24 Tom Swift And His Scrolling Pixels

Posted on January 10, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) TEXAS LIBRARY ASSOCIATON ASKS TINGLE FOR DO-OVER. Today the Texas Library Association’s executive director Shirley Robinson published a “TLA Statement Regarding Author Chuck Tingle” which says they want him to reconsider participating in their annual conference, although it says nothing one way or the other about him going masked.

As you may know, the Texas Library Association is currently planning and securing speakers for our annual conference in April. Last fall, we extended an initial invitation to author Chuck Tingle to participate as a panelist at our Evening with Authors event. We later offered Mr. Tingle the opportunity to participate in a different conference event.

This was a misstep that we regret, and it is counter to our mission to ‘unite and amplify voices…through intentional equity, diversity, and inclusion.’

I contacted Mr. Tingle’s publisher today to apologize and to ask whether or not he might reconsider participating in our Evening with Authors event. I hope Mr. Tingle will accept, and we can discuss what has transpired so that we may all come to a place of greater understanding.

TLA has spent the last two years fighting for the freedom to read and freedom of knowledge in school libraries, and we are always on the side of authors. We set a high standard for ourselves, and in this instance, we did not meet it. In the future, we will be more diligent in our processes and clearer and more thoughtful when discussing opportunities with potential speakers at our events. I am sorry for this mistake. We will learn from this and do better in the future.

(2) FOR FAN MAIL. The US Postal Service will have a Dungeons & Dragons-themed stamp issue this year: “USPS Reveals Additional Stamps for 2024” at American Philatelic Society.

This stamp release marks the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, described by its owners as the World’s Greatest Role-playing Game, that has become a cultural phenomenon. By inviting participants to imagine themselves as wizards, warriors and other adventurers in exciting and treacherous fantasy worlds, Dungeons & Dragons opened doors to whole new universes of creativity for generations of players. The pane of 20 stamps features 10 different designs that highlight characters, creatures and encounters familiar to players of the game. Greg Breeding, an art director for USPS, designed the stamps and pane with existing illustrations.

(3) TWO TO TANGO. The Guardian brings news of an unexpected collaboration: “Keanu Reeves and China Miéville to release collaborative novel The Book of Elsewhere”.

…Their joint novel is titled The Book of Elsewhere and is set in the world of the BRZRKR comic book series created by Reeves, first published in 2021. It follows an immortal warrior on a millennia-long journey to understand his immortality.

The novel is due to be published on 23 July by Penguin. Reeves, who is best known for his roles in The Matrix and John Wick franchises, said it was “extraordinary” to work with Miéville. “China did exactly what I was hoping for – he came in with a clear architecture for the story and how he wanted to play with the world of BRZRKR, a world that I love so much. I was thrilled with his vision and feel honoured to be a part of this collaborative process.”…

…“Sometimes the greatest games are those you play with other people’s toys,” said Miéville on the collaboration. “It was an honour, a shock and a delight when Keanu invited me to play. But I could never have predicted how generous he’d be with toys he’s spent so long creating,” he added….

…Upon its release, BRZRKR, created with writer Matt Kindt and artist Ron Garney, became the highest-selling original comic book series debut in more than 25 years. The comic will also be adapted into a live-action Netflix film starring Reeves and an anime series….

(4) ON THE ROAD AGAIN. Annalee Newitz soon will be touring to promote their far-future epic The Terraformers. Check the venue website to reserve free tickets.

(5) ALDERMAN Q&A. NPR interviews Naomi Alderman whose new book “’The Future’ asks if technology will save humanity or accelerate its end”.

NPR’s Ari Shapiro speaks with author Naomi Alderman on her new novel, The Future, which asks whether the giants of technology more likely to save humankind or accelerate its end.

…ALDERMAN: When I heard about these billionaires building their bunkers, I immediately thought of Lot. So this is a story that is about how you cannot escape from a terrible situation. If you think that, oh no, I’m powerful; I can escape; I can go to my bunker; I’m going to be all right, you just have to know that you take it with you. On a more broad level, I think Bible stories, particularly the stories of Genesis – I grew up reading them in the original Hebrew because I grew up very religious Jewish. And it seems to me that those stories are the foundations of what we might call Western civilization now, and we have sort of ceded them to religious education. So you learn those stories if you have a strong biblical schooling where you’re maybe taught that all of this is literally true, but actually, they’re incredibly important stories.

SHAPIRO: So, like, everybody can talk about the lesson of Icarus. Don’t fly too close to the sun.

ALDERMAN: Right…

(6) HE FOUGHT THE LAW AND THE LAW LOST. AND SO DID HE. Norman Spinrad’s latest “Norman Spinrad at Large” tells why he hasn’t had a new novel out for years.

…When I read that I am “One of the Four “Great Speculative Writers of the Past” I feel that I’m reading my own obituary. Sometimes when I am asked about things of my history I feel like I’m writing it.

Which, I suppose, is one good reason to let my Wikipedia answer such questions instead of myself. When I’m interviewed I’m much more interested in talking about what I’ve written about than talking about myself.

And another reason is that I don’t have time for much of such pondering of my past. I am indeed still crazy after all these years. Since my last new published novel THE PEOPLE’S POLICE in 2017 I’ve written dozens of my On Books column in Asimov’s. Songs. Journalism. This and that in the arts world. Political screeds. Published short stories and novellas, some of which are waiting to become a novel. Even a full first draft of a novel which needs a proper publisher with a good editor.

So why have I not published a new novel since THE PEOPLE’S POLICE in 2017?

That’s a story you won’t find in my wikipedia. That’s a story that is still going on.

There is a lot of talk today that because of the Woke vs. Maga literary political war, white male writers are finding it unfairly difficult getting their work published. Well, I confese that I am a white man, but I don’t think that is what had happened to me.

What Tor books did to THE PEOPLE’S POLICE is why I haven’t been able to publish a novel ever since. My editor on it there was the great David Hartwell. I was so confident of what he would do for the publication that Dona and I went to New Orleans on our own money to shoot promotional video for the book, knowing of course that Tor itself would not pay for any such thing.

But when we came back to New York, the shit hit the fan. David Harwell died in an accident, which among other things, turned THE PEOPLE’S POLICE into what is called a orphan book, meaning no one in Tor championed its publication. A horrible cover of a black cop and a white cop back to back on the hardcover against what the novel was actually hopefully about.

No one showed me the cover until it was too late to change,, telling me that David had approved it while he was still alive without showing it me, which he never would have done, and Tor refused to do anything at all with the videos that we had fronted with several thousand dollars of our money or even spend any at all on promoting the book.

What with the cover and the refusal of Tor to spend anything at all, what could have been a big seller at least in the South, the hard cover sanked. As you might imagine, I was not amused, but I thought a good cover, a just conver, could be put on the trade paperback, and Tor would have the freebee video for nothing.

Instead I was told that there would be no trade paperback. Well I was already crazy and did what most writers were not crazy enough to do. I went to war with Tor. And I won it. I got back my novel away from them so that I could at least create my own trade paperback on Amazon where it still is the only place you can find it.

But I paid a high price for my victory. I lost my agent because no agent can fight on the side of his writer against a publisher, and indeed shouldn’t for the sake of his other writers. And by then, it was becoming just about impossible get a proper publisher to even look at a novel except through an agent. And thusfar there has been no agent willing to take a chance on “One of the Four Great Speculative Writers of the Past.”…

(7) DARRAH CHAVEY OBITUARY. Wisconsin fan Darrah Chavey died January 6, 2024 from complications of heart surgery.

He was a mathematics professor at Beloit College in Wisconsin, teaching Computer Science, Ethnomathematics, and Ballroom Dancing.

He was a member of the Beloit Science Fiction and Fantasy Association. He was an active volunteer in putting on WisCon for a number of years, including running the “Internet Lounge”.

As a contributor to the Internet Science Fiction Database, one of his specialties was SF by women authors, especially works before the mid-80’s. Some of his research was captured on the SF Gender page.

He is survived by his wife Peggy Weisensel Chavey and other family members.

(8) TERRY BISSON (1942-2024). Author Terry Bisson died January 10 at the age of 81. He was especially well-known for short stories including “Bears Discover Fire”, winner of the Hugo and Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial awards, and ”They’re Made Out of Meat”. His story “macs” also won a Nebula (2001), as well as French and Spanish sff awards.

He recently was profiled in The New Yorker, “Terry Bisson’s History of the Future”, which noted his beginnings in the sff field.

…He sold his first science-fiction novel, “Wylrdmaker,” to the publisher David Hartwell in 1981, for fifteen hundred dollars. The novel was pulp: it told the story of Kemen of Pastryn, a satirical futuristic version of Conan the Barbarian. It wasn’t the book Bisson wanted to write, he told me, but “it was the smartest thing I ever did. That’s when I discovered you didn’t have to be fucking Hemingway or Fitzgerald to write a novel.” His second novel, “The Talking Man,” was more of a passion project—it was a fantasy novel set in the rural South, with junkyards instead of castles…

He also wrote many film novelizations, including William Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic; Virtuosity; The Fifth Element by Luc Besson; Alien Resurrection; Dreamworks’ Galaxy Quest; and The Sixth Day, and three Jonny Quest novels, plus other media tie-in novels.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

1987 — Sharyn McCrumb’s Highland Laddie Gone, published in hardcover by Avon Bokks thirty-seven years ago, is the third of the Elizabeth MacPherson mysteries and I think can safely discuss the setting of this novel and the prime character.

