Tag Archives: Space Cowboy Books

Pixel Scroll 5/15/25 A Pixel A Day, Keeps The AI Away

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(1) GREGORY BENFORD CONSERVATORSHIP ANNOUNCED. Joe Haldeman today published on Facebook an announcement and statement by James Benford: “Jim Benford asked me to post this:  Court Approves conservatorship of the Estate and Person of Gregory Benford”. In addition to some information about Gregory Benford’s health, it includes allegations and insinuations about people who have been close to Gregory since his stroke in 2022.

Richard Man tries to correct the characterization about one of those people in this Facebook post.

A number of well-known sff figures comment on the two posts.

(2) LACON V REVEALS FIRST SPECIAL GUEST. The 2026 Worldcon committee, LACon V, has announced Tracy Drain as the convention’s first Special Guest.

Tracy Drain is a flight systems engineer who has helped to develop, test, and operate a variety of robotic spacecraft for deep space exploration over the past 25+ years. Her passion for space grew from an early love of science fiction – she soaked up Star Trek, Star Wars, and Battlestar Galactica, plus sci-fi and fantasy books by the armload. With her eye on a career in space, she studied Mechanical Engineering at the University of Kentucky and interned at the NASA Langley Research Center. After earning a master’s degree in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech, she landed a full-time position at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2000.

As a systems engineer, Tracy works with teams of engineers and scientists to ensure all the parts of a spacecraft (telecommunications, thermal, power, software, etc.), the science instruments, and the mission (spacecraft/instruments, ground data system, mission design and navigation, etc.) are designed to work well together to accomplish the mission goals. Her previous missions have included the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Kepler mission (an Exoplanet hunter), the Juno mission (orbiting Jupiter) and the Psyche mission (now on its way to study an asteroid). She is currently the Chief Engineer in operations for the Europa Clipper mission which successfully launched in October 2024 and is now on its 5.5-year cruise to Jupiter. After arrival in the Jovian system, Clipper will study Europa – one of the most scientifically exciting moons in our solar system!…

(3) LACON V OPENS PROGRAM PARTICIPANT INTEREST SURVEY. The Program Division for LAcon V, the 2026 Worldcon, will be co-managed by Helen Montgomery and Dr. Meg MacDonald. Montgomery chaired Chicon 8, the 2022 Worldcon. MacDonald was co-Division Head for Promotions for Glasgow 2024 – A Worldcon for Our Futures.

LAcon V has a Program Overview page.

Our Program Suggestion Form is for anyone who wishes to submit an idea for a program item. This can be a panel discussion you want to see, a workshop you want someone to run, a discussion group about your favorite book or movie franchise – maybe you just have a cool panel title, or perhaps a fully formed description of a panel but no title. It’s all okay to submit! No idea is too big or too small; we want to hear them all!

And then there’s our Program Participant Interest survey, which is for anyone who is interested in being a program participant, be it on site in Anaheim or online through our virtual offerings. We expect and need hundreds of program participants. Some may be professionals in their field; others may be hobbyists or fans. No matter what, we want to know more about you! Filling out the form does not guarantee that you will be accepted as a participant, but it is the first necessary step in the process, and we’re excited to hear from you.

(4) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboy Books has released Simultaneous Times podcast episode 87 with KC Grifant & Franco Amati.

Stories featured in this episode:

  • “Negation” by KC Grifant; music by Phog Masheeen; read by the Jenna Hanchey
  • “So I Guess I’m Not an Actual Person Anymore” by Franco Amati; music by Phog Masheeen; read by Jean-Paul Garnier

Theme music by Dain Luscombe.

(5) GENRE GRAPEVINE ON SEATTLE WORLDCON. Jason Sanford presents “Genre Grapevine’s Deep Dive into the Use of ChatGPT by Seattle Worldcon”, a public post on Patreon.

….It appears Worldcon leadership only learned that ChatGPT was used in this manner after the fact, when the person on the vetting team revealed what they’d done and said that there was no other way to complete the vetting with so few volunteers on the team. While Worldcon leadership had concerns about the use of generative AI, because ChatGPT had already been used – and because of the lack of needed volunteers on the vetting team – they decided to retroactively accept its use.

What came after is now well known: Word about the use of ChatGPT quickly spread among Worldcon volunteers and the larger genre community. 

I’m told the person on the vetting team who originally decided to use ChatGPT is no longer involved in the vetting process….

Unfortunately, none of the quoted sources was willing to go on the record as a source.

(6) DAVE RATTI OBITUARY. [By Becky Veal.] David Ratti, long time Orlando fan, passed away on May 15, 2025. He had been suffering prolonged illnesses, but the cause of death is initially listed as pneumonia and sepsis.

I don’t know when Dave first got into fandom, but I met him at Necronomicon in 1983. I was pushing my infant son Sean in a stroller when someone came up to me and tried to start a conversation. I remember thinking “another fat jerk“.  And thus I met my best friend of 40 years.

Dave was a founding member of the Orlando Science Fiction Society and the convention Oasis. We worked together editing the bid progress reports for the 1992 Orlando Worldcon, MagiCon. We ran more convention offices and other departments than I can count.

I will write a better obituary later, as I’m sure others will. I’m too exhausted with grief to do more. Dave was unique and special and wonderful in his own way. There will be many tears shed by many fans and friends, including myself.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Liō series (2006)

Nineteen years ago on this date, one of the most unusual strips to come into existence did so in the form of Mark Tatulli’s Liō. It was very easy to market globally as it had almost no dialogue except that spoken by other people in the parodies that I’ll mention in a minute as Liō and the other characters don’t speak at all, and there were no balloons or captions at all giving it a global appeal. 

Liō, who lives with his father and various monsters, i.e. Ishmael a giant squid and Fido a spider, various animals like Cybil a white cat (of course there’s a cat here, a very pushy feline indeed), aliens, lab creations, and even Liō’s hunchbacked assistant.  Why there’s even Archie, Liō’s psychopathic ventriloquist’s dummy. Liō’s mother is deceased. Though why she’s deceased is never stated. Definitely not your nuclear family here.

An important aspect of the strip is that it  will riff off other strips, and lots of them: Blondie, Bloom County, Calvin and Hobbes (my favorite strip ever), Cathy, Garfield, Opus, Peanuts, even Pearls Before Swine (definitely not one of my favorite strips I will readily admit) will become fodder for parody by this strip. That’s where the only dialogue is spoken. 

Tatulli on the Mr. Media podcast back a decade or so said “It’s really a basic concept. It’s just Liō who lives with his father, and that’s basically it, and whatever I come up with. I set no parameters because I didn’t want to lock myself in. I mean, having no dialogue means that there is going to be no dialogue-driven gags, so I have to leave myself as open as possible to any kind of thing, so anything basically can happen.” 

There a transcript of that podcast here as the audio quality of that interview is, as the interviewer admits, rather awful. He says that he got better after that first interview by him. 

In multiple interviews, Tatulli has said the two major contemporary influences on his style are Gahan Wilson and Charles Addams.

It’s good at offending people as this strip demonstrates.

Currently, the strip runs daily globally in more than two hundred and fifty papers. Lio is also available in collections, many of them, found in paperback and digital formats. They display rather well on an iPad. 

(8) MORE MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 15, 2015 — Mad Max: Fury Road

By Paul Weimer: I briefly mentioned Mad Max Fury Road in my recent retrospective of George Miller, but the movie deserves a bit of its own space as well. 

It came out in 2015. Thirty years after the previous entry, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. I had figured that the franchise had had its end. The creation of Fury Road was a delight, and, 30 years after seeing the last Mad Max movie in a theater, I vowed to see this one, too. And so I did, one fine afternoon in May. 

I was blown away. Tom Hardy makes an excellent Mad Max, taking up Gibson’s old mantle. But the thing that struck me immediately is how little he is a part of his own movie. This is a movie about a community, and about an Imperator (Charlize Theron) and a struggle against patriarchal tyranny. Max is only a piece of his own titular film…and yet it works. What I remember about this film isn’t Max so much as Immortan Joe, and his Boys. And Furiosa. And the War Rig.

And the spectacle. Seeing this on a movie theater screen was revelatory. The scale and size of the movie, especially in the “dust storm” sequence, astonished me. My jaw hit the floor when we got to that sequence. And then we get the musician on the attacking vehicle, and a fantastic action sequence. We get moments of intimacy, and care. And utter tragedy, when Furiosa realizes her paradisiacal home is gone forever. The fiercely anti-patriarchal nature of the script.  “We are not things!”

It won six academy awards, and was also up but did not win Best Picture and Best Director. Entirely deserving, Mad Max Fury Road felt (until the recent movie Furiosa) as a capstone to the world of Mad Max. In a way, I feel like it is the one essential Mad Max movie because, as noted above, Mad Max is almost a walk-on in his own titular movie. The movie is much bigger, bolder and larger for not having Max front and center, and possibly why it is so successful. It’s the one essential Mad Max movie. It takes every theme of the previous films, adds new ones and puts it all together in a stunning performance all around.

And the Black and White conversion is fantastic.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) KGB. Ellen Datlow shared her photos from the Fantastic Fiction at KGB readings for May 14, 2025.

Carol Gyzander and Daryl Gregory read from recent work to a full house, despite the dreary weather.

(11) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 134 of the Octothorpe podcast, “In the Framework of Linear Time”, they “discuss the recent Seattle 2025 controversy, and also read out some letters of comment from various listeners, before getting into the real meat of the podcast: roguelikes.” An uncorrected transcript is here.

A photograph of a yellow square on a mantlepiece. On the yellow square is black text and a red shape with yellow text. The text reads “Corflu 42. 2025 FAAn Awards. Best Immutable Object: Octothorpe”. Text overlaid on the photograph reads ‘Octothorpe 134. “Don’t believe everything you read on ChatGPT.”’

(12) LOVE, DEATH + ROBOTS. JustWatch gives reasons to watch “Love, Death + Robots – streaming tv show online”.

JustWatch’s latest Why-To-Watch feature spotlights acclaimed director and animator Tim Miller, the visionary behind Netflix’s genre-defying anthology Love, Death + Robots, which premieres its fourth season today (May 15, 2025). In an exclusive quote shared with JustWatch, Miller speaks to the show’s groundbreaking creative freedom and its potential to convert even the most hesitant viewer into an animation devotee.

The show’s Director Tim Miller says:

This show will make you an animation fan

There’s something for everyone [in “Love, Death + Robots”]. If you want to see artists performing at the top of their game across a variety of genres and styles, and you’re an animation fan, it’s a must-watch. If you’re not an animation fan, this is the show that might make you one.

(13) V’GER LIVES! [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] Engineers at NASA say they have successfully revived thrusters aboard Voyager 1, the farthest spacecraft from our planet, in the nick of time before a planned communications blackout. “Voyager 1: Once ‘dead’ thrusters on the farthest spacecraft from Earth are in action again” at CNN.

Engineers at NASA say they have successfully revived thrusters aboard Voyager 1, the farthest spacecraft from our planet, in the nick of time before a planned communications blackout.

A side effect of upgrades to an Earth-based antenna that sends commands to Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, the communications pause could have occurred when the probe faced a critical issue — thruster failure — leaving the space agency without a way to save the historic mission. The new fix to the vehicle’s original roll thrusters, out of action since 2004, could help keep the veteran spacecraft operating until it’s able to contact home again next year.

Voyager 1, launched in September 1977, uses more than one set of thrusters to function properly. Primary thrusters carefully orient the spacecraft so it can keep its antenna pointed at Earth. This ensures that the probe can send back data it collects from its unique perspective 15.5 billion miles (25 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space, as well as receive commands sent by the Voyager team.

(14) THE KIDS HAVE TO LEARN ABOUT TEKWAR. [Item by N.] Majuular discusses “William Shatner’s TekWar: A Forgotten Franchise in Retrospect”.

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, N., Becky Veal, John Coxon, Steven H Silver, Lis Carey, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge  for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]

Pixel Scroll 4/15/25 The Goldendoodle At Starbow’s End

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(1) UNFAIR USE. Charlie Stross told Bluesky followers that Sam Freedman’s Guardian article linked here yesterday – “The big idea: will sci-fi end up destroying the world?” – is a case of “recycling an article of mine from 2023 without attribution” – “We’re sorry we created the Torment Nexus”.

(2) MAY THE FOURTH BID WITH YOU. “Heritage Auctions Announces ‘Star Wars Day’ Auction” and Animation World Network explains it all to you.

Heritage Auctions has launched the “May 4 Star Wars Day Entertainment Signature Auction,” which will feature over 300 lots ranging from original Star Wars movie posters to screen-used props, high-end replicas, toys, comics, and artwork. The event will conclude with a live session on May 4.

Leading the fleet is the Star Wars Sears Exclusive Set of 12 Carded Figures, the only graded example in existence. Also up for grabs is the Star Wars Sears Exclusive Set of 9 Carded Figures, which includes the highly coveted Boba Fett. These sets, authenticated by industry expert Tom Derby and AFA, are expected to surpass six figures at auction.

“These sets represent a pivotal moment in cinematic history and were among the earliest opportunities fans had to bring the Star Wars universe into their home,” said Justin Caravoulias, Heritage’s Consignment Director of Action Figures and Toys. “Finding them in such incredible condition is exceptionally rare, and the opportunity to win treasures like these on May 4 makes this auction even more special.”

Additionally, the auction features 20 pieces of original artwork from the early days of Lucas Film, including signed Star Wars Droids C-3PO Original Line Art by Alice Carter. John Alvin’s original concept paintings for the unreleased Star Wars Concert Series poster, Greg Hildebrandt’s striking portrait of Darth Vader’s funeral pyre mask, and Olivia De Berardinis’ Grogu painting are also available….

(3) SEEKING AFROSURREALISM. Gautam Bhatia has put out a submissions call for the Strange Horizons – Afrosurrealism Special Issue. Full details at the link.

…Welcome to the Afrosurrealist Special Issue, where the boundaries between the real and the unreal blur, where reality bends, time fractures, and the living and the dead exist side by side. Afrosurrealism has long given shape to our struggles, our power, and our dreams. This special issue seeks to bring those visions to life through stories that cut deep—tales that unsettle, haunt, and liberate….

For this special issue, we are looking for:

  • Worlds that slip between the mundane and the uncanny, the ghostly and the futuristic.
  • Worlds rich with history and spirit striving to manifest—whether set in the past, present, or futures unknown.
  • Tales of hauntings, doppelgängers, liminal spaces, memories, and places that don’t stay put.
  • Give us your tales of portals that lead to nowhere, of cities that rearrange themselves overnight, of people becoming someone—or something—else.
  • Narratives that challenge traditional structures and defy linear storytelling.
  • Works that experiment with or reimagine genres like sword & soul, jujuism, cyberfunk, or Black gothic horror.
  • Visions of power, freedom, and transformation shaped by the Black experience where Blackness itself is a force that bends time, space, and destiny.

Send us your myths. Your nightmares. Your dreams wrapped in ancestral magics and spirit.

The editors for the AfroSurrealism Special invite you to submit fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.

