Seattle Worldcon 2025’s consultative vote drew just a quarter the number of participants who turned out for Glasgow 2024’s inaugural consultative vote last year. Glasgow tallied 1260 ballots, Seattle only 343.
Seattle ran votes on two of the Constitutional amendments that received first passage at the Glasgow 2024 Business Meeting and are up for ratification – (1) the revisions to the Hugo Award categories for Best Professional Artist and Best Fan Artist, and (2) proposal to abolish the Retro Hugo Awards.
VOTING RESULTS. The results of Seattle’s poll are:
In the vote to amend the constitution so as to eliminate the Retro Hugo Awards:
Yes: 164 No: 167 Total: 331
In the vote to amend the Hugo Award categories for Best Fan and Professional Artist:
Yes: 124 No: 160 Total: 284
These consultative votes are not provided for in the WSFS Constitution, are not binding, and have no effect other than that the information will be known to those at the Business Meeting. The Seattle committee said, “The purpose of the consultative vote was to test whether this type of vote is feasible, in case the practice is someday adopted as a formal part of the WSFS decision-making process.”
Author Mia Tsai has announced ConCurrent Seattle, a one-day SFFH con intended to be an alternative program to Worldcon, will be held Thursday, August 14 at the ACT Theatre in downtown Seattle across from the Sheraton.
“ConCurrent was created as a response to Worldcon’s use of ChatGPT in the panelist vetting process,” says Tsai. “The use of ChatGPT at Worldcon has been a breach of trust in an industry of writers whose work has been stolen to train genAI.”
The ConCurrent website contends, “The event is not intended as a replacement for WorldCon, and it is the organizers’ hope that people will be able to attend both without judgment in the spirit of the connection and discovery that has helped the SFFH community thrive.”
And, “ConCurrent’s aim is to provide programming only, with a focus on what is currently happening in the SFFH genre.”
Two participants already advertised are Rebecca Roanhorse and Andrea Stewart.
A crowdfunding appeal has been launched to raise $5,000 to pay for the venue and other expenses. At this writing $1,770 of donations have come in, of which over $500 was contributed by author David Levine.
Business Meeting chair Jesi Lipp provided visuals to familiarize viewers with the basic appearance of their participation screen and the way virtual platform provider, Lumi Global will facilitate the Zoom sessions. Lipp described how the chair will be able to identify people’s requests to speak for or against motions, points of order, and other claims of parliamentary priority.
Lumi Global’s services will cost $20,000, said Lipp, some part being paid by the Scalzi Family Foundation.
Seattle’s decision to hold the Business Meeting in a virtual format for the first time ever is touted as a way to “open participation to both attending and virtual attending members of the Worldcon, and hopefully enable broad participation without the need to sacrifice other convention activities.” Today’s Town Hall drew around 42 participants, the vast majority Seattle committee division and department heads and staff, the rest identifiable business meeting regulars and a few others.
One Town Hall participant challenged the legitimacy of convening a virtual Business Meeting, citing WSFS Constitution section 5.1.1: “Business Meetings of WSFS shall be held at advertised times at each Worldcon”. Business Meeting chair Jesi Lipp said that the committee had the authority to “define their own boundaries” – which is to say, give “at each Worldcon” a novel meaning. Lipp indicated their decision would be issued as one of the rulings of the chair at the virtual meeting, and said that the meeting has the procedural ability to challenge a ruling of the chair, and if it votes to overrule the chair there would just be an in-person meeting at Seattle. (Presently, the only in-person session planned for is the one where Site Selection voting results will be announced.) This was an unexpected concession.
While only Seattle 2025 WSFS members admitted to the Zoom session will be able to participate and vote, the virtual Business Meeting will be publicly livestreamed, and also recorded, with the livestream recordings made available on YouTube. Chair Jesi Lipp noted that if the meeting enters executive session – for example, to receive the report of the Committee on Investigation into the Chengdu Hugo Awards vote which was appointed at Glasgow 2024 – that portion of the meeting will not be livestreamed.
Business Meeting sessions will be supported by a Discord channel where people can carry on side discussions. The Discord will only be available for use for a number of hours beginning before the meeting and sometime afterwards, and made read-only the rest of the time. (Lipp pointed out that people obviously still have the use of other social media venues which they already use to discuss WSFS issues.) The Discord will be subject to the convention’s Code of Conduct.
The deadline to submit items for the Business Meeting agenda is June 4. Send them to bm-submit@seattlein2025.org.
The dates of the virtual Business Meetings are:
Friday, July 4, 9 a.m.–12:30 p.m., Pacific Daylight Time (UTC-7) Sunday, July 13, 9 a.m.–12:30 p.m., Pacific Daylight Time (UTC-7) Saturday, July 19, 9 a.m.–12:30 p.m., Pacific Daylight Time (UTC-7) Friday, July 25, 9 a.m.–12:30 p.m., Pacific Daylight Time (UTC-7)
I rank Roger Zelazny as one of the best F/SF writers of his generation. One of my prime regrets is that I never got to meet him.
I was immediately intrigued when offered the chance to provide covers for a multi-volume collection of his works by NESFA Press, the publishing side of the New England Science Fiction Association.
While pitching the project, the publisher explained that Roger had said in an interview that he always wished to have me do a cover for one of his books; alas that it didn’t come to pass during his lifetime. But I was happy to show my respect for his legacy through my art….
…Upon reflection I settled on a blend of 1) managing elements of RZ stories that applied to tales within a particular volume, and 2) adding things ‘on the fly’ as a part of the process of doing the painting, using connections that popped up while adding details to the composition.
I’m not going to lie…it did occur to me that I could paint anything at random, knowing that a connection could be found between what I chose to depict and some narrative or thematic element in Zelazny’s writing.
That was liberating. I felt free to develop the composition from a “big design” standpoint since there was such a wealth of material to draw on to “populate” the image areas.
The idea of running one image across the spines of the seven books was discussed early on; I believe Alice Lewis, jacket designer on this project, was the one who originally mentioned it. The challenge of making it work seemed exciting, so I was drawn to that approach right away….
(2) SEATTLE WORLDCON 2025 CONSULTATIVE VOTE IS OPEN. Seattle Worldcon 2025 is holding a consultative vote of WSFS members on two of the proposed Constitutional amendments passed on from the Glasgow 2024 Business Meeting. Voting runs from May 1 to May 31 and is accessed through the member registration portal in the same manner as the Hugo Award voting. More information is available on the Consultative Vote Webpage.
As previously announced, Seattle Worldcon is holding a consultative vote of WSFS members on two of the proposed Constitutional amendments passed on from the Glasgow 2024 Business Meeting to the Seattle Worldcon: the proposed revisions of the Hugo Award categories for best professional artist and best fan artist, and the proposed amendment to abolish the Retro Hugo Awards.
The purpose of the consultative vote is to test whether this type of vote is feasible, in case the practice is someday adopted as a formal part of the WSFS decision-making process. These proposals were chosen because they have clearly generated wide interest among the Worldcon community.
…[Mary] Shelley drew on a mythology of technology that goes back to the 6th century B.C. when the figure Prometheus stole fire from the gods and bestowed it to mankind. The “fire bringer,” is often associated with Lucifer, (literally meaning “light bearer”), who pilfered light from the heavens and brought it down to Earth. The “fall of man” implies an age when mortals are illuminated with knowledge. Immanuel Kant was the first to modernize the term, when he nicknamed his pal, Benjamin Franklin, “the Prometheus of modern times” for his nifty work with kites. In the early 19th century, Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus put the concept into terms of controlling biological forces. She not only arguably invented science fiction, but her novel offered a plot device for modern tales, including Flowers for Algernon, The Stand, The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Yann Martel’s short story “We Ate the Children Last.” We all understand the illusions. A scientist sets out to create a more perfect entity, only to have it backfire as the thing he creates gets out of control.