Sharyn McCrumb I’ve covered before, looking at several of her Ballad novels here as well as the genre Jay Omega series as well.

These novels are apparently her take at Agatha Christie as she has told interviewers. Now I don’t see that when I it read them but none-the-less Elizabeth MacPherson, forensic anthropologist, who’s from Scotland is a delightful central character.

Most of these novels are set in the mid Atlantic region of the States, and this one was no exception. The mystery is set at a Highland Games of which there are some hundred in the US alone. Now consider men wearing kilts, haggis on a stick, far too many bagpipes (and I like them) and way too much Scottish themed junk for sale. And everyone is of course Scottish for the day. Now she, our writer, manages to find the humor in all of that and make it quite interesting.

(Yes, I’m part Scottish. Scotch-Irish on my maternal side. No, not Scottish-Irish as I had to explain to more one person who said Scotch was a drink. Scotch-Irish are descendants of Ulster Protestants who emigrated from Ulster to North America during the 18th and 19th centuries. And I’m Welsh on the paternal side.)

MacPherson has to solve her mystery while dealing with the eccentric culture of the Highland Games. I think that McCrumb did a spot-on job of capturing the feel of those games.

Here’s our Beginning…

CLAN CHATTAN

Dear Elizabeth, How are you? It’s been ages! Due to a security leak in your organization (your mom), I have obtained your address and am writing to ask a favor. (In business school they teach us to come to the point in the first paragraph.) Did you know that I’m getting my MBA at Princeton! The folks are so thrilled about it—Daddy’s plastered bumper stickers on every vehicle we own, even the riding lawn mower. It’s quite sweet, really, to see them so happy. Your mother didn’t say what you were doing.

Haven’t seen you at the Highland games festivals since high school. You really ought to come to one. Surely you’re not still upset about the dance competition. Goodness, there’s so much more to a festival than that! There’s the hospitality tent, and the nametag chairman. Not everybody is meant to be graceful, you know.

Anyway, I hope I can persuade you to come to the Labor Day games (see enclosed brochure), because there is something that I need a volunteer for. You remember Cluny, don’t you? He’s fine, as reserved as ever. For the past two years, I’ve been the person in charge of him for the festivals. You know how they like a pretty girl to show him off. Well, this year I simply can’t come! I’ll be in Europe during term break with my flatmate. So, I need someone to take my place. Buffy and Pax and Cammie-Lynn were all booked up, so I’m hoping that you’ll show the old Clan spirit and volunteer for the job. But if you can’t afford it, do say so, and I’ll understand.

Please let me know soon about this. I’m off to Europe next week. Oh, and what have you been doing lately? Teaching? Got to run!

Mary-Stuart Gillespie

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 10, 1957 — George Alec Effinger. (Died 2002.) I first experienced him when I read the Marîd Audran novels (Gravity Fails, A Fire in The Sunand The Exile Kiss). Though he set them in a 22nd-century Middle East, the setting isn’t really faithful to that reality but reflects more the city of New Orleans where he lived much of his life. Truly exceptional novels.

He started work on a fourth Audran novel, Word of Night, but died before that work was completed. The existing two chapters of Word of Night that he did complete are now available in Budayeen Nights, along with the other Budayeen stories and some other short stories as which was edited by Marty Halpern at Golden Gryphon.

The “Schrödinger’s Kitten” novelette won a Hugo at Noreascon 3, it also garnered a Sturgeon and Nebula too; his “Marîd Changes His Mind” novella was nominated for a Nebula but was withdrawn for a Hugo after the nomination was declined.

He wrote a lot, and I do mean a lot, of novels besides the Marîd Audran works but I’ll confess that I’m largely unfamiliar with most of them. I’ve immensely enjoyed The Red Tape War co-written with Resnick and Jack L. Chalker, but that’s it. Anyone care to give an opinion on the rest of his novels?

I see he did the scripts for about a dozen comics, one of which was “The Mouse Alone!” in which he created the character of a young Gray Mouser. Huh. That was the Sword of Sorcery #5 issue, DC Comics, Nov.-Dec. 1973.

And I was surprised to learn he did a Sandman story as well, “Seven Nights in Slumberland” which ran in The Sandman: Book of Dreams. I must’ve read it at some point as I read that anthology. It’s a very good anthology too.

Planet of the Apes novels? Really? Anyone here read these?

George Alec Effinger in 1988. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

(11) ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION.

[Item by Cat Eldridge.]

2001–So this date was when The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring film was premiered at the Odeon Leicester Square in London twenty-three years ago.

I don’t as a rule watch films or series based off literary works that I deeply, madly love. That’s because I’ve got in my mind’s eye my own vision of what each character looks like already, what the landscape is and so forth. So I’m usually disappointed by what is visually created by even the best of our video creators. Not their fault of course.

I cannot begin to remember the number of times that I’ve read The Fellowship of the Ring as it is a novel that I both deeply loved and found to be one that I find always is fresh when I read it. Forty years on since by my first reading of it and now I’m listened to being the tale narrated by Andy Serkis, and I was once again deeply and fully delighted by this story as written by Tolkien.

The very first words of “When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton” were enough to draw me and they’ve drawn me ever since. The rest of the novel is just as good.

So did Peter Jackson do that to me? Very much not at all. He was faithful to the source material as he much as could be given the difference in story telling mediums, and the script as written by him, his wife Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens (they were the writing team for all of the Tolkien films) was quite delightful indeed.

The actors? Stellar they were, one and all in creating the feel that characters of this novels had come alive. I can’t possibly detail all of them here. I really can’t. My favorites? Ian Holm as Bilbo Baggins, Elijah Wood as Frodo Baggins, Ian McKellen as Gandalf and John Rhys-Davies as Gimli. Those are my favorite actors the first time that I watched it and they remained so with repeated reviewings.

McKellen it is said by several sources was the fourth choice as the first three approached to play that role turned it down because of ill health — Patrick McGoohan, Anthony Hopkins and Christopher Plummer.

Oh and the universe they inhabited. John Howe and Alan Lee were deeply involved as conceptual artists throughout the project, Lee mainly on the architecture such as creating Hobbiton; Howe on characters such as Gandalf, the Ents and the Balrog. Weta was responsible first such things as armour, miniatures and weapons.

Oh those Ents. They were just what I expected them to be, perfectly realised to be what was in my minds eye. I did look for a nicely crafted one after the film came out even then they were they were running well several hundred dollars unfortunately. Still want one to have who will sit among my plants here.

So let’s not forget the New Zealand landscape standing in for Middle-earth. It worked magnificently as it has on oh so many occasions for other series and films now. I felt like I was seeing Middle-earth made real.

So I fell in love with it and have stayed so. And therefore I’m not at all surprised that it won at Hugo at ConJosé. It certainly deserved that Hugo.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

Baldo isn’t sure what he can buy with this.
Shoe features a writer with a disturbing perspective.

(13) NEXT TREK. “Star Trek: New Movie in the Works at Paramount Set Before 2009 Film” according to The Hollywood Reporter.

After years of stops and starts, Paramount is making a step toward returning Star Trek to the big screen. Toby Haynes, who directed episodes of of the Star Wars series Andor, will helm a new feature, with Seth Grahame-Smith writing.

This would mark the first feature for Haynes, who helmed the dark, celebrated Star Trek-inspired episode of Black Mirror, “USS Callister.”

Deadline’s article adds, “Insiders add that the final chapter in that main series, Star Trek 4, remains in active development.”

(14) THE APPRENTICE RETURNS. The Mary Sue rejoices: “Heck Yeah, We’re Getting Season 2 of ‘Ahsoka’!”

…Ahsoka‘s renewal is welcome, if unsurprising. The series premiere got 14 million views in the first five days following its premiere, and the series holds an 86% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Ahsoka joins Andor, which is also getting a second season.

Ahsoka stars Rosario Dawson as Ahsoka Tano, a former Jedi Padawan apprenticing under Anakin Skywalker. Dawson first played the character in season two of The Mandalorian followed by an appearance in The Book of Boba Fett. The first season of Ahsoka premiered on Disney+ in August 2023 with 8 episodes….

(15) EXPOSURE. The LA Public Library announced a way for indie authors to submit their e-books for circulation. The info doesn’t discuss any payment for authors.

The Los Angeles Public Library is partnering with BiblioBoard to bring the Indie Author Project public library e-book discover service to L.A. residents.

Indie Author Project provides L.A.’s self published authors a wonderful opportunity to submit their e-book for circulation at LAPL, libraries throughout California, and possibly libraries nationwide. This is a great way to reach a wider reading audience and build buzz on your book.

Indie Author Project also provides adventurous readers access to exciting new literary voices in a variety of genres. Discover a great new author before they make it big!

Click here if you are interested in submitting your title and read the terms of agreement.

Submissions must be in the epub or pdf file format—here are a few sites that provide simple free tools to convert files from MS Word to epub: Online-Convert; Zamzar. Or, use our free Pressbooks tool to create a professional quality formatted ebook file.