We welcome writers who are new and experienced. The submissions call is open to writers of African descent ONLY, whether based in the diaspora or in Africa….

(4) FUNNY BUSINESS. Ira Nayman recommends “Taking Humor Writing Seriously” at the SFWA Blog.

…What makes you laugh? What tries to make you laugh and fails? How do they both work, and why does one succeed where the other doesn’t? As you grow as a comic writer, you’ll start to combine in new ways what you loved in previous works, shaping those devices into something uniquely your own.

Some writers are uncomfortable with this analytical approach. They should embrace it. I once took a course in the Social and Political Aspects of Humor. One of the first things the professor said on the first day of lectures was: “You may be under the impression that analyzing humor will kill it. Most of the students who have taken the course have found that to be untrue.” I couldn’t agree more. If anything, I found my appreciation for well-written humor increased the more I analyzed it. 

This analytical approach is especially helpful when it comes to comic dialogue. Record a conversation, then compare how real people speak to how characters in comedies speak. (Spoiler: They’re very different.) In fact, great comic dialogue is like music: Not only does it have a rhythm that can be timed with a metronome, but it usually contains motifs that it repeatedly comes back to. Listen to “Who’s on First?” by Abbott and Costello, “The Argument Clinic” by Monty Python, and “Why a Duck?” by the Marx Brothers. Note, as well, how pauses can be employed as both a comic element in themselves and to allow the audience room to laugh.

Craft can and must be learned. What you do with that craft, the stories you choose to tell, and the way you choose to tell them is the art you have to provide yourself….

(5) WHO HISTORY. Last night’s BBC Radio 4 arts programme Front Row has an item (one third of the show) on Doctor Who, which we linked to in yesterday’s Scroll. But we didn’t mention it also covered the launch of a new non-fiction book on Doctor Who, Exterminate, Regenerate.  

On screen, Doctor Who is a story of monsters, imagination and mind-expanding adventure. But the off-screen story is equally extraordinary – a tale of failed monks, war heroes, 1960s polyamory and self-sabotaging broadcasting executives. From the politics of fandom to the inner struggles of the BBC, thousands of people have given part of themselves – and sometimes, too much of themselves – to bring this unlikeliest of folk heroes to life.

This is a story of change, mystery and the importance of imaginary characters in our lives. Able to evolve and adapt more radically than any other fiction, Doctor Who has acted as a mirror to more than six decades of social, technological and cultural change while always remaining a central fixture of the British imagination. In Exterminate / Regenerate, John Higgs invites us into his TARDIS on a journey to discover how ideas emerge and survive despite the odds, why we are so addicted to fiction, and why this wonderful wandering time traveller means so much to so many.

(6) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboy Books in Joshua Tree, CA has released Simultaneous Times episode 86 with Thomas Broderick & Jenna Hanchey. Simultaneous Times is a monthly science fiction podcast.

Stories featured in this episode:

“A Love Story” by Thomas Broderick. Music by Phog Masheeen. Read by the Jean-Paul Garnier

“A Locked Box, Bound with Chains, Buried Six Feet Deep” by Jenna Hanchey. Music by TSG. Read by the author

Theme music by Dain Luscombe

(7) SHINICHIRO WATANABE Q&A. “The Creator of ‘Cowboy Bebop’ Thinks Reality Is More Dystopian Than Sci-Fi” – interview in the New York Times (behind a paywall).

Shinichiro Watanabe’s first anime, “Cowboy Bebop,” was quite an opening act. A story of space bounty hunters trying to scrape by, its genre mash-up of westerns, science fiction and noir, with a jazzy soundtrack, was a critical and commercial success in Japan and beyond. Its American debut on Adult Swim, in 2001, is now considered a milestone in the popularization of anime in the United States.

Not one to repeat himself, Watanabe followed up “Bebop” with a story about samurai and hip-hop (“Samurai Champloo,” 2004); a coming-of-age story about jazz musicians (“Kids on the Slope,” 2012); a mystery thriller about teenage terrorists (“Terror in Resonance,” 2014); an animated “Blade Runner” sequel (“Blade Runner Black Out 2022,” 2017); and a sci-fi musical show about two girls on Mars (“Carole & Tuesday,” 2019).

Now, he has returned to the kind of sci-fi action that made his name with “Lazarus,” streaming on Max and airing on Adult Swim, with new episodes arriving on Sundays. The show is set in 2055, after the disappearance of a doctor who discovered a miracle drug that has no side effects. Three years later, the doctor resurfaces with an announcement: The drug had a three-year half-life, and everyone who took it will die in 30 days unless someone finds him and the cure he developed….

Unlike your previous sci-fi projects, “Lazarus” takes place not on a distant planet or far into the future, but in our world just 30 years from now. Why was that important?

In the past, I would look at other works of fiction and get inspired by them. But this time, just watching the news and taking a look at the world, things happening right now seem more dramatic and kind of crazier than fiction. Because I was inspired by events going on in the real world, putting it too far into the future would lose that touch of reality….

The anime starts with a doomsday clock saying there are 30 days until most of humanity dies, and yet we see businesses going on like normal, talk shows interviewing artists, and more. Why did you contrast the urgency of the story with scenes like these?

That was inspired by reality and experiencing the Covid pandemic. Not everyone was acting the same way. There were people who didn’t believe in it, and there were people who didn’t wear masks. I thought the anime would be more grounded in reality if I made it so we had different reactions from the characters….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Small Change trilogy

Doing alternate history right is always hard work, but Jo Walton’s the Small Change books consisting of Farthing, Ha’penny and Half a Crown get it perfectly spot on. They’re set in a Britain that settled for an uneasy peace with Hitler’s Germany, and they are mysteries, one of my favorite genres. And these are among my all-time favorite mysteries of this niche which includes Len Deighton’s SS-GB. and C. J. Sansom’s Dominion. 

I am not going to discuss these novels in any way what so ever. Not going to do it. It’s really going to spoil it for any of you’ll who decide to read them which you really should. I can reveal that the first is a classic British manor house murder mystery complete with the proper centuries old family. Really well-crafted manor house mystery.

The audiobooks are fascinating, there being shifting narrators with Peter Carmichael whose presence is to be found in all three novels is voiced by John Keating, and Bianco Amato voicing David Kahn’s wife in Farthing, but Viola Lark being played by Heather O’Neil in Ha’penny and yet a third female narrator, Elvira, is brought to life by Terry Donnelly in Half a Crown. 

Now I’m fascinated by what awards they won (and didn’t) and what they got nominated for. It would win but one award, the Prometheus Award for Best Libertarian SF Novel for Ha’Penny which is I find  a bit odd indeed given there’s nothing libertarian about that novel. 

Now Half a Crown wracked an impressive number of nominations: the Sidewise Award for Best Long Form Alternate History, Locus for Best SF Novel, Sunburst award for a Canadian novel, and this time deservedly so given the themes of the final novel a Prometheus Award for Best Libertarian SF Novel.

Farthing had picked up nominations for a Sidewise, a Nebula, Campbell Memorial, Quill whereas Ha’Penny only picked a Sidewise and Lambda.

Not a single Hugo nomination which really, really surprised me. 

There is one short story set in this series, “Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction” which you can read in her Starlings collection that Tachyon published. It is in a fantastic collection of her stories, poems and cool stuff! 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) WE’LL MEET AGAIN, DON’T KNOW WHERE, DON’T KNOW WHEN. “‘Big Bang’ Universe Collides As Simon Helberg & Raegan Revord Join Melissa Rauch On NBC’s ‘Night Court’” at Deadline.

NBC‘s Night Court has set up a colliding of the “Big Bang” Universe as Simon Helberg (Big Bang Theory, Poker Face) and Raegan Revord (Young Sheldon) are set to guest star in the Season 3 finale airing May 6 at 8:30 p.m. ET/PT.

Night Court star and executive producer Melissa Rauch played Helberg’s wife on the CBS smash The Big Bang Theory, created by Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady. Although who Helberg will play in the season finale is under wraps, his character is set for a game-changing cameo that could really shake things up for Abby (Rauch).

Revord will play Shelby, a teenage runaway inclined to marry her soulmate, in an homage to the Michael J. Fox episode from the original series.

Fox appeared in the second episode of the original series titled “Santa Goes Downtown,” which aired on January 11, 1984, in the role of Eddie Simms. Eddie and his girlfriend Mary (Olivia Barash) are runaway teens determined to get married, who end up in night court on shoplifting charges. The pair meet a mysterious man who claims he’s Santa Claus, or at least that’s who he claims to be, altering their lives forever. When Fox shot the guest appearance, he was a series regular on the NBC sitcom Family Ties, a few years before he would break out as Marty McFly in Back to the Future.

Additionally, Marsha Warfield will return in her iconic role as Roz from the original series. Other guest stars include Michael Urie and Ryan Hansen….

(11) UP ABOVE THE WORLD SO HIGH. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] Turning space from vacuum to vapidity, by one of my favorite columnists. “What’s more vacuous than an endless vacuum? It’s Lauren Sánchez and Katy Perry’s party in space” by Marina Hyde in the Guardian.

… In truth, how the women looked had been an overwhelming part of the buildup, and by their own design. In an Elle magazine joint interview with the passengers, Lauren showed off the hot space suits she’d personally commissioned, inquiring rhetorically: “Who would not get glam before the flight?” “Space is going to finally be glam,” agreed Perry. “Let me tell you something. If I could take glam up with me, I would do that. We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.” A former Nasa rocket scientist said: “I also wanted to test out my hair and make sure that it was OK. So I skydived in Dubai with similar hair to make sure I would be good – took it for a dry run.” Still want more? Because there was SO much of it. “We’re going to have lash extensions flying in the capsule!” explained Lauren. “I think it’s so important for people to see us like that,” explained a civil rights activist. “This dichotomy of engineer and scientist, and then beauty and fashion. We contain multitudes. Women are multitudes. I’m going to be wearing lipstick.”

Ooof. I always thought space travel was futuristic, but this was the first time it came off as travelling back in time, in this case using their little capsule to take us back to the most ludicrous inanities of 2010s girlboss feminism….

(12) SPLISH-SPLASH. The New York Times meets “The Techno-Utopians Who Want to Colonize the Sea”. (Article behind a paywall.)

…His 304-square-foot habitat was inside the underwater buoyancy chamber that helps stabilize a floating home called SeaPod Alpha Deep. An armed security guard was in the above-water part of the structure, monitoring Koch and ensuring that the pod did not have “any visitors that we don’t want.” When my boat arrived, he threw down a cable and winched me up. Then I made my way down a 63-step spiral staircase to the circular lower chamber — a dizzying process, as the SeaPod rocked in the loudly sloshing sea. I was greeted by a beaming Koch, a bald 59-year-old German engineer with a whitened beard and a Buddha belly.

He gave me a tour, pointing to a school of sardines outside a porthole. The quarters came equipped with a bed, an exercise bike, Starlink internet and a dry toilet. A digital clock on the wall was counting down toward his 120-day goal. (The previous record was 100 days, set in 2023 by Joseph Dituri at Jules’ Undersea Lodge, off the coast of Key Largo, Fla.) “I’ve enjoyed the time, actually,” Koch said in his heavy German accent, his face greenish-blue from the light pouring in. “This is what people get completely wrong. They think that I feel like a prisoner, and I’m putting marks on the wall. My food is excellent, my booze is excellent.” A person came by to clean daily.

Koch arrived here, in small part, via a San Francisco-based nonprofit called the Seasteading Institute, which promotes “living on environmentally restorative floating islands with some degree of political autonomy.” The vision, as the Institute’s president, the “seavangelist” Joe Quirk, once told Guernica, is “startup societies where people could form whatever kind of community they wanted” — a libertarian-inflected world where, it is said, you could “vote with your boat,” relocating to a community in line with your views….

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

Pixel Scroll 3/17/25 And So Pixels Made Of Sand Scroll Into The Sea. Eventually

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(1) S.B. DIVYA FREE ONLINE READING. Space Cowboy Books of Joshua Tree, CA will host an “Online Reading & Interview with S.B. Divya” on March 18 at 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Free registration at the link.

Finding a place to belong becomes a girl’s ambitious quest in a thrilling epic about space, humanity, and self-discovery by S.B. Divya, Hugo and Nebula Award finalist and author of Meru. Akshaya is the hybrid daughter of a human mother and an alloy, a genetically engineered posthuman–and she’s the future of life on the planet Meru. But not if the determined Akshaya can help it. Before choosing where her future lies, she wants to circumnavigate the most historic orb in the universe–the birthplace of humanity: Earth. Akshaya’s parents reluctantly agree to her anthropological challenge–one with no assistance from alloy devices, transport, or wary alloys themselves who manage humanity and the regions of Earth called Loka. It’s just Akshaya; her equally bold best friend, Somya; and a carefully planned itinerary threading continent by continent across a wondrous terrain of things she’s never seen: blue skies, sunrises, snowcapped mountains, and roiling oceans. As the adventure unfolds, the travelers discover love and new friendships, but they also learn the risks of a planet that’s not entirely welcoming. On this trek–rapturous, dangerous, and life-changing–Akshaya will discover what human existence really means.

Get your copy of Loka HERE

(2) EO HITS LIBRARY SUPPORT. “Executive Order Eliminates Agency That Supports Libraries” at Publishers Lunch.

A new executive order issued Friday called for the elimination of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the nation’s only federal agency for supporting libraries. The office of 75 workers administers grants to libraries throughout the US. The executive order reads: “the non-statutory components and functions of the following governmental entities shall be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law, and such entities shall reduce the performance of their statutory functions and associated personnel to the minimum presence and function required by law.”

The IMLS had requested grant money of approximately $255 million for fiscal 2025, and an administrative budget of $24.5 million.

The American Library Association writes in a release, “ALA implores President Trump to reconsider this short-sighted decision. We encourage U.S. Congress members, Senators and decision makers at every level of government to visit the libraries that serve their constituents and urge the White House to spare the modest federal funding for America’s libraries. And we call on all Americans who value reading, learning, and enrichment to reach out to their elected leaders and Show Up For Our Libraries at library and school meetings, town halls, and everywhere decisions are made about libraries.”

The release also lists some of the critical functions of public libraries including: Early literacy development and grade-level reading programs; summer reading programs for kids; high-speed internet access; employment assistance for job seekers ; and much more….

(3) SCIENCE POV. Michael Nayak, while plugging his new book, discusses “Scientist Storyteller: Crafting a Thin Line Between Science Fiction and Science Fact” at CrimeReads.

…Scientific advancements, environmental stressors, and geopolitical tensions can be inextricably linked. This road has been well-tread by masters of crime and science-fiction. In Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton used cutting-edge genetic science to resurrect dinosaurs, transforming bioengineering research into a harrowing lesson about nature’s unpredictability. Robin Cook’s medical thrillers, such as Coma and Outbreak, delve into the darker sides of biomedical innovation; these are stories about how technology intended for healing can result in unforeseen horrors. As a scientist and futurist in my day-to-day life, the fusing of credible scientific research into suspense and ethical complexity is something I relish.