…By the early 1980s, Richard Mulligan at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology isolated genetic code and wrapped it up in a virus, returning it to humankind as a tool. In the same decade, companies such as Biogen and Genentech claimed the patents to control the first applications of genetic engineering. Scientists today are using the gene editing tool CRISPR to do things such as tinker with the color of butterfly wings, genetically alter pigs, and engineer microbes with potentially pathogenic or bioterror purposes. Last year, a group of 150 scientists held a closed-door meeting at Harvard Medical School to discuss a project to synthesize the code of a human genome from scratch using chemical techniques. As Andrew Pollack wrote in The New York Times, “the prospect is spurring both intrigue and concern in the life sciences community because it might be possible, such as through cloning, to use a synthetic genome to create human beings without biological parents.” In August, Shoukhrat Mitalipov at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland reported using CRISPR to alter a human embryo….
…We are at the very start of the “industrial revolution of the human genome,” just as Shelley was writing at the start of the Industrial Revolution. Her essential insight is that science and technology can progress but will never achieve social control without a willful and ongoing abdication, or repression, of our agency. Shelley wants to tell us that what we seek from technology is based on our existential fear of being in control over our own lives, which have no ultimate solution, and which compels us to so eagerly pursue what psychologists call an external locus of control. But mythology is often first presented as a utopia, only to result in a dystopian reality…
The Short: I recently reread one of my favorite SF anthologies as a much younger person, A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, Volume One and Volume Two, Anthony Boucher editor, 1959 Doubleday/1960 Science Fiction Book Club. It was available for purchase only as a two volume set when new. I am not aware of any other SF anthology that includes two novels and 10 pieces of short fiction, much less one that includes four novels and 20 short fiction works in the set. My favorite novel included is the classic The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester, and my favorite short fiction is the classic “The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff“, a novella by Theodore Sturgeon. My overall average rating is 3.73/5, or “Very good”. It was great to rediscover how great the John Wyndham novel Re-Birth is….
…The makers of Andor have teased how transformative it can be to revisit Rogue One after the prequel-to-a-prequel’s conclusion. As of last week, Andor creator Tony Gilroy hadn’t rewatched Rogue since finishing Andor, but he hyped the practice anyway: “Other people around me have done it. So I’ve been reassured. And I’ve seen bits and pieces of it; it comes on, and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, holy crap. Look what that does.’” Diego Luna was even more insistent.“I urge people to see Rogue One right after the end of Season 2,” the actor who plays Cassian said. “They’re going to see a different film.”…
There follow five takeaways which, as you should expect, are full of spoilers.
…As the second Trump administration lurches into its third month, moving fast and breaking government, I’ve been studying what American writers have suggested would occur if a demagogue were elected president. A next step, in novels such as Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here,” involves a direct attack on the Supreme Court if it declines to affirm a president’s agenda. Much the same forces are at work 90 years later. Alternative histories, particularly dystopias, reflect their societies’ radical pessimism, as Harvard professor and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore suggested in 2017:
“Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance; it’s become a fiction of submission, the fiction of an untrusting, lonely, and sullen twenty-first century, the fiction of fake news and Infowars, the fiction of helplessness and hopelessness.”…
What unites the books on the shortlist for this year’s International Booker prize? Brevity, for one thing: five of the six are under 200 pages, and half barely pass 100. They are works of precision and idiosyncrasy that don’t need space to make a big impression. Themes are both timely – AI, the migration crisis – and evergreen: middle-class ennui; the place of women in society. And for the second consecutive year, every book comes from an independent publisher, with four from tiny micropresses. Ahead of the winner announcement on 20 May, here’s our verdict on the shortlist….
(8) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
May 18, 1962 — Twilight Zone’s“I Sing The Body Electric”
They make a fairly convincing pitch here. It doesn’t seem possible, though, to find a woman who must be ten times better than mother in order to seem half as good, except, of course, in the Twilight Zone. — Intro narration.
On this date in 1962, The Twilight Zone aired “I Sing The Body Electric”.
It was scripted by Ray Bradbury and although he had contributed several scripts to the series, this was the only one produced. (His first script, “Here There Be Tygers,” was accepted but never filmed.)
It became the basis for his 1969 short story of the same name, named after an 1855 Walt Whitman poem which celebrates the human body and its connection to the universe. It was according to Whitman anti-slavery. The original publication, like the other poems in Leaves of Grass, did not have a title. In fact, the line “I sing the body electric” was not added until the 1867 edition.
Bradbury’s short story would be published first in McCall’s, August 1969. Knopf would release his I Sing The Body Electric collection in October of that year. It’s been included in least fifty collections and anthologies.)
James Sheldon and William F. Claxton directed the episode; Sheldon directed some of The Man from U.N.C.L.E episodes; Claxton is known for Bonanza and Little House on the Prairie. I’ll confess to having seen a fair amount of the former but none of the latter.
A large ensemble cast was needed as, minor spoiler alert, the primary cast here are shown at two ages, hence Josephine Hutchinson, David White, Vaughn Taylor, Doris Packer, Veronica Cartwright, Susan Crane and Charles Herbert all being performers even though the actual script calls for very few characters.
Another spoiler alert. Perhaps I’m being overly cautious but we did get a complaint about spoiling a 50-year-old episode of a program by not noting that I was going to say something about that program, hence spoiler alerts for these programs.
Auntie, the organic one, caring for the children has decided they are too much of a burden and has decided to leave. So father decided to get a robot grandmother, a new fangled invention in their city. The mechanical grandmother after some resentment by one child is accepted by all after she saves one child from mortal injury and Serling says after that —
As of this moment, the wonderful electric grandmother moved into the lives of children and father. She became integral and important. She became the essence. As of this moment, they would never see lightning, never hear poetry read, never listen to foreign tongues without thinking of her. Everything they would ever see, hear, taste, feel would remind them of her. She was all life, and all life was wondrous, quick, electrical – like Grandma.
So this gentle tale that only Bradbury could write of the children who love her and the ever so wonderful mechanical grandmother ends with Serling saying the words scripted of course by Bradbury for him:
A fable? Most assuredly. But who’s to say at some distant moment there might be an assembly line producing a gentle product in the form of a grandmother whose stock in trade is love? Fable, sure, but who’s to say?
This was the year that the entire season of the series won the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo at Chicon III. Just my opinion, but I think of all the nominees that it was clearly the far superior choice to win the Hugo. Really superior.
It is streaming on Paramount+.
There’s also a boy in the family but I couldn’t find an image of all three children, the father and the grandmother that was as good as this one is.
Travel back with David Tennant, Billie Piper and host Steffan Powell through a host of Whoniversal history…
As Season 2 comes to a climax, a special edition of Doctor Who: Unleashed is set to air on BBC Three, BBC iPlayer and BBC Wales. Steffan Powell is once again set to take a trip through the time vortex as he invites viewers on a journey celebrating the last twenty years since Doctor Who returned, and he will be joined by a host of cast and creatives that have played a part in bringing the show back into the Whoniverse.
Joining Steffan for the ride are some of the show’s most recognisable faces, including past Doctors David Tennant and Jodie Whittaker, former companions Billie Piper, Pearl Mackie, and Mandip Gill, ex-showrunners Steven Moffat and Chris Chibnall, the current Doctor Ncuti Gatwa alongside his newest companion Varada Sethu, as well as the current showrunner and the man who brought the show back in 2005, Russell T Davies.
