The Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association’s juries have chosen the 2025 Rhysling Award finalists from the previously announced longlists.
SHORT POEMS (50 FINALISTS)
• After they blasted your home planet to shrapnel • P. H. Low • Haven Spec 14 • aftermath, in the city. a diary • Peter Roberts • Chrome Baby 133 • Battle of the Sexless • Colleen Anderson • Bestiary of Blood (Crystal Lake Publishing, October) • A Black Hole is a Melting Pot That Will Make Us Whole • Pedro Iniguez • Star*Line 47.1 • Bobblehead • Carol Gyzander • Discontinue if Death Ensues (Flame Tree Collections, October) • Born Against Teeth • Tiffany Morris • Grimm Retold (Speculation Publications, September) • Brandy Old Fashioned • Amelia Gorman • Eye to the Telescope 53 • Chronoverse • Jeffrey Allen Tobin • Star*Line 47.3 • Colony Xaxbara 4 • Kimberly Kuchar • The Space Cadet Science Fiction Review 2 • Dodging the Bullet • Lisa M. Bradley • Small Wonders 13 • Fractal • Jack Cooper • Poetry News Spring 2024 • from Venus, to Mars • Cailín Frankland • Eye to the Telescope 55 • Generation Ship • Akua Lezli Hope • Star*Line 47.3 • Gravitation is Only a Theory • Alan Katerinsky • Wheeling, Yet Not Free (Written Image Press, July) • The High Priestess Falls in Love with Death • Ali Trotta • The Deadlands 35 • In the Future, AI Will Make Ofrendas • Felicia Martinez • Asimov’s Jan/Feb 2024 • The Last Valkyrie • Pat Masson • Forgotten Ground Regained 2 • The Last Woman • Anna Taborska • Discontinue if Death Ensues (Flame Tree Collections, October) • Lesson’s End • Brian Hugenbruch • Samjoko Summer 2024 • Let’s Pretend It’s A Bird • Roger Dutcher • NewMyths 69 • Lost Ark • F. J. Bergman • Space & Time Magazine 146 • Make me a sandwich • Marisca Pichette • Star*Line 47.2 • New Homestead • Akua Lezli Hope • Sublimation Volume 1, Issue 5 • Notes from a Centaur’s Curator • Gwen Sayers • Ghost Sojourn (Southword Editions, April) • The Oarfish Bride • Amelia Gorman • Baubles From Bones 2 • Odysseus’s Apology to Anticlea • Anastasios Mihalopoulos • Lit Magazine 37 • The Old Tradition • Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi • FIYAH 32 • One Bright Moment (International Research Station, Nili Fossae, Mars) • Kate Boyes • SFPA Valentines Day Reading • One Large Deep Fried Thistle Burr • Jonathan Olfert • Strange Horizons 8/19/2024 • Our Combusted Planet • Brian Garrison • Dreams & Nightmares 126 • Pa(i)ncakes • Dex Drury • Slay and Slay Again! (Sliced Up Press, July) • Right to Shelter • Mary Soon Lee • Radon Journal 7 • Rising Star • David C. Kopaska-Merkel • Spectral Realms 21 • Robin’s Rest • Lisa Timpf • Eye to the Telescope 54 • Sea and Sky • Megan Branning • The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Winter 2024 • Song Through Wires • Jacqueline West • Star*Line 47.4 • Sonnet for the Unbeliever • Paul Chuks • Strange Horizons 5/20/2024 • Space Psychiatry • Anna Cates • Star*Line 47.3 • Things to Remember When Descending Through the Ocean • Sandra Kasturi • Poetry Society Stanza Poetry Competition October • the time travel body • Angel Leal • Radon Journal 8 • Transhumanist Classroom • Pedro Iniguez • Mexicans on the Moon: Speculative Poetry from a Possible Future (Space Cowboy Books, November) • traveling through breaths • Eva Papasoulioti • Radon Journal 6 • Trinary • Amabilis O’ Hara • Heartlines Spec 4 • Trip Through the Robot • Carolyn Clink & David Clink • Giant Robot Poems (Middle West Press, July) • Visions of Manhattan • Ian Li • Eye to the Telescope 53 • A War of Words • Marie Brennan • Strange Horizons 9/16/2024 • We Carry Our Ghosts to the Stars • Richard Leis • Star*Line 47.3 • What Dragons Didn’t Do • Mary Soon Lee • Uppagus 6 • The Witch Recalls Her Craft • Angel Leal • Uncanny 60 • You Are a Monster • Beth Cato • Worlds of Possibility August 2024 Issue
LONG POEMS (25 FINALISTS)
• 9n Lives • Mary A. Turzillo • Eccentric Orbits 5 (Dimensionfold Publishing, October)
• The Blackthorn • Mary Soon Lee • Dreams & Nightmares 126
• Body Revolt • Casey Aimer • Strange Horizons 7/29/2024
• Change Your Mind • Gwendolyn Maia Hicks • Small Wonders 16
• Divide By Zero • Michael Bailey • Written Backwards 12/22/24 Post
• Draco Hesperidum • Eric Brown • Eternal Haunted Summer Summer Solstice 2024
• Elemental Scales • Ruth Berman • Star*Line 47.1
• The Fabulous Underwater Panther • Marsheila Rockwell • Blood Quantum & Other Hate Crimes (Fallen Tree Press, July)
• The Final Trick • Angela Liu • Strange Horizons 8/26/2024
• Giant Robot and His Person • Akua Lezli Hope • FIYAH 31
• The High Priestess Writes a Love Letter to The Magician • Ali Trotta • Uncanny 58
• The House of Mulberry Leaves • Ryu Ando • Crow & Cross Keys 2/7/2024
• In Graves Wood • Siân Thomas • Long Poem Magazine 32
• The Last Voyage: Island Relocation Program • Steve Wheat • Radon Journal 8
• Medicine For The Ailing Mortal, as Told in Seven Stories • Silvatiicus Riddle • The Fairy Tale Magazine 5/1/2024
• The Museum of Etymology • F.J. Bergman • Star*Line 47.3
• My Queens Last Gift • Adele Gardner • Dark Dead Things 3
• Porphyria’s Lover • Anna Cates • Abyss & Apex 92
• The Price of Becoming a Villain is to Quell One’s Kin in a Charade of Pact with The Gods • Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan • The Deadlands 36
• Shattered Souls at Heaven’s Gate • Ayòdéjì Israel • The Deadlands 36
• Star Stitcher • A. J. Van Belle • Haven Spec 13
• Watching • Vonnie Winslow Crist • Shivers, Scares, and Chills (Dark Owl Publishing, October)
• We Makes It • J.H. Siegal • Penumbric April 2024 Issue
• What Beautiful Heavens These • Kaya Skovdatter • Strange Horizons 12/23/2024
• When it Really is Just the Wind, and Not a Furious Vexation • Kyle Tran Myrhe • Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day 8/6/2024
(1) ELGIN AWARDS NEWS. Members of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) have until May 31 to nominate books for the 2025 Elgin Awards.
The Elgin Awards, named for SFPA founder Suzette Haden Elgin, are presented annually by SFPA for books published in the preceding two years in two categories, Chapbook and Book.
2025 Elgin Chair: Juleigh Howard-Hobson
Only books of speculative poetry first published during 2023 and 2024 are eligible. Books containing fiction as well as poetry are not eligible. More than half of the poems in the book must be unequivocally speculative as determined by Chair. Translations into English are eligible.
(2) PETER DAVID FUNDRAISER. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Peter David, in addition to having written many fine issues and runs of comics (Hulk, Young Justice, Spider-Man, Supergirl, etc.), and sff (including Star Trek novels), and TV episodes (including Babylon 5) and games, wrote a wonderful, informed-and-informative opinion column “But I Digress…” for the Comic Buyers Guide (which, I see, there are two book collections of).
Now he (and his family) need our help! I see that the GoFundMe has already done remarkably…but it hasn’t yet reached its goal. As of 6:30PM ET today (Sunday, March 16), it’s reached around 55% of its goal.
And here’s the CBR.com article where I saw it – “Comics Icon Peter David Needs Our Help” — with (my) caveat that this article’s link to the GoFundMe has got lots of tracking/etc stuff in their link… I’m planning to use the link I provided just above to make my own donation, later tonight.
As a child, Daveed Diggs and his schoolfriend William Hutson drew pictures inspired by the space-age album covers of funk legends Parliament, filled with gleaming UFOs and eccentric interplanetary travellers. Diggs would grow up to become an actor, winning a Tony award as the first person to play the roles of Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in Hamilton. He’s since voiced Sebastian the crab in The Little Mermaid’s live-action remake and appeared in Nickel Boys, which was nominated twice at this year’s Oscars. But away from Hollywood and Broadway, he’s still dreaming up fantastical sci-fi worlds with Hutson – now through one of the most imaginative, harrowing projects in underground rap.
Along with Hutson’s college roommate Jonathan Snipes – who had a similar childhood experience, inspired by the otherworldly paintings adorning classical albums – the friends formed Clipping in Los Angeles in 2010. Over Hutson and Snipes’s production, Diggs weaves blood-soaked horror stories about racial violence or fables of enslaved people in outer space. On their new album Dead Channel Sky, he raps with mechanical precision over warped rave music, creating a noirish cyberpunk world of hackers, clubgoers, future-soldiers and digital avatars.
Their music has earned them nominations for sci-fi’s highest honour, the Hugo awards, and it’s made all the more distinctive by Diggs’s decision to avoid using the first person in his lyrics. “In an art form that is so self-conscious, is it still rap music if we take that out?” he says on a video call alongside his bandmates. “We discovered pretty quickly that it is, but that it also opened possibilities.” His raps feel like cinema or musical theatre, narrating action and voicing dialogue with characters of – generally – ambiguous gender and race. “What we’ve found from fans is that, because we don’t have much to do with these characters ourselves, it has allowed people to put a lot of themselves into them, to come up with reasons why this stuff is happening, and make links between songs we didn’t think of.”…
During the interview, Martin mentioned that he wanted to see his novel Fevre Dream adapted. He also admitted that there were potential issues that might hinder it getting made, especially as it is a historical horror novel about vampires on a steamboat set in the 1850s. However, Martin maintained that, as long as the source exists, the stories can still be told. “But Frank Herbert probably didn’t think Dune would ever be made. Well, they made it, but you know what happened there,” Martin said, implying the 1984 film’s mixed reception. “If Frank had lived long enough and seen what they’re doing now, that would be great, but he’s gone.”…
…Martin recalled his brief interactions with Frank Herbert and the Dune author’s own experience with his wildly popular series, saying:
“Frank made Dune, which was one of the great, great books in the history of science fiction. But I know him a little, not a lot, just over conventions, and I think he was a little bothered that all they wanted was Dune. ‘Give us another Dune. Give us another Dune. Give us another Dune.’ He wrote other good books. He wrote Under Pressure, a deep-sea novel about exploration. He wrote The Santaroga Barrier. That’s all of us writers. We want our other children to get some attention, too.”…
Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday resurrected debunked rumors that public schools were putting litter boxes in classrooms for students dressed as cats, amplifying right-wing criticism of some educators as he pushes for a statewide private school voucher program.
The Texas Republican told a gathering of pastors at a Baptist church in Austin that the so-called furries trend is “alive and well” in communities across the state, and that lawmakers needed to ban it.
