Tag Archives: SFF Book Reviews

Pixel Scroll 4/9/25 Do Not Scroll Gentle In That Good File, Pixels Should Burn And Rave At End Of Thread

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(1) MURDERBOT TRAILER. Murderbot premieres May 16 on Apple TV+.

It’s rogue. It’s powerful. It would rather be watching TV. Based on the award-winning, best-selling series by Martha Wells, Murderbot follows a rogue security unit as it searches for the meaning of life.

(2) BABELING ABOUT BOOKS. Starship Alexandria is a new podcast by Emma Newman and Adrian Tchaikovsky.

The Sci-fi and Fantasy podcast from the best of futures!

In this future, humanity has solved its problems and is now sending spaceships from Earth, not in a desperate attempt to escape the apocalypse but because we can do so in a spirit of hope and exploration. 

As a part of the Starship Alexandria Project, the far-future analogues of 21st century authors Emma Newman and Adrian Tchaikovsky have been tasked to make recommendations from the ship’s vast library of creative works based on the preferences of our 21st century counterparts.

Each of us will take it in turns to nominate a book, film or similar work, and the other will play judge and give the thumbs up or thumbs down to be recommended across the fleet.

Because despite the great technological advances that have made this grand journey possible, space travel can still take a while and everyone can benefit from a good recommendation. 

Starship Alexandria episode 1 is “The Kraken Wakes”.

For this very first episode of Starship Alexandria, Emma puts forward John Wyndham’s classic SF novel The Kraken Wakes (1953) for Adrian to read and consider (published in the US as Out of the Deeps.) 

Bonus episodes and other material are available for those who subscribe to the Starship Alexandria Patreon.

(3) MAKING A STATEMENT. Jeremy Szal forwarded the post he’s written making clear his stance on AI/LLM. Szal is also included in the Kadrey v. Meta class action lawsuit. “Statements on AI”.

Without in any way limiting the author’s and his publisher’s exclusive rights under copyright, it is expressly prohibited to use any of the author’s works to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text. The author reserves all rights to license uses of his works across any platforms.

In addition, it is expressly prohibited to upload any part of any of this author’s work to any generative AI programs (including but not limited to Meta, ChatGPT, etc).

Any violation of these rights are infringing on copyright law (Copyright Act 1968, to name but a few examples) and may be subjected to prosecution, not including the ongoing class action lawsuit in Kadrey v. Meta – of which the author is already included.

The author also asks that no one “create” AI-generated fan-art, fanfiction, or any kind of material, based on or inspired by his works. Any emails containing such “art” will be deleted unread.

******

I will also decline to wittingly blurb or support any books that were written, in part or as a whole, with generative AI. The waters here can be murky, but if any text in the book was not written by a human, and instead was written by a machine/LLM, then I have no interest in reading it, or anything that the author ever writes.

 Art is human expression created by human hands. That matters to me, and that will always matter to me, so I will give no quarter to machine-generated slop. That is my ongoing stance.

(4) A WRITER OVERCOMES. “Butt in the Chair: How Disability Changed My Writing Habits” by Catherine Tavares at the SFWA Blog.

It’s spring 2023. My desk is clean, my laptop on and humming along like a charm. It’s open to a brand new Scrivener file, and I have three hours free to work on my stories.

Only, I’m not in the chair writing. I’m on the floor in agonizing pain.

In the years since that day, there have been many doctors, tests, and treatments that have all led to the same disappointing diagnosis: unexplained, chronic nerve pain. On a good day, that means a hot, tingling buzz radiating from my hips on down. On a bad day, it’s like the entire lower half of my body is being scraped raw by fiery sandpaper.

That day, I could not sit, and just like that, I could not write.

A common bit of writing advice given to authors is to just “get your butt in the chair” and write. For a long time, that advice worked for me, and I built my habits around spending hours at my desk, not getting up until I met my goal. My desk was my writing haven; the mere act of sitting down triggered creativity, productivity, and joy.

But as the days of unending pain dragged into weeks and months, my haven became a horror….

… If I could hack my own brain, I figured, then I could most certainly hack my own writing process.

I did so, inspired by a mental health exercise called Internal Family Systems Therapy. I enjoyed IFST because it let me do what I do best: create characters, assign them roles, and take them on a journey together. IFST helped me through a lot of the trauma of disability, and it also made me realize just how much work I can do inside my own head—no desk or chair required.

In the wake of that breakthrough, I abandoned Team Pantser for a term I am making up just now: Team Daydreamer. When I’m in the shower, lying in bed, eating a meal, exercising, I meditate on my stories. I plan out the plots, worlds, characters, compose entire scenes word-for-word—all before I ever actually get my butt in the chair to write. And when I do finally get to my desk, with half the story work already done, I can spare the attention my body needs and have a productive session well within my pain limits.

I can finally physically and mentally write again….

(5) LAGNIAPPE. Dina shares “My Thoughts on The Hugo Award Finalists 2025” at SFF Book Reviews.

Isn’t it lovely when there’s a Hugo finalists announcement without too much fuss? I said this last year already, but after living through the Puppy Years and then witnessing the shit show that was the Chengdu Worldcon Hugo Awards, I always release a breath of relief when the finalists are… just normal….

Dina punctuates the ending of several categories with a recommendation about something she wishes had been a finalist, like this novella —

Books I wish were here:

Once again, let me tell you about the amazingly talented Moses Ose Utomi, who blew me away with The Lies of the Ajungo and then followed that novella up with one that’s just as great, The Truth of the Aleke. I nominated it, of course, and I will probably love and nominate the third in the trilogy next year. Man, do I wish this book was on the ballot, as it would be an easy number one spot. Since it isn’t, let me urge you to pick up the first book. It’s suuuuper short.