As well as chatting with the stars about what Doctor Who means to them, Steffan will be revealing secrets from behind the scenes with interviews with those who work behind the cameras to bring Doctor Who to life….
…The idea of the Silurian Hypothesis was inspired by an episode of Doctor Who, where intelligent reptilian creatures called Silurians awakened from 400 million years of hibernation due to nuclear testing. While this was a work of fiction, the hypothesis raised a profound possibility: What if there were once other advanced civilizations on Earth that have completely vanished?
Humans often think that their existence and their civilization are eternal, but history teaches us otherwise. Take ancient Egypt, for instance. For over 3,000 years and across 30 dynasties, Egyptians lived under the shadow of the pyramids, fished the Nile, and mingled with other cultures. To them, their civilization seemed everlasting, yet it too disappeared. Similar fates befell the Mesopotamians, the Indus Valley civilization, the Greeks, Nubians, Persians, Romans, Incas, and Aztecs. These great empires, once thriving with millions, left behind scant evidence of their grandeur.
Modern humans have been around for about 100,000 years, a mere blip in the hundreds of millions of years that complex life has existed on Earth. Given this vast expanse of time, it’s conceivable that other intelligent species might have risen and fallen long before us. Would we even know they had been here?…
…The Silurian Hypothesis suggests looking for markers of industrialization on a global scale. One key marker is changes in the isotopic composition of elements, which can be detected in sedimentary layers. For instance, human activities have altered the nitrogen cycle and increased the levels of certain metals like gold, lead, and platinum. Most notably, the burning of fossil fuels has changed the carbon isotope ratios in the atmosphere, known as the Suess effect, which is detectable in sediment cores.
Interestingly, a sudden global change in carbon and oxygen isotope levels was observed 56 million years ago during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). The PETM saw Earth’s temperature rise by six degrees Celsius over 200,000 years, with fossil carbon levels spiking. Some scientists speculate that a massive volcanic eruption caused this, but the exact cause remains unknown. Could it have been evidence of an ancient civilization? Probably not, but it does show how such an event could leave a detectable mark.
The Silurian Hypothesis, while not proving the existence of ancient civilizations, provides a framework for searching for them, not just on Earth but also on other planets. The Drake Equation estimates the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy, suggesting there could be anywhere from 150,000 to 1.5 billion. If intelligent life can arise multiple times on a single planet, as the Silurian Hypothesis proposes, it opens up exciting possibilities for finding civilizations throughout the galaxy….
(12) THE INSIDE (THE BOOKSHOP) STORY. [Item by John King Tarpinian.] The Howling (1981) Bookshop scene was filmed at the Cherokee Bookshop, which was on Cherokee just off of Hollywood Boulevard. The wandering customer is Forry Ackerman.
[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Jeffrey Smith, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]
Seattle Worldcon 2025 chair Kathy Bond posted a new “Message From the Chair” on May 13 following up last week’s statement about the way ChatGPT was used in the panelist selection process.
Last week, I promised an update about the progress Seattle Worldcon 2025 has made regarding our next steps related to remedying our mistakes related to the use of ChatGPT in panelist vetting. Much of this update can be summed up as “we’re waiting to hear back from the people we have invited to help.”
Regarding re-vetting, we have invited two people, new to our team, to join, and we are waiting to hear back from them. We are still searching for at least three to four more people to join that team. If you would like to volunteer, please email feedback@seattlein2025.org. This new team will be working with our existing program team but be reporting to the chair.
We have reached out to a team of two people with prior Worldcon programming experience to audit our program process and the remedial steps. We are still waiting to hear back from them.
We have processed all refund requests that we have received; former members will be receiving them this week.
Our next update will be once we have identified who is helping with re-vetting and performing our program audit or in three weeks, whichever comes sooner.
(1) GUARDIAN BOOK REVIEWS. Past Best Fan Writer Hugo winner Abigail Nussbaum, and author of 2025 BSFA Award winner Track Changes penned the Guardian’s latest “The best science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup”. Nussbaum cover The Devils by Joe Abercrombie (Gollancz, £25), The Incandescent by Emily Tesh (Orbit, £20), Land of Hope by Cate Baum (Indigo Press, £12.99), and A Line You Have Tracedby Roisin Dunnett (Magpie, £16.99).
(2) MEETING DEATH SCIENTIFICALLY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The BBC’s World Service has a nifty weekly science programme Unexplained Elements. This week’s programme was topical with this week’s news of the Pope popping off and the pomp and circumstance ceremony that garnered international attention. It was a topic in which the late Terry Pratchett would have been interested.
It addressed questions such as when did humans first start burying their dead? The answer seems to be over 100,000 years ago, but this is for anatomically modern humans. Apparently some proto-human species (whose brain capacity was a third of modern humans) may have buried their dead, though the research (currently in peer review) is debatable. Apparently, the pre-print has been amended to take criticisms into account and while one critic has been convinced, others remain sceptical.
Another topic was that of the biology of graveyards. Because its ground remains largely untilled, and because of gravestones and the like, there are many micro-environments, and both these factors lead church graveyards have a higher local area biodiversity.
Then there is the issue of a dead person’s digital rights to their social media and online accounts. The European Union’s GDPR is the world’s most robust data protection regulation, though that does not seem to stop firms like Facebook or EventBrite failing to strictly follow it (just look as the small print when you sign up) or even Worldcons who arguably (it would be interesting to test this in court and I could write an essay on this) fail to strictly adhere to its provisions. Nonetheless, despite GDPR being the world’s gold standard in data protection, the dead have no rights whatsoever under GDPR!
Talking of a dead person’s digital rights (or lack thereof), what of mobile (cell) phones and smartphones, what happens to them when they ‘die’? Well, fans of Red Dwarf might say that they go to silicon heaven. The reality, however, is for most of them landfill! Here there are multiple environmental sustainability issues. All those heavy metals and rare earth elements leech out in landfill causing threats to water tables and other ecotoxicology issues. And then there is the loss of these elements (which include silver and gold – many kilograms per tonne of mobile phones disposed) to the economy necessitating the mining of replacement elements and the environmental damage that this does. So the next time a Worldcon tells you that they are ditching recyclable paper from sustainably managed forests (look for the kite mark when buying the paper for publications) don’t accept the Worldcon’s word for it: more greenwash!
First up, we delve into the thorny issue of when early humans started to carry out funerary rituals, before turning our attention to graveyards and the life that thrives within these sacred environments.
Next, we are joined Carl Öhman from Uppsala University in Sweden, who reveals what happens to our data when we die and why we should care about it.
Plus, we discuss the precious materials hiding in our old devices, and find out whether animals mourn.
Here are two newish frauds that appear to be on the rise. As with most writing scams these days, they target self-published authors.
The Book Order Scam
I’ve written before about book order scams, in the context of scammers impersonating bookstores such as Barnes & Noble with out-of-the-blue emails promising bulk purchases and big royalties. All the author has to do is pony up thousands of dollars or pounds to cover printing and/or shipping costs (the relevant note here: bookstores do not print the books they sell, and they typically order from the publisher or publishing platform, rather than from the author).
This newer version of the book order scam is somewhat different, arriving not from a bookstore impersonator, but from the self-publishing service provider the writer has hired to publish and/or market their book. That provider isn’t a true self-publishing company, though, but rather one of the many ghostwriting scams that waylay would-be indie authors in order to defraud them….