He endorsed newly filed legislation by state Rep. Stan Gerdes called the “Forbidding Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying in Education (F.U.R.R.I.E.S) Act,” which would prohibit any “non-human behavior” by a student, “including presenting himself or herself … as anything other than a human being” by wearing animal ears or barking, meowing or hissing. The bill includes exceptions for sports mascots or kids in school plays.
Gerdes’ office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The bill didn’t have any immediate cosponsors.
Pantheon, the animated TV series that adapts stories by Hugo award-winning Science Fiction author Ken Liu, is one of the most ambitious Science Fiction series on television. It depicts the Singularity from the point of view of a grieving young girl and her family as they discover her late father has been illegally uploaded into a digital consciousness as part of a tech corporation’s plans for the next step in human evolution. Pantheon is a complex and ambitious Science Fiction series, covering topics like the uploading of human consciousness, The Singularity, Quantum entanglement, and the moral, ethical, philosophical, and existential questions that come with it, along with a commentary on capitalist exploitation…
Congratulations on the complete story of “Pantheon” finally becoming available. Can you take us back to how you came up with the original stories that ended up in “The Hidden Girl and Other Stories”? Did you just start with one before you felt inspired to explore the ideas further?
[Ken Liu] Thank you! It’s such a pleasure to talk about Pantheon. The show is based on seven stories I wrote: “The Gods Will Not Be Chained,” “The Gods Will Not Be Slain,” “The Gods Have Not Died in Vain,” “Carthaginian Rose,” “Staying Behind,” “Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer,” and “Seven Birthdays.” Collectively, I refer to them as the “Singularity” stories. Six of them can be found in my collection, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories.
The three “Gods …” stories were originally written for the Apocalypse Triptych anthologies edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey. From these, you get the basic plot line of Maddie and her dad and the uploaded “gods.” The other stories are set in the same universe and explore the world before, after, and during the apocalypse of UIs taking over the world.
However, I didn’t write the three Apocalypse Triptych stories first. I’ve been exploring the concept of consciousness uploading in fiction for over two decades (the very first story in this universe, “Carthaginian Rose,” was my first published story, all the way back in 2002).
Why have I been writing about this subject so much? The idea of uploading minds is old and quite popular among some groups in Silicon Valley (for whom the success of uploading always seems to be just about a decade or so away). On the one hand, from a materialist perspective, it seems easy to accept the idea that human consciousness can run on different hardware, including upgraded hardware that could unlock our full potential. On the other hand, it also seems that if you “upload” in the manner described in my stories, the uploaded version would not be a “continuation” of you, at least not from the perspective of the you that dies in the process. The premise, uniting boundless hope with existential horror, is irresistible to the imagination. Stories that explore this theme, such as Pantheon and the video game SOMA, tend to generate a lot of debates among fans precisely because of this paradox.
Leading VFX and animation studio Framestore had the recent good fortune of working from previs to postvis to final on Jon M. Chu’s award-winning hit musical adventure, Wicked. On the film, Framestore Pre-Production Services devised the camera angles and movements for sequences involving Nessarose Thropp’s levitating wheelchair, Elphaba taking flight, and Doctor Dillamond.
“The chorography is similar, from action scenes through to musical numbers,” notes Christopher McDonald, Visualization Supervisor, Framestore. “A great starting point is to look at storyboards to get a representation of whether it’s a set or location and then block out the action literally from a top-down perspective. That’s a strong basis because it’s always something you can refer back to once you’ve got that basic blocking in place. On “Defying Gravity,” in particular, we worked quite closely with the stunt team, which had a bunch of tests that were done with the various rigs. They had all of these concepts for movements that Elphaba was going to perform at certain points during the song. Then it was a case of figuring out how do we fit this in? How is it going to look? How are we going to shoot it? Those are the building blocks for scenes like that.” …
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cora Buhlert.]
March 16, 1961 — Todd McFarlane, 64.
By Cora Buhlert: Todd McFarlane, comic creator, toymaker and noted baseball fan, was born on March 16, 1961, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He fell in love with both comics and baseball at an early age. His attempts to become a professional baseball player never worked out. His attempts to become a professional comic artist did.
I first became aware of McFarlane’s work – no, not via Spider-Man or Spawn – but via the obscure DC Comics series Infinity Inc. which featured the children of DC‘s golden age superheroes, the Justice Society of America, engaging in some superheroing of their own. The series ran from 1984 to 1988, McFarlane provided the art from 1985 to 1987.
I was always more of a Marvel fan and bought my first issue Infinity Inc. by accident, because I mistook a green-skinned woman on the cover of an issue for She-Hulk.The green-skinned woman turned out to be Jennie-Lynn Hayden a.k.a. Jade, daughter of the golden age Green Lantern Alan Scott, but this comic I had bought by accident nonetheless intrigued me enough that I started reading the series regularly. I loved the premise of the kids of established superheroes forming their own group as well as the soap operatic antics, particularly the love triangle between Fury, Nuklon and Silver Scarab. The dynamic and engaging art by the then unknown Todd McFarlane certainly didn’t hurt either.
The love triangle I had followed with bated breath eventually concluded with Fury and Silver Scarab marrying, which annoyed me, because I was team Nuklon, and I moved on to other comics. So did Todd McFarlane. First, he worked on Batman: Year Two and then moved over to Marvel to work on The Incredible Hulk.
In 1988, Todd McFarlane got his big break, when he took over pencilling duties on The Amazing Spider-Man. The friendly neighborhood web slinger was a perfect match for McFarlane’s overly detailed art style. McFarlane depicted Spider-Man swinging in mid-air in dynamic, contorted poses and turned his webbing, usually depicted quite plainly, into an elaborate tangle of individual strands.
The highly detailed art style of Todd McFarlane and other artists who came up in the late 1980s like Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld or Erik Larsen was much criticized in later years – not without reason, because McFarlane was much better at covers and splash pages than at visual storytelling. But in the late 1980s this style felt like a breath of fresh air, because it was so different from anything that had gone before.
The career trajectories of the superstar comic artists of the late 1980s and early 1990s – Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld – are remarkably similar. All three took over a mainstream Marvel title – The Amazing Spider-Man, The Uncanny X-Men, The New Mutants – and gained lots of acclaim for their work on these already popular titles. They created characters popular to this day – McFarlane’s most famous Marvel creation is Venom – and achieved superstar status. In response, Marvel relaunched these titles with a flashy number one issue with multiple variant covers that became some of the bestselling American comic books of all time and also launched the comic speculation bubble of the 1990s.
But trouble was brewing behind the scenes. The young superstar artists wanted more creative control on the titles they were working on and also clashed with veteran Marvel writers and editors. Marvel made concessions in order to keep their most popular artists happy, gave them co-creator credit on certain characters and also let them take over writing duties, whereby it quickly became apparent that McFarlane, Lee and Liefeld were much better artists (and even that is debatable, given the notable weaknesses particularly of Rob Liefeld) than writers. In McFarlane’s case, Marvel editors were not happy with McFarlane’s increasingly dark and violent art and storylines for Spider-Man, traditionally a more light-hearted character.
These simmering issues exploded in 1992, when Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Erik Larsen, Whilce Portaccio and Jim Valentino left Marvel to form Image Comics, an umbrella publisher for independent comic creators. McFarlane’s launch title for Image was Spawn, based on a character McFarlane had created as a teenager. Spawn No. 1 was a huge success and sold 1.7 million copies, making it the bestselling independent US comic of all time. McFarlane is still president of Image Comic to this day.
As a teenage comic reader, I knew nothing about the behind the scenes clashes at Marvel. All I knew was that all my favorite artists all left at the same time and started new titles, while over at Marvel the X-Men and Spider-Man books began their long decline. I did buy several Image titles, but very few of them appealed to me as much as the Marvel work by those same artists did. Spawn I dropped after a few issues, because it didn’t appeal to me at all. Other problems quickly became apparent as well with comics delayed for weeks and months. Spawn was one of the more consistent Image titles and came out with relative regularity. And because McFarlane realised that he was a better artist than writer, he hired various well-regarded writers for Spawn.
Todd McFarlane gradually lost interest in the ongoing Spawn comic and expanded into other fields. He made headlines by spending huge amounts of money on collectible baseballs and tried to enter the film business with led to a Spawn movie in 1997. In 1994 he also founded Todd Toys, renamed McFarlane Toys after Mattel insisted that they owned the rights to the name “Todd”, which was also the name of Barbie’s younger brother (who was ironically discontinued shortly thereafter). McFarlane Toys started off by producing action figures based on the Spawn comic series and branched out into action figures based on videogames, music, sports, horror films, anime and many other franchises. In 2018, McFarlane Toys also took over the DC Comics license from Mattel.
Once again, Todd McFarlane made a huge splash with his entry into the toy industry. Like his artwork, his action figures were a lot more detailed and realistic than action figures had been up to this point. Ironically enough, they also shared many of the same weakness, because while the figures were beautiful, they were also stiff and hard to pose. The character selection was lacking as well. For example, the DC Multiverse action figure line from McFarlane contains endless variants of Batman and Superman, including offbeat designs such as a Batman figure with an electric guitar, but lesser-known characters, particularly female characters (which McFarlane claims don’t sell and also turn little boys into serial killers – yes, really) were few and far between. Even a classic looking Wonder Woman was nigh impossible to find, let alone characters like Huntress or Jade, to whom I’d been introduced by McFarlane’s artwork almost forty years ago.
McFarlane’s biggest impact on the toy world, however, was indirect. Because in 1999, Jim Preziosi, Eric Treadway, H. Eric “Cornboy” Mayse and Chris Dahlberg, four sculptors working at McFarlane Toys to bring those beautiful action figures to life, left the company to form Four Horsemen Studios, an independent toy design company which designed the Masters of the Universe 200X and Classics lines as well as the DC Universe Classics line for Mattel, the Marvel Legends line for ToyBiz, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles line for NECA as well as the Mythic and Cosmic Legions lines for their own company. Many of the toys in my collection were designed by them.
Todd McFarlane is the subject of much criticism, a lot of it well deserved. However, he also changed the industries in which he worked – both comics and toys – forever. Image Comics broke through the stranglehold of Marvel and DC on the US comic market and offered a home for creator owned comics, while McFarlane Toys turned action figures from toys for kids into collectibles for adults, a market toy companies had barely explored before.
(10) CREEPERS, FICTIONAL AND REAL. [Item by Steven French.] Interesting interview with Róisin Lanigan who has ‘remade’ the haunted house genre for the rental age in her new novel (and cites The Amityville Horror, of course): “Róisín Lanigan: ‘I moved to London and got bedbugs’” in the Guardian.
Why was horror the right approach?
I’m a big horror fan. I was reading a lot about haunted houses, and thinking about how all haunted house stories are essentially about owning property and the huge burden that places on you psychologically. And then I was thinking, I wonder what the equivalent is for us, as millennials who rent? Alongside that, I was seeing a lot of my friends – and myself – beginning to live with their partners much earlier than we had been conditioned to think you might do so, for financial reasons.
That then brings complications, if you’re not quite ready to make that step. So the book is a ghost story set in the rental crisis, but it’s also about this young woman’s experience of a situation that she finds increasingly intolerable, and how she has no outlet to express that….
