(1) SUN-TIMES PRINTS FAKE READING LIST. [Item by Steven H Silver.] On Sunday, the Chicago Sun-Times published a recommended reading list. The problem is that only 5 of the 15 books exist. The other 10 were AI hallucinations.
The list includes the real Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury and the not-quite-so-real The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir.
Ars Technica has the story: “Chicago Sun-Times prints summer reading list full of fake books”.
The creator of the list, Marco Buscaglia, confirmed to 404 Media that he used AI to generate the content. “I do use AI for background at times but always check out the material first. This time, I did not and I can’t believe I missed it because it’s so obvious. No excuses,” Buscaglia said. “On me 100 percent and I’m completely embarrassed.”
A check by Ars Technica shows that only five of the fifteen recommended books in the list actually exist, with the remainder being fabricated titles falsely attributed to well-known authors. AI assistants such as ChatGPT are well-known for creating plausible-sounding errors known as confabulations, especially when lacking detailed information on a particular topic. The problem affects everything from AI search results to lawyers citing fake cases.
On Tuesday morning, the Chicago Sun-Times addressed the controversy on Bluesky. “We are looking into how this made it into print as we speak,” the official publication account wrote. “It is not editorial content and was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom. We value your trust in our reporting and take this very seriously. More info will be provided soon.”…
… Freelance journalist Joshua J. Friedman noted on Bluesky that the reading list was “part of a ~60-page summer supplement” published on May 18, suggesting it might be “transparent filler” possibly created by “the lone freelancer apparently saddled with producing it.”…
…The publication error comes two months after the Chicago Sun-Times lost 20 percent of its staff through a buyout program. In March, the newspaper’s nonprofit owner, Chicago Public Media, announced that 30 Sun-Times employees—including 23 from the newsroom—had accepted buyout offers amid financial struggles….
(2) INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2025. Heart Lamp, a collection of 12 short stories by Banu Mushtaq, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, has won the International Booker Prize 2025. It is a non-genre work.
In a collection of 12 short stories, Heart Lamp chronicles the everyday lives of women and girls in patriarchal communities in southern India.
Originally published in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, Banu Mushtaq’s portraits of family and community tensions testify to her years tirelessly championing women’s rights and protesting all forms of caste and religious oppression.
Mushtaq’s writing is at once witty, vivid, moving and excoriating, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. It’s in her characters – the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost – that she emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature.
(3) DARTH VADER IS STILL TALKING AND SAG-AFTRA TAKES ISSUE. [Item by Jim Janney.] “SAG-AFTRA Hits Fortnite With Unfair Labor Practice Over AI Darth Vader Voice” reports Variety — although the objection is not the use of James Earl Jones’ voice (which he authorized prior to his death), or even the use of AI, but the lack of negotiation to set a new price.
SAG-AFTRA is objecting to the use of AI to recreate the late James Earl Jones’ bass intonations of Darth Vader in Epic Games’ “Fortnite.”
The actors union said Epic-owned Llama Productions “chose to replace the work of human performers with AI technology” for the Star Wars-themed Fortnite Battle Royale mini-season that launched last week. “Unfortunately, they did so without providing any notice of their intent to do this and without bargaining with us over appropriate terms.” As such, SAG-AFTRA filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board against Llama Productions….
…Jones, who died in 2024 at 93, had signed off an agreement to allow his archival voice recordings to be used to recreate his younger voice from the Star Wars films for future Lucasfilm projects. In addition, Jones’ family had granted permission for the use of his voice in “Fortnite,” according to Disney, Lucasfilm and Epic Games. “James Earl felt that the voice of Darth Vader was inseparable from the story of Star Wars, and he always wanted fans of all ages to continue to experience it,” his family said in a statement. “We hope that this collaboration with ‘Fortnite’ will allow both longtime fans of Darth Vader and newer generations to share in the enjoyment of this iconic character.”
But SAG-AFTRA said “Fortnite’s” use of Jones’ AI-generated voice was not cleared by the union.
In its statement, the union said, “We celebrate the right of our members and their estates to control the use of their digital replicas and welcome the use of new technologies to allow new generations to share in the enjoyment of those legacies and renowned roles. However, we must protect our right to bargain terms and conditions around uses of voice that replace the work of our members, including those who previously did the work of matching Darth Vader’s iconic rhythm and tone in video games.”…
(4) IAIN M. BANKS MUST BE SPINNING. Vox notes “The tech billionaires are missing the point of their favorite sci-fi series”.