Fake Reviews
Fake reviews–sometimes just a few lines, sometimes elaborate essays with stars and number rankings–arrive unasked-for, attached to a complimentary email claiming that a book has been “discovered” by book scouts or book evaluators. Or they’re included as part of a pitch for a package of publishing and marketing services, to show how much the service provider believes in the author’s book.
Undoubtedly produced by feeding book blurbs and other info into chatbots, they are essentially bait: affirmation and flattery designed to induce the author to reply, so they can be subjected to aggressive sales pitches for whatever the “reviewer” is selling.
Here are a couple of examples, both sent out by scammers on this list. They’re not just book reviews–they’re PROFESSIONAL book reviews! So much better than just the regular kind….
(4) CHERRYH ANNOUNCEMENT. CJ Cherryh told Facebook followers yesterday she and Jane Fancher won’t be at the Seattle Worldcon – but it’s not the result of any controversy.
Jane and I will not be attending WorldCon despite it being in our state (which some people might want to know)—no controversy, just the expense and the physical buffeting of crowds. While Jane’s got more go-juice than I do, the crowd pressure and distances involved would be pretty exhausting, leaving us sadly low-energy. We’ll still go to friendly ‘little’ cons in driving range, note well, if we know about them!!! and be our brilliant selves, but we’re not up to a full-on WorldCon.
Joanna Russ’s writing career was relatively short, running from 1968 to 1987, with a number of essay collections published in the years after that. Her fiction career consists of just six novels and four collections, but each of the novels she published challenged engrained conventions of the genre.
The Female Man was received with shock, horror and vituperation when it was published in 1975. Its fractured narrative, and its direct attack on patriarchy and the straight-jacket of performative femininity, were described as shrill and man-hating. Over the years it emerged as a classic of feminist science fiction, a novel that continues to excite and resonate, and a touchstone for proudly militant feminists.
This exploration of The Female Man offers a close reading of the text, focussing on how the book works, its structures, arguments, humour, and brilliant anger
As a children’s book author, I love a good mystery. Which is why, last month, after a Virginia elementary school principal abruptly cancelled my visit by email, with no explanation or interest in rescheduling or paying me, I decided to investigate.
It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out what had happened: a parent had complained because of a social media video I had made celebrating Pride month. In it, I mention that Snail, a character in my Whale, Quail, Snail early reader series (illustrated by Sam Ailey), is nonbinary. Most snails are. “It’s a fiction series,” I add, “but that’s a fact.”…
… I wish I could tell you that my story ended amicably with the return of my visit to the school’s calendar. That’s not what happened.
Instead, after I asked for my fee, the principal turned the matter over to the district’s lawyers. The principal then informed the school librarian, who booked my visit, that she might have to pay me out of her own pocket. I told her I would not take her money, no matter what happened. I was extra-outraged that the principal was threatening to make her pay for the “crime” of setting up an author visit.
But my story doesn’t end there. I’m not just a children’s book author. I’m also a former trial lawyer. So instead of walking away muttering about injustice, I spent some quality time with my contract.
That’s right, my author contract. Whenever I am invited to visit a school, my booking agent draws up a contract—and this visit was no exception. According to one clause, if an appearance is cancelled with less than 30 days notice, the school is required to pay my entire fee plus any non-refundable travel expenses. The principal had cancelled on me 28 days before my visit.
And finally, my contract specifies that the contract is governed by the law of the state where I live, not the law of the state where the school is located. So if I wanted to sue for breach of contract, I could simply file papers in my local courthouse (no legal expertise or degree required!).
So, I did. Which is how I got to a different kind of happy ending: the school paid me my fee.
It’s not the win I wanted, because that would have had me standing in front of a gymnasium full of elementary school students. But it is a victory, as I see it, for all authors, especially in this current climate….
Rather than revolutionizing warfare, unmanned systems have emerged as evolutions within the larger information revolution; advancements to be sure, but failing to render conventional militaries obsolete or dramatically reshaping force structures….
Emma Capron, a curator at the museum who was responsible for the acquisition, describes the altarpiece as “wildly inventive” and “full of iconographical oddities,” per the Art Newspaper.
Start with the dragon and its bizarre dog-like face, exaggerated fangs and dripping drool. According to tradition, Satan, disguised as a dragon, swallowed St. Margaret whole. His stomach rejected her and there she appears in the painting, kneeling in prayer, totally unfazed by the event.Next to Margaret, one of the two angels holds a book of song, once thought to be a hymn by the English composer Walter Frye but now identified as musical gibberish. The other angel plucks her mouth harp, “a sound hardly associated with celestial harmony,” as the National Gallery says in the statement….
… John Cena‘s very R-rated DC superhero has returned in the first trailer for “Peacemaker” Season 2, created by DC Studios co-chief James Gunn. The sophomore season takes place in the rebooted DC Universe, which officially kicked off with Gunn’s animated series “Creature Commando” and continues with his summer tentpole “Superman.” Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner and Isabela Merced’s Hawkgirl cameo in the trailer and will appear in “Superman.”…
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
May 10, 1969 — John Scalzi, 56.
By Paul Weimer: I’d read John Scalzi’s blog for years before his fiction.
I got onto the Scalzi train with his entry in Metatropolis. His story involving a high tech pig farmer had all of the bones of a Scalzi story, from its “I think I know everything” protagonist, to its often snarky sense of humor. While I didn’t fall deeply in love with his work, then or since, I kept reading his work. Redshirts, of course, which still may be my favorite of his novels and stories, helped expand in my mind the metafictional opportunities in science fiction. Lock In is a solid piece of science fictional speculation on how a society might come together and respond to the consequences of a pandemic. Given that it was written long before Covid…I wonder if Scalzi or, aged fifty six yearswould have reconsidered the novel after the worldwide reaction to the aftermath of the Covid Pandemic.
Of course the Old Man’s War series is the one that he gets grief for, because it should appeal to the Sad and Rabid Puppies…but it is, in the parlance of today, “too woke”. It’s possible that the existence of such books helped motivate Torgersen and Beale, an irritant to their ideology and worldview (and a counterexample to the idea that Mil-SF must be conservative). Again, I do wonder how Scalzi would write it today, given all that has happened.
So this is a long way of saying that although it is on my Kindle, I have not yet read When The Moon Hits Your Eye, which seems to have as triggering an idea (the moon turns into cheese. Seriously?) as one can possibly make in the field. But it shows that in the end, Scalzi likes to have fun when writing. He never takes it too seriously, even if he keeps it as rigorous and locked down as the story needs. He’s just telling stories and doing his thing and having the time of his life, and haters can go hang.
The first time I actually met him in person, he didn’t remember it. He was extremely jet lagged, sitting in a hotel lobby and apparently remembered little from the entire weekend. Due to circumstance (although Scalzi is an excellent DJ, I am told, I am not a dance party goer), I only finally, finally actually got to talk to him at the Glasgow Worldcon. Being part of the photography team did let me meet and photograph everyone who would hold still. But did he know who I was? I’m still convinced that he didn’t, and that’s all right.
(12) AMAZING STORIES COLLECTION. Amazing Stories: Best of 2024,a collection of science fiction short stories published by the magazine over the past year, is now available.
Edited by Lloyd Penney, this collection continues Amazing’s nearly century-long tradition of exploring the strange, the speculative, and the sublime.
From lunar labor revolutions to delicate alien diplomacy, these stories represent the vanguard of speculative fiction. Readers will encounter futures both dystopian and dazzling, technologies that reshape identity and time, and characters grappling with the emotional and ethical consequences of scientific progress. Highlights include:
“A Short-Lived History of the Stockpiling of Time, in Post-Mono-Heliocentric Space-Times” by K.V.K. Kvas, a mind-bending tale of interstellar economics, identity, and revolt.