Whether it’s video games or animated movies and TV, you may have noticed that Black characters have matching hairstyles time and time again – often flat, two-dimensional and straight up unrealistic hairstyles. And this isn’t a coincidence. While advancements in depicting straight hair have been happening by leaps and bounds, Black hair animation has been stuck, until now.
A.M. Darke, an artist, game maker and professor in UC Santa Cruz’s Department of Performance, Play and Design, co-authored algorithms last month that animate three major characteristics of Black hair. Professor Darke joins us now to talk about her research. Thanks so much for being here.
A M DARKE: Thank you so much for having me.
RASCOE: What are these three attributes that could be illustrated in animation?
DARKE: So I’ll start by saying that whenever you’re tackling a research problem, you get to define, you know, what features matter and are important. So with straight hair, there have been certain features that say, oh, OK, if we hit this look, then we’ve got it, right? We’ve succeeded. For Black hair, that hadn’t happened. My part in this research is defining those targets. So the three targets that I defined to say, OK, these are essential features of Afro-textured hair was phase locking, switchbacks and period skipping. So I want to break that down.
RASCOE: Yeah, let’s start with the first one.
DARKE: So, phase locking is what we’re calling the kind of spongy matrix that happens when you have coilier and kinkier hair textures. So before the hair actually turns into sort of a defined curl, you kind of have this matrix of hair that – I say it’s kind of spongy because it’s sort of like each strand is sort of going in different directions.
RASCOE: Well, that’s my hair under my wrap right now.
DARKE: (Laughter).
RASCOE: That’s what my hair is. It is spongy, and it is not quite curled and then going in all different directions. And then what’s the next thing?
DARKE: Switchbacks – they’re the – sort of a secret sauce for adding a level of realism. For those of you who are old enough, we used to have telephone cords, and they were stretchy, and you might stretch the telephone cord, and it gets a kink in it. And so that is a switchback. It’s just when the curl doubles back on itself before rejoining or going in a different direction.
RASCOE: And then what’s that final third thing that you came up with in the paper?
DARKE: Period skipping – so this was another essential feature. And to simplify it, period skipping is really the frizz factor. So if you think about a coil and each sort of wave, we’ll call those periods. In clumped curls, all of the hairs are spiraling in the same direction, and that’s what we see as a defined curl. But as we know, curly hair very rarely just falls in line, and so you’ll have hairs that break out of the pattern, and so they skip the period. That is what gives the appearance of, like, frizzy or undefined hair….
(12) OLD SPICE SUPERHERO SCENTS. I must have missed these when they came out. The Batman and Superman variants are mainly offered on eBay and through some Amazon vendors. On the other hand, “Krakengard” is currently available as part of the Old Spice Wild Collection..
Traditional mechanical watches have a timeless quality only matched by the ageless, simple joy of classic arcade titles like Asteroids. To celebrate the 45th anniversary of Asteroids, Atari, and watchmaker, Nubeo released a slate of limited-edition wristwatches with a watch hand in the classic triangular, alien-blasting spaceship.
Atari and Nubeo’s Asteroids collection includes five styles with similarly colored bands. Each watch face features a classic scene from the original 1979 arcade hit, including a field of vector graphics-style asteroids and flying saucers. The spaceship doesn’t move across the screen, but it spins in the center while constantly firing at an incoming alien bogey.
A four-person crew entered the International Space Station early Sunday morning, part of a mission to relieve two astronauts who will now return to Earth after a protracted stay on the orbital base.
The arrival of the replacement crew means that NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore can now go home after more than 9 months in space. Their trip to the ISS in June was supposed to last just over a week, but it morphed into a much longer expedition when their Boeing Starliner spacecraft ran into technical problems and was sent back to Earth without a crew.
NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers — as well as Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi and Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov — floated through the ISS hatch at 1:35 a.m. ET. Sunday morning….
…Williams and Wilmore — along with fellow NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov — are set to depart the ISS for Earth no earlier than Wednesday, depending on weather conditions….
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Cora Buhlert, Patch O’Furr, 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 Daniel Dern.]
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) has posted the Rhysling Awards Long Lists of poems published in 2024.
SFPA’s juries will have until April 30 to pick the shortlists for the “Best Long Poem” category (50–299 lines; for prose poems, 500–1,999 words) and the “Best Short Poem” category (11–49 lines; for prose poems, 101–499 words). These selected poems will appear in the 2025 Rhysling Anthology which will be sent to SFPA members who will begin voting for the winners on July 1.
SHORT POEMS (83 nominated poems)
Abstain from Spinning, beauty • Dyani Sabin • Small Wonders 14
After they blasted your home planet to shrapnel • P. H. Low • Haven Spec 14
aftermath, in the city. a diary • Peter Roberts • Chrome Baby 133
Amateur Mycologists • Mariel Herbert • Baubles From Bones 2
Battle of the Sexless • Colleen Anderson • Bestiary of Blood (Crystal Lake Publishing, October)
A Black Hole is a Melting Pot That Will Make Us Whole • Pedro Iniguez • Mexicans on the Moon: Speculative Poetry from a Possible Future (Space Cowboy Books, November)
Bobblehead • Carol Gyzander • Discontinue if Death Ensues (Flame Tree Collections, October)
Born Against Teeth • Tiffany Morris • Grimm Retold (Speculation Publications, September)
Brandy Old Fashioned • Amelia Gorman • Eye to the Telescope 53
Briar Tea Party • Gretchen Tessmer • A Frolic of Fairies (West Avenue Publishing, April)
Bridge of Grass, Bridge of Suspension • Katherine Quevedo • The Inca Weavers Tale (Sword & Kettle Press, January)
Chronoverse • Jeffrey Allen Tobin • Star*line 47.3
Colony Xaxbara 4 • Kimberly Kuchar • The Space Cadet Science Fiction Review 2
Dietary Advice • P. S. Cottier • BFS Horizons 17
Dodging the Bullet • lisa M. Bradley • Small Wonders 13
there are no taxis for the dead • Angela liu • Uncanny 58
Things to Remember When Descending Through the Ocean • Sandra Kasturi • Poetry Society Stanza Poetry Competition October
Time Lord Thief • Vince Gotera • Altered Reality Journal June
the time travel body • Angel Leal • Radon Journal 8
Totality • Mary A. Turzillo • The New Verse News 45390
Transhumanist Classroom • Pedro Iniguez • Mexicans on the Moon: Speculative Poetry from a Possible Future (Space Cowboy Books, November)
traveling through breaths • Eva Papasoulioti • Radon Journal 6
Trinary • Amabilis O’ Hara • Heartlines Spec 4
Trip Through the Robot • Carolyn Clink & David Clink • Giant Robot Poems (Middle West Press, July)
Visions of Manhattan • Ian li • Eye to the Telescope 53
A War of Words • Marie Brennan • Strange Horizons 45551
We Carry Our Ghosts to the Stars • Richard Leis • Star*line 47.3
What Dragons Didn’t Do • Mary Soon Lee • Uppagus 6
Wildlife and Rainforests Inside My Father • Angel Leal • Strange Horizons 45452
The Witch Recalls Her Craft • Angel Leal • Uncanny 60
The Woodcutter • Anna Cates • Disabled Tales 45477
You Are a Monster • Beth Cato • Worlds of Possibility 45505
You can’t just sit there crafting hopefully-viral insta posts and expect a dragon to show up (tl; dnr: how to catch a dragon c. 2024) • Melissa Ridley Elmes • Eccentric Orbits 5 (Dimensionfold Publishing, October)
LONG POEMS (61 nominated poems)
9n lives • Mary A. Turzillo • Eccentric Orbits 5 (Dimensionfold Publishing, October)
The Baker at the Beggar’s Wedding • Amelia Gorman • Spectral Realms 20
Battle of the Bards • Frank Coffman • Forgotten Ground Regained 2
Becoming a Veteran • Herb Kauderer • Distilled from Water (Written Image Press, July)
The Blackthorn • Mary Soon Lee • Dreams & Nightmares 126
Body Revolt • Casey Aimer • Strange Horizons 45502
A Bullock of Special Burden • Denise Dumars • Animal Gnosis (Alien Buddha Press, September)
Change Your Mind • Gwendolyn Maia Hicks • Small Wonders 16
Comet, Cow(nota)girl, & A Cry for Cold • Elizabeth R. McClellan • Eco Punk literary 2
Defiance by Cake • Beth Cato • Worlds of Possibility August
Divide By Zero • Michael Bailey • Written Backwards 12/22/24 Post
Draco Hesperidum • Eric Brown • Eternal Haunted Summer Summer Solstice 2024
(0) Spent a great Saturday at my brother’s to celebrate my birthday, which is today. And Cat Eldridge celebrated yesterday, because his really is on the 15th. So it’s been a candle-powered 770 weekend.
(1) SFPA ELECTION. The Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) has voted in Brian U. Garrison as their next SFPA President. Brian’s term begins March 1.
The vote breakdown by percentage was:
Brian U. Garrison – 48% Wendy Van Camp – 38% Miguel Mitchell – 14%
(2) ONLY A SMOKING CRATER LEFT. Somebody on Bluesky got themselves blocked in a hurry.
(3) GREENE FOLLOW-UP. Naomi King has posted another video about her sexual assault allegations against fellow YouTuber Daniel Greene: “Daniel Greene Situation Part 2”. In relating their history King makes a number of what a lawyer would call “admissions against interest”, statements about their conduct that tend to make a speaker more credible because they make them more vulnerable to criticism.
(4) ALIEN ON HIS MIND. Camestros Felapton’s “Thinking about Xenomorphs” is inspired by Alien: Romulus but (as he says) is not a review. It’s a place for him to express opinions like this one:
….I think I dislike the whole bit that runs through the series of the xenomorphs being some kind of perfect organism. They are weird and nasty and I really like them as monsters, they really are terrifying. They are at their deadliest when people underestimate them or attempt to control them. That aspect of them symbolically punishing ignorance or hubris gives them a supernatural vibe without them ever actually being supernatural*….
A huge event, with hundreds of participants, takeout pizza boxes stacked shoulder-high on carts, a jazz-rock band, a d.j., teams from about thirty high schools, robots by the dozen, and robot parts by the (probably) thousands spread out on tables in the cafeteria: it was the first day of the qualifiers for the all-city semifinals in the NYC first Robotics Competition, at Francis Lewis High School, in Queens.
Zigman asked the team to wait a second while he took a group photo, as he had done with other winners. “I love this,” he said, as the kids dispersed. “Look at who was here today. All kinds of kids—African Americans, Indians, West Indians, Asians, Hispanics, Muslims, Jews. Our stem centers, which stay open every day until 10 p.m., are just thronged. We have kids working on robots in the halls. Kids are fascinated with this. They work together, help one another, pick up math skills almost unconsciously. Differences of race, religion, your truth, my truth—all of that vanishes. Here the truth is the robots.”…
(6) PRESERVING THE FIRST CAP. In “Saving Captain America” – the Guardians of Memory tell Library of Congress blog readers how they did it.
The original concept drawing of Captain America is in the Print and Photograph Division at the Library of Congress. It is one of the feature artifacts in the Stephen A. Geppi Collection of Comic and Graphic Arts that was donated to the Library in 2018.
