cast of Warehouse 13, a show that I really, really loved. Her first genre role was as Jayna, one of the Wonder Twins, on the Smallville series. And she showed in a crossover episode of Eureka, “Crossing Over”.  She was in Camille Engelson on Stitchers which I must watch soon. 

(13) COMICS SECTION.

  • Bizarro  shows mythical beasts need therapy, too.

(14) WHO DAT? The Bookseller’s Joe Phelan knows there’s always an audience for anyone prepared to tell us, “What happened to Sad Puppies?”

The Sad Puppies era is arguably the bleakest passage in the history of the Hugo Awards. The Puppies’ campaigns gave rise to smears, vitriol, conspiracy and hostility; they can be regarded as an early skirmish in publishing’s now-pervasive “culture wars”, where suspicion, belligerence and an unwavering conviction in one’s own position routinely permeate discourse.

There are quotes from Kevin Standlee and Neil Gaiman which Phelan presents as recently obtained, and another from this laughably “anonymous” pro-Puppy figure:

…The anonymous Sad Puppies advocate we spoke to fully disputes suggestions that the campaigns should be branded failures. They are adamant the Hugos remain just as unrepresentative and biased as they considered them to be in 2013, and they believe Sad Puppies played an important role in raising awareness of this apparent issue.

“No, it was not unsuccessful. The campaign(s) proved to any onlookers who care to look that the modern Hugos are awarded solely for reasons of political correctness. A casual perusal of the lists of candidates and winners over the past four years is a sufficient confirmation of this. The Hugo Awards, in effect, burned themselves to the ground for the sole purpose of avoiding my work being recognised. The fans had selected an author that the insiders did not prefer – despite that I myself was a Tor author at the time. Those who hoped sobriety would prevail, and the Hugos return to the dignity they once knew, had their hopes dashed.”…

If you know any ex-Tor authors who were on the Sad Puppy slates that weren’t named John C. Wright, please do refresh my memory.

(15) PURE WROUGHT. Speaking of Mr. Wright, his recent “Note on Christian Science Fiction” contains this wonderful passage scoffing at some familiar genre works:

…People would go mad at the sight of stars, Mr. Asimov? Really? Eyewitnesses to the Crucifixion would immediately convince the world without any fuss that all religion was bunk, Mr. Clarke? Say you so? One should sleep with whores out of courtesy to one’s hosts when visiting whoreland, Mr. Heinlein? Really? Adultery is lawful for persons truly in love, Mrs. Rand? Honestly? Or, my personal favorite, if Captain Kirk is split into a good and evil pair, a la Jekyll and Hyde, the bad side is filled with passion and energy rather than filled with vice, and the good side is indecisive and weak rather than virtuous? Really, Mr. Roddenberry? Honestly, is that the way good and evil works, or have you simply been reading too much Freud, and it has warped your brain?…

(16) SEEMS MORE RELEVANT NOW. [Item by Todd Mason.] A quote from an old sff magazine:

“The Ukraine had had a number of serious attacks in the previous week, which refuted the theory that the metal locusts were a Russian weapon being used in preparation for a mobilisation of forces.”

“The Locusts” by R. Whitfield Young, Science-Fantasy, April 1958.

Apparently the only published story by Young under that byline, and one might guess why from the bulk of the story.

(17) AGAIN. CBR.com decides “Kaley Cuoco & Pete Davidson’s Meet Cute Is a Clever, Affecting Sci-Fi Rom-Com”.

When Sheila (Kaley Cuoco) approaches Gary (Pete Davidson) in a New York City bar at the beginning of Meet Cute, it seems like the moment referenced in the title — the romantic-comedy staple of the main characters first encountering each other in an adorable, amusing manner. For Gary, that’s what it is. He’s won over by Sheila’s offbeat charms, including ordering the exact same drink as him and toasting in the exact same way. For Sheila, though, this isn’t her first time meeting Gary, or even the fifth time. As she tells him almost immediately, she’s a time traveler, and she’s experienced this moment multiple times already. It’s a disarmingly direct way for the movie to introduce its sci-fi concept, which is indicative of the clever, surprising, and emotionally affecting story to come….

(18) LONGER AGO THAN YESTERDAY. Neil Gaiman, Ian Rankin, and Denise Mina are featured in this 2009 BBC piece about graphic novels that dropped today.

(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Adam Savage reports from the convention he holds (Silicon!) and how a fabricator he calls “evil Ted” gave him a very realistic foam space helmet.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Todd Mason, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 8/10/22 Put Me In A Con, Hurry, Hurry, Hurry Before The Scroll Is Gone; I Can’t Control My Reading, I Can’t Control My Blog

(1) WONDERS NEVER CEASE. The 1982 Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund delegate Kevin Smith has finished his trip report: “I finally got a round tuit”. You can read it online here: “TAFF Trip”.

40 years ago, in September 1982, I went to the USA, primarily to attend Chicon IV, the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago. The trip was paid for by TAFF, the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund, and one of the expectations is that anyone going on a TAFF Trip should write a report about it. That’s what I’ve done, finally. You can find it under ‘TAFF Trip’ in the menu bar above.

From the “Introduction”:

What I said before I left America to come home was: “I’ll write a short trip report, but do it quickly when I get back.”

As I recall, I wrote this in my next fanzine: “It were great!”

Well, it met the ‘short’ and ‘do it quickly’ criteria, but probably failed the ‘trip report’ hurdle.

So here we are. It has taken a mere 40 years, but is quite short. What more could you ask…?

[That’s what we call a rhetorical question, in the trade. You’re not supposed to answer it. Especially not like that, it’s not nice.]

(2) SCARES IN THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR. Scares That Care announced in a press release they are discontinuing their Charity Weekend event:

Since its founding in 2006, the Scares That Care charity has raised nearly $400,000 for organizations, children, and families impacted by illness, burns, or breast cancer. We’ve achieved that thanks to the generosity of you – our Scares That Care family. Due to rising costs involved in producing a show of this type, the Board of Directors has unanimously decided to discontinue our Charity Weekend event. This will allow us to focus on our other fundraising efforts, so that we can expand our goals. While we understand that many of you will be disappointed by this news, we ask you to remember that we have never been a charity that supports a convention. Rather, the convention has always supported the charity. As such, our overall mission continues, and we invite our Scares That Care family to support our other upcoming fundraisers and events. Details on our annual Christmas Dance, AuthorCon II, and other surprises are forthcoming.

Brian Keene added in his newsletter:

…But I do want to assure people that the convention was profitable. That’s not the issue. the issue is that we are a charity, and as a charity, we need to look at costs versus profit. The economy and rising costs in everything from fuel to food is hitting all of these big multi-media conventions….

(3) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Richard Butner and Veronica Schanoes in-person on Wednesday, August 17 at 7:00 p.m. Eastern. Masks welcome.

Richard Butner

Richard Butner’s short fiction has appeared in Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, been shortlisted for the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Fountain Award, and nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. His collection The Adventurists was published by Small Beer Press in March. He lives in North Carolina, where he runs the annual Sycamore Hill Writers’ Conference.

Veronica Schanoes

Veronica Schanoes is a writer whose debut short story collection, Burning Girls and Other Stories, appeared in paperback from Tordotcom in June. She is also an associate professor in the English department of Queens College – CUNY. In both guises, she works with fairy tales and fantasy.

Where: KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003. (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs)

(4) NEWS FROM THE FRONT. In “Covers! What are They Good For?” Sarah A. Hoyt continues her Mad Genius Club series about book covers by telling us —

What covers aren’t for:

1- to be beautiful. I mean, the eye is attracted to beautiful things, so beauty helps, but is not needed.

2- to be an accurate representation of your book. Again, if your character is a slim redhead and the cover model is a zaftig brunette (who is also very pretty) no one cares. Before they read the book, the readers don’t know that. And after they read the book they might leave a review that says “I don’t know where the cover brunette came from” but that won’t stop them promoting you if they loved the book.

3- be exactly what you envisioned in your head while writing the book. Unless of course, you’re an amazing cover artist on the side, and know exactly what sells in your genre or subgenre the month your book comes out.

4- (Contra insty trolls) signaling to the world how smart and sophisticated you are. (Unless you’re selling litewawy and little because the illusion of smart and sophisticated is essential there.)