(16) ARTIST INTELLIGENCE. [Item by Steven French.] What do you do when you don’t have a photo to go with a creepy story about a Tennessee ghost or an Aboriginal Australian cryptid? You ask an illustrator for an equally spooky image of course! Atlas Obscura shared its best illustrations of the year: “In 2023, We Illustrated the Darkest Corners of the Human Imagination”.

At Atlas Obscura, we’re always curious about the unusual, and that doesn’t always lend itself to photos. So we turn to an amazing army of illustrators to bring readers into our stories. This year, we noticed that many of our favorite illustrations were commissioned to depict the dark and the mysterious—pretty on-brand for us—whether it’s of menacing creatures of the spring, un-jolly characters of Christmas, or myths of the Egyptian underworld. Our artists around the globe took on the art direction challenges with spooky glee, and brought these unearthly stories to life with bewitching visuals….

…Illustrator Harshad Marathe generally enjoys working on otherworldly subject matter, such as mythology, or creatures, demons, and dieties. So he took naturally to the Egyptian sun god, on a boat towed on snakes, in a desert. He conceived other trippy and colorful scenes for our series on Egypt’s netherworld, a highlight of our annual month-long Halloween bacchanalia….

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. The trailer has dropped for Monolith, available in theaters and on digital beginning February 16.

While trying to salvage her career, a disgraced journalist begins investigating a strange conspiracy theory. But as the trail leads uncomfortably close to home, she is left to grapple with the lies at the heart of her own story.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Daniel Dern, Ita, Kathy Sullivan, Carl, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jeff Smith.]

Pixel Scroll 8/16/23 La Pixel È Malleable

Posted on August 16, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) NEW SFF NOVELLA CONTEST COMING IN SEPTEMBER. The Fantasy Review will take entries in the inaugural Speculative Fiction Indie Novella Championship (SFINCS) beginning September 2.

The Speculative Fiction Indie Novella Championship (SFINCS, pronounced “sphinx”) is a yearly competition to recognize, honor, and celebrate the talent and creativity present in the indie community. We are a sister competition to both SPFBO and SPSFC, and we highlight greatness in the novella format in all areas of speculative fiction (fantasy, science fiction, horror, etc.).

See eligibility requirements here. Find the judging process and timeline here.

These are the organizers and their social media pages: Nathan: Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok; The Shaggy Shepherd: Twitter; Rowena: Twitter and Instagram; Tabitha: Twitter and Instagram.

(2) WILL FTC DIP INTO BIG RIVER? “Authors and Booksellers Urge Justice Dept. to Investigate Amazon” reports the New York Times.

With mounting signs that the Federal Trade Commission is preparing to file a lawsuit against Amazon for violating antitrust laws, a group of booksellers, authors and antitrust activists are urging the government to investigate the company’s domination of the book market.

On Wednesday, the Open Markets Institute, an antitrust think tank, along with the Authors Guild and the American Booksellers Association, sent a letter to the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission, calling on the government to curb Amazon’s “monopoly in its role as a seller of books to the public.”

The groups are pressing the Justice Department to investigate not only Amazon’s size as a bookseller, but also its sway over the book market — especially its ability to promote certain titles on its site and bury others, said Barry Lynn, the executive director of the Open Markets Institute, a research and advocacy group focused on strengthening antimonopoly policies.

“What we have is a situation in which the power of a single dominant corporation is warping, in the aggregate, the type of books that we’re reading,” Lynn said in an interview. “This kind of power concentrated in a democracy is not acceptable.”

The letter, addressed to Lina Khan, the chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, and Jonathan Kanter, who leads the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, comes as the F.T.C. appears to be closing in on its decision to bring an antitrust case against Amazon. Amazon representatives are expected to meet this week with members of the commission to discuss the possible suit, a sign that legal action may be imminent….

(3) BARBIE’S TEACHABLE MOMENTS. The New York Times asks “Will Hollywood Learn These 5 Lessons From ‘Barbie’?” Here’s one of the lessons they have in mind:

5. Stop saving the good stuff for the sequel

With “Barbie” on a path to become the year’s highest-grossing movie worldwide, Warner Bros. will inevitably try to conjure a franchise from it. Yet much of what makes “Barbie” feel fresh is that it tells a complete story and doesn’t spend time setting up spinoffs or sequels. In fact, it ends in a place that would be hard to roll back: with its lead at the definitive end of her character arc. Gerwig and her stars aren’t signed for “Barbie” sequels, and when I spoke to Gerwig after her blockbuster opening weekend, she said she’d put every idea she had into this movie without the thought of doing more: “At this moment, it’s all I’ve got.”

(4) KING HAS PLANS. The Guardian tells readers, “Stephen King says he may continue the Talisman series”. Later in the article King tells what he finds scary.

Stephen King has suggested that he may write a third instalment of the two-book Talisman series, which he co-wrote with the late Peter Straub. Asked on a podcast if his days of writing “epics” were in the past, King replied “never say never”. “Before he died, Peter sent me this long letter and said we oughta do the third one, and he gave me a really cool idea and I had some ideas of my own,” he said.

Speaking as a guest on an episode of the Talking Scared podcast, King added that the volume – which would follow The Talisman and its sequel, Black House – “would be a long book”….

(5) HAUNTED LAUGHS. Nostalgia Central introduces a new generation to the Fifties ghostly comedy series Topper. Episode videos can be viewed there, too.

… The Thorne Smith classic came to television with Leo G Carroll as the stuffy and befuddled well-to-do banking vice president, Cosmo Topper, whose new house at 101 Yardley Avenue in New York, was inhabited by the ghosts of the former owners, George and Marion Kerby, who had been killed in an avalanche while skiing in Switzerland.

Only he could see them, which made for some hilarious situations indeed, especially as George and Marion – not to mention their alcoholic St Bernard dog, Neil – were prone to practical joking….

(6) EVEN A DOLLAR. Francis Hamit’s Kickstarter for his novel Starmen is over 80% funded. As he explained in the latest update, he’s looking for any level of help.

An old friend who I have not seen or heard from for many years wrote me to say that she hasn’t got much these days but would give something. And that is all I want. Even a dollar is welcome. Seriously. I set the goal low deliberately because I want as many people as possible to read this book and tell their friends. Most publishers will reject this out of hand. It’s too long. 180,000 words and counting as I add more material to fix flaws my developmental editors found.

I’m a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, generally acknowledged as the best writing school in the English speaking world but I never thought i’d learned it all. My motto is KAISAN!, a Japanese management term meaning “continuous improvement”.

Most publishers will also reject this book because it does not fit neatly into a genre. They won’t know how to market it unless there is so much “buzz” that everyone wants to read it. And that, Gentle Reader, is where you come in. Give me a dollar or more and help me make goal.

If I make more there are other things I can do with it. Hire help. Both Leigh and I are disabled. The goal amount will go to hire someone to properly format the E-Book so its a smooth read. Buying reviews from Kirkus and other outlets. Managing the fulfillment. The T-shirts and mugs come from Printful. They will send them directly to you. Formatting and producing a paperback. Upgrading our computers. I have a big backlog of other work to publish. Every dollar helps!

As the old English folksong goes “Have you got a penny? Can you give a penny? But if you haven’t got a penny, then God Bless You!

(7) ORPHANS IN THE SKY. “Our Galaxy Is Home to Trillions of Worlds Gone Rogue” in the New York Times says “Astronomers have found that free-floating planets far outnumber those bound to a host star.” But Andrew Porter is disappointed the article doesn’t mention “spindizzies”.

Free-floating planets — dark, isolated orbs roaming the universe unfettered by any host star — don’t just pop into existence in the middle of cosmic nowhere. They probably form the same way other planets do: within the swirling disk of gas and dust surrounding an infant star.

But unlike their planetary siblings, these worlds get violently chucked out of their celestial neighborhoods.

Astronomers had once calculated that billions of planets had gone rogue in the Milky Way. Now, scientists at NASA and Osaka University in Japan are upping the estimate to trillions. Detailed in two papers accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal, the researchers have deduced that these planets are six times more abundant than worlds orbiting their own suns, and they identified the second Earth-size free floater ever detected.

The existence of wandering worlds orphaned from their star systems has long been known, but poorly understood. Previous findings suggested that most of these planets were about the size of Jupiter, our solar system’s most massive planet. But that conclusion garnered a lot of pushback; even scientists who announced it found it surprising.

To better study these rogue worlds, David Bennett, an astronomer at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and his team used nine years of data from the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics telescope at the University of Canterbury Mount John Observatory in New Zealand. Exoplanets were indirectly detected by measuring how their gravity warped and magnified the light arriving from faraway stars behind them, an effect known as microlensing.

With help from empirical models, the researchers worked out the spread of the masses for more than 3,500 microlensing events, which included stars, stellar remnants, brown dwarfs and planet candidates. (Data from one of those candidates was compelling enough for the team to claim the discovery of a new rogue Earth.) From this analysis, they estimate that there are about 20 times more free-floating worlds in our Milky Way than stars, with Earth-mass planets 180 times more common than rogue Jupiters…

(8) MEMORY LANE

1987 – [Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Sharyn McCrumb is, to me, an interesting writer that I like and admire a lot. Appalachian-born and resident, her novels are deeply rooted in the history and folklore of that region though for the most part our Beginning this Scroll is definitely not.