(6) WEIRDLY SUSPICIOUS. Christopher Lockett looks at his course outline with a Trumpian eye: “Curriculars: The Relative Weird, Part One—Horror as Privilege” at The Magical Humanist.

…Growing up, we were often taught that Canada and the U.S. share “the longest undefended border in the world.” That was always spoken with pride and approbation. Lately, I’m finding those words resonating in my mind with something less than the spirit of national confraternity, and something more like the spirit of paranoia.

This sense is exacerbated by the spectacle of the anti-“D.E.I.” jihad currently scouring government databases and websites, the first salvoes against universities, and most recently against museums and parks (and, bizarrely, zoos). The March 27 executive order about this last category employs language—such as that about removing “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian and elsewhere—reads like the Project 2025 crowd considered Orwell’s 1984 as a useful guide rather than a cautionary tale…

… In my fourth-year course “The American Weird,” I must imagine that my first three weeks would have passed muster, as we did a selection of stories by H.P. Lovecraft. As I talk about at length in my earlier post “The Trumpian Weird,” Lovecraft’s particular brand of racist ideation, in which threats to White subjectivity are allegorized by the monstrous and eldritch, is perfectly consonant with MAGA’s White nationalism. But after that? Well, I can’t imagine any of it would remain un-purged.

Last time I talked about my American Weird class in this space, I outlined a very rough breakdown of contemporary weird fiction: the banal weird, the relative weird, and the utopian weird. As I noted in that earlier post, the banal weird doesn’t tend to make for great storytelling (unless you’re China Miéville), but it is something we constantly encounter in reality, as at the root it’s about our apparently bottomless capacity to normalize the unthinkable. We don’t get Trump 2.0 without the banality of Weird. And, ironically, it is the forces that animate and facilitate Trumpism that make what I’m terming the Relative Weird a particularly significant iteration of Lovecraftian fiction…

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born April 9, 1937 — Marty Krofft. (Died 2023.)

H.R.Pufnstuf.
Who’s your friend when things get rough?
H.R. Pufnstuf.
Can’t do a little, ‘cause he can’t do enough

Who here didn’t grow up watching some of the shows created by the Krofft brothers? Well, this is the day that Marty Krofft was born, so I get to talk about their work. Let’s get started.

Their very first work was designing the puppets and sets for Banana Splits, a rock band composed of four animal characters for Hanna-Barbera.  To get a look at them, here’s the open and closing theme from the show.

After working for Hanna-Barbera, they went independent with the beloved H. R. Pufnstuf, their first live-action, life-sized puppet series. It ran a lot shorter than I thought lasting only from September to December of ‘69. Like everything of theirs, it ended up in heavy, endless syndication.

Next was The Bugaloos. This was a musical group, very much in keeping with the tone with Banana Splits. It was four British teenagers wearing insect outfits, constantly beset by the evil machinations of the Benita Bizarre. Here’s the opening song, “Gna Gna Gna Gna Gna” courtesy of Krofft Pictures.

Sigmund and the Sea Monsters lasted two seasons though it was aired over three years, the second delayed because a fire at the beginning of season two which destroyed everything. It’s about two brothers who discover a friendly young sea monster named Sigmund who refuses to frighten people. Poor Sigmund. This time you get a full episode as that is all Krofft Pictures had up, “Frankenstein Drops In”

There’s two more series I want to note. 

The first is Land of the Lost which was created though uncredited in the series by David Gerrold. So anyone know why that was? It was produced by Sid and Marty Krofft who co-developed the series with Allan Foshko. Lots of genre tropes here. A family lost in a land with dinosaurs and reptile men? It was popular enough that it lasted three seasons. And here’s the opening and closing credits for season three.

The very last pick by me is Electra Woman and Dyna Girlwhich lasted but sixteen episodes of twelve minutes. Despite the ElectraEnemies, their foes here being way over the top, this is SF though admittedly on the pulp end of things. 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) SPACE COWBOY BOOKS ONLINE READING. On Tuesday April 22 at 6:00 p.m. Pacific, Space Cowboy Books will host an online reading and interview with Ai Jiang. Register for free HERE. Get your copy of A Place Near the Wind HERE.

From a rising-star author, winner of the both the Bram Stoker® and Nebula Awards, a richly inventive, brutal and beautiful science-fantasy novella. A story of family, loss, oppression and rebellion that will stay with you long after the final page. For readers of Nghi Vo’s The Empress of Salt and Fortune, Neon Yang’s The Black Tides of Heaven and Kritika H. Rao’s The Surviving Sky.

Liu Lufeng is the eldest princess of the Feng royalty and, bound by duty and tradition, the next bride to the human king. With their bark faces, arms of braided branches and hair of needle threads, the Feng people live within nature, nurtured by the land. But they exist under the constant threat of human expansion, and the negotiation of bridewealth is the only way to stop— or at least delay—the destruction of their home. Come her wedding day, Lufeng plans to kill the king and finally put an end to the marriages.

Trapped in the great human palace in the run-up to the union, Lufeng begins to uncover the truth about her people’s origins and realizes they will never be safe from the humans. So she must learn to let go of duty and tradition, choose her allies carefully, and risk the unknown in order to free her family and shape her own fate.

(10) LET ROVER COME OVER. “Lunar Outpost unveils sleek new ‘Eagle’ moon rover” at Space.com.