She follows that beginning with a longer list of what covers are for.

(5) ROUNDUP TIME. G.W. Thomas shares a list of “Science Fiction Writers Who Wrote Westerns” at Dark Worlds Quarterly.

The collection Westerns of the 40s (1977) surprised me when I saw who the editor was, Damon Knight. That pillar of the Science Fiction community published the award-winning anthology series Orbit for decades. But he also did a couple of books about Pulp SF from the 1930s and 1940s. So why not some Cowboy stories from the same time period?

The bigger surprise was who he chose for that book. Not your usual W. C. Tuttle, Luke Short and Walter Tompkins stuff. Nope, Clifford D. Simak, John D. MacDonald and Murray Leinster. Three of the seven were written by Science Fiction authors. Now you can make the case for John D. MacDonald’s true fame is in the detective/suspense field. This is true, but old John D. did write Science Fiction for a spell before he quit it because it was too easy….

(6) TOO MUCH THE SAME THING? At Black Gate, Joe Bonadonna talks about his personal experiences with the sword and sorcery genre and why it withered in the 1980s in “IMHO: A Personal History Of Sword & Sorcery And Heroic Fantasy”.

Conan, King Kull, Cormac, Bran Mak Morn — names that conjure magic, characters often imitated, but never duplicated. These creations of Robert E. Howard (circa 1930) started the Sword and Sorcery boom of the 1960s and early 1970s. Then there are the barbarian warriors inspired by Howard — “Clonans,” as one writer recently referred to these sword-slinging, muscle-bound characters. A fair observation, but in some cases, not so true….

(7) WRITING FOR ANIMATION. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] The For Eternia podcast has a lengthy interview with Tim Sheridan, who was one of the writers of Masters of the Universe: Revelation and also worked on a lot of other animated shows. Even if you haven’t watched the show, Sheridan has a lot of things to say about writing and storytelling.

(8) GET HUMBLE. There’s a Humble Bundle for “Image Comics 30th Anniversary: The 2000s” – pay what you want and help charity.

Image Comics turns 30 this year and we’re ready to celebrate! This bundle is all about Image in the 2000s, including the debuts of well-loved series like Invincible Volume 1: Family Matters, The Walking Dead Volume 1: Days Gone By, and Fear Agent: Final Edition Volume 1! On top of the new heroes, villains, and sagas the decade brought, this bundle also includes the continuing adventures of fan-favorite Image characters Spawn,The Darkness, and Savage Dragon. Grab this bundle and help support BINC (Book Industry Charitable Foundation)!

Daniel Dern comments on the deal: “At this price (range), if you have any interest in these Image titles — or even want to see if you’re interested — it’s a hard bargain to resist.

“(Note, I only recently discovered Eric Larsen’s Savage Dragon. They are great! A mix of whacky plots, text/character/art references to Marvel, DC and other bits, and more. (Caution: Lots of violence, sex, gore and bad science. If you want to start ’em from the beginning, Hoopla has them — the Archives editions have more per borrow (~25 issues each), but, IIRC, are in black-and-white, it’s possible (I haven’t checked) that the fewer-paged non-Archives are in color.)”

(9) RAYMOND BRIGGS (1934-2022). [Item by Cora Buhlert.] Writer and illustrator Raymond Briggs died August 9 aged 88. He is best known for The Snowman (which is genre, because it features a magical flying snowman), but a lot of his other work such as Fungus the Bogeyman is genre as well. He also wrote and drew the terribly depressing nuclear war graphic novel (also filmed) Where the Wind Blows, where a nice elderly British couple dies slowly of radiation poisoning in spite of attempting to follow the official UK government civil defense guidelines.

Lots of tributes to him from the Guardian:

(10) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.  

2008 [By Cat Eldridge.] Fourteen years ago on this day, the animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars premiered. It is the first fully animated film in the Star Wars franchise and takes place shortly after Episode II – Attack of the Clones, at the start of the Clone Wars.

Ok let me note that I was in the minority of individuals that really liked it. I liked the voice acting and thought the story was quite excellent. Yes, the animation was odd, but Lucas has the right to do what he wants as it’s his damn universe, not ours, something’s fans seem to keep forgetting. 

It received largely hostile, and I mean hostile reviews mainly due to both the story here and the animation style which offended, well, almost everyone.  Now that’s out of the way let’s look at it.

It was written by Henry Gilroy, Steven Melching and Scott Murphy. Keep the first writer in mind as he will go to be the writer on oh-so-stellar Star Wars: The Clone Wars which will run for seven series and over one hundred and thirty episodes. 

The voice talent was second to none: Matt Lanter, Ashley Eckstein, James Arnold Taylor, Dee Bradley Baker, Ian Abercrombie, Catherine Taber, Christopher Lee, Samuel L. Jackson and Anthony Daniels. Many of these will carry over into the later series. Tom Kane is the narrator here as he is in later series. 

So why the hostile reaction? The style is an homage to the stylized looks of both Japanese anime and manga, something fans and critics alike weren’t expecting. Roger Ebert in his review said, “the characters have hair that looks molded from Play-Doh, bodies that seem arthritic, and moving lips on half-frozen faces—all signs that shortcuts were taken in the animation work.”  

Curiously the New York Post in its review lauded the original Star Wars film for its depth of character development (huh?) saying of this film, “Director Dave Filoni is so concentrated on the action that we’re never given the chance to care who lives and who is blown into spare parts.” 

Also curious is the claim that Star Wars: The Clone Wars did very poorly at the box office. Yes, compared to the live action films in the franchise it was a disaster, but animated features generally never do as well as live action films. (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is the very rare exception.) It cost eight million to make and made sixty-three million in its first run, not bad at all. It obviously put a lot of asses in the seats that autumn. 

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give a middling forty percent. What I must note is Lucas had in mind all along a Star Wars: The Clone Wars series which debuted in October of that year. That series holds a ninety-three percent rating over there.

Oh, and the animation style for that series is the same. Just saying. 

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 10, 1896 John Gloag. His first SF novel, Tomorrow’s Yesterday, depicts a race of cat people from the distant future observing human society. It was one of five SF novels and a double handful of short stories he wrote in the Thirties and Forties. (Died 1981.)
  • Born August 10, 1902 Curt Siodmak. He is known for his work in horror and sf films such as The Wolf Man and Donovan’s Brain. The latter was made from his own novel and ISFDB notes it was part of the Dr. Patrick Cory series. He wrote quite a few other genre novels as well. Donovan’s Brain and just a few other works are available in digital form. (Died 2000.)
  • Born August 10, 1903 Ward Moore. Author of Bring the Jubilee which everyone knows about as it’s often added to that mythical genre canon, and several more that I’m fairly sure almost no one knows of. More interestingly to me was that he was a keen writer of recipes. ISFDB documents that four of his appeared in Anne McCaffrey’s Cooking Out of This World: “Kidneys — Like Father Used to Make” and “Pea Soup — Potage Ste. Germaine“ being two of them. (Died 1978.)
  • Born August 10, 1913 Noah Beery Jr. Genre-wise, he’s best remembered as Maj. William Corrigan on the Fifties classic SF film Rocketship X-M, but he showed up in other genre undertakings as well such as 7 Faces of Dr. LaoThe Six Million Dollar ManFantasy IslandBeyond Witch MountainThe Ghost of Cypress Swamp and The Cat Creeps. I think he appeared in one of the earliest Zorro films made where he’s credited just as a boy, he’d be seven then, The Mark of Zorro which had Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and his father, Noah Beery Sr. (Died 1994.)
  • Born August 10, 1952 David C. Smith, 70. He is best known for his fantasy novels, particularly those co-authored with Richard L. Tierney, featuring characters created by Robert E. Howard. Most notable are the six novels which involved Red Sonja. Those novels are available on Apple Books but not on Kindle.
  • Born August 10, 1955 Tom Kidd, 67. Genre illustrator, he’s won an impressive seven Chelsey Awards. Though he didn’t win a Hugo for Best Professional Artist, he was nominated  at Aussiecon Two, Nolacon, Conspiracy ‘87 and ConFiction. Since I’m fond of this Poul Anderson series, I’m giving you his cover for Maurai & Kith.
  • Born August 10, 1955 Eddie Campbell, 67. Best known as the illustrator and publisher of From Hell (written by Alan Moore) which is, errr, interesting and won an IHG Award, and Bacchus, a series about the few Greek gods who have made to our time. Though not genre, I highly recommend The Black Diamond Detective Agency which he did. It’s adaptation of an as-yet unmade screenplay by C. Gaby Mitchell. 
  • Born August 10, 1965 Claudia Christian, 57. Best-known role is Commander Susan Ivanova on Babylon 5. She has done other genre roles such as being Brenda Lee Van Buren in The Hidden, Katherine Shelley in Lancelot: Guardian of Time, Quinn in Arena, Lucy in The Haunting of Hell House and Kate Dematti in Meteor Apocalypse. She’s had one-offs on Space RangersHighlanderQuantum LeapRelic Hunter and Grimm. She’s Captain Belinda Blowhard on Starhyke, a six-episode series shot in ‘05 you can watch on Amazon Prime.