The narrative approach of grounding extraordinary events in everyday science, and creating a recognizable sliver of reality, has made it easier for me as a reader to slip into the protagonist’s shoes. I can more immediately imagine myself in their situation, instead of suspending disbelief and going along for the ride. Andy Weir’s The Martian is a great example. The protagonist uses actual scientific principles and problem-solving strategies to overcome life-threatening challenges. Weir’s meticulous attention to detail on the minutiae of survival on Mars captured our imagination….

(4) MIÉVILLE COLLECTIBLE EDITION. Tomorrow The Folio Society will release a limited edition of China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station​.

The Folio Society, independent publisher of beautifully illustrated hardback books, is partnering with award-winning fantasy and sci-fi author China Miéville for the ultimate edition of his iconic steampunk novel PERDIDO STREET STATION. First published 25 years ago in 2000, PERDIDO STREET STATION blends elements of fantasy, horror and science fiction and was nominated for several awards, winning the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award, establishing Miéville as a central figure in the “Weird Fiction” genre. The Folio Society limited edition, with a scant 500 copies available, will include the full text of the first edition, a new afterword by the author, and a map and striking art by award-winning illustrator Doug Bell, who is making his debut with the Folio Society.

Crafted with China Miéville’s close involvement, the 707-page PERDIDO STREET STATION Limited Edition from the Folio Society will feature a limitation page signed by the author and artist, printed map endpapers, iridescent foiling, a presentation box in the rough shape of a moth, and a black ribbon marker. Illustrator Doug Bell has contributed a binding and map revealing the layout of the city of New Crobuzon, as well as 8 black and white integrated chapter opening illustrations and 12 full-colour illustrations. The book will be bound in screen-printed and blocked canvas cloth, printed in black and metallic copper ink, and presented in a clamshell covered in paper which has been silver cold-foiled, printed, laminated and over-blocked in translucent foil with a design by the artist.

A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Miéville is the only author to have won the Arthur C. Clarke three times.

(5) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

March 17, 1948 — William Gibson, 77.

By Paul Weimer: The High Duke of Cyberpunk.

I first came to William Gibson like many other people, with Neuromancer. It took me a few years to get to it, I was still working through 50s to 80s SF through much of the 1980, so it wasn’t until I was an adult that I finally got a deep dive into Cyberpunk.

I started with Neuromancer, of course, and found out why everyone was so interested and so enthused about it. I still think it holds up, even now, I re-read it a few years ago.  But I do admit that other Gibson novels stand on their own, and not on the shoulders of Neuromancer alone. But Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive are, basically, what a lot of people think of when they think of “cyberpunk”. One can thank, or blame, The Matrix for taking so many notes from the Sprawl books in order to transmit that aesthetic and idea into the mainstream.

The Difference Engine, for example, which he co-wrote with Sterling, feels very dated now (and some of his attitudes are pretty awful, I think, even now), but it stands as an icon of Steampunk even today. Once again, aesthetics are important, even more so than Cyberpunk, in conveying a mood and an idea (or even, gasp, a VIBE) to science fiction. 

But would I have new readers start with either? No. I think the novel that really captures his voice, his importance and his strengths as a writer is The Peripheral. I highly enjoyed the Amazon series, even given the liberties that it took with the source material, but I think that it is a good way for people to be introduced to the virtual reality and other technological ideas that Gibson brings to the table. In a real way, The Peripheral shows how important Gibson and his point of view on technology and science fiction are in a way few have matched in any era. That makes him, in my mind, one of the advocates of a phrase I coined during the Chengdu Ineligibity, of the Science Fiction Project. 

So in the end one might say that Gibson is a godfather, or one of the prime movers at the very least, of two subgenres of science fiction, in addition to being an advocate for the Science Fiction Project. That’s a solid legacy. And as mentioned above with The Peripheral, people are still discovering and enjoying Gibson for the first time. 

William Gibson

(6) COMICS SECTION.

My latest @newscientist.com cartoon

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2025-03-16T10:49:48.921Z

(7) SHORE/CRONENBERG Q&A. [Item by Steven French.] Director David Cronenberg and film composer Howard Shore talk about their work together ahead of their next film, The Shrouds. “’Something must have gone wrong with us’: David Cronenberg and Howard Shore on four decades of body horror” in the Guardian.

What would having sex in a car crash sound like, as music? What about a gynaecological exam performed by identical twins, or a man’s transmogrification into a grotesque human-insectoid hybrid? These are just some of the challenges faced, over more than 40 years and upwards of a dozen films, by the composer Howard Shore as part of his long collaboration with the director David Cronenberg. Shore, 78, may have won three Oscars for the magisterial sweep of his Lord of the Rings score, but it is his work on the 81-year-old Cronenberg’s notorious body-horror movies, from The Fly to Dead Ringers and Crash, that is most indelible. Those last two films will be screening this month as part of a wider tribute to Shore’s work at the London Soundtrack festival, where the composer will appear with his director-collaborator for an onstage conversation. Ahead of that encounter and the release of their next collaboration, The Shrouds, the pair sat down to talk about their long, bloody body of work….

(8) STEERING HUMAN EVOLUTION. [Item by Steven French.] Here’s an interesting addendum to Jonathan Cowie’s recent review of Mickey-17! “How humans can reinvent themselves to live on other worlds” at Phys.org.

… The stresses of the space environment are likely to become more concerning as explorers and settlers go beyond Earth orbit and our planet’s protective magnetic shield. Which gets us back to the things that can kill Mickey 17 and other earthly life forms.

Radiation is the top concern. The studies done to date suggest that astronauts could be exposed to cancer-causing levels of radiation during a three-year mission to Mars and back. Thick shielding could reduce the risk, but Mason suggests using genetics as well.

“For example, tardigrades are these water bears that can survive even the vacuum of space and heavy doses of radiation,” he says. “We’ve made cells in my laboratory that can actually take a tardigrade gene and use it in a human cell, and have this increase of radiation resistance—an 80% decrease in the [DNA] damage that we observe.”…

(9) YOU CAN’T WIN, YOU CAN’T BREAK EVEN, AND YOU CAN’T GET OUT OF THE GAME. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] Space.com asks “is our universe trapped within a black hole?” It seems that two-thirds of distant galaxies observed by the Webb Telescope are rotating one way, the same as nearer ones, and one third in the opposite direction.

Which leads me to two questions: what’s the difference between the rotations, if there is no preferred direction “up”?

The other… I’d love to hear someone explain to me how this would be different from living in a four-dimensional torus-shaped universe. “Is our universe trapped inside a black hole? This James Webb Space Telescope discovery might blow your mind”.

… Black hole cosmology, also known as “Schwarzschild cosmology,” suggests that our observable universe might be the interior of a black hole itself within a larger parent universe.

The idea was first introduced by theoretical physicist Raj Kumar Pathria and by mathematician I. J. Good. It presents the idea that the “Schwarzchild radius,” better known as the “event horizon,” (the boundary from within which nothing can escape a black hole, not even light) is also the horizon of the visible universe.

This has another implication; each and every black hole in our universe could be the doorway to another “baby universe.” These universes would be unobservable to us because they are also behind an event horizon, a one-way light-trapping point of no return from which light cannot escape, meaning information can never travel from the interior of a black hole to an external observer.

This is a theory that has been championed by Polish theoretical physicist Nikodem Poplawski of the University of New Haven.

Black holes are born when the core of a massive star collapses. At its heart is matter with a density that far exceeds anything in the known universe.

In Poplawski’s theory, eventually, the coupling between torsion, the twisting and turning of matter, and spin becomes very strong and prevents the matter from compressing indefinitely to a singularity.

“The matter instead reaches a state of finite, extremely large density, stops collapsing, undergoes a bounce like a compressed spring, and starts rapidly expanding,” Poplawski explained to Space.com. “Extremely strong gravitational forces near this state cause an intense particle production, increasing the mass inside a black hole by many orders of magnitude and strengthening gravitational repulsion that powers the bounce.”

The scientist continued by adding that rapid recoil after such a big bounce could be what has led to our expanding universe, an event we now refer to as the Big Bang.

“It produces a finite period of cosmic inflation, which explains why the universe that we observe today appears at largest scales flat, homogeneous, and isotropic,” Poplawski said….

(10) CUT TO THE BONE, AND THROUGH. The Planetary Society today sent out a newsletter that leads with the news reported by Ars Technica in its article “White House may seek to slash NASA’s science budget by 50 percent”.

White House is considering a staggering 50% cut to NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in the 2026 budget request. Such a dramatic cut, if implemented, would have widespread negative consequences, including the cancellation of nearly every planned spacecraft project, the premature termination of active missions throughout the Solar System, and the rapid constriction of the related scientific and technical workforce in the United States.

It would be nothing short of an extinction-level event for NASA’s science activities.

While no formal budget submission has been made, this report is credible. It is consistent with the administration’s stated spending goal and, notably, with a proposal released by the conservative think tank, Center for Renewing America, in 2023. This alternative budget declared that “every executive branch agency must focus on its core mission. For NASA, that is Deep Space Exploration, putting Americans back on the Moon, and looking to Mars…The Budget also proposes a 50% reduction in NASA Science programs and spending.” I reference this document because the organization’s founder and President, Russell Vought, is now the Director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, which is responsible for the upcoming budget request …

(11) SECRETS OF OUR MILKY WAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Back in the late 1990s, SF² Concatenation co-founding editor Graham Connor kindly invited me for a week at ESA’s European Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands. (Incidentally, ESTEC was where SF author Alastair Reynolds also worked, and he must have been there unbeknownst to us at that time.)  Graham would work during the day designing and testing satellite microwave communication systems while I raided the ESTEC library (that’s when on the way home I found out that a ream of photocopy paper imaged similarly to plastic explosives on the then airport security scanners… but that’s another story). At the time I was at ESTEC I visited their press office, and they were all agog with the forthcoming ESA Gaia Probe: I still have Gaia magnetic badges on my fridge.  Gaia has now come to the end of its life and the Astrum YouTube Channel has now posted an 18-minute vid on what we have learned from this remarkable space telescope…

ESA’s Gaia telescope has reached the end of its life, but what has it discovered about our Milky Way galaxy’s hidden secret?

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

Pixel Scroll 3/15/25 I Wish I Could Pixel Like My Captain Kate (Janeway)

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(1) WE’RE NOT TALKING ABOUT A HOBBIT HOLE HERE. The Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog has posted to Bluesky a spin on the “Omelas” tale in the voice of you-know-who. Stunningly on point. Fourteen posts long. The first one is here.

OK. My quick attempt at "My Omelas, Right Or Wrong."1/XLet me tell you about this incredible place, Omelas. It’s huge, folks, absolutely beautiful. Everybody’s happy. Everybody’s winning. The economy, it's fantastic, the best economy anyone’s ever seen, believe me.

— An Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog (@hugobookclub.bsky.social) 2025-03-13T16:54:55.838Z

(2) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES IS SEVEN. Space Cowboy Books today launched the 7-year anniversary episode of the Simultaneous Times podcast. This episode is a collaboration with Apex Magazine.

Simultaneous Times 7 Year Anniversary Episode

Featuring stories from the pages of Apex Magazine.

  • “Then Came the Ghost of My Dead Mother, Antikleia” by Nadia Radovich. With music by Doctor Auxiliary. Read by Jenna Hanchey
  • “What Happens When a Planet Falls From the Sky?” by Danny Cherry, Jr. With music by Phog Masheeen. Read by the Jean-Paul Garnier & Jenna Hanchey

Theme music by Dain Luscombe

(3) SPECIAL ACCESS TO NATURE FUTURES STORY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] SF² Concatenation has just posted the first of its four “Best of Nature Futures” short stories of the year. Because it is behind a paywall, non-Nature subscribers can’t access the original weekly stories. Fortunately SF² Concatenation has an agreement with Nature and the permission of respective writers to re-post four a year. The story “Cosmic Rentals” by Dave Kavanaugh concerns a rental store where you can literally hire “universes”… What’s not to like? …And if you scroll down below the story you will get the author’s ‘story behind the story’. You access it here.

(4) WHAT YOU WON’T SEE ON THE BALLOT. The Ursa Major Awards, the annual anthropomorphic literature and arts award, will shortly release their 2024 finalists and open public voting. But the administrators have decided to announce some rulings on the prospective nominees ahead of time.

We are about to present the list of nominees for 2024 and will open up voting soon. However, we thought it was best to first present a list of special considerations for a select few entries we have received this year.

In the Best Anthropomorphic Game category, Atlyss did receive enough nominations to place in the top 5, but because Atlyss has only been released as an “early access” title, it has been disqualified from the 2024 list.

In the Fursuit category, only one qualifying entry was given more than a single vote, therefore we felt it best to drop the category for 2024, as has been done in the past.

In the Best Anthropomorphic Music category, an album titled “Where Will the Animals Sleep” would have been in the top 5 nominations. However, as neither the content nor the author is anthropomorphic / furry, it has been disqualified.

(5) FEAR FACTOR. “Snow White Premiere: Dwarf Actor Responds to Rachel Zegler Movie Pivot” in The Hollywood Reporter.

One performer from Disney‘s new Snow White is sharing his thoughts amid the debate surrounding the launch for the live-action movie.

Martin Klebba — who has appeared in two previous versions of Snow White, including the 2012 feature Mirror Mirror that stars Julia Roberts and Lily Collins — provides the voice of Grumpy in the new movie and also serves as an advisor for the miner characters. Klebba tells The Hollywood Reporter that the recent controversy surrounding Snow White, which has led to the film’s Saturday premiere not inviting press onto the red carpet, has meant a less exciting celebration for those involved in the project that stars Rachel Zegler as the title character and Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen.

“It really isn’t going to be a red carpet,” says Klebba, who emphasizes that he is very proud of the movie and cannot wait for audiences to see it. “It’s going to be at the El Capitan [Theatre], which is cool. But it’s basically going to be a pre-party, watch the movie, and that’s it. There’s not going to be this whole hoopla of, ‘Disney’s first fucking movie they ever made.’ Because of all this controversy, they’re afraid of the blowback from different people in society.”

Klebba says that the premiere changes were due to “the controversy with Rachel” but clarifies that he had not been given direct information on why the event was altered. Zegler is known as an outspoken star who suggested in 2022 that she was not a fan of the original 1937 animated classic due to outdated plot points. Additionally, after President Donald Trump was elected in November, Zegler posted comments to social media that were critical of his victory before later apologizing….

(6) FREAKIER FRIDAY. They’re afraid, too, apparently. “Freakier Friday Teaser Trailer”. Movie in theaters August 8.

(7) DO FANNISH VALUES WORK IN SCALED-UP CONVENTIONS? Patch O’Furr analyzes the issues of “How to love the freedom of leaderless fandom, and fight the flipside of organized abuse” for furry fans at Dogpatch Press.

Do you know the story where several blind people try to describe an elephant by only touching small parts of it? Nobody can say what the whole animal is.

That happens when furry subculture talks about itself, and protests outside stereotypes by falling into its own… The Geek Social Fallacies….