One of the most momentous developments of the new Trump era is how major billionaires in the tech industry — frequently known as the broligarchs — have thrown their weight behind the president. During the 2024 election, they offered high-profile support and made big donations; after the inauguration, they announced new company policies that aligned them with President Donald Trump’s regressive cultural ideologies.
Elon Musk had already turned Twitter into a right-wing echo chamber since purchasing it in 2022, and spent several chaotic months earlier this year as Trump’s government efficiency henchman. Jeff Bezos has revamped the Washington Post’s editorial section to build support for “personal liberties and free markets.” Mark Zuckerberg decided to get rid of fact-checkers at Meta.
It was a massive show of power that revealed how possible it is for these wealthy men to remake our culture in their own image, transforming how we speak to each other and what we know to be true. Using that power on Trump’s behalf seems to have paid mixed dividends for Silicon Valley, but it nonetheless makes clear how important it is to understand their worldview and their vision for the future.
Which is why it is striking to note that Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg share a favorite author: Iain M. Banks, the Scottish science fiction writer best known for his Culture series. Banks is an odd choice for a bunch of tech billionaires. The author, who died in 2013, was a socialist and avowed hater of the super-rich.
“The Culture series is certainly, in terms of more modern science fiction, one of my absolute favorites,” Bezos told GeekWire in 2018, adding, “there’s a utopian element to it that I find very attractive.” Bezos has attempted twice to adapt the series for TV at Amazon, once in 2018 and again in February. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg picked the Culture novel Player of Games for his book club in 2015….
… The politics of these books are not subtle, and they are also not compatible with the existence of billionaires. So it’s worth thinking about why the broligarchs have so consistently cited a socialist author as an inspiration. What do they find tantalizing about Banks’ work? Are they missing the point altogether?…
(5) ANOTHER BOOKSTORE SUPPORT FUNDRAISER. “Binc Launches Fundraising Campaign to Meet Increased Need and Rising Grant Amounts”. [Via Shelf Awareness.] Dozens of authors and creators have joined the Book Industry Charitable Foundation to help launch the Now More Than Ever, I Stand with Bookstores fundraising campaign to encourage book and comic lovers to stand with their community stores in challenging times.
Dozens of authors and creators from across genres have joined the Book Industry Charitable (Binc) Foundation to declare their commitment to book and comic people. Their support is launching the Now More Than Ever, I Stand with Bookstorescampaign to engage book and comic lovers in standing with their community stores amidst challenging times. Stores across the country will have displays May 19-June 2, 2025, encouraging in-store purchase and/or donating to Binc.
Thanks to the generosity of Binc ambassador and best-selling author Amor Towles and other authors/creators the first $50,000 in donations received will be matched dollar for dollar. Donate today.
Binc noted that with the growing uncertainty regarding federal funding to support local community resources, the challenges against First Amendment rights, and overall financial insecurity, “store employees are at greater risk of harassment and not being able to withstand and navigate a personal crisis.” Requests to Binc for help have increased 8% over last year and the average amount to resolve a crisis is also rising….
(6) IS THE TIME LORD RUNNING OUT OF TIME? Inverse collates the Doctor Who cancellation rumors in “37 Years Later, The Oldest Sci-Fi Show Might Repeat Some Troubling History”.
…According to new rumors published by The Mirror, the current incarnation of Doctor Who, shepherded by showrunner Russell T Davies, is headed for a “big pause” after the 2025 “Season 2” concludes in two weeks. The report cites “insiders” who claim that Davies has “already planned the next two seasons, having almost completed scripts for series 16 and with stories for the 17th series worked out.” (Series 16 and 17 translate Season 3 and 4 in the new post-2024 number system.)
The rumor that’s bigger, and backed up by some confirmed statements, is that it’s unclear if the BBC’s partnership with Disney+ will continue after 2025. Before the latest season of Who launched, Inverse confirmed with Davies himself that “There’s no commission of Season 3 yet. There are no serious conversations about anything because the series doesn’t exist yet. But I love this job. I love staying in it. I’d be very happy.”…
(7) WELLMAN BOOK REMINDER. “Manly Wade Wellman’s Cahena Going Out of Print” and DMR Books would be happy to sell you a copy while they still can. Ordering information is here — “Cahena — DMR Books” – where there is also a detailed plot summary.
In 2020 DMR Books made arrangements to reprint Manly Wade Wellman’s final novel, Cahena, bringing it back into print for the first time in nearly thirty-five years. The contract is expiring soon, and at the end of May it will once again be unavailable.
Cahena is a historical novel (with fantasy elements) dealing with the brave and beautiful warrior queen who reigned over the Berbers in the seventh century. The Cahena, as she was known, was believed to be a sorceress and prophetess. She led an army forty thousand strong in a valiant struggle against the Mohammedan invaders who were fresh from their conquest of Carthage….