(12) WONG TO PEN DEADPOOL. Alyssa Wong and Martin Coccolo launch Deadpool’s next era in November.

Deadpool’s new ongoing series will be written by Alyssa Wong, known for her acclaimed work on thrilling books like Star Wars: Doctor Aphra and Iron Fist, and drawn by Martin Coccolo, the artist currently wowing readers in the action-packed Hulk vs. Thor: Banner of War crossover. The two rising Marvel stars will take out their pent up aggression on everyone’s pizza-faced, jabber-mouthed, misguided, hate-to-love, love-to-hate fave in new Deadpool adventures loaded with riotous violence and relentless body horror. Deadpool’s latest solo exploits will kick off with a bang as a new mercenary group sends Deadpool on one of his most dangerous missions, an intoxicating villain unleashes a twisted plan on Wade’s body with horrifying side effects, and a hot new romance arrives on the scene to drive Wade crazy!

The world knows Wade Wilson is one of the top mercenary/assassins in the Marvel Universe, even if he is simultaneously the most annoying one…but he’s pushing to make that recognition official as he auditions for the elite group known as the Atelier. Now, he has 48 hours to kill one of the world’s most famous supervillains. Only problem? He’s been kidnapped, and something…strange…is GROWING INSIDE HIM.

“I love chaos. And what is Deadpool if not chaos incarnate? I’m honored to take the reins for Wade’s next solo adventure–expect romance, expect body horror, and expect a wild time!” Wong promises….

(13) DROPS OF WISDOM. Neil Gaiman answers tweets from people with questions about Greek, Roman, Norse, and Egyptian mythology for WIRED in “Neil Gaiman Answers Mythology Questions From Twitter”.

(14) ARTIFICIAL BURRITO INTELLIGENCE. Midjourney creates a portrait of John Scalzi. Then Chuck Wendig gets it to answer the question “What if you are what you eat?”

(15) CATCH THE WAVE. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Jason Momoa talks about his roles in fantasy movies, including an explanation about why the 2011 Conan The Barbarian was awful, and reveals that Denis Villeneuve would like to adapt Dune Messiah into a third Dune movie in the British GQ article “Jason Momoa, Aquaman and real life superhero, is on a quest to save the ocean”.

Jason Momoa doesn’t exactly love that he keeps dying, if you really want to get into it. “My kids are always like, ‘Are you gonna die again? You always die,” he says, a little forlornly. “I obviously made a name for myself dying so if you see me it’s like, ‘Momoa’s gonna jump on the bomb, I know it!’”

Thus far he has been shot in the head, blown up, smothered, died by suicide, had his throat slashed, and been stabbed in both the stomach and the chest. It was watching his most recent death, in Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi spectacular Dune with his 12-year-old son, that really got to him. “It was pretty heart wrenching, cause I was like, ‘I’m right here buddy!’ But he was like, ‘Papa nooooooooo,’ he recalls, howling like a dog at the moon. “I said: ‘Listen dude: if you’re gonna go out, go out big.’”

Which might make it sound as though the Aquaman actor is a mere mortal, but if you saw Jason Momoa walking down the street (and not, say, emerging from the ocean with a trident in his hand, and the promise of avenging his sea queen mother glinting in his eye) you might still wonder if this towering man didn’t arrive on dry land using a branch of coral as a surfboard, having caught a wave from a kingdom far more exciting than anywhere on planet earth…. 

(16) PRIME TARGET. Cyber warfare is unleashed in The Enigma Factor, first in the twelve-book Enigma Series by Charles Breakfield and Rox Burkey.

A brilliant programmer is targeted by cyber predators! Jacob Michaels, computer network security-tester extraordinaire, tries to settle into a quiet life of work to polish his cyber security skills after the death of his mother. Jacob is unaware that his growing reputation makes him a person of interest. Cyber-criminals are hunting for new recruits. They target this brilliant programmer to seduce him into joining their cause. More people are hunting him than just the Russian cyber kingpin. Jacob sets off to find those who are targeting him. He discovers he’s in the crosshairs of previously unknown global experts. Of course, having his identity erased puts him front and center above anything else.

Buzz, when looking for the easy way, makes a ghastly judgement error and inadvertently crosses the line to the darknet. He pleads to his best friend Jacob for help. Jacob, brilliant as he is, doesn’t have enough experience to help Buzz on his own. Jacob battles against global cyber masterminds using his knowledge of programming, identity theft, and hacking. He is pulled up short when his security knowledge is dwarfed following his introduction to the distractingly beautiful encryptionist Petra. Jacob’s challenge is how to keep ahead of the criminals and learn who to trust. In their debut TechnoThriller, The Enigma Factor, award-winning authors Breakfield and Burkey weave a complex tale of danger, intrigue, and international cyber combat. They use a relevant technology foundation, then layer on travel, romance, humor and mystery. Like rust, the cat and mouse game of the new cyber warfare age never sleeps.

The book is published by ICABOD Press and is available worldwide across all platforms including from Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, and as an audiobook.

Charles Breakfield is a technology expert in security, networking, voice, and anything digital. Rox Burkey is a technology professional who excels at optimizing technology and business investments. Together these Texas authors create award-winning stories that resonate with males and females, as well as young and experienced adults.

(17) IN THE BEGINNING. Vice explains how “China Is Planning to Turn the Moon Into a Giant Space ‘Shield’”.

Chinese astronomers aim to peer for the first time into the cosmic “dark ages,” an unexplored era about 200 million years after the Big Bang, by using the Moon as a shield to block out noisy radio signals caused by human activity on Earth, reports the South China Morning Post.

The Discovering the Sky at the Longest Wavelength (DSL) mission envisions sending a fleet of satellites to the Moon that could capture ultralong radio waves made by hydrogen atoms in the darkness before cosmic dawn, when the first stars were born bursting with radiant light…. 

(18) A FULLY OPERATIONAL ASTRONOMICAL STATION. [Item by Chris Barkley.] The NASA article is from April 2020, but it’s a nice counterpoint to the Chinese mission…JUST LIKE For All Mankind!!! “NASA’s Plan to Turn the Moon Into a Telescope Looks Like the Death Star” at Vice.

Called the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT), the proposal is the brainchild of Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay, a robotics technologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. On Tuesday, LCRT was selected for initial “Phase 1” funding ($125,000) by NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, which aims to explore advanced, far-future technologies.

LCRT is still in “very early stages of development,” said Bandyopadhyay in an email, noting that “the objective of Phase 1 is to study the feasibility of the LCRT concept.”

“[W]e will mostly be focusing on the mechanical design of LCRT, searching for suitable craters on the Moon, and comparing the performance of LCRT against other ideas that have been proposed in the literature,” he added.

Bandyopadhyay envisions building the LCRT in a crater that measures about three to five kilometers (two to three miles) in diameter. The telescope’s wire-mesh scaffolding could be delivered and erected by wall-climbing robots, such as NASA’s DuAxel rovers, which would be capable of scaling the vertical slopes of the crater…

…“LCRT could enable tremendous scientific discoveries in the field of cosmology by observing the early universe in the 10–50m wavelength band (i.e., 6–30MHz frequency band), which has not been explored by humans to date.”

In particular, the telescope could shed new light on the mysterious processes that occurred more than 13 billion years ago, as the first stars in the universe were being born, according to a 2018 paper led by Bandyopadhyay. It could also examine fine details about exoplanets that orbit other stars….