…That’s the natural downside of the old-school fan values, but things were more personal when groups were smaller scale. They would put up with a few jerks because it was harder to kick them out and sustain groups. Now add decades of growth, and much bigger scale of members who don’t know each other. (Dunbar’s Number names a finite limit on how many relationships your brain can handle.) Put the problem on steroids with internet platforms we don’t own. It’s not YOU, it’s MATH….

…The math of escalating abuse

Rapid and unplanned growth of furry subculture has many unforeseeable effects. Straining the limits of conventions is one covered on Soatok’s furry cybersecurity blog: Furries Are Losing the Battle Against Scale. Convention attendance is doubling every few years and “the furry community is growing at a break-neck exponential speed.”

Security suffers without top-down management at impersonal scale, especially when the more we depend on net platforms, the more problems we have by policy. Social media is built to shift liability for moderation from owners to users. It’s their business model to be unaccountable! The point is to eliminate the cost of the editor/gatekeeper/mod layer by automating the labor and letting volunteers and peers fill in.

Peer moderation may feel like personal control, but meanwhile, bad actors can game the system with off-site advantage. Moderators may respond to simple individual incidents on-site, but can’t even see complex cross-platform abuse. That’s how responses can be weak, scattered, inconsistent, and lack resources for scale, no matter how much their hearts are in it.

If you can’t see abuse, it festers. Think of church scandals where abuser priests were shifted around from church to church. We have that too, but there’s no orders from the top. It’s from being nobody’s job. A long-time creep can use a newly minted fursona to jump from group to group, when it’s easy to change accounts and delete evidence, but an uphill battle to track them or get consequences. Different process, same outcome….

(8) REMEMBERING A CLASSIC HORROR AUTHOR. “Lisa Morton Discusses Dennis Etchison” in an installment of the Horror Writers Association’s blog series “Nuts & Bolts”.

Lisa Morton describes Dennis Etchison’s work as a “brain bombshell” that changed her idea of what horror fiction could do. When she was just starting out, Etchison had a major influence on both her art and her career. In this month’s edition of Nuts & Bolts, Lisa discusses Etchison’s writing technique, his influence on her own work, and what writers today can learn from the late horror legend.

Q: Can you tell us a little about Dennis Etchison and his contributions to the horror genre?

A: To me, Dennis is one of the absolute greatest craftsmen of the horror short story. His short story collection The Dark Country came out in 1982, when most of the genre was split between Stephen King’s suburban, East Coast horror on one hand and the glorious excesses of the splatterpunks on the other, and his work fit into neither camp. It was completely unique and was the first time I’d read horror set mostly in my hometown of Los Angeles; it’s not an exaggeration to say that it made me think I might be able to write horror fiction. My all-time favorite short story is his 1993 masterpiece The Dog Park, which is one of those works of fiction that’s like a magic trick — it really gets under your skin and you’re not sure how it was done. Although I also like several of his novels, especially California Gothic, his short fiction is what I think will be remembered….

Guillermo Del Toro, Peter Atkins and Dennis Etchison in back of Mystery & Imagination Bookshop in 2013.

(9) KGB PHOTOS. Ellen Datlow has posted photos on Flickr of the “Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series March 12, 2025” gathering where Victoria Dalpe and Jedediah Berry read from their work to a very full house.

(10) LACON V HOLDING ANAHEIM MEETING. LAcon V, the 2026 Worldcon committee, told Facebook readers how to ask to attend their meeting next weekend.

LAcon V is hosting an in-person meeting on March 22nd and 23rd at the Anaheim Hilton.

This is a good opportunity to meet some of our leadership, learn more about the convention, and possibly become part of the LAcon V team!

If you are interested in participating, and plan to be in the Anaheim area, please email us at info(at)lacon.org for further details.

(11) T. JACKSON KING (1948-2025). Author and archeologist Thomas Jackson King, Jr. died December 3, 2024. SFWA’s tribute “In Memoriam: T. Jackson King” notes he was “a prolific writer of science-fiction, horror, and urban fantasy, and an award-winning journalist. He wrote articles for The SFWA Bulletin and SFWA Handbook, and served as the SFWA Election Committee Chair.” 

(12) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

The Girl with Something Extra series (1976)

Networks in the Sixties liked young actresses. They were either sexy, or they were cute. So let’s talk about the lead of The Girl with Something Extra series that debuted forty-nine years ago. 

That lead actress was Sally Field which tells you how deep the story was intended to be. She was a wife who had ESP, and her husband played by John Davidson never quite understood her. It was intended to be cute, really, really cute with her giving it that cuteness. 

There was other cast, but really who cared? Not the studio. It was intended to be just a vehicle for these two to be a couple as this critic noted “The plot for The Girl With Something Extra TV show immediately brings to mind another show that ended in March of 1972 after a whopping eight seasons on the air! That series of course was “Bewitched” which also featured a young newlywed couple with the wife having super-human powers that caused many problems for her and her husband.” 

The audience apparently didn’t grasp its charms, and it was canceled after one season of twenty-two half hour episodes. 

So the Apple search engine says it’s not streaming anywhere. The Flying Nun is streaming on, errr, Tubi. Any of y’all ever subscribe to that service? 

Lancer Books published a tie-in novel by Paul Farman, The Girl With Something Extra. 

I see multiple signed scripts is for sale on eBay. Press photos too. Like the one below. Aren’t they cute? Well, aren’t they?

(13) COMICS SECTION.

(14) DWAYNE MCDUFFIE AWARD TAKING ENTRIES. Comics Beat announced that the Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity in Comics is accepting submissions. “Mark Waid joins 10th annual Dwayne McDuffie Award selection committee”.

…As in previous years, the event will name one winner from five honored finalists, whose work resembles a commitment to excellence and inclusion on and off the page, much like the late Mr. McDuffie’s own efforts to produce entertainment that was representative of and created by a wide scope of human experience. Moreover, prolific comic creator Mark Waid has joined joined the selection committee which includes The Beat‘s own Heidi MacDonald, and other notable comics industry figures.

The 10th annual “Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity in Comics” is now accepting submissions at https://dwaynemcduffie.com/dmad/. The deadline is May 1, 2025 for comics published during the 2024 calendar year.

New York Times best-selling author, Mark Waid, joins a selection committee of notable comic book professionals led by industry legend, Marv Wolfman. This prestigious prize has grown exponentially in esteem since it was established in 2015 in honor of Dwayne McDuffie (1962-2011), the legendary African-American comic book writer/editor and writer/producer of the animated Static Shock, Justice League, and Ben 10: Alien Force/Ultimate Alien, who famously co-founded Milestone Media, the most successful minority-owned comic book company in the history of the industry.

The slogan for the Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity in Comics is Mr. McDuffie’s own profound saying:

“From invisible to inevitable.”

Prolific writer/creator, Mark Waid, is “proud to be part of the DMADs”:

“As a medium and as a community—even removing from consideration the onslaught of bigotry and intolerance sweeping the U.S. as we speak—the world of comics has a responsibility to recognize, promote, and honor comics that not only employ great storytelling but are emblematic of the power of equality and inclusion. As creators, good work from anyone forces us to up our game. As readers, we’re all better off—and more entertained and educated—when we’re exposed to the widest possible variety of voices and viewpoints.”…

(15) AVENGERS ACADEMY. Anthony Oliveira, Carola Borelli and Bailie Rosenlund’s Avengers Academy Infinity Comic series on Marvel Unlimited comes to print for the first time this June.

Since launching last year, Marvel Unlimited’s hit AVENGERS ACADEMY Infinity Comic series by rising star Anthony Oliveira and visionary artists Carola Borelli and Bailie Rosenlund has become an online phenomenon, gaining a devoted fanbase who tune in each week to experience the adventures of Marvel’s most promising young heroes! This June, the acclaimed series comes to your local comic shop in AVENGERS ACADEMY: ASSEMBLE #1, a new one-shot collecting the first six issues in print for the first time!

From the X-Men to the symbiote hivemind, this eclectic group assembles fan-favorite characters from every corner of the Marvel Universe, including new sensations like Kid Juggernaut. Discover their journey to become tomorrow’s Mightiest Heroes in this masterful blend of teen drama and super hero adventure!

SCHOOL’S IN SESSION!

Welcome to Avengers Academy! Seeking to guide the next generation of super heroes, Captain Marvel recruits a misfit team of super-powered teens: CAPTAIN AMERICA OF THE RAILWAYS, BLOODLINE, ESCAPADE, MOON GIRL, RED GOBLIN, and new hero on the block, KID JUGGERNAUT! But classes are the least of their concerns as they fend off super-villain attacks, make new friends – and new foes – and learn what it really means to be Earth’s mightiest heroes. Featuring the first appearance of an all-new SINISTER SIX, this is one book you don’t want to miss!

Check out the all-new cover by Stephen Byrne and preorder Avengers Academy: Assemble #1 at your local comic shop today! For more information, visit Marvel.com.

(16) FARADAY UNCAGED. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] Why do we have a lot of electricity? Faraday. I think a lot of us know who Faraday was, but this is a lovely, loving article. “Unearthed notebooks shed light on Victorian genius who inspired Einstein” in the Guardian.

…When a lab assistant at the Institution got into a brawl and was fired in February 1813, Davy remembered the 22-year-old Faraday and offered him the job – which involved taking a pay cut, but gave the young man access to the laboratory, free coal, candles and two attic rooms.

Faraday later gave an account of this job offer: “At the same time that he [Davy] gratified my desires as to scientific employment, he advised me to remain a bookbinder, telling me that Science was a harsh mistress… poorly rewarding those who devoted themselves to her service.”

Despite Davy’s advice, Faraday accepted the job. It was a decision that would prove to be seminal for science. Over the next 55 years, while working for the Royal Institution, Faraday discovered several fundamental laws of physics and chemistry – including his law of electromagnetic induction in 1831, which illuminated the relative motion of charged particles.

It was thanks to Faraday’s trailblazing experiments at the institution that he discovered electromagnetic rotation in 1821, a breakthrough that led to the development of the electric motor and benzene, a hydrocarbon derived from benzoic acid, in 1825. He became the first scientist to liquefy gas in 1823, invented the electric generator in 1831 and discovered the laws of electrolysis in the early 1830s, helping to coin terms such as electrode, cathode and ion. In 1845, after finding the first experimental evidence that a magnetic field could influence polarised light – a phenomenon that became known as the Faraday effect – he proved light and electromagnetism are interconnected….

(17) PIXEL SCROLL TITLE EXPLANATION OF THE DAY. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Via “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate” (1922).

Probably my favorite recording (keeping in mind I’ve only listened to a fraction of the various artists’ recordings) is from Jim Kweskin’s Relax Your Mind album (more generally one of my favorite albums): “Three Songs – A Look at the Ragtime Era (Sister Kate’s Night Out) : I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate”.

Here’s the first version I’ve run into (yesterday!) that shows there’s a long intro section: “Sister Kate” – song and lyrics by Vi Wickam, Paul Anastasio, Albanie Falletta | Spotify.

Lots of (current/recent) popular covers!

Dave Van Ronk “Sister Kate”.

Here’s the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band “Sister Kate”.

And here’s an unexpected cover (from the From Liverpool To Hamburg 2CD set) — The Beatles – “i wish i could shimmy like my sister Kate” (live).

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Arnie Fenner.] This “Frazetta Fridays” episode about the creation of Vampirella includes some fun history featuring Harlan, Forry, and Trina Robbins.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Arnie Fenner, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 2/20/25 The Tweel Of Rhyme Blares, “Thou Art Groot!”

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(1) THE MURDEROUS MONTH OF MAY. Apple TV+ announced today “Apple’s new sci-fi series “Murderbot” to make global debut May 16, 2025”. They also released two photos of Murderbot, one with the helmet, the other without.

Today, Apple TV+ unveiled a first look at “Murderbot,” its highly anticipated comedic thriller created by Academy Award nominees Chris and Paul Weitz (“About a Boy,” “Mozart in the Jungle”) and starring Emmy Award winner Alexander Skarsgård (“Succession,” “Big Little Lies”), who also serves as executive producer. The 10-episode sci-fi series will make its global debut on Apple TV+ with the first two episodes on Friday, May 16, 2025 followed by new episodes every Friday through July 11.

Based on Martha Wells’ bestselling Hugo and Nebula Award-winning book series of the same name, “Murderbot” is a sci-fi thriller/comedy about a self-hacking security construct who is horrified by human emotion yet drawn to its vulnerable clients. Played by Skarsgård, Murderbot must hide its free will and complete a dangerous assignment when all it really wants is to be left alone to watch futuristic soap operas and figure out its place in the universe.

The ensemble cast also includes Noma Dumezweni (“Presumed Innocent”), David Dastmalchian (“Oppenheimer”), Sabrina Wu (“Joy Ride”), Akshay Khanna (“Critical Incident”), Tattiawna Jones (“The Handmaid’s Tale”) and Tamara Podemski (“Outer Range”).

(2) FROM CLIMATE EXTREMES TO HISTORIC BALKAN ORIGINS OF VAMPIRISM. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Modern fantasy lore has it that Transylvania is the home to vampires, creatures from the past that feed of the presently living for their immortality… Way back in the 1990s, following the fall of the Iron Curtain that divided Europe we (members of the SF² Concatenation  team and the former NW Kent SF Society had a series of E. Europe science and SF cultural exchanges with Romanian and Hungarian fan (and scientist fan) partners.  As part of this I was lucky enough to have a guided tour of Transylvania.  I also got to visit Jimbolia, an ethnically Hungarian town in Romania surrounded on three sides by a border with Serbia. Actually, I got to visit it with SF fans three times over the years…

This brings us up to today, and academics from Jimbolia Technology Highschool, as well as the University of Oradea (Romania), have found Transylvanian chronicles, diaries, and official records from the 16th century that illuminate extreme climate events of that time — the 16th century was part of what is known as the “Little Ice Age”. They found that prolonged heat waves, often associated with droughts and unusually cold winters, could affect agricultural production, leading to food shortages, forced migration, and social instability… 

Primary research Gaceu, O. R. et al (2025)  “Reconstruction of climatic events from the 16th century in Transylvania: interdisciplinary analysis based on historical sources”, Frontiers in Climate, vol. 6, pre-print.

All of which brings to mind whether such events could have been attributed by peasant locals to the mystical? (Other research has previously shown that witch burnings in Germany increased in rural areas around the time of crop failures associated with climate events.)

While vampires were popularised in the west with Stoker’s 19th century novel, we must remember that it was in the 17th century the Greek librarian of the Vatican, Leo Allatius, produced the first methodological description of the Balkan beliefs in vampires (Greek: vrykolakas) in his work De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus (“On certain modern opinions among the Greeks”) a few decades after the 16th century climate extreme events in the area described by this latest research. 

(3) BROCCOLI IS OFF THE MENU. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] In a shake-up worthy of a James Bond martini, the Broccoli family has relinquished control of that storied movie franchise. It will be Amazon MGM Studios forging the way forward. “James Bond Shake-Up: Amazon Takes Creative Control of Franchise” at The Hollywood Reporter.

The James Bond movie franchise has gotten a shake-up, with Amazon MGM Studios and Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli forming a new joint venture to house the movie property’s intellectual property rights.