“Return from Venus” by C.B. Droege, a quiet and touching story about cross-species friendship and the longing for home.
“Best Case Scenario” by Susan Oke, a suspenseful diplomatic mission where what you offer—and what you misunderstand—could mean the difference between peace and peril.
With cover art by Hugo Award-winning artist Bob Eggleton and a lineup of diverse voices offering everything from hard science speculation to lyrical philosophical fiction, Amazing Stories: Best of 2024 is a must-have for any SF fan’s collection.
“Amazing Stories has always been a home for bold, boundary-pushing science fiction,” says Editor-in-Chief Lloyd Penney. “This year’s stories continue that proud legacy—with some of the most challenging, beautiful, and entertaining tales we’ve ever published.”
It is available online at amazingstories.com and in paperback and eBook editions at indie and major retailers worldwide or at this link.
(13) MONSTROUSLY COOL. That’s what your drinks become with an assist from the “Godzilla Ice Mold”.
We Bury the Dead is a gripping, emotional thriller set in a world transformed by the undead. In a unique take on the zombie genre, the film follows Ava—a woman tormented by loss—who volunteers with a corpse retrieval unit to search for her missing husband. Set against a surreal yet intimate apocalypse, the story explores love, grief, and the fragile boundaries of what makes us human.
Daisy Ridley says:
The script is beautiful. It’s about grief and watching someone desperately trying to find an answer, even though she doesn’t know what that answer is going to be. The backdrop of the zombies represents this moment for [my character] Ava because she’s neither here nor there emotionally. Ava’s sole purpose is to find her husband. As a means to get to him, she joins the body retrieval unit which volunteers to find people and notify families. The zombies look like our friends and family, so it’s close enough to reality but in a way that doesn’t feel too close. It feels horribly human.
A Soviet-era spacecraft plunged to Earth on Saturday, more than a half-century after its failed launch to Venus.
Its uncontrolled entry was confirmed by both the Russian Space Agency and European Union Space Surveillance and Tracking. The Russians indicated it came down over the Indian Ocean, but some experts were not so sure of the precise location. The European Space Agency’s space debris office also tracked the spacecraft’s doom after it failed to appear over a German radar station.
It was not immediately known how much, if any, of the half-ton spacecraft survived the fiery descent from orbit. Experts said ahead of time that some if not all of it might come crashing down, given it was built to withstand a landing on Venus, the solar system’s hottest planet.
The chances of anyone getting clobbered by spacecraft debris were exceedingly low, scientists said….
…Any surviving wreckage will belong to Russia under a United Nations treaty….
…After so much anticipation, some observers were disappointed by the lingering uncertainty over the exact whereabouts of the spacecraft’s grave….
More than half of your body is not human, say scientists.
Human cells make up only 43% of the body’s total cell count. The rest are microscopic colonists.
Understanding this hidden half of ourselves – our microbiome – is rapidly transforming understanding of diseases from allergy to Parkinson’s.
The field is even asking questions of what it means to be “human” and is leading to new innovative treatments as a result.
“They are essential to your health,” says Prof Ruth Ley, the director of the department of microbiome science at the Max Planck Institute, “your body isn’t just you”….
… But genetically we’re even more outgunned.
The human genome – the full set of genetic instructions for a human being – is made up of 20,000 instructions called genes.
But add all the genes in our microbiome together and the figure comes out between two and 20 million microbial genes.
Prof Sarkis Mazmanian, a microbiologist from Caltech, argues: “We don’t have just one genome, the genes of our microbiome present essentially a second genome which augment the activity of our own…
(17) SCIENCE PAPERS WITH UNDISCLOSED AI USE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is controversial to some, in no small part due to large language models (LLMs) and other A.I. (such as image-generating A.I.) using people’s intellectual property (their written or art works) for A.I. and LLM training without permission or recompense. This is exemplified by the recent debate over the Seattle’s Worldcon use of A.I. (for example, see (1) in the Scroll here).
Similarly, the use of A.I. has controversies in science. Indeed, a number of leading science journals, such as Nature, frown on the use of A.I. and/or at least ask science authors to declare any use of A.I. in their submissions. The latest news here comes from a news item in this week’s Nature that hundreds of papers have used A.I without disclosure!
Generative A.I. tools such as ChatGPT have quickly transformed academic publishing. Scientists are increasingly using them to prepare and review manuscripts, and publishers have scrambled to create guidelines for their ethical us. Although policies vary, many publishers require authors to disclose their use of A.I….
But science sleuths have identified hundreds of cases in which A.I. tools seem to have been used without disclosure…
…Publishers need to act quickly to resolve issues of dishonest A.I. use.
[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Rich Lynch, Paul Weimer, Francis Hamit, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Xtifr.]
Some public announcements by departing program participants have been spotted:
Leah Ning of Apex Books has written a two-page “public record” of the reasons for withdrawing as a Seattle Worldcon 2025 program participant. Read it at Bluesky.
Cora Buhlert has written a link compilation post, “Robot Hallucinations”, that also features a long exposition about what ChatGPT returned when she ran her own name through the prompt. The notorious prompt namechecks this blog, about which Cora says, “File 770 is a good resource, but it’s not the only SFF news site nor is it free of bias. So privileging File 770 as a source means that any bias it has is reproduced.” Which is true as far as it goes, however, I believe the reason Seattle included 770 was to corral news about code of conduct violations.
Like most artists, she is not insured and has to come out of pocket for medical expenses after her major surgery. Please help her on her path to recovery.
Afua Richardson is known for her work on Genius and World of Wakanda. Other stories she has drawn for include X-Men, Captain Marvel, Captain America, and the Mighty Avengers for Marvel Comics; and Wonder Woman Warbringer and All-Star Batman for DC Comics; and Mad Max. She also worked with U.S. Representative and civil rights leader John Lewis to illustrate Run, a volume in his autobiographical comic series co-written with Andrew Aydin. She won the 2011 Nina Simone Award for Artistic Achievement for her trailblazing work in comics.
In welcome news for the Institute of Museum and Library Services and two more federal agencies targeted for dismantling by a presidential executive order, the District Court of Rhode Island has granted 21 states’ attorneys general the preliminary injunction they sought in Rhode Island v. Trump. In response to the evidence and to an April 18 motion hearing, chief judge John J. McConnell Jr. granted the states’ motion, agreeing with the plaintiffs that the executive order violates the Administrative Procedures Act, separation of powers principle, and the Take Care clause of the U.S. Constitution.
From the first paragraph of his order, Judge McConnell upheld that Congress controls the agencies and appropriates funding, and he referred to “the arbitrary and capricious way” the March 14 order was implemented at the IMLS, Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA), and Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS). He determined that the EO “disregards the fundamental constitutional role of each of the branches of our federal government; specifically, it ignores the unshakable principles that Congress makes the law and appropriates funds, and the Executive implements the law Congress enacted and spends the funds Congress appropriated.”
Notably, the order’s timing closely coincided with FY25 congressional appropriations. On March 15, the day after issuing the EO, President Donald Trump—a named defendant in the case—approved the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, mandating FY2024-level funding for IMLS and other agencies through September 25, 2025. In 2024, IMLS was appropriated $294,800,000, so the same amount was approved for FY25.
In some cases, IMLS is issuing checks, fulfilling its statutory obligation…
(5) TONY AWARD NOMINEES. File 770 lists the many “2025 Tony Award Nominees” of genre interest at the link.
