Tag Archives: SFWA

Pixel Scroll 2/4/25 Cause We Are Materializing In A Living World (From The Soundtrack To “Kirk and Spock Beam To Ego The Living Planet”[1])

Posted on by
30

(1) DOWN THESE MEAN TWEETS. Less than 24 hours after The Self-Published Science Fiction Competition announced its new “SPSFC Code of Conduct” (linked in yesterday’s Scroll), the SPSFC management announced they were removing a writer named Devon Eriksen from the contest for violating the CoC. They did not specify why, which in these post-JDA-lawsuit times is regarded as wisdom. However, it’s clear what the host of Indie Book Spotlight believed:

And this exchange being on X.com, large numbers of people claimed to be unable to understand the problem, beginning with this fellow:

So the Indie Book Spotlight host put up a screenshot with a lengthy quote by Eriksen showing what they had in mind, which I’m not going to repost but which can be read here.

Devon Eriksen’s public response to being banned was (1) to claim he wasn’t aware he was even entered in the contest, and (2) to mock the whole proceeding at length, which you can read at X.com or in File 770’s screencaps — image-1, image-2, image-3, image-4, image-5, image-6. Or not at all, if you prefer.

(Credit Camestros Felapton with the scoop: “Different Thing”.)

(2) THIS IS THE END, MY FRIEND. “Apocalypse stories: Everything Must Go by Dorian Lynskey explores why we love skipping to the end” – a review and commentary by Slate’s Laura Miller

“The worst is not. So long as we can say ‘This is the worst,’ ” go the lines from King Lear quoted in Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel Station Eleven. Any stories we tell about the end of the world will have to be fictional, since once the real thing occurs, no one will be around to describe it. As the British journalist Dorian Lynskey relates in his erudite, delightfully witty, and strangely cheering new book, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, the fact that we can only ever speculate on the subject makes us speculate all the more frantically. “There is simply no end of ends,” Lynskey writes of the books, movies, TV shows, pop songs, and video games we’ve created to depict the apocalypse—or its near misses and the aftermaths thereof….

… Apocalyptic narratives are, of course, always more about the vexing present than the enigmatic future. Everything Must Go encompasses the stories told by doomsday cults, scientific Cassandras, pulp novelists, video game designers, and Hollywood movies. The idea that the world will one day come to an end is an especially Western notion, Lynskey points out, with its roots in the Book of Revelation. That strange document, with its psychedelic signs and portents, Lynskey writes, “supplies the Bible with a narrative arc and gives humanity’s story a theatrical finale.” Other cultures steeped in different religions may view time as cyclical, but the Judeo-Christian tradition sees it as an arrow, going in one direction, to an inevitable conclusion. As terrifying as the prospect of apocalypse can be, Lynskey writes, “it rescues believers from the endless mess of history by weaving past, present and future into a coherent, satisfying whole with an author, a message and an ending.”…

(3) THOUGHTS ABOUT AWARDS VOTING. BSFA’s Vector has republished Jo Lindsay Walton and Polina Levontin’s article “Gender, Democracy, and SF/F Literary Awards” from Foundation 149 (winter 2024).

This article explores cultural and design dimensions of non-governmental voting systems, focusing on science fiction and fantasy (SFF) literary awards voted for by fans, with a focus on the British Science Fiction Awards. The design of such voting systems needs to juggle a range of goals, one of which is fairness with regard to gender — acknowledging that ‘fairness’ is not straightforward to define, particularly given such awards are embedded within broader gender inequalities. Our analysis suggests that men have been more likely than women to vote for works by men, and also more likely to vote in ways that amplify the influence of men’s votes under an Alternative Vote System. We suggest that SFF awards are cultural spaces which lend themselves to experimentation with new democratic forms, and briefly offer potential sources of inspiration. Just as SFF has aspired to be a space to think about the future of technology, gender, the environment, and many other issues, SFF award spaces could be spaces for thinking about the future of democracy. We also offer recommendations to SFF awards designers and communities to address gender bias (emphasising reflective practices over technical solutions), and to continue to explore how aesthetic and cultural values and identities are constructed and negotiated within SFF award spaces, and beyond….

(4) ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY RECOMMENDED. [Item by Steven French.] In “What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in January” authors and readers tell the Guardian which were their favorite books read last month and first up is …

Eimear McBride, author

Everyone else got there a long time ago but I’ve only recently read Adrian Tchaikovsky’s sci-fi masterpiece Children of Time. Cautionary, richly imaginative and deeply, unexpectedly humane, it was both utterly unputdownable and a welcome relief from the current resignation to dystopia.

I’ve also been taking delight in Edward Carey’s glorious novel Edith Holler. Set in a Norwich that is at once fictional, historical and fantastical, he transports the reader into the world of brilliant 12-year-old Edith who is cursed to never leave her family’s tumbledown theatre … until fate decides otherwise. Filled with the author’s witty, curious observations and alive with his own illustrations, it’s a novel like no other.

(5) CARL BRANDON SOCIETY 2024 ACCOMPLISHMENTS. SFWA distributed this report with the latest Singularity newsletter.

Thanks so much for your continuing support of and interest in the Carl Brandon Society. In these parlous times, we depend on you, and we want you to be able to depend on us. In the past several years, we’ve all been through a lot. Our focus—as individuals, as an organization, as countries within the world—has shifted. At the Carl Brandon Society, we’re slowly working through how we need to position ourselves during and after that shift.

We’re moving from a small, social organization of readers and writers with big dreams but essentially no money to a still-small organization with some tools to accomplish some of those large goals. With Covid reduced but still circulating, we’re figuring out how to be safe at in-person events, while expanding our online events, which allow us to serve writers and readers in the wider world, not just in the United States.

2024 Accomplishments

  • Awarded Octavia E. Butler scholarships to students at Clarion and Clarion West workshops
  • Held three online workshops: Cosmic Horror with Premee Mohamed, DIY workshop with Suzan Palumbo, and Decolonial Worldbuilding with Helen Gould
  • Held a children’s book fair in conjunction with Seattle Public Library and Mam’s Book Store
  • Distributed books left after book fair to several Seattle area school libraries
  • Hired Program Director Isis Asare out of a pool of outstanding qualified applicants

We are determined to stay focused on our work despite the current political climate. We believe it’s important, and we believe you think so, too.

Sincerely,
K. Tempest Bradford, Jaymee Goh, Susheela Bhat Harkins, Shiv Ramdas, Victor Raymond, Kate Schaefer, Nisi Shawl, and Yang-Yang Wang
The Carl Brandon Society Steering Committee

P.S. We’re sending a donation of $1000 to Octavia’s Bookshelf, the Black-owned bookstore in Los Angeles that has stepped up as a community resource in the wake of the devastating fires. Octavia was one of our founding members. Please consider donating to the bookstore to help rebuild that community.

And please consider supporting us with a donation as well. Thanks so much!

P. O. Box 23336
Seattle, WA 98102

The Carl Brandon Society is recognized by the IRS as a qualified 501(c)3 organization, and all donations to it are tax-deductible to the full extent of the law. No goods or services were provided in exchange for this donation. Our federal tax I.D. number is 27-0140141. 

(6) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

February 4, 1993 — Groundhog Day film (premiered this day)

By Paul Weimer: One of the pinnacles of time travel movies is a movie that doesn’t think that it’s a genre movie: Groundhog Day. 

Consider: We have no reason, no mechanism, nothing we can point to as to why Phil Connors (Bill Murray in peak mode, having shed some of the questionable elements of his Ghostbusters character and just playing an unpleasant weatherman but without some of the sleazier elements from the prior movie). We are not meant to like Phil at the beginning. He is dismissive, arrogant, cruel and I wouldn’t want to spend an hour, much less a day, with him on a road trip.

And so, after getting trapped in Punxsutawney the night of Groundhog Day thanks to a blizzard he didn’t accurately predict, he wakes up on the morning of February 2nd again. And again. And again and again. 

Murray’s Phil does what many of us would do in this situation at first. He tries to escape the town by any which means he can. When that fails, when his universe shrinks to the horizon of the town, he then takes subtle advantage of the situation, seeing what he can do. He goes through cycles of mania and depression and tries to kill himself, to no avail. He tries to kill Phil the Groundhog, figuring he is the reason for the time loop. 

Nothing works.

And then comes the slow turn. Phil decides, with an eternity of the same day, to make use of his gift. He learns things, ranging from flipping cards to literature to French to chiropractic back adjustment to playing the piano. What starts as a sleazy way to seduce Andie McDowell’s Rita turns into a genuine romance. The wacky comedy of the first part of the movie turns into a more considered romantic-comedy-drama of a man who over thousands of days learns to do better and be better. 

But the movie shows it can’t all go his way, and is surprisingly nuanced for it. Consider Phil’s multiple attempts to save a dying homeless man’s life, to no avail. No matter what Phil does, the man ultimately dies, each and every time. It’s a poignant philosophical, or even religious look at fate, destiny, and the limits of what we can change…but an acknowledgement that, what we can change for the better, we MUST change for the better. 

Fantasy, comedy, philosophy. And wonderful performances all around. A beautifully filmed movie of a town that was already locally famous (I had long heard of it and its annual celebration but it was too far away to ever visit) but it became globally famous thanks to the movie. The movie is a pinnacle of early 1990’s filmmaking. It never thinks it’s a genre movie but it is genre enough that we are invested in Phil’s slow transformation. 

And so, after thousands of tries, after a day spent helping the town, Phil finally breaks free of his time loop, ending his purgatory (or maybe it’s a Bardo) as inexplicably as it began. 

One of the pinnacles of time travel movies is a movie that doesn’t think that it’s a genre movie: Groundhog Day.

Consider…

(7) COMICS SECTION.

(8) TOP 5 OVERRATED SF WRITERS? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The Outlaw Bookseller has a bit of a click-baity offering on his followers’ most over-rated SF writers. (Actually, I have some sympathy with a couple of their choices — but what do I know?). This came out just a couple of days ago but already has had nearly 8,000 views… “Your Top 5 Most OVERRATED SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS- I respond to your comments”.

Steve asked for your views on which SF authors and books receive undue praise and here are the results…and as ever, he responds to your comments in kind….

(9) COMIC RELIEF. Camestros Felapton has had a busy day. Thanks to another of his posts, “Extra Scuttlebutt”, we’re now aware of the insulting things that Larry Correia has been saying about Jon Del Arroz, and the low esteem in which Vox Day holds Correia – because Vox publishes comics by JDA and therefore feels obliged to run interference for one of “his” authors. Below is Vox’s rationalization for violating omerta; then you can read a selection of Correia’s vituperative quotes at Vox Popoli’s post “Churchill, FDR, and Stalin” [Internet Archive link].

Back in the days when the Sad Puppies were the #GamerGate of the science fiction world, I reached a gentleman’s agreement with Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen, two of the first three leaders of the Sad Puppies, after they decided that they did not want to be directly connected to me or the group that became known as the Rabid Puppies. I told them at the time that this separation was a mistake for them, and that there were more Rabid Puppies than Sad Puppies, but they refused to believe that and insisted it was necessary for reasons that I will leave to them to explain.

However, they did agree that given the amount of media scrutiny we were all under, it would serve little purpose for us to attempt to speak for, or about, each other in public. All three of us knew that the media was going to try very hard to utilize anything that we would say to undermine the others. To their credit, and to mine, none of us gave the media any material for ten years.

Unfortunately, I have now concluded it is time to end that gentlemen’s agreement because a) it is now clear and undeniable that these are two men who are not, and perhaps never were, on the side of what is right or what is true, b) they are not gentlemen, and c) they have been repeatedly lying about one of my authors for several years….

