Six Posthumous Recipients to Receive 2021 Bill Finger Award

Comic-Con has named six writers who have contributed greatly to the history of comics to receive the 2021 Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. The selection, made by a blue-ribbon committee chaired by writer/historian Mark Evanier, was announced June 30.

“Since we are not yet in a position to honor a writer who is still with us in a proper ceremony, we’re going to a long list of comic book writers from the past who we feel did not receive sufficient recognition or reward for their contributions to the field. As with last year, we have selected six posthumous awards and no ‘alive’ award,” Evanier explained. “Each of these six writers left us with a body of work that the judges deem worthy of this honor.”

This year’s recipient list includes two of the most prolific writers to ever work in comics—and there are several others who have received or may soon receive this award who unquestionably count among the most prolific ever. The Finger Award committee takes no position as to which of them was the most prolific. Such a determination might require records that no longer exist (or never existed), as well as distinguishing between writing the most stories and writing the most pages. “All of these writers deserve recognition,” Evanier remarked. He added, “Everyone should remember that it’s tough to determine precise totals when you’re recognizing writers who did not receive credit for most of their work or, in some cases, didn’t receive any credit at all.”

The Bill Finger Award was created in 2005 at the instigation of Finger’s friend and colleague, Jerry Robinson, who felt that Finger had received way too little credit and compensation for his work in comics, especially regarding Batman and that character’s supporting cast and mythos. As Evanier explains, “Though Bill Finger now receives a lot more recognition than he received in his lifetime, there are still so many who have not, and that’s why we keep giving out these awards.” Here are this year’s recipients, in alphabetical order.

In addition to Evanier, the Finger Award selection committee consists of Charles Kochman (executive editor at Harry N. Abrams, book publisher), comic book writer Kurt Busiek, artist/historian Jim Amash, cartoonist Scott Shaw!, and writer/editor Marv Wolfman.

This year’s recipients are, in alphabetical order:

Robert Bernstein (1919–1988)

A former high school English teacher, Robert Bernstein began writing comic books around 1945, working for, among other companies, Fox, Hillman, Harvey, and Spark, though his longest association then was with Lev Gleason. There, he joined the ranks of ghostwriters for Charles Biro on the top-selling Crime Does Not Pay and similar comics. In the 1950s, Bernstein wrote war, western, and horror scripts for Atlas (later known as Marvel) and for EC Comics, where his scripts appeared in Valor, Impact ,and M.D., among others. He is also said to have written the entirety of the short-lived EC series Psychoanalysis and to have patterned one of its recurring characters, Mark Stone, on himself and his own experiences undergoing analysis. His major account during the fifties, though, was DC Comics, where between 1952 and 1968 he wrote countless stories featuring Superman, Superboy, Supergirl, Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, Aquaman, Green Arrow, Congo Bill, and Congorilla as well as scripts for all of the company’s war and romance titles. In the 1960s, he also wrote Iron Man, Thor, and The Human Torch stories for Marvel under the name “R. Berns,” and without credit he wrote The Fly, The Jaguar, The Shadow, and other books for the Archie line. Throughout most of his career, he was also functioning as an impresario, arranging and promoting concerts in Long Island, New York (his longtime residence) and around the state. In 1968, he curtailed his comic book writing to focus on the music; he died in 1988.

Audrey “Toni” Blum (1918–1973)

Audrey “Toni” Blum was very likely the first female comic book writer/creator. The daughter of artist Alex Blum, she worked under an array of pen names—or with no credits at all—so it is difficult to determine her first work. It may have been in 1936–1937 on “The Vikings,” published in New Comics (later Adventure Comics) for DC. Whatever the date of her entry into the field, it made her one of the few women creating comic book material who wasn’t lettering or coloring. She began working for the Eisner-Iger shop in 1938 and wrote stories in a wide variety of genres, usually directly with Eisner and the artists who drew her stories. Some of this writing was done in what later became known as “The Marvel Method” and some was done as complete scripts. Her best-known work was for Quality Comics, where she wrote Black Condor, The Ray, Dollman, and Uncle Sam. She also reportedly wrote scripts for the “The Spirit” and “Lady Luck” Sunday newspaper comic book inserts Eisner produced. During World War II, she married shop artist Bill Bossert, and she largely retired from comic book writing when the War ended. Thereafter, she authored children’s books, and some sources say she wrote stories drawn by her father for Gilberton’s Classics Illustrated series. She passed away in 2020.