(6) RACE MATHEWS (1935-2025). Charles Race Thorson Mathews, a founding member of the Melbourne Science Fiction Club in 1952, and holder of its membership number 1, died May 5. Race suffered a broken pelvis from a fall three weeks ago, and had been going downhill since. He died May 5 at the age of 90.
Fancyclopedia 3 recalls he sold off his collection to fund the courtship of his wife, and mostly gafiated in 1956 following his marriage.
He subsequently went into politics. He opened Aussiecon 1 in 1975, while he was a member of federal parliament. By 1985 he was Minister for the Police and Emergency Services for the State of Victoria and at Aussiecon 2 gave the opening address. Mathews was kind enough to let File 770 publish his speech, which was rich in fanhistorical anecdote. (It can be found at File 770 57, p. 16 (part 1) and File 770 58, p. 2 p15 (part 2).)
Mathews was the author or editor of numerous books on politics, cooperatives and economics.
He is the subject of a biography, Race Mathews: A Life in Politics by Iola Mathews, Monash University Press, 2024.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
May 7, 1931 — Gene Wolfe. (Died 2019)
By Paul Weimer: Were I to do this birthday properly and proud, I’d do a Gene Wolfe piece that had unreliable narration, used a prodigious and positively unwonted vocabulary, possibly footnoted, and definitely something to be re-read, re-examined and thought over for years.
Unfortunately I am not Gene Wolfe, and frankly, few other others in the SFF genresphere have ever dared to try and approach him. His is the kind of work that like few others, you can read and re-read over a lifetime, and get not just nuggets but whole veins of new and exciting ideas. His ideas have influenced my RPG scenarios and ideas for years.
Jack Vance may have invented the Dying Earth, but Gene Wolfe codified it and made it a whole subgenre of his own with the New Sun books, which is where i began his work. I did begin a bit in the deep end, but a friend (and at the time one of the players in my TTRPG) said that I just had to read Gene Wolfe. And so I did. Did I understand my first read through of Severian’s story? Not as much as I thought I did. Read number two went much better, and I keep thinking I need a read number three–I’ve made a couple of abortive attempts at it but the siren song and responsibility of new work keeps me from doing so.
After Beyond the New Sun, I went to the Long Sun (generation ships for the win!) and then moved on. I loved the Wizard Knight series with its Yggdrasil like setup of worlds (you all know how much I enjoy worldbuilding, even as I sometimes mistype Discworld for Ringworld and my editor misses it 😉 ). I think the Fifth Head of Cerberus might be his most accessible work, an entry point if you want to try Wolfe without going for some of the more elusive works. I think The Land Across is also a good entry point as well, and feels timely and relevant with its capricious rules in the government of the country our narrator visits (also makes me think of Miéville’s The City and the City).
I’ve not read all of his oeuvre, but I’ve tried most of it. I’m weakest on his short stories and need to catch up on those (I’ve read Castle of Days of course, and found out recently a friend found a copy of the Castle of the Otter for a bargain price in a used bookstore. What a rare find!)
My favorite Wolfe are probably the Latro books (Soldier of the Mist and Soldier of Arete and Soldier of Sidon). These books are almost as if Gene Wolfe decided. “Paul Weimer needs books just for him). Latro is a Roman mercenary, circa 470s BC serving as he will in the Mediterranean as a soldier. He’s had a head injury and so cannot remember events of the previous day (50 First Dates, anyone?). However, he can see the various supernatural beings that populate the landscape that no one else can. The books are masterpieces of information holding and withholding as we, the reader can piece together things that Latro clearly misses, all in one of the best all time favorite set of settings. Sure, you’ve got to work hard to really get these books, but that’s the secret of all of Wolfe’s work. If you want to read it, be prepared to do the home work. Sure, this series and much of Wolfe’s work is not a casual read (and I’ve tried audio and audio and Wolfe do not work for me), but Wolfe was Umberto Eco in full SFF guise. If that is what you are ready for, or in the mood for, Wolfe’s works await you.
I never got to meet him in person, alas. Requiescat in pace.
(9) WATER, WATER, EVERYWHERE. “Hugo 2025: Flow” is another compelling review of a Hugo finalist by Camestros Felapton.
…Simple plot. The characters are a cat who is a cat. A labrador who is very much a labrador. A lemur that is a bit obsessed with stuff. A capybara that is a bit stoical. A secretary bird who possibly is a transcendental messenger of cosmic forces whose role is to usher the cat into a meeting with the divine to maybe save the world or maybe that’s a dream. So straight forward stuff.
Of course, I’m being intentionally obtuse. The film uses simple parts to tell a complex story with many thought provoking aspects, an intentionally unresolved mystery and a strong religious themes without any overt religion or religious messaging….
(10) FALLING ON HIS SWORD A SPECIALTY. Gary Farber reminds File 770 “I’m still willing to make sacrifices for fandom.” He wanted to be sure we didn’t miss his offer on Facebook —
Now I’m thinking I could volunteer to a Worldcon so they could have another body they could offer up to resign to take the blame for whatever Inevitable Embarrassing Scandal is happening in that half of that year before the con.
I wouldn’t need any actual skills. I could just have a title, and then be duly fired/resign when someone needs to be fired/resign in order to take the blame.
Future Worldcon Committees, I’M AVAILABLE!
Sandra Bond suggests his title should be, “Gary Farber, Omelas Fan.”
Comparing someone at work to the Star Wars villain Darth Vader is “insulting” and “upsetting”, an employment tribunal has ruled.
A judge concluded that being told you have the same personality type as the infamous sci-fi baddie is a workplace “detriment” – a legal term meaning harm or negative impact experienced by a person.
“Darth Vader is a legendary villain of the Star Wars series, and being aligned with his personality is insulting,” the employment judge Kathryn Ramsden said.
The tribunal’s ruling came in the case of an NHS blood donation worker Lorna Rooke, who has won almost £30,000 after her co-worker took a Star Wars-themed psychological test on her behalf and told colleagues Rooke fell into the Sith Lord’s category….
… In August 2021, members of Rooke’s team took a Star Wars themed Myers-Briggs questionnaire as a team-building exercise.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator sorts people into 16 categories based on how introverted they are, level of intuition, if they are led by thoughts or feelings and how they judge or perceive the world around them….
…Rooke did not participate as she had to take a personal phone call but when she returned a colleague, Amanda Harber, had filled it out on her behalf and announced that she had the same personality type as Vader – real name Anakin Skywalker.
The supervisor told the tribunal this outcome made her feel unpopular and was one of the reasons for her resignation the following month….
“To Gabriel Horcasitas, the man who shot me, it is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances,” says a video recording of Pelkey. “In another life, we probably could have been friends.
“I believe in forgiveness, and a God who forgives. I always have, and I still do,” Pelkey continues, wearing a grey baseball cap and sporting the same thick red and brown beard he wore in life.
Pelkey was 37 years old, devoutly religious and an army combat veteran. Horcasitas shot Pelkey at a red light in 2021 after Pelkey exited his vehicle and walked back towards Horcasitas’s car.
Pelkey’s appearance from beyond the grave was made possible by artificial intelligence in what could be the first use of AI to deliver a victim impact statement. Stacey Wales, Pelkey’s sister, told local outlet ABC-15 that she had a recurring thought when gathering more than 40 impact statements from Chris’s family and friends.
“All I kept coming back to was, what would Chris say?” Wales said….
…Wales and her husband fed an AI model videos and audio of Pelkey to try to come up with a rendering that would match the sentiments and thoughts of a still-alive Pelkey, something that Wales compared with a “Frankenstein of love” to local outlet Fox 10.