… Now, to a certain extent, this is a tempest in a teapot. Literally no one in our greater community has given a quantum of a damn about what Larry Correia thinks ever since he opted out of leading the Sad Puppies more than a decade ago. Being a flagrant Never-Trumper, a civic nationalist, and a Mormon, he’s as irrelevant to the tens of thousands of Castalia, Arkhaven, and Unauthorized fans as I am to his readership. And I doubt more than two percent of our community has ever even heard of Brad Torgersen.

But nevertheless, as we’ve seen again and again, what permits wickedness to thrive is the tolerance and the silence of those who know better. And what Larry and Brad have been doing for years, the twisted rhetoric they have been repeatedly attempting to pass off as the truth, is neither good, nor beautiful, nor true. They no longer merit respect or restraint on my part….

(10) NOT JUST ANY RUBBLE. [Item by Steven French.] An elegiac and timely piece on collecting space rocks: “It came from outer space: the meterorite that landed in a Cotswolds cul-de-sac” in the Guardian.

 With a population of 5,000, Winchcombe is a pretty town of honeycomb-coloured limestone and timber-framed buildings. The Wilcock family home is a neat 1960s detached house on a quiet cul-de-sac on the outskirts of town. Early in the morning of 1 March, Cathryn Wilcock, a retired primary school teacher, opened the curtains of her living room and noticed a pile of dark lumps and powder at the edge of her driveway. It looked as though someone had upended an old barbecue.

The Winchcombe meteorite had probably travelled more than 100m miles to reach our planet. Had it landed just a few metres to the left it would have fallen into a thick privet hedge and probably never been discovered. Had it landed a few metres closer to the road, Cathryn would have assumed it was rubbish churned up by a passing car and swept it away. Instead, her husband, Rob, went out to investigate.

Rob immediately recognised that something strange had occurred. He got together some rubber gloves, old yoghurt pots and plastic bags and went outside to pick up the stones.

(11) FANTASTIC 4 TRAILER LIVE RELEASE EVENT. [Item by Marc Criley.] I think this pretty much caught most all of us in Huntsville by surprise!

The Fantastic 4: First Steps Trailer release was held at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama — the “Rocket City” — and was live-streamed on YouTube. All four stars were present beneath the Saturn 5 rocket exhibit as they and the crowd counted down to the trailer release.

The trailer is shown at the end of the release event video. However, if you want to cut to the chase…

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Marc Criley, Jeffrey Smith, 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 Daniel Dern. Title footnote [1] From Marvel comics/movie: “Ego the Living Planet” in the Wikipedia.]

Pixel Scroll 1/15/25 Merry Pippins, Halfling Nanny For Hire

Posted on by
16

(1) COSTS OF BOOK/JOURNAL PIRACY. “New Government Report Cites Ongoing Concern Over Pirate Sites” — Publishers Weekly counts the losses.

Several international websites that publishers argue continue to actively pirate copyrighted material were included on the U.S. Trade Representative’s frighteningly named Notorious Markets List (NML). NML is the centerpiece of the USTR’s annual Review of Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy, the goal of which is to “motivate appropriate action by the private sector and governments to reduce piracy and counterfeiting.”

The 2024 report features a list of sites that are violating the copyrights of companies across a wide range of industries. Rather than try to document that monetary loss to American companies caused by these websites (though the report does cite a study which found that digital piracy cost the U.S. economy $29.2 billion in 2019), NLM reviews what actions, if any, companies have taken to stop their sites from engaging in piracy.

The two companies that drew the most attention from the Association of American Publishers are Library Genesis, commonly known as Libgen, and Sci-Hub. As part of a series of actions against Libgen, in 2023, textbook publishers filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the company. Libgen, which is believed to operate from Russia and has been used by Meta to train its AI efforts, hosts 80 million science magazine articles, 2.4 million nonfiction books, 2.2 million fiction books, and 2 million comic strips. According to the report, Libgen sites are “subject to court orders in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.”…

(2) FANTASTIC NEWS. Fantasy Magazine has officially returned, with a new publisher.

Co-Editors-in-Chief Arley Sorg and Shingai Njeri Kagunda will curate a wonderful selection of short fiction, flash fiction, poetry, and more in quarterly issues for publisher Psychopomp (known for Psychopomp.com, Psychopomp novellas, and of course, The Deadlands magazine, edited by E. Catherine Tobler)!

Kagunda and Sorg both bring engaging visions and eclectic, sharp sensibilities to the field, as well as a history of positive involvement in the genre community. Kagunda’s writing has earned her Ignyte and British Fantasy Award nominations, and her work as co-editor at PodCastle made her a two-time Hugo Award finalist. Sorg has received two community service awards, and his work as co-editor at Fantasy made him a three-time Locus Award finalist and a two-time World Fantasy Award finalist.

The first issue of Fantasy with Psychopomp is scheduled for June 2025 publication. Fantasy plans to open to submissions February 1 – 7. See submission guidelines at the link.

Subscribe to Fantasy Magazine via email for $5 per quarter. Use this link to subscribe. Psychopomp will publish Fantasy content on the Fantasy Magazine website after an exclusive to-subscribers period. Digital issues will also be available at their Grave Goods store and on WeightlessBooks.com.

For more information, see publisher Sean Markey’s blog post.

(3) THANKS FOR THE STAR WARS MEMORIES. Craig Miller will do a Q&A and signing in conjunction with a showing of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope at The Frida Cinema in Santa Ana on January 19 at 4:00 p.m. Address: 305 E. 4th St, STE 100, Santa Ana, CA 92701. Craig hears that a small number of droids will be present…

You’re invited to a special screening of the 1997 Special Edition of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope with special guest Craig Miller! Craig was director of Fan Relations for Lucasfilm from 1977-1980. He created and oversaw the official Star Wars Fan Club as well as having edited and written virtually all of the first two years of Bantha Tracks as well as being a producer for Lucasfilm Ltd. 

Craig will be appearing for an on-stage discussion about his experiences at Lucasfilm and his time during Star Wars! The discussion will be moderated by Scott Zilner. Craig will also be available to meet fans, and also be signing his book Star Wars Memories.

(4) SFWA ADDITIONS. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Association (SFWA) has announced a new office assistant, and that two past presidents of the organization are taking on new volunteer service roles.

Office Team: Misha Grifka Wander (he/they) joined operations this week.

You might recognize Misha as our Nebula Awards Commissioner. He is stepping down from that position after participating in a competitive round of hiring. Thank you to all the candidates who applied. Misha is a game designer, writer, artist, and academic from the American Midwest. He obtained his PhD in English from Ohio State University and has worked in nonprofits and office management. Misha will be joining our Interim Executive Director Russell Davis in the virtual office from 10:00 AM to 6:30 PM EST. Welcome, Misha!

Historian: Michael Capobianco will be stepping into the volunteer role of Historian. As Historian, Capobianco will be supporting the board and organization, providing historical perspective and guidance when needed.

Past President Advisor: Mary Robinette Kowal has been appointed Past President Advisor. 

(5) STOP THAT TRAIN(ING)! [Item by Steven French.] “British novelists criticise government over AI ‘theft’” reports the Guardian.

Kate Mosse and Richard Osman have hit back at Labour’s plan to give artificial intelligence companies broad freedoms to mine artistic works for data, saying it could destroy growth in creative fields and amount to theft.

The best-selling novellists spoke out after Keir Starmer a national drive to make the UK “one of the great AI superpowers” and endorsed a 50-point action planthat included changes to how technology firms can use copyrighted text and data to train their models….

(6) PERSONAL DEFINITIONS OF SPECPO. Seattle Worldcon 2025 poet laureate Brandon O’Brien has launched a department on the Worldcon’s website called “Con-Verse”. He picked a logical topic for his first post.

…What better place to start this blog, then, by trying to ask and answer the one question that comes up often from people outside the space: what is a “speculative” poem? But like most things in art, and poetry in particular, there are as many answers as there are poets and readers themselves. Hopefully, with enough of them we may notice some patterns of understanding, so I figured it was only right for you to hear from a multitude of expert voices on the matter. Here’s what some members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) had to say…

Read the quotes he compiled from 16 poets at the link.

(7) NYT NOTES DISNEY SUPPORT FOR FIRE-AFFECTED EMPLOYEES. The New York Times explains how “Hollywood’s Filmmaking Continues Despite L.A. Wildfires”.

…With thousands of homes destroyed, many of them in neighborhoods favored by producers, executives, agents and stars, and roughly 300,000 people under evacuation orders or warnings, little work got done at studio headquarters. Some studios closed entirely, and others encouraged employees to work remotely.

Consider the impact of the fires on Disney alone. As of Monday, 64 Disney employees had lost their homes and hundreds more had been evacuated, including Robert A. Iger, the chief executive, and three members of his senior leadership team.

Mr. Iger has been overseeing Disney’s relief effort from a hotel, approving $15 million for community services and rebuilding efforts, arranging for Disney employees who have lost their homes to receive two months of free furnished housing and opening Disney’s studio wardrobe warehouses to employees who need clothes and shoes. He has also been calling Disney employees who lost their homes.

“I want them to know that people at the top of the company are looking after them, that we care,” Mr. Iger said by phone on Monday. “We’re going to go through some really tough times here, but we’ll get through it together.”

Meanwhile, Disney’s movie assembly lines — like the rest of Hollywood’s — have been almost completely unaffected.

Disney has seen some flurries of ash on its Burbank lot, but no flames. Pixar and Lucasfilm, both owned by Disney, are based in Northern California.

Sony Pictures is in Culver City, far from any of the fires. Paramount Pictures and Netflix are in Hollywood, the neighborhood, which is 40 minutes by car from the two biggest fires. The sprawling Warner Bros. and Universal Pictures lots in the San Fernando Valley have been untouched.

For the most part, live-action movies are no longer shot in the Los Angeles region. It’s too expensive. Instead, movie production has moved to states like Georgia, New York, New Jersey and New Mexico and countries like Britain and Australia — all of which offer generous tax incentives.

Only two movies from major studios were affected by the fires. Filming was halted on “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” a 20th Century Studios remake of the 1992 thriller. The third “Avatar” movie, also from 20th Century, which Disney owns, briefly paused production, too….

(8) TODAY’S DAY. [Item by Daniel Dern.] According to The Kitchn’s article “National Bagel Day Deals 2025: What You Need to Know”:

The holiday was originally celebrated on February 9, which coincided with National Pizza Day…

Some bagelries and we-also-sell-bagellers have bagel freebies/deals, lists online or ask wherever you get your bagels.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born January 15, 1935 — Robert Silverberg, 90.  

Editor’s note: Robert Silverberg is ninety years old today!  

By Paul Weimer: A legend of science fiction whose work I came to in an oblique way. 

In a short story, “Half-Baked Publisher’s Delight”, in a collection of “great short short stories”, I first came across the name Robert Silverberg. It was a weird little story where Isaac Asimov (a name I knew well at that point) and someone named Robert Silverberg, competed to be the most prolific SF author.  I had no idea who Silverberg was, but I was intrigued that the story had put him up against Asimov. Clearly, I needed to read his work.

Robert Silverberg. Photo by Allen Batson.

My first Silverberg was, as it so happens, the science fantasy Lord Valentine’s Castle. I thought it was a simple fantasy novel, but imagine my delight as, we follow the story of the titular Valentine and the troupe of entertainers he has joined with, that the narrative mixed science fiction elements, particularly the psionics, and the old Earth technology still on the planet. The novel is long and sprawling and concentrates heavily on the worldbuilding and the wandering across the landscape. Aside from the deceptively young Valentine, the other characters recede into the background somewhat to focus on the world presented. In other words, it was perfect for me as a teenaged reader. 

I would only later find out that it was slightly atypical, and that the interior life of Silverberg’s characters, his concentration on their inner lives and problems, and depth of their plights, is really the more typical Silverberg.  I admire and enjoy both sides of Silverberg’s writing. (Kingdoms of the Wall is much more like Majipoor in this regard, for instance, too, than his character-oriented novels and stories.)