(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Honest Game Trailers:  Mario Strikers:  Battle League,” the Screen Junkies say that this newest edition of the Mario franchise you can have your favorite Mario characters fight each other in a battle royale that’s vaguely like soccer except people actually score goals and you can drop kick your opponents into a giant banana.  “This is a fun family game to play together,” the narrator says, “which will naturally lead to you cussing out your friends and family while you’re in front of the TV.”

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

Pixel Scroll 8/3/22 We Don’t Need No Pixelcation, We Don’t Need No Scroll Control

(1) HUGO VOTING DEADLINE APPROACHES. Chicon 8 reminds everyone that the Hugo Award voting deadline is August 11. Aiyee!

Remember, you have only over one week left to vote for for the 2022 Hugo Awards, the Lodestar Award for best Young Adult Book, and the Astounding Award for Best New Writer!

All ballots must be received by 11 August 2022, 11:59 pm PDT (UTC-7). Access our website link [above] for information on how to access the voters packet, how to vote online, or how to vote by mail.

(2) APPEAL FOR CWCF. Yesterday the Chicon 8 committee also asked for donations for the Chicago Worldcon Community Fund.

The Chicago Worldcon Community Fund (CWCF) needs another $5000 to meet the needs of our community! Can you contribute?

The CWCF is a special fund to help defray the expenses of attending Chicon 8 for non-white fans or program participants, LGBTQIA+ fans or program participants, and local Chicago area fans of limited means.

You can give directly to the fund or even donate a membership you may not use. Even $5 goes a long way!

For donation information or how to apply to the fund, visit our site at the link [above].

(3) REALLY FINISHING A BOOK. Carmen Maria Machado’s newsletter, in “On Writing and the Business of Writing”, considers why authors are tempted to overlook their clear priority.

A very long article about the Jumi Bello plagiarism scandal has come out from AirMail. In brief, if you aren’t familiar with the story: a debut author had her book canceled by the publisher because it contained a significant amount of plagiarism.

The article, which is about what happened and its antecedents and aftermath, is… not great. The journalist focuses on odd, salacious details, fails to draw some obvious points, and misses big questions about the commodification of marginalized identities, the responsibility of due diligence from agents, editors, and publications, how authors often take the fall for systemic industry failures, and the lack of education around the ethics of influence and inspiration1.

I’m not going to address any of those points, though I hope someone does because I think they’re important. But I do think there is something hugely instructive to be taken from this incident—something that teachers of writing and emerging writers alike can learn from—about the business of publishing and the fragility of the creative life.

…This is a story about plagiarism, yes, but it’s also a story about something I see so much of—in my capacity as a teacher, a mentor, and just someone who gets asked about publishing literally constantly. That is, how easy it is to let the desire to be published (and by extension obsessed over by name-brand agents, editors, and publishing houses) completely outstrip the act of writing a good book.

… I was lucky. Jesus was I lucky. Because there’s an alternate universe where I was writing a (more obviously) commercially viable book in grad school and agents fought over me and I published something not done, something closer to my thesis, which had the seeds of a good book but was not, in and of itself, a good book. Instead, I was forced to sit with Her Body and Other Parties until it was ready. I am so fucking grateful that I got to write the book I needed to, even if I resisted that process at every turn….

(4) INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE FOR THE FAN The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts has announced the ICFA 44 Guest of Honor and Guest Scholar.

  • Guest of Honor — Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki is an African speculative fiction writer and editor in Nigeria. He has won the Nommo award for Best Speculative Fiction by an African twice, both for Short Story and Novella, as well as the Otherwise and British Fantasy Awards. He is the first African to have won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette with his climate fiction story “O2 Arena,” for which he is also a BSFA, BFA and Nommo Award finalist, and the first African to be a Hugo Award Best Novelette finalist. He is the first African editor to be a finalist in the Hugo Award Best Editor categories and the first BIPOC editor to be a finalist in both the Hugo Award Editing and Fiction categories in the same year. He is the founder of Jembefola Press and the Emeka Walter Dinjos Memorial Award for Disability in Speculative Fiction. He is the first African-born Black writer and the youngest writer to be Guest of Honor at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts.  

  • Guest Scholar – Dr. Isiah Lavender III 

Isiah Lavender III is Sterling-Goodman Professor of English at the University of Georgia, where he researches and teaches courses in African American literature and science fiction. His books include Race in American Science Fiction (Indiana UP, 2011), Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction and Dis-Orienting Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction (UP of Mississippi, 2014 and 2017 respectively), Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement (Ohio State UP, 2019), and Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century (Ohio State UP, 2020), co-edited with Lisa Yaszek. His interview collection Conversations with Nalo Hopkinson is forthcoming from UP of Mississippi in early 2023. He is currently hard at work on The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms, co-edited with Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Grace Dillon, and Taryne Jade Taylor as well as his manuscript-in-progress Critical Race Theory and Science Fiction. If you would like to know more about Dr. Lavender, check out https://narrativeencounters.aau.at/how-reading-shapes-us-isiah-lavender/

The title of Dr. Lavender’s ICFA Guest Scholar presentation shall be “Imaginary Amendments and Executive Orders: Race in United States Science Fiction.” 

(5) NOT EXACTLY A BIOPIC. The Hollywood Reporter says “Charlize Theron, Alfonso Cuaron Team for Philip K. Dick Family Movie ‘Jane’”, a project that sounds like it will be based on a reality PKD wished he had inhabited. Which is very PKD, as you doubtless already know.

Oscar winners Charlize Theron and Alfonso Cuarón are partnering for Jane, an Amazon feature project based on the personal life of beloved science fiction author Philip K. Dick from his daughter Isa Hackett.

The genre-bending project is based on the relationship between Dick and his twin sister, Jane, who died six weeks after birth. The death affected Dick personally, and also influenced his creative work.

Jane, according to the project’s description, is “a moving, suspenseful and darkly humorous story about a woman’s unique relationship with her brilliant, but troubled twin, who also happens to be the celebrated novelist Philip K. Dick. While attempting to rescue her brother from predicaments both real and imagined, Jane plunges deeper and deeper into a fascinating world of his creation.”…

“The story of Jane has been with me for as long as I can remember,” said Hackett. “Jane, my father’s twin sister who died a few weeks after birth, was at the center of his universe. Befitting a man of his unique imagination, this film will defy the conventions of a biopic and embrace the alternate reality Philip K. Dick so desperately desired—one in which his beloved sister survived beyond six weeks of age. It is her story we will tell, her lens through which we will see him and his imagination. There is no better way to honor him than to grant him his wish, if only for the screen.”

(6) NEW FROM NEVALA-LEE. Cora Buhlert interviewed Alec Nevala-Lee about his brand-new book Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller for her “Non-Fiction Spotlight” feature.

Biographies of prominent SFF and SFF-adjacent people are quite common on the Hugo ballot and today’s featured non-fiction book is just such a biography.

Therefore, I am pleased to welcome Alec Nevala-Lee, author of Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller to my blog today….

What prompted you to write/edit this book?

I’ve been interested since high school in Fuller, whom I first encountered in the pages of the Whole Earth Catalog. After Astounding, I was looking to expand the range of subjects that I could cover as a writer, and Fuller was an obvious choice—his life expresses many of the themes that I’ve explored in my earlier work, and until now, there’s never been a reliable biography that covered his entire career using the best available sources. I hoped that writing it would be a real intellectual adventure, and it was.

 
(7) START HERE. Becky Spratford’s post in The Line-Up, “These Six Horror Anthologists Are Masterful Curators of Terror”, kicks off with two books edited by Ellen Datlow, so they’re obviously on the right track!

…Anthologies are books that collect short stories by multiple authors, often under a common theme. Because these volumes contain tales by different voices, the work of the editor is extremely important. Not only does the anthologist have to solicit and select the titles to include, but they also have to edit and arrange said stories into a cohesive tome. The very best anthologists are able to expertly walk that line, offering different voices that when expertly brought together, create a unified whole, a single book that readers will enjoy from cover to cover.