Colorado-based Lunar Outpost just unveiled its new “Eagle” moon rover at the Space Foundation’s 40th annual Space Symposium here, and it looks straight out of science fiction. Sporting a sleek metallic finish and ice-blue LED lighting, the Eagle rover turned quite a few heads on the expo floor this year. But Eagle boasts more than just futuristic looks.

The rover is packed with features designed with the next generation of Artemis program moon explorers in mind and is based on feedback from current NASA astronauts at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, according to Lunar Outpost’s A.J Gerner….

… In the configuration shown here at the symposium, the Eagle vehicle features two seats for crew, each with its own redundant and mirrored controls, meaning either astronaut can control the rover. The steering controls on each side consist of a single handle that controls four individual motors that drive each wheel. Each wheel can turn independently of the other three, allowing the Eagle rover to turn on its center axis or “crab walk” sideways, Gerner said…. 

(11) TARDIGRADE MOTION. [Item by Steven French.] If we really do want to go to Mars, perhaps we need to pay less attention to a certain billionaire and look more closely at the ‘water bear’ (recently voted Invertebrate of the Year by Guardian readers): Want to know how to survive in space? Ask a tardigrade (phys.org) at Phys.org.

The 2025 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, which took place from March 10–14 in The Woodlands, Texas, witnessed some very interesting proposals for space exploration and science. In addition to bold mission concepts, scientists presented exciting opportunities for potential research that addresses major questions. Not the least of which was “How can humans survive in space and extraterrestrial environments”? One study in particular presented how the study of tardigrades could help address the challenges involved….

[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Lis Carey, Teddy Harvia, N., Jeffrey Smith, Mike Kennedy, 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 johnstick.]

Pixel Scroll 3/24/25 I’m Still Big; It’s The Pixels That Got Small

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(1) OVERSEAS VISITORS TO U.S. WARNED. “Some European countries and Canada issue advisories for travelers to the U.S.” – Minnesota Public Radio has the story.

Some European countries, as well as Canada, are warning their citizens who travel to the United States to strictly follow the country’s entry rules or risk detention as the Trump administration cracks down on immigration enforcement.

Denmark, the United Kingdom, Germany, Finland and Canada have revised their guidelines at a time when some travelers from these countries have been detained by immigration officials….

…The heightened advisories come after citizens from European countries have been detained and deported by immigration officials while traveling to the United States. Some of the warnings also note that the State Department has also suspended its policy allowing transgender, intersex and nonbinary people to update the sex field on their passports — eliminating the X marker as an option.

“We will enforce visa rules and other conditions of entry,” a State Department spokesperson told NPR on Saturday. “Prohibiting travel into the United States by those who might pose a threat or violate conditions of their visa is key to protecting the American people.”

On Friday, Germany’s Foreign Office adjusted its travel advisory after several of its citizens were reportedly arrested and detained by immigration authorities while entering the U.S., according to local media reports. The country is warning citizens that entering the U.S. through the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) or a visa does not guarantee the right to enter the country.

The foreign office’s guidance says that, because U.S. border officials have the final authority to make decisions about whether someone can enter the country, there’s nothing that the German government can do to reverse a denial of entry. It recommends that travelers be able to provide proof of their return trip home, such as a plane ticket.

A German official on Saturday told NPR the country’s consulates general are aware of cases of citizens being detained and are in contact with their families as well as U.S. officials.

The United Kingdom is also warning its residents to comply with all entry rules or they “may be liable to arrest or detention.” The move comes after a tourist from the U.K. was reportedly arrested and detained by ICE at the U.S.-Canada border earlier this month.

Both Denmark and Finland have updated their travel guidance regarding people’s gender markers on their travel documents….

…On Friday, Canada also updated its travel guidelines for entering the U.S. Canadians and foreign nationals who visit the U.S. longer than 30 days “must be registered with the United States Government,” the government’s website warns — and that failure to comply could lead to “penalties, fines, and misdemeanor prosecution.”

(2) CANADIAN BOOKSELLERS CHALLENGE UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCES. Publishers Weekly reports “Canadian Booksellers Unite in Tariff Fight”.

Canadian booksellers have joined forces to ask that Prime Minister Mark Carney exempt books from the 25% counter-tariffs scheduled to take effect on April 2 on $125 billion worth of goods imported from the U.S.

In an unusual collaboration, Laura Carter, executive director of the Canadian Independent Booksellers’ Association (CIBA), and Heather Reisman, CEO of chain bookseller Indigo Books & Music, sent a letter to the Prime Minister on March 20 urging the exclusion of books from the impending tariffs.

Carter and Reisman said in their letter that imposing tariffs on books would have “devastating consequences for Canadian readers, our businesses, and our cultural landscape,” reported the Quill & Quire.

The letter highlights a significant industry concern: that books by Canadian authors printed in and distributed through U.S. warehouses would be subject to the additional tariff, as the majority of books sold in Canada are published by Canadian divisions of multinational publishers.

“Unlike interchangeable consumer goods we know that readers will not likely substitute a book arriving via the U.S. for a Canadian printed and warehoused book,” Carter and Reisman said in the letter. “At this time there is nowhere near the capacity in Canada to handle all of our printing and warehousing. This tariff threatens the survival of bookstores and the livelihoods of thousands of Canadians.”…

(3) NNEDI OKORAFOR PROFILE. BBC Sounds makes available Outook’s feature on Nnedi Okorafor,“Making Marvel magic: The creative spark from my hospital bed”.

Nnedi Okorafor is an award-winning, Nigerian-American author of fantasy and science fiction. 