My favorite series by her is decidedly genre, the Ballad series, which has a woman who knows exactly when an individual is going to pass beyond the mortal veil, and more than one novel where ghosts figure in. I think Ghost Riders is the best of these.

And her Elizabeth MacPherson novels aren’t genre but they are really fun mysteries with MacPherson being an archaeologist. The Scottish games set Highland Laddie Gone is the best and intentionally comical of these. (Davina Porter narrates the audio version and does a stellar job.) You need to have attended a Scottish game or two, and been possible slightly inebriated while there to appreciate this novel. Don’t miss the haggis on a stick if you do go. Is it in a sheep’s stomach? Maybe, maybe not.

The Bimbos of the Death Sun duology where our Beginning comes includes Zombies of the Gene Pool.

Bimbos of the Death Sun was published by Windwalker / TSR in 987 with the cover illustration by Jeff Easley. Zombies of the Gene Pool followed five years later from Simon & Schuster. Not quite a Meredith Moment but really close, both are available from the usual suspects.

Both are set within fandom and that means that anyone who reads them, well, I like them a lot but I know that is not a opinion not universally shared. But since when is any book universally liked or disliked, loved or hated?

Now I expect nearly all of you have read these novels but some haven’t so I’m not spoiling a damn thing.

So here’s the beginning of Bimbos of the Death Sun

The visiting Scottish folksinger peered out of the elevator into the hotel lobby. When he pushed the button marked “G,” he naturally assumed that he would arrive at the ground floor of the building. Now he wasn’t so sure. Things were different in America, but he hadn’t realized they were this different. Perhaps “G” stood for Ganymede, or some other intergalactic place. Who were those people?

A pale blonde in blue body paint wearing a green satin tunic stepped on to the elevator, eyeing his jeans and sweatshirt with faint disapproval. “Going up?” she said in her flat American accent. She looked about twenty, he thought. The elevator was moving before he realized that he’d forgotten to get out.

“You here for the con?” she asked, noticing his guitar case.

“No. I’m a tourist.” He liked that better than saying he was on tour; it prevented leading questions that ended in disappointment when the American discovered: 1) that they had never heard of him, and 2) that he didn’t know Rod Stewart. “What are you here for?”

She grinned. “Oh, you mean you don’t know? It’s Rubicon—a science fiction convention. We’re practically taking over the hotel. There’ll be hundreds of us.”

“Oh, right. Like Trekkies.” He nodded. “We have some of your lot back home.”

“Where’s home?” she asked, fiddling with the key ring on her yellow sash.

“Scotland.” At least she hadn’t tried to guess. He was getting tired of being mistaken for an Australian.

As the elevator doors rumbled open on the fifth floor, the departing blue person glanced again at his jeans. “Scotland, huh?” she mused. “Aren’t you supposed to be wearing some kind of funny outfit?”

“Is Diefenbaker here yet?” asked Bernard Buchanan breathlessly. He always said things a little breathlessly, on account of the bulk he was carrying around, and he was always clutching a sheaf of computer printouts, which he would try to read to the unwary.

Miles Perry, whose years of con experience had made him chief among the wary, began to edge away from the neo-fan. “I haven’t seen him,” he hedged.

“I had a letter from him on Yellow Pigs Day, and he said he’d be here,” Bernard persisted. “He’s supposed to be running one of the wargames, and I wanted him to look at my new parody.”

Miles swallowed his exasperation. It was, after all, the first hour of the convention. If he started shouting now, his blood pressure would exceed his I.Q. in no time, and there were still two more days of wide-eyed novices to endure. Diefenbaker would encourage these eager puppies; he brought it on himself. Miles had a good mind to post a notice in the hotel lobby informing everyone of Diefenbaker’s room number. Maybe a few dozen hours of collective neo-fans, all reading him fanzine press at once, would cure him of these paternal instincts. Really, Diefenbaker would write to anybody. Just let someone in Nowhere-in-Particular, New Jersey, write in a comment to Diefenbaker’s fan magazine, and Dief would fire back a friendly five-page letter, making the poor crottled greep feel liked. More comments would follow, requiring more five-page letters. Miles didn’t like to think what Dief’s postage budget would run. And this is what it came to: post-adolescent monomaniacs waiting to waylay him at cons to discuss Lithuanian politics, or silicon-based life forms, or whatever their passion was. If he weren’t careful, he’d get so tied up with these upstarts that he wouldn’t have time to socialize with the authors and the fen-elite. Miles would have to protect Dief from such pitfalls, for his own good.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born August 16, 1884 — Hugo Gernsback. Publisher of the first SF magazine, Amazing Stories in 1926. Also helped create fandom through the Science Fiction League. Writer of the Ralph 124C 41+ novel which most critics think is utterly dreadful but Westfahl considers “essential text for all studies of science fiction.” (Died 1967.)
Born August 16, 1930 — Robert Culp. He’d make the Birthday Honors solely for being the lead in Outer Limits’ “Demon with a Glass Hand” which Ellison wrote specifically with him in mind. He would do two more appearances on the show, “Corpus Earthling” and “The Architects of Fear”. Around this time, he made one-offs on Get Smart! and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. before being Special FBI Agent Bill Maxwell in The Greatest American Hero. Did you know there was a Conan the Adventurer series in the Nineties in which he was King Vog in one episode? I’ve not seen it. Do we consider I Spy genre? Well we should. (Died 2010.)
Born August 16, 1933 — Julie Newmar, 90. Catwoman in Batman. Her recent voice work includes the animated Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders and Batman vs. Two-Face, both done in the style of the Sixties show. They feature the last voice work by Adam West. Shatner btw plays Harvey Dent aka Two Face. She was on the original Trek in the “Friday’s Child” episode as Eleen. She also has one-offs on Get Smart!, Twilight Zone, Fantasy Island, Bionic Woman, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Bewitched and Monster Squad.
Born August 16, 1934 — Diana Wynne Jones. If there’s essential reading for her, it’d be The Tough Guide to Fantasyland which is a playful look at the genre. Then I’d toss in Deep Secret for its setting, and Fire and Hemlock for her artful merging of the Scottish ballads Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer. Now what’s the name of the exemplary short story collection she did late in life? Ahhh it was Unexpected Magic: Collected Stories with the great cover by Dan Craig. Yes, I bought it without opening the book solely because of the cover! (Died 2011.)
Born August 16, 1934 — andrew j. offutt (and Andrew J. Offutt, A. J. Offutt, and Andy Offutt). I know him through his work in the Thieves’ World anthologies though I also enjoyed the Swords Against Darkness anthologies that he edited. I don’t think I’ve read any of his novels. And I’m not a Robert E. Howard fan so I’ve not read any of his Cormac mac Art or Conan novels but his short fiction is superb. His only award was a Phoenix Award which is a lifetime achievement award for a science fiction professional who had done a great deal for Southern Fandom. (Died 2013.)
Born August 16, 1952 — Edie Stern, 71. Fancyclopedia 3 says that she is “a well-known SF club, con, filker, collector and fanzine fan.” Well it actually goes on at impressive length about her. So I’m going to just link to their bio for her thisaway.
Born August 16, 1960 — Timothy Hutton, 63. Best known as Nathan Ford on the Leverage series which is almost genre. His first genre was in Iceman as Dr. Stanley Shephard, and he was in The Dark Half in the dual roles of Beaumont and George Stark. He’s David Wildee in The Last Mizo, based off “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” by Lewis Padgett (husband-and-wife team Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore). He was Hugh Crain in The Haunting of Hill House series. I’m going to finish off this Birthday note by singling out his most superb role as Archie Goodwin on the Nero Wolfe series.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

The Argyle Sweater has a superhero case of “It’s not you, it’s me…”
Last Kiss shows a summer camp where all eyes are on Wonder Woman

(11) DOES THIS DOME HAVE A FUTURE? The New York Times notes how “A Dormant Dome for Cinephiles Is Unsettling Hollywood”.

Since the November night in 1963 when the Cinerama Dome opened its doors with the premiere of “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World” — drawing Milton Berle, Buddy Hackett and Ethel Merman to the sidewalks of Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood — the theater, and the multiplex that later rose around it, has been a home for people who liked to watch movies and people who liked to make movies.

Its distinctive geodesic dome, memorialized by Quentin Tarantino in the 2019 film “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” has become more retro than futuristic over the years, a reminder of a Technicolor past. Yet through it all, the complex known as the ArcLight Hollywood remained a cinephile favorite, with no commercials, no latecomers admitted and ushers who would, after introducing the upcoming show, promise to stay behind to make sure the sound and picture were “up to ArcLight standards.”

But today the ArcLight Hollywood is closed, both a victim of the coronavirus pandemic and a symbol of a movie industry in turmoil, even in its own backyard….

The shuttered complex — its entrance marked by plywood boards instead of movie posters — stands as a reminder of the great uncertainty that now shadows old-fashioned cinema in American culture. Dual strikes have shut down production. Competition from streaming services, as well as shortened attention spans in a smartphone era, has led movie theaters around the nation to shut their doors….

Yes, that’s where I saw It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. Also Krakatoa, East of Java. And years later, E.T. It would be missed.

(12) ELEMENTARY. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “12 Different Ways to Organize the Periodic Table of Elements” at Visual Capitalist. (Playlist: Tom Lehrer’s “The Elements”, of course…) I’m sure there are yet more arrangement variants out there.