I’ve read a lot of Silverberg, as you might tell, including novels, now and again, since. I enjoyed his work in the Heroes in Hell series. I enthused to his historical fiction turn in Gilgamesh. His variety of time travel stories, from Up the Line to the heartbreaking Sailing to Byzantium, have always enthralled me. Nightwings, taking place on a far future Earth, I first encountered in an incomplete graphic novel edition that inspired me to go and find the original and complete story. I meant to, but never found the Mouth of Truth in Rome, which features in the story.

I have a lot of favorite Silverberg stories.  If I had to go with one story, it is going to be a story I’ve mentioned before. “Enter a Soldier, Later, Enter Another”. It’s the story that starts his Timegate sequence of historical personages brought back as artificial intelligences, and it has the programmers have Francisco Pizarro encounter Socrates, to memorable and sometimes very funny results. The story shows Silverberg’s skill at dialogue, at character, and using history. 

If I had to go with one longer work, I am going to cheat again and not name one of his novels, and instead go with his Roma Eterna sequence. A series of short stories set in a world where the Roman Empire wound up in a dynastic cycle of rises and falls but never complete collapses, the stories in the collection explore a variety of themes of empire, of renewal and destruction, and lenses of looking at our own history by showing a funhouse version of it in his alternate historical path.

I’ve seen Mr. Silverberg at a couple of Worldcons…but have not actually exchanged any words with him.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY, TOO.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born January 15, 1944 — Christopher Stasheff. (Died 2018.)

By Paul Weimer: Back in the 1990’s, Christopher Stasheff seemed to be everywhere in my fantasy and my science fantasy reading. I kept encountering his work again and again, and in a variety of contexts.  Trying to remember what was actually first is a murk of memory, because I seem to recall being bombarded with several different early Stasheff’s that I read.  

Her Majesty’s Wizard starts off as a portal fantasy. Matthew Mantrell, graduate student, finds a strange piece of paper in a copy of the sagas. He translates it, and it translates him to an alternative magical medieval Europe. He falls in love with the Princess he rescues, teams up with an unlikely set of companions, and has to face the dark lord Malingo.  Matt might know Shakespeare for his poetry based magic, but it might not be enough.   

Christopher Stasheff

The Enchanter Reborn and The Exotic Enchanter were compilations edited by Stasheff of additional stories of L Sprague De Camp’s Harold Shea, aka The Incompleat Enchanter. Stasheff not only was the co editor of the two volumes, but he also contributed stories to each volume. The quality of the stories vary according to the author but Stasheff’s entries “Sir Harold and the Hindu King” and “Sir Harold and the Monkey King” help expend Harold’s adventures beyond the usual Western Canon. 

Stasheff contributed to one of my favorite shared world verses, the Time Gate stories created by Robert Silverberg. In an age here and now where LLMs are being labeled as AI, talking about true AI is a bit tricky. But in this verse of the shared world, in the 22nd century, real sentient AI recreations of historical personages are created (Silverberg’s “Enter a Soldier, Later, Enter another” with Pizarro and Socrates, kicks that all off).  So, Stasheff writes a story where a couple of the AIs decide to create one of their very own. 

Stasheff also did a shared world of his own, called “The Gods of War”. The Gods of War supposes that Gods of conflict and battle fight throughout history, and sometimes they are created from the minds of men, tulpa style. Tek, the God of technological battle, is the newest God of War.  Needless to say, this young and energetic God gets the ire and the attention of much older Gods of War and strife.

What I remember was definitely not first, but I read a little later, was Stasheff’s turn into science fantasy, The Warlock in Spite of Himself. Rod Gallowglass works for an interstellar agency in a polity looking for lost and forgotten colony planets. He might be a cynic and a grump, but even Rod is a bit stumped when he finds the planet of Gramarye. Rod doesn’t believe in magic, magic can’t possibly exist, his mindset is completely and utterly scientific and rational. And yet he is confronted with witches, warlocks, elves and monsters. There has to be a rational explanation for all of it…doesn’t there?  I read a few of these, but there are well over a dozen of novels in this setting.

A very fun writer. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Bizarro continues variations on vampire names.
  • Bliss introduces a strange new breed.
  • Dinosaur Comics is skeptical about the Vader reaction.
  • Eek! is about a different Vader reaction.
  • Rubes knows there no place like this home.
  • Strange Brew is the problem.

(12) TODAY’S THING TO WORRY ABOUT. “World Monuments Fund Puts Moon on List of At-Risk Sites” reports the New York Times. (Story behind a paywall.)

…With a growing number of wealthy people going to space and more governments pursuing human spaceflight, the group warns that more than 90 important sites on the moon could be harmed. In particular, some researchers are worried about Tranquillity Base, the Apollo 11 landing site where the astronaut Neil Armstrong first stepped onto the moon’s surface.

Protections for cultural heritage are typically decided by individual countries, which makes the task of taking care of important international sites like the moon more difficult.

Since 2020, the United States and 51 other countries have signed the Artemis Accords, a nonbinding agreement that outlined the norms expected in outer space. The rules included a call to preserve space heritage including “robotic landing sites, artifacts, spacecraft and other evidence of activity on celestial bodies.” A separate binding United Nations agreement provided for the protection of lunar sites, but there has been little progress in getting key countries to sign it.

“The moon doesn’t belong to anybody,” de Montlaur said. “It is a symbol of hope and the future.”

For almost 30 years, the World Monuments Fund has received nominations for its watch list of endangered sites from heritage experts around the world. The list is an educational and promotional tool serving the nonprofit’s other efforts to preserve cultural heritage.

A division of the International Council on Monuments and Sites devoted to aerospace heritage nominated the moon for the nonprofit watch list. Gai Jorayev, president of that division, said that members wanted to see sustainable management because of the “sheer number of human artifacts on its surface.”

Beyond the lunar orbiters and rangers scattered across the moon’s surface that express scientific achievements, there are also artifacts of human culture. Apollo 11 astronauts left a golden olive branch to symbolize peace, while a SpaceX rocket lifted a lander that carried 125 miniature sculptures by the artist Jeff Koons to the moon’s surface last year….

(13) THAT NUMBER SOUNDS FAMILIAR. Indianapolis station WTHR reports “FEMA isn’t giving California wildfire victims just $770”.

… Multiple viral posts imply that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is giving the victims just $770 in federal assistance. Some of the posts also compare the disaster relief spending to the government’s spending on foreign aid….

…Fact checking dispels the rumor that FEMA is giving Los Angeles wildfire victims just $770. Where did that number come from? President Joe Biden announced that people will receive a “one-time payment of $770 so they can quickly purchase things like water, baby formula and prescriptions” under the Serious Needs Assistance program. But that is not the only disaster relief available. People can apply for additional assistance.

If you are affected by the Los Angeles wildfires and in need of assistance, please contact FEMA at https://www.disasterassistance.gov.

(14) MUPPET APPEARANCE. “Kermit the Frog Sings for Hoda Kotb on Her Final ‘Today’ Show” on January 10 reports ToughPigs.

As journalist and television personality Hoda Kotb said goodbye to Today, the show she’s been part of since 2007, she got a visit from a very special guest: Kermit the Frog.

Kermit’s appearance had a special significance, as Hoda brought on her daughters, Hope and Haley. During the broadcast, it was revealed that Hoda sings one of Kermit’s signature songs to her children [Hope and Haley] every night… “Rainbow Connection.” And if you thought that was a perfect excuse for Kermit to sing “Rainbow Connection,” you must be psychic, because that’s exactly what he did! 

View Kermit’s performance at the Today website: “See Kermit the Frog sing ‘Rainbow Connection’ for Hoda Kotb”.

(15) SF2 CONCATENATION SPRING EDITION. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] SF² Concatenation now has its spring (northern hemisphere academic year spring) up. It has the usual large, seasonal news page together with articles and convention reports, plus some 40 standalone book reviews. Table of contents…

v35(1) 2025.1.15 — New Columns & Articles for the Spring 2025

v35(1) 2025.1.15 — Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Reviews

v35(1) 2025.9.15 — Non-Fiction SF & Science Fact Book Reviews

(16) GRRM FILM ADAPTATION ARRIVING IN MARCH. A trailer has been released for In the Lost Lands, based on the George R.R. Martin short story. Entertainment Weekly reported that the project, starring Milla Jovovich and Dave Bautista, is directed by Paul W.S. Anderson and will premiere March 7. 

A queen, desperate to find happiness in love, takes a daring step: she sends the powerful and feared witch Gray Alys to the “Lost Lands” to give her the magical gift of turning into a werewolf. With the mysterious hunter Boyce, who supports her in the fight against dark creatures and merciless enemies, Gray Alys roams an eerie and dangerous world. And only she knows that every wish she grants has unimaginable consequences.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Daniel Dern, Tom Becker, 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.]

SFWA Establishes Pro Rate for Speculative Poetry

Posted on by
1

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) has for the first time established an official professional rate for speculative poetry pay.

The Speculative Poetry 101 hub on SFWA.org says:

“The SFWA minimum payment rate for professional poetry markets is $50 per poem or $1 per line. There is no minimum length requirement.”

The Speculative Poetry 101 hub was also updated today with a helpful “Marketing Your Poetry” section.

Casey Aimer, a founding SFWA Poetry Committee member and organizer of Speculative Poetry 101, says the hub will continue to grow throughout 2025. Aimer is a cyberpunk poet and founder and poetry editor of the semi-pro science fiction publisher, Radon Journal.

Pixel Scroll 11/9/24 Tea In Hand, I’ve Been Watching Pixels Playing In The Autumn Leaves

Posted on by
17

(1) FRONT LINE GAMERS. The ChrisO_wiki on X.com has a long thread about the popularity of Warhammer 40,000 imagery among Russian and Ukranian fighters. One commenter calls it “a thread about the eclectic ideology of the current leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church, which could only be defined as a bizarre blend of traditional Russo-Soviet militarism and statism, wrapped around a pagan warrior cult.”

The entire thread can be accessed on the Thread Reader App. (What’s funny is that when I went there to look at it the first two ads shown in the thread were for toilet bowls. And since I haven’t been shopping for those online, the algorithim certainly didn’t get that idea from me!)

(2) DON’T PANIC…SO MUCH. McSweeney’s Internet Tendency mimics a professional pundit telling us “Here’s Why a Second Death Star Won’t Be That Bad”.

…I understand why people are worried, considering Palpatine has vowed retribution against Luke Skywalker, called the rebel alliance “the enemy within,” and vowed to banish millions of galactic migrants to the outer rim. But I believe that, deep down, below his contorted face, badly disfigured by the corrupting dark force surging through his veins, all Palpatine really wants to do is improve the economy. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if he pardoned Luke Skywalker and put this entire war behind him. Just because he’s never given the slightest indication that those are his true intentions doesn’t mean it can’t happen…

(3) SFWA FILLING VACANCIES. SFWA President Kate Ristau’s update to members today included news about changes to the organization’s staff.

In the past month, we hired a new controller and are settling in a new bookkeeper. These important roles will help continue to support our financial stability, with the leadership of our CFO, Jonathan Brazee. We have also reviewed procedures around financial transparency and fiscal responsibility. We are on a solid financial path, with healthy reserves.

After thirteen years as our Executive Director, Kate Baker will be stepping down at the end of November. We are grateful for Kate’s service and support. Former SFWA President Russell Davis has stepped in as Interim Executive Director, and we expect a full, open, and transparent hiring process to begin in the coming weeks. This process will take the hiring committee time as we restructure and look for an executive who can collaboratively guide SFWA into the future.

(4) HORROR REVIEWS. Lisa Tuttle’s “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup” for the Guardian covers Blood Over Bright Haven by ML Wang; Jackal by Erin E. Adams; The Road to Roswell by Connie Willis; Curdle Creek by Yvonne Battle-Felton; and The Incubations by Ramsey Campbell.