Becoming a writer was not the most straightforward journey for Nnedi. Before her literary success she was a talented tennis player and dreamt of turning pro. However following a diagnosis of scoliosis, routine surgery to her spine left her temporarily paralysed. 

Confined to her hospital bed, Nnedi found solace in her vivid imagination and began writing for the first time. It was the start of a highly successful career as an author and led to a request from Marvel to write some of their comics. Over the years she has written characters including Spiderman, the X-Men and the Avengers. Nnedi is also the first woman to write the character of T’Challa – the Black Panther, as well as his tech-loving sister, Shuri. Her latest book is called Death of the Author. 

(4) CHALLENGER HISTORY RECOGNIZED. The National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced March 20. The complete list of honorees is at the link. The only work of genre interest is the nonfiction winner.

Adam Higginbotham won the nonfiction award for Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space. As committee chair Jo Livingstone stated, “Surprisingly propulsive in form and shocking in the facts it reveals, Challenger is a story of incompetence fostered when government agencies are invaded by corporate decision-makers.” 

(5) THEY WERE EXPENDABLE. “Review: Mickey 17” from Camestros Felapton.

…While Timo manages to secure a nice position on the crew of the colony ship, Mickey fails to read the paperwork and ends up being the designated “Expendable”: a person who has elected to be digitised so that new copies of him can be printed out each time he dies. For various reasons (explained in the film), the ship is only allowed the one expendable and only one copy of Mickey at a time. Thus he ends up being a living crash test dummy/human Guinea pig for scientists on the ship. Each death and reprinting leads to a new number….

(6) EL-MOHTAR’S NEW BOOK. Dina praises “A Fairy Tale With Teeth: Amal El-Mohtar – The River Has Roots” at SFF Book Reviews.

…I loved everything about this little book. The plot itself – that of two sisters who stumbled into Faerie as children, but have come out again – was fast-moving and surprisingly exciting for such a short novella. The language was pure poetry, not just on a line by line basis, but also because it includes snippet of songs and actual poems. The beautiful etching illustrations are just the cherry on top of the gorgeous SFF novella sundae.
Perhaps most impressively was the way El-Mohtar managed to make her characters come to life….

(7) MYSTERY UNLOCHED. [Item by Steven French.] Here’s a fun piece on the various media appearances of the Loch Ness monster, prompted by a musical about to premiere in Scotland: “From The Simpsons to Werner Herzog: the coolest, craziest, scariest Nessies ever” in the Guardian.

It is the UK’s largest body of fresh water, its volume totalling more than all the lakes of England and Wales combined. It is also the UK’s greatest source of daft stories. For the best part of a century, Loch Ness has used its monster-adjacent status not only to finance a healthy tourist economy, but also to generate a small industry in Nessie-related fiction, from the inspired to the crackpot. The Simpsons sent Mr Burns to do battle with the creature in an episode called Monty Can’t Buy Me Love. From the pen of poet Ted Hughes came Nessie the Mannerless Monster, who was tired of being told she does not exist. And indie folkster Matilda Mann has a song called The Loch Ness Monster, containing this advice: “Stay right down there.” Not wanting to be left out, the Royal Mail has just honoured Nessie with a fine, if rather unscary, stamp.

To these slithery ranks we will shortly be able to add Nessie, a family musical written and composed by Glasgow’s Shonagh Murray and about to premiere in Edinburgh and Pitlochry. Murray was reluctant to tackle such a familiar Scottish icon, until a challenge from her father drew her in. “I had just finished doing a couple of shows about the women behind Robert Burns,” she says. “I was joking with my dad that I needed to find something a wee bit less Scottish. He was like: ‘Oh, there’s loads of Scottish stories that have been told – but not to their full potential. You should do a Nessie musical.’ On a dare, I wrote an opening number. The more I was writing, the more I liked it. There was something charming and special about it.”

I never met the monster, said the writer of The Secret of the Loch after her research, but I did find a wonderful whisky

Despite claims to the contrary, the story goes back no further than May 1933. That was when hotel proprietor Donaldina Mackay and her husband John, driving along the north shore of the loch, claimed to have seen a large creature on the surface. They said it resembled a whale and described it rolling for a minute before disappearing. Their testimony, reported by the Inverness Courier, set off a summer of sighting claims. At the time, the dinosaur-battling King Kong was becoming a monster hit in cinemas, but here was a fearsome creature on Scotland’s very own soil (or loch)….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Mike Glyer.]

Born March 24, 1946 – Andrew Porter, 79. File 770’s indispensible Scroll contributor Andrew Porter got into sf fandom in the Sixties. He published a major genzine, Algol/Starship (1963–83), which received five Hugo nominations and won in 1974. And he has been a leading sf news writer for even longer — his first news-related column on upcoming paperbacks appeared in James V. Taurasi’s Science Fiction Times in 1960. Later in the decade he started his own newzine, S.F. Weekly (1966–68), and returned in the Eighties with Science Fiction Chronicle (1980–2002), a 21-time Hugo nominee and won in 1993 and 1994.

Andrew Porter in 1993 with his Hugo Award.

Porter was assistant editor on The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction from 1966–74, and associate editor at Lancer Books in the late 1960s. Outside the sf field he also worked as a trade magazine editor and advertising production manager on such titles as Rudder, Quick Frozen Foods (under editor Sam Moskowitz), QFF International, Construction Equipment, and Electro-Procurement.

He has independently published nonfiction collections such as The Book of Ellison, Dreams Must Explain Themselves by Ursula K. Le Guin, Exploring Cordwainer Smith, and Experiment Perilous: The Art and Science of Anguish in Science Fiction and The Fiction of James Tiptree, Jr. by Gardner Dozois. He was honored with a Special British Fantasy Award in 1992.