Vic Lockman (1927­–2017)

Born into a vaudeville family (his father was the aptly named escape artist Earl Lockman), Vic Lockman broke into comics in 1950 as a letterer for the Dell Comics created by Western Publishing. He worked briefly in editorial for Western but soon moved into freelancing. While he occasionally pencilled, lettered, and/or inked comics for Dell, his main output for the next 29 years was as a writer, producing more stories for the firm’s “funny animal” comics than any other freelancer. During his most prolific period (1955–1984), he claimed to have written one story per day. Some were one-pagers or puzzle pages, a few were book-length, but most were 4 to 8 pages, submitted in “sketch” format with rough drawings and all of the copy handwritten. Western’s editors did not buy every submission, and some of what they passed on was purchased by the Disney Studios for its foreign comics program that created comics not published in America. That and interviews with his editors made credible Lockman’s claim of having sold more than 7,000 scripts. His work appeared in Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Uncle Scrooge, Goofy, and all the Disney comics produced by Western, along with tales of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety & Sylvester, Woody Woodpecker, Andy Panda, and dozens more. He was said to have created the Disney comic book character Moby Duck and to have developed and written The Wacky Adventures of Cracky. Lockman also wrote Terrytoons comics such as Mighty Mouse for St. John Publishing and Dennis the Menace comics for Hank Ketcham, but his most passionate work was for the Christian marketplace, where he published dozens of books and tracts, most of them featuring his writing and drawing on religion and controversial topics of the day. Lockman left this world in 2017.

Robert Morales (1958–2013)

Born in New York City and of Afro-Puerto Rican descent, Morales broke into writing for magazines such as Heavy Metal and Publishers Weekly. Moving into the world of entertainment journalism, he worked as executive editor of the music and pop culture magazine Reflex and at Quincy Jones’s Vibe magazine, where he gave greater exposure to the work of cartoonists such as Chris Ware, Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, Jeff Smith, and Kyle Baker. Morales and Baker collaborated on several projects, including perhaps Morales’s best-known work in comics, the groundbreaking seven-issue miniseries for Marvel Truth: Red, White & Black. Published in 2003, it introduced the African American character Isaiah Bradley. Using World War II and the Tuskegee medical atrocities as their canvas, Morales and Baker crafted a stark tale that explored America’s history of racial injustice and medical experimentation on African Americans. The story revealed that Bradley was the first successful recipient of the super-soldier serum, which would later transform serviceman Steve Rogers into Captain America, and established Bradley as the first Captain America. Most recently, a version of the character appeared in the 2021 television series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, raising awareness for Morales and his work that is long overdue. Morales would go on to write a celebrated run of the monthly Captain America series for Marvel in 2004. He passed away unexpectedly on April 18, 2013, at the age of 54.

Paul S. Newman (1924–1999)

Hailed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the all-time most prolific comic book writer, Paul S. Newman is credited with more than 4,100 published stories totaling approximately 36,000 pages. His earliest credit seems to have been in 1947 for DC’s teen comic A Date With Judy. Within months, though, he was selling scripts to Avon Comics, the American Comics Group, Fawcett Comics, Timely (Marvel), Hillman, Fiction House, and many others. His longest runs were writing The Lone Ranger and Turok, Son of Stone for Western Publishing in tandem with Dell Comics. In fact, when Western and Dell severed their partnership and split into two separate lines of comics in 1962, Newman was among the few contributors to then work for both houses. A very partial list of the comics he wrote would include Doctor Solar, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Plastic Man, Prince Valiant, Smokey the Bear, The Sub-Mariner, Mighty Mouse, I Love Lucy, Gunsmoke, Hopalong Cassidy, Kid Colt, Fat Albert, Gene Autry, The Twilight Zone, Jungle Jim, Leave It to Beaver, Captain Video, Yosemite Sam, Patsy Walker, Zorro, Nancy and Sluggo, and Mr. Ed, plus almost every anthology title published by Atlas/Marvel during the fifties or Western during the following three decades. All of this was in addition to dozens of young adult novels written for Western Publishing, movie scripts, and the newspaper strips of Robin Malone, Smokey the Bear, The Lone Ranger, Laugh-In, and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Paul S. Newman passed away in 1999.