(5) WHY DO TOOLS FALL IN LOVE? The name of the play is “Maybe Happy Ending.” “A New Broadway Musical Asks: Can Robots Fall in Love?” (Article is behind a New York Times paywall.)

…The story is about two outcast helperbots who meet at a robot retirement home and build a relationship while grappling with their own obsolescence, and Park thinks it is especially relatable after the coronavirus pandemic. “People have become so comfortable staying alone in their rooms and connecting to each other through a screen,” he said in a recent interview in Midtown Manhattan.

Shortly after previews began last month, Park, 41, a former K-pop lyricist who wrote the show’s lyrics, and Aronson, 43, who wrote the music — both collaborated on the book — talked about their inspirations and the different approaches to developing the show’s Korean and English versions. In a separate video call, Criss, 37, and Shen, 24, discussed the challenges of playing robots who look like humans.

Here are five things to know….

… The actors have a unique challenge.

The script spells it out: Oliver (Criss) and Claire (Shen) are robots who look like humans (they are dressed like hipsters, circa 2010).

Criss’s robot is an older model, so he, Shen and the production’s director, Michael Arden, decided that he would be the more robotic of the two main characters. That allowed Criss to draw on his training in physical theater at the Accademia dell’Arte, the performing arts school in Arezzo, Italy.

“The fear for an actor on a stage is to be like a cartoon character,” said Criss, who cited Kabuki theater, vaudeville and silent-film-era comedians as inspirations for his character’s movements and expressions. “However, because of the construct of our show, which is extremely theatrical and heightened, the more you lean into that, I think the more effective the piece.”

As for Shen’s character, the group decided that, because she was a newer model, her movements would be nearly indistinguishable from a human’s.

“It was interesting to get to work in that middle ground, that gray area,” she said.

(6) GOLDSMITHS PRIZE. The winner of the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize has been announced. This year, neither the winner nor the other shortlisted books were detectably of genre interest:

  • Parade (Rachel Cusk, Faber)

The prize, worth £10,000 and run in association with the New Statesman, was open to novels published between 1 November 2023 and 31 October 2024, written in English by citizens of the UK or Ireland, or authors who have been resident in either country for three years and have their book published there.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born November 9, 1934 — Carl Sagan. (Died 1996.)

By Paul Weimer: Billions and Billions of milliseconds of my life have been influenced by Carl Sagan.

It all started with Cosmos, the original TV series. I heard about it (in TV Guide!) and wanted desperately to watch it in the hallowed year of 1980. I was entranced from the first episode, which had such diverse ideas as the cosmic calendar, the Library of Alexandria and much more.  Cosmos became important must see viewing for me, and in an age before I had a VCR, I tried to use a tape recorder to capture an episode (“Heaven and Hell”, on Venus and global warming).  I was entranced and Carl Sagan is directly responsible for me being fascinated with science in general and biology and astronomy in particular. He kindled the love of science in me. While I did not ultimately end up as a scientist, my love of science grew hand in hand with my love of science fiction, and Sagan is the person to thank and point to for that. 

Besides Cosmos, his last major work, Pale Blue Dot, stands as a book that very darkly and presciently has foreseen our current political environment, where ignorance and misinformation, particularly around science, has become public policy for the Republicans. Sagan’s warnings, as well as his love of science and his defense of science as an idea, a process, that is ultimately not just worthwhile…but vital to our future. 

Sagan has written other books as well, and has been an influential figure, good and bad for a long time (I remember an Omni magazine comic that posted and posited him as a villain covering up evidence of aliens having visited Mars. That…was a bit of a shock). 

In order to celebrate Carl Sagan’s birthday, you must first invent the universe.

(8) BRADBURY, SAGAN, AND CLARKE AT CALTECH. And we’re only a couple days away from the anniversary of the panel that gave rise to Mars and the Mind of Man, a non-fiction book chronicling a public symposium at Caltech on November 12, 1971 featuring Ray Bradbury; Arthur C. Clarke; Bruce C. Murray; Carl Sagan and Walter Sullivan. The symposium occurred shortly before the Mariner 9 space probe entered orbit around Mars.

In this excerpt from the panel, Bradbury reads his poem “If Only We Had Taller Been”.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) SO IT GOES. Steven Heller interviews artist Igor Karash about his illustrations for Easton Press’ forthcoming limited edition of Slaughterhouse-Five. “Kurt Vonnegut’s Time Traveler Reimagined” at PRINT Magazine.

You mentioned that you started working on it at the outset of the Ukraine-Russia war. How did it impact your work?
Not in the greatest way. When I started developing the visuals, I was predominantly moved by the idea of examining the “horrors of war,” bouncing on the borderline between the darkest side of human nature and the paradoxical presence of good (this is the main message of the book for me). And then, the first war on the European continent since WWII turned everything upside down. Ukraine for me isn’t just another country—this is where I went to art school, where I met my wife, and where both of my children were born. From day one of the Russian invasion I was closely watching and following all news from Ukraine, contacting my friends there, etc., and almost immediately my drawings of the “horrors of war” on the surface of my drawing tablet started to feel bleak, unimportant and fake compared to the tragic reality unfolding before me, and I more deeply sunk into the hole of “PEOPLE DO NOT LEARN FROM THEIR PAST. SO IT GOES.” It took me a while to find enough inner peace to continue the project.

(11) WARNING AGAINST CHATBOTS. [Item by Steven French.] The UK’s communications regulator has warned digital platform companies that ‘chatbots’ which imitate either real or fictional people, alive or dead, could fall afoul of new online safety laws: “Ofcom warns tech firms after chatbots imitate Brianna Ghey and Molly Russell”.

Ofcom said it had issued the guidance after “distressing incidents”. It highlighted a case first reported by the Daily Telegraph where Character.AI users created bots to act as virtual clones of Brianna, 16, a transgender girl who was murdered by two teenagers last year, and Molly, who took her own life in 2017 after viewing harmful online content.

It also pointed to a case in the US where a teenager died after developing a relationship with a Character.AI avatar based on a Game of Thrones character.

(12) NEUROMANCER MUSICAL ACCOMPANIMENT. [Item by Steven French.] If you’ve ever listened to Gibson’s Neuromancer in audiobook format, the soundtrack is now available separately: “Neuromancer | Black Rain | Room40” at Bandcamp.

From Lawrence English
It’s hard to imagine that this year William Gibson’s Neuromancer celebrates its 40th anniversary. Having recently re-read the book for the first time in a great many years, the world building Gibson undertook in that text and the lingering cultural spectres he conjured, feel ever so evocative of moments of our contemporary lived experience. The books continued cultural resonance has resolved in a way that captured a future reading of an, at that time of its release, unknown internet era. It was an era of promise, and imagination, of speculative hope and down right uneasiness in equal parts.

In 1994, as the books 10th anniversary was on hand, New York duo Black Rain were commissioned to make a soundtrack to the audio book version of Neuromancer. Read by the author himself, this document, originally publish on a series of cassettes, would go on to be recognised as a unique glimpse into Gibson’s sensing of the characters and places that make up the Neuromancer zone.

Following a period of work as an expanded collective, Stuart Argabright and Shinichi Shimokawa, the two core members of Black Rain, decided to strip back their unit largely to a duet format. Their focus became more engaged around studio practice, and it was this refocusing that was ultimately serendipitous. As they started work on Neuromancer a number of new approaches and techniques emerged and with them came a new sonic language the pair had only imagined previously.

The audio book was a huge success and the soundtrack too was recognised for its brooding and post-industrial electronic grind. Since that time however, the recordings have largely remained in obscurity. While a couple of the pieces have surfaced in various editions including an excellent compilation by Blackest Ever Black, the entire suite of pieces has remained unpublished until this moment.

Working off the original master tapes, this edition (like the book), folds and morphs over itself in an episodic stratification. Pieces emerge, like strange architecture, from one another forming a sonic environment that feels almost tangible. I spent many weeks working on these tapes and also on the connections between the pieces. In collaboration with Stuart, our joint aim was to create a version of the soundtrack that speaks to the very atmosphere of the text itself. It’s a delight to share this collection of work for the first time. 

(13) TUNING INTO THE MILKY WAY. [Item by Steven French.] How to build your very own handy-dandy radio telescope using only “a 1-meter satellite dish, a Raspberry Pi, and some other basic electronics such as analog-to-digital converters” (and an empty washing up liquid bottle – sorry, channelling old memories of kids tv programmes!): How to build a home radio telescope to detect clouds of hydrogen in the Milky Way (phys.org) at Phys.org.

…If I ask you to picture a radio telescope, you probably imagine a large dish pointing to the sky, or even an array of dish antennas such as the Very Large Array. What you likely don’t imagine is something that resembles a TV dish in your neighbor’s backyard. With modern electronics, it is relatively easy to build your own radio telescope. To understand how it can be done, check out a recent paper by Jack Phelps posted to the arXiv preprint server….

(14) THE QUIET FAN. The example of 2001 to the contrary, “Blue Danube” is not what a space traveler hears as he arrives at an orbital facility. “Space stations are loud — that’s why NASA is making a quiet fan” at Space.com.

Despite the International Space Station being comparable in size to a five-bedroom house, the prospect of spending months confined to a building that floats 250 miles (402 kilometers) above the Earth would be daunting for many.

You’d have to deal with limited space, a lack of privacy, the knowledge that you’re being watched, and the difficulty of performing everyday tasks in a zero-gravity environment. One thing we don’t often consider, though, when it comes to living on the International Space Station (ISS), is the sound. The constant hum of fans keeping crucial life support systems and instruments cool could get to anyone after a while, and there is nowhere to escape it.Thankfully, NASA researchers have developed a new “Quiet Space Fan” to reduce noise on crewed spacecraft, a design they plan on sharing with the industry for future use on commercial space stations.

By reducing noise at the source, NASA hopes people will be able to hear each other more clearly, become aware of alarms faster, and reduce risk of hearing loss, along with mitigating the irritation that loud, unwanted sounds can incur….

[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mlex, Jo Fletcher, Paul Weimer, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 11/1/24 Do Not Count A Pixel Scrolled Until You’ve Seen The Jetpack. And Even Then You Can Make A Mistake

Posted on by
16

(1) GREG HILDEBRANDT (1939-2024). Artist Greg Hildebrandt died October 31. Tolkien Collectors Guide paid tribute:

Greg’s wife Jean posted this to his social media today that he has passed after a short illness.

“The light has gone out in my life. At 12:36 pm this afternoon the love of my life, my best friend and soulmate passed away. Greg was 85 years young. He was the sweetest man I ever knew. We worked together for 45 years. We lived together for 33 of those years. We had a beautiful life we were blessed. Greg has been fighting for 5 months to regain his ability to breathe after a serious side effect of a heart medication. He fought very hard to win this battle but in the end he was just too weak. He passed away peacefully in my arms. He knew he was safe and he was loved and he will be missed terribly. I cannot imagine my life without him. He was my guy, yesterday, today, tomorrow and forever. You are my heart and it is broken!”

Greg and Tim Hildebrandt, known as the Brothers Hildebrandt (born January 23, 1939), were American twin brothers who worked collaboratively as fantasy and science fiction artists for many years, produced illustrations for comic books, movie posters, children’s books, posters, novels, calendars, advertisements, and trading cards. Tim Hildebrandt died on June 11, 2006.

Greg Hildebrandt received a Chesley Award for Artistic Achievement in 2010. Gizmodo’s tribute includes numerous examples of his artwork.

Greg Hildebrandt in 2009. Photo by Alan White.

(2) WORDS FROM NEW SFWA PRESIDENT. SFWA’s newly-elected President Kate Ristau today sent this message to members:

In June, writers, creators, and fans gathered in-person and online to countdown to the start of the Nebula Awards Ceremony. In Pasadena, we passed out glow sticks and monitored the YouTube chat. We were ready to celebrate the works and creators that lit up the year.