He was Fan Guest of Honour at ConFiction, the 1990 World Science Fiction Convention held in The Hague, Netherlands. The audio of his speech is available at Fanac.org.

He also was recognized by Chicon V (1991) with a Special Committee Award for Distinguished Semiprozine Work. And he was honored with the Big Heart Award in 2009.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Rainbow Mars by Larry Niven (1999)

Twenty-six years ago Rainbow Mars was published by Tor. It is my absolutely favorite work by Larry Niven, with Ringworld being my second. After that, it’s the Gil the ARM stories. Because of what the stories are, it hasn’t been touched by the Suck Fairy at all.

It contains six stories, five previously published and the longest, “Rainbow Mars”, written for this collection, plus some other material. It is about Svetz, the cross-reality traveler who keeps encountering beings who really should not exist including those Martians. He travel back in time  but it isn’t really time but alternative realties to retrieve animals as now in 3050 of them save dogs are extinct, but he never gets it right. 

SPOILER HERE. Horses are unicorns, Gila monsters are, monsters of sort in the form of fire breathing dragons, and, well, guess, that bird? No a phoenix is certainly not a great idea, is it? END OF SPOILER, REALLY IT IS. 

Now in the afterword, Niven notes, “Time travel is fantasy. But the only way to get fun out of it is to treat it as Analog–style science fiction. Keep it internally consistent. Lay out a set of rules and invite the reader to beat you to the consequences.” So these stories are to him SF, not fantasy. 

The first story, “Get A Horse!” was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in October 1969. That was followed by “Bird in the Hand” in the same magazine, October of the next year. Surprisingly the third story, “Leviathan!” was published in Playboy in August of that year. 

Yes, I know Playboy did a lot of SF, it’s just that I wouldn’t have expected this story to show up there. It fits F&SF better in my opinion. Your opinion on that matter of course may differ.

Then “There’s a Wolf in My Time Machine” was published in October of that year in the fine zine that printed the first two. 

Finally the last story that got printed at that time, “Death in a Cage” was published in Niven’s The Flight of the Horse collection in September of 1973 which collected these stories as well. (The Flight of the Horse also had “Flash Crowd” which I like a lot and “What Good is a Glass Dagger?” which is fantastic.) 

Now we get Rainbow Mars, the novel, yes novel as Tor insists it is, that finishes out this delightfully silly volume. I think it’s a novella but y’all can give me your opinion on that. 

Some of Pratchett’s idea from a conversation he had with Niven remain in the final version of Rainbow Mars, mainly the use of Yggdrasil, the world tree. Though there’s Norsemen as well…

There’s two other two short pieces, “The Reference Director Speaks”, in which Niven speaks about his fictional sources for the Mars he creates, and “Svetz’s Time Line” which is self-explanatory. 

An afterword, “Svetz and the Beanstalk”, rounds out the work in which Niven talks about the fictional sources for Rainbow Mars as a whole.

The fantastic cover art, which was nominated for a Chelsey Award, is by Bob Eggleton who has won, if my counting skills are right tonight, an impressive nine Hugos, mostly for Best Professional Artist though there was one for Best Related Work for his most excellent Greetings from Earth: The Art of Bob Eggleton. 

I once, a long time ago, heard a pirated copy of the audiobook when the internet was a lot easier place to find such things. There were Zelazny novels there read by him. Sigh… 

Postscript: We also recommend John Hertz’ “Interview with Hanville Svetz (Larry Niven, co-author)” first published in Argentus, 2004, and available in Dancing and Joking on page 34.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) DON’T PANIC. “Netflix’s $275 Million ‘The Electric State’ Has Fallen Flat. No Matter?” The New York Times explains the reasons for the company’s sang froid. (Behind a paywall.)

Netflix spent over $275 million to make “The Electric State,” a sci-fi action adventure film starring Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt and a slew of sentient robots. Had it opened in theaters, instead of on its service as it did on March 14, the film would almost certainly be declared a giant disappointment.

Reviews have been dismal. And though the movie debuted at No. 1 on the streaming giant’s weekly chart of most-watched movies, it had far fewer views (25.2 million) than other expensive features, including “The Gray Man” (41.2 million), which was made by the same directors, the brothers Joe and Anthony Russo.

But there was little hand-wringing inside Netflix this week. No marketing chief was blamed. No production executive packed up her office.

Instead, the movie demonstrates how different Netflix is from the traditional studios — and how easily the company can spend so much for a middling result without Wall Street’s noticing. (Its stock is up slightly this week.)

Truth is, no one piece of content moves the needle at Netflix in either direction. “Squid Game 2” was the most-watched title in the company’s most recent engagement report, with 87 million views, but it accounted for only 0.7 percent of total viewing. Rather, the $18 billion that the company spends each year on movies and shows is meant to reach a worldwide audience with different tastes and interests. The budget for “The Electric State” represents 1.5 percent of what the company will spend on content this year….

(12) KEY OBSERVATIONS. Olivia Waite opens the door to “Science Fiction, Locked Room Mysteries, and the Joy of Literary Games” at CrimeReads.

Let me be very obvious at the start and say: a murder victim can’t tell you who the killer is. Locked-room mysteries are puzzling because the only person you’re sure was in the room is the one person you can’t ask for testimony. That’s also what makes locked-room plots such challenging things to read or write — a baffling impossibility turns out to be an illusion with a material explanation. An airgun from the empty house across the street, a serpent in the ventilator, a disguise or an accomplice or a clock hand nudged to display a fraudulent time.