Robert “Bob” White (1928–2005)

Bob White was the creator, writer, and artist of Archie Comics’ Cosmo the Merry Martian humorous sci-fi series. Between 1954 and 1968, he worked prolifically as a penciller/inker and sometimes writer on many Archie-related titles, including Archie and Me, Archie as Pureheart the Powerful, Archie’s Jokebook, Archie’s Madhouse, Archie’s Mechanics, Betty and Veronica, Jughead, Reggie and Me, and of course, just plain Archie. His most acclaimed work for the company was probably his stint on Archie and Me, writing and drawing many of the action/adventure-ish full-length stories for the title’s early issues, as well as plenty of memorable covers. He also wrote stories about The Shield, Black Hood, and The Web for Archie’s 1960s superhero line, Mighty Comics. His stint with the company came to an end in 1968 because, he said, he was found to be “moonlighting” on Tippy Teen for rival Tower Comics. White was so discouraged by this that he opted to leave the comic book industry altogether and switch careers. He labored in the emerging field of computer programming for the remainder of his working days and passed away in 2005.

[Based on a press release.]

Six Posthumous Recipients to Receive 2020 Bill Finger Award

Six writers who contributed mightily to the history of comics have been selected to receive the 2020 Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. The selection, made by a blue-ribbon committee chaired by writer-historian Mark Evanier, was announced July 15.

“In a year where Comic-Con cannot take place, it seemed wrong to honor, as we usually do, one posthumous writer and one who is still with us,” Evanier explained. “The one who is still with us would be denied the full honors of being brought to the convention and presented with the award onstage. Therefore, after much discussion, we decided to instead present no ‘alive’ award this year, and, assuming there is a convention in 2021, we will present two of those awards then. For 2020, we have selected six writers from the dozens who have been nominated to receive the posthumous award. Each of these six during their time in the industry produced a body of work that the judges deem worthy of more recognition and/or reward than it has received.”

The Bill Finger Award was created in 2005 at the suggestion of the late Jerry Robinson, who worked with Finger, knew him, and was disturbed that Bill had received so little credit and compensation for his work in comics, especially with regard to Batman and that character’s supporting cast and world. As Evanier explains, “Though Bill Finger now receives a lot more recognition than he received in his lifetime, there are still many who do not, and that’s why we keep giving out these awards.”

In addition to Evanier, the Finger Award selection committee consists of Charles Kochman (executive editor at Harry N. Abrams, book publisher), comic book writer Kurt Busiek, artist/historian Jim Amash, cartoonist Scott Shaw!, and writer/editor Marv Wolfman.

This year’s recipients are, in alphabetical order:

Virginia Hubbell Bloch (1914-2006)

The writing of Virginia Hubbell Bloch—almost wholly uncredited, some signed by others—could be found for years in the pages of Lev Gleason Publications, MLJ Comics, and Dell Comics in the forties and fifties. A poet and copywriter before she met her first husband, comic book artist Cari Hubbell, she began writing scripts, some drawn by her husband and some not, in 1941 for MLJ, which would later be known as the Archie company. That was where she met editor-writer Charles Biro, who encouraged her to write comics and who went on to become the most famous comic book writer of his day, often credited on covers. Artists who worked for him at Lev Gleason later told historians that many of the scripts credited to Biro were clearly ghostwritten by Virginia Hubbell, especially for the popular Boy Comics and the Lev Gleason version of Daredevil. On her own, she also wrote for Marvel, St. John, and Western Publishing, where she mainly wrote Little Lulu. She also wrote plays and children’s books, credited (when she was credited) as Virginia Bloch after she divorced Carl and remarried.