Captain America was the creation of Joe Simon who sketched this drawing in 1940 while working for Timely Comics, now Marvel Comics. It was a turbulent time following the Depression with the threat of war in the news. So it is easy to understand the appeal of Captain America, an ordinary man who was given extraordinary powers, a figure who embodied our American ideals. Simon’s character, drawn in black ink, with a patriotic uniform colored with red and blue watercolor, joined the other popular comic superheroes of the day; Superman and Batman.
The drawing arrived at the Library in a gold oval frame that measured roughly 14 x 20 inches.
Shortly afterwards it was unframed by a specialist who discovered a pencil drawing on the back along with several condition problems that prompted her to bring it to the Conservation Division for treatment.
During my initial examination I found that the drawing was on a rectangular sheet that had been cut multiple times and folded up to make the drawing fit into the small frame. The fragile paper had split apart at some of the folds where sticky white tape had been applied to repair them. Patches of gummy adhesive with paper residues from the old window mat attachment were on the front of the drawing. The paper was also badly distorted from being confined in the frame preventing the paper, a hygroscopic material, from expanding during periods of higher humidity.
My goal was to unfold the paper without causing more damage and to remove all the white tape repairs, adhesive, and paper patches. The paper splits and cuts were to be mended and the drawing flattened and housed in conservation quality materials….
Thousands of letters, photographs, illustrations and books from one of the world’s largest private Lewis Carroll collections have been donated to the UK out of the blue by an American philanthropist.
The extraordinary gift has been made to Christ Church, University of Oxford, where Carroll lectured and where he met Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which celebrates its 160th anniversary this year.
The collection includes more than 200 autograph letters, some of which are unpublished. There are a number to his “child-friends” and their parents, often sending riddles and jokes and copies of books. Some shed light on Carroll’s interest in the theatre.
There are also significant early editions, including the Alice books, The Hunting of the Snark and mathematical works. A copy of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground is inscribed to Alice’s mother by Carroll: “To her, whose children’s smiles fed the narrator’s fancy and were his rich reward: from the author. Xmas 1886.”
Carroll is considered one of the best amateur photographers of his day and the donation includes more than 100 of his photographs. The subjects include his friends and noted figures such as the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti….
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
February 16, 1954 — Iain M. Banks. (Died 2013).
By Paul Weimer: Some of you might think I am fortunate, for I still have plenty of Iain Banks yet to read.
You might ask why I, such an indefatigable reader of science fiction, would be in such a position. And, unfortunately, it is because of the first Banks novel I read, and one that I bounced hard off. Inversions.
Inversions is the Culture novel that is not a real Culture novel. It’s set on a distant planet, at a medieval level of technology with only the vaguest hints that there is a wider world out there. It’s got alternating points of view, and there is a hint of technology and one bit of implication about one of the characters, it is otherwise a fantasy novel without a scrap of magic or wonder. It’s dry and mundane and I wondered if Banks was for me at all. So I didn’t read Banks for years thereafter. I decided that the Culture could flourish in splendor without me. The Culture didn’t need me as a reader. It had its champions and readers.
And then Banks tempted me to try his work again.
Because Banks wrote a multiverse novel, Transitions. Readers of my reviews and criticism know I am all about multiverse novels, long before the multiverse was a thing. And so when Banks announced he was writing one, I was mildly curious. (And then a friend told me it was fantastic and I needed to read it)
So, I decided to give Transitions a try.
To my delight, unlike Inversions, I found Transitions to be one of the most interesting and innovative novels in the subgenre. Stunningly and engagingly well written, and a fantastic “chase sequence” unlike nearly anything I’ve ever read in cross world books. Philosophical, thoughtful, engaging, and highly literate. It was an eye-opener, and I started to reassess my opinion of Banks’ work. Maybe, I thought, Inversions was an outlier. But Mount TBR is huge and I didn’t read a Banks novel for some years afterwards.
I finally started reading Culture novels with The Player of Games a couple of days ago. Yes, it was for a podcast, and having fondly remembered Transitions, I finally decided to give Banks and The Culture a chance. And I am so glad that I did. I finally got to see this mysterious Culture and its post-scarcity society, put in contact and dealing with a dangerous, avaricious empire. I finally saw what others have seen in the Culture novels in specific and Banks’ work in general. The depth of worldbuilding, psychology, sense of wonder and the big philosophical questions. Big damn space opera but space opera of a metier quite unlike most in the field.
I haven’t had a chance to dip back into The Culture since, however. But one day I will. I am not going to try and re-read Inversions, though.
The entirety of the lower 48 states, the greater Americas, and some regions beyond will witness — weather permitting — a total lunar eclipse the night of March 13 and into the early morning of March 14. This special cosmic event occurs when the moon, Earth, and sun are aligned. Long, red wavelengths of light pass through Earth’s atmosphere and are projected onto the moon in majestic rusty or crimson colors.
(11) THROWING HANDS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The UK has a new entrant in the race to develop our robot overlords. And they have the ballscojones guts to name the company Humanoid. Yet, no one has yet been brave enough to name their bot Hymie. “UK firm unleashes new humanoid robot with hands faster than humans” at Interesting Engineering.
…Humanoid’s mission is to lead the society into a new future where humans and robots interact seamlessly in the same way that people use the smartphones today. This could help to address a whole host of issues, including workforce shortages in certain industries.
“At Humanoid, our team believes in a future where humans and machines work side by side, not in competition, but in harmony,” Sokolov explained in a press statement. “This societal shift will address social issues such as workforce shortages and aging population while giving people more freedom to focus on more creative and meaningful work.”
“The strongest argument in favor of humanoids is that the world is already designed for humans, so they can seamlessly integrate and quickly adapt to existing environments,” he continued. “With a world-class team, Humanoid has ambitious plans for the year ahead. In 2025, we plan to develop and test our alpha prototype for two platforms — wheeled and bipedal. We’re also in ongoing discussions with leading retail companies for potential pilot projects.”…
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Michael J. Walsh, Andrew (not Werdna), 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 Steve Davidson.]
…So how do I write my unintentionally unreliable narrators? I am so glad you asked. (I am pretending you asked, because I am an unreliable essayist.)
You might think the most important thing is to understand the person who is narrating the story, whether in first person or close third person. And seeing how this person’s mind works and how they fail to understand key aspects of their own life. And sure, this is super important, and it’s a pre-requisite of writing a good narrative POV to begin with. If you’re telling a story from a particular person’s perspective, you should absolutely know their preconceptions, including the stuff they tend to overlook.
But I’d say that’s not actually the most vital part of creating an untrustworthy narrator. Rather, the most important step is to get fully into the heads of the characters who aren’t narrating. Think about it: how do you know what your POV character is failing to see, unless you know what these other characters are aware of and how they see the situation? And why this is important to those other characters? (I’m assuming you’re not doing an omniscient POV, because that’s sadly rare these days — and if the POV isn’t omniscient, then the only other way of looking at the events of your story must come from one of the other characters. There’s no objective truth, just competing perspectives.)
One common technique for insinuating that your narrator is missing something is to sneakily insert information in a way that makes it clear the narrator isn’t noticing it. A lot of tight-third-person narrators do this to great effect: You’ll get pieces of information through the POV character’s perspective, and yet this protagonist will miss it entirely. No shade to that technique — I love it. But this isn’t my favorite way of insinuating that a narrator is a bit out to lunch. Not by a long chalk.
I vastly prefer when one of the other characters in a story says something (or does something) that indicates that they have been viewing the events of the story in a radically different way, and it takes the protagonist or POV character by surprise. I like this better because it gives the other characters more of a life of their own, and because the protagonist themself is forced to grapple with the fact that they’ve been reading things wrong. (Or at least, not reading them the same as their friends.)…
(2) CLARION WEST SEEKS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR. Clarion West will hire the organization’s first Development Director, after receiving a grant from the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust of Vancouver, Washington.
This is a full-time, hybrid position based in Seattle, WA. More information about the position and how to apply can be found here.
This grant will provide the capacity to hire our new development position and to establish the infrastructure for a capital project that will help ensure the long-term sustainability of the Six-Week Workshop — effectively expanding our summer residency program.
Clarion West has no physical location of its own for classrooms, events, and residency programs. Instead, the organization partners with other organizations and universities when offering in-person classes, workshops, and other events. However, these spaces are often not easy to access and prohibitively expensive.
As a long-term solution, the organization seeks to lay the groundwork for a community center serving Pacific Northwest organizations who specialize in supporting writers, literacy, and publishing of underrepresented and marginalized groups. The organization seeks to purchase or renovate a facility that provides free and reduced rate spaces for speculative fiction artists, writers, and those that love their work.
(3) SFPA PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION. Members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association have until January 31 to vote on the three candidates for President of the organization:
Brian Garrison
Miguel O. Mitchell
Wendy Van Camp
The new term will begin March 1, 2025.
(4) WELL-SEASONED TRIVIA. [Item by Steven French.] The BBC has a long running quiz show known as Richard Osman’s House of Games hosted by ‘quiz giant’ and cozy crime author Richard Osman (of the Thursday Murder Club series) and in which each round features a different kind of quiz game. However, the final round is always ‘Answer Smash’ in which contestants have to ’smash’ the answer to a question into the name of the object pictured below it and earlier this week one of the questions was ‘Which starship captain is played by Patrick Stewart in Star Trek: Next Generation?’ with the picture being of some pale looking seed pods. Trekkies and curry-lovers across the UK all leapt up as one with the answer …!!
As a very young reader, I adored Encyclopedia Brown and “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.” After I begged my personal literary curator (a.k.a. my librarian mother) for more stories that felt like puzzle-solving, she got me started on Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, which eventually led to Agatha Christie and Mary Higgins Clark. My real obsession began in the late ’80s in college, when I would browse the $1 paperbacks at Powell’s in Portland, Ore. I discovered a slew of smart, gritty female sleuths who began to feel like friends — Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski, Karen Kijewski’s Kat Colorado, Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone. I never dreamed I’d have a row of my own books on those same shelves.
Are there times when being a trained lawyer gets in the way of telling a good story?
In a great legal thriller like “Presumed Innocent,” the technical details are not the star. Instead, Scott Turow’s expertise infuses his characters and the creation of the world itself. In hindsight, I probably used my lawyer brain too much in my debut, because I was insecure trying my hand at a novel. These days, if I find myself writing about the law itself, I ask myself what it adds to character, plot or setting — and then I usually delete it. Wanda Morris is only three books in, and she’s already been compared to Turow and John Grisham for good reason.
The trio of friends at the center of your novel call themselves “The Canceled Crew.” Why was it important that social-media blowback figure in the story?
I’m fascinated by the way we collectively decide that strangers on the internet are either completely perfect or the worst humans ever, based on a few seconds of social media. At a time when the most rewarding books are ones in which the good guys aren’t all good, and bad guys aren’t entirely bad, it’s bizarre that we don’t have more nuance when it comes to characterizing real people whose real lives are affected by the weird sort of fan-fiction that gets crowdsourced online….
The principle at the heart of Annie Baker’s plays can most easily be described as the “communality born of circumstance.” Most of Baker’s plays are some variation on the following premise: A group of otherwise-unrelated strangers are brought together in a single purgatorial space; slowly, the exterior world melts away. When they leave the room, that whole world dies with them.