The moments before the SFWA logo hits the screen are full of anticipation. For the past four years, I have felt this joy as I served on the Nebula Awards Ceremony Team, honoring and celebrating the speculative fiction community. Now, I am stepping into a new leadership role to serve as your SFWA President.

But I know it’s not just me.

As an Executive Director of a 501(c)(3) arts nonprofit, I understand that this is a role of stewardship and care. I am serving the organization – helping us get on the right path. I would like to see us do that work together with character and integrity (to be the Samwise Gamgees and Ned Starks of the world…without losing our potatoes or our heads).

SFWA is in a time of transition, and faces many decisions as it rockets into the future. My intent is not to make these decisions for the organization – it is to help the organization make the best decisions. That takes community, collaboration, and a coalition of people willing to step up and make SFWA better.

That is how SFWA works. We celebrate, advocate, and support our genre community through the efforts of active and engaged volunteers, supporters, allies, staff, and friends.

We do that work together.

So, while I am excited about the opportunities I see to improve the trajectory of the organization – to lead strategically and encourage growth while being grounded in fundamentally sound organizational systems and principles – I am most excited about working with all of you.

As I step up into this position, and work toward better meeting the mission of SFWA, I look forward to collaboration, cooperation, and growth – with your help.

In the final moments of the 2024 Nebula Awards Ceremony, we raised our glowsticks and sparkled in the chat as Sarah Gailey encouraged us to carry our fires with us, “burning with passion and anger and rage and sorrow and love.” But they also reminded us that we carry those fires “in all our courage and all our principles.”

So as we light the way, as we carry candles for our genre and for our friends, we do so together.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to light the way with you.

(3) HEAR FEAR. To celebrate Halloween, Here & Now producer Kalyani Saxena spoke with three horror authors — Grady Hendrix, Alexis Henderson and Alix E. Harrow — at WBUR’s CitySpace. “Terrifying tales: How 3 horror writers think about the hidden power of scary stories”. Hear the 10-minute radio Q&A at the link.

(4) CONTRASTING DOCTOR WHO WITH UN PEACEKEEPING MISSIONS. “Fourth Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law: Doctor Who and Humanitarian Interventions – How a Time Lord foreshadows the Responsibility to Protect” at OpinioJuris.

…Echoing this condemnation, the Doctor is once again put on trial for his intergalactic meddling, this time by the High Court of the Time Lords (1986). The viewer is presented with a litany of negative consequences that have resulted from the Doctor’s unsanctioned interventions. However, this time, the Doctor puts forward a strident defence of their actions, illustrating the changing norms around foreign intervention at the end of the Cold War. The Doctor condemns the Time Lords for their bureaucratic passivity in the face of atrocity crimes and proudly declares, “While you have been content merely to observe the evil in the galaxy, I have been fighting against it”.  The High Court eventually accepts the Doctor’s argument that action must be taken ‘in the face of evil’, but still punishes them for breaking a seemingly inviolable law.

While the Doctor had embraced the need for intervention, the UN – like the Time Lords – was slow to follow….

(5) BA-BUMP! “What makes music scary? Your imagination plays a part” explains NPR.

Just two notes are all it takes for John Williams to build tension in his famous composition for the film “Jaws.”

“We don’t see the shark at the beginning, but we know there’s something there,” said Daniel Goldmark, head of popular music studies at Case Western Reserve University. “It all just comes down to this very, very tiny little paring of sounds that turns into something really, well, monstrous.”

Repetition is another musical technique that comes up often in soundtracks for scary movies. Other commonalities include minor keys and held-out dissonances, where the notes seem to disagree….

… Ferraguto said he particularly enjoys the use of instruments in the final movement of “Symphonie Fantastique” by Hector Berlioz, influenced by the story that goes with it.

“There’s an E-flat clarinet solo that sounds like a kind of cackling, insane witch. And beneath that are these bubbling bassoons that I kind of always imagine as a kind of a cauldron,” he said.

The opening theme of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film “The Shining” also adapted a selection of “Symphonie Fantastique,” which plays as a car navigates to a remote hotel in the mountains…

(6) DEATHWORLD IS HERE. [Item by Steven French.] Author Andrew Michael Hurley ponders the diverse roles played by nature itself in dystopian fiction: “The new folk horror: nature is coming to kill you!” in the Guardian.

Concern about the depletion and loss of nature is nothing new. Anxieties about global ecological catastrophes have been present in dystopian fiction for at least the last century. Nordenholt’s Million, a 1923 novel by Alfred Walter Stewart (writing as JJ Connington) sees a pernicious bacterium, known as the Blight laying waste to the world’s soil. It’s a precursor to John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956) where the so-called Chung-Li virus decimates the wheat harvest in the far east before spreading across the entire Earth.

Worlds in other post-apocalyptic novels are scarred by pollution, acid rain, genetic mutation, overcrowding, fire and drought – and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the genre is deluged by catastrophic flooding. In JG Ballard’s work of 1962, The Drowned World, the ice caps have melted, and England has been transformed into a tropical quagmire. While Richard Cowper’s The Road to Corlay (1978) takes us to a Great Britain of the year 3000, where rising sea levels have split the country into the Seven Kingdoms, making the Mendips and the Quantocks islands. More recently, we might think of Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From and also Julia Armfield’s Private Rites, which reimagines King Lear in a half-submerged London.

(7) FROM THE BLACK LAGOON TO YOU. FigureFan Zero reviews “Universal Monsters: Ultimate Creature From The Black Lagoon by NECA”.

Over the last couple years, I’ve taken a look at quite a few of NECA’s Ultimate Universal Monsters, but oddly enough I have yet to touch on my favorite one of the bunch. Yup, it’s The Gillman, and he is not only one of my favorite creature designs of all time, but I absolutely love the movies. When I was about ten years old, they showed Revenge of the Creature in 3D on network television and it was a huge event in our house. We got the 3D glasses for the whole family, my Dad made Jiffypop and it was just a great time and a very fond memory….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by JJ.]

Born November 1, 1923 — Gordon R. Dickson. (Died 2001.)

By JJ: Writer, Filker, and Fan. Gordon R. Dickson was truly one of the best writers of both science fiction and fantasy. It would require a skald to detail his stellar career in any detail. 

Gordon R. Dickson

His first published speculative fiction was the short story “Trespass!”, written with Poul Anderson, in the Spring 1950 issue of Fantastic Stories. Childe Cycle, featuring the Dorsai, is his best known series, and the Hoka are certainly his and Poul Anderson’s silliest creation. 

I’m very fond of his Dragon Knight series, which I think reflects his interest in medieval history.  His works received a multitude of award nominations, and he won Hugo, Nebula, and British Fantasy Awards. 

In 1975, he was presented the Skylark Award for achievement in imaginative fiction. He was Guest of Honor at dozens of conventions, including the 1984 Worldcon, and he was named to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and the Filk Hall of Fame. 

The Dorsai Irregulars, an invitation-only fan volunteer security group named after his series, was formed at the 1974 Worldcon in response to the theft of some of Kelly Freas’ work the year before, and has provided security at conventions ever since.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) WHEN READING THE BOOK IS NOT RECOMMENDED. Collider offers its list of “10 Worst Horror Movie Decisions, Ranked”.

In horror movies, characters often don’t always make the right decisions. It’s a common cliché that some of them would make completely baffling, even moronic, choices that either get them or other people killed. Anyone who has ever seen these films can at least relate to one time or another getting frustrated whenever they notice the characters are doing something that they should have completely done the opposite way.

Here’s one of their favorites.

3. Reading from the Book

‘The Evil Dead’ Franchise (1981-)

The Evil Dead films are the go-to for splatter horror entertainment. Featuring five near-perfect installments, including a beloved but short-lived TV series, this bloody good franchise often follows groups of people as they come across “The Necronomicon Ex-Mortis,” or The Book of the Dead. Bound in human flesh and inked with blood, it harbors a dark power that can summon demons and other nightmarish creatures to attack or possess whoever so unwisely reads out loud its incantations.

However, that’s precisely how all this trouble in the Evil Dead films starts. Whether it’s through sheer naivety or dumb curiosity, some characters completely ignore all warning signs to not utter words from the Necronomicon, but they do it anyway. Unfortunately, it leads to terrifying consequences as the book unleashes its frightening demons, known as the Deadites, to proceed to take over bodies and attack those around them. This happens a lot throughout the franchise, especially when the hero, Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell), has possession of it, as he always seems to mess things up and unleash hell once again.

(11) ROLLING, ROLLING, ROLLING. “The New Glenn rocket’s first stage is real, and it’s spectacular” at Ars Technica.

Blue Origin took another significant step toward the launch of its large New Glenn rocket on Tuesday night by rolling the first stage of the vehicle to a launch site at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Although the company’s rocket factory in Florida is only a few miles from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, because of the rocket and transporter’s size, the procession had to follow a more circuitous route. In a post on LinkedIn, Blue Origin’s chief executive, Dave Limp, said the route taken by the rocket to the pad is 23 miles long.

Limp also provided some details on GERT, the company’s nickname for the “Giant Enormous Rocket Truck” devised to transport the massive New Glenn first stage.

“Our transporter comprises two trailers connected by cradles and a strongback assembly designed in-house,” Limp said. “There are 22 axles and 176 tires on this transport vehicle. It’s towed by an Oshkosh M1070, a repurposed US Army tank transporter, with 505 horsepower and 1,825 pound-feet of torque.”

The transporter can only take certain roads due to its length, 310 feet (95 meters), and height with the rocket on board. The New Glenn booster has a diameter of 23 feet (7 meters), which is far too large to transport beneath conventional bridges….

(12) RAT PATROL. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Two new job categories may be opening: one for African giant pouched rats to sniff out wildlife contraband and another for their handlers. The 3-pound rodents are trained to pick up the scent of various wildlife items that are commonly smuggled (think ivory as a very recognizable example) and alert their handlers.

Willard would be so proud. Ben would just want the treat that comes along with a correct alert. “Giant three-pound rats trained to sniff out illegal poaching” – Popular Science has the story.

African giant pouched rats (Cricetomys gambianus) could be the next line of defense in the illegal wildlife trade. A team of researchers have trained these three-pound rats to pick up the scent of elephant ivory, rhino horn, pangolin scales, and a small tree called African blackwood. All of these animals and plants are listed as threatened or at a high risk of extinction and are illegally trafficked. The findings are detailed in a proof-of-principle study published October 30 in the journal Frontiers in Conservation Science…

(13) SQUID GAME RETURNS. AllYourScreens brings us “First Look: ‘Squid Game’ – Season Two (Video)”.

Season 2 raises the stakes, with Lee Jung-jae reprising his role as Seong Gi-hun, also known as Player 456. With a hardened demeanor and the scars of past games, Gi-hun is on a desperate mission to expose the deadly truth of the competition. Yet, his warnings go unheeded, and tensions rise as fellow players question his intentions. The teaser also shows the return of Lee Byung-hun as the mysterious Front Man, whose true motivations remain cloaked in secrecy, while Wi Ha-jun’s Hwang Jun-ho is back, driving the narrative forward as the relentless detective on a mission of his own.

(14) AI TEXT WATERMARK FOLLOW-UP. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Further to the reporting of the research paper on a method of watermarking AI-generated text, Nature has just published a more newsy article on the paper and its implications. “GOOGLE Unveils ‘Invisible Watermark’ for AI-Generated Text”.

(15) “TIME TO TAKE OUT THE TRASH”. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This week over at Dr Becky there is a 12-minute video looking at whether there is alien technology around Proxima…  “Debunking the ‘technosignature from Proxima Centauri’ rumours”.