Under the terms of the agreement, Amazon MGM Studios will gain creative control of the James Bond franchise, while Wilson and Broccoli will remain co-owners of the 60-year-old property. In 2022, Amazon acquired MGM, including a vast catalog with more than 4,000 films and 17,000 TV shows.

Since the MGM acquisition, Amazon has held rights to distribute all of the James Bond films, and following completion of the joint venture transaction will control the creative on future productions.

“We are grateful to the late Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman for bringing James Bond to movie theatres around the world, and to Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli for their unyielding dedication and their role in continuing the legacy of the franchise that is cherished by legions of fans worldwide. We are honored to continue this treasured heritage, and look forward to ushering in the next phase of the legendary 007 for audiences around the world,” Mike Hopkins, head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, said in a statement on Thursday….

Variety thinks they can explain “Why Amazon Took Control of James Bond; Next 007 Movie Remains in Limbo”.

…And even as every actor with a British accent has seen themselves tipped to slip into Bond’s designer tux, development on a follow-up has stalled. There’s still no director, no story, and no script for a new installment, sources say, and without those elements little progress has been made on finding a new leading man. Though there has been a character bible circulating around the studio and a few informal meetings with potential creative talent, shooting on a new movie is at least a year away. That’s been a source of frustration at Amazon, which spent $8.5 billion to buy MGM four years ago, in no small part because of the ties to Bond. Even with the initial acquisition, Amazon MGM only owned 50% of the franchise and was relegated to being a passive partner when it came to artistic choices.

Rumors have swirled for years that the Broccolis have clashed with Amazon over the direction of Bond. The family felt the e-commerce giant was a poor home for the elegant secret agent and bristled at its efforts to expand the scope of the franchise, while Amazon executives were frustrated by the glacial pace of getting a new film off the ground, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The company managed to get the Broccolis to sign off on a reality competition spinoff show, “007: Road to a Million,” but other attempts to revitalize the property have yet to bear fruit.

Amazon MGM’s joint venture with the Broccolis is unique in that it is not an outright sale. The family will retain an ownership stake. However, the Broccolis, who controlled everything from casting to marketing decisions, will release their grip on the series. That will allow Amazon MGM to move more quickly to figure out how to keep Bond relevant….

(4) SCIENCE BOOKS RECOMMENDED. Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks in Nature: “Poetry on Mars and robots on Earth: Books in brief” (behind a paywall). One of his selections is —

Waiting for Robots

Antonio A. Casilli Univ. Chicago Press (2025)

US founding father Thomas Jefferson used dumbwaiters — small lifts that carry meals — during his extravagant dinners. There seemed to be no human intervention, but the lifts were operated by enslaved basement staff. As sociologist Antonio Casilli acutely observes, today too, artificial-intelligence systems are made to seem automated, often by overlooked and underpaid workers.

And here’s the cover of another choice:

(5) LGBTQ IDENTIFICATION GROWS. “Nearly One in 10 U.S. Adults Identifies as L.G.B.T.Q., Survey Finds” – in the New York Times (behind a paywall).

Nearly one in 10 adults in the United States identifies as L.G.B.T.Q., according to a large analysis from Gallup released Thursday — almost triple the share since Gallup began counting in 2012, and up by two-thirds since 2020…..

…The increases have been driven by young people, and by bisexual women.

Nearly one-quarter of adults in Generation Z, defined by Gallup as those 18 to 27, identify as L.G.B.T.Q., according to the analysis, which included 14,000 adults across all of Gallup’s telephone surveys last year. More than half of these L.G.B.T.Q. young adults identify as bisexual.

Among all respondents, 1.3 percent identified as transgender, up from 0.6 percent in 2020. That is higher than other large surveys have found in recent years…

(6) LGBTQ VIDEOS BACK ONLINE. The City reports “NYC Schools Restore LGBTQ Videos Yanked by PBS Following Trump Executive Order”.

In response to a blizzard of executive orders from President Donald Trump, the Public Broadcasting Service recently erased a series of videos made in partnership with New York City Public Schools focused on LGBTQ history.

This week, the city’s Education Department found a new home for them: its own website.

The short films draw on material from the city’s LGBTQ-focused curriculum, part of a series called “Hidden Voices” that seeks to elevate a broad range of underrepresented groups students learn about in their social studies classrooms.

The videos profile prominent LGBTQ people such as the feminist thinker Audre Lorde and civil rights leader Bayard Rustin. They also survey key historical moments, including the mass dismissal of queer government employees during the Lavender Scare of the 1940s-’60s and the 1969 Stonewall uprising in Greenwich Village, widely considered a catalyst of the modern LGBTQ rights movement….

(7) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. There’s a new episode of the monthly science fiction podcast produced by Space Cowboy Books in Joshua Tree, CA. Simultaneous Times Episode 84 has stories by Marisca Pichette & Eric Fomley.

Stories featured in this episode:

“Press Release from a Utopia on the Way Down” by Marisca Pichette; with music by TSG; read by Jenna Hanchey

“The Thing You Never Were” by Eric Fomley; with music by Phog Masheeen; read by the Jean-Paul Garnier

Theme music by Dain Luscombe

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

February 20, 1988 — Ray Bradbury Theatre’s “Gotcha”

Thirty-seven years ago on this evening, Ray Bradbury Theatre’s “Gotcha” first aired on HBO. It like a lot of genre series can now found streaming on Peacock. 

In the episode, a lonely man dressed as Oliver Hardy at a masquerade party meets a lonely woman dressed as Stan Laurel, it seems nothing short of a match made in heaven. But a game of Gotcha! may just test their newfound romance a little too much. Or will it? Being Bradbury what’s your guess? 

It was based off his short which was published in Terry Carr’s The Year’s Finest Fantasy, Volume 2 but the romance shown here wasn’t in that story as Bradbury added it in here. 

The cast was Saul Rubinek and Kate Lynch, and it was directed by Brad Turner who has done a lot of genre series work including seventeen episodes of The Outer Limits. The casting of Saul Rubinek and Kate Lynch was absolutely perfect. 

Reception for it is generally excellent. As Scared Stiff puts it: “GOTCHA is incredible. It’s another great tale in this series and it reminded me a great deal of the beginning of Twilight Zone: The Movie with Dan Aykroyd turning into a monster. This tale starts off so slow and cheerful that the turn to terror was very impactful. I really enjoyed this. As a horror fan you can’t ask for much more. I highly recommend it.” 

Yes, I liked it very much. I think the story here is sharper, more sure of who the characters are than a lot of his stories in this series was which were more interested in the gimmick that drove the story.  

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) AT LAST THE LAST. “The Last Of Us: HBO Sets Season 2 Premiere Date” reports Deadline. (Behind a paywall.)

HBO has finally revealed when audiences can expect the new season of The Last of Us.

Season 2 will debut on April 13 at 9 p.m. ET/PT, which means it’ll be picking up the Sunday marquee time slot from The White Lotus after the third season of Mike White’s series concludes. As always, the episodes will be available to stream on Max at the same time that they air on HBO.

Along with the date announcement, HBO also released a few new character posters featuring Ellie (Bella Ramsey), Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Abby (Kaitlyn Dever)….

(11) DON’T FORGET TO BITE ON THIS CLICKBAIT. “Could Michael Sheen be the first Welsh Doctor Who?” asks Nation Cymru. And for what it’s worth, Sheen once said on an episode of Staged (his show with David Tennant) he had been considered, then “they wanted to go in another direction” as the show biz cant goes.

Michael Sheen is among the favourites to become the next Doctor Who.

The actor has been named among the frontrunners for the prized role by the bookies, who have installed him at 6/1 to become the next occupant of the Tardis after news broke that the current Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa, looks set to stand down after two series.

There’s never been a Welsh Doctor Who – and with the modern incarnation of the series being filmed in Cardiff, it would be the perfect moment for a native of Wales to enter the Tardis.

Sheen, of course, lives in Wales and has shown his unswerving commitment and dedication to Welsh culture with the launch of the Welsh National Theatre.

There are others who think so too.

Writing for the Standard while pondering potential candidates for the role, media commentator Vicky Jessop wrote: “We’ve never had a Welsh Doctor before – might it be time to change that, once and for all? A longtime friend of David Tennant, Sheen also recently announced that he was becoming a “not for profit” actor, meaning he’s pledged to give away large chunks of his salary to charity and focus on doing jobs he loves. Long story short: his paycheque might actually be affordable for the beleaguered BBC.”

Other names in the running include Crown lead Josh O’Connor, Slow Horses actor Jack Lowden and Hobbit star Richard Armitage.

After 10th Doctor, David Tennant, surprised everyone by returning as the 14th Doctor, 11th Doctor Matt Smith has also been mentioned as a possibility for another stint in the Tardis.

(12) WOLF TICKETS. Metro News says “Amazon Prime Video viewers are stumbling upon ‘best’ comedy series in years”.

TV fans have been binge-watching both seasons of ‘engaging’ show Wolf Like Me which was recently added to the streamer free for subscribers.

The series follows single father Gary (Josh Gad) who lives in Adelaide with his daughter Emma (Ariel Donoghue) as he strikes up a relationship with Mary (Isla Fisher).

Both Gary and Emma are still emotionally traumatised after the death of her mother Lisa seven years ago, so when Mary enters the pictures and is able to connect with Emma she is a welcome addition to the family.

However, Mary is hiding baggage of her own that she fears may hurt Gary and Emma: she is a werewolf.

On Google, Wolf Like Me fans have been urging everyone to watch the hidden gem series which has flown under the radar since it first aired on Stan and Peacock in 2022….

(13) LIKE YOU NEED TEENY TINY BRANDING IRONS FOR ANTS. BBC finds “Dorset micro artist sets world record for smallest Lego sculpture”.

A micro artist has set a new Guinness World Record for creating the smallest handmade sculpture.

David A Lindon, from Bournemouth, said the creation took months of planning and months of creating to bring to life.

He set the world record for his sculpture of a red Lego piece which measures 0.02517mm by 0.02184mm.

Mr Lindon, an engineer by trade who started work as a micro artist in 2019, says the sculpture is about the same size as a human white blood cell.

He’s become known for his work creating miniature pieces of art, including three microscopic re-creations of Van Gogh masterpieces on a watch mechanism which sold for £90,000.

Mr Lindon’s latest creation, which was crafted from a piece of red Lego brick, was measured by the team at Evident Scientific using a light microscope….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George takes us inside the “Love Hurts Pitch Meeting” – beware spoilers.

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

Pixel Scroll 12/11/24 If You Stare At A Scroll Too Long, It Dissolves Into Pixels

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(1) CITY TECH SF SYMPOSIUM. For Andrew Porter it was a short walk to yesterday’s City Tech SF Symposium in Brooklyn. He brought his camera with him and shot these photos during the “Asimov/Analog Writers Panel”.

L to R: Matthew Kressel, Mercurio D. Rivera, Sakinah Hoefler, Sarah Pinsker, moderator Emily Hockaday, senior managing editor of Analog and Asimov’s SF magazines. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.
Emily Hockaday. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.
Sakina Hoefler. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

(2) SKYWALKER SHELTERS IN PLACE. The Franklin Fire has forced several well-known celebrities to evacuate, but some haven’t left.

The Franklin fire is raging through California’s Malibu coast, causing evacuations and ravaging homes while some celebrities like Mark Hamill shelter in place.

Hamill took to Instagram on Tuesday to share with fans that he would not evacuate his California home, with the “Star Wars” star telling his 6.2 million followers on the platform to “stay safe.”

“We’re in lockdown because of the Malibu fires. Please stay safe everyone! I’m not allowed to leave the house, which fits in perfectly with my elderly-recluse lifestyle,” Hamill wrote.

Hollywood legend Dick Van Dyke is also one of the celebrities in the affected area, saying on Facebook that he evacuated the area with his wife Arlene.

The Franklin Fire continued to explode in size overnight and covers 3,983 acres as of Wednesday morning with 7% containment, according to CalFire. Late Tuesday night, officials said 2,667 had burned. It was fueled by strong Santa Ana winds and low humidity, a dangerous combination prompting red flag warnings in the region through Wednesday evening….

Others who have evacuated include Cher, Eagles rocker Don Henley, and Cindy Crawford.

(3) PRODUCERS GUILD AWARDS. Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story is a nominee in documentary category for the 36th annual PGA Awards. The complete list of nominated documentaries is at the link. That is the first and only PGA category announced so far.

(4) THESE GHOSTS WANT TO BE SEEN. [Item by Steven French.] The UK’s “Society of Authors calls for celebrity memoir ghostwriters to be credited” – the Guardian tells why.

The SoA’s call comes following writers expressing frustration in recent months about celebrities writing books at a time when author incomes are in decline. Last year, Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown was criticised over her novel, Nineteen Steps, which was ghostwritten by Kathleen McGurl. While Brown publicly acknowledged McGurl’s work in an Instagram post, critics said that McGurl’s name “should be on the cover”.

(5) GHOSTLY GIFTS. [Item by Steven French.] If anyone happens to be in the Chicago area: “Ghoulish Mortals – St. Charles, Illinois” in Atlas Obscura.

JUST WEST OF CHICAGO, THERE is a little spot of spooky in the charming downtown of St. Charles, Illinois. Ghoulish Mortals is made up of equal parts immersive haunted house-style vignettes, macabre art gallery, and pop culture collector gift shop.

Haunting organ music leads you down the quaint downtown sidewalks and into the dark mysterious doors. As you make your way exploring through the shop, you will travel through a haunted mansion, a fortune teller’s tent, an 80s living room inspired by Stranger Things, a killer clown circus, abandoned hospital operating room, cannibal swamp cabin, and even come face to face with Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors. 

If you love horror movies, true crime, the occult, oddities, or fantasy, leaving this shop empty-handed is nearly impossible!

(6) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES PODCAST. Space Cowboy Books of Joshua Tree, CA presents episode 81 of “Simultaneous Times – Eric Fomley & Adele Gardner”. Stories featured in this episode:

(7) RHYSLING AWARD CHAIR NAMED. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) has announced the 2025 Rhysling Award Chair will be Pixie Bruner.

Pixie Bruner (HWA/SFPA) is a writer, editor, mutant, and cancer survivor. She lives in Atlanta, GA, with her doppelgänger and their alien cats. Her collection The Body As Haunted was published in 2024 (Authortunities Press). She co-curated and edited Nature Triumphs : A Charity Anthology of Dark Speculative Literature (Dark Moon Rising Publications). Her words are in/forthcoming from Space & Time Magazine, Hotel Macabre (Crystal Lake Publishing), Star*Line, Weird Fiction Quarterly, Dreams & Nightmares, Angry Gable Press, Punk Noir, and many more. She wrote for White Wolf Gaming Studio. Werespiders ruining LARPs are all her fault.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Thirty-two years ago, The Muppet Christmas Carol premiered, directed by Brian Henson (in his feature film directorial debut) from the screenplay by Jerry Juhl. 