Sometimes, as is the case in Infinite Life, they are guests at a health resort; elsewhere, in The Flick and The Antipodes (my personal favorite, which you would know, if you cared about me), they are colleagues. The stage, to Baker, is static, stilted; set-pieces do not change. For the next two hours or so, she seems to tell her viewers, this room is all that exists in the world.
Not coincidentally, this is very much what it feels like to be at a comic convention: seven hours, or thereabouts, in a hall where time, casino-like, slips away, and the two most frequent questions you are asked — if you’re me, at least — are “Hey, how are you doing?” (to which the answer is usually “Who’s to say, man”) and “Is that all you bought so far?” (to which the answer is “No, I got three more bags full, I just put them behind a friend’s table, I have a problem, I know”).
But, triumphant and physically burdened, I returned from England — the country so joyful that on Christmas of 2003 the #1 song on the charts was Gary Jules’ godawful cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World” — with several pounds of books purchased at this year’s Thought Bubble Festival. I now intend to tell you about three of them. I hope that’s okay with you.
(7) SARGENT Q&A ABOUT ZEBROWSKI. Paul Grondahl interviewed Pamela Sargent about her partner, the late George Zebrowski who died December 20: “Grondahl: George Zebrowski, prolific sci-fi writer, 78” in the Albany (NY) Times-Union.
…“We both thought he’d come home and write again, but his body just gave out,” said Pamela Sargent, his partner since 1964, when they met as freshmen philosophy students at Binghamton University.
“Even back then, he was very interested in science fiction and wanted to be a writer more than anything else,” Sargent said.
Sargent had gone on a few dates her freshman year with Zebrowski’s dormitory roommate, but when the roommate failed to show up at her dorm for a planned date, Zebrowski showed up instead.
“We’ve been together ever since,” said Sargent, a widely published novelist in fantasy and historical fiction genres.
They have lived together since 1970, but never married. “We decided marriage wasn’t going to change anything,” Sargent said. They did not have children and devoted themselves to scratching out a living as full-time writers.
“It was never easy, and we had penurious years,” she said.
Zebrowski supplemented meager book royalties with freelance writing — essays for Omni magazine, book reviews and a column for Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine. The couple also were paid editors for Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association’s Bulletin, a trade publication.
The couple collaborated on four write-for-hire novels in the Star Trek series. “Those were the only books we wrote together because we didn’t want to have personal disputes masked as editorial suggestions,” she said.
“George was meticulous about his prose,” she said. “He hated sloppy prose and if I committed a really wretched sentence, he’d call me out on it.”
Zebrowski wrote in a small study stuffed with books in the front of the house and Sargent’s book-crammed office was in the back. Their spare bedroom in the middle was a reference library with shelves of scientific volumes. They shared the house with a black-and-white black cat named Spencer (after Spencer Tracy).
When finances got especially tight, Zebrowski would sell a rare edition from the couple’s library of more than 5,000 volumes that engulfed a small bungalow they bought in 1996.
“We’ve got walls of books in every room except the bathroom,” Sargent said….
By Paul Weimer: One of my first two SF books bought for me was the Good Doctor’s collection I, Robot (the other, for those wondering, was The Martian Chronicles by Bradbury). Needless to say, between the two, I was hooked onto science fiction and soon either raiding my brother’s extensive collection, or lobbying to get an adult library card so I could check out “Real” science fiction at the library. Doctor Asimov’s endless source of ideas was half of that equation in getting me started in SF.
Asimov’s prose was, in fact, about as colorless as one can reasonably get. No one is totally devoid of style, but he was not a prose stylist and I didn’t read him for prose. (That would be the aforementioned Bradbury. I am firmly convinced that handing me such a pair of authors right off is part of the secret in getting me to read SF of a wide spectrum from the start).
I could name any number of favorites when it comes to Asimov’s work. The original Foundation? The Gods Themselves? One of his finely crafted short stories like “Nightfall” or “The Last Question“? How to choose? For fiction, I am going to finally land on The End of Eternity, his time patrol/time travel novel. It turned out to be the first time patrol novel that I ever read, and it made a huge impression. One of my recurring non player characters in my roleplaying games, Noys, is named for the primary female character in the book.
I should not neglect talking about his nonfiction which I consumed readily. Collections of his essays “Asimov on…” from his column in the Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy. My favorite, and I wore out a couple copies of it, was “Asimov on Numbers”. I would learn about everything from what a Dorothy Sayers novel has to do with factorials, to the tallest mountain on Earth (it is not Mount Everest). I wish these collections were in ebook form, I would buy them. Used copies of these books as well as all of his non fiction are expensive. I also enjoyed his nonfiction books on the Bible, and Shakespeare as well.
And I should plug here, Our Angry Earth, which he co-wrote with Frederik Pohl, in the late 1980’s. He scarily and presciently predicted what would happen, way back then, what would happen if we did not start to engage with the problem of climate change. The pair were, in fact, Cassandras of the first water.
I am unfortunately aware that he was a broken step, in person. This pains me. I still would have liked to meet him.
Isaac Asimov
(10) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Isaac Asimov’s “The Fourth Homonym” story.
So let’s look at Isaac Asimov’s “The Fourth Homonym” story. His Black Widowers stories of which this is one I think are some of the cleverest bar style stories ever done even if they weren’t set in a bar like Clarke’s White Hart tales.
These stories which were based on a literary dining club he belonged to known as the Trap Door Spiders. The Widowers were based on real-life Spiders, some of them well known writers in their own right such as Lin Carter, L. Sprague de Camp, Harlan Ellison and Lester del Rey.
This story was first published thirty-nine years ago in the Puzzles of the Black Widowers collection
There were sixty-six stories over the six Black Widowers volumes that were released. So far only one volume, Banquets of the Black Widowers, has been released as an ePub. And yes, I’ve got a copy on my iPad as they are well worth re-reading.
And now the beginning of this most excellent story…
“Homonyms!” said Nicholas Brant. He was Thomas Trumbull’s guest at the monthly banquet of the Black Widowers. He was rather tall, and had surprisingly prominent bags under his eyes, despite the comparative youthfulness of his appearance otherwise. His face was thin and smooth-shaven, and his brown hair showed, as yet, no signs of gray. “Homonyms,” he said.
“What?” said Mario Gonzalo blankly.
“The words you call ‘sound-alikes.’ The proper name for them is ‘homonyms.’ “
“That so?” said Gonzalo. “How do you spell it?”
Brant spelled it.
Emmanuel Rubin looked at Brant owlishly through the thick lenses of his glasses. He said, “You’ll have to excuse Mario, Mr. Brant. He is a stranger to our language.”
Gonzalo brushed some specks of dust from his jacket sleeve and said, “Manny is corroded with envy because I’ve invented a word game. He knows the words but he lacks any spark of inventiveness, and that kills him.”
“Surely Mr. Rubin does not lack inventiveness,” said Brant, soothingly. “I’ve read some of his books.”
“I rest my case,” said Gonzalo. “Anyway, I’m willing to call my game ‘homonyms’ instead of ‘sound-alikes.’ The thing is to make up some short situation which can be described by two words that are sound-alikes – that are homonyms. I’ll give you an example: If the sky is perfectly clear, it is easy to decide to go on a picnic in the open. If it is raining cats and dogs, it is easy to decide not to go on a picnic. But what if it is cloudy, and the forecast is for possible showers, but there seem to be patches of blue here and there, so you can’t make up your mind about the picnic. What would you call that?”
“A stupid story,” said Trumbull tartly, passing his hand over his crisply waved white hair.
“Come on,” said Gonzalo, “play the game. The answer is two words that sound alike.”
There was a general silence and Gonzalo said, “The answer is ‘whether weather.’ It’s the kind of weather where you wonder whether to go on a picnic or not. ‘Whether weather,’ don’t you get it?”
James Drake stubbed out his cigarette and said, “We get it. The question is, how do we get rid of it?”
Roger Halsted said, in his soft voice, “Pay no attention, Mario. It’s a reasonable parlor game, except that there don’t seem to be many combinations you can use.”
Geoffrey Avalon looked down austerely from his seventy-four-inch height and said, “More than you might think. Suppose you owned a castrated ram that was frisky on clear days and miserable on rainy days. If it were merely cloudy, however, you might wonder whether that ram would be frisky or miserable. That would be ‘whether wether weather.’ “
There came a chorus of outraged What!’s.
Avalon said, ponderously. “The first word is w-h-e-t-h-e-r, meaning if. The last word is w-e-a-t-h-e-r, which refers to atmospheric conditions. The middle word is w-e-t-h-e-r, meaning a castrated ram. Look it up if you don’t believe me.”
“Don’t bother,” said Rubin. “He’s right.”
“I repeat,” growled Trumbull, “this is a stupid game.”
“It doesn’t have to be a game,” said Brant. “Lawyers are but too aware of the ambiguities built into the language, and homonyms can cause trouble.”
The gentle voice of Henry, that waiter for all seasons, made itself heard over the hubbub by some alchemy that worked only for him.
“Gentlemen,” he said. “I regret the necessity of interrupting a warm discussion, but dinner is being served.”
Scott Wilson grew up obsessed with superheroes, but he never saw his own culture in the comic books he’d get lost in.
“When I was a kid, my favourite superhero was Wonder Woman. I’d twist a bath towel into a lasso and pretend it was the Lasso of Truth,” he says.
Scott grew up in Rubibi (Broome), spending his time on country around the Western Australian tourist town.
Spider-Man was the superhero who really captured his imagination, and he identified with the idea of a high school student by day, masked avenger by night.
But like most superheroes, without his mask, Spider-Man is a white man.
For Scott, it raised a very personalquestion: Why don’t I ever see myself in these stories?
As he grew up and learned to make his own superheroes, Scott found the answer in creating comics that draw from the world’s oldest living culture, and by sketching its newest figures.
He called it the Indigiverse. In this universe, the superheroes talk in traditional language, and draw their power from the Dreaming.
…You have always maintained that what you do is comics. But India is also a country where the “graphic novel” as a format was defined by the publication of a handful of books (Maus, Palestine, Persepolis, etc.) that included your own. What do you think about the romance comics you started with?
That rubbish? That was in Malta. I was young and that sort of fell into my lap because a publisher knew I was interested in drawing and suggested three options: children’s comics, action comics, or romance comics. I chose romance comics because that was so out of my league that I thought it would be kind of humorous. It ended up as a series called Imħabba Vera (“True Love”).I think it was the first [art] comic series in Malta at the time: black and white, 64-pagers, each written and drawn in one month. It was quite an effort to get those out. I burned out on it after six issues. Also, the fact that the publisher wasn’t paying me had something to do with burning out on it.
They were terribly drawn. But what was sort of amusing is that Malta had no history of comics, so I could tackle subjects that would be unacceptable in American comics. Romance comics, but the girl gets pregnant and has to go to Amsterdam to get an abortion. Malta is a Catholic country where abortion isn’t really allowed. So I explored those sorts of issues and no one really raised an eyebrow because I don’t think most people realised. This is not your typical comics fair, because they didn’t read comics. They didn’t really know what comics could do. It was good just to force me to draw, draw, draw.
I wish I could say my drawing improved a lot because of it. I don’t think it did. That took a lot more time.
But you had a robust readership. Are there plans to translate it? It did well. I can’t remember the figures or whatever, but I know they sold out and they were doing well.
I hope they are not translated. I hope those things are burned at the stake.