Nicola Cuti (1944-2020)

Nick Cuti began his writing (and drawing) career in 1968 with the self-published underground comic book Moonchild, much of which was done while he was serving in the Air Force. After his service, the popularity of Moonchild led to a series of jobs, including working for animator Ralph Bakshi, assisting artist Wally Wood, and serving as an assistant editor and writer at Charlton. Charlton led to Warren Publishing, and Warren led to DC. Along the way, he co-created E-Man and a spinoff comic, Michael Mauser, with artist Joe Staton. Cuti’s writing for those comics won great critical acclaim, especially in bringing a fresh approach and a healthy sense of humor to a superhero title like E-Man. He later worked extensively as an artist in animation, as a writer-producer of short independent films, and an author of both text and graphic novels, some of which revived his beloved Moonchild. Nick left us earlier this year, and we look forward to a representative of his family joining us at the 2021 ceremony for a more formal recognition of his work.


Leo Dorfman (1914-1974)

Leo Dorfman began his comic book writing career in 1950, following years of writing mystery and romance novels under a wide array of pseudonyms. Utterly uncredited for most of his first two decades in comics, he first worked for Fawcett Comics until they cut back in production and sent all their freelancers scurrying for other markets. It wasn’t until 1957 that he connected with Western Publishing, writing westerns based on TV shows such as Cheyenne and Gunsmoke at first, later segueing to The Twilight Zone, Boris Karloff’s Tales of Mystery, Ripley’s Believe it or Not, and other comics filled with ghost stories. In 1960, he began writing for Mort Weisinger at DC, contributing to the world of Superman with tales not only about the Man of Steel but also Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, Superboy, and Supergirl. Among his many contributions to the mythos was that In Superboy, he introduced the character of Pete Ross. He also penned “The Amazing Story of Superman-Red and Superman-Blue!”, which ran in a 1963 issue and was considered one of the most memorable stories to ever grace the Superman comic book. At the same time, he wrote hundreds of stories for Western under the Dell and Gold Key imprints and hundreds more for DC. In 1971, he launched the comic Ghosts for DC, filling it with allegedly true tales of the unexplainable and quickly becoming the top seller of all the DC titles that offered such stories in anthology format.


Gaylord DuBois (1899-1993)

Gaylord DuBois spent over 30 years writing comic books and children’s books for Western Publishing, the comics appearing under the Dell and Gold Key imprints. His work for them included thousands of scripts for well-known properties including The Lone Ranger, Red Ryder, Bat Masterson, National Velvet, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, and Roy Rogers, as well as stories featuring his own co-creations, The Jungle Twins, Brothers of the Spear, and Turok, Son of Stone. Between 1947 and 1971, he wrote an estimated 95 percent of all the comics Western produced of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes. During his run on it, the Tarzan comic book was consistently one of the top-selling comics in America; in the sixties, so was a comic DuBois wrote every issue of except the first: Space Family Robinson. During this time, he also wrote novels, Big Little Books, and other text-based publications for Western, many of them featuring the same characters. In his last years, DuBois—a devout Christian who occasionally taught Sunday school or filled in for a pastor on vacation—authored several Christian-focused comic books and books of inspirational poetry.


Joe Gill (1919-2006)

Suggested by some as the most prolific comic book writer of all time, Joe Gill began his career in the mid-1940s, working for his brother Ray Gill at Funnies, Inc., a company that created content for many comic book publishers. Soon, Joe was working directly for most of those publishers, including a staff job at Timely (now Marvel), where he wrote The Human Torch, Captain America, and, from all reports, every kind of comic they published. Around 1948 when Timely laid off a number of staffers, Gill connected with Charlton Comics, where he wrote a minimum of one comic a week until the firm ceased publishing in 1986. Some who worked with him claimed it was more like one comic per day, which was what it took to make a decent living for a company that paid such low rates. Few Charlton titles during those years did not feature some Joe Gill scripts, but the best remembered books would include Konga, Gorgo, Billy the Kid, Cheyenne Kid, Ghostly Tales, The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves, The Phantom, Flash Gordon, Popeye, Tales of the Mysterious Traveler, and all the other western, war, romance, and ghostly titles. He was the co-creator of Captain Atom, Peacemaker, The Fightin’ Five, and Sarge Steel, among others. He also worked briefly for DC, Dell, and a few other publishers, but just his astounding output for Charlton earns him a Finger Award.