Based amazingly faithfully off that beloved story, it starred Michael Caine as Ebenezer Scrooge with a multitude of Muppet performers, to wit Dave Goelz, Steve Whitmire, Ed Sanders, Jerry Nelson, Theo Sanders, Kristopher Milnes, Russell Martin, Ray Coulthard and Frank Oz, to name just some of them. 

I must single out Jessica Fox as the voice of Ghost of Christmas Past, a stellar performance indeed. 

Following Jim Henson’s death in May 1990, the talent agent Bill Haber had approached Henson’s son Brian with the idea of filming an adaptation. It was pitched to ABC as a television film, but Disney ended up purchasing it instead. That’s why it’s only available on Disney+ these days. 

Critics in general liked it with Roger Ebert being among them though he added that it “could have done with a few more songs than it has, and the merrymaking at the end might have been carried on a little longer, just to offset the gloom of most of Scrooge’s tour through his lifetime spent spreading misery.” 

Ebert added of Caine playing Scrooge that, “He is the latest of many human actors (including the great Orson Welles) to fight for screen space with the Muppets, and he sensibly avoids any attempt to go for a laugh. He plays the role straight and treats the Muppets as if they are real. It is not an easy assignment.” 

They did give him his own song which showed us the cast.

Those songs were by Paul Williams, another one of his collaborations with the Jim Henson Company after working on The Muppet Movie.

Box office wise it did just ok, as it made twenty-seven million against production costs of twelve million, not counting whatever was spent on marketing. And that Christmas goose. 

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a rather ungloomy rating of eighty-eight percent.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) ‘INNER LIGHT’ WRITER HAS SHOW IN DEVELOPMENT. Inverse reports: “32 Years Later, One of Star Trek’s Most Celebrated Writers is Launching a Gritty Sci-Fi Show”.

The writer responsible for the most celebrated episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, is launching a new gritty sci-fi series. As reported by Deadline, Morgan Gendel — writer of TNG’s “The Inner Light” — has just secured a deal with Welsh broadcaster S4C, Hiraeth Productions, Canada’s Fun Republic Pictures and Karma Film, to develop a new “eco-thriller” science fiction show currently titled Isolation. The in-development series will focus on an ensemble of characters attempting to combat climate change in the near future, who also encounter an extraterrestrial force capable of direct contact with human minds.

“There’s a whole ‘Inner Light,’ kind of linkage here, to the extent that both deal with alien technology and the human brain,” Gendel tells Inverse. “And you’ve got a team thrown together isolated from humanity to one extent or another. Those are not intentional [parallels]. My writing often puts people in a pressure cooker to see what emotions or truths boil out of them.”…

(11) SURREALISM OF GENRE INTEREST. John Coulthart assembles a gallery of “The art of Jean Ransy, 1910–1991” at { feuilleton }.

… All the same, Jean Ransy may fit the Surrealist bill even if he doesn’t seem to have had any lasting connections with those groups who regarded themselves as the official guardians of the Surrealist flame. Ransy was Belgian artist which makes him Surrealist by default if you subscribe to Jonathan Meades’ proposition that Belgium is a Surrealist nation at heart. (Magritte wasn’t a Surrealist, says Meades, he was a social realist.)

Ransy’s paintings appear at first glance like a Belgian equivalent of Rex Whistler in their pictorial realism and refusal to jump on the Modernist bandwagon. Whistler and Ransy were contemporaries (Whistler was born in 1905) but Whistler’s paintings were much more restrained even when outright fantasy entered his baroque pastiches. The “metaphysical” vistas of Giorgio de Chirico are mentioned as an influence on Ransy’s work so he was at least looking at living artists, something you never sense with Whistler. There’s a de Chirico quality in the tilted perspectives and accumulations of disparate objects, also a hint of Max Ernst in one or two paintings….

Le chemin de ronde au visage soleil (1985).

(12) JUSTWATCH SHARES 2024 TOP 10 LISTS. What were the most-watched movies and TV shows on streaming services in 2024? JustWatch compiled these year-end Streaming Charts based on user activity, including: clicking on a streaming offer, adding a title to a watchlist, and marking a title as ‘seen’. This data is collected from >45 million movie & TV show fans per month. It is updated daily for 140 countries and 4,500 streaming services.

2024 was packed with standout streaming hits. Movies like “Civil War”, “Oppenheimer”, and “The Fall Guy” drew huge audiences with their mix of action and drama. On the TV side, shows like “Shogun”, “Fallout”, and our streaming charts champion “The Bear” kept viewers hooked all year long. Whether it was blockbuster films or binge-worthy series, there was something for everyone. These titles set the tone for another exciting year in entertainment.

(13) WE STAND CORRECTED. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian says people have jumped to the wrong conclusion about an image in the trailer we ran yesterday: “Emaciated zombie in 28 Years Later is not Cillian Murphy, sources confirm”.

When the trailer for Danny Boyle’s belated zombie sequel 28 Years Later released on Tuesday, the less-than-rosy-cheeked appearance of the first film’s star, Cillian Murphy, did not escape comment.

A scene in which a strikingly skinny member of the undead suddenly rears up, naked, behind new star Jodie Comer was taken as confirmation of rumours that Murphy had returned for an appearance in the new film….

…Yet the Guardian can reveal that the actor playing “Emaciated Infected” in the film, due for release in June 2025, is not Murphy but rather newcomer Angus Neill.

Neill, an art dealer specialising in old masters, was talent-spotted by Boyle, who was much struck by his distinctive looks. Neill also works as a model, with his professional profile suggesting he has a 28-inch waist….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Ryan George takes us inside the “Elf Pitch Meeting” – one of the retro reviews stockpiled in anticipation of his baby arriving.

Will Ferrell is one of the most successful comedy actors of our time – but back in 2003, it was kind of a surprise to see him leading a Christmas movie as a giant non-elf. Elf ended up becoming a holiday classic, but it still raises some questions. Like what happened to that poor nun? Why didn’t the news reporter follow up on anything? Is Buddy the elf actually kind of creepy? So check out the pitch meeting that led to Elf to find out how it all came together!

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

Pixel Scroll 11/13/24 I’ve Been To Pixels But I’ve Never Scrolled To Me

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(1) DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE. Paul Lynch’s book Prophet Song, set in a near future Ireland, is the 2024 Fiction Winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Lynch’s novel also received the Booker in 2023.

(2) THE BOOKSHELF IS THEIR COSTAR. Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin have launched a weekly newsletter called Shelfies, in which they get people to talk about their favorite bookshelf, and their connection with the books on it. Shurin declares, “It is unashamedly us snooping at people’s shelves.”

Take a unique peek each week into one of our contributors’ weird and wonderful bookshelves! We love books – and we’re the sort of people who love checking out other people’s collections! With Shelfies, we’ve asked a wide range of readers, authors and collectors from all walks of life to share not just their shelves with us – but the books that changed them.

From novelists to video game designers, scientists and film makers, and from London to Singapore, Ghana, Australia and New York and all points in between, Shelfies is a unique dose of book love directly into your inbox – sharing our love of books, with you.

(3) AMAZON EDITORS PICKS OF THE YEAR. Today Amazon posted: “Announcing the Best Books of 2024, as chosen by the Amazon Editors”. These two novels of genre interest are listed:

  • The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo
  • The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

(4) SFPA OFFICER ELECTION RESULTS. Starting January 1, 2025, Diane Severson Mori will be Vice President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association.

(5) ONCE MORE INTO THE AIRLOCK, DEAR FRIENDS. On the Seattle Worldcon 2025 blog, Cora Buhlert pays tribute to a Poul Anderson novel that was a Hugo finalist in 1961, the last time the Worldcon was in the city. “Fantastic Fiction: Knights versus Aliens: The High Crusade by Poul Anderson”.

Science fiction often begins with a question of “what if”? And in 1960, Poul Anderson asked just such a question: What if aliens attempting to invade the Earth encountered a troop of medieval knights? And what if the knights won the ensuing struggle? This is the premise of The High Crusade, one of the most offbeat and entertaining science fiction novels of the early 1960s….

(6) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboys Books of Joshua Tree, CA has produced the eightieth episode of their Simultaneous Times podcast with stories by Elena Sichrovsky and Colin Alexander.

From the pages of Radon Journal.

Stories featured in this episode:

“Tonight We’re Wearing Waste Bags” by Elena Sichrovsky; Music by Patrick Urn; Read by Jenna Hanchey

“Dreamer, Passenger, Partner by Colin Alexander; Music by Phog Masheeen; Read by Jean-Paul L. Garnier

Theme music by Dain Luscombe

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Anniversary: The Running Man (1987)

By Paul Weimer: Possibly the best of the Schwarzenegger SF movies of the late 1980’s. Yes, better than The Terminator, better than Predator, possibly on a par with Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The Running Man remains a biting satire of fascism, authoritarianism, consumerism, game shows, and a whole lot more. 

The authoritarian hellhole that the United States, using violent game shows as an opiate to the masses is really on point, decades later, rather more plausible than ever. Some of the best (and by best, I mean scary) are some of the commercials and interstitial bits in between the actual Running Man show. The show where a man climbs a rope, trying to grab dollars with a vicious pack of dogs underneath him…or the neo-Puritanism revealed when an announcer shockingly reveals Amber may have had several lovers in a year.

Arnold strides through this film and carries it on his charisma, as a package deal with Richard Dawson, who plays Damon Killan as an evil version of his Family Feud persona. They have the best rapport and the movie sings when they finally meet each other. (I was surprised on a rewatch how long the movie actually takes to put the two of them in the same room as each other). I also think the movie hits the right level of action, adventure, social commentary, and humor. 

And then there are the betting pool scenes. Long before betting truly has taken over sports, and a lot of other things, the betting on the TV show seemed to me at the time to be “over the top” (who would bet on a game show)?  Naive me didn’t believe it…but in the years since, it makes absolute and corrosive sense that the general public would in fact bid on the game show and the deaths on the show. I mean, if The Running Man was made today, Draftkings would be advertising on The Running Man.

Sadly, given recent events…I think it might be too naive in thinking that the ending, where the crimes of the state being revealed lead to revolution and change, can actually be realistic in this day and age. But I can dream, right?

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE. Cora Buhlert celebrated the recent holiday with “Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre Halloween Special: ‘The Tomb of Sibor’”.

I don’t have any Egyptian looking trinkets in my collection, so this Olmec head my Dad brought back from Mexico years ago will have to do.

…“Remember, girls, we are looking for the Lost Tomb of Sibor. Scorpia, since your people hail from the Crimson Waste, you have knowledge of this wasteland that the Horde lacks…”

“Yes, but…”

“So I get why you need Scorpia. But why am I here, Shadow Weaver?”

“Because you are Force Captain, Catra. And because Scorpia didn’t want to go without you.”

“I’ll get you for this, Scorpia.”

“So lead the way, Scorpia. You do know where the tomb is, don’t you?”

“Yes, but… I don’t think this is a good idea, Shadow Weaver. The Tomb of Sidor is an accursed place. My people shun it and never go there.”

“Silly barbaric superstition. The Tomb of Sidor contains something of great value to the Horde and I mean to retrieve it for Lord Hordak. And now go, Scorpia. Take us to the Tomb.”

“Yes, but it’s your funeral.”

“Is that a promise?”

“Hush, Catra, she’ll hear you.”…

(10) WET WORK. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] It may be that there are sub-surface mini-seas on some of the moons of Uranus!

The Voyager 2 flyby of Uranus in 1986 revealed an unusually off-centred planetary magnetic field. Nine US and one Brit researchers have now re-examined the Voyager Solar wind data set. It reveals that Uranus was hit by a Solar windstorm at the time of the craft’s encounter with the planet. This Solar windstorm offset the planet’s magnetic field.

Similar observations in the Saturn system reveal that when its moons with sub-ice surface water orbit outside of the protection of Saturn’s magnetic field, probes cannot detect water-group ions; this is because they have been swept away by the Solar wind. The researchers therefore hypothesise that the absence of water-group ions when Voyager 2 passed by might not be due to an absence of moons sub-surface water but due to the Solar windstorm that was raging at the time that swept those ions away.  It could be that some of Uranus’ moons do have sub-surface water. They hypothesise that Uranus’s two outer moons, Titania and Oberon, are more likely candidates for harbouring liquid water oceans.

The primary research paper is Jasinski, J. M. et al. (2024) “The anomalous state of Uranus’s magnetosphere during the Voyager 2 flyby”. Nature Astronomy, Pre-print.

(11) MOOR OR LESS. “Utility in Britain Offers Free Electricity to Grow Clean Energy” – a New York Times article. Link bypasses the paywall.

Were Heathcliff to roam the blustery moors around Wuthering Heights today, he might be interrupted by a ping on his cellphone saying something like this: The wind is raging, so power is cheap. It’s a good time to plug in the car.

OK. So the 18th-century literary occupants of these windswept hills received no such pings.

But Martin and Laura Bradley do. They live in Halifax, an old mill town below the wuthering, or windy, heights of West Yorkshire. And when a squall kicks up, producing a surplus of electricity from wind turbines on the moor, their phones light up with a notification, like one that informed them of a 50 percent discount one Saturday in October….

…Octopus Energy, the country’s biggest electricity supplier, runs nine wind turbines on those hills. When it’s gusty, and power is abundant, it offers discounts. The Bradleys say they save upward of 400 pounds ($517) a year. Octopus says it not only attracts customers but also persuades communities that they benefit from new energy infrastructure.

“We’ve got these famously bleak, windy hills,” said Greg Jackson, the company’s chief executive. “We wanted to demonstrate to people that wind electricity is cheaper, but only when you use it when it’s windy.”…

(12) THE DEATHS FROM TROPICAL STORMS AND HURRICANES IN THE USA HAVE BEEN GREATLY UNDERESTIMATED. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In climate-change science fiction, people die in major climate events: cf. the film The Day After Tomorrow or the climate fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson.

In the real world, people die all the time and this enables demographers to calculate the number of expected deaths. Usually only a score or more deaths are associated with US tropical storms.  These are due to obvious things like drownings or being hit by wind-blown debris.

Two US demographers have now looked the number of excess deaths (those above the expected death rate) between 1930 and 2015. They have found that there are an average of 7,000 – 11,000 excess deaths in the months following a tropical storm or hurricane. These deaths are mainly from infants (less than 1 year of age), people 1 – 44 years of age, and the black population. (Presumably the elderly were safe in a refuge while young adults were protecting property and so in harm’s way? But the very elderly also took a big hit.) The researchers did not look at the death certificates of all (around 100,000) those excess deaths over this eight-and-a-half decade period and so do not know exactly what it was they died of. This, they say, needs to be the subject of future research.

The primary academic paper is Young, R. & Hsiang, S. (2024) “Mortality caused by tropical cyclones in the United States” Nature, vol. 635, p121-128.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Disney Debuts ‘The Boy & The Octopus’, Taika Waititi’s Holiday Tale Starring a CG Cephalopod” – Animation Magazine introduces the four-minute short.