Because this month saw yet another bullshit claim that an announcement of the discovery of intelligent alien life was imminent. And I got mad. Maybe it’s just because this is the tip of the iceberg of so many fake discovery claims that circle the internet, especially when it comes to JWST, which are just all absolute trash. And this week I have reached my limit and I’m going to take it all out on BLC1 – breakthrough listen candidate 1 – a radio signal detected back in 2020 which was already shown to be radio interference back in 2021, but that this month a documentary film maker claimed to have spoken to the folks at the Breakthrough Listen project who are hunting for signs of intelligent alien life in radio data, and claims that an announcement from Breakthrough and the University of Oxford about BLC1 are imminent. I’m a researcher at Oxford, and I can tell you now we all laughed. So in this video, we’re going to dive into everything we know about BLC1 to put these rumours to rest completely. First starting with: 1) BLC1’s detection back in 2020 and why it was initially thought to be a promising “technosignature” of intelligent alien life, 2) how BLC1 was ruled out as a real “technosignature”, and 3) how no recurring signal has been detected since.

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

2024 SFWA Special Election Results

Posted on by
1

The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association has announced the results of the 2024 special election.

PRESIDENT

  • Kate Ristau

Ristau outpolled two other announced candidates, Christine Taylor-Butler and Jennifer Brozek.

SECRETARY

  • Steven D Brewer

After the only announced candidate withdrew, Brewer declared as a write-in candidate in early October. Brewer was the only write-in to receive a substantial number of votes.

Fewer than 300 votes were cast for President, and only a little over 100 for Secretary.

The office of President was vacated by the resignation of SFWA President Jeffe Kennedy on August 1. And when Interim President (formerly vice-president) Chelsea Mueller resigned on August 15, Secretary Anthony W. Eichenlaub moved up to take her place. Once his time ends as Interim President, Eichenlaub, having succeeded Mueller as Vice-President, will remain on the Board in that office.

Those chosen in the Special Election will serve the balance of the current terms, beginning November 1 through June 30, 2025.

The members of the SFWA Board of Directors as of November 1 will be:

Kate Ristau – President
Anthony Eichenlaub – Vice President
Jonathan Brazee – CFO
Steven D Brewer – Secretary
Christine Taylor-Butler – Director-at-Large
Phoebe Barton – Director-at-Large
Noah Sturdevant – Director-at-Large
Alton Kremer – Director-at-Large

The fifth director-at-large, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, was removed from the Board by a vote of the current directors on October 27.

Ekpeki Removed as SFWA Board Director-at-Large

Posted on by
7

The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) Board, in response to ethics complaints about Director-at-Large Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, voted yesterday to remove him from office.

Here is the text of the official announcement: “SFWA Board Statement on Removal of a Director-at-Large”.

On 10/27/2024, the Board met to discuss multiple ethics complaints regarding Director-at-Large Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki after hearing statements from various parties involved. Mr. Ekpeki was also given a chance to speak to the Board regarding these complaints. After due consideration, and in compliance with Article V(5)(iii) of the SFWA Bylaws, the Board voted unanimously to remove Director-at-Large Ekpeki from his position on the SFWA Board of Directors for good and sufficient cause, effective immediately.

The Board will not be answering questions on this matter to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki had just been voted onto the Board this summer, and started serving on July 1.

Pixel Scroll 10/15/24 Like Scrolls Thru The Hourglass, So Are The Pixels Of Our Lives

Posted on by
27

(1) SEATTLE 2025 CONSIDERING ARTISTS TO DESIGN HUGO BASE. The 2024 Worldcon committee announced on Facebook:

Seattle Worldcon 2025 is currently accepting information from artists interested in designing the 2025 Hugo Base. Have an idea that builds yesterday’s future for everyone?

If, after reading the information listed at the link below, you are interested, please fill out the form. Our Hugo Base Subcommittee will be reviewing submissions until November 15, 2024. After that point, we will contact you to either move forward with further discussions or with a heartfelt thanks for sharing your interest.

There’s a Google Doc link in the post that takes readers to the complete guidelines. They say in part:

Our Hugo Base sub-committee will be reviewing submissions based on the following criteria:

  1. Ability to produce an initial order of 45 bases;
  2. Ability to possibly produce more bases upon request in the 3 months after our convention;
  3. Concept that fits with the theme of our Worldcon (https://seattlein2025.org/about/our-theme/); and,
  4. Ability to have the initial order delivered to us by July 24, 2025;

(2) ALSO KNOWN AS. Dave Hook discusses “My Favorite Speculative Fiction Pen Names” at A Deep Look by Dave Hook.

….Historically, it was not that hard for an author in pulp or genre fiction to publish under a name different than their legal name. Many works of fiction were submitted to editors in the mail, perhaps with a cover letter and address or post office box. Correspondence and payment could go back to that address, with someone ultimately cashing the check. Especially before the internet, it was not hard to do this. I assume the editors often knew there was a pen name, or even requested one be used.

With today’s copyright laws and the internet, it is my suspicion that using a pseudonym without anyone other than your agent, editor or publisher knowing it is you is a good deal harder than it might have been in the past….

… Cordwainer Bird was used by Harlan Ellison for “material he was partially disclaiming”, to quote SFE. This was substantially scripts for TV, including “The Price of Doom” (1964) episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, “You Can’t Get There from Here” (1968) episode of The Flying Nun; and “Voyage of Discovery” (1973) episode of The Starlost. Harlan Ellison’s first published story was “Glow Worm“, a short story, Infinity Science Fiction, February 1956. He wrote under many pseudonyms especially early in his career. For those not familiar with his broad work in speculative fiction including SF, fantasy, and horror and combinations thereof, you would not go wrong with the recent collection Greatest Hits, J. Michael Straczynski editor, 2024 Union Square & Co. (see my review).

Cordwainer Bird was also used as a pseudonym by Philip José Farmer with permission of Harlan Ellison for the “The Impotency of Bad Karma“, a short story, Popular Culture June 1977. His first published work was “The Lovers“, a novella, Startling Stories August 1952. 1952, rather revolutionary and still important. Farmer went through what he called his “fictional author phase” from 1974 to 1978, when he used pseudonyms that were often the names of fictional writers in works by others or by him. My own favorite in terms of pseudonym used by Farmer is “Venus on the Half-Shell“, a novella, F&SF December 1974, as by Kilgore Trout, who first appeared in Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, 1965 Holt, Rinehart and Winston….

My fave did not make his list – “Tak Hallus”, a Steven Robinett pseud that supposedly is Persian for “pen name”.

(3) SFWA UPDATE. SFWA’s Interim President Anthony W. Eichenlaub today sent a message to members that said in part:

…Recent resignations prove to us how much we’ve come to depend on our staff while also highlighting flaws in the structure of our organization. SFWA must change as it rebuilds. To help guide us in this, we are bringing in Russell Davis in a transitional leadership position. He knows SFWA well, understands corporate structure, and is already getting up to speed.

At last week’s Board meeting we discussed new formats for the Nebula Conference that will allow us to serve both members and non-members without burning out volunteers or staff. Our yearly event has taken many forms throughout the years, and we want to focus this year on a celebration of everything SFWA has accomplished over these past sixty years. None of the details are nailed down yet, but it will likely be a significant change from the Nebulas of recent years. We’re focusing on the Midwest and we’ll have more to share as soon as possible.

We also now have a finalized confidentiality policy. It’s back from the lawyer, and the next step is to vote both this and the corresponding OPPM changes in so that we can start rolling it out. My hope is that we can make this the start of a cultural shift toward transparency for the organization. Change is easier when it happens in the light of day….

(4) SIFTING AND SIEVING. Uncanny Magazine coeditor Michael Damian Thomas today expanded on his previous comments about an AI-inspired surge in submissions.

(5) LIVE FROM BROOKLYN. The Brooklyn SciFi Film Festival is now live through October 20.

We kick off the 5th annual Brooklyn SciFi Film Festival by making over 200 films available to stream online and upvote for recognition.

(6) A NICE PAYCHECK, TOO. Variety hears the actor say — “Harrison Ford: Rejecting Marvel Roles Is ‘Silly’ When Audiences Love It” – and you can quote him.

Harrison Ford is no stranger to blockbuster Hollywood franchises, having played Han Solo and Indiana Jones across decades. And now, the 82-year-old actor is joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross / Red Hulk in next year’s “Captain America: Brave New World.” Speaking to GQ magazine, Ford said it would be “silly” to avoid Marvel when it’s something moviegoers have clearly responded to for years now.

“I mean, this is the Marvel universe and I’m just there on a weekend pass. I’m a sailor new to this town,” Ford said about his MCU debut. “I understand the appeal of other kinds of films besides the kind we made in the ’80s and ’90s. I don’t have anything general to say about it. It’s the condition our condition is in, and things change and morph and go on. We’re silly if we sit around regretting the change and don’t participate. I’m participating in a new part of the business that, for me at least, I think is really producing some good experiences for an audience. I enjoy that.”…

(7) WARD CHRISTENSEN (1945-2024). Ars Technica pays tribute to “Ward Christensen, BBS inventor and architect of our online age” who died October 11:

Ward Christensen, co-inventor of the computer bulletin board system (BBS), has died at age 78 in Rolling Meadows, Illinois. He was found deceased at his home on Friday after friends requested a wellness check. Christensen, along with Randy Suess, created the first BBS in Chicago in 1978, leading to an important cultural era of digital community-building that presaged much of our online world today.

In the 1980s and 1990s, BBSes introduced many home computer users to multiplayer online gaming, message boards, and online community building in an era before the Internet became widely available to people outside of science and academia. It also gave rise to the shareware gaming scene that led to companies like Epic Games today….

…Christensen and Suess came up with the idea for the first computer bulletin board system during the Great Blizzard of 1978 when they wanted to keep up with their computer club, the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists’ Exchange (CACHE), when physical travel was difficult. Beginning in January of that year, Suess assembled the hardware, and Christensen wrote the software, called CBBS.

“They finished the bulletin board in two weeks but they called it four because they didn’t want people to feel that it was rushed and that it was made up,” Scott told Ars. They canonically “finished” the project on February 16, 1978, and later wrote about their achievement in a November 1978 issue of Byte magazine.

Their new system allowed personal computer owners with modems to dial up a dedicated machine and leave messages that others would see later….

Tom Becker also notes, “There is some indication that he was active in Chicago fandom. He has a mention on Fancyclopedia as one of the founders of the Build-A-Blinkie organization.” — “Ward Christensen”.

… Dale Sulak, Dwayne Forsyth and Ward Christensen created the Build-a-Blinkie organization. Build-a-Blinkie is a 501(c)3 dedicated to the teaching of STEM. They run learn-to-solder events in the Great Lakes area. Build-a-Blinkie has the world’s largest mobile soldering stations and participates at numerous Maker Faires, libraries, universities, Maker Spaces, and Chicago-area sf conventions…. 

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY?

Born October 15 [allegedly], 1953 – Walter Jon Williams, 71. [The Science Fiction Encyclopedia says he was born October 2, 1953. The Internet Science Fiction Database says his birthday is October 15, and so does IMDb. His blog (“Geezer Test”) celebrates October 28 as does the Wikipedia. We’re celebrating the ISFDB’s choice this year.]

By Paul Weimer: I mentioned Walter Jon Williams before in my remembrance of the work of John Ford. And I stand by what I said there: he is one of the most widely writing people in SFF today. The sheer breath of the type of work he writes, from the post singularity(?) Metropolitan, to the sword and singularity of Implied Spaces, the Drake Majestal future space opera crime capers, and so much more. The impossibility to pin him and his work down, I think is part of the reason why his work isn’t better known–he doesn’t stick to a line long enough to get complete traction in it so that he attracts a critical mass of readers. 

And that is a shame. 