That’s what Kafka said about his work. Well, some things might be good for some academic who wants to understand or dilute whatever impact I’ve ever had. That’s what that stuff’s there for. It’s not good. It’s not probably not worth it. But I don’t know. Maybe one day when people get really obsessed about me…
Gary Johnson was clearing clay with a digger at the Oxfordshire quarry where he works when he hit an unexpected bump in the limestone surface.
“I thought, it’s just an abnormality in the ground,” he said. “But then it got to another, three metres along, and it was hump again, and then it went another three metres, hump again.”
What Johnson had discovered was part of an enormous dinosaur trackway dating to nearly 166m years ago, when the quarry was a warm, shallow lagoon crisscrossed by the huge creatures….
… Researchers have now unearthed about 200 large footprints at the site, making this the biggest dinosaur trackway ever found in Britain. The tracks are thought to have been made by two types of dinosaur: the herbivorous cetiosaurus, a sauropod that walked on four legs, and the smaller carnivorous megalosaurus.
So far, five separate trackways have been found stretching up to 150 metres in length, and experts from the universities of Oxford and Birmingham believe they could extend much further as only part of the quarry has been excavated….
(15) THE ANCESTORS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This week’s Nature cover story relates to a new technique for analyzing ancient DNA which will inform us as to how ancient civilizations migrated, merged and so forth…
Norse code
The use of genetic ancestry to trace history and probe events of the past is challenging because ancestries in many locations are relatively similar, making it hard to distinguish groups and populations. In this week’s issue, Leo Speidel, Pontus Skoglund and colleagues present a new approach called Twigstats that allows subtle differences in ancestry to be reconstructed in high resolution. The researchers use their technique to examine the genomic history of early medieval Europe. This allowed them to track the expansion of two streams of Scandinavian-related ancestry across the continent, as well a later stream of ancestry expanding into Scandinavia before the Viking Age (around 750–1050). The cover is inspired by the serpentine carvings found on Viking Age runestones and features the Elder Futhark runes for the DNA nucleotides A, T, G and C.
When Billy Crystal was about to begin filming his scenes for The Princess Bride, director Rob Reiner decided to completely change the scene by telling him three simple words, “forget the lines.” This not only completely changed the character, but nearly upended the production entirely.
[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Paul Weimer, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Mark Roth-Whitworth.]
(1) CITY TECH SF SYMPOSIUM. For Andrew Porter it was a short walk to yesterday’s City Tech SF Symposium in Brooklyn. He brought his camera with him and shot these photos during the “Asimov/Analog Writers Panel”.
L to R: Matthew Kressel, Mercurio D. Rivera, Sakinah Hoefler, Sarah Pinsker, moderator Emily Hockaday, senior managing editor of Analog and Asimov’s SF magazines. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.Emily Hockaday. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.Sakina Hoefler. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.
(2) SKYWALKER SHELTERS IN PLACE. The Franklin Fire has forced several well-known celebrities to evacuate, but some haven’t left.
The Franklin fire is raging through California’s Malibu coast, causing evacuations and ravaging homes while some celebrities like Mark Hamill shelter in place.
Hamill took to Instagram on Tuesday to share with fans that he would not evacuate his California home, with the “Star Wars” star telling his 6.2 million followers on the platform to “stay safe.”
“We’re in lockdown because of the Malibu fires. Please stay safe everyone! I’m not allowed to leave the house, which fits in perfectly with my elderly-recluse lifestyle,” Hamill wrote.
Hollywood legend Dick Van Dyke is also one of the celebrities in the affected area, saying on Facebook that he evacuated the area with his wife Arlene.
The Franklin Fire continued to explode in size overnight and covers 3,983 acres as of Wednesday morning with 7% containment, according to CalFire. Late Tuesday night, officials said 2,667 had burned. It was fueled by strong Santa Ana winds and low humidity, a dangerous combination prompting red flag warnings in the region through Wednesday evening….
Others who have evacuated include Cher, Eagles rocker Don Henley, and Cindy Crawford.
(3) PRODUCERS GUILD AWARDS. Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story is a nominee in documentary category for the 36th annual PGA Awards. The complete list of nominated documentaries is at the link. That is the first and only PGA category announced so far.
The SoA’s call comes following writers expressing frustration in recent months about celebrities writing books at a time when author incomes are in decline. Last year, Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown was criticised over her novel, Nineteen Steps, which was ghostwritten by Kathleen McGurl. While Brown publicly acknowledged McGurl’s work in an Instagram post, critics said that McGurl’s name “should be on the cover”.
JUST WEST OF CHICAGO, THERE is a little spot of spooky in the charming downtown of St. Charles, Illinois. Ghoulish Mortals is made up of equal parts immersive haunted house-style vignettes, macabre art gallery, and pop culture collector gift shop.
Haunting organ music leads you down the quaint downtown sidewalks and into the dark mysterious doors. As you make your way exploring through the shop, you will travel through a haunted mansion, a fortune teller’s tent, an 80s living room inspired by Stranger Things, a killer clown circus, abandoned hospital operating room, cannibal swamp cabin, and even come face to face with Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors.
If you love horror movies, true crime, the occult, oddities, or fantasy, leaving this shop empty-handed is nearly impossible!
(7) RHYSLING AWARD CHAIR NAMED. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) has announced the 2025 Rhysling Award Chair will be Pixie Bruner.
Pixie Bruner (HWA/SFPA) is a writer, editor, mutant, and cancer survivor. She lives in Atlanta, GA, with her doppelgänger and their alien cats. Her collection The Body As Haunted was published in 2024 (Authortunities Press). She co-curated and edited Nature Triumphs : A Charity Anthology of Dark Speculative Literature (Dark Moon Rising Publications). Her words are in/forthcoming from Space & Time Magazine, Hotel Macabre (Crystal Lake Publishing), Star*Line, Weird Fiction Quarterly, Dreams & Nightmares, Angry Gable Press, Punk Noir, and many more. She wrote for White Wolf Gaming Studio. Werespiders ruining LARPs are all her fault.
(8) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Thirty-two years ago, The Muppet Christmas Carol premiered, directed by Brian Henson (in his feature film directorial debut) from the screenplay by Jerry Juhl.
Based amazingly faithfully off that beloved story, it starred Michael Caine as Ebenezer Scrooge with a multitude of Muppet performers, to wit Dave Goelz, Steve Whitmire, Ed Sanders, Jerry Nelson, Theo Sanders, Kristopher Milnes, Russell Martin, Ray Coulthard and Frank Oz, to name just some of them.
I must single out Jessica Fox as the voice of Ghost of Christmas Past, a stellar performance indeed.
Following Jim Henson’s death in May 1990, the talent agent Bill Haber had approached Henson’s son Brian with the idea of filming an adaptation. It was pitched to ABC as a television film, but Disney ended up purchasing it instead. That’s why it’s only available on Disney+ these days.
Critics in general liked it with Roger Ebert being among them though he added that it “could have done with a few more songs than it has, and the merrymaking at the end might have been carried on a little longer, just to offset the gloom of most of Scrooge’s tour through his lifetime spent spreading misery.”
Ebert added of Caine playing Scrooge that, “He is the latest of many human actors (including the great Orson Welles) to fight for screen space with the Muppets, and he sensibly avoids any attempt to go for a laugh. He plays the role straight and treats the Muppets as if they are real. It is not an easy assignment.”
They did give him his own song which showed us the cast.
Those songs were by Paul Williams, another one of his collaborations with the Jim Henson Company after working on The Muppet Movie.
Box office wise it did just ok, as it made twenty-seven million against production costs of twelve million, not counting whatever was spent on marketing. And that Christmas goose.
Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a rather ungloomy rating of eighty-eight percent.
(9) COMICS SECTION.
Reality Check should not be surprised by these test results.
The writer responsible for the most celebrated episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, is launching a new gritty sci-fi series. As reported by Deadline,Morgan Gendel — writer of TNG’s “The Inner Light” — has just secured a deal with Welsh broadcaster S4C, Hiraeth Productions, Canada’s Fun Republic Pictures and Karma Film, to develop a new “eco-thriller” science fiction show currently titled Isolation. The in-development series will focus on an ensemble of characters attempting to combat climate change in the near future, who also encounter an extraterrestrial force capable of direct contact with human minds.
“There’s a whole ‘Inner Light,’ kind of linkage here, to the extent that both deal with alien technology and the human brain,” Gendel tells Inverse. “And you’ve got a team thrown together isolated from humanity to one extent or another. Those are not intentional [parallels]. My writing often puts people in a pressure cooker to see what emotions or truths boil out of them.”…
… All the same, Jean Ransy may fit the Surrealist bill even if he doesn’t seem to have had any lasting connections with those groups who regarded themselves as the official guardians of the Surrealist flame. Ransy was Belgian artist which makes him Surrealist by default if you subscribe to Jonathan Meades’ proposition that Belgium is a Surrealist nation at heart. (Magritte wasn’t a Surrealist, says Meades, he was a social realist.)
Ransy’s paintings appear at first glance like a Belgian equivalent of Rex Whistler in their pictorial realism and refusal to jump on the Modernist bandwagon. Whistler and Ransy were contemporaries (Whistler was born in 1905) but Whistler’s paintings were much more restrained even when outright fantasy entered his baroque pastiches. The “metaphysical” vistas of Giorgio de Chirico are mentioned as an influence on Ransy’s work so he was at least looking at living artists, something you never sense with Whistler. There’s a de Chirico quality in the tilted perspectives and accumulations of disparate objects, also a hint of Max Ernst in one or two paintings….
Le chemin de ronde au visage soleil (1985).
(12) JUSTWATCH SHARES 2024 TOP 10 LISTS. What were the most-watched movies and TV shows on streaming services in 2024? JustWatch compiled these year-end Streaming Charts based on user activity, including: clicking on a streaming offer, adding a title to a watchlist, and marking a title as ‘seen’. This data is collected from >45 million movie & TV show fans per month. It is updated daily for 140 countries and 4,500 streaming services.
2024 was packed with standout streaming hits. Movies like “Civil War”, “Oppenheimer”, and “The Fall Guy” drew huge audiences with their mix of action and drama. On the TV side, shows like “Shogun”, “Fallout”, and our streaming charts champion “The Bear” kept viewers hooked all year long. Whether it was blockbuster films or binge-worthy series, there was something for everyone. These titles set the tone for another exciting year in entertainment.
When the trailer for Danny Boyle’s belated zombie sequel 28 Years Later released on Tuesday, the less-than-rosy-cheeked appearance of the first film’s star, Cillian Murphy, did not escape comment.
A scene in which a strikingly skinny member of the undead suddenly rears up, naked, behind new star Jodie Comer was taken as confirmation of rumours that Murphy had returned for an appearance in the new film….
…Yet the Guardian can reveal that the actor playing “Emaciated Infected” in the film, due for release in June 2025, is not Murphy but rather newcomer Angus Neill.
Neill, an art dealer specialising in old masters, was talent-spotted by Boyle, who was much struck by his distinctive looks. Neill also works as a model, with his professional profile suggesting he has a 28-inch waist….
(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Ryan George takes us inside the “Elf Pitch Meeting” – one of the retro reviews stockpiled in anticipation of his baby arriving.