France Edward Herron (1917-1966)

France “Eddie” Herron was referred to as “the first comic book writer” by some of his contemporaries. The honor is arguable, but he was writing and editing as early as 1937, mainly for the Harry “A” Chesler studio, which produced comic book material for several publishers. He worked for Centaur Comics, then for Victor Fox’s outfit, which is where he met and began a long association with Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Among the other companies he worked for, often simultaneously, were Timely (where he worked with Joe and Jack on Captain America and co-created The Red Skull), Quality Comics, and Fawcett (where he wrote many early stories of the original Captain Marvel and co-created Captain Marvel Jr.). In 1945, he began a long association with DC Comics, where he often wrote Superman and Batman stories, and he was the main writer for long stints on Boy Commandos, Green Arrow, Challengers of the Unknown, and Tomahawk. His scripts appeared in all their war, western, romance, crime, and mystery titles, and he co-created the character, Cave Carson. Among the many newspaper strips he authored were Bat Masterson, Davy Crockett, Rip Tide, and Captain Midnight.


[Based on a press release.]

Pixel Scroll 12/18/16 Scroll Measured By Weight. Pixels May Settle In Packing

(1) PROMETHEUS AWARDS RECOMMENDATIONS. Members of the Libertarian Futurist Society can formally nominate a work for any category of the Prometheus Awards.

Here are the works nominated so far in 2016 for the Prometheus Award for Best Novel:

2016 Prometheus Award Best Novel nominations
(Nominations as of Dec. 17, 2016. Nominations deadline: Feb. 15, 2017)

  • Morning Star: Book III of The Red Rising Trilogy, by Pierce Brown (Del Rey, Feb., 2016)
  • Speculator, by Doug Casey and John Hunt (HighGround Books, Sept. 2016)
  • Dark Age, by Felix Hartmann (Hartmann Publishing, June 2016)
  • Kill Process, by William Hertling (Liquididea Press, June 2016)
  • Through Fire, by Sarah Hoyt (Baen Books, August 2016)
  • The Corporation Wars: Dissidence by Ken MacLeod (Orbit, 2016)
  • Too Like the Lightning, by Ada Palmer (TOR Books, 2016)
  • Written in Fire, (Book 3 of The Brilliance trilogy) by Marcus Sakey (Thomas & Mercer, Jan. 2016)
  • The Core of the Sun, by Johanna Sinisalo and Lola Rogers (Grove Press/Black Cat, January 2016)
  • Blade of p’Na, by L. Neil Smith (Phoenix Pick, October 2016)
  • Arkwright, by Allen Steele (TOR Books, March 2016)
  • On to the Asteroid, by Travis S. Taylor and Les Johnson (Baen Books, August 2016)
  • Necessity, by Jo Walton (TOR Books, July 2016)

(2) THEATRICAL ALIENS. Alastair Reynolds’ story is being brought to the stage using puppets designed by Mary Robinette Kowal — “The House Theater of Chicago to Stage World Premiere of Sci-Fi Thriller DIAMOND DOGS”.

The House Theatre of Chicago presents their initial production in 2017, Diamond Dogs, adapted from Alastair Reynolds’ science fiction adventure by Althos Low and directed by Artistic Director Nathan Allen, playing at the Chopin Upstairs Theatre, 1543 W. Division St., January 13 – March 5. Diamond Dogs is also a participant in the 2017 Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, January 19 – 29. Preview performances are January 13 – 20. Opening/press night is Sunday, Jan. 22.

Diamond Dogs follows a 26th century team of humans and transhumans as they investigate a mysterious alien tower, bent on brutally punishing all intruders. Uncovering clues and solving puzzles, each crusader will make dangerous, eye-popping sacrifices to get to the mysteries atop the spire. Blood will spill. This thriller is one of 16 stories set in novelist Reynolds’s expansive Revelation Space Universe. Artistic Director Nathan Allen teams up with The House’s most inventive designers and guest artists to bring this unique universe to life. Body modification is the norm in the future, and award-winning puppet designer Mary Robinette Kowal, who is also an award-winning sci-fi author, articulates and re-shapes the actors’ human forms into powerful mechanized players battling for their lives. Reynolds is one of a new generation of hard science-fiction authors, a craft he began during his decade-long career as an astrophysicist with the European Space Agency. Diamond Dogs is a pure example of the “Deadly Maze Story,” a staple of Science Fiction since H. P. Lovecraft. This world premiere production at The House Theatre of Chicago marks the first of Reynolds’ works to be adapted for another medium.