The Periodic Table of Elements is an iconic image in classrooms and laboratories all around the world.

Yet despite having an almost unanimous agreement amongst scientists on its composition, there are over 1,000 different periodic tables—and that number continues to grow. This is because the standard table does not highlight all of the existing relationships between the elements.

With 118 elements currently known, there are many different interactions and stories to tell. Here are some of the most remarkable, fascinating and bizarre periodic tables that we could find….

(13) IT’S NOT EXACTLY SACRAMENTAL. Good grief, whoever thought of this branding? “The Exorcist Collectors Series” at Mano’s Wine.

Mano’s Wine is thrilled to offer horror fans the chance to collect officially licensed bottles featuring moments from their favorite movies. Whether you plan to kick back and calm your nerves after those jump scares with a glass of delicious Cabernet Sauvignon, or keep it on your bar for the suspense this bottle is a showstopper.

(14) TAKES A KICKING AND KEEPS ON TREKKING. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Tsk! and maybe “Maybe you don’t want to do that…” “Introducing Unitree H1: Its First General-purpose Humanoid Robot”.

(15) MENTAL MASONRY. Scientific American tells how “Neuroscientists Re-create Pink Floyd Song from Listeners’ Brain Activity”.

Researchers hope brain implants will one day help people who have lost the ability to speak to get their voice back—and maybe even to sing. Now, for the first time, scientists have demonstrated that the brain’s electrical activity can be decoded and used to reconstruct music.

A new study analyzed data from 29 people who were already being monitored for epileptic seizures using postage-stamp-size arrays of electrodes that were placed directly on the surface of their brain. As the participants listened to Pink Floyd’s 1979 song “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1,” the electrodes captured the electrical activity of several brain regions attuned to musical elements such as tone, rhythm, harmony and lyrics. Employing machine learning, the researchers reconstructed garbled but distinctive audio of what the participants were hearing. The study results were published on Tuesday in PLOS Biology….

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Billie Ellish sings “What Was I Made For?” from Barbie.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Daniel Dern, Steven French, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jim Janney.]

Pixel Scroll 3/28/23 Pixels Yearning To Be Running With The Wild Things

Posted on March 28, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) LINK Q&A. “Kelly Link Can’t Write Narrative Before 3pm: And Other Tips For Purposeful Writing” at Literary Hub.

What time of day do you write?
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out why I hate writing so much, when it’s also the thing that I want most to do—it turns out a large piece of this is that I mostly hate writing when I’m attempting to do it between waking up to around 2 pm. For a long time, I thought that real writers settled down to do their work first thing, and so I must be a dilettante not to be able to get anything done without finding it excruciating.

Finally, after lots of experimenting, I’ve realized that before 2 pm I can’t really make much headway, and that at some point between 2 and 3 in the afternoon some little switch in my brain flips, and I can think about narrative. And so now, on days when I’m going to write (including important emails), in the morning I do dishes, play games on my phone, and even watch some TV. From 3 pm to around 1 am, given the freedom to just write, I can get a lot of work done….

(2) OBVIOUSLY WRITTEN AFTER 3 P.M. And The New Yorker has a review of Link’s new collection White Cat, Black Dog: “A Shape-Shifting Short-Story Collection Defies Categorization”.

…One thing that fairy tales teach us, of course, is that it’s wise not to examine such magic too closely—better to accept the gift gratefully than to inquire into its provenance. Still, at the risk of incurring the magician’s wrath, we might look more closely at one of these stories and see if we can figure out how it works. “Prince Hat Underground” is the second story in the new collection, and the only one that’s previously unpublished. It begins in a very un-fairy-tale-like fashion, in medias res: “And who, exactly, is Prince Hat?” This isn’t as familiar an opening as “Once upon a time,” but it does point down a well-trodden path in literary fiction—that is, toward a character portrait. “Gary, who has lived with Prince Hat for over three decades, still sometimes wonders,” Link continues. And so the plot becomes even more familiar: this is the story of a marriage, and, more particularly, a story of the secrets that persist even in long-term relationships. Already we have, in two lines, a thumbnail sketch of this relationship, between staid, reliable Gary and the boyish, fanciful Prince Hat….

(3) SMALL WONDERS KICKSTARTER NEARS FINISH LINE. Stephen Granade reports, “We’re in the final day-and-a-half of the Small Wonders Kickstarter and are tantalizingly close to funding. We’ve passed 75% funded so got to release a new story from Nebula winner John Wiswell.”

Read “Irresponsibly Human” at the link.

I already got a body. Infiltrating their planet was easy after that; theirs is a simple culture, so unevolved that social media is still legal. Give me a week of using this body and the culture’s tech, and I’ll have enough experiential data to synthesize a whole army. They won’t even know we’re here until we’ve won. I’m going to be the first person to conquer another planet as a senior thesis project….

Granade adds, “When we reach 90% we’ll release a new poem by Beth Cato, and we’ve got a new story from Premee Mohamed as a reward for us fully funding.”

(4) YOUR NAME THERE. NASA continues to invite people to “Send Your Name to Mars” on a “Future Mars Mission” whenever that may be. In the meantime, you can download a lovely Boarding Pass. My name went to Mars with Perseverance.

(5) DIAL TIME. Do you have Indiana Jones in Cannes? Well, let him out! “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny to Debut at Cannes” and The Hollywood Reporter has details.

…The French fest runs May 16-27, with Dial of Destiny eying a day two or day three debut.

It is a homecoming of sorts for the pulpy hero. Fifteen years ago, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull debuted at the fest, which has been a launching ground for tentpoles in recent years….

(6) NO RESPECT. Ed Power demands to know, “This Mormon sci-fi author made $55m last year. So why isn’t he taken seriously?” The article, about WIRED’s hit job on Sanderson, is behind a paywall at The Telegraph.

From tipping the barman to pre-teen beauty pageants, America is no stranger to bizarre rituals. One of the weirdest is the glossy magazine “hit piece”. This involves a journalist pretending to be friends with a famous person and then demolishing them over 2,000 words or so. Make that 4,000 in the case of a new Wired magazine “profile” of fantasy author Brandon Sanderson, in which the best-selling writer is subjected to a thorough biffing-up….

(7) PUBLISHING NIGHTMARE AVOIDS PRISON. “Book fraudster Filippo Bernardini spared jail” – the Guardian says he will be deported instead.

…Filippo Bernardini, who worked as a rights coordinator, pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud in New York in January.

He was yesterday sentenced by judge Colleen McMahon to time served, meaning he will not be imprisoned, according to the Bookseller. He has agreed to pay $88,000 (£72,700) to Penguin Random House to cover the legal and expert fees the company paid as a result of his scheme.

Bernardini has also been sentenced to three years of supervised release, and will be deported from the US to the UK or Italy, where he grew up….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

1992 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Great secondary characters are a must in any ongoing series. So it is with Sharyn McCrumb’s Ballad series, mysteries set in her native Appalachian region. And here we get the story of Nora Bonesteel.

The one that is our Beginning this Scroll is from The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter which was published by Scribner in 1992. It was the second in the series after the debut novel, If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O. To date, there are thirteen Ballad novels and some shorter works.

The Appalachian Writers Association gave The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter its Award for Best Novel.

As per our policy here of absolutely no spoilers, I won’t say anything this novel or anything explicit about the series. I’ll only say that the author has a deft hand at writing interesting characters set in what seems to be authentic Appalachian settings with interesting stories.

PROLOGUE

Summer for the living,
Winter for the dead—

The rule for solstice alignment
of standing stones
in pre-christian britain

Nora Bonesteel was the first one to know about the Underhill family. Death was no stranger to Dark Hollow, Tennessee, but Nora Bonesteel was the only one who could see it coming.

She was well past seventy, and she lived alone in a white frame house up on the part of Ashe Mountain that had been Bonesteel land since 1793. Across the patchwork of field and forest, eye to eye with the Bonesteel house, was the outcrop of rock called Hangman, looking down on the holler with a less benevolent eye than Nora Bonesteel’s. They perched on their respective summits, the granite man and the parchment woman, in a standoff older than the pines that edged the meadows.

She seldom left her mountain fastness except to walk down the gravel road to church on Sunday morning, but she had a goodly number of visitors—mostly people wanting advice—but they’d come bringing homemade blackberry jelly or the latest picture of the grandbaby so as not to seem pushy about it. Folks said that no matter how early you reached her house of a morning with a piece of bad news, she’d meet you on the porch with a mug of fresh-brewed chicory coffee, already knowing what it was you’d come about.

Nora Bonesteel did not gossip. The telephone company had never got around to stringing the lines up Ashe Mountain. She just knew.

Dark Hollow folk, most of them kin to her, anyhow, took it for granted, but it made some of the townspeople down in Hamelin afraid, the way she sat up there on the mountain and kept track of all the doings in the valley; sat up there with her weaving, and her pet groundhog, and her visions.