A Disney Holiday Short: The Boy & The Octopus follows the journey of a child who discovers a curious octopus has attached to his head during a seaside vacation. After returning home, the boy forms a true friendship with the octopus by introducing his new companion to his life on land — harnessing the power of the Force with his Jedi lightsaber, playing with his Buzz Lightyear action figure, and imagining Santa Claus’ route around the world with the map on his wall — before taking the lovable octopus out into the world to experience the joy of the holidays, hidden under his Mickey Mouse beanie….

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

Pixel Scroll 10/10/24 I Ride An Old Anti-Gravity Paint, My Partner Favors Cavorite

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(1) NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE. Korean author Han Kang wins 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature reports Publishers Weekly. (There are no genre elements present in the descriptions of Han Kang’s work in “What to read: Han Kang” at NobelPrize.org, or in the “Han Kang” Wikipedia article.)

Han Kang. Ill. Niklas Elmehed © Nobel Prize Outreach

…One of only 18 women to be awarded global literature’s highest honor, she is the first South Korean writer to win the prize and the first Asian laureate since 2012, when the Nobel was awarded to Chinese author Mo Yan.

“Han Kang’s visible empathy for the vulnerable, often female lives, is palpable, and reinforced by her metaphorically charged prose,” said Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel Committee at the Swedish Academy, the body that administers the prize. “In her oeuvre,” he added, quoting from the Committee’s citation, “Han Kang confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose.”…

(2) FORMER FRAZETTA HOME IN FLORIDA UNHARMED BY STORM. Frank Frazetta’s daughter reassured fans that the Frazetta Art Gallery in Boca Raton, FL was undamaged by Hurricane Helene. (This is not the Frazetta Art Museum which is in Pennsylvania.)

This paragraph distinguishes the Frazetta Art Gallery from the Museum:

…For Frazetta fans, it’s an essential destination, since it contains dozens of pieces of Frazetta artwork, paintings, newspaper strips, comic book pages, and a nice selection of personal artwork Frazetta executed as gifts for his wife, Ellie, and other family members. The personal work on display gives viewers a true feeling of intimacy, of being part of Frazetta’s inner circle, since most of them have never been reprinted….

(3) ELECTORIAL. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] A few years ago, because of the Sad Puppies Affair (which, contrary to popular belief, was not a Man From U.N.C.L.E. episode), there was much debate in fandom as to how we vote on the Hugo short-list.  Now, better late than never, this week’s edition of Nature has an article on electoral systems,  “Which Is The Fairest Electoral System?”  

Scientists hope to explore whether some approaches are more likely to promote democratic resilience or to stave off corrosive partisanship. Such answers might inform policy, but differences in interpretation are inevitable when it comes to politics. “Democracy is a complex system,” says Lee Drutman, a political-science researcher at New America, a think tank in Washington DC. There can be multiple ways to parse the data, he says.

A Hugo-type system is briefly mentioned…

There are sub-variants in FPTP (first past the post) systems: ranked-choice voting, which is used, for instance, in Australia, ensures a majority winner. Voters rank all candidates or parties; the lowest-ranked candidate drops out and their supporters’ second-choice preferences are tallied, and so on until a single candidate surpasses a 50% threshold. And run-off elections, such as those in France, when the two leading parties are voted for in a second round, ensure a direct national face-off.

Interestingly the piece has two conclusions. One that ranked choice has benefits, but a contrary view 2) is that this pushes folk to limited options. Here the article calls for more political parties in the US rather than the two big ones.  In Hugo terms this would translate as increasing the number in the short-lists.

(By the way, personally I have no preference: I just share out of interest and am not advocating anything.)

(4) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 120 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Activate Liz” —

We do rather fewer letters of comment than last episode, and then we let Liz do her favourite topic of all: STATISTICS.

Listen here: Octothorpe (Podbean.com). Read the unedited transcript of the episode here.

Words read ‘Octothorpe 120: Introducing Judge Coxon. “I am the lore”’. They are around a picture of John as a Judge in the style of *2000AD*, holding a big stack of books. The logo of the Clarke Award may or may not appear in the artwork.

(5) ATWOOD PICKS A CARD. Margaret Atwood appeared on NPR to publicize her new collection called, Paper Boat: New And Selected Poems: 1961-2023. They played clips of her answers to questions on the Wild Card program. “Writer Margaret Atwood plays a game of ‘Wild Card’”.

MARTIN: When I asked the question [about envy], though, you asked for a definition – envy that you suffered or had to manage or other people’s envy of you?

ATWOOD: Yes.

MARTIN: Is that – does that happen a lot?

ATWOOD: It has, certainly. Yeah. So what I said to young writers who had had a sudden success, I said, within a couple of years, you will have three nasty, vicious personal attacks from people you don’t know.

MARTIN: What were the attacks that were leveled at you in your first couple years of success?

ATWOOD: (Laughter) Some of them were quite funny. So a lot of it had to do with hair – Medusa hair, frizzy hair, you know, name something about hair. Yes, and one of them wrote a satirical fairy tale in which I bit the heads off men and made them into a pile and turned into an octopus. Figure that out.

MARTIN: So you were a Medusa-haired man hater.

ATWOOD: Yeah. And power mad, ladder-climbing…

MARTIN: Oh, power mad?

ATWOOD: Yes. Power-mad, ladder-climbing witch.

MARTIN: Oh, wow. I mean, that’s evocative.

ATWOOD: I thought so too.

(6) REMEMBERING J.G. BALLARD. “Diary: Deborah Levy on J. G. Ballard” at Book Post.

J. G. Ballard, England’s greatest literary futurist, changed the coordinates of reality in British fiction and took his faithful readers on a wild intellectual ride. He never restored moral order to the proceedings in his fiction because he did not believe we really wanted it. Whatever it was that Ballard next imagined for us, however unfamiliar, we knew we were in safe hands because he understood “the need to construct a dramatically coherent narrative space.”

When it came to anything by Ballard, genre really did not matter to me; his fiction could have been filed under “Tales of Alien Abduction” or “Marsh Plants” and I would have hunted it down. Despite our difference in generation, gender, and literary purpose, it was clear to me that he and I were both working with some of the same aesthetic influences: film, surrealist art and poetry, Freud’s avant-garde theories of the unconscious….

…The reach of his imagination was never going to fit with the realist literary mainstream but I was always encouraged by his insistence that he was an imaginative writer.
“I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.”

Good on you, Jim.

His highly imagined landscapes and abandoned aircraft and stopped clocks and desert sand were located in his head—and anyway he preferred driving fast cars to walking. He once sent me a photograph of the Heathrow Hilton and told me it was his spiritual home. …

 (7) BUSTED. Was Chuck Tingle’s “true identity” revealed today? That’s what author C.J. Leede was hoping we’d think, til you-know-who caught them in the act.  

(8) THOU SHALT NOT PASS. “The Editors Protecting Wikipedia from AI Hoaxes” — an excerpt from a 404 Media’s post.

A group of Wikipedia editors have formed WikiProject AI Cleanup, “a collaboration to combat the increasing problem of unsourced, poorly-written AI-generated content on Wikipedia.”

The group’s goal is to protect one of the world’s largest repositories of information from the same kind of misleading AI-generated information that has plagued Google search results, books sold on Amazon, and academic journals.

“A few of us had noticed the prevalence of unnatural writing that showed clear signs of being AI-generated, and we managed to replicate similar ‘styles’ using ChatGPT,” Ilyas Lebleu, a founding member of WikiProject AI Cleanup, told me in an email. “Discovering some common AI catchphrases allowed us to quickly spot some of the most egregious examples of generated articles, which we quickly wanted to formalize into an organized project to compile our findings and techniques.”…

(9) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboys Books presents episode79 of the “Simultaneous Times” podcast with Pedro Iniguez, Lisa E Black, and Addison Smith.

  • “Sneeze” by Pedro Iniguez. (Music by Phog Masheeen. Read by Jean-Paul L. Garnier)
  • “Of Course I Still Love You” by Lisa E Black. (Music by Phog Masheeen. Read by the author.)
  • “Residual Traces” by Addison Smith. (Music by Fall Precauxions. Read by Jean-Paul L. Garnier.)
  • Theme music by Dain Luscombe.

Simultaneous Times is a monthly science fiction podcast produced by Space Cowboy Books in Joshua Tree, CA.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Anniversary: Barbarella film (1968)

Oh, Barbarella. 

I didn’t quite get why it was so controversial when I first saw it, it was a bowdlerized version of the already bowdlerized version Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy. This was on a local channel in New York City in the 1980’s. I thought it was a funny but rather goofy looking SF movie, although of course Jane Fonda was something to look at.

(My father was upset at her being in the movie, something I did not understand for years until I understood her politics…and my own family’s politics, better)

I finally got to see the uncut and real version in the early 2000’s on DVD.  And then I could finally see what I was missing. Did it add a lot to the actual movie besides the visuals? No, but what visuals!  I slotted it in the same space as Woody Allen’s Sleeper, as a science fiction movie that talked about sex, and around sex, a lot. But going on the other visuals, the sets, costume design and props (including the infamous Excess Pleasure Machine) were just mind boggling in both of the versions I’ve seen.  Too, the actual cinematography is mesmerizing, the camera knows where to linger, where to bring our attention in sometimes rather chaotic and baroque set pieces. I have not yet seen a 4k version of the film, but that is something I do very much need to see sometime, to see it at the maximum fidelity and clarity.  

Is it great cinema? No. But it is great art. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) DEADPOOL AND WOLVERINE COMICS REUNION. “Deadpool and Wolverine officially return in 2025, Marvel confirms” – GamingBible has the story.

…For those who miss the bromance between Marvel’s Deadpool and Wolverine, you’re in luck because the pair are officially returning in 2025.

Their antics won’t play out on the big screen but upon the pages of comics instead.

The Deadpool/Wolverine series comes from writer Benjamin Percy and artist Joshua Cassara. This partnership, much like Deadpool and Wolverine, is a match made in heaven.

Fans who enjoyed the bloody violence of the film needn’t worry that the comics will strip that action away…

(13) BEGINNING OF A FASCINATION. CrimeRead’s Jeremy Dauber outlines “A Brief History of the Rise of Horror in 19th Century America”.

At the Civil War’s end, under a quarter of Americans lived in cities; by the end of the Great War, the proportion was almost exactly half. All those people moving to the cities—both from rural America and from abroad— changed things. Size created anonymity, the possibility of losing yourself in the crowds, remaking yourself, if you so chose. . . . or getting lost, and not always by your choice. Increasingly, the streets were lit by electric light, and the machines inside them were powered the same way; but that simply swapped a new set of shadows and terrors for the old ones. The horrors of the next decades were, all too frequently, industrial and mass-produced: whether they came from the chatter of guns or the whirr of a film projector, they cast an eye on progress, and murmured about what lay beneath.

Start, perhaps, with that newly electrified white city, Chicago. In 1893, its World’s Columbian Exposition, or World’s Fair, was an announcement of America’s newly flexing muscles: its willingness to be broad-shouldered, to play a leadership role in world affairs, to stride into the future. And yet, inside the city limits, there sat a haunted castle. This castle, though, had no clanking chains, no Gothic ghost or Salem witch; it had a psychopath who used modern tools—the soundproofed room, the knockout gas-bearing pipes, and of course, the three-thousand-degrees-Fahrenheit kiln—to disable, kill, and dispose of guests who checked into his World’s Fair Hotel at 701 Sixty-third Street. And why did H. H. Holmes do it? For his part, when eventually caught, he had a simple, and chillingly modern, explanation: “I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.”…

(14) I DO SOLEMNLY SWEAR. SFFAudio reminds us that once upon a time Robert Bloch urged authors to swear to uphold “ROBERT BLOCH’S CREDO FOR FANTASY WRITERS”.

(15) JUSTWATCH MARKET SHARE REPORT. As the third quarter of 2024 comes to an end, JustWatch has released their latest data report on market shares in the US. As usual, they based our report on the 13 million JustWatch users in the US selecting their streaming services, clicking out to streaming offers and marking titles as seen.

SVOD market shares in Q3 2024
Global streaming giant: Prime Video managed to keep its first-place rank, with a 1% lead against Netflix. Meanwhile, Max is managing to stay ahead of major competitors Disney+ and Hulu.

Market share development in 2024
Disney+ and Hulu both gained momentum with a +1% subscriber boost by September. While Netflix and Max stumbled with a -1% decline each, revealing a shake-up in the streaming rivalry.

(16) IF YOU INSIST ON WATCHING. “Too Scared to Watch Horror Movies? These 5 Tips May Help” says the New York Times (paywalled).  

The October ritual of watching horror movies in the lead-up to Halloween can be exhilarating. Unless, of course, you can’t quite stomach the gory and gruesome, or even the spooky and spine-tingling….

…If you’re someone who wants to indulge in the season but dreads jump scares and buckets of blood, here are five tips that could help even the biggest scaredy cats among us start to open up to the world of horror.

The first two tips are:

Embrace the Spoiler

The first and best line of defense is to read the plot in advance. If you’re feeling brave, go for just a synopsis, but there’s no reason to be a hero. I sometimes read an entire plot in great detail before watching, especially with films I know will tap into my weak spot: movies about demonic possession. Unlike with other genres, knowing what will happen in horror doesn’t necessarily detract from the experience of watching. Your heart will most likely still pound. You will probably still jump. And the visuals and sounds will probably still shock. Knowing what comes next may simply help keep the anxiety and uncertainty in check.

The Smaller, the Better

Nothing against the big-screen experience, but going small, by watching on your phone or a tablet, can go a long way. Not only will you have a sense of control that a crowded theater with speakers blaring hellish soundscapes can’t provide, you will also be able to make adjustments. If it gets too loud or chaotic, turn down the volume. If it gets too visually scary, turn down the brightness or flip the device down. Sometimes for the most intense scenes, it’s better to just hear the movie without seeing it, or to watch without sound….

(17) QUITE A TAIL. And for your viewing pleasure, The Copenhagen Post recommends “Reptilicus”.

Next time you’re looking for a Danish film to watch, spare a thought for Denmark’s only giant monster film ‘Reptilicus’ – a 1960s cult-classic with puppets, bad acting, bazookas, and a prehistoric reptilian beast rampaging through Amager…

… Reptilicus is the name for two monster films about a giant, prehistoric reptile which decides to attack Denmark.

Shot simultaneously, one film is in Danish (1961) and the other is from the USA in English (1962). Both films have a near identical cast (except for one actress) and two directors (Poul Bang – Danish, and Sidney Pink – English) who took turns throughout each shooting day to create two of the most iconic, kitsch and downright unintentional masterpieces to grace Danish screens.

The plot tells of a Danish miner in Lapland who accidentally digs up a section of a giant reptile’s tail from the frozen ground. The section is flown to the Denmark’s Aquarium in Copenhagen, where it is preserved in a temperature-controlled room for scientific study.

Of course they don’t put anyone competent in charge of monitoring it but instead choose a bumbling buffoon (the legendary Dirch Passer). The room is left open and the section begins to thaw and regenerate….

(18) FILLING UP WITH GAS. According to TechRadar, “Toyota’s portable hydrogen cartridges look like giant AA batteries – and could spell the end of lengthy EV charging”.