Will Ferrell is one of the most successful comedy actors of our time – but back in 2003, it was kind of a surprise to see him leading a Christmas movie as a giant non-elf. Elf ended up becoming a holiday classic, but it still raises some questions. Like what happened to that poor nun? Why didn’t the news reporter follow up on anything? Is Buddy the elf actually kind of creepy? So check out the pitch meeting that led to Elf to find out how it all came together!
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, 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 Cat Eldridge.]
(1) DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE. Paul Lynch’s book Prophet Song, set in a near future Ireland, is the 2024 Fiction Winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Lynch’s novel also received the Booker in 2023.
(2) THE BOOKSHELF IS THEIR COSTAR. Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin have launched a weekly newsletter called Shelfies, in which they get people to talk about their favorite bookshelf, and their connection with the books on it. Shurin declares, “It is unashamedly us snooping at people’s shelves.”
Take a unique peek each week into one of our contributors’ weird and wonderful bookshelves! We love books – and we’re the sort of people who love checking out other people’s collections! With Shelfies, we’ve asked a wide range of readers, authors and collectors from all walks of life to share not just their shelves with us – but the books that changed them.
From novelists to video game designers, scientists and film makers, and from London to Singapore, Ghana, Australia and New York and all points in between, Shelfies is a unique dose of book love directly into your inbox – sharing our love of books, with you.
(4) SFPA OFFICER ELECTION RESULTS. Starting January 1, 2025, Diane Severson Mori will be Vice President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association.
Science fiction often begins with a question of “what if”? And in 1960, Poul Anderson asked just such a question: What if aliens attempting to invade the Earth encountered a troop of medieval knights? And what if the knights won the ensuing struggle? This is the premise of The High Crusade, one of the most offbeat and entertaining science fiction novels of the early 1960s….
“Tonight We’re Wearing Waste Bags” by Elena Sichrovsky; Music by Patrick Urn; Read by Jenna Hanchey
“Dreamer, Passenger, Partner by Colin Alexander; Music by Phog Masheeen; Read by Jean-Paul L. Garnier
Theme music by Dain Luscombe
(7) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Anniversary: The Running Man (1987)
By Paul Weimer: Possibly the best of the Schwarzenegger SF movies of the late 1980’s. Yes, better than The Terminator, better than Predator, possibly on a par with Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The Running Man remains a biting satire of fascism, authoritarianism, consumerism, game shows, and a whole lot more.
The authoritarian hellhole that the United States, using violent game shows as an opiate to the masses is really on point, decades later, rather more plausible than ever. Some of the best (and by best, I mean scary) are some of the commercials and interstitial bits in between the actual Running Man show. The show where a man climbs a rope, trying to grab dollars with a vicious pack of dogs underneath him…or the neo-Puritanism revealed when an announcer shockingly reveals Amber may have had several lovers in a year.
Arnold strides through this film and carries it on his charisma, as a package deal with Richard Dawson, who plays Damon Killan as an evil version of his Family Feud persona. They have the best rapport and the movie sings when they finally meet each other. (I was surprised on a rewatch how long the movie actually takes to put the two of them in the same room as each other). I also think the movie hits the right level of action, adventure, social commentary, and humor.
And then there are the betting pool scenes. Long before betting truly has taken over sports, and a lot of other things, the betting on the TV show seemed to me at the time to be “over the top” (who would bet on a game show)? Naive me didn’t believe it…but in the years since, it makes absolute and corrosive sense that the general public would in fact bid on the game show and the deaths on the show. I mean, if The Running Man was made today, Draftkings would be advertising on The Running Man.
Sadly, given recent events…I think it might be too naive in thinking that the ending, where the crimes of the state being revealed lead to revolution and change, can actually be realistic in this day and age. But I can dream, right?
I don’t have any Egyptian looking trinkets in my collection, so this Olmec head my Dad brought back from Mexico years ago will have to do.
…“Remember, girls, we are looking for the Lost Tomb of Sibor. Scorpia, since your people hail from the Crimson Waste, you have knowledge of this wasteland that the Horde lacks…”
“Yes, but…”
“So I get why you need Scorpia. But why am I here, Shadow Weaver?”
“Because you are Force Captain, Catra. And because Scorpia didn’t want to go without you.”
“I’ll get you for this, Scorpia.”
“So lead the way, Scorpia. You do know where the tomb is, don’t you?”
“Yes, but… I don’t think this is a good idea, Shadow Weaver. The Tomb of Sidor is an accursed place. My people shun it and never go there.”
“Silly barbaric superstition. The Tomb of Sidor contains something of great value to the Horde and I mean to retrieve it for Lord Hordak. And now go, Scorpia. Take us to the Tomb.”
“Yes, but it’s your funeral.”
“Is that a promise?”
“Hush, Catra, she’ll hear you.”…
(10) WET WORK. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] It may be that there are sub-surface mini-seas on some of the moons of Uranus!
The Voyager 2 flyby of Uranus in 1986 revealed an unusually off-centred planetary magnetic field. Nine US and one Brit researchers have now re-examined the Voyager Solar wind data set. It reveals that Uranus was hit by a Solar windstorm at the time of the craft’s encounter with the planet. This Solar windstorm offset the planet’s magnetic field.
Similar observations in the Saturn system reveal that when its moons with sub-ice surface water orbit outside of the protection of Saturn’s magnetic field, probes cannot detect water-group ions; this is because they have been swept away by the Solar wind. The researchers therefore hypothesise that the absence of water-group ions when Voyager 2 passed by might not be due to an absence of moons sub-surface water but due to the Solar windstorm that was raging at the time that swept those ions away. It could be that some of Uranus’ moons do have sub-surface water. They hypothesise that Uranus’s two outer moons, Titania and Oberon, are more likely candidates for harbouring liquid water oceans.
Were Heathcliff to roam the blustery moors around Wuthering Heights today, he might be interrupted by a ping on his cellphone saying something like this: The wind is raging, so power is cheap. It’s a good time to plug in the car.
OK. So the 18th-century literary occupants of these windswept hills received no such pings.
But Martin and Laura Bradley do. They live in Halifax, an old mill town below the wuthering, or windy, heights of West Yorkshire. And when a squall kicks up, producing a surplus of electricity from wind turbines on the moor, their phones light up with a notification, like one that informed them of a 50 percent discount one Saturday in October….
…Octopus Energy, the country’s biggest electricity supplier, runs nine wind turbines on those hills. When it’s gusty, and power is abundant, it offers discounts. The Bradleys say they save upward of 400 pounds ($517) a year. Octopus says it not only attracts customers but also persuades communities that they benefit from new energy infrastructure.
“We’ve got these famously bleak, windy hills,” said Greg Jackson, the company’s chief executive. “We wanted to demonstrate to people that wind electricity is cheaper, but only when you use it when it’s windy.”…
(12) THE DEATHS FROM TROPICAL STORMS AND HURRICANES IN THE USA HAVE BEEN GREATLY UNDERESTIMATED. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In climate-change science fiction, people die in major climate events: cf. the film The Day After Tomorrow or the climate fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson.
In the real world, people die all the time and this enables demographers to calculate the number of expected deaths. Usually only a score or more deaths are associated with US tropical storms. These are due to obvious things like drownings or being hit by wind-blown debris.
Two US demographers have now looked the number of excess deaths (those above the expected death rate) between 1930 and 2015. They have found that there are an average of 7,000 – 11,000 excess deaths in the months following a tropical storm or hurricane. These deaths are mainly from infants (less than 1 year of age), people 1 – 44 years of age, and the black population. (Presumably the elderly were safe in a refuge while young adults were protecting property and so in harm’s way? But the very elderly also took a big hit.) The researchers did not look at the death certificates of all (around 100,000) those excess deaths over this eight-and-a-half decade period and so do not know exactly what it was they died of. This, they say, needs to be the subject of future research.
A Disney Holiday Short: The Boy & The Octopus follows the journey of a child who discovers a curious octopus has attached to his head during a seaside vacation. After returning home, the boy forms a true friendship with the octopus by introducing his new companion to his life on land — harnessing the power of the Force with his Jedi lightsaber, playing with his Buzz Lightyear action figure, and imagining Santa Claus’ route around the world with the map on his wall — before taking the lovable octopus out into the world to experience the joy of the holidays, hidden under his Mickey Mouse beanie….
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cora Buhlert, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Thomas the Red.]
This year’s Speculative Poetry Contest judge, Stephanie M. Wytovich, selected the winning pieces and honorable mentions from a pool of more than 416 anonymized entries.
LONG CATEGORY
1st Place: A Maiden’s Grimoire by Fija Callaghan 2nd Place: Stasis in Hyperdrive by Clarabelle Miray Fields 3rd Place: Panopticon by F. J. Bergmann
SHORT CATEGORY
1st Place: i watch shelley duvall’s faerie tale theatre when i am afraid of what’s to come by Kailey Tedesco 2nd Place: Inter-dimensional Bodice Ripper (Paperback, $1.98 + tax) by Kailey Tedesco 3rd Place: Reading Arthur C. Clarke, Sipping Hot Cocoa by Jonathan Pessant
DWARF CATEGORY
1st Place: Whirlpool by Colleen Anderson 2nd Place: She Reveals Herself by Tabor Skreslet 3rd Place: Perpetual Care by Christopher Ripley Newell
Prizes in each category (Dwarf, Short, Long) are $150 First Prize, $75 Second Prize, $25 Third Prize. Plus publication on the SFPA website for first through third places.
(1) WIN A DOCTOR WHO SCREENING. Doctor Who’s upcoming Christmas is getting a special early release for selected fans. As part of Doctor Who and Star Trek’s “Friendship is Universal” collaboration fans in the US and the UK are eligible to enter a competition to see the episode screened in their local movie theater for them and 30 others. Enter here: “Friendship Is Universal – a Festive Special Competition”.
Friendship is Universal is a celebration of the companionship and camaraderie that is at the heart of Doctor Who, both in the characters we love, and the heart (or hearts!) of every fan of the Whoniverse. Why not honour the friends and friendships you hold dear by entering this competition?
You could win the chance to bring Doctor Who to your local cinema this Christmas for an exclusive screening of the festive special, before it airs. Plus, you can invite your friends and family too!
To enter, please submit your details before 23:59 pm (BST) on 13 October 2024. Good luck!
(2) SF 101. Phil Nichols and Colin Kuskie tell listeners “Let’s Go Ape” in Episode 47 of the SF 101 podcast.
It’s fifty years since the TV series of Planet of the Apes debuted, enlivening the childhood of millions around the planet of the humans. Phil and Colin enjoyed the show as kids, but now undertake a celebratory rewatch, reviewing the adventures of Virdon (the blond one), Burke (the dark-haired one), and Galen (the hairy one).
We also have a Planet of the Apes quiz, and our usual round up of recommendations of past, present and future SF.
…The Authors Guild, the largest and oldest professional organization for writers in the United States, is teaming with a new start-up, Created by Humans, to help writers license rights to their books to artificial intelligence companies.
The partnership, announced Wednesday, comes as authors and publishers are wrestling with the rapid incursion of artificial intelligence into the book world. The internet is already flooded with books generated by A.I., and sophisticated chatbots can instantly generate detailed summaries of books and spew out material in the voice and style of popular writers.