(8) AI / COPYRIGHT BATTLE IN PARLIAMENT. BBC reports “Peers demand more protection from AI for creatives”.
The House of Lords has dealt a second defeat to the government over its Data (Use and Access) Bill.
Peers had already backed an amendment calling for more copyright protections for the creative industries from artificial intelligence (AI) scrapers once.
MPs rejected that amendment and sent the Bill back to the Lords, where Technology Minister Baroness Jones told peers it would lead to “piecemeal” legislation as it pre-empted consultation on AI and copyright.
However, there was broad and vociferous support for Baroness Kidron, a film director and digital rights campaigner, who accused ministers of being swayed by the “whisperings of Silicon Valley” asking them to “redefine theft”.
The Lords rebellion follows condemnation from Sir Elton John, who called the government “losers” over the weekend and said ministers would be “committing theft” if they allowed AI firms to use artists’ content without paying.
He joins the ranks of high-profile musicians, including Paul McCartney, Annie Lennox, and Kate Bush, who are outraged by plans they say would make it easier for AI models to be trained on copyrighted material.
Kidron’s amendment would force AI companies to disclose what material they were using to develop their programmes, and demand they get permission from copyright holders before they use any of their work.
Highlighting the power differential between the big tech giants in the US and creatives in the UK, Kidron branded the government’s plans “extraordinary”.
“There’s no industrial sector in the UK that government policy requires to give its property or labour to another sector – which is in direct competition with it – on a compulsory basis, in the name of balance,” she said….
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
May 20, 1928 — Shirley Rousseau Murphy. (Died 2022.)
Now we come to a woman who wrote about cats who talked and understood human speech, Shirley Rousseau Murphy. How could I resist such a writer? Certainly the Pixels wouldn’t be happy if I didn’t celebrate her, would they?
The series that I’m interested is the Joe Grey series which involves a number of felines in a small coastal California town with a thriving tourist trade who develop the rather unusual ability not only to understand human speech but to talk it as well. No, it’s not explained, nor should it be. It is just is as all such things should be,
In first novel, Cat on the Edge, Joe Grey, our central feline and mostly the narrator here and in all of the novels, is the only witness to a murder. As the author says on her website, “Escaping the killer, he becomes the hunted, and he’s one scared tomcat–until he meets green-eyed Dulcie, a charmer with talents to match his own.” He also discovers shortly there’s the aforementioned talents. Weirded out at first, he’s delighted eventually.
The writing here is better than just decent with some quite unexpected plot developments that add considerable depth to the story. Joe Grey as a cat seems a feline in his behavior, the setting is charming and makes sense, and the mysteries are reasonably good though I wouldn’t call them particularly deep. I should admit I find that true of nearly every mystery I read. If characters are interesting, the plot fascinating and the setting well crafted, I don’t care that the mystery is slight at best, which they more often than not are.
It obviously sold well as there were twenty-one novels before she stopped with the last, Cat Chase the Moon, published after her death. A novella, Cat Chase the Moon, which I think is a prequel also has been published only by the usual suspects.
So all of these novels in this series I suspect based on listening to the first eight and a number of the latter to date are all like any series of this sort such that you could read any or all of them and be entertained by what you read. Is there an explicit order to them? No idea though I do know the last one does wrap up the series.
She has a number of other works, none of which I’ve read.
The Fontana Duology is a paranormal series involving Satan Himself with cats again prominently involved based on the really cute orange tabbies on both covers, and also the titles are The Cat, the Devil, and Lee Fontana and The Cat, the Devil, the Last Escape.
Tired of cats yet? You’re out of luck if you are as she wrote went on to pen The Catswold Portal where a young girl could transform herself into, oh guess. She actually notes on her website that she describes each cat in detail so this is a small calico.
Ok, I promise no more cats, so finally I’ll stop with dragons that I consider to be akin to cats. I really do. They probably like having their bellies tickled. Carefully.
The Dragonbards trilogy which has as its story a sleeping dragon who awakens only to find her beloved land ruled by an evil despot and the only one who can save is a bard who is not be found. It’s a YA series that got very, very good reviews.
Well I should say that she did unicorn fiction as well. Her story is “Starhorn” which is found in The Unicorn Treasure which she edited in the hardcover first edition from Doubleday cover art and illustrations by Tim Hildebrandt.
(I am not looking at her children’s fiction which would take many more paragraphs. Really it would. And there’s horses there.)
Cats, dragons, unicorns. Is that the Holy Trinity of fantasy fiction? If not, it should be.
(10) COMICS SECTION.
- Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee plays around.
- Free Range illustrates procrastinators who started early.
- Jerry King introduces a bug detector.
- Lio gets an important part.
- Loose Parts provides a choice.
- Rhymes with Orange meets up.
- Rubes tries a comparison.
- Wallace the Brave’s Rose provides Star facts.
(11) SANCTUARY MOON. Inverse tells “Why Apple’s Best New Sci-Fi Series Created Its Own Version of ‘Star Trek’”. For those who can’t get enough Murderbot coverage, of which I am one.
…That’s right, while the primary story of SecUnit (Alexander Skarsgård) is the focus of Murderbot, the Murderbot itself is a big fan of a fictional sci-fi soap opera called The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. While the book version of this meta-show was described by author Wells as “How to Get Away with Murder in Space,” the TV series version is very much more a Star Trek, complete with the hilarious catchphrase “boldness is all.” Speaking to Inverse, the showrunners of Murderbot, Paul Weitz and Chris Weitz, revealed how their take on Sanctuary Moon happened.
Mild spoilers ahead.
In the series, we get John Cho of Star Trek fame as a kind of swaggering Captain Kirk figure, who may have the best collar and jacket in all of contemporary sci-fi. But both Weitzes note that casting Cho because of the Star Trek connection wasn’t the only reason to bring him into this project. “John did have that iconography coming in, as did Clark Gregg with his Marvel experience,” Paul Weitz explains. “But really these were just people who we had their phone numbers. We’d worked with John before on I think 12 films or something.”…
(12) HYDROGEN BOMB DESIGNER. [Item by Andrew Porter.] This is a very fascinating article, and there’s a link to an interview with his widow, which talks about growing up in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Link bypasses the New York Times paywall: “Dick Garwin Fought Nuclear Armageddon. He Hid a 50-Year Secret”.
Enrico Fermi’s battle with cancer was nearing its end in late 1954 when he received a visitor.
Fermi, a Nobel laureate in physics, had fled fascism in Europe and become a founder of the nuclear age, helping bring the world’s first reactor and first atom bomb to life.
The visitor, Richard L. Garwin, had been Fermi’s student at the University of Chicago, the laureate calling him “the only true genius I have ever met.” Now, he had done something known at the time only by Fermi and a handful of other experts. Not even his family knew. Three years earlier, the boy wonder, then 23, had designed the world’s first hydrogen bomb, which brought the fury of the stars to Earth.
In a test, it had exploded with a force nearly 1,000 times as powerful as the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima, its power greater than all the explosives used in World War II.
To his reverential student, Fermi confided a regret. He felt his life had involved too little participation in crucial issues of public policy. He died a few weeks later at 53.
After that visit, Dr. Garwin set out on a new path, seeing nuclear scientists as having a responsibility to speak out. His resolve, he later told a historian, came from a desire to honor the memory of the scientist he had known best and admired most…
(13) BLAST IN THE PAST. “14,000 years ago, the most powerful solar storm ever recorded hit Earth. ‘This event establishes a new worst-case scenario’” says Space.com.
An extreme solar storm hit Earth some 14,300 years ago, more powerful than any other such event known in human history, a new analysis of radiocarbon data has revealed.
The solar storm, the only known to have taken place in the last Ice Age, long eluded scientists as they lacked appropriate models for interpreting radiocarbon data from glacial climate conditions.
But a new study by a team from the Oulu University in Finland has taken a stab at the measurement interpretation with eye-opening results. Using a novel chemistry-climate model, the team found that the marked spike in the carbon-14 isotope detected in fossilized tree rings was caused by a solar storm more than 500 times as powerful as the 2003 Halloween Solar Storm, which was the most intense in modern history….
… In 2023, a major spike in radiocarbon concentrations in fossilized tree rings was discovered, indicating a major solar storm must have taken place as the last ice age was drawing to an end.
The new study was finally able to precisely assess the magnitude of that solar storm and date it more accurately. The scientists believe that solar storm took place between January and April in the year 12,350 BC, likely dazzling the hundreds of thousands of mammoth hunters who lived in Europe at that time with the most awe-inspiring aurora borealis….
…Scientists previously studied records of five other radiocarbon spikes found in tree ring data, which they attributed to powerful solar storms that had taken place in 994 AD, 775 AD, 663 BC, 5259 BC and 7176 BC….
(14) SPACE MAIL. [Item by Chris Barkley.] LOOK at what I found in my mailbox TODAY!!!!! I had completely forgotten that I did this when I attended Chicon 8!
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Rob Thornton, Jim Janney, Dave Ritzlin, Steven H Silver, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, and Teddy Harvia for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]