Toyota is showcasing a series of sustainable developments at the Japan Mobility Bizweek later this month – including its vision of a portable hydrogen cartridge future, which could apparently provide ‘swappable’ power for next-gen hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs).

Originally a project of Toyota’s mobility technology subsidiary Woven (formerly Woven Planet), the team produced a working prototype of a hydrogen cartridge back in 2022 but has since developed the idea further… and appears to be running with it.The latest cartridges are lighter and easier to transport, with Toyota claiming the current iteration has been developed with the experience the company has gained in reducing the size and weight of the hydrogen tanks used in its fuel cell electric vehicles….

…Put simply, the cartridges would allow fuel cell electric vehicle drivers to swap out their power source when hydrogen levels run low, rather than having to refuel at a station like you typically would with a fossil fuel-powered car.

But Toyota also feels that these refillable and renewable cartridges could be used in a multitude of situations, such as to generate electricity in a fuel cell to power the home or even providing hydrogen to burn for cooking.

In fact, Toyota and the Rinnai Corporation are exhibiting a stove at Japan Mobility Bizweek that does just that. Similarly, in emergency situations, the hydrogen cartridge could be removed from the car and used to power any applicable device in the case of a blackout, for example….

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Paul Weimer, Danny Sichel, Lise Andreasen, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel “All Is Wells” Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 9/8/24 I’ve Grown Accustomed To The Doors of Your Face, the Lamps of Your Mouth

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(1) OFF THE CLOCK. “Critical Choices: Time Travel and Identity” by Rjurik Davidson at Speculative Insight.

…Psychologists suggest that your sense of self is constructed interpersonally, in relationship with others, and hence also in relationship to the social world. Individualism is nothing but a liberal myth. For example, people who venture into nature to “find themselves” typically discover the opposite: they lose any sense of their self. Isolated from society, they dissolve into their surroundings, become one with daily tasks: “catch fish,” “start fire,” “sleep.” They no longer exist. “All You Zombies” brilliantly illuminates this dissolution, counterintuitive to those schooled in Thoreau’s Walden or other such romantic myths. In the story, the main character (Jane) takes painkillers for her perpetual headache but discovers that without the pain everyone else disappears. It is as if the veil is torn from a false reality, revealing the true world beneath, seen before as through a glass darkly but now face to face – a premonition of one of Philip K. Dick’s enduring fascinations. Without mother, father, a social world, Jane’s existence manifests as a headache of existential dread. Either way, with headache or not, she experiences her plight as a pain of isolation. She is “alone in the dark.” Her declaration, “I know where I came from,” is replete with irony. Her somewhat desperate affirmation is made precisely because there is nothing but doubt. Neither she, nor the reader, actually knows where she came from – methinks that Jane dost protest too much….

(2) REWARDING TRANSLATION. Anton Hur analyzes “Literature that expands the borders of what ‘international’ can mean” in the Washington Post. (Usually there’s a paywall, but I was able to read this article. Hopefully, so will you.)

…But why have a translated literature category [for the National Book Awards] at all? Neil Clarke, the editor of the science fiction magazine Clarkesworld, had the same thought; he has argued against creating a translation category at the Hugo Awards, claiming that it would serve to further marginalize translated literature. A quick glance at the history of nominees for best novel at the Hugos reveals that a translation has been a finalist only twice, and for the same team: the redoubtable Cixin Liu, author of “The Three-Body Problem,” and his translator Ken Liu. As someone who reads translations primarily and prodigiously, you can’t make me take Clarke’s fears of “further” marginalization seriously. And it has to be said that this also applies to the National Book Awards, which simply stopped taking translated literature into consideration for more than three decades. (In writing this article, I was asked to consider what works may have been overlooked by the awards during the 2010s and, well, imagine me madly gesticulating at all the works in translation published in the eligibility periods between 2009 and 2017.)…

(3) THE DOCTOR IS IN. Jon Del Arroz proclaimed yesterday over a photo of Kirk and Spock that “Star Trek is an inherently right-wing concept. It upholds man’s greatness as being designed in the image of God and promotes manifest destiny and dominion of God’s creation.” Robert Picardo (who memorably played Voyager’s Emergency Medical Hologram) took him to task. Admittedly, the kind of attention Jon always hopes somebody will give him.

(4) FULL MOON VOTERS. “In Michigan, an ‘Unhinged Werewolf’ Will Make It Clear Who Voted” says the New York Times. (Behind a paywall.)

Plenty of the submissions in a statewide contest to design Michigan’s next “I Voted” sticker featured cherry blossoms or American flags fluttering in the wind.

Only one entry, however, depicted a werewolf clawing its shirt to tatters and howling at an unseen moon. A smattering of stars and stripes poke out from behind its brawny torso.

“I Voted,” reads a string of red, white and blue block letters floating above the creature’s open maw.

The illustration, which was created by Jane Hynous, a 12-year-old from Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich., was revealed on Wednesday as one of nine winning designs that the Michigan Department of State will offer local clerks to distribute to voters in the November election.

The werewolf sticker received more than 20,000 votes in the public contest, beating every other entry by a margin of nearly 2,000 votes, said Cheri Hardmon, a spokeswoman for the Michigan Department of State. The design gained traction on social media among those who found it fitting for an intense, and at times bewildering, moment in national politics….

(5)  FANAC FAN HISTORY ZOOM: PLOKTA. [Item by Joe Siclari.] It’s a fannish mystery how this jumped from nothing to an everyday phrase all over fandom.

The FANAC Fan History Zoom Series starts off its new season with what promises to be a fun, interesting, historical and important session as it brings back together the Plokta Cabal. The group was known for its weird news, quirky humour and radical graphics. 

September 22, 2024 – The Secret Origins of Plokta, with Steve Davies, Sue Mason, Alison Scott, and Mike Scott

Time: 2PM EDT, 1PM CDT, 11AM PDT, 7PM London (BST) & too early in Melbourne

This fannish group burst on the scene in May 1996 with the fanzine Plokta, which went on to receive two Best Fanzine Hugos, 2 Nova Awards for Best Fanzine, and Hugo nominations each year from 1999 to 2008. They are energetic, quirky and very, very funny. They are writers, artists, con runners, Worldcon bidders and fan fund winners. Join us and learn more about their secret origins, fannish impact and what they are doing now.

To attend, send an email to fanac@fanac.org

Two other Fanac Zoom session already on the calendar are:

  • October 26, 2024, Time 7PM EDT, 4PM PDT, Midnight London (sorry), and 10AM AEDT Sunday, Oct 27 Melbourne, Senior Australian fan Robin Johnson interview, with Robin Johnson, Perry Middlemiss and Leigh Edmonds
  • January 11, 2025, Time 2PM EST, 11AM PST, 7PM GMT London, and 6AM AEDT (sorry) Sunday, Jan 12 Melbourne, Out of the Ghetto and into the University: Science Fiction Fandom University Collections, with Phoenix Alexander (University of California, Riverside), Peter Balestrieri (University of Iowa), Susan Graham (University of Maryland, Baltimore County), and Richard Lynch (moderator)

(6) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary – Star Trek, The Original Series (1966).

On September 8 fifty-eight years ago the first episode of Star Trek aired. I want to talk about my favorite episode in the series, which is “Trouble with Tribbles”. Now there are other episodes that I will go to Paramount+ to watch such as “Shore Leave”, “Mirror, Mirrior” or “Balance of Terror” but is the one that I have watched by far the most and which I enjoy as just the funnest one they ever did.

It was first broadcast in the show’s second season, just after Christmas on December 29, 1967. The previous episode had been another one I also like a lot, “Wolf in the Fold”, written by Robert Bloch. 

This script, which was Gerrold’s first professional sale, bore the working title for the episode of “A Fuzzy Thing Happened to Me…” Writer and producer for the series Gene did heavy rewrites on the final version of the script.  The final draft script can be read in Gerrold’s The Trouble with Tribbles: The Story Behind Star Trek’s Most Popular Episode with much, much more on this episode. 

Memory Alpha notes that “While the episode was in production, Gene Roddenberry noticed that the story was similar to Robert Heinlein’s novel, The Rolling Stones, which featured the ‘Martian Flat Cats’. Too late, he called Heinlein to apologize and avoid a possible lawsuit. Heinlein was very understanding, and was satisfied with a simple ‘mea culpa’ by Roddenberry.”  

It of course is centered on tribbles. Wah Chang designed the original tribbles. Five hundred were sewn together during production, using pieces of extra-long rolls of carpet. Some of them had mechanical toys placed in them so they could move. 

According to Gerrold, the tribble-maker Jacqueline Cumere was paid $350. Want a tribble now? Gerrold has them for you in various sizes and colors. So if you’re in seeing these, go here. tribbletoys.com

Let’s talk about why it’s about my favorite episode. I’m watching it now on Paramount+. I’ve to come to the bar scene where Cyrano Jones is trying to sell the Bar Manager a tribble when Chekov and Uhura come in. When Uhura asks if it’s alive, it starts adorably purring (who created that purr?), and the story goes from there.

The next morning Kirk walks. Uhura and a group are admiring that her tribble has reproduced. Where there was one, there are now, I stopped the video to count fourteen in various hues. (Not sure what all of them are as I’ve got color blindness.) Really cute but remarkably not one seems concerned.

Right there it exhibits that It has some of the best script writing in the series including this choice line as Spock holds and strokes a tribble: “Its trilling seems to have a tranquilizing effect on the human nervous system. Fortunately, of course … I am immune … to its effect.” There is an amused look from Uhura and the others. 

Oh, and it has Klingons. Not the Worf-style ones. The ones that look like someone cos-played an Asian military character of a thousand years ago. So naturally that hard to lead to a bar fight, doesn’t it? It does when a Klingon calls Scotty’s Enterprise, his beloved ship, a garbage scow. Well, he actually calls it a lot of things before ending with that. Perfect, just perfect. 

Now let’s segue from that bar brawl to reworking of this episode to the Deep Space Nine episode which I need not talk about as I know you know about it: “Trials and Tribble-ations”. It would be nominated for Hugo at a LoneStarCon 2. It would digitally insert the performers from the original series into that episode. 

I’m assuming y’all know this delightful episode which I think can best have its attitude summed up in this conversation…

Sisko to Bashir: “Don’t you know anything about this period in time?” 

Bashir: I’m a doctor, not an historian.”

Dax in her red short skirt: “In the old days, operations officers wore red, command officers wore gold… (Looks at her outfit.) “And women wore less. I think I’m going to like history.” 

I’ve watched both shows back-to-back several times, which is well worth doing as they did an stellar job of making the DS9 characters work seamlessly in the old episode. (I know they weren’t actually there but still.) No wonder it got nominated for a Hugo. 

I could single out even more scenes like Kirk buried in tribbles, for how he reacts or the very subtle line about Spock’s ears, but I’ll stop here. I just adore it and “Trials and Tribble-ations” as both are entertaining, feel-good episodes. 

(7) COMICS SECTION.

(8) MAR$. The Week contrasts The Martian Chronicles with billionaires’ plans for Mars in its editorial letter, “Martian dreams”.

…Along with other sci-fi staples such as living forever and computerizing consciousness, colonizing Mars is now an obsession of our tech elite. Rocket tycoon Elon Musk has said he wants to establish a “self-sustaining civilization” of 1 million people on our neighboring planet as an insurance policy against humanity’s extinction. Yet I can’t help but think that, like Bradbury and Lowell before them, Musk and his fellow billionaires are really projecting their own beliefs onto Mars’ red vistas….

(9) HIDDEN PROPERTY INSPIRED LOVECRAFT. Charming old NYC architectural history, with a genre link! “Inside a West Village passageway leading to a hidden courtyard and 1820s backhouse” at Ephemeral New York.

…One person who made note of this Evening Post writeup when it appeared was author H.P. Lovecraft. A resident of New York City in the 1920s, this horror and science fiction writer published a short story titled “He,” which involved a narrator taking a late-night, time-traveling sojourn through Greenwich Village.

“At the conclusion of ‘He,’ a passerby finds the narrator—bloodied and broken—lying at the entrance to a Perry Street courtyard,” wrote David J. Goodwin, author of the 2023 book Midnight Rambles: H.P. Lovecraft in Gotham.

In “He,” from 1925, the narrator calls it “a grotesque hidden courtyard of the Greenwich section,” as well as “a little black court off Perry Street.”…

(10) TARA CAMPBELL READING.  Space Cowboys Books of Joshua Tree, CA will host an “Online Reading & Interview with Tara Campbell” on Tuesday September 17 at 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Register to attend for free at Eventbrite.

In the parched, post-apocalyptic Western U.S. of the 22nd Century, wolves float, bonfires sing, and devils gather to pray. Water and safety are elusive in this chaotic world of alchemical transformations, where history books bleed, dragons kiss, and gun-toting trees keep their own kind of peace. Among this menagerie of strange beasts, two sentient stone gargoyles, known only as “E” and “M,” flee the rubble of their Southwestern church in search of water. Along the way, they meet climate refugees Dolores Baker and her mother Rose, who’ve escaped the ravaged West Coast in search of a safer home. This quartet forms an uneasy alliance when they hear of a new hope: a mysterious city of dancing gargoyles. Or is it something more sinister? In this strange, terrible new world, their arrival at this elusive city could spark the destruction of everything they know. Tara Campbell summons fantastical magic in this kaleidoscopic new speculative climate fiction.

Get your copy of the book here.

(11) RADIO ASTRONOMY. [Item by Steven French.] This is pretty much standard stuff but the radio telescope itself is amazing: “Inside the ‘golden age’ of alien hunting at the Green Bank Telescope” at Physics.org.

Nestled between mountains in a secluded corner of West Virginia, a giant awakens: the Green Bank Telescope begins its nightly vigil, scanning the cosmos for secrets.

If intelligent life exists beyond Earth, there’s a good chance the teams analyzing the data from the world’s largest, fully steerable radio astronomy facility will be the first to know.

“People have been asking themselves the question, ‘Are we alone in the universe?’ ever since they first gazed up at the night sky and wondered if there were other worlds out there,” says Steve Croft, project scientist for the Breakthrough Listen initiative.

For the past decade, this groundbreaking scientific endeavor has partnered with a pioneering, US government-funded site built in the 1950s to search for “technosignatures”—traces of technology that originate far beyond our own solar system.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or “SETI,” was long dismissed as the realm of eccentrics and was even cut off from federal funding by Congress thirty years ago.

But today, the field is experiencing a renaissance and seeing an influx of graduates, bolstered by advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as recent discoveries showing that nearly every star in the night sky hosts planets, many of which are Earth-like.

“It feels to me like this is something of a golden age,” says Croft, an Oxford-trained radio astronomer who began his career studying astrophysical phenomena, from supermassive black holes to the emissions of exploding stars…

(12) MERCHANT OF MENACE. Actor Vincent Price gave an entertaining interview on Aspel & Co in 1984.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George invites us step inside the Pitch Meeting that led to The Crow (2024).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Gailey said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Anniversary: Land of the Lost series (1974)

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

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

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

Until Bubble Boy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(11) COMICS SECTION.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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