Judge Todd Lang responded positively to the AI usage. Lang ultimately sentenced Horcasitas to 10 and a half years in prison on manslaughter charges…
From the highly anticipated adaptation of master storyteller Stephen King’s first-written novel, and Francis Lawrence, the visionary director of The Hunger Games franchise films (Catching Fire, Mocking Jay – Pts. 1&2 , and The Ballad of the Songbirds & Snakes), comes THE LONG WALK, an intense, chilling, and emotional thriller that challenges audiences to confront a haunting question: how far could you go?
[Thanks to Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, N., Paul Weimer, Ersatz Culture, Joyce Scrivner, Cliff, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Joe H.]
Bond says ChatGPT was not used in deciding who to invite as a panelist, it was used “in the discovery of material to review after panelist selection had occurred.”
Morgan adds, “This process has only been used for panelists appearing on site in Seattle; panelists for our Virtual program have not yet been selected.”
Bond stresses that “ChatGPT was used only for one tailored task that was then followed by a human review and evaluation of the information,” and that “no selected panelist was excluded based on information obtained through AI without human review and no selected panelist was chosen by AI.”
As part of their remediation, the Seattle committee is redoing the part of the program process that used ChatGPT, with that work being performed by new volunteers from outside their current team.
Morgan also makes her own apology (the chair published her own several days ago).
I want to apologize specifically for our use of ChatGPT in the final vetting of selected panelists as explained below. OpenAI, as a company, has produced its tool by stealing from artists and writers in a way that is certainly immoral, and maybe outright illegal. When it was called to my attention that the vetting team was using this tool, it seemed they had found a solution to a large problem. I should have re-directed them to a different process. Using that tool was a mistake. I approved it, and I am sorry. As will be explained later, we are embarking on the process of re-doing the vetting stage for every invited panelist, completely without the use of generative AI tools.
And Morgan has provided the text of the ChatGPT query that was used in the vetting process.
The committee will be making their next update about the subject on May 13.
(1) MORE SEATTLE WORLDCON 2025 COVERAGE. Two of the more widely-read pop culture sites have picked up the story – and heavily cite File 770, for which I thank them.
In February, Philadelphia-area author Hannah Levin found out she’d been accepted to participate in A Million Lives Book Festival, a convention of fantasy authors, narrators and influencers to be held the first weekend of May at the Baltimore Convention Center. As a new author whose debut novel, “The Treasured One,” was published by Aethon Books in 2024, she was excited about the event. “We thought it would be a big thing for us,” she said.
It was a big thing, but not in the way anyone expected. The festival, organized by Baltimore-based author Grace Willows’ Archer Fantasy Events, was supposed to provide an opportunity for writers to network and an audience of at least 500 to 600 paid ticket holders. What participants got, they said, was a disappointing weekend of dashed expectations, unfulfilled promises, lost money and more questions than answers.
“I think ‘debacle’ is the word for it,” Levin said of the event that was quickly dubbed online as the Fyre Festival of literary festivals.
The 11 authors, vendors and influencers I interviewed by email and phone spent between $300 and $2,000 to attend A Million Lives depending on their travel arrangements and other factors. They said they were promised special badges that designated them as official participants, a creator’s lounge, cosplay events and a VIP swag bag for the top two ticketing levels.
That didn’t happen.
“There was a huge financial loss for authors, vendors and narrators attending,” wrote a book influencer known as Azthia, who spent about $300 on a plane ticket but crashed with other participants when her hotel stay was not paid for as promised. “They were told 600 tickets and in the end there were more authors than attendees.”…
Bella Ramsey has a decent shot at Emmy success this year — and won’t quibble if competing in the Lead Actress category.
The British star of HBO hit The Last of Us identifies as non-binary and prefers the they/them pronouns, but said it was fine for people to “call me how you see me.”
Speaking on Spotify’s The Louis Theroux Podcast about gendered award categories, Ramsey said it was important “recognition for women in the industry is preserved.”
“I don’t have the answer and I wish that there was something that was an easy way around it, but I think that it is really important that we have a female category and a male category,” Ramsey added.
The former Game of Thrones star said they had thought hard about how to represent non-binary individuals in award categories, but did not have a solution.
One idea was to name the category “best performance in a female character,” but Ramsey said this creates issues for those portraying non-binary characters on screen.
One thing Ramsey is certain of is that being called an “actress” feels uneasy. “I have a guttural, ‘That’s not quite right,’ instinct to it,” Ramsey said. “But I just don’t take it too seriously … it doesn’t feel like an attack on my identity.”…
JK Rowling has said she will not fire actor Paapa Essiedu from the forthcoming Harry Potter TV series over his support for transgender rights.
Essiedu has been cast as key character Severus Snape in the HBO drama, which is designed to run for more than a decade and will be one of the most expensively produced television shows of all time.
In a post on X, Rowling wrote: “I don’t have the power to sack an actor from the series and I wouldn’t exercise it if I did. I don’t believe in taking away people’s jobs or livelihoods because they hold legally protected beliefs that differ from mine.”
Last week, Essiedu, along with more than 1,500 figures from film and TV, signed an open letter condemning the UK supreme court ruling, which judged that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act refer only to a biological woman and to biological sex….
Last year, i visited the music historian Ted Gioia to talk about the death of civilization.
He welcomed me into his suburban-Texas home and showed me to a sunlit library. At the center of the room, arranged neatly on a countertop, stood 41 books. These, he said, were the books I needed to read.
The display included all seven volumes of Edward Gibbon’s 18th-century opus, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ; both volumes of Oswald Spengler’s World War I–era tract, The Decline of the West ; and a 2,500-year-old account of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, who “was the first historian to look at his own culture, Greece, and say, I’m going to tell you the story of how stupid we were,” Gioia explained….
…He’s not alone in fearing that we’ve entered a cultural dark age. According to a recent YouGov poll, Americans rate the 2020s as the worst decade in a century for music, movies, fashion, TV, and sports. A 2023 story in TheNew York TimesMagazine declared that we’re in the “least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press.” An art critic for The Guardianrecently proclaimed that “the avant garde is dead.”
What’s so jarring about these declarations of malaise is that we should, logically, be in a renaissance. The internet has caused a Cambrian explosion of creative expression by allowing artists to execute and distribute their visions with unprecedented ease. …
…in 312 c.e., the Roman Senate ordered the construction of a gaudy monument called the Arch of Constantine. It incorporated pieces from older monuments, built in more glorious times for the empire, which had begun its centuries-long decline.
The Arch is one of Gioia’s favorite metaphors for modern culture. The TV and film industry is enamored of reboots, spin-offs, and formulaic genre fare. Broadway theaters subsist on stunt-cast revivals of old warhorses; book publishers rely disproportionately on backlist sales. Entertainment companies have long understood the power of giving people more of what they already like, but recommendation algorithms take that logic to a new extreme, keeping us swiping endlessly for slight variations on our favorite things. In every sector of society, Gioia told me, “we’re facing powerful forces that want to impose stagnation on us.”
The problem is particularly acute in music. In 2024, new releases accounted for a little more than a quarter of the albums consumed in the U.S.; every year, a greater and greater percentage of the albums streamed online is “catalog music,” meaning it is at least 18 months old. Hoping to remonetize the classics, record labels and private-equity firms have spent billions of dollars to acquire artists’ publishing rights. The reemergence of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2022, 37 years after its release, seemed to signal that this was a good bet. A brief placement in a popular TV show (Netflix’s Stranger Things, itself a pastiche of 1980s movie tropes) could, it turned out, cause an old hit to outcompete most of the newer songs in the world….