Chandler famously objected to how this makes murder into something like a game — and he’s not wrong, ethically or aesthetically — but he does overlook the crucial fact that games are extremely fun. And my god do we need whatever fun we can scrape from these times….

… The great rebellious joy of sci-fi is that it rewrites the rules of our universe: faster than light travel, sentient mechanical beings, aliens and wormholes and alternative timelines and mirror universes and all. You must only touch the ball with your hands becomes you must never touch the ball with your hands. You transform a fact so you can explore the consequences — the propulsive and then what? that keeps the fictional pages turning. Humans colonize Mars — and then what? Robots can have feelings — and then what?

A corpse can tell you who killed them — and then what?…

(13) STOP THEM SCRAPERS! [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] All the “by clicking on this, you accept our terms”… ever want to set your terms (my son’s working out such a “by my use of your software, you you agree…”)? Well, here’s an IEEE proposed standard for it. “Doc Searls Proposes We Set Our Own Terms and Policies for Web Site Tracking” at Slashdot.

…Basically your web browser proffers whatever agreement you’ve chosen (from a canonical list hosted at Customer Commons) to the web sites and other online services that you’re visiting.

“Browser makers can build something into their product, or any developer can make a browser add-on or extension…” Searls writes. “On the site’s side — the second-party side — CMS makers can build something in, or any developer can make a plug-in (WordPress) or a module (Drupal). Mobile app toolmakers can also come up with something (or many things)…”MyTerms creates a new regime for privacy: one based on contract. With each MyTerm you are the first party. Not the website, the service, or the app maker. They are the second party. And terms can be friendly. For example, a prototype term called NoStalking says “Just show me ads not based on tracking me.” This is good for you, because you don’t get tracked, and good for the site because it leaves open the advertising option. NoStalking lives at Customer Commons, much as personal copyrights live at Creative Commons. (Yes, the former is modeled on the latter.)…

(14) SUNK COST. Adam Rowe discusses depictions of “Atlantis” at 70s Sci-Fi Art.

Much like the Bermuda triangle, Bigfoot, and the psychic powers of plants, serious discussions of Atlantis seem to have dwindled down to nothing since the ’70s and ’80s. But maybe it would be more fair to say that they’ve gotten less fun because, much like any other conspiracy theory, belief in Atlantis is now an on-ramp to harmful views like climate change denial or white supremacy….

… Now that I’ve gotten all the sensible opinions out at the front of this post, I have to admit that I really enjoy all this pseudo-historical nonsense. I devoted a whole chapter of my sci-fi art book to cryptozoology and the paranormal – while it was clearly distinct from science fiction, it was a thriving genre with plenty of crossover, including many big-name artists….

Here’s an example by David Hardy.

(15) ANDOR. Disney+ has dropped a trailer for the final season of Andor, which begins streaming on April 22.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, John Hertz, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 8/2/21 Don’t Talk About Scrolldays! You Kidding Me? Scrolldays? I Just Hope We Can Scroll!

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(1) SWEET AND SOUR NOTES. Kameron Hurley shares her answer to a professional challenge: “When Should You Compromise? How to Evaluate Editorial Feedback” at Locus Online.

…There is also a huge variance in the quality of editorial and stakeholder feedback. Some­times you get notes that make it clear that the person making them was reading (or wants to read) an entirely different book than the one you’ve written.

So how do you determine which notes to take to heart, and which to ignore?

For me, it all comes back to understanding my novel and the story I want to tell. The feedback I get that gets me closer to refining and communicating that story is the feedback I take. The notes I get that that are clearly moving off into a direction that takes me away from the story I want to tell are the ones I toss….

(2) TRUE PRO TRUTH. John Scalzi announced “Dispatcher 3: Finished!” Soon after he tweeted —

(3) STAND BY. Vanity Fair says the LOTR for television is coming out in 2022. “Amazon’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ Unveils a First Image and Release Date”. Someone – not the Vanity Fair writer — pointed out the September 2 release date coincides with the anniversary of Tolkien’s death in 1973. (Actually, the Vanity Fair article names two different September release dates, but the second presumably is a typo.)

Ever since 2017 when Amazon first announced the massively expensive deal that would send TV audiences back into the world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, fans have been eagerly wondering when their journey might begin. The folks behind the as-yet unnamed series have picked a very auspicious date indeed. Break out the Longbottom Leaf and mark your calendars for September 2, 2022 so you can see what Amazon has had cooking over in New Zealand these last few years.

The date announcement comes with a first image of the series to celebrate the wrap of filming in New Zealand, and fans will be sure to eagerly pore over every pixel. We can confirm that the image is from the first episode though sources close to the production are declining to confirm the identity of the figure seen there. This could be an image of a city in Valinor. The trees in the background, at least, are very interesting. …

(3) DREAMS. Read Aaron Starr’s amazing parable “Feathers or Stones” at Black Gate. Today!

Once, long ago, there was a poor writer who lived in the depths of a forest with his wife. He would spend his evenings putting words to page while his wife rested by the fire. As she did so she would read those stories which were complete, and yet not yet ready for market. Using a special red pencil, she would note occasional errors and put to him questions the writing had left unresolved, in order that his next version of the story might be improved.

During the day she would walk out into the forest and spend her time hewing mighty trees, for she was a woodcutter by trade. He, meanwhile, would tend to the small garden, and every few days journey into the nearby town, riding down the river on a mighty raft formed of entire tree trunks she had stripped, all lashed together, and he would walk back home before sundown. Thus they had a modest supply of silver, and the wife was content they be together every evening.