His work is clever, erudite, witty, and bears up to multiple readings. The intensity and subtlety of the Dread Empire’s Fall series, one of the best space opera series out there, is criminally underappreciated. Or his Quillifer series, which feels like early Renaissance with magic and Gods sort of world, as Quillifer is the “Most Interesting Man” made flesh–but that doesn’t help him get out of his latest schemes and problems. He has to work hard with cleverness, boldness and ingenuity to continue his rise. (Quillifer is a favorite of mine, and it feels resonant with the work of K J Parker).

And he’s also written a solid Star Wars novel, The New Jedi Order: Destiny’s Way.

He’s also written outside of genre, from historicals to near future thrillers to a straight up disaster novel (The Rift— really good!)  He always seems ready to invent and try something new. .

Williams also runs the Taos Toolbox workshop in New Mexico every year.

I got to meet him in Helsinki, where he was GOH for the 2017 Worldcon, but he doesn’t remember me. Alas!

Walter Jon Williams

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) ATWOOD ON THE RADIO. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This week’s BBC Radio 4’s The Verb programme had as one of its two guests the SF grandmaster Margaret Atwood, firmly in poetry mode of course.

Ian McMillan talks to Margaret Atwood and Alice Oswald about how we write poetry, and their own process, the natural world, time, and the possibilities of myth…

You can download the 42-minute programme here.

(11) ROCKY HORROR. Buzzfeed shares a collection of “Rocky Horror Picture Show Behind The Scenes Facts”. Lucky thirteen is —

13. Rocky is wearing a prosthetic plug to cover his belly button. Because Frank-N-Furter created him, he wouldn’t have had an umbilical cord.

(12) KEVIN SMITH NEWS. [Item by Danny Sichel.] Kevin Smith has finally regained the rights to his 1999 religious fantasy DOGMA, which were being controlled by Harvey Weinstein. Yes, that  Harvey Weinstein.

Smith is planning to rerelease the movie on home video format as well as streaming; he’s also mentioned the possibility of sequels and associated TV material, now that Weinstein will no longer be getting any of the profit. “Kevin Smith Regains Control of Dogma, Coming to Streaming” at Consequence Film.

Kevin Smith’s celebrated 1999 comedy, Dogma, will soon be re-released in theaters and made available on streaming for the first time, now that the director has finally secured the rights to the film after its one-time owner, Harvey Weinstein, held it “hostage” for years.

Smith confirmed the acquisition during a recent interview on The Hashtag Show, explaining that the rights had been bought off Weinstein recently, which allowed him to finally regain them. “The movie had been bought away from the guy that had it for years,” he said. “The company that bought it, we met with them a couple months ago. They were like, ‘Would you be interested in re-releasing it and touring it like you do with your movies?’ I said, ‘100 percent, are you kidding me? Touring a movie that I know people like, and it’s sentimental and nostalgic? We’ll clean up.’”

(13) RED PLANET AGRICULTURE. In Nature, “Rebeca Gonçalves explains how plant food could be grown on the red planet”: “Planning for life on Mars”.

The day this photo was taken, in November 2021, I got the best of presents. One hundred kilograms of material designed to simulate Mars regolith, the dense, soil-like deposits present on the planet’s surface, arrived from Austin, Texas, at the Wageningen University laboratory in the Netherlands, where I was then working. Mars has no nutrients or organic matter, so there’s no real soil in its regolith. The simulant I received had been developed by NASA researchers on the basis of data retrieved and analysed by rovers that have visited the red planet.

Over the next few months, my colleagues and I started to explore what we could grow in the material. We found that tomatoes, peas and carrots all took to the soil and grew well. But could these plants realistically survive on Mars?

The planet does have water, but most of it is frozen at its poles or buried deep underground. So for plants to live, water would need to be pumped up to the surface. Mars has almost no atmosphere and no magnetic field, so plants would have to be housed in colonies, with greenhouse-like structures to protect them. In these, an internal ecosystem with a controlled atmosphere could help the plants to retrieve oxygen through hydrolysis.

In modern agriculture, those techniques are already used to protect crops. And research to understand how to help food grow in harsh conditions won’t be wasted if it doesn’t get to Mars. That’s because restoring infertile, degraded soil that’s been damaged by climate change, or events such as flash flooding and droughts, will become more and more important in the future.

I’d love to visit Mars, but preferably when some kind of life-support system is in place. Our research might represent a step in that direction….

(14) CASH OFFENDS NO ONE. The Hollywood Reporter says the litigation is over: “Microsoft Settles Antitrust Suit Seeking Divestiture From Activision”.

Microsoft has settled an antitrust lawsuit brought by gamers challenging the tech giant’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

The two sides on Monday notified the court of a deal to dismiss the lawsuit “with prejudice,” meaning it can’t be refiled. Terms of the agreement weren’t disclosed. “Each party shall bear their own costs and fees,” agreed the lawyers in a court filing.

The lawsuit, filed in California federal court in 2022 by gamers across multiple states, stressed that the merger will create among the largest video game companies in the world, with the ability to raise prices, limit output and reduce consumer choice. One example cited in the complaint was the possibility that Microsoft makes certain titles exclusive to Xbox. It was filed less than two weeks after the Federal Trade Commission sued to block the deal….

(15) IN TIMES TO COME. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Should someone check to make sure these are not plutonium-producing breeder reactors? “Google inks nuclear deal for next-generation reactors” reports The Verge.

Google plans to buy electricity from next-generation nuclear reactors. It announced the deal yesterday, which it says is the world’s first corporate agreement to purchase electricity from advanced small modular reactors (SMRs) that are still under development.

Google inked the deal with engineering company Kairos Power, which plans to get its first SMR up and running by 2030. Google agreed to purchase electricity from “multiple” reactors that would be built through 2035.

Google needs a lot more clean energy to meet its climate goals while pursuing its AI ambitions. New nuclear technologies are still unproven at scale, but the hope is that they can provide carbon pollution-free electricity while solving some of the problems that come with traditional nuclear power plants…

(16) PRIMARY APPEAL. “Rainbow Brite: New TV Show and Theatrical Movie in the Works” – Variety covers the spectrum.

Rainbow Brite is getting a remix from Crayola Studios and Hallmark, which are teaming to develop a new TV series and feature film inspired by the 1980s children’s franchise.

The theatrical movie is in the works from “Fast & Furious” and “Sonic the Hedgehog” producers Neal H. Moritz and Toby Ascher, while Cake Entertainment is developing a series with “contemporary appeal” based on the themes of “friendship, teamwork and the power of color and optimism to overcome darkness and negativity.”

Per the series logline, “Rainbow Brite, a friend, hero, role model and creative inspiration who brings all the colors of the rainbow to the universe, is transported to a dark and gloomy place with a mission to bring color, light and happiness to the world.”…

(17) IMITATION IS THE SINCEREST FORM OF BEING RIPPED OFF. [Item by N.] “Elon Musk, Tesla Mocked for Copying ‘I, Robot’ Designs” – The Hollywood Reporter tells why.

At Tesla‘s big Cybercab Robotaxi presentation last week at the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, the company also showed off the latest iteration of the Tesla Bot, dubbed Optimus, as well as a Robovan. The initial reveal of the trio of robot products caused great excitement on social media, but, very quickly, praise turned to mockery as the designs were scrutinized with a host of people accusing Elon Musk‘s company of ripping off the designs found in the 2004 sci-fi film I, Robot starring Will Smith.

Tesla had dubbed the event “We, Robot,” which plays into the title of Isaac Asimov’s 1950 short-story collection on which the film is based, so there was some recognition of the cross-pollination of ideas. However, many on social media called out the uncanny resemblance that all three of Tesla’s planned robot offerings have to similar products in Alex Proyas‘ film, which is set in 2035 Chicago….

Optimus, a general-purpose robotic humanoid Tesla is currently developing that takes its name from the Transformers character, does bear similarities to the NS5 robots found in I, Robot. But it was the fact that the Robovan (a self-driving people mover that looks like the robot delivery vehicle in the film) and Robotaxi (a self-driving taxi that looks like the Audi RSQ in the film) also aped similar vehicles found in I, Robot that really inspired the relentless mockery on social media and even a response from Proyas.

Alex Proyas also directed the 1998 film Dark City.

[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Paul Weimer, N., Tom Becker, Danny Sichel, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Thomas the Red.]

SFWA Special Election Candidates Named

Posted on by
1

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association today notified members that Special Election candidates for the roles of President and Secretary have been finalized. Their platforms have been posted in the members-only forum.

The candidates are:

PRESIDENT

  • Jennifer Brozek
  • Kate Ristau
  • Christine Taylor-Butler

SECRETARY

  • Matthew Reardon aka JRH Lawless.

The office of President was vacated by the resignation of SFWA President Jeffe Kennedy on August 1. And when Interim President Chelsea Mueller resigned on August 15, Secretary Anthony W. Eichenlaub moved up to take her place.

Those chosen in the Special Election will serve the remainder of the current terms (until June 30, 2025).

SFWA will open voting on October 9. The ballots will be counted after: October 23, 2024.

Pixel Scroll 9/7/24 You Are Like A Pixel Scroll, There’s Files In Your Skies

Posted on by
21

(1) SANS CLUE. Cora Buhlert declares, “The Guardian is Clueless about Masters of the Universe”.

…That said, the casting of Alison Brie has attracted more mainstream attraction than the casting of Galitzine and Mendes, probably because Brie is better known. And so Ben Child, who has a weekly geek media column in The Guardian, penned a spectacularly clueless article about the proposed live action Masters of the Universe movie.

Even the headline is terrible: “Can Travis Knight’s He-Man movie do for boys what Greta Gerwig’s Barbie did for girls?”

Yes, we all know how fiercely gendered the toy industry is, but must we really perpetuate those shitty stereotypes, especially when we know they’re wrong? Because in the 1980s, Mattel found to their own surprise that forty percent of all Masters of the Universe toys were sold to girls, which is what prompted the introduction of She-Ra. The 1980s Filmation cartoon was eagerly watched by both boys and girls and though Masters of the Universe fandom skews male, there are plenty of female fans, me among them. This isn’t surprising either, because Masters of the Universe has always featured plenty of impressive female characters such as Teela, Evil-Lyn, the Sorceress, Queen Marlena and of course, She-Ra and her entire supporting cast. Finally, there are plenty of male Barbie collectors as well….

… The main problem with the article is that Ben Child seems unable to view Masters of the Universe as anything other than a joke…

(2) FORMER BOARD MEMBER, NOW 404 ERROR. Sarah Gailey, who was on the NaNoWriMo “writers board” is no longer, as explained in “Some Thoughts on NaNoWriMo”.

…It’s reasonable for people to have reacted badly; the “statement” they released was very silly. To say “we will not take one of two positions, but we will say that one of those positions is classist and ableist” is not the deft rhetorical maneuver that NaNoWriMo seems to think it is. The arguments themselves around this so-called classism and ableism wave off the actual existence of writing communities, critique groups, beta readers, and critique partners; they also ignore the creative realities of the impoverished and disabled artists, marginalized authors, and indie authors who have been working all this time without the help of language learning model software that was trained on work stolen from their peers and colleagues. …

And this is the statement Gailey sent to Kilby Blades, Interim Executive Director of NaNoWriMo:

And Gailey said:

… I haven’t heard anything back. As of the time I’m writing this, the urls for the staff page and the Writers’ Board page are returning 404 errors. So does the url for my pep talk. …

(3) GOOD OMENS THIRD SEASON STILL HAPPENING. “’Good Omens’ season three on track at Amazon despite Neil Gaiman allegations” reports Screen Daily.

The third season of Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens is understood to be going ahead as planned at Amazon Prime Video, even though Disney has paused a feature adaptation of Gaiman’s novel, The Graveyard Book, following allegations of sexual assault against the UK author and screenwriter….