(3) RESNICK ON WRITING. Joshua Sky interviews Mike Resnick for Omni.

JS: What other elements are important in a new writer? Is it attitude, is it talent? What’s your take on that?

MR: First, you’ve got to be a smooth enough writer so that it’s not an effort for the editor, or the reader to get to the bottom of each page. That’s essential. You’ve got to know how to push a noun up against a verb with some grace. And of course you should have a knowledge of the field, because while there’s still a million ideas we haven’t touched, there’s probably half a million ideas that have already seen print. And unless you have a totally new take on it you’re not going to sell it. There used to be a rejection slip from Amazing Stories, back when Ted White was editing it, where there’d be a number of boxes he could check to explain why he’d rejected it. The box he checked most was, “Heinlein did it better – and earlier.”

I would love to have a rejection slip like that, but all Galaxy’s Edge’s rejections are personal. But yeah, you’ve got to know the field if you want to write in it. Which makes sense. I mean, shouldn’t you care enough about the field in which you want to make all or part of your living so that you’ve been reading it and know about it, and know what has been done to death and what hasn’t?

(4) ANSWERS WANTED James Davis Nicoll wants to tap into File 770 readers’ collective wisdom about project management tools useful for conrunners.

A local theatrical organization has ongoing communications challenges. The current means of communication (email, facebook, facebook messages) all seem to lend themselves to communications breakdowns [1]. I recall that Basecamp worked pretty well for the Tiptrees but Hipchat, Slack and Telegram have also been suggested as well. I know a bunch of you run cons. Would you recommend any of these tools?

[1] Facebook lends itself to amnesia but even in email it can be hard to find the specific email you want, particularly if you’ve forgotten it exists. Or never knew.

(5) BILL WARREN REMEMBERED. Scott Shaw! told Facebook readers that Svengoolie paid tribute to the late Bill Warren on this week’s program.

Tonight on Me-TV, during his presentation of Hammer’s 1960 classic THE BRIDES OF DRACULA, Svengoolie (AKA Rich Koz) made a VERY nice mention of Bill Warren‘s passing. He showed the photo of Bill with Robby the Robot and Kerry Gammill‘s cover for the new edition of Bill’s KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES! Sven mentioned Bill’s work with Forry Ackerman and his insanely voluminous knowledge about the films we all love. He even mentioned Beverly Warren! It made me very proud to see such a wonderful acknowlegement of the sweet, funny guy we all miss.

I wasn’t aware that Sven’s tribute to Bill was gonna be tonight, but surely some of you out there recorded tonight’s episode of SVENGOOLIE

(6) GABOR OBIT. Zsa Zsa Gabor (1917-2016) died December 18. Her Internet Movie Database bio says —

Undoubtedly the woman who had come to epitomize what we recognize today as “celebrity”, Zsa Zsa Gabor, is better known for her many marriages, personal appearances, her “dahlink” catchphrase, her actions, life gossip, and quotations on men, rather than her film career.

Her biggest genre credit was the movie Queen of Outer Space. She also appeared in Nightmare on Elm Street 3, and episodes of Night Gallery (segment “The Painted Mirror”), Batman, and Supertrain.

queen-of-outer-space

(7) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • December 18, 1839 — John William Draper took the first photo of the Moon. (“Say ‘Cheese!’”)
  • December 18, 1968Chitty Chitty Bang Bang opens in New York

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOYS

  • Born December 18, 1913 – Alfred Bester
  • Born December 18, 1946 — Steven Spielberg (Amazing Stories) and
  • Born December 18, 1958 — Steve Davidson (Amazing Stories)

(9) OUR REPLACEMENTS. Kate Macdonald looks back at early cyborgs in her “Review of ‘No Woman Born’ (1944) by C.L. Moore and ‘Lady in the Tower’ (1959) by Anne McCaffrey” at Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations

I teach sf to university students, and knew from the critical literature about gender in sf that sometime in the 1940s a writer called C. L. Moore published a landmark story about the first female cyborg. I tracked down a copy of ‘No Woman Born’ this year, and was deeply impressed. This story is a glowing beacon of fine writing and an impressive acceleration of how the cyborg operates in fiction. No longer a destructive masculine, war-making automaton from the post-WW1 years, this cyborg is a dancer and singer whose new flexibility and vocal range enhance her art, and successfully disguise her strength of purpose by using her femininity to cloak her developing ambitions. Deirdre is a person who is now a cyborg, and her humanity is totally present throughout this novella, despite her gleaming gold body, and her inhuman speed and agility.

The story could just as well be a three-act play. It’s set in Deirdre’s apartment where Harris, her former manager, comes to visit her for the first time after her rehabilitation following a disastrous fire, then when he and her besotted surgeon Maltzer watch her first public performance on TV in her new body, and finally when Harris witnesses Maltzer’s threat to prevent any more cyborgs being made, and Deirdre’s command. ‘No Woman Born’ is not just a story of one person, it’s an opening up of possibilities: cyborgs are stronger and faster, so what will that mean for women, as well as for men? What will that mean for the humans left behind? Can relations between a man and a woman be the same now that the woman is made of metal? How will a woman feel about her body, when no-one is there to admire it? And does this matter? By creating a female cyborg whose primary attributes, in the eyes of the men who managed and created her, are her grace and beauty, Moore shows us that when a cyborg claims autonomy, she becomes nobody’s creature, and can decide how she will live her extended, augmented life. It is a tremendous, game-changing story for feminism in sf, and for how we need to learn to think about being post-human. It’s also beautifully written, with unforgettable images of Deirdre learning to see, to stand, move and dance humanly again, in her glittering robe of metal mesh, and her golden, visored face.

(10) LOVECRAFT COUNTRY MUSIC. If you are looking for a Christmas present for your favorite dark ambient fan, the Cryo Chamber label has been releasing massive collaborations named after Lovecraftian gods. The latest one is named Nyarllathotep. The albums are available in CD and digital formats.

A 190 minute dark soundscape album recorded by 25 ambient artists to pay tribute to H.P. Lovecraft. Field recordings from the deepest dark corners of 4 continents. Dusty tapes out of forgotten archives. Strings through crackling amplifiers and distorted drone combine into a sea of pitch black. Nyarlathotep is a manipulative being in the Lovecraftian Mythos. Unlike Cthulhu, or Azathoth, he delights in cruelty and deception. Causing madness is more important than destruction to him.

Smell the burning embers as you kneel outside the sunken temple before Nyarlathotep. Feel the raspy touch of the faceless pharaoh as he leads you to the ancient Pyramid. Hear his inhuman summoning call to gods beyond reality.

(11) AFROFUTURISM. The New York Times highlighted Afrofuturism in their Year in Style 2016 section. In the article, Ytasha L. Womack, author of the 2013 Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, speaks almost in counterpoint to the Puppies:

“When…in the imaginary future… people can’t fathom a person of non-Euro descent a hundred years into the future, a cosmic foot has to be put down.”

…Afrofuturism’s resurgence could not be more timely, arriving as it does in a climate perceived as indifferent, if not downright inimical, to racial and ethnic minorities. In her book, Ms. Womack recalls a time when black or brown sci-fi characters were all but invisible in the culture at large. As a girl, she would fantasize that she was Princess Leia of “Star Wars.”

“While it was fun to be the chick from outer space in my imagination,” Ms. Womack writes, “the quest to see myself or browner people in this space age, galactic epic was important to me.” It was in the absence of minorities from pop lore, she goes on, “that seeds were planted in the imaginations of countless black kids who yearned to see themselves in warp-speed spaceship too.”

Count among them Tim Fielder, a New York graphic artist and animator whose sci-fi illustrations, produced over a 30-year span, drew visitors last spring to “Black Metropolis,” at the Gallatin Galleries at New York University. Mr. Fielder’s pioneering cartoon narratives — notably those of “Matty’s Rocket,” his spirited black female cosmonaut, who will lift off next year in graphic novel form — are particularly relevant now, he maintained: “They let young artists know that they’re not on dangerous turf, that someone has gone there before them.”