But the writer was not content….

(4) INTERRUPTED DEBUT. Galactic Journey reviews the latest (in 1966) issue of If, including this story by a brand new author: “[August 2, 1966] Mirages (September 1966 IF)”.

The Empty Man, by Gardner Dozois

Jhon Charlton is a weapon created by the Terran Empire. Nearly invulnerable, incredibly strong and fast, he can even summon tremendous energies. Unfortunately for him, for the last three years, he has shared his mind with a sarcastic entity called Moros, which has appointed itself as his conscience. Now, Jhon has been sent to the planet Apollon to help the local rebels overthrow the dictatorial government.

Gardner Dozois is this month’s new author, and this is quite a debut. It’s a long piece for a novice, but he seems up to it. There’s room for some cuts, but not much. The mix of science fiction and almost fantasy elements is interesting and works. The only place I’d say a lack of experience and polish shows it at the very end. The point is a bit facile and could have been delivered a touch more smoothly, but it’s a fine start to a new career. Mr. Dozois has entered the Army, though, so it may be a while before we see anything else from him.

(5) FROM MASHUPS TO SMASHUPS. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster, Designated Reader, Financial Times.] In the July 28 Financial Times, Tom Faber discusses video game crossovers.

Most crossovers are like this:  Brawlers created solely to let fans collide fictional DNA of their favourite characters against each other,  Their storylines are little more than a set dressing,usually involving a convenient tear in the space-time continuum. Kingdom Hearts, a collaboration between Disney and Final Fantasy developer Square-Enix, took narrative more seriously to offer a role-playing game with original characters and complex lore.  Sending plucky anime heroes out adventuring with Donald Duck to learn the true meaning of friendship may sound like a painfully trite exercise, but the games proved a runaway success. Kingdom Hearts developed into a stranger, darker story than anyone expected.

Today we are at peak crossover. There is The Little Prince- in -Sky:  Children of the Light, Assassin’s Creed in Final Fantasy, DC Comics heroes in Mortal Kombat and dozens of franchises distilled into costumes for party game Fall Guys.  Sometimes these make sense:  Yes, ace attorney Phoenix Wright and kindly Professor Layton could plausibly solve crimes together while Pirates of the Caribbean nestles neatly into the nautical fiction of Den of Thieves.  Others are plain wrongheaded: Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing pits the blue hedgehog against other Sega characters in go-karts, blithely ignoring his defining trait–Sonic doesn’t need a vehicle to go anywhere fast. 

(6) MIDSOUTHCON HONORS. Nominations are being taken for the 2022 Darrell Awards through December 1. See complete guidelines at the link.

In order to qualify, the work must either be written by an author who is living in the greater Memphis area (as defined below) when the work is published OR have at least one significant scene set within that area. Broadly defined, the area is west Tennessee, north Mississippi and northeast Arkansas.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

  • 1991 – Thirty years ago, Charles de Lint’s The Little Country novel wins a HOMer Award. The HOMer Awards were given by the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature Forum on CompuServe. Locus notes that the winning authors were active there. (The novel was set in Cornwall though the music in it is influenced by Northumberland bagpiper Billy Pigg as the principal character is smallpiper Janey Little.) It was also nominated for the Aurora, Locus, Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature and World Fantasy Awards as well. It’s just been released as an audiobook, and it is available from the usual suspects. 

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 2, 1917 — Wah Chang. Of interest to us are the props he designed for the original Star Trek seriesincluding the tricorder and communicator. He did a number of other things for the series — the Rabbit you see on the “Shore Leave” episode, the Tribbles,  the Vulcan harp first seen in “Charlie X“ and the Romulan Bird of Prey. Other work included building the title object from The Time Machine, and the dinosaurs in Land of the Lost. (Died 2003.)
  • Born August 2, 1920 — Theodore Marcuse. He was Korob in “Catspaw”, a second season Trek episode that aired just before Halloween aptly enough. He had appearances in The Twilight Zone (“The Trade-Ins” and “To Serve Man”), Time Tunnel, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Wild Wild West and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. in the episodes “The Re-collectors Affair,”  “The Minus-X Affair,”  and “The Pieces of Fate Affair.” (Died 1967.)
  • Born August 2, 1932 — Peter O’Toole. I’m tempted to say his first genre role was playing King Henry in A Lion in Winter as it is alternate history. Neat film. Actually before that he’s got an uncredited role in Casino Royale as a Scottish piper. Really he does. His first genre role without dispute is as Zaltar in Supergirl followed by being Dr. Harry Wolverine in Creator. He’s Peter Plunkett in the superb High Spirits, he’s in FairyTale: A True Story as Arthur Conan Doyle, and Stardust as King of Stormhold. Not surprisingly, he played Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Died 2013.)
  • Born August 2, 1948 — Robert Holdstock. Another one who died far too young. His Ryhope Wood series is simply amazing with Lavondyss being my favorite volume. And let’s not overlook his Merlin Codex series which is one of the more original takes on that character I’ve read. The Ragthorn, co-written with Garry Kilworth, is interesting as well. Tor, which has the rights to him in the States, has been slow to bring him to the usual suspects. (Died 2009.)
  • Born August 2, 1949 — Wes Craven. Swamp Thing comes to mind first plus of course the Nightmare on Elm Street franchiseof nine films for which he created Freddy Krueger. Let’s not forget The Serpent and the Rainbow. (Died 2015.)
  • Born August 2, 1954 — Ken MacLeod, 67. Sometimes I don’t realize until I do a Birthday note just how much I’ve read of a certain author. And so it was of this author. I’ve read the entire Fall Revolution series, not quite all of the Engines of Light Trilogy, just the first two of the Corporation Wars but I’ve got it in my to be finished queue,and every one of his one-off novels save Descent. His Restoration Game is quite chilling. I should go find his Giant Lizards from Another Star collection as I’ve not read his short fiction. Damn it’s not available from the usual suspects!
  • Born August 2, 1955 — Caleb Carr, 66. Ok, I’ll admit that this is another author that ISFDB lists as genre that I don’t think of as being as genre. ISFDB list all four of his novels as being genre including The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness which are not even genre adjacent by my reading. So is there something in those novels that I missed? 
  • Born August 2, 1976 — Emma Newman, 45. Author of quite a few SF novels and and a collection of short fiction. Of interest to us is that she is co-creator along with her husband Peter, of the Worldcon 75 Hugo Award winning podcast Tea and Jeopardy which centers around her hosting another creator for a nice cup of tea and cake, while her scheming butler Latimer (played by Peter) attempts to send them to their deaths at the end of the episode. Her Planetfall series was nominated for a Hugo at CoNZealand.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Off the Mark shows even an animated celebrity’s prosthetics can’t get past TSA.