Amazon officially greenlit the third season of fantasy drama Good Omens in December 2023. Screen understands plans have not changed for the third season starring Michael Sheen and David Tennant to start filming in early 2025 in Scotland. Gaiman is executive producer, writer and showrunner of the series that is based on a book he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett.

Gaiman is also executive producer and a screenwriter on Anansi Boys, a Prime Video series based on Gaiman’s novel of the same name. While production wrapped on the series last year, no official release date has been set. Screen understands there are no plans to not stream the series….  

(4) CRIME ACTUALLY DOES PAY. For seven years! “FBI busts musician’s elaborate AI-powered $10M streaming-royalty heist” – Ars Technica tells how the scheme worked.

On Wednesday, federal prosecutors charged a North Carolina musician with defrauding streaming services of $10 million through an elaborate scheme involving AI, as reported by The New York Times. Michael Smith, 52, allegedly used AI to create hundreds of thousands of fake songs by nonexistent bands, then streamed them using bots to collect royalties from platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music.

While the AI-generated element of this story is novel, Smith allegedly broke the law by setting up an elaborate fake listener scheme. The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams, announced the charges, which include wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy. If convicted, Smith could face up to 20 years in prison for each charge.

Smith’s scheme, which prosecutors say ran for seven years, involved creating thousands of fake streaming accounts using purchased email addresses. He developed software to play his AI-generated music on repeat from various computers, mimicking individual listeners from different locations. In an industry where success is measured by digital listens, Smith’s fabricated catalog reportedly managed to rack up billions of streams.

To avoid detection, Smith spread his streaming activity across numerous fake songs, never playing a single track too many times. He also generated unique names for the AI-created artists and songs, trying to blend in with the quirky names of legitimate musical acts. Smith used artist names like “Callous Post” and “Calorie Screams,” while their songs included titles such as “Zygotic Washstands” and “Zymotechnical.”

…The district attorney announcement did not specify precisely what method Smith used to generate the songs….

(5) BULGACON. Начална страница (bulgacon.org) – Bulgacon, the Bulgarian national convention – takes place September 21-23 with Ian McDonald and Farah Mendlesohn as guests of honor. Dr. Valentin D. Ivanov reports, “Many panels will be in English and the committee is considering opening the online panels to everybody.”

(6) LEARNEDLEAGUE SFF: NARNIA AND MURDERBOT. [Item by David Goldfarb.] Question 1 on day 9 of the current regular LearnedLeague season asked us:

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, and The Magician’s Nephew are all books set in what mythical realm?

(I’ve spoiled the answer in my header, but I daresay very few Filers would have had any trouble with it.) This had a get rate of 89%, with no single wrong answer getting to 5% of the submissions.

In the most recent off-season there was a One-Day Special about File 770’s favorite rogue death machine: follow this link to see Murderbot for Everyone. As the title suggests, the questions try to include general-knowledge paths to the answers as well as knowledge of the books themselves. I actually didn’t do all that well on it: 9 right out of 12, and only 63rd percentile in the scoring. Filers may enjoy seeing if they could have done better.

(7) FLASH SF NIGHT. Space Cowboy Books of Joshua Tree, CA presents “Flash Science Fiction Night” online on Monday September 9 at 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Register to attend for free here.

This is the last Flash Science Fiction Night of the season! Join us online for an evening of short science fiction readings (1000 words or less) with authors Jenna Hanchey, Eric Fomley, and Marie Vibbert. Flash Science Fiction Nights run 30 minutes or less, and are a fun and great way to learn about new authors from around the world.

(8) SFWA TOWN HALL COMING. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association Board will conduct the organization’s first SFWA Town Hall for members on September 10, 2024.

This event is part of the ongoing effort to foster communication with the membership, talk about what the organization is current doing and planning, and to take an opportunity to listen.

By working together, the board can address concerns and begin writing the next chapters in the history of SFWA.

(9) TRIBUTE TO BROTHER. Inverse remembers, “40 Years Ago, a Cult Classic Sci-Fi Movie Beat John Carpenter to the Punch”.

…Compared to the bloated multiverse era where “less is more” is an alien concept, 1984 cult favorite The Brother from Another Planet seems like it’s been beamed in from an entirely different celestial body. Its $350,000 budget — a small sum even for the time — would be lucky to cover 30 seconds of a Marvel flick. Its special effects are limited to a few glowing lights and a deformed toe. And far from delivering any grandstanding speeches, its superhero is entirely mute.

The titular Brother, who’s not even given the luxury of a name, is an extra-terrestrial whose powers are far more intuitive (he can hear voices from the past by touching his surroundings) than communicative. But thanks to a nuanced performance from future Emmy winner Joe Morton, he still manages to convey the emotional complexities of the immigrant experience (just to make it clear the film is allegorical, his primitive spaceship crashlands on Ellis Island)….

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Anniversary: Land of the Lost series (1974)

By Paul Weimer. “Marshall, Will and Holly, on a routine expedition…”

Before Buck Rogers, or Battlestar Galactica, or reruns of TOS Star Trek, the first genre shows I can recall watching, in the misty lands of the 1970’s, were reruns of the Sid and Marty Krofft TV shows, including and most especially, Land of the Lost. 

What was not to love in those days? The Marshall family trapped in another world. Dinosaurs! Lizardmen! Weird alien technology crystals? I watched the show avidly, until it fell away from TV screens, and other tv series took their place in my mind in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.  And I mostly didn’t think about Land of the Lost for two decades.

Until Bubble Boy.

Bubble Boy was a 2001 film, and I can’t really counsel you to seek it out and watch it. It has a young Jake Gyllenhaal playing the titular immunocompromised character who goes on adventures despite being in a bubble. But he is as sheltered emotionally and otherwise as he is physically, having not been allowed to even watch much TV.  One of the shows he has been able to watch was, in fact, Land of the Lost…and very early in the movie, the titular character does a “punk rock version” of the theme song.  It brought me back immediately to my young watching of the show.  That song really is an earworm.

Later on, a few years later, I met a friend who was obsessed with the show, and insisted I watch it again. So, with the suck fairy an idea that had not formulated in popular culture, but was in my mind, I decided to rent it on Netflix DVDs and rewatch it. I was nervous it was more going to be than wasted time, that my fond distant memories of the show would burst like a bubble.

Yes the show is cheesy, the special effects not so much, and it is a kids tv show…but I was surprised at how much I liked the show for what it was. 

Watching the entire arc from start to finish, I saw the creative seeds of genius in the show (and also saw at least one episode I had missed back in the day. Crucially, an episode written by Larry Niven (!) where the Marshalls try to paddle out of the Land of the Lost, run into a Confederate Gold miner and discover they are, in fact, in an enclosed pocket universe. Combine that with the crystal powered pylons that allow time and space travel, a time loop episode and more, the strong SF roots of the show came to mind. 

And then there is Enik. Poor, poor Enik, the intelligent Sleestak..who thought he had traveled into the past to see the barbaric ancestors of his high-tech civilization. And the soul crushing realization he gets when he realizes that he has in fact traveled far to the future, and his high-tech civilization is doomed to fall to barbarism. Heady stuff for a kids TV show, eh?

Land of the Lost crops up again, visually and otherwise in fantasy novels and tv series. In the novel Paragaea, for instance, the main character, trapped on another planet, stumbles onto a jungle temple ruin, complete with Sleestaks, described exactly in terms of the tv series. 

But the remake movie with Will Farrell? Skip it. Just skip it. I’ve never seen the reboot series, either (that is apparently currently on Apple TV).

“When I look all around, I can’t believe the things I found…”

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) CAMPY CRANIUM. “New horror musical arrives in Ypsilanti just in time for Halloween” – The Eastern Echo has details.

Getting antsy for the spooky season? Kick off those calendars with the premiere of “The Brain That Wouldn’t Die!”, a new musical written by Ypsilanti-area vocalist and stage director Carla Margolis.

Inspired by the 1960s cult classic of the same name, the musical is a reimagining that takes audiences through the infamous, campy storyline with an all-new original soundtrack. When a brilliant yet, reckless scientist’s fiancé is decapitated in a car accident, he uses a magical serum to keep her head alive. The head, while completely immobile, keeps its ability to sing and talk.

Fans of the movie can expect a more serious look at the same themes found in the original. 

“It focuses on bodily autonomy for women; now that it’s more perilous than ever, I don’t really address it specifically, but there was definitely an inspiration. There’s a lot of misogyny baked into this story,” Margolis said. 

Margolis’ unique take is rooted in a time period when feminist themes were less accepted in media, and that elevates the script to new levels, they said….

(13) ALL ABOARD FOR ALL ALONG. “How Marvel expands ‘WandaVision’ corner of MCU with ‘Agatha All Along,’ ‘Vision Quest’” – Entertainment Weekly interviews a Marvel TV exec and a showrunner.

…These two shows will broaden what Schaeffer refers to as “the WandaVision corner” of the MCU, and Winderbaum says Agatha All Along, titled after Hahn’s chart-topping song of the same name as performed in that first series, “really led the charge.”

The premise kicks off when a mysterious goth teen who’s obsessed with witchcraft (Joe Locke) helps Agatha break free of Wanda’s spell, only now she’s completely left without her powers. This “Teen,” who’s been hexed by…someone so that he can never share his name or any identifying information with other witches, plants the idea of traversing the Witches’ Road, a mystical realm that faces wanderers with deadly trials. If conquered, Agatha could regain all her magic once more. She just needs a coven to pull it off. Enter Aubrey Plaza’s Rio Vidal, Patti LuPone’s Lilia Calderu, Sasheer Zamata’s Jennifer Kale, and Ali Ahn’s Alice Wu-Gulliver….

(14) SAIL SIGHTED. “NASA spacecraft captures 1st photo of its giant solar sail while tumbling in space” – Space has the story.

On April 23, NASA launched a solar sail protype to orbit around our planet — a piece of technology that could very well revolutionize the way we think about spacecraft propulsion. Then, on Aug. 29, the agency confirmed this sail successfully unfurled itself in outer space. Yet, we still didn’t have official photographic evidence of this for some time. 

Now, as of Sept. 5, we indeed do. NASA has released the first image of the open solar sail, formally called the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System, and stated that the spacecraft from which the sail was released will continue to send back more footage and data as time goes on….

… As NASA says in the statement, it’s important to first remember there are four wide-angle cameras in the center of the spacecraft anchoring the sail. 

Near the bottom of the image, one camera view shows the “reflective sail quadrants supported by composite booms” while at the top of the photo, we can see the back surface of one of the craft’s solar panels. Most spacecraft are lined with solar panels because that’s how they power themselves up: with sunlight.

“The five sets of markings on the booms close to the spacecraft are reference markers to indicate full extension of the sail,” the statement says. “The booms are mounted at right angles, and the solar panel is rectangular, but appear distorted because of the wide-angle camera field of view.”…

(15) WHIP IT. Gizmodo says “Bear McCreary Wants to Bring an Obscure Lord of the Rings Song to Rings of Power”.

The soundtrack for Amazon’s Lord of the Rings prequel has afforded composer Bear McCreary a canvas as vast as Middle-earth to play with: Howard Shore-ish riffs, unique orchestral pieces, and increasingly in season two, lots of song work. We already know the lumbering hill-troll Damrod is getting his own heavy metal infused piece this season, and this week, McCreary weaved one of Tolkien’s own poems into a beautiful song to welcome Tom Bombadil to the show. But the composer has a much more obscure, and much more intriguing ditty from the franchise’s adaptive past he wants to make a nod to.

That song? “Where There’s a Whip, There’s a Way” from the Rankin Bass adaptation of Return of the King. “I’m looking. I’m looking for the moment,” McCreary said in a recent Instagram live chat of his desire to bring the song to Rings of Power (via /Film). “It hasn’t happened yet but I would love to make that happen.”

[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, David Goldfarb, Paul Weimer, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Ken Richards.]