(12) BEFORE YOUR EYES. NPR combines story and video in its report “Google assembles decades of satellite photos to show changes on Earth”.

Google Earth’s time lapse videos of earth’s landscape could make you think about the great baseball player Yogi Berra.

“I thought about one of the quotes attributed to Yogi Berra,” says Marc Levy, a political scientist at Columbia University’s Earth Institute who specializes in issues of global health and development. “He said, ‘You can observe a lot just by watching.'”

To show just how much the Earth’s landscape has changed over the past three decades, Google sifted through 5 million satellite images containing three quadrillion pixels. The result is a series of high-resolution, zoomable time-lapse videos that capture, in unprecedented detail, the human impact on this planet.

 

(13) SCIENCE HISTORY. Genevieve Valentine reviews “’Hidden Figures,’’The Glass Universe,’ And Why Science Needs History” for NPR.

But history tends to get simplified; a map becomes a single road leading from point to point. It’s not surprising that some scientists who contributed invaluably to the field have been kept out of the dominant narrative because they were women, and they were considered anomalies of their time. (That those times practically overlap — meaning a steady line of crucial work being done by women — is one of those scientific patterns that tend to get forgotten.)

But in the last days of the 19th century and the early days of the 20th, Henrietta Swan Leavitt — one of the many woman “computers” at the Harvard Observatory — used the measurements of variable stars to determine fixed distances across space. And fifty years later, Katherine Johnson — a black woman working at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia when the state was still deeply segregated — would map John Glenn’s space flight, and America’s trip to the moon.

(14) RADIO ART. A few months ago we reported the drawing competition BBC Radio 4 was having  to draw episode art for their re-broadcast of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust radio adaptation. The program is airing this month – there will be a repeat Christmas weekend. Schedule here: Stardust – Next on – BBC Radio 4.)

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian,  Bruce Arthurs, Chip Hitchcock, Michael J. Walsh, Steve Davidson, and Rob Thornton for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip W.]

Scott Shaw! Deuce of Deuces

Scott Shaw!’s costume for the 1972 Worldcon – The Turd — was made with 3 jars of peanut butter, a pair of Leggs pantyhose, cornstarch and some cornhusks. It brought him lasting infamy and inspired one of Rotsler’s Rules for Masquerades. And after decades of sharing the story with convention audiences Shaw has now told it to the camera.

I was one of the first fans to see Shaw in costume that day and many times considered sharing my eyewitness account here. But there’s really no second line to a story that begins, “I was there when The Turd came out.” Put another way, I was standing in front of the elevator doors when Shaw arrived and stalked off to the ballroom, leaving chunky drips in his wake.

Comics artist Scott Shaw! was 21 and his story about a monster from the underground sewers called The Turd had been published not long before he arrived at the Los Angeles Worldcon of 1972. He’d been to a Worldcon masquerade before. This time he felt an overwhelming desire to see what people who worked all year on their costumes would think about an entry someone had made in the last five minutes.

They didn’t think kindly of it, was the answer. Shaw laughs as he retells the grim details in his video. Thanks to him, Rotsler’s Rules for Masquerades [PDF file] admonishes fans —  

7. Parts of your costume should not be edible or smell. Parts of your costume should not fall off accidentally, brush off against other contestants, or be left lying around on the stage.

Afterwards Shaw took an epic shower. He worried about what the maid would think, but that’s nothing next to other embellishments that end his story. As Shaw tells it, a few weeks after L.A.Con the hotel plumbing exploded, having been clogged with massive amounts of peanut butter. The hotel came back to the convention committee and charged them thousands of dollars for the repairs.

That last part never happened.

For one thing, the con only cleared a couple of thousand dollars altogether and they didn’t spend any of it replumbing the International Hotel. The peanut butter reportedly did clog the bathtub in Shaw’s room, but that’s all.  

Still, you have to appreciate the symmetry that Shaw ends his story with a bunch of BS.

[Thanks to Michael J. Walsh, Martin Morse Wooster, Andrew Porter, David Klaus, Steven H Silver and all the ships at sea for this story, and to Craig Miller for a memory download.]