(10) SOMETIMES THEY DO GROW WEARY. R.H. Lossin revisits “William Morris, Romantic Revolutionary” at the New York Review of Books.

At the end of William Morris’s News from Nowhere, or, An Epoch of Rest (Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance), a woman named Ellen explains to the visitor, William Guest, that he cannot stay in this perfect place of clean air, meaningful work, and satisfying leisure. Not because of any fictional science of time travel, nor because he poses a threat to this particular future’s social harmony, but because his very being has been so thoroughly deformed by the social conditions of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism that he is incapable of experiencing the pleasures and desires of a world freed of competition, exploitation, and suffering. “You belong,” explains Ellen, “so entirely to the unhappiness of the past that our happiness even would weary you.”

…Many aspects of News from Nowhere set it apart from other utopian fiction of the time—it is decidedly socialist, conscious of the environmental costs of industrialization, backward-looking rather than futuristic, and free of prescriptiveness about any particular social arrangements—but Ellen’s melancholy observation on the psychic life of the capitalist subject is singularly important. If no other argument for revolutionary change made within the novel seems persuasive, this line, appearing late in the narrative, should give us reason to consider the insufficiency, even the costs, of a pragmatic reformist mindset. At a moment in history when social reform and conservationist policy have appeared on the political horizon, William Morris offers a reminder of the constitutive limits of our imaginations. He urges us to wish harder, not plan better….

(11) INSIDE HIS STRUGGLE. SFF Book Reviews’ “The State of SFF – August 2021” roundup has an excellent lead-in to Scott Lynch’s recently-made-public newsletter update.

…Scott Lynch has always been transparent about his battle with depression and the resulting delay in publishing further books in the Gentleman Bastard series. When The Republic of Thieves came out years after the previous volume, me and the other Locke Lamora fans were happy and excited and hopeful that the series would continue soon. In 2019, Lynch mentioned that the next instalment, The Thorn of Emberlain, was as good as finished. It had a cover and everything. But as of 2021, the book hasn’t been published yet.

Scott has recently posted an update about his struggle with anxiety and his difficulties letting go of his work (handing it in to the publisher, making posts public, etc.). I found the post both brave and educating. I am no stranger to anxiety but it can take so many shapes and forms and not all of them are well-known. Scott is now taking medication to help him and as far as comments on the internet go, I think we all agree that we wish him the best! Whether the next book comes out soon or not isn’t even a point of discussion. We just want Scott to be okay.

(12) WATCH ALONG WITH JMS. J. Michael Straczynski has made public another Synced Straczynski Commentary for Babylon 5 for the “And the Sky, Full of Stars” episode.

Originally created for Patrons of my page at: https://www.patreon.com/syntheticworlds This is an original full-length commentary/reaction for And the Sky, Full of Stars, one of our most important season one episodes. Sync up at the start of the commentary, and hit play.

(13) UNBREAKABLE. SYFY Wire is astonished: “Coulson (Still) Lives?! Marvel Confirms Clark Gregg Is Back For ‘What If…?’ Series”.

Phil Coulson just can’t be killed! Thanks to a production brief for Marvel’s What If…? (debuting next week), we now have it confirmed that Clark Gregg officially recorded dialogue for the animated anthology series. While the document doesn’t go into specifics about the episode Gregg’s featured in, we’d say it’s not too far-fetched to assume that he’ll reprise the role of the Corvette-loving S.H.I.E.L.D. agent who has a rather impressive talent for sticking around the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Coulson, whose MCU tenure can be traced back to the very beginning in 2008’s Iron Man, was a regular recurring character across the movies until he was murdered by Loki (Tom Hiddleston) in 2012’s The Avengers. As Mobius (Owen Wilson) was kind enough to remind us in the season premiere of Loki, the agent’s death was the catalyst for bringing together Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.

(14) WHY PROVO IS FANNISH PT. 64. [Item by David Doering.] Here at the Provo City Cemetery is another reason why our city is suitably fannish–even Daleks come here to die… 

A Dalek Named Thomas… kids’ book maybe?

(15) REANIMATION. The Huntington knows our day won’t be complete without a timelapse video of the blooming of one of its famous Corpse Flowers.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. The How It Should Have Ended gang takes on Loki in this episode with spoilers. “Villain Pub – Into the Loki-Verse”.

[Thanks to JJ, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, David Doering, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Richard Horton.]