(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
May 6, 1969 — Annalee Newitz, 56.
By Paul Weimer: I first encountered Annalee Newitz’ nonfiction, first, as a columnist, as a non fiction writer, as a podcaster with their partner Charlie Jane Anders. Four Lost Cities is an amazingly researched book looking at the rise and fall of four cities and what we can learn about the challenges they faced. I learned an amazing amount I never know about, for example, Angkor Wat. I think it is their strongest work and if you asked me “what one book of theirs should I read?”, Four Lost Cities is the one I’d put into your hands.
Annalee Newitz
Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction was a surprisingly hopeful book, given its title and content.
Although they have been writing fiction, too for a while, I finally got into their fiction with The Future of Another Timeline, with rival powers fighting for control of a timeline just catnip for me. Given the political changes lately in the United States, it feels even more relevant than it once did. And once again, I learned a lot about some historical events I hadn’t even heard of, thanks to the jumping around the timeline by the protagonists. But even with that, the changes to the timeline are not shown in some grand manner, but how they affect people. People matter to Newitz’s work.
Newitz’ work is bright, well researched, deep, and thought provoking, with a mind like an engineer and the language and diction of an English professor. I am pretty sure that as good as Future was, I prefer Newitz’ nonfiction more, but I am primed for whatever they decide to turn their prodigious powers on, next. (In the meantime, of course, there is always Our Opinions are Correct).
[Note: ISFDB and the Science Fiction Encyclopedia say Newitz’ birthday is today, Wikipedia says tomorrow. Happy birthday whichever is the case!)
(7) COMICS SECTION.
Herman is aboard that trebuchet we so often hear about.
…As I said in the intro, the film has more bite than you might imagine. It’s not a nature documentary and their are kid-friendly fantasy elements to how the animals of the island live but aside from that the animals are presented naturalistically. There is a repeated emphasis on death as a common occurrence and the film is clear that animals kill and eat other animals. Fink the fox (the almost ubiquitous Pedro Pascal) is a key supporting character but when he first turns up he is trying to catch and eat Bright Bill, Roz’s adopted baby goose child.
The idea of juxtaposing robots with nature is not a new one but it is an under-explored one….
When the Netflix series “Wednesday” needed a guillotine recently, it did not have to venture far. A North Hollywood prop house called History for Hire had one available, standing more than eight feet high with a suitably menacing blade. (The business offers pillories too, but the show wasn’t in the market for any.)
The company’s 33,000-square-foot warehouse is like the film and television industry’s treasure-filled attic, crammed with hundreds of thousands of items that help bring the past to life. It has a guitar Timothée Chalamet used in “A Complete Unknown,” luggage from “Titanic,” a black baby carriage from “The Addams Family.”
Looking for period detail? You can find different iterations of Wheaties boxes going back to the ’40s, enormous television cameras with rotating lenses from the ’50s, a hair dyer with a long hose that connects to a plastic bonnet from the ’60s, a pay phone from the ’70s and a yellow waterproof Sony Walkman from the ’80s….
… History for Hire, which Jim and Pam Elyea have owned for almost four decades, is part of the crucial but often unseen infrastructure that keeps Hollywood churning, and helps make it one of the best places in the world to make film and television.
“People just don’t realize how valuable a business like that is to help support the look of a film,” said Nancy Haigh, a set decorator who found everything from a retro can of pork and beans to a one-ton studio crane there for “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” which she won an Oscar for. “But it’s because people like them exist that your moviegoing experience has such life to it.”…
… “I don’t know what we would do without them,”saidPascale, who has won an Oscar for “Mank.”
No one likes entertaining that idea. But with fewer movies and television shows being shot in Los Angeles these days, and History for Hire getting less business, the Elyeas fear they may not be able to afford to renew their lease for five more years. If they close, Los Angeles will lose another piece of the vibrant ecosystem that has kept it attractive to filmmakers, even as states like Georgia and New Mexico lure productions with lucrative tax credits. Some Angelenos fear a vicious cycle: If the city continues to lose local talent and resources, even more productions will flee….
When XYZ Films‘ “Watch the Skies” has its U.S. theatrical release on Friday, Hollywood will also get a glimpse at the state-of-the-art in AI-driven “visual dubbing” and its potential for Hollywood.
“Watch the Skies” is a sci-fi adventure filmed in Swedish (under the name “UFO Sweden”), but, uniquely, the actors will appear to be speaking English through the use of TrueSync, an AI visual dubbing tool from startup Flawless, which effectively syncs new (in this case, English language) dialogue with the actors’ mouth movements. The original actors recorded their lines in English as an ADR process, before the Flawless AI tech was applied to the movie….
While Andorenjoys effusive praise from critics and Star Wars fans, both usually fail to mention a key reason the series is so unique. The two-season Disney+ series is the first, and thus far only, story in the expansive saga aimed specifically at adult viewers. How Cassian Andor finds his way to the Rebellion meticulously examines the Star Wars political philosophy, which only works because it ignores an important aspect of the mythology: the Force. As a fan of both the political and spiritual allegory in this universe, I believe ignoring the latter makes the series absolutely brilliant….
(12) GETTING WITH THE TIMES. Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki reminds readers:
The collaborative system generated more than 100 hypotheses relating to the origins of life in the Universe.
Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have created a system that can perform autonomous research in astrobiology, the study of the origins of life in the Universe.
AstroAgents comprises eight ‘AI agents’ that analyse data and generate scientific hypotheses. It joins a suite of other AI tools that aim to automate the process of science, from reading the literature to coming up with hypotheses and even writing papers….
…The result was 101 hypotheses from Gemini and 48 from Claude. One hypothesis posits that certain molecules found on Earth would make “reliable biomarkers” indicating the presence of life. Another suggests that a cluster of the organic molecules found in two meteorites might have formed through the same series of chemical reactions.
Buckner scored each hypothesis. She deemed 36 of the Gemini hypotheses to be plausible and 24 novel. By contrast, none of the Claude-generated hypotheses was original — but they were overall less error-prone and clearer than Gemini’s.
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Jeffrey Smith, Daniel Dern, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kendall.]
The Seattle Worldcon 2025’s WSFS Division Head Cassidy, Hugo Administrator Nicholas Whyte, and Deputy Hugo Administrator Esther MacCallum-Stewart today announced their resignations from the committee in the following statement:
Effective immediately, Cassidy (WSFS DH), Nicholas Whyte (Hugo Administrator) and Esther MacCallum-Stewart (Deputy Hugo Administrator) resign from their respective roles from the Seattle 2025 Worldcon. We do not see a path forward that enables us to make further contributions at this stage.
We want to reaffirm that no LLMs or generative AI have been used in the Hugo Awards process at any stage. Our nomination software NomNom is well-documented on GitHub for anyone to be able to review. We firmly believe in transparency for the awards process and for the Finalists who have been nominated. We believe that the Hugo Awards exist to celebrate our community which is filled with artists, authors, and fans who adore the works of our creative SFF community. Our belief in the mission of the Hugo Awards, and Worldcon in general has guided our actions in the administration of these awards, and now guides our actions in leaving the Seattle Worldcon.
Cassidy
Nicholas Whyte
Esther MacCallum-Stewart
The Seattle Worldcon’s WSFS Division administers the Hugo Awards, Business Meeting, and Site Selection. The committee’s remaining WSFS Division leadership includes Deputy Division Heads Kathryn Duval and Rosemary Parks (who is also Site Selection Coordinator).