Anthologies are also the best way for readers to survey the landscape of a genre, to see a wide variety of styles and voices writing under one umbrella. They also provide a tasting menu of voices familiar and brand new. And if the editor does their job well, readers will finish the book having learned of a few new writers who will be added to their personal to-read pile….

(8) HOW TO SELL A BOOK BY ITS COVER. Sarah A. Hoyt is starting a series about cover creation for indie authors at Mad Genius Club: “The Great Cover Up”.

… Which means this year alone, I’ve laid out a thousand for covers I just couldn’t seem to get right. There are now reasonably priced artists and at the end of the series I’ll give you names and contacts. Also places to buy ready-made and/or decent graphics just needing the lettering. But here is the thing: you still have to know what the cover is supposed To do and what it can do. And what in a cover matters or doesn’t

I guarantee 90% of what you think matters in a cover doesn’t. And vice-versa. And you must know what matters and what a cover is supposed to be, because when that artist/designer hands you Hamlet, you’ll have to explain why it won’t sell cornflakes and why he must prostitute his art to give you a jingle….

(9) LIGHTS OUT. Hollywood accounting played a role in the highly-publicized cancellation of two productions. But that wasn’t the only reason: “The Dish: What’s Behind The ‘Batgirl’ & ‘Scoob!’ Discard? David Zaslav’s Abject Rejection Of Jason Kilar’s HBO Max Strategy” at Deadline.

Why did Warner Bros scrap Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt?

The cancellation by Warner Bros of two made-for-HBO Max streaming movies came as a shock to the town. There are several threads here, but the move amounts to an emphatic rejection of past WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar’s strategy to make original $70 million live-action and animated films directly for the streaming site.

The makers of the live-action Batgirl and the animated Scoob! learned today that those films were being stopped in their tracks. The timing was particularly awkward for Batgirl co-directors Adil El Arbi and Billal Fallah. Both are in Morocco for El Arbi’s wedding — some wedding present — and they expected to return to the cutting room and continue work on the film that stars Leslie Grace, J.K. Simmons, Brendan Fraser and Michael Keaton.

There were initial cries that the scrapping of Batgirl carried bad optics because the title role is played by a Latina. But there were reasons for the move. In both cases, the filmmakers were told that it came down to a “purchase accounting” maneuver available to Warner Bros Discovery because the company has changed hands, and also changed strategy from the previous regime. This opportunity expires in mid-August, said sources, and it allows WBD to not have to carry the losses on its books at a time when the studio is trying to pare down $3 billion in debt across its divisions.

There has been much speculation on why Batgirl was canceled, having to do with it being a bad movie. …

(10) THE SQUEEZE IS ON. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] An Anonymous Source reveals how hard it is to work on Marvel films. At Vulture: “A VFX Artist Explains What It’s Like Working for Marvel”.

It’s pretty well known and even darkly joked about across all the visual-effects houses that working on Marvel shows is really hard. When I worked on one movie, it was almost six months of overtime every day. I was working seven days a week, averaging 64 hours a week on a good week. Marvel genuinely works you really hard. I’ve had co-workers sit next to me, break down, and start crying. I’ve had people having anxiety attacks on the phone.

The studio has a lot of power over the effects houses, just because it has so many blockbuster movies coming out one after the other. If you upset Marvel in any way, there’s a very high chance you’re not going to get those projects in the future. So the effects houses are trying to bend over backward to keep Marvel happy.

To get work, the houses bid on a project; they are all trying to come in right under one another’s bids. With Marvel, the bids will typically come in quite a bit under, and Marvel is happy with that relationship, because it saves it money. But what ends up happening is that all Marvel projects tend to be understaffed. Where I would usually have a team of ten VFX artists on a non-Marvel movie, on one Marvel movie, I got two including myself. So every person is doing more work than they need to.

The other thing with Marvel is it’s famous for asking for lots of changes throughout the process. So you’re already overworked, but then Marvel’s asking for regular changes way in excess of what any other client does. And some of those changes are really major.…

(11) NECROMANCER RECRUITMENT. The publicity for Tamsyn Muir’s forthcoming novel Nona the Ninth includes the “LOCKED TOMB QUIZ! What Necromantic House Are You??” at Riddle.com.

TLT stans, RISE!

The Emperor needs necromancers, and this is your chance to align with one of the Nine Houses! 

SPOILERS THRU THE END OF HARROW THE NINTH YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

(12) MEMORY LANE.  

1995 [By Cat Eldridge.] Back in in 1995 Charles Vess self-published a biannual series of illustrated ballads entitled The Book of Ballads and Sagas in a series of four chapbooks, through his Green Man Press. In this series Vess illustrated adaptations of traditional Scottish and English ballads written by a variety of contributors, including Emma Bull, Charles de Lint, Neil Gaiman, Sharyn McCrumb, Jeff Smith, and Jane Yolen.  

Debbie Skolnik reviewed it for Green Man and she noted there that “The ballads are English and Scottish; the sagas are, as their name implies, Norse in origin. There are more ballads than sagas. Actually, there’s only one saga: Skade. Being enthralled by the English and Scottish ballads myself, I am quite familiar with all the stories. Norse mythology, however, I know very little about, so I did a little bit of quick research to familiarize myself with the basic story.”

I read when it came out as I got them sent to me by Vess before I sent them unto Debbie for review. Of course the illustrations by Vess were stellar as everything by Vess is. (I’m writing this under the artwork for the art for the cover art for de Lint’s A Circle of Cats.) So how were the stories?

If you liked of the tale of Thomas The Rhymer, Ellen Kushner has done an excellent version of the story in her book of the same name. Here she retells the tale in a much-shortened version.

Charles de Lint took up the matter in “Twa Corbies” (Two Crows) which deals with the death of a Knight and the Corbies telling his tale. Twa Corbies will become part of his Newford characters in the firm of Maida and Zia, the Crow Girls who are immortal.

Vess himself does Tam Lin and it is one of the best pieces here. The depiction of the cursed Tam Lin turning into various creatures is quite amazing. 

I have barely scratched the surface of what is offered here. If you like this sort of ballads and sagas, I’m sure you’ll love this.

Debbie notes in her review that “Careful readers will note that Steeleye Span has recorded a version of almost all the ballads in this series of books.” That’s certainly true and Vess has acknowledged that he was strongly influenced by that band in selecting the tales here. 

The chapbooks were later printed in a hardcover edition in 2004 by Tor books with some additional material.

(13) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 3, 1861 Michel Jean Pierre Verne. Son of Jules Verne who we now know rewrote some of his father’s later novels. These novels have since been restored using the original manuscripts which were preserved. He also wrote and published short stories using his father’s name. None of these are the major works Jules is now known for. (Died 1925.)
  • Born August 3, 1904 Clifford Simak. I was trying to remember the first novel by him I read. I’m reasonably sure it was Way Station though it could’ve been City which just won a well-deserved Retro Hugo. I’m fond of Cemetery World and A Choice of Gods as well. By the way I’m puzzled by the Horror Writers Association making him one of their three inaugural winners of the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement. What of his is truly horror?  I really can’t think of anything by him that’s truly horror. (Died 1988.)
  • Born August 3, 1920 P. D. James. Author of The Children of Men which she wrote to answer the question “If there were no future, how would we behave?” Made into a film which she said she really liked despite it being substantially different than her novel. I like authors who can do that. ISFDB lists her as having done a short story called “Murder, 1986” which they say is genre but I’ve not read it. (Died 2014.)
  • Born August 3, 1940 Martin Sheen, 82. So that was who that was! On Babylon 5: The River of Souls, there’s a Soul Hunter but the film originally didn’t credit an actor who turns out to be Sheen. Amazing performance. He’s been in a number of other genre roles but that’s the ones I like most. Though I will single him out for voicing Arthur Square in Flatland: The Movie.
  • Born August 3, 1946 John DeChancie, 76, A native of Pittsburgh, he is best known for his Castle fantasy series, and his SF Skyway series. He’s fairly prolific even having done a Witchblade novel. So who here has read him? Opinions please. And no, I didn’t know there were Witchblade novels. 
  • Born August 3, 1950 John Landis, 72. He’d make this Birthday List if all he’d done was An American Werewolf in London, but he was also Director / Producer / Writer of the Twilight Zone movie. And wrote Clue which is the best Tim Curry role ever. And Executive Produced one of the best SF comedies ever, Amazon Women on the Moon. Neat fact: he was the puppeteer for Grover in The Muppet Movie, and he later played Leonard Winsop in The Muppets Take Manhattan
  • Born August 3, 1972 Brigid Brannagh, 50. Also credited as Brigid Brannagh, Brigid Brannah, Brigid Brannaugh, Brigid Walsh, and Brigid Conley Walsh. Need an Irish red headed colleen in a genre role? Well she apparently would do. She shows up in Kindred: The EmbraceAmerican GothicSliders, Enterprise (as a bartender in one episode), RoarTouched by an AngelCharmedEarly Edition, Angel (as Virginia Bryce in a recurring role), GrimmSupernatural and she had a run in Runaways in the main role of Stacey Yorkes.