The night that Garrett Webster died in that wreck on the road to Asheville, Nora had the carrot cake baked to take to the funeral by the time somebody stopped in the next morning to tell her about the accident. She had a dream, she said, while she was sleeping in that old iron bedstead with the hollow pipes at the head and foot of it. Suddenly, she had heard a clang and felt the bed vibrate, as if somebody had hit those footboard pipes with the point of a sword. She’d sat up in bed, looking to see what woke her, and there was Garrett Webster standing at the foot of her bed, smiling at her from inside a glow of white light. When he saw that she’d seen him and knew who he was, he faded away, and the room was dark again. It was eight minutes past five, Nora said, and she got up right then to start fixing that cake for Esther Webster and her boys. The state trooper’s report said that the wreck between Garrett Webster’s car and a semi on Route 58 had occurred at 5: 08 that morning. It also stated that Webster never knew what hit him, but Nora Bonesteel reckoned he had.

She knew other things, too. Who was pregnant, when to cover your tomato plants for frost, and where your missing wedding ring would turn up. She could cure nosebleeds by quoting the sixteenth chapter of Ezekiel, sixth verse; and she knew how to gauge the coming winter by the bands on a woolly worm. But that was nothing to marvel at. Every family had somebody with the simple gifts; even ones who knew when there had been a death within their family, but what made Nora Bonesteel different from others with the Sight was that for her it wasn’t only a matter of knowing about close kin. The fate of the whole community seemed as open to her as the weekly newspaper. Even newcomers, like the Underhills, outsiders who had bought an old farm and had come as strangers to settle between the mountains, were within the range of her visions.

Nobody in Dark Hollow ever mistook her for a witch. She taught Sunday school to the early teens, and she kept her place in an old leather King James Bible with the feather of a redbird’s wing. Nora Bonesteel never wished harm, never tried to profit by her knowledge. Most times, she wouldn’t even tell people things if it was bad news that couldn’t be avoided. And if she did impart a warning, she’d look away while she told it, and say what she had to in a sorrowful way that was nobody’s idea of a curse. She just knew things, that’s all. In the east Tennessee hills, there had always been people who knew things. Most people felt a little sorry for her, and were glad they could go through life with the hope that comes from not seeing the future through well-polished glass.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 28, 1912 — A. Bertram Chandler. Did you ever hear of popcorn literature? Well the Australian-tinged space opera that was the universe of the Rim World and John Grimes was such. A very good starting place is the Baen Books omnibus To The Galactic Rim which contains three novels and seven stories. If there’s a counterpart to him, it’d be I think Dominic Flandry who appeared in Anderson’s Technic History series. Oh, and I’ve revisited both to see if the Suck Fairy had dropped by. She hadn’t. (Died 1984.)
Born March 28, 1928 — Ron Soble. He played Wyatt Earp in the Trek episode, “Spectre of The Gun”. During his career, he showed up on a huge number of genre series that included Mission: Impossible, The Six Million Dollar Man, Shazam, Planet of The Apes, Fantasy Island, Salvage 1 and Knight Rider. His last genre role, weirdly enough, was playing Pablo Picasso in Pterodactyl Woman from Beverly Hills. (Died 2002.)
Born March 28, 1933 — J. R. Hammond. Looking for companionable guides to H.G. Wells? Clute at EoSF has the scholar for you. He wrote three works that he recommends as being rather good (H G Wells: A Comprehensive Bibliography, Herbert George Wells: An Annotated Bibliography of his Works and An H G Wells Companion: A Guide to the Novels, Romances and Short Stories). Clute says that his “tendency to provide sympathetic overviews, now as much as ever, is welcome.” (Died 2018.)
Born March 28, 1942 — Mike Newell, 81. Director whose genre work Includes The Awakening, Photographing Fairies (amazing story, stellar film), Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (popcorn film — less filling, mostly tasty), Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and two episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, to wit “Masks of Evil” and “The Perils of Cupid”.
Born March 28, 1944 — Ellen R. Weil. Wife of Gary K. Wolfe. She wrote a number of works with him including the non-fiction study, Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever. They wrote a fascinating essay, “The Annihilation of Time: Science Fiction; Consumed by Shadows: Ellison and Hollywood,” which can be found in Harlan Ellison: Critical Insights. (Died 2000.)
Born March 28, 1946 — Julia Jarman, 77. Author of a children’s book series I like a lot, of which I’ll single out Time-Travelling Cat And The Egyptian Goddess, The Time-Travelling Cat and the Tudor Treasure and The Time-Travelling cat and the Viking Terror as the ones I like the best. There’s more to that series but those are my favorites. I see no indication that the cats are available from the usual suspects alas.
Born March 28, 1972 — Nick Frost, 51. Yes, he really is named Nick Frost as he was born Nicholas John Frost. Befitting that, he was cast as Santa Claus in two Twelfth Doctor stories, “Death in Heaven” and “Last Christmas”. He’s done far more genre acting than I can retell here starting with the Spaced series and Shaun of The Dead (he’s close friends with Simon Pegg) to the superb Snow White and The Huntsman. He’s currently Gus in the Truth Seekers, a sort of low-budget comic ghost hunter series

(10) FANAC’S FANNISH FEMINISM PANEL. Fanac.org hosted a two-part presentation about “Feminism in 1970s/80s Fandom” with Janice Bogstad, Jeanne Gomoll, and Lucy Huntzinger.

Fandom in the 70s/80s saw real influence from people with a feminist perspective, from the creation of Wiscon to fanzines like Janus and Rude Bitch, and to raising awareness of the reality women experienced. What were the beginnings? How did Wiscon get started? Was fandom following popular culture or leading it?

Part 1 – Panelists Janice Bogstad and Jeanne Gomoll tell us about the creation of Janus, Wiscon and the Madison nexus of feminist thought in 70s fandom, and Lucy Huntzinger brings us into the 80s with the lamentably short-run Rude Bitch, and her other experiences in fandom as a feminist. Moderated by Edie Stern, FANAC.org webmaster, this intriguing panel reveals the unusual origins of Janus (and how the editor found out it was a fanzine!), the academic background brought to the discussions of women in science fiction, and some of the factors that made Madison the hotbed of feminist thought in fandom.

These personal histories trace the growth of feminist discussion in broader fandom, and explore why fandom felt like a safe space for women. The panelists also discuss the sometimes negative reactions received…Wound through with personal anecdotes (“Will the real James Tiptree please stand up!”, and the production of “The Emperor Norton Science Fiction Hour”), the discussion provides a window on an important area of science fiction fan history.

Part 2 – Panelists Jeanne, Lucy and Janice continue here with more on the reactions they received from others, and with the differences in being a feminist in fandom in the 70s and in the 80s…Part 2 has stories about dating approaches in fandom, the wonderful origins of Corflu, and a number of anecdotes (both serious and constructive as well as personal and funny) about well known women writers. There are charming anecdotes about Octavia E. Butler, Connie Willis, Sheri Tepper (and her rousing call to action on population growth), and Ursula K. Le Guin.

You’ll also hear about the origins and early days of the Tiptree Award, and its novel funding mechanism. Finally, there are audience comments and reminiscences including a true story about the Minneapolis chicken hat…This session is lots of fun, with a serious thread underlying it.

(11) FLIGHT HISTORY SUFFERS FIRE DAMAGE. The New York Times reports “Wright Brothers’ Airplane Factory Is Badly Damaged in Fire”.

A fire that broke out at a building complex in Dayton, Ohio, on Sunday damaged a factory founded by Wilbur and Orville Wright, the brothers who were the first people to successfully fly an airplane.

The fire throws into doubt the future of the factory, where the brothers built planes starting in the 1910s. It became part of the National Park Service’s group of aviation-related sites in Dayton in 2009.

The factory is a monument not just to the brothers and their consequential invention, but also to the role of leading industrialists of the day in giving birth to the age of commercial aviation. The factory was built shortly after Wilbur Wright visited New York in 1909 and “got buttonholed by the Vanderbilts, the Colliers, J.P. Morgan, folks like that,” said Dean Alexander, who was the park service superintendent in Dayton when the site was added. “The first thing they paid for was building that factory,” Mr. Alexander said.

The Dayton Fire Department said that it is investigating the cause of the fire, which started at 2:28 a.m. Sunday and damaged the roof and interior of buildings in the complex. No one was injured, the department said….

(12) LUCAS MUSEUM OF NARRATIVE ART. “Lucas Museum in Los Angeles Slated to Open in 2025” says the New York Times.

In the spring of 2018, after years of bidding wars, shifting proposals and changing plans, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art broke ground in South Los Angeles.

And despite many subsequent delays, pandemic-related and otherwise, the enormous scope of the project by the “Star Wars” filmmaker George Lucas is finally coming into focus, and the museum is slated to open sometime in 2025, my colleague Adam Nagourney recently reported in The New York Times.

That may come as a surprise.

“My sense from the response to this story is that many people here were unaware of how far along the museum has come, and how big it is,” Adam, who is based in Los Angeles, told me.

As a refresher, Lucas considered building his billion-dollar museum in Chicago or San Francisco, but settled on Los Angeles, where officials were more aggressive in courting the project, which was expected to bring with it prestige and thousands of construction and museum jobs. The futuristic building, reminiscent of a low-flying spaceship, is being built on what were once parking lots in Exposition Park, across the street from the University of Southern California, Lucas’s alma mater.

The Lucas, designed by Ma Yansong, one of China’s most prominent architects, is part of a recent wave of museum construction in Los Angeles. The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened in 2021, and the Hammer Museum this month completed yearslong renovations. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is also in the midst of a major overhaul….