The Authors Guild has taken an aggressive stance against the unauthorized use of books by A.I. companies to train large language models, which power chatbots that can generate complex and often evocative text. Last year, it brought a class-action lawsuit on behalf of authors against OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, arguing that using books to train Chat GPT’s chatbot without licensing the rights amounts to copyright infringement. (The Times also sued OpenAI and Microsoft last year, claiming copyright infringement of news content used by A.I. systems.)
By endorsing Created by Humans’ platform, the Authors Guild is in a sense acknowledging that there is no avoiding the disruption that A.I. has unleashed on the book business. Through their partnership, the Authors Guild will help Created by Humans develop informational webinars for authors that will explain how licensing works and what their options are.
“What’s good about licensing is it gives the author and the publisher control, as well as compensation, and it gives you the ability to say no,” said Mary Rasenberger, the chief executive of the Authors Guild, who will serve on Created by Humans’ advisory board. “Right now, it’s the A.I. companies that just went and crawled pirate websites and swept all that material in.”
Several A.I. companies have already registered interest in licensing book content through the platform, said Trip Adler, the co-founder and chief executive of Created by Humans. Adler declined to name the companies, citing nondisclosure agreements….
It’s 2024. Extreme weather events due to global warming have overwhelmed parts of the United States. Water is increasingly scarce. The mass migration of people in search of more livable conditions has caused political tension and border closures. A drug epidemic spreads across the country. And a candidate for president promises he can fix the country’s problems with more religion and fewer regulations.
That’s the premise of Octavia E. Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower, which was published in 1993.
The novel contains a powerful and poignant vision of the United States of the future, one that rings scarily true in the present. The 2024 of Butler’s 1993 work isn’t so far away from the 2024 in which we’ll all currently living. Butler published a sequel, Parable of the Talents, in 1998. Both feature a protagonist named Lauren Olamina, a young woman trying to survive and make a life for herself….
At File770 the eminent host replied to a post about the musical nature of the recent Joker film:
PJ Evans: Imagine the Arthur Freed Joker with Gene Kelly as Joker, Judy Garland as Harley Quinn, and let’s throw in Fred Astaire as the Riddler! “You made me love you”…”
…Over the course of her career, del Rey earned a reputation as a superstar editor among her authors. Arthur C. Clarke, who co-wrote the screenplay for “2001: A Space Odyssey,” called her the “most brilliant editor I ever encountered,” and Philip K. Dick said she was the “greatest editor since Maxwell Perkins,” the legendary editor of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
She got her start, though, working as an editorial assistant – in truth, a “gofer” – for the most lauded science fiction magazine of the 1960s, Galaxy. There she learned the basics of publishing and rose rapidly through the editorial ranks until Ballantine Books lured her away in 1973.
Soon thereafter, Ballantine was acquired by publishing giant Random House, which then named del Rey senior editor. Yet her first big move was a risky one – cutting ties with Ballantine author John Norman, whose highly popular “Gor” novels were widely panned for their misogyny.Nonetheless, del Rey’s mission was to develop a strong backlist of science fiction novels that could hook new generations of younger readers, not to mention adults. One early success was her “Star Trek Log” series, a sequence of 10 novels based on episodes of “Star Trek: The Animated Series.”
Unfortunately, this scholar of fantasy literature doesn’t understand that it wasn’t a “Hugo committee” but Hugo voters who were responsible for her getting the award — the one Lester threw back in our faces, of course.
…Yet despite these accolades, Del Rey’s reputation continued to suffer from its own commercial success. Notably, Judy-Lynn del Rey was never nominated for a Hugo Award for best professional editor. When she died in 1986, the Hugo committee belatedly tried granting her a posthumous award, but her husband, Lester, refused to accept it, saying that it came too late….
(7) 2024 NOBEL PRIZE IN CHEMISTRY. [Item by Steven French.] Gamer wins Nobel Prize! Well, Hassabis started out as a games designer before developing Deep Mind’s AlphaFold programme which has helped scientists make major strides towards predicting complex protein structures (looks like AI is on a roll with this year’s prizes!)
One half to David Baker (University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA; Howard Hughes Medical Institute, USA) “for computational protein design”
and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper of Google DeepMind, London, UK “for protein structure prediction”
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 is about proteins, life’s ingenious chemical tools. David Baker has succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures. These discoveries hold enormous potential….
Most 17-year-olds spend their days playing video games, but Britain’s latest Nobel prize winner spent his teenage years developing them.
Sir Demis Hassabis, who was jointly awarded the chemistry prize on Wednesday, got his big break in the tech world as co-designer of 1994’s hit game Theme Park, where players create and operate amusement parks.
Born in London to a Greek Cypriot father and Singaporean mother, Hassabis went on to gain a double first in computer science at Cambridge University, launch his own video game company, complete a PhD in cognitive neuroscience and then co-found the artificial intelligence startup DeepMind, which Google bought for £400m in 2014.
The 48-year-old was knighted for services to AI this year….
(8) EAGLE CON 2024. Eagle Con 2024 will take place on Tuesday, October 15 and Wednesday, October 16 on the 3rd floor of the Cal State LA University Student Union in Los Angeles.
Space Cowboy Books owner Jean-Paul L. Garnier will take part in a panel of speculative poets as part of Eagle Con 2024 “Unfrakking the Future”, along with Wendy Van Camp, Pedro Iniguez, and Denise Dumars. The event is open to students and faculty. The panel runs on Wednesday Oct 16 from 12:20-1:25 p.m. Pacific.
Also on October 16, from 4:35– 5:40 p.m., will be the Prism Award Presentation to Edward James Olmos (University Student Union 3rd Floor Los Angeles Room 308).
The Prism Award is given to creators who have made outstanding contributions to diversity in speculative genres across media. This year we honor legendary actor and Cal State LA alumnus Edward James Olmos. Among his many acting credits, Olmos has been a central character in two of the most important science fiction stories of all time: he was Gaff in the film Blade Runner (1982) and Admiral William Adama in the series Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009). Come hear him discuss his illustrious career and his life at Cal State LA.
Awardee: Edward James Olmos, actor (Blade Runner, Battlestar Galactica, Stand and Deliver, Mayans M.C., Miami Vice)
Moderator: Dr. Stephen Trzaskoma, Dean of the College of Arts and Letters
(9) DONA SADOCK DIES. Norman Spinrad today announced the death of his partner Dona Sadock.
Dona Sadock’s body has just died. But her great spirit will allways be immortal.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Mike Glyer.]
Born October 9, 1964 – Guillermo del Toro, 60. Here at File 770 we’re big fans of filmmaker, director, and author Guillermo del Toro. And not just because of the great work he’s done – including Pan’s Labyrinth (he wrote its Nebula-winning script), The Shape of Water (which won him an Oscar as Best Director while the film took Best Picture), Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (an Oscar for Best Animated Feature), plus two Hellboy movies, and Pacific Rim. He’s also an impressive and generous person.
Guillermo del Toro in 2023. Photo by Boungawa.
As John King Tarpinian, reporting on the del Toro signing at Mystery & Imagination in 2013, told us: “Guillermo is a kind, unassuming, down to earth man. When he heard a local bookshop, Mystery and Imagination, was just getting by in this age of internet sales and big box book stores he volunteered to do what turns out to be his only official signing of his new book, Pacific Rim, as a fund raiser… Once the event got started Guillermo was more than affable with all in attendance. He spoke with everybody, shook everybody’s hand. Guillermo was great with kids, a few of which had drawn their versions of the Kaiju. He’d stop and look at the drawing showing real appreciation at their attempts….”
He’s been inducted to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame (2017), and naturally has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (2019).
However, he tells interviewers that there’s a price to pay for his work:
“I think the main sign of a good story for you is that it has to hurt. It has to dig deep into who you are … I jokingly say that Hellboy is autobiographical, but it is. The way I think about myself, and the way I think about my story with my wife, everything is in there, and Pan’s Labyrinth was incredibly personal, to the point where I showed it to my wife and she turned to me after seeing the movie complete and she said, ‘You felt that bad?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I felt that bad.’
His latest project, a Frankenstein movie for Netflix, recently finished filming.
(12) HOW COOL IS THIS? The Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) now has badges that Elgin Award winners can put on the covers of their books.
(13) UM, ACTUALLY. “Online Rent-a-Sage” Bret Devereaux disputes the notion in some fantasy literature that systems of magic would be reduced to a kind of science and its practitioners would resemble engineers. The fifteen-post thread begins here.
Its an understandable but incorrect modern assumption to assume that basically all knowledge is scientific in nature.
But human beings have experienced matter, energy and chemicals for hundreds of thousands of years.
Physics and chemistry are far younger. 2/
— "Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux (@BretDevereaux) October 8, 2024
Instead, people in the past mostly had what we might call 'craft knowledge' – knowledge of *what* worked, absent knowing *how* it worked.
This becomes hilariously clear reading ancient writers like Pliny the Elder or Theophrastus, who haven't a clue how a lot of nature works. 4/
— "Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux (@BretDevereaux) October 8, 2024
And later…
Even moreso of course if that magic *doesn't* work on physics-like principles. What if usually spells work, but sometimes, randomly, for reasons no one understands, they don't?
I'd expect an orthopraxy response – "well, you must have done it wrong, do it again!" 13/
— "Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux (@BretDevereaux) October 8, 2024
(14) ROCK’N SFF. [Item by Steven French.] As is well known, Jimi Hendrix was a huge science fiction fan and this essay in Classic Rock looks at how his SF reading shaped his second album, Axis:Bold as Love: “Jimi Hendrix: the story of the Axis: Bold As Love album”.
If you were to write a science fiction novel set in the year 1967, it would be hard to imagine a more captivating cosmic messenger than Jimi Hendrix. With a wild afro that looked like a shock of electrical wires, psychedelic duds streaked with hues from the Crab Nebula and a strange language that was part-philosophical rambling, part screaming Stratocaster, he came to London, dropping jaws wherever he went. And since aliens always arrive on earth with a manifesto to help humanity, Hendrix’s was called, with futurist bravado, Axis: Bold As Love.
He’d already grabbed everyone’s attention early that year with his band The Experience’s debut Are You Experienced. So the second album seemed the ideal vessel for a message. Axis was recorded in fits and starts amidst a hectic tour schedule that included over 180 international dates (including package outings with such strange bedfellows like The Monkees and Englebert Humperdinck), many TV appearances, and a landmark appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival. It was seen by Hendrix’s manager Chas Chandler and Jimi’s labels Track in the UK and Reprise in the US as a quick follow-up release, a way to keep the conversation going with fans and critics. Considering it was followed less than a year later by Jimi’s double-album masterwork Electric Ladyland, it’s not surprising that Axis has suffered from a kind of middle child syndrome. But middle children can go to extremes to get attention, and this one often sounded like it was tuned to a radio station on another planet.
Not to belabor the extraterrestrial, but Hendrix even described the album as “science fiction rock ‘n’ roll,” and on the opener Up From The Skies, he sings from an alien’s point of view: “I wanna know about the new mother Earth, I wanna hear and see everything.” That fascination was there from his childhood. As a boy, Jimi claimed he saw a UFO, and he was obsessed with TV show Flash Gordon, even insisting that his family call him “Buster,” after the serial’s star Buster Crabbe.
(15) MOVING PICTURE OF THE DAY. Possibly inspired by Steve Vertlieb’s article “Hermann and Hitchcock: The Torn Curtain” posted on File 770 today, Andrew Porter sent this GIF.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Dann, Peer, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