(14) COMICS SECTION.

(15) MR. MEME. In the Washington Post, Michael Cavna looks at the “Mr. Men” characters created by British illustrator Roger Hargreaves in the 1970s have now become popular memes. “’Little Miss [Blank]’: How a kid-book meme became viral comedy”.

… Fast-forward to this month, when one Instagram account alone — “LittleMissNotesApp” — has attracted nearly 2 million followers by posting the Hargreaves’ characters beneath such captions as, “Little Miss Lexapro,” “Mr. Vape Cloud” and “Little Miss Aggressive Drunk.” The account gives credit to the user “Juulpuppy,” who last spring began posting such art updates as “Little Miss Weed Psychosis.”…

(16) FLAME OFF. CBR’s Jerry Stanford came up with “10 Jokes From The Golden Age Of Marvel Comics That Wouldn’t Be Printed Today”.

Asbestos Was Overused, Making It An Unintentional Joke Years Later.

In the Golden Age, Marvel’s Human Torch seemed unstoppable, so criminals, Nazis, and other villains resorted to asbestos, a material that became popular for its resistance to fire. In the 1970s, it also became known for causing cancer.

While the use of asbestos was not originally played for humor, the best-known example of this is Asbestos Lady, who clothed herself head-to-toe in the carcinogenic material. However, the funniest example comes from All-Winners Comics #11, where a villain known as the Hawk traps the Human Torch and Toro in an airtight, asbestos-lined dungeon. The Torch’s hyperbole call the sealed room “a death trap.” Time has made this an unintentional joke.

(17) INSIDER INFORMATION. “Neil Gaiman Knows What Happens When You Dream”. And he shares that with the New York Times.

For the last five or six years, we’ve been living through what feels like almost unfathomable turmoil, and I think a lot of people see this period as an unprecedented chapter in the human story. But when it comes to stories, I basically believe in Ecclesiastes’ “There is nothing new under the sun.” So my question to you is whether you think we are living in a new story — or is it just new to us? 

This reminds me of something that happened after the Sept. 11 attacks. When we could fly again, I flew to Trieste, Italy, for a conference. I remember going into a display of Robert Capa photographs taken in that area during World War II. Until that moment, I had regarded World War II as being unimaginably distant in time. It was this thing that had happened in history, that had happened to my family — basically all of them were killed; a couple of outliers made it to England — but that was history. That happened then. But there was something very strange about looking at those Robert Capa photos post-9/11, because they made me go, Those people are us. I feel the same way today. History is now. But I’m also getting more obsessive about human beings over huge swaths of time. Part of that came out of being on the Isle of Skye during the serious U.K. lockdown. On Skye, if there’s a rock somewhere, it’s probably because somebody put it there. I realized that the rock that I was using to keep the lid on my dustbin was a stone that had been dragged around. People have been in this place for thousands and thousands of years, and in this bay I’m living in, they’ve left behind rocks! Realizing that about the rocks makes you take the long view. Which is that the human race is mostly people just trying to live their lives, and that bad [expletive] is going to happen. That then moves you into other territory….

(18) THAT DARNED ELUSIVE EARENDEL. Or so the Baroness Orczy might have phrased the news. “James Webb Space Telescope sees Earendel, most distant star” and Space.com shares the image.

The James Webb Space Telescope has caught a glimpse of the most distant star known in the universe, which had been announced by scientists using Webb’s predecessor the Hubble Space Telescope only a few months ago. 

The star, named Earendel, after a character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” prequel “The Silmarillion,” was discovered thanks to gravitational lensing in a Hubble Space Telescope deep field image. The star, whose light took 12.9 billion light-years to reach Earth, is so faint that it might be rather challenging to find it in the new James Webb Space Telescope image, which was released on Twitter on Tuesday (Aug. 2) by a group of astronomers using the account Cosmic Spring JWST(opens in new tab). 

The original Hubble image provides some guidance as to where to look through the zoomed-in cut-out. Essentially, Earendel, is the tiny whitish dot below a cluster of distant galaxies. By comparing the Hubble image with that captured by Webb, you can find the elusive Earendel….

(19) KEEP WATCHING THE TREE. “This Mystery Orb From the Sky Has Baffled Us All”, which is saying a lot for something reported on Popular Mechanics.

Social media is awash with theories about the origin and purpose of a strange, smooth, solid object, which landed on a tree in Veracruz, Mexico, the night of July 31.

Isidro Cano Luna, a television meteorologist reporting on the mystery, says locals described the sphere making a sound as it fell, but releasing no fire. He posted several messages to his more than 132,000 followers about the object, along with photos of what appears to be a dull, yellow sphere the size of a large beach ball perched atop a tree.

… Luna describes the sphere in all caps in his posts. It seems to be made of “A VERY HARD PLASTIC OR AN ALLOY OF VARIOUS METALS,” and “APPARENTLY IT HAS AN ANTENNA,” he says. Luna wonders if it could be a former chunk of a Chinese rocket that crashed back to Earth and landed in the Indian Ocean over the weekend. Perhaps it could be radioactive, he writes, warning people who see it not to get too close. There’s no apparent way to get inside the orb, either. It has a a code visible on its exterior, he says in an August 1 post. “NOTICE SMALL HOLES THAT ARE A KIND OF [INDECIPHERABLE] CODES.”

(20) GOING VIRAL. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] The BBC explains a computer virus in this report from March 1992.

(21) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Ryan George reveals that a time traveler from 2022 has a very hard time explaining Elon Musk to the people of 1996.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Brian Z., Michael J. Walsh, Todd Mason, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]

Pixel Scroll 3/30/22 Everybody In This Scroll Is Wearing A Pixel, And Don’t Kid Yourself

(1) GAME MAKER SETTLES HARASSMENT SUIT. “Activision Blizzard to pay $18 million to harassment victims” reports the LA Times. However, a number of other such suits remain active.

Activision Blizzard agreed to set up an $18-million fund for employees who experienced sexual harassment or discrimination, pregnancy discrimination or retaliation as part of a settlement with a federal employment agency Tuesday.

The consent decree, which a federal judge said she intended to sign after a hearing Tuesday, comes in response to a lawsuit filed against the Santa Monica video game company in September by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which alleged that Activision employees were subject to “severe” and “pervasive” sexual harassment in the workplace.

Anyone who worked at the company after September 2016 and believes that they were subject to harassment, discrimination or retaliation will be eligible to apply for a share of the cash payout. The company officially denied all wrongdoing as part of the settlement, which also included requirements for regular audits overseen by the federal agency over the next three years, changes to workplace policies and anti-harassment training.

(2) MARK YOUR WESTEROS CALENDAR. TechRadar reports “Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon finally has a release date on HBO Max”.

Game of Thrones spin-off House of the Dragon has finally been given a release date on HBO Max – and fans don’t have long to wait for Westeros’ return.

The 10-episode series, based on George R. R. Martin’s 2018 novel Fire and Blood, will begin streaming in the US and other HBO Max territories on August 21. Those in the UK will be able to access episodes at the same time as their US counterparts (on the morning of August 22) on Sky Atlantic and Now TV.

House of the Dragon will tell the backstory of the Targaryen dynasty, with events taking place 200 years prior to the events of the original show. Fans were treated to an ominous teaser trailer for the series back in 2021, but we’d expect a full-length trailer to drop imminently, given the recent news confirming its release date….

(3) FLASHBACK TO 2000AD’S 40TH BASH. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Alas, I could not make the 2017 event but one of my old college SF soc mates did a write up: “The 40th 2000AD anniversary event” at SF2 Concatenation.