(13) BALANCE OF POWER. “Would building a Dyson sphere be worth it? We ran the numbers” says Ars Technica. Daniel Dern posits, “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”

… For these and many other reasons, a Dyson sphere costs energy. So we’re going to see how long it will take to recoup the energy investment of building one and what the optimal design might be to minimize the initial investment.

To get at some numbers, we’re going to make a lot of assumptions. People like to poke fun at physicists for simplifying complex problems, sometimes beyond recognition. The old joke goes that dairy farmers reached out to a nearby university to help understand why milk production was low, and the response from the physicists began by assuming that the cows were spherical.

But there is something powerful about this simplifying approach, which is why physicists are trained in it from day one. First, it lets us answer questions when we’re not interested in precise numbers at the outset. Here, we just want a general sense of feasibility—will building a Dyson sphere take a (relatively) small, medium, or extreme amount of energy? Second, simplifying the problem helps cover up mistakes (either in calculations or our starting assumptions). If all we’re going after is a general ballpark, then a factor-of-two mistake (or even 10 or 100) won’t really change the overall intuitions our calculations enable….

Also: How about instead making a Ringworld-scale Dyson vacuum cleaner? (to suck up all that dark matter and other clutter…?)

(14) VERSE OF THE DAY. Too long to use as a title, however, it deserves Scroll honors. By Randall M:

One File makes you pixel
And one File makes you scroll
And the ones Mike Glyer sends you
Don’t go anywhere at all
Go ask Jetpack
When it’s on a roll

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Andrew (not Werdna), Randall M., Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 3/19/23 It’s Tribbles All The Way Down (Except Level 47, Which Is Selbbirts)

Posted on March 19, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) PICS AND IT STILL NEVER HAPPENED. David Brin stares into the abyss, discussing “All those ‘chat’ programs… and the End of Photography as Proof of Anything At All” at Contrary Brin.

One of the scariest predictions now circulating is that we are about to leave the era of photographic proof.  For generations we relied on cameras to be the fairest of fair witnesses.  Images of the Earth from space helped millions become more devoted to its care.  Images from Vietnam made countless Americans less gullible and more cynical.  Miles of footage taken at Nazi concentration camps confirmed history’s greatest crimes.  A few seconds of film shot in Dallas, in November of 1963, set the boundary conditions for a nation’s masochistic habit of scratching a wound that never heals.

Although there have been infamous photo-fakes — such as trick pictures that convinced Arthur Conan Doyle there were real “fairies” and Mary Todd Lincoln that her husband’s ghost hovered over her, or the ham-handedly doctored images that Soviet leaders used to erase “non-persons” from official history — for the most part scientists and technicians have been able to expose forgeries by magnifying and revealing the inevitable traces that meddling left behind.

But not anymore, say some experts.  We are fast reaching the point where expertly controlled computers can adjust an image, pixel by microscopic pixel, and not leave a clue behind.  Much of the impetus comes from Hollywood, where perfect verisimilitude is demanded for fantastic onscreen fabulations like Forrest Gump and Jurassic Park.  Yet some thoughtful film wizards worry how these technologies will be used outside the theaters….

…The new technologies of photo-deception have gone commercial. For instance, a new business called “Out Takes” set up shop next to Universal Studios, in Los Angeles, promising to “put you in the movies.” For a small fee they will insert your visage in a tete-a-tete with Humphrey Bogart or Marilyn Monroe, exchanging either tense dialogue or a romantic moment.  This may seem harmless on the surface, but the long range possibilities disturb Ken Burns, innovative director of the famed Public Broadcasting series The Civil War.  “If everything is possible, then nothing is true. And that, to me, is the abyss we stare into. The only weapon we might have, besides some internal restraint, is skepticism.”

Skepticism may then further transmute into cynicism — Burns worries — or else, in the arts, decadence….

(2) NO LONGER BEING OVERLOOKED. Lila Shapiro spends time “In Northampton with Kelly Link and her community of like-minded writers”.

….In the stories of Kelly Link, strange things happen in otherwise ordinary settings. A teenage girl from Iowa travels to New York to find an older guy she met online and ends up at a hotel hosting a pair of conventions: one for dentists and one for superheroes. A girl from the Boston area discovers a lost world preserved inside her grandmother’s old handbag (which is made from the skin of a dog that lives inside it). Her stories do not abide by the rules of conflict and resolution — they make sense in the way that dreams make sense. Pressed to explain these phenomena, Link’s characters tend to change the subject. “The mechanics of how I can speak are really of no great interest, and I’m afraid I don’t really understand it myself, in any case,” a talking cat insists in a story from Link’s new collection, White Cat, Black Dog. Since 2001, Link has published four books of short stories, with the fifth — a series of unsettling retellings of classic fairy tales — out this month. For much of that time, she has worked in relative obscurity. Early reviewers were impressed by her originality, but she remained largely unknown outside of M.F.A. programs and fantasy circles. When her first book was published more than 20 years ago, serious literature, for the most part, meant one-pound tomes of psychological realism.

That has changed as Link’s stature has grown. In 2016, she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; a few years later, the MacArthur Foundation awarded her a “genius” grant for “pushing the boundaries of literary fiction.”…

… After getting an M.F.A. at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Link enrolled in the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. “I thought, This will be a group of people who are doing the same kind of work. But in fact, the feedback I got from many of the people was, Well, I don’t know what this is.” While she and her fellow students admired some of the same authors — Heinlein, Asimov, Tolkien — Link’s indifference to genre conventions was apparent. If her heroines start an epic quest, they’re likely to get distracted or lost or turn into someone else entirely. “I remember thinking she already wrote better than I did and there was really no point in her coming to this workshop,” said Karen Joy Fowler, one of Link’s professors at Clarion…..

(3) TIME IN A BOTTLE. Dorothy Grant persuasively explains why people should listen to Neil Gaiman’s entire advice about the freelance life in “Saying No” at Mad Genius Club.

…He [Neil Gaiman] went on, though, to warn about the problems of success… and that’s what gets dropped out of a lot of the advice. He noted the problems of success are harder, in part because nobody warns you about them… and what do people do? Not listen to the warning, and drop it out of their quotes. They include:

“The point where you stop saying yes to everything, because now the bottles you threw in the ocean are all coming back, and have to learn to say no.”

(4) PLUS ÇA CHANGE, PLUS C’EST LA MÊME CHOSE. “50 Best Short Stories for High School Students” at We Are Teachers is surprisingly chock full of sff – Bradbury, Le Guin, Poe, Dahl – though I’m a little more surprised at how many of these stories were already part of the canon when I was in high school and are still on a list like this.

If there is one thing that my students and I share, it’s our love for short stories. High school kids may not choose to read short stories on their own time, but they get very excited when the story I choose to teach a concept is short. I find that short stories pack a stronger emotional punch. They elicit real reactions, especially if the author manages to surprise them. In fact, short stories are the thing I use most often in my high school lessons to teach literary devices, act as mentor texts for our writing, and get students excited about reading. Here is a collection of 50 of my favorite short stories for high school students….

(5) GIRARDI Q&A. The Horror Writers Association blog has a new “Women in Horror” entry: “Women in Horror: Interview with Jill Girardi”.

Jill Girardi is the internationally best-selling, award-nominated author of Hantu Macabre, a novel which was optioned for a film starring MMA Fighter Ann Osman and directed by Aaron Cowan (a senior member of the Visual Effects team that won four Oscars for Avatar and Lord of the Rings.)…

What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it?

This is something I’ve found difficult to explain over the years. Going back to the subject of du Maurier’s work, I found her simple, direct form of writing to be both beautiful and haunting, evoking so many emotions in the reader. The symbolism of it struck such a deep chord with me. For example, in one of my favorite stories, The Apple Tree, a mere tree takes on the qualities of a deceased woman, one who withered from neglect and lack of love all her life. The image was one that stayed with me long after I first finished reading the story. Many people believe that horror is all about shock value, that there’s no emotion or any deep meaning in it. Those of us who read or write horror know otherwise. We know that something as simple as a tree can haunt you, and bring you close to your own pain. This is what I adore about horror. There is so much more lurking under its surface….

(6) GODZILLA NOVELIZATIONS. [Item by Ben Bird Person.] Since its publication nearly 70 years ago, there is finally an English translation by Jeffrey Angles to the Shigeru Kayama’s novelizations for Godzilla (1954) and Godzilla Raids Again (1955). According to its Amazon listing, it’ll be published by University of Minnesota Press and released October 3, 2023.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

2003 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Sharyn McCrumb’s Ghost Riders is the seventh of her Ballad Novels, her mystery series set in the Appalachian Mountains. It features a strong dash of magic realism as you’ll see in the Beginning from this novel which was published twenty years ago by Dutton Adult.

I like the novels because they feel authentic which reflects McCrumb’s being born and raised in the Appalachian region. The novels are richly detailed, the characters are fully developed, particularly the continuing ones such as Rattler, and the stories are certainly some of the better ones set in the Appalachian region.

And if her name sounds familiar, that’s because of Bimbos of the Death Sun and Zombies of the Gene Pool which she wrote.