PSIFA (my college SF society) has official permission from 2000AD (along with Cambridge U SF Soc) to have the Gronk as its mascot. We also visited its Command Module a couple of times back in the day (1979 and 1980) when it was based in London and had the 2000AD team as guests at one of our Shoestringcons, and Alan Grant as a guest of honour at one of our annual dinners. Indeed, at our college the SF soc was quite active as indicated by 2000AD being the second best-selling weekly (after New Scientist) at the college’s main campus Students Union shop.  So my links with 2000AD are somewhat historic. I must say, we never dreamed back then that it would last for the best part of half a century.  Indeed, I recall when some of us were chatting with them, that they themselves never thought the comic would last as evidenced by the fact they dubbed it with the then futuristic title 2000AD.  Well, we’re well past that milestone now…

The 40th anniversary celebratory bash cum one-day mini-con was very much a fan event with all the 2000AD Great & Good, script and art creator-droids present (there must been over 60 or so there), many with long queues for signings and sketches. And when the queues died off, you just wondered up for a chat. Tharg’s Nerve Centre and Pat Mills were particularly busy.

(4) HONEY, I’M HOME. “NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei, Russian cosmonauts return safely to Earth”, and the Washington Post assesses how the two countries’ support teams cooperated.

Two Russian cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut landed in a remote area of Kazakhstan on Wednesday after undocking from the International Space Station and flying back to Earth in a historic mission that came amid mounting tensions over the war in Ukraine.

…The landing marks the end of a triumphant mission for Vande Hei, whose 355 days in space set a record for the longest single spaceflight for an American. His safe return, along with his Russian counterparts Pyotr Dubrov and Anton Shkaplerov, also serves as a powerful symbol of partnership amid heightened tensions between the United States and Russia over the war in Ukraine — strain that has surfaced persistent questions about whether the relationship in space can endure.

Ever since Russia’s bloody invasion of Ukraine began more than a month ago, NASA has steadfastly maintained that the station has been operating normally and that its relationship of more than 20 years with the Russian space agency has been unaffected by the turmoil on the ground.

NASA deployed a team of about 20 personnel to Kazakhstan to retrieve Vande Hei, who would be whisked away in a helicopter to a NASA aircraft at a nearby airstrip. He is scheduled to fly directly back to Houston to be reunited with friends and family. The Russian and American teams appeared to be working well together in the recovery effort, which they have done many times before over their long partnership in space.

NASA has said it cannot operate the station without the Russians, which provide the propulsion that allows the ISS to keep its orbit and maneuver when needed. Russia needs NASA, as well, as the space agency provides power to the Russian segment of the station….

(5) GARRY LEACH (1954-2022). Artist Garry Leach died March 26 at the age of 67. The 2000AD website has an extensive tribute.

A modest and unassuming talent, by the time of his first work for 2000 AD – inking Trevor Goring’s work on the Dan Dare story ‘The Doomsday Machine’ in 1978 – his confident brushwork was already unmissable and although appearances were sporadic – whether on high-tech superspy series M.A.C.H.1 or on one-episode Future Shocks, including working with future collaborator Alan Moore – his self-assured style brought a solidity to its pages.

…His greatest and most famous work was co-creating the new Marvelman with Alan Moore in 1981. A revival of the unauthorised and believed-abandoned British version of Captain Marvel from the 1950s, this series for Dez Skinn’s Warrior anthology was a stunning deconstruction of the superhero genre that presaged Moore’s better-known work on Watchmen.

Garry’s sharp-lined realism brought a languid, sinewy quality to Marvelman that befitted Moore’s intense psychological script…. 

… After a spell working in advertising, Garry returned to comics in the late 1990s as John McCrea’s inker on Hitman, and worked for other DC Comics titles such as Legion of SuperheroesMonarchy and Global Frequency. He also inked fellow 2000 AD artist Chris Weston on J. Michael Straczynski’s The Twelve for Marvel Comics and returned to 2000 AD in 2004 to produce covers for the Judge Dredd Megazine….

(6) MEMORY LANE.

1978 [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Forty-four years ago at IguanaCon II where Tim Kyger was the Chair and Harlan Ellison was the pro guest and Bill Bowers was the fan guest, Frederik Pohl’s Gateway wins the Hugo for Best Novel. 

The other nominated works for that year were The Forbidden Tower by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Time Storm by Gordon R. Dickson and Dying of the Light by George R. R. Martin. 

It was serialised in the November and December 1976 issues of Galaxy prior to its hardcover publication by St. Martin’s Press. A short concluding chapter, cut before publication, was later published in the August 1977 issue of Galaxy. (Huh? Why was this done?) 

It would win damn near every other major Award there was as it garnered the John Campbell Memorial for Best Science Fiction Novel, the Locus Award for Best First Novel, the Nebula Award for Novel and even the Prix Pollo-your Award for Best Science Fiction Novel published in France. It was nominated for but did not win the Australian Ditmar Award. 

It of course the opening novel in the Heechee saga, with four sequels that followed. It is a most exceptional series.

I’m chuffed that Pohl was voted a Hugo for Best Fan Writer at Aussiecon 4. Who can tell what works got him this honor? 

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 30, 1928 Chad Oliver. Writer of both Westerns and SF, a not uncommon pairing of occupations at the time he’s was active. He considered himself an anthropological science fiction writer whose training as an academic informed his fiction, an early Le Guin if you will. Not a terribly prolific writer, with just nine novels and two collections to his name over a forty-year span. Mists of Dawn, his first novel, is a YA novel, which I’d recommend as it reads a lot to similar what Heinlein would write. (Died 1993.)

Born March 30, 1930 John Astin, 92. He is best known for playing as Gomez Addams in Addams Family, reprising his role in the Halloween with the New Addams Family film and the Addams Family animated series. A memorable later role would be as Professor Wickwire in The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., and I’d like to single out his delightfully weird appearance on The Wild Wild West as Count Nikolai Sazanov in “The Night of the Tartar” episode.

Born March 30, 1948 Jeanne Robinson. She co-wrote the Stardance Saga with her husband Spider Robinson. To my knowledge, her only other piece of writing was “Serendipity: Do, Some Thoughts About Collaborative Writing”‘ which was published in the MagiCon Program. (Died 2010.)

Born March 30, 1950 Robbie Coltrane, 72. I first saw him playing Dr. Eddie “Fitz” Fitzgerald on Cracker way back in the Ninties. Not genre, but an amazing role none-the-less. He was Valentin Dmitrovich Zhukovsky in GoldenEye and The World Is Not Enough, with a much less prominent role as a man at an airfield in Flash Gordon being his first genre role. Being Rubeus Hagrid in the Potter franchise was his longest running genre gig. He’s also voiced both Mr. Hyde in the Van Helsing film and Gregory, a mouse, in The Tale of Despereaux film. 

Born March 30, 1958 Maurice LaMarche, 64. Voice actor primarily for such roles as Pinky and The Brain (both of which Stross makes use of in The Laundry series) with Pinky modeled off Orson Welles, near as I can tell the entire cast of Futurama, the villain Sylar on Heroes, the voice of Orson Welles in Ed Wood, a less serious Pepé Le Pew in Space Jam, and, though maybe not genre, he’s voiced  Kellogg’s Froot Loops spokesbird Toucan Sam and  the animated Willy Wonka character in Nestlé’s Willy Wonka Candy Company commercials.

Born March 30, 1990 Cassie Scerbo, 22. She’s only here because in researching Birthdays for this date, one site listed her as being a member of the cast of Star Trek: Progeny, yet another Trek video fanfic. Though IMDB has a cast listed for it, that’s about all I could find on it. If I was betting a cask of Romulan ale, I’d wager this was one of the productions that Paramount got shut down before it actually was shot.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • Existential Comics pits Iron Man against the Villains of Society. (And don’t miss the alt text.)

(9) THOSE GREAT EXPECTATIONS. Sarah A. Hoyt explains her concept of a “contract with the reader,” and what it took for her to learn the importance of foreshadowing in “Just Sign on the Dotted Line” at Mad Genius Club.

… There was for instance the notable book whose description says that Mr. Bennet had improved the family fortunes, and so Lizzy and Darcy met on equal footing, which I stopped reading halfway through.

It wasn’t because our protagonists had not yet met. Yes, sure, the promise of any Jane Austen fanfic is that the couple will meet and have a happy ever after. I could have stayed with it, if they were having adventures leading up to “Everything between them changed in these ways.” It was that with that premise, the writer proceeded to give us exactly how Mr. Bennet improved family fortunes. To do her credit, she’d researched regency money and investment structures, and landowning, and how to improve land, and the price of cereals and….. Did I just fall asleep and drool on the table?

Yeah, after a first chapter that introduces the Bennet family, the author decided she’d suffered for her knowledge and we should too. When I got to the actual calculations pages, I gave up and hied to easier pastures. To be charitable, perhaps she’d been driven insane by the people who write regencies that assume that noblemen are businessmen, doctor is a revered status, and some dukes are accountants. It was still a major welshing on her contract with the reader.

Also in my own defense, my problems with foreshadowing were never as bad as the bad examples above. I just failed to establish the “range of the possible” in a book, and then had things happen that — to the reader — amounted to dropping an elephant from the ceiling onto the main character, with no warning….

(10) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 54 of the Octothorpe podcast, “John Coxon is dancing, Alison Scott is listening, and Liz Batty is Batman. We discuss the Chengdu Worldcon and the recent controversies they’re at the centre of, before moving onto discussing the FAAn Awards and books by Jo Walton and Naomi Novik.” Note: The episode was not yet loaded at the time this Scroll was posted.

A man with a beard wears a Necron-themed Christmas jumper, standing next to a Necron wearing an Octothorpe-themed Christmas jumper.

(11) ARTIFICIALLY INTELLIGENT STARGATE SCRIPT. Giant Freakin Robot announces “Richard Dean Anderson Joining The SG-1 Cast For New Stargate Episode”. (Subscription to The Companion is necessary to access the episode which is coming in May.)

When SG-1 entered its ninth season, Richard Dean Anderson ended his status as star and producer of the series. Instead, he opted to make several guest appearances. Now, much like his character, the former SG-1 star is being coaxed of retirement for a special reunion of the popular sci-fi show. According to Gate World, he is set to suit up Jack O’Neill for version 2.0 of Stargate A.I. The project, which was a table reading of a script written by artificial intelligence, was such a hit last November that The Companion has decided to give it another shot.

(12) FUTURE TRIAGE. In the Washington Post, Pranshu Verma says the US military is creating a program called In The Moment which would use AI to calculate military triage, while bioethicists debate whether it’s a good idea to let an algorithm determine who lives and who dies on the battlefield. “U.S. military wants AI to make battlefield medical decisions”.

…To that end, DARPA’s In the Moment program will create and evaluate algorithms that aid military decision-makers in two situations: small unit injuries, such as those faced by Special Operations units under fire, and mass casualty events, like the Kabul airport bombing. Later, they may develop algorithms to aid disaster relief situations such as earthquakes, agency officials said.

… Matt Turek, a program manager at DARPA in charge of shepherding the program, said the algorithms’ suggestions would model “highly trusted humans” who have expertise in triage.But they will be able to access information to make shrewd decisions in situations where even seasoned experts would be stumped.

For example, he said, AI could help identify all the resources a nearby hospital has — such as drug availability, blood supply and the availability of medical staff — to aid in decision-making.

“That wouldn’t fit within the brain of a single human decision-maker,” Turek added. “Computer algorithms may find solutions that humans can’t.”…

(13) THE NEED FOR SPEED. “Turing Award Won by Programmer Who Paved Way for Supercomputers”  — the New York Times has the story.

In the late 1970s, as a young researcher at Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago, Jack Dongarra helped write computer code called Linpack.

Linpack offered a way to run complex mathematics on what we now call supercomputers. It became a vital tool for scientific labs as they stretched the boundaries of what a computer could do. That included predicting weather patterns, modeling economies and simulating nuclear explosions.

On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest society of computing professionals, said Dr. Dongarra, 71, would receive this year’s Turing Award for his work on fundamental concepts and code that allowed computer software to keep pace with the hardware inside the world’s most powerful machines. Given since 1966 and often called the Nobel Prize of computing, the Turing Award comes with a $1 million prize.

In the early 1990s, using the Linpack (short for linear algebra package) code, Dr. Dongarra and his collaborators also created a new kind of test that could measure the power of a supercomputer. They focused on how many calculations it could run with each passing second. This became the primary means of comparing the fastest machines on earth, grasping what they could do and understanding how they needed to change.

(14) CHIPS ON THE TABLE. With Love From Sweden has some big news about the country’s SJW credentials:  “Issue 66: The status of cats & scilla season”.

…Earlier this month riksdagen (the Swedish parliament) voted in favour of an amendment to the law on supervision of dogs and cats, which means that cats will soon have the same status as dogs. From January 1 2023, all cats in Sweden are to be registered and either chipped or tattooed – or the owners could face a fine. Cat shelters and other animal welfare organisations have advocated for this change for many years, to raise the status of the cat. According to the last count, there are approximately 1.159,000 cats in Sweden.

Since 2001, all dogs that live in Sweden need to be marked with an identity number and recorded in the dog register of the Swedish Board of Agriculture. The registered owner is responsible for the welfare and behaviour of the dog, and the same will go for cats. Many dogs were already id marked before 2001 and many cats are already id marked today….

(15) LONG TIME PASSING. “Hubble telescope detects most distant star ever seen, near cosmic dawn” – the Washington Post picks up the story from Nature.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, there was a large and magnificently brilliant star that shined across the young, expanding universe. The starlight skewed blue. It was the cosmic morning, when everything in the universe was still new, raw, the galaxies still forming not long after the first stars had ignited and lit up the heavens.The light from that blue star traveled through space for billions of years, and then one day a few thin beams crashed into a polished mirror — the light bucket of the Hubble Space Telescope.

In a report published Wednesday in the journal Nature, a team of astronomers asserts that this is the most distant individual star ever seen. They describe it as 50 to 100 times more massive than our sun, and roughly 1 million times brighter, with its starlight having traveled 12.9 billion years to reach the telescope….

(16) EYE BEFORE AIYEE.The Sea Beast is a new animated feature from Netflix coming in July.

In an era when terrifying beasts roamed the seas, monster hunters were celebrated heroes – and none were more beloved than the great Jacob Holland. But when young Maisie Brumble stows away on his fabled ship, he’s saddled with an unexpected ally. Together they embark on an epic journey into uncharted waters and make history.

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Spider-Man:  No Way Home,” the Screen Junkies say that Spider-Man. having played second fiddle to Iron Man, Iron Man’s personal assistant, and Iron Man’s astrologer, now has to play second fiddle to two other Spider-Men.  This “2 1/2 hour brain vacation” has “all the characters you loved” from the previous Spider-Man movies, “some of the characters you forgot about, and none of the characters Sony would like you to forget about.”

[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Jeffrey Smith, John A Arkansawyer, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Russell Letson.]

L. Neil Smith (1946-2021)

L. Neil Smith

Author L. Neil Smith, a well-known advocate of libertarianism in the sf genre, died August 27.

Smith created the Prometheus Award – originally conceived as a one-off award when it was given for the first time in 1979. The Libertarian Futurist Society was organized by other fans in 1982 to continue the Prometheus Awards program. Smith became a perpetual favorite, nominated 15-times for the Prometheus Award and winning four times — for The Probability Broach (1982), part of his seven-book North American Confederacy series, Pallas (1994), The Forge of the Elders (2001), and a Special Award given to him and illustrator Scott Bieser for The Probability Broach: The Graphic Novel in 2005.

With 28 books to his credit, Smith may actually be most widely-known for three Star Wars novels featuring Lando Calrissian, all published in 1983.

He also wrote the nonfiction books Lever Action (2001) and Down with Power: Libertarian Policy in a Time of Crises (2012).

He was an early member of the Libertarian Party and twice mounted unsuccessful attempts to secure its Presidential nomination (for 2000 and 2004).

Sarah A. Hoyt wrote a farewell: “Goodbye, My Friend”. The family has set up a place to leave remembrances, “Lester ‘L. Neil’ Smith, III’s Memorial Website”.

[Thanks to Dann for the story.]