And now our Beginning…

Prologue: Rattler

The boy stood still in the moonlight watching the riders approach. The chill of the night air had shaken the last bit of sleep-stupor from him, and he shivered, feeling the wind on his legs and the sensation of his bare feet touching the rough boards of the porch, and knowing that he was not dreaming. He had stumbled outside to make his way to the privy, but now something–not a sound, more like a feeling–made him stop a few feet from the door, and for long minutes as he stood there he would forget the push in his bladder that had sent him out into the cold darkness of an October night.

Night riders.

Horses were not an every day sight in the mountains nowadays, as they had been in his daddy’s time. Now that the Great War had ended in Europe, the world had changed. People talked about aeroplanes and automobiles and store-bought clothes. Every year brought more Model A’s into the county, and those folks that didn’t run an automobile could take the train into Johnson City or Asheville if they needed to go. You sent money to the mail-order catalogue, and the postman would bring you the goods, all parceled up in brown paper, whatever you’d asked for. They called it “the wish book.” But nobody ever wished for the old days, not in these mountains. They all wanted the future to get here double quick.

But tonight was an echo of the old days… there were horsemen at the edge of the woods.

The boy wondered who these riders were, out on the ridge past midnight, far from a road and miles from the next farm. He could make out three of them just this side of the trees beyond the smokehouse, but in the faint light of the crescent moon their features were indistinguishable. They carried no lantern, and they rode in silence. It took the boy three heartbeats longer to register the fact that the horses made no sound either. He heard no rustle of grass, no snapping of twigs beneath their hooves.

One of the riders detached himself from the group by the woods and trotted toward the porch where the boy stood. He was a tall, gaunt man in a long greatcoat and scuffed leather boots, and he had a calculating way of looking through narrowed eyes that froze the boy to the spot like a snake-charmed bird. The rider looked to be in his twenties, with dark hair and black whiskers outlining his chin, as if he were growing a beard by default and not by design. The boy stared at the face, a pale oval in the moonlight, and he forgot to move or cry out.

The man smiled down at him as if he had trouble remembering how. “Evenin’, Boy,” he said in a soft mountain drawl. “What’s your name then?”

“Rat–they called me Rattler, mister.” It took him two tries to get the sound to come out of his throat.

The rider grinned. “Rattler, huh? Mean as a snake, are you, boy?”

The boy lifted his chin. Even if he was shivering in his nightshirt, he was on his own porch and he would not cower before a stranger. “I don’t reckon I’m mean,” he said. “But I give salt for salt.”

“Fair enough.” The dark man looked amused. “I guess I do the same.” He glanced back at the woods where his companions waited, motionless, shadows in moonlight. “And you’d be–what? About twelve?”

“About,” said the boy. He would be eleven in January.

“Well, snake-boy, what do you say? You want to ride with us?”

The boy shrugged. “Got no horse.”

“Reckon we could rustle you up one.”

The smile again, cold as a moonbeam. The boy hesitated. “You never said who you are, Mister.”

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 19, 1821 — Sir Richard Francis Burton KCMG FRGS. He was a geographer, translator, writer, soldier, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer and diplomat. He worked on the translation of an unexpurgated version of One Thousand and One Nights. Also, Vikram and the Vampire or Tales of Hindu Devilry. Mind you, he was also the publisher of both Kama Sutra and The Perfume Garden. Philip Jose Farmer made him a primary character of the Riverworld series. (Died 1890.)
Born March 19, 1926 — Joe L. Hensley. Long-time fan and writer who was a First Fandom “Dinosaur” (which meant he had been active in fandom prior to July 4, 1939), and received the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award in 2006. Very impressive! His first genre fiction sale was the short story “And Not Quite Human,” published in the September 1953 issue of Beyond Fantasy Fiction. His co-authors included Alexei Panshin and Harlan Ellison. Though he wrote nearly fifty pieces of short fiction, and much of that is not genre, he wrote just one genre novel, The Black Roads. (Died 2007.)
Born March 19, 1928 — Patrick McGoohan. Creator along with George Markstein of The Prisoner series in which he played the main role of Number Six. (The one and only Prisoner. I know it’s been remade but I refuse to admit it exists.) I’ve watched it at least several times down the years. It never gets any clearer but it’s always interesting and always weird. Other genre credits do not include Danger Man but comprise a short list of The Phantom where he played The Phantom’s father, Treasure Planet where he voiced Billy Bones and Journey into Darkness where he was The Host of. (Died 2009.)
Born March 19, 1932 — Gail Kobe. She has genre appearances with the more prominent being as Jessica Connelly in Twilight Zone’s “In His Image”, in another Twilight Zone episode as Leah Maitland in “The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross”, and two Outer Limits episodes, first as Janet Doweling in “Specimen, Unknown” and then as Janet in “The Keeper of the Purple Twilight”. (Died 2019.)
Born March 19, 1936 — Ursula Andress, 87. I’m sure I’ve seen all of the original Bond films though I’ll be damned I remember where or when I saw them. Which is my way of leading up to saying that I don’t remember her in her roles as either as Honey Ryder in the very first Bond film, Dr. No, or as as Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale. Bond girls aren’t that memorable to me it seems. Hmmm… let’s see if she’s done any other genre work… well her first was The Tenth Victim based on Sheckley’s 1953 short story “Seventh Victim”. She also appeared in L’Infermiera, oops wrong genre, The Mountain of the Cannibal God, The Fifth Musketeer, Clash of the Titans where she played of course Aphrodite, on the Manimal series, The Love Boat series and the two Fantaghirò films.
Born March 19, 1945 — Jim Turner. Turner was editor for Arkham House after the death of August Derleth, founder of that press. After leaving Arkham House for reasons that are not at all clear, he founded Golden Gryphon Press which published really lovely books until it went out of existence. (Died 1999.)
Born March 19, 1947 — Glenn Close, 76. I had not a clue that she’d done genre-friendly acting. Indeed she has, with two of the most recent being Nova Prime in Guardians of The Galaxy, Topsy in Mary Poppins Returns and voicing Felicity Fox in the animated film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. Before those roles, she was Aunt Josephine in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, Blue Mecha in A.I. Artificial Intelligence and Madeline Ashton in Death Becomes Her. Oh the latter is almost too weird in what it is.
Born March 19, 1955 — Bruce Willis, 68. (It’s very sad what’s happening to him.) So do any of the Die Hard franchise count as genre? Even setting them aside, he has a very long genre list, to wit Death Becomes Her (yes another actor in it), 12 Monkeys (weird shit), The Fifth Element (damn great), Armageddon (eight tentacles down), The Sixth Sense (not at all bad), Sin City (typical Miller overkill) and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (yet more Miller overkill).

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal asks the question: should we always go for the antiques?
Tom Gauld imparts a publishing industry spin to the Cinderella story.

My cartoon for yesterday’s @GdnSaturday / @GuardianBooks pic.twitter.com/lWJS2C4mWS
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) March 19, 2023

(10) PLUNKING TOGETHER. In “Krissy and I Have a Band: Introducing OEMAA and ‘Parking Space’”, John Scalzi lets fans hear a driver’s overflowing white-hot rage when supply exceeds demand.

…We agreed that we would form a punk band, whose musical theme would be venting furiously about the minor annoyances that beset ones such as ourselves, which is to say, comfortable middle-aged folks.

Fast forward to 2023, and right now, and I’m happy to announce that Krissy and I do, in fact, have a punk band in which we bemoan the inconveniences of the hugely privileged. We call ourselves OEMAA (pronounced “wee-ma”), which is an acronym for Outrageously Entitled Middle-Aged Assholes, and our first song, “Parking Space,” is the sonic blast of aggrievement emanating from the soul of a man in an SUV who sees the parking space he’s been hovering over get snapped up by another equally entitled jerk in a Lexus. Hell hath no fury like a dude in an SUV, missing out on a parking opportunity…

(11) INEXPLICABLE WRITING. Ryan George takes viewers inside the Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Pitch Meeting.

With the first movie as well as the book series being massive international successes, Warner Bros was fast to get to work on adapting the second book in the Harry Potter series: The Chamber of Secrets. What adventures lay ahead for Harry Potter at his death trap of a magical high school?! People were anxious to see it play out on the big screen. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets definitely raises some questions though. Like why would Hogwarts hire Lockhart and why would he accept, knowing full well that he’s a fraud? Was the Whomping Willow really the best thing they could think of to put on school grounds? Why does the car have a mind of its own? Why did Hagrid send children off to speak to man-eating spiders in the most dangerous forest there is? How did Nearly Headless Nick get unpetrified? Is Fawkes the secret star of this movie?! To answer all these questions and more, step inside the Pitch Meeting that led to Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets! It’ll be super easy, barely an inconvenience.

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Colonials debuts in select theaters on April 7 and on digital platforms on April 11.

On his mission from Mars, a space colonist’s ship is attacked by a Moon-based civilization and crash lands on Earth. Having lost his memory, he joins forces with a Resistance to save the galaxy from human extinction.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Lise Andreasen, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

File 770

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Tag Archives: Sharyn McCrumb

Pixel Scroll 1/10/24 Tom Swift And His Scrolling Pixels

Pixel Scroll 8/16/23 La Pixel È Malleable

Pixel Scroll 3/28/23 Pixels Yearning To Be Running With The Wild Things

Pixel Scroll 3/19/23 It’s Tribbles All The Way Down (Except Level 47, Which Is Selbbirts)